Click on the video above to watch Episode 108 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: Welcome to Episode … Oh, hey. Episode 108 of Hump Day [inaudible 00:00:07] out and we’re pumping up pretty damn … Anyways, Episode 108 today is the 30th of November. It is great to see everybody, and we’ve got almost the full crew. Hernan, how’s it going, man? Are you pumped up for this Hump Day hang-out?
Hernan: Oh, yeah. Yeah, and you know what? I actually played a keyboard. I see the guys with the keyboard’s here, which is pretty damned cool stuff. Yeah, for the ones that, because this is being posted on a community. I think that we could post it on the LAN space. I don’t know. What do you guys think?
Bradley: We can. [crosstalk 00:00:41] I think that’s the most popular …
Adam: Well, [Gary 00:00:44], if you’re listening, feel free to go ahead.
Bradley: I think that’s the most popular thread in like the MasterMIND for like the last …
Adam: Well, while Hernan’s posting quasi-appropriate pictures of us, or what should be us, Marco, how’s it going?
Marco: This show has already degraded to I don’t know what the hell it is right now, man. What’s up?
Adam: Things are going good. How’s the weather? I feel like I kind of missed out, today.
Marco: It’s pretty good, man. As I told you, of course, it’s really cold at night. Now we’re heading into December, so it’s around 65, brr.
Adam: Oh, that’s … Yeah, put on an extra T-shirt.
Marco: Yeah, I had to grab a sheet …
Adam: Actually, you know, that’s tough.
Marco: …to cover myself so I don’t feel that freezing cold. Other than that, you know, you know how it is here, man. It’s the tropics. Can’t complain.
Adam: Good deal. All right. Well, Chris isn’t here, so we’ll move on down. Bradley, how’s it going?
Bradley: Good, man. How are you?
Adam: Good, good, good. No complaints. We’re just going to do this real quick. Wanted to say thanks to everybody who entered the Black … What’s up? Oh, I see you shaking your head at me. I thought you were like saying, “No, don’t say anything.”
Bradley: No, I’m sorry. I was [inaudible 00:02:01].
Adam: I was like, “What? People won a contest. They should be excited.” Nah. Anyways, everybody who entered the contest for Black Friday Weekend, we’re going to be mailing out to the winners, people [inaudible 00:02:12] hat and then we’ve got some T-shirts and a pretty cool mug. Thanks again for entering and sharing, and congratulations to the people who won.
We’re also going to be having some more information coming out soon. We’ve got some updates and some good juicy information about Video Powerhouse, so there’s going to be some cool stuff coming down the pipe with that, so stay tuned in December. There’s going to be some big news in January. I’ll leave it at that, for now. I think that’s it unless you guys … Do we have anything else?
Bradley: Those of you that are in one of the Semantic Mastery memberships, either IFTTT v.2, MasterCLASS or MasterMIND, I posted in the appropriate groups, today, about a Video Powerhouse case study request. We’re looking for applicants to create case studies using Video Powerhouse for three different video types: local video, evergreen affiliate/CPA videos, and Launch Stack videos, and also for Maps Powerhouse. You will be compensated. Wrong videos on the page. For me? What do you mean? Oh, it’s still 107.
Adam: Yeah, sorry. I just updated it. Yeah, it’s still 107. I just saw somebody say, “Where’s the …”
Bradley: [inaudible 00:03:27]. I don’t know, but let me change that really quickly. Sorry about that. All right. Anyways, yeah, if you guys are in one of those groups and you see the post, if you want to apply, you will be compensated with free credits for Serp space so that you can perform the case study. Then, after the case study has been completed and delivered, then you will get an additional 500 free credits as well. Then we’re going to select the best case studies to be used in our promotional material, that sort of thing, and we’ll probably end up giving some extra compensation to the case studies that are selected.
By the way, the video’s been updated on the page.
Adam: Awesome.
Bradley: Okay, cool. Besides that, I don’t think we have anything else, do we??
Adam: No. Let’s do this.
Bradley: All right. Cool. I’m going to grab the [inaudible 00:04:14] screen. Oh yeah, cameraman. We need to do that, too. I was on short … I set this up very, very quickly today. That’s why we’re a little bit screwed up here. All right, let’s see if you guys can see … Actually, you know what? I’ll take the whole screen. I’m assuming you guys can see everything all right.
Hernan: Yup, we can.
Bradley: All right. Just one second. Zoom in a little bit. See this awesome GIF?
Adam: That’s awful.
Bradley: Gosh. What were you and Hernan doing, Adam?
Adam: Just getting pumped up.
Bradley: All right.
Adam: [inaudible 00:04:55].
Marco: Is that what they call it, now?
Bradley: [inaudible 00:04:59] the first one up. I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly. I think we had this trouble last week or the week before. “Hi, all. If I have a website with an IFTTT ring to it, can I link from the footer of the website to the ring?”
I’m not sure I understand what you mean. If you’re talking about being able to put your links into your network properties, in the sidebar or footer, yeah, that’s fine, because remember, most of those are social media properties or web [inaudible 00:05:27] they’re extensions of your brand, right? There’s a plugin. If it’s a WordPress site, there’s a plugin that I’ve always used for doing that. It’s called Social Stickers. Okay, again, Social Stickers. It’s a free plugin. You can install that into your WordPress site, and then there’s like … I don’t know. There’s whole bunch of different icons that it comes with. Then all you do is enter in your profile URLs, and it will automatically populate with … There’s several different icon options, as well.
That’s the one I’ve always used. That way, you can just insert a widget into a sidebar or a footer. If you’re going to hardcode it into the theme, you can do that as well. It really doesn’t matter. What I would do is just mainly link to your main social media profiles, like the Big Five, right? because that’s pretty standard. Then for the rest of the IFTTT properties, I would probably link those using the JSON-LD markup. Right? Structured data markup because you can then stick all of your other profile links for your IFTTT network in the same-as attributes in the header of the site, right? So it’s not going to show up on all the pages, like it won’t be visible to a visitor, but Google which is the bots, they will see all of those links as same-as attributes.
Again, that’s something that your can do with JSON-LD markup. There are a couple different JSON-LD markup creators that you can use that are right online. You can just do a search for that in Google to find them, or if you need to, we can post a couple sources or resources for that here on the event page. Okay?
Not Seeing A Google Plus Page Publicly
All right. Danny Stillman is up. He says, “Hey, guys. I’m new to the IFTTT program. I was having issues with Google Plus pages. When using Classic, it had issues creating a page, and would error out when trying to edit it, so I’ve decided just to get familiar with the new Google Plus pages.” Okay, Danny. They suck. I can tell you that, right off the bat.
“I’m able to edit the page when I logged in at the URL about.google.com.” Okay. “However, whenever I try to preview the page in an incognito window, it won’t display anything unless I log in. Is this normal for pages, or is there a different, public URL that I should be using?”
Yeah. Danny, the about.google.com, that only works when you’re signed in, and that won’t allow you … Let’s say you have Firefox open and you have created the page, so you’re already logged into your profile or to that Google account, right? Whether it’s a profile or page, it doesn’t matter at that point. That about.google.com URL will work there because you’re logged in, but let’s say that in Chrome, you’re logged into your main profile, and you take that URL from the Firefox browser and paste that into Chrome, it’s still not going to pull it up, because it’s a different account. Does that make sense?
If you were to hit the about.google.com in Chrome, it would pull up your profile. Does that make sense? My point is is that, yeah, what you want to do is get the Google Plus URL, all right? You edit it on the about.google.com URL, but the public view URL is going to be the one that’s plus.google.com/ and then a string of numbers which is your page ID, okay? Hopefully that makes sense. The new Google Plus interface sucks. I don’t know why they’re trying to force that on everybody, but it is what it is. We have to deal with it.
I totally agree. It’s kind of convoluted in how you edit all that stuff now. In fact, I actually set up another page just the other day, and the actual link section wasn’t present. It was weird. I created a new Google My Business local page, right? Because remember, all pages now all fall under the Google My Business title, right? That’s how you manage your pages now, is you find them in the Google My Business dashboard. You don’t find them in Google Plus anymore. Under Classic Google Plus, you still can, but under new Google Plus, there’s not even a pages section anymore in the sidebar or the menu option, the slide-out menu from the left, or from the top, I guess I should say. This right here. This menu here, it doesn’t even show pages in the new one.
The only way to access those is through Google My Business, right? So from there, you have location pages and brand pages. If you create a location page … One of our MasterMIND members … I believe it was Carol Bell. She pointed out that recently she had created a few pages or whatever, and I guess Google automatically merged a locations page and a brand page. It used to be that you could create separate locations pages and brand pages for the same company, for the same brand, the same website. You could create a locations page and a brand page.
It looks like they’re trying to do away with that, but when you create a new locations page now, it creates a brand page for you. It’s interesting, because I just experienced this this week, literally. I think it was Monday, I created a new Google My Business page, and it automatically created a brand page for me. However, the brand page, now, doesn’t even have all of the sections to add links or other profile links like the old brand pages did.
It does, however, give you the introduction and the about section that you can edit, which is just like a text editor. It’s like a WYSIWYG editor. In there, you can actually put text in and hyperlink using anchor text, whatever text you want for anchor text. As far as I know … Again, I only played with it a little bit on Monday. When I get some time to dig into it a little bit more, I will, but from what it looks like to me, is what they’re doing is they’ve redesigned the pages, the Google My Business pages, both locations and brand pages to not have the link section.
Maybe a brand only page has the link section, but a locations page … We all knew that didn’t have a link section anyway. The locations page didn’t, but the brand pages would allow you to. But now, when you create a locations page, it seems to automatically create a brand page, but it’s restricted in that it doesn’t have all those sections that we’re used to seeing in Google Plus Classic.
I totally understand your frustration, Danny. We’ve talked about this a couple times in the Update webinars. You should have access to all of those. Recent, I think probably with the last two, in the last two Update webinars, we talked about that a little bit more. We’ll probably talk about that even further, because the changes are still being rolled out, guys, if that makes sense, so whatever we talked about two months ago is probably different now than it was, as far as Google Plus interface goes. Okay? Hopefully that makes sense.
Google Plus Profile Connected In Buffer
“Also, in the training video about Buffer, only Google pages were available to connect with. Buffer has added the option to link a Google profile, now. Does it matter which one we connect to, or should we connect to both?” Really? You can connect a profile, now, to Buffer? Somebody…
Hernan: Hmm. I didn’t know that.
Bradley: I was going to say, can anybody else confirm that? It’s not that I don’t believe you, Danny, but I thought that was against Google’s Terms of Service, Google Plus Terms of Service was to have auto-posting to profiles. But anyways, maybe they’ve changed that, too. That may be true. I’ll have to look into that. In fact, give me a second. I’m going to write that on my white board for IFTTT updates.
Hernan: Yeah, I’m checking into my Buffer account while we’re at it, so …
Bradley: Buffer post to profiles. Just a minute. If so, I’ll add that to the list for the next Update webinar to cover, Danny. I appreciate you pointing that out. I will definitely look into that. Hernan’s looking into that, as we speak. Typically, what I’d do, Danny, is I would still connect to your brand page, in other words your page instead of your profile, because you basically are creating a brand for each website that you put a ring around, unless it’s a personal blog, in which case, yeah, it would make sense.
Even a personal blog, it would still make sense to have a personal blog page, so to speak, instead of just your profile. But if you can syndicate to both … I think though, with Buffer though, can’t you … Again, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think with Buffer, you can only connect one social media. Unless you have an upgraded paid account? I think you can only post to one social media account …
Hernan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bradley: … through the free account.
Hernan: Yeah, that’s correct. With the free account, you can only pick one. Like you can have several … You can connect Facebook profile page or group, but you can only post to one of those, you know?
Bradley: Right.
Hernan: Yeah, you can connect Google Plus profile, as I can see here …
Bradley: Wow.
Hernan: … on Buffer, so yeah.
Bradley: Okay. All right. With that said, I will still cover that in the next Update webinar, Danny, for sure. I’ll look in it, and I’ll play with it a bit too, to see how we can best utilize that. Since this is new to me, I can’t really give you good advice on that now, other than I would still connect to the page for syndication to begin with. Then, maybe sometime between now and the next Update webinar, if that changes, you will know because I’ll let you guys know on the Update webinar. Okay? For now, I would say, continue to post to the page, unless of course, by the way, you have like a really good following on Google Plus, and then it would also make sense to post to your profile so that you get more engagement and everything else.
Affiliate Links In YouTube Videos
That’s a good question. I don’t know about specifically at option, Devin. I haven’t looked into that, but as far as having an affiliate link in a YouTube video, does it affect rankings? I’ve never seen that, because here’s the thing. If you put an external annotation link in the video itself to where like there’s a clickable link in the video player, somewhere in that video player frame, then that’s supposed to be only going to a website that you have access to, so in other words, your own website.
In the past, I used to actually verify my website, my associated website, and then I would use a redirect plugin, for example, Pretty Links or any one of the redirect plugins, and I would create a redirect link from my domain to an affiliate offer. I would put that directly in the video. However, that is against YouTube’s Terms of Service, and they will terminate your account if they catch you doing it. I’ve had that happen. Most of the time, you’ll get away with it and they’ll never catch you, but I don’t want to lose a channel over something like that, so now what I’ll do is create a landing page on my domain.
You can call it a bridge page, right? A bridge page is just where you link to a page on your domain where you can give more information about the affiliate product, and then have the affiliate buy link or buy button or whatever, or the link that takes them over to the sales … you know, your affiliate link that takes people to the sales page, on that bridge page. That’s a way to get kind of a work around so that you can still use external annotations within the video, but not violate the terms of service.
As far as having an affiliate link like in the video description, I’ve never had any issues with it. Again, I still use a redirect URL, because I don’t ever drop like a raw JVZoo URL in, for example, in a video description. You can do that though. I’ve seen other people do it. I don’t know if that affects rankings or not, because I’ve never done it, but I’ve seen other people do that. I’ve see videos that had just like raw JBZoo links or ClickBank links directly in the description. Typically, I will always cloak the link anyways, through one of my own domains, so it will be a redirect that will be cloaked or a meta refresh or something like that. It’s just a prettier URL than a raw affiliate link for the most part. Okay?
Do you guys have any experience? Do you know if it affects rankings at all? I’ve never seen it.
Hernan: No, me neither, because usually the rules that govern YouTube rankings and YouTube video rankings on Google, because you need to factor in the two rankings, YouTube rankings on its own, and then Google rankings. They’re different than the usual websites, because we have seen embeds. We have seen those kind of things, which is the main thing that we create in Video Powerhouse in the first place. Embedding a video will usually help it rank higher on YouTube and on Google, so the rules are kind of different.
At the end of the day, unless you have an annotation, as Bradley was saying, or a card with an extend-a-link, the only place that you will actually put the link for your affiliate probably would be on the video description, you know?
Bradley: Yeah.
Hernan: Unless you copy and paste that description, which we advise you not to do, if you embed that video into somebody else website, like we are doing with Video Powerhouse, you will only get the video. You won’t get the description. You know what I mean? It’s different in a way that again, I’ve seen that one of the best things that you can do is launch jacking with videos, and for example, ARYS Academy for Launch Jacking. Those kind of things. You know, usually, most of the descriptions will lead to JBZoo or similar, you know?
Using Persona To Brand A YouTube Channel Or Using Existing IFTTT Ring Connected To The Money Site
Bradley: Yeah. Okay, cool. Sky is up next. He says, “I have an IFTTT ring around my money site. Let’s call it Ripper Shoes. I want to put a completely separate IFTTT ring around my YouTube channel. Should I use Persona to brand it, or can I use something like Ripper Shoes Video House?”
You can do either, Sky. Usually I just do Persona rings around the YouTube channel. If I have a branded ring and an associated website … So I’ve got a YouTube channel, I’ve got a money site, and I’ve got one branded ring … what I will typically do is put the branded ring around the money site, because YouTube doesn’t need any extra authority. I mean, yes, you do want to build a channel authority and all that. I get all that, guys, but what I’m saying is your website, your sell posted website, that’s where you’re going to want to push most of the relevance. Why? Because you own that.
Right? You don’t own the YouTube channel. They’re just allowing you to use it, right? So I always try to build the authority on the money site with the branded ring. That’s if I’m not syndicating from both the YouTube channel and the money site to the same branded ring, which you can do, just so long as you don’t have like every time you upload a video to your channel, and that syndicates to your branded ring, if you were to just take that video and then create a blog post on your blog with the video and the same title … You know, the blog post title would be the title of the video, that kind of stuff … then that would also syndicate and that ends up looking like duplicate posts on the Web 2.0 properties, your network properties. So you don’t want to do that.
For example, if you’ve got your YouTube channel that is syndicating to the network, and then you take the videos from your channels and republish them on your blog, but make the posts unique to where they’re not just basically an exact duplicate of the video, you can still use the video in the post, but change the titles, add some text, and all that kind of stuff. Then it’s not duplicate content on your Web 2s, your network properties.
Typically, I just do a Persona ring if I’m going to split it up to where I have a separate ring for, or if I want to stack additional rings on a YouTube channel, which we always encourage, right? Your main money site, in my opinion, you should only be using a branded tier one ring, nothing else. That’s it. Nothing else. But on YouTube, you can stack as many tier one rings as you want, Persona based rings, and as many tier twos or full two tier networks as you want.
For that I always just use Persona based stuff, because all we’re looking for there is really the push, you know, the embeds and the backlinks and the social signals and stuff that those networks can provide to the YouTube video to help them rank. Hopefully get some traffic from some of those network properties as well, but for ranking purposes, that’s what we’re looking for. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a branded ring or not for the YouTube channel. Okay?
For the money site, it obviously does. It’s up to you. You can use a Persona. Typically, that’s what I do, but if you want to create like a second branded network that has the distinguishing label of video whatever. You add something in there just to make it different from your main branded network, then you could do that, as well. It’s really just a preference thing. Okay? Since I always just have my VAs build the network, I just always have the branded network built for the money site, and then Persona based networks for everything else.
Reinstating A Suspended Google Adwords Account
Ethan’s up. He says, “Hey guys. I recently purchased Local Kingpin, and went through all the training. It was really good strategy, and I see a lot of potential in it. I set up my AdWords account and started running campaigns. I made back my investment in your training literally overnight and then some.” Awesome Ethan. “But then things went South from there. About a week into the campaign, I reallocated my campaigns from my initial account into another new account, mainly for branding purposes.
“For a few days after that, I had both accounts running different ads at the same time, and targeting different keywords. For billing, I had two different cards paying for the AdSpend, one debit, one credit card, but the billing info was the same.” Okay. “Anyways, they suspended all my accounts due to suspicious behavior and the payment of this or your other AdWords account. I think, on one of the accounts, I tried to manually pay the balance off, even though billing was set to automatic. A Google supervisor mentioned this as a potential factor. When I sent an appeal to them, they responded with a vague and unhelpful email saying, ‘We confirm that your account is in violation of AdWords policy. Since this decision is final, the account will not be reinstated. Please avoid creating additional AdWords accounts as they will be subjected to the same suspension.'” Well that sucks, Ethan.
“Now my billing information is flagging automatic suspensions so I guess I can’t use my address anymore. Although I am strongly considering advertising with Bing now, for more reasons than one, I would still like to have the option to advertise with Google, so I’m in need of some help. What would be your recommendation on how to approach this so I can get back up and running and not have to worry about this BS?”
Yeah, that kind of sucks, man. That’s a good question, because I haven’t run into that.
Hernan: Yeah, I have.
Bradley: You have?
Hernan: Well, you can get your AdWords account suspended for a bunch of reasons. My question would be, why would you have different AdWords account under the same name. You know the bank details, those you cannot fake them. I would definitely go with different campaigns, if you want, within the same account, or if you create like a Google client service, you can have a business and you can manage that account. That would be like step number two, maybe filing for an LLC, having a different address, and then you go from there, but again, at the end of the day, you’re playing under their rules. This applies with AdSense, as well. You cannot have more than one AdSense account with them having the same details. You know what I mean? They can shut you down.
With that said, I would say be patient, Ethan. Try to call them. Like try to call them and follow up with them. Just tell them, “Well, I didn’t know,” et cetera. Most often than not, and this comes to kind of a social engineering side of things in the way that it will strongly depend on the people that picks up the phone. Some people will be really helpful with you; some people won’t. It’s just a matter of picking up the phone and calling them. The same happens with Facebook accounts that get banned. Just pick up the phone and call them, you know? Try to get that account reinstated, because the main reason is not the account. The main thing is your credit card and your debit details. Those hurt, the sensitive data.
Marco: If I can add a …
Hernan: I would say that …
Marco: Ethan …
Hernan: Yeah, go ahead, Marco.
Marco: Go ahead and finish Hernan. Okay. Act really ignorant. Call them and act just as stupid as you can. Just do, “Oh my god, I had no idea. I didn’t know.” Just be as ignorant as possible. Don’t go in there acting like you know it all, and that you’re trying to solve it, and that you were doing it for branding purposes and whatever. Just tell them that you were trying to switch things over. You didn’t know that you needed to shut one off and start the other one. Just act stupid. I’ve noticed that they try to really help people who are ignorant.
When you go in there acting like you really know, and that “Hey, look. I was trying to brand, and I was doing this.” “Okay, we know that you were trying to game us. That’s done. We’re shutting you off. That’s it, no question.” Call them. Act ignorant. Try to get someone else on the phone that will actually help you. They can be really helpful at times, man. Then as Hernan was saying, it just depends on who you get.”
Hernan: Right. Right. It’s like calling the bank. That’s the way I see it. Like if you have a problem with one of these companies, you just need to keep trying. That will be my main intake on it, because again, I had like some AdWords accounts been banned because of that. Like some client would make a mistake and they will shut them down, and I would have to intercede.
The only last thing that I wanted to say is that Bing, it’s definitely not Google, so my best bet would be to get your account back and running, Ethan. If you want to invest in advertising on Bing, go ahead. The kind of audience that you will have on Bing is completely, 100% different than you will have on Google, and the results will be different. Local campaign, it has been proven on Google because there’s an audience there. There’s a demographics that use Google. There’s a demographics that use Bing. They’re completely different, so I would definitely … Go ahead and try it, of course. If you have a tested funnel that converts, go ahead and try it, but do not expect that Bing will replace Google. It doesn’t. You know? It doesn’t let go, so …
Bradley: The last thing I was going to say … I’ve done this … is go get a prepaid credit card that you fund, or a debit card that you fund, one of those kind of things. You don’t need like a whole nother bank account, but just like a … NetSpend, for example. Netspend.com is … I got several prepaid debit cards from there that I load. You just go to Western Union and load some cash onto them. Then you can use those as well. That’s something that I’ve done, so that I can have multiple credit cards for stuff like that. Just go to NetSpend.
If you need a different billing address, then I recommend getting a P.O. Box or something, and doing that. Again, try what Marco and Hernando said first, because that would prevent you from having to do that, but there are work arounds. Sometimes, that kind of stuff sucks, but luckily, I haven’t run into this problem. I will do some more digging into that as well, because that’s something that I certainly would need to update Local Kingpin about, if I find that that’s going to be a problem. I don’t want anybody else experiencing that either, so I’ll look into that, and I will update the training.
By the way, anybody that purchased Local Kingpin, I added several more update videos this week. There’s an update section in there, and there’s a doc or a lesson in there where I list all of the updates in the order that they’re updated, and put the dates so that you’ll always know what is the most current. Go check that out, because I added like three more videos this week.
Marco: At least he knows it works, so as soon as he gets it going, he can start making money again, so …
Bradley: That’s right.
Marco: … There is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You get this all sorted out, you can go back to making money. It can be sorted out, man. It’s not the end of the [inaudible 00:30:08].
Bradley: Interestingly, we have MasterCLASS in about 30 minutes, and anybody that’s been in MasterCLASS knows that I’ve been working on an affiliate campaign using AdWords, well, and other traffic sources. But I’ve been fighting Google AdWords for about six weeks with this campaign, because it’s one of those industries or topics that Google doesn’t like very much, and so you have to jump through a thousand hoops. Once you jump through those a thousand, they put another 500 in front of you.
For about six weeks, I went back and forth with AdWords for about 15 different email replies back and forth with them, trying to get it squared away. I finally got all my ads approved for that account. Now, I’m driving a lot of traffic into it. Sometimes, you have to jump through some hoops, Ethan, but once you do, then it opens up those traffic gates for you. It’s kind of worth it to go through the trouble. It’s a pain in the ass, but once you get through it, you’ll be better for it. All right?
Best Way In Telling Google To Crawl Updated YouTube Meta Titles/Desecriptions
Our YouTube SEO course specifically was called YouTube Mastery. It was basically derived from the MasterCLASS, like the first eight weeks of the MasterCLASS. Ethan, I don’t know if you’re in the MasterCLASS, but if you are, I’d just go back and watch the first eight weeks of MasterCLASS in the members’ area. If you want to purchase that course, it’s like … I don’t know … 67 bucks. It’s called YouTube Mastery. Just search Google for YouTube Mastery by Semantic Mastery, and you should be able to find it. It’s a little bit dated in that some of the interfaces … You know, some of the interfaces have changed in YouTube since we recorded those videos, but all of those principles still stand that are taught in that course.
As far as your videos not being indexed, you know, it might be a channel thing. I don’t know, Ethan. I’m just making an assumption here. I know that there’s been some flukes in the past where I’ve had videos that just flat out wouldn’t index. It’s just weird. Like it’s just kind of like just an anomaly, so to speak, when that happens. If you have multiple videos in the same channel that aren’t indexing, it might be a channel issue. I don’t know that that’s the case, but that’s something I would look into. Like take one of the videos from your channel. Upload it to another channel, even if it’s a test channel that you just create, to see if it will index right away. If it does, then it can lead you to believe, you can make the assumption that your other channel has got an issue of some sort.
However, that said, if you want Google to crawl your videos, there’s two things you can do. One, if you have a Twitter account that’s a real, active Twitter account, you can Tweet the URLs. That seems to get the bots to come crawling very quickly. Something else you could do is drop a link in a Google doc, right, and set the Google doc to public, so anyone on the web can see it, because Google docs [crosstalk 00:33:23].
Hernan: Stop. Stop. [inaudible 00:33:24] another way. [crosstalk 00:33:27] another way.
Bradley: You can do that. there’s also the Google crawl, the submit tool for search console, right? If you go to Google and you search “submit URL,” and you’ve got to be logged into your Google Search console, but if you put “Submit URL to Google,” …. It’s going to be this first link right here. You have to be logged in, but you can also submit it directly to Google. Okay? That’s all you need to do.
Again, as far as the index updating, for like your YouTube titles and stuff, that’s not something you have any control over. You can’t force Google to update. Typically with YouTube stuff, though, at least the thumbnail image will update almost immediately, but like the YouTube title and stuff like that in the search results, that … It depends on what kind of industry you’re in. Some industries, the index gets refreshed more often than others, and some, it’s just really, really slow.
Like for example, some of the home services industries that I work in, the index doesn’t refresh for sometimes a few weeks. You’ll make a change to an SEO title for a post for example, or a page or something like that. Sometimes it will be 10 days, two weeks before the title’s updated in the search results. That’s just because they don’t refresh those results as much, because it’s not as heavily as a changing industry, if that makes sense. The industries that are content heavy, where there’s a lot of activity, like for example, the tech industry, something like that, those kind of results refresh a lot more often than say roofing results would. Okay?
You don’t really have any control over that, but if you want to get them … You can check to see if they’re indexed by doing, for example, the submit tool right here, and then just do the info operator. If you go to Google and you type in info:, right? info: and then you put the YouTube URL in, then it will show whether it’s indexed or not. So for example, let me just grab something from our YouTube channel real quick, one of our recent videos. Let’s say this one for example. We’ll copy that link address. We’ll come over here and paste that in. Whoops. That’s not what I wanted to do. Forgive me. Let me go back to Google. We’ll say info: and that one’s … Let’s get rid of this. That one’s not indexed yet. Okay, well that one’s not indexed yet.
They typically will index and you’ll be able to see it very quickly. You can probably just search directly on … No, that’s not showing up, either. But that’s typically how I will go about it. Again, if you’ve got a Twitter account that’s active, that’s one of the best ways to do it, because then it’s not as spammy, so to speak, because you’re like naturally getting bots to come crawl it. All right?
Google Sites VS WordPress
Ivan’s next. He says, “Hey, guys. I have a client that I made a Google My Business account for. Now she asked me to build a website for the company. Google Sites or WordPress?”
I don’t know. My personal preference is still with WordPress only because you have a lot more … Although again, there’s the new Google Sites that are responsive and all that. I have not played with those at all. I have zero experience with those, so based upon my knowledge of the old Google Sites versus WordPress, I would still suggest WordPress, only because you have a hell of a lot more design control, and also the ability to add plugins, a lot more functionality. But Google Sites are certainly powerful and I know the new responsive designs that they have are a hell of a lot better. Again, I would have to have more experience with the new Google Sites to be able make a clear determination, but from my experience that I have at the moment, I would say WordPress.
What do you guys think? What do you think, Marco?
Marco: You know my answer. Do both.
Bradley: Yeah, you could. You could still do both.
Marco: There’s no reason why they should be mutually exclusive. Go with WordPress since that’s what IFTTT is. It’s the foundation, right? You run the rss feed from WordPress to your IFTTT, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a secondary site on Google Sites. Make it look really good. I don’t know. Justin, our RYS done for you … The guy who does the DFY RYS stacks, he’s doing some awesome websites with the new interface. He did some training videos on how to do them, which I might share at some point. I mean, they really look good. They’re responsive. You can do just a ton of awesome things with those, so I would just say both. Even if you do one with the old interface, do it. There’s no reason why you can’t. We do with RYS Academy. We build a companion [crosstalk 00:38:25] site for the drive stack, so reason not to do it.
Bradley: That’s right I would still make WordPress, in that case, the main money site, but …
Marco: Correct.
Bradley: … use Google Sites as a feeder site.
Marco: Okay.
Building PBNs For Video Syndication
Well, I don’t know that I’ll create a video for that, Justin. Maybe. It’s not going to be anytime soon. I can tell you that, but if you’re in the MasterCLASS, we have a MasterCLASS webinar in about 20 minutes. If you want to post this question over there, we can go into a little bit more detail on that. That’s fine. Knowing that you’re requesting that, we also have a thread in the MasterCLASS Facebook group for, you know, content requests from you guys for many members that has been, despite my nudging, despite my prompting, there’s been very little request for content in that thread. Again, it’s in the MasterCLASS Facebook group. If you want to contribute to that, and request some specific content, that’s the place to do it, and we can cover that a little bit more in depth. Okay?
Video PBN sites are a hell of a lot easier. Like there’s a lot less work involved as far as footprint issues and everything, as there are with like PBNs that you’re going to be using for backlinking to websites, so you can be a little bit more … You don’t have to be quite as careful, is my point, for video syndication sites.
Lead Gen Sites Designs
Let’s take a look at it.
Adam: I would change the UI big time, but …
Bradley: Yeah, it’s a little busy.
Adam: It’s just the UX. Yeah, it’s busy. I mean, if it works, right? there’s something going on right, but …
Bradley: Yeah.
Adam: … they could really clean up the calls to action.
Bradley: As far as landing pages for lead gen sites, you know, there’s a tested, tried, and true, proven landing page format that works really good with like AdWords campaigns and stuff, for example. I can’t pull an example up to show you, Brian, right here on this webinar. In MasterCLASS or MasterMIND, I can, but I can’t do it here. You could search online and just find landing page templates for lead gen sites that you’re going see a lot of the same elements.
Typically, you’ll have a headline. You know, your contact information at the top, you’ll have a headline, and then a video and an opt in box. Those are like the main elements. Then you’re going to want bullet points and maybe some testimonials. Obviously, testimonials are always good, contact information in several locations, that kind of stuff. But yeah, this one to me is just too much. There’s too much text and everything else. Personally, I don’t like this design. The reason why so many of the landing pages for local lead gen are similar is because they’ve been proven to work and to convert the best. Okay?
I would do that. Start searching. Again, in MasterCLASS or MasterMIND, I can go over, and I can pull up some examples that are in some of our courses to show you. I just can’t do that right here. I’m not prepared for that anyways, but you know, you can search Google for lead gen or local lead gen landing page templates and that kind of thing. You’ll start seeing some common elements across various designs. The reason why they are there is because they’ve been proven to convert with lots of testing.
Then obviously, you can always play around with that. I stick with what works, which are those design elements, and then I just kind of switch things out for split testing, like different headlines or different colors, that kind of stuff. I usually don’t really change the position of the elements on the landing page as much as just like changing text, for example, or changing colors, because the elements are where they are for a reason, if that makes sense. Okay?
How would I improve that design? Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. I mean I would have like usually, a video or some sort of text box with a call to action, a clear call to action. Then usually, the opt in form is going to be over here somewhere, right? Then there’s the bullet lists, which are like features or why the business is different, like why the business is different than other competitors in the area, call to action, again, some testimonials, that kind of thing.
Try to keep your landing pages simple. Especially, like I don’t know … It’s not so critical for SEO, like if you’ve got local lead gen sites that you’re using SEO as your way to generate leads. I don’t know if it’s as critical, but for AdWords stuff, when you’re paying for traffic, you really don’t want … Like this, somebody could land on this page. I don’t know that they’re running ads to this, guys, I’m just saying, this is not something I would run as an AdWords landing page because there’s too much, there’s too many distractions on this page for somebody to click and go somewhere else on the site, and never end up calling or opting in or submitting a contact request form. Typically, on the landing pages, you want one clear call to action, and that’s pretty much what the page is built around, which is either pick up on the phone and call, or submit the contact request form, or both. Do one or the other is what I’m saying. Right? Anyways, hopefully, that was helpful.
Charlottesville Homes. “Hey, it’s Toby Beavers here. I quit my job and I’m back in SEO 100%.” Awesome, Toby. “Question: I’ll be rejoining MasterMIND in late December, after I catch up with the basics. Is there anything in the course that’s not working now, so I don’t have to read it?” That’s funny, Toby.
Yeah, I would say just start with the most recent stuff and work your way back. There’s obviously stuff from two years ago that I wouldn’t suggest doing now, but honestly, you probably can get everything that you need from the last six months anyways, right? I would start with the most recent. Work your way back from there. Once you get to the beginning of 2016, you’ll probably already be swimming in too much info anyways. There are certainly some things that are still valid, no matter what, like they’re timeless in the SEO world, but a lot of the stuff that we do that’s kind of like cutting edge, that’s all going to be recent stuff. Once you’re into MasterMIND, just ask questions, Toby. That’s the quickest way to get pointed to the right content.
Andrew’s up next. He says, “I just joined Semantic Mastery, and decided to dig into the content. I’ve been a SEO journeyman for a few years, consulting for two local businesses and a tech company. I’m looking forward to learning and applying skills to turn SEO into a significant source of income in the next six months.” Well, good for you, Andrew. Welcome. Good luck.
Fixing RSS Feed URL Issues When Adding It To IFTTT
Yeah, Larry. Make sure you have a post on your site. I’m not saying you don’t, but if you tried to submit a recipe or an applet to create an applet in IFTTT, and you enter in for the feed, which is your trigger, an empty feed … In other words, if you go look at your feed in Firefox, if there’s no posts in that feed, it’s going to say, “Not a valid feed URL,” so you have to have at least one post, number one.
Number two, if you do have a post in your feed and you try to add it, and it still saying, “Not a valid feed URL,” it’s most likely a plugin conflict, because I’ve seen that happen, too. Go in and disable all your plugins, try it again, and it should validate the feed. It should say it’s fine. [crosstalk 00:47:19].
Marco: Hey, Bradley.
Bradley: Go ahead.
Marco: We dealt with this in Facebook, and his problem was that he wasn’t set to custom URL. He just had to reset his slugs. That’s all he had to do. Once he reset it to custom, everything started working fine.
Bradley: Oh, you mean the permalinks.
Marco: The permalinks, right.
Bradley: Got you.
Marco: Yup.
Bradley: That’s another thing. That’s a good point. Right. If you had your permalink set up to whatever the default is, post date or whatever, then you’re right. It won’t work there, either.
Marco: That’s why he was getting that, and so we went through that, and it was fixed.
Bradley: Very good. Now Larry said that also, he had lost the network. I don’t know what you mean by lost the network, unless you mean you lost the recipes, because IFTTT making changes should not affect all your network properties. It might affect the applets, formerly known as recipes, right? But it shouldn’t affect your network, so I’m not sure if that was just kind of lost in translation there. If you lost your recipes or applets within your IFTTT account, that should not affect your network.
Selling A Video That Is Generating Leads
Okay, Damon’s up. Let’s see. We’ve only got a few minutes, guys, so we’ll get through just a couple more, and then we’re going to wrap it up. Damon says, “I have a video that’s generating leads. I’ve reached out via email to a few contractors, and sent them leads. They flaked out. This was originally a case study, but actively generating leads. What would you do to sell this? I want to sell flat out. It’s for snow removal in South Buffalo, New York.” Ooh, that’s going to be a busy, busy lead gen property in the next few months. “They are getting it bad, now.” I don’t know what that means. “I noticed most contractors either don’t answer the phone, or can’t take the work.
Haven’t put a bunch of time, but I was thinking creative video with samples of the most recent calls, run through what they are doing well on their site, like your video email training, Bradley, and give a nugget or two, and tell them to contact me if they want instant leads. Marco, Bradley, Hernan, bearded guy, oh, yeah, Adam, how would you sell this? I’m great at getting results. Definitely working on improving my salesmanship.”
I would just contact more snow removal companies until somebody takes you up on the offer. That’s what I would do. Honestly, what I would do is I would have an email template that I would hire a VA to do all the scraping of the leads and then sending the emails out. You could set up a prospecting funnel. I know you don’t … Like if you’re just trying to unload this property, then sell it cheap, too. You know what I mean? That’s something else you could do just to get it off your hands, and still make some money back. But what I do whenever I’m prospecting … I don’t do much of it anymore, but when I was doing a lot of prospecting … is I would just, including for service providers for lead gen properties, is I would have a VA scrape all the leads for me manually. I always found that to be way more effective, get much better results. Then I’d have them do all the emailing. Then I would just field responses or replies.
Adam: Yeah, I’m thinking, too, what you might also want to try to do is like do what Bradley’s saying, but then, instead of expecting a reply, like maybe send them to like … Man, shit … like an opt in page. I’m trying to think of how this would work best, but basically, the idea of being like send them to an opt in page where they can opt in via text, and get something back.
Bradley: Yeah.
Adam: I know you could do this with other things, but obviously like we do it with click funnels. You can have it so that they could text and get more information. A lot of these guys, like other contractors, they’re probably going to be able to text or send a message while they’re out, but they’re not going to scroll through and read like a long-ass email and watch a video and all of that. Right?
Bradley: Yeah, that’s true.
Adam: Try to make the point of contact easier for them somehow, because that’s probably the only hurdle. The other thing is, they may just be swamped. I live up by Buffalo, so they may have their hands full and not need it, but you never know. Then it’s a numbers game. See if you can get a VA on it, and then reduce the friction point.
Bradley: Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. You said you’ve reached out to several contractors and they flaked out. Well, there’s got to be more, the contractors. Somebody will take you up on the offer. It’s a numbers game.
Adam: Yeah, and if they immediately flaked out and you want to unload it … Like if they just said, “No,” that’s one thing, but if they just didn’t answer, try going back again. You know what I mean? Give them round two. Just make up some reason, and be like “Hey, you know, blah, blah, blah. I’ll give you a $10 discount” or something. I don’t know. You know, just an excuse to contact them again.
Google Tag Manager Issues
Bradley: Yeah. Keith Best is up. I know we’re just about out of time, guys. We’ll give it about another three minutes. Keith Best said, “Just a heads up for those following Local Kingpin. Got up to creating tags and tag manager. Followed the video and created them. Tested using Tag Assistant. Got an error.”
Keith, that’s an error in tag manager, and I spent about an hour going through the exact same thing that you’re talking about here, is it really pissed me off because like I was seeing the exact same thing that you’re seeing. I’m assuming that’s going to be the same trouble. Yeah, that’s what it is.
“Did this twice and then did a search on Google. Google has changed the tag IDs from six to seven, but Tag Assistant hasn’t been updated.” So you did the exact same thing that I did. I was annoyed with it, because I spent about an hour trying to figure out what the hell was wrong. Eventually, I did some searches, and I found in several different forums, that that is indeed what the problem is. They changed the tag IDs from six to seven, and the Tag Assistant plugin, Chrome extension has not been updated yet, so … Anyways, look, he said that was two and a bit hours bloody wasted. I feel your pain, brother. I spent about an hour on that so we’ve got, between the two of us, over three hours wasted.
Watching Videos In Incognito Windows To Index Them
“Congratulations on your AdApprove.” Thanks Ganty. Let’s see. “Did you think that if the videos are watched through an incognito window or something, it might index the YouTube videos?”
The problem I have with that, Ganty, is … My god, that is an awful, awful picture.
Hernan: [inaudible 00:53:16] disturbing.
Marco: It is disturbing.
Bradley: The turkey torque.
Adam: I kept scrolling past that. I just … every time I went up to check requests. I was like, “Nope, I can’t stay here.”
Bradley: Ganty, the problem with sending views to a non-indexed video is that can seem unnatural, too. Does that make sense? If a video’s not indexed, where are the views coming from? Granted, it can be an unlisted video. It can be embedded on websites as an unlisted video, and people can be watching it, but I hesitate to send like fake traffic or whatever to a video that’s not been indexed yet. I always like to wait until it’s indexed before I start sending traffic to it. The reason for that is just because I don’t want to raise any red flags.
Like Google knows, or YouTube knows if the visitor is watching the video on YouTube, or if they’re watching it on an embed. You can tell all that by looking at YouTube analytics, right? It will tell you if the video’s been watched on YouTube, whether it’s been on the watch page or the channel page or in a playlist or in an embed or anything like that. I wouldn’t recommend just sending views to it unless it’s been indexed. All right?
Okay, guys, we really have to wrap it up. Oh wow. Look, we’re pretty much done anyways. “I’ve started using CSM’s …” Oh, Crowdsearch. “for [inaudible 00:54:39], but I am curious why it didn’t show up in Google Analytics and Insights.” I’m not sure, Mark. I’m not sure what you mean by this question. Why it didn’t show up in Google Analytics, I’m not sure. I’d have to dig into that a little bit more, but we’re out of time, anyways. Guys, looks like that was pretty good timing because we’re just about done.
MasterCLASS starts in five minutes, guys. We’ll see you over there. Thanks, everybody for being here.
Hernan: Ooh, see everybody.
Marco: Bye, everyone.
Adam: Bye-bye.