Question 1: How did you get into search engine marketing?

Answer:

I joined this Internet marketing meetup group on meetup.org in Atlanta, Georgia.

There was a speaker by the name of Gina Gaudio-Graves that was very successful with search engine marketing and took the time to show us how to be successul. Before I started using search engine marketing, I used online classified ads, such as Craigslist and Backpage to advertise my products and services.  

I saw the success of Gina's business on the search engine and it surpass my marketing efforts by 200%. I followed her advice and started doing research of my own and continue to do more research every day.

Question 4.

Writing [good] blog comments is important from a social media point-of-view (people will want to click on your link in order to find out more about you). How important is it from an SEO point-of-view?

From a SEO point-of-view, I make sure I input 1 – 2 keywords in each comment.  In addition, I add my link to my recent blog post at the end of my comment, unless the blog have Comment Luv.  After my comment is approved, I social bookmark the entire blog post (which I commented) to the major social bookmarking sites, like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit.  I use OnlyWire.com to submit the blog post to all social bookmarks websites simultaneously. 

I perform this method to create my website back links because the major search engine crawls these high ranked social bookmark websites often. Therefore, this process gives my website links more rank juice each time. I try to implement this step everyday for SEO marketing on my blog.

Question 5
How important is article submission in online marketing in general?

Article submission is very important but not in the traditional setting of submitting it to article directories like, Ezine and GoArticles.  

I upload my articles to document sharing sites, like DocStoc, Slideshare, and others.

The reasons why I use document sharing sites instead of article directory sites are:

• Google rank my documents higher:  It appears that Google rank document sharing sites higher.  I would only get 10%-15% chance of any of my articles on Ezine sites to rank high on major search engines.  The same articles I submit to document sharing sites give me a 95% chance of ranking high on the search engine.
• Fast indexing: My documents are indexed on Google within a few hours and often as fast as a few minutes.  
• No review process: Some sites like Ezine take days or weeks to review and approve my article.  There is no waiting period with document sharing sites.  You just upload and you are ready to go live.
• Links:  Unlike most article directories, document sharing sites don’t limit links to the bottom of your article in the resource box. You can add links anywhere and there are no limit to how many links you can have in your article.
• Images: You are not allowed to add images to your articles with article directories, which make your article looks dead and boring.  You can add images to your articles with document sharing sites. Adding clickable images to your documents adds to the overall appearance of your articles and ultimately higher click-through rates.

My three top document sharing sites are:

• DocStoc
• Slideshare
• Calameo

I have an upcoming post with more specified information about document sharing sites.

Question 6
What area/s of digital marketing will you be focusing on / focusing more on in 2010?

I will certainly perform more video blogging because most people are visual learners.  Videos that are uploaded on video sites, like YouTube, Google videos, Yahoo videos, and so on are indexed faster and mostly appear on the first page.