Collecting those Cold Calls

The past 2 weeks has been pretty busy fielding calls from new potential clients. While I typically get a few every month, just last week I had 4 which seemed a little on the busy side.

This tells me that people are probably looking for some relief from this economic crunch. Revising or building new stuff is a great way for them to improve their businesses.

The cool thing, is that of the cold calls I have received, only one has been from here in Atlanta. I can see by my web traffic analytics that I get people from all over the world looking at my stuff.

In the past 3 years, I have maintained almost 70% of my traffic from the organic search engines. And these recent inquiries prove it: I am hardly local.

Why It Matters
The fact that I get people from wherever calling me about business means that I want my message to reflect this. While I don't think it necessarily does at the moment, as I revise and rewrite my stuff I will need to keep this in mind. Much of what I do has no geographical specification, but I want to purposefully remain aware of what my message might mean, depending on who is reading it, where.

So for you, o' my aspiring freelance seo writer, this means a couple things:

1. NEVER underestimate the power of the Internet and a decent site on it. Remember: I am not reaching out to these potential clients, they continue to find me. And my site is old, pretty weakly written and was only halfway optimized over 4 years ago. But it still works!
2. Remember: you are likely talking to more people than you realize, and many messages you might think are short lived will actually find a way to stick around for years.
3. Start early with good habits regarding refreshing your own content. I am horrible about this, and so my site doesn't as accurately represent me as it could. So while I may be having some great calls lately - how many am I missing? How many more could I get?

Hopefully, a few of these calls turn into new relationships. I liked the people I have been speaking with - we'll have to see if I make the right fit for them.

In the meantime, I am starting to revise and reform my own messaging. And my new direction will assume that I can get people from all over the place to see it, and that it might live much longer online than perhaps it should.