That Pam Chick

If you follow me on Twitter, are friends with me on Facebook, or have had more than a 30 second conversation with me in the last year, this announcement will come as no surprise. As of June, I will be a full-time college student again. I am enrolled at K-State in the Dietetics program with the goal of becoming a Registered Dietician. I have experienced how much positive dietary changes can affect quality of life first hand, as well as in many friends and family members. Over the last few years, it has become apparent that my passion lies in helping people make those positive changes.

When deciding to go back to school, I also had to decide if I was going to do it while continuing to work full-time for BlueGlass Interactive, or to leave my position at this awesome company and go to school full-time. I decided that it would be best for me to dedicate myself to school full-time and made the bittersweet decision to resign from my position. However, BlueGlass is still working with clients on comprehensive online marketing packages which include pay-per-click management, and I am still working with them on these projects.

It will take me a couple of years to finish the degree and complete the internship that is required before I can practice independently. Therefore I will still be servicing my existing PPC management clients with the same quality work I always have. I am grateful for the wonderful clients I have (and for the friends that have referred them to me) and will continue honing my skills as a PPC manager for years to come. Dating an SEO consultant also guarantees that I will be at various conferences and industry events.

Luckily, K-State offers a fully accredited online program so I don’t have to sit in a classroom with 18-year olds arguing about what a healthy diet really is. So, I will still have plenty of energy for harassing all of my SEO, SEM, PPC, <insert acronym here> friends into eating healthier and taking care of themselves. I also have time and energy for a few more PPC management clients. So, if you, or someone you know, are looking for AdWords management, I’d be happy to help. You can reach me at pam at thatpamchick dot com.

Thank you to all of you that have encouraged me in this decision and to those that have told me that they are making healthier choices due to my non-stop harassment. It means the world to me. You can check out my blog Practically Primal (and like it on Facebook!) for upcoming posts on nutrition and fitness.

P.S. That creepy thing pictured above is apparently a K-State flying rally monkey. You will not find me at any homecoming games with animal carcasses on my fingers, no matter how much I talk about eating strange meats.

It’s been over five years since I left my job and started consulting for a living. I had a good year of business being great before the economy really tanked, leaving me and many other small business owners in the weeds. There was a long period of time where I wasn’t making enough each month to cover my bills and had to decide between buying groceries or paying my credit card bill (guess which one won).  After floundering for a while I made some changes and within a year I had a successful PPC consulting business. So, how did I do it so quickly and how can you do it too?

Pick one thing you’re good at and focus on that. How many people do you know that offer PPC, SEO, SMO, ORM, PR and every other acronym on the planet? How good do you think they are at all of them? Chances are there’s one or two things they are good at and they just do the other things to make money. Do you want to refer clients to people who are just doing something for the money? Neither does anyone else. Pick the thing that you are the best at and focus on it. You will have happier clients, you will be happier and you will become better at what you do. Partner with someone who offers the services you don’t so you can still be a one-stop shop for clients without offering subpar work. There’s plenty of business out there for all of us, so if we all focus on what we’re good at and refer out the projects that aren’t right for us we can all be more successful.

Network. I don’t mean go to conferences and rub elbows with “rockstars” and I don’t mean retweet everything Neil Patel tweets. I mean actually make friends with people in the industry. Real friends. Friends that would bail you out of jail are more likely to refer business to you than people you buy a drink for three times a year and never interact with outside of industry events.

Don’t disappear when business is bad. Falling off the radar when business is down is the equivalent of failing companies cutting out their marketing budgets. If you aren’t visible, people will forget about you and will refer business elsewhere. This doesn’t mean you should go into debt going to every conference trying to drum up business. It means you should pick the one or two that will give you the most bang for your buck and be seen there. There are ways to save money on conferences so you don’t blow your budget. You could choose a conference that is near you so the travel costs are less. You could choose to only go for a day or two to reduce hotel costs. You can share a room with someone. You can skip the expensive dinners and go to the free cocktail parties. I know people that go to conferences and don’t spend a dime on anything but their hotel. Networking is marketing for a consultant so don’t eliminate your networking budget entirely.

Let people know what you do. I realize this sounds silly. I thought it did at first too. But it’s not silly. There are people that I’ve known for nearly 10 years through the conference circuit and yet I have only a vague idea of what they do. If I had a client to refer to them, I wouldn’t know that I should refer the client to them because I don’t know what services they offer. I’m pretty sure that there are people that I’ve spent hours talking to yet they don’t know for sure what I do.  Update your Twitter bio, your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn and make what you do very clear on your website. My bios never said anything about what I did because I didn’t want to be one of those “I’m an SEM guru!” jerks and because my Twitter is anything but professional. So, I married the two worlds by adding “awesome at PPC” to my bio as a humorous way to let people know what I do. Shortly after making that change I saw a dramatic increase in inquiries.

Let people know you are taking on new clients. Don’t waste all that time you spent networking by pretending you’ve got more clients and money than you could ever possibly need. If people think you are too busy for new clients, they will send them to someone else. After casually mentioning to a small group of people I know well that I was taking on new clients and would appreciate any referrals my business increased dramatically.

Don’t be too eager. Contrary to my last point, don’t walk around handing out your business card to every one in your path letting them know you are open for business and have great rates. When you go to a restaurant and they have oysters on sale and the waiter keeps pushing them, do you think “wow they must be really great oysters, and at such a great price!”  No, you think “stop trying to sell me crap oysters that are about to go bad.” You need to find a balance between letting people know that you are available to take on the right projects and looking like an SEM bargain bin.

Refer business to others. If someone comes to you and asks you to do something that isn’t your forté, refer that person to someone you trust. The next time they have a project to refer, there’s a better chance they will send it your way. Quid pro quo.

Take care of your clients. Nothing is stronger than a client referral. Doing a good job for your clients is the best way to ensure they will stay with you long term and will bring you additional business. If you can’t do a good job for your clients due to lack of time, knowledge or skill, no one will be happy in the long run and you’ll end up constantly having to find new clients which will get harder and harder as your reputation dwindles.

I don’t go to conferences anymore. I’ve sat through too many sessions (maybe not 99 but close enough) where not only didn’t I learn anything but I was given information that was flat out wrong or “tips” that weren’t viable anymore. I’ve also found myself sitting in sessions having de ja vu realizing that I sat in that exact same session with those exact same speakers at the last conference. So, I stopped wasting time and money going to conferences in 2006 and started just reading recaps of sessions I thought may be interesting. I bet a lot of you have done the same.

So, after 4 years of not attending a conference* that I didn’t speak at, why am I going to BlueGlass LA?

• The mix of session topics on the agenda is killer. Everyone will learn something in every session, regardless of the size of their company or their position. There’s everything from the requisite links session to a metrics session to one on raising capital.
• Networking is built in. At a lot of conferences, the networking opportunities & parties are put on by sponsors or search engines and you have to be “in” to know where to go or how to get in. At BlueGlass LA, dinner and a party are right on the agenda after the sessions. It doesn’t get much easier than that & you won’t get a better opportunity to meet such a wide range of people.
• BlueGlass LA is the new, supercharged, “LAized” Search & Social conference. I spoke at IM Spring Break and Scary SEO which were put on by the awesome guys at Search & Social, who are now part of the über company BlueGlass. Those conferences were not only well organized and informative but they were fun and had the best networking I’ve never seen at a conference. I expect nothing less from BlueGlass LA now that there are even more great minds behind the conference. And because it’s going to be in LA, it will be LAized which means it will be even more awesome.
• It’s in California. Yes, that makes it easy for me to attend. But, it should make it awesome for you to attend! I bet the majority of you are living somewhere that is currently humid, hot or just plain lame. LA is none of those things. Or, if you do live in California it is makes it easy for you to attend too.  So register now and don’t forget to pack your bathing suit and a helmet (cuz’ BlueGlass LA is gonna blow your mind!)

UPDATE: Get 15% off with this code – lastweekbg

EVEN BETTER UPDATE: The first 10 people to register using the code cp20 will get 20% off!

*ThinkTank was a networking event.