Showing posts with label Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 160. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 160. Show all posts

Monday, December 11, 2017

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 160

Click on the video above to watch Episode 161 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.  

 

 

Announcement

Adam: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is episode 161. Today is the sixth of December. First one in December, we're rolling towards the end of the year but not quite there. Speaking of closer to the end of the year, we're going to have a pretty awesome Hump Day Hangout coming up later in December but stay tuned for that, we'll tell you more about that coming. Real quick, we want to go down and say hi to everybody and see how everyone is doing. Chris, how are you doing today?

Chris: Looking good. It's glad to be here.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan, how about yourself?

Hernan: Good. It's actually quite warm right now in Buenos Aires. Yeah, I'm excited for what's coming. We have a lot of stuff coming. Oh, what? Are you cold?

Adam: No, I don't know. I'm perfectly warm.

Hernan: Okay, right, okay.

Adam: Hey, Marco. How's it going?

Marco: Well, the doctor took a look at my MRI today and said, “Holy shit.” Those are not words that you want to hear when the fucking doctor takes a look at your MRI of your fucking back, dude so that's what I'm doing.

Adam: All right, fair enough. Bradley, how about you, man?

Bradley: I went to a doctor once with an ear infection and it hurt like a son of a bitch. The doctor put the thing in the ear to look at it and he goes, “Whoa.” I was like, “Doc, you're not supposed to do that.” “I've never seen an eardrum look like that.”

Adam: Well, make it not look like that.

Bradley: No wonder it hurts, right? Anyway, this is great, guys. Today has been a really good day, really productive day. I got a shit ton of stuff done. I'm just excited to be here and answer some questions, and hang out.

This Stuff Works
Adam: Cool. Well, before we get into it, I got a couple of quick announcements. I'm going to post some stuff on the page. If you've never have come to Hump Day Hangouts, first of all, thank you very much for being here. It's awesome and we love having more people join us. We got some good stuff for you, some resources I'm going to post on the page for you. If you were around over the Thanksgiving time period and for Black Friday then you saw the e-mails and you saw the page we got, you know that Syndication Academy is increasing a price. It's going to be like a 50% jump. It's something we've been putting off for a long time and this is last announcement that it's happening, and the price is going up to $97 a month here shortly in seven days. We want to give everyone fair notice a nice reminder here before that happens, and you can get that for free if you join the Mastermind, all right? We want to remind people about that, that's one of the many, many perks of being a Mastermind member.

Something else we wanted to talk about, obviously there's been ongoing updates with RYSP loaded. There's been a ton of new contents, stuff going on there. I'll let Marco talk about this.

Marco: Yeah, we have in fact a new webinar coming up on Monday. We're calling it Multi-Location Domination with Automation.

Bradley: Wow.

Marco: Yes, sir. We're going there. We got in fact two scripts that we're rolling out to make things easier just to allow people to make it as simple as possible to go and take over not only their local niche, right? The local area but surrounding areas and just take shit down city by city, that's how we do it, that's what we're teaching. We're also going to show how it's done globally by the way because we're in the lab taking a look at that, and as a matter of fact, when we roll out the Multi-Location Domination webinar, we're going to raise the price on RYS reload. The price is going up. I don't know how much. You know I always push as much as possible as much as you guys will allow but price is going up. I suggest if you're on the fence, it's time to get in. Get in where you fit in or get left behind. We're going to teach people how to take over, it's really that simple.

Adam: Nice. Yeah, it'll be going up. We'll have some more information coming out about that you guys if you're watching. If you're curious, I'll also post the links obviously. If you've been thinking, “Oh, I've heard about RYS and it's neat and maybe I should do that.” One, you should, it's awesome. If not that then you should be checking out the [inaudible 00:04:05] services if you're more of the outsourcing type, but if you've been thinking about getting in, now would be obviously a great time. Before we start answering questions, I think Bradley, you had something you wanted to share with people, right?

Bradley: A couple of things, number one, go to bradleybanner.com. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and also my daily Mindset updates. I just posted another video just a few minutes ago like literally 15 minutes ago that I recorded today kind of impromptu. I wasn't planning on it but I had something that I wanted to share so I recorded a 20-minute video. I just posted it on Facebook as well as my YouTube channel. Going through those e-mails every single day, consistently every single day now, it takes me anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes to write an e-mail everyday but I'm developing a habit and it's been … I can see … It's like today I wrote e-mail number 20 and I can see the results already like it's already improving my ability to write and convey thoughts better. In other words like it's a habit worth developing. I've put it off for years and finally I'm developing the habit with intention and it's working well like for example I had a bunch of VSLs video sales letter stuff that I had to record today and I had some scripts to write for some re-marketing videos and stuff.

Typically a VSL script would take me or a re-market whatever, a video script would take me hours to write but I was able to bang out three of them in about an hour's time today. I attribute that to a habit of writing that I've started to develop. I encourage you guys to do something similar even if it's journaling whatever. I'm just using the e-mail list as my vehicle. I would encourage you to go check it out because I basically talk about some pretty cool stuff as far as goal setting and mindset and that kind of thing. Anyway, that's it. I do want to tease one thing rather quickly because we're going to talk about this at the beginning part of next week's Hump Day Hangouts briefly maybe 10 minutes or so. I'm going to cover this a little bit more in depth but today I just want to tease you guys with it. Oh, also check this out. I got my Mastermind shirt on. Thank you, Adam for sending it.

Adam: That's pretty cool. Nice.

Bradley: Yeah, I meant to drop this down a little bit. There you go, how is that?

Adam: Nice.

Bradley: One of the thing, I just wanted to tease very quickly is guys the prospecting funnel stuff that I've been working on developing for a few months, I had to put it on hold for a bit while I worked on some other stuff. The last two weeks I've really been working on it hard again and it improved the process quite a bit, and the results are fucking astounding like I don't know how else to say it other than that. I'm just going to give you guys a very quick sneak peek of this and then we're going to talk about a little bit more next week. I'm not going to go into details, guys. This is more conceptual because this is going to be shared. This is being shared in the Mastermind. We are starting a new Mastermind educational track in January 2018 where we're going to be basically building two businesses throughout the year from soup to nuts, start to finish.

One is a physical business like a brick and mortar type business, it's a gym and then the other one obviously the emphasis is on the digital marketing but it's going to be more than just digital marketing, right? It's going to be traditional marketing as well as like setting up businesses, setting up a business, entity structuring, all that kind of stuff because I think that's important. As marketing consultants, we should know about this stuff anyway, right? Number two, the second business. I was going to do two local businesses but I made an executive decision last week to make our local agency that we're building right now as the second project that we're going to highlight and cover as part of the Mastermind training next year. All of these is going to be revealed in very fine detail starting in January.

In fact I've already started sharing a lot of this agency building stuff which is an automated scalable agency. The way that i should've built mine originally but you can't know which you don't know, right? I've already started sharing a lot of that in the Mastermind but I'm just teasing you guys with this to encourage you to come join the Mastermind especially if you're doing local because the results are undisputable, indisputable as far as like how well this is working on the prospecting side of things. Still working on the sale side, the fulfillment side, all of that is coming but the prospecting side is working. Enough teasing, let me just show you very quickly, I'm going to grab the screen. Guys, I'm not going to put this up for long but I want to show you something.

This Stuff Works
This is an image of the prospecting funnel. I told you I'm not going to put it up for long. I'm about to switch screens, take a screenshot fast, fast, fast. All right, moving on, that's the prospecting funnel and take a look at this for example. This is the … I'm using drip.com as our auto responder for all contractors that are being put into this funnel, this prospecting funnel. These are only people that have taken action and you can see that like … I know it's probably small on you, let me zoom in just a little bit, guys. [inaudible 00:09:08] look at just yesterday at it at 12-5 so December 5, we scroll down. We had 10 new contacts out of just yesterday alone. Those are inbound needs, guys. You guys see that? If we take a look at … Let me pull over here for just a moment.

This is our pipe drive account. This is what we're using for our sales pipe line, it's called pipe drive, it's awesome. You can see that when I share a little bit of information about this a few weeks ago. I had run 125 e-mails through the system, 25 e-mails a day for five days and we had 13 inbound leads from that which is a 10% response rate. Since that time I've increased the outbound e-mails to 75 per day, it's been about six days. We've had about another 150 e-mails go out and look we're up to 48 leads now. We had 12 so we've added 36 more leads out of 150 e-mails, guys, that's almost a 20% response rate. It's absolutely incredible what we're getting through here.

Again I just wanted to point that out because I'm really hoping that many of you guys that are thinking about joining the Mastermind or if you're doing any sort local, I would highly encourage to come join us starting in January, well now is a good time too by the way but because I'm going to be literally dissecting exactly how that's built step by step throughout the year so that by the end of the year, you could build your own automated agency if you so choose, or you can wait until we can build it for you and you can pay us and we'll build it for you. Now that's coming too but that probably won't be for at least another year. Anyways, with that said, I'm going to move on. If you guys have any questions about that specifically, come join the Mastermind, I'll be happy to answer them, all right? You guys got any comments on that before I move on?

Adam: I do. I'm [inaudible 00:10:57]. I think this is awesome.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Such a cool process because it pulls in just a ton of stuff I won't go into but just yeah, I love it. I'm excited for this.

Bradley: Yeah, me too, man.

Marco: For anyone who's new and watching this, those are people who got e-mails and contacted us back.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: It's no longer just a cold e-mail going out. Hopefully you'll be able to find some of these people contacting us and saying, “We're interested. Tell me more,” which is I mean that's just awesome so now you have a pool of people to contact.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Anyone that's new, that's what's going on. We go really in depth as you said in the Mastermind. The Mastermind is the place to be in 2018. If you're not there, you should be.

What Are The Points You Need To Convey To The Client When It Comes To Service Costing?

Bradley: Totally agree, I couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you, Marco. All right, enough of that. Let's get into some questions. We've got several. I'm excited. Let's get into it. Mel, she's up. She says, “I'm sending video e-mails and it's getting some traction but when asked for price, I'm having some trouble. What kind of points do you try to convey when they ask how much does it cost.” I swear this question was asked last week. I swear this was … Anyways, how much does it cost? Now if that's the first question out of a prospect's mouth, they're probably not going to be a good client. I've experienced that many, many times. Those are price-conscious people. I understand we all are price-conscious to a degree but the problem with people that come right out of the gate with how much does it cost is it's because they have already made assumptions and all they're looking at … They look at marketing as an expense, not an investment. It's very hard to satisfy any client that thinks of marketing as an expense instead of an investment.

Marketing should create an ROI. If it creates a return on investment then it's an investment, it's an ROI. Investment is right in that title, you know what I mean? When they come right out of the gate with thinking of it as an expense and asking how much does it cost then even if you were to land them as a client, you're probably going to have difficulty with them. They're never going to be satisfied. There always going to be questioning, what's going on because they're penny pinching, right, and because they're … Again I just want to explain it, that's a red flag. For me over the years after doing this so many years, that's a red flag for me. I would recommend that when it comes down to that, I try to avoid pricing stuff upfront until after I've had the chance to talk with them and analyze like a particular property. That said, sometimes you just have to talk them up front like what it is and you're going to lose them. A lot of the times you're going to lose them but don't cut undercut your services just to try to land clients.

I get how important it is especially when you're starting out or you're trying to go to an agency because I've done it, guys like I have taken any client on that was willing to give me money regardless of my gut feeling. We've all talked about this all of my partners, all of us at [inaudible 00:14:08] had similar expenses. I'm looking forward to hearing some comments about this again in just a moment. My point is every time I've done it as well where many times over the years where I've said okay it's money I'm going to take it, and I've had a bad gut feeling and then it ends up being a nightmare. It requires so much additional work, so much hand holding, so much convincing that what I'm doing is valuable that it's just not worth it. You're better off just prospecting more clients until you find those that don't put up as much resistance or to understand that it's an investment that should produce a return on investment, excuse me, should produce a return instead of an expense.

Again when it comes down to somebody says how much does it cost, typically that's if you want to just answer him, get him out of your life like thank you very much, that's what Bill Goodin in Hot Prospects says. He says it all in one word, no spaces between them, “Thankyouverymuch” click like hang up. You know what I mean? I don't mean be a prick about it. I just mean like give him the price and let them say, “Oh no, that's too much.” Let them hang up on you then, that's fine. Don't take it personally, move on. Prospect like what I just showed you over here, fill your pipeline full of prospects and you won't have to worry about that. Does that make sense? Now I know you're doing video e-mails and I know that's a much slower process and that's why I recommend that with the video e-mails, you keep them very short because you don't want to spend … Here's the thing, Mel, when I get a get a client referral and I do a video e-mail with an analysis of their properties and stuffs, sometimes those go 20, 25 minutes long.

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I'm not kidding but that's because it was a client referral so there's a much better chance of me landing that client anyways. It's a high quality lead because it was a client referral but when I'm doing cold prospecting and I'm sending video e-mails which I don't really do so much anymore because it's so time consuming. I like the shotgun approach better because you could scale it. With starting out that rifle approach of doing video e-mails is very effective but I would try to keep your initial video, your outreach video, down to five minutes or less so that you can bang out several of them within an hour and get them out because again it's a numbers game.

You might get out of sending 10, you might get three. My consistent number is worth three or four responses out of every 10 e-mails that I sent. Out of every three or four responses, I would typically get one client, sometimes two, and so again that's what I recommend that you try to keep it short. Otherwise you end up with 15 or 20-minute videos for every potential client, cold e-mail that you send and that's just way too much work. What are your comments, guys?

Hernan: I totally agree with you, Bradley in terms of the quality of the clients that you're getting. It's funny because I wasn't franker with one of the Mastermind's call like five minutes before they hang up. One thing he said really resonated with me and he was saying, “It's way easier to increase the quality of the clients that you get than to try to reeducate them into why your stuff that you're doing is worth it.” In other words, instead of trying to reeducate themselves on why they will need to take your marketing serious, and why they're doing an investment and why they should be doing and should be doing that, that puts you in a perspective of, “Well, I need now to educate them into why my stuff is valuable.” The perfect client, which is something that you need to come up with. There's nothing that … You need to come up with what's your perfect type of client, which sometimes like I would say 9 times out 10, we don't do. We just go and try to find as many clients as possible and that puts you in the position of getting the worst type of clients on earth pretty much, right?

Number one, ask yourself what your perfect type of client is and number two, try to find those clients in a way that they already understand that marketing is an investment. Bradley would tell you yeah go after the ad works guys. Go after the guys that are already advertising because they already know. Go after the guys that are doing SEO that you can actually pinpoint that they're doing SEO or they have their maps already set up. Maybe not perfect but they understand the value that ad works can bring to their business et cetera, et cetera so that's why I think it's way easier and way more rewarding. You will end up working with better clients, getting better quality and try to enhance your process of getting clients to get better quality clients than try to turn someone's minds over, which is nearly impossible and it will wear you out. You know what I'm saying? That would be my comment.

Adam: All right, I'll play devil's advocate real quick and not disagreeing actually, just offering the counterpoint and I would say that also you got to do your homework on this one. I've seen people go in and try to just sell videos. Let's say they are selling video rankings or something like that. They go in and they get to the money part and they don't know what their potential client's cost is or what their business model is and then it becomes really hard for people to talk because they don't understand or they go in with the completely wrong offer. Make sure you do your homework and find out how much is a lead work to this person. You don't have to know down to the dollar but do you know the market? Do you know how much it's worth? Is the lead worth $5 or $50? Figuring that out and then you can at least talk until it leads you to the right people.

Bradley: Yeah, and to expand on what Adam said, if you understand the market. Your potential customer base, which will be like local businesses or whatever kind. In my case like contractors, tree service contractors, right? Let's just use that as an example. I understand about how much a good tree service lead is worth to a contractor because I understand from being in that industry what a qualified lead could produce for a contractor as far as revenue. With that said, you can frame or stir the conversation into a let me show you how instead of how much does it cost, let me show you what it can produce. Does that make sense because then you're taking the cost equation. You're taking cost out of the equation, right? The focus isn't on the cost. The focus is on the return and that when you reframe their question in that light or in that manner then they start to see the return on investment potential but as Hernan said I 100% agree with him. If you have to first convince somebody as to why your service is valuable or important then before you then have to sell it to him then you're doing twice as much work because first you have to convince then you have to sell so avoid that.

If you feel like you're catching resistance where you're trying to convince them then let them go, thank you very much, click. Thank you very much, click. Get the hell out of my life. Next like SWSWSWSW, some will, some won't, excuse me. Some will, some won't, so what, someone's waiting, and that's really what it comes down to. Just fill your pipeline with quality leads. Know your market. Know the potential what a lead is worth so that you can stir the conversation towards a return on investment versus cost price. Does that make sense?

Marco: I'm reading this just a touch differently and I don't disagree with either you or Hernan but I'm more inclined with Adam. If she's having trouble understanding how to price her services, I mean that's a bit different and that's just understanding the market and what are leads worth. I mean if a guy … If a lead is worth $2,000 to that person and you can produce, you should be concentrating on what you're going to do, right? You get paid for what you produce rather than getting paid for whatever for something nebulous that the client doesn't understand. I'm going to affect your bottom line positively, that's what I'm going to do for you. As long as you take that approach, you understand the market, you understand the client. You understand what a lead is worth then you won't have trouble pricing yourself and your services, that's how I'm seeing this question.

This Stuff Works
Bradley: Yeah, and last thing, that's a great question by the way, Mel so I'm going to plus one at number one. I'm sorry we spent so much time on this, guys but that's a fantastic question. What happened? It didn't plus one. The last thing I would say about that, Mel is you can always have a foot in the door product or service that you can provide even for free, right? I don't recommend … Guys, don't work for free for often but you can have a foot in the door offer some sort of product or service that you provide for free to prove yourself to a potential client, to a prospect, that works really well like I do that. I'll talk to a potential client and I'll say, “Look, let's talk about pricing.” If that comes up then I'll say, “Let me just prove to you that I'm capable of producing some results and then we'll talk about that. This is what I'm going to do.”

A lot of times what I'll do is I'll do some video marketing campaign so I can get them some quick wins that they can see by going to search results and seeing videos ranked for various keywords, various locations whatever. I'll just do a quick … It might take me 30 minutes to set up a video campaign and blast it out using some spam tools or whatever. Get them ranked for a few keywords and then I just show them the results and say, “Look, this is what I was able to do in a few days and then imagine what I could do if you hired for this or that.” Does that make sense? You can give them something for free just to whet their appetite so to speak and then you can upsell them into or sell them into an actual service at that point you've already … You've given them results in advance.

Again video marketing is fantastic for that because it's something that you can get done very, very quickly. You can get results quickly. It's almost tangible, right? They can see the results and because of that, you can oftentimes upsell, that's why I use video primarily as my opening product or service, okay. Again, great, great question, Mel.

How Would You Optimize A Maps Listing For A Potential Client Located In The Midst Of Small Counties?

All right, Shibga's up. He says … Or Shibga, I'm sorry if I butchered that. “My potential client is located in the midst of a bunch of small counties. Since I'm only doing maps, he won't be showing up in counties even just 10 miles from him. The competitor's currently up there are getting traffic from difficult keywords organically and that is not something I want to do. What would you suggest? Thank you.” Well-

Marco: If I may?

Bradley: Go ahead.

Marco: He's in RYS Academy reloaded and that's Monday's webinar, dude.

Bradley: Perfect. There you go. As far as everybody else, it's not an RYS. My suggestion in that case would be, well I'm going to give you number one, ad words, right? You can do that rather quickly and you can just set up GO targeting so it's very easy to get them to start generating traffic for all the different areas that way plus if you've got a Google My Business, you use the location extension for your ad words ad then you can actually have your maps, your Google Maps, your Google My Business Maps listing show up in Maps in the actual Maps. Now I'm starting to see the Maps listed, the first listing in the three-pack is now an ad for a lot of queries like that's been rolling out slowly but I'm starting to see that appear more and more in various industries now where there's an actual four-pack instead of a three-pack because the first listing is an ad, and that's something that you can absolutely do. All you need is a location extension, which means you need a Google My Business listings verified, and then you can use the location extension and ad words, so that's number one.

Number two would be to rank organically. I don't see a lot of value in that for local lead [inaudible 00:26:22] type of stuff. I've got mixed results on that but that's all you could do short of setting up PO boxes in all the various areas, which can be a pain in the ass, and then you've got a ton of Google My Business listings to optimize, a bunch of citations, all that kind of stuff to do. It's really up to you. I would do what Marco was talking about with RYS stuff, he's doing multi-location training on Monday but I would also consider ad words and go after some organic stuff unless you're willing and capable of setting up a bunch of Google My Business profiles listings for various locations using PO boxes or something, okay.

What Are Your Thoughts On AMP?

Eliza says, “Hey guys, have you heard of AMP? If so, what are your thoughts on it?” Marco, I'll let you talk on that since you developed the plug-in.

Marco: We have an AMP plug-in. All you have to do is go to the Facebook group, AMP Creators Mastermind in Facebook and join then download the plug-in. It's working for news more than anything else, that's where AMP really helps. It speeds up the page. A very light version of the page is served up through AMP. I think as Google goes more into mobile, it will have greater weight. It will become more important. Right now it hasn't had the impact that it should've had but that's because if you're not producing news, the Accelerated Mobile Page experience isn't really necessary. Your website is fast enough as it is or should be fast enough as it is, right? I mean that's just my take on it. We do have the plug-in so you can experiment with it and see whether it works for you, whether it has any effect in your niche. We haven't seen any effects as a matter of fact with AMP on anything local unless you produce news, something that's newsworthy like Google's going to pick up.

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Bradley: Yeah. I don't have much of a comment because I haven't really played with it much.

What Do You Think Are Some Issues With Writing Blog Posts And Repurpose Them To Videos, Embeds, And Syndication?

All right, quit this house says, “Good day. I want to write blog posts. Create a video of each blog with content samurai then syndicate the video. Take that link of video embedded in the blog then syndicate the blog. Any issues? PS, get better soon, Marco.” No, that's fine. In fact I've talked about this in Mastermind in Master class when we used to have a Master class as well. One of the strategies that I've used with some of my contractors, the ones that are willing to do it, which is a great strategy is their technicians basically give instructions to their technicians. Let's say plumber, that's one of the industries that I've done this for, it's a plumbing company.

They had I think six employees or technicians. Six plumbers that were out there working with vans and all that kind of stuff. They just go out on job site and take their phone, iPhone, Android whatever and record a very short video from the jobs that they go out on. Just say, “Hey, this is Joe from Joe's Plumbing in Fairfax, Virginia. We're out on location in Fairfax, Virginia, we got a call for a water heater that needed replaced and this what I found.” He takes his phone and shows where the water heater was. The heating element went bad, we basically replaced the water heater and now this customer has hot water again, and they're happy. If you have any water heater problems in Fairfax, Virginia, contact us at an in-call to action. Very, very simple like a 60-second video, 60 to 90 seconds, sometimes even less and then they send me the video file and then I upload it to YouTube.

I send it to a transcription service, have it transcribed then I go post the video with the transcription on the blog, which then syndicates out across the syndication network, and it gives me the ability to optimize the YouTube video and rank that for keywords like water heater repair, Fairfax, Virginia for example and as well as the blog post, which adds additional content to the site that's a 100% relevant, it's a 100% unique user or 100% created, unique created content. Does that make sense? It's a very, very good strategy because it's something that you don't even have to do like to me, it's very simple to just … They send me the video, I upload it to YouTube, optimize the videos, send that to rev.com to get it transcribed, get the transcription back within usually a couple of hours, and then I can post that as the actual post content, which has its keyword rich.

It's got the call to action and ends up going into silos so I interlink that up to the silo heading, and then that goes out across the syndication network which in turn helps to boost the overall site; very, very powerful strategy. I don't see anything wrong with that at all. I would encourage you to do it. Test with it to see. I haven't done it specifically talking about what you're talking about here but I can't imagine why that would be any different. It's a good strategy, check it out.

How Would You Sell Map Embeds To Somebody?

Muhammad, what's up, Muhammad? He's here every week asking questions and being very engaged, it's awesome. We're glad to have you, buddy. He says, “Hey guys, how would you sell Map Embeds to somebody?” You don't, Muhammad. You wouldn't sell Map Embeds unless it's an SEO or somebody that understands it. My first reaction would be don't. Don't even try to explain. I mean some people are inquisitive and you can try to explain it in a way but a lot of the times like when you start talking about that kind of stuff with prospects, their eyes glass over because they really don't understand it anyways. I try to avoid that like technical kind of stuff with most clients if possible, but anyways “I never really thought of a Map ranking as something to include in SEO [inaudible 00:32:12]. Is it something you guys would include?”

Yeah, when I'm selling SEO services, I typically for the most part am selling Maps ranking, local SEO Maps ranking for the most part but I don't particularly tell them all the different things that I'm doing to get them ranked. Not stuff like Map Embeds because they wouldn't understand like for the most part. I might tell them I'm going to produce content. I'm going to optimize your listing, your photos. We're going to create corresponding content on your website. We're going to do some link building stuff and syndicate content out across your social media properties to get you some exposure and traffic, all that kind stuff but I don't talk about Map Embeds and that kind of stuff. What do you guys think about that?

Marco: I totally agree. Don't ever sell rankings, dude, Muhammad. You cannot control rankings. If you can't control rankings then you cannot sell what you can't be sure that you're going to do. I mean you can be really good at it but then run into a stubborn niche or stubborn sub niche where you just can't rank them out, and you just sold the client on ranking them out so now what are you going to do? Sell results, guys, everyone, everyone in this. When you're out there and you're selling your services, you're going to produce results. What those results are, that's up to you. It's not up to the client to decide what the results are. The results will be reflected in the bottom line through visitors to the website, leads and close leads and all of that. How you go about it, that's what they're hiring for you the expert. Approach it that way, don't ever, ever sell rankings ever.

Bradley: I would only comment that I actually do often sell rankings. What I do is I preface. I say, “Look, I don't work for Google,” so Google can change its algorithm at any time. They're constantly adjusting your algorithm so things change but the trend is, the idea or the goal is to get you ranked in the Maps like that's what I say when I'm talking to a prospect. I say, “This is what I know works and I'm going to do this.” I don't sell them rankings but I tell them that they can expect to see some movement and we're likely going to get the goal, the end goal what my intention is to get them ranked in Maps, but what I'm selling are the services that have shown to prove that is the end result. Does that make sense?

It's like I don't say or guarantee rankings, I don't because I'm not … If I'm going to guarantee rankings, I'm going to own the asset. It's going to be lead gen thing because I'm not guaranteeing it to anybody but me but I don't guarantee rankings to clients. Unless for example I got a video production company that I do a lot of wholesale SEO for, I basically don't guarantee rankings but I tell them if we're not ranked on page one then you just don't pay for it. Does that make sense? So that's what I do, I don't guarantee rankings but I tell them they don't pay unless they're ranked. Keep moving, we got two more questions from him. We're going to try to roll through these. I know we're running short on time today already.

How Would You Sell Syndication Networks To Bloggers And YouTubers?

“For sales practices and extra money, I'm trying to sell syndication networks to bloggers and YouTubers. How would I best approach this? I've bought BB's recommended book on cold e-mail and use his practices but I must be doing something wrong because I haven't seen much interest.” All right, so a couple of things, Muhammad, my thoughts on trying to contact and sell to bloggers and YouTubers is that they're in the marketing space so to speak, they're in the digital space maybe not marketing but they're in the whole digital space, and they're probably numb. I'm trying to think about the right word here. They're probably used to just ignoring pitch type stuff especially probably a lot of YouTubers because I know like our YouTube channels like we've got our [inaudible 00:36:18] Master generals as well as my own channel, we got a lot of subscribers and I get pitched shit all day long all the time. We get spam e-mails from people trying to sell us on YouTube services like stuff all the time. They're probably just ignoring a lot of that. They're numb to it so to speak.

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Bloggers are very similar because bloggers get pitched all the time on guest post and link swaps and link exchanges, all that kind of stuff as well. It could just be that, I don't know because I haven't really pitched to those kind of people but the other thing would be maybe … I'm not sure about cold e-mailing those. I would have to think about it and obviously, Muhammad, I would recommend that you just test different … You're going to have to split test your different cold e-mail approaches. What I'm doing for contractors is working incredibly well but I don't know that that method would work for YouTubers and bloggers. I would just try different types of cold outreach e-mails until you found one that seems to work well and then repeat that, scale that, right? It's going to requite some split testing on your part. It's a lot of work I know. It's a lot of trial and error but once you find something that works like what I found with the contractor prospecting that I'm doing then you can scale it and you can just see massive results, okay?

As far as when I started selling networks like when I first built, started outsourcing that and I trained some virtual assistants, and I started selling networks, I sold them retail to local businesses and then I sold them wholesale to SEO agencies. What I did was I just went to the various marketplaces like SEO Mojo was one of them, SEO Clerks was another one of them, and I just put up listings for networks to sell syndication networks, and that's how I ended up landing a lot of SEO agency clients was through those service sites by selling networks. I would sell it for like … I believe I was selling networks at the time for $297 or $299 around $300 for a single network but for agencies, I had an agency from Australia contact me and he wanted 10 per month, 10 syndication networks per month.

At the time I actually I wouldn't do it, well, I actually probably would do it now still but I ended up selling those networks at $100 a piece to him so he'd pay me $1,000 a month. I'd sell them. I have my team would build him 10 networks and my networks cost me about $50 to build so I would literally pocket about $500 to not really do a damn thing, which was awesome. You may want to consider doing that too like putting your service up on some of these sites, all right?

How Would You Explain The Benefits Of PR In Layman's Terms To A Client?

Last is, “How would you explain the benefits of PR in layman's term to a client?” Exposure, brand building and traffic, that's it. You don't sell the SEO part of it. You can mention that it should have an SEO benefit, should help them it will likely or often will help them to rank better but would you want to sell is the exposure, the brand building and the traffic that it will produce, those are the things.

You want to talk about the benefits not the features. Essentially you want to tell them how, what are the end results that a press release can provide that's traffic, authority and brand building and exposure, massive exposure. Anybody else would comment on that? All right, we're going to keep moving.

Marco: Yeah, I know. I was about to say that, yeah. I agree with you, Bradley in terms of … Business owners they all care about how many new clients, how many new leads they can get. Usually they don't care about rankings or positions or whatever like keywords and all of that jazz. If you talk about in business terms like again this is an investment, I like the different … The comparison between assets and liabilities but the way [inaudible 00:40:30] gets it. For example, you would have money that you throw away every week pretty much. You buy stuff, you go to Starbucks, you go out to dinner whatever, you buy clothes, that's money that goes out and never comes back, right? Assets and the way millionaires think is that they invest their money into stuff like real estate or stocks or whatever, now would put more money into their pockets so that's how they're thinking. Well, you can do the same because you can say this is a service that would put more money to your pocket because that will increase the visibility of your website, the traffic and ultimately if the website converts, the leads, right?

If you think about it, you're investing the money. We always backtrack to the investment versus the spending side of things so that's how I usually frame it and it works.

How Do You Get Viewers To A Niche YouTube Channel That Contains Other People's Popular Videos?

Bradley: Yeah, awesome, thanks. All right, the next one is Eddie Grim. Eddie, I read this question ahead of time and I'm not sure how you're going to get viewers to your videos. I understand you're saying that you're starting a niche top-based YouTube channel. [inaudible 00:41:38] a lot of other people's popular videos to my channel. The question that I would have for you, Eddie is if you're just adding other people's popular videos to playlists because that's really the only way you can do it. You can't really add their videos to your channel unless you download their videos and then upload to your channel, which is against terms of service, right? I'm not saying you can't do that, hint, hint but I am telling you that it's against terms of service and you may get a copyright claim or something like that from one of those people if you are to download and re-upload on to your channel so keep that in mind. However, you can put other people's videos into your own playlist and there's some benefit for doing that.

The only problem with the next part of your question is you say, “the goal is to gain viewers that I can re-target with ads.” Unless, the video is on your channel like it's your video uploaded to your channel then even if you have other people's popular videos and playlist and somebody were to click through from your playlist to that other person's video, you won't be able to re-target them because you won't get a re-marketing cookie from somebody clicking on to their video. Does that make sense? As far as I know you can't and again I may be mistaken here but I don't think you can set up a re-marketing list for videos within a playlist like I think it's only for individual videos or a channel, which in that case you can re-target them if they land on your channel, right? I'd have to go in and look at ad words to see.

I'm not going to do that right now obviously we're running short on time anyways but I'm going to be doing a lot of ad word stuff starting in January with the new Mastermind training curriculum. The first month or the first module is all about PPC (Pay Per Click) and YouTube is going to be included in that so it's something that I will probably have soon, I'll know for sure. I know that you can re-target people that interact with any videos on your channel. I don't know if that also includes other people's videos that you've embedded or added to playlist from your channel or not, I don't know. Can anybody else confirm that?

Marco: Yeah, I know. I think that is the exact same thing that you're saying, Bradley like you need to own the asset in order for Google to count the cookie towards your re-marketing list. What I would say, Eddie is see why these videos are so popular, try to emulate them, try to do the same title, keywords, et cetera, et cetera and then try to rank them on YouTube because that will put you like for example on semantic mastery channel and on my own channel, I'm pretty sure that will probably is channel two. 20% of the videos bring 80% of the views. Is that big? Is that cute? You will have, I don't know, I probably have a couple of 100 videos semantic mastery has at this point thousands of videos but only a small fraction of those videos will for some reason will get … Not for some reason but because they are really targeting really high volume keywords on YouTube, right? They're targeting really high volume keywords and they're getting shared. They're getting a lot of comments so YouTube will increase their view cap, and that will trickle down into the rest of the channel.

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Here's the thing, you want to try to emulate these popular videos, record your own version, curate them whatever, and try to run them on YouTube so that you can now own the asset. Once you have that, again, you need to create a bunch of videos so that 20% of those videos will get 80% of the traffic and once you have that then you can start re-targeting those people with that. You can also do pay-per-view. You can try to use the ad words to a video, and that's something that you can do as long as you own the video. You can do with [inaudible 00:45:29] but there's absolutely zero sense on spending money to do that but the point here is that you own the video but that's a number scale. The pay-per-view needs to be lower than the re-targeting cost and that's usually not the case, right? You're paying more per view than that the ROI that you're getting when you're re-targeting these people so have that mind.

The best way to go, in my opinion, will be to get a lot of organic traffic from YouTube. Rank your videos on YouTube so that you can get a lot of organic traffic and then go to channel re-targeting.

Bradley: By the way, there are ways to siphon some authority off of those videos that are really popular that get a shit ton of views. Eddie, that way that you do that is scrape the tags from the videos that are ranking really well or that are getting a lot of views, the really popular videos. Scrape the tags. There are tools that can do that. You can also right click and view page source. Get the first two or three tags but there are tools that will scrape tags for you. Scrape the tags. Use those same tags in your video as well as the channel name of the channel that has the popular video and put that video into a playlist from your channel alongside of your other videos. In other words, when you go to optimize your own video targeting the same type of keywords as the popular videos that you want to siphon some authority from, you want to scrape the tags from that popular video, place it into your video.

You also want to scrape the channel or add the channel name as a tag in your video. You also want to create a playlist with that popular video next to your video. What happens is a lot of the times, it's not 100% of the time and I don't know what the threshold like what the circumstances are to make it work sometimes and not others but what I've seen a lot of that, when you do that is your video will end up popping on the end screen of a video when they show related videos like checkerboard of related videos. Your video will pop into there as well as in the right-hand sidebar on the watch page of the related … The right-hand sidebar where they show related videos. You'll end up popping into there and you end up getting a lot of referral traffic just because you're in the related video section if that makes sense, and that's a great way to siphon authority off of other people's videos, okay? Good question though, Eddie.

Do You Know A Tool Like Cinch Tweet From Mastery PR Intended For Linkedin?

Jonathan says, “I purchased Cinch Tweet for mastery PR and this tool works like crazy.” Awesome, that's great to hear. “Do you have similar tool for LinkedIn?” I don't know, Jonathan. I don't even know Cinch Tweet is. I just know that I know we did a promo for it for mastery PR but I'm not a tweet guy or Twitter guy so I haven't played with that at all. I don't know of one for LinkedIn, sorry.

Adam: Yeah, Jonathan. What you could do is probably hop into the group if you're not already a part of the semantic mastery, our free Facebook group and ask in there because I think Chris has been at least playing around with it so that would be the place to ask.

How Would You Reinstate The Previous Top Ranking Of A Client Site That Targets 3 Main Keywords?

Bradley: Yeah. All right, Ralph's new. He says, “Hey guys, I'm a rookie when it comes to SEO for site. I have a client in Minneapolis area. He used to rank on page one for his key phrase, something changed a couple of years ago and now he's back on page three, if even that. I just took over his site trying to get him back on page one. His company specializes in three areas. Okay, the way the site seems to be set up, they're trying to shoot for all three targets on the front page at once.” Yeah, that's pretty common actually. “Should I redo the title of description in H1 tags to shoot for keyword one and put keyword two and three on other pages? I tried using video to get them on page one, that doesn't seem to work.”

Okay, yeah, Ralph, I would absolutely recommend that … I don't typically try to rank the homepage guys. I mean it happens and there's ways that you can force the homepage to rank but I usually optimize for again for contractors if they have separate services. I always like to try to optimize a specific service page for basically one primary service, right? I have separate pages for each one of those. In your case, it would be a separate page for keyword one, one for keyword two and one for keyword three because what happens is each one of those pages can be highly optimized for that particular keyword, that service in that location. It's likely that you can end up ranking that as long as there's not other domain health issues, Ralph. Assuming that everything else is fine, I would recommend that you would target specifically each keyword or service with its own page and then optimize it for that but then what you do is obviously you just internally link from each one of those pages up to the homepage.

In Maps you're usually going to rank their homepage in Maps, not always the case but usually but then for organic, you would end up ranking the individual pages based upon the keywords search query, right?

Marco: I have a question. Sorry to stop you while you're going through this but do we still have a backdoor to SEO bootcamp?

Bradley: I think we do.

Marco: Because I mean I was just going through that over the weekend.

Bradley: It's amazing.

Marco: And I couldn't stop. I went and I was lying down in bed and just listening and I went through. I forget how many videos I went through just listening. The guy is amazing on his keyword research and how to set this up. Ralph, everything that you're looking for and how to set this up, how to target the keyword whether it's a category, whether it is the top of the silo, whether it's supporting LSI and whatever, this is covered in there. I have yet to see anyone who covers on page SEO as thoroughly as what's covered in SEO bootcamp.

Bradley: Yeah, dude. He's bad ass, man. I don't know if it's … I think the $500 price is now doubled unfortunately. I think it's $1,000 now but it's worth it even at $1,000. I'm not kidding, Ralph. It's fantastic. It really is that good. If somebody didn't already drop the link, it's semanticmastery.com/seobootcamp, I believe, that will take you over to it if you want to check it out. I'm not sure if that's the link or not. If not, if somebody-

Adam: Yeah, I'm looking for it right now just to confirm.

Bradley: Yeah, that's what I would suggest, Ralph is obviously optimize a separate page for each one of those and then you can link from those pages up to your homepage, that would be the better route to go than trying to be … If you're trying to cover too many topics on one page and they're not closely related enough then you dilute the optimization of any one of the keywords if that makes sense, okay? All right, we're almost out of time, guys. Unfortunately we didn't get … Well, I guess we got the most of them.

Will A Syndicated Content About Recipe Triggers Duplicate Content Issue?

All right so next question, “Hi. We are selling a new sweetener on our blog e-com site. Bloggers started to create recipes with it on their blogs, which is awesome. Now I started to create blog posts with those recipes by cloning them on our blog inside my recipe silo and these posts are then syndicated to a syndication network too. I'm doing this for obvious reasons, easy content and creation for me and additional publicity for them. Question, will this trigger and kind of duplicate content issues for me or not?”

No, it won't because … Well, first of all just make sure that you are attributing. As long as you are citing the source … Okay, it won't create any content issues for you anyways regardless, okay, period but to do it legally and properly the way that you should do it ethically as well is you make sure that you are getting attribution to the source where you got those recipes. Always cite the source. Give credit where credit is due, that's not going to cost you any issues if you don't as far as SEO issues, but it can cause … You can get DMCA complaints, which are basically copyright infringement complaints. If one of those bloggers decided that you were infringing upon their intellectual property, and they decided do a DMCA complaint then Google can de-index that page or post and that's a bad sign for you and it's a bad sign for the domain. I would recommend that you just you are always linking back to the source.

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You can no-follow the links, that's what I do. No-follow them but make sure that you link back to the source and give them the credit where it's due, okay?

Should You Link Back To The Original Post Or Just Cite Them On The Syndicated Blog Post?

Question two, “Is it enough to cite their blog in the bottom of my current recipe without …” No, I would always link back to it, always. If you're worried about passing dues, no-follow the link, okay? “As I link back to it, cite their blog at the bottom of my current or should I also link back to their original post?” Yeah, always link back to the original source of the content that you're curating, that's essentially what you're doing. You're curating content which is perfectly legit, that's how most of the content is produced for all of my blogs, and client blogs and lead gen sites and all that is through curation. There's nothing wrong with that. Just make sure that you cite the source.

By the way when you're curating content, guys, sometimes you're still going to get people that are pissed off about it, which is dumb in my opinion but sometimes because you are providing them a link, potential exposure, potential traffic but you are giving credit where it's due. I still have gotten some cease and desist, take-down notices type stuff from curating, it happens from time to time. It's just part of the game. Just don't freak out when it happens. “I'm asking this because they all link to different pages on my site in their recipes. This would be some sort of reciprocal linking, I guess, which I heard is not good.” No, it's fine. In that case, in this particular circumstance, that's absolutely fine because it's not like you're trying to gain for SEO. You guys are just cross-promoting because it makes sense, it's relevant. It's not an SEO thing, right? I mean it provides SEO value but the intent is not strictly for SEOs. Does that make sense?

Reciprocal linking was something that was a no-no years ago. I don't know if it's still considered a no-no in Google's eyes because there is a lot of crosslinking between and co-citation and things like that now. I'm talking about old directories, guys. A lot of web directories, they would only publish your link if you put a widget in the footer that linked to their directory. Those are reciprocal links that are frowned upon but two bloggers cross-promoting each other's post, that's not really … I don't work for Google so I don't know but I can tell you it's logical for that to not be a reciprocal link penalty type thing. Any comments on that, guys?

Marco: Yeah, I haven't been doing a lot of reciprocity like reciprocal links lately so I wouldn't … I don't have data like recent data.

Which Should You Get First, RYS Stack Or Syndication Network Or Both?

Bradley: All right, we're almost out of time. Fortunately we got through almost all of the questions. Harold asks, “Hey guys, what's up? Quick question, should I get an RYS stack, a syndication network or both?” Well, my go-to answer is going to be both. Of course, Harold. No, I mean that for real. I always start with syndication networks is always standard operating procedure but as soon as that gets built, I order the RYS drive stack as well, but it is really standard operating procedure, so I would say yes to both. Any comments, guys?

Marco: No, absolutely. Set up your syndication network, prime it just like we teach in the syndication academy. Once that's done, get the RYS stack going and link to everything in T1. I mean it's really that simple, and you can power everything up through link building through your drive stack, which will protect your T1, and your money site.

Which Company Provides The Best Citation Services?

Bradley: All right, Dan says, “Hey, gents. What are your suggestion for best source to have citations done?” Serpspace of course, Dan, duh. Dan, I'm giving you a hard time but yeah Serpspace. You can go in there and like … If you're looking for the Cadillac, the Ferrari of citations, you're going to spend more money but they are fabulous. They are done very, very well. I would say Loganix, they've got some really good packages. Semanticmastery.com/loganix but for new sites typically, I would just go with what we have in Serpspace and just order the big citation directory sites, which is like the national type sites and then I try to go with the hyper local type citations, which are a lot more like niche specific or local specific type directories. Those are always like standard operating procedure.

I usually start right off the bat with new sites with about anywhere between 40 to 60 citations, which is about 20 or so of the big national directories like the big heavy hitters, Yelp and Angie's List, Yellowpages that kind of stuff, and then we try to find … We scrape citation or directory sites that are either niche specific or more localized and then build the additional citations there. Also don't forget, Dan, to order citations or aggregate listing submissions like New Stark Louise. What are the other ones? Info USA, several of those. The other one is Factual is one. The other one is Axiom. Those are all really good because you get listed in those and about three to six months later, you'll have citations and a ton of different directories because other directories scrape or pull data from those, and create listings for you. It's more of a long-term thing but you want to do that right upfront because in about six months you'll start seeing a whole bunch of new citations start popping up and you didn't have to build them or create them.

All right, last question, I know we're right at the five o'clock mark, “Is Cinch Twitter good for tier one? Can it be used on the Twitter attached to RSY stack?” Honestly, I have no response for that because I don't even know what Cinch Tweet does. Anybody else have an answer to that?

Adam: No, I don't. Good one to hop in the group probably and ask there.

Bradley: All right. We're done, guys. Oh, wow. Everybody else bailed out. Thanks, everybody for being here. We'll see everybody else next week, I guess because we don't have any other webinars this week, do we?

Adam: I don't think so.

Bradley: Sweet. All right, everybody, thanks for being here.

Adam: See you.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Bradley: See you.

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Monday, December 4, 2017

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 160

Click on the video above to watch Episode 160 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

 

 

Announcement

Adam: Turn off the light so everyone can see it better.

Oh, what's this? A tee shirt. Oh, well, we're live. What do you know?

Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangout Episode 160. The one where Adam gets to model all of his awesome the-shirts.

We're happy to have you here, and before we get started, of course, we want to go around and say hello to everybody. I'll start on my left as I see things here on the screen.

Chris, how's it goin man?

Chris: It's good. It's snowing in Austria. Time to hit the slopes soon. Can't wait.

How are you doing?

Adam: Can't complain. It should be snowing here, but it's like fifty. Fahrenheit for those of you outside the U.S, but yeah it's nice. Can't complain.

Hernan, how about you. How are things going? You're moving into summer down south.

Hernan: Yeah it's fucking chilly man. I don't know. It's November 29th. It's pretty nice. I was expecting some warm, but no. It's chilly.

Nice t-shirt by the way. Good logo.

Adam: Thank you. Thank you. It comes I black as well, but I chose this one. First one I grabbed out since I was running late. I'm the reason we're late, but all right.

Well Marco, how are you doing man?

Marco: I'm good man. What's up?

Adam: Not much. I usually check in with you for the weather, but I know you're down south closer to Hernan. So I guess the weather is about the same for you?

Marco: It's the same.

Adam: Sounds good. Alright.

Roman, how about you man? How you doing?

Roman: Oh fantastic up in Canada.

Adam: Gotcha. Wow. Weather report? What's going on there, man? Is it snowing? Is the great white north a blizzard? What's happening?

Roman: We've actually just recently had a nice warm day of fifty degrees. It's been a pleasant freezing for the entire rest of the time I've been here though. (laughs)

Chris: Wow. Sweet.

Adam: Alright.

Bradley, I was just in your neck of the woods for Thanksgiving. A couple hours away from you, so I'm pretty sure I know how it is, but how are things going with you down there? Weather or anything I guess so.

Bradley: Everything is peachy. (laughs)

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Adam: Alright. (laughs)

Bradley: Glad to be here.

Adam: Outstanding. All right.

Well, we've just got a few quick announcements. If you're new to Semantic Mastery, first of all, thank you for watching Hump Day Hangouts, and hanging out with us, and being here. You should check out the battle plan, the SEO Blueprint. I'll pop a link in there. You can save seventy-five bucks with the discount code we got.

If you have not yet, please head over to serpspace.com. You can get your free account there. There's a couple free tools, which actually we should ask Roman about that if he's got some additional stuff coming out. That's also where all the awesome, done-for-you services are located. Okay.

And then as well, the last thing we want to let you know is always check out support.semanticmastery.com. We have our frequently asked questions there. Things that require graphs, or charts, or some of Bradley's amazing artwork. We compiled them there in one spot. So during the week if you have a question, you can go there and check that out. Alright?

That is it on my end. You guys have anything you want to cover before we get started?

I can think of one thing real quick. I believe… correct me if I'm wrong. Is Jeffrey Smith's SEO boot camp still … Is there quick reopening on that? Did we confirm that? Now that we're live. (laughs)

Bradley: I'm glad you mentioned that because I've got the link right here. Yeah guys, the SEO boot camp training that I've been talking about for a few weeks now, Jeffrey Smith's SEO Boot Camp Training. It was on a special price for $497. Roughly 500 bucks for a limited time, and then he closed that. So it ended up going to $997, but because of how much we've talked … how well we've talked about it. How good we've talked about it. He basically opened it back up for our subscribers to join again for $497 for limited time only.

So if you guys are interested in it, now would be the time because once it goes back up to regular price again when he closes it, which is in one to three days I guess. I don't know. I know he said it was only going to be a couple days. It'll be $997. So I recommend that you get it.

We've also got some bonuses that we'll throw in. We'll throw in Content Kingpin if you need it. If you don't have it already, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com if you end up picking up the SEO boot camp training, which I highly, highly recommend. Guys, I wouldn't be recommending SEO training from someone else unless it was that good, and his is really that good.

So anyways, I'm gonna drop the link, and you guys can go check it out. I highly recommend that you get it while it's still at half price. Okay. And you'll get our bonuses too, so…

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Adam: Awesome. Yeah, if you're watching this down the road, it's probably not available. So you know, hopefully we can work something out with him again, but that's the way it works. It was open for about a week there. This'll be over. This is 11/29, November 29th. This'll be over November 30th.

Bradley: Okay. That's semanticmastery.com/seobootcamp if somebody's watching this at a later date. Even at a thousand dollars it's totally worth it. I'm not lying. If you can't get it now, then get it later when you can afford it. (laughs) Cause it's worth it, alright. Anything else?

Adam: We're good.

Bradley: Alright, last thing before we move on. Go to bradleybenner.com, and subscribe to my YouTube channel, or my email list. Period. That's it. (laughs)

Now I've been doing the Mindset Mastery series over there once a week. I try to … well, not every week, but most weeks I try to get a video done, and it's often a series of videos because I have to split it up into multiple videos. This week I just did some Q&A stuff. You can ask me questions about Mindset series. There's a button on the bradleybenner.com page where you can just click. It's takes you over to Google Form. You can submit questions.

I also highly recommend that you subscribe to my email list. It's daily Mindset updates, and it's just every day I've started working on developing a habit of trying to write every day a minimum of 200 words, and I'm using the Mindset Mastery email series as my vehicle. That's where I'm doing all of my writing. I've gotten … I've written Monday through Friday almost every single day. I think we're up to like 15 or 16 emails in the series already. But it's mostly basically at the end of my morning ritual or routine where I do my daily goal setting, and planning, and brief meditation, and some study, and stuff like that.

Typically, I have something in my mind that I want to convey, some idea. That what I just put to paper, or in an email. I draft an email from that. My goal is just a minimum of 200 words per day. Typically, they end up between 500 to 800 words in order to fully convey my thought, but it's something that's kind of turning into a labor of love for me, and it's just kind of like kick your ass stuff. Like get off your ass and go do something, be productive, don't make excuses. That kind of stuff. That's the kind of stuff I respond to well. I'm not gonna lie. This is more of a selfish thing for me that I'm doing for me, but I figured I might as well put it up there because it may help some of you. So I recommend going and checking it out.

I drop some links to various resources; to Amazon Books, and audio programs, and all the kind of stuff that I'm studying, tools, and things that I use. It's not like an affiliate promo thing. I'm literally just sharing with you guys what kind of resources that I'm using in my daily practice of self mastery, and personal growth, and that kind of stuff.

So, go check it out. Alright. With that-

Adam: I'm gonna head over there and get signed up.

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Bradley: I'm gonna move on. Alright. Here we go guys.

How To Optimize A YouTube Channel For A DJ Service?

Alright, so Pierre is up first. He says, “hey guys, I am new to SEO. I've just created a YouTube channel for a DJ service, and launching in Montreal. How can I optimize my YouTube channel?”

Well, there's a few things you can do to your channel. It's more about optimizing the individual videos. Don't get me wrong, it's good to optimize the channel as well, but there's limited things you can do to the channel. For example: One thing that's important, at least in my opinion through my testings, is to theme the channel. So if… what I mean by that since you're new Pierre is you want to try to keep all the videos that you have uploaded that are public on your channel, right?

If they are unlisted or private it really doesn't matter, but anything that's public on your channel you want to make sure that it's closely related to what the overall theme of your business is. Right? So music related stuff probably. Maybe videos from weddings that you've DJ'd at or events that you've DJ'd at. That kind of stuff so that it all makes sense. Right? You want to try to keep the theming somewhat relevant.

It's okay to have occasionally some random videos, but I would suggest is that you create playlists for that and that's one of the ways that you can kind of like silo or categorize, compartmentalize your YouTube channel, is by using playlists. As far as the actual optimization, just go the settings. We'll go to the creator studio. I'm not going to walk through it because we've got too many questions to get through, but we have a course called YouTube Mastery. It's a little bit dated but the principles are all still the same.

So, if that's something you … that walks through how to optimize YouTube channels, as well as individual videos both on page and off page optimization and playlist optimization. All of those things. Link building, advanced ranking techniques, all of that is in YouTube mastery. Again, it's probably three years old now so some of the interfaces have changed … Interfacing in YouTube has changed a bit, but all of those principles are absolutely still relevant today. So I would recommend you pick that up

I believe YouTube Silo Academy is part of that or is a bonus or something in there. If not, YouTube silo academy is only a seven dollar product. That's something else I would recommend because using playlists in YouTube and creating them as like website silos is very, very powerful. It's like standard operating procedure now for any sort of YouTube work that I do now. So I would recommend that you pick that up or if you pick up YouTube Mastery, again, it's an expensive product. Are we even still selling that guys? I don't even know if we are. To be honest.

Adam: Probably we are.

Bradley: Okay. All right. Well as long as we are still selling it, go pick it up and then what I would suggest is not even buying YouTube Silo Academy because just contact us at support, if you end up buying YouTube Mastery. Tell us you purchased and we'll give you access to our bonus site, which YouTube Silo Academy is included in the bonus site. As well as a shit ton of other training. It's worth it just to get the bonus site. But that's what I would recommend, Pierre because that will take you step by step through how to optimize a YouTube channel and the videos and the playlists and do the link building and all the other stuff that is required to rank videos. Okay?

Okay, so moving on. So John says … Anybody want to comment on that before I move on?

Roman: You covered that completely.

Bradley: All right.

Should Articles Created As Part Of A Drive Stack Have Unique Content?

John says “Hey guys, I'm trying to understand more about drive stacks. This would be a good question for Marco. When creating the articles as part of the drive stacks should the content be unique?” Doesn't have to be, John. At all.

“Also, if we have a website that we want to rank are we better off pointing the stack at the money site or should we instead build a secondary stack just to rank that by itself?”

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I'll give you my answer and then I want to hear Marco's as well, but yeah for drive stacks I link to all of my most important properties within the stack. So in other words, like I link to the money site. I link to the Google my business maps URL. I link to the Facebook page. Any of like the real powerful tier one social properties or even citations like Yelp, for example. I throw a Yelp link in as a target URL for my drive stack.

The primary URL should be your money site in my opinion. Unless you're just trying to rank in maps, but again you should be putting both of those links as target URL's anyways. I've pretty much always linked to my money site, homepage of the money site, as well as any … the Google map business listing, and any of the other most powerful tier one links or citations, which includes social properties and things like that. That I'm trying to boost. To basically validate the entity. Push relevancy into the whole eco-system and that kind of stuff.

So Marco what's your take?

Marco: I totally agree. That's it. Link to everything. Anything and everything because it will push power to whatever it is linked to. It doesn't matter inside the drive stack and if you're worried about the money site, then just do an I-frame imbed. Instead of linking directly to it. All you have to do is … the way that we teach to connect, right? The connection loop. Closing the loop. That's taught inside our RYS Academy Reloaded and it's one of the most important things that you can do. It's I-framing on not only the D-site, which we also teach, but also on the money site and that I-frame will cause everything to flow through and will also protect the money site. That's what I would do.

Bradley: Very good. Thank you.

Why Is A PBN Website Auto-Blogging Videos?

Next question from John. He says “Brad, I was reverse engineering a few of your links that lead to the G-site for a Virginia SEO that led me to an obvious PBN that is being used. I don't want to name it here since I don't think it matters. I noticed that the website has what appears to be its own social syndication ring of various 2.0 properties. But it also appears that the site is auto-blocking videos, why? These videos don't appear to be syndicating and I assume that is on purpose.”

No, John. Honestly, I've talked about this in just about every time we talk about the SEO Virginia. My first experience with RYS Academy methods. Right. That's the first thing that I ever built, is that. The Virginia SEO or SEO Virginia, whatever, Google site and I did a drive stack around that key word and boom I've been ranked. Well, I built it in May of 2015 and I think it was about six or eight weeks before it ranked, but it's been ranked ever since. It hasn't budged a fucking spot since then. That's like incredible.

So anyways, I've talked about this many, many times. You obviously hadn't heard it, but I had a old PBN network, private blog network that was way, it was crafted very poorly. It was based upon like 2012 and 2013 PBN building principles. Right? So, as of 2015 when I built that drive stack, those PBN's were basically toxic for links for any sort of money site. They were that bad. Only because, again, 2012/2013 methods for building PBN's were a lot different than they were in 2015, right?

So I had like large PBN network that was basically useless for building links to money sites. I pretty much re-purposed them. To be video broadcasting sites. All that would do is use them as like an imbed network to optimize or rank videos. So I basically just turned my PBN's … the old ones that were crappy, they weren't themed well, that kind of stuff, they had a whole bunch of different posts on them and different topical categories and things like that, so they were just very, very … they would have been toxic had I linked directly to money sites.

So that said, because I had that available and they were all Google properties for that test, that first experience with RYS methods, right? So the Google drives properties as well as the Google site, I used that PBN network, which was now a video broadcasting network specifically, just because in my opinion they were like spam links, but I didn't care because it was a Google properties. So I did one PBN link run. I think at the time it was about 38 or 40 links and that was it. A lot of those sites have been expired now. I let the domains expire on a lot of those sites, but a handful of them are still alive. Probably just because they are on auto-renew and I just pay for them every year.

So that's it. I haven't done any link building to that site at all since May of 2015. So again, any of those sites that you saw back links coming from pointing to that are either test sites or just basically old spammed PBN sites that are just still existing. I think there might be a few links in there, coming from some sites that are in our video powerhouse network, because, again, a lot of those sites from my old PBN's were just turned into video broadcasting sites and that's it.

So, anyways. Just to answer your question John. That was purely done from back in 2015. There's been no link building done to that property since then. What you are looking at are old links coming from PBN's that are no longer being used or if they're being used it's specifically only for video syndication.

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All right. Good question though. DOS says … Go ahead.

Marco: I would add that's not where the secret sauce is. I mean, if that's where he's investing into PBN links and all that. You're way off course, man. You've got to circle back.

Bradley: Okay. Very good. I totally agree. That's what I was trying to get at. Maybe I wasn't clear about it, but those links were … that was just to help get it pushed. I remember when I did that, like I said, it was right after I built it I did a run through my PBN through part or a handful of sites, a few dozen anyways, and I let it go. I checked on it every few days for about two or three weeks and it was in and out of the Google site and some of the drives files were in and out of the index. They were bouncing all over the damn place when they were in the index.

So I basically kind of like just gave up on it. I just kind of forgot about it. It was like six or eight weeks later. So it was probably in July or so. July or maybe even August but I remember I just happened to think about it and I went and just did a manual search of SEO Virginia and boom it was number one and I was like “Holy shit!” And it's been there ever since. I've never done a damn thing to it.

So, again, it has very little to do with the links, if anything at all because those links would have tanked in other sites, if it wasn't Google properties, right? So what Marco just said is absolutely correct.

Would You Advise Linking Each Page Of Spun Google Sites To A Good Quality Site’s Hopmepage To Push More Link Juice?

All right. DOS says “I've been building a good quality new giggle site.” That must be on purpose because he did it multiple times. “A new giggle site to point at my money site and in building fun giggle sites with silo linked pages and linking only the home page to those back to the good Google site. Would it push any more juice if I linked each page directly up to the good site or is it about the same?”

No, I would do what you're doing DOS. I would do what you're doing because there's a lot of value in pushing juice from inner pages to a home page and then having like or to any particular specific page. Right?

To any, one specific page using internal links to push relevancy and equity to that page and then have that one … and again, it can be home page or any other page. It doesn't matter. And then having one link outbound to whatever your real target site is. There's a lot of … I mean, I like to do that better because then you can actually go build links to the posts or the inner pages that are all pointing to one specific page that then linked to your actual target URL. You can build links to those inner pages and it adds an extra layer of protection because now its inbound links hitting inner pages.

Inner pages pushing all that juice to the specific page that then outbound links to your money page. Now remember these are all Google sites. So you can get away with a hell of a lot more, but typically that's the same type of structure or format that will do for link building for anything within our web two networks or syndication networks, right? Like that's a very powerful strategy.

By the way we have a Syndication Academy webinar immediately following this. That's two in the month of November, but since we didn't have one in October. I made up for it. I've redeemed myself.

But with the syndication networks, it's the same thing. If you push a post out through your blog and it syndicates out across all the web two sites, you can go grab the web two post URLs from that specific post. And then build links to those because there should be a link, well, there's the attribution link that points back to the original money site post, right? And in the money site post is then going to have an internal link up to the page that you're trying to push.

So if you're building links to the web two post URLs think about how many hops back you are from your actual target URL. Right? Target URL, which is a page on your money site, then the first tier link is the blog post from your money site, second tier links are the web two posts, the re-publishing of your blog post from your money site onto the web two platforms, and your fourth tier links are going to be any sort of spam links you that you want to point at your web twos. Your post URLs. Does that make sense?

So it's a very, very clear … it's a very clean way to build links and actually funnel like through all that relevancy back up to your target page. So it's a safe way to do it. That's primarily how I'm doing stuff with the Google site generator for example. It's very similar to what I just described. What you're talking about here.

Anybody else want to comment on that? That was a great question, by the way, DOS.

Chris: Yeah, it is. I think that you might have great job answering it.

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Bradley: Okay, cool. Moving on. Muhammad what's up buddy? I just answered your questions for Mindset Mastery this week, by the way, Muhammad, in case you hadn't seen it yet. I actually did like two more videos guys but I wasn't happy with them. Like for another 45 minutes of content and I deleted them so… if I get time this week I'm going to try to redo them and post those as well, if not, that's what I'm going to talk about next week.

Would The Second Corrected Press Release Be As Powerful As The First?

“Hey guys, I'm following the local PR strategy, that BB talked about in the recent Syndication Academy webinar. My first PR from Serpspace turned out to have an error I missed. Could my second PR be a correction of the first? Would it be just as powerful?”

It's going to have to be worded slightly different Muhammad otherwise it will probably be rejected by the distribution service because they don't allow duplicate content. Rob, who's co-partner, co-creator of RYS Reloaded with Marco, he does really good with creating his own PRs from using other people's PRs and just rewording them. (laughs) Like re-writing some of the stuff and then just re-publishing those, which is awesome and then putting his own links and stuff in it.

All I ever do Muhammad is just use the PR writers from whatever distribution service we're using if it's in Serpspace we use our PR writers there. If it's any one of the other services that I use, I always use their in-house writers. I used to use my own PR writer, but the problem is each different distribution service is going to have different editorial guidelines. They're all similar but there are some slight nuances.

Even if you have your own PR writer, it's good to have that because you get a specific voice that becomes consistent through all the PRs but the problem with that is different distribution networks may kick it back for various reasons, right? And say no, this needs to be edited. Or it says not approved or unapproved because of this reason and that reason. It becomes kind of a pain in the ass.

I've learned it's just more efficient to use the PR writers that are available within the actual distribution services because they know what will pass their editorial guidelines. I just always give very specific instructions. I always provide the PR title. A lot of the PR writers are going to want to change the title and tell you that their title's better.I always change it back because I know what the hell I want to target. When I provide the PR title I want them to use that.

So anyways, PR title; who, what, when, where, sometimes why or how and then you want quotes from an executive or if you're doing a review post, like an announcement of a new review or a five star review or whatever like that, you can always use the review text from the customer as a quote. But that's pretty much what they're looking for. Just keep that in mind. I would recommend if you had a PR written from Serpspace, because we don't even allow user-submitted PR's anymore do we Roman?

Roman: No, no we don't.

Bradley: Yep.

Roman: Yeah, I was also going to mention that because I've had to do this in the past where you know somebody misses some kind of information on the press release when they submit it out and then they would need to make a correction. We can have a press release written up basically saying that what we stated here was incorrect and that this is correct. It gives you an excuse to link back to the original PR and then you can push it up that way and turn the disadvantage into an advantage.

We've done it in the past, corrections PR's. Just message support and we should be able to take care of it.

Bradley: Very good, thank you.

By the way, Muhammad, keep this in mind. Anybody doing a PR strategy … guys when you go to add links into your press releases. If you're going to be doing any sort of stacking, you want to use a re-direct URL to the PR's that you're pointing links to.

So like, if you're doing a second tier PR, which points to another PR you want to use a re-direct URL because a lot of those PRs purge and some of them purge within as little as 90 days. I've got a lot, actually I'm not going to get into that. I'll talk about that in MasterMind tomorrow, but I've got a lot of stuff that I've seen since I started doing stacking, which was about five months ago. I've done a lot of that and there's a lot of those PR's that were originally published that are now been purged from the PR sites. They're on some sites but the vast majority of them now have already been deleted so they're … some sites delete after 90 days, some sites delete after six months or 180 days. Right?

Then there are some that keep them for I don't know how long, but they are still up. It's best if you just keep a record, like a spreadsheet of all the PRs and your target URLs and then use redirects. I recommend just setting up like a dummy domain for that or even a sub-domain, like press dot something or whatever.

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That's what I do and I just use Prettylink Pro, I use Prettylink Pro but you can use Prettylink Lite, which is a free plug-in to set up all the redirects and I use that so now if a PR is published that is pointing to a target URL of another PR that has been purged I can go in and swap what that link in the published PR with that link is pointing to. Right? The destination. The target URL. I can change that out. I can swap that out to something else. It can be anything. It can be a tier one property, a syndication network, a citation, anything I want. That way I don't lose that juice, if that makes sense.

So I highly recommend that you do that. I just started doing that recently. I don't know why the hell I didn't think about it before, but I'm doing that now with all my stuff and it's much better that way. Plus you can actually build the authority of running your own domains that way.

How Would You Handle Curated Content For Multiple Real Estate Clients In Multiple Cities?

Number two says, “I'm currently curating two posts a week for my real estate client. One on real estate topics made with recent articles and another on local news with local papers and sources. I want to use this model with another realtor in another city. How different would the real estate posts have to be? For instance, if I had five realtors it would start to get hard to have all them completely unique every week. Can I edit them or would I hire more VA's to write more unique ones?”

If you're curating posts, what I would recommend doing is, I wouldn't republish the same post across multiple, you probably could. To be honest Muhammad you likely could do that. Just take the post, the original curated post and republish it on the other five realtors websites and you'd probably be fine, right? But, because a lot of people do that with local sites anyways. Like, if they do local plumbing sites. They'll copy the same content and the only thing they swap out is the actual geographic modifiers, the location modifiers.

That still seems to work. I've never recommended doing that. I don't do that personally. Curating is easy enough because all that the curators have to do is a couple of sentences of commentary in between each curated piece of content. So if all the heavy lifting has been done with the first curated post, which is finding content to support the theme of the article, right? Of the post. Then laying it out in a logical order. Then there literally is an opening, a small amount of commentary between each curated piece, and a conclusion. That's it. That can be done very, very quickly.

If the curated article has already been published once, I would recommend you just send that over to another blog and just have the commentary slightly change so that it is unique. That's all I would do. Again, if you've got multiple curators you could even have the first, the primary curator send it out to the other curators and have them just do a slight re-write on the commentary and it would be a much more efficient way, but you'd also be guaranteeing you've got unique content that way. That's what I would do.

Any comments on that guys?

Okay. [crosstalk 00:28:48]

Chris: That was pretty in depth, actually. I was actually thinking something else.

Marco: Pretty good stuff, man. I hope everybody took notes.

Do Drive Stacks Have Enough Power And Authority To Rank Sites On Their Own?

Bradley: Thanks guys. John's up again. He says, “Do the drive stacks have enough power and authority to rank a site on their own?”

Sometimes John but I don't ever, personally I don't ever expect it to be enough. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised, but sometimes, a lot of the times, No it's not enough. It depends on the competition. Our standard answer applies here.

Do the drive stacks have enough power and authority to rank a site on their own? It depends. (laughs) I'll let Marco comment on that. What do you think Marco?

Marco: Sorry, I was talking into a muted mic. I totally agree. It depends. And just like you said, sometimes you're pleasantly surprised, sometimes you hit something that you figured is easy but the competition is actually more than you thought so you're going to need more. What's the best way? Well, there's a ton of ways, Bradley was just talking about press releases.

Press releases to drive stack work like gang busters. [crosstalk 00:29:59] Press releases are a form of link building. You could also do link building. [Damian 00:30:07], again, does a great job of link building into the drive stacks. He's been doing it for a few years for us now. So he knows exactly what needs to be done. There's just a ton of things. There's just so much.

If you have a verified Google my visits, you can go into there and drive relevance and power from your Google my visits into your drive over to the money site. I mean, this is endless because of the way that drive stacks work. Once again, I'm going to promote the training. All of this is covered in RYS Reloaded. You don't have to go and try to reverse engineer all of this. The training is available right now in RYS Reloaded. It comes with a Facebook group, webinars, Rob is always in there, providing value so I highly recommend you come and join the training.

Bradley: Yeah. It's a complex beast, John. It's freaking super powerful and very effective but without … I mean you can try to reverse engineer … it took Marco and Gary [Kireon 00:31:16] originally like 18 months of development figuring all of this shit out. So my point is, you're going to spend a shit ton of time trying to reverse engineer stuff or testing and you can get it all done for you basically all the stuff handed to you on a silver platter as to what works if you join the Academy or you just buy done-for-you networks and then you can try to reverse engineer those. Which would be a hell of a lot faster than just kind of trial and error on your own. Right?

But, yeah, I absolutely recommend that it sounds like you like building stuff from your questions, which is great. That's awesome. I would highly recommend that you join the Academy so that you can get the proper training. You'll shortcut your learning curve by months and months if not years.

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What Does The Call Center Tell The Incoming Callers/Leads (For That First Month) Before There's A Contractor To Service The Leads?

All right. Dan's up. “Bradley mentioned on previous hump day using a call center to answer calls for lead-gen sites and having it set up for a month or so before trying to sell to a new client or contractor, what does the call center tell the incoming callers, the leads?”

Dan if I said that I had a call center set up prior to actually selling the leads, well I can't believe I would have said that, I may have, and if I did I apologize because that's not what I meant. What I typically do … now, hold on a minute, what I'm saying is if starting off something brand new most of the time all I'll do is set up a voicemail on, so like I'll use a call redirect number, call forwarding number, and I'll just set up a voicemail. If I do not have a service provider, all I do is set up a voicemail because all I'm looking for is the call records. Right? History of calls.

Some people will leave a message. It's very rare. Most people will call and hang up, but I can go into the virtual phone number dashboard and actually pull call reports. Anything that has a local area code, in my opinion, counts as a valid call. That's just to keep your expenses low, Dan. Only because Answer Connect, which is the call center service I use, I love them. I've been using them sine I first set it up back in 2012. So I've been using them for five, damn near six years now. They are a really great service. But it's rather expensive. Unless you're producing revenue, I don't recommend setting that up. I would just send it to a voicemail. Make sure you're using a call tracking number, that way you can go in and look at call analytics. You can filter out any non-local area codes. Which some of those could be valid calls, but then you can show what type of call volume you're getting. Right?

Then as soon as you get somebody willing to purchase or buy the leads, then you can set up the call center. Since I have a call center set up, it only costs me five bucks per month to set up an additional, what they call, sub-account in Answer Connect. So I've got a primary account number, which is a phone number, and then every other, I've got many sub-accounts underneath that. It only costs five dollars per month per sub-account at Answer Connect. Then you pay for your monthly, excuse me, your minutes. You pay per minute usage as well. So it's very inexpensive.

If you already have it set up, then what you could do is, you could still get the lead's information, just the same type of a script, a lead qualifying script is what I call it, right? Then just nobody ever calls the lead back is my point, if you don't have somebody yet, if you've already got Answer Connect set up then you could certainly do that. I wouldn't say go cancel it just to go back and set it up again, as soon as you get a service provider, but if you don't have that set up yet don't do it. Just use a voicemail, if that makes sense. Okay?

“Do you tell them that someone will call them back?” Well, of course. I mean, if you're using an answering service that's what the as part of the script, typically what I write in the script is after the questions have been answered that I have put into the script, which basically qualifies a lead. Name, address, phone number, type of service requested, best time to call, email address, that kind of stuff and then a brief description of the job. Typically, the answering service says “Okay Mr./Mrs. Whatever. Blank. We'll have our estimator call you back as soon as they can. And that's it. If they don't call them back, so be it. Don't worry about it.

Chris: And we have a pretty good setup on how to do all those things in the MasterMind.

Bradley: Yep. We're going to be covering that starting January 1st. We're going to be building, well, we'll talk about that again after I announce it to the MasterMind members tomorrow. So we'll talk about that a little bit more next week.

Is There A Need To Clean Up Old Citations Pointing To A Domain That Has Been 301 Redirected To The Legitimate Domain In GMB?

Jay says “If a local business has a previously used domain with lots of citations to it and that previous domain has 301 directed to the legitimate domain in GMB, do all these citations need to be cleaned up to reflect legitimate domain or can these citations be left alone?”

Okay, Jay. The real correct, the best answer is yes, they should all be updated because there is still incorrect data out there, right? Remember, Google is … even punctuation, incorrect punctuation on citations can be considered incongruent and can cause NAP or ranking issues, right? And so the name, address, phone number, and URL, like we always talk about citations as NAP; name, address, phone number.

And that's true because that is a legitimate … it doesn't have to have a reference to a link to be a citation. Right? It's a citation. It's a mention of the business. The brand, the address, the phone number. But most citations do have a link. Whether it's a hyperlink, clickable, or just like a text link, it doesn't matter. It still counts. It's still considered a citation. So any of the data, and there's data points if it's incongruent can cause issues.

Now that's the genuine answer, Jay, although I have some properties out there that had the exact same situation you're talking about. A lot of them are old, generic lead-gen sites that have now been, they're being serviced by a contractor now and I set up more branded type domains or pseudo-branded domains and I have the old ones redirected to just like what you're talking about and some of those sites are still ranked in the mass pack, but to be honest with you, in the more competitive areas anytime there's been NAP issues from something like that you have to correct them or you're not going to rank.

The less competitive areas, it may not be as much of an issue. At least in my experience, I've got some properties that are still ranked in the mass pack even though that specific condition you're talking about here exists. But in anything that is a little bit more competitive, no, it really does make a difference and again, I highly recommend, marketer center, I don't know if we have it inside Serpspace. Do we have the citation cleanup inside of Serpspace?

Adam: Yeah, we do.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. You know, it's a good service. It's not as good as the service that we have, or that Loganix has for citation cleanup. That's a lot more expensive. Loganix's citation cleanup is the best I've used. There's no doubt. It's really expensive. I say really expensive but it's worth it. It depends on how many citations are out there, Jay, if you've got hundreds of citations already than just go with the Loganix package.

I hate to say that with Roman on especially, but the reason why I say that is because they'll work on it for like eight to 12 weeks I think. They'll do like three separate attempts for every single directory. They're really, really thorough about it. I noticed that … it's only worth it if you've got a lot of citations out there or a lot of really bad inconsistencies. If it's just a handful of stuff, absolutely do it through Serpspace. You'll save yourself a shit ton of money.

Roman: Yeah, that's exactly it. Because you've got one that's more … one that's a budget solution and the other one that's it's high end. You pay for it. Exactly.

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Bradley: Yep. Okay. And you know, $500 is totally worth it with the amount of work that goes into that. It's ridiculous. If you've ever tried to update citations on your own guys, I'd rather like watch grass grow than do it. It's so tedious.

Do You Have Any General Tips Or Insights About How One Might Offer Freelance SEO Services On A Platform Like Upwork?

Okay. Sam's up. What's up Sam? He's with us in Portland. He says “Hey all, I've been trying to supplement my income by offering SEO services on upwork. I'm still learning myself so my track record is a bit unproven, but I think I can still provide value to people. Do you have any general tips or insights about how one might offer freelance SEO services on a platform like that? Thanks in advance.”

Sam, I'm quite sure, go to Udemy or Udimy or whatever the hell it's called, the digital information training whatever site and go do a search on like upwork SEO. Something like that. I know there's courses out there. I've seen them. That teach people how to, especially digital marketers, how to promote themselves on upwork and freelance and some of those other sites and actually get ranked for keyword searches and stuff like that.

Because I've looked at them in the past. I've never done any of it myself because I've never offered my services on any of those platforms, but I've seen those training courses. So I would recommend just do some Google searches for that and see what you can find.

Anybody have any recommendations?

Adam: I'll just offer some of the general stuff like you can go out there. I would look at other places to drive leads into other places as well, even if you're sending them through upwork. It's a great place to get started, but very quickly, please start being picky. You've got to pay your bills, but be careful about taking on a bunch of crazy pants clients.

Bradley: Yeah, and I wish I could remember off the top of my head. There was one course out there specifically, I sat through a whole webinar one time about this course. It was specifically for SEO's trying to promote themselves on upwork. I almost bought it but I didn't. I can't remember the guys name now. I would point it out if I knew it, Sam, but just do a little bit of research, man. It might take some digging. Some playing around with different type of queries.

Adam: I'll go the other way with this too real quick. Cause Sam I met you in person. You're a personable guy. You're easy to get a long with. We talked. I would say don't give up … you're in Seattle, that's a huge market and especially since you're maybe not having people like beating down your door online to get your services, that don't ignore the local area. If you know anyone, can you help someone again, if you don't have that track record, then you do need some sort of credibility first. I think we might have talked about this in person. Start going out. Maybe there is someone you can help locally. I think that, that do that in parallel with pursuing the online jobs. [crosstalk 00:41:39]

Bradley: Here you go guys. Sorry guys, just real quick. Only $12 for Udemy courses right now. Just go search upwork and look there's a whole bunch of courses here on how to market yourself on upwork.

Chris: So is he in our Master class, MasterMind?

Bradley: No, he's not. I don't think so.

Adam: Nope, not yet.

Chris: Otherwise I would recommend to MasterMind Prospecting [inaudible 00:41:59].

Bradley: Right.

Roman: Yep, like Adam was saying, there's a huge amount of opportunity locally as well. Find out where the business owners are at. A lot of times they have meetings, conferences, things like that and that's where you want to be.

Adam: Well, like Bradley, when you got started, was that Chamber of Commerce?

Bradley: No, actually I didn't do the Chamber of Commerce when I got started because it's like 300 or 400 dollars a year to join and at the time I was broke so I didn't do it. But I went to meet up groups. Just go to meetup.com and you can find like lead-share groups and things like that and those are always great and I've said this before, because people ask, Sam, right here on Hump Day Hangouts before what's the quickest way to find clients?

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We just covered this within the last couple of weeks actually. I recommend, what Adam said, absolutely. Meet up groups, Chamber of Commerce meetings, any sort of lead-share type group stuff, those are all great to get started.

Also, video email prospecting, which is a laser approach. Like a rifle approach. Instead of a shotgun approach. The prospecting funnel that Hernan just mentioned or Chris, I guess it was Chris, just mentioned a moment ago that we're teaching inside the MasterMind right now is more of a shotgun approach. It's a mass approach as opposed to a really like targeted approach. The video email prospecting, which Sam you should have access to because it's in the bonus site, which you should have access to, is I would definitely go through that.

If you don't like going out to live events like networking events, then you can do really, really well with the video email prospecting stuff. It just takes a little bit of time, but it's worth it because the response rate is so high. Okay.

How Do You Use Hangout Millionaire To Promote Affiliate Products In An Ecommerce Store?

All right. Eddie says “I am using Peter Drew's Live Rank Sniper and also recently purchased these Google Site Body Mass Blogger Creator and Hangout Millionaire. I am not sure if I should use Hangout Millionaire to create videos to be used as videos for random affiliate products and for an e-commerce store or if they should be used on a dozen secondary YouTube channels to create videos used only for back links to quality money videos? I already plan on using your video powerhouse for embeds of my quality money videos with all of that. How do you suggest best using Hangout Millionaire? Thank you.”

Okay. That's a great question, Eddie because I'm actually using that right now for a couple of projects. I'm really going to be using it heavily starting in January, but right now I've just been kind of playing with it a little bit.

So what I do is I use the Live Rank Sniper to do all my keyword identification, right? Call it poking. Keyword poking. Figure out which keywords you can rank for. All those channels that I use in Live Rank Sniper are orphaned channels. They have no connection to anything on the web. They're just basically test or spam channels. I just use them to poke keywords.

Once I use the Live Rank Sniper to do the report, do the Google search report and it sends back the text file with all the keywords that rank in the URLs of the videos that ranked. Those are ranked on page one or page two and there's a setting in there. You can only select page one if you want or one or two. They'll return the keywords. Then from that I just go back into the channel. I use Browseo so I'll have multiple channels in there open in various tabs.

I just jump into the channel and delete all the videos and then I go actually input those keywords that ranked with no syndication networks. They're orphan channels. They're just basically spam channels but I've been able to rank on page one or page two with those. So what I do is just take all those keywords and go drop those in Hangout Millionaire to a channel that is actually connected to syndication network or in my case, multiple syndication networks.

That's what I do. Keep in mind if you're going to use the same video over and over again then you may want to split up across a few different channels. Like when you do the actual money videos because somebody could report your channel and it could get terminated, but that's why I like to use multiple tiered syndication networks with one channel so that everything is triggered from one location. That way if that channel gets taken down, for whatever reason, or suspended then all I have to do is replace that channel with another one, but all my syndication networks are intact. It's just a matter of updating applets in, one set of trigger applets at the original source, original channel source. Does that make sense?

So it's just easy to replace if … it's still a pain in the ass, but it's better than having your stuff spread out across multiple channels, which that is kind of pain in the ass to set up too and keep track of is my point. All right. As far as the affiliate products. I don't do it. I'm using it mainly for local stuff. I can't imagine it would be any problem to create videos to be used for random affiliate products and e-commerce store.

As far as the actual link building, using it as a link building tool. For link building to other YouTube videos, yes that works. That absolutely works. In fact, I've tested that in the past where I've had. It's essentially like the same strategy we talk about in the Silo Academy, right? YouTube Silo Academy.

If you've got a video that's stubborn and so what I would do is use something like Power Suggest Pro to go enter in that seed keyword that you're trying to rank for and then scrape a shit ton of really long tailed keywords and search queries that are associated with that keyword. Filter them out to only the most relevant ones and you should end up with a handful. Six, eight, ten, whatever keywords that are longer tailed versions of that shorter tailed one that you're trying to rank. That you're having a hard time with.

Then you can set up a Hangout Millionaire campaign and target, use the longer keywords that you scraped from Power Suggest Pro to all basically build links to that one video and make sure you're using playlists. Put them all on a playlist with your top video, the one that you're trying to rank is at the top of the playlist. So that you link in the Hangout Millionaire video description both to the URL of the top-level video that you're trying to rank, as well as to the container, the playlist URL. Right? You do that and that absolutely works. I've seen significant jumps just from doing that.

Basically you are building a silo and you're using all of the longer tailed keywords, which are actual queries people search for, to push relevancy and keyword theming up to the top-level video. Does that make sense?

Okay. We're going to move on. Hopefully that was helpful.

Spamming YouTube

Eliezer, he's a new Mindset Mastery subscriber, I know that. He posted a question the other day. He says, “Hey guys, for whoever has this idea I'd like to share my results. I decided to spam my YouTube video. It has 400,000 contextual links and well, my entire channel video reviews tanked. I optimized everything else, but I was too aggressive. Normally I would spam web twos, but I just had to test it out to see if it worked. Less than a day. Don't underestimate YouTube's algorithm.” I'll plus one that. Thanks for sharing that, man.

Marco: That's a guy after my own heart, man.

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: I love doing that and seeing what happens. Just don't do it on anything you care about, man.

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: But it's worth the test.

Bradley: Yep. Totally agree. Eliezer, I need to figure out how to pronounce that. Yeah, definitely. That's what we do, is just test the shit out of stuff. We test it. Marco likes to blow shit up because he tries to figure out … that's how you figure out what the threshold is. Right?

Marco: Yep.

Can You Assign Rel=”Canonical” To A GSite?

Bradley: All right. Greg says, “Can you reconicalize a G-site?” Not that I know of, but Marco may be able to answer that better.

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Marco: No, you can only conicalize it up to, what do you call it, a TLD, your own domain.

Bradley: Yes.

Marco: You can do that. You can get conicalized to that. We tried to hack a conical into a G-site. I think Rob tried several ways and it wouldn't pick it up correctly. We're trying, Greg, believe me. It's one of the things that's in the lab. We play a lot with G-sites and see how much we can get away with.

Bradley: Yeah, and to be clear, I'm sorry I didn't say that Greg, but you can conicalize a G-site if you're using a custom domain. You have to set up the domain mapping inside the G-sites dashboard. It's a little geeky doing it. I had a hell of a time doing it. It's kind of weird. You've got to go in and set up C-name records and stuff like that, but it was a pain in the ass. I just remember it being a bitch to do, but then it conicalizes the G-site URL to your custom domain, which is crazy because both sites still exist.

You can still visit the Google site's URL and it exists but it's just conicalized, instead of it being like a redirect, it's a conical. Right? So both sites still exist. Which is actually kind of cool because then you can spam the shit out of the Google site and it will push over to your main domain, essentially your main domain is what the Google site is sitting on, right? People won't see it. It's pretty cool. Right? Very similar to what we do with tag pages and stuff Greg. You should know that. You're in the MasterMind.

How Do You Retrieve An Old Gmail Account That Hasn't Been Used In A Long Time?

Ken Roberts says, “I have a real issue and hope someone can help me. I've been trying to log in to a Gmail account that hasn't been used since back in 2013. Let's see. So it's a valid site, basically valid brand. I'm not going to read the whole question. It's too long.

Roman: I think he's trying to upgrade his email account.

Bradley: Good luck Ken. I know Greg commented in the Syndication Academy Facebook group about that as well and all I would do is echo his statement. His comment and that would be that I would call back and try to get another GMB rep on because the one I know that you talked to said that they couldn't do anything.

I would just try to call back and see if somebody else can help you some way. As long as you can prove that it's like your business or your profile. That kind of stuff. I don't know what their verification requirements are for that, but I know typically I'll try a couple of way to recover an account when I get locked out like this. I've got several of them.

If it takes me 30 minutes and I have not recovered it, I quit. I move on. I know that sucks in your case, but I would try to do something like maybe reissue a GMB and have it re-verified under a different Gmail account. What I think Greg mentioned to you. It's so much fucking work trying to jump through the hoops they put in front of you.

It's just not worth it, unless it's an unique situation, which it sounds like it may be in your case Ken. Somebody else want to comment on that?

Roman: When you talk to the people just refuse to hang up and just drive them nuts and maybe you'll eventually get what you want. (laughs)

Bradley: The squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?

Okay. Cool. I think we're almost done guys.

Keith says, “It's a bloody good course.” He's talking about SEO Boot Camp. Jennia says the same thing guys. I'm telling you. It's worth it. Pick it up. If you've got to use PayPal Credit, do it. Cause it will go up to a thousand bucks if you don't. “I had purchased SEO Boot Camp. Highly recommend program and learning a lot from Jeffrey Smith, the SEO ninja. Thanks for having him on.” Absolutely. He is awesome. “I have some questions I would like to address before I create and publish anything.” Credit niche. Guys we've got to wrap this up too. So I'm going to try to run through this as quick as I can.

“Credit Niche is used for example only. Do you think this URL structure would be over optimization?” Yes. Absolutely, Jennia. My methodology, now I haven't gotten that far into the course yet of what Jeffrey recommends but I can tell you my own experiences. I always try to keep my category slugs and my post URLs and page URLs very, very short and succinct and not over optimized. Actually, Jennia, if you're in Syndication Academy I'm going to be covering best practices for content and marketing and post and page optimization in the webinar that we're going to have five minutes from ow.

So if you're in Syndication Academy I highly recommend you join the webinar today. If not, if you can't make it you can always watch the replay, but I'm going to be covering that and personally, I would not. I might have like … you've got credit in the route, credit here, top-level category, child category you've got credit, and then you've got credit in the post URL.

In my opinion, that's way, way, way over optimized. I might do Creditpros.com/repair/maybe blemish if that's an actual keyword/how to repair credit fast. Having it in the slug there is not so bad because it's so far removed from the route where the other occurrence would be, but I would absolutely not have it in every one of those. That's way over optimized, in my opinion.

Anybody else want to comment on that?

Roman: Yeah, I'm not a big fan of physical silos like that, that run that deep.

Bradley: Yep.

Roman: Virtual silos are, in my opinion, better. This has it's place for physical silos like that but it's … and those URLs are ridiculously over optimized.

Bradley: Yep. I kind of agree with Roman here, in that, it depends on the type of site. Like, in this case, it sounds like it's more like a national site instead of local. If you're doing local and you're covering different geographic areas it makes sense to have the physical silo structure, which just means your permanent link structure is set up to show category/post name. Right?

So you see the actual silo structure in the URL, but you can still accomplish the same thing by just doing the post name permanently structure. You still do all of your internal linking. You still stack all your content within their proper categories, child categories, and posts and that sort of thing, but you can have it much shorter where it would be creditpros.com/howtorepaircreditfast. You wouldn't see all this other stuff here.

But even if those aren't shown, don't over optimize them. I still would follow as if I was showing it in the URL. I would still keep it short and succinct. But again, on local stuff, I like to show, for local stuff, I like to show the hierarchy of how the locations are stacked. So it might be top-level category state, then maybe county as the child category, and then city as the post. Something like that, but again, it just depends and what Roman said is absolutely true. A virtual silo can accomplish the same end results without all this crap.

Roman: Yeah, I mean, virtual silos are easier to manage because setting pages up, and things like this can be a real pain when you start getting into other CMSs and stuff like that. If you can accomplish the same thing without it, it's much better.

Bradley: Totally agree.

Adam: Well, I've got something I need to say and that is you want one of these awesome, awesome shirts you should come join the MasterMind. I mean, there's like 10 billion other reasons but I mean, I don't know, these are pretty nice too.

Bradley: Well, that's the icing on the cake, guys if there was ever a reason to join the MasterMind it's to get the shirt. (laughs).

All right. Thanks everybody. We'll see you all, well some of you, on the Syndication Academy webinar and the rest of you or some others we'll see tomorrow on the MasterMind webinar. The rest of you, we'll see you next week. Thanks guys.

Adam: Adios.

Chris: Bye, bye.

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