Richard Eastes' Blog
Choosing an SEO company
Jan 8th
Like any new industry, scammers will start up because they know that potential customers don’t understand the industry. It’s easy to be a snake oil salesman.
I’ve been doing my own SEO for 10 years now and have hired around 10 companies from time to time to help out. So I have had the experience to spot the bad guys when they screw up as I’m also an SEO.
I’ve seen businesses blow mountains of cash on SEO companies that are either scammers or don’t even realise that they’re doing a horrible job.
Ben, It gets worse. Sometimes an SEO company is SO BAD that they’ll make decisions that actually do more harm than good.
Here are some common examples that I’ve personally experience
- They created 100′s of forum profiles and include our link in the profile. We had to have them remove them immediately. They tried their best to convince us it was safe. If I didn’t know any better, I would have believed him as they were very convincing. If google found this, we could have been close to being penalised
- We gave them access to a website so they could make improvements. Turns out that they used this opportunity to link to themselves from our footer. This is unacceptable and will do more harm than good.
- 1000′s of low quality links with exact match keyword text. More harm than good.
Luckily, I never allowed these companies to work on my main website http://www.vroomvroomvroom.com.au and we still rank highly for most car rental terms.
Others aren’t so lucky and have had their businesses nearly destroyed.
THE PROBLEM
The good SEO companies deserve to be paid more the horrible companies deserve to be named and shamed so that others don’t make the same mistake.
THE SOLUTION
I’m working on a project to rank the worlds best and worst SEO companies. Stay tuned!
Things I’ve learned about SEO
Jul 6th
Finished my first presentation on SEO today. Lots of audience participation. Many of whom walked away with some nice free, juicy, relevant links. Hooray! The prezi presentation is below as are resources I promised I’d provide afterwards. Here they are!
Content update schedule.
We like to keep our content fresh and consistently improved upon. We use this excel spreadsheet to help keep track of updates and to let various writers know when they need to next make updates and where. Download spreadsheet here
My Fav SEO Resources:
http://google.com/trends – for keyword and niche research
http://reddit.com/r/seo – For keeping up to date with SEO news
http://advancedwebranking.com – For monitoring SERP results of myself and competitors (just put the settings on a very slow speed so it doesn’t burden the search engines and forces them to block your desktop IP address.
Keeping up with the Jonses in real life
Dec 11th
Staged word of mouth advertising. Does it work? 1000% growth. I think it does.
Like the “Keeping up with the Jonses” but in real life.
Under-Rated Business Tips
Sep 25th
- Day-dreaming every day.
- Positive look on failing. If you aren’t failing at something, you aren’t working on hard enough problems.
- Develop the art of exceeding expectations
- SEO. Did you know that 80% of online marketing budget = Ads. 20% of budget = SEO/organic. While 20% of search traffic comes from ads and 80% comes from organic.
- Speaking like a human instead of a company. (use “I” instead of “We”)
- Developing a staff culture of innovation
- STOP doing stuff. Spend as much time brainstorming what you shouldn’t be doing, as you do on what you should.
What are your under-rated business tips?
Biography
Sep 25th
Story
At 23, Richard Eastes took a risk and spent his life savings on adopting a struggling internet start-up in 2002. At that point, the start-up was generating a mere 5 sales a day until Richard used SEO and word of mouth techniques to increase sales to over 800/day or $50m in sales per annum.
The company is called VroomVroomVroom. It’s goal is simple. To be the easiest way to rent a car. It’s won dozens of awards for fast growth, usability and innovation.
Richard believes the most under-rated business technique is the element of surprise and uses it, along with search engine optimisation (SEO) to keep growing.
Available for Speaking
Richard speaks on entrepreneurship, travel industry and internet marketing including:
- How to choose a brilliant SEO company and how to spot the crap ones
- Predictions for the Future of the Travel Industry
- Entreprenership – 6 most important things I’ve learned as an entrepreneur.
- I do my own SEO. Here’s my secrets.
- Case Study – How I made a million dollar travel website from scratch.
Education
Bachelor of Information Technology at QUT
Studies entrepreneurship at Entrepreneurs Organisation
Accolades and Awards
Deloitte Technology FAST50 award 4 years in a row
Asia-Pacific Deloitte Fast 500 award
Smart50 Company Award 3 years in a row
Amadeus TRAVELtech Website of the Year Award
Contact
Blog: http://eastes.com.au
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=5479673&trk=tab_pro
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/eastes
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/eastes
7 truths that travel businesses must know about Facebook
Aug 18th
1. Facebook ads converts like crap
Buy some Facebook ads and you’ll see. Some niches do okay such as Make money at home and college student niches.
2. Facebook users don’t really care about you that much
Kelly uses Facebook to see if Robert has commented on her profile. Robert logs on to perv on bikini photos of Renae. They don’t care that much about your travel business. Facebook is built for friends, not for companies. Of course, you can also be a friend. Use this to your advantage and create one on one relationships and connections with people. Use your real names.
3. Facebook is a time sink. F*%K yeah, it is
Worldwide total number of hours spent online greatly increased in March 2011 over the same month previous year. Yeah yeah, you already know that, here me out though. Remove facebook from those statistics and the total number of hours spent online actually decreased!!!
4. Facebook Events are a treat for travel websites
Travel is usually based around an event. Flight time, cruise departure, car rental pickup or hotel check in. Use the event API and get on that like dog on bone.
5. If you use Facebook to self promote, give up now. Just. give. up.
I know it’s tempting, but it’s not worth your time. I know what you’re thinking “Boy, this Richard Eastes fellow is negative”. Sure, self promotion is fine on Facebook in very small doses. There’s a time and place for heavy self promotion and Facebook isn’t one of them. Yes, it can do more harm than good.
6. People don’t use Facebook for search
0 people use Facebook for searching for stuff. That means Even less will use Facebook to look for you. This brings me to number 7.
7. Be worthy. This applies with and without Facebook
If people aren’t talking about you, someone in your company needs to invent something worth talking about.
Success breed Complacency
Aug 9th
When you let success lead to complacency. Complacency breeds laziness. Laziness breeds competition. Competition leads to struggle. Struggle leads to hard work. Hard work leads to Success.
As you can see, it is a cycle.
At the moment, Australia is at the success part of this common cycle. To take full advantage of our current position, we can’t become complacent.
Creating passionate customers
Jul 9th
Why create passionate customers? Why? Because passionate customers talk about you. I’ll rephrase that.
THEY WILL TELL THEIR FRIENDS ABOUT YOU
How does a company do this?
Apart from under promise and over deliver, you need to do something they totally wouldn’t expect. Don’t tell them they’ll get a “bonus”, just give it to them. The surprise is what makes the memorable experience and memorable experiences are worth sharing. Don’t tell them you’re going to give them a free cupcake. Just give them a free cupcake.
Why does this make people tell their friends? 2 main reasons. Because people feel generous when they have shared something useful or fun. People like to feel generous and fun.
EXAMPLES
- Beauty salon, Hair salon. Offer a glass of champagne while they wait
- Print shop. Give customer a couple wall posters of their logo with their next order. Maybe framed
- Mexican Fast Food Restaurant. Get the kitchen to give a shout out in Spanish to every new customer. Yes, ask if they’ve been there before if they aren’t an obvious regular.
- Bank. Give massages to people waiting in line
How to get into Affiliate marketing
Jun 15th
My girlfriends friend just asked me for my opinion on an affiliate link she provided as a new business venture she’d like to start in the health product niche. Here is what I replied with….
Hi Iris!!!
Sorry I have take so long to get back to you. I am very slack. 
This looks like an affiliate website that you have signed up to. If so, congratulations!!! Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways for individuals to start making money online. Some people are making millions of dollars from affilaite marketing and to be honest, is how much of the internet business world goes round. That’s the good news. The exciting news is that it is a lot of work still.
My advice is to do the following:
- choose a niche and focus on that niche alone. Don’t get distracted and try to do B, C, D, E and F as well. (you have done this already. yay!)
- experiment by buying some google adwords, targeted to your very local customers. eg( when someone searches for “body reshapers” and they are in your city) If they are buying more than your are spending, hooray!!! you just repeat this step over and over.
- Get a website. Don’t pay for one. Use http://www.jimdo.com to start off with. or google sites or wordpress.
- publish content about the thing/s you are selling. publish SHIT LOADS of content. Include photos, ratings, reviews, discussions (fake discussions if you have to) video reviews (put em on you tube), video demonstrations etc.
- Find companies that you could partner with and swap content with. eg( find all the personal fitness trainers in your area and arrange some kind of content swap on each others websites.) This will start to get your website ranking on google. This is called SEO and is where the big money starts coming in for the long term. Could take years of work before the rankings start getting profitable, so it is a test of patience and endurance.
I hope I have been of some type of help to start you off!
Richard.
PS. I can’t really comment on the niche you have chosen as my idea of fitness is to just go for a run once a month.
My most embarrassing moment
Mar 15th
I was at the office by myself a few years ago. Got a 1 hr massage from the new girl at the massage parlor next door. It was a nice, relaxing massage. She wasn’t sure how to use the credit card machine so she said her boss would come see me later. He did. Unfortunately, someone had sent me a dirty porno movie, so I opened it. Hardcore porn. No, I wasn’t masturbating. Anyway… movie wouldn’t close down because of bloody windows freezing. He said “oh, sorry, I’ll come back. I should have knocked”. I didn’t know what to say. Very embarrassed. It got worse. I built up courage to go next door to pay for the massage. I apologised and tried to laugh it off. I went back to my office and sat down and noticed that my fly was down the whole time as well. This was my most embarrassing moment.