Excerpts from top successful Intenet Marketers that will be useful to us.

Excerpts from top successful Intenet Marketers that will be useful to us.

I launched my personal SEO blog on internet marketing and have been doing some cool researches on the sure ways (tips, tutorials etc) to boost my rankings as well as generate human traffic. During my research, i came across a series of interviews granted to top internet marketers (who are doing well and making cool cash online) on how they got to the top, thier challenges and struggles etc and feel i should post it here for upcoming internet marketers and freelancers and even top marketers here to also learn from. Top internet marketers such as matthew woodward, john more, jacob hagberg, terry kyle, daniel tan, brian dean, matthew aton and many more.

NOTE: Seoclerks mods and admins, i am not in anyway promoting them or thier services or websites here, i just want most of us to gain from what has made them succeed online.

Let me start from matthew woodward (owner of the popular matthwewoodward website),. during his interview he was asked this question:
What are the 3 most important SEO strategies you like to use for better ranking?

HIS RESPONSE:
This is a great question and we are currently undergoing a huge shift in the SEO world with more of a reliance on social signals & authorship and less of a reliance on links.
This is the biggest fundamental shift we have seen in how Google ranks websites since linkbuilding was introduced to the SEO world in 1998.
I believe this creates a great opportunity across every niche for people to establish themselves as the authority in the coming year.
So with that in mind-

1) High Quality Content
I know its cliché but content really is king. There is a reason why some movies make millions of dollars and other makes huge losses at the box office.
If a movie is highly entertaining and engaging you can be damn sure people will tell their friends, buy the Blu-ray, do the same for the sequel and watch other movies by that director. The same is true for content on the web. The cream will always rise to the top – and there aren’t many people creating cream.

How To Create High Quality Content
Creating high quality content is pretty easy to do though. First of all you need to understand your audience & what problems they face.

Once you know what problems they face you can come up with a series of blog posts that solve those problems. When you write each post, drill down into the subtopics and make sure you explore every area in detail to create the most authorative piece of content on the topic at hand. Write it in a clear and easy to understand manner – don’t go all out with big words. Make it simple to digest, break it up with clear headings.

Once the post is written – THEN do keyword research and look for opportunities to naturally weave relevant keywords into the post.
Understand each of the problems your audience faces and solve them in this manner.

This creates trust and engagement with your audience which translates into subscribers, more traffic, comments, social shares, backlinks, affiliate clicks and sales. But more importantly it creates relationships. Every 24 hours people spend 140 hours engaging with my content building relationships with them on complete auto pilot while driving links,social signals & rankings.

The content is the seed that grows to success.

Change Your Content Mindset

If you’re still writing 500-1000 word articles with 2-3% keyword density you need to change your mind-set.

Given the choice would you watch the TV channel that had poorly thrown together shows or would you watch the channel that houses high quality popular shows like breaking bad, lost, 24,Dexter and so on?
Your readers are presented with the same choice when they look at your website.

2) Social Signals & Authorship
If you haven’t integrated Google Authorship on your site yet – do it right now!
Driving social signals is very easy to do, if you have good content.
I have positioned social sharing icons at the end of every post with a clear call to action.

I also have a sweet plug-in that asks people to share the post on a social network in exchange for some extra content. When creating a tutorial I try to put together an exclusive pack of relevant resources to offer in exchange for the share.

These take a bit of work to put together but it really is worth putting in the extra effort to help people out.
All of this grows your social signals and influence which have a huge impact on rankings today, never mind in 6 months.
In an effort to grow Authorship I have also included links to my Google+ profile at key areas of conversion. Did you know that once a user has taken action once, they will do what you ask next? So the first time someone leaves a comment on my site or opts into my email list they are asked to connect with me on Google+

When someone shares my content on Twitter, I send them a friendly Tweet inviting them to join my forum for free advice.

What all of this creates is a self-supporting eco system of social signals across the entire site constantly building authorship & trust with my audience.

3) Competitor Links
One of the most effective link building strategies that will always stand the test of time and any algorithm update is replicating your competitor’s backlink profile.

This is one of my most effective link building strategies.
It is really easy to do as well-

1) Make a list of the current top 10 sites for your target keyword
2) Use this tutorial to download the backlinks of each specific URL
3) Merge all the backlinks you find into 1 master list
4) Open each URL in the list 1 at a time in a browser and find your competitors link
5) Look at how you can get a link to your site from the same page your competitor has
a. If you can’t work it out – drop the site an email and ask!
6) Rinse and repeat for the entire list

The reason this is so effective is because these are all the links that are currently supporting the top 10 results but the links the site at #1 has are different to the links the site at #3 has. So if you can replicate the link profile of the entire top 10 for your 1 site – it instantly becomes the most authorative page in terms of links for that keyword. This does take a bit of time to do and for the most part is a pretty manual and boring process but it is more than worth the effort and creates a solid foundation of links to your site. I’ve used this tactic for years and years and I encourage you to do so as well!
You’ll be glad to know I’ve paid a developer to create a bespoke desktop application that automates the entire process end to end in a couple of clicks.

Can you tell us about the single most important SEO MISTAKE you should have avoid in the process of ranking high in the search engine?

HIS RESPONSE:
The biggest SEO mistake is focusing on SEO. I find most people tend to find a niche, do some keyword research, register a domain, throw up a 10 page site with 500-1000 word articles at 2% keyword density, scatter some affiliate links and immediately start chasing links and rankings as quickly as possible.That approach is destined to fail time and time again.

All you are doing is creating something that pleases a certain set of metrics as laid out by Google. Metrics that change hundreds of times a year.
Remind me quickly – is it Google that has to get off their backsides, find their wallet, take out their credit card, type in the card details, type in their address details and click buy for you to make a commission? Or is it the user?

Think about that for a minute. If you have a site that isn’t performing right now – I want you to ask yourself one question- What value does my site offer over and above going directly to the merchant? For example if your reviewing products and linking to Amazon – what value do you offer over and above people reading actual reviews by real verified buyers of the product on Amazon directly?

If you can’t answer that question with complete confidence you’re destined to fail – not only with rankings but also with conversions and sales.
People are so obsessed with SEO and link building they forget about everything else. This is INTERNET MARKETING. SEO is just a small component of internet marketing and should only be considered once you have built an engaging site that actually deserves to rank in the first place.
I speak to a lot of people that have built ‘the best affiliate site in the world’. I rarely see an affiliate site that deserves to rank.

Roughly speaking you should spend the first few months of the site creating high quality content and perfecting the user experience. Putting critical components in place like social sharing, authorship, rich snippets, videos, email auto responders, a clean design, easy navigation, clear calls to action and so forth.

While you are doing that you can begin to find & engage your audience online
This will not only drive the initial traffic and opportunity to create relationships with people (you know the ones that make you money) but also begins to build out a relevant link profile slowly and steadily.

After a few months you will have created a solid foundation on which to build upon exploring further SEO and link building opportunities.

That is all for now: i will bring in more and more useful excerpts from them for us to learn so we can implement and be as successful as them one day. I am sure most of us will gain something from his interview.

Thank you