1 Good Reason - Internet Marketing

I have a new client- Thank You and Welcome! The fact that they are just 10 miles from my office and we could meet, but neither of us has tried, is a little interesting. How much the web has changed business in a few short years.

They found me on one of the Freelance job shopping sites, Elance, Get a Freelancer, or Guru, frankly which one doesn’t matter. On these sites you can post a project and ask for bids. I’m competing in a global market, with the likes of Indians, Chinese, Romanians, and dozens of other countries. It’s impossible for me to compete on price with them, (if I need to explain why, you’re reading the wrong blog.) But I’ve found it is easy to win projects by doing a few simple things:

• I read the RFQ (Request for Quotation). It seems that many of the bidders simply plug in a standard reply, which works poorly. Imagine that?
• Whenever possible I visit the site in question. Then I include observations about the site in my bid. (I think they used to call that, “personalized service.”)
• I point out that my English is very strong and that allows me to use nuance, and vernacular that are simply unavailable to those living in other countries. (A competitive advantage.)
• And finally I bid what I think is a fair price for the work, based upon the fact that I live 8 miles from Times Square in New York City. (Local pricing in a global marketplace!)

My bids are always amongst the highest my clients tell me. Clients post jobs asking for SEO with a budget of $250 to $500 for a small project, I bid, $1000 to $1500. Because that’s what it will take for me to make a living wage on the job. The Romanians, Chinese and Indians, all bid in the $200-$300 area, and I still win the job. Why is this? (Now please don’t go off on me about being an xenophobe, or a racist, I’m talking about business here, these are merely representatives of globalization.)

Because people are willing to pay for quality?

Because of the subtitles of American English?

Because I prepare personalized bid responses?

I think it’s a little of all of the above but I think it’s more that we are social animals. And we prefer those from our group, clan, club, and of our kind, to those “outsiders” from somewhere else. It’s interesting and exciting to have friends from other places, but we really want our dry cleaner to be a local. For no logical, or empirical reason we feel we can trust the local more than the outsider. This is why we prefer to buy from people near as opposed to buying from those far away.

I do think I’m an excellent SEO, this blog is partly the proof of that. In one day last week my Technorati Ranking soared 1,000,000 points. On Wednesday I had a Technorati Ranking of 1,642,000 and an Authority of 4, on Thursday I had a Ranking of 547,000 and an Authority of 12. Not bad for a blog that’s only 1 month old. However, on Technorati unlike with money, the first million is easy, that last 1/2 million is the hard part. [Update current Technorati Authority is 21 and Ranking is 395,824]
In any case, I’ve found that globalization is a strong presence in my market but I can compete fairly well, so far. Perhaps my reading of these interactions is mistaken. If you have an alternate theory as to why my clients agree to my fees over these much lower priced competitors I’d love to hear it.

Tanks for reading,

Chris