Interview with Matthew Woodward

Today I have an awesome interview with Matthew Woodward who has been making quite a name for himself in the affiliate marketing and blogging space.

This is my first interview it was a great experience with Matthew Woodward. A pleasure to have him here at Leadbloging.

1. Please introduce yourself and your background in internet marketing & SEO.

I am Matthew Woodward and I run an internet marketing and SEO blog and agency. My blog publishes top-quality case studies, reviews and tutorials which have already helped thousands of people with their online businesses.

I started messing around with the internet around the age of 13 by writing online gaming reviews and I then went onto create my first community-based website. After this, I joined the corporate world and really developed my skill set leading some huge online marketing campaigns for some big names.

I quickly got frustrated working in the corporate world because all the red tape meant far too many missed opportunities. So I left and that is when my blog was born.

2. What are your favourite SEO tools and why?

You can see a list of the tools that I use here. But the most noteworthy ones I use would probably first be Ahrefs because they tick so many boxes when it comes to SEO, I like their interface and as a backlink checker, you can’t beat the data they provide.

The other tools I use every day is my keyword & link building spreadsheets. They save me so much time when it comes to keyword research and link building, and as they say… time is money. 

3. What advice would you give anyone who is new to the industry

If you are new to the industry then you need to get some basic knowledge. You can do that by investing in some courses or just scour the internet for beginner guides and get to work. 

But once you have the basic principles you need to get stuck in right away. SEO changes day to day so no matter how much training you do, it won’t be as valuable as learning on the job.

Don’t be afraid of making mistakes and being hands-on. It’s the best way you can learn and the more you do the quicker things will make sense.

4. How do you monetize your blog?

I used to publish income reports every month which detailed exactly how I monetized my blog. You can see from these that I usually generate an income from affiliate sales, consultations (although I don’t do much of this now) and other projects that I like to experiment with. I also go one step further and show exactly what I worked on each month to grow the blog and discuss the problems I faced.

Another key income stream that starts with the blog is my SEO agency Search Logistics. The blog demonstrates the expertise that my agency can offer ultimately building business for my SEO team to work with which ultimately adds to my income.

5. How do you decide what content to write?

The first stage of deciding what content you should be writing is listening to your audience.

Whether that’s on social media, forums or your comments section.

You should be finding out what problems they are facing and offer them solutions through your content.

I have a very thorough content production process which ensures any articles I publish are researched, edited to make them easy to follow and understand and have top quality graphics and videos. We never cut corners or publish content for the sake of it.

6. What’s your content promotion strategy?

Once I publish an article I do a number of promotion strategies to get it in front of as many of the right people as possible.

This includes sending it to all my subscribers. Promoting to my followers on social media. I discuss the topic on forums and will subtly link back to the post where applicable. I contact anyone who I have included in the article which usually gives more exposure when they share and link to it.  

I will use content promotion as a way to build links too. When I reach out to people promoting the post I will use any relevant opportunity to see whether I can get a link placed as well as the links that will come naturally.

7. What is your favourite link building method?

My favourite link building strategy by far is competitor backlink analysis. 

All you need to do is find your competitors best backlinks and replicate them. This works really well because they are links that Google already approves of which is why they have the top spots in the rankings.

 And this process is made even easier with my intelligent spreadsheet that does the hard work for you. You just need to feed the data from your competitor’s backlinks into the spreadsheet, which then spits out all the links you should go after.

8. What WordPress hosting would you recommend?

On the blog I am currently using Kinsta who have provided a solid hosting service but I also use WPX hosting for other sites. 

I actually put both these hosts (and 5 others) through some pretty vigorous tests and they both performed consistently well.

 WPX Hosting is very affordable and was the fastest with the best support, whilst Kinsta has a solid overall performance.

 

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