September marks my one year anniversary as a Duct Tape Marketing Certified Consultant. What a great year it’s been and I have Duct Tape Marketing, John Jantsch and the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network to thank (in large part) for it.

Today, we are launching a new website for our SEO services and we’ve done our best to incorporate a year’s worth of Duct Tape Marketing experience and training into this site, while still baking in our brand of Kansas City SEO.

If you’re familiar with Duct Tape Marketing, you are familiar with the the “strategy before tactics” mantra and you’re probably aware of the Marketing Hourglass:  Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat, Refer.  You can see that the hourglass had a big influence on the design and structure of this site.

The Second Best Investment I’ve Ever Made

I say second best because an investment in myself was the groundwork for a dream career of working with small business owners in Kansas City and now around the country.

As far as a third party investments, however, becoming a Duct Tape Marketing Consultant has been the best investment I’ve ever made.  Nothing else has come close in terms of ROI – this has been a real game-changer for me and my business.

I don’t want to mislead anyone. It’s not like joining the DTM Network opens the sales floodgates by itself. In my case, I not only became heavily engaged, I also practice what Jantsch teaches. That’s probably made the biggest difference.

Marketing is a contact sport.  And you can’t write just write a check anymore and expect to get results from the sidelines.

The DTM training has helped me remove my tactical SEO blinders and see the bigger picture of content marketing, and given me and my team what we need to succeed in the new era of content-driven SEO.  I have identified my ideal customers and have worked tirelessly this year to create and distribute great content.  It really works.

Here are some of this year’s highlights:

1. Our revenues are doubling this year.

I am confident they will double again next year.  I have a super-charged inbound marketing in place and my team is growing.

2. Better at content marketing = better at SEO

I went from being a reluctant writer to a prolific blogger and my writing has extended into other forms of content as well, such as videos, eBooks and soon podcasting.

3. I co-wrote a book.

But wait there is more.  It became an Amazon Best Seller.  It was endorsed by some of the top names in marketing and SEO, such as Copyblogger’s Brian Clark, BNI’s Dr. Ivan Misner, Freshbook’s Mike McDerment and The Art of SEO‘s Eric Enge…and many, many more influencers and tech company CEOs.

Our competitors hand business cards out at sales meetings.  We hand out our best-selling book.  Boom.

With Duct Tape Marketing and John’s help, combined with my own hard work and content, I’ve been able to increase my authority in my niche and especially in my market.

4. We’ve systematized our process & scaled our services.

Through Duct Tape Marketing, we’ve been able to establish a strategic partnership with UpCity, a technology company that provides an SEO-centric inbound marketing platform.  With this platform, we’ve been able to standardize our proprietary search engine optimization process in a way that will enable us to scale using cutting edge Internet marketing techniques and methodologies.

As an extra bonus, the DTM Network provides access to dozens of the top digital marketing tools.  That means DTM has helped me grow my business as well as helped saved us money on the third party tools we need to deliver top-notch SEO and marketing services.

5. We’re taking market share from the big boys.

Aligning with Duct Tape Marketing has helped to elevate our own brand.  This is especially helpful in the SEO and Internet marketing space.  Many business owners are hammered by cold-calling SEO sales people and misleading robo-calls pretending to be Google.  By partnering with DTM, we can leverage the most powerful and trusted name in small business marketing.  This increases the trust factor and gives prospective clients, especially larger businesses, more confidence in working with a boutique agency such as ours.

This brand power, combined with our own track record, has enabled us to close more business with high-quality companies.   In fact, we took three large accounts this year way from large creative agencies.  We’re going to take a lot more in 2016.

Duct Tape Marketing is not only the perfect complement for a web development and Internet marketing agency like ours, its the missing link.

You can’t can’t win on Google anymore without great content, and you can’t create content without knowing your ideal customers or having a solid marketing plan in place.

Have questions about Duct Tape Marketing or becoming a DTM Certified Consultant?  Please call or email me.

This post originally appeared on the Kansas City SEO Blog