Dori Friend Interview

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Name: Dori Friend

Industry: SEO

Website: www.dorifriend.com

Product: SEONitro

Dori Friend’s Bio: Dori Friend is a veteran in the SEO war. While she may not be as popular as the other search experts, she remains at the top of the masters list. A self-proclaimed recluse, Dori devotes much of her time growing her site network which in turn fuels her SEO firepower. Her SEONitro is a proof of her success in this field.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

Hi guys, David Jenyns here from davidjenyns.com and I’ve tracked down quite possibly the most difficult person to get hold of because she is out in the middle of nowhere out in the States. She’s got her own ranch. It’s Dori Friend who very early on in my internet career I got introduced to when she was aligning herself with Jeff Johnson and they started some software called Traffic King Pro and I went along to that very first seminar.

Dori’s skill set, she actually came from a background previous to moving into the internet marketing space as a software designer for Apple. So she was very much involved in the creation of that software and it just opened my mind as far as creating large networks of sites. She was doing a lot of things in the early days as far as building out blog networks and almost like AdSense farms, huge networks. Then she actually shifted into doing a lot of buying and selling of expired domain names. That’s becoming a little bit of the rage now but she was doing that a long time ago and it was helping to jump start her networks.

I have fond memories of Dori back at Jeff Johnson’s event. That was back in 2004 or whenever it was. At the end of the seminar we all went out for a pretty big night and they were some memories there. So I’d just like to welcome you to the call Dori. Thanks for your time.

Dori Friend: Thank you, thanks for that good introduction. I’m impressed that you actually have my history down quite well.

David Jenyns: Yes, I’ve been following you. I know you’re pretty under the radar. In addition to that, you run little workshops at your ranch because you are out in the middle of nowhere. I think I had to even give you a call back on your phone line because you ran your internet through the satellite, so the Skype wasn’t that clear. What sort of other things have you been doing? That was a very broad brushed stroke. Are there any other little projects you wanted to mention?

Dori Friend: My main stayer is my SEO business and that’s SEONitro. Recently I have been building networks for Brad Cowan. So it’s basically my technology, my networks with his branding. So finally I’m just focusing on my SEO business. Like I was saying before the call, I’ve had the shiny object syndrome that a lot of internet marketers get where I wanted to do a little bit of everything and so I was just making a little bit of money at everything.

I’ve always made a very decent income even way back when I was a software developer for Apple, so my sights have always been pretty high. Since I started really focusing, mindfully focusing on one business, my income has exponentially expanded to places where I’ve never been and it’s really exciting for me. I consciously have to keep doing that to myself every time I see something, I say, oh, I can make money doing that. Then I say, no, no, come back, come back. I’m lucky I have an assistant who keeps me in check. She does, she says, focus, focus, focus. Just the simple words like that, focus. It really has done amazing things for me.

It is all about SEO. I’ve done a lot of other things in Traffic. I was the host of Traffic Rockstars in May and that was a big distraction for me outside of my SEO business. It was an incredible event and it was a free event. But it was a distraction, it was just one of those things. But I’m definitely the SEO behind the scenes for a long time, doing SEO for a lot of the big guys and also for myself too.

David Jenyns: With the SEO, and maybe in a moment we can delve a little bit deeper into how you kick start a website to get your strategy, but as far as your core business, let’s say for the SEO component, is that selling your services as someone who can get your clients rankings?

Dori Friend: No, I don’t sell my services anymore. That was another thing because that was trading my time for money and I did not want to do that. Even though I did that for a while and I had other people working for me, right now I lease out my networks to people, not to beginners, mostly to other SEO professionals and people who have businesses that know what keywords convert for them. That’s my typical target range, my clientele.

I also did a report for newbies to start out, the first thing to do when they get a site. A lot of people think it has to be aged to get it ranked in a lot of these major industries, but we just proved that it didn’t. We just ranked Brad Callan’s weight loss diet within three months for a lot of weight loss terms and that guy is really banking it right now in that industry.

It was a new site and in three months we got it ranking and this is what I did. I found a nice aged domain that had page rank. I’m all about buying expired domains, things that already have authority. Then we did a 301 redirect for that. Now I know that sounds technical and so on but it is pretty simple, people can just google that. That instantly gives the domain age and authority and gets maybe some page rank because it transfers everything.

I do that on a pdf; it’s called sevenstepseo.com. You can get it there and it’s just a free pdf and it has five steps in it. That was the first one to get your site kick started. Then I tell people to start putting their sites in the directories just to get them indexed. Do a lot of lower level linking and then really pound it in with some higher level linking. But you’ve got to know what keywords convert for you. That’s the most important thing.

You need an SEO campaign because if your keywords don’t convert and this is actually going back to why I stopped taking on clients, too. We didn’t get paid until we got it onto the first page, but then they would say, oh that keyword doesn’t convert and they wouldn’t want to pay us anymore for that keyword after we’d worked maybe six months to get them there. So you need to know what keywords convert for you. That’s the most important thing.

David Jenyns: I can recap a little bit. You talked about making sure you know which keywords convert, so obviously that would start off with some sort of testing. With the clients do you point them in the direction of AdWords for something like that or you’re hoping that their business is old enough to know that?

Dori Friend: Yes, absolutely, most people have run AdWord campaigns and so they know what keywords convert or they’ve just been around long enough to know from their analytics what is converting from maybe different types of traffic that they’re getting. But I think the simplest thing is doing an AdWords campaign. Not something you have to pay a lot for but just to know what keywords are going to convert.

Another thing too, if you’re going after long tail, you can get some decent rankings just by some on page optimization and then go to SEMRush. They track everything that is in the top twenty. Get a report there and find out where you are. You might be listed for a couple of hundred keywords you don’t even know about, like on page two and then start doing a linking campaign to those and that can really boost your traffic too.

David Jenyns: So you pretty much look for that low hanging fruit as well, so you’re finding out what keywords convert, going through looking for the low hanging fruit for keywords you are already kind of ranking for but you haven’t got page one listings for and then driving some extra traffic to those. Then you mentioned using so the expired domain names as far as picking them up as they expire, trying to find something with some age, with a little bit of authority, obviously some good PR, doing a 301 Redirect back to the site.

Let’s say you’re kick starting a site. Do you grab multiple domain names? Do you start 301 redirecting?

Dori Friend: I might do one or two. I think I did two for Brad’s weight loss site and that was just to kick start it. It gives an added punch, just a little bit of authority to start it out with. Then we hammered that site with links.

This is another myth. A lot of people think, it’s a new site, I’ve got to start slowly. That’s rubbish, there’s no truth to it. There is a lot of rubbish in the industry, a lot of myths. That’s one of them. You can tell, if you start watching your rankings, if they’re going up, going up and then they start going down, then you know you’re over optimizing.

So what you do is start linking to your site using your url as your keyword, that means your domain name www.domainname.com, http, the url is your anchor text. You start linking to your site with that and it comes back immediately. It really helps over optimization so you can watch it and you can steer it until you can finally get settled in on top rankings. You can blast it, we do it all the time, we have a lot of success with it.

Another thing that is a big myth out there is people get content theory. People think I’ve got to have unique articles to link from. Unique articles one, in their site, and two, your unique articles to get links from. I think both are huge myths. Content doesn’t play a huge role in my SEO game, it’s all about off page optimization and that’s links coming in.

I have an example I’ve been linking to my Dad’s olive oil site and all it says is ‘This will be the site of blah, blah, blah.’

I’m already on page two for organic olive oil and I haven’t even been linking from my own networks. This is just something I’m doing and testing and I’m on page two for a lot of these major keywords without any content on the site. I’m not going to push it to page one until I get content on the site but it just goes to show people that I know Google says it’s about content, but it really isn’t.

David Jenyns: That’s key, it all is about, I think you call them external supporting links. After the 310 Redirects you move into doing some directories. Now directories, I’m assuming you guys used to talk about Directory Maximizer and we still use that. Is that what you use for directories?

Dori Friend: Yes, I still use Directory Maximizer, there might be some other sources out there that are cheaper. That’s 14c a submission. That’s also just going to get you low level links. I totally believe in low level links like forums, all that kind of thing, just massive amounts of links that don’t really have any authority behind them. I even go so far as to really value links from sites that are not in Google’s index. Doing my competitive research, this is how I figured that out. Probably up to fifty per cent of the incoming links to sites out there are from sites that are not in Google’s index. Most people don’t know that. So yes, you want to get a variety of links.

David Jenyns: With that Directory Maximizer, do you end up just rolling out as much as you can get from Directory Mazimizer?

Dori Friend: Yes, I do. Then other places too, there are other I call them low level linking from membership sites and so on.

David Jenyns: Like blog networks?

Dori Friend: Yes, blog networks, absolutely. There are tons of them, there are different kinds.

David Jenyns: Some of the ones we’ve been testing out and you obviously mentioned Brad Callan, so there’s SEO Link Vine and then there is AMA is well known and Unique Article Wizard, the Portal Feeder, the Syndicate Kahuna guys have one, plus you’ve got obviously your own and then we shift into the high level area. Are there any other of the low level linking material that you like to do?

Dori Friend: Linx Boss. I just started using them for getting links like that. They don’t put links in the content of the blogs, they put it on the footer of each post. That typically doesn’t work as well. There are some things about each one of those networks that are good and then that are not so good. But I think they all have a place. I wouldn’t say, oh don’t use that because that’s no good. I think all the linking sites have a place.

David Jenyns: Can you ever get linked to from somewhere that hurts you? This is that age old question.

Dori Friend: No, this is another myth. If that was possible, then we could take out our competition. I have linked to a lot of people in my career and I have lost a lot of sites from getting reported from my network. None of my clients’ sites have ever been hurt. It’s who you point to, not who’s pointing to you, if that makes sense. You can’t control who’s pointing to you, or we could take down our competition. I’ll get some of my network sites reported and it has to be a manual review at that point and Google will de-index them because they’ll see this is just a link site. So I can lose, but I’ve never seen a money site taken down for that type of linking.

David Jenyns: You mentioned as well, it depends on your mood as to how you hit things. Do you have a structured way that you go about the link building process? Are you just, hey, let’s monitor, see where that site is and we’ll keep on hammering links from a variety of different sources until we get what we’re after?

Dori Friend: Yes, it’s pretty much that, although there is a lot of monitoring going on. If we’re blasting with links and all of a sudden we start going down into the hundreds, we’re pulling our feeds. We’re going to pull the feeds that are feeding links out into the network and we’re going to go to my low level network and put in a feed that is using the url, the keywords. It is like a free for all.

I do like, though, to study my competition. I’ll go look at the top ten on that page of the keyword and I will look to see what kind of links they’re getting. I don’t want to waste my network links on my sites that I don’t need all that authority pushed to them. When we went into the weight loss industry, we knew that we needed a ton of links everywhere we could get them. But for olive oil, organic olive oil, gourmet olive oil, it’s not been really tough. So I wouldn’t go hammer that site with a ton of links.

I started linking to it with a low level linking thing, I’m getting to the second page. I’m probably going to put a feed in from my network for a week or two, see where I’m at and then pull back. Does that make sense? But I do study my competition. I also know in the olive oil industry too, their sites were very old. Even though my site was a 204 site, I went and got an older site and did a 302 Redirect for that, just because it helps out a little bit.

David Jenyns: That initial start, that’s a great little start there, you’ve got the 301 Redirects after obviously doing appropriate research and knowing the keywords and competition. Then doing the directory sites, you looked through Directory Maximizer, then you start off with your low linking material which is your blog networks.

You mentioned Linx Boss and then as part of your own network you have some low level linking style sites. Before we shift into the high level linking material, are there any other low level linking? Obviously you’re very big on automated material, so it’s either a service or a blog network where you can use something like Traffic King to be able to pump the feed out through to your own network. Are there any other things outside of that?

Dori Friend: You’ve basically covered it. There are a lot of different linking programs, I can’t name them all right now. I did write a report on the whole linking thing. People can get it if they opt in to my list. I don’t have the url off the top of my head for it. It was a free thing I did, part of the Seven Step SEO Quick Start Guide, actually number seven, it was the seventh step. I talk about where to go get back links, how to go get them and things like that.

There’s a cool little service out there called Fiverr, fiverr.com. That site is just about people doing crazy things for $5. If you punch in SEO back links, you’re going to get these kids, students at colleges and so on, willing to put links on their dotedu site, the school site, pointing to your blog or something. That’s a cool way to get some dotedu links and things like that very cheaply or inexpensively. It’s just a little tip that I found and I’ve been doing that.

David Jenyns: Fiverr’s fine, you can get lost in there on ridiculous things too, getting people to write things.

Dori Friend: So you know about Fiverr?

David Jenyns: Yes, we used it for a product launch. I didn’t actually look for SEO material, but we got some girl to write the SEO method on her forehead and a few other people to do some ridiculous things.

Dori Friend: Oh, yes, I know. It’s amazing what they’ll do for $5. It’s crazy, sometimes I just look around the site and laugh, oh, I have to do some practical jokes on my friends.

David Jenyns: So the Fiverr, and shifting into the higher level linking material and this is more the importance of building your own network. You guys were talking about this a long time ago. Even now, there are a few people who are starting to talk about it and they’re effectively just rebranding what it is you’re talking about. They have their own names for it but really when it comes back to it, it’s very much what you and Jeff Johnson and a few other people were talking about. That whole idea, even coining your own terms, your money sites, your feeder sites and building out that network of sites, that basically support it.

I know that’s a big part of what you’ve been doing. You’ve been building a massive network and you’ve had a few times when a few of them have got linked together and you lose parts of that network but you keep building and where you are now, especially acquiring all the aged domain material. As far as the way that you talk through, I don’t know if you can talk a little bit about this high level linking material?

Dori Friend: I can talk about SEONitro and what I’ve just done for Brad. We have a network of sites that are mostly PR3s, 20% PR4s, 20% PR2s and then PR5s and PR1s. You can definitely over optimize a site from that. Manual linking, a lot of the SEO professionals that lease out these networks from us, they will manually link to their clients. It goes on a post and in your post it’s best to have the links inside the post instead of at the bottom or the top. The best way to get authority from the site is getting a link from within the contextual block. So we do that.

These kind of sites, these high powered networks which are totally automated except for manual linking if you want to do that, but this is not a sales pitch here. You talked about the fact that we’ve been doing this for a long time and we have. Traffic King was built just to automate sites and networks of sites. In fact it was a cloaking system way back in the day. We were doing these networks, it was an AdSense type of thing. It’s turned into more of a white hat publishing, grey hat. Any time you’re trying to manipulate the search engines, I think it’s grey hat.

It’s an incredible content domain management and publishing system, Traffic King Pro. I spoke at Yanik’s in 2007 and it was Underground 3 and what I spoke about was building your own SEO link network. I thought that was really important and really crucial for people to have to start building those kinds of networks because then you have the power on your own. You don’t have to go out and beg for links.

So now when I want to hit an industry, I have my networks that I can go do that. I thought it was important for other people to start building that and you don’t need Traffic King Pro to do it, you don’t need all these fancy tools or expensive tools, you can start base level just by using Fantastico and installing a WordPress blog or a Joomla site and there is other software out there that you can automate postings if you want or just manually post. Sometimes I put up sites and I’ll put up one post, that’s it and I’m done with it because I don’t want to share it with anyone else, I want those links going to my site.

So, yes, we’ve been doing this a long time. There are certain things you want to look out for when you are building your own network like getting different hosts. We use SEO Hosting a lot, it works really well because then the sites in your network are coming from different IPs. Be sure to change your name servers on that.

David Jenyns: With that, that’s a big thing especially with people building out these networks and I personally hold you and Jeff responsible for this. When I was setting up a network because we rolled out a large network of five hundred sites and we ended up segregating them, making sure that you had different hosts, so that way they were on separate IP addresses, registering them in Mum’s name, brother’s name, everybody else’s name, basically to try and keep these separate.

You can spend an incredible amount of time trying to keep these separate and then you can do something really stupid, having the same Google analytics account installed on it or there are so many little things.

Dori Friend: Or the same AdSense account. I don’t put AdSense on any of my network sites that I’m just trying to push in the rankings.

David Jenyns: It stitches them all together and then once that happens you just see it drop out, especially with some of the elaborate linking that we were doing very early on. You’re still going down that path. These days I’ve really shifted away from that. We still build our supporting sites but perhaps it’s to do with the volume, the point at which you need to go, alright, now we’re getting to a point where we need to separate this. I’d be interested to get your thoughts on how important it is for most people to be going down that road? Is it more trouble than it potentially could be worth?

Dori Friend: You mean building your own network?

David Jenyns: Yes, but then also trying to protect the different divisions of it. Building your own network, but then saying, right I’m going to try and split it across ten different hosts, different IP addresses, different domain name registrars. Unless you’re excessively cross linking, does it really make that much of a difference?

Dori Friend: It does actually. I don’t do any cross linking in my networks at all. I put about ten sites on each IP. The reason you want different IPs in different names is so Google thinks that they are owned by different people. It’s not like you’re going to be penalized for linking to your own sites but it’s been tracked that if you have a hundred sites and they’re all in the same name, all in the same server, and you’re linking to your money site, that’s not going to give you the boost that you want.

So we’ve been doing this for a long time. It was a hassle before SEO Hosting came about, finding those hosts was horrible and it used to be different registrars too. Finally having different profiles so you can just create a profile, like Host A profile A, Host B, profile B type of thing. That kind of thing, I don’t do that anymore, I have assistants who do all that. It can be hired out once you create a system around it. So it’s still important if you’ve going to build a network, to have it look like it’s not all on that same person. I hope I answered your question and I understood it right.

David Jenyns: I’m interested then as well, do you ever look at, sometimes an easy way to get around, especially if you’re trying to do it on a shoestring, is setting up a web 2.0 network where you look for some of the different properties like WordPress and Tumblr and Posterous, a few of those ones that actually have no no follow issues and they’re actually sending some quality links. Do you dabble in Web 2.0 at all?

Dori Friend: Not so much, social sites and so on because I’m so focused on building my own type of networks, buying deleted domain ns, expired domains right now, the acquisition part is really what I focus on. I do believe if you’re on a shoestring budget and I see this all the time, that if you put up an article on ezinearticles.com is an authority site. It’s going to be easier for you to rank that article than probably on your branding site. So you can do those types of things, Squidoo lenses and get those ranks.

Easy, what’s easy? There’s an Ezine article for Medifast. Medifast was a huge seller, the diet thing that Commission Junction people were all after. So you get the article there, they click on the link which is a referral link, they get commission and boom.

David Jenyns: It’s funny, when we break it down, your core whole SEO thing, a lot of people out there will make SEO more complicated than it needs to be. Usually they talk in terms of on page, off page, but pretty much you’re saying, for you, you focus 80% on off page.

Dori Friend: Except for the title tags. I can still rank something that the title tag doesn’t match the keyword, the keyword that I’m ranking to it. It could be apples and I’m linking to it saying it’s an orange. If I keep linking to this apple site saying it’s an orange, it’s an orange, it’s an orange, pretty soon Google is going to think it’s an orange, even though it’s an apple. So you can still do that. If your title tag says it’s an apple or an orange, then it’s easier to rank. It will be easier to rank something if your title tag is matching the keyword of that page. That I still highly recommend and believe. But other than that, the content on the site, blah, blah, blah.

People get content, blah, blah, blah. Unless the site is identical, you have two identical sites, the duplicate content myth I’ve never seen it take action on anything. The Stomper Net guys demystified the Latent Semantic Indexing, that whole thing that was happening in 2006. They totally dismantled that. It went through our industry and everybody was so scared about what was going to be happening. It never even came to fruition. There was one conversation that Google had about it and it just went through our industry like a headless pumpkin man or something.

David Jenyns: It did, and a lot of people came out with these little tools.

Dori Friend: They said, it has to be themed, and it has to be this and it doesn’t really. You can l link a flower site linking from a mechanic site, you can, I do it every day, all day. Maybe not flowers to mechanics but you know what I mean. So that took care of the content myth. I’ve only seen sites get, not de indexed but one won’t rank as high as the other if they’re identical. Identical sales letter, like you do a site and then you duplicate that site. Google does not want that to happen or else if it was totally on page optimization you could control the front page.

Back in the day, and this is why AdSense is not as easy to go after as it used to be. Back in the day it was all about on page optimization. You could figure out what kind of on page optimization you needed to do to rank your sites. That’s why it was easy for us to rank our sites. We were cloaked because of course we gave the search engine candy and would rank and show to the people something else to make them quick. That worked brilliantly until you had to start getting back links. It just wasn’t as quick, you couldn’t do it in the massive amounts we were doing it in and make it work since the back link thing.

David Jenyns: That leads to, I’m thinking about the changes in search. Since back then, apart from the idea that on page may be not as important now and it is still about the links. Every now and then it feels like something new sweeps through the SEO community. Most recently it was Google Instant. From your eyes, have you seen any significant changes in SEO or the way that you do it?

Dori Friend: No, I’ve not seen any significant changes. I’ve seen things that have opened my eyes, like realizing that pages that aren’t in Google’s index still work for some reason. This is when I had a whole network get de indexed because one of my client’s customers was linking to a trademark term and they shouldn’t have been. That person had the trademark term, complained to Google, Google did a manual edit of who was linking to their competitor’s site and of course it was me and they de indexed my pages. Nobody in that network’s rankings hurt or were affected from the de indexing, which is totally opposite of what you would think.

So it lead me to believe that de indexed sites are not totally devalued. I’m still getting my head around that whole thing because it’s kind of weird to think that. Back when I do my competitive analysis, I do realize that the majority of links coming into a site are from sites that have not been indexed or are not in the index or have zero page rank. So that goes back to your low level linking, get links from low level blogs that may be not in the index, zero blogs, ones, whatever. Get your sites going and then hit it with PR3s and PR4s. See what’s ranking in your industry. See how many PR4s or 3s you need to get to rank that site.

David Jenyns: As part of that testing, and you were saying once that blog or that part of your network got de indexed, did you also have a look, let’s say you’ve got a normal website operating and you remove links from some of your networks. Is it easy for you to see like turning on a light switch on and off, hey, I’m adding these five links here, my rankings go up. I remove these five links, my ranking goes down?

Dori Friend: Yes, it’s pretty much like that. It is pretty much like that, in fact. SEONitro is a year program and if people leave before the year is out, people have to quit for different reasons and mostly I don’t take their links down, but if they’re mean I say, ok, I’m taking your links down and they would drop right out of the rankings. Mostly it’s been clients we work for really hard to get them on the front page, then they’d say their keyword didn’t convert so those are really actually the people we take our links down from and they would certainly drop like a lead balloon.

What else is also interesting is I’ll be linking to somebody for a long time. Of course if I stop linking, you would think, ok, they might start dropping down. In some cases they will, depending on the industry and how competitive those keywords are. But in a lot of cases, because of all the past linking and because the linking is still there, even though they’ve ruled off that front page, the link is still coming in, their rankings will still stay the same for a lot of the keywords, for a lot of the mid range to long tail. So it’s not that you have to continually link like you do in competitive industries.

I do see that in the competitive industries like weight loss, you have to continually keep your linking going, keep it going, keep it going.

David Jenyns: What’s your gut feeling, what’s changing in the community online, like we’ve got the emergence of these blog networks? They’ve been around for a while but they’re very much becoming front and centre and there are different little services and things coming out which very much automate the process and they’re tapping into these blog networks. The longevity of this style of linking, it’s like you said, it can’t really go away because they are really the foundations of what search is built on. It’s built on links and back links and that’s why you need a mix of your low level and your high level material.

Do you see a point at which, if you’ve got a small business I think you probably get about ten requests every day for SEO services from Indian companies that are going to be rolling out masses of links through their networks. Are you thinking the music has got to stop at some point or what are your thoughts?

Dori Friend: I don’t know, I have no idea. I used to teach I can rank an apple with an orange link. I used to say, I know this is going to come back and bite me for saying this, but it hasn’t yet. It’s been five years, six years that I’ve been teaching this material. That’s on top of the time that I was cloaking, the AdSense years in 2003-2004. Even before that we were doing Commission Junction. The AdSense was really traumatic in those days.

I don’t know, I keep thinking it’s going to bite me and something is going to happen, it’s like an arms race, Google switches this and switches that. But it really hasn’t seemed to have changed for quite a while. I have had my blog networks up that I’ve leased out to people since 2006. It’s still working and it’s still working really well for myself and for my clients. I call them clients but they’re mostly customers, it’s not like I take on clients. They are other SEO professionals who lease my networks out so they can link from them.

So a lot of them are probably making their own networks at the same time because you can never have too many links if you are in the SEO business.

David Jenyns: That really comes down to the core of what it’s all about, building those links and building them out. I know you dispelled a few myths there. Shifting gears slightly, because I know you’ve been in the game for a long time. I always like to find out, and you hinted at one of them when we were talking about before the call, but some of the big mistakes you see people doing when trying to create wealth online. You mentioned one of them, which is chasing the shiny objects and whatever is newest and brightest is where people seem to jump.

You had a big shift in your income when you really narrowed that focus. Are there any other mistakes where you see people going wrong?

Dori Friend: Not testing, believing the myths, believing what they hear, I think really undermines the industry a lot. One person will say something and it will go through like wildfire. Even when I’m teaching, I’ve said, ok, you guys I’m going to tell you what I’ve experienced or the things that I’ve heard and then you can base that. I like to do my SEO from what I’ve tested, not from what I’ve heard. That’s where I get my results from. That’s why I know the content methods are stupid and so on.

So I see people doing that. I see people just buying into everything that gets sold. I think my best advice for somebody coming out, just starting, yes, one, there is a sense that you do need to buy into a lot of education because you do need to educate yourself in the internet marketing industry. That doesn’t mean you’re going to educate yourself on how to sell other internet marketing material. But say you want to start a business, like my Dad is selling olive oil, we’re in the olive oil business. He has the business going on and he’s learning about how to do that online.

So I think I would recommend if somebody was coming in, yes, get educated first. You’re going to have to spend some money probably. I don’t know, there is an awful lot of material online. Look at this interview. I’ve just really told you a lot of things that normally just wouldn’t be out there I think. Even a little bit on how to build networks. But focus on one thing. Focus on one business.

I think if I was to do this all over again, and this is how I started. I came into this business as a logo designer, because I was a designer for Apple. I designed interface software, interface and visual design. I did logos and then just graphics. I was an art major and I thought, ok, what can I do online? I can make logos. So I started that and that’s how I started educating myself and somehow I just got so into SEO, it really matched my personality. I was talking to David, I’m kind of a recluse. I’m really fun at the bar.

I don’t do many phone calls, I don’t talk to many people on the phone. I sit in front of my computer and I love that, I’m like a cave person. So I get out and go to the bar. If you come to meet me, I’ll buy you a beer.

David Jenyns: I can vouch for that.

Dori Friend: Yes, you can. The logo design business and if I didn’t get so caught up in SEO, I keep saying I’m going to go back into the logo design business because that’s where my talents are, that’s where I could have really done something. It’s not like I’m not doing anything now, because I am and I’m doing very well. But I see these guys that started back when I started in 2000, who built these companies, design companies and sold out and I know they sold for millions and millions of dollars because they got huge.

Pick a business, stick to it, learn how to promote that business online, that would be my best advice.

David Jenyns: That was exactly what I was asking. It kind of leads into the next question. If you look back at those key turning points for you and you look back over your career and the point at which you started doing this, that had a marked effect. Obviously one of them is making sure that you do focus on what it is that you’re going to be working on. Obviously testing I another important point. Were there any key things? I don’t know, maybe you started to outsource your customer service or maybe when it was when you started working with certain people.

Dori Friend: That’s a really good question. There are two things that have really changed my business and that is one, yes, outsourcing and two is creating systems, creating systems that I can outsource. That’s what I’m very big in now, that’s exactly what I’m doing in SEONitro which has, I think, helped me grow exponentially and has also given me the freedom to take off when I want to. I have a person who can run my business because I have a system that I set up, the outsourcing, the customer support, everything about that.

First you have what you need to do, you sell, then you maintain your customers. So the system is around everything. You outsource to try to bring people into those spots that will take care of that. So I have my main person, I call her my VP who manages everybody but she does mostly my customer support. Then there are other people who build sites and things like this. We have a process, like a list, like a checklist that they go through.

When I buy sites and I still do that, it goes to person A and then to person B and then to person C and they each have individual jobs that they do, it’s like a system. So creating systems is really important and I didn’t know that until I heard somebody talk about that at a seminar. It was systems, what on earth is that? I don’t know, I’m an art major. So really I had a hard time learning the business aspect and creating something like I’m going to sell sooner or later.

So I think that’s important, outsourcing, definitely, systems definitely. That’s not something I came into this industry knowing and it’s still something I’m working on, management. I always liked to think I was a one man band and sat in front of my computer and got lost in it all day. That kind of thinking really limited me, but I had to be that to create my system to pass on.

David Jenyns: Now that you’ve got that system, it sounds like what you’re working on over the next six months or so I imagine, is just further automation of those systems. Is that’s what’s coming down the pipe for Dori in late 2010 and 2011?

David Jenyns: Yes, that’s actually my goal, creating systems and documenting those systems so I can sell the company. So I have all my ducks in a row and that can be difficult too. Oh, book keeper, taxes, who wants to think of those things? I certainly don’t, but now it’s ok, this is getting bigger, I really need to get these ducks in a row. So it’s not only about creating systems, but documenting them so I can replace anybody.

David Jenyns: Are you thinking about selling out and just riding horses and having your cocktail parties on Friday afternoon? Is that really what’s going to happen?

Dori Friend: Yes, that could happen. But you know what? I’ll sell out but I’ll probably build something else. I’m going to go into logo design, I tell you. I think once you learn it then you can do it over and over again. You hear about all these entrepreneurs, oh, yes they’ve built and sold five businesses and so on. I’m finally getting to know how they did that and it’s taken me a long time to understand how they did that.

Once you realize, I think, it’s all about systems, creating systems, creating something you can make a profit with and creating systems on how to automate it, and take yourself out of the equation is really what it’s about. For me it’s like a puzzle and I really like that. That’s why I really like SEO because it’s kind of a puzzle, I test things and so on.
So I am really a geek, I just got a telescope too. I watch the stars. My friends laugh at me. I am front of the bar but I’m also a geek.

David Jenyns: It shines through in the work that you do. You do operate at a very high level. To wrap up, I can’t thank you enough for your time. Like you said, you’re a little bit of a recluse and you don’t hop on these calls very often, so I feel quite privileged that I managed to be someone to get you on the line. You are very generous both with your time and information you give. If people want to keep an eye on what you’re doing, there is SEONitro. But where are some places they can go to find out what Dori’s up to?

Dori Friend: Well, dorifriend.com is my blog and that is where I report everything that I test and ramble on and people ramble on back at me. Actually I don’t tend to ramble on that much and I only post every month or so because I’m more visual than I am a writer. But I do like to share my test results with the people on my list because then the people on my list will tend to get better and better and then they’ll buy into SEONitro. That’s what I sell is SEONitro and that’s the network that I lease out on a monthly basis.

It’s mostly always closed, though, because I only let fifty people in at a time. My list is dorifined.com, my blog, they can get on my list. Even email me at dorifriend.com and I’ll send you my process map. Actually you can get it at the blog, you don’t have to email me. It’s a pretty good process map, it’s a seven step SEO quick start guide. It talks about buying a deleted domain, doing a 301 Redirect, all the things we talked about, submitting to directories, choosing keywords, studying your competition, creating a baseline and developing SEO pages and back links and it goes into detail with that. It’s a report that I did. I actually did that with Brad, he did an email for me and I said, I’ll build my list, I‘ll get something out and it was really good.

David Jenyns: Well, we might wrap it up there. Thanks again Dori, we covered some awesome material and I know people are going to love it and they can check out dorifriend .com. Thanks guys.

Dori Friend: Thanks.

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