Search Feature

Randy Brown is apparently a glutton for punishment, because he has agreed to be the next victim (err, I mean interviewee) of the SearchFeature Blog. Randy is the founder and owner of GrownupGeek.com (GuG) which netted just under $80,000 in 2007. Randy also has a blog, Learn Success with Randy Brown, where he blogs about what he has learned about how to (and how not to) run a successful website.

Stephanie: Randy comes to us, not as an SEO professional, but as more of a do-it-yourselfer. So how did you do it, Randy? How did you learn all of this SEO stuff? And what is the #1 piece of advice that you would give to a brand new site owner?

Randy: I learned 99% of my SEO techniques from free online resources like forums and blogs. I’m a skeptic at heart so I never fell for any of the ‘get rich quick’ ebooks or services that promise to get you to the top of the SERPS overnight - it just aint gunna happen. The other 1% I learned by trial and error. A few Google-slaps later and I’m still learning.
My number one piece of advice for a new website owner would be to not give money to anyone that promises to get your site to rank high on the search engines or to make you rich. Virtually everything you need to know can be found online - for free. It’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s going to take some time and effort, but I’m living proof that it’s possible.
My number one piece of advice would be don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid to get started, don’t be afraid to fail and don’t be afraid to keep trying if you do fail.

Stephanie: What was the biggest mistake you ever made with your website/blog and what was the best thing you ever did for it?

Randy: I think the biggest mistake I made was early-on when the site was just getting popular and just starting to rank in the Google Serps. I made some title-tag changes and all of my popular pages disappeared from the rankings for weeks. That’s when i really started to learn about SEO - the hard way.
I think the best thing I did was to add a forum-section to the website, resulting in fresh, unique, user-generated content being created every day which the SE’s love. The forum areas now account for the majority of our traffic and earnings.

Stephanie: What gave you the original idea for the website, and what did you expect, or hope for, it to become when you first started out?

Randy: The original idea was to make the site a place where I could answer all the common “newby” computer questions that my wife and co-workers asked me every day. My only real hope was that I could generate enough earnings with Adsense to cover my hosting and domain-name fees. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that it would become as popular as it is or generate the kind of income that it does.

Stephanie: I’ve been following your blog for the last several months. It seems like you keep hitting these huge roadblocks but each time you seem to turn it around and come out, not just on top, but better off because if it. How do you do that? Is it dumb luck or do you have some kind of magic that we all can borrow?

Randy: I would like to say that it is because I’m a friggin genius. But to be honest I think it’s just a combination of common-sense, learning how to deal with each situation as it arises, and a bit of dumb-luck.

Stephanie: Forums and blogs are notorious for being low money makers. How have you managed to monetize your forum and your blog into such huge successes?

Randy: In April 2008 GrownUpGeek.com netted over $14,000 - over 3/4 of that came from Premium (paid) membership fees. The rest came from a combination of Adsense, Kontera and some affiliate sales. By giving members what they want in the premium (paid) forums, and making sure that we provide value, we’ve turned Premium Membership into a real money maker. I’d like to say it was my idea, but I actually got the idea from a post that Jeremy Shoemaker made in his blog a year or two ago.
Combining both Adsense and Kontera has been a good way to generate passive income from the site with virtually no additional investment of time or effort.
In my blog, I have no advertising and don’t sell anything so it does not generate any income. I guess I do it just to help others.

Stephanie: And it’s become a bit of a standard question for SearchFeature interviews, but what do you see for the future of SEO? What changes do you foresee for the industry? Five years from now, do you think there will be such a thing as organic optimization?

Randy: I think that as search engines and spammers both become more sophisticated, good, clean, wholesome, whitehat SEO will become more and more difficult. Even though the better SE’s like Google will rely more and more on user-behavior which is difficult to manipulate, webmasters will always be able to “optimize” for it. Although I’m sure SEO will be as different 5 years from now as it was 5 years ago, there will always be some “O” left in SEO ..

Stephanie: If the SearchFeature Blog was your site, what is the first thing you would do to monetize the site?

Randy: Well the first thing I would NOT do is slap Adsense on it. I think too many webmasters make that mistake on day-1 (I know i did). Adsense is a good way to monetize an established site/blog, but for a new/low traffic site, you may be driving away visitors for pennies. After the site has some regular readers and is getting some decent traffic (say, 1,000 visitors per day or more) I would definitely use Adsense, and maybe Kontera. I would also recommend monetizing the site further by offering premium content. By providing members additional “premium” content on a subscription basis or even for a flat-fee you can easily generate thousands of dollars in extra income each month. Of course you also need to provide content worthy of the label ‘premium’ - that is that hard part.

Stephanie: Tell us something more about yourself apart from the GuG website/blog. What other sites do you have, what else do you do, and what other passions do you have? Any hot new projects on the horizon?

Randy: There isn’t much to tell. My life consists mostly of waking up, going to my “day job”, coming home and working on GrownUpGeek.com until I fall asleep. In addition to GrownUpGeek and my blog, I have one other site about the region that I live in.. Because I haven’t invested much time or effort into that site, it’s still a ‘work in progress’. The only hot-new project on my to-do list is to re-design GrownUpGeek.com and upgrade the script from the old version of Drupal that it’s running to a newer version and maybe throw in a little vBulletin integration.

Randy must be doing something right because his site has been mentioned as a Google Adsense Success Story, featured in the Adsense Help & Support Pages, mentioned on the Adsense Blog, and quoted by Kontera in one of their Press Releases and featured by Kontera in thier presentation at BlogWorld. That is impressive stuff, Randy! Thanks for joining us….