Aaron Wall Interviewed By Todd Mintz

Aaron Wall is…well, you should know who he is if you’re reading this blog :.)

1) Why should somebody choose your platform to learn SEO (as opposed to learning SEO in a classroom setting or an online educational service)?

I have worked on some of the largest sites on the web and many small ones too. And I have went from total no name (and nearly bankrupt) guy to becoming a Technorati top 100 blogger. That wide array of experience has helped shaped me away from a person who gives “black and white universal answers” which often end up being wrong, and instead makes me appreciate the diversity of approaches that can lead to the end goal, and why many of them work well in some markets or for some people while they have litterally no effect for others who may know more but just do not understand the psychology of effective marketing.

The big difference between us and everything else on the market is that we not only offer a comprehensive training program, but we also interact in an exclusive member community where members help each other. SEO is not about finding the singular right answer, but about finding sustainable marketing strategies that build longterm value and a competitive advantage.

I tend to view our SEO training course as an online educational service, so it is hard for me to separate it from that category (other than realizing the added value from our community forums). I think you mentioned in a recent post that you were surpised how clean the signal to noise in the community forums was. That is an extension of having a strong brand, a great network of industry friends (including you), and a pricepoint that filters out the worst customers.

And the good thing about the support forum is that if you have a question in a week or in a month about things specific to your site we can hel provide solutions to your problems as they come up. You can’t really get that with most training programs or classroom environments.

2) Why did you change your business model?

Before changing our model I wrote a blog post called “Improving SEO Book Customer Value” In the post I highlighted that:

– search is getting more subjective (hand edits, etc.)
– complexity kills many great products (Microsoft is not in a good position right now)
– the perceived lowering of value of ebooks due to pollution by marketers (perception creates reality due to the market for lemons effect)
– rather than creating a more complex product, it is better to offer a product that becomes more of an interactive service…customers need answers to their questions, not a bigger sea of information to swim through

3) What role does Giovanna play in the business?

I sometimes make some dumb decisions. Giovanna prevents the market from seeing many of them. 😉

She is good at biz-dev stuff and she is the one who found the programmer who finished the SEO Book programming job.

She has mostly been working on building out sites behind the scenes, but she is starting to become more interactive with blogging and
helping create some of the training presentations and whatnot. She is also looking to help extend out our SEO tools once we find the right programmer.

4) Did the closing down of Threadwatch disenfranchise a lot of alternative viewpoints? How welcoming is Sphinn to these same people?
(Note that I asked John Andrews the same question)

I think they are two different audiences with different agendas and mindsets. A slight overlap in some ways but I think Threadwatch was more of a place for old-timers. If any of them really felt disenfranchised they could have tried to create something similar. And that was the problem – most of the people who liked it did not want to contribute in a meaningful way, and largely only liked it because other people were doing most of the work.

The 180+ comments in the closing Threadwatch thread I made did a good job of showing the shallowness of the support. People only cared enough when they knew it was going to die. And after it did nobody made an honest effort to replace it.

I tried my best to run it, but think I am a bit too pessimistic already. It was adding to that nature, which was probably not good for my personal character development. The site became a bit too toxic to where it was hard to enjoy working on.

5) There are lots of alarms being sounded in the Domaining community about the Snowe Bill, arbitrage, type-in traffic poaching, etc. Is the sky falling or is this just a blip in the road? What strategy would you recommend to somebody who wants to “invest” in domain names?

According to Jay from Domain Tools the bill did not suggest that domains could be seized, just fined. So if you are running a clean above board show I think you probably have nothing to worry about.

The bigger things that are potentially going to hurt domainers who do not develop are:

– many of them are losing traffic as more and more people are treating Google as the address bar. Given that Google recently added a “search this site” search box in their search results for searches for Amazon.com and some other sites…this really shows how search and even the address bar are sorta moving toward Google.
– as the web gets more competitive it is going to be hard to develop late and catch up with top ranked sites

If you want to invest in domains for resell it seems .com are the fastest appreciating names. If you plan on developing names to establish cash flow you are probably better off spending your money on .org and .net domain names.

6) How valuable is image in the SEO community? What image do you try to put forth of yourself and how would you like others to view you? ) (Note that I asked Brian Provost the same question)

I think it is important largely because without image and brand trust if you sell invisible services, information, or software then you are just a commodity. If you are perceived as a commodity you will attract commodity clients. To some degree perception becomes reality.

I think I try to be hard to be the guy who is willing to be honest, even if doing so costs me money in the short run. And the guy who remembers the past and puts current events into historical context with a hope of being able to predict trends and predict the future. I don’t like just participating in the marketplace, I also like trying to shape it – which is often stressful, hard, and something that erodes short-term profits.

Sometimes I am a bit crass. I have been told I should soften up there, but there are so many people exchanging pageviews (largely because their business model requires it) that I would rather just be honest, even if it costs me a couple sales or a couple followers.

7) How can a business purchase SEO services and feel comfortable that they aren’t going to be screwed?

I think word of mouth goes a long way here. So does spending some money on education prior to buying services. Buy blind (especially if done with a low price point) and I think they deserve what they pay for – ignorance gets taxed in virtually every market.

Even smart people get duped if they do not do enough research. My wife trusted SEMPO when she was new to the SEO field, and they sent her to some sleazy firm that outsourced all the work and did NOTHING but reciprocal links. Her site did not rank for anything competitive until AFTER we took her reciprocal links page down.

8) What is the current state of free speech online and what is your prognosis for the future?

This is such a complex topic that I would be a liar if I said I could realistically predict the future. Having said that, my best guess is that the value of copyright keeps getting eroded and the value of conversation and interaction keeps increasing. If you want your voice to count you really need to create a destination that people are willing to subscribe to.

From my personal experience I can say that if you are new to a market it is easy to package your information such that it is easy to steal so that is an extra marketing channel. As you get more established and build a brand you need to break the content into chunks though to prevent the black marketplace from lowering the percieved value of your work.

9) How prevalent is manual intervention in the SERPS (aka “Hand Jobs”)?

It is hard to say beyond what is publicly reported. Many of the PayPerPost guys got nuked. Text Link Ads does not rank for their own brand. Google engineers hit one of my sites. There were a number of public reports of PageRank editing from guys like Brian Clark and Darren Rowse. That leads me to believe the process is still a bit sloppy, and the mass PageRank editing was as much about changing perception as it was about trying to change the web.

I still see lots of spammy garbage do well, so I think the editing is hit and miss. Sorta unreliable. I think as a publisher the key to being able to protect yourself is having a well watched channel to flame Google in if you feel you were treated unfairly.

10) Black Hat SEO: How viable is it now and where is it trending? Will it ever it to a point where it becomes too difficult to break the rules successfully?

I think it is getting harder to where a smaller pool of people can do so profitably. And for the amount of effort needed to keep up with it all, some of those people would probably make far more money from running longterm websites.

I think people will always be able to break the guidelines. That is not the issue that Google, etc. need to solve. The key is to keep increasing the opportunity cost to where it is just easier and more profitable to follow the guidelines than to create lower quality information.

Keep in mind that the most legitimate sites and brands will push the envelope and I am not sure how Google will prevent them from doing so. They have virtually no opportunity cost since Google lets them rank again right away even if they are publicly outed for doing really dirty stuff.