Click on the video above to watch Episode 170 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.
Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
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Announcement
Adam: Hey, everybody, welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is episode 170. It's the 7th of February, and we are all here. This is a rare day; it's a blue moon; there's something weird going on. We're going to get right to it. Let's say hi to everybody.
Look at this, we got Chris on camera even. How is it going man?
Chris: Been good. Yeah, new setup here.
Adam: Nice, nice, good to see you. Alright. This is weird. I usually don't even see Chris. Alright. Hernan, how is it going?
Hernan: Hey, guys. What's up? It's really good to be here.
Adam: That's it.
Hernan: That's it for now. I'm just excited to be here. It's really good to be here.
Adam: Awesome. Hey, Marco, what's up?
Marco: Oh, man, it's horrible. It was 60 degrees last night.
Adam: That's insufferable. How do you put up with that?
Marco: I had to get [inaudible 00:00:45], man. That's not fair.
Adam: Somebody's gotta suffer through it. I'm glad that you can carry that weight for all of us. Man, Bradley, how is it going, man? Are you doing better today?
Bradley: I am, thank you for asking. It was an awful day yesterday. I had a molar crack Monday night, and God, you talk about painful. That shit hurts. I was in excruciating pain all night Monday night, and then most of the day yesterday, until I got into an emergency dentist appointment. Thank God, they pulled the tooth, I said … I was just telling Marco, the dentist was like “You've got a fractured tooth. We're going to have to pull it out.” I was like “Just take them all.” Because it hurt so bad, you know.
It got done. He even prescribed me some really good drugs, and I didn't even get the prescription filled which is crazy.
Adam: So happy to have it out?
Bradley: Yeah, man, I just was glad to have it out. Really, I don't need the pain pills, to be honest with you. I did at the time, but now that it's out, it's fine. Beer works just as good.
Adam: Fair enough. Fair enough. Speaking of pain killer, a pain that you might be experiencing is with press releases. Bradley's got some stuff coming up real soon, I believe we're going to start recording later in the month, or beginning of March, and it's going to be basically a press release course. We're not going to go into a lot of details today, but we are going to offer a special kind of pre-release access to that for people who want to jump in on that.
Bradley, you just got like a quick summary because I know we haven't worked out all the details, but do you want to tell people kind of what you're aiming for with that course?
Bradley: Yeah, we're going to do a course, it'll be like a live recorded course. We're, essentially, going to sell, pre-sell I guess, access to the course. And then we're gonna be … And I'll have some supplemental training inside the membership area right off the bat, basically like the working procedure, or the step-by-step process, the outline, things like that of what the press release method that I've been using for Local SEO is.
Then, we're going to be recording the training via live webinars, at least two, possibly three. But I think we can cover it all in two unless we need a third webinar for specifically Q&A and implementation, but other than that … We're definitely going to start. I think the first webinar is set for March something another, March 4th or something. Is that correct?
Adam: It might be the first. Top of the month, [crosstalk 00:03:06]
Adam: Cool, well that's gonna be coming up. And like I said, we're gonna have some more information for everybody. What we want to do basically there is offer you a really good deal up front. So if that's something you sound interested in, we'll have some more information for you and you can check it out.
So on top of that, too, we're working on getting the Battle Plan updated. So we've already released several updates to the Battle Plan … And a lot of animals in the background. Doesn't get any better than this when you're live and you can't mute yourself. Alright, gonna keep rolling with this.
Anyway, so with the Battle Plan we've already had a bunch of updates throughout the last year, and we're getting ready to update it to version 2.0. So we've got a lot of good stuff coming up with that. Just wanted to let everybody know. We've had a lot of really good feedback on it, and we're looking forward to sharing that with a lot more people. And then-
Marco: Don't forget the RYS Reloaded Little Blackbook v2.0, man.
Adam: Oh, that's right. I almost did forget about that, Marco. You wanna tell people about that?
Marco: It's just that we've done 10 updates already, 10 update webinars since we released RYS Reloaded Academy, and it's time to write up a new version of the Blackbook that gives you all of the secrets into RYS Reloaded. And so I'll be writing that up in the next couple of weeks, as well as the Done for Your Users Guide. That's coming also.
Adam: Outstanding. And then also-
Marco: [crosstalk 00:04:28]
Adam: The charity is still ongoing, right? People can still donate? Like we finished that section. I don't know how you want to describe it, but people can still donate to the charity, right?
Marco: School year 2018, I actually have a thank you letter from the charity, and I have the receipts for the money, and I have pictures of all of the supplies and everything that we got. So, what I decided, and I told you guys, is if we just keep it going all year instead of waiting until the end of the year, we could do a whole lot more. And I think since we have such a generous group of people who follow us … our membership was really generous also … Why not keep it open all year so that … Donate a couple of bucks a month. It turns out to be a whole lot of money for what we need. So we'll have that there all year, SUBs for kids. I'll post the link. Donate a couple of bucks. Commit to donating a couple of bucks a month, and it'll turn into quite a bit by the end of the year.
Adam: Yeah. If we can too, Marco, if you send over the pictures to one of us we can get … I mean, hell, you could. But we can get something together, maybe put out a blog post every once in a while with some of the updates on that.
Marco: Well that's another thing that the charity agreed to. They going to be following up, and I think I mentioned this last time, we're going to get an update from … like they'll follow one child and we'll get an update, then the next month another one, and another one, for the entire school year so that you guys can actually see what the money is doing. It's like just you give the money and then you don't know. You're actually going to see what the money's doing through these testimonials. I don't wanna call them case studies because they're children, right?
But through these wonderful things that are happening with these … You should have seen them. I was there when they came through to pick up the stuff, man. It was fabulous.
Adam: Outstanding. Outstanding. If you want to just post the link, I think that's the easiest way to do this, and like you said, we'll just keep doing this. This is awesome that we're able to help them out.
Speaking of something we're publishing, I got my copy. I'm pretty happy. So I've got the MasterMIND Newsletter for February. I was actually reading Chris's stuff. So I've got some stuff coming up with Chris we're gonna be working on. I'm gonna be working on some stuff he shared, which was awesome.
But I'm bringing this up because I just had a talk with a new MasterMIND member who just joined in the last week, and as part of that we give a consultation call, which I'm not gonna reiterate the prices that various of us charge for consultation time, but part of turning the MasterMIND is you get a free call to talk to us and go over some things. And that was really illuminating too about what he's working on, and his goals, and working on building his team, and doing all that because it fits right in with what's going on with the Semantic Mastery MasterMIND moving forward in 2018 and how we've got several projects on … Bradley's building out a couple businesses. We're dealing with digital only. We're dealing with brick and mortar. We've got a lot of stuff going on. I would ask you to keep an eye out, and if building a business is something you're looking to do in 2018, then by all means check out the MasterMIND.
Bradley: Yeah, and I've got some really good results. We got a MasterMIND meeting tomorrow, or webinar, tomorrow, and I've got a lot of really awesome updates for the crossfit case study and project, and I'm really looking forward to sharing that with everybody tomorrow. So definitely, guys, come join the MasterMIND. It's awesome this year.
Adam: Awesome.
Bradley: Are we done on announcements?
Adam: I hope so. I say I hope so because I've been talking long enough, but did you guys have anything that you needed to add or want to add?
Bradley: I'm good.
Chris: I'm good.
Bradley: Let's get into some Q&A.
Alright, let's see. That's awesome, Wayne. Oh, Jesus.
Does Syndicating Videos Through IFTTT And Embedding It To A Blog Post Would Fire Duplicate Content Issues?
Alright, quit this house is up. He says, “Good day to this manic team. If I syndicate a video through IFTTT then embed the video in a blog post with spin version of description and add a picture or two to that blog post then syndicate that new blog post am I playing with “duplicate” fire?”
Well, no. I mean, here's the thing, and this is, I believe, one of the answers in our Knowledge Base because we do get this question somewhat often. Yours is a bit more specific because you're talking about spinning the YouTube description and that kind of stuff. I wouldn't do that on a money site. I wouldn't spin anything on a money site to be honest with you unless you're gonna do it manually, which why? Why the hell would anybody wanna do that? So anything with your money site I would not recommend. If it was just like a feeder site, something that you were using like to feed traffic or whatever into your money site, then that's fine. So like, if it's like a first or second tier type site, then that's okay, but I wouldn't do it for your money site.
So, one of the things, guys, we typically don't recommend syndicating video descriptions anyways. You can take a video that's published to your YouTube channel … Okay, listen. If you've got a syndication network that's attached to your money channel, right, and also to your blog, which is perfectly fine to do, and you upload a video and it's … you know, obviously it's gonna syndicate out to the network. You can still take that video and go publish a blog post with it.
However, and I've said this again dozens of times, I know it's in our knowledge base, but what I see people do, which is wrong and causes problems, is when they take the video that has already been syndicated to their branded syndication network, and then they just go over to the blog, embed the video, and then use the same title as the video for the blog post title. And the description may be slightly different or whatever, like the actual post body might have some content because typically the YouTube syndication, you guys know if you're using the applets like we recommend that you use them, it's typically only gonna be published … It's gonna be the embed code, then there will be an actual link to the video, and then a via channel link. Right? Or a playlist URL, either one. And so that's all that's ever syndicated to the branded network.
What happens when you grab that video though and go take it over to your blog and just embed the video, use the same title, and then maybe there's some slight variations to the post body to the web 2 properties that they get syndicated to it, looks like a duplicate post. It looks very similar to because they share basically the same title, it's typically the video's the first thing that pops up. So it's gonna look like duplicate posts across your branded network. It's not that it's gonna cause you any SEO issues. The problem occurs when the branded web 2 accounts get terminated for spam because you're duplicating every post basically.
So all I recommend doing is … It's perfectly fine to syndicate the video from your YouTube channel to your network then go create a blog post and embed the same video. Vary the title though. Make the title more like a normal blog post title, which is typically a lot more … It follows a more natural speech pattern, right? You know usually when we optimize for a video title, guys, it's literally an exact match keyword and that's it, right? I mean that's all we want, and that's the SEO title, that's what helps it to rank specifically for that particular keyword. So that's usually how we optimize for videos.
For blog posts however though, it should be a bit more conversational, like the title. And then you should also add some additional content below the video if you're gonna embed the video at the top of the post. One thing you can do is if there's speech in the video, you can have the video transcribed. Right? And just add the actual transcription as the text, which also gives you opportunities to link and have internal links or links to offers or whatever you're doing. You can do all of that too.
So just keep that in mind. If you wanna syndicate the same video, it's fine. Just make sure that you vary the blog post enough to make it unique. And again, I highly recommend not using spin anything on your money site unless you're gonna do it manually, which again, you've got better things to do with your time than spinning. So.
Any comments on that, guys?
Hernan: Um, yeah. I totally agree with you, Bradley. We don't use any spin texts whatsoever on the money site because you want the money site to convert, right? And spin text usually doesn't do that. So, something that I've been experimenting a little bit with is what Bradley was saying. We use rev.com to get our videos transcribed. We have been using it for a while now. But now what I'm kind of experiencing a little bit is to add a summary on the top of the video. So you have the video, you can transcribe, and then you make a quick summary like two or three main points of that video, and that's your post. That's your blog post. Right? So I've been experimenting a little bit with that. And then, yeah, I would definitely get the video transcribed and post that if you want to create a blog post instead of give Rich Text, which that's work. You know?
How Would You Retain The Map Pack Rankings If You Add Additional Services To An Existing GMB Page?
Adam: Yep. Very good. Okay. Next question is from Kevin. What's up, Kevin? He says, “Hey, guys. I have a maps question. I have a GMB set up for a snow removal company that now wants to offer lawn care and rank in the maps for lawn care keywords. The business name is KDP Snow Services, and I want to change the GMB business name to KDP Lawn and Snow Services. I guess I don't have to though. Also the GMB's main category is currently snow removal, and I wanna change it to lawn care and make snow removal a secondary category. If I make said changes, will the map pack rankings for snow removal keywords tank, which are currently ranking?
Well, Bradley, how would you go about making this transition but still retain all map pack rankings?
If it's a whole bunch of them, then I wouldn't change the name because it's gonna require you to go back and update all of those citations, which certainly I don't advise you to do that, Kevin. There are services that will do that for you that are much more efficient at it, but it can be rather expensive. For example, Loganix is the best citation cleanup service I've ever used, and I've used many of them. Every since I found Loganix though, I haven't used any others. I can tell you that, and in fact I just ordered another Loganix citation cleanup package yesterday for a client. So it's a really, really good service, but it's $500. You know? So if it's for a client and you can pass that cost off to them, like …
I'll be honest with you guys. How I do it, I've got an affiliate account with Loganix, and so what I do is I charge a client $600 to do the citation cleanup, and all I do is I set up an account on a web mail domain, you know a domain mail, a web mail account on the client's domain. And then I go visit my own affiliate link in a clean browser, and then purchase under their domain, their web mail I purchase the citation cleanup from Loganix. And that way I make $100 off the sale up front because I marked it up a $100, and then I also make a slight commission on it too, and that's perfectly fine because it's for the client. Right? And then it just takes me about 20, 25 minutes maybe to go through and actually enter all the data in to the Loganix dashboard for adding the client and for the citation cleanup project. And so I end up making like, I don't know, $150 or something like that for about 25, 30 minutes worth of work, and then Loganix does all the rest of it.
So if it's something you can pass off to the client, absolutely. Do that. Make sure that you do, as I just mentioned though, because that way you can still make a few bucks off of it, or you can charge them as much as you want. I'm just telling you I typically just charge my clients about $600 for it, and that way I make about $150 off of just basically data entry for a few minutes. Okay?
Anyways, if they have a whole bunch of citations, you would have to update all of the citations with the new name. So if they only have a handful though, then yes, I would absolutely update the name because it's gonna make more sense to have KDP Lawn and Snow Services if you're also offering lawn services. But again, it's not critical. It's helpful but not critical. Okay?
So if you've only got a handful of citations, then you can order like individual citation cleanup. You know, Bright Local has that offering. I believe we offer that inside of SERPSpace. There's plenty of places out there that you can order citation cleanup for just a set number of citations instead of all of them, which Loganix just does everything that they find, if that makes sense. That's why it's a one set price. Alright?
Okay. That said, as far as … let's see. Also the GM main category … Yeah. Changing the category shouldn't affect anything. Let me rephrase that. I've changed categories for stuff that I manage or my own lead gen properties, client stuff as well. I've actually gone in and changed categories before and in many cases, and I've never seen that have an effect on my ability to rank. Usually it's because I've ranked my client or lead gen property or whatever, and it had the wrong category designated, and I was still able to rank it, and then I would go in at a later date and change the category to the correct category. And I've never experienced any dancing from changing categories. I'm not saying it can't happen. I'm just saying I've never experienced that.
Does anybody else here have experiences with movement from changing categories?
Marco: I haven't seen it. I mean, and I've done it. And I haven't really seen any type of negative movement. If there is, you could just hit it with, what do you call it, a press release or a drive stack and then just pump it back up, man. It's not really a problem, and it's not a permanent problem. The only time that I saw something negative it cleared up, so it could have been something else. So I never really paid it any attention.
Bradley: So, yeah. So, Kevin, again, if you have a manageable amount of citations, then I would change the name. If there's a lot of citations though, then I wouldn't recommend it unless you can pass that cost off to the client. Now if there are a lot of citations, and you do decide to change the name, then understand that it likely will do some dancing until the citation cleanup job is done and that takes about six weeks. I'm not saying that it … It very may well stay in the same position that it's at now, by just changing the name.
Let me give you an example, the client that I ordered the citation cleanup job for just yesterday from Loganix, they have the worst NAP consistency of any client I've ever dealt with and that is no bullshit. I mean, it is the most awful thing that I've ever seen. And I use Bright Local as my reporting software, and the citation tracker report I mean it looks like it's a bunch of random businesses. There are also commonalities between the name, but it is so many different variations of their name, and they had two different physical addresses, and they had four different phone numbers, but the variations of their business name was at least 11 variations of their business name. Think about that.
For whatever reason, I still don't understand, they're still ranked number one in maps for their very specific keyword. Right? And plus their local modifier. And so I got on the phone with them and I told them … cause they're a new client, and I basically told them, “Look. I can help you guys with this. We're gonna have to do a citation clean up job, but first before I even do that we need to decide on a one version of your name and from that point forward any time you guys every do anything online and you're gonna post about your business, you have to use that name.” And so we did. We agreed on a particular name, and so I went into the Google My Business Dashboard and I changed the name to the one that we agreed on. I did that about two days ago, on Monday, changed the name, and it hasn't moved yet.
So again, I'm not saying changing the name won't cause it to move. I've actually seen it to move quite a bit, but as long as it's somewhat similar. Like if you were to change it completely from KDP Snow Services to Kevin's Lawn and Snow Care or something like that, it would probably have a more significant negative effect at least temporarily until everything got updated. But by just changing from KDP Snow Services to KDP Lawn and Snow Services, that's very similar to the change that I made to this business's name because their name was … Again, it was similar, but there was 11 different variations: different punctuation, there was inc. on some of them and not on others, and apostrophes in some of them and not on others, and ampersands in some of them and not on others and all that. And all I did was consolidate it down to one and I updated the Google My Business Profile for the business name and it didn't move at all.
So as long as it's, at least from my experience … I've had other experiences similar to that, but that's just a really recent example. If the name change is only slight, then it typically doesn't cause much movement as far as when you change it in Google My Business. Now updating the citations, that's a different story. Again, if you've got a lot of citations, when you start to update them it's going to start dancing, but if you only have a handful of citations then you can typically update them rather quickly and it doesn't effect it much if at all. Okay?
Good questions though.
I could probably, unless you're in a really northern area though, Kevin … Well, yeah. I guess what I was about to say doesn't … In my area, snow removal stuff it's a fairly easy keyword to rank for, but I'm also in an area that we only get snow like once or a couple months out of the year. So if you're in an area where you get a lot of snow, it's probably a lot more competitive. The less competitive, guys, the less sensitive the listings are to slight changes like that. Okay?
What Are Some Best Practices In Using BrowSEO This 2018?
Alright. Nigel's up. What's up, Nigel? He's here every week asking good questions. He says, “Good day, gents. Thanks for answers and patience last week, super helpful as always. By the way, Jeffrey Smith's SEO Bootcamp is going well, thorough, easy to consume and digest. Will be implementing soon.” Yeah, there's a lot to implement in there, buddy. A lot to implement in there. “BrowSEO is still working 2018. 2016 Hump Day Hangouts solid overview. If yes, any advice on approach, usage, your application of it presently at all?”
I still use it the exact same way I've always used it, which is just to manage multiple profiles and build histories. You know, like browsing histories and cookies and all that kind of stuff for the personas, for the different accounts. That's all I use it for. There are a ton of other features. I know what. I've never taken the time to learn any of the other features in part because I hear that the training sucks. It's disorganized and all that kind of stuff, and I'm not trying to put down BrowSEO, but I've heard a lot of complaints about that stuff. We've had a lot of people ask us if we would produce training for BrowSEO over the last two years, and I'm not gonna commit to doing that because again, I only use it for a very specific reason and for that it works really, really well. Okay? And again, all I do … Like I use BrowSEO specifically just to have a whole bunch of different profiles, persona accounts, whatever. I even keep client accounts and stuff in there now, and that way when I open up the browser, all the history and everything's still there.
And by the way, guys, a lot of those personas are just on my own IP. Like, I know I've mentioned in the past, if you're really, really concerned about IP diversity and all that kind of stuff then you can use proxies with BrowSEO. Right? Absolutely, I would recommend you get dedicated proxies, dedicated private proxies. In other words, like for example when you buy proxies a lot of times you have the option, well some places don't even give the option, but some places will give you the option of having the proxies replaced every 30 days.
And when I say get private proxies, I mean don't get shared proxies cause then you end up sharing them with other people. And so you've got people logging in or with different histories and all that stuff through those IPs. You don't wanna do that. You wanna get dedicated proxies specific to you, and then you wanna have them permanent proxies. Occasionally they might blacklist anyways, and you've gotta get them replaced in which case you could replace the proxy or the IP with another IP from the same city, and it typically won't trigger a reverification of the Google account or any other account for that matter if it's in the same locality, right. If it's close in proximity.
Again, just so you guys know, most of the stuff I do in BrowSEO is just on my own IP. I mean think about it, guys. But here's the thing, here's why this is important. What we used to do years ago, which was, and this has been taught in Syndication Academy, but that was log in to our … Use Firefox. Clear browsing cache history, cookies, all that. Run C Cleaner then open up Firefox in a brand new fresh session. And then log into whatever account you want to log into.
well, then what happens when you want to log in to another account? You gotta go through that process again. And it's not the process that's the problem. The problem is every time you open up that browser, you're in a 100% clean environment again. Right? And so that's completely unnatural. That is 100% unnatural. Right, guys? I mean people that log in to their accounts, most people anyways unless you're wearing a tin foil hat, they're not gonna clean their browser after every session. And so there's no history. There's no cache. There's no profile being built up for that persona, and so it's very, very unnatural.
So again, when I'm using BrowSEO now, I just use my own IP, but every browsing session is accruing it's own history. It's building a profile for that persona. Right? Because every time I log in, it's still in the same session even though it's on my IP, it's in its own browsing session that's attached to that persona. Right? And so think about when you go to Starbucks, or you go to a public library, or you go into anywhere where there's public WiFi and everybody's using it. It's all on the same IP, so it doesn't matter. You know what I mean?
Now if you're building a shit ton of back links from different profiles and stuff and they're all from the same IP, that's one thing, but if you're just logging into accounts and doing day to day activity stuff for your different persona accounts and things like that, it's perfectly fine to have them all under the same IP. Right? As long as the browsers are accruing histories and building a profile for each one of those personas so they each have their own separate browsing session that isn't wiped clean after every session if that makes sense. Okay? And I have had zero problems doing that using just my own IP, guys. So I don't even use proxies. Don't get me wrong, I've got a handful of accounts that I still have running through proxies in BrowSEO, but the vast majority of my stuff just runs through my own IP now. Okay?
That's a great question, Nigel. So as far as if you want … I think there was another … What's the other one, guys? That's not BrowSEO, but other people are using it and they're happy … Is it Ghost Browser?
Adam: Yeah. Ghost Browser.
Bradley: Ghost Browser. Okay. Might wanna try that one too. Apparently, that one's got better training. And it's not that I'm not knocking Simon and his stuff, it's just apparently the training's been disorganized. It's hard to follow. It's hard to find and that kind of stuff. So if you're looking to do more than just the basic use of what I use it for, then you may wanna go with something that is a little bit easier to follow so to speak.
What's A Practical Content Ratio Of Original VS RSS Curation When You Are Just Starting Out?
Alright, “New client, new site content plus seasoning. What's a practical ratio of original versus RSS curation to start?” Well, the new site content, typically the pages are gonna be written content's unique. Right? Don't let me confuse you guys. Curated content is unique as long as … Well, you're supposed to inject commentary and you're combining other snippets of content from other locations into one unique piece of content. But what I'm saying is usually for pages, I have pages written, and then I have posts curated. Okay, does that make sense?
So that's just basically it. Very rarely do we actually write blog posts unless it's a client that is handling the writing on their own or has somebody in house that is writing. If it's something that I'm providing, we don't write blog posts. We curate blog posts. Period. Okay?
Alright, “10 blog plus 10 videos enough to start? Then two to three per week for how long?” Okay. Yeah, well for seasoning, guys, usually whenever I launch a new site, and this is all covered in the Battleplan, but I always have at least three but usually five posts in queue ready to be curated posts, ready to be dripped out once the site is pushed live. And I usually will post those three to five posts, depending on the industry, I try to mimic what posting schedules are for other sites in that industry. Right? Especially for my local area. And sometimes, like a lot of contractor niches, they just don't post at all. So what I'll do is I'll submit, I'll drip out three to five posts over the course of about two weeks.
And then after that, yeah, you can set up the automation. Well I say automation, but we don't do anything automated on our money sites. Everything's done via virtual assistants. It's done manually. So most of my clients that I provide content marketing services for, it's at least one blog post per week. Okay? I've got some clients we do three blog posts per week. That's about the extent of it though. It's between one and three posts per week, is usually what I do. But again, it's all done manually. It's not done via automation. Okay?
For how long? Until you get results. If it's a client, indefinitely. For how long? Indefinitely because that's a monthly recurring service that you charge them for. Right? And I mean, here's the thing. For my own lead gen sites, guys, I publish enough posts with this syndication networks to get it to rank, plus the other stuff that I do now. Right? Press releases, drive stacks, all of that. Once it ranks, I stop publishing posts until I need to again because it's just an expense that I don't wanna cover. For clients, however, and it's not that I'm just trying to take their money. The thing with client … Like for me, my own lead gen assets, I wanna run them as lean as possible. Right? Spend as little money as possible. I wanna get results with the least amount of effort and resources as possible. So as soon as I get results I stop blogging until it needs it again. But for clients …
And when I say until it needs it again, guys, it's typically because I drop from A position to B, or from B to C, or from A to D, and I go out of the three pack and then I lose calls and then it's like scrambling. And yes, it would make more sense to continue just doing blog posts so that I don't lose that positioning at all, but again, for my own lead gen stuff I wanna run as lean as possible so I don't do that. I just run the until I get ranked, and once I get ranked I don't run them anymore, then if I need to give it a boost a few months down the road, six months, a year down the road, whatever, then I'll tell my curators, “Hey, I need you to go publish a few more posts over here.” And they'll go handle it, and I get my rankings back.
But for clients, I don't want them to experience that drop. Right? So when clients ask me, “Can we get ranked and then stop this service?” I tell them, “No, absolutely not. Well we can, but there's a very good chance that you're going to drop in rankings. It's probably not gonna occur right away, but it will, and then you're gonna be calling me and saying, ‘What can we do to get these rankings back up?' And then you're gonna have to be patient while the SEO work works, you know, the SEO work takes effect. So if you'd rather just keep up at the top of the maps ranking and generating the phone calls that that listing provides, you may as well … my suggestion, my advice is that you continue the service.”
That's how I sell it and that's how I justify it, and I mean it that way. It's not that I'm trying to take people's money. It's because I don't want them to experience a drop in call volume because we weren't blogging. Cause it's a nominal expense, guys. If you're producing good results, they should be happy to pay for it.
This is what you're achieving. If you stop that, then you're stopping not only link building, but you stop triggering the freshest algorithm. And then like Bradley said, once you do that, well why should the bot come back if it's not getting anything new out of your website? It'll just go somewhere else and look for it until you do, we call it the G tickle. The G tickle will tell the bot, “Hey, come back cause we got some new stuff for you.”
Bradley: That's right. That was a great question, Nigel. Two in a row, man. He's the winner today. Nigel is the winner. I haven't even read the rest of the questions. I'm gonna try to roll through the last one.
Is BrowSEO And RYS A Viable Strategy To Warm Up New IFTTT Syndication Network?
“Can BrowSEO for engagement plus RYS before IFTTT syndication be a viable seasoning strategy to warm up new networks?” Yeah, it absolutely could. You know, you could send some … Like if you had personas and stuff like that that you could have, like for example, follow Tumblr blogs, engage, maybe comment, stuff like that, that's gonna make your branded network properties look so much more real, right? I mean they're real anyways, but by providing some engagement and stuff like that, that's a lot of work. If you've only got a couple of projects that you're working on, then that's something that you could implement, or if you hired some virtual assistants that you have them doing that kind of work for you through BrowSEO, then that's something absolutely would work.
I don't do that, only because it requires quite a bit of setup and resources, and I've got a lot of projects. But that's something that we've actually talked about at Semantic Mastery, was building teams of VAs that could run BrowSEO to do that, provide engagement, like real engagement. So maybe in the future that'll come.
Would Adding Internal Links To A Syndicated Post Still Have An Effect?
Mohammad's up. What's up, Mohammad? He says, “Hey, guys. Can I add internal links to a post after it's been syndicated? Will they still have an effect?” Yeah, you can, but the link is only going to be present in the post on the blog on your money site. It's not gonna be syndicated. It doesn't update the syndicated posts when you update on the blog. Does that make sense? If you were to republish the post with the new link in it, then it would re-syndicate with the new link in it, so all the web 2s would also include the link.
Which, guys, if you're just using the syndication networks with the three primary blog properties, there's really only three properties that you're … I mean you get like blog, or Tumblr, or WordPress, right? Cause those are the only ones that we syndicate the full content of the post to, other than like document storage, like Google Docs for example, which in that case you'd want the link from that too. Right?
But if you go in and change a post after it's been syndicated, it's only gonna update on the blog itself not all the other properties. Okay?
“How high can-
Marco: Can I stop you for a second?
Bradley: Please.
Marco: The pro-version of our RSS plug in, Mohammad, which you have access to as a MasterMIND member, has the ability to … It has a setting where you could have it republish the old post. So yes, by all means, go change the internal links. It won't matter on that first post, but when the time comes for that post to recycle and repost, it'll go out with the new links. So you have access to that.
How High Can Monthly SEO Retainers Go?
Bradley: Yep. Thank you, Marco. He says, “How high can monthly SEO retainers go?” How high can you think, Mohammad? Like how high can you count? I say that kind of tongue in cheek, guys, but I've seen SEO retainers tens of thousands of dollars, no kidding, depending on the size of the company. Not something I've ever done. The biggest I've ever done was $3500 a month, and I don't like working for companies like that big. Honestly, I like working with the smaller companies. That's just my own personal preference. So my average across all of my, it's gone up a little bit, but it's closer to $900 a month now for my clients, but again, I've got a lot of … Well I don't even have a whole lot of clients anymore. But I've got several clients that are grandfathered in at like peanuts, which is really ridiculous, but they've been good clients and there's no reason for me to raise their prices, at least I don't feel that there is. So.
2K a month, I mean that's pretty average. A lot of the people in our MasterMIND are running somewhere between $1000 and $2500 a month depending on the size of the client. So, yeah. It's gonna vary. It's gonna depend on how much money they have, like how good they're doing and how kind of results you can produce. But I'm not kidding. I've seen $25, $30,000 a month SEO retainers before. So. I know Marco's seen some big ones, too.
Marco: Yeah, it just depends. The company, if you do it local, you have to understand the local economy. If it's a local guy, well a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills is local, but you're not gonna charge that guy 2K for a client that might be worth $100,000, a lifetime client that maybe half a million, maybe ore. It depends on the clients that you're bringing in to him. So you have to understand your market. You have to understand the market's economy. You have to understand the people that you're dealing with. A mom-and-pop store may not have the ability to pay that 2K, but they have the ability to pay something, and if they grow then of course they should understand that the retainer is going to go higher each month.
But understand the market. Understand the people that you're working for. Understand what a lead is worth to that person. And if you know that you can produce X amount, then you already know what your retainer should be.
How Crazy Should You Go With Press Release For A New Site?
Bradley: Yes, sir. John's up. Hey, John. He says, “How crazy can I go with press releases for a new site?” I wish Rob was here. “Should I wait during the time the site is in the sandbox?” Okay. I'm gonna tell you what I typically do for press releases, guys. It's natural for press release links, like a huge influx of press release links, even for a brand new site. And why I say that is because what do people do when they launch a new service, or a new product, or a new website, a new business? They wanna tell the world. What better way to tell the world than publish a press release? So it's perfectly natural to do that.
That's about one of the only things, either that or something going viral, those are pretty much about the only two times you can get away with a massive what they call “link velocity,” a real high volume of link velocity with a brand new site. I wouldn't recommend really any other time that you would hit it with hundreds of links at once. You know what I mean? Other than a press release or if something like a post on the site was to go viral. Right?
So typically what I do for a new site, is I'll publish a press release and then I publish … I've been recently, for the last several months, since I've been doing a lot of testing, I publish one press release about every two weeks for most of the sites that I handle. And that goes for client sites now as well as my own lead gen stuff. I'm publishing about two press releases per month per site.
However, Rob, who's co-creator of RYS Reloaded with Marco, he's also helped, been doing a lot of press release testing and stuff, he's like one of our testers now. He's doing all kinds of lab experiments, which is awesome. He's a great guy. But anyway, he's been doing a ton of testing, and he'll hammer the shit out of new sites with press release, after press release, after press release. I wish he was here to say if he's experienced anything negative, but all I've heard is the positive. As far as I know, the sky's the limit, but I would still be a little bit cautious until I got confirmation from perhaps Rob maybe on the next webinar.
Do you know, Marco, what his experience has been?
We push through My Maps and into tier one as a matter of fact because it's perfectly okay to include one of your tier one properties as a link, link to that, drive people to that. People will come through naturally to your website. What better way is there? Than to notify search engines that your website is trusted than to get traffic flowing in even if it's brand new?
The natural way that it would happen is you go, you announce that you're present in social media, and people start coming in and looking at your project. So that's how you would shoot the press releases. I'm not gonna talk about the entire strategy here because people are paying a lot of money for that, but if you can think outside the box, you can figure out … Or, come join our MasterMIND.
Bradley: Yeah. That's what I was gonna say.
Marco: It's in there.
Bradley: Yeah. And the press release training that's coming out next month. We'll be launching it I guess next week, but we're gonna cover a lot of this in that. So I would highly recommend that you pick that up, but all of this is covered inside the MasterMIND all the time. Everything.
What Are Your Recommendations To Push Power To A 2-Month Old Site?
So anyways, “What are your recommendations to push power for a site only two months old?” Syndication network, blogging consistently, drive stack, press releases, and then traffic. Traffic. You can send traffic. Even YouTube ads, guys, which are dirt cheap … If you go in and set up YouTube ads that are targeted … If it's a local business, you can set it up by geography, and you can drive traffic for pennies per click to your site. And that's super relevant traffic because it's from local IPs, and also if you do your topical targeting or keyword targeting … It's called layering when you add different types of targeting criteria. Right?
But as far as location targeting, it's very, very simple cause you can just set radius or whatever you want around your specific business and you can drive traffic into the site very, very cheaply. Whether the shit converts or not, it doesn't really matter. It certainly is better if you have a good ad campaign that can produce leads or sales or whatever. Absolutely, that should be an end goal. But I'm not gonna lie, a lot of the times I set up YouTube ad campaigns for new sites just to drive traffic from a very specific geographic region into the site so that I'm getting natural traffic signals if that makes sense.
And so you don't have to just use YouTube ads. I just use that as an example because it's inexpensive. You could use Bing. Bing is cheaper than AdWords for sure, and you could get search click ads, which those type of clicks will typically be clicks that will convert to leads or sales depending on what your conversion goal is, your conversion objective is. For me it's typically leads. Right?
I recommend YouTube ads cause it's the cheapest of all. And I don't do Facebook stuff, that's what we have Hernan for. So I can't speak on that. Hernan can probably talk about that. I'm sure Facebook's a great source of traffic for seeding traffic into a new site as well. It's just not something I do. You wanna comment on that Hernan?
Marco: He dropped off.
Adam: Hernan had some issues and had to drop off.
Bradley: Okay. Well we're gonna keep moving, but that was a great question, John. So definitely syndication network, drive stacks, press releases, those are like traditional SEO stuff you can do, right? But you wanna drive some traffic in there because, guys, traffic is like where the magic happens now. Right? It really does. If you can just drive some traffic through some of, you know, properties that you've been doing SEO work for or with, you're gonna get so much better results. Alright?
It It Possible To Repurpose An Old Swedish T1/T2 Network For An English Website Project?
Ben's up. Ben says, “I have an old two tier network from about a year ago that I stopped using because the traffic wasn't converting. It was Swedish language content that I was trying to convert with an English language offer. It didn't work. Thousands of clicks, not a single sale. My current project is all English language. Is it possible to repurpose the old Swedish T1, T2 network with the new project?” Yeah, absolutely.
“I remember saying that networks bind to an IP. It's been over a year since I posted anything. I deleted all the old content. Do you think it would still be effective?” Yeah, and absolutely. I just talked about this I think last week, if not last week it was two weeks ago. But I went through and found 95 syndication networks, full … well just single tiers, but 95 rings that weren't being used anymore because they were from PBN sites that I let expire.
Some of these syndication networks were built in 2012, I'm not kidding, and they're still alive and kicking today. They just haven't had any content posted to them in forever. So I just had one of my VAs go in, and we've repurposed 45 of them, 45 or 50. I still have about 45 left that still are just sitting dormant right now. But some of those networks, especially the ones from back in 2012, have been repurposed four and five times, and it doesn't matter. They're still there. They're still working.
So absolutely you can repurpose them. Okay? Don't just start new ones all the time, guys. If you've got networks out there that aren't being used, repurpose them. Right? Save some money. Hire a VA to do it by the way. Don't do it yourself. Hire a VA.
Marco: Can I just say that he left probably thousands of dollars on the table because he got thousands of clicks but the offer was in English. When he saw that there were no conversions, why didn't he send them to an email sign up so that he could deliver … What's that?
Bradley: An opt in or even a retargeting pixel or something.
Marco: Whatever so that he could just harvest some of those thousands of people and send them to wherever you want. I mean that's why you do retargeting. That's why you harvest emails. That's why you do all of these things, so that later on while your list is building you can just market to them, anything that's related to their interests. I mean even remotely, and they either opt in, they ignore it, or they opt out. If they opt out, they were never going to buy anyway so who cares?
But you let thousands of clicks go, and what happened to all of those emails or perhaps retargeting campaigns? I would say that there's money in that Swedish language content if he uses it correctly.
Bradley: Yeah, and the beautiful thing about remarketing, guys, is, again, I can't speak for Facebook although I understand it's similar, but for AdWords, remarketing lists, it's dirt cheap to send clicks from YouTube videos to a remarketing list. It's like literally I get clicks between one to three cents per click, or per view I should say, to the remarketing list. And if it takes five views at three cents per view to get one click, then I paid 15 cents for a click. Does that make sense? So it's dirt cheap. I mean, I get clicks or views for as low as a penny on using a remarketing list. So something like that. And I understand in Facebook it might not be that cheap, but it may be. Hernan's not here to confirm, but I know that it's a lot cheaper to market to a remarketing list than it is somebody cold.
Where Do You Setup An Event's Page Like The Weekly Hump Day Hangout?
Ivan. What's up, Ivan? He says, “Questions about the gross solution webinar. I want to start a weekly webinar on computer questions and answers.” Okay, that sounds awesome, Ivan. One of the best things that we've ever done was start this Hump Day Hangout series, and I highly recommend. In fact, I was at the SEO Rock Stars event earlier this, I guess last year now. And there were several people that were asking like, “What is your best solution for growth?” And I said probably one of the most consistent things we've ever done is Hump Day Hangout. So it's absolutely a great, great strategy. It's just consistency is what's required. Right? Don't hit or miss it. You gotta do it consistently to build a following. Alright?
“Where do you set up an event page like this one?” Go to plus.google.com/events. It's so stupid that they took that out of the menu options now. You can't find it via navigation. You gotta go direct to the URL, but it's plus.google.com/events. That's how you set it up. Okay?
“Do you promote the event with your ads or just build it and they will come?” No, I wouldn't promote … I haven't promoted an event page with ads, at least I can't remember if I ever have. If I had, I think I would have remembered. But we've promoted opt ins, like sent people from ads to an opt in which then puts them on a list, and then we email them with the events, with the links to the events. I'm sure you know, Ivan, because you get our emails telling you to come to Hump Day Hangouts. You know what I mean?
But you probably could run people directly to an event page, but what I like to do is try to send them somewhere we can capture their contact info, whether it's an email or, like I said, remarketing. You can't put, as far as I know, you can't put a remarketing tag on an event page. You can on an opt in page though. Right? Go ahead.
Bradley: Yeah-
Adam: It's really easy setup with Google+ and it's simple, which is why we use it.
Bradley: Yeah. And we've tried other sources of event stuff before, guys, and we've always come back to just using Google+ because it just works well with YouTube and I prefer this platform. I hate the new Google+ just so you know, but I still like Google Events because it's just simple. And again, we've tried several other different webinar platforms, and the chat boxes, and apps. There's just always freaking problems, and this is consistent and makes it easy. You guys can see what I'm looking at while I'm looking at it as opposed to like WebinarJam where you can't really see the chat box or what I'm seeing and all that. I just prefer this setup for webinars. So.
Do You Promote The Event With Ads Or Wait Until People Notice It?
“Do you promote or just build it and they will come?” Yeah, again, you can run some ads, social media posts, and things like that help, especially if you're in groups, you know, Facebook groups, even Google+ groups, whatever around people that are interested in PC or computer questions and stuff like that. Then just get in there and share, you know? Get in there and start.
I mean that's what we did when we initially got started, was a lot of us were just in different groups and just chatting about stuff and then just we'd try to be helpful, and then we would drop a link say, “Hey, we got a free Q&A webinar we do. Come check it out.” And we started building a following that way. We have run ads though, like I said from … I'm sure Hernan's done some stuff from Facebook, but I've done ads from YouTube before to start building where we were targeting other SEO channels, SEO keywords, you know that kind of stuff, and we've done fairly well with those. So.
And by the way, in MasterMIND next month, or in the next module, which is gonna be Video Marketing Module where we're gonna be talking about YouTube ads. We're doing a PPC Module right now, but it's search PPC not video. So we're gonna be doing video PPC next as well as video SEO. It's just Video Marketing Module period, which is gonna cover all that stuff. And one of the projects that I'm gonna be setting up and building throughout that module, the Video Marketing Module, is going to be a subscribe campaign for the Semantic Mastery channel. So we're going to be using YouTube ads to help build our subscriber list to our YouTube channel. So that's gonna be something really interesting to do. So come join the MasterMIND already, Ivan. That's what I was getting at.
At What Point Do You Tell The Client They Really Must Have A New Website Or You Won't Be Able To Help Them?
Almost out of time, guys. We've got just a few more questions. Scott says … What's up, Scott? He says, “At what point do you tell the client they really must have a new website or you won't be able to help them? I've been working with a client who has a site using the Jupiter theme, and it's very difficult to work with this theme. Do you have themes that are on your no-fly list? Thanks so much.”
Yeah, anything outside of WordPress I tell them flat out I'm not working on. I won't do it. If you guys want me to do SEO for you, that's fine. I'll install a WordPress on a sub-domain of your main domain, and I'll use that. I'll do all my SEO work from there. If it's an actual … Yes, if somebody has a WordPress site already, but it's on an old theme or a theme that I'm not comfortable … Or a lot of times, guys, when I get a client, if they already have a WordPress site built that somebody else did, then I'll go in and I'll poke around the dashboard and I'll tell them, “Look, set me up with an account. Create a user account for me. I'll log in, and I'll poke around and tell you if I feel comfortable messing with this theme or not.”
Because I'll tell them flat out, like I'm not a WordPress developer or designer. I use very specific theme developers, and it's just a handful of them. I've used Ink themes for years, which is not the greatest developer, but I've been using them for years, and also I've been using Thrive themes a lot recently, which Thrive's got a lot of really good stuff. So between those two … If it's outside of that, then I'm not saying I won't work on a site that's not one of those two developers, but I will go in and poke around. And if I feel that it's gonna be too difficult or too much of a learning curve I flat out tell them, “I'm not gonna work on this site. If you have a webmaster or somebody that you've had work on your site in the past, or build your site, or whatever, maintain your site, then I will provide consultation, in other words instructions, for what to be updated, what needs to be updated, and they can handle that. But I am not gonna do it.”
And last resort is if they don't have somebody that has been handling their website that I can provide the consultation services to, the instructions to, then I will just go to UpWork, but that's an expense that I pass to the client, and I mark it up because I've gotta go manage the outsourcer. Right? I've gotta go hire somebody, screen and hire somebody, and then manage them, so I'm gonna pass that cost over to the customer with a markup if that makes sense. And I'll tell the customer flat out, “I'm not gonna be the one editing your site because I'm not comfortable with that theme. However, I can get somebody to do it, and it'll just be a separate line item on the invoice.” If that makes sense. Okay?
Good question, Scott.
Walt says, “How the heck do we delete event photos?” That's funny. I know. Gotta love Wayne's memes.
Is It A Good Idea To Use Rocket Video Ranker If You Have Poked And Found Keywords That Are Ranking?
Quit this house, “If you have poked and found keywords that are ranking is it still a good idea to use Rocket Video Ranker or is that redundant?” No, you can cause remember … Well, it depends on what you're doing, but Rocket Video Ranker will upload the videos that are like live videos … I use the Live Rank Sniper for poking, which creates just scheduled live events. They're not actual videos. And so once I've discovered … And I use that tool all the time, you guys. Live Rank Sniper, I freaking love that tool.
Anyways, once I figured out all the keywords then I just go delete all of them from whatever channel I use. And I use one channel now for Live Rank Sniper over, and over, and over again. It's a channel that I bought. It was an aged YouTube channel from 2006. I bought it for $50, and I use that channel now for poking. Every single time. And it's the same channel, and it's crazy. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten terminated because I'll create 25 or 30 live events in a 24 hour period, and then I delete them all and do another 25 or 30 events the next day. But once I figured out the keywords, I delete them all, and I'll use something else to upload the videos to. And I'm actually using one of Peter Drew's other tools, Hangout Millionaire, to do that now.
Rocket Video Ranker will still work. It absolutely will. Bill … It is Bill Cousins, yeah. He actually just recently did an update to that training talking about how you don't wanna have outbound external links in your video descriptions if you're gonna use Rocket Video Ranker and you turn all 30 videos on live at one time. Apparently that may have been what's been triggering some of the channels to basically … They don't no index or they don't get terminated. They just don't index, or they'll index very briefly and then every video on channel gets deindexed but the channel still remains live. You can still view the videos; they're just not indexed.
And apparently from … According to Bill, and I didn't attend the training but I saw his post on Facebook about it, he said that there's an issue with … or maybe it was an email … that there was an issue with having outbound links in the video descriptions when you do that. And so the better route would be to upload the videos with no outbound links in descriptions, and then you can go back through and add the links in gradually. And he's got one of the tools that I think is … I'm not sure if it's part of the suite or not, but it's called Video Link Vortex. Apparently that will allow … It has a setting now that he's coded in there that will go in and drip those links into the existing videos over time so that it doesn't cause the channel to basically deindex if that makes sense.
So yeah, you can use it, guys. Just remember each tool is gonna have a very unique strategy, and you just gotta learn how to use it very well. Anything that you wanna do with Rocket Video Ranker, I would direct you to ask Bill Cousins and Lem Moore, because those two are the ones that are behind that. And they know that tool so much better than I do. Right?
So that was a good question though. We're almost out of … Oh, we are out of time. “Also if you have poked and found the keywords that are ranking, would you use 30 complete unique videos and Rocket Video Ranker with your money site or would that still not be a good idea?” No, I wouldn't do that. With Rocket Video Ranker, the beautiful thing about that is that you don't need a syndication network or anything. You just need a YouTube channel.
So I would not use that with a money channel. I would go buy a YouTube channel or create it yourself, but I just buy them now, and I would just use a channel with no syndication. It can be an orphaned account, meaning there's no connection to anything else on the web, and just upload 30 videos to that, and that's it. Cause if the channel burns you just upload the same 30 videos to another channel, right? You don't wanna do that to your money channel though because you don't wanna upload 30 videos, even if they are … well I guess if they're unique, but that kind of defeats the point of using the tool if they're all unique. Right? Cause that's really not gonna save you time. So I would recommend that you don't do that on the money channel. Use it for spamming, but not for money channels. That's my own personal opinion on how I use it. Alright?
Well, alright, guys. Sorry we ran out of time again. Look at all these questions from Damon. Damon, you're gonna have to ask those questions in the MasterMind, buddy.
By the way, we've got MasterMIND webinar tomorrow.
Adam: Whoo.
Bradley: Alright, guys. Sorry about the time, but great, great questions today. So we appreciate everybody being here. Thanks, Marco and Adam for sticking around.
Marco: Later, man.
Adam: Later, buddy.
Bradley: Don't forget MasterMIND members webinar tomorrow. Don't miss it. It's a good one. See you.
Marco: They're all good.
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