It’s been over a year since I announced I left my comfortable corporate job to start my own business. I had grand plans at the time that didn’t align with my actual energy levels. Since then I’ve made some big decisions that profoundly impacted the direction of my business. In this blog post, I’m giving you a behind-the-scenes look at my SEO business, how I set everything up and how I’m hoping to continue to grow my business.
1. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.
If I could give one piece of advice to anyone starting a business, it’s to simplify your activities to focus on what brings the results. I spent the first 3 months after leaving my 9-5 job on “holiday mode” without even realizing it. I would spend Mondays arranging X Spaces, Tuesdays recording content for a podcast, Wednesdays writing my newsletter, Thursdays scheduling content for the week and Fridays writing blog post content.
At the same time, not even my content was specialized. I wrote SEO content for my blog, I shared productivity and entrepreneurial tips on my newsletter and podcast and my X profile was all about Web3 marketing.
That’s far too many different directions to make any real progress in any direction.
3 months, no profit. I quickly felt the need to start making money ASAP. And my #1 focus was to specialize.
That’s why by September 2023 I realized I needed to focus on the money-making activities. I had to learn how to make it rain.
That’s when I decided to focus on a quick win. I’d previously worked in an SEO and analytics role for over 8 years, and even though I had grand plans to be a content powerhouse, I felt the need to specialize to make money.
Fortunately, that’s what happened. Within 1 month of this decision, I landed my first $1,000+ client.
2. You have a marketing problem
Once I started selling my SEO services, I quickly realized I had several issues:
- I wasn’t reaching many people.
- I wasn’t getting many high-quality leads.
- I wasn’t landing calls with anyone with an SEO budget.
Trying to advertise my services on X helped me jump on calls with curious people. But none of these people represented websites with SEO budgets.
This all changed when I decided to refocus my marketing approach.
I leaned into my personal network. I asked a friend who’s involved in the California tech scene if he’d be willing to share my new SEO consultancy in his network. Yes, I’d still be offering free SEO discovery calls, but it would be a complete shift in audience.
This strategy worked out!
I found a new market of people who had websites and were keen to invest in the long-term organic traffic SEO provides. Once I realized how powerful his network was, I asked him to post again every few months. I also reached out to other contacts in similar industries I wanted to target and found a great new approach to generating clients that I never realized.
I guess it’s true. Your network really is your net worth.
3. You gotta switch it up
The final lesson I learned is that even if I thought I had the perfect SEO package to sell to every type of prospect, that wouldn’t always be the case in practice.
Sure, I could try to fit every square peg through a round hole. But the truth is, sometimes you and the prospect are both better off without your core offering.
That’s why I now offer a few different types of packages. Now, when I want to work with a new client but they don’t have a big budget, I try to identify their most important SEO priority. Then I sell them that specific component without the fluff of weekly 30-minute calls and technical audits that they don’t need.
For example, I signed on a new client over the summer that I wouldn’t have worked with a year ago. Even though they’re in my desired field, their budget is too small to justify all the hours I’d need to implement my core SEO package.
That’s why I have a lite package, which helps clients improve their SEO without all the bells and whistles. My main focus with them is creating a keyword-led SEO content plan. I then also review the content and make minor changes before it goes live. I also ran a technical audit, but I knew they didn’t need much support on that front. Instead, I’d answer any technical questions over email and in our bi-weekly calls.
The client is responsible for managing the content writing process and implementing the technical recommendations, while I spend my efforts providing recommendations and ensuring they’re implemented.
This is completely different from the all-content-included package that I was selling a year ago.
Have you started a business?
If you’ve taken the leap into starting your own business, then SEO might be the marketing channel for you. Book a call with me to learn more about your website’s current SEO set-up and how you can improve it.