6 Questions I Asked Aaron Wall Over Dinner - Learn the SEO Secrets He Doesn’t Share on His Blog

Learn more about Internet marketing strategy by subscribing to my RSS feed - free and updated daily!

I had the privilege of attending Elite Retreat last week and somehow found myself seated between Andy Liu and Aaron Wall at the dinner table. Both are great classy guys and I definitely learned a lot from them. More to come on that later. For now, here’s an interview I did with Aaron Wall of SEO Book. Tons of useful information in here… Thanks Aaron!

What’s your reasoning for doing this? You’d be the last person I would expect to be guest posting and interviewing.

As a marketing experiment AND because I was getting board writing my site…but more the first than the second.

SEO is a long and hard process. How did you fund yourself and keep your head up in the beginning when times were unknown and money was scarce?

I got a credit card which probably was dumb, but then I got another job to hold me over on the financial front. I was also lucky in that I did not have any kids or anybody to support when I was first starting out, so I could afford to take some risks.

I think one of the things that helped me out was that rather than trying to make as much money as quick as possible I tried learning like a machine. I read books like this one and I also read a lot of great books about the psychology of the web (The Cluetrain Manifesto, Don’t Make Me Think) and lots of great marketing books (Purple Cow, The Tipping Point). If you are new to the web and can not afford lots of the higher price point material many of these books are worth more than some things being sold at much higher price points.

I went to one of Seth Godin’s in office meetings back in 2004. On his table he had a list of remarkable products that were well marketed. In my camera I had pictures of some of those same products from when I saw them out and about. Realizing how successful Seth is, and seeing that I was instinctively aware of some of the stuff he thought was great was a great confidence booster.

What were some of the ways you built yourself up as an authority on SEO?

Off the start the big thing was participating in forums. Back then I would say forums were about where blogs are now…blogs are more dominant currently though. A key to getting noticed was not to be one of 100,000 forum members, but instead to contribute where it was easier to stick out on smaller sites. So I moderated a couple SEO forums.

When the Google Florida update happened I did a ton of research about what happened and wrote an article about it. Reflecting upon that article it was not perfect, but it was good enough to get me a lot of exposure and more leads than I could handle. While I had lots of market attention I went on a link bulding binge, turning that 15 seconds of fame into a lot of high authority links. For example, I did things like look for co-citation between two competing sites where I knew one of the sites moved, and then I would email the webmasters to let them know that other site moved and that it would be cool if they could list me too.

At the end of 2003 I started blogging. Which was huge for building mindshare and subscribers.

From there the other big things I have done to be remarkable and get well known were

• I got sued by Traffic Power (which ended up working out to a stressful but profitable $40,000 link buy and public relations campaign)
• I created a bunch of cool free SEO Tools and give them away.
• I spoke at a bunch of conferences (great for building authority and attracting great clients, if you desire clients)

What are some of the most effective creative link building tactics that you have used to build up your search rankings?

• Giving away software, tools, and widgets work great.
• Getting sued worked remarkably well.
• Social interactions and contests (like your recent WinningTheWeb contest) help build a lot of exposure fast
• The other thing that is really important for standing out is creating featured content. Articles like our Blogger’s Guide to SEO and our 101 link building tips got a lot of exposure and links.

What are the factors you take into consideration when breaking into a niche with a new site?

What can I do that is different and gives me a competitive advantage here? How can I create something that is powerful that is hard for the competition to clone? Some of the best assets turn out to be domain name, social relationships, community features, aggressively promoted leading editorial content, and site design.

You also have to think of a concept you want to stand for. Something to believe in that is not already dominated. For instance, Danny Sullivan = search = Danny Sullivan. No matter how hard I might try search will never be equal to me. I had to be more niche than that…I started owning concepts like seo book and seo blog and have tried to spread that to SEO, and over time I suspect we will move into other related fields as well, but you have to pick who you want to compete against.

What are your plans for the future? Will you be focusing your efforts on SEO Book or tapping into new markets and Internet marketing strategies? (ppc, affiliate, etc)

I still intend to market the site somewhat aggressively, but honestly I am quite fine if our SEO training program has an organic growth profile. The harder you push growing a private community the more you distort stuff…better to let it build over time, get feedback, refine it, improve it, etc. Plus I am capping it at 1,000 members to ensure I have time to spend with all the community members. We are already about 2/3 of the way there.

I have a lot of other site development projects I work on as well. My wife has been heading up many of these. If we work on some of these only 5% or 10% as much as we work on SeoBook.com then we should honestly stand a good chance of dominating those markets.