Click on the video above to watch Episode 165 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.
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Announcement
Adam: Episode 165. The first Hump Day Hangouts in the brand new spanking year of 2018. Before we get started, I just want to jump down real quick and say hi to everybody. Chris is muted, but hopefully he's going to speak up here. How are you doing, man?
Chris: Been good. Obviously, I'm speaking up here.
Adam: Awesome. As always, appreciate you joining us. Sometimes I forget that Chris is like super far ahead of us timezone-wise. I think I'd probably be asleep if I was him, so thanks for being here.
Chris: Interesting.
Adam: Hernan, how's it going, man?
Hernan: Hey, guys. Hey, everyone. Yeah. Really, really excited about what's coming. I'm really excited for this new year. There's a lot of the good stuff coming up, so I'm excited to be here. I like your t-shirt by the way.
Adam: Oh, this one? Oh, that's right. It's the Semantic Mastery Mastermind shirt. I'm glad you noticed. Thanks.
Bradley: This old rag? I just threw it on, right?
Adam: I don't know what you're talking about. This is custom, so I've got like three shirts now because we tried a couple different materials. I'm Semantic Mastery decked out.
Bradley: Nice.
Adam: Yeah. Marco, what's up, man?
Marco: What's going on, man? I'm so looking forward to 2018 and everything that we got going. I mean we just got some awesome stuff coming down the pipeline.
Adam: Yes, we do.
Marco: It's going to be a good one.
Adam: It is. I completely agree. Speaking of that, one, Bradley, how's it going, but then two, I also wanted to ask you, we're starting in on the new mastermind training and so if you can share with people just quickly about what kind of January's about because we kind of got I'll say like a theme for each month and that we're doing kind of modulized training. If you want to kind of share with people like what's going on?
Bradley: Yeah, man. First of all, happy to be here. Glad it's 2018. I'm glad the holidays are pretty much over now because although it's a nice time of year, it's incredibly stressful. I'm glad it's over so we can get back to the grind. Do what I enjoy. That said, yeah, mastermind we're starting the new curriculum right away. I've actually started working on it yesterday and I will be … Throughout the rest of the year we've got several different modules and we're trying to kind of like trying to keep our training more organized now and more logical in a way.
That's really what we're going to be developing out and building two businesses throughout the process, a local gym, it's a CrossFit and MMA/boxing gym, as well as the digital marketing agency that we're building. We're going to be building those in the mastermind in this first month or the first module. The modules are somewhat going to follow the months. In other words, one for January, one for February, but there's likely going to be some modules that take more than four weeks. It may end up being that we end up with 10 modules over 12 to 14 months or something like that.
That said, we're starting with the PPC module because that's basically how I start all sort of projects now is using PPC to determine keywords and find out where the traffic is and which offers convert and that kind of stuff. It's logical to start there. We're starting with the PPC module. I'm going to drop a link on the event page, guys, that is the actual mastermind 2018 schedule or course outline I should say. Just one minute while I drop the link. You guys can check it out. I'm going to grab the screen real quick and we'll just very quickly look at the first module and then we'll get into questions. Bear with me for one moment. Okay. This is it. We've got module one, which is the PPC.
We'll wind up doing some retargeting stuff a little bit later down the road, retargeting and remarketing. We're going to touch on that briefly at the beginning or excuse me, during this PPC module, but we're going to have later on down … Later on in the year, we're going to have probably a whole entire module based on remarketing. Okay? I just want to kind of give you guys a heads up that we're going to be doing that for local businesses first. We also have the agency, which is great because those are national terms. Right? We're going to be targeting an industry, a niche, not a specific location. For our agency, we're going to be setting up some PPC campaigns, as well as Facebook Ads and stuff to try to drive the industry type into our agency.
We're going to get both national PPC stuff, as well as local PPC stuff. Then that said, I've also got … Because I'm going to be basically neck deep in AdWords and PPC stuff for the next several weeks, we've got a few different like campaign things that we want to set up for both Semantic Mastery, as well as our affiliate business Mastery PR that I'm going to be doing some AdWords for YouTube, excuse me, YouTube ad stuff for both of those, which could be applied to affiliate work, right, or list building. List building and affiliate offers. Again it's going to be rather intense, in-depth going into PPC as much as we can over the course of the next four to six weeks. Again I'll be doing the AdWords stuff and Hernan will be doing the Facebook stuff.
If you're interested in checking it out guys, now is a really good time to get in. This is the start of this whole process that we're going to be going through for the rest of the year. We've got a lot of work cut out ahead of us, but I think it's going to be really, really good.
Adam: Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, that's just one of the many good things we got going on. I'm pretty pumped about that. If anybody has any questions about the mastermind, feel free to ping us at support@semanticmastery.com, post in the Facebook group. Let us know and we're happy to answer questions about that. Before we get into the questions though, we did have one thing we wanted to mention. Again we've gotten a lot of donations. We're really happy about that and I'll let Marco kind of talk about this because it's still going on for a couple more weeks. If we can, we really like to bump that up.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: Yeah. I mean we have it going on until January 26, which gives us a week to go shopping before school starts. I mean I'll drop the link for people who want to go and donate. A dollar, $2, everything that you donate gets us that much closer to getting another kid a full set of supplies, uniforms and books. It's for the entire year, right, for 2018. A hundred bucks will go a long way towards getting these kids to school and then out of the streets. Right? That's what we try to do. Keep them away from the gangs, from the drug dealers who use them. Right? Just other people who use them. We know that education is the way to go and so we try to provide that.
We try to provide tutoring. We try to provide safe havens so that they can go and have a place to stay so that they can be safe while mom and dad are at work because even in these communities, right, the so-called the most dangerous communities, there's good people there who have to go out and work everyday and run the gauntlet, man. They don't know what's going on with the kids because they have no option, but to leave them at home and hope that they go to school and hope that they survive the day. I mean that's what we're doing. We're trying to get them out the street and into school. Keep them in school because education is the way. That's what we're doing. That's the link. We're at over 3K.
Adam: We got a forced charity Hump Day Hangout. We're not going to do that. A big thank you to everyone who's donated. There's been a lot already and we really do appreciate it. More than that, I mean you can imagine there's going to be a ton of kids getting to go to school having the stuff they need, which is pretty awesome in my mind.
Marco: Before I forget, Semantic Mastery donated $1,000. Anyone matching the $1,000 that Semantic Mastery donated gets two hours consultation from me. If anyone donates $5,000, I'm going to set up one campaign, right, from beginning to end with everything, with IFTTT, with RYS Reloaded, with everything that you need to make it work whether it's client, whether it's your own personal business. If you're willing to do that, I'm willing to do this for you. 10 hours is more than enough for us to go grab a niche and you're going to start making money. Anyone thinking about it, there it is. That's my offer to you.
Adam: That's awesome. All right. Before we get into it, real quick, just want to say if you're new to the Semantic Mastery group and you're just seeing this, first of all, thank you very much for being here. A lot of people ask us, “Where should I get started?” The place to get started is the Battle Plan, the SEO Blueprint. We got a coupon code for you. You can save 75 bucks. We highly suggest just grabbing that and getting started with that. That's going to show you what you need to do and just break it down so you can just follow that. All right? If you haven't yet created an account at SerpSpace, head over there. It's free to create your account. You can check it out. There's some free tools, as well as all of the done-for-you services inside of there.
Some really cool stuff coming there. Don't have time to go into that today. Then support.semanticmastery.com, that's where we put a lot of the frequently asked questions. Maybe it's like Friday and you don't want to wait until Wednesday for Hump Day Hangouts. You can go there, check that out and see if it's already been answered. We have a lot of videos, clip videos and charts and diagrams and things like that. Anything else on your guy's end or should we jump into it?
Bradley: I've got one thing. Go to bradleybenner.com and subscribe if you want mindset like kicking ass everyday. I'm still working on that everyday. I have not been able to record any videos in like three weeks. Yeah, yesterday was Tuesday, right? It's kind of blur, but I just started my coaching at the CrossFit gym every morning. I'm going to be setting up some video equipment over there and I'll probably have time to bust out videos over there a lot more often. Anyways, I'm going to be adding more videos to my YouTube channel, guys, for the mindset stuff, but I haven't had the time due to the holidays. I have been updating the emails every single day, which is awesome.
It's something that I've developed that habit now. I'm like 47 days into it. It's great because it's really helping me to become a better writer and to kind of get my thoughts out there in a more concise way, which is difficult for me sometimes. Again it's just more of a kick in the ass type thing like to motivate, get you thinking about your own goals, your own habits and that kind of stuff on a daily basis. I encourage you to go check it out, bradleybenner.com. I'm not pushing a bunch of affiliate offers. I do link to the resources that I discuss like the books. It's pretty much all Amazon stuff, but it's really just more about try … I've gotten a lot of really, really good replies from people that are subscribed.
Adam: Let's do it.
Do You Have Any Advice For Using Up CrowdSearch Credits?
Bradley: All right. Tom's up first. Tom, I read your question earlier and yeah, you can still use crowd search. I'm not saying don't use it. I'm just saying it's not as effective as it used to be. I think there's some reasons for that. We won't get into that now, but it can still be used and it can still be effective if you use it correctly. Okay? First of all, yeah, you can run traffic directly to your YouTube videos. That's fine. You can run traffic direct to the YouTube URL, so it's not even a search and click in other words, or you can run them through YouTube search or Google search. Right? You can do either one. It's what we call CT spam, click-through spam. That works. That still works fine.
I wouldn't worry about running those kinds of clicks to a YouTube video. All right? Don't worry about that. As far as your money site, I would be lying if I said that I don't still have some campaigns running using it, but they're all navigational campaigns that are going to money sites I mean. In other words, they're set very conservatively with just brand or what we call navigational searches, navigational search queries. Right? What is a navigational search query? That would be brand name plus … Just brand name. Brand name plus phone or brand name plus contact. Brand name plus website. Brand name plus location. Brand name plus service. When I say service, I mean like keywords.
For example, if it's a plumber and let's say it's Roto-Rooter and you need a water heater repair or replacement, let's say water heater repair, a navigation search for that would be like Roto-Rooter water heater repair. Does that make sense? Anything like that. A brand search plus the city name. Anything that includes a brand search is what's called a navigational search query or any search that contains the brand term, brand name is a navigational search query. I'd still have some of those setup. They're just run very conservatively. Just a trickle, a couple 10, 15 maybe searches per month. Then from that I end up using the location IPs. I don't know how accurate any of that is.
It does use a shit ton more credits if you do it that way, but I narrow it down to the city level. Then what I do is just monitor the activity on those to see what sort of search activity has been done. If I don't see any in a couple of weeks, if I haven't seen what I had set it to like let's say I got 15 a month, so you should essentially see one every other day. If in two weeks I don't see five, six, seven searches, then I know that it might be too narrow, my targeting, so I pull that back to just maybe state level as opposed to city level if that makes sense and then allow it to run that way. I still use it for that and it still works okay. It's not great. It's not nearly as effective as it used to be.
One other thing you can still do that does still work well is the referral traffic method. I don't know, Tom, if you caught last week's Hump Day Hangout, but somebody asked a question similar to that and I found the video that I had done with Jason Johnson about how to use crowd search for referral traffic for video SEO. It works whether it's video, SEO or for your own money sites too. I don't have that right off hand, but it was on last week's Hump Day Hangout if you want to go find that in your Google Events. If not, maybe I'll locate it afterwards and grab that link and drop it here on this page. You can watch that too and that will show you how to set up referral traffic campaigns with it, which are really good.
Okay? I mean if you've got it, just use it. You know what I mean? There's no reason not to use it. Just be careful about it. I do not like doing keyword search click like CT spam, right, click-through spam, from Google search to my money sites with it anymore. Okay? Referral traffic's fine. Navigational search queries are fine, but not keywords. I wouldn't recommend doing keyword search queries unless you're incredibly conservative. All right? Then referral traffic works well in YouTube also.
Do You Recommend Posting Published Press Releases On Lead Generation Sites?
Jenny is up. He's been following the mastermind or excuse me, the Mindset Mastery Series. What's up, Jenny? I appreciate your comments, buddy. He says, “Happy new year. Wishing health, wisdom and prosperity to you all.”
I'll plus one that. Back at you. Question, do you recommend publishing or posting published press releases on lead generation sites? I've been using PRs for a while and it does help with the snack pack rankings. Yes, it does. I was wondering if it would be wise to post a copy of PR on money site under like in the press category or have it run through IFTTT? Good, bad or ugly ranks? I mean, thanks. Jenny, yeah, you can do that.
Just whenever a press release is distributed, it always from whatever the service is, the distribution services that's being used, it's published in one location first and then it's picked up by the press cables or the press wires or whatever and republished, right, syndicated and republished by all the sites in that distribution network, but it's originally published in one location. If you can identify and a lot of times all you got to do is just publish the press release and then go … Once you get the report back from whatever service it is that you're using, just go open up one of the press releases and click on one of the links and it'll take you to one of the published press releases.
Usually at the bottom it will have an attribution as to where the original source was, the original publication source. Right? Just click that and it'll take you to the original source and from there just copy that URL and give attribution to that URL. You can republish the press release on your own site and your own syndication networks. Right? You can resyndicate it out to your own networks. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Just make sure that you treat it just as if you would any other sort of syndicated posts, which is that you give credit back to its original source. Identify the source. Like I mentioned, you can do that by just clicking on anyone of the distribution points.
Most of them will have an attribute. They should. They should all have it really, a link back to the original publication, and from there you just copy that URL and just give attribution back to that. Cite the source. Republish it on your own blog. That's fine. Just put a link at the bottom that says, “Originally published here,” and then link to it.
Marco: You know what? I'm in a good mood. Someone just donated a hundred bucks to the charity. I'm going to give something away. Look, most of these press release centers have a media room, whatever they call it, where they list your press releases. They'll also allow you to iframe whether it's your website, maps or whatever videos or other things in that media room, in that media center. Take that page and iframe it on your website. It's not that difficult. If you don't know how to iframe, just go to the W3Schools and it shows you how to iframe, how to make it fit your page or whatever. Then you can, I'm not going to say spam, you can build links, let's make it as quality as possible, to your media center on the press release center.
That's going to hit the iframe that's on your webpage anyway. What's going to happen is you're going to get that mirror on mirror effect that's powering up your press releases. Anyway, it'll power up your media room and it'll power up the page where you do the iframe and then that'll spread throughout. If you have that linked correct and we showed jump links in RYS Reloaded, I'm not going to share that here, but if you have your jump links done right and iframe also correctly, I mean you're going to destroy just about anything that you're doing … Your competition locally. I mean it works really, really well.
Marco: You have like a triple iframe. It gets crazy, but iframes is where it's at. It's where it's at because it's not counted as a link, but it's a link. Do follow and all kinds of good things happen through iframes.
Does Changing The Address From The UPS Store To A PO Box In Minneapolis Affect Current Local Rankings?
Bradley: All kinds of debauchery. It's awesome. I can't believe you gave that away. You're usually telling me to zip it. Awesome. Thanks, Marco. Ralph is up. Ralph says, “Hump Day questions.” Okay. Back to the PO Box question, “I recently took over SEO on a client's website. They're ranking well for certain keywords using a Minneapolis address. However, the address used is a UPS store. I didn't realize this until I looked at the photos. I thought it was a PO Box from the US Postal Service, but it is not. What should I do? Move it over to USPS PO Box? If I change the address from the UPS store to a PO Box in Minneapolis, will that affect our rankings? Will I be able to move the reviews along with the address?”
Yes. Okay. The first question is what should I do? Move it? I wouldn't. I wouldn't move it if it's ranking. Here's the thing, if it's already ranking, there's really no reason to move it. I don't suggest creating new UPS or a new Google My Business listings using UPS mailboxes because Google has cracked down on that quite a bit. If you have flown under the radar this long, leave it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. You know what I mean? I wouldn't go in and mess with it as long as it's ranking. That doesn't mean that tomorrow or six months from now or two years from now Google isn't going to come in and say, “It's a spam account,” and deactivate it or delete that listing, terminate the listing, but why not just cross that bridge when you come to it?
I mean that's what I'm saying. If it's not ranking yet, then yeah, change it. Why not? You don't have anything to lose. Right? If it's already ranking and it's producing results for the client, then I wouldn't mess with it. Just leave it alone. However, if you were to change the address from a UPS store to a PO Box, would the reviews move along with the address? Yes. The only time the reviews do not move is when you delete or terminate or say when you close a listing and then create a new listing. That's the only time that you're going to lose the reviews. It used to be when there were Google Plus pages and all that kind of stuff there was some trickiness there where you could lose them, but now it's all done in maps.
If all you're doing is changing the address or anyone of the data points, anyone of the company details, it doesn't change the listing. In other words, it's still the same company. It's still the same entity. It's just some of the details have changed, so your reviews will stay in place. Okay? Some of this maybe rookie questions, but hey, I'm thankful. No, that doesn't matter, Ralph. That's what we're here. I know there was some time in the past where rookie questions may have been looked down upon by me at some point, but that's no longer the case, guys. I welcome any question. We do. That's what we're here for. That's what Hump Day Hangouts is all about. Thanks for participating, Ralph, and hopefully that helps.
I wouldn't mess with it. Leave it alone as long as it's producing results. If it's not ranking, then sure, change it now because it could be a problem in the future. It may always stay under the radar. I just know I've had UPS mailboxes that have had issues because of that. Okay?
Mohammad's up. What's up, Mohammad? He just joined our mastermind recently. It's awesome. He's been really active. Thank you for that. He says, “Hey, guys. What's a good sign that your client acquisition pipeline needs work? Maybe it's because of the holidays, but lately, I've been getting just a couple of leads every week or two. Now obviously more is better, but what does a healthy pipeline look like to you guys in terms of activity?”
Okay. That's a great question. Mohammad, we have been heavy prospecting for the last, I don't know, two months or so. Yes, I think we have been unsuccessful for the most part in closing the leads that we've been able to generate because I believe a big part of it has to do with the holidays. Look, we as a group, Semantic Mastery, know for sure beyond a shadow of a doubt because we've been doing this stuff now for several years in the internet marketing space is that our product sales and everything tanked between November and basically middle to end of January. Pretty much from November to February like sales just tanked. It's because of the holidays. It makes sense. Well, I'm finding that to also be the case for like most …
Hernan: No. I was about to say that I was experiencing the exact same thing that you guys were. We discussed this a little bit on the meeting. It's completely normal. Like November and December are by far that worse months for new client acquisition. They're great for upsells or cross-sells or if you have a client and they're investing because they're with a credit card in hand and what not. That's great if you already have a database built, but starting from scratch on November and December for new client acquisition is pretty tough mostly because everyone else, like everyone is seeing what kind of deal they can get. Right? Everyone is shopping pretty much, number one. Number two, everyone is thinking about something else.
You need to have that in mind, Mohammad. Most of our businesses are none seasonal, unless you're treating with some specific type of contractors. I know that Bradley does a lot of tree services and those are really seasonal, but nonetheless, you need to have that in mind. These months are usually best for upsells and cross-sells. Sell them some more stuff.
Marco: The only client I ever closed and we're talking about nearly 15 years, the only client I ever closed at Christmas was a client who did something that was seasonal. Of course, for the Thanksgiving and Christmas season and that was it. Well, there was another one, but that was here in Costa Rica, but that's because that's the tourist high season in Costa Rica. It's very seasonal. I mean you guys are absolutely right. That I can think of in 15 years, two clients, one was for tourism and the other one was what they were selling was for … Not Thanksgiving, but Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's okay, Mohammad. I'd be worried if it doesn't start picking up this month, like towards the end of the month.
Then that's when you should start looking and saying, “Okay. What's going on? What do I need to fix?”
What's A Good Sign That Your Client Acquisition/Pipeline Needs Work?
Bradley: He says, “I've been getting just a couple of leads every week or two. Now obviously more is better, but what does a healthy pipeline look like to you guys in terms of activity?” That's also a good question. It depends really on what type of volume you're looking to do. Also, what type of prospecting you're doing. In other words, there was the laser approach or the rifle approach, right, which is very, very targeted. We covered that just recently in the mastermind when we did the video email prospecting webinar where I went through that step-by-step. That's very super effective for generating leads, but it can be very time-consuming.
Okay? A full on course about it. All right? If you outsource this, you know what will get done. If you leave it to yourself to do it, I know and I'm speaking from experience from me, guys. I can talk about what I did and it's pretty common. It's pretty typical because I've heard this. What do we do especially as solopreneurs, which I'm pretty sure Mohammad is, which is what I was for a very long time, is if we provide client services or we're looking for lead gen service providers to buy leads from us, then what do we typically do? We typically go out, set up prospecting campaign. We start to generate leads. We start talking to a few people. Then we land a client or two or three and then we turn the prospecting machine off.
We go do the work that they hired us for. Right? We go rank properties and work on their stuff and blah, blah, blah because we're good. We got those leads. Right? We closed the sale. We're good. We don't need anymore leads right now, but then what happens when that work is done? Then you got to start all over again. Right? You got to start that machine back up. You got to go through the process. What you should be doing is and I've said this many times before, but this is where I failed and that's why I say I speak from experience because I didn't … That's exactly what I did. I used to do it in waves, in cycles. It was always up and down, up and down.
What I should've done in retrospect was kept my pipeline full of leads at all times because that does a number of things. Number one, it helps you to be more selective in who you get to work with. Right? If you got 10, 20 new leads coming in every single week, then you can select out of that. You can cherry pick the best leads to work with. That way if you start to catch any resistance from anybody or you feel like that the communication isn't great between a potential prospect and yourself, then you don't have to work with them. When you only turn on a prospecting machine long enough to collect a few leads, then you try to close everyone of them sales. Am I right? How many of you guys can relate to that?
If you've only got five leads in your pipeline, you try to close every damn one of them regardless of whether the project is really ideal or not, right, because you don't have any other leads to work on. If you had 20 leads instead of five, you could hand select the ones that you want to work with and the ones that feel like they're uncomfortable or you got a gut feeling are going to be difficult or whatever, you pass on them. Right? You put them in the delete pile so that you don't even have to worry about them. That way you can be more selective. You get to work on projects that you prefer to work on and it's something that again you need to keep that going all the time, Mohammad.
That's what I totally recommend and that's why I recommend outsourcing the vast majority of that because then you know it gets done week in and week out without you having to do it. You can focus on doing the other stuff. Right? Just to finish up, if you're using the video email prospecting method, which is a very targeted approach, the rifle approach, you may only be able to get 10 or 20 emails sent out per week. If you systematize it, you turn it into a process, you hire an outsourcer, you could easily do 10 to 20 videos per week, outbound emails per week. Out of that you should expect about six to eight leads, right, as long as your numbers are similar to the numbers that I've been able to repeat over and over again over the years.
Right now we're averaging about seven or eight inbound leads per day based on about a 75 or 80 outbound emails per day. It's roughly a 10% response rate from mass prospecting, but our quality of leads isn't as good as if we were to do video email where we'd get a 30% to 40% response rate and they would be much higher quality when we … Those responses are much higher quality because it was more like a personalized message if that makes sense. Again it's going to all depend, Mohammad, on what are good numbers. It depends on your prospecting method. It depends on how you're trying to scale your business and that kind of thing.
Either way, whether you're doing shotgun method or the rifle method, I recommend that you set up a process and just turn that shit on and don't ever turn it off. Just let it run. Keep your pipeline full of as many leads as possible, so that you always know that you have a bucket to go to to pull work from whenever you need it. Okay? You guys have any comments on that before I move on?
Adam: No, that's good.
Hernan: Yeah. I just wanted to add. Adam, are we still sending out books to our mastermind members? Like The 10X Rule for example?
Adam: Oh yeah.
Hernan: Okay. That's a great book, Mohammad. Like that's a great book to read if you want to increase the amount of leads that you're getting. It's a way of seeing things. Right? Grant Cardone, he will tell you that you need 10 times the amount of leads that you think you need in order to close one of them. Right? I think that's another thing that I would do for mastermind members is that we send them amazing books every month. The 10X Rule is definitely one of my favorite books on this regard.
How Do You Index Lead Gadget Sites?
Bradley: I agree. Adrian. “Hey, guys. Happy new year to you all. I was wondering if you could answer a question about Lead Gadget. I'm interested in your method of helping get my LG sites indexed. I saw somewhere that you had the sites to Google to index, but only two sites per Google account. Do you use browser?” Well, first if all, Adrian, just as a clarification, I haven't used Lead Gadget in probably over a year. Not because it doesn't work. It doesn't fit my business model. I attempted to force that into my business model, but it's a churn and burn strategy guys and it's not my preferred strategy. I'm not saying anything bad about Lead Gadget and the ATM, the application that they built to build these mass page sites.
I build them once. Once they start generating revenue, they continue to generate revenue. Just to give you some update, Adrian, like I said, I haven't done any stuff, anything with Lead Gadget in well over a year. I don't know that any of those methods are even still valid today because I'm not in there messing with that application anymore. Okay?
Adam: Where would be a good place for him to go?
Bradley: I would go to the Lead Gadget group in Facebook or contact Don and/or Brian. Right? The developers. Find out. I'm sure they've got training somewhere on what's working right now. Again what I did was, well, what? A year and a half, two years ago now, and so I wouldn't recommend … I mean that may still be valid, but I would get confirmation on that from people that are still doing this everyday. Right? All right. I appreciate the question, Adrian. Sorry I can't give you a better answer, buddy. It's just not something I'm doing. If I gave you an answer right now, it would likely not be accurate. I don't want to do that.
What's The Deal With PBNs For 2018?
Amy. “Hey, Semantic Mastery gang. Happy new year. My question is what's the deal with PBNs for 2018? I see a lot of conflicting information about setting them up and how to use them. I am so confused and I really don't know what to do.” I'm going to let Marco take that one because I know he's got a strong opinion on it.
Marco: I wanted to rant when I saw this because people who are still using the term PBN are doing the industry a disservice. There's no such thing as a PBN anymore. Name me the last private blog network that you got into and you got some links and it actually did something for your rankings. I mean truly private. Because the moment that they advertise, it's no longer private. I mean that's an oxymoron. Private blog network, but you advertise. Right? You go out and you do it in Google and Google's looking for you. What's going on now is that PBNs or whatever it is that you want to call them, I don't know what we're going to call them, what it's become it's a link network. You could do your own link network, but it takes a lot of time and effort.
You can't just go the way that you used to get an expired domain and just bring it back, put a link in there and link to your website and that's it. It was fine. Now we're talking about relevance. Is there activity relevance, right, and trust and authority? That all comes into play. Why? Because Google figured out that instead of going after the private blog networks, all they had to do was go after the type of links that these private blog networks provided, which were garbage to start with. They came up with the distance graph. What the distance graph did is it devalued most of the links, unless your links came from what's called a seat site or a seat set.
We could call it satellites because we do use a Peter Drew's List Site Builder to push relevance to something that maybe a little bit difficult to push up. Right? Maybe we have a keyword. We'll build a page for it. We'll push actual relevance. It might just take an extra folder inside the main drive folder for that keyword, an extra page, an extra push page. I mean so many things work. Press releases have quality links that you could use. There's so many places where you can grab quality links. Our own Syndication Academy over time builds up the quality, the relevance, the trust, the authority and activity, all of the things that you need to make this work. I get upset when I see people still using the term PBN.
Even in one of the bigger Facebook groups that still push PBNs, the person who started the group came out and said that PBN were no longer working the way that they used to. You have to do them differently, but he's still calling them PBNs and I don't understand why because they're not PBNs. I mean that's my take on it. If you guys have another take on it or if you can expound on what I said, you're more than welcome, but to me the upsetting thing is that in 2018 we're still calling them PBNs and that's a disservice to the community.
Bradley: Yeah. They can still be effective. Part of the reason I stopped using them was because the requirements to hide your footprint, it became more and more difficult like really to do it correctly. Finding hosting that was decent, that was affordable, hiding all the footprint issues like name servers and SOA records and who is data and then you have to have unique IPs and different themes and different types of site installs. All the shit that goes into it is just it continued to get more and more difficult, more and more stuff was added in order for them to be set up correctly to where they were safe and would last, would have some longevity and still be effective. Right?
Another one of the things about PBNs, those types of sites, is that they need to be built out to look like real sites. Right? What I ended up finding was that I ended up having to built out PBNs as if they were mini money sites, like other money sites, because that's the only way to make them look valid and genuine and real to where they'll pass manual review. What makes PBN so much more effective is if you can get them to rank and to actually generate real traffic. Right? That in itself will super charge a PBN, but in order to do that, you have to treat the site like a money site. To me it just was so much work to try to build little mini money sites so to speak to build links to the money site that I ultimately want to target.
It's just a lot of work. That's part of the reason why I stopped doing it. However, there might be some solutions out there that are still valid that work. Maybe your friends at Semantic Mastery are working on developing something to do that.
Bradley: One last thing I want to mention about that before we move on, we still got about 10 minutes, is interestingly some of the people I talk to that still use PBNs quite a bit actually, the process or the method that I was just talking about is what they do is that they treat them almost as if they're mini money sites. They work on making sure that the design is nice, that content is quality, that it ranks, that there are offers and things that can be monetized on the actual PBN sites, so that the site itself ends up generating revenue. It's not just a site that was built for the sole intent of ranking another site. It's a site that actually generates traffic and actually generates revenue.
They'll put ad sets on it or they'll put affiliate offers or they'll put banner ads, so that they can get paid for clicks. That kind of stuff. There's all different kinds of things that you can do to monetize affiliate site, or excuse me, PBN style sites. Okay? That's one of the things that the people that are still using them that's what they're doing, right? At least the people that I've talked to. They're creating like these little mini money sites that they're monetizing, they're ranking, they're getting traffic to them and all of those are signals that help to elevate or increase the power of that site. It makes it more valid, right, more powerful.
Anything that it links to becomes … It's a much stronger link because … What Marco says, A-R-T. It has all of those characteristics of a real site. Go ahead, Marco.
Marco: What they work on is activity, relevance, trust and authority, which changes the link from a garbage link to a link that's considered part of a seat site or a seat set and again go read the blog post. I know it's from 2015. It's over two years old, but it's relevant today because it's explaining what's happened. I explained it back in 2015. Two years ago, guys, this was done. You were warned that it was happening. I know a lot of you guys are new and you're not up on it. If you're not, I'll go find it for you and post the link so that you can go read it. It's a good read.
Bradley: Awesome. Adrian, one more question about Lead Gadget. He says, “You said you would be doing a course on teaching VAs to build with Lead Gadget. How is that going?” Well, I mean that was done. I created training for virtual assistants. I trained two VAs that that's all they were doing full time was building sites, but I never released that. It was proprietary training. In other words, it was specific to the projects that we were working on. I did not make a more generic version of it. I am no longer associated with those guys. I'm not part of that business anymore. Obviously, I'm not going to create training for it now, Adrian. Okay?
What Are Your Advice For Newbies Who Want To Purchase The SEO BattlePlan And Done For You Services In Serp Space?
At the time, I was associated with them and I did develop it, but it was never turned into an actual training that you could use because it wasn't white labeled so to speak or whitewashed if that make sense. It was still all the projects I was working on. Okay. John, thank you for that, buddy. I appreciate that. John is also a mastermind member. He just posted the video for the crowd search for referral traffic from last week. I appreciate that, John. Nigel says, “Happy new year, gents.” Plus one.
“I'm starting out with a new client yoga studio and want to follow the Battle Plan using done-for-you services. However, a lot of this is new to me and I want to be sure of what I'm ordering. That said, is there additional guidance that comes with or advice for a newbie when purchasing SerpSpace done-for-you services? Any recommendations beyond Battle Plan for new yoga practice whose end goal was eventually Amazon and sponsorship? I am trying to establish a more done-for-you fulfillment from the start if that matters. Any feedback is appreciated.” Well, Nigel, right here is a great spot for you to ask any questions at all about SerpSpace stuff or processes or anything. That's what Hump Day Hangouts is for. Right?
This is free. It doesn't cost you anything. You're welcome to come here and post questions. We certainly ask that you don't post six questions in a row. You know what I mean? Because that wouldn't be fair to other people, but come in and post a question or two. If you can attend live, then you can just wait until a couple other questions have been posted and then post another question or two. That's fine. We're happy to answer them here. You can also ask some questions obviously in the SerpSpace support.
I don't think we have a Facebook group for it yet. I know we've been talking about it, but you could also ask questions probably in our Facebook group too and we can tag the appropriate people to get you the right response. You guys have any other suggestions? Adam maybe?
Adam: Yeah. One sec. I was just trying to look. If I can find it, I think the group might be going up, or it'll be up soon. I thought I saw something, but I don't want to give it out in case they're still working on it. We'll just say I think what you said is a good start. Just keep asking questions, Nigel.
Bradley: That's right. Yup. Again definitely feel free to come here, Nigel, and ask questions. That's fine. You can use the support over there also if you have questions specific about an ordering process or something like that. That's what it's for. We're happy to answer any questions. Okay? It looks like we're done with questions. We can wrap it up a couple minutes early. That's fine. I know we've got another meeting coming up anyways. Any parting words?
Adam: Let's see. We got a few minutes, so I'm going to take the mic for a second just say to everybody again thank you for donating to the charity. If you have a chance to go back, if you haven't yet. Literally like Marco said a dollar helps. Anything's appreciated. You're going to end up helping kids, which is what we've done now two years in a row is finding charities and ways we can try to help kids. There's always someone worse off who can use help. I know I've had help in my life and I'm super appreciative of it. Hearing what Marco's saying about these kids, I'm sure that this could make some pretty significant changes in their lives.
Would It Still Be Advisable To Follow The BattlePlan Section That Deals With PBNs?
Bradley: Yeah. Absolutely. It looks like we got another one from Mohammad. He says, “Hey, guys. Given what you all just said about PBNs, would it still be advisable to follow the Battle Plan section that deals with it?” Hernan?
Hernan: I would say so. The reality is that when we talk about PBNs in the Battle Plan, if you see how we treat them, we talk about them in a context. Right? We're not saying, “Yeah. Go ahead. Buy a shitty domain. Put one link on it. Blah, blah, blah.” We are really actually saying what we are actually saying here, which is the work involved on a PBN is much more than what it was three years ago when you could just slap up a shitty website and just put a link and bam, you got ranked. That's not how it's working right now. It's another way and I think it's like the seventh or eighth step after you go into the Battle Plan. We always recommend first doing everything else that you know how to do, Mohammad, which is the drive stacks, the syndication networks.
Boost those syndication networks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera first and then you can go into some sort of PBNs should those be needed. Right? Because if you comply those steps, those usually are not needed. We're really clear on the Battle Plan that these are steps that you can follow, but at some point if you don't need to push any more links to it, just don't do it. Right? Don't do a PBN because it says over there “do PBN” or whatever. Those are mostly suggestions. Right? The way we do things if we need a keyword pushed up or whatever. You need to have that in mind and you need to have the context that surrounds all of the website.
I think the on site SEO part of the website is really like super, super critical that you go through that first and then you move forward down the line. You move down the line on the different tips and tricks that we get. Have that in mind, Mohammad.
Marco: My take on this is until our service comes online, which shouldn't be that far, I'm looking probably four, five, six months down the line when we bring that on where it's going to be perfect for solving the PBN problem, I'd say just save yourself a whole bunch of time, problems and headaches and go order a drive stack. You're going to get better results that you can get from probably any for lack of a better word PBN that you could buy and set up, unless you get that in one in a million where it's super powerful and it has those links that you're looking for and you can build it up.
Bradley: Yeah. All right. We got to wrap it up. We got one more question that came through from Ralph Pendergraph. He says, “Bradley, are you worried that Google may come down on USPS PO Boxes?” I mean yeah, I am. Of course, that's always a concern. It still works. I've been worried about that for three or four years since I started doing it. It still works today. What I recommend is if you're going to be using PO Boxes with the street address option, it absolutely still works. What I have seen is if you try to register several Google My Business listings under the same account that are all using PO Boxes, sometimes after the second or the third PO Box that you try to register as a Google My Business listing, it will flag the account.
I've had that happen. The workaround is just create a new Google account, a new Google profile for every single new GMB listing that you're going to create using a PO Box as the physical address. That's what I found works and I haven't had any trouble since. Occasionally I will still get one that gets terminated or rejected right off the bat. It's rare, but it happens. I'll even get another PO Box in the same freaking post office and create a new Google account using the new address and it's worked. I don't know if it's a fluke or what, but it has happened. Like I said, it's something that I'm going to continue to use as long as it's still working. At some point they may crack down on it.
Technically it's against terms of service, but as long as it's still working, I'm going to use it. Building a backlink to your site is against terms of service. You know what I mean? All right, guys. We appreciate you all being here. We'll see you all next week. Thanks.
Chris: Adios.
Bradley: All right.
Hernan: Sounds good.
Bradley: All right. Bye, guys.
Marco: Bye, everyone.
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