Pete Williams
Name: Pete Williams
Industry: Online Marketing
Website: www.preneurmarketing.com
Pete Williams’ Bio: Sure Pete Williams (www.preneurmarketing.com) is known in the internet marketing community as one one of the 30DC crew, but what you might not know is that he’s more than a one trick pony.
Pete’s got a long list of accomplishments under his belt including being the author of ‘How to Turn Your Million Dollar Idea Into A Reality’, JCI Creative Young Entrepreneur finalist, Cleo Bachelor of the Year finalist… and that’s just to name a few.
I first got to know Pete many, many moons ago, when I discover he too had the idea of selling the MCG (but that’s another story, for another day). Suffice to say, it’s true what they say “great minds think alike”…
I’ve come to know Pete quite well over the years and what I like most about him is the fact he’s out there, in the real world, applying excellent internet marketing skills to dominate a niche outside of the ‘how to make money/internet marketing’ niche.
Listen in as I grill Pete on how he drives traffic to his telco business. As always , it’s free to download, no optin required.
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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.
David Jenyns: Welcome to another call for theSEOmethod.com. I’m very excited today to be joined by Pete Williams. You may have heard of him. He’s another one of the guys behind selling the MCG and that’s how I first got to know Pete Williams. I’ve known him for many years now. He’s been a key player in the 30-Day Challenge.
He’s an author, speaker, Cleo Bachelor of the Year contender and entrepreneur. I suppose you’d say he’s a very successful business owner in his own right and I think that’s what I like most about Pete Williams. He’s successful outside the realm of internet marketing so he’s really applying what it is that he knows. I’d like to welcome you to the call, Pete.
Pete Williams: Thanks Dave, and much appreciated. It’s good to be here.
David Jenyns: Excellent. We’ll dive straight in. This call is all about driving traffic to your website through any means possible and also through SEO specifically. To start off, I know you do a lot of work with your separate business outside of the internet marketing realm, which is in the telco area. When you’re setting up that website, how do you go about driving traffic to that website?
Pete Williams: Sure. Well to put in context, my real world business or what I call my babysitting business is a telco company where we sell and install real world phone systems in offices around Australia. Most of our leads come from the web. So even though we’re a real world business with bricks and mortar offices in a couple of different states, we’re very much web- based in terms of the marketing side of things.
In terms of traffic, we’ve got two main sources of traffic, one’s pay per click and one is SEO. For the first couple of years, once we got the site up and running, we were very heavy with AdWords. We’re still a six figure spender a year on AdWords, very high six figures. We’ve actually found in the last couple of years that the SEO traffic we’re getting to our various sites in the network we have, far outweighs the pay per click traffic. So definitely SEO is our lead source these days.
We still find that AdWords is a strong player and primarily our main source when we’re trying to crack into a new market and get the traffic to the site and see what keywords are coming through and all the kind of stuff.
David Jenyns: With the pay per click, what sort of keywords are you targeting for how you get clients in?
Pete Williams: In my opinion, we’ve got two groups of keywords. We’ve got the actual specific product based stuff. To give an analogy to people, if we’re saying a shoe store, things like Nike shocks, or Nike structure, or the model type keywords if people are searching for particular products we sell. Then we’ve got the generic high level stuff, so running shoes, or Nike in general, very broad terms. That is the two buckets that I consider our traffic comes through.
David Jenyns: From a conversion point of view I know when you do pay per click, you obviously monitor a lot of conversions, what is the difference you see between those two types of keywords from a user and conversion perspective?
Pete Williams: It’s surprising actually. We’ve found in the telco niche in particular anyway, there is not a whole lot of difference in the conversion rates. My personal opinion is that I think people who are going through AdWords tend to be more buyers than SEO. This is unfortunately not backed up by some stats in front of me, but this is the gut feeling that I’ve always had and that I think plays out.
The market is getting wiser these days. Three or four years ago, people didn’t know the difference between the sponsored links and the natural listings on search engines like Google. So they just clicked anywhere they saw a relevant ad. People are getting more educated, they’re getting wiser to the way the whole search engine results page is laid out.
People who are looking for information go for the SEO natural links listings. They are familiar with how that algorithm works or is meant to work. People who want to buy stuff tend to go to the AdWords listings because they know they’re going to go to a store. No one generally does pay per click.
For information sites, you do pay per click because you know you’re going to make a return on your investment. That’s also my personal habit too. If I’m going to go on line and buy something, I tend to go to the pay per click listings. That’s what I seem to find in my experience is that is where the stores are, that’s where you’re going to get a better experience a lot of the time. That’s my quick take on the difference from a conversion perspective. Realistically, in the space we play it in the telco game standpoint, it’s pretty similar.
David Jenyns: When you were talking about the types of keywords you’re targeting, you talked about the longer tail stuff and also the broader type keywords. Have you seen much difference in conversion on those types of keywords?
Pete Williams: It’s an interesting scenario, because with the telco game anyway, it’s a lot more technical. So the long tail tends to be people who already know what they’re looking for, which can mean either they’re looking for support for their phone system, so it doesn’t actually convert from that perspective. At the same time, it’s often people who have already got a quote for what they’re looking for and they’re going to search that long tail again to try and find second quotes. So it’s a really mixed bag in that scenario, which is bizarre.
From our perspective, a lot of people are asking their secretary, please go and search for a telephone system for our office. They just go and look for all the short tail stuff because they don’t know the long tail. So it comes down to the market place you’re playing in.
That’s where a lot of people have to spend their time to actually understand their market place and really do the market research up front when they’re doing any sort of pay per click or SEO campaign or any sort of online campaign for that matter. Don’t just jump in and do keyword research for the first week and go, yes, I’ve done that. It’s a continual learning curve because as you grow you find out more about your market place which changes the way you play the game. It’s about continual research and continual market understanding so to speak.
David Jenyns: To flip over to the more specifically SEO, and you mentioned that’s really starting to take a strong foothold where you’re driving your traffic from, what is it that you’ve done, maybe start with on page optimization, with the way that you’re optimizing your telco site?
Pete Williams: If you don’t mind, I might take it in a slightly different direction, from a development perspective. The way we build the sites, and I build all my sites, is we take a slightly different approach. What we actually do when we build a site is the actual SEO is the second thing we think about. A lot of people I know who play in the SEO game, they tend to build their sites purely around SEO and they forget about conversions and make conversions a second phase of it.
I always take a slightly different approach and it’s a bit weird. I build the site for conversion and then ensure it works for SEO, not the other way around. So we always sit down and say, ok, we’re going to build a site about running shoes for example. I’ll jump on the web, have a look around some other competitors’ sites, see how they do their site, and come up with a structure for the site that I think would work from a user perspective, from a conversion perspective, and I guess from an ease of use perspective.
We’ll map out the site map without doing any SEO research, just what we think the site should look like for a user perspective and our competitor analysis perspective. Then what we’ll do is, we’ll put that aside and forget about that. We’ll then go off and do SEO research then and there. So we’ll work out what keywords are in the market place we’re playing in, where the long tail, is, where is the short tail, what keywords we want to target, where we think they’ve got some opportunities.
Then we’ll come back and try to match that bucket of keywords we’ve just pulled together to the site matrix or the site map. We’ll say, this keyword here will target this page over here on the site map. What we end up with is a bunch of keywords we don’t currently have pages for in our existing site map. It’s only then we go and create pages for those particular keywords. So it’s a slightly different way. I know a lot of people go out about all the keywords and try and stuff all the main keywords into a navigation structure that screws up usability.
David Jenyns: With some of those pages, even some of the core ones, when you first structure the site from a usability point of view, do you have a basic way that you’ll still do your basic SEO? You’re still doing your title tags, your descriptions?
Pete Williams: Oh, yes, absolutely. So when it comes to putting the site together, absolutely, there’s the title tag, the meta description. My belief with the meta description is, it’s all about getting the click. The weight that meta description has through the actual ranking you get I think is pretty negligible these days. It’s all about the way you play the game, to ensure you actually get the click. There are plenty of other factors that ensure we rank highly in the results page.
Once you’re already ranking, it’s the meta description that will get you the click. It’s all about conversion. So many people forget that the thing about conversion from an on page perspective is, once you get traffic to your site, you’ve got to get them to hit the buy button or the contact us button or whatever you’re trying to achieve on your site. Forget about conversion from a results page perspective. That’s such an important factor that so many people think about that yes, being number one is going to get you more traffic than being number two on the results page and more traffic than number three and so on.
Testing we’ve found is that if you have a very good meta description that actually displays, you still can out traffic the first result.
David Jenyns: So you do a little bit of on page stuff and let’s say you are deciding here are some keywords that I do want to go after and this is after you’ve already set up the site for usability and so on, and you say, these are some keywords that I want to do. What are some of the other things you do from an on page point of view?
Pete Williams: It comes down, to from my point of view, SEO is not that hard. Once you know the basic structure which obviously you guys are covering in the method, there’s not a whole lot to it. So as long as you get your page title right, you want to have your keyword in your meta description, it does give it some weight. Make sure you’re writing it more to get the click through. Obviously H1 tag is an important thing that we’ve found works really well by putting your keyword in, or a couple of keywords in the headline. Then just making sure the body copy is there.
One thing that we’ve found is that when it comes to the body copy, we’ve found you want to make sure you’ve got more words on the page that are unique than aren’t unique. From that perspective what I’m trying to say is if you’ve got a website with a skeleton, so you’ve got the entire website with the navigation and the standard footer and all that kind of stuff, if you work out how many word that takes up, make sure the unique content on that page about the Nike sneaker actually outweighs the general structure of the site.
That way Google will say, this is definitely a unique site, it is not a slightly modified version of another page. Does that make sense?
David Jenyns: Yes, for sure. Especially we find with some of the e commerce stuff that we do, even from unique content, obviously a lot of the words throughout the page are going to be similar just because of your navigation and that sort of thing. If you’ve only got one or two sentences for the product description, you’re not really adding much uniqueness to that page.
Pete Williams: Also just being smart with your internal links. That’s sort of on page/off page too. On site, within your own site, make sure that you’re linking correctly with the right anchor text throughout the content and make sure that those internal links are actually in the content themselves, not just in the footer and the navigation. Google’s algorithms and spiders are getting smarter and smarter.
Matt Cutts, a spokesman from Google made a comment about this recently. You want to make sure that the actual anchor text links are in your content, because Google gives more weight to that than in your basic footer. So you want to make sure that you are doing anchor text the way Google wants you to do it.
David Jenyns: A lot of this stuff is all about doing what happens naturally and a lot of times just stuffing keyword anchor links down the bottom of your page really is what an SEO person does, as opposed to what happens naturally.
Pete Williams: Exactly. One of the things I try to hit home to my internal guys because we’ve got a decent sized team in the office that does all our online marketing stuff, also some of the stuff I tried to hammer home in the 30-Day Challenge this year, is really ask yourself the question, what would Google do, or what does Google want? To answer that question, it is trying to obviously serve the best results or the most relevant results to the user.
You have to think, what am I doing here, to help Google achieve that goal? If you do that, they’re going to support you and reward you. You don’t want to do anything spammy. You want to do stuff that is natural, you want to do stuff that is going to give the user a better experience when they come to your page, so that Google will reward that and help get more people to that page by giving you a higher ranking.
David Jenyns: Some solid advice there. From an off page point of view, I suppose how do we give Google what it likes on an off page point of view, naturally occurring How do you do your off page optimization?
Pete Williams: I guess it comes down to a few different things. We’ve actually got a decent network of sites because of the size of our telco company. We are one of the larger hardware resellers in Australia. We have a network of sites based around the various business units we have. So we can have quite a natural authentic network of sites which is handy.
I don’t really suggest people go out there and create their own domain farms of different sites necessarily to game Google. Make sure you do it all authentically and legitimately.
Really getting the most out of Google webmaster tools has been something that we’ve done a lot of. Everything from making sure you’re on the Google Maps listings and obviously you’re registered with Google Webmaster to actually get your site indexed with that, xml feeds through the Google Webmaster tools being very powerful. It’s actually just working with Google the way they want you to work.
It’s an obvious thing, but in my experience, it’s very highly overlooked. So many people set a website and all this online page SEO and off page SEO stuff but don’t actually go to the people they want to be ranked with and do what they suggest first and foremost which is register for the Google Webmaster program and submit your site. It’s such an obvious thing that is overlooked.
So many things in business and marketing and obviously that incorporates SEO, it’s the obvious and easy stuff which people don’t think will work so they don’t do it, so they try and jump straight to the more complex stuff. They say, oh if I get one link that’s on a page ranked five blog back to my site, it’s going to far outweigh putting a title tag on every single page. That’s absolute rubbish. So really start from the foundation and work your way up.
To answer your question, everything from trying to get a natural network of your own sites is legitimate. Article marketing – so submitting articles to relevant places that can actually help your industry as well. So not only are you getting back links in journals or on line blogs but you are actually becoming a market leader. There are obviously plenty of servers out there where you can submit to, article marketing networks and so on which have quite a bit of power.
Look at some other industry journals or industry weblogs or industry article networks. Approach them and say, I actually own a website about x, y, z. I have a running shoe website, for example, mrrunningworld.com. Can I write an article about the latest Nike running shoes that are coming out, or can I write an article about some tips that will help your readers as well?
Offer genuine content to other webmasters so you’re getting quality of links no one else can really get unless you actually have a relationship. You’re getting good quality links, you’re getting market leadership awareness, or general off page pr which I’m a big believer in to. I think doing some creative things like that can be powerful.
David Jenyns: With some of the stuff you’ve done to build up the telco site, the network of sites definitely sound like a key part of the strategy. Do you also do, you mentioned the article marketing and creating the content and also going out and having your articles published on other authority sites, is that the main stuff that you guys do for off page stuff? Is that where you focus your time at the telco?
Pete Williams: Yes, the whole social book marking stuff. Whenever you put a new post up or a new web page up on your site make sure you go out and social book mark that a few times to make sure the engines and the spiders find you. It’s a very low level thing to do but it is a good way to get indexed quickly. As you grow, make sure you’re putting out good content about all those topics and getting back links deep into your site.
David Jenyns: I love the idea that you’re touching on doing good, solid, white hat stuff that isn’t going to get you banned, and you’re building a business for the long term, not one of these sites that you put up just to crash and burn three months down the track.
Pete Williams: It comes back to what I said earlier. When we started off, I won’t say we ignored SEO. We spent most of our time and effort driving traffic through pay per click because that was getting the quickest return on investment. So we grew the business off the back of that. While that was happening, we were continually just slowly building SEO. So over time now we’ve got a very solid basis that’s going to be hard to knock off in my opinion.
It hasn’t been any black hat, grey hat trying to game the system. It’s all been very natural, long term links, sites that have been up for years. The content doesn’t change, but new content has been added to the site. So it’s a naturally evolving thing. Obviously Google is getting smarter and smarter and is rewarding people who are doing normal, natural things.
David Jenyns: The good thing about combining pay per click with SEO as well, if you’re monitoring conversions, you get to see what pages are converting when people are landing. Then you can start to optimize for those. Sometimes people do it a little bit the wrong way around and optimize for everything and they get ranked for a keyword that really isn’t worth anything for them.
Pete Williams: I think AdWords is a great tool to use to build up your keyword list, see what keywords are coming, see what long tail stuff is out there and getting a feel for your marketplace. So I really believe anyone who’s building a website should at least do pay per click for at least a couple of months to get a quick solid bang for traffic. You can get some good solid results. You can’t manage anything you don’t measure, and it can take a while to measure some stuff if all you’re doing is SEO.
David Jenyns: With some of those things we talked about, both on page and off page, and some of the different factors, I know that it’s a combination of everything adding up together, but what would you say is the single biggest ranking factor of all of those things?
Pete Williams: I think it’s probably something a lot of people don’t want to hear. That’s just time, in terms of, it isn’t just going to happen overnight. But once it happens, and you’ve got a good solid foundation, it is really a foundation that you can grow a lot of things off, not just your web traffic.
I think it’s about putting in the effort, or even outsourcing the effort. You don’t have to do this all yourself. As long as you know what’s going on, you can outsource it to an SEO company. You can keep them in check by actually asking them what they’re doing, making sure they’re doing the right thing and not gaming you. There are so many SEO companies out there that don’t have a clue. So it’s good to be educated. You can actually engage you own outsource team, whether it be in the Philippines or India or Croatia or elsewhere and get them to do that for you.
So you don’t have to invest your own time, it’s the education that comes with it that really gives you the power. I think it’s just actually doing the basics, getting the basics right before you try and do all the fancy potentially grey hat SEO stuff. You might get a quick spike in traffic but it isn’t going to stick around. Make sure you get your page titles, makes sure you get your meta descriptions, make sure you’ve got H1 tags and content on your site and do good anchor links internally through your site. Worry about your internal world first. Get that right. Submit your internal world to the almighty Google. Make sure they’re aware of how you’re looking after your internal world and then look outside for other bits and pieces. That’s the Pete Williams’ three-step approach.
David Jenyns: When you do start to look for links outside of your own internal site, you touched on a few of those different ones, you mentioned the network and the Article Marketing and also maybe even getting some articles published on some authority sites. For natural SEO to happen, you want a variety of links, but if you had to choose one of them, where do you see the best bang for your buck?
Pete Williams: I think bang for buck, it’s Ezine Articles. It’s quite easy to get an article in ezinearticles.com. I think if you’re looking at it from a holistic business approach, I think it’s about getting articles with your name on it in other relevant websites, whether it is in a guest blog post on someone else’s blog, or whether it is an article in an industry based e magazine style website or something like that. You’re getting a very contextual back link, in that the link’s content is in some context. It’s not just a random link on the footer of a massage website where you’re trying to say Nike running shoes.
It’s an anchor link in the middle of good content that’s in the right context. You’re also getting that exposure as market leader and opinion maker. So you’re getting three bangs for that one buck. It’s a bit more effort to do it, but you’re getting more birds with one stone, so to speak.
David Jenyns: You did talk a bit about the outsourcing side of things. When outsourcing, I know one thing is always hard is getting someone with a good command of the English language, we were talking about this a little bit earlier. What sort of tasks do you outsource? I know you’ve got a full team, so that’s another thing, so for the telco stuff you’ve got guys ready to help and do what needs to be done.
Pete Williams: It comes down to the low level stuff so to speak. If you want to do Ezine Articles or Squidoo Lenses or HubPage articles, which again which are low lying fruit and low level sort of stuff, you can easily outsource that kind of stuff. That is going to get you a contextual back link but it’s not going to get you traffic.
There are two levels of off page SEO in my opinion. There is off page SEO that is designed just to get a link which is hopefully going to give you more weight. That is Squidoo and even Ezine Articles. But then there is obviously the off page link that’s going to give you traffic. That’s where I try and keep that more in house. This is like the blog posts I’m talking about and things like that. When it is not traffic worthy, like Ezine Articles or Squidoo, you can easily outsource that sort of stuff.
But even outsource the networking, in terms of , say to your outsourcer, I want to write articles on blogs. I want to do guest post on blogs about Nike running shoes. Here’s a template email. Go out and send it to people. It shouldn’t be the typical template, Hi, I went and visited your website. I like it and I want to link to you. Can you link back to me?
It’s actually, Hi, I’m writing on behalf of Pete Williams. He writes about a, b and c. I’m a big fan of your blog. I think he would be great to submit an article to. If you’re interested I can put it on his to do list to write an article as a guest post for you if you’re interested. Cheers. Whatever the template may be, you can get them to do that low level networking side of stuff for you. You obviously have to write the article, but they can actually set up the relationship to a certain extent.
David Jenyns: I liked the way you positioned that as far as emailing someone outside of the way they’d normally be emailed. It’s not like one of those standard, hey, can you link back to me, I’ve linked to you, and then insert link here. We do a lot of that stuff when contacting someone, all you have to do is think in terms of, from where you’re sitting, what sort of email would you respond to?
I delete, and my team deletes those emails every day of the week. It’s when someone approaches you with that unique way, they’ve taken the care to notice who you are, what you’re about and how they can help you, as opposed to, hey, give me a link.
Pete Williams: Exactly. It’s about offering something of value. Yes, people can argue a reciprocal link has some value, so you are offering value. But by saying, I actually want to write an article for your readers because I think I can offer something your readers would like, which means your readers will like you more because you’re offering them more material about a topic they’re interested in, it’s value. So you can really leverage that, moving on for other sort of JV stuff in the future, if you’re in that game. So I think it’s really important to think about it at a higher level than just simply SEO.
David Jenyns: Yes. When talking about rankings and that sort of thing where do you see the easiest opportunity for rankings at the moment? Is there are particular way of getting rankings or a particular type of keyword? Where are you seeing that low hanging fruit?
Pete Williams: The method I’m going to talk about is basically the method that’s taught in the 30-Day Challenge. You mentioned at the start that I’m quite involved with that. We talk about a matrix, the amount of competitors you need to have, the amount of traffic it should have, using tools like Market Samurai, which I think is a fantastic tool for SEO which can help you do some wonderful keyword research.
Something a lot people don’t know about Market Samurai is that even if you sign up for the trial version of Market Samurai, once that trial expires, the keyword research module is always open. It is amazing that it is something they don’t actually promote themselves, which I find completely bizarre. I think it is a wonderful tool for keyword research and a wonderful tool for internet marketing in general. If you don’t even buy it, just grab the free version for the keyword research module because there is nothing like it out there.
I think using things like WordPress to set up blogs, Google seems to be loving the WordPress structure these days. WordPress blogs are a great tool to help you get quick ranking. I think it’s just about finding a keyword with low competition, generally long tail, putting up a blog, getting some quick back links to it, feeding it to the webmaster, Google feature or function and just going from there. It’s hard to give a general answer to that question.
David Jenyns: You hit a couple of good ones. WordPress is something that has been echoed throughout these calls. There’s a hot tip for anyone listening.
Pete Williams: Concerning the WordPress thing, and this is just in my opinion. No research is behind this, this is a warning. I don’t think it is the WordPress itself that’s making it work. The beautiful thing about WordPress is that it’s very clean, in that it keeps the style sheet which is the design of the site and all the code that makes the design of the site, away from the content that actually is the website itself. I think it’s fundamentally that which makes it so easy to get ranked.
Most web developers, when they design a site, they put all this rubbish code around the content, that Google finds it hard to find the words that the page is actually about. With WordPress it keeps it very separate and very clean. I think the reason WordPress is going so well is because it is such an easy tool to use to get a site up that is clean.
David Jenyns: A lot of it also has to do with the way it does its internal structuring with setting up the links and the keywords and the way it all links. You’ve got separate categories and it splices together, especially if you’re using little summaries for your articles, you’ll splice that all together and it’s just creating these mountains of pages out of one post. You can tag it in multiple different categories and then you’re not going to tag each post the same under every category so the category pages themselves become unique.
I agree. It’s not necessarily Google is smiling upon wordpress.org, it’s the way it’s fundamentally built.
I want to shift gears slightly and find out, especially in the 30-Day Challenge, you’ve worked with many people. This year over 75,000 people went through the 30-Day Challenge. So you’ve worked with a lot of new people. What’s one of the biggest errors internet marketers make?
Pete Williams: I think it’s what I was touching on earlier, is the market research sort of stuff. They don’t do enough of it up front. They say, I’m interested in cross stitch. I’m going to go and sell information in the cross stitch niche. They don’t do enough market research. Are there competitors out there, are there even people searching for the product, are the people who are actually searching wanting to buy stuff? So they tend to rush in and don’t do enough upfront research.
They don’t do enough continual research to understand the market. As the market grows, or as you grow in your business, the way you understand the marketplace and the consumer and even the keywords change too, continually. So you don’t do research to find new keywords necessarily, although you want to do that, but also how the marketplace is currently operating. Has it changed in what people are looking for, is there a different way you can be selling the stuff? Finally, internet marketers, once they have a business operational, they don’t think that it’s a business. They think it’s an internet based online business. I use the word business, but they don’t think of it as, hey, I’m selling information to x, y,z niche. It’s ,I’m selling x,y,z on the internet.
A lot of people don’t think there are people off line that are interested in their content. I might have a website talking about my fishing tips, for example. How many fishing magazines are out there? How many people have no idea how the internet works because they’re late fifties or sixties or even in their twenties to be honest, and they just use Facebook only, who are interested in that topic and you could still be marketed to?
Remember that you’re an information marketer, not an internet marketer. It’s something I hate. People say, I’m an internet marketer. No you’re not, you’re a marketer who sells x,y, a, could be information, whose primary source of leads is the internet. You’re still a marketer. Realize a lot of your market could be off line and you can just demolish a market if you take it off line these days, because no one does. Everyone’s too scared to spend 35c or 50c on a postage stamp.
So if you actually go off line and do what used to work, it’s going to kill these days, because no one gets mail anymore. No one gets a fax, no one gets hard written mail anymore, it’s all email and half of it is spam so they take it with a big grain of salt.
Not only can you get more sales if you go off line, but if you go off line and match that to drive traffic on line, people aren’t going to be exposed to auto responders, they’re not going to know what an auto responder is. So when you actually have a sign up form on your website, or an online video, they’ll say, what’s this? Off line, they’ll be more open.
So if you’ve got articles published in an online magazine because you’re writing in journals to become a market leader, take that to your website, and say, as featured in, or a regular columnist in Fisherman Monthly or whatever it might be. It’s going to give you more credibility and increase your conversions. That’s the big soapbox I’ve been trying to scream from for the last six to nine months, if you’re on line marketing, you’re still a marketer in general, so go off line. Look at going analogue.
David Jenyns: Yes, and having seen a lot of stuff you do, and I know you’re a big believer in the press release as well, that’s all about going off line. I know you can do press releases on line. But getting in touch with main stream media, maybe you can talk a little bit to that as well.
Pete Williams: Yes, absolutely. I guess it comes down to two things really, why you actually want to do this. You want to look at going off line and actually getting PR for yourself based around your particular niche or your on line business,, to actually get new traffic to your site. We spoke before about people who are going to read the daily newspaper or subscribe to the particular journal in your niche. Pretty much any niche on line is going to have an off line magazine or journal or some form of off line media that you can tap into.
So that’s going to get you new traffic, it’s gets you unbiased traffic and I’ll say uneducated traffic. I’m not saying that to slight the people, but when they go online for the first time, if all they’ve experienced is hotmail and Facebook, to get an auto responder email, it’s going to blow their mind. So their conversion rate is going to be a lot higher.
You’ve also got that credibility of going off line. So many people online are skeptical thinking, am I getting scammed, is this e book only going to be two pages long, what’s this e book going to be like, is it going to be valuable, is this guy going to take my money and disappear? But if you can go on there and say, I’ve actually written articles for a,b,c magazine or I’ve been featured in The New York Times newspaper talking about my passion, it gives you credibility.
A person on your website, is going to say, if The New York Times is willing to put their name behind this person, this guy must be legit, he must be honest, he must have value, he must be offering something of good value, so it’s going to help increase that conversion rate ten times. So I’m a big believer in all that, and it’s good for the ego to be featured in a local newspaper. You can show your Mum, she can cut it out and put it on the fridge no matter how old she is. So it’s good for that as well.
David Jenyns: I think there are some real take aways there, and especially the biggest point that I got out of what you were talking about, is the idea of treating your online marketing as a business. You just need to approach it like a business, not some little hobby that you’re just doing to fill your evenings up with.
We were talking about where new internet marketers go wrong. Once they do start to get it right, like where you’re at right now, where have you seen some of the biggest gains that you’ve made in your internet marketing career? What are some of the key steps that you can look back now on and say, when I started to do that, that’s when I started to see huge growth?
Pete Williams: There are a couple of things. It’s going to seem an obvious thing to a lot of people: having a product to sell. A lot of people go online and they start an online business. I know I did that quite a bit previously. I went in and I’d start a blog about a particular niche, children’s sleeping bags or whatever it might be and do affiliate marketing here and there. I’d say, yes, I’m making a couple of dollars here and there but no big money.
You can’t make big money unless you’ve actually got a product to sell. Making money as a pure affiliate 100% of the time is hard work. So I think actually taking the step to producing your own product, no matter what space you’re in, is a big thing. Actually having something that allows you to make a purchase is good.
So many people buy courses and do programs and learn all this stuff and do a half hearted effort of actually implementing it. If you sit back and take a breath and say well how many places now can people actually give you money? If you have one blog online which has one affiliate link in it, do you really expect to replace your current income with one affiliate link on one blog post? Stop kidding yourself. Take a step back and say, look I’m not really selling what I think I’m selling, or I don’t actually have anything to sell. You can’t get paid if you don’t have anything to sell.
If you’ve taken those two steps, you’ve got something to sell and it’s going quite well, making relationships is important. Don’t forget it is a business, and in the real world, a lot of business growth comes from networks and competitors and suppliers. It’s about becoming a player in your market space. If you are an affiliate of a particular person, turn around to them and say, can I spend half an hour with you on the phone on Skype and record a conversation I can use to market?
Why would they say no? You’re trying to push their product for them. Of course they’re going to offer their time to help you out because you’re making money for them, you’re making sales for them, without them having to do anything. So half an hour of their time is a no-brainer. So it’s about making the effort to make relationships with people out there.
David Jenyns: I suppose coming down to the tail end of this call, when it comes down to SEO and even IM in general, who are some of the people you watch in the world of IM?
Pete Williams: Sure. Ed Dale is a good friend of mine, a business partner of mine. I’ve a got a few projects going on at the moment, a new book coming out next year, so I’ll give a plug for that right now. It’s currently titled It’s Not About the Product. It’s basically the principles and foundation and the context and the thinking behind what we teach in the 30-Day Challenge. With the 30-Day Challenge, the only thing we have time to do is teach the steps with a little bit of context.
The book is more about the context behind a successful internet business. Ed and the team in the labs, and Dan Raine, Rob are big support for me because I get to pinch their ideas and pick their brain, and obviously they get to share a lot online. Even general blogs out there: SEOMoz is a great blog to read, Matt Cutts’ blog. He’s the Google guy who gives out all the information. I find Twitter good, because everyone retwitters everyone’s articles and stuff like that.
It’s not really following a person, it’s about following a trend or a topic. So I just follow three or four influential people in the SEO space on Twitter and not even just the SEO space. If something good comes up, someone’s going to talk about it. So if you follow enough people, without making it too noisy, you’re going to find the good stuff because you’re going to find it spoken about by a couple of different people.
Obviously the Market Samurai boys as well, Brant, Eugene, I’ve known for about ten years in a previous life funnily enough. Those guys are some of the smartest guys going around.
David Jenyns: I’d say you’d be one of the smartest ones around as well. If people want to find out more about yourself and what it is that you’re doing, where can they find more out about Pete Williams?
Pete Williams: Probably the best bet is my blog which is preneurmarketing.com. The blog’s up there. I post on it as much as I can and hopefully over the next couple of months I’m going to have a lot more content coming in. That’s the best place. Throw in your RSS feeder, and I’ll hit you with anything that comes up.
David Jenyns: We’ll end it there. I want to thank you very much for your time. I know you’re extremely busy. It’s always a pleasure when we can jump on the line.
Pete Williams: Anything to help you out mate.
David Jenyns: Thanks.
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