As any type of company or consultant, the WRONG clients can destroy your success. It is often very tempting to keep clients, since the money seems nice, but when you drill down to the nitty gritty, they are often not very profitable at best, and a complete resource drain that can damage your pocket book and your quality of life at worst. Beyond strictly fiscal drains, a bad client raises your stress levels, and makes life much more difficult all the way around. In just about any company, the pareto principle applies to bad clients. 20% of clients create 80% of the problems. Breaking it off with a client can be a scary experience, but those that practice "culling the client heard" can attest to just how important it is. If you continue to take on clients that are not great, you will end up in a vicious cycle of doing work you don’t like for people you don’t like. Don’t think twice - break up with them. Here’s some tips for breaking up with the wrong types of clients whether you do design, development, marketing, or ANY type of service based occupation as a consultant or company.
I asked Calum Coburn, who is an expert in negotiation training and business leadership to do a piece for the site on helping SEO consultants to be better at sales and negotiation. After all, we are naturally GEEKS, and generally only forced into sales by default. Big thanks to Calum for taking the time to write a nice piece that should help those that want to get better clients or are considering doing SEO consulting as a full time job. Managing client expectations is such a critical component of SEO consulting, that it should be considered throughout the entire process (including sales). Here’s Calum’s take on what may help many consultants to manage expectations more effectively, and acheive higher sales with BETTER clients.
These just popped to mind - and thought it’d make a good post. Most success on the web is not technical driven - it is still people driven. Here’s some rules I try to live by:
Please see below for resume submission details - if you can’t follow directions, you are automatically disqualified. I am working on some cool new projects with a few partners, and we need some help.
The title pretty much sums this one up. I’m not gonna go off on this one here, I just thought it was an interesting parallel after getting off a site that was for a large product manufacturer, had two guys with nice suits on one of the most hideous homepages I had ever seen. I still just don’t get why people want to cheap out on webdesign. I don’t have the ambition to extoll the virtues of proper design to the uninitiated anymore, but it still kinda bugs me on occassion. If you can spend several hundred dollars on a nice suit, you understand why it’s important to make an impression. Why is that so difficult to translate to the web? Any body else got some favorite examples of sites that need a redesign with people wearing suits?
After attending the ASIDIC conference last month, I had a whole new insight into the world of premium content providers. Elisabeth Osmeloski and I wrote a piece for Search Engine Watch dealing with Free versus fee models on the web. It’s really fascinating how revenue models are shifting for many content providers. Part II of the article will be along shortly.
Andy Beal has developed probably the most brilliant contest in the world of SEO in quite some time. If you are fairly new to SEO - it is a great opportunity to get some significant exposure and maybe even win $5,000. There are some very nice submissions so far, if you haven’t checked it out yet. For those looking to hire SEO’s - these guys are probably the hungriest. Get them before Rand does.
