New Seasons, New Projects

DISCLAIMER

Before you even begin reading this, you should know that this post is one of more of a babbling, protracted soliloquy than a focused, informative post on any predetermined subject. You acknowledge that you read this post at your own leisure, and in no way can I be held accountable for wasted time spent in reading this blog post.

With that said, onward…

So I’m excited to be starting yet another blog. I’ve kinda waded head-first into first blogging, and then WordPress, designing WordPress sites before I even had one of my own! Anyway, I have some cool things going on. It’s a lot of work, and it’s sometimes tough to stay even-keeled (if that’s the right phrase?).

I mean, every day, it seems impossible to keep up with everything you need to know. What this plugin does, or this theme options, autoblogging, on-page SEO, linkbuilding strategies, social bookmarking, article marketing, ecommerce, Magento, on and on… it never really seems to end! I mean, here I am… 7:15 on a Saturday night, and I’m blogging. But I don’t care. I need to get this internet marketing thing down, and I’ll make almost any sacrifice necessary to get this part of my life handled.

(By the way, I’m supposed to be bolding, italicizing, and <h>ing important keyword phrases in this post to make it more searchable… but I’m not going to. I leave it to you, the reader of this blog to congratulate yourself for the initiative required to find this page. I commend you so much in fact for finding this invisible, non-searchable blog that I even think you owe it to yourself to go and grab a cookie.)

The tough thing to do is to focus on finishing one project at a time. With so much out there and so many potential projects to put on my plate it’s easy to get spread too thin, get overwhelmed, and not get anything done. I absolutely CRINGE when I pick up a training eBook that’s 120+ pages or a video that’s 90+ minutes. Just CUT OUT THE FAT… tell me what I need to know!

Anyway, I have been able to get some pretty kick-ass clients over the past few months. One of my absolute favorite companies to work with is West Coast Flooring. This was one of those things that kind of just came about randomly but turned out to work really well.

I was introduced to the manager of West Coast Flooring through Jessica McKimmie, who is the CEO of Sneaker Academy. Jessica has turned out to be a great contact for me, but when we met it was completely random. I was sitting across from her at a coffee shop called Twiggs in Normal Heights. There was an old lady who was having trouble exiting, so I stood up and helped her out. Jessica and I hit it off after I asked her a serious question: Was it true that by placing your laptop on your lap you put yourself at risk of lowering your sperm count?

She responded that she wasn’t exactly sure. But, as we talked more… I showed her some of my illustration work and she told me that she ran her own marketing agency. Clearly, it was meant to be. After pestering Jessica with a dozen or more e-mails thereafter, she asked me to create logo comps for a company called “Yo! Naturals” which was changing it’s name to “Fresh! Healthy Vending.” She was only offering me $250 for the comps – but I didn’t really have any connections and she struck me as a nice, pleasant person, easy to get along with and good to know – so I agreed.

That project was fun, but I’m not going to get to into right now, because I’ve completely digressed from the original point of this post! I created something like 60 comps just for that one project, though only a few got accepted, if you’re interested in seeing a couple of them you can do so here.

The fun part was that I created an awful lot of logo scripts by hand (I was trying to go for that “organic” look). I used a Japanese sumi-e brush and came up with some cool varieties.

Needless to say, none of my comps were chosen by the client. Only one of them was presented, and I was a bit disappointed that the creative director messed with the colors and then stuck it on the bottom of the comp submission… it certainly didn’t help my case. Whatever though, I still get paid and besides, this wasn’t about me, and sometimes you just have to swallow your pride and be a team player.

Ok guys… now lets all form a circle and join me in a chorus of Kumbaya. Come on now!

Anyway, so flash forward a month or two. I tell Jess that Matt Hartless and I are diving headfirst into the wonderful world of WordPress. Jessica sends me an e-mail saying that she has a client for me. This client can’t afford a normal “Sneaker Academy” budget, so it should be perfect for me.

So I met up with a new lady named Molly and together we went up to San Marcos to meet with the client, who dum de dum… was West Coast Flooring! And the rest is history. Just kidding.

Molly and I got horribly lost because the directions we had were bad. By the way, if you’ve never been to San Marcos… it’s one of the LAST places I would recommend you live, along with Clairemont, Escondido, and Logan Heights. It’s kind of a toss-up. It’s in the middle of NOWHERE. So we basically showed up to our meeting about 45 minutes late.

Kelley, the lady, seemed very perturbed when we arrived. And Molly was freaking out too. But I told Molly, don’t worry about this… I got this. The reason I was confident about the meeting was because I had researched the client beforehand and I was in the middle of absorbing my new software platform training called Traffic Geyser. I was learning how to dominate local niches. Google Maps. Online video. Etc. And based on my research, I saw firsthand the marketing efforts that West Coast Flooring was attempting… it was obvious to me that their online marketing was a serious concern of theirs. Therefore, armed with my knowledge, I was confident that once the discussion began, the meeting would go according to how I envisioned it… because I understood my client and her needs.

As expected, Kelley and I had really good rapport once we started rapping about marketing. By the end of the meeting she was positively glowing, and I was satisfied because I got to know more about my client and what they were all about.

After the meeting was over Molly told Jess that the meeting was unfocused and that I was trying to pitch additional services, but that simply wasn’t the case. An agenda can be passed along in an e-mail or even an SMS… you can’t just meet with people to address an agenda. It took me a while to realize this, but people have a need to connect with people. We’d all love to be efficient machines of productivity, but you gotta put in the “face time” as well. There may be no material value to it, but there definitely is value.

Anyway Jessica called me to admonish me and I profusely apologized for my errant and fallible ways. After that it was all good. The project, however, took a while because there about 5 or 6 links of communication that information pertaining to the site had to pass through, even for the most ridiculously small edits. It seems that everyone involved became frustrated with the process. I almost wanted to strangle my partner Matt a couple of times for flaking out on me when we were supposed to complete certain elements of the project.

In spite of everything, we managed to eventually complete the project and get everything functioning as it was meant to be. We ended up doing a lot! And I was doing things I never imagined I’d be doing. Like setting up a Live Chat feature, or Google Voice (this was months before anyone had heard of Google Voice, mind you), customizing a permalinks structure, or even Light Box… I had no idea what it was until this project.

A little bit later, I finally pitched the idea of using Traffic Geyser to promote the site. Jessica helped me draw up a contract (her contracts and other business related documents are, in a word: AMAZING), and we were off to the races.

Two articles and two videos each month, for $797 a month, for six months. For me… a 24 year-old living off Ramen and those $2 “Eating RIght” things you purchase at Vons… it was the biggest deal I’d ever done. That being said, Minh Huynh of Mahal Style, who has become something of a mentor to me (topic for another post) agreed to help me produce the videos for an remarkably reasonable fee. By the way, I can’t say enough good things about the guy. Minh is a true class act and his work is simply exceptional. His Facebook fan page is one of the most popular around town, too: www.Facebook.com/MahalStyle

Here are the first two videos that we created:

You can see all of the videos and articles (and site, obviously) that we’ve created over at www.WestCoastFlooring.com. or at http://www.Youtube.com/flooringexperts.

By the way, the whole point of the video marketing is to have an effective sales funnel. Everything needs to be carefully thought out, planned, and executed. But virtually NONE of my clients, when I first consult with them, have this “figured out.” They don’t even know what SEO even entails, what their best “converting keywords” would be. But really, all these videos are, and all a website should be, is to get that traffic and drive it to an END POINT, which is a sale. Nothing more, or less. A website’s purpose is not to “inform,” that doesn’t do anything.

That said… as stated previously an effective sales funnel requires forethought. You have to have a great offer, stuff you can give away for free, you have to CAPTURE the leads by getting an e-mail or phone number, and of course… you have to have a PACKAGE to sell (notice I said package, not product… and for good reason). I learned some tricks from my buddy John Carlton… when making a sale, you want to throw in irresistible “bonus offers,” rather than offering a lower price. In fact, sometimes even charging more can radically improve your conversion rate. Don’t be the cheapest kid on the block… offer the best value. This thinking alone radically changed my way of doing business. Mr. J Carlton is a genius full of good marketing ideas… but I won’t get into them all right now, you should probably go and buy his book 🙂

But I digress!

The whole purpose of this post was to state that we are working on the West Coast Flooring account (a San Diego Flooring company, yada yada… happy yet, search engines?), and that it’s been crazy. Seriously. I’ve been trying so much sh*t when it comes to getting backlinks. Sometimes I don’t even know what it is I’m actually doing, but I know exactly the type of result I want. Whether it comes to Scrapebox or Mr Ryan Deiss’ “super secret” Authority Codes, I literally have no idea if any of this stuff is going to work… because I haven’t tested it.

I mean, people seem to vouch for just about everything, but who is actually doing this sh*t right? I’d like to submit my application to become your new best friend, thanks.

Danny Flood