Best $79 I've spent ~ seo book

Hey Aaron, where did you get the idea of seo book from?

I talked about it before in forums and bam, your book is out after

 

in the past I had a large information site that sold services, but:
-I did too much typing on the site for it to sell services well. I always wanted to learn more than sell services.
-I am generally bad at sales and underpriced services (first client only charged them $100 for #1 rankings, second client only charged them $300 for #1 rankings for an adult site)
-out of luck one article I wrote (which looking back today was not in my own opinion a stellar article) got popular and I could not handle all the leads I was getting. I kept raising prices, but I still found it too easy to spread myself too thin and realized that selling services was not real scalable. I did not want employees or to be an employer, so I needed another way to create income, something that would subsidize living costs and my continuing to learn about search engines and the web.
-my large information site was nearly impossible to keep up to date and had no real business model since I did not like selling services and nobody was paying me for it. I realized there had to be a way to let content age and not have to change it, while at the same time keeping up with all the latest trends. that led to me wanting to create a blog.
-I noticed everyone always said "you dont want an seo book...they are always outdated." so I figured it would be a good business model to create one, and sell it under the concept of it being current. I thought the blog would work well to reinforce it as being current. I update the blog and book somewhat regularly, and that was why this thread was created.
-the blog and book started slower than I expected, but after a few months it started going way better than I would have ever guessed.

 

Is it all white hat or does it cover the darker side of the trade as well?

I've been thinking about getting this book as a quick reference type manual instead of the slew of bookmarks I have on various topics.

For those that have the book is it easy to use for just reference?

 

>Is it all white hat or does it cover the darker side of the trade as well?

mostly white hat / gray hat IMHO...

I have not done lots of the more advanced search spam generator stuff, and would not be comfortable writing it all out if I did because the people who made $20,000 a month off it would probably not help me market the ebook more than enough to offset all the hate mail, destroyed revenue, misfocused effort, and negative marketing from people who expected to do well with a spam generator site and ended up shocked and disappointed with me when their revenue was eventually cut for the sites being filtered out of the results for being all search spamlike.

>For those that have the book is it easy to use for just reference?

the quality of the content is probably greater than the quality of writing, because I never wrote much before I wrote the book and because I frequently update it. some of the parts are not as perfectly linear as I would like them to be because I want people to be able to peak at a section and get enough out of that section, and because I rewrite it often. I can only read it so often without getting burned out on re reading stuff that I wrote, so I update it once every month or so and then sometimes do complete rereads and lots of content cleanup every 3-4 months.

I am constantly learning and the search landscape is changing quickly, so there is always ways I can improve it. Right now I am working on creating free SEO tools and interviewing many people in the search space. the end goal of my business model is to make learning SEO as cheap & quick as possible while still providing good marketing information and still having a functional business model.

recently on a threadwatch seo book review thread a person by the name of IanB said:

"I've never actually got round to reading straight through the book, but I've dipped into it so many times, and always found something helpful, something I didn't know - about more than just SEO. One of the benefits of the slightly disjointed nature of the text is that you can just leap to the relevant section and get what you need without having to have had a lot of context from earlier pages."

 

I might have to check it out

 

Thanks for the answers Aaron.

 

I love the book - Been trying to review it on my blog but life overtakes my time so I hav'nt gotten down to the chapter by chapter thing. But I truly look at Arron Wall as one of the more reliable sources out there.