Aaron Wall Exclusive Interview on Social Media Marketing

Posted on 09. May, 2009 by Nate in SMO, Starting an Online Business

This is part 3 of a social media marketing interview series.

Here are the other two interviews on social media marketing:

• Mat Siltala
• Chris Bennett

Aaron Wall is a must follow.  He’s always been an entrepreneur. One of Aaron’s big claims to fame in the online marketing space is the world renown book, SEOBook! The first version of the famous SEO Book came out in December of 2003. It’s since been revised about 50 times and continues to be an industry leader. SEO Book.com is a leading SEO blog by Aaron Wall covering the search space. It offers marketing tips, search analysis, and a whole lot more.

In 2008 Aaron transitioned SEO Book.com to a membership site, offering over 100 online SEO training modules, tutorial videos, custom SEO spreadsheets, exclusive tools, and a community support forum. Aaron has been mentioned in niche online and print marketing publications as well as popular tech sites like Slashdot and TechCrunch, right on through to large mainstream news publications like The Wall Street Journal, The London Times, Wired, USA Today, BusinessWeek, Business2.0, Time Magazine, The Register, MSNBC, and The Guardian.  Aaron currently runs SEOBook.com and offers SEO education and consulting. Follow Aaron Wall on Twitter!

Aaron Wall on Social Media Marketing

(MollerMarketing) In regards to social media, where is the best place to start if you are new to online marketing?

(Aaron) I think most people are best off building up their own sites and participating in the water cooler areas of their niche communities before spending much time on broad social media sites.

Why is social media marketing such an important part of success with a new online business? or is it?

The web is a social network. Eric Schmidt recently said:

We’ve been careful not to bias it using our own judgment of trust because we’re never sure if we get it right. So we use complicated ranking signals, as they’re called, to determine rank and relevance. And we change them periodically, which drives everybody crazy, as or algorithms get better. … The usual problem is you’ve got somebody who really is very trustworthy, but they’re not as well-known and they compete against people who are better known, and they don’t ‘in their view’ get high enough ranking. We have not come up with a way to algorithmically handle that in a coherent way.

So search is a popularity contest. And that is one of the search engine’s biggest flaws. Either you are well known or you are obscure. And if you are obscure (compared to others in your marketplace) then Google is not likely to send you very much traffic.

What are some of the main tools all new social media marketers should learn how to use if they plan to survive?

I think a lot of it comes down to treating people well and caring the most for the people who care the most for you. Find ways to filter out a lot of the noise, be responsive with emails, and track what people are saying about you around the web. You can track what people are saying via a twitter vanity search, Google Alerts, and looking through your analytics data.

Is social media marketing at all tied to monetization?  If so, how?  If not, why not?

Most of it tends to be indirect…sorta like how a company spends a lot of money on branding. The brand can build profit margins but slowly. Most ways of profiting from social media come from 2 things:

• inbound links which build awareness and help all pages on your site rank better
• new business opportunities that are available *because* you are well known

Please share one specific social media marketing experience that you attribute to financial success.

Speaking at SEO conferences is huge if you want to pull in SEO clients. Being seen as an authority is worth a lot of money.

Giving away free software that is designed around being something you yourself would want to use is a nice way to build a big reach.

And there are lots of social cues of trust you can leave on your site, like customer reviews, and references to “as seen in” media mentions. Some SEO bloggers name-drop their clients to try to impress their readers, which is yet another way of building perceived authority amongst an audience.

Where do you see social media marketing going in the next 3 years?

In various ways it will become more self-absorbed with more niche communities catering to virtually every niche and bias, even if the bias is absurdly wrong. Remember Eric Schmidt’s comment from above. They can’t tell right from wrong, only what is popular. And it is easier to become popular if you promote something that resonates with the biases and identities (and perhaps flaws) of a market.

Is social media marketing taking over the world of organic search engine optimization as we once knew it?

It is one piece of a strategy. Mechanical SEO without an understanding of conversion is not that valuable. I think the same way about trying to push hard on the social media front if it is not tied to business goals. Social media can bring in awareness, but awareness without a business model is just noise. You still have to be able to monetize that awareness.

Clean and easy links are getting harder to get unless you are already well known. In competitive markets you have to adopt the Abraham Lincoln strategy to online marketing: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”

cheers
Aaron

One More Thing!

Aaron has always been an entrepreneur – check out this fun info:

Aaron Wall’s Entrepreneurial Lifestyle

I have always been entrepreneurial and have over-invested in anything I did. As a kid growing up I raked leaves and shoveled snow for money. I also was a paperboy. I got to where I knew

• what order to deliver newspapers in
• the most efficient ways to do my route (ie: when should I be on foot or bicycle)
• when to collect payment (ie: is that car in the driveway owned by the person who tips

Much of the paper route money was plowed into baseball cards. I started collecting baseball cards in 1989 at the age of 10 and by the time I was 16 I sold cards at shows. That actually taught me quite a bit about marketing. The main tips were:

• Money was just a means for barter.
• Just because I liked something did not mean others would.
• If I thought something was junk that was irrelevant if others liked it.
• Different markets have different demands.
• As long as I was organized, if I offered simplicity in pricing, it typically more than made up for any loses created by those pricing opportunities.
• Some items go for a premium over their fare market value.
• Things which are past their day or out of the limelight not only decrease in value, but then are even harder to sell at the lower value.
• Predicting trends and arbitrage on other’s inefficiencies created opportunities to profit.
• The items that attract shoppers and the items that sell are not necissarily the same items, but there is a synergystic effect if they are well organized. I really appreciate learning that lesson as it relates to linking (ie: those who recommend your stuff and grant you authority may not be the same people who purchase your items).

Special thanks to Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com for his time to answer questions about social media marketing.

Upcoming Social Media Marketing Interview

Our next interview will be with Darren Rowse, the official “ProBlogger”! Stay tune…