Louey's Journal

If any coders read this, roughly how long does it take to go from knowing nothing about coding to be able to code a basic HTML website?

I know there are about 1,000,000 variables that have to be considered to answer that question but for someone who knows the enough coding to change the format of a wordpress article and can put 10 or so hours a week into it, is it closer to 1 year or 3 months?

Everything I'm reading at the moment about SEO is putting a HUGE emphasis on website speed and that kind of speed only comes with a straight HTML site. Got to get off wordpress...
 


Much closer to three months. And if you're an intelligent fellow, much less. You won't be a whizz but you'll be proficient enough to hack together a few sites.
 
That's awesome. I'll start by downloading a few templates then work my way through some manuals to see if I can make sense of it.

Thanks guys.
 
Just landed in a very new situation and I'm not sure how to handle it. If you've got any advice, let me have it.

I've starting doing inbound marketing consulting for a local software development company. They had a large client who needed marketing help and as software dev, not marketing is their area of expertise, they got me in to do it.

I've designed the new website and as part of that process, started having direct communication with their client.

Today, the client called me up and asked me to work directly with them, outside of the existing contract they have with the software development company.

Moral dilemma: Do I tell the software dev guys about this or just submit my proposal to the client?

Just to be clear, the proposal I'm sending won't in any way effect the work I'm currently doing with the Software dev team. It'll be a completely separate project that won't involve software at all. Just marketing.

I want to do right by the software dev guys but I also don't want to land the client in hot water for appearing to go behind the software dev teams back.

What would you do?

NOTE: I live in a small country town where you can't afford to fuck people around and make a bad name for yourself.

NOTE 2: Just writing this has made it pretty clear, I need to tell the software dev team but make it clear it's work that's not in their scope at all.

NOTE 3: Still keen to hear what you guys would do.
 
The client asked me submit a proposal, including a retainer, and I had no idea what to send or really what a retainer was so found this two bits of useful information.

Check them out if you're as confused as I am.

http://www.redmudmedia.com/2013/02/14/seo-retainer-rates/

SEO-cost_1.png
 
Louey, glad I could jump in here and help, your "10 Google Analytics" link was super helpful.

So, retainer. It differs each client for me, based on a few things:

- Relationship
- On-going work
- Client Calls
- My hourly rates

All of these factors combine to provide an estimate of time I will be considered available for work / consulting monthly / quarterly / annually

Bonus: Be weary of anything longer than 3 months. Many times projects evolve, and you can easily be taken advantage of out of sheer negligence.

I've used Bidsketch for years, and if you're doing freelance work, you'll need to have almost every document they provide. Here's a proposal: Free SEO Proposal Template

Now, to answer your moral problem above, the simple answer is communicate. The situation is mutually beneficial since many times during contract SEO you'll find you need to make changes that...dev's are perfect for.

That should do for now,

my best.
 
Thanks mate. Appreciate the response.

I've just finished chatting with the dev team and we've come up with a solution that should work out.

I'll check out those forms. That's definitely something I have no idea about. Much appreciated.
 
Louey37 said:
<...>

What would you do?
<..>
NOTE 2: Just writing this has made it pretty clear, I need to tell the software dev team but make it clear it's work that's not in their scope at all.

NOTE 3: Still keen to hear what you guys would do.
Click to expand...

Exactly that.

Tell them what the project is and make it clear that you'll throw stuff in their area of expertise their way.

And do so..

::emp::
 
emp said:
Exactly that.

Tell them what the project is and make it clear that you'll throw stuff in their area of expertise their way.

And do so..

::emp::
Click to expand...

Building off what EMP said above. At the very least you should send the software Dev. company a thank you letter for referring the business. Depending on your relationship with the software company you could also throw them a $$ kickback.
 
Thanks for the feedback guys. It's a pretty delicate situation given the town I live in only has 6000 people and the guys who run the Dev company are at the heart of the tech community down here.

In the end, I just decided to go with whatever they wanted - refer him back to them - as it wasn't worth burning bridges with the entire tech scene and most of the business community just for one client.
 
Staccs said:
Relevant reading if you want to dig deeper into analytics. I did find it a little long.
Click to expand...

Woah... 507 pages on Analytics? Fuck. I really do know nothing.

What are the main points they push in there? Is it more ideological (mindsets) or practical based (step by steps)? What did you take away?
 
LEARNING LESSON: Customers want more information about free optins

Just learnt a really interesting lesson about optins.

I recently migrated my site to a new host and when I did, for some reason, all the option boxes shat themselves meaning I had to rebuild them.

When I did, my optin rate dropped by 30%. I knew it couldn't be because of the hosting but I couldn't figure out what it was until I started digging through which specific optin boxes had their numbers dropped.

I worked out it was the optin box on the page dedicated to the free optin book I was offering (It had got no optins).

It took me a while to figure out that the reason it wasn't getting any optins is because traffic wasn't getting to the page any more.

Traffic wasn't getting to the page any more because when I rebuilt the optins, I didn't set up the images of the free ebook to redirect to the optin page (they just loaded the image of the book when someone clicked on them).

So, last night I changed the images to link back to the free book page and the optin rate has regained the 30% it dropped.

aXvn39U.png


So, the lesson here is if you've got a free optin bribe you're offering, make sure the customers can click on it and get directed to a sales page giving them more information about what they're downloading.

You could be missing out on 50% optin rate increase.
 
Louey37 said:
Amazing what you find when you dig into stats...

3r6xtsW.png


The most used browser size is also the worst converting by a LONG shot. 4 times worse than desktop size. Good place to start working on conversions...

...
Click to expand...

Weird... what device is that?

So you got two definitive losers, that have a width of 320 pixels.

First I thought the width is a problem, as #4 is converting better than the (current average)...with 360px wide. But then # 10 is a problem again, at the same 360px width.

Tadaaa... height.

Every shittily converting size is under 600px high.

Call to action or some button not on 1st site for those devices?

Edit:
320 by 568 is the iPhone 5
320 by 480 is seen by older Androids a lot (Samsung Galaxy, for example)
360 by 640 is weird... Nokias? e.g Nokia 5230

So this definitely seems to be a mobile problem ... check your site on phones.

::emp::
 
Interesting about having the opt-in lead to an explanation page ... this makes me think that I might like to have a whatever-you-call-it float up window instead of taking them to a new page. Definitely worth testing because getting this info across without a new page switch could possibly raise your conversions even higher.

Have you thought about doing an unpopup box? I'll be experimenting with one soon.
 
emp said:
Weird... what device is that?

So you got two definitive losers, that have a width of 320 pixels.

First I thought the width is a problem, as #4 is converting better than the (current average)...with 360px wide. But then # 10 is a problem again, at the same 360px width.

Tadaaa... height.

::emp::
Click to expand...

Thanks for that mate. You're right there. I'm just starting to really dig into the front end conversions. I just hit #1 for a big keyword yesterday and traffic is soaring. I need to take advantage of this now.
 
ard555 said:
Interesting about having the opt-in lead to an explanation page ... this makes me think that I might like to have a whatever-you-call-it float up window instead of taking them to a new page. Definitely worth testing because getting this info across without a new page switch could possibly raise your conversions even higher.

Have you thought about doing an unpopup box? I'll be experimenting with one soon.
Click to expand...

Could be mate. It's definitely something worth trying. I'll put it on the list and see how it goes.
 
MILESTONE: Just cracked 4000+ visitors in a day! Woot!

M5BtD3M.png


Really interesting to watch this move. The last update pushed traffic from 2500 visitors to 3000 visitors per day and then this jump happened.

It's all coming in on one page. There are two very interesting things about this page:

1. It ranks #4 for a keyword that only gets 1500 exact match searches per month but it pulls in nearly 1100 visitors per day. It's almost entirely long tail searches that I'm not even trying to rank for.

2. The page is actually duplicate content. I ripped it from a forum I was part of, added an introduction, and posted it on my site. I quick search shows up 13,200 copies of the same article on the web yet for some reason, Google's chosen mine to be the authority on this.

Today is traditionally the biggest day for traffic for me so it'll be interesting to see how high it gets.
 
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