Interviews

Mike Blumenthal is a Local Search expert and well respected in our industry. We don’t go to the same conferences, so we haven’t met in person, but we have interacted many times over the past five years. He maintains a popular blog: Understanding Google Places & Local Search – Developing Knowledge about Local Search. He took some time out to share some thoughts with our readers.

Ash: How and when did you get into Local Search? What is your current role in your business? Tell us a little about the typical challenges you face in your work.

I had run a large family retail business. A division of that business involved technology and since 1996 we had build and hosted small websites. In 2000 I wanted to build a website for the business but was frustrated by the tools available to me. As a result my designer found some great lightweight open source software that she modified to function as a small business content management system. I liked it so much that I decided to focus on web development for small and medium businesses in our market. Read the rest of this entry »

I met Bill Slawski when the two of us were on an SEO 101 panel at Pubcon a few years ago along with Bruce Clay and Jill Whalen.

L to R: Bill Slawski and Ash Nallawalla, Pubcon 2007

Ash: How and when did you get into SEO? What is your current role in your business? Tell us a little about the typical challenges you face in your work. Read the rest of this entry »

Brad Geddes is known to Webmasterworld members as eWhisper and on Twitter as @bgtheory. He kindly shared some of his insights with us.

Ash: How and when did you get into PPC? What is your current role in your business? Tell us a little about the typical challenges you face in your work.

I started my first PPC campaign with GoTo.com in 1999. I’m currently the founder of Certified Knowledge, a PPC training & toolset company.

My challenges are extremely varied. We work with a large number of advertisers and agencies to help train their staff, design tests, and work through their bigger problems. So, the largest pains for advertisers and agencies become my challenges to help them solve.

The biggest challenge overall is determining how money flows through a business. Many companies want to set bids based upon revenue or profit targets. But determining revenue when there are phone calls, margins, long b2b sales cycles, free trials to paid accounts, lifetime visitor values, etc can be a huge challenge to overcome. Often once these issues become trackable; the PPC campaigns become easier to manage. Read the rest of this entry »

Pubcon attendees would often see Tamar Weinberg live-blogging the sessions from the front row. Now that she is a mother, I haven’t seen her at Pubcon of late. Perhaps this year?

Ash: How and when did you get into social media? What is your current role in your business? Tell us a little about the typical challenges you face in your work.

I’ve been involved in social media since before they called it “social media.” I knew I wanted to do something with online communities as early as 1992. That gave me a head start since I had been able to do what I’ve always been doing for marketing when social media took the Internet by storm.

Today, I do a lot of things, from social media strategy to implementation to execution to community management to video marketing strategy and everything in between.

The typical challenges today is saturation; everyone is trying things and not everyone is doing it well. However, the penetration of different businesses — especially late bloomers — causes skepticism and it makes it harder for people to trust these businesses joining the social media space, no matter how altruistic and authentic they are. Read the rest of this entry »

Ralf Schwoebel is well-known as “Pontifex” on Webmasterworld and @trabit on Twitter. I meet him every year at Pubcon, where he is a popular speaker on technical SEO topics. He shares some of his insights with us.

Ash: How and when did you get into SEO? What is your current role in your business? Tell us a little about the typical challenges you face in your work.

In late 2001 my eCommerce software company suffered from the New Economy meltdown and we had to close it down. I had to rethink the way of online marketing and was pushed by a good friend of mine into promoting eBay in Germany as an affiliate.

With an urgent need for money, we did some black hat spamming before we figured out that a long term white hat SEO strategy gives you a very nice stability as an affiliate. Read the rest of this entry »

I have known Rasmus Sørensen as “rumbas” for many years on Webmasterworld. He moderates the European Search Engines forum there. He was kind enough to be interviewed here.

Ash: How and when did you get into SEO? What is your current role in your business? Tell us a little about the typical challenges you face in the Danish SEO world.

I, as many others in the industry, kind of fell into SEO by chance. A good friend of mine started a small SEO firm in 1999 and asked me to assist him in doing the actual work for clients. It was mainly titles and descriptions and Google was a little know player. I was still at university studying corporate law, but quickly got my BA and never looked back. Since then I’ve been through an rather turbulent ride from 5 employees to a listing on the stock exchange, 200 people and offices in several European countries and back to only a few guys in a small office. Interesting 10+ years. Read the rest of this entry »

Rae Hoffman, aka “Sugarrae”, would be at home if she lived in Australia, where we tend to call a spade a bloody shovel. She speaks her mind on topics she is passionate about, which makes her views so valuable. No sugar coating; just the facts.

Ash: How and when did you get into SEO? What is your current role in your business? Tell us a little about the typical challenges you face in your work.

I fell into SEO by accident. I started in the non profit sector and was doing “SEO” and link building long before I knew what they were in regards to the search engines. In the early 2000s, I started doing affiliate in the telecom sector. From there I went on to do a ridiculously wide variety of niches. Read the rest of this entry »