Thanks for being a part of Thought Leader Thursday today Jason. You’ve become quite the media sensation by taking something that we all do every single day, getting dressed, and finding a way to make money doing it. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came up with this idea?

I’ve been in marketing/design for over 10 years, when I graduated college I worked a 9-5 gig and hated it. I co-founded a web design company from my couch and saw some great success from that for 2 years before trying to make money wearing t shirts. I knew that companies were cutting back on their advertising budgets and that lots of companies weren’t able to use social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc). I figured t-shirts were an easy enough item for companies to make and the majority of them were already doing so. I bought the domain for iwearyourshirt.com, had a website up a month later and soon after that I was wearing t shirts for money. When the last day in 2009 sold out this past August I knew I needed to focus on become a full-time shirt wearer to avoid being a “one hit wonder”.

Your business has really taken off and right now you’re booked solid until September of 2010. The momentum you have now is probably a pretty stark contrast to what you faced when you first started talking to people about this. What sort of challenges did you have to overcome and how did you do that?

I was incredibly fortunate early on, in that I didn’t have months or years of waiting to become profitable. My expenses for iwearyourshirt.com are insanely low (I had to buy 200 extra hangers at Target) so as soon as days started to sell a month after launching the site I was happy. My biggest challenges where spreading the word without sounding like a salesman and dealing with copycats. I had a nice sized Rolodex that I had built up over the years and knew that if people liked the idea they’d mention it to their friends. And I knew that I’d work longer and harder than anyone else who copied the idea and that hard work would pay off… and it did!

Quite a few well-known companies have paid you to wear their shirts, along with lots of smaller companies. If you had to pick, which one was the most interesting?

It’s too hard to pick my favorite or the most interesting. Not because I don’t want to show favoritism but because almost every company has a great story to tell. I wore shirts for Zappos.com, LifeLock, Turbo Tax, Bill Cosby, HARO, Wired Magazine and also wore them for a Breast Feeding Book, a women’s makeup company and many more. I’ve supported charities like WaterIsLife.com as well as the Race for the Cure (breast cancer). About the only thing I haven’t done is wear a painted on t-shirt…

You’re prices are definitely a bargain considering how exposure you’re giving advertisers, why don’t you tell our readers exactly what they get for their investment?

When you buy a day on iwearyourshirt.com you get 3-4 photos published to Flickr, 1 of those photos becomes my Facebook Profile photo for the day, a blog post about your company, a unique/creative/humorous YouTube video (also published on Facebook) and a 1-hour live video show on Ustream.tv. All of these items are pushed to my 22,000+ followers on Twitter and 3,600+ friends on Facebook. In 2010, you get everything DOUBLED with my buddy Evan White wearing your shirt as well.

What do you tell the super-analytical marketers who want to measure every detail about the effectiveness of their advertising?

I am glad you asked this question and I have a few points to make here. #1 It’s not about the exposure outside of social media of me in your t-shirt. If I went to Times Square where 1,000 people walk a minute and was there for 10 minutes, 10,000 people should see me. How many of them will go to your website or better yet – remember your company? None. #2 You are paying at the most in 2010 $730 (already sold) for the content listed in the question before this one. If you paid an advertising agency or something else it would be 10x the price, maybe better quality, but who would they share their content with? I have a tuned in audience, ready to consume my content and enjoy it. #3 Not everything boils down to immediate hits on your website, followers on Twitter or views on a video. I am creating content that will live on forever on the Internet, content with good SEO authority and content that is fresh and engaging. Many people have mentioned that they get referrals months after their day because people find them through Google or saw their stuff on iwearyourshirt.com. Think of iwearyourshirt.com as a fun branding promotion to a highly engaged audience through t-shirts. I’m not your saving grace for your company, but I’m also charging a very affordable rate.

You’re obviously a creative guy, what’s next for you?

More t-shirt wearing!!! I’ve had some great success and press in 2009 and 2010 only has 68 days left to sell as of this interview. I want to add more t-shirt wearers to iwearyourshirt.com in 2011 and will need to find them next year. I encourage people to use social media to get their foot in the door with me and avoid sending another email with a word doc resume attached. I’m a social media guy, use social media to get in my face. And of course I have to mention that I’ve got an underwear deal next year with TommyJohnWear.com, a sock deal with BlackSocks.com and some other really fun, big-picture, stuff in the works for 2010!

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I’ve always been into politics, ever since I was a kid. It was something we talked about a lot at home and I just grew up around it. I remember liking that my dad got me an autographed picture of our then Prime Minister, Jean Chretien. That was before he was disgraced in the Sponsorship Scandal…

So when I turned 18, I wanted to influence the national federal election, and I decided to start a blog. I read up on promoting sites and ranked my own site for my target keywords in just a few months, plus I accumulated a PageRank 5, which seemed super important. (It probably mattered more then, in early 2006, than now. SEOmoz has done studies showing PageRank as a predictor of ranking is only 3% better than random guessing, which tells you how far we’ve come.)

Anyways, having had success for myself, I decided to start offering the service to others. The rest is history.

Google shook things up not too long ago when they took an aggressive stance against paid links. Do you think this should be a serious concern for the average person who may buy or sell just a handful of links?

If they’re selling links in an obvious way, those links will probably be discounted. The buyers may also be penalized, at least briefly, depending on the broader context of their actions. Allow me to illustrate.

This summer, I consulted with a friend on his African community cultural site for free, so he gave me a footer link with decent anchor text. I asked for that because a local competitor has these links on all his client sites and he ranks for generic terms with sitelinks. Within 1-2 months after I noticed that I wasn’t ranking 1st anymore on a particular brand keyword. It could have been a coincidence, but I think that Google saw that as a potential paid link (offtopic site, footer location). The rest of my backlink profile being clean, and the fact I didn’t get other such backlinks afterwards, is how I explain my first place rankings returning on that keyword.

For people who don’t mind taking calculated risks, what advice do you have to avoid any penalties when buying or selling links?

They should read my 101 tips on how to buy text links.

Besides that, one principle I love is blending in with your niche’s organic link graph.

One final idea I’ve had recently and am looking forward to testing is to buy links to content on sites you don’t own. For example, buying links to a video on Youtube. Make that video valuable, but only a teaser that invites visitors back to your site for the full piece and who knows what results you might get?

For the truly risk-adverse people who don’t even want to consider buying links, do you have any advice for a successful link building campaign?

Sure. Use a hub finder – those are about the best quality links. Thing is, they’re a hassle to build because email addresses on hubs are often out of date, and sometimes it’s not even clear who to contact. I once found that some spammy, viagra-ad filled site was a hub. I couldn’t understand what was going on and how this might be contributing to ranking my competitors. I dug around and found the site was owned by the same folks who ran an escort review site, which was the real source of the links. By going through the escort review hub, I got quality links. [No, this wasn't for an adult client.]

I think this is the kind of stuff Eric Ward does, and I understand his rates. This kind of work is thankless – you’re wading through plenty of crummy hubs and junk, plus the majority of your emails get ignored, and even those that are opened don’t always get your link request accepted.

If you read Eric’s pricing, articles and methodology, the price per link he seems to be charging is about $250 – $400 / link. And that’s because he’s automated lots of it, and probably has assistants doing the grunt work. He’s providing value to clients that’s worth probably $1000 – $4000 / link or better, but the SEO market just wouldn’t support that kind of pricing. Then the same people will blow 100K on one-time PPC traffic when Eric’s links would last them longer and make them way more.. The market is stupid. (And I don’t get why Eric doesn’t make a war chest and become an affiliate, to be honest.)

Can I prove what I’m saying? Yeah, I can. I did this kind of stuff when I was new to SEO. I charged $300 / month at the time and then $500/month. I stopped after a while because my rates had increased and I was spending too much time for too little money. The client’s asked me repeatedly to come back and work for them again. Why? Because 10 months after I stopped working for them, they were still ranking 3rd on their top keywords, ahead of mega-brands with much larger budgets. And they had done no SEO work in the interim.

What are some of the tools that you just can’t live without for your link building efforts?

Creative and critical thinking, footprints. Hub finders if I’m going to do SEO for my own sites.

You’ve probably had more than a few clients come your way after they made a mistake building their own links and suffered a penalty. What are some of the more common mistakes you’ve seen?

That hasn’t happened, actually. I did have a client who decided that an automated reciprocal link trader would be a good idea to implement, however, after we were already working together. He thought this automated directory script was what was helping him rank.

If I can generalize from that, the lesson to be learned is clients should do what they’re good at. Sell their products/services. Let your SEO direct your link building tactics. You wouldn’t tell the builder of your house that you were going to pour part of the concrete yourself, so why would you build links yourself [without asking the SEO if the tactic was valid or not]?

A lot of people new to Internet marketing end up sacrificing long-term results for hopes of overnight success. Can you recommend some guidelines for a long-term, defensible link building campaign?

Hire someone who is passionate about your topic. Have them network all day long with other bloggers via blog comments, Twitter, email etc. Once those relationships are in place, it’s easy to ask for links over and over again (provided you have good content to link to).

Or you can get a link builder like yours truly who will do that, only faster. If folks are interested in hiring me for improving their conversion rates, SEO or link building, they can email Gab@seoroi.com :).

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Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you today. The Internet was quite young and content was thin in 1998. I launched HysterSisters as a content website, providing frequently asked questions (and answers) surrounding women’s medical issues. The site had articles and a guestbook. You might remember those guestbooks: Bravo (I think?). They were simple, hosted elsewhere, and allowed visitors to write a few lines to the owner of the site. In those early years, the website was selected as a “hot find” by yahoo – and within a short time the visitors increased and were using the guest book like a message board – asking more questions, answering each other.

There weren’t many options for message boards back then but I recognized a need from my visitors on that guestbook. They wanted to talk to each other! I initially added “Inside the Web” message board and shortly added a few more to divide the traffic into different topics. It helped – but registration wasn’t an option therefore managing inappropriate posts was difficult. EZBoard came along soon after so I quickly appointed moderators and we opened registrations. Within a short time we had over 10,000 members. The time was 2001 and revenue from advertising was enticing so I opted to purchase my own software and install it on our hosted space. I tried UBB first and when I found that I had to prune the board every 2 weeks to stay on our server plan – I selected vBulletin (which is still what we are using for our software). A year or so later we moved onto a dedicated server.

I really was in over my head. I didn’t launch my website to create a community. I launched my content site to provide helpful information to other women. But I was smart enough that when it took off in a direction I hadn’t planned, I researched, did what I needed to do, and I did the next thing. Thankfully, early in our community’s life, I found a wonderful group of women to stay with me as moderators and I was brilliant enough to hang out on vBulletin.com’s community where I found a web-developer, who is still with me today. We use vBulletin as the engine for HysterSisters.com, managing not only the community but it also manages my content, data-infomatics and our timed email messages based on our members medical information.

I share all this to explain that behind this wild ride into community management was a women in her forties (I’m now in my fifties) who’s background was education, not technology. I knew how to teach. I knew how to gather content and provide it in a way that was helpful to others and the community that grew from my initial idea was a fluke by some definitions, a God-thang by others.

And so, because I was in over my head, I dug in to learn about the software, the administration control panel and community management, I knew I could learn things only from other community administrators. The Admin Zone is a product of that need in my own life – to rub elbows with other community leaders. To learn about server security and community management. Because of my educational background, I often turn what I’ve learned into a teaching opportunity. I have documented much of what I’ve learned in articles at The Admin Zone.

I think most people who run a website have thought about adding a forum, and many have even tried, but few manage to gain the traction they need to take off. What are some of the things that people should consider before they add a forum to their site?

It’s an interesting question – and one that is accurate to my own philosophy – adding a forum to an existing successful website. Often, I see people coming along and launching forums without a website – which I find curious. I’m of the belief that content is king. I think it is the ultimate in sticky power for a website and ultimately a forum. In fact, even yesterday I spent the day adding more content to my website. It’s a typical weekly activity for me. So, that would be first on my list.

I would also suggest that for a community to exist, a purpose must be established. This doesn’t need to be of gigantic proportions, but forums without purpose tend to fizzle out after the family’s applause quiets down. I always encourage others who ask me – “Select a topic for your forum that begs to be discussed”. Find that need and fill it by offering a community that rallies behind the discussion of a topic or a cause.

You’ve been involved in a pretty wide range of forums, so you’ve probably seen some common factors among the successful ones. In your experience, what are the the three most important factors?

1. Purpose. Those forums with purpose grow deep and wide.
2. Management. Making sure the rules are specific and fair but the staff follows through in a manner that is respectful. Ignoring bad behavior and allowing bullies to stick around drives away your good citizens.
3. Love for the topic. Love for people.

What are the three most common mistakes you’ve seen people make when launching a forum?

1. Fail to have a topic. You have no idea how how often people come to the Admin Zone and say something like: “Hey! What topic should I make my forum? I have software license and a domain. Any ideas?” Privately, I roll my eyes. I would never suggest investing money in software and a domain registration without having a thriving website up and running already. (/sidenote – the Admin Zone wasn’t a website first. We launched the forum and had instant traffic from our friends at other software websites – but we immediately began to write helpful articles for our visitors – and the article list continues to grow.) Quite frankly, if you don’t have a burning idea, don’t buy the software.
2. Fail to have rules. I’ve had a few disgruntled members who have left my website because they didn’t like one of my rules. They go launch their own forum without rules and within 1 month (if they are still online) they have rules – almost identical to mine. No one wants to join a website that is run like the wild, wild west. Its counter-productive. Every community will need their own kinds of rules. For HysterSisters, my attorney needed to add a chunk of info because of the medical/legal implications of patient-talk. Good citizens of your community will be discouraged and not feel safe if they are allowed to be bullied.
3. Failing to count the costs. Putting up forum software may take a few hours. Customizing it with your colors and logo may take a little bit longer. At that point, the job has only just begun. The community needs to be nurtured and encouraged. The visitors need a reason to start a discussion or reply to thread. The investment to the longevity of a healthy community is time and consistency. Show up.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve seen people face is achieving the critical mass that is necessary to maintain a successful forum. What can someone do to get visitors to post on a new forum, and more importantly, to come back?

I utilize tools within vBulletin software to send a welcome letter when my members register. I also use “notices” that display on the top of the forum pages when a member hasn’t posted yet to our “Introduce Yourself” forum. At HysterSisters, most of our traffic and then new registrants, tend to be women with very little experience in an online community. We try to make things simple with signs and notes along the way to encourage them to participate. We, also, have a monthly e-Magazine that is topic driven, sent to our members using Constant Contact’s email program. We include a few snips from discussions that match the content which encourages our members to come back and participate. Because HysterSisters is a patient support website, we also auto-create one thread per week, as a “Progress Report” for our members to check-in after surgery. Its one simple way of teaching them how to participate – by giving them a specific way to reply.

One other thing that comes to mind when I think about participation and returning members, I think there is a magic factor somewhere in the mix. Who’s to say why one forum blossoms while another wilts? The death of a community or a “failure to thrive” forum  can often be traced to bullies in the community or a non-existent administrator or staff. Sometimes, its some other factor that is not as easily diagnosed.

I realized that HysterSisters.com was a true community when I could best describe our members as loyal. When the brand of the website seemed to be the cause by itself – with the topic embedded – the members carry the message offline and into their lives. Word of mouth then becomes a great traffic source! The truth of this revelation has nothing to do with something I can point to as something I did – it is a result beyond the software, beyond my ability, and beyond my production. It’s a mystery of people’s desire for relationships in an online environment.

There are many types of forum software available, and your Forum Matrix website makes it easy to do side-by-side comparisons, but for people who don’t understand what the various features mean, what would your top two choices be, and why?

I love vBulletin. I haven’t kept up with the newest choice of its version 4 yet, but we have found vBulletin to have wonderful features and a simplified way to customize it. I think its reasonably priced and their support has been superb. I also can recommend phpBB. Its a great alternative and has many of the features offered by vbulletin. I don’t have personal experience with phpBB, but do know many successful big-board-forum administrators who use it and are quite happy with it.

For forum software that isn’t optimized for search engines right out of the box, do you feel that SEO modifications are worth the effort?

Probably, if I was starting out today, I would use an SEO modification to help get my pages indexed as quickly as possible. But, for HysterSisters.com, I chose to ignore the modification when it came out a few years ago. We are already indexed fairly well and have very good organic rankings within the search engines. My biggest fear was adding on SEO at some point and losing my rankings, ratings, and indexed pages. In my mind – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Both new and established forums are often targeted by spammers who are trying to promote their own websites, using automated as well as manual techniques. What counter-measures would you recommend for handling this issue?

We’ve tried using captcha but for some reason the images were hard for my registrants to see. I know that feeling when I’ve tried to fill out a form on some other website and can’t get the images right. (Must be my 50 year old eyes. ;)) Now we use a question and answer in the registration process which is not a typical question. Its a customization we added ourselves.  We also have other questions in our registration process that are not typical. These weren’t intended to be a spammer-deterrent but as additional information for our members’ profiles. It turns out those extra questions stump the bots.

Thank you for giving me an opportunity to answer your questions. Even after eleven+ years, I’m still learning how to be a better community manager and still find my greatest inspiration in my relationships with other forum administrators.

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One part luck, one part hard work, and the remainder a blessing from God!

I’ve spent the last ten years of my career focusing on Internet marketing–particularly search engine optimization. A few years ago, I started getting requests to help clients “clean up” their Google reputation–pushing down negative items when you Google their name. Between 2005 and 2007, that expanded to other areas and I found myself helping businesses manage all aspects of their online reputation. I coauthored Radically Transparent, which was released in 2008 and that really helped to shift my focus from SEO to online reputation management. Soon after, I founded Trackur.com and since then I’ve found myself firmly planted in the world of reputation management and social media monitoring.

Your feature-rich online reputation monitoring service, Trackur, has created quite a buzz. Can you tell us more about it?

After writing Radically Transparent, I realize that there was a huge void between the rather basic Google Alerts, and the rather expensive social media monitoring solutions–some of which cost thousands of dollars a month. I felt there was a need for an online reputation monitoring tool that offered sophisticated features, yet was easy to set-up and didn’t break the budget. Trackur launched in February 2008 with a plan that started at just $18 a month and took just 60-seconds to set-up. Since then, more than 11,000 accounts have been registered and Trackur’s not only helping the small business owner monitor their reputation, but it’s also used by many large companies and PR firms.

You’ve consulted on reputation management for a wide range of clientele, ranging from small companies all the way up to Fortune 500 companies that we’ve all heard of. Do you see any common trends when it comes to the reputation challenges that companies find themselves in or their responses to them?

The commonality is that both small and large businesses need to ensure they have a positive reputation. After that, it somewhat divides. Small companies lack the budget to build flashy blogs or invest in infrastructure to monitor and manage their online reputation. However, they tend to be in a position to make faster decisions and are able to work one-on-one with the customers–it’s usually the business owner that participates in the management of their online reputation.

Fortune 500 companies have the opposite problem. They typically have the financial resources, but they tend to be such large, complex organizations that any information collected is often silo’d and it takes weeks to get approval to implement strategies that would benefit the company’s online reputation.

What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen people make when it comes to responding to a reputation management crisis, and how someone salvage the situation if they’ve already made one of these mistakes?

The biggest mistake is simply not having official channels in place to allow your customers to complain. Most disgruntled customers post to blogs and Twitter because they feel like they are not being heard by your company. They get frustrated with your lack of customer service and they think to themselves, “I’ll show them, I’ll post a negative review on Yelp/Twitter/Blog.” If companies would simply look at how they’re listening to their customers, and how they escalate and resolve customer service complaints, many of the reputation problems you see would never make it to the web.

Perhaps the second biggest mistake is not apologizing soon enough. We tend to get too defensive, when we screw-up. We want to try and resolve the problem without accepting blame and without putting our hands in our pockets. When your business faces a legitimate complaint, move quickly to resolve it. Don’t think about the few dollars in refund demanded by the customer, instead think about the thousands of dollars in lost revenue, if the customer creates a reputation headache for your business!

Obviously, being proactive is always the best approach, so what are some things that companies can do to help protect their reputation ahead of time?

First, be honest with yourself about your company’s weaknesses. You need to know what your Achilles’ heel is, so you have a better idea of where a complaint is going to surface. If you can’t improve your product or service, then you should at least be aware of the issues. Second, simply listen. If you did nothing else than listen to what’s being said about your company on the Internet, you’d be ahead of your competition. Listen to complaints, praise, product features–heck even listen to what’s being said about your biggest competitors!

Lastly, figure out your company’s “centers of influence” before you start any social media engagement. If your customers aren’t the type to use Twitter, it’s pointless investing in a Twitter strategy–no matter how trendy it is! Once you know the best channel for reaching your customers, focus on it like it’s another one of your products or services. Don’t just launch it, then forget about it. Invest the time and resources into making it a success!

If a company does find themselves in a crisis, what are a some things they can do to minimize the impact it has on their business?

We have an entire chapter about that in Radically Transparent, but I can distill my advice down to just three words.

Sincerity, Transparency, and Consistency.

Be sincere in your apology. Let your detractor know that you acknowledge your mistake and are truly sorry. Next, be transparent in how this situation arose. Was it poor customer training? Or, perhaps a problem with your manufacturing process. Whatever the issue, be open about it and be equally open about how you plan to resolve the situation. Lastly, be consistent in your future actions. Your customers will forgive you the first time, but they’ll look to make sure that this situation doesn’t happen again. It can take 2-3 years before they fully trust your company again, so you have to be consistent.

Can you recommend any free tools that people can use to streamline their reputation management efforts?

For listening, I would start with Google Alerts–it’s free. If you outgrow that–or need something more powerful–then Trackur’s just $18 a month. As far as engagement, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook and most of the other social media channels are completely free. Typically you don’t have to invest hard dollars in technology, you have to invest your time. It’s that personal connection between you and your customer that truly helps strengthen your online reputation.

Do you have anything new on the horizon that you’d like to tell us about?

Right now I’m focusing my time on adding new features to Trackur. I’m extremely proud of what we’ve built and I want to continue adding value to those that trust their reputation monitoring to us!

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It’s weird to talk about, because I was doing this for over a decade for my own interests, and without a business plan in mind. I just realized that these tools like blogging and social networks and presence applications like Twitter gave us a way to interact that really helped bring together like-minded people. To be honest, there was no industry when I started. I’m not a marketer or a PR person by trade. I’m a technologist. I just applied my business communications passions with my use of the tools, and built useful connections along the way.

I think a lot of people misunderstand social media and end up falling into one of two groups. Those that try to cram their message down everyone’s’ throats at every possible opportunity, and those that are too passive and fail to leverage their efforts from a marketing perspective. How does someone find the right balance?

Social media is a toolset. If people are hoping to find a way to market and do business through these tools, it’s important to blend what you’ve mentioned above. Here’s a starter trick: Listen more than you speak. There are great tools to let us search blogs, follow information streams, and listen to services like Twitter. If you learn how to listen, then speaking will come more naturally.

There is a tremendous and growing number of social media channels available today. Someone could easily spend all day using just a small portion of what’s out there. Which sites are going to give a marketer the best response for their time?

Right now, Facebook and Twitter are the big ones. You could say that blogs haven’t gone away, either, but those require a lot of blogger relations skills (that seem to be lacking in typical PR firms). A nice blend of blogging, tweeting, and use of social sites like Facebook is a simple layout for potential success.

Social media marketing doesn’t just apply to what you do on websites like Linked In or Twitter; it really applies to any online interaction with others. What tips do you have for a new company with little or no recognition to reach out to other key players in their industry, and what common mistakes should they avoid?

Companies would do well to build simple profiles of users they’re tracking to better understand their target. Read my last 10 blog posts. I don’t write about software very much, so I’m not your target for that. I don’t write about food more than once a month or so, and even then tangentially, so that’s no good. I do evangelize quite often, so I get a plus for that. See where I’m heading? That’s the best way to learn about people. As for mistakes to avoid, don’t bullhorn the room. Get to know people. Talk about them first. And then if there’s a reason and an opportunity, introduce your product or service in a very glancing and easy-to-ignore way. (To start.)

We’ve all seen companies make mistakes that cause a huge backlash throughout the online communities, such as the recent case where Horizon Realty Group sued a tenant for $50,000 because she inferred that they didn’t care about mold in her apartment. If a company finds themselves in a similar situation, what is the best way to use social media for damage control?

Use the Three A’s of good customer service: Acknowledge, Apologize, and Act. Do it fast. In a world that has Twitter, 24 hours is far too long for a response. Figure out all the angles and go from there. Be quick and decisive. If you make a mistake, own it.

You recently launched your newsletter and already have over 6,000 subscribers. Are you working on anything else new that you’d like to talk about?

The newsletter is fun because it shows the “behind the scenes” of being Chris Brogan (whatever that means), which is also a hint of where I’m going next. I’m passionate about empowering people within their companies for success. That’s what’s next.

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I have always been in sales and in a variety of industries. I worked as a telemarketing representative for two years and was able to learn the telemarketing side of business. I eventually decided to establish my own company so that I could run the business differently. I wanted to begin with a strong team approach where every marketer’s opinion is valued and the marketer can really take charge of the account and use their personality to enhance the campaign.

When we first started, we focused on business to government (B2G) campaigns and then transitioned to business to business (B2B) campaigns since the demand was much stronger for those services.

Most people have mixed emotions about telemarketing and are afraid to utilize it for marketing their business because of some of the questionable ethics that have become associated with it over the years. In your opinion, what are some of the differences between ethical and unethical telemarketing techniques?

It can definitely be a “rough and tumble” industry and most of the reputation and bad press comes primary from the business to consumer companies. We have all received those annoying calls at dinnertime with a telemarketer that is clearly reading verbatim from a script. But for the most part, the business to business (B2B) campaigns are not like that. Quite simply, you cannot have success if your team sounds like “telemarketers” and simply read the script.

Unethical telemarketing includes repeated contacts with someone that is truly not interested and using manipulative and coercive tactics for an immediate sale. Those unethical tactics simply would not work for our market. Our B2B audience is much savvier. The skills to reach decisions makers and present to business owners or managers are much more refined. The initial sales calls cannot sound like a 30 second infomercial, but rather has to be about assessing their initial interest level and potential needs in a conversational manner.

I firmly believe that business ethics cannot be legislated or learned. Ethics are ingrained in you. If you want long term business success, the ethics will either make or break your business and reputation.

Even though they have little, if any time available to dedicate to sales calls, most business owners are afraid to outsource it because they are concerned about how their company may be represented. What can you say that would ease their minds?

With the bad press that the industry receives, I can certainly understand their concerns. However, if outsourcing is done correctly, it will sound as though the calls are coming directly from their office (not from an outside telemarketing firm).

Business owners should only select an outsourcing company with a strong history and longevity, extremely qualified staff, and procedures that ensure the program is going as planned. Avoid using companies that have questionable reputations and companies that take shortcuts from the onset. Make certain that the outsourcing company has a solid plan for your program.

Any successful program begins with a true understanding of the client’s needs. There should be a written plan regarding the campaign including what types of companies should be contacted, the scripting or the approach, and how objections will be handled.

For the cash-strapped entrepreneur who can’t afford to outsource their sales calls, what advice to you have for finding viable prospects for sales calls?

The first step involves defining your target market. You should define your prospects in terms of company size, industry, and geographical markets. Of course, you can sell to a variety of markets so you should identify each market you would like to pursue.

Next, you should customize your approach to each target market. For example, you cannot approach attorneys and auto mechanics in the same way. Even though your product or service may be used by both markets, they may use your offering differently and have different motivations for their purchasing decisions. Be aware of the differences and similarities between each market and consider how best to reach that market.

Having a unique market niche (or niches) will greatly enhance your results. You can find new prospects through existing business contacts, local business associations (like the Chamber of Commerce), or you can purchase contact lists from lead list vendors.

I think the biggest challenge for people during a sales call is the introduction, and many find themselves bumbling along in an effort to get their prospect to like them. Do you have any tips for generating interest quickly and efficiently?

The key factor in initial sales calls is an understanding of your true goals. Of course, your long term goal is to build a relationship and secure the sale, but that usually does not happen in just one sales call or visit. Your immediate goal is to create an initial interest, so that you can continue building that relationship. It takes time to know your prospects and their needs.

Practice your 15 second approach. Know the three key points that you can say in less than 15 seconds that will entice your listener to want more information. Too often, we try to cram every intricate detail into that initial conversation, but details can wait until the prospect is ready. Just supply them with enough information to peak their interest.

Everyone has a different opinion on how many times to call a prospect before giving up on them. If you call too few times you may miss an opportunity just because they were busy or out of town. If you call too many times, you can waste your time and appear desperate. Without a doubt, each situation is going to be a bit different, but do you have any general guidelines?

With most prospects, we will make 3 to 5 attempts to reach them and during that time, we will also leave a few voice mail messages. It is critical that the attempts are spread out over a 2-3 week time frame. After 3-5 attempts, we then move that contact to an exhausted status and we will try again in another month or two.

You should also ask the receptionist for a good time to reach your prospect and follow their feedback. They may have staff meeting on Monday or maybe they don’t work on Fridays, so use this information to plan the best time to reach them.

How has the economy affected the telemarketing industry and your clients?

The last six months has been very interesting. We experienced a decrease in business during the fourth quarter of 08. However, we used that time to continue with new marketing efforts and now business is a strong as ever and still growing. I believe that the economic changes should force every business to re-evaluate their marketing strategies to make their business stronger – rather than just accepting the decline in business and waiting for the economy to improve. Now is the time to implement new initiatives.

Many of our clients are more aggressive with their telemarketing campaigns. In many cases, their competition has gone out of business, so our clients are often using telemarketing programs to secure those un-serviced accounts. We do have some clients that are holding until the economy improves, but for the most part the economy has resulted in additional business for us, so that we can help our clients secure new business – even in today’s economic climate.

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I’m never sure which industry I fall into, frankly.  I started out with web design in 1995 and quickly realized I had a passion and talent for SEO, which was encouraged by the company I was working for at that time.  Cre8pc.com launched back then as an SEO teaching site and was popular enough that many people continue to contact me for SEO services, despite my having switched to usability and software QA testing in 2000.

As a user interface engineer, while I loved the design work, I was never as good as the guys I worked with when I reached the point of working with the best in the business at Verticalnet. I could code but not visualize designs. I could organize. I had a gift for detail and a strong leaning towards logic, as well as heaping loads of passion for the user experience.  VERT management was smart enough to see that and put me into their newly created web software application QA testing department. There was no usability person in QA and other than Jared Spool, Alan Cooper and Jakob Nielsen(and a few others), few teachers.  I was fortunate to have been mentored by a Human Factors PhD while at Verticalnet. Soon enough, I developed my own blend of QA usability testing, based on the discipline of software application functional and user interface testing. 

The interesting thing was that I freelanced in SEO at night for my own clients and was teaching it in the old Cre8pc Website Promotion club in Eteamz (later Yahoo! and it is now Cre8asiteforums.com).  I could bring my knowledge of SEO to UI and QA work and accessibility, which I also picked up.  I learned in time that I was extremely valuable as a well rounded person who could understand and support web designers, and the goals and requirements of company management.  In the end, usability work won out because search engines were dying and the challenge and fun were gone. All anyone had to do was wave money in front of an engine and rank was theirs.  So I focused on what happens once site visitors arrive.  Today, I offer a blend of both usability and SEO.  I have a team of folks I team up with on projects.  I’m a strong team player and like working that way.

Most websites fail miserably when it comes to usability. I think part of that is because people think that everyone else thinks like they do. What can they do to open up their thinking and create a more usable website?

Test, test and test more.  Many site owners are held hostage by their web designers who want to add things that may not be right for the company or target users.  It’s not that they’re selfish. It’s that they love to design and there are gobs of toys to play with.  I don’t blame them.  However, they may be less trained in the usability side, or not thinking of special needs users, or perhaps don’t understand the difference between women and men and how they interact with the web.  Some don’t understand SEO, but most have the basics down these days. 

A website is never for the site owner. That’s rule number 1.  When approached from the perspective that you are presenting something that benefits others, everything from site requirements to design to marketing changes.   One of my services developed by chance because site owners were frustrated and had no idea how to communicate with their designers.   They needed a mediator.  So I’m called in or emailed for an objective outside opinion during the site-build phase.  Site owners are nervous and want someone with experience and a wide background to seek support with on how things are going, if they’re on the right track, if any design choices are “wrong”, or just to hear me say, “Your people are doing great work for you.”   It’s scary to spend money on web sites and not be sure if it is going to work when it’s rolled out to the public.  
 
What are some of the more common usability mistakes that you see and what can people do to resolve them?

Poor color contrasts.  Fonts that are too small or can not be resized by their browser.  Ads, navigation and polls that pop up and cover up content.  Pages crammed with too much information.  This is quite common and comes from the belief that if you don’t show everything at once, nobody will know what you offer.  The truth is, visitors will follow tasks or browse as long as they’re confident where you’re taking them.  Therefore, lead with well defined link labels in the navigation and embedded inside content to pages inside the site by creating interest.

For example, I’m working on a site for someone introducing something brand new and slightly unusual.  His Internet Marketer changed my “Personal Experiences and Feedback” navigation link to “Testimonials”.  I suggested they reconsider that, because the word “Testimonials” is not that compelling.  Most people figure they’re fake anyway.  But in this case, the site is about someone who has direct contact with people doing a unique, personally developed type of bodywork.  He claims that his work changes lives and he leans heavily on word of mouth.  Therefore, they agreed to switch it back to “Personal Experiences”.  If there was more room, I would have pushed for a verb, like “Read”, or if he had video testimonials, link to that page with “Listen to Personal Experiences”.  The trick is to understand motivation and persuasion.

Jakob Nielson once claimed he had over 2000 usability heuristics.  Every web site needs testing or reviews on a regular basis because human-computer behavior is constantly evolving. How we interact with the web is important to marketing.  The worst mistake is to put up web “brochure” and think it will have any impact on revenue.  These are the days of social conversation and user generated content.  We can no longer talk to, but rather, we’re being encouraged to speak with our customers.

As new technologies emerge, they offer new functionality but at the same time, they cause new problems. Once upon a time, Flash was probably one of the worst perpetrators. What new technologies adversely affect usability today? 
 
Any technique or technology that interferes with a user task is not recommended.

It’s not the technology that’s the problem. Rather, how it’s applied.  Flash is fine, but it must come with user controls so they can slow it down or stop it.  Flash images can be valuable marketing tools for artists or products that target human senses. However, the implementation is sometimes a deal breaker and creates page abandonment instead.

Ads that load over content are ridiculous.  I’ve been to sites where the ad sticks and can’t be moved or closed.  Are they not testing for this?  AJAX is nice but has usability issues when bookmarking pages.  Drop down menus are a pain in the neck because they cover up text and can be clumsy to use.  The fun stuff is fine as long as it’s not hindering site usage and this is why tracking and regular site testing are needed to help understand what may be hindering task progress.  

Technology, such as Flash or AJAX can help make some tasks much easier for developers, but more often than not, they are used when they don’t need to be. Do you have any guidelines to help someone decide if they should utilize a particular technology from a usability point of view?

This is when Requirements Gathering comes in.  The majority of companies still don’t invest in the time and resources to do this and I’ve seen where not doing so creates serious problems for businesses.  Before a stitch of code is laid down, I suggest preparing a document that lists all site goals, and organizes every nuance from target user, specified tasks, and whether SEO, accessibility and usability are site requirements.  Everything is documented and from that, site guidelines are prepared for consistency.  Test plans are created to make sure every requirement is met.  This is when it is discovered that the usability requirement that states, “Content must be clear and easy to read” is validated and if something like an ad or navigation drop down covers up content, this is considered a “defect” or failed metric  and must be corrected.

People always ask, “What do you think of my site?”  I want to say back to them, “Who cares what I think.  Does it meet your site requirements? Has it been tested?  Has each requirement been validated? Are your site guidelines being adhered to?  Have you checked your logs? Do you have it set up for data analysis and tracking so you know for sure what’s not working as per your requirements?”

(I wrote How Web Site Requirements Keep Your Project from Exploding to help people understand better what I mean when I talk about this.)

For the website owners who aren’t quite ready to invest in your top-notch usability services yet, what are your top three recommendations improve the usability of their website?

Register the site with Google Analytics and take advantage of their free tools.  You can’t improve anything until you know what’s going on. 

On the homepage, answer the Who/Where/What/Why/When/How questions, preferably above the page fold.  When you offer good reasons for someone to stay put, they will.  And remember, it’s not about you. The emphasis is on what you can do for your customers, as well as why, when and how you do it better than anyone else.

Avoid “clunky” designs.  We’re already stressed out, okay?  Break up content with shorter paragraphs and insert small images if they help communicate your message.  Create “gutters”, which are vertical columns of white space that allow us to breathe.  Soothing colors are calming. Don’t make it look like there’s a food fight happening on the homepage.  Site visitors are really tolerant folks and they’ll stick with your site when you provide a pleasant experience in ways that motivate them.

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Thanks for the compliment. Although I’m not sure there is a food chain, we’re all in this thing together!  I think I “got started” in about middle school. Since then, through all of the twists and turns of life, I have been a computer nerd. That has manifested itself in a number of different ways, from hardcore gamer to programmer to designer. When I do anything, I try to dig really deeply into it and get seriously involved. I always knew I loved web design, but college didn’t quite prepare me with the skills I needed to get into it. I ended up working in the printing industry out of college, all the while tinkering with web design and wishing that’s what I was doing. Eventually I managed to get an interview with a design company losing their web guy and squeezed my way into that job and that’s where I’ve been ever since.

CSS is a double edged sword for most designers. It can be tough to learn, but once you master it, you can get a hell of a lot more done in less time, and editing a CSS-based website takes less time and effort. Some people still cling to old, outdated methods to design websites, such as using tables and frames. What advice to do have to help get them over the hump and start using CSS?

I think CSS gets a reputation for being difficult to learn because of the position people are in when they begin. CSS is one of the very first things you need to learn when first starting out in web design. So those people are coming from a “never coded anything before” angle, so of course it’s going to feel difficult at first to understand the strange and abstract concepts at play. CSS might also be learned as an afterthought for already experienced programmers. The syntax of the language itself is trivially easy for them, but they just aren’t designers at heart, so it feels difficult to accomplish designs that look very nice.

If someone is coming from the angle of having being designing websites with tables for years and years and “it works for them”, I’d tell them to consider all the very tangible benefits of CSS layout. Sexy, clean, semantic markup, for one thing. Accessibility, lighter weight pages, better SEO, non source-order-dependent markup, flexibility… Between all that stuff, they should be excited to get to work trying it. And the fact is, it’s just not that difficult. Someone working on the web for years should have no trouble adapting a little to start building pure CSS layouts.
 
 A lot of search engine optimization professionals are starting to see the power of CSS in terms of organizing their code to present content in the most efficient and effective manner to both search engines and visitors. What are some of the most critical opportunities you think they should be taking advantage of with this, and what could they do that might potentially cause problems?

The source-order-independence of CSS layouts is a big one for SEO. In a table-based layout, if you have a left sidebar with ancillary content, that is certainly going to come first in the markup and thus seem to be of higher value and importance to a search bot. A left sidebar in a CSS layout can easily come after the right-side main content, and avoid that problem. Likewise, an excessively large menu system could be placed at the bottom of a page in the markup, but visually in the header.

The biggest SEO advantage of CSS layouts is how slim and trim your HTML becomes. If you are doing it right, nearly every tag in the HTML purely exists to describe the content it contains. This makes quick work for search bots, who will understand the content and hierarchy of your page very clearly.
 
 
Internet Explorer 6 seems to be breathing it’s last few breaths, making many work-arounds obsolete, while CSS itself has undergone a number of changes that give if far more flexibility than ever before. In your opinion, what are some of the coolest, most useful things people can do with CSS today?

It does feel like IE6 is dying more and more these days. I’d say in a years time we’ll see a large percentage of designers just ignoring it like we do with Netscape (for example) now. One of the biggest limitations of IE 6 was the weird hacks we had to use for alpha transparent PNGs, which never seemed to work quite perfectly. It has been a problem for so long for us current-generation designers that many of us just don’t even bother using them anymore. Next generation designers will never have known that pain and the cool possibilities of transparent graphics will be in play more.

@font-face is also very real and as soon as Firefox 3.1 is out and widespread I think we’ll see a ton of this. Magazine style sites are going to get a lot prettier!
 
 
On the other side of that coin, what are some of the biggest weaknesses of CSS today and what can designers do to work around them?

CSS has plenty of weaknesses. Grid-like layouts are way harder than they need to be, which always fuels the flames in the tables vs. CSS wars. Obviously font usage is kind of a mess, but beyond that web typography is severely limited. Kerning is far too difficult, we can’t have type follow a certain path, we can’t have type knock out backgrounds or have backgrounds of it’s own easily. Unfortunately the answer for a lot of this isn’t “add a bunch of new stuff to CSS3″. Some of it is root/fundamental problems that will likely need a root/fundamental rewriting of the language. If you think CSS3 is going to take a long time…

Some of the really simple shortcomings are solvable via JavaScript. Think of the lack of support for nth-child selectors, which make zebra striping a table trivially easy. Doesn’t work in IE of course, but jQuery has an :odd selector that makes it incredible easy to implement that DOES work in IE.
 
Your website, CSS Tricks, is loaded with tutorials along with one of the most active CSS forums I’ve found. You already had a full-time job when you started it; what was the motivation behind it?

The day it started it was a part of a network of sites I had going intending to be sort of help/resource sites. CSS-Tricks was there specifically because we didn’t have anything web related yet and all the stuff I was learning from building all these other sites had me reeling with ideas. So now I had this outlet to be writing about the cool stuff I was learning about web design. Turns out that is what I enjoyed the most and so when the other fizzled out, CSS-Tricks kept going strong. It has always been a combination of wanting to help people and share ideas, a record keeping mechanism for myself, and the desire to make a buck or two on running a successful site.

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I have been working in corporate IT for years now, I went straight into IT from college. The last five or six have years have been in Internet facing systems. I went freelance, again in corporate IT, but the culture of big business IT left me cold. I was into blogging and developed a couple of sites (since flipped or left to die) about a couple of topics, and it occurred to me that I could develop a business supplying services to blog owners. The rest is history, I have been developing WP dude for about six months now, I finished my last corporate gig in April and I am now full time into this new business, it is still in a start-up phase but I am loving every minute.

I like to write, deep down I want to be a writer rather than a techie so the combination of writing about and providing a technical service are ideal fits for my skills and things I enjoy.

I am a bit of a blogging evangelist, I just love the fact anyone can create a blog (for free on Blogger or wordpress.org) and write their stuff. There are no editors to say no to the content. Much of it is very poor, but there is some excellent stuff out there making people think, stuff which would never match an advertisers profile and get published otherwise. My RSS reader is crammed full of quirky blogs I love the medium.

You’ve been offering WordPress consulting for people who are somewhat technical and just need assistance with specific tasks. Would your consulting services also be appropriate for someone who is less technical? What is the benefit in hiring you instead of just slugging through the support forums?

I think my benefit is that some people just don’t have time or inclination to wade through the forums. They may spend hour upon hour searching for a solution, struggling technically to implement the solution and the time they have spent is time lost in their core business when they could have hired me. I provide solutions to people who just want to get on with blogging and creating content.

An analogy I would use is a plumber, I could read the DIY manual, then buy the tools, then change the shower head. But it would be a quicker neater job to bring in a plumber for an hour.

I’ll assume that you probably hear a lot of the same questions over and over. What are some of the more common misunderstandings or misconceptions about WordPress?

Trying to get over the concept of a trackbacks or pingbacks still send my head spinning, the other thing people struggle to get their head around is the concept of a page versus a post on WordPress.

I think WordPress is extremely powerful, both as a blogging platform and as a content management system. Right out of the box, it’s pretty SEO friendly, easy to set up and use, and there is a plugin available to accomplish just about any task one can imagine. Is there a situation you can think of where it wouldn’t be an ideal choice? 

In my opinion It is not that good for e-commerce, I know there are a couple of plugins to add products and shopping carts to a WordPress blog, but I am not too sure about them, but would love to hear of a success story. When you are searching for a products you know what you want, you type in red widget size 12 to Google and you expect a product page with a price. You don’t want to wade through blog content to get to the item you want.

A solution such as Shopify, Magneto or even an e-bay store is better than a WordPress blog with an e-commerce function in my opinion.

There are thousands of plugins, and many of them do the same thing, so separating the proverbial wheat from the chafe can be tough for a WP novice. Some of our top picks are All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, What Would Seth Godin Do, and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. You’re the resident WP expert; what plugins do you think people need to be using?

I use all the ones you mention, a could to add to your list are backup plugins, I use two, one for the database backup and the other to backup what I think of as the code base, the WordPress files, your uploaded images etc. They are Wordpress backup, and WordPress database backup.

The other thing I would recommend to everyone is the security scanner plugin, a fantastic utility which does a penetration test of your blog security and then provides a report of the weaknesses

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