Rebecca will be speaking about “Blogging” at Searchfest 2009 which will be held March 10th in Portland, Oregon. Get your tickets now.
1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.
My name is Rebecca Kelley (https://www.seomoz.org/team/rebecca), and I’m the site manager and a search marketing consultant for SEOmoz.org (https://www.seomoz.org), where I’ve worked for the past 3 years. They were advertising on Craiglist for an entry-level SEO position, and I applied for the job while I was a student at the University of Washington finishing my undergrad degree in Communciations and Spanish. They didn’t hire me but I persuaded Rand to give me an internship, so I worked as an unpaid intern for a couple months before they decided that I grew on them like a fungus and offered me a full-time job. Now I work on a variety of tasks (I “wear a lot of hats” for the start up), but I mainly manage much of the content that gets published on SEOmoz (including our main blog, our user-generated blog, and a lot of PRO content) as well as blog for the site and provide consulting and reports for our clients.
2) What are the top challenges that SEOmoz faced / is facing in getting people to pay for premium content?
The main challenge is answering the question “Why should I sign up for PRO when I have free access to X, Y and Z tools elsewhere on the web?” There are a lot of free tools and resources out there, and it’s our goal to educate our members and other Internet marketers out there and inform them that we have a lot of great tools that go beyond the scope of the free tools available on the web. We also have our Q&A feature, in which we act as private consultants to our members and encourage them to ping us with any Internet marketing questions they have. Our PRO memberships extend beyond tool usage and include a lot of great guides, directories, discounts, and SEO tips, and we’re constantly striving to improve the user experience and the value of PRO.
3) How can a Twitter newbie learn to use the medium to advance their business?
I think that a lot of people still don’t “get” Twitter. Sure, it’s a time suck, but I use it a lot for business purposes. I have a great network of followers who I often ping with Internet marketing questions, and I’ve even gotten great feedback from people on non-business stuff (for example, I was shopping for new cookware and learned a lot about the quality of various brands from the advice I got via Twitter). I think Twitter’s great for getting opinions and answers from a large group of people, and it’s also good for promoting your brand and business. If you’ve written a new blog post or have some exciting company news, tweet it. If you’re hiring for a new position, let your followers know. Want to advertise your services? Share what you do and your rates! Twitter has a lot of benefits, and I think that if you’re savvy on how to properly use your account and leverage it for both professional and personal reasons, it can definitely be a great asset, especially for business.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.