SEO marketing consultant or a Google Analytics operator?

As I’m putting together my marketing business, I have now revisted what I do for the third time. Bear with me for a bit on this journey. This is my digital marketing company coming-of-age story.

three versions of my marketing business and what I’m starting to get right

I’m making no promises about locking it in, but if you follow my journey, you might get some insight on where you’ve been going with your company and where you want to be.

Dan Sullivan Marketing Company V.1:

Some web hosting, some web design, some SEO consulting, WordPress fixing, and general advice-giving over coffee. This was my side job while I worked at the law firm for 6 years. I got to help a lot of individuals and small businesses with their marketing stuff.

The profit here wasn’t critical, so on the “Learn or Earn” continuum, there was a lot of LEARN. It also let me apply stuff I was learning in my day job. Application is learning, so again, learning was half the success. Or as I learned from watching G.I.Joe ever single school day from 1983-1986, “Knowing is half the battle.”

The other half is wise execution.

Sullymedia to Ordinary Marketing in 2025 (V.2):

After hearing Joni Eareckson Tada’s talk at the GLS about how the power of God in ordinary people, and then a conversation with a friend who said “All this marketing stuff is ordinary to you but it’s complicated to the rest of us!” I was trying to get away from Sullymedia, and it looked like Ordinary was the name I would land on.

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men (ORDINARY!), they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus.

Acts 4:13 ESV

For most of this year I’ve been offering a few services with fixed prices. It gave me an easy menu to work with and an clear little thing to offer people. I could give you an SEO Audit, or a complete marketing audit, or take you through the branding process of Storybrand. (I’m not a StoryBrand Certified Guide, but I’ve gone through a ton of the training.)

The problem with offering those ‘easy’ products was that once I gave a client the SEO Audit, they were left to fix it themselves or pay me a nebulous hourly rate to fix it.

I was getting ripped off and so were they.

I could fix their SEO, but if their hosting was garbage, it didn’t help. I could take over their web hosting and give them excellent speed and uptime, but if the content on the site was still unclear, it didn’t help.

The whole point of my business is to help people have good marketing for their businesses, but I wasn’t helping enough.

Why Service Provider or Solution Provider is a terrible phrase

So I sat down and charted out all of the services I offer. What can I do to actually help small businesses with their marketing? I chopped up some old letterhead cards, got out my favorite fountain pen, and started writing them out.

It’s an impressive list, right? I should probably list them in a better way on my MARKETING WEBSITE. Good grief.

But looking at that list of things, services, if you will, a bunch of my marketing trainining clicked. I’m not a Google Analytics operator. I’m an SEO expert. I’m not an Email Newsletter assembler. I’m a permission marketing guru! (Confidence. You choose it. It doesnt’ choose you.)

I’m doing what John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing fame says not to do. “Don’t sell tactics. Sell the strategy that drives the tactics.” (my paraphrase)

Another way of saying it: I don’t care what kind of oil filter and synthetic oil the shop puts in my car, I want my car to work right and not break down!

Cue the inspirational music.

So while these are all tasks I do and have done numerous times as a one-person marketing department at various companies, that’s not what I am now. Which brings us to Ordinary Marketing V.3.

V.3: a full-service Marketing strategy and execution company

Every company is different, but the Ordinary Marketing process works the same way in most cases. You want hot leads ordering your stuff, right? You want your current customers to be happy with your service and to continue interacting with you for repeat business. You want them to feel confident sending their friends to you,too.

So now instead of holding back that StoryBrand process until you pay me $500, I show up to the discovery meeting with a couple printed out copies of the StoryBrand framework pdf. Instead of noting on an SEO audit “Add relevant CTAs to landing page” I’m going in and re-writing the page to make it a freaking conversion machine.

And that is helpful.

After meeting with a friend in the manufacturing industry, he asked me “Is there a cheaper version of this?” And I said yes, but it basically amounts to me holding back, not doing as much, and leaving the execution of the work to you.

Even if you have a one-person marketing team at your company, good marketing is a lot of work.

hiring a digital marketing agency can be expensive

Every small business started with cheap, word of mouth advertising. “Cousin Ricky is selling Cutco knives!” was a starting point for a lot of us.

But today, every business needs marketing. You can’t consider yourself doing even the most ordinary marketing if you don’t have a website, Facebook page, Google Business profile, etc. It stacks up quick.

So instead of piecemeal services, let’s market this stuff! Start figuring out the ROI of your marketing budget and target areas that need improvement. Install a complete and dependable marketing system into your company.

Keep following along here, of course, because a BLOG is your NUMBER ONE SEO TOOL. (Post about that coming soon.)

But if you’re tired of overworking your one-person marketing department,
if you started your business to do something besides marketing,
if you want to figure out what it’s going to take to bring in business,
call me.