Brian Carter Interview

Published by Your SEO Mentor under Monday Interviews, SEO, Your SEO Mentor Podcasts

Nov
03
2008

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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.

That went away. I had to get a job. I got a job doing Pay-Per-Click and SEO for a health website. I decided I didn’t like being an acupuncturist because you had to care about other people’s health. You had to be a real nurse kind of person. I was really scientific. I actually ended up helping more when I got into Pay-Per-Click and SEO. I wanted to run tests. In acupuncture, I wanted to figure out what was working, and why. People just wanted me to be nice. They wanted to feel better. That was kind of secondary for me. [laughs]

I had another job where I did ecommerce for a while for an outdoor store. They were really behind the times. They should have started an ecommerce site about five years before. It ultimately didn’t work out. They had no idea what they were getting into. They didn’t have enough of a separate inventory to handle it.

I moved onto my current job, which was basically to build an internet department for a company that had a ten or fifteen year background in Web design and development in the travel industry. They created their own software application for booking hotel rooms, golf tee times, and all this stuff. I started building out their SEO process for clients, Pay-Per-Click and so on, and then bringing in other guys to train. I moved into social media as well.

Garrett: Is that Fuelinteractive.com?

Brian: Yeah, that’s Fuelinteractive.com. The cool thing is; this last year I’ve had to live on the other side of the country from my wife to take this job. It seemed like a really good opportunity. The guys I’m working with are really smart people. They make good decisions, which just blows my mind because most companies I’ve worked at have had a lot of corporate stuff to put up with. That’s been good. I’ve been able to speak at conferences, blog, and become what I think is one of the new waves of the future for social media, which is to be sort of a brand spokesperson, a Web 2.0 brand spokesperson.

Garrett: Where do you live, now?

Brian: I live in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Garrett: You said your wife, so do you live there with your wife? Do you have any kids?

Brian: My wife still lives in San Diego. We have a house there. We live bi-coastally. That’s why I said, coming back from Florida, it was a five-hour flight. If I have to fly out to San Diego to see her, that’s an eight or nine hour day traveling.

Garrett: That’s a very interesting background. It’s very interesting how you got where you are, from acupuncture. You’re a comedian also, right? You do a little comedy?

Brian: I have done standup comedy since early 2007. I started doing that. I kind of lucked into a really cool situation with a bunch of guys who were doing sort of a comedy co-op kind of thing. Usually, comedians don’t cooperate with each other very well. They’re very rebellious people. I got to work with some. We did some training together. I got to do a lot of stage time that usually a new person doesn’t get to do. That was very cool.

Garrett: Do you have a search related joke for us today?

Brian: We have a client at Fuel, that I can’t remember if they were a Web client, and we were trying to get them to be an SEO client or something like that. My CEO was talking to them on the phone. He said, “Just go to Google, and type in ‘blah, blah’ key word.” They said, “Google, which one is that, is that MSN?”

Garrett: That’s a good one.

Brian: He used to have a guy that worked for him that he ultimately conspired to get fired because he was just killing business. They drove four hours to try and get this account from a company, this pretty savvy company. My current boss spent a couple of hours convincing them they were the right company to do it. Near the end of the sales call, this guy that used to work for this company said, “Oh, they have this really cool thing they can do now. They can put a link on your site that goes to an entire other Web page.” This is around two years ago.

Garrett: That’s funny. Thanks for telling us about your background. Let’s get into some of the main questions. What is it you really enjoy about the online marketing industry, SEO, and social media that’s up and coming, and really, your career? What do you enjoy about all this?

Brian: I tell people I’m an optimizer. I’ll optimize anything. I tried to optimize my wife. It didn’t work. She told me to stop. [laughs] What I like about this stuff is I have some verbal skills. I have some math skills. I’m a perfectionist. You can do all those things, use the words, use math to measure semantics. You can measure your progress. In short, you can turn all the SEO and Pay-Per-Click into a laboratory. You can test things. You can keep track of what works and what doesn’t. You can quantify it. It’s endlessly fascinating to me.

There are some social scientists like Dan Zarrella, and other people. All they really do is look at the science of this stuff. From my perspective, I just like getting people results. When people buy these services, like SEO and Pay-Per-Click, I’m not really a sales type of guy. I have never thought of myself as a sales person. If people spend money, I want them to spend it wisely. I just love this stuff.

We use Omniture for our analytics. We’re able to track what’s working and what’s not. I just love getting into that.

Garrett: That’s good. It’s interesting that you like that. To me, that’s one of the most important pieces of anything we do with online marketing – being able to test it and make sure it’s working. That’s great that you really enjoy that.

Brian: The way I see it, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Claude Hopkins, the father of scientific marketing. He’s the first guy with direct marketing to measure percentage of returns of coupons and things like that. Now, everything is trackable and measurable. Even though it’s not perfect, and analytics are not perfect, right now marketing is in the midst of a complete revolution. Stuff is being held accountable now in a way it never could be before.

Garrett: That’s true. With that in mind, let’s say there’s a newbie coming into the online marketing and SEO or social media scenes. If you could give them one tip, or more than one tip, what would that be?

Brian: Learn. Read. Read everything. Test things out. I have guys now I’m training. I hate to have to tell them step-by-step what to do. Ultimately, everybody works differently. Everybody has different strengths. You’ll have to find your own way, as long as you’re producing results. In the beginning, some of the stuff is so complicated. I’ve had to create – we have a thirty-five step process for our SEO program. I’ve written pages of different ways, things to look at, and Pay-Per-Click, to optimize that.

I was telling them today, they should probably get their own “.com,” install WordPress on it, mess around, and learn how to do how to do their own HTTAccess files and things like that. I have dozens of blogs and sites. Until you’ve done enough of it, you just won’t get it.

Garrett: I think that’s one of the best tips I’ve heard. Not only do you learn it, but you take action and do something about it. Unless you do it, you’re not going to learn it in this industry. You have to understand by doing it. That is a huge tip for everybody listening.

In your opinion, what’s the most exciting trend in our industry, SEO, search engine marketing and social media? What’s the most exciting trend in your eyes, today?

Brian: I guess I don’t know whether to call it a trend. The thing I’m most excited about is Twitter. It’s almost a cliché to be excited about that right now, but I can’t believe it. I can’t believe the speed that stuff happens on Twitter, the connections we make. For example, we’re working on a New Year’s Eve PR thing with some mom bloggers that are associated with part of a Wal-Mart Eleven Mom’s thing. They have relationships with Ford, and so on. We’re kind of a small regional agency, trying to grow into a national one. The fact that we’re able to make a connection with somebody on Twitter, that could turn into a big social media event, with a lot of influential people, from important companies, it’s just huge.

Earlier today, I was able to speak on a podcast about social media for legal marketers. I would never have gotten into that if I hadn’t spoken at a conference I was able to speak at because of Twitter. The speed at which – everybody knows life has been speeding up and all that. Technologies have been speeding up. Now, it’s actually accelerating human networking and it just blows my mind.

Garrett: With that in mind, with Twitter and social media, how do you see the Web changing because of this in the next year or two?

Brian: I already see a lot of the top websites are 2.0 websites. People are very social. They naturally like news and things that change. They like interacting with people. It’s clear, from the 2.0 stuff that people like being seen and being able to express themselves. We already know that the way information is distributed through more and more channels. We used to be just three T.V. stations. Now, it’s cable, website, and 2.0 sites. It just seems like niches are becoming more self-sustaining. I don’t know. I’m not sure if I can really predict. I would think we would probably see people moving into more 3.0 sites as they get into more than one 2.0-type site. I don’t know if it will be FriendFeed or Facebook, which is in some ways a 3.0 site now. That’s about as far as I can see.

Garrett: With that in mind, they always say, “Content is king”. We hear that a lot. I think that’s going to be a big thing. Anybody can get on the sites very easily and put whatever they want up. I think great content is what’s going to make marketers and businesses successful in this. Why don’t you just give us a tip or two about writing great content, whether it’s for your SEO campaign or your social media campaign?

Brian: Going back to statistics a little bit, a lot of people talk about looking at what titles get the most Digg’s. It doesn’t have to be Digg because obviously Digg’s demographics are a little bit younger and goofier. You might want to write something for a business audience. There are ways to get stats to see what actually makes people click or makes people vote positively. You don’t even have to change your message.

To me, I think it becomes an art to be able to guess what people are going to be interested in. It’s a matter of trying to get them interested, stimulated, and get across the message you want to get across. Content in itself, no matter how valuable it is, if you ever do a lot of writing or you talk to people who tell you how to write better, they’ll say, “Look at your audience. What do they care about? How do they read it?” I’m a big Strunk and White fan. If you read The Elements of Style, it will talk about things like, “If you don’t do the work for the reader, the reader has to do more work. People are lazy. They have short attention spans.” If you become a good writer, which takes a lot of writing, and you study what people respond to, you’ll write content that gets read and gets passed along. It’s viral.

To me, with the increasing number of people online and the speed of it, and you look at the speed of something like Twitter and social voting sites like Digg and Sphinn, if the content is built to be viral – by that I don’t mean it’s fluff or just about sex or whatever but it’s made in a way to be read and passed along. For example, I’ve been reading lately a couple of books by Cialdini, the guy that wrote Influence. He studied the science of why people comply, why they do stuff. Obviously, there is probably a white hat or black hat way to do this, to influence people. You want to be ethical, but you need to understand why people do what they do.

Garrett: Those are some great insights on how to write great content. Really, what you’re saying is there is so much out there that you have to have something that will catch their attention. You said that people are lazy so you almost have to write in a way that makes them not only want to read more, but to compensate for their laziness.

Brian: I think a great example is Dosh Dosh or this guy Maki; he’s really good. His blog looks great. It’s so comprehensive that you almost want to vote for it because he put so much work into it. He gave me so much. Using this principle of, “If I give you a lot, you feel like you owe me; you’re going to vote for me.” He used really cool graphics. It makes you feel like it’s a really professional site. He looks at things like are there bullet points, not just a big mass of one paragraph of text that’s completely unreadable. It’s spread out. There’s more space. The text kind of breathes. All those things that make it readable and make you want to vote for it, that gives him authority. He does a really good job with that.

Garrett: That’s a great example. Here’s a question I always ask those that I’m interviewing. A lot of people either have a hard time answering it, or just have a ton of people they follow. Who are some of the favorite people in SEO, social media, and online marketing industries that you continually follow online? You gave us an example of Dosh Dosh or Maki. Are there any others you really love to follow because they have great content all the time?

Brian: I’m going to risk actually answering that because you’re always afraid you’re going to leave somebody out. I follow Chris Brogan for social media, Anil Dash who is from Movable Type. I’m actually a much better fan of WordPress but he’s a really smart guy. I like reading his stuff. He’s a really good speaker.

For SEO, I like Ann Smarty. She produces really useful lists and reviews that are very good and very easy. They don’t go too long. They’re very useful. I follow Jeff Quipp, Loren Baker. Loren Baker jumped on my car at the Hard Rock. He’s a funny guy. Of course, I also follow Rand Fishkin, and Danny Sullivan. I think Danny is one of the most interesting speakers in our industry. He’s like the ADHD comedian guy. I was very impressed at the SEOmoz Expert. I follow Jordan Kasteler, Dave Snyder, Brian Chappell, and Wayne Sutton in North Carolina, who is a Top 100 Twitterer. He’s a very neat guy in social media. I also follow Brandy Eddings, who is one of the best in Pay-Per-Click. Lisa Barone, of course – I guess those are the main ones that come to mind.

Garrett: Like you said, every time I ask that, everybody is worried they’re going to miss somebody. Those are some great people.

Brian: If I didn’t list somebody, it’s because I absolutely hate them and I hope that they hate me for the rest of my life. [laughter]

Garrett: Brian, I had the opportunity of meeting you last week in Florida, which was awesome. You’re a funny, nice guy. I appreciate your friendship. You spoke at Scary SEO last week, in Florida. Tell us a bit about what you spoke about and what your biggest take away from that conference was.

Brian: The big thing I’ve been trying to do is to come up with a keynote, which is a speech – what I’d like to do is start speaking to more corporations and things like that. I’ve been working with a guy who is a professional keynote speaker now. He makes a lot of money doing that. I was very lucky to meet him, again, through social networking. We came up with this thing that expresses – I didn’t realize it but like I said, I’m an optimizer. I try to optimize everything. You could also say I’m a perfectionist. It sounds nicer if you say I’m an optimizer.

We came up with this system that is like a five-step system. You can optimize anything, whether it’s your SEO, Pay-Per-Click, your social media, your life, or your finances, or your wife – but don’t try that. There are five steps.

The first thing is you have to have a goal. The clearer it is the better. I have jokes that go along with all this stuff, in my speech, but I’ll just give you the facts. You come up with a goal. The second thing is you need to establish a measurement for that goal so it is quantified. The third this is to look at where you’re starting, what you have, what your resources are and what your strengths and weaknesses are, skills you have or don’t have, people you have or don’t have. Step four is to figure out a strategy to get from where you are to where your goal is. This is where you get into tactics and all those things that most people get fascinated with. It doesn’t happen until step four. You have to lay out all the other steps ahead of time and make sure you actually get somewhere. Step five is the optimization. It’s kind of a loop. Now that you’ve established the competence with your goal and the metric, you can see, five months from now, two weeks from now or whatever, how much closer are you to your goal.

Once we came up with that, at first I thought this was okay, but I’ve started using it with clients. I will see that when we run into these problems – ultimately you want your client to be happy. If they don’t know where they want to go, they’re never going to be happy. Say it’s something as simple as, “I want you to get me a bunch of real estate leads.” You could say, “Cool, we’ll do that. At what cost per lead will make you happy?” If they don’t know that, you’re not going to have a happy client. You’re going to get them two hundred dollars a week? Is it fifty dollars a week? They won’t know if it’s a success unless you define it.

Garrett: Those are some great tips. I like how you said you could bring that into your personal life, because you can. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never be happy yourself. Essentially, you are your own client. Those are some awesome tips, Brian. I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to sit down and talk with me. You’ve given some awesome insight on our industry, where we’re going, and some great tips to help us all to be more successful. If my listeners want to follow you, and find out more about who you are and what you do, where should they go?

Brian: I’ll tell them where to go. [laughs] They can go to Briancarteryeah.com, which has everything about me. It has a link to Fuelinteractive.com. It has a link to Getmorefaster.com, which is my professional speaking site. It has links to a whole bunch of sites and blogs. Briancarteryeah.com has everything.

Garrett: And Twitter is @briancarter, right?

Brian: Yes, just @briancarter.

Garrett: Thanks again, Brian, for taking time. We hope the best for you in everything you’re doing.

Brian: Thanks, man. Thanks for having me on. I really enjoy your interviews.

Garrett: Awesome, thank you.

To find out more about who transcribed this interview check out Tamara Bentzur!

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 9:27 am and is filed under Monday Interviews, SEO, Your SEO Mentor Podcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.