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Biggest SEO Advice: Love Your Job!

December 10, 2012 | SEO | 6 comments

Love Your Job

Having a job that you love is looked at as a rare thing in America. It’s practically a fantasy. I personally believe that philosophy is a joke, and that anybody can have a job they love if they really want it. Most people just don’t want to do what it takes to get there.

The biggest reason so many in America have jobs they dislike is because they are too focused on money. They want to get a job right off the bat that pays well. These jobs typically pay well starting out but then never go anywhere financially. Which then leaves you stuck at a job you hate only to find out your friends who started at low paying jobs are now making more money than you and loving life.

Think about all the people you read about that are successful, musicians, actors, artists, even SEO’s. Now look at the beginning wages for these various industries. Actors and artists basically work for free until they hit it big, and musicians make just enough at a few gigs to buy themselves lunch. Even the SEO industry starts out (on average) at fairly low wages. Now think of the people at the top of these industries and see what they have in common. They all love their jobs and they all make good money.

When you love your job, you excel so much faster than those who do it just to make money. This is especially true in the SEO industry. SEO is unlike your traditional career that stays the same for years. SEO changes on a weekly basis. If you show up to work, complete your tasks and mentally clock out at five, your SEO tactics will be out-of-date within a year and you will start to fail at what you do.

Think about the influential people you follow within the SEO industry. They are constantly reading, researching, writing, and probably tweeting. These people love what they do. Hence why they are so dang good at what they do.

Wondering if you love your SEO job? Ask yourself these five questions:

1. When I go home, does anything related to SEO ever cross my mind?

2. Do I participate in online marketing communities on my free time? (Inbound.org, SEOmoz, etc)

3. Do I run any personal websites/blogs and test out new ideas and strategies on it?

4. When I wake up to go to work do I smile and consider myself lucky?

5. Do I ever find myself reading SEO articles outside of work?

If you can answer yes to at least four of these five questions, there is a good chance that you not only you love your job, but you are awesome at it. Please don’t think that you always have to be engrossed in learning SEO outside of your full-time job in order to love it. I get that you need time away and you need to live a balanced life. However, if you find yourself always avoiding SEO outside of your job because you consider it “work,” there is good chance SEO doesn’t run through your veins and you will eventually get your butt kicked by someone who does.

Steve-Jobs-Passion-Quote

Doing SEO as a career can be more stressful than you think. With the entire world moving to conducting their lives through the internet, businesses want to be noticed by these users and be in the conversation. They will spend plenty of money to do so. The competition is high as well as the expectations. Dealing with large amounts of money and trust from these companies to take them to the top, can be overbearing to many SEO’s. However, when you truly love SEO, not only is your job not stressful, it’s secretly fun to you. You don’t stress about whether your marketing strategies will work because you live them. You read about them at night for fun, you tweet about them, write about them, try them out on your personal websites. When you truly love SEO, your job isn’t going through a list of preset tasks set by your boss. Your job is asking yourself the same question Mark Cuban always asks himself, “If I was trying to kick my own ass, what would I do?” That’s the secret to being an awesome SEO.

It’s no secret that having a job you love is important to your happiness in life. Due to the rapid change that SEO goes through every week, this is even more true if you are in SEO. If you don’t love what you are doing, you are going to get whooped by those who do, and your website(s) will never succeed.

Brandon Hassler
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Brandon Hassler

Senior Account Manager at 97th Floor
Brandon Hassler is a Senior Account Manager at 97th Floor. He currently assists brands in elevating their web presence and is always looking for ways to learn more and innovate the industry.
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  • http://twitter.com/glenn_ferrell Glenn Ferrell

    Answered your questions. Yes :) And, since I work at home, I pretty much never stop. Over dinner tonight I told my wife and son how excited I was that I had finally figured out how to actually figure exactly why the backlink counts from OSE, Google and SEMrush are different. Funny … they didn’t think that was all that cool :)

    • http://www.hasslerseo.com/ Brandon Hassler

      Thanks for comment Glenn! I was actually wondering why all of those backlink reports are different, what did you find?

      • http://www.facebook.com/ashwin.ramesh.73 Ashwin Ramesh

        They’re different because they use different data-sources. Nobody has an “accurate” count of backlinks as considered by Google since they don’t have access to Google’s actual database.

        They either get their data from third party sources or have their own scrapers and crawlers do the job. I know for a fact that OSE and SEMRush use third party tools for part of if not all their data.

  • http://twitter.com/miksas MikSas

    I see “links” in my dreams LOL!, I still have that “fire in my belly” and helping for-profits and non-profits get better visibility (not neccesarily beat their ‘competition) online gives me a sense of accomplishment everyday, though not necessarily making more than what I need…

  • http://www.kizi2.com/ kizi 2

    okay. i agree with your ideal. thanks for your article.

  • http://www.y8u.org/ Juegos Friv

    This author has it occurring in communication and perceptions.