Patrick Altoft
Interview with Patrick Altoft of BlogStorm
1. Tell us a little about yourself and your blog.
BlogStorm was originally designed as a link tracker and the blog evolved from that really. My day job is providing consulting services to clients who want more traffic, exposure and sales on their websitesso I enjoy blogging about topics that help other webmasters with their sites.
2. One of the things you specialize in is linkbait, for those just getting started, describe what linkbait is.
Linkbait is simply the act of putting some great content on your site in the hope that people will see it and link to it. Sometimes the content wasn’t intended to be linkbait but ends up attracting millions of links. The key with linkbait is to remove ads from the pages and to make sure as many bloggers as possible see it. A useful resource is my beginners guide to linkbait.
3. You have been using the blog to market your consulting services. How have you found blogging to help with sales/new customers?
The blog wasn’t initially intended to be a marketing machine for my services but once people started emailing me I added a link to the menu. I was getting loads of emails from people wanting cheap SEO services which isn’t something I offer so adding my hourly rate has cut down on a lot of those emails. New enquiries stand at about 2 or 3 clients per week.
4. What were your major sources of traffic when you first started your blog?
Our week 1 stats were pretty high but the traffic has continued at a good level ever since. Main sources are other blogs, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious and Google is sending about 100 uniques per day as well.
5. What is your BlogTracker tool and how can bloggers use it?
The tool allows bloggers to track links to all of their blog posts. We monitor your RSS feed for new stories and check links to your posts every day. The data is plotted on a graph so that you can easily see which of your posts were the most popular. It is useful so you know which posts you should be writing more of and which were not very popular outside your site. I also like to look at the stats for the top sites to see who is doing well with linkbait.
6. If you could go back and start over, what is one thing you would do differently?
I’m not sure that I would do anything differently to be honest. In the early days I paid a lot of attention to feedback and altered the site a lot after launch so any changes were made quickly. Maybe if I was 12 months earlier to market the blog would have had less competition.
7. What is the #1 piece of advice for new bloggers that want to reach your level of success?
Firstly use Wordpress, then make sure you really optimise it - don’t make all the mistakes John Chow made.
Second make sure you have good enough content to get other bloggers to link to you. Thirdly don’t start a blog about blogging or SEO, even with the success of BlogStorm I still found it hard to attract readers and links.
Thanks for your time, we also want to point readers to a great post you made titled How I built 10,000 links in 3 weeks . It has some great tips for bloggers who are just starting a blog or already have a growing blog but want to increase their rate of growth
