If you’re anything like us then you’ll rely on the Internet for your business. Without it, we would not exist. It truly is one the most important business tools today. The Internet allows us to work at home on the Isle of Skye. Which is our dream.

However, ensuring that our business survives is always at the forefront my mind. Every month we take on around 8-10 explainer videos and 1 or 2 website design projects. With this, around 75% of these comes from referrals. Which is great because that’s what you need. People sharing our services around the global town. However, ideally, I’d like 50% of our projects coming from new customers. But why? We are busy enough as it is. It’s because the more new customers we get, the more people we have referring us. This secures the future of our business.

Getting to the top of search engines is key to finding new customers. But how is this done? Well, for the past 3-4 years we’ve paid various SEO companies overseas and here in the UK. It’s not just pennies either. It’s thousands of pounds, and in all honesty, each company has been a disaster. Either poor tactics, not enough research into our target market or, like our latest experience, very poor communication. The latest did know what they were doing. I paid £500 for one month of SEO with the plan of running for a further 5 months. But they simply didn’t deliver. I had to push them to do the work. Call me old fashioned, but the customer should never need to persuade the business to do the work that has been paid for.

Since my SEO disaster I’ve decided to say R.I.P to all SEO companies. It’s really not worth the time, the money and the hassle. Unless you have £3000+ to spend per month on one of the big SEO companies, I’d recommend doing it yourself. Before doing this, there are lots and lots of things you should be reading. So, over the course of the next 3 months I’m going to be creating a PDF of my progress and what I learn (the good and the bad) and how our site is performing. But why? Well, as you may know already we work with a lot of start ups who have great ideas but limited budgets. This is another way of helping out. And, at the end of it all, if successful, we will develop a budget friendly SEO service to add to our website. I will also be blogging about the whole experience over the course of the 3 months.

If you’d like advice on other money saving tips when starting a business then please just fire us an email. Or, create some questions on our forum.