Below, Dan Kaplan from SEO company periscopeUP tells us how his team uses Basecamp to manage two production facilities, three writers, and three designers spread around the world.
Basecamp Keeps periscopeUP Above Water
periscopeUP is a boutique SEO company, managed entirely in the cloud. Our two man shop is able to help dozens of clients stay on top of Google, Yahoo! and Bing rankings and generate more leads from their websites. To keep costs low, periscopeUP outsources every aspect of their business, and Basecamp keeps track of it all.
My co-founder Eric Kronthal (sales) and myself (operations) rely on Basecamp to manage two production facilities (in the Philippines and Thailand), three writers (North Carolina, Baltimore & Denver) and three designers (Phillipines, Denver, and Baltimore).
As a Project Manager, staying on time and on budget is critical, and Basecamp is the only tool I've found that helps me manage so much productivity.
periscopeUP's Basecamp Dashboard.
How is One Project Manager Able to Manage So Much Work?
With Eric focusing on sales, I am the company's only PM. I am a power-user of Basecamp, taking advantage of advanced features to streamline operations and manage dozens of web development and SEO projects.
Templates are a favorite feature. periscopeUP uses a proprietary process created over the past 13 years of web development trials and tribulations. We've put this 52 point SEO checklist into a template, broken out into each stage of the process.
Getting a new client up on Basecamp takes about five minutes, because all we have to do is create milestones and attach pre-made to-do lists from our templates. Everything is ready to go, from project intake to billing, on-page optimization to coding, and site submissions to link building.
More Productivity. Lower Costs.
Maintaining and improving a repeatable process has allowed periscopeUP to scale our business without having to add new Project Managers:
- Pushing the Basecamp RSS feed to shared Google Calendars helps us stay on schedule
- Writeboards keep track of SEO content revisions
- Comments let writers, designers, coders and PMs collaborate with clients
- By giving clients their own Basecamp account (and correct use of private tasks), we're able to easily get client approvals on screenshots, copy changes and documents without revealing too much of the secret sauce.
The Basecamp RSS feed pushed to a shared Google Calendar.
A Focus On Clients
When we started the company, we were struggling with Google Docs, then DotProject, to keep track of multiple jobs, multiple vendors, and multiple headaches.
Eric has said that, "Basecamp has cut our project management time in half, which as a salesman I love because it allows us to provide high touch customer service and not worry that something's going to fall through the cracks. After they've worked with us, upselling a client on more services is easy!"
It Travels Well
When a client called in a panic that they were no longer on page one, with Eric in West Virginia, myself in New York, a coder in the Phillipines, and a writer in N. Carolina, the team was able to check their SEO logs, make copy updates, recode a few pages, and update XLM site maps to quickly restore rankings.
To-Do items across all projects.Tips for other customers
Do we have tips for other Basecamp users? I'm excited by the new dates feature on tasks. Use your milestones to schedule the big deliverables, and apply dates to key tasks on the critical path needed to achieve those deadlines. The feature has been out only a week, and we've already been able to use it to reduce email clutter.
