Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 223
Click on the video above to watch Episode 223 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.
Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.
Announcement
Bradley: Hey everybody. This is Bradley Benner with Semantic Mastery. I’ve got several of my partners on. Apparently, Adam wasn’t able to make it because he’s traveling, he’s on a phone and he wouldn’t look well, so it’s gonna be just me and three of my partners. I’m gonna go on down the line as I see them before we get started.
Chris, I see you first. How are you doing man?
Chris: Doing good here today. Happy to be here. Exciting, cool webinar pretty much here. How are you doing?
Bradley: I’m good. I’m good. I’m glad to be here as well. I was cramming to get ready for this because I had a client meeting to go over today and I wasn’t 100% prepared, so I apologize for that. We’re going to be talking about what’s working in 2019 and really how to be a successful local marketer in 2019, kind of switch up the format slightly.
Let me also introduce Hernan. Hernan, how are you?
Hernan: Hey guys. I’m really excited to be here. It’s really good to be here. I’m excited to show you guys what’s coming.
Bradley: Cool. Then, last but not least, Marco, our unapologetic spammer. How are you, Marco? He must be muted.
Marco: Yeah, man, sorry, I was muted. What’s up man? What’s working is, you got to be working to make money, man. You can’t make money if you don’t work at it. But if you put in the work, it hasn’t been this good in a very long time online.
Bradley: Yeah. Guys, I wanna go ahead and just jump right into the presentation. Just for those of you that came for the Hump Day Hangout, that really starts in about an hour, at 4:00 p.m. as it always does. What we’re doing is just kind of updating. Every year we try to do a webinar for new subscribers where essentially we just post what we feel is working best in 2019 and what we see is for the foreseeable future, for the next year, what we’re working on in our businesses and what we’re promoting, and the reason why we’re doing that, and how to get success, how to get the best results from digital marketing. And now with really more of a slant on the local marketing side of it because that’s primarily what most of us are doing now. That’s because there’s more opportunity right now in local marketing than I’ve seen in my career since I started in digital marketing back in 2010.
Because of that, that’s why we’re really pushing that, we wanted to focus Semantic Mastery in on what’s working best and where the most opportunity is instead of trying to be everything to everybody. We really wanted to focus on what we see or feel is the best opportunity for getting results quickly and building a business that’s profitable quickly.
That’s really why we kind of wanted to do this webinar today, is just kind of lay that out for new subscribers. So that somebody coming into Semantic Mastery as a subscriber, or just being introduced to Hump Day Hangouts, or our content in any way, shape or form, they’re able to get an idea of what we’re about and what we’re gonna be teaching and sharing in our courses, in our training, and that kind of stuff.
Do you guys wanna comment on any of that before I jump into the presentation?
Hernan: Let’s just do it. I think that this is a pretty, pretty cool way of kickstarting the year. I know that’s February the 13th, but we almost always do it this time of the year because we have some good stuff coming up. So, yeah, it’s a good update, a good refreshing of what’s working, and some update, some twists. So it’s pretty cool.
Bradley: Then I’m gonna go ahead and grab the screen and we’re gonna get right into it. Let’s do it. Okay.
How To Be A Successful Local Marketer In 2019
How to be a successful local marketer in 2019, a new subscriber orientation webinar. We’re gonna be covering today, some of you may have seen something similar to this, we’re going to be covering this with, like I said, a little bit more of a local slant today, but: an introduction as to who we are; strategy; branding; identity plus authority, that’s really important; web properties, the typical properties that we would use in digital marketing and lead generation; content, why that’s important and what type of content; traffic, paid organic and social, we’re going to talk about those; and links, which are still important, not as important as they used to be, it’s a lesser piece of the overall pie now, but it’s still important; and then list building email, which we’ll talk about that and how to apply that in local marketing-, for local marketing, excuse me.
We’re gonna jump right into it. Guys, we’re going to try to keep this to no more than about 45, 50 minutes from now, so that we can get into a regular scheduled program of Hump Day Hangouts at 4 p.m. Eastern.
Starting with an introduction. Well, welcome to Semantic Mastery. We are Semantic Mastery. Unfortunately, Adam is not here, but it’s a total of five of us. I’m Bradley. I do a lot of the training, a lot of the Hump Day Hangout, the questions, and answers. We all try to attend Hump Day Hangouts every week. It’s one of our favorite things. We’ve been doing Hump Day Hangouts over four years now. I’m going on four and a half years almost. Every single week we’re consistent.
I say that we’re dedicated and consistent later on in the slide here because that’s true. I mean, we’ve only had scheduled missed Wednesday for Hump Day Hangouts in four and a half years. That was again that was a scheduled day off. Dedicated and consistent, that’s the nature of the game for us. That’s how we’ve been able to stay in this space for this long.
We’re all web professionals with our own web businesses. What I mean by that is, I run my own digital marketing agency separate and apart from Semantic Mastery and each one of my partners each has their own businesses as well. Guys, if you wanna jump in and talk about any of your businesses, that’s fine, otherwise, I’ll just keep going. Just interrupt me if you do.
So yeah, so we all have our own businesses, and why is that important? Well, because we’re not just product developers, right? We don’t just teach digital marketing theory. Which unfortunately there’s a lot of that in this industry, right? There’s a lot of people that teach methods that should work, but the bulk of their income from actually applying those methods, it’s more about selling a training product or whatever. I’m not saying that about everybody, that’s not a blanket statement, but there is a lot of that in this industry. And that’s very unfortunate.
What kind of separates us is we each have our own specialties and our own unique abilities, my partners and I do. That we all have our own businesses outside of Semantic Mastery where we may have some overlap obviously between what we all do, but we each run our own separate businesses. So that we come to Semantic Mastery as a group with collective knowledge about a vast array of marketing types and methods and procedures and all that kind of stuff that we then combine and share with you to give you the Semantic Mastery methods.
And it just works, the real-world methods that have proven to be effective. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have our own marketing agencies or consulting businesses outside of Semantic Mastery. If it didn’t work, we wouldn’t have a lasting business, right? So all of the things that we do have been tested, tested, and then tested some more.
What I mean by that is, I’ve got a couple different divisions of my own agency as I do a lot of lead generation, which are web properties and assets that I own and control that then I sell or lease the properties, sell leads or lease the properties to businesses, mostly contractors. I work mostly with contractors like home service contractors, construction contractors, that kind of stuff. Then I also do client work, which means I just provide more of the traditional marketing agency services to clients.
That’s not my preferred method, it still works really well. It’s a good source of revenue, but my preferred method is the lead generation side of things. But again, everything that I do, I test on my own lead generation assets first, because those aren’t client assets. So I do a lot of testing on lead generation assets and when I find something that works, if I can repeat the results or duplicate the results a few times over for my own assets, then I start to apply those to client assets, client properties.
Once I get results for clients then I know for a fact that those methods are working. That’s when I come to teach them to Semantic Mastery members. That’s where we develop our products and our training around stuff that we’ve already tested in the real world with real live clients, or lead generation assets, or whatever the case may be. So that they’re proven, they’re effective, and they’re safe, right? At least safe for the time being, because Google could change his mind at any moment as to what’s safe and what’s acceptable and what’s not.
Again, we try to test everything ahead of time and make sure that it’s duplicatable. That it’s not just an anomaly, it’s not just something that occurred, it’s something that we can repeat. Then we teach you so that you can go out and apply it to your own businesses without having to do all the trial and error on your own.
You said I can refresh now?
Hernan: Yeah.
Bradley: Stand by, guys. I got to represent this.
Hernan: Yeah. We’re good.
Bradley: Okay. Cool. Okay. So SEO, traffic generation, marketing, and business training. That’s really what we teach. What I mean by that is, there are a ton of products out there that will teach you a specific SEO method or tactic, and that’s great. It’s good to know how to execute a particular method and to get results. But there’s a hell of a lot more that goes into building an actual real business than just learning a specific method like an SEO tactic, or how to run a pay-per-click ad, or how to set up a PPC ad or pay-per-click ad, or something like.
That’s all good to know. Knowing how to get results with a particular method or multiple methods, that’s good to know, but that doesn’t make you a business owner. I think one of the drawbacks about the internet marketing industry is that there’s a lot of training products that teach how to do one specific thing and do it very well, but it doesn’t teach you how to build a business around that thing, whatever that is.
That’s where I think there’s a lot of … that our industry lacks that. I think it’s a little bit backwards because everybody gets excited about learning a particular method. They’re sold this dream, that is, if they just get really good at that one thing, all their financial needs will be met, they’re gonna reach financial freedom. And that’s not the case.
Ninety-five percent of people that come into this industry end up not making any money or not doing very well and it’s because of the lack of business building training. That’s something that we really, really try to do, is provide a lot of additional training besides just how to get good at one particular method. We wanna be able to teach people how to build a business around that, how to monetize it, how to make money, and how to remove yourself from the process so that you can be a true business owner.
What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, when you get good at any one thing and you start to try to build a business around that, if it’s you doing the work, then you have really just created another job for yourself where you’re your own boss. Granted that’s better than being an employee for somebody else, being self-employed is certainly better in my opinion. And I’m not putting anybody down that has a job, okay, I’ve had jobs before too. But being self-employed typically means you’re the technician, you’re executing the work as well. Meaning you’re doing the fulfillment and that’s just like having another job. So it’s hard to scale that. You reach a point where you cannot take on any more work. There’s only so many hours in a day. You can only fulfill so much work for others before you run out of time.
One of the things that we strive to do is teach people how to remove themselves from the processes. First, learn a process. I get that it’s good to get familiar with something and learn it and understand it. But then teach it to somebody else. Learn how to delegate the work to others so that you can duplicate yourself and start to work on higher level things and really create a real business. The difference between being self-employed and being a business owner is: self-employed, you’re doing the work, you’re the one that essentially fulfilling; and the business owner,-
Marco: Bradley.
Bradley: I’m sorry, go ahead.
Marco: Yeah. If I may, people see me posting in the groups all the time about the Semantic Mastery way, going back and forth. Wherever I go I’m always talking about the Semantic Mastery way. What you’re describing is, in a nutshell, the Semantic Mastery way. It’s getting where you want to be instead of being where you have to be.
Bradley: Correct.
Marco: That’s POFU. Although the money that’s POFU to you may not be there all at once. Everything that you’re doing, everything that you’re building is going to get you there instead of sticking you at a point where you plateau and you cannot grow because there’s only 24 hours in the day.
Bradley: That’s exactly right and that’s what I’m getting at. The difference between self-employed and business owners, self-employed, like I said, you’re doing most the fulfillment, you’ve created another job for yourself where you’re your own boss. Again, that’s better than being an employee for somebody else, I totally get that. But a true business owner can step away from the business and the business continues to generate revenue. That’s because you have built processes and systems and you have personnel in place.
That means that the business will still operate without you being there on a day-to-day basis, being in the day-to-day operations. You still can be as a manager, but my point is, you can make money while you sleep because you’ve got processes in place and systems and personnel that are actually fulfilling the work that you provide or whatever your business model is, if that makes sense.
That’s really what we strive to do besides just teach marketing methods that produce results. We try to teach how to build a business around that and then remove yourself from it, so that you can work on higher level stuff like expanding your business as opposed to just the day-to-day grind.
When I say we’re dedicated and consistent I mean that because, again four and a half years now, or close to four and a half years, we’ve been doing this Hump Day Hangouts. We love it every single week. It’s an hour that we give back to the community. We answer questions free, people can come and ask us questions.
We’ve got a lot of members that have joined, graduated up to our Mastermind that had started out as just attending our Hump Day Hangouts and asking questions every single week and building their businesses around the help that they received from us and maybe elsewhere also. But then they end up, once they start generating enough revenue coming and joining with us in the Mastermind where that’s where we teach a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff and the nitty gritty and the things to really build in scale a business. This is something that we really enjoy doing. We’ve been around for over five years now. It’s kind of a rarity in the SEO training industry. There’s not a whole lot of groups out there that have stayed around that long.
Do you guys wanna comment on that before I move on? Okay.
Strategy. We’re gonna talk about strategy. This is gonna be like, I said, a little bit more of a slant on local marketing this time than we’ve done in the past. That’s because that’s really what we’re focusing on now. As you see at the very bottom of that, that I’ve got focus is bolded and I’ll talk about that here in just a moment.
Strategy is really choose a niche. I always recommend this to everybody, which is … Let me just explain. When I first got started in digital marketing, especially local marketing, I would have taken on any client, any business that would talk to me. I think a lot of you guys that are considering starting a business, or have maybe perhaps have already started a business, are just looking to generate revenue any which way you can, and I get that. I get the need to generate revenue. However, you’re gonna be a lot less effective trying to be everything to everybody because of the enormous amount of work that is required to get good at any one industry or business vertical.
Choose a Niche
When I say choose niche, I mean, from a local marketing standpoint, choose a business vertical that you want to work with or work in. In other words, for me, personally, I do a lot of contractor marketing. I do marketing for contractors, home service type, construction type contractors. I have a contracting background actually, so I just am very comfortable in that space. But even that is a very broad space, right? Contractors, there’s electricians, and plumbers, and HVAC, and tree services, and landscapers, and fencing contractors, and roofing contractors, and general contractors, home remodeling. I mean, guys, I could go on and on and on and on and every single one of those are specific business verticals.
The problem with trying to service or cater to all of those is that there’s an enormous amount of research that goes into learning a particular market, what the keywords are that generates the traffic, what the pain points are, what the business owners pain points are. Because remember, as a marketing consultant or marketing agency or lead generation agency, it’s a business-to-business relationship, not business-to-consumer. So we have to understand the pain points that those business owners are going through and meet those needs at the same time.
If we’re providing marketing consulting and marketing services for those business owners for their businesses, we also need to understand the consumer side of it. We have to really get to know those industries and the vocabulary within those industries. We have to know how to talk to, not only the business owners but, how to present the businesses, the services that the businesses provide to the consumers. So it’s a lot of work, guys. If I were to tell you that …
Again, when I got started, I would take any type of business that would talk to me. I would take insurance agents and realtors or real estate agents. I would talk to contractors, all different types of contractors, like I just listed a bunch of. I would talk to dentists or eyecare physicians. All those different things that I would … and every single time I would go through to a new industry, I would start to work in a new industry, I’d have to start from square one. I’d have to do all this research and then I’d have to develop creatives and marketing messages and call-to-actions. It was just an enormous amount of work. What I found was it’s very, very difficult to get traction when you’re always starting from square one, always starting from zero.
So what I recommend is to just select the niche or a business vertical that you have a genuine interest in. It’s not just about money.
One of the biggest contractor types or business contracting industries that I do a lot of lead generation is in tree services. To be honest, I don’t have any interest in tree service work, but there’s a lot of damn money in that industry. That was what got me interested in that industry, was the fact that there was a lot of money. I kind of fell into that, I’m not gonna get into that story, but it kinda really fell into my lap. I’ve pursued it for many, many years because it’s very lucrative. But I really have no interest in tree services.
What I recommend if you’re just getting started is select a niche that you have an interest in. But you have to confirm its viability, that’s the next step. What I mean by that is, is there money there? Is there a demand for marketing services and perhaps lead generation services there? Because you might select an industry that you have an interest in, but if there’s not a demand for marketing services or lead generation services, you’re never going to make any money there. So don’t do that.
Confirm Viability
When I say confirm viability, there’s a couple simple ways to do that. You can just go to Google and do a search, for example, like I said, tree service. If I was just typing in a Google search tree service plus a city name, I’m gonna see a whole bunch of Google ads, as well as the regular search results. But I’m gonna see Google ads, which means there’s tree service contractors that are paying for traffic for those types of search queries. That means that there’s money there.
Again, you have to kind of do some minimal research to determine if an industry is viable. If there’s money, there’s a marketing budget in that type of an industry, if there’s a demand for marketing services. There’s a few ways that can be done. But again, you want to confirm viability.
Then select the monetization method. When I say select the monetization method, you can do a traditional client services agency model where you’re approaching business owners in that particular business vertical and then pitching your services saying, “Hey, I can provide you with marketing services, SEO, Maps marketing,” whatever the case maybe.
Or there’s lead generation, which is kind of what we’ve been pushing recently a lot more, and there’s reasons for that. Lead generation would be where you go out and build your own assets in that particular business vertical. Once they start to generate leads produce results, then you go contact business owners and say, “Hey, Mr. Business Owner, or Miss Business Owner, I have something that you need. I have something that you want right now, on demand, at my fingertips ready to go. I’ve got leads for your specific products or services in your specific area available now.” That puts you in a whole different dynamic. It changes the dynamic between the conversation. It puts you in a position of power in a negotiation because now you already have results, it’s results in advance.
When I say select monetization method, I mean how are you going to monetize your services? Are you going to provide client agency services, or lead generation services, or consulting services? Maybe you don’t wanna fulfill anything, you just wanna provide advice. That’s a perfectly viable business model as well. That would be considered consulting. That’s where you just go in and suggest and make recommendations on how to improve stuff, but you don’t actually do the work.
Do you guys wanna talk about maybe perhaps some of other monetization, or should I continue moving? I just wanted a second opinion, if anybody wanted to jump in. Okay. I’ll keep on moving.
As I mentioned before, keyword and market research is incredibly important. Once you’ve selected whatever niche you have an interest in and you’ve confirmed its viability-
Marco: I’m sorry, Bradley.
Bradley: Go ahead.
Marco: I was muted.
Bradley: Okay.
Marco: The monetization method that you’re talking about, it’s not just for local. I don’t want people to think that what we’re doing only works at a local level. I’m very fond of saying that your local is only limited by how you view it. Once you get out of that mindset where your local, again, it’s your street, your neighborhood, your city, maybe your county-
Bradley: Maybe state.
Marco: Yeah. What if local is your state or a set of states, or maybe the United States, or maybe English-speaking country? Once you start viewing it that way, your mind kind of opens up as to how you can use all of these different methods into targeting all of these different things. Again, just to be clear, don’t think of this as a way to pigeonhole yourself into that because this can be used for many other things.
Bradley: That’s correct. Yeah. Guys, as I mentioned before, I’m kind of taking this presentation more towards a local aspect because that’s what we’re teaching. But like Marco says, absolutely, local was all relative. Your local is relative to you, what is your local, how do you define local. I stay on pretty much hyper local stuff. But again, it really depends on your business vertical and that kind of stuff too, guys.
As mentioned before, once you’ve chosen your niche, you’ve confirmed its viability, you’ve selected your monetization method, whatever you choose to be your business model, then the next step is keyword and market research, which is what I was just mentioning about. There’s so much front-end work in that, I’m not gonna lie to you. We’re not gonna make you promises that all this shit is easy, because it’s not. There’s a lot of work that goes into building a real business. That’s where I think we’re sold a dream with internet marketing training products all the time, about how easy it’s gonna be. Well, I’ve got news for you, it’s not necessarily all that easy. If you have processes and systems in place and that’s kind of what we try to teach, then it can be easier.
But it’s still not easy, it’s gonna require work in research keyword and market research, which is important, because again that’s the tip of the spear. That’s how you’re gonna start developing your marketing plan both for marketing to business owners, which will become your clients or your service providers or buyers of your leads, but also from the consumer standpoint so that you can get results for those businesses.
Once you’ve got your research and your keyword data, then you wanna plan ahead, which is really, planning is key. That’s something that took me a long time in my business to understand. We as a corporation, Semantic Mastery, really take planning seriously. We have a weekly corporate meeting. We plan out a year in advance and then we break it down into quarterly goals, and then we break them down into action items and steps, and things like that.
That’s critically important. I know a lot of you might be rolling your eyes right now about, “Oh, I know what I want to do, I don’t need to write down a business plan.” But trust me, when you have it written down, you define your plan, then now you’ve got kind of a roadmap that will keep you on track and less susceptible to distractions and shiny object syndrome.
What is that? Well, if you’re watching this webinar, you have an entrepreneur mindset. Right? That’s the very reason why you’re on this webinar, is because somewhere deep down there’s an entrepreneur inside of you. As an entrepreneur, I can tell you, I absolutely pursue or chase opportunities. That’s what entrepreneurs do. We see opportunity, we want to pursue it. But the problem is, it’s easy to get distracted and start chasing too many opportunities. The grass is always greener, right? We always see opportunity and want to chase it because we think there’s a chance to make money and blah blah blah.
If you plan ahead with a particular business model that you want to follow, that will make you less susceptible or less likely to falling prey to shiny object syndrome and considering other opportunities until you have built a profitable business around your business plan. I would recommend without a doubt, it’s important, define your business plan, your model. Write it down, create like an executive summary, and then start developing a plan on how to reach that goal. And stick with it. Be patient and focus on that one thing, whatever that business model is and what your plan is. Write the plan out and focus on that until you get it profitable. Then if you want to pursue other things, do it, but wait until you get profitable.
Why am I telling you this? Because I have chased down so many other opportunities throughout my career that ended up costing me money because I never followed through with it, because at some point I would get bored with it because it wasn’t producing results, because I wasn’t putting enough effort into it to see it to completion, to where it started to bear fruit. At some point I see another opportunity and start chasing that one. Next thing you know, you’ve got 18 different projects going and none of them get completed. None of them start generating revenue because you’re trying to do too many things at once.
Which is exactly why I said choose one niche, learn it get, good at it, build a business around it, make it profitable and then if you want to chase something else, chase something else after you’re generating revenue from your first selection. You see what I’m saying? Because that’s how you start to make money. You can progress into other areas of your business and expand if you want, but you’ve already got something generating revenue. If you’re not generating revenue from your business model yet, why would you start going after another business model? You see what I’m saying?
I’m telling you that from experience and I know that my partners have experienced similar setbacks throughout their careers as well.
Marco: Here’s just a thing from yesterday, for us, just to let people know that we do drink our own Kool-Aid. We each assigned ourselves or each other a task to complete within the next 90 days. At the end of the next 90 days, if we haven’t completed it, then we will be held accountable for it. When we complete it then we will take another task and so on and so on and so on. That’s a plan, guys. That’s a plan for growth and that’s a way to be successful. We do drink our own Kool-Aid. Everything we’re telling you, it’s because that’s what we do.
Bradley: Yeah. I mean, guys, we meet weekly and then we set 90-day goals. We do everything in 12-week sprints or 90-day sprints. We’ve learned over, especially the last couple of years now, to really focus in on one main goal for each of us every 90 days. Instead of 15 goals, it’s one.
Why is that? Because when we’ve tried the 15 goal approach, or whatever, half a dozen goals, whatever it may be, we’ve all done that, we’ve all tried that, and what we found is we’ve not been effective in any one area. When we finally learned how to focus and boil it down to the one thing and build 90-day sprints or 12 week planning and work sessions around that one thing, we started to see growth and we started to see traction in every area, because we’re really focused on that one thing, if that makes sense.
Again, I would encourage you not to chase all the greener grass that’s always on the other side of the fence, it’s always more opportunity elsewhere. Don’t do that select one industry or one particular business model, learn it, get good at it, make it profitable before you move on to the next. Okay.
Identity & Authority
Next, identity and authority. This is incredibly important for getting traction in any type of digital marketing. It doesn’t have to just be for local or lead generation. As Marco said, this would be for anybody that wanna do affiliate marketing or anything else. Brand identity and authority is really, really important right now, especially for SEO.
But besides that, consumers, users of the web have gotten savvier over the years and people pay attention to brands, people follow or seek out brands, and people are willing to pay more and more money for services, buy products and/or services from brands that they know, like, love and respect than they can get elsewhere for cheaper because they’re willing to pay more or they want the status symbol, so to speak, of dealing with that brand, or engaging with that brand, or having that product or service from that brand. I’m sure you can relate.
My point is, identity and authority, you have to think about, as a marketer, how can we build that identity and authority, and build a brand to where the people that are seeking products and/or services in that industry, that space, that vertical? What can we do to help make it to where they’re seeking out that particular company, that provider? That’s something that we do.
I’m talking about for SEO, too. I mean, it’s really, really important. Google rewards brands. Hands down, that’s a fact. Google rewards brands. If you have authority in a particular industry, then you can get results from pretty much anything that you do without having to go through all of the additional work that perhaps a company with no authority or a no name or a generic type company would happen. That goes for websites and digital assets, too.
What I’m saying is, if you build authority within a digital asset, you can get results from it even as you add new content and things like that. Whereas, if you don’t have that authority built, then it’s an enormous uphill battle for everything, to get traction for anything.
My point is, identity and authority start with brand. There’s a company or corporate branding, so that would be obviously a brand for a company or, in my case, for example, with contractors, it would be like having a tree service company that now has a strong brand and has expanded into multiple areas, that kind of stuff.
That would be a corporate brand. But there’s also personal and professional branding. Guys, a person, a celebrity, and authority can be a brand. For example, a celebrity is oftentimes a brand, an author can be a brand. Do you see what I’m saying? Bloggers, social media stars, YouTubers, those can be brands as well, coaches and motivational speakers, those kinds of things. Those can be personal/professional type brands. So you can build that up, too.
Having a presence, obviously, at a bare minimum you wanna be on all the major social networks. You all know what those are so I don’t need to go into that. But having a digital presence is incredibly important. Having a website is important too, although we’ve shifted slightly in the fact that a lot of the lead generation stuff we don’t build necessarily web sites or self-hosted websites, which requires a ton of work. We can use what we call GMB assets or Google My Business assets. That’s more of the lead generation side. But having a website or Google My Business assets, depending on what your business model, that’s really, really important. Okay.
Association
Association. Associating the brand or the person or professional with keywords in products and/or services. Creating associations is another way to get traction. Again, that’s a little bit more advanced, but what I’m talking about is, over time, if you’ve built authority in a particular industry, then keywords and search queries, Google will start making associations for that. There are ways to manipulate that, too. Obviously, we’re not getting into that here, but there are ways to manipulate that kind of association. Once you’ve developed that association, your traffic can grow exponentially because of those associations. It’s again very, very important.
Then lastly, build relevant associations with like-minded people. That’s kind of like social proof. That’s also networking and things like that. Again, that’s more traditional business stuff, not necessarily digital marketing related. But if you want to get traction in any one area and grow your business, then go consult with other like-minded people, other professionals and start networking.
One of the things we love about our Semantic Mastery Mastermind is that it’s a lot of like-minded people at varying levels of their business and many different business models too. But we’re all in the group together specifically to discuss marketing and business practices. What happens is we end up finding opportunities within the group that spawns or blossoms new businesses right out of those associations, if that makes sense.
That’s actually how we got started as a group, corporation Semantic Mastery, my four partners and I, we got started as part of another Mastermind and we would just meet on an accountability group on a weekly basis and share information. We learned over about a year and a half time, about eighteen months, that the information we were sharing within our accountability group was more valuable than half the shit we were paying for to be in Mastermind groups. So we decided to start our own corporation and our own training and consulting company, which is Semantic Mastery. Five years later, here we are. We love it. It’s been fun and it’s been lucrative. Again, that was through associations with like-minded people. Okay. It’s hugely important.
Web properties. There’s a long list. This is a laundry list. I’m not going to go through each one of these one by one because it’s really not necessary. These are typical web properties that you would use in marketing for building your own brand, or client’s brand, or lead generation assets, or whatever the case may be.
Self-hosted work sites. Typically, WordPress sites, that’s about the most common. Again, I’m doing a lot of lead generation stuff right now where I’m not needing to build WordPress websites, and I kind of like that because there a lot of work goes into that, because now GMB Google My Business, provides a lot of these types of tools inside of the Google platform, which doesn’t cost anything. They’re simple to set up and they generate results. That’s why I listed that as second, as a GMB Map and website. Those are assets or digital properties that can be set up with not a whole lot of work and they can generate an enormous amount of results. I talked about that.
YouTube. I love YouTube videos. At Semantic Mastery, we do a ton of YouTube stuff because that’s primarily where our content is for our training and stuff like that. It’s great source of traffic. It’s good for local marketing. It’s good for affiliate marketing. It’s good for everything. I love YouTube. There’s a ton of traffic there. That’s another web property and asset.
Podcast. I don’t do a ton of podcasts or listen to a ton of podcasts but there’s a lot of traffic to be had there. So those are good, too.
Parasites. Those are third-party sites. Those could be like Web 2.0, social media properties, other types of web properties that you can get listed on, that you don’t necessarily own but you can get a page on them. That’s what parasites would be.
Social media. You all know what social media is. I don’t have to describe that.
Web 2.0’s would be like blog sites like WordPress.com or Tumblr, Blogger, Live Journal, Medium. Those are all types of like web 2.0 properties where you can create like blogs or web pages and add content and control the content, that kind of stuff.
Press releases. Those are incredibly powerful for generating authority, and traffic, and link building, and just announcing news. Press releases are a critical component of a lot of the stuff that we do in our own processes for generating results for clients, as well as for link building, like I said, for SEO results. Press releases are incredibly powerful for all of that. We’re big, big, big fans of press releases.
Then last thing, what’s working in your chosen niche? What do I mean by that is, whatever your chosen niches, and your research, with your keyword research and market research, just pay attention, what are the other kind of web properties that you see commonly while you’re doing your research? Make notes of that because you want to make sure that you create properties on those platforms as well. Okay. I’ll keep moving.
Content
Content. Content is important. That’s basically what Google is about, right? It’s about content. It’s about producing content in whatever your chosen industry is and being consistent in your high quality content. Gone are the days, I mean, trust me, there are plenty of spammers out there that still do a lot of spammy stuff and they can still get results. But you’re gonna get a lot better results if you produce quality content.
That doesn’t mean you have to produce it, it really depends on what your business model is. But just understand that content is a necessary part of promotion on the web, whether it’s written content, text-based content, video content, audio content, visual content like graphics, whatever.
Content is incredibly important. It’s a critical component of promotion on the web. So make it high quality. Remember, as I mentioned earlier, internet users, web users are much savvier now than they were a few years ago. They expect quality content now. They’re not going to engage with shitty crappy content.
It’s not going to get you results. You might be able to use crappy content to get ranked in the Google, in search engines, but that’s not going to convert, it’s not gonna translate into conversions, which means leads and/or sales.
You wanna have good quality content. You wanna be consistent in your quality and consistent in your production of content. That’s really key. For example, lead generation with Google My Business, I do a ton of that, and being consistent with posting on a regular basis, frequently and regularly and consistently is critical to getting results. It’s important.
Rich media. What is that? Rich media is a multimedia type of content. Video, audio, visual, text, all combined, so make sure that you’re using all different types of medium. Images, important videos, obviously, podcasts, and MP3s, I don’t do a lot of that, but that can be part of rich media. So keep that in mind. All right.
So then, what types of content? Well, there’s original, which means you should be a subject matter expert if you’re producing original content, and/or you have to hire subject matter experts to produce original content. What I mean by that is, if you go to a content farm, when I say content farm, I mean like these cheap article writing services and you order content for a client’s website on, let’s just use, home remodeling services, you’re gonna get some crappy generic type of content written by somebody that’s not a subject matter expert in home remodeling. So just be aware that that’s gonna be crappy content.
If you wanna get good content, you would have to talk to a home remodeling contractor that understands that industry and have them write the content. That can be rather expensive unless you’re the subject matter expert or you know where to hire and are willing to pay for a subject matter expert to produce original content.
That’s perfectly valid and viable. Original content is powerful. But it can be expensive and it can be time-consuming if you’re generating it on your own, which I don’t recommend you do. We recommend curated content. Love it.
Curated content just means being able to go out and find content that has been written from subject matter experts, about whatever your particular topic is; and then combining content that you found on the web with commentary to produce an original piece of content that includes other people’s content but you always cite the source. Again, it’s called content curation. Go do a Google search and learn more about it.
That is our preferred method of content generation for marketing purposes because that way you don’t have to be a subject matter expert. You just have to be able to locate quality content and then combine it in a way to reinforce whatever thought, topic that you’re trying to promote, idea that you’re trying to promote. So use other people’s content to reinforce the idea that you’re trying to promote. Does it make sense? Again, it’s a very, very powerful way to do it without having to be a subject matter expert.
Distribution
Distribution. Distribution would be about republishing, getting out your content out on the web. Where else can you publish it besides just perhaps the website or the blog? Share it on social media, syndicate it out through a broadcasting network or a content amplification network, something that we call syndication networks. Very, very powerful. It’s a great strategy because you can set it up once and every time you produce content it will automatically republish and distribute itself, broadcast itself out to multiple web properties, which just means you’re amplifying your reach. Very, very powerful.
Lastly, engagement. Engagement is one of the primary ranking factors now, ranking signals. Again, that goes back to quality. If you have quality content, people will engage with it, provided you can get it in front of them, which is what distribution is for. Does that make sense? If you have good quality content, you have good distribution, you will get engagement. Engagement is one of the primary ranking factors now.
Okay. Keep moving. We’re gonna run out of time if I don’t hurry.
Traffic. Having good content is great, but if you don’t get traffic to it, it’s nothing. It’s like having a billboard in the middle of a desert. If nobody sees it, what good is it? Does that make sense? What you want is the billboard right in the middle of a busy highway. That’s essentially what traffic is. We wanna generate traffic to our web assets, to our web properties. We want people to notice and engage with our content, and the way you do that is through traffic.
How do you do that? Well, there’s paid advertising, which would be considered like pay-per-click marketing. That’s a great way to jumpstart traffic immediately because this, literally, you fund the source. When your ads get approved on whatever platform or network you’re using, the traffic starts. It’s almost instantaneous. It’s immediate. So the paid advertising is great.
Search
Search. Search oftentimes requires a little bit of effort and some time before you start getting results – not always the case. Sometimes you get lucky and you’re able to generate traffic from search right away. When I say search, I mean like SEO. But a lot of the times there’s gonna require some time and some effort before you start to get results.
The beautiful thing about search traffic is that it’s free. I mean, when I say free, it still requires time and effort, so it’s not free. Or it might require you paying … But my point is you’re not paying per click or per view type thing. So that’s SEO, basically.
YouTube
YouTube. Again, huge source of traffic. YouTube is actually the second largest search engine or most traffic search engine. People don’t think of YouTube as a search engine, but it is. It’s just a video search engine, a video content search engine. Huge amount of traffic.
Social media. We all know there’s a ton of traffic there. I’m not a huge social media marketer. I do more SEO and YouTube stuff and PPC stuff. But social media, there’s a ton of traffic there, depending on what vertical you’re in. It is an integral part of an overall marketing picture. So don’t discredit it, don’t avoid it. Make sure you’re using it.
Display Networks
Display networks. Again, that’s more paid traffic stuff. By the way, the Google Display Network has gotten so much better in the last year, year-and-a-half. Guys, I’m doing training on that inside of our Mastermind. I really, really like it. It used to be a pain in the to do Display Network advertising, it’s gotten a lot easier recently. Display networks is a great source of traffic.
Remarketing. It should be an integral part of every marketer’s toolbox. Remarketing, retargeting on Facebook, I guess it’s called retargeting, but remarketing is incredibly powerful. It will help you to convert traffic that would have otherwise been lost. What I mean by that is when traffic comes to a website, you cookie them, and then you follow them around the web with banner ads, and remind them that they visited the site. So that when time and circumstances changes, puts them in a position where they’re ready to make a buying decision, they’re reminded of your product or your service, or your client’s products and services.
Remarketing should be an integral part of all marketing campaigns, in my opinion, in this day and age, 2019. It produces fantastic results and it costs a fraction of cold traffic, cold paid traffic. It’s absolutely important that you do that.
Organic Search
Organic search. We just talked about search. Organic search is just getting stuff to rank in either Google, Yahoo, Bing, or YouTube. Again, organic search, it’s SEO.
Social media, we just talked about that, content marketing, and engaging in groups and communities with like-minded people. Again, just what we talked about earlier, social media is a great source of traffic. If you can produce quality content, consistent content, consistent quality content, and also if you engage with groups and/or communities, there’s a ton of traffic that can be had there. Then, podcasts, again I don’t have a lot of experience in that field, but I know for a fact that there’s a ton of traffic there.
Then, video marketing, video marketing, YouTube, it doesn’t have to be YouTube, but having a niche channel and then promoting content, it could be for clients, it could be for your own business, for whatever, like if you want to position yourself as expert in whatever your chosen business vertical is, you could create a YouTube channel and start producing content about how you can help those types of businesses and then create a niche channel around that to where you become the authority or an expert in their eyes. That’s kind of what Hernan, as he calls “the Eagle method.” That’s positioning yourself as an authority in a particular business vertical, and you can have a video marketing in this channel.
Links
Links are still important. As I mentioned at the beginning of this webinar, they’re less of an overall piece of the pie to get results, but they are still critical. Backlinks are links from other websites that link to your content or your assets, whatever you’re trying to promote. It’s kind of like a vote of confidence. It’s not necessarily quantity, it’s much more about quality and relevancy now than quantity. But getting links from relevant sources or other relevant content, especially if you can find authority type of content or authority sources to get links from and then engagement upon those links is incredibly important. That’s kind of what powers everything up.
I’ve just talked about in several occasions now, engagement being one of the primary ranking factors and that’s absolutely true for links. If you go out and build a bunch of links that might move the needle a little bit, but not nearly as much as if you build just a handful of links and then send traffic through those links, or put those links in places where it’s going to naturally get traffic, people clicking through. That is a much, much more powerful way to build links than just mass links that don’t get clicked on, which Google kind of disregards at this point.
Again, links are incredibly important. Where do you get them? Well, social media, obviously. Every time somebody drops a link to a piece of content that they just published on their blog, in their social media groups, and they get a bunch of engagement from that, that’s a huge signal. Google knows that where that traffic is coming from. So that’s a great signal because it means people are engaging with your content, they’re visiting your website. They’re engaging with that link that was generated on the social media platforms. It’s huge.
For video social embeds, that’s really powerful. That means sharing videos across social media channels and platforms. That’s great for video SEO and getting better results from video. Web 2.0, again same thing, links from web 2.0s or embedding. It’s great to get results for video.
Citations
Citations. Those are like publishing or mentions of your name, address, phone number on the web. That’s for local businesses. But a citation can also be just the mention of a brand name, for example. That’s a citation. Citation just means publishing of a name of a business. It could be name, address, phone number. It could be name, address, phone number, a backlink. It could be name and a backlink, phone number. You see what I’m saying? It’s a mention of a brand, a company, whatever, a website, a personality, whatever on the web, that’s considered a citation.
There’s niche citations, which would be like a plumber getting listed on a plumber directory; that would be considered a niche citation. A local citation would be a plumber getting listed in a local business directory for their local Chamber of Commerce; that would be like a local citation. Or it could be a citation on a national type of business directory, like Yelp, for example, or Angie’s List or Super Pages, for example.
Unstructured citations. An unstructured citation just means that it’s not a traditional business directory, but it’s still a mention, a publishing of a name, address, phone number, website, or any combination of those data points. Again, unstructured citation is considered like press releases. When a name, address, phone number is listed and press releases as contact information that’s considered an unstructured citation. Very, very powerful still.
Co-citations. That’s essentially generating, building association without actually … It’s like building association and siphoning authority without an actual direct hyperlink. Very powerful strategy. I don’t really have time to get into exactly what co-citation is, but let’s just say that it’s a way to associate a web property or a brand or an entity as an authority through mentioning it on other properties without it being a direct link. It’s called co-citation.
There’s a really cool tool that can produce co-citation automatically. It’s a great tool, we just did a promotion for it a couple weeks ago. Again, that’s something that we’ll talk about in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind, Hump Day Hangouts, stuff like that. Co-citations are powerful though. Very, very powerful. It’s a great way to build authority without actually building links.
Private blog networks. We don’t do a lot of that anymore, but I wanted to address this because there’s still a lot of that out there. They can be powerful. I wouldn’t recommend to link back directly to self-hosted money sites or websites, they can be toxic. But you can still use them, that’s essentially going out and building websites for the sole purpose of building links, and that can help. That can still be effective. Again, we don’t recommend doing it directly to self-hosted money sites, but they can be used effectively in certain situations. So I did wanna mention them.
Spam. Spam is great. When I say spam, that’s like mass link building, things like that. It a can be very, very powerful if you know how to do it correctly. I don’t recommend it for a novice. I would recommend if you’re gonna use that kind of stuff that you would just hire somebody that knows what they’re doing. We have a great, great source for that. If you ever need that, reach out to us, or go to our store MGYB.co and that will be available. All right.
Lastly, trust and authority. Those are the types of links that we try to suggest building. If you’re gonna be building links, build leads, trust an authority. Press release is great source. It’s easy to build links with press releases. It’s real simple.
Media. Again, that’s kind of what we’re doing with YouTube and stuff like that. Those are great types of links. Also media, when I say like press releases, a lot of those get republished on media type sites, news sites, things like that, that would be considered media links. Those are great.
Guest posts on authority blogs, that’s great too. Not just great for the SEO and the link, but also because, if it’s relevant content on authority blog, you’ll get traffic from that. Again, engagement traffic signals are a huge ranking factor.
Okay. we’re gonna go a little bit over, unfortunately. That’s okay. We’re gonna have to keep going. We’re almost done.
List building and email
List building and email. I’m wanting to mention this. This is still important even though, in the local marketing space, it’s a little bit more difficult. It’s still important. Let me kind of explain what I mean. If you’re doing affiliate marketing, list building and email marketing is incredibly important. That’s where you’re gonna get most … Also like media channels, such as YouTube and social media can be incredibly effective too.
Build and email list, that becomes an asset. That becomes an asset that you own and control. Whereas even a YouTube channel, you don’t really own that. You might have a YouTube channel and create a hell of a great following and have a massive business on YouTube, but YouTube could shut you down at any time. Having an email list, that’s yours. That’s an asset that you build. You might get kicked off of an email platform, but you still have your list. It’s still your list, you build that. It’s very, very powerful.
In local marketing terms, understanding how to build email marketing lists for clients and implement email marketing for clients is incredibly powerful. A lot of clients don’t have any desire to do it though, I can tell you that. A lot of local businesses that I deal with contractors don’t have any desire to do it. But if you can educate them on why it’s so powerful and then implement it for them, it can be incredibly powerful for local marketing.
But you, as the marketer, build your own list even in the local marketing space, consider building your own list of business owners in your chosen vertical, so that you can always market your services, your lead generation, or your agency marketing services to business owners in your chosen business vertical.
You wanna stay in contact with them. You want to continually remind them that you’re there so that when they are finally ready to make a purchasing decision or hire a marketer, or start buying leads or look for a lead generation service, who’s top of mind? You are, because they’re on your list and you send them helpful and useful information on a consistent basis via email. Again, remarketing is kind of like the new email in a way. The two of those combined together, remarketing and email marketing, is incredibly powerful for building your own business, including local marketing and/or lead generation.
Just for example, if I go out and build a list of tree service contractors that are on my email list, that every single time I have new assets available that are generating leads, now I have an audience that I can market those to. Does that make sense? It’s incredibly powerful. In any number of ways, email marketing is still very, very, very, very powerful.
Email provides direct access to interested parties. They got your email list because they opted in somewhere, which means they raised their hand said, “Yes, I’m interested. I might not be ready to purchase, but I am curious, I am interested.” This allows you to continually contact them.
More reach than social. You know that unless you’re paying to promote your content on social media platforms, especially Facebook, for example, it doesn’t get a ton of traction or reach. So email is direct access to people. Think about it, how many times you check email on your phone in a day? Think about that. Most people do. It’s a direct access to people.
You own the list. It’s a business asset. It’s something that can be sellable. It has a real monetary value. So just keep that in mind. You can’t own a YouTube channel or Facebook group. You can run it, but again, YouTube or Facebook, or whatever platform you’re on, you’re at their mercy. You don’t own it. They could shut it down at any time, they could shut the company down, or whatever. Facebook could go belly-up, I don’t think it’s gonna happen, but it could and you would lose access to all those users in your group or your page; and the email list, you get to keep.
Okay. All right. Since we’re going a little bit over and we’re going to Hump Day Hangouts, we’re gonna roll through this next few parts of this, and then we’ll jump into our regular scheduled programming.
But basically, if you want to save a ton of time, MGYB.co, that’s our store. It stands for Make Google Your Bitch. It’s funny but that’s where we provide the Done For You services that are the same methods that we use in our own businesses. We started out Semantic Mastery is a company to produce training products about the methods that we use in our own businesses because they work. But what we found is a lot of people would go through the training and say, “Man, that’s awesome, but it’s a lot of work. Can you do it for us?”
What we’ve discovered over the years is that, not only do we produce the training now, but we want to provide you with access to the same methods that we teach done for you so that you don’t have to do the work, so that you can focus on building your business instead of the grunt work and fulfilling and doing the actual execution of the methods. You don’t have to execute the methods, if you can come to us and purchase it. We execute it, we fulfill it for you so that you can work on client generation, expanding your businesses, refining your processes, outsourcing, those kind of things, building a real business.
So go to mgyb.co and see a menu of our items. That’s going to continue to expand in 2019, quite a bit over the next couple of months. We’ve got a ton of products and development, or not products or services and development, they’re proven but we’re trying to get them into our stores is what I’m saying. Over the next several months, a lot of new services are going to be opening up as we get them into the store. Done for you services Semantic Mastery style, it’s built exactly to the same specifications we all use in our own businesses.
Following our standards, quality, and support, that’s Syndication Networks. We’ve just been talking about content amplification, brand amplification, broadcasting and distribution networks, that’s what Syndication Networks are. We build them for you. We use them in all of our businesses.
RYS Stacks
RYS Stacks, which is Rank Your Shit Stacks, essentially that’s using Google Drive properties to create massive authority. It works incredibly well. It’s a tedious process to build them, but we can do it for you, save you the time. You can get the result, benefit from the results without having to do the work.
GMB Autoposting
GMB Autoposting, that’s Google My Business posting, which is activity and consistency. That’s incredibly important, I’ve talked about that. GMB Autoposting is a tool that helps make it easier and consistent to schedule posts. It’s a way to automate posts. Very, very powerful.
Press releases, I’ve just talked about that. We have a fantastic press release distribution platform. We provide you with an organization page, which is incredibly powerful. It’s good pricing. So check out our press releases.
GMB Verifications
GMB verifications. If you want to go build a lead generation business, you need to start with building, or verifying, securing Maps assets. You can try to do it on your own, it’s a pain in the ass, it’s expensive and time consuming, and you’re probably gonna have minimal success and actually securing. But you come buy in from us, we’ll do it for you. We have a unique way of being able to do that and provide maps listings for you. So you can start building your lead generation business or building, expanding your client’s Maps presence.
Keyword research. We have a fantastic keyword research product, which will give you all the keywords that you will ever need in your chosen industry or vertical. Instead of you have to spend … I’m not kidding, I used to always do this myself manually and it would take me four to six hours. Any time I would start a new industry and I was just talking about I have to start from square one and do all that research just to generate the keyword research report for an SEO campaign and perhaps content marketing campaigns, it would take me four to six hours in a new industry.
Why would I want to go through that when I can go buy it at our store and in a few days, I get the report back and it’s done, I can focus on building the other parts of my business while that gets done? That’s grunt work stuff. It’s critically important, don’t get me wrong, but it’s still grunt work stuff that I don’t need to be doing. I can hire that out, and that’s what we provide for you.
CORA Reports
Cora Reports. Those are just huge reports that are about on-page. It’s incredibly powerful, so check those out. We’ve got some more data on the website for that. Much more coming. All right.
You wanna get proven ranking processes? Well, SEO Battleplan. That’s kind of like our front-end product. It’s like a PDF guide that just walks you through processes that we’ve developed, that are consistent and repeatable, that produce results for us over and over and over again. It’s basically like a step-by-step checklist and recommendations on how to get results with any type of web asset. It’s not fluff, it’s not an 800-page PDF because we want to make ourselves sound smart, it’s actually very simple.
It’s a very simple guidebook that shows you step-by-step processes to get results with the different types of web assets. If you want something that’s over complicated, that’s not the SEO Battleplan. This is a simple guide that is like an actionable item guide that will help you to get results. Again, SEO Battleplan is a step-by-step method for new websites, aged website, YouTube videos, local websites, and now Google My Business stuff because that’s where we’re doing a lot of Google My Business lead generation and asset building right now. So that’s new for 2019.
If you wanna check that out? Go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com. It’s inexpensive and it’s incredibly powerful guidebook, which will help you to have a consistent and repeatable process for getting results.
That’s one of the problems a lot of people have in this industry, is they go out and start buying, or they might try a bunch of different things and they get summary results here in some results there, but then they go to try to duplicate it and they didn’t have a step-by-step plan, checklist essentially, of what to do and in what order to repeat those results, and so it’s always trying to reinvent the wheel. You don’t need to do that. Follow a plan, guys.
McDonald’s is incredibly successful because they have a system and a plan, and it’s a step by step plan. It’s a linear type of operation. Do this, then this, then this, then this, and now your hamburger is made, your Happy Meal is made, whatever the case may be. That’s what this is. It’s a repeatable process that you can use to get results consistently. Again, very inexpensive but very powerful.
Do you wanna fast track your success? Semantic Mastery Mastermind, that’s our top level coaching group. That’s where I spend the bulk of my time, to be honest, is in the Mastermind and doing training for that. We get into everything. We get into specific marketing tactics and methods. We get into the weeds on that. We get real nitty gritty down into what’s working and what’s working now and some advanced stuff.
But then we talk about business building, entity structuring. We’ve had lessons and CPAs come on and talk about how to protect your money from Uncle Sam, to reduce taxes. I mean, we’ve talked about building business processes, and outsourcing, and managing teams of employees and/or outsourcers, and all of these things that go into building and managing and maintaining a successful marketing business. It’s not just about marketing. We don’t just teach marketing, we teach business practices too.
What’s in store for the Mastermind in 2019? Local marketing and lead generation business building, that is primarily what we’re teaching because of the opportunity being what it is right now. That’s where we see the most opportunity to get results fast. To start generating a profitable business right now, the quickest way, in my opinion, is through local marketing and lead generation. So that’s what we’re focused on in 2019. We do teach beyond just that, just so you know, but that is where the bulk of our attention is at the moment.
POFU Pathways. That stands for Position Of Fuck You. That’s kind of a joke that we have. But it’s the truth. You get your business into a position where you get to pick and choose your clients. You get to pick and choose the projects you work on. That’s called a Position Of Fuck You. That’s where we all want to be. Instead of having to take on clients or projects just to generate revenue because we need it, we can pick and choose or cherry pick what we want to work on and who we want to work with, because we’ve elevated our business to a position that allows us to do so.
POFU Pathways. There’s really two pathways when you join the Mastermind. It’s either start-up or growth. If you’re just starting out, you’d follow the start-up path. If you already have a business, no matter what level you’re at, there’s always room for growth and you could follow the growth pathway. So those are our two pathways, the POFU pathways. It makes it really simple. You either enter the door on the left or you enter the door on the right. You’re either a start-up or growth. You’re one or the other. Then we help to suggest the training and/or products that will help you reach whatever goal where you’re at currently.
Outsourcing
Outsourcing. Like I said, we teach that. We teach how to hire, train, and manage virtual assistants, and how to grow, and how to remove yourself from your business processes so that you can build a real business. Instead of just building yourself another job, you build yourself a business.
Scaling, how to get growth. Again, that’s the growth path. Those of you that come in as a start-up, then once you have a business that’s starting to generate revenue and you get profitable, now you transition over to growth and how to scale.
Live events and meetings. Yeah, we’re going to be doing POFU Live again this year in 2019. We have also bi-weekly webinars that often go two-and-a-half to three hours long. It’s ridiculous how long they go. Marco and I are always on those for two-and-a-half-, at least two hours, but oftentimes two-and-a-half. Sometimes three hours, it’s ridiculous. But we get a lot of training into that time.
Thousands in discounts and Done For You services. Plus, every time we launch new things, the Mastermind always gets first crack at it before we launch it publicly, if we launch it publicly. So there’s a ton of benefits to be in the Mastermind. If you’re interested in that, check it out.
Okay. I think that’s it. Do you guys wanna comment on these stuff before we jump into the last 45 minutes of Hump Day Hangouts?
Marco: Yeah. The only thing I’m gonna add to this is that, once again, we haven’t done away with SEO, we haven’t done away with affiliate or anything else like that. We’re focusing on local, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have groups and we don’t have places where we talk about what’s working in SEO today.
Bradley: Correct.
Marco: Because even though the web is fluid, there’s certain principles that you need to concentrate on if you’re dealing with technical SEO. My way, from day one, from when I started, is I wanna know how to manipulate this. Because if I have to write and wait for Google to pay attention, I’m gonna be waiting too long. I’ll be dead before Google decides to pay attention. So I’m gonna draw Google’s attention. I’m gonna force Google to like my shit.
It’s the whole concept behind RYS Academy. Force Google to look at your shit, to pay attention to what you’re doing, and then force them over to where you want to go. You force the bot. You teach the bot. These are principles again that we teach in other groups.
If you’re interested, all of those are available. But I would say always start in our Semantic Mastery Mastermind, number one, because we’re always there and we’re at the forefront applying all of these principles on a regular basis and sharing them. Number two, because our upper-level products, those are available at a discount only to Mastermind members. You either pay full price or you join the Mastermind and you get steep discounts for anything above 300. Anything above $300 you can get a steep, and I mean a steep discount, especially our higher-end stuff where these principles are available.
Bradley: All right, guys. Those of you that are joining Hump Day Hangouts, we were just finishing up the first hour, which went a little bit over and that’s my fault as always. Just kind of laying out what’s working in 2019. So if you guys are confused, that are just here for Hump Day Hangouts, we’re going to jump into that right now and try to roll through that rather quickly. I’m gonna save the introductions since we’re 15 minutes into this hour and I’m just gonna jump right into questions. Okay? Are you guys cool that?
Marco: Yep.
Bradley: Okay, cool.
Hernan: Let’s do it.
Bradley: All right. By the way, the format looks entirely different. That’s because Google Plus shut down, is shutting down. You cannot create Google Events pages anymore so that’s why we shifted to this. It’s gonna take a little bit of getting used to, even on my part, so bear with us.
GMB Verification Issues
All right. I’m gonna start right at the bottom. Chaotic Silence says, “Mmm, Well, this is different. So this is my Disqus profile? Haven’t used in a long time. Michael Wheaton here.” Okay, Michael, I’m familiar with you. He says, “I have a question concerning one of MGYB phone verified Gmail/GMB accounts. I just ran into a bump in the road this weekend that may get my account suspended by Google. Somehow I triggered a Google phone reverification of my Gmail account when I tried to open a FeedBurner account inside a Ghost Browser tab from within a Google search page while logged into my Gmail account. Since I don’t have the same phone number, the Gmail account was verified with I used a Trac Phone that has the same area code that the Gmail … Google sent me a six-digit code. When entered the code, refused to recognize it saying it was incorrect code even though it was a correct code.”
Okay. I’m still gonna try to finish reading this question. That’s a long damn question. “As of today, Google’s not yet suspending my Gmail account. I’m still able to use it, at least for now. I have not cleared any cookies or history since I initially opened the account in Ghost Browser. Any ideas?” No. I’m not sure why trying to create a FeedBurner account will do that. I’ve not experienced that. But here’s the thing, if you’re not locked out of the account, I don’t understand what the issue is other than you’re not able to create that FeedBurner account under that. If it’s only requiring a phone verification to create that FeedBurner account, what I would recommend is trying …
Here’s the thing, I’ve got tons of GMB assets and sometimes when I try to log in, if I’m logging in …. For example, all the new assets that I build go directly to my VAs, so my VAs are the ones that are logging in building them out. But occasionally, I might have to log into one of those assets to do something. So I will open it up in my Browseo or Ghost Browser. I use Browseo, but whatever, I will open it up on my PC and it will trigger a phone verification to get access to the account. It doesn’t require you to use the same phone number that the account was created with.
So what I do is I just use what’s called the Berner app. It’s on my Android device. I’m sure it’s on Apple, or whatever, and I’m not an Apple user, but an iPhone. It’s probably there too, the Apple Store. But it’s in Android. It’s a Berner app. I can use those, generate a number for three credits, it’s just a text-based number. It costs me three credits, which I just by 25 credits at a time so that I have credits available. It costs me three credits to create what’s called a mini-burner. It gives me a phone number. I can select the area code that’s common to that asset that I’m trying to login into. Then I just type in that phone number and I get the text message and it allows me access. That’s it.
If you get your account locked where it requires you to verify the phone number that you used as the recovery phone number, then you’re kind of screwed unless you have access to that phone number. But often times that type of a lockout will also allow you to regain access through just verifying your recovery email, which is why it’s incredibly important to assign a recovery email to a Google account when you set up a new Google account. So that if you are using a phone number that you won’t have access to in the event that it triggers reverification, you’ll still be able to reverify through the email address.
But typically, if it’s just saying it’s an unrecognized device trying to log into the account, any phone number will work. Trac Phone might be one of the rare occasions, I don’t know, I’ve never used it. But Berner app works for that. I can let you know because it happens to me often. I have to log into an account that my VAs have set up and it just says, “We want to confirm that it’s really you.” That’s what the message says. I just create a new mini burner. A lot of times I’ll use the same, if I still have a mini burner, because it only lasts like seven days or whatever, if I still have a mini burner, like I’ll use the same mini burner number for multiple verifications if needed to just gain access to it.
So that’s just one thing, Michael. You might wanna try that. Just try the Burner app. It should work. If you still have access to the account, then it didn’t lock you out of the account, you don’t need the original recovery number. For whatever reason, you’re just not able to create that FeedBurner account. So what? Create the FeedBurner under another account. It doesn’t have to be the same account. Does that make sense? Really, the whole FeedBurner are like, and I don’t know, I’ve not tested to see if having the FeedBurner feeds that you wanna generate for like RSS authority sniper, which I see as part of your question.
I haven’t tested to see if generating the FeedBurner feed under the same account of the GMB asset that you’re trying to promote or whatever is any more effective. But I really don’t care. My point is, I’ll use my own FeedBurner account to create multiple feeds for projects. That’s not an issue. It hasn’t been for my business anyways, so I wouldn’t sweat it.
If you still have access to that account and it didn’t terminate or lock you out of the account, then just continue using that account. I would try using a burner app phone number for verification purposes, if it requires that for FeedBurner. I’ve not experienced that so I’m not sure why. If you were using a dirty proxy, that might have done it. What I mean by that is, if you’re using commercial proxies, which most proxy providers are commercial proxies, and it’s been flagged for whatever reason, that could cause anything that you do to be a lot more sensitive and trigger reverifications.
That’s why I recommend if you’re going to be using proxies, use residential proxies. Make sure to at least attempt to try to get dedicated proxies. And that’s kind of hard. I’m using residential proxies that are rotating. It’s like HTTP refresh proxies. In other words, each time a new page loads or you refresh, it could pull another IP in. But the residential IP is not commercial IPs and because I’m keeping my browsing session intact through Browseo and/or Ghost Browser, it doesn’t matter if the IP changes, because we never logged out of this session, if that makes sense.
Think about why that doesn’t, is it a problem? Because most people will be on a mobile device and if they have their Wi-Fi on, then that means every time they get connected to another Wi-Fi their IP changes. And plus, mobile IPS are dynamic, right? So my point is, the IP changes constantly, but the browsing session remains live and intact. That’s why it’s okay for IPs to change, but as soon as you change devices, that’s going to trigger verification. Or if you clear cache and cookies and try to log into accounts, that will often trigger reverification. But IP change won’t, as long as the browsing session remains intact, which is why “browser keeper apps,” as I call them, like Browseo or Ghost Browser are critically important in today’s environment.
Again, I’m not worried about FeedBurner. It might have been a dirty IP issue, whatever the case may be, you can use another account to create the FeedBurner feed, it’s not going to affect the campaign. I wouldn’t worry, if you still have access to that account, then I really wouldn’t sweat it that much.
How Do You Deal With Clients Finding Out Your GMB Assets That They Are Leasing?
Okay. Dan’s next. He says, “Hey guys, I have a few questions. If we should not share our GMB assets with companies we’re releasing assets to, have you not run into a scenario where a person looking for service online tell service provider where they found them, i.e., GMB name?” No. You misunderstood what I’ve said, Dan. What I say is when you’re pitching your lead generation services and you’re prospecting and trying to secure a service provider to either lease your assets or buy the leads from you, you don’t want to show them the assets that you have available.
Because what happens if they don’t like you or it doesn’t work out, and now they go … Remember, you’ve built lead generation properties in their industry, in their service area. So if they don’t end up becoming your service provider, couldn’t they easily report your stuff as spam? Of course, they could. That’s why you don’t ever share your assets with people on the prospecting sides. Once they become service providers, if they find out about it, who cares? You’re selling them the leads, right? They’re already buying the leads from you, why is that an issue?
Again, I don’t just automatically tell them, “Hey, these are all the assets that I have,” once they become service providers. But if they find out, it’s not a big deal. If as long as you’re providing them with a valuable service, leads at a reasonable price and they’re quality leads, why would that matter?
Again, Dan, maybe I wasn’t clear on my explanation of that before and hopefully that clarifies it for you. I just mean don’t show your assets to prospects on the pitch side of things because somebody is likely gonna be pissed off that you’ve outperformed them, and likely report your asset. So just keep that in mind.
What Are Your Thoughts On Pay Per Call Model?
Okay. “Have you any of you done the Pay Per Call model? If so, any comments concerning with the said model?” If you’re talking about using Pay Per Call exchange networks like Ring Partner and stuff, and I’m not saying anything bad about Ring Partner, that’s just the one that comes to top of mind, if that’s what you’re asking about, a lot of those services are good to push traffic to or phone calls to while you’re trying to find a permanent service for a more permanent service provider, somebody that you can develop a relationship with and sell the leads to or lease the assets to, that’s an okay strategy. But just know that your conversions are going to suck that.
What you’re going to get paid for, the calls that convert into a billable or payable type of call, is just really, really low. That’s because those are typically like phone tree systems. Most callers want a live person answering the phone when they call and so they will hang up. Very few people will actually push 13 different numbers to get eventually to where they can submit their information for a lead for the product or services. Does that make sense? Just keep that in mind.
Yes, it works, it’s not great though.
Marco: Yeah. I totally agree with you on this pay per call model. The way that it’s set up right now with that call tree is horrible, the conversions are horrible. Some of the conversions, they … It’s just the way that it’s all calculated is BS because it’s all done behind the scenes and you don’t really know.
One of the tests that I’ve set for myself personally in the next 90 days outside of what we said for Semantic Mastery is to get our own version of a pay per call model set and going. Hey, guys, what I’m trying to do is make it transparent so that you see the calls you generate, you see where they go, you see whether they were answered you were able to record the call, and you’re able to get paid for the leads that you generate rather than having 80 to 90% of your leads go to waste. It’s in the works. I can’t say that I’ll have it for sure in 90 days, but that’s the goal that I’ve set for myself.
Bradley: Again, that’s because a lot of our members are following our lead now and building out lead generation businesses. There’s no lie. There are times where we have, not only us but, our members will have multiple assets that are generating leads but they don’t have a secure service provider in place yet. So those calls go into oblivion and that’s wasted leads. So we want to be able to provide a better solution than a lot of the existing pay per call exchange networks where the conversions are really, really low. It’s still better than just allowing the calls to go into the ether and not get answered.
Don’t follow my lead, I’ve actually set up just a voicemail box where a lot of times the calls just go to a voicemail box. Because again, I found really poor results with using pay per call exchange network so I really don’t even bother going through the application process and stuff. To me, it’s just a waste of time, so I just send stuff to a voicemail box until I got a consistent enough call volume and then I’ll set up a call center.
Again, I use Answerconnect.com. I love. It. I got multiple accounts with them. It’s great. So I’ll set up a call center to where a live person does answer the phone and still collect the lead. Even if I don’t have a service provider yet, at least I’ll have a record of these leads valid like screened calls. So that I can use that in my marketing to pitch my service to service providers because now I can show them the leads and what they look like coming from my call center. So that they can understand what the leads will look like to them if they decide to use my services, if that makes sense. Okay. Hopefully, that answers your question, Dan.
How Many Verified GMBs Should You Order If You Want An Entire Service Area Verified For GMB Listings?
IMG says, “Hey, guys. Thanks for the awesome content. If I wanted to get an entire service area verified for GMB listings, i.e., all of Southern California, all of Phoenix, et cetera, how many verified GMBs do I order from you guys?” Well, that would be up to you to do their location research and figure out which locations you want. Typically, again, Local Lease Pro model, we did an update on how to actually look on a zip code by zip code basis for opportunities. That’s really how the location research side of things is really where it all starts.
That’s what the whole Local Lease Pro model is about. It’s about finding opportunities through the location research that are likely going to be easier to get results from and looking at every single individual zip code specifically. I use all near me keywords and those search procedures. Again, all that’s taught in the Local Lease Pro course so I can’t really get into that here, except that I would if, in your case, IMG, or Israel, as I see your name now, would be to go out and do the location research.
Which, by the way, I don’t recommend you do the location research. Hire a virtual assistant and train them how to do it, because it’s tedious work. You can pay a virtual assistant $3 or $4 an hour from the Philippines, which is a good wage for them, and teach them how to do the location research based on the training that’s available in Local Lease Pro. You could develop the process in the training video in an hour. You give it to a VA and allow the VA to do all your location research for you while you work on developing the content and creatives and the marketing and all of that for whatever your chosen vertical is. Location research is tedious work. It’s critical, but it’s tedious work. Outsource it.
We will probably end up having location research as a service in MGYB because I’ve already had people reach out to me and ask me about that. So that might be something that, we don’t have it on the books to do yet or in the plans, but it’s probably something that we’ll end up doing. Okay. Again, that’s up to you. You need to go out and determine which areas you want and then you would submit the order. All right.
Also, by the way, if you’re talking about doing bulk stuff like this, reach out to Support because we might be able to work something out with you on bulk pricing. That’s not something that is available. I’m just saying Israel is acting like he’s gonna be a bit aggressive in this. If that’s the case, we’re happy to entertain a potential discount for bulk orders.
Marco: Yeah. Rob and I will talk to him. If he’s talking about that many, we’ll work something out, definitely. On bulk. Again, keyword “bulk.”
Bradley: Correct.
Marco: People always like to ignore keywords like bulk. Sometimes they reach out to say, “Hey, I want a discount for one.” No.
Bradley: No. We have one of our POFU Live attendees buy 50 GMB verifications all at once, so we gave him a really sweet deal on that. Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about. You’re gonna go aggressive like that, we’ll work something out with you. Okay. He says, “This is for an actual company but their office is in San Diego. I know Local Lease Pro probably covers this, but I wanna get this going.” Yeah. Again, you have to have to provide us with, you can’t just say, “I wanna do all the Phoenix,” that’s not how it works.
Because, honestly, there’d be a lot of zip codes that you would be paying for to get an asset created that you really stand no chance of getting any results from without a ton of effort. So it’s on you. It’s incumbent upon you. It’s your responsibility to provide us with the areas that you want, which through the location research you’re going to be able to identify as the areas that provide the most opportunity to get results from with the least amount of effort.
It’s not an exact science. I’ve got lots of cases where I’ve got indicators that it should be easy to secure an asset, and get results, get it ranked essentially very quickly, and that’s not the case. But it doesn’t mean that they cannot still be optimized and get results, it just means it ends up requiring more work. Again, it’s still not an exact science. It’s still kind of an educated guess. Especially if you follow the original location research training, that’s where you do find those simple opportunities where you can get results almost overnight.
The more advanced or the updated location research where we get down on a more granular level on a zip code by zip code basis, I’m targeting, I’m looking at it differently. The competition is still higher, but we’re looking for indicators on why our assets are likely going to be able to push into the top three. Again, all that’s covered in the training, I cannot cover that here. Okay.
“Also, should I use SerpSpace or MGYB store?” Well, we are no longer associated with SerpSpace, so you need to make that decision, Israel. Obviously, we’re gonna promote our store Mgyb.co. I’m not gonna tell you not to use SerpSpace. But our store is what we are gonna suggest because that’s what we are behind. Those are our products and our services in MGYB.
Marco: It’s also what we’re using.
Bradley: Correct.
Marco: We drink our own Kool-Aid.
Can You Post The Same GMB Content For Clients With Multiple Locations?
Bradley: Jeff says, hey, Jeff, I spoke with Jeff on the phone before. What’s up, Jeff? He says, “For clients with multiple locations who are posting to GMB, can they post the same content to each GMB, or should they be mixing the copy up for a location basis?” Well, it’s better always to have original content. I understand we’ve had this question before. I get the fact that if it’s the same brand in multiple locations … You could attempt it.
It doesn’t matter for me, for example, one of my tree service contractors, I think we’ve got like 20 locations for him now, for that company now, and every single one of those assets get unique content posted to their GMB assets. We might use similar images or the same batch of images that are geotagged or the metadata has been optimized with specific location data for each location, it might be the same images and I know that even that’s not ideal. But obviously, the content, the text, and we use templates, my team all uses content templates that I’ve created for them. But that the keywords, they’re all tokenized templates so that they can just swap out keywords and such. Using those or swapping out the keywords makes them somewhat unique, is my point. So they are unique posts for every location, is what I’m saying.
You can try. I haven’t attempted it. I haven’t tried and tested posting the same content to multiple locations for the same brand to see what kind of difference and results I get. I haven’t tested that. You may wanna try that, Jeff. I don’t think it would hurt anything. I just don’t know if it would produce good results like unique content tends to do. Does that make sense?
Again, I would test that, Jeff. I don’t think that would create a problem. I really don’t think it would hurt anything or cause any negative issues. I haven’t tested it though, that’s the caveat. But again, I can only assume original content is going to produce, or unique content per location is gonna produce better results.
Marco: We have to always remember what it is that we’re talking, which algorithm or which part of the algorithm, if you want to look at it that way. Fresh, unique, relevant content, that’s updated on a regular basis. If you miss any one of those four, then you’re short on what is being required of you as far as content. Now there’s a bunch of things that you can do with content. I know that you’ll mention the test, where only H tags were used and all this other shit, that’s on a website and you can manipulate the website in such a way that you can manipulate the algorithm.
We’re talking about a GMB post where these factors aren’t present. How would you do it then? You would do it by giving Google what it wants. Google is asking for it, right? It told us from the beginning. What we’re going to be looking for from now on is fresh, unique, relevant content, updated on a regular basis. Miss any one of those and you may not get as much as you would if you met all four factors.
Bradley: Yeah. I mean, it reduces its effectiveness, right? That’s typically what happens. Again, you may still be able to get the results that you desire, Jeff, using the same content. So that would be worth testing on your part.
Marco: Yep.
Have You Tried Mapify360 Tool For Finding Local GMB Clients?
Bradley: Jim says, “Has anyone at SM otherwise tried the Mapify360 tool for finding local GMB clients? It looks fairly easy to use, but I haven’t bitten the bullet yet.” I’ll check it out. I have not, honestly. Personally, what I do is usually once I built a bunch of assets in a particular area, service area then a very simple way is just to have a VA go out and scrape contact lists for me. If you’re using a lead scraper, like Lead Kahuna, for example, that’s what I do for mass prospecting campaigns. Again, I don’t run it, I have a VA that runs it. That will actually show non-verified profiles, GMB profiles, and things like that. If you wanna filter by that.
Also, again like I said, a lot of times I’ll just have a VA go out and, say, get me the top 20 tree service contractors in this specific area, collect all their contact information, put it into a spreadsheet. Then I provide them with the email that I want them to send and I have them do all of that too. You know what I mean? So that I’m not doing that kind of work.
But there are tools like this. I’ve not looked at this particular tool. I know Peter Drew is working on one right now that is dead simple. I love it. I love it because it literally is the simplest interface I’ve ever seen. You put a keyword in, the city name, and then you put in the password. It’s just a script that runs in a browser tab and it takes about, depending on the area, it takes five to 10 minutes for it to spit out the results.
But when it does, it’s just basically like a text file in the browser window that has, and I don’t know if I’m supposed to be talking about this because it’s in development, but it’s an awesome tool because it’s so simple. What’s cool about it is it lists the top 20 businesses from the API from that keyword search at that location, and then it lists their NAP and a link to their GMB. Then, if it’s unverified, it’s got the link to it too. When you click on it, it opens up in a new browser tab or a pop-up window directly to that GMB profile or that Maps listing in it where it says “Owned this business?” That means you can click in to verify it.
There’s a specific strategy that I’m actually going to be testing using that method over the next couple of weeks. I just announced that to our POFU Live attendees, we have an accountability group that’s ongoing, and I just announced that on Monday. That’s something I’m gonna be testing because I’ve got multiple location clusters now of GMB assets that need to be monetized. So I’m gonna be developing my outreach and sales strategy, or prospecting and sales strategy essentially for finding service providers for these location clusters that I have that are producing, that aren’t monetized yet.
Again, that may be a great tool. I haven’t tested it. Any one of those kinds of tools will work, is my point. It will just kind of make your process more efficient, identifying opportunities or people to reach out to. Does that make sense? So I can’t say anything specifically about this, but if it looks interesting to you and you don’t have another tool that does something similar, then, yeah, I’d say go for it.
Remember, use tools if it’s gonna make your life easier, not because they’re sexy or they look cool. Honestly, think about, and this is something like shiny object syndrome, I’ve experienced that in my own, I’m sure we all have, we see something looks awesome when we just buy it because we think, “It’s awesome, I’m gonna use it,” and we don’t end up really using it or whatever the case may be. I try to look at every purchase now as, is this actually going to help my business or make things more efficient or easier or save me time?
Especially with software, a lot of times software has learning curve. I don’t know how easy is this one. It might be really simple, I don’t know. I haven’t looked at it. But I don’t like having to learn how to use software to use it. That’s part of the reason I love Peter Drew’s tools because they’re so simple, there’s no learning curve. You know what I mean? That’s what I like. I like easy.
Again, it might be a great product I can’t comment on it yet. Perhaps I’ll look at it and if you ask the question again next week, I’ll have an answer for you. That’s not what I wanted to do. Okay. Yeah. He’s just commenting on Disqus. “Rest in peace, Google Plus. Rest in peace. Greg.” I like that. It’s cool. Plus one it, but we can upload it I guess.
Should You Focus On Posting And Skip Tracking Phone Number Using CallRail If The Client Is Already Getting 30 Calls A Month Without Any Posts?
Mohammad. All right. Mohammad’s a rock star. He’s in our Mastermind. “Hey, guys. I just got access to my new electrician guy’s GMB. I see that he gets about 30 calls a month presently without posts. I’m planning to do a post a day. I usually track the phone number using CallRail, but since he has decent calls already, is doing so fair, – is doing so fair, I’m not sure what that means – or should I just do the posts?” No. I mean, if he’s a client, I mean he’s already doing something that’s producing results, just increase what he’s doing. More posts equals better. Typically, that’s what I found. More posts equal better, better results.
If that’s what you’re asking, I’m not sure I understand the question. But if that’s what you’re asking I would continue to do that.
Marco: I’d like to ask Mohammad this, and you can take this inside the Mastermind, how do you know he’s getting about 30 calls a month? Are you able to see the call log? Have they been transparent with you? How do you know for sure that’s the calls that he’s getting? If you’re certain and they continue being transparent, then you start your marketing and you show how you were able to grow from 30 to however many more you’re able to produce. Simple.
But if you’re just going by the word that they gave you, you really don’t know. So I would say, first, just check and make sure, have them be transparent so that you can be transparent with them and show the progress as you go along. That’s how I would handle this. You have to stay out of CallRail because then it avoids setting up a new number inside the GMB. You can just leave whatever number it is that they have.
Bradley: Yeah. Remember, GMB is only gonna show call volume from people that tap to call from a mobile device. So people that see on desktop or laptop and see the GMB asset or the Maps listing and then call from their mobile device but they didn’t do the search from their mobile device, that’s not gonna register as a call from the GMB. So his call you may be much higher. Again, you’re only looking at tap to calls from GMB Insights. Does that make sense?
That’s why having a call tracking number is better because then you can track all calls no matter where they originated from. Not necessarily just from tap to call feature on a mobile device, if that makes sense. That’s part of the reason. Okay.
Also, this is interesting that we can thread, replies but it’s gonna make it hard on us. So I’m not necessarily gonna scroll down when I see the notification that a reply has been made to somebody else’s comment all the time. In this case, since this is new, I saw that John commented on this. That’s cool, John, I appreciate you commenting on that. He says he’s working with GMB Hunter, he just had an awesome sale working really well and very simple.
I’ve heard of GMB Hunter. Isn’t that the Ranking Factory’s product? Or is that maybe that’s Lloyd Farrell’s product, with the mass optimizer and stuff? Anyways, that’s cool. I’ve heard of that one. If it’s working well for you, that’s another option. That’s cool. Thanks, John, I appreciate that.
ETA of Battleplan V2
All right. Second question from Mohammad. “Do we have an ETA on the Battleplan?” Yeah. I think February 27th.
Hernan: Yeah, February 27 is when we will launch it.
Bradley: Beautiful. Remember that Kool-Aid guy? “Oh, yeah.” Have you ever seen the Family Guy where the Kool-Aid guy’s sitting in the recliner in his house. I think it was Peter Griffin comes blasting through his wall and he’s like, “Oh, I guess it’s not so cool after all.” Anyways, I love the Family Guy, it’s awesome.
Hernan: Oh, my god.
Bradley: Marco says, “My online success model can be summed up like: Good old-fashioned blunt force trauma.” Yeah, brute force. “Bend the bot to your will instead of bowing down following the herd to the slaughterhouse.” I like that.
Hernan: Yeah. We were commenting about what each of us are doing so.
Will The Current Rankings Be Affected If You Redirect A Crashed WordPress Site To Its GMB Site?
Bradley: Okay. I’m just gonna keep on moving. Thanks, Wayne, for the memes, as always. Question from BJ. “A client’s WordPress website crashed. They have good organic and 3-pack rankings. I’m going to rebuild the original site but in the meantime, I’m redirecting the URL to their GMB website and will definitely implement Local GMB. Should I be concerned that the ranking will go down while WordPress site is getting fixed? Thanks.”
BJ, I can’t answer that with certainty for your particular issue. I can tell you though I had one of our one of our members from local lease pro. I don’t know if there was a mastermind member or what. But anyway, somebody sent me a PM in Facebook and said that they were trying to research how to set up an @id page or whatever and they found one of my tree service sites and it had a WordPress site. I’m not really building WordPress sites for lead gen assets anymore because I’m just using the GMB website. But somebody notified me and said, “Hey, that site’s down. It’s getting a 500 internal server error.”
I don’t know how long that site was down because I don’t have like a nut monitor on that kind of stuff. I just never really did. I noticed that that particular tree service listing had fallen out of the 3-pack because it could have been weeks that that site was down and I didn’t even know it. So I just redirect it because I said, “I’m not rebuilding that site, I don’t give a shit about anymore.” So I just redirected the domain inside a cPanel to the GMB website and within two days I was back in the 3-pack.
Again, all the citations and everything had all been … Because it’s an older listing I’ve had. so I built a ton of shit in citations over the years and all of those have the URL, self-hosted the domain. But I just did a redirect in cPanel to the GMB website URL and within two days it came back and it’s in the 3-pack now. I’m not gonna rebuild the WordPress. I could care less about it. As long as it’s in the 3-pack, it’s generating calls, that’s all I care about.
I don’t know if it’s gonna affect your particular project, but I think that’s a pretty good way to resolve it while you’re working on refixing the site.
What were you gonna say, Marco? I’m sorry.
Marco: In order to avoid 404s. he has to make sure that it’s a wildcard redirect.
Bradley: If it’s on a subdomain.
Marco: Well, it has to be either from cPanel or from the host. Every page, everything has to be redirected to the GMB. If it isn’t, then you’re going to run into 404s and you would have ranking problems, because Google isn’t going to find the page that’s ranking, it has to follow the redirect to the GMB. It has to understand that everything is now in the GMB.
Bradley: Yeah. But inside cPanel it’s easy to setup a wild-card redirect.
Marco: Yeah.
Bradley: It’s easy to do.
Marco: Yep.
Bradley: That’s what I would do, BJ. I can’t swear that you’re not going to experience some dancing or movement, but I’ve been able to recover them rather quickly by just doing what he’s saying, which is I did a domain redirect inside of cPanel. Guys, go to a cPanel and you’ll see like that, you’ll see the section where domains are and there’s redirects. You can go in there and set a wild-card, which you just use the asterisk for that. If it’s a subdomain, it can be a subdomain redirect, it doesn’t matter. It’s really easy to do.
Google Webmaster Tools Not Fetching Keywords & Traffic Data From Website
AYOUB says, “Hi. I have a website that’s most of its articles doesn’t have any keywords in the Google Webmaster tool and no traffic from Google knowing that all the articles are optimized for SEO.” I’m not sure what that means. Are they indexed? I’m not really following the question. “I have a website that most of its articles don’t have any keywords in the Google Webmaster tool and no traffic from Google knowing that all the …” Okay. They might be optimized articles, but are they indexed? That’s the thing.
Here’s something you can do, is just go to Google search, type in “site :” S-I-T-E colon, and then put in a domain, so domain.com, whatever your domain is. Put site colon domain.com and it will show you what the indexed pages are. You can also inside a search console, the new interface, you can also look and see which pages are indexed. If they are indexed and it’s not showing any keyword data, because as far as I know, in search console, if somebody performs a search query and Google gives your webpage an impression, pretty much no matter where it is in the search results, as long as I think it’s in the top 10 pages, it will register as an impression. In search console, we’ll show you the query that provided that impression or triggered that impression.
Whether it gets a click or not, that’s not the point, it should show an impression. So if you’re not seeing any impressions for search queries for the keywords that your articles are optimized, to me, that’s a non-indexed article. But if it’s indexed and it’s not seeing impressions, that means it’s not in the top 100, which means there’s probably a penalty issue on that domain. There’s a quality issue there somewhere if it’s not registering the top 100.
Guys, I could be wrong. The Google search console might show impressions even beyond position 100. I just can’t recall off the top of my head. Again, that’s a great optimization strategy for content, is to go into search console, sort by impressions, and then make sure that you have position, average ranking position enabled too. So that you sort by impressions and look for stuff that’s getting a shit ton of impressions, but the average ranking position is on page two or three, or something like that, so position 11 to 20, or 21 to 30.
Those are pieces of content or webpages that you could do a little bit of additional SEO work and start generating a ton of traffic from because Google is saying this query is getting a lot of impressions and your page has been identified as relevant, but it’s not relevant enough to be on the first page. So those are really good opportunities to optimize that content. Do a little additional work and start generating a lot of additional traffic. Does that make sense?
If you’re not seeing impressions for the keywords that your content is optimized, it’s either non-indexed or there’s a penalty of some sort levied against it, is what is my assumption. I would also look at the manual actions or manual notifications in search console to see is there any spam notifications or anything like that?
Marco: This is one of those times where I would go into Google Analytics rather than Google Webmaster Tools. I also have a question, Ayoub, I think your name is, I think that’s how it’s pronounced. If I’m messing it up, sorry, didn’t mean to. But I’d wanna know what the age of this way website is. It could have a million optimized articles that are optimized for SEO. If it’s a day-old, it makes no difference. You’re not you’re get anything out of it or you might. But I wanna see Analytics because not all traffic is good traffic.
Bradley: It’s true.
Marco: Not all signals are good signals. Because if you’re getting some traffic, but that traffic is hitting the back button or is it’s a bounce rather than good traffic, good traffic that’s dwelling on your website, that’s taking action, that’s clicking through, doing all of the things that a normal person would do, then that signal is negative. You could be getting negative because it’s optimized for SEO instead of being optimized for the audience that’s going to read the article.
Bradley: Correct.
Marco: You have to do two things. SEO optimization is fine, but if it reads like an SEO optimized article rather than an article that I wanna read, I’m not going through it. I’m not gonna bother because I wanna read something interesting, something that’s gonna grab my attention. I’m sure most other people in your niche are looking for the same thing. Unless you’re in the SEO niche where you’re trying to grab SEO. So all of these things come into play.
Google Webmaster Tools is a fine tool and you can use it, as Bradley said, but go into Analytics and see what kind of signals you’re getting and what kind of signals you’re sending back to Google if you’re getting any traffic. If not, then again, that’s a problem and it could just be that you have some serious, serious issues with the website and penalties so that it’s not being served to anyone.
Bradley: Yeah. That’s called visitor behavior. In Analytics, look at the visitor behavior reports and you’ll see how people come and how they interact. You’ll also see the traffic that comes in if they go from one page to another. You’ll see the flow that they took through their journey, like clicking links through your site and that kind of stuff. Look at that. That’s true. That’s also something.
However, I would think that if Analytics is showing traffic, then I would assume there would be impressions at least registering in search console too. You know what I mean? It’s interesting though. Definitely look at that stuff.
We’re almost done with questions. I see another couple comments. I might jump down in a minute and look at those as well. Also, let me do this real quick because I know sometimes these comments don’t show unless I refresh. What did I just do, I just fucked it up, didn’t? Let’s see, sort by most recent. Let’s do that, newest, that’s what I wanted. Okay, cool. It looks like, no, nothing’s there that I didn’t see before.
Can Facebook Or Instagram Trigger Syndication Networks?
All right. Guys, it’ll take me a little bit a while to get used to doing this with Disqus, so just bear with me if I have to scroll around sometimes. All right. We’re gonna go back to Mohammad again. He says, “Hey guys. Can Facebook or Instagram trigger Syndication Networks? How would that work?” “Check out Integromat.” Okay, thanks, Adam. That’s a mouthful there. “Thanks, Adam. Would I just add this to my existing networks? Off the top of my head.” Okay, cool. It looks like that questions been answered.
Marco: Can I just add to that? guys, we’re the syndication network people. We go into IFTTT and we check and see what we can do in there. If you were to look, Mohammad, just go in there and take a look applets in Instagram and all, you’ll be able to see everything that you can do to grab Instagram to trigger your Syndication Networks.
Bradley: Let’s just take a look real quick. I know you can use Facebook as a trigger. So if we go over here to-
Marco: I use Instagram. That’s why I told him to go look at Instagram, because I know you can.
Bradley: Yeah. So if I wanted to create a new applet, then I would just go in and click … I wonder why my profile picture isn’t showing. Come on, IFTTT. There we go. If this, and then I would go find Facebook. You can have Facebook page trigger. I don’t see just Facebook, but it’s like a profile, but it looks like a Facebook page can trigger. Because if this and there’s Facebook pages, that means that can be used as a trigger.
Marco: Go down lower.
Bradley: Okay. Hold on, I will in a minute. But I just clicked the Facebook page trigger and these are all the different types of triggers that can be generated from a Facebook page via IFTTT. If I scroll down a little bit further, there is Facebook. So click that, wow, that’s a lot of different trigger types. So, yes, and look for Instagram too. I don’t use Instagram for anything. I’ve never been on Instagram, honestly, so I don’t know if that’s in here or not.
Marco: It is.
Bradley: Okay.
Marco: It’s a trigger.
Bradley: Okay, cool. Well, there you go.
Marco: No, just search it, search in services. Type in Instagram and it’ll pull it up. There you go.
Bradley: There you go. Okay. Well, it won’t show me the triggers I guess because I don’t have it connected.
Marco: No. Just for Mohammad, and I now give out, here’s a free bone for you guys. You’ve stayed us with us for two hours, you deserve it. Instagram to Tumblr, Tumblr RSS trigger everything else. There you go.
How Many Hours Would It Take A Person To Build Each Drive Stack In RYS Reloaded?
Bradley: Boom. Love it. All right. Jim says, “If I were to buy RYS Reloaded for the purpose of training a VA, approximately how many hours were to take that person to build each drive stack assuming they become proficient at it.” That’s a question for you, Marco, since you manage those.
Marco: Yeah. Let me see, how many hours would it take a person to build? Okay. It takes the average VA, not Jessen, Jessen rocks, six to eight hours to build one stack. Once they become really proficient, they can get it in at around six hours, to do it the way that we do it fully, with everything that we integrated into it.
Bradley: And to make everything look beautiful too because he does an amazing job.
Marco: But it’s not the same because he trains all of our VAs. We tell you, guys, grab the Rockstar, put him at the team lead, pay him well and now he trains everyone that I sent to him and so that we get consistent quality. So what he does is he oversees. Now he’s in quality assurance and he is the team lead. He’s just fabulous. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. Jessen can knock one out in four hours, that’s when you find a rockstar, because he has processes in place where he has simplified what he does. So he can knock one out in four to maybe five hours. But the average VA, once they’re really well-versed in the procedure, between six and eight hours. So it’s gonna take them a full workday to do one RYS Stack. That’s why it takes so long for us to give you your drive stacks back because they’re labor-intensive.
Bradley: Yeah. I was just looking for those other comments. “Lloyd.” Okay, John. That’s GMB Hunter, that must be Lloyd Farrell. He’s the guy mass optimizer and all that. I know he’s got some good products. I’ve not even used them, but I know they’re good products because I know some of our members use them. Honestly, like I said, I don’t spend a lot of time learning software. He’s actually, Lloyd’s even giving me access to some of them. I haven’t done it and I feel bad, because I just don’t have time to play a new software. I just use geosetter for optimizing images and stuff just, because I’ve always used that I already know that. But I know Lloyd has got good products. Okay. I can endorse those just because I know from other members of our group that they say that’s good products. I can say that with them because I trust my member’s opinions of that.
Marco: That’s a question by Martin Kendall, right?
Bradley: I missed it. I was gonna go back to that.
Marco: Yeah.
What Are Your Thoughts On Digital Marketers Toolbox From Empire Network?
Bradley: Then we’re gonna wrap it up, guys, because I gotta go get my daughter tonight for dinner. What’re your thoughts about Digital Markers Toolbox from Empire Networks?” It’s solid. I gotta be honest with you, I saw a demonstration by Jeffrey Smith from SEO Bootcamp at our POFU Live. He spoke at our POFU Live event in October and he showed me what that tool is. It’s freaking impressive. If you’re doing big agency type work or big national campaigns, even on a local level, it’s almost overkill for that. But it’s solid, like it’s incredible. The amount of data that you get back about an entire market, like it’s insane. It shows you where the money is. It’s expensive.
It’s an expensive tool. That’s why I say typically for a lot of the hyper-local stuff I do it would be way overkill for what I do. But depending on what your business model is, it’s just insane what the kind of data comes back from this and how fast it comes back. It’s really cool.
Marco, are we allowed to talk about potentially being able to generate the DMT reports in MGYB because I just mentioned it? I mean, what can say about-
Marco: Yeah. You’ve just mentioned that. It’s not ready. We have to work a whole bunch of things out with Matt and we’ll see if we offer it or some version of it because people don’t need most of our people that kind of power. They don’t wanna whole market, they want their local area, and that’s fine. Maybe, as I said, I have to work it out with Matt and see how or if this is even going to go into our MGYB.
Bradley: Yeah. I’m trying to make it to make that as an option like available, like you could buy a report from our storage MGYB. It makes sense because not everybody would need a subscription to that tool, which is expensive. I mean, again, depending on what your business is and what your business model is, it might be incredibly valuable to you and you might need a subscription.
What I’m saying is, for a lot of people, they might just wanna generate a report and. That’s why Marco is working with Network Empire, with Matt Da Cruz trying to get this worked out. We can’t promise that it’s gonna be available, but we’re certainly attempting it. That’s why I can say it’s a solid tool. If you need to know everything about a particular market, it’s a great tool for that. It’s really impressive, to be honest with you.
Marco: Yeah. For people who have agencies, I mean, it’s a slam dunk because you can go in and literally just push button and you get a market.
Bradley: You follow your money. It goes where all the money flows through that market, it’s insane.
Marco: Yeah. You can’t get any better than what Matt and those guys are doing over there.
Bradley: He’s put like 15 years of development into that. Matt’s a good guy, definitely. No doubt. I’m a fan.
Marco: Yeah. We’re all fans.
Bradley: All right, guys. I think we’re gonna wrap it up. That has been two hours for us. I hope you guys enjoyed it, the new format. It’s a little bit funky right now for me just getting used to it. But it will become more familiar. We appreciate you all being here. We’ll see you all next week.
By the way, Syndication Academy, we have an update webinar tomorrow at 3 p.m. I think is when I have it scheduled for. Just go check the Facebook group. There’s an event scheduled in the Facebook group. I’ll see you guys there tomorrow. Thanks everybody.
Bradley: Bye everyone.
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