Networking Outside Your Normal Circles

I always do what I can to network outside of the IT community. When I look at the clients I have, almost none of them have come from meetings with fellow IT community members. First there's Tom Dampsy, the London Ontario Real Estate Agent who I met at Toastmasters. Next is Don Hill the clothing wholesaler who I met through Forest City Surplus and who I designed a website for his wife's baby wear business. Then there is Franz Cauchi from Funclips Coupons who is a fellow Freedom Party member. I remember introducing myself to Franz at a Freedom Party post-election meeting in 2008. To my surprise right before were ready to start a Freedom Party executive meeting he said that he remembered that I was a website developer and asked if I was accepting any new clients. I gave him a business card and we were in touch later that week. After a few e-mails I convinced him of the value of my search engine optimization and website improvement services.

I'm quite impressed with the improvements I did for Franz and his Funclips Coupons website. If you're unfamiliar with Funclips let me give you a little bit of background on the organization. Funclips is an organization which sells coupon books in the greater Toronto area (Toronto, Mississauga, Barrie, and Oakville). In the past customers were simply given a list of businesses that had advertised in the coupon book. Now prospective customers can be more certain of their purchase because all the coupons that are in the book are listed at the bottom of each city webpage. The additional coupon details should have a positive effect on long tail searches for the businesses listed in the coupon book.

One thing that surprised me about Funclips from an SEO standpoint was that despite the fact the website had been in existence for over 10 years it had almost no backlinks. I would have thought a company that had a web presence for 10+ years would have more than a few backlinks. I guess this proves that if one does not go out and actively seek backlinks on an occasional basis one will not get any backlinks. It will be interesting to see what happens to Funclips coupon books and its Google rankings. When I started it wasn't showing up for almost any search term. It will be interesting to see what the results will be when I'm done.