Trada is sponsoring a free online marketing MarketingProfs event on Wednesday, Oct. 6 with three sessions on search engine marketing. The first session, Content SEO, is led by Jiyan Wei of PRWeb and Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing. Lee agreed to be interviewed for Trada’s blog. You can find Lee on Twitter at @leeodden and the TopRank blog.
With a background in PR and social media, I was new to search engine marketing when I started at Trada, but it didn’t take long to find out who the rocks stars were. Lee Odden? He’s definitely an SEO rock star. He was kind enough to answer some questions about content SEO and a slew of other questions.
Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing
1. Building Your Online Reputation
That was the first question I asked Lee on how he was able to build such a strong reputation in the search engine marketing space. Lee was gracious enough to point out that it’s an iceberg analogy. That the visible rockstars are only the tip of an industry of professionals that may not solicit attention but are brilliant at link building, keyword research, content SEO, or general SEO.
For Lee himself, he was an SEO practitioner from 97 to 03, and he was a lurker on forums and blogs. I liked how he put it, he kept taking and wasn’t giving. I can be a lurker myself, and I’m not the only one out there. I like thinking of it that lurking is taking. Slowly, Lee realized he had information to provide, and he started commenting more and more. He was noticing how effective other marketers were in giving away their intellectual property and that people who shared information stood out. In late 2003, he launched the Online Marketing blog.
Lee had another fantastic analogy in that, “It’s hard to pay the bills with a pocketful of famous.” He was referring to SEO practitioners who give away too much information because they want to be famous. The end goal isn’t to be famous. It’s to be able to drive results by having a strong online reputation. To be noticed online, keep doing inherently interesting things online. If someone is really visible online, pay attention and copy what they’re doing right. Connect with them and apprentice if they’re willing.
2. Content for B-to-B Organizations
As a BtoB organization, Trada sometimes struggles with finding the right balance of social media. Lee has a recent brilliant blog post about the B2B Online Marketing Trifecta: Content, Social Media & SEO. He disagrees that social media is just for B2C and judiciously argues that B2B organizations produce massive amounts of content that can serve both SEO and social media purposes.
During our interview, Lee emphasized that you don’t make content social, as an organization, you should be more social. What he means is don’t just put photos on Flickr or videos up on YouTube. Build a network in which to share your content. More importantly, add value to your network by friending, commenting and retweeting. This will help content propagate. Providing relevant value and being part of the community will help create a scenario where people are wondering what you’ll publish next rather than asking why you’re spamming their network.
3. Leveraging Your Existing Content
Every organization has content, and Lee provided valuable insight on how organizations can keep that content in mind. One of his first tips was to build an editorial plan that will help you determine what new content to create and what content you can re-purpose. Check Lee’s blog for an excellent example, “10 Essential SEO Interviews.” Lee does an immense amount of interviews for his blog, and by providing a recap of some of the top SEO blogs he reuses content and pulls together a helpful resource for his readers.
One of his other tips was that presentations are a fantastic starting point for blog posts. By expanding upon the bullet points in the presentation, you can get 2 or 3 blog posts. With Trada’s webinar series, we’re trying the same thing. We did a webinar on holiday paid search and did series of holiday PPC blog posts on simple tips for holiday paid search, the myth of Black Monday, and the buying cycle’s affect on paid search.
During the half-hour I spent with Lee, I picked up a ton of useful information. Be sure to sign up for the MarketingProfs event on Content SEO on Oct 6 to get more of Lee’s insights! You can also check out a quick video below of Lee talking about the cycle of social media and SEO in content market optimization.
If you enjoyed our interview with Lee, you should check out our interviews with the social media marketing team at Threadless and Robert Wolfe of Crowdrise.
About Elaine Ellis
