Things that don’t work
I’m taking a good long look at my strategy for getting work. Since I’m playing a bit of a waiting game right now and I’ve scaled things down (partially on purpose – partially not) ready for the arrival of our next baby (any time in the next couple of weeks).

Anyhow, that leaves me with a bit of time to think about how I should be expanding (now that there seems to be more work about). I did a bit of that at the beginning of the year, and discovered a couple of things that don’t work.

SEO – search engine optimisation is one of them. I re-worked my website, and replaced it with a slightly easier to update, but less good looking site mainly because I thought it would appeal to search engines.

I also wrote a lot of how-to articles that I thought might appeal to my clients and got a company to post links to them on lots of interested websites so I got lots of backlinks (something search engines love) to my site.

It worked from the point of view that my site now appears much more frequently in web searches and comes up strongly when my favourite keywords are typed into google.

A success.

Or so you’d think. However, what I find is that it doesn’t make any difference. I haven’t got a single piece of work or even a contact (that I know of) from a normal search engine search.

On the other hand, I’ve got loads from the searches I pay for on google – the sponsored links.

In other words, if someone searches for an animator and I come up in the normal search they don’t bother clicking on it – or if they do, they don’t then contact me. If it comes up as a sponsored link, they do.

Which is a bit puzzling because I do the opposite – I assume that the sponsored links aren’t what I’m really looking for, and the really good stuff is the stuff that’s come up without being paid for….

Oh, well.


Another thing I did that doesn’t work is mailing lists - Getting a firm to find email addresses for lots of companies and sending out a mail to all of them. I’ve got a pretty good response in terms of people saying thanks for emailing, and I’ll keep your details, etc. but nothing to speak of in terms of actual work.

I have a feeling this is partially because I don’t really like doing this kind of mailing, and I’m a bit nervous about it, and it doesn’t sit well with me.



I think I’m finding myself forced by degrees towards a more serious and more personal approach to marketing. I have to do, what I guess I knew all along I’d have to do – just go out (or at least get somebody to go out) and personally meet and talk to the people I want to use my work.

It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it. now, it’s just a matter of finding out who that somebody should be…