Forums, Branding and Public Relations

If you are an SEO Consultant that charges $80 per hour like me, have too many clients and too little time - why would you go to forums and spend 15 minutes only to answer some guy asking SEO questions on a forum, for free and giving out valuable information? Why?

And why would you start your own SEO forum in your own language and give out all the "secrets" about SEO? Why should you have a blog and write tips, guides, tutorials and strategies you easily could charge for and keep for yourself?

Why is there an "SEO school" on the site of the SEO Company?

It's about Public Relations.

You don't spend those 15 minutes to answer that guy, only because of him. You do it because hundreds of other readers will see it and if you are skilled and do it wisely - you will over time be seen as a Pro in the field and people will listen to you. People will recommend you.

In the forum I created there is my name in the upper right corner, an "SEO School" on the site of the SEO Company will make people to link to it, mention it and get people visiting it. Now when I get those e-mails asking for advice and so on I can simply say: Go to my forum and ask.

I am active in more than 5 forums, both english and swedish and with more than thousand posts. On all of them my real name is my username. The same is with my blog and my name is on all my different sites and on all the automatic form e-mails that are being sent from my directories, topsite and forum.

In my opinion, branding your own name is much smarter than to brand a company name if you are speaking about a business field relating to consultant services.

It is like an author - he has only his name he can brand, nothing else.

In my opinion a person is more likely to buy services from a consultant with a personal name he recognizes than "SEO Company ABC".

My name is unique, there is no other person on the internet with this name. But still if someone Googles my name in quotation marks he sees 176,000 hits so if he wants to do some reading to check me he can spend the next months doing so ... and there is nothing I don't want people to read.

Just want to say that I have had an incredible success in my SEO career and here I give some reason for it.

Think branding.

Other SEO Pros that I have noticed are branding their names:

Aaron Wall Rand Fishkin John Scott

And then you have examples when some made up forum nick names becomes the identity of the person:

Oilman WebGuerilla Jenstar Black Night

Forums, Branding and Public Relations

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