Category: Update

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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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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 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 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.

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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.

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I Need to be More Open to Feedback and Criticism

A friend was giving me some suggestions on some of my marketing efforts and part of my website, and I realized that my natural reaction is to get defensive or dismissive.

I’ve created a business over the years in which I don’t need to rely on anyone and rarely have any genuine discussions with anyone about how to run it. I’m in charge and I decide pretty much everything.

But I wonder how much of that is just sort of a defense strategy to avoid facing any criticism? Perhaps in my quest for total independence, I’ve gone too far and now dismiss all external suggestions.

And that’s a bad thing.

Many of his suggestions were good. And I really should be actively seeking advice from others if I want to keep growing and succeeding.

I’ve never liked feedback or criticism but I feel like that’s something I should probably address. Because I need that feedback. It is extremely helpful.

This might just be a personal thing that I need to focus on and work on over time. Hopefully I’ll eventually start actively getting feedback from others in some way and make improvements based on that feedback.

It may be the only way forward!

Especially since I had a major disappointment yesterday. I had been in talks to acquire a fairly large website host and it looked like an excellent fit. I found out yesterday that they decided to go with another buyer, which was a huge blow.

I feel like I need to channel that disappointment and do better all around and improve. I need to get tactical with my efforts and really start hammering home my efforts to acquire other businesses.

It’s nice when they come to me, but I don’t think I can count on that every time. I need to start aggressively seeking them out, I think.

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I Really Have Come a Long Way in the last 10 Years

I was just thinking recently about past events and behaviors and how far I’ve come since them. Particularly just in the time span of the last 10 years.

I think about my interactions with business contacts and clients, and I just cringe. I cannot believe that that’s who I used to be.

I would regularly do things that I now consider to be either wildly unprofessional or just… Bizarre.

The point of this post isn’t really as a list of examples, but some might be worth giving.

I remember when I first branched out on my own, I struggled to get anything done. I had one single client at one point, and the website still took months to build. I’d just procrastinate constantly and not make any progress.

For many years, basically everything I did was just a massive amount of procrastination. Any recurring task, I would push off until the last moment or later.

I remember realizing, the night before a presentation at my BNI group, that I knew nothing about the AV setup. I had just assumed the projector was always there and available and that somebody would help me with it.

I decided maybe that was a bad assumption, and emailed the chapter member in charge of it at like midnight the night before. He would later tell me that he saw my message and decided, “this isn’t my problem” and didn’t respond or worry about it.

And that was an important lesson for me. Though it did work out in the end.

When it comes down to it, I just don’t think I would see any potential in my younger self if I met him. Everything was sloppy and I had no discipline whatsoever.

I also made almost no money, and it’s no surprise why.

I feel very fortunate that I somehow improved over the years and am now doing a ton better. I’m also a person I actually like and people trust to get things done.

Sometimes it’s just so hard to see the progress, and I get frustrated. It’s also easy to just focus on one metric, like income, and not see everything else that has improved.

Even if income was the most important thing, I feel like it’s actually a lagging indicator. Developing myself pays itself off in all areas of life, in addition to also being the primary method to increase future earning potential.

But overall, it’s just nice to take a step back and see the progress. I’m actually embarrassed thinking about what I was like just 10 years ago, both personally and professionally. I’m not perfect now clearly, but I’ve come so far in so many ways.

And I think that’s a good thing. If you’re not embarrassed by what you were like in the past, are you even improving?

None of the changes came overnight. Much of it has been described in this blog, which I believe I started in mid 2018.

I think it points to the power of gradual improvement, and always taking steps in the right direction. Improving just a little bit at a time compounds into huge changes over time.

It would be fun to actually ask some of my friends if they’ve noticed any of the change. If it’s obvious to me, I wonder if it’s obvious to them.

The point is: I think I’m going in the right direction. There are setbacks, of course, and lately I’ve felt fairly discouraged, but as long as I just keep progressing, it’s all good.

The hard times will pass, and I’ll be all that much better for having strived to keep making progress even when it was really hard.

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Update on Yearly Goals and New Habit Relating to Sleeping

I just reviewed my post about my goals for the year and wanted to give an update on my progress for that.

I’ve made lots of meaningful progress towards many of the goals and I would say that a lot of them are very much doable still. I don’t think any are impossible and few are unlikely. It’s nice to see that they are coming along.

Here is some specific progress relating to specific goals:

  • I haven’t initiated any deals to buy other companies yet, but I’ve had some nibbles, and I’ve made incredible progress towards attracting more of them
  • I haven’t reviewed business profit so far but I suspect we are more profitable than ever
  • I am well within my goal of limiting myself to 30 hours per week of work
  • My photos site is coming along nicely, and it’s entirely possible I’ll have 10 sales by the end of the year
  • Haven’t had any alcohol since I made the goals and shouldn’t have any trouble making it to next year
  • I need to make plans to camp overnight on a river island
  • I’ve been disc golfing a lot, though I haven’t come too close to an Ace yet
  • I may or may not join a rock climbing gym, we’ll see
  • I’ve biked a bit

So overall, good progress. Especially since I wrote that at the end of April and haven’t had that much time to actually get these things done. I finished tons of major projects at home here already. They weren’t “goals” for the year but they still had to get done, and now I should have more time to put towards other things.

Finally, I’d like to formally change the habit I’m working on. I’ve done an excellent job (100% success, I believe) of waking up at 7:30am and not snoozing my alarm.

However, I’m still struggling to develop my own circadian rhythm. And I think one of the biggest parts of that is that I’m doing lots of other things in bed, including not getting up right away and instead using my phone for quite a while.

For the most part, it’s to study, but I think it’s still probably a big problem.

To start with, I’m going to try to establish a new habit of physically getting up within 5 minutes of being awake, starting the day, and not returning to bed at all.

This will require studying elsewhere, which is fine.

I’m hoping that will help quite a bit. I want to generally not use my bed for anything else until I go to bed, but I don’t want to make that a hard rule until I’ve established the morning one first. I generally read in my bed and I think it would be better if I did that somewhere else.

Either way, we’ll start here and then move on once it’s established.

Down the road I could also consider mandating that I go outside and get some light first thing, never use my bed except for sleeping, and perhaps even establish a hard bed time.

But I’ve been getting closer and closer to fixing my sleep and I just need to continue one step at a time.