Search Featured: Garry Conn

Garry Conn is one of the people who teaches his readers how to make money online. He is also a very good friend and great guy and I’ve had the pleasure of talking to him quite a few times lately. Here is the interview … enjoy!

Mike: Garry, when did you originally start building web sites and blogs and at what point were you doing it on a professional level?

Garry Conn: My first web site was built back in 1998. It was a very basic web site that advertised aircraft for sale for a monthly fee. Since that time, that web site has been sold to another member of my family. Over the years I have built, maintained and owned a number of different web sites, all of which have been sold over the years. Today, all I build are blogs. For me, blogging is the next generation of content publication. In fact, not much has changed in my business model over the years other than the platform in which I use to build and maintain sites on the Internet. When I first started, I’d use programs such as Microsoft FrontPage or DreamWeaver. Those programs were awesome back in the day, but today I use WordPress for everything I do. I have been doing this off and on professionally since 1998. During the last 10 years there have been times when I did indeed need to maintain a full time day job to cover typically family and living expenses. By trade, I am a registered and licensed optician. I have almost 15 years experience in the optical and eye care industry. If worse came to worse and I totally started to fail at my online ventures, I could easily fall back on landing a job back with an Optometrist or Ophthalmologist practice.

Mike:There seems to be a lot of non competitive niches out there, I am surprised to see so few of them taken advantage of. Why would you say so many Adsense publishers don’t get into any of them? Would you say that one of the biggest mistakes so many Adsense publishers are making is greed and too much focus on the highest paying keywords out there rather than finding something they are more able to succeed with?

Garry Conn:I think that there are plenty of people making very good money online. Those who typically do make good money online are people that you don’t see socializing with the popular crowds of people at many of these conventions. While I am not saying that the popular public icons in this business don’t make money online, what I am saying is that there are hundreds of people that create and maintain very profitable web sites but choose to stay out of the public eye. Those people typically use programs such as Adsense or other common affiliate based product marketing programs such as Commission Junction and LinkShare. I can not say that there are people who aren’t taken advantage of high paying keywords that yield a low level of competition in the search engines because there are tons of people who do this daily un-noticed. For the true successful entrepreneurs out there, I do not think that greed plays a factorization in their level of success. I believe that common sense coupled with excellent ideas and execution play the biggest role in their success. Also, it doesn’t hurt to be competitive in nature as well.

Mike:Let’s get real. Every blogger out there who has SEO knowledge is suffering from a little bit of tunnel vision. What advice would you give to any blogger out there so that his messages still flow and are not just boring stuff written to the spiders?

Garry Conn:SEO is over-rated. It isn’t hard to build a search engine friendly web site. WordPress out of the box is already more search engine optimized than most web sites people pay developers thousands of dollars to build. With a few minor tweaks to WordPress, I have in my hands a search engine magnet. Once again, I can’t stress enough that SEO is way over-rated. If Google and other search engines didn’t develop a web crawler that was forgiving of amateur coding and terrible HTML skills, then their engine wouldn’t have an index as robust as what they are. My advice to anyone is to focus on publishing entertaining, information or useful content that people like and feel compelled to link to. SEO is nothing, the beef is in what you publish and the reaction you get from the people that read it and most importantly what they do after they read it.

Mike:There have been discussions over whether or not blogging may become regulated in the future, like every blog would get a publishing number. Do you see that happening, do you believe it would decrease spam and would you be in favor of it?

Garry Conn:I don’t see how this is possible. I use build a web site using WordPress in a matter of a few hours and present to you and there would be absolutely no way you could detect that it was WordPress. What is a blog? What is a web site? Is there really much of a difference? Yeah, I think so, however, in my business I don’t build traditional blogs… again, I use WordPress as a system that allows me to quickly and efficiently publish quality information on the Internet that people either find entertaining, informative or useful. My sites even though they are built and maintained using blog software are not blogs. Many of them don’t receive comments and many of them don’t have active profiles in places such as MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog. What most of my sites do have though are RSS feeds which comes standard with WordPress. From there I take my RSS feed and allow FeedBurner.com to manage them.

Mike:A lot of people go out to every convention there is. You have never been to one. Do you think you will ever attend any and what do you think you would be able to get out of it?

Garry Conn:No. I don’t go to conventions. I may attend one in the near future as I have been toying with the idea in my head. I honestly can’t tell you what I would get in return from attending. So far my perception of these events are nothing more than social gathers among younger individuals who enjoy getting out and socializing. I am 31 years old, married and have four kids. My mingling and partying days are long over. The only reason why I would attend a convention is if I knew that many of my older and more mature contacts and blog readers would attend. It would be great to meet a large handful of people that read my blog on a day to day basis. My blog tends to attract a very younger audience, which is fine, I enjoy helping them, but I seriously doubt that there is much we share in common other than me providing them with tips on how to make money online. But, perhaps in due time, you may find that I’ll make an appearance one day.

Mike:A lot of people read your blog for advice. What advice would you give somebody who never set up a blog, someone who has a blog that isn’t making money and someone who already is successful but unsure which next step to take?

Garry Conn:Well, I could go into lengthy details; however, the answers really lie within my blog. Start reading my blog, subscribe to my free email mailing list and invest time into reading my archives. In the next two months I will have published over 1000 articles on my blog. The average word count per article is around 700 words. There is a hidden wealth of information in my blog. All people need to do is subscribe to it and invest time into reading what I write.

Mike:Name 5 pieces of advice that you have once received which made a positive difference.

Garry Conn:Don’t do email spam, don’t sell or accept paid links, don’t publish sponsored posts or paid reviews, using the NOFOLLOW attribute external links when you are unsure where they lead to, don’t copy or prefabricate content for the purpose of ranking in the search engines. Produce your own hand typed content or pay writers to do it for you. Write naturally and don’t worry about packing in keywords. Search engines are programmed in a way that look for natural writing behaviors and are easily able to detect when people are deliberately injecting targetable keywords into their content. While it is ok to use choice words in your content, you need to always make sure that you are totally writing in a very natural way. If you write content that is optimized for humans, that too then is optimized for search engines.

Mike:Name 5 horrible pieces of advice that set you back.

Garry Conn:LOL… email spam, selling and accepting paid links, publishing sponsored posts or paid reviews, not using the NOFOLLOW attribute on external links that pointed to shady and bad neighborhoods, using programs that prefabricated content for the purpose of ranking in the search engines, and not producing my own quality content or paying someone else to do it for me. Oh and also, injecting targetable keywords and links into content didn’t go very well for me either in the past.

Mike:If you were to be able to pick any interviewee out there, name him and name something you have never been able to ask him or her.

Garry Conn:If I had my choice in a few select people that I would like to spend an entire day with alone at a table with a pad and pen, a tape recorded and a white board, I would have to say that my first choice would be Bill Gates, my second choice would be Matt Cutts and my third choice would be Jeremy Zawodny. My forth choice would be Jeremy Schoemaker. My filth choice would be Joel Comm. As far as the things that would be discussed, man there would be too much to list here. Needless to say, when I would be done with each, I would have picked their brains until they turned to mush. After watching Top Affiliate Challenge, I too would love to spend a day with Ken McArthur as well as the Top Affiliate Challenge winner, Jonathan Van Clute.

Mike:Which topics are you ready to write about which you haven’t had the chance to yet and why? And to you personally, which are the hardest obstacles to overcome when it comes to creating something that people like to read more of?

Garry Conn:I write about things that don’t require external research. I don’t have time to invest into research. My content all comes from within myself and the things that I know in my head. In my business I have to be super quick in publishing content on the Internet. The more content that I produce the more money that I make. I make money by monetizing my content as well as offering various email opt in subscriptions to offset low traffic periods in the search engines. My advice to anyone who wants to publish entertaining, informative or useful content is to choose topics that come very natural to them. For me, my only limitation is in how quickly I can type. My goal is to become so proficient with my typing skills that I can will soon be able to type as fast as my mind dictates to my fingers to type. I want to be able to type as fast or faster that I can speak. When I can do that, then the sky is really the only limit. Granted, I do now have writers who work for me and that works very well. But, it doesn’t compare to me writing the material myself. I very much enjoy writing and I very much enjoy it when I can see my writing capturing the attention of others. The feeling is very rewarding.

Mike:Have you ever made a post that you really regretted and which one of your posts are you most proud of?

Garry Conn:Yes. and I will not say. In fact, the one post that comes to mind has indeed been removed, but I still have not revealed the true story and history behind why I wrote that post. Maybe one day I will.

Mike:Name 3 different blog posts which you have read and consider excellent. Tell me what you like about them so much and what you are doing trying to get even better.

Garry Conn:That is a difficult question to answer and would indeed take too much time. Why don’t I tell you a few blogs that I enjoy reading all together rather than me attempting to point out the best blogs posts of 2008. I enjoy reading www.shoemoney.com, www.joelcomm.com, www.mattcutts.com, www.searchenginejournal.com, http://adsense.blogspot.com, www.problogger.net, www.aweber.com/blog and www.clickbank.com/blog/ just to name a few.

Mike:How do you believe your life would have turned out differently had blogging been around when you were a kid?

Garry Conn:The better question to ask me would be how I feel my life would have been and how I would have impacted the lives of others if I lived during the era when the Internet was being pioneered and developed. I have always been fascinated with the Internet and even at an early age. As a child, my favorite movie was and still is, War Games staring Matthew Broderick. I was 6 years old when that movie came out, but didn’t watch it until I was 8 or 9 years of age. Back then, my parents purchased a Commodore 64. I think looking back now, pretty much every geeky kid owned one. My father was pretty savvy with it and I remember that we indeed had some kind of external modem for it and some how he was able to connect with other computers using it. Since an early age I have loved computers and more so the Internet. So, I can’t quite answer your question the way you asked, but I can say that I am very pleased with being the age I am in at the current era of the Internet. While the pioneers who shaped and molded this technology are now retired, really the true birth of the Internet is happening right now as we speak. It excites me to know that I may live to see it grow over throughout the remainder of my life. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for the Internet. Furthermore, I can’t wait to see what kind of business options are birthed from the continued growth of the Internet. I know for a fact, that as long as I am living and breathing, that I will have my hands as well as business in it.

Search Feature is back up!

Some complications have cause Search feature to be down for a couple of days, basically I forgot to change IP addresses in the registry when the server locations moved. I apologize about this and will repost interviews which have not been included in the backup.

Take care,

Mike Dammann and the Search feature team.

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