Nine months ago I quit my job to start my first company, Siege Media. Three months later, I talked about the mysticism of entrepreneurship, “taking the jump” and how the process was remarkably easy – and also, something I probably should have done earlier.

It was and it is, but that doesn’t make building a company an absolutely smooth ride. Running a consulting business in a state of mediocrity is relatively simple – the demand for SEO services is great and if you’re at all active online, client inquiries come rather easily.

However, growing said company is a different beast entirely – client churn is a distinct possibility if you provide lackluster work, and if that becomes the standard, don’t expect much in the way of client referrals.

So, while running the company is easy, quitting was a no-brainer and should have been done earlier, there were definitely things that I did not expect entering the process that I now know, nine months later.

1. Your Website Won’t Make or Break You

When I entered the process I had the expectation that I would make a company website that others simply weren’t. I would blog frequently, it would be done with the precision and excellence others simply weren’t, and I would finally beat back the SEO myth that we do not eat our own dog food.

Of course, this didn’t happen. Instead, clients did. I wanted to blog and spend time tweaking the site, but demand immediately came through providing good work. We got referrals by spending four more hours on improving our clients businesses, not by allocating that time to blog more. More importantly, those four hours insured that our clients would be retained, and longer term contracts would be signed.

So, it was illuminating to know that as an in-house SEO and niche consultant my outside laughter for those businesses who never blogged and had websites that were laughable was really rather based in ignorance – many if not all of these “empty” agency websites may actually be but a few tight landing pages for the thriving businesses that escalated more on the great work that built them naturally.

While the KPI for your ad-driven website may create a psychological bias that blogging more=results, in the agency world, much of the business development comes behind the scenes, in e-mail, during one on one conversations, and in boring Excel spreadsheets.

That said, let me add the disclaimer that I still believe in blogging as a method for driving business, and the other positive effects that come with it. Blogging frequently doesn’t mean an agency is struggling.

However, I think it is worth communicating that you may find it (ironically) surprising when building a company that the initial engine of growth comes not from writing more words for the outside world, but instead, spending more time on client accounts.

2. Account for Personal Life Impacts on Productive Work Periods

Something that has also contributed to my lack of writing is the simple readjustment of my life. In the past two years I have started dating someone I care about deeply, and because of that, what was once a time period spent writing – nighttime, is now spent hanging out with her.

This is a simple adjustment that has caused a syphoning out of one of my most productive times for that kind of work. And that’s not to say that it’s bad – I choose to hang out with my girlfriend instead of write, but it is a reality that as you begin to give and care about someone else more than populating a text field, one part of your work life may suffer.

For you, your night work might be better spent heads down on difficult projects or something else. As someone who might be considering starting a company or entering into another large project, it is worth thinking about your night hours, and how you spend them – if your personal life changes and someone else enters it, how will that impact your work life? Will that valuable part of your working efficiency cause your business to go down in flames? Or will you find yourself pushing that person away in an effort to prevent it, causing a possible hole in both?

These kinds of considerations may prevent one business – or your personal relationship – from losing before they take off. For me, not writing as much has been fine: the business has grown from within, and I now have a more rewarding, enriching life because I am spending it with someone else.

For you, it may be difficult to balance both personal life and work, or your more productive times may be at conflict with your significant other’s time off. Definitely, how you deal with this interplay may define your immediate life trajectory – and the business that comes with it.

3. Zero Employees – Easy. One Plus – Damn Hard.

It took me quite a while to hire Siege’s first employee, but I’m glad I took the time. I found someone great (Bryan Vu, you should follow him), and now Siege has the capabilities to grow and do better work – something I’m extremely excited about.

That said, hiring an employee dramatically changes the game. You essentially have a mouth to feed, cash flow must be monitored more closely, and the business becomes less “just do SEO work for people” and more “build a company with processes, a business bank account, and a future plan”.

In the first six plus months, I essentially ran on experience – no fancy Excel documents, processes or anything like that: this was possible because it all existed in my mind. When you hire someone else, that must be transcribed on paper or at least verbally, and there must be standards for implementation that grow with the company – or your work will suffer as it scales.

Moreso, the choices you make at two plus employees (we’re on the verge of hiring a second) can begin to truly create the culture your company will call its own. Will we be a young company? An old one? Do we work hundreds of hours? Just get stuff done? Telecommute? In office? How will we hire? All of these considerations are important, and suddenly turn a lifestyle business into a real one.

Up to the first hire, your work is easy: you are still doing what you always did. At some points during the first and through the second plus employee, you suddenly are thrown into a world of process documentation, paperwork and long-term business strategy – efficiencies that were never truly developed building links in-house.

So, be aware of the challenge and difficulty of that transition. For that reason, I am taking it slow. No outside funding, no forced hires, no 80-hour work weeks to force growth: the decisions will be methodical, and hopefully, the end product will be rewarded.

What’s Next? Transition

I’m finding that the next stage for Siege Media will be building out the competencies to create effective content in house. We are currently an outreach and strategy shop – while that has benefits, it is also limiting for the clients who do not have the content development capabilities in house, and we have also found that sometimes communicating content needs can create a gap between idea and end product.

I will always believe that clients should have that piece within their own doors – where true vertical efficiency can be built – but for some, that is just too difficult to do. So, we will begin to do it here, and hopefully do it well. We will hire the people that can do that, and we will take on the clients who believe in what we do and trust us enough to take our recommendations and run with them.

At the end of 2013, Siege Media will also be opening a new office in San Diego. How that transition occurs will be another building block that will shape the company, and it is a challenge I look forward to.

And, if all goes well, I’ll hopefully find the time to blog about it sometime soon. Hopefully.

The post Early Lessons From Building a Consulting Company appeared first on Ross Hudgens.

Duplicate/thin content is almost always bad, and it’s sometimes difficult to find it on our websites, especially the bigger ones. Lots of different advanced operators and code searches can bring up some bad content, but there’s another method I haven’t seen discussed that can also do a lot of good towards finding content we can deindex from the search engines: deep diving in Google Analytics.

In particular, what you should do first is open up a date range short enough to not capture tons of changes you might have already to page indexation based on a site audit or whatever, but wide enough to get a significant amount of data, and then sort by “Traffic Sources -> Organic”, so you are only seeing traffic from search.

Next, sort by landing page, and then by bounce rate.

What you’ll get after doing this are pages with the worst bounce rates coming from the search engines. Most of the time, these are absolutely terrible pages with small visit numbers, because they aren’t optimized or useful – so they’ll have astronomically high bounce rates. Bad bounce rate from the search engines = not good, and a possible Panda signal.

Example result:

Those aren’t pages I’d want indexed. Undergo this process for your own sites and you might just find content that you never wanted the search engines to discover in the first place.

Of course, please use your discretion when deindexing these pages, as it is not my recommendation that you deindex every page with 100% bounce rate and a few visits.

The post How to Quickly Find Content That Shouldn’t Be Indexed appeared first on Ross Hudgens.

In mid 2011, I had what was really my first speaking gig, at SMX Advanced, about link building. I had done a link building clinic before 10 or so people before, but this was the first serious thing I had done – talking before 200-300 some odd internet marketers in Seattle. I was an introvert, and my friends replied to the news of me talking at SMX with a “YOU’RE speaking at a conference?! I can’t see that” in reference, and I really hadn’t done much to prove them wrong.

I went up to give the 15-minute talk on local link building, and mid-talk, I realized the slides I had sent to SMX were not the ones being used. I ran with it, but my voice cracked, I was nervous, and my session slides had enough bullet points to kill several kitten litters.

I didn’t do well, and the low point was felt when one of the other SMX speakers actually publicly called out the session for being substandard in his own talk later, mostly because the speakers were chosen to present over his friend. Of course, as someone who felt like he gave a poor presentation around other good ones, I was embarrassed, my confidence was crushed, and I headed home with my head down and my tail between my legs.

Embarrassment on Whiteboard Friday

To add fuel to the fire, the next day after Advanced, I was lucky enough to be allowed to speak with Tom Critchlow on Whiteboard Friday. Although not traditional public speaking, this was clearly for an audience, and my performance reflected it – if you watch the video, you can hear the “rights” that I end up saying more than 24 times in the video as a nodding idiot in opposition to Tom. Moz took until 3PM on Friday to post it, and I wasn’t even sure it was going to go live, which I imagine might have been for that reason.

After reporting back to company HQ, I told our CEO that I wasn’t sure public speaking was for me – surely, some people just weren’t meant to do it, and I was always going to be that nerd writer who would better excel behind a keyboard. This just wasn’t going to happen, and it was better meant for the extroverts like Wil Reynolds and Rand Fishkin.

Then, some month or so later, I got an e-mail from Blueglass co-founder Chris Winfield to speak at Blueglass Tampa, and the speaking engine began again. I wasn’t sure I was going to pitch another conference, but I wasn’t going to say no to Chris, and off I went, this time to speak for an extended period of 25 minutes in front of some of the smartest marketers on the planet.

Fast Forward One Year

Fast forward a year later, and I was invited back to speak at BlueglassX  to talk about link building once again. After my session, Chris came up to me and gave me one of the best compliments I’ve received –

“It was night and day watching you speak this year as compared to last year – I can tell your speaking ability improved a lot.”

Coming from Chris, who I respect a ton, this really meant the world. In addition, I also got a lot of great feedback from attendees, and to be honest – it felt good – real good, especially coming off that slighting at SMX Advanced, and the huge embarrassment “right” after it on Whiteboard Friday.

When I spoke at Blueglass Tampa in 2011, although I wasn’t as abysmal as my SMX Advanced effort, I was still that bumbling newbie who needed a lot of work in front of an audience. To hear that from Chris, it felt like an official pronouncement that I was no longer going to be called out for not belonging on a panel like I had at SMX Advanced.

How I Improved My Public Speaking

I didn’t improve my public speaking by attending workshops or speaking in front of a mirror. No, improvement came from several different modalities, and I think there’s lessons to be had from what I did, that I hope a few of you might be able to pull in with your own efforts.

1. I only presented content that fully encompassed my obsession at that time

At SMX Advanced, I pitched tactics that I didn’t really believe in, or even practice. Some of the slides there I used, but it was more me pitching the panel rather than deciding to dictate the absolute best stuff I knew at that time. I am a believer in conferences that allow speakers to pick the topic – they have something specific brewing in their head that they’ve been consumed by, and it’s always going to be the best stuff to present content wise. At SMX Advanced, I had presented stuff I didn’t really believe in as someone who wasn’t an experienced speaker as well, and it clearly showed.

At my first Blueglass TPA, I was allowed to present stuff I believed in,  and although I was still an inexperienced speaker, at least I had content that reflected the blog writing that got me invited.

Even a year later, at SMX East, where I had to pitch the session description, I modified the content from my initial presentation pitch because I knew if I stuck to the standard write-in I gave SMX – stuff on WPMU.org’s Penguin recovery almost six months earlier, it would have been a boring and lackluster presentation, because most of that data was old and heard many times over.

2. I fed on any and all positive feedback

After my first Blueglass Tampa talk, I got positive feedback. It wasn’t overwhelming, but I heard good things from attendees – mostly because, as I mentioned, I actually presented something that I cared deeply about, knew in and out, and was actually good. It’s amazing what just a few good things, and a positive tweet stream, can do for a presenter’s confidence.

Once I got those first bites of “I’m not horrifically bad” from my Blueglass Tampa presentation, I was able to improve over and over on previous efforts. After reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, I was very aware of the 10,000 hour rule – repetition is key, and every time out, I began iterating on the last attempt.

But when you’re stuck in a “bad, still bad” kind of rut, it can be difficult to see that light at the end of the tunnel – so it’s important to feed on the feedback that shows that improvement is happening. If I had heard negative sentiment again at Blueglass TPA, it’s possible I would not still be trying to speak today.

3. I learned from and iterated on all negative feedback

Most conferences worth their salt will collect feedback on your presentation/the event, and even if they don’t, it’s often pretty easy to see where you went wrong after the fact. This can show itself from a lack of engagement on Twitter, not many nice things said, and generally, if you dive into the tweet stream from the event, you can find negative feedback that doesn’t mention you explicitly that gives a specific reason why your presentation was bad.

You’ll see this frequently – things like “this is too promotional” . dissenting opinions from something being professed as fact on the presentation, or, really, an overall silence in reference to your presentation. Each little snippet offers some insight as to why your presentation was bad.

If you’re hearing “this was too promotional”, learn how to market better, then pitch presenting – if you hear dissenting opinions, tighten up your actual skillset (if it seems widespread – of course one opinion may be wrong). Generally, silence can be taken as “I can’t use this, or there’s nothing actionable here”.

After the conference, you might get feedback from the providers, or simply be able to feel out your own problems. After SMX Advanced (and before it), I realized I had too many bullet points – this occurred to me right before I presented, and caused the error in the wrong deck being shown. I did my best to alleviate this at Blueglass TPA, although not perfectly. By Distilled’s Linklove, I had eliminated them pretty much completely.

At Distilled’s conference, the main feedback I got from the organizers, as forwarded to them by attendees, was that I was looking down at the ground too much. You can see this at play in the picture above and also the video supplied by Distilled. Lynsey Little, Events Manager at Distilled, said the following:

You rated extremely well for the content of your session, but a little lower for speaking. If I could offer you any feedback on why that might be, it would be that you had a tendency to not directly engage with the audience, you looked down at the floor and back at the screen quite frequently.

Clearly, I still lacked confidence in my speaking ability. I took this to heart, and at BlueglassX, my most recent talk, Melissa Fach tweeted the following about my presenting style:

Clearly, this was awesome to read, especially off my last presentation’s audience feedback. I had taken this feedback dilberately, acted on it, and it paid off with positive feedback in my next speaking opportunity.

4. I invested in content

After TPA, I knew one of the main things my presentation lacked was design. I hate designing things (although I love and am neurotic about design), so I thought the perfect thing to do would be to actually invest in the design of my presentation with an external source. I knew talented PPT designer David Crandall, who whipped up the presentation design on top of my content for LinkLove for a significant but worthwhile sum – around the same cost as an infographic.

This was more than most would pay to present to an audience, yes, but I knew investing in a great design would improve the effectiveness of the presentation, and help cover up a deficiency in my talks previously. The ROI would come, I had no doubt, and sure enough, it did.

Because of my talk at Linklove, I received several other opportunities, client inquiries, and snowball presentation invites. And more importantly, the nice feedback I got from the session meant I had additional positive feedback to feed off of.

Although I haven’t paid anyone to design my decks since LinkLove, I have received help from the talented Melissa Kowalchuk and also, I have tried my best to syphon design lessons from experts such as Rand Fishkin and Jonathan Coleman. I still consider this area a deficiency, but I no longer consider it a glaring hole.

5. I learned the craft

Speaking is one of the few endeavors where people can get thrown in an extremely difficult situation without any previous experience or ability to learn by practice. So, most have very little idea of how to do it effectively until they have to do it repeatedly, which of course creates problems for people starting out.

You can read things about public speaking going up to your first presentation, but you will inevitably miss things that are incredibly important to its effectiveness, and/or not execute effectively. Some of the things that I learned throughout the process, but didn’t know before:

• Have little to no bullet points, seriously. How do people still do this? Well, I somehow managed to in my first presentation, although I did my best to avoid it.
• Don’t read off your deck. Your deck should be a reflection of the bigger point you are going to talk about. Going back to the “only give talks on stuff you dictate yourself” point, you should have less than 20 words on each slide, almost every time.
• Bring a USB drive with your final PPT. I learned this the hard way at SMX Advanced – if you want to make sure the best version is there (or any version is there), you better bring the slides yourself.
• Design is incredibly painful, and worth it. Most people aren’t good at design, especially SEOs. Designing the deck to look good will take a huge amount of time, but it should be done. It doesn’t MAKE the presentation, but it definitely enhances it. If you can’t do it yourself, get help, and/or use techniques that enhance it in an easy way – such as big images with one line of text. But be careful, do not create a presentation that can be summarized with “build great content”, or I will hate you.
• Listen to yourself speak before you go before an audience. I practice and record my presentation three to five times before each talk, and this allows me to get a feel for the flow and also the timing in regards to the constraints of the conference without overdoing it. It also helps me notice language irregularities, such as the aforementioned “rights” I had no idea I was saying until the SEOmoz WBF went live. I still tend to talk fast during presentations (I’ve heard that twice!) – so I hope to improve that next time around, but I’ll probably still be a little quick, cause I tend to actually care about what I talk about.
• Don’t speak in a casket. I am still shocked at how many people do this. Standing behind the podium tapping the computer for each slide is a terrible way of speaking, it lacks energy, and it will lose audience attention. I kinda did this at BlueglassX because there were constraints on a small stage, but I still brought a slide changer that allowed me to move both my hands and show the energy I felt about the stuff I was talking about. As a speaker, you should be moving around, making eye contact, and in general showing the energy and passion you should feel about your slides.

6. I got more confidence in myself, not my speaking

Through a years time, a lot happened, but most of my ability to show confidence on the stage comes from actually believing I know what I’m talking about – and I’m sorry if that appears arrogant, but it’s a necessary requirement in order to give a good talk. One of the biggest holes in confidence or reasons people don’t speak is because they believe someone will ask them some question that will pick them apart on stage, crushing their confidence.

This is a legitimate concern, and one you should have. But it’s also one that can be fixed by doing.

Are you gaining positive rankings for your clients? Do people share and like your blog posts? Are you getting client inquiries? All of these and more can help contribute to your overall tactical confidence, and they should be worked out and developed over time before you think about going on stage.

I was able to do this more over the past year, and also, I was able to become more confident in my life. I got a great girlfriend, I got the balls to quit my job, move and start my own business, and I continued to write blog posts that generally were met with good reception,  that allowed me to build a growing audience that helped me perpetuate the notion that I might actually be on to something SEO wise.

You, of course, can replicate this same concept for yourself, or at least some version of it. But it doesn’t come from rehearsing your talk 50 times in front of a wall – it comes from improving your life away from the lectern.

Improvement != Good

Although I definitely do feel I’ve improved, please do not take this as a public declaration that I think I’m a good public speaker. This is a public declaration that I think I’ve gotten better – whether it’s from 1/10 to 3/10 or something better, I’m not sure, but improvement overall is a good feeling, and one I hope I can pass on to others who also had a fear of public speaking as I did.

I don’t think I’ll ever be Wil or Rand, but I do know I’ll keep plugging away at this craft – a new one, within our bigger  practice – to better teach people this thing called internet marketing.

For those interested, my BlueglassX slides on “link building strategies for 2013″ are now online. I’ll also be speaking on E-Commerce SEO at SearchFest in Portland on February 22nd, 2013. You can also discuss this post on Inbound.org.

The post How I Improved My Public Speaking appeared first on Ross Hudgens.

Today is the official launch of Siege Media, my digital marketing consultancy. Check out the blog for the official announcement post.

For those wondering what the launching of the blog there means for the state of RossHudgens.com, it’s safe to say that most digital-marketing-centric “tactics” will find themselves on SiegeMedia.com, and the more entrepreneurship/personal/entertainment type pieces will still get posted here. I promise that the content won’t change, although the site hosting it will.

Thanks to everyone who has read/subscribed/supported this blog so far – 2013 should be a good one.

The post Introducing Siege Media appeared first on Ross Hudgens.

Google’s Keyword Trends tool is extremely interesting to me. Here, we can see if businesses, tactics, and more are in free fall, growth, or stagnation. We can potentially identify stock opportunities or similarly, when we should eject or short a company. We can see the interest levels in our competitor. Below, I identified several searches that were top of mind in terms of interest level.

And of course, it should be noted that these searches are not 1:1 indicators of a companies health – they are simply measures of the direct traffic to their sites through the search engines. Also, it is very possible many of these keywords have double intent, such as SEM, which Tad Chef has already noted on Inbound.org, which can skew this data.

So, take it for what you will – if nothing else, this is an entertaining exercise.

SEO Tools: SEOmoz vs Raven Tools vs Ahrefs vs Screaming Frog vs Hubspot

SEO Jargon: Link Building vs Content Marketing vs Inbound Marketing vs Content Strategy

Social Networks: Twitter vs Facebook vs Pinterest vs Linkedin

Industry Acronyms: SEO vs PPC vs SEM vs CRO

Social News Sites: Hacker News vs Digg

SEO Giants: Amazon vs Wikipedia

Content Strategy Buzzwords: User Experience vs Information Architecture

Advertising Online: Facebook Advertising vs Twitter Advertising vs Google Advertising vs Bing Advertising

The post Digital Marketing Keyword Interest Over Time appeared first on Ross Hudgens.

A few years ago, I did work for a client with seasonal burst  - and not just “sorta” seasonal burst, a seasonal-exclusive burst, that required extremely aggressive link building techniques. This client was in a space that had what I now define as a high competitive backlink crossover (CBC) that often comes with a certain vertical and/or a certain type of SEO that tends to over-populate itself in the vertical. When I was hired to do work for this client over the duration, what happened was as follows:

• Every site in the vertical loaded up and aggressively bought and rented paid links to the point that page authority leapt 15+ points for the targeted page over a two month period
• Every site in the vertical dropped spend upwards of $10k+ buying links in a very short duration, probably some in the $20-30k range
• Every site in the vertical aggressively grabbed every link their competitors bought in the same point of time with no barrier to link acquisition besides cost, creating extreme authority bloat with little value creation
• Every site in the vertical churned a significant portion of their links b/c of renting, creating a net minimal authority gain across the sites despite significant spend

While they were the only client I’ve worked with in this specific situation, I’m sure there are many others who face similar environments – environments where extreme authority bloat occurs because of a type of SEO – the “competitive analysis” expert.

This “competitive analysis” SEO often has little to offer in terms of unique backlink acquisition skills, and makes a practice of building his or her domain authority off the backs of other sites – in the way of things like paid links, directories, and guest posts. While highly effective, this “authority bloat” has a way of working itself out in a way that hurts the original site owner, especially when another SEO with any lick of competitive research ability also finds his way into the vertical, ready to ramp up the amount of competitive backlink crossover in the space.

When this occurs, this seemingly “sweet” domain authority and/or homepage authority – often in the upper 60s, 70s, and sometimes even 80s, tends to highly overrepresent itself – because any other SEO has the ability to automatically replicate these links for his or her own gain. Thus, an entire vertical becomes a practice of hypercompetive link syphoning, to the point that no real content is being created besides some nominal products, and the need to continue this process is required in order to compete in a vertical where hyper aggressive competitive research occurs.

Growth of the Secondary Market

Of course, the winner here becomes not the site owners, who must maintain extremely high budgets with high churn to maintain and keep pace with their equity, but rather the people who sell the links to them and/or require their labor (guest posts) in order to replicate. Thus, much of the value is passed to a link-selling ecosystem (heaviest in areas such as travel, finance, design) where site owners can increase their rates and lower their content creation costs as the sites trying to appeal to the search engines – a more fluid, and less static environment – fight desperately for the scraps of what they see as “high authority/PR/relevancy” that is necessary because, of course, their competitors built that link, too.

This “authority bloat” system is unique and unfortunate, because it leads to a diluted internet polluted with junk links and substandard content, and also, a system that rewards a link economy tumbling towards a path of increasingly shrinking margins for SEO. At a certain point, the market (such as in its current condition) becomes “flipped” where an intelligent affiliate/web owner would instead focus on link selling to webmasters focused on competitive research, instead of trying to recreate a website in the same system and trying to rank with significantly more risk.

You can see this condition at play in the finance industry, where a hyper-complex personal finance network called The Yakezie is designed to efficiently depart you from your SEO budget, or in the travel industry, where Paddy Moogan was quoted with an average paid link amount of $285.

Let me say that the price Moogan received is overrepresented dramatically and done with poor bargaining, but it goes to show what someone who tries to blindly inquire about paid links without any real negotiation skills (and with a potentially large budget approved by higher ups) can pay out in a system where every player is building a really tall building with terrible infastructure.

Penguin Says Hello

This environment where “authority bloat” – and the unique markets it creates – showed its complexity and ability to recede (and then evolve) quite clearly when the Penguin update inititally came around. The industry in general took a turn for the worse when sitewide links got slapped in the face by Google and many of these markets – and the sites that supported them – got significantly hit.

However, despite Google’s aims, the web is still not entirely altruistic and the link economy survives – guest posting for cash, infographic posting for cash, and blog posts for cash will always be systems at least partially supported by Google if done efficiently and without the laziness that previously occurred at scale in past years.

Authority bloat lives, and with it, an evolved and even more hungry network of “casual” bloggers ready to eat through your budgets. This reality and the conditions that pertain to it mean that you can float on the seas of authority bloat that fuels your vertical, but the efforts that it requires is simply not worth it to build any kind of sustained ranking, as too many levers must float in your favor – such as the website where your link was originally hosted maintaining it’s weight before being pillaged by other SEOs capable of basic competitive research – or your competitors being bad enough to not have an SEO who has heard of competitive research – in order for it to be a worthwhile strategy.

It is a reality that at some point, partial authority bloat will occur. “KEYWORD directory” searches will always happen, and if you do not make them, you will lose out. But know that when you submit your link report at the end of the month to your client and/or direct reports with a roster of these kinds of links – those with high potential to be acquired by your competitors in the future – you will not have gained ground – you will have only ran uphill in quicksand. For any website in a vertical with SEOs worth salt, these kinds of links don’t stay uncovered for long – and all that happens is a return to middle ground, and/or an increase in price for the directory that further fuels the inversion of profits that actually creates a net-loss for the second link acquirer.

Avoiding Authority Bloat

We, as SEOs, can and should do all we can to avoid authority bloat. It is inherently an action generated through laziness – build links by easily assimilating competitors and/or nearby verticals, to the point where one syphons the next into infinity. And as I noted earlier, the act of grabbing competitor links makes sense, and to a certain point should be done – and should be done aggressively – in a vertical where it has already took hold.

However, in other verticals, authority bloat through competitive research is simply not yet a reality, and should be avoided – if we truly have future webmaster ROI in mind. Content in these verticals actually still takes weight, and even if it doesn’t, people generate links through unique, non-replicable fashions (even if it’s still in spammy ways). When a certain type of SEO – one that excels in competitive research link acquisition - arrives in a vertical, and then another shows up, it can create a step-on-one-another effect that inflates authority until the 3rd and 4th place players, who have now lost, fire their SEOs and hire new ones until the process builds on itself and the margins have all but disappeared.

This kind of environment clearly creates massive profit loss, and even in situations where the profit flips to a new player (such as in the link selling market), it’s still not an attractive one – ugly sitewide paid links and off-topic crap in author bios.

Create Non Replicable Link Profiles – Not Powerful But Copyable Ones

Similarly, if we are said highly-talented competitive research SEO who will take any adjacent link from a somewhat-relevant competitor into a new vertical, I ask that we stop, as SEOs, and reconsider. There is artistry, talent and respect garnered for that SEO that built a link profile of 60+ DA that you export to Excel, which causes a “Shit – I can’t get any of these links” type moment. There is none of that respect for the 80+ DA generated entirely off of sitewide blogrolls. Similarly, there is none of that feeling that you can’t beat that site that there often is for the site with links you can’t copy.

I would love to initially build that DA 60 site without one link that can be peeled off by a competitor over that boring, redundant 80 DA with 90% competitive backlink crossover that is going to create reduced long-term margins for my clients. I can start that path by not opening the doors with my own competitive research skills in adjacent verticals, which feel “great” because they build so many links, but aren’t that “great” at all because they do little besides create short term gains, which reducing and evaporating SEO profits in an entire vertical (while also eating into other vertical profits as well).

It can feel easy to quickly add a link on a directory, but trust me, it feels dirty when you look back at your link report from February and competitor #1 is on every single page, and you realize that every “relevant” blog in the industry now looks like a paid link farm.

We can make the most money as SEOs (and webmasters), now and into the future, by building unique content that can’t be recreated easily. It’s sustainable, it’s more fun, and it keeps the profit in-pocket. Yes, keep stealing links from your competitors, but please, stop building links competitors can steal.

The post Authority Bloat: An SEO Industry Problem appeared first on Ross Hudgens.

Three months ago, I made the jump to entrepreneurship. Since that time, I’ve been asked a few questions about what that process has been like, so I thought I would write a little update post to give a little context to the experience, with some specificity to SEO and the agency environment in general.

There are several posts that have been written about doing your own thing, and all of them are of course accurate, as it pertains to the given person’s experience. However, I believe that we are all a bit conditioned to create illusions about what entrepreneurship really is or isn’t – what the process can be or won’t be, and what will happen we make the jump ourselves.

The reality is that the context of the jump has extreme variance from person to person – for the college dropout hoping to trudge forth on the paycheck from their retail-store job while creating a beta software app, the concept of “entrepreneurship” is a billion times more scary than the guy coming off an exit at IPO-ville with immediate VC backing at their next endeavor. “Entrepreneurship” is an idea, with absolute definition, but the concept as imagined has true polarity – simply quitting a steady paycheck does not endeavor you towards a gold star of achievement. It is somewhat respectable, yes, but by no means should we think of every jump in a similar context.

I say this because I’m not sure what I experience or have experienced or will experience is comparable to that college dropout, or the three guys in their basement eating ramen hoping to ship beta before rent comes due. I started my own thing, yes, but there was never a fear of starting back at zero or having my life feel like a failure because of coming up short. There are varying levels of risk, and comparable feelings we might share, but the ideas are different. Their jump requires great risk. I am not certain any SEO agency jump does, especially if it is done appropriately, because of the services context.

When I made the jump, made my announcement, I was lucky enough to get lots of kind e-mails, words of respect, and most importantly, client inquiries from my efforts. It was, of course, deliberate – make an announcement, and pray that people would come to me and need work to be done.

Sure enough, there was.

Entrepreneurship as a State of Mind

Intrapreneurship is a concept that is gaining traction and in general, the internet allows us a sense of self-developed entrepenership that comes from allowance to get a variety of side work and develop side projects without much risk. Because of this, we are allowed little entrepreneurial ”actions” through our tenure of working for the man – creating our own ideas, shipping them, and seeing them fail or succeed. Most importantly, the internet has allowed us to create a business in and of itself, one that gains continual equity and has recurring returns – the concept of “personal brand”.

And never is it more powerful than in a entrepreneurial services context, where the perceived equity in our abilities allows us to create client inquiries that pay the bills. Every e-mail sent asking “do you have client bandwidth?” is a respectable admonishment of your perceived ability to deliver ROI – this is a great thing and it comes from the ability to scale our physical identities through blogging, Twitter and etc that helps prove worth.

Because of this concept, I believe not that I started my jump to “entrepreneurship” three months ago, no – I started by jump to entrepeneurship more than two years ago when I started this blog. I continued building my “company” when I kept writing when I got home from work and when I delivered good returns for the side clients whose websites I helped build. I created “equity” every time I decided to tweet something that might be worthwhile online.

Every tweet I sent and effort I spent that created equity in this digital, “identity” corporation created an eventual state where not quitting my job was simply stupid – I had made and worked tirelessly to create a potential engine of referrals and inquiries in that “identity”, and to not use it specifically to that aim was basically wasting the equity I had build up to that time. I have fortunately gotten offers to work at a startup and in several different contexts similar to my previous position – and these are things I would potentially enjoy, yes, but to waste the potential equity that “personal brand”, dirty as it may sound, creates for me (or anyone else) to leverage into client work that pays well and speaking gigs that open up other opportunities – would be a true “lighting on fire” of that which I had done to build that before quitting.

It is very possible and likely to port new connections, respect and etc to other areas – but it is not a 1:1 value transfer – the worth recedes. It has to – you spent two years building equity online with one specific community, then you switch, you will inevitably create a packet loss in that transfer.

The “Jump” – Or Step Forward

When I initially quit, I was scared, but I wasn’t paralyzed. I felt confident in the aforementioned equity I had built, and because of that, I equate what I did to not be a ledge jump at all, but rather, a step forward. It simply had to be done, and it wasn’t “fear” in the truest sense of the word. I had already built a potential business online, and it had essentially been proven out. For some reason, people decided I was worth following, and worth reading. I had the metrics to prove it. I had run rate and the bank account to survive the winter. There was almost no risk. Of course, fear existed, but the reality is that what we imagine and what actually occurs is far, far different. As it turned out, I worked on this business from 6PM-2AM for the last two years – I just happened to decide to incorporate three months ago.

And yes, the reality matched what I described above – the aforementioned “it’s going to work out, I determined that through two years of work” – and quickly. In the first month, I felt a quenching of fear in my stomach from the inevitable dip in my bank account, but this was, and is, a guarantee for almost anyone - I had to sign up clients, and the sales cycle is by no means immediate. Nonetheless, it is a bad feeling, and you will almost certainly hate it dearly after seeing the opposite for many years in your posh corporate gig. But once that lull subsided and I started getting my first client checks, things started feeling better. I sunk into a groove. This new scary “entrepreneurship” thing felt the same as what I had been doing the last two years. Oh, shit – it was.

Lessons, Differences, Change

This is not to say that I’m recommending that you make the jump to doing SEO consulting full time. In fact, I probably recommend that you don’t. But what I do recommend to you – if you do enjoy and hope to build a company or do your own thing some day, is a push forward to build equity in something without an obvious endgame. In the infancy of this blog, I wrote about my regrets about competing in athletics, because that avenue had a ceiling for me – I would never play in the NFL. Similarly, I suggest you do not continue working on avenues with low ceilings – find your highest one, and work to move towards it.

So many are simply not doing that – and I believe that much of what “entrepreneurship” is, sometimes, simply demanding we continue to build something without an apparent ceiling. If we continue to do that, we will always be engaging in the potential for something entrepreneurial, whether or not we have someone is sending us a steady paycheck or not.

Nobody who has built brand equity for four years in a potential service industry deserves respect for quitting their job to start their own consulting business. It’s pitifully easy if you’ve done that work. Of course, doing that work is incredibly hard, but the difference is the occurrence of risk – in traditional startups, it occurs at the jump point – for service based folks, the “risk” is simply having the belief that the work you’ll put in to create the equity while employed will pay off.

It’s very possible to jump headlong early and just hope your business development will reward itself without the equity pre-built, but if you wait around, you’re basically just an idiot for not jumping, because you’re wasting maximizing the asset you’ve created in your off time. People like me don’t deserve any respect for “taking the entrepreneurship risk”, definitely – I waited too long if anything.

Turns out, “jumping” in this context is damn easy – writing on  Microsoft Word at 2AM when your friends are out partying in your early 20s is the hard part.

The post Making The Jump: Reflections Three Months In appeared first on Ross Hudgens.

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to give a talk to the University of Washington INFO 320 “Information Needs, Searching, and Presentation” class, about what they need to do to get hired in search and SEO specifically. Although many of the suggestions are SEO specific, many of the tips I offered can be cross-referenced to any job hiring process. These are my slides from the talk. To view the deck on SlideShare, click here.

The post How to Get a Job in SEO appeared first on Ross Hudgens.

I’ve had the good fortune of being selected to speak at SMX events three times now. While I’m no Vanessa Fox, who seems to appear 95 times speaking per event, I feel like I have a decent idea, now, of what it takes to get selected to speak at the conference.

Speaking at SMX is a great honor, and brings good benefits. It got me lots of new connections, job offers, client work, my girlfriend, subsequent speaking gigs, and other benefits that would not have been possible without it. I highly suggest doing your best, as a marketer, to speak at one of their events.

Last week while listening to some of my peers and some of the sessions, I had a bit of a breakthrough as it comes to getting accepted to speak there. If you opened this post thinking I’d write something like “be a trusted authority” and “have something compelling to pitch”, you’d be right – but I would not have written this article if that’s all I was going to offer as advice – as those parts are obvious, and basically amount to “build great content” in another form.

The real secret to getting accepted at SMX is understanding the format. When most people pitch the panel, they blindly pitch something they think might be good as it pertains to the session description. From there, the moderator has to choose three, sometimes four – sometimes five – people to speak on the panel.

What occurs here is very important. It is this moderator’s job to make sure the content on their panel is unique, and has little to no overlap. Matt McGee, frequent SMX moderator, told me that this – sometimes overlapping content – is one of the only complaints they get, and the moderators work extremely hard to prevent any of this occurring. Therefore, it is up to the person pitching to understand this constraint the moderator is under when choosing speakers.

Understanding Panel Story Structure

This is where some important strategy comes in. Moderators – good moderators – will creative a narrative with their session. It will have a beginning, middle and end – all informing different difficulties and strategies people might use for their businesses. For example, let’s look at a specific narrative that might occur for an authorship session.

• Speaker 1: Intro to Authorship
• Speaker 2: How to Implement Authorship
• Speaker 3: Using Authorship to Your Promotional Advantage
• Speaker 4: The Future of Authorship

The reality of what happens when most people pitch for a session like this, they will fit into a singular, overpitched speaker type. SMX will open a session to get pitched, and to the outside speaker, they might imagine that they are going up against 100 other people that pitch for those four spots.

Instead, they are commonly actually going against 90 other people for that one popular slot – perhaps, here, the “Using Authorship to Your Promotional Advantage”. Meanwhile, Bill Slawski pitches the Speaker 1 slot to talk about patents that inform authorship, and he goes against nobody. He is pretty much automatically accepted, because his pitch fills the need of the narrative, and he has no competition.

Of course, Bill has the reputation for patents, and trust. This is still important, and weighs in to the decision greatly. However, when pitching a session, it is very worth thinking about how people might commonly be pitching each need, and the potential thought process of the moderator. How will they create a narrative? How can I offer a compelling pitch that competes against the fewest other pitching marketers in the narrative story?

It is this kind of thought process that will dramatically improve your chances of getting accepted to speak at a panel – because you are helping the moderator create a better session through diversity. Of course, you’ll never know for sure what people are pitching, but you could probably make some good educated guesses based on common psychology and industry trends that might inform the pitches – such as recentness, sexiness, or lack of complexity.

If you can get in the smallest group possible, you can better improve your chances of getting all the great benefits speaking at SMX – or any other panel-based conference – can offer. You’ll also help make the conference sessions better – and that’s damn cool too.

Extra note: If interested, I posted my SMX East deck on Slideshare as well – “Content Strategy Post-Penguin“. It addresses a lot of what I talk about in my “Transitioning to a Content Strategy” post here, with a little spice thrown in at the end for good use. Also, you might notice it debuts my consulting business, Siege Media, the website of which is currently under development.

The post How to Get Accepted to Speak at SMX appeared first on Ross Hudgens.

You will often times find people who say things like “EMDs should rank well”, “Google Plus will succeed”, “guest posting will always work”, “Pinterest is worth investing in”, “white hat %&$ing works”, “infographics can be successful”, and etc. While these are all things that can and might be true, the reality is the author of their statements should greatly inform how you interpret them.

How do their own interests align with the statement itself? Do they own Exact Match Domains? Do they compete heavily against Exact Match Domains? Have they invested tons of time in Google Plus? Do they offer Pinterest services? All of these kinds of things can help inform how we should assess an opinion.

We all have our biases, conscious or not, so when we hear people potentially say things that inform our own decisions, we should immediately do some necessary due diligence into their background to inform whether or not there opinion seems A) extremely clouded, B) clouded, or C) just clouded enough with natural bias that it just might be worth considering.

Anything else might lead us on a path we might ultimately regret ever starting on.

The post Cognitive Bias at Play in SEO appeared first on Ross Hudgens.