“It’s always an uphill battle, and you’re always, in the back of your mind, wondering if someone has that exact same match that can kill you.”

Interview by Mike Sullivan

Nathaniel Broughton is an Internet entrepreneur, investor, and online marketing professional.  Nate’s led the online marketing efforts for two Inc. 500 winners and served as CEO for a third.  His current projects include VAMC, SuretyBond.com, and Growth Partner. Nate is also a regular contributor at MO.com.

MO:
What experiences led to the entrepreneurial success you are today?

Nathaniel:
I think that there wasn’t really necessarily anything prior to working at Show-Me Tickets, which I kind of list anywhere I write about what I’ve done. I started working there at the beginning of college, and it was just getting ready to launch. It was a four year old business, but it hadn’t grown into like the beast that it became. It was kind of like just still run out of a bedroom. If you can kind of picture that old entrepreneurial setting, with a bunch of people in the back bedroom running a business, that’s kind of where it was at that point.

So, coming in there and seeing those guys at that point and being able to be a part of it from there, until we soon moved into an office, and that business blew up. And just learning from the two brothers there, Brant Bukowsky, was the one co-founder, and he was on the marketing side, so he was definitely a mentor in the early days and continues to be. So, I think it was just watching them and seeing it go so well from being in their bedroom to being a full, $20 million business in a few short years. I was just kind of along for the ride, and that kind of showed me the power of the Internet, Internet marketing, and that you could do things on your own. That was kind of concurrent with me going to college and seeing that as an option, and sort of seeing where that might lead. I think that’s just where it all started, and I got really excited about it and thinking that you can pull this off. It doesn’t matter who you are. These guys are just like me, and I was helping out the whole time. So I just kind of kept my eyes and ears open, and that’s where it all started.

MO:
As an online marketing expert, is online marketing more than just on page SEO?

Nathaniel:
Yeah, definitely. It includes a ton of stuff. On page SEO is always one key aspect that a lot of people screw up in an overall online marketing campaign. But, just SEO in general, you have to talk a lot about link building and content development for on your site and other sites, and then all the other things around link building, whether that’s link based stuff or all of the different ways that you can do it. So, I’m pretty well versed in that. I spent a lot of time just building links over the years, and that’s still obviously good fuel for ranking a site. And then, onsite as well, conversion optimization, running tests on organic pages and/or on paid traffic stuff. It’s on the SEO side, onsite and off-site, whether that’s cleaning up the site itself. It’s so easy to get it right on your site as far as clean URLs, clean titles, good internal link structure, and not too many clicks away from the homepage, and just stupid stuff a lot of people mess up, to get that right and then to go out there and just be producing content and getting links and getting mentions. I mean that’s all it really comes down to.

MO:
What role does social networking play in online marketing?

Nathaniel:
It depends on the business. Yeah, if you’re a big ass brand, like Southwest Airlines or something, you probably want to have somebody on Twitter all the time and on Facebook. That’s just a company that I kind of follow, because I use them a lot and I like them. I’m able to see there stuff where it’s a seamless transition or seamless operation from face from their e-mails to their onsite to their text messages to their Twitter and their Facebook and things like that. For big ass companies like that definitely. Yeah, I see it working a lot for those guys. It depends on how you build your business too. Some people, like my friend, the Rise to the Top Guy, it’s pretty much all social. He’s on Twitter and Facebook all the time interacting with his followers and his fans and people that he may interview and commentators and everything. That’s really the core of his business, so he has to be.

Still, if you’re just doing an affiliate or SEO play, I don’t think that it’s a necessity at all. It can be an added benefit, especially with our mortgage bank, were able to use it to some, I guess, benefit. But there are certain people who will engage with you on those social platforms regardless of the type of business you have. So if you leave that untouched and unmonitored, then you’re probably missing out on a certain percentage of the business you can have. But we haven’t seen that become, you know, 20% of our business or anything like that. I think a lot of more straight SEO lead gen plays and/or affiliate marketers would probably agree with that. So, it’s not a necessity. You can leave it hanging. You might be missing a certain piece. But there are also parts of it that are starting to drive back to SEO. They’re saying that a lot of retweets will get a page index faster or all of these things that Bing’s integrating from Twitter. So, social and SEO are starting to merge a little bit. So that can start to be interesting in the next couple years, where maybe a like equals a link or you have to start looking at those things in the same frame. So that’s kind of where I’m looking at it at. I definitely don’t think that it’s a necessity for all businesses.

MO:
What is the best way to build backlinks to a website?

Nathaniel:
I don’t think there’s a better way to do it than to manually ask for them. If you’re a new person on the block, or if you’re even a midsized company, I don’t think it scales. To some degree, I think a lot of companies struggle with it because they don’t have the patience. Like you say, it is hard and time consuming, and the returns are low. You may send out 100 e-mails and only get 2 back or something like that. I mean, it used to be a lot better back in the day, but it’s a bit of a loaded question and a loaded issue that a lot of people can’t crack. But I don’t think there’s any way to do it better than to just honestly contact other site owners that are relevant and try to offer them something of value. Hopefully you’re being creative enough to where you can do something that they are perceiving it as value. Of course, you can try to pay them, and that can work. It doesn’t have to hurt you. I think it hurts you when you start to get a little bit lazy with it, or you use people and you’re paying people that are going to get lazy with it. A lot of those link networks, the only way that they can make a ton of money is to do it on scale. So they fail because they try to sell it to 500 people, and they put 420 of them on the exact same site and that’s just a huge red flag. So, there are ways to pay for it, and a lot of people still do it effectively where you’re not going that route.

As far as getting links other ways, of course people take advantage of the social stuff and the link-based stuff, and they aren’t paying for all those links. People are finding out about them and linking to them naturally. You can make that work. But I still think the best way to do it is you have to look at it as more like a relationship. It’s not just e-mailing people cold. You’re trying to create relationships with the site owners. So any way that you can do that is going to be effective. We’ve tried to be a little more creative than , “Hi, I’m some random 18 year old kid that Nathaniel hired in Columbia. Will you link to me?” We’re trying to use people with a more of a better background or more of a professional approach that we can partner with, whether that’s journalists or industry experts. I think there’s a lot to be said for creating an industry expert in what ever industry you’re in. There’s like the circle jerk blogosphere for every industry out there, and if you can participate in that with a face and a name, then that can really help you get a lot of links and a lot of attention. And once you build up a certain momentum and a list of places that you’ve been featured or mentioned, then you can get a lot more down the road too.

And then as far as on the company side, like there’s a lot of opportunities for you to get your company’s name out there. People throw all these out on how to get 20 links lists all the time. Or you can do charity things and be involved in the community and try and win awards. There’s always an award that you can apply for. Or try to get your name mentioned in the paper locally. That’s a little bit easier. But that’s ways to get links and get mentions, and I think you just need to be a little bit more creative about it and not get stuck in the box of I need to hire somebody to blast out e-mails to random site owners, because those days are definitely far and gone.

MO:
How important are domain names in online marketing?

Nathaniel:
The best way to say it is that they give you an incredible head start if you get the right ones. They save you a lot of work maybe in the long term, upfront if you can get the right name, whether that’s a name that’s an exact match keyword play or just a good keyword play if you’re a niche. So, maybe that’s FHAMortgage.com if you’re trying to be a nationwide FHA mortgage broker. That can help a lot as far as instant credibility and not having to spend as much time and money and effort marketing yourselves. If you’re like, Bills FHA Shop or whatever, that’s a lot harder and a lot harder mountain to climb. So I think that domain names offer a huge head start and a huge defensible position in search marketing and just against competitors and with your customers and people that find you randomly through the Web. The more solid your domain name is and the more directly relevant it is to the niche, it’s going to help you.

We’ve done it all where we’ve had really great domain names and we paid good money up front, and we’ve had some that we just registered straight up and we had to spend a lot more time and money and all those things I just mentioned to try to build them up into an authority site. It’s always an uphill battle, and you’re always, in the back of your mind, wondering if someone has that exact same match that can kill you. Someone’s going to come and get that, or if someone’s going to take the one that’s been parked for five years and really take us on. It’s kind of a crappy position to be in, just having that in the back of your head. So, domain names are a huge head start, a huge credibility builder, and almost always worth the upfront cost in the long term if you’re serious about building your business. That’s something that’s going to generate a lot of money for yourself and/or something that you’re going to sell later on or get an extra investment for it. If you’ve got a great domain name, I think you’re a lot more likely to be taken seriously by potential investors and/or potential acquirers down the line.

MO:
For those that may not be familiar with the term, can you explain what an angel investor is?

Nathaniel:
Angel investors do primarily two things for startups. The first is obviously on the capital side. They give them money to invest in their business. Whether they’ve created something that needs additional funding to hire more people or to add sales, to add a backbone to the company and take it to the market and start to bring in more revenue, angel investors provide financial help. The more important part that angel investors provide is just advice. Angel investors are generally, you know, coming in at the stage well before VC money, the big money guys with the big guns come in. There usually more one-on-one, usually a local or a regional group that’s going to come in and sit in and have coffee with you and learn about your business and be able to help you iterate and find what’s wrong and make it better. Hopefully, they’re people that have had experience in the industry that you’re working in. Those are always the best angel investors to have. It’s the money and then it’s the advice and experience and that one-on-one stuff. You’re probably in a position where you only have a couple of employees or a couple of people involved, and they come on and like kind of become a part of the team. A lot of them do, and hopefully, a lot of them are doing that more and more as opposed to being like being the codgy old dude with a lot of money that just wants to throw money around. I think you’ll find that you’ll find that most of them are pretty hands on, and that’s the help that they provide. And then, once you do get to a point of success if you do, then angel investors provide introductions to venture capitalists and kind of help you go to that next step as well. They’re kind of like a bridge to jump you along the line.