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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'My Client Won't Do - Whiteboard
Friday'

Posted by wilreynolds
One of the most common challenges for web marketers is dealing with clients
(or bosses, etc.) who either ask the impossible of us or don't think we're worth
their time and money. In today's Whiteboard Friday (filmed during October's CEO
swap), Wil Reynolds offers up all the techniques and tips you need to win their
favor, their support, their resources, and their business.






Whiteboard Friday - Wil Reynolds - My Company Won't Do





For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!



Video Transcription


Howdy, Moz fans. This is Wil Reynolds, the CEO of Moz, for this week at least
[Note: This Whiteboard Friday was filmed during October's CEO Swap], and I want
to talk about this quote that we all have said at some point, which is: "My
client or boss won't do." I would like to help you get your boss or your client
to do stuff so that you can then do awesome things. So I'm going to walk you
guys through the way that we kind of do this at SEER.


We specifically had a client call us out and say, "Don't want to build
anything new. Challenge, game on. Can you guys take this stuff we've already
done and not do anything new, don't ask for anymore resources or assets, and
create success for us?" We took that as a challenge. So we said, "You're damn
right we will."


So this is what we did. First thing you do when you're trying to get someone
to adopt content marketing, inbound, whatever it is they've been saying no to,
look at what they've already done. Start with their old assets. There are two
ways you can go about finding these.


First, you can find them online. Super easy. Look at their old e-mail
campaigns. What kind of things were they promoting in those e-mails? Are they
consistently promoting in those e-mails? If you look over time, you'll get an
understanding for what it is they're trying to promote. There's usually some
gold in there in terms of understanding the old assets that they had built and
promoted in the past.


The other thing is use your Moz tools. Open Site Explorer, you can see what
content they've built that has already taken off and gotten social shares and
links on its own naturally, even if they didn't promote it. Followerwonk. Who's
following them? So who is following them online that might work at some of their
target trade publications that they're interested in getting into or some of the
other larger news outlets that they might be interested in?


New link notifications. Obviously, there's just the Just Discovered Links
beta. It is sitting there telling you that old stuff potentially gets new links.
So what you're not doing is asking to build anything new. You're just starting
off by finding out some of the things they've already done.


Continuing on that path. Marketers who sometimes can't get things done in
organizations love to build microsites, and then they leave and they go to some
other company. No one in the company remembers that campaign that they put
together on that Tumblr site or whatever site it may be.


So shout out to Annie Cushing who told me about Reverse Internet. Reverse
Internet, simple tool. You go there, ReverseInternet.com, put in your domain. It
will tell you other sub-domains that exist on that server. It'll also tell you
things like where else the Google Analytics code has been placed for that
company. That will help you discover old assets that the company maybe had done
at some point and is no longer supporting. The beauty is then you can find if
they've got links or not, and then you can start to promote them or repurpose
those links in some way.


Misspelled domains. So Allie O'Brien and I came up with this one for one of
our clients. What we basically did is we went into Google Analytics and looked
all the different, it's not 100% "not provided" yet. But we took all the
misspellings of their brand name as some of the individual keywords. What we
were able to do is realize, "Oh, my God. These are the most popular misspellings
of our domain. I wonder if anybody has ever linked, to the client, with the
wrong domain? Not everybody checks their links."


Sure enough, we found about 54 linking root domains where people had linked
to the wrong site. Some of them were our friend, the girl with the backpack and
the blonde that we see on every like landing page. Yeah, some of them were even
to that.


So we found people that were trying to link to my client and just made the
mistake of linking to the wrong site. They didn't have to do anything. We found
it for them and created value.


The last thing is Image Raider. Hannah from Distilled told me about this a
long time ago. The beauty is that you can take things like the client's logo.
You can take custom images that they've procured. Image Raider will just tell
you when somebody has copied them somewhere on the Web.


The beauty of that is now you're finding people who have copied your stuff.
Start a relationship, start a dialogue. Maybe they haven't linked, maybe they
have. Either way, go work with them, start a relationship or re-spark a
relationship.


Finding things offline. So we have clients all the time that have done
studies, and they're sitting somewhere on a shelf that they've done and no one
is using them for online. Yet they have talked about them in other places. We
also find that clients have grants and scholarships and things like that that
they've always been doing. They just don't exist online.


That's just a matter of asking clients some questions to uncover from them
what have they been doing in their business, because they might not be doing
inbound yet, but they have been doing some kind of marketing. As you unearth
what they've done and ask those questions, you will inevitably find things that
they've been doing.


You can always look at their subject matter experts. I've got to kind of go
online for that with GPlusData.com. So GPlusData is a tool that basically you
can sort by people's followership on Google+. But you can do that by employer.
If the employer is large enough, they won't even know the people inside their
own company who are really active on Google+ who have a lot of followers who can
help to push and promote their old assets.


Obviously, as well here, we've got speaking. You want to know where people
are speaking in the company if it's like a B2B and they're going out to
different conferences and speaking. Easy way to say, "Oh, well you're speaking
at these events and these conferences. Let's make sure we understand how to get
some link value out of you going to those conferences."


So now that you've kind of indexed the old assets, you've got to promote them
somewhere. So what you can do is you can just look at the things you've promoted
or the assets you've got. See if they've already got links. See if they've got
social movement.


I did this for Starbucks. Not a client, but I took their domain and dropped
it into Reverse Internet and found out that they had a Hawaii microsite that had
built hundreds and hundreds of linking root domains, and somebody there just
pulled it down. They didn't say, "Hey, maybe we should actually try to redirect
that somewhere. Maybe we should put content up."


Also look at who's commenting on your blog. It's funny how we'll often look
out and try to create new relationships when we're not looking at the people who
already love us and comment on our blogs. So, if you've got assets that are
making all this stuff happen, then you can just pay for links. I mean you can
pay for exposure, because you're not going to buy links. The beauty is that
people have already linked, commented, and shared these things socially. So you
already have proof that people actually like this stuff. You found it all.


So now what you can do is you can use networks like -- not link networks --
content exposure promotion networks, like Outbrain, Taboola. You can even use
Twitter.


You can use newsletters in the industry. So often I don't think that we will
pay for exposure in a newsletter, because we're thinking, "There are no links in
the newsletter. Do they put an archive up and link to me with a followed link?"
Wrong way of thinking about it.


If you have an asset that you know at one point people really liked, then you
put it in the newsletter, it's just going to get take again. But you're going to
put in a newsletter of a third party that's in the industry and a trade pub.
Those guys are always looking for money. Negotiate them down, put your asset in
their newsletter, and you'll be amazed at how all of a sudden you're going to
start to be building links off of this.


I'm going to talk about this for our Distilled friends at Distilled London.
SEER invested about $10,000 in testing out some of these networks, and I want to
share with you what we found. But I will tell you this. One infographic we had
done for our client picked up almost 35 links in a month by spending about $100
on Taboola.


So now that you've gotten the old assets, you've promoted the new ones, in a
larger organization, you've started to actually prove yourself. So now they're
willing to do some RCS. So it's like "Great. Now we can actually pitch some new
stuff. We've got a lot of things in the hopper."


Your client is starting to see movement. They're seeing links being built.
There's proof that you actually know what you're talking about and that you're
creating opportunity.


Another thing about promoting assets is, once in a while, a client can't talk
about competitors on their site. So a tip from Rand, the Rand that's in Philly
right now running SEER, is optimizing a listing that talks about you positively
that might be ranked somewhere on the first five or so and try to build links to
that and move it up. So smart. It's funny, I've known that guy for eight years
and I think I've heard him say that before, but it just sunk in like two weeks
ago. So I'm going to keep trying to trumpet that for Rand.


Now that you can pitch new stuff and do some RCS, you've got to think about
who controls the purse strings? Who's going to care the most about this? Because
if all your pitches, especially in a larger enterprise, are going to a marketing
manager, they may not always be able to get the buy-in, even though they agree
with what you're trying to do. So let's make it easy for them.


See, this whole process is about making things easy for your marketing
contact. Find their old stuff, promote their old stuff. Now, let's make sure
that for our new stuff, it's going to resonate when they bring it up the food
chain.


First thing, understand what the CEO and C-level execs are looking for. How
do you do that? You're not going to be able to call them up all the time. If
they're publicly traded, read their 10-K. It will tell you exactly what they
believe the vision of the future is for their business. What's going to happen
in the next quarter? What's going to happen in the next year? How are things
looking year-over-year?


If you can take that information, now you know what the CEO, the CMO are
thinking the future of the company is. So when you go to build RCS, maybe you
should be building it on where they think the future is or where things are
going to go. That information is just sitting there in their 10-K. Read the
executive summary. It usually won't take you more than five minutes. But it will
make sure everything you pitch to your client has a high propensity to resonate
as they bring it up the food chain, which will then get it funded so we can do
fun stuff.


Brand people. If you have a client who's undergone a re-branding recently,
the way that we've been pitching this, specifically, for certain clients is they
spend countless hours, countless hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up
with a new logo and a new brand image. Then what I show those clients is that
people, to the tune of thousands of times a month, are searching for their brand
and the word "logo."


Then I show them the image search results. Very often, shortly after a
re-brand, it's showing people the old brand. So what do you do? You help them
build out pages on their site that actually reflect the new brand. Maybe it's a
story about the brand, maybe it's multiple different versions of the logo.


Why? Because when somebody does a search for their brand, the last thing
these people want to do after a spending a year working on their new brand is to
let the old brand continue to perpetuate. So, of course, they're going to say,
"Oh, right. If you're trying to help us make sure that no one uses the old logo
and the old marketing, we would love to invest in that." It's a great way to use
search to get connected with the brand people. Once the brand people and the
marketing people love you, you'll be amazed at how many things you can actually
push through the funnel that are RCS-style concepts.


PR. PR folks are always, for the most part, looking for exposure. But I
believe we can add a little bit of analysis to that. Looking at Twitter
followers. Understanding using a tool like Twtrland. It will tell you what
someone's most popular tweets are. It will help you to get a feel for what
they're all about. Search for some of these folks in Google News.


Once you get an understanding for who their targets are and what they like to
write about and what resonates best with their audience, you can help these guys
get that much closer to the people they're trying to reach. Super simple.


Last, but not least, something that we've actually found out is cutting
people's costs for their call centers is something that CFOs really like. Call
centers are often looked at as nothing more than an expense. Not necessarily a
place to get across a brand message, even though it can be. I think most
businesses look at it as an expense and a big one.


So what we're doing for a client, this isn't even link-building or SEO. It's
just helping their business out. It's to say every time somebody looks for an
FAQ and calls you, it means the FAQ probably failed. So what we're doing with
one client is we're actually helping them to analyze their FAQs and to see how
many times they're getting calls after somebody has viewed the FAQ.


The CFO is going to love us for that. So is the CMO, so is the CEO. Why?
Because it's just saving them money by using the Web, which is there and where
most people go first to help people get the right answer.


All right. So we've found old assets. We've promoted new ones. We've now got
ideas on how to pitch new stuff. Great.


The last step in any relationship is becoming a trusted adviser. The number
one thing, if you track hours, you are making it very hard to become a trusted
adviser. The reason being, I find that when a client hires you or you're working
in-house or wherever you're working, when you go, "Oh, we're out of time to help
you with that thing you wanted," you start feeling like an agency, not like a
part of the team.


So whether you're an agency or in-house, my recommendation is tracking hours
and telling a client you're going to stop certain things that they really want
you to do because you're out of hours is a bad idea if your goal is to become a
trusted adviser. You can always get those dollars made up later in another
project. Trust me, I've seen it work several times.


Internal documentation. So the other thing you want to do is you want to give
them leave-behinds. Most people would say, "Well, you do that so that your brand
is on the stuff and that people know about you." Well, no. Make your work stand
out so that people know about you.


I like internal documentation because it helps their team have processes to
follow. Very often, in enterprises or large organizations, people say, "Every
time we launch a new this, what are the steps that someone should do at a
minimum every time?" That gives you an opportunity to create that thing that
keeps your direct point of contact from getting that question every single time.


When you can, work onsite. I think either Tom or Will Critchlow were the
first people to mention that to me. But it just makes a ton of sense. When you
are around, your clients or your partners will bring you into meetings that you
may have otherwise not been brought into, which gets you exposure to people who
don't necessarily always know the great work that you're doing.


Training, and I don't mean like charging people for training. Sometime this
week, you might say, "This week we're going to put off this thing that we were
going to do because, instead, what we're going to do is we're going to work on
training your team." People love that. That's an investment that you're making
in their team getting smarter, which means sometimes you might actually work
yourself out of a job if you level up their team, and that's okay because then
you can become part of helping them hire the right replacements for you.


That's how you become a trusted advisor versus just somebody selling a client
on something. We've actually done this. We've helped clients hire and eventually
replace us. What's interesting is, as their company grows, very often they'll
come back to us to help bridge a gap until they can get budget for another hire,
and that is completely okay.


Another thing is going to their conferences. So if you go to search
conferences, MozCon, Distilled, whatever, that's great. But when you're trying
to become a better advocate for your clients, you've got to walk a step in the
shoes of their customer. How are you going to do that?


Ask them what conferences that they go to or that their team goes to and go
to them. You may not need to sit in every session. You might not have to pay the
big costs. But just go around the exhibit hall. See what kind of software is
being sold. Keep an ear out. What kind of problems are the softwares out there
solving? When you do all that, you're going to understand their customer at a
very, very, very deep level, which is how you become a trusted adviser.


I think when you combine all this stuff together, so you're optimizing old
assets, which marketers love, because you're not asking them to spend any more
time at work. You're going to be able to do all of it yourself. You're promoting
these assets, which basically, especially if you use these kinds of outlets,
they don't have to do a lot of work. These sites already exist. You've just got
to get a sign-off on insertion order. Boom. You're rocking and rolling and
helping them to build links.


You're able to pitch your new stuff. You now have the CEO or the CFO or the
CMO loving you because you understand where they're going. Your internal
marketing team is going to love you because every new idea you come to them with
fits the vision of the company.


The brand people are going to love you because you're helping to protect the
logo that they've spent hours and hours on and all their new re-branded
materials. You're helping to protect that and prevent people from perpetuating
their old stuff. The PR team loves you. The CFO loves you.


Now that all those people love you, you're going to have an opportunity to
become a trusted adviser to that organization. Just don't screw it up. All
you've got to do is act like you were one of them.


Don't do things based off of hours. Create internal documentation that helps
everybody get better. Work onsite when you can. Spend your time training them.
It doesn't mean you have to have new hours. It just might mean that you change
something for a week or two.


You want to help them in hiring if that's what they need. That's okay. Be
there to help them in that process. Go to their conferences and understand their
clients' needs. And you, my friends, will get a seat at the larger marketing
table.


Thank you so much, and I guess I'll be back in Philly next Friday. I hope I
do this again soon. Thanks.



Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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