You can be better!

Matthew Woodward is one of the top internet marketers in the UK. His blog is listed amongst the best 100 blogs in Technorati, has won numerous awards like being listed on Problogger as a top blog, and has also been featured on Unbounce’s list of top 75 blogs.
It was launched on 5.02.2012 and currently boasts of a Global Alexa rank of 5800.
Let’s see how he went about it and achieved all this in less than a year.
Recognizing the opportunity
I had also felt the same things which spurred Matthew to create a blog that contained actionable material. At that time, guest blogging was in much vogue with established sites like Problogger, Copyblogger, Johnchow accepting filler content in the name of guest posts. If 6 posts went live each week, 5 of them would be guest posts with rehashed content.
There was even a term for that kind of content — epic shit .
There was a need for content that was new and refreshing. Matthew came up with SEO video tutorials that showed for the first time what it took to rank a site on Google.
Well, in other words, the videos were about tiered link building, article spinning, hacking guest blogging etc.
Finally, Matthew decided that the purpose of the blog was to help people. He wanted to achieve that whenever someone asked for SEO help, say in forums, his tutorials would be the ones shared.
Matt Cutts always said that great content is something that is useful to the community, something unique and something that has original research.
Building an external link is against Google’s guidelines. The funny thing is that even though Matthew is an expert on link building, he did not build links to his blog.
I find that the least shared tutorial on his blog, on finding your target audience is one of the most useful ones. (See How to find and engage your target audience online for profit? )
In Matthew’s case, he went about listing the top most internet marketing forums and set up Google alerts to find people who needed help with or were talking about SEO.
Creating a story
People love stories and can relate to them. A blog is a more serious business, but I have often felt that Matthew used the power of storytelling amply on his blog. By creating a video series of Tiered Link building tutorials, he made people come back for more. For more months than I can count these tutorials were the most shared and visited items on his blog.
Introducing a forum that further fueled the concept of helping people and at the same time basked in the benefit of user-generated content was another master stroke.
The results
Matthew is now a part of the top internet marketers and makes most of his income via affiliate sales. He does consultations too, but most of the time he’s busy traveling and has little time to devote to the numerous people who want to throw cash at him.
His achievements for the past year:
632,452 page views
31,715 hours/3.6 years spent reading my posts
Won 5 major awards
$73,334.09 profit
There are a few things that I learned from following him around since the day he began MatthewWoodward.co.uk

1. Plan, yes plan
   I have seen many of us who would start an online business or blog without any thinking. They would waste six to seven months on it and would then abandon it with a bitter heart. The primary complaints would be that there is no traffic, no money etc.
   Before starting his blog, Matthew spent months thinking about what the content strategy would be. He planned on how to get traffic. He also realized where his target audience lived online and executed his steps on reaching out to them.
   One of his readers in Costa Rica Yeison began a blog
   mytanfeet.com which is entirely about Costa Rica. In less than 6 weeks this guy who could not write English properly had his blog featured on two newspapers and earned $350. Over 90% of bloggers don’t make a cent. Currently, it does over $1000 every month. And they have gone on to launch one of the first multilingual marketing blogs yeisonkim.com .
2. Don’t fret about the money
   Don’t start a business or blog in which you don’t have your heart. Passion rules everything. These days one can make money from anything. I heard that some guy sold a fish for $10,000. The money will come if you build something that people like and want to associate with.
3. Play by your key strengths
   According to Noah Kagan (later in this post), each person on the planet is a super human. Everyone has superhuman strength in some field. Some excel at marketing, some at writing, still others in Excel. At the age of 13, Matthew built his first site on video games. He made these cool videos which showed people how to play the game properly.
   Fast forward a few years later he makes these uber cool tutorials with fancy graphics and CTAs rolling in and I am like, “Wow, how does he do that?” Not many people put in that much effort into what they are doing. But with his experience making videos it’s a key strength that Matthew has.
   Think about what you can do better than others and you will find your key strength.