Successful SEO depends on two things: The amount of time the SEO has to invest (which often correlates to your budget) and the skills of the SEO doing the work. Without those two things, it's difficult to answer question number one. SEO, and digital marketing, in general, require a lot of skillsets that most people don't have. They have some, but not all. They should, however, be letting you know what activities they are doing and explaining why they are important and what the results should be. As for the second question, there is a lot to do and it's a matter of prioritizing. Ten SEOs will tackle the same project ten different ways, but that doesn't necessarily make any of them wrong. A great resource you can use to understand what an SEO can/should be doing is webmarketingchecklist.com (disclosure: I wrote it.) This will at least give you a place to start an intelligent conversation and set priorities. As for milestones, you need to determine what your goals are. Are you going for sales, leads, traffic or conversions? What are you getting now and what do you hope to achieve. Then have a conversation with your SEO to determine if your expectations are realistic with the time they have to invest.

I would consider every product page on your site a landing page worth driving traffic to. Almost everything you would do to optimize a landing page for performance can be done to your internal site pages. This will 1) help you get better results from your existing pages and 2) save you time from having to optimize multiple pages for the same thing.

A side effect of stress is using up micro nutrients. As certain nutrients exhaust, like cobalt + chromium, this increases stress till a snowball effect can occur... with many... oddball endpoints best avoided. Incarceration + institutionalization come to mind. Meditation is a great tool. Ponder this... If you're alive, everything's truly good. If you're dead, well no use reading further. I manage my stress through quieting my mind + also avoiding any food stressors which accelerate burning micronutrients. Simple guideline. Avoid eating anything with a face or any product from a critter with a face. So no mystery cadaver or cadaver squeezings (dairy). I took a very long step myself. Creating a Super Food company which imports ingredients from all over the world + shipping finished products back out all over the world. No requirement for you to do this. Just locate all the best Super Foods you can find + design your own Super Food brews (fluid based products), till you find the sweet spot of nutrients for your body. This tends to be a life long adventure, once you start, as the cleaner you eat, the more your body + nutrient desires will evolve/refine. Just enjoy your wild ride.

How would you describe this app to a friend? Who would you recommend this app to? If the app wasn't working, what would you use instead? And observation! Just watching people use the app, you can see from their faces/hands which bit is working for them or not. Great to hone in those areas of delight and frustration and ask "you seem frustrated right now, is something not working for you" or the opposite? Do these rather than asking about a magic wand. I worked at the forefront of streaming video and consumers asked for everything and then once they got it, didn't use the features etc. You will find similar stories elsewhere. Share the resource if you find it. Thanks

If I were you, I would launch a Facebook Group. It's the easiest way right now to create a community around your business of people interested in your offering and which contribute to each other. Why a Facebook Group? Think about where is the primary place where people spend their time without getting paid. Yep, you guessed it right. It's Facebook. B2B Marketers/Founders/CEOs… Your audience is on Facebook. Trust me, or better, trust people that are seriously smashing it on this niche thanks to Facebook Groups. I’ve started my Facebook Group recently after Vin Clancy and Charlie Price from the famous “Traffic and Copy” group suggested me various time to do it. In the word of Vin Clancy: “It’s the perfect place to build your 1000 true fans.” Other reasons why to start one are: - You have a community! To test our your ideas, and to gain a sustainable momentum (people from your group will invite more in the future, and so on.) - There are way too many blogs out there, and people are sick and tired of optin popups, they tend to give their emails much less (only when the content it’s remarkable, but with so many competition it’s hard to stand out.) - It’s the only public area of Facebook. For the rest, FB is pushing down all the organic reach to push you to buy FB Ads (in groups it’s still not possible.) A Quick Note on Personal Branding Ultimately creating remarkable contents on your Facebook Group (Linkedin and other platforms and blogs as well of course) with consistency will contribute to building your brand and differentiate from the competitors. You’ll create a little space progressively in the brain of your customers with a kind of “positive karma” which they will want to reciprocate in the future (we’re human beings, read Robert Cialdini’s book for more about that.) If you need support in creating and growing your Facebook Group from 0 to thousands of members, and monetize it, call me here on Clarity!

Many ideas come to mind. You might book some calls with people you follow on Clarity, to flesh some of these out better. Start a Kickstarter project with high dollar perks of some number of weeks. Setup a travel site about how to enjoy your particular part of Mexico (sites, activities, seasonal fruit, festivals) + buy traffic from Outbrain + Taboola to your travel site. Then sell your services as a broker to book lodgings. You will first book out your properties, then charge a fee to other property owners to book out their properties. There are many spins on the above idea. For example, cut deals with some City's Chamber of Commerce to do an export seminar, where you charge $5K-$10+ for a 30 day excursion for people to come + learn about products they can import from your area. Now that I think about it, I did created a set of recordings... geez... must of been nearly 10 years of first one, about generating cashflows in other countries. If this might interest you, PM me + I'll try to find these recordings + resources.

I would say, what you are hearing is correct - I would take all 4 of those as MAIN factors. Maybe add another two - Verticals that you are an expert in. - Verticals where you will have enough $$ to break into / develop / support for some time, until you start making profits. Most startups operate at a loss for a long time, until they build critical mass of users. If you run out of money before you are profitable - what's the point? For example, space flights are "hot" right now (space-x, blue origin, etc), but you would probably have no expertise in it, and not enough money to get into space craft biz.

I think that all news site have app. For example my favorite is Flipboard. It have IOS/Android app

Selling to HR departments is hard work + low income (compared to other approaches) + they can cut off your income any time. This is basically working a job. Lowest income + highest exposure to income loss. If you have a B2C product, sell to consumers, not businesses. Just setup a content site writing about your niche with an ways to purchase you product on your site. Then buy traffic - Outbrain/Taboola/Facebook/Google - to your site. In your case, you might even be able to create a Facebook look alike audience for your product. If you PM me, I can pass along a couple of folks who can likely help you with Facebook campaigns. Depending on the exact nature of your product, you might also experiment with buying Yahoo Gemini traffic. This way you go direct to consumers + never have to deal with pitching HR folks... who by the way, get pitched stuff like this all the time + usually they have no budget to buy anything like this... so rarely pans out for people pitching. If you really think going the HR director route is useful, just call up a few + ask for interviews about their work + then ask them questions about how they make their purchasing choices + budgets they have to work with. Based on my experience trying to pitch HR folks in the past, likely you'll only interview a handful, before you ditch this in favor of going direct to consumers, via paid traffic. Traffic is cheap + you never have to talk with curmudgeonly HR folks.

You need a source of capital to carry you through the receivables period. Basically you've got three options: -Borrow money to finance the receivables -Find investors to contribute equity to finance receivables -Sell the receivables (factoring) or some combination of these. In my experience you're talking about making the same leap that a bathroom renovator might make to become a home-building contractor. The difference in that business is also capital. Arrange a call if you'd like to discuss your particular case. I can run through a few questions with you and help point you in the right direction. Best, David Barnett

Strong and bold branding. Make it a prduct to flaunt.

This is a tuff one! As an entrepreneur, you will never be truly happy working for someone else. Not to say there is anything wrong with working for another company, it is just that entrepreneurs have a drive to innovate the process and shake up the market that just does not jive well with working for another person. Reading through your question, I would first suggest that you really think over the question at hand and make sure that your recent set back in business is not the driving factor to work for someone else. I have now started 9 businesses from scratch and of those nine, one of them was a failure. The failure gave me pause before I started another business, 6 months to be exact, I began to second guess myself. Once I moved though that by recognizing the driving factor, I was able to jump back out to my natural abilities again. With this said, I will say that I learned many of the skills of consulting and business through my 2.5 years working for a consulting firm owned by someone else before I started my life as an entrepreneur. There is safety in learning while being paid! The other benefit to working under another developer is to gain access to His network of individuals and vendors while gaining the creditability that he holds. While working for him, you will be building your own credibility in the field so that when you step out, you will have instant credibility for your own business. Please let me know if I can be of more help, I would welcome the opportunity to talk by phone with you to let you know how I was able to keep an open communication about my intentions of going out on my own while working for my soon-to-be competitors.

Hi! First of all I recommend to make a pitch deck for yourself that completely describes your product, user needs, market and theirs validation and lay down money after you will be confident with that document on proof of concept (it will cost you much less then creating MVP). I'd be happy to talk further with you about the difference between MVP and proof of concept stages and help you to set correct KPI to each of them regarding your product

I host 100s of high traffic, high speed, WordPress sites. If a client asked me this question... I'd say... This type of spaghetti setup is okay for a hobby site. Not for a real + money generating + pay your bills type of project. For real (money generating) projects. Keep tech simple. I run straight up Apache + FPM PHP + sites I host load test at roughly 1.1M request/minute throughput. You read that right. There's all sorts of myths about what's required for fast sites. My guess, 99.999% of everything written about fast sites is written by people who've never run a high traffic site or don't understand how to setup sites to isolation + fix slow points. Do yourself a favor + hire someone smart to host your site. In the long run, you'll save a truckload of money.

Hi! First of all i recommend to pitch your product to a community that represents your market , then give them free access to basic features that will complete most common scenarios and create premium features that will convert happy customers to paid users. I'd be happy to talk further with you about setting up market adoption of your product if you'd like to give me a call sometime

Having raised over $100 million in angel and VC funding for startups I've founded and a couple others I've advised, I have some related experience in addressing this question. The company you outlined above seems more like an angel or friends and family deal for a lifestyle business than a VC financing round for a technology startup. VC's want to see a billion dollar market opportunity potential, and a company that has a chance of reaching at least $100 million in revenue by year 5. I'd be happy to talk further with you about fundraising options if you'd like to give me a call sometime.

I believe in MVP (Maximum Validated Product). The more you get customer/user validation, the more robust and complete the product becomes. It's smart to begin testing immediately to collect data that can help road mapping for the next product build improvements. Launch early with a few lighthouse customers to get the following (but not exhaustive) information: • Validate improvement over previous product iterations • Validate visual fit as a lightweight QA process • Supplement quantitative A/B testing to investigate user preference from a qualitative perspective • Identify missed usability issues or awkward product flows • Show use cases of a product in multiple environments (Desktop vs. Mobile) • Collect user feedback and hear their opinions, suggestions, and desired features lists

In general no effect... and... Be aware all content in subfolders + subhosts is now considered part of domain, so make sure you stick with some sort of common theme across all your content... to maximize your SEO. Also, there's no real way to do what you describe... short of using sshfs or something similar to mount your WordPress site into your EC2 instance, so technically you'll have challenges. Likely best you talk with a Server Savant about what you're targeting to accomplish, before you get to far down your implementation track. Also, you'll have far more flexibility if you dump your .net tech + go with strait up LAMP... Linux + Apache + MariaDB + PHP + WordPress. With .net you'll end up spending considerable time trying to fix technical issues that are unfixable or take many times the hours + dollars required to fix with a Lamp Stack.

Great Question! As I'm sure many other SEO's here have mentioned.. you should absolutely be leveraging the sub-folder as opposed to the sub-domain as Google and Bing associate sub domains as separate entities with their own value metrics outside of the primary root. The only real time I would recommend a sub-domain over a sub-directory would be due to platform restrictions (Shopify, Wix, etc) where you don't have access to build an infrastructure to support nested content from multiple hosts. Definitely worth chatting about, however you shouldn't have any problems using the sub folder with any other host you'd like.

I use Google Search. You can write your own scraper (if you're very smart), or purchase one off the shelf.

Asking for a link back to their blog is different than re-posting their content -- and there are SEO considerations for both. A link is one of the most powerful signals Google uses to decide who is a credible source and who is not. The more links, the more credible you must be (so goes the thinking). So website owners are working hard to get a lot of links from a lot of sources. Google has not been shy about touting the benefits of both linking to others AND receiving links. There is issue with Site A linking to Site B, and Site B linking back to Site A. In general, if someone asks you link to them, they may promise to link back, but that link will disappear pretty quickly through automated management. Sharing the same content is not going to do you any favors. Google is quick to recognize duplicate content and penalize the copy-cats. There are ways around that (with a rel=canonical element), but it is a little more technical than I think you're looking for, right now. Copying other people's content is done, and sometimes the copier gets more traffic and success than the original poster. There is a good write up of how BuzzFeed does this here: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/science-behind-buzzfeeds-viral-content In short, there are reasons to both link to another site and quote their content. For optimal performance, this is measured and balanced with your own content and links coming to you. I hope this helps, if you have other questions or want more help. Send me a message or schedule a call. All the best, -Shaun

Re-posting someone else's blog post, word for word, will likely not help you at all. Getting requests to link out to these other sites also doesn't help you--at least not near as much as it helps the sites you're linking to.

You'll need to provide more details/context for your question. How long is a piece of string? How big is a house? It all depends on how much time, money, and/or effort you're willing to spend generating those leads.

I have used this https://canvanizer.com/ for my venture as well as for other clients. Feel free to contact in case you need to get more details.

"...may not see the value of our platform yet or that they already have an existing older system." This is where you want to focus your energies. Why don't they see the value of what you're offering? What roadblocks exist here and how can you remove them? Have you spoken with existing clients to see how they are using your service and what they feel is missing? What was their feedback and have you implemented it into your system? What is it about their old system that they feel is better than yours / or that yours fails to overcome a certain shortcoming and is not worth the hassle of migration? I think some digging into your clients is in order. A better picture needs to be painted about their needs and how they perceive that value that you offer.