About Holistic Web Presence Content Marketing company in Salt Lake City, United States
Every one of your customers has a story. Holistic Web Presence helps you tell those stories. Learning to harness the power of your clients' stories is a powerful method of generating meaningful content for your site, which in turn helps your small busines
Work with the specialists
Holistic Web Presence takes an unusual approach. We educate our clients to do as much for themselves as they want to do. As we develop a method of improving a clients online visibility we capture and share that knowledge though online training. All our clients get access to that knowledge and know-how.
Holistic is a skills based services company. We hire smart run a modern virtual operation with staff in the U.S. and the Philippines. We train look after and pay our staff well.
As a result we have a high level of staff retention rarely losing anyone.
Offshore and working smart. You will notice that half our company is offshore. This means we hire English speaking graduate level very smart people with a strong work ethic. We can pay them well and yet save on costs at the same time. This enables us to get more done with less thus passing the cost savings on to our clients.
Just think about it. No office costs no infrastructure costs. Our staffing costs are a fraction of the rate of more traditional companies. Like it or not the world is round and we are competing in a global economy.
Back in 2010 I found myself working in a business that was failing.
Not a good word for any small business owner or employee. Bankruptcy is bad news and traumatic for the owners of a business as well as the employees of that business. You know the statistics 80% of small businesses fail. So it is not unusual especially in these economic times for people to suddenly find themselves out of a job.
This story however is not about the bankruptcy itself rather it is the tale of three sales people Jerry Nancy and Fred and what they did after the bankruptcy.
Two of the sales people went on to create successful businesses and one failed. They were all good sales people. All started from the same point. What was the difference between them and what caused their successes and the failure?
When the company failed the sales people like anyone in that position naturally went through an emotional roller coaster and realized that they would need to find alternative jobs. Jerry Nancy and Fred having been the top sales people in the company for an extended period had achieved a very good income and standard of living. In part this was due to their sales performance but it was also due to annual pay rises.
As they thought about the process of finding a job in another company they realized that it may not be a given that they would be able to immediately maintain the same income level. This is a common problem long standing successful employees face.
At the core of it their reason to get a job would be to work for a company that would do the marketing necessary to generate a flow of leads that they could turn into sales. Dont get me wrong they were capable of developing their own opportunities but the problem is that it would by nature be a very slow and inefficient process. A process unlikely to enable them to generate enough income to live on or maintain their standard of living.
This is where I come in. Knowing these people and their strengths very well I encouraged them to consider starting their own regional based businesses. Essentially doing what they did before but doing it for themselves rather than working for someone else.
Conversely they knew me and had some idea of what I could do in relation to generating leads for them through online visibility.
I saw raw talent in these people and knew I could help them by doing what I loved. Namely online marketing and I could also build a business around it.
They were all very effective sales people experts in their fields and they knew their products very well. I knew that all they needed was leads. I was very confident that given a flow of incoming leads they would all do a great job of turning those prospects into sales.
Hence we partnered. Holistic Web Presence was born initially focused on helping these three people to create and grow their businesses. Jerry and Nancy immediately went for it investing what savings they had and applying the same energy and singleness of purpose they had applied to being top sales people.
Fred on the other hand was cautious by nature and felt that he had to protect his family by easing into a business in small steps. To achieve this he invested a just little in the business being somewhat skeptical that it would provide him enough income in the short term. While doing that he sought other forms of income by doing contract work of various types to supplement his income.
Jerry had a backlog of clients and projects that he was able to develop to carry him over for a while. While he was doing that I focused on building his website and driving visibility at a local city based level mostly for the east coast of the U.S. He also funded several Adwords campaigns that we used to generate some immediate initial business. While Adwords did not return a brilliant ROI we were at least able to create enough extra business to keep him going.
It took about six months and a lot of work to start to see the leads coming in without Adwords and by the ninth month he was doing very well. At eighteen months Jerry achieved a million dollar annual run rate and has not looked back since.
Fred with the little he invested in the website wanted to see some results before going further with it. Fred was focused in California and knowing that this was one of the strongest markets for the product I really wanted him to be successful.
I did way more work on the site than he funded my intent being to get him some initial results to try to convince him to go after it more aggressively. After about four months we achieved some good traction with it ranking quite well in Orange County. He did not invest in Adwords at all though.
As we increased the visibility of his site I attempted to talk to him several times but found it hard to get hold of him on the phone. This was a concern to me in that I knew if people call as a result of visiting a website they generally expect someone to answer the phone! It also made it difficult to generate more content for the site. If I called Fred he would sometimes take many days to get around to calling me back.
I discovered that the reason he was erratic in returning my calls was because he was busy doing project work on a noisy building site. He simply did not hear the phone and by the time he had a chance to call it was late in the evening.
Nancy was a completely different character. Nancy was also a bit of a skeptic and decided to engage with an alternative web development company based in India. She did this in order to drive down costs and execute very quickly. After about six months little traction and several thousand dollars out of pocket we re-connected and started working together again.
From there Nancys story is similar to Jerrys with her business focused on Texas and the mid-west. She reports a really good revenue level and is so busy she is hiring staff to keep up with it.
Freds attitude was that he would believe it when he saw it. His level of skepticism was such that he invested the minimum not really convinced that it would work. The resulting lead generation from his online presence was mediocre at best and when he did get something he was rarely available to answer the phone.
For Fred the net of his approach his belief that investing in web presence was unlikely to produce results turned out to be correct.
He gave up on the website after about nine months right at the time Jerrys business was ramping. He got a job working for a company selling the same product he was before which only lasted a few months. What he is doing today I have no idea…
For Jerry the net of his approach total commitment once he made a decision was that he ramped quickly and is now a leader in his market with a very good business revenue level and reputation. He is highly visible online in a range of places.
As Fred was not fully in the game we jointly made the strategic decision to re-focus Jerrys online visibility in California. We were able to acquire Freds website at a low cost develop it further and use it as a vehicle to drive more leads to Jerry.
For me this was a challenging time. I went through the first year without making any significant profit or earning a living.
Income at that point barley covered the costs of running the business.
Over time however Jerry and Nancy have been able to increase their spend on marketing as their revenues have grown. By doing a great job for them they have become advocates for Holistic and have helped me to gain additional clients.
What I find most fascinating about this story is the way both Jerry and Fred proved that their beliefs were correct. Jerry believed that it would work out and committed himself to making that belief come true. Fred on the other hand did not believe it would work and proved to himself that he was right it didnt.
A major learning for me therefore is that your beliefs how much you really believe and commit can create the reality and therefore justify those beliefs.
In other words if you believe you can be successful and commit yourself to it then you probably can be successful.
Conversely if you are not really convinced that you will be successful and therefore hedge your bets then you are much more likely to stay stuck on the fence of life.
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Such a strategy will help your business show up at the top of search results, giving you a unique edge over your competitors. Holistic Web Presence was established in 2010 by Tim Barrie, a veteran sales and marketing manager in the tech industry. Having w
