Click on the video above to watch Episode 159 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: All right. We're live. Hey, everybody. Happy Thanksgiving Hump Day Hangouts. This is Bradley Benner with Semantic Mastery wearing my turkey hat for at least temporary for the beginning of this. I thought everybody would get a laugh out of this. It's November 22nd, 2017. This is Hump Day Hangouts episode 159. Welcome, everybody. We've got everybody on with us today except for Adam. I think he's traveling. I'm going to go right on down the line and introduce everybody as I see them. Chris, how are you?
Chris: Been good. Glad to be here. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
Bradley: All right. Hernan, how are you?
Hernan: Hey, guys. Hey, everyone. It's really good to be here. I see a lot of people chilling already for Thanksgiving. That's good to see.
Bradley: I'm looking for the Hangout app that, like effects app, so that I could add turkeys to all of your heads as well. I think they did too. I just didn't see it anyway. Last but not least, Marco, how are you?
Marco: I'm good, man.
Bradley: Good? You want to share with everybody why you're do good?
Marco: Sure. Here you are. Can you see it?
Bradley: Scotch. Right?
Marco: No, it's rum.
Bradley: Oh, it's rum. Okay.
Marco: It's a 15 year old rum.
Bradley: Right. This is going to be a party.
Marco: Happy Thanksgiving.
Chris: YOLO.
Bradley: All right. Hernan, what kind of announcements do we have?
Hernan: Good question, Bradley. Glad you asked. Well, we have a bunch of stuff going on for Black Friday. We're not allowed, as per Adam's instructions, we are not allowed to share the links with you guys just yet. You just need to be aware of that. We're going to be sending some emails with good stuff tomorrow and Friday. The point here is that you can get a lot of stuff from Semantic Mastery and SerpSpace and Mastery PR for a big discount. What you need to ask yourself is with that money are you going to purchase a new TV or you're actually going to invest in your business, right? That's going to put you more money back in your pocket. One thing is going to take money out of your pocket. The other thing is going to put more money in your money.
I would suggest doing the latter, but that's up to. Stay tuned because it's going to be really good. We have some really stuff coming for the Semantic Mastermind MPR on SerpSpace.
Bradley: Very cool. Yeah, guys, I would recommend just waiting until Friday or tomorrow and we send out the emails, and you could check it out then. I did want to briefly talk about and then I'll pull this hat off and we'll get down to serious business. I did want to talk about briefly the, and I'll grab the screen in a minute and we'll talk about the image that I have added there, but I'm having some really amazing success right now with the prospecting funnel that I've been working on for a while. I've kind of worked on it for the last couple days or several days, excuse me, and really refined it. It's working like crazy right now. That's something we're going to be revealing.
We've actually revealed it to the mastermind members already specifically how it's set up and I'm going to be continuing to share that as I continue developing that out. The prospecting side is working great. Now I've got to refine the sales process and the onboarding and the client fulfillment. That's what I'm working on now. I'm an open book when it comes to this stuff inside the mastermind guys. We've already had a lot of people interested in the Facebook post where I posted this image. I mean it really is it's us bribing you to come join the mastermind. You want to learn how to set up a funnel like this for yourself and automate your prospecting? That's fine. We'll teach you, but you got to come to the mastermind to do it.
Just wanted to share that with you guys. I guess we don't have any other announcements, Hernan. I'm going to go ahead and get right into questions.
Marco: No. No. Hang on. I have to make an announcement because Rob has some personal issues that he needs to attend to. We have the holidays and he has some issues. I have my back issues that I have to tend to. There will be no Reloaded webinar this Monday. We're going to push it to the following Monday or the Monday after that. If we skip, we'll make it up to everyone. We usually come up with something up really nasty to share, so that they can go abuse the rankings. I just wanted to let everyone know. I'll be posting in the Facebook group that there will be no webinar on Monday.
Bradley: Okay. Very good. All right. Anything else, guys?
Hernan: We're good to go.
Marco: No, that's it.
Bradley: All right. Cool. Yeah. Again guys, this is what I was talking about, this particular image here. This was just taken as a screenshot this morning from Pipedrive. After having this on hold for about four or five weeks, I turned this back on last Tuesday. This was this morning before businesses were opened, essentially before any emails went out today. I've been sending out only on weekdays, Monday through Friday, emails. We had Tuesday through Friday last week and in Monday of this week, well, Tuesday as well. A total of five business days. 25 emails per day. Total emails sent 125. We actually had 13 inbound leads, but one of them I deleted out because we actually called the guy and he was a real jerk.
We actually really had 13% or excuse me, 13 out of 125 emails. 13 inbound leads out of it, which is freaking crazy. It's just working really, really well and that's what I wanted to point out. It's really cool setting up a … I've been working on it for weeks, but it works very, very well. There was some bugs in it that I covered in the last mastermind webinar last week that I have resolved those issues and it's just working beautifully now. I'm really excited about it. I'm going to continue sharing that as I further develop the onboarding and fulfillment funnel as well. Andy T's up first.
Did You Notice Any Issues When Syndicating Posts From Blog To Network Properties From Time To Time?
He says, “Hi, team. I wanted to ask why sometimes the IFTTT fail to syndicate my blog post to all my web 2.0 properties and after a few days or sometimes weeks later, everything back to normal. Why is this happening from time to time? Do you guys face the same issue? Thanks.” Not really. I mean yeah, of course, it happens sometimes, Andy. What I would recommend is that you are … If you're not doing this already, is go purchase networking monitoring from SerpSpace. Plug all your networks into there because you'll get notifications when something is not posting properly and it's very inexpensive. You can jump in there very quickly and figure out what's going on.
A lot of the times if it's a specific web 2.0 that it didn't post to, then most of the time it's just you have to reconnect that service or that channel, so that web 2.0 property. You just got to go into IFTTT, go to services, go select that property and then hit reconnect and that'll fix it. If like for example if you got 10 properties in your network and it syndicates to nine of them and it's just this one that's like intermittent or hit or miss, that kind of stuff, just reconnect the channel or the service and that should fix it. If it's all of them, then it's likely a trigger issue on the RSS feed side of things, which would lead me to believe sometimes there can be problems with your RSS feed from your WordPress blog.
I'm assuming you're using WordPress or any sites for that matter that has an RSS feed. Sometimes there's problems. Specifically with WordPress, you can sometimes have theme or other plugin compatibility issues that will actually affect the RSS feed. That's a pain in the ass. You've got to isolate that through process of elimination or another quick fix, sometimes when there's … I've run into this before where I've had issues with RSS feed not being picked up by IFTTT. The only way to fix it, I was never able … In some cases I've not been able to isolate the reason why and I've had to develop or find a workaround.
The workaround typically is to go burn a FeedBurner feed from the WordPress feed and then use the FeedBurner feed URL as your RSS URL for the trigger of the applets. That oftentimes will fix it. The only problem with that is some of the properties that we syndicate to when using the FeedBurner feed, it doesn't pull in the correct feed title. There'll kind of like be like a blank title or a generic title or it will say FeedBurner or something like that, but in my opinion it's not that big of a deal. I use the FeedBurner trick as kind of like a last resort if I can't isolate the original problem. You guys have any comments on that?
Chris: Yeah. Use a feed validation service. You for example have like [inaudible 00:08:52] that can post a link and a couple other ones as well, which I highly recommend, and use that as like very first indicator to see if the feed is valid and if there's any errors on there.
Bradley: Okay. Thank you.
Marco: He also says that everything goes back to normal. To me, that's not really problem. To me, that would just be focused more on are you getting results. If he checks and after a few weeks everything is normal or everything is the way it should be, what are the results of what he's doing? Because maybe he's just focusing on something that's not really an issue. That would be only advice. What are the results? Are you getting more traffic? Are you getting more leads, sales? Whatever it is that your end result or your goal should be or is, what is it that you're getting there? Because the only way that this is a problem is if you're not getting the end result.
That's when you start working your way back and seeing what it is that you need to fix. Right now I really don't see that he needs to fix anything.
Bradley: Yeah. Andy, I recommend throughout the training as well and as often as I can really, don't focus … Kind of what Marco said is focus on the bigger picture stuff. If it's flat out just not syndicating to any of the properties, then yeah, go troubleshoot, go investigate. If it's just intermittent, or it's hit or miss with some of the properties, I recommend just skipping it because focus on bigger stuff instead of sweating the small stuff. I know because when I first started using or actually for quite some time after I started building and using syndication networks, I would spend sometimes hours trying to troubleshoot every single little issue to where I wanted every post to get syndicated to every property in the network 100% of the time.
The couple of tips that I just gave you are some quick fixes that you can go on and test very quickly. Reconnect the channel is always the first thing that I recommend. Then if you're still continuing to get repeated errors or non syndicated posts from your RSS feed, then go burn a FeedBurner feed and replace the feed URL as the trigger in the applets. That's your quickest fixes.
How Do You Use Local Events And News To Establish Local Relevancy With Google?
James is up. He says, “How do you use local events and news to establish local relevancy with Google? Is it as simple as curating local events and news? Do you also use a link strategy with curated content?” James, yeah, actually we just did another mastermind newsletter. We had to turn in the content for the mastermind newsletter for December.
We just turned that in yesterday really. I actually am covering part of that in that mastermind newsletter, but yes, you can embed like local calendar events. You can also use plugins and things like that that you can add feeds to, which are great to go find local blogs or local newspapers. Any kind of local publications that have feeds and import feeds direct so that you can basically post … Even if not post or snippets of posts, you can still get like headlines and embed like a widget onto a page or a post on your site or even multiple pages or posts. It doesn't matter. The point is is that you can use these plugins and embedded calendar events and news sites and things like that to just inject … You can use Twitter too by the way.
You can use Twitter too to inject local relevancy into pages or posts. It's not really a backlinking strategy. There are some things that you can do with that. I'll talk about that in just a moment. It's really about the on-page. It's about adding local geographic relevant information to your site. Google starts to associate that, your keywords and your site, your brand with that local event. You got to try to be a little bit targeted with that.
Sometimes if you're in a big metropolitan area, the events are just flat out overwhelming, so you've got to try to put a filter on it, throttle it down a bit, or you can use very specific keywords sometimes or hashtags if you're using Twitter and things like to kind of narrow it down to where it's not overwhelming the number of events that get posted. It's really more about an on-page thing in that respect. However, I have tested and played with this a little bit and I'm doing a little bit of testing with it right now. We've got limited time for it, but creating mini sites that are local event type sites, specifically to use as like a PBN, but you don't have to even create any content.
It's auto generated content from other local events and news related sites. You're just using it to basically create a curated site that just repost events and things. It's just strictly for creating local relevancy and then you can use that to link over to your money pages. As far as like the linking strategy, that's how I'm doing it. There might be some other ways that some others here can comment on, but that's … Typically, I just use it for on-page relevancy. However, I have been testing recently with creating some mini sites that are hyper local focused and using that as just curated news and events calendar basically. You can use Facebook by the way, guys, Facebook Events.
You can do searches for Facebook and use those to add content and then actually linking from those like mini sites over to the money site. You guys got comments on that or any other strategies?
Hernan: No. I think you nailed it because I pretty much do the same that you said, Bradley.
How Much Power Would A Network Lose If You Don't Include A Tumblr Account?
Bradley: Okay. All right. Cool. Sam's up. What's up, Sam? Sam was in Portland with us. He says, “I'm having problems getting Tumblr to send me an email verification for one of my syndication networks. Assuming I can't get that straightened out, how much power would my network lose if I don't include Tumblr account? Would it be better to set up a Tumblr account for this network using a different email address?” Yes, Sam. It's not the end of the world if you can't get a Tumblr account, but you should be able to get a Tumblr account. Just use a different email. We've had that happen in the past for whatever reason. As a matter of fact, I think in the training even … It's been a while since I've built a network myself.
I remember specifically that we used to use the Outlook email a lot for … Like we would set up the Gmail as the main profile, right, but then we would always create a recovery email, which would either be Yahoo or Outlook. We typically would use Outlook or Hotmail or some Microsoft email because it was less of a pain in the ass to create an account than Yahoo. A lot of the times we would end up … The Tumblr account would end up getting suspended immediately. There was a time and it's not so much anymore, but there was a time where Tumblr used to suspend accounts like at a drop of a hat. They may still do it. I'm not building them all the time anymore, so I don't know. I know this is in the training.
We would just submit an email to support and say, “Why was my account suspended? There's not even been any content posted or anything like that.” A lot of times they would reissue or reinstate the site, reactivate the site. If they didn't, sometimes we'd get denied. We'd end up using just like the Outlook email. Another thing you can do, Sam, is use a webmail account if it's connected to a brand domain, right? If it's a branded network, then you can just create a webmail account and use that. Again it's not the end of the world if you can't use Tumblr or if you can't get a Tumblr account set up, but chances are just try another email and you'll probably get it.
How Many Rings Are Safe To Use In IFTTT Network For Money Site?
Raphael's up. “Hi. How many rings is it safe to use in an IFTTT network for a money site?” Well, Raphael, it can be safe to use as many networks as you want, as long as you are setting them up the way that we recommend if you're going to use two tiered or multi-tiered structures for money sites for blog syndication. I don't recommend it. I recommend that unless you're only managing like one site and then in that case, you have the bandwidth to be able to manage multiple layers or tiers of networks. It's really super important that you are injecting additional relevant content into the persona based networks. You only want one branded network per money site. Period. That's it. Right? That would be a network that is branded and themed for the brand, so it's going to be consistent all the way across.
You only want one per money site. That's why I usually recommend to just stick with a branded tier 1 ring for a blog syndication and that's it. Multiple networks is doable. It can be safe. By the way, you can never eliminate your footprint, but you can minimize it by using the … Who keeps pinging me? Somebody keeps pinging. Anyways, you can minimize it by injecting related content feeds into the additional networks, the supporting networks. We cover all that stuff in the training. Any comments on that guys before I move on?
Hernan: Yeah. I mean we have always said the same, right? If you're doing huge power sites, you can do multiple rings. For money blogs, usually you don't need that many. I mean if you're setting your on site SEO in the way that we explained for example on the Battle Plan, et cetera, et cetera, you don't need a multiple tier network for a blog.
Bradley: Just so you guys know, with YouTube networks, you can stack as many networks as you want. There's no footprint issues. As long as you're using the applets the way that we've shared, then there's no problem with it. At least not yet. There hasn't been for years. I've been using this method since 2012 and I've never had any issues with YouTube with as many networks as you want. It's never been a problem. I have had it caused problems with websites if I haven't minimized my footprint or covered my tracks properly. That's what the beautiful thing is about the branded networks, guys. You're not covering your tracks. You're literally staking your claim. You're throwing a flag up in the air and saying, “Hey, this is us. This is my brand. This is us on all these other properties.”
That's why we interlink them and all that other stuff because we are literally saying, “This is us. Come look at our footprint,” right? That's what we're doing. For all the other persona based networks, you don't want to do that.
Can Review Schema Be Overused?
Muhammad's up. What's up, Muhammad? He says, “Hey, guys. Can review Schema be overused?” Yes, Muhammad. You can get a manual penalty in Search Console from Google for Schema spams, structured data spam. You absolutely can. I've gotten it, so I know. All right? “I have it on all my posts and the reviews are real, but I read there's such a thing as Scheme abuse.” Yes, there is. If you have them in all your posts and they're real … Okay.
The terms of service state that if an individual page, like a service page or a product page, has reviews for that product or service that's highlighted on that page, then the review Schema should be marked up for those reviews specific to that product. Where it can cause problems is if you have like an aggregate review rating that you basically append or add to every page and/or post on the site to where it's a site wide aggregate review rating for every page on the site, every page and/or post on the site. That can get you into trouble. That's against terms of service.
If you have say six reviews for a service page and the reviews are specific about that service, then you can mark that page up for those six reviews and the home page of the website can have an aggregate rating, but it shouldn't be site wide if that make sense. Any comments on that guys before I move on to the next part of it?
Hernan: Yeah. Just be careful. I mean some people will go ahead and for example do Schema and JSON-LD, and that's duplicate. That's actually overusing. Like rich snippets or structured data. You either do one or the other.
How Harmful Are Multiple H1 Tags On A Page?
Bradley: Right. Okay. Number two is how harmful are multiple H1 tags on a page? It depends on the page like a blog index page is going to typically have multiple H1 tags because the title of each post is usually … It's going to be theme specific, but it's pretty much industry standard, the index pages, whether they're category index pages, blog index pages, tag index pages, anyone of those are going to have multiple H1 tags because every single post in that category with the blog page or the tag index or whatever are going to have … Each one of the blog or post titles are actually H1s. You'll have multiple H1s in that case and that's normal, right? For typical pages or posts, not index pages, then no, it's not good.
You should only have one H1 tag. Okay? I would just, Muhammad, confirm if it's an index page, don't worry about it. It's not an issue because that's normal. If it's like a standalone page or post, then yes, you only want one H1 tag. If you've got a long post, authority content post, 2,000 plus words, that type of stuff and you've got like multiple themes or concepts within that one article, then it make sense sometimes to have more than one H2 because maybe the concepts within the article are unique enough or different enough that like having another H2 would make sense as a way to like break it up to break up the concepts or ideas within that same article, but that's rare that an article is that long that it would have such too broad concepts on it.
I recommend typically only having one H2 unless it falls under that criteria that I just mentioned, but you can have multiple H3s, multiple H4s, that kind of stuff. I would recommend only one H1 and H2. Use it only once on an article if it's about a single topic, but if it's about multiple topics like long form authority content, then sometimes it makes sense to have multiple H2s. Any feedback on that guys?
Hernan: Yeah. I'm just saying like that's why you're using H1, H2s, H3s. I think that there's also like best practices. I don't have enough data to confirm this, but the best practices say that high on the page that needs to be … You need to follow a hierarchy of title types, right? You've got an H1, you only have one, but then you have an H2 and then an H3 and then maybe another H2, et cetera, et cetera, right? You need to follow these order, but internally you can have as many as you want.
How Do You Improve The Rank Of Affiliate Blogs That Are Stuck At The Bottom Of Page 1?
Bradley: Okay. Cool. Number three is what do you do when you have blogs at the bottom of page one and you want them higher? I have a blog for an affiliate site that ranks seven to eight for a big keyword. Is there anything I can do besides waiting? Yeah, there's a lot you can do, Muhammad. I'll give you a couple quick fixes right now, but I mean there's so many things that you could do for that. One is send traffic to it. I'm not even going to recommend any of the spam traffic bots out there because they're just not working well at the moment, but you could do stuff like send traffic from social media if you know how to do that or you could hire micro task workers.
Like go to microtaskworkers.com or microworkers.com I think it is or just search micro task workers in Google and go select one of them. Mechanical Turk's another one, something like that. You can actually hire people to go search in Google and click on your link and that's a real traffic signal. That absolutely will help. Obviously you could do a drive stack, an RYS drive stack. You could build more links to it. One of the other things, press releases are working really, really well right now. If you could figure out an angle to create a press release about that particular link, that page or post on your site, then that would also work. Something else you can do is add additional on-page content.
In other words, you can update that specific page with more content. Add like an updated paragraph or something else onto the page to just kind of add additional relevancy to the page. Something else that you can do on site, on the website itself is do additional … Like create that as a category. If it's not already its own category, make that a category so that you can actually put like child posts underneath it as supporting articles, so that you essentially make that one post part of like the top of a silo or at least part of a silo that then you add additional supporting articles to that all interlink up to that one post. Right?
Especially if you're syndicating with a network, right, a syndication network because each additional post that you publish to your blog that's going to be interlinked up to that post that you're trying to push will end up going out across your network. You get a bunch of internal links plus the external links from the branded network that are going to be pushing back to that one post. Those are just a couple big quick fixes. I know you guys have some other suggestions.
If you change a million different things and then you go back and change it up, you don't really know what's going on. Sorry. You don't really know what created the good effect so that you can do more of that. You know what I'm saying?
Is It Okay To Create A Local Lead Generation System With A Gsite With Blogger As A Trigger For The Syndication Network?
Bradley: Yup. Okay. We'll move on. Next up he says, “Is it a good idea to create a local lead generation system with a G site along with seven city specific pages with a blogger blog being the trigger for syndication network or is it better to have a WordPress.com site?” It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter which blog you use as a trigger. Honestly, it really doesn't. I've tested with all of them. I've ranked Tumblr sites. I've ranked blogger sties. I've ranked WordPress.com sites. It doesn't really matter. If any of you guys have a different opinion on that, what I would recommend doing is go look … Sometimes you just have to test to be honest and I don't know why this is.
It's I guess the random ranking factor of Google, but sometimes WordPress sites will rank for certain keywords way better than blogger sites and sometimes Tumblrs will rank better than the other two. Really sometimes you just have to test. That's what I love about the syndication networks because if you syndicate a post from your money site to a network that's going to have blog or Tumblr or WordPress and you go like boost those three posts on the web 2.0s, right, so you can go build links to those posts, one of them you'll see where they start to rise in the search results and one of them will start to surface or bubble up to the top. Rank higher than the others.
Then that's the one that you know is the stronger site for that particular search query or keyword theme, which is interesting. Again it varies. I don't know why that is, but it just is. That's why I would just say do a little bit of testing to determine what's the best route or what's the best property. If you don't know, then just select one and run with it. If you have the ability to do some testing, test and figure it out. See which ones perform the best and then use that as your trigger if you want, as a web 2.0 trigger instead of a money site trigger. That's absolutely fine.
Hernan: Yeah. That's one of the reasons why we do syndication networks in the first place, right, because you don't know what's going to rank right off the bat. With that, under the logic you could have like it's always better to have like, I don't know, 5, 7 or 10 or 15 properties syndicated under your content. Some of them will not even rank ever. Some of them will actually pop on page one when people are searching for your stuff, right, or your brand or a long tail article that you have written, et cetera, et cetera. What I'm trying to say is that you want to have as many opportunities to rank as possible, right?
That's why we're doing syndication networks and that's why I would say if you have the chance to test with branding properties using some sort of syndication, that will be even better because that will multiply your chances of actually ranking because as Bradley suggests, there's this random ranking factor that on some cases some websites will do better than others, but you don't need to choose. That's the good news.
Should You Use RVR-Pro On The Branded YouTube Channel Or To A Separate Channel?
Bradley: Yeah. The second part of his question was should we use RVR Pro? That's Rocket Video Ranker, one of Bill Cousins' products. Should we use RVR Pro on money site YouTube channel or set up a separate YouTube channel? Separate and I'll tell you why. Guys, it's a good product. There's no doubt. I've used it quite a bit and it works really, really well. For those of you that aren't aware of it, I don't know, Hernan, if you want to try to grab the link. It should be in the spreadsheet, but RVR Pro, I've played with it quite a bit and been really successful with lead gen campaigns, as well as wowing potential clients, prospects with it. What I found and I'm not talking bad about the software, I want everybody to understand.
I want to be completely transparent about what I have found with this method. I've got several channels out there that have been affected by this, but as long as you understand it, that's fine. It's a churn and burn strategy. Period. Just keep that in mind. It's a churn and burn strategy. Don't use your money site and I'll tell you why because I've got several channels that I had set up, phone verified channels that I use specifically for RVR Pro. I would go out and create 30 videos at a time and it's all handled by the software, guys. It makes it super simple to do. It's a rather quick process, but I would go target and it basically uploads all the videos as private or unlisted. Then once they're all uploaded, it turns them all to public at the same time.
For some reason or another and I don't know why and I've said this through the webinars that we did with Bill and everything, I don't know why it works, but it works. As long as it works, I'll exploit it. I'll take advantage of it. What I have found is that within a few weeks and sometimes it's a little bit longer, it's a couple months, I don't know when exactly it's happened, but I've had it happen to multiple channels that I've used this method. All of a sudden all the videos will basically fall out of the index, basically become the index and the channel's still there. The channel doesn't get terminated, but I can't get any videos from the channel to index.
Whenever YouTube or Google decides that it's spam and they de-index everything, but they don't terminate the channel. I've got several channels that I actually was using with Live Rank Sniper as part of a poking. For example, I had several RVR Pro channels that I had ran some campaigns with. In fact, some of them were the channels that I used in the case studies when we did the webinar with Bill Cousins. I hadn't used those channels since we did the case study and they're all in Browseo. I just opened up those channels and said, “Okay. Here, I'm going to use this for Live Rank Sniper to poke a bunch of keywords, that kind of stuff.” I was doing a whole lot of poking a couple of weeks ago and so I was like literally testing hundreds of keywords.
I needed a bunch of different YouTube channels, so I just grabbed some of those from RVR Pro. What happened was when I would run Live Rank Sniper to go search Google to check the results of the scheduled live events to see if they ranked on page one or page two, that's how you know which keywords are easy to rank for, I kept getting back blank text files with no ranking videos whatsoever, which is odd. Especially for dozens and dozes of keywords, you should get some results. I kept getting these blank text results back, text files back, which means it didn't find any results. I went and literally tested manually by uploading a video, copying the URL once it was uploaded, make sure it was public.
I'd go over to Webmaster Tools or Submit URL Tool in Search Console and submit it, which usually will index that link within a matter of seconds if not minutes, right, or minutes if not seconds. It typically indexes very, very quickly. I've been unable to get some of those channels to index anything. Keep that in mind just so you know. I consider that a churn and burn strategy. It's great for wowing people. It's great for short-term lead gen projects. There might be some channels that have longevity, but there's some sort of … It's got to be some sort of percentage of them that end up with the same trouble that I had.
What Are Your Thoughts On Free Traffic Exchange Sites?
Ivan's up. What's up, Ivan? He says, “Hi, guys. There are a lot of free traffic exchange sites on the web. Question, do you think they are beneficial? Should we use them?” I don't know. I've not tested them, Ivan. “If we do, should we use our money site links for tier 1 properties?” I would absolutely recommend if you're going to test it that you would do it to tier 1 properties.
If there's any way that you can direct the traffic to click a link once they land on the target URL, so like you can give them a second target URL, then you could always have them click through from the tier 1 property to your money site, which is a super good signal for SEO, right? Put analytics on your site and then send referral traffic through your social media properties. A lot of the social media sites actually report to Google anyway, so Google is aware of the traffic. If you have analytics on your site, if you run it through tier 1 properties first, that's great because it's referral traffic from social sites or web 2.0 properties. Its great signal, but I would not recommend without testing on some like demo sites or dummy sites.
I would not send that kind of traffic direct to money site. Now again I don't have any experience with this, guys. I have not tested that, but that's why I'm not going to recommend to you that you run it to your money site without testing first.
Hernan: Yeah. I agree. You need to think of what kind of traffic is being exchanged on these websites. It's usually like Popunder or not Popunder, but tool bars kind of traffic and what not. Yeah, I would definitely recommend that. If you filter that through Twitter for example, that helps a lot or through a PBN or through whatever, right? That helps a lot, but directly, it's kind of hard.
Bradley: You can spam the shit out of a press release too by the way. You can just throw shit traffic at a press release and you can actually get press releases to rank higher and to also stick, to stay in the index for longer, but that way. I've tested that quite a bit.
How Do You Increase The Visibility Of An MLM Company Website Online?
I know a lot of these network marketing sites, guys, you need to check because a lot of the times because of the fact that all independent business owners, IBOs or whatever they call them in this specific MLM company, but that's typically what they're called, because they all have the same basic sites with the only difference is the URL, a lot of the times those individual sites end up being no indexed as part of the code. It's in the header or they're all canonicalized to the root domain, which means Google likely won't index the page. If it's got a no index header tag, Google likely won't index it or robots.txt, either one, right?
If it's got a canonical tag which points back to the root, which is the main network marketing company domain, then Google likely won't index it or it'll be a fleeting index. In other words, it could index, but then fall out because every time Google does recrawls and caches again, sometimes they'll pick up the canonical tags, sometimes they won't. You need to check the code, the source code, and take a look at that. Because if that's your issue, there's probably nothing you can do about it. Marco, can you comment on that at all?
Marco: I totally, totally agree with you. You got to check the source code and make sure that the individual pages or websites or whatever it is, some domains don't have the no index tag. If it doesn't have the no index tag, you're still going to have a hard time indexing simply because of the market that you're in, the niche that you're in. I think Robin is in RYS Reloaded if I'm not mistaken. I'm sorry I haven't been in there as much as I should have because of my back. After the holidays and the new year, I should be back and fully in there. Just go in there and tag me because you should be able to do it with the way we do it in RYS Reloaded. You should be able to index.
If there were all indexable, then you should be able to do it with the way we index in RYS Reloaded. Catch me in there. Tag me.
Hernan: That makes sense. I think that pretty much everyone that's working on an MLM … Here's the thing. They will give you these office or these asset that you can definitely leverage, but what I would recommend is two main things. Number one is that you can branch off to an environment that you can control, right, to a blog that you can control. That you can actually push people into your downline, whatever, or your own office, et cetera, et cetera, but it's an environment that you can control. It also happens to a lot of the people pinging me when it comes to Facebook Ads for MLMs. If you're doing any kind of beta testing or SEO, you don't control the environment. It's super hard to install a Pixel. There's no way you can install a Pixel or check conversions.
You're pretty much throwing money at it blindly, right? I would suggest that you branch off a little bit and this will have another effect, Robin. The fact that you can control environment, so you control leads because the reality is that most people that visit your website and if you're providing good quality content, they obtain to get more information about that base on this opportunity, maybe I would say 95% of those people will not become part of your team, right? That's completely normal, but that doesn't mean that they're useless. You can use them for something else. For example, Mike Dillard made a lot of money selling services and stuff for MLM people. He was part of an MLM.
He was pushing people on his line of work, but he was also leveraging the opportunity of building an asset with the money that came from the MLM. There's no reason why you shouldn't be focusing a little bit on your own side of things while pushing people into the MLM or trying to show them the business opportunity or the, sorry, the products, right? You can also do your own thing a little bit and gather leads through some other thing.
Bradley: The other thing is like what Hernan just said, I totally agree is I would recommend that you … You got to be careful and find out what the rules and regulations are, the bylaws or whatever, for the particular network marketing company because sometimes they really frown upon having your own blogs and things like that, which I think is stupid by the way. That's part of the reason why I've never been really happy with any network marketing company. If you have your own assets and your own blog, you can push traffic to that site and you don't need to worry about Google and indexing that site. It doesn't matter, right? That's the thing.
If you control your own assets that you can use to generate traffic, you can push that traffic wherever you want to that actual MLM site if you want to. That's fine. Also, like what Hernan said is if you capture those leads from the sites that you manage, not the MLM site but from your own assets, then even if they don't join, which the vast majority of them aren't going to join, you still have an asset, right? You have an email list now. You know that they're at least interested in that theme, right, that niche, that industry, that topic, whatever it is, that product, that business, whatever. You know what they've raised their hand because they opted in and they've actually clicked through and all that stuff over to the site.
Hernan: No. No. I was just saying that yeah, I agree with you.
How Do You Find Contractors For Your Lead Gen Service?
Bradley: This is Sergei. He asked me in this in a PM in Facebook and I told him to go post it over here because I thought everybody could benefit from this. He said, “I've set up a lead gen tree service website as my testing ground for more aggressive SEO. I'm receiving calls already. Semantic Mastery stuff freaking works.” I'm going to plus one that. He says, “How do you find contractors to pass the leads to and what percentage or fee do you charge?” Okay. Sergei, I've actually covered this. I don't know if you're still in the mastermind. I believe you are. You should have access to all of the master class training, the archives from that. We don't do the master class anymore, but you should have access to all that.
There's been like specifically prospecting funnels for service providers for lead gen stuff that I've set up. It's very similar to like what I'm doing for prospecting for agency clients right now, right? Now there's a couple ways. You can do the shotgun approach, which is in that particular city, you just scrape all the leads, get all the contact leads for all the tree service contractors in that particular city and just do a mass email blast to all of them. Like literally it's carbon copy, the CC, right, so that they see that you're emailing everybody and put a basic pitch in the email that sends them over to a landing page where you can have a video explaining and you could show results, you can show that you're ranking.
You can show screenshots of call records, things like that, so that you can prove that you actually have these leads currently right now and push them over there. Put an application. I like to put a Google form application where I'm not asking them anything sensitive, but I make them jump through a hoop to qualify themselves as a potential service provider that I want to work with. Because I can tell you right now especially in the tree service industry about 85% or 90% of them aren't even going to fill out the form because they're not very sophisticated. Some of them are going to fill it out and they're going to say something rude or crude in it or they're going to email you back and they're going to cuss you out and stuff like that.
That's just the nature of that industry, guys, but there will be probably a few that will raise their hand or that will actually complete the process. Sometimes and this is funny, but a lot of times I've set up these funnels for service providers essentially just to prospect service providers for a lead gen asset that's already producing leads, right? I'll send people through the process, but instead of them filling out the actual Google form and then me contacting them, they end up looking at the page and then just contacting me back via the email that I sent them and starting a conversation that way or they'll call sometimes. Those are the ones that you want because those are the people that have like …
Even though they didn't go through the specific process you set up, they're anxious. They're hungry. They want those leads. Then obviously for tree service stuff, guys, I always recommend that you only work with clients or service providers that have insurance. Make sure they've got business licenses, stuff like that. Because even though you're just providing the leads, I don't want any liability ever coming back to me for that kind of stuff. Just make sure you've covered your ass. Obviously don't sell leads to a tree service contractor that has like one star reviews and shit like that. Don't do that, right?
It is about the money, but you also got to make sure that the leads that you're sending to the contractors are going to be serviced properly because it's your asset that's going to be damaged if they don't perform well. All right? As far as that, the other process that you could go through as opposed to the shotgun approach would be the rifle approach. Once again, Sergei, I know you have access to the video email prospecting training. That's more of a laser approach. It's a lot more time consuming, but it's very, very effective. That way you could actually hand-select contractors.
For example, you could go find the tree service contractors, just do a little bit of research and find the ones that have the best reviews and hand-select them and reach out to them with a very targeted specific video email message telling them that you chose them because of how good of a review … They got a really good reputation and you've got these leads and you want somebody that has a good reputation. Now you're massaging their ego. It works really, really well. Okay? Also, don't forget, even with the laser approach, you don't want to not let them know that you're also providing this offer to other contractors. Especially with the laser approach, the rifle approach, you can actually list the other contractors that you've hand-selected in the email.
Reply quickly though because I've also contacted and then just bullet point it right out, like Joe's tree service and Bob's tree service and blah, blah, blah right on down the list because that creates a sense of urgency. I found contractors really respond well to that sense of urgency. Now sometimes they're just going to flat out cuss you out. Get over it. As far as what percentage or fee you charge, it depends on the relationship. It also depends on how I'm generating the leads. It depends on the area too, right? It depends on the level of competition. It really does depend, Sergei. Typically, if I'm doing AdWords for tree service and tree removal jobs, then like I'll charge on a flat fee per lead, per qualified lead, which would be …
It ranges between say $50 to $75 per lead. If I'm doing SEO, if my leads are coming in through SEO as opposed to AdWords where I'm not paying per click, then I will have a lower price, a lower cost per lead price. If I'm doing AdWords, I specifically just tell the contractors, “Look, sometimes it cost me $30, $35, $40 to generate this lead. I've got to charge you $75 per lead.” Period. I'm just transparent about it with them. I tell them flat out, “If it's SEO, then sometimes I might charge 40 bucks per lead or 50 bucks per lead.” Then generally what I like to do is especially with tree service … Now this isn't always possible.
Once you've developed a relationship with the service provider and a track record and he's proven to perform well, to be able to close a lot of jobs, he pays you when he's supposed to and all that kind of stuff, then you can always negotiate a revenue share and that's my preferred method especially in a tree service industry because I get 10% of any jobs that close. The contractors love that because they don't pay for leads that don't turn into revenue. They only pay for leads that generate revenue, but you have to have a trusting relationship with them. They have to be good closers, right? You get like, especially with tree services, 10% and it's pretty much all labor. There's very rarely ever any material cost in the job.
I'm not kidding. The average job for my biggest contractor, my best tree service contractor with the revenue share model, the average job is about 1,800 bucks. I get $180 on average per call. We had a lot clearing job that came through. It was a $47,000 job. I'm not kidding. I got $4,700 for one damn phone call. That was a damn good week. Just so you know, that's a great model, but you have to have developed a relationship with the contractor first, a trusting relationship. Anybody have any comments on that before I move on?
Hernan: That's pretty cool. Yeah, no. When you have that relationship, that's where the actual money is.
Bradley: Yup.
Hernan: Not selling the leads. The actual I'll pay you when somebody closes. Depending on the niche, right? That's why it's usually better to go for high ticket niches, right? It takes time. You can start with the Rank and Rent model, then moving to the lead selling model, and then finally, you want to get to that model when you're being paid for a new contract.
Bradley: Absolutely. To start with, yeah, the Rank and Rent is absolutely the easiest way, guys. You're going to leave a lot of money on the table on that way though, but that's the easiest way and quickest way to get going and to start generating revenues is just Rank and Rent because it's simple. All you go to do is charge a flat fee. I still got a lot of lead gen sites out there that are on the Rank and Rent method and that's fine. It's simple to manage that way. Doing PPL, pay per lead, or revenue share, you have to have a lot more tracking in place, more infrastructure basically, but it's worth it because you'd make so much more money. All right. Keith's up from Super Spun Article. Keith, I was promoting your stuff I think it was last week just so you know.
What Do You Mean By Custom Sidebars To Create A Silo's IFTTT Network?
He says, “Hey, guys. Question on IFTTT networks. Was on your SerpSpace sales page and saw a comment from Bo about custom side bars to create silos IFTTT network. Can you explain what he meant by this?” No, because I'm sorry. I'm not familiar with the comment, number one. I'm not sure exactly what he meant other than I think maybe possibly what he was talking about is our builders in the sidebars of like the blogs. Everyone of the sites with the properties, platforms, whatever, within the syndication networks that allow us to add our other profile links, we do that.
Like for example with WordPress.com or with Tumblr or blogger, we'll add in the sidebar all the links to all of the other properties in the network and that's just to create like a branded silo I guess if that's what he's talking about. Again I don't know because I'm not Bo, so I don't know exactly what he meant by that. Does anybody else have maybe ideas on that?
Hernan: Let me check. I don't know, buddy. You'll need to ask him.
Bradley: Yeah. Just post in the group, Keith, in our Facebook group, the SEO Tutorials Facebook group and tag Bo on it if you have a question specifically. I know he'll answer it because he also moderates that group for us anyways. Okay?
Is There Any Benefit In Running RSS Masher Feed Through FeedBurner Before Adding To IFTTT Recipes?
Next question from Keith. Another question this time on RSS feeds, “Is there any benefit,” and we're almost out of time guys, “Is there any benefit in running the RSS master feed through FeedBurner before adding it to IFTTT recipes to add content to network sites?” Yeah, I mean there is. There's some slight benefit because you siphon a little bit of authority from the FeedBurner domain, which is basically a Google domain. There is some benefit. I got to be honest, I don't do it unless I'm like …
I typically don't do a lot of those like additional little steps that have tiny, tiny fraction of a benefit. If you've got the time, sure. Why not? It wouldn't hurt. You'd have two separate feeds at that point, right? You got your RSS master feed and then you have a FeedBurner feed, so you could actually use it in different locations. You could submit both feeds to different aggregators, RSS directories, and that kind of stuff. I mean it's not going to hurt is my point. Okay? All right. Cool. We're almost done.
What Are Your Thoughts On Money Robot And SEO Jet?
Edward, “You guys like Money Robot or do you like SEOJet?” Edward, I don't run any of the tools. I can't answer that. You'd have to talk to Dedia, our link building manager. He could answer any question about any spam tool out there right now.
He's an expert in all of them. He'll tell you the best ones to use. Anybody got a comment on that before I move on? We're almost done. Good. We should be able to finish these questions.
Which Part Of The Syndication Network Training That Teaches How To Connect A Web 2.0 To The Client's Website Through The RSS?
“Where do I go in syndication training to see how to connect a web 2.0 the client's website through RSS?” Wow, Edward. Come on buddy. I know you, Edward. You are like a sponge, man. You already know this. Unless I'm misunderstanding your question, you just create an applet with an RSS as the trigger. If this RSS, then that select the web 2.0 and that's it. Then set up the applet. Am I misinterpreting the question, guys?
Hernan: How to connect a web 2.0 to the client's website through the RSS. Maybe it's not supported by IFTTT. Is that what you're saying, Ed?
Bradley: Oh, if it's the case, then yeah. Maybe that's it, Ed. Again I'm not picking on you, buddy. You know you're cool. If it's a web 2.0 that IFTTT can connect to as a service, then you just use an applet. Very, very simple. All that's covered, right? If it's a web 2.0 that does not connect to IFTTT, then you're going to have to look for another service that would make … There are some plugins out there that will … Like SNAP, Social Network Auto Poster plugin. That may connect to the web 2.0 specifically. DLVR.it is another one. Zapier obviously. You could use that if it connects. You're going to have to find another way to do it. If it's not IFTTT specific, find another way to do it. Sometimes you just can't.
Should You Use A P.O. Box Or Street Address When A Client Wants To Setup Another Location?
Sometimes you can't automate it. All right. Next question from Ed, “I have several clients that want to set up another location. I can just set up a box at the post office and use street address and not the box.” Yes. You have to fill out an additional form, Ed. Standby one minute. Let me see. Right here. This is it. This PDF form. It's a form you can get it at the post office or you can download it and then print it out. All you got to do is fill this out. It doesn't cost anything else guys. It's just one additional form. You just put the post office street address here. The box number that they assign you when you go pick up your post office box. The city, state, zip. This is exactly how you have to write it.
You use the street name and then you use the number sign. They're very particular about that by the way. You use the pound sign, the hashtag symbol, and then the number of the box. That's how you write it out when you fill out this form. That's all you got to do is sign this form. I'm going to grab this link and drop it on the event page. This is the street address option. I just did, Paul. Last question I believe is from Donald. What's up, Don? Shit. I forgot to mention that again. I always forget. The Mindset Mastery Series. I just posted another video yesterday for the Mindset Mastery Series after two weeks of not doing videos because of my traveling to Vegas and all that shit.
Also, I've been focusing on building my email sequence, my autoresponder sequence, for … If you go to bradleybenner.com guys, you can sign up for my Mindset Mastery Series emails, my email series. What I'm trying to do is build the habit right now. For years, I've been meaning to improve my writing skills because writing is such a shitty job. It sucks. It's not that I'm bad at it, but it takes me forever to do it and it's very painful. It's very tedious process. The only way to ever get better at stuff like that is just do more of it guys. It's just like anything else. It's the only way to get better at it. For years, I've been putting it off.
I've created a goal many, many times to get better at writing and I've never followed through because I never built a habit out of it. I started about three weeks ago with this Mindset Mastery Series and again you can subscribe to the emails. Go to bradleybenner.com and there'll be a popup to subscribe. If you don't like it, just unsubscribe. What I've been doing every single day as part of my daily routine now with the meditation and with my daily goal setting and planning, now I'm also writing an email every morning. It's not every morning, but I try to get Monday through Friday as often as possible. My goal is to write a minimum of 200 words per day. What happens is by the time I get to 200 words, it's not enough to convey the thought that I'm trying to get across.
My emails are on average about 600 to 800 words. It's been great because I think I've got 12 emails in there over the last three weeks. I've only missed a few days and I'm starting to develop the habit, which is going to make it easier for me to write in all areas of my business and my life, right? Again I would recommend you go check that out. I know Don's been following it, so thanks, Don. Just keep in mind guys, I do use colorful language, some strong language in those emails at times. If you're easily offended, just don't subscribe or unsubscribe if it offends you. It's really about kicking your ass and making you like get off your ass and go do something. Go be productive. Make life happen.
Does Sean Donahoe's Commission Commando Still Works?
That kind of stuff. I respond well to that kind of talk. That's the way I talk in those emails. All right. Anyways, I'm going to answer this question, Don, and we're going to wrap it up. We're a little bit over. I think you were using the Sean Donahoe's Commission Commander. I think he's talking about Backlink Commando. Does it still work today? Plus, if you tried RSS, makes the plugin to see how it works.
Hernan: Probably yeah. We were using Backlink Commando. It's not being supported anymore. He also had Commission Commando for some other stuff, but Backlink Commando is not being supported anymore.
Bradley: Yeah. I never use Commission Commando. Backlink Commando was a way to extract the web 2.0 URLs, post URLs for the syndication network and automatically send them to an indexer, which was great, but they stop supporting it about probably a year and a half ago now, maybe two years ago even. We never found another solution that was able to do that. We've talked about developing our own, but we've never done it and it's not really a really top priority. It maybe something that SerpSpace … I know that's on the to do list of SerpSpace because with our network monitoring over there at SerpSpace, it would make it super simple and we have an indexer service and everything already built into SerpSpace.
It's just a matter of developing it to pull and extra the URLs. It's something that's on the to do list. I imagine it will be done within the next few months, but I just can't give you a date when. All right. I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Hernan: No, I mean, yeah. I don't know how high on the priority list that is.
Bradley: Last thing guys, by the way Don, I did cover an alternative way to do that to extra the web 2.0 post URLs automatically and have them posted to a drive file, a spreadsheet, and then you could actually just like send the spreadsheet. You could build links to the spreadsheet or send it on the indexer or whatever and that will help the web 2.0 post URLs to get indexed. That was all covered in an update webinar in IFTTT or excuse me, Syndication Academy. Just go back and look through the updates or the webinar replays archives and you should be able to see where I mention an indexing method for web 2.0 posts and that will show you how to set that up. “Have I tried RSS Mixer plugin?” No. Not that I'm aware of.
All right, guys. We got to wrap it up. Happy Thanksgiving everybody. Thanks for being here and spending your Thanksgiving eve with us.
Hernan: Happy Thanksgiving, guys.
Marco: Happy Thanksgiving. Bye, everyone.
Hernan: Bye.
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