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yuta-nakamots · 3 years ago

Text

perfect - z.cl

Pairing - Chenle x Fem!Reader

Genre - fluff, angst, university!au, friends to lovers!au

Warnings - alcohol consumption, mention of drunkeness, lots of arguments, heavy making out, breakups, contains an aged up chenle (26-ish) towards the end

Summary - He’s definitely not your knight in shining armor, he may not be the one you bring home to mother, but he’ll be the one to give you flowers. Chenle is not the right one for you, but he is for right now.

Word Count - 5.2k

A/N - Bolded phrases are song lyrics taken from One Direction’s song ‘Perfect’ and inspired from the lyrics along with all the vlives where Chenle and the members have started yelling out the lyrics.This was supposed to come out back in January but school held it up and now Ana is gone hhhhh. I know she’s still on Tumblr but under a new url so if anyone wants to send this to her, to let her know that I did finish it, that would be nice.

Taglist - @astroboy-lele @in-my-neofeelings || fill out this form if you’d like to join my general taglist ^^

Written for the Sometimes Letting Go… Collab originally hosted by @sunryu who unfortunately deactivated.

When I first saw you from across the room, I could tell you were curious

The mutual attraction between you and Chenle was undeniable. Ever since the two of you first met as freshmen in an econ class, you knew he was your twin flame and he was yours. That initial meeting was almost comical, the way the professor said to pair up and talk to someone next to them for a bit and it seemed like everyone had turned away from you except for the boy sitting next to you.

It seems you both had the same realization as your heads turned and eyes met. “Well I guess you’re my friend for today,” he began, “hi, my name is Chenle. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Y/n,” you told him, “the pleasure is all mine.”

“So, why are you in this class?” He asked, tapping his pen on his leather-bound planner.

You hesitated for a second as you thought about how much to tell him. “I’m majoring in business and this was just one of the mandatory classes in my plan.”

“Hm, same here,” Chenle shared, seeming the slightest bit amused at your similarity, “would you also happen to be in calculus this semester?”

“Section 3 at 10:30?” You counter.

Chenle broke into a smile, “that’s the one.”

“How about freshman seminar?” You asked.

“1:15 in the world language building?” Chenle offered, copying your answer from before.

“Wow,” your eyebrows were raised in actual disbelief, “did you steal my schedule or something?”

“No, but I do believe in fate,” the boy next to you confessed, “would you like to get lunch sometime before freshmen seminar?”

You nodded, “I’d like that,” you stopped mid-sentence when you remembered that you told your friends you’d eat with them, “I am gonna be eating with my friends though so I could introduce you to them if you’d like.”

“Want to bet that we have the same friends too?”

“No way, that would be too coincidental.”

And coincidental it was. Somehow your friends knew some of Chenle’s friends whether it be from high school activities, childhood friends, or even having just met in their own classes. Your small group of five had immediately doubled in size.

Of course, with such a large group of friends, there was much fun to be had and many memories to be made. During midterms is when you were thankful you were majoring in business and not something like biology or chemistry. You could still go out and have fun on weekends with Chenle and the majority of your friends, meanwhile a few poor souls had to stay back to study their ‘reaction mechanisms’ or whatever the heck those things were called.

You quickly found that you weren’t one for parties though you loved to hang out with your friends and have small little parties of your own in the dorms. Every single time, as you all got progressively drunker and started to clock out for the night, it was always you and Chenle left being the two most sober with no other choice but to take care of your friends over hushed conversations.

“How much vodka did Hannah even drink?” Chenle asked while you both worked on cleaning up the mess of solo cups and napkins surrounding your friend who had, unfortunately, drank over half of the bottle. You picked it up, waving it at Chenle to show him. “She’s gonna have a nasty hangover…or at least wake up super dehydrated.”

As you worked on laying a blanket across her, passed out on the floor, Chenle had managed to stuff all the napkins inside the cups he had collected and was busy aiming at the trash can across the room. Right as he was about to shoot, “miss!” you called out. The little stack of cups hit the rim of the plastic trash bin and fell to the floor. Chenle turned to you, sticking out his tongue and imitating the way you caused him to mess up before going to properly dispose of the rubbish.

Instead of simply placing it in the waste, he once again returned to where he stood before, with one eye shut, aiming for the bin. You let out a scoff, ready to disturb him once more. He shot you a glance, knowing what you were planning from the way you just stood watching him. But regardless, he tried again. “Airball” you sang as he released the short stack of cups, sending them flying to the foot of the bin.

Chenle let out a growl, childishly stomping his way over to you while you tried to quietly escape from his grasps through the mess of food and other miscellaneous items on the floor. From the hushed giggles and name-calling from the two of you as you both stumbled around the room, to the whispered late-night thoughts and affirmations spoken from your positions on the floor with your heads resting on the edge of a bed, you barely even noticed how fast time was passing.

“Are you going home for the holidays?” You asked him.

He shook his head, “it’s my first time getting to live away from my parents and whenever I do go back, they’ll probably be expecting me to bring some girl with me.”

You turned to look at him, “why would they expect that?”

“They’re both getting old and want to retire soon,” Chenle started, “so the faster I get married and take over the company, the faster they’ll get to live out the rest of their lives,” he explained.

“Well that’s not very nice of them,” you commented, “what kind of parents would place such high responsibility on their child like that?”

“Mine I guess,” Chenle sighed.

After a moment of silence, you sat up, unsure what to make of the next words to come out of your mouth. “If you want, I could go with you.” Chenle looked at you with his eyebrows furrowed. “Like, I could be your fake girlfriend or something so that they don’t bother you so much about finding one.”

“That’s…an idea,” he started, biting on the corner of his lip as he played out possible scenarios in his head. “I think that would only make it worse though since we’d both have to make up stories and tell the same information.”

“True. But we could at least make it look believable, don’t you think?” You reached over to pet Chenle’s head the same way you’ve seen him do to his friends. “Oh, Chenle, you’re so cute,” you cooed, “I can’t wait to marry you and be with you for the rest of our lives.”

He grabbed your wrist and put it in your lap, not very keen on the show of affection. “Yeah, I think we’d look like a pretty convincing couple.”

“Do we look good together though?” You pondered. “If we were to show up to an event or something, would we make people stop and stare at us?”

“Anyone can do that if they wear something weird or do something out of the ordinary-“

“Okay but that’s not what I’m asking,” you interrupted, “I’m asking, would we look good together as a couple?”

Chenle shrugged apprehensively, “sure.” Your eyes bore into him as if forcing a more legit answer out of him. “Yes, I think we would look good as a couple.”

It was as if you and Chenle were made for each other. Whatever one did, the other was never too far behind. It was absolutely no surprise to your friends when you told them Chenle had asked you out and you became official. While your college careers continued and friends came and went, Chenle was always with you. He was your solid island in the middle of a tumultuous sea, your oasis in a dried desert. You didn’t need anyone else around to have fun, just him, just the two of you.

But if you like causing trouble up in hotel rooms and if you like having secret little rendezvous

Being with Chenle was as wild as things could get. It meant impulsive plans and bad decisions. Weekend nights normally consisted of one of you driving with no destination in mind until someone got hungry. Even at that point, the night didn’t end.

Sometimes the two of you would stay out past midnight, not wanting to leave each other’s company just yet. The feeling of the wind whipping past you as Chenle drove or the thrill of gassing it down the freeway was almost dreamlike. One would think that at this point, you’d return home, but for you, your home was wherever Chenle was. If it meant staying in a small hotel room for the night drinking cheap wine out of paper cups then so be it, that was home.

“Baby, you already drank almost half of the bottle, leave some for me,” Chenle teased, his eyes glimmering under the low lighting. The brightness of the small lamp on the desk failed to reach where he was sitting, the cozy armchair too far in the corner for it to be illuminated.

“Come here and get some then,” you suggested, lazily winking at him before downing another shot-sized gulp and enjoying the burn from the liquid running down your throat. The bed you were sitting on wasn’t all that soft but you had already warmed up a little spot of it and gotten too comfortable to move.

Chenle raised an eyebrow at you, a smirk tugging at his lips. “I don’t think you want me to do that.”

“Why not?” Your expression mirroring his.

“You wanna find out?

“Maybe I do.”

He let out a scoff and within a second he was on the bed, climbing up and settling over you. His warm breath fanned your neck, the scent of alcohol filling your senses. “Are you sure about that?”

“Fuck around and find out, handsome,” you taunted.

You had barely even finished your sentence before Chenle’s lips were on yours, his usual soft and pillowy lips became hot and heavy against yours under the guide of the fifteen-dollar wine. You were sure that you were definitely getting tipsy but Chenle’s love and passion were even more overwhelming. It was moments like this when you felt that you were drunk off of his love and it was absolutely intoxicating in the best way.

If you like to do the things you know that we shouldn’t do, then baby I’m perfect

It was drunk weekends like this that led to a rocky start of the following week. It’s not that you and Chenle were bad students, it’s just that when you become totally infatuated with the person you love, you start to devote yourself to them instead of what actually needs to get done.

As sophomores in college, one would think that you’d have a little more self-control but with Chenle, you just couldn’t help it. He was worse than any drug you could ever take, to the point where your friends would have to intervene and keep you in your rooms until a substantial amount of work was done.

You called them annoying but really you should’ve been thankful to them for caring so much about you back then, and you are thankful, looking back on it. They always told you ‘distance makes the heart grow fonder’ and you wish you had listened to them. Maybe if you did, you wouldn’t have lost a relationship that you thought was practically flawless.

Perfect for you

In junior year, that is when your beautiful illusion finally began crumbling down. Your workloads grew heavier and your hours of sleep decreased. Chenle would often leave you on read, having opened your message in the middle of studying then forgotten to reply to it. Even when you childishly got upset at him for that, he’d always give you the same apology or buy you something cute as if money could shut you up.

With little to no distance between the two of you, it was easy for boundaries to be crossed and for problems to go unaddressed. You can feel like you know someone so well, that they’ll always understand what you mean and they can read your words like a book, but it didn’t seem that way anymore with Chenle.

He’d make fun of the way you always made him say ‘I love you’ at least once a day or some of your other pet peeves, including the way you had a Hello Kitty mouse pad that was ‘too childish for a college student to be using.’ It may have been out of love but it sure didn’t seem that way.

I might never be the hands you put your heart in or the arms that hold you any time you want them

Soon, the little pricks in your relationship spread past closed doors and into your schoolwork. Sharing a major and classes with your significant other was not exactly ideal, especially when they had different values and beliefs from you and had to argue for their reasoning.

“That just isn’t sustainable in the long run though,” you commented as you read through Chenle’s senior research report while seated opposite of him inside a library study room.

He ran a hand through his hair, leaning back into his seat, about to repeat himself for the fourth time. “It’s not about sustainability, it’s about the profit margin that’s being made. What don’t you get?”

“It’s not good for the environment, it’s not good for the people working in the factories,” you point out, “I don’t get how you can subject these things onto people.”

“Y/n, we’re business majors,” he stated plainly, “we study money, the economy, sales, company relationships, we’re not here to be environmentalists. Things don’t have to last very long, so much as they make a profit.”

“But we should think about the impact of our future businesses and their longevity in the world-”

“You should think about passing this class and stop being so prissy and uptight about saving trees or whatever the fuck you’re going on about.”

You were absolutely shocked at the words that had just come out of his mouth. This wasn’t the first time he had seemingly degraded you in this manner, but when it came to school and your own work, you were deeply offended at what he had said, especially since both of you had spent many hours on your respective projects.

“Chenle,” you began softly, “tell me you didn’t mean that.”

He refused to meet your gaze, “If I told you that then I would be a liar.”

“Look, you can’t just spew whatever bullshit you want and just expect that people won’t get hurt,” you criticized, only to be cut off once more.

“Then maybe you should learn to not take everything so seriously,” he snapped back.

“I...I think we need a break.”

“Agreed.”

“No, from each other.” Chenle’s head whipped up to look at you, his eyes went wide when he realized what you were insinuating.

“Baby no, you know it’s not like that,” he started, but it was already too late. You blocked his voice out of your head as you packed your belongings, just wanting to get out of this room, wanting to get away from him.

This wasn’t the first time you had fought with him in this way but it felt like you had finally lost all your patience. You were tired of always being told you were wrong and having your thoughts and ideas invalidated. As you stormed away from the library, you realized that maybe you needed to let go of things that no longer brought you joy.

Sometimes letting go...is a new start

After that incident, you did indeed have a fresh start. You slowly removed Chenle from your life and just in time for graduation. Whenever he tried to approach you on campus, you always turned the other way even if it meant being late to class. Luckily, you didn’t have many shared classes with him anymore and you were all the more grateful for it right now.

You’d come back to your campus apartment with the occasional flower or sticky note left on your doorstep asking you to give him another chance but you simply didn’t have enough time or energy to care anymore. Commencement was approaching and you still had yet to hear back from any of the companies you had applied to for internships.

But that don’t mean that we can’t live here in the moment

One of your friends had mentioned that Chenle had already received news that he was accepted into his family’s business, a large company in China, and you wished you could’ve been there when he had read the email. You could practically hear his yell of delight, his laugh when he’d turn to hug you, even if it was practically guaranteed that he’d get in, you missed it all so much but there was no turning back now.

It wasn’t until after commencement did you receive your own letter of acceptance from one of the largest foreign trade companies in the area after you saw Chenle for the last time. “Zhong Chenle, Bachelor of Arts in business management.” You remembered the immense pride and pain you felt in your chest, watching him walk across the stage to claim his diploma as you sat clothed in the same cap and gown only a few rows away. You wished you could share your emotions with him, but you had to remind yourself that he was no longer yours, he was no longer the man you first fell in love with.

‘Cause I can be the one you love from time to time

Four years have passed since that moment at commencement. In those four years, you’ve climbed your way up in the company, taking a hold of a directing position in project development and management. With all your success though, there was always one failure that kept floating through your mind. The number of sleepless nights and wandering moments you’ve spent thinking about all the ‘what ifs’ and the changes you should’ve made in your relationship have all decreased with time, but sometimes it all comes crashing back. You miss the memories you made with him and you miss being so young and naive.

Sometimes you managed to hear a thing or two about the company he worked for but you never paid much attention to it, always falling back into a spiral of guilt and calling yourself the sole reason why your relationship fell apart. Chenle would even pop into your mind at the weirdest times when you’d be thinking of anything but him.

Like the other day as you were staring out the window of your office, watching people and cars pass by, your memory of Chenle speeding down the empty highway suddenly resurfaced. The adrenaline you felt from the buildings and signs whizzing by, the slight buzz of alcohol you felt in your system, the cool air coming in from Chenle’s window, the warmth of his hand in yours. You couldn’t help but smile at it fondly yet it turned sour when you thought of the last time he ever drove you somewhere. You had argued with him about something dumb, you couldn’t even remember it at this point, and you even slammed the door before storming off to who knows where.

Or some months ago, you were interviewing possible new hires for the company and met someone from Puerto Rico. Once you finished the interview with them, you sat at the wooden desk while remembering the way you teased Chenle because he didn’t know how to pronounce Puerto Rico. You thought it was cute and even told him that, but it ended up in another fight because you may have spent a little too long dwelling on the topic.

But oftentimes when you find yourself thinking about him, you’d wonder how he’s doing. Is he happy where he is right now? What kinds of things is he doing for his job? Has he found a new girlfriend? What if he dated many other people after me? What if he’s married? Would he have children by now? Or most importantly, ‘does he still love me?’

And if you like midnight driving with the windows down, and if you like going places we can’t even pronounce

Regardless, you’d shake off all these thoughts and continue about your day, completing the tasks assigned to you. The majority of your time was spent conducting interviews and deliberating with the directors about who to hire for what position. It was quite fun, really. You got to meet all of the new hires before they came into the company and you felt empowered by the fact that you would be indirectly responsible for the future of the company in this sort of way.

On one particular day, everything felt like it was going just a little too well. Your hair was done just the right way, traffic was light, your coworkers seemed to all be in a good mood, but most importantly, there were no fat folders sitting on your desk, waiting for you to go through. Just a single sheet of paper with the list of the new hires coming in for their briefings along with the notes you were required to go over.

You didn’t bother checking it, seeing as how you had exactly two minutes left before the scheduled meet time, which was exactly the amount of time you needed to head downstairs to the conference room. You really should have checked the list though. It would have prepared you for the shock of seeing a certain someone sitting at the table in a suit that looked all too good on him.

“Zhong Chenle?” You audibly gasped, pausing in your tracks the moment you entered the conference room.

His eyes were already on you as if he knew you’d be the person to walk through that doorway at that exact moment. “That would be me.”

The other new hires looked around at each other sharing all types of glances. Worried, suspicious, surprised, questioning, nothing really all that positive. “Sorry, he’s just an old friend that I was surprised to see,” you quickly explained, trying to pull yourself back together.

Throughout your whole presentation, it was like all the attention in the world was directed at you. Never had you felt this nervous before doing something that was supposed to be so familiar. Every time your eyes glanced over in Chenle’s direction, his gaze managed to catch yours as if he was trying to speak to you without any words.

By the time you adjourned the meeting and sent the new hires off to their respective departments, it felt like you had run a marathon. Your palms were clammy, your legs shaky, your mind racing, and your heart was pounding.

Chenle was the only one left in the conference hall while you pushed in all the chairs and turned off the lights. “Looks like these years have done you well.” He commented, finally able to take in the sight of you now that there was no one else around.

“I could say the same for you.” His shoulder had gotten broader and any childlike features had left his face. He truly looked like he had grown into a man. The dark gray suit he was wearing fit the lines of his body so well, it made you think he could’ve been a model instead of simply becoming an office worker. “So how have you been?”

He did a classic Chenle shrug, “nothing much really. I started off being just a marketing employee, did some work, and got myself to be chief marketing officer. It seems you’ve gotten much further than I have, though. Project development and management?”

“Oh, it’s not anything huge. I just help with planning things out and doing all the paperwork for its execution. I only do interviews and help with hiring when we’re in season, which would be why I’m here right now,” you explained, motioning for him to follow you out of the room. “Your new supervisor is probably wondering where you are. I sent the rest of the newbies a few minutes ago already. I’ll just tell him that you had a few questions about our operations.”

“Wow, cheating the system? That’s not the way I remember you,” Chenle said with mock disapproval. You led him to the elevators, pleasantly surprised to find one still on your floor after you hit the ‘up’ button. Your eyes met with his while you gestured for him to go in. “Ladies first,” he had a cat-like grin on his face as you rolled your eyes and stepped into the elevator.

“So why did you decide to leave your company? Weren’t you going to take it over someday?” You ask over the squeaking of the doors closing.

Chenle leaned against the cold metal wall of the elevator, “I still plan to but I felt like they were just kind of babying me or treating me differently because they knew of my background,” he explained. You could only nod to acknowledge the fact that you were listening. “I told my parents that I wanted to get experience outside of the company and they didn’t really understand at first until I showed them my point of view and how it’s a little worrisome to perhaps, learn how to cook when you always have chefs around you giving you instructions down to the tiniest things.”

The elevator came to a stop and the heavy doors opened onto the floor Chenle would be working on. “But why this company? We’re not even closely related to yours?” You led him down the hallway in the direction of his supervisor's office.

“My parents were the ones who recommended it, actually. It would be a little risky to go to a neighboring one in the case of it being viewed as a betrayal or like some kind of inside mission so they said I should just come back here since I’d probably have a high chance of acceptance-“ you put a hand up to stop him from talking, seeing how many of the other employees had started to look at him due to his volume.

“Chenle, must I remind you that this is an office?” You gritted out, embarrassed in front of your colleagues.

He shook his head before turning to the mass of them, bowing politely then continuing in the same direction as before. Once both of you reached the head office at the end of the hallway, Chenle spoke up once more. “By any chance, are you free tonight?”

“That depends,” you began, “what are you hinting at?”

“Just seeing if you’d like to go out to dinner so we can properly catch up, I guess,” he proposed bashfully.

You hummed in thought, “mmm, put in a good word for me with your supervisor and you’ve got a deal.”

“Deal,” he agreed.

“Meet me in the lobby at 5:30, don’t be late,” you told him before knocking on the wooden door in front of you and allowing Chenle in.

If you like to do whatever you’ve been dreaming about, then baby you’re perfect

You thought Chenle’s wine phase in college would be just that, a phase, but it really wasn’t. He had ordered an expensive bottle of merlot even with all your insistence that you wouldn’t be drinking and even made him promise that he’d be sober enough to drive himself back to wherever his accommodations were.

He made a face of fake dismissal before picking up your last conversation. “So anyway, as I was saying earlier, my parents suggested that I come back here, especially since I got my degree from the university so I’m bound to get in.”

You were about to open your mouth to say something like “getting in is not a guarantee” especially coming from your experience in doing interviews and having to decide which applicants to turn down, but you decided against it.

“Initially, I was a little against it since I didn’t want to come back to somewhere I’ve already stayed at for some time,” he confessed, “but after I did some research on the company and found out that you’re one of the associates, I was a little more open to the idea.”

There was a break of silence while you started to link your thoughts together. “So you came here because you found out that I work here?”

“Yes, but also no,” Chenle stated, blurting the second part out rather quickly when he saw the shift in your expression. “It is true that I wanted to see you and how you were doing but it’s not just that. I figured that if you worked here and had such a high position, it must be a good place to work.”

“But what I’m hearing is…you came here because of me,” you state bluntly though your heart couldn’t help but let out a cheer of delight.

Chenle redirected his gaze at the neighboring tables. “You could say that, sure.”

“Chenle, what do you want out of this? What do you want out of me specifically?” You contended. His eyes continued to flit around the lowly lit space, not daring to meet yours unlike earlier in the conference hall. “What? Did you come back just expecting me to run into your arms? Did you think we would just pick up where we left off?”

Now he looked down at the white tablecloth, as if in shame. “Would it be wrong of me to ask for a second chance?”

You too joined him in staring at the table, wishing that he had answered ‘no’ to your previous questions. “It wouldn’t exactly be wrong, but it’s not right either. I’d be willing to give you a second chance if we agree to not call it that, but rather a promise.”

He finally looked up at you again, his dark pupils catching the dim golden lights above him. “A promise?”

You nodded. “We’re older now, we’re fully grown adults with jobs to do and taxes to pay. We’re no longer the same carefree college students we used to be.”

“Well yeah, obviously-“

“No, listen,” you interject, cutting him off, “we can’t just recklessly play with each other’s minds and feelings like we used to. No more games and no more ‘next times.’ If we try again, I want this to be a promise that we’ll both do better because we can and we want to.”

“If it’s a promise that you want then,” Chenle held out his hand with his pinky finger extended, “it’s a promise I’m willing to make.”

You linked your pinky with his before bringing your thumbs together and sealing the promise. Matching smiles appeared across both of your faces as you stepped into a new chapter of life with Chenle by your side once more.

Sometimes letting go is…perfect. So let’s start right now

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darker-soft-starker · 4 years ago

Photo

Starker High School AU Pt. 6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

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tw: general howard stark warning

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There is a buzzing by his ear.

At first, Tony doesn’t really notice it, waking up in short increments before being pulled back under. But he keeps waking, unsure what keeps tugging him out of his dreams, hand flapping around his face as he tries to stop the incessant ringing.

“Blergh,” he mumbles into his pillow.

Batting his hand around to quell the source of annoyance, he comes to grip his phone, squinting as it lights up inches away from his face and vibrates against his palm. For a second he thinks it’s his alarm, but then he remembers that he didn’t set one. It’s a succession of text notifications cascading down his screen that alerts him out of the slope of slumber with a start.

The only time his phone goes off like this is an emergency. The first thing he registers is that it’s only eight-minutes after seven. He blinks, sight clearing from the sleep wedged in his eye as he reads the flurry of still-incoming texts.

> so thanks for last night > yknow > for the ride > i mean > you know what i mean > anyway > so that folder i gave you had my BIO notes, not econ > im such a doofus > i need them back > don’t bother looking at them lol > can we meet up?

Tony groans, eyelids heavy as anvils. Jesus christ. He didn’t get home until four after dropping this guy off and he’s already up and bothering him? What gives?

Exhausted and annoyed, he tucks his phone under his pillow and sets it on do-not-disturb for extra measure. There ain’t no way he’s getting up at seven on a Saturday for fucking class notes. Prick.

In his opinion, he’s filled his quote of good deeds for the month and he doesn’t need to be up for another few hours. Whatever it is, he thinks, snuggling into his pillow, he’s sure it can wait.

---

The next time he wakes it’s just after nine. There’s a gap in his curtains allowing a sharp shard of sunlight into the room where it directly pierces into his eyelids.

He groans tiredly into the drool patch on his pillow, willing sleep to come back to him, turning on his other side, gripping the edges of the quilt and tightening it around himself until he is firmly cocooned within it. It’s nice and warm, and sleep is such a rare commodity to him so it’s novel to bask in its dregs. But there isn’t any more sleep to come he’s quick to realize, giving up after a few minutes and blinking up at the ceiling.

Nine is practically six. It’s criminal to be up this early.

There’s an unusual flurry of texts on his phone, some from Rhodey, but most of them are from Parker, an endless ladder of increasing franticness.

Tony tosses his phone to the end of his bed carelessly.

It’s been literally less than twelve hours since he’s had to deal with the shithead. Surely whatever was lodged up his ass couldn’t possibly be as important as Tony ignoring him.

Swinging his legs off the bed, he stands and stretches his arms up high, fingers curling. The stretch feels good and he takes a quick sniff of his armpits to gauge if he can forego a shower for the third day in a row.

The stench is wicked. It’s possible that he’s overdue.

He strips off as he heads towards the adjacent bathroom, naked and nursing a semi.

He can’t help but shudder as his back meets the cold tiles, the intuitive shower head following his body with a mechanical whir, miscalculating its aim and spraying him in the face.

Ah. That will need to be recalibrated, he notes.

But, he can’t say he really minds, tolerating the spray, even as it hits his mouth like a fire hose. He ducks his head to wet his hair, reaching blindly for the touchpad to dial down the pressure. Once the water is to his liking he reaches down to take himself in hand, leisurely stroking himself.

It’s just a perfunctory part of his morning ritual; he doesn’t really have anyone in mind as he brings himself to full hardness, just the fleeting memory of lips around his cock, the next of a well rounded ass, not feeling particularly creative.

Okay, so maybe he pictures some big, brown eyes and dark hair he can run his fingers through. And maybe he goes off like a rocket. That’s his business.

Anyway, once he’s out of the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist, he inspects his appearance in the mirror. The bruises on his face are still pretty gruesome, deep purple and beginning to yellow around the edges. The cut on his lip seems to be well and truly scabby.

Turning to the side, Tony takes observation of his overall torso region; his stomach is not as defined as he’d like it to be - probably due to his affinity for carbs and sweets, if he’s honest. Between a few fingers he can pinch the skin and pull it a little -- and look, he’s a bit soft around the middle, but he lifts, alright. Maybe he isn’t exactly steel cut like the dudebros on the football team who have made being ripped their life mission, but he has musculature under the adipose.

Is he a little self-conscious about it? Sure. Is he worried about it enough to give up garlic bread and cronuts? No. Especially when he spots a new chest hair nestled comfortably between his pecs.

Probably a bit too proud of himself because of a singular piece of hair, Tony gets dressed in a pair of jeans that have seen better days, speckled with singe marks and thinning at the knees and a singlet, slinging on his leather jacket for the finishing touch.

He almost forgets the bot.

“Look at you,” he says, to the mangled mess of metal on his desk. Scooping the injured, beeping bot Tony stuffs it into his backpack. “Come here, darling. Shh, you’re okay.”

Peering both ways out of the hall to ensure the coast is clear, he quickly descends the stairs, shushing the bot the whole way.

On the ground floor, he pauses when he hears voices coming from his father’s office. It takes a second to recognise the voices, his father and Stane arguing over one another, loudly, then softly. He tries to listen in, catching somewhat audible hisses about the company finance officer.

Careful to avoid the floorboards that squeak he tiptoes to the kitchen to pocket a few muesli bars and a water bottle from the fridge.

The voices get progressively louder as he sneaks to the front door, silently saluting their maid as he passes. She waves back at him, offering a sympathetic smile as he goes out the door.

His heart pounds as he reaches his car, parked around the corner street.

“Alright, baby,” he grins, revving the engine. “Let’s go.”

---

“The fuck?”

It’s hard to be sure, but perhaps Rhodey doesn’t expect Tony’s unannounced arrival at his front door. Not if the furious scowl and bunny slippers on his feet are anything to go by.

Nonetheless, he slips past the front door, welcoming himself into his friends home, despite the exasperated outcry of for fucks sake Tony, it’s Saturday and it’s not even noon, can’t you call ahead?

No, he can’t call. Well, actually, he reconsiders, heading down the hall to the basement, his friends footsteps echoing behind him, he probably could, but it wouldn’t make anyone less mad at him, so what’s the point?

Besides, judging by the empty driveway and barren living room, Rhodey’s family is already out, he’s not sure what the issue is.

“The issue is I am tired, man,” his friend complains, following him down the stairs. “What are you doing here?”

“Me too, honeybear, freakin’ exhausted,” Tony mutters, skipping down the stairs. “Go back to bed. I’ll be out of your hair in a minute.”

“Oh sure, and let you solder your fingers together again. Nah. Not taking the fall for that.”

“I’m not going to solder my fingers together. I’m a pro.”

“Unless you need me to remind you of last summer,” Rhodey takes a seat at the workbench, “I suggest you shut up.”

“You’re rude, you know that?” Tony asks, retrieving the bot from his backpack and setting it upon the bench. “I’ll have you know that I’ve learned since then.”

“And yet you still refuse to wear gloves,” his friend sighs, settling heavily upon the adjacent chair. There’s a comfortable quiet between them while Tony works, carefully settling all the pieces onto the table, moving each with care.

It’s hard to miss the weight of observation on the back of his neck, but he lets his friend drink his fill before he’s ready to speak.

“You fuck up something?” He points to the bot.

Tony shakes his head, pressing the solder into the circuit board. “No. Well, yes. The coding is perfect, as usual, but this idiot isn’t any smarter than a Roomba. He’s meant to be smarter.”

“So?

“He is smarter. I dunno, sometimes he messes up,” Tony mumbles, reaching blindly for the bent-nose pliers before Rhodey places it in his hand. “He’s not bad, just dumb. It’s not his fault.”

“And again, what happened? Did you run him over?”

“No, the old man got sick of me playing with ‘toys’. Dumb-dumb here met the wall in a very dramatic fashion. It was an Oscar-worthy performance.”

There’s a sigh from behind him.

“Does that explain your face?”

Tony glances behind him and smirks.

“You mean my dashing good looks?”

“Tony.”

“Honestly? I got into a fight with a feral racoon that ran off with some old lady’s purse. It nearly cost me an eye, but I saved the day. She called me a hero, gave me some stale crackers from her purse and then gave me her number.”

“Tony.”

“Fine. I was skateboarding. I was in the middle of executing a super complicated kickflip but lost control when an enlarged gutter rat scurried in front of me. I flew headfirst into the gravel. Very embarrassing. That work?”

“Tony.”

“Look, just leave it will ya? God, you’re like a nagging wife. Pick whichever story makes you feel all nice and fuzzy inside.”

Rhodey is suddenly before him, waving something in his face. “Your phone, jackass. Your better half is calling?”

Huh?

Tony blinks, gently setting down the pliers and the chip he’d removed, taking his phone. It vibrates, Your Better Half flashing across the screen.

“Parker, ugh.”

He really should have changed the contact name by now, he thinks, swiping to answer.

“Alcoholics Anonymous,” Tony answers by way of greeting. “How may I direct your call?”

“Ha ha, very funny, asshole. So you are awake. I’ve been trying to contact you all morning.”

“I know. I’m beginning to think you actually might have separation issues,” Tony says. “I just got rid of you like eight hours ago.”

“I’m calling about the folder. Didn’t you read my texts?“

“Oh, I read them,” Tony settles back on the stool and continues to work on the main circuit. “See, I was just ignoring you. Hoping you’d take the hint, but I forget subtlety is lost on you.”

“Look, I need my notes. Can we meet up?”

“Right, for Bio,” Tony rolls his eyes. “Can’t it wait until Monday?”

“No. I, uh -- I have a test first period. I need to study for it.”

“Uh-huh. Just remember, the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. You’ll be fine.”

“I take AP Bio, asswipe, I’m aware of that. Can I just get it back, please?”

“You take AP Bio? Was that an admin error or something?” he asks, holding the chip he’d retrieved earlier up to the light to inspect for any damage.

It looks to be ok. The damage to the bot overall seems to be mostly cosmetic, couple of scratches, a few dents. Nothing that a few replacement panels wont fix. Whatever he hasn’t already got stored here Rhodey will surely have spare parts, it’ll be fine. God, what would he do if his friend didn’t lovingly tolerate Tony using his space for storage and barging in whenever he lucks. It’s lucky Rhode’s parents are so chill though, unlike his own. He may be a hot-head but he’s practically a saint compared to -

“ - hello? Are you still there? I can hear you breathing.”

Tony blinks. “Right. Your notes. Look, I’m kinda busy. I have a life outside of you and I don’t actually care about your academic integrity, so, you’re gonna have to wait.”

“For how long?”

“I’ll drop them off this evening, like six-ish. Hey, maybe we could do that interview with May if she’ll be around.”

“...I’m not sure that’s the best idea.”

“C’mon, I already told you I’m not actually hot for your aunt. I’ll be professional.”

Rhodey shoots him a bewildered look.

“That’s not what -- look, whatever. Just don’t be late okay. I have a life outside of you too.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that one before. I’ll try and not get in the way of your weekend plans of crying while you masturbate.”

“I literally hate you.”

“And yet you aren’t denying the crying. Anyway, I have to go now, try to clean yourself up before I get there. See you at six, bubby,” he hangs up, cracking his neck before refocusing on his mangled creation. “Now where were we?”

“What the fuck.”

Tony pauses, pliers in hand. There is a particular expression on Rhodey’s face erring on the side of confused and haunted.

“What?”

“’Bubby’?”

“Don’t say it like that - it’s like an inside thing. Don’t repeat it to him, alright, he’ll get pissy. And then I’ll get pissy.”

“You know it’s just a project, right? You two aren’t actually married.”

“Thank god. Could you imagine being married to that guy?” Tony shudders. “Scary.”

“Two weeks ago you said he was the bane of your existence. Now you have ‘inside things’ with him? You saw him last night?”

He sighs, shoulders dropping. Yeah, he doesn’t really have a good explanation for any of that.

The thing about himself, Tony’s found over time and trial, is that he really, really likes to press buttons. He likes to test variables, wants to see what would happen if he did something he wasn’t supposed to, and map out the world as it occurs in motion around him. Curiosity means he likes to test the parameters, to see what can yield, what will bite back.

More often than not that kind of impulsive brand of curiosity has gotten him in some sort of trouble. Turns out not everything and everyone appreciates being tested - and many things like to lash out when pressed.

Parker, Tony has found, is somebody that doesn’t yield or bite. If Tony was a betting man he’d have placed his money on the boy being more of a yielding type - but what he does is he presses buttons just as much as Tony does, buttons he didn’t even know he had to be pressed.

And that very much interests Tony.

He just doesn’t know what to do with that information, except to keep pressing.

“I’ll explain later,” Tony promises, mentally crossing his fingers. “In the meantime, can we forget about Parker and focus on my broken baby here?”

Rhodey relents, but Tony knows that look in his eye. He’ll be hearing about it later and at the most inconvenient time. And he’s gonna tell Pepper.

Wonderful.

He really should change Peter’s contact name in his phone.

---

By the time he leaves the Rhodes residence and heads to his next destination, his robot is in somewhat in working order again. It remains fairly immobile though, just until Tony can replace the damaged infrared and touch sensor. It clicks its metal claws sadly towards Tony in the passenger seat as he drives.

It’s a Roy Orbison kind of day, so the music is loud and the guitar is heavy as he makes the drive to Harlem.

And if Tony frees a hand to pat the bot on its’ metal head every so often, that’s his business.

When he reaches the other side of the city he parks in his usual space at a nearby lot and contemplates whether or not he should leave the malfunctioning bot in his car for the sake of being professional. It clicks at his jacket, weakly grasping the material as if on a plea - and damn, Tony knows the thing isn’t actually sentient but what kind of asshole would he be if he left it here for the day.

Heart squeezing with sympathy, Tony delicately places him in the backpack, leaving the zip partially open for ‘air’.

Next, snacks.

While he’s retrieving a pack (or two) of Reeses, he comes across Parker’s folder that he’d stashed there last night. Their conversation from earlier returns to the forefront of his mind.

Look, Parker might not be the knuckle-dragging, monosyllabic dumbass Tony initially suspected that he was, and yeah he was savvy as demonstrated during their trip to the rental market - and yeah, definitely smarter than his social circle would suggest, and is absolutely and a source of constant surprise to Tony - but is he AP Bio - or AP anything material?

Time to find out.

The first thing that Tony notices is that the notes are definitely not for Bio. They’re for Econ, as initially prescribed.

The second thing he notices, as he flicks through the papers, skimming over the complicated graphs and annotated research, is that what he’s reading is actually good.

Well, I’ll be darned, Tony thinks, eyes getting progressively wider as he flicks through the pages. Not bad at all.

Makes him wonder why Parker thought he was missing his Bio notes though.

The answer to that becomes clear when a crumpled envelope falls out of the stack onto Tony’s lap. He picks it up, at first thinking it’s a part of the research, but pauses. It’s open and it’s addressed to May Parker.

“Um,” he says.

It’s from Queens Presbyterian Hospital, which should make him drop it as if it were burning. It doesn’t, though. Either it’s meant to be included in the folder, or it’s not and that’s why Parker has been acting like a crazy-ex all morning.

Hmm. Tony sits there, torn, debating whether or not to look into it, the overdue stamp standing out against the crisp paper like a warning sign. On one hand, he’s running kinda late and, y’know, privacy or whatever -- on the other, his fingers are already itching to know what’s in it.

Mind your own business, he can already hear Rhodey saying, mind your own business, Tony.

Curiosity and a distinct lack of a moral compass wins, as always. Just a quick peek, that should be okay, right? The envelope is already open anyway, so, it’s not like anyone will be able to tell.

God, this is none of my business, he tells himself, even as he’s retrieving the letter from within and starts reading it.

Oh.

Tony quickly stashes the letter back into the envelope and back into the folder. Yep, definitely none of his business.

Yeah, he really shouldn’t have done that. Big fucking yikes on his behalf. And yep, there’s the guilt -- or at least he thinks the stomach churning is guilt, it could be the stale muesli bar he ate on the way.

Nonetheless, it hangs over him like a dark cloud as he picks up his backpack and heads out to the garage across the road. What kind of asshole looks into someone’s mail because they can’t help themselves. This dick, that’s who.

Fixing a grin he doesn’t really feel, he heads to the back office. He knocks on the window, ducking his head into the open door.

“Yo,” he waves to the man sitting behind the desk. “Sorry I’m late.”

“Hey kid,” the man looks up, smiling before his face drops. “Tony, your face. What happened?”

“This? It’s nothing --”

“-- is that why you couldn’t come to work yesterday? Not that I mind,” the man stands up. “Are you okay? Was it --”

“-- Was it nothing to worry about? Absolutely,” Tony holds his hands up in surrender. “Just an unfortunate encounter with a wild, feral squirrel in Central Park. I tell you, they’re deceivingly cute, but they’re pests. Totally out of control.”

“Tony.”

“Jarvis,” he interrupts, gesturing to the cars in the garage behind him. “C’mon. Look, let’s get to work, okay? Save the violins for later.”

And by later he means never.

The man sighs, world-weary, looking at him like he knows exactly what he’s thinking. At first he’s certain his boss is going to push the issue, but it must be a day for dodging bullets because he relents.

“Alright, kid. I got a ninety-four Ford sedan back there with your name on it. Busted fan belt, overheated engine. Probably needs a new set of spark plugs while you’re at it.”

With a grateful nod, Tony heads back, locating the vehicle in question. It’s rusted to all hell and probably not worth the cost of repair, but he gets stuck into it anyway, keen for a distraction. He sets his bag and bot down near him while Jarvis blasts Alice Cooper’s Poison.

Tony might not have all the answers to life’s problems, but this is something he knows how to fix.

---

He probably distracts himself a little too well, because by the time he’s wrapped up with the Ford it’s already five-thirty and he’s a mess of engine oil and coolant.

It’s only when Jarvis squeezes his shoulder and points to the clock on the far wall does he realise that he’s lost his sense of time. How the fuck is he supposed to clean up and get all the way from Harlem to Queens at this time of night?

“Ah, crap,” Tony mutters, setting down his socket-wrench in his toolbox. “I’m late.”

“Late for what? You got a hot date or something?” Jarvis asks, stepping back to give him some room as he rushes to the staff bathroom.

“What, no,” He calls back, running the faucet and pumping soap over his hands. “I gotta go see about a guy.” He struggles to hear his boss over the running water but he doesn’t have time to stop and figure it out.

“From school?”

“Yes, and a prime pain in my ass,” Tony mutters, drying his hands on his jeans, walking back into the garage. “Anyway, see you Monday, chief?”

His boss nods, passing Tony his earnings for the week in cash. Tony should have known to dash and run because he starts hearing the proverbial violins when Jarvis clamps a hand on his shoulder, squeezing in a way that is more paternal than Tony is comfortable with.

“You know you can call me, you have my number. You come up and see me and the missus whenever you want.”

Tony fake snores.

“Jarvis.”

“We have a spare room,” he insists, shrugging sheepishly and stepping back. “It’s yours at any time.”

“I see you enough, okay, don’t push it. I’ll see you Monday,” Tony draws him into a one-armed hug and claps him on the back. “Don’t you worry about me.”

“Don’t make me worry.”

“No promises,” Tony salutes, slinging his backpack on shoulder and walking backwards out of the garage to the street. “Hug the missus for me.”

Jarvis salutes back.

With that he sprints across the street when there’s a gap in traffic, bot snapping gently at his hair as he runs.

Sweaty and sore, he is full of energy, a sense of accomplishment coursing through his blood, like an afternoon of work can only provide. He should fire off a text, he thinks, as he starts the ignition and heads out onto the road, yeah. Let Parker know he will be late.

And he does genuinely mean to send a message at the next traffic stop, but then Queen starts playing on the radio and Tony isn’t a fool, okay, he turns that up loud.

Next traffic stop, he promises himself.

---

“I’m beginning to think you can’t read the time,” Parker opens the door with a scowl. “You said six.”

Wincing in the hallway, Tony looks at his phone. Six-fifty-nine. It’s not totally his fault, okay. There was a pile up along the way and traffic was a nightmare of ridiculous proportions. He swears he’s gonna be the first person to invent a commercially viable flying car just for the sake of personally avoiding road congestion.

“Yeah, so. Here’s the thing: I had things to do, okay, priorities --”

“You and your priorities, I swear to god --”

“Here,” Tony cuts him off, passing him his folder, letter neatly inside where it isn’t going to obviously slip out. “Your folder, dumbass.”

Peter grips it, holding it to his chest as he stares at Tony for a moment, before passing it to the nearest flat surface, a weathered and small table that holds their keys.

“Okay, thanks,” Peter nods, smiling grimly, looking behind his shoulder. “Appreciate it. You can go now.”

“So where are the Econ notes,” Tony blurts, wincing as he plays dumb. “I mean, if you had something prepared.”

Peter blinks, surprised. “Oh, uh. Um, It can wait until Monday, can’t it?”

“The assignment is due Wednesday.”

“Right. Um, just give me a sec --”

“Is that Tony?”

May appears behind Peter, smiling brightly. Tony waves, rocking back on his feet.

“Hey, Missus Parker.”

“Hey there, handsome,” she hip-checks her nephew, joining him in the doorway and glancing between the two. “You didn’t mention we were having company tonight, Pete.”

“He’s not handsome and he’s not staying --”

“-- I was just dropping something off,” he looks to Peter. “And excuse you, the lady has spoken and I have to agree. I am handsome. Some might even say that I’m debonair.”

“And some might say that you’re deplorable.”

“Hmm, I think you mean adorable.”

That prompts a smile out of Peter. He crosses his arms over his chest and tilts his chin up, all haughty.

“Tony Stark, you are many things, but adorable isn’t one of them.”

He leans in, pouting playfully. “Oh come on, Parker. I’m a little cute, aren’t I?”

“No.”

“Not even a little?”

“Uh, let me check,” Peter pauses before smiling sardonically. “Verdicts in - jury says you’re one-hundred-percent despicable. Sorry.”

"I’m sure I could sway the jury.”

“I think you mean you could pay the jury.”

Tony nods, pretending to be serious. “Well, yeah. You know, for consensus.”

Peter licks his lips, shifting closer.

“Consensus is important...”

“...Well, if you two are done,” May says after an extended period of silence, tying her hair back into a ponytail. “We were just about to head out to a Thai place around the corner. Tony, you should join us.”

“Oh, no, that’s okay. I should go --”

The rest of his words are cut off by a truly monstrous growl of his stomach. He winces, scrunching up his nose sheepishly. He probably should have eaten more than Reeses all afternoon.

“Well, I guess that settles that,” May says, stepping out of the doorway and beckoning Tony in. “Come in. Sorry about the mess.”

It’s with Peter still staring at him that he reluctantly enters their apartment, brushing past the other boy. It looks the same as it did the other week, mostly tidy and smelling like incense. There’s a sizeable stack of unfolded laundry on the dining table, however, that wasn’t there before.

Tony’s distracted by a pair of dancing-bulbasaur boxers sticking out of the pile when May leans in close to sniff at his hair.

“You’ve got something in your hair, honey. Is that paint?”

He runs his fingers through his hair, palm coming back streaked with green. “Oh, uh, radiator fluid,” he explains, holding up his hand.

“Can I ask what you did to your face?”

“I saved a homeless guy and his beef-sandwich from a pack of rabid, angry dogs. No need to call me a hero.”

May looks at him oddly. “Oh, well, if you say so. Go get yourself washed up and we can head out.”

The burn of Peter’s stare follows him all the way to their bathroom.

---

The meal is less awkward than Tony thought it would be.

Well, for him at least.

Over larb and khao pad they’d gotten through an informal interview with May about her experience as a caregiver with a single income. Not only was it informative for his own future financial independence, but she has been generous enough to speckle in colorful anecdotes of her nephew’s upbringing. Parker’s face has been getting progressively redder all night and it has nothing to do with the spice in his food.

Tony has enjoyed the evening thoroughly.

“ - and of course, we were lucky we hadn’t decided to go cheap on the health insurance. Especially when Pete here broke his wrist at gymnastics when he was eight.”

Tony barely holds back a snort.

“You did gymnastics, Parker?”

Peter tips his head back to stare at the ceiling and sighs. The flush seems to be creeping down his neck too, Tony observes gleefully. He stuffs a large mouthful of rice in his mouth to mitigate the urge to tease.

"Yes, he was very good, weren’t you, Pete? So talented, you should see his medals.”

“Stop, please.”

“C’mon, no need to be embarrassed, Pete, you were amazing,” she says. “You’re still a flexible little bug, aren’t you?”

Tony chokes on his rice.

Peter has his eyes squeezed shut and looks like he wants the earth to swallow him whole.

“May, I’m literally begging you.”

“Uh,” he beats at his chest with his fist, swallowing roughly. “So how long did you do that for?”

“Until I was fourteen.”

“Why’d you quit?”

There’s a very deliberate, weighted pause. May and Peter share a look between them and Tony gets a deeply uncomfortable sense that he’s just stuck his foot in it. Retract, he thinks, already regretting opening his mouth.

“Well,” May clears her throat, her tone light. “After my husband, Pete’s uncle Ben died, we moved away and we had to make some... financial cuts at the time.”

The bite he’s just taken goes to ash in his mouth. God, he really is a big idiot isn’t he. He’d assumed that May never got married to the man in the photos or that they’d just divorced, he didn’t realise that he’d passed - and so recently, too. Welling up with shame, he can’t stop himself from glancing at Peter, who’s staring at the table, lips pursed.

“Oh,” he clears his throat. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to - I didn’t know. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” May waves her hand dismissively, but her smile is strained. “Anyway, what about you, Tony? You’re severely asthmatic, right? That must have been hard, growing up if you wanted to play sports.”

Tony’s eyes widen.

“Yes, um, so hard. Luckily I’m not really an exercise-y kinda guy. I personally prefer to keep a heart rate below eighty beats per minute.”

“Did you have any hobbies growing up?”

“Yeah, driving my parents crazy,” Tony says, glad for the shift from the somber topic. “Escaping from nannies, seeing how quickly I could get them to quit.”

“You like tinkering,” Peter says quietly, looking up. “You mentioned, before. Cars and stuff.”

He shrugs, starting to feel as if he’s under the microscope, especially when Peter looks at him, eyes glittering with thinly-veiled interest.

“I mean, I don’t know. I like - building stuff, I guess. Machines and robots, y’know, cars. It’s like, whatever.”

“You want to be the next Elon Musk or somethin’?” Peter asks, not unkindly, resting his chin on his hand.

“Nah, I wanna be the first Tony Stark,” he scratches his cheek, suddenly bashful. It’s an uncommon feeling for him. One hard to avoid, however, particularly when there is a boy who Tony doesn’t really hate who’s asking about his life like it might matter.

He clears his throat. “Anyway, mostly it was just me cataloguing all the ways I could make the vein in my fathers’ head pop. I’m still working on that.”

May looks between them, smiling.

“Sounds like you were a handful.”

“Sure was.”

Still is, apparently, no matter how much he tries to stay out of the way.

The silence that follows is punctuated by the sounds of cutlery scraping across plates, of shrinking ice cubes rattling against glass. It feels pensive at the same time as it does thorny, like Tony opened the door to let someone in but accidentally let out a few ghouls.

And despite knowing he’d stepped on a landmine with the Parkers, he can’t help but wonder what other pieces of the puzzle he’s missing. Why Peter doesn’t live with his parents. Not that Tony is invested in him or anything.

He just doesn’t like mysteries, that’s all.

May excuses herself after to head to the bathroom not long after. It’s during that time that the waiter brings the check, which Tony takes immediately, slipping in some of the cash he’d gotten earlier, despite Peter’s protests. He was gonna do it anyway, even if he didn’t have the letter in the back of his mind.

“Stop paying for me,” Peter says after he passes the check-book back to the waiter. “Your family is rich, I get it. I’ve told you, I don’t need your charity.”

Tony shakes his head. It’s not worth mentioning that the only money he spends doesn’t come from his family.

“It’s not charity. Do you really think I’m that nice, eh? C’mon. Maybe I like lording it over you.”

“Well, at some point I’m going to pay you back.”

“And when that time comes I’m not going to accept your money.”

“You will,” Peter smiles wryly down at his plate. “I have my ways.”

“As do I, sweetums. Now, do me a favour: shut up and finish your larb.”

Peter does, but something about him shifts. It seems more quiet and contemplative, his eyes staying longer on Tony than they normally would. He wants to tell him to take a picture, but for once, Tony thinks it’s probably best if he keeps his mouth shut.

---

Back at the apartment, Peter goes to retrieve his ‘Econ notes’, taking the folder from the table and retreating to his bedroom. In the interim, May offers to let Tony stay over, inviting him for what he’s sure would be a rousing game of Mario Kart.

He politely declines.

“You sure? Winner gets to choose a movie.”

“I should really get home,” he says. “Thanks though. And thanks for dinner.”

“No problem. Thank you for paying, you didn’t have to do that. Let me pay you back.”

“No need. Think of it as payment for your services and letting us pick your brain tonight.”

She reluctantly accepts with a lot less pride than what her nephew displayed and that makes Tony feel a little sick, because it’s evident that she’s a proud and stubborn woman by nature. Her acceptance, albeit laboured, speaks volumes as to the reasoning behind it.

What takes him by surprise is when she hugs him goodbye and kisses his cheek.

“You’re a good egg, Anthony. Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

It’s probably the most maternal touch he’s had since, well. Probably since he last went to stay with Jarvis and his wife. Fidgeting in the hold, he’s not sure if he wants to squirm or to sink into it.

May leaves when Peter comes back in, a familiar stack of notes in his hands that he passes to Tony.

“You gonna kiss me goodbye, too?”

“What?” Peter blinks.

"Uh, never mind,” Tony waves the papers at him. “Thanks for this.”

Peter looks around to make sure they’re alone before leaning in rather promptly.

“Wow, hold up on the proximity there,” Tony inches back, startled by their sudden closeness. “I was joking about the kiss --”

“You read the letter, didn’t you,” Peter whisper-hisses.

“What? Letter? What letter?” Tony says, voice strangled. “I don’t know of any letter.”

He gets a painful poke in his chest for his lies.

“Don’t play dumb. It wasn’t where I left it.”

“I’m not -- ow, quit poking me.”

“Then stop lying. You’re unbelievable -- don’t you know that opening someone else’s mail is a crime?”

Tony’s shoulders slump as he concedes.

“Look, it was an accident, it just slipped out. And also, it’s not technically a crime, if the envelope was already open.”

“Oh and the letter magically opened itself and forced you to read it.”

“That could be argued.”

“Why couldn’t you mind your own business?“

Sick of being poked, he shoves the papers between his arm and his ribs to hold them and takes Peter’s fingers in his hands, squeezing the digits when they struggle to break free of his hold.

“I should have, I admit it - I didn’t think, okay, I’m sorry. Is she okay?”

Peter stops struggling, looking over his shoulder again.

“I don’t know,” he leans in again to whisper, “I only found it yesterday, I haven’t spoken to her yet. Look, I know you hate me, but can you please not tell anyone about this?”

“Why would I tell anyone?”

“I don’t know, because you’re the devil, and you get a kick out of seeing me suffer?”

“True, but I’m not going to tell anyone. Promise. That would make me look like an asshole and you like a martyr. Ergo, I shut my cake hole and continue looking better than you.”

“You’re a real prince charming,” the other boy huffs, but seems to take him at face value. “If I find out differently I’m going to come after you. You’re going to need dental work afterwards.”

Tony lets go of their joined hands, balling his fists and raising them to his face, mimicking what the other boy had done last night.

“You wanna tousle, huh?”

He gets a light shove out the doorway for his attitude.

“Alright, smartass. Get the fuck outta here already.”

“Going, going. Goodnight, princess.”

He mock bows, peering up under his eyelashes, momentarily arrested as he watches Parker roll his eyes and bite his bottom lip in an attempt to smother a smile.

His heart continues to beat a bit oddly all the way down to the car, where he sits in contemplative silence for a few moments until the sound of metal clicking shifts him out of his thoughts.

“Oh, hey you,” he coos, gently retrieving his bot from his bag and placing it in the passenger seat, instantly feeling bad. “I didn’t think I would take so long. I’m sorry.”

Placing a seatbelt over the bot and buckling him in, Tony begins to narrate his night to him as he pulls off the curb and begins driving.

“I guess that Parker isn’t so bad,” he tells the bot, who swivels its head in response to his voice. “I mean, he can’t dress for shit and has questionable tastes in friends - oh, and cannot hold his liquor - but I dunno, baby-bot. He’s okay. Don’t tell anyone I said that, though -- and oh my god, did I mention he did gymnastics, what a fucking dork...”

The thoughts churn and buoy him until he pulls up to his house nearly an hour later. From the driveway he can see his fathers office light still on.

The sight of it makes his stomach drop, all good cheer gone in an instant.

“Damn,” Tony whispers to himself, tapping his knuckles against the steering wheel. This time of night on a Saturday can only mean one thing and he is really not in the mood to be in the crosshairs of whatever his father and Stane are up to.

But before he can work himself into a worry his phone vibrates in his pocket.

> hey, look, thanks for not being a total dick tonight about everything > and last night as well, I guess > yknow what i mean < ur welcome < by the way, i’m proud of you > for what < not finishing off ur aunts beer tonight < takes strength < asking for help is the first step > omfg i take back what i said > ur the worst < and ur a pain in my ass > they have creams for that u know > anyway, g’nite, butthole > p.s. you’re still not adorable Tony smiles down at his phone. < goodnight bambi The bot clicks at him, breaking him out of his train of thought.

“Don’t look at me like that. Let’s go in, but you gotta keep quiet, okay.”

He manages to avoid detection and attention from anyone, despite accidentally stepping on a squeaky floorboard. Maybe it had something to do with the record player and raucous laughter coming from the office.

In any case, Tony’s just happy to make it back to his bedroom. There, he toes off his sneakers and starts getting ready for bed, stashing the leftover cash into a drawer.

It makes him think about Peter’s reluctance for Tony to pay for over the last couple of instances, and how freaking annoying that is. And rude.

Honestly, the dude should count himself as one of the lucky guys - Tony is not that magnanimous. He doesn’t experience an impulsive, unthinking eagerness to provide for just anybody.

Oh.

Tony stills in the middle of his bedroom.

Oh no.

He knows what this is.

“This is bad.”

---

tagging: @bylerboyfriends @ravens-starker-stuff, @starker-rays, @ironspiderstarker, @muse-of-gods, @notfor-temporaryuse, @tabbycat1220, @sugarfreecult, @rebel13lion39, @plueschpop, @spideravocados, @jellybbunny, @booktrashme, @elfkido, @mycatislickingmybedsheets, @queerghostboyo, @disneyprincessdominatrix, @cherrygoldlove @starkerflowers @starkeristheendgame @thewolffearsher @starkersugar , @starkerforlife6969, @css1992, @parkerrbitch, @fuckmemrstark, @blankblankityblank, @ilovemoreid, @blaquedecember, @killmylonelysoul, @notfor-temporaryuse, @arvaen

#starker #ironspider #tony stark x peter parker #high school au

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forasecondtherewedwon · 5 years ago

Text

21st Century Friction

Pairing: Peter Parker x Michelle Jones (Spideychelle) Rating: T Word count: 10,817 @spideychelleweek

Spideychelle Week Day 6: Enemies to Lovers

Summary: Peter needs an arts credit to graduate, but he didn't mean to pick the course that even the English majors avoid! Luckily, he has the help of Michelle Jones, the tutor Tony hired for him. Unluckily, she just overheard him insulting her entire academic discipline. They're not breaking off the arrangement―Peter's determined to do well in this stupid English course to keep his average up and Michelle won't let his bad attitude stand in the way of a cheque from Tony Stark.

With one tempestuous meeting down, they only have two semesters and twenty-five books to go.

Peter’s in big trouble―huge―and Mr. Stark did tell him that if he’s ever in trouble he should ask for help, so he calls, looking for help, and gets nobody, so he calls again and gets Happy, who hangs up once Peter makes him understand that, no, this isn’t about somebody trying to kick his Spidey-suit ass but about him trying to pick a new class (Happy’s next to some freaky machine at the time and it makes the cell reception wonky), but who finally listens all the way to the end on the seventeenth time Peter manages to get through to him without having his call dropped, and then Mr. Stark is told about it and though Peter isn’t immediately apprised of the solution to his own problem for some reason, he’s informed that cash has been flashed and that the solution will, inevitably, be attained.

Until then, Peter begins the first week of his third year of college and shows up to the labs and lectures of every class on his schedule, including English 1034: 21st Century Literature from A to Z.

AGUALUSA, José Eduardo ― A General Theory of Oblivion

“A tutor?” Peter hisses into his phone, pacing the tight corridor of the library’s fourth-floor stacks. “How is his solution to get me a tutor? I don’t need a tutor! I’m smart, Happy, remember? What did I want instead? Well, I don’t know! I have to keep all my core classes for my major, but maybe he could’ve made them give me credit for taking something online from another college? I’m not screwing up my schedule for English lit. I don’t even know why I gotta take this! I know how to read, you know? I’m just―”

Oh sure, he heard the other person enter the aisle, but he assumed it was to grab a book, so the noise of annoyance that leaves his mouth when his phone is snatched from his hand and his call ended is absolutely genuine.

“’Sup,” says the person, who’s a woman his age, who’s handing his phone back with a lazy gesture, who’s apparently entirely cool, casual, and unapologetic about unceremoniously hanging up on Happy for him. “You gotta take English lit because it sounds as though your vocabulary needs it and, hi, I’m Michelle. Your tutor.”

She mumbles an indelicate string of words after that as she turns and walks away from him out of the stacks and Peter picks up ‘entitled asshole’ even though he isn’t trying to listen, just follow her and set this thing straight.

“Uh, no, you’re not,” he assures her, alarmed when the place he’s trailing her to turns out to be a table where her stuff is waiting―open notebook, two different coloured pens, a copy of the syllabus for English 1034. No, no, no!

“Well, I can’t guarantee you’ll actually learn anything since you seem to have a combination of a pretty thick skull and an overinflated ego, but I’ll hold up my end of the deal. Let me guess, Business major?”

“Bio,” Peter grits out, grasping the back of the chair intended for him as this Michelle person slides neatly into hers, like the library’s her living room because she lives here. Fine. He’s happy for it to stay that way. He has access to all the books he needs in the sciences library on the other side of campus.

“Well, my condolences to the parts of your brain which, in most people, would produce non-literal comprehension and creative thought. But I’m sure you know the names for those, don’t you, Science Guy? Ok, quit making that face and let’s go over your syllabus.”

She doesn’t look up the entire time she speaks and Peter has never heard a person sound so pretentious in real life.

“Are you kidding me? No. Even if I wanted or needed to be tutored, it wouldn’t be by you. You grabbed my phone out of my hand!”

“Yeah,” Michelle agrees, meeting his eye with something firm in her own, “and you were talking on it in one of the library’s Quiet Zones. I’m not here to give you a lesson on Comparative Ignorance.”

“What makes you think you can just do that?” Peter demands. He feels sort of ridiculous and like he’s simultaneously taking the argument a step too far and a step not-far-enough; he’s not usually like this, but then, other people aren’t usually like that.

“The fact that I was paid in advance.”

She nods towards the chair and Peter doesn’t know why he does it, but he sits, still mad.

“Stark paid you to tutor me,” he states.

“Boy, are you struggling with the concept of exchanging currency for services too? Maybe there’s a basic Econ class you could still get into.”

“Why you?”

“Why you?” Michelle counters. “Why can’t smarty-pants, Stark-patroned Peter Parker just suck it up and get through a single English credit? Seriously, why not, since you seem to think it’s just reading and therefore easy. Why not just bribe the college to hand you the credit? You want me to tell you where the Financial Office is? I could show you because, ok, about me now, I’m here on scholarship because I couldn’t find a benevolent billionaire to smooth my path for me.” She straightens up in her chair, eyes practically volcanic with heat. “And here’s another why me for you: because I love what I study, I think literature has worth and beauty, and, oh right, I have the highest grade point average in the entire School of Arts and Humanities.”

Peter’s so floored for a minute that he forgets why he’s angry.

“It wouldn’t be right,” he finally says, trying to at least regain the moral high ground after her offhand suggestion of bribery. “Buying a credit. It wouldn’t be right.”

“So… instead you demean the entire discipline, like that’s going to help you.”

He scoffs.

“It’d help me more than you would.”

“Helping you is why I’m here.”

“You sound thrilled about it.”

“Hard not to be when I have the honour of tutoring the Spider-Man,” she says, matching his sarcasm.

Ugh, he hates that she brought that up. By his third year, he’s become less of a novelty in the halls―these days, people get more excited about a sighting of the local gopher who lives in a hole near the Astronomy building―and having it thrown in his face like this is even more uncomfortable than requests for selfies. Or the few mortifying pleas for his autograph. They’re locked in a mutually-irritated glare, which Peter breaks with a groan and a roll of his eyes.

“I didn’t want to be in this class,” he admits.

“And yet the online course selection process is so very hard to fuck up. Thus, you did in fact choose this class. Unless… does Tony Stark pick your classes for you?”

Peter ignores that. He can’t both fume and be cooperative enough to get her help, which he’s starting to think he might need. Maybe she can give him some kind of insider English department knowledge that will rid him of English 1034.

“It is an interesting choice,” Michelle continues carefully. Is she smirking at him? He can’t quite tell.

“I didn’t read the description.”

“What did you expect ‘20th Century Literature from A to Z’ to be?”

She’s mocking him, but Peter feels like his mistake in taking this particular class is an easy one to make. He has plenty of reasons to back him up.

“It’s a first-year level English course, it’s non-essay, and ‘A to Z’ made it sound like an overview,” he lists confidently.

“In case you don’t already know or suspect this, nobody who’s actually in the English program takes it.”

Michelle’s tone is extraordinarily smug.

“I thought you guys loved to read,” Peter says accusingly, leaning back and crossing his arms.

“Not a novel every week for two semesters! Dude, you picked a course with twenty-six required texts. ‘A to Z’ is for the alphabetical order of the authors’ last names.”

“I know that now,” he grumbles, eyeing the booklist Michelle has neatly aligned next to the syllabus on their study table. “And now all the other full-year non-essay English classes are full, so I can’t drop this one because there’s nothing to pick up in its place.”

“That’s an insanely stupid mistake.”

“Noted.”

“Ok, if you’re ready to move on, what were your thoughts on Agualusa?”

“You still want to tutor me?”

She looks at him like he’s truly the uncomprehending, unimaginative Bio-dunce she described.

“There are few things I want less than I want this. The only possible enjoyment here is getting to meet one of the unsuspecting idiots who signed up for that class, and even that doesn’t cancel out the way you belittled my area of study and those who study it. So.” Michelle extends a hand and, when Peter realizes what she wants, accepts his panic-purchased copy of A General Theory of Oblivion. “Time to prove you can read.”

BEATTY, Paul ― The Sellout

“I see you found the place,” Michelle greets without looking up from what she’s reading (which is the book for his course).

Peter attempts to glance around without being obvious about it.

“It’s the same table we sat at last time,” he says, mostly certain.

“I know.” She looks up. “I just thought you might get lost in unfamiliar territory. Had you ever been in here before last week?”

He laughs bitterly as he slings his backpack off and lets it slam into the leg of the table, making Michelle frown.

“Yeah, I had.” Once. When he toured the college with May before applying to undergrad. “Don’t be so gatekeeper-y. These books aren’t just for English majors.”

“Oh, so you avail yourself of them often for pleasure reading? Sorry, sorry,” she adds quickly and something inside Peter eases at the hope of an apology, “I forgot I was talking to the guy who signed up for the most reading-heavy class the English department offers. Of course you must love to read.”

“I just want to get my mandatory arts credit to graduate.”

The motive should be obvious, Peter thinks, but maybe she’ll take pity on him because he’s offering an explanation.

“You’ve already successfully postponed it your first two years. Why not push it to next year when you can take a lighter class?”

“There are a lot of required fourth-year courses for my major. I don’t have room for anything that isn’t impor―”

He cuts himself off, but Michelle looks pissed. What? It’s the truth! If he thought English was more important than Biology, he would’ve studied English!

“You’re trying to get me to wait for an easier class and you told me I shouldn’t assume English was easy,” he accuses.

“It’s not! I didn’t say an easier class, I said a lighter one. You know, with fewer books to read. English ten-thirty-four is an easy class.”

“Yeah right!”

“Really, Peter?” He’s startled to hear his name leave her mouth. “Exactly how deep were you expecting the analysis to go when you only spend a week on each book? That’s a Monday and Wednesday course, right? So you’re only actually discussing the book for three hours. A bunch of your assigned texts are over four hundred pages, which means covering around one hundred and thirty-three pages every hour of discussion, or a little over two pages every minute. And that’s just content. If you were actually digging into any of these books, you’d discuss themes, historical context of the subject matter, intertextual influence…”

“You’re pretty good at math,” he says wryly. “I bet you could have majored in that instead.”

“I could’ve majored in anything, but I chose a subject that actually has a soul.”

“It’s cute that you’re so noble about it,” Peter says, feeling like an honest-to-Thor asshole because he’s never disparaged anyone or anything by calling them or it ‘cute’ before, “considering the current arrangement.”

She gives him a harsh look before finally asking, “What do you mean?”

“You’re studying something so intellectual and culturally important or whatever and looking down at people in Business and the sciences. Lots of us love what we’re majoring in and some of us are in it for a career with a good salary. I’m just worried you’re being a bit of a hypocrite. How superior can you feel when you’re peddling your English-major wisdom for a paycheque from Tony Stark?”

Michelle can’t really murder him―his reflexes are too fast, his body too durable, and the most dangerous thing she appears to have at her disposal is a blue ballpoint pen―but she kinda looks like she might give it a try. Ok, so undercutting her integrity in a vengeful rant was probably beneath him. She was being such a snob though!

Finally, her expression relaxes and she uncaps her pen (Peter flinches), poising it over the page where, last week, she composed him a strong set of notes as they attempted a rocky discussion of the book.

“How much did you get read?”

CHOI, Mary H.K. ― Permanent Record

Peter sits and nods at Michelle when she looks up.

“We’re past the add/drop date,” he announces. “Guess I’m officially in English ten-thirty-four for the rest of the year.”

“And when you graduate, it’ll be right there on your transcript, smuggled through in between the important courses. Even if you can’t hack it and fail the class,” she concludes with a small, scornful smile.

“As far as I know, you’re being paid too much to let me fail.”

It feels like a gross powerplay the second he’s said it. If they’re really going to do this, he needs to start taking the meanspirited way that she roots against him in stride. Does he think about finding a different tutor every time she makes a sly comment like that? Sure, but he’s stubborn enough about maintaining a strong average to recognize the value of learning from the best student in the program.

“So…” he says after a minute, watching Michelle flip through his book to find where he’s marked the passages examined in class. “We never really agreed to it out loud, but I guess this is our standing place and time to do this?”

“Yeah, there’s a clipboard where you sign up to reserve a specific table. I put our names down for every Thursday for the rest of the year.”

“Really?”

“No, numbskull,” Michelle informs him lightly. “You can’t reserve a table, only the study rooms. I knew you didn’t know how the library worked.”

“How ‘bout, instead of that, we talk about the demands of fame.”

“Oh? Are you trying to open up to me?” She taps the end of her pen hard and fast against the table as though to emphasize this is something she doesn’t have time for.

“No. I did my assigned reading.”

He reaches out and grabs his book, dragging it back across the table.

DAY, Kate Hope ― If, Then

“I kept waiting for it to get good. Why didn’t it get good?” he asks, spinning the book on their table, then trapping it under his palm.

“Patience, spider-brain,” Michelle instructs. “It is good. It’s suspenseful and subtle and atmospheric and it’s no wonder those things went right over your head. Weren’t you at least interested in Ginny? She’s a surgeon.”

“So?”

“So, you’re in Biology. Don’t you want to be a doctor or something?”

“I don’t know yet,” Peter says with a shrug. Man, is she going to start bugging him about figuring out his career path? He has May for that. “Do you know what you want to be?”

“A tutor,” she responds flatly.

He’d smile if they were friends because she’s apparently hilarious.

“It takes some time to build if the part you’re most interested in is the sci-fi stuff,” Michelle concedes. “Did you read it to the end?”

“I didn’t have time. I had to start the next book early because I have a big lab assignment next week.” He sighs and lets his head fall into his hand just thinking about it.

She frowns and looks down, so he can only assume she disapproves of his priorities or his poor time management or something.

But then she mumbles, “You should try audiobooks.”

“Thanks,” Peter says, because that’s actually a great idea. He can listen on his way to campus in the mornings and he won’t have to carry the book on the days he doesn’t have that class. It’ll mean buying an audio copy of everything he already purchased, but he’ll still use the hard copies most of the time, and it’s not like Mr. Stark’s going to begrudge him another hundred bucks. Plus, almost all of the books for this course are novels, so it won’t even feel like doing homework!

In the midst of excitedly thinking over how much time he’ll have if he takes her advice, he glances at Michelle. She’s ignoring him.

ENDICOTT, Marina ― Good to a Fault

It’s the first week of October and Peter thinks he has the hang of this being-an-English-student thing. He read-slash-listened-to the whole book this week and even though the next two weeks’ novels are a couple of the longest in the entire course, he’s undaunted. When he gets to the library and finds Michelle―the classes they have right before this tutoring session end at the same time, but she always beats him here―he brags about being totally on top of his reading. She’s possibly starting to smile at him when he says, “I’m getting good at this. You want any tips?”

“God, Peter!” she blurts. “This is the third year of my major! Try to have some fucking respect!”

He holds up his hands placatingly. Once his books are out, Peter starts watching her and notices a syllabus at her elbow that isn’t for English 1034. Aggressively highlighted in green is tomorrow’s date and ‘MIDTERM.’ His don’t start for another week. He never consciously realized that Humanities students had midterm stress too. Michelle must be taking more than one English class right now, plus whatever else fills up her schedule. Jeeze, that’s a lot of reading, and she’s reading enough of his books to help him on top of doing her own shit. Peter winces and keeps his mouth shut until she’s ready to begin.

FLYNN, Gillian ― Gone Girl

They’re in the thick of midterms and having a particularly grouchy (on both sides) tutoring session.

“Quit writing a bunch of nothing,” Michelle criticizes, like that’s somehow useful feedback.

“I’m getting to my point!” Peter complains.

“They’re long answer questions, not essays. You won’t get any pity marks for filler like you do in a Bio exam.”

“They don’t give marks for filler in Bio exams!”

“Well then where did you learn to answer questions like this?” she snaps. “Do you want to start this one over or try another one?”

They glare at each other for several sluggish moments.

“I’ll start over,” Peter decides, meeting her challenging look with his own.

“Fine.”

This time, Michelle not only passes him the question she came up with but also rips a piece of paper out of her notebook, tears it into thirds, and hands him one of those as well.

“One-sided,” she instructs.

“Yeah, I get it.”

“Be concise.”

“If you took your own advice, I’d be able to write in silence right now instead of being distracted by the sound of you talking!”

In what seems like a blink as Peter looks up from his paper and tightly-gripped pencil in confusion, Michelle has her bag packed and shoves back from the table.

“Help me study!” he yells after her in desperation.

“Earn it with something more than money,” she calls back, flipping him off over her shoulder.

GO, Justin ― The Steady Running of the Hour

Groveling wouldn’t be well-received, Peter thinks. Instead, he brings Michelle an iced coffee as an apology for being a dick last week when he was freaking out over midterms. They’re experiencing a final flare of summer weather and it seems like a practical offering as well as a symbolic gesture. Unfortunately, the man at the front desk makes Peter toss the coffee before he’s allowed in because of a No Food and Drink policy. He feels really awkward about it and distinctly emptyhanded when he approaches Michelle at their usual table.

When it’s clear that she’s not focused on anything else, Peter spills the story and does end up saying, “I’m sorry” out loud. She likes one of those things enough to smile at him―not a big one, but not a sarcastic one either―and he exhales in relief.

“I really appreciate that you’re doing this,” he adds during a lull when they’re looking over the notes he made in class, trying to decipher his professor’s analysis of a certain passage.

He studies Michelle’s downturned face until she looks up and meets his eye.

“When do you get your midterm results?”

“Not for a couple of weeks. The prof doesn’t seem like he’s in any rush.”

“Are you worried about how you did?” she asks, propping her chin up with her fist. It makes her mouth slope into a playful pout and he follows the line of it with his eye for a second.

“Kinda.”

Michelle shakes her head.

“You shouldn’t be. You’re working hard. I know you passed.”

It’s the first session that they don’t fight. Feels good.

HAM, Rosalie ― The Dressmaker

“Holy shit,” he breathes when Michelle enters. “What is that?”

The day has finally come that he beats her to the library, which is the first shock, but this is an entirely separate and far less expected thing.

“It’s Halloween,” she states. As though it’s no big deal that she just walked in here wearing a silky-looking, floor-length, emerald green gown. Well, he assumes it’s a gown and not a skirt that sits really high on her waist, but he can’t see the entire thing; she’s wearing a cropped hoodie over top. The juxtaposition makes him grin.

“Where did you get that?”

“I made it.” Just as Peter’s mouth is dropping open, she huffs a laugh and says, “Of course I didn’t. It was my grandma’s. The style’s not totally right, but I thought the colour was a pretty good match.”

“Right,” he agrees as she swishes over and sits, cautiously smoothing the dress as she does so. “Because you’re obviously supposed to be…”

Michelle rolls her eyes as she takes the opportunity for illuminating him.

“Cecilia Tallis. From Atonement,” she prompts. “Keira Knightley played her.”

“Oh, ok, yeah. I think I saw part of that one time when my aunt May was watching it.”

“It was a book first,” Michelle teasingly informs him.

“I know you’ll be amazed to hear that I haven’t read it.”

“So amazed.”

“You look good in green,” Peter throws out there while she’s still looking at him.

“Don’t be weird about it, Parker.”

He totally sees her smiling to herself when they turn to their books and wonders if they’re friends yet.

ISRAEL, Lee ― Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Nope, nope, nope, they’re definitely not friends yet! After their revision session last week, Peter thought more about his and Michelle’s potential friendship, then started to feel weird about the fact that he’s paying her―or that Mr. Stark is, on his behalf. It’s been rare lately that both he and Mr. Stark aren’t busy at the same time, but with Peter’s midterms over and a new month beginning, Tony worked out a time for them to speak in person. Peter might have got rambling a little under the heady influence of his mentor’s full attention and maybe some things came across incorrectly. It wasn’t a meeting though, and he definitely didn’t know that decisions were being made!

“I thought you were finding this helpful!” Michelle says.

“I am,” he insists. “I left Mr. Stark a message. I’m gonna set it straight!”

“Oh, like you set it straight over the weekend? He fired me as your tutor!”

“I didn’t know he was doing that!”

“What did you say to him?” she demands.

Fuck, this is going to be embarrassing to say face-to-face. Peter glances at their table―where they didn’t sit down, due to this accidental termination―and feels himself get all overheated and shifty.

“That I felt weird about paying you.”

“Because English is so worthless you should be able to learn about it for free? Yeah, I guess you could’ve made the internet your tutor, but it’s a full two months too late for that!”

“Dammit!” Peter says, frustrated. “No! Because I thought maybe you and I were friends now because it seemed like maybe we were and I’d definitely like us to be friends, but I didn’t want you to feel obligated to be nice to me as a friend or anything more than a tutor just because you’re being paid. Do you want to be friends with me?” he summarizes bluntly.

“Yes.”

He frowns in confusion.

“Really?”

Michelle’s eyes dart to the side, then zip back to his face.

“…Isn’t that what you want? I think that’s literally what you just told me you want.”

“And the money thing?”

“Yeah, you’re definitely going to fix that as soon as we’re done today. My time and expertise are valuable as hell and I’m super willing to take Tony Stark’s money.” She gives him a weird look. “My friendship is not for sale.”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to assume―”

“I mean, I don’t know how people make friends over there in Biology, but―”

“Ok, that’s far enough,” he says, laughing when she smirks to admit she was kidding.

“I guess you better start calling me MJ too,” she says, taking her usual seat.

“If I had any extra names you didn’t know, I’d totally let you use one in exchange.”

She shrugs easily and picks up this week’s novel when he places it on the table within her reach.

“Speaking of people using other names…” MJ says as she taps the cover. “Ready to talk about a famous forger?”

“Smooth transition.”

“Thanks… pal?”

“No,” Peter says to ‘pal,’ making a face.

“No,” she agrees. “I’ll just have to remember that we’re friends now without a new name to remind me.”

“You’re officially my meanest friend,” he jokes.

MJ snorts.

“Peter, with all the time we’re spending together this year, I’m gonna be your best friend.”

JOHNSON, Adam ― Fortune Smiles

“Seventy-three!” Peter cries out when he strides into the library that Thursday. Desk Man shoots him a look and Peter mouths, “Sorry.” But if that guy’s annoyance with Peter is on the rise, so is the strength of his friendship with MJ.

“Seventy-three?” she repeats excitedly, then pauses, seemingly waiting for him to say more.

He understands. For her, getting a 73 on an English exam would probably be a blow to her average and something she’d struggle to course correct from on the final. He’d feel the same about receiving that grade in one of the classes that make up his major. But for his first college English exam? A discipline that’s forcing him to learn a completely different type of material and regurgitate that knowledge on an exam that’s neither practical nor multiple choice? It’s huge. He beams to let MJ know he hasn’t come to complain about her ineffective tutoring. Totally the opposite.

“That’s great,” MJ says. She rises from her chair because Peter’s too hyper―even a full day after getting his mark―to sit down yet.

“Yeah?”

“I told you you’d do fine,” she reminds him.

Then she goes to shove his arm and Peter misinterprets it, pulling her in to finish what he thought was the beginning of a hug. Just as he’s realizing and loosening his arms from around her, MJ’s hands come up and squeeze his back once, ending in a few reassuring pats. They break out of it, holding each other at arm’s length and she gives him a firm nod in conclusion. Peter laughs awkwardly. After that, they re-establish their usual rhythm.

“So, the first short story collection on your booklist,” she says as she sits. Rather than taking his regular spot across from her, he drags the chair around the circular table so they’re side by side. MJ watches him without protest.

“These are the first short stories I’ve read,” he tells her.

“What did you think?”

“I like it. It’s nice how it breaks the book into chunks. Makes it seem shorter maybe?”

“Definitely.”

Weirdly, their opinions about the book and what his prof wants him to learn from it continue to closely align. Of course, they don’t get through everything because, after about 15 minutes, MJ asks if he brought his midterm with him. He yanks it free of his backpack and they spend the rest of their time going over it. With a 73, Peter expects a lot of the review to be criticism (of the constructive variety) and notes on what he should’ve done better or different. Instead, it’s MJ gasping (quietly but happily) every time she finds a place where he mentioned something they went over together. He watches her eyes scan over where he described If, Then as ‘suspenseful, subtle, and atmospheric’ before going further into his comparison between that novel and Gone Girl. She catches his eye, her expressions changing like a shuffling card deck. Peter sees impressed come up, then pleased, then a third, unfamiliar thing that’s gone when MJ flips his exam to the next page.

KOCH, Herman ― The Dinner

“How is this book so horrific and so good?” Peter asks wonderingly.

They were going over his class notes until the notes referred to a page number of the novel. When he couldn’t remember what happened there, they looked it up. It was just supposed to be a refresher, but it turned into them reading nine pages―waiting for each other before flipping when their reading speeds raced, constantly slipping out of and regaining first place.

“It’s giving me rage-hunger,” MJ said.

“Rage-hunger?”

“Yeah, you know, when you’re incensed about something to the point that you start getting really hungry? Happens to me at protests.”

“Listen,” Peter says, dropping his voice to a compelling whisper. “I have pretzels.”

“Here?”

He nods.

“Do we risk it?”

“Yes,” she insists.

While she keeps watch, glancing around, Peter grasps the edge of the pretzel bag in his backpack. His expression feels pretty constipated as he struggles to open the bag soundlessly, but it’s worth the effort when he feels it give. Furtively, they sneak pretzels from his bag―balanced between their legs under the table―up to their mouths, attempting to chew as silently as possible and speaking in a soft slur with pretzels distending their cheeks.

LINK, Kelly ― Get in Trouble

Yeah, so, after being caught with mouths full of pretzels, they’re slightly afraid to immediately return to the library. Instead of meeting there on Thursday to go over all of Peter’s notes at once, he and MJ snatch time all week long. It’s another collection of short stories this week, so they go over the first one before he even attends his Monday English 1034 lecture, meaning he’s super prepared to participate for once, after running his thoughts by his tutor in advance. The next time, they do story number two, plus his class notes, then continue meeting when they can.

Peter hesitates before asking if she still wants to get together at their regular hour on Thursday. What if she feels like she’s given him enough of her time this week? What if she made other plans? But when he does ask, she’s surprised that he ever considered them not having their scheduled session. He’s not entirely sure why he was so scared she’d say no. That was silly. Although they both acknowledged that they’re friends, he thinks they’re finally starting to act like it.

So they meet on Thursday. And then they meet on Friday too. They say it’s for tutoring and keep Peter’s copy of Get in Trouble between them on the table of the student community centre, but they don’t open it. MJ trades him a bite of her pizza slice for some of his fries. He laughs hard when she gets ketchup on her lip, then swallows the sound down as she licks it off.

“Did I get it?”

“Um, yeah,” Peter replies, stupefied.

MOYES, Jojo ― Me Before You

“Well,” he says, retyping his notes to add MJ’s insights, “here’s another one where I can count watching a movie as part of studying.” Peter keeps typing for a minute, but she doesn’t respond, so while his eyes remain on the screen he asks, “Are you judging me? I promise I’m still going to read the rest of the book.”

Finished, he looks over to see MJ staring intently at the open novel. Peter concentrates on the book first―she’s right near the end―then on his friend’s face. Is she…?

“Are you crying?” he asks softly, leaning towards her.

He thought she might hide her reaction, but she raises her head and sniffs as tears pour down her cheeks. She’s so naked with emotion that Peter shudders.

“Maybe,” she says, making them both laugh, hers a bubbling noise from the wetness in her throat. “But ignore this. I said I wouldn’t spoil the ending for you.”

“Obviously, nothing dramatic happens,” Peter sarcastically infers. “You cry all the time. I have zero reason to think it has anything to do with Me Before You.”

Smiling, she finally wipes the last of her tears away with the sleeve of her cardigan.

“I still have a little bit left to read.”

“Borrow it,” he says.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I can listen to the audiobook for a while, or you can just keep it overnight and we’ll hang out tomorrow and I’ll get it back from you. Unless you think you’d need longer.”

MJ rolls her eyes at him.

“Please. I eat Jojo Moyeses for breakfast. I’ll probably finish it during the break in my next class.”

“So, you wouldn’t even need it overnight then,” he says, trying to be sly. She lets out a laugh.

“You want to read it so badly, don’t you?”

“Maybe I just don’t like lending out my books.”

“Liar. I bet you’re going to read the rest all in one sitting.” MJ smirks and stands the book on the table like both she and it are taunting him. “Don’t you need to prioritize your other courses, Peter? What about Biology?”

“Offer revoked,” he tells her, making to take the book back. She doesn’t let him, holding it up and away from him.

“Are you going to spend all night reading for pleasure instead of doing your science homework? Shame on you, Peter. What about your future?”

He stands too quickly in his attempt to grab the book, startling MJ, who rocks back in her chair a little too far. But it can’t tip faster than his reflexes can react; Peter instinctively grabs her around the waist and pulls her against him as the chair topples and the paperback hits the ground with a soft thump. They haven’t been this close since they hugged after his midterm results. He opens and closes his mouth without saying anything, fingers shifting against MJ’s back as she gets her balance. Seems to take her longer than it should, but he won’t let go before she’s ready. Which’ll be any second now, he’s sure. She’s flushed, eyes roaming his face. Probably about to tell him she can stand all on her fucking own.

Any second now.

NG, Celeste ― Everything I Never Told You

It’s the second week in December and their final tutoring session of the semester. Exams start tomorrow, though the one for English 1034 isn’t until the 21st. Peter should be psyched―after this exam, he’s halfway done the course―and yet his shoulders carry some heaviness into the library, along with big, wet snowflakes. He perks up at the sight of MJ, then grows subdued just as fast. They’ve become the kind of friends who meet during the week, always at school, usually with at least the pretense of studying. She’s never been to the apartment he shares with three roommates; he has no idea where she lives. Their most secure connection is a list of 26 books and after today’s session, 14 of those will already be behind them. Theoretically, they’re committed to spending another semester together (unless the world ends via hostile alien takeover, or Mr. Stark fires MJ again and she agrees to it for some reason). What happens after that?

Peter doesn’t like the way winter break looks like a preview for the end of the school year in April. He’s sure that’ll come up quick after the new year because second semester always feels shorter than first. Will they be close enough by then to make plans for hanging out over the summer? He knows MJ’s from here, but not if she’ll be around. And what about next year? He won’t be studying English. Are they gonna see each other on campus or both be too busy with their final year of undergrad―keeping up grades and searching for their first job opportunities right out of college? And then? Will one or both of them move away for work or grad school, or just to find a cheaper place to live while they’re starting out? Seriously, they could be faint memories to each other in under five years.

He's weighed down with all of this as he flops into his seat at their table.

“Do you think you’re ready?” MJ asks just before she glances up.

“What?” Peter replies, devastated.

“For your exam.” She meets his eye and her expression collapses inward a little as she assesses his mood. “What’s wrong?”

He looks at her face. It’s easy to admit to himself that her eyes are more trusting than they used to be when they stared back into his, and he has to allow that she’s more trusting too. Same with him. They’ve smoothed each other out, rounded off each other’s bluntest angles. Peter has no desire for them to ever have another shouting match like they did during the early weeks of this arrangement. In fact, his ideal dynamic for them would be the complete opposite.

“I guess I’m… worried.”

“We should get together next week.”

“That would be great,” he tells her with eager relief.

Wow, what would they do? Grab lunch? Dinner? Hot chocolates and ice skating at Rockefeller Center? A movie at his place? All of his roommates have early or no exams (lucky bastards) and plans to head home for the holidays right after, leaving him alone in the apartment.

“This is a late exam,” MJ says, doublechecking the date in her planner, which includes all of his deadlines (in red ink) alongside hers (in blue), “but the library’s open practically every day but Christmas.”

Oh. She means get together here. Of course. He didn’t really make it clear that the exam isn’t what he’s worried about, or at least it’s not the main thing.

“Well,” Peter says, “consistency.”

“What’s up with you?” she asks, narrowing her eyes are him, apparently not satisfied since he does still sound kinda bereft.

Retrieving his novel and his laptop, he says, “Nothing,” and thinks, I was just wishing we were more than friends.

OZEKI, Ruth ― A Tale for the Time Being

They hang out once before his exam, when MJ helps Peter with prep, and once after, when he’s getting a jump on his reading for semester two. The second time, totally by accident, she meets May.

MJ’s at his apartment for the first time and the two out of three of his roommates who’ve already returned are being loud enough that Peter can’t forget their existence the way he wants to (just for right now) and ignore everything in the world that isn’t his tutor/friend/person he’s been pining for every spare second since they’ve been apart. Two weeks is too long. They’re finally taking an honest crack at the novel he’s been assigned for next week, the first week back at school, when there’s a knock at the door, followed by cheerful hollering from his roommates. Peter knows who it is even before he rises and sheepishly lets his aunt hand him everything he forgot at home when he packed; his roommates love May.

Though he told MJ she didn’t have to get up, she’s suddenly next to him at the door―he’s startled to feel her briefly lean against him―then being pulled into a hug by his aunt. When she leaves for a minute to go to the washroom, May drags Peter away from his roommates.

“Who was that?” she wonders, face lighting up with curiosity and premature excitement.

He feels himself turn red and itches at his cheek like he can scratch the flush out.

“Just a friend.”

His aunt raises her eyebrows doubtfully.

PALAHNIUK, Chuck ― Choke

After spending last Thursday giving A Tale for the Time Being the attention they should’ve the week before, they’re back on schedule with a new book. Sort of back on schedule. They start off discussing the novel, but when Peter runs one of his prof’s assertions about it past Google, he finds out Choke has a movie version. He and MJ glance at each other. Yeah, why not? It’s only their second week back on campus and they don’t have their full studying stamina back yet. They trek down to the film library in the basement to see if they have a copy.

Soon, they’re wearing bulky borrowed headphones, hunkered down at the corner computer in the viewing lab that’s kept in the dark, watching a film about a sex addict. They’re awkward at first, or maybe it’s just Peter, but eventually he relaxes, folding his arms over his chest and leaning back in his chair. MJ shifts around next to him. She kicks her shoes off and brings her feet up off the floor. They’re tightly side by side to watch the same computer screen, so when she crosses her legs, her knee lands on his thigh. Peter stares at it for a minute in the screen’s glow, missing the movie. He lays his palm on top of the rough, cool denim, and MJ turns her head to see what’s up. Immediately, he moves to withdraw his hand from her knee, but she pats the back of it, giving him permission.

Heart thumping, Peter eases the headphones off one ear. The room’s completely quiet, apart from the way MJ exhales heavily through her nose as she settles into position for the rest of the film. He swallows. He should tell her, right now.

“Hey, MJ…” he starts.

But she doesn’t look, doesn’t turn. Can’t hear anything outside those fucking headphones. Weirdly, she does glance at him a few minutes later, unprompted. She reaches out and pauses the movie. He lifts his headphones off when she does, eyes drawn to how they mess up her hair.

“Did you say something?” MJ asks.

Now, now, now, Peter tells himself.

“Uh, no.” He gives her a tight smile and unpauses Choke.

QUICK, Matthew ― The Good Luck of Right Now

“You have other friends, right?” Peter wonders aloud as MJ reads over the short responses he’s composed for an online participation thing that his prof made worth a truly stupid 4% of his grade.

“A couple.”

She says it straight, unembarrassed. He understands her well enough to know she has no interest in tricking people into believing she’s more social or at all inclined towards networking. Those people, whoever they are, were lucky to have her let them in. Abruptly, Peter realizes he’s probably being counted among them. He grins to himself.

“Plus, like, class friends.”

“Sure,” he agrees.

He does the same thing―always attempts to figure out who seems nice so he can try to be paired with them for group projects or have someone to sit with if they have another class together in the future.

“Any other kind of friends?” Peter asks tentatively. MJ quits reading his laptop screen and side-eyes him. “Like a… like maybe a boyfriend?”

It’s probably a no. It has to be a no. Even with the length of time it took for them to talk about their personal lives, she would’ve mentioned a boyfriend by now. Wouldn’t she?

“I… a boyfriend? No, I… Why would I have…? Do you?”

Well, this is a surprise. He expected her to either answer straightforwardly or question if he ever listens to what she says. But she’s oddly flustered and inarticulate. And blushing, Peter notices, though she won’t let him hold her gaze.

“No,” he says, settling for the single syllable that’ll do the job.

MJ sort of nods, then directs his attention to the screen.

“Just a question, but has anyone ever taught you how to use basic punctuation? Jesus, Parker.”

As much as that comment’s much more in character, every one of his senses screams, ‘MISDIRECTION!’

ROWELL, Rainbow ― Fangirl

“Say nothing,” MJ instructs when they run into each other in front of the library, coming from opposite directions.

About what? Peter wants to ask, but he doesn’t say even that much because the look on her face is intense and because the wind is icy, slicing their faces with snow that’s more like sharp daggers. He bounds up the stairs next to her and straight inside when she jerks the door open with her mittened hand. All the way upstairs and to their table, he keeps wary eyes on her. He only looks away for a minute to set his backpack down and shrug out of his outer layers; the library’s kept almost stiflingly warm and dry. They pile their wet outerwear on one of the extra chairs, then MJ glares at him before he can sit. He stares back, baffled.

“Nothing,” she reminds him, and unzips her hoodie.

Does he look silly with the way his jaw drops? He can’t even care. She’s wearing a Spider-Man t-shirt.

“I―”

“No words. No sounds of any kind.”

So Peter grins in silence and retrieves the usual studying accessories from his backpack. Eventually, MJ groans out her admission.

“I forgot to do laundry.”

He continues to say nothing about the shirt, even when he is permitted to speak so they can discuss his reading. What he wants to say isn’t something she’d like―that he’s deduced from the laundry comment that this is an old shirt, not a recent buy. Meaning she’s had it since who knows how long before she ever met him. Meaning she’s a fan.

SENNA, Danzy ― New People

“How are you liking the course?” MJ asks him out of the blue. She’s tracing the curving shapes and purple letters on the cover of this week’s book with her fingertip.

Peter laughs.

“My prof’s never even asked us that.”

“That’s because profs don’t want honest answers. Only in essays, and even then, you have to pad them with all the shit the prof said in class in order to stroke their ego into giving you a good mark.”

“Cynical.”

She smiles dryly.

“Thank you. But really, how are you finding it?” She looks nervous about how he might answer.

“A lot of work,” he says honestly, “but it also feels like less work than my other courses.”

“Because it’s a fluff discipline compared to Biology?”

“Stop it, no, because you’re helping me. It feels like something I’m doing for fun.”

“Who are you?” MJ shakes her head, wearing a smug smile. “If the you from September could see you now. Oh, actually, that reminds me. Put your number in.”

She hands him the new phone she mentioned she’d be getting last weekend.

“What did you have me saved as in your old one?” he asks, adding his number to a new contact page. MJ takes the phone back before he can input his name.

“Oh, you don’t want to know.” He’s fairly certain she’s joking.

“Did it contain the word ‘dickhead’?”

She shrugs and slouches in her chair, phone held low and close. She finishes entering his information out of his line of sight.

“You’ll never know.”

Maybe not, Peter thinks, when MJ gets up a while later to refill her water bottle, but he can at least check what she has him under now. She left her phone out on the table, screen up, so he texts her an innocuous ‘testing, testing’ and watches for the new message to pop up.

Evidently, he’s in her phone as his normal name. His name, plus a heart. His real one’s suddenly beating very fast.

THIEN, Madeleine ― Do Not Say We Have Nothing

It’s almost Valentine’s Day and their college’s week-long study week, two compelling reasons for Peter to tell Michelle Jones―tutor, friend, precariously deepening crush―how he feels about her.

Before their tutoring session, he psyches himself up in the bathroom mirror, until other people walk in and he has to pretend to be coughing. He doesn’t really feel ready and their time together ends up being sort of a flurry anyway because part of the library’s being painted and there are fewer tables. With a ton of people on the cusp of more exams and big assignments due before the break, it takes Peter and MJ a while to find a table. Even after that, the paint smell gradually fills the air, forcing them to stop early.

God, and he didn’t say anything!

“We should meet up later,” he asserts firmly, at the same moment MJ says, “Try again tonight?”

“Yeah,” they say together.

Peter grins and she smiles back before quickly ducking her head. He bites his lip, restraining himself from catching her chin with his fingers and tilting it up.

“Ok then,” he says. “Ok. The library’ll probably still stink, so… my apartment?”

“Or my place,” MJ offers, slightly wide-eyed.

“Oh, yeah. That would be, that’d be good.”

“You can walk back with me, if you don’t mind waiting for my class.”

He doesn’t, and they do that, and as MJ’s unlocking the door to her apartment, he finds out two things: that she has a roommate and that her roommate’s staying the night at her boyfriend’s. Whatever, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be romantic or anything. They’re discussing art and politics during China’s calamitous Cultural Revolution. There’s no way MJ would even be thinking about… but then she leads him to the couch instead of the kitchen table. And she sits down next to him, letting their thighs touch. And his breathing just isn’t steady for the hangout that goes two hours before they even think to check the time. So many times, he has the feeling they’re one brush of their legs, one bump of their shoulders, one tuck of her hair with his fingers away from something more, but every chance seems to come and go while the tension stays.

Eventually, Peter gathers his stuff and lingers with her in the open doorway of her apartment. She’s leaning into the frame, smiling at him as he says a bunch of nothing, just to make the night last longer. He takes a breath. Ok, he’s gonna do it. He’ll tell her.

The next second, MJ’s pressing her mouth to his. Then, while he’s still dazed from the kiss, she pushes him out the door and says, “Um, see you after study week, Peter.”

URQUHART, Jane ― The Night Stages

What’s this mean? Peter wants to ask her, right after the kiss and for the whole study break. Except he’s in the city, doing Spidey-patrol and finishing the nearly-500 pages of Do Not Say We Have Nothing, and she’s in New Orleans, building affordable housing with a charity. When he texts her because he can’t resist asking how she is and what she’s working on that day, she always gets back to him, but there’s nothing flirtatious in her words, nothing to assure him she shares his preoccupation over the kiss. So startling, so make-the-hair-stand-up-on-the-back-of-his-neck. And it was supposed to make everything clear, when one of them made a move (in his head over the weeks before it happened, it was him), not confuse the hell out of him.

It's awkward when they meet on campus on Monday. Neither of them goes in for a hug and they carry on a stilted conversation about how each of their breaks went, Peter twisting his fingers around in his sleeves. At least they didn’t postpone this until Thursday. He senses that they’re both thankful for the length of this week’s novel and how many times it guarantees they’ll meet (their productivity per session definitely took a nosedive when they became friends). He assumes the relief comes from wanting to push past this awkward stage by getting used to each other again. Then, when they meet in the library the next day, MJ picks a different table. Actually, a completely different floor. It’s basically dead, no other students or staff in sight, and, with his face flushed with desire and anticipation, she braces a hand on his thigh, leans in, and kisses him for the second time.

On Wednesday, it’s the same spot (but later because Peter has an evening lab) and he initiates, hand on the back of her neck as they kiss slow and deep, never even unpacking their bags.

Thursday, they meet at their old table, like normal, and do some actual work. But that night, he walks MJ home and tries to give her a goodbye kiss that turns into them making out with her pressed up against the closed door of her apartment.

They agree, on Friday morning, that Peter really needs to devote some concentration to this novel, so they study at his place that evening. Because all of his roommates are home, they’re camped out in his room, on his bed, but with his door wide open. The most they attempt is holding hands, anxiously separating when one of his buddies pokes a head in to ask if Peter’s seen his phone charger.

By Saturday, at her apartment, they abandon pretenses, though they haven’t exactly said in words what it is they’re doing without those pretenses. Are they friends who kiss? Are they dating? Is MJ his girlfriend? None of that is as pressing as pulling her onto his lap and kissing her until they’re tired and she checks her phone to see that it’s almost two in the morning. Reluctantly, MJ climbs off his lap and Peter watches her disappear into her bedroom. He strips off his jeans and falls asleep on her couch wrapped in a blanket and his school hoodie.

The next morning, they look over his notes because he’s here and they might as well. Their socked feet overlap beneath her kitchen table. She refills his glass of orange juice before he notices it’s almost empty.

VÁSQUEZ, Juan Gabriel ― The Sound of Things Falling

He’s in love with her. It’s the beginning of March, the air has quit biting, MJ’s blushing when he uses his high school Spanish to correctly pronounce the characters’ names, and he’s in love with her.

WALKER, Karen Thompson ― The Dreamers

Peter falls asleep at her place again. This time, MJ’s tucked into him when he wakes up. Gradually, he drags up a fuzzy memory of her padding into the living room during the night, putting him on alert until she nudged him over to make room on the couch. Her roommate’s home. They don’t care, don’t flinch apart when she walks into the room. He hangs around most of Saturday, only leaving because he really needs to do some work on his other courses. MJ kisses him when he goes, gently stroking his earlobe with her thumb.

X ― N/A

“No X?” she checks. “Are you sure?”

“It’s on the syllabus,” Peter points out, pulling MJ’s feet across his thighs as he eats an apple. They found an alternate study spot that allows food.

“Yeah, I know, I have the copy from the beginning of the year, but I figured your prof would update it to add something.”

“I think he told us one time that he was going to,” he says, trying to remember exactly. “Now, he says he was always planning on leaving this week free for us to ask questions in class before the exam.”

“But there are still two full weeks of classes before exams,” MJ says skeptically. “If this break was intentional, he’d do it the last week of classes instead.”

“I don’t know. I mean, I know there are two weeks left, but I don’t know what else to say. No X.”

“Semi-related,” she prefaces, giving him a serious look that makes Peter pay attention, “is it ok with you if I consider you my boyfriend?”

He laughs until he realizes she looks genuinely unsure of what his answer will be.

“Please.”

Peter holds his apple out of the way when MJ wiggles forward to hug him.

YAZDANIAN, Showey ― Loopholes

“You wanna go somewhere with me?” MJ asks.

Peter knows she’s been watching him rearrange the digital copy of his notes―simplifying and streamlining so they’ll be easy to study from between now and the date of his final exam. It’s very comforting, her undemanding gaze, and he feels himself emotionally stretching into it, like a cat. He loves to be near her. His girlfriend.

“Yes,” he says. “I mean, where?”

She laughs gently at him and props her elbow on the table, right next to his.

“The English Department scheduled a year-end trip to see a play.”

“That sounds very… high schoolish,” he decides, grinning.

“Hey, some of us aren’t too up our own asses to understand the thrill of a field trip. Maybe in Biology―”

“Ugh,” Peter groans jokingly at her relentless, unserious digs at his chosen discipline.

“―you’ve lost your sense of childlike wonder.”

“But I might be able to get it back if I go to this play? What’s the play?”

“Romeo and Juliet,” she mumbles.

“You want to see that? It’s depressing and, and overdramatic,” he states, though he’s never seen it performed, and definitely never read the play.

“I don’t really care about seeing the play,” MJ says as she gives him a meaningful look.

“Oh. Aw.” He smiles at the thought that she just wants to spend time with him. “Do I have to sign up or something?”

“I… might have already signed you up.” Peter raises his eyebrows at her and it’s enough to push her to continue. “It’s supposed to be an internal thing, just English majors, but the turnout for anything with any significant cultural value’s always really low―” MJ rolls her eyes. “―especially right at the end of the year, when people are starting to focus on exams, even though it’s a great opportunity to see a high-quality production with cheap student-group-discount tickets. Anyway, I talked to the prof because he knows me from teaching me last year and asked if you could come because you are taking an English class even if you’re not majoring.”

“He agreed?”

She nods.

“As I suspected, there were a bunch of tickets left over because they always reserve too many. They’re great seats.”

“Why are you trying to convince me to come?” Peter teases. “Apparently, I already signed up.”

Despite the dozens of times they’ve met this year, comprising probably a hundred hours, and the affectionate admissions, and the kissing that’s been driving him insane for more, this is their first date date. He’s excited to be at the theatre because he’s never gone before, and he purposely didn’t tell Mr. Stark about this so he wouldn’t try to pay for it; Peter bought his own ticket. They’re deep into the second part of the play, intermission behind them, and before things can get gruesome on stage with the stars meeting their violent ends, he leans in so close to MJ that his nose brushes her ear.

“You’re my best friend,” he whispers.

She turns her head, smile clamped together by the way she’s biting her bottom lip. There’s joy in her eyes that makes his heart drop and flip and soar back up, too high, into his throat. He’s still looking at her when she turns her face back to the performance.

“Also, I love you,” Peter says, almost choking on his heart.

Swiftly, he kisses her cheek and settles back into his seat, but MJ tugs the hand that’s been entwined with hers since they sat down. She leans across the armrest between their seats and he’s happy to move the rest of the way. Something hot courses through him when she not only kisses him more roughly than he anticipated but grabs the tie he wore with his button-up, blazer, and good jeans. When she releases him with a smirk and a pat on his chest, Peter practically collapses back into place, stunned.

“Oh,” MJ adds, glancing at him again in a quick flick, “I love you too.”

ZOBOI, Ibi ― Pride

There are three stacks of books on the surprisingly nice hardwood floor of MJ’s bedroom. It’s small compared to the size of his sense of accomplishment for seeing this demanding course through to the end. Although this is the first time Peter’s assembled all 25 books at once, they aren’t organized alphabetically; there’s a pile each for books he remembers well, those he wants to reread sections of, and ones where, logically, he knows he read them, and yet he can barely recall the plot. He feels pretty goddamn good about the fact that, out of 25, only 2 made the third pile. Actually, one’s unaccounted for, because it’s the last book on his syllabus and it’s currently dangling from his hand while he takes a break from reading it.

“Hey,” he hisses at MJ.

Lying on her back on her soft, thick rug while she studies for one of her exams, his girlfriend angles her head to look at Peter, hanging over the side of her bed.

“What?”

He grins.

“Nothing. Just wanted to say, ‘hey.’” He’s so used to her rolling her eyes. “How’s the floor?”

“Not bad.”

“You wanna come up here?”

MJ eyes him suspiciously.

“I need to study,” she reminds him. “Everything I know about your books got mixed up with everything I’m supposed to know about my books and I’m still mentally untangling.”

Peter keeps staring down at her, trying to make his eyes wide and pleading. It takes her seconds to give in. She groans as she starts to sit up, appearing to lead with her knees and elbows as she rearranges her limbs, collapsing and unfolding like a portable lawn chair. MJ steps gingerly over his book stacks, then he’s grabbing her waist and pulling her to the bed, where she flops down beside him. Her head’s facing the wrong way though, so Peter shuffles around, getting her socks out of his face. They take turns sighing tiredly―the extreme burdens of another year of lectures over and another round of exams about to begin―then Peter tilts his forehead to touch hers.

“Happy you’re almost at the end?” MJ asks softly.

“Yeah, but I also kinda wish I could take another English class next year. I think I actually did better in Bio this year because I got to take a break from it with something that was totally different. Does that sound possible?”

“Mhmm.”

She lets her eyes close―probably resting them after concentrating for so long.

“I’ll miss reading this much.”

“And?”

With her eyes shut, only her eyebrows prompt him to go on.

“And I’ll miss talking about what I read with you,” he says.

“Maybe you don’t need to worry about that,” she suggests.

“Why not?”

MJ smiles.

“Because I’ve been working on a new list of books I think you’ll like since October. We can meet in the library and talk about them.”

“Every week?” Peter checks. “What about Biology?”

“If you have time,” she clarifies.

“No, I mean I’ve spent a year studying English lit, learning about your discipline.” With a grin, he trails his fingers down MJ’s throat, stopping at the neck of her long-sleeved shirt. “So, I was just wondering, if you’d be interested in studying Biology.”

He kisses her neck where he stroked, then up beneath her jaw, making MJ laugh until she gasps instead, gripping his hair.

“I don’t think we should wait for September.”

“Well, you’re still the tutor for another week,” Peter reminds her. “I’ll follow your lead.”

#my writing #spideychelleweek2k20 #spideychelle #spideychelle fic #spideychelle fanfiction #peter parker #peter x mj #peter x michelle #peter parker x michelle jones #michelle jones

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thisnerdsadventures · 4 years ago

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research updates!

This post has been difficult to write, so I've been putting it off for a while, not gonna lie. The reason I put it off is because I'm not quite sure how yet to reflect on my MEng experience so far. I didn't have a great experience last semester because of social isolation, neverending confusion, lack of guidance, imposter syndrome, zoom fatigue, etc., so I was really hoping IAP would be better so that I didn't just write a really depressing half-assed post about "how my MEng is going/not going" here.

Well, IAP did go better! I finally figured out a path forward and have been able to make progress on my project on my own. This has led to a generally improved sense of purpose in life, which was VERY missing last semester. I think what was missing was my usual shenanigans that I randomly find myself in with my friends, whether it's hackathons or spontaneous trips or literally forming startups. But in my own way, I've done a couple things of interest in the past few months in addition to my research, just to keep this blog fun haha, no other reason

My Actual Research

So last semester was rough because I was ramping up to a somewhat new project, a new direct supervisor, and a new degree program/way of life..... all remotely. I thought it would be fine, and yet it wasn't? I talked to some of my friends who started a full time job, and nearly all of them agreed, that ramping up to a new job in zoom land was extremely difficult. One of them said they hadn't even finished ramping up yet (T.T) I reflected a lot on why it was hard, and I determined it was because I only had one or two hours of scheduled face to face with my direct supervisor per week, and little to no other guidance outside of that. I was trying to learn as much as I could about existing research, which was not only in compilers (which, to be honest, I didn't know a lot about), but also in computer architecture (which I also did not know much about at all) and trying to understand things from discussions where I barely had a foundational knowledge to begin with. I struggled to even find the questions to ask that would help me out.

At this point, my supervisor was also really busy with his own deadlines, and I don't think he had much management experience of his own, so it was also probably hard for him. If we were in person, he'd be able to sense the confusion in my face and I'd be able to pop by his office whenever I needed, even if that was every day. But zoom calls are laggy and poor resolution and emails asking for help are often left unread. For the first two months of my MEng, it was mostly like this, just kind of feeling I was bumbling along, not really sure what I should be doing.

Wow, my imposter syndrome was off the charts. I began to panic about whether I’d be able to finish my degree on time, even though I was like literally like. two (2) months into this endeavor. At some point in November (I think literally right around the election), I felt really, really worthless, as a researcher, as a contributing member of society, and I felt really, really lonely and constantly anxious because I didn’t have like //my job// to ground me to reality. The Thursday after this, I sat on the Esplanade with my friend, our feet hanging over the water and we watched the sun go down. As we talked, I felt myself grounded again, and my overthinking brain calmed down for the time being.

When I went home, I decided I was going to find outside things to occupy me if my research was going to. I signed up to be a tech lead for my school’s Google Developer’s Student Club (yes, I really cannot leave Google), and I signed up to interview for MIT. I decided to #manage #up and make things better re:research by asserting my confusion??? if that makes sense lol

By Thanksgiving, I was home in California, and I felt like I had a way better plan moving forward for my research and was busy planning a few things here and there for my various obligations. I was also taking microeconomics for fun, which was actually.... really fun (as it turns out).

IAP

This IAP was pretty much just an extension of the semester, I mean like I guess that is just how MEng goes lol, but I actually did a good amount of /stuff/ this IAP. I would usually work on my research for the morning and some of the afternoon, and in the afternoon I would bake or go on walks with my mom and workout, and in the evenings, I would work on my other obligations, or read, or other random side projects. Such side projects include: investing in penny stocks, writing music, creating tiktoks

I have very little to report on IAP, i really haven’t done much anything noteworthy in the past couple months tbh lol. My research has been going a lot better, I have more of an idea of how I can troubleshoot/explore different avenues on my own, and I can get a lot done before asking for help. The 8am meetings are killing me though. I have one tomorrow and I will complain about it surely. Not sure if anything is going to change for the upcoming semester, though I decided to just become a straight up econ major for my last semester for no apparent reason, so that’ll be fun1!11!! (i registered for three econ classes lol) MIT told us they were vaccinating us when the time comes, so that’s good too !!!

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moontaeilll · 6 years ago

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ALL ABOUT SM GLOBAL PACKAGE & NEO CITY: SEOUL EXPERIENCE

by twitter user @sugnsook // @yudotaeil

Hello~ so i am not that good at explaining/vlogging or writing stuffs but in this thread? or blogpost or wherever u guys reading this, i will try to describe my experience as much as I can. Also for now, I am dividing this post, FAQ-style according to several topics, and I will put a separate detailed post on my own Neo City: SEOUL experience. I hope this will help for u guys deciding to splurge a bit on concert/global package!

Disclaimer: In the past, I got a few ccs complaining about my fangirl related-expensive expenses, I just want to note earlier here that as the whole prior to the actual concert, I was a part time student & working 30+ hours a week, working every chances I get. It was also my last semester of undergrad studies & I have been wanting to attend NCT’s first ever concert since 2017 and been really saved up since then, so I consider the large expenses is pretty much a treat for myself.

Tl;dr: if you worked hard enough and really wanted to attend your faves event, just go for it, as it was really worth it.

— General

What is included in Global Package?

Concert ticket (depending on days u wanna go), a good quality hotel for your stay, return transportation to & from the concert venue - hotel, preorder access to official merchandises, NCT 127 theme global package-special merchandises, NCT 127 theme snack boxes (after the concert), One themed lunch, a half day tour with tour guide before the concert, special event (varies according to what concert) - for NCT127’s we got a photoshoot session with NCT127’s life-size standee in SM’s infamous practice room itself.

How much does Global Package cost?

All i can say first thing first is….it IS costly. The ones I am paying is $949USD for Superior Single (Course C) as shown below:

The difference between the prices & packages are it depends on which hotel they will locate you & your seating in the concert. They also have Course A, Course B & Course C which depends on the concert days you are attending. Because I am flying out to Seoul just for the purpose of concert so why not just buy the two days ticket? And yeah that is why I chose Course C.

When does the ticketing open?

Usually the global package ticketing will only open at least one month prior to the actual concert, just like the concert announcement itself. Basically right after SM announce the concert, just be prepared as the ticketing will be shortly after it, right before the general ticketing starts. My advice is just, save up save up and save up as it is really well-known super costly.

How competitive the tickets are?

It is less competitive than general ticketing for sure, but pretty competitive in between ifans itself. When I bought mine, I initially planned for just economy ones but the ticket sold out WHEN i clicked “payment”. So, be quick or you might need to wait a bit more. I’m the type to be anxious if I dont have my ticket yet so I really want my ticketing matters to be settled up as soon as possible so-- when I figured out the economy package got sold out I quickly clicked on superior option - impulsively hehs.

During that ticketing, SM allows you to hold your payment up to 2 hours, as for twin package buyers can split payment. So if the tickets sold out, you might be able to get it after 2 hours. NOTE THAT: SM changed the policy from 2 hours to 30 mins now.

Eventually SM will release more packages and you CANNOT change your options once you have buy it. The packages will be available up until a week/or two before the concert, but the type of packages is really depends. I would say, Course C - Economy package sold out pretty quickly because that is what most people aiming for.

*also, keep refreshing the page if you are buying at the exact ticketing open time! The ticketing for mine opened 3 mins before the actual time so yeah….

How is the payment made?

Paypal only. Just be sure you have signed up to smtown travel account, and link you cards or have paypal balance to get your payment completed smoothly. Your package will only be confirmed once you get the payment confirmation so, having a working payment method is important. SM’s cancellation policy is ridiculous so I recommend everyone who is interested to join GP to do a thorough research beforehand.

Can international fans join general ticketing?

Yes, but not really feasible, as Yes24 sites require verification, unless you have connections with korean verifications or buy from 3rd party. The downside of 3rd party is you might get even more expensive ticket collectively compared to what Global Package has offered.

How good the seats are?

It depends on your luck as you will only draw your ticket basically the day before the concert. The more you paid for the package, the better the seats. For standing you might get a better queue number and in korea concerts you strictly go in by queue number. I chose seating, so for luckily one of my seat was right next to extended stage, and another seat was on the other side but center view. Also i luckily got both sides of seating so I can enjoy the concert with both views.

It is possible to trade your ticket between other global package holders tho - bcs i saw people did this at my hotel lol but you cannot ask sm to change your ticket. The concert ticket will be written as “해외팬투어” (intl fans tour), instead of your name.

My seat on the first day

My seat on the second day, center view

My seat on the second day, side view

Is there a customer service page i can rely to?

Yes. If there is one thing i would applaud SMtown travel for, it is for their customer service. I used a lot of their “Q&A” page and they typically will reply you within one business day. If you ask on weekend, they will respond to you as quick as on Monday. So if you have any like literally, ANY question about your package, just send a question to them and they will reply personally as soon as they can. And it is in english.

— Logistics

After you have bought your package, SM will update the logistics & schedule 2 WEEKS before the concert. So don’t worry if they ghosted you out before that 2 weeks lol.

Technically, they will divide the hotels according to the package type (dlx/superior/econ), then they will divide you into bus numbers, according whether you are seating/standing. Also your schedule will depends on the bus number you get. And this is non-exchangeable, as they prepared everything according to the list that they grouped you out.

How is the hotel?

For me, i got located at Ibis Styles Ambassador Hotel in Gangnam. Because I got single package, i got the whole hotel room for myself, lol what a new experience, as for my solo travels i only go for budget hostels 🤣. The hotel location is only 15~20mins subway away from the venue, and it is walking distance from COEX. There are a bunch cafes & convenience store nearby so it is pretty easy to get something. The only thing is SM’s booth opens at 8pm, so because I arrived early, I just roamed around until the booth opens. At SM’s booth, it is where you pick up your preordered merchs, sm’s merchs and most importantly draw your tickets. Also I took the chance when gathering with fellow global package goers to trade anything i needed to exchange while everyone is there.

I dont know where to put this under, but for GP, We were given a greeting card from the boys, bunch of stickers, a letter set (with colour pencil), L-holders, bunch of posters and nct127’s moodlight. For the letter set, you can decorate and write fanletter to the members and hand it to your tour guide at the time they ask you. I bought some masking tape and stickers beforehand to decorate my letter, u can prepare it ahead too and transfer it to the letter they give as the time frame is really short.

Can I go to the concert by my own?

Yes you can~ Be sure to tell your tour guide so that they dont waste time waiting. You also have to tell them whether u want to go back to hotel with them or not, as that is when they will hand you the snack boxes. If you are not certain of travelling alone in Seoul, i recommend to travel by the bus they provide, because the tour guide will bring you right until the concert entrance. For me, I wanted to join fan-events and roam around the venue more, so I decided to go on my own. (Best thing about it was when you’re in a train with fellow NCTzens they just airdrop you a lot of nct related stuffs — including the selfies they airdropped at the venue!).

— Itinerary

How tight the schedules are?

It kinda not as tight as I thought? Except for pretty early schedule on the first day, also Maybe because I got a seating ticket so I dont go to venue after the tours right away (standing fans had to queue right away after the tour)

And for me, this was my schedule —

25th 8pm: pick up merchs, ticket etc from SM booth 26th 10am - gather at hotel lobby 10:30am - depart for lunch (at Bulgogi Brothers), it was NCT127-theme and they play nct’s songs! 11:50am - depart to COEX artium - u get 1 hr to roam around there, I chose to roam around smtown museum 1pm - depart to SM C&C building in cheongdam, for special event Around 2~ish - depart back to hotel

U get free time in between and gather back at 4:30pm to depart to concert venue as concert starts at 6. As concert ends around 8:30pm, they give you about 45mins~ to get back to the bus if you wanna go back with them. 27th Bus departs at around 2 pm if i recall, as concert starts at 4pm. I went out at 10am lols (also tell your tour guide!) and bus departs around 7:30pm after the concert. 28th - check out around 12pm.

Detailed itinerary will be updated in my experience post.

The best thing about the concert period was they give you discount on some SM-related stuffs. For example, they give 30% off (?) for beverages at sm cafe for ticket/GP holders, and also discounted smtown museum admission. There were also new merchs got released that time, and some other promotions going on.

Snack box after the concert!

Merchs I collected from kfans giveaways at the venue

The best part was NCTZens spreading out the fanproject - sing Paradise during Encore; using Airdrop. NEO indeed 😎

The amount of memes & stuffs being airdropped - lol

— Budgeting

General budgeting for my trip:

Flight - around 1.6K MYR return trip with 20kg luggage & meal (AirAsia)

Hotel - i only went during my GP stay period so it was all inclusive (hotel + concert ticket) with that $949 USD

Other expenses (tmoney, food, additional merchs) - about $250 usd is enough for me for 4 days, considering I spent on buying cosmetics & merchs a lot. My own preordered merchs was separate amt too, it depends on what u do/willing to spend around that period.

— For Muslim Fans

Do they provide halal meals?

They dont provide halal meat, but you can request for vegetarian option or seafood. During lunch, I got vegetarian bibimbap set. And for the snack boxes, too bad SM provided ham/bacon in the sandwiches, which I am not confident in removing it so I decided to not eat, just eat the cookies. Also they offer late-night meals after the concert (separate pay), but I didnt opt for that one and only went to eat at nearby places.

Can I pray before the concert?

Yes~ as I mentioned earlier, there are a few hours gap before you depart to concert so you can pray at your hotel beforehand. Or if you dont mind, like I did as I went to venue early on the 2nd day, I went to pray at Olympic Park area itself, there are a lot of benches or u can walk a bit further to isolated places to pray. I just sat down at some bench and pray while sitting down.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

These are what I can think of, and as I said earlier I do have another separate post regarding my own NEO CITY: Seoul experience, and I will update under a thread. If you have any questions feel free to contact me via twitter (@sugnsook/@yudotaeil) or curiouscat.me/6sungjae. Also for neo city fancams/random pics about my trip, it will be updated eventually under the main thread where this entry is posted :) Hope it helps!

#neo city seoul #sm global package #h:blog #concert

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winglesstinkerbell · 4 years ago

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I’m checking out the module for Pharm’l Marketing & Entrep and I’m lowkey: freaking out + panicking.

I know for a fact that the pharmaceutical industry is business in nature, but I generally don’t like business/econ stuff. It’s just... not within my interest. I’m not used to thinking about what I can gain (money and ‘power’ gains, for that matter). All I want to do is care for the patients and serve the people by physical, heart-warming means. I’m used to fantasizing about how I can consume myself for others, not the other way around. I’m not saying that business people are crazy for money and power, I am actually amazed by how smart, strategic, and wise they are; but I used to hear stories of big fishes in the sea, some corporations at that, who are just as greedy as how they could be. Personally, I don’t want to measure my success for the amount of money I have or the humber of villas and buildings and brands I possess. The idea is great, but I don’t want to live the rest of my life owning a big-time company that I have to worry about everyday, thinking about how everything I have built and poured my life into may collapse just like that. I’m paranoid and not consistent, that’s why I think it’s not for me. That is just... not my purpose.

But what comes around goes around.

I survived my high school entrep class, my first year college entrep class, my another first year pharmacy administration/management class, and here is yet another marketing class dedicated for pharmacy as a business.

I know it’s necessary, and I am not antagonizing it.

But still, I hate it. I always don’t enjoy these classes no matter how much I try.

No offense to ABM peeps, I’m rooting for you all.

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beyondvapepage · 5 years ago

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 284

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 284 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

All right, we are live Welcome everybody to Hump Day hangouts today is Episode 284. Today’s the 22nd of April 2020. So we’re still going strong here, we got the whole team and we are going to jump into questions. But real quick, I wanted to say if you’re watching us live, I’m going to have a link down below the battle plan version 4.0 is getting ready to hit the streets as of next week. But if you’re watching this in time, you’re going to have a chance to get in on the pre-launch and get special access, along with some extra goodies and possibly a discount. But there’s definitely a deadline on this, you’ve got to hop on before Monday, which would be let me look at my calendar real quick. That would be the fourth. So you’ve only got a few days to hopefully you’re watching this live or you’re catching up this week. But you can find that link below and hop on that. So with that said, we’ve got a couple of other things to cover, but I want to say hi to everybody, real quick.

So let’s start at the bottom work our way up, Chris. How are you doing there?

Yeah I’m doing excellent. The weather is good. Corona is like disappearing so like things open and stuff so quite happy here

Nice. Good stuff. Marco, how about you the weather?

It looks nice. It looks maybe sunny. A little bit heavy hitter, man. This is heavy hitter weather so you when you get with the plan, this type of shit that you could get otherwise you got to go with what you got and what can I say?

Very nice. I have myself muted while I was doing some typing. Everyone watching live but just put the link for the Battle Plan for the early access list. Just click on that and get access when it comes out. We’re not gonna roll over to you next. How are you doing today?

Doing great. I’m wearing my Semantic Mastery schwag and do good man good. Good. Business is booming. Everything is moving on the right direction. Happy to be here. So good.

Cool. All right, Bradley, how you doing? How come your shirts not as worn as mine?

Mine’s got when wear been worn enough to where it’s fading so it’s all in the secret and how you wash it, man? No, it’s just because I worked so hard at my computer. It just wears hard on the desk again. Things are good, man. The weather’s nice here and well. They’re as good as they can be considered but yeah, I’m still happy and healthy. So that’s good enough for me.

Good deal. Well, good deal. I’m glad to hear that. We are going to get into it. We got a bunch of questions today. But real quick wanted to cover a few other areas. Of course, we’ve talked about the battle plan but also if you’re an agency owner and consultant, you want to get more clients, you want to grow your revenue and you want to scale your team, then you need to be checking out 2xyouragency.com if you haven’t already joined or if you’re a mastermind member, of course, you get access to that for free. If you’re mastermind member and you want to access just hit up [email protected] And we will get you in there. And then last but not least, if you haven’t yet, mgyb.co is the place to get your done for you services, whether it’s press releases, RYS drive stacks, syndication networks, link building all sorts of good stuff, as well as some great training over there. So we’ve done training with Rob, there’s a bunch of webinars, best practices, just some really good stuff over there. mg y b.co. And then last, but not least, of course, subscribe to us on YouTube because we like knowing that you’ve got access to our good information, and it makes us feel good. I’m not gonna lie, we look at the numbers. Sometimes we’re like, ooh, the subscriber counts going up. So help us out in that way. And we’ll do the same for you and keep putting out great information. I was just looking before you and I was just looking at the analytics on YouTube, and our viewers are 5050 Subscribe them and nuts. Subscribe. So you guys who are not subscribing, my question to you, and please drop it in.

A video productive comment, drop the comment and hit Why aren’t you Subscribing to our Channel, to all of that good information. That’s what keeps us going right? Without you guys supporting us Subscribing to our channel, getting notifications when the videos are coming on when we’re coming on live, then this would all be pointless. So come on, it’s half of you that have that are watching this video that have not subscribed to our channel. So please do so.

Good stuff. And I’ve got one last thing and then I’m going to turn it over, see if anyone else has some wrap-up comments. But you guys probably saw the post on Facebook or I believe I’ve had two of them already and then a couple of emails. But we released the video a short while it’s not a short video is about say a video series but a video-based training for people who are looking to start their agencies or consulting businesses. You know, I know there’s a lot of obstacles to it and a lot of us you know, get stuck some analysis paralysis or you think that the obstacles bigger than you are bigger than it is and you’re not sure

How to get around that. So we’ve just recently put that out as of this Monday. And there’s a cool add on you can get for that. Which is it just a real to the point additional video that talks, each of us talking about what our single biggest mistake is, as we’ve done consulting, or agencies, and what we would do differently in order to avoid that, because that’s some real blood, sweat and tears material right there. So I’ll put the link down below. If you’re that’s something you’re wanting to do. Maybe right now with the way the world is, and you’re looking at, hey, I’d like to start my agency, or I’d like to be doing some consulting on the side to be generating some revenue. I highly suggest checking this out today, and seeing how you can do that and basically shortcut you know, save yourself some time, money and potentially some pain points there.

Great, I guess Other than that, anything else before we dive into questions?

Oh, I think that’s just it’s just real quick on my end, guys, every time we upload the battle plan, it’s a big ripple. And the reason why it’s because the stuff there isn’t a better plan will allow you to get the fastest results as fast as possible with the least amount of steps and work in mobile, you’re on your end. That’s the main goal of the battle plan. So go ahead and subscribe for the early notifications because we’re going to be launching really, really soon and every time we do so we get a lot of people in you know, in the queue, and it’s going to be pretty inexpensive as well, because we’re going to give you the help that you guys need to succeed with your, with your projects right now. So go ahead and get on the pre launch list so we can get you a lot of good stuff a lot of bonuses. Yeah, real quick about that the battle plan, this version, the for 2020, or whatever we’re calling it, v3 or whatever.

It’s different from our previous additions in that it’s more streamlined because of how we’ve kind of developed the SEO shield and the components and such. So it’s a lot easier to implement our methods, no matter what type of project you’re doing local, regional, national global affiliate Econ, it doesn’t matter what it is, it applies to this the same way to each and every type of business now, or online project. And so our battle plan is definitely a lot more streamlined now. Also, we, you’ll see when you get it, but we’ve also, you know, really made it a lot more simplified to where we’re pointing, you know, to additional training when needed, but mainly to mg y b for done for you services and or two other training videos that are just free on our YouTube channel. So there are no links pointing to, you know, external places now that we don’t recommend anymore. It’s been completely updated. And I think it’s a lot. It’s a simplified version of it, but it’s every bit as effective if not more effective now than ever before.

So with that said, we can get into questions, guys. Let’s do it. By the way, we’re almost at a million or 40,000 views away from a million views on our YouTube channel, which is good. We get like some balloons dropping. I don’t know but it’s pretty cool I was looking at lifetime analytics for YouTube today and we’re 40,000 views away from a million views so I thought that was pretty cool.

all right here we go You guys should be seeing my screen correct

yeah all right we’re gonna start with Mohammed’s from seven days ago because I know I didn’t get a chance to answer this we’ll start right there

Would An SEO Power Shield Be Better For A YouTube Channel?

so Mohammed asked Hey guys I was about to buy a multi-tiered syndication network for YouTube channel with no money site or anything just the channel but I saw your SEO shield sale with a she’ll be better for a YouTube channel I’m leaning towards yes because of the entity building. You know, that’s a really good question Mohammed as part of the reason I wanted to answer this because I don’t know I’ve never ordered an SEO shield specifically just for YouTube channel. I’ve never tested that. Um, you know, the multi-tiered syndication networks work great for sending for YouTube, SEO because it helps to provide all you know all the really good stuff.

knows that it needs for a new video, especially when they’re seasoned, that the networks and the multi-tiered syndication network are seasoned. And they, you know, aged a little bit and have relevant content on them. And then obviously, if you link below to them. They do a lot most of the heavy lifting as far as SEO is concerned for YouTube stuff, but I’ve never done an actual SEO show specifically to YouTube channel. And here’s why. Because usually, the YouTube channel is part of an overall entity, right? So it’s just part so the YouTube channel gets included in the SEO build-out because it’s part of an overall entity, but I’ve never actually just had us SEO shield built specifically to a YouTube channel. So I haven’t tested that, to be honest with you. I’m curious as to what Marco thinks about whether that would work or not or what his opinion of it is, but I would say try it. I know the multi-tiered syndication networks work but I can only assume that the SEO shields would work but I haven’t tested and I just have to be really clear about that. But it’s a good question. What do you think, Marco?

It’s not something that I’ve tested but it shouldn’t be any different than anything else that we build. And let’s call it an entity around but it’s actually an entity validator that you’re looking for is to validate your channel. So let’s say that instead of your blogging point or your point of syndication being your money site or a free one of the free blogs, right the Tumblr the blog, or wherever it is that you choose to blog from or in this case, Vila vlog from YouTube. building up your entity shouldn’t be any different. Now, the whole thing around this is how do you approach it because when you’re building schema, you can’t build it on the YouTube channel. The YouTube channel is it’s pre-done for you Everything is done that you could add your other profiles and still interlink everything through the syndication network.

In your second-tier syndication and build it up that way, but there would have to be a focal point somewhere else for that entity. And they did this with an old page though, right? Yeah, I mean, you could build the @ID page but the ad this is this is where we get we go to Okay, so where’s the ad Id gone? This is the YouTube channel then going to be also the @ID and how to how do we get the schema worked into the YouTube channel.

I mean, this is a test in the making. One of the things, why we went with the heavy hitter club, is because we want to test these types of things. So this is a great test in the making. And as a matter of fact, I already wrote it down on my notes, of things to do for the heavy hitter club is to start a YouTube video. See how we can work the entity around it. I mean, there’s no reason why it can’t be an s3 and why we can’t tag it. From there, right use the @ID, and now I have to kind of figure out, and I’m not going to do this in a free forum, figure out how I’m going to build this entity around this YouTube channel.

When it’s something that Google controls, and I can’t get into the schema, maybe we can force schema. Somehow I don’t know. It involves a whole lot of things. But Mohammed, definitely heavy hitter. If you’re not in there already, you should be. And, you know, it’s a test in the making, and I’ll make sure to set it up. Yeah, and think about that, just and I’m kind of thinking through this too, but because I think it’d be a great test to use YouTube channel as the primary entity asset, and then try to build that out, see what we could do with it. But one thing I know that you could do with it with the ID page, for example, is like, you know, YouTube silos and you embed the playlist that could really help to for, you know, pushing power into the YouTube channel through the ID page to so there, that would be

A really good test. That’s something that’s the heavy hitter club was, was made for, you know, so that’s awesome. Mohammed will, will, hopefully, you’re going to join them the heavy hitter club anyways, and then you can see that test when it gets set up. But I think that that’s certainly worth a good test. And if you happen to do so, Mohammed, let us know how it goes. Okay. Aaron’s up, he says, I’m really fuzzy about using Google Maps, does it help to create a mind maps with points of interest in the area? Then creating lines to my business location to indicate travel distance in a relationship with that location? Yes, that works really well. Now if you have a storefront business, right, so a business where customers come to your place of business, then yes, you would do it that way where essentially you would have you know, your address because it’s not hidden, right? And then you would go from points of interest that and then create driving directions to your location. Alternatively, if it’s a service area business, you can do it the other way around, which is to create driving directions from your business to points of interest right within the service area. However, if you’re not publishing your address, which if it’s a service area business, in 95% of the cases there, you’re not supposed to have your physical location published. For service area businesses, then you could just use something like a city center or as like from, you know, city center from where your business is located. and use that as kind of the central point with the driving directions going out to the points of interest.

The idea here is also to create geo posts on your main money site too, as well. So blog posts that talk about those areas where those points of interest are, right. So you create basically optimized posts, blog posts that are optimized for that particular location, and publish them and you can actually create location-based silos on your site. You can do it that way too. By the way, these can be like hidden blog posts, in other words, they don’t have to be public. They’re just used for SEO purposes.

And it does work well because we’ve done that in the past, or I’ve done that in the past for Google Maps listings that had been pigeon filtered, which means Google, Google Maps was kind of hiding them, even though there wasn’t really a penalty. They were being hidden because they were considered too closely related to a similar business. And Google for whatever reason chose another business and would kind of ghost a GMB listing. It’s called it was a pigeon filter. And one of the ways to get around that was doing similar to what you’re asking about Aaron, which is doing these geo posts, and that that works fairly well. So that’s a good question. Anybody want to comment on that on my map as a standalone product in another, I’m not sure how much power you can get from that I would recommend starting out with a drive second G site and the mind map that we build out and either building out the mind map or building out additional mind maps, which you would then embed on the money site, then you could carry all of that relevance through since everything is tied together. But as a standalone, we had a similar question in the mastermind, by the way. And my answer is going to stand firm that I don’t recommend that as a standalone, you could push just so much more power and relevance when you relate everything inside a drive second, and the companion G site, and then inner pages on the G site that target the inner pages on the money site.

Yeah, and to be clear, Aaron, when I say, create blog posts, what you do is you would create a blog post about the one particular area that like for example, if you’ve got, you know if you’ve got five areas that you service, or that you want to target specifically, each blog post would have its own mind map with driving directions from your point of or from the point of interest back to your business, if you’re a storefront business or vice versa, if it’s a service area business, that so that you would have literally like five different mind maps in this example, right? So each one would have its own. And then you can have one mind map that has kind of all of them together. But what I’m saying is for the individual posts that are optimized for one particular location, you would just have that mind map on there. And then like Marco said, but you’re better off also including those mirroring those onto the G site. Because again, you can mirror the blog posts onto the G site, embed the blog post in there along with the mind map, and then those become link building targets. So but yes, you can do that kind of stuff and it does add relevancy.

Is It Okay To Only Use Service Types Keywords In The Main Menu Of A Website?

Mike’s up mic says, Hey, guys, I want to create a strong main menu for a local service site. I have seven top main keywords, is it okay to use only keywords for the main menu so you’re talking about like the main navigation menu instead of creating one drop-down or link of services that contain all of the keywords (service types), I want to create the main menu using only service types of keywords, other links like about us, and come tag us can be in the footer. What do you think about that? Thanks, honestly, it really makes no difference in that I’m, that I’m aware of.

There’s, you know, drop-down menus aren’t the best thing in the world for SEO. But they’re also they’re logical for user experience because it would make sense to not clutter up your, if you got seven different services, and you’re going to try to push them all into the main navigation bar, but then you don’t have things like contact and about, you know, contact us and about us pages and stuff like that up there, and maybe a link to your blog, blog index page and that kind of stuff. First of all, the menu could get rather busy that way, you know what I mean? Like rather crowded. So, you know, and also, I think it’s important to kind of keep in what people are used to, which would be having those other links at the top of the navigation menu instead of having to go search for them. Not that many, many people ever go to the About Us page or whatever, but you know, I would prefer to keep that. Like what people are typically used to and just use a drop-down? That’s what I would suggest. But I don’t, you know, I haven’t tested to see if one way is better than another. So I couldn’t tell you I just like I said, for user experience, I think your menu could be rather cluttered that way. And it could also cause people to search for links with that they’re looking for, you know if they were looking to contact us about us, that kind of stuff. So my advice would be to not worry about that. I don’t see where the SEO benefit would come from, from trying to structure it the way that you are. But honestly, I don’t have any definitive answer to that. Does anybody else? No, and I don’t see it right. I don’t see what the difference would be. And this would be kind of difficult to test because you would need two sites, two sites that are the same, targeting the same thing, one with this type of menu that he’s proposing and one with a traditional menu and see which one performs the best. Now that that kind of testing can get can take a whole lot of time and then it turns out that

It makes no difference you just wasted all that time. It’s not a waste. It’s a test. And it’s a perfectly good test. But don’t do that until you have time to do the testing right now go with what’s working. And by, you know, traditional menus work just fine. You rank just fine. It doesn’t matter. Even the, you know, some people have questions about the domains, right, whether using a traditional TLD or a nontraditional to do one of that vanity TLD. And you can rank them both just the same. You can rank anything, just about the same. It’s all about power. It’s all about the art, right? activity, relevance, trust, and authority. That’s what it’s all about. Everything else becomes obsolete doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make a difference when you pushing enough art into whatever it is that you’re doing.

What Are The First Steps In Powering Up An SEO Power Shield?

Next question I’m planning on ordering. Yeah, okay, sorry. I just want to make sure I didn’t skip on planning on ordering the SEO power shield. But after it’s delivered, what are the first next steps to powering up content for Google? Links etc. Yeah, link building and embed, embed, and or link building packages from MGYB is one of the best next steps. Also, if you once you get the branded stack mirroring your and I know there’s a question further down the page today about explaining what theme mirroring is, but themed mirroring your money site into the G stack, the drive stack, as well as the G site, that’s really, really powerful too. Now, I’ll be 100% you know, clear, most of the mirroring that I do is on the G site. And I don’t typically always mirror the drive stack like add additional folders that are so for example, you know, if you’ve got three silos on your, on your, your money site, you would clone each one of your primary drive stack folders and then create them as subfolders one mirrored for each silo, right. And then from there, you would take all the files in the folder are all the files within the silo folder now and optimize them for your particular keywords.

For that silo, and then up and then all the links from inside that would link over to the corresponding pages and posts within that silo on your money site as well as what you Mir on to the G site, which is the same structure. Now, again, I don’t always do that and the drive stack, because what I found for a lot of, you know, all I do is local. And so for most local projects, I’m able to mirror onto the G site and accomplish without having to drive do all the additional work in the drive stack. But in some cases, it does require it because I need the additional push. And so as I always talk about and we usually recommend, don’t, you know, try to get the best results with the least amount of effort, right? So what I do is I mirror my money site onto the G site, and I do that very thoroughly. And then I use my G site as my link, building target embeds and link building targets and just smash the shit out of it with links and embeds all the time. And if I need an additional push, then I will mirror into the drive stack and do it but right now it’s still open manual process on the mirroring work. We’re so close guys to be able to offer the drive stack expansion service, inside MGB, but it’s not available just yet. So that’s why I kind of reserve that for only when absolutely needed, because of the manual component. But, you know, again, once that once we have the ability to do that in mg y, b, there’s no reason why I wouldn’t smear the shit anyway, you know what I’m saying? So, uh, so yeah, I think first of all theme mirroring is, the first thing you can do is to start building links to your drive stack and your G site. When you get it back. That’s hands down. One of the first things I always do, but then while the links are being built, you can start to mirror you know, set up the theme mirroring on the site, as well as Dr. Stack if needed. And then once that’s done, now you have additional link building targets for your next batch of links. Does that make sense? Comments?

Nobody, okay.

How Would You Create An Ad Content As A Replacement For A Discontinued Affiliate Program?

Cows up next to break the SEO questioning for a second. I have a sales copy. Question for one of you, this is probably going to be one for Adam. And or Hernan, then if you had the opportunity to place an ad right on the sales page of one of your competitors with no limitations to what it could say or how long it could be, what would you say? I’m an affiliate marketer and I plan on creating my own digital products similar to a competitor. Fortunately, I’m already ranking in spots 1234 some of my competitor’s product keywords via review blog posts, they dropped their affiliate program, so I’m planning to just create my own product and cross-promote on those review posts. How should I word my own sales message to convert as many of my competitor’s prospects as possible? Thanks, guys.

That’s a really good question. I would add that one over to Hernan and Adam so Hernan. Yeah, so I’m ruining the question. Sorry. It’s okay. I actually don’t get the technical back part of this. Like, I mean, you did draw a diagram or can you guys explain Okay, yeah. So he’s got affiliate review pages ranked for in positions one, two, and three.

For a product that he was promoting as an affiliate, yeah, and that product developer has now discontinued their affiliate program. So he’s still ranking with those review posts for that product. And since it’s his pages, he wants to now link to a similar product that he can get an affiliate commission from that review. So how would you word your How would you push people from that page over to the page that you want them to buy a similar product from? Without? You know, how would you do that? That’s what he’s saying. What would you How would you write it? What would the copy say?

Right? So there’s a couple of options here. And maybe you want to test this, but the first thing that comes to mind is to just be honest, we have had that happen in our in the past. In our end, you know, we were offering a service or a product as an affiliate, and we were using that product, and then for some reason, the service stop working, and then we just went ahead and said hey, This product is no longer available. But if you’re looking to achieve the same results, go here and check this out, right? So as long as the product delivers the same result or as long as the frame minutes the same, don’t be afraid to be upfront and honest, because, at the end of the day, people are searching for a solution, right? So if the secondary product that you’re now offering, whether it’s yours or an affiliate is it’s providing that solution, then it’s just a matter of, you know, reframing it from a perspective of, hey, this offer and unfortunately, this offer is discontinued. But we have found an alternative to this, which is this one, right? So if you want to get x with a why, if you want to, you know, if you’re looking to get x results, then click here, and then you’re sending them to the next. What would you say in this case?

Yeah, I think it’s an interesting one because we’re dealing though too, with the organic side. So like if you really did a heavy overhaul like there’s, you know, it might change what you’re appearing for. So I might keep the contents long as it makes sense in right, like a more alternative to the type of introduction, and be like, Hey, are you looking to learn about this product? Here’s a lot of information about it. But this might be a better alternative for you and do that. I mean, I realize that would be the lead-in, and then maybe you could keep the content. Yeah, that I was gonna say one of two things. While you guys were talking, I was thinking about it. One is a purely SEO tactic, which probably isn’t allowed or is probably not recommended. Marco would know the answer to this but do like a three-second meta refresh so that when somebody lands on the page with your competitors, your product or that you used to after about three seconds, it redirects to a new page through a meta refresh that talks all about your product or service that could be considered cloaking. Marco, is that yes or no?

That’s in that gray area. Yeah.

That’s right. So I saw you that the user is going with the intent of seeing one but you’re serving the user something else. But then again, he put a pause on that meta refresh, right? You put a timer five seconds so that the user knows you’re going somewhere else, man. Yeah, you might overcome that. I don’t know. I don’t know what legalities on that. Yeah, I neither did I, but it doesn’t sound cool. Well, they also have layover plugins that are, you know, again, it’s kind of blackhat stuff. I mean, we don’t typically care about that stuff. But I’m just letting you know that they have layover plugins where you could literally display one page with the underlying page still like it’s still there. But the viewer sees a different page. And again, some of these things aren’t 100% kosher, but I know people do it and get away with it all the time. So the other option is like what Adam just said, I like what he said, which is you could add just a new, you know, opening or section to the top of the page that talks about

Hey, I know you came here to find out about, you know, XYZ product, which there’s a thorough, you know, review of it below, however, and then do what Adam or excuse me, Hernan said, which is kind of explain why the new product, which is one that either you develop or another affiliate product and other products that you’re promoting is comparable and you know, similarly good and why you recommend that now over the other one or something like that, if that makes sense, because then as Adam said, You’re keeping the content that was ranking anyways. And all you’re doing now is adding a new section up above that, which shouldn’t affect the ranking of that existing page much at all. Because if it’s already ranking really, really well, you’re just updating that page really, without it as long as you’re not changing that page considerably. As the structure of the page, I think you’d be fine. So those are a couple. Does anybody else now? Yeah, I just wanted to say that from an SEO perspective, you can still use that page, and you know how you have this long-form articles that they rank for a bunch of keywords, and you know, 2000 3000 4000 word articles. And they are living breathing things right like that you can add content to them, you can like, on some cases, you might visit the same article like a year later, and it will have like, I don’t know, like pieces of content added to it and whatnot and then you know, boxes that will take you to different places, because of course, we’re in the digital marketing space, everything changes so fast. So don’t be afraid to do those slight changes to the content, and then follow what Adam just said is that, you know, just add a box on top and say, hey, these programs would allow you to achieve the same results that you were looking for. Click here, you know, yeah, I like this, just so people, I mean, just so that they’re 100% informed. an overlay is another word for cloaking.

Cloaking will get you in trouble just because others get away with it doesn’t mean that you can get by a manual if you get a manual review, and you’re cloaking. That’s it, you lose everything it goes by. So just so everyone’s aware, and we’re clear on what you’re doing by overlaying or by cloaking anything. Yep. And I’m, I thought I was clear about that, but thank you for reiterating it. So, before we get people contacting us saying, You told me to do it, because that’s not what I said, I said, You know, I know that it can be done, whether you choose to do it or not, it’s up to you. And it’s probably not a good idea. But I know, I know a lot of people that do that kind of stuff. You know, in the past, I’ve done local lead gen sites that way where I’d rank my own site and then use an overlay plugin to show you know, whoever was buying the leads from me show their site on top of mine. Mine was the one ranking, not theirs, but you know, those, those were quite popular A few years ago, those type of plugins, but, you know, fortunately, I don’t have to, I don’t really worry about that anymore.

Is There A Difference In Results With Unique And Spun Content In The Drive Stack?

The next question was from Olaf. He says, Is there a difference in results with unique spun content in the drive stacks compared to just the same text with different titles and keywords? It’s a good question. Marco. Sorry about that I was muted. No, we haven’t seen any difference. That’s why we just go with anything we can grab because it doesn’t matter. Perfect. Do you see Seo? Hey, guys, when the shield is in place, generally speaking, how does it take? How long does it take to see effects? Do I simply throw links at it afterward? And can I update the NAP when I moved to another office in a different part of the city? Yeah, uh, how long does it take to start showing effects? It varies. It varies, like, at least my experience is it varies rather wildly between projects. Sometimes I’ll see results like in a matter of days. Other times, it will be weeks and it really just depends. I honestly don’t know what causes that maybe Marco can shed some light on that, but I know that I always see results. But it’s a matter of sometimes, you know, sometimes it’s quick. Other times, more often than not for me the drive stacks take several weeks before I see considerable movement from them. But as far as do, we already talked about the best practice which is next links mirroring your G site mirroring your drive stack, link building, and embeds those are hands down the best things that you can do.

Last question and I’ll answer and I’ll let Marco chime in is can I update the nav when I moved to another office in different parts of the city? Yes, you can. Just keep in mind that there’s going to be a lot of, you know, when you make that move, you have an existing G site and this is outside of the drive stack. Yes, you can go in and update your nav on all your drives, files, right all the files within your drive stack as well as on the G site. Make sure you’re updating your structured data on your money site, all that kind of stuff. So it’s all congruent. But you also remember you got to clean up any citations and part of the remember when you’re pushing content on the web to like through syndication and everything else if you have any PII mentioned in those, those now are all going to be causing NAP issues when you do make that change. So just be aware of that. If you are if you’re anticipating a move for the business location, then consider that when you’re publishing content and things like that to not include any PII, I’m not saying that you do. But I’m just for other people. Like for example, if you have an NAP and press releases and such, they get published out on the web hundreds at a time. And now all of a sudden, you change when now you’ve got those press releases to count as citations, because name address and phone numbers published and you can’t go update those, right, you can update your organization perhaps, and any new press releases will be show the new nav, but the old ones are still going to be out there. And those are things that you can’t update once they’re published. So you just got to really keep that in mind when you’re doing it. But yes, you can go in and just change your nav within the drive stack the G site and everywhere else that you have editor access. Do you want to comment on that, Marco?

Yeah, on the first part of that how long it takes, again, it depends. different niches react differently. And even within the same niche, I’ve seen fluctuations where, you know, a week, two weeks, and then other times, it’s like, four or five weeks out. And it’s still nothing happening. And it doesn’t happen until you run some press releases and some link building when you start doing some other stuff to power up. It’s an independent, it depends on game and Google. I don’t know how else to say Google’s broken. And it’s so crazily broken, that would that works one day, may work differently The next day, or you’ll see that it doesn’t work. I was just doing testing that this is what this is where this is coming from. And I ran the tests about six weeks ago. And I got one set of results and I just ran it again today because a mastermind member asked a question about it, and I got different data.

And so if the data isn’t consistent, if Google isn’t consistent about the results that it produces, then what are we to rely on to say, yeah, it takes this long, or it’ll take maybe longer. And in this niche, it’ll take this on, we can’t do that, because we’re not in control of whatever it is that Google is doing in their servers, right and that relational database, and how it relates your entity to the rest of the entities in that relational database to give the user the best results. All we can do is like submit our stuff for indexing, build links, press releases, syndicate the content, power up our tier-one property, look for other link building ready called link building websites, things that are powerful websites with trust and authority for those things so so that we could power up our project the best way possible.

Other than that, I mean, there’s no way to say yeah, you can get it number one tomorrow. If that were the case, I’d be a billionaire right now. If I could predict with any certainty that I could rank within a day, and anyone who’s saying that I’d call them out on it now I’m one of those people. You got to show me You say you can rank the 24 hours for a real keyword now, no bullshit, no longtail 10-word longtail that anybody could rank for my daughter could probably rank for it right now. I’m not talking about that. I’m just saying it’s again, it goes back to it depends. And that’s where I’m gonna stay on that.

sounds like that was a dig against your daughter man. She’s 18 months but oh god.

Austin’s up. He says I just wanted to say what I’ve seen so far with the SEO shield being built for me is literally mind-blowing. Guys. That’s one for the testimony folder. I’ve built a lot of this stuff by hand before and know the time involved signing up for a heavy hitter, heavy hitter club paid club today should be enrolled by the time this goes live. Thanks again, to all of you. Thanks, Austin. Dawn, that was a great testimonial. Thank you very much for that we did not pay him for that, I swear. So, but thanks, Don. And we appreciate that. And yeah, man, if you’ve been watching, and I know you have because you’ve been participating a lot, and I know you’re in the real estate business as well.

It works incredibly well for at least the land business, I can imagine it works just as well for the house business, although that is certainly more competitive than the land business. But it will give you an edge over your competitors. Just remember what we talked about several times today already about how to power that thing up. Don’t forget to try to mirror at very minimum mirror G site to match what your money site structure is and then embed your G site or excuse me your money website pages into your G site. And when you’re ready, come join the mastermind because I’ve been doing training on how I do a lot of really cool things with the G site including tag silo. Well, that’s money site stuff, but really cool stuff. And I’m so close now to have in my next kind of really big project live that I’m sharing with the silo structure, build out the in how I’ve seen mirrored everything in the mastermind and my next mastermind webinars next Thursday, and the site should be live by then it’s taken me almost six weeks to build it. But anyway, you should definitely come to check it out. It will help your business I promise.

Is There An Update To Twitter’s RSS?

Next are questions from BB who always post multiple questions every week. I keep telling you not to post multiple questions. They’re getting shorter though. So you are making progress maybe. But this time, it’s only three short questions as opposed to 18 really long ones. Anyways, I’m just giving you a hard time man. He says one is there an update to the Twitter RSS Twitter widgets is a thing of the past. So what do I do? I honestly haven’t touched Twitter since the last time I developed content about Twitter, which was probably four years ago, so I can’t answer that anybody. I haven’t gotten into look at the Twitter RSS feed lately, so I can’t say I mean either. I just don’t I just hate Twitter to be honest with you. I know it’s got some SEO benefits. There’s no question it does. I just I’ve never, ever gave a damn about good Ah, you know how they have their life platform called Periscope. You know, for periscope is the light platform Twitter. And there’s a lot of people in periscope apparently. Yeah, and I didn’t know and I started going live with restroom because restroom.io will allow you to go live on Facebook, YouTube, and whatnot. And then I started adding networks because you know, why not? They’re free. And they have absolutely zero viewers on like twitch for instance, but periscope I got like 50 viewers are a number. I don’t know if they’re bots if you know is people that are real but I got some use so there might be some benefit over there. Yeah. Oh I’m not saying you can’t squeeze benefit from Twitter I know you can I just never had a desire to do anything with Twitter. It’s been years since I’ve even logged into Twitter I think so. I think he can he can always go third party right that this there’s something called up RSS app. And you can get a Twitter feed right from there. I just use that about a month ago.

Cool. Man, you know what? Oh, I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about updates.

Adam, what are you talking about? Well, because we’re going to be updating something here soon that RSS I might want to play with this as part of the update for the new. Oh, yeah. There’s Wow. We could maybe think a little bit. A little bit maybe. Yeah. Syndication Academy.

What we’re going to be completely updating it and relaunching that more news to come but this Thank you, Marco, for pointing this out. This is something I would definitely dig into for when I start the development of the syndication Academy 2020 or version, whatever we’re gonna call it. So that’s coming guys can’t say when but it’s coming

Can You Submit English-Based RSS Directories As Non-English RSS Channels?

The next question from BB. Can I submit to English based RSS directories and non-English RSS channels? Yes. Yeah. Because honestly, I don’t know that RSS directories that people actually go to RSS directories but there’s a little bit of SEO benefit. They used to be more powerful than they probably are now. But yeah, and by the way, if you’re going to submit to RSS guys unless you have a tool that does it, just go to Fiverr and, and go get RSS to submit gigs and literally just go to Fiverr and stuff for RSS submit and pay somebody five bucks plus the $2 charge there’s like seven bucks an hour or whatever the hell it is to have them do it for you like I will submit your RSS feed to over 100 RSS feed directories for five bucks guys so honestly just pay somebody five bucks give them your RSS feeds, in fact, you can you know I would recommend even creating a super feed or a spliced feed using something like Damon Nelson’s RSS masher and then submit that feed and you know, just pay five to whatever it is seven bucks I think with the service fee now and have somebody else do it because it’s tedious as hell to submit them on your own and just you know, let somebody else do it.

RankerX VS FCS Networker In Terms Of Linking Campaign

Okay, last question. I think RankerX versus FCS networker which is better for linking campaign understand that GSA is good for third-tier and up an FCS is good for second-tier whereas RankerX comes into play. I couldn’t answer that BB. If you want to ask a question about link building tools, I would post that in a free Facebook group and you know, and you know, ask daddy are late builder kills he’ll come in and comment on that and he’s the one that can give you the best advice on that I don’t run link building tools I haven’t for at least five or six years. And I don’t ever plan on running them again. So I can’t answer that. Anybody else has any recommendations?

Yeah, Dadea runs rank correct. Okay. I that that’s I believe that says go-to tool. I don’t think he uses FCS.

No, he is using FCS because it became cost-prohibitive. They kept raising the rates on it, everything else so, and then he uses GSA but I what I say is, if you’re building contextual on at tier two, it would be tier two. Why not build contextual to the contextual?

Yeah, agreed. So yeah, again, just asking the free Facebook group, you know, the audio will can and can help you out with that.

What Is Theme Mirroring?

Next question was, can you explain what is the mirroring? I think we did that. I’ll kind of run through it again briefly. But whatever your primary money site is that the architecture, right, so the structure of the site, hopefully using silos, because they work, what you do is on the G site, you mirror that same structure. So in other words, you create a one to one ratio of pages on the G site for pages on your money site, right? You don’t necessarily have to do that for all the posts. Because if you’re content marketing as part of your SEO strategy, so you’re blogging, right, that you don’t necessarily have to create a new page every time you create a blog post. There are ways around that I talked about that again in the mastermind very specifically how to utilize the G site and benefit from all the blog posts without having to create a separate G site page for each blog post. Okay, so I do talk about that in a mastermind can’t talk about that right here but on a conceptual level you for all of like your top of silo pages, for example. So your product, main product pages or service pages, or whatever you create pages on the G site that so that mirror, same keyword, you know, optimized for the same keyword, everything else, then you can add content to the page. But all I do is just iframe in my money site pages. So remember, it’s a one to one ratio, right? One G site page for every page on the money site. For that, I’m trying that has SEO value, right. And so I just iframe that into there.

Now, there are some other things that you can add into those G site pages too. For example, if you mirror the same structure in your drive stack, which means when you buy a drive stack from us right now, it’s for brand plus primary keyword Association. It’s about building the entity. Once you get that you can clone that main folder, which clones everything within the folder, and then make that a subfolder of the main folder and then optimize all of the files within that subfolder now title that subfolder for one of your silos, right? So it’s optimized for the same keyword. It’s mirrored just like your site structure, then all the files within that particular folder can be edited and optimized for the same keyword set is that silo with all of the internal links, the links from the G site or the drive stack files, pointing back to your money site, the same corresponding silo pages and posts within that silo on the money site, and also to your G site that has now been mirrored. Does that make sense? That’s when you can also embed your folders. So like again, top of the silo page on your money site has a mirrored top of the silo page on your G site. And now if you have a subfolder from your main drive stack that has been optimized for that particular silo, now you can actually embed that folder and the files in that G site page that make sense. So that becomes your link building target, the G stack or the G site, the drive stack, and the files and folders and files. All of those become your link building targets, not your money site because your money site is being all the links are being built to your money site through the G site and the drive stack.

So all you do is you hammer away at the G site and their drive stack files and folders. And you push all that relevance through to your money site without an actual physical HTML link pointing directly to your money site. That makes sense. So that’s, that’s the mirroring on a conceptual level. Again, we get into the nitty-gritty of this stuff, and either our bias Academy reloaded the mastermind or now even have a heavy hitter club. Is that correct? Marco?

Yep. Anything you want to add to that? No, I thought that was perfect. It’s just a copy. That’s all it is. you’re copying open, you’re copying over. That’s what’s called a mirror. When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see the same thing?

That’s it. And you know, credit for that theme mirroring, you know, I guess, the term was from network empire for many years ago. And it’s great. It just works really, really well. And I love the fact that we like Marco has caused it. We’re in the belly of the beast. And that’s what we’re doing like with we’re using Google to insulate the money site and then we push ever thing into the Google properties which funnels down to the money site without ever physically touching if that’s that makes sense. And it works incredibly well. So

Alright, hopefully, that helped. Karen says no question. Just cheers for doing great work. Thank you, Karen.

And let’s see next. Show shut up and take my money.

We need more people like you, buddy.

Mohammed says, Hey guys ended up buying the show to report the results as they come in. Yeah, that’d be awesome. Mohammed, let us know, please. And I still think that would be a good test for the heavy-hitter club. Since Marco wrote it down. It probably gets done.

Alright Bibi’s back for another set of questions this time there’s five

Would It Okay To Use A Simplified Slug To Avoid Keyword Stuffing In Breadcrumb Links?

All right, so BB I’ll let you slide with three earlier I’m not going to answer all five right now. Okay, I will answer one, and if there’s any time left I’ll come back.

Let’s say there is a silo domain.com/dogs/dog-food. Okay, is it okay to make the slug of dog food post as simplified form domain slash dog food instead of the subdirectory. Yes, yes, that’s the difference between a virtual silo and a physical silo. Right. And, again, if you just go to our YouTube channel and search for silo structure, just go to semantic map or youtube.com slash semantic mastery then use the channel search feature and search for silo structure. That’s it. The videos that come up the first two videos are simple silo structure and complex silo structure. If you watch those, those are showing how to set up what’s called a physical silo which is showing the silo structure in the permalink. Right, so it’s this category slash post name permalink structure, that that’s how I used to do it because I used to like to see it in the URL, but we test it I haven’t tested it recently on me personally, I haven’t tested it recently, but years ago, I tested it but the when you’re just using the post name permalink structure, as long as your internal linking is done correctly within your silos, so your internal silo linking is done correctly.

It makes no difference. At least it didn’t years ago. And I’m pretty sure Marco will confirm this, that it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever, a virtual silo versus a physical silo, all the internal linking everything, the hierarchy of your categories, and your subcategories and posts. If it’s complex, all of that stays the same. The only difference is what is displayed in the URL. And so there is no difference in SEO, whether you use virtual silo or physical silo. And in fact, I recommend using virtual silo now, because it makes the URLs less optimized, right. So it’s less likely to trigger an over-optimization penalty for a URL that is hyper optimized with too many occurrences of the same keyword, which is what basically you were asking for here. So yes, virtual silo. Post name. permalink structure is absolutely effective for silos. Does anybody want to comment? Ah, that was perfect. Okay, beautiful. Moving on.

What Should You With A GMB That Is Sharing A Map Pin With Other GMB?

Mohammed says, Hey, guys, one of my real estate clients is moving to a new city and enlisted me to create the GMB in his old city. His realtor GMB shared a map pin with the brokerage I believe this may have affected our GMB impressions. But I don’t have proof What should I do with the new one? Do I keep the address shared with his new brokerage or persuade him to move the pin to a new location? That’s a good question. Now, I haven’t done Local SEO For realtors in probably four years.

But when I did that was, that was pretty common practice. I’m pretty sure it still is where a brokerage has can have, you know, the brokerage itself has its own GMB listing but then individual realtors from within that brokerage can also create their own listing map listing.

It’s okay, you can do that Mohammed remembers as long as the name, address, phone number, and URL. So we talked about NAP but URL was part of that right? So there are four data points, their name, address, phone number URL, as long as three of those four data points are you

Make then you can get away with it. So in this case, the business name would be unique, the address would be the same, but then the phone number would be unique and the URL would be unique as long as you can achieve that so the address would be the same, but the business names are different. So for example, let’s just use REMAX That’s the last time I did a local SEO for realtors, It was for a REMAX brokerage so REMAX Warrington okay would be the name of the primary brokerage but then each individual realtor would have their name, slap, comma, REMAX, right or something like that. That’s how you would do it that the business names are different, the addresses the same phone numbers were different. And the URLs were different because each one of the realtors had their own, you know, landing page or website or whatever. And that makes no problem. It’s whenever you start to mix up two or more data points, that that causes ambiguous NAP issues. So hopefully that makes sense. Does anybody want to comment on that? Okay

Do You White Label Your Services?

Nigel is up. Nigel, It’s been a while somebody says hey guys thanks for all your help appreciate all you do or appreciate you all excuse me do you currently white label at all? If not, is there an opportunity to white label with you guys my problem is that I have been offered a bunch of services to white label but none that I really know or trust and I’m naturally skeptical and there is the ethics issue specifically I’m getting requests for services but I need fulfillment to be a bit more packaged up and customized for different niches not sure that is making sense but I will say this and I’m certainly willing to do all the work to write up all the copy for such an endeavor like for example creating done for you bundle descriptions based on what can work for the average customer when people trust you. You want to give them something you believe in but it has to be bundled so you don’t confuse it yeah which I completely agree with you Nigel which is why we created the SEO shield, which is just a bundle of all the different components because we’ve been touting use all these different components for years really, and it was you know,

We kept getting the same questions and people would buy one service but not the other. And then they would say, well, well, it doesn’t work. And it’s whenever we looked into it, it’s because they didn’t put all the components together as we tell. So that’s why we sell the SEO shield now as a bundled service because it just makes it so much easier for everybody. So I know what Marco is going to say I’m gonna say it for him first and then let him say the SEO shield works no matter what industry you’re in what business vertical what type of project is local, regional, national, global affiliate e-commerce doesn’t matter. Right. So yes, you can white-label because basically, you can just create your own landing page with services or products, but product bundles are whatever that you want to call it, that you can sell to your clients, customers, whatever. And then we can fulfill and you can, you know, bundle them or title them and put descriptions in any way you want. But the SEO shield will work doesn’t matter what kind of project it is. So it’s just about how you package it right? That’s so that’s what you’re asking. Will we do it?

Well, that’s what MGYBis we don’t put branding on any of the delivered services. So you can absolutely white-label, you just need to come up with copy and packaging them how you see fit, which will speak best to your desired customer. Does that make sense? Do you want to comment on that Marco? So basically what he’s asking for is MGYB. That his comment is, okay, well, I want someone that I know that I can trust. We’ve priced everything so that people can mark it up. And they can mark it up as much as they want. We’ve had people charge What was it? $2,000 for a syndication network. And that was a few years back. Remember that? Yeah. Yeah. He had the check. He had the check. Yeah, look, I just sold it. It was about two K. And it’s $67. Back then I think it was sick 4760. So I forget what it was, but it was ridiculous. The market but it’s what the market will bear. At any rate. What we’ve done at MGB is set up all of our products and services, what we use in

Our own projects with our own clients with whatever it is that we do, what we’ll be using in the heavy hitter club.

And everything was placed in the store. And it’s made available to the general public so that they can go and repeat what we’re able to do. We don’t just talk about the shit that we do. We don’t just, you know, we don’t go after these keywords that as I said, my eighth my 18 months old can rank for, we’re going aftermarkets, right? We’re going after the top. We’re not shy about who we go after when you decide to go after Amazon. You’re not shy about who you’re going after he has yet to get after it. Point is whatever he’s looking for. So whatever niche makes a difference, because it’s once he orders it, and he tells us the niche is going to be tailored to that niche. That’s right. We go in and we detail it we detail we add all of the information, all the necessary information, images, whatever it is that we need to do to package it for that client.

And in that niche, and you know, if I was just looking at our deep keyword research, and we’ve done the research, I can’t remember how many, but it’s across a bunch of niches. And I will continue doing more and more and more drive stacks. I mean, we’ve done drives from CBD oil all the way I think, to art supply.

So a couple of dancing classes hold number, yellow. So it does matter, Nigel, the niche makes no difference. What you have to do is, as Benny said, set up your own land, your own store, I said, Are your own way of selling them so that you write it up any way you want. But then also, you’re going to just mark it up and then go buy it from MGYB. That’s right. And maybe if you produce enough volume talk, I know one of the owners, By the way, Nigel in case you didn’t know, so I can talk to him. And if you produce enough, right

If you’re ordering enough, then your volume discount, yeah, I could talk to some of the owners and ask them for a coupon or a volume discount, or something that would make it even better for you to go out and sell it. I know the owners, they’re a bunch of bricks, though. So the point is that whatever it is that you’re looking to do, it’s already set up for you to do it. Now I don’t, I don’t typically do this unless somebody is in the mastermind. But if you, I’m assuming you’re on Facebook, pm me, private message me in Facebook, and I’ll shoot you a link to schedule a brief consultation call with me for free, so that I can kind of guide you along kind of get a better idea of what it is that you’re trying to do. Because if it’s going to help us sell more stuff, and MGYBand helps you at the same time then I’m all about giving you know a consultation call to kind of help you think through this and develop a little bit of a plan for it. So message private message me in Facebook and I’ll shoot you a link to my calendly link that you can schedule a call with

With me in the next week or two and I’d be happy to jump on a call with you for a few minutes. Okay.

last but not least, this is just a comment and it’s right at the five o'clock mark. So thank you for this Nigel he says you bros you guys are just awesome because you answer everything I just got to drop some kudos so many marketers are just going for the money grab and I’m super happy. I found you guys before this gold rush madness and maybe living in a bubble, but it’s like the Wild Wild West. Thanks, guys. Yeah, well, we certainly appreciate that. You know, this being Episode 284 we’ve been around the block for many years, and we’re still here. So you know, it’s not just about the money grab for us. We’re very, very passionate about this. So thank you. Thank you, buddy. Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 284 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

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angelagiles18 · 5 years ago

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 284

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 284 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

So let’s start at the bottom work our way up, Chris. How are you doing there?

Yeah I’m doing excellent. The weather is good. Corona is like disappearing so like things open and stuff so quite happy here

Nice. Good stuff. Marco, how about you the weather?

Doing great. I’m wearing my Semantic Mastery schwag and do good man good. Good. Business is booming. Everything is moving on the right direction. Happy to be here. So good.

Cool. All right, Bradley, how you doing? How come your shirts not as worn as mine?

Great, I guess Other than that, anything else before we dive into questions?

all right here we go You guys should be seeing my screen correct

yeah all right we’re gonna start with Mohammed’s from seven days ago because I know I didn’t get a chance to answer this we’ll start right there

Would An SEO Power Shield Be Better For A YouTube Channel?

Is It Okay To Only Use Service Types Keywords In The Main Menu Of A Website?

What Are The First Steps In Powering Up An SEO Power Shield?

Nobody, okay.

How Would You Create An Ad Content As A Replacement For A Discontinued Affiliate Program?

That’s in that gray area. Yeah.

Is There A Difference In Results With Unique And Spun Content In The Drive Stack?

sounds like that was a dig against your daughter man. She’s 18 months but oh god.

Is There An Update To Twitter’s RSS?

Cool. Man, you know what? Oh, I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about updates.

Can You Submit English-Based RSS Directories As Non-English RSS Channels?

RankerX VS FCS Networker In Terms Of Linking Campaign

Yeah, Dadea runs rank correct. Okay. I that that’s I believe that says go-to tool. I don’t think he uses FCS.

Yeah, agreed. So yeah, again, just asking the free Facebook group, you know, the audio will can and can help you out with that.

What Is Theme Mirroring?

Alright, hopefully, that helped. Karen says no question. Just cheers for doing great work. Thank you, Karen.

And let’s see next. Show shut up and take my money.

We need more people like you, buddy.

Alright Bibi’s back for another set of questions this time there’s five

Would It Okay To Use A Simplified Slug To Avoid Keyword Stuffing In Breadcrumb Links?

All right, so BB I’ll let you slide with three earlier I’m not going to answer all five right now. Okay, I will answer one, and if there’s any time left I’ll come back.

What Should You With A GMB That Is Sharing A Map Pin With Other GMB?

Do You White Label Your Services?

Our own projects with our own clients with whatever it is that we do, what we’ll be using in the heavy hitter club.

With me in the next week or two and I’d be happy to jump on a call with you for a few minutes. Okay.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 284 published first on your-t1-blog-url https://ift.tt/1WMpNvB April 24, 2020 at 10:01PM Semantic Mastery https://ift.tt/2YeHIxM

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pledje · 5 years ago

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 284

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 284 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

So let’s start at the bottom work our way up, Chris. How are you doing there?

Yeah I’m doing excellent. The weather is good. Corona is like disappearing so like things open and stuff so quite happy here

Nice. Good stuff. Marco, how about you the weather?

Doing great. I’m wearing my Semantic Mastery schwag and do good man good. Good. Business is booming. Everything is moving on the right direction. Happy to be here. So good.

Cool. All right, Bradley, how you doing? How come your shirts not as worn as mine?

Great, I guess Other than that, anything else before we dive into questions?

all right here we go You guys should be seeing my screen correct

yeah all right we’re gonna start with Mohammed’s from seven days ago because I know I didn’t get a chance to answer this we’ll start right there

Would An SEO Power Shield Be Better For A YouTube Channel?

Is It Okay To Only Use Service Types Keywords In The Main Menu Of A Website?

What Are The First Steps In Powering Up An SEO Power Shield?

Nobody, okay.

How Would You Create An Ad Content As A Replacement For A Discontinued Affiliate Program?

That’s in that gray area. Yeah.

Is There A Difference In Results With Unique And Spun Content In The Drive Stack?

sounds like that was a dig against your daughter man. She’s 18 months but oh god.

Is There An Update To Twitter’s RSS?

Cool. Man, you know what? Oh, I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about updates.

Can You Submit English-Based RSS Directories As Non-English RSS Channels?

RankerX VS FCS Networker In Terms Of Linking Campaign

Yeah, Dadea runs rank correct. Okay. I that that’s I believe that says go-to tool. I don’t think he uses FCS.

Yeah, agreed. So yeah, again, just asking the free Facebook group, you know, the audio will can and can help you out with that.

What Is Theme Mirroring?

Alright, hopefully, that helped. Karen says no question. Just cheers for doing great work. Thank you, Karen.

And let’s see next. Show shut up and take my money.

We need more people like you, buddy.

Alright Bibi’s back for another set of questions this time there’s five

Would It Okay To Use A Simplified Slug To Avoid Keyword Stuffing In Breadcrumb Links?

All right, so BB I’ll let you slide with three earlier I’m not going to answer all five right now. Okay, I will answer one, and if there’s any time left I’ll come back.

What Should You With A GMB That Is Sharing A Map Pin With Other GMB?

Do You White Label Your Services?

Our own projects with our own clients with whatever it is that we do, what we’ll be using in the heavy hitter club.

With me in the next week or two and I’d be happy to jump on a call with you for a few minutes. Okay.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 284 published first on your-t1-blog-url

0 notes

oasisoptimization · 5 years ago

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 284

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 284 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

All right, we are live Welcome everybody to Hump Day hangouts today is Episode 284. Today's the 22nd of April 2020. So we're still going strong here, we got the whole team and we are going to jump into questions. But real quick, I wanted to say if you're watching us live, I'm going to have a link down below the battle plan version 4.0 is getting ready to hit the streets as of next week. But if you're watching this in time, you're going to have a chance to get in on the pre-launch and get special access, along with some extra goodies and possibly a discount. But there's definitely a deadline on this, you've got to hop on before Monday, which would be let me look at my calendar real quick. That would be the fourth. So you've only got a few days to hopefully you're watching this live or you're catching up this week. But you can find that link below and hop on that. So with that said, we've got a couple of other things to cover, but I want to say hi to everybody, real quick.

So let's start at the bottom work our way up, Chris. How are you doing there?

Yeah I'm doing excellent. The weather is good. Corona is like disappearing so like things open and stuff so quite happy here

Nice. Good stuff. Marco, how about you the weather?

Very nice. I have myself muted while I was doing some typing. Everyone watching live but just put the link for the Battle Plan for the early access list. Just click on that and get access when it comes out. We're not gonna roll over to you next. How are you doing today?

Doing great. I'm wearing my Semantic Mastery schwag and do good man good. Good. Business is booming. Everything is moving on the right direction. Happy to be here. So good.

Cool. All right, Bradley, how you doing? How come your shirts not as worn as mine?

Mine's got when wear been worn enough to where it's fading so it's all in the secret and how you wash it, man? No, it's just because I worked so hard at my computer. It just wears hard on the desk again. Things are good, man. The weather's nice here and well. They're as good as they can be considered but yeah, I'm still happy and healthy. So that's good enough for me.

Good deal. Well, good deal. I'm glad to hear that. We are going to get into it. We got a bunch of questions today. But real quick wanted to cover a few other areas. Of course, we've talked about the battle plan but also if you're an agency owner and consultant, you want to get more clients, you want to grow your revenue and you want to scale your team, then you need to be checking out 2xyouragency.com if you haven't already joined or if you're a mastermind member, of course, you get access to that for free. If you're mastermind member and you want to access just hit up [email protected] And we will get you in there. And then last but not least, if you haven't yet, mgyb.co is the place to get your done for you services, whether it's press releases, RYS drive stacks, syndication networks, link building all sorts of good stuff, as well as some great training over there. So we've done training with Rob, there's a bunch of webinars, best practices, just some really good stuff over there. mg y b.co. And then last, but not least, of course, subscribe to us on YouTube because we like knowing that you've got access to our good information, and it makes us feel good. I'm not gonna lie, we look at the numbers. Sometimes we're like, ooh, the subscriber counts going up. So help us out in that way. And we'll do the same for you and keep putting out great information. I was just looking before you and I was just looking at the analytics on YouTube, and our viewers are 5050 Subscribe them and nuts. Subscribe. So you guys who are not subscribing, my question to you, and please drop it in.

A video productive comment, drop the comment and hit Why aren't you Subscribing to our Channel, to all of that good information. That's what keeps us going right? Without you guys supporting us Subscribing to our channel, getting notifications when the videos are coming on when we're coming on live, then this would all be pointless. So come on, it's half of you that have that are watching this video that have not subscribed to our channel. So please do so.

Good stuff. And I've got one last thing and then I'm going to turn it over, see if anyone else has some wrap-up comments. But you guys probably saw the post on Facebook or I believe I've had two of them already and then a couple of emails. But we released the video a short while it's not a short video is about say a video series but a video-based training for people who are looking to start their agencies or consulting businesses. You know, I know there's a lot of obstacles to it and a lot of us you know, get stuck some analysis paralysis or you think that the obstacles bigger than you are bigger than it is and you're not sure

How to get around that. So we've just recently put that out as of this Monday. And there's a cool add on you can get for that. Which is it just a real to the point additional video that talks, each of us talking about what our single biggest mistake is, as we've done consulting, or agencies, and what we would do differently in order to avoid that, because that's some real blood, sweat and tears material right there. So I'll put the link down below. If you're that's something you're wanting to do. Maybe right now with the way the world is, and you're looking at, hey, I'd like to start my agency, or I'd like to be doing some consulting on the side to be generating some revenue. I highly suggest checking this out today, and seeing how you can do that and basically shortcut you know, save yourself some time, money and potentially some pain points there.

Great, I guess Other than that, anything else before we dive into questions?

Oh, I think that's just it's just real quick on my end, guys, every time we upload the battle plan, it's a big ripple. And the reason why it's because the stuff there isn't a better plan will allow you to get the fastest results as fast as possible with the least amount of steps and work in mobile, you're on your end. That's the main goal of the battle plan. So go ahead and subscribe for the early notifications because we're going to be launching really, really soon and every time we do so we get a lot of people in you know, in the queue, and it's going to be pretty inexpensive as well, because we're going to give you the help that you guys need to succeed with your, with your projects right now. So go ahead and get on the pre launch list so we can get you a lot of good stuff a lot of bonuses. Yeah, real quick about that the battle plan, this version, the for 2020, or whatever we're calling it, v3 or whatever.

It's different from our previous additions in that it's more streamlined because of how we've kind of developed the SEO shield and the components and such. So it's a lot easier to implement our methods, no matter what type of project you're doing local, regional, national global affiliate Econ, it doesn't matter what it is, it applies to this the same way to each and every type of business now, or online project. And so our battle plan is definitely a lot more streamlined now. Also, we, you'll see when you get it, but we've also, you know, really made it a lot more simplified to where we're pointing, you know, to additional training when needed, but mainly to mg y b for done for you services and or two other training videos that are just free on our YouTube channel. So there are no links pointing to, you know, external places now that we don't recommend anymore. It's been completely updated. And I think it's a lot. It's a simplified version of it, but it's every bit as effective if not more effective now than ever before.

So with that said, we can get into questions, guys. Let's do it. By the way, we're almost at a million or 40,000 views away from a million views on our YouTube channel, which is good. We get like some balloons dropping. I don't know but it's pretty cool I was looking at lifetime analytics for YouTube today and we're 40,000 views away from a million views so I thought that was pretty cool.

all right here we go You guys should be seeing my screen correct

yeah all right we're gonna start with Mohammed's from seven days ago because I know I didn't get a chance to answer this we'll start right there

Would An SEO Power Shield Be Better For A YouTube Channel?

so Mohammed asked Hey guys I was about to buy a multi-tiered syndication network for YouTube channel with no money site or anything just the channel but I saw your SEO shield sale with a she'll be better for a YouTube channel I'm leaning towards yes because of the entity building. You know, that's a really good question Mohammed as part of the reason I wanted to answer this because I don't know I've never ordered an SEO shield specifically just for YouTube channel. I've never tested that. Um, you know, the multi-tiered syndication networks work great for sending for YouTube, SEO because it helps to provide all you know all the really good stuff.

knows that it needs for a new video, especially when they're seasoned, that the networks and the multi-tiered syndication network are seasoned. And they, you know, aged a little bit and have relevant content on them. And then obviously, if you link below to them. They do a lot most of the heavy lifting as far as SEO is concerned for YouTube stuff, but I've never done an actual SEO show specifically to YouTube channel. And here's why. Because usually, the YouTube channel is part of an overall entity, right? So it's just part so the YouTube channel gets included in the SEO build-out because it's part of an overall entity, but I've never actually just had us SEO shield built specifically to a YouTube channel. So I haven't tested that, to be honest with you. I'm curious as to what Marco thinks about whether that would work or not or what his opinion of it is, but I would say try it. I know the multi-tiered syndication networks work but I can only assume that the SEO shields would work but I haven't tested and I just have to be really clear about that. But it's a good question. What do you think, Marco?

It's not something that I've tested but it shouldn't be any different than anything else that we build. And let's call it an entity around but it's actually an entity validator that you're looking for is to validate your channel. So let's say that instead of your blogging point or your point of syndication being your money site or a free one of the free blogs, right the Tumblr the blog, or wherever it is that you choose to blog from or in this case, Vila vlog from YouTube. building up your entity shouldn't be any different. Now, the whole thing around this is how do you approach it because when you're building schema, you can't build it on the YouTube channel. The YouTube channel is it's pre-done for you Everything is done that you could add your other profiles and still interlink everything through the syndication network.

In your second-tier syndication and build it up that way, but there would have to be a focal point somewhere else for that entity. And they did this with an old page though, right? Yeah, I mean, you could build the @ID page but the ad this is this is where we get we go to Okay, so where's the ad Id gone? This is the YouTube channel then going to be also the @ID and how to how do we get the schema worked into the YouTube channel.

I mean, this is a test in the making. One of the things, why we went with the heavy hitter club, is because we want to test these types of things. So this is a great test in the making. And as a matter of fact, I already wrote it down on my notes, of things to do for the heavy hitter club is to start a YouTube video. See how we can work the entity around it. I mean, there's no reason why it can't be an s3 and why we can't tag it. From there, right use the @ID, and now I have to kind of figure out, and I'm not going to do this in a free forum, figure out how I'm going to build this entity around this YouTube channel.

When it's something that Google controls, and I can't get into the schema, maybe we can force schema. Somehow I don't know. It involves a whole lot of things. But Mohammed, definitely heavy hitter. If you're not in there already, you should be. And, you know, it's a test in the making, and I'll make sure to set it up. Yeah, and think about that, just and I'm kind of thinking through this too, but because I think it'd be a great test to use YouTube channel as the primary entity asset, and then try to build that out, see what we could do with it. But one thing I know that you could do with it with the ID page, for example, is like, you know, YouTube silos and you embed the playlist that could really help to for, you know, pushing power into the YouTube channel through the ID page to so there, that would be

A really good test. That's something that's the heavy hitter club was, was made for, you know, so that's awesome. Mohammed will, will, hopefully, you're going to join them the heavy hitter club anyways, and then you can see that test when it gets set up. But I think that that's certainly worth a good test. And if you happen to do so, Mohammed, let us know how it goes. Okay. Aaron's up, he says, I'm really fuzzy about using Google Maps, does it help to create a mind maps with points of interest in the area? Then creating lines to my business location to indicate travel distance in a relationship with that location? Yes, that works really well. Now if you have a storefront business, right, so a business where customers come to your place of business, then yes, you would do it that way where essentially you would have you know, your address because it's not hidden, right? And then you would go from points of interest that and then create driving directions to your location. Alternatively, if it's a service area business, you can do it the other way around, which is to create driving directions from your business to points of interest right within the service area. However, if you're not publishing your address, which if it's a service area business, in 95% of the cases there, you're not supposed to have your physical location published. For service area businesses, then you could just use something like a city center or as like from, you know, city center from where your business is located. and use that as kind of the central point with the driving directions going out to the points of interest.

The idea here is also to create geo posts on your main money site too, as well. So blog posts that talk about those areas where those points of interest are, right. So you create basically optimized posts, blog posts that are optimized for that particular location, and publish them and you can actually create location-based silos on your site. You can do it that way too. By the way, these can be like hidden blog posts, in other words, they don't have to be public. They're just used for SEO purposes.

And it does work well because we've done that in the past, or I've done that in the past for Google Maps listings that had been pigeon filtered, which means Google, Google Maps was kind of hiding them, even though there wasn't really a penalty. They were being hidden because they were considered too closely related to a similar business. And Google for whatever reason chose another business and would kind of ghost a GMB listing. It's called it was a pigeon filter. And one of the ways to get around that was doing similar to what you're asking about Aaron, which is doing these geo posts, and that that works fairly well. So that's a good question. Anybody want to comment on that on my map as a standalone product in another, I'm not sure how much power you can get from that I would recommend starting out with a drive second G site and the mind map that we build out and either building out the mind map or building out additional mind maps, which you would then embed on the money site, then you could carry all of that relevance through since everything is tied together. But as a standalone, we had a similar question in the mastermind, by the way. And my answer is going to stand firm that I don't recommend that as a standalone, you could push just so much more power and relevance when you relate everything inside a drive second, and the companion G site, and then inner pages on the G site that target the inner pages on the money site.

Yeah, and to be clear, Aaron, when I say, create blog posts, what you do is you would create a blog post about the one particular area that like for example, if you've got, you know if you've got five areas that you service, or that you want to target specifically, each blog post would have its own mind map with driving directions from your point of or from the point of interest back to your business, if you're a storefront business or vice versa, if it's a service area business, that so that you would have literally like five different mind maps in this example, right? So each one would have its own. And then you can have one mind map that has kind of all of them together. But what I'm saying is for the individual posts that are optimized for one particular location, you would just have that mind map on there. And then like Marco said, but you're better off also including those mirroring those onto the G site. Because again, you can mirror the blog posts onto the G site, embed the blog post in there along with the mind map, and then those become link building targets. So but yes, you can do that kind of stuff and it does add relevancy.

Is It Okay To Only Use Service Types Keywords In The Main Menu Of A Website?

Mike's up mic says, Hey, guys, I want to create a strong main menu for a local service site. I have seven top main keywords, is it okay to use only keywords for the main menu so you're talking about like the main navigation menu instead of creating one drop-down or link of services that contain all of the keywords (service types), I want to create the main menu using only service types of keywords, other links like about us, and come tag us can be in the footer. What do you think about that? Thanks, honestly, it really makes no difference in that I'm, that I'm aware of.

There's, you know, drop-down menus aren't the best thing in the world for SEO. But they're also they're logical for user experience because it would make sense to not clutter up your, if you got seven different services, and you're going to try to push them all into the main navigation bar, but then you don't have things like contact and about, you know, contact us and about us pages and stuff like that up there, and maybe a link to your blog, blog index page and that kind of stuff. First of all, the menu could get rather busy that way, you know what I mean? Like rather crowded. So, you know, and also, I think it's important to kind of keep in what people are used to, which would be having those other links at the top of the navigation menu instead of having to go search for them. Not that many, many people ever go to the About Us page or whatever, but you know, I would prefer to keep that. Like what people are typically used to and just use a drop-down? That's what I would suggest. But I don't, you know, I haven't tested to see if one way is better than another. So I couldn't tell you I just like I said, for user experience, I think your menu could be rather cluttered that way. And it could also cause people to search for links with that they're looking for, you know if they were looking to contact us about us, that kind of stuff. So my advice would be to not worry about that. I don't see where the SEO benefit would come from, from trying to structure it the way that you are. But honestly, I don't have any definitive answer to that. Does anybody else? No, and I don't see it right. I don't see what the difference would be. And this would be kind of difficult to test because you would need two sites, two sites that are the same, targeting the same thing, one with this type of menu that he's proposing and one with a traditional menu and see which one performs the best. Now that that kind of testing can get can take a whole lot of time and then it turns out that

It makes no difference you just wasted all that time. It's not a waste. It's a test. And it's a perfectly good test. But don't do that until you have time to do the testing right now go with what's working. And by, you know, traditional menus work just fine. You rank just fine. It doesn't matter. Even the, you know, some people have questions about the domains, right, whether using a traditional TLD or a nontraditional to do one of that vanity TLD. And you can rank them both just the same. You can rank anything, just about the same. It's all about power. It's all about the art, right? activity, relevance, trust, and authority. That's what it's all about. Everything else becomes obsolete doesn't matter. It doesn't make a difference when you pushing enough art into whatever it is that you're doing.

What Are The First Steps In Powering Up An SEO Power Shield?

Next question I'm planning on ordering. Yeah, okay, sorry. I just want to make sure I didn't skip on planning on ordering the SEO power shield. But after it's delivered, what are the first next steps to powering up content for Google? Links etc. Yeah, link building and embed, embed, and or link building packages from MGYB is one of the best next steps. Also, if you once you get the branded stack mirroring your and I know there's a question further down the page today about explaining what theme mirroring is, but themed mirroring your money site into the G stack, the drive stack, as well as the G site, that's really, really powerful too. Now, I'll be 100% you know, clear, most of the mirroring that I do is on the G site. And I don't typically always mirror the drive stack like add additional folders that are so for example, you know, if you've got three silos on your, on your, your money site, you would clone each one of your primary drive stack folders and then create them as subfolders one mirrored for each silo, right. And then from there, you would take all the files in the folder are all the files within the silo folder now and optimize them for your particular keywords.

For that silo, and then up and then all the links from inside that would link over to the corresponding pages and posts within that silo on your money site as well as what you Mir on to the G site, which is the same structure. Now, again, I don't always do that and the drive stack, because what I found for a lot of, you know, all I do is local. And so for most local projects, I'm able to mirror onto the G site and accomplish without having to drive do all the additional work in the drive stack. But in some cases, it does require it because I need the additional push. And so as I always talk about and we usually recommend, don't, you know, try to get the best results with the least amount of effort, right? So what I do is I mirror my money site onto the G site, and I do that very thoroughly. And then I use my G site as my link, building target embeds and link building targets and just smash the shit out of it with links and embeds all the time. And if I need an additional push, then I will mirror into the drive stack and do it but right now it's still open manual process on the mirroring work. We're so close guys to be able to offer the drive stack expansion service, inside MGB, but it's not available just yet. So that's why I kind of reserve that for only when absolutely needed, because of the manual component. But, you know, again, once that once we have the ability to do that in mg y, b, there's no reason why I wouldn't smear the shit anyway, you know what I'm saying? So, uh, so yeah, I think first of all theme mirroring is, the first thing you can do is to start building links to your drive stack and your G site. When you get it back. That's hands down. One of the first things I always do, but then while the links are being built, you can start to mirror you know, set up the theme mirroring on the site, as well as Dr. Stack if needed. And then once that's done, now you have additional link building targets for your next batch of links. Does that make sense? Comments?

Nobody, okay.

How Would You Create An Ad Content As A Replacement For A Discontinued Affiliate Program?

Cows up next to break the SEO questioning for a second. I have a sales copy. Question for one of you, this is probably going to be one for Adam. And or Hernan, then if you had the opportunity to place an ad right on the sales page of one of your competitors with no limitations to what it could say or how long it could be, what would you say? I'm an affiliate marketer and I plan on creating my own digital products similar to a competitor. Fortunately, I'm already ranking in spots 1234 some of my competitor's product keywords via review blog posts, they dropped their affiliate program, so I'm planning to just create my own product and cross-promote on those review posts. How should I word my own sales message to convert as many of my competitor's prospects as possible? Thanks, guys.

That's a really good question. I would add that one over to Hernan and Adam so Hernan. Yeah, so I'm ruining the question. Sorry. It's okay. I actually don't get the technical back part of this. Like, I mean, you did draw a diagram or can you guys explain Okay, yeah. So he's got affiliate review pages ranked for in positions one, two, and three.

For a product that he was promoting as an affiliate, yeah, and that product developer has now discontinued their affiliate program. So he's still ranking with those review posts for that product. And since it's his pages, he wants to now link to a similar product that he can get an affiliate commission from that review. So how would you word your How would you push people from that page over to the page that you want them to buy a similar product from? Without? You know, how would you do that? That's what he's saying. What would you How would you write it? What would the copy say?

Right? So there's a couple of options here. And maybe you want to test this, but the first thing that comes to mind is to just be honest, we have had that happen in our in the past. In our end, you know, we were offering a service or a product as an affiliate, and we were using that product, and then for some reason, the service stop working, and then we just went ahead and said hey, This product is no longer available. But if you're looking to achieve the same results, go here and check this out, right? So as long as the product delivers the same result or as long as the frame minutes the same, don't be afraid to be upfront and honest, because, at the end of the day, people are searching for a solution, right? So if the secondary product that you're now offering, whether it's yours or an affiliate is it's providing that solution, then it's just a matter of, you know, reframing it from a perspective of, hey, this offer and unfortunately, this offer is discontinued. But we have found an alternative to this, which is this one, right? So if you want to get x with a why, if you want to, you know, if you're looking to get x results, then click here, and then you're sending them to the next. What would you say in this case?

Yeah, I think it's an interesting one because we're dealing though too, with the organic side. So like if you really did a heavy overhaul like there's, you know, it might change what you're appearing for. So I might keep the contents long as it makes sense in right, like a more alternative to the type of introduction, and be like, Hey, are you looking to learn about this product? Here's a lot of information about it. But this might be a better alternative for you and do that. I mean, I realize that would be the lead-in, and then maybe you could keep the content. Yeah, that I was gonna say one of two things. While you guys were talking, I was thinking about it. One is a purely SEO tactic, which probably isn't allowed or is probably not recommended. Marco would know the answer to this but do like a three-second meta refresh so that when somebody lands on the page with your competitors, your product or that you used to after about three seconds, it redirects to a new page through a meta refresh that talks all about your product or service that could be considered cloaking. Marco, is that yes or no?

That's in that gray area. Yeah.

That's right. So I saw you that the user is going with the intent of seeing one but you're serving the user something else. But then again, he put a pause on that meta refresh, right? You put a timer five seconds so that the user knows you're going somewhere else, man. Yeah, you might overcome that. I don't know. I don't know what legalities on that. Yeah, I neither did I, but it doesn't sound cool. Well, they also have layover plugins that are, you know, again, it's kind of blackhat stuff. I mean, we don't typically care about that stuff. But I'm just letting you know that they have layover plugins where you could literally display one page with the underlying page still like it's still there. But the viewer sees a different page. And again, some of these things aren't 100% kosher, but I know people do it and get away with it all the time. So the other option is like what Adam just said, I like what he said, which is you could add just a new, you know, opening or section to the top of the page that talks about

Hey, I know you came here to find out about, you know, XYZ product, which there's a thorough, you know, review of it below, however, and then do what Adam or excuse me, Hernan said, which is kind of explain why the new product, which is one that either you develop or another affiliate product and other products that you're promoting is comparable and you know, similarly good and why you recommend that now over the other one or something like that, if that makes sense, because then as Adam said, You're keeping the content that was ranking anyways. And all you're doing now is adding a new section up above that, which shouldn't affect the ranking of that existing page much at all. Because if it's already ranking really, really well, you're just updating that page really, without it as long as you're not changing that page considerably. As the structure of the page, I think you'd be fine. So those are a couple. Does anybody else now? Yeah, I just wanted to say that from an SEO perspective, you can still use that page, and you know how you have this long-form articles that they rank for a bunch of keywords, and you know, 2000 3000 4000 word articles. And they are living breathing things right like that you can add content to them, you can like, on some cases, you might visit the same article like a year later, and it will have like, I don't know, like pieces of content added to it and whatnot and then you know, boxes that will take you to different places, because of course, we're in the digital marketing space, everything changes so fast. So don't be afraid to do those slight changes to the content, and then follow what Adam just said is that, you know, just add a box on top and say, hey, these programs would allow you to achieve the same results that you were looking for. Click here, you know, yeah, I like this, just so people, I mean, just so that they're 100% informed. an overlay is another word for cloaking.

Cloaking will get you in trouble just because others get away with it doesn't mean that you can get by a manual if you get a manual review, and you're cloaking. That's it, you lose everything it goes by. So just so everyone's aware, and we're clear on what you're doing by overlaying or by cloaking anything. Yep. And I'm, I thought I was clear about that, but thank you for reiterating it. So, before we get people contacting us saying, You told me to do it, because that's not what I said, I said, You know, I know that it can be done, whether you choose to do it or not, it's up to you. And it's probably not a good idea. But I know, I know a lot of people that do that kind of stuff. You know, in the past, I've done local lead gen sites that way where I'd rank my own site and then use an overlay plugin to show you know, whoever was buying the leads from me show their site on top of mine. Mine was the one ranking, not theirs, but you know, those, those were quite popular A few years ago, those type of plugins, but, you know, fortunately, I don't have to, I don't really worry about that anymore.

Is There A Difference In Results With Unique And Spun Content In The Drive Stack?

The next question was from Olaf. He says, Is there a difference in results with unique spun content in the drive stacks compared to just the same text with different titles and keywords? It's a good question. Marco. Sorry about that I was muted. No, we haven't seen any difference. That's why we just go with anything we can grab because it doesn't matter. Perfect. Do you see Seo? Hey, guys, when the shield is in place, generally speaking, how does it take? How long does it take to see effects? Do I simply throw links at it afterward? And can I update the NAP when I moved to another office in a different part of the city? Yeah, uh, how long does it take to start showing effects? It varies. It varies, like, at least my experience is it varies rather wildly between projects. Sometimes I'll see results like in a matter of days. Other times, it will be weeks and it really just depends. I honestly don't know what causes that maybe Marco can shed some light on that, but I know that I always see results. But it's a matter of sometimes, you know, sometimes it's quick. Other times, more often than not for me the drive stacks take several weeks before I see considerable movement from them. But as far as do, we already talked about the best practice which is next links mirroring your G site mirroring your drive stack, link building, and embeds those are hands down the best things that you can do.

Last question and I'll answer and I'll let Marco chime in is can I update the nav when I moved to another office in different parts of the city? Yes, you can. Just keep in mind that there's going to be a lot of, you know, when you make that move, you have an existing G site and this is outside of the drive stack. Yes, you can go in and update your nav on all your drives, files, right all the files within your drive stack as well as on the G site. Make sure you're updating your structured data on your money site, all that kind of stuff. So it's all congruent. But you also remember you got to clean up any citations and part of the remember when you're pushing content on the web to like through syndication and everything else if you have any PII mentioned in those, those now are all going to be causing NAP issues when you do make that change. So just be aware of that. If you are if you're anticipating a move for the business location, then consider that when you're publishing content and things like that to not include any PII, I'm not saying that you do. But I'm just for other people. Like for example, if you have an NAP and press releases and such, they get published out on the web hundreds at a time. And now all of a sudden, you change when now you've got those press releases to count as citations, because name address and phone numbers published and you can't go update those, right, you can update your organization perhaps, and any new press releases will be show the new nav, but the old ones are still going to be out there. And those are things that you can't update once they're published. So you just got to really keep that in mind when you're doing it. But yes, you can go in and just change your nav within the drive stack the G site and everywhere else that you have editor access. Do you want to comment on that, Marco?

Yeah, on the first part of that how long it takes, again, it depends. different niches react differently. And even within the same niche, I've seen fluctuations where, you know, a week, two weeks, and then other times, it's like, four or five weeks out. And it's still nothing happening. And it doesn't happen until you run some press releases and some link building when you start doing some other stuff to power up. It's an independent, it depends on game and Google. I don't know how else to say Google's broken. And it's so crazily broken, that would that works one day, may work differently The next day, or you'll see that it doesn't work. I was just doing testing that this is what this is where this is coming from. And I ran the tests about six weeks ago. And I got one set of results and I just ran it again today because a mastermind member asked a question about it, and I got different data.

And so if the data isn't consistent, if Google isn't consistent about the results that it produces, then what are we to rely on to say, yeah, it takes this long, or it'll take maybe longer. And in this niche, it'll take this on, we can't do that, because we're not in control of whatever it is that Google is doing in their servers, right and that relational database, and how it relates your entity to the rest of the entities in that relational database to give the user the best results. All we can do is like submit our stuff for indexing, build links, press releases, syndicate the content, power up our tier-one property, look for other link building ready called link building websites, things that are powerful websites with trust and authority for those things so so that we could power up our project the best way possible.

Other than that, I mean, there's no way to say yeah, you can get it number one tomorrow. If that were the case, I'd be a billionaire right now. If I could predict with any certainty that I could rank within a day, and anyone who's saying that I'd call them out on it now I'm one of those people. You got to show me You say you can rank the 24 hours for a real keyword now, no bullshit, no longtail 10-word longtail that anybody could rank for my daughter could probably rank for it right now. I'm not talking about that. I'm just saying it's again, it goes back to it depends. And that's where I'm gonna stay on that.

sounds like that was a dig against your daughter man. She's 18 months but oh god.

Austin's up. He says I just wanted to say what I've seen so far with the SEO shield being built for me is literally mind-blowing. Guys. That's one for the testimony folder. I've built a lot of this stuff by hand before and know the time involved signing up for a heavy hitter, heavy hitter club paid club today should be enrolled by the time this goes live. Thanks again, to all of you. Thanks, Austin. Dawn, that was a great testimonial. Thank you very much for that we did not pay him for that, I swear. So, but thanks, Don. And we appreciate that. And yeah, man, if you've been watching, and I know you have because you've been participating a lot, and I know you're in the real estate business as well.

It works incredibly well for at least the land business, I can imagine it works just as well for the house business, although that is certainly more competitive than the land business. But it will give you an edge over your competitors. Just remember what we talked about several times today already about how to power that thing up. Don't forget to try to mirror at very minimum mirror G site to match what your money site structure is and then embed your G site or excuse me your money website pages into your G site. And when you're ready, come join the mastermind because I've been doing training on how I do a lot of really cool things with the G site including tag silo. Well, that's money site stuff, but really cool stuff. And I'm so close now to have in my next kind of really big project live that I'm sharing with the silo structure, build out the in how I've seen mirrored everything in the mastermind and my next mastermind webinars next Thursday, and the site should be live by then it's taken me almost six weeks to build it. But anyway, you should definitely come to check it out. It will help your business I promise.

Is There An Update To Twitter's RSS?

Next are questions from BB who always post multiple questions every week. I keep telling you not to post multiple questions. They're getting shorter though. So you are making progress maybe. But this time, it's only three short questions as opposed to 18 really long ones. Anyways, I'm just giving you a hard time man. He says one is there an update to the Twitter RSS Twitter widgets is a thing of the past. So what do I do? I honestly haven't touched Twitter since the last time I developed content about Twitter, which was probably four years ago, so I can't answer that anybody. I haven't gotten into look at the Twitter RSS feed lately, so I can't say I mean either. I just don't I just hate Twitter to be honest with you. I know it's got some SEO benefits. There's no question it does. I just I've never, ever gave a damn about good Ah, you know how they have their life platform called Periscope. You know, for periscope is the light platform Twitter. And there's a lot of people in periscope apparently. Yeah, and I didn't know and I started going live with restroom because restroom.io will allow you to go live on Facebook, YouTube, and whatnot. And then I started adding networks because you know, why not? They're free. And they have absolutely zero viewers on like twitch for instance, but periscope I got like 50 viewers are a number. I don't know if they're bots if you know is people that are real but I got some use so there might be some benefit over there. Yeah. Oh I'm not saying you can't squeeze benefit from Twitter I know you can I just never had a desire to do anything with Twitter. It's been years since I've even logged into Twitter I think so. I think he can he can always go third party right that this there's something called up RSS app. And you can get a Twitter feed right from there. I just use that about a month ago.

Cool. Man, you know what? Oh, I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about updates.

Adam, what are you talking about? Well, because we're going to be updating something here soon that RSS I might want to play with this as part of the update for the new. Oh, yeah. There's Wow. We could maybe think a little bit. A little bit maybe. Yeah. Syndication Academy.

What we're going to be completely updating it and relaunching that more news to come but this Thank you, Marco, for pointing this out. This is something I would definitely dig into for when I start the development of the syndication Academy 2020 or version, whatever we're gonna call it. So that's coming guys can't say when but it's coming

Can You Submit English-Based RSS Directories As Non-English RSS Channels?

The next question from BB. Can I submit to English based RSS directories and non-English RSS channels? Yes. Yeah. Because honestly, I don't know that RSS directories that people actually go to RSS directories but there's a little bit of SEO benefit. They used to be more powerful than they probably are now. But yeah, and by the way, if you're going to submit to RSS guys unless you have a tool that does it, just go to Fiverr and, and go get RSS to submit gigs and literally just go to Fiverr and stuff for RSS submit and pay somebody five bucks plus the $2 charge there's like seven bucks an hour or whatever the hell it is to have them do it for you like I will submit your RSS feed to over 100 RSS feed directories for five bucks guys so honestly just pay somebody five bucks give them your RSS feeds, in fact, you can you know I would recommend even creating a super feed or a spliced feed using something like Damon Nelson's RSS masher and then submit that feed and you know, just pay five to whatever it is seven bucks I think with the service fee now and have somebody else do it because it's tedious as hell to submit them on your own and just you know, let somebody else do it.

RankerX VS FCS Networker In Terms Of Linking Campaign

Okay, last question. I think RankerX versus FCS networker which is better for linking campaign understand that GSA is good for third-tier and up an FCS is good for second-tier whereas RankerX comes into play. I couldn't answer that BB. If you want to ask a question about link building tools, I would post that in a free Facebook group and you know, and you know, ask daddy are late builder kills he'll come in and comment on that and he's the one that can give you the best advice on that I don't run link building tools I haven't for at least five or six years. And I don't ever plan on running them again. So I can't answer that. Anybody else has any recommendations?

Yeah, Dadea runs rank correct. Okay. I that that's I believe that says go-to tool. I don't think he uses FCS.

No, he is using FCS because it became cost-prohibitive. They kept raising the rates on it, everything else so, and then he uses GSA but I what I say is, if you're building contextual on at tier two, it would be tier two. Why not build contextual to the contextual?

Yeah, agreed. So yeah, again, just asking the free Facebook group, you know, the audio will can and can help you out with that.

What Is Theme Mirroring?

Next question was, can you explain what is the mirroring? I think we did that. I'll kind of run through it again briefly. But whatever your primary money site is that the architecture, right, so the structure of the site, hopefully using silos, because they work, what you do is on the G site, you mirror that same structure. So in other words, you create a one to one ratio of pages on the G site for pages on your money site, right? You don't necessarily have to do that for all the posts. Because if you're content marketing as part of your SEO strategy, so you're blogging, right, that you don't necessarily have to create a new page every time you create a blog post. There are ways around that I talked about that again in the mastermind very specifically how to utilize the G site and benefit from all the blog posts without having to create a separate G site page for each blog post. Okay, so I do talk about that in a mastermind can't talk about that right here but on a conceptual level you for all of like your top of silo pages, for example. So your product, main product pages or service pages, or whatever you create pages on the G site that so that mirror, same keyword, you know, optimized for the same keyword, everything else, then you can add content to the page. But all I do is just iframe in my money site pages. So remember, it's a one to one ratio, right? One G site page for every page on the money site. For that, I'm trying that has SEO value, right. And so I just iframe that into there.

Now, there are some other things that you can add into those G site pages too. For example, if you mirror the same structure in your drive stack, which means when you buy a drive stack from us right now, it's for brand plus primary keyword Association. It's about building the entity. Once you get that you can clone that main folder, which clones everything within the folder, and then make that a subfolder of the main folder and then optimize all of the files within that subfolder now title that subfolder for one of your silos, right? So it's optimized for the same keyword. It's mirrored just like your site structure, then all the files within that particular folder can be edited and optimized for the same keyword set is that silo with all of the internal links, the links from the G site or the drive stack files, pointing back to your money site, the same corresponding silo pages and posts within that silo on the money site, and also to your G site that has now been mirrored. Does that make sense? That's when you can also embed your folders. So like again, top of the silo page on your money site has a mirrored top of the silo page on your G site. And now if you have a subfolder from your main drive stack that has been optimized for that particular silo, now you can actually embed that folder and the files in that G site page that make sense. So that becomes your link building target, the G stack or the G site, the drive stack, and the files and folders and files. All of those become your link building targets, not your money site because your money site is being all the links are being built to your money site through the G site and the drive stack.

So all you do is you hammer away at the G site and their drive stack files and folders. And you push all that relevance through to your money site without an actual physical HTML link pointing directly to your money site. That makes sense. So that's, that's the mirroring on a conceptual level. Again, we get into the nitty-gritty of this stuff, and either our bias Academy reloaded the mastermind or now even have a heavy hitter club. Is that correct? Marco?

Yep. Anything you want to add to that? No, I thought that was perfect. It's just a copy. That's all it is. you're copying open, you're copying over. That's what's called a mirror. When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see the same thing?

That's it. And you know, credit for that theme mirroring, you know, I guess, the term was from network empire for many years ago. And it's great. It just works really, really well. And I love the fact that we like Marco has caused it. We're in the belly of the beast. And that's what we're doing like with we're using Google to insulate the money site and then we push ever thing into the Google properties which funnels down to the money site without ever physically touching if that's that makes sense. And it works incredibly well. So

Alright, hopefully, that helped. Karen says no question. Just cheers for doing great work. Thank you, Karen.

And let's see next. Show shut up and take my money.

We need more people like you, buddy.

Mohammed says, Hey guys ended up buying the show to report the results as they come in. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Mohammed, let us know, please. And I still think that would be a good test for the heavy-hitter club. Since Marco wrote it down. It probably gets done.

Alright Bibi's back for another set of questions this time there's five

Would It Okay To Use A Simplified Slug To Avoid Keyword Stuffing In Breadcrumb Links?

All right, so BB I'll let you slide with three earlier I'm not going to answer all five right now. Okay, I will answer one, and if there's any time left I'll come back.

Let's say there is a silo domain.com/dogs/dog-food. Okay, is it okay to make the slug of dog food post as simplified form domain slash dog food instead of the subdirectory. Yes, yes, that's the difference between a virtual silo and a physical silo. Right. And, again, if you just go to our YouTube channel and search for silo structure, just go to semantic map or youtube.com slash semantic mastery then use the channel search feature and search for silo structure. That's it. The videos that come up the first two videos are simple silo structure and complex silo structure. If you watch those, those are showing how to set up what's called a physical silo which is showing the silo structure in the permalink. Right, so it's this category slash post name permalink structure, that that's how I used to do it because I used to like to see it in the URL, but we test it I haven't tested it recently on me personally, I haven't tested it recently, but years ago, I tested it but the when you're just using the post name permalink structure, as long as your internal linking is done correctly within your silos, so your internal silo linking is done correctly.

It makes no difference. At least it didn't years ago. And I'm pretty sure Marco will confirm this, that it doesn't make any difference whatsoever, a virtual silo versus a physical silo, all the internal linking everything, the hierarchy of your categories, and your subcategories and posts. If it's complex, all of that stays the same. The only difference is what is displayed in the URL. And so there is no difference in SEO, whether you use virtual silo or physical silo. And in fact, I recommend using virtual silo now, because it makes the URLs less optimized, right. So it's less likely to trigger an over-optimization penalty for a URL that is hyper optimized with too many occurrences of the same keyword, which is what basically you were asking for here. So yes, virtual silo. Post name. permalink structure is absolutely effective for silos. Does anybody want to comment? Ah, that was perfect. Okay, beautiful. Moving on.

What Should You With A GMB That Is Sharing A Map Pin With Other GMB?

Mohammed says, Hey, guys, one of my real estate clients is moving to a new city and enlisted me to create the GMB in his old city. His realtor GMB shared a map pin with the brokerage I believe this may have affected our GMB impressions. But I don't have proof What should I do with the new one? Do I keep the address shared with his new brokerage or persuade him to move the pin to a new location? That's a good question. Now, I haven't done Local SEO For realtors in probably four years.

But when I did that was, that was pretty common practice. I'm pretty sure it still is where a brokerage has can have, you know, the brokerage itself has its own GMB listing but then individual realtors from within that brokerage can also create their own listing map listing.

It's okay, you can do that Mohammed remembers as long as the name, address, phone number, and URL. So we talked about NAP but URL was part of that right? So there are four data points, their name, address, phone number URL, as long as three of those four data points are you

Make then you can get away with it. So in this case, the business name would be unique, the address would be the same, but then the phone number would be unique and the URL would be unique as long as you can achieve that so the address would be the same, but the business names are different. So for example, let's just use REMAX That's the last time I did a local SEO for realtors, It was for a REMAX brokerage so REMAX Warrington okay would be the name of the primary brokerage but then each individual realtor would have their name, slap, comma, REMAX, right or something like that. That's how you would do it that the business names are different, the addresses the same phone numbers were different. And the URLs were different because each one of the realtors had their own, you know, landing page or website or whatever. And that makes no problem. It's whenever you start to mix up two or more data points, that that causes ambiguous NAP issues. So hopefully that makes sense. Does anybody want to comment on that? Okay

Do You White Label Your Services?

Nigel is up. Nigel, It's been a while somebody says hey guys thanks for all your help appreciate all you do or appreciate you all excuse me do you currently white label at all? If not, is there an opportunity to white label with you guys my problem is that I have been offered a bunch of services to white label but none that I really know or trust and I'm naturally skeptical and there is the ethics issue specifically I'm getting requests for services but I need fulfillment to be a bit more packaged up and customized for different niches not sure that is making sense but I will say this and I'm certainly willing to do all the work to write up all the copy for such an endeavor like for example creating done for you bundle descriptions based on what can work for the average customer when people trust you. You want to give them something you believe in but it has to be bundled so you don't confuse it yeah which I completely agree with you Nigel which is why we created the SEO shield, which is just a bundle of all the different components because we've been touting use all these different components for years really, and it was you know,

We kept getting the same questions and people would buy one service but not the other. And then they would say, well, well, it doesn't work. And it's whenever we looked into it, it's because they didn't put all the components together as we tell. So that's why we sell the SEO shield now as a bundled service because it just makes it so much easier for everybody. So I know what Marco is going to say I'm gonna say it for him first and then let him say the SEO shield works no matter what industry you're in what business vertical what type of project is local, regional, national, global affiliate e-commerce doesn't matter. Right. So yes, you can white-label because basically, you can just create your own landing page with services or products, but product bundles are whatever that you want to call it, that you can sell to your clients, customers, whatever. And then we can fulfill and you can, you know, bundle them or title them and put descriptions in any way you want. But the SEO shield will work doesn't matter what kind of project it is. So it's just about how you package it right? That's so that's what you're asking. Will we do it?

Well, that's what MGYBis we don't put branding on any of the delivered services. So you can absolutely white-label, you just need to come up with copy and packaging them how you see fit, which will speak best to your desired customer. Does that make sense? Do you want to comment on that Marco? So basically what he's asking for is MGYB. That his comment is, okay, well, I want someone that I know that I can trust. We've priced everything so that people can mark it up. And they can mark it up as much as they want. We've had people charge What was it? $2,000 for a syndication network. And that was a few years back. Remember that? Yeah. Yeah. He had the check. He had the check. Yeah, look, I just sold it. It was about two K. And it's $67. Back then I think it was sick 4760. So I forget what it was, but it was ridiculous. The market but it's what the market will bear. At any rate. What we've done at MGB is set up all of our products and services, what we use in

Our own projects with our own clients with whatever it is that we do, what we'll be using in the heavy hitter club.

And everything was placed in the store. And it's made available to the general public so that they can go and repeat what we're able to do. We don't just talk about the shit that we do. We don't just, you know, we don't go after these keywords that as I said, my eighth my 18 months old can rank for, we're going aftermarkets, right? We're going after the top. We're not shy about who we go after when you decide to go after Amazon. You're not shy about who you're going after he has yet to get after it. Point is whatever he's looking for. So whatever niche makes a difference, because it's once he orders it, and he tells us the niche is going to be tailored to that niche. That's right. We go in and we detail it we detail we add all of the information, all the necessary information, images, whatever it is that we need to do to package it for that client.

And in that niche, and you know, if I was just looking at our deep keyword research, and we've done the research, I can't remember how many, but it's across a bunch of niches. And I will continue doing more and more and more drive stacks. I mean, we've done drives from CBD oil all the way I think, to art supply.

So a couple of dancing classes hold number, yellow. So it does matter, Nigel, the niche makes no difference. What you have to do is, as Benny said, set up your own land, your own store, I said, Are your own way of selling them so that you write it up any way you want. But then also, you're going to just mark it up and then go buy it from MGYB. That's right. And maybe if you produce enough volume talk, I know one of the owners, By the way, Nigel in case you didn't know, so I can talk to him. And if you produce enough, right

If you're ordering enough, then your volume discount, yeah, I could talk to some of the owners and ask them for a coupon or a volume discount, or something that would make it even better for you to go out and sell it. I know the owners, they're a bunch of bricks, though. So the point is that whatever it is that you're looking to do, it's already set up for you to do it. Now I don't, I don't typically do this unless somebody is in the mastermind. But if you, I'm assuming you're on Facebook, pm me, private message me in Facebook, and I'll shoot you a link to schedule a brief consultation call with me for free, so that I can kind of guide you along kind of get a better idea of what it is that you're trying to do. Because if it's going to help us sell more stuff, and MGYBand helps you at the same time then I'm all about giving you know a consultation call to kind of help you think through this and develop a little bit of a plan for it. So message private message me in Facebook and I'll shoot you a link to my calendly link that you can schedule a call with

With me in the next week or two and I'd be happy to jump on a call with you for a few minutes. Okay.

last but not least, this is just a comment and it's right at the five o'clock mark. So thank you for this Nigel he says you bros you guys are just awesome because you answer everything I just got to drop some kudos so many marketers are just going for the money grab and I'm super happy. I found you guys before this gold rush madness and maybe living in a bubble, but it's like the Wild Wild West. Thanks, guys. Yeah, well, we certainly appreciate that. You know, this being Episode 284 we've been around the block for many years, and we're still here. So you know, it's not just about the money grab for us. We're very, very passionate about this. So thank you. Thank you, buddy. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you guys.

#Semantic Mastery

0 notes

daynamartinez22 · 5 years ago

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 284

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 284 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

So let’s start at the bottom work our way up, Chris. How are you doing there?

Yeah I’m doing excellent. The weather is good. Corona is like disappearing so like things open and stuff so quite happy here

Nice. Good stuff. Marco, how about you the weather?

Doing great. I’m wearing my Semantic Mastery schwag and do good man good. Good. Business is booming. Everything is moving on the right direction. Happy to be here. So good.

Cool. All right, Bradley, how you doing? How come your shirts not as worn as mine?

Great, I guess Other than that, anything else before we dive into questions?

all right here we go You guys should be seeing my screen correct

yeah all right we’re gonna start with Mohammed’s from seven days ago because I know I didn’t get a chance to answer this we’ll start right there

Would An SEO Power Shield Be Better For A YouTube Channel?

Is It Okay To Only Use Service Types Keywords In The Main Menu Of A Website?

What Are The First Steps In Powering Up An SEO Power Shield?

Nobody, okay.

How Would You Create An Ad Content As A Replacement For A Discontinued Affiliate Program?

That’s in that gray area. Yeah.

Is There A Difference In Results With Unique And Spun Content In The Drive Stack?

sounds like that was a dig against your daughter man. She’s 18 months but oh god.

Is There An Update To Twitter’s RSS?

Cool. Man, you know what? Oh, I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about updates.

Can You Submit English-Based RSS Directories As Non-English RSS Channels?

RankerX VS FCS Networker In Terms Of Linking Campaign

Yeah, Dadea runs rank correct. Okay. I that that’s I believe that says go-to tool. I don’t think he uses FCS.

Yeah, agreed. So yeah, again, just asking the free Facebook group, you know, the audio will can and can help you out with that.

What Is Theme Mirroring?

Alright, hopefully, that helped. Karen says no question. Just cheers for doing great work. Thank you, Karen.

And let’s see next. Show shut up and take my money.

We need more people like you, buddy.

Alright Bibi’s back for another set of questions this time there’s five

Would It Okay To Use A Simplified Slug To Avoid Keyword Stuffing In Breadcrumb Links?

All right, so BB I’ll let you slide with three earlier I’m not going to answer all five right now. Okay, I will answer one, and if there’s any time left I’ll come back.

What Should You With A GMB That Is Sharing A Map Pin With Other GMB?

Do You White Label Your Services?

Our own projects with our own clients with whatever it is that we do, what we’ll be using in the heavy hitter club.

With me in the next week or two and I’d be happy to jump on a call with you for a few minutes. Okay.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 284 published first on your-t1-blog-url

0 notes

localwebmgmt · 5 years ago

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 284

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 284 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

So let’s start at the bottom work our way up, Chris. How are you doing there?

Yeah I’m doing excellent. The weather is good. Corona is like disappearing so like things open and stuff so quite happy here

Nice. Good stuff. Marco, how about you the weather?

Doing great. I’m wearing my Semantic Mastery schwag and do good man good. Good. Business is booming. Everything is moving on the right direction. Happy to be here. So good.

Cool. All right, Bradley, how you doing? How come your shirts not as worn as mine?

Great, I guess Other than that, anything else before we dive into questions?

all right here we go You guys should be seeing my screen correct

yeah all right we’re gonna start with Mohammed’s from seven days ago because I know I didn’t get a chance to answer this we’ll start right there

Would An SEO Power Shield Be Better For A YouTube Channel?

Is It Okay To Only Use Service Types Keywords In The Main Menu Of A Website?

What Are The First Steps In Powering Up An SEO Power Shield?

Nobody, okay.

How Would You Create An Ad Content As A Replacement For A Discontinued Affiliate Program?

That’s in that gray area. Yeah.

Is There A Difference In Results With Unique And Spun Content In The Drive Stack?

sounds like that was a dig against your daughter man. She’s 18 months but oh god.

Is There An Update To Twitter’s RSS?

Cool. Man, you know what? Oh, I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about updates.

Can You Submit English-Based RSS Directories As Non-English RSS Channels?

RankerX VS FCS Networker In Terms Of Linking Campaign

Yeah, Dadea runs rank correct. Okay. I that that’s I believe that says go-to tool. I don’t think he uses FCS.

Yeah, agreed. So yeah, again, just asking the free Facebook group, you know, the audio will can and can help you out with that.

What Is Theme Mirroring?

Alright, hopefully, that helped. Karen says no question. Just cheers for doing great work. Thank you, Karen.

And let’s see next. Show shut up and take my money.

We need more people like you, buddy.

Alright Bibi’s back for another set of questions this time there’s five

Would It Okay To Use A Simplified Slug To Avoid Keyword Stuffing In Breadcrumb Links?

All right, so BB I’ll let you slide with three earlier I’m not going to answer all five right now. Okay, I will answer one, and if there’s any time left I’ll come back.

What Should You With A GMB That Is Sharing A Map Pin With Other GMB?

Do You White Label Your Services?

Our own projects with our own clients with whatever it is that we do, what we’ll be using in the heavy hitter club.

With me in the next week or two and I’d be happy to jump on a call with you for a few minutes. Okay.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 284 published first on your-t1-blog-url

0 notes

semanticmastery · 5 years ago

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 284

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 284 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

So let's start at the bottom work our way up, Chris. How are you doing there?

Yeah I'm doing excellent. The weather is good. Corona is like disappearing so like things open and stuff so quite happy here

Nice. Good stuff. Marco, how about you the weather?

Very nice. I have myself muted while I was doing some typing. Everyone watching live but just put the link for the Battle Plan for the early access list. Just click on that and get access when it comes out. We're not gonna roll over to you next. How are you doing today?

Doing great. I'm wearing my Semantic Mastery schwag and do good man good. Good. Business is booming. Everything is moving on the right direction. Happy to be here. So good.

Cool. All right, Bradley, how you doing? How come your shirts not as worn as mine?

Great, I guess Other than that, anything else before we dive into questions?

all right here we go You guys should be seeing my screen correct

yeah all right we're gonna start with Mohammed's from seven days ago because I know I didn't get a chance to answer this we'll start right there

Would An SEO Power Shield Be Better For A YouTube Channel?

so Mohammed asked Hey guys I was about to buy a multi-tiered syndication network for YouTube channel with no money site or anything just the channel but I saw your SEO shield sale with a she'll be better for a YouTube channel I'm leaning towards yes because of the entity building. You know, that's a really good question Mohammed as part of the reason I wanted to answer this because I don't know I've never ordered an SEO shield specifically just for YouTube channel. I've never tested that. Um, you know, the multi-tiered syndication networks work great for sending for YouTube, SEO because it helps to provide all you know all the really good stuff.

In your second-tier syndication and build it up that way, but there would have to be a focal point somewhere else for that entity. And they did this with an old page though, right? Yeah, I mean, you could build the @ID page but the ad this is this is where we get we go to Okay, so where's the ad Id gone? This is the YouTube channel then going to be also the @ID and how to how do we get the schema worked into the YouTube channel.

I mean, this is a test in the making. One of the things, why we went with the heavy hitter club, is because we want to test these types of things. So this is a great test in the making. And as a matter of fact, I already wrote it down on my notes, of things to do for the heavy hitter club is to start a YouTube video. See how we can work the entity around it. I mean, there's no reason why it can't be an s3 and why we can't tag it. From there, right use the @ID, and now I have to kind of figure out, and I'm not going to do this in a free forum, figure out how I'm going to build this entity around this YouTube channel.

The idea here is also to create geo posts on your main money site too, as well. So blog posts that talk about those areas where those points of interest are, right. So you create basically optimized posts, blog posts that are optimized for that particular location, and publish them and you can actually create location-based silos on your site. You can do it that way too. By the way, these can be like hidden blog posts, in other words, they don't have to be public. They're just used for SEO purposes.

Is It Okay To Only Use Service Types Keywords In The Main Menu Of A Website?

What Are The First Steps In Powering Up An SEO Power Shield?

For that silo, and then up and then all the links from inside that would link over to the corresponding pages and posts within that silo on your money site as well as what you Mir on to the G site, which is the same structure. Now, again, I don't always do that and the drive stack, because what I found for a lot of, you know, all I do is local. And so for most local projects, I'm able to mirror onto the G site and accomplish without having to drive do all the additional work in the drive stack. But in some cases, it does require it because I need the additional push. And so as I always talk about and we usually recommend, don't, you know, try to get the best results with the least amount of effort, right? So what I do is I mirror my money site onto the G site, and I do that very thoroughly. And then I use my G site as my link, building target embeds and link building targets and just smash the shit out of it with links and embeds all the time. And if I need an additional push, then I will mirror into the drive stack and do it but right now it's still open manual process on the mirroring work. We're so close guys to be able to offer the drive stack expansion service, inside MGB, but it's not available just yet. So that's why I kind of reserve that for only when absolutely needed, because of the manual component. But, you know, again, once that once we have the ability to do that in mg y, b, there's no reason why I wouldn't smear the shit anyway, you know what I'm saying? So, uh, so yeah, I think first of all theme mirroring is, the first thing you can do is to start building links to your drive stack and your G site. When you get it back. That's hands down. One of the first things I always do, but then while the links are being built, you can start to mirror you know, set up the theme mirroring on the site, as well as Dr. Stack if needed. And then once that's done, now you have additional link building targets for your next batch of links. Does that make sense? Comments?

Nobody, okay.

How Would You Create An Ad Content As A Replacement For A Discontinued Affiliate Program?

Cows up next to break the SEO questioning for a second. I have a sales copy. Question for one of you, this is probably going to be one for Adam. And or Hernan, then if you had the opportunity to place an ad right on the sales page of one of your competitors with no limitations to what it could say or how long it could be, what would you say? I'm an affiliate marketer and I plan on creating my own digital products similar to a competitor. Fortunately, I'm already ranking in spots 1234 some of my competitor's product keywords via review blog posts, they dropped their affiliate program, so I'm planning to just create my own product and cross-promote on those review posts. How should I word my own sales message to convert as many of my competitor's prospects as possible? Thanks, guys.

That's in that gray area. Yeah.

Is There A Difference In Results With Unique And Spun Content In The Drive Stack?

The next question was from Olaf. He says, Is there a difference in results with unique spun content in the drive stacks compared to just the same text with different titles and keywords? It's a good question. Marco. Sorry about that I was muted. No, we haven't seen any difference. That's why we just go with anything we can grab because it doesn't matter. Perfect. Do you see Seo? Hey, guys, when the shield is in place, generally speaking, how does it take? How long does it take to see effects? Do I simply throw links at it afterward? And can I update the NAP when I moved to another office in a different part of the city? Yeah, uh, how long does it take to start showing effects? It varies. It varies, like, at least my experience is it varies rather wildly between projects. Sometimes I'll see results like in a matter of days. Other times, it will be weeks and it really just depends. I honestly don't know what causes that maybe Marco can shed some light on that, but I know that I always see results. But it's a matter of sometimes, you know, sometimes it's quick. Other times, more often than not for me the drive stacks take several weeks before I see considerable movement from them. But as far as do, we already talked about the best practice which is next links mirroring your G site mirroring your drive stack, link building, and embeds those are hands down the best things that you can do.

sounds like that was a dig against your daughter man. She's 18 months but oh god.

It works incredibly well for at least the land business, I can imagine it works just as well for the house business, although that is certainly more competitive than the land business. But it will give you an edge over your competitors. Just remember what we talked about several times today already about how to power that thing up. Don't forget to try to mirror at very minimum mirror G site to match what your money site structure is and then embed your G site or excuse me your money website pages into your G site. And when you're ready, come join the mastermind because I've been doing training on how I do a lot of really cool things with the G site including tag silo. Well, that's money site stuff, but really cool stuff. And I'm so close now to have in my next kind of really big project live that I'm sharing with the silo structure, build out the in how I've seen mirrored everything in the mastermind and my next mastermind webinars next Thursday, and the site should be live by then it's taken me almost six weeks to build it. But anyway, you should definitely come to check it out. It will help your business I promise.

Is There An Update To Twitter's RSS?

Cool. Man, you know what? Oh, I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about updates.

Can You Submit English-Based RSS Directories As Non-English RSS Channels?

RankerX VS FCS Networker In Terms Of Linking Campaign

Okay, last question. I think RankerX versus FCS networker which is better for linking campaign understand that GSA is good for third-tier and up an FCS is good for second-tier whereas RankerX comes into play. I couldn't answer that BB. If you want to ask a question about link building tools, I would post that in a free Facebook group and you know, and you know, ask daddy are late builder kills he'll come in and comment on that and he's the one that can give you the best advice on that I don't run link building tools I haven't for at least five or six years. And I don't ever plan on running them again. So I can't answer that. Anybody else has any recommendations?

Yeah, Dadea runs rank correct. Okay. I that that's I believe that says go-to tool. I don't think he uses FCS.

Yeah, agreed. So yeah, again, just asking the free Facebook group, you know, the audio will can and can help you out with that.

What Is Theme Mirroring?

Now, there are some other things that you can add into those G site pages too. For example, if you mirror the same structure in your drive stack, which means when you buy a drive stack from us right now, it's for brand plus primary keyword Association. It's about building the entity. Once you get that you can clone that main folder, which clones everything within the folder, and then make that a subfolder of the main folder and then optimize all of the files within that subfolder now title that subfolder for one of your silos, right? So it's optimized for the same keyword. It's mirrored just like your site structure, then all the files within that particular folder can be edited and optimized for the same keyword set is that silo with all of the internal links, the links from the G site or the drive stack files, pointing back to your money site, the same corresponding silo pages and posts within that silo on the money site, and also to your G site that has now been mirrored. Does that make sense? That's when you can also embed your folders. So like again, top of the silo page on your money site has a mirrored top of the silo page on your G site. And now if you have a subfolder from your main drive stack that has been optimized for that particular silo, now you can actually embed that folder and the files in that G site page that make sense. So that becomes your link building target, the G stack or the G site, the drive stack, and the files and folders and files. All of those become your link building targets, not your money site because your money site is being all the links are being built to your money site through the G site and the drive stack.

So all you do is you hammer away at the G site and their drive stack files and folders. And you push all that relevance through to your money site without an actual physical HTML link pointing directly to your money site. That makes sense. So that's, that's the mirroring on a conceptual level. Again, we get into the nitty-gritty of this stuff, and either our bias Academy reloaded the mastermind or now even have a heavy hitter club. Is that correct? Marco?

Alright, hopefully, that helped. Karen says no question. Just cheers for doing great work. Thank you, Karen.

And let's see next. Show shut up and take my money.

We need more people like you, buddy.

Alright Bibi's back for another set of questions this time there's five

Would It Okay To Use A Simplified Slug To Avoid Keyword Stuffing In Breadcrumb Links?

All right, so BB I'll let you slide with three earlier I'm not going to answer all five right now. Okay, I will answer one, and if there's any time left I'll come back.

What Should You With A GMB That Is Sharing A Map Pin With Other GMB?

Mohammed says, Hey, guys, one of my real estate clients is moving to a new city and enlisted me to create the GMB in his old city. His realtor GMB shared a map pin with the brokerage I believe this may have affected our GMB impressions. But I don't have proof What should I do with the new one? Do I keep the address shared with his new brokerage or persuade him to move the pin to a new location? That's a good question. Now, I haven't done Local SEO For realtors in probably four years.

Make then you can get away with it. So in this case, the business name would be unique, the address would be the same, but then the phone number would be unique and the URL would be unique as long as you can achieve that so the address would be the same, but the business names are different. So for example, let's just use REMAX That's the last time I did a local SEO for realtors, It was for a REMAX brokerage so REMAX Warrington okay would be the name of the primary brokerage but then each individual realtor would have their name, slap, comma, REMAX, right or something like that. That's how you would do it that the business names are different, the addresses the same phone numbers were different. And the URLs were different because each one of the realtors had their own, you know, landing page or website or whatever. And that makes no problem. It's whenever you start to mix up two or more data points, that that causes ambiguous NAP issues. So hopefully that makes sense. Does anybody want to comment on that? Okay

Do You White Label Your Services?

Our own projects with our own clients with whatever it is that we do, what we'll be using in the heavy hitter club.

So a couple of dancing classes hold number, yellow. So it does matter, Nigel, the niche makes no difference. What you have to do is, as Benny said, set up your own land, your own store, I said, Are your own way of selling them so that you write it up any way you want. But then also, you're going to just mark it up and then go buy it from MGYB. That's right. And maybe if you produce enough volume talk, I know one of the owners, By the way, Nigel in case you didn't know, so I can talk to him. And if you produce enough, right

With me in the next week or two and I'd be happy to jump on a call with you for a few minutes. Okay.

#Semantic Mastery #Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 284

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