Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants

What Do 400 Consultants Know about Web Marketing?

Given that so many consultants use Web sites to woo clients and market their services, it’s fair to ask how effective their Web sites are as marketing tools. And what factors make the difference between a successful Web site and a bomb?

In this month's Guerrilla Consultant, we've answered those questions.

How?

So far, more than 400 consultants have taken our Guerrilla Consulting Web Site Self-Assessment. We've gone through the survey data, which comes to us on an anonymous basis, and offer six simple steps to improve the marketing ROI of any consultant’s Web site.

If you'd like to read the results, have a look at the recent issue of The Guerrilla Consultant.

What's Your Web Site Done for You Lately?

Not long ago, I did some research on the marketing capabilities of consultants’ Web sites. I looked at sites of the mega-consulting firms, medium and smaller-sized firms, and independent practitioners.

From slogging through consulting Web sites, I learned that too many of our sites just scratch the surface of the Web’s potential marketing power. Why waste valuable time and money on a Web site if it doesn’t help bring in new clients?

Do you know what your Web site does for you? To help answer that question, you can take our confidential Guerrilla Consulting Web Site Self-Assessment. It will only take five minutes, and you’ll receive a customized report, which will be available immediately after you complete the assessment. The results will also be sent to your e-mailbox.

Oh and it doesn’t cost you a dime.

Take the Guerrilla Consulting Web Site Self-Assessment.

In the latest issue of The Guerrilla Consultant, you'll also find an article on the  eleven principles for great consulting Web sites.

Enjoy it and let me know what you think.

Blog Business Summit

Last week, I spent some time at the 2005 Blog Business Summit in San Francisco.

The meeting covered every imaginable element of business blogging, including how to choose a blogging engine, design a corporate or personal blog, build traffic, and stay on top of what others are saying about your blog.

The question that many asked was how do you find a "voice" for your blog? Darren Barefoot and Molly Holzschlag answered that question in detail. One blogger summarized Darren and Molly's thoughts in the post, blog writing style.

Many thanks to Summit speakers Dave Taylor, Debbie Weil, Rebecca Blood, DL Byron, Robert Scoble, and Steve Broback.

Some of the presentaton slides are available from the Blog Business Summit site.

More summit meetings are planned, so visit Blog Business Summit to learn more.

What Does Google Think of You?

My colleague Catherine Weber isn’t a porn star, but you might get the wrong impression by Googling her name. Surely no one who Googles this respectable marketing consulting firm owner would really mistake her for the other Catherine Weber. But still, it’s somewhat embarrassing for her.

(And by the way, trust me; you really don’t have to go check!)

This goes to show how important it is to make sure that a Google search of your own name will yield the results you want clients and prospects to see. If your name is Bob Smith you’ve got a lot of competition, so don’t expect to show up high in a search for the name alone. This doesn’t mean you have to change your name to Bob Lardschnitzel to stand out. Someone who understands how to optimize Web sites for search engines can figure out what your chances are for decent rankings, and how to maximize them.

Not that Catherine’s plight is that bad. If you just add either the word “consulting” or “marketing” to her name, as a prospect is likely to do, she’s on the first page. And, now that I think of it, she really doesn’t want to attract traffic from people who were looking for you-know-who.

Do you know what Google thinks of you? Go take a look and tell us what people think they’re finding out about you and your firm.

Many thanks to Mike McLaughlin for letting me guest post here.

-Andrea Harris- (definitely NOT the big-time blogger, artist, musician, Regional Vice President for the South Caucasus, professor, author of Notes from a Housewife, or Candidate for Cupertino City Council, as Google may lead you to believe)

Hats Off to Tim Berners-Lee

What a guy.

Toward the end of December 1990 in a lab in Switzerland, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee brought to life his creation—the World Wide Web. At the time, his colleagues admired his ingenuity, but most people simply could not envision practical uses for his invention.

So, Berners-Lee used his creation to speed up access to the lab’s telephone directory. Some of his colleagues resisted even that use, arguing that what they had was just fine.

Who knew that the tools Berners-Lee had created to define the basic structure of the Web—tools he gave away for free, by the way—would spawn a revolution in how we all work and live?

Ten years later, at the end of 2000, Berners-Lee’s lone Web site had a lot of company: over 25 million Web sites around the world.

In summer 2004, Time magazine named Berners-Lee one of the top thinkers of the 20th century. Berners-Lee recently told the BBC that his invention was “just another program.” Right—and I’m the Queen of England.

No, wait...the Queen of England is involved in the story. In July 2004, Queen Elizabeth II knighted Berners-Lee for his pioneering work. He’s also received Finland’s Millennium Technology Prize.

Berners-Lee is a modest guy, but he clearly sees beyond what most of us see, and he thinks BIG. In an interview in the October 2004 issue of Technology Review, Sir Tim points out that, “Early on, people really didn’t understand why the Web was interesting. They saw it in the smaller scale, and it’s not interesting in the smaller scale.”

Sir Tim currently heads up the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT in Boston, where he is working on his next big idea—the Semantic Web. Well, the world is listening now, Sir Tim. Lead on!