Court and I have spent the last couple of years together building our brand in the world of making money online. We enjoy it, and we’re not going anywhere (at least we hope to hang around if our audience and subscribers will have us for a few more years!).
At the same time, we’ve realized that there’s a whole world out there we’ve ignored – the world of the small business owner looking to find new customers and clients through the search engines. So we’ve decided it’s time to establish a new brand that gives us a chance to reach out to that market. We’d like to introduce you to SEO Educators (http://seoeducators.net – the site is under construction at the moment). SEO Educators is looking to help the small business owner that knows she could be pulling customers and clients from Google and Yahoo! every month, but doesn’t have thousands of dollars to pay an SEO firm to help her get ranked. Our goal is to give this kind of entrepreneur an SEO plan she can implement with the resources (time, money, and staff) she already has.
But the point of this post isn’t to sell you on SEO Educators, so I’ll stop there. You can check out the site in the next week or so when the copy is written if you’re interested.
So what is the point of this post? There are actually three:
1. Help Us Out with Our Logo Design Contest
Court and I are notoriously bad when it comes to design. Not only do neither of us have a shred of design ability, we can’t even really say what we like or don’t like in a design. Some friends of ours turned us on to 99designs.com. For somebody as design-impaired as me 99designs.com is an absolute heaven-send. In a nutshell, you sign up to run a design contest, write a brief about what you need, and then tens of thousands of designers have the chance to submit an entry in hopes of winning the cash prize you established at the beginning of the contest. Seriously, this is brilliant. You can read more about what 99designs can do for you here.
Court and I would really love to have feedback and suggestions on our logo design contest. Pop over and check it out if you like. We need all the help we can get.
2. Do You Have Access to Small Business Owners? Join the SEO Educators Affiliate Program
We need affiliates! 99% of our traffic is geared toward making money online, and we need to talk to small business owners. If you’re a web designer, developer, marketing consultant…or anybody else that knows some business owners, send me an email (mark[at]thekeywordacademy[dot]com) so I can get in touch with you about becoming an affiliate. We’re tentatively planning a lead-based affiliate program where your job will be to get people to reach out to us, and you’ll be paid healthy commissions when we convert those leads to clients.
3. Sales Experience? Become An Independent Sales Rep for SEOEducators.net
Some of you may know I spent four years as an inside sales rep and sales manager before quitting to work full-time with Court. I miss sales and I’ve looked forward to creating a product with Court that would give us the chance to partner with a solid group of independent sales reps who could take our product to market and earn a great living at it. We know there are quite a few corporate sales types out of work right now, and we’d like to give a good opportunity to a few people who want to make a full time living talking to small business owners about our SEO educational products.
Initially, we’re looking to work with three or four people who’d like to earn upwards of $50,000 per year as a rep for our business. Wow, did that ever sound like an MLM pitch, so let me clarify. This will be commission-only sales; you’ll be paid one commission if you prospected the client yourself and a different commission if we generate a lead and you make the sale. The reason I say upwards of $50,000 per year is not because we can make any guarantees about your earnings, or the number of lead you’ll get etc. I say $50,000 because we’re looking for people to work full-time on this, and I don’t think it would be worth it if you were going to make less than $50,000 for your trouble. Ideally I’d like to see our reps making in the $75,000 to $100,000 range.
As I said, I was in commission sales for years, so I don’t throw those numbers around ignorantly or lightly. If you have sales ability and confidence, get in touch with me and we’ll talk about whether this could be a good fit. I can tell you this would have been my dream sales job when I was in sales – working from home (or wherever I wanted) making as many sales as I decided to make, and not having an annoying sales manager bugging me all the time because he’s trying to beef up his bonuses. We’re looking for some independent spirits with the ability to explain value and close. Most people reading this just shuddered in semi-horror. We’re looking for the three of you who think that sounds friggin cool. Again, email me if this has any appeal at all to you and we’ll talk about the details.
And that’s it! Check out our logo contest, become an affiliate for SEOEducators.net, and let us know if you’re interested in an independent sales job.
Have a great one everybody.
Interesting stuff especially about the design contest website.
As for the sales rep opportunities, who wants to work full time to make $50,000 to $75,000 when you can make that (and more) by just following all the advice you guys give? You guys teach the basics which allow us to be our own boss and make as much as we want!
Glad you have the vision of what we do here Thomas. I can tell you though, I miss picking up the phone and making sales quite a bit. I like talking to people, asking them questions to see if what I have matches what they need, and persuading them that my product is a good fit based on our discussion. I know I’m not the only one out there wired like that, so I’m looking forward to building a small team of people who feel the same way.
I know most of our readers here aren’t into that sort of thing, but if you know anybody who needs a chance to make some money – put them in touch with me!
Sorry you didn’t take us up on our offer to have a free logo design contest on our contest site, DesignersContest.com. We even have an affiliate program you could have made some money with.
Seems like you have something solid there Matt – I don’t remember getting an offer though….?
Hey Mark, I know a guy who after a few years of running the show at a sales floor (near you) of a big name infomercial, is breaking away from the company to start his own floor. I think he’s looking for leads to pitch. Not sure if that is what you are looking for, or if he is looking for it either (he was heading towards doing a stock options course lead), but if so, I might be able to broker that. I’ll leave it at that, as that might not be what you are looking for at all.
Thanks for the thought; we won’t have anything close to the lead volume that a sales floor will need. We’re looking to work with a few people who do a combination of their own prospecting and converting whatever leads we generate through affiliates. Avoiding sales floors also goes a long way toward keeping people from hating you and wanting to shut down your business…and if you know anything about that industry you know exactly what I’m talking about
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Oh I sure do know all about that.
Sounds like a solid new site Mark. =)
I’m not into sells or design, but if you need any help with anything in the SEO space, let me know.(a link, help teaching, etc)
Interesting concept Mark. As a former Small Business owner, and someone who still rubs shoulders with a few, I think two obstacles you’ll have to over come are:
1. Most small business people are busy running their own business and do not have the time or desire to learn SEO. Heck, a lot do not even know how to throw up a website.
2. A lot of SB owners don’t understand the value of SEO. Of course, this will be your job to show them. Showing them is one thing, getting them to fork over the money is another. I’d say most would rather pay YOU to do it rather than learn it their self…see obstacle #1 above…:)
Hope ya’ll make this work and if I run across anyone needing a course in Small Business SEO, I’ll send ‘em your way.
Don
Are you offering a residual? I sold seo packages before and worked at 10x Marketing. How are you planning on doing the fullfillment scaling seo effectively is difficult and I would only want to push a quality service.
We’re not offering a residual, nor are we planning to have to worry too much about scale on the fulfillment side. This is going to be an education/consulting business. We’re avoiding actually doing the SEO for clients because, as you said, quality tends to suffer in most (all) big SEO shops.
It takes me far too long to design anything, I’d just keep on changing it.
Following the advice from Court, I have submitted articles to different article directories. I want to know why many of those articles do not appear to be linking back except for the ezine ones, being all the articles indexed by Google.
Hello Mark and Court!
I’m running into this a lot!
Error establishing a database connection…AND…if it happens after hitting add a comment…it loses the comment! Arrgghh!
I would like to contact you folks. Can you tell me a way to do this?
Your new customer,
Riley West – An Internet Marketer In The Making.