Business Management Consultant - Stuntdubl Search and Marketing Consulting

Welcome back! Good to see you. If you haven't seen it, here's the archive of my best writing. Thanks for visiting!

I microblog now more than I blog at Twitter.com/stuntdubl
Feel free to drop me a line sometime or subscribe in case I ever post again.

I haven’t spent a lot of 2009 posting for my little marketing blog, and I miss taking the time to sit down and write about what I’m learning. 2009 has been a whirlwind of projects outside the scope of just SEO, and I’ve realized that talking isn’t doing.  It’s made me realize that over-simplifying what I do on the web to purely SEO is doing myself a disservice due to a variety of factors discussed below. Those of you with years of experience building and improving ever aspect of a website deserve more credit than you sometimes receive. I’ve watched many of my friends and peers write books, develop large communities on the subject, and take jobs at some of the most prestigious companies in the world. Despite all this, I doubt I will continue to pitch myself as “an SEO” for much longer. I know I will always truly “be an SEO” at heart, but I think it’s time to move on (for real this time). I will most likely focus on online business management consulting, and improving business’s overall online profits through refining processes and strategies. What will that look like? Probably something very similar to the services I’ve been providing clients for years, with a more generic label that doesn’t elicit the same negative connotations. Really, how different can our marketing services be from the likes of Mckinsey , Accenture, ECGMC, OliverWyman, or others in the management consulting association?

1. Pay extra for premium domains (if you develop them)

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?