Cory Collins Page One Power. Photo By Jon Ball Photography
Editor’s Note–As part of our ongoing P1P Interview series, we decided to give our readers a peek behind the curtain into the inner-workings of our small link building firm. Page One Power’s Cory Collins, a strong young writer who is actively flexing his professional muscle, has a natural bent towards link building strategies, which made him a natural fit for our next interview victim.
Plus, he resembles actor Ryan Reynolds, and who wouldn’t want to chat with a Ryan Reynolds look-alike?
After talking to Cory Collins, you get the impression that this soft-spoken guy could easily make a big name for himself. Granted that’s a cliché but it doesn’t make it less true. Less than four months into his stint at Boise link building firm Page One Power and he’s set his sites on writing for some of the biggest online publishers in the industry and he’s not likely to stop there.
A challenge for any online startup company is that while they are long on creativity, ingenuity, tech savvy and entrepreneurial go-get ’em spirit, they are short on workers with experience. With an industry built on swift changes, the ability to quickly adapt is a necessity if the company wants to stay competitive.
Not everyone likes changes, and some workers actively avoid it. Where these employees struggle, Collins has demonstrated his ability to run with the pack.
For his part, Collins sees himself as actively learning an industry that he is growing more passionate about. But, like anyone new to an industry, Collins has had his share of challenges. However, he has been able to intuitively grasp concepts that can take years to master, and longer to understand well enough to write proficiently about. He points out that the majority of people on the street don’t understand what the internet really is, or what Google actually does behind the scenes in order to be, well, Google.
Collins explained that while many in the search world will bandy about terms like search engine optimization (SEO), search algorithms, domain authority, etc., the most of people don’t understand the inner workings of what the internet is.
“There’s this entire back world that no one knows about,” Collins said, of his introduction to the world of link building at Page One Power. “I think a lot of people don’t fully understand all the technicality that goes into making the internet what it is. Especially when you are talking about SEO; I was surprised at how technical SEO actually is. It has certainly made me appreciate the internet more, in particular, the subtlety of what you see.”
Collins explained that prior to working at the link building firm, he believed that the internet “what a what you see, is what you get” kind of information system. Much like the scene from the movie “The Matrix” newer workers in the ranks of SEO and link building may initially feel as though they have, in the infamous words of Matrix character, Morpheus, swallowed the red pill, of sorts: “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes”.
If “The Matrix” metaphor is pushed further, like Neo, newness has its drawbacks. People may flounder under the duress of so much minutia, and information overload can set in. Ideally, the skill set needed to succeed in an environment that requires constant learning and change are what make the teams at Page One Power able to make the company clients rank the way they want.”If you think of looking out over a valley, you can see this vast valley with trees, but you don’t see the individual components[ the leaves on the trees, the birds, etc.] that make up everything that is in a valley,” Collins said. ”When you begin to learn about something as specialized as link building you begin to see every minute detail that goes into a website.”
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Collins’ 30-second Website Appraisal
Page Rank
Overall Authority
Web Presence
Backlinks
Content
Update Frequency
Sense of How Established a Site is
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He said the way he experiences the web now is different, and its a difference that he prefers. With a degree in journalism, Collins is one of many of the news-writer-turned-web-content-writer phenomena that companies are turning to for developing advantageous content. His J-school background might be what drives him to further investigate what he termed the “infinitely growing” web.
Like the web, the exponential potential is limitless and in that respect, Collins is much the same.
