Matthew Woodward

Matthew Woodward is an award winning internet marketer and blogger known for his highly detailed tutorials and case studies.

Matthew started his online career when he was 13 years old writing games reviews for a website which lead him to build his first website when competitive gamers needed a place to share their videos before YouTube existed. He gave up the corporate lifestyle nearly 5 years ago to focus on building out his own empire of sites one page at a time In his professional career he has led international brands to success with his creative and out of the box internet marketing strategies.

The award winning blog was born out of an SEO experiment to see if it was possible to rank a website without any link building, purely focusing on creating high quality content. The experiment was a great success and the blog has gone on to win a number of awards quickly growing to a 6 figure blog.

In less than 12 months Matthew managed to build a blog that made over $73,000 profit and over 600,00 page views and he also won 5 major awards with the likes of The Best of 2012, Pro Blogger One To Watch 2013, Unbounce Top 75 Internet Marketing Blogs and scored 2 Top 100 honours from Technorati.

Expect a lively no holds barred presentation as Matthew takes you over his shoulder in full transparency step by step to build your own 6 figure blog. Some of Matthews recent publications include Meet Matthew Woodward, and How To Use Social Media To Destroy Your Business.

Speaker Interview
Please introduce yourself and tell us, why UnGagged?

My name is Matthew Woodward, I’ve built a very successful blog in the internet marketing niche recently, but have over 15 years experience across corporate, SEO, conversion; and I’m going to be sharing all my top tips and tricks that I used to build a blog and hit so much success in such little time.

What are your top tips and priority actions for overcoming issues associated with any big Google algorithm roll outs?

When Google do a big update, what I tend to find is people really lose control, and everything goes crazy and it’s hard to get a handle on it. People are reading forums, there is a lot of misinformation, and it just fuels the fire. Instead what people should do, is look at it objectively, be calm, take a step back, let the dust settle, and the make an informed decision about how to move forward.

How can businesses with smaller budgets and resource best respond to big updates?

Small businesses have a huge advantage in the web in general, not just with algorithm updates; because bigger companies, corporates are very inflexible. They need to talk about things, look at risk, go through a lot of red tape before they can actually translate that into action. Whereas, a small business can be quick to react, they’re very agile, and that gives them huge advantage; not just in how they do things, but with budget as well.

Are you aware of any gamechanger developments on the horizon that in-house or consultant SEOs should be aware of?

You should definitely start bringing social into your overall campaign. You can find arguments that social doesn’t have an effect, and arguments that it does. In my personal experience, is that it does and it’s something that needs to be a part of your overall process. As well as that, we’re starting to see the introduction of engagement signals. Again, it’s only an introduction, it’s only a small part of it; links are still king but social and user engagement are certainly becoming a part of that overall picture that Google builds now.

In your niche or sector, what’s the most annoying misconception? Please feel free to set things straight!

The biggest misconception in SEO is that it’s the magic bullet to everything. People seem to think that if they start building links, or get ranks and traffic then the money will flow; but tis only a small part of the wider picture, If you’re only focused on SEO, it’s unlikely you’re going to hit success. SEO is a small part of the bigger machine that you need to consider.

Current favourite SEO tool or platform? Or can you give us the inside track on any sexy SEO related platforms, tools or developments coming soon?

So, not really tools or platforms at the moment, but what’s really effective at the moment, is private blog networks. So, any tool or platform that supports private blog networks, building of them; it allows your to reduce a lot of the risk in SEO because you have full control over the links and the deployment, but the cost is also low. It provides a great ROI while being low risk, and given SEO is just risk management, it really fits the bill. My team does a private blog network building service, if people don’t want to learn about it and just want to click a button and have their own private blog network. Otherwise, there’s some great resources across BlackHatWorld that you can research and look at about buying domains, setting a post in, and such things.