Just a quick post to say that my SEO consulting business – morganonlinemarketing.co.uk (or “MOM” for short) – is celebrating its second anniversary today, as I officially started my journey into self-employment on Tuesday 7th May 2013.
There’s a lot of people to thank, especially the community up at Welsh ICE for their on-going support as well as my parents (who run Computer Recruiter and Los Locos Beach). I have some exciting things planned for the coming years, so stay tuned…
I actually have some spare capacity for the first time in around 12-18 months, so if you’d like to work with me then please get in touch. I have some nice testimonials (many of which you can also see on my LinkedIn profile) and I’m told that I charge extremely reasonable rates for the standard of service that I provide, which is very nice. đ
Last year marked my first Christmas as a self-employed freelancer with my own clients… which meant that I approached the whole idea of sending out Christmas cards in very much of an “oh F*@K!” manner: I hastily bought a box of cards, wrote in them in my hilariously horrendous handwriting using a dark green biro (to match my business’ branding) and fired them off to my clients’ postal addresses.
It was a sucky effort.
Even before December 2013 rolled by, I had the idea of doing something different… something special in place of traditional Christmas cards. Now I ain’t no fancy designer, so creating a slick, physical, deliverable item was out of the question. I always liked the idea of doing something that involved an online/digital element though.
This year, I put more thought into it and created Christmas e-cards in the form of custom landing pages on the morganonlinemarketing.co.uk website, which took on two different aspects…
Type 1 – Individual e-cards for clients & other folk
So, as mentioned above, the main aspect of the e-cards took the form of custom landing pages for individual recipients. They’re all orphaned pages (meaning that nothing else is linking to them, internally or externally) and they’ve also been noindexed, meaning that they won’t be picked up by the search engines.
Here’s an example of one. Each one contains a personalised message to the recipient – which beats having a generic message across the board.
(Click to enlarge)
So far I’ve created about 20 of them. Beyond clients, they’ve also gone to people who’ve referred me work and who have done me favours or helped me out over the past year. I can also quickly knock one up if someone sends me a card or e-card, so I can potentially avoid that awkward moment that can happen where someone sends you one and you don’t get chance to send one back. Quite handy.
Type 2 – The "welsh ice bauble" challenge…
I also created another e-card page, but this one wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular. It had a secret, ‘Easter egg’ quality to it (and no, I’m not getting my holiday seasons mixed up)…
I wanted to follow suit, so I decided to create a page for it – similar to the above individual/client e-cards – except that this one could be indexed by Google…
For my bauble, I coloured it orangey-gold and drew green lines on it (to try and match the revised logo – the star of the tree) and stuck a label on it with a Google logo and the phrase: "welsh ice bauble"
If you’ve ever read any of my posts and thought “hey, this stuff ain’t half bad!” then I’d really appreciate your vote. It only takes about 30 seconds to do.
I gave a talk to the mighty unified.diff crowd a few weeks ago. Click here for slides, photos and even a video of the whole thing! I’m pretty proud of my talk, which took on a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ format (for those of you who are familiar with the books)…
Contributions on other sites
I’ve been interviewed! I talk about SEO, how I got my start in the industry and my approach to consulting.
One year ago today, on Tuesday 7th May 2013, I took the plunge. I thought I’d mark the occasion of my freelance SEO & PPC business’ 1st birthday by answering a question I’ve been asked a few times by a fair few people: why “Morgan Online Marketing?”
First things first though… One year. Wow. It’s flown by. I’d like to take this opportunity to say: to the person who told me that “[I] wouldn’t last a day in self-employment,” not only did I prove you wrong, but I’ve done so 365 times over. How do you like that? Thanks for driving and inspiring me.
Anyway, now that that’s off my chest… Back to the name. I’ve had a range of feedback, from people telling me it’s strong and respectable, to a local business advisor simply declaring “nah, not sexy enough…” when he first heard it (which pissed me off at the time, but now, looking back, I just find it really funny).
Now I ain’t no fancy branding expert, but I put a lot of thought into the name. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I came up with it, but when I did, I decided that it’d stick – that I wouldn’t be changing it. Here’s a few thoughts on why I went with it…
Why not SEOno?
The first thing someone said to me was: why didn’t I call my business “SEOno” after this very blog? After all, the blog had been around for years before and some people (him included) see SEOno as my ‘brand.’
Just a quick post to say that my SEO consulting business – morganonlinemarketing.co.uk (or “MOM” for short) – is celebrating its second anniversary today, as I officially started my journey into self-employment on Tuesday 7th May 2013.
