Bloggers Face-Off: David Airey vs. Patrick Altoft

David Airey
Patrick Altoft 1. How long have you been blogging? I started in October 2023, and fumbled about in the dark for a few months until I realised what a blog was Since early 2023. I started as a way to easily add content to my affiliate sites 2. Has it been worth it so far? Without doubt. I’ve made so many great contacts, and it’s been good for business too Totally. Having blog content on affiliate sites makes them much more legitimate in the eyes of Google. Running Blogstorm has allowed me to become quite a well known SEO consultant in a relatively short time 3. How many page views does your blog generate daily? Around 20,000 hits, and 3,500 visits Blogstorm generates a couple of thousand per day on average at present but the traffic varies a lot. In the first 6 months I was on Digg 5 or 6 times and the blog received a lot more traffic 4. Do you make money with it? Yes, but not through the standard advertising route you find on a lot of blogs. I use my site to attract new design clients, so it’s best to keep it clean I don’t make any money directly with Blogstorm, in fact we don’t even accept advertising. The blog is purely to promote our SEO services 5. Full posts or excerpts on the homepage? Fishing for a compliment, Daniel? On both my blogs I use your excellent ‘homepage excerpts‘ plugin. I show the most recent article in full, with four others as excerpts Definitely excerpts in a magazine style. Real users are used to arriving at corporate or newspaper style sites so if you want to convert these users into readers you can’t have a long scrolling blog page 6. What is the biggest mistake you did along the way? Tough one, because all my mistakes have turned into positives. I’m a firm believer that the fastest way to learn is by getting something wrong. Still, if I was to choose one thing that had the biggest impact, it would definitely be having my domain name stolen whilst on holiday I had one blog that made a huge amount of money for 12 months and then stopped totally. If the site had been sold at it’s peak it would have made 6 figures easily 7. What is the best way to gain RSS subscribers? Write content that people want to read At present I’m using a home grown technique that customizes a message to search visitors. If somebody searches for “seo sins” and clicks on my site they see an advert saying “We are planning a post about seo sins next week so subscribe to the RSS feed” 8. Is it important to have a unique design? Yes. If you can’t afford to hire a designer, or if you like a certain theme that’s available, jump in and customise it yourself. It can be fun, and will definitely help set you apart Totally. Blogs are so easy to set up that you need a unique design to establish your brand and make your site appear legitimate. Even creating a logo can make all the difference 9. Do you care for Pagerank or Alexa? Not as much as I used to. There are articles on my blog about such things, written when I had more time on my hands. Ultimately, if you spend time on your content, your search rankings will fall into place. Chasing after stats will only take up time you can spend researching a great blog post I am pleased when a site has a PR increase but that’s about it. Alexa is good for comparing similar sites but Compete is much better 10. How many RSS feeds do you track daily? About 100, although I don’t always track them daily. Sometimes I browse my feed reader every few days About 200 at the moment, all related to SEO, tech news or internet marketing in some way 11. What is the funniest blog on the web? No idea, although maybe I’d be better at telling jokes if I subscribed to one I don’t really read comedy blogs 12. What is the secret of your success, expressed in one word? Positivity Practice

About Mark

Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He’s an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he’s not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.