Why Aaron Wall is My Hero
I just read an article at “Traffic Power Sucks” dot com.
Then I decided to write about why Aaron wall IS my hero. I have never met Aaron Wall in person, but I have shared a few mail exchanges with him that has brought me to write this article. Let me share with you why Aaron Wall is my hero.
When working at homes.com in the PowerSearch division, I discovered Aaron Walls SEO Book website in sales training when my sales manager who is still ranked #1 for “Ocean Beach Real Estate”, told me to use Aaron’s Keyword Research Tool when trying to sell SEO to our real estate agent clients.
Unknown to me at the time the tool was querying Overatures inventory tool and it often went down at no fault of Aaron's. Due to the problems with the tool, I decided to make my own tool and my own website for it. This one! The sole purpose of the site was a backup SEO book style Keyword Research tool of my own. I had no idea how to do this, and I really didn’t have to wait long until my next client keyword demo. I noticed that Aaron freely offered his tool’s source. Score one point to Aaron for hero status.
I then emailed Aaron with selfish intentions. I emailed him and told him that homes.com used his tools daily, and that was probably the reason it kept going down. I really hoped he would block our whole IP range so that my departments reps would have to find another tool for demos. I planned to suggest mine.
To my moral dismay, Aaron replied and seemed happy that we found his tool useful, and even admitted that he was not the best coder and couldn’t tell me why it was not reliable. (Overture's fault as I now know). Score another point to Aaron for hero status for not being annoyed that a 100 sales reps were using his tool multiple times an hour.
I sucked at sales, really I did. I just couldn’t sell SEO/SEM services that I knew sucked, but I am a hard worker, and made 200 cold calls a day the last couple of weeks just so that I could keep my job. They transferred me to fulfillment as an SEO/SEM Account Manger, as in my sales manager’s words, “I was a extremely fast learner” with regard to SEO/SEM. I guess my excitment of finally finding a niche that I could devote my career to was hard to hide. What they didn’t know is that I spent time that I should have been cold calling and selling reading Aaron’s FREE Blogs and Tutorials so I really was getting all my info from a great source. Score another point to Aaron for hero status for providing great free info.
I did learn fast, and was actually able to outdo my SEO managers ranking on what I now know to be a very uncompetitive term. “Pacific Beach CA Real Estate”, my site is HomesinPB.com. This was really not much challenge, even though our sites were all template based duplicate content crap, and when took down my site after I left, I quicky had it back up via a great little scrapper program called website extractor. :)
I got a big break and dream job at a marketing agency downtown San Diego where I was told I would be able to do both SEO and SEM, but really only did SEM until my temporary contract ended because they found "cheaper not better" labor. For SEM, I read Aaron walls PPC whitepaper, and actually learned allot of things that I didn’t know. Score another point to Aaron for hero status for providing free SEM reading that helped me drop CPS on the ESET account from 25% to 10% in less than a month after taking it over from the senior SEM specialist. I found Aarons typo generator extremely helpful while I managed ESET’s monthly PPC campaign for antivirus software.
About this time I added Aaron Wall to my linked in account, and he promptly responded by accepting my link request. Score another point to Aaron for hero status for being a legitimately cool guy.
Shortly after this I read Aarons opinion about Drupal being the wave of the future for CMS systems on his website, where he suggested that it was an up and coming CMS that everyone should consider for search eninge ranking strategy. I found it fascinating, and now as you may or may not have noticed all my sites are using Drupal. Back at the blog page I left a post, where Aaron responded to my comment in a very nice way, although he thought I was "Robin in pb", not "Rob in PB". Score another point to Aaron for hero status for being a cool blogger that reads feedback from his posters even if he did think I was a woman.
Last month I got a new job as the manager of SEO operations at 1parkplace.com which has a great IDX solution for capturing real estate leads, and its sister site iStrategy.com. Please if you must go look over those websites be kind, I just started and have been putting together business plans and not doing what I enjoy best, tweaking websites for ranking. Back to the point, in my interview the preexisting 1parkplace SEO consultant Mary McKnight from RSS Pieces asked me where I got my SEO information from. I replied “Aaron Wall’s SEO Book” and Mary said, “oh that’s great, he is a close personal friend of mine.” So once again , Aaron wall gets a hero vote for helping me get a great job, just by my mentioning his name to misses McKnight.
Then tonight, here I was updating “get your name out there” a bit because I have been seriously neglecting it recently. I came across an article about Traffic Power and started reading up about them, laughing at the similities between them and homes.com’s eStrategy division, whom by the way I now suspect stole the idea of the name from my new company and their 10+ year old iStrategy division and domain. I did a little research on Traffic Power when I came across the article;
“When I explained to him that my financial situation was going to cause me to give up the fight, Aaron said, "Send me the bills, I'll take care of it." ” http://www.trafficpowersucks.com/
That did it, Aaron wall is now officially my hero. Is he related to Jesus? I know, I know….sure he has gotten rich from SEO unlike Jesus, but this is one guy that I sure think deserves all his success.
