BAMFAM: One of my favorite sales terms

BAMFAM: One of my favorite sales terms

Because I spend a lot of my time thinking and talking about sales (best) practices, I’ve come across a lot of monikers that are super useful. I also get a lot of questions about them, and sometimes I am amazed when a sales professional doesn’t know them. Today I want to tell you about one […]

Charging your worth

Charging your worth

Today I read a great excerpt in Robert Glazer’s Friday Forward (one of my favorite newsletters). Quoting from Robert directly: There is a famous fable about Pablo Picasso that goes something like this. One evening, while enjoying a meal at a restaurant, Picasso—the world’s most influential artist at the time—was interrupted by an admirer. The […]

How to raise your freelance prices

How to raise your freelance prices

Working for yourself is an incredible thing. You have freedom, you have flexibility, you can work from your favorite coffee shop or your pajamas or another country completely. Over the last three years I’ve worked from 20+ states in the US and 12 different countries. We’ve moved twice and I take most Friday afternoons off. […]

How to sell consulting retainers

How to sell consulting retainers

One of the most common questions I get emailed from consultants trying to build a sustainable consulting practice is around retainers, and how to sell ongoing projects where you keep working with the client long term. The question is usually something like “How do I sell a retainer? I mean, what will I do after […]

How to run a profitable consulting business

How to run a profitable consulting business

I get emails weekly from consultants who are struggling to make ends meet. And this always makes me sad, because when you run a consulting business the right way you can absolutely print cash and really change your lifestyle for the better. Contrary to what some think, I’m not just about making money. Making money […]

Popular vs Effective

Popular vs Effective

Today I saw a tweetstorm from someone I respect in the consulting space who was essentially saying that as a leader or an executive, your job is to make change happen, not to be popular. He went on in that to tell the story of doing away with a margarita cart “tradition” on his team […]

How To Build A Successful Consulting or Agency Business

How To Build A Successful Consulting or Agency Business

Thinking about going on your own to build a consulting or agency business? Then read this first.

I will never forget September 29th, 2015. This was the day after I got laid off from my last fulltime job (19 months, where does the time go?) and I was laying in bed. I’m an ENTJ with a Type A personality (aka, I can never sit still) so even though I was unemployed and didn’t have to worry about money until the end of the year because of the severance I received, my mind was already spinning with what I was going to do next.

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How Long Does SEO Take To Start Working?

How Long Does SEO Take To Start Working?

In my line of work, it’s common to get the “how soon can I expect results?” question from new or prospective clients. Many SEOs say that it takes a few months to many months to really start seeing results. And whatever you are seeing after 2 to 3 months pales in comparison to what you will see at 12 months if you are doing SEO right.

I’ve always struggled to pitch the longterm value of SEO and that it takes time for many reasons:

  • You need to allow time to do the audit
  • You need to allow time to get the work implemented
  • You need to allow time for Google to recrawl everything
  • Building links takes a lot of time if you’re doing it scalably as you build the rest of your business

One of the reasons why I love having my own site(s) is that I can show specific case studies.

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Why I’m Not Building A Search Marketing Agency

Why I’m Not Building A Search Marketing Agency

Most of my friends are building their own search marketing agencies these days, and they’re succeeding beyond their wildest expectations. Many of them have 5-15 employees, are doing seven figures a year in revenue, and are doing fantastic work for their clients. I often get the question (I was asked it twice just this past […]

Solving Enterprise SEO Duplicate Content Issues

Solving Enterprise SEO Duplicate Content Issues

I don’t do much solo consulting these days, but when I do it is almost completely with digital marketplaces (if you want to chat with me about your marketplace, you can do it here). These sites always struggle with mass duplicate content issues, which is likely why you are here today.

A marketplace (like my own B2B marketplace Credo) seeks to balance both the supply and demand sides so that a) sellers can make a profit from their involvement and b) buyers have enough variety/choice to have a great experience on the site or service.

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