SEO Mentor

I had a blast interviewing James Duthie from Down Under! With his amazing Australian accent and wonderful online marketing tips and content, James is the epitome of a up and rising online star. James is famous for his powerful guest posts that rock the industry every time a new one is posted. Listen above to my interview with James or read the transcript below!

Garrett: Hello everyone, Garrett Pierson, Your SEO Mentor here with James Duthie. How are you, buddy?

James: Very good, Garrett, how are you?

Garrett: I’m great. I hear that Australian accent there, is that right?

James: Yes, that is correct. I’m from Melbourne, Australia, sunny Australia. It’s a beautiful spring morning where I am, at the moment. It’s a good time of year to be in Australia. It’s just coming into summer in the next few months.

Garrett: That’s awesome. I’m going to ask you a couple of questions throughout the interview, and it sounds like there’s a slight delay. We’ll work through that. James, tell us a little bit more about yourself. For those who may not know you, what is your background in the online-marketing industry, your family, your hobbies, or whatever you want?

James: I’ll start on a personal level. As you can tell and as we’ve discussed, I’m from Melbourne, Australia, which is why I have a funny little accent. I’m twenty-nine-years-old, turning thirty in a couple of weeks. I am officially starting to get old, I believe. I have no kids at this point in time but living with my girlfriend of four years. I dare say it’s not too far around the corner. I love sports, all kinds of sports. I play basketball a couple of times of week, which I have done for pretty much my whole life. I try to work out at a gym as well. When I’m not working, I’m either playing sports or watching sports.

From a professional level, and the online-marketing industry, I got into online marketing around the start of the new millennium. I was working in a global-market research company. I did work there for quite a while, for about seven years. They actually went through I suppose a transition process of turning the operation by telephone onto an online platform. I was in that company during that transitional period when they switched a lot of what they did from an offline environment, to an online environment. That including building websites, building traffic to their websites, communicating with their data base; there were a whole range of activities that I picked up experience on, in terms of web development, communications, email, traffic generation and customer acquisition, just a broad range of experiences.

About a year and a half ago, I switched to the agency environment. At the moment, I’m working for Australia’s biggest online-marketing agency. My role is predominantly online marketing strategy and in particular, I’m developing online marketing strategies and customer retention strategies for our clients.

I’m not an SEO strictly by trade; it’s something I do as a hobby on my own blog. I started blogging last year for another agency I was working for. I got hooked into blogging as soon as I started it. I worked on that blog for a few months and then at the start of this year I decided to start my own personal blog, OnlineMarketingBanter.com. That’s’ been going since January of this year. It’s really given me a little playground to play around with SEO, social media and get my hands dirty getting some real experience. I suppose that’s me in a nutshell.

Garrett: I have to say I love your accent.

James: Thank you. It seems to be a very popular accent with the Americans.

Garrett: Tell us something you really enjoy about the online-marketing industry and the career you’ve had.

James: I think the best thing about working in the online-marketing industry is actually the knowledge-sharing culture within the industry. There’s just a massive online community of SEO, online marketers, special media marketing, affiliate marketers. They’re all, I suppose, working together to share information, share tips, and share tactics and strategies. It’s a fantastic learning environment both for experienced people and newbies as well; basically anyone who is interested in the industry, with the right motivation, can become an expert because there’s such a huge wealth of knowledge that’s being recorded online through blogs, social media, tools and communications mediums.

I think the aspect of the industry that I do enjoy most is the fact that, realistically, we’re competitive with all the other online marketers out there, but at the same time, we’re all sort of working together as a community to share information and share knowledge. I think there’s a really good culture in the online community for helping out brethren. That’s probably one of the things I really like about the online-marketing industry.

Another point would probably be creativity. There’s constant influx of new technologies, tools and technologies, within the online-marketing environment. In the last few years, we’ve seen blogs and social media, micro blogs and all these new forms of media that are emerging. I suppose clients come to us and want to know how to begin to leverage these new media forms.

When clients come to us, there are probably not a lot of case studies and success stories with these new forms of media, so it opens up the door for a lot of creativity to work with clients, with their unique businesses, and find ways to make these new forms of media work for them. It’s exciting to be like pioneers in the field, try new things, and open up creative juices.

Garrett: That’s awesome. Going back to that first piece you spoke about, gaining that knowledge; if you were able to give one great tip or some advice to a newbie starting in the online-marketing industry, what would that be?

James: I think it all comes down to one word for me and that’s ‘read’. The knowledge sharing probably is the best aspect of the industry. There are just so many great sources, all the information out there, so many very smart people sharing their knowledge and sharing their views online. I think the most important thing to do if you want to get into the industry is to identify the right sources of information, such as Search Engine Land, Seomoz, these types of information Mecca’s, and add them to your RSS feed, subscription, or however you like to follow the information. Commit to actually reading.

The industry, I suppose, is like the life of a dog. One year on the internet or online-marketing industry is really the equivalent to about seven years. It moves so quickly. If you want to keep up with what’s happening you need to have your finger on the pulse. I suppose you need to have passion for information as well. You need to want to read, read everything daily, and want to read it all. If you are not motivated to read, you just aren’t going to do it. You need to have a passion for the industry and a passion for the information and keeping up to date with what’s happening.

Garrett: That’s awesome!

James: I suppose the other key piece of advice would be that after you’ve read a bit and think you understand the concepts, you actually get your hands dirty. I suppose that’s why I started my own blog; I was doing a lot of reading but probably not putting as much of it into practice as I liked, particularly because my full time role was in strategy. A lot of what I was reading about in terms of SEO and social media weren’t areas that I was able to put into practice via my full time role. I wanted an opportunity to go out there, have a bit of a play around, and see what I could learn from a practical point of view. After you absorb some of the information and understand it, get out there and start applying it; start a blog, start promoting, start optimizing. The best way to learn is by doing. Once you’ve grasped the knowledge of all your concepts, get out there, form your own little blog, your own little playground, and start learning by doing.

Garrett: That’s a great tip. I totally agree. There’s wonderful content out there and you have to read it.

James: That’s right. I subscribe to about fifty or sixty blogs and I know other people in this industry subscribe to hundreds. One of the biggest challenges is just being able to keep up with the information overload. You have to commit to doing it. I set aside an hour and a half every morning just to go through my RSS reader and say, “This is what I do for the first hour and a half of every day.

Garrett: In your opinion, what’s the most exciting trend in the online marketing or the SEO or social media industries, today?

James: That is a very good question. I’ll address it from a high level and say the speed of innovation is probably the thing I find most exciting, rather than isolating a single trend in social media or SEO. I think the speed of innovation is the most exciting part of working in the online-marketing industry.

I’ll give you an example within the browser market. We saw Firefox 3 come out not that long ago, with some great new tools and features. Then obviously, this week Google Chrome came out. Again, they’re changing the game as well. We have Explorer 8 coming out in the not too distant future as well. You can see this constant race to be innovative, to introduce new features, and I suppose the really good thing about the browser market is it’s all great software. There’s so much happening, so much innovation, and it’s all concentrated on a culture of innovation that’s bread from providing a greater user experience. Everyone’s trying to win market share by being the most innovative, by having the best new features.
The innovation is happening across all industries, whether it’s browsers, SEO tools, social media sites, tools, and technologies. I think the most exciting part of the online-marketing industry, in whole, is the innovation and amount of smart people who are constantly working to provide new tools that make our lives easier and better.

Garrett: I’m sure with all of the reading you do; you’ve come across many articles about social media. It seems to be the new trend. How do you see social media changing the Web in the next year or two?

James: Probably the key area I’d like to see social media change the Web is within search itself. I suppose the evolution of social search. I guess we have two ways of categorizing content on the web, at the moment.

We have the automated manner, which is the search engines whereby Google’s algorithm is looking at the on-page and off-page factors, assessing the page’s importance, and then giving an overall trust ranking and quality ranking, determining the importance and quality of that page.

On the other side of the equation, we have the social web, sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and so forth, where people are driving the quality of the content. They’re voting, bookmarking, or essentially nominating the content they believe is good; that content is pushed out and promoted via those social networks. There are two separate ways of categorizing content on the Web.

The area I’m looking for is sort of an amalgamation of these two information categorization processes, so social media and the human behavior is actually taken into account within the search engine algorithms. I suppose, at the moment, what’s probably missing from the search engine rankings and algorithms is the human judgment. Social media is obviously where the real human intelligence and real human judgment is coming into play to categorize and qualify content. I’d really like to see one of the search engines attack this in an aggressive manner, looking to integrate the human judgment into their algorithm so we can blend both the social web and the other algorithms to provide search engine results that are not perfect, but better than what we’re getting now.

Garrett: I totally agree. The search engines need to step it up a bit and give us what we want, right?

James: Yeah, that’s right. I’m not a technical expert on the subject of social search. Anyone who is interested in the subject, there is a really great article by Dave Harry and Bill Slawski, over at Dave’s blog. It was titled The Quest to Social Search Sensibilities. In that, Dave and Bill really went into the potential of social search. If people are interested in the subject, I’d recommend going there and listening to or reading what they have to say. They could probably explain it in a much more technical and informational way than myself.

Garrett: That’s great. Anybody that is listening on iTunes or somewhere else, make sure you head to YourSEOMentor.com and I’ll have a link to that article. I’ll also make sure I put a link to your blog, James, at OnlineMarketingBanter.com.

Staying on the subject of social media, what is your favorite social media site online, and why?

James: There are probably two sites in particular that are my favorite social media sites, for different reasons. The first objective I have for social media is from a consumption perspective, where I want to pull information in, read it, and pull information, articles, and stories that are relevant to me. The best social media site for that purpose, for myself, is Sphinn, which is the social news site for online marketers and search marketers. That site is essentially a niche site. It has a great community there. There are some very smart people, who spend a lot of time contributing to that site, aside from the articles themselves that get published there and shared there, there’s also a social element to the site as well. Aside from reading the stories that are the online marketing and search marketing stories, there are often conversations around those stories and debates that go on. It’s a really good community for up-and-coming online marketers, as well as experienced online marketers, to congregate and talk about issues within the industries. From a consumption perspective, Sphinn is where I spend most of my time.
I suppose from a promotional perspective, in terms of leveraging social media for my own blogs, StumbleUpon would be my preferred network, to actually send traffic toward my blog. When I first started blogging, StumbleUpon was the most accessible for a newbie. Digg is a huge behemoth and it’s hard to get any visibility within Digg as a new user. With StumbleUpon you can get some visibility straightaway and reap some benefits within the network as well. StumbleUpon has probably been where I’ve concentrated my own efforts. I try to be an active ’stumbler’ and contribute to the network in a positive manner.

Garrett: That’s interesting. In a lot of these interviews, the number one social media site was Twitter. I think it’s very interesting that you mention Sphinn. I also love that site. I never really thought of it as a social media site, until now.

James: I guess it depends on how you classify social media. Personally I would put your social news sites like Digg and Sphinn and then social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Del.ici.ous, and the micro blogging sites such as Twitter and Plurk. From a personal perspective of never really having a whole lot of interest in the micro blogging over the reading, up to this point, I’ve played around a little bit with Plurk without ever creating an account in Twitter. It’s not something that’s really interested me too much to this point. I can see the benefits in the micro blogging. I suppose at some point, you have to maintain a balance between your online life and your offline life. Twitter or micro blogging is a sacrifice that I’ve made so my girlfriend still gets to see me once a week or so. [laughs] That’s my little sacrifice in terms of maintaining some sort of online/offline balance.

Garrett: That’s totally understandable. Tell us some of your favorite people in the online-marketing industry or SEO or social media, which you continually follow online. I know you’re not going to be able to hit them all, but just give us a couple of the top ones that you suggest others to follow.

James: It’s a dangerous question because you’re always going to leave out someone you really respect and admire, but I’ll try my best to not leave anyone out. I suppose number one for me is Dave Harry from HuoMah.com. Dave has actually been a great influence; I suppose he is a mentor for me. He came across my blog early and took an interest in my writing. We’ve maintained regular contact from pretty much the time he first came across my blog, via email and each other’s blogs. He’s really helped me with my own thought development and with tips and advice along the way regarding how to gain an audience, how to use social media, and so forth. He has been a great influence for me. Aside from the fact that he’s helped me a lot along the way he also produces one of the most intelligent and thought-provoking SEO blogs out there. He really has a great depth of knowledge in the industry, and of course, he has a great sense of humor as well. He’s one that I pretty much read everything he writes.

Steven Bradley from Van SEO Design is another guy who has been willing to share his time and expertise to help me along the way. Kim Bock is another from LearningSEOBasics. She’s also been very helpful along the way; sort of helped guide me with my own social media and blogging habits. Again, both of those guys produce really great content for the industry.

Aside from individuals, there are also quite a few agencies that I follow fairly religiously. You have your standards like Seomoz, seopeople, or SearchEnginePeople, Maki from DoshDosh, Darren Rowes from Problogger, Shana Albert, Donna from SEO Scoop. There are just so many good information sources.

I suppose that’s another area that I really appreciated having Sphinn as my social news network of choice. Within Sphinn you can quickly identify who the really knowledgeable people are within the industry. I’ve found Sphinn to be a very good place to get a grounding in who really knows what they’re talking about and who I need to follow.

I suppose one to throw in there from a newbie perspective is Ken Jones. He’s a guy from the U.K. who has some really entertaining SEO thoughts. I like to follow what he says as well.

Garrett: Switching modes a bit, let’s speak about some recent news within the industry that’s been out there like a ‘fire storm’, I guess you could say. Let’s talk about Google Chrome quickly. Tell us your opinion of Google Chrome as a new internet browser.

James: I haven’t had a lot of time to play around with Google Chrome, as yet, but I’ve had enough time to sort of form an impression of the browser itself. I think all the new features are pretty cool, really. I really like OmniBox, and I love the fact that you can search third-party sites directly from OmniBox. If I want to search eBay or one of the sites I use a lot for music, [25:07.4] music online is called Juno. Once Chrome picks up my browsing history, if I type in a last name into OmniBox it will actually give me the option to search within those music sites that I purchased from, straightaway. Rather than having to go to that site and the online search, I can do it straight from Google Chrome. I think that’s a very cool feature.

I like the speed dial page as well. It’s not exactly a new feature; I think they borrowed that from Opera. I think it’s cool. When you open you tap it and it gives you all your most frequently visited pages. It can be a quick one-click process to get to the sites you visit often.

I think Google Chrome is going to be a solid product. As I said, I think all the features are cool. My only concern is that there’s not a helluva lot there for your average Jo. A lot of the new features are very much for your power users and your tech users. If you talk about features like [26:25.1] docs tabs and task management, it’s very tailored to the power rank of the market. I just hope Google Chrome doesn’t eat into Firefox’s market share because Firefox is a great browser. I really want to continue to see Firefox do well, but there is a risk that Google Chrome will eat into Firefox’s market share, as opposed to Internet Explorer, which I’m not sure is the intention of Google or not.

There is an interesting thread on Sphinn, I think started yesterday or the day before, asking people to share their percentage of browser usage since Google Chrome has been released. One that I found very important was from Lee Odden from TopRank who said his Firefox market share on TopRank had fallen 10% since Google Chrome had been released. At least from that one test, it looks like the heavy tech users are the ones adopting Google Chrome, and that’s potentially at the cost to Firefox. I just hope that Firefox doesn’t go into the wilderness because Google Chrome has been released.

Garrett: It’s interesting to see what’s going to happen. For me, I love Firefox. I won’t use Google Chrome until they come out with some add-ons. I use add-ons all day long. For me, I’m not switching over; not going to switch over yet.

James: I’m very much in the same market. I use tons of add-ons with Firefox. I suppose that’s probably what’s holding back many of the tech-savvy users at the moment. Until all of their Firefox add-ons are compatible with Google Chrome, Firefox will be able to maintain their market share. I’m sure at some point in the not-too-distant future; all of the developers will make their add-ons compatible with Google Chrome. Hopefully it won’t spell the death of Firefox.

It was interesting to read in that same Sphinn thread where users were sharing their browser market shares for their own , Sphinn was their online marketing audience; a lot of the people contributing were contributing statistics from marketing blogs and tech sites. They had very heavy Firefox market shares, 50% or 50%+ of users were at Firefox because the tech-savvy market is the Firefox market.

That’s no surprise, but a few people published some statistics from generic consumer sites. They showed a market penetration for Google Chrome as 0.200% or so. In reality, it doesn’t look like the general consumer out there, your average Joe, is even aware that Google Chrome exists at this point in time. I guess it surprising because it’s only been released for about a week. It will be interesting to see the adoption rate of Google Chrome, both within the tech market and for your average Joe as well.

Garrett: James, you’re famous for your guest blog posts on other people’s blogs. Out of all those recent blog posts that you’ve written, what is your favorite subject that you’ve written about so far?

James: I think you’ve been very generous with your use of the word ‘famous’, Garrett. I don’t think I’m famous for them, but they’re a lot of fun and they help me get a bit of extra exposure. I do enjoy the guest blogs. My favorite on at this point would have to be one that I did over at SEO Scoop for Donna. That post essentially looked at the assumptions regarding the quality of social media traffic.

In particular, I did a bit of analysis on search engine traffic versus social media traffic. The way I did that was that I compared two blogs, one that received almost all of its traffic from social media, and one that received almost all of its traffic from search engines. I looked at the traffic quality characteristics at both sites, looking at bounce rates, percentage of readers who returned to the blog, which was an indication of reader loyalty, looking at the average page views, and a range of quality characteristics to see how the two sites compared, and ultimately how search engine traffic compared to social media traffic.

The findings were interesting, not groundbreaking, or surprising. Of course, search engines won almost every category in terms of traffic quality. It was really interesting. I received quite a lot of positive feedback from that guest post. That was probably the one I enjoyed writing, trying to add a bit of intelligence to an area where there hasn’t been a lot of research or scientific data.

Garrett: I’ll make sure I put a link to that guest post, as well. Finally, James, I want to tell you I appreciate your time. We’re clear across the world and we’re doing a podcast. It’s exciting! I just want to thank you for your time. If my listeners or anybody that wants to know or find out more about you, where should they go?

James: I suppose my blog is the best place to go. I try to publish there a couple of times a week, at least once or twice a week, with some new thoughts and opinions on the online-marketing industry, particularly within SEO and social media and online-marketing strategy. My blog is OnlineMarketingBanter.com. That’s the best place to catch me. I’m not a big micro blogger so you’re not going to find me on Twitter, I’m afraid. The best place is really my blog at Onlinemarketingbanter.com.

Garrett: Again, thank you, James and I hope to speak with you again in the near future. Have a great day.

James: Thank you, Garrett. I appreciate the time.

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

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 10:35 am and is filed under Google, Monday Interviews, Online Marketing, SEO, SEO Friends, Social Media, 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.

Tags: Google Chrome, James Duthie, Online Marketing, OnlineMarketingbanter.com, SEO, Social Media, Sphinn