The SEO Rapper Interview
15
2008
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I find that sometimes the Online Marketing and SEO industries can be a bore and that is the very reason why Chuck Lewis the SEO Rapper has had so much success. If you haven’t heard Chuck’s raps then you have missed out on some serious entertainment and also some great content. I had a wonderful opportunity to find out more about The SEO Rapper in my interview and he even let me add one of his raps within the interview so listen to the interview above or check it out below. Thanks Chuck!
Garrett: Hello everyone, this is Garrett Pierson, Your SEO Mentor here. I have the opportunity to interview Chuck Lewis, also known as The SEO Rapper of TheSEORapper.com. How are you, Chuck?
Chuck: I’m good. I can’t complain at all.
Garrett: Good! I just want to ask you my first introduction question. Tell us a little bit more about yourself, for people that might not know you. Tell us about your background, the music, and the online marketing industries, family hobbies, or something we might not know about you.
Chuck: Okay, about me, it can be found online. I’ve been in the music business for a while. I’ve been writing rap since middle school and high school, doing gospel hip-hop, marketing hip-hop where the name “poetic prophet” came from, as some people refer to me. I released a couple of albums doing this and they did pretty well. My Mo Serious Entertainment record label, mostly entertainment, that’s where that album premiered. I have a couple of other artists that I manage for the most part. For about the five or six years I’ve been doing online marketing at an agency called Pop Labs. I do search engine marketing there. I’m doing keyword research, optimization, and managing pay-per-clicks and everything else there, all day every day.
I have three children, Jordan, Akilah, and Brianna. They are my Charlie’s Angels, as I call them. I play basketball, play pool, and watch sports. Those are my hobbies if I’m not on some social media site creating a profile or something.
Garrett: That’s wonderful. Football is starting now. Who is your favorite football team?
Chuck: I rode with the Patriots last year. I have been riding with them for a few years actually. I’m in Houston so I have to pull for the Texans. Hopefully we can squeeze into the playoffs this year. My favorite is Randy Moss and Tom Brady. Tom is out right now for the season, so we’ll see what happens with that.
Garrett: That’s true. That’s great. I didn’t know you had three kids. The Charlie’s angels, right?
Chuck: Those are my angels right there.
Garrett: Let’s get into the industry questions. Tell us what you really enjoy about the search-marketing industry, and your career.
Chuck: I enjoy search marketing because, although it’s not a new form of advertising, I still believe it’s in the infant stages. I think it’s better and more effective than traditional methods such as the Yellow Pages and TV and radio. Although I don’t think those are everything per say, I think search definitely is easier to target.
As far as my career, I deal with business owners. I enjoy the opportunity to help them make money. In time, they pay us, and we make money. To see someone who is kind of new to the industry and actually help them understand their business, help them market online, build them a brand new custom website and actually put it online, market it, and they reap the benefits from it; I would say that probably brought me the most joy.
Garrett: That’s wonderful. Let’s say there is a newbie coming into the online marketing, SEO, or social media industries. What are a couple of gold nuggets of advice that you would give someone that is new?
Chuck: I would say use all three of them. SEM (Search Engine Marketing), SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and social media. These days, and this is my personal opinion, they all go hand-in-hand. It’s true you can do one without the other but I think you should do all three to be effective. That’s my personal opinion. I think it comes out better that way. By doing social media you can build a relationship with clients and understand, what your faults are and correct those, and actually get to know your clients better. SEO goes without saying; page one on Google is gold, with the right key phrase. Managing PPC (Pay Per Click) is the quickest and easiest way to find targeted people. I think they all go hand-in-hand. If I had to give someone advice, I would say that if you do all three correctly, you’re headed in the right direction.
Garrett: That’s a great tip; use everything possible to get your name out there. You’re famous for your online raps regarding SEO or the online-marketing industry. I would say your “Design Coding” rap was one of your most famous raps so far. I actually find it very educational; I loved it. Why don’t you go into some detail on design coding and why it’s so important?
Chuck: There are a lot of designers out there. One thing about design is it’s a design. Some people focus on aesthetics too much, and not necessarily the conversion of the client. In regards to getting ranking in the search engine and getting your site accessible by other mediums, not search engines but mobile and so on, it has to be coded right. Actually, I was telling one of my coworkers today that some sites look good but the coding is bad. It’s like a pretty car with a bad engine. It won’t work right. I think that’s the key. If your coding is right you’ll get ranked better, the site will load faster, and you’ll work across browsers. There are all sorts of benefits to just having your coding right.
Then again, with designs, I started by saying your site design is the first thing people see. The design has to be captivating. You need to have the right CTA’s and USP’s and everything else so they can convert. I think the two definitely go together.
Garrett: I like your analogy of the car. In your opinion, what is the most exciting trend in the SEO or online marketing, especially the new social media industries today?
Chuck: I would say the trend would be partnering. I say that in regards to social media sites. They call them ‘friends’. I think the concept is the same. These days you seem to be able to find more partners than clients. I think that’s the trend. I think people are forming relationships that go beyond the sale of a certain product or service. They are bartering, trading services, using each other, and tapping into each other’s client bases. I think that trend is going to continue to grow. It will grow from the retail industries to service providers or even people who are strictly online. I think relationship building is the trend.
Garrett: I totally agree.
Chuck: In fact, the Web 2.0 deal is based around relationships, in my opinion.
Garrett: I totally agree. Staying on the social media subject, what’s your favorite social media site online, and why?
Chuck: Wow, I’ll give you two of them. YouTube will probably be my favorite. It can be a great time waster too. You’ll find yourself on there for hours. It’s also informative. If you are looking for some instructions about something, there’s probably a video about it. It’s instructional, definitely entertaining, and it’s obviously helped boost me with what I’m doing now. Secondly, I would probably say Twitter. I signed up with Twitter a long time ago but didn’t start using it until early this year. It’s a great way to put out a lot of information very quickly, to a lot of people. I think it’s great. I think as the Web advances they’ll make advancement, and even get better.
Garrett: You’re the first person I’ve interviewed that has said YouTube. I think that’s interesting; it’s one of the channels that you use, to talk about what you do, and to get your name out there.
Chuck: I have Facebook pages and MySpace pages, Virb, BeBo and all these others, but YouTube, Twitter and probably Facebook. I’ll put them in there too.
Garrett: I’ll make sure I have a link to your YouTube page so everyone can check out your raps. Speaking about your famous raps, out of all of them, what is your most favorite subject that you’ve rapped about so far?
Chuck: My favorite one was “Conversion Closing.” It was one of the least popular ones, but that was my favorite, mainly because it takes more than having a great design. It takes more than driving traffic to the site. The traffic has to do something when it gets there. If it doesn’t convert, what is the purpose? One of the lines I said in that song was, “I’d rather have a hundred clicks and close thirty-five, than have a thousand clicks and only close nine.” What I meant by that was you have to close the traffic that comes to the site. If they don’t convert, you don’t make any money. They’re experience was wasted and they leave your site. That whole rap was focused on converting the user to a paying client, member, or whatever your desired action is when they land there.
Garrett: It wasn’t as popular, but it seems to be your favorite one.
Chuck: Mainly because I put a lot more time into that one. It took me longer to write, longer to memorize. My friend, who actually produced the track for it, thought the track was exceptional. That became one of my personal favorites.
Garrett: Tell us some of your favorite people that you follow online in the online-marketing industry that you find yourself continually following. I know that might be a big list of people, but just give us a couple of your favorites.
Chuck: If I could name four or five people, I would start with Kelsey Ruger. He’s a great guy in regards to social media and SEO, and online marketing. He’s the vice president at Pop Labs. I follow Guy Kawasaki, Matt Mullenweg at WordPress; he’s pretty cool. I like Danny Sullivan; he always has some great information. Also Andy Jenkins over at StomperNet.
Garrett: That’s a great list of guys there. I appreciate your time, Chuck. If somebody wants to find out more about you and what you do, and some of your raps, where should they go?
Chuck: They can go to my newest site, a video blog at www.TheSEORapper.com. They can go there and actually see all of the YouTube videos there as well, read bios and such. The YouTube page is http://www.youtube.com/m0serious, and the O is a zero, actually. You can go to http://www.poeticprophet.net. That’s my personal blog. Twitter.com/chuck – don’t ask me how I got that name, it was just available. Everyone asks me that. If you go to one of those, you will find me from there. I’m also on LinkedIn at charleslewis. If you go there, find me and talk with me. I will definitely comment back and talk with you.
Garrett: You could probably search Google and search SEO Rapper, right?
Chuck: If you do that, the first fifty pages will be blog posts of everything. It was crazy. That’s how “Design Coding” blew up so much. Everyone blogged about it. It was ridiculous. I performed it at New York at SES New York. It really blew up from that point.
Garrett: That’s sweet. Have you done any raps about some conferences lately? I think you did one at a StomperNet conference, didn’t you?
Chuck: Yeah, I actually performed “Conversion Closing” at StomperNet, and “Design Coding” and then I wrote something custom for StomperNet, which they liked. I did the same thing a few weeks ago in San Francisco, at WordPress. I did something for PBS and Biz Kids. That came out well and I had a lot of fun in Seattle doing that.
We have a lot of things in the making. I’m working on a new gospel album, which I’ll be putting out the first quarter of next year. I have several new online marketing raps coming soon, like “Page Rank”, actually finished that one. We just have to make the video. There is a lot going on.
Garrett: It sounds like it. Great, Chuck, I really appreciate you spending some of your precious time away from your family to spend it with me, and sharing some of your thoughts on the industry. It’s been a great interview. I really appreciate you. Everybody, if you are listening to this at iTunes or on your iPod, make sure you head over to theseorapper.com, or check out the transcript of this interview at YourSEOMentor.com. Thanks, Chuck.
Chuck: Thank you.
To find out more about who transcribed this interview check out Tamara Bentzur!
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Tags: Chuck Lewis, Interview, Online Marketing, Pop Labs, SEO, Social Media, The SEO Rapper
