After nervously waiting for what seemed an eternity for the next blog or YOUmoz post after Rand’s wedding weekend extravaganza, it was a thrill to see Duncan jump in with a great blog post on the 3 cornerstones of SEO and the amazing Distilled triangle of SEO-ness. After reading a comment I decided it’d be a good idea to have a roundup of the top 10 (as selected by me) recent blog posts of advice on running your SEO business from our favorite SEO freaks and geniuses.
I’m quite sure I haven’t covered every single post that everyone deems relevant, but that’s what the comments are for, right? (Suggest away!) So without further ado, I present for your reading pleasure the top 10 blog posts on running an SEO business from the people who do it successfully every day.
How to Grow Your SEO Firm – Will Critchlow, recently married, crafted this well rounded article on expanding your SEO agency by winning the right kind of clients by networking and building trust.
Why Reputable SEO Firms Don’t Promise Guaranteed Search Engine Rankings – Rand Fishkin, also recently married, gives a hailstorm treatise on the snake oil sales people we all know and hate out there. Contained in this extremely useful post are some great thoughts you can take away and use in your own work with prospects when bidding against or repairing the damage of these disreputable agencies.
The 3 Cornerstones of SEO – Duncan Morris gives his thoughts on explaining difficult concepts and ideas in a sales presentation to an uninformed client or prospective client from one of the resident Brits at Distilled. There’s even an illustration (bonus!).
What Your Mama Didn’t Tell You About Becoming an SEO Consultant – Derek Edmond delivers a rant worth reading if you’re considering a career in SEO (still a good read if you’ve already been sucked in) and the things you should know and expect.
Does Your SEO Consulting Contract Have a Clause Limiting Your Liability? – The Honorable Sarah Bird, Esq. gives an inspired brief on the smart way to limit your contractual liability when crafting your agreements with customers. A must read if you use contracts. You do use contracts, right?
Manage Risk By Including an Indemnification Clause in Your SEO Contracts – Sarah delivers another one out of the park with this informative Amicus Curiae. Just read it. In fact, you should read all of her posts if you want to keep from getting pwned.
Content and Marketing Lessons Learned from the Dark Knight – Rebecca Kelley, SEOmoz’s resident bad ass (don’t let her squishee Plurk avatar fool you!) presents this list of top marketing and content ideas for promoting your site and business.
Stealth Reputation Management – Do you love Zima? Do you really want the world to know it? Will gives a video presentation on managing your online personal and business reputation.
What I Learned from a Fishmonger in Seatle – An instant classic. A treatise on becoming world famous in business and your personal life by how you treat your customers. Written by none other than… myself.
Good Financial Advice for Startups – Rae Hoffman pours some sugar on us with some solid financial tips on running a new SEO startup business with fiscally responsibility and links to similar posts advice from a few other people you may know. She has even more advice for startup CEOs here.
There’s a lot of great business advice in the contributions above and quite a few of the authors link out to the authors who inspired them, so it should provide several hours of good reading, link following and learning.
Through this process I have discovered we all love to write about the latest techniques, but we’re not doing a lot of writing on how we run our businesses to be successful, so I encourage you, humble reader, to get out there, write a post on an aspect of your business and share it with us all. Tell us about it in the comments below or shout it out on Twitter or heck, just blog it and those of us who drool over your RSS feed will see it!
