Aaron Wall Interview, SEO Book Founder Talks Life and SEO

By: Michael Dunlop     Topics: Entrepreneur Interviews

Interview with Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com. The SEO Book Training Program has over 100 cross referencing online training modules that allow you to learn SEO one piece at a time. Many modules also include how to videos and other bonuses like spreadsheets of common keyword modifiers and an example of aligning keyword research data with site structure and on page optimization.

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Todays interview is with perhaps one of the biggest names in SEO – Mr Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com

SEO Book.com is a leading SEO blog covering the search space. It offers marketing tips, search analysis, and whatever random rants come to Aaron’s mind. 😉 The first version of  SEO Book came out in December of 2003.

Hi Aaron
Thank you for this interview. The many young entrepreneurs at WebMakeMoney.com will I am sure find your replies of great interest.

First off – can we have a little background information – Where you live? How old you are? What motivates you? Inspires you?

I am 28 years old and live in the San Francisco area with my loving beautiful wife Giovanna ( http://www.heygio.com ). I guess the biggest thing that motivates me is wanting to learn, and being attracted towards things I am passionate in.

1) Tell us about SEOBook.com? Why did you launch SEOBook.com?
At the end of 2003 I wrote an article about the Google Florida Update ( http://www.search-marketing.info/newsletter/buyads.htm ). From that article I got really popular. Like I went from getting ~2 inquiries a month to about 30 phone calls a day. I simply could not keep up with it all, and figured there was probably a good market for selling an ebook offering usable tips, without requiring selling personalized consulting to each prospect.

Plus I saw that consulting was sorta feast or famine, and that blogs were getting a disproportionate number of links because they made it so easy to be subscribed to and link to. So I figured being a part of the conversation and selling an information product off of that made sense. It also helped that SEO keeps changing and was a fast growing field. Both of which meant a large number of *potential* customers waiting for me to fill the demand. I was also lucky to get the exact match .com domain name for $8.

2) Can you tell us how many copies of the SEO Book have been sold?

I think it was a bit more than 13,000 copies sold, a bunch given away to good charities, plus I would guess far more have been pirated as well. Even yesterday I saw an eBay listing someone did.

3) I understand that recently you moved over to a Membership website option – what was the reason for this and how was it received?

As the field got more complex (especially with lots of hand editing from Google) I felt that the one size fits all approach of a book just was not as good as offering feedback and strategies specifically for your site. The reason for the move is to establish a deeper, more meaningful relationship with a limited number of customers willing to pay for such a relationship.

I think anytime you change business models there is friction, especially if you move from a one time sales model to a subscription. Our SEO training course ( http://training.seobook.com/ ) has been fairly well received…we have far more subscribers than we were expecting at this point, with over 100 people joining in the first 48 hours and almost all of them staying subscribed (yesterday was our 1 month anniversary).

I think a big feature we offer that is of exceptional value is our private member community forums. The admission price filters out bottom feeders to keep the signal to noise high. I feel that personalized help I have given has helped many members. And I feel I have learned a lot from member feedback, interacting with members, and reading suggestions members give each other. I look forward to participating there each day and feel I learn something new every day…if I like it that much I figure other people probably do too.

4) How do you describe SEO and what do you consider two or three of the essentials of SEO?

SEO is the art and science of creating targeted traffic streams from relevant search queries. Keyword research and link building are two basic fundamentals of SEO, but as the web gets more and more conversational I think branding, public relations, and conversations are really sorting out the winners from the losers. What is remarkable about your site? Why should I be talking about it? What makes you unique? Why should I be talking about you? Those are the questions that allow individuals to beat multi-billion dollar corporations.

5) What do you dislike the most about the SEO industry?

I don’t like how many people who essentially make a living from SEO (like the guy who ran the spammy weblogs inc. linkfarm network) ( http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6312 ) get away with calling SEO dirty. And some people in our industry are ____ enough to ask that guy to keynote at conferences.

Google funds a lot of the spam and copyright violations then claims they are above it all. This quote from their search query evaluation guidelines displays their lack of respect for copyright more clearly than anything else I have ever come across

“(Scraped Content that is not Spam) Lyrics, poems, ringtones (that the user programs rather than downloads), quotes, and proverbs have no central authority. When you see pages with this content, you cannot judge it to have been copied, and the pages should not be assigned a Spam label. Unfortunately, some content is written specifically for Spam pages and you will not find it on another source.
Although you may be convinced that the intent is to deceive, if the content makes sense and appears original, you will not be able to label such pages Spam.”

Also I think some people quest so much for fundamental truths that they isolate information into meaningless chunks void of context. The truth is we are all a bit lucky, and SEO is becoming more and more of a subset of marketing.

6) What were the main factors that generated sales of your SEO book in the early days? I understand you ran an affiliate program – how important was that?

Keep in mind that before I created SEO Book I had already had spent a year learning SEO, and already wrote that wildly popular Google florida update article a few months prior.

People think that bolting on a fleet of affiliates is a key to sales, but that is probably only true if they exist as value added resellers, or if you are in with the hype filled joint venture email offer spammers, or if your product is already a market leading product that is impulsively purchased and easy to recommend.

Before I changed my model recently affiliates were a good chunk of sales but I need to improve my sales funnel again to get affiliate sales back up. But they were not a big sales channel until my brand was already well known.

I think the key to getting early sales was just participating in the community and getting people to talk about me. If Seth Godin mentions my site that is probably another $1,000 in the bank account. And there was a controversial Search Engine Watch forum thread talking about stuff I was doing. Though the thread did not feature me in a good light, it still doubled my income for about a week.

Conversation = profits.

After I got profits I re-invested into create a better site design and giving away a bunch of free SEO tools ( http://tools.seobook.com/ ), both of which turned out to be good long-term business decisions.

7) Do you feel social media marketing / buzz marketing can play a part in SEO? (i.e content that gets linked to?)

Well I think one of the leading SEO strategies is to create content that focuses on a topic that is easy to link at. In an ideal world it would be something I did every day.

Truth be told though I really am only able to practice it on a deep and meaningful level about once a month…but my wife is getting into doing it too…so when she gets some more practice it is “look out world!”

8) If you could go back in a time machine to the time when you were just getting started with SEOBook,  what business related advice would you give yourself?

Buy a lot of short memorable and keyword laden .com, .net, and .org domain names and sit on most of them for 5 years, while developing out the best ones.

9) Do you think that entrepreneurialism is something that is in your blood? Or is it something that can be learned?

I think it is both. If you are a person who seeks out why things work the way they do and like learning stuff starts to fall in place for you over time. But you have to be willing to work harder and more hours than the average person does.

The world was never fair and was always nepotistic. Winning market-share either means creating new markets or stealing market-share from established players. To do either you need to create social relationships and get people talking about you.

10) Is there anyone that you look up to and model yourself on? (You can name more than one)

I think I am still a highly flawed individual, but my mom had great work ethics, my wife is really loving, Tim Berners-Lee created the web, and Seth Godin really taught me that marketing does not need to be as sleazy and destructive as it often is. Noam Chomsky is also an inspiration.

11) Do you have any favourite business related, SEO, webmaster or personal development related books that you can recommend to other entrepreneurs?

Godin’s Purple Cow ( http://www.sethgodin.com/purple ), Steven Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think ( http://www.sensible.com ), and The Cluetrain Manifesto ( http://www.cluetrain.com ) are probably the basis for my online strategy.

12) What is the best advice you have ever been given?
It was probably something that the guy who goes by the moniker NFFC told me. Hard to pick out just one, but maybe this is it

“I think the best brands, the best sites have a large portion of their founders personality in them. Never be afraid to be yourself, after all there are 1/2 billion people on the www, not all of them have to agree with you. Concentrate on the ones that share your views, concentrate on making their experience the very best it can be, the rest forget them.
Or to put it another way, the best sites say – this is what we do, this is how we do it, if you don’t like it go somewhere else.
Ultimately though I think it comes down to desire and the will to win.”

13) What advice would you give to a Young Entrepreneur setting up their first online business?
Set up a blog and read this SEO guide ( http://www.seobook.com/bloggers ). Understanding how conversational markets work and learning markets is key to being able to deliver products and services that the market wants. Also the relationships you build give you the reach and credibility needed to be able to spread ideas and build market demand.

If you start building relationships and market exposure you do not need to make money right away. Many people build for years before becoming stars. It is much easier to become wildly successful if you start sewing the seeds of  trust before trying to extract value from the network.

I would probably still be marginally profitable if I had not shared so much and built relationships with my mentors like NFFC.

Also read Seth Godin’s Purple Cow ( http://www.sethgodin.com/purple/ ), Steven Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think ( http://www.sensible.com ), and The Cluetrain Manifesto ( http://www.cluetrain.com ) in your first month or two online.

14) If the Internet had not existed – what do you think you would be doing?

This probably sounds sad, but I think I would probably be dead or in jail or something. I mean the web saved me in just about every way possible – it even sent me an angel.

15) Have you any plans (personal or business) that you can share with us about your future plans / goals / lifetime goals?

My wife and I want to have a kid in the next couple years. Some vacation time this year is in order as well. And I want to keep learning every day until I die – which is hopefully a long way off.

website http://www.seobook.com
keyword tool http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook
bloggers only http://www.seobook.com/bloggers

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