The frequent readers among you are no doubt already familiar with UpBuild’s core company values. Today, we’re announcing a new initiative that will strengthen our commitment to three of those values in particular — purpose, betterment, and transparency — by making our collective expertise available to you, when you need it, absolutely free of charge. We’re calling it the UpBuild Help Desk.
Twice a week, for two hours at a time, a minimum of two Builders will be standing by to answer your every question about SEO, analytics, and digital marketing. Think of this resource as being positioned somewhere between a college professor’s office hours and the Apple Store Genius Bar: you bring us your questions or your challenges — however general or specific — and we explore them together in a live conversation via Zoom. This idea happened to originate as a way of making optimal use of the sponsor’s table that UpBuild had secured for Engage, Portland’s big annual search marketing conference, back in February when that event was first being organized. Once it became clear that Engage, along with every other human gathering under the sun, was going to have to be postponed for the sake of public health, we looked to find another way of making the idea a reality. For a fully remote company in what has sort of become a fully remote world, the choice was clear. So here we are!
How we use a Help Desk time slot will be up to you. The slots will last 15 minutes, and during that time, we can try to help you with a nagging problem on your site, or you can pick our brains about a current topic in SEO or analytics, or we can just shoot the breeze. We can make it a video conference, or just audio, or we can simply chat back and forth over Zoom’s text chat feature if you’re more comfortable communicating in writing. You also can feel free to screen share if you want us to take a close look at something. We can’t promise a solution in every case, but we can promise that we will try our best to get to one.
In service of another of our core values — integrity — we want to use the last of the available space in this post to promise you that we will not use the Help Desk as a sales tool. At no point in our discussions will we treat your problem like an opportunity for us to sell you on our services. These sessions are meant to be casual, comfortable, good-faith conversations between human beings with a shared interest. We might find one of your problems adequately fascinating to want to write about it in a blog post (anonymized, of course), but that is the fullest extent to which this resource would ever cross paths with our marketing.
We’ll be staffing the Help Desk between 10:00 AM and noon Pacific time, every Monday and Wednesday, beginning Monday, July 6 and lasting until the end of the month, at which time we will pause to determine whether it has proven valuable to the community, and whether we believe it’s a service we can continue to provide over time. Fifteen-minute slots will need to be claimed in advance, and our sign-up form is available here.
We look forward to helping you soon!
