Interviews

Thanks to everyone for the support that you gave to this content format. I’ll do my best to get the top members of this forum to walk through their journey and answer questions related to their career. Today we have in the seat @Sherb, whom I decided to make some questions related to his writing career and his opinions about SEO. Give it a read. Totally worth it. 1. Can you tell us about your background? How did you get into this business? I’m 28 years old, American, born and raised in the Southeast. I was born into a middle-class family. Dad was a nuclear chemist and is now a tax appraiser and going to be retiring in a few months at age 60. Mom was an incredible teacher, had an extensive education, and was well-loved amongst her students and peers. She sadly passed away from cancer a couple years back. They instilled a very hard work ethic for myself and my sister. We earned everything we got, although they made sure we never, ever went without. We spent many weekends in work clothes toiling around the property. They made sure we both got great educations and they we went to and graduated from college, as they had done. While in high school, I started screwing around with Blogspot blogs. Some of them I made got traffic here and there. I would write short stories about my classmates and put them up online and they loved to read them, and would frequently ask for certain things to be included in future stories. In college, I cooled off from the online world for a bit to focus more on my studies. I still dabbled here and there, but didn’t do any serious IM work. After my wife graduated, she started medical school and would consistently be pulling 70-80 hour weeks between classes and studying. I needed something to fill my time, so I started working on a few websites. While doing this, I posted about being interested in online reputation management. It was here that I was contacted by my first client, who referred me to my second client, and the list went on. I had perused Blackhatworld in some form or fashion since early 2007, and towards the end of 2014 into 2015, finally had the expertise I thought was needed to contribute something of value to the board. I started diving deep into IM and SEO, and haven’t looked back. 2. Tell us a bit of your current projects, what are you working on? I have left the online reputation management world for now, choosing to focus on the less stressful content writing while working on my own projects. I’ve got several travel and affiliate sites, the largest of which being my Iceland travel site that I have been working on when time allows for over a year. I’ve also got a 60-site PBN that myself and my web property manager handle the growth of. I have several local service businesses that I plan to launch before the end of the year, outsourcing 90 percent of the work to outside parties and truly dive into the business world from a managerial standpoint. 3. How did you discover your talent for writing? I’ll paste something I wrote back in mid-July: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/will-grammarly-help-me-with-english.1044152/#post-11227387 I got an old Windows 95 computer for my 8th or 9th birthday and it was so slow that it would only run Office. I spent my weekends from ages 8 to 12 chopping firewood, doing chores around the house with my parents and sister, and writing stories about tornadoes and FBI field agents and abandoned theme parks and everything in between. I put my friends in the stories and then had them read them. Practicing constantly eventually got me to the point where I was winning essay contests. I went to Disney World for a week because I won an essay contest. I’ve got a shit-ton of trophies in the closet from spelling bees and speech contests and essay contests I won on the state level. I got an all-expenses paid trip to Washington DC because I wrote a killer paper on how we should capture stories of WWII vets before they all die. I spent my last two summers of high school on college campuses getting “the college experience” and learning advanced mathematical concepts… because I wrote a convincing application letter. I got my college education completely paid for because I wrote a shit-ton of essays my senior year of high school and won over a dozen small scholarships as a result. And now I make a six-figure income between writing I do online, for clients, and in my day job. Knowing how to write is (to me) the second most important real-world skill you can have. The first being the ability to communicate and filter your thoughts into spoken words and actions. 4. What does a good content research process look like? Researching the topic should not be difficult. Google what it is about, utilize the resources that your customer offers you from the get-go, and make sure you understand what is being asked of you. To me, almost as important as understanding the subject matter is understanding how it will be used, and tailoring your writing to meet the needs of your client’s website. I have lost several-thousand dollar writing gigs because an article I provided was in a completely different style and tone than what the customer had on their site already. That is a mistake I will not make twice. If your content is going on a website for a doctor, you’d better provide non-conversational language and strong call to action, and have enough medical knowledge to not put in filler content that destroys the message being conveyed with unnecessary wordiness. 5. How do you research when you have to write for some unknown topic you don’t have much knowledge about? If the topic is not something I am familiar with, I treat it

Today in the Expert Interview Series we have a well reputable member. He is all over the digital world from E-commerce to SEO he has what to say. Totally an interview that you should read. 1. Could you please tell us a little bit of the journey how you started in internet marketing till the moment of this interview? I started in IM about 12-13 years ago promoting Clickbank products. Before starting with IM I had built some large Facebook groups and pages in the very early days of Facebook that across them had millions of followers, it was easy back then (sigh). I never really used them for internet marketing though until I discovered Clickbank. I created an account and placed some links and the next morning woke to $238. I was blown away and started making a lot more each day promoting Clickbank guides on the many groups and pages I had created in the past. Since then I have always had a passion for affiliate marketing and creating large hubs where people gather online. My wife and I have worked on many fun projects together and started one of the fastest growing etsy shops of all time which at one point was also one of the top selling etsy shops in the world. We sold that business and moved on to helping other sellers grow their businesses. It feels like we are coming full circle as we have been generating the majority of our income from affiliate marketing over the last 12 months and are about to get back into the fray with eCommerce and POD. Before IM from 15 – 21 I worked in a lot of call centers and developed customer service skills which helped a lot with managing our businesses ourselves and the ability to speak to anyone on the phone no matter their position. Most of those jobs where in sales departments so I learned a lot of great skills. No matter if it was insurance, phones, inbound sales outbound sales, customer service/sales, I was always the best performer or within the top 1% without fail and would max out on the bonuses and extra commission so I always wanted more and had to become self employed to do it. In my spare time I started working for myself by singing up to an MLM company selling household products when I was 18 and did fairly well with that and had a team generating 35k – 50k sales each month by the time I was 19. I learned a lot of skills from that mlm business and two others I joined before moving to the US. In fact it was a franchise/mlm company I initially moved to the US to do when I was 22. I moved to Vegas and met my wife, we got married 6 months later and moved back to the UK for a year and it was at the end of that year which we got into Clickbank and moved back. We earned so much money in a two month time frame that we decided to move back to the US, paid for my immigration and attorney and had the ability to work for ourselves from that point on. 2. Tell us a bit of your current projects, what are you working on? The most exciting projects right now are some of our Fiverr affiliate promotions that we are doing as well as some POD shops we are in the process of building. We also dabbled with Poshmark over the last year and surprisingly have built up quite an empire on there with a few shops that are automated and promoted with imacros. The number one project right now however is developing land we purchased so that we can utilize our online promotional skills with promoting an Airbnb retreat for tourists coming to the Grand Canyon and to offer experiences and workshops. As well as that side of things I would ultimately like to have a large cottage industry out there with people running the various businesses and shops we will have online processing the orders and fulfillment all in house, as well as it being an incubator for small businesses. (dont say commune it’s not going to be a commune lol!) maybe I will try and keep the promiscuous aspetcs of a commune though, that sounds GRRRR8 lol! 3. What do you think the future has prepared for SEO? Much the same with people constantly trying to game the system or understand it better. The more people understand SEO the more it will change. It’s people like the users on this forum that will dictate the future of SEO as they are the people changing it every day with new techniques that over come obstacles, that then spawn new obstacles. Whenever people adopt a new way of promotion it forces innovation and change to stand out from the crowd. I feel it will evolve as fast as technology has evolved. 4. When you get a new ORM client, what are some basic stuff that you should deal with? Firstly I ask them what they want to achieve and then let them know what is going to realistically be achievable and set out budgets for it. Most of our clients probably fall under SMM more, but with doing that you inevitably are doing ORM too. Most of the clients we have are not familiar with ORM or its principles so there is a lot of education to be done. The most important thing in my opinion is making sure the client understands what it is they need, making sure that’s something you can actually deliver on and then educating the client to make sure that they know a lot of the best practices to make my job as easy as possible and not to cause unneeded pr problems going forward. 5. You have done some e-commerce stuff too. Could you please elaborate a bit into that? What’s the

Note: This is a very very long interview, so I suggest you take a coffee, pen & paper as @Leith shared some really great golden nuggets here. To begin with, I’d like to say thanks to @Geasy for this opportunity. The last time I did an “interview” was years ago, and although I’m no guru or celebrity.. it’s still pretty cool that some members wanted to find out more about myself. I’ve said this time and time again but BHW has been instrumental in my SEO career so far and the connections I’ve made here over the last few years has been invaluable. And before we begin, I have to warn you. I have a tendency to write… a lot. The answers below ended up totalling 7k words (WTF?) If I bore you at any point please feel free to curse me in the comments, lol. Can you tell us about your background? How did you get into this business? Before I start rambling on about my background, a question I get asked quite frequently is whether or not Leith is my name. Thought I’d take this chance to clarify. It’s my ‘online’ name/alias (the name comes from the area I grew up in). I’m really not sure what sort of format to go with this interview, so I’m going to shamelessly copy @Sherb. This is going to sound cliched (and you’ve probably heard this a million times elsewhere). I wasn’t born in a wealthy family; quite the opposite actually. Mum didn’t work – she was usually too busy keeping myself and my two younger brothers in check. That wasn’t easy, lol. Dad worked 2 jobs. 7am – 1pm stacking shelves and then 6pm – 2am as a chef at a restaurant. We really didn’t have money. But that didn’t matter. Whatever little money my Dad made went towards rent, food and paying for my private tuition. My parents did everything they could to ensure I got quality education, both in school and outside. After all, they were relying on me and my future. I didn’t have any games consoles, didn’t have a mobile phone and we didn’t have money to eat out or go on holiday. Despite this, my parents would always somehow find ways to give me money to go out with friends here and there. Deep down though, I knew we were struggling and that sparked my initial desire to make money. I could write an entire book about what happened next, but I’m going to skip right to the end. After experimenting with various offline money making methods (reselling sweets in school, trying to make my own playing cards (failed miserably, lmao), selling whatever items I could find in my house, going to auctions to snag cheap bargains) I eventually realized I had to do something else. I’ve always had a fascination towards computers. I would go to typewriting class during my lunch break at school and since it was only me that was at the class (LOL), the teacher would work with me on a 1 to 1 basis (I can now hit 150+ WPM when writing long-form content, so I’d say it paid off). After begging my Dad for what felt like years for a computer, my wish was finally granted. To be precise, this was my first computer. It was the cheapest option available at Curry’s. I’ll always remember my Dad haggling with the sales rep, even though we knew the price (which was actually on sale for £249) was final. And since I didn’t have any Internet (we couldn’t afford it), I spent the first few months playing Pinball and attempting to play Minesweeper (I had no idea how to play). After what felt like another few years, we finally purchased an Internet package — and this is where things started to get interesting. Again, I could write an entire book about how I started but I’m going to cut to the chase. After stumbling across several “make money from home” ads, I found myself clicking some of them and ending up on a GPT site (these are sites that pay you $0.20 – $0.50 for doing surveys). I made a tiny amount of money on these sites ($20 or so), but ultimately I leaped through various other verticals such as affiliate marketing, video marketing, torrents, PPD… and in the end, SEO. It was mid 2009 at this point. The connection I felt once I grasped the very basics of SEO will always have a special place in my heart. For anyone who was in the industry back then, you’d know literally how easy it was to rank. So easy you could do it blindfolded. In a way, SEO really screwed up my education at school. My Dad was paying for my private tuition, but I wasn’t paying attention in those classes. I wasn’t doing my homework and my social life quickly evaporated. You’d find me always rushing to the library during lunch break to soak up my knowledge on SEO. Even after school when I arrived home, it was straight to the computer to read, read, read. It’s safe to say when I literally had no social life, lol. Whatever chance I got, I made sure I was absorbing information. It became worryingly addictive. At my age back then, most kids were going to the movies, playing football, on the games console or just sitting in front of the TV all day. The first site I ranked went on to generate hundreds in revenue and it wasn’t long before I met my business partner (who is still my business partner today) @d3t0x online and we hit $2k/day in revenue on some of our sites. This was a game-changer for me in particular, since during this period I was making my Dad’s monthly wage in a day, lol. Being able to give my parents the full payment for rent, food expenses, new clothes, restaurant meals and holidays to meet family abroad (who we never had the chance to meet) all thanks to my online marketing

1. Can you tell a bit about yourself? What do you do and how did you get started in internet marketing? I am 28, born in Slovakia (note, not Slovenia), raised in the lower-ish middle class family with my younger brother and sister. I graduated from law school at Masaryk University in Czechia, where you can find me wandering the streets of southern Moravia drunk to this very day. I started with IM, remotely, when I was 19. I was working as an externist for one advertising agency as a PPC campaign admin. But the work there went slowly to shit and being 21 and stuck at law school, well, I figured that I might do PPC campaigns for my own clients. Oh well, how wrong was I. After the initial success I kinda run out of money to promote my service and well, had to say farewell to this idea (From what you can see, I really like to talk about myself). Then one day I came across BHW, which was a huge coincidence. I remember having a cigarette break with my band-mates during rehearsal and someone came up with idea to make a meme website, like a copy of 9gag. So my job was to find a Facebook clickjacker. I remember looking for one for hours until I stumbled across BHW and I read threads here until 5am. That was back in 2012. I took the action the very next day, made my first big money the very year and it took off from there. 2. Tell us a bit of your current projects, what are you working on? Well, to be honest, I am trying to divert from IM altogether. I am mostly focusing on cryptocurrency offline (if they can be called offline) projects (no, I am not doing any ICO). And why the diversion? I feel kinda burnt out and I feel like a change is needed to move in my “professional” life, if we can even call it that. 3. What kind of SEO tools do you regularly use? My most favorite tools are my employees. No idea how they handle my mood swings and temperament. I guess I pay them well enough. Besides that, I love remote desktop and teamviewer… No, really, considering that I focus mostly on selling domains, my tools without which I would not be able to do crap are Majestic, Ahrefs, Archive, Domaintools and Hosterstats. One that I love the most, outside the domain checking category, is probably Semrush. Makes keyword research effortless. And this will sound cheesy as hell, but the best tools are your hands and head. I might be old school, but I still like to do most of my work without any automation. 4. How do you see the role of A.I. in SEO? I prefer the term “virtual intelligence” for science sake. Well, we can already see it in effect in form of the “Rank Brain”. I believe that if you were to ask a Google engineer why a certain site is ranked #1 for its term, he would not be able to answer. Google algorithm is advancing and learning fast, but the question is, whether it can “kill” SEO as we know it. And I believe it can’t. There will always have to be some “factors” like backlinks etc., that can be exploited and manipulated. So unless the search engine can read the mind of the user, I think we are good to go. Problem is that SEO is taking way too long nowadays. Ranking site can take years and you have to be content with the fact that you might be pouring money down the drain for months and might not ever see those money again. Getting your initial investment back can take ages and overall, SEO is a game for big boys only nowadays. You can ask any backlink sellers about how their orders look compared to few years back. Newbies can’t really afford SEO and those who come in with $100 budget end up very disappointed and demotivated. 5. What kind of link building strategy do you use? My main focus, despite the fact that I sell domains, is a perfect onsite optimization. Once you build a flawless site with flawless densities, interlinking and keyword research, the entire link building campaign is a piece of cake. And besides guest posts, PBNs and few expired web 2.0s, I do not even use any other links. Waste of time. They don’t do crap anyway. And unless you are planning to pointlessly play with fire and pump your exact/partial anchors as high as possible, while trying not to end up stuck sandboxed at 2nd page, then you do not need any foundation links at all. 6. Do you still use 301 redirects? What is a proper way to make them work? Well I have never been using 301 redirects that much and I have not played with them in some time. I know what some of my clients have been doing quite successfully and I’ve mentioned it all over the forum quite a few times (dozens). – Don’t even bother with some small 10 – 20RD domains. – Get a big one. – Like really big one. – Bigger – Is it big enough? Good. – It’s related though, right? No? Sucks. – Get a niche related one. – More related. – Anchors get redirected too you know, so if there are some random anchors, even if within your niche, then it’s not a good idea. – Good, now build it up. – What do you mean you want to redirect it at registrar level? No. – Build it up like a regular site. Populate it with content. – 2 weeks have passed and you want to redirect it? Haha, no. – Wait for a few months. – Does it rank naturally for some keywords? Good. – No you can’t redirect it yet, wait some more. – Are you there still? – Good,

Disclaimer: I’m all over the place. Please forgive me for the sporadic answers. 1. Can you tell a bit about yourself? What do you do and how did you get started in internet marketing? 1. I got into IM in 2009. I was about 14. Lived in a rural area so there wasn’t much to do – no distractions. So it led to me spending a lot of time on the computer and then eventually internet marketing. Micro niche websites were popular then, so I made them for people. I realized the only two keyword research tools at the time (Micro Niche Finder and Market Samurai) sucked so I started making my own. Exec VIP member meathead1234 told me I ought to sell licenses and not just keep it for myself. hitman247, another exec VIP on here, saw me talking about it on the forum and came in as one of my first customers. He’s now a very close friend of mine – we chat daily and visit each other often. After that, the company blew up on BHW and WF. I got WSO of the day and week. First day I ever made 5 figures was then, when I was 16. PayPal came along Feb 1, 2012 and did what they do, limited my account, held 5 figures and cancelled all my recurring subscriptions. This basically forced my company to a slow and painful death. More about that here. Then I founded another tool called SerpClix (credit goes to BTB and Taktical for their advice on this project), and had some exciting times with that. Learned old school sales. One day I was on the call with an older man, he was an agency owner down south and had a few big contracts. I think it was Victoria’s Secret and Hilton Hotels for each around $500k/mo. He wanted to try SerpClix. On the other end of the call is me, a kid in college, sitting in my apartment at a desk, half dressed, bed head, about 2:00 in the afternoon, excited and anxious with every answer I gave back. He said he wanted to try it for $500. I confidently replied “add a zero” – and he’s said “okay, $5000?” – and that was basically one of my first sales calls ever. His young female assistance PayPal’d that money over to me right away. I got another few hundred agencies signed up and then one agency just bought the company outright and I’ve been enjoying life ever since. So, to answer your question, what do I do – I sell software. Mainly. 2. Tell us a bit of your current projects, what are you working on? 2. Right now I moved to San Diego for the winter. I just graduated college 11 months ago so I’m kind of living my life on the money I earned while in college. SD is supposed to be one of the best places in North America, so I got a nice place downtown. I don’t even call what I do “work” – like I wake up in the morning and just do whatever I want to do. But after I exercise, clean up and clean my apartment, I fill my empty time with problem solving. I’ve been coding all sorts of stuff lately but my main venture is my influencer search engine Shout. Everyone in the IM/ecom space is pretty familiar with success stories like Quay Australia so I won’t recap much but there’s a lot of money to be made in influencer marketing, so I just have a tool that helps do that. I’m also into ecommerce, and we’ve been doing well with that. 3. You have successfully built 3 6-7 figure companies, and sold one. What are the processes to achieve something like that for someone who only does SEO? 3. Everyone makes money in a different way on here. There’s no real process that’s true for all of us. As humans we try to find patterns in situations where patterns may not exist. I guess the first thing is to decide what your goals are. If you’re good at SEO, the easiest way to make money is to sell links in the BST forum. Everyone does it. Issue is, you’re going to struggle to become a millionaire from that. If you’re like me, you’re looking for something that can grow and be massive, not capped. So you could rank your own money sites. Sure, less capped, but the issue is then, your income is super unstable. Rankings jump around. They’re like your mentally unstable ex – you never know what they’re going to do next and you can’t have that shit in your life. So that’s why I like PPC. You can spend $50/day and mess around with campaigns and when you get a good campaign, you just scale it. You find guys who can bank roll a $250k/mo ad spend, you show the numbers/ROI for your trial campaigns and you decide what kind color your Lambo is gonna be (joking about the Lambo, no one gives a shit what kind of car you drive). However, to answer your question, easiest and most reliable money in SEO is being an agency. A friend of mine, Ilan, owns a very successful agency. He doesn’t take on clients under $3k/mo. We talked 2 weeks ago when he called me about some ecom stuff. But he mentioned his competition was under offer for $35 million. He says he doesn’t know how they get an offer because no one in the agency space wants more clients. They’re all busy. If you have discipline and can open an office in a city, there’s good money to be made. As for my own process – I’m kind of old school. Also I wouldn’t say I’m in the SEO space, but I’m just an entrepreneur. I basically prove my worth to as many people as possible and opportunities present themselves. So I try to keep an open

After I’ve been asked multiple times from members here to continue my Interview series with successful BHW members, I decided to give it a go and ask @MisterF who gladly accepted to answer my questions. I know he is a very busy man because he runs multiple businesses but he took no more than 1 hour to give me the answers which I highly appreciate. I’ll continue to do other interviews as well, so you can go ahead and suggest other people in this thread or by PMing me. Without any further ado, let’s see the great answers that @MisterF gave us. 1. Can you tell a bit about yourself? What do you do and how did you get started in internet marketing? I’m David. A couple of interesting facts: At 17 I got my gliding licence, and then passed my driving test 6 months later. So, I could glide solo before I could drive solo. I enjoy travel, have been to Dubai over 20 times in the past 10 years. I’ve taken a shower at 40,000 feet while flying with Emirates. I have a close friend in the States who was a personal advisor to President Obama, so the 6 degrees of separation thing is another claim to fame. It’s rather interesting when he was across in the UK, we’re having dinner, and he gets a phone call from the White House. I live in Spain along with my partner and 3 dogs. Love the life put here and having a swimming pool helps in the heat of summer. I’m just into my 50s and left school many years ago to join the military. There I was a police investigator undertaking counter-intelligence work. I also did close protection, including guarding some of the UK and Saudi Royal Families. I’ve run businesses since 1991 and love the freedom of being my own boss. My first business was selling office supplies. I’d never done it but knew that all companies needed envelopes to send out invoices and mail, paper to print on and pens or printer ribbons to create them with. I borrowed £1k off my parents as a loan, bought stock and went door to door in my van selling and handing out my business cards. I paid my parents back pretty quickly. My first 12 months turning over £130k on a 25% net profit. I love doing a deal, both as a seller but also as a buyer. Around 1998 I was heavily into matched betting/sports arbitrage. Through that, I met people building websites and cashing in on affiliate programs in the betting industry. Then 10 years later, I found BHW when I needed scraper tools and people to build websites for me. I’ve always been fascinated by SEO and keyword research; I love that I’m continually learning new and more effective ways of doing things. I’m fortunate to personally know some of the top players in the SEO industry. There are some brilliant people out there who don’t promote themselves enough. People who work on technical SEO etc. really fascinating stuff. 2. Tell us a bit of your current projects, what are you working on? Along with my partner, we run or are partners in 3 different businesses, none of which are purely IM based. 1) Firstly, we run conferences and seminars. 2) Then we have a specialist store, and we sell mainly through FBA. < That’s as much as I’m saying 3) The third business is just being revamped. We’re moving and setting up our own manufacturing operation. That’s as much as I’m saying As well as the 3 businesses above, I am a partner with @WebMinati within an SEO agency. We’ve had great results with clients of the forum, so we decided to open up a BST on here for one of our services. I also help manage my partner with her content writing business. She’s busy with that, and we have a great team of writers. We deliver 350k+ words a month to clients. 3. What do you think the future has prepared for SEO? SEO is ever-evolving. Quality over quantity still matters, as does relevancy. I’m really interested in how BERT and NLP will become more significant considerations. If you ever get chance to meet or listen to Dawn Anderson, do so she really does dig deep into this type of stuff. 4. Do you do any other businesses besides the online world? How important do you consider having something on the side? My IM ventures have just been side projects over the years, to be honest. I have around 8 test sites for assessing SEO strategies on, and then 6 or so affiliate sites too, which bring in a healthy income. Our FBA Amazon stuff is a regular income method. What we like here is we signed a couple of manufacturers up, so we have sole UK/European rights to market their products. As I mentioned, we are just opening up our own manufacturing operation too, which will help with our bottom line. The old saying about not having all your eggs in one basket applies in most things, from business to investments. 5. What are the steps you take to optimize a website? Clean structure, fast-loading theme, not too heavy with plugins and fast, secure hosting is essential. 6. What are some books that have changed your mindset? Key influences have been – The Art of War by Sun Tzu ( hence the name of our SEO agency ) The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson. 7. What’s been your biggest regret since starting out and your biggest lesson? Biggest regret: Not focusing enough time on some projects that went by the wayside. Biggest lesson: Don’t be afraid to jump into something, but make sure you have the time and resources to commit fully. I taught myself to trade options many years