It’s in the trenches where the real battle, er, work occurs.
I belong to the appropriate professional associations related to my business with regard to search marketing, web analytics, web design and so forth. Personally, I am beginning to think that most of them are over-priced and useless when it comes to providing the type of services that actually benefit a professional in my business. I suppose they are good for you with respect to providing some sort of credibility but I am even beginning to wonder if that is true. I mean, I was certainly successful long before I joined any organization and I don’t think my clients really care if I am a member of this or that association. What they care about is, can I perform, do I know what I am talking about and what is the end result.
Most of these organizations I look around on the things they promote and the blogs they tout and for the most part it just seems like a collective of name dropping and who-knows-who. I guess what I am saying is they seem to puff themselves up on a ritual of self-importance but really don’t provide any substance.
I was looking around at the search marketing associations and noticed also that the majority of them, in order to get listed as a “top” seo firm you have to pay a fee to the organization. And in most cases it is a pretty hefty fee which also requires annual renewal. Now is it just me or is there something rather odd about that picture?
Meanwhile, it’s life here in the trenches that is where the real business takes place. So that got me to thinking about a couple of things. Number one is, I want to use this blog as a place to actually provide some of the insights, knowledge and experience I have learned from years of operating my own successful business. My hope is that I can provide something of value to someone else that might be trying to run their own small business in this field or might be wanting to learn how to do their own Internet marketing and is trying to figure it all out. If I can in some small way provide something of true value to another that is related to my work without regard for receiving anything in return then I think that would be a worthwhile endeavor. It’s about giving something back.
So I am going to try and take the time to spend some more energy on the blog in regard to helpful information related to this field, no name dropping allowed.
With respect to that, I have written a paper about my opinion on the value of “link building” and “Page Rank”. This is something in the search marketing business that a lot of people spend a lot of time on and many are charging a fortune to clients for development of. Well, it might be advisable to read my paper on the subject and think about some of the things I say before you go out and pay big dollars for a link building campaign.
I’ve also went out and registered some appropriate urls related to the building of a new search marketing association. It really bugged me that the top associations in this business require these big fees on an annual basis to be listed as a “top” seo company. I think there are many factors which make a company or a person well qualified to be considered the best at what they do. In this business (the seo business) I am not overly convinced that just because a company has some really big clients or generates some really big dollars, it is “the best”. I’m just a little bitty company. I have a few really big clients and a lot of really small clients. But I didn’t just jump on the bandwagon three or four or five years ago when it became evident that search marketing was the next big revenue wave in this business. I ran a very successful bulletin board and then the Internet came along and I have been involved in the Internet since the very first day it became a public enterprise. And I have been involved in search marketing since I began with the Internet. The point of this information is that I might just be a tad bit qualified to make determinations and formulate opinions when it comes to observations about trends related to search marketing. In fact, considering that about 95% of my business is by referrals from my clients and my clients will tell you that every single one of them is at the top of the major search engines for relevant terms related to their business you can also say confidently that I might know what I am doing. But the point of all of this is that I am willing to bet there are quite a few “unsung heroes” in this business that are plugging away while the elite are out there dropping names and charging exhorbitant fees to join their high falutin organizations. So my plan is to form an organization that will be different and try to find ways to support the unsung heroes of this business. I’m not sure how I am going to do this or if it will even be successful, but I am going to try because I think it is a worthy endeavor.
The soldiers in the trenches are the ones that need our support the most.
