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How do Digital Marketing Firms with near 0 Traffic survive?
Posted by on May 7, 2020 at 3:10 pmCuriously, I ran a few tools (Ahrefs) on the sites of some digital marketing companies that seem to be surviving.
However, most of them have organic / paid traffic of 0. I’m wondering how this is the case AND that they are still surviving.
Where did they get their clients from?
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11 Replies
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Referrals? I freelance and 90% of my clients are from referrals
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Old fashioned sales and word of mouth, I assume.
I would have a hard time hiring someone who hasn’t proven their abilities on their own site, but it is *sometimes* the case that they are so busy with client work, they don’t have time to manage their own sites/channels or just don’t see the ROI in it.
For example, in college I installed car audio systems. For clients, everything had to be perfect. All the wires had to be hidden, equipment perfectly mounted, etc. My car? I just threw it all in there. Funny how that works!
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Sales, cold calling and knowing people.
My agency has a sales department who have prospects they call everyday.
With this you kinda have to go out and get business, its probably wont come to you unless you do great work and word of mouth gets out. Especially with people signing year or multiyear contracts with agencies, sometimes your prospects werent looking.
I couldnt tell you how many emails we get from clients who were contacted by competitors with a bullshit report saying whats going wrong and why were so bad.
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Half of them are bullshit snake oil salesmen. If you cant SEO or market your own website. Why the hell would I pay you to drive traffic to mine? Its like all the WordPress “Agencies” with cookie cutter WordPress sites that have 10 sec page load times and client portfolios that look like something from a teenages highschool homework portfolio. The industry is full of bullshit. No standards. At all.
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We get all our business from referrals and networking events. We used to put more effort into our ads but it never drew prospects with the money to do anything worth while.
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Most of those testing sites are sampled data not actual traffic counts (underreporting)
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I get all clients from Referrals, run no paid traffic, and have done very little SEO for my site. Heck, I left the site unfinished for 3 years because I barely had time to handle the paid work on my plate. Taking some billable time away to work on a site to generate leads that I didn’t have time to work didn’t make any sense.
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Word of mouth. I have been in SEO for 15 years and just started assembling a site. We have never needed one, still do not need one, but feel it is just time to do one.
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They may not actually have clients; they also may also not have any traffic – every tool, including ahrefs can only provide an estimate. They “could” be getting all their traffic from Reddit…
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Traffic in Ahrefs or any tool is a guestimate. I have never found it to be accurate. Look at what they’re ranking for. Are their rankings for keywords that will help them get business?
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So, I’m a content marketer.
My site has 23 pages that rank in the first three results from Google. Not bad, eh? I have about 100 pages in total (so far) of high-quality work.
Even from those 23 high-ranking pages, I see no more than about 1,200 visits to my site per month, 85% of which come through there.
I’ve had some months where it only lands me one or two clients (which is fair, considering the painstaking amount of research people go through before hiring a content marketer).
One of my clients, who I wrote for, didn’t even have a website. Instead, they just continually worked on a PDF portfolio that they sent to people who wanted to see what they had to offer.
Worked like a charm. To each his own. I do 100% of everything on my site from content writing, to editing, management, and all that stuff in between, and it costs me less than $400 per year for all of it. In terms of my small investment, I’ve netted about 90X more money than I spend on the site, so it’s obviously worthwhile, but it’s just not for everyone.
I’ve gotten plenty of work through referrals. Word of mouth. Heck, I even gave a guy my business card (yes, I still think they’re useful) while we were both checking in at a hotel. Didn’t know this guy at all, the concierge just decided to ask what I do while he was shooting the shit, and the guy next to me mentions that he’s been looking for a content marketer.
Boom. Three years of an ongoing client relationship. I gave the kid a tip the next morning.
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