Why you need to do the math on marketing before saying it’s too expensive

Posted by on August 16, 2021 in Business

It’s incredible to me how many times I’ve spoken with a company who hears a number for SEO, let’s say $2,500, and they say “Wow that’s too expensive! I can’t afford that!” But then I probe deeper and ask them what their goal is for SEO (in keeping with the example above). Oftentimes, I hear this: Oh we don’t know what our goal is. That’s fine, I say. How much do you make per organic visitor, or if it’s easier…

How to Drive Leads to Your Local Business

Posted by on June 24, 2021 in Business/Sales

With the rise of large companies like Amazon dominating the industry, small business owners and marketers are feeling the pressure. It can be difficult to compete with these eCommerce giants when you run a local brick-and-mortar business like HVAC companies or law firms that rely on foot traffic to make sales. Any business owner or entrepreneur knows all too well the importance of generating leads. Without sufficient leads, you run the risk of making insufficient sales, which is bad news…

How to connect Gravity Forms to your CRM

Posted by on May 17, 2021 in Sales

When I started Credo back in 2013, I had a WordPress site with Gravity Forms installed. One of my coaches likes to joke about this, mostly in the context of that we’ve built a real business off of that start. As a business generating leads, whether for yourself or others, when you’re first starting out just having form software and a live site is a big win. But once you’re achieving any sort of scale, manually entering new leads into…

Why client expansion is an agency’s highest leverage

Posted by on April 22, 2021 in Pro Blog/Sales

 As an agency, your business grows when one of a few things happens: You get more leads and close more of them You retain clients for a longer period of time You trim back expenses Let’s be honest first, getting more leads and closing more of them is really hard. We all wish there were a magic button labeled ‘New Leads,’ but if you’ve been trying to increase leads to your site, you know it’s just a lot of…

The SEO proposals I used to close $288,000 in SEO consulting work

Posted by on April 5, 2021 in Case Studies/Sales

When I first got laid off from Trulia in 2015, I had a three month runway of finances before I needed to either be making enough to stay self-employed (and paying my half of our San Francisco expenses) or starting a new job. I was interviewing and had some great conversations with some super cool companies, I knew in my heart of hearts that I wanted to work for myself. Spoiler alert: I’m writing this in April 2021 and I’m…

The best CRMs for marketing agencies

Posted by on March 22, 2021 in Sales

Because I spend a lot of my days talking with marketing agencies who are trying to sell their services to prospective clients, I spend a lot of my days thinking about sales and how agencies can be more successful. A question I hear time and time and time again is “what’s the best CRM for marketing agencies?” I don’t believe there is a “best” CRM for marketing agencies, but there are CRMs that are more commonly used by marketing agencies…

5 Fixable Reasons Your Sales Prospects Aren’t Converting

Posted by on March 10, 2021 in Sales

Are you trying to convert sales prospects but your conversion rates continue to plunge? Numbers vary between sources, but the latest studies suggest that only around 10% to 15% of leads turn into conversions. That means you’re doing better than average if you convert 2 of 10 leads. To nurture leads, you need to have alligator-thick skin. You need to accept some level of rejection. Ghosting will happen. You just need to learn how to live, and learn from, this character-building experience….

The five elements of a successful services proposal

Posted by on March 8, 2021 in Sales

I was once working with a marketing consultant who was offering high-end SEO audits. This person is extremely accomplished, but they were struggling to close high-ticket audits. They’d close them from time to time, but they felt like they had hit a ceiling for how much they could charge. At the time I was offering 1:1 consulting with agencies and consultants, and they signed on for a few sessions. Part of this coaching was me asking them to send me…

How to make whitelabeled services work

Posted by on February 25, 2021 in Business/Hiring a marketing provider/Pro Blog

Over the years Credo’s been contacted by quite a few entrepreneurs and new agency owners who are signing new clients and looking to find contractors to deliver the work. I’ll be upfront and say that if someone is looking for contractors, Credo is not a good fit for them. We mostly work with best-in-class digital agencies, not contractors, and we have helped a few agencies of record find another agency to run a specific channel that the AOR does not…

Agency vs productized service – what is the difference?

Posted by on February 4, 2021 in Business

Before starting Credo, I always thought businesses understood what an agency is, does, and could be hired to do. But as we’ve gone through the years and we’ve spoken with thousands of companies, I’ve realized that thinking was completely wrong. After working through a business’s needs and educating on what an agency is best for vs a freelancer or consultant, the point of contact will then have conversations with agencies. Often, we’ll hear back feedback that goes something like this:…

How to fund your business

Posted by on January 28, 2021 in Business

When Russ Perry was getting Design Pickle off the ground, he bought a pickle costume off of the internet and went to conferences dressed up as a pickle. He used this notoriety to get his first customers for Design Pickle, and now that company easily makes six figures per month in revenue. Russ funded Design Pickle with company revenue. Bill Gates, who is right now the fourth richest person in the world, started Microsoft when he was working at Honeywell…

The Lead Generation Ladder for Agencies and Consultants

Posted by on July 7, 2020 in Sales

I was recently emailing with a solo consultant who contacted Credo about becoming a customer on the supply side of our business. Basically, they want to get more digital marketing leads in their door. I hear this a lot, so I went to their website to poke around. Seeing a few concerning things which I messaged them about (and which turned out to be on purpose but a really bad user/conversion experience), we got into a discussion. As happens with…

What are the 4 P’s of marketing and how do you apply them to your business?

Posted by on May 6, 2020 in Business

Alright team, it’s time to get back to the basics. In the online world, there are a lot of marketers who have never taken a business or marketing class in their life. In fact, I would say this applies to most of my peers in the SEO and digital industry. We’ve learned through the school of hard knocks. That’s made us strong, but also left many without a proper education and grounding off of which to build and change as…

How to navigate a service business in unsettling times

Posted by on March 10, 2020 in Business/Pro Blog

Dear reader, Well, we’re in weird times right now aren’t we? I’m only 35 so I wasn’t really paying attention to the broader world during the economic crash in 2000/2001, didn’t really think about SARS when it was ongoing, and I had just started my first professional job 3 weeks before the 2008 recession began. Interestingly, that company about doubled in size during that recession and I learned a few things. Right now, with the COVID-19 virus spreading and the…

9 SEO metrics that matter (and 5 that don’t)

Posted by on February 25, 2020 in Business

Let’s face it – there is a LOT of information on the internet about SEO and how to do very tactical things like building new links, fixing information architecture, writing proper title tags, doing an SEO audit, and the like. There’s a lot of information about how to do SEO, but there is woefully little out there about measuring SEO and knowing if you’re getting a return. When you Google [seo metrics] (and find an article other than this one)…

Why you need business insurance

Posted by on February 18, 2020 in Business/Sales

Transcript Hey there, what’s going on everybody? John Doherty, Founder and CEO right here at Credo. So today I tweeted out something where basically I said, if you are sending proposals to clients without including a statement of work or you’re not sending a statement of work before you even send them a proposal, you are not going to sign nearly as many clients. And if you do sign clients they’re going to be clients that are paying you less…

What is the Flywheel Effect and how does it apply to marketing?

Posted by on February 11, 2020 in Business

Today, I want to talk about the concept of marketing flywheels. I was recently asked on Twitter if I could sum up a flywheel in a tweet, because I was talking about how in one Friday, my company generated over half a million dollars in lead pipeline: Oh and the best part? I worked ~30min. Was watching a sick baby. Power of a flywheel. — JOHN DOHΞRTY 🤓 Denver entrepreneur (@dohertyjf) February 8, 2020 This was across eight different projects…

The three types of leads you’ll encounter in your business

Posted by on January 28, 2020 in Pro Blog/Sales

If there is one thing I’ve learned over the years in business, it’s that people are always more optimistic than they think they are. Most (many?) businesses start because the founder saw something they needed and decided to build it after they couldn’t find it. We’re always looking for solutions to problems that we have, and sometimes they exist and sometimes they don’t. Check out the “request for product” search on Twitter: With this in mind, I’ve learned that there…

The next $100M SEO company

Posted by on November 21, 2019 in Business/Marketing Industry

Something I find myself thinking about a lot recently is the growth of certain industries and types of businesses. For example, when we look at the growth of Software As A Service (SaaS) as a topic over the last 15 years we see this: But when we compare that against e-commerce, we get a very different picture of its actual size: To bring the example back closer to home, let’s look at how [search engine optimization] as a topic compares:…

Is the online directory business model broken?

Posted by on October 22, 2019 in Business

Do you remember phone books from when you were a child? If you weren’t born until the late 90s you may not, but I remember looking through phone books as a child to find the right phone number to call for somewhere. We take this for granted now with Google Maps in our pocket on our iPhone, but 10+ years before the iPhone even came out we were looking in phone books. This may come across as a “get off…

How to hire a business coach

Posted by on October 16, 2019 in Business

In September 2019 I shared a thought in a tweet, and it was seen by over 100,000 people. Mind = 🤯 The tweet? If you are an entrepreneur doing at least $100k/yr in revenue and you do not have a coach, may I strongly recommend that you find one? I now have 2, and working with them is singlehandedly the best thing I’ve done for myself as an entrepreneur and for my business. — John Doherty 🤓 Denver entrepreneur (@dohertyjf) September…

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