Category: Business

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I Need to Start Adding a lot of Additional Content to Existing Blog Posts

I have learned recently that Google is really starting to prioritize posts that go into great detail about a topic and answer a variety of different questions. Context needs to be established so that it can use AI and answer complicated questions.

Obviously I’ve noticed for years now that posts that go into excruciating detail about something tend to rank first for most of my questions. It’s often quite irritating as a user but it doesn’t matter. That’s what ranks.

So my goal now should be to systematically add tons of relevant information to my website. That might mean just adding additional pieces of information to existing and popular blog posts.

But it may also mean doubling-down and adding more articles that are similar to the first one and linking them together. It may also mean linking more of my existing posts together.

What might even be smart is to take a category in which I have tons of posts, and write a huge article with the sole purpose of linking to all of them.

While my rankings seem better than ever, my traffic seems to be slipping a bit, and this might be a great way to improve it.

Finally, just an update that my Adwords campaigns have not been very successful. I don’t know that I’ve gotten any actual calls, just spend a lot.

I may need to revisit those soon. And if I can’t get those to work, I may have to actually pay a company to do SEO for me.

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Regrouping on Growing the Business

I’ve sort of trailed off recently when it comes to working on the business and growing it. For a while, I was really hitting the SEO stuff hard and totally revising my site, and it was working! But then I stopped, and now my traffic and results are dropping again.

Right now, I want to circle back on doing two things in particular.

First, I think it’s time that I actually write a newsletter and send it out to my clients. This will involve a few steps:

  1. Finding out when I last sent out a newsletter, then finding out which new clients I’ve added since then and adding them to the newsletter list
  2. Figuring out what big changes have happened in the industry to include in the newsletter (chatGPT?)
  3. Compiling maybe some of my recent posts if they are helpful
  4. Actually writing the newsletter and sending it out
  5. Coming up with a schedule to send these out quarterly

I think that it’s key to keep in touch with all my clients. They need to know I’m around and I need to be top-of-mind for them. They want to know I’m active and working on their best interests. This is the best way to do that.

I’ve made a note to prepare for this tomorrow and proceed with next steps.

The second thing I want to do, is to start producing content again. I need to be posting regularly in my blog if I want to rank highly. I’ve really been slacking here. I’m not sure when my last blog post was.

But if I can keep posting regular content, it should greatly improve my results for all posts. Maybe I should come up with a schedule where I write a new post every couple weeks, and maybe revise an old one every two weeks, too. Something like that.

That’s it for today! I think it’s really important I focus on growing, since I haven’t been the last couple years and that has been a problem.

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In All My Hobbies I’ve Opted to Nominally Do One Hard Thing – At the Expense of Fundamentals

I always hated “fundamentals”. I always wanted to just jump to doing the really difficult, impressive stuff so that I could prove I was good at something.

I remember with skateboarding, I always struggled with some core stuff, and instead of just perfecting each thing one at a time, I would spend all of my time trying to land – for example, a 360 flip. It’s a very difficult trick, and every so often – only from a standstill – I could land it.

It looked bad and I could never really get the hang of doing it consistently, but sometimes I could do it. And that made me feel like I was good at the sport.

I wasn’t though. I was just ignoring all the small pieces that were required to get good.

Or on the trampoline. I did get good at basic flips, but then I started doing backflips with a full 360 in them. Once again, it wasn’t pretty. But I could do it. And it impressed people and made me feel like I was really good at it.

And then guitar. I never practiced with a metronome, I didn’t learn any music theory, my rhythm was bad, and just so many of the fundamentals were totally foreign to me.

But I could play one of the more complicated Stevie Ray Vaughan licks. Not very well, obviously, but I could play the notes and I could do it quickly.

I think with all these things, there has been sort of a desperate thread to prove (to myself?) that I’m good at something. I skip steps to just get to the hard stuff because otherwise I feel like I’m just not that great.

And I also just get bogged down in the details of things and it feels overwhelming. I’d rather just go to something cooler and more showy.

I never put any of this together until just recently. The irony is that, in my quest to prove I was good at things, I neglected the very fundamentals which would have enabled my actual success.

It’s sort of frustrating looking back now and seeing how counter-productive it was. I should have drilled in the fundamentals and mastered them so that I could proceed from there with a good base.

Even now, I’m just realizing I do it with weight training, too. I’ve neglected all stretching and all core stability exercises. Instead, I’ve focused hard on obvious measures of success like my bench press numbers.

And then just the other day I injured my back again, ostensibly as a result of not building up core strength. In this case, I got burned by not building up a literal base of stability from which to expand my strength.

In work, I’d much rather take on major acquisitions than slowly build up my client base with strong business fundamentals.

So the question is: what do I do now?

The first step is obviously what I’m doing here: acknowledging the issue. Now that I’m actually aware of it, I can watch out for it going forward. I can pay attention and notice where it might be counter-productive.

I’m really going hard at the guitar again, and it’s important that I do things differently this time. I actually have been focusing a lot more on the fundamentals this time around, so perhaps I have already started to improve. But I do really need to dial that in and realize that being rock-solid on the basics will make the harder stuff way easier.

And I should obviously apply that elsewhere, to. Particularly with my business. I need to look for all the ways in which I’m neglecting some of the basics and really start to work on them. I already sense that there are tons of areas in which I need to improve.

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We Need to be Very Specific in Who We Work With in our Marketing Materials

This is one of those things that I’ve always known, and yet refused to ever actually do despite all the evidence.

I feel like many things like this are becoming clearer over time. Of course I need to do this.

My concern in the past was always that I was afraid of excluding anyone.

But the thing is… Particularly on my website, I’ve gotten relatively few clients from it despite high traffic. A huge part of that is likely that nobody has felt as if I was speaking to them.

When someone is looking for an agency to work with, it’s extremely effective if they hear their industry mentioned, or at the very least a description of their size of business or something else that will make them feel like we’ve worked with businesses like theirs and can absolutely succeed.

I think I need to start out by saying things along the lines of, “we work with Twin Cities small businesses with between 5-20 employees.”

That’s a great start.

Sure, some bigger companies might decide we’re not big enough for them, but that’s fine. It may even be true!

But for the most part, people who don’t fit that description are just going to gloss over it. A business with just the one owner as an employee will probably still reach out, since they aren’t that far from the description. And they may even feel grateful when I tell them we’ll still work with them.

But most importantly: since I haven’t gotten tons of business from my website, it can really only go up from here.

I think it’s also a good idea to list some specific industries or types of business we work with, like:

  • Home builders
  • Remodelers
  • Business Service Providers (accounting, payroll, marketing, HR, legal, finance, etc.)
  • Niche product makers (e-commerce)
  • Residential services (cleaners, lawn care, plumbing, electrical, security systems)
  • Membership organizations

That’s probably a good start.

So now I just need to revamp some of my main service pages and home page and include these descriptions throughout. Especially near the start of each page.

Hopefully this will help increase conversion.

 

 

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It’s Time to Start Paying for Advertising

It’s finally time I get serious about advertising. I need to pay to promote myself online and test a variety of different places to see if I can generate any business that way.

Back when my average client wasn’t very profitable, it was tough to justify spending very much on Adwords, for instance. But I have since revamped my product offering and am now pushing my Total WordPress Maintenance package which bundles a bunch of our WordPress services together, resulting in considerably higher total profit. This means I can justify spending a ton more on advertising for each client acquisition.

While I’ve tried this a little bit in the past, I never took it very seriously. I suspect my total ad spend throughout the entire time I’ve been in business is less than $1000, which means I really haven’t done it at all.

But it, along with my organic SEO, is likely the future of growth for me.

If I can lock something down that is repeatable and scalable, I just need to push that heavily and I’ll finally start seeing the consistent growth I’ve been hoping for.

To start, I’m going to focus on Google Adwords. I don’t know yet whether it should all just be ads shown directly in Google, or if perhaps I should focus on local ads in maps.

There’s a lot I don’t know, actually. And so one of the first things I’d like to do is more research on advertising with Google and what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully that will guide me a bit.

I’m hoping to spend maybe a month or two optimizing that and seeing if I can get some results.

If that doesn’t get me what I’m looking for, I might start looking into other advertising avenues. Perhaps smaller directory sites like Yelp or Thumbtack. I’ve tried LinkedIn before and gotten nowhere, so I’m not sure if I’d want to go back to that or not.

Regardless, it’s important that I move forward with these and do what I can to grow. I’d rather not go back to in-person networking to grow my business, and I don’t want to stagnate, either.

I may finally ask for some help with SEO, too, since it feels like I should be getting way more business from my site and organic rankings than I am. That may be the next step after advertising.

I’d love to start adding a client or two per week from new leads. If I could do that, I’d be golden.

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I’m Going to Rewrite all of my Top Blog Posts to Make Them More Relevant

This is not a very exciting blog post to read again in the future, but it’s important for me to think through this because it could have a huge impact on my success.

I’ve been working on improving my website from a technical SEO perspective and also just more broadly trying to improve its rankings. It has a lot going for it, yet I still have not been converting many visitors into clients. For a few years now, I’ve slowly been losing traffic but at least I’ve gotten to a point now where that is no longer the case.

So that brings me to today’s task.

I’ve made the realization that all my top-ranking pages are essentially irrelevant to building or maintaining websites. Most are random tutorials involving Photoshop or other misc. programs. I couldn’t tell you why these happen to rank so well when my far-more-relevant content does not.

Either way, I have learned that this could actually be quite counter-productive. I used to think that all traffic was good traffic. But if my top-ranking pages are irrelevant, Google won’t know what I actually do and will never rank my for what I want to be ranked for.

So first, I’m going to try to make those pages more relevant.

I started today with a Photoshop-related tutorial. I added a handful of references to website design and building websites, and generally framed the whole thing as a website designer’s guide to this particular problem.

I’m hoping that this – along with adding some links to other website-related pages – will indicate to Google that the real topic is websites.

So now I want to go through all of my top-ranking pages (perhaps the top 20 or more) and re-write them so that they are more relevant to websites. It’s possible this will have a huge impact.

There’s also the chance that it won’t.

If months go by and it hasn’t made a difference, I may need to consider trying something else. I maybe even want to consider removing the posts and redirecting their URLs to somewhere else on my site.

It would be a shame to lose that traffic, but if those rankings are actively preventing me from ranking my other pages, and none of those visitors are ever converting, why would I keep them? It doesn’t make sense.

I hope it doesn’t come to that. But it might. We will see!

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I Need to Stop my Phone Spam, and Start Answering Calls from Unknown Numbers

A lot of things have slowly started becoming very clear to me lately. As I’ve thought more about my business, the more I’ve realized that I’ve been really blind to some obvious truths.

One of them is that never answering unknown numbers on my phone is costing me business. It’s likely that most potential new clients that reach out to me are probably calling, and of those, few will leave a voicemail or email me if I don’t pick up.

In high school I worked at a small business office and the owners would be furious if the phone rang more than 2 times without getting picked up.

I should probably have a similar mindset.

The problem now, of course, is that I believe almost all of the calls I get are spam. In the past, I would have said that virtually all of them are spam. But I guess I don’t actually know that.

So first, let’s deal with that.

I might have to sign up for a service that removes me from spam lists. I know there are a handful of services that do this, and I’ll need to research them and see which is the best. I just added this to my list.

If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll be removed from most lists and the spam will die off.

It’s possible it won’t. Given my position in the web design industry, it’s likely I’m on lists that you can’t be removed from.

If I’m getting too much spam even after that, I may have to look into other solutions. I could have a robot-answering machine or find other ways to filter out spam. Maybe I need a service that scans numbers and makes sure they aren’t on any lists.

And then once that is all set, I need to start actually answering calls. I might need to figure out a way to have a schedule on my phone to have it ring but only during business hours.

Hopefully, if all my efforts pay off, I’ll start having lots of potential new clients reach out to me and I can start signing them up for our services.

I’ll write more about that in the coming weeks but hopefully things will really start working out. Little issues like this one now seem obviously problematic to me and I’m hoping to work through them all.

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I Need to Get Serious About Paying for Leads

I’ve decided I should actually put some work into paid ads and trying to acquire clients that way.

In talks with a business owner whose business I wanted to acquire, I learned that he had been using paid ads on an obscure directory site and was paying $60/lead.

He was then profiting like $80/month on each of the clients he got.

Even if only 10% of those leads signed-on, this would still be a great deal. Considering the going rate for a business like this is 1x annual recurring revenue.

So in his case, each client should be worth around $1200 to him.

And I need to start looking at it that way.

Obviously these aren’t as good as acquiring a company, because every client will require onboarding, and there will be lots of sales work I’ll have to do. So I can’t pay that much.

But if I’m trying to sign them up for services which will yield $80/profit per month, I’d argue I should be willing to pay at least… $800 per new client. That’s still far less than I was willing to pay for his company.

That’s a lot of money to be able to throw around. And they’ll still pay themselves off quickly.

If I could pay $800/lead and get… Say 5 new clients each month, I’d obviously be spending a lot on it but I’d be adding $400/month of extra profit, every single month in the future. And I’d be adding to this number each month.

After just one year, I’d have another $4800 of profit coming in each month, or $57,600/year. That sounds pretty good to me.

Granted, I will have spent $48,000 that year in advertising, but it would be worth it. Because these clients would keep paying for years.

It’s also worth noting that I would literally be cash-flow positive even in year one. It would be a lot of work taking everyone on, but absolutely worth it.

With this in mind, I need to get aggressive and try a ton of things. I need to try ads in various directories, Google, Google Maps, and wherever else I can find.

I will have to do research to figure out what keywords to use. I’ll need to track things so I can figure out which keywords are the most successful and which ones are a waste.

Regardless: I just need to do it all. The specifics remain to be seen. But I need to put some serious money into this because it will still be profitable.

One advantage I have over most is that my overhead is basically zero, so I don’t need to be as profitable as the bigger shops. I can afford to spend a lot more on each lead because my margins are still high. Once you have a large staff, an office, and a bunch of other pricey things, it gets difficult to maintain.

I’m feeling excited, though, because I’ve never really taken paid ads seriously and I’m only just now realizing how incredibly helpful they could be.

I’m hoping to kick this off within the next few weeks and I’ll report back with results.

 

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I Need to Tune Up My Website and Focus on Improving SEO

I have a large website and tons of useful content. Until recently, it was getting a ton of traffic, too.

But it’s been consistently dropping despite adding new content regularly, and at this point I’m at like 20% of what I had just a year ago.

It’s time I figure that out.

The first thing I need to do is fix all the issues identified on my site by SEMrush and Google Search Console. I’ve already done the most critical ones and some of the low-hanging fruit, but there is way more to be done.

The biggest things remaining are that I need to make sure all images have alt tags. It will be slow-going, apparently, because some of the ways images are used on my site apparently do not automatically load the alt tag data even though I’ve entered it.

Regardless, I need to get my traffic to return, if for nothing else than to attract sellers of their website hosting companies.

I have a list of things I can fix, and we’ll see if those things make a difference over time. I’m hoping my traffic starts to creep back up again.

If not: I think what I’ll do is share some of my data with the SEO community and see if they can help with ideas, or possibly find and hire someone with lots of experience to take a second look.

But this should be my priority for the time being.

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I Want to Lead a Life of Improvement and Accomplishment, not Just Enjoyment

I think the underlying concept of this post has been brewing in my mind for quite some time now, and maybe I’ve said similar things in the past. But more recently I feel that it’s come to a head.

I think I’ve been so preoccupied with my own enjoyment of the world that it has sort of distracted me from my goals.

Now, perhaps more than ever, I want to pursue grand goals and work tirelessly to achieve them. Even minor accomplishments feel more satisfying than ever, and meaningless entertainment or pleasure-seeking seems to leave me feeling more dissatisfied than ever.

Rather than lament why that is, I think it’s easier and more effective to just go with it. To start moving away from those things and, instead, really dive headfirst into accomplishing my numerous goals.

This doesn’t mean I can’t ever enjoy myself, but it does mean establishing what it will take to achieve my goals and sticking to those things.

It probably does mean avoiding some activities in favor of others. For example, I have found that nature-based activities and things that are more physically-active in general are far more rewarding than, say, just going out and drinking.

Plus they have the added benefit of being healthy and making me feel better long-term, vs. drinking which is the exact opposite.

I sort of feel like I’ve been so preoccupied with some internal things and other parts of my life in general that I’ve lost focus on my goals for quite a while now.

In the last year, specifically, I feel like I was too distracted to actually accomplish anything beyond that.

I knew that at some point I’d start feeling like I am now, and that time has come a little earlier than expected.

And I see it as a very good thing. It requires confidence, initiative, and a positive outlook to really feel motivated and disciplined enough to have this kind of focus. And those things were conspicuously absent to varying degrees for the last year.

I’m not sure if I will immediately start to turn things around but at this point I’m feeling like that should really be where my focus is.