Todd Malicoat, AKA StuntDubl,
has created a legendary brand among search marketing insiders and
needs little introduction. I first had the pleasure of watching him
present “Digg pointers” along with Neil Patel at SES
Chicago 2006 and was immediately engaged by his no-shit
high-integrity approach to content, link building, making friends,
sharing, and building his own brand. This guy is a true search
marketing artist.

StuntDubl was an early SEM blogger, linkbaiter
and foundational search marketing practitioner. With recent posts
like “The SEO
Playbook - Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice,” Todd is still
quietly active in the blogging community as he builds companies,
speaks at search marketing shows, and selectively services
clients.

Recently I interviewed him by phone. We talked
about linking, search marketing, StumbleUpon, his early Digg days,
vetting SEM firms, starting an SEO career, and other practical
topics. You’re invited to listen to the MP3 and read the full
transcript. This is a must-listen for anyone considering a career
in search marketing and seasoned veterans alike.

Marty: Todd, you’re one of
the most respected link baiters in the world. I’m curious as to how
you got your start in social network link building and if you have
any anecdotes regarding your background and early viral
successes.

Todd: The first time I did
that vanity search for my own name and went out and found my own
resume out there online, you know my resume had my name, phone
number, home address, everything else, and I went, “Oh well, I
guess that’s so much for privacy,” and so I kind of took the
proactive approach to it. So as much as my name is out there and
everything else, it really wasn’t an accident of, I was pretty much
a shameless whore with it, with promoting myself and just always
putting content out, you know. Like this year, you know, always
being willing to do an interview or talk with someone or record
some content here and there. So that’s really kind of how from a
personal perspective I got involved in the social networking aspect
of the web in general, just kind of within the Internet marketing
community, and just really getting to know people and having
conversations with people, and like you were saying earlier before
we started recording, it’s just kind of a very cool community full
of all kinds of interesting people, and the fact that you get to
know those people and then how it works, it’s really a pretty
amazing thing.

Marty: What was the first actual link bait
content you ever blew out on the Internet, Todd?

Todd: Yeah, I really always did it as the SEO
thing, and I guess I didn’t even think of it as link bait at the
time as much, so it was more really just writing posts about SEO
before there was a whole lot of SEO bloggers, I guess. And that
came from, I went to a webmaster world show and realized that
everybody just knew my screen name and webmaster world where I had
been posting and such, so that then became the blog, and then just
continues to write there, and it wasn’t so much where it is now of
specifically saying I’m going to craft a piece of content to go out
and get some links, it was more just writing about, I guess it was
a little more authentic at that point –

Marty: Mm hmm.

Todd: – but it wasn’t specifically geared to
draw links –

Marty: Huh.

Todd: – and it wasn’t quite as outrageous and,
not even outrageous but just, uh –

Marty: Hyperbolic.

Todd: Yeah, yeah. It wasn’t explicitly for
links, it just kind of naturally did that, and I think in ways I’ve
really, you know, shot myself in the foot there, you know, because
every time I do do a piece of content or something, it gets called
out as link bait now. [laughs] So if I do an exceptional piece of
content, you know, it gets called out as link bait all the time,
which can be a good or bad thing, I guess, depending on how you’re
looking at it, and certainly it is and certainly I love the links.
And part of how I got into it was just having, got into link
building for so long and knowing how tedious and time consuming,
but at the same time valuable it was, the link baiting thing just
became a no-brainer of people.

Marty: Right. Do you remember specifically
when you began to think, if I could do this for my own SEO, SEM
content, I can do it for clients, and I’m going to go out and do it
in genres and arenas different from SEO?

Todd: It’s just really only been within the
last year and a half that the whole link baiting phenomenon really
took off. I’d have to go back and see when the term was kind of
coined there. I guess maybe a year and a half, two years ago now.
So I think for me it was the first time I saw something really do
real well on digg and then just hit digg and it got picked up all
over the place. So link baiting, you know, itself has been around
for forever, just in, you know, putting out a promotional piece of
content and a public relations stunt, or whatever –

Marty: Um hmm.

Todd: – and then attracting publicity. So for
me it was just the first time I thought, oh wow, that was pretty
easy to get a good piece of content on digg. I just need to figure
out how to get more good pieces of content on digg and then just by
virtue of looking there it’s going to build, you know, who knows
how many links.

Marty: Um hmm.

Todd: So that for me probably was the point,
the first time I blogged something and it made it on digg, and I
went, whoa, this, that got a whole bunch of links, so that was
probably the turnaround point. And then it was creating content for
that distribution channel that then got me on that channel to other
audiences.

Marty: Are you a Stumbleupon fan, Todd?

Todd: I am. I really haven’t done it as much
as I’d like to, but I’ve heard fantastic things and I’ve dabbled
with it enough to know that I really should be doing more with it.
I –

Marty: Mm hmm.

Todd: – I’ve really seen some cool stuff come
out of Stumbleupon and traffic is fantastic from what I’ve seen and
some links out of it too.

Marty: A lot has changed in the last two years
of content publication on the Internet. What do you see as the
fundamental values and techniques that have not changed?

Todd: Probably the hooks, for sure. You know,
we deemed them the link baiting hooks, and there’s probably even
more than what is out there, you know, that we kind of established.
I think Nick
Wilson was the first one. There was a debate at some point I
think between Nick Wilson and Aaron Wall
coining the term
link baiting and Nick wrote one of the first posts on building
bait hooks, so the resource hook, the attack hook –

Marty: Um hmm.

Todd: – the humor hook, and various different,
there’s probably three or four other ones there as well. And those
are going to be fundamental. The headlines, I think, is hugely
fundamental.

Marty: Mm hmm.

Todd: The one for that, the blog that came out
of nowhere, not really out of nowhere, but really has gained tons
of notoriety now is copyblogger because he’s
such a fantastic copyrighter and he focuses on those same core
fundamental elements over and over that are just excellent and
worth reviewing constantly.

Marty: It’s clear from your writings that you
place an extremely high value on tools and research. After a client
engages you to create content designed to attract attention,
traffic and links, what process do you typically undergo to
establish experts, research partnership opportunities, and explore
a topic’s sphere and buzz?

Todd: So I think that’s one of the areas that
you just can’t automate. That’s part of what makes SEO special and
that, well you know, no matter what big company comes along and
creates custom solutions isn’t going to last forever because the
research, the most important research, is always going to be done
on the bleeding edge of whatever the community is.

Marty: Right.

Todd: So a big part of that is going into the
communities and, you know, becoming an inquisitive member of them,
and going in as a new person and saying, I’m really clueless here,
who are the experts, and learning how to listen to people and how
to be a, kind of, member of the community without being an overly
aggressive or overly parasitic member, I guess, without going in
and saying, hey teach me all this stuff.

Marty: Um hmm.

Todd: Going in and being kind of the ideal new
member because every community is used to new people and they
embrace new people –

Marty: Um hmm.

Todd: – but they do so with a certain
threshold of tolerance. So going into those communities and doing
that, and that’s really happened in the social networks, you know,
digg, Stumbleupon, you’ve kind of got to go in there with, you
can’t just go in with the attitude of, I want to rape and pillage
and take everything for myself and the selfish attitude, you really
have to be learning about what every community is. So I think
that’s important within any social, or within any industry, from
loans to mortgage to open source code, you know, I think you really
have to have that mentality going in of learning about the
community and that’s a fundamental part of the research that can’t
be done with the automated tools and everything else. There are
tools to make it a little bit easier. One I really like is
Aaron Wall’s keyword tool, the
SEO book, because he’s got all of the keyword information, all of
the social sites in one place, so you search for something and you
have kind of a repository portal of just different sources.

Marty: That’s really interesting. There’s so
much demand for search marketing professionals out there and lots
of people want to get into it, many of who are migrating from
traditional areas of media and advertising and marketing and public
relations, it’s all folding into the Internet, and pretty soon the
guys who sell advertising for the cable network and who work at the
local PR firm, we’re all going to be playing for the same coaches.
What words of support and wisdom do you have for professionals who
are heading towards jobs in the SEM world?

Todd: Yes. Ultimately that it’s kind of an
idea economy that we’re in now. It’s not, you know, the industrial
economy or the automation economy. The money is generally made from
great ideas, it’s not from getting over on people or just having a
short term solution to something, it’s having a great idea that’s
long term and scaleable and that people really like and enjoy and
will spread. It sounds kind of, I guess, cliché, but that would be
the biggest advice is, you know, coming up with great ideas.

Marty: Um hmm. Now on the other side, for
clients who seek professional search marketing help, what advice
would you give them to qualify the credibility of a search
marketing firm?

Todd: It’s a fairly small community, really.
As much as there’s a lot of SEOs out there, but the SEO community
is a small one.

Marty: Right.

Todd: And I honestly only came across a
handful of SEOs that really were never active in that community
that were worth their salt. So generally it’s kind of finding out
within, you know, finding the SEO community, becoming a small part
of it at some level, at least taking enough interest in it to
become a part of it at a very low level, and finding out the
provider’s reputation is within the community.

Marty: If somebody has a good reputation on
Sphinn that’s a likely indicator that they’re a reputable SEO
then?

Todd: Right. Or even just asking around. One
of favorite techniques when I’m, I love to go deep sea fishing, and
one of my favorite techniques that I use for that, that I think
applies to SEO is I go and say, well if you were booked up for that
day, who would you recommend? You know, who catches fish? Another
interesting one that I have had, have come across, was a potential
client had searched for a term that one of my clients was ranking
for, he then called up my client and said hey, I’m in this industry
and I’m really not a competitor to you, I just searched for this
term and was curious who did your SEO because you’re doing really
well, and they referred him back over to me and he said, this was
how I found you, yada, yada, and I was like, wow, that’s a pretty
good way to find an SEO, I suppose, is find out who is doing the
SEO for the people in the top 10.

Marty: Cool. Do you ever feel the need to
unplug? And how do you escape, Todd?

Todd: Absolutely, and I’m feeling the need
more and more. [laughs] So we were talking before we started
recording there as well, I love to travel, so I’ll be gone to a
friend’s wedding there in the Philippines shortly. I love to get
out and, the conferences are kind of unplugging, even though it’s
still work it’s getting away and I consider most of the people in
the industry to be among my best friends for certain, so that’s
always a good way to unplug. Fishing. Fishing is one of my
favorites – getting out on the boat. Nothing like a day on the
water, just relaxing.

(Source)

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