Maybe you’re just starting your small business. Maybe you’ve had it going for a while. Maybe you don’t even call it a business — you’re just trying to make a little extra money.
But it feels like everybody is doing better than you are.
It feels like there’s so much you need to learn before you can even start to catch up. Everybody’s trying to sell you something insanely complicated and you’re not ready for that. They’re selling memberships to sites you don’t even know if you have time to check out and 300 page tomes you’ll never be able to read, let alone understand.
It’s overwhelming and it feels totally pointless.
I’ve been there. When I started IttyBiz, I did it on about four days notice. I had no website. I didn’t have a designer, let alone a design. I hadn’t even bought my domain name yet. But then I got chosen to be the main sponsor in a giveaway on the Problogger website.
40,000 people were about to see my website, and it didn’t exist yet.
I scrambled and came up with the best thing I could in the time I had and crossed my fingers. I knew NOTHING. I was just an offline marketing consultant trying to make a go of it online.
I was willing to pay whatever it took to learn what I needed to about getting my website organized, but there wasn’t any information to be found.
All of the ebooks were either FOR experts who already knew the basics or BY experts trying to sell me something huge. Everybody had a bias, and it was impossible to tell the good information from the bad. (Plus, there was a startling lack of ninjas.)
The thing about SEO is that there are no absolutes. Google never came out and said “This is how it’s done, baby!” and because of that, nobody is able to say they have the definitive answers. (If someone does tell you they have the definitive answers, run away and bring your credit cards with you!)
As I went along, I spent a lot of money and a lot of time figuring out SEO. I’ve created this website and a few others and after a long learning curve, they started doing what I wanted them to do. I started getting the traffic. I started making the sales.
If you don’t already know me, I’ll give you a little bit of background. I’m a home business marketing consultant. I help people who run businesses with fewer than five employees create dynamic marketing campaigns on the cheap. My clients are broke. They hire me because I know how to market businesses and websites without paying a fortune.
They’re nice, normal people with crappy bosses and busy toddlers and annoying parents and they don’t have the money or the time to screw things up.
As my business moved forward, I started getting the same questions over and over.
