Petersen Media Group

We help you spend less time ensuring your site is there, and more time making it profitable.

Case Study: Scribe SEO Quickly Increases Search Rank

Scribe SEOMore and more, people are wanting great SEO from their WordPress site without paying an arm and a leg for an “SEO Expert” because it’s become increasingly difficult to know who actually is an expert. Enter Scribe SEO and what it can do for the layman, even the geeky developer who’d rather code than think about SEO.

I was contacted by a Chicago businessman who had some bad press back in 2011. He said that those affected had apparently made it a hobby to keep the press at the top of Google results for his vanity namesake search. It certainly appeared to be true, because I knew about the bad press before our appointed consultation call because it was front and center right below his LinkedIn profile.

I’m by far, unequivocally not so, an SEO expert. I only know the basics – probably enough to be dangerous, but I’ve had pretty good success in past years and project using Scribe SEO, so I told him that it would take some time, effort, and consistent blog posts and multiple social network profiles to push that down below his actual intellectual property and profiles.

Boy was I wrong!

It didn’t take much time and barely any effort. Scribe SEO makes it what I call “stupid easy” to fill in the SEO fields (especially in Genesis themes) and maximize the SEO impact to the writing you already produce. It’s not too difficult to come up with a plan to focus on what you want traffic for and follow Scribe’s suggestions to get there.

2013-04-27The site was still behind a request to block Google bots until it was live on his domain on April 26th. Production had started just that Monday on the 22nd. On April 27th, the robots.txt message was gone from search results and it went from 5th to 3rd in the search results.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t do a little happy dance over such a quick result for my efforts to serve my client well. Happy happy happy. That’s a good old win-win-win right there, baby!

But wait! There’s more!

2013-04-30I had a moment to pause and think about things – just a moment or two – and I decided to do another vanity search for him. Today, April 30th, the site is now the 2nd site  in the SERP (search engine results page) and I will be sure to update this when it overtakes his LinkedIn profile in the results.

I can’t stress enough that I’m not an expert and I don’t even mention SEO on my Services page at all – because I don’t necessarily want that kind of project. Scribe SEO makes it that easy to get these kinds of results.

This was a result from a brand new site that didn’t exist before the 19th and didn’t have Scribe SEO installed until the 22nd. I couldn’t be more pleased with such immediate results.

If you are scared to death to spend $1200 on an expert who doesn’t help your rankings and would like to learn the basics and do enough to see results, then you really should try it out, at least for a month while you learn. Don’t blame me if you like it so much you don’t ever want to publish another post without it.

How to Build More Profit into Your Business

Today was a very early day, but I got to talk about “How to Build More Profit into Your Business” with about 125 viewers. WordSesh started at 00:00 UTC, which was 8pm here on the East Coast. My slot was 10:00 UTC, so I was up at 4am for my 6:00 time. The live talk went faster than my practice session yesterday, so I may edit what I did yesterday and post it in place of this live recording later.

You can grab a copy of my slides or just flip through them on my SpeakerDeck page: http://speakerdeck.com/jpetersen/wordsesh-2013

Key Points

  • Always be honest.
  • Care about your clients.
  • Sell benefits, not features.
  • Compete on value, not price.
  • Skill > Speed
  • Integrity > Skill

I’m Speaking at WordSesh 2013 LIVE!

I'm Speaking at WordSesh 2013 Live!

This week I got tapped for my first two WordPress speaking engagements. The first one is WordSesh 2013 coming up this Saturday, April 13th at 10:00 UTC (that’s 6:00am for us U.S. Americans). I’ll be presenting “Building Greater Profits into Your WordPress Business.”

The great thing about this, our WordPress community, is that, while there is always going to be someone (or hundreds) of people who know more about something than any single individual, we all bring something unique to the table. That said, it’s my hope that I validate some things you are doing right, shine some light on some areas you maybe hadn’t thought of before – or things you just haven’t had the courage to do or say – and I’ll be available for ongoing discussions long after the presentation.

I’ll be spending time preparing for Saturday and writing about the process afterward for the benefit of those who are asked to present some day and are curious or concerned about how to prepare and present. I’ve said it many times on Twitter: I’m an open book – I don’t have any trade secrets to do what I do.

On Monday I also released Stealth Login Page plugin and it’s nearly up to 600 downloads in its first week, so thank you all for all the positive feedback. Read more here or go check it out at the repository.

Business Baby Steps

You’ve probably heard that the method to eat an elephant is “one bite at a time.” It’s the principle of taking baby steps to accomplish a big thing. Project managers set up milestones and mini goals to gauge progress, celebrate accomplishments, and to avoid getting bogged down looking at the mountain of work. I’ve also heard that rock climbers plan their path and then concentrate on the five to ten feet above them, all the way to the top.

Starting your business is very similar

If you haven’t already quit your job, start small and make your mistakes while you still have a good safety net to fall back on when someone doesn’t pay or you underestimate a quote. I recommend Jon Acuff’s book, Quitter if you’re looking to quit sometime soon to do your own thing.

Figure out how much you want (or need) to make, divide that by the number of hours you can work, and then how many hours of that you can bill for. If you’re doing project pricing, reverse the steps after calculating your need: how long will it take you to do the project and then price according to how much you need to charge over that time. Set up milestones for cash flow if you need to.

An example

I recently sought help for feeling stuck and unable to concentrate on my voluminous list of projects and to-do items. The advice I got back was to cast out thoughts of how productive I usually am and make a daily to-do of no more than 3 items with the 3rd item considered to be a bonus task – if I get to it, great.

Last week, I set out to convert the brilliant code @norcross handed me to redirect login attempts on a WordPress site and turn that code into a plugin that will work for all themes, not just a fix coded into a client’s theme, if needed.

I’ve only written one plugin, and the vast majority of that was done by other friends with experience. This time I wanted to write it. I watched tutorials, practiced for a few hours with things not working and error screens until I got it working. I went step by step with each file to break it down into the readme file, the plugin file, and settings. I broke each of those up into tasks, too. Adding a settings page to the dashboard menu, plugging in the actual function, designing the settings form, etc.

Now, it’s live in the repository and it’s being well-received by the community. I couldn’t have done it if I didn’t break it down into baby steps – Sunday, I finished eating my elephant.

On to my next large herbivore.

What are you breaking down into chunks to achieve? How can I be of assistance?