Eugene Ware
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Name: Eugene Ware
Industry: Online Marketing, SEO
Website: Market Samurai
Eugene Ware’s Bio: If you’ve been watching the internet marketing world for the past 6 months there’s a very good chance you’ve heard of the SEO tool “Market Samurai”… It’s pretty much come out of the gate as an indispensable addition to any SEOers toolkit.
What you probably don’t know is who’s the mastermind behind it?
Today, I’d like to put the spotlight on Eugene Ware, one of the key player behind Market Samurai. You’ll rarely hear from Eugene since he’s a “behind the scenes guy” but he’s had more impact on the internet community than most people recognise.
Starting out in the early days with Ed Dale, Eugene was instrumental in the development of what has come to be known as the “UnderAchiever Method”… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.
David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns from the SEO Method, and I’m very excited to be joined today by Eugene Ware. I don’t think many people know this guy. He’s extremely underground yet he’s been around for as long as I can remember in internet marketing, but always behind the scenes. In the very early days he got started with working with Ed Dale and did some stuff where they built up a web development company and then also helps develop the precursor to the UnderAchiever Method which was called the Cashflow Machine. That’s where I first found out about Eugene’s work. That sort of evolved into the whole UnderAchiever Method with Frank Kern.
He really has been in information marketing for a long time and helped consult a lot of IM gurus especially here in Australia and helped build up and manage the propertyinvesting.com.au. That was for the whole Steve McKnight information marketing side of things. To cut a long story short, Eugene really knows his stuff. He’s more well known at the moment for the work he’s done with Market Samurai. He’s one of the main guys over at Market Samurai, I thought it would be awesome to get him on the phone, quiz him about SEO and what he does with his business and SEO. I’d like to welcome you to the call Eugene.
Eugene Ware: Pleasure to be here.
David Jenyns: We’ll just dive straight into it. I’ve got a few questions I want to ask. This is a particularly broad question. When you’re first starting a new website what are the sort of steps you’d take to drive traffic to a website? Where do you start and what is the process that you go through?
Eugene Ware: It’s sort of a mixed question. I could talk about people having online assets so online assets being products and content and links, the number of people on your prospect list, your customer list and your partners. The answer to that question really depends on taking a look at your own asset base, wherever you are at and looking at what’s most appropriate for you. So for me if I was to start today, I’ve got a very large data base, so my first action would be to email my database about that and drive a lot of traffic that way and then go on to talk to some of our partners promoters and do it that way. That’s talking from me personally where our business is today.
Saying that, over fourteen, fifteen months ago the current company I’ve got, Market Samurai didn’t exist. I had one or two things on my asset list which was I knew lots of influential people in the marketing world and so from that perspective, my first port of call was to try to do something with them that would be of interest to them that they would promote to their list and then of course be able to build my list up as a result of that.
That’s me personally as a company. From the perspective of someone starting out with essentially nothing, no large leveragable relationships or no list or those kind of things, thing I’d think of going either the SEO route o0f the AdWords route to start generating traffic and therefore start building a list is definitely where I would start looking at things.
David Jenyns: So I guess on of the key takeaways I got from that was the importance of looking to what you’ve got, or what assets, leveraging off those, work off where you’re already strong. Then look to build a list. You did mention pay per click as well. Let’s say you were starting out or even consulting with someone, where would you suggest they start, with either pay per click or SEO?
Eugene Ware: To answer that question is purely based on your asset base. If you don’t know what you’re doing in AdWords, you’re going to be very poor very quickly. It’s going to get eaten up very quickly, you’re going to waste a lot of money learning to play the game unless you know what you’re doing. So I wouldn’t necessarily be telling them to be doing the AdWords thing without having a very strong training or strategy behind doing that without buying some good course teaching you how to do it.
Saying that, though, I think there is no faster way for someone to test the market even if they’re losing money via AdWords. So if they’re looking at getting their toe in the water, and I’m a big believer in testing the market, then AdWords is fantastic whether you’re starting out or not starting out and you’ve got some online assets behind you, AdWords is a very quick way to put your toe in the water.
Saying that now, with some of the SEO methodologies around today, it’s very easy, if you know what you’re doing to actually dominate a keyword very quickly in a matter of days to weeks depending on the strength of the competition around the keyword. So it really depends on what your time horizon is to actually get a result.
So if I wanted to know in a couple of days I’d probably go the AdWords route. If I was happy to play around for a couple of weeks and wait for the results to come in, then throw up a site to SEO some keywords to get some traffic to test the commerciality of that traffic is something I would take a look at doing.
David Jenyns: With both of those it sounds like the first place you start is your keyword. We mentioned market research and then keyword research flows on from that. I know that’s a real strong point of yours. For the keyword research, what sort of process do you go through, and does it vary between the pay per click and SEO? What sort of process do you go through for identifying what sort of keywords to go after?
Eugene Ware: Well the same principles apply for AdWords and SEO. There are a number of things I look for for a keyword and most people make all these mistakes. We coin the phrase, there are three golden rules you need to get right when picking a keyword. The first is you need to pick keywords for traffic and while it seems really obvious, most people who just randomly pick a keyword will just have such abysmally small amounts of traffic around them to not even be worth your time to do anything about it unless you want to do this across tens of thousands of keywords.
So finding a keyword with traffic is really really important. Until about twelve months ago there was no good way to actually find out how much traffic a keyword had because Google kept all that information to itself. We had to use other services which really only extrapolated a small subset of that data, so until recently we had very poor data. Now we can find those keywords which have traffic.
After you’ve found the keywords that have the traffic, and this applies as much to AdWords as SEO, you need to pick off a keyword that has an acceptably low level of competition that you can actually realistically compete. The number one mistake most people make is they pick a keyword that is just too tough for them, If it’s starting out from scratch with no page rank, no links, then it’s not to say you can’t get any results but you are limited in the result you can get in a small window of time. You need to make sure that when you’re going after a keyword that you can effectively compete for that keyword.
Otherwise, and I think Guru Bob talks about this a lot, it takes exactly the some amount of work to succeed as it does to fail. For all this hard work, all this optimization, all this link building, if you pick the wrong keyword, and it’s just too hard for you, then you’re stuffed. So you need traffic and you need low enough levels of competition.
The third thing you need to check is the commercial value of the keyword. This is something that really blows my mind and no one really talks about. I can speak from personal experience. This is a really valid way to look at the market. You need to make sure that the keyword that you’re picking has commercial value, that there is evidence of people selling something, hopefully something similar to what you’re planning to sell. You want to see evidence of people spending money in that market, particularly advertisers in that market. You need to make sure that people who are advertising are taking a look at their business models and making sure that there is a long term business model in it for you if you’re going to go into to a market.
There are ways of measuring that and people seem to pick keywords that they’re ordering first by how much traffic they have or how little competition they have, but very few people make the obvious thing and just say I want to pick the keyword that’s going to put the most amount of money into my pocket in the shortest amount of time. For me that commercial value is really important, and there is a range of cool ways that you can measure that these days.
David Jenyns: With the commercial value, I’ve heard of a lot of people talk about this sort of thing in the past, you look at two good examples of that. One is the tattoo market and the dream analysis market, both of which have quite a lot of searches, dream analysis even more so. There are quite a lot of searches there, yet commercial value on that particular keyword is low. Most people are looking for free dream analysis, and they’re not really going to buy anything. You might do your research like Eugene just said, tick off traffic and tick off low competition and say, ok, here’s a keyword I can go after. Then when you actually come to the market and try to monetize that you’re not really going to have anything.
I think a lot of people get scared away from markets that have competition, and if anything, I think Jeff Johnson talks about this, you want to go after markets with competition because it shows there is money there. All you have to do that is just a little bit better.
One thing you did mention that I was interested to find out more from you, because I know you guys do a lot testing over there at Market Samurai with the traffic component, and you talked about, of late or relatively recently, Google started providing some sort of insight into how much a particular keyword’s getting, through some of the testing I’ve done, I’m seeing massive discrepancies. For example, you can have number one position ranking for a keyword and not even get one tenth or even much less than that, click throughs on that particular keyword. What are your thoughts on the way to use that and do you take it with a grain of salt?
Eugene Ware: I think ultimately that’s the thing of testing, you do take it with a grain of salt and you do look to multiple sources. Just like with share trading you don’t buy something just based on one signal you look for multiple signals to be saying the right thing before you take action on something.
David Jenyns: I didn’t know you dabbled in the stock market!
Eugene Ware: Yes I did the daytrader HQ training and did a bit of day trading.
David Jenyns: That’s where I got started in daytrader HQ and then I went on to be a trainer for Home Trader.
Eugene Ware: No way! Small world! So you do take it with a grain of salt. Most people get so tied up with analysis paralysis, and particularly with the product we provide, we provide data that people can just get so obsessed about and it’s good that it does provide some discipline and some rigor to what can be a very risky business if you don’t know what you’re doing.
I like to do an AdWords campaign first and actually confirm the data. I know that the AdWords data should be a percentage of what the full number of searches are and AdWords will tell you the number of impressions that your ad got as well. So if you’re looking for confirmation you could spend a little bit of money to get that insurance that the traffic is behind a particular keyword.
I certainly do the AdWords, throw it to a site and test the commercial value and the conversion and the traffic before I was to invest heavily going into that market.
David Jenyns: So one of the first stages, both pay per click and SEO is obviously to do some keyword research. Maybe if we head a little bit down the SEO track, because obviously you can take those keywords and load them into your pay per click and start to do your monitoring of conversion and that sort of thing and tweak things.
From an SEO point of view, once you take those keywords, how do you incorporate that into a site that you’re going to promote? Maybe we should start, are we going to talk about a sales letter type site or an e commerce site? But how would you go about a website once you’ve done your research? How many keywords do you pick out and where do you start?
Eugene Ware: I try to pick a small subset of keywords that are tightly semantically grouped with each other that meet certain traffic competition and commerciality filters that I put on them. So I basically say I’m looking for keywords that have a decent amount of traffic, so it’s going to be worth my time, with a decent amount of commercial value is what I’m really looking at. Obviously it’s going to be the way my competition threshold based on what my SEO asset base is in terms of my other sites and my ability to get links. So I like to think of this cluster of keywords as essentially becoming categories. If it is a blog on my site I typically have somewhere six to twelve major keywords or something behind my site. But there’s definitely some semantic clustering of those keywords. They’re related to each other. That is really one of the cool things behind Google keyword tool. They’re actually giving you semantically relevant keywords and that’s really important.
What are you thoughts with that whole semantic thing as well? It leads into the whole LSI and is that something you pay attention to?
Eugene Ware: Well, not to argue about this for an hour. LSI is a specific mathematical algorithm which absolutely Google does not use. That’s very different from the perspective of saying well, does Google consider semantic relevance of content and semantic relevance of links? Absolutely it does. If you’ve got a website about a whole lot of unrelated topics and unrelated content, it’s not to say you can’t rank well, but you’re going to rank less well than someone who has a very tightly themed site.
So the LSI argument out there sort of misses the point. They’re saying, do they use this algorithm? The reality is they do use an algorithm. I’ve seen videos of Google showing semantic scoring algorithms that they’re using. So they definitely are using semantic algorithms in the background.
It boils down to quality. Google wants to serve up the best quality content for any keyword and if it finds a nice, tightly themed site which is all about a particular keyword then it makes sense that that thing should rank more highly than something else potentially.
David Jenyns: Once you’ve got those six to twelve very tightly semantically clustered keywords and you load them in as your categories, beyond that, if you’re making posts in there, are you going for even longer tail keywords?
Eugene Ware: The first thing, if my purpose is to test the market is to validate that there is traffic in that market. The key thing about testing is to risk the minimum amount to get a quick result back. So you don’t want to over invest in a website when you’re starting out. When you’ve tested the market you’re already in, you’ve done some AdWord testing, then you can go hard at it. But from the testing perspective, you should be still looking to put posts of those category keywords and then I’ll go into link building in a second, but do some link building and then just wait and measure what happens.
If there’s an action you look at the reaction and if you’re not seeing positive things then you have to start asking the questions why. At least you haven’t over invested into a market from an SEO perspective anyway.
David Jenyns: With on page optimization for those keywords if you’re creating posts, apart from the basics that most of my clients know everything, from keyword in the right places: your title tag, meta description keywords and then a little bit throughout the page, even an H1 tag, and a couple of links don’t go astray as well, is there anything much more that happens from an on page point of view?
Eugene Ware: Not really. Only just looking at internal linking structure and things like if you’re using a blog to rank, things like tagging and those kind of things are really important and actually looking at site structures to get the best bang for your buck on those sort of things. Really there’s not that much to the on site optimization. It’s the internal link structure which stuffs most people up.
David Jenyns: What are thoughts on the way of no follow? Leslie Rohde obviously made that really well known quite a few years ago now and it really did get used quite a lot. There are supposed to be some developments of late, some change in that. What are your thoughts on no follow at the moment?
Eugene Ware: I think it’s a bit disappointing. Google is on the back foot now. No follow is still no follow. It’s just that they’ve changed the rules to prevent something called page rank sculpting from happening. So a lot of those techniques that people were using to concentrate page rank on those pages in their website are not as effective as they used to be. It was actually a nice trade off between nice good navigation for people who were visiting your website and the ability to pass page rank and guide you to pages that you really wanted them to see.
The side effect of this decision is probably going to be a lot of people are going to be going back to what happened seven or eight years ago just using a Java script links and those sort of things to try to create a set of links for navigation and a set of links for SEO. This is really sad.
David Jenyns: Yes. And I think for me now the first thing that popped into my mind was, well, now the aim of the game is how many pages can I create rather than really sculpt these pages and have that page rank funneled. Leslie Rohde talks about when you create a page you’re creating a page rank out of nothing. A brand new page with no links to it has some PR value in it, and it is between zero and one, but there is some value there. What you want to do is just all about the numbers of those pages.
Eugene Ware: To some degree. I think really the best way to think about page rank, and Google is on the record for saying that their published algorithm for page rank is really different now, it’s changed. Even when Matt Cutts joined he said it was very different to what the published patented algorithm was.
But aside to that, the original idea really was that page rank was the probability that a random guy surfing the web would land on your web page. So if you had more content out there it does makes sense if you link it well and you have external links to those pages, you have a higher probability of stumbling on the page if there are more pages out there.
Obviously if there are more keywords out there you can potentially rank for as well. So I think you’re right, although obviously you can go too far in that direction as well.
David Jenyns: Yes. So once we start to create some of these pages and we’re testing it. You do a little bit of on page stuff and then start on your off page campaign. What sort of things do you do? Do you follow a bit of the Thirty Day Challenge sort of process or do you have your own sort of process that you’ve adopted when you’re trying to rank a site?
Eugene Ware: The Thirty Day Challenge process is pretty much what we use in house, the first bits of it. The first challenge when you have some content is to get the thing indexed and build up some initial links to that content so that content gets discovered ideally with those keywords in the links linking to your web page. That makes a difference. So the first thing is using social book marking, RSS submission. Whether you do it manually, and we use Traffic Bug which was promoted in the Thirty Day Challenge this year.
That is essentially to build that first set of links. Each of those links is relatively low value. At that stage of the process it’s about getting indexed, getting relevant links for a bunch of low competition pages. Now that might be enough to see some good rankings based on those initial set of low ranking links that you’re building into your content. But that is certainly where I would start because it’s so easy and it has become part of our publishing process and that’s why we’ve built it into our product Market Samurai.
After you’ve published your blog you just click a button and use the keyword and write some description about what your content’s about and you’ve got a couple of hundred links being built over time from social book marks and site directories and RSS submissions. It’s quite low value but it’s enough to kick start the process.
David Jenyns: When you said you might even get some rankings for some of the keywords, obviously you’re going to continue to build to links to some of the other keywords and your core domain name and the primary keyword. Let’s say you’ve picked up some of those secondary keywords, do you continue to build links for that? I know Ken Giddens told this story a very long time ago about outrunning this bear. All his friend needed to do was outrun his other friend and he would be fine. After you’ve got rankings for some of those words, do you then focus on other words?
Eugene Ware: I believe in having the best return on my time. Everything I try to do is in as leveraged way as possible. So I would take a look at where I am getting rankings and take a look at the associated traffic with those rankings. If I’m in position three for a keyword and I know that with very little work and a bit of additional link building I can push myself to a two or a one, that is a massive percentage increase in the traffic from a positional increase of one or two.
I’m always going to focus on what’s going to put the most money in my pocket. So that is going to focus my link building. You look at what the ranking is. That is the importance of making sure you’re monitoring the rankings on a regular basis. My big problem with the world of SEO is you ask two hundred SEO people in a room the same question, you’ll probably get two hundred different answers.
What people need to do, and it’s really important particularly if you’re considering SEO being part of the strategy of your business that you learn to learn for yourself. Don’t just take what other people have said or believe a lot of myths that are out there. You need to learn for yourself. The only way to learn for yourself is to take an action and measure the response of that action. So use some sort of tracking solution to monitor what you did and what the response was is going to teach you a lot more about SEO than ten thousand dollars of SEO courses.
David Jenyns: Yes, I think you hit on some key things there. For me it all comes down to taking that action and getting some runs on the board. By just doing something, I think that’s the real key.
You did mention things like monitoring your keywords. And for people who are looking for a way to do that, we’ll talk a little bit about Market Samurai. I know within Market Samurai there’s the rank tracker, which is a really good of keeping on top of what rankings you’re getting for particular keywords that you’re targeting. In addition to the social book marking and the RSS submission, what sort of other link building mechanisms do you go after?
Eugene Ware: I call that level one link. Level two link building is, when you are getting positive results, you don’t want to over invest in the market. If you’ve done a little bit of work and you’re not seeing any positive results at all, then you might want to consider moving on or not it depends on your understanding of what that market is.
The next thing I would do is move into leveraged link acquisition. There are few solutions out there where you can acquire hundreds, if not thousands of back links, certainly hundreds from a variety of different sources very quickly. That’s actually using article marketing or content syndication methods. The two I use are Article Marketing Automation which is ridiculously cheap for what you get and Unique Article Wizard which is a big article syndication network.
They’re two services by crafting an article from the perspective of getting other people to publish that content on their site, you can get a whole lot of links back to your site. The trick is actually how to use those links to your best advantage having a linking strategy that’s going to work for you. There are a lot of people that use it very poorly and just use it to spam a whole lot of stuff out there. But it you put the work in and particularly if you write properly spun content then you can for very little effort get a big result.
In most cases for most keywords you’re going to do very well using those solutions.
David Jenyns: Let’s say you’ve got a primary money site that you’re looking to promote using some of those services which could be argued to be somewhat grey hat. Is that something you try and distance.
Eugene Ware: I talked earlier about acquiring assets. I thin k the greatest asset for people playing in the SEO space can do is build up their own network of websites that have page rank, that have good authority and good reputation. So certainly you’ve got to keep your money site absolutely pristine. You might be doing a lot of these link building activities in your content cluster, you blog network that you’ve got outside and then channeling the power that your building up their to your main site. That’s why I was saying about the link building techniques that you were using. Make sure you are doing that effectively across your entire cluster of sites.
David Jenyns: You mentioned level two being leverage. Do you include stuff like your Ezine Article and those more Web 2.0, not that you’d call Ezine Web 2.0, but Squidoo and Hub Pages. Do you include that as part of that level, or is that level three?
Eugene Ware: Again I think it boils down to return on time. It takes time to write that content. If you write your content correctly for content syndication then you can take a unique spun version of that content which you’re going to syndicate anyway and submit it to EzineArticles first, because they need to have unique content on their site. They’ll do a due content check first. Wait until it’s accepted by Ezine of course and then after that’s finished then go and syndicate a version or spun version of that content using some of those syndication platforms we talked about before.
You can do the same with Squidoo and all the different Web 2.0 properties. That’s certainly a super effective solution. Again you’ll look at the time that goes into that as well. You want to take an action and see positive feedback before going back and investing further in it. There are solutions to build up leveraged 2.0 properties and submissions, but a lot of them are very spammy. I personally don’t use any of them.
David Jenyns: You mentioned with AMA and Unique Article Wizard as well spinning of the content and then getting that out. From a point of trying to get that out as high quality as possible, I know that’s something that we’ve had in the past outsourcing. You really do need to teach people how to use the system. They need to understand the way the linking methodology works so they’re shooting deep links in and they’re also shooting links off to other articles to promote your promoting pages. Do you have any tips on the spinning side of things?
Eugene Ware: Yes, a couple of things. There are some automated solutions out there. Ninety- nine point nine percent of them are rubbish. There’s at least one of them I know of that’s quite good – one called Content Boss, which does a pretty good job for an automated solution. We’re looking to integrate that into our tool very shortly. One of the critical limiting factors for most people for SEO, you need to have keyword and you need to have content.
For most people writing the content is really painful. If your not knowledgeable about the content, you’re going to outsource it and getting a spun version of that can be challenging. Content Boss is one solution for that and there will be some good human solutions available for writing spun articles shortly.
David Jenyns: So we talked about some of those different methods and then you try level three. They might be the more manual type, you’re not necessarily getting as much leverage. We talked about a few of the different things, like the EzineArticles. Where do you see 2.0 and any other strategies?
Eugene Ware: I think Web 2.0 is the thing that you logically pursue probably shortly after that leveraged stuff. I wouldn’t call it level three, maybe level two and a half. Some of these Web 2.0 domains are having a lot less impact today than they used to. There are still some ways out there to find some good sources of good quality back links. One thing Google is on the record saying is they’re actively going after sites which give links away too freely.
They can measure that and they can see that; they know what a blog is, and they know what a forum is. There is now a Google forum search that they’ve added in. Presumably they know what some of these Web 2.0 sites are as well regardless of follow or no follow. It would make sense that they discount the value of content that’s been built on that site. Whether or not that’s happening today, I’m sure a degree of it is or it certainly will in the future. From that leverage perspective you need to make sure what you’re doing has some long term value as well. You might use some things that are classified in the grey hat theme today, but you need to fundamentally provide value out there playing within the rules. That is so that long term you’re getting results.
David Jenyns: So that was level two and a half. Is there a level three?
Eugene Ware: There is a level three, but there is no panacea for level three. Level three just finding good quality places to get links back from. That’s when you or someone you’re paying is going out there and finding links manually building rank links from high quality sites.
For me personally it doesn’t make a lot of sense. From a time perspective, I know there are companies out there that do it. I would much prefer to own my own assets and build them up over time and then point those assets at my own sites. The fundamental of business strategy is the word control. You need to be able to control your destiny and be able to influence things. To the degree that you are reliant on getting links from those other sources in some way you have less control.
Ultimately you should be trying to build up your own assets so that you can influence the results and get the results that you want.
David Jenyns: In part of level three as well would you include building your own network?
Eugene Ware: For me that’s probably level four really. Level three is, what I tell people, is going to be manually getting links from people. Level four is really moving to the next level moving to build up your own assets.
David Jenyns: Is there a level five?
Eugene Ware: I don’t think so. I mean you becoming the platform that people are getting links from. You being the next Wikipedia or something like that, you being the next Web 2.0 site, potentially.
David Jenyns: We talked about all the different strategies you use going from the initial let’s get it indexed to some leveraged methods and then also talked about using Web 2.0 and the next level up going out searching for those really good quality links through some sort of content exchange or providing articles to have published. The next level obviously, level four is building the network and really owning those links. For what it is that you do, there’s quite a bit of work there. How much of this are you outsourcing or keeping in house? This is for you more personally.
Eugene Ware: We have our network of blog sites. To be honest we don’t use them for ourselves. It’s out testing bed, our laboratory so that we can test strategies just for the development of our own SEO product we know that whatever we’re doing is working, or when hear something we can test that it works. The reality is that for our own business we do very little SEO. It’s the cobbler’s son with no shoes sort of thing. It’s quite funny.
For us we do very little of that. What it boils down to is a discussion between SEO and business. I think the fundamental question to ask is, most people are asking what is the minimum I can do to get the biggest impact in my life, and while it’s a good question to ask from a technical perspective, it’s a bad mentality to have. It’s a much better mindset to say, how can I serve the maximum amount of people.
If you ask that question you’re going to get a different set of answers than if you asked the first question. From our perspective for the business, we don’t necessarily use SEO in the way we talked about just then. What we do say is creating content should be part of every single business. Regardless of what your strategy is. Creating content, having conversation creating fantastic value, serving as many people as you can through the value that you’re delivering through blog posts, through videos, through audios, through Web nars, through whatever form it takes, through software, put as much value out there as possible.
Now you’re going to put that content out there anyway. So why not put that content out there in the most leveraged optimized way possible? If you just put that content out on you own website and you don’t link to it and no one ever finds it, you’re not creating value for people. Value is created when people see the stuff that you’re putting out there.
When you’re putting out a video, using Traffic Geyser or something just to get it out to as many platforms as possible, when you’re putting out an article, looking how to syndicate that onto as many platforms as possible and using AMA with good quality content that you’ve written to get it out there as much as possible. Look at everything you do and make sure if you’re going to do the work once with a little bit of extra work you can receive a hundred times the reward particularly if you’re disciplined about doing it with every single piece of content that you put out there.
That’s personally how we use the stuff. We use our own content, leveraging things. One thing our product has been quite poor in the training of things. We’ve relied on third parties like Thirty Day Challenge and StomperNet and other people to create content around our product. We’re doing our own training and our own content to amp up the amount of content that we push out there. We’re putting in a very highly structured list to say if we do an article, we need to do this and this and just make that a part of every bit of content that goes out.
David Jenyns: Almost like a system there. I like it. One thing you mentioned, and I did hear Rich Chefron talk about it a long time ago, just by putting out good content, and by positioning yourself as the market leader, SEO happens naturally at that point. I feel like SEO really is the on ramp when you’re first starting out to get you to that critical mass. Once you get to critical mass you don’t need to focus on it so much especially if you’ve got that system in place. It’s something that just kind of happens I n the background.
You talked about providing good value products with real value to people, to the end user. You’re not just pushing out rubbish. I say this with a little bit tongue in cheek. As far as ranking, and we understand the importance of getting a variety of links to the website, but where do you see you get the biggest bang for your buck for the links you do get? If you had to pick just one, and we’re by no means advising anybody to do that, where do you see getting the best bang for your buck?
Eugene Ware: From links. Obviously apart from great content and just getting great organically linking stuff back, apart form that, I think just looking at AMAs and AWs. Had I known about these services earlier in my career, if I’d known some of these things existed, it would have been a different story. There’s some good bang for buck there. What I said earlier about getting links too easily, I think these services will decline in value over time but certainly make hay while the sun shines.
David Jenyns: Leading on from that, where do you see the biggest opportunity for getting rankings? You interpret that in any way you see fit. A big opportunity for rankings, is there any insight there?
Eugene Ware: Yes. There are a number of places. We all know that ranking in the long tail is really the ultimate. One of the things where the continual, new, fresh source of long tail keywords every single day is in new products that are being created. A lot of people are going to search for Samsung TV Model 1736, that kind of stuff. I know a lot of people are automating that kind of stuff, but there are still big opportunities in having a system that’s taking a lot of these new product names and just building content around them and links around them because there is such low competition.
If you can have a system which doesn’t require you or you can outsource that and leverage that up then if you go after a specific niche in the products that way then you can probably do very well.
The other area is just in localization. One of the massive opportunities, and you and I know about this being from Australia, is just targeting local markets whether at a country level or even a suburb or a state level. This is done by taking a lot of keywords that are proven money keywords and simply combining them with locality names and suburbs and that kind of stuff. It works particularly for things that people are more likely to search for that are specific to a location because maybe it is an offline business or service or something like that. I think there are massive opportunities there.
There are some changes in the search engines that I’ve seen where you can essentially type in a suburb or a postcode and say, show me the businesses or the results that are specific to that postcode. That is where SEO is going. The guys who are first to that market and start dominating there will have a really big advantage, so I think there will be opportunities in that market.
The other thing is SEO for video. Anyone who’s put out a YouTube video knows its essentially indexed the moment that it is published. Within minutes you will see it rank. There are a lot of big opportunities to SEO for video. The issue with video is that you are one step removed from a call to action. There are some changes to YouTube space to make it a lot easier for you to link off to your own web page over time and they will come through shortly. That will change the video SEO game as well quite a bit as well, so they’re the major ones.
David Jenyns: You’ve ticked some great ones there. To build on that local search as well, I know Frank Kern had that tool a while back and it was used more for your pay per click stuff where it added the keyword modifiers in. You’d put in your city state and they would just get plastered onto the front of whatever keyword you’re going after. Doing that in SEO I can see huge potential there, especially when you search on Google now and that little local map comes up. That’s more so for if you’ve got a real business with a locality.
I think there are some key easy at the moment what is low hanging fruit and a lot of opportunity there. Some of the ways to identify, we talked about this a few times, Market Samurai is a really powerful tool and I think the brains behind it, yourself, Guru Bob and all the insight that you’re getting from the Thirty Day Challenge team and now also with that StomperNet insight, I think we’re going to see some fantastic things in there. It’s really the one stop shop when it comes to keyword research. We mentioned the tracking function and the keyword research.
The good thing I like about the keyword research and the SEO competition is the analysis you can do on keywords that you’re going after to look for the factors that make for a website as to the ranking it’s getting: the age, the PR, how many back links it’s got, all that sort of stuff. It’s all very easily done within the Market Samurai. You guys are constantly putting any new functionality in there. I know you’ve got the AdWords module that’s coming. Are there any other sort of things that are coming down the pipe? You mentioned one of them a little earlier. Are there any other things coming down the pipe for the Market Samurai?
Eugene Ware: Yes we will be coming out with a link building solution shortly. We’re trying to solve what is quite a difficult SEO problem. We’re looking at how we can deliver the most value and make it acceptable for mere mortals because it is a bit of a nerdy thing to be doing really. The degree to which we can make it accessible for mere mortals to do and even professionals that just need to do it a lot faster.
One of the raw building blocks for successful SEO is keywords and when we launched that was the major feature of our product, keyword research and keyword analysis and doing the competition analysis we talked about before. And then content. To rank you need something to rank for. So the ability to find content or to write content is something that we’ve got some functionality to do.
You also need to find a way to make money depending on what your business model is. I’m not sure if you’ve had a look at the monetization module that we’ve released with Market Samurai, but that’s all about very quickly finding affiliate offers, so if you don’t have a product, with having a product and with a couple of quick clicks building up ads and then publish it straight to your blog.
The next logical thing we’re going to be looking at is link building. That’s a really critical factor. Fundamentally SEO boils down to that link building war at some stage. That makes it easy for people to do what they should do, what they know they should do, in a leveraged way with a couple of clicks and just build a whole bunch of links. They should do that for every piece of content on the website. That’s where we’re headed. There are some other things that I probably don’t want to talk about and that will be coming down the track. It’s essentially that we’re looking at the big problems. Most of the features that we built into our software, we’re just looking at what people are asking for and giving it to them and looking at why they are failing. We’re looking at giving them tools to help them in those areas where they’re not so strong.
David Jenyns: The biggest thing I see, and you see it with a lot of different tools especially with a lot of different functionality is the more tools you can add into something, you want to keep it as light as possible while being intuitive enough that you don’t get lost in it. At the moment I think Market Samurai has got that handled quite well. It’s quite logical and intuitive the way it goes down and I’m sure as you add in those different types of functionality you guys will hold onto that as well. I think that’s one of the things that sets Market Samurai above the pack as a keyword research tool, and the minds behind it are really quite sharp.
If people want to find out more about Market Samurai they can Google Market Samurai and it will obviously come up number one. Or you can head to the seomethod.com/samurai.
We all know about the importance of having your keyword in the domain name, and that’s an easy way to get some quick rankings, what’s the play behind something like Market Samurai. I think I have an idea why you’ve done it, but why did you go for something like Market Samurai as opposed to Keyword Research Tool or something?
Eugene Ware: Ok. There are two things there. One is why don’t we have the word keyword in there. We actually own Keyword Samurai and that will actually redirect through to marketsamurai.com. The vision we had of the software was, it’s hard, because when you start of with such a strong keyword tool you’ll always be remembered in the market as the keyword tool.
We don’t see ourselves as being a keyword tool. Keywords out there are free, we provide a level of analysis. In fact if you download Market Samurai today you actually get the keyword module free. It doesn’t expire. The other modules in the tool expire, but the keyword module which is why 90% people know us and is the most used module there, we actually give away free.
What we do see ourselves as being is a work flow tool. We want to be the internet marketing operating system if you want to call it that and you start from the keyword, and then you need to find some content and then you need to find a way to monetize that and then you need to publish some content, write some content and then you need to build some links and then you need to monitor your position in the search engine. So we see ourselves as a workflow tool that you open up every single day to actually get SEO done. That’s why we call ourselves Market Samurai.
When we have the AdWords functionality in there it’s going to be not just SEO, that’s why we used the name Market. The reason we called ourselves Samurai. Originally we wanted to use the word ninja. People talk about ninjas and that’s a real ninja tool and it’s where you get internet marketing space. I was coming up with a name for the business and the tool and I spoke to my wife and she’d just read about a famous samurai. They’re about discipline, about doing things ethically, integrity, they’re about honour, and it really encapsulated some of our views on business.
We’re not about getting rich quick, we’re about building long term sustainable wealth that will last. We’re about putting value out there. We’re about doing things different to, hopefully it’s seen to be different to some of the people in the internet marketing world who just want to make money.
So a bit of it is just what we’re about as a company and we want to create good quality stuff and really we do want to help people succeed. Google is a multi billion dollar business because they put out trillions of dollars of value. You’re a million dollar business because you put out tens of millions of dollars worth of value. So we’re trying to put a lot of value out there. With our tool, it is ridiculously cheap, people keep telling us that, but we really want people to have good experience and a high value proposition there because we want to work with our customers for the long term. That’s why the word Samurai.
David Jenyns: I think the way you explained all that and a lot of what we talked about tonight gives fantastic insight into the fact that you must have some really good mentors and some people that you follow. In the world of SEO who are the people you watch out for? You know SEO so what does the SEO guy look at when he wants to learn SEO?
Eugene Ware:To be honest a lot of the stuff we learn is stuff we try ourselves or from our peers. So I spend a lot of time on the phone Mark Lindsay and Guru Bob and people like that just because we hang out and we’re friends. So in terms of where the leading edge is coming from, they’ve either come up wit it themselves or read about it, so that’s the majority of stuff.
Aside from that, stuff I do follow quite religiously is obviously the Google Web Master stuff. I cannot believe how many myths and lies and old wives’ tales people are still talking about today when you can just read the Google Web Master blog, follow Matt Cutts, watch his videos. They tell you in black and white, this is the way it is and this is the way it isn’t. Getting it from the source I think is critical. Everyone needs to be listening to those people. If you’re not you’re going to hear it second hand, it’s going to be processed. It’s going to be people’s opinions about it. You need to go directly to the source.
Apart from that there are just a couple of email newsletters that I’ve randomly signed up with. One is called WebProNews which is quite good and SEOmoz is a good place as well. But for me really it’s people that are doing it and Gogle themselves. I would say they are the two key places and just what we learn from doing it.
David Jenyns: I think you’re definitely someone who people would want to watch out for as well. If someone wants to find out more about what you do, where can they? Obviously they can check out theseomethod.com/samurai or they can just Google Market Samurai. Are there any other ways that people can keep in touch with you, Twitter or a website?
Eugene Ware: Yes, my Twitter name is eugeneware all one word, and that’s one way you can keep tabs on what I’m up to. The blog that we’ve got is noblesamurai.com/blog my name might not be at the bottom of some of the blog but will certainly a lot of the content and ideas do come from me. That’s another good way to keep in touch with what we’re finding out.
David Jenyns: Well can’t thank you enough Eugene for your time. Much appreciated. I think you’ve provided some terrific value just in this one call here. You’re very free and giving with your time and it is much appreciated.
Eugene Ware: A pleasure to be here.
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