Todays guest at MikeShakin.com - Gerald Weber, president of Search Engine Marketing Group in Houston, TX. You can also follow him on Twitter - @the_gman. I appreciate that Gerald took time to answer my questions.

Gerald, please give our readers a bit of your professional background. How did you get into Search Engine Marketing?

I started out working for a local search marketing company doing sales. I was actually doing a pretty good job at selling SEO/SEM services to business owners, but the company I was working for kept changing the commision structure every time I started to hit the goals. In other words, they were trying to make sure I didn’t get too much money so they could keep their own wallets nice and fat. In December of 2005, I had enough of this treatment and decided to hang my own shingle and here we are today.This is the point I decided it was time to learn SEO

How many hours do you work daily and what are your daily tasks?

Well this varies really, but generally speaking, I try to keep my work day in the normal business hours range i.e. 9am to 5pm CST(about 8 hours). However, it’s certainly not uncommon that I find myself doing work at very odd hours. That’s the life of an entrepreneur, and I like it that way.

The way I keep myself on track is by making daily to do lists. I write out all of my tasks the day before, and then I just go through and check off each task as it’s completed. This keeps me focused and meeting my daily goals. Too many entrepreneurs overlook the importance of getting organized. Being disorganized can kill your business, no matter how good you are at what you do.

My daily tasks generally consist a large percentage of link building, Adwords management and communicating with my staff to ensure that other tasks are completed in a timely manner.

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Today’s guest at MikeShakin.com is Dave Olson, Community Director of HootSuite Media, Inc. Hootsuite is my favorite Twitter tool. I appreciate that Dave took time to answer my questions. I also appreciate help of Mike Abasov, Marketing Ambassador, HootSuite Media Inc., to organize this interview.

Thanks for talking with us, Dave. Let’s start with what Hootsuite is. In a world of Twitter clients, what does the new and improved Hootsuite offer that is different or better than any of the competing tools available?

HootSuite is designed for social media managers and agencies who need to manage multiple accounts collaboratively with teams. We also aim to make a tool which allows you to manage all aspects of a social media powered campaign in one dashboard. This means you can broadcast messages across networks, monitor conversations with searches, understand audience behaviour, analyze click stats and much more - all from one tool. In other words, it’s specifically designed for professionals using social media to power outreach efforts.

How long did it take to get Hootsuite from brainstorming to final product? What was the hardest part of work?

The product is never “final” per se, and it was only a few months from idea to first version. We iterate rapidly with new versions almost monthly and frequent releases of apps and platforms.

A few months after the first release, came HootSuite 2.0 which added the columns layout among other tools. This year, we’ve released team collaboration tools, a new HTML 5 version and too many tools (including influence measuring, Google Analytics integration and customer insights) to list. We’ve also started on a crowd-sourced translation project to add more languages. So we’re never done, and the hardest part is wanting to go faster, faster, faster…

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Today’s guest at MikeShakin.com - Daniel Scocco, famous blogger from Brazil, author of Dailyblogtips.com. I think that Daniel is one of the best bloggers around. I appreciate that Daniel took time to answer my questions.

Thanks for talking with us, Daniel. You’re a blogging celebrity, but what about regular Daniel? Where do you live? What do you do in your spare time? Give us a glimpse into your non-blogging life.

I don’t share too much of my personal life online, because I figure it would bother people to death….

But since you are asking, I am a 26 year old guy currently living in Brazil. Most of my day is spent working. When I am not online I am either training (weight-lifting and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu), playing the saxophone, or going out with friends.

Could you explain how you became a full-time blogger?

Back in 2005 when I got my degree in International Economics I was left with a big document that I had prepared for my thesis. I had put a lot of effort into researching and writing it out, but I was sure that apart from myself only two people would end up reading it, my teacher and my father….

Instead of letting the document sit idle and gather dust, therefore, I decided to chop it off into small articles and publish them on the web.

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Today’s guest at MikeShakin.com is Loren Baker, Editor in Chief of world famous SEO resource Search Engine Journal. This interview was originally given for my Russian blog Shakin.ru but i decided to publish it’s English version on this blog. I appreciate that Loren took time to answer my questions.

Loren, thanks for the interview. When did you first get involved with search marketing?

Thanks for interviewing me. I first got involved with search marketing in 1999 when I was a university student. I was looking for an internship in advertising and marketing as I was majoring in both fields. A lot of students were taking jobs at large businesses, but I found an opportunity interning for a small online marketing consultant, and took a chance in a field which was it its infancy at the time, but I knew it would be a challenge and would result in a lot of opportunity.

Now, search marketing is a huge industry and almost all businesses use search to gain customers or sell products. It was a good choice.

How many hours do you work daily and what are your daily tasks?

I really do not clock my hours, but I would guess that I more or less work about 12 hours a day.

I usually wake up in the morning and check email, reply to tweets, check rankings, analytics and drink coffee for about an hour. then I review blog posts in draft mode on Search Engine Journal, moderate comments, track search news and view some forums for another hour or so.

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