#+ I have too fucking many artworks uploaded here already

[beastblade69]

okay I feel like all the furniture in my brain stands upside down, what's more, disorganised. funny 'tis this feeling like someone else constantly pushes their fingers inside my skull and blends everything inside. and suddenly I don't know what to think because the furniture is not organised right, it's placed so funny, I mean. it shouldn't be this way. what a fucking mess

[dirtyoldmanhole]

@/damoselcastel was kind enough to show me a bunch of the FE:Fates visual works artbook pages the other day!

and because i am continuing to be .... brain rotted (lol) ... grabbed a copy since there was more than a few relevant pages/official artworks, and wanted to have a high res/color corrected version of these pages for art refs to slap on my reference boards! if i'm looking at them every day now for the past three months they better be accurate!!!

anyway! it came TODAY!!! :D :D pakidge

IT WASN'T EVEN SUPPOSED TO COME UNTIL THE END OF THE MONTH AAAAA

god dang this thing is THICK, now this is what i call a proper artbook! a little hard to see here but you can see by both the front and the spine that it's a chonker -- the two tellius artbooks combined are thicker but they're also a bit smaller elsewhere.

rest is under the cut b/c it's me promptly going feral :P

(and seeing who's on the spine ahhh!!! honestly that's really cool and super appropriate given his subtle plot/character relevance?! super fucking cool to keep seeing nintendo nod at him in symbolically relevant places, but not too overtly )

SPEAKING OF I SHIT YOU NOT GUESS WHICH SPREAD THIS THING FELL TO FIRST

I SHIT

YOU

NOT--

stone cold, swear to you, straight up didn't intend that but this was literally me irl then:

:')))))))))

(also HE GETS A WHOLE SPREAD???? and a turnaround?!!!!!! even freaking corrin's nohr noble design gets like an EIGHTH of the page

gunter gets treated SO WELL in this artbook i'm on the floor trying not to sob like i'm sixteen again and begging for any zihark scraps

also this is so much more high res than what's on my reference board the nitpicky artist in me is literally crying for joy about FINALLY HAVING A HIGH RES REFERENCEEEEEEEEEEE

also what the fuck the architecture is so cool???????????

THE WORLDBUILDING I AM WILDING

for real tho i remember my first conquest playthrough my jaw was on the FLOOR being genuinely amazed at how cool the worldbuilding was especially on the nohrian side with the gothic vibe and y'all don't know how useful this is going to be to replicate nohrian motifs in all of my drawings/probable comics/doujinshi/etc.

[foams at mouth]

this artbook also covers EVERYTHING

like there's a healthy amount of character work , but there's also enemy designs (always thought fate's enemy designs were unusually kickass, like some of these folks could be outright characters themselves), the architecture stuff above....

my room lines....

OH MY GOD THIS MEANS I HAVE A THIRD SET OF TRANSLATIONS I CAN CROSS REFERENCE TO FUCK YES

sorry for shitty blurriness it's just me vibrating in excitement lmao i'll upload it in the high res chunk

.....

hellooooo sir~~~~

(you knew i was going to be posting that shot >:D )

his possession CGI gets a full fucking page too ajlsjsjkskjhhjshjg

HE GETS TREATED SO GOOD HERE Y'ALL, SO MANY FULL PAGES???????????? is this what it's like to be brain rotted over a major character i will never know the feeling lul

(there's actually at least two other gunter fullbody artworks in here, those have already been scanned/uploaded properly by others so i won't post 'em here unless y'all want em!

and then lastly!

to finish it off, god this cover progress is so cool, kozaki knows what he's doing.

and i'm pretty sure gunter's linework gets changed halfway through, his expression's somewhat different than on the final! and i'll be posting that along with the other high res/cleaned up scans! just need to figure out if my scanner's gonna do a better job than my phone or vice versa.

[tries to stay composed] [fails]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[hippriestess]

Part 3 - “ I thought we had some kind of agreement but with you it was just prurience”

So, where were we. Ah yes....Record Store Day 2019.

It was, perhaps inevitably, a heavy day for Fall fans. Lead-in times both for the manufacture of vinyl records and for participation in RSD are such that Smith's death came too late for the impact to be evident in the 2018 event but for 2019, we were absolutely flooded in a way that caused some, quite rightly, to question the judgement of the organisers in allowing so many obvious vultures to swoop in for an easy bite. 

The “monitor mixes” from the 2CD edition of “The Unutterable” were pressed to vinyl for the first time. “Whoo-fucking-pee” quoth the faithful and you will have absolutely no difficulty acquiring it today should you be down to few enough marbles for it to seem like a good investment. BMG hold the rights to the group's Rough Trade recordings and went with a box set of five 7” singles under the awful title “Medicine For The Masses”. This was the exact same format as “The Rough Trade Singles Box” from 2002 although with the bonus of containing the correct Peel Session versions of “Container Drivers” and “New Puritan” (Castle/Sanctuary had updated the 5 disc CD edition once they had acquired the rights to the BBC tracks but the vinyl edition of Italy's Earmark Records retained the Grotesque and Totale's Turns versions used in the initial pressings). Given not only that none of this material is any way scarce but that an excellent single LP release had been given to all 10 tracks in the box (Peel takes included) by US imprint Superior Viaduct in 2018, it was perhaps inevitable that “Medicine For The Masses” pretty much flopped on the day and can now be acquired brand new for a good £10 less than the asking price on the day itself.

Ah yes, Superior Viaduct, let's not forget them. A well-regarded reissue label with a smattering of current artists, they had already issued some Fall vinyl in 2016/2017, putting all the studio albums up to “Perverted By Language” back onto vinyl as well as the first 2 singles and the eternally category-defying “Slates” 10”. Following Smith's passing, they have (almost) completed the task with the aforementioned “Rough Trade Singles” LP and a new pressing of “Totale's Turns”. These editions have been very well received and have been praised for the quality both of the mastering and of the pressings but they remain largely inaccessible to UK fans due to licensing restrictions preventing the editions from being imported. As such, you'll hafta pick these up on a one-to-one basis off your own bat.

Right, back to Record Store Day 2019. We also had the “opportunity” to buy a number of live albums. 5 of them, in fact. All of these had previously been released on CD towards the end of 2018...so this was going to be called Crap Rap Part 14 but it's now called “Stop Releasing Every Gig You Can Find On Some Mouldy Third Generation Maxell C90 on a double LP”

Live albums have always been canon with The Fall. “Totale's Turns” was their 3rd LP release, “Live In London 1980” was issued by Chaos Tapes with the group's permission in 1982, “Fall In A Hole” was allowed until copies were exported. We had “Seminal Live” and “The 27 Points” mixing live with studio, as did “I Am Kurious Oranj” with several tracks recorded during the original Edinburgh run of the ballet. Even the “Perverted By Language Bis” video was largely live material. Even once the shark was jumped in the late 90s/early 00s with the endless recycling of those outtake/live compilations, there were official live missives, such as the excellent “Last Night At The Palais” in 2009, the wonderfully titled but patchy “Uurop VIII-XII Places in Sun & Winter, Son” in 2014 though to the terrible “Live In Clitheroe” in 2017. So, all in, it comes as no surprise at all that over 20 more live albums have been added to The Fall's discography since Smith's sad departure from this realm.

There were no less than 5 live albums dumped merrily onto the shelves for RSD 2019, 3 of them doubles. On their own, this would have been an outlay of over £100...in fact, if you wanted the full RSD Fall, you'd have had little or no change on the day from £250. For exactly no unreleased music. No unreleased music? What were these live albums then? Let's wind back to late in 2018... (I told you this was tough to do in any kind of linear fashion).

Arriving via the PledgeMusic site, “Set Of Ten” released by “Cog Sinister”, worked like this: 10 previously unreleased live recordings were contained in a sturdy square box with spiffy new artwork from Pascal LeGras. The tariff? £100. Ouch. Now, a handful of them were announced as separate releases, however, if you bought the box you would receive an exclusive disc – a recording from Derby, 1994. Cometh the hour, the Derby CD was one of the first to be released on its own. Huh.

A small amount of digging revealed that this set was the work of Rob Ayling. With the dates running from 1980 to 1999, the general opinion re: Set Of Ten was that these tapes were very likely to be in Ayling's possession due to the “Live From The Vaults” series on Voiceprint, Ayling's previous imprint, from 2005. When that series was announced, the five releases were said to be simply the first batch.  It could therefore be deduced that these tapes had been destined for future batches. At the time, there was a minor dust-up over them and no further volumes were issued. Whatever the motivations, presenting an 11 CD set of old bootlegs with so little quality control being put into the audio and asking £100 for it felt like cold ash in the mouth. Worse still, PledgeMusic went bust before many customers could receive their sets, leaving them to either claim chargebacks on their credit cards or simply out of pocket as ordinary creditors to the failed business. It must have been galling for those who lost money to see the CDs arriving on their own and several cut onto expensive vinyl.

I've picked up a couple of the CDs separately and these have been largely fine. Recording quality is listenable but obviously audience derived. The best one by far of those I've heard is “Live 23rd June 1981 @ Jimmy's Music Club New Orleans”, a great recording of a full-tilt Fall performance from a critical time in their existence (pictured) . There's a palpable tension, possibly due to the return of Burns, brought back not just out of practicalities but also to even the group up a bit, now that Smith was beginning to reconsider the wisdom of having a team of childhood friends for a group. Rehiring Burns was designed to put some grit back into the machine and it worked. Having a full set from this line-up is a worthy addition to the canon and it should be snapped up before it vanishes – this is the only one of the “Set Of Ten” CDs that seems to be thin on the ground. The artwork and credits show the level of care taken over the release; that is – pretty much none. The CD artwork has the 6 piece “Hex” line-up – Karl Burns is the only drummer here as Paul Hanley was at home doing his O Levels. However, the sleeve credits Paul Hanley and not Burns, adding a credit for Duncan Burndred, who was the group's driver at the time. The info had been sourced from the “Slates & Dates” press release which credited Burndred with “the rest” (ie anything other than music and management). Likely pilfered from thefall.org, this missive was retooled for the artwork without any real consideration.

However, it seems there was sufficient demand out there and, cometh the tail end of 2019, cometh another Set of Ten, given the snappy title...”Another Set Of Ten”. They must have been up all fucking night thinking of that one. Again, it has 11 discs. It does get interesting here insofar as most of the tapes come from between 2009 and 2013 suggesting not only that there wasn't much left from the original “Vaults”- destined batch but also making it unclear from whom these tapes were being licenced. They are, of course, under no obligation to discuss such matters publicly and, indeed the current incarnation of Cog Sinister would likely feel aggrieved at having the question asked. They are, after all, a legitimate enterprise. 

A quick skwizz at the Discogs page tells you that “Another Set Of Ten” is not a triumph; all the tapes are listed as being audience tapes, one disc has just six songs from the gig and several others are also incomplete and/or mislabelled. The main contributor to the Discogs entry (to whom, hello!) notes that the tracklistings appear to be taken from photographs of setlists uploaded to thefall.org's justly revered and thoroughly sublime gigography but, where the setlist didn't match what was played, no attempt has been made to correct this. They haven't even matched up the content with the tracklistings!!! At time of writing, these ones are just starting to slip into the shops on their own, possibly Covid delayed as you could get them via online retailers for a while. The cover for a Manchester gig from 2009 looked like a sick joke and it was hard not to think similar (albeit at lower pitch) about the inclusion of an infamous Motherwell gig at which MES was completely plastered and Brix had quit the band an hour or so before the show. What's next? Worthing? Brownies?

Yet it is very hard not to be continually tempted. There's some juicy setlists in these discs and the artwork at least has some effort – Pascal LeGras has done a very fine job here and his art certainly gives the right feel to the releases. I'm guessing that was the plan. I’ve got my eye on a few. It’s a disease this, I tell you...

Anyway, one way of the other, 5 of the “Set Of Ten” discs found their way onto vinyl on RSD, courtesy of reissue imprint Let Them Eat Vinyl and all of these are still easy to score, should you wish. The whole Gonzo/Let Them Eat Vinyl hookup is interesting for scholars of who-owns-what in terms of The Fall's catalogue. As above, we know that BMG have the Rough Trade recordings but LTEV's “Grotesque”, issued in 2017, states it is licensed by Sanctuary.

LTEV have also been putting some of the other lesser releases from the catalogue onto vinyl, including 2 mid 90's live albums (Phoenix 1995 and “The Idiot Joy Show” - nothing that was wasn't available for buttons on CD in the early 00s) as well as “Interim”, the demos and live cobble-together that attempted to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in 2004. The latter had never been pressed to vinyl before and with bloody good reason.  Yr mileage, as always, may vary.

Whilst not The Fall, acolytes will doubtless want to know that Ed Blaney issued a 2CD edition of “The Train”, containing the full 40-minute “(Part Three)” CD, a similarly lengthed alternate version and a clutch of remixes. Blaney also uploaded a properly touching tribute to Smith on YouTube, including reminiscences with other friends of Smith.

One more part to come, in which we burn the spotlight of shame onto a couple of the worst products ever to have had the name The Fall unwillingly emblazoned upon their sleeves and take a quick look over some of what we know is in the pipeline.

[ajcrwl]

webp? hell yea!

oh god, imagine thinking that gifv or webp formats are bad and blaming it all on Googel.

it’s not the format that’s bad, tumblr just needs to tweak it’s conversion algorithm, perhaps. and let us upload our own webp files. hardly anything can compare to webp’s file size. 

as someone who makes animated files for nearly every page of my comic i had to constantly choose between making a gif with smaller dimensions or destroying the quality for the sake of smaller file size. and then i found out that webp exists and WHOO BOY. i can make animations with the same dimensions and at HALF THE FILE SIZE of what the gif would be???

it’s incredibly flexible when you can control the creation of your own files. there’s even a whole ass photoshop plugin which greatly simplifies the process of saving a file as webp. in fact, even though i’m someone who is tech savvy, i prefer to use it instead of the command line for simplicity (there’s a free libwebp library, and you can also convert files with ffmpeg in your console).

and then i hear some people scream that it’s only supported by chrome, which is a lie?? 

wait, did you mean old as fuck IE doesn’t support it? well it’s about time to GET A BETTER FUCKING BROWSER. as for Safari holding back on webp support - i can imagine why, but none of the reasons are “because webp sucks”. so while there is no webp in your precious Apple device.... GET A BETTER FUCKING BROWSER.

I wish I could attach my own webp files for comparison, but let me show you this instead:

These are the files I made for one of the pages of my comic. Take a look at the dimensions. GIF file at half the dimensions is twice the size. Webp is only slightly compressed and looks almost exactly like the original art, while GIF has lost background gradient smoothness and gained some artifacts. I can show you a bit of the background where this difference is the most evident:

Webp is on top, GIF at the bottom. Webp can have somewhat visible “blocks” but it largely depends on the compression level. Gif has too much noise and gradient smoothness is completely ruined.

SO

one of the things that matters to me and matters to Tumblr is server space. what also matters to me is that my animations look just as good as my original art, and considering how many effects I like to use and how many colors there are, it’s nearly damn impossible to preserve with GIFs even at the best quality settings.

OK BUT WHAT ABOUT PIXEL ART

good question. i think webp can still achieve this. i’ve done a quick test with this image:

(credit: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/9YPWa )

opened it in Photoshop and this is what the output shows:

left is source file, right is webp preview. they really look EXACTLY the same. and you know what the best part is?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

once again, the webp version is drastically smaller. okay, yeah, it says 1,5 KB in the preview and windows says 2KB, but that’s because the file is actually 1,58 so I guess it rounded up, here are the correct numbers (pardon the Russian language ui):

sooooo, stop demonising the entire file format? ask tumblr to let us upload webp files instead? if y’all are smart enough to bitch about it and find out how to turn it off in browser settings, you will learn how to make these files by yourselves too. it took me, like, one evening.

YEAH BUT TUMBLR FILES BIG, COMPRESSION HARD

i hear ya. and i already said: they need to tweak their conversion algorithm. what i noticed is that the gifv file your browser shows is always slightly bigger than the webp file it saves. i’m not sure what causes that, i’ll try to find out.

and again, as i said, we need to be able to upload our own webps. trust me, when you learn how to make them, it’s hard to look back.

[snakeassembly]

I Loved and I Loathed Pt.1 BodyPainter! Taehyung x Reader (Angst/Drama)

Summary: You meet Taehyung, a body painter that makes you question everything that you’ve ever believed in. He wants to make you his, but there’s a problem. You’re already engaged.  

 Author's Note: I am still alive. This story will have parts. I’m sorry that it took me so long to upload only for me to come up with this trash.  Enjoy lovelies!

Warnings: cursing, nudity, possible smut in the future (?)

Word Count: 5,221

 //

Your feet were cemented to the dirty concrete floor and you could tell that the bodyguard's patience was wearing thin. However, a quick glance at your face made him hold his tongue from commenting how you were holding up the line. Not that you noticed or cared.

The bright blue neon lights across the front of the grimy building taunted you as your feet shuffled from side to side. You were sure that your once smooth and glossy lips were now chapped and swollen from you constantly biting it. A few curses and yells were heard from behind you, but you paid it no mind. Your focus was solely on the flickering sign, Texture.

You attempted with great difficulty to not roll your eyes at the slightly cheesy name.

However, the sign intimidated you greatly and you were starting to regret taking the card from Jungkook and coming here in the first place. You stuck out like a sore thumb by the way you dressed. Everyone was dressed in t-shirts and sweatpants, clothes that didn't seem appropriate for a place that mimicked the vibe of a nightclub. You were perplexed at their style. A group of girls who were standing in line eyed you up and down before letting out a snotty scoff.

Screw this, I'm leaving.

You turned on your designer's heels and began making your way back to your car where your driver was waiting for you. However, before you could even take 3 steps, a hand shot out from your peripheral vision and tightly grasped your shoulders.

"Annnnd where do you think you're going?" You immediately tensed at the unwelcomed physical contact, but you quickly relaxed after you heard the voice.

"Home," you deadpanned.

You shrugged his hand off of your left shoulder, making the purse that was hanging to fall off. Before you could bend down to reach your bag, your friend quickly swiped it up for you. You turned around and faced the handsome man, who was looking at you with a bewildered expression.

"But you just got here?"

"I know," you continued monotonously. You tried to side step him, but all he did was mimicked your steps, blocking your way.

"Don't be like that; you haven't been out in so long. Ever since you got engaged, you haven’t been hanging out with me anymore," Jungkook whined.

You ignored the mention of your engagement.

"It's night time though," You smirked at him while crossing your arms together. Jungkook pinched the bridge of his high nose in frustration.

"You have no idea how hard it is for me to not hit you right now."

"Hey!" you protested. Without any regard to your wishes, Jungkook steered you towards the entrance of the building and the bodyguard lets both of you guys in without a second glance. Along the way, you were chastising him about how he shouldn't threaten a woman. Jungkook carried your purse with him, effectively preventing you from leaving.

"Oh you're a female?" He glanced towards your chest, "I couldn’t tell."

Your mouth dropped in offense; your hands came up to cross across your chest. But before you could get a chance to defend your acceptable size, you were stopped short when you noticed the scene that you were in.

The interior of the building was a stark contrast to outside. It was not the club vibe that you were expecting. Despite the exterior building being dingy and run-down, inside was almost as luxurious as the finest spas that you've been to. The lights were red-toned, giving off a sensual mood that was starting to affect you. Around the room, there were massage tables, set up with numerous people already on them. But, they weren't getting massages, they were getting painted on.

However, much to your dismay, too many people were walking around. But, that wasn't what was bothering you. It was because of their clothes, or lack thereof.  

People were naked.

Even though silk robes were given out to the customers, it was optional. It seemed like most of them chose to go all natural.

You felt your cheeks warm up, not like Jungkook could tell due to the red lights, and you held up a hand against the side of your face to block the sights of the countless genitals. With wide eyes, you turned to look at Jungkook. He was too busy checking out the girls that were walking past to notice your discomfort.

"Jungkook?" you squeaked out. He managed to tear his eyes away from a dark-haired chick to look at you.

“Oh, I forgot how much of a prude you were,” he teased. His face got closer to yours, making you more uncomfortable. You roughly shoved his face away with two perfectly French-tip manicured fingers.

“Why in the hell did you bring me to this place?” You hissed.

“It’s art, ___.” Jungkook sighed as he rubbed his forehead to soothe the pain.

You quirked an eyebrow in response, “What is?” Sure there was painting involved, but the fact that it had to be so racy, so provoking, artistic was the last word you would describe this ordeal.

“The people,” he gestured to his surroundings, “they’re all art. They’re no longer empty canvases. They’re completed works now.”

Your eyes quickly scanned around the place. He was right. The artwork that was displayed on a person’s body part was detailed and meticulously done. The artists were so skilled that you could even make out the difficult techniques that were used under the terrible lighting.

Your eyes zeroed in on a girl who was currently getting worked on by a guy, who you could only see the back of his head. From where you stood, you could only slightly make out the white tiger that was painted across her back with hibiscus flowers framing its face. It seemed like she was enjoying what the guy was doing to her based on the sounds that were emitting from her mouth, even though he was not touching her in any kind of sexual way.

He gently patted her shoulder to signal that he was finished. The red headed girl stretched out like a cat and draped her silk robe over one of her arms. She held out a hand towards the guy and batted her fake eyelashes. He gently took her hand before leaning down to kiss it. A giggle escaped from her.

You slightly cringed at the high pitched sound. It rang loud and clear despite you being half way across the room.

You finally got a good look at the guy when he turned around and immediately locked eyes with yours.

Oh come on, now that’s unfair.

God was too nice when he created this guy because he was fucking mesmerizing. Even with his shaggy bangs hanging close to his eyes, the intensity that radiated off of them sent shivers down your spine.

Jungkook raised a hand, “Taehyung!”

The guy finally tore his gaze away from you and glanced at Jungkook. A soft smile curled up on his face and he, with the red bombshell, approached you guys. As he got closer, you could make out the shiny lip ring that graced his lips.

Just when I thought he couldn’t get anymore attractive.

The man enthusiastically greeted Jungkook as they both exchange a warm embrace. You were trying very hard not to stare at the girl’s nude body. Jungkook, on the other hand, remained unfazed by the view.

“Texture’s number 1 customer! It’s so good to see you!” His deep and sultry voice placed you under a trance, “You haven’t been coming around lately. What is up with that man?”

Jungkook sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck, “Ahh well, Father’s been on my ass about the company. He’s retiring soon and he wants to make sure he’s going to leave it in good hands.”

Taehyung dismissively waved away Jungkook’s excuse.

“You know I don’t get your corporate world. That’s just rich people’s problem.”

Jungkook shrugged in response. You haven’t said a word since the conversation started. Instead, you were too busy admiring Taehyung’s appearance. Dressed in ripped black jeans, and a white Gucci t-shirt tucked in, he was oozing with sex appeal. His aura was striking, but not to the point where it was overpowering. It was more subtle. However, he made sure that he was noticed.

“I see you have a kitten with you,” Taehyung remarked.

“I can say the same thing about you,” Jungkook nodded in greeting to Taehyung’s companion.

He surveyed you up and down, “A spoiled princess?” Your mouth parted in shock at the rude comment.

“What does that make you? The ugly frog?” You rolled your eyes.

“Yes, if that means I can get a kiss from the princess,” he winked in your direction. However, he winced as the red head dig her nails into his arms, not fond of the flirty comment.

Jungkook smirked at his friend’s grimace , “Ooh she’s feisty.”

“You should see how she is in bed.” You almost gagged.

“Gross,” you softly muttered. Unbeknownst to you, Taehyung heard the remark.

“Baby,” the girl whined, “I want to leave.”

“I would love to, but I have a few more clients left before I can leave,” Taehyung looked down at the girl. She pouted and crinkled her eyebrows in disappointment.

At this moment, Taehyung would usually just shoo the girl away. But, he was feeling a bit obnoxious today and wanted to grate on your nerves just for his amusement.

“However,” Taehyung purred, “I’ll make it up to you tomorrow night.”Satisfied with his answer, the woman strutted away. You couldn’t help but be slightly envious of her ass. Taehyung inwardly smirked when you rolled your eyes.

Jungkook snapped his fingers, “That reminds me, do you think you can add another one to your list?”

Taehyung quirked an eyebrow, “For you?”

“Nah,” Jungkook drawled. He jutted a finger in your direction.

“For her.”  

“For ME?”

“For HER?”

Your head and Taehyung’s snapped to each other after realizing you guys spoke at the same time.

“I don’t want him.” You crossed your arms and blew a stray strand of hair out of your eyes.

“You don’t seem to be an ideal customer either princess.”

“You guys don’t really have a choice since I’ll be the one paying,” Jungkook rolled his eyes at your childish antics, “How can you guys hate each other already?”

“It’s certainly not IMPOSSIBLE,” Taehyung scoffed.

“Plus,” he went to stand next to Taehyung before flinging an arm around his shoulders, “you don’t even know her name.”

Taehyung glanced at you, who was awkwardly shifting your weight between each foot. You clearly don’t belong here; anyone could tell. This wasn’t your scene. You looked like you should be at a fancy restaurant, having people at your beck and call. The last thing he needed was an entitled customer to ruin his day.

With an exasperated sigh, he reluctantly agreed. He signaled you to follow him, but before you guys could get any far, Taehyung was stopped by Jungkook.

“Hey, do you think the beauty who worked on me last time is available?” Jungkook grinned.

Taehyung scanned the open area before spotting the girl Jungkook requested for. His whistle caught her attention and she looked up in confusion before spotting Jungkook. She immediately smirked and nodded him over. He threw your purse at you without any regard and you clumsily caught it.  Jungkook advanced towards her before turning around to wink at you guys before leaving the both of you alone.  

You scoffed at his actions and you turn towards Taehyung, who was surprisingly nowhere to be found.

What an asshole.  

You scanned the crowd, making sure to take a double look at the guys who had an undercut. You finally spot Taehyung leaning against the staircase that lead towards downstairs. He smirked at you before raising a finger to beckon you towards him.

“It would be nice if you give me a heads up next time before you disappear,” you snapped.

“Last time I recalled, you’re not my mother,” he retorted, “but then again I was never good at listening to her either.”

He started making his way down the stairs and through the poorly lit hallway. You struggled to catch up to him and by his increasing pace, he had no intention of slowing down to accommodate you either.

With a few more twists and turns and instances where you almost tripped, the both of you finally arrived at the destination.

It was a door. That was it. No designs, no colors, no posters, none at all. It was just plain and…empty. It was a stark contrast to the neighboring doors that were eccentric with bold colors or were littered with posters.

A sense of loneliness settled within your chest and you were confused on why it ignited such a feeling.

“That’s unexpected,” you softly uttered.

Taehyung glanced at you over his shoulder, “What is?”

“How transparent humans really are.” Before he got a chance to probe further into your answer, you brushed past him and into the room.

The lights had a blue tint to it and unlike the massage tables outside, there was a bed in the center. To the left was a small sink and across the bed was a small sofa where a pile of paint bottles were carelessly about.

He gestured you towards the bed, but you switched directions and sat on the sofa instead. It didn’t feel right for you to be on the bed. It felt intimate and you barely knew the guy standing in front of you.

Taehyung rolled his eyes at your action. In his head, he made another note about how highly you must think about yourself when compared to him and he was put off.

“Why are you so defensive?”

You snapped your head up, “What?”

“Your walls are up so high that I can barely make out the top of your head.”

“Well, grab a ladder,” you retorted.

“You don’t have to be such a bitch you know?”

You leaned back against the sofa and crossed your arms in an arrogant manner, “I know.”

Taehyung was about to open his mouth and complain about how he’s never met someone with such a horrible attitude. He was 2 seconds away from kicking you out and telling Jungkook to shove the money up his ass.

However, the playful glint in your eyes made the words in his throat die. Seems like the princess had a sense of humor after all.

“What? Cat got your tongue?”

Without replying, Taehyung snatched a couple of paint bottles from the sofa and grabbed a few brushes from the cabinet above the sink.

Two could play at the game he thought.

With his leg, he rolled a steel stool and settled in front of you. Your thighs were in between his legs and he was so close you could feel the heat radiating off his body. You took a sharp inhale at the unexpected invasion of space.

“Guess whose tongue the cat have now?”

“Is this really necessary?” Your meekly said. You lowered your head, avoiding eye contact.

Taehyung narrowed his eyes before pushing himself a few feet away. “Is that better?”

“Lots.” Your airway seemed to finally open up and you can feel the blood leaving your cheeks.

He started making wild, painting motions in the air. “And how exactly am I going to paint like this, genius??”

You stared at him, “Oh.”

He returned back to his original position and you swear that he moved even closer to you than before.

Taehyung glanced at your finger that was anxiously tapping on the sofa. He inwardly smirked at your discomfort and felt proud of being able to affect you so much.  

“What do you want and where do you want it?”

A puzzled expression etched on your face.

Taehyung made a motion over your body, “The picture, what do you have in mind?”

“I haven’t thought about that…” you rubbed the back of your neck in embarrassment. You stuck out your hand.

Taehyung dumbly stared at it, unsure of what you want him to do before slowly giving you a high five.

You giggled, “No, I mean I want it on my hand.”

Taehyung mentally facepalmed at his own stupidity before trying to save face.

“Oh, I knew that.”

“No, you didn’t,” you teased.

“Yes I—,” a hand covered his mouth.

“Are you going to work on me or not?” You raise an eyebrow in challenge.

You feel something wet swiped across your hand and you flinched back in disgust. He licked you.

“I can work on you in other ways,” he winked. You roughly rubbed your hand on your jeans, trying to ignore the slight pleasant shivers that ran up your spine that his tongue caused.

He grabbed your other hand without permission and firmly grasped it.

How can someone’s hand be this tiny he wondered. His own hand practically engulfed yours.

Not wanting to stay longer than he had to, he decided to put you out of your (and his) misery and made the decision for you.

“Let me surprise you.” Taehyung softly muttered.

“Huh?”

“I’ll paint whatever I want,” he softly smiled at you. You glared at him in suspicion.

“Just trust me and close your eyes.”

What the hell is he on?

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, you did what he asked of you. Taehyung couldn’t help but take the opportunity to study you. You looked so peaceful. Your dark eyebrows were no longer furrowed and your lips weren’t pursed anymore.

Taehyung jerked in surprise when one of your eyes opened and your brown orb curiously peeked from under your long eyelashes.

“Holy shit, don’t do that!” He grasped his chest.

“You were taking too long to start!” You exclaimed.

One of his fingers came up to fold your lid closed. He shushed you. Before long you felt the cool paint on your left hand, but instead of focusing on the brush strokes, you were paying attention to how gentle he was.

Taehyung took notice of how your ring finger was empty. He wondered about what kind of boyfriend you would have. Would the guy be from a well-off family who wear suits and attend luxurious parties with you and take you out on shopping sprees?

Surprisingly, would the guy be normal with a regular day job who showed his love through letters and have cozy nights in as dates?

Why was he interested anyways? It wasn’t like you were kind or as good looking as his red headed friend. He barely knew you. So why couldn’t he swallow the slight hope that gnawed at the back of his head at the thought of you possibly being single?

After half an hour of him working in comfortable silence, you started to become restless. Taehyung had to tug you forward a few times because you started to lean back.

You groaned. “Are you done yet? My back hurts.”

“It depends. Do you want it to look shitty or the best that it can be?” Taehyung hummed.

You let out a whine in response.

Taehyung bit on his lip ring to keep from laughing at your childish antics. You surprised him in many ways. Even though your first impression wasn’t great, he picked up on the subtle details that allowed him to understand you a bit more.

For instance, most if not all female customers do not  hesitate to show off their skin in hopes of getting into his pants. It was normal for Taehyung to see a girl’s chest within thirty seconds of meeting her. Yet here he was painting on your hand and that felt more intimate than any other naked body he worked on.

“How did you end up here?” Taehyung questioned, reaching for the orange paint bottle and squirting it on the palette. “You seem too high end to come to a place like this for entertainment.”

“I didn’t really have a choice in the matter,” you grumbled with your eyes still closed, but Taehyung could see them roll behind your eyelids. “Jungkook threatened to buy my share of stocks if I didn’t come.”

“But that’s not the real reason why you came though because you could always  just buy it back.” Taehyung pulled you forward again, this time with a bit more force.

“Well that’s the only reason I’m giving you.” Taehyung could feel your hand tense up in his, so he decided to drop the topic. He started drawing small circles with his thumb in the center of your hand in comfort.  

An awkward silence settled between you two and you started to feel guilty for snapping at him when he was just curious.

Making up your mind, you took a deep breath. You didn’t want to give him a hard time anymore.

“I needed a change in scenery,” you confessed.

“I’m assuming that you weren’t expecting naked people as part of that scenery am I right?” He chuckled.

Even though all you could see was darkness, you could imagine his eyebrow quirking in amusement and his eyes crinkling in laughter.

Realizing that he wasn’t upset with you, you decided to let your guard down a little. Just a little bit.

“I needed a break from the stack of papers on my desk. Having people barging in and out of your office and demanding for papers to be signed can take a toll. Having family as business partners and employees can blur the line between what you want to do and what you should do. I had to fire one of my cousins a few days ago. Imagine how the Christmas dinner will turn out.” You dryly chuckled.

“I’m sure a side of icy glares will complement your hot dinner,” Taehyung offered.

“Just the thought of her makes me want to fly back to America.”

“You’re from America?” His ears peaked in interest. You felt the brush stopped its motions. Taehyung’s gaze shifted to your face and you fought to not squirm in your seat.

“I grew up there actually. I graduated high school, went to prom and everything. I came back three years ago.” Taehyung hummed to signal you to continue. You feel the brush move again.

“Why did you come back?” It must have been hard for you to leave your entire life and start all over again in a foreign country.

“I had some obligations that needed to be fulfilled as the daughter and assistant director of my Father’s company.”

“Oh? What kind of obligations?”

You thought back to your unexpected engagement. When your Father phoned you while you were in America and demanded for you to get on the next flight back to Korea, you assumed that there was a dire emergency with the company or that your brother’s gambling ways had finally caught up to him.  

“Establishing business connections.”

Taehyung hummed in thought, “And how’s that going?”

“It’s a work in progress,” your lips twisted up in a grimace.

Satisfied with the knowledge that he gained from you, he decided that it was enough for today.

“What about you? How did you end up working here?”

Taehyung spluttered. He wasn’t expecting you to take interest in his life because you seemed to be the type that couldn’t care less. No customer tried to ask about his background; they were either preoccupied trying to bargain the price or shamelessly flirting with him.

“I needed to eat and I didn’t want to rob people or sell my body. Luckily the owner of Texture took me in and became my mentor. I know that the business is unconventional, but that’s what brings people in .” He paused. “Plus, I like to paint. Not everyone is born with a gold spoon in their mouth.”

Anger surged within you and you were about to defend your way of living before Taehyung spoke again, “It wasn’t a jab at you. But I’ve seen wealthy people waltz in here and many of them have been blessed with comfort and luxury at a young age. They reap the fruits of labor their parents sowed and some of them are just wastes of space with no contribution to the company.”

Hearing the description, Namjoon and Hoseok automatically popped in your head. “Yeah, I can see where you’re coming from,” you mumbled.

A comfortable silence settled between you guys once again.

You attempted to take a peek at what he was doing. You saw a blur of different shades of blue before you feel a slight pain on the tip of your nose. Taehyung had caught you red handed and took it upon himself to reprimand you by tapping your nose in warning.

He sucked in a breath through his teeth, “Stop that.”

You didn’t know how much time has passed but you knew that your back was so tense that if you didn’t crack it in the next twenty seconds you’d go crazy.

Taehyung let out a deep exhale. His breath fanned across your face. It replaced the warmth that was no longer present on your hand. “We’re done!” He exclaimed.

You carefully opened your eyes, not wanting to be blinded by the lights even though it was a dark blue hue color. You studied your hand. It was a detailed drawing of a squid. Its slender body stretched to half of your forearm before reaching the back of your hand where you can make out the ocean background. Its legs were tangled  together before spreading out to each of your fingertips. The squid seemed to float on your arm, like it was real due to the dark shadows that provided dimension.

Taehyung wiggled his fingers. “You can make it move too.”

“Holy shit, this is amazing!” Your mouth was opened and your eyes almost popped out of their sockets. This was better than any work you’ve ever seen in museums.

You could barely contain your excitement for you started to jump up and down in your seat. The creativity, the details, the labor that went into painting this work made you all the more appreciate Taehyung even more. Not only that, but it’s on YOUR body. Art is on your body and you get to walk around and show it off instead of carrying a large painting around.

“You’re fucking amazing, Taehyung!”

It was the first time you said his name since you arrived.

You beamed up at him, eyes filled with admiration.

The sight made his heart lurched to his throat and his stomach to drop like lead.

 //

 Later on that night, you couldn’t stop bragging about Taehyung’s art to Jungkook. You stood to the side, watching the girl paint on Jungkook’s hard abs. You wiggled your fingers in his face when he was laying down before abruptly attaching your hand to his face.

The “squid” attacked him.  

“Oh my god. If you don’t stop being a brat I’m going to throw you into the ocean and you’ll have plenty of squids to be your friend.” Jungkook seethed.

Beside you, Taehyung couldn’t help but puff his chest out with pride at your countless praises. Taehyung glanced at you.

You were bouncing up and down from side to side on the soles of your feet like a little kid in a candy shop.

You were…kind of cute Taehyung mused.

A shrilling ring tone sliced the air and he noticed that it was coming from your phone. You fished out the device from your Chanel bag and looked to see who the caller was.

Immediately the bright grin on your face disappeared and your lips set in a thin line.

Who the fuck could that be? Taehyung wondered.

You hesitated on answering the call before taking a deep breath and pressing the green button.

“Hello?” You turned around and took several steps away from the group for some privacy. It was not going to be a pleasant conversation.

Jungkook followed Taehyung’s line of vision before remarking, “You’re staring.”

“No I’m not,” Taehyung denied.

“Yes you are.”

“No, I am not.”

“Yes, you are Taehyung,” the girl who was painting on Jungkook chimed in.

Jungkook high-fived her.

“Shut up, Chungha.” Taehyung snapped.

She raised her hands up in defense. There was a brief moment of silence.

Anxiety was overflowing from you like a broken sink. You were trying to keep your emotions in check, but by the way you roughly ran your fingers through your hair and how your jaw clenched and unclenched, a blind man could see how distressed you were.

“You’re still staring.”

Taehyung didn’t realize he was before tearing his gaze away from your figure. He glared at Jungkook but the younger man ignored it. Instead, he focused on flexing his abs.

Taehyung was too preoccupied with killing Jungkook in ten different ways in his mind that he didn’t notice you making your way back.

“Jungkook, we need to leave.” Taehyung slightly jumped. A hint of urgency was present in your tone and both of the guys caught it.

Without missing a beat, Jungkook jumped off the table and snatched his shirt that was hanging off from an extra stool. Luckily, Chungha was finished.

You didn’t wait for him to finish buttoning up his shirt before briskly making your way to the entrance. The naked bodies no longer intimidated you.

Jungkook followed behind, still struggling with his shirt. Taehyung fell into step with his friend.

“What’s going on?” He inquired. They were all having fun and relaxing until that phone call. Now, everything was in disarray. You were leaving too soon for his liking.

“Priorities,” Jungkook vaguely replied.

After crossing the entrance, you looked over your shoulder to briefly say goodbye to Taehyung.

“Thank you for everything,” you held up your painted hand and wriggled the fingers, making the squid move.

Your driver opened the door for you and you slid in. Jungkook patted the driver on the shoulder. “I’m going with her, make sure someone returns my car back to my house.” The driver bowed in response.

Before going in after you, Jungkook slipped Taehyung a wad of cash. “I’ll see you next week?”

“Yeah of course man,” Taehyung said, straining his head to peek inside the SUV to take a look at you.

“Will she be alright?”

Jungkook paused for a second, which Taehyung didn’t find comforting, “Yeah, she’ll be fine.”

“Hey Taehyung?”

Taehyung focused back to Jungkook. He quirked an eyebrow in confusion.

“Don’t.” Jungkook firmly said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t fall for her.” With that sentence, Jungkook climbed into the car, leaving behind dust and the smell of gasoline.

Taehyung stood in the damp and cold street, dumbfounded at Jungkook’s warning. As he watch the car disappear around the corner, he came to a realization.

He never got your name.

[hopesanpedro]

Createurs - We Exist

I have the pleasure of being in the presence of talented and passionate artists and musicians most of the time and it’s, for me, is one of the best things in my life. Friends, I call these people.

Last Saturday, one of the bands I looked out for in the past years launched their first album – We Exist. Createurs, which is apparently the French word of creators which is already so beautiful when you think about it in itself, is a collaborative band telling the stories of the monsters not just under our beds but also the ones inside our heads, even the ones that are chasing us, through the music of different people. They have also collaborated with different visual artists for each of their song and those artworks were also featured in the lyrics booklet with their CD.

We Exist album has 12 well-written tracks that speaks of the eerie, the enchanting, the damned, and the mystery of the entirety of life. Yes, life.

Now, I’m not going to pretend like I’m some music expert and give you guys a review of their album. I am, however, going to share with you my thoughts on each and favorite lyrics from the tracks in it.

1. Pancake (Re)Mix

This one’s a little too close to my heart. Remember the artworks I’ve mentioned earlier? I made one for them and it was for this song. I think this is the most outright cheesy song they have in their album. But even so, it wasn’t the corny kind. I described this one as “colorful” when I first heard it. It’s exactly the reason why I was careful on putting too much color in the artwork, I didn’t want to take the colors from the song – I wanted it to be as serene and innocent as the song.

“Flying with time just to witness your smile. And I, oh I’m falling down tonight”

We all know the feeling of being all chummy giddy soft inside like we swallowed a whole damn litter of puppies and they won’t stop making you melt from the inside and that’s what this song makes you feel like – kilig. Oh young, new, love.

2. Tides and Lifelines

Okay, just reading the title you’d get an idea of what this song is about. This song reminds me of a lyric from one of my most favorite band ever ever; “love is watching someone die”. (fine it’s from What Sarah Said by Death Cab For Cutie). I think this is one of the songs Createurs wrote and it speaks about mortality and how we deal with it.

“We’re the bullet in each other’s gun, shoot the angels that would take us apart”

Just read those lines. I don’t want to even think how hard it is to be so desperate and helpless in trying to help someone so dear in the brink of death. Ouch, I’m just gonna go and cry for a while.

3. Teragram Carnivale

“Shadows fall on rooms like this, where the sun and the moon collide, with your eyes that once were my carousel rides”

I feel like we all can relate to this song in some way. It has to be relevant to every one of us at some point in our lives. We all wanted to believe in something that has grew its root around our hearts and got a little too caught up in the roller coaster rides. I think this song brings you back to that particular time to make you realize that the past never changes and they never go away. Definitely in my top 3.

4. Facemask

I think I’ve played this song one too many times when they uploaded this on spotify before. Mostly because of its catchiness and its angst. Lol sorry I know, I can’t think of a better way to describe it. You can actually feel the song’s anger and disappointment wrapped in some sort of vengeful feeling.

I liked the lines “You’re only fooling yourself, messing everyone’s head.  A catfish, a sly dish, the culprit, gets blown kiss”

In this digital era, anything and everything can be edited or lied about and it gets sickening when someone or a group of people manipulate others by lying to them about important things.  Technology is a beautiful thing if used for good, but there is some greed in humanity that uses it for something else entirely.

5. Trigger Warning

“It’s the beginning and it’s the end. When all the light has been set, a warning when night is at best.”

I feel like this song was supposed to be in the beginning? It would have been nice to have heard this intro to all their haunting songs, both in a good and eerie way. It’s like the ones you hear when you watch a horror movie that gives you chicken skin and cool fog kinda vibes. It’s a mood setter, a look into the mirror of our own self. It asks you to look inside and acknowledge that you are one of these monsters you are so scared of.

6. The Curious Life of Mr. Hyde II: The Mexicat

This song is still in my everyday playlist. It’s been there since I’ve met Rain the night they played for WAT Up the first time and I got sucked into their music. Oh god I have so many favorite lines from this song!! It’s about mental issues and it perfectly sings the chaos that is in one’s head. They wrote this to try and explain how complicated it is to be in the state of unstable mental health in a very poetic way.

Here are my top 3 lines (YESS BECAUSE I CANT CHOOSE OKAY?? ☹ ); “The colorful imagery of dancing audacity”, “Conversing with my demons, addicted to the tone”, “I haven’t got a martini or any kind of whiskey, But baby you’re my margarita, drunk in love with you”.

Welp. Let’s just say I love the entire lyrics ugh

7. Pianocktail

OH THIS! I love this one. This reminds me of my other favoritest band forever – Panic! At The Disco. The story within and the sophistication in this one is something that’s imprinted into my fanatic heart (awow).

“The taste has never been this condescending. A drink to be made by the one and only pianocktail!”

Ah, there’s nothing more tripping than an uncertainty for something you’ve had for so long.

8. Chat Box From Alaska

“She’s a part-time lover and a beautiful liar, plagued with her broken words and empty promises. Cornered by the pillars of her comfort and embrace, making out with someone better, someone smoother, someone tastier”

I feel like this song is basically for fuck girls who manipulates people for sex by leading people on and leaving them just as fast. I think the last part of this song was written by Rain as a poem years and years ago? Nevertheless, it ended the song so smoothly.

9. Awful Things the Moon Saw

This song makes me think of obsessive lovers or past ones that refuses to let it go. Maybe it’s also us when we hold on a little too tight on something that’s already slipping away.

“Well you know you’ve got me haunted by your scent, Now I find myself begging and falling for you more and more.”

It is also kind of a lullaby to me for some reason, I can sleep soundly with this one playing hehe

10. St. Cecille

This one’s also in my playlist since I’ve first heard it. I think I read the story behind (or at least heavily connected) this song, written by the vocalist. He has a lot of passion, idk ask him. JK!!!!

"Rhyme our thoughts in this waltzing dreams. Time stops when you are around. You’re the one I’ve been talking about on the song of roads and hearts”

I wish I can share with you guys the link to the story but I’m not sure if he’d like that. Anyway, this love song is right up my alley – mysterious, magic, and love? Hell yas.

11. Bloodstream

All I can say about this is that I am so excited for the story to come out because I want to look more into it. Twilight’s werewolves just left the building.

“Chaotic, poetic, and overly narcissistic. Hypnotic, agnostic, but slightly optimistic. Out of the forest to Manila fucking buses. It’s a tale about a man who waltzed among carcasses.”

It’s a midnight story!

12. Stellar Memories

The first song, besides the ones I’ve already heard before of course, that caught my attention in the album was this one. It’s a desperate attempt to preserve something we believe in and wish for its memories to last up to our end.

“Set up the fire and let’s dance around the house. Then watch it burn down like the dreams we fought so hard to get. If this is it, hope higher, ‘cause we’ll hide from the world and never make a….”

I feel like this is the best song to end the album with because I didn’t want it to end and I just kept it on loop for all its entirety because I liked each song.

I’ve already wrote a (lengthy) Instagram post about their well thought branding and packaging but I also want to commend them for the bomb line up and organized launch! Page Four Production reminded me so much of the first gigs of WAT UP and made me miss the team. From promotions to media exposures, to the materials! I look forward to attending gigs they’d come up with!

I won’t ask for more releases so soon because I want to savor this album and all its stories. I’ve already heard the Part I of Mr. Hyde and it’s Createurs’ gift to everyone who attended their launch so if you are curious, wait for the next album maybe it’d be included there.

This album will always have a special place in my heart. It’s definitely worth the long wait. Congrats, Createurs!

Listen to them on Spotify and follow them on their social media pages to be updated!

[todokori-kun]

WELCOME BACK!

 <3 I really missed you, and it’s so great to hear you had fun! (and omg yes so ready to see all those beautiful pics)

Yaaayyyy join me in MCU feels hell. And oooh, you have a ship for the fandom now! Like, Stoki’s still my favorite Steve pairing but Stony’s really cool too…you know I ship almost everything XD (also am I the only person who sorta hated almost everyone by the end of CW? Like, of course they’re still my favs and there are still some cinnamon rolls, but, come on. Why couldn’t you all just get along ;-;)

Speaking of Illumi, do you know that Hisoka/Illumi is an incredibly popular ship in the HxH fandom? Probably because both of them are so horrible that they have like 0 friends other than each other. Nobody else wants to hang out with these losers. (Chrollo tolerates Hisoka and the adults in Illumi’s family seem to spend enough time with him to give him orders, but that’s about it.) It’s a trash ship with two trashy people and tbh I love it XD

So continuing with the eye jokes, imagine. Hisoillu version of Helpless. Hisoillu version of Satisfied.

“Look into his eyes and the sky’s the limit”

“Intelligent eyes in a hunger-pang frame”

(I know you did thise one before but still) “But when I fantasize at night, it’s Illumi’s eyes”

just, I’m imagining animatics for this with the ‘camera’ zooming in on Illumi’s dead fish eyes every time the lyrics mention them. It’s hilarious and also mildly terrifying

(though I guess if we’re actually making a Hamilton AU Hisoka’s way more likely to do something like Say No To This…)

idk if I’d want to be a parent either really LOL. Kids are adorable but I don’t think I’ll ever be responsible enough to raise one…

If Ishida makes a plot twist or something about it being someone else pretending to be Hide I'm actually gonna get mad. Dude. Not only would that bring the Hide feels right back it’d just make absolutely no sense omg

(also you read the new chapter, right? So, let’s talk about Juuzou and that huge death flag)

I’ve heard of Soul Eater and considered reading it but it’s not really the kind of thing I’m into…artwork’s cute, though, and Death the Kid seems like an interesting guy so maybe someday XD

AGH I’M ACTUALLY SORTA JEALOUS BECAUSE WOW I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA HOW TO WATCH THAT LEGALLY HERE IN KOREA. (unless I ask my dad for help but he doesn’t like manga/anime at all, so…) But yes, I’m really happy Lizzy finally got her moment this time! Now anime-only fans can’t complain about her being a ‘shallow’ character so hopefully there’ll be less fighting over Lizzy in the Kuro fandom :D

FINALLY. Fellow Death Note fan <3333 Who’s your fav? Do you have any ships? Are you done with the anime??? :D (also do you know…you picked a really interesting time to join the DN fandom. The American live-action movie just came out and it sucks so freaking bad, like I haven’t even watched it yet and just from the reviews/clips, here’s what I got:

-They turned Misa into this Harley Quinn-type character. Only without any depth.

-Light/Misa is an actual canon ship, like, it’s not abusive or one-sided like it is in the anime/manga, it’s just…a thing. Light loves Misa. Misa loves Light. It’s like every cringey high school romance movie ever, only with more murder

-They freaking bent the Death Note rules just so Light could get away with all sorts of ridiculous stuff

-L cries, L rants, L is overly emotional

-Light tells L where he hid a page from his Death Note. Light doesn’t deny being Kira. Light shows Misa his Death Note when they like barely know each other and she’s still a complete stranger to him. Light acts like an idiot.

-Oh sure, he’s Kira, God of the New World, but he still cares about going to prom with his girlfriend and making stupid faces as they pose for pictures

-So much unnecessary gore. Heart attacks are Kira’s thing, Light isn’t that emotional about his kills, he doesn’t care as long as the 'villains’ are dead, so why???

-Apparently Rem does not exist. Sayu doesn't exist either. Light’s mom is dead (probably so he can angst over her)

-Light Turner. Light TURNER. Out of all the surnames they could have chosen…

-And now, for the most unforgivable sin:

How dare they not include the Potato Chip scene)

And then random things: JJ and Light have the same voice actor. Yurio and Mello (imo…have you met Mello yet?) could be long-lost twins.

Also:

I’ve fallen into Steven Universe hell and now I’m imagining so. Many. Gem AUs. Have you ever heard of SU?

(look:

1- don’t stress about the messages, and come on, I’d never get mad at you over something like this! You’re way too awesome.

2-  I don’t really know what to say 'cause I’m bad at comforting people, but ugh, it sucks to hear that school’s tiring you out! Queen Luna’s gonna get through this, though. I mean, you’re great at so many things and you’re freaking smart and…this is awkward but maybe you understand Evans Language by now? XD Guess I’m just trying to say that I’m sure you’ll do great, and if you ever need someone to talk to I’m (almost) always free *hugs*

3- Um. So, other than tumblr, I think the only way I can talk with you right now is if we email each other? The email address I used this time is my real one (or rather, my dad’s, since I don’t have one of my own yet…) so maybe we can talk about this more through email and find a better way to contact each other? If that’s ok with you can you send me a message there?)

P.S:

I’ve started college and have no idea what I’m doing

*slams head against keyboard* guess who managed to get sick. It’s only been a week since school started. Whatever, I’m still going to school, but I woke up breathing like a fish on land, bc asthma. Yay.

I’m definitely gonna upload the pics today!!

Okay, but one thing I’m wondering about, is How? Not in a malicious way or anything, I’m genuinely curious to why you ship Stoki (and where it began). Was it that redemption fic you told me about or did you ship it before? 

Tbh, I didn’t hate the characters in CW, I hated the situation. Because there’s so so much pointless conflict that could easily be solved if everyone sat down and talked like normal people. But nooo we have to go around attacking each other. ((ALSO CAP’S LETTER TO TONY, I AM DEAD))

I’ve already learned (and experienced) that shipping is a very weird and unusual thing, so I’ll be honest and say I’m not even surprised that ship exists. At least it has some basis XD

I’m actually tempted to go through the lyrics of the whole musical and find every single eye line there is, only to replace it w Illumi’s eyes.

Not only zooming in on the eyes, the word itself is louder than the rest XD man if only I could draw…

Tbh I’d say I’m responsible enough (HA, that’s more or less a lie), but I’m honestly way too irritated with the little ones to be able to have one of my own. My cousin recently celebrated her 3rd bday and I was stuck looking after her during the party, bc all the adults were talking among themselves and I swear to god, I haven’t moved that much since I had to run 2km for PE. Where do they get their energy. Not to mention the adults thought it would be a good idea to leave me w her, because I’d already drunk 3 glasses of wine (i was bored and not allowed to do anything other than stare at emptiness or look after a 3yo). Turns out my tolerance isn’t that bad after all.

Lol let’s be honest, Ishida would totally do that. He knows the fandom would riot and that’s the whole point.

All the death flags. Tbh I don’t know how I feel about it. It’s obvious that either Touka or Juuzou are probably gonna die and I wan’t neither (If I have to choose tho, I’d rather Juuzou survives.) Also Naki. HNNNNNNGH

I think you’d actually like the manga? It takes a pretty dark turn compared to the anime and deals with lots of mental issues (the whole theme of the later volumes is Madness). Also, lots of death XD Well, the artwork changes drastically, so which one are you talking about XD

The girl in the coat (left first pic, middle 2nd) is the same person for reference. Death the Kid was one of my first anime crushes. The guy has OCD and is a total badass. 

MUHAHAHAHA I think someone uploaded the Lizzy fight to youtube so you can probably find it there, but I am in love. The animation is beautiful, so that’s also a huge plus. All in all, it was handled really well.

Death Note

So last I’ve watched is ep 25, aka the one WHERE L DIES. And i am not okay. I am nowhere near okay. Nope. Not at all.

Oh i’ve heard all about the adaptation. Tbh I find the whitewashing hilarious. Setting the movie in America removes so much of the series’s logic, so why? L being the way he is is probably my favourite mistake. They took the best character and ruined him completely.  POTATO CHIP SCENE NOOOO But my question is: did everything go just according to the keikaku?

Have fun w SU! I’ve watched it for a while, but gave up at some point. I might pick it up again if I have the time ^^ Word of advice, watch out for the fandom, they’re among the most toxic ones I’ve ever encountered. One time, they almost drove an artist to suicide because she didn’t draw Rose ‘thick enough’. So yeah.

What did I do to deserve you as my friend TT^TT Thank you so so much, those words mean more than you can imagine.

Um. Looks like we’ll be staying here, because I never, ever check my mail, despite getting school assignments there, so yeah. If we used mail, you’d probably get a response every leap year.

How does the education system work in Korea? Like, at what age do you start going to which school?

Also, I’ve told you about Mystic Messenger? I think you’d like the newest update, because damn, it’s creeping me out. Also, it’s in Korean, so + ((My thoughts during the prologue of the new route: Nani the fuck))

[amirosebooks]

Humanity’s Angels Acknowledgements

Holy shit, it took me 5 1/2 months to finish it, but Humanity’s Angels is finally done and posted on Archive of Our Own.

It rang in at just under 93k (once I fixed a duplicate scene error from my original upload). It’s the single longest thing I’ve ever written and the first time I’ve written something with this much plot. I’m super proud of myself and even more thankful to the people who helped me slay this beast.

Check out my official fic tag and my worldbuilding tag too because I’ve been having fun with them.

@sevenspirals​ / @sevenpointedspiral​ -- First, I’d like to thank my challenge partner for making some gorgeous artwork for my story. I had this little day dream I used to motivate myself to write on the hard days about finishing this story and being able to use the artwork created for it as backgrounds on my phone. The art you made was so much more beautiful than I’d anticipated or day dreamed of. I’m so glad that, even though procrastination is an evil beast and real life sucks the life out of you sometimes, that we were able to finish this together and on time.

@malady579​ -- GIRL. You don’t even go here watch the show anymore, but you put up with me flailing over it for five and a half fucking months. You read through all the bits I sent to you and acted as my cheerleader through the whole damn process and I’m so fucking grateful I have you in my life. Thank you. (I promise I’ll start writing stories with character you give a few more fucks about asap. Also, sorry not sorry for the feels I gave you.)

@quiescentcastiel​ -- Dude, you came in at the last minute to save my ass when my other betas were either out of the country or swamped with real world things. Thank you so fucking much. You helped me add more depth to an already layered story with your questions and requests for clarity.

@gertiecraign​ -- You hung in there with me as long as you could and omg, thank you. This whole thing got so much bigger than I’d ever planned and I’m so happy you were willing to help me with it. Your suggestions gave me ideas for some truly brutal feels moments in the story and I hope you don’t have too many regrets about them now that it’s all said and done.

@mittensmorgul​ -- Dude, you didn’t even volunteer to help with this shit, but you were patient with me whenever I randomly dropped into your Tumblr message thing with questions about canon and “is this too ooc?” bits. Thank you. 

@hazeldomain​ -- Thank you! You and Gertie were there for me in the beginning with the enthusiasm I needed to really get going with this story. I’m so thankful you took time out of your life to read through my shit and give me feedback.

@merythapy​  -- You were there with Hazel and Gertie in the beginning. Your enthusiasm and positivity helped so much to keep me motivated when I was struggling to find my way with the story. Thank you.

I know there were more who helped, but I’ve lost your tumblr names to time and space. So if you’ve helped me out or listened to me whine about this fic and how writing is hard, thank you.

Honorable Mentions: My husband for putting up with me writing this for half the year. The spn meta writers out there who helped me get a better, deeper understanding of the characters that I needed while writing this.

The bi!Dean meta writers especially for letting me see the areas people have issues with when reading Dean’s sexuality. Those meta posts helped me shape my version of bi!Dean in a way that, I hope, makes it clearer for someone out there to see how he could still be the Dean we’re all familiar with while also being bisexual af.

The season 12 meta writers and spoiler posters. I couldn’t watch the season live for multiple reasons but I was able to follow along with the character developments and major plot points while I wrote this beast thanks to you guys.

[SPOILERS] TPTB for ruining my beautiful plans for the fight scene of this fic by leaving Cas “dead” at the end of the season which forced me to rethink and reapproach my plans. After reading some related meta to Cas’s development and other people’s hopes for him, I was able to write a climax that I am super proud of that takes (unintentional when I first plotted this shit in February) nods from the season finale and turns them upside down.

[attract-mode-collective]

Of Course Dr. Mario Has A Storyline, What Kind Of A Dumb Question Is That?

Yes, it’s true. It’s even in the instruction manual! Though the latest video from Gaijillionaire details the storyline in the manga adaptation of Dr Mario, is something that was dreamt up by the comickers at Bonbon.

I’m not sure what I like more: how it somewhat connects to Super Mario Land (well its manga adaptation at least) or the explanation as to why the pills fall so slowly in-game. That and all the bits & pieces that would appear in Mario titles many years down the road; I do believe it is plausible that Miyamoto may have gotten some ideas from the manga.

On a semi-related note, a couple of mini storybooks based upon early Famicom titles popped up on Yahoo Auctions. They’re no longer active, but thankfully uwagoto was able to save the pics (here and here)…

I really hope, as one of the cover implies, Donkey Kong Jr and one of the fish from Balloon Fight actually teams up against the Balloon Fighter and Bubbles from Clu Clu Land.

And why the hell not; here we have another Mario related vid this early into the proceedings, but one on the opposite end of the spectrum. There’s a brand new series that I dig, called Low Poly, which tracks the evolution of a character model from game to game. And the first installment, based upon Mario (obviously), is perhaps my favorite thus far. Cuz I had long assumed that Mario hasn’t changed all that much, past his GameCube. Well, I was wrong…

insertdisc5 states: “i started thinking about a zelda game where link and ganondorf are childhood friends and gave myself Intense Feels”…

Here we have my first fave piece of Persona fan art (the first of many to come, no doubt), by averykua…

Also via Avery Kua, from her homepage, is this very nice looking arcade stick…

Here’s the artwork in full, btw…

Back to my mai latest P5 waifu; the very first Futaba figure has been revealed!

The best part about is how she comes with interchangeable parts, which means she you can take her jacket off and even have her pose with Morgana…

It also hasn’t taken long for someone to produce a pair based upon the protagonist’s glasses. Which I thought about getting, but as my buddy @ducktastic pointed out, they’re not the most flattering looking frames IRL, at least not as nice as ones based upon P4. Though for anyone else interested, you can pre-order a pair via National Console Support…

My pal @vitaminsteve passed along this tweet, by someone that’s “really close to starting an IG dedicated to the living situations of wrestling fans. it's fucking fascinating.” Included is this image of a guy with a ton of replica wrestling belts (you non-wrestling fans have NO IDEA how much each only one can sometimes cost), and also a Sega Saturn Bomberman multitap…

Oh, and here’s what the multitap looks like when its full potential has been reached (via @Cure_makopi)…

Back to wrestling; was just listening to Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard, aka my current fave podcast, and a recent episode mentioned the indoor Sega Saturn blimp, a staple of mid 90s WWF PPVs. And which coincidentally just appeared in my feed (was originally posted by laser-lobotomy)…

BTW, the game Battle Monsters was also brought up in that same episode, multiple times.

Kotaku recently passed along some tweets from folks in Japan that noticed that the windows at a shopping mall there looks like DS game cards…

Another neat thing that Kotaku picked up from Twitter users in Japan that you might have missed is this story about a kid who wanted a Switch so bad that he made a one out of cardboard…

And while his son was taking a bath, dad places the real thing inside…

As always, the @CoolBoxArt Twitter feed continues to deliver…

BTW, am assuming the reason why Kyle passed along to me the intro to the PSone version of UNO is cuz the Saturn version’s cover was shared earlier today...

Whereas @GoodBoyGraphics recently shared a flyer for Attack Animal Gakuen…

The actual art on the cart is quite different, yet also quite the same, and overall quite nice…

FYI, the lead from the game is the school from the bazooka you previous saw here.

Speaking of girls with guns, and also food, cuz I’m hungry as I’m writing this; byronb states: “BurgR. Va inspired by the D.Va references coming from Wendy’s and Arby’s”…

Please enjoy this scene from the arcade by crisalys…

Which do you prefer; this woman whose arms is wrapped around a MSX (via potetoboy)…

Or this snake wrapped around a GBC (via scale-punk)…

While on the subject of the Game Boy Color, here we This Does Not Compute, which addressing one of classic gaming’s great white whales yet again: a GBC with a backlit screen. Unlike with other models of the Game Boy, you can’t mod the factory-installed screen for such a thing, for reasons that has been explained already. Hence why the appearance of the dream mod that appeared on a Chinese shopping site was such a big deal to those in the know. Colin tried to get ahold of one and… thus we have this 20-minute long video!

Which animated gif from a not so popular third installment of fighting franchise do you dig the most? This one from Virtua Fighter 3 (via lvrllnd)…

Or this one, from Street Fighter EX3 (via vgjunk)…

And which animated gif from a game that I’m pretty sure you’ve never heard of appeals to you the most? This moment captured from Akatsuki Denko Senki/Akatsuki Blitzkampf (via kazucrash)…

Or this equally frantic and perplexing moment from Hard Head 2 (via obscurevideogames)…

One more question, for now at least: which part of part of Sega 3D Classics’ ending do you prefer? The part in which Ecco the Dolphin steals the car from OutRun…

Or when the pterodactyl from Ecco steals it (both via grooveonfight)…

Hey look, Asteroid cookies (via it8bit)…

Speaking of arcade classics, perhaps everyone’s aware of my affinity for TNT Amusements’s informercials? The first one I ever covered was for GameSetWatch over a ten years ago(!!!), then a bit more recently, I passed along an earlier example when the Attract Mode blog was still powered by WordPress. Well, turns out, there’s yet another infomercial, one that predates even those two efforts! Which was recently uploaded to the TNT YouTube channel, with the bonus commentary. Alas, much like how the second one isn’t quite as strong as the third and final masterpiece, the first attempt is rough around the edges; Todd hadn’t developed his comedic chops, but hey, we all have to start somewhere and it all starts here…

According to actionfigureinsider.com…

“BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc., the creator and publisher of the ubiquitous PAC-MAN, is bringing back the nostalgic, iconic art of PAC-MAN in the form of a new Style Guide called “PAC-MAN Retro”. BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment worked with a team of in-house designers to expertly create the new style guide, which is comprised of a series of evocative artwork styles from the 80s that catapulted the game into one of the highest grossing licensing brands in history.”

Here’s apparently an excerpt from the style guide. Basically, for those of us who have been patiently waiting for a toy based upon Pac-Man, back when he had red eyes, our day might finally be here…

Meanwhile, miki800.com tells us that the Arthur from Ghosts ‘n Goblins figure I first showed off nearly a year ago is finally almost here (there’s even an additional face, with the Pac-Man-looking eyes)…

Though is Ghosts ‘n Goblins too mainstream for you? I get it; I too prefer something more off the beat path as well. Hence why I too am interested in these Wings of Wor figures also (via mendelpalace)…

Check out these absolute stunning models by Kow Yokoyama, for the original Super Famicom release of Front Mission, that Video Game Densetsu gathered up (you can see everything here and here)…

Oh, and to prove that I’m not only about toys and models based upon old Japanese games, here’s a wonderful assortment of Killer Queen figures that was spotted over at the Killer Queen NYC FB page…

Am pretty sure this rather curious ad that has oldgamemags perplexed is for Ubisoft’s very early Mario Kart clone, Street Racer. It’s also reason #175,932 why the recently leaked Mario + Rabbids is hardly a shock to my system at least…

And here’s reason #275,853 why I love Mortal Kombat so much (via angyspaulding)…

Plus reason #275,854, and yet another long ass video; courtesy of mysterious0bob comes an hour long vid of glitched finishing moves from a MK rom hack that’s bucking at every single seem. It’s… truly something else. It’s also hard to say what my absolute favorite part is, though the 39:30 mark is just one of many in which things become legitimately high art…

These GameCenter CX screencaps are pretty relevant to me, especially since I recently turned 40 and am officially middle aged, though I’m not too out-of-shape I’d like to think (via starbornkit)…

And finally, here we have some images by Filip Hodas (via retrogamerblog)…

… Which remind me of the cover to that zine I’M STILL WORKING ON I SWEAR TO GOD…

… Though here we have an interesting opinion from SlimeGirls…

Don’t forget: Attract Mode is now on Medium! There you can subscribe to keep up to date, as well as enjoy some “best of” content you might have missed the first time around, plus be spared of the technical issues that’s starting to overtake Tumblr.

[lawrenceseitz22]

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

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

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

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.

  Announcement

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

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

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

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

Chris, how’s it goin man?

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

How are you doing?

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

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

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

Nice t-shirt by the way. Good logo.

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

Well Marco, how are you doing man?

Marco: I’m good man. What’s up?

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

Marco: It’s the same.

Adam: Sounds good. Alright.

Roman, how about you man? How you doing?

Roman: Oh fantastic up in Canada.

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

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

Chris: Wow. Sweet.

Adam: Alright.

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

Bradley: Everything is peachy. (laughs)

Adam: Alright. (laughs)

Bradley: Glad to be here.

Adam: Outstanding. All right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bradley: Okay. That’s http://ift.tt/2BIn92b if somebody’s watching this at a later date. Even at a thousand dollars it’s totally worth it. I’m not lying. If you can’t get it now, then get it later when you can afford it. (laughs) Cause it’s worth it, alright. Anything else?

Adam: We’re good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Optimize A YouTube Channel For A DJ Service?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: Probably we are.

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

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

Roman: You covered that completely.

Bradley: All right.

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

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

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

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

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

So Marco what’s your take?

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

Bradley: Very good. Thank you.

Why Is A PBN Website Auto-Blogging Videos?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roman: No, no we don’t.

Bradley: Yep.

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

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

Bradley: Very good, thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any comments on that guys?

Okay. [crosstalk 00:28:48]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: Yeah, we do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anybody have any recommendations?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: Nope, not yet.

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

Bradley: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spamming YouTube

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

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

Bradley: Yep.

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

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: But it’s worth the test.

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

Marco: Yep.

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

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

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

Bradley: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bradley: The squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?

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

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

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

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

In my opinion, that’s way, way, way over optimized. I might do http://ift.tt/2BIneTx blemish if that’s an actual keyword/how to repair credit fast. Having it in the slug there is not so bad because it’s so far removed from the route where the other occurrence would be, but I would absolutely not have it in every one of those. That’s way over optimized, in my opinion.

Anybody else want to comment on that?

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

Bradley: Yep.

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

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

So you see the actual silo structure in the URL, but you can still accomplish the same thing by just doing the post name permanently structure. You still do all of your internal linking. You still stack all your content within their proper categories, child categories, and posts and that sort of thing, but you can have it much shorter where it would be http://ift.tt/2koOdzn. You wouldn’t see all this other stuff here.

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

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

Bradley: Totally agree.

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

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

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

Adam: Adios.

Chris: Bye, bye.

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 160 posted first on your-t1-blog-url from Blogger http://ift.tt/2jdfVLE via IFTTT

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

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

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

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

 Announcement

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

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

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

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

Chris, how’s it goin man?

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

How are you doing?

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

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

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

Nice t-shirt by the way. Good logo.

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

Well Marco, how are you doing man?

Marco: I’m good man. What’s up?

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

Marco: It’s the same.

Adam: Sounds good. Alright.

Roman, how about you man? How you doing?

Roman: Oh fantastic up in Canada.

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

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

Chris: Wow. Sweet.

Adam: Alright.

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

Bradley: Everything is peachy. (laughs)

Adam: Alright. (laughs)

Bradley: Glad to be here.

Adam: Outstanding. All right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: We’re good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Optimize A YouTube Channel For A DJ Service?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: Probably we are.

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

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

Roman: You covered that completely.

Bradley: All right.

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

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

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

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

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

So Marco what’s your take?

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

Bradley: Very good. Thank you.

Why Is A PBN Website Auto-Blogging Videos?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roman: No, no we don’t.

Bradley: Yep.

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

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

Bradley: Very good, thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any comments on that guys?

Okay. [crosstalk 00:28:48]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: Yeah, we do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anybody have any recommendations?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: Nope, not yet.

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

Bradley: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spamming YouTube

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

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

Bradley: Yep.

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

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: But it’s worth the test.

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

Marco: Yep.

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

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

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

Bradley: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bradley: The squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?

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

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

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

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

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

Anybody else want to comment on that?

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

Bradley: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

Bradley: Totally agree.

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

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

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

Adam: Adios.

Chris: Bye, bye.

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 160 posted first on your-t1-blog-url

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

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

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

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.

  Announcement

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

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

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

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

Chris, how’s it goin man?

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

How are you doing?

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

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

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

Nice t-shirt by the way. Good logo.

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

Well Marco, how are you doing man?

Marco: I’m good man. What’s up?

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

Marco: It’s the same.

Adam: Sounds good. Alright.

Roman, how about you man? How you doing?

Roman: Oh fantastic up in Canada.

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

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

Chris: Wow. Sweet.

Adam: Alright.

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

Bradley: Everything is peachy. (laughs)

Adam: Alright. (laughs)

Bradley: Glad to be here.

Adam: Outstanding. All right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bradley: Okay. That’s http://ift.tt/2BIn92b if somebody’s watching this at a later date. Even at a thousand dollars it’s totally worth it. I’m not lying. If you can’t get it now, then get it later when you can afford it. (laughs) Cause it’s worth it, alright. Anything else?

Adam: We’re good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Optimize A YouTube Channel For A DJ Service?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: Probably we are.

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

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

Roman: You covered that completely.

Bradley: All right.

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

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

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

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

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

So Marco what’s your take?

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

Bradley: Very good. Thank you.

Why Is A PBN Website Auto-Blogging Videos?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roman: No, no we don’t.

Bradley: Yep.

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

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

Bradley: Very good, thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any comments on that guys?

Okay. [crosstalk 00:28:48]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: Yeah, we do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anybody have any recommendations?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: Nope, not yet.

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

Bradley: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spamming YouTube

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

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

Bradley: Yep.

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

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: But it’s worth the test.

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

Marco: Yep.

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

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

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

Bradley: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bradley: The squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?

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

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

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

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

In my opinion, that’s way, way, way over optimized. I might do http://ift.tt/2BIneTx blemish if that’s an actual keyword/how to repair credit fast. Having it in the slug there is not so bad because it’s so far removed from the route where the other occurrence would be, but I would absolutely not have it in every one of those. That’s way over optimized, in my opinion.

Anybody else want to comment on that?

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

Bradley: Yep.

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

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

So you see the actual silo structure in the URL, but you can still accomplish the same thing by just doing the post name permanently structure. You still do all of your internal linking. You still stack all your content within their proper categories, child categories, and posts and that sort of thing, but you can have it much shorter where it would be http://ift.tt/2koOdzn. You wouldn’t see all this other stuff here.

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

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

Bradley: Totally agree.

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

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

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

Adam: Adios.

Chris: Bye, bye.

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 160 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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

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

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

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

  Announcement

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

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

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

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

Chris, how’s it goin man?

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

How are you doing?

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

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

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

Nice t-shirt by the way. Good logo.

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

Well Marco, how are you doing man?

Marco: I’m good man. What’s up?

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

Marco: It’s the same.

Adam: Sounds good. Alright.

Roman, how about you man? How you doing?

Roman: Oh fantastic up in Canada.

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

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

Chris: Wow. Sweet.

Adam: Alright.

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

Bradley: Everything is peachy. (laughs)

Adam: Alright. (laughs)

Bradley: Glad to be here.

Adam: Outstanding. All right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: We’re good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Optimize A YouTube Channel For A DJ Service?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: Probably we are.

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

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

Roman: You covered that completely.

Bradley: All right.

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

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

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

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

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

So Marco what’s your take?

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

Bradley: Very good. Thank you.

Why Is A PBN Website Auto-Blogging Videos?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roman: No, no we don’t.

Bradley: Yep.

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

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

Bradley: Very good, thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any comments on that guys?

Okay. [crosstalk 00:28:48]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: Yeah, we do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anybody have any recommendations?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: Nope, not yet.

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

Bradley: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spamming YouTube

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

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

Bradley: Yep.

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

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: But it’s worth the test.

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

Marco: Yep.

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

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

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

Bradley: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bradley: The squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?

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

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

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

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

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

Anybody else want to comment on that?

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

Bradley: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

Bradley: Totally agree.

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

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

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

Adam: Adios.

Chris: Bye, bye.

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 160 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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

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

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

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.

  Announcement

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

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

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

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

Chris, how’s it goin man?

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

How are you doing?

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

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

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

Nice t-shirt by the way. Good logo.

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

Well Marco, how are you doing man?

Marco: I’m good man. What’s up?

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

Marco: It’s the same.

Adam: Sounds good. Alright.

Roman, how about you man? How you doing?

Roman: Oh fantastic up in Canada.

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

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

Chris: Wow. Sweet.

Adam: Alright.

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

Bradley: Everything is peachy. (laughs)

Adam: Alright. (laughs)

Bradley: Glad to be here.

Adam: Outstanding. All right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bradley: Okay. That’s http://ift.tt/2BIn92b if somebody’s watching this at a later date. Even at a thousand dollars it’s totally worth it. I’m not lying. If you can’t get it now, then get it later when you can afford it. (laughs) Cause it’s worth it, alright. Anything else?

Adam: We’re good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Optimize A YouTube Channel For A DJ Service?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: Probably we are.

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

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

Roman: You covered that completely.

Bradley: All right.

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

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

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

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

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

So Marco what’s your take?

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

Bradley: Very good. Thank you.

Why Is A PBN Website Auto-Blogging Videos?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it’s a very, very clear … it’s a very clean way to build links and actually funnel like through all that relevancy back up to your target page. So it’s a safe way to do it. That’s primarily how I’m doing stuff with the Google site generator for example. It’s very similar to what I just described. What you’re talking about here.

Anybody else want to comment on that? That was a great question, by the way, DOS.

Chris: Yeah, it is. I think that you might have great job answering it.

Bradley: Okay, cool. Moving on. Muhammad what’s up buddy? I just answered your questions for Mindset Mastery this week, by the way, Muhammad, in case you hadn’t seen it yet. I actually did like two more videos guys but I wasn’t happy with them. Like for another 45 minutes of content and I deleted them so… if I get time this week I’m going to try to redo them and post those as well, if not, that’s what I’m going to talk about next week.

Would The Second Corrected Press Release Be As Powerful As The First?

“Hey guys, I’m following the local PR strategy, that BB talked about in the recent Syndication Academy webinar. My first PR from Serpspace turned out to have an error I missed. Could my second PR be a correction of the first? Would it be just as powerful?”

It’s going to have to be worded slightly different Muhammad otherwise it will probably be rejected by the distribution service because they don’t allow duplicate content. Rob, who’s co-partner, co-creator of RYS Reloaded with Marco, he does really good with creating his own PRs from using other people’s PRs and just rewording them. (laughs) Like re-writing some of the stuff and then just re-publishing those, which is awesome and then putting his own links and stuff in it.

All I ever do Muhammad is just use the PR writers from whatever distribution service we’re using if it’s in Serpspace we use our PR writers there. If it’s any one of the other services that I use, I always use their in-house writers. I used to use my own PR writer, but the problem is each different distribution service is going to have different editorial guidelines. They’re all similar but there are some slight nuances.

Even if you have your own PR writer, it’s good to have that because you get a specific voice that becomes consistent through all the PRs but the problem with that is different distribution networks may kick it back for various reasons, right? And say no, this needs to be edited. Or it says not approved or unapproved because of this reason and that reason. It becomes kind of a pain in the ass.

I’ve learned it’s just more efficient to use the PR writers that are available within the actual distribution services because they know what will pass their editorial guidelines. I just always give very specific instructions. I always provide the PR title. A lot of the PR writers are going to want to change the title and tell you that their title’s better.I always change it back because I know what the hell I want to target. When I provide the PR title I want them to use that.

So anyways, PR title; who, what, when, where, sometimes why or how and then you want quotes from an executive or if you’re doing a review post, like an announcement of a new review or a five star review or whatever like that, you can always use the review text from the customer as a quote. But that’s pretty much what they’re looking for. Just keep that in mind. I would recommend if you had a PR written from Serpspace, because we don’t even allow user-submitted PR’s anymore do we Roman?

Roman: No, no we don’t.

Bradley: Yep.

Roman: Yeah, I was also going to mention that because I’ve had to do this in the past where you know somebody misses some kind of information on the press release when they submit it out and then they would need to make a correction. We can have a press release written up basically saying that what we stated here was incorrect and that this is correct. It gives you an excuse to link back to the original PR and then you can push it up that way and turn the disadvantage into an advantage.

We’ve done it in the past, corrections PR’s. Just message support and we should be able to take care of it.

Bradley: Very good, thank you.

By the way, Muhammad, keep this in mind. Anybody doing a PR strategy … guys when you go to add links into your press releases. If you’re going to be doing any sort of stacking, you want to use a re-direct URL to the PR’s that you’re pointing links to.

So like, if you’re doing a second tier PR, which points to another PR you want to use a re-direct URL because a lot of those PRs purge and some of them purge within as little as 90 days. I’ve got a lot, actually I’m not going to get into that. I’ll talk about that in MasterMind tomorrow, but I’ve got a lot of stuff that I’ve seen since I started doing stacking, which was about five months ago. I’ve done a lot of that and there’s a lot of those PR’s that were originally published that are now been purged from the PR sites. They’re on some sites but the vast majority of them now have already been deleted so they’re … some sites delete after 90 days, some sites delete after six months or 180 days. Right?

Then there are some that keep them for I don’t know how long, but they are still up. It’s best if you just keep a record, like a spreadsheet of all the PRs and your target URLs and then use redirects. I recommend just setting up like a dummy domain for that or even a sub-domain, like press dot something or whatever.

That’s what I do and I just use Prettylink Pro, I use Prettylink Pro but you can use Prettylink Lite, which is a free plug-in to set up all the redirects and I use that so now if a PR is published that is pointing to a target URL of another PR that has been purged I can go in and swap what that link in the published PR with that link is pointing to. Right? The destination. The target URL. I can change that out. I can swap that out to something else. It can be anything. It can be a tier one property, a syndication network, a citation, anything I want. That way I don’t lose that juice, if that makes sense.

So I highly recommend that you do that. I just started doing that recently. I don’t know why the hell I didn’t think about it before, but I’m doing that now with all my stuff and it’s much better that way. Plus you can actually build the authority of running your own domains that way.

How Would You Handle Curated Content For Multiple Real Estate Clients In Multiple Cities?

Number two says, “I’m currently curating two posts a week for my real estate client. One on real estate topics made with recent articles and another on local news with local papers and sources. I want to use this model with another realtor in another city. How different would the real estate posts have to be? For instance, if I had five realtors it would start to get hard to have all them completely unique every week. Can I edit them or would I hire more VA’s to write more unique ones?”

If you’re curating posts, what I would recommend doing is, I wouldn’t republish the same post across multiple, you probably could. To be honest Muhammad you likely could do that. Just take the post, the original curated post and republish it on the other five realtors websites and you’d probably be fine, right? But, because a lot of people do that with local sites anyways. Like, if they do local plumbing sites. They’ll copy the same content and the only thing they swap out is the actual geographic modifiers, the location modifiers.

That still seems to work. I’ve never recommended doing that. I don’t do that personally. Curating is easy enough because all that the curators have to do is a couple of sentences of commentary in between each curated piece of content. So if all the heavy lifting has been done with the first curated post, which is finding content to support the theme of the article, right? Of the post. Then laying it out in a logical order. Then there literally is an opening, a small amount of commentary between each curated piece, and a conclusion. That’s it. That can be done very, very quickly.

If the curated article has already been published once, I would recommend you just send that over to another blog and just have the commentary slightly change so that it is unique. That’s all I would do. Again, if you’ve got multiple curators you could even have the first, the primary curator send it out to the other curators and have them just do a slight re-write on the commentary and it would be a much more efficient way, but you’d also be guaranteeing you’ve got unique content that way. That’s what I would do.

Any comments on that guys?

Okay. [crosstalk 00:28:48]

Chris: That was pretty in depth, actually. I was actually thinking something else.

Marco: Pretty good stuff, man. I hope everybody took notes.

Do Drive Stacks Have Enough Power And Authority To Rank Sites On Their Own?

Bradley: Thanks guys. John’s up again. He says, “Do the drive stacks have enough power and authority to rank a site on their own?”

Sometimes John but I don’t ever, personally I don’t ever expect it to be enough. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised, but sometimes, a lot of the times, No it’s not enough. It depends on the competition. Our standard answer applies here.

Do the drive stacks have enough power and authority to rank a site on their own? It depends. (laughs) I’ll let Marco comment on that. What do you think Marco?

Marco: Sorry, I was talking into a muted mic. I totally agree. It depends. And just like you said, sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised, sometimes you hit something that you figured is easy but the competition is actually more than you thought so you’re going to need more. What’s the best way? Well, there’s a ton of ways, Bradley was just talking about press releases.

Press releases to drive stack work like gang busters. [crosstalk 00:29:59] Press releases are a form of link building. You could also do link building. [Damian 00:30:07], again, does a great job of link building into the drive stacks. He’s been doing it for a few years for us now. So he knows exactly what needs to be done. There’s just a ton of things. There’s just so much.

If you have a verified Google my visits, you can go into there and drive relevance and power from your Google my visits into your drive over to the money site. I mean, this is endless because of the way that drive stacks work. Once again, I’m going to promote the training. All of this is covered in RYS Reloaded. You don’t have to go and try to reverse engineer all of this. The training is available right now in RYS Reloaded. It comes with a Facebook group, webinars, Rob is always in there, providing value so I highly recommend you come and join the training.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s a complex beast, John. It’s freaking super powerful and very effective but without … I mean you can try to reverse engineer … it took Marco and Gary [Kireon 00:31:16] originally like 18 months of development figuring all of this shit out. So my point is, you’re going to spend a shit ton of time trying to reverse engineer stuff or testing and you can get it all done for you basically all the stuff handed to you on a silver platter as to what works if you join the Academy or you just buy done-for-you networks and then you can try to reverse engineer those. Which would be a hell of a lot faster than just kind of trial and error on your own. Right?

But, yeah, I absolutely recommend that it sounds like you like building stuff from your questions, which is great. That’s awesome. I would highly recommend that you join the Academy so that you can get the proper training. You’ll shortcut your learning curve by months and months if not years.

What Does The Call Center Tell The Incoming Callers/Leads (For That First Month) Before There’s A Contractor To Service The Leads?

All right. Dan’s up. “Bradley mentioned on previous hump day using a call center to answer calls for lead-gen sites and having it set up for a month or so before trying to sell to a new client or contractor, what does the call center tell the incoming callers, the leads?”

Dan if I said that I had a call center set up prior to actually selling the leads, well I can’t believe I would have said that, I may have, and if I did I apologize because that’s not what I meant. What I typically do … now, hold on a minute, what I’m saying is if starting off something brand new most of the time all I’ll do is set up a voicemail on, so like I’ll use a call redirect number, call forwarding number, and I’ll just set up a voicemail. If I do not have a service provider, all I do is set up a voicemail because all I’m looking for is the call records. Right? History of calls.

Some people will leave a message. It’s very rare. Most people will call and hang up, but I can go into the virtual phone number dashboard and actually pull call reports. Anything that has a local area code, in my opinion, counts as a valid call. That’s just to keep your expenses low, Dan. Only because Answer Connect, which is the call center service I use, I love them. I’ve been using them sine I first set it up back in 2012. So I’ve been using them for five, damn near six years now. They are a really great service. But it’s rather expensive. Unless you’re producing revenue, I don’t recommend setting that up. I would just send it to a voicemail. Make sure you’re using a call tracking number, that way you can go in and look at call analytics. You can filter out any non-local area codes. Which some of those could be valid calls, but then you can show what type of call volume you’re getting. Right?

Then as soon as you get somebody willing to purchase or buy the leads, then you can set up the call center. Since I have a call center set up, it only costs me five bucks per month to set up an additional, what they call, sub-account in Answer Connect. So I’ve got a primary account number, which is a phone number, and then every other, I’ve got many sub-accounts underneath that. It only costs five dollars per month per sub-account at Answer Connect. Then you pay for your monthly, excuse me, your minutes. You pay per minute usage as well. So it’s very inexpensive.

If you already have it set up, then what you could do is, you could still get the lead’s information, just the same type of a script, a lead qualifying script is what I call it, right? Then just nobody ever calls the lead back is my point, if you don’t have somebody yet, if you’ve already got Answer Connect set up then you could certainly do that. I wouldn’t say go cancel it just to go back and set it up again, as soon as you get a service provider, but if you don’t have that set up yet don’t do it. Just use a voicemail, if that makes sense. Okay?

“Do you tell them that someone will call them back?” Well, of course. I mean, if you’re using an answering service that’s what the as part of the script, typically what I write in the script is after the questions have been answered that I have put into the script, which basically qualifies a lead. Name, address, phone number, type of service requested, best time to call, email address, that kind of stuff and then a brief description of the job. Typically, the answering service says “Okay Mr./Mrs. Whatever. Blank. We’ll have our estimator call you back as soon as they can. And that’s it. If they don’t call them back, so be it. Don’t worry about it.

Chris: And we have a pretty good setup on how to do all those things in the MasterMind.

Bradley: Yep. We’re going to be covering that starting January 1st. We’re going to be building, well, we’ll talk about that again after I announce it to the MasterMind members tomorrow. So we’ll talk about that a little bit more next week.

Is There A Need To Clean Up Old Citations Pointing To A Domain That Has Been 301 Redirected To The Legitimate Domain In GMB?

Jay says “If a local business has a previously used domain with lots of citations to it and that previous domain has 301 directed to the legitimate domain in GMB, do all these citations need to be cleaned up to reflect legitimate domain or can these citations be left alone?”

Okay, Jay. The real correct, the best answer is yes, they should all be updated because there is still incorrect data out there, right? Remember, Google is … even punctuation, incorrect punctuation on citations can be considered incongruent and can cause NAP or ranking issues, right? And so the name, address, phone number, and URL, like we always talk about citations as NAP; name, address, phone number.

And that’s true because that is a legitimate … it doesn’t have to have a reference to a link to be a citation. Right? It’s a citation. It’s a mention of the business. The brand, the address, the phone number. But most citations do have a link. Whether it’s a hyperlink, clickable, or just like a text link, it doesn’t matter. It still counts. It’s still considered a citation. So any of the data, and there’s data points if it’s incongruent can cause issues.

Now that’s the genuine answer, Jay, although I have some properties out there that had the exact same situation you’re talking about. A lot of them are old, generic lead-gen sites that have now been, they’re being serviced by a contractor now and I set up more branded type domains or pseudo-branded domains and I have the old ones redirected to just like what you’re talking about and some of those sites are still ranked in the mass pack, but to be honest with you, in the more competitive areas anytime there’s been NAP issues from something like that you have to correct them or you’re not going to rank.

The less competitive areas, it may not be as much of an issue. At least in my experience, I’ve got some properties that are still ranked in the mass pack even though that specific condition you’re talking about here exists. But in anything that is a little bit more competitive, no, it really does make a difference and again, I highly recommend, marketer center, I don’t know if we have it inside Serpspace. Do we have the citation cleanup inside of Serpspace?

Adam: Yeah, we do.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. You know, it’s a good service. It’s not as good as the service that we have, or that Loganix has for citation cleanup. That’s a lot more expensive. Loganix’s citation cleanup is the best I’ve used. There’s no doubt. It’s really expensive. I say really expensive but it’s worth it. It depends on how many citations are out there, Jay, if you’ve got hundreds of citations already than just go with the Loganix package.

I hate to say that with Roman on especially, but the reason why I say that is because they’ll work on it for like eight to 12 weeks I think. They’ll do like three separate attempts for every single directory. They’re really, really thorough about it. I noticed that … it’s only worth it if you’ve got a lot of citations out there or a lot of really bad inconsistencies. If it’s just a handful of stuff, absolutely do it through Serpspace. You’ll save yourself a shit ton of money.

Roman: Yeah, that’s exactly it. Because you’ve got one that’s more … one that’s a budget solution and the other one that’s it’s high end. You pay for it. Exactly.

Bradley: Yep. Okay. And you know, $500 is totally worth it with the amount of work that goes into that. It’s ridiculous. If you’ve ever tried to update citations on your own guys, I’d rather like watch grass grow than do it. It’s so tedious.

Do You Have Any General Tips Or Insights About How One Might Offer Freelance SEO Services On A Platform Like Upwork?

Okay. Sam’s up. What’s up Sam? He’s with us in Portland. He says “Hey all, I’ve been trying to supplement my income by offering SEO services on upwork. I’m still learning myself so my track record is a bit unproven, but I think I can still provide value to people. Do you have any general tips or insights about how one might offer freelance SEO services on a platform like that? Thanks in advance.”

Sam, I’m quite sure, go to Udemy or Udimy or whatever the hell it’s called, the digital information training whatever site and go do a search on like upwork SEO. Something like that. I know there’s courses out there. I’ve seen them. That teach people how to, especially digital marketers, how to promote themselves on upwork and freelance and some of those other sites and actually get ranked for keyword searches and stuff like that.

Because I’ve looked at them in the past. I’ve never done any of it myself because I’ve never offered my services on any of those platforms, but I’ve seen those training courses. So I would recommend just do some Google searches for that and see what you can find.

Anybody have any recommendations?

Adam: I’ll just offer some of the general stuff like you can go out there. I would look at other places to drive leads into other places as well, even if you’re sending them through upwork. It’s a great place to get started, but very quickly, please start being picky. You’ve got to pay your bills, but be careful about taking on a bunch of crazy pants clients.

Bradley: Yeah, and I wish I could remember off the top of my head. There was one course out there specifically, I sat through a whole webinar one time about this course. It was specifically for SEO’s trying to promote themselves on upwork. I almost bought it but I didn’t. I can’t remember the guys name now. I would point it out if I knew it, Sam, but just do a little bit of research, man. It might take some digging. Some playing around with different type of queries.

Adam: I’ll go the other way with this too real quick. Cause Sam I met you in person. You’re a personable guy. You’re easy to get a long with. We talked. I would say don’t give up … you’re in Seattle, that’s a huge market and especially since you’re maybe not having people like beating down your door online to get your services, that don’t ignore the local area. If you know anyone, can you help someone again, if you don’t have that track record, then you do need some sort of credibility first. I think we might have talked about this in person. Start going out. Maybe there is someone you can help locally. I think that, that do that in parallel with pursuing the online jobs. [crosstalk 00:41:39]

Bradley: Here you go guys. Sorry guys, just real quick. Only $12 for Udemy courses right now. Just go search upwork and look there’s a whole bunch of courses here on how to market yourself on upwork.

Chris: So is he in our Master class, MasterMind?

Bradley: No, he’s not. I don’t think so.

Adam: Nope, not yet.

Chris: Otherwise I would recommend to MasterMind Prospecting [inaudible 00:41:59].

Bradley: Right.

Roman: Yep, like Adam was saying, there’s a huge amount of opportunity locally as well. Find out where the business owners are at. A lot of times they have meetings, conferences, things like that and that’s where you want to be.

Adam: Well, like Bradley, when you got started, was that Chamber of Commerce?

Bradley: No, actually I didn’t do the Chamber of Commerce when I got started because it’s like 300 or 400 dollars a year to join and at the time I was broke so I didn’t do it. But I went to meet up groups. Just go to meetup.com and you can find like lead-share groups and things like that and those are always great and I’ve said this before, because people ask, Sam, right here on Hump Day Hangouts before what’s the quickest way to find clients?

We just covered this within the last couple of weeks actually. I recommend, what Adam said, absolutely. Meet up groups, Chamber of Commerce meetings, any sort of lead-share type group stuff, those are all great to get started.

Also, video email prospecting, which is a laser approach. Like a rifle approach. Instead of a shotgun approach. The prospecting funnel that Hernan just mentioned or Chris, I guess it was Chris, just mentioned a moment ago that we’re teaching inside the MasterMind right now is more of a shotgun approach. It’s a mass approach as opposed to a really like targeted approach. The video email prospecting, which Sam you should have access to because it’s in the bonus site, which you should have access to, is I would definitely go through that.

If you don’t like going out to live events like networking events, then you can do really, really well with the video email prospecting stuff. It just takes a little bit of time, but it’s worth it because the response rate is so high. Okay.

How Do You Use Hangout Millionaire To Promote Affiliate Products In An Ecommerce Store?

All right. Eddie says “I am using Peter Drew’s Live Rank Sniper and also recently purchased these Google Site Body Mass Blogger Creator and Hangout Millionaire. I am not sure if I should use Hangout Millionaire to create videos to be used as videos for random affiliate products and for an e-commerce store or if they should be used on a dozen secondary YouTube channels to create videos used only for back links to quality money videos? I already plan on using your video powerhouse for embeds of my quality money videos with all of that. How do you suggest best using Hangout Millionaire? Thank you.”

Okay. That’s a great question, Eddie because I’m actually using that right now for a couple of projects. I’m really going to be using it heavily starting in January, but right now I’ve just been kind of playing with it a little bit.

So what I do is I use the Live Rank Sniper to do all my keyword identification, right? Call it poking. Keyword poking. Figure out which keywords you can rank for. All those channels that I use in Live Rank Sniper are orphaned channels. They have no connection to anything on the web. They’re just basically test or spam channels. I just use them to poke keywords.

Once I use the Live Rank Sniper to do the report, do the Google search report and it sends back the text file with all the keywords that rank in the URLs of the videos that ranked. Those are ranked on page one or page two and there’s a setting in there. You can only select page one if you want or one or two. They’ll return the keywords. Then from that I just go back into the channel. I use Browseo so I’ll have multiple channels in there open in various tabs.

I just jump into the channel and delete all the videos and then I go actually input those keywords that ranked with no syndication networks. They’re orphan channels. They’re just basically spam channels but I’ve been able to rank on page one or page two with those. So what I do is just take all those keywords and go drop those in Hangout Millionaire to a channel that is actually connected to syndication network or in my case, multiple syndication networks.

That’s what I do. Keep in mind if you’re going to use the same video over and over again then you may want to split up across a few different channels. Like when you do the actual money videos because somebody could report your channel and it could get terminated, but that’s why I like to use multiple tiered syndication networks with one channel so that everything is triggered from one location. That way if that channel gets taken down, for whatever reason, or suspended then all I have to do is replace that channel with another one, but all my syndication networks are intact. It’s just a matter of updating applets in, one set of trigger applets at the original source, original channel source. Does that make sense?

So it’s just easy to replace if … it’s still a pain in the ass, but it’s better than having your stuff spread out across multiple channels, which that is kind of pain in the ass to set up too and keep track of is my point. All right. As far as the affiliate products. I don’t do it. I’m using it mainly for local stuff. I can’t imagine it would be any problem to create videos to be used for random affiliate products and e-commerce store.

As far as the actual link building, using it as a link building tool. For link building to other YouTube videos, yes that works. That absolutely works. In fact, I’ve tested that in the past where I’ve had. It’s essentially like the same strategy we talk about in the Silo Academy, right? YouTube Silo Academy.

If you’ve got a video that’s stubborn and so what I would do is use something like Power Suggest Pro to go enter in that seed keyword that you’re trying to rank for and then scrape a shit ton of really long tailed keywords and search queries that are associated with that keyword. Filter them out to only the most relevant ones and you should end up with a handful. Six, eight, ten, whatever keywords that are longer tailed versions of that shorter tailed one that you’re trying to rank. That you’re having a hard time with.

Then you can set up a Hangout Millionaire campaign and target, use the longer keywords that you scraped from Power Suggest Pro to all basically build links to that one video and make sure you’re using playlists. Put them all on a playlist with your top video, the one that you’re trying to rank is at the top of the playlist. So that you link in the Hangout Millionaire video description both to the URL of the top-level video that you’re trying to rank, as well as to the container, the playlist URL. Right? You do that and that absolutely works. I’ve seen significant jumps just from doing that.

Basically you are building a silo and you’re using all of the longer tailed keywords, which are actual queries people search for, to push relevancy and keyword theming up to the top-level video. Does that make sense?

Okay. We’re going to move on. Hopefully that was helpful.

Spamming YouTube

Eliezer, he’s a new Mindset Mastery subscriber, I know that. He posted a question the other day. He says, “Hey guys, for whoever has this idea I’d like to share my results. I decided to spam my YouTube video. It has 400,000 contextual links and well, my entire channel video reviews tanked. I optimized everything else, but I was too aggressive. Normally I would spam web twos, but I just had to test it out to see if it worked. Less than a day. Don’t underestimate YouTube’s algorithm.” I’ll plus one that. Thanks for sharing that, man.

Marco: That’s a guy after my own heart, man.

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: I love doing that and seeing what happens. Just don’t do it on anything you care about, man.

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: But it’s worth the test.

Bradley: Yep. Totally agree. Eliezer, I need to figure out how to pronounce that. Yeah, definitely. That’s what we do, is just test the shit out of stuff. We test it. Marco likes to blow shit up because he tries to figure out … that’s how you figure out what the threshold is. Right?

Marco: Yep.

Can You Assign Rel=”Canonical” To A GSite?

Bradley: All right. Greg says, “Can you reconicalize a G-site?” Not that I know of, but Marco may be able to answer that better.

Marco: No, you can only conicalize it up to, what do you call it, a TLD, your own domain.

Bradley: Yes.

Marco: You can do that. You can get conicalized to that. We tried to hack a conical into a G-site. I think Rob tried several ways and it wouldn’t pick it up correctly. We’re trying, Greg, believe me. It’s one of the things that’s in the lab. We play a lot with G-sites and see how much we can get away with.

Bradley: Yeah, and to be clear, I’m sorry I didn’t say that Greg, but you can conicalize a G-site if you’re using a custom domain. You have to set up the domain mapping inside the G-sites dashboard. It’s a little geeky doing it. I had a hell of a time doing it. It’s kind of weird. You’ve got to go in and set up C-name records and stuff like that, but it was a pain in the ass. I just remember it being a bitch to do, but then it conicalizes the G-site URL to your custom domain, which is crazy because both sites still exist.

You can still visit the Google site’s URL and it exists but it’s just conicalized, instead of it being like a redirect, it’s a conical. Right? So both sites still exist. Which is actually kind of cool because then you can spam the shit out of the Google site and it will push over to your main domain, essentially your main domain is what the Google site is sitting on, right? People won’t see it. It’s pretty cool. Right? Very similar to what we do with tag pages and stuff Greg. You should know that. You’re in the MasterMind.

How Do You Retrieve An Old Gmail Account That Hasn’t Been Used In A Long Time?

Ken Roberts says, “I have a real issue and hope someone can help me. I’ve been trying to log in to a Gmail account that hasn’t been used since back in 2013. Let’s see. So it’s a valid site, basically valid brand. I’m not going to read the whole question. It’s too long.

Roman: I think he’s trying to upgrade his email account.

Bradley: Good luck Ken. I know Greg commented in the Syndication Academy Facebook group about that as well and all I would do is echo his statement. His comment and that would be that I would call back and try to get another GMB rep on because the one I know that you talked to said that they couldn’t do anything.

I would just try to call back and see if somebody else can help you some way. As long as you can prove that it’s like your business or your profile. That kind of stuff. I don’t know what their verification requirements are for that, but I know typically I’ll try a couple of way to recover an account when I get locked out like this. I’ve got several of them.

If it takes me 30 minutes and I have not recovered it, I quit. I move on. I know that sucks in your case, but I would try to do something like maybe reissue a GMB and have it re-verified under a different Gmail account. What I think Greg mentioned to you. It’s so much fucking work trying to jump through the hoops they put in front of you.

It’s just not worth it, unless it’s an unique situation, which it sounds like it may be in your case Ken. Somebody else want to comment on that?

Roman: When you talk to the people just refuse to hang up and just drive them nuts and maybe you’ll eventually get what you want. (laughs)

Bradley: The squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?

Okay. Cool. I think we’re almost done guys.

Keith says, “It’s a bloody good course.” He’s talking about SEO Boot Camp. Jennia says the same thing guys. I’m telling you. It’s worth it. Pick it up. If you’ve got to use PayPal Credit, do it. Cause it will go up to a thousand bucks if you don’t. “I had purchased SEO Boot Camp. Highly recommend program and learning a lot from Jeffrey Smith, the SEO ninja. Thanks for having him on.” Absolutely. He is awesome. “I have some questions I would like to address before I create and publish anything.” Credit niche. Guys we’ve got to wrap this up too. So I’m going to try to run through this as quick as I can.

“Credit Niche is used for example only. Do you think this URL structure would be over optimization?” Yes. Absolutely, Jennia. My methodology, now I haven’t gotten that far into the course yet of what Jeffrey recommends but I can tell you my own experiences. I always try to keep my category slugs and my post URLs and page URLs very, very short and succinct and not over optimized. Actually, Jennia, if you’re in Syndication Academy I’m going to be covering best practices for content and marketing and post and page optimization in the webinar that we’re going to have five minutes from ow.

So if you’re in Syndication Academy I highly recommend you join the webinar today. If not, if you can’t make it you can always watch the replay, but I’m going to be covering that and personally, I would not. I might have like … you’ve got credit in the route, credit here, top-level category, child category you’ve got credit, and then you’ve got credit in the post URL.

In my opinion, that’s way, way, way over optimized. I might do http://ift.tt/2BIneTx blemish if that’s an actual keyword/how to repair credit fast. Having it in the slug there is not so bad because it’s so far removed from the route where the other occurrence would be, but I would absolutely not have it in every one of those. That’s way over optimized, in my opinion.

Anybody else want to comment on that?

Roman: Yeah, I’m not a big fan of physical silos like that, that run that deep.

Bradley: Yep.

Roman: Virtual silos are, in my opinion, better. This has it’s place for physical silos like that but it’s … and those URLs are ridiculously over optimized.

Bradley: Yep. I kind of agree with Roman here, in that, it depends on the type of site. Like, in this case, it sounds like it’s more like a national site instead of local. If you’re doing local and you’re covering different geographic areas it makes sense to have the physical silo structure, which just means your permanent link structure is set up to show category/post name. Right?

So you see the actual silo structure in the URL, but you can still accomplish the same thing by just doing the post name permanently structure. You still do all of your internal linking. You still stack all your content within their proper categories, child categories, and posts and that sort of thing, but you can have it much shorter where it would be http://ift.tt/2koOdzn. You wouldn’t see all this other stuff here.

But even if those aren’t shown, don’t over optimize them. I still would follow as if I was showing it in the URL. I would still keep it short and succinct. But again, on local stuff, I like to show, for local stuff, I like to show the hierarchy of how the locations are stacked. So it might be top-level category state, then maybe county as the child category, and then city as the post. Something like that, but again, it just depends and what Roman said is absolutely true. A virtual silo can accomplish the same end results without all this crap.

Roman: Yeah, I mean, virtual silos are easier to manage because setting pages up, and things like this can be a real pain when you start getting into other CMSs and stuff like that. If you can accomplish the same thing without it, it’s much better.

Bradley: Totally agree.

Adam: Well, I’ve got something I need to say and that is you want one of these awesome, awesome shirts you should come join the MasterMind. I mean, there’s like 10 billion other reasons but I mean, I don’t know, these are pretty nice too.

Bradley: Well, that’s the icing on the cake, guys if there was ever a reason to join the MasterMind it’s to get the shirt. (laughs).

All right. Thanks everybody. We’ll see you all, well some of you, on the Syndication Academy webinar and the rest of you or some others we’ll see tomorrow on the MasterMind webinar. The rest of you, we’ll see you next week. Thanks guys.

Adam: Adios.

Chris: Bye, bye.

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 160 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 160

Click on the video above to watch Episode 160 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.

  Announcement

Adam: Turn off the light so everyone can see it better.

Oh, what’s this? A tee shirt. Oh, well, we’re live. What do you know?

Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangout Episode 160. The one where Adam gets to model all of his awesome the-shirts.

We’re happy to have you here, and before we get started, of course, we want to go around and say hello to everybody. I’ll start on my left as I see things here on the screen.

Chris, how’s it goin man?

Chris: It’s good. It’s snowing in Austria. Time to hit the slopes soon. Can’t wait.

How are you doing?

Adam: Can’t complain. It should be snowing here, but it’s like fifty. Fahrenheit for those of you outside the U.S, but yeah it’s nice. Can’t complain.

Hernan, how about you. How are things going? You’re moving into summer down south.

Hernan: Yeah it’s fucking chilly man. I don’t know. It’s November 29th. It’s pretty nice. I was expecting some warm, but no. It’s chilly.

Nice t-shirt by the way. Good logo.

Adam: Thank you. Thank you. It comes I black as well, but I chose this one. First one I grabbed out since I was running late. I’m the reason we’re late, but all right.

Well Marco, how are you doing man?

Marco: I’m good man. What’s up?

Adam: Not much. I usually check in with you for the weather, but I know you’re down south closer to Hernan. So I guess the weather is about the same for you?

Marco: It’s the same.

Adam: Sounds good. Alright.

Roman, how about you man? How you doing?

Roman: Oh fantastic up in Canada.

Adam: Gotcha. Wow. Weather report? What’s going on there, man? Is it snowing? Is the great white north a blizzard? What’s happening?

Roman: We’ve actually just recently had a nice warm day of fifty degrees. It’s been a pleasant freezing for the entire rest of the time I’ve been here though. (laughs)

Chris: Wow. Sweet.

Adam: Alright.

Bradley, I was just in your neck of the woods for Thanksgiving. A couple hours away from you, so I’m pretty sure I know how it is, but how are things going with you down there? Weather or anything I guess so.

Bradley: Everything is peachy. (laughs)

Adam: Alright. (laughs)

Bradley: Glad to be here.

Adam: Outstanding. All right.

Well, we’ve just got a few quick announcements. If you’re new to Semantic Mastery, first of all, thank you for watching Hump Day Hangouts, and hanging out with us, and being here. You should check out the battle plan, the SEO Blueprint. I’ll pop a link in there. You can save seventy-five bucks with the discount code we got.

If you have not yet, please head over to serpspace.com. You can get your free account there. There’s a couple free tools, which actually we should ask Roman about that if he’s got some additional stuff coming out. That’s also where all the awesome, done-for-you services are located. Okay.

And then as well, the last thing we want to let you know is always check out support.semanticmastery.com. We have our frequently asked questions there. Things that require graphs, or charts, or some of Bradley’s amazing artwork. We compiled them there in one spot. So during the week if you have a question, you can go there and check that out. Alright?

That is it on my end. You guys have anything you want to cover before we get started?

I can think of one thing real quick. I believe… correct me if I’m wrong. Is Jeffrey Smith’s SEO boot camp still … Is there quick reopening on that? Did we confirm that? Now that we’re live. (laughs)

Bradley: I’m glad you mentioned that because I’ve got the link right here. Yeah guys, the SEO boot camp training that I’ve been talking about for a few weeks now, Jeffrey Smith’s SEO Boot Camp Training. It was on a special price for $497. Roughly 500 bucks for a limited time, and then he closed that. So it ended up going to $997, but because of how much we’ve talked … how well we’ve talked about it. How good we’ve talked about it. He basically opened it back up for our subscribers to join again for $497 for limited time only.

So if you guys are interested in it, now would be the time because once it goes back up to regular price again when he closes it, which is in one to three days I guess. I don’t know. I know he said it was only going to be a couple days. It’ll be $997. So I recommend that you get it.

We’ve also got some bonuses that we’ll throw in. We’ll throw in Content Kingpin if you need it. If you don’t have it already, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com if you end up picking up the SEO boot camp training, which I highly, highly recommend. Guys, I wouldn’t be recommending SEO training from someone else unless it was that good, and his is really that good.

So anyways, I’m gonna drop the link, and you guys can go check it out. I highly recommend that you get it while it’s still at half price. Okay. And you’ll get our bonuses too, so…

Adam: Awesome. Yeah, if you’re watching this down the road, it’s probably not available. So you know, hopefully we can work something out with him again, but that’s the way it works. It was open for about a week there. This’ll be over. This is 11/29, November 29th. This’ll be over November 30th.

Bradley: Okay. That’s http://ift.tt/2BIn92b if somebody’s watching this at a later date. Even at a thousand dollars it’s totally worth it. I’m not lying. If you can’t get it now, then get it later when you can afford it. (laughs) Cause it’s worth it, alright. Anything else?

Adam: We’re good.

Bradley: Alright, last thing before we move on. Go to bradleybenner.com, and subscribe to my YouTube channel, or my email list. Period. That’s it. (laughs)

Now I’ve been doing the Mindset Mastery series over there once a week. I try to … well, not every week, but most weeks I try to get a video done, and it’s often a series of videos because I have to split it up into multiple videos. This week I just did some Q&A stuff. You can ask me questions about Mindset series. There’s a button on the bradleybenner.com page where you can just click. It’s takes you over to Google Form. You can submit questions.

I also highly recommend that you subscribe to my email list. It’s daily Mindset updates, and it’s just every day I’ve started working on developing a habit of trying to write every day a minimum of 200 words, and I’m using the Mindset Mastery email series as my vehicle. That’s where I’m doing all of my writing. I’ve gotten … I’ve written Monday through Friday almost every single day. I think we’re up to like 15 or 16 emails in the series already. But it’s mostly basically at the end of my morning ritual or routine where I do my daily goal setting, and planning, and brief meditation, and some study, and stuff like that.

Typically, I have something in my mind that I want to convey, some idea. That what I just put to paper, or in an email. I draft an email from that. My goal is just a minimum of 200 words per day. Typically, they end up between 500 to 800 words in order to fully convey my thought, but it’s something that’s kind of turning into a labor of love for me, and it’s just kind of like kick your ass stuff. Like get off your ass and go do something, be productive, don’t make excuses. That kind of stuff. That’s the kind of stuff I respond to well. I’m not gonna lie. This is more of a selfish thing for me that I’m doing for me, but I figured I might as well put it up there because it may help some of you. So I recommend going and checking it out.

I drop some links to various resources; to Amazon Books, and audio programs, and all the kind of stuff that I’m studying, tools, and things that I use. It’s not like an affiliate promo thing. I’m literally just sharing with you guys what kind of resources that I’m using in my daily practice of self mastery, and personal growth, and that kind of stuff.

So, go check it out. Alright. With that-

Adam: I’m gonna head over there and get signed up.

Bradley: I’m gonna move on. Alright. Here we go guys.

How To Optimize A YouTube Channel For A DJ Service?

Alright, so Pierre is up first. He says, “hey guys, I am new to SEO. I’ve just created a YouTube channel for a DJ service, and launching in Montreal. How can I optimize my YouTube channel?”

Well, there’s a few things you can do to your channel. It’s more about optimizing the individual videos. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to optimize the channel as well, but there’s limited things you can do to the channel. For example: One thing that’s important, at least in my opinion through my testings, is to theme the channel. So if… what I mean by that since you’re new Pierre is you want to try to keep all the videos that you have uploaded that are public on your channel, right?

If they are unlisted or private it really doesn’t matter, but anything that’s public on your channel you want to make sure that it’s closely related to what the overall theme of your business is. Right? So music related stuff probably. Maybe videos from weddings that you’ve DJ’d at or events that you’ve DJ’d at. That kind of stuff so that it all makes sense. Right? You want to try to keep the theming somewhat relevant.

It’s okay to have occasionally some random videos, but I would suggest is that you create playlists for that and that’s one of the ways that you can kind of like silo or categorize, compartmentalize your YouTube channel, is by using playlists. As far as the actual optimization, just go the settings. We’ll go to the creator studio. I’m not going to walk through it because we’ve got too many questions to get through, but we have a course called YouTube Mastery. It’s a little bit dated but the principles are all still the same.

So, if that’s something you … that walks through how to optimize YouTube channels, as well as individual videos both on page and off page optimization and playlist optimization. All of those things. Link building, advanced ranking techniques, all of that is in YouTube mastery. Again, it’s probably three years old now so some of the interfaces have changed … Interfacing in YouTube has changed a bit, but all of those principles are absolutely still relevant today. So I would recommend you pick that up

I believe YouTube Silo Academy is part of that or is a bonus or something in there. If not, YouTube silo academy is only a seven dollar product. That’s something else I would recommend because using playlists in YouTube and creating them as like website silos is very, very powerful. It’s like standard operating procedure now for any sort of YouTube work that I do now. So I would recommend that you pick that up or if you pick up YouTube Mastery, again, it’s an expensive product. Are we even still selling that guys? I don’t even know if we are. To be honest.

Adam: Probably we are.

Bradley: Okay. All right. Well as long as we are still selling it, go pick it up and then what I would suggest is not even buying YouTube Silo Academy because just contact us at support, if you end up buying YouTube Mastery. Tell us you purchased and we’ll give you access to our bonus site, which YouTube Silo Academy is included in the bonus site. As well as a shit ton of other training. It’s worth it just to get the bonus site. But that’s what I would recommend, Pierre because that will take you step by step through how to optimize a YouTube channel and the videos and the playlists and do the link building and all the other stuff that is required to rank videos. Okay?

Okay, so moving on. So John says … Anybody want to comment on that before I move on?

Roman: You covered that completely.

Bradley: All right.

Should Articles Created As Part Of A Drive Stack Have Unique Content?

John says “Hey guys, I’m trying to understand more about drive stacks. This would be a good question for Marco. When creating the articles as part of the drive stacks should the content be unique?” Doesn’t have to be, John. At all.

“Also, if we have a website that we want to rank are we better off pointing the stack at the money site or should we instead build a secondary stack just to rank that by itself?”

I’ll give you my answer and then I want to hear Marco’s as well, but yeah for drive stacks I link to all of my most important properties within the stack. So in other words, like I link to the money site. I link to the Google my business maps URL. I link to the Facebook page. Any of like the real powerful tier one social properties or even citations like Yelp, for example. I throw a Yelp link in as a target URL for my drive stack.

The primary URL should be your money site in my opinion. Unless you’re just trying to rank in maps, but again you should be putting both of those links as target URL’s anyways. I’ve pretty much always linked to my money site, homepage of the money site, as well as any … the Google map business listing, and any of the other most powerful tier one links or citations, which includes social properties and things like that. That I’m trying to boost. To basically validate the entity. Push relevancy into the whole eco-system and that kind of stuff.

So Marco what’s your take?

Marco: I totally agree. That’s it. Link to everything. Anything and everything because it will push power to whatever it is linked to. It doesn’t matter inside the drive stack and if you’re worried about the money site, then just do an I-frame imbed. Instead of linking directly to it. All you have to do is … the way that we teach to connect, right? The connection loop. Closing the loop. That’s taught inside our RYS Academy Reloaded and it’s one of the most important things that you can do. It’s I-framing on not only the D-site, which we also teach, but also on the money site and that I-frame will cause everything to flow through and will also protect the money site. That’s what I would do.

Bradley: Very good. Thank you.

Why Is A PBN Website Auto-Blogging Videos?

Next question from John. He says “Brad, I was reverse engineering a few of your links that lead to the G-site for a Virginia SEO that led me to an obvious PBN that is being used. I don’t want to name it here since I don’t think it matters. I noticed that the website has what appears to be its own social syndication ring of various 2.0 properties. But it also appears that the site is auto-blocking videos, why? These videos don’t appear to be syndicating and I assume that is on purpose.”

No, John. Honestly, I’ve talked about this in just about every time we talk about the SEO Virginia. My first experience with RYS Academy methods. Right. That’s the first thing that I ever built, is that. The Virginia SEO or SEO Virginia, whatever, Google site and I did a drive stack around that key word and boom I’ve been ranked. Well, I built it in May of 2015 and I think it was about six or eight weeks before it ranked, but it’s been ranked ever since. It hasn’t budged a fucking spot since then. That’s like incredible.

So anyways, I’ve talked about this many, many times. You obviously hadn’t heard it, but I had a old PBN network, private blog network that was way, it was crafted very poorly. It was based upon like 2012 and 2013 PBN building principles. Right? So, as of 2015 when I built that drive stack, those PBN’s were basically toxic for links for any sort of money site. They were that bad. Only because, again, 2012/2013 methods for building PBN’s were a lot different than they were in 2015, right?

So I had like large PBN network that was basically useless for building links to money sites. I pretty much re-purposed them. To be video broadcasting sites. All that would do is use them as like an imbed network to optimize or rank videos. So I basically just turned my PBN’s … the old ones that were crappy, they weren’t themed well, that kind of stuff, they had a whole bunch of different posts on them and different topical categories and things like that, so they were just very, very … they would have been toxic had I linked directly to money sites.

So that said, because I had that available and they were all Google properties for that test, that first experience with RYS methods, right? So the Google drives properties as well as the Google site, I used that PBN network, which was now a video broadcasting network specifically, just because in my opinion they were like spam links, but I didn’t care because it was a Google properties. So I did one PBN link run. I think at the time it was about 38 or 40 links and that was it. A lot of those sites have been expired now. I let the domains expire on a lot of those sites, but a handful of them are still alive. Probably just because they are on auto-renew and I just pay for them every year.

So that’s it. I haven’t done any link building to that site at all since May of 2015. So again, any of those sites that you saw back links coming from pointing to that are either test sites or just basically old spammed PBN sites that are just still existing. I think there might be a few links in there, coming from some sites that are in our video powerhouse network, because, again, a lot of those sites from my old PBN’s were just turned into video broadcasting sites and that’s it.

So, anyways. Just to answer your question John. That was purely done from back in 2015. There’s been no link building done to that property since then. What you are looking at are old links coming from PBN’s that are no longer being used or if they’re being used it’s specifically only for video syndication.

All right. Good question though. DOS says … Go ahead.

Marco: I would add that’s not where the secret sauce is. I mean, if that’s where he’s investing into PBN links and all that. You’re way off course, man. You’ve got to circle back.

Bradley: Okay. Very good. I totally agree. That’s what I was trying to get at. Maybe I wasn’t clear about it, but those links were … that was just to help get it pushed. I remember when I did that, like I said, it was right after I built it I did a run through my PBN through part or a handful of sites, a few dozen anyways, and I let it go. I checked on it every few days for about two or three weeks and it was in and out of the Google site and some of the drives files were in and out of the index. They were bouncing all over the damn place when they were in the index.

So I basically kind of like just gave up on it. I just kind of forgot about it. It was like six or eight weeks later. So it was probably in July or so. July or maybe even August but I remember I just happened to think about it and I went and just did a manual search of SEO Virginia and boom it was number one and I was like “Holy shit!” And it’s been there ever since. I’ve never done a damn thing to it.

So, again, it has very little to do with the links, if anything at all because those links would have tanked in other sites, if it wasn’t Google properties, right? So what Marco just said is absolutely correct.

Would You Advise Linking Each Page Of Spun Google Sites To A Good Quality Site’s Hopmepage To Push More Link Juice?

All right. DOS says “I’ve been building a good quality new giggle site.” That must be on purpose because he did it multiple times. “A new giggle site to point at my money site and in building fun giggle sites with silo linked pages and linking only the home page to those back to the good Google site. Would it push any more juice if I linked each page directly up to the good site or is it about the same?”

No, I would do what you’re doing DOS. I would do what you’re doing because there’s a lot of value in pushing juice from inner pages to a home page and then having like or to any particular specific page. Right?

To any, one specific page using internal links to push relevancy and equity to that page and then have that one … and again, it can be home page or any other page. It doesn’t matter. And then having one link outbound to whatever your real target site is. There’s a lot of … I mean, I like to do that better because then you can actually go build links to the posts or the inner pages that are all pointing to one specific page that then linked to your actual target URL. You can build links to those inner pages and it adds an extra layer of protection because now its inbound links hitting inner pages.

Inner pages pushing all that juice to the specific page that then outbound links to your money page. Now remember these are all Google sites. So you can get away with a hell of a lot more, but typically that’s the same type of structure or format that will do for link building for anything within our web two networks or syndication networks, right? Like that’s a very powerful strategy.

By the way we have a Syndication Academy webinar immediately following this. That’s two in the month of November, but since we didn’t have one in October. I made up for it. I’ve redeemed myself.

But with the syndication networks, it’s the same thing. If you push a post out through your blog and it syndicates out across all the web two sites, you can go grab the web two post URLs from that specific post. And then build links to those because there should be a link, well, there’s the attribution link that points back to the original money site post, right? And in the money site post is then going to have an internal link up to the page that you’re trying to push.

So if you’re building links to the web two post URLs think about how many hops back you are from your actual target URL. Right? Target URL, which is a page on your money site, then the first tier link is the blog post from your money site, second tier links are the web two posts, the re-publishing of your blog post from your money site onto the web two platforms, and your fourth tier links are going to be any sort of spam links you that you want to point at your web twos. Your post URLs. Does that make sense?

So it’s a very, very clear … it’s a very clean way to build links and actually funnel like through all that relevancy back up to your target page. So it’s a safe way to do it. That’s primarily how I’m doing stuff with the Google site generator for example. It’s very similar to what I just described. What you’re talking about here.

Anybody else want to comment on that? That was a great question, by the way, DOS.

Chris: Yeah, it is. I think that you might have great job answering it.

Bradley: Okay, cool. Moving on. Muhammad what’s up buddy? I just answered your questions for Mindset Mastery this week, by the way, Muhammad, in case you hadn’t seen it yet. I actually did like two more videos guys but I wasn’t happy with them. Like for another 45 minutes of content and I deleted them so… if I get time this week I’m going to try to redo them and post those as well, if not, that’s what I’m going to talk about next week.

Would The Second Corrected Press Release Be As Powerful As The First?

“Hey guys, I’m following the local PR strategy, that BB talked about in the recent Syndication Academy webinar. My first PR from Serpspace turned out to have an error I missed. Could my second PR be a correction of the first? Would it be just as powerful?”

It’s going to have to be worded slightly different Muhammad otherwise it will probably be rejected by the distribution service because they don’t allow duplicate content. Rob, who’s co-partner, co-creator of RYS Reloaded with Marco, he does really good with creating his own PRs from using other people’s PRs and just rewording them. (laughs) Like re-writing some of the stuff and then just re-publishing those, which is awesome and then putting his own links and stuff in it.

All I ever do Muhammad is just use the PR writers from whatever distribution service we’re using if it’s in Serpspace we use our PR writers there. If it’s any one of the other services that I use, I always use their in-house writers. I used to use my own PR writer, but the problem is each different distribution service is going to have different editorial guidelines. They’re all similar but there are some slight nuances.

Even if you have your own PR writer, it’s good to have that because you get a specific voice that becomes consistent through all the PRs but the problem with that is different distribution networks may kick it back for various reasons, right? And say no, this needs to be edited. Or it says not approved or unapproved because of this reason and that reason. It becomes kind of a pain in the ass.

I’ve learned it’s just more efficient to use the PR writers that are available within the actual distribution services because they know what will pass their editorial guidelines. I just always give very specific instructions. I always provide the PR title. A lot of the PR writers are going to want to change the title and tell you that their title’s better.I always change it back because I know what the hell I want to target. When I provide the PR title I want them to use that.

So anyways, PR title; who, what, when, where, sometimes why or how and then you want quotes from an executive or if you’re doing a review post, like an announcement of a new review or a five star review or whatever like that, you can always use the review text from the customer as a quote. But that’s pretty much what they’re looking for. Just keep that in mind. I would recommend if you had a PR written from Serpspace, because we don’t even allow user-submitted PR’s anymore do we Roman?

Roman: No, no we don’t.

Bradley: Yep.

Roman: Yeah, I was also going to mention that because I’ve had to do this in the past where you know somebody misses some kind of information on the press release when they submit it out and then they would need to make a correction. We can have a press release written up basically saying that what we stated here was incorrect and that this is correct. It gives you an excuse to link back to the original PR and then you can push it up that way and turn the disadvantage into an advantage.

We’ve done it in the past, corrections PR’s. Just message support and we should be able to take care of it.

Bradley: Very good, thank you.

By the way, Muhammad, keep this in mind. Anybody doing a PR strategy … guys when you go to add links into your press releases. If you’re going to be doing any sort of stacking, you want to use a re-direct URL to the PR’s that you’re pointing links to.

So like, if you’re doing a second tier PR, which points to another PR you want to use a re-direct URL because a lot of those PRs purge and some of them purge within as little as 90 days. I’ve got a lot, actually I’m not going to get into that. I’ll talk about that in MasterMind tomorrow, but I’ve got a lot of stuff that I’ve seen since I started doing stacking, which was about five months ago. I’ve done a lot of that and there’s a lot of those PR’s that were originally published that are now been purged from the PR sites. They’re on some sites but the vast majority of them now have already been deleted so they’re … some sites delete after 90 days, some sites delete after six months or 180 days. Right?

Then there are some that keep them for I don’t know how long, but they are still up. It’s best if you just keep a record, like a spreadsheet of all the PRs and your target URLs and then use redirects. I recommend just setting up like a dummy domain for that or even a sub-domain, like press dot something or whatever.

That’s what I do and I just use Prettylink Pro, I use Prettylink Pro but you can use Prettylink Lite, which is a free plug-in to set up all the redirects and I use that so now if a PR is published that is pointing to a target URL of another PR that has been purged I can go in and swap what that link in the published PR with that link is pointing to. Right? The destination. The target URL. I can change that out. I can swap that out to something else. It can be anything. It can be a tier one property, a syndication network, a citation, anything I want. That way I don’t lose that juice, if that makes sense.

So I highly recommend that you do that. I just started doing that recently. I don’t know why the hell I didn’t think about it before, but I’m doing that now with all my stuff and it’s much better that way. Plus you can actually build the authority of running your own domains that way.

How Would You Handle Curated Content For Multiple Real Estate Clients In Multiple Cities?

Number two says, “I’m currently curating two posts a week for my real estate client. One on real estate topics made with recent articles and another on local news with local papers and sources. I want to use this model with another realtor in another city. How different would the real estate posts have to be? For instance, if I had five realtors it would start to get hard to have all them completely unique every week. Can I edit them or would I hire more VA’s to write more unique ones?”

If you’re curating posts, what I would recommend doing is, I wouldn’t republish the same post across multiple, you probably could. To be honest Muhammad you likely could do that. Just take the post, the original curated post and republish it on the other five realtors websites and you’d probably be fine, right? But, because a lot of people do that with local sites anyways. Like, if they do local plumbing sites. They’ll copy the same content and the only thing they swap out is the actual geographic modifiers, the location modifiers.

That still seems to work. I’ve never recommended doing that. I don’t do that personally. Curating is easy enough because all that the curators have to do is a couple of sentences of commentary in between each curated piece of content. So if all the heavy lifting has been done with the first curated post, which is finding content to support the theme of the article, right? Of the post. Then laying it out in a logical order. Then there literally is an opening, a small amount of commentary between each curated piece, and a conclusion. That’s it. That can be done very, very quickly.

If the curated article has already been published once, I would recommend you just send that over to another blog and just have the commentary slightly change so that it is unique. That’s all I would do. Again, if you’ve got multiple curators you could even have the first, the primary curator send it out to the other curators and have them just do a slight re-write on the commentary and it would be a much more efficient way, but you’d also be guaranteeing you’ve got unique content that way. That’s what I would do.

Any comments on that guys?

Okay. [crosstalk 00:28:48]

Chris: That was pretty in depth, actually. I was actually thinking something else.

Marco: Pretty good stuff, man. I hope everybody took notes.

Do Drive Stacks Have Enough Power And Authority To Rank Sites On Their Own?

Bradley: Thanks guys. John’s up again. He says, “Do the drive stacks have enough power and authority to rank a site on their own?”

Sometimes John but I don’t ever, personally I don’t ever expect it to be enough. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised, but sometimes, a lot of the times, No it’s not enough. It depends on the competition. Our standard answer applies here.

Do the drive stacks have enough power and authority to rank a site on their own? It depends. (laughs) I’ll let Marco comment on that. What do you think Marco?

Marco: Sorry, I was talking into a muted mic. I totally agree. It depends. And just like you said, sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised, sometimes you hit something that you figured is easy but the competition is actually more than you thought so you’re going to need more. What’s the best way? Well, there’s a ton of ways, Bradley was just talking about press releases.

Press releases to drive stack work like gang busters. [crosstalk 00:29:59] Press releases are a form of link building. You could also do link building. [Damian 00:30:07], again, does a great job of link building into the drive stacks. He’s been doing it for a few years for us now. So he knows exactly what needs to be done. There’s just a ton of things. There’s just so much.

If you have a verified Google my visits, you can go into there and drive relevance and power from your Google my visits into your drive over to the money site. I mean, this is endless because of the way that drive stacks work. Once again, I’m going to promote the training. All of this is covered in RYS Reloaded. You don’t have to go and try to reverse engineer all of this. The training is available right now in RYS Reloaded. It comes with a Facebook group, webinars, Rob is always in there, providing value so I highly recommend you come and join the training.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s a complex beast, John. It’s freaking super powerful and very effective but without … I mean you can try to reverse engineer … it took Marco and Gary [Kireon 00:31:16] originally like 18 months of development figuring all of this shit out. So my point is, you’re going to spend a shit ton of time trying to reverse engineer stuff or testing and you can get it all done for you basically all the stuff handed to you on a silver platter as to what works if you join the Academy or you just buy done-for-you networks and then you can try to reverse engineer those. Which would be a hell of a lot faster than just kind of trial and error on your own. Right?

But, yeah, I absolutely recommend that it sounds like you like building stuff from your questions, which is great. That’s awesome. I would highly recommend that you join the Academy so that you can get the proper training. You’ll shortcut your learning curve by months and months if not years.

What Does The Call Center Tell The Incoming Callers/Leads (For That First Month) Before There’s A Contractor To Service The Leads?

All right. Dan’s up. “Bradley mentioned on previous hump day using a call center to answer calls for lead-gen sites and having it set up for a month or so before trying to sell to a new client or contractor, what does the call center tell the incoming callers, the leads?”

Dan if I said that I had a call center set up prior to actually selling the leads, well I can’t believe I would have said that, I may have, and if I did I apologize because that’s not what I meant. What I typically do … now, hold on a minute, what I’m saying is if starting off something brand new most of the time all I’ll do is set up a voicemail on, so like I’ll use a call redirect number, call forwarding number, and I’ll just set up a voicemail. If I do not have a service provider, all I do is set up a voicemail because all I’m looking for is the call records. Right? History of calls.

Some people will leave a message. It’s very rare. Most people will call and hang up, but I can go into the virtual phone number dashboard and actually pull call reports. Anything that has a local area code, in my opinion, counts as a valid call. That’s just to keep your expenses low, Dan. Only because Answer Connect, which is the call center service I use, I love them. I’ve been using them sine I first set it up back in 2012. So I’ve been using them for five, damn near six years now. They are a really great service. But it’s rather expensive. Unless you’re producing revenue, I don’t recommend setting that up. I would just send it to a voicemail. Make sure you’re using a call tracking number, that way you can go in and look at call analytics. You can filter out any non-local area codes. Which some of those could be valid calls, but then you can show what type of call volume you’re getting. Right?

Then as soon as you get somebody willing to purchase or buy the leads, then you can set up the call center. Since I have a call center set up, it only costs me five bucks per month to set up an additional, what they call, sub-account in Answer Connect. So I’ve got a primary account number, which is a phone number, and then every other, I’ve got many sub-accounts underneath that. It only costs five dollars per month per sub-account at Answer Connect. Then you pay for your monthly, excuse me, your minutes. You pay per minute usage as well. So it’s very inexpensive.

If you already have it set up, then what you could do is, you could still get the lead’s information, just the same type of a script, a lead qualifying script is what I call it, right? Then just nobody ever calls the lead back is my point, if you don’t have somebody yet, if you’ve already got Answer Connect set up then you could certainly do that. I wouldn’t say go cancel it just to go back and set it up again, as soon as you get a service provider, but if you don’t have that set up yet don’t do it. Just use a voicemail, if that makes sense. Okay?

“Do you tell them that someone will call them back?” Well, of course. I mean, if you’re using an answering service that’s what the as part of the script, typically what I write in the script is after the questions have been answered that I have put into the script, which basically qualifies a lead. Name, address, phone number, type of service requested, best time to call, email address, that kind of stuff and then a brief description of the job. Typically, the answering service says “Okay Mr./Mrs. Whatever. Blank. We’ll have our estimator call you back as soon as they can. And that’s it. If they don’t call them back, so be it. Don’t worry about it.

Chris: And we have a pretty good setup on how to do all those things in the MasterMind.

Bradley: Yep. We’re going to be covering that starting January 1st. We’re going to be building, well, we’ll talk about that again after I announce it to the MasterMind members tomorrow. So we’ll talk about that a little bit more next week.

Is There A Need To Clean Up Old Citations Pointing To A Domain That Has Been 301 Redirected To The Legitimate Domain In GMB?

Jay says “If a local business has a previously used domain with lots of citations to it and that previous domain has 301 directed to the legitimate domain in GMB, do all these citations need to be cleaned up to reflect legitimate domain or can these citations be left alone?”

Okay, Jay. The real correct, the best answer is yes, they should all be updated because there is still incorrect data out there, right? Remember, Google is … even punctuation, incorrect punctuation on citations can be considered incongruent and can cause NAP or ranking issues, right? And so the name, address, phone number, and URL, like we always talk about citations as NAP; name, address, phone number.

And that’s true because that is a legitimate … it doesn’t have to have a reference to a link to be a citation. Right? It’s a citation. It’s a mention of the business. The brand, the address, the phone number. But most citations do have a link. Whether it’s a hyperlink, clickable, or just like a text link, it doesn’t matter. It still counts. It’s still considered a citation. So any of the data, and there’s data points if it’s incongruent can cause issues.

Now that’s the genuine answer, Jay, although I have some properties out there that had the exact same situation you’re talking about. A lot of them are old, generic lead-gen sites that have now been, they’re being serviced by a contractor now and I set up more branded type domains or pseudo-branded domains and I have the old ones redirected to just like what you’re talking about and some of those sites are still ranked in the mass pack, but to be honest with you, in the more competitive areas anytime there’s been NAP issues from something like that you have to correct them or you’re not going to rank.

The less competitive areas, it may not be as much of an issue. At least in my experience, I’ve got some properties that are still ranked in the mass pack even though that specific condition you’re talking about here exists. But in anything that is a little bit more competitive, no, it really does make a difference and again, I highly recommend, marketer center, I don’t know if we have it inside Serpspace. Do we have the citation cleanup inside of Serpspace?

Adam: Yeah, we do.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. You know, it’s a good service. It’s not as good as the service that we have, or that Loganix has for citation cleanup. That’s a lot more expensive. Loganix’s citation cleanup is the best I’ve used. There’s no doubt. It’s really expensive. I say really expensive but it’s worth it. It depends on how many citations are out there, Jay, if you’ve got hundreds of citations already than just go with the Loganix package.

I hate to say that with Roman on especially, but the reason why I say that is because they’ll work on it for like eight to 12 weeks I think. They’ll do like three separate attempts for every single directory. They’re really, really thorough about it. I noticed that … it’s only worth it if you’ve got a lot of citations out there or a lot of really bad inconsistencies. If it’s just a handful of stuff, absolutely do it through Serpspace. You’ll save yourself a shit ton of money.

Roman: Yeah, that’s exactly it. Because you’ve got one that’s more … one that’s a budget solution and the other one that’s it’s high end. You pay for it. Exactly.

Bradley: Yep. Okay. And you know, $500 is totally worth it with the amount of work that goes into that. It’s ridiculous. If you’ve ever tried to update citations on your own guys, I’d rather like watch grass grow than do it. It’s so tedious.

Do You Have Any General Tips Or Insights About How One Might Offer Freelance SEO Services On A Platform Like Upwork?

Okay. Sam’s up. What’s up Sam? He’s with us in Portland. He says “Hey all, I’ve been trying to supplement my income by offering SEO services on upwork. I’m still learning myself so my track record is a bit unproven, but I think I can still provide value to people. Do you have any general tips or insights about how one might offer freelance SEO services on a platform like that? Thanks in advance.”

Sam, I’m quite sure, go to Udemy or Udimy or whatever the hell it’s called, the digital information training whatever site and go do a search on like upwork SEO. Something like that. I know there’s courses out there. I’ve seen them. That teach people how to, especially digital marketers, how to promote themselves on upwork and freelance and some of those other sites and actually get ranked for keyword searches and stuff like that.

Because I’ve looked at them in the past. I’ve never done any of it myself because I’ve never offered my services on any of those platforms, but I’ve seen those training courses. So I would recommend just do some Google searches for that and see what you can find.

Anybody have any recommendations?

Adam: I’ll just offer some of the general stuff like you can go out there. I would look at other places to drive leads into other places as well, even if you’re sending them through upwork. It’s a great place to get started, but very quickly, please start being picky. You’ve got to pay your bills, but be careful about taking on a bunch of crazy pants clients.

Bradley: Yeah, and I wish I could remember off the top of my head. There was one course out there specifically, I sat through a whole webinar one time about this course. It was specifically for SEO’s trying to promote themselves on upwork. I almost bought it but I didn’t. I can’t remember the guys name now. I would point it out if I knew it, Sam, but just do a little bit of research, man. It might take some digging. Some playing around with different type of queries.

Adam: I’ll go the other way with this too real quick. Cause Sam I met you in person. You’re a personable guy. You’re easy to get a long with. We talked. I would say don’t give up … you’re in Seattle, that’s a huge market and especially since you’re maybe not having people like beating down your door online to get your services, that don’t ignore the local area. If you know anyone, can you help someone again, if you don’t have that track record, then you do need some sort of credibility first. I think we might have talked about this in person. Start going out. Maybe there is someone you can help locally. I think that, that do that in parallel with pursuing the online jobs. [crosstalk 00:41:39]

Bradley: Here you go guys. Sorry guys, just real quick. Only $12 for Udemy courses right now. Just go search upwork and look there’s a whole bunch of courses here on how to market yourself on upwork.

Chris: So is he in our Master class, MasterMind?

Bradley: No, he’s not. I don’t think so.

Adam: Nope, not yet.

Chris: Otherwise I would recommend to MasterMind Prospecting [inaudible 00:41:59].

Bradley: Right.

Roman: Yep, like Adam was saying, there’s a huge amount of opportunity locally as well. Find out where the business owners are at. A lot of times they have meetings, conferences, things like that and that’s where you want to be.

Adam: Well, like Bradley, when you got started, was that Chamber of Commerce?

Bradley: No, actually I didn’t do the Chamber of Commerce when I got started because it’s like 300 or 400 dollars a year to join and at the time I was broke so I didn’t do it. But I went to meet up groups. Just go to meetup.com and you can find like lead-share groups and things like that and those are always great and I’ve said this before, because people ask, Sam, right here on Hump Day Hangouts before what’s the quickest way to find clients?

We just covered this within the last couple of weeks actually. I recommend, what Adam said, absolutely. Meet up groups, Chamber of Commerce meetings, any sort of lead-share type group stuff, those are all great to get started.

Also, video email prospecting, which is a laser approach. Like a rifle approach. Instead of a shotgun approach. The prospecting funnel that Hernan just mentioned or Chris, I guess it was Chris, just mentioned a moment ago that we’re teaching inside the MasterMind right now is more of a shotgun approach. It’s a mass approach as opposed to a really like targeted approach. The video email prospecting, which Sam you should have access to because it’s in the bonus site, which you should have access to, is I would definitely go through that.

If you don’t like going out to live events like networking events, then you can do really, really well with the video email prospecting stuff. It just takes a little bit of time, but it’s worth it because the response rate is so high. Okay.

How Do You Use Hangout Millionaire To Promote Affiliate Products In An Ecommerce Store?

All right. Eddie says “I am using Peter Drew’s Live Rank Sniper and also recently purchased these Google Site Body Mass Blogger Creator and Hangout Millionaire. I am not sure if I should use Hangout Millionaire to create videos to be used as videos for random affiliate products and for an e-commerce store or if they should be used on a dozen secondary YouTube channels to create videos used only for back links to quality money videos? I already plan on using your video powerhouse for embeds of my quality money videos with all of that. How do you suggest best using Hangout Millionaire? Thank you.”

Okay. That’s a great question, Eddie because I’m actually using that right now for a couple of projects. I’m really going to be using it heavily starting in January, but right now I’ve just been kind of playing with it a little bit.

So what I do is I use the Live Rank Sniper to do all my keyword identification, right? Call it poking. Keyword poking. Figure out which keywords you can rank for. All those channels that I use in Live Rank Sniper are orphaned channels. They have no connection to anything on the web. They’re just basically test or spam channels. I just use them to poke keywords.

Once I use the Live Rank Sniper to do the report, do the Google search report and it sends back the text file with all the keywords that rank in the URLs of the videos that ranked. Those are ranked on page one or page two and there’s a setting in there. You can only select page one if you want or one or two. They’ll return the keywords. Then from that I just go back into the channel. I use Browseo so I’ll have multiple channels in there open in various tabs.

I just jump into the channel and delete all the videos and then I go actually input those keywords that ranked with no syndication networks. They’re orphan channels. They’re just basically spam channels but I’ve been able to rank on page one or page two with those. So what I do is just take all those keywords and go drop those in Hangout Millionaire to a channel that is actually connected to syndication network or in my case, multiple syndication networks.

That’s what I do. Keep in mind if you’re going to use the same video over and over again then you may want to split up across a few different channels. Like when you do the actual money videos because somebody could report your channel and it could get terminated, but that’s why I like to use multiple tiered syndication networks with one channel so that everything is triggered from one location. That way if that channel gets taken down, for whatever reason, or suspended then all I have to do is replace that channel with another one, but all my syndication networks are intact. It’s just a matter of updating applets in, one set of trigger applets at the original source, original channel source. Does that make sense?

So it’s just easy to replace if … it’s still a pain in the ass, but it’s better than having your stuff spread out across multiple channels, which that is kind of pain in the ass to set up too and keep track of is my point. All right. As far as the affiliate products. I don’t do it. I’m using it mainly for local stuff. I can’t imagine it would be any problem to create videos to be used for random affiliate products and e-commerce store.

As far as the actual link building, using it as a link building tool. For link building to other YouTube videos, yes that works. That absolutely works. In fact, I’ve tested that in the past where I’ve had. It’s essentially like the same strategy we talk about in the Silo Academy, right? YouTube Silo Academy.

If you’ve got a video that’s stubborn and so what I would do is use something like Power Suggest Pro to go enter in that seed keyword that you’re trying to rank for and then scrape a shit ton of really long tailed keywords and search queries that are associated with that keyword. Filter them out to only the most relevant ones and you should end up with a handful. Six, eight, ten, whatever keywords that are longer tailed versions of that shorter tailed one that you’re trying to rank. That you’re having a hard time with.

Then you can set up a Hangout Millionaire campaign and target, use the longer keywords that you scraped from Power Suggest Pro to all basically build links to that one video and make sure you’re using playlists. Put them all on a playlist with your top video, the one that you’re trying to rank is at the top of the playlist. So that you link in the Hangout Millionaire video description both to the URL of the top-level video that you’re trying to rank, as well as to the container, the playlist URL. Right? You do that and that absolutely works. I’ve seen significant jumps just from doing that.

Basically you are building a silo and you’re using all of the longer tailed keywords, which are actual queries people search for, to push relevancy and keyword theming up to the top-level video. Does that make sense?

Okay. We’re going to move on. Hopefully that was helpful.

Spamming YouTube

Eliezer, he’s a new Mindset Mastery subscriber, I know that. He posted a question the other day. He says, “Hey guys, for whoever has this idea I’d like to share my results. I decided to spam my YouTube video. It has 400,000 contextual links and well, my entire channel video reviews tanked. I optimized everything else, but I was too aggressive. Normally I would spam web twos, but I just had to test it out to see if it worked. Less than a day. Don’t underestimate YouTube’s algorithm.” I’ll plus one that. Thanks for sharing that, man.

Marco: That’s a guy after my own heart, man.

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: I love doing that and seeing what happens. Just don’t do it on anything you care about, man.

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: But it’s worth the test.

Bradley: Yep. Totally agree. Eliezer, I need to figure out how to pronounce that. Yeah, definitely. That’s what we do, is just test the shit out of stuff. We test it. Marco likes to blow shit up because he tries to figure out … that’s how you figure out what the threshold is. Right?

Marco: Yep.

Can You Assign Rel=”Canonical” To A GSite?

Bradley: All right. Greg says, “Can you reconicalize a G-site?” Not that I know of, but Marco may be able to answer that better.

Marco: No, you can only conicalize it up to, what do you call it, a TLD, your own domain.

Bradley: Yes.

Marco: You can do that. You can get conicalized to that. We tried to hack a conical into a G-site. I think Rob tried several ways and it wouldn’t pick it up correctly. We’re trying, Greg, believe me. It’s one of the things that’s in the lab. We play a lot with G-sites and see how much we can get away with.

Bradley: Yeah, and to be clear, I’m sorry I didn’t say that Greg, but you can conicalize a G-site if you’re using a custom domain. You have to set up the domain mapping inside the G-sites dashboard. It’s a little geeky doing it. I had a hell of a time doing it. It’s kind of weird. You’ve got to go in and set up C-name records and stuff like that, but it was a pain in the ass. I just remember it being a bitch to do, but then it conicalizes the G-site URL to your custom domain, which is crazy because both sites still exist.

You can still visit the Google site’s URL and it exists but it’s just conicalized, instead of it being like a redirect, it’s a conical. Right? So both sites still exist. Which is actually kind of cool because then you can spam the shit out of the Google site and it will push over to your main domain, essentially your main domain is what the Google site is sitting on, right? People won’t see it. It’s pretty cool. Right? Very similar to what we do with tag pages and stuff Greg. You should know that. You’re in the MasterMind.

How Do You Retrieve An Old Gmail Account That Hasn’t Been Used In A Long Time?

Ken Roberts says, “I have a real issue and hope someone can help me. I’ve been trying to log in to a Gmail account that hasn’t been used since back in 2013. Let’s see. So it’s a valid site, basically valid brand. I’m not going to read the whole question. It’s too long.

Roman: I think he’s trying to upgrade his email account.

Bradley: Good luck Ken. I know Greg commented in the Syndication Academy Facebook group about that as well and all I would do is echo his statement. His comment and that would be that I would call back and try to get another GMB rep on because the one I know that you talked to said that they couldn’t do anything.

I would just try to call back and see if somebody else can help you some way. As long as you can prove that it’s like your business or your profile. That kind of stuff. I don’t know what their verification requirements are for that, but I know typically I’ll try a couple of way to recover an account when I get locked out like this. I’ve got several of them.

If it takes me 30 minutes and I have not recovered it, I quit. I move on. I know that sucks in your case, but I would try to do something like maybe reissue a GMB and have it re-verified under a different Gmail account. What I think Greg mentioned to you. It’s so much fucking work trying to jump through the hoops they put in front of you.

It’s just not worth it, unless it’s an unique situation, which it sounds like it may be in your case Ken. Somebody else want to comment on that?

Roman: When you talk to the people just refuse to hang up and just drive them nuts and maybe you’ll eventually get what you want. (laughs)

Bradley: The squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?

Okay. Cool. I think we’re almost done guys.

Keith says, “It’s a bloody good course.” He’s talking about SEO Boot Camp. Jennia says the same thing guys. I’m telling you. It’s worth it. Pick it up. If you’ve got to use PayPal Credit, do it. Cause it will go up to a thousand bucks if you don’t. “I had purchased SEO Boot Camp. Highly recommend program and learning a lot from Jeffrey Smith, the SEO ninja. Thanks for having him on.” Absolutely. He is awesome. “I have some questions I would like to address before I create and publish anything.” Credit niche. Guys we’ve got to wrap this up too. So I’m going to try to run through this as quick as I can.

“Credit Niche is used for example only. Do you think this URL structure would be over optimization?” Yes. Absolutely, Jennia. My methodology, now I haven’t gotten that far into the course yet of what Jeffrey recommends but I can tell you my own experiences. I always try to keep my category slugs and my post URLs and page URLs very, very short and succinct and not over optimized. Actually, Jennia, if you’re in Syndication Academy I’m going to be covering best practices for content and marketing and post and page optimization in the webinar that we’re going to have five minutes from ow.

So if you’re in Syndication Academy I highly recommend you join the webinar today. If not, if you can’t make it you can always watch the replay, but I’m going to be covering that and personally, I would not. I might have like … you’ve got credit in the route, credit here, top-level category, child category you’ve got credit, and then you’ve got credit in the post URL.

In my opinion, that’s way, way, way over optimized. I might do http://ift.tt/2BIneTx blemish if that’s an actual keyword/how to repair credit fast. Having it in the slug there is not so bad because it’s so far removed from the route where the other occurrence would be, but I would absolutely not have it in every one of those. That’s way over optimized, in my opinion.

Anybody else want to comment on that?

Roman: Yeah, I’m not a big fan of physical silos like that, that run that deep.

Bradley: Yep.

Roman: Virtual silos are, in my opinion, better. This has it’s place for physical silos like that but it’s … and those URLs are ridiculously over optimized.

Bradley: Yep. I kind of agree with Roman here, in that, it depends on the type of site. Like, in this case, it sounds like it’s more like a national site instead of local. If you’re doing local and you’re covering different geographic areas it makes sense to have the physical silo structure, which just means your permanent link structure is set up to show category/post name. Right?

So you see the actual silo structure in the URL, but you can still accomplish the same thing by just doing the post name permanently structure. You still do all of your internal linking. You still stack all your content within their proper categories, child categories, and posts and that sort of thing, but you can have it much shorter where it would be http://ift.tt/2koOdzn. You wouldn’t see all this other stuff here.

But even if those aren’t shown, don’t over optimize them. I still would follow as if I was showing it in the URL. I would still keep it short and succinct. But again, on local stuff, I like to show, for local stuff, I like to show the hierarchy of how the locations are stacked. So it might be top-level category state, then maybe county as the child category, and then city as the post. Something like that, but again, it just depends and what Roman said is absolutely true. A virtual silo can accomplish the same end results without all this crap.

Roman: Yeah, I mean, virtual silos are easier to manage because setting pages up, and things like this can be a real pain when you start getting into other CMSs and stuff like that. If you can accomplish the same thing without it, it’s much better.

Bradley: Totally agree.

Adam: Well, I’ve got something I need to say and that is you want one of these awesome, awesome shirts you should come join the MasterMind. I mean, there’s like 10 billion other reasons but I mean, I don’t know, these are pretty nice too.

Bradley: Well, that’s the icing on the cake, guys if there was ever a reason to join the MasterMind it’s to get the shirt. (laughs).

All right. Thanks everybody. We’ll see you all, well some of you, on the Syndication Academy webinar and the rest of you or some others we’ll see tomorrow on the MasterMind webinar. The rest of you, we’ll see you next week. Thanks guys.

Adam: Adios.

Chris: Bye, bye.

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 160 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 160

Click on the video above to watch Episode 160 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.

  Announcement

Adam: Turn off the light so everyone can see it better.

Oh, what’s this? A tee shirt. Oh, well, we’re live. What do you know?

Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangout Episode 160. The one where Adam gets to model all of his awesome the-shirts.

We’re happy to have you here, and before we get started, of course, we want to go around and say hello to everybody. I’ll start on my left as I see things here on the screen.

Chris, how’s it goin man?

Chris: It’s good. It’s snowing in Austria. Time to hit the slopes soon. Can’t wait.

How are you doing?

Adam: Can’t complain. It should be snowing here, but it’s like fifty. Fahrenheit for those of you outside the U.S, but yeah it’s nice. Can’t complain.

Hernan, how about you. How are things going? You’re moving into summer down south.

Hernan: Yeah it’s fucking chilly man. I don’t know. It’s November 29th. It’s pretty nice. I was expecting some warm, but no. It’s chilly.

Nice t-shirt by the way. Good logo.

Adam: Thank you. Thank you. It comes I black as well, but I chose this one. First one I grabbed out since I was running late. I’m the reason we’re late, but all right.

Well Marco, how are you doing man?

Marco: I’m good man. What’s up?

Adam: Not much. I usually check in with you for the weather, but I know you’re down south closer to Hernan. So I guess the weather is about the same for you?

Marco: It’s the same.

Adam: Sounds good. Alright.

Roman, how about you man? How you doing?

Roman: Oh fantastic up in Canada.

Adam: Gotcha. Wow. Weather report? What’s going on there, man? Is it snowing? Is the great white north a blizzard? What’s happening?

Roman: We’ve actually just recently had a nice warm day of fifty degrees. It’s been a pleasant freezing for the entire rest of the time I’ve been here though. (laughs)

Chris: Wow. Sweet.

Adam: Alright.

Bradley, I was just in your neck of the woods for Thanksgiving. A couple hours away from you, so I’m pretty sure I know how it is, but how are things going with you down there? Weather or anything I guess so.

Bradley: Everything is peachy. (laughs)

Adam: Alright. (laughs)

Bradley: Glad to be here.

Adam: Outstanding. All right.

Well, we’ve just got a few quick announcements. If you’re new to Semantic Mastery, first of all, thank you for watching Hump Day Hangouts, and hanging out with us, and being here. You should check out the battle plan, the SEO Blueprint. I’ll pop a link in there. You can save seventy-five bucks with the discount code we got.

If you have not yet, please head over to serpspace.com. You can get your free account there. There’s a couple free tools, which actually we should ask Roman about that if he’s got some additional stuff coming out. That’s also where all the awesome, done-for-you services are located. Okay.

And then as well, the last thing we want to let you know is always check out support.semanticmastery.com. We have our frequently asked questions there. Things that require graphs, or charts, or some of Bradley’s amazing artwork. We compiled them there in one spot. So during the week if you have a question, you can go there and check that out. Alright?

That is it on my end. You guys have anything you want to cover before we get started?

I can think of one thing real quick. I believe… correct me if I’m wrong. Is Jeffrey Smith’s SEO boot camp still … Is there quick reopening on that? Did we confirm that? Now that we’re live. (laughs)

Bradley: I’m glad you mentioned that because I’ve got the link right here. Yeah guys, the SEO boot camp training that I’ve been talking about for a few weeks now, Jeffrey Smith’s SEO Boot Camp Training. It was on a special price for $497. Roughly 500 bucks for a limited time, and then he closed that. So it ended up going to $997, but because of how much we’ve talked … how well we’ve talked about it. How good we’ve talked about it. He basically opened it back up for our subscribers to join again for $497 for limited time only.

So if you guys are interested in it, now would be the time because once it goes back up to regular price again when he closes it, which is in one to three days I guess. I don’t know. I know he said it was only going to be a couple days. It’ll be $997. So I recommend that you get it.

We’ve also got some bonuses that we’ll throw in. We’ll throw in Content Kingpin if you need it. If you don’t have it already, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com if you end up picking up the SEO boot camp training, which I highly, highly recommend. Guys, I wouldn’t be recommending SEO training from someone else unless it was that good, and his is really that good.

So anyways, I’m gonna drop the link, and you guys can go check it out. I highly recommend that you get it while it’s still at half price. Okay. And you’ll get our bonuses too, so…

Adam: Awesome. Yeah, if you’re watching this down the road, it’s probably not available. So you know, hopefully we can work something out with him again, but that’s the way it works. It was open for about a week there. This’ll be over. This is 11/29, November 29th. This’ll be over November 30th.

Bradley: Okay. That’s http://ift.tt/2BIn92b if somebody’s watching this at a later date. Even at a thousand dollars it’s totally worth it. I’m not lying. If you can’t get it now, then get it later when you can afford it. (laughs) Cause it’s worth it, alright. Anything else?

Adam: We’re good.

Bradley: Alright, last thing before we move on. Go to bradleybenner.com, and subscribe to my YouTube channel, or my email list. Period. That’s it. (laughs)

Now I’ve been doing the Mindset Mastery series over there once a week. I try to … well, not every week, but most weeks I try to get a video done, and it’s often a series of videos because I have to split it up into multiple videos. This week I just did some Q&A stuff. You can ask me questions about Mindset series. There’s a button on the bradleybenner.com page where you can just click. It’s takes you over to Google Form. You can submit questions.

I also highly recommend that you subscribe to my email list. It’s daily Mindset updates, and it’s just every day I’ve started working on developing a habit of trying to write every day a minimum of 200 words, and I’m using the Mindset Mastery email series as my vehicle. That’s where I’m doing all of my writing. I’ve gotten … I’ve written Monday through Friday almost every single day. I think we’re up to like 15 or 16 emails in the series already. But it’s mostly basically at the end of my morning ritual or routine where I do my daily goal setting, and planning, and brief meditation, and some study, and stuff like that.

Typically, I have something in my mind that I want to convey, some idea. That what I just put to paper, or in an email. I draft an email from that. My goal is just a minimum of 200 words per day. Typically, they end up between 500 to 800 words in order to fully convey my thought, but it’s something that’s kind of turning into a labor of love for me, and it’s just kind of like kick your ass stuff. Like get off your ass and go do something, be productive, don’t make excuses. That kind of stuff. That’s the kind of stuff I respond to well. I’m not gonna lie. This is more of a selfish thing for me that I’m doing for me, but I figured I might as well put it up there because it may help some of you. So I recommend going and checking it out.

I drop some links to various resources; to Amazon Books, and audio programs, and all the kind of stuff that I’m studying, tools, and things that I use. It’s not like an affiliate promo thing. I’m literally just sharing with you guys what kind of resources that I’m using in my daily practice of self mastery, and personal growth, and that kind of stuff.

So, go check it out. Alright. With that-

Adam: I’m gonna head over there and get signed up.

Bradley: I’m gonna move on. Alright. Here we go guys.

How To Optimize A YouTube Channel For A DJ Service?

Alright, so Pierre is up first. He says, “hey guys, I am new to SEO. I’ve just created a YouTube channel for a DJ service, and launching in Montreal. How can I optimize my YouTube channel?”

Well, there’s a few things you can do to your channel. It’s more about optimizing the individual videos. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to optimize the channel as well, but there’s limited things you can do to the channel. For example: One thing that’s important, at least in my opinion through my testings, is to theme the channel. So if… what I mean by that since you’re new Pierre is you want to try to keep all the videos that you have uploaded that are public on your channel, right?

If they are unlisted or private it really doesn’t matter, but anything that’s public on your channel you want to make sure that it’s closely related to what the overall theme of your business is. Right? So music related stuff probably. Maybe videos from weddings that you’ve DJ’d at or events that you’ve DJ’d at. That kind of stuff so that it all makes sense. Right? You want to try to keep the theming somewhat relevant.

It’s okay to have occasionally some random videos, but I would suggest is that you create playlists for that and that’s one of the ways that you can kind of like silo or categorize, compartmentalize your YouTube channel, is by using playlists. As far as the actual optimization, just go the settings. We’ll go to the creator studio. I’m not going to walk through it because we’ve got too many questions to get through, but we have a course called YouTube Mastery. It’s a little bit dated but the principles are all still the same.

So, if that’s something you … that walks through how to optimize YouTube channels, as well as individual videos both on page and off page optimization and playlist optimization. All of those things. Link building, advanced ranking techniques, all of that is in YouTube mastery. Again, it’s probably three years old now so some of the interfaces have changed … Interfacing in YouTube has changed a bit, but all of those principles are absolutely still relevant today. So I would recommend you pick that up

I believe YouTube Silo Academy is part of that or is a bonus or something in there. If not, YouTube silo academy is only a seven dollar product. That’s something else I would recommend because using playlists in YouTube and creating them as like website silos is very, very powerful. It’s like standard operating procedure now for any sort of YouTube work that I do now. So I would recommend that you pick that up or if you pick up YouTube Mastery, again, it’s an expensive product. Are we even still selling that guys? I don’t even know if we are. To be honest.

Adam: Probably we are.

Bradley: Okay. All right. Well as long as we are still selling it, go pick it up and then what I would suggest is not even buying YouTube Silo Academy because just contact us at support, if you end up buying YouTube Mastery. Tell us you purchased and we’ll give you access to our bonus site, which YouTube Silo Academy is included in the bonus site. As well as a shit ton of other training. It’s worth it just to get the bonus site. But that’s what I would recommend, Pierre because that will take you step by step through how to optimize a YouTube channel and the videos and the playlists and do the link building and all the other stuff that is required to rank videos. Okay?

Okay, so moving on. So John says … Anybody want to comment on that before I move on?

Roman: You covered that completely.

Bradley: All right.

Should Articles Created As Part Of A Drive Stack Have Unique Content?

John says “Hey guys, I’m trying to understand more about drive stacks. This would be a good question for Marco. When creating the articles as part of the drive stacks should the content be unique?” Doesn’t have to be, John. At all.

“Also, if we have a website that we want to rank are we better off pointing the stack at the money site or should we instead build a secondary stack just to rank that by itself?”

I’ll give you my answer and then I want to hear Marco’s as well, but yeah for drive stacks I link to all of my most important properties within the stack. So in other words, like I link to the money site. I link to the Google my business maps URL. I link to the Facebook page. Any of like the real powerful tier one social properties or even citations like Yelp, for example. I throw a Yelp link in as a target URL for my drive stack.

The primary URL should be your money site in my opinion. Unless you’re just trying to rank in maps, but again you should be putting both of those links as target URL’s anyways. I’ve pretty much always linked to my money site, homepage of the money site, as well as any … the Google map business listing, and any of the other most powerful tier one links or citations, which includes social properties and things like that. That I’m trying to boost. To basically validate the entity. Push relevancy into the whole eco-system and that kind of stuff.

So Marco what’s your take?

Marco: I totally agree. That’s it. Link to everything. Anything and everything because it will push power to whatever it is linked to. It doesn’t matter inside the drive stack and if you’re worried about the money site, then just do an I-frame imbed. Instead of linking directly to it. All you have to do is … the way that we teach to connect, right? The connection loop. Closing the loop. That’s taught inside our RYS Academy Reloaded and it’s one of the most important things that you can do. It’s I-framing on not only the D-site, which we also teach, but also on the money site and that I-frame will cause everything to flow through and will also protect the money site. That’s what I would do.

Bradley: Very good. Thank you.

Why Is A PBN Website Auto-Blogging Videos?

Next question from John. He says “Brad, I was reverse engineering a few of your links that lead to the G-site for a Virginia SEO that led me to an obvious PBN that is being used. I don’t want to name it here since I don’t think it matters. I noticed that the website has what appears to be its own social syndication ring of various 2.0 properties. But it also appears that the site is auto-blocking videos, why? These videos don’t appear to be syndicating and I assume that is on purpose.”

No, John. Honestly, I’ve talked about this in just about every time we talk about the SEO Virginia. My first experience with RYS Academy methods. Right. That’s the first thing that I ever built, is that. The Virginia SEO or SEO Virginia, whatever, Google site and I did a drive stack around that key word and boom I’ve been ranked. Well, I built it in May of 2015 and I think it was about six or eight weeks before it ranked, but it’s been ranked ever since. It hasn’t budged a fucking spot since then. That’s like incredible.

So anyways, I’ve talked about this many, many times. You obviously hadn’t heard it, but I had a old PBN network, private blog network that was way, it was crafted very poorly. It was based upon like 2012 and 2013 PBN building principles. Right? So, as of 2015 when I built that drive stack, those PBN’s were basically toxic for links for any sort of money site. They were that bad. Only because, again, 2012/2013 methods for building PBN’s were a lot different than they were in 2015, right?

So I had like large PBN network that was basically useless for building links to money sites. I pretty much re-purposed them. To be video broadcasting sites. All that would do is use them as like an imbed network to optimize or rank videos. So I basically just turned my PBN’s … the old ones that were crappy, they weren’t themed well, that kind of stuff, they had a whole bunch of different posts on them and different topical categories and things like that, so they were just very, very … they would have been toxic had I linked directly to money sites.

So that said, because I had that available and they were all Google properties for that test, that first experience with RYS methods, right? So the Google drives properties as well as the Google site, I used that PBN network, which was now a video broadcasting network specifically, just because in my opinion they were like spam links, but I didn’t care because it was a Google properties. So I did one PBN link run. I think at the time it was about 38 or 40 links and that was it. A lot of those sites have been expired now. I let the domains expire on a lot of those sites, but a handful of them are still alive. Probably just because they are on auto-renew and I just pay for them every year.

So that’s it. I haven’t done any link building to that site at all since May of 2015. So again, any of those sites that you saw back links coming from pointing to that are either test sites or just basically old spammed PBN sites that are just still existing. I think there might be a few links in there, coming from some sites that are in our video powerhouse network, because, again, a lot of those sites from my old PBN’s were just turned into video broadcasting sites and that’s it.

So, anyways. Just to answer your question John. That was purely done from back in 2015. There’s been no link building done to that property since then. What you are looking at are old links coming from PBN’s that are no longer being used or if they’re being used it’s specifically only for video syndication.

All right. Good question though. DOS says … Go ahead.

Marco: I would add that’s not where the secret sauce is. I mean, if that’s where he’s investing into PBN links and all that. You’re way off course, man. You’ve got to circle back.

Bradley: Okay. Very good. I totally agree. That’s what I was trying to get at. Maybe I wasn’t clear about it, but those links were … that was just to help get it pushed. I remember when I did that, like I said, it was right after I built it I did a run through my PBN through part or a handful of sites, a few dozen anyways, and I let it go. I checked on it every few days for about two or three weeks and it was in and out of the Google site and some of the drives files were in and out of the index. They were bouncing all over the damn place when they were in the index.

So I basically kind of like just gave up on it. I just kind of forgot about it. It was like six or eight weeks later. So it was probably in July or so. July or maybe even August but I remember I just happened to think about it and I went and just did a manual search of SEO Virginia and boom it was number one and I was like “Holy shit!” And it’s been there ever since. I’ve never done a damn thing to it.

So, again, it has very little to do with the links, if anything at all because those links would have tanked in other sites, if it wasn’t Google properties, right? So what Marco just said is absolutely correct.

Would You Advise Linking Each Page Of Spun Google Sites To A Good Quality Site’s Hopmepage To Push More Link Juice?

All right. DOS says “I’ve been building a good quality new giggle site.” That must be on purpose because he did it multiple times. “A new giggle site to point at my money site and in building fun giggle sites with silo linked pages and linking only the home page to those back to the good Google site. Would it push any more juice if I linked each page directly up to the good site or is it about the same?”

No, I would do what you’re doing DOS. I would do what you’re doing because there’s a lot of value in pushing juice from inner pages to a home page and then having like or to any particular specific page. Right?

To any, one specific page using internal links to push relevancy and equity to that page and then have that one … and again, it can be home page or any other page. It doesn’t matter. And then having one link outbound to whatever your real target site is. There’s a lot of … I mean, I like to do that better because then you can actually go build links to the posts or the inner pages that are all pointing to one specific page that then linked to your actual target URL. You can build links to those inner pages and it adds an extra layer of protection because now its inbound links hitting inner pages.

Inner pages pushing all that juice to the specific page that then outbound links to your money page. Now remember these are all Google sites. So you can get away with a hell of a lot more, but typically that’s the same type of structure or format that will do for link building for anything within our web two networks or syndication networks, right? Like that’s a very powerful strategy.

By the way we have a Syndication Academy webinar immediately following this. That’s two in the month of November, but since we didn’t have one in October. I made up for it. I’ve redeemed myself.

But with the syndication networks, it’s the same thing. If you push a post out through your blog and it syndicates out across all the web two sites, you can go grab the web two post URLs from that specific post. And then build links to those because there should be a link, well, there’s the attribution link that points back to the original money site post, right? And in the money site post is then going to have an internal link up to the page that you’re trying to push.

So if you’re building links to the web two post URLs think about how many hops back you are from your actual target URL. Right? Target URL, which is a page on your money site, then the first tier link is the blog post from your money site, second tier links are the web two posts, the re-publishing of your blog post from your money site onto the web two platforms, and your fourth tier links are going to be any sort of spam links you that you want to point at your web twos. Your post URLs. Does that make sense?

So it’s a very, very clear … it’s a very clean way to build links and actually funnel like through all that relevancy back up to your target page. So it’s a safe way to do it. That’s primarily how I’m doing stuff with the Google site generator for example. It’s very similar to what I just described. What you’re talking about here.

Anybody else want to comment on that? That was a great question, by the way, DOS.

Chris: Yeah, it is. I think that you might have great job answering it.

Bradley: Okay, cool. Moving on. Muhammad what’s up buddy? I just answered your questions for Mindset Mastery this week, by the way, Muhammad, in case you hadn’t seen it yet. I actually did like two more videos guys but I wasn’t happy with them. Like for another 45 minutes of content and I deleted them so… if I get time this week I’m going to try to redo them and post those as well, if not, that’s what I’m going to talk about next week.

Would The Second Corrected Press Release Be As Powerful As The First?

“Hey guys, I’m following the local PR strategy, that BB talked about in the recent Syndication Academy webinar. My first PR from Serpspace turned out to have an error I missed. Could my second PR be a correction of the first? Would it be just as powerful?”

It’s going to have to be worded slightly different Muhammad otherwise it will probably be rejected by the distribution service because they don’t allow duplicate content. Rob, who’s co-partner, co-creator of RYS Reloaded with Marco, he does really good with creating his own PRs from using other people’s PRs and just rewording them. (laughs) Like re-writing some of the stuff and then just re-publishing those, which is awesome and then putting his own links and stuff in it.

All I ever do Muhammad is just use the PR writers from whatever distribution service we’re using if it’s in Serpspace we use our PR writers there. If it’s any one of the other services that I use, I always use their in-house writers. I used to use my own PR writer, but the problem is each different distribution service is going to have different editorial guidelines. They’re all similar but there are some slight nuances.

Even if you have your own PR writer, it’s good to have that because you get a specific voice that becomes consistent through all the PRs but the problem with that is different distribution networks may kick it back for various reasons, right? And say no, this needs to be edited. Or it says not approved or unapproved because of this reason and that reason. It becomes kind of a pain in the ass.

I’ve learned it’s just more efficient to use the PR writers that are available within the actual distribution services because they know what will pass their editorial guidelines. I just always give very specific instructions. I always provide the PR title. A lot of the PR writers are going to want to change the title and tell you that their title’s better.I always change it back because I know what the hell I want to target. When I provide the PR title I want them to use that.

So anyways, PR title; who, what, when, where, sometimes why or how and then you want quotes from an executive or if you’re doing a review post, like an announcement of a new review or a five star review or whatever like that, you can always use the review text from the customer as a quote. But that’s pretty much what they’re looking for. Just keep that in mind. I would recommend if you had a PR written from Serpspace, because we don’t even allow user-submitted PR’s anymore do we Roman?

Roman: No, no we don’t.

Bradley: Yep.

Roman: Yeah, I was also going to mention that because I’ve had to do this in the past where you know somebody misses some kind of information on the press release when they submit it out and then they would need to make a correction. We can have a press release written up basically saying that what we stated here was incorrect and that this is correct. It gives you an excuse to link back to the original PR and then you can push it up that way and turn the disadvantage into an advantage.

We’ve done it in the past, corrections PR’s. Just message support and we should be able to take care of it.

Bradley: Very good, thank you.

By the way, Muhammad, keep this in mind. Anybody doing a PR strategy … guys when you go to add links into your press releases. If you’re going to be doing any sort of stacking, you want to use a re-direct URL to the PR’s that you’re pointing links to.

So like, if you’re doing a second tier PR, which points to another PR you want to use a re-direct URL because a lot of those PRs purge and some of them purge within as little as 90 days. I’ve got a lot, actually I’m not going to get into that. I’ll talk about that in MasterMind tomorrow, but I’ve got a lot of stuff that I’ve seen since I started doing stacking, which was about five months ago. I’ve done a lot of that and there’s a lot of those PR’s that were originally published that are now been purged from the PR sites. They’re on some sites but the vast majority of them now have already been deleted so they’re … some sites delete after 90 days, some sites delete after six months or 180 days. Right?

Then there are some that keep them for I don’t know how long, but they are still up. It’s best if you just keep a record, like a spreadsheet of all the PRs and your target URLs and then use redirects. I recommend just setting up like a dummy domain for that or even a sub-domain, like press dot something or whatever.

That’s what I do and I just use Prettylink Pro, I use Prettylink Pro but you can use Prettylink Lite, which is a free plug-in to set up all the redirects and I use that so now if a PR is published that is pointing to a target URL of another PR that has been purged I can go in and swap what that link in the published PR with that link is pointing to. Right? The destination. The target URL. I can change that out. I can swap that out to something else. It can be anything. It can be a tier one property, a syndication network, a citation, anything I want. That way I don’t lose that juice, if that makes sense.

So I highly recommend that you do that. I just started doing that recently. I don’t know why the hell I didn’t think about it before, but I’m doing that now with all my stuff and it’s much better that way. Plus you can actually build the authority of running your own domains that way.

How Would You Handle Curated Content For Multiple Real Estate Clients In Multiple Cities?

Number two says, “I’m currently curating two posts a week for my real estate client. One on real estate topics made with recent articles and another on local news with local papers and sources. I want to use this model with another realtor in another city. How different would the real estate posts have to be? For instance, if I had five realtors it would start to get hard to have all them completely unique every week. Can I edit them or would I hire more VA’s to write more unique ones?”

If you’re curating posts, what I would recommend doing is, I wouldn’t republish the same post across multiple, you probably could. To be honest Muhammad you likely could do that. Just take the post, the original curated post and republish it on the other five realtors websites and you’d probably be fine, right? But, because a lot of people do that with local sites anyways. Like, if they do local plumbing sites. They’ll copy the same content and the only thing they swap out is the actual geographic modifiers, the location modifiers.

That still seems to work. I’ve never recommended doing that. I don’t do that personally. Curating is easy enough because all that the curators have to do is a couple of sentences of commentary in between each curated piece of content. So if all the heavy lifting has been done with the first curated post, which is finding content to support the theme of the article, right? Of the post. Then laying it out in a logical order. Then there literally is an opening, a small amount of commentary between each curated piece, and a conclusion. That’s it. That can be done very, very quickly.

If the curated article has already been published once, I would recommend you just send that over to another blog and just have the commentary slightly change so that it is unique. That’s all I would do. Again, if you’ve got multiple curators you could even have the first, the primary curator send it out to the other curators and have them just do a slight re-write on the commentary and it would be a much more efficient way, but you’d also be guaranteeing you’ve got unique content that way. That’s what I would do.

Any comments on that guys?

Okay. [crosstalk 00:28:48]

Chris: That was pretty in depth, actually. I was actually thinking something else.

Marco: Pretty good stuff, man. I hope everybody took notes.

Do Drive Stacks Have Enough Power And Authority To Rank Sites On Their Own?

Bradley: Thanks guys. John’s up again. He says, “Do the drive stacks have enough power and authority to rank a site on their own?”

Sometimes John but I don’t ever, personally I don’t ever expect it to be enough. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised, but sometimes, a lot of the times, No it’s not enough. It depends on the competition. Our standard answer applies here.

Do the drive stacks have enough power and authority to rank a site on their own? It depends. (laughs) I’ll let Marco comment on that. What do you think Marco?

Marco: Sorry, I was talking into a muted mic. I totally agree. It depends. And just like you said, sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised, sometimes you hit something that you figured is easy but the competition is actually more than you thought so you’re going to need more. What’s the best way? Well, there’s a ton of ways, Bradley was just talking about press releases.

Press releases to drive stack work like gang busters. [crosstalk 00:29:59] Press releases are a form of link building. You could also do link building. [Damian 00:30:07], again, does a great job of link building into the drive stacks. He’s been doing it for a few years for us now. So he knows exactly what needs to be done. There’s just a ton of things. There’s just so much.

If you have a verified Google my visits, you can go into there and drive relevance and power from your Google my visits into your drive over to the money site. I mean, this is endless because of the way that drive stacks work. Once again, I’m going to promote the training. All of this is covered in RYS Reloaded. You don’t have to go and try to reverse engineer all of this. The training is available right now in RYS Reloaded. It comes with a Facebook group, webinars, Rob is always in there, providing value so I highly recommend you come and join the training.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s a complex beast, John. It’s freaking super powerful and very effective but without … I mean you can try to reverse engineer … it took Marco and Gary [Kireon 00:31:16] originally like 18 months of development figuring all of this shit out. So my point is, you’re going to spend a shit ton of time trying to reverse engineer stuff or testing and you can get it all done for you basically all the stuff handed to you on a silver platter as to what works if you join the Academy or you just buy done-for-you networks and then you can try to reverse engineer those. Which would be a hell of a lot faster than just kind of trial and error on your own. Right?

But, yeah, I absolutely recommend that it sounds like you like building stuff from your questions, which is great. That’s awesome. I would highly recommend that you join the Academy so that you can get the proper training. You’ll shortcut your learning curve by months and months if not years.

What Does The Call Center Tell The Incoming Callers/Leads (For That First Month) Before There’s A Contractor To Service The Leads?

All right. Dan’s up. “Bradley mentioned on previous hump day using a call center to answer calls for lead-gen sites and having it set up for a month or so before trying to sell to a new client or contractor, what does the call center tell the incoming callers, the leads?”

Dan if I said that I had a call center set up prior to actually selling the leads, well I can’t believe I would have said that, I may have, and if I did I apologize because that’s not what I meant. What I typically do … now, hold on a minute, what I’m saying is if starting off something brand new most of the time all I’ll do is set up a voicemail on, so like I’ll use a call redirect number, call forwarding number, and I’ll just set up a voicemail. If I do not have a service provider, all I do is set up a voicemail because all I’m looking for is the call records. Right? History of calls.

Some people will leave a message. It’s very rare. Most people will call and hang up, but I can go into the virtual phone number dashboard and actually pull call reports. Anything that has a local area code, in my opinion, counts as a valid call. That’s just to keep your expenses low, Dan. Only because Answer Connect, which is the call center service I use, I love them. I’ve been using them sine I first set it up back in 2012. So I’ve been using them for five, damn near six years now. They are a really great service. But it’s rather expensive. Unless you’re producing revenue, I don’t recommend setting that up. I would just send it to a voicemail. Make sure you’re using a call tracking number, that way you can go in and look at call analytics. You can filter out any non-local area codes. Which some of those could be valid calls, but then you can show what type of call volume you’re getting. Right?

Then as soon as you get somebody willing to purchase or buy the leads, then you can set up the call center. Since I have a call center set up, it only costs me five bucks per month to set up an additional, what they call, sub-account in Answer Connect. So I’ve got a primary account number, which is a phone number, and then every other, I’ve got many sub-accounts underneath that. It only costs five dollars per month per sub-account at Answer Connect. Then you pay for your monthly, excuse me, your minutes. You pay per minute usage as well. So it’s very inexpensive.

If you already have it set up, then what you could do is, you could still get the lead’s information, just the same type of a script, a lead qualifying script is what I call it, right? Then just nobody ever calls the lead back is my point, if you don’t have somebody yet, if you’ve already got Answer Connect set up then you could certainly do that. I wouldn’t say go cancel it just to go back and set it up again, as soon as you get a service provider, but if you don’t have that set up yet don’t do it. Just use a voicemail, if that makes sense. Okay?

“Do you tell them that someone will call them back?” Well, of course. I mean, if you’re using an answering service that’s what the as part of the script, typically what I write in the script is after the questions have been answered that I have put into the script, which basically qualifies a lead. Name, address, phone number, type of service requested, best time to call, email address, that kind of stuff and then a brief description of the job. Typically, the answering service says “Okay Mr./Mrs. Whatever. Blank. We’ll have our estimator call you back as soon as they can. And that’s it. If they don’t call them back, so be it. Don’t worry about it.

Chris: And we have a pretty good setup on how to do all those things in the MasterMind.

Bradley: Yep. We’re going to be covering that starting January 1st. We’re going to be building, well, we’ll talk about that again after I announce it to the MasterMind members tomorrow. So we’ll talk about that a little bit more next week.

Is There A Need To Clean Up Old Citations Pointing To A Domain That Has Been 301 Redirected To The Legitimate Domain In GMB?

Jay says “If a local business has a previously used domain with lots of citations to it and that previous domain has 301 directed to the legitimate domain in GMB, do all these citations need to be cleaned up to reflect legitimate domain or can these citations be left alone?”

Okay, Jay. The real correct, the best answer is yes, they should all be updated because there is still incorrect data out there, right? Remember, Google is … even punctuation, incorrect punctuation on citations can be considered incongruent and can cause NAP or ranking issues, right? And so the name, address, phone number, and URL, like we always talk about citations as NAP; name, address, phone number.

And that’s true because that is a legitimate … it doesn’t have to have a reference to a link to be a citation. Right? It’s a citation. It’s a mention of the business. The brand, the address, the phone number. But most citations do have a link. Whether it’s a hyperlink, clickable, or just like a text link, it doesn’t matter. It still counts. It’s still considered a citation. So any of the data, and there’s data points if it’s incongruent can cause issues.

Now that’s the genuine answer, Jay, although I have some properties out there that had the exact same situation you’re talking about. A lot of them are old, generic lead-gen sites that have now been, they’re being serviced by a contractor now and I set up more branded type domains or pseudo-branded domains and I have the old ones redirected to just like what you’re talking about and some of those sites are still ranked in the mass pack, but to be honest with you, in the more competitive areas anytime there’s been NAP issues from something like that you have to correct them or you’re not going to rank.

The less competitive areas, it may not be as much of an issue. At least in my experience, I’ve got some properties that are still ranked in the mass pack even though that specific condition you’re talking about here exists. But in anything that is a little bit more competitive, no, it really does make a difference and again, I highly recommend, marketer center, I don’t know if we have it inside Serpspace. Do we have the citation cleanup inside of Serpspace?

Adam: Yeah, we do.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. You know, it’s a good service. It’s not as good as the service that we have, or that Loganix has for citation cleanup. That’s a lot more expensive. Loganix’s citation cleanup is the best I’ve used. There’s no doubt. It’s really expensive. I say really expensive but it’s worth it. It depends on how many citations are out there, Jay, if you’ve got hundreds of citations already than just go with the Loganix package.

I hate to say that with Roman on especially, but the reason why I say that is because they’ll work on it for like eight to 12 weeks I think. They’ll do like three separate attempts for every single directory. They’re really, really thorough about it. I noticed that … it’s only worth it if you’ve got a lot of citations out there or a lot of really bad inconsistencies. If it’s just a handful of stuff, absolutely do it through Serpspace. You’ll save yourself a shit ton of money.

Roman: Yeah, that’s exactly it. Because you’ve got one that’s more … one that’s a budget solution and the other one that’s it’s high end. You pay for it. Exactly.

Bradley: Yep. Okay. And you know, $500 is totally worth it with the amount of work that goes into that. It’s ridiculous. If you’ve ever tried to update citations on your own guys, I’d rather like watch grass grow than do it. It’s so tedious.

Do You Have Any General Tips Or Insights About How One Might Offer Freelance SEO Services On A Platform Like Upwork?

Okay. Sam’s up. What’s up Sam? He’s with us in Portland. He says “Hey all, I’ve been trying to supplement my income by offering SEO services on upwork. I’m still learning myself so my track record is a bit unproven, but I think I can still provide value to people. Do you have any general tips or insights about how one might offer freelance SEO services on a platform like that? Thanks in advance.”

Sam, I’m quite sure, go to Udemy or Udimy or whatever the hell it’s called, the digital information training whatever site and go do a search on like upwork SEO. Something like that. I know there’s courses out there. I’ve seen them. That teach people how to, especially digital marketers, how to promote themselves on upwork and freelance and some of those other sites and actually get ranked for keyword searches and stuff like that.

Because I’ve looked at them in the past. I’ve never done any of it myself because I’ve never offered my services on any of those platforms, but I’ve seen those training courses. So I would recommend just do some Google searches for that and see what you can find.

Anybody have any recommendations?

Adam: I’ll just offer some of the general stuff like you can go out there. I would look at other places to drive leads into other places as well, even if you’re sending them through upwork. It’s a great place to get started, but very quickly, please start being picky. You’ve got to pay your bills, but be careful about taking on a bunch of crazy pants clients.

Bradley: Yeah, and I wish I could remember off the top of my head. There was one course out there specifically, I sat through a whole webinar one time about this course. It was specifically for SEO’s trying to promote themselves on upwork. I almost bought it but I didn’t. I can’t remember the guys name now. I would point it out if I knew it, Sam, but just do a little bit of research, man. It might take some digging. Some playing around with different type of queries.

Adam: I’ll go the other way with this too real quick. Cause Sam I met you in person. You’re a personable guy. You’re easy to get a long with. We talked. I would say don’t give up … you’re in Seattle, that’s a huge market and especially since you’re maybe not having people like beating down your door online to get your services, that don’t ignore the local area. If you know anyone, can you help someone again, if you don’t have that track record, then you do need some sort of credibility first. I think we might have talked about this in person. Start going out. Maybe there is someone you can help locally. I think that, that do that in parallel with pursuing the online jobs. [crosstalk 00:41:39]

Bradley: Here you go guys. Sorry guys, just real quick. Only $12 for Udemy courses right now. Just go search upwork and look there’s a whole bunch of courses here on how to market yourself on upwork.

Chris: So is he in our Master class, MasterMind?

Bradley: No, he’s not. I don’t think so.

Adam: Nope, not yet.

Chris: Otherwise I would recommend to MasterMind Prospecting [inaudible 00:41:59].

Bradley: Right.

Roman: Yep, like Adam was saying, there’s a huge amount of opportunity locally as well. Find out where the business owners are at. A lot of times they have meetings, conferences, things like that and that’s where you want to be.

Adam: Well, like Bradley, when you got started, was that Chamber of Commerce?

Bradley: No, actually I didn’t do the Chamber of Commerce when I got started because it’s like 300 or 400 dollars a year to join and at the time I was broke so I didn’t do it. But I went to meet up groups. Just go to meetup.com and you can find like lead-share groups and things like that and those are always great and I’ve said this before, because people ask, Sam, right here on Hump Day Hangouts before what’s the quickest way to find clients?

We just covered this within the last couple of weeks actually. I recommend, what Adam said, absolutely. Meet up groups, Chamber of Commerce meetings, any sort of lead-share type group stuff, those are all great to get started.

Also, video email prospecting, which is a laser approach. Like a rifle approach. Instead of a shotgun approach. The prospecting funnel that Hernan just mentioned or Chris, I guess it was Chris, just mentioned a moment ago that we’re teaching inside the MasterMind right now is more of a shotgun approach. It’s a mass approach as opposed to a really like targeted approach. The video email prospecting, which Sam you should have access to because it’s in the bonus site, which you should have access to, is I would definitely go through that.

If you don’t like going out to live events like networking events, then you can do really, really well with the video email prospecting stuff. It just takes a little bit of time, but it’s worth it because the response rate is so high. Okay.

How Do You Use Hangout Millionaire To Promote Affiliate Products In An Ecommerce Store?

All right. Eddie says “I am using Peter Drew’s Live Rank Sniper and also recently purchased these Google Site Body Mass Blogger Creator and Hangout Millionaire. I am not sure if I should use Hangout Millionaire to create videos to be used as videos for random affiliate products and for an e-commerce store or if they should be used on a dozen secondary YouTube channels to create videos used only for back links to quality money videos? I already plan on using your video powerhouse for embeds of my quality money videos with all of that. How do you suggest best using Hangout Millionaire? Thank you.”

Okay. That’s a great question, Eddie because I’m actually using that right now for a couple of projects. I’m really going to be using it heavily starting in January, but right now I’ve just been kind of playing with it a little bit.

So what I do is I use the Live Rank Sniper to do all my keyword identification, right? Call it poking. Keyword poking. Figure out which keywords you can rank for. All those channels that I use in Live Rank Sniper are orphaned channels. They have no connection to anything on the web. They’re just basically test or spam channels. I just use them to poke keywords.

Once I use the Live Rank Sniper to do the report, do the Google search report and it sends back the text file with all the keywords that rank in the URLs of the videos that ranked. Those are ranked on page one or page two and there’s a setting in there. You can only select page one if you want or one or two. They’ll return the keywords. Then from that I just go back into the channel. I use Browseo so I’ll have multiple channels in there open in various tabs.

I just jump into the channel and delete all the videos and then I go actually input those keywords that ranked with no syndication networks. They’re orphan channels. They’re just basically spam channels but I’ve been able to rank on page one or page two with those. So what I do is just take all those keywords and go drop those in Hangout Millionaire to a channel that is actually connected to syndication network or in my case, multiple syndication networks.

That’s what I do. Keep in mind if you’re going to use the same video over and over again then you may want to split up across a few different channels. Like when you do the actual money videos because somebody could report your channel and it could get terminated, but that’s why I like to use multiple tiered syndication networks with one channel so that everything is triggered from one location. That way if that channel gets taken down, for whatever reason, or suspended then all I have to do is replace that channel with another one, but all my syndication networks are intact. It’s just a matter of updating applets in, one set of trigger applets at the original source, original channel source. Does that make sense?

So it’s just easy to replace if … it’s still a pain in the ass, but it’s better than having your stuff spread out across multiple channels, which that is kind of pain in the ass to set up too and keep track of is my point. All right. As far as the affiliate products. I don’t do it. I’m using it mainly for local stuff. I can’t imagine it would be any problem to create videos to be used for random affiliate products and e-commerce store.

As far as the actual link building, using it as a link building tool. For link building to other YouTube videos, yes that works. That absolutely works. In fact, I’ve tested that in the past where I’ve had. It’s essentially like the same strategy we talk about in the Silo Academy, right? YouTube Silo Academy.

If you’ve got a video that’s stubborn and so what I would do is use something like Power Suggest Pro to go enter in that seed keyword that you’re trying to rank for and then scrape a shit ton of really long tailed keywords and search queries that are associated with that keyword. Filter them out to only the most relevant ones and you should end up with a handful. Six, eight, ten, whatever keywords that are longer tailed versions of that shorter tailed one that you’re trying to rank. That you’re having a hard time with.

Then you can set up a Hangout Millionaire campaign and target, use the longer keywords that you scraped from Power Suggest Pro to all basically build links to that one video and make sure you’re using playlists. Put them all on a playlist with your top video, the one that you’re trying to rank is at the top of the playlist. So that you link in the Hangout Millionaire video description both to the URL of the top-level video that you’re trying to rank, as well as to the container, the playlist URL. Right? You do that and that absolutely works. I’ve seen significant jumps just from doing that.

Basically you are building a silo and you’re using all of the longer tailed keywords, which are actual queries people search for, to push relevancy and keyword theming up to the top-level video. Does that make sense?

Okay. We’re going to move on. Hopefully that was helpful.

Spamming YouTube

Eliezer, he’s a new Mindset Mastery subscriber, I know that. He posted a question the other day. He says, “Hey guys, for whoever has this idea I’d like to share my results. I decided to spam my YouTube video. It has 400,000 contextual links and well, my entire channel video reviews tanked. I optimized everything else, but I was too aggressive. Normally I would spam web twos, but I just had to test it out to see if it worked. Less than a day. Don’t underestimate YouTube’s algorithm.” I’ll plus one that. Thanks for sharing that, man.

Marco: That’s a guy after my own heart, man.

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: I love doing that and seeing what happens. Just don’t do it on anything you care about, man.

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: But it’s worth the test.

Bradley: Yep. Totally agree. Eliezer, I need to figure out how to pronounce that. Yeah, definitely. That’s what we do, is just test the shit out of stuff. We test it. Marco likes to blow shit up because he tries to figure out … that’s how you figure out what the threshold is. Right?

Marco: Yep.

Can You Assign Rel=”Canonical” To A GSite?

Bradley: All right. Greg says, “Can you reconicalize a G-site?” Not that I know of, but Marco may be able to answer that better.

Marco: No, you can only conicalize it up to, what do you call it, a TLD, your own domain.

Bradley: Yes.

Marco: You can do that. You can get conicalized to that. We tried to hack a conical into a G-site. I think Rob tried several ways and it wouldn’t pick it up correctly. We’re trying, Greg, believe me. It’s one of the things that’s in the lab. We play a lot with G-sites and see how much we can get away with.

Bradley: Yeah, and to be clear, I’m sorry I didn’t say that Greg, but you can conicalize a G-site if you’re using a custom domain. You have to set up the domain mapping inside the G-sites dashboard. It’s a little geeky doing it. I had a hell of a time doing it. It’s kind of weird. You’ve got to go in and set up C-name records and stuff like that, but it was a pain in the ass. I just remember it being a bitch to do, but then it conicalizes the G-site URL to your custom domain, which is crazy because both sites still exist.

You can still visit the Google site’s URL and it exists but it’s just conicalized, instead of it being like a redirect, it’s a conical. Right? So both sites still exist. Which is actually kind of cool because then you can spam the shit out of the Google site and it will push over to your main domain, essentially your main domain is what the Google site is sitting on, right? People won’t see it. It’s pretty cool. Right? Very similar to what we do with tag pages and stuff Greg. You should know that. You’re in the MasterMind.

How Do You Retrieve An Old Gmail Account That Hasn’t Been Used In A Long Time?

Ken Roberts says, “I have a real issue and hope someone can help me. I’ve been trying to log in to a Gmail account that hasn’t been used since back in 2013. Let’s see. So it’s a valid site, basically valid brand. I’m not going to read the whole question. It’s too long.

Roman: I think he’s trying to upgrade his email account.

Bradley: Good luck Ken. I know Greg commented in the Syndication Academy Facebook group about that as well and all I would do is echo his statement. His comment and that would be that I would call back and try to get another GMB rep on because the one I know that you talked to said that they couldn’t do anything.

I would just try to call back and see if somebody else can help you some way. As long as you can prove that it’s like your business or your profile. That kind of stuff. I don’t know what their verification requirements are for that, but I know typically I’ll try a couple of way to recover an account when I get locked out like this. I’ve got several of them.

If it takes me 30 minutes and I have not recovered it, I quit. I move on. I know that sucks in your case, but I would try to do something like maybe reissue a GMB and have it re-verified under a different Gmail account. What I think Greg mentioned to you. It’s so much fucking work trying to jump through the hoops they put in front of you.

It’s just not worth it, unless it’s an unique situation, which it sounds like it may be in your case Ken. Somebody else want to comment on that?

Roman: When you talk to the people just refuse to hang up and just drive them nuts and maybe you’ll eventually get what you want. (laughs)

Bradley: The squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?

Okay. Cool. I think we’re almost done guys.

Keith says, “It’s a bloody good course.” He’s talking about SEO Boot Camp. Jennia says the same thing guys. I’m telling you. It’s worth it. Pick it up. If you’ve got to use PayPal Credit, do it. Cause it will go up to a thousand bucks if you don’t. “I had purchased SEO Boot Camp. Highly recommend program and learning a lot from Jeffrey Smith, the SEO ninja. Thanks for having him on.” Absolutely. He is awesome. “I have some questions I would like to address before I create and publish anything.” Credit niche. Guys we’ve got to wrap this up too. So I’m going to try to run through this as quick as I can.

“Credit Niche is used for example only. Do you think this URL structure would be over optimization?” Yes. Absolutely, Jennia. My methodology, now I haven’t gotten that far into the course yet of what Jeffrey recommends but I can tell you my own experiences. I always try to keep my category slugs and my post URLs and page URLs very, very short and succinct and not over optimized. Actually, Jennia, if you’re in Syndication Academy I’m going to be covering best practices for content and marketing and post and page optimization in the webinar that we’re going to have five minutes from ow.

So if you’re in Syndication Academy I highly recommend you join the webinar today. If not, if you can’t make it you can always watch the replay, but I’m going to be covering that and personally, I would not. I might have like … you’ve got credit in the route, credit here, top-level category, child category you’ve got credit, and then you’ve got credit in the post URL.

In my opinion, that’s way, way, way over optimized. I might do http://ift.tt/2BIneTx blemish if that’s an actual keyword/how to repair credit fast. Having it in the slug there is not so bad because it’s so far removed from the route where the other occurrence would be, but I would absolutely not have it in every one of those. That’s way over optimized, in my opinion.

Anybody else want to comment on that?

Roman: Yeah, I’m not a big fan of physical silos like that, that run that deep.

Bradley: Yep.

Roman: Virtual silos are, in my opinion, better. This has it’s place for physical silos like that but it’s … and those URLs are ridiculously over optimized.

Bradley: Yep. I kind of agree with Roman here, in that, it depends on the type of site. Like, in this case, it sounds like it’s more like a national site instead of local. If you’re doing local and you’re covering different geographic areas it makes sense to have the physical silo structure, which just means your permanent link structure is set up to show category/post name. Right?

So you see the actual silo structure in the URL, but you can still accomplish the same thing by just doing the post name permanently structure. You still do all of your internal linking. You still stack all your content within their proper categories, child categories, and posts and that sort of thing, but you can have it much shorter where it would be http://ift.tt/2koOdzn. You wouldn’t see all this other stuff here.

But even if those aren’t shown, don’t over optimize them. I still would follow as if I was showing it in the URL. I would still keep it short and succinct. But again, on local stuff, I like to show, for local stuff, I like to show the hierarchy of how the locations are stacked. So it might be top-level category state, then maybe county as the child category, and then city as the post. Something like that, but again, it just depends and what Roman said is absolutely true. A virtual silo can accomplish the same end results without all this crap.

Roman: Yeah, I mean, virtual silos are easier to manage because setting pages up, and things like this can be a real pain when you start getting into other CMSs and stuff like that. If you can accomplish the same thing without it, it’s much better.

Bradley: Totally agree.

Adam: Well, I’ve got something I need to say and that is you want one of these awesome, awesome shirts you should come join the MasterMind. I mean, there’s like 10 billion other reasons but I mean, I don’t know, these are pretty nice too.

Bradley: Well, that’s the icing on the cake, guys if there was ever a reason to join the MasterMind it’s to get the shirt. (laughs).

All right. Thanks everybody. We’ll see you all, well some of you, on the Syndication Academy webinar and the rest of you or some others we’ll see tomorrow on the MasterMind webinar. The rest of you, we’ll see you next week. Thanks guys.

Adam: Adios.

Chris: Bye, bye.

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 160 published first on http://ift.tt/2xufntM