Events

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

6 Freelance SEOs photo
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!

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

I Hate Sales banner
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.

Anti-Sell – My Freelance Heroes Day Talk

Steve Morgan at FH Day 2019 photoAnti-Sell now has its own dedicated website & blog! Check it out at Anti-Sell.com.

On Thursday I spoke at the incredible Freelance Heroes Day in Wolverhampton, which is an annual one-day conference run by Annie & Ed of the amazing Freelance Heroes community.

My talk was in conjunction with my new book, Anti-Sell – essentially a condensed talk version of the book, giving sales and networking tips to freelancers and small business owners who struggle with (or simply downright hate) sales.

Here’s the link to the slides, plus they’re embedded below:

I was blown away from the feedback following on from my talk. Here’s just a few examples of some of the lovely things people said:

Incidentally, if you’d like me to speak at your event about small business sales/networking, then please do get in touch. You can see my list of past speaking gigs here.

Oh and if you’ve yet to buy the book, go here. It’s available in paperback, Kindle and self-narrated audiobook formats from Amazon, Audible and the iTunes Store.

[Image credit – Steve Folland]

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

My Trip to MozCon 2018 in Seattle!

Steve & Roger MozBot photoWhat a month July was! On Sunday 8th July I flew to Seattle to attend MozCon 2018, having won a VIP ticket in a competition by Moz. My submission was a short story about Roger MozBot (Moz’s brand mascot) discovering a time machine, visiting various points in Moz’s past and potential future. You can read it here! (FUN FACT: I only know of 3 people so far who have found the story’s Easter egg…)

Hightlights of my trip included:

When I got back I blogged my notes from two of the lunch discussion round-tables for a post on State of Digital.

And you can see all my tweets, notes, pics, etc. of MozCon and Seattle here.

I also did a talk at Welsh ICE (my coworking space) as part of their ICE Breaker series, which is when members of the ICE community do a 20-minute talk during Wednesday lunchtimes (formerly known as Friday ICE, which used to be held – no surprise – on Fridays). The guys at ICE videoed it and published it to Facebook Live, which I’ve embedded below! 👇

Become Cardiff SEO Meet’s Site Review Sponsor and Have Your Software Demoed to a Room of Digital Marketers…

Cardiff SEO Meet has some fantastic sponsors, including food sponsors and – as of the next event (our 8th one) – a website sponsor (website coming soon!) and a photo/video sponsor.

Recently however I realised that there’d be a great opportunity for someone to be a site review sponsor too, who’d get all the usual perks (listed below) and – if they’re an SEO software/tool provider – a really good added extra…

What is a site review? How do they work?

Our site reviews are essentially live SEO audits, where we quickly audit a volunteered website in 20-30 minutes, running it through a few different SEO tools and trying to give the website volunteer as much ‘quick win’ info as possible – whether that be related to keyword research, technical SEO, inbound link building, Google Maps optimisation, ecommerce SEO or whatever else is applicable to them/their business/their site. The volunteered site is announced privately to the Meetup group a few days before the event, giving them time to do some homework (if they want to) and come to the event prepared. We take suggestions from the audience on what might be wrong with the site and what they could be doing to get the most out of SEO.

Wanna learn more? I wrote about site reviews in more detail over on State of Digital.

We’ve run site reviews since the 2nd event, so we’ve done 6 in total so far. Only one has been filmed, which I’ve embedded below if you want to get an idea of how they go…

Notes on the video: a) you’ll have to forgive the filmed-on-an-iPhone quality; b) the first one we did was a bit clunky and we ended up veering away from SEO-specific topics in parts – they’ve run a lot more smoothly since then; c) it starts about 3 minutes and 25 seconds in

What do you mean “demoed to a room”…?

Cardiff SEO Meet Bierkeller stage photoWell usually we jump into a variety of tools: so I might run Screaming Frog, take a look at the site’s links using Majestic, etc. etc… and even get some random suggestions from the audience (the best one we’ve had to date is Keyword Shitter – LOL). There’s no particular reason why I choose these tools – I just go with what I already use and know.

But then it hit me: with the site review sponsor, we could showcase an SEO software tool for 5-10 minutes of the site review, giving it extra attention and focus during the audit. So if a technical SEO tool takes the slot then we spend longer looking at technical SEO; if a link analysis tool takes the slot then we spend longer looking at link analysis; you get the picture. And if someone takes the slot, I’ll make sure that we don’t use any of the sponsor’s direct competitors – so if it’s a link analysis tool, we won’t use any other link analysis tools – just the sponsor’s.

Click to read more!