Creating A Freelance Consultant Lead Machine With WP Engine

Creating a website that truly fulfills its business purpose is hard. Very hard actually; unless you are an absolute pro. There are a million decisions to be made, and for each one it is time consuming to do the research to ensure you’re making the right decisions, and how those decisions affect all other decisions being made.

Right People is an online service through which European companies can find and hire freelance consultants. We engage with CIOs, IT development managers and IT operation managers, and based on their specific needs we find a freelance consultant that is a perfect match, whether they require a software developer, an IT project manager or an infrastructure expert.

A few years ago we started to launch microsites in different competence areas to attract leads from companies searching for a consultant. This worked well, and along with the traditional approach of simply calling and meeting customers, it became an important source of leads for Right People. These sites were build on a CMS other than WordPress and were hosted by a local vendor. The problem was, we often battled unexpected downtime and frequent malware attacks that would suddenly shut down the sites.

We knew we had a good thing going by attracting leads online, and we needed our setup to be more professional. We therefore created a digital strategy to try and answer some key questions:

• Should we make one large website or many small microsites?
• What platform should we use?
• What hosting vendor should we use?
• How should the website interact with social media?
• How should the website be developed to build the optimal foundation for SEO?
• How should the design be for optimal conversion of leads?

Primarily for SEO reasons, we decided to go with one site based on WordPress that is managed and hosted by WP Engine. In our research, we found that site performance was quite important for SEO; meanwhile our research and recommendations from experts we know showed that WP Engine was by far the most professional choice in this area.

It was a long process to get the site up and running, mainly because we created very large amounts of content. We wanted a unique “landing page” for each specific consultant role that we can deliver to our clients. (As an example, you can see a landing page for a .NET developer here.)

As part of this process, WP Engine’s functionality with daily backups and roll back made quite a difference. It gave us the freedom to try things without being afraid of making severe mistakes, as we knew we could always roll back to a previous version. This, combined with automatic upgrades that don’t require any action on our part, is simply light years ahead of the previous web hosting vendors we used.

When trying to make a professional service it is necessary to have the best and most professional partners, and for Right People I can say that we have truly achieved this with managed WordPress hosting from WP Engine.

Our site is now live and the first valuable leads have checked in. You can see our results here:

www.rightpeoplegroup.com

Søren Rosenmeier is a partner with Right People.

Right People is a leading provider of freelance consultants designed to match the exact need of the customer within IT services. It was founded in 2007 by two partners both with a background as freelance consultants.

Right People operates primarily within the fields of software development, IT infrastructure and IT project management. The business model is simple and it is both free of charge and without any obligations for the customers to get an offer for  a freelance consultant for a specific project.

Since its start, Right People has experienced yearly growth rates between 25 percent and 50 percent and is one of the fastest growing freelance consultant agencies in Europe.