Thank you for your recent call. Despite the fact that you ignored my "Do Not Call" entry for telemarketers, I found our conversation to be somehow refreshing. I hope that you'll find this memo equally "refreshing" and will feel free to share it with your pals at Traffic-power.

I think you'll find that you will be much more successful in your attempts to solicit future business if you'll keep the following simple guidelines in mind:

• When you make an unsolicited call pitching your search engine optimization services to a website owner, you'll sound much more credible if you've actually visited the website in question. Your obvious surprise at my assertion that I'm a website designer was a little comical, but I'll give you points for honesty when you admitted that you hadn't actually looked at the very website that you intended to help.


• You might also want to do something about the optimization of your own website in search results before asking me to pay you to improve mine. When I search for "search engine optimization" on Google, your site doesn't come up in the top 200 results, and frankly, sugar, I don't usually look past the top 50.


• Along those same lines, it would seem really helpful to your pitch if you knew in advance how my site performed on the most relevant keyword searches. For example, a search for "website design Midland Texas" puts me in two of the top three places on Google. It's pretty hard to improve on that, isn't it? Of course, that would have required that you actually visit my site and determine its purpose, and I know that, as a busy consultant, you simply don't have time for those kinds of details.

In closing, I know you have a job to do, as do we all. Time is money, and I'm sure you have quotas to fill and miles to go before you sleep. So I'll overlook the hasty-and-oh-so-insincere "have a nice day" accompanied by a hang-up in my mid-sentence, and wish you, too, a very nice one.

Your pal,