Thursday, December 28, 2006

 

Interview with Neil Patel & Cameron Olthuis

Rand: Over the past 12 months, ACS (your company) and you as individuals have grown to enormous popularity inside the Internet Marketing field - to what do you attribute that increase? Have there been specific tactics you've used? What is it an organic growth or was there strategic planning involved?

Cameron: There was definitely some strategic planning involved, when I joined the company early this year one of the first things we did was sit down together to create a strategy for increasing our client base. A few of the things we planned were blogging, speaking at conferences, and partnering with traditional advertising agencies.

I would say most of our growth has come from blogging. We have also partnered up with a number of Web 2.0 bloggers to do their consulting work for them. Also, going to conferences and networking with other people inside and outside of the industry has been huge for us.

Neil: One of the key things that led to the growth of ACS was bringing in key players into the company. In the last 12 months we brought Cameron in as a director of marketing. We have also brought on some other people such as Aneil Weber who handles all of the business development for ACS as well as Serph and Crazy Egg.

The other thing that I continually do which has helped grow ACS since day 1 is help people who don’t have money. I got into the SEO field in high school because I had a website and needed some way to bring in traffic. At that time I learned a lot of my knowledge from reading and experimenting with my own site and now I try and help people who can’t afford Internet marketing services just like how I could not in high school. By helping others it goes a long way and we might not make any money because of it, but it does help create some good PR for the company.

Rand: Many folks in the SEO world who know you associate you with some famous clientele - are you allowed to disclose your relationships? Can you tell us about some of the firms you do work with?

Cameron: We are allowed to disclose some of our relationships, many of our contracts include confidentiality clauses but there are ones that do not. A lot of the consulting work we do is on web strategy, social media and other new trends outside of SEO and for most of this work the clients do not mind us disclosing the relationship.

A few of our clients include: HP, Samsung and Dogster. We also work with some very popular bloggers like Guy Kawasaki, Pete Cashmore from Mashable and Richard McManus from Read/Write Web.

Rand: The social media and "Web2.0" spaces seem to be a focus of yours - can you speak to how you leverage those tools to help clients?

Cameron: Social media is great, these new mediums really make it easy to create viral marketing campaigns that spread easier than they ever have in the past. If you create the right type of content and target your submissions, everything else should take care of itself. Of course managing the buzz you create is a whole other story and can certainly take a lot of work.

The social media sites can be used in a number of different ways to help clients including branding, traffic, and of course linkbaiting for SEO.

Rand: Digg, specifically, seems to a big area that's used for marketing and "linkbaiting" - what have been your experiences in using Digg's popularity to benefit clients?

Neil: If you can get clients on the front page of Digg numerous times there is a very high chance that you can increase their link popularity which in turn will increase their search engine rankings. As long as you can make the content or "linkbait" attractive to the Digg community as well as related to the client’s website you can potentially get hundreds if not thousands of related links.

But in doing all of this the main thing you have to watch out for is the community because if you upset them there can be a tremendous backlash. As long as you put the Digg community first and you don’t spam them you will be fine.

Rand: Digg's politics and inner sanctum are fairly unique - any chance we can get you to open up on some of the politics & unique methods Digg uses to control the content on the site?

Neil: A couple months ago you did a study which showed that over 50 percent of the stories that make the Digg font page is controlled by the top 100 users. When most people think of Digg they think about how all the users control what gets on the front page. This is true, but there are a lot of politics involved with Digg because of the Top 100 ranking system. If you dupe a lot of these top users or if you try to take their position or submit spam stories, some will try and wipe you out. Every time you submit a story people will mark it as lame or spam so that none of your stories will make the Digg front page.

As for the content control, Digg has a sophisticated algorithm which can pick which stories hit the front page and which don’t. The algorithm takes into account factors such as the number of diggs, amount of buries, identity of the voters, time, IP addresses, and category of the submission which all affect when and if the story makes the front page. Digg also has measures set in place to stop spammers, such as if stories from a specific blog are marked as spam too often that URL could be banned from Digg.

Rand: Who's your dream client? What kind of projects do you love to take on?

Cameron: There are quite a few different kinds of projects we enjoy working on. I would say our dream client is someone with a great product that Seth Godin would call a purple cow. It is so much more enjoyable to work with products that you truly believe in and actually use yourself. It is also a lot easier to create buzz when you are working with these kinds of products and services.

We also like clients that have the resources and guts to do things that are out of the ordinary because this is what takes for the best viral marketing campaigns. It’s nice when clients give us the space to do what we think is in their best interest, although sometimes we do need to work closely with them until we completely understand their products and business goals. Last but not least we enjoy working with startups because all of us are entrepreneurs at heart.

Rand: In the reverse, what makes for the most difficult kind of project?

Cameron: There are a number of things that can make a project difficult to work on. Not so great products are the one thing that sticks out to me the most. If the product just flat out sucks there is not a whole lot we can do to help other than giving the guidance to make it better. A lot of times though these people don’t appreciate that kind of feedback, in which case we just can’t work with them.

Neil: In my opinion, the most difficult projects are usually when we have trouble communicating with a client. Products can be improved and clients can be educated, but if there is a lack of communication it is hard for us to do our job.

Rand: You're involved in several projects outside the SEO consulting/services business - care to talk about those?

Cameron: The project that I am most closely involved with is called Serph, which is currently in closed beta testing. Serph is a buzz-tracking tool that we created out of our own pain of not being able to effectively track the buzz for clients in one central place. It is actually a social meta search engine that pulls the results from places like Technorati, Bloglines, Google Blog Search, Digg, Delicious and many more. It then sorts through the results to strip the duplicates and lists them with the most recent results first. Serph actually has many uses beyond tracking buzz for your company or a competitors company; you can use it to find the buzz on anything.

Neil: The project that I am most involved with is Crazy Egg which is launched but has a lot of new features coming out in the next few months. One of the cool things we are trying to do is take the heatmap to the next level so that it is more useful to website owners as well as bloggers. Since we launched, we have been continuously working hard to scale Crazy Egg, so it can be used by hundreds of thousands of users.

Rand: What do you see as early-adoption trends that we might be talking about 12-24 months from now? Any sites or styles on your radar?

Cameron: I still think there is a lot of space in social networking for niche topics and industries. I also think that we will see a lot of white label social media sites in the future. I think we will see a big rise in branded social networks (MySpaces & YouTubes) for companies that have a large base of customer evangelists.

Rand: You both work in different cities at different times; do you find collaboration to be difficult?

Cameron: I don’t find it difficult at all. With all the project management and communication tools that are available these days I think it’s very simple. We stay connected through IM and phone all day and so far we’ve had no problems.

Neil: When we have to collaborate in person we are only one to two hours away from each other. In most cases this is not required but if we have to meet up it is very doable.

Rand: In terms of cost, where do the majority of your projects fall? Is it just a few high-priced clients or many smaller deals or a mix?

Cameron: We actually have the perfect blend of projects that we work on. We have a few of the high priced projects for large companies and we also do a lot of stuff with startups and smaller companies. It doesn’t really matter to us what the size of the deal is as long as we think we can help. We’ve turned away projects both big and small because we didn’t feel there was a match or that we could effectively work with and help the company.

Rand: Your blog, Pronet Advertising, is part of the 9rules network - can you talk about that relationship a bit? Has the participation been valuable to you?

Cameron: It is an honor for us to have our blogs in the 9rules network. They only select a few of the best blogs on the web for each category so when we were selected it really made us excited. One of the best benefits of being in the network is the relationships we have created with the other bloggers in the network.

Neil: 9rules sends a couple of hundred visitors a week to Pronet Advertising, but as Cameron said the main benefit from it is the relationships you build through the community. If I need any technical help, someone to talk to or even financial help, 9rulers are always there waiting to help you out. Some call 9rules a network or a community, but I see it more as a family.

Rand: What are some blogs or resource sites you read/refer to regularly that folks in the insular SEO world might not be aware of?

Cameron: I used to read a few hundred blogs but over the last couple months I have trimmed that down to about 75, I was simply wasting too much time reading blogs that did not provide any value to me.

Rand: You watch Digg all the time - what is, in your opinion, the best way to make sure you hit the front page?

Neil: In most cases if the story is good it will make the front page and if it sucks, it won’t. Either way, the chances of getting a “bad” story on the front page are really low because the community tends to immediately start marking these stories as spam or lame. One tip I can give you is that if you want to maximize your chances of hitting the front page make sure you submit your story in the morning or afternoon (PST) that way it gets the most visibility.

Another important thing you can do is to pick an attractive title and description simply because many people digg a story based on the title/description and don’t even visit the website. We once had a story that got submitted to Digg and an hour later our server went down. Within the next 2 hours the story got around 15 more diggs and it then hit the front page even though our server was down.


Many thanks to Neil & Cameron - you can see Cameron speak at SES Chicago next week (on the linkbait & viral marketing panel) and Neil will hopefully be at several conferences next year, too. Their blog, ProNetAdvertising, covers all things Internet Marketing, with a particular focus on social media angles. Their company, Advantage Consulting Services, provides some of the best viral marketing services available on the web.


# posted by JP @ 9:44 AM
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