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firewoodfigs · 5 years ago

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letters to a young poet

Summary: Riza Hawkeye, a young, aspiring poet, exchanges letters with her fiancé, Roy Mustang during his time in the military academy. He attempts to write her poems and prose about life and love, and occasionally sends her presents to remind her of him. Like his boxers.

read on ao3

(a/n: (i) title is taken from Rilke's book. (ii) tw: the timeline of this is largely based on yet another man's battlefield, so there are brief mentions of racism here. (iii) I recommend reading on ao3 instead because... formatting issues, again xD (iv) original poetry at the end)

for @royaiweek 2020 - thank you to the lovely mods for organising!! 💖

~x~

“Promise you’ll write to me when I’m away?”

“Of course, Roy,” Riza drawls idly as she adjusts his coat and ensures that his tie is neatly in place.

“Thank you. I’m going to miss you terribly, you know,” he says, pressing a tender kiss to her forehead before stretching his arms out invitingly. Smiling, she leans in and allows herself to be crushed to his chest in a warm, firm embrace.

God, I’m really going to miss her, he thinks, as he inhales her scent - a lovely mix of gunpowder and peonies and old books - and incarcerates it in his memory.

Roy steps back to admire her pretty countenance properly. Pride and admiration swells in his heart, and he can't help but run his fingers gently through her flaxen tresses once more before resting them on her lips.

“Let me be your muse,” Roy declares with a triumphant grin, pressing a hand to his heart with a melodramatic flourish that earns an amused eye roll from his fiancée. “For parting is such sweet sorrow, and -“

“Shut up.” She pulls him by his tie to kiss him roughly, before flashing a wicked grin and kicking him out of the door. “Get going, you lovesick, histrionic fool.”

Riza throws his belongings out and slams the door as he stares at the wood longingly with an endearing pout.

~x~

June 8th

Dear Riza,

How doth your literary endeavours come along? I hope all is well with thee. Whenever I close my eyes, I see you Like a midsummer’s night dream, exquisite And when I open my eyes to sunlight I cannot wait to see you once again.

All my love, Roy.

~x~

June 12th

Roy,

Stop trying to imitate Shakespeare and force all your sentences into iambic pentameters. It makes me shudder - in disgust, not delight, lest you misconstrue what I’m saying.

Anyway, my literary endeavours are coming along fine. I’ve been spending my time reading some of the books you got me for my birthday, and for someone who writes so incorrigibly you sure do have impeccable taste. All is well on my end. What about you? How are you adjusting to the academy?

Thanks for the pressed flowers that you sent over, by the way. They’re surprisingly lovely, though I’m sure all credit goes to Vanessa’s guidance.

I also enclosed a scarf that I personally knitted for you in case it gets cold at night. Because you have an uncanny tendency to misplace your things, I embroidered a few water droplets in blue at the bottom for clearer identification (if you lose it I’m never making you anything ever again, this took me days to complete).

Hopefully, they serve as a reminder to you that you’re useless in the rain as well, so that you’ll refrain from doing anything reckless or stupid in my absence.

All my love, Riza.

~x~

Roy tears the package open with all the enthusiasm of a child opening his presents on Christmas morning the instant it lands in his hands. His eyes light up appreciatively at the lovely scarf, laughing at the tiny water droplets at the bottom that she’d added as a personal touch.

When he reads her letter and realises its intended meaning, though, an indignant frown makes its way to his handsome features.

Nevertheless, he dons it on immediately, relishing in the warm comfort and how it smelt like her, like flowers blooming in spring (even if his fiancée didn’t appreciate his poetic attempts, he very much liked to believe he was capable of using a simile properly).

June 16th

Dear Riza,

Thank you for the lovely gift, although your harsh words wound me terribly. Nevertheless, I understand that underneath your acerbic tongue lies a tender heart full of love, and I am a lucky man to be the sole recipient of it. I’m glad you liked the flowers. One day I’ll buy you a carful of them, I promise.

Things are going fine here. I’m adjusting well to the ridiculous sleep schedule (you’re the only person I know who willingly wakes up at seven in the morning daily), and with the rigorous physical training we have to endure I believe you’ll have a glorious set of washboard abs to admire the next time you see me.

I must say, though, the food here is pretty bad. Spinach quiche is pretty much the only edible thing, but this man - I think his name was Huggles or something. Sorry, Hughes - had the audacity to take the last piece of quiche right under my nose.

(Per your commands, though, I refrained from trying anything stupid.)

What’s even worse is the racial prejudice. The other day I saw an Ishvalan getting bullied by a trio of ugly men, but they left before I realised what was really happening… So I helped him out after that. I can’t bear it, to this day - they picked on him just because of his skin colour, for goodness sake! It was completely unwarranted.

It’s only been a week but I already miss you terribly. Can’t wait till I see you again.

All my love, which extends from one end of Amestris to Xing, Roy.

~x~

June 21st

Dear Roy,

Sure, keep deluding yourself however you like if it makes you happy. You’re not the only recipient, by the way - I made a cute little scarf for Hayate, too, who has replaced your ‘snuggling spot’ in my bed, as you like to call it. Between the both of you I sometimes can’t tell who smells worse.

Also, don’t be ridiculous - what would I even do with a carful of flowers?

I’m glad to hear that things are fine on your end. Waking up at seven is a wonderful thing, especially when you get to see the sunrise, no? I look forward to seeing those abs, though with your drinking habits I’m sure you’ll probably end up with a beer belly in the foreseeable future. Don’t drink too much.

I’m sorry to hear about the quiche. I’ll make you one when you’re back. If it makes you feel better, though, I’ve sent some cookies I made the other day to you as well. Express delivery, in case they go bad.

Also, even if you haven’t already punched the Hughes guy I can already envision you slamming your tray down on the table, turning around to scowl at him like a petulant child and competing with him in just about everything you do.

All I will say is this: relax, it’s just a bloody quiche.

Good to know that you did that! The Ishvalans most certainly don’t deserve such treatment. No one does, of course, but it’s frustrating that certain ethnicities still continue to be singled out and ostracised in Amestris, despite the state’s proclamation that it’s a cosmopolitan society accepting of different cultures and whatnot… Until then, we have to stand with them, stand up for what’s right, and -- oh, I don’t mean to ramble. Just know that I’m proud of you, Roy. Keep at it.

If it does make you feel better I suppose a tiny part of me does miss you too. Just the slightest.

All my love, Riza (not interested in your silly competitions) Hawkeye.

~x~

Roy blanched at the bag of cookies she’d sent him and the thought of Riza’s quiche. Cooking had never been her strongest suit, and while she was talented in many areas somehow all of that seemed to go away every time she entered a kitchen.

Nevertheless, it was Riza who’d painstakingly made them, and because he appreciates his fiancée’s efforts he vows to eat every single one of them even in her absence.

He bites down on a cookie apprehensively, and is pleasantly surprised to discover that it’s edible. It bears emphasising that this is an incredible feat for Riza Hawkeye - considering how she’d managed to almost burn the entire kitchen down when she tried to make a simple pasta dish for his birthday.

(Fortunately, they’d managed to extinguish it, but afterwards Roy mentally designated himself as head chef for the rest of their lives.)

Deeply touched by the gesture, he wraps one of his shirts to send back as a gift. The thought of her dressed in his apparel has him grinning like the lovesick, histrionic fool that Riza said he was.

June 26th

Dear Riza,

Don’t say that, I definitely smell better than Hayate. And I know for a fact that you love me, although maybe not as much as I love you -- my love for you knows no territorial boundaries.

You could curate your own gardens with a carful of flowers, I suppose. And we could… Well, smell the flowers and procrastinate together?

It is - the sunlight reminds me of you, and I appreciate that. A lot. I also haven’t been drinking, so don’t worry - these glorious abs are definitely en route to you.

Thank you for the cookies - they were delicious, and I look forward to your quiche when I return. Baby steps, alright? I hope the kitchen will still be intact when I come home.

… It’s sometimes creepy how well you know me… But I think you’ll be pleased to at least know that I became friends with Hughes, after we confronted said trio.

We also made a new friend today - Heathcliff! He’s the Ishvalan I told you about in my last letter. He told us he joined the military because he wanted to change and empower the people’s perceptions of Ishval and its culture from a point of leadership. I think that’s an admirable dream - one that I’d like to assist in, too. He’s been a great friend, and I can’t stand to see him be the recipient of so many pejorative remarks. It’s completely unjustified, and you’re absolutely right on that point.

I take that as an admission that you miss me ‘most ardently’ - have you been writing poems about me in my absence?

On that note, you’ll be pleased to know that I have a break on the 8th of July for a couple of days. Want to do something fun? I know you’ve been dying to check out that shooting range, and I’ve been training in the academy for my victory.

All my love, kisses and glorious abs, Roy

P.S. I’ve also enclosed a token of my own affection herein for you - hopefully it reminds you of me whenever you wear it.

~x~

Riza stared confusedly at the oddly-shaped lump that surfaced after she opened the package. After reading his letter she was expecting one of his shirts, maybe one of his button-downs that would’ve been perfect as an oversized sleeping top on her, but she certainly wasn’t expecting his…

Boxers.

His boxers, of all things. She holds it up to scrutinise it in its full glory, and it’s peppered with little puppies - his favorite pair.

To say Riza is surprised is an understatement. She’s not quite sure why he’d sent her his boxers or how she’s supposed to even wear it, but she chucks it aside in the laundry for him to retrieve it when he returns.

July the 8th. The date's circled in bold, bright red on her calendar.

She’d never admit this out loud to any living person, not even her best friend Rebecca. The only person who’d heard her let out an almost-giggle (almost, because Riza Hawkeye did not do giggles) in excitement was Hayate. Because God, did she miss him terribly, and true to his predictions he’d been her muse for quite a number of her recent poetic endeavours.

July 3rd

Dear Roy,

Whatever, you insane idiot. I miss you and I love you too. That is all.

For the record, the kitchen is still intact, and will continue to be so. My cooking skills aren’t that bad.

That’s great to hear. You’re an honorable and intelligent (this is questionable) man, Roy, and I would definitely like to see that kind of change happening. I hope Heathcliff is well, too - send him my regards.

… I refuse to lower myself to drawing smiley faces on my letters, but you’ll see one on July the 8th in person.

And yes, it would be nice to check out that shooting range, though let’s be real - we both know you can’t defeat me no matter how hard you try. I do live up to my namesake, after all.

All my love, Riza

P.S I don’t know if it was intentional, but I never knew you had a thing for me wearing your boxers. Unfortunately, they are way too loose for me and I won’t be wearing them any time soon. Your underwear and I eagerly await your return.

~x~

The 8th of July finally comes around. Everyone in the academy is astonished at just how fast Roy Mustang is capable of running. He might’ve been the golden boy, and he generally outran most, if not all, of them during their training sessions, but now he looked like his pants were on fire as he made a dash for the gate and boarded the first train in a sweaty mess.

Roy continues running like a madman after alighting the train, desperate to reach their home as soon as possible to explain his predicament. He certainly hadn’t intended to send his underwear over, and was sure that one of the other men must have done so as a practical joke on him.

(Fortunately for the culprit, Roy didn’t manage to identify who he was, but there would certainly be hell to pay when he did so.)

As if on cue, Riza opens the door with a beatific smile adorning her features. “I can hear you panting all the way from the other end of Amestris, Roy.”

He chuckles awkwardly, rubbing the back of his head in embarrassment. “Well, I’m excited to see you, for starters. And, uh…”

“You want your underwear back?”

“Yes, of course I do.” He pants, struggling to catch his breath while trying to formulate a coherent explanation. “Look, I swear it wasn’t deliberate - I intended to send you one of my shirts, and I definitely don’t have a thing for you wearing my boxers. I don’t know which idiot in the academy substituted my shirt for my underwear to sabotage -” She lets out a laugh. It's loud, unrestrained. Roy thinks it’s the most beautiful sound he’s heard in a month. “You really are hopeless, Roy. It’s fine. Defeat me at the shooting range, and you can have it back tonight.”

~x~

In the end, his favorite pair of boxers sits at the bottom of the laundry for the rest of the day, because Riza Hawkeye is an indomitable force of nature at the shooting range.

She does, however, have a poem written for him, and he’s so enraptured by it that he forgets all about the underwear fiasco. “I’m back home, ma chérie,” he whispers as he runs his fingers down the groove of her spine, as if he’s tracing constellations on the canvas of her back while they lay together on satin, hearts thrumming in harmony. “I’d like to keep holding you close, too -” he recites, but he’s quickly interrupted by her.

“You sound best when you don’t speak, Roy,” and with that Riza silences him with a fiery kiss that rouses an overwhelming conflagration in him.

One that can only be put out by her.

Roy grins delightfully into the kiss, all too willing to oblige. Her lips are an inviting chamber of unbridled affection and unsatisfied desire, and he finds himself exploring her eagerly, fingers tracing her sharp cheekbones in reverent adoration.

Riza responds in kind, trailing a hand down his shirt and notes, somewhat gleefully, that he has indeed returned with said glorious abs. She makes a move to untuck his shirt, humming to herself in amusement as she feels his bare stomach quiver beneath her curious palm.

He’s quick to make a comeback, though. Unwilling to be teased by her Roy draws her deeper into the kiss - she’s utterly incredible, he thinks, as he cards his fingers through her flaxen tresses - and he tastes traces of eggs and pastries and -

- and spinach?

“You made spinach quiche?” Roy asks curiously, breaking away from the kiss for the briefest of moments.

“What on earth,” she huffs. “Way to ruin the moment, Roy.” A scarlet blush makes its way to her cheeks - equal parts breathlessness from the vigour with which he kisses her, and embarrassment at being found out.

He laughs, and quotes yet another line teasingly. “Didn’t you say you’ll even listen to my silly moonshine?”

Riza scowls. “I do regret writing that now. Perhaps I will -”

“No, no, please continue writing more,” Roy pleads in earnest, and before she can make a decision he’ll live to regret he kisses her again with such an ardent love, such a fervent passion that it completely derails her train of thought.

The quiche rests in the oven, burnt and forgotten.

~x~

adieu, mon chéri. may you fare well. in my heart, you will always dwell. (won’t you please come home soon, or will it only be after june?)

you write to me, letters (hidden within are flowers) to abate my need for you. i knit scarves in a room candlelit;

holding a heavy weight within from empty spaces on satin. i’d like to hold you close again -- hurry, love, won’t you run to the train?

i’ll let you place your weight on mine oh, i’ll even listen to your silly moonshine (come home to me, darling my soul is aching in longing)

~x~

*moonshine: foolish talk or ideas.

#royaiweek20 #royai #royai fic #royai au #poetry #royai fanfic #rhyme #I tried LOL #my first time writing in first person oops :"D

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imaginaryculturepress-blog · 7 years ago

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In which we launch the first-ever Tales from the Pit story/review, and Why Even Try Launch “More Than”.

Hi, hello, and welcome!

My name is Skyler and the story I'm about to tell you shall include approximately twenty thousand words of insignificant information that's definitely not aimed at increasing my website traffic. ... Definitely not... ...Anyway... I'm trying to make this a regular type of post, as with all things on this blog; a sort of "concert story", if you will. It’ll mainly include photographer-orientated content such as issues that occurred whilst shooting, though I’ll attempt to add as much crowd and band information as possible. Perhaps now that I've gained the idea, I ought to start shooting a few things around the venue and whatnot to add to these posts. Maybe train stations and car rides with a Tumblr-esque theme, stray dogs and freeways at peak hour, and whatever else is deemed suitable. I needed a name for this segment, though, something memorable and preferably a reference of sorts. So I did what any Five Finger Death Punch fan would do and turned to their extensive catalogue of music to find something even remotely similar to my requirements. And then I realised: they have a live album called Purgatory: Tales from the Pit. I didn't feel "Purgatory" was the best heading, but "Tales from the Pit" had a nice ring to it. Shorten it to TFTP and you've really got something. Sort of. So I suppose we should restart this. Hi, hello, and welcome to Tales from the Pit! *Include all the above nonsense that did nothing more than waste your time and increase my Google search rankings. * ... Let's cut to the chase, shall we? T'was the Wednesday before the With Con show when I found myself at a fish and chips shop, surrounded by drunk dudes and dogs. There were VBs on a table and a pregnant American Bulldog wagging its tail, making me question all my life decisions. Why was I at this place? Why am I a concert photographer? Why does nobody tour in Perth? What is the impact of the dog’s pregnancy on the Australian economy? Etcetera. I had one show coming up, the aforementioned one, this Saturday at Red Lighting Paradise (HQ). Plus a potential Placebo show at Perth Arena. (It later turned out that the Placebo pass was all mine. It also turned out that the concert was cancelled. Read more on that here.) But besides that, I was free and bored out of my mind. That’s the thing about concert photography; you’re either working until your brain explodes - shooting, emailing, arguing with the Internet, editing - or sitting around sending press requests. Or blogging. (School disclaimer: yes, I also study… …when I’ve no editing to work on…) And considering that in the last six months I’ve only covered nine shows and almost Placebo, that’s a lot of wasted – sorry, school-orientated - time. (Update: another show happened last Friday, Homebrand's "Shelf" launch show.) I soon returned home to a stable wifi connection to find a photographer’s favourite message: “Would you be able to cover our launch show this Friday? Sorry for the late notice!” T’was from one of my favourite local acts, Why Even Try, known for their (positively) insane sets and marvellous music. Supporting them were Grey States, Shedhead, and Crown Loser, three bands I hadn’t previously photographed but was extremely excited for. The late notice didn’t bother me, though I was left trying to back out of prior arrangements. Before long, we’d confirmed the shooting arrangements and everyone resumed with the launch show preparations: set list confirmations, instrument things that I’ve no clue about ‘cause my job is to just click a camera button, etcetera. The only problem I seemed to have (aka that my parents seemed to have) was the two-shows-in-a-row ordeal. The closest I’d gotten to this was in June, with the Boris the Blade Warpath Weekender on the 3rd and SOTA Festival two days later. Not to mention that those shows were back when I had lower self-expectations and everyone was used to waiting up to a week for photos. Nowadays, it was show day on Friday and photos by Sunday at the latest. But two shows in a row? Having to go from prep to travel to shooting to travel to sleep to editing to prep to travel to shooting to travel to sleep to editing again? Whilst suffering from an extremely annoying cold that left me coughing with every breath? This would be interesting. Friday came soon enough. T'was my first day back at school after a week of feeling sick as all hell, and the amount of work I received was definitely more than what was taught. "Test next Monday!", "This is due, erm... today!", "This is worth twenty percent of your overall mark!", "Don't forget your bibliography!", the list could go on forever. Concentrating on all those tasks was nearly impossible. There were two shows coming up and I still felt like crap. I made a mental note of everything I had to do. Prep gear, charge batteries, ensure the lenses are clean, pack, DON'T FORGET THE MEMORY CARDS, bring earplugs, and, of course, clear enough space on my laptop to load the couple thousand photos. (Photographer rant: why do laptops have such limited space and why do raw images take up so much of it?! And why aren't the affordable hard drives Mac-compatible?!) The evening rolled around rather quickly. Before I knew it, I was outside HQ, wondering why, exactly, there was a razor blade on a picnic table. As always, there were young children around with their parents, skateboarding, scootering, and just generally being really freaken loud. The weather was nice, though. T'was that perfect winter-going-onto-spring style that you usually found around there. And everybody knew each other. Well, most people did, whilst I just stalked everyone online. (Oh sue me.) Soon enough, we found ourselves inside the venue and deciphering gear. The latest edition to my kit, a beautiful 85mm f1.8 Nikkor, was my go-to lens, and I anticipated it to perform similarly to how it did at the Ambleside show. Mounted on my entry-level DSLR, the Nikon D3400, I thought I had the best setup ever. Key word: thought. The lights dimmed shortly after, and Crown Loser - aka James and Co. - were onstage, facing a crowd of fans - aka friends - and a lens that was failing to focus - aka my heavily praised 85mm f1.8 Nikkor.

When you consider it, concert photography is rather simple: you choose a subject, have your lens focus on it, press the button on the camera, and spend thirteen hours trying to save the image the next day. But when said lens cannot focus on said subject, you my friend are fucked. Because, no matter what fancy Tumblr aesthetic you were "going for", a blurry photo is a blurry photo, and a blurry photo is shit. So I could've taken a thousand fuzzy images and made them greyscale before trying to convince the band that it was "supposed" to look like that, but I wasn't about to. I knew they'd see right through it - even my grandmother would. The problem was, I hadn't realised my lens issue automatically. It wasn't until half way through CL's set that I finally noticed that the pixels were blending into a blurry mosh pit. (That made no sense but anyway...) Was my lens dusty? Dirty? Fucked? Had my friends pulled some crude joke on me at school? Oh, that's right - I don't have friends! (I'm joking, I've around three...ish.) (I also don't usually take my gear to school.)

So I had to go clean it. Except that didn't help. Nothing helped. I messed with my ISO and threw manual mode into a frenzy. Maybe it had something to do with the fogginess? That sometimes happens. The venue either uses smoke machines to create better light illusions (which are useless if you're employing green and red lighting anyway) or has a large number of people in a small space sweating like crazy. , it created fog and wouldn't be helpful. Of course, said fog would disappear soon enough, but that's the thing: fog wasn't the problem. So what was the issue? I was fucked if I knew! I continued changing my settings and attempting new angles. I made more trips to my equipment and I wouldn't blame anyone in the audience for wanting to kill me for that, because let's face it: nobody appreciates the idiot who keeps interrupting your viewing pleasure every five minutes due to lens issues. Or angles. Or memory cards. Or batteries. Or - you get the point. It was a frantic set. I managed to get a minuscule nine photos out of the entire thing, which was disappointing but better than nothing. The band was amazing, of course. I don't know a lot about music (besides how to photograph and headbang to it) but they did really freaken well, delivering a dynamic, memorable set. I'd say something even more generic such as "the crowd seemed to enjoy themselves immesely" but if you know that crowd, and if you're reading this then you probably do, they're not exactly fussed as long as they can jump around and yell random crap. (Which, quite frankly, is the best type of audience.)

As they were playing their final song, Dion said, in the way he always does, "SHEDHEAD FUCKING SUCK!" And who was up next? You guessed it - Shedhead.

With my ineffectual lens still ineffectual, the band took to the stage, delivering a magnificent set that had the whole crowd headbanging and screaming inside jokes.

I decided to swap my gear at some point during their set, as evident in the photos. For comparison, here's a shot of their (extremely talented) (I need new adjectives) lead singer and guitarist, Alex, taken with the 85mm:

And from roughly the same angle with a 35mm:

There's obviously quite a difference, as you'd expect. It's always of great appreciation to have various lens sizes, for sometimes you're after full stage shots or landscape full-body shots and other times you want close ups, but unfortunately I didn't have that pleasure for the majority of this show.

I'm not about to lie: it pissed me off. It truly did. You've probably realised that by now. Here I was, being expected to take (relatively) professional(ish) photos, depending on this bloody combination of glass and plastic Nikon dare call a lens, and it was completely failing me. (Did I mention that it was an excess of $500? Yup.)

Now, I know that most of you photographers out there will be scoffing at me, tired of my complaining and thinking something along the lines of, "It's not about the gear you have, but how you use it." Well, that's a valid claim. It is. But this usually comes from someone who either shoots with multiple lenses, or some smart ass who doesn't even do photography. You have to go based on what the bands are after, what they typically end up posting. You send them twenty-something photos, and they'll use a couple for profile photos and some for their social media. And which ones are used for social media? Predominantly closeups.

So, if the band you're shooting for is (potentially indirectly) after zoom-ins and your 85mm is broken, you my friend, are, as previously stated, fucked. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it for the rest of the show except sit around and weep or take out your old 35mm.

But hang on, Sky! Don't you have a 50mm?

I wished I did. (Note: I purchased one soon after this gig. Like, the next day. I'll get to that in my next post on the With Con show; it was quite the drama.)

So stuck in those photographical Down Days I remained. (See what I did there? No? Go educate yourselves here.) The band continued playing adroitly, and before I became accustomed to shooting with the 35mm again, their set was over.

Halfway through.

During the intermission, I came up with a game plan: shoot the first song or two with the 85mm and hope to capture a useable image, then swap over to the 35mm.

Grey States (who I always thought were Greystates) were soon up, and I was faced with a new issue: someone - a band member's father, most likely - was Skyping a relative to show them the entire set. Whilst in the photographer spot. (Is it just me or is there an unspoken rule at HQ regarding the corner where the stage and pit meet? Like, that lil' gap? Isn't that for photographers? And, if it's a really popular band, for extreme fans as an addition to the front row? Photographers, what're your takes on this? Aren't we supposed to get stuck in that section?)

And I get it; a former member of Green Day was performing. But move out of the fucking way! If you want evidence of the set, you've got these professional(ish)(not really) photos to display. Send them to those relatives. Do what you want with them (just offer a bit of credit for ya gal here). Skype later, yeah? I was probably in the way the entire time regardless. (Side note: I can imagine that relative just saying something along the lines of, "Ko je ona budala što uvjek stoji ispred kamere? Ošni ju, jebo ju konj!" Assuming they're Bosnian. Which they most likely aren't.)

Just stay out of Sheldon Cooper's spot.

As for the band, well, damn. They delivered an incredible set, incorporating magnificent instrumentals and musical creativity. (Has anyone realised just how little I know about music and musical terminology? It's rather ironic. Comment some new words that you usually use to describe music.)

Why Even Try were soon playing, and by this point I was through with my 85mm. It wouldn't focus, it wouldn't photograph, it wouldn't function the way it was supposed to. So the 35mm it was. Back to getting ultra close to people, apologising waaaay too much, doing what I'd do anyway and taking shots from the stage, suffering, etcetera. All whilst listening to a riveting set and trying not to dance.

Honestly though, the guys were a prime example of why the Western Australian music scene isn't dead yet; their performance was dexterous and exuberant, making for a convivial night that may or may not have resulted in some pretty cool photos (if I do say so myself). "More Than" is definitely worth checking out, just as all their songs are. All the bands' Facebook links will be listed later on in this post, so leave them a like and listen to their music.

And that was that.

MUSIC SUMMARY:

Crown Loser: incredible/5

Shedhead: fuck yes/5

Grey States: outstanding/5

Why Even Try: 69/5

PHOTOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY:

Lenses: kill me now/5

Camera: for the price I paid, I'm not allowed to complain/5

Lighting: if I had the money I would change the venue's entire lighting setup/5

Editing: time consuming/5

My sanity: nonexistent/5

These aren't real ratings? Well... it's not exactly a "real", "generic", "stereotypical" music blog; one moment we'll be discussing shows, the next we'll be reviewing records and considering the environmental impacts of veganism and how minimalism influences tour life. All whilst poorly referencing lyrics and incorporating weird metaphors and Shakespearean terminology. I don't understand it either.

So that was Friday. Up next: Saturday.

No shit, Sky.

Also up next: the With Con show. On the aforementioned Saturday.

Stay tuned.

Until then, go listen to all the bands mentioned in this post. Find their Facebook links here:

Why Even Try

Grey States

Shedhead

Crown Loser

Live long and headbang, xx-Skyler Slate

#bands #livemusic #gig #concert #review #concertphotography

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hayleycanalscapstoneblog · 3 years ago

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Journalism Research: Interview with Emily Allen from the Mountain State Spotlight

Hi, I don't know if I could hear you. Sometimes I have an issue with zoom where I don't get the other person's audio so if it doesn't pop up, I can always call you instead. Okay, wait, try now.

What about now?

Yeah, I can hear you.

Okay, good. Cool. Awesome.

Yeah. How are you doing?

Doing? Well, how are you?

I'm good. It's a little early for me.

Yeah, it's weird. Like, I've never had to use interview questions written by somebody else. But because it's like a research project with a bunch of people. We're kind of like, given our blueprint for this.

And what is this for your in your senior or your graduate? I'm a senior, and it's for my capstone class. So we're doing a big collaborative project, kind of to help us get an idea of what getting a job is going to be like, once we leave.

Sure. Yeah. Big world. Yeah, for you.

How long ago did you graduate?

Um, I graduated from the University of Minnesota like 2018.

Okay, cool.

I'm glad I'm talking to somebody who was recently here.

Yeah, no, it's still fresh in my mind.

Yeah. Are you from Minnesota?

No, we moved around a lot. But I did school up there. So I kind of stayed in the Midwest before I got my job in West Virginia.

Yeah, cool. I got you. Well, I'll jump into it, because they gave me a lot. But you don't need to like elaborate if it's a pretty basic question, just because, I mean, they really just gave me quite a list. And can I record?

Yeah, yeah, totally. Thanks for checking.

Yeah, in North Carolina, you like don't technically have to ask people. But whenever I'm talking to somebody out of state, I don't want to know, you know, I think just in general, too. It's good practice to let them know if you're on the record, you're recording.

And it's an easy way just to be like, Can I quote you?

Yeah, true. Yeah.

Yeah. The weirdest people will have like, you know, the need to say no, like, managers. Yeah. Well, apparently, if you work for Taco Bell, you can't do interviews. I found out so.

Okay. Yeah, that's a couple of corporations.

Anyways, so how would you classify the type of journalism you do? Would you say it's like watchdog journalism, civic journalism? I'm just curious what specification specification you give it.

Um, I think watchdog and civic are both good terms. I mean, I should clarify. So I've been here with balancing spotlight and since June, and it's a nonprofit, and I think both those adjectives work well for it. Yeah. But I daily newsrooms before it. So I always think, with the jobs that I've had, it's been a civic duty. But this is the first time that we've really, for me, done, you know, kind of the watchdog accountability, not just quoting people what they say. But following up and adding extra content and verifying.

That's really cool. And that's kind of the type of journalism I want to get into myself. So watchdog civic, nonprofit, more or less?

Yeah, I'm really bad at like the adjectives that come with this because I literally to paper radio and now, I'm in a nonprofit. I think all those are accurate and when there's like a description on our website, I mean, I, I do I think personally, my job is more community based to I don't know what that term. But I mean, it just goes beyond press releases and press conferences and basic interviews. Yeah, I don't know how to grab that. I'm probably not making sense.

No, that that totally makes sense. Yeah, yeah. I was talking to some people at the devil strip last year. And they're a co op, so very, like community based. And just got a strong sense of what that means for them. Like, knowing the readers in person created a lot of that meaning. So what motivates you to do this type of journalism?

Um, different things on different days, I think. I mean, right now with the job I have, so I'm kind of an out state reporter. I don't cover you know, Charleston, I go out like I was in Dodd Ridge County yesterday, which is extremely rural and farther north. And I think it's really just a, I like talking to people that I've never met before. I like dealing with strangers. I like, you know, learning new things. And even when the job gets really hard, and I'm asking really, like rough questions, and I'm dealing with, kind of hard to interview, you know, public officials, I think I always think back well, I wouldn't want to stop what I'm doing. Because tomorrow or next week, I'm going to go meet so and so or I'm going to go here this. I think it's that kind of a thing.

Yeah. So the base is like in Charleston?

Yes. Yeah, we don't have we're all on the boat for now, because they took off during a pandemic. And I've been here since June. But we're all in Charleston. Yeah. But we travel out for things as necessary. I'm traveling every week, so Okay, mileage is great. Yeah. Do they give you gas? Yeah, yeah, mileage we get reimbursed. So I used to work for public broadcasting. And it was the same way that you got a safe car. And it's kind of awkward, whatever works. on devices in the middle of nowhere where we can't get cell service or anything. to step up, yeah.

One of the one of the questions they were wanting us to ask is like, what other forms of journalism you've been involved with, and then like, kind of how long you've been out in the field. Just what that journey has looked like for you?

Sure. Um, so I graduated in 2018. And immediately after that, like, I didn't even walk the stage. I just went to North Dakota, because I got a job at the Grand Forks Herald, which they're still daily, they stopped printing after I left, they do a Sunday edition and a Wednesday edition. But when I was there, they printed every day, which is like amazing, like just that, that that kind of thing can happen. I covered city government for Grand Forks, which is the city in North Dakota, but across the river, we had East Grand Forks in Minnesota, they also covered their government. And I helped with state house coverage, and sometimes regional stuff, but not a lot. I really just stayed where I land. And then I applied to report for America, which is what I still am in. And they hooked me up with a job in West Virginia, which is West Virginia public broadcasting. So I was full of yours, and I covered Southern West Virginia, sort of the same thing I'm doing now I'd go out there and then I also helped cover the State House. So the legislative session, the radio did well they put me on TV during the session, which wasn't great for me. So fun. And then this summer, my report for America term ended so two years, and I reapplied and got in here with the spotlight club and I'm doing less Statehouse coverage obviously it's I think what's really cool about us is we're not daily, so there's no paper to fill. There's no air show to fill. It's just the website, we do, I think we try to do like two to three stories a week. So it's regular content, you know, if something needs more time, or editors are pretty cool about understanding that and doing whatever it takes to better story out. I think what's also cool too is even though I'm just online exclusively, and that's sort of a thing, we let newspapers and radio stations and whatnot, republish our stuff for free. So sometimes, like I'm in a paper on the other side of the state and you know, I don't work with synthetically maybe.

Yeah, that's really cool. So, so like fully digital, with exceptions.

Yeah, I mean, it's up to that, like public broadcasting. They put a lot of our stuff on their website. I work with Douglas soul. He does a bunch of stuff, but he's mostly economic development. But he did this really big investigation into a sheriff's department in Rowan County, which is maybe an hour from here more rural, and their local paper ran it. So they give it an S run on our website, like people would have seen it, but maybe not a lot of people who live there. But because their paper chose to republish it, like that's something that their community is listening to and adhering to and talking about. Yeah, it was a tangent.

No, it's very interesting. So would you say you guys are local, or state level?

Yeah, I think Well, I mean, I'm here's local journalists. But it is weird because I don't live in a lot of the communities that I'm going to so I'd say state level. Yeah. We I mean, we have a lot. A lot. We're a small team, but we cover Charleston's I guess it's kind of locally based. I think it just depends. But state probably more. So we're not like local, local, or local.

Yeah, I was working for app voices. And I think they have an office up there. But I felt the same way. Because it like feels sort of local, but then, you know, we're not actually reporting on like the town we're in, so much as a regional thing. Okay, so what what would what would you say your specialty is currently?

Um, you mean like skills or what we put out or like you're...

like the topic you report on.

I'm kind of all over the place. Just because not eat is like, I think they call me community watchdog or something. So really, I mean, I pay attention to city council meetings, county commission meetings from where I'm at, or I travel, and I kind of just whatever they're talking about, we'll dive into. And sometimes I'll take something that's happening on the state level, or something that someone else has covered. And I'll bring it into a community and cover what's happening there. So like, it's hard to just like, explain that way. But through by way of example, like we had the huge opioid trial against the three big distributors in Huntington, but it happened in Charleston. So that was, I mean, nationally renowned, the state level news story, but there are like, hundreds of other smaller West Virginia communities that have lawsuits, and nothing's happening to them. So we that story, and I went to Mingo. County, on the Kentucky border, West Virginia, though, and just talked to them about what the opioid epidemic looks like out there. So that kind of a thing, just is I kind of cover all sorts of things, but it just has to have a really community that's chosen.

Yeah, that makes sense. So which, like areas specific qualifications or like journalistic qualifications, would you say are important to have like, for your kind of job?

Um, a lot of things, I think. I mean, being able to, I mean, organizationally, I like I think being organized is important, and being able to plan and stick to the plan of what you're about to report. But I think in terms of reporting, I don't want to just say interviewing, because that's really broad, but like, you know, being able to, you know, knowing how to interview public officials and people who are supposed to serve the public and holding them accountable, but also knowing how to interview like normal people. Because I especially like in our newsroom, and I'm really like, down with this, including, just like regular West Virginians who are impacted about things or like, curious about things you're concerned about things is really important to our work. Because it's something that people can relate to. So I think it's really important to know, like, how to identify real people in a way that's not like exploitive, and like, there are tons of ways to do it. It just depends on the context, but also knowing how to talk with them and being respectful, but getting the best story that you can. Yeah. So in terms of interviews, I think those two things are important public records, laws, even a daily journalism, if you're just aware of that as an area, it's really important. I would still like the more that I ease into this job, the more I learned about public records laws and how that works, but I think it's important just to do whatever you can to get whatever information is out there. And different information from what you know, other outlets might be able to get just by resources. And I think it's not really a skill but something that's really, really important, especially if you're a statewide news organization covering local rural communities keeping up with local news, because even though it's like, strapped like there are tons of local papers still throughout West Virginia. So just taking like an hour or two every day, just to Know what's happening in places and keeping tabs on that. I think it's I don't know if it's a skill, but I think it's really important to any job but this kind of specifically.

Yeah, I feel like that'd be a good like qualification or like, just habit to have doing that kindof work. Do you count yourself as like part of the target audience of the newspaper?

Like, am I a reader for Mountain State spotlights?

Yeah, yeah. Or like would you be even if you weren't working for them? I think so. I mean, it's weird because like, they're extremely new and we just celebrated a year but I've only been here since June. So I was like, I don't know if they were targeting me, but I was a reader and I benefited from their coverage before I came over here. Sure. I think I mean, I think we just target like West Virginians. I think this whether it's to inform them or to let you know somebody living in a community know what's going on in that community.

Do you do like digital? multimedia yourself?

Um, yeah, I guess we I don't have a camera. Like I've been I've taken public broadcasting. We learned a little bit on photography. So it some of that. I think it's important to be able to have some kind of art company in your work, especially digitally. Sorry, I have a cat.

I got this cat at a gas station. rehabilitating her and she's great, but she likes to climb the window screens and she's not ready to get out into the real world.

Did you find her there?

Yeah, yeah, we found her at a gas station and just took her and I'm very fortunate that she's healthy and well, she had fleas.

Via journalism, yeah, I mean taking photos, knowing what you're. And sometimes I think, especially if you're a reporter, and you're starting out, you don't have a lot of control about how your website looks like. So just knowing generally like small things that can make that more engaging, we're lucky we have a really, I think we have a really easy to follow a website, like local newspapers, despite like the quality of their work being really good, like, the websites can be really old. And it's just unfortunate because it's not as compelling or engaging to some people. But just knowing simple things that can make that look good. Like breaking up the copy with sub headers, like an easy headline, the kinds of sentences layout, I think that those things are important, too.

Yeah. So would you say your newsroom? is like, actively campaigning for more digital, like multimedia along with the work? Or is it just like if you can do it, go ahead and do it?

Like we? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a we're all pretty. Like we write we make sure we find our art, we come up with the headlines. Something, it's kind of like, it's a lot because nobody signs up for it. But it is really important. They can come up with our social media copy to like, what are tweets going to say a bunch of technical stuff, that I don't know the words, but like when you see an article on Twitter, like making sure that paragraph a little light one under it is it fits in it makes sense. And it's the accurate characters and with like Google searches, we already do that. And I think it's important because you don't have a paper to fill. It's not like this is the first place typically where people are going to see us. So making sure you can do all you can to build that out. Is is important to us. And it's been important since I started I don't think anybody's like fighting to do that. I mean, obviously better at the more time goes on.

Yeah. Okay, so to pivot away from Digital journalism. And kind of back to something you were saying earlier about, like representing just an ordinary people as well. Do issues of inclusivity and representation come up a lot in your work.

Coverage?

Yeah, for coverage, or like, for, just like the general ethics of what the organization is trying to achieve?

Yeah, I mean, it's so it's weird, just in general, because we don't have an office. So we meet regularly over, we don't have to, because we did have those conversations in my last two jobs. But I remember it was always something that happened in the physical workplace. It is, I mean, when we're individually, I guess, as a newsroom, that's not something that we haven't had a lot of that yet. But when I'm working on copy, and I assume like, I guess I can just be myself, when my editor is looking over something, and we're planning who we're going to reach out with, I think that comes up. And I think for any story. I mean, you want to talk to somebody who, you know, has a compelling story, and is going to be easy to read. And you know, obviously there's somebody worth quoting. But you also want somebody who's representative of what, you know, the thing you're counting on is so if it's like the opioid epidemic, you want to talk to somebody who's been dealing with substance use disorder, if it's like racial inequity, or inequality, like you want to talk to somebody who's on the other end of that you don't want to interview like, just a bunch of white people at like a Black Lives Matter protests. So sometimes, that's common sense. Because it's being you know, taught to us that it is something that when we're planning stories, we make sure to the best of our ability, and sometimes there's a time crunch. You know, to the best of our ability, we make sure we talk to people who are you know, can actually speak to what you're recording on, which is why I think that, you know, the importance of like, the like regular person is so important, because public officials can say they're doing whatever they want, solve these problems. I mean, they're not experiencing

Yeah. How do you? How do you make sure that you're humanizing people and not like tokenizing them?

I think that's a really good question that like, I get really anxious whenever I run a story with because it's super important to have regular people, but I'm also really scared. Like, and maybe this is like, thinking too highly of myself. But like, I've seen how you know, in daily journalism, if you're doing these crime stories, where you run some of these mug shots, and their name, years later, when they're doing well, they can’t get a job because of it, you know. Also Yeah, tokenizing is dehumanizing. I think it just, I mean, obviously, you want it to be a newsworthy story and something worth reporting on. So if it's a topic that's important, make sure the person that you're talking to, is fully aware of what you're going to say about them. Because they there's no reason to do gotcha journalism with a normal person. Um, but also make sure like when they're consenting, they know what they're consenting to. And like don't talk them out of like speaking with you, but How to like just, I don't know. So for the same Mingo county story with the opioid epidemic, I mean, we did talk to people who were in recovery from substance use disorder. And they work on this quick response team, like the language differs from state to state, but these are the people that you know, after an overdose happens. Typically they work for the health department or, you know, emergency response, and they go out there and they try to connect the person was overdosed and has been saved to like treatment options. So like a recovery home or inpatient, outpatient, and they just give them resources to keep up with them. So somebody in that team was dealing with recovery. And I mean, I was nervous, but I also felt confident speaking with her, but she was very well, but she was saying, and she'd done this, like, you know, interviews kind of before. And she's in a, you know, better place, and she's aware of what her name being out there means. So I just think it's important to have people like that I think something else that's really important that newsrooms at our newsroom like, I mean, I don't know if we're perfect because you know, he can sometimes you just have to be told you're doing it wrong to understand that so far, we're really good at people first language. And it really it just depends on when you're talking to someone how they wish to be described, but you know, you don't say, like an addict, you say somebody is dealing with addiction. Rather, you say somebody who's dealing with substance use disorder. It just depends. So speaking about people as people first, you know, when you're dealing with jails or prisons, like incarcerated, people aware, versus inmates, I think that's really important for treating people like and I don't know if like, readers who aren't dealing with this issue, notice that kind of stuff, but I think it does make a difference. And, I mean, it kinda reminds people that you're talking to people?

Yes, no, definitely really important. Yeah, I feel like I, I definitely noticed that in stories when I read them, for sure.

Have you personally encountered hate groups or hate speech? In your reporting or while reporting?

Oh, um, I have not. I mean, I think members of hate groups who sometimes you go to events and there but I have not had the opportunity to cover that. At this point. I know, people who have I know it sucks and their concerns, but that's not something that I have a lot of.

Do you think other watchdog journalists like? Is that something that they frequently would deal with? Or?

I think it depends. So I'm in reporting for America. And they are in for four or five of us in the state. I'm not sure. So most of those are in my organization here. There's one reporter in Morgantown where WVU is and he works for 100 days in Appalachia, which is another really good. They're good. They prefer to but he covers I think his beat specifically is white supremacy. But he's done, you know, he goes out and talks to the covers, that kind of thing. So he's exclusively that and additionally taking pictures for other stuff, cuz he's a really good photographer. I mean, he certainly brings like a watchdog aspect to it. And I think it just depends. I mean, there's so many things to cover with that kind of washed up. I like that is something that definitely should be covered and needs to be covered for just in general. But I don't know if anybody in my organization, I'd have to go back. I definitely know their stories really good comes up. But that exclusively not not yet for me, but I can't speak for my colleagues.

I still think it's especially with because I went to school in Minneapolis. So there were I interned at the paper up there and they had a lot of coverage. When, you know, when these protests were happening after the police killed George Floyd. Yeah, there were groups that were actually coming out here that were not involved with that at all. And so these people that I used to intern with had to learn very fast what Voodoo boys were and yeah, they're still covering some of those criminal trials. So it's just interesting. I still think it's being covered now and I think I it's definitely something where we live in West Virginia, Appalachia. In general, but it's not something that I've dug into, like, I just read about it, and I go, oh my god, that's terrible. Yeah.

Yeah, maybe I'm just associating it with a few years ago, cuz there's a few incidents like at our university when I like first came here. And I feel like I was feeling it more on a local level, whereas, uh, not so much anymore. But yeah, it's definitely, of course still there.

Okay, well, would you say? I mean, if you don't have the experience, like having encountered it before, I don't know if you'd know about the ideal way to address it. But have you heard from any colleagues, how they would go about addressing and countering hate speech while reporting?

It's not really a conversation we've had I mean, I know in general, like in classes, I've had an experiences I've had, I think it's true, the lot of things. If it's, I mean, because like, you know, when you ask if we take a stance, like all the way back, like we don't side with people other than, you know, our readers and what's best, but I do think it's pretty, like, universal, that, hey, groups are wrong, and some of these things are bad. offensive and, and just hateful. So I mean, I think and I have no experience in this, but just, especially with things like vaccine misinformation in the election. It's important, I mean, to cover it, and to let people know what's going on, but to not validate it. Yeah. Like, I don't have a lot to elaborate on it. So I haven't had to deal with that. Yeah, I don't know what the best way to do. But I think it's really important just to, you know, somebody says something, like not just running something, because it's a good quote, because it could be hateful, and it might be harmful to your readers. Just in general, like I assume that applies that kind of thing, too. But I was like the election or mental health or, I mean, just anything, like just being responsible about what you run and not running it just because it's catchy, but just making sure that it's important. Yeah, so not validating what they stand for is important. You're governing that. Yeah.

Okay. Thanks for teasing that out with me. I guess like, I only have two more questions, but do you have like a professional position that you're like, aspiring to fill?

Um, I really like what I do. Now. I really, I mean, I just have a I have a cool job, I get to drive out to places and talk to people I haven't met before and learned a bunch of things I don't know. But also, at the end of the day, when I put out a story that just looks good, and it feels good. And I feel like I've got things different from other outlets. It feels really important. I'm like, I am doing something that makes a difference. Yeah. So I don't know I like what I do. Now. I I want to keep being a reporter. I think especially in this industry to I don't know I there's so many people, I do just want to get into like national stuff after this. It's, it's you feel like there are more and more people. I don't know what your interests and aspirations are. But I think like there are more people who were like, wow, like, local journalism is actually kind of cool. And there are things you can do with this. And maybe we need more voices in these matters of interest, like national outlet.

I think there's a lot of it just depends. And we're a new state level organization. So you know, a lot of my job, especially because I go out to places where I mean, people don't go to Charleston a lot. So when I introduce myself, I also have to explain my news organizations, they have never heard of it. But typically, if you're working for like a local news outlet, or even a public broadcasting, like, I feel like there's more trust there, regardless of who you're talking to them sometimes like national outlets. Even when you are a state level news organization, going into a more local community. It's just I don't I don't know that feels good. Like, you feel like you're on their side. Yeah. Like, I live here. It does suck, though, like pay disparities and some really, really local jobs, especially legacy print, but on a extremely local level. I think that is kind of why it's viewed as a stepping stone. And maybe something more sustainable needs to happen there.

And I think sometimes national outlets they don't like they don't understand what they're saying is probably going to come off as offensive or harmful to the community. So yeah, I mean, even if you can't live like directly in the community, you're covering the closest you can get to it. And the more you live there, and the more you keep in touch, like I think it's really important. And I mean with some daily stories you can't do this book longer form stuff like what we do like to keep in touch with people even after you write with them, and you're out there continuously. I mean, in a professional way, but I mean, they're they're human beings, they're not characters, so I think that's

Yeah, definitely just like, establishing trust and relationships. Do you have anything else you want to add? I I think I've kind of hit everything.

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jenniferbowley · 6 years ago

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239

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Click on the video above to watch Episode 239 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Adam: Alright, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts, the one where you hear the weird sound of Hernan rubbing his hands together.

Hernan: We’re live, Adam!

Adam: cómo estás

Hernan: I’m good. Thank you.

Adam: Gotcha. Well, welcome everybody to Episode 239 of Hump Day hangout today is the fifth of June 2019. And we have got some good stuff for you today. But real quick, we’re going to run down the line and say hello to everybody. So Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Excellent as always, super good to be here.

Adam: It’s good. Your audio sound super good today, man. Do you have any mic?

Chris: No, no. Yeah, books. Yeah, sounds good. All right. Or not? How about you? How are you doing?

Hernan: Good, man. I’m just freezing my ass off down here. So I’m drinking tea. You guys are having the nice part this time of the year. But other than that good. Happy to be here. Happy to hang out with you guys a little bit. So good stuff coming up.

Adam: Outstanding! Marco, how about yourself, man?

Marco: What’s up? You know, about six weeks ago, I was listening to the temptations. I wish that it would rain. And it hasn’t stopped since that day. Red rain. Yeah, I’m gonna stop listening to that spot maybe to stop raining.

Adam: Awesome. Bradley. How are you doing?

Bradley: Good. I’m happy to be here. Excited. I gotta we gotta run it. I gotta be out for like, right at five today, though. My daughter’s graduating eighth grade and going into high school next year. And so I want this big, like award ceremony this evening and all that and can’t believe she’s gonna be fucking High School man.

Hernan: You don’t sound super excited.

Bradley: Yeah, she grew up too damn fast. And that means I’m getting old as a problem.

Adam: Yeah, that’s crazy. I’m trying to think when we met her. What was that like three or four years ago? or? Yeah, man. That’s crazy. Anyways, Long Time Time flies. Alright, well, getting back to the hump day hangouts topic. If you’re watching us for the first time. That’s awesome. You’re in the right place. Thanks for watching. Whether you’re watching us live at https://www.semanticmastery.com/hdquestions or if you’re checking out the replay on YouTube. This is the place to be you can ask the questions at again https://www.semanticmastery.com/hdquestions. That’s where we’ve got the form the little chat box for all the questions, you can ask your questions ahead of time, you know if you aren’t gonna be able to make it live or you just want to make sure it gets answered because it is first come first serve. Beyond that, we get asked a lot you know, where should I start with semantic mastery Well, this is the place to start. You know, we’re here every week we’re answering questions. We’re watching Hernan choke to death on his drink. And but then we tell people after watching that, don’t grab the Battle Plan. All right. And that’s what you want to grab. You know, if you want to get better repeatable results, go to https://www.battleplan.semanticmastery.com. But if you’re past that you’re kind of wanting, either you’re ready to start or you really want to grow your digital marketing business, then, you know, joining an experienced community with faster access to real-world info and testing with the Semantic Mastery Mastermind is the place for you. And again, you can find out more about that at https://mastermind.semanticmastery.com and for those of you who liked using done for you services and like to speed things up and over to mgyb.co, and I’m almost done, I do want to say that if you can subscribe to our YouTube channel helps us grow helps us get our word out there. And if you come across any videos or clips that you like, please share them. You know, if you find something particularly helpful, there’s probably someone you know who might like that as well. And real quick, I wanted to say because Hernan just kind of glossed over this I bet he can actually talk now maybe he’s recovered from his drinking. I know. Yeah, kind of. But I think heard on you’re going to be doing some live q&a for our mastermind members. Kind of a live thing if you call direct

Hernan: Oh, yeah, I’m gonna be starting. I’m going to be starting I tried to start last week, but it was up kind of a problem because I wasn’t in the country. So I was given a traffic workshop. So but these Friday, I’m going to start doing kind of a serious about paid traffic, specifically Facebook ads, and Instagram ads. We’re focused on local, we can talk about pretty much anything you guys want to lead gen. In general, you know, CPA e-commerce, what do you guys want, it’s going to be exclusive for the mastermind is going to be on the Facebook group. So you need to be part of the Facebook group, if you’re in the Mastermind, you haven’t been joining or visiting the Facebook group, that’s where the magic happens pretty much besides the calls and whatnot, that’s where, you know, we get a lot of action happening or whatnot. So head over there, I think I’m gonna be doing it. Let me actually confirm you guys the time. So it’s going to be Friday, the seventh and it’s going to be at 11 am. Eastern. So it’s going to be there, it’s got to be live, it’s got to be awesome. So you know, it’s got a bit I’m going to be testing it out as well to see what kind of response we get. And you know, if you guys agree with that, that could have become a cycle. So just jump in live like, once or twice a month, just answering Facebook stuff. That’s part of the commitment that we have with the mastermind people that we want to give them as many tools as possible to grow their business. And Facebook ads is a powerful tool indeed. So

Adam: sounds good. Yeah. And that’s on top of all the regular training, everyone gets in the mastermind as well as the community. So if you’re interested, head over to https://mastermind.semanticmastery.com and join up before Hernan goes live. So you can attend the

Bradley: speaking of which I’ve got YouTube ads training that I’m going to be doing over the next several weeks in there. Because I’m doing several YouTube ads campaigns for Semantic Mastery I’ve just been recording several videos over the last couple days. In fact, we’re going to try to grow our YouTube channel subscriber base to above 10,000. So I’m setting up several campaigns using in-stream ads and YouTube for that, and I’m going to be kind of documenting and sharing, you know, the process for that kind of stuff, as well as we’re going to start increasing our Hump Day hangout attendance to and I want to use YouTube ads for that, because there’s an enormous amount of traffic to be had from YouTube, if you know how to do it, right. And it just takes consistent effort and you know, trial and error to figure out the best recipe so to speak for the ads and the messaging to get that right. And so I’m going to be doing a lot of that I also started another business that I finally revealed to the mastermind last week, I’ve been teasing it for a month, I’m not going to talk about here, but I’m going to be using YouTube ads a lot for that business as well. And it’s just, it’s going to be cool, because it’s going to be slightly different from just our standard, you know, local lead gen stuff that we’ve been kind of pushing for the last, you know, six or eight months, because it was you know, there was so much opportunity in that. But, you know, we’ve kind of done all that. And so now we’re going to kind of broaden out a little bit and do some, I think it’s really good timing that is Don’s gonna be doing some Facebook, and Instagram paid traffic training. And I’m going to be doing some paid traffic training on YouTube ads and how to get traffic that can be applied for you know, affiliate type businesses or local businesses or, you know, just getting like branding and awareness and all that kind of stuff, building up an email list, building your subscribers, lead generation, it’s just going to be kind of all-encompassing, so I think it’s a really good time to be in the mastermind.

Adam: Awesome. All right. Well, if we don’t have anything else, or rather, is there anything else? You guys, are we good to go? To one. All right, we’re good to go. Let’s hop into it.

Bradley: Alright, let me grab the screen. And we’ll get into the questions. Sweet. All right, where are we? Seven days ago. Okay.

How Do You Use The Embeds Service At MGYB?

So it looks like to Tushar is first he says embeds service at MGYB. Why be how do you recommend using this? Is it for tier one links or money sites or the embeds on niche relevant sites? Well, the embed network is for embedding pretty much any sort of iframe. Typically, people think of embed services as being used for just videos. But it can be used for Maps, Google Maps, Google, Google, my business maps, you can, you can actually iframe pretty much almost any website unless it has an iframe breaker. So you can use it for any number of things. We use it specifically for videos GMB or Google My Business map embeds as well as RYS you know, RYS Reloaded methods or tactics session, say. So, if you’re not familiar with that, it’s really powerful to do with your drive stack stuff, your files and folders and things like that, that you can embed, which is great, because, you know, if you order a drive stack to be built from MGYB and then you can use parts of that as part with the embed service. And the same thing goes with maps and beds or video embed. So it can be used for pretty much any sort of thing and embeds or actually, I don’t know how much Marco would want to get into this year. But embeds are like a do follow link even on nofollow sites. So they’re very, very powerful. And they work very well. Marco, what do you want to say about?

Marco: That said, it’s like getting a link, but it doesn’t count against your link profile.

Bradley: Yeah, it’s raining again.

Marco: Yeah, it’s raining really hard, and the thunder coming through and all kinds of good stuff. You can hear it. But anyway, that’s just the way it is. And embeds are really simple. It’s a display of your page. on somebody else’s, it’s a tunnel. And all the credit goes back to the source. And that’s just what it is. It’s a way to get a link that doesn’t get counted as a link. So if it’s not counted as a link, it cannot incur a penalty.

Bradley: Yeah, and they’re really powerful and the embed networks are primarily web to auto-embed networks that are link building manager has been building for years now. So they are themed networks. In other words, he’s been building and seasoning these links, or excuse me, these web 2.0 embed networks for I’d say, at least three years, maybe even four years now. So a lot, I mean, first of all, it’s a massive network. And second of all, a lot of these are their aged and themed well, because he’s been building and building and building. I mean, he’s got hundreds of thousands, if not over a million properties built specifically for this kind of stuff. So again, they are themed, very, a lot of them are aged. So it’s it is a very powerful thing. We’ve seen quite a lot of movement, using the embed service for like GMB map embeds. You know, I don’t do a whole whole lot of video SEO stuff, or at least a haven’t been recent. But I’m going to be over the next several months because I’m going to be doing a lot of YouTube stuff right now. But I’m doing paid traffic as well. So I’ll be testing that some more. I know it works well for videos, but I have been doing a shit ton of map stuff, Google Maps, and GMB stuff. And I’ve been using that embed service for that as well as like we, we teach in any one of our paid training courses about @ID pages, again, can’t go into that here in a free setting. But in our paid courses, we talked about @ID pages. And they’re very, very powerful to embed in some of the biggest movements that I’ve seen, are using just traditional link building like, again, the same service that we have an MGYB and an embedded service or combination of both, where you embed a property and then hit the embedded the properties where it’s embedded with additional links. And that tends to really move the needle. And what I like about that service is that it’s easy, it’s easy for us, right? Because we all we have to do is place an order, you know, and in our link building manager and his team take care of all of that. So it’s easy on me, I just have to submit details. And then you know, a few weeks later, I get the report. And I can usually see depending on the obviously level of competition, but you can usually see the results will move the needle just from the link building and the embed services combined. So it’s a very powerful service. And it’s simple, simple to fulfill.

How To Build Citations For Multiple Cities Website?

Next is he says how to build citations for multiple cities website. Do you offer GMB verification for your local clients? I asked this because I’m not sure if this is risky. And we should limit this to our own properties. Should we do this for a client with a service business that can serve multiple cities? Yeah, you can I mean, that’s something I up sold to a lot of my clients was adding additional locations and I’m using air quotes because they didn’t a lot of my clients didn’t actually go get physical, you know, additional office spaces or, or shops, because most of them are contractors. But we did add additional maps listings for a lot of my clients. However, I don’t, you know, I always recommend taking precautions if you’re going to do that for businesses like if you’re doing it for lead gen stuff, you understand the risks, right? So so that, you know, use them at your own risk. But when you’re dealing with a client, you have to be more careful, right, you do not want to do anything that could essentially pass a penalty to their main brand or their main domain, their main location. So whenever I’ve up sold maps expansion or location expansion to existing clients, then what I would do is either just use subdomains from their root domain for each location or I would avoid using their domains alt altogether and just use GMB assets, which would be the GMB website GMB posts, the map itself, that kind of stuff, and then obviously would be branded still for the main company. And if they would all have their own unique tracking numbers that would go to what I’ll forward to the, you know, main phone number for that company. Typically, they would either have an in house receptionist that would answer the phone or I would set up an answering service like like, like I’ve been doing for my lead gen stuff forever. And so all the locations would go to the same destination phone number, but all of the individual locations would have a unique physical address a unique phone number and a unique web address.

If it was going to be used with their branded domain, we would, we would always use subdomains, not inner pages. So not like location pages, it would always be subdomains. And typically I wouldn’t even build websites on them on the subdomains, I would just do a redirect from the subdomain to the GMB website. That makes sense. But in some cases, I recommended not even and it’s just again, for those clients that were worried about it, I said, you know, we don’t even need to use your domain, we can just use this the GMB website as the main website for each location. The idea is to get the leads to go to the main, you know, the leads back to your client, you’re the business, it doesn’t necessarily mean as long as you can brand it with the same logo and same like the header image. So the GMB website image, that kind of stuff that you know, the header image on that, all of that, that’s all that you really need to brand it. And the rest of it can still be left within just GMB, which is what I recommend. So it really depends on the level of risk that your clients are willing to take, I always recommend trying to reduce or eliminate risk as much as possible. So the only thing that would stay the same would be their name. But we’ve actually had a discussion recently in the mastermind, I’m not going to get too much into it but adding a pending an additional term to the actual business name to make it more unique. So for example, if you had four locations in one city, you could name it like north, south, east and west. So company name North company name, East company name, South company name West. And that actually helps to add a little bit of diversity to the business name to prevent any potential pigeon issues. But like I said, it’s still it would still be I still wouldn’t recommend actually connecting any of those assets directly to the primary businesses location or websites because you want to reduce any risk. That makes sense. Okay.

As far as building citations, I don’t build citations to GMB assets unless they are real bona fide businesses that I have x or addresses excuse me that I have access to collect mail from and I’ve talked about that on for many, many months. Now. If you’re buying GMB verify, you know, verified GMB locations. That means it’s it’s a spam address, or it’s an address that you do not have access to collect mail from or at. Does that make sense? So the problem with getting building citations is the moment that you start building citations because most citation directories or business directories require a physical street address in order to build the listing. And the moment that you start adding your business or publishing a listing on a business directory with the street address. Okay, you’re going to start you’re going to get on that that street address is going to be put on a marketing mailing list for physical mail via United States Postal Service. And what happens is that location, that address that you use will start to receive business-related mail that’s addressed to the company that you have listed as the GMB. And so if it’s going to an actual building that or to somebody’s house, God forbid, I recommend that nobody ever uses somebody’s house address, unless that’s their own house, or they got permission to do it. But if it’s going to a building or a house, and somebody starts getting email, or excuse me physical mail, with solicitation offers from marketing companies and Vista print and, you know, list providers like info USA and like all these different I know, because I get a ton of them myself, you start getting all these marketing, e mails, these solicitation mails for offers for the business, then it’s likely that somebody’s going to report that business is not being actually at that location. So I highly recommend that you don’t do that you can get results without citations. If you have a physical address that you can accept mail that then I absolutely recommend using citations because it is still very powerful and effective. But you can still get results without using citations. And if you’re using GMBs that are not, you don’t have access to the actual physical address, and I recommend that you do not. Okay. Do other things.

What Is The Best Way To Keep Up The Rankings If You Need To Change The Phone Number Of A GMB Listing?

Dustin said Hey guys, I need to change the telephone number on my GMB. What’s the best way to keep the GMB rankings only delete the old number and add the new number in my RYS tack or to adding the new number. And keeping also the old number and RYS stack. Um, well. Actually what I would do?

Bradley: Well depends. If because if you’re going to change the phone number, if you mean any properties that you have access to edit, I would want to change to add the new phone number in. But think about if you do have citations, we were just talking about those. But if you do have citations out there, that’s a real pain in the ass to go change the phone number. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend doing that yourself at all, I would hire service for that there’s a great service for that. But from Loganix, if you go to https://www.semanticmastery.com/loganix, then that’s the best service. I know for citation cleanup work. It’s more expensive than some of the other services but they’re really really, really thorough, I’ve had really good results with them. So if you have to do if you have citations, it’s a real bitch because you’re going to want to update the phone number on those. However, if you’re not going to lose the old number entirely right, then you can keep that phone number in the GMB as a secondary phone number.

So what you can do is actually go in and add or essentially click to add another phone number into the GMB dashboard. And then cut and paste the existing phone number into the second position and put the new phone number in the first position and then click Save. That way Google understands that that old phone number is still associated with that profile. However, if that old phone number is not going to receive calls any more than it being listed on a bunch of other business directories, in the event that people do try to contact the business on this business from this business directory listings, it’s going to be an invalid number. For the SEO purposes, it would still be okay because you left the old number in the GMB dashboard is a secondary number. It won’t be published. But Google will recognize that it’s associated with that business. But like I said, if you have existing NAP or citations published on the web, then I would recommend that you try to update those as possible. And again, if it’s something you have access to like drive stacks, yeah, absolutely update the number. But when it comes to citations and things like that, it’s a real bitch. It takes time and consistent effort. And so I recommend you hire a service for that. So but I want to comment on that.

Adam: No.

Bradley: okay.

Does The Semantic Mastery Battle Plan Help In Setting Up A Local Lead Gen Business?

Now, Rob says, I just recently purchased a franchise product that provides SEO Services. It’s not from you guys. Well, then we’re skipping this question. Now. I’m kidding. He says in that from you guys, the company gave some exhausted training on how to sell the services but seems like everything was leaning towards cold calling and door knocking in order to get clients somehow came across you guys on the internet purchased the Battle Plan. I have a website that franchise gave two for lead gen gave to me for lead gen but was not familiar with how to set it up for lead gen does the Battle Plan product up with that. And if there’s something else I could use with your product to get the ball rolling a little faster, sorry, for the long text. Okay, um, well, as far as lead gen using for lead gen for like getting clients really all you need is a, you know, a landing page that you know, describes your services and has a real big strong call to action to contact you. Right? Typically, it’s going to be you know, your phone number real big, perhaps your email address, if you want to publish that, I don’t like to do that or contact form. Right? You know, once, once more information, contact us, or contact me, depending on how your branding your business, contact me here and you know, have a little contact form. But so that’s just standard, right? That’s just a standard lead gen type web page. So you can set your own. Like, for example, my own agency website is just a one-page site. That’s all it is. It just says what I do. And there’s you know, a contact form at the bottom. So if there are contact buttons, you know, in several locations, if they click it, it just scrolls down to the bottom right where the form is. That’s it. That’s all I do.

Because it that’s for inbound marketing, right. So typically, you’re going to be driving people to a landing page, if you’re doing if you’re if you know if you’ve got inbound marketing setup. So that’s like settings, running ads to drive traffic to your landing page. Or it could be organic stuff. But what I found is as-as a marketing consultant myself, right, running my own agency, I found that most of the time that I’ve been able to secure clients is when I’m going out and doing outbound marketing, where I’m, I’m contacting them, right, I know, you can get inbound leads, but personally, for my own business, I don’t get a lot of inbound leads, most of the inbound leads, I do get offers from referrals from existing clients. But you know, I don’t get a whole lot of cold leads coming from Google, or you know, I don’t do a lot of pay per click marketing to get clients, but from just straight SEO, you know, I rank well for SEO, Virginia and things like that. But I don’t typically get a lot of leads from that. What I’ve gotten most of my leads from was me doing the outreach. And you’re right, I hate cold calling, I hate door knocking I hate it, I absolutely despise it. So we developed a product called video lead gen system, which I’ve been using since 2012, to build my own agency. And I recently streamlined it because we built a whole bunch of lead gen assets, I needed to find a way to get service providers to monetize our lead gen assets. And so I needed a way to streamline the video lead gen, or video email prospecting method that I had always been using because it was time-consuming, very effective, but time-consuming. So we created lead gen video lead gen system and an updated it recently, and just relaunched it. So if you’re interested in that, I’m sure Adam, you probably already dropped the link to it. But I would recommend that you try that for him because that’s a great way to get people to get noticed or to get a conversation or a dialogue started with potential prospects. Because you got to think about this, if you just recently are starting to try to build your own agency, I’m going to tell you now that it is a saturated market out there when dealing with local businesses or business owners period, it doesn’t have to be local businesses. But business owners get hammered relentlessly by marketing and advertising companies all the time, they’re getting solicitations via cold emails via cold calls, you know, by people knocking on their door seriously, like walking in and pitching them just like what your franchise company is telling you to do. That’s like the norm now. And so you really need to differentiate yourself, you need to be able to make yourself stand above the competitors or get noticed, through all that noise. And so that’s why I said the video lead gen system is a great way to separate yourself from the rest of the pack and just becoming another solicitor. Right. And so again, guys, I’m not discouraging anybody from getting into, you know, providing Client Services or becoming an agency and all that. But I will tell you that it’s a lot harder now than it was five years ago, to get clients attention or prospects attention. And that’s because of you know, it’s just an absolute feeding frenzy out there people the businesses get hammered nonstop with solicitation calls, emails and offers all the time. And so you have to really be able to stand up, stand out from that crowd. So the video lead gen system is a great way to do that it does require some work, it’s not a magic bullet. And it requires consistent follow up but we talked about all of that in the training and if you implement that, you’ll see that you will start to get much much higher response rates than you would from typical cold calls or not, you know walking in the door and calling on think about this guy’s and I’ve done door to door sales in the past, think about you know, as a business owner it like I work from home, and I can’t stand it when somebody knocks on my door like to try to, you know, whether it’s a Jehovah’s Witness or some a census purse, somebody wanting to ask questions for the Census Bureau or anything like that somebody comes in beats on my door, and I’m in the middle of working or recording a video or something like that. It it’s an interruption it pisses me off, I also don’t answer the phone unless I know who the phone calls from. And I’m really if I’m only if I’m expecting the call, as a business owner, myself, I don’t want to be interrupted. So think about when you cold call somebody or you go walk in their door, and you know, knock on their door to say that you try to sell them something, what you’re doing is interrupting them. And that pisses a lot of people off. So I don’t recommend that at all. I recommend you get more creative on your pitch and your approach and make it easy for them and convenient for them to hear your message. And that’s part of the reason why the video lead gen system works so well. Because you can send them a personalized video that explains why you reached out to them, and they can watch it when it’s convenient for them. And when you set up notifications properly, you’ll know exactly when they’re watching your video, so you can follow up with them immediately. Right. So that was a really good question. But like I said, when it comes down to the Battle Plan, no Battle Plan is going to tell you how to get results from like, get your getting your websites seen and get traffic to them and get better results for them for SEO and all that kind of stuff. But lead gen, standard lead gen templates, very simple, you can just look at like go to Google and look up lead gen. You know landing page templates and things like that and get an idea of what your basic elements are that you should have. And then the rest of it is really about honing your message right crafting your message and finding an approach that’s going to get people’s attention and get them to want to follow back up with you. Okay, turn a cold lead into a warm lead. And that’s what the video lead gen system is all about.

Marco: In our free Facebook group, Adam did a post on the 31st. of May. And he talked to us about this, how he uses the video, little video lead gen system with Loom to follow up. So he says it makes it more personal, right? They’re used to video so he sends them a video. And it says his conversions are way higher. Why don’t you talk about that, Adam?

Adam: Yeah, definitely. It’s such an easy system to use. And it’s funny because videos used to be tough to do. And I remember I copied Bradley’s method from the first version of lead gen system and using images and this that the other thing but now these tools like loom have made this so much easier, where I can put the video it plays natively in Gmail. And even if it didn’t, if it looks like an image is there, and then not only that because I went ahead, that’s just the free version, the paid I went ahead and paid for it when you know, brought out their pro version or whatever. And I can put an overlay link that goes anywhere I want on there, which is awesome. So the conversions on this stuff are super high. Like Bradley says, and anyone who’s gone through the course and put it to us knows how well this works. I mean, it’s crazy getting 3040 plus percent conversion rates and, and the method that most people get 1% or less. And then the follow up is super important. at poker we live in 2018 and DC, did a little exercise. I had people stand up. And they said, you know, assuming everybody here is involved in some sort of business where they talk with customers. I said, you guys all in this room, everybody does some sort of follow up, right? You know, everybody nodded their heads. Yep. Okay, so I said, Everybody, stand up. And I’m going to talk I’m going to say a number starting with one and working my way up and say how many, you know, automated follow up either calls or emails do you have in your business right now. So started at one. And you know, everybody was pretty much still standing up said too few people said they only got two, three more people sitting down by four, there are very few people standing and I may have this wrong, but I think by the time I got to six, there was one person in the entire room standing up, I didn’t even have six, which I’m since fixed. But your rate of response from people goes up hugely as you keep going and we all know this, you know the over supposed to maintain this contact and we’re supposed to follow up with people. But if you don’t have this process or this method to do it, you know, you get busy, you got other things you want to do, it’s not fun, but this is what gets results. So you know, highly encourage anyone who doesn’t have a great method for doing this that isn’t already giving you fantastic results to just go grab video lead gen system put it to work. And this is one of the fastest courses to return your money and then probably 10 or 100 fold over time.

Bradley: Yeah. And last thing I want to say about that is also if you’re going to be pitching or prospecting for your new business, I recommend that you really do niche down to a particular industry, because you’ll get really, really good being able to talk speak directly to that that type of business owner as opposed to being all over the place where if you’re going to be marketing to pretty much just to businesses in general, you have to really understand what’s important to every business industry and and and speak to those owners with their VA with their own vocabulary. It’s very difficult and it takes a lot of time and a lot of experience to get good at being a general marketer. It’s much easier and much more scalable to become you know, a specialist or like a boutique marketing professional in other words, where you really niche down and become an industry-specific professional. Because then you can you really only need to come up with like learn to function Have you, Larry, the pain points, the hot buttons, know what the customers for that particular business are looking for what their needs are all of that it makes it so much easier to scale. And then you can just expand your business by targeting more locations, right? expand your service area, essentially. But you’re still targeting the same business owner, same business type, I would recommend that highly. Alright, so

Does Google Favor An Authority Site With Specific Niche And Location Over A Lead Gen Site With Powerful Backlinks In It?

next Gordon’s up he says, Hey, guys, as usual, your Hump Day hang Hump Day help is greatly appreciate it. You’re welcome, Gordon. He says, I’m not sure how Google search algorithm works in one particular instance, when it comes to local search, be taking a standard lead gen site that is branded with specific business NAP actual or made up as well as having links to citations in the major directories and a GMB listing and compare it to an authority site that is targeted to a specific business niche in location. But without any of the items just mentioned, for the lead gen site. They’re both equally easy to rank or would Google’s search algorithm favor one type of site over the other? And if so, in what way? Um, I’m not sure what you’re talking about, unless you mean like, a local lead gen site versus like, a Yelp page or something, if that’s what you mean, or a big authority type site like Well, I mean, Yelp would be one of those. But like home advisor would be another one or Angie’s List or, and I’m talking contractor type stuff, but like in the real estate market, it would be like, you know, long and foster century 21 or, you know, REMAX and things like that versus a local lead gen site. Right. So my point is, it really depends when it comes to maps listings maps rankings, I found that a local lead gen site, you can typically rank, you know, better than those type of sites, because a lot of those sites won’t have a maps listing like a physical location in their particular area. But when it comes to organic rankings, yeah, it’s tough. If it’s a search with local intent, especially if there are directories. You know, if you go to a search in Google right now, guys, you’ll see that the I think Google’s broken again, and I’ve talked about this in recent Hump Day Hangout, because there are, you know, Google is nothing but an index of links, right, Google doesn’t search results are indexed results, the search engine results pages of the SERPs is nothing but an A list of indexed results, right. So page one is the top 10 results as indexed by Google, according to Google’s algorithm. But if you take a search to do something like plumber, Fairfax, VA for Virginia, right, so plumber, Fairfax, VA, you do that search, and you’ll see that there are the maps listings, which is great. And you might see a couple of local business, local businesses ranking organic listings, but you’re primarily going to see business directories, that are indexed in the organic section that when clicked upon, go to another index page. We talked about this recently. Right. And it’s very difficult to compete with that kind of stuff. So let’s just take a look real quick. If I say, plumber, Fairfax VA.

Alright, we’re going to scroll down. Let me zoom in a little bit. Okay. And you can see there blue because it’s still cooking from the last time I was I was here, but you’re going to see ads. All right, let’s make sure that we’re spelled right. Okay, so we’re going to see ads, and then we’re going to see the maps rankings, which I find are easier to do when competing in this type of space, right? Because take a look that, you know, the top three, there’s one actual company website, right? That out of the top three, so number one, and number three, our index pages have on other So essentially, when click, when you click through to this guy’s all it does is take you to another damn index, which is what Google’s pages, right, it’s an index. And then you take a look at this. And if you click through, and it’s nothing but another index of plumbers on Yelp, and that is in Fairfax. And the same thing goes for Angie’s List, right? Then you’ll see Michael and sons, Okay, number four, so that’s another company. But then home advisor, that’s another index page. So out of the top five, three out of the top five, are actually index pages. And so again, even though they don’t have a physical location there, which is why they’re not in maps, you can see that those are authoritative sites. And they are their authority is why they rank so well, organically, even if they’re not super optimized, right, specifically like data. If you take a look at the Yellow Page, it doesn’t have a ton of content here about plumbing and the plumbing services, or the services that plumbers offer and all that kind of stuff. All it is is a freakin index page. Right? That’s all it is. And so it’s not content rich at all. Yet, it’s ranking very, very well. Number one, in fact, that makes sense. So when it comes to actual, you know, which one is easier and which one’s harder, that’s why I’ve always recommended for local lead gen focus on maps. Because it’s gotten over the years, it’s gotten harder and harder to rank in organics, the organic section, excuse me, because of the business directories. And Google is gone through phases where sometimes it will this index page again, I I think it’s stupid, think about that. You go from one index to another index. That’s dumb. I don’t think that’s useful to anybody. Right? I mean, that’s just my opinion. But I really don’t think that’s useful to anybody. Why would you want to go from one index to another index, when you click through now you’re, you’re just you’ve added an additional step to find your solution. Right. So again, I think that’s done. But over the years, we’ve seen that happen with Google where they get rid of the index, the directory listings, the indexed directory listings, it’s okay to have a Yelp page for a specific company ranked in the top 10. You know, that’s fine, because that means that company had probably proof done really well at filling out their profile optimizing it, well, they probably got a lot of engagement, that kind of stuff, that would be fine. But to go to another index page, unfortunately, that’s kind of where we’re back to now. And I don’t know that it’s going to change or when it will change, it may, like I said, it’s gone in cycles over the years. So when it comes to what I think is easier to do, I think you’re much better off focusing on maps, for local lead gen stuff, then trying to do though, you know, trying to fight or compete with the authority sites in the organic rankings. And I know, some people might have differing opinions. But you know, fighting with Yelp and their authority, excuse me over here, it’s very, very difficult. The same thing with Angie’s List, home advisor, you know, it’s very, very difficult. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: Not I’m going to agree with that. But I would also say that in SERPs now, what really matters is the entity and how well you are how much you’ve taken care of the entity, how much power you’re pushing to the entity, so that so that you’re presented to Google, as trusted and authoritative also, in a niche. If you don’t do that correctly, then you have no hope of trying to rank in the, in the SERPs, right? Especially, again, against these are powerhouses. But you can as he, as you’ve shown that there is one, there is a company that’s right in there. And the way that you do that is power, you should first of all, we went through the entity webinar, right, we did that in Syndication Academy, where we showed the steps that you need to take that to solidify the entity or what I call the end game. So that when you push power into the entity, Google is going to take all of that power, as trust and authority for your entity so that you can go against these, these powerhouses and get in there. But it does take a lot of power. It does take a lot of creativity and you know, your schema has to be right. There are many things that come into play when you’re trying to do this. And as you said, it’s easier to go after the maps.

Bradley: Yeah, I totally agree with what you’re saying, though. I mean, my point is to get results and get, you know, I start with maps, there’s no question. But always definitely you want to evaluate solidify that entity, you want to try to build brand authority for that particular entity. Because it’s not that you can’t rank in the organic section, it’s just going to take you longer and more effort. And so my point is start with maps. Once you start getting, you know, leads coming in for your lead gen business or for your client, then you can focus on all the other stuff that you’re going to need to do to get ranked. And you’re going to try to attempt to rank in the organic section as well, which all the stuff that Marco just mentioned is absolutely correct. So do both, but start in my opinion with the map stuff. And that’s what you know, that’s why I’ve run my business for years.

Okay, so next one, he says is would it make a positive difference if you listed one or two random local business and a piece from that niche on the authority site to give Google a local business name, address, and phone number? Thanks again? Would it make a positive difference if you listed one or two random local business and a piece from that niche on the authority site? I’m not sure I understand that one. If you’re trying to rank order, actually what it makes? Maybe the way I’m interpreting this, as you’re saying, if you’re trying to rank organically by including any piece from other businesses, perhaps it would make it more like an authority site. I wouldn’t recommend that. I mean, it depends what depends on what you’re doing. But it unless you’re building a directory site, I wouldn’t do that. Right. I mean, I wouldn’t want to push authority over to anybody else’s site, especially competitors. So I’m not sure I understand that part of the question. I’m going to move on.

How Do You Pick What Links To Use When You’re Adding The Service Post Links On The City Page For The Second County?

Don says thanks for Hump Day Hangouts. Two questions for Bradley and your complex silo YouTube video, use the following structure. Okay, when adding the second County, it seems that the post name should be slightly different. Yes, it should be. Those videos were recorded many years ago. So I’d have to I don’t even really remember what I said in those videos. But yes, the post name should be unique, forever, all the way down to that level. However, let me just clarify something right now. There’s no need to use the physical silo structure anymore, which is what you’re looking at. And that URL structure there, which is where you know, the category slash post name permalink structure in WordPress, you don’t need to do that anymore. You didn’t need to do it back then. But I preferred it back then because I liked seeing the hierarchy of the silo structure within the URL. But we’ve tested over and over again, and you know, I haven’t done any hard tests in the last few years. But it’s not necessary to have that as a physical silo, you can do what’s called a virtual silo, which is just using the post name permalink structure. So it makes your URLs much cleaner, much shorter. Right, it’s, it’s still, you still want to build your categories correctly. And you know, your sub your subcategories. If you’re doing a complex solid structure, you’re going to have categories and subcategories, right? And pages and child pages, and then post right, which is your third level deep. But yes, when it comes to the permalink, or the slug, for the post you want to have that is unique for each post, you can’t duplicate Leak Repair, for example, as a post slug on two different posts, because it will, but WordPress, by default will put a dash two for the second one, right.

And so on the post level, I’ve always recommended that you would on the post level or even on a subcategory level. But my point is, you’re going to need to have unique slugs, right. And so that’s why it’s not necessary to have the physical silo. Because let’s say that let’s say if you were going to have Fairfax County and Prince William County, and then you were going to go directly to like, I don’t know, plumbing, let’s say, let’s just say you’re going to try to use plumbing as a subcategory for both. They’re two different parent categories, then you’re going to have plumbing and plumbing dash two, right, because the second time you try to create that subcategory, it’s going to have the same slug, it’s not going to work. So my point is, you know, I stopped using the physical silo structure, which is where you see everything in the link. And it started using virtual solid because I don’t care if there’s a plumbing dash to as a subcategory. As long as it stacked within the higher the way that you build it out in the silo structure. The bots will crawl it correctly to where it won’t bleed over from one plumber like plumbing dash to to plumbing, you know, the regular plumbing if that makes sense. They will all be separate containers basically. But you don’t have to look at that ugly URL was my point. So it makes sense. So I’ve switched to just doing virtual silo structure, which again, is just using the post name permalink because that way you can hide all of that stuff that’s hard or impossible to reconcile within WordPress. However, that said, there is another way to silo and I can’t obviously I’m not going to get into that here because it would take the rest of the time, I’d have to get out my snag and start drawing side siloed diagrams and all that. And anybody that’s been in the mastermind knows what an abomination that is. But you can silo also using categories and tags, guys, you can use tags as a way to add for especially for complex silos where you’ve got perhaps multiple locations, but you’ve got the same service that’s going to be provided in each location. Right? So instead of having location silos, via categories, and in-service silos via categories, which is difficult to do, you can, you can actually use tags to create silos too, right? So you can have like location silos or service or product or service categories, and then use tags as a way to create location silos. And there’s, there’s a way to do all of that, which is a little bit cleaner. It still takes some planning out guys, a complex silo structure is just what the name says it is. It’s complex. And so I always recommend if you’re going to do that, that you map it out first because it will take some thought to be able to do it correctly. Marco, were you gonna say something or somebody? Not? Good. Already popping might pop.

Okay, so But yeah, as far as when it goes down to the post level, yeah, make always recommended that the posts be more like conversational type titles, and the person the link structure can reflect the more like what the title of the post is, right? But if you’re just using the permalink, the post name permalink, which is just a simple, excuse me a virtual silo, then it’s not going to matter. Because your URLs are going to be rude calm, you know, root domain, com slash posting, even all the way down to the post level, which is deep into the siloed. Right? That it’s just going to be posting and at your, at your earlier pages higher up in the silo at subcategory level, it’ll be, you know, root domain.com, slash subcategory, or at the category level root domain, com slash category. Right. So it’s always just going to be whatever that page that you’re landing on is going to be as bright past the first, you know, the first level past the domain itself. And so that’s a much cleaner way to build a silo In my opinion, because then you know, it doesn’t matter. Because even if you’re permalinks, or have the dash twos and things like that, which are ugly, and I always had a hard time reconciling that with the physical silo structure was very difficult. But over the years, I learned that it’s absolutely not necessary, you can do it with a virtual silo. So you can hide all that ugly URL shit that happens when trying to do that with a complex silo, it doesn’t matter the but still crawls it the way that you build it. Right? So regardless of how ugly the URL is, if you’re hiding all that shit, it won’t matter. That makes sense.

Where Do You Typically Include The Links To The County Silo Index Pages?

Okay, question two do you typically include the links to the county silo index pages in the site-wide header, navigation footer nav link on the homepage content. Other know, and we talked about this in mastermind, I can’t get into this very deep here either, because once again, it’s we don’t have the time number one. Number two, this is something that we this is kind of stuff we cover in the mastermind. But no, essentially, with a silo structure you want from the navigation, you want to be able to link to your top-level category, pages, right, which are pages, also categories. And then on the category, the top level silo pages, you can link to subcategories. If you have them, then your subcategory pages, you don’t want to really link to anything from there, except for perhaps back up to the root domain, like the homepage, and then all of your supporting articles will be stacked or placed underneath each subcategory. And you’d want to daisy chain those together, or link from the subcategory back up to the homepage or to the top level category but not the subcategory. You don’t want to create what Marco calls a reciprocal link even on the same domain. And that’s about as far as I can get into that right here. Okay. That’s changed recently, too, by the way. So again, those are old, old videos, that the principles are still remain valid. But I have absolutely changed my strategy slightly on how I build those type of solid structures out now. And maybe it’s time for an update on that.

Should You Create Two Different GMB Assets For Two-Related Keywords Or Separate Them?

Gabriel’s up he says, Hey, guys, thanks again, for all the great content plus one here. Missing g plus, yeah, I’m currently working on building a GMB asset for solar panel installation services and solar panel installation course. Should I create two different GMB assets? Or should I use one big asset to rank for both keywords best solar panel installation? A solar panel? Oh, I see what you’re saying. So one, is it services? And one is, of course, that’s a good question. I mean, if it’s a local course, where only people that aren’t you’re going to be marketing the course to local people then like like, you know, for people to come to a school or a location to learn how to install solar panels, then yeah, I guess you could use it, I would recommend doing it for both. But if you’re going to if the course is if you’re trying to market that, well, you can always still have a GMB. But yeah, I would probably come if it’s for the same company and everything that I don’t, I would just keep it all under one entity, one asset. That’s my thoughts. But that’s just because you can actually accrue more authority that way, then try a separate them. Marco, what do you say?

Yeah, I wouldn’t separate them either going to have them on the same website. I don’t see why you would need two different GMB. They’re totally relevant. So there’s relevance there. That’s everything that you need. And then pushing those two. I mean, in the course, and I don’t want to get into it too much. We show that we show a way where you can do both just through posts. Right. And it’s still in in the same GMB. But you know, you post about the course and you post about the service. And you can keep them separate. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. And again, I would I, you know, I try to reduce assets, if possible, when it comes to stuff like that, try to keep them all housed on one entity, essentially one web entity, right, which would be, you know, a website that you could add, like, we were just talking about silos, for example, right, instead of having two separate assets, it’s more work to maintain two separate assets, and you’re actually, it’s going to take longer to build the authority to each individual asset than it would be to have the cumulative effect of having both of them under one asset.

And if he’s using the GMB auto poster or the briefcase, then he can get the RSS feed out and actually going to his T one and use both post right both types of posts, and power up his tier one that way, and create the relevance for both throughout his tier one assets. And, of course, you have to do our way as reloaded, you have to do the drive stack. And you can also stack it in there right to stack targeting each of the what would be top level categories.

How To Keep The Domain Authority (DA) Of Previous Citations Without Confusing Google With Different NAP Data Of A New Citation?

Yeah, um, so the next question was from Steve, he says, Hey, guys, thanks for your time. If I register a domain, and when I go to do the citation, see that it already has citations from the previous owner? What is the quickest way to keep the domain authority and build new citations without confusing you? Okay, so when you say citations, that leads me to believe that you bought a domain that was being used for a local business, right? Because local businesses are the ones that typically get citations being published in business directories, right. So name, address, phone number plus website URL. And so as far as keeping domain authority, I don’t care about domain authority. So I’m not, you know, honestly, I’m not going to recommend how to keep the domain authority because I just don’t care about that metric. I stopped caring about that metric years ago, it doesn’t make any fucking difference. I swear to you if you know how to build relevancy, domain authority doesn’t mean shit, right? Unless you have incredibly high domain authority numbers, in which case, then it does have an effect. But for anything below 80, you’re not it’s not going to make a difference whether you have domain authority or not if you know how to build relevancy. So that’s irrelevant, right. But as far as you talking about citations, if you mean, if you just mean links, there’s not much you can do. But if you’re talking about site, because they’re, they’re already built to the site, you could disavow them. I know, there’s going to be conflicting opinions on that. But, you know, I would also check to see if they’re toxic or spammy links, that kind of stuff. But if you’re talking about citations, where that domain was being used by different business, and just published citations on the web name, address, phone number, and web and web address, that are linking to that, and now you’re going to use it for a new business with a new name, new address, new phone number, new brand, then I would recommend that you would hire a citation cleanup service. Again, I talked about that earlier, like Loganix, or Loganix. I don’t know whether I’m saying it right or not. But uh, semanticmastery.com/loganix, that will get you to it’s, like I said, it’s a bit expensive, but it’s hands down the best service I’ve used for, for cleaning up inconsistent NAP issues, right. So they’ll go out and contact all the directories where they find that now incorrect. citation and name, address and phone number. And the requests that be updated, they’ll submit the new details. And they’ll do that for I think, a total of four rounds. So they’ll do it like every two weeks for a total of eight weeks, or something like that, to were like, because sometimes you have to contact those directories multiple times to get them to actually do it. So that’s what they do. It’s expensive, but it works. And it works, you know, about 70% of the citations that are found that to be incorrect, will be updated. And that’s that, I found that to be really, really high compared to a lot of the other services out there that say they can do it that get are pretty much lackluster results. So again, if you’re talking about that, when you’re saying citations, if you’re using that term correctly, and it’s listed that web, that domain is listed with another name, address and phone number from another business, and now you’re going to use it for a new business with a new brand new name, new phone number, new address, all of that, then you are going to need really clean that up out there. Because otherwise, you’re going to create ambiguity. And it’s going to dilute your efforts and build new citations is going to make it hard to get results. It’s always more important to clean up bad data than it is to build new data, which just dilutes bad data. Does that make sense? Start with that start with the cleanup.

Would You Recommend That The Inner City Pages Have The Same Style As The Homepage?

JOHN says one cousin is a good idea to make the other pages on the site the same style is the homepage. I’m trying to rank the homepage city page for a city but I’m also trying to rank other pages for other cities. Now, do you think it’s a good idea to just copy my site tone page style? Not the content, just the style? And if I copy the content, just rewrite? Or is that a good idea? Yeah, I mean, that’s fine. As far as like the layout of the page, I don’t think that makes much of a difference. I could be wrong. But in my opinion, it’s more about having the content unique and optimized for the specific cities that you’re trying to rank rewrites are fine. I’ve done that a lot, especially for lead gen stuff where I’ll go out and like by an article, or by five articles, and I’ll have each article rewritten three times. Right. So now I’ve got 15 articles. And it’s a lot to have an article rewritten and have a new article written. Right. So that’s what I would do is go buy authority content, pay a lot of money for an 800 or 1000 word article. And then I would send that to an article rewriting service and have them rewrite it, you know, three, four or five times. And now I’ve got multiple versions of that one article. By the way, I always would put in tokens into the article, like for the location name, just put it in brackets put in, you know, in brackets, location, or city or something like that, as opposed to actually putting a city name in there. And that makes it easy to just use, Find and Replace, to be able to swap out location names. Once you know when you have it all rewritten with those tokens as opposed to city names. And then you have multiple versions of the article, each version, you can use the Find and Replace function to replace with a new city name. So it makes sense. It’s much easier to do that. So yeah, as far as the layout, that shouldn’t make any difference. It’s more about the content and what it’s optimized for. Okay, and why the web is coming up? Yep. Monday, June 10. 3pm.

Can You Embed A GMB Post?

Can you embed a GMB post Marco says you can. I haven’t tried it but Marco says you can.

Marco: I have and still can. Okay, cool.

Bradley: Got a shirt today. Look at that. That’s cool. We got to wrap it up in about three minutes. Looks like we’re about done anyway.

How Do You Recover A 3-Pack Rankings?

So last question, says a real business with a physical location GMB was ranked in three pack for multiple keywords but is now outside of top 10 only changes where we started GMB post press advantage prs and sent money robot links to and embed to add ID page and G site but never directly to the money site. It may be in Google dance. So we have stopped money robot links in embeds. We will continue to make GMB posts and press releases would appreciate your input and suggestions to try and recover three pack rankings. Um, yeah, that I don’t I mean, I don’t know without having more detail on it. It could just be a dance, but I doubt it that typically doesn’t happen for what you’re talking about. Like it was in the top three, and now it’s outside of the top 10. Got it something had to have been triggered. See, embed to add ID page and G site but never directly to money site. Yeah, I don’t. And also depends on how you set up we had a long discussion going on in the mastermind just recently about how the ad ID page is connected to a money site if you’re using a self hosted website for the money site, as opposed to just GMB assets. Guys, remember, if you’re just using GMB assets, you can get away with absolute murder. Right? If you’re using a self hosted website is the primary website though you have to be more careful because you can’t just spam the shit out of your, your your assets that are going to be all linked and pointed back to a self hosted website. Right? Because the rules are different. So it depends on how you have your ad ID page setup is the canonical setup to your homepage. If so, and you’re spamming that, which is what money robot is, then you’re essentially passing spam back to your money site. Right? So there’s other ways to do that break that chain to where it’s not spam isn’t being pointed directly to your money site, run it through a Google Site instead. Right? So you can canonical lies your ad ID page to your G site that’s part of your drive stack, and you’re in your money site be linked from within your dive stack, right, so that all your spam links to your ad ID page and your embeds and all that other stuff that you’re using total spam for, which is fine if you’ve got the structure if you got it set up correctly. But if you got it canonicalization to your homepage, where do you think that all that credit is being that credit from the spam is being passed to? Right? So you think about that. So you got it, you really got to know how what you’re doing when you’re going to use Spam. Spam is perfectly effective. But you got to know how and when to use it properly. Right. So again, I can’t without knowing more specifics of your project. I don’t know how you’ve got all your this chain set up. But my guess is you probably have somewhere your spam links are actually being passed directly to your money site somehow some way, which could be through a canonical from the ad ID page. Could be that simple. But it could be more than that to are you embedding your money site into your ad ID page and in spamming the shit out of it. Don’t do that. Right. Use your Google properties, which is what we teach. So again, there’s without more detail on this specifically, which by the way, if you are in the mastermind, we can take a look at it and analyze it and help you figure out the problem and fix it. Right That’s what we do. But can’t do that here on Hump Day. Hang out. Anyways, looks like we’re done. That was perfect timing. Everybody. Thank you for being here. No mastermind webinar this week, but we will see you guys next week.

Thanks, guys.

Alright man. Bye, everybody. Later

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239 syndicated from https://medium.com/@SpanishFly

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thecatladyknits · 8 years ago

Text

D has this friend (a woman) from college and she has terminal brain cancer. She was diagnosed June or July of last year. She just turned 41. I guess the way it works is it is ultimately terminal, but like... it can go into remission or just keep going, but it will ultimately like always come back and kill you. Most people only live 1-2 years after diagnosis. She just posted on fb this morning that it’s back.

I barely know this girl, but I am a fucking wreck. She is going to fucking DIE within probably a year and she knows it. I am terrified for her. I am terrified that this kind of thing could happen to me or anyone else, completely randomly. She just collapsed at work one day, without any (apparent) symptoms and was whisked into fucking brain surgery.

This is my ultimate anxiety nightmare. Like I would rather just collapse and die without warning than collapse only to find out I have like a year to live. Every day, knowing you’re moving closer and closer to death. Complete terror.

I also feel weird about this girl because of how she’s acted towards D. I know that they hooked up at some point during college, but that doesn’t bother me. He’s had a lot of girlfriends and that’s okay. But a few years ago (since we’ve been together), she propositioned him. Multiple times. He said no and that it was highly inappropriate since she knows he’s in a relationship. She apologized and whatnot, but I still felt weird about it. Not too long after that is when she was diagnosed. He said maybe that was one symptom, like personality changes. He said she was always a bit quirky, and hung up on him since their college days, so he kind of blew it off, but maybe it was.

After she was diagnosed, she wanted to go visit friends she hadn’t seen in awhile, including D (she lives in CT, we’re in OH). She came here in December with her husband (they got married after she was diagnosed but had been in a sort-of-romantic-type relationship for awhile - which makes her proposition seem even more inappropriate, but maybe it was an open relationship, idk). And she told D she didn’t feel comfortable meeting me??? Because of her feelings for D? AUGH. I honestly was so frustrated and upset by this. I don’t care that they dated in college. I do care that she propositioned him, but I could write that off to a symptom. What the fuck is this “I actively don’t want to meet your girlfriend of nearly 5 years” stuff? And they were coming over to our place. What am I supposed to do, leave my own home so she’s not uncomfortable? D told me to stay, that he told her I was going to be there. So I’m like great, now I am meeting this girl who doesn’t want to meet me, who propositioned my boyfriend, who is apparently still in love with him for the past 20 years, who has brain cancer and like... I just did not know what to do.

Well, they came over, I was very polite and the guys were mostly talking about video games or something, with her and I sort of just quietly listening (and me having absolutely no idea what to say or do), and after like a half hour, she just came over and sat down by me and was like “I don’t know or care about what they’re talking about. I have terminal brain cancer and all my friends I’m visiting just keep wanting to talk about it and say they’re so sorry and I’m like whatever, I’m over it, I don’t want to talk about it” and immediately started asking me where I worked, what I did for a living, where she was going to travel in the near future, asked me if I/we had been anywhere fun, etc. Like we had a nice conversation about work and travel and pets and just normal shit people talk about. Then we all went out to dinner, had super normal conversations (with the exception of her joking that at least she wouldn’t have to see Trump’s full term). We legit had a nice time with them.

She added me as a friend on Facebook almost immediately. I accepted because of course, what am I going to say “you’re dying but you sent an inappropriate text to my boyfriend so...”

Anyway. I just don’t know how to feel. She actually seems really fun and was nice and I could see us being friends if not for the other circumstances. I wished her a happy birthday (which made me cry too - what if this is her last bday) and she “loved” it on fb and I am just like oh my god my heart is breaking.

I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know how to feel. I don’t feel angry at her, I don’t wish her ill in any way. I am so incredibly sad for her and it’s just absolutely terrifying to think about. And to be reminded, almost daily, that she is LITERALLY GOING TO DIE. Probably soon. Not like next week soon, but soon. She’s still getting treatment. But she seems fine. She looks fine. She’s traveling the world. She got early retirement from her job. How the fuck does she deal with this? How the fuck is her husband dealing with this? How the fuck would anybody deal with this?

Fuck.

#death #health anxiety #anxiety #scared for her #i don't know how to feel #i cannot imagine #how fucking scared she must be #crying

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drunkbooksellers · 8 years ago

Text

Ep 14: Paul Constant, Seattle Review of Books

Epigraph

The Drunk Booksellers get stoned on this 4/20 themed episode with Paul Constant of the Seattle Review of Books.

Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, our website, or subscribe using your podcatcher of choice.

This episode is sponsored by Books & Whatnot, the newsletter dedicated to books, bookselling, and bookish folk; check out their newsletter archive here. Follow Books & Whatnot on Twitter at @booksandwhatnot.

If you want to get our show notes delivered directly to your inbox—with all the books mentioned on the podcast and links back to the bookstore we’re interviewing PLUS GIFs—sign up for our email newsletter.

Introduction

In which we make pot jokes and get excited about books

We're switching up our intoxicant of choice this episode and getting stoned rather than drunk (mostly). Paul's rocking Mr. Moxey's Mints (of the peppermint/sativa variety). Emma's smoking CBD (not to be confused with William Steig's children's picture book, CDB!). Kim stops talking while stoned—which would make for a really awkward podcast episode—so she's drinking the hoppiest IPA she could find instead. Everyone's a little too high to explain the varieties of weed particularly well, so you should just read David Schmader's Weed: The User's Guide: A 21st Century Handbook for Enjoying Marijuana.

Paul's Reading:

Up South by Robert Lashley

The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks

A collection of books from Mount Analogue Press

Manners by Ted Powers

Final Rose by Halie Theoharides (a comic book tone poem about love and loss made up screenshots from The Bachelor)

Reading Through It book club pick: What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump's America, edited by Dennis Johnson

Emma's Reading:

First Position by Melissa Brayden (thanks to a recommendation from our episode with The Ripped Bodice)

Giant Days 4 by John Allison, Max Sarin, Lissa Treiman, Liz Fleming, and Whitney Cogar

All the Lives I Want: Essays about My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers by Alana Massey (thanks to a recommendation from our episode with Amy Stephenson)

Kim's Reading:

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder

The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power by Joseph Turow

Forthcoming Titles We're Excited For:

You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie (out June 13)

Love and Trouble: a Midlife Reckoning by Claire Dederer (out May 9)

also mentioned Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses

Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) by David Sedaris (out May 30)

Hunger: a Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay (out June 13)

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood (out May 2)

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer (out April 25)

Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch (out April 18)

Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki (out May 9)

Isadora by Amelia Gray (out May 23)

Dreaming the Beatles: the Love Story of One Band and the Whole World by Rob Sheffield (out April 25)

Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive by Kristen J Sollee (out June 13)

Modern Tarot: Connecting with Your Higher Self Through the Wisdom of the Cards by Michelle Tea (out June 13)

The Perfect Mix: Everything I Know about Leadership I Learned as a Bartender by Helen Rothberg (out June 20)

Chapter I [18:50]

In which we learn what The Seattle Review of Books is, talk about book reviews as a meta art form, and get advice on promoting diversity and being a safe, welcoming place for people who aren't white bros

The Seattle Review of Books is a book news, review, and interviews site. This isn't consumer reports, with a thumbs up or down on each title; each review aims to have a conversation with the book. It's a site that aims to look like your bookshelf, without genre classification.

Emma & Kim don't quite understand Paul's assertion that people don't organize their bookshelves, but we roll with it.

SRB makes all their money through a single sponsor (which changes each week). If you're interested in their sponsorship program, you can learn more here.

Paul wants to promote young, new writers and help them build up their clip file. So you should probably pitch him with your brilliant, bookish ideas. Email submissions@seattlereviewofbooks or fill in the contact form on their about page.

Emma particularly loves the Help Desk by Cienna Madrid. Ask Cienna an awkward book-related question at [email protected].

Being a couple of white guys, Paul and his co-founder Martin McClellan are extremely concerned with diverse representation. You can learn more about how SRB encourages diversity in both the books they review and the reviewers they publish on their about page (or by listening to this episode...). But you should know right off the bat, they are not here to promote the new Franzen novel and they will not pander to bros.

Chapter II [33:10]

In which we talk about life in the US post-election, say something negative about a book, and discuss Paul's past (and current) life as a bookseller

Reading Through It is a post-election book club hosted by Seattle Review of Books, the Seattle Weekly, and Third Place Books Seward Park. They meet the first Wednesday of every month.

On our post-election world, Paul Constant says: "This is what books were made for. Books are engines of empathy... the only way to do a deep-dive into an issue. It's our stored knowledge... This is the moment for books."

The next Reading Through It book group pick is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. They'll be meeting Wednesday May 3rd at Third Place Books Seward Park.

Read Paul's article on his time at Borders: Books Without Borders: My Life at the World's Dumbest Bookstore Chain

Though he's not technically a bookseller anymore, Paul is still "on team books." Keep an eye out for our "I'm On Team Books" t-shirts, which may or may not be a thing we sell one day.

Chapter III [43:20]

In which Paul is better at explaining our questions than stoned Emma is at asking them, Emma and Kim give Paul major side-eye due to his bookseller confession, and Emma continues to push Uprooted by Naomi Novik

Desert Island Pick (what would you read that you never had the time to read before): The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro (beginning with The Path to Power)

We couldn't find a video of the following clip of Caro on the Colbert Report, so we'll just leave you this series of gifs to explain why you, too, should consider bringing an epic five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson as your desert beach read:

You're welcome. Now, back to your regularly scheduled show notes.

Station Eleven Picks (the books to preserve for society) The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (everything you need to know about living in a society) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (everything you need to know about life and how it doesn’t always work out the way you want, but you should live it anyway)

Read Paul's essay about The Scarlet Letter, originally written for Scarecrow Video.

Wild Pick (traveling is about observing things... soaking everything in) We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live by Joan Didion ("because she is the greatest observer on the planet and I would want to be like her when I was traveling")

Bookseller Confession Once again, we have a guest who hasn't read Harry Potter. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? Paul also hasn't read Lord of the Rings and Kim proceeds to side-eye him from across the city.

(In case you were wondering, the title of the direct link to this gif is "wtf-i-cant-even-you-are-stupid." Just sayin'.)

Emma, naturally, tries to convert Paul to fantasy w/ an Uprooted recommendation because "nobody doesn't like it." Paul commits to reading it in order to prove her wrong.

Go-To Handsell Fup by Jim Dodge Paul saved the book from going out of print and—arguably more importantly—he handsold a copy to Allison Hannigan.

Impossible Handsell Paradise by AL Kennedy (and everything by AL Kennedy)

Book for Booksellers Saving Capitalism by Robert Reich

Favorite Bookstores Elliott Bay Ada’s Technical Books Third Place Ravenna

Favorite Literary Media

Not to brag, but, we’re the only podcast Paul listens to.

The Rumpus Lit Hub Book Forum Electric Literature Shelf Awareness

Epilogue

In which we tell you where to find us on the Internets

You can find Paul on:

Twitter

Seattle Review of Books is also on Twitter

Seattlereviewofbooks.com

You can find us on:

Twitter at @drunkbookseller

Litsy at @drunkbooksellers

Facebook

Instagram

Newsletter

Website

Emma tweets @thebibliot and writes bookish things for Book Riot.

Kim tweets occasionally from @finaleofseem, but don’t expect too much 'cause she saves all of the interesting (ie. book-related) shizzle for Drunk Booksellers.

Subscribe and rate us on iTunes!

Check out this episode!

1 note · View note

mcrmadness · 4 years ago

Note

Die the asks thingy: everything divisible by three:D?

Oh my gosh I feel myself so stupid - I thought that was the question and not that you meant every question that has a number divisible by three! :D (I’m happy I realized that before answering something snappy like “Everything divisible by three is divisible by three ;D” lol.) But thanks! I need to do bit of counting here but let’s see what comes out of this!

This was to the Get To Know Me Uncomfortably Well -ask thingy. So many questions that I will leave only a few before the read more link!

3. When is your birthday? It was actually just a few days ago, so in June, and I was born in 1991. 6. What’s your lucky number? 13. 9. How tall are you? Short :D Only 156cm or so. No idea what that’s in inches but not much. 12. What was your last dream about? I don’t remember last night’s dream anymore but the one I can remember was from the night before and I dreamt of someone from my fave band visiting me at my parents’ house and he was giving us his signatures, I was talking non-stop and he was then sitting on the stove eating a piece of organic sausage, and I just cringed because he hasn’t eaten meat in decades and I wasn’t sure if he knew it was meat or how he even knew it was organic meat. And then he turned into a dog and wanted to leave and I let him out and told him “But I understand, I’m also an introvert and very sensitive.” and told him to send my regards to his bandmates. 15. Favorite song? I don’t really have just one favorite, I have several from all bands I listen to and can’t really compare them to each other. 18. Do you want children? Nope. 21. Have you ever been to the hospital? Yes. Had an open heart surgery at the age of 3, which is why I had to visit the hospital a lot before and after that. I still have to go to checkups every few years or so. I have also been to the hospital when I broke my arm at the age of 14.

24. Baths or showers? Showers. Bathtubs are becoming bit of a rarity in Finland and I’ve always lived in houses or flats with a shower only, bathtubs are more common in old places that haven’t been renovated yet. I remember when I was younger and my cousins’ has a bathtub and I always wanted to use it but I didn’t really get to do that because of how expensive it would have been and how much water you have to use to even get that filled. 27. Would you like to be a big celebrity? I don’t think so. I get too overwhelmed too easily, even tho sometimes I feel like I’d like to be a bit more visible. But I still have social anxiety which is why I often say that I’m an attention whore who is afraid of being the centre of attention. 30. How many pillows do you sleep with? Just one under my head but then I have several others in my bed, mostly I’m hugging this body pillow because it just feels better in my joints etc. 33. What do you typically have for breakfast? Just bread (rye or oat) with butter, sometimes with cheese, sometimes also with cucumber and herbal salt. And some days I’m more into eating oatmeal with milk and honey. Whatever it is I eat, I always get tea (Earl Grey with honey) afterwards. 36. Favorite clean word? Clean word? What is a clean word? I don’t get it :D 39. Do you have any scars? (I swear this question is in this ask thingy twice, somewhere in the end but it did not end up in my list!) Yes, the one from the heart surgery that will be lifelong scar, right in the middle of my chest. Then something I’m not sure if it’s from the surgery too or from the time when I was a teenager and my cat of that time tried to jump on me but failed and grabbed my leg with his claws. That made a nasty wound near my groin because I didn’t take care of it properly, and it maybe left a scar. It’s kinda hard to find anymore. 42. Are you a good judge of character? I believe so. I am very intuitive and can sense all kinds of things from people. I usually see straight away from people if I will get along with them or not. But sometimes I can also hold some prejudice that makes me not see clearly and later on have to admit to myself that this time I was wrong. But usually I do see this, it’s probably a lot harder to see from people you know than from people you don’t know, since that’s how you end up becoming friends with narcissistic people. It’s so much easier to tell other people that you know what, your friend/spouse sounds like a toxic person than see it when it happens to yourself. 45. What is your favorite accent? I guess this is about English and from these I have to say Scottish. I could just listen to that accent for hours and never get tired of hearing it :D It must be the r, it sounds so familiar because in Finnish we roll the r’s very hard. Lately I’ve also grown to tell Irish accent apart from others and I like the sound of that too. But if talking of others but native English accents, I have to admit that I really like it when people speak with an accent. And I’m especially drawn to German accent and I’m able to hear native Germans based on their English accent, I always love to play this guessing game with myself in my head where I try to guess someone’s nationality if their accent doesn’t sound like native English :D Finnish is also fun to find but at the same time I hate how it sounds because it remind me of the fact that’s how I sound, too. 48. Can you curl your tongue? Yeah. 51. Are you scared of spiders? Well, yes. Except daddy longlegs, they’re fun, but they also are not spiders, so... But yes, I am scared of spiders but at the same time I don’t really mind them because in Finland we don’t have many poisonous ones and those normally don’t find their way inside the houses, so the ones inside the houses are totally harmless and more of useful. So if I spot a small spider, I let her/him stay. And we have a deal: they don’t touch me and I won’t touch them. I’m more of afraid of touching a spider (or any bug) than just seeing them, so I won’t go in panic mode just from seeing them. 54. Are you a clean or messy person? I’m messy. I’d say hygienic, but messy. I have arranged everything I can put in order but everything that I can’t or that I have to use more than every now and then, will become messy very, very soon. 57. How long does it take for you to get ready? It depends, from 15-20min to one hour? I usually set my alarm so that I can snooze for 30-60mins and then I’ll have about an hour to get ready. If I have to shower, then I add one more hour to it. During work and school mornings I usually got up so that I was ready in 15-20 minutes because it was happening every day and I needed as much sleep as I could because I don’t know how to go to bed early enough. 60. Do you talk to yourself? Nope, I don’t like hearing myself because it triggers/worsens my depersonalization. Sometimes I might say accidentally something aloud without planning that and I always scare myself :D:D:D:D 63. Biggest Fear? Hmmmmm... probably fire. Or death itself. 66. Do you like long or short hair? On myself or others? On myself I have this... well not short but also not long? Because it’s the easiest to maintain but I also think I’d look terrible with too short hair. (But I already look terrible so that probably wouldn’t change a thing.) 69. Extrovert or Introvert? Introverted ambivert. 72. Are you scared of the dark? Yes. I am able to sleep without the lights on and I actually need the room to be dark, but I am afraid of the dark, especially outside. 75. Have you ever started a rumor? I don’t think so. But if I have, then it was in my teens and totally unintentional because I can sometimes be socially very, very stupid. 78. Have you ever done drugs? Nope. 81. Can you roll your Rs? Sure thing :D I mentioned it already but Finnish has rolled r’s only so I can do that. But also Finns who can’t roll the r exist and sometimes I place my tongue wrongly behind my teeth and lose the r. 84. What color is your hair? Dyed black. My natural hair color is “golden blond”. 87. Do you keep a journal? No, unless random Tumblr posts are counted :D I don’t like journals, they just make me sad because I know I’m the only person to read them so when I write, I imagine myself being old and reading them and it makes me so sad because I imagine that no of those things like bands exist anymore and all the people and animals have died or friendships have ended and whatnot. 90. What makes you angry? Injustice. Impolite people. People who don’t listen to others. Especially when I’m told “I don’t care.” I feel so much rage inside of me that I just want to punch them and it’s scary because I am in no way violent and I don’t want to punch anyone, but I just don’t even have words for how angry that makes me feel. 93. Do you want a boy a girl for a child? I don’t want to have kids. (But I am willing to take lots of cats and they can be both boys or girls, but only so that they can’t start breeding like rabbits :D) 96. How did you get your name? If this means my irl name: My mom came up with it as a longer version, then my dad came up with my middle name and they dropped the second half of the original name. So my parents thought it was a great name for a child. 99. Color of your bedspread? I don’t have one :D:D:D:D:D I have a loft bed so I don’t need to use them anyway.

#Anonymous #ask mcrmadness #long post

0 notes

beyondvapepage · 6 years ago

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 239 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Adam: Alright, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts, the one where you hear the weird sound of Hernan rubbing his hands together.

Hernan: We’re live, Adam!

Adam: cómo estás

Hernan: I’m good. Thank you.

Chris: Excellent as always, super good to be here.

Adam: It’s good. Your audio sound super good today, man. Do you have any mic?

Chris: No, no. Yeah, books. Yeah, sounds good. All right. Or not? How about you? How are you doing?

Adam: Outstanding! Marco, how about yourself, man?

Adam: Awesome. Bradley. How are you doing?

Hernan: You don’t sound super excited.

Bradley: Yeah, she grew up too damn fast. And that means I’m getting old as a problem.

Adam: Awesome. All right. Well, if we don’t have anything else, or rather, is there anything else? You guys, are we good to go? To one. All right, we’re good to go. Let’s hop into it.

Bradley: Alright, let me grab the screen. And we’ll get into the questions. Sweet. All right, where are we? Seven days ago. Okay.

How Do You Use The Embeds Service At MGYB?

Marco: That said, it’s like getting a link, but it doesn’t count against your link profile.

Bradley: Yeah, it’s raining again.

How To Build Citations For Multiple Cities Website?

What Is The Best Way To Keep Up The Rankings If You Need To Change The Phone Number Of A GMB Listing?

Adam: No.

Bradley: okay.

Does The Semantic Mastery Battle Plan Help In Setting Up A Local Lead Gen Business?

Does Google Favor An Authority Site With Specific Niche And Location Over A Lead Gen Site With Powerful Backlinks In It?

How Do You Pick What Links To Use When You’re Adding The Service Post Links On The City Page For The Second County?

Where Do You Typically Include The Links To The County Silo Index Pages?

Should You Create Two Different GMB Assets For Two-Related Keywords Or Separate Them?

How To Keep The Domain Authority (DA) Of Previous Citations Without Confusing Google With Different NAP Data Of A New Citation?

Would You Recommend That The Inner City Pages Have The Same Style As The Homepage?

Can You Embed A GMB Post?

Can you embed a GMB post Marco says you can. I haven’t tried it but Marco says you can.

Marco: I have and still can. Okay, cool.

Bradley: Got a shirt today. Look at that. That’s cool. We got to wrap it up in about three minutes. Looks like we’re about done anyway.

How Do You Recover A 3-Pack Rankings?

Thanks, guys.

Alright man. Bye, everybody. Later

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

0 notes

daynamartinez22 · 6 years ago

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 239 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Adam: Alright, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts, the one where you hear the weird sound of Hernan rubbing his hands together.

Hernan: We’re live, Adam!

Adam: cómo estás

Hernan: I’m good. Thank you.

Chris: Excellent as always, super good to be here.

Adam: It’s good. Your audio sound super good today, man. Do you have any mic?

Chris: No, no. Yeah, books. Yeah, sounds good. All right. Or not? How about you? How are you doing?

Adam: Outstanding! Marco, how about yourself, man?

Adam: Awesome. Bradley. How are you doing?

Hernan: You don’t sound super excited.

Bradley: Yeah, she grew up too damn fast. And that means I’m getting old as a problem.

Adam: Awesome. All right. Well, if we don’t have anything else, or rather, is there anything else? You guys, are we good to go? To one. All right, we’re good to go. Let’s hop into it.

Bradley: Alright, let me grab the screen. And we’ll get into the questions. Sweet. All right, where are we? Seven days ago. Okay.

How Do You Use The Embeds Service At MGYB?

Marco: That said, it’s like getting a link, but it doesn’t count against your link profile.

Bradley: Yeah, it’s raining again.

How To Build Citations For Multiple Cities Website?

What Is The Best Way To Keep Up The Rankings If You Need To Change The Phone Number Of A GMB Listing?

Adam: No.

Bradley: okay.

Does The Semantic Mastery Battle Plan Help In Setting Up A Local Lead Gen Business?

Does Google Favor An Authority Site With Specific Niche And Location Over A Lead Gen Site With Powerful Backlinks In It?

How Do You Pick What Links To Use When You’re Adding The Service Post Links On The City Page For The Second County?

Where Do You Typically Include The Links To The County Silo Index Pages?

Should You Create Two Different GMB Assets For Two-Related Keywords Or Separate Them?

How To Keep The Domain Authority (DA) Of Previous Citations Without Confusing Google With Different NAP Data Of A New Citation?

Would You Recommend That The Inner City Pages Have The Same Style As The Homepage?

Can You Embed A GMB Post?

Can you embed a GMB post Marco says you can. I haven’t tried it but Marco says you can.

Marco: I have and still can. Okay, cool.

Bradley: Got a shirt today. Look at that. That’s cool. We got to wrap it up in about three minutes. Looks like we’re about done anyway.

How Do You Recover A 3-Pack Rankings?

Thanks, guys.

Alright man. Bye, everybody. Later

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239 published first on your-t1-blog-url

0 notes

angelagiles18 · 6 years ago

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 239 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Adam: Alright, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts, the one where you hear the weird sound of Hernan rubbing his hands together.

Hernan: We’re live, Adam!

Adam: cómo estás

Hernan: I’m good. Thank you.

Chris: Excellent as always, super good to be here.

Adam: It’s good. Your audio sound super good today, man. Do you have any mic?

Chris: No, no. Yeah, books. Yeah, sounds good. All right. Or not? How about you? How are you doing?

Adam: Outstanding! Marco, how about yourself, man?

Adam: Awesome. Bradley. How are you doing?

Hernan: You don’t sound super excited.

Bradley: Yeah, she grew up too damn fast. And that means I’m getting old as a problem.

Adam: Awesome. All right. Well, if we don’t have anything else, or rather, is there anything else? You guys, are we good to go? To one. All right, we’re good to go. Let’s hop into it.

Bradley: Alright, let me grab the screen. And we’ll get into the questions. Sweet. All right, where are we? Seven days ago. Okay.

How Do You Use The Embeds Service At MGYB?

Marco: That said, it’s like getting a link, but it doesn’t count against your link profile.

Bradley: Yeah, it’s raining again.

How To Build Citations For Multiple Cities Website?

What Is The Best Way To Keep Up The Rankings If You Need To Change The Phone Number Of A GMB Listing?

Adam: No.

Bradley: okay.

Does The Semantic Mastery Battle Plan Help In Setting Up A Local Lead Gen Business?

Does Google Favor An Authority Site With Specific Niche And Location Over A Lead Gen Site With Powerful Backlinks In It?

How Do You Pick What Links To Use When You’re Adding The Service Post Links On The City Page For The Second County?

Where Do You Typically Include The Links To The County Silo Index Pages?

Should You Create Two Different GMB Assets For Two-Related Keywords Or Separate Them?

How To Keep The Domain Authority (DA) Of Previous Citations Without Confusing Google With Different NAP Data Of A New Citation?

Would You Recommend That The Inner City Pages Have The Same Style As The Homepage?

Can You Embed A GMB Post?

Can you embed a GMB post Marco says you can. I haven’t tried it but Marco says you can.

Marco: I have and still can. Okay, cool.

Bradley: Got a shirt today. Look at that. That’s cool. We got to wrap it up in about three minutes. Looks like we’re about done anyway.

How Do You Recover A 3-Pack Rankings?

Thanks, guys.

Alright man. Bye, everybody. Later

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239 published first on your-t1-blog-url http://bit.ly/1WMpNvB June 10, 2019 at 09:50PM Semantic Mastery http://bit.ly/2vg4Or5

0 notes

pledje · 6 years ago

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 239 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Adam: Alright, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts, the one where you hear the weird sound of Hernan rubbing his hands together.

Hernan: We’re live, Adam!

Adam: cómo estás

Hernan: I’m good. Thank you.

Chris: Excellent as always, super good to be here.

Adam: It’s good. Your audio sound super good today, man. Do you have any mic?

Chris: No, no. Yeah, books. Yeah, sounds good. All right. Or not? How about you? How are you doing?

Adam: Outstanding! Marco, how about yourself, man?

Adam: Awesome. Bradley. How are you doing?

Hernan: You don’t sound super excited.

Bradley: Yeah, she grew up too damn fast. And that means I’m getting old as a problem.

Adam: Awesome. All right. Well, if we don’t have anything else, or rather, is there anything else? You guys, are we good to go? To one. All right, we’re good to go. Let’s hop into it.

Bradley: Alright, let me grab the screen. And we’ll get into the questions. Sweet. All right, where are we? Seven days ago. Okay.

How Do You Use The Embeds Service At MGYB?

Marco: That said, it’s like getting a link, but it doesn’t count against your link profile.

Bradley: Yeah, it’s raining again.

How To Build Citations For Multiple Cities Website?

What Is The Best Way To Keep Up The Rankings If You Need To Change The Phone Number Of A GMB Listing?

Adam: No.

Bradley: okay.

Does The Semantic Mastery Battle Plan Help In Setting Up A Local Lead Gen Business?

Does Google Favor An Authority Site With Specific Niche And Location Over A Lead Gen Site With Powerful Backlinks In It?

How Do You Pick What Links To Use When You’re Adding The Service Post Links On The City Page For The Second County?

Where Do You Typically Include The Links To The County Silo Index Pages?

Should You Create Two Different GMB Assets For Two-Related Keywords Or Separate Them?

How To Keep The Domain Authority (DA) Of Previous Citations Without Confusing Google With Different NAP Data Of A New Citation?

Would You Recommend That The Inner City Pages Have The Same Style As The Homepage?

Can You Embed A GMB Post?

Can you embed a GMB post Marco says you can. I haven’t tried it but Marco says you can.

Marco: I have and still can. Okay, cool.

Bradley: Got a shirt today. Look at that. That’s cool. We got to wrap it up in about three minutes. Looks like we’re about done anyway.

How Do You Recover A 3-Pack Rankings?

Thanks, guys.

Alright man. Bye, everybody. Later

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239 published first on your-t1-blog-url

0 notes

localwebmgmt · 6 years ago

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 239 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Adam: Alright, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts, the one where you hear the weird sound of Hernan rubbing his hands together.

Hernan: We’re live, Adam!

Adam: cómo estás

Hernan: I’m good. Thank you.

Chris: Excellent as always, super good to be here.

Adam: It’s good. Your audio sound super good today, man. Do you have any mic?

Chris: No, no. Yeah, books. Yeah, sounds good. All right. Or not? How about you? How are you doing?

Adam: Outstanding! Marco, how about yourself, man?

Adam: Awesome. Bradley. How are you doing?

Hernan: You don’t sound super excited.

Bradley: Yeah, she grew up too damn fast. And that means I’m getting old as a problem.

Adam: Awesome. All right. Well, if we don’t have anything else, or rather, is there anything else? You guys, are we good to go? To one. All right, we’re good to go. Let’s hop into it.

Bradley: Alright, let me grab the screen. And we’ll get into the questions. Sweet. All right, where are we? Seven days ago. Okay.

How Do You Use The Embeds Service At MGYB?

Marco: That said, it’s like getting a link, but it doesn’t count against your link profile.

Bradley: Yeah, it’s raining again.

How To Build Citations For Multiple Cities Website?

What Is The Best Way To Keep Up The Rankings If You Need To Change The Phone Number Of A GMB Listing?

Adam: No.

Bradley: okay.

Does The Semantic Mastery Battle Plan Help In Setting Up A Local Lead Gen Business?

Does Google Favor An Authority Site With Specific Niche And Location Over A Lead Gen Site With Powerful Backlinks In It?

How Do You Pick What Links To Use When You’re Adding The Service Post Links On The City Page For The Second County?

Where Do You Typically Include The Links To The County Silo Index Pages?

Should You Create Two Different GMB Assets For Two-Related Keywords Or Separate Them?

How To Keep The Domain Authority (DA) Of Previous Citations Without Confusing Google With Different NAP Data Of A New Citation?

Would You Recommend That The Inner City Pages Have The Same Style As The Homepage?

Can You Embed A GMB Post?

Can you embed a GMB post Marco says you can. I haven’t tried it but Marco says you can.

Marco: I have and still can. Okay, cool.

Bradley: Got a shirt today. Look at that. That’s cool. We got to wrap it up in about three minutes. Looks like we’re about done anyway.

How Do You Recover A 3-Pack Rankings?

Thanks, guys.

Alright man. Bye, everybody. Later

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239 published first on your-t1-blog-url

0 notes

semanticmastery · 6 years ago

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 239 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Adam: Alright, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts, the one where you hear the weird sound of Hernan rubbing his hands together.

Hernan: We're live, Adam!

Adam: cómo estás

Hernan: I'm good. Thank you.

Adam: Gotcha. Well, welcome everybody to Episode 239 of Hump Day hangout today is the fifth of June 2019. And we have got some good stuff for you today. But real quick, we're going to run down the line and say hello to everybody. So Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Excellent as always, super good to be here.

Adam: It's good. Your audio sound super good today, man. Do you have any mic?

Chris: No, no. Yeah, books. Yeah, sounds good. All right. Or not? How about you? How are you doing?

Hernan: Good, man. I'm just freezing my ass off down here. So I'm drinking tea. You guys are having the nice part this time of the year. But other than that good. Happy to be here. Happy to hang out with you guys a little bit. So good stuff coming up.

Adam: Outstanding! Marco, how about yourself, man?

Marco: What's up? You know, about six weeks ago, I was listening to the temptations. I wish that it would rain. And it hasn't stopped since that day. Red rain. Yeah, I'm gonna stop listening to that spot maybe to stop raining.

Adam: Awesome. Bradley. How are you doing?

Bradley: Good. I'm happy to be here. Excited. I gotta we gotta run it. I gotta be out for like, right at five today, though. My daughter's graduating eighth grade and going into high school next year. And so I want this big, like award ceremony this evening and all that and can't believe she's gonna be fucking High School man.

Hernan: You don't sound super excited.

Bradley: Yeah, she grew up too damn fast. And that means I'm getting old as a problem.

Adam: Yeah, that's crazy. I'm trying to think when we met her. What was that like three or four years ago? or? Yeah, man. That's crazy. Anyways, Long Time Time flies. Alright, well, getting back to the hump day hangouts topic. If you're watching us for the first time. That's awesome. You're in the right place. Thanks for watching. Whether you're watching us live at https://www.semanticmastery.com/hdquestions or if you're checking out the replay on YouTube. This is the place to be you can ask the questions at again https://www.semanticmastery.com/hdquestions. That's where we've got the form the little chat box for all the questions, you can ask your questions ahead of time, you know if you aren't gonna be able to make it live or you just want to make sure it gets answered because it is first come first serve. Beyond that, we get asked a lot you know, where should I start with semantic mastery Well, this is the place to start. You know, we're here every week we're answering questions. We're watching Hernan choke to death on his drink. And but then we tell people after watching that, don't grab the Battle Plan. All right. And that's what you want to grab. You know, if you want to get better repeatable results, go to https://www.battleplan.semanticmastery.com. But if you're past that you're kind of wanting, either you're ready to start or you really want to grow your digital marketing business, then, you know, joining an experienced community with faster access to real-world info and testing with the Semantic Mastery Mastermind is the place for you. And again, you can find out more about that at https://mastermind.semanticmastery.com and for those of you who liked using done for you services and like to speed things up and over to mgyb.co, and I'm almost done, I do want to say that if you can subscribe to our YouTube channel helps us grow helps us get our word out there. And if you come across any videos or clips that you like, please share them. You know, if you find something particularly helpful, there's probably someone you know who might like that as well. And real quick, I wanted to say because Hernan just kind of glossed over this I bet he can actually talk now maybe he's recovered from his drinking. I know. Yeah, kind of. But I think heard on you're going to be doing some live q&a for our mastermind members. Kind of a live thing if you call direct

Hernan: Oh, yeah, I'm gonna be starting. I'm going to be starting I tried to start last week, but it was up kind of a problem because I wasn't in the country. So I was given a traffic workshop. So but these Friday, I'm going to start doing kind of a serious about paid traffic, specifically Facebook ads, and Instagram ads. We're focused on local, we can talk about pretty much anything you guys want to lead gen. In general, you know, CPA e-commerce, what do you guys want, it's going to be exclusive for the mastermind is going to be on the Facebook group. So you need to be part of the Facebook group, if you're in the Mastermind, you haven't been joining or visiting the Facebook group, that's where the magic happens pretty much besides the calls and whatnot, that's where, you know, we get a lot of action happening or whatnot. So head over there, I think I'm gonna be doing it. Let me actually confirm you guys the time. So it's going to be Friday, the seventh and it's going to be at 11 am. Eastern. So it's going to be there, it's got to be live, it's got to be awesome. So you know, it's got a bit I'm going to be testing it out as well to see what kind of response we get. And you know, if you guys agree with that, that could have become a cycle. So just jump in live like, once or twice a month, just answering Facebook stuff. That's part of the commitment that we have with the mastermind people that we want to give them as many tools as possible to grow their business. And Facebook ads is a powerful tool indeed. So

Adam: sounds good. Yeah. And that's on top of all the regular training, everyone gets in the mastermind as well as the community. So if you're interested, head over to https://mastermind.semanticmastery.com and join up before Hernan goes live. So you can attend the

Bradley: speaking of which I've got YouTube ads training that I'm going to be doing over the next several weeks in there. Because I'm doing several YouTube ads campaigns for Semantic Mastery I've just been recording several videos over the last couple days. In fact, we're going to try to grow our YouTube channel subscriber base to above 10,000. So I'm setting up several campaigns using in-stream ads and YouTube for that, and I'm going to be kind of documenting and sharing, you know, the process for that kind of stuff, as well as we're going to start increasing our Hump Day hangout attendance to and I want to use YouTube ads for that, because there's an enormous amount of traffic to be had from YouTube, if you know how to do it, right. And it just takes consistent effort and you know, trial and error to figure out the best recipe so to speak for the ads and the messaging to get that right. And so I'm going to be doing a lot of that I also started another business that I finally revealed to the mastermind last week, I've been teasing it for a month, I'm not going to talk about here, but I'm going to be using YouTube ads a lot for that business as well. And it's just, it's going to be cool, because it's going to be slightly different from just our standard, you know, local lead gen stuff that we've been kind of pushing for the last, you know, six or eight months, because it was you know, there was so much opportunity in that. But, you know, we've kind of done all that. And so now we're going to kind of broaden out a little bit and do some, I think it's really good timing that is Don's gonna be doing some Facebook, and Instagram paid traffic training. And I'm going to be doing some paid traffic training on YouTube ads and how to get traffic that can be applied for you know, affiliate type businesses or local businesses or, you know, just getting like branding and awareness and all that kind of stuff, building up an email list, building your subscribers, lead generation, it's just going to be kind of all-encompassing, so I think it's a really good time to be in the mastermind.

Adam: Awesome. All right. Well, if we don't have anything else, or rather, is there anything else? You guys, are we good to go? To one. All right, we're good to go. Let's hop into it.

Bradley: Alright, let me grab the screen. And we'll get into the questions. Sweet. All right, where are we? Seven days ago. Okay.

How Do You Use The Embeds Service At MGYB?

So it looks like to Tushar is first he says embeds service at MGYB. Why be how do you recommend using this? Is it for tier one links or money sites or the embeds on niche relevant sites? Well, the embed network is for embedding pretty much any sort of iframe. Typically, people think of embed services as being used for just videos. But it can be used for Maps, Google Maps, Google, Google, my business maps, you can, you can actually iframe pretty much almost any website unless it has an iframe breaker. So you can use it for any number of things. We use it specifically for videos GMB or Google My Business map embeds as well as RYS you know, RYS Reloaded methods or tactics session, say. So, if you're not familiar with that, it's really powerful to do with your drive stack stuff, your files and folders and things like that, that you can embed, which is great, because, you know, if you order a drive stack to be built from MGYB and then you can use parts of that as part with the embed service. And the same thing goes with maps and beds or video embed. So it can be used for pretty much any sort of thing and embeds or actually, I don't know how much Marco would want to get into this year. But embeds are like a do follow link even on nofollow sites. So they're very, very powerful. And they work very well. Marco, what do you want to say about?

Marco: That said, it's like getting a link, but it doesn't count against your link profile.

Bradley: Yeah, it's raining again.

Marco: Yeah, it's raining really hard, and the thunder coming through and all kinds of good stuff. You can hear it. But anyway, that's just the way it is. And embeds are really simple. It's a display of your page. on somebody else's, it's a tunnel. And all the credit goes back to the source. And that's just what it is. It's a way to get a link that doesn't get counted as a link. So if it's not counted as a link, it cannot incur a penalty.

Bradley: Yeah, and they're really powerful and the embed networks are primarily web to auto-embed networks that are link building manager has been building for years now. So they are themed networks. In other words, he's been building and seasoning these links, or excuse me, these web 2.0 embed networks for I'd say, at least three years, maybe even four years now. So a lot, I mean, first of all, it's a massive network. And second of all, a lot of these are their aged and themed well, because he's been building and building and building. I mean, he's got hundreds of thousands, if not over a million properties built specifically for this kind of stuff. So again, they are themed, very, a lot of them are aged. So it's it is a very powerful thing. We've seen quite a lot of movement, using the embed service for like GMB map embeds. You know, I don't do a whole whole lot of video SEO stuff, or at least a haven't been recent. But I'm going to be over the next several months because I'm going to be doing a lot of YouTube stuff right now. But I'm doing paid traffic as well. So I'll be testing that some more. I know it works well for videos, but I have been doing a shit ton of map stuff, Google Maps, and GMB stuff. And I've been using that embed service for that as well as like we, we teach in any one of our paid training courses about @ID pages, again, can't go into that here in a free setting. But in our paid courses, we talked about @ID pages. And they're very, very powerful to embed in some of the biggest movements that I've seen, are using just traditional link building like, again, the same service that we have an MGYB and an embedded service or combination of both, where you embed a property and then hit the embedded the properties where it's embedded with additional links. And that tends to really move the needle. And what I like about that service is that it's easy, it's easy for us, right? Because we all we have to do is place an order, you know, and in our link building manager and his team take care of all of that. So it's easy on me, I just have to submit details. And then you know, a few weeks later, I get the report. And I can usually see depending on the obviously level of competition, but you can usually see the results will move the needle just from the link building and the embed services combined. So it's a very powerful service. And it's simple, simple to fulfill.

How To Build Citations For Multiple Cities Website?

Next is he says how to build citations for multiple cities website. Do you offer GMB verification for your local clients? I asked this because I'm not sure if this is risky. And we should limit this to our own properties. Should we do this for a client with a service business that can serve multiple cities? Yeah, you can I mean, that's something I up sold to a lot of my clients was adding additional locations and I'm using air quotes because they didn't a lot of my clients didn't actually go get physical, you know, additional office spaces or, or shops, because most of them are contractors. But we did add additional maps listings for a lot of my clients. However, I don't, you know, I always recommend taking precautions if you're going to do that for businesses like if you're doing it for lead gen stuff, you understand the risks, right? So so that, you know, use them at your own risk. But when you're dealing with a client, you have to be more careful, right, you do not want to do anything that could essentially pass a penalty to their main brand or their main domain, their main location. So whenever I've up sold maps expansion or location expansion to existing clients, then what I would do is either just use subdomains from their root domain for each location or I would avoid using their domains alt altogether and just use GMB assets, which would be the GMB website GMB posts, the map itself, that kind of stuff, and then obviously would be branded still for the main company. And if they would all have their own unique tracking numbers that would go to what I'll forward to the, you know, main phone number for that company. Typically, they would either have an in house receptionist that would answer the phone or I would set up an answering service like like, like I've been doing for my lead gen stuff forever. And so all the locations would go to the same destination phone number, but all of the individual locations would have a unique physical address a unique phone number and a unique web address.

If it was going to be used with their branded domain, we would, we would always use subdomains, not inner pages. So not like location pages, it would always be subdomains. And typically I wouldn't even build websites on them on the subdomains, I would just do a redirect from the subdomain to the GMB website. That makes sense. But in some cases, I recommended not even and it's just again, for those clients that were worried about it, I said, you know, we don't even need to use your domain, we can just use this the GMB website as the main website for each location. The idea is to get the leads to go to the main, you know, the leads back to your client, you're the business, it doesn't necessarily mean as long as you can brand it with the same logo and same like the header image. So the GMB website image, that kind of stuff that you know, the header image on that, all of that, that's all that you really need to brand it. And the rest of it can still be left within just GMB, which is what I recommend. So it really depends on the level of risk that your clients are willing to take, I always recommend trying to reduce or eliminate risk as much as possible. So the only thing that would stay the same would be their name. But we've actually had a discussion recently in the mastermind, I'm not going to get too much into it but adding a pending an additional term to the actual business name to make it more unique. So for example, if you had four locations in one city, you could name it like north, south, east and west. So company name North company name, East company name, South company name West. And that actually helps to add a little bit of diversity to the business name to prevent any potential pigeon issues. But like I said, it's still it would still be I still wouldn't recommend actually connecting any of those assets directly to the primary businesses location or websites because you want to reduce any risk. That makes sense. Okay.

As far as building citations, I don't build citations to GMB assets unless they are real bona fide businesses that I have x or addresses excuse me that I have access to collect mail from and I've talked about that on for many, many months. Now. If you're buying GMB verify, you know, verified GMB locations. That means it's it's a spam address, or it's an address that you do not have access to collect mail from or at. Does that make sense? So the problem with getting building citations is the moment that you start building citations because most citation directories or business directories require a physical street address in order to build the listing. And the moment that you start adding your business or publishing a listing on a business directory with the street address. Okay, you're going to start you're going to get on that that street address is going to be put on a marketing mailing list for physical mail via United States Postal Service. And what happens is that location, that address that you use will start to receive business-related mail that's addressed to the company that you have listed as the GMB. And so if it's going to an actual building that or to somebody's house, God forbid, I recommend that nobody ever uses somebody's house address, unless that's their own house, or they got permission to do it. But if it's going to a building or a house, and somebody starts getting email, or excuse me physical mail, with solicitation offers from marketing companies and Vista print and, you know, list providers like info USA and like all these different I know, because I get a ton of them myself, you start getting all these marketing, e mails, these solicitation mails for offers for the business, then it's likely that somebody's going to report that business is not being actually at that location. So I highly recommend that you don't do that you can get results without citations. If you have a physical address that you can accept mail that then I absolutely recommend using citations because it is still very powerful and effective. But you can still get results without using citations. And if you're using GMBs that are not, you don't have access to the actual physical address, and I recommend that you do not. Okay. Do other things.

What Is The Best Way To Keep Up The Rankings If You Need To Change The Phone Number Of A GMB Listing?

Dustin said Hey guys, I need to change the telephone number on my GMB. What's the best way to keep the GMB rankings only delete the old number and add the new number in my RYS tack or to adding the new number. And keeping also the old number and RYS stack. Um, well. Actually what I would do?

Bradley: Well depends. If because if you're going to change the phone number, if you mean any properties that you have access to edit, I would want to change to add the new phone number in. But think about if you do have citations, we were just talking about those. But if you do have citations out there, that's a real pain in the ass to go change the phone number. In fact, I wouldn't recommend doing that yourself at all, I would hire service for that there's a great service for that. But from Loganix, if you go to https://www.semanticmastery.com/loganix, then that's the best service. I know for citation cleanup work. It's more expensive than some of the other services but they're really really, really thorough, I've had really good results with them. So if you have to do if you have citations, it's a real bitch because you're going to want to update the phone number on those. However, if you're not going to lose the old number entirely right, then you can keep that phone number in the GMB as a secondary phone number.

So what you can do is actually go in and add or essentially click to add another phone number into the GMB dashboard. And then cut and paste the existing phone number into the second position and put the new phone number in the first position and then click Save. That way Google understands that that old phone number is still associated with that profile. However, if that old phone number is not going to receive calls any more than it being listed on a bunch of other business directories, in the event that people do try to contact the business on this business from this business directory listings, it's going to be an invalid number. For the SEO purposes, it would still be okay because you left the old number in the GMB dashboard is a secondary number. It won't be published. But Google will recognize that it's associated with that business. But like I said, if you have existing NAP or citations published on the web, then I would recommend that you try to update those as possible. And again, if it's something you have access to like drive stacks, yeah, absolutely update the number. But when it comes to citations and things like that, it's a real bitch. It takes time and consistent effort. And so I recommend you hire a service for that. So but I want to comment on that.

Adam: No.

Bradley: okay.

Does The Semantic Mastery Battle Plan Help In Setting Up A Local Lead Gen Business?

Now, Rob says, I just recently purchased a franchise product that provides SEO Services. It's not from you guys. Well, then we're skipping this question. Now. I'm kidding. He says in that from you guys, the company gave some exhausted training on how to sell the services but seems like everything was leaning towards cold calling and door knocking in order to get clients somehow came across you guys on the internet purchased the Battle Plan. I have a website that franchise gave two for lead gen gave to me for lead gen but was not familiar with how to set it up for lead gen does the Battle Plan product up with that. And if there's something else I could use with your product to get the ball rolling a little faster, sorry, for the long text. Okay, um, well, as far as lead gen using for lead gen for like getting clients really all you need is a, you know, a landing page that you know, describes your services and has a real big strong call to action to contact you. Right? Typically, it's going to be you know, your phone number real big, perhaps your email address, if you want to publish that, I don't like to do that or contact form. Right? You know, once, once more information, contact us, or contact me, depending on how your branding your business, contact me here and you know, have a little contact form. But so that's just standard, right? That's just a standard lead gen type web page. So you can set your own. Like, for example, my own agency website is just a one-page site. That's all it is. It just says what I do. And there's you know, a contact form at the bottom. So if there are contact buttons, you know, in several locations, if they click it, it just scrolls down to the bottom right where the form is. That's it. That's all I do.

Because it that's for inbound marketing, right. So typically, you're going to be driving people to a landing page, if you're doing if you're if you know if you've got inbound marketing setup. So that's like settings, running ads to drive traffic to your landing page. Or it could be organic stuff. But what I found is as-as a marketing consultant myself, right, running my own agency, I found that most of the time that I've been able to secure clients is when I'm going out and doing outbound marketing, where I'm, I'm contacting them, right, I know, you can get inbound leads, but personally, for my own business, I don't get a lot of inbound leads, most of the inbound leads, I do get offers from referrals from existing clients. But you know, I don't get a whole lot of cold leads coming from Google, or you know, I don't do a lot of pay per click marketing to get clients, but from just straight SEO, you know, I rank well for SEO, Virginia and things like that. But I don't typically get a lot of leads from that. What I've gotten most of my leads from was me doing the outreach. And you're right, I hate cold calling, I hate door knocking I hate it, I absolutely despise it. So we developed a product called video lead gen system, which I've been using since 2012, to build my own agency. And I recently streamlined it because we built a whole bunch of lead gen assets, I needed to find a way to get service providers to monetize our lead gen assets. And so I needed a way to streamline the video lead gen, or video email prospecting method that I had always been using because it was time-consuming, very effective, but time-consuming. So we created lead gen video lead gen system and an updated it recently, and just relaunched it. So if you're interested in that, I'm sure Adam, you probably already dropped the link to it. But I would recommend that you try that for him because that's a great way to get people to get noticed or to get a conversation or a dialogue started with potential prospects. Because you got to think about this, if you just recently are starting to try to build your own agency, I'm going to tell you now that it is a saturated market out there when dealing with local businesses or business owners period, it doesn't have to be local businesses. But business owners get hammered relentlessly by marketing and advertising companies all the time, they're getting solicitations via cold emails via cold calls, you know, by people knocking on their door seriously, like walking in and pitching them just like what your franchise company is telling you to do. That's like the norm now. And so you really need to differentiate yourself, you need to be able to make yourself stand above the competitors or get noticed, through all that noise. And so that's why I said the video lead gen system is a great way to separate yourself from the rest of the pack and just becoming another solicitor. Right. And so again, guys, I'm not discouraging anybody from getting into, you know, providing Client Services or becoming an agency and all that. But I will tell you that it's a lot harder now than it was five years ago, to get clients attention or prospects attention. And that's because of you know, it's just an absolute feeding frenzy out there people the businesses get hammered nonstop with solicitation calls, emails and offers all the time. And so you have to really be able to stand up, stand out from that crowd. So the video lead gen system is a great way to do that it does require some work, it's not a magic bullet. And it requires consistent follow up but we talked about all of that in the training and if you implement that, you'll see that you will start to get much much higher response rates than you would from typical cold calls or not, you know walking in the door and calling on think about this guy's and I've done door to door sales in the past, think about you know, as a business owner it like I work from home, and I can't stand it when somebody knocks on my door like to try to, you know, whether it's a Jehovah's Witness or some a census purse, somebody wanting to ask questions for the Census Bureau or anything like that somebody comes in beats on my door, and I'm in the middle of working or recording a video or something like that. It it's an interruption it pisses me off, I also don't answer the phone unless I know who the phone calls from. And I'm really if I'm only if I'm expecting the call, as a business owner, myself, I don't want to be interrupted. So think about when you cold call somebody or you go walk in their door, and you know, knock on their door to say that you try to sell them something, what you're doing is interrupting them. And that pisses a lot of people off. So I don't recommend that at all. I recommend you get more creative on your pitch and your approach and make it easy for them and convenient for them to hear your message. And that's part of the reason why the video lead gen system works so well. Because you can send them a personalized video that explains why you reached out to them, and they can watch it when it's convenient for them. And when you set up notifications properly, you'll know exactly when they're watching your video, so you can follow up with them immediately. Right. So that was a really good question. But like I said, when it comes down to the Battle Plan, no Battle Plan is going to tell you how to get results from like, get your getting your websites seen and get traffic to them and get better results for them for SEO and all that kind of stuff. But lead gen, standard lead gen templates, very simple, you can just look at like go to Google and look up lead gen. You know landing page templates and things like that and get an idea of what your basic elements are that you should have. And then the rest of it is really about honing your message right crafting your message and finding an approach that's going to get people's attention and get them to want to follow back up with you. Okay, turn a cold lead into a warm lead. And that's what the video lead gen system is all about.

Marco: In our free Facebook group, Adam did a post on the 31st. of May. And he talked to us about this, how he uses the video, little video lead gen system with Loom to follow up. So he says it makes it more personal, right? They're used to video so he sends them a video. And it says his conversions are way higher. Why don't you talk about that, Adam?

Adam: Yeah, definitely. It's such an easy system to use. And it's funny because videos used to be tough to do. And I remember I copied Bradley's method from the first version of lead gen system and using images and this that the other thing but now these tools like loom have made this so much easier, where I can put the video it plays natively in Gmail. And even if it didn't, if it looks like an image is there, and then not only that because I went ahead, that's just the free version, the paid I went ahead and paid for it when you know, brought out their pro version or whatever. And I can put an overlay link that goes anywhere I want on there, which is awesome. So the conversions on this stuff are super high. Like Bradley says, and anyone who's gone through the course and put it to us knows how well this works. I mean, it's crazy getting 3040 plus percent conversion rates and, and the method that most people get 1% or less. And then the follow up is super important. at poker we live in 2018 and DC, did a little exercise. I had people stand up. And they said, you know, assuming everybody here is involved in some sort of business where they talk with customers. I said, you guys all in this room, everybody does some sort of follow up, right? You know, everybody nodded their heads. Yep. Okay, so I said, Everybody, stand up. And I'm going to talk I'm going to say a number starting with one and working my way up and say how many, you know, automated follow up either calls or emails do you have in your business right now. So started at one. And you know, everybody was pretty much still standing up said too few people said they only got two, three more people sitting down by four, there are very few people standing and I may have this wrong, but I think by the time I got to six, there was one person in the entire room standing up, I didn't even have six, which I'm since fixed. But your rate of response from people goes up hugely as you keep going and we all know this, you know the over supposed to maintain this contact and we're supposed to follow up with people. But if you don't have this process or this method to do it, you know, you get busy, you got other things you want to do, it's not fun, but this is what gets results. So you know, highly encourage anyone who doesn't have a great method for doing this that isn't already giving you fantastic results to just go grab video lead gen system put it to work. And this is one of the fastest courses to return your money and then probably 10 or 100 fold over time.

Bradley: Yeah. And last thing I want to say about that is also if you're going to be pitching or prospecting for your new business, I recommend that you really do niche down to a particular industry, because you'll get really, really good being able to talk speak directly to that that type of business owner as opposed to being all over the place where if you're going to be marketing to pretty much just to businesses in general, you have to really understand what's important to every business industry and and and speak to those owners with their VA with their own vocabulary. It's very difficult and it takes a lot of time and a lot of experience to get good at being a general marketer. It's much easier and much more scalable to become you know, a specialist or like a boutique marketing professional in other words, where you really niche down and become an industry-specific professional. Because then you can you really only need to come up with like learn to function Have you, Larry, the pain points, the hot buttons, know what the customers for that particular business are looking for what their needs are all of that it makes it so much easier to scale. And then you can just expand your business by targeting more locations, right? expand your service area, essentially. But you're still targeting the same business owner, same business type, I would recommend that highly. Alright, so

Does Google Favor An Authority Site With Specific Niche And Location Over A Lead Gen Site With Powerful Backlinks In It?

next Gordon's up he says, Hey, guys, as usual, your Hump Day hang Hump Day help is greatly appreciate it. You're welcome, Gordon. He says, I'm not sure how Google search algorithm works in one particular instance, when it comes to local search, be taking a standard lead gen site that is branded with specific business NAP actual or made up as well as having links to citations in the major directories and a GMB listing and compare it to an authority site that is targeted to a specific business niche in location. But without any of the items just mentioned, for the lead gen site. They're both equally easy to rank or would Google's search algorithm favor one type of site over the other? And if so, in what way? Um, I'm not sure what you're talking about, unless you mean like, a local lead gen site versus like, a Yelp page or something, if that's what you mean, or a big authority type site like Well, I mean, Yelp would be one of those. But like home advisor would be another one or Angie's List or, and I'm talking contractor type stuff, but like in the real estate market, it would be like, you know, long and foster century 21 or, you know, REMAX and things like that versus a local lead gen site. Right. So my point is, it really depends when it comes to maps listings maps rankings, I found that a local lead gen site, you can typically rank, you know, better than those type of sites, because a lot of those sites won't have a maps listing like a physical location in their particular area. But when it comes to organic rankings, yeah, it's tough. If it's a search with local intent, especially if there are directories. You know, if you go to a search in Google right now, guys, you'll see that the I think Google's broken again, and I've talked about this in recent Hump Day Hangout, because there are, you know, Google is nothing but an index of links, right, Google doesn't search results are indexed results, the search engine results pages of the SERPs is nothing but an A list of indexed results, right. So page one is the top 10 results as indexed by Google, according to Google's algorithm. But if you take a search to do something like plumber, Fairfax, VA for Virginia, right, so plumber, Fairfax, VA, you do that search, and you'll see that there are the maps listings, which is great. And you might see a couple of local business, local businesses ranking organic listings, but you're primarily going to see business directories, that are indexed in the organic section that when clicked upon, go to another index page. We talked about this recently. Right. And it's very difficult to compete with that kind of stuff. So let's just take a look real quick. If I say, plumber, Fairfax VA.

Alright, we're going to scroll down. Let me zoom in a little bit. Okay. And you can see there blue because it's still cooking from the last time I was I was here, but you're going to see ads. All right, let's make sure that we're spelled right. Okay, so we're going to see ads, and then we're going to see the maps rankings, which I find are easier to do when competing in this type of space, right? Because take a look that, you know, the top three, there's one actual company website, right? That out of the top three, so number one, and number three, our index pages have on other So essentially, when click, when you click through to this guy's all it does is take you to another damn index, which is what Google's pages, right, it's an index. And then you take a look at this. And if you click through, and it's nothing but another index of plumbers on Yelp, and that is in Fairfax. And the same thing goes for Angie's List, right? Then you'll see Michael and sons, Okay, number four, so that's another company. But then home advisor, that's another index page. So out of the top five, three out of the top five, are actually index pages. And so again, even though they don't have a physical location there, which is why they're not in maps, you can see that those are authoritative sites. And they are their authority is why they rank so well, organically, even if they're not super optimized, right, specifically like data. If you take a look at the Yellow Page, it doesn't have a ton of content here about plumbing and the plumbing services, or the services that plumbers offer and all that kind of stuff. All it is is a freakin index page. Right? That's all it is. And so it's not content rich at all. Yet, it's ranking very, very well. Number one, in fact, that makes sense. So when it comes to actual, you know, which one is easier and which one's harder, that's why I've always recommended for local lead gen focus on maps. Because it's gotten over the years, it's gotten harder and harder to rank in organics, the organic section, excuse me, because of the business directories. And Google is gone through phases where sometimes it will this index page again, I I think it's stupid, think about that. You go from one index to another index. That's dumb. I don't think that's useful to anybody. Right? I mean, that's just my opinion. But I really don't think that's useful to anybody. Why would you want to go from one index to another index, when you click through now you're, you're just you've added an additional step to find your solution. Right. So again, I think that's done. But over the years, we've seen that happen with Google where they get rid of the index, the directory listings, the indexed directory listings, it's okay to have a Yelp page for a specific company ranked in the top 10. You know, that's fine, because that means that company had probably proof done really well at filling out their profile optimizing it, well, they probably got a lot of engagement, that kind of stuff, that would be fine. But to go to another index page, unfortunately, that's kind of where we're back to now. And I don't know that it's going to change or when it will change, it may, like I said, it's gone in cycles over the years. So when it comes to what I think is easier to do, I think you're much better off focusing on maps, for local lead gen stuff, then trying to do though, you know, trying to fight or compete with the authority sites in the organic rankings. And I know, some people might have differing opinions. But you know, fighting with Yelp and their authority, excuse me over here, it's very, very difficult. The same thing with Angie's List, home advisor, you know, it's very, very difficult. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: Not I'm going to agree with that. But I would also say that in SERPs now, what really matters is the entity and how well you are how much you've taken care of the entity, how much power you're pushing to the entity, so that so that you're presented to Google, as trusted and authoritative also, in a niche. If you don't do that correctly, then you have no hope of trying to rank in the, in the SERPs, right? Especially, again, against these are powerhouses. But you can as he, as you've shown that there is one, there is a company that's right in there. And the way that you do that is power, you should first of all, we went through the entity webinar, right, we did that in Syndication Academy, where we showed the steps that you need to take that to solidify the entity or what I call the end game. So that when you push power into the entity, Google is going to take all of that power, as trust and authority for your entity so that you can go against these, these powerhouses and get in there. But it does take a lot of power. It does take a lot of creativity and you know, your schema has to be right. There are many things that come into play when you're trying to do this. And as you said, it's easier to go after the maps.

Bradley: Yeah, I totally agree with what you're saying, though. I mean, my point is to get results and get, you know, I start with maps, there's no question. But always definitely you want to evaluate solidify that entity, you want to try to build brand authority for that particular entity. Because it's not that you can't rank in the organic section, it's just going to take you longer and more effort. And so my point is start with maps. Once you start getting, you know, leads coming in for your lead gen business or for your client, then you can focus on all the other stuff that you're going to need to do to get ranked. And you're going to try to attempt to rank in the organic section as well, which all the stuff that Marco just mentioned is absolutely correct. So do both, but start in my opinion with the map stuff. And that's what you know, that's why I've run my business for years.

Okay, so next one, he says is would it make a positive difference if you listed one or two random local business and a piece from that niche on the authority site to give Google a local business name, address, and phone number? Thanks again? Would it make a positive difference if you listed one or two random local business and a piece from that niche on the authority site? I'm not sure I understand that one. If you're trying to rank order, actually what it makes? Maybe the way I'm interpreting this, as you're saying, if you're trying to rank organically by including any piece from other businesses, perhaps it would make it more like an authority site. I wouldn't recommend that. I mean, it depends what depends on what you're doing. But it unless you're building a directory site, I wouldn't do that. Right. I mean, I wouldn't want to push authority over to anybody else's site, especially competitors. So I'm not sure I understand that part of the question. I'm going to move on.

How Do You Pick What Links To Use When You're Adding The Service Post Links On The City Page For The Second County?

Don says thanks for Hump Day Hangouts. Two questions for Bradley and your complex silo YouTube video, use the following structure. Okay, when adding the second County, it seems that the post name should be slightly different. Yes, it should be. Those videos were recorded many years ago. So I'd have to I don't even really remember what I said in those videos. But yes, the post name should be unique, forever, all the way down to that level. However, let me just clarify something right now. There's no need to use the physical silo structure anymore, which is what you're looking at. And that URL structure there, which is where you know, the category slash post name permalink structure in WordPress, you don't need to do that anymore. You didn't need to do it back then. But I preferred it back then because I liked seeing the hierarchy of the silo structure within the URL. But we've tested over and over again, and you know, I haven't done any hard tests in the last few years. But it's not necessary to have that as a physical silo, you can do what's called a virtual silo, which is just using the post name permalink structure. So it makes your URLs much cleaner, much shorter. Right, it's, it's still, you still want to build your categories correctly. And you know, your sub your subcategories. If you're doing a complex solid structure, you're going to have categories and subcategories, right? And pages and child pages, and then post right, which is your third level deep. But yes, when it comes to the permalink, or the slug, for the post you want to have that is unique for each post, you can't duplicate Leak Repair, for example, as a post slug on two different posts, because it will, but WordPress, by default will put a dash two for the second one, right.

And so on the post level, I've always recommended that you would on the post level or even on a subcategory level. But my point is, you're going to need to have unique slugs, right. And so that's why it's not necessary to have the physical silo. Because let's say that let's say if you were going to have Fairfax County and Prince William County, and then you were going to go directly to like, I don't know, plumbing, let's say, let's just say you're going to try to use plumbing as a subcategory for both. They're two different parent categories, then you're going to have plumbing and plumbing dash two, right, because the second time you try to create that subcategory, it's going to have the same slug, it's not going to work. So my point is, you know, I stopped using the physical silo structure, which is where you see everything in the link. And it started using virtual solid because I don't care if there's a plumbing dash to as a subcategory. As long as it stacked within the higher the way that you build it out in the silo structure. The bots will crawl it correctly to where it won't bleed over from one plumber like plumbing dash to to plumbing, you know, the regular plumbing if that makes sense. They will all be separate containers basically. But you don't have to look at that ugly URL was my point. So it makes sense. So I've switched to just doing virtual silo structure, which again, is just using the post name permalink because that way you can hide all of that stuff that's hard or impossible to reconcile within WordPress. However, that said, there is another way to silo and I can't obviously I'm not going to get into that here because it would take the rest of the time, I'd have to get out my snag and start drawing side siloed diagrams and all that. And anybody that's been in the mastermind knows what an abomination that is. But you can silo also using categories and tags, guys, you can use tags as a way to add for especially for complex silos where you've got perhaps multiple locations, but you've got the same service that's going to be provided in each location. Right? So instead of having location silos, via categories, and in-service silos via categories, which is difficult to do, you can, you can actually use tags to create silos too, right? So you can have like location silos or service or product or service categories, and then use tags as a way to create location silos. And there's, there's a way to do all of that, which is a little bit cleaner. It still takes some planning out guys, a complex silo structure is just what the name says it is. It's complex. And so I always recommend if you're going to do that, that you map it out first because it will take some thought to be able to do it correctly. Marco, were you gonna say something or somebody? Not? Good. Already popping might pop.

Okay, so But yeah, as far as when it goes down to the post level, yeah, make always recommended that the posts be more like conversational type titles, and the person the link structure can reflect the more like what the title of the post is, right? But if you're just using the permalink, the post name permalink, which is just a simple, excuse me a virtual silo, then it's not going to matter. Because your URLs are going to be rude calm, you know, root domain, com slash posting, even all the way down to the post level, which is deep into the siloed. Right? That it's just going to be posting and at your, at your earlier pages higher up in the silo at subcategory level, it'll be, you know, root domain.com, slash subcategory, or at the category level root domain, com slash category. Right. So it's always just going to be whatever that page that you're landing on is going to be as bright past the first, you know, the first level past the domain itself. And so that's a much cleaner way to build a silo In my opinion, because then you know, it doesn't matter. Because even if you're permalinks, or have the dash twos and things like that, which are ugly, and I always had a hard time reconciling that with the physical silo structure was very difficult. But over the years, I learned that it's absolutely not necessary, you can do it with a virtual silo. So you can hide all that ugly URL shit that happens when trying to do that with a complex silo, it doesn't matter the but still crawls it the way that you build it. Right? So regardless of how ugly the URL is, if you're hiding all that shit, it won't matter. That makes sense.

Where Do You Typically Include The Links To The County Silo Index Pages?

Okay, question two do you typically include the links to the county silo index pages in the site-wide header, navigation footer nav link on the homepage content. Other know, and we talked about this in mastermind, I can't get into this very deep here either, because once again, it's we don't have the time number one. Number two, this is something that we this is kind of stuff we cover in the mastermind. But no, essentially, with a silo structure you want from the navigation, you want to be able to link to your top-level category, pages, right, which are pages, also categories. And then on the category, the top level silo pages, you can link to subcategories. If you have them, then your subcategory pages, you don't want to really link to anything from there, except for perhaps back up to the root domain, like the homepage, and then all of your supporting articles will be stacked or placed underneath each subcategory. And you'd want to daisy chain those together, or link from the subcategory back up to the homepage or to the top level category but not the subcategory. You don't want to create what Marco calls a reciprocal link even on the same domain. And that's about as far as I can get into that right here. Okay. That's changed recently, too, by the way. So again, those are old, old videos, that the principles are still remain valid. But I have absolutely changed my strategy slightly on how I build those type of solid structures out now. And maybe it's time for an update on that.

Should You Create Two Different GMB Assets For Two-Related Keywords Or Separate Them?

Gabriel's up he says, Hey, guys, thanks again, for all the great content plus one here. Missing g plus, yeah, I'm currently working on building a GMB asset for solar panel installation services and solar panel installation course. Should I create two different GMB assets? Or should I use one big asset to rank for both keywords best solar panel installation? A solar panel? Oh, I see what you're saying. So one, is it services? And one is, of course, that's a good question. I mean, if it's a local course, where only people that aren't you're going to be marketing the course to local people then like like, you know, for people to come to a school or a location to learn how to install solar panels, then yeah, I guess you could use it, I would recommend doing it for both. But if you're going to if the course is if you're trying to market that, well, you can always still have a GMB. But yeah, I would probably come if it's for the same company and everything that I don't, I would just keep it all under one entity, one asset. That's my thoughts. But that's just because you can actually accrue more authority that way, then try a separate them. Marco, what do you say?

Yeah, I wouldn't separate them either going to have them on the same website. I don't see why you would need two different GMB. They're totally relevant. So there's relevance there. That's everything that you need. And then pushing those two. I mean, in the course, and I don't want to get into it too much. We show that we show a way where you can do both just through posts. Right. And it's still in in the same GMB. But you know, you post about the course and you post about the service. And you can keep them separate. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. And again, I would I, you know, I try to reduce assets, if possible, when it comes to stuff like that, try to keep them all housed on one entity, essentially one web entity, right, which would be, you know, a website that you could add, like, we were just talking about silos, for example, right, instead of having two separate assets, it's more work to maintain two separate assets, and you're actually, it's going to take longer to build the authority to each individual asset than it would be to have the cumulative effect of having both of them under one asset.

And if he's using the GMB auto poster or the briefcase, then he can get the RSS feed out and actually going to his T one and use both post right both types of posts, and power up his tier one that way, and create the relevance for both throughout his tier one assets. And, of course, you have to do our way as reloaded, you have to do the drive stack. And you can also stack it in there right to stack targeting each of the what would be top level categories.

How To Keep The Domain Authority (DA) Of Previous Citations Without Confusing Google With Different NAP Data Of A New Citation?

Yeah, um, so the next question was from Steve, he says, Hey, guys, thanks for your time. If I register a domain, and when I go to do the citation, see that it already has citations from the previous owner? What is the quickest way to keep the domain authority and build new citations without confusing you? Okay, so when you say citations, that leads me to believe that you bought a domain that was being used for a local business, right? Because local businesses are the ones that typically get citations being published in business directories, right. So name, address, phone number plus website URL. And so as far as keeping domain authority, I don't care about domain authority. So I'm not, you know, honestly, I'm not going to recommend how to keep the domain authority because I just don't care about that metric. I stopped caring about that metric years ago, it doesn't make any fucking difference. I swear to you if you know how to build relevancy, domain authority doesn't mean shit, right? Unless you have incredibly high domain authority numbers, in which case, then it does have an effect. But for anything below 80, you're not it's not going to make a difference whether you have domain authority or not if you know how to build relevancy. So that's irrelevant, right. But as far as you talking about citations, if you mean, if you just mean links, there's not much you can do. But if you're talking about site, because they're, they're already built to the site, you could disavow them. I know, there's going to be conflicting opinions on that. But, you know, I would also check to see if they're toxic or spammy links, that kind of stuff. But if you're talking about citations, where that domain was being used by different business, and just published citations on the web name, address, phone number, and web and web address, that are linking to that, and now you're going to use it for a new business with a new name, new address, new phone number, new brand, then I would recommend that you would hire a citation cleanup service. Again, I talked about that earlier, like Loganix, or Loganix. I don't know whether I'm saying it right or not. But uh, semanticmastery.com/loganix, that will get you to it's, like I said, it's a bit expensive, but it's hands down the best service I've used for, for cleaning up inconsistent NAP issues, right. So they'll go out and contact all the directories where they find that now incorrect. citation and name, address and phone number. And the requests that be updated, they'll submit the new details. And they'll do that for I think, a total of four rounds. So they'll do it like every two weeks for a total of eight weeks, or something like that, to were like, because sometimes you have to contact those directories multiple times to get them to actually do it. So that's what they do. It's expensive, but it works. And it works, you know, about 70% of the citations that are found that to be incorrect, will be updated. And that's that, I found that to be really, really high compared to a lot of the other services out there that say they can do it that get are pretty much lackluster results. So again, if you're talking about that, when you're saying citations, if you're using that term correctly, and it's listed that web, that domain is listed with another name, address and phone number from another business, and now you're going to use it for a new business with a new brand new name, new phone number, new address, all of that, then you are going to need really clean that up out there. Because otherwise, you're going to create ambiguity. And it's going to dilute your efforts and build new citations is going to make it hard to get results. It's always more important to clean up bad data than it is to build new data, which just dilutes bad data. Does that make sense? Start with that start with the cleanup.

Would You Recommend That The Inner City Pages Have The Same Style As The Homepage?

JOHN says one cousin is a good idea to make the other pages on the site the same style is the homepage. I'm trying to rank the homepage city page for a city but I'm also trying to rank other pages for other cities. Now, do you think it's a good idea to just copy my site tone page style? Not the content, just the style? And if I copy the content, just rewrite? Or is that a good idea? Yeah, I mean, that's fine. As far as like the layout of the page, I don't think that makes much of a difference. I could be wrong. But in my opinion, it's more about having the content unique and optimized for the specific cities that you're trying to rank rewrites are fine. I've done that a lot, especially for lead gen stuff where I'll go out and like by an article, or by five articles, and I'll have each article rewritten three times. Right. So now I've got 15 articles. And it's a lot to have an article rewritten and have a new article written. Right. So that's what I would do is go buy authority content, pay a lot of money for an 800 or 1000 word article. And then I would send that to an article rewriting service and have them rewrite it, you know, three, four or five times. And now I've got multiple versions of that one article. By the way, I always would put in tokens into the article, like for the location name, just put it in brackets put in, you know, in brackets, location, or city or something like that, as opposed to actually putting a city name in there. And that makes it easy to just use, Find and Replace, to be able to swap out location names. Once you know when you have it all rewritten with those tokens as opposed to city names. And then you have multiple versions of the article, each version, you can use the Find and Replace function to replace with a new city name. So it makes sense. It's much easier to do that. So yeah, as far as the layout, that shouldn't make any difference. It's more about the content and what it's optimized for. Okay, and why the web is coming up? Yep. Monday, June 10. 3pm.

Can You Embed A GMB Post?

Can you embed a GMB post Marco says you can. I haven't tried it but Marco says you can.

Marco: I have and still can. Okay, cool.

Bradley: Got a shirt today. Look at that. That's cool. We got to wrap it up in about three minutes. Looks like we're about done anyway.

How Do You Recover A 3-Pack Rankings?

So last question, says a real business with a physical location GMB was ranked in three pack for multiple keywords but is now outside of top 10 only changes where we started GMB post press advantage prs and sent money robot links to and embed to add ID page and G site but never directly to the money site. It may be in Google dance. So we have stopped money robot links in embeds. We will continue to make GMB posts and press releases would appreciate your input and suggestions to try and recover three pack rankings. Um, yeah, that I don't I mean, I don't know without having more detail on it. It could just be a dance, but I doubt it that typically doesn't happen for what you're talking about. Like it was in the top three, and now it's outside of the top 10. Got it something had to have been triggered. See, embed to add ID page and G site but never directly to money site. Yeah, I don't. And also depends on how you set up we had a long discussion going on in the mastermind just recently about how the ad ID page is connected to a money site if you're using a self hosted website for the money site, as opposed to just GMB assets. Guys, remember, if you're just using GMB assets, you can get away with absolute murder. Right? If you're using a self hosted website is the primary website though you have to be more careful because you can't just spam the shit out of your, your your assets that are going to be all linked and pointed back to a self hosted website. Right? Because the rules are different. So it depends on how you have your ad ID page setup is the canonical setup to your homepage. If so, and you're spamming that, which is what money robot is, then you're essentially passing spam back to your money site. Right? So there's other ways to do that break that chain to where it's not spam isn't being pointed directly to your money site, run it through a Google Site instead. Right? So you can canonical lies your ad ID page to your G site that's part of your drive stack, and you're in your money site be linked from within your dive stack, right, so that all your spam links to your ad ID page and your embeds and all that other stuff that you're using total spam for, which is fine if you've got the structure if you got it set up correctly. But if you got it canonicalization to your homepage, where do you think that all that credit is being that credit from the spam is being passed to? Right? So you think about that. So you got it, you really got to know how what you're doing when you're going to use Spam. Spam is perfectly effective. But you got to know how and when to use it properly. Right. So again, I can't without knowing more specifics of your project. I don't know how you've got all your this chain set up. But my guess is you probably have somewhere your spam links are actually being passed directly to your money site somehow some way, which could be through a canonical from the ad ID page. Could be that simple. But it could be more than that to are you embedding your money site into your ad ID page and in spamming the shit out of it. Don't do that. Right. Use your Google properties, which is what we teach. So again, there's without more detail on this specifically, which by the way, if you are in the mastermind, we can take a look at it and analyze it and help you figure out the problem and fix it. Right That's what we do. But can't do that here on Hump Day. Hang out. Anyways, looks like we're done. That was perfect timing. Everybody. Thank you for being here. No mastermind webinar this week, but we will see you guys next week.

Thanks, guys.

Alright man. Bye, everybody. Later

#Semantic Mastery #Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239

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oasisoptimization · 6 years ago