This is the beginning of a series that I plan to do weekly on “Favorite FREE SEO Tools.”
I encourage comments on the tools that are featured each week. Please comment as follows:
1) Comment on the Tool that is featured.
2) Mention a similar Tool that you use that you like just as good or better.
3) Please do not simply link to Aaron Wall’s SEO Tools Page (just an example) and say, “Check out all these “FREE SEO Tools” by Aaron Wall.”
I hope you don’t mind me setting up the simple 3 step guideline above to keep the comments focused on just the tool being mentioned or other very similar tools.
If you don’t have it installed and like SEO, you should give it a whirl. It provides a snapshot very quickly of important data needed for foundational SEO. Here’s a screen shot:
After you install SEO Quake, you will have a request parameters button just below the search box before the rankings. Anytime you are surfing using a search engine, you can click REQUEST PARAMETERS to see all kinds of information on the page about all the sites on that page.
Here’s how I use it to make me look good in just seconds…
1) On the phone with a Potential Client
2) May I have your domain name
3) I’ll then usually either do a site:www. or I’ll use the SEO Quake Tool Bar that is installed. Either way, I gather some quick data.
4) I respond with… I see that you site is ____ months/years old, you have ____ links pointing to your site and you have ____ pages in Google.
5) Remember, this is just quick 15 second snapshot
Now, this is how I use SEO Quake to give additional feedback.
1) Armed with the information above.
2) What is a phrase that you would like to rank for.
3) I type that phrase in Google and hit request parameters.
4) I then look at the Age, Pages Indexed in Google and Links Pointing to the sites.
5) Remember, all of this is literally done in just 2 or 3 minutes. Quick Snapshot.
6) Based on info from the potential clients site and info from the Top 10 ranked sites, I may give combinations of feedback like…
“Your site is a June 2007 site and all of the Top 10 for that term are 2005 or older” (Hint: Site is too new to potentially compete.)
“Your site has 57 links and all of the Top 10 sites have at least 950+ links; however, this does not mean you cannot compete. Linking is more about quality, but I’ll have to dig further on this one.”
“Your site has 5 pages indexed. Most of the Top 10 sites have 100+ pages indexed.”(Hint: They are probably targeting more terms, have a good sitemap, have solid links, etc. Why does the site have only 5 pages? Is it really that small or just not being indexed well?)
Please don’t take me out of context. This is the short version of just some of the things you can do with SEO Quake.
Do you use SEO Quake? It will make you look pretty sharp in a matter of seconds when talking on the phone with someone. Please share your comments.
I’m writing from the Austin, Texas airport about to head back to Raleigh, North Carolina.
Fred and I have had a client since November of 2006 that we have never met face-to-face until today. It’s easy to get caught up in doing business via phone and email. Social media has become a more personalized way of communicating online; however, nothing beats a handshake and a face-to-face meeting.
Our client now feels much better about working with us and even talked about a long term 5 to 10+ year relationship. It’s kind of funny that he feels so much better about us just based on a face-to-face meeting. He had a GREAT 2007 online without ever meeting us.
Now, I’ll pose a question…how do you feel about spending hundreds of dollars to fly round trip to seal a deal or solidify a relationship?
We close out each week with our Who Said That?, where we give some link love to bloggers who have really captured our attention with their inspiring and thought provoking posts.
Stephen tells an incredible story of overcoming his fear of a major challenge in his post “How I Almost Let Fear Stop Me From Accepting A $4,000 Engagement.” This goes to show that even motivational speakers that talk on the topic of overcoming adversity still have challenges with fear! If anyone hasn’t felt this – well then they haven’t challenged themselves enough!
I think that we constantly limit our growth out of fear of stepping outside of our comfort zone. Stephen takes us behind the scenes of how this opportunity outside of his comfort zone surfaced, the turmoil he faced, and what gave him the courage to push past the fear and give an outstanding presentation (and also make a $4,000!) This post makes me wonder what opportunities I’m pushing out of my life by not being open to new challenges outside of my own comfort zone.
Mason gives us a behind the scenes play by play of a decision he made (though he was hesitant at first) that landed him lots of business quickly in the early days of Smart Fuel. Best of all, this move cost him nothing but a little bit of his time. Before this discovery, Smart Fuel was just barely getting off the ground and Mason was struggling with how to get new business.
Mason also shares a $700 marketing investment that he thought would bring a lot of business but turned out to generate zero business or traffic.
Wow! This idea blew me away. This is perhaps the best idea for creating a catchy Adwords campaign that I’ve every seen. I think the pictures speak for themselves…
I hope these great blogs give you lots of creative ideas to fuel your weekend!
It amazes me how many people in the tech world like to speak Geek to potential clients. I’m guessing that they do it to impress and to appear knowledgeable, but it usually turns a potential client into someone who feels like an idiot. I wouldn’t want to do business with someone who makes me feel like an idiot… would you?
Plain English gets us way more business than Geek speak. Yeah, sure, there are times when we speak Geek speak to someone who has some knowledge about the topic. But in many cases, they have read some Geek speak article somewhere and have just enough knowledge to be dangerous. On the other hand, some potential clients have too much knowledge for their own good. We like leaving these for the Geek speaker SEO’s to deal with not us.
In closing, here’s two simple examples.
Geek Speak: Your site is coded in Dream Weaver using tables and we need to transition it to CSS and XHTML while limiting the use of Javascript. We suggest doing a new PSD Mock for you to review in order for us to put a new skin on your website. We’d also like to change your pages from .htm to .php and potentialy need to set up a MySql database to dynamically generate data. Oh, and by the way your URL query strings are all screwed up and we need to rename them to something more SEO friendly with 301 or 302 redirects. With the redirects, we need to speak with our Geek speak programmers on using a 301 or 302. In addition to all this, we need to update your meta tags, provide more internal and external linking using anchor text while balancing the optimization of the on page content. It’s really important that your on page SEO and off page SEO be completed properly. We’ll be able to give you a better idea of all this after doing a site command in Google, running a backlink analysis on your site and your competitors sites. We will also check the anchor text of the backlinks. Finally, Mr. Totally Lost by Now Client, we’ll do an XML sitemap for the major search engines.
Translation: Us: “Here’s what we will do in KINDERGARTEN ENGLISH.” Client: “Oh, I get it. When can you start?”
If you own a business, you’ve no doubt had some crazy brainstorming sessions trying to think up new ways to promote your products or services. Here are 3 companies that didn’t stop with just the ideas:
Sheep-vertising
A Dutch horse breeder looked out at the sprawling land and herds of livestock around and saw a huge blank advertising canvas. The progressive company Hotels.nl was the first to try his idea of branded shirts for sheep, paying 1 euro per shirt, per sheep. What happened next couldn’t have been better. The authorities demanded the advertisements had to go and fined Hotels.nl 1000 Euro per day. Hotels.nl decided to pay the fines, refuse to remove the ads, and take the city to court as the dispute escalated into news. As a result, sales at Hotels.nl increase by 15%.
Alien Marketing
In a boardroom somewhere, a group of KFC execs decided that what they absolutely needed was to build a KFC logo that could be seen from space. KFC hired a team that spent 3,000 hours painstakingly designing, creating, and positioning 65,000 1 foot by 1 foot tiles to create an 87,500 square foot logo that is visible from space.
Watch the video of it’s creation and ultimate destruction:
Bumvertising
This is my personal favorite. A big thanks to Jonathan who linked to this post on Small Business Branding who introducing me to bumvertising! Bumvertising’s president Benjamin Rogovy recognized that “bums use a business model that takes advantage of high volume traffic,” and “imagined that there had to be some value that was not being utilized.” A lot of people are in a frenzy over Bumvertising, claiming that it exploits bums. I disagree! As someone who has hitchhiked across the country and met bums and vagrants and train hoppers from coast to coast (and even held up a sign myself once or twice) I can’t think of one person I’ve ever met who would have been offended to get paid for taping an advertisement to their sign. No matter what you think, Benjamin’s Bumvertising site is getting a lot of links and generating a lot of exposure for PokerFaceBook.com!
We close out each week with our Who Said That?, where we give some link love to bloggers who have really captured our attention with their inspiring and thought provoking posts.
First off, I’d like to give a shout out to James Chartrand who tackled the subject of ‘how to get more comments’ in his first guest post on Copyblogger. I’m sure that even the most confident person around could still feel a bit hesitant to push that publish button on a post like this… I mean – what if no one commented!?! But of they did – as of this moment, there are 86 thought-provoking comments that add to the discussion of this insightful and well-written post.
While working on my degree in Writing from Cal State San Marcos, there was one piece of advice that just about all professors preached – if you want to become better at writing, you’ve got to read – A LOT. If you’ve been looking for a reason to do more enjoyment reading vs. business reading, Joshua Clanton offers a great argument about why reading more fiction can improve your blogging and business writing.
Why is it that most of us refuse to step out of our comfort zone to network with people that have achieved what we desire to achieve? In my opinion, if there is one thing that will get you to where you want to go faster than anything else, it is becoming skilled at networking with the right people. Think about the people you hang around with – do you share a common way of thinking or economic profile? What would happen if you learned to think like someone who was much more successful than you? What would happen if you had connections with some of the most influential people in your industry? What is holding you back from making these connections? This post caused me to take action and initiate a dialog with someone that I very much want to learn from.
I absolutely love this post and if you’re a human being that has ever not lived up to your own expectations, you will probably appreciate it too. I greatly respect anyone who will come right out and say what the rest of us are thinking. Erik analyzes his own experiences with blogging and why he has not been as successful as he’d like to have been. Best of all, he offers some lessons learned from these experiences. Posts about how people have achieved great things are useful, but there is perhaps even more valuable information to be learned from a ‘failure.’ I don’t think Erik is a failure at all. His ability to write honestly about his own experiences and take lessons from his mistakes makes him a success in my book.
I often get really irritated with myself for not being more mobile with my work. I mean, I work for myself. My job is not tied to a physical location. I have a laptop. Why am I not traveling around the world and taking my work with me? This guest post by Mark Hayward written on Skellie’s new blog Anywired really kicked my butt. What captured my attention immediately was realizing that Mark was writing this post from the Caribbean where he now lives. Mark is living the dream – this post and his blog are definitely something to read if you have a dream of living free.
The January 2008 issue has an article by Lee Odden of Top Rank Blog. The title of the article is “Competitive on a Budget: Promote content, socialize online and unify with universal search.”
My first thought was to provide a post here at CBG with bullet points from Lee’s advice. However, I had rather just send you direct to the article.
Great Advice from Lee – Happy Reading – Share Your Comments
I’m going to share a strategy that has proven incredibly successful for David and Fred’s SEO company. It’s been so effective for them that I was even reluctant to share it, but David gave me the green light so here it is!
This is a sales strategy that will work incredibly for anyone who pitches any type of proposal for consideration in order to secure clients including consultants, SEOs, designers, and programmers – and plenty of others. All that is required is CD and any type of screencast software such as Camtasia or Snapz Pro X.
Here’s How They Turn a $0.19 CD Into a Profitable Contract
While their competitors were typing up long-winded mega documents explaining in mind-numbing detail all of the details of their proposal, David creates a full color screencast video with audio explaining the exact details of his execution plan. Using the client’s website as the example, David uses the screencast software to explain problem areas on the site and explain exactly what he will do to fix them and why each step is important to the overall goal.
Next, he burns the screencast to a CD and overnights it to the client. They can then pop it in their computer, sit back and watch the presentation without having to pour through pages of proposals. According to what clients say, this CD is often passed around to different members of the organization who can watch it over and over, as much as necessary.
Why This Proposal Marketing Method is So Effective
The prospects that receive these proposals often compliment them on how much they appreciate them – how do you get complimented on a proposal? The average proposal is a drag for the bidding company to put together and even more boring for the person receiving it!
According to what prospects/clients say, the screencast proposal is so effective because:
David doesn’t use industry jargon
It is very visual – most people prefer to receive information visually
The human voice creates a connection with the prospect that just doesn’t translate on paper
It is completely customized from scratch using their site – no “find (name of last prospect)/replace all with (current prospect name)”
David loves this method too – because it is actually faster, easier, and more intuitive to create a screencast than to create a lengthy document on paper.
A Not-So-Funny Story About The Traditional Proposal Method
Most people have a standard proposal document on paper. Then they go in and enter the information at prompts using the prospects information. I’ve talked to several people who will use an old proposal from the past, and then fill in the information for a new prospect. This can be dangerous! One client that we are working with told David that they received a written proposal that still had a section that related to a completely different business! The company submitting the proposal had taken the time to do a find and replace for the company name, but one entire section talked about a completely different industry.
I’ve made some bad mistakes with proposals as well. Because I grew accustomed to sending out the same old document, I have sent out documents with outdated information several times! Truly customizing a proposal or a quote for each individual client is (in my opinion) the way to go. But until this idea, creating an entirely new written proposal from scratch was a nightmare.
With a screen capture video from scratch, you won’t run the risk of giving the prospect cookie cutter information that doesn’t pertain specifically to their business. For the type of proposal David and Fred offer, every single video uses the prospects website to point out exactly what they will do to improve it. What you choose to highlight on the CD will be different depending on the types of services you offer, but there are probably a variety of ways that you could completely customize a visual screencast using information that specifically relates to that prospect.
Your Thoughts
Have you used this proposal method? How could this method work in your business? Do you have any proposal nightmare stories like the ones above?
You know Dave Navarro regularly writes killer posts at Freelance Folder, but did you also know that he has his own blog? You can find even more of his ‘kick in the butt’ revelations at his Million Dollar Leverage blog – like this one for example. If our plans for 2008 include increasing your wealth, we had better figure out quickly how to become a better networker. For many, this doesn’t come easy, but as Dave points out with his raw words of wisdom, that cannot be an excuse that stands in the way of your success.
Joshua obviously has been in the freelance game for a while to have put together a list that is so dead-on, it’s almost scary. If you’ve been freelancing for even a few months, no doubt you will relate to every one of these horror story scenarios.
If you’re like me and thought just coming up with a domain name you liked was the only decision process when choosing a domain name, you won’t want to miss this one from Vandelay Design. Stephen offers ten useful tools to make sure that the domain name name doesn’t come with any baggage that you didn’t bargain for. The good news is that all of these tools are simpler than trying to decide on the domain name in the first place.
Why are there so many blogs about blogging? It is possible to get so wrapped up in the blogosphere that you don’t make time to actually walk the walk of what you intended to blog about in the first place. Readers want interesting, unique, first person stories – so go out there and make things happen!
Regardless of what some may believe, not all customers are treated equally! The way we are treated as customers largely depends on our behavior as a customer. Customers that are friendly and willing to allow the expert to do what they do best as long as results are happening will often get more work than they paid for and their projects will be at the top of the priority list.
Niche freelancers and experts have the right to pick and choose who they are going to work with. Some of the best experts I know won’t touch certain clients with a 10-foot pole. When I wanted to hire one of Jack Canfield’s consultants, I had to complete a full page questionnaire and a full phone interview before they would even consider me as a client.
I wonder if these customers know much they are getting in their own way when it comes to getting quality results. After a while, these horrible customers can never get work out of the top experts and end up working with anyone who will put up with the abuse.
Working with a broad range of clients has definitely taught me how to be a better customer and get better results from those that I contract for jobs. For those that desire to get only the bare minimum that they paid for and lower than average results here is a guide to how to be the most annoying customer ever:
Hire A Professional to Solve Your Problems And Then Tell Them To Do Everything Your Way
Even if you know nothing at all about design, copywriting, SEO, taxes, financial planning – or whatever you are hiring a professional to do for you, dictate every single detail of the project and use the professional as a tool to complete it.
When the Professional Delivers Exactly What You Ask For, Complain that You Don’t Like It
After you’ve essentially stripped all of the creative rights from the person you’ve hired to do the job and they’ve done what you asked, complain that it doesn’t work. Ask the professional to do it again using another one of your own ideas that didn’t work the first time.
Hold Up the Project And Then Complain That It’s Taking Too Long
When you are asked for feedback, don’t answer right away or provide elusive responses. Take weeks to respond with critical information necessary to move forward. Then one day, send an email in ALL CAPS asking “WHAT’S THE HOLD UP?”
Involve As Many Unqualified People As Possible In the Decision Making Process
When you get your website/copy/blueprint/etc. to review, make sure that you ask as many people as possible for their comments. Then, have every one of those people email the professional directly with their personal opinion – even if they contradict each other. Do not hash out your feedback beforehand and then send a single email with your collective thoughts, let the professional deal with that. Then, when he/she implements one suggestion given by Mary in accounting and another from Josh the web guy down the street, complain about how horrible the project is turning out and ask to redo everything.
Share Your Experiences!
If you’re a freelancer or run a small business, you’ve no doubt had one or more of these nightmare clients – especially in the early days before you learned the warning signs. If you’ve got more tips and pointers about how to be the most annoying customer ever, feel free to add them to the list!
This is the beginning of a series that I plan to do weekly on “Favorite FREE SEO Tools.”
We close out each week with our Who Said That?, where we give some link love to bloggers who have really captured our attention with their inspiring and thought provoking posts.
It amazes me how many people in the tech world like to speak Geek to potential clients. I’m guessing that they do it to impress and to appear knowledgeable, but it usually turns a potential client into someone who feels like an idiot. I wouldn’t want to do business with someone who makes me feel like an idiot… would you?
Geek Speak: Your site is coded in Dream Weaver using tables and we need to transition it to CSS and XHTML while limiting the use of Javascript. We suggest doing a new PSD Mock for you to review in order for us to put a new skin on your website. We’d also like to change your pages from .htm to .php and potentialy need to set up a MySql database to dynamically generate data. Oh, and by the way your URL query strings are all screwed up and we need to rename them to something more SEO friendly with 301 or 302 redirects. With the redirects, we need to speak with our Geek speak programmers on using a 301 or 302. In addition to all this, we need to update your meta tags, provide more internal and external linking using anchor text while balancing the optimization of the on page content. It’s really important that your on page SEO and off page SEO be completed properly. We’ll be able to give you a better idea of all this after doing a site command in Google, running a backlink analysis on your site and your competitors sites. We will also check the anchor text of the backlinks. Finally, Mr. Totally Lost by Now Client, we’ll do an XML sitemap for the major search engines.
I’m going to share a strategy that has proven incredibly successful for David and Fred’s SEO company. It’s been so effective for them that I was even reluctant to share it, but David gave me the green light so here it is!
Regardless of what some may believe, not all customers are treated equally! The way we are treated as customers largely depends on our behavior as a customer. Customers that are friendly and willing to allow the expert to do what they do best as long as results are happening will often get more work than they paid for and their projects will be at the top of the priority list.
