Let An SEO World Champion Teach You Entrepreneurship
Benj Arriola’s weekday is an 8 hour SEO job. He typically deals with many Fortune 1000 clients (including Popular brand names most people know). After work, Benj spends about 3 hours for his own business. The rest of the day is all family time. That’s the day of an SEO World Champion.
In the first 3 quarters of 2008, my SEO business was earning more than my salary from my job. Then suddenly in the last quarter, all my clients suddenly just didn’t have the money to pay anymore and stopped their services. In the last quarter, my SEO job was earning more than my SEO business.
As for my monetized websites, I earn way lower than my salary. My SEO job is a full time job and handling my own SEO clients makes it difficult to do my own thing. Although my goal for 2009 is to decrease all client work and make my monetized websites earn a total of 3 times my salary by the end of 2009. An ambitious goal, but every success should start with some ambition.
In 2007, Benj gained prominence in the SEO Championships. He won in the test of skills among the world’s top Search Engine Optimizers. Benj was not just the ultimate SEO hacker – he was rumored to be (in some quiet circles), a black hatter (A term held in awed respect among those who could ‘fool’ the search engines). Of course, no one could really prove it.
The award gave Benj fame and fortune. He won a brand new car — a sexy European Citroen C2 (a French automobile). He opted for the cash equivalent over the hassle transporting the vehicle to where he was – in the US.
But then again, SEO contest are just search engine ranking contest. And SEO today is a lot more than that. SEO is not just ranking and today, SEO needs to look at conversions, analytics, coordinate well with usability and design, and a lot of strategies revolving in social media. Aside from that there is a lot going on in the mobile SEO space, local SEO and international SEO. Having said all of that, my experience in the SEO World Championship is like… nothing. :) It was just a plain keyword ranking contest.
He’s based in the United States but when he visits Manila he offers CSS/HTML classes to the willing. He strives to go beyond just SEO.
I believe all SEOs need marketing skills, writing skills and technical skills. After running my own business for some time gave me some basic marketing skills and being a web designer/developer prior to being an SEO guy gives me a lot of technical skills. And I may not be the best writer in the world, but I can still come up with something that is good to read. I believe it is my technical skills as one of my strengths accompanied with some creativeness which made my SEO experience a bit different from others. This is mainly what I leveraged on to help win in the SEO World Championship.
He offers some advice to all budding technopreneurs:
- Sometimes looking for shortcuts with a poor knowledge foundation cannot give you a stable amount of income. The quick routes are not always the best.
- To earn a lot online, sometimes you do not even need a lot of SEO knowledge.
- Earning online, like earning in anything is like a game. To win any game, you take a close look at the rules, follow the rules, and study the rules and see how you can win the game by coming up with your strategy seeing where you gain the upper hand and win.
Benj’s recent online venture – Digital Content Reviews. He explains the idea behind the website:
- Here in the US, it was well advertise on TV that the government is requiring all TV broadcast stations to stop analog TV signals and will transition into digital TV with a deadline date of Feb 17, 2009.
- After seeing the government announcements over and over on TV, I decided to search for Digital-to-Analog TV converter boxes online and look for suppliers. I found 4 main suppliers.
- In the last week of November, I put together a website with several Digital TV Converter boxes and reviews compiled from other reviews of these products and placed them on http://www.digitalconverterreview.com/ The domain cost only $8.88 on omnidomain.net and the hosting for a year was less than $35. I probably spent only 2 hours per night for 5 days to make the site.
- Starting December 2008 to February 2009, the site was making 1 to 3 sales per day consistently in affiliate sales. This was plain on-page SEO with minimal link development.
- These products not not really expensive. They range from $50 to $100 and I earn only 4% to 5%. You can go ahead and do the math for an estimate of what I earned. But then again, this is passive income. I do not work to make the money. I just did 1 week work and that was it. The rest I just waited for it to come.
He saw the TV commercials and the opportunity. He made a website and waited for the money.
Inspiration from an SEO Champion.