I am a HUGE fan of The Celebrity Apprentice on NBC.  I don’t watch a lot of television, but this is a show that I cannot – and will not – miss. It’s exciting, suspenseful, and highly entertaining. The more I watch, the more I begin to make connections between the show and SEO. I thought it might be fun to share a handful of “lessons” that I think all in the SEO industry can learn from The Celebrity Apprentice.

1.  Establish relationships with the right people – you’ll need favors later

Annie Duke, one of the two finalists on this season’s Apprentice, is a perfect example. Duke is a professional poker player, and the more you watch her on the show, the more you realize what makes her such an effective player (she beat out 234 players – mostly men – in 2004 to win a World Series of Poker event!). Duke is manipulative, cunning, extremely intuitive, intelligent, and charming – well, some people find her charming (Joan Rivers, fellow finalist, is not one of these people). But one of Duke’s advantages is that she has a very generous circle of friends, the majority of which are also poker players. Duke consistently raised the most money on Apprentice challenges, and all she had to do was call her “people” and sweet-talk them into donating HUGE sums of money. 

How does this relate to SEO? Much of SEO is marketing – and, in marketing, you need to make connections with the right people. Ultimately, these are the individuals that you will reach out to when you need something. In SEO, it’s important to have connections with various “types” of people: those who have great business connections, those who have vast SEO/Internet marketing knowledge, those who have excellent programming capabilities, etc. If you maintain an address book full of useful people and keep in touch with them from time to time (follow them on Twitter!), you can reach out to them when you REALLY need them, and they’ll be more likely to help you out. This is what makes Annie Duke such an excellent player on Apprentice: she knows ALL the right people, and isn’t afraid to use them.

The lesson here is to do as Annie does: surround yourself with other like-minded people who can help you out if you need them. And, of course, it works both ways, so be prepared to reciprocate.

2.  Play the game – but play nice

This is important. On a show like Apprentice, everybody is friendly in the beginning. But as the number of contestants dwindle, and the challenges become more difficult, people’s real personalities start to show (e.g., Jesse James, who went crizazy on Clint Black and told him he is “stupid,” along with a few other things…up until that point, James rarely spoke and everyone loved him). This relates to SEO because we ALL have competitors – but most of them are not as smokin’ as Brande Roderick. SEO in itself could be likened to a game: the rules are always changing, and if you can’t keep up, you lose. 

If SEO were like Apprentice, we would be the contestants, and Donald Trump – the big boss on Apprentice – would be our client – you don’t want to disappoint the big guy. So, we often find ourselves implementing certain strategies to get ahead of our competition – but it is important to remember that you have to play nice. If you DON’T, it could (and probably will) come back and bite you in the ass. At the same time, you have the right to defend yourself if and when a competitor tries some nasty hit job voodoo on your or your client’s website. You don’t have to be BFF with your competitor, but keeping it cool is always a good idea – don’t throw them under the bus, and they won’t have a reason to retaliate. If you do go after them for something (e.g., reporting a paid link) do it the right way, and don’t do it maliciously. If you are focusing on how to bring your competitor down, you’re going to do your own business a great disservice.

Keeping relations friendly is ultimately going to be best for business. You don’t want to end up like Annie Duke and Joan Rivers, who are not on speaking terms and have a serious hatred for one another. Based on that alone, who’s to say that they won’t lose focus of the task at hand and put out a season finale hit job on one another? It’d be great TV – but don’t try it in SEO. 

Your takeaway? You get further with sugar than with vinegar (or however that saying goes).

3.  Keep your friends close, but your competitors closer

In SEO, as noted previously, we spend a lot of time analyzing our competition. An SEO’s focus should be a healthy balance of worrying about our own client and keeping an eye on what our competitor is up to. An issue between Annie Duke and Natalie Gulbis, LPGA golfer, during this season of Apprentice is a good example. By the second or third challenge, everyone knew how well-connected Duke was. Natalie, who was assigned the role of Project Manager for this particular task, hadn’t had much luck raising funds for her team, so she decided to try and take advantage of Duke’s connections herself. Gulbis called Phil Hellmuth, who has won an impressive 11 World Series of Poker events, and ask him to donate money to her team – keep in mind, Duke represented the opposing team. Hellmuth was interested, but suspicious. He called Duke, who was PISSED – if you watch the show, you’ll remember Duke’s loud and heated phone conversation with Hellmuth.

In the end, Gulbis didn’t get any money from Hellmuth, because Duke quickly put the kibosh on that – and she also made Annie Duke REALLY mad. So mad, in fact, that Duke decided to keep an eye out on Gulbis and throw her under the bus in the boardroom. After her failed attempt at squeezing donations out of Hellmuth, Gulbis was on Annie Duke’s radar – keep your friends close, but your competitors closer. It’s safe to say that Duke gave her wealthy friends a “heads-up” about Gulbis, in the event that Gulbis tried to pull a fast one on Duke again. And, eventually, Gulbis was fired (she sucked) and Duke is in the final two.

Keeping a watchful eye on what your competitors are doing is HUGELY important. This means checking competitor backlinks, checking out their site (including subpages) frequently to see if they’re adding new “stuff,” checking to see how many pages of content they have in relation to your own site…etc. Keep in mind that they’re watching YOU, too.

The lesson here is that it pays to know what your competition is up to – and it will also behoove you to keep your progress under wraps, if possible, to avoid giving competitors an edge.

4.  Don’t get personal

Joan and Melissa Rivers. What can you say about these two? Neither have their original faces, and my boyfriend says that Melissa reminds him of a horse (but I’m not here to judge). It’s fairly accurate to say that Melissa basically made a (successful?) career out of riding her mother’s QVC-sold coattails. Neither played the game terribly, and seeing as Joan is in the final two, she obviously did something right. But both made a big mistake: they took EVERYTHING personally. Melissa had some issues with Annie Duke and, eventually, Playmate Brande Roderick, and those spilled over into the boardroom – and, as any mother would do, Joan defended her daughter (even going so far as to liken Annie Duke to Hitler). This was a crucial mistake – you should never let personal attacks invade the boardroom.

For those in the SEO industry, it often feels like we’re in Donald Trump’s boardroom when we’re meeting with a client, as we may be criticized and put down by someone who really has very little knowledge about what we’re actually doing, and that SUCKS. But if we take it personally, and let it bother us, we’ll lose our focus. Our work will suffer. And when our work suffers, our competitors have an advantage. Joan Rivers was lucky in this instance – her “boss” (Trump) really respects her and has followed her career, and because of that he didn’t let the personal attacks and in-fighting in the boardroom sway his decision to bring her to the final two. In SEO, however, you may not be as lucky.

The lesson here? Let criticism – no matter what the source (a client/boss/competitor/co-worker) roll off your back, Mallard Duck-style. Keep on going. There will always be someone who thinks you suck – that’s life. Don’t let your work suffer because you make it personal.

 5.  No idea is a stupid idea

Ok, sometimes, an idea IS stupid. But what ISN’T stupid is sharing an idea, period. SEOs thrive on new ideas. Without them, we fail. This is why so many SEOs have daily or weekly strategy sessions: to share ideas, share strategies, and bounce ideas around. On Apprentice, Clint Black (creepy country singer obsessed with finding a role for a beautiful model in EVERY challenge! He also wrote a boring tuna jingle...) was not very inclined to take the ideas of his teammates into consideration when he was acting as Project Manager. He’d listen to the ideas of other people, but rarely did he implement them in a way that satisfied the team. His teammates consistently told Trump in the boardroom that they felt undervalued and wished Black had been a better listener and team player.

In some SEO companies, there’s a distinct hierarchy. In my company; for example, we work as a team, period. There’s no “boss” – well, there is, but in reference to my fellow peons and I, we all act as equals. If someone isn’t listening to the ideas of someone else, or someone feels that an idea may be useless, there’s a moment where we say hey, we need to take every idea into consideration here, because you never know what might work. Often, an idea that sounded REALLY idiotic in a meeting ends up working out well. Clint Black was criticized in the last episode of Apprentice for failing to incorporate more of Joan River’s ideas into a 30-second commercial (she has been on TV and in comedy for what, like 200 years now?). Then he was fired. Had he been more open to Joan’s ideas, perhaps their team would have won, and he would be one of the final two.

The bottom line? As an SEO, it is imperative that you be open to the ideas of others, and it is also important that you share your OWN ideas, even if your idea may “seem” kind of stupid initially. You never know!

6.  The client is always right

On Apprentice, Donald Trump has the final say in who stays and who’s fired. In SEO, it’s no different, really. Ultimately, your client can fire you if they want to. If you suck, then you deserve it. But even if you don’t suck, you can still be fired. And, in the end, the client is still right. That’s why it’s so sweet to be Donald Trump. I think it’s good to remember this – you may be the best SEO in the biz, but you also have to be a bit humble. You don’t want to give your client the impression that you think that you’re better than everyone else, even if you are. Good ol’ Annie Duke often takes an elitist attitude, and it pisses me (and all of her fellow Apprentice contestants) off. At the end of the day, though, she plays the game, and she’s darn good at it.

I can’t help but admire her somewhat – I mean, the woman is nasty at poker (I do not even know how to play), and she’s also a nasty business woman (which I strive to be). I wonder, though, if her ego might get in the way of her relationship with Donald Trump – because you don’t want to go toe-to-toe with Trump when it comes to ego. He’s the shiz, and he knows it, and I can picture this glorious boardroom scene where Annie Duke battles it out with Trump and claims that she’s better than him – guess what would happen? It’d be amazing to watch, but Duke would be FIRED.

The point is: don’t get all ego-crazy on your client and cop an elitist attitude. You may be the best person for their SEO job, but if they want to fire you, they can, and they will, and in the end, you’ll be out of a job, and the client will still be right.

In closing, I think that The Celebrity Apprentice can teach us quite a bit about being business-savvy in general, but it also has a lot of correlations to SEO. The biggest and best (and most profitable) SEO companies marketed themselves well using their connections, maintained good relationships with their competitors and clients, came up with innovative new ideas, and didn’t mix their emotions with their business. Those who show up on the 15th page of Google results pulled an Andrew Dice Clay and got themselves fired.

So, remember while you are watching the live 3-hour finale this Sunday: play the game, but play smart.  And never sport a combover a la Donald Trump. It ONLY looks becoming on him.