SEOs And Bloggers - What To Say When Someone Asks What You Do lol

As a webmaster or an SEO, you might find it's fairly hard to define what you do, and that it's even more difficult to explain it to others. Whenever I'm in a new group of people and the discussion turns to 'what we do' I find myself somewhat anxious about having my turn. Sure, I do SEO and run a website, but does anyone really know what that entails? And will they think I'm actually just a bum?

More to the point, is it even really an accurate description of what I do? Sure I am a webmaster, and I do do SEO, but that's far from being the whole story. Here are some of the solutions I've come up with…

'I Work Online' 

This one is vague enough that it's always going to be true, no matter what percentage of your time is spent selling affiliate products/doing SEO/creating digital art etc. The downside though is that it's also vague enough to raise suspicion. This is the response that caused my Grandma to promise me that what I did 'wasn't illegal'…

'I'm a Writer'

Technically you do a lot of writing as a webmaster/SEO, so why not just call it what it is? This is perhaps the most accurate way to describe what you do for the biggest majority of your time, so in that regard it's the best response. Of course though people will then ask what magazine you write for, you will then say 'I write for websites' and they will then ask the age-old question: 'how does that make any money?'.

'I Run a Website'

This sounds like a legitimate job, and oddly most people won't ask too many questions about how it makes money (even though they don't understand when you say that you write for websites). It's a bit of an oversimplification and quite vague though.

One way to make this a bit better is to say 'I run a website on fitness' or 'I run a technology website'. That explains a bit more about what you're into, what you do, and the kind of person you are.

'I'm an Internet Marketer'

I would advise against this one. Sadly, too many black hat SEOs and 'social media gurus' that don't know what they're doing have given this term a bad name, meaning that people will generally assume that if you're an internet marketer, you're also as dodgy as they come. A shame, because as you know that's not really the case at all.

'I'm an Entrepreneur'

This is the honest truth. I mean most of us SEOs will also sell a few eBooks on Kindle, have some apps on the app store, have a website offering proof reading services, resell blank CDs… and when you look at this objectively it does fit the description of what it is to be an entrepreneur. There's only one slight downside to this one, and that's that it sounds terribly arrogant and self involved. Look, we can't help it if our job is really cool okay?