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It seems that many of my peers are falling back on cold calling more and more these days in order to build up their SEO portfolios. I reach that conclusion on the basis of the email that is sent to the Xenite.Org Administrators. We seem to be receiving several SEO inquiries a week now.

Some people in the SEO industry feel that cold calling is a sign of a bad SEO. Not in my opinion. After all, if you don’t have clients to begin with, how can you possibly get those referrals you need in order to avoid cold calling?

Sure, there are other ways to drum up business, such as:

• Write a really killer SEO blog that impresses the heck out of people
• Build a really great SEO forum that impresses the heck out of people
• Write a really cool SEO newsletter that impresses the heck out of people
• Speak at SEO conferences
• Buy some PPC ads and hope people click on them

I could go on, but why do that? Frankly, the old “blog-and-they-will-come” trick has probably been milked for all it’s worth. Like any typical pyramid scheme, those who get in at the beginning of the rush are the ones who make the most benefit. It’s now much easier for people with popular SEO blogs to tell newbies to create popular SEO blogs than it is to actually create a new popular SEO blog. Why is that? Because everything that can be said about SEO has been said. Right?

Same thing for forums. Forums are SO 1990s. Everyone tweets now. If you don’t already have a popular SEO forum you’re pretty much left by yourself.

Email newsletters are dying, too. Why? Twitter and all the already popular SEO blogs, forums, and newsletters have sucked up all the potential clients.

And what about speaking at SEO conferences? Well, don’t piss off Danny Sullivan and you might have a shot at that.

So if you suck at managing PPC campaigns or just cannot afford to spend $2000 a month on advertising, you’re left with cold calling. Here’s a few tips about cold calling:

• Check out who owns the site and make sure they’re not a well-known SEO with 1 or 2 popular SEO blogs
• Check out the site owner’s personal Web site and make sure he doesn’t claim to be an SEO theorist or something
• Do a site search on the site and see if any pages come up for “SEO services provided by”
• Do a site search on the site and see if “seo” is in any page URLs
• Go to the front page (that’s also called the root URL) of the site, grab the title, and find the most important expression on that page and see if it ranks on the first page of any popular search engine for that expression

Okay, that might keep you from trying to contact someone in the SEO field and telling them how great you are. Here are a few more tips:

• Does the site use a contact form instead of just posting its email address on the page for scrapers to harvest?
• Read the warnings on the contact form. Do they say anything like, “Do not contact us about links?”

Finally, here is what I would do, if I were cold calling:

• Make a list of local businesses that are not on the Web but which could benefit from having a Web site
• Write up a custom 1-page letter outlining the benefits of being found in search engines for each business
• Mail that letter using a full-price stamp
• Call 1 week later and say, “I sent you a letter about being on the Web. Let’s set up a 20-minute appointment to discuss it.”

Now, I’ve done cold-calling. I’ve cold-called as many as 50 businesses a day. You get a fair number of hangups. Some folks are having a bad day and they can be rude. That telephone, I’m told, can be a real scary thing. But if you’re polite, professional, and persistent, you should end up with a few appointments. If you’re polite, professional, confident, and not too pushy, you should close some of those appointments (at least by getting a second appointment).

That’s how cold-calling works. Now, can you make it work by sending email to people? I don’t know. I never tried. But I know that, being one of the people who doesn’t like receiving those emails, anyone who fails to do their homework or ignores the huge glowing neon signs that say “Don’t send link-related emails” is not going to impress me with either their knowledge of link building or their business acumen.

And cold-calling an SEO professional — well, that just doesn’t make sense.

Normally I don’t reply to these messages but lately I’ve been sending replies along the lines of: “You don’t get out much, do you?”

One last tip to those SEOs who contact me wanting my business: if you started an SEO blog earlier this year and stopped posting after 10 days, take your blog down. No one but you is going to link to it no matter how great a link builder you claim to be.