Wise Marketing Secrets Interview Series with Roel Manarang

It is a pleasure to interview one of the coolest guys in Internet marketing industry from Pampanga—RoelManarang.

I’ve met Roel at the first ever GDI SEO Training Camp where he shared insights on how to be profitable using social media.

Let this interview help us learn more about him and some of his insightful tips and tricks about Internet marketing.

Hi Roel, great to meet you! Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, about your background, and on how you became to be involved with the Internet Marketing industry?

My entrepreneurial spirit started at a young age. I started gaining profit as a designer and programmer (making websites) at the age of 12.

Fast forward, I started blogging around 2008 and became easily obsessed in sales and marketing after I became a sales and marketing manager from 2009 to 2010.

Today, I am fortunate enough to work with more than 180 businesses around the world from small-to-big-sized businesses, including Mitsubishi, Elance, Affilorama, and more.

Apart from writing on my personal blog, I’m currently managing a team of people, Enamtila, which provides content marketing services dedicated to e-commerce and retail brands.

I’m also the publisher and founder of Tycoon Philippines, an award-winning blog on marketing, business, and entrepreneurship.

How do you personally keep yourself up-to-date with the latest in Internet marketing? It’s an ever-changing industry, so Internet marketing consultants by nature need to be on the ball—how do you achieve this?

Few things I do to be up-to-date are the following:

• Build Relationships (Friends, Influencers, and Bloggers)

Probably this is one of the things that I always do that makes me updated to current marketing trends and strategies that are still proven to work. I used to organize a lot of meetups offline.

Whereas online, I follow and connect with influencers and chat with them real time for brainstorming and knowledge exchanges regarding the industry.

• Read Blogs

I use Feedly to compile my favorite Internet marketing blogs and read the latest news, strategies, and tips on the industry. I usually spend 1 to 3 hours reading every day and never miss.

What I learned in life and in this industry is that you should adapt and change before any major trends or changes. This will be the key to success.

What sets your Internet marketing practice apart from the competition?  Are there any unique aspects to your consultancy that give you a competitive advantage?

One of the things that make us unique is the ability to adapt to changes fast. Apart from this, I usually integrate psychology on any marketing strategy and campaign that I do, which not everyone can do.

Also, all the things we do are based on data, intensive experiments, and market research and are not just a random fact or things that you’ll see online.

Lastly, we don’t serve anyone. Right now, we only focus on e-commerce and retail companies through content marketing.

For those who are beginners to Internet marketing, what advice would you give them? It could be anything from how to set the business up, to winning business, or just some plain motivational advice.

I’m 100% self-taught, and on the Wikipedia and taught myself, where the story begins.

For beginners, I advise hopping over my Internet marketing blog for case studies and strategies that I’ve used to different clients I had.

You can also go to other Internet marketing blogs to learn and read; few websites to check are Moz, Quicksprout, and Backlinko.

Then I suggest to test them yourself; if they work for you, adopt them and continually develop and monitor them over time. The best advice is not to fall in love with a tactic and defend it forever.

During your career as an Internet marketing consultant, what has been your favorite or the most interesting project that you’ve worked on?

Most of them are interesting as I rarely accept a project from potential customers. But, the most exciting project so far is a project that needs us to generate ROI on a $0 product. Of course, we did it with over $100k sales.

Are there any other websites or online projects that you want to tell our readers about or anything you are working on currently?

The current online projects that I invest right now is creating web properties.

Since content marketing and sales funnel are my biggest strength that I use to drive revenue to my customers, I also use it to drive income for myself.

What is the best quick-fix way in optimizing your website for Internet marketing?

There is no quick fix because optimization is a continuous process.

However, I’ve published proven marketing and optimization strategies that I’ve used on my websites to increase website traffic consistently without spending a lot of money that you should check out and let me know if it’s helpful.

How do you measure your Internet marketing success for a particular campaign?

There are various ways to measure the success of your marketing. However, the best and most important one is to know how much you drive your customers from your marketing campaigns—I’m talking about revenues.

Because as an entrepreneur myself, sales growth is an important factor to retain your clients and have long-term partnerships with them.

So if you do social media marketing, you should generate sales or conversions through that channel. If you do SEO, you should drive growth of sales or conversions from that channel and so on.

Power Question: How can you get your first 1,000 visitors on a new website in 1 week or less?

I’ve recently had an experiment on a new blog, which received 3,000+ visitors in just 3 days. The secret sauce is a viral post that we’ve made and marketed using the technique we call influencer marketing.

The result was impressive since we did not use any paid advertising. The technique influences influencers through compelling content to share.

We created a content featuring a list of influencers (i.e., top 100 blogs to read and follow); we let them know through Twitter and e-mail, and the new blog started to be flooded with traffic and conversions.

These influencers we’ve mentioned on the content have a wide reach of connections, which happened to be our target customers.

Can you suggest any book, video, person, or website that keeps you inspired in doing Internet marketing?

I love books. I buy and read a lot of books about marketing, entrepreneurship, and psychology, which help me create strategies that most people haven’t used and tested yet.

Here are few of my favorites and new books:

• Disciplined Entrepreneurship (Bill Aulet)
• Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh)
• The 4-Hour Workweek (Tim Ferris)
• 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene)

And lastly, how can we connect with you?

The best way to connect with me is to subscribe to my Entourage for free Internet marketing tips and strategies or follow me on Twitter. I love to connect with amazing people.