Jon Lee Clark is a talented SEO professional who used his personal search engine marketing business website, PPCForHire.com to get clients, broaden his portfolio and for some valuable SEO and SEM strategy experiments. Not every business needs reams of traffic to have a great impact on their business - and in many cases we try things just for the sake of trying them and end up having the greatest success.
When did you launch the business?
I launched the business in August of 2007. I wanted to learn web design and was messing around with HTML and CSS and working with web templates. I realized, if I'm going to be spending all this time learning I may as well put my 'learning curve' to good use. So I purchased a number of domain names and decided on ppcforhire.com as the one I would build and also test and learn SEO techniques to drive traffic and get 'free' leads via the Internet.
At the time the agency i worked for was heavily into real estate clientele and i wanted a more broad portfolio - which was another reason for attempting to build a small personal book of clients.
Is the website your primary means of attracting clients?
When I initially launched the site, it was brand new (obviously) and took time to gain any type of organic rankings. I didn't have the money to put toward paid search campaigns either. I utilized Craig's List initially to pull in my first few clients. From there my SEO began to take hold, I worked very hard at building links and now get the majority of my business through referrals and traditional marketing agency partnerships.
How did you start driving traffic to the site?
I dove headlong into the social media arena - in my profiles I included links back to PPC For hire. I scowered yahoo Answers for questions related to my profession and drove traffic that way as well.
Stumble Upon was a great way to send some quick spikes in traffic as well, however it wasn't very sustainable.
My big break came when after a blog comment, I was picked up in an article on Internet marketing tools.
The article drove almost 150 visits alone that month (January I believe) and provided a number of links. My idea in providing tools on the page was for exactly that reason. It worked out even better than I could have imagined!
Did you yourself use Pay Per Click?
As I mentioned above, I didn't have the funds to put toward it myself BUT I had attended SES in San Jose just as I was recently releasing my site. In the exhibit hall I grabbed all kinds of goodies - the most important? Between $50 - $100 free trials for yahoo, Google, MSN, Looksmart and Ask!
Up to that point I had never used the latter two so it ended up not only being a great way to speed up the indexing of my new site (Google crawls any page you are sending Paid traffic for relevancy & Google Quality Score) but also to gain experience in some 3rd tier engines setup and results - it was glaringly obvious why they are 3rd tier!
What are your plans for the site moving forward?
I plan on continuing to learn with it first off (testing new SEO tactics and improving on others) and also continuing to build out new pages - Certified Adwords Professional Profile; Yahoo Ambassador; Case Studies; etc. The biggest plan is a site blog, however, I'm too busy at the moment to take the time to set it up!