At least. Which is a pretty good piece of pocket money. I suspect even Warren Buffet would slow down to pick that up.

I attribute this to SEO because even thought it was a change in business process coupled with good SEO that made it happen it could not have happened without SEO.

Fair warning to people looking for "advanced" techniques - they ain't here. But what I'm going to talk about is a LOT more valuable than a trick that may or may not work with Google next week or next year.

Best Ever YouMoz Article

Let's look at the real money quote that J Kelly Garrett put in his amazingly excellent SEO article at YouMoz. This piece of advice will serve you while you climb up the value chain from a specialist to a trusted business advisor:

I took the pile [of papers, documentation, etc], pushed it aside, and asked him [the business owner] to tell me about himself. This is a common technique of mine, whether it is a small business owner, or the Chairman of the Board for Burlington Northern Railroad.

He wasn't asking to hear about the guy's soccer team, he wanted to get the gestalt around the company. What is important about the environment, goals, challenges, employees, culture, customers, etc, etc, etc.

It's Not About the Technology

Really, it's not. Not even in SEO. I wasn't about the technology in OO programming. It wasn't about the technology in robotics. It wasn't about the technology during the dang moon shots either.

It's about how the technology serves the business and makes it more successful. Sometimes 'success' means one or more of:

• Improved profit
• Increased revenue
• Decreased risk
• Stronger resilience
• Faster new product introduction
• and on and on...

But if the technology isn't in service to the goals of the business then it will eventually fail.

The $2M Piece of Advice

I know exactly when I finally understood this. No kidding.

I left one job as a consultant making $55/hour doing NeXTStep programming (hey, that was LOT of money back then) and got another one making $75/hour. The had two slots to fill - lead programmer ($50/hour) and technology business advocate ($75/hour).

For some reason, don't know why, during the interview I was homing in on the business objectives of the billing audit system they were building. I kept asking about change management (people, not source!), about deployment, about disruption, etc, etc.

Next thing I knew I was walking about into the freezing flipping cold in Chicago holding onto a 50% raise. Bubba, you don't get too many of those.

If you work that out - 48 weeks a year, 40 hours a week, 40 work years in a lifetime - you find out that that change in focus gets you a $1,920,000 raise.

Actually, it's even more than that because you keep the advantage while you march up the food chain.

Back to The SEO Example

What really struck me about Garrett's example was that the business took the fairly traditional and predictable approach of getting some SEO guys to graft web and SEO onto a traditional "ring and pitch" business.

The SEO guys put together a campaign that generates 2,500 leads and it kills the guy because:

• ROI goes from "signup" to 2 years.
  
• "He is looking at ROIs that should apply to heavy machinery and commercial aircraft."
• Growth rate drops from 19% to 3% because of process issues:
• "growth rate has plummeted from 19% per year to 3% per year because he is in the office answering the phone all the time with close rates of 12% [down from 97%]"
  

Actually, there were a lot of issues, but those are the two killers. Look at what happened - his profits got pushed out a year from acquisition AND instead of looking at an yearly "takehome" increase of $67,032 he was seeing an increase of $10,584. That is an opportunity cost of over $55K!

You can go broke quickly making money that way.

Do the math

I'm just going to quote Garrett's point in toto because it sums up the whole problem so neatly:

SEO Firm Declares “Success.” The PPC campaign is bringing in over 2500 hits per month. Closing the sales is not really their job. They just need to work with the business owner to further tweak everything to bring in more hits. “Obviously” the copywriting needs work to further capture the ones that do get there, or there is something wrong with the business, or whatever...but we are getting people to the site. Just wait till the site starts to rank higher with the search engines!

Remember, the owner is now going broke pretty quickly, has sunk a fair bit of capital into the new venture AND is probably pretty much apoplectic. In fact, if he's like any dial-and-smile salesguy I know, physical and financial threats are probably in the offing.

What's the Solution?

I won't repeat the meat of the article but basically Garrett becomes and advisor and helps the owner re-engineer his business so that he goes back to ROI on close. But most importantly the business growth goes back up to the previous 19% and then all the way up to 28%.

So, back to the math - previous to the first campaign the owner was looking at a yearly "raise" of $67K based on growth. The slap-on-SEO campaign took him down to a $10K raise. The SEO+BPR campaign took him to a $98K yearly raise. Thus the title of this post because the SEO catalyzed a $31,752 additional raise.

I'd like to read a lot more articles like this, and I hope he keeps writing.

This is a really interesting question.  The two primary places I go to learn tips and tricks in the SEO world are the guys over at SEOMoz (disclaimer: we subscribe) and Aaron Wall of SEOBook fame.  Ok, I have a bit of a crush on John Chow's business model and I think ShoeMoney, Dosh Dosh and a buncha others are awesome too.

Tools with Content the Key

But Rand and Aaron are also tool providers.  But they're pretty clearly tool providers who are monetizing other products - exclusive content, a book, whatever.  It's not that they don't have very nice tools, but from the outside it looks to me as if SEOMoz's tools and free content drives their subscription model.  I think Aaron is pretty much upfront that he sells his SEOBook.

Opposite Way Around

We have content to bring in tool users. We have "free" tools to sell, well, tools.  Let me show you why, using SEOMoz's recently published traffic stats:

Rand was using this chart to talk about the importance of long tail, but we look at this and think: the people looking for SEO tools are exactly our target market.  I think it's great he can monetize people typing in "what is SEO" and "seo" but we think that the orange boxed "tools" queries are more to our liking.  This doesn't put us at loggerheads with SEOmoz (what is Turkish for stupid?) because our tools are aimed at very specific vertical markets.

For example, SEOMoz's page strength tool is really quite cool.  So we'd not really try to reproduce that (what would be the point, really?) but we might create a page analyzer tool for, say, mobile focused websites.

Vertical Focus Drives Actionability

One of our annoying habits is that we look at ideas and say:

So, what can you DO with it?

Take the Digg Friend Finder as an example - it's blindingly obvious what you can do with that.  Ditto the Backlink PInger.  Who do we know?  Well, as i mentioned, only around 10% of the users have bothered to read the directions for Digg Friend Finder....  If I hadn't started our my career, back in the days of punch cards, as a technical writer I suspect I'd never document anything again.

Actionable Tasks Should Provide ROI

Great, so you can DO something with these tools - what does it buy you?  Again, by focusing on a specific niche we provide that ROI.  Could we have built a Friend Finder that worked for MySpace, Facebook, Mixx, etc, etc?  Probably.  But it was not clear to us that we could provide an architecturally compliant application that provided TOS compliant ROI.  So we didn't.  Simple is good sometimes.

Bias Toward Action

It may be all the startups under our belts (and all the worthless stock options in the file cabinet!) but we're most interesting in things that do stuff.   Content is great, and we produce a bit and consume a lot.  But you have to translate content into action, either manually (horrors!) or by finding a tool or automated service.

Tools are Always Downstream of Content

Would you know to ping your backlinks if a hundred SEO bloggers hadn't talked about how important it is?  Yes, I know we talked about how All Your Backlinks are Pingworthy, but I'm not under any illusion about who gets read first if Sebastain posts something about backlinks the same day I do.

Would you know the value of more digg friends if there hadn't been a LOT of discussion by social media mavens?  Yes, I gave you our take on Efficient Friending on Digg, but....

But once you read the content you can come to us for tools.  Over and over again, we hope.

Not really, but I am famous among my friends for being able to control the stock market by selling (it goes up) or buying (it goes down). So today I signed up for a month of premium content from SEOMoz and....

Clearly I need to use this newfound power to take Matt's blog down....

All kidding aside, this was a good reminder for me to double-check our hosting company's alerts and make sure that they're pointing at the right cell phones!

I'm hoping this was (a) planned and I missed the notice, or (b) a minor hosting issue!

UPDATE: They're back up!