I recently caught up with Aaron George, co-founder of Lawkick.com, a service that gives users an easy way to find legal help. Aaron studied law at Loyola Marymount University. At Lawkick, Aaron focuses on product design, focus and business strategy. Here is an excerpt from his interview to EntrepreneurshipDaily.com.

Anand:
So, let me start by talking about people who start their business on the side. For example, if I am a 16 year old trying to start a small website business from home, what would you recommend is the best time to incorporate a company?

Aaron:
Well, it kind of depends on the type of business you are starting. But in general, you should think about incorporating pretty early as soon as you are beginning to conduct business and deal with customers, partners, vendors, or any other parties. The more dealings you have the greater your potential liability is, so it’s a good idea to incorporate in order to shield your personal assets from that liability.

Anand:
You had talked about the various kinds of business (C, S, etc.) on your blog. So if I am a one-man business, what would you suggest is the best way to incorporate?

Aaron:
Each business is different, so there really isn’t a general rule for which type of entity is best and I can’t give any real legal advice on that topic. But, the main thing to consider when deciding what type of entity to form is what your goals are for the company. If you are simply looking to create a one-man business that is likely to remain a one-man business, such as a blog or simple website business like you described before, an LLC would probably be a good choice. LLCs are very flexible, they are easy to set up, and they have favorable tax treatment. C or S corporations are a bit more complex to set up and require adherence to certain “corporate formalities.” If your goal is to create a huge company that will be raising venture capital and will one day go public, you may want to start out as a corporation because a corporation offers easy transferability of shares to investors, employees, and partners. You should sit down and decide what type of business you want to create and what your goals are before considering how to incorporate, and I would always recommend hiring a lawyer to guide you through the process and make sure you make the best decision for your circumstances.

Anand:
I am just thinking of a website like Mashable – it started off as a one man blog but is now a large media enterprise. In such a scenario, is it possible to migrate from an LLC to a corporation? Or do you shut the LLC down and create a Corporation from scratch?

Aaron:
It is possible to transition from an LLC to a Corporation if necessary. It is more difficult to transition from a corporation to an LLC. As I mentioned before, LLCs are very flexible and can be structured to meet the needs of almost any type of business. Even some very large companies are structured as LLCs. These days, LLCs are the most popular entity choice for new businesses. But, in some instances VCs have been known to insist on having a Delaware C-Corp before they will invest in your company, so it all just depends again on the goals of the company. Mashable didn’t raise money for a long time until they already had significant revenue as far as I know, so it probably wasn’t much of an issue.

Anand:
Now a couple of questions about hiring a lawyer. You had mentioned on your website that hiring a startup lawyer to setup a company can cost anywhere between $300 to $5000. Now that’s a really wide range. This being the case, what are the things I should be looking at to ensure I am hiring the right lawyer? Any specific questions I should ask?

Aaron:
The cost will depend on a few factors – mainly how much work the lawyer has to do, how complex the work is, and how much experience and prestige the lawyer has. If you just want a lawyer to file your LLC for you, it could be as cheap as $300, but if you need to establish a C-corporation and issue stock to the founders and draft employment agreements for the employees, it can get a lot more expensive. When hiring a lawyer, you should always try to find someone with experience doing whatever task you need done. So I would ask the lawyer about his/her past work history to make sure it aligns with the needs of your business. Also consider the complexity and significance of the work – if it’s something fairly routine like filing a trademark, the experience level of the lawyer is less important than if it’s a high stakes patent litigation case or something.

Anand:
Yes, that makes sense now. I just have a couple of more questions. The next question is about IP protection. As you know, most angel investors and VCs don’t sign NDAs when we talk to them about our ideas. Is there anything at all from a legal perspective that I could do to ensure my ideas are not stolen? Or any way I could deal with them legally?

Aaron:
First, let me explain the reason why VCs don’t sign NDAs. It’s because they see tons of ideas and pitches from startups every day. Chances are very high that some of those ideas will overlap with others, and the VCs don’t want to risk getting involved and investing in a company that does something similar to another company with whom they signed an NDA. So in general, no matter how unique your ideas may seem to you, there’s a good chance someone has already thought of something similar or tried it in the past. My advice to entrepreneurs is always not to worry too much about protecting your ideas early on. It is incredibly hard to create a successful company no matter what the idea is, and execution is always more important than the idea itself. ?Even signing an NDA won’t ensure that your idea isn’t stolen, it just gives you a possible remedy if someone does steal it. In my experience, it is actually better to share your idea with as many people as possible because it allows you to get feedback and figure out exactly what your potential customers will be interested in buying from you.

Anand:
Great answer Aaron, thanks. Just modifying the question a little bit – another area of worry is with respect to the vendors we work with – like, freelancers or manufacturers from other parts of the world. In such cases where a Chinese contractor steals your IP and sells it directly, is there a legal recourse?

Aaron:
That is definitely more of a concern. Any time you are working with contractors, consultants, etc. it is a good idea to take whatever measures possible to protect your IP. You should require them to sign NDAs or other confidentiality agreements before exposing them to any confidential information about your company. It would be very difficult for a small company with limited resources to ever successfully pursue a legal remedy against an overseas contractor, so I would recommend doing a thorough investigation and background check into the people and companies you deal with upfront.

Anand:
This is not related to legal aspects but to Lawkick as a business – could you tell us where you are as a business (in terms of users looking for lawyers) – any specific tips or growth strategies that you used to get these users to your site?

Aaron:
Sure. We launched LawKick in July 2013, so at this point the site has been live for about 7 months. In the early months, there were very few users and we faced the classic “chicken and egg” problem – no lawyers wanted to sign up without clients, and no clients would sign up without lawyers. We first focused on getting the lawyers to join because they are the supply side of the marketplace, which is usually how marketplace businesses start. Once we had about 50 lawyers we focused on growing the client side. Currently we have close to 200 lawyers in our network, all of which have been interviewed and screened before admission. We have helped several hundred clients with their legal needs in the past few months and matched them to the right lawyers in their area. As for the strategies – on the lawyer side we haven’t done any advertising at all. It has all been through direct outreach, referrals, word of mouth, and inbound marketing. On the client side, we have experimented with a little advertising on Facebook but not much. The growth has mostly been from SEO from our blog, attending events, inbound marketing, and word of mouth. It’s still very early on in our company’s life cycle, so we aren’t focusing on growth as much as we are still trying to learn from our users and iterate the product until it is optimized.

Anand:
Thanks a lot Aaron for speaking to Entrepreneurship Daily.

(Source)

Every entrepreneur goes through this dilemma – should you price your product low enough to make it affordable to everyone; or should you price it high enough and win on margins? When I recently sat down to talk to over a hundred entrepreneurs for my book, “How We Did It : 100 entrepreneurs share the story of their struggles and life experiences“, this was one question I wanted them to answer most candidly. After all, I was still deciding how to price my own book!

The responses were not only candid, but also extremely valuable advice. Here are a few excerpts from the answers I loved.

Jeb Blount, Founder, Sales Gravy

I realized very early on that selling books, sales training products, and banner advertising was not a viable strategy. My niche was not big enough to turn those endeavors into real money makers. That got me thinking about where the money was in my niche – that was jobs. That is when we shifted our focus to becoming the hub for sales jobs on the web. That strategy has paid off for us and has allowed us to expand

Jay Barnett, Founder, Priority Pickup

My market is price sensitive and it is competitive. In a market such as mine, I either have to reduce prices to win more business, or ad value.I choose to add value to my service, because you never really win a price war.

Zeb Couch, Founder, SpeedHatch

For Speedhatch, we created several different landing pages with different one-time prices and monthly prices. We went with the one that converted the most paying customers, while also providing us with the highest acceptable stream of revenue.

Joel Simkhai, Founder, Grindr

I decided early on I that I did not want to rely on VC funding so having a revenue model was important for me. Once I realized that Grindr was providing real value to our users, we started to develop Grindr Xtra, a premium subscription service. Grindr Xtra allows users to see more guys around them, add filters to see specific types of guys and really heightens the Grindr experience.

Sam Tarantino, Founder, GrooveShark

Monetization had always been advertising-driven given how we were seeing start-ups like YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. grow. For us, though, we realized the consumer, especially young consumers, were shifting their investment in music from buying the music itself towards spending even more on live events. This added to our long-term monetization strategy to take advantage of this new trend.

John Brady, Founder, <a “rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.protempartners.com/”>Protem Partners

We had a benchmark which was market rate for related and/or similar services. So we discounted beneath that benchmark rate during account acquisition in the beginning, and then raised rates from there as we built a brand and became better known. The important part of the exercise was sitting with a spreadsheet and being realistic about costs, possible unexpected expenses personally (what happens if the car needs a major repair or the hot water heater goes in the next 12 months?), research about business expenses, and then determining how much we could afford to charge or not charge and for how long.

Like all entrepreneurs, Nic Franklin launched his business in the industry he was most passionate about. Oil and gas is “boring” to a lot of us, but as an attorney who was born and raised in the Texas Panhandle, Nic had terrific knowledge about the local oil and gas industry. He had himself developed wind energy projects, run a title company and had been involved with the oil and gas industry since launching the Texas Journal of Oil, Gas, and Energy Law. It then comes as no surprise that this is the industry he was passionate about.

Nic noticed that the land records and titles in three counties had never been digitized before. He realized that digitization of records could help his clients to examine evidence, build title policies and close faster than they could through the traditional route. It was a literal goldmine that he had stumbled upon. It had to be done.

So over the next 9 months, Nic and his team spent every waking hour digitizing land records from the three counties. Then they screwed up something so basic, they would be ruing about it for the rest of time. Nic says:

“This is embarrassing to admit, but the biggest mistake we’ve made so far was waiting too long to get a sign. We were getting quotes for big fancy LED signs, but we had been open for weeks before we ended up getting vinyl lettering and our logo put on our door for $100 as a temporary fix.

We had a huge jump in business that same day, and we get compliments all the time on how sharp it looks, so we decided to forget the $10,000 LED one. There is nothing that feels worse as a start-up than hearing someone say they wish they had known about you weeks before so they could have sent you their business. Here we were, completely changing the way oil and gas and real estate deals are done in the Panhandle, and we had people not knowing we existed. They were walking past our door for weeks, waiting months for data that we could’ve given them in five minutes.”

So there’s it – Nic spent nine months making the most perfect product for his business. But nobody knew he existed. As a start-up, your funds are pretty limited. So any cash inflow can do wonders. While Nic’s company ‘Digital Abstract and Title‘ is doing wonderfully well today, they will never be able to forget that one elementary mistake that nearly cost them the business.

This article contains excerpts from my recently published ebook, “How To Find Your First Customers – 75 Entrepreneurs Tell Us Their Story”. You can download a free copy of the book by clicking to the source.

The first step in any SEO assignment is performing an audit of the client’s website to identify the problem areas, areas of opportunity and a general sense of where you are and where you need to go. In other words, an SEO audit helps you chart the road map for the work ahead. This is true irrespective of whether this is an inbound SEO prospect, or someone you identified as a lead and have reached out to. This is a comprehensive guidebook on what SEO auditing involves and how you should go about it. I have also included dozens of free and paid online tools available for you to perform this auditing more efficiently. So let’s get started.

Build A Site Profile

The first step in any auditing process is to know the monster you are dealing with. Are we talking about a website that was set up only last week, and is so still a virgin in terms of content optimization and backlinks? Or are we talking about a website that is many years old and has been worked on by many optimizers in the past? While the latter helps you build a great SEO audit report, the possible work in SEO could be humongous too; especially if it involves removing bad links.

Anyway, you will first want to know how old the website is, how big it is, in terms of the number of indexed (and unindexed) pages, the level of authority the website has, etc. My favorite tool in this regard is a Google Chrome extension called Open SEO stats. It gives you a generic idea about all the SEO aspects of any given website – like the age of the domain name, the number of indexed pages on Google, the number of backlinks, the traffic trend on third party services like Alexa and Compete, social media presence, page loading speed, web host location, etc. I like it because you get a complete picture of everything about the website in just a couple of clicks.

Website Crawlability Audit

So now you have a mental picture of the website you are dealing with, we can start with the first real step of the auditing process which is to test the website’s accessibility features. Here, we mainly check the website settings that dictate who can access the web page. Also, we check if the website standards are up to date and if web pages work as intended when we request an access.

1. Robots.txt

The first thing to look at is what the robots.txt file say. For those new to the game, this is a text file that contains information on what kind of bots can access your several web pages. So for example, if you have an admin panel on your website for internal purposes that you do not want the Googlebot to access, you could set this condition in the robots.txt file.

You could access this file by simply typing yourwebsitename.com/robots.txt on the browser address bar. Sometimes though, what appears okay on the robots.txt file could have unintended consequences. Alternately, some robot accessibility restrictions may be set at a page level in what are known as robots meta tags. To ensure you have only restricted access for pages you intended to, it is a good idea to instead view the robot access information from a tool like Screaming Frog SEO spider.

This is a free software that will instantly crawl through your entire website and pull out all the HTML elements of your page. You may however require a license if you work with large websites that have more than 500 pages. Anyway, with this tool, you can get instant information on the robot accessibility settings from all the pages on your website. Use this tool to see what pages have robots set to ‘noindex’ or ‘nofollow’, and if this has been done deliberately to prevent Google from crawling the page or if this was a mistake.

2. HTML Status Codes

Besides robots.txt, another factor that could tell you if there any accessibility issues is the status codes. These are ‘responses’ that are delivered when a request to access a web page is sent. The most popular one, of course, is the ‘404 Page not found’ status. Here is a complete list of all the various possible status codes one could receive from a web page.

You may want to know what the status code for the different pages of your website is. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider also gives you information on this. I typically sort the results from SEO spider on the basis of the Status Code to be able to see all the pages that are being redirected (301, 302), not found (404) in one bunch.

Website Indexability Audit

So now that you have studied the “crawlability” of your website, the next step is to know if the content is getting indexed as desired on Google. If you are just starting out on SEO, one thing you should know is that what you see is NOT what you get. You may have a pretty looking website, but that is not how Google could potentially be seeing your website. While Google has been getting better at it, it is always a good idea to keep things simple. So here are some things that you should look at.

1. Navigability

Is the website letting Google freely navigate through all the pages? Does the website have an XML sitemap that dynamically generates a list of all web pages from the website? Has this been provided to Google through the Webmaster tools? Identify these and include them in your audit report.

2. Site Architecture

How is your website organized? Is it one huge mass of a thousand pages? Or, do you have all the content properly organized into various folders and sub-folders. There are two components to the auditing process while looking at site architecture. The first is the URL architecture. Traditionally, it was considered a good habit to demonstrate the organizational structure in the URL. For instance, if you had a directory of various hotels across the country, you would typically have a structure like website.com/state/city/hotel-name.html

However, from an SEO perspective, what matters more is how easily can a user navigate from the homepage to any particular web page they want to. Evaluate how the content is organized, and how the various folders and sub-folders in the website are organized and inter-linked. Also, make a note of whether the URL structure is consistent among all pages under one organizational folder.

3. Animation and Visual Content

As noted already, it is considered a bad idea to use elements like Adobe Flash or Javascript to render content on your website. There are modern technologies like HTML 5 that not only render better to the visitor but is also more search engine friendly. Use a tool like SiteCheckup to evaluate at least all the important pages on the website for Flash elements. That website has quite a few other useful auditing tools that you may check out.

4. HTML Markups

Wouldn’t you rate a news article that is full of spelling mistakes poorly? The same goes for an HTML page that is full of syntax errors and coding violations. In extreme cases, this can also impact the indexability of your website. Run a markup validation check using the W3C tool to identify errors that need to be fixed.

On-Page Content Audit

The next step is to understand if all the HTML content elements are in place on your website. While it is no longer required to have elements like meta keywords on your website, others like Title, header elements, meta descriptions and structured data are still important. I would recommend doing this process via the following steps:

1. Identify main elements through SEO Spider

Every web page needs to have a well defined title, header information, sub-headers. This helps Google understand the context of the page better. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider does a great job in providing this information from all the pages at one place. Typically, you will need to check for the following:

a) Are titles succinct and less than 65 words in length?

b) Is the main headline on the page marked with the H1 tag and the subsequent sub-headers marked with H2, H3, and so on?

c) Is there more than one H1 tag for a page? This is a big no-no

d) Are titles unique? A lot of websites tend to have the same page title across the website

e) Is the title overtly manipulated for SEO reasons? This is again forbidden

f) Does the meta description provide a good summary of the page’s content? This is the content that Google search visitors read before clicking on to your link

2. Content Quality

The quality of content that the website delivers to its audience is paramount from an SEO perspective. But this is a pretty subjective thing to do since what one calls ‘useful information’ is often an individual perspective. At the outset, you will need to check for the following:

a) Is the content unique?

Siteliner is a good tool to help you identify content that may be duplicate on your page. But do note that this only helps with internal duplication. If you have plagiarized it from elsewhere, this tool may not be of help. For such cases, you may use tools like Copyscape.

b) Is it comprehensive enough?

The ideal word length is 300-500 words. But this is plainly subjective and depends on your niche. No tool shall be able to give you the right information for this question. What you could do is do a competitive analysis of other websites in the industry and see if your website has more in-depth analysis and information than the others.

c) Does it provide useful, well-researched and verifiable information?

Again, this is subjective. A competitive analysis could give you an idea of how good your website is compared to competition. Is there a compelling reason why Google should rank your site above the others? If not, note down these points in your audit report.

d) Does it make for easy reading?

Depending on your audience, your content should make for easy reading. This means that the content should not be riddled with too many jargons and abbreviations. Generally speaking, your website should be comprehensible to a student in the eigth to tenth grade. You need not spend too much time on this aspect and use a random sample of content from your website on a tool like Read-Able to benchmark your website’s readability factors.

e) Does the content seem manipulated for SEO reasons?

Self-taught website owners and amateur SEOs often place a lot of focus on elements like keyword density. This typically ends with a keyword-stuffed article that Google can easily make out as a manipulated piece. Your SEO audit report should definitely look into this aspect. The keyword analyzer from SEOBook does a good job at this.

f) Are there grammatical and typographical errors?

Finally, is your content free from grammatical errors and spelling mistakes? There are a number of spelling and grammar checking tools online. But if you are a native speaker of the language, you may make do with your own knowledge and the MS Word spell-check feature.

g) Are you targeting the right keywords?

This is an extremely crucial step. The website you are auditing may be the best in business. But without the use of relevant keywords, you may not be able to reach out to the right audience. Use keyword planner tool on Adwords to identify the main keywords for the niche and study if the website is optimized for all these important keywords.

3. Image Attributes

The SEO Spider does an awesome work crawling through all the images from your site and helps you identify those images that have not been attributed with ALT tags. ALT tag is a textual reference provided for images. This is to help website visitors who may not be able to view the image itself for various reasons and is thus an important SEO hygiene factor.

4. Hyperlinks

It is believed that hyperlinking to contextually relevant high authority publications tend to have a positive fallout on your own web page’s ranking. Additionally, linking contextually to others part of your own website is a healthy way to improve navigation and usability. While auditing the hyperlinks on your web page, there are specifically a few things to look into:

a) Broken Links : Use a tool like W3C Link Checker to check for broken links in your website. Remember to tick the recursive option so that you can check across your whole website.

b) Link Quality : This is again a very subjective aspect. The thumb-rule to determine the quality of the destination website is the kind of backlinks it has, the general level of quality of the website. Ideally, you may want to perform a site audit of each of the websites you are linking out to. But since that may not be practically feasible, a quick way to assess the destination website is to see if it links to, or is linked from an excessive number of spammy websites.

c) Nofollow : There has been a lot of discussion over the nofollow strategy for websites. A lot of website owners tend to be pretty defensive and thus nofollow all their external links by default. This may be unnecessary and can also be counter-productive. Use nofollow if any links are sponsored or if you cannot vouch for the quality of the end link. The nofollow Chrome extension automatically identifies nofollowed links on any web page and is a good starting point to audit the hyperlinks on any web page.

d) Anchor Text : Apart from nofollow, this is another aspect that has been abused by website owners. Identify the anchor text used to point to various internal and external links and analyze if they are either significantly promotional in nature or are stuffed with keywords.

On-Page Security Audit

Often times, websites are penalized by Google for not being secure enough. There are a few things you may check out to evaluate how good the website is, in terms of security.

1. HTTPS

Google has recently announced that they now have HTTPS as a ranking signal. While the non-deployment of HTTPS is not likely to bring down your rankings anytime soon, it is a good security feature to offer your customers. Depending on what you offer, consider the use of HTTPS on your website.

2. Malware Content

Websites are often hacked to host malware content. In some cases, the WordPress or Joomla theme you download may contain hidden malware that may be linking out to spammy niches like casino or gambling. There are two ways to track such content. The first method is to check into your Google Webmaster tools account to look for any malware content reported by Google. The second method is to install the Avast Chrome extension that scans all the Google search results for spyware. Once done, use the ‘site:website.com’ search operator on Google to get a list of all your web pages and look for any potential spam reports.

3. Neighborhood Analysis

Tools like SpyOnWeb give you a list of websites that are hosted in the same IP network as you. Identify potential spam websites on your shared hosting neighborhood that could affect your search ranking.

Off-Page Audit

The off-page audit of your website has mostly got to do with backlink analysis. However, that is not all. You will also need to benchmark the social profile of your website, local listing profile and the overall trustworthiness of your site. Here is a brief on how you go about it:

1. Backlink analysis

This is one of the most important aspects of an SEO audit and one could write an entire book on this topic. However, for the sake of this article, here is a brief rundown of the various aspects you should check out –

a) Number and quality of backlinks : The Moz Open Site Explorer is one of the most popular tools for backlink profile analysis. This service not only gives you the tentative number of backlinks to your website, but also provides a domain authority and page authority rank for each of the inbound links. While this is in no way the absolute measure of the link quality, it gives you a rough idea of the kind of links that point to the website.

b) Anchor text analysis : A natural backlink profile will have a healthy mix of all kinds of anchor texts and not just the keyword you are trying to rank for. BacklinkWatch is a free tool to take a peek into the multiple backlinks that are pointed to your website along with the anchor text used and nofollow parameters, if any. Check out their raw export feature to download the backlink file for any further processing

c) Nofollow ratio : The BacklinkWatch analysis also gives you a distribution of followed and nofollowed links. Typically, most hyperlinks to a website are follow in nature. However, the complete absence of nofollow links can raise eyebrows. This, in conjunction, with other parameters like anchor text keyword stuffing, hyperlink from low trust websites, etc. is often an indicator of bad backlink profile. In such cases, there is a good chance of your website having received a penalty from Google. Look out for any notifications on Webmaster tools for warnings and penalty notifications.

d) Linking Schemes : It has been more than a decade since link exchanges and link wheels went out of use. But you won’t believe the number of websites that still do it. Even if the site you audit does not engage in such tactics, if God forbid, the websites you have earned links from engage in such tactics, it is time to make a note of such websites and potentially disavow them later. The same is true for sponsored links. Even if your client does not pay for links, getting backlinks from websites that do is a risk factor and needs to be accounted for during your site audit.

e) Relevancy : Do a thorough analysis of all the hyperlinks to your website and identify the context for each link. Hyperlinks that are from websites with little context are risky and could potentially impact your website ranking. This is a long drawn process but it is recommended that you do this manually without relying on tools.

2. Social Profile

A website’s social media authority has become increasingly relevant in terms of SEO over the past few years. A higher engagement indicates greater authority and could hence possibly help in SEO ranking. This does not necessarily mean the number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers you have. Instead, it has got more to do with the authority of people tweeting your links or sharing your posts. The Social Authority Checker tool from SEOReviewTools is a good way to benchmark your website’s social authority against direct competitors. While this does not take into account the authority of the users sharing your website URLs, it does give a good starting point to analyze social authority.

3. Local Listing Profile

If the website you are auditing is a local business, it is important to separately audit its local listing profile. This includes the following things:

a) Directory listings : Identify the major business listing directories for the geography the website being audited is based out of and monitor its presence across all these listing pages.

b) Local pack : Identify the major keywords that the website should be ranking for and monitor its visibility in the local pack of the search results.

c) Google+ Page : Does your business appear verified on the Google+ local listings? Also, how is the engagement on this page with respect to the images and videos added, reviews and followers?

d) Local SERPs : How does the website rank for the various keywords relating to the business. If possible, analyze these results with and without including the location in the keyword. For example, if you are auditing a carpet cleaning service in Jacksonville, map the search ranking for both ‘carpet cleaners in Jacksonville FL’ as well as ‘carpet cleaners’ – this needs to be done from a local IP so as to measure the precise ranking positions.

e) Identify duplicates : The Google My Business page might many times have duplicate listings of the same business. While this could be inadvertent, this is also a popular tactic used by blackhat marketers to be visible multiple times inside the local pack. Make a note of these duplicates in the audit report.

f) Check penalty : Penalty in the search results is not the only concern. A local business website may also be penalized from being shown in the local pack. A good way to identify such penalty is by making a search for the primary keyword on Google Maps (example: carpet cleaning in Jacksonville). The results are tagged in an alphabet count – if your website is tagged with one of the top letters like A, B, C,etc. and is still absent from appearing on the local pack, then it is most likely due to a penalty. The reasons for the penalty is multi-fold and is not within the scope of this article.

g) Getting the categories correct : Is your business tagged to the right category on the Google My Business dashboard? Getting associated with the right category is extremely crucial to ranking for the appropriate search terms.

h) Comprehensive profile information : Assess the comprehensiveness of the business profile. This includes business description, right business name, address, phone number, email, open hours, map location, photos and videos.

i) Visibility on Apple and Bing Maps : Make sure your business is listed on Apple maps and Bing maps as well.

j) Structured data : Use the Google structured data testing tool to verify that all the important elements on your website have been marked up correctly. This includes any reviews that you may have since click through rates are believed to be higher on the search results when accompanies by star ratings.

While a lot of manual effort is required to accomplish all of the above auditing parameters, you could get started on this using the BrightLocal local search report. Do note that this is a paid tool and some features are restricted to work with USA based clients.

Mobile SEO Audit

No SEO audit report is complete without looking into the performance and health of the website on mobile search. Here are some things to look into:

1. Webmaster Tools Report

If the website is already linked to the Webmaster Tools, navigate to Search Traffic → Mobile Usability and make a note of any issues pointed out by Google.

2. Mobile URL management

With smartphones becoming mainstream and data plans more affordable, mobile versions of websites are no longer mandatory. However, if you still have a separate mobile URL for each of the website links, check for the following:

a) Proper redirection : Are all the URLs redirecting to the mobile link from a mobile phone?

b) Canonical : Are all the mobile links set up with proper canonical tags to help Google identify the right source link?

c) View desktop version : Do you provide visitors an easy way to view the desktop version of the website?

d) Vary HTTP header : If your website serves different HTML code and design from different URLs to the user based on the device they access the website from, then check for the Vary HTTP header on the source code.

3. Responsive Design

While unique mobile version of the websites are no longer used, it has become extremely critical to replace them with responsive designs instead. While auditing your website, make a note of how your website renders on various mobile and tablet platforms.

4. Design Audit

Usability plays a huge part in any SEO audit report and this is all the more vital while looking at mobile SEO. Make sure to assess the following:

a) Use of Flash elements : Most mobile phones do not run Flash. Make a note of such elements that are deployed on the website

b) Use of popups & popovers : We are not talking just about ads (which are anyway relegated to a miniscule percentage of websites these days). Popovers are many times used to offer better usability on the web. However, they may fail to render correctly on mobile platforms.

c) Use of multimedia : If you render images and videos on your website, how are these elements displayed on a mobile device? Modern HTML5 based video players are lightweight and render better on mobile devices.

d) Validation check : Run a validation test on W3C mobileOK checker to make sure all the design related aspects adhere to standard guidelines.

Competition Analysis

A thorough SEO audit includes benchmarking your website against what the competitors are doing. Typically, one needs to assess all that we have discussed above for each of your main competitors. Broadly, this means the following:

1) The on-page content and design audit

2) The backlink profile of the competitors

3) Their social profile and engagement

4) Performance on local SEO

5) Mobile SEO audit

This mostly completes the SEO auditing process. Is there something that I missed? Point out in the comments and I will add them to the process above. Meanwhile, here is a brief list of different tools you can make use of during your auditing process.

List of Tools

Google Webmaster Tools : Google’s very own website auditing tool that helps you identify the health and hygiene of your website and SEO strategies.

Found SEO Audit : A free tool that helps you generate an audit report for your prospects. Includes major error and warning notifications.

MySiteAuditor : A white labelled SEO auditing service that you may embed on your SEO agency website for visitors to assess their websites. In turn, also helps generate more leads.

SEOCopilot Audit Tool : Free online SEO auditing tool that scans your website for over 50 SEO ranking factors. Also provides side-by-side competitor assessment report.

Zadroweb Site Auditor : Uses metrics from multiple sources including SEMRush and Moz to prepare a well-referenced SEO audit report.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider : An absolute must-use for scanning all the various HTML elements on your website. Free for analysis up to 500 pages.

UpCity SEO Report Card : Touches upon a number of significant SEO aspects of the site. Requires user to input email address though.

WooRank : Another must-try tool to prepare a site review. Includes review of the mobile, social aspects of the site. Also includes the homepage keywords review.

FeedTheBot : Provides technical inputs on relating to HTTP response headers, CSS and JS use along with inputs on Google bot access, page speed and image SEO.

Microsoft SEO Tool Kit : An important tool, simply because it’s from Microsoft. Helps you audit the website beyond just Google guidelines and helps you look at the site from the perspective of Bing, Yahoo and more.

Visual SEO Audit Tool : A software that requires download. Enhances your audit by helping you visualize the crawl process, identify conversion deterrents through screenshot management, visual XML sitemap editors and a site analysis suite. Free to download.

Removeem Anchor Text analysis : A tool to study your anchor text diversity and helps identify potential risk keywords.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth : Helps identify broken links on your website pretty efficiently.

Copyscape : Freemium tool to identify plagiarized and duplicate content on any web page

Urivalet : Nifty tool to check HTTP headers and page load time.

Pingdom Speed Test : Popular tool to measure the web page loading time

SEO Bin : A pretty basic tool for title optimization. Provides inputs on various words and phrases that may be included in your title.

Structured Data Testing Tool : A Google tool to validate the rich snippets and schema on your web pages.

Sitemap Inspector : Helps you identify any potential issues and errors with your existing XML sitemap and also helps you generate a new one.

Fiddler : A useful tool for web developers to debug traffic, test performance and test security.

Open SEO Stats : A Google Chrome extension that provides a holistic overview of the website in terms of website authority, traffic trends, link reports, etc. A pretty good tool to begin your SEO auditing process.

Flash Checker : Want to be absolutely sure about your website’s use of Flash elements on the page? This is a good tool to go to.

W3C Markup Validation : A must-use tool for designers to identify potential markup and validation errors on the website.

Siteliner : A useful tool to identify broken links, duplicate content on your website

SEOBook Keyword Analyzer : Identifies keyword density to help identify over-optimization on your web pages

Read-Able : Know the readability of content on your website using indices like Flesch-Kincaid and Coleman-Liau.

W3C Link Checker : Recursively crawl your website to identify broken links

NoFollow Chrome extension : Instantly identify nofollow links on a web page. Useful to assess over-optimization of your hyperlinking strategy.

SpyOnWeb : Detect other websites on the same shared hosting as yours. Helpful to know the IP neighborhood of your website.

OpenSite Explorer : Get comprehensive reports about your website. Paid tool

BacklinkWatch : Free tool to get an instant list of all backlinks pointing to the site along with information on anchor text and nofollow use.

W3C mobileOK Checker : Check the mobile friendliness of your website using this free tool.

Do you have other interesting tools that I should include here for website auditing? Share it in the comments below and I will be glad to include them into the article.

This article originally appeared on the LeadJoint blog. Click here for the original blog post.

Would you drive with no idea of the size of the vehicle you are maneuvering or what the destination is? Optimizing a website is going to be such an experience if you take up SEO assignments without knowing what you are up to. For one, performing SEO for a large website with half a million pages is not the same as an SEO for a local plumber’s website. Also, being the first one on the job is different from optimizing a site that has already been worked on by another SEO. Understanding the exact objectives of the customer, along with knowing the background of the website is extremely critical to doing a good job. Here are some questions you should ask your client before signing a contract to undertake SEO.

1. How would you describe your business?

This is the first question you ask your client. Yes, it doesn’t take much time to figure out that your client is an attorney or a florist. But the objective of this question is to know everything about what they do – is your client an online player? Do they have a brick and mortar store? What locations do they target? How long have they been in business? You will need answers to all these questions – but asking your client to describe their business helps you get answers to all these different questions.

2. How would you classify your products and services?

So your client is in the floor care business – how would they further classify their offerings? What are the different products and services that they offer? Sometimes, there is a very fine line between their various offerings – clients provide various grades of services for customers with different budgets. Try to understand the different ways the business may be classified based on the different products and services on offer along with the various price points. As an SEO consultant, this information will give you idea of how to organize your website content, along with the keywords that you should target.

3. How do you differentiate your business from competition?

Every business needs a unique selling proposition to carve a niche and thus differentiate themselves from competition. From an SEO’s perspective, the answer to this question will help you see if there is a demand for this USP from customers as much as there is demand for the alternate propositions. For instance, let us assume your client is in the plumbing business and their USP is their use of German tubes – is there a market to this? As an SEO, you can check the Google search keywords data from the client’s location to see if there is a demand for such a service. You may also help identify alternate USPs based on their price point, turnaround time, etc. to craft the right differentiation strategy for your client’s online business.

4. What is the average customer acquisition cost?

Knowing how much your client spends to acquire a customer will give you an idea of the initial targets you should aim for. For instance, if your client spends $1000 a month on Adwords, you can get an idea of how high up the search engine you should get in order to break even. This will also help you negotiate with your client effectively.

5. What is the average lifetime value of your customer?

Often times, the lifetime value of a customer differs with the marketing channel used to convert them. A customer acquired via a promotional offer may sometimes cease the partnership when the prices go up. On the other hand, a customer acquired through referrals may continue their relationship with you for a longer period. Knowing these various lifetime values along with the average figure will help you tweak your SEO strategy. Since SEO is an inbound marketing effort, a relatively lower lifetime value is likely an indication that you are targeting the wrong kind of customers.

6. Have you done SEO before?

This is an extremely important question that will help you audit the website better. A website that has never been optimized before is likely to have very few spammy backlinks and the content is likely to be pretty generic with no focus. On the other hand, a website that has already been through the hands of an SEO may likely contain backlinks that are harming, rather than helping, the website’s ranks. An answer to this question will ensure that you do not miss out on any critical steps in the SEO audit process. This will subsequently help you chart out your SEO activities and thus put a cost to the effort required.

7. Did you hire an agency or do it yourself?

Assuming that the answer to the earlier question was a yes, ask the client about the team in charge of optimizing the website. How does this matter? Well, knowing who worked on the site will give you an idea of things that could have potentially gone wrong. In my experience, business owners that did their own SEO are more likely to have inadvertently indulged in blackhat techniques compared to those that hired an external agency. Also, knowing the agency that did the SEO, you could possibly gain better insights into their modus operandi (quite a few SEO agencies offer ‘packages’ at different price points to customers. Knowing the package the client signed up for could tell you about things that could potentially affect the client’s website).

8. What link building strategies did you use?

A backlink analysis of the website tells you everything you need to know about the kind of links that the website has received. But it is important to know how they were acquired – was it through a sustained PR campaign? Or were bloggers paid for writing about the website? Also, if the client had subscribed to one of the SEO packages, then it is very likely that the website would have seen a pretty unnatural link frequency – so getting to know about the link building strategy straight from the horse’s mouth can tell you if the website has violated any Google guidelines and if they may see a penalty down the line.

9. Has your site ever been penalized by Google?

Assuming you do not have access to your client’s analytics, details of previous penalties (and the timeline of such events) will help you focus your website audit on the right parameters. Alternately, you can simply ask your client for access to their Google Analytics dashboard and make these inferences yourself.

10. What is the objective of this SEO engagement?

A lot of business owners are not aware of the fact that SEO goes beyond just ranking number one on Google search for your keywords. Understandably so, a lot of them find agencies that guarantee results more trustworthy than those that do not promise a number one position. Asking this question will give you an opportunity to understand the business owners’ perspective on the project as well as engage with them about the right way to do SEO.

11. What do you want us to do?

This is a continuation of the previous question where we got to know the objective of the engagement from the client’s perspective. In some cases, business owners expect SEO agencies to deliver on a fixed number of directory submissions, guest blogs and backlinks every month. If this is not what you provide your clients, it is the perfect opportunity to educate your client on why you do not offer such a service and how such things can be risky.

12. Is your web development firm in-house or outsourced?

Coming up with SEO recommendations is only half the battle. Getting them implemented on priority is something that a lot of SEO agencies struggle with. This is because businesses often have their own list of pending web tasks and won’t bother with additional SEO related tasks. If the client has their own in-house web-dev team, which you think may be a bottleneck, you may discuss this issue before-hand. Also, this gives you an opportunity to cross-sell your company’s web development services (if you have one) as well.

13. What is the tentative turnaround time for our on-site recommendations?

This is an extension of the previous question and is necessary to be explicitly discussed for the sake of seamless implementation of SEO recommendations. In some cases, it may be necessary to include this information in the contract agreement itself. For instance, if the client offers to include a bonus component for search rank improvements, it is important to make a note of the turnaround times as well since this has a direct bearing on how soon your SEO strategies show results.

14. Who is the POC in your company?

Before signing up a client, most of the engagement happens between the business development person from your SEO agency and the marketing head (or business owner) from the client’s side. However, things change once the contract is signed. The BDM may handover the responsibilities to the SEO manager while you may need to engage a lot with a marketing executive or the web developer from the client’s side for implementation. It is a good idea to finalize the point of contact from either side before the partnership is signed so as to know the roles and responsibilities from either side.

15. What areas will you provide support on?

It is difficult to offer a price estimate unless you know all things that are expected of you. For instance, it is common for small business owners to often request SEO agencies to implement the changes themselves on the website. Many times this part of the engagement is never discussed before signing the contract. Also, some businesses have their own in-house writers who contribute to the company blog. In such cases, you do not have to include content writing as part of your cost estimates. Having said that, do assess the quality of the client’s in-house writers since their grasp on the language and the content they provide has a direct bearing on your SEO goals. If you insist on having your own writers, discuss this with the client well in advance.

16. Can we mention the payment method and cycle in the contract?

If the contract is drafted from your side, it is a good idea to explicitly mention the billing cycle and possibly introduce penalties for late payments. On the other hand, if the contract is drafted by the business, request the payment terms to be explicitly mentioned in the agreement. As noted already in this article, a lot of business owners are wary of paying SEO consultants until they see positive results. Mentioning the payment terms in the contract will help protect your interests in cases where search engine optimization techniques take time to deliver results.

17. How much money do you spend on online advertising?

Knowing the advertising budget of a client helps you in calculating the prevalent customer acquisition cost as noted earlier. In addition to this, this can also help you build a case for allocating a larger SEO budget, if necessary. Let us assume you have a local small business client who pays you $400 a month for the SEO assignment. This budget does not give you much leeway to work on high value link building efforts like publishing a research report or organizing a giveaway. However, if you know that the business also spends $1000 a month on Adwords, you may convince them to spend a part of this budget on SEO for better long term gains.

18. How do you manage your social media?

Every business, big or small, at least have a Facebook page these days. However, social media management goes much beyond just posting stuff about your company and industry on your Facebook wall. With social signals becoming a crucial part of the search ranking process of late, what a business does on social media impacts their search ranking to a significant extent. Depending on the client’s answers, you may either choose to coordinate with their social media management team for link building efforts (for instance, during giveaways), or offer to take up social media as an additional responsibility.

19. Do you have a PR team?

Business owners often do not see the connect between PR and off-site SEO. Organic and sustained link building is possible through PR and if the business already has a PR team (in-house or outsourced), it makes sense to coordinate with them to maximize the PR reach and link building efforts. Also, make it a point to include the coordination effort with the PR team as part of your responsibilities in the contract.

20. How did you find us?

SEO agencies should always make it a point to have tracking scripts in place to know the source of all their inbound enquiries. But quite often, prospects reach out over phone or via email. In such cases, it is difficult to know how the client found your organization. Asking this question helps you track the performance of your own marketing campaigns and thus benchmark your various client acquisition strategies.

The questions you ask your client before signing them up will give you sufficient inputs on the objective, job responsibilities, project breakdown, pricing factors as well as specific points to put down in the contract. In addition to this, a frank discussion on the above topics will also give you an opportunity to educate your client on any misconceptions they may have about SEO. Do you think we have missed out on any crucial questions? Post them in the comments below and I will add them to the list above (with credits, of course!)

Originally published on the LeadJoint blog. 

It doesn’t matter if you are just starting out as an SEO consultant or if you are already an established agency looking to grow – leads are the holy grail for the growth of any business. There are dozens of strategies, tricks and tools that can help you identify new leads for your SEO consulting business.

The objective of this article is to comprehensively cover all the strategies and tools to find new SEO leads. But in case it doesn’t cover a trick or strategy you personally use, feel free to comment or message me and I shall add your trick or tool to the list.

Let’s get started

Freelancing Marketplaces

This is the first place you should start. Freelance marketplaces like Freelancer.com, Odesk, and Elance have hundreds of small and large businesses seek bids for their SEO projects. It gives you are a ready list of businesses who are ready to spend money NOW to improve their search engine profile.

There are, however, a couple of downsides to this – for one, depending on where you live, you may find that the rivals bidding for the same projects are grossly undercutting you. That is expected considering that Asian and East European bidders often price themselves lower than American bidders.

Also, such marketplaces have ratings and reviews for providers which are often an influential factor among buyers. As a new user, you may face the prospect of being rejected due to zero reviews.

Trick to success : Do not bid on each and every project. Instead, identify websites that you think you can win, and write a personalized note that is probably much more detailed and actionable than other bidders out there. If the project owner has provided a link to their website or has specified the industry/location, make a thorough analysis of the industry or website and make a grand pitch on why you are the best person to do the job. The conversion rate for such bids are vastly higher than using a cookie-cutter bidding template for all projects.

Classified Listings

Classifieds are another place to seek out businesses looking for an SEO consultant. Craigslist is the first thing that comes to mind. Depending on your market, the other popular classified listing websites are Gumtree, Olx and Kijiji.

Trick to success : For Craigslist, use an aggregator like SearchTempest to get SEO job postings from multiple cities and locations on one page. This is an easier way to look up new job postings from the classified service.

LeadJoint

There are different categories of businesses seeking SEO consulting. The first category is of new websites that want to set up a search engine presence. The other category is that of businesses that are already established and ranking on top, but have dropped out of the first page due to various reasons, including penalty.

LeadJoint caters to this second category of businesses. The service monitors thousands of Google keywords for changes in search rankings and digs out potential SEO leads – these are websites that have dropped out of the first page of Google for their major keywords and are hence potentially looking for an SEO consultant.

Trick to success : LeadJoint provides its subscribers the ability to monitor 2000 of their own keywords. Use this quota to add keywords pertaining to local businesses from your town or suburb. Businesses that post on Craigslist or Freelancer websites often have dozens of bids from other SEO agencies. By narrowing down the LeadJoint list to businesses in your local suburb, you can aim for fewer competition and thus a vastly higher conversion rate.

Partnerships

This is by far one of the most effective channels to get new businesses referred to you on a consistent basis. Web designers, developers, copywriters and social media marketing agencies work with clients who may regularly need help with search engine optimization as well. Reach out to such businesses in your city or state and propose a referral commission for every business they send your way. One thing to keep in mind is that such agencies work with clients with drastically different budgets and resource requirements. So it is always a good idea to partner with an agency who deal with the kind of customers that you can cater to with your level of expertise and bandwidth.

Trick to success : Emailing such complimentary business services is a good start. However, a better way to do it is to attend local events and meetups of these various industry segments and networking with them. Since this is a win-win partnership, the web designers and development agencies should be as keen as you are to partner up.

Advertisers

When you are starting out with your SEO consultancy, it may seem like anybody who is not ranking on the first page of Google for their keywords would be a hot candiate for consulting. But that is not the case. A lot of business owners are happy growing organically through word of mouth referrals. Others are interested in new growth opportunities as long as it is free. Very few business owners actively seek to grow bigger and one of the avenues they seek to achieve this is advertising. People advertising on Adwords or YellowPages are already spending money to acquire new customers. This segement of business owners is more likely to listen to your SEO pitch compared to someone who hasn’t spent a dime on getting new customers.

Trick to success : Tools like ISearchFrom help you quickly view Adwords advertisers for various keywords from different geographies. For instance, if you are from NYC and want to know the advertisers for the keyword ‘roofing contractors’ in Los Angeles, you can do so in a couple of clicks. This helps you instantly build a list of leads you can reach out to.

Other Promotional Campaigns

Advertising is not the only way businesses seek to grow. A number of local small business owners run promotional campaigns, give out fliers, discount vouchers and market themselves on websites like Groupon – all of these indicate a business owners’ mindset that is open to seeking growth opportunities.

Reaching out to these businesses with an SEO proposal that will seek to fetch them better returns than their current marketing campaigns can potentially bring you new clients to your SEO business.

Trick to success : There is no doubt that such businesses have a great potential for conversion. However, when you reach out to them, context is key. A plain-vanilla email that pitches your SEO agency would be deleted as quick as any other spam. Instead, if you call them and talk to them about their Groupon or flier campaign, understand the costs involved and then pitch your SEO campaign as a more effective yet cheaper alternative, then you are more likely to convert.

Lead Magnet

Lead magnets are essentially “products” that you give away in order to get new leads for your business. In the case of SEO consulting, your target prospects are mostly business owners or marketing managers looking for advice on ranking on Google. You can target these prospects through giveaways like a free ebook on SEO tips or build an online tool to audit their websites. Make sure to capture emails of your website visitors who want to access these lead magnets so that you can reach out to them with a proposal. MySiteAuditor has a paid service to embed a site audit tool on your website that you can use to capture new SEO leads.

Trick to success : There are entire books written on this topic that it is not possible to explain all the tricks to success here in one step. However, in short, content marketing is key to success here. Find interesting topics that people like to talk about in your industry and write blogs or reports on these topics. With proper distribution across online social media and discussion boards, you can aim for traffic to your blogs. Provide lead magnets like useful Excel tools, research reports or PDF ebooks to this visiting audience to gather leads that you can reach out to.

Affiliate Program

An affiliate program is basically an arrangement where you pay a commission to an intermediate for referring new customers. This can either be your existing customers or a complete third party who has the means to reach out to your target audience. If you are already an established agency, the right way to launch this program is to introduce it to your existing customers. Most agencies regularly receive word of mouth referrals from their existing clientele. By monetarily rewarding your clients for referring new customers, you can convert your goodwill into a financial gain.

Having said that, affiliate programs, if not managed properly, can result in spam and frauds. Be sure who you are recruiting as affiliates for your business.

Trick to success : Affiliate management is a lot of work. To start with, only provide your customers with unique referral codes so that it will incentivize them for word of mouth references. Open it up to the public or a third party affiliate network only when you have sufficient resources to handle the mess that comes with affiliate marketing management.

This article originally appeared on the LeadJoint blog.

Somebody wiser than us all once said, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression.” In the case of lead prospecting, the first impression you make is worth several thousand dollars of business in the long run. How you approach your SEO prospect for the first time is often the defining factor between converting or losing a customer.

Unfortunately, given the number of spammers, scammers and snake oil salesmen present in the SEO industry today, it is often a tough job getting an outbound lead to listen to you, let alone hire your agency. So how do you go about talking to your SEO lead for the first time? Let’s try to figure it out here.

But first things first – not all SEO leads are made alike. How you approach the prospect depends on how you acquired them as leads. There are times when the prospect fills up a form on your website, and there are times when you identify a prospect and would directly reach out to them. These are different scenarios and so require grossly different modus operandi.

Typically, there are four different kinds of SEO leads:

1. Inbound SEO leads; referred by a common connection.
2. Inbound SEO leads; reaching out directly to you.
3. Outbound SEO leads potentially seeking out agencies.
4. Outbound SEO leads not seeking out agencies.

Inbound SEO Leads Referred By A Common Connection

This is by far the most effective lead generation strategy. Business owners who want to optimize their websites for Google often turn to their network for recommendations. Since the agency is often pre-qualified and vetted, the conversion rates are pretty high.

Making the first impression in this case is pretty simple. The prospect already has a favorable opinion of you, thanks to your common connection (either an existing client or an agency you have partnered with). The only thing you need to do is to not blow it.

Trick to succeed :If your communication is over email, follow the lead already set by your prospect or your connection in their inbound communication. Answer their questions as elaborately as possible. Also, be realistic – if you think you will need at least six months to show results, let them know about it in advance. It is easier to caution them in the beginning than to defend the lack of results as the months go by.

Face-to-face communication or phone calls work even better. This helps establish a personal connection between the prospect and you and this virtually seals the deal. However, a word of caution here. Unlike email communication, phone calls do not provide you with a breathing time to think and answer tough questions. Tackling tough questions is an art that takes years of expertise. But if you are just starting out, one trick to tackle this issue is by offering to take all of their questions and answer them in one stretch. Besides giving you the time to think, it also saves time and ensures that both parties do not waste time on unproductive discussions.

Inbound SEO Leads Reaching Out Directly To You

If you have a good online presence (either organically or through ads), then chances are you are receiving quite a few leads directly to your inbox from interested business owners and marketing managers. While this seems like a very attractive proposition, you will soon realize that it is not.

In a whopping majority of the cases, you are not the only person that the prospect reached out to. Quite often, the prospect searches Google for SEO consultants in their locality and expresses interest with at least 5-6 different agencies.

This is a tricky situation because although you have a hot lead with you, you are now fighting with at least half a dozen other SEOs for the same prospect.

Trick to succeed : The time it takes for you to reply to an inbound query is extremely critical (no, we are not talking about the automated email replies here). Set unique email alert sounds for inbound lead enquiries on your mobile phone so that you can respond to such enquiries instantly.

SEO consultants regularly discuss SEO audit results in the first email or phone call itself. This is to sound knowledgeable (and make a good first impression). That is not necessary. For one, it takes time to prepare an audit report and draft an elaborate email. This is going to mess up your first response time.

Instead, aim for an immediate response (preferably over a phone call) thanking the prospect for sending the enquiry and asking for a good time to set up an appointment. This way, you not only establish yourself as an extremely responsive company, but also give yourself sufficient time to prepare an audit report that you will need for your first meeting.

However, this alone may not be sufficient. Remember that you are fighting a handful of other SEOs for the same prospect. It may seem tempting to communicate over email or set up a Skype call to discuss the project. Unfortunately, this is the bare minimum that all the other candidates are doing too.

Wherever possible, set up a face-to-face meeting. No, the prospective client is not going to come to you. You will need to travel to their office. Nothing establishes trust like a physical handshake – and unless you deal with clients who are not in your city or the project costs don’t justify a physical meeting, make it a point to meet them face-to-face the first time.

Outbound SEO Leads Potentially Seeking Out Agencies

If you have subscribed to LeadJoint, you must have a list of dozens of SEO leads from your own city or vertical. Since these are businesses that have lost search traffic, they make attractive outbound SEO leads that you need to reach out to. But unlike the earlier inbound lead scenario, you do not have fight with other SEO consultants for this prospect. You could virtually be reaching out to these businesses at the exact moment they need an SEO consultant.

Trick to succeed : Depending on the niche of the business you are reaching out to, it is pretty likely for the business owner to not check their email frequently enough. So, phone calls always work better than emails. The ideal way to reach out to such outbound SEO leads who are potentially seeking out agencies is as follows:

Use third party tools like WhoIs, the website “Contact Us” page, YellowPages, and LinkedIn to identify the name and contact details of the business owner. Once you have the details with you, call them up early in the morning – preferably between 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. local time. One script that has worked pretty well for me goes something like this below. For this example, I am reaching out to Mr. Smith who runs a carpet cleaning business in London.

‘Hello Mr. Smith, my name is <name> and I am calling from <company name>. We have recently been working with home improvement based businesses in London and have helped companies increase revenues by as much as 48%. Can I ask you a couple of questions to see if there is a chance we could be working together?’

‘Thanks, firstly, what percent of your business comes from the Internet?’

‘Thank you. My second question is do you have a team in place to help you bring more customers from your website’

According to my reports, there are close to 230 people searching for carpet cleaning related search terms on Google from your location. I also noticed that you recently dropped out from the top of Google search for the keyword ‘Carpet cleaning London.’ Would you like to schedule a free consultation to discuss the exact issues that are plaguing your website and what needs to be done to fix this?’

In my experience, this script often gets a better closure rate compared to others I have tried out. For outbound SEO leads, it is important to not sound salesy, but instead focus on bringing value to the customer. This helps establish trust. Converting this prospect into a customer is the second step.

Outbound SEO Leads Not Seeking Out Agencies

Outbound SEO leads that are not currently seeking out agencies are often a tough nut to crack if you do not have an in-house sales team who do this full-time. Because of the human resources involved, this only makes sense for large agencies with at least a handful of sales execs. Smaller agencies who try this prospects basically end up spamming since the model works on the principal of shooting the email at thousands of businesses every week and hoping for at least a fraction of them to respond affirmatively.

Trick to succeed : At the outset, it may seem like the only trick here is to cold call as many businesses as you can in your target geography and niche. But this does not have to be a numbers’ game. You can raise the conversion rate by targeting prospects based on specific criteria. For example, one factor that disctinctly creates a higher likelihood for success is the target’s propensity to spend.

You can gauge this by building a list of websites from specific niche or location that spend money on Adwords or YellowPages. These are businesses that are already spending money to acquire customers. By creating the right value proposition, it is easier to get these businesses to instead spend money on SEO.

There is more than one way to bring new clients to the business. Depending on your growth ambitions and resources at hand, you can pick the right customer acquisition strategy and focus on bringing new business from the appropriate category of leads.

This blog originally appeared on the LeadJoint blog.

Earlier this year, I conducted an online survey of SEO agencies. I found that nearly 30% of these firms had fewer than a quarter of their business coming from Google Search. Besides online search, the most popular marketing channels among SEO agencies were word of mouth referrals, content marketing and direct marketing (cold calls, cold emails, etc.)

Finding new sources of SEO leads has been an industry on to itself for a long time now. Quite a few people have white-labeled websites offering SEO services and the sole purpose of these websites is to gather leads that can then be resold to digital marketing agencies. Another chunk of the marketers sends out thousands of emails every day to small business owners soliciting SEO services. Even if a fraction of these recipients reply in the affirmative, it makes for a good number of leads that can be sold.

Acquiring leads from such dubious sources can be risky. The main reason is that you do not know if the lead you buy is sold only to you or if there are multiple recipients. Also, do you really want to spam thousands of business owners to acquire new customers?

There are a number of legitimate alternatives that you can use to acquire new leads for your SEO business. Here are ten of them to begin with. (If you have more tools to help find SEO leads, mention in the comments and they will be included in the article)

Freelance Marketplaces

The first and foremost channel to acquire new customers for SEO is through freelance marketplaces like Freelancer.com and Odesk. Dozens of small business owners post on these marketplaces everyday and it can be a great place to start. However, there are two downsides to this. Firstly, there are a number of ‘get rich quick’ like projects published on these websites and it takes some effort to filter out these projects. Secondly, with millions of registered freelancers, the competition you need to out-do is immense; especially if you are new to the place and do not have many reviews against your name.

Trick to succeed : The trick to getting conversions on freelance marketplaces is to target projects where you can identify the owner through their website name or past projects. With this information, if you can identify their email address, write a personal email to them with your bidding. This way, you can avoid the rat race within the freelance marketplaces and be seen much more effectively.

Craigslist

One place that is quite ignored these days while scouring for SEO leads is Craigslist. This website is still on top when it comes to local businesses posting advertisements for SEO consultants. One downside however is that since publishing ads on classifieds is a two-way street, you will find a massive discrepancy between the number of posts seeking SEO consultants and ads from agencies seeking new clients. So in a way, you can be sure that a number of businesses may have already sent out an enquiry to agencies who have advertised.

Trick to succeed : There are two tips here. First, regularly post ads about your agency on Craigslist. You will not believe the number of business owners who still look up there. Secondly, while scouring for new leads, use a service like SearchTempest to do a nationwide search rather than doing it city-by-city.

LeadJoint

There are few websites dedicated to SEO lead generation as LeadJoint today. The concept behind this service is simple – the website monitors search positions for thousands of keywords on Google and tracks down websites that have fallen for their major keywords. The conversion rate among such leads is much higher than cold calls.

Trick to succeed : Although LeadJoint is available only to paying subscribers, you can access the first hundred leads for free by entering your email address in the search results page. Test the effectiveness of the service before making the purchase.

Google Alerts

If you follow internet marketing forums, you are likely to frequently come across panicked business owners whose websites have just dropped from the top of Google search. Such businesses, like it is with LeadJoint, are pretty attractive prospects for SEO consulting. You can set up a Google alert for keywords like “website traffic dropped” so you can be alerted every time there is a discussion around this topic.

Trick to succeed : Google Alerts has been accused of being broken by several regular users. If you are not seeing results, you can use an alternate paid service like Talkwalker that monitors the social media for you.

Meetup

Organized industry meetups are pretty common across the world, at least in the cities. This is a great platform to find new contacts and establish a personal or business relationships. Find out local meetups for various industries and participate in them. You can also take part in web designer and PPC advertiser meetups to find partners who you can refer clients with.

Trick to succeed : Always give before you take. To succeed in meetups, talk to the organizer and arrange for an ‘ask me anything’ session with the participants. This way, if you are participating in a carpet cleaners’ meetup, you can answer all their questions about Google ranking in the session. This helps you build an authority among the audience which can also translate into actual business.

Adwords

This is a pretty effective tactic if your target is the local business owner. Few such business owners actually understand how Google Adwords operates. As a result, they lose a lot of money advertising on keywords and locations that do not matter. This a target group that is ideal for SEO prospecting because not only are these business owners already spending money to acquire customers, they are also doing it inefficiently. By pitching SEO consultation as an alternative with a relatively higher return on investment, it is easier to find leads that are interested to listen to you.

Trick to succeed : One trick to get a foot in the door is to provide helpful advice to the prospect about their Adwords campaign. For instance, I found a bunch of Australian local businesses like roofers and plumbers who showed up on the ads when I searched for the relevant keywords from India. By providing these helpful tips, you can start a conversation that can often lead to new SEO business for your agency.

YellowPages

A significant number of business owners still consider YellowPages to be the holy grail. However, with Google doing a better job in listing commercial businesses, YellowPages today is solely a legacy system. That has however not stopped businesses from spending money on advertising there. Many times, these business owners tend to be non tech-savvy. You can approach these business owners with an SEO proposal.

Trick to succeed : The key here is educating the business owners on the pros and cons of YellowPages versus Organic listing. It is a good idea to set up an appointment to provide free consultation. This gives you the opportunity to educate the prospect which is an essential first step before clinching the project.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON THE LEADJOINT BLOG

Ever since I started LeadJoint, the online service for SEO consultants to identify new leads for their business by tracking down websites that have dropped on Google search, I have taken up to content marketing in a big way. This is by far the most effective way to get inbound leads and customers to any online business.

 But marketers often confuse content marketing with blogging and guest posting. Publishing an article is not everything. Content marketing is what you do AFTER you publish that wonderful blog post.

The whole objective of content marketing is to make use of your content (either on your in-house blog or as a guest post on a different website) to bring new visitors and leads to your website. Of course, you do not have all the freedom to modify and redistribute content you have published on another website. But depending on where you publish your content and what rights the website owner provides you, here are four things you must do after your blog post gets published.

Share With Community

The first thing you do after publishing a blog post is to share it with your social network. This typically implies Facebook, Twitter, Email, LinkedIn, reddit, etc.

Studies have found that Facebook users engage quite actively during Thursdays and Fridays. On Twitter, the engagement rates are seen to be higher during the weekends. The time of the day your post reaches the community matters too. News and magazine updates (including blog posts) are more likely to be opened during the lunch hours.

Here is how a typical social media plan should be:

• Schedule your posts to be published on Facebook and Twitter 3-4 times over a three day period

• Include hashtags wherever possible

• If a user tweets your link with an opinion, engage in a conversation with them

• Identify LinkedIn groups that cater to your audience and publish your post

• Identify subreddits that cater to your audience or industry and submit your links

• Do not send the article to your newsletter group more than once.

As a best practice, always remember to engage with your audience over these communities non-commercially throughout the week. A rule of thumb is to engage in a helpful manner at least 9 times for every single commercial post or tweet.

Syndicate

One thing that a lot of content marketers fail to do is syndicating their posts. There are multiple reasons for this. For one, a lot of them are simply unaware of the benefits of article syndication. Secondly, there is concern about syndication potentially impacting your website SEO. As Neil Patel points out in this article, syndication, if done incorrectly, can lead to penalties.

There are two ways to get your articles syndicated across the web. The first method is to make use of content syndication networks. This includes services like Outbrain and Taboola where links from the various publishers in the network are cross-promoted over other blogs and websites in the network.

The second method to do it is through actual syndication. Depending on the industry you cater to, there are online magazines and websites that are open to syndicating interesting and useful content from different publishers in the industry. For instance, the articles I write on the LeadJoint blog are related to SEO and business development, and these are often published verbatim on websites like Medium, Business2Community and SocialMediaToday.

So how does one identify a list of such websites to syndicate to. Many times, a simple Google search for keywords like “this article originally appeared on” should give you a list of websites that accept article syndication. Once you prepare a list, follow these steps:

1. Identify the contact email of the editor

2. Write to them about a recent article you have published which you feel is a good fit for syndication

3. With their approval, rewrite parts of your article in order to not be seen as duplicate by Google

4. Ask the editor if they would allow a rel=canonical in the article body

5. If possible, automate this process (some websites allow this) so that each of your new articles can be automatically syndicated. Of course, in this case, you may be able to submit a rewritten piece.

Publishing On Other Platforms

Once you have invested your time and resources into writing a lengthy blog post, one thing that you must definitely follow upon is to repackage this content to suit the various other sources of traffic. This could be all of these different ways:

1. Uploading a PDF of the article on Slideshare

2. Creating a video of the presentation on YouTube

3. Publishing images and infographics to Pinterest

4. Submitting a copy of the article as an ebook on Amazon Kindle and SmashWords.

Taken separately, they may appear to not contribute any meaningful amount of traffic. However, a sustained level of contribution through these various can help you build a following over each of these various platforms. The result is that the virality of your articles improve with every new publication. But having said that, there are a few tricks to finding greater success through this strategy.

1. Try alternate headlines so that your article content can potentially rank for more than one keyword on Google

2. End your presentations and videos with a call to action back to your website. This helps channel these visitors to your website and thus help you possibly convert them as leads

3. Amazon does not allow users to submit free ebooks. Since the objective here is to enhance reach, the trick to making ebooks free on Amazon is to make it available for free on Smashwords and allow Amazon to ‘price match’.

Sharing Links On Forums & Message Boards

Most business blog articles are intended to answer specific questions or concerns that your customers or subscribers face. For instance, the objective of this very article is to tell business bloggers about the things they must do in order to reach out to more people with their blog posts. To this end, search for forums and communities where questions related to your blog topic has been asked and share helpful information along with a source link back to the blog. In the case of Quora, you also have the option to ask and answer your own question. The objective of this is to trigger a discussion on the topic even if it had not been done before. Additionally, Q&A boards like Yahoo Answers have very good visibility on Google. So answering related questions here might help you be seen by Google users who search on related topics.

All said and done, this is not the be all and end all of content marketing. New strategies to create higher virality are always being developed. For example, one of my customers at LeadJoint once told me how they would often trigger virality of an article by spending a dollar or two on Facebook advertising. Such strategies may not apply to everyone and are yet to be proven winners. I have hence not included them as part of my list. However, newer forms of content marketing are always being tested and executed. Do you have any successful technique outside of what has been posted above? Please feel free to share them in the comments below.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON THE LEADJOINT BLOG

If you have been spending money on customer acquisition, then you must have realized two things by now : One, Google Adwords is absurdly expensive, and Two, Facebook is not something where people come to buy. In other words, while the conversion on Adwords is likely to be high, the costs are on the higher side as well. On the other hand, while Facebook advertising can work out cheaper in comparison, the conversions are not as great as Adwords.

How you negotiate the Adwords space is a discussion for another day. In this topic, we will see how to generate attractive new SEO leads for your digital marketing agency using Facebook. Since this topic is aimed at digital marketing consultants, I would assume that a fair share of my readers would have already dabbled with Facebook advertising in some way or other. However, for the sake of comprehension, I shall keep this article simple so that it is understandable to someone who has not spent a lot of time on Facebook ads.

To begin with, there are two primary channels for acquiring SEO leads through Facebook advertising. The first way is to create regular ads targeted at your audience while the second way is retarget – that is, reinforce what you offer to people who have already visited your website from other sources – including Facebook ads. Let us start with retargeting first.

Creating Effective Retargeting Ads

If you make use of LeadJoint to generate new SEO leads, you are likely to have sent out quite a few cold-emails to hot SEO leads with a proposal. Most often, what happens is that these leads visit your website and may possibly move on. This is also the case with traffic acquired through your SEO, content marketing and social media marketing efforts. Retargeting is a cost-effective method to reinforce your proposal to your website visitors through follow-up ads on Facebook.

This is how to get it done.

Step 1 : Create custom URLs for every target source

Let us assume your main source of website traffic are your cold emails to the leads you obtained from LeadJoint, and guest posts you write on SEO blogs. Try to create unique landing page URLs for people visiting via these different sources. For instance, when introducing your website in your cold email, use a UTM parameter that specifies the source as email. Similarly, if you write for SearchEngineJournal, have a UTM parameter that specifies this in your by-line. This way, it is easy for you to exactly know the sources the visitors come from.

Step 2 : Add conversion pixel

When you create a new ad on Facebook, you are provided the option to add a conversion pixel. This is basically a tracking script you embed on your website that helps Facebook to add these visitors to a custom audience profile (if you have one). This is again an essential prerequisite to retargeting.

Step 3 : Create custom audience

Now that you have set up custom URLs for every unique traffic source you want to traffic, it is time to create custom audiences on Facebook. This is a necessary prerequisite to Facebook retargeting. When you choose to create a new ad on Facebook, you will see a field that reads ‘Custom Audience’. Here, click ‘Create New Custom Audience’

Step 4 : Create separate audiences for every source

How you retarget a lead you contacted via cold email is going to be different from the way you would retarget a visitor who came to your website via a blog post. In the Custom audience window, create separate audience profiles for each of these different sources. This should be possible by specifying the UTM parameter that you used for these traffic sources.

Step 5 : Create unique retargeting ads for every audience

Once you have a custom audience in place, create unique ads that target these specific customers. For instance, you can create an ad to follow up with your email proposal. On the other hand, if you want to target a direct visitor, you can advertise your “self help auditing tool” – this way, you can continue to reach out to your website visitors to enhance your conversions.

Using Regular Facebook Advertising
If you do not have a stream of visitors coming to your website already, it is a good idea to target new prospects via Facebook’s regular advertising. One common mistake that I have noticed with SEO agencies seeking new leads via Facebook ads is that they do not segment their audiences sufficiently. What has worked for me (and what should ideally work for you as well) is the following :

Step 1 : Target decision makers

If you offer local SEO services, then it is likely that you are targeting just the few specific cities you are available in. But not all Facebook users from the city are your audience. People who would need your service are either business owners, CEOs or marketing managers. So, you will have a better ROI targeting these specific groups. When you create a new Facebook ad, click the ‘More Demographics’ button below the Languages option to select Work → Job titles

In this option, pick titles that are associated with decision makers (who you would typically speak to for an SEO assignment). This includes titles like Owner, Owner-Operator, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Marketing Director, etc.

Step 2 : Ad communication

Facebook advertising works with two types of communication – one, where the viewer is already aware of SEO and you talk to them about their own website’s potential; and two, where the viewer is not aware of the business potential from Google. Make sure your ad message communicates one of the two.

Step 3 : Offer a lead magnet

Do not point your Facebook ad directly to your homepage. Instead, take them to a landing page that is seamlessly integrated with your ad message. For instance, if the ad text reads something on the lines of “Is your website still not ranking in Google despite all your efforts?”, then the landing page should provide the user with a lead gen form that provides free SEO auditing. On the other hand, if the ad text is on the lines of “Do you know how you can double your business with Google?”, then the landing page could point to a free ebook that the visitor can download after providing their credentials. By all means, make sure you gather their email or phone number.

Step 4 : Retarget

Continue to retarget these visitors on Facebook until they become customers. This ensures top-of-the-mind recall when these business indeed start looking for an SEO agency.

Facebook is a powerful medium to acquire new leads for your SEO business. Executed right, this can be a sustainable source for growing your clientele. How has your experience with Facebook advertising been? Share your experience in the comments below.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON THE LEADJOINT BLOG

An average SEO consultant handles anywhere between 5 to 10 clients at a time. While anything more than 8 clients could be a tight rope walk, it is not entirely unmanageable if you automate enough tasks to free up more time for doing real work.

When discussing SEO tools, most blog articles restrict themselves to online tools that help with keyword research, backlink analysis and rank tracking. There are dozens of tools that are available for these tasks. While there is no doubt you need tools for these core SEO needs, this alone does not help with automation.

In this article, we will take you through a bunch of online services that you could sign up to. Besides talking about the tools themselves, we will also see how many hours it saves and the cost factor involved. Would these tools pay for themselves through enhanced automation? Let us see –

Client Prospecting

The first step to launching your own SEO consultancy is finding clients you want to work with. Typically, lead generation in the short term happens through advertising, content marketing and agency partnerships while in the long term, it is through word of mouth references. Adwords is expensive with SEO related keywords often going as high as $10 per click in some geographies. Content marketing and partnerships take time to bear fruit and are a time sink. An alternative is to use a service to prepare a ready list of potential websites that may need your service and calling them.

How much time does it take? A lot of agencies may not realize it but writing content on your company blog, attending meetups, talking to web design firms for collaboration opportunities does end up consuming quite a lot of time, and they are all mostly done with one primary objective – to get new leads and customers for your business. As an alternative, when using a tool, it should take not more than ten minutes to download the list and an hour or two every week calling or emailing prospects.

Time saved : 10 hours a month
The cost : $19 per month.

SEO Management

This is one area that all consultants inevitably spend money on. Not surprisingly, there is absolutely no dearth of choices on offer when it comes to SEO management tools. However, bootstrapped agencies often rely on free alternatives like SmallSEOTools or Backlinkwatch for their analysis. At the other end of the spectrum are services like Moz that cost as much as $99 per month for just starters. Free tools are time sinks while tools like Moz are not always affordable for small agencies with just a handful of clients. The trick is to choose tools that help you automate without making it entirely unaffordable. A service I would recommend here is RankWatch that offers quite comprehensive SEO management tools at one-third the price of Moz.

When we discuss the tentative time saved, you may have to compare what a tool like RankWatch does in comparison to the free alternative like BacklinkWatch or SmallSEOTools. Tracking keyword ranking, preparing reports, monitoring backlinks, competition analysis typically takes 60 to 90 minutes per client a month. With an average of seven clients per consultant, we are talking 10 hours a month. An automation tool on the other hand could bring this down to 1-2 hours a month. So benchmarking the benefits,

Time saved : 8 hours a month
The cost : $29 per month

Link Building

One of the key areas of focus for any SEO company is to build high authority links for their clients. This involves creating high value content and trying to build referral links off it, soliciting media companies for PR, cold emailing prospective websites, customers and influencers. For an SEO company, link building is anywhere between 30%-70% of all their SEO tasks. As a result, fixing the inefficiencies would mean terrific productivity improvements overall. Given the large scope of link building automation, let us break into various small tasks and how automation can help here.

Link research & Digital PR : Coming up with new news-worthy things about your client can be time consuming. Instead, follow HARO and spend half an hour a day writing to relevant media queries. Over time, you can build a strong list of backlinks from this tool.

Time saved : 3 hours per month (approx)
The cost : Free

Cold Email : Depending on the kind of links you are building, you may be cold emailing quite a few people every month – be it a guest blog request, or reaching out to media companies and industry early adopters for reviews. There are two challenges here – first, identifying the email address of the recipients and second, sending and following up.

There are ways to use tools like Rapportive to identify the correct recipient email address, but it takes a hell lot of time. Even assuming that it only takes two minutes to dig out one email, you are likely spending 200 minutes (or over three hours) to identify 100 email addresses over the course of a month. Instead, use a tool like FindThatID that automates the email extraction process – and it costs just $2 per search. Assuming it takes you an hour to prepare a list of these hundred people, and there are seven clients you work with

Time saved : 14 hours per month
The cost : $14

The next step is to actually send these emails out. That by itself does not take too much time – you could, like thousands of others, simply BCC all the recipients for your email blast. That way, you are being efficient. But is that effective? Not really. It takes a lot of time to personalize every cold email and follow up with your email recipients. This process however could be automated and you could save 2-4 hours a month using tools like QuickMail. In terms of productivity gains for an SEO specialist with seven clients,

Time saved : 14 hours a month
The cost : $37

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a big part of SEO these days since Google loves websites with lots of useful textual content, not to forget the possibly backlinks that such content bring. There are two parts to content marketing – producing content and marketing them.

Producing content : The time taken to break the writers’ block and identifying attractive new topics depends on person to person. A tool like BuzzSumo is great for finding the right topic to attack. Combine this with a free tool like HARO where you can get people to feed you with experience and opinion, you can cut short the time taken to write a well-researched article by at least half an hour. Assuming you write an article a week for your client, we are talking two hours a month, or at least 14 hours per consultant (with seven clients)

Time saved : 14 hours a month
The cost : $99 per month

Marketing Content : Marketing the content is done through submitting your article on social media and relevant news aggregator sites. There are not sufficiently helpful ways to automate the latter task. But with social media sharing, you can make use of tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to automate the sharing process. For a typical consultant with around seven clients, a paid plan that costs $8.99 per month on Hootsuite is ideal. And the time saved is typically 2-3 hours a month cumulatively.

Time saved : 3 hours per month
The cost : $8.99

Invoicing Management

Unless you are a large enough agency with a full-time accountant, the SEO consultant or the agency owner may often be in charge of handling invoices and payments. MS Excel is great, but is not efficient. A tool like Zoho is ideal when you have to deal with a small number of clients. The hours saved is not exactly quantifiable, but for the sake of this article, you can assume that it takes one hour a month to prepare invoices, follow up and manage tax stuff related to every client. So that’s a saving of seven hours per consultant.

Time saved : 7 hours per month
The cost : $15

Besides these, there are other tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console (previously GWT), Pingdom that almost everybody has in their armor. So, for the sake of this article, we will not account for these universally used tools for measuring productivity improvements.

So where does this leave us?

So as you see, for around $222 a month, you save nearly 73 hours – that is nearly two additional weeks of man-hours – enough to handle at least another 4-5 clients.

Are you making good use of your time at your agency? Share the tools you use and how it has helped you with productivity in the comments below.

This article originally appeared on the LeadJoint Blog

Small business owners do not always rely on the internet for new clients. In a vast majority of the cases, these businesses continue to use traditional marketing techniques like fliers and phone directory listings to get the word out. But ask any business owner who has been at least five years in the industry and they will tell you how there is nothing as profitable as “word of mouth” marketing.

But word of mouth marketing does not happen by itself. Well, you are likely to get more references as long as you do a good job and maintain a relationship with your clients. But if you aspire to grow big and open more outlets in future, then references alone may not scale enough. You will often need a catalyst. While consumer businesses mostly rely on Google for this boost up, in the case of local businesses, this often translates to not more than a couple of extra thousands in revenue – good money, but nothing to thump your chests about.

Large businesses typically tackle this challenge through PR aka public relations. Most large businesses have a PR agency on retainer basis whose job is to get the business and its owner in front of their target audience through news pieces, interviews and the occasional quotes. But how can bootstrapped small businesses reach the local media? Here are a couple of tips about how to go about it.

Create Something Viral : You don’t have to pour ice-cold water on yourself in order to become popular. A simple sign or note that says something funny or quirky is likely to get snapped and shared on social media. If you are funny and lucky enough, you could hit the local papers or even reach the larger world. Sgt. Joes, a pizza shop in Midwest City, Oklahoma experienced the positive effect of PR when a simple sign outside their shop got widely shared on reddit and eventually reached more than 15,000 people across Oklahoma.

Help A Reporter Out : For the uninitiated, HARO is a platform where reporters and writers at large media websites and blogs can reach out to the general populace for sources and quotes. These queries are sent over email to the subscribers in three batches every day. According to Jay Barnett, the founder of Prority Floorcare, the trick to getting great visibility through HARO is by being prompt in answering queries. He says, “Be the first to respond to the HARO queries and follow up quite often. The results will show.” Jay says he has been able to get featured on quite a few large websites thanks to this strategy.

As a small business owner, your target market is often your neighborhood or city. Unlike large businesses, there is no need to get PR from the wide world when the people who matter are blocks away. However, there are two strategies to get momentum through PR. One is the bottom-up approach where you reach out to publications in your suburb which gets noticed by a city journalist and this eventually gets through to a writer with a larger organization. The other is the top-down approach where you aim for the stars and get featured on the major websites. When this happens, the trickle down is much faster as all local newspapers are more likely to carry news pertaining to their locality that is being published elsewhere.

Quite evidently, the bottom-up approach is easier, but slow. But the top-down approach is quick, but tough to crack. What works for you depends on the strategies you build and how persistent you are with your efforts. Share your own experiences with local business PR in the comments below.

PR is huge business. According to a Holmes Report study, the global PR market is valued at close to $13.5 billion (7 percent annual growth) with just the top ten firms reporting close to $4.8 billion in total revenues. The size is understandable given how keenly interested a lot of businesses are about getting brand exposure across mainstream media. For start-ups, this is a moment to realize they have “arrived”.

But unlike what most people think, you do not have to always shell out those five-figure retainers to hope for brand visibility. A lot of media coverage happens when you are creative or least expect it. I asked several business owners and PR agents on their biggest PR win and how they achieved it. Here is a run-down of advice I could pull out from the experiences that they shared.

Be Consistent On HARO

HelpAReporterOut (HARO) is one of the best things to happen to PR and the trick to media exposure is to respond to HARO queries consistently. More than one entrepreneur I talked to cited responding to HARO as the reason to getting featured on media outlets as diverse and popular as Entrepreneur, The Associated Press, ABC, CNN to name a few. As someone who uses HARO regularly to source quotes for my articles, one tip would be to be extremely thorough, yet to the point in your responses. Not all writers are looking to talk to you – by answering their question in your initial response, you give yourself an opportunity to be quoted in case the writer found your response helpful.

Be A Thought Leader

One advice offered by a lot of PR agencies to their clients is to prepare themselves to be presented as thought leaders in the industry. This means speaking at events, being at the forefront of industry-related debates on mainstream media, etc. But many times, such opportunities do not come to startup businesses. A workaround for such cases is through Op-Eds. Thanks to the online media, the opportunity to present your thoughts on mainstream publications is much easier today than it was a couple of decades back. When Sam Polk, the executive editor of GroceryShips.org launched his non-profit startup, he simply emailed his draft to oped@nytimes.com. The result? A front page mention on the Sunday Review in NYT.

Apply For Awards & Recognitions

Ever wondered how those businesses you read about in magazines make it to lists like “Inc’s Fastest Growing 500 companies”? The bare truth is that you basically send them your application. Not only are these lists a PR-win by themselves, but they also open doors to a lot more news-worthiness over time. This is what Matt Behnke, the Founder and CEO of online footwear store Orthotic Shop did to get listed in the Dbusiness’ ’30 in their 30s’ award. He says that he succeeded in the PR campaign by submitting his application along with information about him and his business – and the publishers got back. This is not something you can always achieve, but by keeping yourself updated on the various awards and listings that you could be a part of, you can hope to get featured on at least a fraction over the long-term.

Do Good For The Community (and let your work speak for itself)

You might have often read about small businesses who offered free sandwiches to people in times of tragedy like during the 9/11 attacks or hurricanes. These business owners often do it out of the goodness of their hearts and are not exactly seeking publicity. But the concept of doing good is news-worthy and that is something to remember. Vic Skowronski was the Public Relations Director for Comcast Cablevision of Philadelphia when Pope John Paul II, the Polish pope visited the United States for the first time. Although the event was carried live on EWTN, the cable TV system itself was mostly unbuilt. So Vic called up the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and arranged for the cable TV to be connected to big screens across several parish community centers. The result was massive goodwill among the catholic population with words of praise pouring in from various pastors who announced it from the pulpit. Vic says this activity generated lots of positive coverage across all local news outlets and is something he considers a PR win.

Creating Viral Videos

This heading doesn’t quite explain how well Kent’s Meats and Groceries scored their best PR win to date. In April 2013, a drunk burglar attempted to break into their store by throwing a rocking but fell flat even as the alarms sounded off. Seizing the opportunity, the business owners (with their PR agents) used the surveillance footage to create an ad that stated that their store-made pastrami was so good that some people would do anything to get more. The ad got viral and fetched the business countless hours of PR through coverage on CNN, Huffington Post, Good Morning America, FOX news besides thousands of dollars in TV licenses (for using the footage) and sales. You can read the complete experience as shared by Rocky Slaughter the owner of Sugar Pine media, the PR company here.

Timing It Right

In the case of PR, timing is everything. You may have the best story to tell, but you may not really find success until you put the story in context. For Gary Spivak, the founder of FidelityDating.com, that context came with the Ashley Madison hacking incident. Gary’s website was a dating site for people who had been cheated by their spouses and was a way for them to find faithful partners. Thanks to the high-profile hacking incident, FidelityDating got profound coverage as the anti-Ashley Madison. Since the initial coverage on NY Post, Gary says this angle has also helped him land an interview with Fox News.

Getting brand visibility is a time-consuming job and is definitely not something you can do part-time. While it is important you hire a professional, it is important to be creative and understand the way media works in order to be able to land the right opportunities to tell the world about your business

This is a condensed summary of the ebook, “Your Biggest PR Win”. You can download a free copy of the ebook by clicking here.

This article originally appeared on the Entrepreneurship Daily Tips Blog

Despite the growth in popularity of SaaS tools over the past decade, an overwhelming number of small and medium businesses still use email as their primary online helpdesk platform. The reasons are simple – email is ubiquitous, there is very little training required and you do not need to invest more money for just handling customer support. However, this is the wrong way to look at the problem. If you are a business that handles several hundred support enquiries each month, email-based customer support is not only clumsy, but also extremely disorganized.

Online helpdesks are not just for big companies with dozens of customer support staff. It can vastly improve the efficiency of even small organizations with just one or two support executives. In this article, we will discuss five such helpdesk tools that are not only powerful enough to make support more efficient, but is also easy on your wallet.

osTicket

Are you certain you do not want to spend a dime on helpdesk tools? Then perhaps it is a good idea to explore osTicket. It is a downloadable software that is completely open source and free to use. The native software does not include SSL encryption or email integration and so you may need to work on additional steps here. Alternately, if you do not mind spending $9 per month, you could check out their cloud-based hosted solution. This comes with the ability to handle unlimited tickets and support methods although there are minor limitations on the file size and certain features. Read the complete review here.

Freshdesk

Another wonderful tool for small business owners who are not ready to spend money on helpdesk tools yet is Freshdesk. Their free ‘Sprout’ plan supports up to three agents and allows you to handle email and phone support in addition to maintaining a knowledge base. Besides the free plan, Freshdesk is also a good helpdesk to use if your business is seasonal – their ‘day passes’ allow you to hire additional pair of hands to support during business spikes (as during a product launch or holiday sale). They have a pretty good fan following and you can read the reviews here.

Zendesk

In the world of online helpdesks, Zendesk is definitely one of the most popular tools. This is both due to the fact that it has been around for close to eight years and also because it serves more than sixty thousand paying customers today. Unlike osTicket or Freshdesk, Zendesk does not have a free tier. However their ‘Essential’ tier is pretty cheap at just $5 per month for an agent and at this price you get access to unlimited support requests over email or social networks, knowledge base management, web widgets and agent macros. That’s a pretty comprehensive offering at that price. You can read about everything on offer here.

HelpScout

Help Scout is not half as popular as alternatives like Zendesk or Freshdesk, but they do have a product that will perfectly fit your needs. There is a free tier with one mailbox that can be shared among three support agents. This is of course not as comprehensive as their paid plan. But if you don’t need access to the API or reports and do not mind linking out to HelpScout in your outgoing emails, then this is a good product for you. The product enjoys a raving fan base whose reviews you can read here.

Groove

Groove belongs to the new age of helpdesk solutions that is not aimed at overwhelming their customers with features but instead provide them with straightforward features that are easy to use. They have a free tier that comes integrated with a basic helpdesk with email ticket management. This means you can reply to tickets from your email inbox itself without having to visit the helpdesk platform each time. Even the paid plan is not too expensive in comparison to the other products in the market and only costs $15 per month for an agent. Read about all the reviews of Groove here.

Regardless of whether you choose a free or a paid plan, all these products come with a free trial period that gives you the ability to test and explore the features before deciding on the right product for your business. What did you choose? Write to us in the comments below.

Building an amazing customer experience does not have to be expensive. Little surprises and a persistent reach-out strategy can help businesses build an experience that wow the customers and turn them into active advocates for your product. Here are five cost-effective strategies that any small or medium business could use without having to break the bank.

Measure loyalty instead of satisfaction: At the outset, it may seem like customer satisfaction begets loyalty. But that is not the case according to a study by Watermark Consult. Satisfied customers are happy, but they do not necessarily spread the word about your product or even return to buy from you. A lot of customers are “satisfied” if you nail the core basics of a transaction – including offering a product at the right price and conclude the transaction in a reasonable time. That does not automatically translate into loyalty. To make your customers come back, you need to identify the incentives for them to return. This includes redeemable membership points, coupon codes or member-specific pricing. When a customer is turned into a loyal buyer, they not only spread the word about your business to others, but also become less immune to price changes.

Deliver surprises: One of the oft-mentioned tips in relationship blogs is to make a proactive effort to make your partner feel special through surprises. According to Michigan-based entrepreneur Per Wickstorm, this is no different in business transactions. He says that human beings are the same at an emotional level and businesses, like your spouse, need to have a proactive strategy to make the customer feel special at all times. “You have to continuously remind them about your company and that it cares about them. Find means to surprise your most loyal customers out of the blue, such as upgrading their membership to Platinum or Gold for free overnight or sending them random gifts. In turn, they’ll be telling this act of kindness and generosity to their circle of friends and colleagues”, he says.

Choreograph CX: There is nothing serendipitous about delivering great customer experience. The most memorable experiences that customers face are often choreographed and rehearsed hundreds of times until they are perfected. One of the best examples for this is the Apple Store. At the outset, the elements that go into making the Apple Stores a great case study for customer experience appear to be the products they sell and the store design. While those are the bare basics, what makes Apple Stores special is in the way its employees are hired, trained, motivated and taught to communicate. This comes from years of choreographed interactions that have helped Apple hone the elements that make customer experiences magical.

Ensure Consistency: A 2014 McKinsey study found that consistency in transactions was not of the most critical ingredients to ensure satisfaction and in turn bring loyalty. This includes consistency of purpose, communication and in the transactional process itself. Take the refunding process for instance. A customer is more likely to continue shopping with you if your business has a consistent policy of ‘no-questions-asked returns’. When customers experience inconsistent policies, they are more likely to feel cheated which in turn contributes to unhappiness. A good way to go about this is to identify the various transactional possibilities in your business and establish a documented policy and procedure. This takes out the unpredictability with the transaction, brings about consistency and makes your customers repeat buyers.

Marketing a small business product or service can be hard work at each step along the way. The first challenge here is the budget – most businesses of this size are bootstrapped and the average marketing automation tool is priced well over the budget that such businesses can afford. Another big challenge here is the learning curve required. Enterprise marketing tools require a significant level of integration and customization in order to work well and small businesses simply do not have the resources nor the expertise to get going. In this article, we will take a look at some tools that are built with the small business marketer in mind and how they can be useful to reach out to customers.

Hubbion

An average business has at least three different marketing channels. This includes email, cold calls, SMS marketing and even fliers. Hubbion is an all-in-one marketing channel that lets businesses reach out to customers over multiple channels like SMS, voice, email, fax and even post. The best thing about this service is that it is pay-as-you-go. What this means is that there are no expensive monthly subscriptions to pay for. The average SMS campaign starts at ¢3 per message while email messages start at ¢2.3. Hubbion also lets you pick your own dedicated phone number or shortcode and voice messages through the platform start at ¢4 per call.

HootSuite

HootSuite requires no introduction among online marketers. This is a tool that lets marketers manage multiple social media profiles at one place and also lets them schedule posts. If you are tight on budget, HootSuite has a free plan that lets users handle up to three profiles. Anything above that requires a paid subscription that is quite affordable as well. Small business marketers who do not need many frills and are happy posting on Facebook, Twitter and perhaps Instagram could make do with just the free plan.

Canva

Designing an online banner or a flier to distribute locally does not have to be expensive. With Canva, it is now possible to create high quality banners and fliers for little to no cost. All the image editing features on Canva is free to use and they only charge a nominal dollar or two for premium images used in your projects. Canva is also easy to learn which makes it apt for small business marketers without Photoshop skills.

ReferralRock

Word of mouth referrals continue to be the most effective forms of marketing. A recent study showed that nearly 84% of global consumers rely on references from friends and family while making purchases. But while there are a lot of referral marketing tools for online businesses, there are not many for offline small businesses. ReferralRock is a tool that comes with offline tracking tools that let businesses track and reward customers who are not online and yet help spread the word about the business. The only bummer here is that this does not come cheap and the lowest priced plan is at $125/month. If this is not something you can afford, you could launch your own referral program by letting your customers use their mobile numbers as referral codes.

Synup

If you are a local business, then you might have inevitably received a call from the likes of Yext that help your business manage your business listings across a plethora of listing sites from one place. The only trouble here is that Yext can be quite pricey and not just that, they are known to remove your listings when your subscription ends. For a bootstrapped business, this can be an expensive deal. But if you are absolutely in need of a listings management tool, check out alternatives like Synup that do almost the same thing for far less cost. At $25 per month per location (that’s $300 per year), Synup can do things that can cost as much as $1000 on Yext. If you have multiple locations, the savings on Synup can add up quite fast.

Mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp may have brought down the value proposition of the humble SMS, but its ubiquity continues unhindered. Multiple studies have pointed out that text messages are one of the best performing marketing channels with more than 98% open rate and nearly 36% click through rate. Compare this with email marketing where even a 25% open rate is considered good. But while almost all kinds of businesses engage in email marketing, there are relatively fewer businesses, mostly local businesses, that take SMS marketing seriously. One of the main reasons is the lack of awareness regarding the kind of software tools available to automate your SMS marketing needs.

In this article, we will take a look at some of the best SMS marketing tools available in the market today.

1. Hubbion

Hubbion is a multi-channel marketing automation tool for small and medium businesses. The tool lets users reach out to their contact list over any of the several platforms like SMS, MMS, email, fax, voice and even postcards. Besides the multi-channel aspect of it, there are two reasons why Hubbion finds itself in the top of this list. Firstly, Hubbion comes with a sophisticated automation system that allows users to customize their outgoing response and engagement based on incoming text messages. Secondly, it is easier on the wallet and does not require monthly subscriptions. Users can buy credits that do not expire and it costs anywhere between 2 to 3 cents to send a message.

2. Enger

Enger is a pure-play SMS marketing tool that is useful for businesses looking to create SMS marketing lists. It enables businesses to embed lead capture forms on their website and also schedule future messages to their audience. The tool also comes with mobile web customization, real-time analytics and easy unsubscription. There are two main differences from Hubbion. Firstly, this is a dedicated SMS marketing platform. Secondly, users will need to subscribe to a monthly subscription fee that starts at $10 per month.

3. TextingBase

The objective of TextingBase is to establish connections with your target group and follow up with personally until they are ready to buy. The features on the product include scheduled messaging, personalized SMSes and contact management. The tool also lets you keep track of your contacts’ birthdays, anniversaries and holidays in order to wish your contacts on these specific days. Alternately, you may also categorize them by location in order to send location-specific messages. TextingBase is suited for sales executives and has a starting price of 4 cents per message.

4. FirstHive

FirstHive is suitable for businesses that have large opt-in lists (think thousands). The service lets customers craft SMS, email and social media marketing campaigns through their platform. Besides creating and sending SMS/email/social messages, FirstHive also comes with a basic reporting dashboard to help you understand the effectiveness of your campaigns. Beyond the free thirty day trial, FirstHive costs users $41.67 per month (billed annually) and makes it possible to reach out to as many as 10000 subscribers. Given the annual billing and the large subscriber base, the product is only value for money if you have lots of opt-in subscribers for your SMS marketing channel.

5. Mozeo

Mozeo is one of the relatively more popular SMS marketing tools available in the market today. Similar to Hubbion, Mozeo too lets users buy credits to send SMSes. However, you have to commit to buying a certain volume of messages in order to get them at a cheap price. SMS marketing over Mozeo starts at 3 cents per message and besides the ability to broadcast messages, users also have the ability to send email messages, filter mobile keywords for automation and create landing pages. Do note that Mozeo focuses on the US and Canada regions alone and does not have global coverage like the other tools mentioned in the list.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON THE HUBBION BLOG

As a business, you are likely to be signing up for a number of third party software and services – be it for accounting, marketing, HR, finance or just web hosting. Back in the day, these business software tools were available to download for a lifetime license fee. Users simply paid a few hundred dollars to download the software and it was theirs for a lifetime. Many other developers sold an annual renewal fee which gave its users access to periodic software updates and technical support as well. From a user’s perspective, this often meant large capital investment in software tools which could all be down the drain if the developers folded or stopped updating their software.

But with SaaS gaining ground over the past decade, a large chunk of software makers have migrated to the cloud. This has given rise to a subscription model where the service provider hosts all the tools and data on their servers and users pay a monthly fee to access them. This has been a pretty popular option compared to licensing fee primarily because of the cheaper monthly costs and also because you only paid for as long as you need the service. Established service providers also provide annual subscription for a cheaper cost from users who prefer this option.

While the subscription based billing model is definitely an improvement over lifetime licensing, it still has its flaws. These subscriptions often come in a tiered structure where lower priced subscription plans offer fewer resources and features which expand with every higher tier. Most SaaS services come with an ‘Enterprise’ plan which is often the highest tier of subscription – here the pricing is custom quoted for power users based on their specific usage requirements.

At the outset, this seems like a fair pricing model where you are only billed for what you need. But that is not always the case. An alternate pricing model that has been getting popular in recent times is Pay-As-You-Go. Similar to the model followed on the PAYG phones, these services let users add “credits” to their account which get used up based on your consumption. For services where consumption could change quite drastically, you also have metered billing where you are invoiced at the end of a billing cycle based on your consumption.

Predictable Pricing

One of the arguments made for subscription billing is that your expenses are predictable each month and you do not get rude shocks at the end of the month. While this is true, it also means that your consumption levels are limited to what your plan provides. For instance, if your hosting plan limits your monthly bandwidth consumption, you are likely to miss out on additional revenue if you have a great month with a higher than planned web traffic. Most services do allow you to upgrade or downgrade your plans each month, but then, this defeats the purpose of subscription billing which is to make expenses predictable.

Charging For Unconsumed Resources

The biggest problem with subscription plans is that you are always charged for resources you did not consume. To take the same hosting plan example, let us say the starter plan offers 10 GB of bandwidth at $10 a month while the upper tier offers 100 GB at $30 a month. For a business to enjoy the $10/month subscription, they need to always consume less than 10 GB of bandwidth. Thus, a business that only consumes 2 GB a month continues to pay for 8 GB of unconsumed bandwidth. Worse, if you are a business that consumes 12 GB of bandwidth, you are essentially paying for 88 GB of unconsumed resources.

Compare this with a credit or metered billing structure. A business that consumes 12 GB is only billed for the resources consumed. Subscription billing is fantastic as a service provider but terrible for users.

Money Getting Locked

There are instances where a credits based system does not work well. Service providers that offer credits based billing often have a ‘minimum refill’ amount and it is not possible to add credits fewer than this amount. Some providers require a high minimum refill which could lock your money into their system for a long period. For instance, if you use $10 worth of credits each month and the minimum refill is $100, your credits would not be used completely for ten months. And in case you are not happy with the provider, the money you have already paid for can be hard to retrieve.

Where Subscriptions Make Sense

There are certainly instances where subscriptions do make sense. Internet service providers typically provide an “all you can use” pricing that is billed monthly or yearly. Here, users are billed one amount every month regardless of how much they consume. Here too, heavy users get their consumption subsidized by light users whose consumption does not justify their monthly billing. But the pricing still makes sense because the provider often has operational expenses that are incurred regardless of usage. That is, it takes the internet service provider resources to keep the traffic flowing regardless of how many users use their service and the bandwidth they consume. But for these subscriptions to make sense, there is only one pricing for all consumers with only the outlying very heavy consumers priced differently.

As a consumer, this begets the question – does it make sense to pay a monthly subscription for all the SaaS tools you use – be it for accounting, marketing or anything else. The answer is mostly no. If you have alternate providers who offer all the features you need with a credits system or metered billing model, always go with them. This not only saves your business a lot of cash, but can also protect you from instances where you subscribe to try a new service but forget to sign out before the end of trial period.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON THE HUBBION BLOG

Automating the marketing process is an important component of any business. By creating a system that can capture leads, nurture them and convert them into customers all by itself, businesses can spend more time growing their business. Unfortunately though, marketing automation does not come cheap. Industry leaders like HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot have a starting price of at least $100/month. Also, with many of the advanced features only available at higher priced plans, most of these tools are simply not meant for SMBs.

What Small and Medium businesses need is a no-frills tool that can do away with all the fluff and can accomplish the most essential automation elements at low cost. In this article, we will take a look at five of the best such tools that target small businesses.

Hubbion

Small and local businesses typically deal with customers over both email and text messages. Hubbion is a great tool for SMBs who need to automate their various channels of marketing over SMS, email, voice, fax and posts. Users have the ability to specify certain triggers to add new subscribers to the list and may also schedule autoresponders to reach out to their list. Besides the features and the the ability to reach customers over multiple platforms, another reason for small business owners to prefer Hubbion is the pricing structure. This is a pay-as-you-go service that charges businesses based on the volume of messages sent. What this means is that businesses can get started on their outreach for as little as a dollar or two without having to pay a monthly subscription.

Leadsius

Leadsius is a marketing automation tool for email marketers. Like Hubbion, Leadsius too comes with behavior based triggers and workflow rules that enable an automated system of user engagement across the business website, landing pages, social media and email marketing. The good thing about Leadsius is that it comes with a free plan that has a contact list limit of 2500. However, the features here are limited and this plan does not allow advanced workflow rules and dynamic smart lists.

Spokal

Spokal is an inbound marketing automation plan that comes with features like event based segmentation, email nurturing, A/B testing and social media calendar. The tool is not free by itself and costs a monthly fee of $49/month. This makes it vastly cheaper than the popular marketing automation tools in the market. Do note however that Spokal is not a complete tool by itself and you may need integration with MailChimp or ActiveCampaign to see your emails through.

JumpLead

JumpLead is a wonderful marketing automation tool for website nurturing. It comes with features that lets businesses to trigger targeted marketing activities based on the page visited or the web form completed. These subscribers may then be nurtured and converted into customers via email marketing. JumpLead is free to small businesses that have monthly visitors of less than 200 and need to send less than 100 emails in a month. If you have a website with a larger traffic, you may have to pick one of their paid plans starting at $49 per month.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON THE HUBBION BLOG

It is a well known fact among marketers that consumers who get to touch and feel a product are more likely to experience a sense of ownership and are thus more inclined to buy the product. Brand activation is a relatively recent concept and is aimed at triggering this sense of ownership by building a long term emotional connection between the brand and the consumer. And this does not have to necessarily come from physical touch and may also be executed by providing an experience to the target consumer.

An example of brand activation is the recent ‘Shot on iPhone 6’ series of commercials. For the campaign, Apple invited actual iPhone 6 users to send photos and videos captured on their device and a select few of these submissions were advertised over TV and billboards. The idea is to let target consumers ‘experience’ the beauty of the product and thus feel more connected to the product than they were earlier.

While brand activation may be a new jargon in the marketers’ handbook, the concept itself has been around for quite a while. Free product samples that are routinely given away in supermarkets were originally aimed at guilt-tripping consumers enjoying these samples to reciprocate and buy something in return. However, an added benefit of free samples is that it provides these consumers an opportunity to experience the product and thus increase the likelihood of purchase. Some studies have found the conversion rate from free samples to be as high as 25 – 30 percent.

A successful execution of a brand activation campaign depends on three factors – firstly, understanding the trigger factors for your consumer, the competition landscape and identifying the right KPIs.

Trigger factors are essentially elements that will get the consumer ‘wake up’ and notice your campaign. When Tribord, a company that makes watersports equipments, wanted to promote their floatation jacket, they went around offering unsuspecting folks on the harbor with sea water rebranded as a drink. Tribord’s campaign involved reminding customers about drowning and tasting sea water was a vital “trigger” that helped Tribord market their product.

While devising a trigger for your campaign is important, it is also equally important to make sure that the trigger is unique enough to be noticed among all the marketing clutter that a consumer is exposed to. Analyze the competition landscape to figure out the various marketing campaigns carried out by your competition. At the same time, make a note of all the brands (even if they are not a competitor) who are likely to be using the same experience or trigger. Charting out this landscape is vital in narrowing down a trigger that works.

Once the trigger has been identified and the campaign mapped out, it is important to finalize the KPIs that you will be measuring to benchmark the success of the campaign. A free sample campaign, for instance, should not only measure the sale conversions on the day of the campaign, but also track the long-term loyalty that such campaigns bring to your store.

Brand activation campaigns are a great way to connect with your audience and build loyalty. While executing a successful campaign might mean a lot of trial and error, it is also highly rewarding from an ROI perspective.