Credo Digital Marketing Blog

Grow your business through digital marketing advice and up-to-date strategies.
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3 Sales Techniques To Close More Business

Posted by on April 29, 2016 in Pro Blog

I get asked often by consultants and agencies for feedback about how they sell business. I see a lot of the sales discussions happening via email between Credo pros and the businesses contacting them through the platform, so I see many varying styles. My goal with Credo is to help you close more business. To that end, I’m starting something new – The View From My Seat.

How One Agency’s Consultative Sales Process Closes Better Business

Posted by on April 26, 2016 in Consulting Strategies/Sales

A note from John: this post comes to you from Everett Sizemore at Inflow, who also wrote the monster Prioritizing Your Marketing Channels post. I asked Everett to write this post because I have seen a number of Inflow’s sales cycles and am very impressed with how consultative they are in their process. I believe that this is paramount to the success of consulting businesses who charge a premium for their services. Because they charge a premium, they can afford…

The Best Invoicing Software for Small Businesses

Posted by on April 12, 2016 in Business

Looking for a new digital agency to help grow your business? Schedule a free marketing evaluation with our team to meet the right agencies fast. It’s fast, free, and we get it right. Small businesses and freelancers rejoice! Invoicing sucks (let’s be honest) and is often a bigger time sink than we’d all like (much like proposals and pitching new work), but it’s also paramount to our businesses because without invoicing you don’t get paid. And that REALLY sucks. So I’ve…

How To Hire Growth Engineers

Posted by on March 30, 2016 in Growth

If you run a software business, you are either an engineer yourself or have hired engineers. While hiring engineers can be challenging for many reasons (multitude of choices for them for jobs, salary requirements, etc), I think there are some common mistakes made when hiring engineers that when remedied can help us hire better. When I was at HotPads we hired a four person growth engineering team. This team sat on the regular product engineering team, but the focus of…

The Best WordPress Lead Generation Plugins for Businesses

Posted by on March 17, 2016 in Business/Marketing Strategies

There are a whole host of WordPress plugins. At a quick glance at the WordPress Plugin directory shows that there are close to 43,000 plugins available. That number does not appear to include those stand-alone plugins that work with WordPress. In the unofficial WordPress Plugin Directory, there are 22 different categories of plugins, with over 2,700 subcategories. That is a lot of plugins! Based on our experience, here are the 8 best WordPress lead generation plugins, both paid and free….

Does Ranking #1 In Google Still Matter?

Posted by on March 3, 2016 in Marketing Strategies

Today I learned that 62% of SEOs are less focused on #1 rankings than five years ago. For years, search engine marketers and specifically SEO professionals have focused on getting their keywords to that ever-elusive and super competitive #1 spot in the search engines. Specifically, we have been hyper-focused on ranking #1 because we’ve believed that they get more traffic and therefore better leads/conversions. The search results are constantly in flux, though, as shown via Dr. Pete’s Mozcast Metrics and Algorithm Change…

How Sending My Leads to Credo Is Growing My Business

Posted by on February 26, 2016 in Consulting Strategies/Sales

Note from John: this guest post comes to you from Mike Arnesen of UpBuild, a Credo partner agency in Portland, Oregon. Mike contacted me about writing this post because he uses a great workflow that helps him qualify leads and send the ones that are not a good fit for his agency to Credo, so that they can find the right agency or consultant for their needs. Mike found that by implementing this into his workflow, his response time to…

Is The Time Finally Right For Marketing Management Consulting?

Posted by on February 18, 2016 in Business

Looking for a new digital agency to help grow your business? Schedule a free marketing evaluation with our team to meet the right agencies fast. It’s fast, free, and we get it right. The digital marketing industry is still young, having started in very nascent forms around 1996 with the first search engines, where all that mattered was onpage text. The notion of links as a way to connect the Internet came into being in 1999-2001 with Google coming onto the…

The Marketing Email You Are Not Sending But Should Be

Posted by on February 9, 2016 in Marketing Strategies

Today I want to tell you about the email that we launched when I was at HotPads that outperformed our expectations, and it’s something that most companies out there should do. I can’t wait to do it on Credo someday when I have the right data in place (more on that some other time) because I know that it drives leads like crazy and when you drive leads you drive revenue. Those of you who know me know that I…

The Marketplace Growth Conundrum

Posted by on February 2, 2016 in Business

Marketplaces are an interesting business to build because you are in actuality building two companies. One side is B2C, where you acquire customers as the demand side (either people or businesses). On the other side you have the B2B portion where you are building out the supply side to serve the demand side. It’s a double headed problem, so where do you start? I’m only a little bit into building out Credo, the marketplace that I founded, so I have…

Credo New Feature Update: Consultant/Agency Reviews!

Posted by on January 29, 2016 in Announcements

Here at Credo, we’re bringing transparency to the digital marketing consulting industry. Digital marketing is an opaque industry where a lot of practitioners do not do a great job for their clients and thus earn the industry a bad name (if you’ve been in SEO for more than a few years you are well familiar with this) and hurts all of us. Most importantly, great honest businesses experience harm. I want to put a stop to this. Today I’ve pushed…

How to vet a marketing provider

Posted by on January 27, 2016 in Business

Lots has been written over the years about hiring a consultant or agency for your business. When I sit back and think about what you as a business owner have on your plate for the day to day of your business, worrying about whether or not a service provider can do the job you need them to do should not be something you have to do. More businesses have come to me as of late who want to work with…

Should You Hire An Agency For A “Test” Project?

Posted by on January 21, 2016 in Business/Consulting Strategies

I’ve been in the digital marketing world for about 6 years now and have worked at 2 agencies, two brands inhouse, and now I’m running this company whose blog you are on and doing a bit of side consulting myself. As such, I see and have seen a lot of emails and leads from people seeking SEO services. The SEO and digital marketing industries are still in their nascent early stages. Until just a few years ago, it was relatively…

Should I Do SEO?

Posted by on January 18, 2016 in SEO Tactics

Any SEO consultant or SEO agency owner will inevitably get asked this question sometime during their career: Should I (or my business) do SEO? Well folks, we at Credo want to answer this question for you once and for all, We created this handy-dandy flowchart for you to send to anyone who asks this question:

Goodbye HireGun. Hello Credo

Posted by on January 18, 2016 in Announcements

I just pushed live a new version of my company. Formerly known as HireGun, moving forward the name is Credo and you can find it at GetCredo.com. Let me tell you why. Why change the name of a company that is, for all intents and purposes, just a few months old? If it’s not broken, why fix it? Well, the answer is that the name HireGun was broken and I had to fix it.

How To Set Up MailChimp in WordPress

Posted by on December 10, 2015 in Business/Marketing Strategies

If you do email marketing through MailChimp and your site uses WordPress, congratulations. You’ve already gone through the challenges of finding a domain name, getting hosting (we use WPengine), starting to publish content, and beginning to generate an audience. You’ve also signed up with MailChimp and started to think about how you are going to use email marketing to help grow your business. A lot of the hard work is done, and now you need to connect up the two…

A New Entrepreneur’s Tools for Work Sanity

Posted by on November 20, 2015 in Business

I’m recently out on my own as an entrepreneur. I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea, but I am trying to get two businesses of the ground at the same time — consulting with businesses on growth and inbound marketing on the one side, and then building Credo on the other side. While it’s a virtuous cycle, it is also a lot of work as a (semi)technical solo founder and former agency consultant. To manage the increasingly long…

Moz vs HubSpot

Posted by on November 18, 2015 in Business/Product Comparisons

Looking for a new digital agency to help grow your business? Schedule a free marketing evaluation with our team to meet the right agencies fast. It’s fast, free, and we get it right. Many marketers and businesses have asked the question “Which should I use, Moz or HubSpot?” While the answer is often “Why not both?” because they are vastly different tools (and the founders are very good friends), we thought it would be useful to dig into the differences to…

How To Use SEO To Dominate Your Startup’s Branded Searches

Posted by on November 2, 2015 in Marketing Strategies/SEO Tactics

Startups know that SEO matters, but what they also know is that you need to get your company in front of the right people at the right time. For a small startup, this is key to survival. What a lot of startup don’t do is leverage everything within their power to control their brand and put the most important information about them front and center when potential new customers (or investors) have heard the brand name and conduct a search…

WordPress vs Squarespace – Which is better in 2021?

Posted by on October 22, 2015 in Business/Product Comparisons

Choosing between WordPress and Squarespace can be a difficult decision. By understanding your needs and how each platform measures up to them, you’ll be able to make the informed choice that best serves you. We examined the two platforms across a few topics: Availability of Themes SEO Friendliness Pricing eCommerce Integrations Other Integrations (Mailchimp, etc) So who wins? Let’s look.

What Are The Most Effective Social Media Content Types?

Posted by on October 20, 2015 in Marketing Strategies

Social media marketing has come into its own in the last few years, and the pace of innovation in the space is fast. Point blank, if your business is not using social media marketing to grow your business, you need to investigate it. There are many types available: Retargeting of existing users for purchases (think abandoned shopping carts) or re-engagement (come buy this thing because you liked this thing) New customer acquisition Content promotion The list goes on and on….

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