James Schramko Interview

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James Schramko

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Name: James Schramko

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.internetmarketingspeed.com

Product: SEOPartner

James Schramko’s Bio: A school buddy of mine (quite high up the Mercedes Benz corporate ladder) first told me about this guy using SEO to sell cars in one of their prestigious Sydney based dealerships. Despite being on a pretty good wicket, this guy decided to throw it all in to become a full time Internet Marketer… pretty cool huh?

Well he went on to build an empire, in what feels like, record time. Looking back now, moving into the world of internet marketing, was probably the smartest thing he ever did.

So who is this guy?

His name is James Schramko and now it seems like he’s everywhere (nothing like turning on your RAS)… another one of my school buddies is going to his seminar, he’s hanging out with friend Pete Williams, he chats with the PLRpro boys and he’s springing up on affiliate leader boards everywhere (just saw him in the top 5 for John Carlton’s launch)… suffice to say he’s killing it online.

Anyway, I decided to track the man down to find out what he’s doing. As it happens I was no stranger to James, he had seen my work before, and was only too happy to offer his time.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from the SEO method and we’re actually really lucky today to be joined by James Schramko. I’m extremely excited to chat with James. For me, he’s come out as super affiliate and he’s connecting with all the right people. He’s shared the stage with Jeff Johnson, Brad Fallon, Eben Pagan, Perry Belcher and a whole host of names. I think what I most like about James is the style in which he delivers his material. It’s very straight up, it’s very honest, he doesn’t hold anything back, and I suppose I’ve slightly pre framed this call. Not holding anything back, hopefully he gives us all his best stuff. I’d like to welcome James Schramko to the call.

James Schramko: How are you going David?

David Jenyns: Excellent. Thanks for your time. I know it’s always hard to make time in everybody’s busy schedules. I’ll jump straight to it. Just to kick things off, this is all about the SEO method and how you drive traffic or how you drive traffic to your sites. When you’re first starting up a brand new domain and you’re about to start promoting that domain name, I would be interested to work through the process you go for promoting that domain name.

James Schramko: The first thing I would do when I’m setting up a new site is, I would do some research so I can plan out how I want to build the site around it. I like to go for the SEO side of it. I like to have a good on page structure. I’m also going to use that research to drive my off page content pointing back to it. As you know, you have to have your links having the right words. You also have to pay careful attention as to what page you’re linking back to. Research is a big component of that.

David Jenyns: When you say research, are we talking keyword research, I know you promote Market Samurai. Is that what you mean by research, or do you also mean looking into what other people are doing? How do you do that?

James Schramko: There are a number of things I’ll do for my research. Market Samurai is a great starting point. That would definitely help. There are more advanced things you can do as well, like actually run a pay per click campaign to find the high converting key phrases. Once you do, you can start matching your offers and going for higher conversions.

If you get you search query report going in your account with Google, then you can really get a feel for what sort of words people are finding a site for in the early phase. Then you can build out the site according to what the market’s telling you are high conversion type keywords. Everything I do is focused around buying keywords and going for the conversion.

David Jenyns: Let’s say we take something from scratch, because I know you’re big into systems and systematizing a lot of what you do. That’s one of the ways I think you’ve been able to scale out what you’ve done so quickly. You’ve just registered a new domain name, you’re about to do some research. You figure out, yes, this is the product or whatever I’m trying to promote. You use some Market Samurai. Do you typically drive pay per click traffic first? When you go through the process, I know there are lots of things you can do, as far as in your systematized process, where do you start?

James Schramko: What I’m trying to do is accelerate my understanding of where the money is. So I will run some pay per click in the beginning to get data. I’ll use that data then to build more content. The content I’ll start distributing out across different networks using some of the things like Article Marketing. You’re probably familiar with that sort of stuff. Then I’ll use blog comments and then forums and press releases. I’ll also get links from other blogs by using some blog networks.

The combination of that is really going to power up the pages that you want to rank well and the ones that convert well.

David Jenyns: I know you’re a big fan of WordPress and building on that particular platform. You run some pay per click, you find out what your buying keywords are, you’re monitoring Google Analytics to know where people are converting from.

Then you say, these are the keywords I need to be doing, build out the pages on your WordPress platform for those particular buying keywords. So you’ve built all that on page stuff. All my guys are familiar with the basic on page stuff. You do all the title tags and the right meta descriptions. I know you’re quite good with the sales copy as well. You’re crafting these little pages of content and then are they driving straight to the offer, straight from that, or do you funnel them into another sales letter? I suppose it depends what you’re working on.

James Schramko: It depends on the system. I’m really going well with the blog model where I have a name capture on the blog and I convert a fair bit of that traffic on to a list where I can build the relationship. There are select opportunities for that person to take any of the call to actions, either ones directly in the article itself or to the side where I’ll put strategic banner placements etc.

We’ve talked about building up the on page thing. So then what I’ll do is I’ll take that same content and leverage off page as well. I’ll get rewrites of that article distributed and point back to the first one. Then I’ll start building a layer of third party sites.

David Jenyns: Do you have a process, almost coming back to that systematized process? Ok, you’ve created the page, so you then get those articles rewritten and then going out for distribution. Do you have a thing where you say, for example, at minimum I’m looking for ten articles or twenty articles or whatever? How do you do it? I know there is no hard and fast rule but I’m curious to know. The biggest leverage we’re starting to see with ourselves and some of our clients is when they start to apply it almost as a system. For a system to work you need to have some guidelines or goalposts to shoot between.

James Schramko: I have a perpetual content machine working. All I need to do is feed it keywords and then the content will come back to me for me to place on the blog and the rest of it will be distributed automatically using some of those methods that I talked about.

David Jenyns: Is there any chance we can dig in deep as to how that model works? You get the content done, so you get it written through your writer and then it comes back to you and you publish on the blog. What are some of the different processes? You mentioned stuff like the blog comments and article submissions.

James Schramko: Basically as soon as an article is posted on my blog, that activates back linking and further distribution of that article. That’s the signal.

David Jenyns: Where are you posting on that? Do you take it to Ezine?

James Schramko: Much broader than that. Basically I have someone posting it to article submission sites. So it will go to all the popular article sites and it will also go to private blog networks. It will be linked back to the site and the category and to the article itself. They’ll be different versions of the article.

David Jenyns: Where’s this assistant posting it? It sounds like there are quite a few different areas it’s going out to.

James Schramko: Yes, it goes across several networks, so you don’t want to be single network dependent because it’s too much of a pattern. Also you’re missing opportunities. So you want to go quite broad with your traffic syndication. I use a number of networks and a number of ways to get links. I think that’s worked well for me to go very broad. I’ve got a lot of different traffic channels for my content and that’s why I get a lot more traffic than most people. Also I’m able to cover some of the areas that they’re missing.

David Jenyns: How does your assistant or the assistant who’s posting the content out, know which one to do? Let’s say you’ve just created that content and let’s say you’ve got six or seven different methods you talked about briefly. Do you just say, pick three of the seven different methods that we have at random and post for that? I’m just really wondering how your systematize it.

James Schramko: I have subscriptions with some services and we use all of them, the only enhancement or variable is if I want to add on top. If I want to do an extra special bomb, then I could go a little bit hard core. Say, video distribution; we would start with a baseline but I would also add in a couple of extra video channels if I decide that is going to be worth the effort.

David Jenyns: Yes, I think I actually saw on your blog just recently, you did a post as far as using Animoto and then the way you go you distribute that using Traffic Geyser.

James Schramko: Yes, that is a good example of one traffic channel and there are so many.

David Jenyns: Do you have systems that you’ve created inside your business for each one of the channels?

James Schramko: Yes. So I have a team and I’ve also mapped out the system. So I can easily refer to a mind map and see each of the traffic channels and tick off if it’s been activated or not. There are some that are just on auto default. That will happen for every single article. It will depend on whether it is evergreen content or whether it’s time dependent, if it is a launch or just a general article, as to how hard I’ll push it.

David Jenyns: It’s funny. You mentioned something there which is something similar to what we do. I don’t know if you do it in this way. We use Google Docs and we’re logging the different pieces of content we have on the site and the keyword that we’re optimizing for. Then we have different columns where we mark depending on the different promotion we use for that particular page. Is that what you mean by logging what sort of traffic channels you are activating for those pages?

James Schramko: That’s more sophisticated than what I’m doing. I‘ve just got a mind map that has most of the available options on it. I just look at it and see if I’ve activated one. So for example, I might look at pay per click and I could say, ok, have I got a search campaign, tick, have I got content network, yes, have I got banners and text in the content network, have I put my negative list, am I going for second tier pay per click traffic, am I going for CPV traffic? I’ll just tick the box.

I’ll use my core words and my seed article. If I have extra content I’ll usually have pictures and audio so I can generate videos from it or I’ll have an interview or an Animoto video.

David Jenyns: You mentioned before it’s almost like you’ve got some default things that are done. Then it’s like, depending on whether you want to juice it up, you tick some of those other boxes. The default things that you do, to break that down, to go really granular, what are the default things that you like to do?

James Schramko: Well an article will always be posted to my blog and then submitted to article directories. Then there will be separate blog comments linking back to the article from a blog network. There will be links purchased to link back to the post. They’re all default things. The additional ones would be forum comments, press release and say Google local submission, that sort of stuff.

David Jenyns: One thing that we hadn’t dug too much into, I suppose we do it more where we are as far as selling links. We do that through text link ads. I’m interested to know, when purchasing links, what service you look at for that.

James Schramko: I pretty much use Linkvana. I also have access to two private blog networks that are not publicly available, which I’ve cultivated. I have my own one and I joint venture with someone else. I let them use mine and I use theirs.

David Jenyns: You’re doing this promotion. You’ve got your default and that will just roll out. Your one I know who looks at your stats and that sort of thing. You’re monitoring which keywords are obviously converting. You did some of that also through your pay per click initial testing as well, to decide which ones you are going to juice up further. That will depend on is it evergreen or are there any other triggers that make you go, right, I’m going to look at a forum or a press release or videos?

James Schramko: Basically when I find stuff converting I just start to zone in on it more. They’ll identify themselves, especially with the paid marketing. If it’s converting from paid marketing, it’s a really good sign. You should leverage it out with free traffic as well.

David Jenyns: Very good. With all the different things we’ve talked about, and I know there are so many different factors that make up getting positions in Google, or any search engine for that matter, if you had to just say down to one thing, what the single biggest ranking factor is, what do you see, with all the testing that you’ve done, is the single biggest factor when it comes to ranking sites?

James Schramko: Probably the page title.

David Jenyns: Yes. How do you do your page titles? Obviously you’ve got the keyword in there. Are there any other things that you do to get the most out of that page title?

James Schramko: You have to put it call to action if you can. It should be a selling title. You’re really going for the conversion. It’s not enough just to be ranked at the top. It doesn’t make any difference, if it doesn’t compel people, it’s useless. So that’s where I had this big epiphany and I split tested. I had two identical blogs but slightly different mechanisms. The one with the stronger call to action just blitzed it like 98 to 2 out of 100. It was so significantly different.

David Jenyns: That’s definitely one thing that makes you stand out from the crowd, is the testing that you do. Testing is one of those things which can be the difference between someone making it really big versus just kicking along.

James Schramko: Think about it this way. If you can increase your conversions by 2% and you’re only doing 2%, it’s like getting twice as much traffic. So it’s worth looking at. I’m not a testing freak, but it is worth considering. Be curious and have a look behind the scenes to see what is actually happening. You’d be surprised quite often how easy it is to get an improvement just by checking something out. It could be as easy as installing Heat Map tracking onto your site just to know where people are clicking.

David Jenyns: What do you use for split tests?

James Schramko: I mostly just use Google Website Optimizer or a Link Rotator.

David Jenyns: Very good. You have a lot of Google’s tools and they’re all free.

James Schramko: They have great tools.

David Jenyns: With some of the other things you do, like you’ve got a lot of different link building mechanisms, for all of what you do, where would you identify the biggest bang for your buck? You did say the importance of link diversity and you don’t want to just hone into one particular thing. I’m curious to know, of all the things you’ve tested, where do you notice the biggest bang for your buck?

James Schramko: In terms of conversions, it’s pretty hard to beat forum signatures and blog comments. They’re very targeted buyers, it’s super targeted. You can control where you place your link to a high degree. Here’s a tip. You use the search tool in a form and search for exactly the problem that your blog post solves. Posting that thread you’ll get quite a lot of conversions.

David Jenyns: Very good.

James Schramko: Also you’re posting from a keyword related site.

David Jenyns: So you get the good inbound link. With forums, we’ve done a little bit of forum commenting and also blog commenting as well what are the sort of tips you have? We didn’t have a great success with it. The biggest reason was we were trying to do it en masse. We were using different assistants to do it. We tried to use ones who at least had a grasp of the English language.

But we weren’t seeing a huge amount of traction for how much we were spending. Sometimes you would make a post, this was more so on blog commenting and then that blog comment may not have got accepted. What are your thoughts? Is that something you’re doing yourself or are you outsourcing?

James Schramko: Yes. I do that myself. When it comes to my primary blogs, I post the comments, I post the content, I do the forum posting. You have a lot of control and influence on that. When it comes to article distribution and buying links, or submitting videos you don’t need to be involved with that so much because it’s not going to change the process.

David Jenyns: So I suppose to dig even deeper into that, when you set out what you do for the day, what are the tasks that you’re really hands on with?

James Schramko: Whatever has an urgent deadline, just like a kid with homework.

David Jenyns: All jokes aside, the way you do business is quite structured and you’ve come from that corporate background and you’ve swapped over to the internet marketing world, and you’re not doing everything yourself. There’s no chance that you could be having the success that you are, doing a lot of what you’re doing on your own. You said all the article promotion and buying links gets outsourced. Is it all the content generation or what other things grab your attention?

James Schramko: No, I don’t generate content except for my premium blog posts. All of my content is outsourced, part of my traffic is outsourced. I outsource design, programming, some general administration, shopping. It extends beyond the internet. You’ve got to try and outsource stuff around the house as well if you possibly can, to free you up. A lot of people get distracted and they’re only spending one or two hours on their business. It’s usually 1.5 hours of going through emails and if you’re lucky ten minutes of doing anything to help you get traffic or conversions or create content.

That’s where most people get stuck, it’s just not enough time in on the game.

David Jenyns: I love that time management stuff. I know there’s that great course I don’t know if you’ve listened to it, that is Eben Pagan’s Wake Up Productive and The Effective Executive, by Drucker, that’s a great book on time management.

James Schramko: I love that stuff. I quote Drucker when I speak. He said it’s about doing the right things, not doing things right, but doing the right things. What I do every day is, I focus on what is going to give me a massive result. So I can leave a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff is trivial. When you get right down to it, there are some things that are going to make a huge difference to your income and there are other things that aren’t. So I’m always trying to focus on the most productive things, even if I let some other stuff fall by the wayside. I don’t get tied up in it.

I might have a blog that’s out of date or might have some plug ins updated, but it’s not really as important as putting out the product launch where you’re going to get commission today.

David Jenyns: How do you identify that? Is it something you’re doing at the start of the week and you say, here’s what I’m going to do, and I’m going to scribble it up on my whiteboard? How do you do that?

James Schramko: My whiteboard’s just like a dashboard of what’s important. I have a couple of things on there that remind me what I’m supposed to do, my core things. I don’t want to commit stuff to memory because then it is using up brain capacity. I just let it all go. I’ll have up there core things that I’m doing in my business right now. On the other whiteboard is what the actual tasks are that have to be done. I’ll just try and get rid of them as quickly as I possibly can, just keeping up with the schedule of whatever I commit myself to.

I’ve always got something coming up and I’ll usually produce it just in time, so that it’s fresh and I can attack it once and get it off my plate. I’m not one to pre plan something for three weeks; there’s just way too much flexibility there .I’m more likely to do it three days before, just do it, complete it, finish it and get it off the production line and move on to the next thing.

David Jenyns: You’re working from home and you’ve got the outsourcers. Are you dealing directly with your outsourcers or have you got someone you work with who manages your outsourcers?

James Schramko: Yes, I have a primary outsourcer who I’ve encouraged to grow the business underneath my level. I don’t see or deal with many of the people who are contributing to my stuff, I just have someone in the middle. I’ve more or less outsourced management, is the way I describe that.

David Jenyns: Learning those sort of things, that is the sort of thing that will take someone’s business to the next level.

James Schramko: No doubt. I’m used to hiring and delegating and supervising, so it comes quite naturally for me to keep tabs on where people are up to. I used to have seventy-two employees, so you always had to know what people were up to. If you put projects out there, I just have in the back of my mind, I probably should be getting this thing back soon and usually it will just arrive. Otherwise I just pop off an email and say, I just remembered this, where are we up to and it’ll be almost finished or whatever.

There’s definitely an element to that and it’s probably where a lot of people go wrong. They’re trying to do everything for free and they’re not skilled with business. They’re learning internet marketing as a few tactics strung together.

David Jenyns: Yes, especially people can get caught up in SEO and promoting that sort of stuff. There are so many different things. Rich Schefren outlined this the best when he first came out with the Internet Marketing Manifesto and showed you, in the middle, surrounded by all these different tasks that need to be completed. There is no chance you’d be able to get it all done if you tried to do it yourself. SEO particularly, you can get caught up in all these different techniques and tactics and things like that.

Really breaking it down and coming up with a system and having a replicable system is important. I think that is why I was trying to really dig in deep to find that system that you’ve created. Just to make sure I’ve got it quite clear, you’ve got your initial things that happen for promotion when you get some content generated, that’s a system that will just happen. Following that, if you say, yes this is something I want to promote then you’ve got those extra methods. Those extra methods, things like the press releases, forums and videos, is that something that you’re personally doing?

James Schramko: Sometimes I will because I rather enjoy that stuff. I know that I can engineer things to be a combination of search engine optimization and copy. So I’m going for that call to action. It’s ok, I don’t have a video guy come around and film videos or anything. I just put up a flip camera on a tripod and send out something rough or make a little video on it. It’s ok to do that.

I think one of the key things people have to realize is that they don’t have to do everything. Just the core things that are going to work well for them will get most of the results. So in my case, I know that I get most of my results from having a good piece of content on a nice WordPress blog that builds my list and I feed it from various syndication sources and some RSS feeds and back links and so on. They’re automatically happening and you can even auto bookmark if you want. I know that’s the core thing.

The rest of the stuff is going to add 10 or 20 or 30% on top. The question then is, do you keep adding core things or do you keep trying to do everything all the time? You don’t have to do everything all the time, so don’t feel pressured or stressed out if you can’t do everything that you know you’re supposed to do. I probably do a fraction of what I know about but that’s enough to get by.

David Jenyns: I had another question here I’ve been asking some of the other guys. I’m interested to find out, of the different methods and ways for driving traffic, and you’re monitoring your stats, I’m keen to see where you see the biggest opportunity for easy rankings. Do you see something that is coming on the horizon, because you’re in the thick of it, where you say, this is what I’m spending and focusing a lot of time on?

James Schramko: I think more and more relevancy, more personalized, more localized, more multi media. It’s obvious that multi media is big. I’ve been using Image Tricks and things to get rankings, video. A lot of people ignore audio but it is a big one. It is super easy to get leveraged out there with audio and so few people do it.

David Jenyns: How are you doing that? Are you just splitting audio straight from your video?

James: You can do that. Often I’ll just do an audio and then I’ll blend it with a picture and you turn that into a video, so you can go the other way. Or you can literally just read a post and then podcast it. It is great to get that sticky feel about it for your website. You have a lot of social proof; they can see that it’s been downloaded a thousand times so it really does help bring in that credibility. People keep coming back. That’s not going to hurt your search engine results.

Google notices that you have people coming back and clicking around your site, more page views, staying on your site for longer, lower bounce rate. I’m sure that stuff indirectly helps.

David Jenyns: Yes, I agree. With the audio, are you just posting that on your blog for someone to interact with or are you doing distribution of that as well?

James Schramko: I usually just give it away for free. I podcast it from my blog and you can syndicate that as well if you want to submit it to some podcasting directories and get yourself some more links. I think this is the big trend. I think Google are going to pay more attention to different media other than just posts.

David Jenyns: Yes. You touched on video and you mentioned video before. Video’s working fantastically well. I think coupling that with audio is good. We haven’t done a great deal of audio, so I’ll definitely have to take a look into that.
James: I don’t think many people do, I think they miss that. I had over 10,000 podcasts downloaded off my blog. The great thing is, it’s a Trojan horse. It sits on iTunes, it goes on every iPhone or iPod shuffle. You have access to your customer when they’re in a pretty receptive environment, like driving along or walking along the road with headphones on. You have 100% access with no distractions.

David Jenyns: Yes. I think getting them on those multiple media is definitely the way to go and hook them in. You obviously do a lot of stuff in the internet marketing niche and I suppose we talked a lot about the different things you’re doing there. Have you branched out much into other niches as well?

James Schramko: I have. I think you mentioned the key word, ‘obvious.’ My internet marketing stuff is quite out in public and the non internet marketing stuff is fairly well obscured.

David Jenyns: Those things, are you working with your real businesses? I’m trying to figure out if it’s the same process you’re doing for your internet marketing.

James Schramko: It’s exactly the same process. You could use exactly the same process, you might just want to consider using some different account names or pen names if you want to separate you business out.

For off line clients doing online SEO, it’s exactly the same process. I tell them the same thing. They have to have hero content, they have to leverage it into multi media. I put them into the same system. It’s all under their account so that no one’s going to find that stuff. I just set up another replication of what I have. I use the same content people and everything.

David Jenyns: I know you actually take on some outside clients as well. With what you’re doing there, are you going through the same process, which is, you set up a WordPress blog for them, that is where you have all the premium content? It’s all about that primary blog with the really good content, Ed calls it the champagne content, it’s that really high quality content on that primary blog. Then you use the other networks, or all the different ways for getting links to link back into that. Is that primarily what you’re doing?

James Schramko: Exactly. It’s like I call it, putting the t-ball on the stick when you set up that blog. Then you go along and whack it with the bat. That’s putting the off site content and hammering it to that. Google just loves it. They’ll shoot it up. Once you have an authority blog, you can rank for any long tail phrase overnight, within hours really.

David Jenyns: What are your thoughts on building up networks of sites and things like that? This is getting caught up in the whole tactics of SEO and building your blog networks to support sites. If you’ve got a new client, are you looking at building a couple of blogs or do you just build them that one blog and then promote it through the different methods and then say, focus in on that?

James Schramko: No, I build several. You start with your money page or your money site which has got your core content and then you should definitely have a support network if you want to make it really strong. The great thing is, if you’re doing this for other people, you can build them their site in the middle and you can rank from the sites around it. They don’t have to have ownership of that. That can really be a good way to lock in a service fee.

David Jenyns: Yes, and that’s what you’re doing. I was talking to Marc Lindsay the other day and he was talking about the biggest growth that they’re seeing in their business is coming from taking these external clients on board and it’s funny, I’m almost hearing that echoed from you. Getting these external clients can be great potential?

James Schramko: It’s enormously profitable, a lot more than selling an ebook. Maybe because we speak every couple of days, that could be part of it too. He’s a very switched on guy. You should listen to anything Marc Lindsay says. Those guys are doing a great job.

David Jenyns: Working with those off line clients as well, we talk about in the internet marketing niche going after particular keywords, and you’ve got every man and his dog going after it. When you’re doing localized search and you’re going for ‘dentist Toorak’, or even ‘dentist Melbourne,’ it’s so much easier to go for something like that than it is for some of these more competitive terms.

James Schramko: It’s so easy you have to back off a little bit. I took an ultra competitive market locally and within one week I owned most of page one and I had to back off, I was worried about getting booted for over optimization. You have to be careful not to use too many of the tricks in your bag of tricks because you can actually cause yourself some pain.

David Jenyns: You really end up being a big fish in a little pond and you just absolutely dominate.

James Schramko: And they love you for it too, they are like your best friend. I was literally called into the office of one of my clients a few months afterwards and they asked me if we were doing anything illegal, because they couldn’t believe the increase in results from what they had. They had a very poor performing site that was nowhere to be seen, it had no on page optimization, no off page links, nothing. We absolutely dominated and they couldn’t believe it. It was super human results compared to what people expect.

Some of the basic stuff we’ve talked about is enough to go out and generate thousands per month from a decent client.

David Jenyns: When they called you into that office, did you have a little flip camera ready and get all of that on camera? That right there would be a gold testimonial.

James Schramko: They won’t give me a testimonial because they don’t want their competitors to know how they did it. It’s a very, very lucrative niche. One of their clients has generated them over $150,000 just from one of the leads they got. I’m like the secret squirrel; these clients are very excited. They won’t leave you either, they’ll keep paying whatever you ask.

David Jenyns: I think here we’ve tapped on some tremendous potential. These people who’ve never seen any internet marketing realm, and anything we’re doing is completely new to them. So they’re completely blown out of the water by what you’re doing. The second thing is, if you target the people you’re working with correctly, like you said, one client being $150,000, for them, giving you $5,000 – $10,000 a month for your services is for them a drop in the bucket. A lot of internet marketers are out there battling away trying to sell a $50 ebook.

James Schramko: It’s crazy, they’re out there in forums whinging and moaning about the latest guru who’s trying to suck the money out of their wallet. There are people sitting in offices in the local town who’ve never heard of WordPress, who would not know what anchor text is if it hit them in the face, and they’re happy to pay thousands to be fixed up. If someone’s looking for a good, recurring income business model, that’s a great place to start.

David Jenyns: I mentioned at the start of the call, you network incredibly well and you’ve got some fantastic connections. I’m curious to know, when it comes to SEO who do you keep your eye on?

James Schramko: You can get some good information from Jerry West. I’ve read all their books: Brad Callen and Brad Fallon, but I like Jerry West’s stuff. I also like the guy who was at StomperNet, Dan Thies. He’s got great information, and I managed to catch up with both of them and Dan Thies has a really nice down to earth approach to SEO. He’s not a super techie like Leslie Rohde and so on. I like the practical SEO side of things. I don’t go on the SEO forums I don’t know all the geeky stuff at all.

I just know what Google wants is a nice experience, nice relevant content, well structured, not trying to rip them off. If you deliver them what they want you can easily get good rankings if you don’t try and spam or take short cuts or sneaky tricks, then you’ll go just fine. I was mucking around with the term internet marketer, to see if I could rank for that, and I managed to push that up on to page one of Google. I’ve always had a practical approach. Just have a sensible, reasonable approach to thing and you’ll do fine.

David Jenyns: You’ve shared some gold there. For people who want to find out more about you, I suppose people can jump on Google and type in James Schramko or if you want to head to theseomethod.com/james I’ll link through to James’ primary site. Did you have any final thoughts you wanted to leave on, James?

James Schramko: With search engine optimization, a lot of people make it sound difficult, but don’t be intimidated by it, it’s actually very straight forward. I see brand new people doing this the right way from the beginning and they get fantastic results. Focus carefully on what you’re trying to rank for in the first place. A lot of people make that mistake; I did, trying to rank for the wrong keywords is silly.

Once you’ve figured out what to rank for, work your content around that and make it good quality and put the buying keywords in the page title and the description and a couple of links to it from a few different places and you should be fine.

David Jenyns: Fantastic. I can’t thank you enough for your time James. It is much appreciated.

James Schramko: It’s great to catch up.

David Jenyns: Thanks again.

James Schramko: Thanks Dave.

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