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.

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.

 

 

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.

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!

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.

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.

 

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.

I Think I Need to Start Ramping Up Marketing Efforts Again

I’ve had a lot going on personally. Both in the last few weeks and even, more generally, in the last year.

But I’ve made tremendous progress and I feel that I am approaching the time when I can really start focusing on other things again.

I’ve lost a surprising number of clients in the last few months. Much of it seems to be just coincidence, as a shocking number are simply retiring and winding down operations. A handful are switching to another platform like Squarespace.

Very few simply left for competitors.

Much of this is to be expected. However, I have not added very many new clients in the same time frame. That portion has definitely died down.

I’ve also been getting less and less traffic to my website, which is discouraging.

But none of it should be surprising. I’m really not doing any marketing at all. I’m not advertising, I’m not networking, my blogging has fallen to almost zero, and I really haven’t been making changes to the website, either.

So obviously, those things will need to change.

I don’t need to go crazy all-at-once, but I’m thinking that focusing on some website work and other online marketing is a good place to start. Immediate goals and tasks are:

  • Start blogging regularly again (whether website-related stuff or hosting business stuff)
  • Systematically go through old blog posts and update them to make sure they are good and relevant
  • Make tweaks to website content
  • Add Jimmy and Maria to my team page
  • Fix my portfolio
  • Fix my proposal template
  • Send out a newsletter to all existing clients
  • Add clients added in the last year to my newsletter

Those things are basically all the low-hanging fruit. Most shouldn’t even be all that difficult.

Again, I don’t need to go crazy here. The goal is to just take a step forward at a time. Over time, I should be able to make some pretty major changes without having to put in that much effort. The key is progress.

I’m hoping that my motivation and enthusiasm and energy for these things will pick up as I start to gain momentum and have successes. It’s just a little bit hard right now, know that I’m losing clients faster than I’m gaining them.

Eventually, I may even consider some in-person networking and other efforts. But I don’t want to start with that just yet.

I Need to Add More Pages About our WordPress Services

The thought occurred to me today that I really need to ramp up the content on my website and add a service page for basically every single possible WordPress-related service we provide.

I saw the following in the footer of a competitor’s website:

Screenshot of a competitor's website with a list of their WordPress services

Some of these are, from a human perspective, sort of ridiculous to list by themselves.

But as much as Google tries to get you to just “write content for people” and not to do anything to “game the system”, this is absolutely the way to get search results.

And of course these would all be linked together and linking to my main services pages which should further bolster them.

The goal should be to write these over time and slowly build them up. This will also show Google that we are very active

In addition to helping to attract individual clients to my site (which should still be a goal, and also it’s worth noting that I had two new clients reach out to me randomly this week), it will also improve my rankings and presence to hopefully attract more potential business owners looking to sell their clients or companies.

So I kind of just wanted to brainstorm some articles/pages that I could write:

  • WordPress Backups
  • WordPress Membership Websites
  • WordPress Maintenance (Do I have this already?)
  • WordPress Migration
  • WordPress retained Services
  • WordPress Security
  • Hacked WordPress Site Fix
  • WordPress Speed Optimization
  • WordPress Plugin Audit
  • WordPress Support
  • WordPress Elementor Developers
  • WordPress Diagnosis
  • WordPress Problem Fix
  • WordPress Restoration (like if their site broke or was deleted)
  • WordPress Best Practices
  • WordPress Helpdesk

That’s probably good for now. It will take me a while to actually write all of those, but it should be a good starting point.

Hopefully I can knock out about one per week and go from there. In time, it should lead to some nice improvements in my search results.

Willpower & Motivation are Resources to be Cultivated and Used Strategically

We’ve all heard that you shouldn’t rely on the nebulous idea of “motivation” to get things done or achieve success, but I think that’s a very facile precept that should really be expounded upon.

In general, I think it’s a good idea, but we need to clarify a few points.

Note that I’ll basically use “willpower” and “motivation” interchangeable here, but I’m really referring to the same thing.

I think motivation is like a superpower that you have, but it’s not inexhaustible.

The reason people say that is because some people tend to only get things done when they have large amounts of motivation, and then they have no discipline or structure in place to keep going once it inevitably runs out.

And so yes, I agree with the statement that motivation should not be solely relied upon to get things done.

So how should it be used?

Just like any other resource.

It should cultivated, fostered, and spent or used strategically where its impact will be the greatest.

There are many implications of this paradigm, so I’ll go through them one at a time.

First, willpower must not be wasted. 

This could mean a numbers of things; you shouldn’t use it to accomplish pointless things, it shouldn’t be underutilized, and most importantly: I think that you should set up your day-to-day life to minimize its use.

The most obvious way to do this is what all the self-help and productivity “gurus” taut, which is to establish habits and routine. And this is, in fact, great advice.

Not only will these things keep you productive during extended periods where you have no motivation, they will also amplify the impact when you are motivated.

Think of it like a discount. The same task takes much less motivation because it’s already a habit.

And once you’ve finished your habits, you have much more motivation leftover to tackle additional tasks.

Building habits is, by far, the most important thing you can do for productivity and for maximizing the impact of your motivation and willpower. I’ve talked a lot about it in the past, though, so I don’t need to go into much more detail here.

But in addition to habit-building, it’s also important to plug any obvious willpower “leaks”.

So, for example, let’s say you’re trying to eat healthier. You could buy all the same things at the grocery store like junk food, and then leave it lying around your house every day.

The end result would be that throughout the day, you are constantly seeing the junk food and having to use up some willpower to avoid eating it. You won’t have much of it left for other activities, and you may even run out at some point and give in and eat the junkfood.

So what’s the solution? Easy!

Just stop buying it to begin with. Grocery shop right after eating if you have to, and only buy healthy things. You won’t have any unhealthy options left in your house to be tempted by, and the net effect is that you aren’t using up your willpower on something stupid.

This same concept could apply to lots of other areas, too. Besides obvious ones like not having alcohol lying around if you’re trying to quit drinking, you can also do things like blocking distracting websites on your computer, uninstalling unproductive apps on your phone, and removing activities from your life that you greatly dislike.

The net result is that you’ll have much more consistent motivation leftover to use in areas where it makes the most sense.

The next concept is that you should do everything you can to maximize production of willpower.

Entire books have gone into detail both defining what “willpower” is and also how to maximize it. But in general, I think you need to get the basics of a healthy lifestyle right.

Eating right, sleeping well, avoiding excessive stress (even though short-term stress can help you power through things), and keeping yourself happy are all important to maximizing willpower.

If you’re unhealthy, chronically stressed, or depressed, you probably are going to be severely lacking in motivation and willpower.

Next, you need to use your motivation and willpower on important activities that will have the greatest impact.

You could use it all on tedious tasks that probably could be automated or outsourced. Or you could even do nothing with it and just give in to entertainment even though you’re very motivated.

But instead, you should be using it primarily on high-value activities that are likely to improve your long-term earning or productivity potential.

At the start of this year, my motivation was fairly high. I was being productive in basically all areas. I’d finish my normal work for the day, and then I’d proceed to make great progress on my long-term business goals and some personal ones.

And that was basically every day.

But then, starting at the end of Spring, all of that motivation seemed to dry up. I’ve discussed and speculated on the causes of that at length in other posts, but the important thing now is that I got to see first-hand what the difference was for me between being very motivated and having no motivation.

And it was stark.

Basically all of my efforts beyond just the regular day-to-day stuff completely dried up. I never did any of the business initiatives nor the personal ones. And it has been a little depressing.

This goes to show just how important it is. With it, things go so much better.

It showed me that while it is important to have habits in place (which kept me generally on-track), willpower is still incredibly important and can greatly amplify the impact of your efforts.

It’s starting to come back now, I think, and I have big plans for it. I’m really hoping to make the most of it and get all of my other initiatives back on track.

I want to focus hard on my long-term growth initiatives in my business and really focus on acquiring other companies. It will probably require a lot of manual effort but I suspect that it will be worth it in the end.