How would you run your own online marketing company?

Here's a fun question from Daniel in Thailand.

He asks, Hi, Matt, if you would open your own digital marketing SEM SEO company, what would you do different from the other thousand companies out there?

It's a really fun question, and it makes you think a lot.

There's a lot of great strategies that a lot of great SEO and marketers already use.

So things like running a really useful service can be a great way to attract attention and get buzz.

And the sort of people who run open source great projects are often the sort of people that build up reputable trust in the real world.

And so they build up trust online as well.

You could think about various ways to turn this on its head.

What if you operated?

Of course, it would be completely white hat.

But what if you operated completely transparently?

You more or less recorded every meeting and put every recommendation and guideline up on the web that you made in your company.

I think that would be interesting because the people that would show up, you didn't make them say, okay, you have to be willing to go on the record with what sort of stuff we're doing. But Eric Inge did a really neat project that was almost like this old house where he did a few case studies, where he said, I'm going to take this site and I'm going to show you exactly what I did.

And I'm going to show you how much more traffic you get as a result.

And I thought that was a very powerful case study.

So just off the cuff, those are some of the things that I can think of.

But the beauty of the marketing space is it's entirely based on creativity.

The more you can come up with a cool idea that no one else has, the more you can get to be well known and build your reputation. So I think there's a lot of different niches and a lot of different ways that you you could think about things.