Click on the video above to watch Episode 94 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: Well nobody’s going to believe it but we’re laughing about a flag. Anyways, welcome everybody to Humpday Hangouts, episode 94. Today is the 24th of August. We’ve got everybody here, so let’s say hello. Chris, how’s it going man?
Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?
Adam: Can’t complain, it’s good to be back. Hernon how are you doing?
Chris: Hey guys, hey everyone, it’s really good to be here.
Adam: Good deal. Marco what’s up with the weather today?
Marco: Oh man it’s beautiful. It’s been beautiful all day. Couldn’t be better. Wish you guys were here.
Adam: Yeah, no kidding. Last but not least, Bradley, how are you doing?
Bradley: I’m good man. I don’t have my curtain up because it’s too damn hot here, so…
Adam: Yeah, I think we’ve got about the same weather. You’re probably a couple degrees warmer, so.
Bradley: Yeah, it’s too hot for that, man. Last week I tried to do it with the curtain up and by the end of the webinar I was sitting in a puddle and I was like, ugh, I’m not doing that again, so.
Adam: Good deal. Well we don’t have a whole lot of announcements today for everybody so we’re just going to roll through this. If you got the Humpday Hangout’s announcement email you know that we’ve got via Mastery PR a pretty cool launch coming out next week, so [inaudible 00:01:09] Kingpin will be sending out some more information about that. If you’re involved in content which as an SEO, a marketer, a freelancer, agency owner, this is something you want to keep your eye out for.
Bradley: If you’re no the web you’re dealing with content.
Adam: Yeah. If you want to speed it up, if you want to save money, if you want to free up your time to work on your business then this is definitely something you want to be checking out. Also, we wanted to mention we got a lot of responses about the announcement of Google hangouts and how they’re changing that. While we appreciate everybody’s responses I would ask if you want to post in our groups, that’s fine, please don’t message Bradley privately because when 200 people do that, that gets kind of tough. Like I said, we do appreciate when people send us stuff, but by all means, share it on our page, do something like that so, Bradley if you want to just mention to people what the deal is with that and how we’re not going down in flames any time soon.
Bradley: The deal is Google hangouts, being able to initiate a hangout on air from Google, is being stopped. It’s not going to be available to do that anymore. I’ve gotten dozens and dozens of private messages from all our little helper bees out there that wanted to relay the message to me, as if I didn’t already know. So we do appreciate it but use the public groups to do that guys because it does become quite a bit annoying when I get 150 PMs from people saying, “Did you know?”, “No I hadn’t heard before but thanks.”
That said, we always initiate everything through YouTube guys, we always have, ever since day one. So it shouldn’t affect us at all. Until it actually rolls out we won’t be 100% sure but it should not affect us at all. Google Plus is not going anywhere, and you guys all just come to the event page. Everything that we set up on our end for the webinars is done through YouTube so it shouldn’t affect us at all, but just wanted to give you guys a heads up. We are aware of it, so please don’t PM me. Other than that, yeah we’re good to go.
Adam: Sounds good. Anybody else have anything we need to talk about?
Chris: I think we’re good.
Adam: Al right let’s get rolling.
Bradley: All right, cool, we got questions, so let me grab the screen. Oops, wrong button. Grab the whole screen and lock it. You guys confirm that we are good to go.
Adam: Looking good. Got your whole screen.
Bradley: I really like the gift that you put in there Adam.
Adam: Thank you. I found out slack has a bot, for anybody out there who’s using slack. You just give it a keyword and it randomly pulls one in so you never know what you’re going to get.
Bradley: So you put “Like a boss” in there and this is what it did?
Adam: Yeah, watch this. I’ll do this again live because this is what people really want to see on Humpday Hangouts.
Bradley: That’s really nice.
Adam: There we go. There’s number two.
How To Sell The Benefits Of IFTTT Networks To Local Business Owners?
Bradley: It can’t be all business, you know what I mean? Okay, I kind of like the dancing dickhead better, this one. Anyways, all right, let’s get into it. Mark O’Connell’s got the first question.
Mark O’Connell: Hi guys, hope you are well, go at question for you Bradley.
Bradley: All right.
“I know you mentioned in the V2 training about selling networks to local business owners, but how do you sell them on the benefits and how were you prospecting when you were selling multiple networks a month? I know that might be too in depth to answer here but I can-” The old network’s pretty damn fast now, well that’s sweet Mark. -“and would like to be able to build up some cash by selling some networks, so any advice on prospecting and selling benefits would be much appreciated. Thanks.
That’s actually a really good question Mark. You know we have, I thought I had training in the V2 course about reselling networks. If not, I know that we did it in the monetization webinar which was the bonus webinar after the launch was over. So you might want to go back and review that because we talk about monetizing it in there in depth, but we can cover it briefly here as well.
When I was selling a lot of networks it was basically because … well, first of all I had a pretty big client base so when I started selling networks I was able to, just basically what I call shake the bushes, and that’s just go hit my existing client base and up sell them on additional services so that was pretty simple. Whenever I go to prospect or pitch for any new clients, which I do very little of now, if at all, but when I was pitching or prospecting clients, it’s just part of an overall SEO strategy.
So, when I would, it wasn’t necessarily that I was just selling them a network and that was it. It was an overall strategy for marketing services, right? Which would include SEO, local SEO if they were a local business and content marketing. It’s all one in the same. When I provide marketing services it’s not just SEO on page or off page. Very, very rarely did I ever have any clients where I was just providing link building services for example. Most of the time it was an all encompassing overall marketing strategy which included on page SEO, social media, content marketing, off page SEO so link building, that kind of thing, but all of that was pretty much accomplished through the IFTTT networks and content marketing, right? So that’s pretty much the foundation that all of my SEO services were built upon and that’s how I’ve been doing it for years.
As far as selling on the benefits, what I would do is I would ask questions of prospects. By the way, in case you guys aren’t aware of that, that’s the best way to pitch clients is to ask them questions about their marketing strategy because then you allow them to speak and uncover their weaknesses for you. Then you can craft their message based around their responses and you can actually lead them into coming … They come to the realization that the marketing sucks on their own without you having to point that out because you just get them talking about their marketing strategies.
So one of the things that I would do often is I would ask Mr Business Owner, are you doing any social media marketing? Invariably or 90% of the time, the answers were either no, or yeah, we post on our Facebook page occasionally but it’s never done anything for us. And that’s it. Those are pretty much the two standard responses that I would get was either no we don’t do any social media marketing or yes I did this or that and it didn’t work so I stopped.
So I would explain to them, look, I completely understand, if you only post on your Facebook page every now and then or send a Tweet out every now and then you can’t really expect to get any results, and I understand because you’re running your business that you don’t have time to manage all these social media profiles and properties. However, yo would agree that if you were to have consistency in your social media marketing you’d probably see some fairly good results, am I right? Yes. Okay, well what were you doing whenever you tried to do any social media marketing? Tell me what your strategy was. Then I let them talk a little bit so that I’d get to hear about how bad it was. Then I would use some of their answer in part of what I would say about okay, well, this is what we can do. Would you agree?
You always want to ask leading questions where you can get that yes. You want to keep getting a yes answer out of your prospects because that puts them in that positive frame of mind later where they’re more likely to say yes later on to your proposal, but again, ask a lot of questions.
Then what I would do is I would explain to them that if we had a way where we could just focus on updating content in one location, which would be their main website or blog, but you don’t say blog to a prospect because they don’t understand what that means most of the time. You just say if we were to update content in just one location on a regular basis your website, and then have that content automatically distributed across all of your social media profiles, plus all the main social media platforms. I would list them off, Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube if you’re using video, Pinterest if you wanted to, I would start naming off the main ones they would know about. I would say plus, in addition to that, about 15 other sites, social media and web 2.0 platforms and I would say other sites on the web where we could republish your content, all from one location, you only have to manage one location, don’t you think that would be a lot easier to manage? Well, yeah of course it would. They would say, well yeah, of course it would.
All right, here, let me show you what, this is a service that I can provide and let me show you how it works. I would show them a graphic, the same graphic that you guys have access to, which would just show that wheel essentially, that network ring. I would say look this is the center point here, this is your website, all we need to do is make sure that I have this system, or this structure, set up properly. Everything’s going to be branded, it’s going to have a consistent theme, the graphics are going to be consistent across all of them so it’ll be your branding, your logo, all of that. All we need to do is update content from your website. Published content regularly and consistently to your website and that’s going to automatically update all of these properties which is going to help with your SEO, in other words it’s going to help you rank better in Google and it’s also going to help generate additional traffic outside of Google because on all of those platforms there’s traffic as well.
That’s how I would always frame it. I wouldn’t’ frame it as … Trust me, guys, I’m 100% guilty of using SEO terminology with prospects, and that’s the quickest way to lose a prospect is to start using our industry terms with them.
Adam: Yeah, no techno babble. Tell them the results and walk them through what’s going to happen.
Bradley: That’s right.
Adam: Get them thinking about what they’re going to have at the end of this.
Bradley: You want to simplify it. Dumb it down, so to speak, for the clients. You don’t want to use the techno babble as Adam just said. You want to really, like I said, I had really good success with always asking a lot of questions, asking leading questions to where I’d get them to agree and say yes, yes, yes multiple times. Then I would use some of their responses to the questions that I ask in how I would frame my proposal. It was pretty much a no-brainer. I probably sold an 80% close ratio on … I don’t have exact figures, but I would say probably 8/10 people that I would pitch a network to I’d be able to sell them on it.
Even clients that I didn’t have ongoing SEO services with I could still sell IFTTT networks to if they were doing some sort of content regular publishing on their, even irregular. For example, I have an eye doctor client. She’s one of the most low maintenance clients I’ve ever had. I’ve had her for four years. She was one of my first clients. I still do SEO services for her. You guys would puke if you found out how little I charged her per month, but sh was one of my first clients and she’s just been grandfathered into that price ever since.
She does a blog post about once per quarter. Once per quarter a year, guys, that’s like once every three months she’ll do a blog post. But that was enough for me to be able to sell her on an IFTTT network, even though I don’t do any content marketing for her, all I do is maintain her maps position and that’s it. Because she posted once every quarter or so, so about three or four posts per year is really what she does, I told her, hey you would benefit from having this network. I explained it to her and so she purchased it. I was able to make $700 or $800 or whatever it was that I charged. Actually, at the time for her it was probably a lot less, but to charge her for that network and now every time she does a post it syndicates out across her network. THere’s not nearly as much activity as she should have, but I was still able to sell her on that network.
So, hopefully that was helpful. Adam you’d know, what’s the name of that, is it Ask? The name of the book.
Adam: Yeah, it’s by Ryan Levesque, if I messed up his name I’m sorry, but it’s Ask. Yes you can, yeah.
Bradley: That’s a great book. There’s another one. Shit I can’t remember then name of it now. If I can think about it, there’s another book that I read that was similar to that one and that’s the one that taught me how to ask questions the correct way when prospecting. It’s kind of a sales type book, but, if I can remember it after the webinars guys I’ll come back and post it on this page, a link to that book, because it was a really, really good book.
How Many Tiers Are Allowed When Setting Up Non-Video RSS Networks?
Adam: The next one is Greg. He says, “How deep can I set up my RSS not video networks? Tier 3, tier 4. My tier 2 is well themed and all running independent RSS feeds slow drip or would it be better just to juice the tier 2 networks? Also about interlinking between networks if they are the same people where person would be on separate tier 2 network and the company on tier 1? Muchos gracias”
I don’t understand the second part of the question about interlinking. “the same people where the person would be on separate tier 2 network and company-” I don’t really follow that one.
But as far as how far out can you go? You can go out as far as you want with the automated networks, guys, although I don’t recommend that for websites. For YouTube, fine. I really don’t recommend doing that for websites, guys, as I’ve said 1,000 times, and this will be 1,001 I really recommend that you only do a tier 1 network for your websites.
You can, look Greg, if you’re doing everything like you just mentioned, you’ve got it well themed and you’re running independent RSS feeds, then that’s great, that’s perfect. I still wouldn’t go beyond tier 2 myself personally because it’s just so complicated if you start going out to tier 3 and tier 4.
There’s so many different parts that can breakdown that the maintenance required to keep that running smoothly, to me, is there’s just … What do they call it? The Law of Diminishing Returns. At some point it’s going to be too cumbersome to maintain. In fact, I think tier 2 networks are too cumbersome to maintain for blog syndication. For YouTube it’s a no brainer because it doesn’t require any maintenance. But for blog syndication it does because you’ve always got to be monitoring feeds and things like that. You can use ServeSpace or network monitor to help ease that pain a bit, but it’s still going to be a bit cumbersome to monitor all that stuff.
Anytime anybody else’s feed goes down, now you’ve lost a content source you’ve gotta go in and update your networks and all that kind of stuff. To me, it’s not worth it if you’re only doing one or two or a handful of sites guys, then by all means do it, but when you start managing multiple sites, guys, it becomes too much of a pain in the ass. In my opinion I’d rather just stick with a tier 1 network and just really build that up and I’d get just as good of results out of that really.
But yeah, Greg, as far as I’m concerned. You can go out as long as you’re setting it up correctly the way that we suggest and you’re minimizing your footprint. You can’t eliminate it, but you can minimize it, then you can go out as far as you want but I think your time is better spent somewhere else, though, really.
As far as the interlinking, if you’re on the webinar now Greg, if you want to post a little bit more clarification about the second part, I’d be happy to answer that, I’m just not real clear on what you’re asking here.
When Poking, What Is The Going Rate To The Client For A Page 1 Google Keyword That You Find?
Nate’s next. Hey Nate. He usually says, “Hey, Nate here.” Nate says, “When poking what is the going rate to the client for a page 1 Google keyword that you find? How do you protect it from someone else just coming in and using it?”
Well, the going rate, it depends. Every keyword is going to be different, at least that’s the way I do it. I mentioned this before and I know a lot of people think I’m crazy but when I do wholesale SEO services to video production companies, my typical rate is $100 per month per video, that’s it. Or $100 per month per keyword really. That’s very, very low, but I don’t have to do any of the sales, I don’t have to do any of the client … I don’t’ have to deal with the client at all, the video production company handles all of that. They just send me the work order, I do the work, I get paid. So to me $100 a month per keyword is perfect because it’s like hands free for me. All I gotta do is maintain my networks and do the SEO. You know, I’m the man be hind the curtain and pay no attention to me type thing.
As far as, it varies, if it’s going to be something really competitive, you’re going to want to charge a lot more. If it’s something dead simple to rank then you don’t’ have to charge very much. In fact, if I’m doing a foot in the door strategy with video SEO, which is typically what I use video SEO for guys is a foot in the door strategy. Video SEO is not my main revenue-generating activity. It’s not my main service. I love to use VIDEO SEO as a foot in the door because I can get results fairly quickly and I can prove that I know what I’m doing to a prospect, and then from that point I can up sell them on map services or organic services or now paper click services because I’m doing that now.
So I can up sell them on website redesign. I can up sell them on IFTTT networks and content marketing services. When it comes to just video SEO if I go to a client or like, for example, the video production company comes to me and says, Hey look we’ve got a client here and they’re interested in these five keywords instead of just one, what can you do for me?
What I’ll do is I’ll go poke those five keywords plus a whole bunch of others, once I do my keyword research and I figure out what other potential keywords there are that could be beneficial to their business. The ones that rise to the top or rise the highest are the ones that I’ll go back to the client and say, okay, look, here’s the deal. Especially if a lot of them are easy. If I test 10 keywords and they want five keywords and I can get three keywords to page 1 with no SEO work because I’m just poking it. I test them and I know I can get them to page 1 without even doing any SEO work, then all I’m doing is working on two keywords maybe that are going to require a little bit of SEO work.
So I might give them a deal and say it’s not going to be $500 for five videos for the month, I might do a deal and say I’ll give you five videos at $80 a month per video so it’ll be $400 a month. What’s interesting then is I’m really only working on two videos anyways and I’m getting $400 a month because the other three I’ve already proved by poking that I can rank those with no work.
So my point is I actually end up making more money by offering a package deal with more keywords, but many of those keywords don’t require any work. So I end up getting more money on a volume basis. I get less money per video but more money because of the volume but I’m doing less work because I’m only working on a couple of the keywords. Sot hat’s just something typically I’ll do.
For example one of the more recent jobs that I did for that company was five videos. I charged the guy $450 a month for five videos. What I ended up doing was I poked 34 keywords and I ended up ranking 14 keywords, 14 videos for him and I charged him $450 a month. Well I wasn’t going to go in and take all those other videos down. They were already up and generating traffic. So all Id id was way over deliver. When I said on the report you guys paid for five, here’s 14, how do you like me now? That client’s been paying me for like 14 months for various video SEO services and now we’re probably going to end up doing some ad words for video campaigns for them as well which is great.
My point is that’s kind of the beauty about poking Nate, is that when you get a client or a prospect even, and you can rank multiple keywords for them and then go back to them … And it doesn’t require any work. Why not give that to them or charge them less money per video and do it as a package where you end up generating more revenue? My point is it’s really simple to dot hat and you end up over-delivering and you really wow the customer at that point.
That’s when it opens up the door for other services that can be even more lucrative like maps ranking or PPC management or whatever.
When you say, “How do you protect it from someone else just coming in and using it?” I don’t’ know what you mean with that because if it’s on your channel nobody else can come in and take over your video. If you’re worried about somebody else seeing that you ranked a video and then reverse engineering it and seeing that you did absolutely zero SEO work and were able to rank it and so they want to come rank against it, well that’s the nature of SEO. It’s competitive and so you’ve just got to be a little bit better than your competitor to beat them out. You’re here on these webinars every week Nate, so trust me, you’re better than your competitor.
Can I get a plus one from you guys on that?
Bradley: Yeah.
How Important It Is To Fully Optimize A Joomla Website?
Dan you have to optimize the Joomla site. You can’t take a page, a web page, that is way over-optimized or not optimized at all and just point a well-optimized page to it with the 301 redirect and expect that page to rank. Remember, a 301 redirect essentially removes the content from that 301 redirect. The content is still there but Google doesn’t read the content on that page because it sees the redirect and immediately redirects to the final destination, the target URL. So it doesn’t even consider the content on the 301 redirect page. So, you have to optimize the destination. The final target URL that has to be optimized correctly or else you wont’ get any results. Or you’ll get poor results, for that matter.
So you still have to optimize the Joomla site regardless, and then, you know you’re … In fact, your 301 site, guys, if you wanted to you could take your client’s site and set up your own domain and just do straight 301 redirects with zero content or anything and just do all your link building to your own domain. You can do that. What I typically do is I will optimize the client’s site and then make a clone of it.
In this case, since it’s a Joomla site, I’ve never worked with Joomla so I don’t know if you can clone [inaudible 00:24:25] and then turn it into a Word Pro site, you might have to do some manual work to make that happen, but what I would do is optimize the client’s site, the [inaudible 00:24:33] site ,then I would create my own WordPress site with the same content and everything that’s on the client’s site and then 301 on a page by page basis from my domain to the client’s site, build all my links, not citation links, guys, citation links are going to have to go directly to the client’s site, but any off page link building I’m doing with like PBNs or anything that I’m doing outside of content syndication via IFTTT networks and citations and press releases where you’re going to want to have the client’s domain obviously in the press release, I would be building links to my own domain, which is then 301 redirected.
The reason why I like to do that guys, is make a clone of the site first before doing the 301 redirect, is so that in case the client and I end up parting ways, when I remove the 301 redirects I have an exact clone of that site. All I would do was swap out the critical details, like the company name and the company logo and stuff like that. I’ll change some of the wording on the pages and stuff so that it’s not 100% duplicate page. It’ll be shifted up and changed up a little bit, but the bulk of the work is done because you already did that when you optimized the client’s site.
So if I get a new client and that’s what I’m going to do is build them like a brand new WordPress site, then I’ll build the Word Press site for them, completely optimized to their site and everything, then I’ll make a clone of it and install that on one of my own servers, or one of my own hosting accounts on my domain and just do a strictly page by page one to one ratio redirect and then I’ll build links to my domain instead.
So if they decide they don’t need me down the road, I remove those 301 redirects, make some changes to the pages so that it’s not an exact duplicate to their site, but all the link building that I had been doing to my domain remains. It doesn’t mean that their site’s going to fall out of the index. It doesn’t happen like that. If you were providing proper services to them, like content marketing and citation building and doing press releases and things like that, you still will have built up the SEO on their own domain, but all of the additional link building stuff that you do will be running through your own domain, so when you remove the redirects, you are in a good position to rank with little work. Wit ha lot less work than it took to initially rank the client’s site because you already have built in SEO and backlinks into the domain that you had been redirecting, if that makes sense.
It’s not like if you remove the redirect the client’s site falls out of the index and yours appears magically where they did. It doesn’t happen like that, but it still puts you in a much better position where you have a lot less work to do. Does that make sense?
Facebook Brand/Product Page VS Google My Business Page
All right question 2. “Can I get away with a product or brand for Facebook page or must I get an address and use the local business option for the Facebook page?”
No, I think I’ve probably only actually set up two local business Facebook pages before. Everything else I just use the product or brand page, so I don’t, guys I’m not a huge Facebook guy. I don’t do a whole lot of stuff on Facebook so I’m not sure. Maybe one of the other guys, like Hernan, could comment on this. I’m not sure how powerful the local business pages are for SEO. They might be, I just don’t have a lot of experience with them.
Hernan: Well the problem with Facebook is that it’s not clear … Let’s talk about ranking in Facebook itself because ti has it’s own search engine. It’s not really clear about what are the rules of the game, you know, when it comes to ranking in Facebook. In terms of ranking in Google, it’s definitely a good parasite as long as your page is public because otherwise if there is any kind of issues when crawling that page. For example, for private groups and those kind of things, Facebook gets kind of jealous when sharing with Google a lot of information.
I understand that Google cannot crawl like 95% of Facebook, maybe even more. So, I think that it’s a good parasite. You should probably check on SEM rush because that will give you an idea of how many pages are ranking from Facebook, or local pages or general pages from Facebook on Google. That will give you an idea of the potential that can be a parasite, but I highly doubt that those local details will work the same as well Google Business, like validating or becoming a real citation when it comes to a local business. You know what I mean? So you can rank it but I don’t think they will add up to your data because, again, Facebook gets kind of jealous when sharing formation with Google. So that would be my intake on it.
Bradley: Yeah, I mean, like I said I typically just set up a brand page and that’s it. I don’t usually dot he local page so I just don’t know how much of a benefit that would have. I’d have to do some more testing on that. Like I said, I typically just set up a brand page and run with it. It’s just easier to set up and that’s all I usually ever do.
Do You Use VA When Doing Local Citations?
Bradley: All right Brian says, “When doing local citations do you use a VA outsource to someone like Fiverr market or do you use the Ax story company and let them handle citations?”
I use two services Brian. The same two service I’ve been using for a long time now and that’s Marketer Center, we have a link for that somewhere, and also Loganix. Loganix is expensive but they’re really, really good, especially if you’re in the US. I can’t speak for them outside of the US. We’ve had some Mastermind members that said the results weren’t as good as what I had described for the US market from Loganix .
I usually use Marketer Center unless I’ve got a citation cleanup job to do or if I’m doing the ongoing monthly service which is a great service from Loganix by the way. They have an ongoing citation building service which is $150 a month but they build like 30 citations per month. I don’t have the exact figures off the top of my head, but it’s something like 20 actual business directory citations and then it’s 10 multimedia citations per month so it might be image directories or video links or audio links or whatever every month. They do tiered link building to that, sot hey build links to the citations that they build. That’s only $150 a month so I actually outsource a lot of my citation building now to Loganix just because it’s so much easier. It’s so much easier just to send them the job and let them do it and it gets done.
Marketer Center is great because Marketer Center is … It’s Andrew Sharer is his name, the guy who runs that, and he’s a good dude. He set up his whole entire service to be a white label service. So the pricing is really, really good in marketer Center. You can white label the reports. They generate the reports for you and everything. It’s a really good service. If you’re on an economy scale, I would definitely recommend going with Marketer Center. If you’ve got a bigger budget and you want higher quality work, not that Marketer Center is bad work, I’m just saying it’s the difference between driving a Honda Accord and driving a Cadillac. The Cadillac is Loganix , the Honda Accord is Marketer Center. They’re both really good services so it just really depends on your budget.
I never recommend using fiber for citation building, guys, just don’t do it. C’mon, spend a little bit more money, get some better services. Hiring your own virtual assist is okay, but you’ve got to train them properly, because remember even a punctuation being out of place in citation causes data inconsistency and that can wreak havoc on your NAP and your ranking ability. So, you don’t want to do that. I really don’t like to use VAs for creating citations. The only time I like to use VAs for citation work is when they’re cleaning up a bad or a messy citation situation, but even then now I just outsource that to Loginix. It’s a $500 service but they do an outstanding job of citation clean up. tHey do a great job of it.
Video Marketing Blitz Webinar
Clark’s next. He says, “Last week you talked about a webinar you were going to do about your experience using video marketing blitz. I purchased VMB from your webinar and I am current IFTTT 2.0 member so the subject would be of great interest. Was that open to the public or was that only for one of your groups?
Clark, we mailed out the invitation to the webinar to everybody that purchased. I’m sure we sent more than just one e-mail but the webinar did occur and yes you have access to it. You just need to, I guess, reach out to us via support and we’ll make sure you get access to it. Support@semanticmastery.com, just let us know that you purchased VMB, provide us with proof of purchase, we’ll send you the link. If you’re into Mastermind you can see it regardless of whether you purchased it or not. If you didn’t, if you weren’t in the Mastermind and you want to see it, just send us a proof of purchase and we’ll send you the link.
We’re going to do a followup webinar on that in about five or six weeks because I want to show … We got a virtual assistant now in place that’s going to be running that software like full time and so we’re going to really scale the campaigns up that we talked about in the first webinar for this and we’re going to do a followup webinar in a few weeks so you guys can see what we can do with video marketing blitz when we’ve got somebody working the software full time.
Again guys, I don’t recommend you guys do any of this stuff yourselves, man, outsource it if you can. Sot hat’s really what I want to do is show you guys the potential of this software when you’ve got people doing the work for you. So the followup webinar will come out. Anybody that purchased will get a notification on that ahead of time as well.
Do You Use An Indexing Service To Post To Second Tier Blogs?
Earl we used to have an automated way to do that. Unfortunately it was the Backlink Commando plugin and it integrated with Backlinks Indexer and it was a 100% automated way to actually extract all your web 2 post URLs and submit them to an indexing service without you having to do a damn thing other than set the plug in up. Unfortunately, Sean Donahoe decided to stop selling that plug-in and even supporting it for that matter, so, unfortunately we do not have a way. I talked to Chris, our partner, we mentioned this before, I don’t remember what … Chris if you’re on maybe you can comment. I mentioned to you something about us building a service that would integrate with Backlink’s Indexers API. What did we decide on that? Maybe Chris isn’t paying attention.
Chris: Playing hard to get, all right I see.
Bradley: I couldn’t remember what the conversation … I know we talked about it, I just don’t remember. I think it was just we got too many projects to work on that right now. It is something that we would like … Unless somebody else beats us to market with it, which is fine, I don’t care, I just want a solution Earl just like you’re asking. Right now I’m not doing anything for that because the plug-in doesn’t work anymore. So unfortunately there’s not hing you can do other than have your virtual assistants … If they’re creating the post, like for example, my content curators when they post the post, they can actually go extract … I’m not even having them do it right now because all of my clients are well-established existing clients so it’s not so necessary anymore, I’ve gotten my clients to where they need to be, so it’s just a matter of maintaining their rankings.
If you’re starting a new project, yeah, it would probably be, unfortunately, I don’t know of an automated way to do this anymore. So I would say a virtual assistant would be a good way to do that, would be to just extract all your post URLs from the IFTTT network and submit them once per week to an indexing service. Or at least when they create a new post they could … Like for example, let’s say you’ve got a virtual assistant curating posts for you once per week. Let’s say they did a post last week and now it’s this week and they’re about to publish another post, they could go extract all the post links from last week and submit them to an indexing service this week and just keep doing that. That would be an efficient way to handle that. At least as efficient as we can make it right now without an automated way.
Bradley: So I don’t know guys, eventually we might have a solution. To me, I’m not a developer, so I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, but it seems to me like it would be fairly simple to create a plug-in that that’s all it does is scrape the RSS feeds from a particular, like if we posted in all the RSS feeds from our web 2 network, the IFTTT network, I think there’s like seven or eight properties that give us an RSS feed as an output. If we just posted those into a plug-in it would just extract the most recent items in the RSS feeds and then submit them via API to an indexing service. I can’t imagine that being too difficult but I don’t know.
What Is Your Take On Rapid Article Generators Like Article Forge, Articoolo, Content Professor & Article Builder?
All right Glenn’s up, he says, “Since today’s Hangout reminder e-mail spoke of quality content, what’s you guys’ take on the rapid article generator like Article Forge, Articoolo, Content Professor, Article Builder, etc? I’ve not heard of that one, content professor article builder, et cetera. I can’t stand article writing outsourcing. I feel like I have to write an in depth article telling the writer what I want written to get anything usable back.”
Glenn I totally understand. That’s what Content Kingpin is all about. It launches next Tuesday, so in six days. It’s specifically how all of my virtual assistants, how I run my content marketing business. Those article creators are okay for link building, but never tier 1 link-building, guys, they should only be for tier 2 link-building or beyond, those automatic article generators because the quality of those articles is pretty poor. Hernon?
Bradley: Even if they are readable, like for example, Article Builder, they are super overused so they will not pass Copyscape in a million years. So article IV, article foundry, Essay Content machine, I’ve tested them all and as Bradley was saying, there’s little to … I would say nothing beats content curation in the way that it’s presented on Content Kingpin, plus it’s going to be dirt c heap on the launch, you know? So it’s an investment on your business and you can get a completely untrained VA on one end. If that’s your problem, Glenn, you can train a VA using Content Kingpin alone. So you can plug a VA that’s completely untrained on one end and you wile get a curator on the other end because that’s the main idea of the program. That will pretty much solve your entire content needs forever.
Hernan: Yeah, and here’s the thing. I talk about this at length inside Content Kingpin, guys. I’ll give you a little preview of it right now. What I did was I taught virtual assistance. I learned how to curate on my own first. Obviously I was unable to scale pas at certain point so I had to start teaching virtual assistants to do it. So I’ve got two types of curators and curating is so much better than buying shitty content from an article farm, from a content farm, guys. First of all those writers aren’t content subject matter experts, trust me, they’re not. All they do is go scrape articles from the web and then spin them and then go through and sometimes, if you get a good content farm writer, which is rare, but if you do get a good content farm writer, they’ll put it through a spinning software and then they’ll go through and edit the syntax to make it more readable.
Even that, you’re lucky if you find that. So those articles are all trash, they’re garbage, they’re worthless in my opinion. You’re so much better curating content where you go find high authority subject matter experts on the topic in which you need to write about and get some content, collect some content, organize it in a logical way and then re-publish parts of it, snippets of it, to reinforce your overall idea for your blog post. Whatever idea you’re trying to convey, you use other people’s content to basically reinforce what it is that you’re trying to say. You just inject your own commentary or your own opinion between the curated pieces of content. I’ve got curators that do curating for PBNs, they’re Philippines VAs, so I basically pay them about $4.50 per hour to curate but they can curate three posts per hour. So that comes out to be about $1.50 per curated post. It’s much higher quality that content farm articles, n umber one, n umber two, I get it for cheaper. Number three the curated posts are quality content from authority sources that know what the hell they’re talking about when it comes to that subject.
The I have money site curators. I’ve got one in England, one in Africa, and one in America. So I’ve got three money site curators that publish posts for my client blogs and my client sites and things like that because they’re native English speakers. My UK writer I pay her $30, but she’ll publish two posts in an hour. So that’s like, I pay $15 per curated post, so that’s not a problem. Then I’ve got a curator in Africa, Ester, she’s fantastic, and I pay her between $8 to $12 per curated post but I charge the client anywhere between $20 to $35 per curated post, it just depends on the client.
So there’s a lot of money that can be made from content marketing. That’s what the whole entire course of Content Kingpin’s about. That’ll answer all your questions, Glenn. It’s launching next Tuesday for $47, you’d be crazy if you didn’t pick it up.
There’s Nate saying hi everybody, I knew we’d find it somewhere. “Ganti, what’s up Ganti?” He says, “Don’t PM me.”
How To Get The Best Results From RYS Service?
Paul says, “Hey guys, my question is about how to get the best results from the RYS service. I have a client that I want to rank in the mass pack. He is already in the first phase of Google with his website but not ranking the mash pack. I’m going to do press release. My question is should I do the PR first and then do the RYS service or should I do the RYS and then the PR? My objective is to get him ranked in the map spat. As always guys, keep up the good work.”
Um, there’s probably going to be some differing opinions on this. I haven’t tested one first over the other. Marco could comment on this too. The method I would probably go with would be to do the PR first because you’re going to get a bunch of citations if you add the NAP to the press release, you’re going to get a bunch of citations from that. The reason I would do that first is because you get the citations, but then you can also take the original press release, the one where it was distributed from, whichever service it is that you’re using to distribute the press releases, wherever that’s published first, you can take that and make that a PDF and put that inside your drive stack. So when you have the RYS stack or the drive stack created then you could also have your press release as a PDF inside there which would just help, especially if you start building links to your drive stack which is what we recommend what you do anyways.
Marco are you on?
Marco: Yeah, I’m on.
Adam: What’s your opinion?
Marco: Well, let me do this in a couple of steps because we need to get this out anyway because a lot of people have been asking about what’s include in our RYS because I think that’s what Paul is going to get from us, he’s going to get the FIROYS. What you get is exactly what we teach people to build inside the course. You get every file and folder and everything is optimized. Everything is optimized to carry relevancy wherever it is that you want to push it.
We do docs, we do PDFs, we do drawings. We even look at drive and see what it is. The one thing that you’ll get is a money map. What happens with that money map is that we connect it to your Google verified listing, the map that comes with it.
The first thing that needs to be done is that business needs to be verified for this to have full effect on that map pack, which is what he’s going to be doing, he needs that verified business. He needs to create that entity. Then he’ll turn over that NAP information, he’ll turn it over to our RYSVA and the guy Justin is, he just rocks, he’s just so good at building everything, at carrying relevancy, at connecting the money map to the verified listing map which all pushes relevancy over to the website but it also hits that verified map up and sticks it in the three pack.
Now, you have the press release. You could perfectly just, once that RYS is built and connected, you could send that press release to the RYS folder, that drive stack that we created for more relevancy which is going to push it up to the verified map over to the website from the website since you’re going to have an embedded map on the website, it’s going to carry it back to the verified listing, back into the RYS folder and you’re just going to create all kinds of crazy log going through and shooting everywhere, like the spider web silo that we talk about.
Adam: Nobody has to buy our RYS now, you just spilled all the beans.
Marco: I’m just giving them an overview of what it is. They’re welcome to go and try to figure out how it is that we build everything. Good luck.
Adam: Actually that’s a good idea, though. I mentioned doing the PR first but that’s actually a good idea to have that My maps done first. In most PRs, guys, you can get away with about three links in a press release if you’ve got about 400 or 500 words of content. So actually that would be a good idea to use the press release to link to the My maps URL because then you’d be pushing like 250, 300 media-type style links to that My Maps URL which has do follow links in the description area that you can, it helps to validate the entity, like Marco just said, so that would actually be a pretty good way to go about it.
Marco: On the other hand, if what you want to do is push relevancy to the press release, then you would wait to do the press release and push relevancy from our drive stack over to whatever press release it is that you’re trying to do because we do, when you go into the order form, there’s a field in there that says which URL do you want to push relevancy to? It’s clear and we ask for the NAP, right name, address and phone number that you want all of this … You need, as you said before, it needs to be exactly the same way that it is on your map as in the citations. It can’t vary because we’re going to push all of that NAP relevancy up. Becker came up with this, it’s a slip stream. I think he’s the one that coined the phrase. Slip stream, it just carries all of this over and back, over and back and all that love is what sticks that map number 1 in the three pack.
Adam: All right, we’re going to stop at Nate’s last comment here guys. We’ve got about five minutes left so we’re going to get through these next couple questions. We’ll probably stop at Nate.
How To Trigger Older Blog Posts To New Networks?
John says, “Hey guys, thanks again for doing these hangouts, you’re awesome.” I’ll plus on that. “Have built RSS tier 1, tier 2 networks for several clients and want to find a way to make use of the last six months of pre-IFTTT posts, just the old content. Is there a specific method or module talking about how to trigger RSS tier 1, tier 2 from the money site to the new networks using your SM plug-in with its spintax. Don’t want to create a duplicate post on the same blog with new dates and annoy the Facebook and Due Plus fans a second time with last month’s post but want to push it to network. Thanks in advance.”
Well, first of all John, I pretty much can guarantee you’re not going to annoy Facebook and Duplex followers and fans because you have to think about every time you post … First of all, Google Plus, there’s not a whole lot of people active on Google Plus outside of the marketing industry. So you can pretty much write that off. But Facebook, yeah, there’s a ton of people that are active on Facebook. Pretty much daily, everybody’s plugged into Facebook. The thing is Facebook only shows your post, anything published to your pages, to a very, very, very small fraction of the audience. We’re talking like 3% to 5% of your audience if you’re lucky. I guarantee you if you published a post and it syndicated out to your network and into your Facebook page, then a month later you do it again, chances are, nobody that saw it the month before is going to see it again the second month or it’s going to be new people seeing it the second month that didn’t see it … Or even if they did it’s going to be a very, very small fraction of people. I doubt that it will annoy them.
You can recycle old content, guys. There’s no reason to have to always create new content. You can republish old content to Facebook and Google Plus and get new eyeballs to it every time you do it. So that’s number one. I wouldn’t worry about annoying people.
Number two, our premium version does have a re-publishable post function, but the free version that comes with IFTTT SEO Academy and stuff does not. However, there’s a plug-in that you can use, it’s called Republish Old Posts WP plug-in. It’ll be the first link that comes up. Install that, go through the settings, I’m not going to teach you how to set it up because there’s help files inside of there that will tell you how to set up the plug-in, but it will republish old posts and trigger the RSS re-syndication. Okay, so that’s how you can do that if you want to republish old posts, that’s a good way to do it. Just use that plug-in.
Again, don’t worry about recycling content to Google Plus or Facebook. Nobodies going to see it again. IF they do it’s going to be a small fraction. If they’re annoyed with that, let them un-follow you. Good riddance. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, you know what I mean?
Multiple User Access For Tier 2 Networks
Greg says … Oh this is the followup, I know Adam’s going to get mad at me so I’m going to try to hurry … “Joe owns company and he has two profiles,” This is a followup to the question I asked him to clarify. “okay so he has a company and has two profiles but the company has it’s own tier 1, can Joe be on tier 2 as the owner profile and even better, can his staffer contractors be on tier 2 as well?”
Well you could Greg but personally I wouldn’t do it. You can yes, sure you can do that. I wouldn’t recommend it. The reason I don’t recommend it is because there’s a clear connection between the owner and the business, right? Or the contractors in the business, there’s probably a connection to them, so if you end up syndicating content across all those networks where there’s a clear connection between those profiles and the actual business, then remember guys, when you’re syndicating blog content, you gotta be careful because Google is looking for footprint issues. Syndicating your content to your own branded network is not a footprint issue because you’re claiming your footprint. You’re doing what the big brands do, you’re sharing your content to your branded properties.
When you go out to tier 2 networks, you’re using profiles and personas, even if they’re real profiles, like what you’re mentioning here, you’re doing it to manipulate search engine results. That’s against Google’s terms of service. If I was using tier 2 networks for blog syndication, I would want the personas to be 100% removed and separate from the actual business itself so that I could minimize or reduce my footprint even more. So Greg, I understand where you’re going with that. It’s a logical assumption to make that that might be more effective, but in my opinion, you’re asking for trouble if you do that. You’re better of just using personas.
All right last thing, Nate says to clarify, and this is why I wanted to finish on this one, guys. He was asking about poking and if somebody ever used that video if keyword had been poked and it showed up on page one. He says, “To clarify what if the client uses the same keyword I poked and put up their own videos, does that ever happen?”
Nate I’ve been providing SEO services for clients for four years. I’ve been doing SEO for about almost seven years now, at least six years, and I have never once ever, ever had a client come in behind me and try to rank their own videos after I’ve ranked something for them. Never once, not saying it won’t ever happen ever in the world, I’m not saying that, but it’s very, very rare. Don’t worry about that. Besides that, if a client wants to come rank a video, you’re the one that’s taken all this SEO training. You’ll spank the hell out of them if it comes to a competition between you and the client, who’s going to do better SEO ? You’ll win, you know what I mean, so don’t worry about that.
Okay guys, MasterClass starts in about five minutes for everybody that is going to be on that. Otherwise, we’ll see everyone else next week for the next episode of Hangouts. 95, episode 95 next week.
Marco: See ya everybody!