DEDICATION - Thanks to Megan Williams for believing in this content, following through with the hard work of editing, and getting this thing organized. Thanks to Nathan, A.J., Curtis and many others for making the book look great. Thanks to our wonderful internet marketing customers for giving us their trust. I II CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v INTRODUCTION vii 1. WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN WTC 3 2. OUR WTC WEB MARKETERS 14 3. WEBSITE 29 4. TRAFFIC 110 5. CONVERSION 198 III IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing WTC was not a two-man project. It took a dedicated group of people to strategize, prepare, and execute the content found within its pages. The concepts in WTC span the web as a whole, and deciding what to include and what to mention was challenging. The group effort of myself, Zach Ball, and Megan Williams proved to be an effective combination. Zach Ball was instrumental in the development of the concepts of the book. He and I strove to develop an internet marketing concept that was relevant to the web and to our readers. We also tried to develop a simple, teachable format. We both decided what to include, what not to include, and how to organize it. Megan Williams agonized over every sentence and helped define and position the concepts presented in WTC. Her careful editing has turned this amateur book into something worth reading. Making the book look like something worthwhile was the work of Nathan Smith, A.J. Ogden, and Curtis Hemmert. Finally, thanks to all of our clients who brought their internet marketing problems to us and have trusted us to help them find solutions. -Jon Ball, June 2014 V VI INTRO OUR STORY In April 2009, my wife and I sat in bankruptcy court in Santa Ana, California. After conceding my assets and asking for mercy from creditors, my lawyer gave me a twenty-dollar bill so I could buy lunch. This was definitely a low point in my life. Later that day, I sat in my chair, looked out the window, and wept. I knew I was going to have to give up my passion: photography. The photography industry changed forever with the proliferation of digital cameras and the explosion of cheap alternatives. My wife and five children needed more than photography could provide. While I knew I could never give up photography as a hobby, I also knew that my life as a professional portrait photographer was over. In 1998, I graduated from Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California. After graduation, I moved my family of three back to my hometown of Boise, Idaho to start Jon Ball Photography. Art school taught me how to think critically about composition, exposure, and the overall feel of photography, but it did a terrible job of teaching me how to make money off of these skills. In other words, I brought an incredibly refined photographic technique back to Boise, but no business skills. I knew nothing about marketing, merchandising, pricing, accounting, or sales. Luckily, I tend to be ambitious. I read many books about business. Through trial and error, I learned how to market and sell my portraits. In 2005, I sold Jon Ball Photography and moved my family of six down to Southern California to purchase the most prestigious portrait studio in the country, Charis Portraiture. Unfortunately, I stepped right into the worst economic downturn in 25 years and the dissolution of the portrait industry. * After my 2009 bankruptcy, I moved back to Boise with the hope of making money in another industry. With this idea in mind, my brother Zach and I went golfing. Boise isn’t normanlly a good place to golf in January. But in January 2010, the weather was fair and sunny. My brother had just graduated from Boise State University with a degree in political science with an emphasis on secondary education. He had completed his time as a student teacher and was ready to move forward with getting a job in the area. The job market was VII difficult, but he was prepared to become a teacher. As we golfed, Zach revealed that he had other dreams. He wanted to build his own company and work for himself. The Ball family has had a long history of entrepreneurship, and he wanted to follow the call when the right chance came along. We didn’t know it at the time, but the right chance was that unusually sunny day in January. Zach told me his idea for a job search kit while we were teeing off the 9th hole. I didn’t see what we had to lose. I didn’t want my brother to give up on his dream, so I said, “Let’s do it!” The next Monday, Zach showed up at my house and we made the plan. Our “job search kit” would take the form of a book. We’d write this book together, each taking our own sections, and then sell it online. We thought if we could sell 1,000 copies per month, we’d each make $10,000 every month, which sounded good. Zach spent the next two months going to the Boise Public Library to write. I wrote, too. Two months later, we had Seize the Job. We finally published our book: our fifty-page, comprehensive, easy-to-follow plan designed to help job seekers find the right position. The book was a flop. We sold one copy. We had a one-page website that received traffic from a couple of commercials we ran in Springfield, Missouri. This experience taught us that getting traffic and selling stuff online was much more difficult than we thought it would be. The week after the commercials ran and nothing happened, the money ran out. We needed a new idea − one that seemed foolproof. Zach’s wife worked as a dental assistant. He saw the dental newsletters that dentists gave to their patients, and thought it would be a great idea to start writing and publishing them. Zach started working every day in my home office. He’d drive the 15 miles each morning at 8:00 AM and sit at his desk. We’d write lists of things we had to do. As a result of our dedication and organization, we wrote and produced 10 different dental newsletters. We knew nothing about dentistry, but we believed that if we wanted to do something badly enough, we could do it. I knew from my experience in portraiture that getting customers was the most vital part of any operation, so we discussed how we would attract attention to our product. We realized that if we could get our website to rank highly in Google for the search term “Dental Newsletters,” we would get traffic and eventually we could sell our newsletters. This realization began the odyssey that continues to this day. We purchased SEO for Dummies and read the entire book out loud. It’s a behemoth at 700+ pages. We worked assiduously on the website and its SEO properties. We found this much more rewarding than writing the newsletters themselves! After three months of effort, our site ranked on page one for “Dental VIII Newsletters.” The phone started ringing and we started to try to make sales. What we didn’t know at the time was that the dental newsletter industry had just gone through a major surge and was dead. No one wanted the fancy dental newsletters we ranked so highly for. We had already booked a dental trade show in Denver, Colorado in January 2011 and were prepared to go with our newsletters, even if no one wanted to buy them. But when Zach came to work on December 17th, he suggested that we sell SEO at the trade show instead. As you can imagine, shifting gears in two weeks was difficult, but when the trade show rolled around we had brochures, pricing, and a very basic website detailing our services. Three days and hundreds of conversations later, we had one customer! It only took 12 months. We booked other dental trade shows. Each trade show seemed successful, but when three trade shows passed and no one signed up for our services, things were looking bleak again. While we studied SEO, we found that the most important part of SEO was a process called “link building.” We knew what it was − getting other sites to link to your site − but had no idea how to do it. We noticed that there was a distinct lack of quality link building services in the SEO community and started talking about transitioning from dental SEO to link building. On a particularly low week for our new business in May 2011, I took a walk with my wife near a canal close to our home. I knew very little about link building, but I told her that it was our future. She wanted to know more about link building, but I had faith that Zach and I could take what we had learned about business and apply it to link building. Zach and I studied, agonized, fought over, and discussed link building for hours. We hired a link building trainer, Eric Ward. He talked to us over the phone for 10 hours about the philosophies and methods of link building. In August 2011, we went to an SEO trade show in San Francisco and started to talk about link building. We left with three customers. Thrilled, we went to other trades shows, which led to even more customers. I started to speak on the subject at SEO conferences, and the business surged ahead.