What is happening to our business! I have only recently joined the ranks of commercial search engine optimisers having spent the last 5 years making a handsome living as a super affiliate. A wealthy investor persuaded me to bring my knowledge to the commercial world, we stuck in some cash, got a roomful of employees and NetCallidus was born in may 2005.

So why should we give away the secrets of our industry? I realize that there is such a thing as competitive advantage, but that i believe is down to technique not restricting basic knowledge.

I truly believe we will all be very much more successful when we finally decided to relinquish our comfort blankets and give all those secrets away.....I realise to most this will seem a little controversial, at least privately. but then these conferences are all about giving away information aren't they? I have heard lectures on quality link exchanging, and why you shouldn't use links managers etc, i have reverse engineered most of our industries top companies and have found in many cases they use a lot of the techniques they suggest you don't. There is an awful lot of mis information.

Let me attempt to give you a business reason for giving it all away.

The problem i believe is corporate budget allocation borne out of limited industry knowledge,. How many of you have visited a potential client only to be told their budget is $5000 per year and they want to be number 1 on Google for the search term "Car Insurance" or some other highly significant term?

We all know that the graft required to achieve such results is significant, especially when that client is a page rank 2/10 with 200 total inbound link and 5 html pages!

I find that most of the time i spend with clients is based on education, and when they finally understand the work and skill involved in achieving their desired results allocation the budget required does not become such an issue

Essentially the key is to Manage Expectation.

I recently attended a potential client in the hotel chain business, they had $45,000 dollars allocated to natural search engine optimisation, a significant budget by most standards, however after our meeting I found out that we had lost the deal to another SEO company. The reason we lost out makes me pretty angry, not at losing the deal but at how we lost it.

I found out that the 3 competitor optimisation companies including the final winner had quoted between $30,000 and $44,500 for the job, they had not asked any of the usual questions including, and possibly most importantly what keywords they wanted to appear under.

The web site was

Page rank of 2 / 10,
325 inbound total link popularity with 5 Google link popularity.

the brief was to attain top 10 positions for major industry terms for each of the 15 hotels the company owned, each with their own individual URL.

$45,000 budget divided by 15 web sites means ?250 dollars a month per web site. We said to the client, your budget is unrealistic and bowed out of the race after suggesting they build a portal site linking to all of their hotels.

6 months later the client returned and we took the business. It was worth losing the deal and maintaining our professionalism.

How does this support giving all our secrets away?

If the case study above is to be regarded as quite normal the question should be, how did they get the $45,000 budget in the first place! with the right knowledge they could have set a more realistic budget or toned down their goals to match the funds available and set there expectancy levels correspondingly instead of losing $20,000 dollars on a company that was doomed to failure right from the start.

Lets learn from the world of marketing, most company owners have read copious numbers of books and understand how marketing works, they understand what is involved and realise how expert you need to be to actually receive significant results. There are hundreds of successful marketing agencies out there, it logical really so lets really give up as much information as we can.