My friend Barry Schwartz recently wrote a post over on his site Search Engine Roundtable entitled “Google’s John Mueller: You Focus Too Much On Links” where he embedded this tweet from John Mueller on the Google Webmaster team: You focus too much on links, imo — I’m glad that we use 100s of factors in our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. — 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) January 22, 2019 Now, take this tweet with a grain of salt as it’s literally…
In 2017 we published our digital marketing pricing survey, which became one of the most referenced pricing surveys in the digital marketing industry. 184 respondents across 19 countries participated in that survey. We would love to grow that this time around so that we can provide more accurate statistics for the industry! Thank you everyone for your contributions! We had 272 survey responses, and are now at work analyzing, visualizing, and writing up our discoveries! Stay tuned for a launch…
Over the last few years, Google has undeniably made a lot of changes to their search results pages (SERPs). If you work in SEO you can probably point out hundreds of small changes, and if you’re just a marketer or an average Joe then you’ve probably felt like “something” is different. As someone who looks at “consultant” and “agency” search results a lot, as they are a main driver of Credo’s business, I’ve noticed some alarming changes over the last…
Generic SEO services are dead. If you sell generic “SEO services” as well as “web design services”, “social media services”, and other generic terms that say nothing about what you actually do, then you will soon be out of business. Or, you will continue the client churn and burn with high acquisition costs for low budget clients who want to pay nothing and get everything. And this is your own fault because of how you have positioned yourself.
Aleyda Solis is one of my favorite people in the digital marketing world. She’s whip smart, has a ton of hustle, is always doing interesting things and sharing the learnings with others, and she’s super fun to hang out with (I’ve had hangovers for days after hanging out with her). She’s also an incredible marketer and entrepreneur, and over the last few years has built a business that she loves running from wherever she happens to be in the world….
Do you want to close more of the leads coming to you into new clients and therefore more revenue? If so, you have to follow these three rules of sales: Follow up with everyone within an hour of receiving their message. Follow up with them every couple of days for the first week, then send a final email that you are going to close their record. Set their expectations for next steps and keep to what you commit to. If…
I am going to say something that many of you will disagree with: You should not base your marketing investment decisions off of cost per lead in the B2B space. In fact, I think cost per lead is the worst metric you can look at as you build a service-based business.
Two weeks ago at the MN Summit I presented this deck entitled “No Nonsense Content Marketing”. I have removed one slide that I gave away an an attendees-only gift, but the presentation otherwise is below in its entirety. Enjoy.
You work in lead generation, or run a business where you need to get more people contacting you about your business, listen up. If you are not converting the “leads” that are coming to you, or the “leads” that are coming to you are not qualified and are way too far up the conversion funnel to be of value to you, you don’t need more leads. You need better ones. This is a hack I came up with to convert…
In the never-ending debate on the best PPC Pricing Model, Kirk Williams responds to a recent article against Percentage of Spend pricing by defending it. See his thoughts here, on why Percentage of Spend pricing doesn’t necessarily misalign the agency’s goals with the clients. Make sure to read to the end, where he also presents a variation of the model as a new way to price that brings out the best in all models.
Looking for a new PPC agency who can accelerate your results? Schedule a free marketing evaluation with our team to meet the right agencies fast. In this economy, you can’t afford not to. It’s fast, free, and we get it right. Matching brands with agencies is literally what we do. Many paid acquisition agencies and digital agencies charge a percentage of spend for their fees. The question is: does this pricing strategy create a recipe for client-agency disaster? Or, can…
Hi everyone – In this post you’ll find some information about some upcoming changes to Credo Pro. Over the last few months I have been digging deep into the Credo business metrics and also working with a business coach to figure out how I grow up as an entrepreneur and how to make Credo work better for all of you, which is my number one priority and what keeps me awake at night.
This post is updated annually to add and remove ways to drive traffic to your site. It was last updated August 2021. You need more website traffic. If you run an online business, traffic is your lifeblood because it enables your business model to work and pay your bills. Therefore, you need to employee multiple strategies to bring new visitors to your site and keep old visitors engaged with your content. Here are 51 ways to drive and increase traffic…
I’m involved in a few different groups of consultants and agency owners online, including Credo. One question I see a bunch is agency owners or consultants asking others how often they speak with their clients. This is a very important question, but I also want to turn it around a bit and say that it’s the wrong question. If you’re asking this question, you’re really just looking for the bare minimum that you can do. In reality, if you just…
Yo Credo pros! It’s been a bit since I’ve published a video for you. I got a Mac back in November and fired up iMovie today for the first time in probably 10 years, and wow. It’s really moved forward! That coupled with my new home office setup (and my new cactus) I’m back in the game, so expect more of these coming up.
Hey there! Happy Thursday! I hope the new year is off to a great start for you. Personally, my wife and I just moved to Denver Colorado and are in the middle of getting our lives and house here set up. I wish I was writing this from my office, but my office is full of our stuff that we haven’t put away yet! A short idea for you today to get you started in the new year if you’re…
When most people start consulting on their own (and subsequently hire people and start an agency), they charge too little. Don’t be embarrassed – everyone does it. When I did my first freelance consulting projects in 2011/2012, I charged $50 per hour and was billing hourly. I realized years later that I made them ~$2,000,000 dollars from my SEO work, and I made ~$2,500 from that engagement. Great ROI for them, but not for me. With my next few clients,…
Hey Credo pro – You’re on Credo because you want to build your business and get more clients. One of the toughest parts of any sales program is getting responses from leads, and Credo is no exception. When you are responding to an Open Lead on Credo, you’re one of multiple (up to 4) responses, so you still need to set yourself apart from others.
Ahh the freelance life. Work wherever and whenever you want to, make more money and work fewer hours, retire young. At least that’s the dream, right? Unfortunately, it’s not always reality. One of the toughest realities to run into (and if you have not yet, you will) is when a client does not pay you for the work you have done for them. So what can you do? That’s what this week’s video is all about! The tips: Stop working…
Sometimes when doing work for clients, they ask you to do work that is outside of the scope of your project. What do you do? In this week’s video, I go deeper into some of the strategies I have devised to keep scope creep like this from happening. These include: Making sure that you have a contract signed that outlines the scope of work (and the contract template has been approved by a lawyer). No contract, no work. Explain to…
Last week I wrote about SEO tools and I’m doing it again today because it’s an important topic that isn’t talked about much these days in the digital marketing world. Today I want to cover the question I have often thought about and heard around what tools a business should have access to vs what tools they rely on their agency for. I’ve worked inhouse and at agencies with clients, using many of the tools on the market today. I’ve gone through many…