Internet Marketing Interviews Galore
Some of the best tips, tricks, strategies, and tactics on the Web come from experts giving away great information in interviews. It is far more likely that an Internet marketing expert is going to give up some of their coveted information in an interview rather than a written blog post.
If you’ve ever been to an Internet marketing conference before then you’ll know that the most knowledge you’ll obtain is talking with and listening to the industry leaders over hearing their rudimentary 10-minute panel presentation.
With that said, I’d like to provide resources to some of the best interviews in the Internet marketing industry in relation to SEO, social media, conversion rate optimization, PR, and more.
Books
Online Marketing Heroes is a great book with interviews from 25 of some of the best Internet marketing experts in the industry.
Web 2.0 Heroes interviews thought leaders on the Web 2.0. With Web 2.0, organizations, marketers, application developers, and communicators must be ready to respond and to innovate or be left behind, and the experts featured in this book are leading the charge.
offers new insights by gathering the collected wisdom of the most influential marketing thinkers of our age, each of whom has given a structured interview. Covering a wide range of issues and illustrating concepts with cases of success and failure, these seminal dialogues offer a rare look at what made each master great – and a glimpse of the marketing future.
Videos
* Social Marketing Interviews – Brian Carter interviews leading social media marketing gurus.
* WebMarketingToday – Videos on Ecommerce and Internet Marketing
* Search Engine Strategies (SES) YouTube Channel – Interviews with SES speakers and experts.
* WebProNews – RSS feed of their interviews from speakers at every major Internet marketing conference.
Podcasts
* WebMasterRadio.FM – Podcast interviews with various Internet marketing industry leaders and topics.
* YourSEOMentor – Monday interviews. Garrett Pierson didn’t keep up with these every Monday but there’s still some oldies but goodies in there.
Articles
* Ruud Hein of Search Engine People – Ruud frequently questions gurus from around the Internet marketing sphere. With an advanced Google query you can find all of them here.
* AimClear – Marty Weintraub and his crew host their interviews here.
* Eric Enge – Some of the best interviews I’ve read have come from Eric Enge at Stone Temple. His most recent interview is here and you can click through all the other interviews on the right-hand sidebar.
* WordStream – Their interview series sheds light on multiple aspects of Internet marketing.
* Gab Goldenberg – Gab has his own category of interviews on his site, SEO ROI.
* SEOmoz – A site search on SEOmoz shows some of the most in-depth interviews around.
* Search Engine Land – Make no mistake that if there’s someone good to interview, SEL has the connections to get a good one from them.
Final Thoughts
These great tidbits usually come with weeding through a lot of fluff and small talk within the conversation though. I’d say it’s worth it to get at least one good takeaway from the conversation.
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Using Excel for SEO – the Grand Collection of Tips
You probably know that I am a big Excel fanatic (though not an expert). To me, Excel has always been the ultimate SEO and productivity tool.
I’ve been collecting Excel tutorials for years and this post lists the most useful (yet, the least geeky) of them: no matter which SEO task you have come across, chances are you’ll find one of the following tutorials handy:
1. Export Any Data to Excel
Any well-known keyword research or traffic analytics tool has the “Export-to-CSV” feature and a CSV file is easy to open in Excel – so converting your data into Excel shouldn’t be a problem.
If you still you need some examples, I did a post quite some time ago listing many ways to export your backlink data to Excel; for instance:
* With Yahoo! SiteExplorer you can export results to TSV file and open it as Excel;
* With Google Analytics you can save the report of referring domains (enhanced with plenty of browsing data per each linking domain: bounce rate, time spent on site; pages per visit, etc).
* You can export any search results that provide RSS feed to Google Spreadsheets using =ImportFeed(“feed URL”) formula and then save as Excel:
2. Excel for Keyword Research: a Pivot Table and a (Conditional) Formatting
1. Create a Pivot Table to easily Re-Arrange the Keywords
This post by Richard Baxter on creating a pivot table and a beautiful chart using Excel offers a step-by-step tutorial on how to re-organize your data to run various types of analysis. In short, the steps are as follows:
* Collect your data and create a Master table (more often than not, so to create your master table, you just need to export the required range of data from the tool you are using and open the file using Excel).
o If you are using several tools, you may want to combine the data in one table – this post on using VLOOKUP query will save your life!
* Create a Pivot Table on a new sheet: “Insert > PivotTable > PivotChart“ and choose your table to serve the basis of the Pivot table;
* Add axis fields, values, column labels and filters: The PivotTable Field List uses drag and drop functionality to enable you to populate those little white squares with values. As you add values, the table on the left begins to form.
A pivot table feature allows for plenty of data manipulation options that consequently offers a wide range of research types. Here’s another post giving a detailed tutorial on creating a pivot table and using it for keyword research – so if you still have any questions, refer to it to make things even clearer.
2. Use “Find and Replace” Feature to Visualize the Keyword Patterns
While a pivot table lets you re-arrange the data and create cool charts, conditional formatting allows you to visualize the data sets using different colors. I did a post once on finding your most frequent modifiers using Excel, and here are the steps:
* Use CTRL+F (“Find and Replace” feature);
* Click “Find and Replace” tab;
* Type the word you think may be frequently used with your core term,
* Click “Options” button;
* Choose to “replace with” format;
* Click “Patterns” tab;
* Choose the color you want to highlight the cell containing the word:
* Click OK and then “Replace All”;
* You should then see how many times the word was used, plus the cells containing it will be highlighted.
Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/using-excel-for-seo-the-grand-collection-of-tips/23077/#ixzz0vkiz3eMA
A pivot table feature allows for plenty of data manipulation options that consequently offers a wide range of research types. Here’s another post giving a detailed tutorial on creating a pivot table and using it for keyword research – so if you still have any questions, refer to it to make things even clearer.
2. Use “Find and Replace” Feature to Visualize the Keyword Patterns
While a pivot table lets you re-arrange the data and create cool charts, conditional formatting allows you to visualize the data sets using different colors. I did a post once on finding your most frequent modifiers using Excel, and here are the steps:
* Use CTRL+F (“Find and Replace” feature);
* Click “Find and Replace” tab;
* Type the word you think may be frequently used with your core term,
* Click “Options” button;
* Choose to “replace with” format;
* Click “Patterns” tab;
* Choose the color you want to highlight the cell containing the word:
* Click OK and then “Replace All”;
* You should then see how many times the word was used, plus the cells containing it will be highlighted.
Conditional formatting works the similar way but it can be used to highlight the cells while you are creating the spreadsheet. For example, if you are using Excel to create and track your meta tags, conditional formatting can visualize meta tag character count. Simply use Red/Yellow/Green for good length and warning zones. This keeps you in a quick reference just out of the peripheral.
3. Use =VLOOKUP to compare and combine data exported from different sources:
This post on comparing Google Webmaster Tools Data with Google Analytics Data provides a detailed tutorial on how you can merge any type of statistics data: Keyword Rankings and Keyword Volume, Google Rankings data and Traffic data, Backlinks and Traffic Sources, etc:
3. Excel for Link Building: URL Manipulations
I use Excel for link building process tracking as well as for reporting. The basic “sorting” Excel feature (known by everyone, I guess) makes it much easier to re-arrange the data to find links on the same topic, with the same Google PR, etc.
This section looks at a bit more complex hacks: Excel formulas and tutorials for the URL manipulation.
1. Extract All URLs from the List of Linked Words
It happens very often that you have a list of linked words in Excel and you need to see the full address of each link. Extracting each address one by one is tedious. To automate the task, you will need to create a quick macro – don’t worry, here’s an instruction allowing even a very basic newbie to create one:
1. Open Visual Basic Editor (use ALT + F11 shortcut);
2. Navigate Insert -> Module to adds a module
3. Paste the code below
4. Close the Visual Basic Editor (use ALT + Q)
Sub ExtractHL()
Dim HL As Hyperlink
For Each HL In ActiveSheet.Hyperlinks
HL.Range.Offset(0, 1).Value = HL.Address
Next
End Sub
Now use the macro:
* Navigate Tools -> Macro -> Macros (or use ALT + F8 shortcut);
* Make sure “Extract HL” is chosen and click Run
* You are done! The macro will find each hyperlink in a worksheet, extract each one’s URL, and stick that URL in the cell directly to the right of the hyperlink.
2. Make the List of URLs Active
Another common case is: you export tons of data and end up with hundreds of unlinked URLs. You could go double-clicking on each to activate one by one but this will take too much time. Here’s a quick tutorial on how you can do that:
Repeat steps 1 to 4 from the above tip but use this code:
Sub MakeHyperlinks()
Dim cl As Range
For Each cl In Selection
cl.Hyperlinks.Add Anchor:=cl, Address:=cl.Text
Next cl
End Sub
Select the cells you want to turn into clickable links and Run the “MakeHyperlinks” macro (use the further tutorial from the above part).
Or just use this handy tool by SEOAtomatic: Activate Excel Links
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Don’t Put the Cart Before the SEO Horse
A lot of people like to dive into things without having a plan and strategy in place. SEO and Internet Marketing is no different. There are certain aspects of your web strategy that need to happen first before you can move forward with the other aspects. Depending on what it is, it can make or break your SEO and overall marketing efforts.
Start Spending Money/Resources on SEO Before Identifying Your Goals
Probably the most important and fundamental flaw you can have is to start optimizing your site without identifying your overall site/blog goals. You should be able to answer these questions before spending money and resources on your SEO strategy.
* Who are your primary readers/visitors?
* Where does your target audience live?
* What are your primary keywords?
* Who are the primary competitors?
* How will you delegate roles and responsibilities?
* How will you track your SEO efforts?
Focus on Content Creation Before Your Site is Indexable
Before you start spending lots of your time and resources creating awesome content, you need to make sure that content is properly getting indexed by the search engines. Regardless of how good your content is, if the search engines are not indexing it, you are significantly reducing the changes of your content being found.
* Use a search friendly navigation
* Inter-link your posts
* Submit a XML sitemap regularly
* Deep link your content
Building Links Before Creating Good Content
The foundation to building quality links is and always will be creating awesome content that people would want to link to. If you are trying to gain links to a site and the only thing people can find is “Buy Now”, why would someone link to you. Or if you are trying to build links by submitting to thousands of directories and dropping comments in forums, you are just build spammy and low-value links.
Advertisements Before Traffic
Without having traffic, there is no point in cluttering up your blog with lots of banners and advertisements that will just devalue your blog and its content. When your blog is first starting out, you should be focusing on doing everything you can to build credibility and authority. There is lots of debate about when is the appropriate time is to start adding advertisements to your site. Personally I think there will come a time during the life of your blog/site where people are reaching out to you for advice, asking about advertising opportunities, requesting that you guest blog on their site. Once those things start happening, you will have built the initial credibility with your audience and you can start bringing on advertisers.
Tell Success Stories Without Actually Doing Them First
Especially for SEO companies, if you are making up fake success stories and case studies to win business, your clients will quickly see the true colors of your company and fire you! If your product is suppose to fix a problem someone has, you will have nothing but a lot of angry people, if you don’t know for sure that it does what you say it does
Newsletter Sign-Up Before Creating Free Content
Of course you can also add a newsletter sign-up to your site, however why should someone sign-up? If you create a free piece of content like a Whitepaper or downloadable Webinar that you can offer in exchange for a newsletter sign-up, you will be able to build a list much faster.
Quit Your Day Job Before Your Blog is Making Money
Before you quit your day job to pursue your true passions, make sure you are making a steady income. You should have established some steady income from multiple revenue streams. The reason why I say multiple revenue streams is because what if you are gaining all of your sales from one organic phrase in Google? Then Google decides to pull the rug out from under you and you are nowhere to be found. There goes your main source of income! If you have various ways of making money from your blog, you won’t have to depend on just one revenue stream.
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