Yesterday I had a chance to sit down with a company in the satellite television market.  They are a local Utah company that does door-to-door sales for satellite tv offers from Dish Network and from DIRECTV.  They had asked me to come in, sit down with them, and tell them what I could do for them on an SEO level.  I always like the opportunity to discuss SEO and of course always like the opportunity to provide a quote on my services for online marketing.  After a long discussion about my background, current and previous clients, SEO theory, and the expectations they could have with building a website and marketing it online, they asked me what would stop them from just learning this and doing it themselves.  My answer to them was simple…nothing but your own desire, time, and effort.

The reality is that SEO isn’t a magical potion that only a select few can perform or understand, rather anyone can do SEO but the level of success will depend on your desire to do it well, the time you have to dedicate to learning and performing the trade, and the effort you put forth in making SEO work for you through you and your network.  I basically said, if you want to take your focus away from your successful business to try and do this on your own, that is fine with me.  In the end I think they realized it was much better to hire a professional SEO to do it for them.  I’m not sure if they will hire me or not, but I at least think they realized that they are going to need some help on it.

There was no were else in my career that taught me this fact more than while I was working at Prosper Learning.  While at Prosper Learning I literally worked with 1000’s of small ecommerce start ups and these business owners basically had two choices…they could either learn SEO and do it on their own, or hire it out to a professional.  Most of them, due to lack of funds, decided to try and learn SEO and do it on their own only to fail in the end because they didn’t have the desire, time, or put forth the effort to really do it well.   We’ll see what happens with this satellite tv company, but I hope they find someone to help them reach their goals and honestly, I hope it’s me.