SEO Mentor

Jeff Quipp is an outstanding mind and friendly guy. In this interview he gives a bit on his background and some great tips and resources for all you SEO and Social Media junkies.

Garrett: Hello everyone, this is Garrett Pierson, Your SEO Mentor. I’m a little under the weather today, so excuse my voice. I’m going to interview Jeff Quipp of SearchEnginePeople.com. I’m so excited to interview him. I had the opportunity to meet Jeff back in Florida a couple of months ago. He’s just an outstanding guy, very friendly, and knows his stuff. How are you, Jeff?

Jeff: Great, thanks Garrett. Thanks for having me.

Garrett: Let’s get started. Tell us a little about yourself for people that might not know you. I know that’s very few, but some might not know you. Give us your background in the SEO and online marketing industries, your hobbies and anything else you want to talk about.

Jeff: As you said, I’m Jeff Quipp. I’m President and CEO of Search Engine People. We’re based out of Toronto. My background is actually pretty interesting in how I got into search in general. Essentially, after graduate school, I started working for the Yellow Pages here in Canada. In Canada, there is really only one Yellow Pages company, unlike the U.S. Of course, I got to experience different departments within the Yellow Pages group, had some really interesting experiences. Ultimately, I became in charge of yellowpages.ca at one point. Then, I migrated over to Sympatico-Lycos, which basically evolved out of the Yellow Pages group. Sympatico-Lycos was a content play essentially, but it was also the largest ISP in the country at the time.

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If you like SEO, Social Media, and PPC then you are going to love Brian Carter. This guy is not only really funny he is also a very smart guy. Take a listen or read below some great tips from Brian, also prepare to laugh.

Garrett: Hello everyone, Garrett Pierson here, Your SEO Mentor. Today I have the wonderful opportunity to interview Brian Carter of Fuelinteractive.com and Getmorefaster.com. How are you doing, Brian?

Brian: I’m good. How are you doing, Garrett?

Garrett: I’m doing great. I appreciate you taking some time out of your day to answer some questions about yourself and about your background in online marketing. Let’s just jump to the chase. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background in SEO online marketing, and maybe some things about your personal life like your family, hobbies, or anything else you want to talk about.

Brian: I used to be an acupuncturist. Then I started a site to explain acupuncture and Chinese medicine for people in regular language. That was Pulsemed.org. I spend about four years building articles on that and building an email database. I fully planned to become an acupuncturist.

Ultimately, I started getting a lot of traffic. I learned a little about SEO. I was running AdSense ads and I started making money on that. The next thing I knew, I figured out my own version of the KEI thing, which I felt was actually better than KEI and helped me choose the right key words to rank on. Some of them weren’t in Chinese medicine. I started going for all kinds of weird things like wedding favors and things like that. I started making four thousand dollars a month. I thought, “I think I found something.”
I hired twenty other writers to write all these key word articles. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I was kind of ’spammy’ at the time. I thought, “I’ll just turn my site into an article index.” I started writing all this stuff. There were a couple of months in a row where we brought in more than twenty thousand dollars in AdSense. I thought I was rich for the rest of my life. I was telling all my friends they should starting writing key word articles for Google. They thought I was crazy. I said, “No, this is a revolution! We’re going to make all this money!” All of a sudden, I lost all my rankings. Whether it was an algorithm change or Google decided my site was no longer an authority, or I was being a spammer. Now, when I look back at the instructions I gave to some of these writers, it does look like spam to me.

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In this post you will find a recap of the Scary SEO conference held October 24-25, 2008 with myself and Dana Lookadoo. Listen to the podcast above or read the transcript below!

Garrett: Hello everyone, it’ Garrett Pierson, Your SEO Mentor. I’m here with Dana Lookadoo. How are you?

Dana: Hi Garrett, I’m doing great. Thank you for having me. How are you doing?

Garrett: I’m great. Did I say your last name correctly?

Dana: You did. Lookadoo. I’m impressed. Very good.

Garrett: Dana, what we’re going to do today; I want to go back and forth with you on the awesome event that we just got back from recently, Scary SEO. I want to go back and forth on what we learned, the fun we had, and what everybody missed out on.

Dana: They really did miss out. It’s amazing that such a small conference could have such a large effect. It really did. I’m excited to talk about it.

Garrett: That’s great. All of you that missed out on Scary SEO, it just happened October 24th and 25th, in Ft. Lauderdale. Dave Snyder and Jordan Kasteler put that on from SearchandSocial.com. You can also find out a lot more about the event at ScarySEO.com.

Anyway, it just started out as a nice day, Friday. The fun thing about this conference was it was very small. There were fifty people invited to come. It was small and very personal. That’s what I really liked about this conference.

It started out with Jeff Quipp from Search Engine People. He started out with the opening keynote. He talked about where search came from, what search is, and the future of search. I loved Jeff Quipp’s keynote. It really started the conference off with a bang. It was very fun. Jeff is a smart guy and such a nice guy. I was able to talk with him quite a bit throughout the conference. That was what was so cool about this conference. In any other conference, I probably would never have had the opportunity to get with him unless I would have made a huge effort. I got to sit with him through lunch. I got to sit with him through the dinners and parties afterward and really speak with him and pick his brain about search and social media. That’s what was really fun about this conference.

I was also able to meet you, Dana. We’ve talked on Twitter and I’ve talked with a lot of people that were there, on Twitter, but it was fun to put a face with a name and business. Dana, what was your favorite part of the first day, and essentially the whole conference there in Florida?

Dana: Starting at the bird’s eye where you started. For instance, getting to meet Jeff and Loren Baker, Lisa Barone, Dave Snyder, Jordan Kasteler and Utah SEO Pro now has a face, a body, and a personality. You get to meet them in person, to talk, and to share. It really was one of the highlights of the conference. As you mentioned, going to SES or even an SMX, being at SMX Advance with a smaller venue, I thought that was great. Attending SEOmoz in August, which was even a smaller venue; I thought that was great. Now, attending Scary SEO, that’s the pinnacle. I can’t wait until April when they do their next one. I definitely want to be there because of the intimacy and the quality of what was shared.

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This week I took the guys over here at Global Marketing Strategies; Dave and Scott Brandley, and talked about their background in online marketing and some of their amazing tools. Not only did they give some great tips they also shared some interesting things going on with Trust Guard, their online website verification company. Take a listen above or read the transcript below.

Garrett: Hello everybody, this is Garrett Pierson here, Your SEO Mentor. I’m excited today to interview Dave and Scott Brandley of Global Marketing Strategies and Trust-Guard.com. I’m going to start off today with asking a question, so that those who don’t know the Brandleys can get a little bit of background on your SEO and online marketing industries, maybe your family, hobbies or anything else you want to talk about. Give us a little bit of your background, Dave.

Dave: Scott and I are father and son. We’ve been doing stuff online since 1997, back when the internet was a rumor. People were just starting to do things with it. We’ve kind of figured out how to make things work over time. It’s taken us a while. We built our own shopping cart. We sold products online, figured out how to get traffic in a small niche. We were getting about a million visitors a year to that small niche, which was pretty good. About four or five years ago, we sold that business. We realized that we had some skills that we had learned along the way about traffic and conversion. We love doing that kind of stuff. We’ve developed some tools that help people with their traffic and conversion. That’s kind of our hobby too. We love to come to work and do things like that.

Garrett: You guys work together, father and son. Scott, how has that been, working with your dad?

Scott: It’s been great. Sometimes we want to kill each other, but most of the time we’re like best friends. We work off of each other. We come up with good ideas and make our good ideas even better. It’s been a lot of fun.

Garrett: Why don’t you guys tell us a little bit, about why you guys enjoy it? Dave, you mentioned that it’s a hobby. Tell us a little bit, about why you guys enjoy online marketing, the industry, and your career these past ten or eleven years that you said you’ve been doing this?

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My interview this week was with the smart and interesting Ron Hudson. Be careful because his stories and advice will draw you in and you won’t be able to stop listening above or reading the transcript below. Ron gives amazing advice on how to be successful in this down economy that you can’t miss.

Garrett: Hello, everybody, this is Garrett Pierson here, ‘Your SEO Mentor’. I’m here today with Ron Hudson, of Howtoinfluencepeoplenow.com. How are you, Ron?

Ron: I’m great. Thanks for having me, Garrett. How are you?

Garrett: I’m good. I’ve had a wonderful day. I’m happy it’s the weekend. I’m going to relax with the family. I can’t complain.

I just want to give a quick overview of you, Ron. If I make any mistakes, you can correct those. Ron is the CEO of Success Strategies Research International, Inc. Ron is an author, radio talk show host, and he is trained in CMNLP. Ron, you’re going to have to tell us what that is, in a second here. He is a business growth strategist and strategic influence trainer and coach. He has had the privilege of training sales people at companies such as Coldwell Banker, Dean Witter, Goldmine Software Corporation, New York Life, Cellular One, Lexus, and many others.

Some of Ron’s specialties, again, are the NAC and NLP. Again, we’ll get into that in a little bit more detail, but marketing strategy optimization persuasion, joint ventures; the list goes on and on. This guy knows it all.

Ron: No, I don’t [laughs].

Garrett: You can also check his radio show at Blogtalkradio.com/immediateinfluence. Ron, I’ll make sure I have links to that on my blog post, at YourSEOMentor.com.

There are so many things about you, but why don’t you just tell us a little bit about yourself, for those that might not know you, your background in the training and coaching, marketing industries, your family, your hobbies, or anything. Just give it to us, Ron.

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Rhea Drysdale was willing to spend some time with me even during her busy week with her big announcement that you will hear or read about within the interview. Rhea has had a ton of experience in the SEO industry in such a short amount of time and is very willing to share some great tips about how to stay organized and where to go for great information. Thanks for your time Rhea!

Check out the interview by listening above or reading the transcript below.

Garrett: Hello everyone, this is Garrett Pierson here. Today I have the wonderful opportunity of interviewing Rhea Drysdale. How are you, Rhea?

Rhea: I’m very well, thank you. How are you doing?

Garrett: I’m doing great. It’s good to have you here. Today is Monday, September 22, 2008. I’m just going to give a ‘quick Rhea’ in twenty seconds that I found from her blog. I’ll give a little overview of who she is. She says, “I’ve worked with some of the best Ruby on Rails developers in the world, managed internet marketing for a Fortune 1000, and SEO for a top 200 internet retailer. I’ve also chaired a local non-profit, blogged at Search Engine Journal, and I love SEO.” Is that all true, Rhea?

Rhea: That certainly is. I’ve had a lot experiences in a very short period.

Garrett: That’s great. Everybody can check out more about Rhea at RheaDrysdale.com. I’ll have a link to that so you can check her “About Me” page at /blog/about. Rhea, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background? I know you have an announcement that you announced last Friday. Why don’t you tell us about your background in the SEO and online marketing industry, or anything about your family, your hobbies or anything else you want to talk about?

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