MOM Shortlisted for 2 Awards in the EU Search Awards 2021

EUSA21 Finalist BadgeI am incredibly, incredibly proud to announce that my freelance businessMorgan Online Marketing – is a double-finalist in the European Search Awards 2021, as you can see on their 2021 Shortlist page.

I’m a finalist in two categories – “Best Use of Search – Third Sector/Not for Profit” and “Best Low Budget Campaign (SEO) (Small)” – for my work with the charity Settled.

Settled is an independent charity providing information, advice and support to EU citizens in the UK. I worked with them this time last year (Q1 2020), giving recommendations on how they could further optimise their website for UK-based EU nationals who are searching for information related to the EU Settlement Scheme (a.k.a. Settled Status) – especially those who might be in vulnerable circumstances.

Without sounding too cheesy, it was an absolute honour to work on the project – and I’m delighted that not only was I able to help a charity to meet and surpass its goals, but that my work has been shortlisted twice in a highly-recognised industry awards.

Big love goes to Carl Morris, who introduced me to the project. Thanks also to Chris Lake of Vestd, who kindly took a look at my entry form and gave pointers.

The winners will be announced on Thursday 27th May 2021. Keep your fingers crossed for me yeah? 🤞

Advice for SEO Freelancers – My brightonSEO Oct 2020 Talk

Last Friday, I gave a talk at brightonSEO October 2020, the first time it’s been hosted online (as a result of lockdown). It was my third time speaking at bSEO (here are the links for the first two).

My talk – titled “Going Solo – The Survival Guide for Freelance SEOs (Present & Future)” – gave advice to aspiring, new, and established freelancers, which – during these difficult times – I’m hoping would’ve been useful to a lot of people.

If you missed it live, you’ll need a ticket in order to watch the talk back. However, I can share with you the slides and the talk’s transcript, which I’ll share below…

…But first:

Other freelancers give their tips

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To complement the talk, I asked six other SEO freelancers for their tips. The original plan was to include their tips within the presentation, but with a strict 20-minute timeframe, it just wasn’t doable. So what I did instead is published their tips in full over on the Anti-Sell blog.

Slides

So here are the slides:

Talk transcript

And here is the transcript (which I got by using Otter.ai):

Click to read more!

How to Get SEO Clients (Anti-Sell Style)!

As per my previous post, I recently launched a separate, dedicated blog for all things Anti-Sell, over on Anti-Sell.com.

One of the posts is likely to be of interest to SEOs, which is why I’m signposting it here as well…

How to Get SEO Clients (in a Non-Salesy Way) gives 15 ‘techniques’ for acquiring SEO clients – whether you’re a freelancer or an agency – with sprinkles of tactical ideas and suggestions throughout. As a freelance SEO consultant myself, the vast majority of the techniques and tactics are things that I’ve done myself in order to get new SEO clients – and if there are one or two I’ve not done, then I know other SEOs who have. There’s a bunch of SEO-specific examples throughout as well.

Examples include:

  • Going to non-SEO meetups (yep, you read that right),
  • Running your own [something],
  • Contributing to Facebook groups,
  • Taking part in Twitter Q&A chats (e.g. #SEMrushchat),
  • And more!

Either click the link above or the banner below to see it.

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Happy Anti-Selling, folks. Enjoy!

Introducing… Anti-Sell, the Dedicated Website & Blog

Long-time visitors to SEOno will have probably worked out by now that I don’t post about SEO much anymore. And that I sometimes use SEOno as a dumping ground for other types of posts: namely those related to Anti-Sell (my book), such as freelancing and networking.

Well… I’ve had lots more ideas for Anti-Sell-themed posts, so I decided to do the logical thing: anti-sell.com is now its own website! 🥳

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As it says on the homepage, I have plans for a variety of content: more networking tips, guest posts, more case studies and Anti-Sell Stories… It made sense to give it its own space rather than add them all to SEOno.

It’s been a while since I launched a new site of my own (the last one TechEvents.Wales, which was back in January 2018 IIRC). It went relatively smoothly, although all the pages’ rel="canonical" tags pointed back to the (now non-existent) test sub-domain’s pages, so I’m glad I caught that issue quickly…! 😆

Given that it’s my newest distraction project, I can’t promise that I’ll be posting any SEO posts for a while… However, one of the first posts I have planned for it is a guide on how SEOs can get more clients – so there is a bit of tie-in I guess. And I plan to target some high-volume keywords with some of the posts, so who knows – maybe it’ll make an interesting case study one day as well.

Anyway… If you’d like to write a guest blog post for it, get in touch. There’s also its own Write For Us page which has some rules and guidelines on it.

As I say at the end of the book: Happy Anti-Selling, folks.

Online Networking (Anti-Sell Style)! My Cardiff Met Centre for Entrepreneurship Webinar Talk

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Anti-Sell now has its own dedicated website & blog! Check it out at Anti-Sell.com.

Hello! So… I was meant to give a networking workshop to a bunch of Cardiff Metropolitan University students around mid-to-late March, but then this whole Coronavirus/COVID-19 happened (you might’ve heard of it!), soo inevitably we had to cancel. But the lovely folks at Cardiff Met’s Centre for Entrepreneurship asked if I wanted to do a webinar instead – with (understandably) a focus on online networking tactics rather than offline/face-to-face ones. If you saw my Anti-Sell talks at either Freelance Heroes Day 2019, or Swansea Digital Marketing towards the end of last year, it’s an adapted version specific to the things we can do during our current situation – a ‘lockdown edition,’ if you will.

During the hour-ish-long webinar, I give tips on:

  • What types of online networking opportunities exist – some obvious, some less-so,
  • Why you should target ‘semi-related’ groups/communities instead of just directly-related groups/communities, and what I mean by that,
  • How to remove (or at least reduce) the nerves that can come with participating in something online for the first time, e.g. a webinar or Facebook group,
  • How running or creating your own thing (rather than just ‘attending’ things) puts you in so much more of a visible position – and takes things further,
  • How you should ask for testimonials (i.e. where and how you should try to acquire them),
  • Why you should always try to remain calm, professional and respectful towards others,
  • Aaand a bunch of other stuff.

The folks at the Centre for Entrepreneurship recorded it, passed the recording onto me, and gave me their blessing to publish it publicly on YouTube – big thanks to Hannah, Steve and Lyndsey!

Here are the slides on SlideShare as well:

As an aside, I’m eagerly looking to do more webinars, podcast interviews, written/blog interviews, etc. at the moment – so if you know anyone looking for a guest/speaker/whatever (delete as appropriate), please let them know about me. As thanks I’ll send a free copy of the book to whoever helps me to land something (a free PDF copy for now, and then a free paperback copy as well once the lockdown has been lifted). Check out my speaking page for info, testimonials, past speaking gigs and more.

The talk is in line with Anti-Sell, the ‘sales guide for people who hate sales’ which I self-published last year. Learn more about it here.

Anti-Sell now has its own dedicated website & blog! Check it out at Anti-Sell.com.