“You will never hear the words “secret sauce” and “we can’t tell you, that is proprietary” out of our mouths.”

Interview by Mike Sullivan of Sully’s Blog

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This Interview was made possible by our friends at

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Danny DeMichele refers to himself as an “Internet Strategist.”  He is the founder and CEO of eVisibility .  He has marketed and sold several health, e-commerce, and Internet marketing companies over the past 10 years.  Danny is the co-founder and chairman of the board for Buy Online, Inc. , a conglomerate of e-commerce websites that sell niche products across targeted domains.  At ecoVillage , an online community focusing on eco friendly lifestyles and products, he serves on the board.  Danny is also on the board of ORMA (Online Reputation Management Association).  His current list of clients is equally as impressive as his affiliations.

eVisibility, founded over 12 years ago, has used its Internet marketing strategies to achieve and improve visibility for its clients.  Their philosophy is straight forward and simple: “increase the quality and quantity of prospects visiting your website and convert a greater share of those visitor into customers.”

MO:
You have an excellent reputation as an entrepreneur and an internet marketing professional.  What took you in this direction and led you to where you are today?

Danny:
I have always loved starting new businesses. My first was out of my moms Garage when I was 18, I took over a restaurant delivery company. It was a huge success back then and really paved the way for me to continue to start and run businesses. I sold that business for a whopping $3,000 and reinvested the dollars into an online nutrition company, eventually selling it and starting an internet marketing company.

MO:
As I prepared for this interview, I started with a simple search on your name, “Danny DeMichele.”  What followed was page after page of mostly relevant search results.  Did you architect that, or is there really that much information about you from various random sources?

Danny:
Online reputation management is a huge passion of mine and I believe should be the greatest concern of any executive and business. Too easily can someone slander you (which has happened to me) so I took control of my online reputation. What you see there is architected exactly how I want people to read about me. This also serves as a nice shield in case I ever get attacked in the future.

MO:
In your bio on DannyDeMichele.com , you don’t hesitate to mention that you have a long list of large success and failures and that most of what you have learned has come from those failures.  What were some of those failures and the vital lessons that went along with them?

Danny:
One of the biggest failures I have experienced was the selling of my online nutrition company. What should have been worth millions, ended up being nothing due to haste from my side and not putting ourselves in a position to say “No” to the deal. The one thing I will never do again is have a company that is reliant on Investment of Acquisition. I now run companies as if it is my last, and no one is going to be there to help move it along.

MO:
eVisibility is your Internet Marketing Company, boasting a 90% client retention rate which is well above the industry average.  What does it take to land national and global clients like McDonald’s, Fidelity, or Overture.com and maintain that relationship?

Danny:
One of the main reasons we do so well with our clients is complete transparency in what we do. You will never hear the words “secret sauce” and “we cant tell you, that is proprietary” out of our mouths. We feel that educating the clients, and getting their staff on board with our recommendations and strategies is the key to a successful client relationship. Many people have criticized me for going this route, stating that by teaching the clients, they will leave you as soon as they know enough. But most companies don’t want to deal with these things, and they want a company that they know they can trust.

MO:
One of eVisibility’s service offerings is “Online Reputation Management,”  a service most people are likely not familiar with.  Tell us about this service and why it is important to an organization.

Danny:
As I mentioned earlier, reputation management should be a top concern of anyone doing business, whether an offline or online business. No company is perfect, no company always satisfies, and now one bad customer experience can be voiced to the world in about 10 minutes. If someone uses an online forum to gripe about a business, 8/10 times Google picks it up and shows it when someone is searching for that business. We had a client who estimated they were losing $3-$4 million dollars a year because of a blog some wrote about them. It was almost enough that they were going to change and rebrand a business that they had for 20 years.

Online Reputation Management is a service where we work with our clients to create and promote, with traditional search engine optimization techniques, to make sure you control the top 2-3 pages of search results. This not only defends you from attack, but clients can now control the messaging that they want prospective searchers to see about them. Online reputation management is essentially controlling your brand.

MO:
What Internet marketing advice can you offer to entrepreneurs looking to maximize the visibility of their start up websites?

Danny:
Get educated. Don’t rely solely on outsourced companies to expose their businesses online. The old way of simply going to the yellow pages and placing an add has been changed with having to figure out how to get your business listed in hundreds of websites, and with a variety of strategies. It is critically important that you understand what it is your business needs and what type of company or employees you need to hire to get you there. I would recommend going to Search engine strategies, OMMA, Pub Con, etc, to get a solid foundation. From there, you can go out and hire the right teams and have the knowledge to evaluate what it is they are doing.