One of the most common searches for young entrepreneurs in 2018-2019 was "how to start an SEO, Digital Marketing or Social Media agency?". There's plenty of reasons for this spike in agency interest. More and more people are promoting the EASE of starting your agency via YouTube, blog posts, and more. But the truth is, it's not as easy as some make it seem. Sure, you can actually START the business with a few dollars (literally), but you don't have a business unless you have clients, and that's where things can get tricky for some young entrepreneurs starting their new digital marketing agency venture. Let's dive into some essentials that you'll need in order to start, maintain, and grow your PROFITABLE SEO services, digital marketing or social media agency.

Educating Yourself on the Services that You Plan to Sell Via Your Agency

Education is key in all aspects of life. If you don't at least have a general knowledge of the products and services you'll be selling, you're starting behind the 8-ball. Lots of industry "gurus" will preach that you don't need any knowledge of the products or services, you just need to know WHO to outsource them to. But get this, your clients will often ask you directly for updates, progress, why this, why that, and you need to be able to talk your way through these questions. More and more, small business owners are becoming educated in digital marketing since it's a valuable resource for their business. You need to be able to educate them as you move them through your process. There's no shortage of educational resources for each sub-type of digital marketing, so plan to put in a good amount of time before jumping into the sales and fulfillment process. Also, keep an eye out for those that often suggest that the process is EASY. These individuals often have something to sell you, whether a course, book, or service.

Be Clear About Your Agency Business Model

Oftentimes, I see agencies started on the fly without a real plan or goal in mind for how they'll be modeling their agency. Will you be outsourcing the work? How are you going to find a reputable company to outsource the work to? What happens if this company goes out of business? Do you have a backup plan? Will you be managing the work in-house? If so, how will you manage both sales AND fulfillment when both can easily be a full time job? How will you price your services? Do you plan to have a handful of high-value clients, lots of smaller budget clients or a mix of both? If you're planning on High Value, if one leaves your company or cancels services how will that impact your bottom line and growth projections? If you're planning on lots of smaller clients, you need to ensure you have great lead flow and sales funnel to plan for client turnover. Client WILL leave, it's just a matter of time. Whether that's in a few weeks, months, years, they will leave. And it's not always because of something you did wrong. Maybe they outgrew your company, maybe they SOLD their company. You never know, so you'll need to plan for turnover.

Set the Right Goals

In our world, the best goals are SMART goals. Specific, Measurable, Aspirational, Realistic, Time-Bound. Specific: Be clear about what you want to do. Replace vague terms like, “be the best in the industry” with “Generate $100,000 in sales from retail companies”. Measurable: This is answering the question, “How will I know when I’ve achieved it?”. Aspirational: This is normally Achievable, but as research from Locke and Latham found, having aspirational goals here is far more beneficial. Try adding 20-25% onto what you think you can achieve, and you’ll find you’re hitting goals faster than ever. Realistic: By the same token, know what’s in your reach. Landing $1,000,000 worth of work probably won’t happen in your first year. But, over five years, why the heck not? Time Bound: Set a clear, specific, time frame to achieve your goal in. This can be short, medium or long term, depending on the goal you’re setting. By using this model for your SEO, social media, or digital marketing agency, your SMART goals might look something like this: Get $100,000 worth of digital marketing contracts in the next 12 months Build a team of 3 in-house account and project managers to be paid $30,000 by month 16 Build to 20 clients at an average of $5,000 per month by month 18

Network and Build Relationships

In marketing, it's all about strategy. A strategy is just as important while building your business relationships. Not only can you leverage your relationships to improve your business acumen, but these key connections can be a viable sales force for your business. Start building your business relationships from day one. As you build your list, stay in touch with them with calls, texts, emails, and meetups so that you both know what each other has going on in their world. Not only will they be able to bring you value, but you can pass value along to them in some way too.

Getting Your Digital Marketing Agency Off the Ground

Now that the basics are covered, I hope you're still with me and still have an interest in starting your agency. As mentioned in the first paragraph, starting an SEO, social media, or digital marketing agency is not easy, but if executed correctly, can be the best thing that ever happened to you.

Let's get this business started, shall we?

First, you'll need to figure out how you'll structure your business legally. You can start an LLC, Corporation, Sole Prop., or other entity types. Knowing which to start will be based on many different factors, some including: Are you starting your business by yourself? How do you want your business taxed? Is this just a side hustle as of today with plans to grow in the future? It's always best to speak with an accountant or attorney before starting a business entity. You may have to pay a bit up front, but you may save yourself tons of headaches in the future.

Your Web Presence

Once you've got your legal entity settled, you need to get online. If you don't already have one, a website is your best bet to looking reputable. You won't need anything too flashy or big to start. In fact, I won lots of business when starting with a 5-page website. Think about what services you'll be offering to start and write 1000 words of content on each. Dive into the strategy a bit on each without giving away all of your secrets - if you even have any at this point.

Google My Business

Google My Business is an ESSENTIAL starting point for any small business. It will literally put your business on the map within hours or days and you can leverage this valuable profile to generate leads and promote your business locally. While Google My Business setup is considered a quick and easy novice task, other SEO strategies and best practices are more long-term plays.

Your Portfolio

If you don't have any clients or case studies yet, it's going to be hard to promote your portfolio. But you can begin to work on your own website and use it to get your feet wet and learn about the ins and outs of digital marketing. Optimize your website, promote through Google Ads, run Facebook Ads, and more. You can even offer to help businesses for free. Yes, for free. This is a great way to build your business portfolio and build contacts. If through the business might accept your free offer, there's no saying that you can't charge them down the line. Why not say something like: "Mr. Jones, how about I provide my SEO services free of charge until I rank your service in the top 5 Google results? Once you're there, then you can start paying me $X. How does that sound?"

Pricing Your Services and Yourself

You'll need to figure out how you'll be pricing your services. Do you plan to offer a service at a set rate per month? Or will you offer your services at an hourly rate and charge accordingly. For digital marketing agencies just getting off the ground, it's best to price monthly, plus any ad spends from the client. This means that if you're managing their Google Ads or Facebook Ads, you'll charge a management fee, but any ad dollars that go directly to the publisher (Google and Facebook) are paid directly from your client to them. You'll need their credit card or billing info on file, but it's a lot easier than invoicing for ad spend from the previous 30 days. Plus, what if that client never pays you??

Getting Sales

This, my friends will be the hardest thing you do when starting your digital marketing agency. Don't let anyone tell you any different. Sure, there are gurus that will try and sell you a magic service (for hundreds or thousands of dollars), but will it even work in the end? Best to invest in yourself and your own knowledge first before investing in someone else's.

Cold-Calling and Cold-Emailing

While two of the worst aspects of starting a small business (IMO), cold-calling and cold-emailing do work if executed properly. When it comes to picking up the phone and dialing for dollars, you'll spend a lot of time listening to voicemail boxes and disconnected messages, but when you're finally connected to a human, your odds are good that they'll hear you out. As you perfect your sales pitch, speaking with total strangers over the phone while trying to sell them something will get easier, but it's definitely a right of passage and should be Step 1 for any new business owner. It allows you to hear prospect objections, learn how to curate your sales message, and more. 100% learning. 100% value. Cold-emailing works, but you need to ensure it's done correctly so you're not blacklisted or totally come off as spam. There are services that will handle the sending of the email for you from their mail servers, taking the risk of your email address and domain. If you plan on sending cold emails or hiring a company to do it for you be sure to perfect your sales copy first. I would highly recommend NOT having an overseas company write your sales copy. It just won't work. Don't do it.

Networking

As mentioned above, creating relationships is one of the best ways to bring in new business. Do your best to network with industry professionals, other sales pros., and more.

Paid Ads

Paid ads through Google and Facebook is the quickest way to get eyes on your website and services. Be sure to set up conversion tracking on both to ensure you're tracking your ROI on your ad spend. In some cases, it may take hundreds of dollars of ad spend before you get a lead, but if you price your services correctly, you'll be able to make up that advertising spends in client revenue.

Search Engine Optimization

If you're offering SEO as a service, you better ensure that your own website is properly optimized. There's no shortage of resources that will teach you the basics of website optimization, but to actually rank a website using white-hat techniques, this can take time. Think of SEO as a marathon, not a sprint. Also, as mentioned above, getting your Google My Business listing up ASAP, as well as other SEO quick win tasks,  knocked off your plate, and building local SEO citations, can bring in leads almost immediately.

Content

There's plenty of channels to publish content, but the best bang for the buck these days is blog content and YouTube content. Any content produces on your blog can easily be shared on social media, plus it will be indexed by Google, increasing your odds of being found through Google searches. For YouTube, if you know what you're talking about, you can easily produce one video per week that can potentially get hundreds and sometimes thousands of views.

Agency Product and Service Fulfillment

As mentioned above, once you make the sales, you'll need to deliver your service and results. To recap:

Will you be outsourcing the work? How are you going to find a reputable company to outsource the work to? What happens if this company goes out of business? Do you have a backup plan? Will you be managing the work in-house? If so, how will you manage both sales AND fulfillment when both can easily be a full-time job? How will you price your services? Do you plan to have a handful of high-value clients, lots of smaller budget clients or a mix of both? If you're planning on High Value, if one leaves your company or cancels services how will that impact your bottom line and growth projections?

In my opinion, if you're just starting out, do as much work as possible. Again, this is where EDUCATION comes into play. As someone with years of agency experience, I can pretty much handle ANY job that I sell if I need to. This helps in many ways, but most importantly, it provides a safety net in the event I lose an employee who was once responsible for the task. Not only will handle all aspects of the business give you a crash course in running the business, but you'll also be able to spot holes in the company, where it can be improved, what's best for you to handle in the future and what would be best for an employee or freelancer, and more. On the topic of freelancers, it will take you some time to find reliable professionals that deliver EXACTLY what you're asking for. Keep in mind, 99% of freelancers have their way of doing things, so you may not be able to dictate how they handle their own process. If you can both agree on what the result or deliverable will be, that's the main goal.

Booking Keeping and Accounting

As a new business, you'll want to save as much as possible when just starting out. Bookkeeping and accounting software can get expensive, so do your best to find free products and services that meet your needs. For invoicing, PayPal typically works best. You can easily generate invoices and clients can pay via their PayPal account or credit card. You'll pay roughly 3% on what you invoice, but that's a business expense, so be sure to add up all of your PayPal fees at the end of the year during tax time. You'll also want to monitor your profit and loss as a small digital marketing agency. I've spent lots of time looking for services that do this best on the cheap when I first started out, so below is my list for you to dig into a bit more: Wave And.co Zoho Quickbooks Harvest and more.. In my opinion, they all have their perks, but starting out, you'll want the best bang for your buck. Since Wave is free and plans to stay that way, this is a good first start. And that's it. Those are my Steps to Starting Your Own Profitable SEO, Social Media or Digital Marketing Agency. I am 100% sure there are missing pieces, but finding these pieces are part of what will make your business YOUR OWN. If you should have specific questions, don't hesitate to reach out to me. I'm an open book when it comes to this kind of stuff. You can reach me on Twitter @visionisto About the Author: Nick is the owner of Visionisto, an SEO agency based out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.