Calendar
Network
Feeds
bhancock
Agreed! I just did some more looking around his site and wrote a response to his article on my blog. The funniest thing about him and his site is that he is straight out of late night infomercial land with the rest of the get rich quick speakers. If any group of people could be compared to used car salesman, that group would be it!
I started as a consultant, then later bought a piece of a business which I stayed at for about 10 years until i got fed up with the direction my partner was taking the company. I left and took a senior level management position at an Internet Marketing Agency, and recently got laid off when their tremendous growth led to a 'quick shrinkage'. Now I'm back starting a business again.
There are positives and negatives to both working for someone else and having your own business. If you actually build a business rather than being 'self employed' aka consultant, you have flexibility and don't have to be chained to a desk all the time. Most importantly, you can make money when you're not working and have something that is salable.
If you work for someone else, you have the opportunity to learn while someone is giving you a paycheck. There is a lot more to owning/running a business than being skilled at a trade like Internet Marketing. Working for someone else may give you the opportunity to learn a few things, learn from their mistakes, see the difficulties faced as the business grows, etc. A management position in a medium sized agency is a great training ground for starting your own someday.
It was quite an experience working at the agency I was with and I got to help build one of the bigger players in the industry, but ultimately it wasn't my company, and I wasn't in total control.
It's nice to be in control of my own destiny once again and this will be an even more exciting ride... :)
Good luck!
Generally, if you're an account manager in an agency, you have to 'own' the client relationships anyway. The key is you don't have to acquire them, their handed to you (a lot easier), and you don't have to worry how to pay all the employees every week! :) There's a lot that business owners have to 'deal with' besides acquiring/maintaining client relationships.
I have a new blog as well, and I have had a few big days - solely from Stumble traffic. It really is amazing what can happen when things get picked up in the community.
Best of luck!
Thanks for all of the comments guys, and also for the blog link Darrell.
Regarding the comment from g1smd - I scratched the surface with the most obvious? I don't know if all of these things were the most obvious, they certainly weren't obvious to the clients that fell victim to these tactics.
As far your mention of ethics going both ways, I definitely agree with that. While working at a large agency that had some of the biggest media companies as clients, I was shocked to get word that one client had to 'make numbers' this month and wanted a certain level of traffic - by any means necessary! I forget the actual number, but it was a huge number of visitors in something like a 1.5 week time frame. Being a media site, they were not specifically selling anything like products or services and merely wanted 'eyeballs' to go into their monthly report. We wound up giving the client what they wanted...
It's a crazy world out there! :)
Story: What Does SEM Mean To You?
In my experience working for a large agency that dealt with clients big and small, it was universal that SEM = PPC. I don't like that because one term is enough for me, but it's not nearly as bad as one of the people that frequents Sphinn who is throwing out the term SEO 2.0 and lumping all activities into that - now that's just ridiculous!!!
Back to PPC, I also frequently hear the terms paid search and sponsored search used to describe it as well.
As far as the umbrella term, in my opinion 'Internet Marketing' is the only one phrase that can describe all activities like SEO, SEM, Social Networking, Link Building, adjusting CTAs on web sites, etc. etc. All of these things are marketing activities and they're focused on the Internet, what makes more sense than Internet Marketing?
It's up to us (the industry) to come up with terms for what we do, but unfortunately every once in a while people like to 're-label' things to try to create a buzz and we end up with 10 terms for each discipline... :( I still like PPC...
Story: What Does SEM Mean To You?
Here are some results from Wordtracker:
PPC search engine internet marketing - 108,914
Internet Marketing - 16,957
SEO - 11,294
Search Engine Optimization - 9,877
Search Engine Marketing - 7,899
Search Marketing - 670
As you can see, we all need to refer to our industry as PPC Search Engine Internet Marketing!!! :) Just combine all the terms together into one run-on sentence... Or maybe Wordtracker is a little screwy and search engine marketing is the top term.
I still cast my vote on Internet Marketing, and I'm sticking with it! ;)
Story: Top Ten Organic SEO Myths
I agree with some of your myths, but wholeheartedly disagree with your comments on H1s and Long Tail. Of course nothing is 'necessary', but every little on-page factor when done well is a catalyst in boosting rankings. I have worked with hundreds of clients, large and small, and H1 tags were a key part of the equation in boosting rankings.
As far as the long tail, it's not a given that you will rank well just because you write an article that mentions some long tail phrases in it. If you are specifically going after long tail phrases, then you will be writing specific content for them and optimizing the pages accordingly. Sure, some rankings are just achieved but in a professional environment, research and effort is specifically focused on targeted a set of long tail phrases in order to receive consistent results.
Just to elaborate on your PPC comments, while it does not boost or deter rankings, it does play a factor in visibility and triples your chances of a potential customer clicking through to your site (according to stats by Google).
Oh, I also disagree with the idea of targeting 3-5 phrases per page. In my experience, that worked a few years back but now 3 seems to be the max, with many competitive phrases necessitating 1 or 2.
-All the best
Google needs to accept responsibility for this 'issue' and take care of it themselves, which involves rethinking their algorithm and adjusting it so that links aren't as valuable as they currently are. They can't dictate to site owners to adjust the code on their site for certain links.
Unfortunately, Google has everyone by the balls which is a scary thing. As someone else pointed out, they have gone corporate now, and it is in their best interest to get everyone using Adwords as much as possible and not sending money to other companies to help rankings. I don't think they are worried about the quality of their index as much as potential lost revenue.
I have always been a fan of Google, but they are seriously getting too powerful for their own good.
This was a very interesting article. It is really true what they said - gone are the days of breaking out dusty microfiche to search through old news articles. It's totally mainstream now; anyone can search through articles from home. However, I thought the policy of most media sites was that you had to be a member/subscriber to dig through the archives? Maybe this is changing because of the big opportunity in ad revenue...
We all know how often newspapers and general media make mistakes, and then put out a tiny correction in the next issue. Unfortunately, unless they change something that mistake can haunt someone for eternity now...
Great post. Part II should cover controlling sales staff in an agency environment to not 'add fuel to the fire'! :)
Story: SEO Lessons from Zappos.com
Uggh, this time it took 4 clicks to Sphinn this article. Must be a Firefox bug... :(
I had to click the Sphinn button twice as well... Same FF version as qwerty.
« previous1 next »
Story: How to time your Sphinn Submissions Perfectly to Hit Front Page