Hi everyone. I have been successfully running an online business for many years, but I need some help. I want to provide some background because I always enjoy reading other's stories and want to share mine, but you can skip ahead to "the big problem" below if you don't care:
I am a software engineer by trade and started dabbling in "internet marketing" way back in 2008. At some point in 2009 I built a really shitty affiliate website for a service based niche that for some reason really took off. It was really a "right place, right time" type of deal. At the time I was working with a good friend and business partner who had a pretty good mind for marketing, though we both had zero experience running a "business". For the next couple years after that we really crushed it...somehow. Google loved our website and started ranking it well and we were making $30,000/month with nearly zero work. It was the best of times.
In 2011 we apparently took things a bit too far and received a dreaded Google penalty. My world came crashing down overnight. I thankfully had kept my software development job so I wasn't going hungry, but needless to say my lifestyle changed drastically in a very short amount of time. My business partner did not take it so well, and we ended up splitting ways professionally, though still remain great friends to this day. I spent the next year or so cleaning up the mess we had made of our website with regards to SEO, submitting periodic reconsideration requests that never seemed to help.
Finally, something stuck and the Google penalty was finally lifted. The site never did rank as well as it did at its peak back in 2011, but it had enough traffic to start making around $5,000/month again and that felt great. A few months down the road, just as I was starting to gain confidence and make progress, the company who offered the affiliate program shut the program down. For the second time I was left with $0 in revenue overnight. I had one thing going for me this time around though, my website still had traffic, and thus some kind of value. After a couple weeks of mulling selling the website, I decided to keep it and take a different approach. There was no logical reason I couldn't step out of the affiliate business and offer the service to myself. So I did. I recruited my wife to be my business partner and we set off to take over the world.
Over the last 6 years we were able to grow the company from $0.00 to (I'm proud to say!) $1MM in 2017. There was no magic formula other than persistance and working through and learning failures. That's really all there was to it. My software development background definitely helped as well, because I was able to custom build an entire eco system around our service while my wife handled day to day operations. Now we have a top tier software system that would be both difficult and expensive for someone to replicate.
But there's a glaring problem. A big one.
I suck at marketing. Like, REALLY suck at marketing. I'm not even very good at running a business, I just dont' have the mind or risk tolerance for it. I'm a good engineer, that's about it. Our business is still 100% dependent on organic Google search traffic, which means we are at the mercy of dreaded algorithm changes, and especially recently, have been negatively affected by a few of them. On top of that, one of our major competetors has started up a new "affiliate program" and the serach results are starting to flood with new (very low quality) affiliate websites; Much like the one I built that started all of this. Many of them are using pretty black hat SEO techniques (paid links, PBNs, etc) and are starting to chip away at our market share. We've lost about 20% of our overall traffic since August 2017 and with every new affiliate site and every algo change we seem to be slipping further away. I'm projecting about a 30% reduction in revenue for 2018 from 2017.
And so I need help, mostly with SEO, but with marketing in general. I have already burned through two SEO agencies that have come highly recommended to me from peers, but neither could seem to grasp our industry very well and both were down right awful at backlink acquisition. To be fair, the industry is not very "sexy" and thus it's actually pretty difficult to create engaging, viral content that people want to read, share, and link to. In fact, it's damn near impossible.
I guess my question to /r/entrepreneur is this: How did YOU find a quality marketing and/or SEO agency? I know it's hard to say without knowing the specifics of my business, but what would YOU do in my position? Having employees and a brand to protect I can't just go back to doing blackhat shit to compete, and it's feeling impossible to compete with a legitimate whitehat business.
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