Sales & Marketing

Welcome to Part Two of my interview with Aaron Wall, founder of SEOBook.com.

The topic is online business models, with practical, street-smart insights into how entrepreneurs and small business owners can grow a business online, starting with no capital and just some ideas.

If you have not yet read Part One of my interview — start there. Otherwise, continue on below ….

Question: What role does your blog play in your new private-community business model?

Aaron Wall: As communities grow and age they grow via word of mouth. But when they are new you also need to keep marketing them to ensure they keep growing. For years I have been a firm believer that one of the cheapest forms of marketing is giving away free content.

Giving away content leads to citations on other trusted well read industry related sites.

The links from other sites and the archive of online content help the site rank well in search engines and get thousands of free visitors a day. Most of those people will not convert, but a few will, especially if you keep blogging and they learn to trust you more over time.

The blog also leads to a lot of media coverage and opportunities that would not exist if I were not a well-known blogger. Exposure and the credibility it brings allows you to charge for your services, and it also lets you stumble into many other good deals. I am not a fan of most JV (Editor’s note: joint venture) partnership formats in the Internet marketing field, but I recently did a lot of work with another company in our space which should help create another nice revenue stream for both of us.

Question: How important is brand on the Web today?

Aaron Wall: Local substitution is the process where local merchants try to create something similar to a more expensive and higher quality good created elsewhere. That process has been happening for at least 1,000 years now.

With information every publisher is global, and cloning your knowledge is often as easy as copy and paste. Online many business models are based around advertising and automated networks. Whatever you are selling will work its way onto the Web for cheaper prices or free. Thus, it is hard to use price as a sustained competitive advantage.

A brand is defined in part by what people think of or how they feel when they hear it. While people can (and will) clone, rip off and steal your content, one of the few lasting competitive advantages that you have is brand. Brand is subjective and something that works at a higher level than most thieves do.

Brand and social relationships are what protect your business from the tragedy of the commons. Read entire article.

Posted in Planning & Strategy, Sales & Marketing

When Aaron Wall started in the search industry in 2003, he was an unknown entrepreneur. He taught himself search engine optimization and went on to write a book called SEO Book.

He sold his book over the Internet in the form of an instantly-downloadable ebook (in PDF form).

SEO Book became famous in SEO circles and online marketing circles. Although many entrepreneurs write ebooks, the difference with Aaron is that he created a business around his ebook. And he bootstrapped his business from a clean sheet of paper — literally — to what it is today.

Fast forward 5 years. Aaron Wall is now one of the premier voices in the field of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing. SEOBook has become a brand unto itself. Read entire article.

Posted in Planning & Strategy, Sales & Marketing

I don’t know about you, but all these social networking sites are making me dizzy.

The reason? I don’t know where the conversation is anymore.

It used to be that you didn’t have to worry about conversing online anywhere, except maybe at the occasional message board or perhaps email.

Then came blogs, and suddenly you had conversation on your blog, with readers leaving comments. Or readers might extend the conversation to their own blogs, by discussing your company, you, or even a blog post you wrote. So you had to track the conversation on other blogs as it related to you.

But that’s not what’s making me dizzy. No, what’s making me dizzy are all the social media sites that now encourage sharing, comments and/or voting.

The conversation now is taking place at multiple places … potentially thousands of sites if you are a large company and thankfully fewer if you work in a small business or are a solo entrepreneur.

The past two years have seen an astonishing range of “social” sites or sites with a social component enter the picture. In my case I only pay attention to perhaps a dozen sites (aside from individual blogs), but those keep me busy: Facebook, MyBlogLog, Twitter, Stumbleupon … to name a few.

Others that encourage sharing and commenting include YouTube, Amazon.com, iTunes, Yelp, Google Local, DocStoc. And the list goes on. Read entire article.

Posted in Sales & Marketing, productivity