Wise Marketing Secrets Interview Series with Dave Schneider

Dave Schneider is owner and founder of Selfmadebusinessman.com he sells his own online products and has been considered as an authority in blogging.

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

What is your main source of income? (ex: Client Servicing, Affiliate Marketing, Adsense)

My main source of income is my SaaS product, NinjaOutreach, which is a blogger outreach software.

How do you close a potential SEO client deal?

I think the best way is to try to show them results before they’ve even made a deal. What can you do for them to close it?

Can you make them a custom report detailing all of the changes they need to make, with a clear plan and strategy as to how you will execute them?

Provide them with a free audit, and that will help you stand out.

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

Oh I’ve used a lot of different ones in the last several years though I can’t say I’m a diehard fan of any of them.

The one I use the most is probably Moz OpenSiteExplorer because it’s very powerful to know who is linking to a particular website. I use it for a lot of my outreach campaigns.

Have you ever been in charge or part of a campaign that was successful? If so, what was the result in the SERPs and how long did it last for and what was the term?

Most of my campaigns have been on my own websites. I’ve successfully increased the organic traffic by 3x on my girlfriend’s food blog AvocadoPesto.

I would even say we recovered from a minor penalty. It has continued over the last year.

Have you ever been part of a campaign that ended badly, with the site being banned or losing its ranking, if so what happened?

The only thing I can think of is my Niche Site, which eventually lost its rankings back in September when a lot of PBN ranked websites got hit.

It had a short run of a few months ranking in the top 3 for its key term (best biometric gun safes).

Have you ever done any blackhat SEO and if so were you penalized?

I’ve done some link building for niche websites, and the end result was having them lose their rankings (though to be fair they never would have achieved those rankings if I hadn’t built links to them, and I did make some money over that time).

What is your best practices for on-site SEO?

Having great UI/UX.

Below are two SEO scenarios, please explain in detail how you would go about both:

Scenario 1: A client has a new site that is not indexed and not ranking, he wants to rank quickly, his terms are mid-level about 25,000 searches a month , how would you go about this.

Mainly I would work on some killer content that would serve as nice link bait. It depends on the niche of course.

For example a post I just released on NinjaOutreach is 126 Must Read Traffic Generation Strategies.

A post like this with proper outreach can get hundreds of shares, email list opt ins, and will rank for nice, relevant terms like traffic generation case studies.

I prefer these long term white hat approaches, though to some degree I’ll admit this is not the quickest solution by any means.

Scenario 2: A client has an old authority site, with 1000s of backlinks all relevant but is not ranking and is not banned, what would you do to get this client ranking?

It is indexed but it is not ranking?

In that case I would probably look to see what pages it has that are close to ranking (maybe they are on lower pages for particular keywords), and look to optimize them with better keyword focus and some fresh links to see if we can get them higher.

What niches you’d consider to be untouchable (hard to really rank on) and why?

I think gambling is very hard and I’ve heard there is a lot of negative SEO involved, but honestly I don’t have that much experience in niches outside my own.

If there’s one thing that you’d want me to buy from you using your website what is it and how would you go about it?

Well my NinjaOutreach software of course. You can just head over to the pricing page.