5 Questions about Money, Success & Life with Aaron Wall of SEO Book Fame.
Posted on 29 October 2006 by John
Hey Guys! Here’s the very first of my new mini-interview series 5 Questions about Money, Success & Life. These guys are very successful and very busy, so I decided to stick with the questions I wanted to ask them the most.
The first interview is with Aaron Wall of SEO Book fame. Here we go –
I have been playing on the web for about 4 years so far. I do SEO consulting, am a blogger, an ebook author, a publisher of many websites, and am building a distributed blog review network named ReviewMe.
I actually do not have tons of money still. Whatever I make I like to reinvest into various types of growth. Generally most everything gets spent on marketing or content. I am still young enough and creative enough that I can take huge risks. I still believe I am my own best investment, so I keep trying to make new partnerships and gain equity whenever it makes sense. It is all about finding partners you can trust, and trusting yourself.
I am going to move to California soon…so hopefully that works out ok.
My view of the world is exceptionally web centric and marketing centric, but the biggest mistake I think most people make is a lack of analysis of market dynamics. Like many people jump into a market with no business model, and manually build things that could be built by programs. Having human generated content can work (and is important if you are limited on other resources), but you really have to have a good amount of patience and passion to catch up with established players AND the commoditizing effects of new competition and new algorithms…especially if a market is fairly saturated.
Also it is worth not monetizing too aggressively until your site has built enough authority to compete.
I screw up far more than I do right. So when I do something right I should do it often.
Lots of screwing up, and hopefully a good amount of doing right as well. 
Full Financial Disclosure – I owe most of my search engine success to Aaron’s excellent SEO Book and I rate it as essential reading. You can check it out at BuySEOBook.com (aff).
Next I am going to publish my interview with Zach Holman, owner of the obscenely-popular Photoshop Tutorial site Good-Tutorials.com.
