#BUT.... everything i fucking do is production design....and it does pay more than graphic design overall on average at sr level

[roseband]

....thinking about completely revamping my design portfolio this year but without school it's sooooo hard to get recommendations on what to do for it lol

and svas portfolio continuing education class is when i have band and i don't function when im not in band ;^;

[kishimoto-did-us-dirty]

Naruto Arts School AU

Reposting bc I love this post and bc I can lol

Character

- major

description

Naruto

-Drums

okie nobody can deny that our main boy over here is a loud soul, however, he can also carry a damn good beat that compliments his band mates’ music really well. Tbh, he sucked at music to begin with and had trouble matching rhythms and listening to his band mates when they played, however he eventually became a really good rhythm maker.

Sasuke

-Guitar (lead)

He’d be assigned to the same band as Naruto, and that’s how they met. This boy is a damn good guitarist y’all, but has attitude problems™, and used to not be able to deal with Naruto’s haphazard beat making, thus perpetuating a rivalry between the two. He constantly feels overshadowed by his elder brother Itachi, a piano major.

Sakura

- Dance

Ya girl fucking demolishes every single dance routine. Initially starting out with a focus on ballet (pre-shippuden in canon), our pink headed queen soon realized that she wasn’t getting the full experience of what it meant to dance. Her point shoes were her loves, however they hurt and nipped in places not just physical. She realized that she didn’t want to be pigeonholed into a genre of which she would be inhibited by standard, and rather to dance so as to forget technical perfection. Thus, what would partner with post-shippuden Sakura in canon, Art School AU Sakura got into hip-hop. And bitch, she goes hard. A lot of the other girls who she used to dance ballet with admire her for her absolutely BODYING her dance routines, but also for never sacrificing her femininity to dance and not taking BS for being a girl who goes so hard in a male-dominated genre. (Some people believe that hip-hop is heavy hitting and a little metaphorically “dark” so to speak, which Sakura is not. So obviously I expect a little disagreement regarding this, however if you look at people like Delaney Glazer or Kaycee Rice, that is how Sakura would dance).

Hinata

- Creative Writing

Shy and bookworm-like, Hinata can write the best poetry, romance and adventure pieces out of all the creative-writing majors. She’s especially good at writing character relationships and development, and has such a subtle sense of intelligent wit in her writing, that if you blinked you would miss it. However should you catch it, you’re sure to chuckle. Her only struggle is that she tends to drag on in important scenes, stretching them against the regular flow of the rest of her writing. Needs validation for her writing through an IV drip.

Kiba

- Drums OR Photography

Drums for obvious reasons (loud and obnoxious), although ruff boi looks good with a camera, too. Great at landscapes and street photography.

Shino

- Creative Writing OR Photography

I could definitely see Shino having fucking beautiful handwriting, and being a beast at writing anything within the sci-fi realm. I could also see him doing some journalism, and writing for the school paper. He’s very good at the logic of his sci-fi books and coming up with logical but enrapturing stories, that intermingle knowledge and mystery. He’s a very specific type of read, however, and may not appeal to all, however if you enjoy anything similar to Star Wars or Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, then Shino is your author. If this doesn’t float your boat, though, try photography-major Shino. He can get the best angles of bugs he sees, and has an extensive portfolio with entomology-related snapshots.

Ino

- Dance

Like Sakura, she, too, began with a focus on ballet, however began to branch out into contemporary ballet a little later than Sakura. This is another reason why Sakura switched her focuses, as she and Ino had always had a fierce rivalry for dieting (ballet dancers are pressured to be as thin as possible) as well as battling for technical perfection when they were ballet focused. As the two grew, Ino focused more so on contemporary, but can certainly do some hip-hop with Sakura every now and then, just as Sakura occasionally takes a contemporary class with her. The two still have a rivalry, however, just not to the previous extent as when they were actively competing against each other. They’re more like sisters.

Shikamaru

- Guitar (bass) OR Creative Writing OR Architecture

Smart boy’s a tricky one. He would either be a bassist, a mystery and historical fiction writer, or, of his school offers it, be great at architecture. Idrk.

Choji

- ermmmmm….. maybe graphic design? Tech theatre (props)? Vocal???

Choji is hARD dwnccnpc (that’s what she said). I could see him behind a computer screen, animating and designing games/covers/posters or whatever. He could also do something in theatre, but I don’t think he would do anything up on stage. Something like props would suit him. He might do something in music, tho???? Can he sing???? Help???

UPDATE: Choji is a band kid. He plays tuba or some shit. Big boy got big lungs.

Tenten

- Dance

Always has been, and always will be a hip-hop dancer. She wanted to be like Tsunade, a legendary dancer and followed in her footsteps, taking up hip-hop. (that’s why Sakura focused on hip-hop, too, because Tsunade mentored her and taught a few of her classes, too). Tenten is fast and can keep up with any beat. Not only is she a great dancer, but she’s also athletic, and does track and field (cross country), football, and softball at another school too, since the arts schools doesn’t offer it. Overall great dancer with styl. She’s really looked up to by some of her underclassmen for her cheery, but badass style and skill.

Lee

- DANCE (hip-hop, too)

It’s sweat. It’s burn. It’s energy. It’s Lee.

Neji

- Violin

First chair violinist in his freshman year for the school’s philharmonic orchestra. He be extra like that.

Gaara

- Guitar (bass)

He had a lonely childhood with neglectful/abusive parents, and rock music really helped him with that. Emo music is emo and often made fun of, but the songs have messages and Gaara related, so self-taught himself the bass guitar to help cope, and bring him closer to the music that salvaged him.

Kankuro

-Art

Specifically sculpting. For obvious reasons.

Temari

- Acting

Girl can make you cry with some of her monologues. Total lead. Has a seriousness in her acting that makes her believable, however can falter on the less-serious roles. She may also double-major in whatever Shikamaru does. And she’s better at it than him.

Itachi

-Piano

Boy could play any etude at age 7. Performed at Carnegie Hall when he was 10. And no, he didn’t pay to play there. The hall invited him. Began composing at 9. Has perfect pitch. Owns international awards. If he’s not at school it’s because he’s traveling to play for crowds. He excels at classical and baroque, however has an ear for romantic, and enjoys playing/composing pieces either written or inspired by romantic pieces. Enjoys Schumann, Debussy, and Tchaikovsky. Hates modern classical music, though. Can only take cinematic pieces composed by people like Williams, however can’t stand Prokofiev at all. He does like modern music, though, so long as it’s outside of the orchestral/classical music realm. He likes R&B. He would have liked to do film with Shisui, particularly producing, however his parents pressure him with piano, so he helps Shisui with student films and projects outside of school (will probably pursue film after graduating, tho).

Shisui

- FILM / VIDEO PRODUCTION

Fight me on this!!! THIS BOY IS SO GOOD AT CINEMATOGRAPHY MY FILMMAKING ASS CAN’T EVEN. AS SOMEONE WHO IS IN LOVE WITH FILMOGRAPHY, TRUST ME, SHISUI HAS IT™. THE IT™. HE’S GOOD AT EVERYTHING. CINEMATOGRAPHY. DIRECTING. SCREENWRITING. GRIP-WORK. EDITING. PRODUCING. HE’S SUCH A FILM NERD TOO, AND WATCHES OLD FILMS ALL THE TIME. HE’S JUST TOO GOOD AT IT. DOES STREET PHOTOGRAPHY TOO. HE’S OVERALL A GENIUS WITH CAMERAS. Does film with Itachi outside of school and teaches him, and the two are overall geniuses at filmography. They want to start their own studio together (they do, and it becomes huge). He becomes a leading director, while Itachi becomes a producer and directs sometimes too.

Sasori, Deidara, and Sai

Guess.

Kakashi

- Saxophone

It’s the only thing that suits him and it suits him so well. Has suave.

Obito (omfg his arms y'all)

- Not to say drums or anything, but…. drums.

Narutard 2.0. But he also dabbles in other areas of music. Like, he can also play guitar and sing. He’s also pretty good at music production. Makes R&B sometimes. He wasn’t always the best musician but proved to be a late bloomer, and really harnessed his potential. Tries to be as suave as Kakashi and his saxophone. He isn’t.

Hashirama

- Vocal

OkaYYYYYY. VOCAL GOD. CAN DO RIFFS AND RUNS AND HAS PERFECT PITCH. ALSO THE SWEETEST GUY??? WAS A CHAMBER SINGER AS A FRESHMAN. EVERYONE LOVES HIM, GOOD BOY ENERGY.

Likes to belt.

Madara

- Piano

Total prodigy, but hates classical music. Once was accompanist to Hashirama for a solo vocal performance and hasn’t been left alone since.

Tobirama

- Viola or Cello

Some sort of string instrument and takes it very seriously. Probably plays cello because violas are violas and that’s lame (if you know, you know). Has almost as many awards as Itachi and Madara, but hates his usual piano accompanist, Izuna.

Izuna

- Piano

Also a piano god. The uchihas breed them. Hates being accompanist for Tobirama. They’re secretly best friends though, don’t tell anyone.

Karin

- Tech Theatre.

Idk why. Probably started out with props and made her way up to TD (technical director) in senior year.

Suigetsu

- Tech Theatre

Fucking hates theatre kids. Assistant TD. Karin hates him.

Jugo

- Visual Art

Paints landscapes and nature. Really good with oils and gouache respectively.

Yamato

- lmao Trumpet.

Met Kakashi since they both play brass, but boy he ain’t got that suave. That’s why he plays trumpet. Lmao he plays the fucking trumpet anjdwcnojdnn.

Rin

- Vocal

Sweetest voice and could also play the acoustic guitar when she sang. Died in a car accident junior year. Kakashi was at the wheel when they got hit by a drunk driver. Obito saw the whole thing.

Kurenai

- Visual Art

Can create dream like paintings that almost seem like illusions.

Asuma

- Cello / guitar

Used to play cello because of his parents, but loves to play guitar. Can sing but his voice is raspy from smoking.

Gai

Who the fuck do you think teaches dance?

Jiraiya

- Guitar (lead)

Used to major in lead guitar. Sucked at first. Probably has a couple, casual Grammy Awards (they’re actually not that hard to be awarded with, The Recording Academy award many people outside of mainstream media. My school has a few). Now teachers as head of the Band department at this school.

Tsunade

-Dance

Legendary dancer. Probably toured with a few famous people. Now teaches. Mentored Sakura, and mentored Ino but for a shorter time.

Orochimaru

- Idk, didgeridoo, or some shit

Definitely a wood wind. Flute maybe??? Teaches now but no one knows what he does. Pedophile. Has a thing for Sasuke.

[scottymcgeesterwrites]

Final Fantasy VII Review

 Year: 1997

Original Platform: PlayStation One

Also available on: PC, PlayStation Store

Version I Played: PlayStation One

Synopsis:

The Shinra Electric Power Company rules over the city of Midgar, and the eco-terrorists AVALANCHE stop at nothing to try and prevent the life essence of the planet from being used as energy. Barrett, leader of AVALANCHE, hires a mercenary named Cloud Strife for their bombing mission on a Shinra Mako Reactor. Cloud doesn’t care much for the greater cause and only wants his pay. But then, after a mission goes awry, he meets Aerith, a flower girl who is the descendant of the Ancients. He quickly finds himself wrapped up in the greater conflict against Shinra.

 Gameplay:

Final Fanatasy VII utilizes magic spells via Materia – little orbs that come in a variety of colors pertaining to the natural elements. You can mix and match them on your weapons and equipment, which gives you access to different spells and stats. All your equipment varies with the number of slots for how many Materia orbs you can put in. Leveling up not only upgrades the character but the equipped Materia as well.

 Final Fantasy VII also uses an ATB system but is known for introducing Limit Breaks – finishing moves that build up after the character gets hit over time. Final Fantasy VI had a prototype called Desperation Attack – but it was very rare as it only appeared when your character had 1/8 of their total HP, and there was a 1 in 6 chance of performing the Desperation Attack after selecting Attack. I actually had no idea that was a thing until long after I finished the game, and never experienced it when I played Final Fantasy VI.

Graphics:

Out of all the Final Fantasy games, I have to say that this one has not aged well. It has the worst graphics of the entire series. The battle and cinematic graphics are passable.

(Most of the graphics power seemed to be put in Tifa’s, uh, bosom.)

But the characters in towns, the overworld, and in-game cutscenes are incredibly blocky. PC versions are supposedly sharper, but the PlayStation One version makes it nigh impossible to see any facial expressions. 

The graphics are definitely a product of its time. I always say that the beginning of 3D gaming was essentially like puberty – awkward and full of zits. It wasn’t yet at that stage where it could be aesthetically pleasing. We marveled about it when it was first released, yes, but then we cringed in retrospect.

The environment backdrops however are probably the strongest points, where they capture the industrial nature of Midgar, the reactors and other such buildings.

Story:

Final Fantasy VII became legendary the minute Square released it. Every aspect was memorable. Part of it could be due to the fact that it was the first Final Fantasy game to enter the 3D realm. Another part was Tetsuya Nomura’s character designs, which hit the cool meter to the point of sub-zero.

 The cinematics blew our minds. The opening action scene with Cloud, Barrett, and the rest of AVALANCHE attacking Shinra’s mako reactor is the most memorable opening to a Final Fantasy game. Period. Final Fantasy games really do know how to start at the right spot, no matter how good or bad the overall game is. The opening is always the best part.

Then there was the motorcycle chase. Cid’s airship. The gun fights. Battles with Sephiroth. The extra stuff to find, like summons and extra bosses. So much was jam-packed into the game.

 But the story was the primary factor in making VII famous. It’s definitely one of the better ones. Man, the story became so famous that even gamers who haven’t touched a Final Fantasy game knew the major spoilers. It is the equivalent to knowing Darth Vader’s line, “I am your father” without having actually watched Star Wars.

Aerith (Aeris in the English releases) Gainsborough – the innocent flower girl who holds the secrets of the Ancients – develops a romance with Cloud and fucking dies at the end of Disc 1 by the main villain – Sephiroth. The scene shocked everyone and practically made headlines. Everybody has seen the horrible image in one way or another.

It seems to me that since Final Fantasy V, the stories have gotten more and more used to main character deaths, ultimately transforming into a heavy-hitting TV series rather than simply a video game series. In other words – it matured. Looking back, Final Fantasy IV appears to be child’s play and a prototype of later dramatic storylines with fully realized worlds.

 Final Fantasy VII was also the first Final Fantasy game to create a world much like ours – one with cars and trains and airplanes and machine guns and even cellphones. The main city of Midgar reflects industrialization at its worst, with miles of slums and claustrophobic cities. Shinra Electric Power Company is a reflection of capitalism at its worst - a single entity in charge of so much that it’s pretty much the government. For the first time in a Final Fantasy game, you play as characters who dance between the morally ambiguous line of terrorism and activism. Funny enough, the theme of neglecting the planet resonates with us now more than ever. This game ended up being rather prophetic about the uncontrollable growth of corporations.

While the story is memorable with many intriguing elements, the plot itself is a tangled web. In my opinion, they really hashed in so many things that it’s easy to forget crucial details. It’s not straightforward, but at the same time everything does connect by the end. While Shinra is the driving force as a whole as the villain, Sephiroth takes over, then you learn about his backstory and then with the evil scientist Hojo and the extra-terrestrial Jenova and then “Weapon” and then the planet’s history and this and that and the other thing.

If I were to put Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII together and contrast them, as many gamers do, I would find that Final Fantasy VII is the summer blockbuster and Final Fantasy VI is the Oscar winner. Final Fantasy VII started introducing the sappy romance subplot to the series. A love triangle forms among Aerith, Cloud, and Cloud’s childhood friend Tifa. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with having a love triangle, the writing is like watching middle schoolers trying to express their feelings. Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy IV treated any romance with dignity and realism.

But maybe I’m being a bit harsh. After all, Cloud Strife did go through some suffering as an adolescent. His backstory clearly drives his antisocial behavior, so that becomes a good arc. 

The goofiest but memorable part of the story deals with Don Corneo and Wall Market and running around store to store doing tasks in order to free Tifa from Don Corneo. It ends with Cloud needing to cross-dress as a woman to get inside Don’s mansion. Because, you know, it’s not like Cloud can just break in with his sword and Aerith’s magic or anything like that. But whatever. It’s anime.

The recent Final Fantasy VII Remake for the PS4 seems to streamline the story, and actually enhances the emotions they were trying to deliver in the original. I will be talking about the remake in a separate post altogether since I’m almost done with it at the time of this writing. But there’s a lot that I want to say about comparing and contrasting the remake and the original.

The latter half of the plot takes a couple weird turns. At one point, Cloud became catatonic and confined to a wheelchair.

That part of the game became the sluggish part for me. Sephiroth also tries to confuse Cloud, which confused me. Cloud apparently suffers from some alternate subconscious mumbo-jumbo and like. . .ungh. I get an aneurysm thinking about it sometimes.

Complicated plotlines like Final Fantasy VII start showing up from here on out in the Final Fantasy series. The trend of bishonen characters also begin here, bishonen being the Japanese term for “beautiful boy.” Cloud and Sephiroth have that look. The series starts hashing in sappier romances and much more of an anime feel.

Final Fantasy VII ultimately marked the start of a new era for the series – introducing both cool and overused tropes.

Music:

Hands down the best Final Fantasy soundtrack of all.

The entire soundtrack of this game is memorable. The opening tune, with its light twinkle when the stars show up, is enough to make any gamer know exactly what that’s from.

With a story set in a more modern world, we have music that is more modern. After Final Fantasy VI had a more serious and operatic score, Uematsu displayed his love of progressive rock here. The motorcycle chase incorporates a lot of synth, which was fitting for zipping through the streets of Midgar. However, Final Fantasy VII is the first Final Fantasy game without that familiar starting bassline for the battle them. The battle theme is instantly recognizable but also radically different from its predecessors. It’s dramatic and displays danger.

Meanwhile, the boss theme is one of the best boss themes in the series, or any video game really. It’s an electrifying progressive rock piece, and it’s my personal favorite boss theme.

 The more instrumental pieces are somber, given the dreary atmosphere of the planet. The world map music is very different from its predecessors. It’s romantic one moment, soaring the next, and then dips into foreboding terror. I guess that sums up the story of Final Fantasy VII.

And we cannot leave out One-Winged Angel, which I will talk about below.

Notable Theme:

Without a doubt, One-Winged Angel – played during the terrifying final battle against Sephiroth – is the most memorable piece of music in Final Fantasy VII.

It may very well be the most popular song of the entire series. Nobuo Uematsu was inspired by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It’s a whopping 30 something minute classical piece. If you look it up on YouTube and browse through it, you can definitely note the similarities. However, Uematsu didn’t want some boring classical introduction to the piece. He wanted to add the destructive impact of rock. The theme has a very distinct stamping-your-foot-down quality to it.

I had noticed a certain piece-by-piece feel of the song and that’s exactly how Uematsu composed it. This is the only song that Uematsu has composed where he created several tunes in his head and then rearranged them to make a single comprehensive song.

If you want to get technical, One-Winged Angel is the first Final Fantasy song with lyrics. The chorus sings in Latin about Sephiroth’s burning anger, with some lyrics actually taken from the medieval poem Carmina Burana. It sounds fantastic when fully orchestrated.

In Advent Children, the animated sequel to Final Fantasy VII, the music is accompanied by hardcore metal. This new rendition really illustrates the destructive power of Sephiroth. Uematsu changed the lyrics for Advent Children. They are more original now. I specifically noticed the lyrics “Veni, veni, mi fili”, which translates to “Come, come, my son.” Sephiroth is inviting you so he can kill you.

 Uematsu has stated that the original orchestration didn’t sit well with him. As I suspected, Advent Children’s hardcore metal version is the one he preferred, the one he would have composed had he the technology at the time of Final Fantasy VII.

Verdict:

Another must-play for any RPG fan, even if you think it’s overrated. It’s a must-play because of its popularity, in the same way that people are wide-eyed when you say you haven’t seen Star Wars or such-and-such other popular movie. It’s a whole lot of fun, especially in the scenes that involve other forms of gameplay, such as the motorcycle chase and even a battlefield strategy game in protecting Fort Condor. 

Direct Sequel?

Yes – first there was the CGI movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.

I actually watched Advent Children before playing Final Fantasy VII. I had already known most of what happened in the game and Advent Children became a monumental craze when it first came out. Everybody was talking about it. Watching the sequel before playing the game skewers your interpretation of things. My first impression of Cloud was that he was always whiny and angsty, and meanwhile Tifa kept nagging him to move on. I felt really bad for Cloud losing Aerith.

Then when I actually played Final Fantasy VII, I saw that Cloud starts as this badass mercenary. Tifa is spunky and clearly is the better choice (IMO) but Cloud is enamored by Aerith after only meeting her briefly. WHAT? Cloud. Bro. Make a move on Tifa, you nitwit. Tifa is AMAZING.

 Square Enix then continued the story with Dirge of Cerberus – Final Fantasy VII. This video game sequel focuses on Vincent Valentine, a fan favorite of the original game.

Let me remind you about something – the original game revealed Shinra’s inner deep secret experiments, namely with Sephiroth and Jenova. Dirge of Cerberus introduces an even deeper research team within Shinra called Deepground. I don’t know about you, but it already sounds like the start of a terribly redundant string of sequels, like how the Jason Bourne movies keep revealing an even deeper level of conspiracy theories. Vincent’s mysterious background is now fully revealed. He is defined by – guess what? – another angsty lost lover story, this time with a woman named Lucrecia. Now, okay, look, maybe I’m just being a dick about these types of love stories. But when it keeps popping up within the same series in the same manner, I start asking if you have anything else to offer on your menu.

Lastly, there is the prequel for the PSP – Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. Of all the games in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core has received the most positive reception. If anything, play that after playing Final Fantasy VII before bothering with anything else.

 Oh, and of course there is the Final Fantasy VII Remake, which we thought wasn’t going to happen for the longest time but they finally released it in April 2020. More on that later after I finish it, and after I post my entire series of Final Fantasy reviews!

[bloody-fists-beating-hearts]

It’s a Fallout76/Bethesda rant

Bethesda just released Fallout 1st, a horseshit pay-to-win subscription system for their absolute cum-bubble of a game, and while it’s getting the flack it deserves there are people already putting on their kneepads so they can gobble down Todd Howards entire turgid cock, and as someone who likes rpg’s way too much this irked me, so have a massive and barely coherent rant i took off the discord because why not.

I want to start off with this:  Every good thing about current fallout comes from the fanbase. The stories people tell, the headcanons, the fanfics, the art, everything fans do for it is made with more love, and more thought, than anything Bethesda’s writing and games design team has done in the last 10 years

Now first of all, I haven’t bought or played 76. People are gonna stop me right there and go ”well you haven’t bought it how would you know its bad!!” yeah, I’ve never eaten dog shit either but I can pretty well guess that I ain’t gonna fucking like it.

I knew the second he said "there are no npcs" with actual enthusiasm that this game was gonna be shit. And if you give me 2 seconds to gloat, I never bought the game and I knew this was gonna happen and I was RIGHT so suck my fat hairy nuts all those fanboys who pre-order things mindlessly just because there's a brand name attached to it. If there is anything you take from this its DO NOT PREORDER. BRAND LOYALTY IS FOR BOOMERS AND BOOTLICKERS. FOR FUCKS SAKE BE SMART WITH YOUR MONEY.

Games like this are fucking 80-90 dollars or more in Australia so I actually have to think about whether this momentary distraction is worth almost an entire days paycheck, and I’m still looking for employment which means I actually haven’t bought shit in a while (side note, anyone wants to commission me for 10 dollars I’ll draw damn near anything. God I need to make rent)

Every executive at Bethesda seems to be playing catch-up to EA's monetisation scheme. Beth has abandoned their model of single-player rpg's in favour of a "games as a service" model. Fallout 76 seems to me like its a weird experiment for just how far they can stretch this and still make money. It actually makes me wonder if they are 

 a) just completely unaware of fanbase response [no idea HOW]

b) are running into financial problems and are doing this out of desperation

 c) todd howard is still mad that obsidian made a better fallout than he ever could and he's doing this out of spite 

  Games as a whole has become much like the movie industry where publishers will throw big buckets of cash around to development teams, and those teams have CEO's and higher ups that throw lavish meet n greets and have nice fancy suits and cars and then treat their development teams like shit, overworking them to the point of exhaustion, because the product has to be on time for release dates that are scheduled to be the most profitable (christmas is a notable one). 

And those products are consistently bland, shitty, shallow experiences. Narrative cum-dumpsters that are purposefully made to toe the line as safely as possible, to be open to as wide as an audience as possible so they can make the most money, and Bethesda is a huge offender. Skyrim was fun, sure, but it was watered down to fuck, it had shitty dialogue, it had bland one-note characters, it had a simplified skill system. It was impossible to lose. Seriously, try and fail a fucking quest in skyrim, other than one or two, it's a hand-holder of an rpg, but it has a huge community of fans that put in monumental effort, for free, because they like the Elder Scrolls, and they like the world bethesda made. 

  Then Bethesda goes "hey, that watered down thing we made got huge! lets release it about 12 more fucking times, with some of the SAME bugs, with the SAME content, with the SAME limitations and Yes, we absolutely expect you to pay for it, again. Then they release the remastered edition which, to their credit, is free to anyone who already bought the legendary edition (on PC), and does actually have updated 64bit capability and some graphical enhancements (that aren't anywhere near what some goober in his basement cooked up in his spare time, but whatever). Then, seeing that Skyrim was so popular, with kids especially, and made money, they turn their sights to fallout 4, a game that was so anticipated that someone made a fake countdown and caused a small meltdown on tumblr/social media when it was revealed to be fake (i was part of that fiasco, i remember the hype, i was there goddamnit)

So Fallout, a franchise that literally has its theme as its FUCKING TAGLINE, an ADULT game that is equal parts crude, gory and humorous. A game that satirises the cold war era of american my-country-tis-of-thee blind loyalty and openly mocks the way war was idealised, and shows that not even the literal end of the world could either stop humanity's lust for blood or its desire for conquest. Games that showed you the growth of the world - from shady sands to the NCR, from the vault dweller to arroyo, shit actually happened in the games, the world didn't just stop turning when the bombs dropped. A game where you you become a porn star for fucks sake, and it's funny. 

So Bethesda sees that, makes something like it (fallout 3) which is good, but a little rough around the edges when you look at it too hard. But the way they suck you into the vault, the way they build a relationship with your dad and your way of life is immersive as fuck, so when you leave the place you actually feel like you're leaving something important, not just finishing the tutorial

then they outsource a Fallout game to obsidian, because hey, we saved your franchise by buying it off you, but if you can make an entire game in one year and get a metacritic score of 85 we'll even throw in a bonus. And fuck me sideways and in the ear, if the obsidian devs didn't work themselves harder than a 4-armed hooker. And they made a game that on release was a clusterfuck of bugs, because they were given an unrealistic time limit and missed the metacritic score by ONE POINT so bethesda goes "nhey heh sucks to suck" and fucks them off the franchise forever. EXCEPT (and I admit I'm biased here) the game is good. The game is actually really good when you remove those bugs, and people start forming attachments to it, and mentioning how bad fallout 3's writing is by extension. 

  So Todd and Co. in his infinite wisdom, decide that the only thing a fallout rpg needs is 50s aesthetic and fuck all else, and he releases a game so watered down it can't even be called an rpg. And its not. There are no skills. There are barely any dialogue checks. Instead of dialogue, Nate/Nora is a flat, samrish individual that is either "yes sir right away sir may i have another", "yes but i'm gonna make an unfunny quip about it" "this option pretends to say no but its gonna give you the quest marker anyway". 

The game drops any pretence of difficulty by giving you a deathclaw, a minigun and some power armour in the first 10 minutes, allowing you to effectively reach late-game power levels with some minor scavenging for ammo or cores. Then the game ropes you into some inter-faction war that realistically you wouldn't give a shit about, because some spud in a cowboy hat fucking deputizes you into a military general because you shot like 4 raiders from a rooftop (with a minigun. in power armour. making you nigh-invulnerable to bullets). You're sad about your son about 3 times the whole game and then you're on your merry way to mowing down humans left right and center without a care in the world. God fallout 4's writing is so stupid it gives me an aneurysm.

 Remember the part about resources wars and america only having the veneer of a strong country while riots, inflation, and resource shortages tore it apart from within? Bethesda doesn't, have an eerily stepford pastel coloured glimpse at a world that was totally fine, nothing wrong here, shame it got nuked oh well moving on

Your spouse? yeah you love them, they're said 2 whole sentences to you then they died, be sad because you totally loved them and it is totally sad that they are dead. Your weird play-dough son shaun, you love him so much, you even tickled him on the chin once, okay he's gone off you go to chase him - woah now, don't chase him too hard we have all these side quests for you to do! What would be the narrative reasoning for a supposedly distraught parent to fuck around boston instead of finding their goddamn child? fuck knows! just go pick up some goddamn wood and get to base building sonny-jim! 

Companions? yeah, they're fun, we gave them a romance questline and it's thus: if you pick enough locks and pass a minor charisma check maccready will be ready and willing to tell you about his sick child, and then he'll ride you like a stallion. Talk to him like, 4 times, and he will be your bosom buddy for life in about 3-5 days if you just pick locks like a fucking madman, because character growth is hard and counting beans is easy.

 Also your son is a part of the faction we were talking about! something about synths, remember that one questline from rivet city that barely anyone actually remembers and was an interesting time waster at best? Well get ready to do that same quest but about! 15! more! times! because we could not think of anything else to write about synthetically produced humans that assume peoples identities other than having them as a hamfisted metaphor for slavery. Why do they take over people's identies? Well because the institute needs them to aasdkfjdh kshshshsh t9oe of course. 

Speaking of hamfisted metaphors, here's the underground railroad, named after the underground railroad that actually mattered, except this time its the same thing but synths. They are so top secret that the only way to find them is to follow the only bright red line in a street that is exclusively green-brown otherwise, and then enter their super secret password, which is "password"

They are then, like every other faction, absolutely willing to trust you, at face value, no questions asked, because have to actually do something or require a skill check might make this hard for people under the age of 12 to play. Then you go do whatever fuckin shit you do, I stopped playing at this point, and then you find out your son is actually 60, you guys have a tearful, 10 sentence reunion, then he diesthe whole reason you were out here in the first place dies, and you react appropriately, which is to say you say his name really sadly, and then go back to mowing down raiders with reckless abandon

And then 76 gets released, bethesda drops all pretense of fallout still being an rpg. You want a story? Fuck you, pay up. Its retro future and thats all that makes falloutSatirizing war mongering? You can nuke things in this game and its totally fine, its actually the goal, because fallout has nukes in it right? Pay us 10 dollars and you get army olive drab spraypaint because hurrgh war is fun and great, wasnt that the tagline from the first game?The more i rant the more angry i am because people put their heart and soul into writing this. The lore and dialogue is actual work that someone researched and loved and felt proud of and now  it's becoming a hilariously meta parody of itself. 

Honestly FUCK bethesda and and fuck todd howard for his pisspoor cash grab. Not even worth calling it a video game anymore

[bigskydreaming]

Just wanted to thank people again for their reblogs and donations, I will never be able to describe how I feel about the support - both tangible and emotional - that people on here have given me over the past three months in particular. Especially now that I have a definitive diagnosis and course of treatment to aim for, and an optimistic timeline of maybe even having the surgery within the next few months, at least before the summer....it really just depends there on whether my insurance approves that expense or how much of it, etc.

I still definitely could use continued help, though I’m trying my best to not rely on it as much as possible. Its just...yeah. We’ve kinda hit the point where its really just not possible period for me to make it where I need to get to without support. The slight downside to all the positive stuff I mentioned above is I’m a very goal oriented person. And this has been a very long and constant ordeal for me, where its been nothing but seven days of constant stress and pain a week, not able to rest or relax or take a day off working or searching for work for literally months and months. The only way I’ve managed to keep going is by fixating on some nebulous future point I had to reach and kinda use that to drag myself forward day by day. Its not nebulous anymore. I have answers, I have concrete needs and timelines and all that. But that also means now I have a very clear awareness that I can not make it the rest of the way with just the resources I already have myself.

It’s like...desperation energy, that’s fueled me to get this far and last this long, but there’s a difference between desperation and futility, and motivating myself with the thought ‘just hang in there long enough to get answers and solutions and FIX things’, like, it did what it needed to do, getting me in sight of all that, but it took pretty much everything I’ve got to use all that to tread water, to just stay afloat to get to this point. There’s just not enough there to stretch that out to continuing to stay afloat WHILE doing three times as much work on TOP of that. I know my capabilities and have a lot of self-respect for them, but I also know my limits and I can’t afford to waste everything it took to get to this point just so I can pretend I’m capable of more than I am. Because that’s the other downside of being in sight of the finish line, but still having it far enough away its not anywhere you’re gonna reach in just a few more steps.....like, lmao, I’m fucking tired. I want to rest. And I’ve gotten just enough good news after nothing but years of new rock bottoms that my brain and my body are trying to take that as a sign that its okay for me to just collapse now and take a breather. But I can’t really. Because I’m still not actually there yet.

So on that note, putting the link to my paypal up here nearer to the top for a change, for people who don’t actually need my long-windedness, lol.

https://paypal.me/bigskydreaming?locale.x=en_US

And then on a related note, I just wanted to say again that I’m totally okay with and even eager for people to leave notes with their donation for any writing commission I can do in return. Again, this is totally MY issue, and not something I think should apply to all donation posts: expectations of a quid pro quo. People help out because they want to help out. As long as whatever information a donation post includes is sincere, however much or little that information is, I think that’s the only parameter that matters. People have different personal criteria for what motivates them to actually donate to a relative stranger on the internet. If someone donating to a person whose post is just a simple paragraph of need with no context for why or what their situation is, if that doesn’t make sense to you? It doesn’t have to. That’s not actually any kind of scam. Someone just wants to say, hey I need help and no, I don’t want to explain why? Sure, a lot of people might not feel inclined to donate but anyone who does, they’re not being scammed. Someone asked for x amount of help, someone else decided, hey I can provide this much help and I’m okay with doing that with no further context needed. The end.

Just wanted to clearly express my opinion there, before proceeding on: for ME, personally, I like a degree of quid pro quo for the help people give me, because that’s something that works for my situation. I don’t LIKE not being able to work as much as I want to, because thing is, I have been fortunate enough to make careers out of work that I actually enjoy. My income over the last ten years has almost completely stemmed from acting, writing and graphic design, all things I enjoy. LOL I rant endlessly about how much I hate capitalism, and its true....but I don’t hate doing things I love. Obviously for the past year I haven’t been able to do any acting jobs cuz of my health conditions, and my writing and graphic design work has been unreliable for the last several months for a variety of reasons. 

The major way my health stuff (and related mental health stuff) has impacted me is not even with actual work, but finding new work. My headaches and chronic pain have lessened how many hours I’m able to be focused on work, but not so much that I can’t do what I need to get done when I have a clear objective and goal to focus on. It’s when that’s done and I have nothing else to work on and haven’t made the money I need yet. When I try to power through several hours a day of headaches/pain in search of new jobs as my lack of results amps up my stress and aggravates my health stuff even further....that’s what really makes days suck. And because of my mobility issues with vertigo and not being able to drive and all that, going out and getting a non-internet based job just flat out isn’t possible for me at the moment.

So I’m really starting to feel hopeful again that there actually IS an end point to all this and it might be soon even...and then I can get back to business as usual and build new client bases same as I did before, even get back to acting (omggggggg I miss it). But until that happens, as long as I still need to ask people for help and financial support, like, PLEASE do not feel like you’re imposing on me by suggesting something I can write in return, especially if you’re someone who’s been donating to me regularly. Or if you follow me in part because you enjoy my writing and my headcanons and fics and such. It’s not a chore, its something to do that I CAN do, that I LIKE doing, that I WANT to do. It actually helps make all of this more bearable, because like I said....writing and graphic design as my sources of income...they don’t feel like work. I ENJOY doing them. They actually get my mind off my issues, they give me a reason to get up in the morning, they make me feel productive, like I’m actually doing something with my life instead of just existing, and going through the motions day by day just to survive. 

So if you make a donation and you can think of something you’d enjoy seeing from me, please don’t hesitate. All I ask is that you understand that I’m not in a place to make guarantees at the moment, but when and where I can devote my time and energy to a direction you’ve pointed me in with your donation, I’m happy to, and hopefully that might result in something sooner rather than later. And eventually, if all goes well, I will get to a point (quite honestly a better place than I’ve been physically AND mentally in years) where I CAN be better about staying true to my intentions.

For now, just a rundown of things I have been writing for people who did make requests (though most of them are friends whose names I recognized and I hunted down and badgered into telling me what they’d like so I could do this, lmao. There were definite GDI WHAT DOES IT TAKE FOR ME TO MAKE YOU TELL ME WHAT I CAN DO FOR YOU convos being had, lolol I’m such a well adjusted person, honestly how do I stand it, science may never know).

Anyway, for anyone interested, the current slate of ‘commissions’ I’ve been working on, just so there’s no need to make a duplicate request:

Lightning Crashes Update - LOL a long awaited update to that beast. Its a 3 POV chapter, Kira, Liam and then Allison, and came out to around 10K. It’s done and just needs a final read through and polish, which I’ll do literally as soon as I manage to finish paying my insurance for the month and get caught up with what I owe my motel. Which means in the next couple of days for sure, if for no other reason then I like....have to make sure to pay those things by then one way or another lmao. But point being, for anyone still invested in that fic or interested in reading more, since its been so long and you’ll probably have to reread the existing chapters to refresh your memory, I think its pretty safe to go ahead and do that whenever, and the new chapter will happen somewhere in the next few days. 

As to the rest of the fic after that - this is one of three fanfics that I’ve always sworn I really want to finish someday no matter what, and that remains true. The clusterfuck TW fandom became for me really hurt my ability to write that story the way I originally wanted to, mostly because I didn’t want my resentment of Stiles to affect how I wrote his necessary part of the plot, and by the time there was enough emotional distance between me and the show/fandom to write it again, like....all this happened, lol. So I do think once my health issues are resolved and I’m settled in an actual permanent place, I’ll FINALLY be able to resume it. There’s like, a couple hundred thousand words worth of unposted story already written there, lmao, its just I outline and then write nonlinearly, so most of all that just doesn’t work without me finally writing the bridge chapters that pull it all together.

Born Under a Bad Sign Update - Same thing pretty much, as this is one of the other Big Three fics I’ve always wanted to finish. Largely because its got a sequel that’s already written in full, lmao. The sequel is my YJ version of Under the Red Hood, but builds on the plotline I always had in mind for BUABS. The sequel was just easier for me to write first because it wasn’t as personal. BUABS doesn’t have as much pre-written as LC, but its not nearly as long either, and it has always been totally outlined and with a lot of dialogue for later chapters pre-written. Anyway, this is what I’d like to post after the LC update. It’s not finished, but its also not as long as the LC one. It’s a Roy chapter, and doesn’t have a time break but while writing it I’ve split it into two parts just for my own purposes. The first is Roy and Ollie confronting Catalina, the second is Roy and Ollie talking about their own shit in light of that. For this one, the first part is written, the second has the dialogue written but the rest needs fleshing out. It wont take that long to finish, its really just a day or at most two days of writing. When that’s done just depends on when I can next devote time to it.

Untitled X-Men One Shot - Someone asked if I’d write something about Scott and Bobby’s friendship and some kind of reunion between them after Scott’s return from the dead. I will of course be ignoring AoX completely, lmao. This one’s mostly done, its like 10K lmao (look those two had a LOT to talk about okay), but the last couple thousand words of that is all just dialogue I needed to get down before I had to focus on other stuff. So everything I need is all there, I just need to return to it to finish fleshing out the last quarter or so of it.

Untitled Dick and Jason One Shot - Someone else asked me to write something with just Dick and Jason interacting, set in the comic book universe. I’m going with a blend of pre-nu52 and a little bit of nu52 for the setting, pretty much ignoring Rebirth etc, because a) I think the Rebirth reboot mostly sucked and b) I really don’t know much about post Rebirth continuity cuz I’ve read so little of it cuz what I have read I think mostly sucks. This one is basically Dick and Jason finally airing out their shit and all the things I’ve long wanted them to say to each other and know about each other, so they can try and build an actual functioning relationship as brothers. Its got all the dialogue written, but not much else. The dialogue’s really the only framework I need to build a one-shot, so it won’t be hard to write around it, its again just more about when and where I get the time to do that. It will be Jason POV, as in canon its usually Dick reaching out (to whatever degree) and Jason not trusting his sincerity. So the angle I’m going with is this one shot’s about Jason realizing he doesn’t know his brother as well as he thought, and that if he’s always trying to get the family to accept he’s not the same person he was before, like....the same can be true for Dick. Neither of them are the people they were back then, so the reasons they weren’t close aren’t actually reasons they can’t be close now. And what Jason thinks are Dick’s issue with him might not actually be what Dick actually has a problem with. 

Original Superhero Novella - This is likely the last of these things to be finished as its the longest and thus more on the backburner, like just writing 1 or 2K at a time on it. This one’s the request of a friend who knows enough about my original superhero universe (I call it the Ellis Eighteen universe) to know who she wanted to read about specifically. Which - not surprisingly, given that Batfamily is one of our shared fandoms - is my version of a Batfamily. Only not really, because lol I don’t like being derivative or writing analogs of existing characters aka I must be the specialest snowflake ever. So its more like I was like ugh I love the Batfamily but hate how rarely DC lets them like, GET ALONG, oh hey, I’m gonna shove all my resentment from that into making up my own dysfunctional blended family of superheroes who actually love each other even if they’re bad at saying so. Plus superpowers.

So their concept is there’s a C-List supervillain named Murphy, as in Murphy’s Law. He has low grade probability powers. Basically he makes it so anything that can go wrong will go wrong in a designated area. He doesn’t have any control over how that manifests, but he’s great for diversions, so he gets hired for a heist by some big name supervillains to just create mayhem while they do the actual work elsewhere. Except Murphy discovers the corporation they’re stealing from donates a lot to children’s charities and is heavily involved with ‘supporting’ the foster care system...as a means to seek out superpowered children who end up in the system, and exploit them for their powers. And while looking for the best place/way to make a diversion, Murphy stumbles across evidence of this, as well as four boys on site in advance of them being sent to a home specially intended to raise the boys to feel indebted to their benefactors and eager to do whatever they want them to.

Which doesn’t work for Murphy at all, because he’s not so much a bad guy as someone who ended up a criminal due to circumstances and desperation and from there just never found a reason to stop. This though, he’s not okay looking the other way, so he says screw this company and screw the guys who hired me, and he breaks out the boys and they go on the run, keeping anyone from getting their hands on them and moving from place to place while he tries to provide as much stability as he can, let them grow up and decide for themselves what they want to be.

Eventually though, the two oldest, Misfire and Crossfire (I call them the Fire brothers because even though they’re all biologically unrelated, they each have powers that lend themselves to picking the codenames Misfire, Crossfire, Ceasefire and Backfire). So anyway, after a couple years of this, Misfire and Crossfire end up sneaking out to be vigilantes. And Murphy catches them of course and is like wtf are you thinking, do you know how dangerous that is? What if you get hurt? What if they (asshole corporation) find you?

Only it turns out, they just wanted to be like their dad. Which Murphy doesn’t really know what to do with, cuz he never talks about his past with the boys. Because he’s ashamed of it, doesn’t want them to think of him as a villain. Which they don’t of course. He’s the one who rescued them, who gave up whatever his life was before to make it all about protecting them and always doing what was best for them. To the boys, Murphy’s always been their personal hero, so they kind of took it for granted....that’s what he was. Murphy was never a big name player, and they’ve always assumed that he was just some masked hero or vigilante who retired when he took them in so his old enemies wouldn’t come after them too.

So basically its a found/adopted family where the boys grow up to be heroes, thanks to the values and role model their father provided without ever having a clue how they really saw him, due to his own insecurities. And then it backdoors into Murphy eventually becoming a hero as well as its the only way he knows to keep making sure he’s there to look out for them, as well as like....he’s inspired by his kids, who in turn were inspired by him. He wants to be the man they see him as, live up to that image of him, not realizing that like, he always already was that man. That image of him is based on his actions, the way he raised them. So in reality, its not even that he’s inspired to heroism by the example his kids set, its more a gradual embrace of the role he’d always played for as long as they knew him, no matter how he personally had seen it (and himself).

And because I’m me, they end up making it the family business, with the older two boys and their dad working together to expose and topple companies engaged in exploitative practices, while the younger two ignore all orders to stay home and always stow away to make sure they’re part of the action. Like.....its the Batfamily with superpowers meets Leverage, if the Robins came first and Bruce only became Batman to be their partner and have their backs. And also he used to be a crook which is still way better than a billionaire. So, that’s that on that.

So that’s the slowest of the current slate, its at about 18K of a projected 30K, with this particular story being set after Murphy and the two oldest are already established as vigilantes. Murphy’s in his forties, Misfire’s 21, Crossfire’s 18, Ceasefire’s 16 and Backfire’s 14.

I’m open to writing pretty much anything I’ve ever talked about fandom wise, and that you know is something I’m familiar with. If for whatever reason a request is something I’m not open to writing or I’m not familiar enough with to write, I’ll just make a post about it and you can hop on anon and either clarify or ask for something else. And its okay to ask on anon ahead of time if I’d be open to something.

Anyway, on that note, I’m all done here, thanks again for everything!!!

[brothermouzongaming]

Devil May Cry 5 review

This very much follows the guidelines of your typical DMC game which confounds me as to how that manages to be more good than bad. Stagnation is never a positive mark but come to think of it, DMC isn't the franchise that pumps a title out every year or every other year for that matter. So following the steps that made the IP successful to begin with isn't exactly something to fault. To go even further, I’d say it’s a little refreshing in the old school approach it takes to gameplay loop and presentation. It reminds me of how the previous generations felt while keeping me locked in the present with the gorgeous graphics and art direction. The gameplay expertly straddling the old and new gaming worlds in an intoxicating concoction of nostalgia and realization of what modern gaming can be.  Combat overall is timing and direction based due to the one button controls. It forces the player to splinter their command concepts, throwing away the convention of light, medium, and heavy attacks. Your variation comes in the direction of the left stick in combination with the spacing between button presses, and even whether or not you’re locked on. Your melee, projectile, and special buttons are spread out in the typical DMC fashion and this alone is very unique to this series. It seems like a lot because the control scheme doesn’t coddle the player and in many ways demands quite a bit from them. Especially when this game is meant to be played at the speed of two hummingbirds fucking. (Also, anyone else's hands get tired af after a battle? Or am I just old now...)   

Nero to Hero Boy-wonder is all over the place with frenetic and quick movements that take him from enemy to enemy or more interestingly: bringing enemies to him one by one. The grapple arm is great, on the lighter enemies (most of them) it pulls them to Nero, however, the largebois work as anchors and pulls Nero toward them. Each devil-breaker is unique and even when some may seem niche, at least they have a purpose when they were put into the game. There's a lot of layers when throwing in not just what you like and when you want to whip it out, but which ones you don’t mind burning should the situation arise. The devil-breakers have a main function and an alternative mode with one even having a third ability (Punch Line’s missile-hoverboard feature). My only real problem with Nero’s mechanics is that we can’t rotate through the holster to pick which breaker we want to use next in-game. Other than that, Exceed moves spice up the swordplay and bouncing around the arena never losses it's feeling of excitement and sense of raw power. V is for Vanity Everyone's combat comes with a level of understanding and familiarity even if you've seen nothing but cutscenes and gamers playing. V shakes up the gameplay and the mindset of the player which was jarring at first, but in time I would gain these moments of clarity where I'm this maestro of chaos orchestrating from afar as the battle plays out before me. The demonic bird handles projectiles while an equally demonic Jaguar (...Panther...?) that is your melee attack. With an Ogre like Devil Trigger that lays waste to everything in the arena. It's clear and understandable why he's so divisive given these “hands off” aspects but it's just as over the top as the rest of the series so it doesn't feel out of place. It’s well designed so much to the point of almost being too easy but again like the specific devil-breakers: V is different from the ground up and it’s done to freshen up the experience. A commendable act especially when it really seems to be an honest go at it and less than an idea they threw in last second. There are issues with commands and some not working exactly as you think but with adjustments to the way you play it becomes smooth and fun in no time again. Back to V being dipped in hyperbolic angst: reading his own poetry refills his meter and it sounds like the angriest high schooler wrote it, but again, it's how aggressively everything is leaned into that gives it the charm. Also, V definitely has the best "sprint" feature. He hovers on this little nimbus cloud of black thoughts and Pierce the Veil lyrics it's so cute.   Dante’s Inferno The top shelf killer, Nero is close with his arsenal, but Dante's is the most varied and honestly the most fun. I've encountered few things more satisfying than Lu Kang combo-ing the shit out of two demons to seamlessly switch to your motorcycle dual ax and eviscerate whatever remains of the crowd. It’s so intoxicating I can honestly name on one hand how many other games gave me this feeling (Spider-man 2, Far Cry 3, God of War, and Halo 2). Four styles of combat change most weapon move sets and this keeps the player at the edge of their seat all while the ride remains smooth as butter. Between guns and other projectile launchers as well as the handful of weapons all very diverse in functionality and performance, there’s almost too much to thoroughly use in a single level playthrough. Of all the levels, I’m constantly throwing myself back into Dante’s to see just how smokin and sexy my style can be.  Final thots After the learning curve is conquered, the flow and style of combat are entirely dictated by you the player. This combat is the shining achievement of this series and this iteration of it may be the best yet. The camera does a good job of managing the angles on its own and with little attention, it lacks almost all jank and assists the experience more than competently. Levels are bog-standard but what they do offer past the intro missions are many alternate routes and passages that lead to item discoveries, secrets, and combat scenarios you will otherwise miss if you barrel along the main path forsaking all others. I really enjoy how brave this game is for being itself in a world where every game needs some crazy intrusive online feature or component that stifles or gets in the way of the core game’s potential. The most of DMC5′s online capabilities begin and end with the cameo system, something that drops other players into your level at specific times to assist you or mainly just to look at and watch them do their thing. It’s not intrusive and is even exciting when the action starts to heat up and you and another player are cutting everything in the room to ribbons. I almost want more of it, and that’s what a well-implemented feature can do. 

Concerning red orbs mentioned in my demo post, Capcom went with the confusing decision to load us up with orbs and means of getting them in the main game; only to give us the option to pay for more whenever the need arises. Why Capcom? This game has next to no blemishes but this is one minor one in my book, but I can understand why anyone would look past it. This, however, is my biggest peeve: locking so many of Nero's alternative busters behind the ultimate edition or whatever, made me sigh disappointingly. Why couldn't it have at least been the option to unlock those immediately while other players can grind for them like...everything else in the game... To me, it just goes to show that oldboi Capcom is still lurking in the shadows somewhere looking to nickel and dime us at every dark alley it finds us in. At least this $60 dollar product is one I'm still proud to own. This goes in my “GOTY contenders” folder honestly and I have been having an absolute blast with DMC5 and can’t suggest it enough. Even if it’s your first in the series just do it they have a catch-up cinematic you can watch. Seriously. Play it, pull that fucking devil trigger.

tl;dr 8.5/10

[draco-omega]

10 months ago, I decided to make a game.

10 months later, I have a bunch of art and a bunch of interface code and a whole pile of design notes, and not much game.

This is my story.

(Now in bullet point form so that I can stop redrafting it >.>)

I have a treatment-resistant anxiety disorder which significantly interferes with my ability to work - both on my own projects and other things that might be called 'gainful employment'. (I still feel some shame at admitting this so bluntly, even though I feel ideologically that there should be no more shame in this than any physical impairment that resulted in the same. Fuck mental health stigma, defining self-worth by employment is toxic capitalist dogma, etc, etc.)

In part because of this, I had been effectively unemployed and living with my mother for a number of years. (I still did my best to hammer out projects, but nothing, y'know, actually PAID anything... >.>)

Then in late 2017, my mother died (somewhat unexpectedly) of cancer, which left me with no home (we'd been sharing an apartment that she had been covering most of the rent on) and literally zero income. Obviously grief and upheaval did not help with any of my prior difficulties managing employment, either.

After some debate, I decided to combine the savings I had left over from my last stint as a network administrator with a (modest) inheritance from my mother and try to actually make a living at making games. This is something I had always theoretically wanted to do, but never put actual money on the line for. (Okay, in a perfect world, I'd happily give all my work away for free and live on some minimum guaranteed income, but we do not yet live in such a world).

One of my historically biggest gamedev weaknesses was a lack of artistic ability, so this seemed a perfect thing to put money towards. I could hire an artist, which would not only allow me to make a more commercially appealing product, but would also free me up to focus on the mechanical and writing aspects of gamedev, which are the areas I most wanted to be working on and also consider myself best at. (Any followers that remember my work on ToK may recall me complaining there about how it seemed I spent my time on nothing but graphics? >.>

This was shortly after Touhou fangames had been given the official blessing to be sold on Steam, and some had already achieved great success there, so this seemed like a good way to create some instant appeal and interest in my game, while working with a franchise that I already loved to death and had written hundreds of thousands of words of fanfiction for (eg: This or that or this other thing)

And so Chronicle of False History was born!

...and yet I somehow still spent most of my time working on art. You see, having never worked with an actual artist before, I underestimated a number of things:

1) I underestimated how much work it would be to find a suitable artist in the first place (though at least this part is done)

2) I gravely underestimated how much of my time would be spent on 'art direction' or 'project management' or whatever you want to call it.

Every sprite that is created, even for canonical character designs, requires making a large number of decisions regarding:

What attack and spell poses it will have (and how to cover the broadest range of signature abilities with just two 'frames', for budget reasons)

Which of enumerable (and sometimes mutually-exclusive) costume details from canon (and fanon) should be selected (and do you have any idea just how many variations there are on things as straightforward as 'the hilt of Miko's sword'?)

Gathering a pile of reference images that clearly detail every element of the character (and action poses) to be drawn (which is also harder than you might think; a lot of art is sufficiently suggestive of details to view without actually being a good reference to reproduce and anything that isn't exactly what I'm looking for risks my artist misunderstanding my request entirely)

Designing alternate-history variants of this character in a way that can be clearly conveyed with minimal costume and color changes alone (as any significant redrawing would cost far more and the cast of the game is so large already) and doing so before the part of the game they would appear in is even written.

Gathering reference images for all of those things

Writing up a detailed description of all the decisions listed above (and often drawing actual diagrams of action poses and projectile overlays that are ambiguous to express with just words) and handing it over to my artist

Waiting a while, then getting sketches back and finding out that there is inevitably a whole pile of things that need changing (either because the artist misunderstood my request entirely - despite all that previous effort - or because an idea of mine looked far better in my own head than it does, or just the usual 'incremental improvements' to something that is on the right track but not quite there - like a sort of collaborative redrafting.)

Spending hours poking at these sketches in an image editor, testing how well individual details resolve at in-game size, how well the action frames snap together, and how I feel about each questionable element. This often extends to (crudely) adjusting and readjusting the position and angle of individual limbs and eyebrows and projectiles that feel 'off' so that I can figure out what I would like her to do with them (and whether it's even worth making her take the effort to do anything with them at all)

Finally, summarizing that feedback into a detailed list of change requests (often with new diagrams to clarify my words) and repeating the last two steps over and over and over again.

Like, she does great work - don't get me wrong. I'm very pleased with the end results and this is just an inevitable part of the process of making something professional. But it does also mean that my original idea that paying an artist would free me up to work on things other than art has been... laughable in retrospect, to say the very least. In fact, it's very possible that a greater percentage of my dev time is spent on art-related tasks than on previous projects where I was doing all the art myself - I just get better art for my trouble (and money....)

This is especially true given that:

3) I underestimated just how much art work I would still need to do completely independently of her

Raven is doing character sprites. These are arguably the most individually important art content in the game, and certainly the ones that give it the most screenshot appeal, but that has left me to do everything else. Which has included:

Figuring out how to make battle backgrounds that passably match the art style of the game (since commissioning enough of these to fill all the locations needed would absolutely blow my budget)

Designing the entire look and feel of the combat screen to mesh well with Raven's sprites while also being something I am personally capable of making (using only cheap/free resources)

Creating all tweened animations and particle effects

Designing every single little UI element that exists in the game:

Elemental symbols

Dialogue boxes

Spellcard icons (and the entire menu design that requires them in the first place)

Combat action menus

Icons to indicate spellcard usability

Spellcard tooltips

Targeting overlays

A turn order bar

Spellcard availability reminders

Font choice for damage/healing numbers, spellcard names,

More cursors that you can shake a stick at

Lots more stuff, I'm sure

And even the completed sprites I get from Raven still need multiple hours of processing each to split them into component parts with sufficient information to re-composite and animate in-game. (If you've ever wondered why my screenshots seem to only involve Nazrin while I've already shown sprites for multiple other characters, this is why)

It never ends!!

...which is a fact that has been extremely draining. Like, it is probably difficult to overstate just how demoralizing it has been to pay this much money and work this hard and long and still somehow be mostly doing art (or visual-related coding) when I naively thought this project would offer some freedom from this after the endless, endless hours I spent doing this for ToK.

And it has also revealed a very tangible (and extremely stressful and troubling) fact about this game's development:

I am going to run out of money before I am remotely close to having a saleable product

When I first laid out plans for this project, I ballparked a modest but realistic budget for the artwork. I chose an art style that could provide pleasing visuals for a very large cast of characters at a cost-effective rate (for a game, at least). I deliberately limited my cast size based upon the agreed-upon cost per character with my artist (and have repeatedly held myself back from various fun ideas because I felt I simply could not afford to make a habit of such things). I studied sales figures for comparable games to aim for a target that had a reasonable probability of sufficient return (or at least breaking even). Game development is always a gamble, of course, but I felt (and still feel) that I made a sensible budget call and it was an amount I was fully able to pay.

But in all this, I neglected to factor in what has been, by far, my most costly development expense: remaining alive.

You see, at the rate my artist is able to produce work, the cost of retaining her is utterly dwarfed by such banal things as food and rent and not freezing to death in the winter. I live about as modest a lifestyle as possible - a one-room apartment, no car, no eating out, nothing in the way of luxuries (I don't even own a cell phone) - but that is still awfully expensive when you have no income and no prospect of it in the immediate future either.

It's a vicious cycle. The less work I get done, the more I feel future financial pressures breathing down my neck, the less work I'm able to get done (due to stress and general demoralization), the more I feel future financial pressures, etc, etc, etc.

And there's a logistical problem even outside of my own stress and anxiety and being damnably human in my need for actual rest: I've spent nearly 10 months working together with my artist and thus have a pretty good sense of how fast she's able to get character art done. And unless something changes dramatically, the time required for her to finish the art assets for the game will be several years longer than I will have any savings left to pay for them - because, as it turns out, hiring an artist is actually a tiny expense compared to merely continuing to exist.

I... don't really have a good answer for this problem and I've spent a lot of time consumed by it at this point. I have faith that Chronicle of False History can be a great game... eventually. But that does no one any good if I can't stay afloat long enough to make it. I've considered pivoting to another smaller-scope game project in the meantime, in the hopes of generating some modest influx of cash that could be used to fund the rest of CoFH's development, but there are a whole slew of reasons this is dicey (not least of which is that small-scope projects have a tendency to not be nearly as small as one anticipates...)

I've also thought about exploring Patreon, but like... I'm fully aware that I don't currently produce nearly enough interesting content for people to just want to throw money at. Tantalizing glimpses of it, perhaps. The promise that in the future I might. But what do I really have to show for this at the moment?

And so, here I am, exhausted by a marathon of work I did not properly anticipate and without the tangible reward I'd expected to have by this point (not a finished game, by any means, but like... much more of one than I actually have). And every month that passes by in which I get less done on my game than anticipated is yet more cash bleeding out of my bank account, like I'm trapped on a badly leaking boat with no shore in sight. I need a rest from all these stressors (and some more personal ones not described here), but when time spent not working has itself become a stressor these days, where can I even find it?

...wow, this sure sounded upbeat, huh?

In any case, I still care a lot about CoFH and have no intention of stopping work on it. I just... need to figure out some way to allow myself to continue to do so without this enormous capitalist behemoth crushing me beneath it.

(I had originally intended to provide more of an overview of the useful work accomplished over these past 10 months here, with mockups showing the evolution of the game's visual design, but clearly that goes into a future post at this point).

[regular-lord-reckoner]

that was...incredible 

like yeah, my scoprio ass is LOVING the drama of it all and shit, i love a good gossip session but it’s more than that 

do i wanna keep being office mates with this guy? no. but like...i could make it work, y’know. i’ve worked with people i can’t stand before, it’s nothing new. i’d suck it up and deal with it 

but genuinely, honestly i wanted him to know what the hell he was getting into. point blank.

because the job description and the actual job are not the same thing 

he came into this thinking it was going to be one thing and it’s the complete opposite and on top of that...the management is terrible and doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing and it’s just...a mess. it’s honestly the biggest mess and overall just a failure of a program and nobody needs to be stuck here beating their head against the wall trying to make this happen when it isn’t going to happen 

and i tried to give as much information as i could based on what my office mates had told me but ultimately i wasn’t like...in it, so he wanted to hear it from someone in the actual position and now that he has i think he’s...over it 

i dunno, he may go home and think it over and decide to stick with it but for this kind of pay it’s just not worth it, honestly and i think that may be where he’s at right now 

i literally used the phrase “rearranging deck chairs on the titanic” to describe this position to him and i think he gets it now because of course his manager’s trying to make it sound like things are just kind of hectic for the time being, etc., etc but like...dude 

look at your employee turnover rate for this program that’s been around for almost 2 years now and look at how little you’ve accomplished 

one person isn’t going to be able to fix this, especially when they have zero control over how this program is run

hell, a team of people couldn’t make this workable because this program wasn’t planned out the right way, everything’s backwards in the sense that like...they want our name to be in the community so people know who we are and help us meet our numbers but...when you don’t even know what your program actually does and what you do know is...useless you can’t do that. you’re just a used car salesman at that point pushing bad product for the sake of it, not to actually help the community or change anything and yet it all comes out in the wash as if it’s the employees who just aren’t doing their jobs so...yeah

again, would i love not having to share an office with this dude? of fucking course i would. but this is something he deserves to know, especially when i’ve just watched him get more and more frustrated over the lack of direction and clear answers 

he’s supposedly getting four days of training next week for...who the hell even knows what and we’ll see if that all even ends up happening (because this manager has planned trainings before and then they just...didn’t happen or they were trainings that were done but then like a month later it was “oh wait, forget about all of that, we’re doing something different now!) but like...one of the staples of his “curriculum” is a ten year old video that is considered more or less a joke in the prevention community (and yeah, on top of that he’s like...not at all on board with how ~graphic it is) so...not too sure how that’s gonna work 

like yeah, based on his standpoint in all of this, how he feels about the subject and how it should be taught, he’s not my first pick for an educator on this topic but like...even if he was it’s untenable how bad this situation is. nobody could make this work. no one. because it wasn’t designed that way. 

frankly, i don’t know why it exists at all because this city already HAS well-established programs that have been at this for years and who actually do everything 

this grant only allows for you to do so much and you end up having to refer people to those other programs anyway so like...why does it even exist? 

nobody seems to know, but someone got lumped with the responsibility of trying to make it into something and instead of just...admitting that it’s a failure and a mess and that we need to go back to the drawing board, management is putting it on the shoulders of the poor fucks they lure in to this position with a super misleading job title and then try to bs all day long about why things are so bad, but promise that it’ll get better and it won’t. period. 

i probably shouldn’t have helped set this whole thing up and if i get in trouble i get in trouble, i’ll deal with it but like...somebody had to tell him and he was super grateful to both of them for coming all the way down 

and he kept saying to me like...that alone tells him pretty much everything 

the fact that i just texted one of them to see if i could pass along her phone number to him or call her up and just hand my phone over and she was like...i’ll just come down there instead and then told my other office mate about it and she was like, “oh fuck yeah, i’m coming too” like...that does say A LOT  

so...yeah 

tbh i just want to see this program over and done with and it’s not out of any malicious intent because i just wanna see the drama of it all (that’s just an added bonus) but like...genuinely this is such a fucking shit show and nobody should be getting dragged into this. period. 

be interesting to see what happens. 

[dippedanddripped]

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that everything’s fucked. This time last year, to look at a brand channeling youthful rage and anarchy might have seemed a bit extreme, but considering punk was incubated during the sociopolitical climates of the Reagan and Thatcher eras, it’s not too surprising to see that “middle-finger-to-the-world” attitude become all the more relevant in the post-Trump era.

That certainly hasn’t affected the gentrification of streetwear and sneaker culture. On the one hand, the resale market seems to be stronger than ever, with some models like the Dior x Jordan 1 fetching aftermarket prices that could legit be a down payment on a Honda Civic. On the other, plenty of streetwear’s OGs and upstarts have become galvanized by ongoing protests and paradigm shifts in the fight for social justice, and, well, they can generally agree that the way things are going is pretty terrible.

As a result, streetwear as a culture is continuing to differentiate itself from streetwear as an industry. That’s something we can see in the kinds of labels gaining popularity in this era. Among them is Jon Lopez’s “I Never Heard of You,” a cheekily-named brand that exists as a refreshing antithesis to the commodification of streetwear, sneakers, and digital clout-chasers.

Lopez grew up in Queens, and, like many teens, got into gear and kicks early on, but developed a fondness for graffiti, citing the late great Dondi White as a specific influence. Equally life-changing was when he discovered DMX, Slipknot, and Marilyn Manson.

“I was influenced by shit that was uncut and in your face,” he says. “I loved wearing the most shocking graphic tees I could find — stuff that would piss off any parent or teacher, but my friends would think it was cool.”

Eventually, he ended up working as a graphic designer for Angelo Baque’s OG Awake team (he gets mad background props in a GQ Style editorial from a couple of years ago). That led to a few other opportunities in design and consulting for a few other spots he can’t specifically name, for contractual reasons. But his time spent soaking up game at Awake also highlighted the disparity between streetwear as a business, the faces making a profit, and the faces doing the work.

“I want to put on more Latinx creatives like myself, the same way Angelo has for me and others. It’s not as common to see people who look like me or my friends,” notes Lopez. “It’s crazy, considering how much POC in general have helped influence the dope shit the industry often tries to package and sell for profit.”

I Never Heard of You serves as a call-out to “fake it ’til you make it” culture, and its profane gear speaks to Lopez’s appreciation of shock rock, hardcore music, and things that are intentionally unpalatable for the mainstream. Items range from graphic tees flipping characters like Bugs Bunny and Marilyn Manson merch (unlicensed of course, because fuck doing things the legit way), to all-over print pants and shirts scrawled with “EVERYTHING’S FUCKED,” a print made by Lopez manually scrawling the phrase over and over with a marker.

But these days, trying to go the bootleg route isn’t without its consequences. Less than a week after releasing his second collection, Jon’s @ineverheardofyou account was taken down for copyright violations, a charge filed on behalf of Marilyn Manson’s label. Even though he’s created a backup account @ineverheardofyoubefore, he’s faced with possibly hefty legal fees if he hopes to recover his original username.

On the one hand, it’s the most punk shit ever, but on the other, it’s a quandary not a lot of other smaller labels could face with a similar level of confidence. Owing to Jon’s network of industry veterans and mentors, as well as early co-signs from accounts like @hidden.ny, he’s fortunately more equipped to handle the situation — or if necessary, rebuild his momentum from the ground up.

“With so much corporate interest in streetwear, brands like I Never Heard of You are needed,” notes HIDDEN®, the anonymous founder of Instagram account @hidden.ny, who often posts Lopez’s products out of a genuine appreciation for them. “It’s not your conventional brand. Jon’s experience working in the industry has given him the foundations to build on, but it’s his unique attitude and approach to design which made me a fan.”

It’s a welcome mix of DIY culture with the same anti-corporate attitude that informed streetwear a decade and a half ago. It’s why I Never Heard of You’s most viral products to date are his sneakers. The first was the “Fuck Off 1,” a Jordan 1 hightop with the Swoosh replaced by a middle finger, and the Air Jordan “Wings” logo replaced with an anarchy symbol and “Fuck the Fuck Off” above it.

Of course, bootleg sneakers aren ‘t new. Heads in 2006 remember the way Consolidated Skateboard’s banana-bearing “Drunk SB” sneakers flipped Todd Bratrud’s “Send Help SBs” (probably an inside job, considering Bratrud is also the art director at Consolidated). There’s also Ari Forman’s cigarette-inspired “Ari Menthol 10s,” BAPE’s BAPEsta, and even the high-end flips like RHUDE’s Rhecess that takes its cues from the Nike Terminator.

Sure, Trevor Gorji’s recent “One In the Chamber” have an appeal in their own right, but the decidedly anti-corporate commentary I Never Heard of You brings to the Chicago 1 feels especially relevant, considering Jordan-mania in a post-The Last Dance world.

“I love sneakers, but the culture around it has changed a lot from when I first fell in love with it a few years ago, mostly because of the internet,” admits Lopez. His sneakers (he just dropped an Air Force 1 flip that sold out in a matter of seconds) comment on consumption culture while reluctantly being a part of it — similar to how a brand like Noah acknowledges the evils of capitalism while doing what it can to operate as virtuously as possible.

“The Fuck Off 1s pull from great bootlegs of the past but raise the bar on quality and presentation,” adds HIDDEN®. “They’re a pure expression of rebellion towards the over-saturation of the sneaker market and something I personally wear a lot.”

The middle-finger high tops have even found their way to the high-profile feet of celebs like Future. But to Lopez’s point about the internet ruining things for other people, the long wait time between purchase and delivery has been the bane of every small brand trying to satisfy a large consumer demand. Pairs took months to ship, a process worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic putting even more of a strain on logistics. In response, he coined the term “Amazon Shopper” for the instant gratification people expect after hitting the buy button.

“There is no real appreciation for the work that is put into the items,” he laments. “Amazon Shoppers are the worst. They’re a direct representation of the term with their shitty consumer attitude that plagues the internet and independent artists like myself.”

After selling out of his second drop earlier this month, Lopez isn’t necessarily in a rush to get his next project out, but his next release will likely be in line with more charitable projects he’s done between his capsule collections. He released two T-shirts in the past few months, raising funds for Covid-19 relief as well as bail funds for imprisoned Black Lives Matter protesters. It’s one of the things he picked up from his days at Awake — figure out a way to use your platform to amplify messages you believe in.

“I want people to also pay attention to the fact that there are kids in cages and people that have gone missing with no real answers, and a complete and total disregard for simple human rights here in this country,” he says. “I hope to continue creating items for charitable causes and raise awareness towards certain things with the small creative platform I have. Maybe it will inspire others to do more in their own ways.”

His mentor, Angelo Baque, couldn’t be prouder to witness his glow-up.

“The most important lesson that I hope he learned while working with me is that none of this was given or handed over to me. You have to really want it and bust your ass to get it,” says Baque. “What’s most important about Jon’s work is that he’s staying true to himself and not compromising his vision. I look forward to seeing what he does next.”

[secretentourage]

This is for all of you who are lost, confused, don't know where to start, how to make money, and even how to learn... PLEASE STOP FALLING FOR THIS STUPID MARKETING BS! Today, I woke up with this in my inbox. For a good 5 minutes I just sat there, thinking to myself, "WTH, it's 2017. Why are people still falling for these things?" I decided enough is enough - it's time to educate you guys on the realities of business marketing that you do not seem to understand. I am going to use myself as an example too, so trust me, this isn't a personal attack on anyone, it's opening your eyes. This ad that I saw states that an affiliate marketer has made over $1,000,000 in sales. While this seems high, it's possible for him. That said, here is what most people fail to see and understand: 1. There is a marketing cost to that million dollars of revenue. As a rule of thumb, many marketers take home about 10% of what total gross sales are. The problem, of course, is saying "I took home $100,000" isn't as attention-grabbing as saying "we sold $1,000,000". 2. If you start today, you will not enjoy ANYTHING near that amount. Why? This marketer has been building his business for four years (for example, back when Instagram was a free-for-all platform and every day you could grow 5K followers just by posting quality content. You can't do that anymore.) That means that when you have a base of 2,000,000 followers to market to, you have what most people don't have when they start, which makes it easy to succeed fast. If I do the same thing, I have a huge base of people to pitch so it's just a matter of how I pitch. For the average person, you have to first find a potential lead (pay for it), then attempt a pitch, then adjust based on results. In many cases, this wastes tons of money before you make even one dollar. So for you, the average person getting started, it's unlikely that you see anything near even 5% of your gross sales. If you have to also build a following, you'll be way down in losses before any money is made back. Nowhere does any ad talk about this critical piece of the puzzle. 3. Digital affiliate marketing has been around for YEARS, it's nothing new. This is no different than being an MLM, just online. It's OK if you understand what you're getting into, but you're really just selling other people's products for them and taking half the profit. Would you go to Walmart, buy a bottle of Pepsi for a dollar, and try to resell it for 50c more? It sounds stupid, right? Actually, a Pepsi is more likely to sell than most of the products that are being affiliated because no one knows about them... but they know what Pepsi is. If you think just signing up for a program then posting your affiliate link on your Facebook page is going to make you money, you're delusional. You have to learn how to make great landing pages, write great copy, and even go so far as figuring out how to spend good marketing money that will convert skeptics into believers. If you are smart enough to do this, then the first question you should ask yourself is, "Why the hell would I do all that work just to sell someone else's product instead of my own?" EXACTLY! You wouldn't - which is why 99% give up in their first 30 days. That attrition rate doesn't matter to the guy who recruited you because he gets paid as soon as you sign up to sell. 4. You watch me on social on @icreatemillionaires talk about 3 critical things all the time and leverage my cars, house etc... to convince people, right? I keep saying join the Secret Academy, read RADIUS, read TCT and you too will have what I have. Sounds crazy, right? I agree, and it makes sense if you think of it in the context of what is shown to you. You cannot have a 7 figure house & 7 figures in cars JUST by being an entrepreneur. You can have them when you succeed as an entrepreneur. This is why I never say you'll achieve this in 90 days. I say you will learn this in 90 days. There is a difference. I also never tell you to do exactly what I do. I don't teach people to write blogs, build platforms like Secret Entourage, or sell courses. I don't even teach you what I know to start a business in the automotive industry like I did back then in 2005. I don't teach you how to make $1.7M in real estate like l did in 2006 nor how I made $800,000 in 3 months trading 2 stocks in 2009. I don't teach it because you can't replicate it. It's a matter of timing, it's a matter of being the right person ready to take action in front of the right opportunity. It's not about execution, it's not about knowledge, it's about everything coming together after YEARS of practice and failure. This is not SEXY people, that's why I only have 90K followers on Instagram and not 5 Million. It's a not a dream. It's a reality that every one of you will come to accept at some point in your life or another. You just need to hope that by the time you realize it, it's not too late to have enough energy and time to get started. There is no shortcut. It took me 10 years to make enough money to engage in all the opportunities above I mentioned, while still working a day job. It took me 5 years after that being a small business owner and fucking dying with no sleep to survive and not have to close my doors. It took me 5 more years to learn how to be an entrepreneur and then be able to find victories in varied industries. Somehow, despite all that effort, some guy will open his email see that bs ad and say: "For $47, I am going to have the unicorn formula to making a million dollars this year, even though I haven't even learned to make my first $1000 in business." Business is about the art of creating transactions and getting good at it. It's simple, but it's NOT easy. 5. With Exotic Car Hacks, I don't teach people to wake up in an exotic when they're broke and don't understand 2 things about making a dollar. I teach people to finance in the context of cars because most people don't understand that luxury goods are a financial business transaction for the seller and buyers of these things. The more you understand, the more you realize how to create transactions, not be the one on the wrong side of it. I have an ad that says "Learn to get in an exotic car in 90 days." It's my highest converting ad, and while I show you a Huracan in it, it is NEAR impossible for someone who has never owned a car to buy their first Huracan in 90 days. However, it is not impossible for them to buy their first exotic (perhaps a GTR, R8, Masi etc...) but just cause I show you a pic, you assume it's going to be a Huracan. Marketing is the art of allowing your customers to create self-assumptions of what will happen to them by becoming your customers. By the way - Nike does the same thing with fitness/sports performance, Apple does this for graphic designers and creative artists, and even Subway did it with that Jared guy pushing weight loss. This is an ART. Don't hate it - learn to master it. So what did you learn from this post? 1. Don't fall for stupid bs. There is no $47 solution to your problems. There is no book that will make you a million. Each book is an opportunity to understand how to think. It's up to you to pull the value out of it. 2. You won't make a million sitting at home doing what another 20,000 people tried to do last week. 3. Learn to decipher marketing from reality. 4. Entrepreneurship is about creating a path, not finding one. 5. Business is about creating a path for others to walk on and pay you for it. 6. Read Third Circle Theory & Radius - I wrote them for a reason - so you can learn. If you don't think you get it after you read something the first time, read it again. There is a reason Andy Frisella and Fabio Viviani call me one of the smartest guys they know. It's not because I spit BS. I teach Business & Entrepreneurship. Sometimes that's not sexy, but it's necessary, because in 10 years there will be 60% fewer jobs and most of you will already be behind. This is the time to take action and the time to figure out that first 10 years so you can be in a position to take action when SHTF. Pejman PS: If you want to network with REAL entrepreneurs and learn how REAL businesses are born, then head over to my Secret Entourage Academy here: http://ift.tt/2idQ6Nv http://ift.tt/2v8Y5ge

[kishimoto-did-us-dirty]

Naruto Arts School AU

Character

- major

description

Naruto

-Drums

okie nobody can deny that our main boy over here is a loud soul, however, he can also carry a damn good beat that compliments his band mates’ music really well. Tbh, he sucked at music to begin with and had trouble matching rhythms and listening to his band mates when they played, however he eventually became a really good rhythm maker.

Sasuke

-Guitar (lead)

He’d be assigned to the same band as Naruto, and that’s how they met. This boy is a damn good guitarist y’all, but has attitude problems™, and used to not be able to deal with Naruto’s haphazard beat making, thus perpetuating a rivalry between the two. He constantly feels overshadowed by his elder brother Itachi, a piano major.

Sakura 

- Dance

Ya girl fucking demolishes every single dance routine. Initially starting out with a focus on ballet (pre-shippuden in canon), our pink headed queen soon realized that she wasn’t getting the full experience of what it meant to dance. Her point shoes were her loves, however they hurt and nipped in places not just physical. She realized that she didn’t want to be pigeonholed into a genre of which she would be inhibited by standard, and rather to dance so as to forget technical perfection. Thus, what would partner with post-shippuden Sakura in canon, Art School AU Sakura got into hip-hop. And bitch, she goes hard. A lot of the other girls who she used to dance ballet with admire her for her absolutely BODYING her dance routines, but also for never sacrificing her femininity to dance and not taking BS for being a girl who goes so hard in a male-dominated genre. (Some people believe that hip-hop is heavy hitting and a little metaphorically “dark” so to speak, which Sakura is not. So obviously I expect a little disagreement regarding this, however if you look at people like Delaney Glazer or Kaycee Rice, that is how Sakura would dance). 

Hinata

- Creative Writing

Shy and bookworm-like, Hinata can write the best poetry, romance and adventure pieces out of all the creative-writing majors. She’s especially good at writing character relationships and development, and has such a subtle sense of intelligent wit in her writing, that if you blinked you would miss it. However should you catch it, you’re sure to chuckle. Her only struggle is that she tends to drag on in important scenes, stretching them against the regular flow of the rest of her writing. Needs validation for her writing through an IV drip.

Kiba

- Drums OR Photography

Drums for obvious reasons (loud and obnoxious), although ruff boi looks good with a camera, too. Great at landscapes and street photography.

Shino

- Creative Writing OR Photography

I could definitely see Shino having fucking beautiful handwriting, and being a beast at writing anything within the sci-fi realm. I could also see him doing some journalism, and writing for the school paper. He’s very good at the logic of his sci-fi books and coming up with logical but enrapturing stories, that intermingle knowledge and mystery. He’s a very specific type of read, however, and may not appeal to all, however if you enjoy anything similar to Star Wars or Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, then Shino is your author. If this doesn’t float your boat, though, try photography-major Shino. He can get the best angles of bugs he sees, and has an extensive portfolio with entomology-related snapshots.

Ino

- Dance

Like Sakura, she, too, began with a focus on ballet, however began to branch out into contemporary ballet a little later than Sakura. This is another reason why Sakura switched her focuses, as she and Ino had always had a fierce rivalry for dieting (ballet dancers are pressured to be as thin as possible) as well as battling for technical perfection when they were ballet focused. As the two grew, Ino focused more so on contemporary, but can certainly do some hip-hop with Sakura every now and then, just as Sakura occasionally takes a contemporary class with her. The two still have a rivalry, however, just not to the previous extent as when they were actively competing against each other. They’re more like sisters. 

Shikamaru

- Guitar (bass) OR Creative Writing OR Architecture

Smart boy’s a tricky one. He would either be a bassist, a mystery and historical fiction writer, or, of his school offers it, be great at architecture. Idrk.

Choji

- ermmmmm….. maybe graphic design? Tech theatre (props)? Vocal???

Choji is hARD dwnccnpc (that’s what she said). I could see him behind a computer screen, animating and designing games/covers/posters or whatever. He could also do something in theatre, but I don’t think he would do anything up on stage. Something like props would suit him. He might do something in music, tho???? Can he sing???? Help??? 

Tenten

- Dance

Always has been, and always will be a hip-hop dancer. She wanted to be like Tsunade, a legendary dancer and followed in her footsteps, taking up hip-hop. (that’s why Sakura focused on hip-hop, too, because Tsunade mentored her and taught a few of her classes, too). Tenten is fast and can keep up with any beat. Not only is she a great dancer, but she’s also athletic, and does track and field (cross country), football, and softball at another school too, since the arts schools doesn’t offer it. Overall great dancer with styl. She’s really looked up to by some of her underclassmen for her cheery, but badass style and skill.

Lee

- DANCE (hip-hop, too)

It’s sweat. It’s burn. It’s energy. It’s Lee.

Neji

- Violin 

First chair violinist in his freshman year for the school’s philharmonic orchestra. He be extra like that.

Gaara

- Guitar (bass)

He had a lonely childhood with neglectful/abusive parents, and rock music really helped him with that. Emo music is emo and often made fun of, but the songs have messages and Gaara related, so self-taught himself the bass guitar to help cope, and bring him closer to the music that salvaged him.

Kankuro

-Art

Specifically sculpting. For obvious reasons.

Temari

- Acting

Girl can make you cry with some of her monologues. Total lead. Has a seriousness in her acting that makes her believable, however can falter on the less-serious roles. She may also double-major in whatever Shikamaru does. And she’s better at it than him.

Itachi

-Piano

Boy could play any etude at age 7. Performed at Carnegie Hall when he was 10. And no, he didn’t pay to play there. The hall invited him. Began composing at 9. Has perfect pitch. Owns international awards. If he’s not at school it’s because he’s traveling to play for crowds. He excels at classical and baroque, however has an ear for romantic, and enjoys playing/composing pieces either written or inspired by romantic pieces. Enjoys Schumann, Debussy, and Tchaikovsky. Hates modern classical music, though. Can only take cinematic pieces composed by people like Williams, however can’t stand Prokofiev at all. He does like modern music, though, so long as it’s outside of the orchestral/classical music realm. He likes R&B. He would have liked to do film with Shisui, particularly producing, however his parents pressure him with piano, so he helps Shisui with student films and projects outside of school (will probably pursue film after graduating, tho).

Shisui

- FILM / VIDEO PRODUCTION

Fight me on this!!! THIS BOY IS SO GOOD AT CINEMATOGRAPHY MY FILMMAKING ASS CAN’T EVEN. AS SOMEONE WHO IS IN LOVE WITH FILMOGRAPHY, TRUST ME, SHISUI HAS IT™. THE IT™. HE’S GOOD AT EVERYTHING. CINEMATOGRAPHY. DIRECTING. SCREENWRITING. GRIP-WORK. EDITING. PRODUCING. HE’S SUCH A FILM NERD TOO, AND WATCHES OLD FILMS ALL THE TIME. HE’S JUST TOO GOOD AT IT. DOES STREET PHOTOGRAPHY TOO. HE’S OVERALL A GENIUS WITH CAMERAS. Does film with Itachi outside of school and teaches him, and the two are overall geniuses at filmography. They want to start their own studio together (they do, and it becomes huge). He becomes a leading director, while Itachi becomes a producer and directs sometimes too. 

Sasori, Deidara, and Sai

Guess.

Kakashi

- Saxophone

It’s the only thing that suits him and it suits him so well. Has suave.

Obito (omfg his arms y'all)

- Not to say drums or anything, but…. drums.

Narutard 2.0. But he also dabbles in other areas of music. Like, he can also play guitar and sing. He’s also pretty good at music production. Makes R&B sometimes. He wasn’t always the best musician but proved to be a late bloomer, and really harnessed his potential. Tries to be as suave as Kakashi and his saxophone. He isn’t.

Hashirama

- Vocal

OkaYYYYYY. VOCAL GOD. CAN DO RIFFS AND RUNS AND HAS PERFECT PITCH. ALSO THE SWEETEST GUY??? WAS A CHAMBER SINGER AS A FRESHMAN. EVERYONE LOVES HIM, GOOD BOY ENERGY.

Likes to belt.

Madara

- Piano

Total prodigy, but hates classical music. Once was accompanist to Hashirama for a solo vocal performance and hasn’t been left alone since. 

Tobirama

- Viola or Cello

Some sort of string instrument and takes it very seriously. Probably plays cello because violas are violas and that’s lame (if you know, you know). Has almost as many awards as Itachi and Madara, but hates his usual piano accompanist, Izuna.

Izuna

- Piano

Also a piano god. The uchihas breed them. Hates being accompanist for Tobirama. They’re secretly best friends though, don’t tell anyone.

Karin

- Tech Theatre.

Idk why. Probably started out with props and made her way up to TD (technical director) in senior year.

Suigetsu

- Tech Theatre

Fucking hates theatre kids (I feel that (I used to be one so don’t come at me)). Assistant TD. Karin hates him. 

Jugo

- Visual Art

Paints landscapes and nature. Really good with oils and gouache respectively.

Yamato

- lmao Trumpet.

Met Kakashi since they both play brass, but boy he ain’t got that suave. That’s why he plays trumpet. Lmao he plays the fucking trumpet anjdwcnojdnn.

Rin

- Vocal

Sweetest voice and could also play the acoustic guitar when she sang. Died in a car accident junior year. Kakashi was at the wheel when they got hit by a drunk driver. Obito saw the whole thing.

Kurenai

- Visual Art

Can create dream like paintings that almost seem like illusions.

Asuma

- Cello / guitar

Used to play cello because of his parents, but loves to play guitar. Can sing but his voice is raspy from smoking.

Gai

Who the fuck do you think teaches dance?

Jiraiya

- Guitar (lead)

Used to major in lead guitar. Sucked at first. Probably has a couple, casual Grammy Awards (they’re actually not that hard to be awarded with, The Recording Academy award many people outside of mainstream media. My school has a few). Now teachers as head of the Band department at this school.

Tsunade

-Dance

Legendary dancer. Probably toured with a few famous people. Now teachers. Mentored Sakura, and mentored Ino but for a shorter time.

Orochimaru

- Idk, didgeridoo, or some shit

Definitely a wood wind. Flute maybe??? Teaches now but no one knows what he does. Pedophile. Has a thing for Sasuke. 

And that’s that!! Feel free to send in more requests!! Tell me what you think~ 

[aish-rai]

Oscars 2017: In Review

Oscar time is here again!

Once again, I’ve watched all the films in the Best Picture, Best Director, and major acting categories. I’m not one for long reviews, so I’ve broken it down into mini reviews that will hopefully help you decide who to root for tonight...or not. Who cares. This is Trump’s America, we’re all on our way out anyway. Jkjk.

So, without further ado....

Arrival

This is, by far, my favorite of all the Best Picture nominees. This year, the debate has been about the importance of certain films...the message a film sends, what place it holds in our society. On the surface, a film centered around an alien invasion doesn’t seem as though it would merit much surface importance. But in times of increasing globalism, followed by xenophobia and an overall intolerance for things and people we don’t understand, Arrival highlights the importance of communication, patience, mutual cooperation, and an open mind. At the heart of it, it’s an incredibly personal story about the relationships we form and the decisions we make: what choices would dictate your life if you knew what the outcome would be? What’s the value of the journey versus the destination? Arrival asks us all these questions, but protagonist Louise Banks (a linguist, which it turns out is a SUPER FUCKING COOL job) only answers for herself. The rest of the film is a reflection on humanity, and in times like these, I think that’s just as important as any other “message” film.

Moonlight

Don’t misunderstand me: this is a story for everybody. We can all get something out of it. But it’s a particularly important, incredibly personal story about black masculinity, sexuality, and identity in an environment of poverty and desperation. A queer black man will certainly connect more to this movie than me, a straight white woman. However, with that being said, I still consider this a near-perfect movie. It is in no way inaccessible to the rest of the audience. The way the film has been broken down into three stages of Chiron’s journey to self-discovery allows the story to unfold perfectly. The first third sends the message, “You don’t have to know who you are yet.” By the end, it asks, “Who are you? Have you figured it out yet?” And everything in between is beautiful. The three actors who play Chiron (Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes) are revelations. The fact that the kid from Manchester by the Sea pulled a nomination but Ashton Sanders didn’t is straight up offensive to my sensibilities, tbh. But Mahershala Ali is the real heart of the film as Juan, a local drug dealer who takes Chiron under his wing. His time in the film is brief, but he leaves an overwhelming impression. Also keep a look out for a magnificent performance by Naomie Harris as Chiron’s mother, as well as a color palette that quite frankly took my breath away. This is a film that sends a social message, yes, but it’s also a beautiful story of a personal journey and one that needed to be told.

La La Land

This film has been the frontrunner for quite awhile now, and as all frontrunners do, it has garnered quite a bit of criticism. Aside from just being the frontrunner, I feel like a lot of the criticism stems from the fact that it’s a happy, upbeat film in a year of otherwise somber stories. For some reason, we devalue the importance of joy in our films. I have to be grateful for the criticism, though, because the first time I saw LLL, I only “liked” it. Upon rewatching it, I’ve grown to love it. There’s so much more to it than “white man saves jazz”. That completely disregards the themes of nostalgia, the way the characters hold on to the past and hold themselves back. It’s very much a film that pays tribute to the American musical, while still managing to subvert many of its tropes and modernize the genre. The choice to have two lead actors who are neither singers nor dancers was a great one, in my opinion. Mia and Sebastian are two normal people, not extraordinarily talented but extraordinarily passionate about what they do. And without giving too much away, the ending, while polarizing, was perfect for me. The final montage alone makes it worthy of the praise it’s receiving. Ryan Gosling is good, but perhaps not Best Actor material here (I would have much rather he had been nominated for The Nice Guys). But he’s the perfect foil for Emma Stone, and it’s really her film. The Oscar is hers to lose at this point, and I know that bothers a lot of people, but again, they’re really devaluing the work that went into her character. Not everyone could have done what she did with this role. She nails the comedy, the melodrama, the understated moments, and the big musical ones as well. And really, the film itself is just a technical triumph (which, no shit Sherlock, is how it managed to get so many nominations...so stop whining). The cinematography and the production design are breathtaking, and something we haven’t seen on screen in a very long time. And honestly? Fuck it, we need some joy in this joyless time. Stop fighting it. Singing and dancing doesn’t make it frivolous, but it does reveal how short-sighted some people are when it comes to films.

Lion

First of all, if Sunny Pawar goes missing, don’t look at me. It’s not my fault he’s so goddamn adorable. He stars as young Saroo in the first half of Lion, which tracks a little boy who finds himself aboard a non-passenger train headed across India. He ends up in Calcutta, unable to speak the language or tell local authorities where he’s from. He’s eventually adopted by an Australian family, and grows up in a loving home. But as an adult, he struggles to piece together his journey and find his way back home. This movie will definitely reduce you to a puddle of tears, so keep some tissues handy. However, I did have some issues with it: mainly, the tonal difference between the first half (which I loved), and the second half, which felt weirdly cerebral, until it reverted back to tear-jerking melodrama at the very end. And when given the choice between the melodramatic and the cerebral, I will choose melodrama every time. Despite that, I will say Dev did a great job with portraying adult Saroo’s struggles, his wrestling with his identity and his privilege, his being torn between two lives and two families. Nicole Kidman is also spectacular as Saroo’s mother, and it’s a bit of a pity she wasn’t given more screen time. The scene where she tells Saroo the story of how and why he was adopted is a standout.

Hidden Figures

This is one of those films that tells you an important fact about history that you wouldn’t have otherwise known, and you’re grateful to have been introduced to the story, but when you break it down it’s a bit of a paint-by-numbers film. Don’t get me wrong, it’s one of my favorite films of the year, and it has infinite repeat value. It makes you feel good, and as I said, we can’t underestimate the importance of movies that manage to do that. And Taraji, Octavia, and Janelle are amazing, both individually and as a threesome. But this is a movie for the audience, not for the Oscars. The women were pathbreaking; the film isn’t. But that’s okay! If you watch it, you will undoubtedly love it to pieces, but it’s up against stiff competition this year.

Hacksaw Ridge

On paper, the story (a true one) is beautiful. It’s about Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who, despite refusing to take up arms or harm another man for religious reasons, becomes a WWII medic who saves countless lives. Andrew Garfield gives a lovely performance as Doss, who walks a fine line between goofiness, earnestness, and pure grit. The issue I had with this movie was a personal one: it’s obscenely gory, to the point where my stomach turned (and I’m not usually bothered by these things). The problem is that I can see why the gore was necessary...because hey, that’s war! People’s faces get blown off, they lose limbs, bodies are used as shields. You sort of have to see the graphic violence to understand how important it is that Doss never once picks up a rifle to defend himself. His commitment to peace and healing, juxtaposed against such a violent environment, is truly moving. But I just can’t deal with the level of gore, sorry. If you’re like me and you’re thinking about watching this film, I’d suggest fast-forwarding through the war scenes and focusing on the aftermath. It’s definitely worth watching, just...don’t be surprised if you have an urge to vomit at some point.

Manchester by the Sea

How many different adjectives are there for overrated? I’d heard so much about this film going into it, and perhaps expectation is the root of all disappointment, but all I could see were one-note performances slapped with the term “internalized” to justify them. Lucas Hedges is a serviceable young actor, but hardly the discovery of a lifetime. And then there’s Casey Affleck, who has one good scene in the whole film but is somehow still considered a frontrunner for the Best Actor Oscar. Michelle Williams as the protagonist’s ex-wife is good, but it’s certainly not her best and her competitors were better. The film is a misery fest, which would be fine if you didn’t spend the entirety of it waiting for one person to react to their situation like a normal human being instead of, you know, a sociopath. I think this is a case of confusing a very sad, very moving story with a good film/good performance. Casey’s character is extraordinary...his performance, however, is not.

Hell or High Water

I don’t have much to say about this movie. The premise is intriguing, it’s a bit of a modern day Bonnie and Clyde, and it does reflect upon the new American reality. But jfc, is it boring. Chris Pine gives a great performance, and I enjoyed the banter between Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham...but you can honestly skip this movie and lose out on nothing except the overwhelming feeling that you have dust in your shoes.

Fences

This movie could have been brilliant; it could have been the best of the year. It’s touching, it’s human, and it’s thought-provoking. Unfortunately, they forgot they were making a movie and chose to shoot it exactly like the play. That means that we pretty much never leave the characters’ backyard. It means that all Denzel Washington’s character does is TALK, and talk, and talk some more. And everyone knows that silences are just as important as dialogue. Denzel is fantastic here, but the choices he made as a director hurt the film. Thankfully, Viola Davis is here to save the day. Her confrontation scene alone is enough to warrant her the Oscar. It’s just a pity she’s in the wrong category.

Captain Fantastic

SO underrated! This movie gained no traction leading up to awards season, but it truly is something different onscreen, and you can rarely say that about any movie. Because you’ve probably never heard of it, I’ll quickly summarize: a radical father of six children living off the land is forced to return to society after his wife commits suicide and reflect upon the life he has built for his family. It sounds depressing, but it’s not at all. It’s genuinely moving, with moments of absolute hilarity. You will be laughing one minute, crying the next. Viggo Mortensen gives far and away the best performance among the male nominees, and it’s a shame that with the campaigning system, he’s not going to get any recognition for it.

Elle

I’m torn between wanting to rip this movie to fucking shreds, and not wanting to dignify it with too much ~discourse~. I’ll only say that it offended me deeply as a woman and as a sexual assault survivor, and it was not a story that needed to be told. The complexity of womanhood, of sexuality, and of responses to trauma are all worthy themes to explore...and Elle managed to do that it the worst way for it. Just because they’re speaking French and the story is edgy doesn’t make it any good. It’s absolute junk. and I love Isabelle Huppert, but she left me cold in this role and as much as I’d like to see her be recognized for her body of work, I’ll be really upset if this is the film that does it for her. This film deserves nothing. Au revoir, assholes.

Loving

This film tells a story we’re all vaguely familiar with, Loving vs. the State of Virginia, the landmark case that legalized interracial marriages on a federal level. What we don’t learn about is the people behind the case, the Lovings. Unfortunately, the execution of this film was a bit “Lifetime Movie of the Week” for my taste, but Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton give beautiful performances. If you want to see internalized done right, look to this film, not Manchester by the Sea. Ruth is luminescent onscreen, and is able to communicate so much with just her eyes and body language. The same goes for Joel, who was even more impressive and unfortunately got royally screwed out of an Oscar nomination. Watch it not because it’s pathbreaking cinema, but because it’s a piece of history that needed to be humanized.

Florence Foster Jenkins

Look, I am a sucker for movies about old people. I cried like a goddamn baby throughout this entire film, and I am not ashamed to admit it. There has been a lot of controversy over whether or not Meryl Streep deserved her nomination, and while I too would have liked to have seen Amy Adams get in for Arrival, I wouldn’t call Meryl undeserving. I think the truth is that every performance she gives is worthy, people just get a little tired of seeing her name on the nominations list. It’s become a case of, Well, how is she going to beat what she’s already done? And if you’re looking at it from that perspective, FFF isn’t going to be a cornerstone film in her cinematic journey. But she’s pretty amazing, as she is in everything she does, and I was really intrigued by her character (particularly her relationship with her husband, played by Hugh Grant). What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that people aren’t giving this movie a fair shake. It’s a bit silly at times, and a bit melodramatic, but it’s entertaining and it’s moving. I’d sit through FFF a hundred times before rewatching Hell or High Water, not sorry to say.

Jackie

It’s a good movie, with good direction, good staging, and good acting. So what’s wrong with it? I think what we can surmise is that it’s time to put Jackie Kennedy to rest, literally and figuratively. She’s too singular a person to be portrayed onscreen without the portrayal coming off as a caricature. Natalie Portman (whom I don’t normally care for) gave her all to this role, and still came off looking like Natalie Portman playing dress up as Jackie Kennedy. Jackie was a strange looking beauty with a strange sounding accent. You can dress up as many Hollywood brunettes in her iconic pink suit as you want, but they’re still not going to capture what was so remarkable about Jackie Kennedy. And as much as I love the Kennedys and am intrigued by their story...enough. We’ve seen all this before, multiple times. If you’re going to make a film on them, at least focus it on other members of the family. This particular time in history has been covered onscreen in abundance, and as an audience....we get it. It was terrible, it was sad, it was the death of American royalty, it was a standout moment in our history. Time to move on.

Nocturnal Animals

I’m a bit upset that this movie didn’t make it to the list of Best Picture nominees. Tom Ford is such an interesting director, and this was a strong followup to his beautiful debut, A Single Man. Michael Shannon managed to score a Best Supporting Actor nom, but I truly feel Jake Gyllenhaal was snubbed for a Lead Actor nom. His performance, and the film in general really, walked a fine line between stylization and gritty, violent realism. And the ending of the film is so understated, but still manages to deliver a kick in the gut. Don’t let the lack of Academy love keep you from giving this movie a chance, because it really was under-appreciated this year.

My personal choices:

Best Picture: Arrival or Moonlight

Best Director: Damien Chazelle for La La Land

Best Actor: Viggo Mortensen for Captain Fantastic

Best Actress: Emma Stone for La La Land

Best Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali for Moonlight

Best Supporting Actress: Viola Davis for Fences

[jadedamber]

So you’re slugging it as a temp...

I’ve debated whether it would help anyone if I posted my thoughts on temp workers in office situations in general and in creative fields in particular, and decided, heck, yes, maybe. So here goes.

I’ve been a creative supervisor in corporate field long enough to have gone through managing a number of temps, and while some (two, let’s be real) managed to stay on to become permanent additions to our department, we parted ways with a much greater number of temps who did not work out for various reasons.  

If anyone reading wants to break into a design job, and is roughing it as a freelancer/temp for now, hopefully this will help you up your game.

Things to remember right off the bat:

I. If you’re getting hired as a temp, it probably means one of two things:

1. The company is cheap as hell and doesn’t want to pay for full time workers, and/or 2. It’s a temporary and sudden crunch time, and they need bodies to throw at the crisis.

Both of these things mean that the poor shmuck who will be supervising you is overworked, overstressed, and does not have enough time and resources to train you. It’s not their fault. Most of them would train/hire you in a heartbeat if they had that power. Most of them are happy you’re there, and are dearly invested in you picking up the necessary skills to succeed (because your failure will be on that supervisor’s head).

That means:

II. Attitude is everything. I mean, I’ve had workers who came in with false information about what the job would be (for various reasons) and panicked/resented the fact that they did not know the things we needed from them, but because some of them were open to learning, I had no problem teaching them on the fly, and one such former temp just had their second annual review, if you catch my meaning. It was a good review, too. The other ones used their time with my team as a learning experience and a resume fodder. Still others were gone after a couple of miserable days.

Plus, a good reference from your direct supervisor is a commodity (as I’m learning), and when you’re a temp, your supervisor knows you’re most likely looking around, so most of them are less twitchy about being asked for those.

III. If the supervisor tells you to please ask questions if you don’t understand something - TAKE THEM UP ON IT!  I cannot stress it enough. My teammates and I would much rather be interrupted in our work than have to redo something that was done incorrectly due to assumptions or lack of knowledge - or worse, be confronted with the mistake with 15 minutes to hand-off time. If something does not feel right, say something. If something doesn’t add up - speak up. It won’t make you look incompetent, I swear. No one expects a temp to know all the ins and outs of a particular company.

That brings me to next point:

IV. No one cares if you project-managed elsewhere. I don’t care if you delegated tasks to others before. Here and now, I am your boss and if I say we have to do it a certain way, don’t fucking cowboy it out. If you think there’s a better way, and your supe seems cool, by all means, voice it (in a concise way, please) but don’t salute ok and then do it your way because it’s better in your opinion. You may not know something. There might be reasons that are beyond your scope of knowledge. If your boss seems too busy/assholish, ask your teammates. 

V. Ask your teammates about your supervisor. If they seem reluctant to answer, that should be as clear a signal as if they complained to you for an hour. On the other hand, in my experience, if the boss is cool, people will be pretty happy to tell you. Take them seriously, but watch non-verbal cues, of course, as those are more accurate, usually.

VI. If your goal is to learn as much as possible and move on - GO ALL IN. Ask your teammates questions, watch how they do things, pick up the lingo, volunteer for difficult tasks. And most of all, shut up and listen.  I mean it kindly. If your goal is to learn, then don’t waste your time teaching (or explaining how wonderful you are). You’re there for knowledge, not an ad campaign (unless you’re temping at an ad agency (I’m hilarious, I know, shut up)).

VII. Remember, you’re “just a temp”. I don’t mean it in a derogatory way, but as a reality check. So you think you’re more talented/better worker/whatever than this full-timer over here? Watch and learn what it is that made the company hire that person. You might not want to copy them, but you should at least know what the rules of the game are.  Until you find your stride/voice/strengths, it helps to absorb whatever you can.

VIII. Remember, you’re “just a temp”. This also means that your career is not hinged on this job, so if you keep being treated like crap, pick up the subtle (or not so subtle) cues, and talk to your agency about finding another gig. It’s not worth getting shat on if there are other projects out there, and you won’t know until you ask your rep. 

IX. Make yourself useful. Literally if you’re a temp and you become hella helpful to your supervisor, most of them will fight for you to become full time, if that’s at all a possibility. It doesn’t mean you have to be Gal Friday (or Guy Friday) and be a perfect employee. For example, one of my teammates freaks out every time I split her project with another person, but in a crisis situation she’s the one most likely to stay late and get it done, and I value the shit out of her for that. Another one is kind of slow and I don’t give her any of the most urgent projects, but trust me, if there’s anything that takes finesse and painstaking labor, she’s my go-to person. So, if you act like your boss has to, like, deserve your best effort - nobody cares. No one owes you to “get to know you” or discover you. You might be a fabulous painter, but if you can’t cut a straight line (literally a recent problem we had), I’m sorry, but I can’t use you. Go find a job painting, not working in a fast-paced corporate environment.

X. Take them seriously. This should be a no-brainer, but somehow, it’s something that keeps coming up. I respect your right for self expression, but if the company policy states that you can’t wear graphic t shirts, please fucking listen. If you’re supposed to come in at a certain time, please listen. If you’re told that you’re supposed to check in after a certain task, even though you’ve been doing that task since before you were born and can perform it asleep, drunk, in negative degree weather, on your head - please. please. fucking. listen. 

I just had to let someone go who was very surprised at the news, despite having had several private conversations/warnings regarding following instructions, and it was frustrating for both of us. They thought they were being very productive, because they were doing so much. I thought they were a waste of everyone’s time and resources, because they kept screwing up - not for lack of knowledge, but because oh... they really meant it not to do THAT to a cricut machine... huh. And oh, I guess THAT’s why you save this file a certain way. Like, I don’t got time to deal with that, bye. 

BONUS: If you’re let go, very good chances are, no one will tell you the reason. Your now former supervisor is still overworked and overstressed, It’s an unpleasant conversation no one wants to have, and - since you clearly haven’t made good enough impression - nobody cares about you to give you some tips for the future. 

That’s ok - take the silence as your one huge cue, try to remember all the times things went wrong and what, in retrospect, you should have done differently. Again, you were just a temp, it’s not like you messed up your chances at the Project Runway or American Idol or whatever. 

Just learn. 

It’s not fun, and it’s tough, but hey, you’re the one who wanted a creative job.

Plus it could be that it’s not even you - the agency’s fee might’ve gone up, the big boss has deemed that the crisis has passed (whether it’s true or not), or the budget for a temp has dried up. Most big bosses I’ve dealt with really seem to not consider the fact that temp workers have lives and budgets like the rest of us, and it’s ok to just tell the agency we don’t need them to come in anymore. If your supe is cool, and they have insider knowledge, they WILL warn you if they at all can and they feel like they can trust you not to throw them under the bus.

Use this also to figure out if that is the field you want to be in. One of my best teammates had no clue what they wanted to do after college, temped for my team, and realized they were really into consumer goods (vs. say, web or ad jobs). Another temp knew she wanted to do publishing, worked with us anyway, confirmed it for herself, and left to follow her dream. You just don’t always know right from the start, and it’s ok.

All of the above used to seem very common sense to me, but life disabused me of that notion. And because I realize not everyone is on the same level in life, I hope me sharing these tips will help someone to succeed in this field that increasingly wants more and more experience for entry level positions. Because sometimes temp work is how you get there. 

Go get ‘em, tiger!

[brendajhensonblog]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 232

Click on the video above to watch Episode 232 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

Hernan: Hey, everybody, welcome to Hump Day hangouts episode hold on episode 232 My name is Adam Moody. I’m reading the script that has just said and it’s pretty cool to have you guys here. Today’s the 17th of April and this is looking good. So I’m just going to go and you know in honor to or beloved Adam and Secretary which will be going to be missing on this episode. I’m going to be saying hi to everyone on the list as I see them. What’s up, Marco?

Marco: Oh, I’m first Holy fuck the Latinos first today.

Hernan: Yeah, man.

Marco: We always end up in the back of the bus, but here I am, man. I got a little bit of a cold but I’m still enjoying the beautiful weather. So that’s life. You know, life sucks sometimes. Yeah.

Hernan: How about you Bradley? How’s everything man?

Bradley: I’m happy man I’m happy to be here. Things are good. So yeah, we got a very few questions on the new chat app guys we really apologize about that piece of shit Facebook app that we had on here for two weeks and it got every everybody that commented last week apparently got their Facebook account locked. It was nuts. And anyway, I apologize for that we had no idea was going to be like that I got my I got locked out of my account, or non did Marco did. Several of our mastermind members. It was Wow. Anyways, we apologize, we had no idea something like that was going to happen. That’s why we got this new one on there that looks kind of funky. But it’s kind of cool because it I mean, we’re going to find out if it’s cool or not. It looks old school as hell but it does give us the ability to post gifts and you can sign in and create an account so that you can actually put your image there which I recommend you guys do so that we know who we’re talking to. But if you want to stay anonymous that just use the use it without logging and that’s up to you. But anyway, so moving on. Hopefully, this will be satisfactory. We’ll see.

Hernan: Yeah, yeah, it sounds good man. So we have some people putting Jeff’s or gifts already. That’s pretty cool. So a couple of things that we usually do. If you’re new to semantic mastery, welcome, good to have you here. Don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel. If you want to know more about how we do things, you can go to semantic mastery calm for a slash hump day to be notified every time we go live. And you can come and ask your questions. This is free 100% free. We’ve been doing this for the past seven or five years. And it’s been awesome. So thank you for being here. And if you’re not new to semantic mastery, thank you, thank you for the support. This is awesome. Don’t forget to if you want to step by step repeatable system to you know, rank your websites whatever those are local websites, new websites, age websites, go to Battle Plan out semantic mastery calm and get the battle plan and if you’re ready to join a group of people that are growing their local marketing agencies and whatnot, come to the mastermind which is mastermind.semanticmastery.com. And for all of your done for you premium done for you with SEO services with the stamp of approval of semantic mastery don’t accept second options go to em gee, Why be the SEO and you will have everything that you will ever need for your you know, delivering needs because you shouldn’t be doing the link building you should be growing your agency that makes sense. So those are the announcements I think I nailed it. I might have something I’m going to paste Now I need to copy and paste some stuff on the thing so so yeah, there was we got I guess,

Bradley: Let me tease what you’re doing tomorrow or non so that you don’t have to toot your own horn. We got, we’ve been doing kind of a series in the mastermind. We’re probably going to end up launching a product around it anyways, but it’s Pay Per Click marketing for local and how to get results. We had a course that I produced about two, maybe two and a half years ago now called Local Kingpin. And it was specifically for using Google AdWords obviously, it’s now Google ads, but formerly Google AdWords for setting up lead gen assets and dry and using, you know, producing leads for local businesses, either on a client basis or even on a lead gen basis where you’re selling leads. And that worked really well. But the Google Ads dash dashboard, the whole platform has evolved a lot in the last two and a half years, considerably. And, you know, Google Ads themselves for search ads, excuse me, so search ads are rather expensive, you can still be profitable with that. There’s no question but it’s fucking expensive. So I’ve actually gotten away from using search ads and get more into using display ads and YouTube ads and remarketing obviously, and it works really well because the display ads are the display ad platform is so much better than it used to be. And you know, years ago when I had developed the local kingpin training

It was in that method that I was using display ads. Suck it, they might have worked, but it sucked setting them up because you had to go out in the order or design your own banner ads and you had designed them and all the various sizes that you wanted to display them in. So the leaderboard, and you know, this 350 by 250 rectangles, you know, all these different sizes. And so it was a pain in the ass, I would hire a graphic designer to develop a set of banner ads, and that would be one set of banner ads, and it might cost me 50 or 60 bucks. If you wanted to split test, you’d have to pay for another set of ads, right. And so it was just it was you’d have to wait for you know, several days to get them back from the designer. And it’s a real pain in the ass. And so it wasn’t very efficient. And it wasn’t very effective unless you really split test a lot and then found a winning combination of ads. But now what you can do on the Display Network when you’re setting up display ads is you actually just import photos, it photos and images and let your logo as well and

It’s a square version and rectangular version for each. And then you get to add up to five short headlines, one long headline and then up to five descriptions. So and there’s, you know, character limits for each. But then what Google does is Google will create responsive display ads out of just the images that you upload it to just regular photos will work or graphics, either one and then will automatically start rotating through your various headlines and descriptions to find out which gets the highest click through as an engagement. And then it will start to auto-optimize the campaign and start serving the ads that are the combinations that performed the best more and more often. And so it’s so much easier to set up a campaign now. And although obviously, display ads don’t convert nearly as well as like search ads do, it’s a fraction of the cost guys, and with the audience targeting that Google Display Network has now or Google has period. They have what they call in market audiences and life event audiences and you can even create custom intent audiences.

is now based on keywords which are really cool. I just started playing with that actually. And so if you go and find the you know in the in the in the in-market audience targeting settings if you can go in and find an end market audience for the businesses that you’re generating leads for then those tend to be very good and like for me for contractors typically a the average cost per click runs between anywhere between about 85 cents to $1 50. So somewhere in that range depending on what type of contractor it is that I’m generating leads for. And so that’s a fraction of the cost it just for it’s just quickly for some perspective here, for roofing leads, for example, it could in some of the areas that I do SEO work and generate leads for roofers of roofing. A click for search ads for roofing type keywords can cost 35 to $40 per click. And you know, typically an average conversion rate is somewhere anywhere between 32

40% right, so you’re talking about three clicks to get one lead at $35 per click, that’s $105 per lead. That, to me is incredibly expensive. But with those, if you can there in the market audience targeting, you can actually see that there are a roofing odd Roofing Services in the market audience, and you can use that for display ads. And maybe this says you pay $1 per click will just use a nice round number. And it might be a 10% conversion rate as opposed to 30 or even a 5% conversion rate, which means you need 20 clicks to get one lead, but 20 clicks at $1 to get one lead guy think about that as 20 bucks per lead as opposed to 100 bucks per lead when you’re using search ads. So keep that in mind and that’s for cold traffic. But also for remarketing purposes. Like honestly, if you’re not using remarketing in you’re doing Client Services, you’re nuts because it’s just an inexpensive way to get additional traffic back to

The site and even if that traffic doesn’t convert a lot, a lot of it will, but doesn’t convert into leads. It’s a great branding tool to help that business to gain brand recognition so that people will think of them and go search for their brand name when it’s time for them to need their product or service because they’re constantly reminded of that business. So, long story short,

we’re going to work we’ve been doing a series of training inside the mastermind about using Google ads for Local Lead Generation, not search ads, but display ads and YouTube ads and remarketing ads. And tomorrow Hernan being the Facebook marketing expert that he is, he’s coming into the mastermind to do a full training on how to use Facebook ads for Local Lead Generation. And then we’re actually going to probably be packaging all that up over the next 60 to 90 days at some point and then launching that as a separate product as kind of an update to local kingpin, but we’re going to rebrand it because it’s really going to be a whole new course. Did you guys lose me?

Hernan: No

Bradley: I got a frozen screen. Okay, yeah, there you go. Okay, so anyways, just kind of wanted to teach you guys a little bit on what’s going on in the mastermind tomorrow. Those of you that are the mastermind a lot there’s been a discussion thread by the way or not, did you see the discussion thread in the Facebook group, but are saying that we’re going to rope you into actually contributing more than just the mastermind because they want a full soup to nuts type train. Yeah. So yeah, well, yeah, if there’s a need for it,  you know, the mastermind has the privilege that you know, if you guys there’s a real need about, you know, a specific type of training that you guys want to go after, then we can make a series there’s no problem about that. We’re all about, you know, serving our members as much as we possibly can. So that if that, you know, we have a good response tomorrow, that’s potentially going to happen, at least initially within the mastermind, and then we’ll go from there. But yeah, my idea is to cover as much terrain as possible tomorrow specifically, and then if we need to do another iteration of the, of the training or you know, walk you guys through a couple of case studies. So for instance, I was going through one of the clients that I manage, and we, so he’s a chiropractor. He’s a local chiropractor, and he has four clinics in Dallas. And over the past, I would say over the past six months, we have spent around $160,000 in advertising, and we have generated almost 4000 confirm appointments to those four offices. Now that is rough. So he is charging $49 per appointment, right? It’s an intra massage offer. So he’s charging $49 per appointment. We’re getting him we’re getting those appointments for around 39 to $40. So he’s, you know, making money on the front end, but that’s not even the best thing. The best thing is that each customer forth to him on average $300 you know because they show up to his office and they buy a bunch of stuff and they buy additional massages and they buy so that’s

Average and that’s on the low side. So there’s, there’s effectively we have been moving the needle real hard. He’s super happy Of course because he’s growing. He’s expanding locations and whatnot, and some of the stuff that we were able to implement for him. We will be talking about tomorrow on the mastermind, so it’s going to be pretty cool. Yeah, awesome. Yeah. Alright, so the last thing we’re going to tease before we get into questions, which we were kind of just hoping that more questions would fill in this chat box anyways, uh, we’ve got video lead gen system

to Dotto really is launching next week, next Tuesday. As a matter of fact, we’re going to talk about it well, the first part of next week’s webinar, Hump Day hangouts is going to be where we’re going to, you know, kind of get into some detail about what it’s about and all that because I completely updated it so that still the old training is there, the old method, which I did for years, but over the last several months, I’ve been really redeveloping that method to make it more streamlined and efficient, something that a lot of it can be outsourced, but also just to make it to where, even if you were doing this yourself like, you know, managing the all of the video lead gen or video email campaigns on your own, I don’t recommend that. But if a lot of people still going to do it on their own anyway, it’s a lot more efficient now to where what used to take roughly 20 to 30 minutes per video email to send out. Now what will take you just two to three minutes No kidding, there’s there will be a setup period on the front end where you can’t get into the method here, there’ll be a setup period where it might take you an hour to get everything set up. But then from there for every prospect you want to mail to, it’s literally two to three minutes. And that’s it. And so it’s a hell of a lot more efficient. And I’ve tested a lot of different follow-up methods from that as well to once you are notified of engagement and I talked about all of this in the training and found several different methods that work really well to the kind of get the conversation going and stuff and so I go into great detail. It’s basically a whole new course but you’re still going to get the original version, as well as the Everything’s under

The same membership site now. So there’s the original version, which still works, but it’s a bit more time-consuming. And then there’s the newer version that can be applied to pretty much any sort of marketing service I use specifically one, were really two types of methods for monetizing it. In the examples and in the training, I talked about how to use it for monetizing lead gen assets. And then I also talked about for client services, if you’re just doing outreach for clients instead of lead generation service providers. Then, you know, there’s a method I talked about specifically optimizing GMB stuff, but it can be modified or an applied to pretty much any sort of service that you offer. So if you’re a digital marketer does Facebook ads like her non for example, you could still use the video lead gen system, you just obviously are going to talk about how you can get results with Facebook as opposed to how you can get results with Google My Business. So any of you guys one of the things that we do is we surveyed you guys on a consistent basis to find out what what-what our audience needs, and something that comes up all the time is client getting right? securing clients and that kind of stuff. And so that’s really what this was all about. It’s so that you guys can go out and least get the conversation started. It’s not sales training. I’m not real good at sales unless I got a referral, like been referral but as far as getting the conversation going for prospecting, it’s an outstanding way to do it’s very unique, you’ll get a lot of responses that way. And then it’s really going to be up to you to present your offer in such a way that you close the client, you know what I mean? Or the prospect at that point. So anyways, be on the lookout for that guys. Next week, we’re going to do like we typically have done in the past, which is a limited offer on the front end for 24 hours and then the price will go up. And that’s typically how we do that. So be on the lookout for that next week.

Okay, anything else? I think we’re good.

Alright, cool. Let’s get into questions. Alright, so with our 1989 looking chat box, which kind of cool though. Let’s get into it will start at the top

What Are Your Thoughts On Keyword Research Ninja?

KT says what are your thoughts on keyword research ninja? I have no thoughts on it whatsoever I’ve never used it I really don’t use any keyword research tools anymore other than Power Suggest Pro, Google AdWords you know, the Google Ads keyword planner for because I still do PPC stuff. And then we have our own in-house keyword research product that is like anytime you need keywords, that’s, you know, our go-to source now is MGYB? We have the keyword research done over there because it takes hours to compile a good list of keywords. Really, you can spend hours doing that and organizing the keywords into silos and you know, proper themes and that kind of stuff. And that’s what our, you know, our product on keyword research is specifically it’s you know, our assistant or employee that does all of that have access to multiple tools, SEM Rush, Power Suggest Pro, you know, all different kinds of tools that she uses to actually develop these reports and puts them into silos and all that kind of stuff. So different type of intent keywords, commercial intent, informational queries, that kind of stuff. So it just makes it super easy. So honestly, I can’t give you an opinion on any of those keyword tools because I just don’t use them. It just requires too much time in my opinion. And I’d rather outsource that or use a simple tool when I’m going to do it myself such as Power Suggest Pro. Marco or anybody else wants to comment on any of those.

Marco: I agree that that’s all I use. I use our keyword research. I mean, I taught them how to do it for a reason it’s based on the way that you do it. And the way that I do it, which is Google Trends and power suggest Pro with Google ads, right the Keyword Planner Tool, and but the basis is right there. Then we go into everything else and we drill down as much as we can get as much information as possible go to Answer the Public. We just use just a ton of different tools that we can get all of the keywords. I mean, you get thousands sometimes I see our report come back, and it’s 7, 8, 9 thousand keywords strong. And I’m thinking, this is like the best way to take down a market. Let me if you really need to start and understand your market and the words involved in your market. There’s nothing better. I mean, I don’t know I can’t speak on keyword research Ninja, it might be fabulous. But I can’t say anything other than the way that we have it set up works perfectly well for what we do. Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah. And again, it’s the amount of time that goes into that, you know, I got away from doing it myself because it just takes too much time. Especially to Oregon. Like it’s easy to spit out a bunch of keywords with a tool but to organize them in proper themes, you know, and basically silos and that kind of stuff and intent type people words like that’s yet I mean, as far as I know, that’s manual. I don’t know tools that actually do that maybe keyword research and into does that. I don’t know, I don’t even look at tools like that anymore. So, unfortunately, I can’t give you a good answer to that.

Does Using Subdomains Produce Better SEO Juice Than Using Pages For Multi-City Local Lead Gen Site?

Gordon’s up he says thank you very much again for the help you provide on hump days. You’re welcome. He says he when setting up a multi-city local lead gen site you have advised in the past few subdomains of the main domain for each city instead of using a page under the main domain. When using pages, I know that the SEO juice can be spread among all the city pages, but when using subdomains is the SEO just spread among all the subdomains to help each other one rank met each one rank better, or does each subdomain stand on its own for SEO purposes? Well, it’s a little of both Gordon because, again, a subdomain is treated as a separate entity by Google right. But there is the parent domain being the root domain. So you can the way I always looked at it was subdomains and other subdomains of the same root domain are called siblings, sibling domains, right and the parent domain being the root.

And so what happens is each one of the subdomains or sibling domains are their own standalone sites, which is good for protection purposes. And that’s what we’ve talked about. That’s the reason why I’ve always done that. Now, it’s funny because I really don’t do anything spammy anymore, at least not to the actual money sites. So I can probably get away with just doing the inner pages, but it’s still allowed. You’re still a, you know, and that it doesn’t mean that what we do right now, doesn’t couldn’t be considered spammy tomorrow, because we don’t work for Google. Right. And so even though I’ve never really had, at least for several years now, I haven’t had any issues with getting sites deindexed or penalize. I’ve always kept using subdomains specifically to minimize risk, right to reduce exposure, so to speak. Because as I’ve said before, if you put all of your location pages on the root, so their inner pages, right, and if you catch a penalty against any one of those pages, it could pull the whole site down and all of your other location pages.

Although again, as I said, the methods that we teach, haven’t knock on wood, they haven’t created any penalties that I’m aware of, for any of my own stuff, as well as any of our students, okay, that I’m aware of. And so you could probably get away with doing it on inner pages for management purposes, that would be much easier for there’s no doubt because you’d all you’d have just one site to manage. That said, though, just keep in mind that that’s putting all of your eggs in one basket. So if Google decides to take that basket, or destroy one of the eggs in that basket, it could very well hurt all the others as well. So back to the original question, a subdomain is kind of a standalone site in that if a subdomain was to catch a penalty, for some reason or another, it would only affect that subdomain, the route would be left intact would remain healthy and all of the other sibling domains or subdomains would also remain healthy, untouched, essentially, from that penalty that’s been levied against that one subdomain. So it’s isolates any potential penalty problems. However, if you were to catch a penalty against the root domain, it would automatically apply to all of the child domains or subdomains. Does that make sense? So that’s why we all I’ve done that in the past was to always protect the root against all odds, right? Protect the root. And then if I was going to do anything spammy, it would be on a subdomain level. And that was specifically for that reason.

However, what you can do is in this is something I’ve actually been testing recently, but I don’t have enough time passed to see in fact, I just talked about this on the last mastermind webinar, so 13 days ago, actually, about how to use subdomains and the root domain in conjunction to kind of power it up. And I can’t give away the the the method here because it can’t do that because it’s kind of an extension of something that we teach in our paid courses. But there is a way to still use somebody domains and use the root domain to kind of help power up the subdomains, with inner pages without doing anything that could catch it catch up a penalty to your route. But again, you know, as far as does the subdomains benefit each other, yes, it may not be quite as a quick effect or, or might not be as effective as inner pages. But here’s the thing, every one of those subdomains are still attached to the root, right. So again, the root domain being the parent domain is going to benefit now, you guys know we don’t talk. We don’t care much about metrics. We stopped caring about proprietary third-party metrics several years ago, but let’s just use one as an example because a lot of you guys will understand it this way. Let’s just use domain authority Moz’s metric and page authority is an example okay?

When you have a domain authority that sitewide including subdomains, right, so for example, if you have a domain authority of 20 five on the root, then your subdomains, when you create a new subdomain, it won’t automatically be 25. I don’t think so. But it will become it will benefit from the domain authority of the parent domain. And so what I have found over the years now that I’ve been developing these multi-location sites using subdomains is that at first, when you start developing, like, let’s say you start off with two locations, so you’ve got the root domain, and then to subdomains at, you know, each subdomain being four different location. And then you add, so you start optimizing, you know, doing what you do to get results. And then you add a third location. Well, that third location tech, you know, typically, according to my experience, will, will often start to get results faster than the first two dead, because it’s actually benefiting from some of the authority that has been accrued or you know, accumulated from the previous two subdomains and the route altogether, right. So as a whole, it’s now that that new subdomain is actually benefiting from the authority that has accrued from the previous two and the route itself if that makes sense. So then you add a fourth subdomain and you know, fourth location, and a fifth and a six. And what happens is I start to see each new location that I add, tends to respond quicker get results faster than the previous one, because it’s actually benefiting from the authority of the, you know, cluster essentially, that’s it’s the root domain, as well as its additional its other siblings. So, again, if you’re doing just inner pages, you’ll probably be going to get a faster effect from that. But I found that you know, as you continue to build out additional subdomains, they helped to, they kind of benefit or receive benefit from all of the previous subdomains as well. So they’re at their birth point, right. The moment that you create that subdomain, it really already has some inherent authority because of it being a subdomain of a root domain that has built authority or crude authority if that makes sense.

So, anyway, I can’t get into any more further of that, honestly, because I will be giving away too much. Come join the mastermind and will tell you all about it. So, Marco, do you want to comment on that at all or Hernan?

Marco: Now, just to validate a little bit what you’re talking about on domains, we see that domain subdomain. We see that when we do drive stacks, and we add additional folders and files, right? The more you add the more power that as you say, a cruise and I call it power. I don’t give a shit about domain authority or trust flow. I don’t give a crap about any of that its power. And so the more that you do have whatever it is that you’re doing inside the drive stack, the more power that you pushing through, and the more power that ends up wherever it is that you got that drives tech game. That’s why they work so well. Yeah. And so the more work that you do inside, the more keywords that you target, whether it’s keyword plus location or service, whatever it is that you’re doing.

You do more of it inside your drive stack. And before you know it, I mean, it’s just pushing tons of power wherever it is that you want to go. And we’ve seen people live from case studies that they even get an empty folder to rank before anything else rank. So it’s crazy the amount of power that you can do in this method, whether you’re doing it at the TL D and subdomain level or at the drive stack and G site level. Right?

Twitter Embed Code Not Displaying Properly In GSite

So if it says it says good day Semantic Mastery team thanks for this form to ask questions and get real answers. When optimizing the site, I framed Twitter the area stays blank with no message saying it won’t connect. Is that still okay? All right. I don’t do much Twitter stuff. But I know that if you just take a Twitter URL, tweet URL, a Twitter profile, URL, whatever and try to use an iframe create generator that it won’t show you have to go into Twitter developers and actually generate an embed code for it which you can do with like your timeline, tweets and stuff. So for example, you can take a Twitter profile and go to

The developers, I think it’s developers.twitter.com or something like that just do a Google search, you’ll see what I mean. And you can ask you, or even just go to Google and search, how do you create or embed a Twitter feed? And that’s what you would? Again, I don’t do much Twitter stuff. But if I was going to try, and I haven’t, so I haven’t tested it with G sites, guys, but you could probably it’s probably you’re using the wrong type of embed code. And that’s why it’s not displaying is what I’m saying. If you go generate the correct proper embed code from the Twitter developers site, or whatever, whatever it is, again, I don’t do much Twitter stuff, just like you can, you know, I recently I built Believe it or not, I built some PB ends recently because I was testing. I don’t use PB ends. Often guys, I very rarely use them. But I did build a few that I was testing and somebody product actually. And one of the things that they required was that you had made the site look, you know, very real. So one of the things that asked for was embedding a Twitter feed, so I had some persona profiles from some older since networks that I had built that had Twitter profiles with, you know, updates. And so I just had I had, that’s how I learned to go build this little embed code. And that’s a Twitter feed in bed, that you have to go to the developers console and sign into that account. And then you create it that way. And it gives you the specific embed code for that Twitter feed. So it’s probably that you’re using the wrong one. Now, I could be wrong guys. Because like said, I don’t do much of that stuff with Twitter at all. But I’m pretty sure if you’re trying to use just an iframe generator with a Twitter profile or something like that, it’s going to be blank, it’s going to not work.

Can You iFrame A Facebook Business Page?

Now, the next part of that question is, can you iframe in a Facebook business page? As far as I know, no, I Facebook has iframe breakers that won’t allow you to embed them anywhere using any sort of tool. If anybody has a different answer please speak up.

Hernan: I think you’re right Bradley on that on that and I haven’t personally tried to iframe Facebook but I know that you know, Facebook is kind of against that other than Facebook videos, you know that what you can allow and but you can embed that an iframe that but other than that, I wouldn’t know? Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah, I know. There are some like plugins and stuff that will allow you to embed a or you know, display a Facebook page. But it actually Yes, you have to connect it via API and all that kind of stuff like, so there are WordPress plugins that will do that. But as far as just an embed code from Facebook, I don’t think that’s possible. Once again, I don’t do much Facebook stuff. So I couldn’t tell you with all certainty, but I can I know that, like, if you try to just take a Facebook URL, and iframe it, it won’t it all, it will never display anywhere. I’ve never seen that ever work. So you have to use stuff that connects via API or authorize or what are they called Facebook apps or whatever. We actually create all that shit in order just to get even a Facebook page to show in like a widget area on a website.

Hernan: Um, so yeah, and they’re even more like they’re, they’re even more like restrictive with all of the privacy stuff that they’re going through. So that you may want to consider so.

Bradley: yeah, and then you try to iframe or when you try to embed a Facebook comments app you see what happens the previous couple on the Hangouts that and I get it I guess that’s because people can act that shit so right cool we’re going to keep moving. This chat is already thousand better than anything before devices that is cool thanks to Vaughn I’m glad you guys liked it for a bus the new battle call right revert I think that’s one of the guests says get repeatable oh that’s you that was you that’s maybe a farm setting up by a cat gotcha well mines Bradley hmm feisty forehead motherfucker in charge just in case you guys wondered what that was all about.

Do Semantic Mastery RYS Stacks Add More Value To An Existing Syndication Network & GMB Page?

Bradley: The humanoid says Marco I have an RYS Drive stack order pending and creating an RYS stack I have my syndication network complete in my see when creating a try so that I have my syndication network completed my GMB URL done. would it add more value when I have you build my RYS stacks. Thank you will thank you will

I know that was directed to Marco I’m gonna put my two cents in first before Marco answers. And if you already have your syndication network all your profile URLs to become target URLs as well. guys remember it’s just kind of about it’s just like internal linking right with your syndication network. It’s there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be powering up your tier one assets as well. So if you have all of that I would actually absolutely include those but Marco, that’s more question for you.

Marco: Yeah, I’m thinking that he wants to know if he should have the team, put them into the bill, by all means, that that’s your tier one branded, it should be included and then So when did he get the spreadsheet to hit with link building. That’s what’s going to get hit your tier one branded your GMB and everything that’s inside that drive stack. So yes, by all means, have at it, and you’re going to see some really good results. I’ve been getting a bunch of testimony.

By the way of about people having to build links to their dry stacks and then the drive stacks just going crazy. Yeah once they get some the link building done so yes have added the same thing with the ad ID page. I’ve done some testing with that and just and that’s what I loved about it. It’s one of the easiest methods because all you gotta do is go submit link building gig order to you know, I wouldn’t say to just anybody but Daddy has got it down to a science and just taking like the ad ID the iframe loop stuff that we’ve talked about and again our paid courses and almost all of them it’s available that that just works really well and again, that’s just what that magic of I frames and when you combine that with Dr. stacks or even dr stacks alone, but that’s part of it because of you know, iframe in that gets done in the site, everything else so it’s just incredibly powerful. And just hitting those that’s the beautiful thing about it guys is you know, the daddy has link building pack service which is in MYB, right? They’re still spam links, but he’s good at what he does. He’s a pro, he’s a professional, there’s no doubt and because of that, he knows how to make it really effective. And then when you use something like Google assets as the target or Amazon domain as the primary target, then it can take that kind of abuse like you can hammer away at it, and it can take it and filter it like a champ. In fact, it just kind of powers it up. Now, it’s not something that I would ever direct to the money site, but you can do you know what I mean, but you can do it two very powerful tier one assets, which is why we developed the way that we do so that’s why we don’t even use VPN, who needs a pbn? When we can use Google and Amazon assets to create the same effect and then you spam links as opposed to and I call them spam and everybody who want to do spam. But guys, I mean, that’s what link building tools do they create spam links, you can call them whatever you want. That’s really what they are. Right and so pbn links are technically spammed links to you might be buying links from you know, a domain that has good metrics, but unless it’s super well themed and all that they’re typically spam links anyways, you know what I mean? So it’s just it’s about how you use them and what you point them at. And so we recommend doing it the way that you know, at least our method we use our method for specifically for a reason. It’s efficient, and it works well. Right.

All right old school, like daddy says, will it be set up like this tomorrow? Hernan? What’s tomorrow?

Hernan: The webinar? webinar or mastermind? Yeah, now it’s gonna be on a mastermind. Yeah. It’ll be in the regular mastermind.

Bradley: Jim, think that’s when? Yeah, just the regular master the live mastermind webinar page, just like we’ve always been doing over there. I we haven’t had any problems with that over there. Now it’s in the bond site. Yeah, right. The membership site, right.

So as far as I know, we’ve never had any problems not one complaint with it over there. We had a problem with the Disqus chat app. on these pages for some reason I think it’s a Click Funnels issue like it just didn’t jive well but on the traditional mastermind webinars inside the membership site we haven’t ever had a complaint on that so if I’m wrong and you guys got some complaints about it to make them known to make them known over there in the Facebook group not here.

How Would You Strategize Sending Out An Email Campaign For Over A Year?

I blue panda whoever that is, is hey guys hope this Jeff Oh, what the hell? That’s the same as what we had before. Maybe not okay. Hey, guys hope this chat function works better than this. That piece of shit Facebook jet cheese. Yeah. Or Geez, you’re right. That was terrible. Okay, onto my question. I have a list for my niche that is big enough to send 1000 emails per day for over a year. Wow. This is simply a law of big numbers campaign for my client. These will be a one time blast. Either they respond or they don’t and the next class goes out the next day what would be the best way to approach a list of this size style of sending? I don’t know I’ve never spammed at that level before. Spam demon.

And that’s exactly what you’re doing. So the best person to answer that question is unfortunately not here. That’s Chris, our partner, Chris, he, he’s been doing that kind of work for four years. He can give you the best advice on that. But he’s not here. I’m sorry, he’s traveling. Yeah, the only thing I would know to say is that make sure that you have plenty of sending from domain email account. So in other words, making sure that you’ve got several many, many, many different email account setup, you know, that you can send from because you’re probably going to burn every single account that you send from like, almost every day.

I don’t know for sure, because it depends on how clean your list is. But typically, when you’re sending out mass emails like that, from a particular account, especially 1000 per day, you have to have accounts that have developed some sort of reputation for or else when you go to hit send on 1000 emails from an account that’s not really seasoned. It will you know, the is the internet search or email service providers will throttle those accounts and not the inbox. You know a bunch of them and also with people will start hitting the spam button which it’s likely if they were unsolicited emails, you will get a lot of people hitting the spam button, it will flag that particular domain account for or domain email excuse me for spam and so it will like they’ll just stop unboxing her nine you were going to comment? Yeah, yeah,

I agree with you. What I was about to say is that if you want to, you know, reach out to Chris just post in the Facebook group and maybe take him I don’t know if blue pen is on the mastermind group. Yeah, if you’re in the mastermind, we could get to it. You know, Chris will give you a lot of help out there. Otherwise, you could try it in the free Facebook group and I don’t know how much he’ll reveal about something like that there. But yeah, that’s the only problem like guys I talked about this a few weeks ago, but you know, I got I’ve unsubscribed from just about every single marketing list that I’m I’ve ever been on.

Over the last several months, because I decided to get really focused and you know, buying shiny objects and getting pitched new training, you know, methods and stuff like that all the time was really, and I, you know, there’s they’re kind of happens in cycles. I know a lot of you guys we’ve I’ve talked with a lot of our mastermind members over the last several months I do calls now with, you know, one on one calls with mastermind members, as a new member, you get a one on one call with one of us. And then every quarter or so I try to open up the ability to have another 30 minute call with me so I can kind of help you know, find out more about people in our mastermind and what struggles are going through and offer some guidance and and and, you know, 90 days to six months and three to six months, I have another call with them, find out if they made any progress, and they’re going to have new issues at that point. So one of the things that I’ve heard a lot through those calls without calling anybody out is that, you know, constantly being bombarded with different opportunities. And that’s because we’re all marketers, right? And so we’ve gone out and been signed up for whatever ours, which puts us on email list or we bought products, which puts us on email lists. And the next thing you know, we get hammered and you guys can all relate I’m sure you get hammered and hammered and hammered all the time with solicitation offers for training or for software or tools or services and all that kind of stuff. And you know,

I found that although they may be interesting and sometimes entertaining to go like watch webinars or to go check out the new sales page of the new tool that or software or WordPress plugin or whatever the hell it is, that typically just distracts from making any progress a real progress in my business and you know, over the years I’ve gone up and down with that, you know, sometimes a more susceptible to that other times I’m not but over the last many months now I really just started to unsubscribe from you know, ton of people’s emails. The reason I started saying that was because my oldest email account that is the account that I use, it’s a Yahoo account, Yahoo mail account, that’s the one that I used to always sign up for stuff like I don’t use my main Gmail accounts for for to sign up for lists or two webinars and things like that, because I knew that I get on a spam list, right and people would start spamming me. I’m still getting a ton of spam over there. But I’ve never voluntarily or I very, very rarely voluntarily used one of those primary Gmail type email addresses for signing up for that stuff. But I had a Yahoo mail account that was just getting spammed to death. And so over the last several months, I have really, really gotten a much better handle on that too. Because what I’ve done is I’ve gone every time I get an email now I just daily maintenance Now, every single day, I go through my Yahoo account probably two maybe three times a day. And if there’s an email that came is comes to me that I was unsolicited, which is you know, it’s they don’t come nearly as often as they used to now, I open up the email, I scroll right to the bottom finance subscribe button, I click it and make sure you know in the page reloads that it’s that in the net new tab that I’ve unsubscribed. Then I close that tab and I go back in and I click the spam button and Yahoo

And I do that every single day. And, you know, I used to get literally dozens, sometimes hundreds of emails per day, as many of you guys can probably relate. And now I swear to God, this is no bullshit over the last, probably five to six weeks now, I might get two or three emails per day and some days I don’t get any spam or unsolicited emails anymore. And that’s because I’ve gotten into the habit of doing that. So now it’s much more manageable like that, that email counts almost like a clean account. Now I do still get occasional as I said, Sometimes I’ll get one. Sometimes I get two or even three spam emails where it’s another internet marketer that bought my name off the list somewhere and sends me some bullshit email about the newest WordPress plugin. But I open up the email, I go straight to the unsubscribe button, unsubscribe and then come back and hit the spam button. And so it’s really really reduced that now the reason I said that was because if you start emailing people with unsolicited emails, you’re likely going to have many of them going to hit that spam button and that’s going to tank your deliverability, just like that. So if you’re going to be doing that sort of a strategy, you’re going to need a ton of email accounts ready, essentially one per day and even that, I don’t know that I’d send 1000 per day from one account. I probably split that up across multiple accounts. Okay.

Can You Still A GSite And Empower A Client’s Money Site If You Don’t Have Access To Their Email Account?

Anyways, it says when working with clients and you don’t have access to their email account, can you create a G site for them embed their properties and deliver the power to the money site URL? Well, yeah, I would never ask for access to my clients Google accounts ever never do I asked for that. So that’s how we do it right? We create and fits if it’s the same fits as I know that we used to be in our mastermind you should know that. And it might not be but ya know, like, for example, we just we create for clients created or even if for you guys that buy stuff from us, we’re going to go create a Google account.

To create your assets, the same thing with my clients, I go create a Google account, right or if they’re on G sweet, which some of them are, but most of them aren’t, then I have them add, you know, create an email or user account for me. And then I will end up, you know, giving me they, and then I asked them to give me permissions for to access the other accounts, like our Google Apps essentially within that account, right? That makes sense. And guys, you know, send a screencast video tutorial video to your users. So for example, I don’t ever ask for Google account access, but I do ask for to be added as a Google My Business Manager to their GMB for example. Right. So how do you do that? Well, unless you ask for their login details and go do it set, you know, add yourself as a manager, you know, add yourself as a manager, you got to ask them to do it. So if they don’t know how to do it, you got to provide them with instructions. The easiest way to do that, in my opinion, is to just do a quick tutorial video and show them hey, show him another GMB account. say look, login go to business google. com

Left-hand sidebar, you’re going to go click users, this little box is going to show you’re going to see a little plus icon at the top, click that to add new user at my email address from the drop-down, select, you know, manager, not site or not owner, just add me as a manager and then click you know, invite or send or whatever the button says, and I’ll get an invitation and then I’ll go be able to access you can do the same thing, if they have, you know, if you wanted it to be hosted on their main Google account, like a G site, which is unnecessary. But if you wanted to, you could give them instructions on a go into sites, google.com and add me as a user or manager, whatever, give me permission to be able to access that app within your Google account. However, it doesn’t matter because you can create the new account, build everything under the new account and then add your client Gmail account as a manager and then transfer ownership if you needed to. But again, it’s really unnecessary. It doesn’t matter who the Google account is. You can push the power the SEO juice anywhere you want. Okay.

Facebook Embed Post

Facebook also gives you an embed code for each post. Really? Yeah, it does. You so you can embed a Facebook post? Yes, that is correct. When did that start? Yeah,

it’s always been there. Yeah, it’s been rough. But Jay get. So if you get if you create, like, for instance, if you create, I don’t know, post with a link or a post with an image bubble, blah, then you can embed that somewhere. So it has to, it has to be on in your timeline. Or it has to be like, like on an open page. It can be like, if it’s a closed group, you can’t do anything with it. If if it’s a member, whatever it if it’s hidden or secret or Harvard. I don’t know too much about Facebook. I’m just there answering questions. Yeah, but if it’s open, right, and if it’s public, yes, Google will not Google Facebook will give you an embed code for that post or for whatever it

Is that you’re doing an image or video. But in those at one post though, right, correct, I don’t I think that you’re right that there’s an X breaker if you try to embed the like the entire face. Yeah. Yeah. And it has to come from a, from a Facebook page, if that makes sense. Not from a profile. You know, even if the profile is public, there’s a lot of, you know, stuff going on with privacy and whatnot. So it needs to come from a Facebook page, which is what your clients are going to be using anyway. Right. So um, so yeah, but that’s, that’s another caveat that you want to have in mind. Yeah, well, I mean, okay, so that may mean that that’s cool. And all but you know, unless you’re going to go in and update the iframe, or the embed code on a regular basis on your sites. I don’t see how I mean, obviously, if you’ve got I guess one post that you specifically trying to power up then yeah, and you could embed it and then hammer and you know, the G site or wherever you’ve got an embedded with links or something like that, but you know, typically I like to set up the iframe that is going to update dynamically. So I publish content and it’s on an automatically be in the iframe that I’m trying to power up. Do you know what I mean? So that’s cool. I didn’t, I wasn’t aware that you could embed individual posts, but say, that’s cool. I just learned something. Yep. Very cool. Yep.

Is It Better To Create Different Page For Each Keyword Or Use A Single Location To Rank Different Keywords

Okay, so Gordon’s up again, it says, Thanks a lot for your previous answer. You’re welcome. He says, which brought up this question and used to be okay to use duplicate content for different sites targeting and local niche in different cities, just changing the location info one site for each city. But is that still true? I’ve never done that. Gordon. Honestly, I’ve always advocated for using unique content for all those and that’s specifically because, at some point, it could be, you know, toxic, it could you could end up catching a penalty because it is all duplicate content and duplicate content, guys, it’s supposed to be on the same domain, I get that, but on the same subdomains, you know, I don’t I don’t like that because it’s not as effective.

So what I’ve always always always suggested Yes, it has worked, you can just swap out location information. So like essentially the city modifier within the content. But it’s inexpensive to have a piece of content written and then have it rewritten, it’s a lot less expensive to have it rewritten than to have original content written for each, which by the way, when you go to a content farm, none of its original, all they’re doing is rewriting other content that they’ve scraped from the web, just so you’re aware of that, guys, when you go buy an article from a content farm. It is a rewritten article from something else on the web that they scraped, that’s it, there’s nobody there is actually writing an original article. all they’re doing is going easy and articles or somewhere else scraping an article and then rewriting it and usually it’s rewritten very poorly, by the way, but what I’m saying is you can go out and order an article, habit, you know, Britain for whatever, let’s say it’s 1000 word article, and it cost you 40 bucks. And then you have article rewrites. So let’s say you got six locations six subdomains where you got the URL

So that you paid 40 bucks for that, but then you order five rewrites, it might cost you $8 per rewrite. And now you’ve got six, original, unique, let’s just I’m using air quotes, but six or unique articles that are going to be more effective, in my opinion, long term, then having the same piece of content used across multiple sites where the only thing you change this is the location modifier. So that’s how I’ve done that, guys. I’ve got lead gen assets out there with subdomains with 20 subdomains, and they each have their own unique content. You know, and that’s specifically for that reason.

You know, again, it’s your call, I’ve always wanted to build long term assets that will rank and produce revenue for me for years, and I’ve got many of them. And so, you know, again, it’s all I always think about, it might be a little bit more expensive, a little bit more hassle on the front end. But what’s more of a hassle having assets that stopped producing or start performing poorly, because of you took shortcut cuts on the front end. You know if they’re producing revenue for you and again guys I don’t know if it works or not because I just don’t do it. I don’t know if it still works or not but other people may be able to comment and say oh it works fine that’s fine if you want to build your business that way do it you know, there’s it’s up to you. So I don’t recommend it though. Honestly, I try to do the work up front so that it will produce for me for the long term and I don’t have to continually worry about that shit.

Do you remember that when they first came out with pandas and penguins? What that what Google was asking for rich unique relevant content that’s updated on a regular basis how often they repeated that that was when the doofus what��s his name was still with with with the spam team gotten Matt Cutts right. When that was so that this is they kept asking them they didn’t they keep doing it over and over fresh, unique relevant content updated on a regular basis. But the telling you that for a reason the bot feeds of content

Now I know that people have done tests when and where, you know, they’ve used Latin. And it ranked, but there were still keywords interspersed with that Latin garbage that made it rank and that’s what the bite is feeding off. It’s feeding off that information that you’re giving it. And if you just keep pushing the same information over and over, we have seen this, again, we always test guys is why we can give you the answers to these questions. We’ve seen it time and again and local GMB Pro, that if you use different posts, that if you do it regularly, whatever regularly means for your niche because niches a different each unique niche will react differently to the post frequency. But we know that if you use fresh, unique, relevant content, update on a regular basis, fresh images or you make Google think that they’re fresh images

Marco: don’t even have to be, it’s just all about feeding them but the information that the bot is coded to look for. It’s looking for these variables, right the keyword in the right places, and in the right amount and then information. And, and it’s also looking at how a real person interacts with that content that you’re displaying. And whether that person finishes, whatever action they set out to do. All of this is part of it. Now, if you give people the same information over and over and over again until you change this is a little bit eventually that gets stale, and the bodies will be able to tell how people react to that. And the one thing you’d never want to do is you never want to send us a negative signal. We always concentrate on feeding them but the positive signals that’s going to get us positive actions and reactions going to get us better placement.

going to give us knowledge panel displays is going to get us calls. And it’s going to get us web site visits, and whatever else, right, whatever else that we’re looking for. But it all starts with your content. And yes, you can feed garbage. But eventually, what will happen is it’ll get the index just like it happened with that test website that was done. But that one was just to show what you could do with the content place in in in the right areas. And in the right amount. Guys, don’t trick yourself into thinking I’m going to take the easy way out and just change the location. Give people a reason to think about it. Think like the end user, right? If I’m going in there, and I’m looking to have my problem solved, and I keep seeing the same garbage over and over. I don’t want to deal with that. I want someone that that’s talking to me as the end user, and someone who’s going to help me solve my problem, become problem solvers and you’re going to go a long way towards really developing your content in a way that people are really going to enjoy interacting with, and in the long run is going to make your whole lot more money than taking shortcuts. Yeah.

Bradley: All right. We’re going to wrap it up here in a minute. But if it says mastermind calls from Bradley are awesome, relevant, timely, and actionable period. Thanks fits. Appreciate that. Yeah, I’ve enjoyed those calls. I had a couple of this week already. So again, I appreciate that. And then lastly, Gordon had posted one more question. That’s fine, Gordon, we appreciate that. He says, since relied on questions, I’ll ask something else. And this is a good question.

Is It Better To Create Different Page For Each Keyword Or Use A Single Location To Rank Different Keywords?

He says when creating local Legion pages, is it better or easier to create a different page for each keyword or to try to rank a single location page for a bunch of different keywords? Yeah, so that’s a great question. Because several years ago, that was the method was to it was and that was the industry, right? The traditional knowledge, right was to go out and create. Each page would be optimized for a singular keyword. Right. That was really how silo structure was started.

be taught was, you go out and you create a silo and then you collect the supporting keywords for that silo and then you start creating posts within the silo that each post is optimized for one keyword. And that can still be applied today. But the thing is, though, you’re better off. So let me back up for a minute like with a complex silo, guys, there are categories and subcategories, right? And so what I’m saying is it used to be it was taught for a while the best practices was was to create your top-level keyword would be the top-level page, your top level category. And then for your next tier down of keywords, right, you’re supporting keywords, you would create a subcategory for each of those keywords. Right, so that’s a child page. And then at your post level, you would go out and take longer tail versions of your second tier keywords and you would create individual posts for each one of those that would link up to your sub-category pages, right. And so that was very granular It was like Uber optimized content. But after panda three or four I don’t even remember which one it was but it was sometime around 2014 timeframe we started noticing that that was less effective and now and that’s because guys the algorithm has gotten so much better and understanding natural language right it with AI and rank brain and all of that it understands content and its totality now a lot better than it used to, right it’s Google’s gotten incredibly advanced in that respect. And so now you can actually have longer form content that targets many semantically related keywords that’s the key right? So instead of going out and creating multiple pages, which is kind of a bitch anyway, and it’s it’s really makes as Marco was just talking about, it makes for a shitty user experience to if you go to a site and you have to click to another page to learn more about a very similar keyword anyways or product or service. So it just becomes repetition over and over and over again. And that’s less effective. So you’re better off creating a long-form piece of content, as it as a page that has a lot of your relevant similarly related keywords within that page, you can even have somewhat broader topics combined on the same page. So provided that they’re segregated by correct segments, or headings, and other words, sections within the page. So you know, and I’ve experimented with even ranking one page websites guys for, you know, multiple types of keywords like that wouldn’t even be in the same silo. But because of the way that you organize the content on the page, you can still rank for that. Here’s another example, using like Table of Contents or navigation links with hot links that go to those sections on the page. So that’s a good way to kind of set to analyze the content within a page to where you can only you can have one page that can rank for multiple keywords or themes that make sense. So to answer your question.

I wouldn’t go with optimizing for singular keywords. No, don’t get me wrong if you’re if you’re doing short blog posts, for example, I target, you know, with GMB posts a lot singular keywords, I mean, we still I still sprinkling variations of that single keyword, but there’s one primary keyword typically for me, for GMB posts. So you can still do that. But for your pages on your site, right, I’m talking about posts doing that. But for your pages on your site, which are typically what you’re trying to rank, you’re using posts to support the page, right? So for pages, I would recommend going with longer form content instead. That’s why I don’t usually recommend using complex silos anymore because you can accomplish it with simple silos, which is just categories and page, top-level categories and pages and then post supporting posts. Because complex structures are exactly what their name implies. They’re complex. They’re hard to manage. It’s hard to map out in the beginning, and it’s, it’s honestly, I think it’s overkill for most stuff, especially for local it’s overkill for most local things. All right.

Okay five o'clock I’ve got to go but I am going to read this comment real quick Jim says FYI everyone I placed an order for keyword research it was actually too good with too many keywords but they do break it down and suggest which keywords you should target which ones are good for silo and for supporting keywords. Don’t hesitate to order you won’t regret the quality time saved that it takes the guesswork out of it. shipped Marco trains them. Hello. Thanks, Jim. Jim. So, Alright guys, everybody. We appreciate you being here. I’m kind of digging this app even though it looks old school. It’s kind of cool. what you guys think. I like it. I mean, it works. Yeah. Works. Nobody’s complaining about getting locked out of any account so far. So we’ll see. All right, everybody. We’ll see you guys tomorrow on the mastermind and everyone else next week. Thanks for being here, man. Later see

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 232 posted first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 232

Click on the video above to watch Episode 232 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

Hernan: Hey, everybody, welcome to Hump Day hangouts episode hold on episode 232 My name is Adam Moody. I’m reading the script that has just said and it’s pretty cool to have you guys here. Today’s the 17th of April and this is looking good. So I’m just going to go and you know in honor to or beloved Adam and Secretary which will be going to be missing on this episode. I’m going to be saying hi to everyone on the list as I see them. What’s up, Marco?

Marco: Oh, I’m first Holy fuck the Latinos first today.

Hernan: Yeah, man.

Marco: We always end up in the back of the bus, but here I am, man. I got a little bit of a cold but I’m still enjoying the beautiful weather. So that’s life. You know, life sucks sometimes. Yeah.

Hernan: How about you Bradley? How’s everything man?

Bradley: I’m happy man I’m happy to be here. Things are good. So yeah, we got a very few questions on the new chat app guys we really apologize about that piece of shit Facebook app that we had on here for two weeks and it got every everybody that commented last week apparently got their Facebook account locked. It was nuts. And anyway, I apologize for that we had no idea was going to be like that I got my I got locked out of my account, or non did Marco did. Several of our mastermind members. It was Wow. Anyways, we apologize, we had no idea something like that was going to happen. That’s why we got this new one on there that looks kind of funky. But it’s kind of cool because it I mean, we’re going to find out if it’s cool or not. It looks old school as hell but it does give us the ability to post gifts and you can sign in and create an account so that you can actually put your image there which I recommend you guys do so that we know who we’re talking to. But if you want to stay anonymous that just use the use it without logging and that’s up to you. But anyway, so moving on. Hopefully, this will be satisfactory. We’ll see.

Hernan: Yeah, yeah, it sounds good man. So we have some people putting Jeff’s or gifts already. That’s pretty cool. So a couple of things that we usually do. If you’re new to semantic mastery, welcome, good to have you here. Don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel. If you want to know more about how we do things, you can go to semantic mastery calm for a slash hump day to be notified every time we go live. And you can come and ask your questions. This is free 100% free. We’ve been doing this for the past seven or five years. And it’s been awesome. So thank you for being here. And if you’re not new to semantic mastery, thank you, thank you for the support. This is awesome. Don’t forget to if you want to step by step repeatable system to you know, rank your websites whatever those are local websites, new websites, age websites, go to Battle Plan out semantic mastery calm and get the battle plan and if you’re ready to join a group of people that are growing their local marketing agencies and whatnot, come to the mastermind which is mastermind.semanticmastery.com. And for all of your done for you premium done for you with SEO services with the stamp of approval of semantic mastery don’t accept second options go to em gee, Why be the SEO and you will have everything that you will ever need for your you know, delivering needs because you shouldn’t be doing the link building you should be growing your agency that makes sense. So those are the announcements I think I nailed it. I might have something I’m going to paste Now I need to copy and paste some stuff on the thing so so yeah, there was we got I guess,

Bradley: Let me tease what you’re doing tomorrow or non so that you don’t have to toot your own horn. We got, we’ve been doing kind of a series in the mastermind. We’re probably going to end up launching a product around it anyways, but it’s Pay Per Click marketing for local and how to get results. We had a course that I produced about two, maybe two and a half years ago now called Local Kingpin. And it was specifically for using Google AdWords obviously, it’s now Google ads, but formerly Google AdWords for setting up lead gen assets and dry and using, you know, producing leads for local businesses, either on a client basis or even on a lead gen basis where you’re selling leads. And that worked really well. But the Google Ads dash dashboard, the whole platform has evolved a lot in the last two and a half years, considerably. And, you know, Google Ads themselves for search ads, excuse me, so search ads are rather expensive, you can still be profitable with that. There’s no question but it’s fucking expensive. So I’ve actually gotten away from using search ads and get more into using display ads and YouTube ads and remarketing obviously, and it works really well because the display ads are the display ad platform is so much better than it used to be. And you know, years ago when I had developed the local kingpin training

It was in that method that I was using display ads. Suck it, they might have worked, but it sucked setting them up because you had to go out in the order or design your own banner ads and you had designed them and all the various sizes that you wanted to display them in. So the leaderboard, and you know, this 350 by 250 rectangles, you know, all these different sizes. And so it was a pain in the ass, I would hire a graphic designer to develop a set of banner ads, and that would be one set of banner ads, and it might cost me 50 or 60 bucks. If you wanted to split test, you’d have to pay for another set of ads, right. And so it was just it was you’d have to wait for you know, several days to get them back from the designer. And it’s a real pain in the ass. And so it wasn’t very efficient. And it wasn’t very effective unless you really split test a lot and then found a winning combination of ads. But now what you can do on the Display Network when you’re setting up display ads is you actually just import photos, it photos and images and let your logo as well and

It’s a square version and rectangular version for each. And then you get to add up to five short headlines, one long headline and then up to five descriptions. So and there’s, you know, character limits for each. But then what Google does is Google will create responsive display ads out of just the images that you upload it to just regular photos will work or graphics, either one and then will automatically start rotating through your various headlines and descriptions to find out which gets the highest click through as an engagement. And then it will start to auto-optimize the campaign and start serving the ads that are the combinations that performed the best more and more often. And so it’s so much easier to set up a campaign now. And although obviously, display ads don’t convert nearly as well as like search ads do, it’s a fraction of the cost guys, and with the audience targeting that Google Display Network has now or Google has period. They have what they call in market audiences and life event audiences and you can even create custom intent audiences.

is now based on keywords which are really cool. I just started playing with that actually. And so if you go and find the you know in the in the in the in-market audience targeting settings if you can go in and find an end market audience for the businesses that you’re generating leads for then those tend to be very good and like for me for contractors typically a the average cost per click runs between anywhere between about 85 cents to $1 50. So somewhere in that range depending on what type of contractor it is that I’m generating leads for. And so that’s a fraction of the cost it just for it’s just quickly for some perspective here, for roofing leads, for example, it could in some of the areas that I do SEO work and generate leads for roofers of roofing. A click for search ads for roofing type keywords can cost 35 to $40 per click. And you know, typically an average conversion rate is somewhere anywhere between 32

40% right, so you’re talking about three clicks to get one lead at $35 per click, that’s $105 per lead. That, to me is incredibly expensive. But with those, if you can there in the market audience targeting, you can actually see that there are a roofing odd Roofing Services in the market audience, and you can use that for display ads. And maybe this says you pay $1 per click will just use a nice round number. And it might be a 10% conversion rate as opposed to 30 or even a 5% conversion rate, which means you need 20 clicks to get one lead, but 20 clicks at $1 to get one lead guy think about that as 20 bucks per lead as opposed to 100 bucks per lead when you’re using search ads. So keep that in mind and that’s for cold traffic. But also for remarketing purposes. Like honestly, if you’re not using remarketing in you’re doing Client Services, you’re nuts because it’s just an inexpensive way to get additional traffic back to

The site and even if that traffic doesn’t convert a lot, a lot of it will, but doesn’t convert into leads. It’s a great branding tool to help that business to gain brand recognition so that people will think of them and go search for their brand name when it’s time for them to need their product or service because they’re constantly reminded of that business. So, long story short,

we’re going to work we’ve been doing a series of training inside the mastermind about using Google ads for Local Lead Generation, not search ads, but display ads and YouTube ads and remarketing ads. And tomorrow Hernan being the Facebook marketing expert that he is, he’s coming into the mastermind to do a full training on how to use Facebook ads for Local Lead Generation. And then we’re actually going to probably be packaging all that up over the next 60 to 90 days at some point and then launching that as a separate product as kind of an update to local kingpin, but we’re going to rebrand it because it’s really going to be a whole new course. Did you guys lose me?

Hernan: No

Bradley: I got a frozen screen. Okay, yeah, there you go. Okay, so anyways, just kind of wanted to teach you guys a little bit on what’s going on in the mastermind tomorrow. Those of you that are the mastermind a lot there’s been a discussion thread by the way or not, did you see the discussion thread in the Facebook group, but are saying that we’re going to rope you into actually contributing more than just the mastermind because they want a full soup to nuts type train. Yeah. So yeah, well, yeah, if there’s a need for it,  you know, the mastermind has the privilege that you know, if you guys there’s a real need about, you know, a specific type of training that you guys want to go after, then we can make a series there’s no problem about that. We’re all about, you know, serving our members as much as we possibly can. So that if that, you know, we have a good response tomorrow, that’s potentially going to happen, at least initially within the mastermind, and then we’ll go from there. But yeah, my idea is to cover as much terrain as possible tomorrow specifically, and then if we need to do another iteration of the, of the training or you know, walk you guys through a couple of case studies. So for instance, I was going through one of the clients that I manage, and we, so he’s a chiropractor. He’s a local chiropractor, and he has four clinics in Dallas. And over the past, I would say over the past six months, we have spent around $160,000 in advertising, and we have generated almost 4000 confirm appointments to those four offices. Now that is rough. So he is charging $49 per appointment, right? It’s an intra massage offer. So he’s charging $49 per appointment. We’re getting him we’re getting those appointments for around 39 to $40. So he’s, you know, making money on the front end, but that’s not even the best thing. The best thing is that each customer forth to him on average $300 you know because they show up to his office and they buy a bunch of stuff and they buy additional massages and they buy so that’s

Average and that’s on the low side. So there’s, there’s effectively we have been moving the needle real hard. He’s super happy Of course because he’s growing. He’s expanding locations and whatnot, and some of the stuff that we were able to implement for him. We will be talking about tomorrow on the mastermind, so it’s going to be pretty cool. Yeah, awesome. Yeah. Alright, so the last thing we’re going to tease before we get into questions, which we were kind of just hoping that more questions would fill in this chat box anyways, uh, we’ve got video lead gen system

to Dotto really is launching next week, next Tuesday. As a matter of fact, we’re going to talk about it well, the first part of next week’s webinar, Hump Day hangouts is going to be where we’re going to, you know, kind of get into some detail about what it’s about and all that because I completely updated it so that still the old training is there, the old method, which I did for years, but over the last several months, I’ve been really redeveloping that method to make it more streamlined and efficient, something that a lot of it can be outsourced, but also just to make it to where, even if you were doing this yourself like, you know, managing the all of the video lead gen or video email campaigns on your own, I don’t recommend that. But if a lot of people still going to do it on their own anyway, it’s a lot more efficient now to where what used to take roughly 20 to 30 minutes per video email to send out. Now what will take you just two to three minutes No kidding, there’s there will be a setup period on the front end where you can’t get into the method here, there’ll be a setup period where it might take you an hour to get everything set up. But then from there for every prospect you want to mail to, it’s literally two to three minutes. And that’s it. And so it’s a hell of a lot more efficient. And I’ve tested a lot of different follow-up methods from that as well to once you are notified of engagement and I talked about all of this in the training and found several different methods that work really well to the kind of get the conversation going and stuff and so I go into great detail. It’s basically a whole new course but you’re still going to get the original version, as well as the Everything’s under

The same membership site now. So there’s the original version, which still works, but it’s a bit more time-consuming. And then there’s the newer version that can be applied to pretty much any sort of marketing service I use specifically one, were really two types of methods for monetizing it. In the examples and in the training, I talked about how to use it for monetizing lead gen assets. And then I also talked about for client services, if you’re just doing outreach for clients instead of lead generation service providers. Then, you know, there’s a method I talked about specifically optimizing GMB stuff, but it can be modified or an applied to pretty much any sort of service that you offer. So if you’re a digital marketer does Facebook ads like her non for example, you could still use the video lead gen system, you just obviously are going to talk about how you can get results with Facebook as opposed to how you can get results with Google My Business. So any of you guys one of the things that we do is we surveyed you guys on a consistent basis to find out what what-what our audience needs, and something that comes up all the time is client getting right? securing clients and that kind of stuff. And so that’s really what this was all about. It’s so that you guys can go out and least get the conversation started. It’s not sales training. I’m not real good at sales unless I got a referral, like been referral but as far as getting the conversation going for prospecting, it’s an outstanding way to do it’s very unique, you’ll get a lot of responses that way. And then it’s really going to be up to you to present your offer in such a way that you close the client, you know what I mean? Or the prospect at that point. So anyways, be on the lookout for that guys. Next week, we’re going to do like we typically have done in the past, which is a limited offer on the front end for 24 hours and then the price will go up. And that’s typically how we do that. So be on the lookout for that next week.

Okay, anything else? I think we’re good.

Alright, cool. Let’s get into questions. Alright, so with our 1989 looking chat box, which kind of cool though. Let’s get into it will start at the top

What Are Your Thoughts On Keyword Research Ninja?

KT says what are your thoughts on keyword research ninja? I have no thoughts on it whatsoever I’ve never used it I really don’t use any keyword research tools anymore other than Power Suggest Pro, Google AdWords you know, the Google Ads keyword planner for because I still do PPC stuff. And then we have our own in-house keyword research product that is like anytime you need keywords, that’s, you know, our go-to source now is MGYB? We have the keyword research done over there because it takes hours to compile a good list of keywords. Really, you can spend hours doing that and organizing the keywords into silos and you know, proper themes and that kind of stuff. And that’s what our, you know, our product on keyword research is specifically it’s you know, our assistant or employee that does all of that have access to multiple tools, SEM Rush, Power Suggest Pro, you know, all different kinds of tools that she uses to actually develop these reports and puts them into silos and all that kind of stuff. So different type of intent keywords, commercial intent, informational queries, that kind of stuff. So it just makes it super easy. So honestly, I can’t give you an opinion on any of those keyword tools because I just don’t use them. It just requires too much time in my opinion. And I’d rather outsource that or use a simple tool when I’m going to do it myself such as Power Suggest Pro. Marco or anybody else wants to comment on any of those.

Marco: I agree that that’s all I use. I use our keyword research. I mean, I taught them how to do it for a reason it’s based on the way that you do it. And the way that I do it, which is Google Trends and power suggest Pro with Google ads, right the Keyword Planner Tool, and but the basis is right there. Then we go into everything else and we drill down as much as we can get as much information as possible go to Answer the Public. We just use just a ton of different tools that we can get all of the keywords. I mean, you get thousands sometimes I see our report come back, and it’s 7, 8, 9 thousand keywords strong. And I’m thinking, this is like the best way to take down a market. Let me if you really need to start and understand your market and the words involved in your market. There’s nothing better. I mean, I don’t know I can’t speak on keyword research Ninja, it might be fabulous. But I can’t say anything other than the way that we have it set up works perfectly well for what we do. Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah. And again, it’s the amount of time that goes into that, you know, I got away from doing it myself because it just takes too much time. Especially to Oregon. Like it’s easy to spit out a bunch of keywords with a tool but to organize them in proper themes, you know, and basically silos and that kind of stuff and intent type people words like that’s yet I mean, as far as I know, that’s manual. I don’t know tools that actually do that maybe keyword research and into does that. I don’t know, I don’t even look at tools like that anymore. So, unfortunately, I can’t give you a good answer to that.

Does Using Subdomains Produce Better SEO Juice Than Using Pages For Multi-City Local Lead Gen Site?

Gordon’s up he says thank you very much again for the help you provide on hump days. You’re welcome. He says he when setting up a multi-city local lead gen site you have advised in the past few subdomains of the main domain for each city instead of using a page under the main domain. When using pages, I know that the SEO juice can be spread among all the city pages, but when using subdomains is the SEO just spread among all the subdomains to help each other one rank met each one rank better, or does each subdomain stand on its own for SEO purposes? Well, it’s a little of both Gordon because, again, a subdomain is treated as a separate entity by Google right. But there is the parent domain being the root domain. So you can the way I always looked at it was subdomains and other subdomains of the same root domain are called siblings, sibling domains, right and the parent domain being the root.

And so what happens is each one of the subdomains or sibling domains are their own standalone sites, which is good for protection purposes. And that’s what we’ve talked about. That’s the reason why I’ve always done that. Now, it’s funny because I really don’t do anything spammy anymore, at least not to the actual money sites. So I can probably get away with just doing the inner pages, but it’s still allowed. You’re still a, you know, and that it doesn’t mean that what we do right now, doesn’t couldn’t be considered spammy tomorrow, because we don’t work for Google. Right. And so even though I’ve never really had, at least for several years now, I haven’t had any issues with getting sites deindexed or penalize. I’ve always kept using subdomains specifically to minimize risk, right to reduce exposure, so to speak. Because as I’ve said before, if you put all of your location pages on the root, so their inner pages, right, and if you catch a penalty against any one of those pages, it could pull the whole site down and all of your other location pages.

Although again, as I said, the methods that we teach, haven’t knock on wood, they haven’t created any penalties that I’m aware of, for any of my own stuff, as well as any of our students, okay, that I’m aware of. And so you could probably get away with doing it on inner pages for management purposes, that would be much easier for there’s no doubt because you’d all you’d have just one site to manage. That said, though, just keep in mind that that’s putting all of your eggs in one basket. So if Google decides to take that basket, or destroy one of the eggs in that basket, it could very well hurt all the others as well. So back to the original question, a subdomain is kind of a standalone site in that if a subdomain was to catch a penalty, for some reason or another, it would only affect that subdomain, the route would be left intact would remain healthy and all of the other sibling domains or subdomains would also remain healthy, untouched, essentially, from that penalty that’s been levied against that one subdomain. So it’s isolates any potential penalty problems. However, if you were to catch a penalty against the root domain, it would automatically apply to all of the child domains or subdomains. Does that make sense? So that’s why we all I’ve done that in the past was to always protect the root against all odds, right? Protect the root. And then if I was going to do anything spammy, it would be on a subdomain level. And that was specifically for that reason.

However, what you can do is in this is something I’ve actually been testing recently, but I don’t have enough time passed to see in fact, I just talked about this on the last mastermind webinar, so 13 days ago, actually, about how to use subdomains and the root domain in conjunction to kind of power it up. And I can’t give away the the the method here because it can’t do that because it’s kind of an extension of something that we teach in our paid courses. But there is a way to still use somebody domains and use the root domain to kind of help power up the subdomains, with inner pages without doing anything that could catch it catch up a penalty to your route. But again, you know, as far as does the subdomains benefit each other, yes, it may not be quite as a quick effect or, or might not be as effective as inner pages. But here’s the thing, every one of those subdomains are still attached to the root, right. So again, the root domain being the parent domain is going to benefit now, you guys know we don’t talk. We don’t care much about metrics. We stopped caring about proprietary third-party metrics several years ago, but let’s just use one as an example because a lot of you guys will understand it this way. Let’s just use domain authority Moz’s metric and page authority is an example okay?

When you have a domain authority that sitewide including subdomains, right, so for example, if you have a domain authority of 20 five on the root, then your subdomains, when you create a new subdomain, it won’t automatically be 25. I don’t think so. But it will become it will benefit from the domain authority of the parent domain. And so what I have found over the years now that I’ve been developing these multi-location sites using subdomains is that at first, when you start developing, like, let’s say you start off with two locations, so you’ve got the root domain, and then to subdomains at, you know, each subdomain being four different location. And then you add, so you start optimizing, you know, doing what you do to get results. And then you add a third location. Well, that third location tech, you know, typically, according to my experience, will, will often start to get results faster than the first two dead, because it’s actually benefiting from some of the authority that has been accrued or you know, accumulated from the previous two subdomains and the route altogether, right. So as a whole, it’s now that that new subdomain is actually benefiting from the authority that has accrued from the previous two and the route itself if that makes sense. So then you add a fourth subdomain and you know, fourth location, and a fifth and a six. And what happens is I start to see each new location that I add, tends to respond quicker get results faster than the previous one, because it’s actually benefiting from the authority of the, you know, cluster essentially, that’s it’s the root domain, as well as its additional its other siblings. So, again, if you’re doing just inner pages, you’ll probably be going to get a faster effect from that. But I found that you know, as you continue to build out additional subdomains, they helped to, they kind of benefit or receive benefit from all of the previous subdomains as well. So they’re at their birth point, right. The moment that you create that subdomain, it really already has some inherent authority because of it being a subdomain of a root domain that has built authority or crude authority if that makes sense.

So, anyway, I can’t get into any more further of that, honestly, because I will be giving away too much. Come join the mastermind and will tell you all about it. So, Marco, do you want to comment on that at all or Hernan?

Marco: Now, just to validate a little bit what you’re talking about on domains, we see that domain subdomain. We see that when we do drive stacks, and we add additional folders and files, right? The more you add the more power that as you say, a cruise and I call it power. I don’t give a shit about domain authority or trust flow. I don’t give a crap about any of that its power. And so the more that you do have whatever it is that you’re doing inside the drive stack, the more power that you pushing through, and the more power that ends up wherever it is that you got that drives tech game. That’s why they work so well. Yeah. And so the more work that you do inside, the more keywords that you target, whether it’s keyword plus location or service, whatever it is that you’re doing.

You do more of it inside your drive stack. And before you know it, I mean, it’s just pushing tons of power wherever it is that you want to go. And we’ve seen people live from case studies that they even get an empty folder to rank before anything else rank. So it’s crazy the amount of power that you can do in this method, whether you’re doing it at the TL D and subdomain level or at the drive stack and G site level. Right?

Twitter Embed Code Not Displaying Properly In GSite

So if it says it says good day Semantic Mastery team thanks for this form to ask questions and get real answers. When optimizing the site, I framed Twitter the area stays blank with no message saying it won’t connect. Is that still okay? All right. I don’t do much Twitter stuff. But I know that if you just take a Twitter URL, tweet URL, a Twitter profile, URL, whatever and try to use an iframe create generator that it won’t show you have to go into Twitter developers and actually generate an embed code for it which you can do with like your timeline, tweets and stuff. So for example, you can take a Twitter profile and go to

The developers, I think it’s developers.twitter.com or something like that just do a Google search, you’ll see what I mean. And you can ask you, or even just go to Google and search, how do you create or embed a Twitter feed? And that’s what you would? Again, I don’t do much Twitter stuff. But if I was going to try, and I haven’t, so I haven’t tested it with G sites, guys, but you could probably it’s probably you’re using the wrong type of embed code. And that’s why it’s not displaying is what I’m saying. If you go generate the correct proper embed code from the Twitter developers site, or whatever, whatever it is, again, I don’t do much Twitter stuff, just like you can, you know, I recently I built Believe it or not, I built some PB ends recently because I was testing. I don’t use PB ends. Often guys, I very rarely use them. But I did build a few that I was testing and somebody product actually. And one of the things that they required was that you had made the site look, you know, very real. So one of the things that asked for was embedding a Twitter feed, so I had some persona profiles from some older since networks that I had built that had Twitter profiles with, you know, updates. And so I just had I had, that’s how I learned to go build this little embed code. And that’s a Twitter feed in bed, that you have to go to the developers console and sign into that account. And then you create it that way. And it gives you the specific embed code for that Twitter feed. So it’s probably that you’re using the wrong one. Now, I could be wrong guys. Because like said, I don’t do much of that stuff with Twitter at all. But I’m pretty sure if you’re trying to use just an iframe generator with a Twitter profile or something like that, it’s going to be blank, it’s going to not work.

Can You iFrame A Facebook Business Page?

Now, the next part of that question is, can you iframe in a Facebook business page? As far as I know, no, I Facebook has iframe breakers that won’t allow you to embed them anywhere using any sort of tool. If anybody has a different answer please speak up.

Hernan: I think you’re right Bradley on that on that and I haven’t personally tried to iframe Facebook but I know that you know, Facebook is kind of against that other than Facebook videos, you know that what you can allow and but you can embed that an iframe that but other than that, I wouldn’t know? Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah, I know. There are some like plugins and stuff that will allow you to embed a or you know, display a Facebook page. But it actually Yes, you have to connect it via API and all that kind of stuff like, so there are WordPress plugins that will do that. But as far as just an embed code from Facebook, I don’t think that’s possible. Once again, I don’t do much Facebook stuff. So I couldn’t tell you with all certainty, but I can I know that, like, if you try to just take a Facebook URL, and iframe it, it won’t it all, it will never display anywhere. I’ve never seen that ever work. So you have to use stuff that connects via API or authorize or what are they called Facebook apps or whatever. We actually create all that shit in order just to get even a Facebook page to show in like a widget area on a website.

Hernan: Um, so yeah, and they’re even more like they’re, they’re even more like restrictive with all of the privacy stuff that they’re going through. So that you may want to consider so.

Bradley: yeah, and then you try to iframe or when you try to embed a Facebook comments app you see what happens the previous couple on the Hangouts that and I get it I guess that’s because people can act that shit so right cool we’re going to keep moving. This chat is already thousand better than anything before devices that is cool thanks to Vaughn I’m glad you guys liked it for a bus the new battle call right revert I think that’s one of the guests says get repeatable oh that’s you that was you that’s maybe a farm setting up by a cat gotcha well mines Bradley hmm feisty forehead motherfucker in charge just in case you guys wondered what that was all about.

Do Semantic Mastery RYS Stacks Add More Value To An Existing Syndication Network & GMB Page?

Bradley: The humanoid says Marco I have an RYS Drive stack order pending and creating an RYS stack I have my syndication network complete in my see when creating a try so that I have my syndication network completed my GMB URL done. would it add more value when I have you build my RYS stacks. Thank you will thank you will

I know that was directed to Marco I’m gonna put my two cents in first before Marco answers. And if you already have your syndication network all your profile URLs to become target URLs as well. guys remember it’s just kind of about it’s just like internal linking right with your syndication network. It’s there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be powering up your tier one assets as well. So if you have all of that I would actually absolutely include those but Marco, that’s more question for you.

Marco: Yeah, I’m thinking that he wants to know if he should have the team, put them into the bill, by all means, that that’s your tier one branded, it should be included and then So when did he get the spreadsheet to hit with link building. That’s what’s going to get hit your tier one branded your GMB and everything that’s inside that drive stack. So yes, by all means, have at it, and you’re going to see some really good results. I’ve been getting a bunch of testimony.

By the way of about people having to build links to their dry stacks and then the drive stacks just going crazy. Yeah once they get some the link building done so yes have added the same thing with the ad ID page. I’ve done some testing with that and just and that’s what I loved about it. It’s one of the easiest methods because all you gotta do is go submit link building gig order to you know, I wouldn’t say to just anybody but Daddy has got it down to a science and just taking like the ad ID the iframe loop stuff that we’ve talked about and again our paid courses and almost all of them it’s available that that just works really well and again, that’s just what that magic of I frames and when you combine that with Dr. stacks or even dr stacks alone, but that’s part of it because of you know, iframe in that gets done in the site, everything else so it’s just incredibly powerful. And just hitting those that’s the beautiful thing about it guys is you know, the daddy has link building pack service which is in MYB, right? They’re still spam links, but he’s good at what he does. He’s a pro, he’s a professional, there’s no doubt and because of that, he knows how to make it really effective. And then when you use something like Google assets as the target or Amazon domain as the primary target, then it can take that kind of abuse like you can hammer away at it, and it can take it and filter it like a champ. In fact, it just kind of powers it up. Now, it’s not something that I would ever direct to the money site, but you can do you know what I mean, but you can do it two very powerful tier one assets, which is why we developed the way that we do so that’s why we don’t even use VPN, who needs a pbn? When we can use Google and Amazon assets to create the same effect and then you spam links as opposed to and I call them spam and everybody who want to do spam. But guys, I mean, that’s what link building tools do they create spam links, you can call them whatever you want. That’s really what they are. Right and so pbn links are technically spammed links to you might be buying links from you know, a domain that has good metrics, but unless it’s super well themed and all that they’re typically spam links anyways, you know what I mean? So it’s just it’s about how you use them and what you point them at. And so we recommend doing it the way that you know, at least our method we use our method for specifically for a reason. It’s efficient, and it works well. Right.

All right old school, like daddy says, will it be set up like this tomorrow? Hernan? What’s tomorrow?

Hernan: The webinar? webinar or mastermind? Yeah, now it’s gonna be on a mastermind. Yeah. It’ll be in the regular mastermind.

Bradley: Jim, think that’s when? Yeah, just the regular master the live mastermind webinar page, just like we’ve always been doing over there. I we haven’t had any problems with that over there. Now it’s in the bond site. Yeah, right. The membership site, right.

So as far as I know, we’ve never had any problems not one complaint with it over there. We had a problem with the Disqus chat app. on these pages for some reason I think it’s a Click Funnels issue like it just didn’t jive well but on the traditional mastermind webinars inside the membership site we haven’t ever had a complaint on that so if I’m wrong and you guys got some complaints about it to make them known to make them known over there in the Facebook group not here.

How Would You Strategize Sending Out An Email Campaign For Over A Year?

I blue panda whoever that is, is hey guys hope this Jeff Oh, what the hell? That’s the same as what we had before. Maybe not okay. Hey, guys hope this chat function works better than this. That piece of shit Facebook jet cheese. Yeah. Or Geez, you’re right. That was terrible. Okay, onto my question. I have a list for my niche that is big enough to send 1000 emails per day for over a year. Wow. This is simply a law of big numbers campaign for my client. These will be a one time blast. Either they respond or they don’t and the next class goes out the next day what would be the best way to approach a list of this size style of sending? I don’t know I’ve never spammed at that level before. Spam demon.

And that’s exactly what you’re doing. So the best person to answer that question is unfortunately not here. That’s Chris, our partner, Chris, he, he’s been doing that kind of work for four years. He can give you the best advice on that. But he’s not here. I’m sorry, he’s traveling. Yeah, the only thing I would know to say is that make sure that you have plenty of sending from domain email account. So in other words, making sure that you’ve got several many, many, many different email account setup, you know, that you can send from because you’re probably going to burn every single account that you send from like, almost every day.

I don’t know for sure, because it depends on how clean your list is. But typically, when you’re sending out mass emails like that, from a particular account, especially 1000 per day, you have to have accounts that have developed some sort of reputation for or else when you go to hit send on 1000 emails from an account that’s not really seasoned. It will you know, the is the internet search or email service providers will throttle those accounts and not the inbox. You know a bunch of them and also with people will start hitting the spam button which it’s likely if they were unsolicited emails, you will get a lot of people hitting the spam button, it will flag that particular domain account for or domain email excuse me for spam and so it will like they’ll just stop unboxing her nine you were going to comment? Yeah, yeah,

I agree with you. What I was about to say is that if you want to, you know, reach out to Chris just post in the Facebook group and maybe take him I don’t know if blue pen is on the mastermind group. Yeah, if you’re in the mastermind, we could get to it. You know, Chris will give you a lot of help out there. Otherwise, you could try it in the free Facebook group and I don’t know how much he’ll reveal about something like that there. But yeah, that’s the only problem like guys I talked about this a few weeks ago, but you know, I got I’ve unsubscribed from just about every single marketing list that I’m I’ve ever been on.

Over the last several months, because I decided to get really focused and you know, buying shiny objects and getting pitched new training, you know, methods and stuff like that all the time was really, and I, you know, there’s they’re kind of happens in cycles. I know a lot of you guys we’ve I’ve talked with a lot of our mastermind members over the last several months I do calls now with, you know, one on one calls with mastermind members, as a new member, you get a one on one call with one of us. And then every quarter or so I try to open up the ability to have another 30 minute call with me so I can kind of help you know, find out more about people in our mastermind and what struggles are going through and offer some guidance and and and, you know, 90 days to six months and three to six months, I have another call with them, find out if they made any progress, and they’re going to have new issues at that point. So one of the things that I’ve heard a lot through those calls without calling anybody out is that, you know, constantly being bombarded with different opportunities. And that’s because we’re all marketers, right? And so we’ve gone out and been signed up for whatever ours, which puts us on email list or we bought products, which puts us on email lists. And the next thing you know, we get hammered and you guys can all relate I’m sure you get hammered and hammered and hammered all the time with solicitation offers for training or for software or tools or services and all that kind of stuff. And you know,

I found that although they may be interesting and sometimes entertaining to go like watch webinars or to go check out the new sales page of the new tool that or software or WordPress plugin or whatever the hell it is, that typically just distracts from making any progress a real progress in my business and you know, over the years I’ve gone up and down with that, you know, sometimes a more susceptible to that other times I’m not but over the last many months now I really just started to unsubscribe from you know, ton of people’s emails. The reason I started saying that was because my oldest email account that is the account that I use, it’s a Yahoo account, Yahoo mail account, that’s the one that I used to always sign up for stuff like I don’t use my main Gmail accounts for for to sign up for lists or two webinars and things like that, because I knew that I get on a spam list, right and people would start spamming me. I’m still getting a ton of spam over there. But I’ve never voluntarily or I very, very rarely voluntarily used one of those primary Gmail type email addresses for signing up for that stuff. But I had a Yahoo mail account that was just getting spammed to death. And so over the last several months, I have really, really gotten a much better handle on that too. Because what I’ve done is I’ve gone every time I get an email now I just daily maintenance Now, every single day, I go through my Yahoo account probably two maybe three times a day. And if there’s an email that came is comes to me that I was unsolicited, which is you know, it’s they don’t come nearly as often as they used to now, I open up the email, I scroll right to the bottom finance subscribe button, I click it and make sure you know in the page reloads that it’s that in the net new tab that I’ve unsubscribed. Then I close that tab and I go back in and I click the spam button and Yahoo

And I do that every single day. And, you know, I used to get literally dozens, sometimes hundreds of emails per day, as many of you guys can probably relate. And now I swear to God, this is no bullshit over the last, probably five to six weeks now, I might get two or three emails per day and some days I don’t get any spam or unsolicited emails anymore. And that’s because I’ve gotten into the habit of doing that. So now it’s much more manageable like that, that email counts almost like a clean account. Now I do still get occasional as I said, Sometimes I’ll get one. Sometimes I get two or even three spam emails where it’s another internet marketer that bought my name off the list somewhere and sends me some bullshit email about the newest WordPress plugin. But I open up the email, I go straight to the unsubscribe button, unsubscribe and then come back and hit the spam button. And so it’s really really reduced that now the reason I said that was because if you start emailing people with unsolicited emails, you’re likely going to have many of them going to hit that spam button and that’s going to tank your deliverability, just like that. So if you’re going to be doing that sort of a strategy, you’re going to need a ton of email accounts ready, essentially one per day and even that, I don’t know that I’d send 1000 per day from one account. I probably split that up across multiple accounts. Okay.

Can You Still A GSite And Empower A Client’s Money Site If You Don’t Have Access To Their Email Account?

Anyways, it says when working with clients and you don’t have access to their email account, can you create a G site for them embed their properties and deliver the power to the money site URL? Well, yeah, I would never ask for access to my clients Google accounts ever never do I asked for that. So that’s how we do it right? We create and fits if it’s the same fits as I know that we used to be in our mastermind you should know that. And it might not be but ya know, like, for example, we just we create for clients created or even if for you guys that buy stuff from us, we’re going to go create a Google account.

To create your assets, the same thing with my clients, I go create a Google account, right or if they’re on G sweet, which some of them are, but most of them aren’t, then I have them add, you know, create an email or user account for me. And then I will end up, you know, giving me they, and then I asked them to give me permissions for to access the other accounts, like our Google Apps essentially within that account, right? That makes sense. And guys, you know, send a screencast video tutorial video to your users. So for example, I don’t ever ask for Google account access, but I do ask for to be added as a Google My Business Manager to their GMB for example. Right. So how do you do that? Well, unless you ask for their login details and go do it set, you know, add yourself as a manager, you know, add yourself as a manager, you got to ask them to do it. So if they don’t know how to do it, you got to provide them with instructions. The easiest way to do that, in my opinion, is to just do a quick tutorial video and show them hey, show him another GMB account. say look, login go to business google. com

Left-hand sidebar, you’re going to go click users, this little box is going to show you’re going to see a little plus icon at the top, click that to add new user at my email address from the drop-down, select, you know, manager, not site or not owner, just add me as a manager and then click you know, invite or send or whatever the button says, and I’ll get an invitation and then I’ll go be able to access you can do the same thing, if they have, you know, if you wanted it to be hosted on their main Google account, like a G site, which is unnecessary. But if you wanted to, you could give them instructions on a go into sites, google.com and add me as a user or manager, whatever, give me permission to be able to access that app within your Google account. However, it doesn’t matter because you can create the new account, build everything under the new account and then add your client Gmail account as a manager and then transfer ownership if you needed to. But again, it’s really unnecessary. It doesn’t matter who the Google account is. You can push the power the SEO juice anywhere you want. Okay.

Facebook Embed Post

Facebook also gives you an embed code for each post. Really? Yeah, it does. You so you can embed a Facebook post? Yes, that is correct. When did that start? Yeah,

it’s always been there. Yeah, it’s been rough. But Jay get. So if you get if you create, like, for instance, if you create, I don’t know, post with a link or a post with an image bubble, blah, then you can embed that somewhere. So it has to, it has to be on in your timeline. Or it has to be like, like on an open page. It can be like, if it’s a closed group, you can’t do anything with it. If if it’s a member, whatever it if it’s hidden or secret or Harvard. I don’t know too much about Facebook. I’m just there answering questions. Yeah, but if it’s open, right, and if it’s public, yes, Google will not Google Facebook will give you an embed code for that post or for whatever it

Is that you’re doing an image or video. But in those at one post though, right, correct, I don’t I think that you’re right that there’s an X breaker if you try to embed the like the entire face. Yeah. Yeah. And it has to come from a, from a Facebook page, if that makes sense. Not from a profile. You know, even if the profile is public, there’s a lot of, you know, stuff going on with privacy and whatnot. So it needs to come from a Facebook page, which is what your clients are going to be using anyway. Right. So um, so yeah, but that’s, that’s another caveat that you want to have in mind. Yeah, well, I mean, okay, so that may mean that that’s cool. And all but you know, unless you’re going to go in and update the iframe, or the embed code on a regular basis on your sites. I don’t see how I mean, obviously, if you’ve got I guess one post that you specifically trying to power up then yeah, and you could embed it and then hammer and you know, the G site or wherever you’ve got an embedded with links or something like that, but you know, typically I like to set up the iframe that is going to update dynamically. So I publish content and it’s on an automatically be in the iframe that I’m trying to power up. Do you know what I mean? So that’s cool. I didn’t, I wasn’t aware that you could embed individual posts, but say, that’s cool. I just learned something. Yep. Very cool. Yep.

Is It Better To Create Different Page For Each Keyword Or Use A Single Location To Rank Different Keywords

Okay, so Gordon’s up again, it says, Thanks a lot for your previous answer. You’re welcome. He says, which brought up this question and used to be okay to use duplicate content for different sites targeting and local niche in different cities, just changing the location info one site for each city. But is that still true? I’ve never done that. Gordon. Honestly, I’ve always advocated for using unique content for all those and that’s specifically because, at some point, it could be, you know, toxic, it could you could end up catching a penalty because it is all duplicate content and duplicate content, guys, it’s supposed to be on the same domain, I get that, but on the same subdomains, you know, I don’t I don’t like that because it’s not as effective.

So what I’ve always always always suggested Yes, it has worked, you can just swap out location information. So like essentially the city modifier within the content. But it’s inexpensive to have a piece of content written and then have it rewritten, it’s a lot less expensive to have it rewritten than to have original content written for each, which by the way, when you go to a content farm, none of its original, all they’re doing is rewriting other content that they’ve scraped from the web, just so you’re aware of that, guys, when you go buy an article from a content farm. It is a rewritten article from something else on the web that they scraped, that’s it, there’s nobody there is actually writing an original article. all they’re doing is going easy and articles or somewhere else scraping an article and then rewriting it and usually it’s rewritten very poorly, by the way, but what I’m saying is you can go out and order an article, habit, you know, Britain for whatever, let’s say it’s 1000 word article, and it cost you 40 bucks. And then you have article rewrites. So let’s say you got six locations six subdomains where you got the URL

So that you paid 40 bucks for that, but then you order five rewrites, it might cost you $8 per rewrite. And now you’ve got six, original, unique, let’s just I’m using air quotes, but six or unique articles that are going to be more effective, in my opinion, long term, then having the same piece of content used across multiple sites where the only thing you change this is the location modifier. So that’s how I’ve done that, guys. I’ve got lead gen assets out there with subdomains with 20 subdomains, and they each have their own unique content. You know, and that’s specifically for that reason.

You know, again, it’s your call, I’ve always wanted to build long term assets that will rank and produce revenue for me for years, and I’ve got many of them. And so, you know, again, it’s all I always think about, it might be a little bit more expensive, a little bit more hassle on the front end. But what’s more of a hassle having assets that stopped producing or start performing poorly, because of you took shortcut cuts on the front end. You know if they’re producing revenue for you and again guys I don’t know if it works or not because I just don’t do it. I don’t know if it still works or not but other people may be able to comment and say oh it works fine that’s fine if you want to build your business that way do it you know, there’s it’s up to you. So I don’t recommend it though. Honestly, I try to do the work up front so that it will produce for me for the long term and I don’t have to continually worry about that shit.

Do you remember that when they first came out with pandas and penguins? What that what Google was asking for rich unique relevant content that’s updated on a regular basis how often they repeated that that was when the doofus what’s his name was still with with with the spam team gotten Matt Cutts right. When that was so that this is they kept asking them they didn’t they keep doing it over and over fresh, unique relevant content updated on a regular basis. But the telling you that for a reason the bot feeds of content

Now I know that people have done tests when and where, you know, they’ve used Latin. And it ranked, but there were still keywords interspersed with that Latin garbage that made it rank and that’s what the bite is feeding off. It’s feeding off that information that you’re giving it. And if you just keep pushing the same information over and over, we have seen this, again, we always test guys is why we can give you the answers to these questions. We’ve seen it time and again and local GMB Pro, that if you use different posts, that if you do it regularly, whatever regularly means for your niche because niches a different each unique niche will react differently to the post frequency. But we know that if you use fresh, unique, relevant content, update on a regular basis, fresh images or you make Google think that they’re fresh images

Marco: don’t even have to be, it’s just all about feeding them but the information that the bot is coded to look for. It’s looking for these variables, right the keyword in the right places, and in the right amount and then information. And, and it’s also looking at how a real person interacts with that content that you’re displaying. And whether that person finishes, whatever action they set out to do. All of this is part of it. Now, if you give people the same information over and over and over again until you change this is a little bit eventually that gets stale, and the bodies will be able to tell how people react to that. And the one thing you’d never want to do is you never want to send us a negative signal. We always concentrate on feeding them but the positive signals that’s going to get us positive actions and reactions going to get us better placement.

going to give us knowledge panel displays is going to get us calls. And it’s going to get us web site visits, and whatever else, right, whatever else that we’re looking for. But it all starts with your content. And yes, you can feed garbage. But eventually, what will happen is it’ll get the index just like it happened with that test website that was done. But that one was just to show what you could do with the content place in in in the right areas. And in the right amount. Guys, don’t trick yourself into thinking I’m going to take the easy way out and just change the location. Give people a reason to think about it. Think like the end user, right? If I’m going in there, and I’m looking to have my problem solved, and I keep seeing the same garbage over and over. I don’t want to deal with that. I want someone that that’s talking to me as the end user, and someone who’s going to help me solve my problem, become problem solvers and you’re going to go a long way towards really developing your content in a way that people are really going to enjoy interacting with, and in the long run is going to make your whole lot more money than taking shortcuts. Yeah.

Bradley: All right. We’re going to wrap it up here in a minute. But if it says mastermind calls from Bradley are awesome, relevant, timely, and actionable period. Thanks fits. Appreciate that. Yeah, I’ve enjoyed those calls. I had a couple of this week already. So again, I appreciate that. And then lastly, Gordon had posted one more question. That’s fine, Gordon, we appreciate that. He says, since relied on questions, I’ll ask something else. And this is a good question.

Is It Better To Create Different Page For Each Keyword Or Use A Single Location To Rank Different Keywords?

He says when creating local Legion pages, is it better or easier to create a different page for each keyword or to try to rank a single location page for a bunch of different keywords? Yeah, so that’s a great question. Because several years ago, that was the method was to it was and that was the industry, right? The traditional knowledge, right was to go out and create. Each page would be optimized for a singular keyword. Right. That was really how silo structure was started.

be taught was, you go out and you create a silo and then you collect the supporting keywords for that silo and then you start creating posts within the silo that each post is optimized for one keyword. And that can still be applied today. But the thing is, though, you’re better off. So let me back up for a minute like with a complex silo, guys, there are categories and subcategories, right? And so what I’m saying is it used to be it was taught for a while the best practices was was to create your top-level keyword would be the top-level page, your top level category. And then for your next tier down of keywords, right, you’re supporting keywords, you would create a subcategory for each of those keywords. Right, so that’s a child page. And then at your post level, you would go out and take longer tail versions of your second tier keywords and you would create individual posts for each one of those that would link up to your sub-category pages, right. And so that was very granular It was like Uber optimized content. But after panda three or four I don’t even remember which one it was but it was sometime around 2014 timeframe we started noticing that that was less effective and now and that’s because guys the algorithm has gotten so much better and understanding natural language right it with AI and rank brain and all of that it understands content and its totality now a lot better than it used to, right it’s Google’s gotten incredibly advanced in that respect. And so now you can actually have longer form content that targets many semantically related keywords that’s the key right? So instead of going out and creating multiple pages, which is kind of a bitch anyway, and it’s it’s really makes as Marco was just talking about, it makes for a shitty user experience to if you go to a site and you have to click to another page to learn more about a very similar keyword anyways or product or service. So it just becomes repetition over and over and over again. And that’s less effective. So you’re better off creating a long-form piece of content, as it as a page that has a lot of your relevant similarly related keywords within that page, you can even have somewhat broader topics combined on the same page. So provided that they’re segregated by correct segments, or headings, and other words, sections within the page. So you know, and I’ve experimented with even ranking one page websites guys for, you know, multiple types of keywords like that wouldn’t even be in the same silo. But because of the way that you organize the content on the page, you can still rank for that. Here’s another example, using like Table of Contents or navigation links with hot links that go to those sections on the page. So that’s a good way to kind of set to analyze the content within a page to where you can only you can have one page that can rank for multiple keywords or themes that make sense. So to answer your question.

I wouldn’t go with optimizing for singular keywords. No, don’t get me wrong if you’re if you’re doing short blog posts, for example, I target, you know, with GMB posts a lot singular keywords, I mean, we still I still sprinkling variations of that single keyword, but there’s one primary keyword typically for me, for GMB posts. So you can still do that. But for your pages on your site, right, I’m talking about posts doing that. But for your pages on your site, which are typically what you’re trying to rank, you’re using posts to support the page, right? So for pages, I would recommend going with longer form content instead. That’s why I don’t usually recommend using complex silos anymore because you can accomplish it with simple silos, which is just categories and page, top-level categories and pages and then post supporting posts. Because complex structures are exactly what their name implies. They’re complex. They’re hard to manage. It’s hard to map out in the beginning, and it’s, it’s honestly, I think it’s overkill for most stuff, especially for local it’s overkill for most local things. All right.

Okay five o'clock I’ve got to go but I am going to read this comment real quick Jim says FYI everyone I placed an order for keyword research it was actually too good with too many keywords but they do break it down and suggest which keywords you should target which ones are good for silo and for supporting keywords. Don’t hesitate to order you won’t regret the quality time saved that it takes the guesswork out of it. shipped Marco trains them. Hello. Thanks, Jim. Jim. So, Alright guys, everybody. We appreciate you being here. I’m kind of digging this app even though it looks old school. It’s kind of cool. what you guys think. I like it. I mean, it works. Yeah. Works. Nobody’s complaining about getting locked out of any account so far. So we’ll see. All right, everybody. We’ll see you guys tomorrow on the mastermind and everyone else next week. Thanks for being here, man. Later see

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 232 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

[jenniferbowley]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 232

Click on the video above to watch Episode 232 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

Hernan: Hey, everybody, welcome to Hump Day hangouts episode hold on episode 232 My name is Adam Moody. I’m reading the script that has just said and it’s pretty cool to have you guys here. Today’s the 17th of April and this is looking good. So I’m just going to go and you know in honor to or beloved Adam and Secretary which will be going to be missing on this episode. I’m going to be saying hi to everyone on the list as I see them. What’s up, Marco?

Marco: Oh, I’m first Holy fuck the Latinos first today.

Hernan: Yeah, man.

Marco: We always end up in the back of the bus, but here I am, man. I got a little bit of a cold but I’m still enjoying the beautiful weather. So that’s life. You know, life sucks sometimes. Yeah.

Hernan: How about you Bradley? How’s everything man?

Bradley: I’m happy man I’m happy to be here. Things are good. So yeah, we got a very few questions on the new chat app guys we really apologize about that piece of shit Facebook app that we had on here for two weeks and it got every everybody that commented last week apparently got their Facebook account locked. It was nuts. And anyway, I apologize for that we had no idea was going to be like that I got my I got locked out of my account, or non did Marco did. Several of our mastermind members. It was Wow. Anyways, we apologize, we had no idea something like that was going to happen. That’s why we got this new one on there that looks kind of funky. But it’s kind of cool because it I mean, we’re going to find out if it’s cool or not. It looks old school as hell but it does give us the ability to post gifts and you can sign in and create an account so that you can actually put your image there which I recommend you guys do so that we know who we’re talking to. But if you want to stay anonymous that just use the use it without logging and that’s up to you. But anyway, so moving on. Hopefully, this will be satisfactory. We’ll see.

Hernan: Yeah, yeah, it sounds good man. So we have some people putting Jeff’s or gifts already. That’s pretty cool. So a couple of things that we usually do. If you’re new to semantic mastery, welcome, good to have you here. Don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel. If you want to know more about how we do things, you can go to semantic mastery calm for a slash hump day to be notified every time we go live. And you can come and ask your questions. This is free 100% free. We’ve been doing this for the past seven or five years. And it’s been awesome. So thank you for being here. And if you’re not new to semantic mastery, thank you, thank you for the support. This is awesome. Don’t forget to if you want to step by step repeatable system to you know, rank your websites whatever those are local websites, new websites, age websites, go to Battle Plan out semantic mastery calm and get the battle plan and if you’re ready to join a group of people that are growing their local marketing agencies and whatnot, come to the mastermind which is mastermind.semanticmastery.com. And for all of your done for you premium done for you with SEO services with the stamp of approval of semantic mastery don’t accept second options go to em gee, Why be the SEO and you will have everything that you will ever need for your you know, delivering needs because you shouldn’t be doing the link building you should be growing your agency that makes sense. So those are the announcements I think I nailed it. I might have something I’m going to paste Now I need to copy and paste some stuff on the thing so so yeah, there was we got I guess,

Bradley: Let me tease what you’re doing tomorrow or non so that you don’t have to toot your own horn. We got, we’ve been doing kind of a series in the mastermind. We’re probably going to end up launching a product around it anyways, but it’s Pay Per Click marketing for local and how to get results. We had a course that I produced about two, maybe two and a half years ago now called Local Kingpin. And it was specifically for using Google AdWords obviously, it’s now Google ads, but formerly Google AdWords for setting up lead gen assets and dry and using, you know, producing leads for local businesses, either on a client basis or even on a lead gen basis where you’re selling leads. And that worked really well. But the Google Ads dash dashboard, the whole platform has evolved a lot in the last two and a half years, considerably. And, you know, Google Ads themselves for search ads, excuse me, so search ads are rather expensive, you can still be profitable with that. There’s no question but it’s fucking expensive. So I’ve actually gotten away from using search ads and get more into using display ads and YouTube ads and remarketing obviously, and it works really well because the display ads are the display ad platform is so much better than it used to be. And you know, years ago when I had developed the local kingpin training

It was in that method that I was using display ads. Suck it, they might have worked, but it sucked setting them up because you had to go out in the order or design your own banner ads and you had designed them and all the various sizes that you wanted to display them in. So the leaderboard, and you know, this 350 by 250 rectangles, you know, all these different sizes. And so it was a pain in the ass, I would hire a graphic designer to develop a set of banner ads, and that would be one set of banner ads, and it might cost me 50 or 60 bucks. If you wanted to split test, you’d have to pay for another set of ads, right. And so it was just it was you’d have to wait for you know, several days to get them back from the designer. And it’s a real pain in the ass. And so it wasn’t very efficient. And it wasn’t very effective unless you really split test a lot and then found a winning combination of ads. But now what you can do on the Display Network when you’re setting up display ads is you actually just import photos, it photos and images and let your logo as well and

It’s a square version and rectangular version for each. And then you get to add up to five short headlines, one long headline and then up to five descriptions. So and there’s, you know, character limits for each. But then what Google does is Google will create responsive display ads out of just the images that you upload it to just regular photos will work or graphics, either one and then will automatically start rotating through your various headlines and descriptions to find out which gets the highest click through as an engagement. And then it will start to auto-optimize the campaign and start serving the ads that are the combinations that performed the best more and more often. And so it’s so much easier to set up a campaign now. And although obviously, display ads don’t convert nearly as well as like search ads do, it’s a fraction of the cost guys, and with the audience targeting that Google Display Network has now or Google has period. They have what they call in market audiences and life event audiences and you can even create custom intent audiences.

is now based on keywords which are really cool. I just started playing with that actually. And so if you go and find the you know in the in the in the in-market audience targeting settings if you can go in and find an end market audience for the businesses that you’re generating leads for then those tend to be very good and like for me for contractors typically a the average cost per click runs between anywhere between about 85 cents to $1 50. So somewhere in that range depending on what type of contractor it is that I’m generating leads for. And so that’s a fraction of the cost it just for it’s just quickly for some perspective here, for roofing leads, for example, it could in some of the areas that I do SEO work and generate leads for roofers of roofing. A click for search ads for roofing type keywords can cost 35 to $40 per click. And you know, typically an average conversion rate is somewhere anywhere between 32

40% right, so you’re talking about three clicks to get one lead at $35 per click, that’s $105 per lead. That, to me is incredibly expensive. But with those, if you can there in the market audience targeting, you can actually see that there are a roofing odd Roofing Services in the market audience, and you can use that for display ads. And maybe this says you pay $1 per click will just use a nice round number. And it might be a 10% conversion rate as opposed to 30 or even a 5% conversion rate, which means you need 20 clicks to get one lead, but 20 clicks at $1 to get one lead guy think about that as 20 bucks per lead as opposed to 100 bucks per lead when you’re using search ads. So keep that in mind and that’s for cold traffic. But also for remarketing purposes. Like honestly, if you’re not using remarketing in you’re doing Client Services, you’re nuts because it’s just an inexpensive way to get additional traffic back to

The site and even if that traffic doesn’t convert a lot, a lot of it will, but doesn’t convert into leads. It’s a great branding tool to help that business to gain brand recognition so that people will think of them and go search for their brand name when it’s time for them to need their product or service because they’re constantly reminded of that business. So, long story short,

we’re going to work we’ve been doing a series of training inside the mastermind about using Google ads for Local Lead Generation, not search ads, but display ads and YouTube ads and remarketing ads. And tomorrow Hernan being the Facebook marketing expert that he is, he’s coming into the mastermind to do a full training on how to use Facebook ads for Local Lead Generation. And then we’re actually going to probably be packaging all that up over the next 60 to 90 days at some point and then launching that as a separate product as kind of an update to local kingpin, but we’re going to rebrand it because it’s really going to be a whole new course. Did you guys lose me?

Hernan: No

Bradley: I got a frozen screen. Okay, yeah, there you go. Okay, so anyways, just kind of wanted to teach you guys a little bit on what’s going on in the mastermind tomorrow. Those of you that are the mastermind a lot there’s been a discussion thread by the way or not, did you see the discussion thread in the Facebook group, but are saying that we’re going to rope you into actually contributing more than just the mastermind because they want a full soup to nuts type train. Yeah. So yeah, well, yeah, if there’s a need for it,  you know, the mastermind has the privilege that you know, if you guys there’s a real need about, you know, a specific type of training that you guys want to go after, then we can make a series there’s no problem about that. We’re all about, you know, serving our members as much as we possibly can. So that if that, you know, we have a good response tomorrow, that’s potentially going to happen, at least initially within the mastermind, and then we’ll go from there. But yeah, my idea is to cover as much terrain as possible tomorrow specifically, and then if we need to do another iteration of the, of the training or you know, walk you guys through a couple of case studies. So for instance, I was going through one of the clients that I manage, and we, so he’s a chiropractor. He’s a local chiropractor, and he has four clinics in Dallas. And over the past, I would say over the past six months, we have spent around $160,000 in advertising, and we have generated almost 4000 confirm appointments to those four offices. Now that is rough. So he is charging $49 per appointment, right? It’s an intra massage offer. So he’s charging $49 per appointment. We’re getting him we’re getting those appointments for around 39 to $40. So he’s, you know, making money on the front end, but that’s not even the best thing. The best thing is that each customer forth to him on average $300 you know because they show up to his office and they buy a bunch of stuff and they buy additional massages and they buy so that’s

Average and that’s on the low side. So there’s, there’s effectively we have been moving the needle real hard. He’s super happy Of course because he’s growing. He’s expanding locations and whatnot, and some of the stuff that we were able to implement for him. We will be talking about tomorrow on the mastermind, so it’s going to be pretty cool. Yeah, awesome. Yeah. Alright, so the last thing we’re going to tease before we get into questions, which we were kind of just hoping that more questions would fill in this chat box anyways, uh, we’ve got video lead gen system

to Dotto really is launching next week, next Tuesday. As a matter of fact, we’re going to talk about it well, the first part of next week’s webinar, Hump Day hangouts is going to be where we’re going to, you know, kind of get into some detail about what it’s about and all that because I completely updated it so that still the old training is there, the old method, which I did for years, but over the last several months, I’ve been really redeveloping that method to make it more streamlined and efficient, something that a lot of it can be outsourced, but also just to make it to where, even if you were doing this yourself like, you know, managing the all of the video lead gen or video email campaigns on your own, I don’t recommend that. But if a lot of people still going to do it on their own anyway, it’s a lot more efficient now to where what used to take roughly 20 to 30 minutes per video email to send out. Now what will take you just two to three minutes No kidding, there’s there will be a setup period on the front end where you can’t get into the method here, there’ll be a setup period where it might take you an hour to get everything set up. But then from there for every prospect you want to mail to, it’s literally two to three minutes. And that’s it. And so it’s a hell of a lot more efficient. And I’ve tested a lot of different follow-up methods from that as well to once you are notified of engagement and I talked about all of this in the training and found several different methods that work really well to the kind of get the conversation going and stuff and so I go into great detail. It’s basically a whole new course but you’re still going to get the original version, as well as the Everything’s under

The same membership site now. So there’s the original version, which still works, but it’s a bit more time-consuming. And then there’s the newer version that can be applied to pretty much any sort of marketing service I use specifically one, were really two types of methods for monetizing it. In the examples and in the training, I talked about how to use it for monetizing lead gen assets. And then I also talked about for client services, if you’re just doing outreach for clients instead of lead generation service providers. Then, you know, there’s a method I talked about specifically optimizing GMB stuff, but it can be modified or an applied to pretty much any sort of service that you offer. So if you’re a digital marketer does Facebook ads like her non for example, you could still use the video lead gen system, you just obviously are going to talk about how you can get results with Facebook as opposed to how you can get results with Google My Business. So any of you guys one of the things that we do is we surveyed you guys on a consistent basis to find out what what-what our audience needs, and something that comes up all the time is client getting right? securing clients and that kind of stuff. And so that’s really what this was all about. It’s so that you guys can go out and least get the conversation started. It’s not sales training. I’m not real good at sales unless I got a referral, like been referral but as far as getting the conversation going for prospecting, it’s an outstanding way to do it’s very unique, you’ll get a lot of responses that way. And then it’s really going to be up to you to present your offer in such a way that you close the client, you know what I mean? Or the prospect at that point. So anyways, be on the lookout for that guys. Next week, we’re going to do like we typically have done in the past, which is a limited offer on the front end for 24 hours and then the price will go up. And that’s typically how we do that. So be on the lookout for that next week.

Okay, anything else? I think we’re good.

Alright, cool. Let’s get into questions. Alright, so with our 1989 looking chat box, which kind of cool though. Let’s get into it will start at the top

What Are Your Thoughts On Keyword Research Ninja?

KT says what are your thoughts on keyword research ninja? I have no thoughts on it whatsoever I’ve never used it I really don’t use any keyword research tools anymore other than Power Suggest Pro, Google AdWords you know, the Google Ads keyword planner for because I still do PPC stuff. And then we have our own in-house keyword research product that is like anytime you need keywords, that’s, you know, our go-to source now is MGYB? We have the keyword research done over there because it takes hours to compile a good list of keywords. Really, you can spend hours doing that and organizing the keywords into silos and you know, proper themes and that kind of stuff. And that’s what our, you know, our product on keyword research is specifically it’s you know, our assistant or employee that does all of that have access to multiple tools, SEM Rush, Power Suggest Pro, you know, all different kinds of tools that she uses to actually develop these reports and puts them into silos and all that kind of stuff. So different type of intent keywords, commercial intent, informational queries, that kind of stuff. So it just makes it super easy. So honestly, I can’t give you an opinion on any of those keyword tools because I just don’t use them. It just requires too much time in my opinion. And I’d rather outsource that or use a simple tool when I’m going to do it myself such as Power Suggest Pro. Marco or anybody else wants to comment on any of those.

Marco: I agree that that’s all I use. I use our keyword research. I mean, I taught them how to do it for a reason it’s based on the way that you do it. And the way that I do it, which is Google Trends and power suggest Pro with Google ads, right the Keyword Planner Tool, and but the basis is right there. Then we go into everything else and we drill down as much as we can get as much information as possible go to Answer the Public. We just use just a ton of different tools that we can get all of the keywords. I mean, you get thousands sometimes I see our report come back, and it’s 7, 8, 9 thousand keywords strong. And I’m thinking, this is like the best way to take down a market. Let me if you really need to start and understand your market and the words involved in your market. There’s nothing better. I mean, I don’t know I can’t speak on keyword research Ninja, it might be fabulous. But I can’t say anything other than the way that we have it set up works perfectly well for what we do. Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah. And again, it’s the amount of time that goes into that, you know, I got away from doing it myself because it just takes too much time. Especially to Oregon. Like it’s easy to spit out a bunch of keywords with a tool but to organize them in proper themes, you know, and basically silos and that kind of stuff and intent type people words like that’s yet I mean, as far as I know, that’s manual. I don’t know tools that actually do that maybe keyword research and into does that. I don’t know, I don’t even look at tools like that anymore. So, unfortunately, I can’t give you a good answer to that.

Does Using Subdomains Produce Better SEO Juice Than Using Pages For Multi-City Local Lead Gen Site?

Gordon’s up he says thank you very much again for the help you provide on hump days. You’re welcome. He says he when setting up a multi-city local lead gen site you have advised in the past few subdomains of the main domain for each city instead of using a page under the main domain. When using pages, I know that the SEO juice can be spread among all the city pages, but when using subdomains is the SEO just spread among all the subdomains to help each other one rank met each one rank better, or does each subdomain stand on its own for SEO purposes? Well, it’s a little of both Gordon because, again, a subdomain is treated as a separate entity by Google right. But there is the parent domain being the root domain. So you can the way I always looked at it was subdomains and other subdomains of the same root domain are called siblings, sibling domains, right and the parent domain being the root.

And so what happens is each one of the subdomains or sibling domains are their own standalone sites, which is good for protection purposes. And that’s what we’ve talked about. That’s the reason why I’ve always done that. Now, it’s funny because I really don’t do anything spammy anymore, at least not to the actual money sites. So I can probably get away with just doing the inner pages, but it’s still allowed. You’re still a, you know, and that it doesn’t mean that what we do right now, doesn’t couldn’t be considered spammy tomorrow, because we don’t work for Google. Right. And so even though I’ve never really had, at least for several years now, I haven’t had any issues with getting sites deindexed or penalize. I’ve always kept using subdomains specifically to minimize risk, right to reduce exposure, so to speak. Because as I’ve said before, if you put all of your location pages on the root, so their inner pages, right, and if you catch a penalty against any one of those pages, it could pull the whole site down and all of your other location pages.

Although again, as I said, the methods that we teach, haven’t knock on wood, they haven’t created any penalties that I’m aware of, for any of my own stuff, as well as any of our students, okay, that I’m aware of. And so you could probably get away with doing it on inner pages for management purposes, that would be much easier for there’s no doubt because you’d all you’d have just one site to manage. That said, though, just keep in mind that that’s putting all of your eggs in one basket. So if Google decides to take that basket, or destroy one of the eggs in that basket, it could very well hurt all the others as well. So back to the original question, a subdomain is kind of a standalone site in that if a subdomain was to catch a penalty, for some reason or another, it would only affect that subdomain, the route would be left intact would remain healthy and all of the other sibling domains or subdomains would also remain healthy, untouched, essentially, from that penalty that’s been levied against that one subdomain. So it’s isolates any potential penalty problems. However, if you were to catch a penalty against the root domain, it would automatically apply to all of the child domains or subdomains. Does that make sense? So that’s why we all I’ve done that in the past was to always protect the root against all odds, right? Protect the root. And then if I was going to do anything spammy, it would be on a subdomain level. And that was specifically for that reason.

However, what you can do is in this is something I’ve actually been testing recently, but I don’t have enough time passed to see in fact, I just talked about this on the last mastermind webinar, so 13 days ago, actually, about how to use subdomains and the root domain in conjunction to kind of power it up. And I can’t give away the the the method here because it can’t do that because it’s kind of an extension of something that we teach in our paid courses. But there is a way to still use somebody domains and use the root domain to kind of help power up the subdomains, with inner pages without doing anything that could catch it catch up a penalty to your route. But again, you know, as far as does the subdomains benefit each other, yes, it may not be quite as a quick effect or, or might not be as effective as inner pages. But here’s the thing, every one of those subdomains are still attached to the root, right. So again, the root domain being the parent domain is going to benefit now, you guys know we don’t talk. We don’t care much about metrics. We stopped caring about proprietary third-party metrics several years ago, but let’s just use one as an example because a lot of you guys will understand it this way. Let’s just use domain authority Moz’s metric and page authority is an example okay?

When you have a domain authority that sitewide including subdomains, right, so for example, if you have a domain authority of 20 five on the root, then your subdomains, when you create a new subdomain, it won’t automatically be 25. I don’t think so. But it will become it will benefit from the domain authority of the parent domain. And so what I have found over the years now that I’ve been developing these multi-location sites using subdomains is that at first, when you start developing, like, let’s say you start off with two locations, so you’ve got the root domain, and then to subdomains at, you know, each subdomain being four different location. And then you add, so you start optimizing, you know, doing what you do to get results. And then you add a third location. Well, that third location tech, you know, typically, according to my experience, will, will often start to get results faster than the first two dead, because it’s actually benefiting from some of the authority that has been accrued or you know, accumulated from the previous two subdomains and the route altogether, right. So as a whole, it’s now that that new subdomain is actually benefiting from the authority that has accrued from the previous two and the route itself if that makes sense. So then you add a fourth subdomain and you know, fourth location, and a fifth and a six. And what happens is I start to see each new location that I add, tends to respond quicker get results faster than the previous one, because it’s actually benefiting from the authority of the, you know, cluster essentially, that’s it’s the root domain, as well as its additional its other siblings. So, again, if you’re doing just inner pages, you’ll probably be going to get a faster effect from that. But I found that you know, as you continue to build out additional subdomains, they helped to, they kind of benefit or receive benefit from all of the previous subdomains as well. So they’re at their birth point, right. The moment that you create that subdomain, it really already has some inherent authority because of it being a subdomain of a root domain that has built authority or crude authority if that makes sense.

So, anyway, I can’t get into any more further of that, honestly, because I will be giving away too much. Come join the mastermind and will tell you all about it. So, Marco, do you want to comment on that at all or Hernan?

Marco: Now, just to validate a little bit what you’re talking about on domains, we see that domain subdomain. We see that when we do drive stacks, and we add additional folders and files, right? The more you add the more power that as you say, a cruise and I call it power. I don’t give a shit about domain authority or trust flow. I don’t give a crap about any of that its power. And so the more that you do have whatever it is that you’re doing inside the drive stack, the more power that you pushing through, and the more power that ends up wherever it is that you got that drives tech game. That’s why they work so well. Yeah. And so the more work that you do inside, the more keywords that you target, whether it’s keyword plus location or service, whatever it is that you’re doing.

You do more of it inside your drive stack. And before you know it, I mean, it’s just pushing tons of power wherever it is that you want to go. And we’ve seen people live from case studies that they even get an empty folder to rank before anything else rank. So it’s crazy the amount of power that you can do in this method, whether you’re doing it at the TL D and subdomain level or at the drive stack and G site level. Right?

Twitter Embed Code Not Displaying Properly In GSite

So if it says it says good day Semantic Mastery team thanks for this form to ask questions and get real answers. When optimizing the site, I framed Twitter the area stays blank with no message saying it won’t connect. Is that still okay? All right. I don’t do much Twitter stuff. But I know that if you just take a Twitter URL, tweet URL, a Twitter profile, URL, whatever and try to use an iframe create generator that it won’t show you have to go into Twitter developers and actually generate an embed code for it which you can do with like your timeline, tweets and stuff. So for example, you can take a Twitter profile and go to

The developers, I think it’s developers.twitter.com or something like that just do a Google search, you’ll see what I mean. And you can ask you, or even just go to Google and search, how do you create or embed a Twitter feed? And that’s what you would? Again, I don’t do much Twitter stuff. But if I was going to try, and I haven’t, so I haven’t tested it with G sites, guys, but you could probably it’s probably you’re using the wrong type of embed code. And that’s why it’s not displaying is what I’m saying. If you go generate the correct proper embed code from the Twitter developers site, or whatever, whatever it is, again, I don’t do much Twitter stuff, just like you can, you know, I recently I built Believe it or not, I built some PB ends recently because I was testing. I don’t use PB ends. Often guys, I very rarely use them. But I did build a few that I was testing and somebody product actually. And one of the things that they required was that you had made the site look, you know, very real. So one of the things that asked for was embedding a Twitter feed, so I had some persona profiles from some older since networks that I had built that had Twitter profiles with, you know, updates. And so I just had I had, that’s how I learned to go build this little embed code. And that’s a Twitter feed in bed, that you have to go to the developers console and sign into that account. And then you create it that way. And it gives you the specific embed code for that Twitter feed. So it’s probably that you’re using the wrong one. Now, I could be wrong guys. Because like said, I don’t do much of that stuff with Twitter at all. But I’m pretty sure if you’re trying to use just an iframe generator with a Twitter profile or something like that, it’s going to be blank, it’s going to not work.

Can You iFrame A Facebook Business Page?

Now, the next part of that question is, can you iframe in a Facebook business page? As far as I know, no, I Facebook has iframe breakers that won’t allow you to embed them anywhere using any sort of tool. If anybody has a different answer please speak up.

Hernan: I think you’re right Bradley on that on that and I haven’t personally tried to iframe Facebook but I know that you know, Facebook is kind of against that other than Facebook videos, you know that what you can allow and but you can embed that an iframe that but other than that, I wouldn’t know? Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah, I know. There are some like plugins and stuff that will allow you to embed a or you know, display a Facebook page. But it actually Yes, you have to connect it via API and all that kind of stuff like, so there are WordPress plugins that will do that. But as far as just an embed code from Facebook, I don’t think that’s possible. Once again, I don’t do much Facebook stuff. So I couldn’t tell you with all certainty, but I can I know that, like, if you try to just take a Facebook URL, and iframe it, it won’t it all, it will never display anywhere. I’ve never seen that ever work. So you have to use stuff that connects via API or authorize or what are they called Facebook apps or whatever. We actually create all that shit in order just to get even a Facebook page to show in like a widget area on a website.

Hernan: Um, so yeah, and they’re even more like they’re, they’re even more like restrictive with all of the privacy stuff that they’re going through. So that you may want to consider so.

Bradley: yeah, and then you try to iframe or when you try to embed a Facebook comments app you see what happens the previous couple on the Hangouts that and I get it I guess that’s because people can act that shit so right cool we’re going to keep moving. This chat is already thousand better than anything before devices that is cool thanks to Vaughn I’m glad you guys liked it for a bus the new battle call right revert I think that’s one of the guests says get repeatable oh that’s you that was you that’s maybe a farm setting up by a cat gotcha well mines Bradley hmm feisty forehead motherfucker in charge just in case you guys wondered what that was all about.

Do Semantic Mastery RYS Stacks Add More Value To An Existing Syndication Network & GMB Page?

Bradley: The humanoid says Marco I have an RYS Drive stack order pending and creating an RYS stack I have my syndication network complete in my see when creating a try so that I have my syndication network completed my GMB URL done. would it add more value when I have you build my RYS stacks. Thank you will thank you will

I know that was directed to Marco I’m gonna put my two cents in first before Marco answers. And if you already have your syndication network all your profile URLs to become target URLs as well. guys remember it’s just kind of about it’s just like internal linking right with your syndication network. It’s there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be powering up your tier one assets as well. So if you have all of that I would actually absolutely include those but Marco, that’s more question for you.

Marco: Yeah, I’m thinking that he wants to know if he should have the team, put them into the bill, by all means, that that’s your tier one branded, it should be included and then So when did he get the spreadsheet to hit with link building. That’s what’s going to get hit your tier one branded your GMB and everything that’s inside that drive stack. So yes, by all means, have at it, and you’re going to see some really good results. I’ve been getting a bunch of testimony.

By the way of about people having to build links to their dry stacks and then the drive stacks just going crazy. Yeah once they get some the link building done so yes have added the same thing with the ad ID page. I’ve done some testing with that and just and that’s what I loved about it. It’s one of the easiest methods because all you gotta do is go submit link building gig order to you know, I wouldn’t say to just anybody but Daddy has got it down to a science and just taking like the ad ID the iframe loop stuff that we’ve talked about and again our paid courses and almost all of them it’s available that that just works really well and again, that’s just what that magic of I frames and when you combine that with Dr. stacks or even dr stacks alone, but that’s part of it because of you know, iframe in that gets done in the site, everything else so it’s just incredibly powerful. And just hitting those that’s the beautiful thing about it guys is you know, the daddy has link building pack service which is in MYB, right? They’re still spam links, but he’s good at what he does. He’s a pro, he’s a professional, there’s no doubt and because of that, he knows how to make it really effective. And then when you use something like Google assets as the target or Amazon domain as the primary target, then it can take that kind of abuse like you can hammer away at it, and it can take it and filter it like a champ. In fact, it just kind of powers it up. Now, it’s not something that I would ever direct to the money site, but you can do you know what I mean, but you can do it two very powerful tier one assets, which is why we developed the way that we do so that’s why we don’t even use VPN, who needs a pbn? When we can use Google and Amazon assets to create the same effect and then you spam links as opposed to and I call them spam and everybody who want to do spam. But guys, I mean, that’s what link building tools do they create spam links, you can call them whatever you want. That’s really what they are. Right and so pbn links are technically spammed links to you might be buying links from you know, a domain that has good metrics, but unless it’s super well themed and all that they’re typically spam links anyways, you know what I mean? So it’s just it’s about how you use them and what you point them at. And so we recommend doing it the way that you know, at least our method we use our method for specifically for a reason. It’s efficient, and it works well. Right.

All right old school, like daddy says, will it be set up like this tomorrow? Hernan? What’s tomorrow?

Hernan: The webinar? webinar or mastermind? Yeah, now it’s gonna be on a mastermind. Yeah. It’ll be in the regular mastermind.

Bradley: Jim, think that’s when? Yeah, just the regular master the live mastermind webinar page, just like we’ve always been doing over there. I we haven’t had any problems with that over there. Now it’s in the bond site. Yeah, right. The membership site, right.

So as far as I know, we’ve never had any problems not one complaint with it over there. We had a problem with the Disqus chat app. on these pages for some reason I think it’s a Click Funnels issue like it just didn’t jive well but on the traditional mastermind webinars inside the membership site we haven’t ever had a complaint on that so if I’m wrong and you guys got some complaints about it to make them known to make them known over there in the Facebook group not here.

How Would You Strategize Sending Out An Email Campaign For Over A Year?

I blue panda whoever that is, is hey guys hope this Jeff Oh, what the hell? That’s the same as what we had before. Maybe not okay. Hey, guys hope this chat function works better than this. That piece of shit Facebook jet cheese. Yeah. Or Geez, you’re right. That was terrible. Okay, onto my question. I have a list for my niche that is big enough to send 1000 emails per day for over a year. Wow. This is simply a law of big numbers campaign for my client. These will be a one time blast. Either they respond or they don’t and the next class goes out the next day what would be the best way to approach a list of this size style of sending? I don’t know I’ve never spammed at that level before. Spam demon.

And that’s exactly what you’re doing. So the best person to answer that question is unfortunately not here. That’s Chris, our partner, Chris, he, he’s been doing that kind of work for four years. He can give you the best advice on that. But he’s not here. I’m sorry, he’s traveling. Yeah, the only thing I would know to say is that make sure that you have plenty of sending from domain email account. So in other words, making sure that you’ve got several many, many, many different email account setup, you know, that you can send from because you’re probably going to burn every single account that you send from like, almost every day.

I don’t know for sure, because it depends on how clean your list is. But typically, when you’re sending out mass emails like that, from a particular account, especially 1000 per day, you have to have accounts that have developed some sort of reputation for or else when you go to hit send on 1000 emails from an account that’s not really seasoned. It will you know, the is the internet search or email service providers will throttle those accounts and not the inbox. You know a bunch of them and also with people will start hitting the spam button which it’s likely if they were unsolicited emails, you will get a lot of people hitting the spam button, it will flag that particular domain account for or domain email excuse me for spam and so it will like they’ll just stop unboxing her nine you were going to comment? Yeah, yeah,

I agree with you. What I was about to say is that if you want to, you know, reach out to Chris just post in the Facebook group and maybe take him I don’t know if blue pen is on the mastermind group. Yeah, if you’re in the mastermind, we could get to it. You know, Chris will give you a lot of help out there. Otherwise, you could try it in the free Facebook group and I don’t know how much he’ll reveal about something like that there. But yeah, that’s the only problem like guys I talked about this a few weeks ago, but you know, I got I’ve unsubscribed from just about every single marketing list that I’m I’ve ever been on.

Over the last several months, because I decided to get really focused and you know, buying shiny objects and getting pitched new training, you know, methods and stuff like that all the time was really, and I, you know, there’s they’re kind of happens in cycles. I know a lot of you guys we’ve I’ve talked with a lot of our mastermind members over the last several months I do calls now with, you know, one on one calls with mastermind members, as a new member, you get a one on one call with one of us. And then every quarter or so I try to open up the ability to have another 30 minute call with me so I can kind of help you know, find out more about people in our mastermind and what struggles are going through and offer some guidance and and and, you know, 90 days to six months and three to six months, I have another call with them, find out if they made any progress, and they’re going to have new issues at that point. So one of the things that I’ve heard a lot through those calls without calling anybody out is that, you know, constantly being bombarded with different opportunities. And that’s because we’re all marketers, right? And so we’ve gone out and been signed up for whatever ours, which puts us on email list or we bought products, which puts us on email lists. And the next thing you know, we get hammered and you guys can all relate I’m sure you get hammered and hammered and hammered all the time with solicitation offers for training or for software or tools or services and all that kind of stuff. And you know,

I found that although they may be interesting and sometimes entertaining to go like watch webinars or to go check out the new sales page of the new tool that or software or WordPress plugin or whatever the hell it is, that typically just distracts from making any progress a real progress in my business and you know, over the years I’ve gone up and down with that, you know, sometimes a more susceptible to that other times I’m not but over the last many months now I really just started to unsubscribe from you know, ton of people’s emails. The reason I started saying that was because my oldest email account that is the account that I use, it’s a Yahoo account, Yahoo mail account, that’s the one that I used to always sign up for stuff like I don’t use my main Gmail accounts for for to sign up for lists or two webinars and things like that, because I knew that I get on a spam list, right and people would start spamming me. I’m still getting a ton of spam over there. But I’ve never voluntarily or I very, very rarely voluntarily used one of those primary Gmail type email addresses for signing up for that stuff. But I had a Yahoo mail account that was just getting spammed to death. And so over the last several months, I have really, really gotten a much better handle on that too. Because what I’ve done is I’ve gone every time I get an email now I just daily maintenance Now, every single day, I go through my Yahoo account probably two maybe three times a day. And if there’s an email that came is comes to me that I was unsolicited, which is you know, it’s they don’t come nearly as often as they used to now, I open up the email, I scroll right to the bottom finance subscribe button, I click it and make sure you know in the page reloads that it’s that in the net new tab that I’ve unsubscribed. Then I close that tab and I go back in and I click the spam button and Yahoo

And I do that every single day. And, you know, I used to get literally dozens, sometimes hundreds of emails per day, as many of you guys can probably relate. And now I swear to God, this is no bullshit over the last, probably five to six weeks now, I might get two or three emails per day and some days I don’t get any spam or unsolicited emails anymore. And that’s because I’ve gotten into the habit of doing that. So now it’s much more manageable like that, that email counts almost like a clean account. Now I do still get occasional as I said, Sometimes I’ll get one. Sometimes I get two or even three spam emails where it’s another internet marketer that bought my name off the list somewhere and sends me some bullshit email about the newest WordPress plugin. But I open up the email, I go straight to the unsubscribe button, unsubscribe and then come back and hit the spam button. And so it’s really really reduced that now the reason I said that was because if you start emailing people with unsolicited emails, you’re likely going to have many of them going to hit that spam button and that’s going to tank your deliverability, just like that. So if you’re going to be doing that sort of a strategy, you’re going to need a ton of email accounts ready, essentially one per day and even that, I don’t know that I’d send 1000 per day from one account. I probably split that up across multiple accounts. Okay.

Can You Still A GSite And Empower A Client’s Money Site If You Don’t Have Access To Their Email Account?

Anyways, it says when working with clients and you don’t have access to their email account, can you create a G site for them embed their properties and deliver the power to the money site URL? Well, yeah, I would never ask for access to my clients Google accounts ever never do I asked for that. So that’s how we do it right? We create and fits if it’s the same fits as I know that we used to be in our mastermind you should know that. And it might not be but ya know, like, for example, we just we create for clients created or even if for you guys that buy stuff from us, we’re going to go create a Google account.

To create your assets, the same thing with my clients, I go create a Google account, right or if they’re on G sweet, which some of them are, but most of them aren’t, then I have them add, you know, create an email or user account for me. And then I will end up, you know, giving me they, and then I asked them to give me permissions for to access the other accounts, like our Google Apps essentially within that account, right? That makes sense. And guys, you know, send a screencast video tutorial video to your users. So for example, I don’t ever ask for Google account access, but I do ask for to be added as a Google My Business Manager to their GMB for example. Right. So how do you do that? Well, unless you ask for their login details and go do it set, you know, add yourself as a manager, you know, add yourself as a manager, you got to ask them to do it. So if they don’t know how to do it, you got to provide them with instructions. The easiest way to do that, in my opinion, is to just do a quick tutorial video and show them hey, show him another GMB account. say look, login go to business google. com

Left-hand sidebar, you’re going to go click users, this little box is going to show you’re going to see a little plus icon at the top, click that to add new user at my email address from the drop-down, select, you know, manager, not site or not owner, just add me as a manager and then click you know, invite or send or whatever the button says, and I’ll get an invitation and then I’ll go be able to access you can do the same thing, if they have, you know, if you wanted it to be hosted on their main Google account, like a G site, which is unnecessary. But if you wanted to, you could give them instructions on a go into sites, google.com and add me as a user or manager, whatever, give me permission to be able to access that app within your Google account. However, it doesn’t matter because you can create the new account, build everything under the new account and then add your client Gmail account as a manager and then transfer ownership if you needed to. But again, it’s really unnecessary. It doesn’t matter who the Google account is. You can push the power the SEO juice anywhere you want. Okay.

Facebook Embed Post

Facebook also gives you an embed code for each post. Really? Yeah, it does. You so you can embed a Facebook post? Yes, that is correct. When did that start? Yeah,

it’s always been there. Yeah, it’s been rough. But Jay get. So if you get if you create, like, for instance, if you create, I don’t know, post with a link or a post with an image bubble, blah, then you can embed that somewhere. So it has to, it has to be on in your timeline. Or it has to be like, like on an open page. It can be like, if it’s a closed group, you can’t do anything with it. If if it’s a member, whatever it if it’s hidden or secret or Harvard. I don’t know too much about Facebook. I’m just there answering questions. Yeah, but if it’s open, right, and if it’s public, yes, Google will not Google Facebook will give you an embed code for that post or for whatever it

Is that you’re doing an image or video. But in those at one post though, right, correct, I don’t I think that you’re right that there’s an X breaker if you try to embed the like the entire face. Yeah. Yeah. And it has to come from a, from a Facebook page, if that makes sense. Not from a profile. You know, even if the profile is public, there’s a lot of, you know, stuff going on with privacy and whatnot. So it needs to come from a Facebook page, which is what your clients are going to be using anyway. Right. So um, so yeah, but that’s, that’s another caveat that you want to have in mind. Yeah, well, I mean, okay, so that may mean that that’s cool. And all but you know, unless you’re going to go in and update the iframe, or the embed code on a regular basis on your sites. I don’t see how I mean, obviously, if you’ve got I guess one post that you specifically trying to power up then yeah, and you could embed it and then hammer and you know, the G site or wherever you’ve got an embedded with links or something like that, but you know, typically I like to set up the iframe that is going to update dynamically. So I publish content and it’s on an automatically be in the iframe that I’m trying to power up. Do you know what I mean? So that’s cool. I didn’t, I wasn’t aware that you could embed individual posts, but say, that’s cool. I just learned something. Yep. Very cool. Yep.

Is It Better To Create Different Page For Each Keyword Or Use A Single Location To Rank Different Keywords

Okay, so Gordon’s up again, it says, Thanks a lot for your previous answer. You’re welcome. He says, which brought up this question and used to be okay to use duplicate content for different sites targeting and local niche in different cities, just changing the location info one site for each city. But is that still true? I’ve never done that. Gordon. Honestly, I’ve always advocated for using unique content for all those and that’s specifically because, at some point, it could be, you know, toxic, it could you could end up catching a penalty because it is all duplicate content and duplicate content, guys, it’s supposed to be on the same domain, I get that, but on the same subdomains, you know, I don’t I don’t like that because it’s not as effective.

So what I’ve always always always suggested Yes, it has worked, you can just swap out location information. So like essentially the city modifier within the content. But it’s inexpensive to have a piece of content written and then have it rewritten, it’s a lot less expensive to have it rewritten than to have original content written for each, which by the way, when you go to a content farm, none of its original, all they’re doing is rewriting other content that they’ve scraped from the web, just so you’re aware of that, guys, when you go buy an article from a content farm. It is a rewritten article from something else on the web that they scraped, that’s it, there’s nobody there is actually writing an original article. all they’re doing is going easy and articles or somewhere else scraping an article and then rewriting it and usually it’s rewritten very poorly, by the way, but what I’m saying is you can go out and order an article, habit, you know, Britain for whatever, let’s say it’s 1000 word article, and it cost you 40 bucks. And then you have article rewrites. So let’s say you got six locations six subdomains where you got the URL

So that you paid 40 bucks for that, but then you order five rewrites, it might cost you $8 per rewrite. And now you’ve got six, original, unique, let’s just I’m using air quotes, but six or unique articles that are going to be more effective, in my opinion, long term, then having the same piece of content used across multiple sites where the only thing you change this is the location modifier. So that’s how I’ve done that, guys. I’ve got lead gen assets out there with subdomains with 20 subdomains, and they each have their own unique content. You know, and that’s specifically for that reason.

You know, again, it’s your call, I’ve always wanted to build long term assets that will rank and produce revenue for me for years, and I’ve got many of them. And so, you know, again, it’s all I always think about, it might be a little bit more expensive, a little bit more hassle on the front end. But what’s more of a hassle having assets that stopped producing or start performing poorly, because of you took shortcut cuts on the front end. You know if they’re producing revenue for you and again guys I don’t know if it works or not because I just don’t do it. I don’t know if it still works or not but other people may be able to comment and say oh it works fine that’s fine if you want to build your business that way do it you know, there’s it’s up to you. So I don’t recommend it though. Honestly, I try to do the work up front so that it will produce for me for the long term and I don’t have to continually worry about that shit.

Do you remember that when they first came out with pandas and penguins? What that what Google was asking for rich unique relevant content that’s updated on a regular basis how often they repeated that that was when the doofus what’s his name was still with with with the spam team gotten Matt Cutts right. When that was so that this is they kept asking them they didn’t they keep doing it over and over fresh, unique relevant content updated on a regular basis. But the telling you that for a reason the bot feeds of content

Now I know that people have done tests when and where, you know, they’ve used Latin. And it ranked, but there were still keywords interspersed with that Latin garbage that made it rank and that’s what the bite is feeding off. It’s feeding off that information that you’re giving it. And if you just keep pushing the same information over and over, we have seen this, again, we always test guys is why we can give you the answers to these questions. We’ve seen it time and again and local GMB Pro, that if you use different posts, that if you do it regularly, whatever regularly means for your niche because niches a different each unique niche will react differently to the post frequency. But we know that if you use fresh, unique, relevant content, update on a regular basis, fresh images or you make Google think that they’re fresh images

Marco: don’t even have to be, it’s just all about feeding them but the information that the bot is coded to look for. It’s looking for these variables, right the keyword in the right places, and in the right amount and then information. And, and it’s also looking at how a real person interacts with that content that you’re displaying. And whether that person finishes, whatever action they set out to do. All of this is part of it. Now, if you give people the same information over and over and over again until you change this is a little bit eventually that gets stale, and the bodies will be able to tell how people react to that. And the one thing you’d never want to do is you never want to send us a negative signal. We always concentrate on feeding them but the positive signals that’s going to get us positive actions and reactions going to get us better placement.

going to give us knowledge panel displays is going to get us calls. And it’s going to get us web site visits, and whatever else, right, whatever else that we’re looking for. But it all starts with your content. And yes, you can feed garbage. But eventually, what will happen is it’ll get the index just like it happened with that test website that was done. But that one was just to show what you could do with the content place in in in the right areas. And in the right amount. Guys, don’t trick yourself into thinking I’m going to take the easy way out and just change the location. Give people a reason to think about it. Think like the end user, right? If I’m going in there, and I’m looking to have my problem solved, and I keep seeing the same garbage over and over. I don’t want to deal with that. I want someone that that’s talking to me as the end user, and someone who’s going to help me solve my problem, become problem solvers and you’re going to go a long way towards really developing your content in a way that people are really going to enjoy interacting with, and in the long run is going to make your whole lot more money than taking shortcuts. Yeah.

Bradley: All right. We’re going to wrap it up here in a minute. But if it says mastermind calls from Bradley are awesome, relevant, timely, and actionable period. Thanks fits. Appreciate that. Yeah, I’ve enjoyed those calls. I had a couple of this week already. So again, I appreciate that. And then lastly, Gordon had posted one more question. That’s fine, Gordon, we appreciate that. He says, since relied on questions, I’ll ask something else. And this is a good question.

Is It Better To Create Different Page For Each Keyword Or Use A Single Location To Rank Different Keywords?

He says when creating local Legion pages, is it better or easier to create a different page for each keyword or to try to rank a single location page for a bunch of different keywords? Yeah, so that’s a great question. Because several years ago, that was the method was to it was and that was the industry, right? The traditional knowledge, right was to go out and create. Each page would be optimized for a singular keyword. Right. That was really how silo structure was started.

be taught was, you go out and you create a silo and then you collect the supporting keywords for that silo and then you start creating posts within the silo that each post is optimized for one keyword. And that can still be applied today. But the thing is, though, you’re better off. So let me back up for a minute like with a complex silo, guys, there are categories and subcategories, right? And so what I’m saying is it used to be it was taught for a while the best practices was was to create your top-level keyword would be the top-level page, your top level category. And then for your next tier down of keywords, right, you’re supporting keywords, you would create a subcategory for each of those keywords. Right, so that’s a child page. And then at your post level, you would go out and take longer tail versions of your second tier keywords and you would create individual posts for each one of those that would link up to your sub-category pages, right. And so that was very granular It was like Uber optimized content. But after panda three or four I don’t even remember which one it was but it was sometime around 2014 timeframe we started noticing that that was less effective and now and that’s because guys the algorithm has gotten so much better and understanding natural language right it with AI and rank brain and all of that it understands content and its totality now a lot better than it used to, right it’s Google’s gotten incredibly advanced in that respect. And so now you can actually have longer form content that targets many semantically related keywords that’s the key right? So instead of going out and creating multiple pages, which is kind of a bitch anyway, and it’s it’s really makes as Marco was just talking about, it makes for a shitty user experience to if you go to a site and you have to click to another page to learn more about a very similar keyword anyways or product or service. So it just becomes repetition over and over and over again. And that’s less effective. So you’re better off creating a long-form piece of content, as it as a page that has a lot of your relevant similarly related keywords within that page, you can even have somewhat broader topics combined on the same page. So provided that they’re segregated by correct segments, or headings, and other words, sections within the page. So you know, and I’ve experimented with even ranking one page websites guys for, you know, multiple types of keywords like that wouldn’t even be in the same silo. But because of the way that you organize the content on the page, you can still rank for that. Here’s another example, using like Table of Contents or navigation links with hot links that go to those sections on the page. So that’s a good way to kind of set to analyze the content within a page to where you can only you can have one page that can rank for multiple keywords or themes that make sense. So to answer your question.

I wouldn’t go with optimizing for singular keywords. No, don’t get me wrong if you’re if you’re doing short blog posts, for example, I target, you know, with GMB posts a lot singular keywords, I mean, we still I still sprinkling variations of that single keyword, but there’s one primary keyword typically for me, for GMB posts. So you can still do that. But for your pages on your site, right, I’m talking about posts doing that. But for your pages on your site, which are typically what you’re trying to rank, you’re using posts to support the page, right? So for pages, I would recommend going with longer form content instead. That’s why I don’t usually recommend using complex silos anymore because you can accomplish it with simple silos, which is just categories and page, top-level categories and pages and then post supporting posts. Because complex structures are exactly what their name implies. They’re complex. They’re hard to manage. It’s hard to map out in the beginning, and it’s, it’s honestly, I think it’s overkill for most stuff, especially for local it’s overkill for most local things. All right.

Okay five o’clock I’ve got to go but I am going to read this comment real quick Jim says FYI everyone I placed an order for keyword research it was actually too good with too many keywords but they do break it down and suggest which keywords you should target which ones are good for silo and for supporting keywords. Don’t hesitate to order you won’t regret the quality time saved that it takes the guesswork out of it. shipped Marco trains them. Hello. Thanks, Jim. Jim. So, Alright guys, everybody. We appreciate you being here. I’m kind of digging this app even though it looks old school. It’s kind of cool. what you guys think. I like it. I mean, it works. Yeah. Works. Nobody’s complaining about getting locked out of any account so far. So we’ll see. All right, everybody. We’ll see you guys tomorrow on the mastermind and everyone else next week. Thanks for being here, man. Later see

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 232 syndicated from https://medium.com/@SpanishFly