Wise Marketing Secrets Interview Series with Adam Riemer

Adam Riemer has been doing Marketing and Online Marketing for over a decade.

He has written articles that have been published in DMNews and many other well known publications, he’s also been booked to speak at shows like Affiliate Summit, Search Engine Strategies, Realtors.org, Think Tank and many more (from About).

I encourage you to connect with Adam through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google Plus.

What is your primary marketing goal when it comes to delivering results?

Deliver new customers, revenue and customer retention. Anything else is meaningless to a company.

Some people will argue branding, but if those people don’t come back and shop or spend money, the “branding” was useless.

Everything, including branding, can be placed back to revenue or customer acquisition and that’s what our goal is.

What type of links do you believe are the best links to get?

Natural links from content relevant sources. Same as it’s always been.

Avoid article directories, subdomains, free sites, press release and their sites, blog and forum comment links, sites that allow guest posting or have very opened access for contributors, link out to irrelevant content (with the exception of high end new sites like Forbes, Huffington Post, etc,,,).

What SEO Tools do you have experience with and which ones do you prefer and why?

That’s tricky. The tools I use most are Authority Labs, UpCity (which is an up and coming tool for SMBs but has some cool featured when combined with other tools) and I’m buying SpyFu again.

Off and on I’ve used SEMRush which was good but haven’t subscribed to it for a long time.

For affiliate programs I use shareasale almost exclusively, but have had very good conversations with a few of the other networks and am impressed with the new technologies coming out.

Impact Radius has become a player in the technology space, eBay has been coming out with some cool technology and Zanox group’s affiliate window is working hard to close the gap for cross device tracking.

What kind of “white hat link building strategy that scales” that you recommend? (What makes it your favourite one? How to execute it properly?

Get great content that starts to take off. Once it does keep pushing it out. It could be the first piece you create or the 50th.

Once you have something that finds the right person, keep pushing it out until it’s dead. From there, use internal links to push the authority into the pages you want to rank.

How do you scale this favorite white hat strategy of yours?

Trade secret…not really. PR. Don’t spam, customize everything and remember the people you are pitching are human.

Treat them like humans with fully customized emails to show you read their stuff. Yes, it’s hard work but that is the only way to make it work.

DO NOT SEND CANNED EMAIL OR BLASTS TO LISTS. Unless you’re a huge brand, it does not work and can cause a lot more damage than good.

What is more important: Onsite blogging or content marketing?

Those are almost the same. Onsite blogging is a form of content marketing and a place you can store your content that isn’t a fit for the main site.

What is more important; rankings or converting traffic?

Traffic is useless if your goal is sales or customer acquisition so who cares if it doesn’t convert. If your goal is visitors to sell ad space on a CPM, then rankings.

However, if it isn’t an ad network or they aren’t quality visitors, your quality scores can go down and advertisers will leave.

Among the Google algorithm updates what is the most challenging one that you’ve encountered?

None. It’s the shitty SEO firms that are the problem. Sometimes it’s so bad that you have to start over.

What Is the most important stage of SEO for you and why?

According to other SEO’s each SEO campaign has stages from where to start and how to start it, my apologies if the question is a bit fuzzy but just to rephrase it, if SEO is about stages (ex: onpage audit, offpage audit, linkbuilding, content creation, onpage seo, etc) what do you think should be given more importance by an SEO given the current Google Algorithm updates? 

Anyone who tells you one stage is better than another is full of shit.  If you have a brand new site, that’s great because you can do everything the right way the first time.

If you get a client that had a shitty SEO, you need to start by helping to prevent penalizations.

If you have a client that had a good SEO but moved on, you can start wherever.  There is no one better stage than another.

It always depends on the site you’re dealing with.

If there’s one SEO Guru you’d recommend who and why.

There isn’t one and nobody is a Guru. Everyone has strengths and talents. I know some amazing content producers that can’t do anything from a tech side.

I know some people that can find amazing flaws or things you wouldn’t think of with code, but they can’t create content to save their life. Know what you’re good at and focus on it.

I suck at tech…I can do most of it, but I hate it and am nowhere near the best. That’s why I have friends who I have help with the tech SEO pieces when I do audits.

The client gets everything they need and it’s always high quality. My strengths are in content creation and link building and I’m honest about that.