1 Guy. 1 Month. 2000 New Blog Subscribers

What is up guys Becker here,

It is time for yet another Link Back interview with a person who is killing it online.

Before I get into this , I want to talk about something I noticed recently that I found very interesting about Internet Marketing. I honestly have yet to meet a person who is killing it online that is not also killing it in multiple other aspects of life. I attribute this to one and only 1 things.

Being extremely sucessful online requires person that is CONSTANTLY taking action in every thing he does.

That is the honest truth. I cannot think back to a time when I met a person who was ONLY good at internet marketing.

With That Being Said

I am extremely excited about this interview because the interviewee is a perfect example of what I was talking about above. IM requires a person who constantly is looking for more and does not even recognize the barriers in his way

If there is a coding problem on his website…he learns code and fixs it the next day

If there is not a wordpress theme that is perfect for his site..he makes his own

If you are having trouble getting subscribers, he trys method after method until he creates a subscriber explosion

This is how a truly successful Internet Marketer operates. If there is a wall, you smash at it till you get through..period

So, without further adue I would like to introduce you guys to Brad Branson (of BradBranson.com)

At the moment, Brad actually travels the world as a professional dating coach for one of the worlds largest dating companies, RSD. I personally think that is purrrdy cool, but this is an internet marketing blog I am not interviewing him to talk about that.

What we are here to talk about are some of the crazy shit I have seen Brad pull of online like:

  • Creating a massively popular blog and exploding its subscriber base in a ridicolously short period of time
  • Literally dominating SEO. When I first met Brad he was just starting to get into internet marketing. 2 months later when I checked back in his guy was sitting at the top of Google for a ton of massive search terms. (Check out the search: How to kiss a girl) I have never seen someone get results like that so quickly
  • And all sorts of other cool stuff…you get the point

The Taking Action Interview

So lets get right into it, Brad the first question on my mind is,

Hundreds of people try to create blogs around things they are passoinate about…Yet very few ever see success. Why is Brad Branson.com so popular? What have you done different?

Looking back on the last year and a half since the blog was created, there are a variety of reasons why I think BradBranson.com has been successful. It’s probably a mixture of technical know how, along with writing compelling articles.

I’m lucky that I get to meet the type of people who read my site every weekend, and through the question and answer sessions we have I always am able to come up with new content.

I find the best content is inspired writing. You have to really be in the moment and jazzed about what you are writing about. It just comes through the page, some fourth dimensional vibe that the reader can feel. It’s REALLY obvious when you look at the number of comments/likes/shares when I’m inspired about what I’m writing compared to the articles where I just do some question and answer mundane type of article.

But for the first 6-8 months I followed the old adage of quality content wins, and that just isn’t enough to build momentum around your site. You have to be constantly hording new subscribers, keeping them engaged, and finding ways to build more qualified traffic to your site.

Once I started more aggressive SEO strategies, my traffic increased dramatically.

Blogs live and die by traffic. How did you get traffic to BB.com and what are your future plans to keep it growing?

My main traffic now is a mixture of organic search results, links from forums, and direct traffic.

The biggest impact right now is optimizing heavily for some big hitter search terms. Terms in the 70-200,000 exact match range, many of which I’m on the first page of google already for.

Even after a year of writing content and getting traffic to my site through writing on forums and linking to articles, the exponential increases I’ve seen from optimizing for search traffic suggests I’ll probably double the number of unique visitors to the site in the next 2-3 months, hopefully crossing the 100,000 unique visitor mark.

In the future I plan on grabbing some paid traffic as well to optimize specific landing pages for email newsletter leads, and split testing it to find out what garners the most leads. But right now I’m just working on building long term organic traffic to the site.

Even though the bounce rate is pretty high on the organic traffic, it’s almost 95% new visitors, so purely on brute numbers, I’m building a lot of momentum with repeat visitors.

 

Your site generated a substantial RSS feed in a niche that is very competitive niche, how do you convert so many visitors.

Offer a great free product if they sign up, and try to make it as easy as possible for them.

Even with a giant orange RSS subscriber box I still have people asking all the time how to get the free ebook that comes when they subscribe. So it is really important to make it as obvious as possible how to get the “ethical bribe.”

Alright enough about your blog.. What else are you currently looking into in the internet marketing world? What are your future goals?

There is a synergistic approach I’ve taken between my side IM ventures and the Brad blog. Through building traffic and optimizing the brad site, I’ve learned a lot about how a natural high quality website garners natural links, and yet how it responds to a little “push” with other link building techniques.

I then can create new websites and have them look “viral” as I build them out with content and link building strategies. Then from what works on these new sites, I can use similar link building techniques on the brad site for articles that already have lots of natural links to really supercharge the pages moving up the google search results.

Completely separate from my blog, the other IM ventures I have, my goal is to be as passive as possible, so I’ve chosen a SEO-Adsense type model. I like Adsense because I don’t have to worry much about writing copy, split testing or finding affiliate offers, google takes care of all that for me.

But, once I get a good base passive income from my adsense sites, my goal is to get into paid traffic affiliate offers of some sort. You are able to monetize them quicker, and it is a lot more scalable without a huge staff or outsourcing.

I’m also slowly developing a gameplan for my own products through the Brad blog, but that’s a ways down the road.

 

You call your self a Renaissance man at times on your blog. What other seemingly unrelated skills have helped succeed so far online?
From my background as a scientist, I always wrote a lot of scientific papers, which is probably why the blog writing came so easy to me. I’ve been starting to read more books on good writing skills and diction to increase the quality further in my articles.

Promotion is another biggie when it comes to building your personal brand, and my background playing in a band and learning grassroots promotion has helped me build out the social media aspect of the brand. You always gotta stay on the grind.

Also, I learned Adobe Illustrator and audio/video editing from playing in the band, which are all great skills to have when it comes to tweaking the theme of your site or developing a youTube presence.

 

How do you balance your hectic lifestyle as a world traveling dating coach and other areas of your life?

It’s hard at times mostly because internet can be extremely shoddy depending on the country you are in. But whenever I get the opportunity to find some fast internet connections, I make sure to get all the stuff that might take a while done in spurts. Like long term link building strategies and all that.

 

What are some of your favorite sites/blogs to visit?

I try not to spend too much time reading and visiting other sites, I have too much to work on for my own stuff.

I spend a lot of time over on the wickedfire forum. But there is a pretty high noise to signal ratio over there.

I saw you interviewed Glen over at Viperchill. He always has great new content.

Other than that, most of my time is spent on rsdnation answering questions there.

And then there is my eternally open adsense account where I’m always analyzing data.

What is one thing you wish you knew when you first got into blogging and Internet Marketing?

The repeat visitor aspect of blogging makes traditional advertising a pretty tough monetization model. You really have to think long term for blogging, write quality content for a YEAR OR TWO and then expect to monetize it through developing your own products or building an email list where you can promote other affiliate offers that way.

For internet marketing as a whole, don’t expect some get rich quick idea. It takes a LONG TIME to figure out what type of strategy you want to use. If someone is just starting off, saying you are getting into “internet marketing” is almost like saying you are getting into “business” in the offline arena.

PPC, SEO, PPV, blogging, ecommerce, there are literally MILLIONS of different approaches, and starting off you kind of just have to familiarize yourself with all of it and find how your unique skills/traits will allow you to set yourself apart.

 

Thanks for the interview Brad!
Anytime!

What to take away from this

One thing I would really like to point out is the MINDSET Brad has. When your mind is constantly looking for that next step online instead of focusing on a simple end goal, success is INEVIDABLE

There was never a point in the interview where he said “Well I just want to do as little work as possible to get to point A and then stop learning” or “I only want to focus on this because it is in my comfort zone”. This is how 95% of people think and this WHY 95% of people fail online in my opinion.

A successful person is CONSTANTLY thinking 10 successful steps in advance. Instead of thinking “I want to rank for this” a true Internet marketer is thinkg ” After I rank for this, I am going to optimize this and increase this. I will then expand on this and then leverage it take over the world”

Lastly

What I would also like to point out is all the skills that Brad has built to make money online. Instead of just learning SEO and calling it good, he then started learning how to design sites, convert traffic and about a billion other things. If you take his personal skills as a dating coach/x-scientist you have a severe package of lethality.

I highly highly encourage anyone involved in IM (newbie or freakishly advanced) to approach gaining knowledge in the exact same way.

With that being said, check out Brad Branson.com and do not do drugs!

<3

-Becker