Wise Marketing Secrets Interview Series with Jason Delodovici
Jason James Delodovici is a serial entrepreneur and digital market who currently works at When I Work, an employee scheduling and attendance software for small businesses.
What is your primary marketing goal when it comes to delivering results?
This all depends on what the goal is of your marketing campaign. Is it to increase email subscribers? Is it user and revenue growth at your SaaS startup?
The most impactful growth goal that I’m working on at When I Work is to maximize revenue by increasing trial to paid user conversion rates.
What type of links do you believe are the best links to get?
Any link that is relevant to your site is what you want. It’s not easy getting links – we all know that.
So wasting a bunch of time trying to get 3-4 .edu links will probably not be as impactful as the easier 10-15 links you can get from relevant blogs.
What SEO Tools do you have experience with and which ones do you prefer and why?
I have experience using a lot of different keyword ranking tools and backlink analysis tools but now a days most tools try to have an “all in one” approach so if I had to recommend a tool every SEO should master it would be SEMRush.
SEMRush gives you pretty much everything you need to analyze your SEO efforts and your competitors.
What kind of “white hat link building strategy that scales” that you recommend? (What makes it your favorite one? How to execute it properly?)
The best link building strategy that I’ve used in the last year is guest posting. What I do is I create a monster content list, for example, “25 Best HR Resources of 2015.”
In the article I’ll link out to the top 25 HR resources. Then I’ll email them and let them know I mentioned them and in return ask for a guest post.
This way I’ll get links pointing to my HR related website as well as capture a new audience through my guest post.
This has a pretty high conversion rate (roughly 25-30%) meaning if I create a list post of 100 HR companies and email all of them I’ll get about 25 to 30 guest posts/links.
How do you scale this favorite white hat strategy of yours?
I scale it by creating multiple list posts a month. Since I’m working in house right now 25-30 guest posts a month is a good amount.
If you are trying to scale this for agency use, start coming up with content ideas and monster list posts that you can publish every week. That way you can start getting over 100 links a month.
What is more important: Onsite blogging or content marketing?
Blogging is a huge part of your content marketing strategy.
To be able to have an effective blog that actually drives inbound leads/sales you need to know your audience and create content that appeals to their emotions and persuades them to convert.
Having an effect content marketing strategy that incorporates blogging will be your best bet to start driving those inbound leads.
What is more important; rankings or converting traffic?
Rankings won’t matter if you can’t convert the traffic. You need to have effective landing pages and converting homepages and product pages.
If you have a random page that ranks for a certain keyword that is starting to drive a significant amount of organic traffic, analyze that page and make sure it is set up for conversions with call to actions and updated/more persuasive copy.
Among the Google algorithm updates what is the most challenging one that you’ve encountered?
Penguin for sure. I was working on a client (Slideshare) who was hit by the Penguin update and their traffic plummeted from 5 million sessions a day to 2 million sessions a day.
Seriously…a 3 million session a day drop. The problem was when someone embedded a slide deck on their own website, Slideshare added a link to the embed code that was a little too keyword focused.
We solved the problem by adding branded only anchor text to their embed codes and reaching out to a lot of webmasters to change the existing embed code to the new one on their blogs.
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?
Content creation is the most important aspect to SEO. If you’re content sucks no one will link to you, no one will share and no one will convert.
We’re not in SEO la-la land like in 2009 where rankings were easy to get and content didn’t really matter. Now a days, users are more savvy and expect the best content.
If there’s one SEO Guru you’d recommend who and why.
Sujan Patel. He’s taught be everything about SEO and digital marketing for the past 6 years. He’s introduced me to top marketers around the web and he’s always killing it!