The Self Employed

The Self Employed is the brain child of USA Today Small Business Columnist, Steve Strauss. Considered by many to be the country’s preeminent small business spokesperson, Steve has weighed in on hundreds of topics related to running a business. And then, an opportunity arose.

With decades of experience offering advice to small business people via his syndicated newspaper column, Steve was sitting on mountains of valuable content and an enviable brand. And after he conceived of building the website, the next step was figuring out how to leverage all that material for the web.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

In late 2011, Steve came up with the idea of starting a new website, one that could potentially become the one-stop shop for all things freelance business oriented. With all of his small business expertise, combined with his unique insight into the world of entrepreneurship, Steve was noticing first-hand, the rapid increase in the number of men and women going down the road to self-employment. Where would they find pertinent information on their career? The answer was obvious to Steve: and The Self Employed was born.

OUR ROLE

For the first six months of the project, Novel Creative was there, helping Steve to develop a working SEO strategy that incorporated current best practices regarding site-wide optimization and significant amounts of content development. From keyword research to on-site analytics, we worked in a hands-on capacity with Steve, to update the best of his years’ worth of archived material, and to add as much fresh, on-point new content from expert freelance writers on our team.

The Self Employed: Building on SEO Fundamentals

The results of all that hard work? The Self Employed pulled in sponsorships from such big name brands as eHealth Insurance, SCORE, Staples, Greatland, Elance, Verizon, legalzoom, and others.

The site continues to grow in its importance to this day, as evidenced by its continued upscaling in traffic, Page Rank, and domain authority.

And the best part? Steve’s original mission and vision now function in a high-value web property, that helps thousands of new solo-preneurs to realize their dreams of self employment, each and every day.

REPURPOSED ARCHIVES

We sorted through scores of archived articles to reconfigure and optimize the content for the new website. In the end, the integration was seamless.

SEO FUNDAMENTALS

With any site, SEO fundamentals are crucial. We provided advice and direction on how to implement best practices, site-wide.

CONTENT DEVELOPMENT

New content had to be unique, informative, and in line with the archived material. We created a robust editorial calendar and followed through.