Click on the video above to watch Episode 103 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: Cody and welcome to Humpday Hangouts Episode 103, we’re very close to 104. 1 week away. Let’s say hi to everybody really quick, I’ll start at the end on my screen who I see, and start with Chris, how’s it going?
Chris: It’s been good, how are you doing?
Adam: Can’t complain. Well, I guess I can complain if I wanted to. It’s actually kind of nice here, it’s just cold. I’m just waiting to hear the weather report from Marco, winter has officially started here, so. Hernan, how’s it going?
Hernan: Hey guys, hey everyone. It’s really, really good to be here. I’m excited for today, 104, a lot of stuff going on, so this is going to be a great episode.
Adam: Awesome. Marco, let’s get the weather update.
Marco: Man, I’m sorry to say that it’s still warm in Costa Rica, sorry man. I can’t help it, it’s about 85 right now. Rain is rolling in though, so it’ll go down to about 80. Once the rain goes away, I could go take a dip in the pool, you know how that goes.
Adam: That’s okay, you got to suffer for a little bit so you can enjoy it, the good parts, huh?
Marco: It’s such a tough life.
Adam: Bradley, how’s it going?
Bradley: Good man, glad to be here.
Adam: Good deal, well hey, before we get started I wanted to go real quick, obviously Local Kingpin just launched, so that’s going really well. I think a lot of people might not be aware that we’re also going to have … For people who decide that the local lead gen and on demand traffic generation is for them, we’re going to be doing update webinars as part of the course. You guys are obviously here watching Humpday Hangouts, so you know we like to webinars and we like to do training. Bradly, do you want to tell them just a little bit about what you’re going to be doing with these update webinars and why they’re there?
Bradley: Sure, well. I’m adding a second case study, I actually started setting it up today, so I will be adding additional videos to the training. Guys, it’s a one time purchase but I’m going to be continuing to update the training over the next probably three months or so. Because, I’m still learning on how to improve the AdWords campaigns and so as I continue to learn, I’m going to share that with whoever, all Local Kingpin members because I’m not 100% satisfied with where it’s at now.
Even though I’ve already gotten a lot of good responses for where it’s at I still think it can be better and so I want to make it better, and so I’m going to be continuing to add training inside the members area. Then we’re also going to have probably at least 3 update webinars, that are probably spaced out at least 3 or 4 weeks apart. Over the next 3 months, we’re going to have an additional 3 webinars, which will be kind of like Q and A where members can ask questions about specific issues they’re having, and that kind of stuff.
That goes for the Maps Kingpin upgrade too, which is kind of like the Maps SEO part of it, that’s all going to be … All of that is going to be updated. The front end product and the up sell, if that makes sense.
Adam: Awesome, all right, and then on top of that too. We’re also going to be giving people an additional custom click funnels template to be using for local lead generation. We’re going to be adding that in there, and I think I’m going to talk Bradley to putting it into use, so he’ll be able to give you guys back some analysis on it.
Bradley: Well shit, if you get it done quick enough I can use it on this next case study.
Adam: Awesome. Yeah, all right, should be done tomorrowish, so we’ll see.
Bradley: I’ll be setting up ads this weekend for that new case study, so if you have it done you can share it to my ClickFunnels account and we’ll be good to go.
Adam: Awesome. Yeah, it’s going to be done by some unnamed ClickFunnel certified partner, they’re going to knock it out and we’ll get it done.
Bradley: Weird out here.
Adam: Yeah, some weirdo. What we got? One more? Marco, you want to tell everybody about the event coming up next week?
Marco: Yes, I mentioned last week, we’re going to have CT Fletcher on for an hour and a half, and he’s going to be talking about how he built his business. How he went from nearly dead to right now, kind of social media just about, from what I see and everything that he’s doing. If you guys want to come and join us and listen in, get some tips, some hacks from the guy who’s doing and all … Everything has been done. He’s not really paying for anything, it’s all organic. It’s all just him producing content and getting people to like his stuff, share his stuff.
I’m going to share … Oh, you shared the link already that’s cool. I was going to share the link but, the press release is going out early tomorrow, I would suggest guys that you go and reserve your space because once it goes out … He wants us to be free, he wants us to be available to the general internet or online public. Not just our group, but we’re holding off so that our people can go in and reserve their seats whoever IS going to attend before it goes. Once it goes on and the seats are locked, sorry, catch it on the replay.
We’re planning to have lots of fun, asking tons of questions and just see what he has to say.
Adam: Awesome, that’s going to be a great webinar.
Bradley: Awesome, really looking forward to that too.
Adam: Yup, anybody got anything else? I think that’s about all I got?
Bradley: One more thing I want to mention is we’ve already started getting support tickets for people complaining about the coupon code expiring. Guys, we gave plenty of notice ahead of time for Local Kingpin that we’re going to have a 24 hour coupon available, and also our top affiliates or the affiliates that actually send us real traffic, they got the ability to also send that 100 dollar coupon out.
If you missed it, I’m sorry, but there was plenty of notification ahead of time. One way to avoid that in the future, is to make sure you’re on our notification list. Go to semanticmastery.com subscribe to our notification list and then that way you won’t miss the coupon the next time. That said, that price will be jumping again what to 397 on tomorrow?
Adam: Friday morning?
Hernan: Friday, yeah.
Bradley: Then, eventually next week it’s going to go to it’s evergreen price at 497. If you’re on the fence, and you still haven’t purchased, I’d get it now. Because, there’s no exception guys, if you’ve missed it you’ve missed it, okay. Didn’t want to be a hardass but we’ve got to keep our word, and that’s what we said we’d do. All right, so let’s go ahead and get into some questions, I’m going to grab the screen.
Hopefully you guys can see me zoom in a little bit. Let me know if you’re having an issues seeing guys?
Adam: We good?
Hernan: Can you zoom in a little bit more, because it’s … If it’s tiny for us, I bet that, ah, kay. There we go.
Bradley: That’s about as big as it’s going to get man.
Hernan: Yeah that works.
Influence Google Search Auto Complete
Bradley: When I read a question it’s going to be like watching a tennis match, my head’s going to go from one side to the other. All right, here we go Greg Dreebert says: What’s the best way to influence auto complete in Google Search. Crowd Search, you could do that with any sort of those CT spam bots or applications and obviously Crowd Search is the one we use, but yeah, you could do that over … It takes time but you can influence auto complete or suggest by doing that. Okay?
Informing Google On Redirected Pages
That’s why that’s so effective with brand searches guys, or what do you call navigational searches. Because, over time it adds brand search signals to Google which is very, very strong for businesses, okay? Greg says: When redirecting a site, what about the privacy page about us disclosure table and library images at the old domain, redirect them over or just leave them? Yeah, why wouldn’t you just redirect them Greg?
If you’re moving all the content from one domain to another, just move those pages too. I don’t know why you wouldn’t is what I’m saying. Yeah, just move those and then you could redirect the old links and I don’t know why you’d even need to redirect the old links because those aren’t types of pages that typically, you have any back links going to so it really shouldn’t effect SEO and any at all period, if that makes sense. There’s really no need to redirect old pages to new pages if everybody’s going to land on your new site anyways, if that makes sense?
There’s no sense in redirecting old URLs from privacy policy pages unless for whatever reason you had back links built to that that you want to keep. After redirecting, I could not use the inform Google of address change function inside of search console as it needed the old homepage to exist and I have already redirected it. I instead use the fetch this Google and index the page button, is this is a good idea? Can I do that for all redirected pages? It would be only 10 pages, thanks.
Yeah sure, you can do that. There’s no problem with that, just changing the site address isn’t really that big of a deal inside of search console because you just add the new site once it’s added, once you got it set up and it’s just a new property, that’s all. Okay? The fetch is Google works, it’s the same thing as submitting the URL really, the only difference is when you use the fetch is Google, you can actually take a look at how the page renders to the Google bot. That’s really the only difference. Okay? You can also tell Google if you want them to crawl just that page alone or the page and all of its direct links. You can tell it to do so. Usually with a new site, a good thing to do is if you have a page or like a categories page or something like that you can have it crawl all it’s direct links, then that kind of helps to spider the site quicker. That’s all.
Linkn Building For Serp Space Links
All right, Brandon says: Hi, I have some questions regarding URLs to include in the search space link boating package order, do you suggest we link to Google owned stuff, like blog spot and Google Plus, some Rank Feeder feeds? I wouldn’t do Rank Feeder feeds. The reason I wouldn’t do that is because if you have any of your own money site feeds or posts published in that Rank Feeder feed, then you’d be essentially injecting spam directly to your money site, so I don’t recommend that. Google stuff is fine, some of the individual docs in your IFTTT G Drive folder, yeah you can do that, or you can just set the folder to public which it should be anyways.
Just select the folder URL, all right? Because if you’re just building links to the folder URL then all of the contents within the folder will get the link juice as well. Okay? Just go with the folder there. You can go with individual drive files, that’s fine, but you can do the folder itself. I have built out some of the RYS Stack, do we link to as many of those individual doc sheets and forms as we can. You can, or if you have everything, what we call Spider [inaudible 00:10:52], right? Then you could just link to either the folder or anyone of the docs or all them. It really doesn’t matter, because everything is going to spread around no matter where you inject the link juice, it’s going to spread around if you have it built right.
The network properties, how many individual syndicated blog posts should we link to, I don’t like to individual blog posts on the network properties. I link to the homepage URL of all the network properties, because if you link just directly to the individual post URLs, which is fine if you have … For example, if you have a page on your website that you’re trying to rank and so you’ve published a blog post with an internal link that’s linking up to the page, just the way that we teach and you syndicate that post, then you can go collect those post URLs on the web 2 properties and specifically target those post URLs with additional links, because then you’ll be pushing juice from that post up through that internal link, up to the main page of the site that you’re trying to rank.
I only do that selectively when I need an extra boost for a particular page, but typically I just will build for efficiency reasons links to the homepage URLs of all the profiles, if that makes sense. That’s because for example, with Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, if you’re building things to the homepage URL, then every time a post is published, it’s going to benefit from all of the juice that is basically sitting there on that homepage URL. Until it paginates, until the post paginates, which happens like, let’s say it’s 10 post on each page before it goes to page 2, so that means that you’ve got 9 more posts from the post that you published today, you got an additional 9 posts before that post paginates and pushes off the first page, if that makes sense.
You can … What I’ve found is most of the time you benefit from the link juice while it’s still on that first page and it helps you to rank and then by the time it paginates, you typically should’ve seen results already. Then, by the way you could always build links to your … Once it starts to paginate, like page 2, page 3, you could actually build links to those too by the way. You don’t have to just stop at the homepage URL. I try to get the most mileage out of those link building pages as I can and to me, unless I’m trying to specifically boost a particular post and therefore a page, then I just build directly to the home page URLs of all the network properties. That way, everything that gets published benefits from those links instead of just an individual post or page if that makes sense.
Any body else have any other suggestions for that?
[00:13:34]
Hernan: I think I’ve pointed this out in the past, what I’ve done at some point is in case you need a boost, you know, for those pages and those posts that are page two. Or, you know bottom of page 1, position number 9 and position number 15 for example. What you want to do is to set up a new post with a link back to that page that you want to boost, that way you wait until it syndicates out and then you grab the syndicated URLs. For example, if it syndicates into WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger, you will grab the individual post. They will also have the link to the page that you want to boost, and you can build links to them, you can do PBN to them, you can do FCS Networker to them, whatever you want to do to them, that way you can push an internal page or an internal article higher on Google, you know?
Bradley: Yeah, that’s what I was saying. If you have a particular page on your site that you’re trying to rank then when you publish the post on your blog, from your money site with an internal link to that page. Once it syndicates, collect the post URLs on the web 2’s and that’s only very specific targeting. If you have particular pages on your site that you need to boost for, that’s a good way to do it, but like I said, for efficiency reasons, I like to just build the links to the homepage unless I’m selectively doing what we just discussed. If that makes sense, okay?
Marco: I had some really good results with the free WordPress blog, siloing it, mimicking the original site. Takes a lot of work and every time that you get a new post, of course, it has to be manually added to the silo. I mean, you get tons of traffic once it starts to ranking and it does rank really well, so.
Interlinking Syndicated Content in IFTTT
Bradley: Awesome, all right, Mark says: Hey guys all is well, I have a question about interlinking web 2 articles. I know it would be a bit manual, but with a VA and Browseo, would it be worth going through the web 2 bugs and interlinking posts within that platform. WordPress, for example. Can you do that with syndicated contents, using words or phrases within the syndicated content to link to another post? Thanks.
Yeah, you could. Again, I don’t ever do that just because it requires too much manual work but I suppose you could. My question is, why don’t you just link from one post to another from the main money site blog, so that the link are already present, when you syndicate the article, right?
My point is is if, that logging in into WordPress.com, Blogger and Tumblr for example and then adding manual links to additional posts on those same sites, which could probably be the post from your money site anyways. Why not just create internal links from your original blog posts over to the other posts so that when they syndicate, they’re already interlinked, so that it doesn’t require manual work. Does that make sense? Now, if your main money site is siloed and you don’t want to cross link between posts from different silos.
You don’t want to do that because you’ll bleed the theme of the silo, but if it’s for a flat site, and it’s not siloed then I wouldn’t worry about it. Or, if you’re going to link to other posts within the same silo, then that’s absolutely fine to do. My point is, if you can avoid having to have that second step and going in and actually manually adding links, if you can do that on the front end when you publish the first post, then I would knock it out there. Yes Mark, you can do that but I would recommend doing it from the money site blog itself, and you can interlink within the same silo to other posts in that silo or I wouldn’t interlink between silos though.
IFTTT V2 & Local Kingpin Results & Profit Making
If you’re going to do that, you can do that with no follow links. If that makes sense. That’s more of a navigational thing, that’s more of a link for a visitor than it is for SEO, okay? The no follow links I mean between silo’s. All right, Dave is next. He says, Thank you for allowing me to ask a question. Forgive me, this is a little long as I’m just a little confused. Hi, I was going to invest in IFTTT 2.0, but I’m a little confused now. According to this above course on local lead generation, Local Kingpin, I’m guessing IFTTT 2.0 course is not that affective anymore, as Google has now altered its ranking system. That’s not the case, Dave, that’s not the case at all. It’s a good question so, but that’s not the case at all.
It’s not that IFTTT is not effective, the whole point of the Local Kingpin training course is to generate traffic on demand without having to do a bunch of SEO work. SEO is still absolutely effective for generating leads. Now, organic SEO for local leads isn’t nearly as effective as it used to be, because you have to pass by as many as 7 other listings before you ever get to the first organic listing. That was the whole reason why I started learning how to use AdWords, was because my organic call volume or excuse me, my call volume from my organic listings only, had dropped as much as 60%.
That took a serious hit in my revenue, so I decided I had to figure something else out. Not every lead gen property has a Maps address, right? There’s a lot of lead gen properties that had been generating revenue for me that didn’t have a physical Maps location, so I wasn’t able to rank in the 3 pack, right? If you’re going to focus just on SEO for generating leads, then I recommend that you focus on Maps SEO and that you try and rank in the 3 pack, because the organic rankings aren’t generating leads for searches with local intent that show a map. They’re not nearly as many.
You’ll still get some leads but not nearly as many. I recommend, if you’re going to be doing local lead gen that you foc … SEO is going to be your primary method, that you focus on Maps alone. Which IFTTTSEO Academy, will help you to rank in Maps, okay? In fact, the upgrade I should say for the Local Kingpin course which is about AdWords, is how to rank in Maps which is SEO. Maps SEO. That’s because it’s still very effective and the process that I use to rank in Maps includes an IFTTT network. Any sort of SEO work that we do includes an IFTTT SEO network. Okay? It’s not that IFTTT SEO is not going to help you, it just depends on what is it that you prefer … What would you rather do?
Would you rather drive leads, generate leads by spending money and having it done quickly and it’s very scalable that way? Do you have more time or more money? If you have more time and less money, then you might want to go with something like SEO for generating leads. If you have more money and less time, you might want to go with AdWords for generating leads, right? It really just depends on your own personal preference, where you are and what resources do you have available? Okay?
Hernan: Sorry Bradly, but if I can add to what you were saying. The main point and the main goal of Semantic Mastery, we as a group is that you get profitable and you get results. SEO IFTTT v2, works extremely well so does AdWords, so does Facebook advertising, we have been talking a little bit about that on last mastermind, there’s potential to make a course about that so the idea is not to be either or but rather use every tool at your disposal to grow your assets and-
Bradley: Absolutely.
Hernan: Your company. We would be doing you a disservice if we would say, “Just do SEO,” because that’s not how it works. The idea is that you get results and one of the best way to do that is combine traffic sources, because that will give you more independence and that will give you more freedom and all of those things. I just wanted to say that, that Semantic Mastery is focused on giving you results. Doesn’t really matter what you do, of course SEO works. Even if you do 100% paid advertising, we will still tell you, “Okay, do some SEO, because that’s a long term, mid term traffic source and relationship within the 2,” you know what I mean?
Bradley: Yeah, yup. That’s a good point, because for example, with AdWords, let’s say that your cost per acquisitions for a lead is 35$. It depends on what kind of service you’re in, but for me and my business the tree service industry, that’s actually a good price for acquiring a lead, right? Let’s say 35 dollars is my cost per acquisition because all I’m doing is AdWords. However, what if I can also rank in both Maps and potentially organic listings as well and let’s say that I start getting 30-40% of my leads coming through Maps, right? Then now, I’ve actually decreased my cost per acquisition considerably because I’m generating leads through Maps that aren’t costing me on a per click basis.
There’s still a cost to it, guys. Everybody says free SEO traffic, bullshit. There’s no such thing as free traffic. You have to put work and effort in. It’s either time, work or effort or all of the above. There is no such thing as free traffic, you still have to put work into it, so again, it just really depends on what you’re saying. What your resources are and what Hernan just said is absolutely true. Do as many traffic sources as possible, because that way you have a much more diversified traffic source, you don’t have to rely on just one.
If you just rely on SEO and something happens, Google changes it’s algorithm tomorrow and you lose that site, you’ve just lost a stream of revenue. That’s why I think supplementing even with AdWords now is critical for any sort of local lead gen business because there is so much volatility in SEO that we never know what’s going to happen, it’s becoming increasingly complex. In my opinion, why not go ahead and scoop up traffic from all sources that we can. I stick specifically with YouTube and Google and Maps, right? One of the things eventually I’d like to get into is learning how to generate local leads using a Facebook Ads if I ever decide to start doing Facebook Ads, I have a Hernan though.
He does all that stuff for us, in fact, we may end up doing a training course about that at some point down the road. In which case, I’m anxious to take it, so. All right so, for the rest of that question. I know there will be a lot of hard work put in my myself to rank websites and study for formula, but will it be as effective as initially wise? Yes, it still is. What kind of results have your students been getting in terms of renumeration for ranking websites?
I know we’ve got a lot of really good testimonials in the IFTTT SEO group, so. Our students are getting … Anybody that implements that and they do it, usually gets results, so.
Adam: Yeah, I was going to say, you can go to the IFTTTSEO.com the sales page for IFTTTT SEO Academy and check it out. Those are real, the stuff we put up there, people having results. We’ve got some examples right there.
Bradley: How profitable can I get? I can’t tell you that Dave, wish I could but it just depends on how you’re running … What are your expenses, how are you monetizing your leads, who are you selling them to, what are you selling them for? There’s way too many variables, but a good lead gen site, it really just depends. My lead gen sites, my average on my tree service sites that are SEO based only. I don’t have an average for my AdWords funnels yet because it’s still too new for me. I don’t have enough data for me to be able to determine what my averages are on those.
For my SEO sites that are mainly ranked in Maps for the tree service stuff, I have an average of about 400 per month per location. That’s because it varies widely. For example, I’ve got some that I might only get 2 or 3 jobs out an entire month, so those lead gen properties aren’t making but a couple 100 dollars a month, if that. Sometimes not even that, but I also have other properties that generate 12, 15,000 dollars a month. The average comes out to be across all the different sites that I have roughly about 400 dollars per site per location.
The trick there is to build many, many, many of them, right? I love that guys, because every single one of those is an additional stream of revenue, so that if some of them get hit by … Slapped by Google or whatever, I still have a whole bunch of others that are generating revenue, right? It’s diversification.
Adam: Something else real quick I realized too, that I don’t think that is on the sales page, it will be updating soon then. Is that you did the monetization webinar, so inside of the training there’s actually at least 1 webinar if not 2, I forget. That speak directly towards how you can monetize these.
Bradley: Yeah, it wasn’t a webinar, it was just a training video. Monetization models, I actually just added that yesterday. We’ll be talking more about that again in some of the update webinars, or are you talking about inside of IFTTTSEO Academy, I’m sorry.
Adam: Yes, sorry, you’ve done at least 1 dedicated to it, and there might have been it’s a couple of other players.
Linking IFTTT With GSA, Scrapebox, Fiverr Gigs
Bradley: Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry, I thought you were talking about Local Kingpin, because I just added monetization models training to that yesterday, so. Okay Ashley says: Hi you are great. I want to go back thanks to my IFTTT Network, is that possible to use Black Hat tricks like GSA, Scrapebox, Fiverr Gig or just PBN, yes, absolutely. What we recommend is that your first tier of links, so your first layer of links to your IFTTT network properties, you keep them clean. In other words, don’t use kitchen sink spam, you want to do contextual links from usually properties with some higher metrics, themed if possible. From there, you can throw kitchen spam at that first layer of links, that first tier.
You don’t want to burn your IFTTT properties, because you want to treat those … They are like an SEO Firewall guys, that’s in part why we use them, but at the same time they are extensions of your brand so you don’t want to just spam them to death. The way that we do it, is we build a what is it, it’s between like 75 to 125 contextual links to the IFTTT properties, and then we throw spam behind that.
Hernan: Yeah, that’s the case. You don’t want to burn them, so do not throw a couple 100,000 directly to the IFTTT networks but … Because we have had greater results in terms of metrics, in terms of rankings by adding a layer of contextuals in between. That’s exactly what we are doing on our IFTTT link building service. That’s the structure of it. You get a handful of links per IFTTT property backed with spam, so.
SEO Services With Little To No Resources
Bradley: Yeah, and again, you can use any of those tools that you just mentioned, that’s fine. Okay, Ben says: A client getting questions, starting with little to no resources. If you had to have an SEO client by next week, what would you do to make it happen? Me? Video email, so what I call Vmail. That was how I first started off getting clients, when I first branched out from just doing lead gen and started landing clients as innate client consulting work. I did it with video email.
I literally built my business with my client based business from video email. It was the most effective way to contact and to prospect for clients was video email, okay?
Hernan: Nice.
Bradley: If I pause the screen for a minute, I can get you a link to-
Hernan: I remember that guy, that was pretty good that guy that you made the video prospecting.
Bradley: Yeah. I’ve got a link to an opt in form that you can opt in to get free training on how to do video email if you’d like. I’m going to have to pause the screen to get it, maybe what I’ll do is when the webinar is over. Here, let me make a note of it and I’ll tag you Ben so that you get notified. Just a minute, I’m writing a note. Vmail opt in. You opt in, you get the free training on how to do video email, and then obviously since you’ve opted in I’m going to spam you to death. Just be aware that you’re going to be spammed, no, I’m kidding.
I’ll paste that link on the page once the webinars over Ben.
Marco: If he’s just starting out and he has just absolutely nothing, there’s nothing that he can turn to or go on. Man, the best thing that he can do is network other … In other words, just get out to his local business owners and let them … Let me get this right. Find out who they are, find out what they need, you know what they need, they need more money. You need to figure out how to let them know that you can make them more money without being … Without really hammering them over …
Because, they’ve heard the pitch before. I mean, that’s a thing, get out there, get yourself known. Make up some business cards, fake it till you make it. You can put on them, SEO expert or however it is that you want to brand yourself, but you have to make people aware that your brand exists, what it is that you do and how it is that you can help them. Get out there, hit the pavement, let them know, you get your business cards out there, get known and I think that gets some positive results.
It’s worked for me, I’ve used Craigslist, I’ve used just about everything there is. When I needed a client, I’ve gone to Craigslist for gigs and I’ve bid on jobs that have been posted. Up work, I’ve done it all when I needed a client or when I wanted a client to test something.
Bradley: Yeah, you know, personally I didn’t find a whole lot of good results with going to business networking meetings, like MeetUp meetings and stuff. I ended up spending more damn time just driving back and forth to the meetings and having to buy bullshit breakfast at IHOP or whatever that resulted in such little client work. Although, it just got me out of my comfort zone and talking about my business. Again, everyone’s going to have different results, I’m just saying personally from my experience, the best results I’ve got was from video emails, and that’s selecting potential clients or whatever is particularly in a niche that you want to work in, and then just crafting a video where you’re analyzing their property and not criticising it but explain how it could be improved upon, that kind of stuff.
Then sending those personalized emails to the owners or to the business, preferably owners if possible. A hybrid model of the 2 worked, whereas I would go to the networking meetings and collect business cards and then follow up with those people using video emails. Now that was a 1, 2 punch and that worked well too.
Hernan: Nice.
Chris: Now, I’m going to hop in here and I may got slaughtered on this one by you guys, but I don’t care I’m going to say it anyways. Do 2 things at once, do what they’re saying and then, while you’re looking for that, find somebody, hopefully you know somebody who’s got a business, just do some work for them to get some results. Get a testimonial from them, put yourself out there and do something good for them. It doesn’t happen to be ranking their website on page 1, just, can you help them with their social media? Can you help them with their content? Can you a do a site audit, do something and get a testimonial from them.
Because nobody’s going to want to hire you if you don’t have anybody that can refer you, and that’s where the real work’s going to start coming in, when people start referring you.
Hernan: Yeah. I love this and if I may add a couple of things that have helped me tremendously are to leverage communities. Have discussion forums and Facebook groups for example, and as Bradley was saying, you can really pick what kind of Facebook groups or what kind of communities you’re joining. For example, let’s say you want to work with realtors, join a realtor group and do not try to teach them real estate. Try to help them with digital marketing or SEOing your case. It’s amazing if you add value over there, it’s amazing the amount of work that you can get. Because those people are usually trying to get …
You will not try to sell them anything but just be helpful. As Adam was saying, try to do something for them and it’s amazing the amount of content you can get, because those people are actually … They’re really engaged with their topic and most of the cases they’re really desperate about finding somebody that they can trust. The reality is that you can build that trust by actually helping people in those forms and those Facebook groups that will you get a ton of recommendations and private messages, et cetera.
It has happened to me just for the sake of being helpful on discussion forums that are around a niche that you want to go after and Facebook groups as well. Posting a really good piece of content over there Ben, that’s related to the problems that they are getting that they are getting as Marco was saying, they’re not getting enough leads, they’re not getting enough sales. That will easily position yourself as the authority figure and for example SEO for realtors, and you will get a ton of private messages et cetera, and then off you go.
It’s just about being helpful and do not try to pitch them, because again, they have heard it. You are actually showing them that you can help them in the future but by helping them right now. That has been really valuable for me and that’s a tip that I hope you use because it’s super, super … It’s amazing the amount of feedback that you can get by just being helpful and dedicating 1 or 2 hours a day, just spending time on those forums and communities and being helpful.
Chris: If I could just add, being helpful works.
Marco: We’re going on our 104th episode trying to be helpful, and the whole semantic mastery brand has practically been built on being helpful, so.
Bradley: That’s true, we’ve been at it for 2 years now, next week it will be 2 years on Hump Day hangout so, and last thing I want to mention about that Ben is I’ve always used video SEO as a foot in the door too. As far as video email for prospective but video SEO as a foot in the door typically. Video SEO is not my primary method of making money, I love to use video SEO but specifically as a foot in the door because it’s something that although I know it’s way more difficult than it was even a year ago or 2 years ago, to rank for local terms. You can take a long tailed keyword that’s not competitive at all, even before you initiate the contact with a prospect and rank something for them with their branding on it, so that when you send them a video prospecting email, you can show them the property that you ranked.
Show them a video, and it doesn’t have to be anything spectacular, it’s just to show them that you know what you’re doing. Because, how will they know? For the vast majority of prospects aren’t going to know whether it was a difficult keyword to rank for. For example, you could rank for your keyword plus zip code, right? Your key word plus city plus zip code, because it’s very rare that people search by zip code. They do but it’s rare. You could rank a video for that fairly easily, most likely, and then you could just point that out in your video prospecting email that you send to that specific prospect. Say, “Look, I did this just to show you I know what I’m talking about. Would you be interested in some additional marketing help that can drive more leads in your business and help you to make more money, blah blah blah.”
If that makes sense? That way you can do something for free for them to prove that you know what you’re doing, but I agree with what Adam said and that’s just finding some people that you can be helpful … Hernan as well, find people that you could be helpful with and then maybe offer up some free services in exchange for referrals, that’s another good tactic. Say look, “I’ll help you optimize your Maps listing and maybe perhaps rank a YouTube video for you or whatever and then all I ask for in return is that you give me 3 business referrals. 3 other people that you know that are in business that could potentially use help with marketing.”
Adam: I just want to say real quick to everybody’s who’s requesting access, we’re going to include that link in the Friday email. If you’re not signed up to it, go to semanticmastery.com and get signed up and that’ll be on the Friday email. Also, if you’re watching this in the future from some other point in time since we get a lot of people watching the replays, shoot us an email at support@semanticmastery.com and we’ll get you the link for the video prospecting.
Google Maps Setup For Additional Services
Bradley: Yeah and guys, I’m going to drop it on this events page as soon as we get done, okay? I’ll just post it in about 15 minutes, okay? You guys are going to be right here on the event page. All right, so Ivan’s next he says: Hi guys, looking forward to the 104th. Yes we are too. Question about Google Maps. I created a personalized Google Map, so he’s talking about Google My Maps for my residential computer repair company, now I want to offer 3 more related services. My question is, what do you think will be better? 1, adding 3 new layers or pins targeting services like service 1, 2 and 3 on my existing map or 2, create 3 new Maps. Naming them, service 1, service 2, service 3?
Linking 3 Maps somewhere in the description. By the way I watch the 4 videos of RYS Academy. Awesome information, now I’m playing around with Google sites creation. That’s another link that we can drop Adam, for the free RYS webinar series?
Adam: Yeah, let me grab that really quick.
Bradley: Since that was mentioned. Ivan, I haven’t tested the difference between those 2 methods. The way that I’ve always done it, which I haven’t built a whole lot myself, is adding additional layers to the same map, but I haven’t tested that. Maybe Marco could speak on this one a little bit.
Marco: We’ve tried both and the thing is that everything just flows throughout the folder. Everything depends on the niche, man. Everything depends on what you’re going after, everything depends on the keywords, competition. There’s so many variables that what I would tell him is do both. There’s no reason why you can’t do both because they’re My Maps.
Bradley: Right.
Marco: Go do both and see which one works better. It might just turnout that they all work and-
Bradley: I’ve always just done option 1 on the same map, just add new layers but yeah, I haven’t tried the other method. It would almost be worth setting that up on 2 different properties, to see if one has a better … If you do both at the same time for the same property, I don’t know if you’d know which one had the better results. Because you just threw both at it at the same time. That would be worth setting up a test for though, honestly. Yeah, just do both, why not?
Sistrix Tool
Yeah, apparently that’s what he’s talking about. The Sistrix tool for videos is the only time I’ve ever used it is for video objects. Let’s see what they got. Is it thinking, what the hell is it doing? Okay. Let’s see, anyways, there’s the video tool on here somewhere and that’s the only one that I’ve ever used. The only problem that I find with it is it kind of screws up the formatting of your post if you try to include this in a WordPress post. It gives it some strange formatting and I guess it has to do with CSS conflict or something, from the Microdata. I don’t know, I’m not a coder, does that sound right Marco.
Marco: Yeah, that’s probably it. Even if you play with it, if you CSS it on the website and make it look good, when it gets syndicated out, there’s nothing that guarantees it won’t be stripped out.
Bradley: It’s probably going to look like shit too, yeah.
Marco: You can’t control the CSS or whatever template you’re using on free websites anyways, so, yeah.
Bradley: Yeah, I actually avoid using that when possible. I’ll use the video WordPress SEO video. That WordPress SEO plugin from [inaudible 00:42:53], there’s a video SEO Add on, it’s expensive, but I like to use that if I’m doing a lot of heavy video stuff on sites. Just to finish the question, would you finish the meta item prop interaction count, as this would obviously go up over time. I don’t like to inflate anything in structured data, unless there’s real data to back it up somewhere. Personally, I don’t because you can get structured data spam, manual action taken against your site.
I stopped spamming structured data, probably over 2 years ago now. Because I’ve gotten in the past those structured data spam messages inside … Manual spam messages inside of search console from that and so I stopped doing it. That was like adding review stars and shit when there weren’t really reviews, that kind of stuff. I don’t know if would inflate the interaction count. I would just use whatever the data is at the time, and if you need to update it later on then you could but I don’t know how that updates real time anyways.
I think it’s something you’d have to manually do. For example, I’ve got a client that’s got reviews now showing on his site. He emails me about once a month asking me if I can update the review count on his structured data, which I did for the first couple of months, and now I told him, no. I sent him a video and said, “You do it.” Here’s how you do it, you know, because it’s kind of a pain in the ass. I don’t know how you can update that stuff in real time without doing it manually.
Would you use an H3 rather than the default H2. I don’t know Sky, I haven’t tested if one is more effective than the other. I typically would just whatever the output is. For example, the Systris output. I stopped using it though, like I said. Microdata doesn’t work nearly as well guys as JSON-LD. JSON-LD is the preferred method, even Google says so now. That’s what Google prefers over Microdata. Microdata was the start of structured data guys because it was way to mark up objects without having on a page … Because Microdata is like HTML markup, okay? It’s structured data markup but is uses like HTML elements to do it.
JSON-LD is a smarter way to do it, and by the way did you know that you can add JSON-LD script inside posts for the most part? WordPress editor might strip it out, but you should be able to add it anywhere, that type of script, anywhere on the page. Doesn’t have to be in the header is my point, so. Anybody else want to comment on that?
Hernan: No I would use JSON-LD as well, so.
Bradley: Yeah. There’s plenty of those JSON-LD creator tools online now, lots of them, and you can check that. By the way, if you want to insert JSON-LD into a particular page and WordPress is stripping it out, it depends on the theme I think. Because some themes will strip it out and some won’t, but there is a couple different plugins that you could use to install that. One is I think raw HTML, I think you can add JSON-LD script with that, I can’t remember 100% off the top of my head, but there’s another one which was … Shit, what’s it called. H-O code inserter, or something like that.
You guys remember that one? HO Code starter plugin or something like that. Let’s go see if we can find it real quick. I’ll have to try to find that, dammit, I’ve got notes that I’m taking for follow up. O-H-
Adam: Got more work to do after you’re done working.
Bradley: Yeah right. O-H. Ad scripts, there it is. OH Ad Script, 10 OH Ad Script, 2 pages, that’s the one I’m talking about right there. I don’t see the plugin but that’s what I’m looking for. Let’s see. Maybe the link’s actually on this page, it probably. Hold on, one more second guys. There it is. Right there, this one. O Ad Script to individual pages, header, footer. This is so you can add JSON-LD markup to specific pages or posts. This is the plugin you can use for that. For example, I’m not sure how you would markup a video with JSON-LD, I just haven’t done that myself but I’m sure you can do it.
That’s how you would add it to WordPress if your theme strips it out. All right? All right next, Ganti says: Oh wait I’m sorry is there a lot of scheme that can be potentially be added according to scheme of video. Any tips as the keywords, same as and a few other look pretty interesting. What are your thoughts on that Marco, I’ll let you handle that one.
Marco: No, I mean … I do just the standard, I don’t like to spam it. A lot of people tell you and I’ve seen it said that more is better, especially if you go to schema.org, they’ll tell you that more schema is better. There’s a point and I think you’re one of the people that found out, that Google says, “No, you’re spamming your structured data and screw that.” Why? There’s really no reason to inflate the interaction count. There’s really no reason to add any of that other stuff, keywords and all of that, because you’re taking care of that through your content, silos and everything else anyway.
The video, if you’re getting the transcription, then you have plenty of content. I don’t know why you would want to do keywords, same as maybe, spam My Map instead of a video. Add schema the way that we do it in Maps powerhouse. Add schema that way if you want to spam, where at least you’re protected a little bit.
Facebook Instant Article
Bradley: Next is Ganti says that, if you still find time, we’d like to know more about using Facebook’s new instant articles feature to get traffic to the blog and also use IA with IFTTT, I can’t speak on it at all Ganti, it’s Facebook and I just don’t do anything with Facebook. I guess I’ll defer to Hernan.
Hernan: Hmm. That’s a good question Ganti, I haven’t used it yet, instant article Facebook’s unfortunately.
Bradley: I know there was a launch of some product this week that had to do with that stuff.
Hernan: Oh yeah. No, Ganti I’m sorry, I haven’t used that. I’m still getting used to messenger ads, those ads that you click on them and you get a message on Facebook messenger. Those are pretty cool, I’m starting to experiment a little bit with that, but I’m sorry Ganti, I haven’t got the time to go through it. I’ll try to investigate a bit with it and maybe if you can trigger a Facebook page, you can IFTTT Facebook, IFTTT Native Facebook channel to trigger the automation, you know what I mean? That will link back to Facebook, I don’t think that’s the best use of your IFTTT network, unless you want to publish content early which will be fine.
We will need to dive into that a little bit more.
Ranking Videos
Bradley: All right, we’re at the 5 minute warning, so I’m going to have to roll through the next couple. Jay asks: When negotiating value of lead gen videos to potential client, our lead gen videos that don’t rank on the first page are long tail keyword in Google, but do ranking video listings to tough a sale for the effort, yeah Jay, in my opinion, because very rarely do people click the vertical search. It’s not really all that valuable. I would actually position that not as in the vertical search, the video search of Google. What I would do is suggest, like if I was going to try to talk it up, I would say it’s rank number 1 in YouTube.
Because typically, a lot of the times you’ll be able to rank in YouTube number 1, but even if it won’t rank in Google. There is a lot of traffic in YouTube, it’s not usually the type of traffic that’s looking for local intent stuff, but that’s how I would frame it. Yeah, that’s kind of a tough sell. If it’s not ranking in Google, it’s only ranking in the video search then to me, it’s not really valuable. I’ll target other keywords. That’s what I’ll do is I’ll … I’ve mentioned this many times before, if I can’t rank the keyword, I don’t even let clients tell me the keyword that they want to rank for anymore.
I ask them, what would you like to rank for? Then I do keyword research, and then I come back to them and say, okay, here’s what I can rank you for. These are the different keyword search phrases that I can rank you for. Are any of these acceptable? Maybe, what I’ll do is do a poking job, right? I’ll be able to determine which keywords I can rank for with little to no work, then I’ll go back and say, “Look, I’ll give you a 3 for 1 special. I can’t rank you for this keyword but I can rank you for these other 3, and I’ll give it to you for the same price.”
Why? Because I just found out through poking that I can rank without any additional work, right? Why not give them 3 for one and still capture that revenue, if that makes sense? Now, I don’t just rank them for spamming keywords that don’t generate any traffic. There has to be some traffic potential or else it’s not worth it and I’m not just going to take somebody’s money, unless they just want to see their videos so they can puff out their chest and say they’re awesome, because their video is ranked on page 1, and which case there are clients out there that that’s all they want. It’s just an ego thing. I’ll be happy to take their money to do that for them.
Few Websites For 1 Persona
All right, we got 2 more minutes. Scott says hi, are we able to create a few websites under our own name instead of an alias, is there an issue if a person has several websites? No Scott, I just always talk about reducing potential risk, but yeah you can have as many websites as far as I know under your own name as you want. As far as search console, I don’t know if there’s a limit to how many you can put in search console. I’ve got several dozen and I haven’t hit a limit yet, so. I also don’t put everything under one account, I have persona accounts that actually own in air quotes the account and then I just add myself as a manager. We’ve talked about that many, many times on Humpday Hangouts.
He says, I also notice Google is so sensitive, probably Facebook and other passwords as well. If you don’t log in from the same IP the they are asking for phone verification immediately. That’s true. Using fake alias with burner numbers could be an issue, if the number doesn’t work when needing to reverify for whatever reason a couple of months down the road, things happen. That’s true, but that’s why if you create the accounts under a proxy, another IP, then you can always log in to those accounts through your own IP when the accounts are still new and they typically won’t trigger reverification, and even if they do, you should still have the burner number available if you created the account yourself to begin with.
If you bind it to your IP then you shouldn’t have any additional login issues going forward. That said, you can also, as we mentioned throughout the training, if you create these sites underneath persona accounts and then add yourself as a page manager, then you can access through your own IP because you’re a manager. You’re authorized to access those accounts, so it won’t trigger reverification because you’re accessing from your own account. Again, all of that is covered in the training. If you want to put everything underneath your own profile, you can, just be aware if anything ever happens to your profile, you’re going to lose all your assets. It’s up to you as to how much risk you’re willing to handle.
All right, we got to go guys. I really wish that we got to the rest of the questions, I’m sorry we didn’t. I’m going to go find that link and drop it here for the video prospecting, the vmail course guys. It’s free, it was something I put together like 4 years ago I think it was before I was in a partnership with 2 ladies. We were going real estate branding, so, just it doesn’t have semantic mastery and all of that, but the training is still valid. That’s all that matters, and I’ll drop the link here and then we’ll see IFTTT SEO Academy members in about 5 minutes for the update webinar. Got some pretty cool things to show study and then we’ll see everybody else next week.
Adam: I was going to say to you real quick before we hop off, we also got the podcast guys. Check it out on the website, me and Hernan will crawl through here and Bradley’s been known to come back every once in a while and answer a couple of questions. If you revisit the page, you might see some stuff. Yeah, be sure to check out the podcast and we’ll see you guys later.
Bradley: Okay, bye everyone. Bye.
Adam: Bye Hernan.