Jim Boykins Interview with his career and seo
Jim hopefully I made these question pretty direct, and you can answer them all, if you feel there is any reason what so ever that you shouldn’t answer any of these questions, or you can answer them outside of this interview just please tell me, and I won’t include them in here out of all respect for you, and your company.
1.Jim what made you get into Internet marketing, and where did you start out at. I looked back on your old cached files from years ago screen shots of your old website, and have seen you come quite far, and made a production in your life, so what made you decide to get into Internet marketing?
I had been a computer programmer in high school and college. I left college in 1993 with one semester left to go to work in Alaska. Once I started traveling and working in national parks across the USA, it took 5 years to settle down. When I got a computer in early 99 and got online I was just blown away with the Internet. I knew this is what I had been waiting for my whole life. I learned HTML, built Webuildpages.com, and a few weeks later had someone 1000 miles away ask if I could design their website. When I found they had found my site through a search engine, I became obesseddwith search engines and how to get ranked high on them…and I haven’t stopped.
2 .Did you go to college jim, and if so what college did you go to, and what did you study, and why did you choose that course for.?
I went to Rider College in New Jersey (not it’s Rider University). I was a marketing major and a political science minor. I can’t remember why I choose marketing, but I’m glad I did.
3.Have you ever had client problems, like a client not happy, or not satisfied with your work?
Yes, of course. I try to learn from those so that client expectations are along my lines of expectations, and if I let someone down I try to do what I can to be fair.
4.What do you do on your free time, and do you go to a lot of search engine meetings, (you’ll be seeing me there soon if so) ?
In my free time I try to spend quality time with my wife and 2 little ones (but I’ll admit to sneaking away to the computer often during the weekends and at night. I like to watch the history channel and the discovery channel as well. Since 2002 I’ve been attending most of the SES and webmasterworld conferences, as well as a few other conferences - it’s a fix for my traveling urges I still have.
5.Where was you born at, and grow up at?
I grew up in a small farming town called Galway New York. About 3 years ago I bought my parents home (they moved 3 miles away), so I’m living in the house I grew up in. And my two boys sleep in my room and my brothers room we had while growing up.
6.How long did it actually take you until you started making good cash in the Internet marketing game, and what techniques did you use to get where you are now?
It took years to make money. I waited tables the early years, I worked at two web design companies, I worked for a P2P company, I went back to We Build Pages, I started to make money, the Google Florida update happened and I started loosing money again, and slowly I started building up the company again. In 2003 we came close to breaking even. In 2004 we made a little, in 2005 we did pretty good, in 2006 we did even better, and 2007 is shaping up to be great.
7.If you able to answer this question how many unique visitors do you get on your website day at webuildpages.com (looking at stats)…Looks like webuildpages.com gets about 2,700 visits per day…jimboykin.com gets about 3,300 per day. As far as leads go, the best leads I get are from the blog (they tend to be more educated).
8.Whats your yearly salary?
I’ll pass on this question.
9.What is your main focus for your company with then the next two years?
We’re going to be selling some training material in the near future…that’s about all I can say about that for now, but I’m hoping it will be huge. Beyond that it’s just a matter of hiring and training more Ninjas to keep up with the demand.
10.How many people work with you, and do you mainly do all the Internet marketing work, which i take it you put the ideas together, and make the business models roll on the Internet which i could be wrong, but is this what you do?
There’s about 25 people at We Build Pages now. I’m the “idea man”, but I also consult with lawyers, accountants, financial advisors, business consultants, and employees for ideas on where we want the business to be. For clients, the planning is with the client, the link team in charge of that account, and with me. Then most of the SEO work is performed by our link ninjas.
11.How do you feel about site wide links?
They don’t pack the punch they once did (2002-2003). It’s 1 vote from 1 site….it’s not 10,000 votes like many people think. If the site is off topic it can also skew you rankings having your link on 10,000 unrelated pages. To me, I’d prefer 1 link on 1 page, with the link in the middle of the content, as opposed to a sitewide link in a nav bar or footer area.
12.What are the most popular techniques that you have done to build traffic to websites, and build links fast?
Start with quality content (or add quality content) and combine it with manual work building links. It’s not “fast” but it’s effective.
13.Do you believe that content is king?
Yes, content is King…or Queen, and links is the other.
14.What do you look for when you submit into a directory as a Internet specialist?
Well, there’s not too many real directories (I can count them on one had). But I’ll check to see what category the competitors are in and submit there. And I’ll try to get a description that matches type of description the other sites have in that category.
15.How do you feel about article submissions, and link baits from them?
I think they’re a bit over-hyped. Many people are doing article submissions for link value, thinking they’ll get hundreds of links from submitting thier article to hundreds of places. What happens is that google tends to throw all but 1 (or a few) into the supplimental results because of duplicate content. If the quality is great, so great that other people will link to it, or write about it, then great…but if you’re doing it for links, you might be in for a dissappointment.
16.What would you say is a very popular link bait technique, and how.
(looks like you didn’t finish your question)… Neal Patel, Andy Hagans and the SEOMoz team are the experts at this area.Certainly if you can create great content that attracks links then you’ll do good.
17. Do you get into social bookmarking when you do Internet marketing?
Not much.
18.Whats your favoriate food, and why?
Pizza and Sushi. I never met a pizza I didn’t like, and there’s a sushi restaurant accross the street from the office.
19.Ever done drugs, and if so why jim?
Wow, what a question. If I ever took drugs it was to expand my mind.
20.Okay jim thats pretty much it thanks, do you have any question for me, or anything that you would like to say about how your day has went, thank you so much too jim.
We’ll it’s a Sunday and I’m trying to dig through all the emails that I didn’t get time to respond to during the week. Typical Sunday. Sam’s sleeping, and Mary’s nursing Nate. I’ve also got a few client reports I need to analyze before conference calls with them on Monday and Tuesday. There’s never a dull moment.