That’s why it’s imperative for small business owners to focus on the big picture beyond growing their business to the enterprise level in a matter of months. 

Instead, you’ll first need to consider things like your company culture, core values, internal processes, cash flow, and business model. 

In other words, you need to learn how to crawl before you take off on a Forrest Gump-style sprint. 

One of the best ways to learn how to scale your business successfully is to look at examples and advice from companies that have done it. 

That’s precisely what we’re here to do today, so you’ve come to the right place if you’re after a scaling strategy to enjoy sustainable growth. 

Read on to learn how you can scale your business to handle rapid growth with ease. 

The Difference Between Growing and Scaling a Business

Formally defined, growing your business is when you increase your revenue by adding new resources, such as capital, team members, or technology. 

The problem there is that a steadily growing business will require a ton of resources to sustain it, which becomes self-defeating at a certain point. 

For instance, say that your business is humming along at full capacity serving 10 clients. In an effort to grow and expand, you take on 10 new employees. 

Sounds great, right?

The only problem is that your team currently has all they can handle, so you won’t be able to cater to those new clients without hiring new employees (unless you want to overwork your staff and see a noticeable dip in performance and customer satisfaction). 

Hiring new staff means spending even more resources, which can create a vicious cycle of unsustainable growth. 

Scaling, on the other hand, is when revenue increases without a significant increase in resources. 

An example would be making the switch to cloud-based automation software, enabling you to take on new clients & earn more revenue without having to hire more staff or spend more resources. 

With this type of software on board, you will enjoy scalability and sustainable growth without drowning in debt. 

You can think of scaling as how you plan for your growth. A scaling strategy, then, is the fertile soil that you plant your business in to grow. 

Learning How a Company Scales 

Scaling your business is about staying true to your original vision while managing the impact growth has on your company. 

It’s about setting yourself up to handle new customer acquisitions en masse without blowing a ton of resources or overworking your team to get them. 

To scale a business, you need to establish systems and processes that will set you up for rapid growth – such as developing your brand identity, creating a customer avatar, setting up core values, and optimizing workflows. 

This stage is also where you must build your client experience and business plan to take your products and services to market. 

In essence, the scaling period is the most important time for your business if you want to make it in the long term. 

Do it right, and you’ll be set up for success, no matter how rapidly you intend to grow. Skip a step, or don’t take scaling seriously, and your business will never be able to grow beyond a certain point. 

When should you start the scaling process?

It’s never too early to start establishing a solid foundation for scaling up, so you can start planning whenever you’d like. When scaling your business, it’s best to wait until your business plan is in place and you have very few customer complaints. 

That’s a sign that what you’re doing is working, and with the proper foundation in place, you can begin selling your products and services on a larger scale. 

Successful Examples of Companies That Scaled Up 

Now that you know what scaling your business is and why it matters, it’s time to look at some examples of companies that have been there and done that. 

These are companies that took scaling their business seriously, and it paid off in a big way, so let’s learn what they did. 

Example #1: VanMoof 

Dutch company VanMoof sells state-of-the-art city bicycles that feature integrated alarms and intelligent motors. 

They’re an example of a small brand that was able to scale internationally due to their tenacity and smart planning. 

While they’re now a highly successful international bike company, they didn’t start out that way. Instead, VanMoof had very humble beginnings in the Netherlands, starting out with a simple bike model that had integrated lights and not much else. 

Their sales were high locally, but the founders were dreaming far bigger than that – they wanted to go international. 

So they went back to the drawing board and devised a plan to make their dream a reality. 

They completely retooled and revamped their bicycles and created a new business plan (a direct-to-consumer or D2C model) that made vital cost-cutting improvements on staffing and manufacturing through automation and other methods. 

With that, they had the capability to take their bicycles beyond the Netherlands, and they would do just that. By 2018, they had opened six new stores around the world, and 70% of their revenue was coming from international sales. To sweeten the pot, Rabo Investments partnered with them and provided a €12.5 M growth loan. 

Example #2: Zevo 

Zevo is a plug-in insect and pest remover that’s safe around children and pets. Once they developed their product, they began selling it online with successful results.

At that point, it was clear that they were onto something. They had a unique product that outdid the competition by being non-toxic and pet-friendly. 

The only things that needed to be added were a team and a budget large enough to scale the business. 

Their solution?

They heavily implemented D2C testing straight from the get-go, and the investment paid off. They A/B tested their ad copy, subject lines, calls to action, images, and other types of content with their audience and stuck with what worked the most. 

Zevo’s senior director attributes this testing to shaping their brand communications, which led the brand to strike deals with major retailers Target and Home Depot. 

Example #3: BE-CI

BE-CI is a building envelope consulting firm that was able to grow from $3 million to $11 million in revenue due to its scaling strategy. 

Once the company hit $3 million, the CEO wanted to start scaling up. 

The only issue was communication issues were holding the company back. That’s when the CEO hired a certified communication coach to work with his team. 

Besides that, BE-CI also defined its core values, built accountability by setting employee goals, and held regular ‘rhythm’ meetings with the team that included essential reading for everyone to align them on a central vision. 

The results?

The company was able to grow to nearly $11 million in revenue, and they’re now expanding their offices to the West. 

Tips for Scaling Your Business 

Your business can become just as successful as the examples above with the right strategy. 

That’s why we’ve put together these proven effective tips for scaling any type of business. As a result, you can start building the foundation to scale right here, right now. 

That way, whenever your genius business ideas cause you to start growing like wildfire, you’ll be prepared for it. 

Tip #1: Map out your milestones 

Any great strategy requires a roadmap for success, and scaling your business is no different. 

To start, you’ll want to identify key milestones along the way toward your ultimate goal, which is scaling up. 

First, define where it is you want to be, or in other words, how high you want to scale. Do you want to grow to become an enterprise-level company, or are you content with being a smaller business?

Once you’ve got a goal in mind, start by identifying when your business will completely run out of cash. 

From there, define the milestones you need to hit to ensure that doesn’t happen, complete with a timeline. That will help you keep your eye on the prize without going over budget, which is essential for scaling a business. 

Tip #2: Optimize your products & services to perfection 

You won’t be able to scale up if you don’t already have valuable products and services that your customers need. 

As such, you should strive to perfect your products and services before thinking about scaling your operations. That means taking plenty of time to work out kinks, fix bugs, and ensure the quality of your products. 

Otherwise, these issues will only become more severe as you grow. 

The early days of your business are when you should focus on perfecting what you do by improving your offerings, listening to customer feedback, and finding potential issues. 

All too often, entrepreneurs want to grow like crazy before they do anything else, which is usually a huge mistake. 

If you take the time to perfect what you do early on, scaling your business will become a breeze as you’ll have already fixed most growth issues that companies run into as they expand. 

With airtight products and services, there’ll also be plenty of demand for what you do, so it won’t be hard to reach new customers. Are you eager to scale up your small business so you can start competing with the big dogs in your field?

If so, you’ll first need to realize the difference between scaling a business and growing a business. 

Early on, many young startups & entrepreneurs become obsessed with business growth, but this can lead them to grow beyond their means, which can bring their performance to a screeching halt once they really start to gain momentum. 

Properly scaling your bu

Tip #3: Construct your dream team 

Another mistake startups make they want to grow before establishing a team that can handle the increased demand. 

A gigantic aspect of scaling your business is forming a winning and sustainable team of managers, supervisors, and base-level employees. 

Yet, your in-house staff only comprises one part of your team. 

You’ll also need to develop positive and long-lasting relationships with suppliers and form partnerships with outside organizations to scale successfully. 

Tip #4: Create a customer avatar 

You need to understand your target audience intimately if you want to scale your business with any degree of success. 

The best way to do so is to create a customer avatar that represents your niche audience’s wants, needs, and desires. 

How do you do that?

You do so by conducting audience research and then creating an actual living, breathing persona. Your customer avatar should have a name, address, job, relationships, spending habits, hobbies, and more. 

That will help you understand what types of content and new products your audience wants to see the most, which will help you scale your business. 

Beyond that, you can use your customer avatar to build your sales funnel in a buyer-centric way. Instead of focusing your sales funnel on your needs as a business, focus on your customer’s typical behavior instead. 

For instance, you may discover that your audience prefers discovery calls over filling out lengthy online forms. 

Tip #5: Develop Your Story and Brand 

To be able to scale and find success, your company needs a strong brand identity. 

That means clearly identifying what it is you offer, which problems you solve, and how you’ll improve customers’ lives through your products and services. 

Standard brand-building techniques include SEO & content marketing, social media advertising, and influencer marketing. 

If your business has a clearly defined brand identity early on, it will make scaling your business that much easier. 

Final Thoughts: Scale Your Business 

Growing your business is fantastic, but it can’t happen without first establishing a foundation to scale. 

That way, your team will be able to meet the increasing demands of taking on more clients and projects. 

Automation software, SaaS (software-as-a-service), partnerships, and brand-building are all candid ways to set yourself up to scale. 

Do you need some outside help with scaling your business?

If so, don’t wait to check out our white-label marketing services at The HOTH, as we’ll equip you with everything you need to scale successfully. Our digital marketing gurus are always available for consulting, so feel free to book a call today.      

The post How to Scale Your Business (Advice From People Who’ve Grown and Succeeded) appeared first on The HOTH.

Setting up a digital marketing agency that sells SEO services takes a ton of time, effort, and money.

Yet, once your agency is up and running, you face the additional challenge of building a robust client base – which means you need to have an airtight system for lead generation. 

There’s a significant reason why the salesmen of the famous movie/play Glengarry Glen Ross place so much stock on obtaining high-quality leads. 

Why is that?

It’s because, without qualified leads, it’s next to impossible for companies to achieve consistent, sustainable growth. 

For the salespeople in the movie, the premium leads are like golden tickets for snagging potential top-tier clients – which means big-time commissions for them and the chance at winning a new car. 

For SEO agencies, qualified leads are just as crucial, albeit for the growth of your company & client base, instead of scoring a brand-new Cadillac Eldorado. 

In fact, 95% of marketers claim that lead generation is their #1 goal, with 53% allocating half of their marketing budget to it. 

However, to find new leads on a consistent basis, you’ll need a lead generation strategy, which is what we’re going to provide you with today.

Learning how to generate qualified leads & potential customers that transform into new clients is an art every SEO agency needs to learn how to master if they want to find continued success in the future – so read on to learn how. 

What are SEO Leads?

An SEO lead is an individual or a business that’s shown interest in your SEO services. It may be that they need help building backlinks, making technical SEO adjustments, or they might need a fully managed SEO campaign. 

Their needs will vary, as the SEO industry is vast. 

Inside the umbrella term search engine optimization, there are many different specialties, including:

• Law firm SEO 
• eCommerce SEO 
• B2B SEO 
• CBD SEO 
• B2C SEO 
• Retail SEO
• Real estate SEO
• Healthcare SEO 

And the list goes on and on. For every type of industry or business, there’s an SEO specialty that goes along with it. 

Due to how inclusive the term SEO is, it can be challenging to source the right kind of leads for the services you provide. 

That’s why there’s great benefit in getting highly specific with the types of SEO services you provide. 

Many new SEO agencies make the mistake of going too broad with their approach. They go for the jack-of-all-trades method, where they try to provide every SEO service under the sun for every type of business. 

Keyword research, link-building, on-page & off-page SEO, they offer it all to anyone interested in doing business with them. 

The results?

They wind up not finding very many clients at all due to how all-encompassing & vague their services are. 

That leads us to the first rule of thumb with SEO leads; the more specific you can get with your services, the better. That’s because the more well-defined your services are, the easier it will be to find clients in need of what you provide. 

Selecting a Niche Focus for Your SEO Services

The first step in learning how to generate SEO leads consistently is to give your agency a concise focus for your services. 

It’s crucial to cater to your talents here, so think about what you do best. 

Does your team always knock it out of the park when acquiring backlinks for clients? Then you should consider making that your primary focus. 

If keyword research is your forte, you can make a considerable living selling that service to agencies & companies. 

Or maybe content marketing is what earns you the most accolades. No matter the service, it’s imperative to pinpoint your strongest areas and then focus on them the most. 

The point is to make what you provide as specific as possible, as that will make generating leads easier down the line. 

Besides identifying the services you excel at, you should also choose a niche for your SEO agency. 

The idea is to carve out a corner of the SEO market for yourself, where you can clearly define what it is you do and why you outshine the competition. 

As stated above, there’s a version of SEO for just about every type of business out there, so you should choose one to focus on. 

Instead of being the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none SEO agency, you can become the healthcare SEO agency specializing in premium keyword research & link-building. 

See the difference?

The second agency has a far clearer idea of what they do, and they seem more convincing and experienced as a result. 

How Do You Find SEO Leads?

Now that you know why it’s essential to have a niche focus, how do you start generating SEO leads?

There are many methods for acquiring leads, including using lead generation tools, referrals, Google ads, and inbound & outbound marketing techniques. 

Yet, finding SEO leads is only half the battle. 

Once you have an extensive list of qualified leads, then the challenge becomes contacting them, convincing them to use your services, and then signing a contract. 

For now, let’s focus on the top ways to find SEO leads so you can work on building a list of prospects. 

Inbound & Outbound Marketing Tactics for SEO Lead Generation 

When it comes to marketing strategies, there are two primary types of techniques – inbound and outbound. 

What are those?

Inbound marketing refers to tactics that bring your customers to you instead of seeking them out. Examples include helpful blog posts and videos that solve user pain points and answer common questions. 

Users will directly seek out this type of content to educate themselves or solve a problem, which is why they’re so effective. With a concise CTA (call to action) at the end of the piece of content, you can convince readers to become customers. 

You can also use inbound content to generate leads via acquiring email addresses. You can use a lead magnet, which is a free piece of content you give users in exchange for their contact information. 

Lead magnets can be PDFs, videos, eBooks, and other types of content. The only rule of thumb is they have to provide significant value to your audience. 

Outbound marketing refers to your efforts to bring your brand to customers, which means using things like PPC ads, YouTube ads, and manual outreach via social media. 

While outbound techniques can sometimes be viewed as obstructive by users, they can be just as effective at generating leads and sales as inbound content. Outbound techniques are also best for discovering new leads outside of your current base of SEO clients. 

It’s best to use a combination of inbound & outbound techniques to uncover the most SEO leads. 

Inbound: listing your website in digital agency directories

We’ll start with the inbound technique of listing your website in essential SEO directories. 

What are those?

A digital agency directory is a website containing a list of marketing agencies with varying specialties. 

These directories are perfect for generating SEO leads because they attract individuals, businesses, and web admins that are actively looking for marketing partners & agencies. 

Here are a few examples of digital agency directories:

• HubSpot 
• Marketo 
• Digital Agency Network 
• Clutch 
• Google Partners 

Some of these examples, such as Google Partners, are completely free for any agency wanting to get listed on the directory. 

Other options, like Marketo, require you to be an existing member of their platform to get listed in their directories.

In addition to digital marketing agency directories, you can also list your SEO agency on traditional directories like Yelp, Craigslist, and Yellow Pages to further expand your reach and online visibility. 

These directories are ‘catch-all’ options that provide listings for many different types of businesses, but they still get millions of hits each day, so listing your agency can be worth your while. 

Outbound: finding websites in desperate need of your SEO services 

Switching to outbound tactics for a moment, there’s no reason why you can’t actively seek out web pages that desperately need your services. 

For instance, if your SEO business involves doing stellar keyword research for healthcare agencies, you could look for physician’s websites struggling to rank on page one of the SERPs due to their poor use of keywords. 

How do you find these types of websites?

The easiest way is to do what nobody ever thinks to do – venture beyond the first page of Google results. 

Dive deep into the SERPs, going to page 10 or so, which is an SEO dead zone. Any healthcare website ranking on this page is definitely in need of your help, so don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Once you’ve found a few promising leads, do some outreach and get in touch with the web admins. Let them know about a few ways to improve their website to prove you know you’re stuff and to intrigue them to learn more. 

How to handle the outreach

Here’s an example of an outreach email you could send to a web admin in need of your outstanding keyword research:

Dear Prospect,

I noticed your website during my research and noticed that despite your excellent design, talented staff, and top-notch services, you’re ranking on page 10 of Google. 

My SEO agency specializes in keyword research, where we target specific search queries and optimize our client’s content for them to rank higher. We’ve identified many keywords that we could target and increase your rankings by a significant margin (think page one of Google, generating tons of organic traffic, leads, and sales). 

If you’re interested in what we do, please don’t hesitate to get in touch for a call. 

Thanks, 

SEO expert 

Just like that, you’ve made a convincing case for the prospect to at least hear you out on your offer. To increase your chances of landing a client even further, you can link to your case studies and testimonials to provide proof of your effectiveness. 

Inbound: creating high-quality content to attract prospects to your website

A classic inbound technique is to create useful content (blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc.) to attract lots of website visitors that are interested in what you do. 

This will help you generate qualified leads for your services. 

The best part?

While many outbound techniques are unsustainable in the long run (such as spending money and resources on PPC ads), content marketing will continuously generate leads for you. 

Once you publish a blog, video, or infographic, it will remain there indefinitely, continuing to attract leads for you well into the future without requiring further investment. 

Something as simple as a well-written blog article can generate leads for you for months and years down the line. 

Yet, for your content to have the desired impact, it needs to be relevant and valuable to your target audience. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources creating content. 

That means you’ll need to do some research to uncover which types of content your audience values the most. Beyond that, you’ll need to learn their pain points, problems, wants, desires, and needs. 

To do so, take to relevant social media groups and forums related to your niche audience, and listen to what they have to say. You can also use keyword research tools (like our free keyword planner from The HOTH) to see which keywords are trending and gaining the most traction – as they can give you content ideas. 

For example, if you notice lots of users searching for the keyword ‘back pain remedies,’ you can write a blog post about the most effective ways to relieve back pain. 

Content marketing ideas for generating SEO leads 

There are many different types of content you can use to generate leads and even boost your sales. 

Blogs are extremely popular for content marketing and SEO, primarily due to how easy they are to produce and how effective they can be at generating traffic, leads, and sales. You can choose to write blogs yourself, or you can seek the help of freelancers to knock out the writing for you. 

If you want your blog posts to actively generate leads for you, it’s crucial to include CTAs and lead magnets in them. 

Videos are another prevalent form of content that can generate leads for you, but they’re a bit more time-consuming and expensive to produce than blogs. 

Yet, video content is the way of the future, as video content is expected to account for 82.5% of all web traffic, which will make it the #1 type of content online. So if you aren’t already producing video content, now is the time to start. 

If your budget is limited, you can produce inexpensive, high-quality videos by shooting on a smartphone and using basic video editing software. To generate SEO leads with your videos, go over the top reasons why you provide the best SEO services in your niche. 

You can also create videos featuring powerful customer testimonials and case studies to encourage your prospects to give you a call or, at the very least, leave their contact information. 

Podcasts and webinars are other types of content that are effective at generating leads. For podcasts, do your best to interview lots of relevant guests from the digital marketing and SEO industry. For webinars, let your attendees know how your SEO services can transform their business for the better. 

Inbound: using word of mouth and referrals 

Referrals are one of the most powerful ways to acquire SEO leads and qualified new customers. 

Why is that?

It’s because these leads come from your existing customer base, who can prove to your prospects that you do amazing work that provides real results. 

Nothing holds as much merit as a word-of-mouth referral from a close friend or colleague, which is why you should definitely pay attention to referrals. 

In fact, referrals are so powerful that there are entire businesses (including SEO companies) that thrive off referrals and word-of-mouth hype as their primary marketing strategies. 

How do you get your clients to refer others to you?

The best and most reliable way to do so is to simply provide excellent services for your clients. That alone is enough to get your clients singing your praises to their friends, family, and coworkers.

From there, you can also let your clients know that you’re looking for referrals and that you’d appreciate any they can provide. 

To sweeten the pot for your clients, you can offer discounts or special rewards for referrals. You can see this tactic at work with all sorts of companies, such as getting $50 for referring others to your internet provider. 

Your clients have the incentive of the reward you provide for the referral, and you benefit by gaining a new, qualified client. 

Outbound: outreach using social media marketing 

Social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn are goldmines for lead generation if you know where to look. 

In particular, you should take to groups related to the SEO services you provide and then become highly active within them. 

If you sell healthcare SEO services, then joining health & wellness groups on Facebook is the way to go. You can also frequent medical forums where physicians and nurses post about their jobs. 

Yet, you won’t be able to go for the hard sell approach here, as many social media groups prevent users from outright plugging their products and services. 

Instead of creating posts advertising your services, engage with the users in the group instead. Read their posts, and chime in with some relevant advice. If you can, bring up times that you’ve solved similar problems for your clients with your SEO services. 

By doing this, you’ll build trust within the group, and they’ll appreciate your insights. 

That’s a far better approach than pitching your services without any context, as that will come off as tacky and disingenuous. 

After you’ve engaged with the group for a while, members may begin messaging you for help with their SEO-related issues or even actively seek out your services. 

Outbound: attending relevant webinars and SEO online meetups 

This is a proven effective tactic that many SEO agencies fall back on when they need leads. 

It’s a social technique that involves chatting with attendees and seeing if they require your services. 

To find the most success, you should come up with several different pitches and then use them accordingly. 

Why is that?

It’s because there will be a wide variety of attendees with different needs at each meetup. 

For instance, if you’re speaking with a prospect that’s already very familiar with how SEO works, an in-depth explanation of search engine optimization isn’t necessary and will likely lose their interest. A better pitch for this type of client is to be succinct and get straight to the point. 

Conversely, if you’re speaking to a potential client that has no clue what SEO is, a more in-depth explanation is perfectly acceptable and even necessary. 

That’s why it’s crucial to adapt your pitch to each client, as it will help you acquire as many SEO leads as possible while attending meetups. 

Inbound: generating leads with your website 

Last but not least, you can transform your website into a powerful lead-generation tool with the right tweaks. 

This is where it pays off to have invested in your own website’s SEO. 

If you’re ranking in top spots for keywords like ‘healthcare SEO agencies near me,’ you can turn the traffic you generate into viable leads with the right types of landing pages. 

For the service pages users land on, don’t just offer your services. 

Instead, use a lead generator like a free tool to use in exchange for the user’s email address. You could offer an SEO audit, keyword research, or other types of freebies like PDFs or eBooks. 

These are useful because not every visitor to your website will be ready to enlist your services. 

However, that doesn’t mean that they won’t need your SEO services eventually. 

If you’re able to salvage their email address, you can send them follow-up content and offers. That way, whenever the time comes that they do need healthcare SEO services, your agency will be the first one that comes to mind. 

They already know you, and they regularly receive emails containing helpful and relevant content. As a result, going with your agency will be a no-brainer. That’s why you should always include a lead generator on your landing pages. 

Qualifying SEO Leads 

Now that you have a long list of SEO leads, it’s time to whittle it down to only the most qualified prospects. 

In particular, you need to pay close attention to the company’s structure and any key stakeholders that will be involved in the SEO process. 

You should also examine their online presence, including their current performance on search engines. This will help you not only determine if they’re a qualified prospect, but it will also help you start forming your SEO strategy for their website. 

Include a qualifying form on your website or through email 

A no-nonsense way to qualify your leads is to include an inquiry form on your website or through email. 

This form should contain all the important information you need to determine a qualified lead from an unqualified one. 

While it’s entirely up to you to create this form, here are some suggestions for what it should include:

• What types of SEO services do they want or need
• Their current budget level and how much they’re willing to allocate toward SEO
• When they want to get started 

If they provide satisfactory answers to all three questions, that’s a great sign that they’ll make a valuable client for your agency. 

If the answers aren’t satisfactory, you can ask them to sign up for your newsletter instead of booking a consulting call. That way, if they ever do become a qualified client, they’ll already be in your database, and they’ll know about your services. 

Contacting Your Qualified SEO Leads 

Once you’ve separated the wheat from the chaff in terms of qualified leads, it’s time to get in touch and start to seal the deal. 

Whether you choose to contact your prospects by email or over the phone, here are some pointers you won’t want to forget to include.

Keep things concise 

You’re not here to talk your prospect’s ear off or to send them an email the size of an eBook. Instead, include just enough to hook them and generate interest in your services. 

In other words, you don’t need to harp on and on about the benefits of working with your agency, especially at this stage. 

If you’re typing an email, the sweet spot is to keep it between 50 to 125 words to heighten the chances of receiving a response. 

Make it effortless for clients to take the next step 

Before you pick up the phone or type a word in an email to your client, first think about what you want them to do. 

Do you want them to schedule a consulting call, or would you prefer a face-to-face meeting?

Either way, make what you want explicitly clear in your call or email. If you want them to schedule a meeting with you, make that apparent by saying something along the lines of:

We’d love to meet with you to discuss our SEO services in more detail. Can you please provide a few dates when you’re available?

Just as with CTAs for blog posts, you can’t expect prospects to read your mind when it comes to what you want them to do, so be clear and direct about it. 

Concluding Thoughts: SEO Leads 

If you want your SEO agency to grow and expand in the future, then you need a way to generate a consistent pipeline of leads. 

Referrals, creating content, attending meetups, and finding existing websites in need of your services are all great ways to acquire SEO leads. 

Beyond that, you need to carefully qualify and contact your leads to heighten the chances of them converting into clients. 

Do you need help obtaining leads for your business?

Then don’t wait to check out our white-label digital marketing services at The HOTH. Our team comprises link-building, SEO, and digital marketing experts, so don’t wait to book a call today to revolutionize the way you approach your marketing.

The post How to Get New SEO Leads Without Spending a Ton of Time or Resources appeared first on The HOTH.

Is communication between your team effortless, or do you struggle to get everyone on the same page? Do you have a reliable system for assigning and completing tasks, or are you constantly switching back and forth between email threads and messaging apps?

If you relate more to the second part of each question – that’s a sign that your marketing agency isn’t equipped with the right tools. 

Marketing campaigns involve many moving parts, such as brand-building, content marketing, social media, and CRO (conversion rate optimization), among others. 

Digital marketing tools like CRMs, project management software, and messengers like Slack can help you avoid drowning in work. Access to crucial analytics and metrics is also necessary if you want to find any sort of repeatable success with your marketing efforts. 

There are many types of marketing software, so it can be a bit confusing to know which programs you need and can do without. 

That’s why we’ve put together this extensive guide containing essential tools for marketing agencies in the following categories:

• Analytics Tools 
• SEO Tools 
• Team Collaboration & Project Management Tools 
• Website Creation Tools 

By the end of the list, you’ll know about a ton of helpful marketing agency tools you can use to increase your productivity, communication, SEO, and revenue in 2023. 

Why Digital Marketing Agencies Need the Right Tools 

You may wonder why you need to invest in many expensive platforms, programs, and applications. 

After all, you’ll save lots of money by not using these tools, so why should you bother?

Let’s consider a quick example to illustrate why marketing tools are so essential. Say that you start an SEO campaign with the goal of ranking in the top spot for a certain keyword on Google. 

For 6 months, you plug away creating content, auditing your site, making technical tweaks, and building backlinks. However, you don’t check any analytics during this time, which means you’re basically shooting in the dark. 

Sure enough, when you finally do check your rankings, you discover that Google hasn’t even indexed your site, meaning you’re MIA from the SERPs (search engine results pages). 

As a result, all the time, effort, and money you spent during the last 6 months were for nothing. 

This scenario could have been avoided by using the proper tools to monitor, analyze, and tweak your strategy (not to mention that Google Search Console would have let you know if your site was indexed or not in about 5 seconds, but more on that in a bit). 

Besides analyzing your performance, you can also use tools to improve your productivity through marketing automation software drastically. 

Collaboration tools such as Asana and Trello make knocking out projects a breeze, and tools like WordPress allow you to design gorgeous web pages without having to write a single line of code. That’s why you need to equip your agency with the proper tools if you want to grow your business and scale at the same time. 

Top Analytics Tools 

To learn what works and what doesn’t, you need a way to pour through your data and make sense of it.

You need to make sense of website visitor behavior and a way to judge how you’re doing in relation to your competitors. 

That’s why analytics tools are an absolute must for any marketing agency that wants to find success. Without further ado, here are our picks for the best analytics tools available in 2023. 

Google Analytics 

If you want to gain in-depth insights into your web visitors’ behavior, Google Analytics (GA) is a must-have reporting tool. 

The best part?

It’s completely free, so implementing it won’t cost your marketing agency a dime. 

Whether you’re checking to see how long visitors spend on each page or how well your landing pages are converting, Google Analytics is your one-stop shop for it all. 

Another plus is that the website data comes straight from Google, so it’s far more accurate than marketing platforms that rely on page tags. 

While GA has many features, some of its most helpful reports for marketers and SEOs include the following:

• Customer Behavior Report. Running this report will reveal your target audience’s trends & spending habits – which is great for personalizing content and predicting customer value.
• Browser Report. This one is a necessity for eCommerce businesses, as it will let you know where users are finding your site, which devices they use, and which browsers/devices are getting the most conversions. 
• Keyword Performance Report. SEOs need to pay special attention to this report, as it tells you which queries are bringing in the most traffic, leads, and conversions – which will guide your keyword research efforts going forward. 

One downside to GA is that the program is a bit complicated due to its extensive features, so it will take a considerable time investment to learn all the ins and outs. Still, you can’t beat free, and GA has invaluable data – so it’s worth the learning curve. 

Google Tag Manager 

In order to track a metric, such as the conversion rate of a web page, you need to set up a tag for it. 

What’s a tag?

Broadly defined, a website tag is a tool used to gather data or add new functionalities to a website. Tags often take the form of a snippet of Javascript, a transparent image, or a small pixel that you install onto your web pages (some, not all). 

More often than not, tags are used to track user behavior and gather data. 

For instance, you need to install a conversion tag in the code to track how many conversions a landing page gets. 

Google Analytics, remarketing, conversion tracking, Google Ads, and other digital marketing tools require the use of tags, which is why Google Tag Manager is such a useful tool. 

It allows you to easily manage and update all your website tags in one location. 

You can also come up with your own ways to track user activity using tags, as the tags are highly customizable, so you’ll be able to make full use of your creativity. 

Hotjar 

Sometimes it’s nice to have more than static metrics to analyze website user behavior – and that’s where Hotjar comes into the picture. 

What does it do differently?

Hotjar lets you view videos of your user sessions, making it effortless to identify their pain points and the content they engage with the most. 

All user sessions on Hotjar are available for playback and review, granting you invaluable insights into common user behaviors, activities, and their overall impression of your website. 

This tool is particularly useful for graphic design UX designers, as viewing videos of user sessions can help them perfect your user experience, which will boost your dwell time, lower your bounce rate, and increase conversions.

Funnelytics 

Every aspect of Funnelytics is designed to bolster the effectiveness of your sales funnel, as you’ll be able to take a step back and see the big picture with its visualization tools. 

By visualizing your sales funnel in an easy-to-digest format, you’ll be able to identify gaps in your marketing strategy. Many inbound marketing agencies don’t utilize such a tool, so you’ll be able to push ahead of your competitors by optimizing your funnel. 

Other features include the ability to perform A/B testing on your marketing campaigns, as well as the ability to plan, build, & optimize a new sales funnel from scratch with its forever-mapping tool. 

Funnelytics also has:

• Heat mapping to see which areas of a web page see the most action 
• Enhanced security & data protection 
• ROI reports seeing how effectively your funnel is working 
• An extensive vault of sales funnel templates 

If you’ve been having trouble with the conversion rates of your landing pages, Funnelytics may be the tool you need to raise them again. 

Helpful CRO Tools 

Next, let’s take a look at some tools that will help you optimize your conversion rates. CRO is a necessity for any marketing campaign, especially SEO and content marketing. 

Many beginner agencies make the mistake of focusing entirely on SEO and neglecting CRO, which generates lots of traffic but doesn’t lead to an increase in revenue. 

That’s why you’ll need to incorporate CRO techniques & tools into your marketing strategy to find success with any type of campaign. 

Designing a website to convert means providing an intuitive, fast, and pleasant user experience, engaging and persuasive content, and a convincing CTA to encourage the desired action. Here are the top tools available to help you boost your conversion rates. 

HOTH Conversion Rate Calculator 

You won’t be able to improve your conversion rates if you don’t know what they are, so don’t be shy about using our free Conversion Rate Calculator from The HOTH. 

To use it, you only need to know two simple metrics; how many website visitors you have and how many orders they placed. Once you plug those numbers in, you’ll get to see your conversion rate. 

How do you know if you have a reasonable conversion rate?

As a rule of thumb, rates between 2 – 5% are considered ‘good,’ and anything above that is outstanding. 

So if your conversion rate is below 2% (or if you’d like to get it above 5%), you’ll have some work to do. 

Google Optimize 

This offering from Google is free for medium to small-sized businesses, and it’s an excellent CRO tool. 

With it, your marketing team can test their hypothesis and assumptions on what will increase conversion rates. There are tools to run split and A/B tests, as well as to personalize user experiences. 

Google Optimize boasts many integrations with other Google tools, such as Google Analytics and Google Ads, so you’ll be able to dive deep into your user data to find the most valuable insights. 

While its free version contains plenty of features for smaller companies, enterprise-level businesses will benefit from opting for Optimize 360, its paid version. 

Optimizely 

A bit of a pricier option, Optimizely boasts one of the best user interfaces for split-testing software. It has a myriad of features for running experiments & A/B tests on your web pages and mobile apps. 

Optimizely is complex enough for technical users yet approachable enough for the casual business user to feel right at home. 

It’s definitely one of the most robust ways to carry out tests and experiments on your platforms, but the $36,000 annual price tag may deter some smaller companies. As a result, this tool is best for larger agencies that require complex experiments or A/B testing on a large scale. 

Convert 

This is another CRO platform that offers templates, experiments, and A/B tests, but it’s considerably less expensive than Optimizely. 

At $699 per month, Convert has an annual price tag of $8,388, which is far more reasonable for smaller companies than $36,000. 

Convert still has many in-depth features for multivariate tests and experiments, and the setup process is pretty straightforward. While the program can be a bit complex at times, they offer 24/7 live support from professionals who know the platform inside and out, and they’ll be able to answer any questions you may have if you become confused. 

Leading SEO Tools for Marketing Agencies 

In the current era, SEO is nearly impossible to avoid if you want to find success. 

68% of experiences begin with a search engine, even when the intent is local. 

That means even if you run a local mom-and-pop store, you’ll still need to have a presence on search engines if you want to stay competitive & grow your business. 

Yet, SEO is a marketing tactic that requires lots of monitoring, analyzing, and tweaking to do correctly. There’s no shortage of competition out there, so you’ll have plenty of websites working eagerly to dethrone you once you climb to the top of Google’s SERPs. 

In short, you’ll need an assortment of helpful tools to secure a top spot on Google (and other search engines) and hold onto it. Here’s a list of SEO tools that cover all the bases. 

Free Google Keyword Planner Tool 

SEO campaigns are only effective if you’re able to find the perfect keywords for your website. 

To do so, you need to conduct rigorous keyword research to locate keywords that are A) relevant to your target audience, B) get lots of search traffic, and C) don’t have much in the way of competition. 

How do you find these keywords?

A fantastic place to start is by using our free keyword planner tool from The HOTH. 

SEMRush’s massive database powers it, and it’s an excellent tool for compiling a large list of relevant keywords. 

Using the planner tool 

To use it, all you have to do is enter a keyword or phrase related to your industry, and you’ll get an extensive list of rankable keywords related to your search. 

For instance, if we enter ‘garden’ into the tool, we get a list of 50 real keywords that users are actively searching for, complete with detailed metrics for each, which include:

• Volume. The first metric is the keyword’s search volume, which is how many users are searching for that term each month. 
• CPC. This refers to cost-per-click for PPC campaigns, which is how much the keyword will cost (on average) each time a user clicks on an ad. 
• Comp. Another PPC metric, comp, refers to how competitive the ad placement is for a particular keyword. 
• Difficulty. Some keywords are easier to rank for than others, which is due to a lack of competition. As such, a keyword’s difficulty score represents how hard it will be to rank in one of the top spots for that keyword. 
• Search trend. A high search volume can be deceptive if the keyword is on a downward trend, which is why the search trend feature is useful. It’s a line graph that represents the interest in a keyword over time. If the line is trending up, the keyword is gaining momentum. If it’s going down, the keyword is starting to lose traction. 

Once you find a list of suitable keywords that have good search volume (although there is a case to be made for zero search volume keywords), a low difficulty, and are trending up in popularity – you can move on to the next step of your SEO strategy. 

SEMrush  

There’s a reason why legacy companies like Apple, Samsung, Forbes, and IBM choose SEMrush as their SEO tool of choice – it’s one of the best ways to increase your visibility online. 

The platform provides keyword research, tracks competitor strategies, runs SEO audits on your content, & looks for backlink opportunities all in one convenient location. 

Besides that, you can use SEMrush to manage your content marketing efforts, initiate PPC campaigns, and manage your social media presence. The platform also provides in-depth SEO metrics such as the following:

• Domain authority 
• Total organic search traffic
• Total paid search traffic
• Backlinks 
• Traffic distribution by geographic location 
• SERP features 
• A growth report 

These advanced metrics will help you effectively gauge the success of your SEO efforts as well as develop innovative new strategies. 

And we’ve got even better news: a special SEMrush offer, so you can try it for free and see for yourself how powerful this tool is. Just click here to get started. 

HOTH SEO Audit Tool 

Conducting a thorough audit of your existing content is an integral part of SEO, especially once you know which keywords you want to target. 

To discover the areas that you need to optimize the most, you can use our SEO Audit Tool. 

Once you enter your URL and the keywords you want to include, the tool will work its magic. You’ll get to see your overall SEO score (on a scale of 1 – 100), as well as how well you’ve used your keyword in your content. 

The tool will let you know if:

• You didn’t use your target keyword in your title tag 
• If your title tag doesn’t begin with your keyword 
• If your title tag/metadata has too many characters 

The audit tool also provides a thorough page analysis of your backlinks, outbound links, Page Trust score, and domain authority score. 

Last but not least, the Tasks section provides a checklist of integral action items for your SEO profile. These include:

• Improving site speed 
• Cutting down on page requests 
• Not overusing your target keyword (no more than 2 – 4 times, any more is overkill and may get flagged as spam) 
• Whether you have a link to a sitemap 

With all these insights, you’ll be able to properly optimize your existing content to increase its chances of ranking higher on Google and other search engines. 

Google Search Console 

If there’s one free tool from Google that every marketing agency should use, it would undoubtedly be Google Search Console (GSC). It allows webmasters to monitor their website’s search engine rankings, visibility on Google, and technical issues. 

GSC will even send you automated notifications in real time whenever they detect a technical problem with one of your web pages. 

This is a lifesaver for technical SEO, as your site won’t experience any issues for long without you knowing, which can help you avoid sudden, drastic drops in rankings (believe us, it happens). 

GSC is so valuable because it provides detailed information on how Google views your website. For instance, you can use GSC to quickly determine if Google was able to index your website or not.

If your website isn’t getting indexed, the most brilliant SEO & content marketing strategy in the world won’t amount to anything, which is why GSC is such an essential tool for marketers and SEOs. 

If you discover that Google hasn’t indexed your site, you can remedy that by uploading a copy of your sitemap to GSC. This is a good rule of thumb, even if you are indexed, as a sitemap will help Google’s crawlers better understand your site’s content. 

Free Backlink Profile Checker 

Link-building is an extremely important aspect of SEO, as high-authority backlinks will have a positive effect on your search rankings. 

Yet, building quality backlinks is a time-consuming and difficult process. 

The best way to give yourself an advantage in the link-building game is to check out and target backlinks from your competitors. It’s also necessary to have a way to check the number of dofollow backlinks that you have. 

Our free Backlink Profile Checker can perform both functions for you. It will provide the backlink profile of any URL you enter into it, whether it’s yours or not. 

This is valuable for confirming that your hard-earned backlinks are active and for analyzing your competitors’ backlinks. If you discover some high-authority backlinks that you want to target, you can try to outdo their content and snag the link for yourself – which is the skyscraper method. 

Team Collaboration & Project Management Tools 

For a marketing campaign to reach its desired outcome, you need to have perfectly optimized workflows and solid communication with your team members. 

Those tasks are surprisingly difficult without cloud-based, all-in-one project management tools. For instance, trying to assign and monitor tasks through traditional means can quickly turn into a chaotic mess. 

To check any project’s progress, you’ll have to sort through countless email threads, Slack messages, and Excel spreadsheets. As a result, you’ll spend quite a bit of your precious time just trying to stay organized. 

Here’s a list of the best project management tools on the market to help you save time and increase productivity. 

Asana 

Asana is one of the most popular project management platforms due to its extensive features yet intuitive and easy-to-use interface. 

Whether you’re keeping track of freelance writers or your in-house sales team, Asana can easily handle your needs. You can assign team members tasks that contain detailed instructions and attachments – complete with due dates and a built-in messaging system. 

Asana also has several different dashboard views for visualizing your workflows, such as:

• A calendar view 
• A list view 
• Kanban boards 
• Gantt charts 

With all these options, you have the freedom to organize your projects the way you want. If deadlines are the most pressing factor, you’ll benefit from the calendar view. If you’re more of a visual learner, the Gantt charts and Kanban boards will likely suit your fancy. 

Asana integrates with plenty of apps and platforms, including Salesforce, Hubspot, Canva, and Zapier – which allows for further integrations, like Mailchimp. 

Asana has a free version, which is perfect for startups, freelancers, and small businesses. 

Trello 

If you love the Kanban visual style and have simple project management needs, Trello is an excellent tool. 

Trello relies strictly on Kanban boards, and the free version is excellent for marketing agencies that do not want to spend money on another application. 

Yet, Trello’s main selling point is its ease of use. 

If you don’t feel like sitting through tutorials to learn a new program and want a simple, effective way to manage your tasks, Trello is the way to go. Its interface is so user-friendly that you’ll be able to jump in and start using it on day one. 

Website Creation Tools 

You can’t have a robust digital marketing strategy without a website of your own, which is why you’ll need a high-quality CMS (content management system). 

Social media posts and marketing are certainly effective, but they could never take the place of having an original website, so let’s take a look at the best website design tools. 

WordPress 

Want to start a blog or an eCommerce website to make money online?

If so, then you’ll benefit from trying out WordPress, especially if you don’t know any programming languages. 

WordPress is an open-source CMS that powers over 810 million websites worldwide. It’s a fairly complex program, so new users will have to take some time viewing video tutorials and FAQs. 

Yet, WordPress has top-tier security and support, including a community of experts ready to answer your questions. 

If you’re a web developer that does know how to write code, WordPress has a ton of advanced features you can use to customize your site the way you want. 

Squarespace 

Another popular CMS is Squarespace, which is a more user-friendly alternative to WordPress. 

If you don’t feel like viewing lengthy tutorials to learn how to design a simple blog, Squarespace is the way to go. 

Other perks include unlimited storage space and tons of beautiful templates and stock photos. SEO-wise, Squarespace offers meta descriptions and custom URLs for every web page you create, and Google Analytics is available for all its pricing plans. 

Final Thoughts: Top Tools for Marketing Agencies 

If you want to scale your marketing agency to take on more clients, you need to equip your team with the right tools to keep up with the growing demand. 

All the tools on this list are essentials for marketers, so don’t forget to include at least one tool from each category in your bag of tricks. 

Do you need help devising a winning digital marketing strategy for your agency?

Then you need to drop everything and check out our white-label marketing services at The HOTH. Our team consists of marketing gurus and SEO experts that are always available to chat, so don’t wait to book a consulting call today.  

The post Top Tools for Marketing Agencies (Updated for 2023) appeared first on The HOTH.

Recently, The HOTH has put the finishing touches on our integration with Service Provider Pro (SPP).

SPP makes ordering and delivering white label SEO products quicker and more efficient than ever.

The big perk of using SPP with The HOTH is once your customer purchases a service, the order will automatically shoot into The HOTH’s system for fulfillment. No more being a middleman!

The entire goal of SPP is to help SEO and digital marketing agencies improve their day-to-day from monotonous, repetitive tasks to spending that time actually growing their business!

This article will discuss how SPP works for resellers and the benefits of integrating your HOTH account with this system.

What Is Service Provider Pro?

SPP is an agency management tool that allows you to seamlessly integrate with and offer HOTH products to your clients. Additionally, it acts as a CRM, support desk, point of sale, and much more.

Entrepreneurs and agencies can subscribe to SPP on a monthly or annual basis.

Once inside, users have the ability to connect their SPP account to their HOTH account with only a couple clicks.

Through the SPP dashboard, agencies can create custom services, craft order forms to capture information, track orders, issue invoices, and generate reports.

What HOTH Services Are Available in SPP?

Our most popular SEO products are currently available in SPP:

• HOTH Guest Post (Domain Authority and Publisher Traffic)
• HOTH Blogger (Regular and Pro)
• HOTH Press
• HOTH Syndication

The same options and variants available inside The HOTH’s ordering system are available inside SPP. With guest posts, for example, users can switch the word count and domain authority.

We’re working hard at The HOTH to hook up more products so keep an eye on our SPP Page to monitor which products we’ve added.

The benefit to being fully “hooked up” means that when your customer purchases, the order shoots into The HOTH’s system automatically, and returns to your customer automatically when the order is complete.

No more wasting your time as the middleman copying and pasting order inputs!

The Other Benefits of SPP

We’ve touched on how SPP can save you time with submitting orders but what are the other benefits?

Using SPP makes it easier to scale up your business. After all, the way you manage 10 clients is completely different than the way you manage 100.

The SPP dashboard puts all of your valuable information in one spot. That means you can access your entire client list, track orders, check on payments, and much more.

Not only does this program give you direct access to best-selling HOTH products, but it helps you with client management.

Users can create multiple order forms, confirmation pages that send messages to a client’s email, a member’s area where clients can see the progress of their order, and intake forms.

If you have multiple employees the program makes it easier to coordinate your efforts. There’s also a section where clients can easily contact you with questions or concerns.

Ready To Grow Your Business?

We hope you’re excited about SPP. This software makes it easier than ever before to coordinate orders between your agency and The HOTH.

The days of manually inputting orders or going through pages of emails to provide updates or performance reports to your clients are gone! SPP keeps you and your team organized so you can start focusing on getting more clients.

Would you like to learn more? Visit The HOTH + Service Provider PRO to watch some video tutorials and read FAQs.

Click here if you’re ready to get started with SPP.

The post The Easiest Way To Resell HOTH Services: Service Provider Pro appeared first on The HOTH.

What if you could get there too, and actually enjoy the process?

The problem is that there are TONS of setbacks that will prevent you from getting there (believe me, we’ve had our fair share).

And no matter where you are now, eventually you will hit a wall.

There WILL be a time, or many times, when it feels like that wall is impossible to climb.

But there are a few secrets we learned that helped us soar right over it and get to where we wanted to go. I want to share those with you today.

Let me pull back the curtain for a moment and tell you our story.

Ready?

1. What To Do When Things Get Hard

We were lucky.

We got off the ground running with 0 funding. We started with smart principles of a lean startup mentality and learned along the way:

We tested ideas rapidly and cheaply before investing (Our first order came before we had a website, it was just a youtube video posted on a forum thread with a paypal link).

We had no office and worked from home (no office expenses).

We prioritized getting things done over perfection (We let the market tell us what they wanted and changed based on the feedback).

We focused on creating scalable system and we constantly tweaked and learned.

We wrote an article about it here – You can see what we were focusing on at the time.

The HOTH got up and going quickly, but growing wasn’t easy. (And if you’ve been in SEO for a while – you know it too!)

Soon after we started the HOTH in 2010, Google started releasing the biggest updates of all time with Panda and Penguin.

These constant updates sent the entire world of SEO into a frenzy every few months.

It was emotionally difficult to have a single outside entity have so much control over the perception of your business and your industry.

We survived through the updates with our hard work, but eventually we hit a wall – For about an entire year between 2013-2014 we plateaued.

Even though we had a successful business, it seemed like no matter what we did, we weren’t growing. Our sales kept bouncing up and down in an endless marathon of monotony.

And that was maybe the most dangerous situation to be in, stagnation.

You see, the plateau is The ENEMY.

It’s Groundhog’s Day every day. Waking up to more of the same until you can finally break the spell. And if you keep living the same every day – you’ll eventually go crazy.

What you want is GROWTH. Growth means life.

One snowy day in the 2013-2014 winter, that stagnation finally got to me. I remember it so clearly. I was working on my computer and then all of a sudden I couldn’t work any more. My fingers froze and it was hard to breathe. I remember going to lay on the couch and it felt like someone was pressing on my chest.

That anxiety ridden moment in my Chicago apartment is when I had a hard truth epiphany.

We weren’t where we wanted to be, and the situation was not the problem.

Our stagnation wasn’t because of the market, or the products, or anything else:

The problem was me.

This shock of stagnation created a series of events in my personal life which heavily influenced how I manage my day. In 2014, I moved out of the country to never see snow again and drastically shifted my mentality about how I saw the world and how it operates.

It was painful at first to admit how much I didn’t know. I had read so many books about startups, marketing, and could talk about it for days but in the real world, I couldn’t get over this hump.

Here’s what I learned: The reality is your business success is a reflection of your personal philosophy – conscious or unconscious.

There were lots of easy scapegoats for excuses: Google updates, the changing market, SEO being hard, not having a marketing budget, etc etc.

The easy way out is to think that our problems are situational – You can’t get what you want because of the situation that you’re in. But the reality is that the only thing that’s limiting your ability to create what you want is YOU.

You must take 100% responsibility for everything.

Even though it can be hard to admit your faults and explicitly examine your weaknesses, it’s essential for growth… and it’s empowering.

This quote from Jim Rohn sums it up perfectly:

After you understand your weaknesses, you focus on your strengths and creatively solve for all the weaknesses vs trying to mask them.

That takes true confidence – being able to be vulnerable and admit what you’re not good at. But when you can do that, you can grow by leaps and bounds.

Objective self-awareness is the hard-to-swallow antidote that will help you overcome your limitations.

By focusing on personal growth, you will create ideas about how you see the world, what you really want, and how to actually get there.

This is going to be very important because this understanding of how you see the world will heavily influence how your company will run. Pieces of you will permeate throughout the organization – good or bad.

If you are disorganized, your business will be disorganized.
If you have limiting beliefs, your business will be limited.
If you are lazy, your business will be lazy.

Conversely:

If you take responsibility for everything, you will find your solutions.
If you dream bigger, you can create the path.
If you focus on productivity, you can make it happen.

Realize the biggest limiting factor in getting to where you want to go is not your situation, it is YOU.  Take the responsibility, lose your ego, and find what you need to grow.  Through overcoming your pain will come your strength. This is the domino that will start the chain reaction that will be your success.

2. Create The Growth Vehicle: Use Your Personal Growth Experience To Develop The Culture

After the stagnation, we needed a massive change, and a massive goal.

At the time we were doing about $100k / month and we set a goal 5X the business to $500k a month.

That was a bit scary, since we hadn’t really officially set goals like that previously. Even more difficult was that I didn’t really know what it would take to get there.

We had to change a lot, but the most important thing that had to change was how WE operated.

Anything that works well and consistently is a system.

As an operations guy, I’m always looking to create systems. These can come in many forms – processes for creating products, marketing, services, training docs, SOPs, hiring protocols etc.

This is where most businesses go wrong and why some of the top business books of all time are essentially operations books that teach well-intentioned business owners to create systems.

But the MOST important and often overlooked system that needs created is your Culture system.

WARNING: I know that last sentence might stop you in your tracks as pictures start racing to your mind when you hear about “culture”: hippy business books, corporate jargon, nonsense vernacular like “synergy” etc. Hear me out on this one, I’m going to show you some raw and vital tactics on how to drastically increase the numbers in your bank account.

We have a document called The HOTH Culture Doc. It defines our purpose and dictates how we, the people of The HOTH, operate by working together as a company.

It’s an evolving document that became vital especially after we started to struggle – and that’s exactly what it’s for:

The Culture Doc should allow us to solve any problem that we run into.

In reality it’s just a simple Google Doc that evolves over time. Every person that gets hired goes through it in their on-boarding and has access to it all the time.

The secret about The Culture Doc, while it’s masked as a company operations document, is that it’s really a personal development and growth philosophy. It gives purpose to waking up in the morning and shows how we should act during the day.

In this case, to get to that 500k, we had to redefine and follow our own Culture Doc. This was the practical application of the core beliefs that we have.

To create your own, you need to clarify YOUR PURPOSE, and use your ideas about how the world works (from your growth experiences) to create a set of principles that will guide your company.

As defined by our doc: Our #1 purpose is to help as many people as possible achieve success with SEO, and our number #2 purpose is to have a blast while doing it.

By really defining that, we knew what we had to up our game.

If we wanted to serve more people, we had to reach more people. We drastically scaled our marketing, we released new products to broaden our scope, we brought on some amazing talent to get us to the next level and we went to WORK.

The main reason we were able to make it through this period and hit that goal was because we lazer-focused on what our mission was and HOW we were going to get there. This all came from what we wrote in our culture doc.

The second step is to use your experiences, your personal revelations, your own ideas about how the world works to create your own Culture Doc. The Doc will give structure to dealing with and crushing the inevitable problems your company will face and become the operating manual for your growth vehicle.

3. Coming Full Circle: Find The Hidden Rockstars And Give Them The Opportunity Become Their Best Selves

In 2016, we hit the goal of $500k a month and then set out to do something even bigger in 2017:

Get to $1,000,000 in a single month.

Despite that number seeming unfathomable, a recurring theme had been pounded into my brain is that YOU create the future.

Your job is to DREAM UP what you want, then be a professional problem solver to get there.

Once your revenue gets high enough, you’ll have to bring on people to support that revenue. It will no longer, and can no longer, be you making all the decisions.

In the beginning of the company, it was our goal to create a lifestyle business, specifically so we did NOT have to go to an office.

We had previously been a “virtual” company with the majority of people working from home.

But as the company grew and we defined our mission, our path to get there also clarified – and that included expanding then team in an office environment.

Thanks in great part to George’s (our now COO) leadership, we were able to bring on a rockstar team of talented people and introduce them to the culture that we had defined.

Every single one of these employees got the HOTH Culture document in their onboarding.

In the beginning of 2017, we had everyone sign a huge banner pledge declaring our goal of $1MM in a month.

That buy-in that we got from everyone started working, and it came to the point that we were bursting at the seams with employees working from bean bags due to the shortage of desks.

Just a few months later, we moved into a brand new office with a million dollar view.

The train took off.

On top of the office, we hit the Inc 5000 list, the Tampa Bay Fast 50, and George won a spot on the Tampa Bay Business Journal Up and Comers Under 30 list.

The culture that we defined was alive. We knew our purpose. We clearly knew where we were going. And everyone was working HARD to get there.

The day that we hit a million dollars in a single month was September 30, 2017.

What’s strange is that even though it was a Saturday and the office was technically closed, we had a full house.

From the beginning of the day, 1 by 1, the whole crew started showing up, and by the time we crossed the finish line there was a PARTY.

Everyone was working together to make it happen. We hit the $1MM mark and the slack channel lit up with pictures of celebration, cheers, and people hanging out for the rest of the night.

In that moment, what was previously impossible became possible – and it was a blast.

But what was more interesting was the WAY it happened.

It was clear that the #1 reason we were able to get there was not what most businesses focus on. It wasn’t because we had some big investor, some marketing trick, or the latest startup app.

It was THE PEOPLE.

This was the culmination of the work of every single person on the team, together, working inside the culture that we created.

We have found some of the best people on the planet to run The HOTH. True rockstars.

When you think about hiring the best, you might think that an hiring an A player means getting someone that’s the best in your industry.

But the truth is that biggest rock stars, the true A players on our team are former Target employees, babysitters, bartenders, rock band members.

What we did differently is give these amazing people an environment to thrive through the culture – a place for growth, personally and professionally.

“The greatest gift you can give someone is the power to be successful. Giving people the opportunity to struggle rather than giving them the things they are struggling for will make them stronger.”  – Ray Dalio, Principles

By creating a growth culture, and taking the right people and putting them in the right environment, you’ll be blown away at what you can create together.

The growth culture permeates through the employees not just in the workplace, but also into our daily lives.

It’s not just a job. These are hours of your day, hours of your life. This is your growth vehicle.

It comes full circle – the culture is sustained because we get buy-in. The employees protect the culture because they see the value. The output of all that combined is the ability to create something bigger than you.

The last step is to give the right people the right environment to succeed within a contagious growth culture. Everyone has something in them and it’s up to you to create the culture vehicle. When this happens, it all comes full circle as each individual creates their own growth path.

That’s how you get a whole office full of employees to show up on a Saturday, crush down a million bucks in a month, and enjoy the shit out of it.

What a wild year. Thank you 2017!!

A post shared by The HOTH (@thehothseo) on Dec 22, 2017 at 11:50am PST

Clayton Johnson
CMO @ The HOTH

P.S. If you’d like to join our team of rockstars, check out our open positions here. We’re always hiring!

The post The surprising secret to creating a million dollar a month business that you love. appeared first on The HOTH.

It took us 4 years to get to the first 10k users.

It took us less than 10 months to get to 20k.

Here’s what you need to know to do the same in your business.

Disclaimer

Before we get started, I just want to point out that we are NOT a venture-backed startup. We don’t have the luxury of resting on a huge pile of cash to wildly spend.

This is not us, unfortunately.

The HOTH started in 2010 as a bootstrapped startup literally running our “backend” off of a spreadsheet and using our own laptops in my friend’s apartment.

This growth came from within for us, and it can come from within for you too.

Secondly, while we were searching for answers, I remember reading what seemed like hundreds of posts about “How we acquired 10 million customers without spending a dime or lifting a finger!” or “How we 103X our revenue in 2 days by changing 1 thing”

The articles were pretty outrageous, but they didn’t actually help me understand what to do. In fact, I think I felt discouraged because it all seemed so easy for everyone else.

What I wanted to see is what actually happened behind the scenes, and I’ll tell you what:

For every “massive success” blog post there are 30000 “oh shit” failures that they don’t tell you about.

Alex from Groove (awesome support software by the way), agrees:

There is a lot of failure you don’t see.

For example, in our own journey to 20k users, we’ve had our fair share of failures:

• Had our Facebook ad account banned
• Had our Adwords account banned
• Spent months developing and making proposals for a product that not a single person bought
• Launched campaigns to a 200k person list where the lander didn’t work
• Spent tons of money on new traffic sources that didn’t convert
• Wasted time re-doing things we thought were already done

In the end, none of these failures mattered.

By the time we fail at something, we are already speeding on to 3 other new things and now I EASILY forget our failures.

Failure is your friend. Failure just means you’re TRYING. You’re learning. Keep going.

(By the way, we solved all those problems too – got our FB ad account back, got our Adwords account back, changed our product offering, fixed our landers, etc)

Now that that’s through, let’s get into how you can double your business this year:

1. The Big Mindset Shift

In Grant Cardone’s book, The 10X Rule, he says that you need to set your goals 10X higher than you think, and you need to put in 10X the effort to achieve those.

At first, it may seem pretty daunting, but when you start doing that you’ll see that it won’t be harder to grow, and in some cases it becomes way easier.

The reason it seems like “work” at first is because you haven’t achieved the extraordinary level of success that turns work into passion. Once you start to see the success, you will be addicted.

Everybody has the exact same 24 hours in a day and 7 days a week. Richard Branson has the same amount of time in the day as you.

You’re going to spend those hours one way or another. The only difference between what makes you really successful and what keeps the status quo are the actions you take during the day.

When you understand what you really want, and what it’s going to take to get there, it becomes clear what actions you should be taking during the day (and what you shouldn’t!).

Set goals that would make a massive difference, then ruthlessly cut out the things that do not matter and focus on the actions that will get you closer to where you want to be.

2. Understand Your Business Math

You want your business to grow?

Don’t treat growth like the lottery, trying random things and hoping something works.

Get your numbers down. Without knowing your numbers, you have no real business.

This is put very well by Justin Brooke from IM Scalable.

He’s damn right.

A million dollars in ad spend may sound “expensive,” but the only thing that matters is ROI.

If you gave me a source that for every $1 we put in we consistently got $2 out, we would put in as much money as we could possibly get our hands on.

You don’t have to be confused by CPC, CTR, CPM, CTC, VTC etc. Those numbers can help down the line, but at the end of the day, it boils down to the following:

1. How Much It Costs To Get A Targeted Lead

Find out where a big pool of your audience lives / hangs out. We started with Facebook Ads because everyone is on Facebook.

Here’s how it works:

We run an ad that says something along the lines of “Get this free download of the best SEO Tools.”

We target people that like SEO stuff, like SEO software, SEO news publications, SEO conferences etc.

HOTH Facebook Ad Example

When they click on the ad they go to a lander that asks them to put in their email.

Here, we offer them value in exchange for their permission to market to them (permission marketing).

HOTH Landing Page Example

When they put in their email, their email goes onto our email list and they get the PDF download.

With Facebook’s tools (conversion pixel), we can tell how much it costs for us to get an email address. (Usually between $2-$4 or so).

Facebook ad tracking

2. Figure Out How Much That Lead Is Worth Over Time.

Once the leads are on our email list, we deliver massive value (and build our authority at the same time) by answering all the questions people have about SEO.

During the course of helping them with our value based articles, we also weave in promotions for our products.

For instance, here’s a good example of how we sell HOTH Guest Post:

We basically show people how to get white hat links (our process) and then at the end, we let them know that we can just take care of the whole process for them.

During this process, we use tracking software like Improvely to see how much that lead on average is worth over a 1, 3, 6, 12-month timeline.

Use improvely to track conversions

Usually, we make all our money back from the ad spend within the first month or 2, then from that point forward, it’s pure profit.

3. Scale That Source

Once you know how much your lead costs, and how much they bring in on your timeline, then you can scale your ad spend.

You don’t have to start with a billion dollars. You can start with a relatively small amount.

We saw the results and it was obvious that this was profitable for us. So we doubled the ad spend and measured again. We just kept repeating the process over and over.

Once you have something that works consistently, POUR ON THE GASOLINE.

Make that fire IGNITE and you will see MASSIVE growth in your business.

3. Put Your Marketing On Autopilot

The days of old school marketing are dying. Cold calling should be a thing of the past. What is “in” is HELPING your customers and attracting them to you.

We try to attract everyone to our email list so that we can deliver the most value.

We write this blog that has popups everywhere so we can get people on our email list.

HOTH Popup

We run Facebook ads so we can get people on our email list. We run Adwords so we can get people on our email list. We do everything to get people on the email list.

Once people are on the list, it automatically delivers everyone value and sells each one of our products – on autopilot – building our trust, authority, and sales, every day.

We have a 23 email sequence that every customer gets and they love it. I had multiple people come up to me when we were at Pubcon and SMX and tell me that they really enjoy the emails we send.

HOTH Email Autoresponder

This all results in a marketing system that consistently produces growth. We don’t rely on random tactics or hoping and praying for a post to go viral.

We have a Marketing System that can scale at will.

When we set our sales goals, I can see predictably more or less what we’re going to need to hit those goals.

4. Create The Value Ladder

It’s going to be difficult to really get your max ROI from your lead generation if you only have 1 solution to sell to them.

People have vastly different problems and budgets, even in the same niche.

Just a few years ago, the highest priced product you could buy from us was $250. Then we added a $475 bigger version and someone bought it.

Then we came out with a new product, and we made a package that was worth $875, someone bought it.

Then we made our newest and best solution yet which is a killer combination of a bunch of our products plus extras – The most valuable thing we’ve ever created – It costs $4,000. People bought that too.

For every $4k product we sell to one person, we have to sell more than 60 of the $60 product.

Let that sink in for a minute.

If you have more things you can help your customers with, more products, more offers you can create – DO IT. There is someone out there looking for the solution. We still haven’t found the limit.

5. Test Your Limits

If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough. – Mario Andretti

Once you have your head wrapped around what you want to accomplish, test your limits.

Treat everything as it is urgent. You HAVE to get it done. You have to implement NOW.

In the past, we had a schedule of releasing a product every year or two.

In the last 6 months we have more than doubled our product lineup. Everything is running smooth.

We don’t stop with just new products, or pouring the fire on paid traffic, we’re 10Xing everything and aggressively testing what works and what doesn’t.

We did 3 huge conferences last year to connect with our customers face-to-face.

We had the biggest booth you can get.

Yes, That’s Ric Flair.

We have thousands of HOTH Swag Packs going out to show our appreciation for our customers (and stand out from everyone else).

What could be inside?

You probably can too, and it will make all the difference in the world.

6. Your People Are Everything

I’m a huge believer in systems. We built the HOTH on systems. It’s what allows us (and every other successful business) to deliver quality products to their customers and scale at a rapid pace. You have to have systems in your business for everything.

With that said, at the heart of those systems is great people. We are so fortunate to have the amazing team we have.

We have amazing guidance from the partners Marc & David (they push us to do the uncomfortable).

We have amazing account managers (Greg & Joe) that care about our customers and are on the phones, even after hours, taking care of the needs of our customers.

We have amazing production and support staff (George, Will, Betsy), keeping our products quality and top notch, looking into any kind of issue or question that may arise, quickly resolving it and improving our process.

We have an amazing development team (Sergey, Ed, Alex) that help us create new products, push updates, and improve our systems to make the experience better every day for customers.

We have amazing managers that help us with all of our projects (Sarah, Adan, Randy) to keep the train running smooth.

We have an amazing 500+ person distributed team that helps us produce all of the products, from writing content to production and more. We like to think of this group as our HOTH ARMY.

I’m so thankful that we have this team. It is a testament to what good people can do for your company.

Building your team full of quality A+ players will skyrocket you into success.

Conclusion

These are the very simple ideas that helped us add millions of dollars to our revenue.

All you need are these very simple ideas. Once you understand that, you have the power inside of you to figure out the rest.

If your business is NOT growing, all you need to do is change your mind in one instant. You are not stagnant. You are capable of change. I know your new year’s resolution said you wanted to make more money this year.

This is it.

If this post helped you or inspired you, please share the love!

What other lessons have you learned in your business? We would love to hear your feedback in the comments!

Cheers
Clayton Johnson
@claytonjohnson
COO @ The HOTH

The post We doubled our business last year. Here’s how to do the same. appeared first on The HOTH.

The results range from vague to outdated. Frankly, the internet should be embarrassed.

Most of the resources listed in the search results mention valuing your tangible assets, but what if you don’t have tangible assets? You’ll also likely find formulas which consider the number of years the business was in operation, but what if your business is less than a year old?

While the traditional valuation models might work well in the world of corporate finance or real estate, they don’t always translate to internet-based businesses. It helps to have a tool designed for your operating space. For example, if you’ve built a content site with an affiliate monetization model, how do you even go about valuing that?

There is a lot that goes into valuing an online business, but we’ve done the heavy lifting for you. We created a quick and efficient tool that was made specifically for entrepreneurs who own and operate Amazon Associates, affiliate, AdSense, or any other type of internet-based business.

Click here to access our new free Business Valuation tool!

Business Valuation: How Online Businesses Sale Prices Are Calculated

The new valuation tool is based on over $50 million worth of real-world sales data across a variety of business types. The valuations come from actual data from thousands of sold businesses, not list prices or unsold companies languishing in a marketplace.

Generally speaking, the value of the business is determined by calculating the net profit and assigning a multiple to it. This method is pretty much a universal truth; however, the formula for determining that multiple is our “secret sauce.”

Below is some insight into the top variables we use to help determine the value of a business.

Monetization Model

We consider 12 types of monetization models, from drop shipping to affiliate sites. Although a business often has more than one way to monetize, we look at the primary form of monetization for this purpose.

How Much Work is Required Per Week

This factor can be both subjective and variable. However, as a rule, the less work that is required to achieve a profit threshold, the more the business will be worth. Most buyers are looking to acquire a fairly passive digital asset.

How Long the Company Has Been in Existence

Companies with longevity often command a higher multiple. Plus, longevity means that more data is available to help determine the business’s value. This also showcases any seasonality that your business might experience over time.

Monthly Revenue and Expenses

Profit is a key driver, but we also look at investments, owner salaries, and one-time expenses to extrapolate the real data. By sharing this data with prospective buyers, they’ll get a clearer picture of the real-world financial state of the company.

Traffic Data

Every potential pair of eyeballs is a customer, so the more traffic a website gets, the more it is worth. However, conversion rates and values are also important considerations.

Email Subscribers

Some say that “the money is in the list.” Although it takes more than just an email list to have a profitable enterprise, an email audience is a valuable asset. This is particularly true if you’re in the affiliate space and have JV partners—a single mailing can net six or seven figures!

Affiliates

We look at how many affiliates a company has and how active they are. Because affiliates function as a commission-only salesforce, they can be a tremendous asset at virtually zero expense. We also evaluate payout structures and terms to determine profitability.

Social Media Channels and Followers

The more exposure your business has, the more chances you have to monetize. In addition to being present and having a following, we also look at engagement, advertisement spending, and which channels generate sales.

About the Simple Valuation Tool

Get a rough estimate of your business’s value in seconds—no email opt-in required. Just enter your monthly profit and choose your monetization model. You’ll instantly get an estimation of your total business value, right down to the penny.

If you want a more extensive valuation, try this in-depth valuation tool. This requires a few extra fields, but it can more specifically pinpoint your company’s worth.

The marketplaces for buying and selling online businesses continue to grow and evolve, and you need to keep up with that growth. This landscape is forever changing. Over the past several years, there has been a massive shift in the variety of monetization models and the value of businesses.

If you’re interested in learning more about the current state of the industry, download this free report that shares the results, analyses, trends, and predictions from the sale of over 470 businesses—totaling more than $50 million dollars in deals.

The post How Much Is Your Business Worth? (Here’s How To Calculate Your Valuation!) appeared first on The HOTH.

Keeping track of projects for multiple clients can be frustrating for even the most organized business owner.

Which orders are for which clients? Are they done? Where are all the reports?

In the past, we solved this with tags – the ability to tag and sort by anything you’d like.

But we listened to your feedback and wanted to give this a complete overhaul to make your life much easier, and keep everything organized in one place.

So today, we’re introducing the Client Organizer Beta!

What Is The Client Organizer?

With the Client Organizer, you can now sort your orders into folders that you create, giving you the flexibility to manage multiple projects at one time.

Here’s what it looks like:

The Client Organizer was designed with time-saving improvements like:

• Quick categorization of orders when you place them
• Special highlighted sections to give you an at-a-glance view of orders that need your attention
• The ability to track notes on a per-client basis so you can organize your project details

Using the Client Organizer is easy, and we aim to make it even easier, so be sure to send over your feedback on the process. To get started with Client Organizer, just join our beta by clicking here:

Using The Client Organizer For Projects

Client Organizer is flexible as well – you don’t have to use it strictly for client work.

When you add a new “client”, it acts as a folder to hold orders and notes.

These “clients” can be called anything you want – so you may find it easier to create multiple Client Organizer entries to track a long-running project for a single client, for example.

In-House Marketers With Multiple Projects

In-house marketers who don’t deal with clients can benefit as well.

Now, you can create a Client Organizer “client” for each department you are working with to better help you keep track of deliverables for the marketing team or the brand management group, for example.

Webmasters With Multiple Customers

Webmasters with a small number of high-touch customers could break down orders into multiple “client” folders.

It may be easier to call your folders “BigCorp – Content” and “BigCorp – Links” or to use the client names to remind yourself about the types of orders that are organized inside.

Getting Started: How To Add A Client

Once you’ve joined the client organizer beta, you’ll see a condensed view of all of your existing un-sorted orders.

To add a client, just click the “Add Client” button on the left panel:

Then type the client’s name and click save:

Boom. Now you have a new client!

Adding Existing Orders To A Client

If you’ve been placing orders for a while, you’ll want to add your existing orders to your client. There are a couple of ways to do this.

Adding orders individually

1. Go to “All” orders on the left side:

2. Use the checkbox selector to select the order or orders you want to add to a client.

3. A new assignment dropdown will appear where you can assign the selected orders to the client.

Adding multiple orders with filters

If you have a lot of orders, it may be easier to first filter the orders by URL and add them. Here’s how:

1. Go to “All” orders on the left side:

2. Use the filter box and type in a URL or keyword that you have used for your client. Press enter and it will filter by any orders that used that URL or keyword:

3. Use the checkbox in the header column to select all and use the assignment dropdown to assign them to a client:

Unassign or Reassign Orders From A Client

Accidentally added the wrong order? No problem, you can easily unassing orders.

1. Just click the order you want to unassign or reassign to another client:

2. Then click the appropriate button in the drop down.

How To Make Sure All Your Orders Are Organized

Want to make sure you’ve assigned all the orders to your clients and didn’t miss any?

Just click the “Unassigned” orders button on the left panel and you can see any orders that do not have an associated client:

Add Client Notes

If you click on a client from the left side of Client Organizer list, you can use the “Edit Note” link to add notes for the client.

This is perfect for storing contact details, upcoming strategy ideas, or even pertinent reminders to yourself about the orders you have in progress.

Conclusion

We hope that you enjoy using the Client Organizer and find it easy to use.

This is our beta version so we would love to hear your feedback! We are already working on v2, but we hope this helps you stay organized as you grow with The HOTH!

If you have immediate concerns like bugs or problems using the system, don’t be afraid to contact us.

The post Introducing: The New Client Project Organizer appeared first on The HOTH.

After talking to (literally) hundreds of agencies, we’re able to see patterns of what the most COMMON client problems are…

…And many of them start before the sale even happens!

Avoid This Common Client Mistake

Here’s the biggest issue – Many agencies are promising to deliver on things they simply can’t control.

The thought process goes like this:

Most people get into selling SEO as a “rational business owner.”

They want to PROVE the ROI of your services, so they go to GREAT lengths to prove how it’s all going to work.

They start translating link building into rankings, rankings into traffic, traffic into conversions, and sales into profits.

The thing is, unless you’re running the entire client’s business, you have NO CONTROL over the vast majority of that. 

Their website might not be optimized for conversions. They might not answer their phones. They might not deliver on their products. They might have terrible salespeople. They might have a bad product. 

(I mean, you probably shouldn’t have them as a client at that point, but I digress…)

So what do you do instead?

How To Set The Expectations Correctly

You can close deals simply by showing an enormous amount of proof increasing traffic. 

PROOF is the most convincing element of the sale you can make, and makes many of the other questions diminish in importance.

Here’s how you can talk about the other main categories of expectations:

Timelines For Results:

• In our experience, in general, it takes about 3 to 6 months to start seeing significant results with SEO.
• You have to “suspend your disbelief” through this period.
• You can set expectations of a minimum commitment of at least 3+ months.

Keyword Rankings:

• We suggest not promising to rank for specific keywords. Instead, focus on the amount of targeted TRAFFIC they can drive.
• With a content gap analysis, you can show them the enormous amount of mid-buyer-cycle keyword traffic that they could be targeting. This takes away the focus from ranking for that 1 golden keyword that might take 6+ months.

Costs:

• Ask them what their budget is and compare that to what it will take to compete in their market. The higher the budget, the better and faster it will work.
• You may be able to do small on-page changes for low dollar amounts, but if you want to move mountains you need a budget to work with.
• If your clients can’t pay you for SEO, then you’re probably going after the wrong SEO clients.

By focusing on the right things from the beginning and setting expectations, you can drastically reduce client issues down the road!

Does this client conversation seem like it would work better? Let me know what you think in the comments!

The post The Mini Guide To Setting Client Expectations And Avoiding Nightmares Like a Ninja appeared first on The HOTH.

In the past, you may have had to transfer content into a document, send to your client, then come back and re-transfer the information back to the portal.

It’s an endless game of a copy-and-paste middle man, with no additional value in the middle.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an easy way to give clients the ability to directly approve, reject, edit, or provide feedback to content… without any extra work on your end?

Well folks, today is the day!

In this update, I’ll show you the new white-label content approval feature we just rolled out.

Let’s get into it!

Accessing The White Label Content Approvals

In your HOTH customer dashboard, you can access your white-label content approval link by clicking the arrow next to ‘Review Topic Suggestions’ or ‘Review Articles’.

You can send this link directly to your client to handle all the content approvals!

The Content Approval Experience

You’ll notice that this link is on a third party domain so your client will never know the HOTH exists.

Here is what the client experience looks like when you send them their unique approval link:

1. Topic Review

When the client opens up the white-label URL, they see any topics and articles awaiting review for that order.

The first action a client can take is to reject or approve the topic.

If they reject the topic, their response will automatically be updated in The HOTH system.

Once we re-work the topic, we’ll display the new topic on the white-label site for approval. There’s no work needed here on your end.

If they accept the topic, they’ll see it as ‘Topic Approved’. Once the topic is approved, it automatically goes to the article creation process.

2. Article Review

Once the article(s) for the order are created they’ll be available for review on the white-label approval tool.

There are three actions the client can take: approve the article, reject the article, or edit the article.

If the article is approved, they’ll see it as ‘Article Approved’ and will be able to view it immediately.

If the article is rejected, it will go back to our team for edits.

If the client would rather make a few quick changes themselves, they can do that as well! Then they can approve the article, or reject for further edits.

3. Order Status

The site also displays ‘Next Steps’ so that your client knows what to expect next with their order. This is displayed with both topics and articles, rejected or approved.

Conclusion

Now you have an easy way for your clients to directly review their HOTH Blogger orders with no unnecessary back and forth.

Take a minute to let us know if this makes your content review process easier – we’d love feedback!

The post New Client Content Approval Feature Now Live! appeared first on The HOTH.