#i have to train myself away from outsourcing my own decisions

[allbeendonebefore]

me: ah yes for my birthday i should draw something self indulgent and ridiculous for myself

brain: ah we should ask the people to think of something self-indulgent to draw-

me: [hitting brain with rolled up newspaper] it DEFEATS THE PURPOSE, idiot!!!!

[dearmrsawyer]

Went to The Vamps a few nights ago and had the most fun :) there's something about them?? I don't enjoy a party and I think seeing the Vamps is how a party is supposed to feel lol. They're so FUN, i love sharing a room with them.

I drove up to Sydney to see them, had a great solo concert experience and drove back home. It's the first time I've driven myself to a concert because generally my family see it as a chance to have a night in Sydney while I'm at the show, so I'm always accompanied by a couple of people for the drive. But my brother was away that night and my mum had to stay home so my grandparents wouldn't be alone, so I drove myself and although I was nervous i really enjoyed it! (Also I think my first Vamps concert was the first concert I ever went to alone, and now I'm addicted - I love going to concerts alone)

I was thinking on the drive home about how, aside from work, that's the longest I've been alone since moving into my current house. I haven't been in a very good place for the past year, I know that my life doesn't belong to me right now. It belongs to nonno and nonna, as do any decisions I make about my time. I can't pop out whenever because we need to make sure someone is always home, and I spend many of my free days at home because one of the carers had to cancel their shift (or training a new carer because mum is at work/away). Mum cooks for them 3 or 4 times a week so i'm not very good about cooking when I need to, I eat toast at work for lunch a lot lately lol. And like realistically i don't even have the energy to cook more than I do or leave the house anyway! I feel like I never get to recharge enough to reply to my friend's texts from November, let alone do anything else lol. On new year's day I was thinking about how the new year is like a figment, there's not a single thing about this year that can be different from last year, and felt like I was suffocating. I know it sounds awful to feel that way about living with nonna and nonno. I feel bad because i do like 10% of the caring, probably even less than that, and anything i don't do is on mum's shoulders. I know she's living in survival mode too, but i don't want to talk to her about how hard some days feel because i know she'll carry it and try to find a way to take some of it off my shoulders, and it'll just put more on hers. I know she'll feel like she forced me into this situation and i don't want her to because the reality is that I wouldn't change a thing, this is the best case scenario - the idea of outsourcing my grandparents' care feels far worse than whatever difficulty we have to live through to take care of them here. But it's still difficulty. I try to soothe myself because i know it's the best option, and i get to have all this extra time with them while they're still here. I don't usually feel better lol but i know it's the truth. I'm not very chatty on here because this is all i have felt for a long time, it feels so inane to express other thoughts/feelings that are so small compared to these mammoth feelings towering overhead. Putting it here/reading it again is annoying even me! sick of my own internal monologue!! Also trying to express these feelings is yuck because I feel like I can't express them properly lol, i have lost the ability to communicate. Anyways, I do try to express other thoughts sometimes, to have moments when i feel i have acurately expressed a thought! And hopefully I have the energy/words/will to be able to express more here and there!

I have a more of concerts coming up this year:

Harry on 3 March with my best friend (I'm excited but i'm still pretty disappointed to be seeing him tour Harry's House, which I'm not super in love with 😭 Fine Line is such a beautiful album, I wish i could see him give it all his attention! I love a couple of songs on HH, and there are a couple more that I like listening to but i just can't cope with singing a menu, i can't, i can't sing 'fried rice' 'cook an egg' and feel like i still have my dignity, harry)

MCR on 19 March also with my best friend (we will be seeing each other twice in one month, exactly the number of times i saw her in 2022 lol)

Kisschasy with an old friend from highschool (they're playing at the uni, which is RIGHT behind my house! I'll literally just walk there!)

Also we're going to see Lano and Woodley's new performance and i can't wait, it's going to be so fun

oh AND the local theatre company is doing a Midsummer Night's Dream in the botanical gardens. It was supposed to be December just gone but they postponed because of rain so its this coming December instead. I'm going with my best friend to that too

Trying to think about all of these and how I'm doing more Things this year, and I will hopefully feel like i'm getting more Me moments and maybe this will help average out the general ~life feelings

[loxare]

More Untamed ficlets when I should be sleeping, yay!

Madame Yu hated the boy.

But if she were inclined to be fair, which she usually isn't, she would have to admit that it wasn't because of anything the boy himself did. No, she hated the rumors that his presence sparked, that her husband would disrespect her enough to have an affair with a woman who had rejected him. She hated the way that despite her best efforts, her children regarded him as a sibling. But most of all, she hated the way her husband looked upon the boy with more tenderness than he did upon his own children. Her own children.

It was far too late to get rid of him. Now that he had developed a golden core, to toss him out without teaching him how to properly develop it would be worse than negligence. An improperly developed core could lead to overloaded meridians, causing weakness in the body later in life. So no, she couldn't just kick him out.

But perhaps she could make use of him in another way.

Her maids packed efficiently, as they always have. The boy was training, and as such it was nothing for Yinzhu to sneak in and put a change of clothes in a bag for him. He would not need much. As Madame Yu wrote a note to her daughter, to avoid straining her constitution with worry, Jinzhu got the boat ready. Jiang Fengmian received no such note. He could pace a hole in the floor for all she cared.

By the time Madame Yu walked onto the dock, the boat was prepared and her maids were seated primly, a confused, sulking and soaking wet Wei Ying between them. She raised her eyebrow. Yinzhu said, "He was struggling, so I put him in the lake until he cooled off."

"I told you I could walk by myself," Wei Ying groused. "You didn't need to carry me."

Madame Yu's exact order had been for Yinzhu to pick up Wei Ying from training when they were ready to go. If she decided to interpret her orders entirely literally, Madame Yu was not going to take that from her. Especially since she had also ordered her maids to mind Wei Ying and keep him from annoying her as much as possible. They should get to have some fun.

The journey was peaceful. The river was slow this time of year, so the trip upriver was quick and not turbulent. Wei Ying ran to and fro on the boat but, largely due to Jinzhu and Yinzhu's efforts, stayed away from the shaded pavilion Madame Yu sat under. He fell into the water twice. Gradually, the river narrowed as tributaries branched off, and the water became the swift, clear white waters Madame Yu knew best, and the disciples driving the boat were forced to put down their bamboo poles and use talismans to propel the boat instead.

Finally, they stopped. Meishan Yu had one dock for trading, situated on a slow moving canal dug for that exact purpose. The rest of the river was too fast for any boat to stay docked for long and ran as wild and free as the people who lived along it. The disciples were given their orders, to wait for Madame Yu's return, and then Madame Yu and her maids took their charge into the mountains.

The hall of her grandmother was grand and old, although not as old as the woman herself. It was not a sect headquarters, not technically, but it was where most of the juniors were trained before they were sent into the wilds to complete their lessons.

Her grandmother sat in the central chair on the dais, with Madame Yu's twin elder sisters on either side. Madame Yu stopped a respectful distance away. Jinzhu and Yinzhu retreated to the sides of the hall. They would not be needed here. At her side, Wei Ying fell to his knees and pressed his forehead against the floor, as she had instructed him. Madame Yu bowed. "Popo. Da-jie. Er-jie."

"Ziyuan." Da-jie stood at her grandmother's nod, and took three steps forward, so Madame Yu was addressing her directly. She was the head of Meishan Yu. It was only right. "Why have you come here?"

She knew already. Madame Yu had sent a letter ahead. But now it was time for Madame Yu to make her case. "I have come to have this child trained as a Pearl." Beside her, Wei Ying gasped. She had not told him of the reason she was bringing him here. It was not his business. Wisely, he said nothing.

Da-jie sniffed. "You have two Pearls, Ziyuan. To have more is greedy."

"Not for myself. For my son."

Er-jie laughed. She had not approved of Ziyuan's marriage, but she had not had a voice at the time. "Your son is Jiang. Only Yu may have Pearls."

"My son is half Yu. The blood of the steppe runs through his veins as it does mine." He was not much of a Yu, to be fair. His anger was as quick as the river that rushed through the wilds, but he was timid in his decisions, too soft and slow to deviate from the path carved before him. He was like the slow rivers of Yunmeng.

Perhaps he should come here for training as well.

Da-jie considered. Madame Yu knew it would not be a hardship for her to train Wei Ying. The training for a Pearl was far more intensive than for a disciple, but Wei Ying had already shown a knack for learning and adapting quickly. And it would be a change of pace for Da-jie, who changed the training schedule weekly to keep from getting bored. Training a Pearl would keep her entertained for a while.

Slow as the sun setting behind the mountain, a smile crept over Da-jie's face. "One Pearl for half a Yu. Very well, Ziyuan. Shanzhu. Fengzhu." At her call, Da-jie's Pearls came forward. "Take this out into the field and test him."

Shanzhu grabbed Wei Ying by the back of his robes and hauled him to his feet. He looked upon her with eyes wide. "Madame Yu?"

She did not owe him an explanation. He owed her sect his life and she was going to ensure that life would be a useful one. But something in his gaze made her soften. She did not owe him an explanation. But for most of his life, he had not had a home. And now she was taking from him what her husband had promised would always be his. So Madame Yu said, "you may return to Lotus Pier once you have finished your training."

Wei Ying did not get a chance to respond, as Shanzhu pulled on his arm and dragged him away. But he looked determined rather than frightened.

Er-jie watched as they left. Then she slung an arm around her younger sister's shoulders. "Well. While you're here, why don't we renegotiate our trade contracts? I would love to take even more chilis and lotus silk from you."

"Xiao-Yan." Popo stood and took Ziyuan's hands in her own. "Welcome back, Xiao-Yuan. Come. You shall have lunch and tell me of my grandchildren, and then you will explain why they haven't visited me in four years."

"Yes Popo." Lunch was delicious, and almost as hot as she preferred it to be.

The trip home was quick and quiet, especially with Wei Ying no longer on the boat. When she got home, she was pleased to see that a-Li had not told her father where Wei Ying was, as she had requested. A-Cheng was grumpy but not worried, so she had told him, but Fengmian was in a state of panic. He clearly hadn't played enough attention to his children to see that they were calm.

He was not pleased when she told him where Wei Ying was. But in the end, he did not have a leg to stand on. As the Lady of Yunmeng Jiang, she had final say on which disciples she trained personally and which she did not. If she decided to outsource the training of a disciple to another sect, that was her business. Additionally, she could guarantee that Wei Ying would be fed, clothed, and housed while he was gone, which is what he had been promised when Fengmian had acquired him.

A-Cheng and a-Li both spent the fall and spring in Meishan for the two years after that. The year after, Wei Ying returned as Tiezhu and received Wuxian as a courtesy name, the same day a-Cheng received Wanyin.

Wei Wuxian had used his time in Meishan well, and it did not take him long to catch up with the other juniors. Fengmian named him head disciple, probably to spite Madame Yu, but even she had to admit that he had the skills for it. Wei Wuxian was better even than some of his seniors.

Fengmian stopped praising Wei Wuxian for his skills when the boy stopped reacting well to them. In Meishan, pretty words were meaningless, as ephemeral as the clouds in the sky. Fengmian had never understood that in all the years they'd been married.

Wei Wuxian was stronger than her son. He always had been, and he always would be. Madame Yu had always known this. But now, he was a weapon for her son to wield, a sword to pierce his enemies or a shield to take the blows meant for him. Now, Wei Wuxian's strength was Jiang Wanyin's strength.

Madame Yu watched her son grumble at his laughing Pearl, as a-Li fed them baozi. Her own Jinzhu brought her some more tea while Yinzhu stood at her shoulder.

Her son would always be protected. Her daughter too, if Madame Yu read Wei Wuxian correctly. And this, this was something she could be content with.

***

Madame Yu gets Jinzhu and Yinzhu (gold pearl and silver pearl), so why not Jiang Cheng, I ask myself at an hour past my bedtime? Tiezhu means iron pearl, but the (very brief, very sleep deprived) research I did said that 铁 tie also means weapon, unshakeable, determined, strong, and close, as in "always close to Jiang Cheng". I thought it fit but I might disagree with myself in the morning.

Oh, and Shanzhu means mountain pearl and Fengzhu means summit pearl. Probably. Feel free to correct me if those are wrong

[spacecadetal]

New Blood (a Kakashi Hatake x OC fic) - Chapter One

Warnings: Use of violence, violence, use of knives, swearing, drinking, death mention, death

Read on AO3 or below the line

As the sun began to rise, Kakashi swung his legs over his bed. Stretching his bare body high in preparation for what the day would bring. Whether that was a mission or battle. Grateful for the previous day of rest, Kakashi couldn’t deny he was beginning to feel the pressures of being shinobi.

Orochimaru had caused devastation around the village. Buildings destroyed, lives taken, and the Third Hokage gone. Because of this, manpower was scarce and in an attempt to assure the village appeared just as strong as before to outside eyes, missions continued to be carried out. Despite shinobi in the village being stretched thinner than rice paper.

To make matters worse, Sasuke Uchiha left the village in pursuit of power and revenge. A squad being sent after him to recover him only ended in disastrous results. The village was lucky not to lose anyone but still two members of the squad were left in critical condition while the rest were in need of proper rest. Unfortunately, this left Kakashi to fill in any gap that was in need of filling.

With a book in hand, Kakashi quickly ate breakfast before he prepared himself for the day. Flak vest on, knives packed, headband fastened around his head, Icha Icha packed in the breast pocket of his vest. Ready for what the day may bring.

“Kakashi, you're needed on an A Grade mission. Intel for a client I’m unable to name at this time. You’ll be leaving tomorrow at dawn” Tsunade had said as soon as he arrived at her office, surrounded by paperwork.

“Who is on this squad?”

“It’s a two person squad. You and Gai”

Ah yes. Another Gai and Kakashi adventure. He had been wondering when he would have another one of those. At least this mission should be amusing with Gai tagging along.

“I see. Is that all?”

“No, actually I’ve been meaning to talk to you. I’ve decided because this village is in need of manpower, we need more genin trained to be prepared for anything Orochimaru or anyone else may throw at us. So I’ve outsourced some chunin from across the country to come to Konoha and help prepare the genin for the chunin examinations. We’ll be holding them earlier than usual”

“So where does this leave me?”

“You’re one of the best we have right now. I need you focused on missions. Because Naruto is under Jiraiya now and Sasuke has gone to Orochimaru, Sakura will be trained by someone else”

“Then who will continue her training?”

“Maia Setsudan,” Tsunade said as she slid the folder over to Kakashi.

Kakashi opened it. A picture of a young woman stared back at him. Long brown hair, dark brown eyes, light skin. A serious look on her face. The record itself was thin. No missions, no history of her training, no rank. Just her basic details and stats.

“I don’t mean to question your judgment but this woman has not been trained in any type of jutsu, by anyone”

Despite all of that, her record appeared clean. Nothing sticking out at him, her stats however pointed to her abilities being of a jonin level and this confuses him greatly.

“Not officially no but I’ve seen her skills and she owes me a favour” Tsunade smiled. “The others are at least chunin, yes they did not continue their training but I’m assured they’ll assist the students in any way they can”

“My decision is final. This is only temporary Kakashi”

Kakashi accepted the decision, walking out of the office. He would never doubt Hokage, never disobey Hokage. They were Hokage for a reason but Tsunade had to have lost her mind.

__________________________________________________

In a little clearing, surrounded by trees stood two out of three of Mais Setsudan’s students.

“Hello, I’m glad to meet you both. And I’m sure it will be good to meet Sakura when she gets back. Nevermind that. I’m Maia, just Maia. No need to call me sensei or anything else. I’m just here to help you guys out”

“Now my speciality is knives. Knives are dangerous weapons if you use them right. You can hit your opponents chakra points if you aim them precisely, with agility and speed you can slice your opponent to ribbons.”

“But it would be foolish of me not to have other stances to fall back on. My belief is that ninja should always have a form that acts as both offence and defence”

Kakashi sat hidden in the trees, legs firmly planted on a branch, watching as this woman gave her students a lecture. Stances that enabled both defence and offence of course was a good idea in theory, but realistically sometimes you weren’t able to do so.

“Ma’am-Maia I’m not really skilled in defence” a student, Moto, quietly spoke.

Nodding to himself, Kakashi understood that this wasn’t realistic for every student. Some were just not capable of performing such jutsu, mostly countering this with other stances to make up for it. Knowing your weakness was as important as knowing your strengths. He would give this Maia Setsudan the benefit of the doubt, maybe she would prove to be a capable mentor after all.

“And that’s okay. At your age I was only learning offence but I also learnt how to defend too eventually”

At your age? So she did have training. Nothing formal that Kakashi could see on her record so the question was: who trained her?

Konoha was in a compromising situation as it was these days. Last thing they needed was someone coming into the village and turning out to be a spy for someone that did not have Konoha’s best intentions at heart.

“Look I’ll show you” Maia said, getting herself into stance.

She began running in circles slowly, a wall of wind slowly forming at her feet and growing towards the treetops, forming to incase her in a dome.

“When I say so, throw your kunai at me” Maia ordered.

As she continued to run in circles, increasing her speed, the dome began to form fully. To Kakashi this was a basic wind wall, nothing special or out of the ordinary.

“Now!”

Moto threw his kunai at the dome but on impact the kunai bounced off the dome, flying back towards the student. Kakashi was ready to move and catch it if necessary, getting into position but as he moved to leap, something stopped him. It was Maia leaving her wind dome, running to the kunai and grabbing it before it was inches away from the student’s eye.

“Why didn’t you block or dodge?” she simply asked, no anger in her tone.

“I-I don’t know it’s like my brain froze”

“Well...just don’t do that on the battlefield…”

She was fast, sure but that was dangerously close and maybe Tsunade should be informed that a student almost got seriously injured during the first day of training.

“With the wall, I generate enough speed to defend myself and if my wall is attacked then my wall deflects my opponents attacks back onto them. This includes attacks involving chakra too”

Attacks involving chakra? How could this be? It only stunned Kakashi because it was a basic move weaponised into something more. His suspicions lead him to the conclusion that the dome was infused with low levels of chakra.

“I can also move with my wall meaning my opponents will be knocked over or caught in the wind trap. A basic form can be transformed and with enough training you can use these basic forms as weapons. My wall works for me because of how comfortable I am with speed but we will find where your skills lie and match your forms to that”

Kakashi had watched the rest of the lesson. Waiting for Maia to slip up, give him a reason to run to Tsunade and tell her she’s made a massive mistake but the almost kanui to the eye was the only slip up Maia had made.

She was attentive to the students. Focusing on their strengths and their weaknesses, giving them small adjustments to help chakra flow. It was a very basic lesson but Maia was becoming familiar with the students and this was the best way to do it.

“Next time I want you two to fight each other. Friendly clean match. I just want to see how you do your thing”

That was lesson over, Maia and her students parting ways into the forest and back to the village.

Shadowing her through the forest, Kakashi watched as she walked on her own. For someone so fast she sure enjoyed dawdling along, taking in the trees and the flowers along her path. Maia was an attractive young woman, Kakashi wouldn’t deny that. Her method, from first impression, seemed fine despite the almost injury but Kakashi wasn’t always going to be hidden in the treetops waiting for her to slip up. Despite all of this, a bigger question remained. Who was she? Because if she was a spy or collecting intel for someone then this put Konoha in jeopardy. Even if she knew Tsunade, doesn’t mean others close to the village hadn’t betrayed it before.

Kakashi decided to continue shadowing her through the village. Figure out what kind of character she truly was. Maybe she would prove him right, meet with some contact in the shadows and show him that her intentions were not so pure as they appeared.

Instead of some thrilling spy chase, Kakashi found Maia’s time in the village quite uneventful. She had taken quite some time picking out ingredients at the food stalls, Kakashi could feel himself yawning as she weighed up two carrots. Maia continued to walk around the market, stopping at a bookstore. A copy of some smutty romance novel in hand as she walked out of the store. Kakashi’s eyebrow rose, he himself was a lover of erotic fiction. Perhaps she was as big a pervert as he was, not that he’d openly admit he was a pervert or anything.

He had been shadowing her for a while before he lost her in the crowd. In the streets now instead of the rooftops. Kakashi frowned for a moment as he scanned the crowd, no sign of her anywhere. Still he continued to walk through the crowd, pretending to be minding his own business.

“Can I help you with something?” A voice said to his right, almost making him jump in the air.

Looking to its owner, he found Maia Setsudan. Height wise she came up to his neck, a little shorter than him but she had glared at him as if she was seven inches taller than him. Brown onion in hand ready to pelt him.

“You were up in the trees during my lesson and now you’re following me through the streets. What do you want?”

She knew he was there? How? Kakashi frowned. He’s not detected by just anyone, let alone a ‘shinobi’ with no formal training and Maia was starting to catch on to that.

“Your hair was sticking out from the tree you were watching me from” she laid it out plainly. “Then I saw you on the rooftop at the market”

Kakashi still was yet to say anything, he just couldn’t believe he had picked a terrible hiding spot to begin with.

“No need to frown. If anything I should be the one frowning. I don’t appreciate being followed”

“I’m Kakashi Hatake, Sakura’s mentor” Kakashi finally spoke.

“Ah… I see. You were just making sure your student was in good hands and I can assure you she is” Maia seemed to be beginning to warm up to him despite him shadowing her. Understanding the concern a past mentor may have for his student.

“Can I ask who trained you?”

There it was, the question Maia hated being asked the most. Her smile has started off as genuine but now she started to smile sweetly, a way to hide her frustration. She told Tsunade she would be well behaved. It was a shame he had to ask, she really was warming up to him.

“A shinobi who left his village”

“A missing-nin?”

“Yes. Is that all?” Maia said directly, her patience fading rather quickly. What is this? Interrogation hour?

“What gave you the idea to allow Moto to throw a knife at your shield if you knew it would rebound back at him?”

“Well… I guess my expectations for formally trained ninja of his level were too high” she said, a puff of air leaving her nose in the form of laugh, “but I’m sure you would have stepped in if I had neglected to do so”

Kakashi swallowed hard. She was trying to playing games with him, something he didn’t care too much for. He could stand around all day, taking her quips but he truly had better things to do.

“If that’s all, it was good to meet you Kakashi Hatake.” she said as she walked by, refusing to look back at Kakashi as she left him standing in the crowd alone.

Maia’s happy place was always in the kitchen. No matter how busy her mother was, working two jobs to support them, she always had time to cook dinner. Maia would watch, standing on a wooden crate, helping peel vegetables and wash rice. It’s no wonder she became a chef.

Cooking was second nature, so was holding a knife. She had cooked her mee goreng, sat herself on the couch shovelling it into her mouth as she dived into the new novel she had bought that day.

Descriptions of lust and sensual touching filled Maia’s focus. It had been a very long time since she let a man into her life, let alone in her bed. But it was okay, she lived vicariously through characters in fictional worlds getting their rocks off instead.

As she turned the page, throwing a noodle into her mouth, her attention wandered to the man following her today. Kakashi Hatake.

One day long ago, her master had told her the story of the child prodigy of Konoha. The kid that made his own jutsu, a jutsu so powerful it could cut a lightning bolt in half. Maia remembered how her master told her that one man should not be capable of all that power and destruction and now Maia had stood face to face with him.

Though she felt as if she stood her ground, she still couldn’t help but feel intimidated by the man. For him to question her abilities and asking questions about her training just showed Maia that he was someone she had something to prove to. To prove she was a capable mentor and a capable shinobi. Not only to him but to the whole village, possibly even the world.

__________________________________________________

Maia ran through the forest, searching for the man she saw wander through earlier. Everyday this man would disappear into the forest and Maia would watch the village gates, waiting for him to return. This day, with her mother working a double shift, she bunked off school, instead she would follow him.

She came to a halt when she heard a sound, like a knife scraping on wood. Creeping slowly, Maia approached a shrub to hide, taking notice of the sound of her footsteps. There she crouched, her heartbeat flooding her ears. She thought she had gone unnoticed until-

“I can hear you” the man said, sitting alone in the forest on a rock, sharpening a stick with his kunai.

A young Maia popped her head out behind the large shrub, shy but curious.

“Are you a shinobi sir?”

“I used to be” the man said, unbothered.

“I thought they killed shinobi that ran away”

“They do but they haven’t found me yet”

Maia took a moment to absorb what the man truly said. He was on the run, jumping from town to town till he would eventually die.

“Can you teach me?”

“No way, the last thing I need is something kid exposing me to the whole village”

“But sir, I think I’m meant to be a shinobi”

“Yeah and? Every kid does”

“No, look”

Maia had begun running, running and running in circles. Her speed was unusual for her age, not as great as it would be when she grew older but still impressive. Maia had practised this for months, hoping to impress him so he’d take her on as his student. He began to stroke his chin in thought. Maybe this kid could be shinobi after all, however the shinobi way had the potential to be isolating, trapping. Once that was your path you could never leave and if you did, you’d be on the run for the rest of your life.

“What's the name kid?” the old man asked.

“I’m Maia!”

Next Chapter

[kat09me]

Life of a single mom.

My story begins when I was just 18,…

I am the youngest daughter of four daughters, yet I am the one who is really independent and wanted to have a job and live on my own.

I remember when I was in high school i argued with my teacher in Values Education Subject regarding how the western people live compare to us Filipino people. Because the way most Filipino lives, even if they have their own jobs and family we still live with our parents’ house “extended family living”. It’s not that I don’t want to live with my parents, but I feel like i am more successful when I live my own, have a carrier and can buy things out of my own pocket.

So when I turned 17, my parents asked me to quit college because they’re unable to pay for my tuition. Nor have enough funds for travelling back and forth from our house to school, vice versa ‘cause by the way I live from a different city which is 40 minutes to an hour away from school.

When I turned 18, I was really eager to work so I can help my family. Then, there was this open position in a small beauty store. I applied and was able to get hired as an assistant secretary. I was happy and proud even if my pay that time is only fifty pesos per day ($1 USD). Each day my father would come and visit me at the store and sit in front of my table smiling. He looks so proud of me. Cause even if I am unable to finish my college he can see that I am happy and contented with what I have.

But things changed. A year after i worked there, my father past away due to Heart Enlargement. My heart was really broken and my life changed. I quit working because each time i go to work I remember each day he visits me at work and smile at me. It’s like i can still see him in front of me smiling and my tears just wont go away. Then a friend of my father offered me a good deal. He asked me if I would like to pursue my college. And I was thinking, I am still in first year college and first semester when i quit. It would take me a long time before I can get a job help my family and have my own place. So I have decided to take to take a short cut. I took up a vocational or just a training course for a call center training. I took it for only a month. I was happy and feel ready to take a step in applying. But unfortunately some of the call centers I applied for they require at least 72 units subject taken in college which means i should have taken up to 2 years in college. I was discouraged. I begin to go out all night, come home the next day being drunk, sleep all day and go out at night. That was my daily routine for a year. I was really devastated that the only man I really love and the only person that really makes me special left me. (It was a sudden heart attack and he was in the mountains when it happened.) I keep drinking, hang out with friends and my mom and I always had a fight because of what I am doing with my life.

But after a year, I started to feel tired in going out. I began to realize that i needed to get a job and get my goal. I then made a decision to go to my eldest sister place in Manila and work there. I worked as a sales representative for a huge clothing line in a mall. But it didn’t work out for me for some reason. So I quit and went back home. Then worked as a secretary for a water refilling station for more than a year, then quit and tried my luck in call center industry this time. I was very happy I got hired. It was a sales account and I was able to pass the interview. I worked in that call center in my city for like a year. Then got an opportunity offered in a bigger city from a friend of mine. I took advantage of it but it didn’t work out, i met someone in Bacolod and he helped me in applying to a bigger Call center in that city.

So there it is, I worked there for almost two years. But I keep coming back home and visit my mom twice a month. Even if it will take me 4-5 hours bus ride. Then I met the love of my life. I was really happy and feel so ready to settle down and have kids. (Even if i was told by the doctor when I was nineteen that i won’t get pregnant because I have problem with my uterus).

We were so in love and I even told myself that he will be the one I am going to marry and spend the rest of my life with. So I have decided to quit my job and move back home since he is from my home town. I started working in another call center in a neighbouring city where I studied high school and college. But I keep getting sick and the decided to quit and find opportunities in my home town. My boyfriend and I were living together for a year when my mom noticed something. My hips are getting bigger, I started craving some foods. Specially apple-mango. That was the time we realized I was 3 months pregnant. We were so stress because that time i don’t have job, my boyfriend doesn’t have job either. We were so contented with what we had and were not even ready of having a child.

But then I wanted to keep it. I was twenty five then and I know I am emotionally ready to become a mother, even if I am not financially ready. We decided to keep our baby.

Our daughter was born September 11, 2012. I started working again in a call center in our home town when our daughter was just four months old. We were so happy together, contented with what we had. I started working at home when our daughter turned nine months old. But when our baby turned two years old, it seems that everything changed. We always had a fight, to the extend he would hurt me physically and mentally. Even if we had fights years ago,.. those fights we had were not that physical. But things changed this time. It’s like almost every day we have fight. He even just sleep downstairs of the apartment where we rented out because we want to have a family of our own. Live life of our own as a family. But then everything seems hell each day. December of 2015, after his birthday. When we had a very huge fight and we called it quits.

Me and daughter lived in the same apartment after he left for like a year or two. When my mom wanted me to move back in with them so it’ll be easier for her to watch over my daughter. And so I moved back in. Things are really tough being a single mother. You pay your own bills, take care of my baby’s needs, cook for the both of us, feed her, work for the both of us. I was really used of having her father with us cause even though he was not working, he can just look after our baby and cook for us even if we eat pretty late because he was too lousy and just laying down all the time.

I know I had to be strong for us to survive. Luckily I had jobs that was able to cover our expenses and can let me but things that we need for the both of us. My daughter is in a private school, I was able to give her a good education and helped my family at the same time.

I was happy and felt contented with our lives. Fast forward 2019 of February, I was able to start a small business while I was working.

But tragedy happened, due to the fact that it is really expensive to get a franchise for a rental van here in our country, I was not able to get a franchise but my rental van is already is business. It happened when my driver got caught near the airport and my van got impounded. I was really short of funds because I have no savings at all, since I paid it to serve as a down payment for my van. I was running errands from one city to another city, from island to another island trying to process the release of my van and I was not able to work because I kept on travelling and I had to make loans and more loans. 2 months pass, I found a job where I thought I could earn more because I managed a team of agents working at home for a credit repair company based in the US. At first it was all good. Seems everything was working fine. They paid our first week of work that was included in the cut off pay. But when the next invoice was sent to them, they told us that there funds has been frozen from the bank due to sending funds here in the Philippines. And they promised that after a week it’ll be released, they just need to send some documents to prove that they employed us outsourcely.

We’ve been waiting for six weeks, no pay at all. And they decided to cut as off. They said that they will have to settle those three invoices for six weeks of work we sent them before we continue working. But then days and weeks pass, they didn’t pay us. All of the teams working for them were not paid. And bills keeps filling up, loan sharks have been in our doorsteps almost every day and still nothing. I have been crying almost every day because the person that I owed money from posted me on social media to defame me.

I even thought that if killing myself would make everything silent cause I think my insurance would be enough to cover for my loans, then I’ll do it. But I just can’t afford to leave my daughter. She’s the reason why i work hard, she’s the reason why i am contented not having someone in my life, she’s the reason why all these years I have survived.

So instead of crying and crying, i opened my bible and read;

October 11, 2019, I ready Colossians 3:1-25. What catches my attention was really the first part.

Colossians 3:1-3 ”If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

I began to realize that I was too busy with getting my goal. Looking at those earthly things that I wanted to have for me and my child. For me to help my family. And I forgot to even thank Him each day, asked for His guidance and even pray.

Life is full of trials, it doesn’t matter if your single, married, single parent, or divorced. But it is up to us on how we handle those things that tried to pull us down. I know I am in the midst of trouble now, but i know He is by my side throughout this situation…

God has prepared a price after this dark and rough road I am now,…

[tsgcincinnati]

Advice from some of Cincinnati’s Best Business Owners

Hi! McKenna (MLB) here! We had a really great time last week at our TSG Cincinnati Member Mingle (hosted at the beautiful Hotel Covington) where several talented business owners shared some fantastic insight and a peek behind the curtains of their successful businesses. Not only are they successful business leaders in our Cincinnati community, but they’re all wonderful people who want to support one another and help in any way possible. 

The panel was made up of a diverse group of talented people: Megan Stacey of Megan Stacey Group at Coldwell Banker West Shell , Robin Wood of Robin Wood Flowers, Dr. Carly Rose of Eyecare on the Square ,  Bob Carroll of Carroll Financial and Jonathan Gibbs of Gibbs Insurance Associates. They all do very different different things on a daily basis, and are faced with very different challenges. However, the two things each of them have in common is business ownership and love for Cincinnati. 

Pictured: Dr. Carly Rose, Bob Carroll, Jonathan Gibbs, McKenna Brooks

Here are a few highlights and pieces of advice from them: 

MLB: Robin, How did you take a passion & turn it into a business?

Robin Wood: (Robin Wood Flowers Founder) I came from a long line of entrepreneurs. My dad starting building electronic equipment for fun, then started a radio station (WEBN). One day I thought “I really want to garden. I thought, we really need a florist in Cincinnati”

I wanted to do everything out in the open. In 2001 I was lucky to be invited to join in a space with an interior designer near Xavier. I learned I know nothing about business.

We now have 20 employees and do events all over Cincinnati. We buy flowers from Holland, and flowers from here in Cincinnati. 

Changing careers in the middle of my life, I was able to be on Oprah. She did a show on women who changed careers in the middle of their lives. They called on Valentine’s day asking me to be on the show, and I thought it was a joke. A few days went by and I realized they were serious, so I said ‘ok’ and it was a lot of interviews and a long process. But then they sent me a plane ticket!

But here we are in 2019, and I love what I do!

MLB: How do you find someone as passionate as you are about your business?

Robin: Many of the people we have hired have walked in and said “I want to work for you” - many times this works out, but other times it doesn't and you have to know when to cut it.  Many of our designers have been with us for 10, 15, 20 years. Hiring full-time employees is very difficult. Now we often start with part time and see how it goes. This is the best way to ensure they fit in our culture and are good at what they do.”

MLB: Carly, how do you manage owning the practice with your sister, Ehryn, and live through the challenge of redefining the eye-care experience? 

Dr. Carly Rose: (Optometrist / Owner of Eyecare on the Square) When I went into optometry, my sister was already in optometry school. We swore we’d never work together, because we had a great working relationship and didn’t want to mess that up. Well, a few years went by and she owned her own practice went on a trip to Ireland and asked me to cover our clients. Things went well and she asked me to come on as an associate.

Now things have shifted and I’m the business owner and she works for me as an associate. It is great!  We don’t work together TOO much and work to keep ownership separate.

I have focused a lot on policies and procedures. This allows me to put the blame on the committee. I lean on our staff a lot for decisions, 

MLB: How are you redefining eyecare? 

Carly: One thing we have different than a lot of people around is technology and eye imaging capabilities. We also treat your whole health as it applies to your eyes (for example, what supplements you should take to help your eye health).

  Pictured: Nora Fink, Megan Stacey, McKenna Brooks, Dr. Carly Rose, Dr. Mona Foad

MLB: How do you juggle two roles - the founder/owner of Carroll Financial & Investment Advisor at Carnegie Investment counsel? 

Bob Carroll: I personally went through a divorce about 16 years ago. It made me realize that financial was one part of the process that was very uncertain. I decided to take this on myself as a financial planner. People are faced with this terrible dilemma: how best to move forward? I like to help them with this.

MLB: How do you attract new clients for your businesses?

Bob: Mostly referral, people see what I do and start asking questions. It has been a bit of a challenge because many people are going through divorce, but few of them realize they need financial assistance. Often people say “I wish I knew this existed when I went through a divorce.” Those are the people I need to connect with - they can’t sleep at night. 

My wife happens to be a couple’s therapist. By day she tries to keep them together, I help them during the worst time of their lives. There’s a lot of good that we’re doing.

Pictured: Katy Casteel, Maria Friday , Anna Zimmerman, Dr. Carly Rose, Robin Wood

MLB: You bought the business from your dad, talk about that business. How do you manage that, and your staff, and keep the brand relevant and new?

Jonathan Gibbs: (Owner Gibbs Insurance Associates) I grew up in a small town. My dad came back from Vietnam, and took over my grandmother’s restaurant. He served breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My brother and I peeled potatoes there. 

When I was about 6 or 7 years old, my dad bought his insurance agent’s agency. He did a lot of farm and contracting. When I was in the 6th grade, we moved to Cincinnati because he had a lot of clients moving this way. 

I moved away, went to DePaul, in Chicago, went to NYC, back to Chicago. My dad said “If you want to move back to Cinci, you can help me with insurance!”

I have now been in the business for 15 years, and we own businesses in all sectors. My dad is still around, to help advise the business he has built for the past 40 years. 

What I enjoy doing is to help explain to people: what do you need, what do you feel comfortable buying, etc. There are new risks out there to small business that were not there 10-15 years ago. I love to talk about the little “Cracks” that things can fall through. I enjoy helping with this and getting the change of scenery.

It has been a great business, and I like working with my dad. We are in two separate offices mostly, so we stay out of trouble. 

Pictured: Megan Stacey, McKenna Brooks, Drew Stacey

MLB: Megan, you have tapped into many others who are specialists in their areas to leverage a group of people’s skills to help you build, so you can focus on the right things. Talk about this - how do you hire these people, where do you find them?

Megan Stacey: (Megan Stacey, Owner + Realtor) I made a major career change about 4 years ago. I learned by doing. I am an educator by training, I have a double master’s degree in education. I am a lifelong learner, but I know I can’t do everything. I am hitting my 4 year anniversary, and there are 5 on my team. 

I want to grow gracefully, and part of that is knowing what I don’t know and bringing on the right people.

For example, I bring in Nest Home Staging. I am NOT a designer - I can’t help you make your home look it’s best. As part of my process, which many other realtors don’t do, I pay them to come in and help the homeowners by giving a staging consultation. I’m not trying to sell them on anything. For example, if a customer’s home smells like dog, they tell them for me! 

In addition to using the Coldwell Banker resources, I hire my own designer so I also have custom branded materials. I outsource a lot and use a lot of contractors. You can find great people this way, but it can also be a challenge to find good small-business owners that are reliable. 

The clients that we serve are really counting on us for great referrals. 

I am really passionate about supporting local and connecting people within our great city.

Thanks to all of the other wonderful supporters of the TSG Community who attended and participated! It was a great evening and we are looking forward to seeing everyone again soon. 

Pictured: McKenna Brooks, Nora Fink

Pictured: Trevor Furbay, Amy Gislason, Karen Rolfes

Want to learn more? Email me at mbrooks@thescoutguide.com! 

Want to support these great people? Visit the Directory and see what businesses are a part of TSG Cincinnati and be sure to tell them Scout sent you when you visit them!  

Thanks for reading! ~ McKenna

[topicprinter]

Having an interesting discussion over here so I thought I would expand with a few more thoughts.Do you have any experience?We have hired 13 different full time employees (4 with us currently) and 1000+ part time employees over the past 9 years since we started. We are a pickup and delivery storage company. We aren't a tech company. We aren't scientists. Is our company simple? Far from it. Our logistics are crazy. But it's not rocket science.--Let me make something clear - that post was designed to help people hire early employees and build their team. The post would have been very different if I were trying to tell someone how to hire their next department manager or their next CEO or someone to help them take their company public.Hiring your first employee is very uncomfortable. It's scary. The anxiety in fact can be so crippling that many many people can't take the leap from freelancer to entrepreneur because they just can't do it.So what is the goal of hiring your first employee? TO MINIMIZE RISK.When you are hiring your first employee you need someone willing to follow your lead and follow your process. You need someone who will listen to you and will do as you tell them to do at least initially.It is VERY RISKY to hire someone and let them do their own thing with little structure. You do not know the person. It's as simple as that. You are trusting your business in the hands of someone that you do not know. You are trusting them to take care of your customers. To operate your equipment. This is a big deal.This is why so many people gravitate towards hiring and partnering with their friends. To try to mitigate risk of the unknown. I have done this and it can be great but more often than not it causes problems. Thats why you need a system and a stranger willing to follow that system.--Let me make something else clear - when you are hiring your first handful of employees your goal shouldn't be to hire another entrepreneur or top level manager.I'm unsure why so many people in the thread acted like they would be really upset to be hired by that boss. Of course you would. You are an entrepreneur hanging out in the entrepreneur sub. You don't want to be told what to do. I get that.You, as the business owner, are the manager. You don't need more managers! You need people to follow your lead!There are a select few people in my company that have earned the right of not being told what to do. They don't get that right when they first get hired. When they first get hired they are expected to follow the process that I've worked so hard to build. Its the only way to keep things organized and deliver a consistent product to my customers.That isn't to say I don't listen to my employees and verbally encourage them to bring ideas to me on how to improve. When they call me with questions I challenge them and encourage them to think through it and solve the problem. I don't just tell them what to do and expect them to be quite.The people who earn the trust and prove they can MAKE GOOD DECISIONS get the trust and get the autonomy.--Let me make something else clear - interviewing is a skill and I've found that its not directly correlated with drive.Just like you can't learn much about someone on a first date its really hard to learn a lot of valuable information in a job interview. Especially your first few early interviews when you aren't sure what you are doing. You really get to know someone when something stressful happens on the job. When you watch them solve real problems. Don't get me wrong you can weed out 90% of the people during the interview but it isn't as simple as saying "if you do a better job hiring you can find all these traits in experienced people".In my experience, not always of course, unmotivated people get really really good at telling people what they want to hear all the time to make people think they are excited, driven and getting things done. They put a lot of energy into this. They calculate what they are going to say when you call. What they are going to say at the next team meeting.It's a sad truth but most employees have 1 main goal - to do as little work as humanly possible and still get paid on Friday. In my time as an owner/operator I've had only a handful of employees come to me eager and willing to take stress and work away from me and put it on themselves.Finding motivated and driven employees isn't impossible but you can't hire and interview for it. You have to see it for yourself. This is the main reason why I love hiring inexperienced people and developing and promoting my own talent.--Let me make one more thing clear - challenging and empowering and your employees can be done with structure and processes. Your company has to have structure to succeed. You will have an absolute mess on your hands if everyone is out there doing what they want to be doing in the way they want to be doing it.Employees want structure. Even high level employees want structure and a way of doing things.Motivating and making your employees feel valued is about how you treat them on a day to day basis. Do you listen to them? Do you treat them with respect? Do you encourage them to speak up when they hear something or see something they think they can improve upon?That is the environment that employees love at any company. It's not about the kegerator and ping pong tables.--If I'm hiring someone in an area that I am failing in or do not understand myself I'm going after experience every time. Don't hire an intern to do your payroll. Don't hire an intern to do your bookkeeping. Don't hire an intern to manager you PPC ad campaigns. Don't hire an intern to help you build your training processes.I like to outsource all of this stuff to professional freelancers with experience. I like to stay lean and keep my overhead low. I like contracts on an as-needed basis over employees here every time.Double down on your strengths. Hire people who are extensions of you to provide a consistent service to your customers and outsource everything else.--I got a good response and a valid concern: Yes, but smart inexperienced people figure out real fast what they're worth and jump ship faster than you can spin your head. What about that?All employees, experienced or not, jump ship if you pay them less than the value they bring. Employees just just ship often in general. That is part of running a business. Processes and structure allow you to deal with this and build a company that can survive it.You have to be willing to pay good people more than you are comfortable doing. I pay employees based on the value they bring my business. If they kick ass and add a lot of value I pay them a lot of money.If they outgrow my company and move on to add even more value for another bigger company doing higher margin things I am happy to send them off to do bigger and better things.One of the most rewarding things in business is helping someone in your company land a huge job and pursue a new awesome opportunity. Its part of my duty as a business owner to help my employees advance as far as possible - whether it's with me or not. You can't get emotional or selfish about this stuff.--Lastly - this isn't the rule. This is just an observation based on my personal experience and what I recommend you consider. When you read a book you obviously don't agree with the entire book. I've never read a book that this was the case. But I gloss over what isn't applicable to me and I take in what is applicable to a certain thing I'm dealing with. That is a win for me.I think we can all agree that many entrepreneurs on this sub aren't in the market for $150k a year talent with 10 years experience. We have to make do with fresh, cheaper talent. I know I did in the early days. Hopefully this post encourages them to think outside the box and get comfortable hiring and taking chances on people without experience.

[onlinemarketingcourses]

“Hustle Porn” Is Making Us Sad and Suicidal, by Erica Douglass (erica.biz)

Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” recently told CNBC’s “Make It”: “If I have to give one piece of advice to someone who’s thinking about starting a business, I tell them this: Forget about balance. You’re going to work 25 hours a day, seven days a week, forever. That’s what it takes to be successful.”

Excuse me while my eyes roll all the way to the back of my head!

Here’s the truth: I made my first million dollars at a very young age, from a bootstrapped company.

And the other part of the truth: That business absolutely killed my health.

Today, my husband John and I run a company that generates several million dollars a year in revenue. And we typically don’t work more than 40 hours a week.

We did work long hours when we started. But, especially once we had a beautiful daughter, we realized the long hours we were working wouldn’t be sustainable.

John and I made a conscious decision to hire people and sacrifice extra money in the short term, in order to not kill our health long-term.

I am a ruthless outsourcer. John, who came from the restaurant industry, was knowledgeable on how to hire and grow a team. Together, we “bought our freedom.” We had full understanding that we could work longer hours, hire fewer people, and make more money in the short term…and we chose not to do that.

Instead, we hired employees and trained them, then hired 2 top-notch folks to be our executive team and help us grow and scale the business.

The result? A business that makes several million dollars a year, that also provides for our employees and their families, without killing us.

We Also Gave Our Employees More Time Off

I am a big believer in a shorter work week making people more productive. To that extent, we used to have our managers do a 5-6 schedule (5 days a week one week, then 6 days a week the next week.) This is common in the restaurant industry, but I was not a fan of it. Neither were our two executives.

As soon as our numbers allowed, we made the switch and all managers now only work 5 days a week.

In addition, this year we gave our employees an additional week of vacation, which now applies every year. Happier employees means a healthier business.

“Hustle Porn” Is Directly Tied to the Puritan Work Ethic

The “hustle porn” mentality, which basically says “Never stop working!”, appears to be mostly an American craze. I believe it stems from the old Puritan work ethic. It’s the same mentality that causes people to shame others for hiring help, such as housekeepers.

It also is the source of people working through lunch–and feeling guilty for taking breaks or vacations. The average employee who receives paid vacation only took about half their vacation days (source.)

Why? According to the survey, fear is responsible: “They fear getting behind on their work (34%), believe no one else at their company can do the work while they’re out (30%), they are completely dedicated to their company (22%), and they feel they can never be disconnected (21%).”

This is unequivocally harmful to our happiness as a society. I think a direct link can, and should, be made between “hustle porn” and the skyrocketing use of anti-depressants. “The number of Americans who say they’ve taken an antidepressant over the past month rose by 65 percent between 1999 and 2014. One in every eight Americans over the age of 12 reported recent antidepressant use.”

One in every eight Americans! Is anyone saying that “hustling” will make us happier?

It gets worse. Here’s an article published yesterday. “The suicide rate among Americans of working age increased 34 percent from 2000 to 2016, according to a report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

In the image above, I drew a direct correlation between “hustle porn”, reading about your friends bragging on social media, straight through to increased anti-depressant use and even suicide. We’re spending more time hunched over our phones flipping through the social media “trophy case”, and less time on relaxing and taking a break.

“Hustle porn” and the glorification of overwork is making us both sad and suicidal.

What’s the Alternative?

I don’t want to just breathlessly drop statistics and not offer alternatives. Here are a few ways I’ve stopped myself from overworking while still building a successful business:

Every Sunday night, I set 4 main goals for my next week. I try to set the week up so I have 4 goals and 4 days to work on them. My fifth day of work can then be consumed by any emergency that might pop up, doctor’s appointments, etc.

Every day, I wake up and decide which of my 4 goals I’ll be working on today. That starts my day off strong and focused. For instance, one of my 4 goals this week is “Write and publish a blog post.” That’s what I’m doing today!

I check off 2 “annoyances” and 2-3 household tasks every single day. Yesterday I paid bills, sent clients invoices, and cleaned for 20 minutes. (The 20-minute cleaning is a life hack called a “time block”, where I spend only a certain amount of time on a task to avoid overwhelm.)

When my annoyances, big task for the day, and household chores are done, I STOP WORKING. That’s right! I sometimes do a day from 10AM-4PM. This also gives me incentive to stop procrastinating, because once I’m done for the day, I’m done! I do not push myself into additional work at that point unless I’m motivated. Instead, I go outside and play some Pokemon Go, watch a movie, or read a book–guilt-free!

I have an earlier post where I talk about how I use Trello to organize my tasks. You can see there how I set up and plan my week.

Time and time again, when creatives (writers and software developers in particular) are surveyed, we say we can’t do more than 4-5 hours of creative work in a day. The rest of our time is spent on boring and mundane tasks–many of which I would recommend outsourcing if you run your own business.

Or, if mowing the lawn makes you happy–do that yourself and outsource other items. I’ve learned how to cook and enjoy cooking, so I outsource cleaning and mowing the lawn, but I buy groceries and cook frequently.

If there’s one thing I would love for you to take away from this, it’s that it’s completely possible to build a 7-figure-plus business without killing yourself. It’s OK to hire people (as you have the money to do so.) There probably will be a time at the beginning of your business where you’re working long hours. But it most certainly does not have to be “forever”, no matter what Kevin O’Leary says.

“Hustle porn” does not make any of us happier people. Be OK with being happier instead of being a hustler.

!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n; n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script','//connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js');

fbq('init', '278292052360928'); fbq('track', 'PageView') fbq('track', 'Lead'); Source link

[destiginterviews-blog]

JENNY RICHTER interview in DESTIG Magazine 

Tell us about yourself and background. I was born in East Germany and while I belong to the last generation that has an active memory of growing up in Communism Germany I am glad it only lasted through my early childhood until it got broken down by The People. I value freedom and independence over everything. It is an interesting experience to see a system that crept into every aspect of daily life fall apart. I spend my wild years in post unification Berlin when the city was an adventure playground for the Creatives, the Misfits and the Idealists. We had everything except for money. While Berlin marked the only time and place in my life where and when I felt truly at home I disconnected when I moved to a valley in the Dolomite Mountains/ Northern Italy to study wood carving. I now follow my former teachers on social platforms as they exhibit their amazing work worldwide. They are the best. I briefly studied with Odd Nerdrum who at the time I considered the last master and only person worth learning from. My time with him was short but I learned so much. I met my Philly husband in Berlin when he hired me to recreate the art deco- ornaments for a façade renovation he oversaw. We have that project documented on our website oldeworldcraft.com So I came over to the States and moved in with my #1 man in Philadelphia in Germantown- of all places. I was born a painter as creating paintings is my true expression. Over the years I branched out and acquired many trades- a sculptor of wood, glass and elements (snow and sand) which gave me a solid understanding of proportions space and the geometry of beauty, a contractor specialized in decorative plasters and ornamental façade restorations which taught me to be of service with humility and discipline as well as a highly trained hypnotherapist which gives me the ability to disable the perception filter of my mind and connect to my subconscious as well as our collective consciousness. This rather unusual multi-layered set of skills now serves as my foundation to create art pieces that go further than being a visual product. ​Tell us about your work. My work simultaneously seeks and provides understanding. My pieces are little messages from our collective to ourselves created through me. ​I tap into my personal core to deliver images that tell a universal story. I hope for people who see my images to recognize something familiar, a fraction of their memory of their deeper nature to be triggered. What makes your work and approach unique? I have arrived at a point in my life where I no longer am consumed by pointless beliefs, patterns or desires that still seem attractive in our society. ​I understand that I solely exist to observe, create and ultimately remember. This gives me and my work value and meaning. Why is your work a good investment? In these times where we experience an overwhelming flood of noise and imagery it is important to emphasize and value content. We all seek value and we feel the need to proof our own. It can be seductive to do so through external accessories. Instead we need to value our humanness over everything. ​We are vulnerable creatures of infinite potential. My work is a contribution and an element of our Zeitgeist. It plugs into the current segment of our timeline but exists beyond it. When you invest in a piece of art it is important to evaluate the piece beyond its current time, it has to be strong enough to stand beside pieces of the past and the future. Tell us about some of your achievements. My website www.jennyrichter.com is a sufficient reference for my creations and projects. What I really feel is an accomplishment though is the clarity and independence I have gained through years of solitude. I could not have shared my work at an earlier point as I would have gotten attached to the need of being validated by others. I am also proud that my husband and I have created a solid life foundation for our best creation- 2 little Padawans- while we both came from broken families and started with nothing. Raising kids means your focus shifts from being the center of your own universe to constantly prioritizing another being. So instead of living in the creative flow I have to micro-organize and live with a tight schedule. As someone who highly values independence, alone time and pondering about the bigger things this is hard and I am proud I am doing it. ​ What are your sources of inspiration? My ideas spawn inside my head and then take on a life of their own. I got this line of images in my head that are waiting for their turn. Because I have a very finite amount of time available raising 2 young kids I constantly need to prioritize. Some images have been waiting for years, others squeeze in and give me this urge so they get bumped up and turned into an art piece right away. It can be a teensy moment or feeling that triggers an entire image creation and I often have to catch up on fully grasping its meaning myself. What you are passionate about? I see our civilization standing at a decisive dividing point of power distribution. The proclivity how we transfer power within the macro structures of our society lies within the micro tendency to transfer our personal power. Politically we are witnessing a tuck a war between corporate capability to claim and distribute resources while creating dependency versus a movement of social activism working towards a humane and fair distribution of resources creating an upgraded society of unbound individuals. Personally I am convinced that our monopolized power hierarchies will eventually fail because they aren’t viable and therefor will no longer serve us. However an upgrade to a society of sovereign individuals starts with questioning why we are afraid of our own sovereignty. ​Why do we prefer to outsource our personal power by handing over our responsibilities? Why authorize our religious leaders to hold power over our own spiritual journey or commission doctors to be in full charge of our healing journey? Why do we determine our worth by our material amassment or our lovability by how much we (or our social media avatars) are being validated by others? The biggest power we possess is our attention. What we pay attention to we validate. That is why I hope my artwork contributes a little part to bringing more attention to the vast nature of our being, to trigger self-reflection and focus onto the magic of our reality. Thank you for Your attention. More images from this interview: https://www.destig.com/richter.html ​Website: jennyrichter.com

[theinvinciblenoob]

Building web services and smartphone apps, which is most of what I’ve been doing professionally at HappyFunCorp1 for the last decade or so used to be pretty straightforward. Not easy, but straightforward, especially when the client was a consumer startup, which so many of them were.

The more we did the better we got at it. Design and write two native apps, usually iOS first and Android second. Don’t skimp on the design. Connect them to a JSON API, usually written in Ruby on Rails, which also powered the web site. There’s always a web site; consumers might only see the side which is a minimal billboard for the app, but there’s essentially always also an admin site, to control features and aspects of the app.

Design isn’t as important for the admin site, so you can build that in something crude but effective like ActiveAdmin; why roll your own? Similarly, authentication is tricky and easy to get wrong, so use something like Devise, which comes with built-in hooks to Facebook and Twitter login. Design your database carefully. Use jQuery for dynamic in-browser manipulation since raw Javascript is such a nightmare. Argue about whether to use Rspec or Minitest for your server tests.

All there? OK, roll it out to your Heroku scaling environment, so you can simply “git push” to push to staging and production, with various levels of Postgres support, autoscaling, pipelines, Redis caching, Resque worker jobs, and so forth. If it’s a startup, keep them on Heroku to see if they catch on, if they find the fabled product-market fit, not least because it helps you iterate faster. If so, at some point you have to graduate them to AWS, because Heroku only scales so far and it does so very expensively. If not, well, “fail fast,” right?

Those were the days, my friends, those halcyon, long-gone days of (checks notes) five years ago. The days of a lot of grief, sure, but very little decision complexity. The smartphone boom was on, and the web boom was settling down, and everyone was still surfing those two tidal waves.

Today? Well, today we still are, neither of those waves have broken, per se, software is still eating the world, but things are … different. More of the world is being eaten, but it’s also happening more slowly, like growing 50% a year from a $1 billion base rather than 500% from $1 million. There are fewer starry-eyed founders with an app idea that they’re sure will change the world and funding enough to give it a shot. Those are still out there, sure, and more power to them, but the landscape is more complex, now.

Instead we see more big businesses, media and industrial and retail alike, realizing they must adapt and be devoured, experimenting with new tech projects with a combination of excitement and trepidation. Or requisitioning custom apps for very specific — but very useful — purposes, and requiring them to interface with their awkward pre-existing custom middleware just so. Or tech companies, even big household-name ones, outsourcing ancillary tools and projects in order to focus their in-house teams purely on their core competencies and business models. Our mix of clients has definitely shifted more towards enterprise in the last few years.

Which is not to say that startups don’t still come through our doors with bright ideas and inspiring PowerPoints on a fairly regular basis. As do super starry-eyed blockchain founders (granted, I’m sometimes a bit starry-eyed about blockchains myself) replacing the consumer-app founders of yore. I doubt we’re alone in having had a spate of blockchain startup projects late last year and early this, which has diminished to only a couple active at the moment. (Not least because the tooling is still so crude it reminds me of 90s command-line hacking.) But I strongly doubt that sphere is going away.

We haven’t dealt with as many AI projects as I would have expected by now, probably partly because AI talent is still so scarce and highly valued, and partly because it turns out a lot of seeming “AI” work can be done with simple linear regressions rather than by building and training and tuning deep-learning neural networks… although if you do those linear regressions with TensorFlow, it’s still “AI” buzzword-compliant, right? Right?

Most of all, though, the tools we use have changed. Nowadays when you want to build an app, you have to ask yourself: really native? (Java or Kotlin? Objective-C or Swift?) Or React Native? Or Xamarin? Or Google’s new Flutter thing? When you want to build a web site, you have to think: traditional? Or single-page, with React or Angular or Vue? As for the server — Go is a lot faster than Rails, you know, and oh, that elegant concurrency handling, but, oh, where is my map/filter/reduce? Javascript is still a clumsy language, but there are certain advantages to having one language across the stack, and Node is powerful and package-rich these days. And of course you’ll want it all containerized, because while Docker definitely adds another layer or two of configuration complexity, it’s usually worth it.

Unless you want to go fully ���serverless,” at least for aspects, with Amazon Lambda or Google Firebase? Even if you don’t use Firebase for a datastore, how about for authentication, huh? And if you’re all containerized, and Kubernetized if/as appropriate, though maybe let’s not go the many-microservices route until you’re sure your product-market fit justifies it, then where do you want to roll it out, AWS or Azure or Google Cloud or Digital Ocean? Or do you want to use one of their PaaS services, like App Engine or Beanstalk, which, like Heroku, sorta kinda live between “serverless” and “bare metal virtual machines”?

I oversimplify, but you get my point. We’ve never had more options, as developers, more tools available to us … and we’ve never had to struggle more with analysis paralysis, because it’s awfully hard to determine which of the possible toolsets is the best one for any particular situation. Sometimes — often — we have to be happy with just selecting a good one. And that selection problem doesn’t look like it’s going to get easier anytime soon, I’m afraid. It’s a strange time to be a coder. We live and work all tangled up in an embarrassment of riches.

1Yes, that’s really our name. No, this TC column isn’t a full-time gig. (Which is something people frequently assume, because it’s so much more visible and to some people writing a column every week sounds like a lot of work, but no, I’m really a CTO.)

via TechCrunch

[fmservers]

The tools, they are a-changing

Building web services and smartphone apps, which is most of what I’ve been doing professionally at HappyFunCorp1 for the last decade or so used to be pretty straightforward. Not easy, but straightforward, especially when the client was a consumer startup, which so many of them were.

The more we did the better we got at it. Design and write two native apps, usually iOS first and Android second. Don’t skimp on the design. Connect them to a JSON API, usually written in Ruby on Rails, which also powered the web site. There’s always a web site; consumers might only see the side which is a minimal billboard for the app, but there’s essentially always also an admin site, to control features and aspects of the app.

Design isn’t as important for the admin site, so you can build that in something crude but effective like ActiveAdmin; why roll your own? Similarly, authentication is tricky and easy to get wrong, so use something like Devise, which comes with built-in hooks to Facebook and Twitter login. Design your database carefully. Use jQuery for dynamic in-browser manipulation since raw Javascript is such a nightmare. Argue about whether to use Rspec or Minitest for your server tests.

All there? OK, roll it out to your Heroku scaling environment, so you can simply “git push” to push to staging and production, with various levels of Postgres support, autoscaling, pipelines, Redis caching, Resque worker jobs, and so forth. If it’s a startup, keep them on Heroku to see if they catch on, if they find the fabled product-market fit, not least because it helps you iterate faster. If so, at some point you have to graduate them to AWS, because Heroku only scales so far and it does so very expensively. If not, well, “fail fast,” right?

Those were the days, my friends, those halcyon, long-gone days of (checks notes) five years ago. The days of a lot of grief, sure, but very little decision complexity. The smartphone boom was on, and the web boom was settling down, and everyone was still surfing those two tidal waves.

Today? Well, today we still are, neither of those waves have broken, per se, software is still eating the world, but things are … different. More of the world is being eaten, but it’s also happening more slowly, like growing 50% a year from a $1 billion base rather than 500% from $1 million. There are fewer starry-eyed founders with an app idea that they’re sure will change the world and funding enough to give it a shot. Those are still out there, sure, and more power to them, but the landscape is more complex, now.

Instead we see more big businesses, media and industrial and retail alike, realizing they must adapt and be devoured, experimenting with new tech projects with a combination of excitement and trepidation. Or requisitioning custom apps for very specific — but very useful — purposes, and requiring them to interface with their awkward pre-existing custom middleware just so. Or tech companies, even big household-name ones, outsourcing ancillary tools and projects in order to focus their in-house teams purely on their core competencies and business models. Our mix of clients has definitely shifted more towards enterprise in the last few years.

Which is not to say that startups don’t still come through our doors with bright ideas and inspiring PowerPoints on a fairly regular basis. As do super starry-eyed blockchain founders (granted, I’m sometimes a bit starry-eyed about blockchains myself) replacing the consumer-app founders of yore. I doubt we’re alone in having had a spate of blockchain startup projects late last year and early this, which has diminished to only a couple active at the moment. (Not least because the tooling is still so crude it reminds me of 90s command-line hacking.) But I strongly doubt that sphere is going away.

We haven’t dealt with as many AI projects as I would have expected by now, probably partly because AI talent is still so scarce and highly valued, and partly because it turns out a lot of seeming “AI” work can be done with simple linear regressions rather than by building and training and tuning deep-learning neural networks… although if you do those linear regressions with TensorFlow, it’s still “AI” buzzword-compliant, right? Right?

Most of all, though, the tools we use have changed. Nowadays when you want to build an app, you have to ask yourself: really native? (Java or Kotlin? Objective-C or Swift?) Or React Native? Or Xamarin? Or Google’s new Flutter thing? When you want to build a web site, you have to think: traditional? Or single-page, with React or Angular or Vue? As for the server — Go is a lot faster than Rails, you know, and oh, that elegant concurrency handling, but, oh, where is my map/filter/reduce? Javascript is still a clumsy language, but there are certain advantages to having one language across the stack, and Node is powerful and package-rich these days. And of course you’ll want it all containerized, because while Docker definitely adds another layer or two of configuration complexity, it’s usually worth it.

Unless you want to go fully “serverless,” at least for aspects, with Amazon Lambda or Google Firebase? Even if you don’t use Firebase for a datastore, how about for authentication, huh? And if you’re all containerized, and Kubernetized if/as appropriate, though maybe let’s not go the many-microservices route until you’re sure your product-market fit justifies it, then where do you want to roll it out, AWS or Azure or Google Cloud or Digital Ocean? Or do you want to use one of their PaaS services, like App Engine or Beanstalk, which, like Heroku, sorta kinda live between “serverless” and “bare metal virtual machines”?

I oversimplify, but you get my point. We’ve never had more options, as developers, more tools available to us … and we’ve never had to struggle more with analysis paralysis, because it’s awfully hard to determine which of the possible toolsets is the best one for any particular situation. Sometimes — often — we have to be happy with just selecting a good one. And that selection problem doesn’t look like it’s going to get easier anytime soon, I’m afraid. It’s a strange time to be a coder. We live and work all tangled up in an embarrassment of riches.

1Yes, that’s really our name. No, this TC column isn’t a full-time gig. (Which is something people frequently assume, because it’s so much more visible and to some people writing a column every week sounds like a lot of work, but no, I’m really a CTO.)

Via Jon Evans https://techcrunch.com

[brendajhensonblog]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 195

Click on the video above to watch Episode 195 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

Bradley: I just haven’t installed it yet.

Adam: I love this thing. Hey! Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts episode 195, where we talk about standing desk. If you would like to order your standing desk contact me for … Just kidding.

Bradley: For my [inaudible 00:00:13] link.

Adam: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, that’s funny. I was just working on … I’m setting up a site that’s around like home office stuff. That’s going to be part of it. I am at a desk so I can make the thing go up and down here. Anyways, what I actually want to talk about and not this is that it’s episode 195, when we’re getting closer to that episode 200. This is a reminder for us that we’ve got to come up with something good.

But before we get into it let’s go around and say, “Hi,” real quick. We got the full team here. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Greetings from Barcelona today.

Adam: Nice! Nice. Never been. Heard good things. I know, Hernan, you went there, right? You really liked it, didn’t you?

Hernan: Yeah. It’s a nice city. Very nice city.

Chris: It is.

Adam: Good deal. All right. We won’t talk to Hernan too much because he’s got a cold. I don’t want him to get everyone sick.

Hernan: Thank you, Adam. Thank you, everybody. I’m excited to be here. Woo-hoo.

Adam: Marco, how you doing, man?

Marco: I’m good, man. Really good. Really excited about everything that’s coming down the pipeline.

Adam: Awesome.

Marco: Really looking forward to what’s coming.

Adam: Yeah, definitely. Bradley. How about yourself? How you doing? You don’t have thunderstorms or anything going on?

Bradley: Not today. I’m actually tired as hell today because I was up late last night with Peter Drew for a webinar that we did for him about local GMB … I know we’re going to talk about that a lot today. But yeah I start my day at 4:00 a.m. He’s in Australia. Whenever he wants to do a webinar to his audience it’s like eight or nine p.m. Eastern for my time in Virginia. That’s a long damn day. It was 9:30 last night when I got done. I put in a 16-and-A-half-hour day. I used to do that shit all the time but, to be honest, I haven’t done that kind of stuff in quite some time. I’m a little bit delirious today, so to speak. But I’m here and I’m happy, so let’s go.

Adam: Outstanding. Okay. First off, if you’re new to Semantic Mastery and you’re joining us, thanks for watching. Whether you’re watching us live or whether you’re watching the replay on YouTube, we appreciate you checking it out.

Like I said, if you are new to Semantic Mastery and you haven’t grabbed it yet, then please grab the battle plan. The link will be below. It’s the best place to help you out with your SEO and digital marketing in basically all areas. Even if you’re not new, it’s great to have that repeatable process so that you can do these things over and over again and get good results. However, if you feel like you’re past that and you’re ready to take things up a few notches, then the mastermind is the place for you to be.

If you’ve already got a few clients and you’re wanting to figure out either how to fill that pipeline and grow your revenue as a local digital marketer or as an agency owner, then we want you in the mastermind. I’m going to put that link on there as well.

I’ll let Bradley talk a little bit. We’ve got a few things coming up with the mastermind, right? Did you mention or am I … Okay.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Cool. Yeah. Coming up, I think maybe that’s part of one of the questions. I forgot. Sorry. I’m getting [crosstalk 00:03:07] …

Bradley: Get enough sleep last night, Adam?

Adam: No, no. My wife’s out of town. Now, I was filling that up with too much work so I’ve been doing the longer work days, which is throwing me off and stuff.

Bradley: The only reason why you said that is because she might watch this later. I know what you were doing.

Adam: Yeah, no. She watches all the intros, so I got to … No, I’m just … Hey, Jenny!

But, with the mastermind, if you’re a local digital marketer or you’re looking to grow, it’s not just by yourself or if you’re building an agency, then that’s the place you want to be. Beyond that, I want to talk a little bit about our live event. [pofu 00:03:40] live is coming up. That’s in October. It’s going to be that October 19th, 20th, and 21st. The 19th is the VIP day. If you get a VIP ticket, you can come with us. We’re going to have stuff paid for. We’re going to have an event. We’re going to have some food, some drinks. We’ll have some fun. Then, the real action kicks off on the 20th and the 21st.

We’re limiting it at 25 people. Ticket sales are already on underway. We’ve sold tickets so I just want to put that out there as that is a hard limit. Once we hit 25, it’s over. If you want to get signed up, I’m going to put the link below as well. Hernan, is there anything specific we want to tell people about that?

Hernan: Yeah, definitely. Here’s the thing. The other day we were brainstorming one week, what would be the value and the actual, what we could give you guys that it will blow your mind with value so that you might come to the event and have a lot of value out of it? It came out to be that after almost five years of Semantic Mastery, we have developed a system that will allow you guys to any kind of maximum MMR on any kind of students, step by step, it will allow you guys to go ahead and set up a prospecting system to get new leads and convert them into clients give them results really, really fast and then scale. There’s these three steps and these three pillars, if you would, of the “Semantic Mastery system.”

That’s basically the whole thing of the event. We’re going to show you guys how to get more leads and better leads that you can charge more for your services, for your local marketing agencies, whether you’re doing PPC or SEO, it doesn’t matter. We will show you how to do that, number one.

Number two, we’re going to show you how to give them results fast so that they can stay pretty much longer, that when you get results fast for a client, they tend to stick longer because they pretty much love you guys.

Number three where we show you how to scale, how to actually hire and train and set up the processes and outsource your business so you can repeat the process and you don’t become the bottleneck. That’s going to be pretty cool. We have some pre-training material. We want to help you guys uncover what’s going to be that helpful, that decision of fuck you that you want to be in. I think that’s going to be pretty amazing. I’m super, super stoked about that.

If you’re looking for any or all of those stuff and if you’re thinking you’re lacking that into your business, just come to pofu live. That’s got to be awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah. The idea, just to jump in real quick. I see Marco. He’s itching, too. The idea, guys, is really to fast track your success on how to … It’s going to be locally based. In other words, the training is focused more on local than anything else. It’s just not really in us just because that’s primarily what most of our audience does, guys, and that’s obviously what I do. That’s really what it’s about.

We’re going to try to basically give you a blueprint and a fast track to success on how to prospect and land a client, fulfill the service to get them results rather quickly. Then, how to scale and really remove yourself from the business which is really the idea, to go from self-employed to a true business owner, where you don’t have to be present in managing the day-to-day operations of your business in order for it to still produce revenue for you. That’s really the idea.

I know most of us are self-employed. I still am too to a very big degree but there are processes and stuff that I’ve been developing to help pull myself away from having to do all the work in my agency. That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s really where we’re taking Semantic Mastery. That’s what the pofu live event is going to be about. We would encourage anybody that is really looking to fast track, the ability to not just get clients and perform services, guys, because that’s just you created your own job.

That’s still way better than working for somebody else. I’m not knocking that at all. I’ve done it for years but my point is the idea is do you want true freedom? If you want true freedom, you shouldn’t have to be behind your computer 5, 10, 12 hours a day generating revenue. You should have people in place that are doing it for you because you built the system and the processes that can afford you that opportunity.

That’s really what we’re what we’re trying to do with Semantic Mastery and that’s what the mastermind is all about but pofu live is going to be like a condensed version of it where you’re just going to get hit with the fire hose over the weekend and walk away with an actual plan for your business. That’s part of the reason why we want to keep it very, very small because we couldn’t sit down with 50, 100, 200 people and do this but with 25, we very well can. That’s the idea.

Marco, were you going to add to that?

Marco: Yeah. What I was going to add is that what I’m going to be talking about is it’s fine to have all of these things at your disposal, which is what we make available to mainly our mastermind members. We do have one of products and we have another lower membership but the mastermind is where it’s at. But even then, we’ve had people who can’t overcome their own …

Bradley: Analysis of paralysis, or a paralysis of analysis, right?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: There you go.

Marco: It’s their own preconceived notions of what can and can’t be done, of what they can and can’t do and letting other people dictate what you can and cannot do. Fuck that! Position of fuck you allows you to say, “Fuck that.” You can’t tell me what the fuck I can or cannot do. My discussion topic is going to be centered around that. It’s not just having all of these things available because they can just put you, like you said, in analysis paralysis, right?

Bradley: Right.

Marco: Where you analyze and analyze and analyze and you don’t do shit. That’s not what this is about. You have to be an action taker. We have a ton of those people. We have people who only come to hunt their hangouts, get the information. They go and apply and they make money. I know of at least two people who built up their businesses that way. Action takers, that requires a certain kind of mindset. It’s the only way to get the pofu.

Bradley: Amen. Can we get any questions? What else we got, Adam?

Adam: I was probably not editing a split test page in ClickFunnels just then. Yeah, that was it. I wanted to make sure that we talked to everyone about the live event. I appreciate you guys telling them more about that and what the real reasons are behind it.

I’ll just add on to that there’s the side benefits, the things that we don’t have to do but are huge benefits to you. You get to meet other people like yourself, who are investing in their time and obviously putting their money where their mouth is and saying, “Okay, I want to learn more about this but I also want to be around the other people.”

That’s part of why I like me and Hernan or when I went with Bradley going to ClickFunnels Live. It’s not because I want to shake hands with Russell Brunson. He’s a neat guy but that’s not going to help us make more money or bring in more clients or help me save time but being around those people, getting those ideas. That’s a huge benefit in building that network. I encourage people to do that. If it’s not our event, find something else where you can push yourself but hopefully you’ll come join us.

Bradley: Awesome. All right. We can get into questions now?

Adam: Do it.

Bradley: All right. Let’s do it. I’m going to grab the screen. Oops. Wrong button.

Adam: We got it.

What WordPress Plugin Do You Recommend For Pasting The Schema Code From The SerpSpace Structured Data Generator?

Bradley: All right. Richard is up first. Richard says, “Are you aware or can you recommend a WordPress plug-in it will let me just paste in the schema code that I generated using the search space structured data generator?” I answered this last week because I think you posted this. Yeah. Several days ago I saw it.

Obviously, in case you guys are on aware of this, we recommend stopping using any SEO plug-in other than Jeffrey Smith’s SEO Ultimate plug-in. It’s hands down the best SEO plug-in. By the way, they’re about to release a new version of it they’ve been working on for months. Jeffrey and a couple other guys have been working on it for months. That it’s about to be upgraded. That’s going to be the pro version, which I highly recommend, guys, which is the paid version of it but it’s super affordable unlike Yoast and the Yoast premium upgraded version of it is stupid expensive. This, SEO Ultimate Plus is not. It’s a much, much better plug-in, anyways. It doesn’t bloat like put a bunch of bloated code in like Yoast does.

I’m not going to lie. I’ve still got a lot of websites out there with Yoast on it just because I haven’t taken the time to go through and swap out the plug-ins and update the settings but I’m no longer creating any websites with any other SEO plug-in other than Jeffrey Smith’s ultimate SEO. The reason I bring that up or SEO, excuse me, SEO Ultimate plug-in. The reason I bring that up, Richard, is because it has a code inserter module in the plug-in that you can use to insert code to pages or posts. There’s site-wide code injection. There’s also specific page and/or post code injection. It gives you a lot of options to be able to do exactly what you just asked.

However, if you are adamant about using a different SEO plug-in, which, again I highly encourage you to switch, but if you’re using some other SEO plug-in that doesn’t have that option, then I would recommend using a very simple plug-in. It’s listed right here. I think they change their name recently but, yeah, it’s SOGO Header Footer, add script to individual pages header footer. This is a great plug-in because it gives you some functionality to where you can add code to specific pages or posts, whether you want them in the header or the footer of the page or the post like the HTML header or the footer area. It does a lot of really cool things too.

Again, I always try to limit the amount of plug-ins on my WordPress sites to the bare minimum. If I can use something like the SEO Ultimate plug-in that has that function, I’m going to do that so that I can consolidate two plug-ins into one but, again, if you’re using something else, then I would recommend just using these SOGO Add Script plug-in.

Hernan: I totally agree with you about Jeffery, man. It’s hands down the best. Yoast has become a bloated virus.

Adam: Yeah. It’s stupid.

Hernan: Anytime a plug-in tries to do your SEO for you and it does not do it correctly, it’s time to say, “No thanks, man. I don’t need it,” because I’m supposed to know what I’m doing. Why in the world would you handcuff me in such a way that I can’t do what I know I’m supposed to do, which is why I just said, “No more Yoast ever.”

Bradley: Yeah. In Yoast’s defense, there’s a lot of people out there that aren’t CEOs, guys. They’re not SEO nerds like we are. For somebody that is a civilian or a layman, so to speak, then I assume that some of the things that it suggests are better than nothing at all. Somebody doesn’t have any SEO knowledge is going to follow the guidelines of those types of plug-ins. I, for years, have said, “Don’t follow the guidelines of SEO plug-ins because you’ll over-optimize,” or whatever.

In their defense, I would say that they’re trying to serve a very broad audience with that plug-in but for anybody that pretends or says that they know what they’re doing, you want to be able to have the options to change things and manipulate things that you can’t do with Yoast and Jeffrey Smith’s plug-in allows you to do that. Again, that’s SEO Ultimate and the SEO Ultimate Plus, which is the upgraded or the pro version, which is what I highly recommend. It’s inexpensive and it’s worth it because it gives you a lot of additional functionality, some really cool stuff that you can do with that plug-in.

How Important Is Setting Up An AMP Version Of Your Sites?

All right. Sam’s up. He says, “How important is setting up AMP version of your sites and do you recommend any plug-ins or anything to simplify setting it up?” It is really important, Sam, especially now because, guys, the mobile-first indexing has been rolled out. If you have sites that are in search console, you probably have already gotten notifications from search console or from Google directly about that but they posted it on their blog and that rolled out in July but that’s on the Google webmaster’s blog. If you want to look at what mobile-first indexing is, that’s rolled out now.

I would highly recommend that you start doing that. It’s something I haven’t even really started implementing yet myself but I know that the AMP version, guys, it’s basically what the AMP pages do or the poster or whatever is it creates a cached version of the page in Google servers, so that it can load the page up, least this is my understanding of it. People can tap on it from mobile search. It basically loads instantly the page or the post because it’s not actually going to the website. It’s being served from Google’s servers.

Is that correct, Marco? From Google’s cache?

Marco: That is correct. That’s exactly what’s happening. Now, there’s some … I don’t want to say the word. There’s people out there who say that you’re giving away control of your website to Google. Who gives a fuck? They’re delivering it immediately. You can’t get any faster than immediate. Mobile-first speed is, if not the main, it’s very critical and one of the main signals, shall we say, or maybe ranking factors. I don’t know how to word it but yes. Use AMP. Google is telling you to use it for a reason.

Do we recommend any plug-ins? Oh! We just happen to have our own version of the plug-in. All you have to do is go to the Facebook group and creator’s mastermind and ask to join. You’ll be able to download it. I did a video on how easy it is to install it and how to do some really tricky shit with it to get Google to give you special love. There you go.

Bradley: Guys, this is that post I was just talking about, rolling out mobile-first indexing. It went live in July of 2018. This link right here we talked about the announcement. This talks about using PageSpeed and mobile search rankings. Guys, this is incredibly important. Just think about it, guys. If you go through these articles and just go search Google for mobile-first indexing and you can read through some articles directly from Google but essentially they’re saying that now, even their desktop out, like their primary ranking algorithm now is based upon mobile indexing. Their mobile data centers instead of their desktop and laptops because mobile users have eclipsed for quite some time now mobile and desktop users. Two-thirds of all search traffic now originates from mobile devices. That’s huge.

Again it’s very, very important and speed and making sure your websites are responsive and all that stuff is really, really important now for SEO because, again, the old metrics of optimizing for desktop and laptop are now secondary. Totally go through some of this stuff. Get up to date on it and put it to use.

I’ve been doing a lot of AdWords testing recently again after many months of not doing much of it. I’m seeing just a shit ton of traffic coming from AdWords or from mobile devices now in AdWords even for YouTube stuff, which is incredible. I think that’s crazy. I’m seeing a lot of traffic on my YouTube ads coming from mobile devices now. I’ve even been setting up a lot of PPC like search call-only ads and stuff like that recently because just Mobile’s really much taken over. I highly encourage you guys to check that out. Like Marco said, we do have a plug-in that will convert your pages into AMP or create an AMP version of your pages and posts.

Marco: Pages and posts, yeah. That’s the main thing about our plug-in is that we do both your pages and your posts. They’re converted into AMP.

Which SerpSpace Service Is Best For Rank And Rent Video Model?

Bradley: Yup. Okay. Design2framework is up. He says, “I want to promote my YouTube channel so that each video in there will be on the first page on Google. Number one is not mandatory and YouTube’s search engine results are irrelevant because it’s for local business services.” Okay. “I’m going the rank and rent video model, which one of your search space offers is best for that?”

There’s several. First of all, syndication networks is pretty much standard operating procedure. I would highly recommend with YouTube guys there are no footprint issues. You can get as crazy as you want to with as many networks stacked to your channel or triggered by your YouTube channel as you want. There’s no problem with stacking as many tier one networks as you want or as many multi-tiered networks as you want. It makes no difference, guys. I have found over the years … Now, I haven’t done any specific testing on this in about two years now because I haven’t had to. My test that I did two years ago … Guys, I tested extensively with channels, YouTube syndication to just tier one networks and then also to multi-tiered networks. I ran several tests over the course of many months about where I tried to keep all things equal except for the number or the configuration of the syndication networks.

Again, I would try multiple tier one networks to where the same one channel triggers multiple tier one networks or doing two-tier networks and in stacking multiple two-tier networks onto a channel. What I found was, by doing a bunch of tier one rings, the content, the videos would rank faster like usually quicker than through the two-tier rings but they didn’t stick as long. In other words, they start slipping in rankings sooner than the ones that took longer to rank by being syndicated out through multi-tiered network or many multiple multi-tiered networks but those tend to stick longer. Like, they would stay higher in the search results for longer periods of time before they would start to slip.

The reason I’m telling you that is just because, first and foremost, I recommend if this is your business model, ranking and renting videos, focus on first and foremost building up multiple syndication networks either building them or buying them since you asked about search space, I highly recommend that you just buy them so you can save your time and go out and sell your service instead of creating and building networks.

What I would suggest is build up your syndication networks or buy them, whatever, to your channel to where you have a vast extensive set of networks, then you can boost those networks with link building packages to give them even more power, because that’s really, really important, guys, to have your own network if you’re going to be doing a video rank and rent model. You want your own broadcasting network especially if your theming your networks.

For example, if you’re doing rank and rent, I highly recommend that your channel be niche down to one specific vertical, if possible, or you can go broader but then use playlists so that you’re basically siloing your channel like you would silo a website. We’ve got a product called YouTube Silo Academy. You can just do a Google search if you want to find it, YouTube Silo Academy, that you can pick up, purchase it for, I think, $7 or you can get it in one of our bonus sites if you haven’t. If you’ve bought any products from us at all, it’s in the bonus site. Go through that training. Learn how to silo a YouTube channel because then you can actually use your playlists as ways to trigger syndication to specific networks if you wanted to do it that way. There’s a number of ways that you can configure it but my point in telling you this is the syndication networks from SerpSpace is one of the first things I would recommend for anybody that’s doing a video rank-and-rent business model. Okay. That’s number one.

Number two, anything that you want to give a push that’s already been syndicated out across your networks, that’s what Video Powerhouse is for. It’s great for that. Our Powerhouse networks have been themed and they’ve been used for over two years now or at least I think it’s been about two years. Anyways, the Video Powerhouse network, there’s a lot of power behind that, guys, because they’re aged and themed domains that have their own syndication networks. Then, you can also add secondary Web 2.0 network embeds as well as backlinks, everything else through that order process. If you have videos that need a boost, use the Video Powerhouse.

Lastly, or the next thing I would suggest, is to send traffic to your videos, preferably real traffic. I never recommend sending fake traffic to videos anymore at all or really to much of anything at all. There are a couple options there. The first one we’re going to mention is the MGYB.co which stands for make Google your bitch dot co. That’s our marketplace where you can buy YouTube views. They’re real YouTube views, guys. It’s not spam views like which you would buy from YouTube view services years ago. It’s not that at all. These are real, real people. This is real traffic. It’ll even show is traffic from ads in YouTube analytics. You can get targeted real visitors from our YouTube views service at MGYB.co.

Another option especially for local stuff is you can set up YouTube ads to drive local traffic but based upon your geographic targeting in the Google Ads dashboard. It’s no longer AdWords. It’s now called Google Ads but the Google Ads Dashboard you can set up location targeting so that you can get local IP clicks for your local videos, which is huge for ranking videos, guys. All you need to do is set up and I’ve talked about this many, many times in recent months on Hump Day Hangouts. I’m sure we probably even have this in our YouTube channel but how to use video ads or AdWords for video to rank local videos. If you just go to our channel and search, you’ll see where I’ve done extensive training on that already. That’s a great model as well.

You can use the YouTube View service, guys. Engagement is one of the biggest ranking factors for YouTube videos now. Even in Google search. If you can show engagement by either buying views direct from YouTube or AdWords or Google Ads, excuse me, or by using a service that can provide real traffic, although you don’t get the geographic targeting. You can’t get as specific or as narrow with geographic targeting through our YouTube view service yet but it’s really cost effective.

Marco: Can I stop you? Yes we can.

Bradley: Oh, you can?

Marco: [crosstalk 00:26:41]. We can get city.

Bradley: Oh, wow. Oh, even better, then.

Marco: You can get city and I believe, the last time I checked, we were really close on radius.

Bradley: That’s great. It’s evolving is what you’re saying.

Marco: It’s always evolving. Everything we do always evolves.

Bradley: Okay. I have to get in there and play with it more, then, because I have not in a few weeks.

There you go. Those are my recommendations. As far as what is the best way to sell and close video rank and rent model, that’s a whole nother can of worms. There’s several things. I would say the video email method is one of the best ways to do it although that is time consuming. It works well. We have a product called Video Lead-Gen System that teaches exactly how to do that. Also, we’re doing prospecting and I have been now for months in the Semantic Mastery mastermind, which by the way, I’ve made significant progress in the last few weeks and having really, really good results with the prospecting side of things now. We cover a lot of that in the mastermind. It’d be great to have you come join us there, but if not, you can check out Video Lead-Gen System for the video email process and how to do that. That works really well.

Cold calling, if you’re comfortable doing that, that absolutely works. It’s a pain in the ass. I can’t stand it. I hate it. I would rather have my toenails pulled off one by one than do cold calling and I mean that. I hate it but it does still work but prospecting video emails works well.

Also, again, I can’t get into it here, guys, because we don’t have the time plus this is basically what I’m teaching in the mastermind right now, which is how to set up prospecting funnels and such. If this is your primary business model, I would recommend that you learn how to set up a prospecting funnel because that’ll automate a lot of it for you. It will reduce your manual workload for prospecting. That’s essentially what I’ve been developing for months now in the mastermind is how to set up prospecting funnels and also how to hire virtual assistants to basically operate the prospecting funnel and manage their process, the leads that come in. We’ve, like I said in the last couple weeks, made really a lot of progress that and all this stuff is going to be taught to the mastermind members here and during the month of August and would encourage you to come check it out but yeah.

Again, video emails, probably the best way to do it, in my opinion, if you don’t want to call, if you want to pick up the phone, cold calling will help. It’s very discouraging to get rejected all the time. I can’t stand cold calling but if you can get through enough no’s, you’ll get a yes. That’s one of the quickest ways to get somebody signed up.

One other thing I just want to mention about that is in our MGYB marketplace, we have the video carpet bomb offer thing. I don’t know if we have the prospecting module or prospecting video carpet bomb offer available yet. Marco, is that available yet?

Marco: Is that the smaller offer?

Bradley: Yes.

Marco: I have to check if it was added.

Bradley: Okay. That should be available soon, if it’s not yet, guys. What I want to mention about that is if you have video marketing tools, you can do this on your own but we developed a process or I did using Video Marketing Blitz, which is one Ab’s products. It’s a good product. I trained a VA about a year and a half ago how to do it, how to run that tool. That’s his job is just to run the Video Marketing Blitz tool. We set up this campaign that we call video carpet bomb. Randy James actually came up with the name but we developed it out a little bit together.

One of the things that I’ve been doing recently is whenever we have a lead come in to our pipeline, so through our prospecting funnels essentially a lead comes in. Now, we’ve got an inbound lead. Once the contact has been made by our sales person to that contact and an initial call has been made and they literally spoke on the phone, then what we do is what they schedule for the next call because that first call is what we call a discovery call so they can just get to know the business owner a little bit, ask them some questions about their business, blah, blah, blah. Then, we always set the next appointment.

What happens is as soon as Roberto, my salesman, gets off the call with that prospect, he sends the company data, the business information over to our VA that runs video carpet bomb process for us, who takes just a PLR video, a local lead gen-type PLR video. There’s many sources you can get those made or you can buy already done for you videos. He takes a video and superimposes or does a text overlay with that prospect’s phone number and then also obviously optimize the description with the call to action to them and all that. Then, we do a 10- or a 15-mile radius from where their business is located and we target their primary keywords plus the locations, all within that 10- or 15-mile radius. What we do is maybe wind up like we’ll try to rank 60 videos.

Out of those 60 videos because I have a VA that does this, guys. The VA gets paid $4 an hour roughly. It might take him an hour to run a small campaign like this. It cost me essentially $4 to where now, when that second call occurs with that prospect, my salesman says, “Hey, look. By the way, we want to show you how serious we are about earning your business.”

You could do this with a lead gen service provider that you’re trying to sell somebody to lead like once you’re trying to get them to buy leads from you or ranked and rent. If you’re going to rent out videos. My point is, you could actually optimize a video for their brand, rank it for a bunch of keywords. Then, show them. “Look. This is how serious I am.” I don’t recommend you doing that if you’re manually doing the work because it does take a lot of time but that’s why, again, it’s so important about outsourcing, guys. This is what we’re trying to convey to you guys is how to delegate this work.

I got a VA I pay $4 essentially because it takes him an hour. Out of, say, sixty attempted keywords to rank, we end up ranking 15 or 20 of them or even if it’s 10, who cares? My point is, this is something we do for free to show the prospect during that second call, we can show them live results with videos ranked for their services, for their keywords, with their contact information on it. We use that as a trust-building process. We’d say to them, this is part of our script, “We want show you how serious we are about earning your trust and earning your business, so this is what we did for you and the last weeks since our previous call.” We present them with the data that shows them, “Hey, look. We ranked this video for 14 different keywords for your product and the services that you offer in your service area.”

What happens is we get people that are like, “Wow! Nobody’s ever taken the time to do something like that on a pitch call,” which is what it is. We’re pitching them on for our services. That’s something that we’re going to have available inside of MGYB.co, our marketplace, so that people can go in and for $20 or $25, I don’t know what the final price is going to be yet, they can buy it. It’ll get done and sent back to them with, I think what we’re trying to do is a three-day turnaround time. But if you’ve got your own tools that you can do it or hire somebody in-house to do it for you, hire a virtual assistant to do it for you.

I know I spent a lot of time on that, guys, but I think that was a great question and, again, for somebody just getting started with the rank-and-rent business model, whether it’s videos or maps listings or whatever, guys, I know because that’s how I got started. I know there’s a big learning curve on like how to set up your business in a way that you can scale it. It’s very difficult to do. That’s why I’m trying to share what I’ve learned over the years that you guys can get results faster, scale your business even faster. It’s a great question, though, by the way.

Okay. MJ’s up. He says, “Hey, guys. Great program. Love the information you share. I have a question about image optimization and Google My Business. Is it possible to optimize images uploaded to GMB by clients? I have a rental client who has several images uploaded by their customers. Can they be optimized and what can be done? Thanks, guys.”

No, because they have to be optimized before they’re uploaded. Essentially you could go into GMB and download them and then optimize them and upload them again but then you would be uploading them as the business owner. They would be duplicate photos anyway, so that really doesn’t make any sense but the important thing is if your business or your client’s business has customers that’s uploading photos from their mobile devices then they’re getting a lot of the relevant signals that you want anyways because most phones have the GPS enabled. When customers take photos with their phone and then upload them, you’ve got all that geo location, all that geo tag, the metadata information, the Exif data that is already appended to the file, so that you’re already sending really good signals.

I wouldn’t worry about trying to optimize photos that are uploaded by customers. That’s just a blessing that they’ve got customers that are uploading photos to their GMB anyways. I haven’t really found any of my clients where that’s occurred.

Marco, what do you have to say about that?

Marco: That’s gold. Don’t touch it. Don’t touch it. Leave it alone. Google got the message. Clients like the business enough to upload images unless they’re really crappy images of a complaint or whatever, of garbage. Something like that where you don’t want to think you’d get rid of it but you couldn’t because it was the customer who uploaded. It’s a double-edged sword. You got to walk that fine line but yeah. What you could do is educate more clients on what they need to do, which is actually have the GPS turned on, so that Google can get the message that they’re at the location.

Here’s the thing. Google knows so much right now that I’ve taken images at the location with the GPS turned off, with geolocation turned off. I’ve come home and gone to upload them. Google knew where they were taken. That’s how sophisticated they’ve gotten. No. Man, don’t touch those. That’s gold. Customers or clients uploading images into the GMB. As long as they’re great images, just leave it.

Bradley: That’s right.

Do MasterMind Members Have Access To Trello Boards Containing The Business Processes Of Semantic Mastery?

Dan’s up. Dan says, “Hey, gents. I have a question regarding the mastermind Trello boards for processes you use in your business. Are these accessible to mastermind members? If so, I’m in. If not, how can I talk you into getting those?” To be honest, no. They’re not available, Dan. When we first launched, I think it was Syndication Academy — Originally it was called IFTTT SEO Academy — we tried that route because, remember, I trained on my virtual assistants on the processes of how to build networks which you guys know is an intricate process but I’d built out all the process docs and then converted them all into Trello boards specifically so that it would make it so much easier to train builders at scale.

That was an enormous amount of work, guys. It took me four months of almost two hours a day five days a week, I’m not kidding, to do that. It was an enormous amount of work but we have our SerpSpace building team, our builder team. Some of those boaters have been with me for five years now. We’ve got a team that will have all been trained from that exact same process. In fact, that’s what the whole training was developed around, the Syndication Academy training from the processes that I developed for my virtual assistants.

The reason I mention that is because when we first launched IFTTT SEO Academy, at the time, one of the upgrades was the outsourcing or maybe that was mastermind. I don’t remember but we had what we called an outsourcer training portal, which was where I had all my Trello boards that I gave access to the members. I think that was mastermind not IFTTT SEO Academy. It was an upgrade.

But, yeah, what happened was the problem was a couple things. Number one anytime a board had to be edited, first of all, people would come in and I was supposed to add them. It’s very difficult to add people to boards because if you add them to the board then they can literally change the boards. At least several years ago when we did this, there was a problem with people would come in and instead of making a copy of the board and importing it into their own account and then saving a template copy. So, making a copy of one that you would keep as a template and then using the others, people would just start making changes and actually using the public board that they were supposed to just make a copy of. It created a ton of work for me to have to keep going back in and rearranging the board, putting it back to its original state. It’s a pain in the ass. “Fine,” I said. “That’s enough. I’m done. I’m sorry, guys. You guys can’t follow instructions so I’m no longer going to give that.” We discontinued that.

The other part of this, though, besides the fact that, Dan, I’m sure you could follow instructions, so that might not be an issue, but the other part of that is what I found is if I’m training virtual assistants for a very specific task and that’s going to be their main job duty or something that they’re going to repeat over and over and over again, something that doesn’t change often. Then, I will create Trello boards for that but I have actually reverted most of my process documentation now back to just Google Drive, Google Docs. The reason why is because they’re much more easy, at least for my business. I don’t know about my partners but for me most of my process docs are living, breathing documents that are constantly being edited and refined. It’s much more work to do that in Trello boards than it was to just keep a processed doc in Google Doc form that I can go in and edit or my virtual assistants might, my employees, my workers can go in and make comments on and all that stuff.

I’ve really reverted back to just using YouTube for training videos, screencast videos. I upload to YouTube and then I create process docs in Google Docs where I always start. Step one is always training video. I drop the URL. Then, it’s the step-by-step process in outline format in Google Docs. I’ve actually stopped using Trello, guys, unless, like I said, it’s for something very specific, in which case that isn’t going to change very often but the processes that I’ve been developing for prospecting. For example, I built my team now that’s handling the prospecting and we’ve got the sales and we’ve got people scraping lists and all that. All of that is all now held in Drive because we’re constantly finding ways to make the process more efficient. It just takes too much time to change it all out in Trello. It’s easier to edit inside of Drive.

That said, Dan, yes in the mastermind I’ve been sharing a lot of my processes as far as the prospecting module and stuff like that. If there’s something specific that you would want, you’d have to contact one of us or contact us at support or if you’re in the mastermind, you could just post about it in the group. We can certainly potentially give you process talks about stuff but I’m not going to go out and create process docs for stuff that we do that hasn’t already been created just to share. A lot of the stuff that we do have or that I have from my own business, it’s proprietary, in that it’s stuff that are specific to my business that really wouldn’t make sense to share anyway. I would have to make the process docs from my own business more generic for them to be able to fit for them to be usable for a lot of you.

That’s again, why I said it’s … In my opinion, Dan, the best thing to do is which I know that you said in your comment right here is that you’re running into trouble. You’re having a hard time keeping ahead of your virtual assistants. I know. It’s a pain in the ass, man, but that’s why [crosstalk 00:42:55] …

Adam: I think you’ve talked about the process stuff. Dan, if you join the mastermind, like you said, we’re happy to talk you through. There’s a bunch of different ways to do this but I actually had this exact question from a different angle come from a mastermind I’m in. They said I’m really scared about making my first couple of hires. I think that’s a common pain point because a lot of people, it’s good. By all means, hire someone because a lot of this is trial by fire but I think, Dan, one of the problems here is it sounds like you’ve got the problem. You’ve got the person but the in between hasn’t been bridged and so you’re feeling that pain, where beforehand, generally if you want … You haven’t built the process docs before you got the person. Now, you’re realizing that you have to run your business, provide the services, and train someone and do the processes.

The lesson to learn here that I learned, too, working with one of my first VAs was knowing ahead of time what it is you want them to do and starting to lay that out either hiring them with the clear goal that they’re going to write their own process docs off of videos or something or that you’re going to lay out the process for them ahead of time or something in between, because, yeah, it’s … What are you saying here? You’re struggling to put together boards while keeping your current customers serviced. Definitely, so maybe you work out something in between. If you have someone who can write decent English then maybe you have them. You say, “Hey, look. I’m going to pay you to watch the videos and as you do it, write down the list.” Then, you can go through and maybe edit that and make it nicer.

Bradley: Yep. That’s great advice. That’s what we teach in Outsource Kingpin is that you can hire somebody to create the process docs for you, as long as you record the training video. That’s something you can outsource the process docs is my point, guys. That’s a great way to do it because that’s where … I still do a lot of my own process docs just because typically it’s something comes up that we need a process for, so I just go ahead and draft the process doc myself as I’m going through the steps to do whatever needs to be done. That way it’s done. I do it one time. That’s the last damn time I have to do it, because then I immediately just hand it off to a VA.

But what I would also suggest, Dan, is to get ahead of this is try to find tasks that are repetitive in your business, create process docs for those first so that you can reduce your workload. The sooner you can unload repetitive tasks that you do to your VAs, then that’s going to free up that time that you have those tasks that you have to do over and over and over again. It’s going to free that time up to allow you to develop even more process docs for maybe some more of the complex processes or functions of your business.

Again, try to get all the menial stuff or the repetitive tasks outsourced first, delegated first so that you can work on the more complex process docs for the higher level stuff.

But you guys, honestly, guys. One of the biggest parts … Remember, if you’re trying to move from being self-employed to business owner, these are the kinds of things you have to do but the idea is yeah, it’s a lot of work. For example syndication networks, guys. Like I said, it took me four months to create the process docs, the entire process to train virtual assistants how to do it but it took me four months. It’s been like five years since I’ve had to build a … I’ve built a few syndication networks since then but it’s really been five years since I’ve had to create or build a syndication network myself because I’ve trained an army of builders to do it for me, if that makes sense, all from four months worth of work that I put in several years … I don’t have it’s been five years but three or four years ago, if that makes sense.

Again, you put the work in now and it’s going to free you up in the future, so you don’t have to do that shit anymore.

Marco: Yeah, great. If I can real quick add that the skill sets and the abilities that you have right now and that have taken you to where you’re at right now, Dan, will not take you from where you’re at to where you want to be. There’s a lot of re-education, there’s a lot of skill set that you need to learn, that all of us needed to learn like how to set up processes, how to coach teams, how to manage teams and whatnot that can take you to the next level.

That’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about pofu life because we’re sharing with you the skill set that you need to have in order to run a team because setting our processes, it’s a skill set that you need to learn. It was ranking websites at some point or ranking medias at some other point but then it becomes as managing people and sending out processes. That’s interesting to learn as well.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s a great question, Dan.

How Do You Use GMB Posts To Push Link To The Money Site And Tier 1 Syndication Network?

Ivan’s up. He says, “I have a GMB site, a dot-com site and a tier one syndication network. What’s the best use of the GMB post? Is it good idea to push links to your links in your tier one properties or just link to your dot com site?”

Link to everything, Ivan. Link to all your branded properties. My VA’s, they’ve just got to do the GMB post for us. They just have a spreadsheet with all the company, the contact, the client information for whatever business they’re working on. In there is a list of target URLs and also a list of keywords. Essentially, they just cycle through. Let’s say I’ve got 15 target URLs, which includes citations, obviously the money site, the Google Maps, URL, the share URL. There’s tier one syndication properties. Like I said, citations, press release organization pages. All those kind of things, we just put them in the target URL column. Then, the VAs, whenever they’re doing their GMB post, they just go right on down and just, post one gets link number one, post two gets link number two. They just go on down and cycle through that.

The idea here is just to continually be linking to your tier one properties. It helps to validate the entity, strengthen the brand. Over time, you’re just going to start seeing everything start rising up. Link to everything, all your tier one branded properties. Anything that’s really tier one. Guys, that’s what you can be linking to. Direct to your money site, direct your maps listings, your GMB website, if you have it, which you should. By the way, you can also link to other GMB posts. That’s like daisy-chaining. I can’t talk more about that you have to come to Local GMB Pro if you want to learn more about that stuff.

Is It Acceptable Practice to Have the Same Street Address in Multiple GMB Listings?

R. Bacon! What’s up, buddy? He says, “Hey, guys. Is it acceptable practice to have the same street address in multiple GMB listings? There is a realtor group that has four listings in GMB maps all with the exact same street address and two showing up in the three pack. I was thinking Google was not okay with that.”

They’re not supposed to be but real estate offices have been one of those types that I’ve seen that for years. That’s been an issue for years because technically the broker or the real estate company, let’s say Long & Foster or Century 21 is supposed to have a maps listing but each individual realtor, real estate agent within that office could potentially have their own maps listing with the same address. It’s supposed to not be that way but real estate companies have been doing that for many, many years. It’s something that’s pretty common. Yeah, again, it’s not supposed to be that way but it’s common. It’s been that way for years. I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon.

Any Concerns Of Using Linux Operating System For SEO?

He says, “On another topic, any concerns on using Linux operating system on your computer you use for SEO?”

I don’t know. I had Linux in my laptop when I first started. I had two operating systems. Whenever I opened my laptop, I would choose whether I wanted to go into Linux or Windows. That’s when I first started my business but about two years later, I switched to just Windows only. I haven’t even been on Linux. I don’t see why it would be any problem. It’s just an operating system. It’s just how you access software.

Marco: Yeah. I would say the same. In any case, if you’re using an Android phone, you’re using Linux. If you’re using …

Bradley: [inaudible 00:50:45] that.

Marco: Yeah. Chromebook, yeah. It’s all based on Linux. If you’re using a Chromebook to do SEO, for example, you’re using Linux. Yeah. At the end of the day, it’s all a matter of tracking and IPs and whatnot. It’s the same stuff.

Is There Any Drawback Of Changing A GMB Address To Not Showing It On The Page?

Bradley: Yup. Okay. Let’s roll through the next few. Nigel’s up. What’s up, buddy? He says, “Hey. Good day, gents. Thank you for all you do. I have a GMB service area business currently set up with address showing and active and have also been using the verified address in posts. Is there any drawback to changing it to not showing using address anymore and can you quickly explain how?”

Look, I try to follow what Google’s recommendations are. If you have a service area business where customers do not come to the location, you’re supposed to uncheck that box in the info section of the Google Maps or Google My Business info tab when you’re editing the info. If you go into the address, click the pencil link icon and then you go into the address where the street address is shown and such. Then, if it’s service area business, you start adding in the cities and/or zip codes or whatever to define the service area. Then, there’s that check box underneath that that says, “Your address will be hidden if this box is unchecked,” or not checked.

If you read what the Google’s recommended guidelines are is that if the customers never come to the business location. Let’s say a plumber runs a business from his home, the plumber’s always going to the customer location and the customers don’t ever come to the plumber’s home because he’s not selling plumbing fixtures there, if that makes sense. It’s not like a storefront. In that case, you’re supposed to uncheck that box. In other words, hide the street address. I’ve always set up all my business listings that way or my client’s listings that way because that’s what Google’s suggest to do.

However, I know that other people have said, “Well, if you leave the box checked and it shows the address you’ll rank better.” I think that really depends on where the business is physically located or in relation to the centroid of the city, of the location. Obviously, the closer you are to the centroid of that location that your business is physically located in, the better … Typically, one of the ranking signals for maps ranking has been proximity to city center. The closer the physical address was, typically the better it would rank.

I know that, for some service area businesses, people would still leave the address shown if it was close to the city center because it tended to rank better. However, it’s not something I’ve tested because I never wanted to … A lot of my addresses, guys, are spammed addresses. They’re PO boxes. I don’t want other people complaining about it. I typically hide the addresses. If you’re already doing well, here’s what you could do. You could always uncheck the box if that is the proper way that it should be. You could uncheck the box to hide the address and monitor rankings. See your results. If it drops, if you slip in from out of the three pack or whatever, then switch it back. It’s just a matter of checking or unchecking a box. That’s what I would suggest doing but I haven’t really tested that. I know other people have said, “Showing the address versus not showing it can sometimes create better results,” but I typically don’t do that because I don’t want an address showing.

Have You Had Any Success Using The Message Functionality Of GMB Posts?

“Anyone using or having success with message functionality in GMB posts?” Yeah. Some of my clients, they … It’s not often. They don’t get messaged nearly as much as they get phone calls or link clicks to their websites but some messages do come through. It’s not something I’ve seen a lot of activity in but some people do that.

Think about that, guys. Again, that’s Google trying to keep people on the Google platform. They’re giving people the ability to do a Google search, locate a business, and actually, text message them directly from Google so they never leave the platform. That’s what GMB Pro is all about. It’s about keeping the Google users on the Google platform. That’s why Google is rewarding all of us who are using all of the Google My Business services and posting and staying active in that ecosystem because we’re giving Google exactly what it wants by keeping Google users in the Google environment.

How Long Should You Wait Before Adding RYS To An Optimized GMB?

Quit This House says, “Good day, gentlemen. After optimizing GMB, should we wait to add RYS and start the once per month for four months press release or ramp both up right away?” That’s up to you. You don’t need to wait. After optimizing GMB, you can do an RYS stack immediately. You can start hitting it with press releases immediately. You don’t have to do just one per month.

Rob, he was doing four per week. I tend to do mine about once every two weeks. That’s the frequency I like. It tends to work really, really well. Again, 12 out of 15 properties that I applied this method to, I was able to rank in the three pack within six press releases or less doing one every two weeks. I would recommend increasing your frequency on press releases if you want quicker results. Also, there’s no reason to wait on a drive stack, man. It’s GMB stuff. Just fire away.

Will You Be Offering Done For You Local GMB Pro Services Anytime In The Near Future?

All right. We’re going to try to get through a couple more real quick, guys. Got to wrap it up. Click Star says, “Hey, guys, I have a question regarding your Local GMB Pro offerings. Will you be offering done-for-you Local GMB Pro services anytime in the near future? If so, how long before this is available and how much do you feel the services will cost?

Marco, how soon until we open that up?

Marco: She’s ready to go. We’re discussing prices.

Bradley: Okay. I’d say within a week, two weeks tops?

Marco: Yeah, yeah. She’s already working. I gave her one of my best clients to work on. Guys, I never do that. I never train anyone on a client but I said, “If this is going to work, if I’m going to put her to work on other people’s GMBs, then she should be working on something that I care about.” I did. I gave it to her. She’s doing a fantastic job. You saw the video she did, right?

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: The walkthrough?

Bradley: Yup.

Marco: You know the type of work that she can do. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t want to put a hard date on it because we won’t meet until Tuesday to decide on what we’re going to charge for it.

Bradley: Let’s say within two weeks, roughly.

Marco: Yeah. Two to three weeks.

Bradley: Okay. We don’t know the pricing just yet but what we’re likely going to have is tiered pricing depending on the posting frequency, correct?

Marco: Correct and whether you’re going to provide images …

Bradley: Images or not.

Marco: … in video or if we have to provide them, which we can. Yeah, so it depends on just how much work she has to do. Everything has a cost because it takes more time to do.

Bradley: That’s right. Within two to three weeks. You heard it here, guys. You can hold up hold our feet to the fire. We’ll get it done. I know we’re really going to be pushing GMB Pro stuff, guys, because it works so damn well, guys. We want you guys to be using it because it works. You can get your clients results almost overnight. It doesn’t require you to do any damn work. You just literally resell the service to your clients and make money, guys. It will work. We’re going to be pushing the shit out of this service and growing that done-for-you GMB Pro VA team, virtual assistant team, to be able to provide this at scale. I’d say, “Hold off. Wait,” because when it comes, it’s going to be good.

All right. I got time for just a couple more. It looks like we’re almost done anyway. If anybody has to bounce that hasn’t already, please feel free.

What Is Your Opinion On Cora After A Year Of Using It?

Jonathan says, “I thank God for you, guys.” Why, I will plus one that. Awesome, Jonathan. He says, “Came across an email from a year ago that I had not read on Cora. What is your opinion on Cora a year later? Again, many thanks.” I rank number one in YouTube because of you all. No, you ranked number one on YouTube because of what you did. All you did was follow instructions that we provided but you had to take action. You ranked number one in YouTube because of what you did.

All right. As far as Cora, yeah. It’s awesome. Cora’s great, guys. It’s freaking awesome. By the way we can run Cora reports for people. Do we have that available yet, by the way, in MGYB?

Marco: Yes, we do.

Bradley: All right. Good question, then, Jonathan, because you can go buy Cora or subscribe to Cora, if you’d like. We have an offer that I think is like 25% off or 30% off with this stated pricing is, anyways, if you go through our link. It’s rather expensive but, Ted, who is the developer of it, he’s perfectly cool with subscribing for a month. Then, running all the reports that you need. Let’s say you run an agency. You got 15 or 20 clients. You go run reports for all 15 or 20 clients and then cancel your subscription. Then, three or four months later, after you’ve tuned the sites based upon the data that the Cora report shows, you can go back and subscribe again for a month and run all the reports to see how much progress you’ve made. That’s perfectly fine with Ted. He even announced that on the webinar, which is rare because a lot of times people aren’t cool with that kind of stuff. He was.

You can do that or you can buy Cora reports from us because we provide that now. We have access to Cora and one of our virtual assistants will run the report. You can buy it from us, from MGYB.co. It’s a great product, guys. There’s no doubt. Cora reports give you so much data, it’s ridiculous and it gives you the points on which you can tune your on-page stuff mainly. You can do off-page stuff, too, but I would always start with on-page factors that the Cora report shows. It’s a great product.

Do You Still Suggest Using Tubesift For YouTube?

Okay. We’re almost done. I think we just got a couple. Dan says, “Do you still suggest using TubeSift or simply using placements for YouTube channels and YouTube videos within the AdWords platform okay now?” No, I still absolutely use TubeSift for placements, Dan. I’ve been doing a lot of YouTube ad stuff recently. I’m actually testing YouTube ads right now for prospecting for generating clients for our agencies. Also, I’m doing remarketing stuff.

Just keep in mind, guys, with remarketing and YouTube, you have to have a thousand people on the remarketing list. For the GDN, Google Display Network, you only need to have a hundred people on the remarketing list. Anyways, the reason I brought that up is because I’ve been doing a lot of remarketing stuff lately, too, and I’m still trying to build the pixel up with a thousand people for the YouTube remarketing.

But that said, yeah, I still absolutely use TubeSift. It’s a great tool. Not only that but I might even still have … No, I don’t have it open up still but I’ve been using it a lot lately. Ted Chen is behind that. He’s the developer behind it. It’s Justin’s product but Ted Chen’s the developer. It’s same developer from Power Suggest Pro, our favorite keyword tool of all time, as well as Leads Recon. It’s all the same developer, Ted. He’s a great guy, a great developer. It’s a great tool. They’ve actually added some really cool things in the TubeSift recently.

By the way, guys, we should drop the link for that if we have it because it is a great tool. They’ve added several things to it recently. Their keyword research is very similar to Power Suggest Pro. It’s the same developer, so it’s great for that. Also, he has a banner designer now built into the TubeSift tool, which is great if you’re doing in-stream ads. You know that there’s a companion banner that shows up in the top right corner of the YouTube watch page. Now, you can create those companion banners right inside TubeSift. They’re 300 pixels wide by 60 pixels tall. It’s great. Super simple to do. Placements are absolutely great. However, for running like local YouTube ad stuff, I just use geographic targeting and in-market audiences or life event audiences, if possible because in-market audiences and life event audiences, it’s called audience targeting. Those work really, really well for generating …

Remember, Google’s storing data on those people, guys. That’s how it knows that it’s in market for a particular product or service or has recently moved or like a life event or gotten married or something like that. Google knows because Google has all that data on those individuals.

If you can select an in-market audience or a life event audience with a category within those audiences that are close to what you’re promoting your product or service and then you select the proper geographic targeting, think about how highly valuable those clicks are to that ad or to that video because Google knows it’s a local IP so it’s 100% geographically relevant. It also knows that the visitor, the clicker, the person or the viewer of the video, whether they click or not, it depends, but the viewer of that video has also been in market or is completely relevant to the content of that video as well. That view is weighted a hell of a lot more than a view from somebody outside of a geographic area or that has no browsing history or profile history of looking for content related around that, if that makes sense.

Again, guys, is about engagement. TubeSift is great because it can help you to create great placement lists and also do keyword research and just a ton of stuff that it does. It’s a great tool.

Marco: By the way while we’ve been talking, the video carpet bomb offer has been added to MGYB.co, so we have both offers, the higher-priced model and the lower-priced model.

Bradley: Okay. Thanks, by the way, Marco.

Scott, I was reading your question. He says, “Showing the address in Google Maps listing is irrelevant for service businesses. I know, because my site ranks number one with no address showing.”

Yeah, Scott. I’ve got literally dozens of map listings ranking number one with no street address showing. Yeah, you can absolutely rank without street address showing. All I’m saying is that what I was mentioning earlier was that I know some people have said that in competitive areas, if they choose to hide their address, their rankings aren’t as good as if they show their address, even for service area businesses.

Again, guys, this just what I’ve heard. I’m not telling anybody to do that I prefer to do what it says to do, which is if customers don’t come your location, don’t show your street address. That’s how I’ve managed all of my listings and I have no problem ranking them. Again, it’s up to you whether you want to do that or not. Scott, I appreciate that. I agree with you.

He says also, “If you don’t have a physical location where you can meet with customers, your Google reviews will suffer. People don’t like it when they cannot find a business location.” That’s true if you have a storefront where people come to the business but again with like plumbers and a service area business, for example, if they never come to the business, that doesn’t mean that they won’t leave reviews. Again, I’ve got dozens of sites out there with lots of reviews where the street address isn’t shown because there’s no reason for it to be shown. People will never come to the business yet my reviews still show. Does that make sense? That really is irrelevant in my opinion because people will still leave reviews.

You’re right. If it’s a storefront and the address is hidden, that’s just stupid. People will leave bad reviews because they can’t find your damn business because you hid the address.

“Can we get a link for Cora?” Did somebody find that link for Cora, by the way?

Marco: Yeah. Actually, he says I gave him the link to MGYB.com, but he says it’s not in there. I’m going to talk to Caesar and see it’s probably already added but it’s not live.

Bradley: Okay. Sorry. We’ll get that worked out. Okay. We’ll get that worked out, Craig. If you want the actual link to the Cora offer itself, we have it. We have the webinar that we did with Ted and all that. It’s on our site. I’ll grab the link and I’ll drop it on the page. If you want to go through that, that’s perfectly fine, too. If you just want to buy the done for you Cora reports, Marco will get that squared away. He’ll tag you in the mastermind or something.

All right, guys, I’m going to wrap it up. We’re a little bit over. Thanks everybody for hanging out. No mastermind tomorrow. We’ll see everybody next week.

Marco: Yeah.

Adam: Yup.

Bradley: Okay, guys. Thanks, everybody.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Adam: Bye.

Marco: Goodbye.

Bradley: See …

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 195 posted first on your-t1-blog-url

[jenniferbowley]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 195

Click on the video above to watch Episode 195 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

Bradley: I just haven’t installed it yet.

Adam: I love this thing. Hey! Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts episode 195, where we talk about standing desk. If you would like to order your standing desk contact me for … Just kidding.

Bradley: For my [inaudible 00:00:13] link.

Adam: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, that’s funny. I was just working on … I’m setting up a site that’s around like home office stuff. That’s going to be part of it. I am at a desk so I can make the thing go up and down here. Anyways, what I actually want to talk about and not this is that it’s episode 195, when we’re getting closer to that episode 200. This is a reminder for us that we’ve got to come up with something good.

But before we get into it let’s go around and say, “Hi,” real quick. We got the full team here. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Greetings from Barcelona today.

Adam: Nice! Nice. Never been. Heard good things. I know, Hernan, you went there, right? You really liked it, didn’t you?

Hernan: Yeah. It’s a nice city. Very nice city.

Chris: It is.

Adam: Good deal. All right. We won’t talk to Hernan too much because he’s got a cold. I don’t want him to get everyone sick.

Hernan: Thank you, Adam. Thank you, everybody. I’m excited to be here. Woo-hoo.

Adam: Marco, how you doing, man?

Marco: I’m good, man. Really good. Really excited about everything that’s coming down the pipeline.

Adam: Awesome.

Marco: Really looking forward to what’s coming.

Adam: Yeah, definitely. Bradley. How about yourself? How you doing? You don’t have thunderstorms or anything going on?

Bradley: Not today. I’m actually tired as hell today because I was up late last night with Peter Drew for a webinar that we did for him about local GMB … I know we’re going to talk about that a lot today. But yeah I start my day at 4:00 a.m. He’s in Australia. Whenever he wants to do a webinar to his audience it’s like eight or nine p.m. Eastern for my time in Virginia. That’s a long damn day. It was 9:30 last night when I got done. I put in a 16-and-A-half-hour day. I used to do that shit all the time but, to be honest, I haven’t done that kind of stuff in quite some time. I’m a little bit delirious today, so to speak. But I’m here and I’m happy, so let’s go.

Adam: Outstanding. Okay. First off, if you’re new to Semantic Mastery and you’re joining us, thanks for watching. Whether you’re watching us live or whether you’re watching the replay on YouTube, we appreciate you checking it out.

Like I said, if you are new to Semantic Mastery and you haven’t grabbed it yet, then please grab the battle plan. The link will be below. It’s the best place to help you out with your SEO and digital marketing in basically all areas. Even if you’re not new, it’s great to have that repeatable process so that you can do these things over and over again and get good results. However, if you feel like you’re past that and you’re ready to take things up a few notches, then the mastermind is the place for you to be.

If you’ve already got a few clients and you’re wanting to figure out either how to fill that pipeline and grow your revenue as a local digital marketer or as an agency owner, then we want you in the mastermind. I’m going to put that link on there as well.

I’ll let Bradley talk a little bit. We’ve got a few things coming up with the mastermind, right? Did you mention or am I … Okay.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Cool. Yeah. Coming up, I think maybe that’s part of one of the questions. I forgot. Sorry. I’m getting [crosstalk 00:03:07] …

Bradley: Get enough sleep last night, Adam?

Adam: No, no. My wife’s out of town. Now, I was filling that up with too much work so I’ve been doing the longer work days, which is throwing me off and stuff.

Bradley: The only reason why you said that is because she might watch this later. I know what you were doing.

Adam: Yeah, no. She watches all the intros, so I got to … No, I’m just … Hey, Jenny!

But, with the mastermind, if you’re a local digital marketer or you’re looking to grow, it’s not just by yourself or if you’re building an agency, then that’s the place you want to be. Beyond that, I want to talk a little bit about our live event. [pofu 00:03:40] live is coming up. That’s in October. It’s going to be that October 19th, 20th, and 21st. The 19th is the VIP day. If you get a VIP ticket, you can come with us. We’re going to have stuff paid for. We’re going to have an event. We’re going to have some food, some drinks. We’ll have some fun. Then, the real action kicks off on the 20th and the 21st.

We’re limiting it at 25 people. Ticket sales are already on underway. We’ve sold tickets so I just want to put that out there as that is a hard limit. Once we hit 25, it’s over. If you want to get signed up, I’m going to put the link below as well. Hernan, is there anything specific we want to tell people about that?

Hernan: Yeah, definitely. Here’s the thing. The other day we were brainstorming one week, what would be the value and the actual, what we could give you guys that it will blow your mind with value so that you might come to the event and have a lot of value out of it? It came out to be that after almost five years of Semantic Mastery, we have developed a system that will allow you guys to any kind of maximum MMR on any kind of students, step by step, it will allow you guys to go ahead and set up a prospecting system to get new leads and convert them into clients give them results really, really fast and then scale. There’s these three steps and these three pillars, if you would, of the “Semantic Mastery system.”

That’s basically the whole thing of the event. We’re going to show you guys how to get more leads and better leads that you can charge more for your services, for your local marketing agencies, whether you’re doing PPC or SEO, it doesn’t matter. We will show you how to do that, number one.

Number two, we’re going to show you how to give them results fast so that they can stay pretty much longer, that when you get results fast for a client, they tend to stick longer because they pretty much love you guys.

Number three where we show you how to scale, how to actually hire and train and set up the processes and outsource your business so you can repeat the process and you don’t become the bottleneck. That’s going to be pretty cool. We have some pre-training material. We want to help you guys uncover what’s going to be that helpful, that decision of fuck you that you want to be in. I think that’s going to be pretty amazing. I’m super, super stoked about that.

If you’re looking for any or all of those stuff and if you’re thinking you’re lacking that into your business, just come to pofu live. That’s got to be awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah. The idea, just to jump in real quick. I see Marco. He’s itching, too. The idea, guys, is really to fast track your success on how to … It’s going to be locally based. In other words, the training is focused more on local than anything else. It’s just not really in us just because that’s primarily what most of our audience does, guys, and that’s obviously what I do. That’s really what it’s about.

We’re going to try to basically give you a blueprint and a fast track to success on how to prospect and land a client, fulfill the service to get them results rather quickly. Then, how to scale and really remove yourself from the business which is really the idea, to go from self-employed to a true business owner, where you don’t have to be present in managing the day-to-day operations of your business in order for it to still produce revenue for you. That’s really the idea.

I know most of us are self-employed. I still am too to a very big degree but there are processes and stuff that I’ve been developing to help pull myself away from having to do all the work in my agency. That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s really where we’re taking Semantic Mastery. That’s what the pofu live event is going to be about. We would encourage anybody that is really looking to fast track, the ability to not just get clients and perform services, guys, because that’s just you created your own job.

That’s still way better than working for somebody else. I’m not knocking that at all. I’ve done it for years but my point is the idea is do you want true freedom? If you want true freedom, you shouldn’t have to be behind your computer 5, 10, 12 hours a day generating revenue. You should have people in place that are doing it for you because you built the system and the processes that can afford you that opportunity.

That’s really what we’re what we’re trying to do with Semantic Mastery and that’s what the mastermind is all about but pofu live is going to be like a condensed version of it where you’re just going to get hit with the fire hose over the weekend and walk away with an actual plan for your business. That’s part of the reason why we want to keep it very, very small because we couldn’t sit down with 50, 100, 200 people and do this but with 25, we very well can. That’s the idea.

Marco, were you going to add to that?

Marco: Yeah. What I was going to add is that what I’m going to be talking about is it’s fine to have all of these things at your disposal, which is what we make available to mainly our mastermind members. We do have one of products and we have another lower membership but the mastermind is where it’s at. But even then, we’ve had people who can’t overcome their own …

Bradley: Analysis of paralysis, or a paralysis of analysis, right?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: There you go.

Marco: It’s their own preconceived notions of what can and can’t be done, of what they can and can’t do and letting other people dictate what you can and cannot do. Fuck that! Position of fuck you allows you to say, “Fuck that.” You can’t tell me what the fuck I can or cannot do. My discussion topic is going to be centered around that. It’s not just having all of these things available because they can just put you, like you said, in analysis paralysis, right?

Bradley: Right.

Marco: Where you analyze and analyze and analyze and you don’t do shit. That’s not what this is about. You have to be an action taker. We have a ton of those people. We have people who only come to hunt their hangouts, get the information. They go and apply and they make money. I know of at least two people who built up their businesses that way. Action takers, that requires a certain kind of mindset. It’s the only way to get the pofu.

Bradley: Amen. Can we get any questions? What else we got, Adam?

Adam: I was probably not editing a split test page in ClickFunnels just then. Yeah, that was it. I wanted to make sure that we talked to everyone about the live event. I appreciate you guys telling them more about that and what the real reasons are behind it.

I’ll just add on to that there’s the side benefits, the things that we don’t have to do but are huge benefits to you. You get to meet other people like yourself, who are investing in their time and obviously putting their money where their mouth is and saying, “Okay, I want to learn more about this but I also want to be around the other people.”

That’s part of why I like me and Hernan or when I went with Bradley going to ClickFunnels Live. It’s not because I want to shake hands with Russell Brunson. He’s a neat guy but that’s not going to help us make more money or bring in more clients or help me save time but being around those people, getting those ideas. That’s a huge benefit in building that network. I encourage people to do that. If it’s not our event, find something else where you can push yourself but hopefully you’ll come join us.

Bradley: Awesome. All right. We can get into questions now?

Adam: Do it.

Bradley: All right. Let’s do it. I’m going to grab the screen. Oops. Wrong button.

Adam: We got it.

What WordPress Plugin Do You Recommend For Pasting The Schema Code From The SerpSpace Structured Data Generator?

Bradley: All right. Richard is up first. Richard says, “Are you aware or can you recommend a WordPress plug-in it will let me just paste in the schema code that I generated using the search space structured data generator?” I answered this last week because I think you posted this. Yeah. Several days ago I saw it.

Obviously, in case you guys are on aware of this, we recommend stopping using any SEO plug-in other than Jeffrey Smith’s SEO Ultimate plug-in. It’s hands down the best SEO plug-in. By the way, they’re about to release a new version of it they’ve been working on for months. Jeffrey and a couple other guys have been working on it for months. That it’s about to be upgraded. That’s going to be the pro version, which I highly recommend, guys, which is the paid version of it but it’s super affordable unlike Yoast and the Yoast premium upgraded version of it is stupid expensive. This, SEO Ultimate Plus is not. It’s a much, much better plug-in, anyways. It doesn’t bloat like put a bunch of bloated code in like Yoast does.

I’m not going to lie. I’ve still got a lot of websites out there with Yoast on it just because I haven’t taken the time to go through and swap out the plug-ins and update the settings but I’m no longer creating any websites with any other SEO plug-in other than Jeffrey Smith’s ultimate SEO. The reason I bring that up or SEO, excuse me, SEO Ultimate plug-in. The reason I bring that up, Richard, is because it has a code inserter module in the plug-in that you can use to insert code to pages or posts. There’s site-wide code injection. There’s also specific page and/or post code injection. It gives you a lot of options to be able to do exactly what you just asked.

However, if you are adamant about using a different SEO plug-in, which, again I highly encourage you to switch, but if you’re using some other SEO plug-in that doesn’t have that option, then I would recommend using a very simple plug-in. It’s listed right here. I think they change their name recently but, yeah, it’s SOGO Header Footer, add script to individual pages header footer. This is a great plug-in because it gives you some functionality to where you can add code to specific pages or posts, whether you want them in the header or the footer of the page or the post like the HTML header or the footer area. It does a lot of really cool things too.

Again, I always try to limit the amount of plug-ins on my WordPress sites to the bare minimum. If I can use something like the SEO Ultimate plug-in that has that function, I’m going to do that so that I can consolidate two plug-ins into one but, again, if you’re using something else, then I would recommend just using these SOGO Add Script plug-in.

Hernan: I totally agree with you about Jeffery, man. It’s hands down the best. Yoast has become a bloated virus.

Adam: Yeah. It’s stupid.

Hernan: Anytime a plug-in tries to do your SEO for you and it does not do it correctly, it’s time to say, “No thanks, man. I don’t need it,” because I’m supposed to know what I’m doing. Why in the world would you handcuff me in such a way that I can’t do what I know I’m supposed to do, which is why I just said, “No more Yoast ever.”

Bradley: Yeah. In Yoast’s defense, there’s a lot of people out there that aren’t CEOs, guys. They’re not SEO nerds like we are. For somebody that is a civilian or a layman, so to speak, then I assume that some of the things that it suggests are better than nothing at all. Somebody doesn’t have any SEO knowledge is going to follow the guidelines of those types of plug-ins. I, for years, have said, “Don’t follow the guidelines of SEO plug-ins because you’ll over-optimize,” or whatever.

In their defense, I would say that they’re trying to serve a very broad audience with that plug-in but for anybody that pretends or says that they know what they’re doing, you want to be able to have the options to change things and manipulate things that you can’t do with Yoast and Jeffrey Smith’s plug-in allows you to do that. Again, that’s SEO Ultimate and the SEO Ultimate Plus, which is the upgraded or the pro version, which is what I highly recommend. It’s inexpensive and it’s worth it because it gives you a lot of additional functionality, some really cool stuff that you can do with that plug-in.

How Important Is Setting Up An AMP Version Of Your Sites?

All right. Sam’s up. He says, “How important is setting up AMP version of your sites and do you recommend any plug-ins or anything to simplify setting it up?” It is really important, Sam, especially now because, guys, the mobile-first indexing has been rolled out. If you have sites that are in search console, you probably have already gotten notifications from search console or from Google directly about that but they posted it on their blog and that rolled out in July but that’s on the Google webmaster’s blog. If you want to look at what mobile-first indexing is, that’s rolled out now.

I would highly recommend that you start doing that. It’s something I haven’t even really started implementing yet myself but I know that the AMP version, guys, it’s basically what the AMP pages do or the poster or whatever is it creates a cached version of the page in Google servers, so that it can load the page up, least this is my understanding of it. People can tap on it from mobile search. It basically loads instantly the page or the post because it’s not actually going to the website. It’s being served from Google’s servers.

Is that correct, Marco? From Google’s cache?

Marco: That is correct. That’s exactly what’s happening. Now, there’s some … I don’t want to say the word. There’s people out there who say that you’re giving away control of your website to Google. Who gives a fuck? They’re delivering it immediately. You can’t get any faster than immediate. Mobile-first speed is, if not the main, it’s very critical and one of the main signals, shall we say, or maybe ranking factors. I don’t know how to word it but yes. Use AMP. Google is telling you to use it for a reason.

Do we recommend any plug-ins? Oh! We just happen to have our own version of the plug-in. All you have to do is go to the Facebook group and creator’s mastermind and ask to join. You’ll be able to download it. I did a video on how easy it is to install it and how to do some really tricky shit with it to get Google to give you special love. There you go.

Bradley: Guys, this is that post I was just talking about, rolling out mobile-first indexing. It went live in July of 2018. This link right here we talked about the announcement. This talks about using PageSpeed and mobile search rankings. Guys, this is incredibly important. Just think about it, guys. If you go through these articles and just go search Google for mobile-first indexing and you can read through some articles directly from Google but essentially they’re saying that now, even their desktop out, like their primary ranking algorithm now is based upon mobile indexing. Their mobile data centers instead of their desktop and laptops because mobile users have eclipsed for quite some time now mobile and desktop users. Two-thirds of all search traffic now originates from mobile devices. That’s huge.

Again it’s very, very important and speed and making sure your websites are responsive and all that stuff is really, really important now for SEO because, again, the old metrics of optimizing for desktop and laptop are now secondary. Totally go through some of this stuff. Get up to date on it and put it to use.

I’ve been doing a lot of AdWords testing recently again after many months of not doing much of it. I’m seeing just a shit ton of traffic coming from AdWords or from mobile devices now in AdWords even for YouTube stuff, which is incredible. I think that’s crazy. I’m seeing a lot of traffic on my YouTube ads coming from mobile devices now. I’ve even been setting up a lot of PPC like search call-only ads and stuff like that recently because just Mobile’s really much taken over. I highly encourage you guys to check that out. Like Marco said, we do have a plug-in that will convert your pages into AMP or create an AMP version of your pages and posts.

Marco: Pages and posts, yeah. That’s the main thing about our plug-in is that we do both your pages and your posts. They’re converted into AMP.

Which SerpSpace Service Is Best For Rank And Rent Video Model?

Bradley: Yup. Okay. Design2framework is up. He says, “I want to promote my YouTube channel so that each video in there will be on the first page on Google. Number one is not mandatory and YouTube’s search engine results are irrelevant because it’s for local business services.” Okay. “I’m going the rank and rent video model, which one of your search space offers is best for that?”

There’s several. First of all, syndication networks is pretty much standard operating procedure. I would highly recommend with YouTube guys there are no footprint issues. You can get as crazy as you want to with as many networks stacked to your channel or triggered by your YouTube channel as you want. There’s no problem with stacking as many tier one networks as you want or as many multi-tiered networks as you want. It makes no difference, guys. I have found over the years … Now, I haven’t done any specific testing on this in about two years now because I haven’t had to. My test that I did two years ago … Guys, I tested extensively with channels, YouTube syndication to just tier one networks and then also to multi-tiered networks. I ran several tests over the course of many months about where I tried to keep all things equal except for the number or the configuration of the syndication networks.

Again, I would try multiple tier one networks to where the same one channel triggers multiple tier one networks or doing two-tier networks and in stacking multiple two-tier networks onto a channel. What I found was, by doing a bunch of tier one rings, the content, the videos would rank faster like usually quicker than through the two-tier rings but they didn’t stick as long. In other words, they start slipping in rankings sooner than the ones that took longer to rank by being syndicated out through multi-tiered network or many multiple multi-tiered networks but those tend to stick longer. Like, they would stay higher in the search results for longer periods of time before they would start to slip.

The reason I’m telling you that is just because, first and foremost, I recommend if this is your business model, ranking and renting videos, focus on first and foremost building up multiple syndication networks either building them or buying them since you asked about search space, I highly recommend that you just buy them so you can save your time and go out and sell your service instead of creating and building networks.

What I would suggest is build up your syndication networks or buy them, whatever, to your channel to where you have a vast extensive set of networks, then you can boost those networks with link building packages to give them even more power, because that’s really, really important, guys, to have your own network if you’re going to be doing a video rank and rent model. You want your own broadcasting network especially if your theming your networks.

For example, if you’re doing rank and rent, I highly recommend that your channel be niche down to one specific vertical, if possible, or you can go broader but then use playlists so that you’re basically siloing your channel like you would silo a website. We’ve got a product called YouTube Silo Academy. You can just do a Google search if you want to find it, YouTube Silo Academy, that you can pick up, purchase it for, I think, $7 or you can get it in one of our bonus sites if you haven’t. If you’ve bought any products from us at all, it’s in the bonus site. Go through that training. Learn how to silo a YouTube channel because then you can actually use your playlists as ways to trigger syndication to specific networks if you wanted to do it that way. There’s a number of ways that you can configure it but my point in telling you this is the syndication networks from SerpSpace is one of the first things I would recommend for anybody that’s doing a video rank-and-rent business model. Okay. That’s number one.

Number two, anything that you want to give a push that’s already been syndicated out across your networks, that’s what Video Powerhouse is for. It’s great for that. Our Powerhouse networks have been themed and they’ve been used for over two years now or at least I think it’s been about two years. Anyways, the Video Powerhouse network, there’s a lot of power behind that, guys, because they’re aged and themed domains that have their own syndication networks. Then, you can also add secondary Web 2.0 network embeds as well as backlinks, everything else through that order process. If you have videos that need a boost, use the Video Powerhouse.

Lastly, or the next thing I would suggest, is to send traffic to your videos, preferably real traffic. I never recommend sending fake traffic to videos anymore at all or really to much of anything at all. There are a couple options there. The first one we’re going to mention is the MGYB.co which stands for make Google your bitch dot co. That’s our marketplace where you can buy YouTube views. They’re real YouTube views, guys. It’s not spam views like which you would buy from YouTube view services years ago. It’s not that at all. These are real, real people. This is real traffic. It’ll even show is traffic from ads in YouTube analytics. You can get targeted real visitors from our YouTube views service at MGYB.co.

Another option especially for local stuff is you can set up YouTube ads to drive local traffic but based upon your geographic targeting in the Google Ads dashboard. It’s no longer AdWords. It’s now called Google Ads but the Google Ads Dashboard you can set up location targeting so that you can get local IP clicks for your local videos, which is huge for ranking videos, guys. All you need to do is set up and I’ve talked about this many, many times in recent months on Hump Day Hangouts. I’m sure we probably even have this in our YouTube channel but how to use video ads or AdWords for video to rank local videos. If you just go to our channel and search, you’ll see where I’ve done extensive training on that already. That’s a great model as well.

You can use the YouTube View service, guys. Engagement is one of the biggest ranking factors for YouTube videos now. Even in Google search. If you can show engagement by either buying views direct from YouTube or AdWords or Google Ads, excuse me, or by using a service that can provide real traffic, although you don’t get the geographic targeting. You can’t get as specific or as narrow with geographic targeting through our YouTube view service yet but it’s really cost effective.

Marco: Can I stop you? Yes we can.

Bradley: Oh, you can?

Marco: [crosstalk 00:26:41]. We can get city.

Bradley: Oh, wow. Oh, even better, then.

Marco: You can get city and I believe, the last time I checked, we were really close on radius.

Bradley: That’s great. It’s evolving is what you’re saying.

Marco: It’s always evolving. Everything we do always evolves.

Bradley: Okay. I have to get in there and play with it more, then, because I have not in a few weeks.

There you go. Those are my recommendations. As far as what is the best way to sell and close video rank and rent model, that’s a whole nother can of worms. There’s several things. I would say the video email method is one of the best ways to do it although that is time consuming. It works well. We have a product called Video Lead-Gen System that teaches exactly how to do that. Also, we’re doing prospecting and I have been now for months in the Semantic Mastery mastermind, which by the way, I’ve made significant progress in the last few weeks and having really, really good results with the prospecting side of things now. We cover a lot of that in the mastermind. It’d be great to have you come join us there, but if not, you can check out Video Lead-Gen System for the video email process and how to do that. That works really well.

Cold calling, if you’re comfortable doing that, that absolutely works. It’s a pain in the ass. I can’t stand it. I hate it. I would rather have my toenails pulled off one by one than do cold calling and I mean that. I hate it but it does still work but prospecting video emails works well.

Also, again, I can’t get into it here, guys, because we don’t have the time plus this is basically what I’m teaching in the mastermind right now, which is how to set up prospecting funnels and such. If this is your primary business model, I would recommend that you learn how to set up a prospecting funnel because that’ll automate a lot of it for you. It will reduce your manual workload for prospecting. That’s essentially what I’ve been developing for months now in the mastermind is how to set up prospecting funnels and also how to hire virtual assistants to basically operate the prospecting funnel and manage their process, the leads that come in. We’ve, like I said in the last couple weeks, made really a lot of progress that and all this stuff is going to be taught to the mastermind members here and during the month of August and would encourage you to come check it out but yeah.

Again, video emails, probably the best way to do it, in my opinion, if you don’t want to call, if you want to pick up the phone, cold calling will help. It’s very discouraging to get rejected all the time. I can’t stand cold calling but if you can get through enough no’s, you’ll get a yes. That’s one of the quickest ways to get somebody signed up.

One other thing I just want to mention about that is in our MGYB marketplace, we have the video carpet bomb offer thing. I don’t know if we have the prospecting module or prospecting video carpet bomb offer available yet. Marco, is that available yet?

Marco: Is that the smaller offer?

Bradley: Yes.

Marco: I have to check if it was added.

Bradley: Okay. That should be available soon, if it’s not yet, guys. What I want to mention about that is if you have video marketing tools, you can do this on your own but we developed a process or I did using Video Marketing Blitz, which is one Ab’s products. It’s a good product. I trained a VA about a year and a half ago how to do it, how to run that tool. That’s his job is just to run the Video Marketing Blitz tool. We set up this campaign that we call video carpet bomb. Randy James actually came up with the name but we developed it out a little bit together.

One of the things that I’ve been doing recently is whenever we have a lead come in to our pipeline, so through our prospecting funnels essentially a lead comes in. Now, we’ve got an inbound lead. Once the contact has been made by our sales person to that contact and an initial call has been made and they literally spoke on the phone, then what we do is what they schedule for the next call because that first call is what we call a discovery call so they can just get to know the business owner a little bit, ask them some questions about their business, blah, blah, blah. Then, we always set the next appointment.

What happens is as soon as Roberto, my salesman, gets off the call with that prospect, he sends the company data, the business information over to our VA that runs video carpet bomb process for us, who takes just a PLR video, a local lead gen-type PLR video. There’s many sources you can get those made or you can buy already done for you videos. He takes a video and superimposes or does a text overlay with that prospect’s phone number and then also obviously optimize the description with the call to action to them and all that. Then, we do a 10- or a 15-mile radius from where their business is located and we target their primary keywords plus the locations, all within that 10- or 15-mile radius. What we do is maybe wind up like we’ll try to rank 60 videos.

Out of those 60 videos because I have a VA that does this, guys. The VA gets paid $4 an hour roughly. It might take him an hour to run a small campaign like this. It cost me essentially $4 to where now, when that second call occurs with that prospect, my salesman says, “Hey, look. By the way, we want to show you how serious we are about earning your business.”

You could do this with a lead gen service provider that you’re trying to sell somebody to lead like once you’re trying to get them to buy leads from you or ranked and rent. If you’re going to rent out videos. My point is, you could actually optimize a video for their brand, rank it for a bunch of keywords. Then, show them. “Look. This is how serious I am.” I don’t recommend you doing that if you’re manually doing the work because it does take a lot of time but that’s why, again, it’s so important about outsourcing, guys. This is what we’re trying to convey to you guys is how to delegate this work.

I got a VA I pay $4 essentially because it takes him an hour. Out of, say, sixty attempted keywords to rank, we end up ranking 15 or 20 of them or even if it’s 10, who cares? My point is, this is something we do for free to show the prospect during that second call, we can show them live results with videos ranked for their services, for their keywords, with their contact information on it. We use that as a trust-building process. We’d say to them, this is part of our script, “We want show you how serious we are about earning your trust and earning your business, so this is what we did for you and the last weeks since our previous call.” We present them with the data that shows them, “Hey, look. We ranked this video for 14 different keywords for your product and the services that you offer in your service area.”

What happens is we get people that are like, “Wow! Nobody’s ever taken the time to do something like that on a pitch call,” which is what it is. We’re pitching them on for our services. That’s something that we’re going to have available inside of MGYB.co, our marketplace, so that people can go in and for $20 or $25, I don’t know what the final price is going to be yet, they can buy it. It’ll get done and sent back to them with, I think what we’re trying to do is a three-day turnaround time. But if you’ve got your own tools that you can do it or hire somebody in-house to do it for you, hire a virtual assistant to do it for you.

I know I spent a lot of time on that, guys, but I think that was a great question and, again, for somebody just getting started with the rank-and-rent business model, whether it’s videos or maps listings or whatever, guys, I know because that’s how I got started. I know there’s a big learning curve on like how to set up your business in a way that you can scale it. It’s very difficult to do. That’s why I’m trying to share what I’ve learned over the years that you guys can get results faster, scale your business even faster. It’s a great question, though, by the way.

Okay. MJ’s up. He says, “Hey, guys. Great program. Love the information you share. I have a question about image optimization and Google My Business. Is it possible to optimize images uploaded to GMB by clients? I have a rental client who has several images uploaded by their customers. Can they be optimized and what can be done? Thanks, guys.”

No, because they have to be optimized before they’re uploaded. Essentially you could go into GMB and download them and then optimize them and upload them again but then you would be uploading them as the business owner. They would be duplicate photos anyway, so that really doesn’t make any sense but the important thing is if your business or your client’s business has customers that’s uploading photos from their mobile devices then they’re getting a lot of the relevant signals that you want anyways because most phones have the GPS enabled. When customers take photos with their phone and then upload them, you’ve got all that geo location, all that geo tag, the metadata information, the Exif data that is already appended to the file, so that you’re already sending really good signals.

I wouldn’t worry about trying to optimize photos that are uploaded by customers. That’s just a blessing that they’ve got customers that are uploading photos to their GMB anyways. I haven’t really found any of my clients where that’s occurred.

Marco, what do you have to say about that?

Marco: That’s gold. Don’t touch it. Don’t touch it. Leave it alone. Google got the message. Clients like the business enough to upload images unless they’re really crappy images of a complaint or whatever, of garbage. Something like that where you don’t want to think you’d get rid of it but you couldn’t because it was the customer who uploaded. It’s a double-edged sword. You got to walk that fine line but yeah. What you could do is educate more clients on what they need to do, which is actually have the GPS turned on, so that Google can get the message that they’re at the location.

Here’s the thing. Google knows so much right now that I’ve taken images at the location with the GPS turned off, with geolocation turned off. I’ve come home and gone to upload them. Google knew where they were taken. That’s how sophisticated they’ve gotten. No. Man, don’t touch those. That’s gold. Customers or clients uploading images into the GMB. As long as they’re great images, just leave it.

Bradley: That’s right.

Do MasterMind Members Have Access To Trello Boards Containing The Business Processes Of Semantic Mastery?

Dan’s up. Dan says, “Hey, gents. I have a question regarding the mastermind Trello boards for processes you use in your business. Are these accessible to mastermind members? If so, I’m in. If not, how can I talk you into getting those?” To be honest, no. They’re not available, Dan. When we first launched, I think it was Syndication Academy — Originally it was called IFTTT SEO Academy — we tried that route because, remember, I trained on my virtual assistants on the processes of how to build networks which you guys know is an intricate process but I’d built out all the process docs and then converted them all into Trello boards specifically so that it would make it so much easier to train builders at scale.

That was an enormous amount of work, guys. It took me four months of almost two hours a day five days a week, I’m not kidding, to do that. It was an enormous amount of work but we have our SerpSpace building team, our builder team. Some of those boaters have been with me for five years now. We’ve got a team that will have all been trained from that exact same process. In fact, that’s what the whole training was developed around, the Syndication Academy training from the processes that I developed for my virtual assistants.

The reason I mention that is because when we first launched IFTTT SEO Academy, at the time, one of the upgrades was the outsourcing or maybe that was mastermind. I don’t remember but we had what we called an outsourcer training portal, which was where I had all my Trello boards that I gave access to the members. I think that was mastermind not IFTTT SEO Academy. It was an upgrade.

But, yeah, what happened was the problem was a couple things. Number one anytime a board had to be edited, first of all, people would come in and I was supposed to add them. It’s very difficult to add people to boards because if you add them to the board then they can literally change the boards. At least several years ago when we did this, there was a problem with people would come in and instead of making a copy of the board and importing it into their own account and then saving a template copy. So, making a copy of one that you would keep as a template and then using the others, people would just start making changes and actually using the public board that they were supposed to just make a copy of. It created a ton of work for me to have to keep going back in and rearranging the board, putting it back to its original state. It’s a pain in the ass. “Fine,” I said. “That’s enough. I’m done. I’m sorry, guys. You guys can’t follow instructions so I’m no longer going to give that.” We discontinued that.

The other part of this, though, besides the fact that, Dan, I’m sure you could follow instructions, so that might not be an issue, but the other part of that is what I found is if I’m training virtual assistants for a very specific task and that’s going to be their main job duty or something that they’re going to repeat over and over and over again, something that doesn’t change often. Then, I will create Trello boards for that but I have actually reverted most of my process documentation now back to just Google Drive, Google Docs. The reason why is because they’re much more easy, at least for my business. I don’t know about my partners but for me most of my process docs are living, breathing documents that are constantly being edited and refined. It’s much more work to do that in Trello boards than it was to just keep a processed doc in Google Doc form that I can go in and edit or my virtual assistants might, my employees, my workers can go in and make comments on and all that stuff.

I’ve really reverted back to just using YouTube for training videos, screencast videos. I upload to YouTube and then I create process docs in Google Docs where I always start. Step one is always training video. I drop the URL. Then, it’s the step-by-step process in outline format in Google Docs. I’ve actually stopped using Trello, guys, unless, like I said, it’s for something very specific, in which case that isn’t going to change very often but the processes that I’ve been developing for prospecting. For example, I built my team now that’s handling the prospecting and we’ve got the sales and we’ve got people scraping lists and all that. All of that is all now held in Drive because we’re constantly finding ways to make the process more efficient. It just takes too much time to change it all out in Trello. It’s easier to edit inside of Drive.

That said, Dan, yes in the mastermind I’ve been sharing a lot of my processes as far as the prospecting module and stuff like that. If there’s something specific that you would want, you’d have to contact one of us or contact us at support or if you’re in the mastermind, you could just post about it in the group. We can certainly potentially give you process talks about stuff but I’m not going to go out and create process docs for stuff that we do that hasn’t already been created just to share. A lot of the stuff that we do have or that I have from my own business, it’s proprietary, in that it’s stuff that are specific to my business that really wouldn’t make sense to share anyway. I would have to make the process docs from my own business more generic for them to be able to fit for them to be usable for a lot of you.

That’s again, why I said it’s … In my opinion, Dan, the best thing to do is which I know that you said in your comment right here is that you’re running into trouble. You’re having a hard time keeping ahead of your virtual assistants. I know. It’s a pain in the ass, man, but that’s why [crosstalk 00:42:55] …

Adam: I think you’ve talked about the process stuff. Dan, if you join the mastermind, like you said, we’re happy to talk you through. There’s a bunch of different ways to do this but I actually had this exact question from a different angle come from a mastermind I’m in. They said I’m really scared about making my first couple of hires. I think that’s a common pain point because a lot of people, it’s good. By all means, hire someone because a lot of this is trial by fire but I think, Dan, one of the problems here is it sounds like you’ve got the problem. You’ve got the person but the in between hasn’t been bridged and so you’re feeling that pain, where beforehand, generally if you want … You haven’t built the process docs before you got the person. Now, you’re realizing that you have to run your business, provide the services, and train someone and do the processes.

The lesson to learn here that I learned, too, working with one of my first VAs was knowing ahead of time what it is you want them to do and starting to lay that out either hiring them with the clear goal that they’re going to write their own process docs off of videos or something or that you’re going to lay out the process for them ahead of time or something in between, because, yeah, it’s … What are you saying here? You’re struggling to put together boards while keeping your current customers serviced. Definitely, so maybe you work out something in between. If you have someone who can write decent English then maybe you have them. You say, “Hey, look. I’m going to pay you to watch the videos and as you do it, write down the list.” Then, you can go through and maybe edit that and make it nicer.

Bradley: Yep. That’s great advice. That’s what we teach in Outsource Kingpin is that you can hire somebody to create the process docs for you, as long as you record the training video. That’s something you can outsource the process docs is my point, guys. That’s a great way to do it because that’s where … I still do a lot of my own process docs just because typically it’s something comes up that we need a process for, so I just go ahead and draft the process doc myself as I’m going through the steps to do whatever needs to be done. That way it’s done. I do it one time. That’s the last damn time I have to do it, because then I immediately just hand it off to a VA.

But what I would also suggest, Dan, is to get ahead of this is try to find tasks that are repetitive in your business, create process docs for those first so that you can reduce your workload. The sooner you can unload repetitive tasks that you do to your VAs, then that’s going to free up that time that you have those tasks that you have to do over and over and over again. It’s going to free that time up to allow you to develop even more process docs for maybe some more of the complex processes or functions of your business.

Again, try to get all the menial stuff or the repetitive tasks outsourced first, delegated first so that you can work on the more complex process docs for the higher level stuff.

But you guys, honestly, guys. One of the biggest parts … Remember, if you’re trying to move from being self-employed to business owner, these are the kinds of things you have to do but the idea is yeah, it’s a lot of work. For example syndication networks, guys. Like I said, it took me four months to create the process docs, the entire process to train virtual assistants how to do it but it took me four months. It’s been like five years since I’ve had to build a … I’ve built a few syndication networks since then but it’s really been five years since I’ve had to create or build a syndication network myself because I’ve trained an army of builders to do it for me, if that makes sense, all from four months worth of work that I put in several years … I don’t have it’s been five years but three or four years ago, if that makes sense.

Again, you put the work in now and it’s going to free you up in the future, so you don’t have to do that shit anymore.

Marco: Yeah, great. If I can real quick add that the skill sets and the abilities that you have right now and that have taken you to where you’re at right now, Dan, will not take you from where you’re at to where you want to be. There’s a lot of re-education, there’s a lot of skill set that you need to learn, that all of us needed to learn like how to set up processes, how to coach teams, how to manage teams and whatnot that can take you to the next level.

That’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about pofu life because we’re sharing with you the skill set that you need to have in order to run a team because setting our processes, it’s a skill set that you need to learn. It was ranking websites at some point or ranking medias at some other point but then it becomes as managing people and sending out processes. That’s interesting to learn as well.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s a great question, Dan.

How Do You Use GMB Posts To Push Link To The Money Site And Tier 1 Syndication Network?

Ivan’s up. He says, “I have a GMB site, a dot-com site and a tier one syndication network. What’s the best use of the GMB post? Is it good idea to push links to your links in your tier one properties or just link to your dot com site?”

Link to everything, Ivan. Link to all your branded properties. My VA’s, they’ve just got to do the GMB post for us. They just have a spreadsheet with all the company, the contact, the client information for whatever business they’re working on. In there is a list of target URLs and also a list of keywords. Essentially, they just cycle through. Let’s say I’ve got 15 target URLs, which includes citations, obviously the money site, the Google Maps, URL, the share URL. There’s tier one syndication properties. Like I said, citations, press release organization pages. All those kind of things, we just put them in the target URL column. Then, the VAs, whenever they’re doing their GMB post, they just go right on down and just, post one gets link number one, post two gets link number two. They just go on down and cycle through that.

The idea here is just to continually be linking to your tier one properties. It helps to validate the entity, strengthen the brand. Over time, you’re just going to start seeing everything start rising up. Link to everything, all your tier one branded properties. Anything that’s really tier one. Guys, that’s what you can be linking to. Direct to your money site, direct your maps listings, your GMB website, if you have it, which you should. By the way, you can also link to other GMB posts. That’s like daisy-chaining. I can’t talk more about that you have to come to Local GMB Pro if you want to learn more about that stuff.

Is It Acceptable Practice to Have the Same Street Address in Multiple GMB Listings?

R. Bacon! What’s up, buddy? He says, “Hey, guys. Is it acceptable practice to have the same street address in multiple GMB listings? There is a realtor group that has four listings in GMB maps all with the exact same street address and two showing up in the three pack. I was thinking Google was not okay with that.”

They’re not supposed to be but real estate offices have been one of those types that I’ve seen that for years. That’s been an issue for years because technically the broker or the real estate company, let’s say Long & Foster or Century 21 is supposed to have a maps listing but each individual realtor, real estate agent within that office could potentially have their own maps listing with the same address. It’s supposed to not be that way but real estate companies have been doing that for many, many years. It’s something that’s pretty common. Yeah, again, it’s not supposed to be that way but it’s common. It’s been that way for years. I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon.

Any Concerns Of Using Linux Operating System For SEO?

He says, “On another topic, any concerns on using Linux operating system on your computer you use for SEO?”

I don’t know. I had Linux in my laptop when I first started. I had two operating systems. Whenever I opened my laptop, I would choose whether I wanted to go into Linux or Windows. That’s when I first started my business but about two years later, I switched to just Windows only. I haven’t even been on Linux. I don’t see why it would be any problem. It’s just an operating system. It’s just how you access software.

Marco: Yeah. I would say the same. In any case, if you’re using an Android phone, you’re using Linux. If you’re using …

Bradley: [inaudible 00:50:45] that.

Marco: Yeah. Chromebook, yeah. It’s all based on Linux. If you’re using a Chromebook to do SEO, for example, you’re using Linux. Yeah. At the end of the day, it’s all a matter of tracking and IPs and whatnot. It’s the same stuff.

Is There Any Drawback Of Changing A GMB Address To Not Showing It On The Page?

Bradley: Yup. Okay. Let’s roll through the next few. Nigel’s up. What’s up, buddy? He says, “Hey. Good day, gents. Thank you for all you do. I have a GMB service area business currently set up with address showing and active and have also been using the verified address in posts. Is there any drawback to changing it to not showing using address anymore and can you quickly explain how?”

Look, I try to follow what Google’s recommendations are. If you have a service area business where customers do not come to the location, you’re supposed to uncheck that box in the info section of the Google Maps or Google My Business info tab when you’re editing the info. If you go into the address, click the pencil link icon and then you go into the address where the street address is shown and such. Then, if it’s service area business, you start adding in the cities and/or zip codes or whatever to define the service area. Then, there’s that check box underneath that that says, “Your address will be hidden if this box is unchecked,” or not checked.

If you read what the Google’s recommended guidelines are is that if the customers never come to the business location. Let’s say a plumber runs a business from his home, the plumber’s always going to the customer location and the customers don’t ever come to the plumber’s home because he’s not selling plumbing fixtures there, if that makes sense. It’s not like a storefront. In that case, you’re supposed to uncheck that box. In other words, hide the street address. I’ve always set up all my business listings that way or my client’s listings that way because that’s what Google’s suggest to do.

However, I know that other people have said, “Well, if you leave the box checked and it shows the address you’ll rank better.” I think that really depends on where the business is physically located or in relation to the centroid of the city, of the location. Obviously, the closer you are to the centroid of that location that your business is physically located in, the better … Typically, one of the ranking signals for maps ranking has been proximity to city center. The closer the physical address was, typically the better it would rank.

I know that, for some service area businesses, people would still leave the address shown if it was close to the city center because it tended to rank better. However, it’s not something I’ve tested because I never wanted to … A lot of my addresses, guys, are spammed addresses. They’re PO boxes. I don’t want other people complaining about it. I typically hide the addresses. If you’re already doing well, here’s what you could do. You could always uncheck the box if that is the proper way that it should be. You could uncheck the box to hide the address and monitor rankings. See your results. If it drops, if you slip in from out of the three pack or whatever, then switch it back. It’s just a matter of checking or unchecking a box. That’s what I would suggest doing but I haven’t really tested that. I know other people have said, “Showing the address versus not showing it can sometimes create better results,” but I typically don’t do that because I don’t want an address showing.

Have You Had Any Success Using The Message Functionality Of GMB Posts?

“Anyone using or having success with message functionality in GMB posts?” Yeah. Some of my clients, they … It’s not often. They don’t get messaged nearly as much as they get phone calls or link clicks to their websites but some messages do come through. It’s not something I’ve seen a lot of activity in but some people do that.

Think about that, guys. Again, that’s Google trying to keep people on the Google platform. They’re giving people the ability to do a Google search, locate a business, and actually, text message them directly from Google so they never leave the platform. That’s what GMB Pro is all about. It’s about keeping the Google users on the Google platform. That’s why Google is rewarding all of us who are using all of the Google My Business services and posting and staying active in that ecosystem because we’re giving Google exactly what it wants by keeping Google users in the Google environment.

How Long Should You Wait Before Adding RYS To An Optimized GMB?

Quit This House says, “Good day, gentlemen. After optimizing GMB, should we wait to add RYS and start the once per month for four months press release or ramp both up right away?” That’s up to you. You don’t need to wait. After optimizing GMB, you can do an RYS stack immediately. You can start hitting it with press releases immediately. You don’t have to do just one per month.

Rob, he was doing four per week. I tend to do mine about once every two weeks. That’s the frequency I like. It tends to work really, really well. Again, 12 out of 15 properties that I applied this method to, I was able to rank in the three pack within six press releases or less doing one every two weeks. I would recommend increasing your frequency on press releases if you want quicker results. Also, there’s no reason to wait on a drive stack, man. It’s GMB stuff. Just fire away.

Will You Be Offering Done For You Local GMB Pro Services Anytime In The Near Future?

All right. We’re going to try to get through a couple more real quick, guys. Got to wrap it up. Click Star says, “Hey, guys, I have a question regarding your Local GMB Pro offerings. Will you be offering done-for-you Local GMB Pro services anytime in the near future? If so, how long before this is available and how much do you feel the services will cost?

Marco, how soon until we open that up?

Marco: She’s ready to go. We’re discussing prices.

Bradley: Okay. I’d say within a week, two weeks tops?

Marco: Yeah, yeah. She’s already working. I gave her one of my best clients to work on. Guys, I never do that. I never train anyone on a client but I said, “If this is going to work, if I’m going to put her to work on other people’s GMBs, then she should be working on something that I care about.” I did. I gave it to her. She’s doing a fantastic job. You saw the video she did, right?

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: The walkthrough?

Bradley: Yup.

Marco: You know the type of work that she can do. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t want to put a hard date on it because we won’t meet until Tuesday to decide on what we’re going to charge for it.

Bradley: Let’s say within two weeks, roughly.

Marco: Yeah. Two to three weeks.

Bradley: Okay. We don’t know the pricing just yet but what we’re likely going to have is tiered pricing depending on the posting frequency, correct?

Marco: Correct and whether you’re going to provide images …

Bradley: Images or not.

Marco: … in video or if we have to provide them, which we can. Yeah, so it depends on just how much work she has to do. Everything has a cost because it takes more time to do.

Bradley: That’s right. Within two to three weeks. You heard it here, guys. You can hold up hold our feet to the fire. We’ll get it done. I know we’re really going to be pushing GMB Pro stuff, guys, because it works so damn well, guys. We want you guys to be using it because it works. You can get your clients results almost overnight. It doesn’t require you to do any damn work. You just literally resell the service to your clients and make money, guys. It will work. We’re going to be pushing the shit out of this service and growing that done-for-you GMB Pro VA team, virtual assistant team, to be able to provide this at scale. I’d say, “Hold off. Wait,” because when it comes, it’s going to be good.

All right. I got time for just a couple more. It looks like we’re almost done anyway. If anybody has to bounce that hasn’t already, please feel free.

What Is Your Opinion On Cora After A Year Of Using It?

Jonathan says, “I thank God for you, guys.” Why, I will plus one that. Awesome, Jonathan. He says, “Came across an email from a year ago that I had not read on Cora. What is your opinion on Cora a year later? Again, many thanks.” I rank number one in YouTube because of you all. No, you ranked number one on YouTube because of what you did. All you did was follow instructions that we provided but you had to take action. You ranked number one in YouTube because of what you did.

All right. As far as Cora, yeah. It’s awesome. Cora’s great, guys. It’s freaking awesome. By the way we can run Cora reports for people. Do we have that available yet, by the way, in MGYB?

Marco: Yes, we do.

Bradley: All right. Good question, then, Jonathan, because you can go buy Cora or subscribe to Cora, if you’d like. We have an offer that I think is like 25% off or 30% off with this stated pricing is, anyways, if you go through our link. It’s rather expensive but, Ted, who is the developer of it, he’s perfectly cool with subscribing for a month. Then, running all the reports that you need. Let’s say you run an agency. You got 15 or 20 clients. You go run reports for all 15 or 20 clients and then cancel your subscription. Then, three or four months later, after you’ve tuned the sites based upon the data that the Cora report shows, you can go back and subscribe again for a month and run all the reports to see how much progress you’ve made. That’s perfectly fine with Ted. He even announced that on the webinar, which is rare because a lot of times people aren’t cool with that kind of stuff. He was.

You can do that or you can buy Cora reports from us because we provide that now. We have access to Cora and one of our virtual assistants will run the report. You can buy it from us, from MGYB.co. It’s a great product, guys. There’s no doubt. Cora reports give you so much data, it’s ridiculous and it gives you the points on which you can tune your on-page stuff mainly. You can do off-page stuff, too, but I would always start with on-page factors that the Cora report shows. It’s a great product.

Do You Still Suggest Using Tubesift For YouTube?

Okay. We’re almost done. I think we just got a couple. Dan says, “Do you still suggest using TubeSift or simply using placements for YouTube channels and YouTube videos within the AdWords platform okay now?” No, I still absolutely use TubeSift for placements, Dan. I’ve been doing a lot of YouTube ad stuff recently. I’m actually testing YouTube ads right now for prospecting for generating clients for our agencies. Also, I’m doing remarketing stuff.

Just keep in mind, guys, with remarketing and YouTube, you have to have a thousand people on the remarketing list. For the GDN, Google Display Network, you only need to have a hundred people on the remarketing list. Anyways, the reason I brought that up is because I’ve been doing a lot of remarketing stuff lately, too, and I’m still trying to build the pixel up with a thousand people for the YouTube remarketing.

But that said, yeah, I still absolutely use TubeSift. It’s a great tool. Not only that but I might even still have … No, I don’t have it open up still but I’ve been using it a lot lately. Ted Chen is behind that. He’s the developer behind it. It’s Justin’s product but Ted Chen’s the developer. It’s same developer from Power Suggest Pro, our favorite keyword tool of all time, as well as Leads Recon. It’s all the same developer, Ted. He’s a great guy, a great developer. It’s a great tool. They’ve actually added some really cool things in the TubeSift recently.

By the way, guys, we should drop the link for that if we have it because it is a great tool. They’ve added several things to it recently. Their keyword research is very similar to Power Suggest Pro. It’s the same developer, so it’s great for that. Also, he has a banner designer now built into the TubeSift tool, which is great if you’re doing in-stream ads. You know that there’s a companion banner that shows up in the top right corner of the YouTube watch page. Now, you can create those companion banners right inside TubeSift. They’re 300 pixels wide by 60 pixels tall. It’s great. Super simple to do. Placements are absolutely great. However, for running like local YouTube ad stuff, I just use geographic targeting and in-market audiences or life event audiences, if possible because in-market audiences and life event audiences, it’s called audience targeting. Those work really, really well for generating …

Remember, Google’s storing data on those people, guys. That’s how it knows that it’s in market for a particular product or service or has recently moved or like a life event or gotten married or something like that. Google knows because Google has all that data on those individuals.

If you can select an in-market audience or a life event audience with a category within those audiences that are close to what you’re promoting your product or service and then you select the proper geographic targeting, think about how highly valuable those clicks are to that ad or to that video because Google knows it’s a local IP so it’s 100% geographically relevant. It also knows that the visitor, the clicker, the person or the viewer of the video, whether they click or not, it depends, but the viewer of that video has also been in market or is completely relevant to the content of that video as well. That view is weighted a hell of a lot more than a view from somebody outside of a geographic area or that has no browsing history or profile history of looking for content related around that, if that makes sense.

Again, guys, is about engagement. TubeSift is great because it can help you to create great placement lists and also do keyword research and just a ton of stuff that it does. It’s a great tool.

Marco: By the way while we’ve been talking, the video carpet bomb offer has been added to MGYB.co, so we have both offers, the higher-priced model and the lower-priced model.

Bradley: Okay. Thanks, by the way, Marco.

Scott, I was reading your question. He says, “Showing the address in Google Maps listing is irrelevant for service businesses. I know, because my site ranks number one with no address showing.”

Yeah, Scott. I’ve got literally dozens of map listings ranking number one with no street address showing. Yeah, you can absolutely rank without street address showing. All I’m saying is that what I was mentioning earlier was that I know some people have said that in competitive areas, if they choose to hide their address, their rankings aren’t as good as if they show their address, even for service area businesses.

Again, guys, this just what I’ve heard. I’m not telling anybody to do that I prefer to do what it says to do, which is if customers don’t come your location, don’t show your street address. That’s how I’ve managed all of my listings and I have no problem ranking them. Again, it’s up to you whether you want to do that or not. Scott, I appreciate that. I agree with you.

He says also, “If you don’t have a physical location where you can meet with customers, your Google reviews will suffer. People don’t like it when they cannot find a business location.” That’s true if you have a storefront where people come to the business but again with like plumbers and a service area business, for example, if they never come to the business, that doesn’t mean that they won’t leave reviews. Again, I’ve got dozens of sites out there with lots of reviews where the street address isn’t shown because there’s no reason for it to be shown. People will never come to the business yet my reviews still show. Does that make sense? That really is irrelevant in my opinion because people will still leave reviews.

You’re right. If it’s a storefront and the address is hidden, that’s just stupid. People will leave bad reviews because they can’t find your damn business because you hid the address.

“Can we get a link for Cora?” Did somebody find that link for Cora, by the way?

Marco: Yeah. Actually, he says I gave him the link to MGYB.com, but he says it’s not in there. I’m going to talk to Caesar and see it’s probably already added but it’s not live.

Bradley: Okay. Sorry. We’ll get that worked out. Okay. We’ll get that worked out, Craig. If you want the actual link to the Cora offer itself, we have it. We have the webinar that we did with Ted and all that. It’s on our site. I’ll grab the link and I’ll drop it on the page. If you want to go through that, that’s perfectly fine, too. If you just want to buy the done for you Cora reports, Marco will get that squared away. He’ll tag you in the mastermind or something.

All right, guys, I’m going to wrap it up. We’re a little bit over. Thanks everybody for hanging out. No mastermind tomorrow. We’ll see everybody next week.

Marco: Yeah.

Adam: Yup.

Bradley: Okay, guys. Thanks, everybody.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Adam: Bye.

Marco: Goodbye.

Bradley: See …

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 195 syndicated from https://medium.com/@SpanishFly

[beyondvapepage]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 195

Click on the video above to watch Episode 195 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

Bradley: I just haven’t installed it yet.

Adam: I love this thing. Hey! Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts episode 195, where we talk about standing desk. If you would like to order your standing desk contact me for … Just kidding.

Bradley: For my [inaudible 00:00:13] link.

Adam: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, that’s funny. I was just working on … I’m setting up a site that’s around like home office stuff. That’s going to be part of it. I am at a desk so I can make the thing go up and down here. Anyways, what I actually want to talk about and not this is that it’s episode 195, when we’re getting closer to that episode 200. This is a reminder for us that we’ve got to come up with something good.

But before we get into it let’s go around and say, “Hi,” real quick. We got the full team here. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Greetings from Barcelona today.

Adam: Nice! Nice. Never been. Heard good things. I know, Hernan, you went there, right? You really liked it, didn’t you?

Hernan: Yeah. It’s a nice city. Very nice city.

Chris: It is.

Adam: Good deal. All right. We won’t talk to Hernan too much because he’s got a cold. I don’t want him to get everyone sick.

Hernan: Thank you, Adam. Thank you, everybody. I’m excited to be here. Woo-hoo.

Adam: Marco, how you doing, man?

Marco: I’m good, man. Really good. Really excited about everything that’s coming down the pipeline.

Adam: Awesome.

Marco: Really looking forward to what’s coming.

Adam: Yeah, definitely. Bradley. How about yourself? How you doing? You don’t have thunderstorms or anything going on?

Bradley: Not today. I’m actually tired as hell today because I was up late last night with Peter Drew for a webinar that we did for him about local GMB … I know we’re going to talk about that a lot today. But yeah I start my day at 4:00 a.m. He’s in Australia. Whenever he wants to do a webinar to his audience it’s like eight or nine p.m. Eastern for my time in Virginia. That’s a long damn day. It was 9:30 last night when I got done. I put in a 16-and-A-half-hour day. I used to do that shit all the time but, to be honest, I haven’t done that kind of stuff in quite some time. I’m a little bit delirious today, so to speak. But I’m here and I’m happy, so let’s go.

Adam: Outstanding. Okay. First off, if you’re new to Semantic Mastery and you’re joining us, thanks for watching. Whether you’re watching us live or whether you’re watching the replay on YouTube, we appreciate you checking it out.

Like I said, if you are new to Semantic Mastery and you haven’t grabbed it yet, then please grab the battle plan. The link will be below. It’s the best place to help you out with your SEO and digital marketing in basically all areas. Even if you’re not new, it’s great to have that repeatable process so that you can do these things over and over again and get good results. However, if you feel like you’re past that and you’re ready to take things up a few notches, then the mastermind is the place for you to be.

If you’ve already got a few clients and you’re wanting to figure out either how to fill that pipeline and grow your revenue as a local digital marketer or as an agency owner, then we want you in the mastermind. I’m going to put that link on there as well.

I’ll let Bradley talk a little bit. We’ve got a few things coming up with the mastermind, right? Did you mention or am I … Okay.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Cool. Yeah. Coming up, I think maybe that’s part of one of the questions. I forgot. Sorry. I’m getting [crosstalk 00:03:07] …

Bradley: Get enough sleep last night, Adam?

Adam: No, no. My wife’s out of town. Now, I was filling that up with too much work so I’ve been doing the longer work days, which is throwing me off and stuff.

Bradley: The only reason why you said that is because she might watch this later. I know what you were doing.

Adam: Yeah, no. She watches all the intros, so I got to … No, I’m just … Hey, Jenny!

But, with the mastermind, if you’re a local digital marketer or you’re looking to grow, it’s not just by yourself or if you’re building an agency, then that’s the place you want to be. Beyond that, I want to talk a little bit about our live event. [pofu 00:03:40] live is coming up. That’s in October. It’s going to be that October 19th, 20th, and 21st. The 19th is the VIP day. If you get a VIP ticket, you can come with us. We’re going to have stuff paid for. We’re going to have an event. We’re going to have some food, some drinks. We’ll have some fun. Then, the real action kicks off on the 20th and the 21st.

We’re limiting it at 25 people. Ticket sales are already on underway. We’ve sold tickets so I just want to put that out there as that is a hard limit. Once we hit 25, it’s over. If you want to get signed up, I’m going to put the link below as well. Hernan, is there anything specific we want to tell people about that?

Hernan: Yeah, definitely. Here’s the thing. The other day we were brainstorming one week, what would be the value and the actual, what we could give you guys that it will blow your mind with value so that you might come to the event and have a lot of value out of it? It came out to be that after almost five years of Semantic Mastery, we have developed a system that will allow you guys to any kind of maximum MMR on any kind of students, step by step, it will allow you guys to go ahead and set up a prospecting system to get new leads and convert them into clients give them results really, really fast and then scale. There’s these three steps and these three pillars, if you would, of the “Semantic Mastery system.”

That’s basically the whole thing of the event. We’re going to show you guys how to get more leads and better leads that you can charge more for your services, for your local marketing agencies, whether you’re doing PPC or SEO, it doesn’t matter. We will show you how to do that, number one.

Number two, we’re going to show you how to give them results fast so that they can stay pretty much longer, that when you get results fast for a client, they tend to stick longer because they pretty much love you guys.

Number three where we show you how to scale, how to actually hire and train and set up the processes and outsource your business so you can repeat the process and you don’t become the bottleneck. That’s going to be pretty cool. We have some pre-training material. We want to help you guys uncover what’s going to be that helpful, that decision of fuck you that you want to be in. I think that’s going to be pretty amazing. I’m super, super stoked about that.

If you’re looking for any or all of those stuff and if you’re thinking you’re lacking that into your business, just come to pofu live. That’s got to be awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah. The idea, just to jump in real quick. I see Marco. He’s itching, too. The idea, guys, is really to fast track your success on how to … It’s going to be locally based. In other words, the training is focused more on local than anything else. It’s just not really in us just because that’s primarily what most of our audience does, guys, and that’s obviously what I do. That’s really what it’s about.

We’re going to try to basically give you a blueprint and a fast track to success on how to prospect and land a client, fulfill the service to get them results rather quickly. Then, how to scale and really remove yourself from the business which is really the idea, to go from self-employed to a true business owner, where you don’t have to be present in managing the day-to-day operations of your business in order for it to still produce revenue for you. That’s really the idea.

I know most of us are self-employed. I still am too to a very big degree but there are processes and stuff that I’ve been developing to help pull myself away from having to do all the work in my agency. That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s really where we’re taking Semantic Mastery. That’s what the pofu live event is going to be about. We would encourage anybody that is really looking to fast track, the ability to not just get clients and perform services, guys, because that’s just you created your own job.

That’s still way better than working for somebody else. I’m not knocking that at all. I’ve done it for years but my point is the idea is do you want true freedom? If you want true freedom, you shouldn’t have to be behind your computer 5, 10, 12 hours a day generating revenue. You should have people in place that are doing it for you because you built the system and the processes that can afford you that opportunity.

That’s really what we’re what we’re trying to do with Semantic Mastery and that’s what the mastermind is all about but pofu live is going to be like a condensed version of it where you’re just going to get hit with the fire hose over the weekend and walk away with an actual plan for your business. That’s part of the reason why we want to keep it very, very small because we couldn’t sit down with 50, 100, 200 people and do this but with 25, we very well can. That’s the idea.

Marco, were you going to add to that?

Marco: Yeah. What I was going to add is that what I’m going to be talking about is it’s fine to have all of these things at your disposal, which is what we make available to mainly our mastermind members. We do have one of products and we have another lower membership but the mastermind is where it’s at. But even then, we’ve had people who can’t overcome their own …

Bradley: Analysis of paralysis, or a paralysis of analysis, right?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: There you go.

Marco: It’s their own preconceived notions of what can and can’t be done, of what they can and can’t do and letting other people dictate what you can and cannot do. Fuck that! Position of fuck you allows you to say, “Fuck that.” You can’t tell me what the fuck I can or cannot do. My discussion topic is going to be centered around that. It’s not just having all of these things available because they can just put you, like you said, in analysis paralysis, right?

Bradley: Right.

Marco: Where you analyze and analyze and analyze and you don’t do shit. That’s not what this is about. You have to be an action taker. We have a ton of those people. We have people who only come to hunt their hangouts, get the information. They go and apply and they make money. I know of at least two people who built up their businesses that way. Action takers, that requires a certain kind of mindset. It’s the only way to get the pofu.

Bradley: Amen. Can we get any questions? What else we got, Adam?

Adam: I was probably not editing a split test page in ClickFunnels just then. Yeah, that was it. I wanted to make sure that we talked to everyone about the live event. I appreciate you guys telling them more about that and what the real reasons are behind it.

I’ll just add on to that there’s the side benefits, the things that we don’t have to do but are huge benefits to you. You get to meet other people like yourself, who are investing in their time and obviously putting their money where their mouth is and saying, “Okay, I want to learn more about this but I also want to be around the other people.”

That’s part of why I like me and Hernan or when I went with Bradley going to ClickFunnels Live. It’s not because I want to shake hands with Russell Brunson. He’s a neat guy but that’s not going to help us make more money or bring in more clients or help me save time but being around those people, getting those ideas. That’s a huge benefit in building that network. I encourage people to do that. If it’s not our event, find something else where you can push yourself but hopefully you’ll come join us.

Bradley: Awesome. All right. We can get into questions now?

Adam: Do it.

Bradley: All right. Let’s do it. I’m going to grab the screen. Oops. Wrong button.

Adam: We got it.

What WordPress Plugin Do You Recommend For Pasting The Schema Code From The SerpSpace Structured Data Generator?

Bradley: All right. Richard is up first. Richard says, “Are you aware or can you recommend a WordPress plug-in it will let me just paste in the schema code that I generated using the search space structured data generator?” I answered this last week because I think you posted this. Yeah. Several days ago I saw it.

Obviously, in case you guys are on aware of this, we recommend stopping using any SEO plug-in other than Jeffrey Smith’s SEO Ultimate plug-in. It’s hands down the best SEO plug-in. By the way, they’re about to release a new version of it they’ve been working on for months. Jeffrey and a couple other guys have been working on it for months. That it’s about to be upgraded. That’s going to be the pro version, which I highly recommend, guys, which is the paid version of it but it’s super affordable unlike Yoast and the Yoast premium upgraded version of it is stupid expensive. This, SEO Ultimate Plus is not. It’s a much, much better plug-in, anyways. It doesn’t bloat like put a bunch of bloated code in like Yoast does.

I’m not going to lie. I’ve still got a lot of websites out there with Yoast on it just because I haven’t taken the time to go through and swap out the plug-ins and update the settings but I’m no longer creating any websites with any other SEO plug-in other than Jeffrey Smith’s ultimate SEO. The reason I bring that up or SEO, excuse me, SEO Ultimate plug-in. The reason I bring that up, Richard, is because it has a code inserter module in the plug-in that you can use to insert code to pages or posts. There’s site-wide code injection. There’s also specific page and/or post code injection. It gives you a lot of options to be able to do exactly what you just asked.

However, if you are adamant about using a different SEO plug-in, which, again I highly encourage you to switch, but if you’re using some other SEO plug-in that doesn’t have that option, then I would recommend using a very simple plug-in. It’s listed right here. I think they change their name recently but, yeah, it’s SOGO Header Footer, add script to individual pages header footer. This is a great plug-in because it gives you some functionality to where you can add code to specific pages or posts, whether you want them in the header or the footer of the page or the post like the HTML header or the footer area. It does a lot of really cool things too.

Again, I always try to limit the amount of plug-ins on my WordPress sites to the bare minimum. If I can use something like the SEO Ultimate plug-in that has that function, I’m going to do that so that I can consolidate two plug-ins into one but, again, if you’re using something else, then I would recommend just using these SOGO Add Script plug-in.

Hernan: I totally agree with you about Jeffery, man. It’s hands down the best. Yoast has become a bloated virus.

Adam: Yeah. It’s stupid.

Hernan: Anytime a plug-in tries to do your SEO for you and it does not do it correctly, it’s time to say, “No thanks, man. I don’t need it,” because I’m supposed to know what I’m doing. Why in the world would you handcuff me in such a way that I can’t do what I know I’m supposed to do, which is why I just said, “No more Yoast ever.”

Bradley: Yeah. In Yoast’s defense, there’s a lot of people out there that aren’t CEOs, guys. They’re not SEO nerds like we are. For somebody that is a civilian or a layman, so to speak, then I assume that some of the things that it suggests are better than nothing at all. Somebody doesn’t have any SEO knowledge is going to follow the guidelines of those types of plug-ins. I, for years, have said, “Don’t follow the guidelines of SEO plug-ins because you’ll over-optimize,” or whatever.

In their defense, I would say that they’re trying to serve a very broad audience with that plug-in but for anybody that pretends or says that they know what they’re doing, you want to be able to have the options to change things and manipulate things that you can’t do with Yoast and Jeffrey Smith’s plug-in allows you to do that. Again, that’s SEO Ultimate and the SEO Ultimate Plus, which is the upgraded or the pro version, which is what I highly recommend. It’s inexpensive and it’s worth it because it gives you a lot of additional functionality, some really cool stuff that you can do with that plug-in.

How Important Is Setting Up An AMP Version Of Your Sites?

All right. Sam’s up. He says, “How important is setting up AMP version of your sites and do you recommend any plug-ins or anything to simplify setting it up?” It is really important, Sam, especially now because, guys, the mobile-first indexing has been rolled out. If you have sites that are in search console, you probably have already gotten notifications from search console or from Google directly about that but they posted it on their blog and that rolled out in July but that’s on the Google webmaster’s blog. If you want to look at what mobile-first indexing is, that’s rolled out now.

I would highly recommend that you start doing that. It’s something I haven’t even really started implementing yet myself but I know that the AMP version, guys, it’s basically what the AMP pages do or the poster or whatever is it creates a cached version of the page in Google servers, so that it can load the page up, least this is my understanding of it. People can tap on it from mobile search. It basically loads instantly the page or the post because it’s not actually going to the website. It’s being served from Google’s servers.

Is that correct, Marco? From Google’s cache?

Marco: That is correct. That’s exactly what’s happening. Now, there’s some … I don’t want to say the word. There’s people out there who say that you’re giving away control of your website to Google. Who gives a fuck? They’re delivering it immediately. You can’t get any faster than immediate. Mobile-first speed is, if not the main, it’s very critical and one of the main signals, shall we say, or maybe ranking factors. I don’t know how to word it but yes. Use AMP. Google is telling you to use it for a reason.

Do we recommend any plug-ins? Oh! We just happen to have our own version of the plug-in. All you have to do is go to the Facebook group and creator’s mastermind and ask to join. You’ll be able to download it. I did a video on how easy it is to install it and how to do some really tricky shit with it to get Google to give you special love. There you go.

Bradley: Guys, this is that post I was just talking about, rolling out mobile-first indexing. It went live in July of 2018. This link right here we talked about the announcement. This talks about using PageSpeed and mobile search rankings. Guys, this is incredibly important. Just think about it, guys. If you go through these articles and just go search Google for mobile-first indexing and you can read through some articles directly from Google but essentially they’re saying that now, even their desktop out, like their primary ranking algorithm now is based upon mobile indexing. Their mobile data centers instead of their desktop and laptops because mobile users have eclipsed for quite some time now mobile and desktop users. Two-thirds of all search traffic now originates from mobile devices. That’s huge.

Again it’s very, very important and speed and making sure your websites are responsive and all that stuff is really, really important now for SEO because, again, the old metrics of optimizing for desktop and laptop are now secondary. Totally go through some of this stuff. Get up to date on it and put it to use.

I’ve been doing a lot of AdWords testing recently again after many months of not doing much of it. I’m seeing just a shit ton of traffic coming from AdWords or from mobile devices now in AdWords even for YouTube stuff, which is incredible. I think that’s crazy. I’m seeing a lot of traffic on my YouTube ads coming from mobile devices now. I’ve even been setting up a lot of PPC like search call-only ads and stuff like that recently because just Mobile’s really much taken over. I highly encourage you guys to check that out. Like Marco said, we do have a plug-in that will convert your pages into AMP or create an AMP version of your pages and posts.

Marco: Pages and posts, yeah. That’s the main thing about our plug-in is that we do both your pages and your posts. They’re converted into AMP.

Which SerpSpace Service Is Best For Rank And Rent Video Model?

Bradley: Yup. Okay. Design2framework is up. He says, “I want to promote my YouTube channel so that each video in there will be on the first page on Google. Number one is not mandatory and YouTube’s search engine results are irrelevant because it’s for local business services.” Okay. “I’m going the rank and rent video model, which one of your search space offers is best for that?”

There’s several. First of all, syndication networks is pretty much standard operating procedure. I would highly recommend with YouTube guys there are no footprint issues. You can get as crazy as you want to with as many networks stacked to your channel or triggered by your YouTube channel as you want. There’s no problem with stacking as many tier one networks as you want or as many multi-tiered networks as you want. It makes no difference, guys. I have found over the years … Now, I haven’t done any specific testing on this in about two years now because I haven’t had to. My test that I did two years ago … Guys, I tested extensively with channels, YouTube syndication to just tier one networks and then also to multi-tiered networks. I ran several tests over the course of many months about where I tried to keep all things equal except for the number or the configuration of the syndication networks.

Again, I would try multiple tier one networks to where the same one channel triggers multiple tier one networks or doing two-tier networks and in stacking multiple two-tier networks onto a channel. What I found was, by doing a bunch of tier one rings, the content, the videos would rank faster like usually quicker than through the two-tier rings but they didn’t stick as long. In other words, they start slipping in rankings sooner than the ones that took longer to rank by being syndicated out through multi-tiered network or many multiple multi-tiered networks but those tend to stick longer. Like, they would stay higher in the search results for longer periods of time before they would start to slip.

The reason I’m telling you that is just because, first and foremost, I recommend if this is your business model, ranking and renting videos, focus on first and foremost building up multiple syndication networks either building them or buying them since you asked about search space, I highly recommend that you just buy them so you can save your time and go out and sell your service instead of creating and building networks.

What I would suggest is build up your syndication networks or buy them, whatever, to your channel to where you have a vast extensive set of networks, then you can boost those networks with link building packages to give them even more power, because that’s really, really important, guys, to have your own network if you’re going to be doing a video rank and rent model. You want your own broadcasting network especially if your theming your networks.

For example, if you’re doing rank and rent, I highly recommend that your channel be niche down to one specific vertical, if possible, or you can go broader but then use playlists so that you’re basically siloing your channel like you would silo a website. We’ve got a product called YouTube Silo Academy. You can just do a Google search if you want to find it, YouTube Silo Academy, that you can pick up, purchase it for, I think, $7 or you can get it in one of our bonus sites if you haven’t. If you’ve bought any products from us at all, it’s in the bonus site. Go through that training. Learn how to silo a YouTube channel because then you can actually use your playlists as ways to trigger syndication to specific networks if you wanted to do it that way. There’s a number of ways that you can configure it but my point in telling you this is the syndication networks from SerpSpace is one of the first things I would recommend for anybody that’s doing a video rank-and-rent business model. Okay. That’s number one.

Number two, anything that you want to give a push that’s already been syndicated out across your networks, that’s what Video Powerhouse is for. It’s great for that. Our Powerhouse networks have been themed and they’ve been used for over two years now or at least I think it’s been about two years. Anyways, the Video Powerhouse network, there’s a lot of power behind that, guys, because they’re aged and themed domains that have their own syndication networks. Then, you can also add secondary Web 2.0 network embeds as well as backlinks, everything else through that order process. If you have videos that need a boost, use the Video Powerhouse.

Lastly, or the next thing I would suggest, is to send traffic to your videos, preferably real traffic. I never recommend sending fake traffic to videos anymore at all or really to much of anything at all. There are a couple options there. The first one we’re going to mention is the MGYB.co which stands for make Google your bitch dot co. That’s our marketplace where you can buy YouTube views. They’re real YouTube views, guys. It’s not spam views like which you would buy from YouTube view services years ago. It’s not that at all. These are real, real people. This is real traffic. It’ll even show is traffic from ads in YouTube analytics. You can get targeted real visitors from our YouTube views service at MGYB.co.

Another option especially for local stuff is you can set up YouTube ads to drive local traffic but based upon your geographic targeting in the Google Ads dashboard. It’s no longer AdWords. It’s now called Google Ads but the Google Ads Dashboard you can set up location targeting so that you can get local IP clicks for your local videos, which is huge for ranking videos, guys. All you need to do is set up and I’ve talked about this many, many times in recent months on Hump Day Hangouts. I’m sure we probably even have this in our YouTube channel but how to use video ads or AdWords for video to rank local videos. If you just go to our channel and search, you’ll see where I’ve done extensive training on that already. That’s a great model as well.

You can use the YouTube View service, guys. Engagement is one of the biggest ranking factors for YouTube videos now. Even in Google search. If you can show engagement by either buying views direct from YouTube or AdWords or Google Ads, excuse me, or by using a service that can provide real traffic, although you don’t get the geographic targeting. You can’t get as specific or as narrow with geographic targeting through our YouTube view service yet but it’s really cost effective.

Marco: Can I stop you? Yes we can.

Bradley: Oh, you can?

Marco: [crosstalk 00:26:41]. We can get city.

Bradley: Oh, wow. Oh, even better, then.

Marco: You can get city and I believe, the last time I checked, we were really close on radius.

Bradley: That’s great. It’s evolving is what you’re saying.

Marco: It’s always evolving. Everything we do always evolves.

Bradley: Okay. I have to get in there and play with it more, then, because I have not in a few weeks.

There you go. Those are my recommendations. As far as what is the best way to sell and close video rank and rent model, that’s a whole nother can of worms. There’s several things. I would say the video email method is one of the best ways to do it although that is time consuming. It works well. We have a product called Video Lead-Gen System that teaches exactly how to do that. Also, we’re doing prospecting and I have been now for months in the Semantic Mastery mastermind, which by the way, I’ve made significant progress in the last few weeks and having really, really good results with the prospecting side of things now. We cover a lot of that in the mastermind. It’d be great to have you come join us there, but if not, you can check out Video Lead-Gen System for the video email process and how to do that. That works really well.

Cold calling, if you’re comfortable doing that, that absolutely works. It’s a pain in the ass. I can’t stand it. I hate it. I would rather have my toenails pulled off one by one than do cold calling and I mean that. I hate it but it does still work but prospecting video emails works well.

Also, again, I can’t get into it here, guys, because we don’t have the time plus this is basically what I’m teaching in the mastermind right now, which is how to set up prospecting funnels and such. If this is your primary business model, I would recommend that you learn how to set up a prospecting funnel because that’ll automate a lot of it for you. It will reduce your manual workload for prospecting. That’s essentially what I’ve been developing for months now in the mastermind is how to set up prospecting funnels and also how to hire virtual assistants to basically operate the prospecting funnel and manage their process, the leads that come in. We’ve, like I said in the last couple weeks, made really a lot of progress that and all this stuff is going to be taught to the mastermind members here and during the month of August and would encourage you to come check it out but yeah.

Again, video emails, probably the best way to do it, in my opinion, if you don’t want to call, if you want to pick up the phone, cold calling will help. It’s very discouraging to get rejected all the time. I can’t stand cold calling but if you can get through enough no’s, you’ll get a yes. That’s one of the quickest ways to get somebody signed up.

One other thing I just want to mention about that is in our MGYB marketplace, we have the video carpet bomb offer thing. I don’t know if we have the prospecting module or prospecting video carpet bomb offer available yet. Marco, is that available yet?

Marco: Is that the smaller offer?

Bradley: Yes.

Marco: I have to check if it was added.

Bradley: Okay. That should be available soon, if it’s not yet, guys. What I want to mention about that is if you have video marketing tools, you can do this on your own but we developed a process or I did using Video Marketing Blitz, which is one Ab’s products. It’s a good product. I trained a VA about a year and a half ago how to do it, how to run that tool. That’s his job is just to run the Video Marketing Blitz tool. We set up this campaign that we call video carpet bomb. Randy James actually came up with the name but we developed it out a little bit together.

One of the things that I’ve been doing recently is whenever we have a lead come in to our pipeline, so through our prospecting funnels essentially a lead comes in. Now, we’ve got an inbound lead. Once the contact has been made by our sales person to that contact and an initial call has been made and they literally spoke on the phone, then what we do is what they schedule for the next call because that first call is what we call a discovery call so they can just get to know the business owner a little bit, ask them some questions about their business, blah, blah, blah. Then, we always set the next appointment.

What happens is as soon as Roberto, my salesman, gets off the call with that prospect, he sends the company data, the business information over to our VA that runs video carpet bomb process for us, who takes just a PLR video, a local lead gen-type PLR video. There’s many sources you can get those made or you can buy already done for you videos. He takes a video and superimposes or does a text overlay with that prospect’s phone number and then also obviously optimize the description with the call to action to them and all that. Then, we do a 10- or a 15-mile radius from where their business is located and we target their primary keywords plus the locations, all within that 10- or 15-mile radius. What we do is maybe wind up like we’ll try to rank 60 videos.

Out of those 60 videos because I have a VA that does this, guys. The VA gets paid $4 an hour roughly. It might take him an hour to run a small campaign like this. It cost me essentially $4 to where now, when that second call occurs with that prospect, my salesman says, “Hey, look. By the way, we want to show you how serious we are about earning your business.”

You could do this with a lead gen service provider that you’re trying to sell somebody to lead like once you’re trying to get them to buy leads from you or ranked and rent. If you’re going to rent out videos. My point is, you could actually optimize a video for their brand, rank it for a bunch of keywords. Then, show them. “Look. This is how serious I am.” I don’t recommend you doing that if you’re manually doing the work because it does take a lot of time but that’s why, again, it’s so important about outsourcing, guys. This is what we’re trying to convey to you guys is how to delegate this work.

I got a VA I pay $4 essentially because it takes him an hour. Out of, say, sixty attempted keywords to rank, we end up ranking 15 or 20 of them or even if it’s 10, who cares? My point is, this is something we do for free to show the prospect during that second call, we can show them live results with videos ranked for their services, for their keywords, with their contact information on it. We use that as a trust-building process. We’d say to them, this is part of our script, “We want show you how serious we are about earning your trust and earning your business, so this is what we did for you and the last weeks since our previous call.” We present them with the data that shows them, “Hey, look. We ranked this video for 14 different keywords for your product and the services that you offer in your service area.”

What happens is we get people that are like, “Wow! Nobody’s ever taken the time to do something like that on a pitch call,” which is what it is. We’re pitching them on for our services. That’s something that we’re going to have available inside of MGYB.co, our marketplace, so that people can go in and for $20 or $25, I don’t know what the final price is going to be yet, they can buy it. It’ll get done and sent back to them with, I think what we’re trying to do is a three-day turnaround time. But if you’ve got your own tools that you can do it or hire somebody in-house to do it for you, hire a virtual assistant to do it for you.

I know I spent a lot of time on that, guys, but I think that was a great question and, again, for somebody just getting started with the rank-and-rent business model, whether it’s videos or maps listings or whatever, guys, I know because that’s how I got started. I know there’s a big learning curve on like how to set up your business in a way that you can scale it. It’s very difficult to do. That’s why I’m trying to share what I’ve learned over the years that you guys can get results faster, scale your business even faster. It’s a great question, though, by the way.

Okay. MJ’s up. He says, “Hey, guys. Great program. Love the information you share. I have a question about image optimization and Google My Business. Is it possible to optimize images uploaded to GMB by clients? I have a rental client who has several images uploaded by their customers. Can they be optimized and what can be done? Thanks, guys.”

No, because they have to be optimized before they’re uploaded. Essentially you could go into GMB and download them and then optimize them and upload them again but then you would be uploading them as the business owner. They would be duplicate photos anyway, so that really doesn’t make any sense but the important thing is if your business or your client’s business has customers that’s uploading photos from their mobile devices then they’re getting a lot of the relevant signals that you want anyways because most phones have the GPS enabled. When customers take photos with their phone and then upload them, you’ve got all that geo location, all that geo tag, the metadata information, the Exif data that is already appended to the file, so that you’re already sending really good signals.

I wouldn’t worry about trying to optimize photos that are uploaded by customers. That’s just a blessing that they’ve got customers that are uploading photos to their GMB anyways. I haven’t really found any of my clients where that’s occurred.

Marco, what do you have to say about that?

Marco: That’s gold. Don’t touch it. Don’t touch it. Leave it alone. Google got the message. Clients like the business enough to upload images unless they’re really crappy images of a complaint or whatever, of garbage. Something like that where you don’t want to think you’d get rid of it but you couldn’t because it was the customer who uploaded. It’s a double-edged sword. You got to walk that fine line but yeah. What you could do is educate more clients on what they need to do, which is actually have the GPS turned on, so that Google can get the message that they’re at the location.

Here’s the thing. Google knows so much right now that I’ve taken images at the location with the GPS turned off, with geolocation turned off. I’ve come home and gone to upload them. Google knew where they were taken. That’s how sophisticated they’ve gotten. No. Man, don’t touch those. That’s gold. Customers or clients uploading images into the GMB. As long as they’re great images, just leave it.

Bradley: That’s right.

Do MasterMind Members Have Access To Trello Boards Containing The Business Processes Of Semantic Mastery?

Dan’s up. Dan says, “Hey, gents. I have a question regarding the mastermind Trello boards for processes you use in your business. Are these accessible to mastermind members? If so, I’m in. If not, how can I talk you into getting those?” To be honest, no. They’re not available, Dan. When we first launched, I think it was Syndication Academy — Originally it was called IFTTT SEO Academy — we tried that route because, remember, I trained on my virtual assistants on the processes of how to build networks which you guys know is an intricate process but I’d built out all the process docs and then converted them all into Trello boards specifically so that it would make it so much easier to train builders at scale.

That was an enormous amount of work, guys. It took me four months of almost two hours a day five days a week, I’m not kidding, to do that. It was an enormous amount of work but we have our SerpSpace building team, our builder team. Some of those boaters have been with me for five years now. We’ve got a team that will have all been trained from that exact same process. In fact, that’s what the whole training was developed around, the Syndication Academy training from the processes that I developed for my virtual assistants.

The reason I mention that is because when we first launched IFTTT SEO Academy, at the time, one of the upgrades was the outsourcing or maybe that was mastermind. I don’t remember but we had what we called an outsourcer training portal, which was where I had all my Trello boards that I gave access to the members. I think that was mastermind not IFTTT SEO Academy. It was an upgrade.

But, yeah, what happened was the problem was a couple things. Number one anytime a board had to be edited, first of all, people would come in and I was supposed to add them. It’s very difficult to add people to boards because if you add them to the board then they can literally change the boards. At least several years ago when we did this, there was a problem with people would come in and instead of making a copy of the board and importing it into their own account and then saving a template copy. So, making a copy of one that you would keep as a template and then using the others, people would just start making changes and actually using the public board that they were supposed to just make a copy of. It created a ton of work for me to have to keep going back in and rearranging the board, putting it back to its original state. It’s a pain in the ass. “Fine,” I said. “That’s enough. I’m done. I’m sorry, guys. You guys can’t follow instructions so I’m no longer going to give that.” We discontinued that.

The other part of this, though, besides the fact that, Dan, I’m sure you could follow instructions, so that might not be an issue, but the other part of that is what I found is if I’m training virtual assistants for a very specific task and that’s going to be their main job duty or something that they’re going to repeat over and over and over again, something that doesn’t change often. Then, I will create Trello boards for that but I have actually reverted most of my process documentation now back to just Google Drive, Google Docs. The reason why is because they’re much more easy, at least for my business. I don’t know about my partners but for me most of my process docs are living, breathing documents that are constantly being edited and refined. It’s much more work to do that in Trello boards than it was to just keep a processed doc in Google Doc form that I can go in and edit or my virtual assistants might, my employees, my workers can go in and make comments on and all that stuff.

I’ve really reverted back to just using YouTube for training videos, screencast videos. I upload to YouTube and then I create process docs in Google Docs where I always start. Step one is always training video. I drop the URL. Then, it’s the step-by-step process in outline format in Google Docs. I’ve actually stopped using Trello, guys, unless, like I said, it’s for something very specific, in which case that isn’t going to change very often but the processes that I’ve been developing for prospecting. For example, I built my team now that’s handling the prospecting and we’ve got the sales and we’ve got people scraping lists and all that. All of that is all now held in Drive because we’re constantly finding ways to make the process more efficient. It just takes too much time to change it all out in Trello. It’s easier to edit inside of Drive.

That said, Dan, yes in the mastermind I’ve been sharing a lot of my processes as far as the prospecting module and stuff like that. If there’s something specific that you would want, you’d have to contact one of us or contact us at support or if you’re in the mastermind, you could just post about it in the group. We can certainly potentially give you process talks about stuff but I’m not going to go out and create process docs for stuff that we do that hasn’t already been created just to share. A lot of the stuff that we do have or that I have from my own business, it’s proprietary, in that it’s stuff that are specific to my business that really wouldn’t make sense to share anyway. I would have to make the process docs from my own business more generic for them to be able to fit for them to be usable for a lot of you.

That’s again, why I said it’s … In my opinion, Dan, the best thing to do is which I know that you said in your comment right here is that you’re running into trouble. You’re having a hard time keeping ahead of your virtual assistants. I know. It’s a pain in the ass, man, but that’s why [crosstalk 00:42:55] …

Adam: I think you’ve talked about the process stuff. Dan, if you join the mastermind, like you said, we’re happy to talk you through. There’s a bunch of different ways to do this but I actually had this exact question from a different angle come from a mastermind I’m in. They said I’m really scared about making my first couple of hires. I think that’s a common pain point because a lot of people, it’s good. By all means, hire someone because a lot of this is trial by fire but I think, Dan, one of the problems here is it sounds like you’ve got the problem. You’ve got the person but the in between hasn’t been bridged and so you’re feeling that pain, where beforehand, generally if you want … You haven’t built the process docs before you got the person. Now, you’re realizing that you have to run your business, provide the services, and train someone and do the processes.

The lesson to learn here that I learned, too, working with one of my first VAs was knowing ahead of time what it is you want them to do and starting to lay that out either hiring them with the clear goal that they’re going to write their own process docs off of videos or something or that you’re going to lay out the process for them ahead of time or something in between, because, yeah, it’s … What are you saying here? You’re struggling to put together boards while keeping your current customers serviced. Definitely, so maybe you work out something in between. If you have someone who can write decent English then maybe you have them. You say, “Hey, look. I’m going to pay you to watch the videos and as you do it, write down the list.” Then, you can go through and maybe edit that and make it nicer.

Bradley: Yep. That’s great advice. That’s what we teach in Outsource Kingpin is that you can hire somebody to create the process docs for you, as long as you record the training video. That’s something you can outsource the process docs is my point, guys. That’s a great way to do it because that’s where … I still do a lot of my own process docs just because typically it’s something comes up that we need a process for, so I just go ahead and draft the process doc myself as I’m going through the steps to do whatever needs to be done. That way it’s done. I do it one time. That’s the last damn time I have to do it, because then I immediately just hand it off to a VA.

But what I would also suggest, Dan, is to get ahead of this is try to find tasks that are repetitive in your business, create process docs for those first so that you can reduce your workload. The sooner you can unload repetitive tasks that you do to your VAs, then that’s going to free up that time that you have those tasks that you have to do over and over and over again. It’s going to free that time up to allow you to develop even more process docs for maybe some more of the complex processes or functions of your business.

Again, try to get all the menial stuff or the repetitive tasks outsourced first, delegated first so that you can work on the more complex process docs for the higher level stuff.

But you guys, honestly, guys. One of the biggest parts … Remember, if you’re trying to move from being self-employed to business owner, these are the kinds of things you have to do but the idea is yeah, it’s a lot of work. For example syndication networks, guys. Like I said, it took me four months to create the process docs, the entire process to train virtual assistants how to do it but it took me four months. It’s been like five years since I’ve had to build a … I’ve built a few syndication networks since then but it’s really been five years since I’ve had to create or build a syndication network myself because I’ve trained an army of builders to do it for me, if that makes sense, all from four months worth of work that I put in several years … I don’t have it’s been five years but three or four years ago, if that makes sense.

Again, you put the work in now and it’s going to free you up in the future, so you don’t have to do that shit anymore.

Marco: Yeah, great. If I can real quick add that the skill sets and the abilities that you have right now and that have taken you to where you’re at right now, Dan, will not take you from where you’re at to where you want to be. There’s a lot of re-education, there’s a lot of skill set that you need to learn, that all of us needed to learn like how to set up processes, how to coach teams, how to manage teams and whatnot that can take you to the next level.

That’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about pofu life because we’re sharing with you the skill set that you need to have in order to run a team because setting our processes, it’s a skill set that you need to learn. It was ranking websites at some point or ranking medias at some other point but then it becomes as managing people and sending out processes. That’s interesting to learn as well.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s a great question, Dan.

How Do You Use GMB Posts To Push Link To The Money Site And Tier 1 Syndication Network?

Ivan’s up. He says, “I have a GMB site, a dot-com site and a tier one syndication network. What’s the best use of the GMB post? Is it good idea to push links to your links in your tier one properties or just link to your dot com site?”

Link to everything, Ivan. Link to all your branded properties. My VA’s, they’ve just got to do the GMB post for us. They just have a spreadsheet with all the company, the contact, the client information for whatever business they’re working on. In there is a list of target URLs and also a list of keywords. Essentially, they just cycle through. Let’s say I’ve got 15 target URLs, which includes citations, obviously the money site, the Google Maps, URL, the share URL. There’s tier one syndication properties. Like I said, citations, press release organization pages. All those kind of things, we just put them in the target URL column. Then, the VAs, whenever they’re doing their GMB post, they just go right on down and just, post one gets link number one, post two gets link number two. They just go on down and cycle through that.

The idea here is just to continually be linking to your tier one properties. It helps to validate the entity, strengthen the brand. Over time, you’re just going to start seeing everything start rising up. Link to everything, all your tier one branded properties. Anything that’s really tier one. Guys, that’s what you can be linking to. Direct to your money site, direct your maps listings, your GMB website, if you have it, which you should. By the way, you can also link to other GMB posts. That’s like daisy-chaining. I can’t talk more about that you have to come to Local GMB Pro if you want to learn more about that stuff.

Is It Acceptable Practice to Have the Same Street Address in Multiple GMB Listings?

R. Bacon! What’s up, buddy? He says, “Hey, guys. Is it acceptable practice to have the same street address in multiple GMB listings? There is a realtor group that has four listings in GMB maps all with the exact same street address and two showing up in the three pack. I was thinking Google was not okay with that.”

They’re not supposed to be but real estate offices have been one of those types that I’ve seen that for years. That’s been an issue for years because technically the broker or the real estate company, let’s say Long & Foster or Century 21 is supposed to have a maps listing but each individual realtor, real estate agent within that office could potentially have their own maps listing with the same address. It’s supposed to not be that way but real estate companies have been doing that for many, many years. It’s something that’s pretty common. Yeah, again, it’s not supposed to be that way but it’s common. It’s been that way for years. I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon.

Any Concerns Of Using Linux Operating System For SEO?

He says, “On another topic, any concerns on using Linux operating system on your computer you use for SEO?”

I don’t know. I had Linux in my laptop when I first started. I had two operating systems. Whenever I opened my laptop, I would choose whether I wanted to go into Linux or Windows. That’s when I first started my business but about two years later, I switched to just Windows only. I haven’t even been on Linux. I don’t see why it would be any problem. It’s just an operating system. It’s just how you access software.

Marco: Yeah. I would say the same. In any case, if you’re using an Android phone, you’re using Linux. If you’re using …

Bradley: [inaudible 00:50:45] that.

Marco: Yeah. Chromebook, yeah. It’s all based on Linux. If you’re using a Chromebook to do SEO, for example, you’re using Linux. Yeah. At the end of the day, it’s all a matter of tracking and IPs and whatnot. It’s the same stuff.

Is There Any Drawback Of Changing A GMB Address To Not Showing It On The Page?

Bradley: Yup. Okay. Let’s roll through the next few. Nigel’s up. What’s up, buddy? He says, “Hey. Good day, gents. Thank you for all you do. I have a GMB service area business currently set up with address showing and active and have also been using the verified address in posts. Is there any drawback to changing it to not showing using address anymore and can you quickly explain how?”

Look, I try to follow what Google’s recommendations are. If you have a service area business where customers do not come to the location, you’re supposed to uncheck that box in the info section of the Google Maps or Google My Business info tab when you’re editing the info. If you go into the address, click the pencil link icon and then you go into the address where the street address is shown and such. Then, if it’s service area business, you start adding in the cities and/or zip codes or whatever to define the service area. Then, there’s that check box underneath that that says, “Your address will be hidden if this box is unchecked,” or not checked.

If you read what the Google’s recommended guidelines are is that if the customers never come to the business location. Let’s say a plumber runs a business from his home, the plumber’s always going to the customer location and the customers don’t ever come to the plumber’s home because he’s not selling plumbing fixtures there, if that makes sense. It’s not like a storefront. In that case, you’re supposed to uncheck that box. In other words, hide the street address. I’ve always set up all my business listings that way or my client’s listings that way because that’s what Google’s suggest to do.

However, I know that other people have said, “Well, if you leave the box checked and it shows the address you’ll rank better.” I think that really depends on where the business is physically located or in relation to the centroid of the city, of the location. Obviously, the closer you are to the centroid of that location that your business is physically located in, the better … Typically, one of the ranking signals for maps ranking has been proximity to city center. The closer the physical address was, typically the better it would rank.

I know that, for some service area businesses, people would still leave the address shown if it was close to the city center because it tended to rank better. However, it’s not something I’ve tested because I never wanted to … A lot of my addresses, guys, are spammed addresses. They’re PO boxes. I don’t want other people complaining about it. I typically hide the addresses. If you’re already doing well, here’s what you could do. You could always uncheck the box if that is the proper way that it should be. You could uncheck the box to hide the address and monitor rankings. See your results. If it drops, if you slip in from out of the three pack or whatever, then switch it back. It’s just a matter of checking or unchecking a box. That’s what I would suggest doing but I haven’t really tested that. I know other people have said, “Showing the address versus not showing it can sometimes create better results,” but I typically don’t do that because I don’t want an address showing.

Have You Had Any Success Using The Message Functionality Of GMB Posts?

“Anyone using or having success with message functionality in GMB posts?” Yeah. Some of my clients, they … It’s not often. They don’t get messaged nearly as much as they get phone calls or link clicks to their websites but some messages do come through. It’s not something I’ve seen a lot of activity in but some people do that.

Think about that, guys. Again, that’s Google trying to keep people on the Google platform. They’re giving people the ability to do a Google search, locate a business, and actually, text message them directly from Google so they never leave the platform. That’s what GMB Pro is all about. It’s about keeping the Google users on the Google platform. That’s why Google is rewarding all of us who are using all of the Google My Business services and posting and staying active in that ecosystem because we’re giving Google exactly what it wants by keeping Google users in the Google environment.

How Long Should You Wait Before Adding RYS To An Optimized GMB?

Quit This House says, “Good day, gentlemen. After optimizing GMB, should we wait to add RYS and start the once per month for four months press release or ramp both up right away?” That’s up to you. You don’t need to wait. After optimizing GMB, you can do an RYS stack immediately. You can start hitting it with press releases immediately. You don’t have to do just one per month.

Rob, he was doing four per week. I tend to do mine about once every two weeks. That’s the frequency I like. It tends to work really, really well. Again, 12 out of 15 properties that I applied this method to, I was able to rank in the three pack within six press releases or less doing one every two weeks. I would recommend increasing your frequency on press releases if you want quicker results. Also, there’s no reason to wait on a drive stack, man. It’s GMB stuff. Just fire away.

Will You Be Offering Done For You Local GMB Pro Services Anytime In The Near Future?

All right. We’re going to try to get through a couple more real quick, guys. Got to wrap it up. Click Star says, “Hey, guys, I have a question regarding your Local GMB Pro offerings. Will you be offering done-for-you Local GMB Pro services anytime in the near future? If so, how long before this is available and how much do you feel the services will cost?

Marco, how soon until we open that up?

Marco: She’s ready to go. We’re discussing prices.

Bradley: Okay. I’d say within a week, two weeks tops?

Marco: Yeah, yeah. She’s already working. I gave her one of my best clients to work on. Guys, I never do that. I never train anyone on a client but I said, “If this is going to work, if I’m going to put her to work on other people’s GMBs, then she should be working on something that I care about.” I did. I gave it to her. She’s doing a fantastic job. You saw the video she did, right?

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: The walkthrough?

Bradley: Yup.

Marco: You know the type of work that she can do. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t want to put a hard date on it because we won’t meet until Tuesday to decide on what we’re going to charge for it.

Bradley: Let’s say within two weeks, roughly.

Marco: Yeah. Two to three weeks.

Bradley: Okay. We don’t know the pricing just yet but what we’re likely going to have is tiered pricing depending on the posting frequency, correct?

Marco: Correct and whether you’re going to provide images …

Bradley: Images or not.

Marco: … in video or if we have to provide them, which we can. Yeah, so it depends on just how much work she has to do. Everything has a cost because it takes more time to do.

Bradley: That’s right. Within two to three weeks. You heard it here, guys. You can hold up hold our feet to the fire. We’ll get it done. I know we’re really going to be pushing GMB Pro stuff, guys, because it works so damn well, guys. We want you guys to be using it because it works. You can get your clients results almost overnight. It doesn’t require you to do any damn work. You just literally resell the service to your clients and make money, guys. It will work. We’re going to be pushing the shit out of this service and growing that done-for-you GMB Pro VA team, virtual assistant team, to be able to provide this at scale. I’d say, “Hold off. Wait,” because when it comes, it’s going to be good.

All right. I got time for just a couple more. It looks like we’re almost done anyway. If anybody has to bounce that hasn’t already, please feel free.

What Is Your Opinion On Cora After A Year Of Using It?

Jonathan says, “I thank God for you, guys.” Why, I will plus one that. Awesome, Jonathan. He says, “Came across an email from a year ago that I had not read on Cora. What is your opinion on Cora a year later? Again, many thanks.” I rank number one in YouTube because of you all. No, you ranked number one on YouTube because of what you did. All you did was follow instructions that we provided but you had to take action. You ranked number one in YouTube because of what you did.

All right. As far as Cora, yeah. It’s awesome. Cora’s great, guys. It’s freaking awesome. By the way we can run Cora reports for people. Do we have that available yet, by the way, in MGYB?

Marco: Yes, we do.

Bradley: All right. Good question, then, Jonathan, because you can go buy Cora or subscribe to Cora, if you’d like. We have an offer that I think is like 25% off or 30% off with this stated pricing is, anyways, if you go through our link. It’s rather expensive but, Ted, who is the developer of it, he’s perfectly cool with subscribing for a month. Then, running all the reports that you need. Let’s say you run an agency. You got 15 or 20 clients. You go run reports for all 15 or 20 clients and then cancel your subscription. Then, three or four months later, after you’ve tuned the sites based upon the data that the Cora report shows, you can go back and subscribe again for a month and run all the reports to see how much progress you’ve made. That’s perfectly fine with Ted. He even announced that on the webinar, which is rare because a lot of times people aren’t cool with that kind of stuff. He was.

You can do that or you can buy Cora reports from us because we provide that now. We have access to Cora and one of our virtual assistants will run the report. You can buy it from us, from MGYB.co. It’s a great product, guys. There’s no doubt. Cora reports give you so much data, it’s ridiculous and it gives you the points on which you can tune your on-page stuff mainly. You can do off-page stuff, too, but I would always start with on-page factors that the Cora report shows. It’s a great product.

Do You Still Suggest Using Tubesift For YouTube?

Okay. We’re almost done. I think we just got a couple. Dan says, “Do you still suggest using TubeSift or simply using placements for YouTube channels and YouTube videos within the AdWords platform okay now?” No, I still absolutely use TubeSift for placements, Dan. I’ve been doing a lot of YouTube ad stuff recently. I’m actually testing YouTube ads right now for prospecting for generating clients for our agencies. Also, I’m doing remarketing stuff.

Just keep in mind, guys, with remarketing and YouTube, you have to have a thousand people on the remarketing list. For the GDN, Google Display Network, you only need to have a hundred people on the remarketing list. Anyways, the reason I brought that up is because I’ve been doing a lot of remarketing stuff lately, too, and I’m still trying to build the pixel up with a thousand people for the YouTube remarketing.

But that said, yeah, I still absolutely use TubeSift. It’s a great tool. Not only that but I might even still have … No, I don’t have it open up still but I’ve been using it a lot lately. Ted Chen is behind that. He’s the developer behind it. It’s Justin’s product but Ted Chen’s the developer. It’s same developer from Power Suggest Pro, our favorite keyword tool of all time, as well as Leads Recon. It’s all the same developer, Ted. He’s a great guy, a great developer. It’s a great tool. They’ve actually added some really cool things in the TubeSift recently.

By the way, guys, we should drop the link for that if we have it because it is a great tool. They’ve added several things to it recently. Their keyword research is very similar to Power Suggest Pro. It’s the same developer, so it’s great for that. Also, he has a banner designer now built into the TubeSift tool, which is great if you’re doing in-stream ads. You know that there’s a companion banner that shows up in the top right corner of the YouTube watch page. Now, you can create those companion banners right inside TubeSift. They’re 300 pixels wide by 60 pixels tall. It’s great. Super simple to do. Placements are absolutely great. However, for running like local YouTube ad stuff, I just use geographic targeting and in-market audiences or life event audiences, if possible because in-market audiences and life event audiences, it’s called audience targeting. Those work really, really well for generating …

Remember, Google’s storing data on those people, guys. That’s how it knows that it’s in market for a particular product or service or has recently moved or like a life event or gotten married or something like that. Google knows because Google has all that data on those individuals.

If you can select an in-market audience or a life event audience with a category within those audiences that are close to what you’re promoting your product or service and then you select the proper geographic targeting, think about how highly valuable those clicks are to that ad or to that video because Google knows it’s a local IP so it’s 100% geographically relevant. It also knows that the visitor, the clicker, the person or the viewer of the video, whether they click or not, it depends, but the viewer of that video has also been in market or is completely relevant to the content of that video as well. That view is weighted a hell of a lot more than a view from somebody outside of a geographic area or that has no browsing history or profile history of looking for content related around that, if that makes sense.

Again, guys, is about engagement. TubeSift is great because it can help you to create great placement lists and also do keyword research and just a ton of stuff that it does. It’s a great tool.

Marco: By the way while we’ve been talking, the video carpet bomb offer has been added to MGYB.co, so we have both offers, the higher-priced model and the lower-priced model.

Bradley: Okay. Thanks, by the way, Marco.

Scott, I was reading your question. He says, “Showing the address in Google Maps listing is irrelevant for service businesses. I know, because my site ranks number one with no address showing.”

Yeah, Scott. I’ve got literally dozens of map listings ranking number one with no street address showing. Yeah, you can absolutely rank without street address showing. All I’m saying is that what I was mentioning earlier was that I know some people have said that in competitive areas, if they choose to hide their address, their rankings aren’t as good as if they show their address, even for service area businesses.

Again, guys, this just what I’ve heard. I’m not telling anybody to do that I prefer to do what it says to do, which is if customers don’t come your location, don’t show your street address. That’s how I’ve managed all of my listings and I have no problem ranking them. Again, it’s up to you whether you want to do that or not. Scott, I appreciate that. I agree with you.

He says also, “If you don’t have a physical location where you can meet with customers, your Google reviews will suffer. People don’t like it when they cannot find a business location.” That’s true if you have a storefront where people come to the business but again with like plumbers and a service area business, for example, if they never come to the business, that doesn’t mean that they won’t leave reviews. Again, I’ve got dozens of sites out there with lots of reviews where the street address isn’t shown because there’s no reason for it to be shown. People will never come to the business yet my reviews still show. Does that make sense? That really is irrelevant in my opinion because people will still leave reviews.

You’re right. If it’s a storefront and the address is hidden, that’s just stupid. People will leave bad reviews because they can’t find your damn business because you hid the address.

“Can we get a link for Cora?” Did somebody find that link for Cora, by the way?

Marco: Yeah. Actually, he says I gave him the link to MGYB.com, but he says it’s not in there. I’m going to talk to Caesar and see it’s probably already added but it’s not live.

Bradley: Okay. Sorry. We’ll get that worked out. Okay. We’ll get that worked out, Craig. If you want the actual link to the Cora offer itself, we have it. We have the webinar that we did with Ted and all that. It’s on our site. I’ll grab the link and I’ll drop it on the page. If you want to go through that, that’s perfectly fine, too. If you just want to buy the done for you Cora reports, Marco will get that squared away. He’ll tag you in the mastermind or something.

All right, guys, I’m going to wrap it up. We’re a little bit over. Thanks everybody for hanging out. No mastermind tomorrow. We’ll see everybody next week.

Marco: Yeah.

Adam: Yup.

Bradley: Okay, guys. Thanks, everybody.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Adam: Bye.

Marco: Goodbye.

Bradley: See …

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 195 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

[howardkuester22]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 195

Click on the video above to watch Episode 195 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

Bradley: I just haven’t installed it yet.

Adam: I love this thing. Hey! Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts episode 195, where we talk about standing desk. If you would like to order your standing desk contact me for … Just kidding.

Bradley: For my [inaudible 00:00:13] link.

Adam: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, that’s funny. I was just working on … I’m setting up a site that’s around like home office stuff. That’s going to be part of it. I am at a desk so I can make the thing go up and down here. Anyways, what I actually want to talk about and not this is that it’s episode 195, when we’re getting closer to that episode 200. This is a reminder for us that we’ve got to come up with something good.

But before we get into it let’s go around and say, “Hi,” real quick. We got the full team here. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Greetings from Barcelona today.

Adam: Nice! Nice. Never been. Heard good things. I know, Hernan, you went there, right? You really liked it, didn’t you?

Hernan: Yeah. It’s a nice city. Very nice city.

Chris: It is.

Adam: Good deal. All right. We won’t talk to Hernan too much because he’s got a cold. I don’t want him to get everyone sick.

Hernan: Thank you, Adam. Thank you, everybody. I’m excited to be here. Woo-hoo.

Adam: Marco, how you doing, man?

Marco: I’m good, man. Really good. Really excited about everything that’s coming down the pipeline.

Adam: Awesome.

Marco: Really looking forward to what’s coming.

Adam: Yeah, definitely. Bradley. How about yourself? How you doing? You don’t have thunderstorms or anything going on?

Bradley: Not today. I’m actually tired as hell today because I was up late last night with Peter Drew for a webinar that we did for him about local GMB … I know we’re going to talk about that a lot today. But yeah I start my day at 4:00 a.m. He’s in Australia. Whenever he wants to do a webinar to his audience it’s like eight or nine p.m. Eastern for my time in Virginia. That’s a long damn day. It was 9:30 last night when I got done. I put in a 16-and-A-half-hour day. I used to do that shit all the time but, to be honest, I haven’t done that kind of stuff in quite some time. I’m a little bit delirious today, so to speak. But I’m here and I’m happy, so let’s go.

Adam: Outstanding. Okay. First off, if you’re new to Semantic Mastery and you’re joining us, thanks for watching. Whether you’re watching us live or whether you’re watching the replay on YouTube, we appreciate you checking it out.

Like I said, if you are new to Semantic Mastery and you haven’t grabbed it yet, then please grab the battle plan. The link will be below. It’s the best place to help you out with your SEO and digital marketing in basically all areas. Even if you’re not new, it’s great to have that repeatable process so that you can do these things over and over again and get good results. However, if you feel like you’re past that and you’re ready to take things up a few notches, then the mastermind is the place for you to be.

If you’ve already got a few clients and you’re wanting to figure out either how to fill that pipeline and grow your revenue as a local digital marketer or as an agency owner, then we want you in the mastermind. I’m going to put that link on there as well.

I’ll let Bradley talk a little bit. We’ve got a few things coming up with the mastermind, right? Did you mention or am I … Okay.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Cool. Yeah. Coming up, I think maybe that’s part of one of the questions. I forgot. Sorry. I’m getting [crosstalk 00:03:07] …

Bradley: Get enough sleep last night, Adam?

Adam: No, no. My wife’s out of town. Now, I was filling that up with too much work so I’ve been doing the longer work days, which is throwing me off and stuff.

Bradley: The only reason why you said that is because she might watch this later. I know what you were doing.

Adam: Yeah, no. She watches all the intros, so I got to … No, I’m just … Hey, Jenny!

But, with the mastermind, if you’re a local digital marketer or you’re looking to grow, it’s not just by yourself or if you’re building an agency, then that’s the place you want to be. Beyond that, I want to talk a little bit about our live event. [pofu 00:03:40] live is coming up. That’s in October. It’s going to be that October 19th, 20th, and 21st. The 19th is the VIP day. If you get a VIP ticket, you can come with us. We’re going to have stuff paid for. We’re going to have an event. We’re going to have some food, some drinks. We’ll have some fun. Then, the real action kicks off on the 20th and the 21st.

We’re limiting it at 25 people. Ticket sales are already on underway. We’ve sold tickets so I just want to put that out there as that is a hard limit. Once we hit 25, it’s over. If you want to get signed up, I’m going to put the link below as well. Hernan, is there anything specific we want to tell people about that?

Hernan: Yeah, definitely. Here’s the thing. The other day we were brainstorming one week, what would be the value and the actual, what we could give you guys that it will blow your mind with value so that you might come to the event and have a lot of value out of it? It came out to be that after almost five years of Semantic Mastery, we have developed a system that will allow you guys to any kind of maximum MMR on any kind of students, step by step, it will allow you guys to go ahead and set up a prospecting system to get new leads and convert them into clients give them results really, really fast and then scale. There’s these three steps and these three pillars, if you would, of the “Semantic Mastery system.”

That’s basically the whole thing of the event. We’re going to show you guys how to get more leads and better leads that you can charge more for your services, for your local marketing agencies, whether you’re doing PPC or SEO, it doesn’t matter. We will show you how to do that, number one.

Number two, we’re going to show you how to give them results fast so that they can stay pretty much longer, that when you get results fast for a client, they tend to stick longer because they pretty much love you guys.

Number three where we show you how to scale, how to actually hire and train and set up the processes and outsource your business so you can repeat the process and you don’t become the bottleneck. That’s going to be pretty cool. We have some pre-training material. We want to help you guys uncover what’s going to be that helpful, that decision of fuck you that you want to be in. I think that’s going to be pretty amazing. I’m super, super stoked about that.

If you’re looking for any or all of those stuff and if you’re thinking you’re lacking that into your business, just come to pofu live. That’s got to be awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah. The idea, just to jump in real quick. I see Marco. He’s itching, too. The idea, guys, is really to fast track your success on how to … It’s going to be locally based. In other words, the training is focused more on local than anything else. It’s just not really in us just because that’s primarily what most of our audience does, guys, and that’s obviously what I do. That’s really what it’s about.

We’re going to try to basically give you a blueprint and a fast track to success on how to prospect and land a client, fulfill the service to get them results rather quickly. Then, how to scale and really remove yourself from the business which is really the idea, to go from self-employed to a true business owner, where you don’t have to be present in managing the day-to-day operations of your business in order for it to still produce revenue for you. That’s really the idea.

I know most of us are self-employed. I still am too to a very big degree but there are processes and stuff that I’ve been developing to help pull myself away from having to do all the work in my agency. That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s really where we’re taking Semantic Mastery. That’s what the pofu live event is going to be about. We would encourage anybody that is really looking to fast track, the ability to not just get clients and perform services, guys, because that’s just you created your own job.

That’s still way better than working for somebody else. I’m not knocking that at all. I’ve done it for years but my point is the idea is do you want true freedom? If you want true freedom, you shouldn’t have to be behind your computer 5, 10, 12 hours a day generating revenue. You should have people in place that are doing it for you because you built the system and the processes that can afford you that opportunity.

That’s really what we’re what we’re trying to do with Semantic Mastery and that’s what the mastermind is all about but pofu live is going to be like a condensed version of it where you’re just going to get hit with the fire hose over the weekend and walk away with an actual plan for your business. That’s part of the reason why we want to keep it very, very small because we couldn’t sit down with 50, 100, 200 people and do this but with 25, we very well can. That’s the idea.

Marco, were you going to add to that?

Marco: Yeah. What I was going to add is that what I’m going to be talking about is it’s fine to have all of these things at your disposal, which is what we make available to mainly our mastermind members. We do have one of products and we have another lower membership but the mastermind is where it’s at. But even then, we’ve had people who can’t overcome their own …

Bradley: Analysis of paralysis, or a paralysis of analysis, right?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: There you go.

Marco: It’s their own preconceived notions of what can and can’t be done, of what they can and can’t do and letting other people dictate what you can and cannot do. Fuck that! Position of fuck you allows you to say, “Fuck that.” You can’t tell me what the fuck I can or cannot do. My discussion topic is going to be centered around that. It’s not just having all of these things available because they can just put you, like you said, in analysis paralysis, right?

Bradley: Right.

Marco: Where you analyze and analyze and analyze and you don’t do shit. That’s not what this is about. You have to be an action taker. We have a ton of those people. We have people who only come to hunt their hangouts, get the information. They go and apply and they make money. I know of at least two people who built up their businesses that way. Action takers, that requires a certain kind of mindset. It’s the only way to get the pofu.

Bradley: Amen. Can we get any questions? What else we got, Adam?

Adam: I was probably not editing a split test page in ClickFunnels just then. Yeah, that was it. I wanted to make sure that we talked to everyone about the live event. I appreciate you guys telling them more about that and what the real reasons are behind it.

I’ll just add on to that there’s the side benefits, the things that we don’t have to do but are huge benefits to you. You get to meet other people like yourself, who are investing in their time and obviously putting their money where their mouth is and saying, “Okay, I want to learn more about this but I also want to be around the other people.”

That’s part of why I like me and Hernan or when I went with Bradley going to ClickFunnels Live. It’s not because I want to shake hands with Russell Brunson. He’s a neat guy but that’s not going to help us make more money or bring in more clients or help me save time but being around those people, getting those ideas. That’s a huge benefit in building that network. I encourage people to do that. If it’s not our event, find something else where you can push yourself but hopefully you’ll come join us.

Bradley: Awesome. All right. We can get into questions now?

Adam: Do it.

Bradley: All right. Let’s do it. I’m going to grab the screen. Oops. Wrong button.

Adam: We got it.

What WordPress Plugin Do You Recommend For Pasting The Schema Code From The SerpSpace Structured Data Generator?

Bradley: All right. Richard is up first. Richard says, “Are you aware or can you recommend a WordPress plug-in it will let me just paste in the schema code that I generated using the search space structured data generator?” I answered this last week because I think you posted this. Yeah. Several days ago I saw it.

Obviously, in case you guys are on aware of this, we recommend stopping using any SEO plug-in other than Jeffrey Smith’s SEO Ultimate plug-in. It’s hands down the best SEO plug-in. By the way, they’re about to release a new version of it they’ve been working on for months. Jeffrey and a couple other guys have been working on it for months. That it’s about to be upgraded. That’s going to be the pro version, which I highly recommend, guys, which is the paid version of it but it’s super affordable unlike Yoast and the Yoast premium upgraded version of it is stupid expensive. This, SEO Ultimate Plus is not. It’s a much, much better plug-in, anyways. It doesn’t bloat like put a bunch of bloated code in like Yoast does.

I’m not going to lie. I’ve still got a lot of websites out there with Yoast on it just because I haven’t taken the time to go through and swap out the plug-ins and update the settings but I’m no longer creating any websites with any other SEO plug-in other than Jeffrey Smith’s ultimate SEO. The reason I bring that up or SEO, excuse me, SEO Ultimate plug-in. The reason I bring that up, Richard, is because it has a code inserter module in the plug-in that you can use to insert code to pages or posts. There’s site-wide code injection. There’s also specific page and/or post code injection. It gives you a lot of options to be able to do exactly what you just asked.

However, if you are adamant about using a different SEO plug-in, which, again I highly encourage you to switch, but if you’re using some other SEO plug-in that doesn’t have that option, then I would recommend using a very simple plug-in. It’s listed right here. I think they change their name recently but, yeah, it’s SOGO Header Footer, add script to individual pages header footer. This is a great plug-in because it gives you some functionality to where you can add code to specific pages or posts, whether you want them in the header or the footer of the page or the post like the HTML header or the footer area. It does a lot of really cool things too.

Again, I always try to limit the amount of plug-ins on my WordPress sites to the bare minimum. If I can use something like the SEO Ultimate plug-in that has that function, I’m going to do that so that I can consolidate two plug-ins into one but, again, if you’re using something else, then I would recommend just using these SOGO Add Script plug-in.

Hernan: I totally agree with you about Jeffery, man. It’s hands down the best. Yoast has become a bloated virus.

Adam: Yeah. It’s stupid.

Hernan: Anytime a plug-in tries to do your SEO for you and it does not do it correctly, it’s time to say, “No thanks, man. I don’t need it,” because I’m supposed to know what I’m doing. Why in the world would you handcuff me in such a way that I can’t do what I know I’m supposed to do, which is why I just said, “No more Yoast ever.”

Bradley: Yeah. In Yoast’s defense, there’s a lot of people out there that aren’t CEOs, guys. They’re not SEO nerds like we are. For somebody that is a civilian or a layman, so to speak, then I assume that some of the things that it suggests are better than nothing at all. Somebody doesn’t have any SEO knowledge is going to follow the guidelines of those types of plug-ins. I, for years, have said, “Don’t follow the guidelines of SEO plug-ins because you’ll over-optimize,” or whatever.

In their defense, I would say that they’re trying to serve a very broad audience with that plug-in but for anybody that pretends or says that they know what they’re doing, you want to be able to have the options to change things and manipulate things that you can’t do with Yoast and Jeffrey Smith’s plug-in allows you to do that. Again, that’s SEO Ultimate and the SEO Ultimate Plus, which is the upgraded or the pro version, which is what I highly recommend. It’s inexpensive and it’s worth it because it gives you a lot of additional functionality, some really cool stuff that you can do with that plug-in.

How Important Is Setting Up An AMP Version Of Your Sites?

All right. Sam’s up. He says, “How important is setting up AMP version of your sites and do you recommend any plug-ins or anything to simplify setting it up?” It is really important, Sam, especially now because, guys, the mobile-first indexing has been rolled out. If you have sites that are in search console, you probably have already gotten notifications from search console or from Google directly about that but they posted it on their blog and that rolled out in July but that’s on the Google webmaster’s blog. If you want to look at what mobile-first indexing is, that’s rolled out now.

I would highly recommend that you start doing that. It’s something I haven’t even really started implementing yet myself but I know that the AMP version, guys, it’s basically what the AMP pages do or the poster or whatever is it creates a cached version of the page in Google servers, so that it can load the page up, least this is my understanding of it. People can tap on it from mobile search. It basically loads instantly the page or the post because it’s not actually going to the website. It’s being served from Google’s servers.

Is that correct, Marco? From Google’s cache?

Marco: That is correct. That’s exactly what’s happening. Now, there’s some … I don’t want to say the word. There’s people out there who say that you’re giving away control of your website to Google. Who gives a fuck? They’re delivering it immediately. You can’t get any faster than immediate. Mobile-first speed is, if not the main, it’s very critical and one of the main signals, shall we say, or maybe ranking factors. I don’t know how to word it but yes. Use AMP. Google is telling you to use it for a reason.

Do we recommend any plug-ins? Oh! We just happen to have our own version of the plug-in. All you have to do is go to the Facebook group and creator’s mastermind and ask to join. You’ll be able to download it. I did a video on how easy it is to install it and how to do some really tricky shit with it to get Google to give you special love. There you go.

Bradley: Guys, this is that post I was just talking about, rolling out mobile-first indexing. It went live in July of 2018. This link right here we talked about the announcement. This talks about using PageSpeed and mobile search rankings. Guys, this is incredibly important. Just think about it, guys. If you go through these articles and just go search Google for mobile-first indexing and you can read through some articles directly from Google but essentially they’re saying that now, even their desktop out, like their primary ranking algorithm now is based upon mobile indexing. Their mobile data centers instead of their desktop and laptops because mobile users have eclipsed for quite some time now mobile and desktop users. Two-thirds of all search traffic now originates from mobile devices. That’s huge.

Again it’s very, very important and speed and making sure your websites are responsive and all that stuff is really, really important now for SEO because, again, the old metrics of optimizing for desktop and laptop are now secondary. Totally go through some of this stuff. Get up to date on it and put it to use.

I’ve been doing a lot of AdWords testing recently again after many months of not doing much of it. I’m seeing just a shit ton of traffic coming from AdWords or from mobile devices now in AdWords even for YouTube stuff, which is incredible. I think that’s crazy. I’m seeing a lot of traffic on my YouTube ads coming from mobile devices now. I’ve even been setting up a lot of PPC like search call-only ads and stuff like that recently because just Mobile’s really much taken over. I highly encourage you guys to check that out. Like Marco said, we do have a plug-in that will convert your pages into AMP or create an AMP version of your pages and posts.

Marco: Pages and posts, yeah. That’s the main thing about our plug-in is that we do both your pages and your posts. They’re converted into AMP.

Which SerpSpace Service Is Best For Rank And Rent Video Model?

Bradley: Yup. Okay. Design2framework is up. He says, “I want to promote my YouTube channel so that each video in there will be on the first page on Google. Number one is not mandatory and YouTube’s search engine results are irrelevant because it’s for local business services.” Okay. “I’m going the rank and rent video model, which one of your search space offers is best for that?”

There’s several. First of all, syndication networks is pretty much standard operating procedure. I would highly recommend with YouTube guys there are no footprint issues. You can get as crazy as you want to with as many networks stacked to your channel or triggered by your YouTube channel as you want. There’s no problem with stacking as many tier one networks as you want or as many multi-tiered networks as you want. It makes no difference, guys. I have found over the years … Now, I haven’t done any specific testing on this in about two years now because I haven’t had to. My test that I did two years ago … Guys, I tested extensively with channels, YouTube syndication to just tier one networks and then also to multi-tiered networks. I ran several tests over the course of many months about where I tried to keep all things equal except for the number or the configuration of the syndication networks.

Again, I would try multiple tier one networks to where the same one channel triggers multiple tier one networks or doing two-tier networks and in stacking multiple two-tier networks onto a channel. What I found was, by doing a bunch of tier one rings, the content, the videos would rank faster like usually quicker than through the two-tier rings but they didn’t stick as long. In other words, they start slipping in rankings sooner than the ones that took longer to rank by being syndicated out through multi-tiered network or many multiple multi-tiered networks but those tend to stick longer. Like, they would stay higher in the search results for longer periods of time before they would start to slip.

The reason I’m telling you that is just because, first and foremost, I recommend if this is your business model, ranking and renting videos, focus on first and foremost building up multiple syndication networks either building them or buying them since you asked about search space, I highly recommend that you just buy them so you can save your time and go out and sell your service instead of creating and building networks.

What I would suggest is build up your syndication networks or buy them, whatever, to your channel to where you have a vast extensive set of networks, then you can boost those networks with link building packages to give them even more power, because that’s really, really important, guys, to have your own network if you’re going to be doing a video rank and rent model. You want your own broadcasting network especially if your theming your networks.

For example, if you’re doing rank and rent, I highly recommend that your channel be niche down to one specific vertical, if possible, or you can go broader but then use playlists so that you’re basically siloing your channel like you would silo a website. We’ve got a product called YouTube Silo Academy. You can just do a Google search if you want to find it, YouTube Silo Academy, that you can pick up, purchase it for, I think, $7 or you can get it in one of our bonus sites if you haven’t. If you’ve bought any products from us at all, it’s in the bonus site. Go through that training. Learn how to silo a YouTube channel because then you can actually use your playlists as ways to trigger syndication to specific networks if you wanted to do it that way. There’s a number of ways that you can configure it but my point in telling you this is the syndication networks from SerpSpace is one of the first things I would recommend for anybody that’s doing a video rank-and-rent business model. Okay. That’s number one.

Number two, anything that you want to give a push that’s already been syndicated out across your networks, that’s what Video Powerhouse is for. It’s great for that. Our Powerhouse networks have been themed and they’ve been used for over two years now or at least I think it’s been about two years. Anyways, the Video Powerhouse network, there’s a lot of power behind that, guys, because they’re aged and themed domains that have their own syndication networks. Then, you can also add secondary Web 2.0 network embeds as well as backlinks, everything else through that order process. If you have videos that need a boost, use the Video Powerhouse.

Lastly, or the next thing I would suggest, is to send traffic to your videos, preferably real traffic. I never recommend sending fake traffic to videos anymore at all or really to much of anything at all. There are a couple options there. The first one we’re going to mention is the MGYB.co which stands for make Google your bitch dot co. That’s our marketplace where you can buy YouTube views. They’re real YouTube views, guys. It’s not spam views like which you would buy from YouTube view services years ago. It’s not that at all. These are real, real people. This is real traffic. It’ll even show is traffic from ads in YouTube analytics. You can get targeted real visitors from our YouTube views service at MGYB.co.

Another option especially for local stuff is you can set up YouTube ads to drive local traffic but based upon your geographic targeting in the Google Ads dashboard. It’s no longer AdWords. It’s now called Google Ads but the Google Ads Dashboard you can set up location targeting so that you can get local IP clicks for your local videos, which is huge for ranking videos, guys. All you need to do is set up and I’ve talked about this many, many times in recent months on Hump Day Hangouts. I’m sure we probably even have this in our YouTube channel but how to use video ads or AdWords for video to rank local videos. If you just go to our channel and search, you’ll see where I’ve done extensive training on that already. That’s a great model as well.

You can use the YouTube View service, guys. Engagement is one of the biggest ranking factors for YouTube videos now. Even in Google search. If you can show engagement by either buying views direct from YouTube or AdWords or Google Ads, excuse me, or by using a service that can provide real traffic, although you don’t get the geographic targeting. You can’t get as specific or as narrow with geographic targeting through our YouTube view service yet but it’s really cost effective.

Marco: Can I stop you? Yes we can.

Bradley: Oh, you can?

Marco: [crosstalk 00:26:41]. We can get city.

Bradley: Oh, wow. Oh, even better, then.

Marco: You can get city and I believe, the last time I checked, we were really close on radius.

Bradley: That’s great. It’s evolving is what you’re saying.

Marco: It’s always evolving. Everything we do always evolves.

Bradley: Okay. I have to get in there and play with it more, then, because I have not in a few weeks.

There you go. Those are my recommendations. As far as what is the best way to sell and close video rank and rent model, that’s a whole nother can of worms. There’s several things. I would say the video email method is one of the best ways to do it although that is time consuming. It works well. We have a product called Video Lead-Gen System that teaches exactly how to do that. Also, we’re doing prospecting and I have been now for months in the Semantic Mastery mastermind, which by the way, I’ve made significant progress in the last few weeks and having really, really good results with the prospecting side of things now. We cover a lot of that in the mastermind. It’d be great to have you come join us there, but if not, you can check out Video Lead-Gen System for the video email process and how to do that. That works really well.

Cold calling, if you’re comfortable doing that, that absolutely works. It’s a pain in the ass. I can’t stand it. I hate it. I would rather have my toenails pulled off one by one than do cold calling and I mean that. I hate it but it does still work but prospecting video emails works well.

Also, again, I can’t get into it here, guys, because we don’t have the time plus this is basically what I’m teaching in the mastermind right now, which is how to set up prospecting funnels and such. If this is your primary business model, I would recommend that you learn how to set up a prospecting funnel because that’ll automate a lot of it for you. It will reduce your manual workload for prospecting. That’s essentially what I’ve been developing for months now in the mastermind is how to set up prospecting funnels and also how to hire virtual assistants to basically operate the prospecting funnel and manage their process, the leads that come in. We’ve, like I said in the last couple weeks, made really a lot of progress that and all this stuff is going to be taught to the mastermind members here and during the month of August and would encourage you to come check it out but yeah.

Again, video emails, probably the best way to do it, in my opinion, if you don’t want to call, if you want to pick up the phone, cold calling will help. It’s very discouraging to get rejected all the time. I can’t stand cold calling but if you can get through enough no’s, you’ll get a yes. That’s one of the quickest ways to get somebody signed up.

One other thing I just want to mention about that is in our MGYB marketplace, we have the video carpet bomb offer thing. I don’t know if we have the prospecting module or prospecting video carpet bomb offer available yet. Marco, is that available yet?

Marco: Is that the smaller offer?

Bradley: Yes.

Marco: I have to check if it was added.

Bradley: Okay. That should be available soon, if it’s not yet, guys. What I want to mention about that is if you have video marketing tools, you can do this on your own but we developed a process or I did using Video Marketing Blitz, which is one Ab’s products. It’s a good product. I trained a VA about a year and a half ago how to do it, how to run that tool. That’s his job is just to run the Video Marketing Blitz tool. We set up this campaign that we call video carpet bomb. Randy James actually came up with the name but we developed it out a little bit together.

One of the things that I’ve been doing recently is whenever we have a lead come in to our pipeline, so through our prospecting funnels essentially a lead comes in. Now, we’ve got an inbound lead. Once the contact has been made by our sales person to that contact and an initial call has been made and they literally spoke on the phone, then what we do is what they schedule for the next call because that first call is what we call a discovery call so they can just get to know the business owner a little bit, ask them some questions about their business, blah, blah, blah. Then, we always set the next appointment.

What happens is as soon as Roberto, my salesman, gets off the call with that prospect, he sends the company data, the business information over to our VA that runs video carpet bomb process for us, who takes just a PLR video, a local lead gen-type PLR video. There’s many sources you can get those made or you can buy already done for you videos. He takes a video and superimposes or does a text overlay with that prospect’s phone number and then also obviously optimize the description with the call to action to them and all that. Then, we do a 10- or a 15-mile radius from where their business is located and we target their primary keywords plus the locations, all within that 10- or 15-mile radius. What we do is maybe wind up like we’ll try to rank 60 videos.

Out of those 60 videos because I have a VA that does this, guys. The VA gets paid $4 an hour roughly. It might take him an hour to run a small campaign like this. It cost me essentially $4 to where now, when that second call occurs with that prospect, my salesman says, “Hey, look. By the way, we want to show you how serious we are about earning your business.”

You could do this with a lead gen service provider that you’re trying to sell somebody to lead like once you’re trying to get them to buy leads from you or ranked and rent. If you’re going to rent out videos. My point is, you could actually optimize a video for their brand, rank it for a bunch of keywords. Then, show them. “Look. This is how serious I am.” I don’t recommend you doing that if you’re manually doing the work because it does take a lot of time but that’s why, again, it’s so important about outsourcing, guys. This is what we’re trying to convey to you guys is how to delegate this work.

I got a VA I pay $4 essentially because it takes him an hour. Out of, say, sixty attempted keywords to rank, we end up ranking 15 or 20 of them or even if it’s 10, who cares? My point is, this is something we do for free to show the prospect during that second call, we can show them live results with videos ranked for their services, for their keywords, with their contact information on it. We use that as a trust-building process. We’d say to them, this is part of our script, “We want show you how serious we are about earning your trust and earning your business, so this is what we did for you and the last weeks since our previous call.” We present them with the data that shows them, “Hey, look. We ranked this video for 14 different keywords for your product and the services that you offer in your service area.”

What happens is we get people that are like, “Wow! Nobody’s ever taken the time to do something like that on a pitch call,” which is what it is. We’re pitching them on for our services. That’s something that we’re going to have available inside of MGYB.co, our marketplace, so that people can go in and for $20 or $25, I don’t know what the final price is going to be yet, they can buy it. It’ll get done and sent back to them with, I think what we’re trying to do is a three-day turnaround time. But if you’ve got your own tools that you can do it or hire somebody in-house to do it for you, hire a virtual assistant to do it for you.

I know I spent a lot of time on that, guys, but I think that was a great question and, again, for somebody just getting started with the rank-and-rent business model, whether it’s videos or maps listings or whatever, guys, I know because that’s how I got started. I know there’s a big learning curve on like how to set up your business in a way that you can scale it. It’s very difficult to do. That’s why I’m trying to share what I’ve learned over the years that you guys can get results faster, scale your business even faster. It’s a great question, though, by the way.

Okay. MJ’s up. He says, “Hey, guys. Great program. Love the information you share. I have a question about image optimization and Google My Business. Is it possible to optimize images uploaded to GMB by clients? I have a rental client who has several images uploaded by their customers. Can they be optimized and what can be done? Thanks, guys.”

No, because they have to be optimized before they’re uploaded. Essentially you could go into GMB and download them and then optimize them and upload them again but then you would be uploading them as the business owner. They would be duplicate photos anyway, so that really doesn’t make any sense but the important thing is if your business or your client’s business has customers that’s uploading photos from their mobile devices then they’re getting a lot of the relevant signals that you want anyways because most phones have the GPS enabled. When customers take photos with their phone and then upload them, you’ve got all that geo location, all that geo tag, the metadata information, the Exif data that is already appended to the file, so that you’re already sending really good signals.

I wouldn’t worry about trying to optimize photos that are uploaded by customers. That’s just a blessing that they’ve got customers that are uploading photos to their GMB anyways. I haven’t really found any of my clients where that’s occurred.

Marco, what do you have to say about that?

Marco: That’s gold. Don’t touch it. Don’t touch it. Leave it alone. Google got the message. Clients like the business enough to upload images unless they’re really crappy images of a complaint or whatever, of garbage. Something like that where you don’t want to think you’d get rid of it but you couldn’t because it was the customer who uploaded. It’s a double-edged sword. You got to walk that fine line but yeah. What you could do is educate more clients on what they need to do, which is actually have the GPS turned on, so that Google can get the message that they’re at the location.

Here’s the thing. Google knows so much right now that I’ve taken images at the location with the GPS turned off, with geolocation turned off. I’ve come home and gone to upload them. Google knew where they were taken. That’s how sophisticated they’ve gotten. No. Man, don’t touch those. That’s gold. Customers or clients uploading images into the GMB. As long as they’re great images, just leave it.

Bradley: That’s right.

Do MasterMind Members Have Access To Trello Boards Containing The Business Processes Of Semantic Mastery?

Dan’s up. Dan says, “Hey, gents. I have a question regarding the mastermind Trello boards for processes you use in your business. Are these accessible to mastermind members? If so, I’m in. If not, how can I talk you into getting those?” To be honest, no. They’re not available, Dan. When we first launched, I think it was Syndication Academy — Originally it was called IFTTT SEO Academy — we tried that route because, remember, I trained on my virtual assistants on the processes of how to build networks which you guys know is an intricate process but I’d built out all the process docs and then converted them all into Trello boards specifically so that it would make it so much easier to train builders at scale.

That was an enormous amount of work, guys. It took me four months of almost two hours a day five days a week, I’m not kidding, to do that. It was an enormous amount of work but we have our SerpSpace building team, our builder team. Some of those boaters have been with me for five years now. We’ve got a team that will have all been trained from that exact same process. In fact, that’s what the whole training was developed around, the Syndication Academy training from the processes that I developed for my virtual assistants.

The reason I mention that is because when we first launched IFTTT SEO Academy, at the time, one of the upgrades was the outsourcing or maybe that was mastermind. I don’t remember but we had what we called an outsourcer training portal, which was where I had all my Trello boards that I gave access to the members. I think that was mastermind not IFTTT SEO Academy. It was an upgrade.

But, yeah, what happened was the problem was a couple things. Number one anytime a board had to be edited, first of all, people would come in and I was supposed to add them. It’s very difficult to add people to boards because if you add them to the board then they can literally change the boards. At least several years ago when we did this, there was a problem with people would come in and instead of making a copy of the board and importing it into their own account and then saving a template copy. So, making a copy of one that you would keep as a template and then using the others, people would just start making changes and actually using the public board that they were supposed to just make a copy of. It created a ton of work for me to have to keep going back in and rearranging the board, putting it back to its original state. It’s a pain in the ass. “Fine,” I said. “That’s enough. I’m done. I’m sorry, guys. You guys can’t follow instructions so I’m no longer going to give that.” We discontinued that.

The other part of this, though, besides the fact that, Dan, I’m sure you could follow instructions, so that might not be an issue, but the other part of that is what I found is if I’m training virtual assistants for a very specific task and that’s going to be their main job duty or something that they’re going to repeat over and over and over again, something that doesn’t change often. Then, I will create Trello boards for that but I have actually reverted most of my process documentation now back to just Google Drive, Google Docs. The reason why is because they’re much more easy, at least for my business. I don’t know about my partners but for me most of my process docs are living, breathing documents that are constantly being edited and refined. It’s much more work to do that in Trello boards than it was to just keep a processed doc in Google Doc form that I can go in and edit or my virtual assistants might, my employees, my workers can go in and make comments on and all that stuff.

I’ve really reverted back to just using YouTube for training videos, screencast videos. I upload to YouTube and then I create process docs in Google Docs where I always start. Step one is always training video. I drop the URL. Then, it’s the step-by-step process in outline format in Google Docs. I’ve actually stopped using Trello, guys, unless, like I said, it’s for something very specific, in which case that isn’t going to change very often but the processes that I’ve been developing for prospecting. For example, I built my team now that’s handling the prospecting and we’ve got the sales and we’ve got people scraping lists and all that. All of that is all now held in Drive because we’re constantly finding ways to make the process more efficient. It just takes too much time to change it all out in Trello. It’s easier to edit inside of Drive.

That said, Dan, yes in the mastermind I’ve been sharing a lot of my processes as far as the prospecting module and stuff like that. If there’s something specific that you would want, you’d have to contact one of us or contact us at support or if you’re in the mastermind, you could just post about it in the group. We can certainly potentially give you process talks about stuff but I’m not going to go out and create process docs for stuff that we do that hasn’t already been created just to share. A lot of the stuff that we do have or that I have from my own business, it’s proprietary, in that it’s stuff that are specific to my business that really wouldn’t make sense to share anyway. I would have to make the process docs from my own business more generic for them to be able to fit for them to be usable for a lot of you.

That’s again, why I said it’s … In my opinion, Dan, the best thing to do is which I know that you said in your comment right here is that you’re running into trouble. You’re having a hard time keeping ahead of your virtual assistants. I know. It’s a pain in the ass, man, but that’s why [crosstalk 00:42:55] …

Adam: I think you’ve talked about the process stuff. Dan, if you join the mastermind, like you said, we’re happy to talk you through. There’s a bunch of different ways to do this but I actually had this exact question from a different angle come from a mastermind I’m in. They said I’m really scared about making my first couple of hires. I think that’s a common pain point because a lot of people, it’s good. By all means, hire someone because a lot of this is trial by fire but I think, Dan, one of the problems here is it sounds like you’ve got the problem. You’ve got the person but the in between hasn’t been bridged and so you’re feeling that pain, where beforehand, generally if you want … You haven’t built the process docs before you got the person. Now, you’re realizing that you have to run your business, provide the services, and train someone and do the processes.

The lesson to learn here that I learned, too, working with one of my first VAs was knowing ahead of time what it is you want them to do and starting to lay that out either hiring them with the clear goal that they’re going to write their own process docs off of videos or something or that you’re going to lay out the process for them ahead of time or something in between, because, yeah, it’s … What are you saying here? You’re struggling to put together boards while keeping your current customers serviced. Definitely, so maybe you work out something in between. If you have someone who can write decent English then maybe you have them. You say, “Hey, look. I’m going to pay you to watch the videos and as you do it, write down the list.” Then, you can go through and maybe edit that and make it nicer.

Bradley: Yep. That’s great advice. That’s what we teach in Outsource Kingpin is that you can hire somebody to create the process docs for you, as long as you record the training video. That’s something you can outsource the process docs is my point, guys. That’s a great way to do it because that’s where … I still do a lot of my own process docs just because typically it’s something comes up that we need a process for, so I just go ahead and draft the process doc myself as I’m going through the steps to do whatever needs to be done. That way it’s done. I do it one time. That’s the last damn time I have to do it, because then I immediately just hand it off to a VA.

But what I would also suggest, Dan, is to get ahead of this is try to find tasks that are repetitive in your business, create process docs for those first so that you can reduce your workload. The sooner you can unload repetitive tasks that you do to your VAs, then that’s going to free up that time that you have those tasks that you have to do over and over and over again. It’s going to free that time up to allow you to develop even more process docs for maybe some more of the complex processes or functions of your business.

Again, try to get all the menial stuff or the repetitive tasks outsourced first, delegated first so that you can work on the more complex process docs for the higher level stuff.

But you guys, honestly, guys. One of the biggest parts … Remember, if you’re trying to move from being self-employed to business owner, these are the kinds of things you have to do but the idea is yeah, it’s a lot of work. For example syndication networks, guys. Like I said, it took me four months to create the process docs, the entire process to train virtual assistants how to do it but it took me four months. It’s been like five years since I’ve had to build a … I’ve built a few syndication networks since then but it’s really been five years since I’ve had to create or build a syndication network myself because I’ve trained an army of builders to do it for me, if that makes sense, all from four months worth of work that I put in several years … I don’t have it’s been five years but three or four years ago, if that makes sense.

Again, you put the work in now and it’s going to free you up in the future, so you don’t have to do that shit anymore.

Marco: Yeah, great. If I can real quick add that the skill sets and the abilities that you have right now and that have taken you to where you’re at right now, Dan, will not take you from where you’re at to where you want to be. There’s a lot of re-education, there’s a lot of skill set that you need to learn, that all of us needed to learn like how to set up processes, how to coach teams, how to manage teams and whatnot that can take you to the next level.

That’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about pofu life because we’re sharing with you the skill set that you need to have in order to run a team because setting our processes, it’s a skill set that you need to learn. It was ranking websites at some point or ranking medias at some other point but then it becomes as managing people and sending out processes. That’s interesting to learn as well.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s a great question, Dan.

How Do You Use GMB Posts To Push Link To The Money Site And Tier 1 Syndication Network?

Ivan’s up. He says, “I have a GMB site, a dot-com site and a tier one syndication network. What’s the best use of the GMB post? Is it good idea to push links to your links in your tier one properties or just link to your dot com site?”

Link to everything, Ivan. Link to all your branded properties. My VA’s, they’ve just got to do the GMB post for us. They just have a spreadsheet with all the company, the contact, the client information for whatever business they’re working on. In there is a list of target URLs and also a list of keywords. Essentially, they just cycle through. Let’s say I’ve got 15 target URLs, which includes citations, obviously the money site, the Google Maps, URL, the share URL. There’s tier one syndication properties. Like I said, citations, press release organization pages. All those kind of things, we just put them in the target URL column. Then, the VAs, whenever they’re doing their GMB post, they just go right on down and just, post one gets link number one, post two gets link number two. They just go on down and cycle through that.

The idea here is just to continually be linking to your tier one properties. It helps to validate the entity, strengthen the brand. Over time, you’re just going to start seeing everything start rising up. Link to everything, all your tier one branded properties. Anything that’s really tier one. Guys, that’s what you can be linking to. Direct to your money site, direct your maps listings, your GMB website, if you have it, which you should. By the way, you can also link to other GMB posts. That’s like daisy-chaining. I can’t talk more about that you have to come to Local GMB Pro if you want to learn more about that stuff.

Is It Acceptable Practice to Have the Same Street Address in Multiple GMB Listings?

R. Bacon! What’s up, buddy? He says, “Hey, guys. Is it acceptable practice to have the same street address in multiple GMB listings? There is a realtor group that has four listings in GMB maps all with the exact same street address and two showing up in the three pack. I was thinking Google was not okay with that.”

They’re not supposed to be but real estate offices have been one of those types that I’ve seen that for years. That’s been an issue for years because technically the broker or the real estate company, let’s say Long & Foster or Century 21 is supposed to have a maps listing but each individual realtor, real estate agent within that office could potentially have their own maps listing with the same address. It’s supposed to not be that way but real estate companies have been doing that for many, many years. It’s something that’s pretty common. Yeah, again, it’s not supposed to be that way but it’s common. It’s been that way for years. I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon.

Any Concerns Of Using Linux Operating System For SEO?

He says, “On another topic, any concerns on using Linux operating system on your computer you use for SEO?”

I don’t know. I had Linux in my laptop when I first started. I had two operating systems. Whenever I opened my laptop, I would choose whether I wanted to go into Linux or Windows. That’s when I first started my business but about two years later, I switched to just Windows only. I haven’t even been on Linux. I don’t see why it would be any problem. It’s just an operating system. It’s just how you access software.

Marco: Yeah. I would say the same. In any case, if you’re using an Android phone, you’re using Linux. If you’re using …

Bradley: [inaudible 00:50:45] that.

Marco: Yeah. Chromebook, yeah. It’s all based on Linux. If you’re using a Chromebook to do SEO, for example, you’re using Linux. Yeah. At the end of the day, it’s all a matter of tracking and IPs and whatnot. It’s the same stuff.

Is There Any Drawback Of Changing A GMB Address To Not Showing It On The Page?

Bradley: Yup. Okay. Let’s roll through the next few. Nigel’s up. What’s up, buddy? He says, “Hey. Good day, gents. Thank you for all you do. I have a GMB service area business currently set up with address showing and active and have also been using the verified address in posts. Is there any drawback to changing it to not showing using address anymore and can you quickly explain how?”

Look, I try to follow what Google’s recommendations are. If you have a service area business where customers do not come to the location, you’re supposed to uncheck that box in the info section of the Google Maps or Google My Business info tab when you’re editing the info. If you go into the address, click the pencil link icon and then you go into the address where the street address is shown and such. Then, if it’s service area business, you start adding in the cities and/or zip codes or whatever to define the service area. Then, there’s that check box underneath that that says, “Your address will be hidden if this box is unchecked,” or not checked.

If you read what the Google’s recommended guidelines are is that if the customers never come to the business location. Let’s say a plumber runs a business from his home, the plumber’s always going to the customer location and the customers don’t ever come to the plumber’s home because he’s not selling plumbing fixtures there, if that makes sense. It’s not like a storefront. In that case, you’re supposed to uncheck that box. In other words, hide the street address. I’ve always set up all my business listings that way or my client’s listings that way because that’s what Google’s suggest to do.

However, I know that other people have said, “Well, if you leave the box checked and it shows the address you’ll rank better.” I think that really depends on where the business is physically located or in relation to the centroid of the city, of the location. Obviously, the closer you are to the centroid of that location that your business is physically located in, the better … Typically, one of the ranking signals for maps ranking has been proximity to city center. The closer the physical address was, typically the better it would rank.

I know that, for some service area businesses, people would still leave the address shown if it was close to the city center because it tended to rank better. However, it’s not something I’ve tested because I never wanted to … A lot of my addresses, guys, are spammed addresses. They’re PO boxes. I don’t want other people complaining about it. I typically hide the addresses. If you’re already doing well, here’s what you could do. You could always uncheck the box if that is the proper way that it should be. You could uncheck the box to hide the address and monitor rankings. See your results. If it drops, if you slip in from out of the three pack or whatever, then switch it back. It’s just a matter of checking or unchecking a box. That’s what I would suggest doing but I haven’t really tested that. I know other people have said, “Showing the address versus not showing it can sometimes create better results,” but I typically don’t do that because I don’t want an address showing.

Have You Had Any Success Using The Message Functionality Of GMB Posts?

“Anyone using or having success with message functionality in GMB posts?” Yeah. Some of my clients, they … It’s not often. They don’t get messaged nearly as much as they get phone calls or link clicks to their websites but some messages do come through. It’s not something I’ve seen a lot of activity in but some people do that.

Think about that, guys. Again, that’s Google trying to keep people on the Google platform. They’re giving people the ability to do a Google search, locate a business, and actually, text message them directly from Google so they never leave the platform. That’s what GMB Pro is all about. It’s about keeping the Google users on the Google platform. That’s why Google is rewarding all of us who are using all of the Google My Business services and posting and staying active in that ecosystem because we’re giving Google exactly what it wants by keeping Google users in the Google environment.

How Long Should You Wait Before Adding RYS To An Optimized GMB?

Quit This House says, “Good day, gentlemen. After optimizing GMB, should we wait to add RYS and start the once per month for four months press release or ramp both up right away?” That’s up to you. You don’t need to wait. After optimizing GMB, you can do an RYS stack immediately. You can start hitting it with press releases immediately. You don’t have to do just one per month.

Rob, he was doing four per week. I tend to do mine about once every two weeks. That’s the frequency I like. It tends to work really, really well. Again, 12 out of 15 properties that I applied this method to, I was able to rank in the three pack within six press releases or less doing one every two weeks. I would recommend increasing your frequency on press releases if you want quicker results. Also, there’s no reason to wait on a drive stack, man. It’s GMB stuff. Just fire away.

Will You Be Offering Done For You Local GMB Pro Services Anytime In The Near Future?

All right. We’re going to try to get through a couple more real quick, guys. Got to wrap it up. Click Star says, “Hey, guys, I have a question regarding your Local GMB Pro offerings. Will you be offering done-for-you Local GMB Pro services anytime in the near future? If so, how long before this is available and how much do you feel the services will cost?

Marco, how soon until we open that up?

Marco: She’s ready to go. We’re discussing prices.

Bradley: Okay. I’d say within a week, two weeks tops?

Marco: Yeah, yeah. She’s already working. I gave her one of my best clients to work on. Guys, I never do that. I never train anyone on a client but I said, “If this is going to work, if I’m going to put her to work on other people’s GMBs, then she should be working on something that I care about.” I did. I gave it to her. She’s doing a fantastic job. You saw the video she did, right?

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: The walkthrough?

Bradley: Yup.

Marco: You know the type of work that she can do. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t want to put a hard date on it because we won’t meet until Tuesday to decide on what we’re going to charge for it.

Bradley: Let’s say within two weeks, roughly.

Marco: Yeah. Two to three weeks.

Bradley: Okay. We don’t know the pricing just yet but what we’re likely going to have is tiered pricing depending on the posting frequency, correct?

Marco: Correct and whether you’re going to provide images …

Bradley: Images or not.

Marco: … in video or if we have to provide them, which we can. Yeah, so it depends on just how much work she has to do. Everything has a cost because it takes more time to do.

Bradley: That’s right. Within two to three weeks. You heard it here, guys. You can hold up hold our feet to the fire. We’ll get it done. I know we’re really going to be pushing GMB Pro stuff, guys, because it works so damn well, guys. We want you guys to be using it because it works. You can get your clients results almost overnight. It doesn’t require you to do any damn work. You just literally resell the service to your clients and make money, guys. It will work. We’re going to be pushing the shit out of this service and growing that done-for-you GMB Pro VA team, virtual assistant team, to be able to provide this at scale. I’d say, “Hold off. Wait,” because when it comes, it’s going to be good.

All right. I got time for just a couple more. It looks like we’re almost done anyway. If anybody has to bounce that hasn’t already, please feel free.

What Is Your Opinion On Cora After A Year Of Using It?

Jonathan says, “I thank God for you, guys.” Why, I will plus one that. Awesome, Jonathan. He says, “Came across an email from a year ago that I had not read on Cora. What is your opinion on Cora a year later? Again, many thanks.” I rank number one in YouTube because of you all. No, you ranked number one on YouTube because of what you did. All you did was follow instructions that we provided but you had to take action. You ranked number one in YouTube because of what you did.

All right. As far as Cora, yeah. It’s awesome. Cora’s great, guys. It’s freaking awesome. By the way we can run Cora reports for people. Do we have that available yet, by the way, in MGYB?

Marco: Yes, we do.

Bradley: All right. Good question, then, Jonathan, because you can go buy Cora or subscribe to Cora, if you’d like. We have an offer that I think is like 25% off or 30% off with this stated pricing is, anyways, if you go through our link. It’s rather expensive but, Ted, who is the developer of it, he’s perfectly cool with subscribing for a month. Then, running all the reports that you need. Let’s say you run an agency. You got 15 or 20 clients. You go run reports for all 15 or 20 clients and then cancel your subscription. Then, three or four months later, after you’ve tuned the sites based upon the data that the Cora report shows, you can go back and subscribe again for a month and run all the reports to see how much progress you’ve made. That’s perfectly fine with Ted. He even announced that on the webinar, which is rare because a lot of times people aren’t cool with that kind of stuff. He was.

You can do that or you can buy Cora reports from us because we provide that now. We have access to Cora and one of our virtual assistants will run the report. You can buy it from us, from MGYB.co. It’s a great product, guys. There’s no doubt. Cora reports give you so much data, it’s ridiculous and it gives you the points on which you can tune your on-page stuff mainly. You can do off-page stuff, too, but I would always start with on-page factors that the Cora report shows. It’s a great product.

Do You Still Suggest Using Tubesift For YouTube?

Okay. We’re almost done. I think we just got a couple. Dan says, “Do you still suggest using TubeSift or simply using placements for YouTube channels and YouTube videos within the AdWords platform okay now?” No, I still absolutely use TubeSift for placements, Dan. I’ve been doing a lot of YouTube ad stuff recently. I’m actually testing YouTube ads right now for prospecting for generating clients for our agencies. Also, I’m doing remarketing stuff.

Just keep in mind, guys, with remarketing and YouTube, you have to have a thousand people on the remarketing list. For the GDN, Google Display Network, you only need to have a hundred people on the remarketing list. Anyways, the reason I brought that up is because I’ve been doing a lot of remarketing stuff lately, too, and I’m still trying to build the pixel up with a thousand people for the YouTube remarketing.

But that said, yeah, I still absolutely use TubeSift. It’s a great tool. Not only that but I might even still have … No, I don’t have it open up still but I’ve been using it a lot lately. Ted Chen is behind that. He’s the developer behind it. It’s Justin’s product but Ted Chen’s the developer. It’s same developer from Power Suggest Pro, our favorite keyword tool of all time, as well as Leads Recon. It’s all the same developer, Ted. He’s a great guy, a great developer. It’s a great tool. They’ve actually added some really cool things in the TubeSift recently.

By the way, guys, we should drop the link for that if we have it because it is a great tool. They’ve added several things to it recently. Their keyword research is very similar to Power Suggest Pro. It’s the same developer, so it’s great for that. Also, he has a banner designer now built into the TubeSift tool, which is great if you’re doing in-stream ads. You know that there’s a companion banner that shows up in the top right corner of the YouTube watch page. Now, you can create those companion banners right inside TubeSift. They’re 300 pixels wide by 60 pixels tall. It’s great. Super simple to do. Placements are absolutely great. However, for running like local YouTube ad stuff, I just use geographic targeting and in-market audiences or life event audiences, if possible because in-market audiences and life event audiences, it’s called audience targeting. Those work really, really well for generating …

Remember, Google’s storing data on those people, guys. That’s how it knows that it’s in market for a particular product or service or has recently moved or like a life event or gotten married or something like that. Google knows because Google has all that data on those individuals.

If you can select an in-market audience or a life event audience with a category within those audiences that are close to what you’re promoting your product or service and then you select the proper geographic targeting, think about how highly valuable those clicks are to that ad or to that video because Google knows it’s a local IP so it’s 100% geographically relevant. It also knows that the visitor, the clicker, the person or the viewer of the video, whether they click or not, it depends, but the viewer of that video has also been in market or is completely relevant to the content of that video as well. That view is weighted a hell of a lot more than a view from somebody outside of a geographic area or that has no browsing history or profile history of looking for content related around that, if that makes sense.

Again, guys, is about engagement. TubeSift is great because it can help you to create great placement lists and also do keyword research and just a ton of stuff that it does. It’s a great tool.

Marco: By the way while we’ve been talking, the video carpet bomb offer has been added to MGYB.co, so we have both offers, the higher-priced model and the lower-priced model.

Bradley: Okay. Thanks, by the way, Marco.

Scott, I was reading your question. He says, “Showing the address in Google Maps listing is irrelevant for service businesses. I know, because my site ranks number one with no address showing.”

Yeah, Scott. I’ve got literally dozens of map listings ranking number one with no street address showing. Yeah, you can absolutely rank without street address showing. All I’m saying is that what I was mentioning earlier was that I know some people have said that in competitive areas, if they choose to hide their address, their rankings aren’t as good as if they show their address, even for service area businesses.

Again, guys, this just what I’ve heard. I’m not telling anybody to do that I prefer to do what it says to do, which is if customers don’t come your location, don’t show your street address. That’s how I’ve managed all of my listings and I have no problem ranking them. Again, it’s up to you whether you want to do that or not. Scott, I appreciate that. I agree with you.

He says also, “If you don’t have a physical location where you can meet with customers, your Google reviews will suffer. People don’t like it when they cannot find a business location.” That’s true if you have a storefront where people come to the business but again with like plumbers and a service area business, for example, if they never come to the business, that doesn’t mean that they won’t leave reviews. Again, I’ve got dozens of sites out there with lots of reviews where the street address isn’t shown because there’s no reason for it to be shown. People will never come to the business yet my reviews still show. Does that make sense? That really is irrelevant in my opinion because people will still leave reviews.

You’re right. If it’s a storefront and the address is hidden, that’s just stupid. People will leave bad reviews because they can’t find your damn business because you hid the address.

“Can we get a link for Cora?” Did somebody find that link for Cora, by the way?

Marco: Yeah. Actually, he says I gave him the link to MGYB.com, but he says it’s not in there. I’m going to talk to Caesar and see it’s probably already added but it’s not live.

Bradley: Okay. Sorry. We’ll get that worked out. Okay. We’ll get that worked out, Craig. If you want the actual link to the Cora offer itself, we have it. We have the webinar that we did with Ted and all that. It’s on our site. I’ll grab the link and I’ll drop it on the page. If you want to go through that, that’s perfectly fine, too. If you just want to buy the done for you Cora reports, Marco will get that squared away. He’ll tag you in the mastermind or something.

All right, guys, I’m going to wrap it up. We’re a little bit over. Thanks everybody for hanging out. No mastermind tomorrow. We’ll see everybody next week.

Marco: Yeah.

Adam: Yup.

Bradley: Okay, guys. Thanks, everybody.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Adam: Bye.

Marco: Goodbye.

Bradley: See …

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 195 published first on your-t1-blog-url

[angelagiles18]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 195

Click on the video above to watch Episode 195 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

Bradley: I just haven’t installed it yet.

Adam: I love this thing. Hey! Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts episode 195, where we talk about standing desk. If you would like to order your standing desk contact me for … Just kidding.

Bradley: For my [inaudible 00:00:13] link.

Adam: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, that’s funny. I was just working on … I’m setting up a site that’s around like home office stuff. That’s going to be part of it. I am at a desk so I can make the thing go up and down here. Anyways, what I actually want to talk about and not this is that it’s episode 195, when we’re getting closer to that episode 200. This is a reminder for us that we’ve got to come up with something good.

But before we get into it let’s go around and say, “Hi,” real quick. We got the full team here. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Greetings from Barcelona today.

Adam: Nice! Nice. Never been. Heard good things. I know, Hernan, you went there, right? You really liked it, didn’t you?

Hernan: Yeah. It’s a nice city. Very nice city.

Chris: It is.

Adam: Good deal. All right. We won’t talk to Hernan too much because he’s got a cold. I don’t want him to get everyone sick.

Hernan: Thank you, Adam. Thank you, everybody. I’m excited to be here. Woo-hoo.

Adam: Marco, how you doing, man?

Marco: I’m good, man. Really good. Really excited about everything that’s coming down the pipeline.

Adam: Awesome.

Marco: Really looking forward to what’s coming.

Adam: Yeah, definitely. Bradley. How about yourself? How you doing? You don’t have thunderstorms or anything going on?

Bradley: Not today. I’m actually tired as hell today because I was up late last night with Peter Drew for a webinar that we did for him about local GMB … I know we’re going to talk about that a lot today. But yeah I start my day at 4:00 a.m. He’s in Australia. Whenever he wants to do a webinar to his audience it’s like eight or nine p.m. Eastern for my time in Virginia. That’s a long damn day. It was 9:30 last night when I got done. I put in a 16-and-A-half-hour day. I used to do that shit all the time but, to be honest, I haven’t done that kind of stuff in quite some time. I’m a little bit delirious today, so to speak. But I’m here and I’m happy, so let’s go.

Adam: Outstanding. Okay. First off, if you’re new to Semantic Mastery and you’re joining us, thanks for watching. Whether you’re watching us live or whether you’re watching the replay on YouTube, we appreciate you checking it out.

Like I said, if you are new to Semantic Mastery and you haven’t grabbed it yet, then please grab the battle plan. The link will be below. It’s the best place to help you out with your SEO and digital marketing in basically all areas. Even if you’re not new, it’s great to have that repeatable process so that you can do these things over and over again and get good results. However, if you feel like you’re past that and you’re ready to take things up a few notches, then the mastermind is the place for you to be.

If you’ve already got a few clients and you’re wanting to figure out either how to fill that pipeline and grow your revenue as a local digital marketer or as an agency owner, then we want you in the mastermind. I’m going to put that link on there as well.

I’ll let Bradley talk a little bit. We’ve got a few things coming up with the mastermind, right? Did you mention or am I … Okay.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Cool. Yeah. Coming up, I think maybe that’s part of one of the questions. I forgot. Sorry. I’m getting [crosstalk 00:03:07] …

Bradley: Get enough sleep last night, Adam?

Adam: No, no. My wife’s out of town. Now, I was filling that up with too much work so I’ve been doing the longer work days, which is throwing me off and stuff.

Bradley: The only reason why you said that is because she might watch this later. I know what you were doing.

Adam: Yeah, no. She watches all the intros, so I got to … No, I’m just … Hey, Jenny!

But, with the mastermind, if you’re a local digital marketer or you’re looking to grow, it’s not just by yourself or if you’re building an agency, then that’s the place you want to be. Beyond that, I want to talk a little bit about our live event. [pofu 00:03:40] live is coming up. That’s in October. It’s going to be that October 19th, 20th, and 21st. The 19th is the VIP day. If you get a VIP ticket, you can come with us. We’re going to have stuff paid for. We’re going to have an event. We’re going to have some food, some drinks. We’ll have some fun. Then, the real action kicks off on the 20th and the 21st.

We’re limiting it at 25 people. Ticket sales are already on underway. We’ve sold tickets so I just want to put that out there as that is a hard limit. Once we hit 25, it’s over. If you want to get signed up, I’m going to put the link below as well. Hernan, is there anything specific we want to tell people about that?

Hernan: Yeah, definitely. Here’s the thing. The other day we were brainstorming one week, what would be the value and the actual, what we could give you guys that it will blow your mind with value so that you might come to the event and have a lot of value out of it? It came out to be that after almost five years of Semantic Mastery, we have developed a system that will allow you guys to any kind of maximum MMR on any kind of students, step by step, it will allow you guys to go ahead and set up a prospecting system to get new leads and convert them into clients give them results really, really fast and then scale. There’s these three steps and these three pillars, if you would, of the “Semantic Mastery system.”

That’s basically the whole thing of the event. We’re going to show you guys how to get more leads and better leads that you can charge more for your services, for your local marketing agencies, whether you’re doing PPC or SEO, it doesn’t matter. We will show you how to do that, number one.

Number two, we’re going to show you how to give them results fast so that they can stay pretty much longer, that when you get results fast for a client, they tend to stick longer because they pretty much love you guys.

Number three where we show you how to scale, how to actually hire and train and set up the processes and outsource your business so you can repeat the process and you don’t become the bottleneck. That’s going to be pretty cool. We have some pre-training material. We want to help you guys uncover what’s going to be that helpful, that decision of fuck you that you want to be in. I think that’s going to be pretty amazing. I’m super, super stoked about that.

If you’re looking for any or all of those stuff and if you’re thinking you’re lacking that into your business, just come to pofu live. That’s got to be awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah. The idea, just to jump in real quick. I see Marco. He’s itching, too. The idea, guys, is really to fast track your success on how to … It’s going to be locally based. In other words, the training is focused more on local than anything else. It’s just not really in us just because that’s primarily what most of our audience does, guys, and that’s obviously what I do. That’s really what it’s about.

We’re going to try to basically give you a blueprint and a fast track to success on how to prospect and land a client, fulfill the service to get them results rather quickly. Then, how to scale and really remove yourself from the business which is really the idea, to go from self-employed to a true business owner, where you don’t have to be present in managing the day-to-day operations of your business in order for it to still produce revenue for you. That’s really the idea.

I know most of us are self-employed. I still am too to a very big degree but there are processes and stuff that I’ve been developing to help pull myself away from having to do all the work in my agency. That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s really where we’re taking Semantic Mastery. That’s what the pofu live event is going to be about. We would encourage anybody that is really looking to fast track, the ability to not just get clients and perform services, guys, because that’s just you created your own job.

That’s still way better than working for somebody else. I’m not knocking that at all. I’ve done it for years but my point is the idea is do you want true freedom? If you want true freedom, you shouldn’t have to be behind your computer 5, 10, 12 hours a day generating revenue. You should have people in place that are doing it for you because you built the system and the processes that can afford you that opportunity.

That’s really what we’re what we’re trying to do with Semantic Mastery and that’s what the mastermind is all about but pofu live is going to be like a condensed version of it where you’re just going to get hit with the fire hose over the weekend and walk away with an actual plan for your business. That’s part of the reason why we want to keep it very, very small because we couldn’t sit down with 50, 100, 200 people and do this but with 25, we very well can. That’s the idea.

Marco, were you going to add to that?

Marco: Yeah. What I was going to add is that what I’m going to be talking about is it’s fine to have all of these things at your disposal, which is what we make available to mainly our mastermind members. We do have one of products and we have another lower membership but the mastermind is where it’s at. But even then, we’ve had people who can’t overcome their own …

Bradley: Analysis of paralysis, or a paralysis of analysis, right?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: There you go.

Marco: It’s their own preconceived notions of what can and can’t be done, of what they can and can’t do and letting other people dictate what you can and cannot do. Fuck that! Position of fuck you allows you to say, “Fuck that.” You can’t tell me what the fuck I can or cannot do. My discussion topic is going to be centered around that. It’s not just having all of these things available because they can just put you, like you said, in analysis paralysis, right?

Bradley: Right.

Marco: Where you analyze and analyze and analyze and you don’t do shit. That’s not what this is about. You have to be an action taker. We have a ton of those people. We have people who only come to hunt their hangouts, get the information. They go and apply and they make money. I know of at least two people who built up their businesses that way. Action takers, that requires a certain kind of mindset. It’s the only way to get the pofu.

Bradley: Amen. Can we get any questions? What else we got, Adam?

Adam: I was probably not editing a split test page in ClickFunnels just then. Yeah, that was it. I wanted to make sure that we talked to everyone about the live event. I appreciate you guys telling them more about that and what the real reasons are behind it.

I’ll just add on to that there’s the side benefits, the things that we don’t have to do but are huge benefits to you. You get to meet other people like yourself, who are investing in their time and obviously putting their money where their mouth is and saying, “Okay, I want to learn more about this but I also want to be around the other people.”

That’s part of why I like me and Hernan or when I went with Bradley going to ClickFunnels Live. It’s not because I want to shake hands with Russell Brunson. He’s a neat guy but that’s not going to help us make more money or bring in more clients or help me save time but being around those people, getting those ideas. That’s a huge benefit in building that network. I encourage people to do that. If it’s not our event, find something else where you can push yourself but hopefully you’ll come join us.

Bradley: Awesome. All right. We can get into questions now?

Adam: Do it.

Bradley: All right. Let’s do it. I’m going to grab the screen. Oops. Wrong button.

Adam: We got it.

What WordPress Plugin Do You Recommend For Pasting The Schema Code From The SerpSpace Structured Data Generator?

Bradley: All right. Richard is up first. Richard says, “Are you aware or can you recommend a WordPress plug-in it will let me just paste in the schema code that I generated using the search space structured data generator?” I answered this last week because I think you posted this. Yeah. Several days ago I saw it.

Obviously, in case you guys are on aware of this, we recommend stopping using any SEO plug-in other than Jeffrey Smith’s SEO Ultimate plug-in. It’s hands down the best SEO plug-in. By the way, they’re about to release a new version of it they’ve been working on for months. Jeffrey and a couple other guys have been working on it for months. That it’s about to be upgraded. That’s going to be the pro version, which I highly recommend, guys, which is the paid version of it but it’s super affordable unlike Yoast and the Yoast premium upgraded version of it is stupid expensive. This, SEO Ultimate Plus is not. It’s a much, much better plug-in, anyways. It doesn’t bloat like put a bunch of bloated code in like Yoast does.

I’m not going to lie. I’ve still got a lot of websites out there with Yoast on it just because I haven’t taken the time to go through and swap out the plug-ins and update the settings but I’m no longer creating any websites with any other SEO plug-in other than Jeffrey Smith’s ultimate SEO. The reason I bring that up or SEO, excuse me, SEO Ultimate plug-in. The reason I bring that up, Richard, is because it has a code inserter module in the plug-in that you can use to insert code to pages or posts. There’s site-wide code injection. There’s also specific page and/or post code injection. It gives you a lot of options to be able to do exactly what you just asked.

However, if you are adamant about using a different SEO plug-in, which, again I highly encourage you to switch, but if you’re using some other SEO plug-in that doesn’t have that option, then I would recommend using a very simple plug-in. It’s listed right here. I think they change their name recently but, yeah, it’s SOGO Header Footer, add script to individual pages header footer. This is a great plug-in because it gives you some functionality to where you can add code to specific pages or posts, whether you want them in the header or the footer of the page or the post like the HTML header or the footer area. It does a lot of really cool things too.

Again, I always try to limit the amount of plug-ins on my WordPress sites to the bare minimum. If I can use something like the SEO Ultimate plug-in that has that function, I’m going to do that so that I can consolidate two plug-ins into one but, again, if you’re using something else, then I would recommend just using these SOGO Add Script plug-in.

Hernan: I totally agree with you about Jeffery, man. It’s hands down the best. Yoast has become a bloated virus.

Adam: Yeah. It’s stupid.

Hernan: Anytime a plug-in tries to do your SEO for you and it does not do it correctly, it’s time to say, “No thanks, man. I don’t need it,” because I’m supposed to know what I’m doing. Why in the world would you handcuff me in such a way that I can’t do what I know I’m supposed to do, which is why I just said, “No more Yoast ever.”

Bradley: Yeah. In Yoast’s defense, there’s a lot of people out there that aren’t CEOs, guys. They’re not SEO nerds like we are. For somebody that is a civilian or a layman, so to speak, then I assume that some of the things that it suggests are better than nothing at all. Somebody doesn’t have any SEO knowledge is going to follow the guidelines of those types of plug-ins. I, for years, have said, “Don’t follow the guidelines of SEO plug-ins because you’ll over-optimize,” or whatever.

In their defense, I would say that they’re trying to serve a very broad audience with that plug-in but for anybody that pretends or says that they know what they’re doing, you want to be able to have the options to change things and manipulate things that you can’t do with Yoast and Jeffrey Smith’s plug-in allows you to do that. Again, that’s SEO Ultimate and the SEO Ultimate Plus, which is the upgraded or the pro version, which is what I highly recommend. It’s inexpensive and it’s worth it because it gives you a lot of additional functionality, some really cool stuff that you can do with that plug-in.

How Important Is Setting Up An AMP Version Of Your Sites?

All right. Sam’s up. He says, “How important is setting up AMP version of your sites and do you recommend any plug-ins or anything to simplify setting it up?” It is really important, Sam, especially now because, guys, the mobile-first indexing has been rolled out. If you have sites that are in search console, you probably have already gotten notifications from search console or from Google directly about that but they posted it on their blog and that rolled out in July but that’s on the Google webmaster’s blog. If you want to look at what mobile-first indexing is, that’s rolled out now.

I would highly recommend that you start doing that. It’s something I haven’t even really started implementing yet myself but I know that the AMP version, guys, it’s basically what the AMP pages do or the poster or whatever is it creates a cached version of the page in Google servers, so that it can load the page up, least this is my understanding of it. People can tap on it from mobile search. It basically loads instantly the page or the post because it’s not actually going to the website. It’s being served from Google’s servers.

Is that correct, Marco? From Google’s cache?

Marco: That is correct. That’s exactly what’s happening. Now, there’s some … I don’t want to say the word. There’s people out there who say that you’re giving away control of your website to Google. Who gives a fuck? They’re delivering it immediately. You can’t get any faster than immediate. Mobile-first speed is, if not the main, it’s very critical and one of the main signals, shall we say, or maybe ranking factors. I don’t know how to word it but yes. Use AMP. Google is telling you to use it for a reason.

Do we recommend any plug-ins? Oh! We just happen to have our own version of the plug-in. All you have to do is go to the Facebook group and creator’s mastermind and ask to join. You’ll be able to download it. I did a video on how easy it is to install it and how to do some really tricky shit with it to get Google to give you special love. There you go.

Bradley: Guys, this is that post I was just talking about, rolling out mobile-first indexing. It went live in July of 2018. This link right here we talked about the announcement. This talks about using PageSpeed and mobile search rankings. Guys, this is incredibly important. Just think about it, guys. If you go through these articles and just go search Google for mobile-first indexing and you can read through some articles directly from Google but essentially they’re saying that now, even their desktop out, like their primary ranking algorithm now is based upon mobile indexing. Their mobile data centers instead of their desktop and laptops because mobile users have eclipsed for quite some time now mobile and desktop users. Two-thirds of all search traffic now originates from mobile devices. That’s huge.

Again it’s very, very important and speed and making sure your websites are responsive and all that stuff is really, really important now for SEO because, again, the old metrics of optimizing for desktop and laptop are now secondary. Totally go through some of this stuff. Get up to date on it and put it to use.

I’ve been doing a lot of AdWords testing recently again after many months of not doing much of it. I’m seeing just a shit ton of traffic coming from AdWords or from mobile devices now in AdWords even for YouTube stuff, which is incredible. I think that’s crazy. I’m seeing a lot of traffic on my YouTube ads coming from mobile devices now. I’ve even been setting up a lot of PPC like search call-only ads and stuff like that recently because just Mobile’s really much taken over. I highly encourage you guys to check that out. Like Marco said, we do have a plug-in that will convert your pages into AMP or create an AMP version of your pages and posts.

Marco: Pages and posts, yeah. That’s the main thing about our plug-in is that we do both your pages and your posts. They’re converted into AMP.

Which SerpSpace Service Is Best For Rank And Rent Video Model?

Bradley: Yup. Okay. Design2framework is up. He says, “I want to promote my YouTube channel so that each video in there will be on the first page on Google. Number one is not mandatory and YouTube’s search engine results are irrelevant because it’s for local business services.” Okay. “I’m going the rank and rent video model, which one of your search space offers is best for that?”

There’s several. First of all, syndication networks is pretty much standard operating procedure. I would highly recommend with YouTube guys there are no footprint issues. You can get as crazy as you want to with as many networks stacked to your channel or triggered by your YouTube channel as you want. There’s no problem with stacking as many tier one networks as you want or as many multi-tiered networks as you want. It makes no difference, guys. I have found over the years … Now, I haven’t done any specific testing on this in about two years now because I haven’t had to. My test that I did two years ago … Guys, I tested extensively with channels, YouTube syndication to just tier one networks and then also to multi-tiered networks. I ran several tests over the course of many months about where I tried to keep all things equal except for the number or the configuration of the syndication networks.

Again, I would try multiple tier one networks to where the same one channel triggers multiple tier one networks or doing two-tier networks and in stacking multiple two-tier networks onto a channel. What I found was, by doing a bunch of tier one rings, the content, the videos would rank faster like usually quicker than through the two-tier rings but they didn’t stick as long. In other words, they start slipping in rankings sooner than the ones that took longer to rank by being syndicated out through multi-tiered network or many multiple multi-tiered networks but those tend to stick longer. Like, they would stay higher in the search results for longer periods of time before they would start to slip.

The reason I’m telling you that is just because, first and foremost, I recommend if this is your business model, ranking and renting videos, focus on first and foremost building up multiple syndication networks either building them or buying them since you asked about search space, I highly recommend that you just buy them so you can save your time and go out and sell your service instead of creating and building networks.

What I would suggest is build up your syndication networks or buy them, whatever, to your channel to where you have a vast extensive set of networks, then you can boost those networks with link building packages to give them even more power, because that’s really, really important, guys, to have your own network if you’re going to be doing a video rank and rent model. You want your own broadcasting network especially if your theming your networks.

For example, if you’re doing rank and rent, I highly recommend that your channel be niche down to one specific vertical, if possible, or you can go broader but then use playlists so that you’re basically siloing your channel like you would silo a website. We’ve got a product called YouTube Silo Academy. You can just do a Google search if you want to find it, YouTube Silo Academy, that you can pick up, purchase it for, I think, $7 or you can get it in one of our bonus sites if you haven’t. If you’ve bought any products from us at all, it’s in the bonus site. Go through that training. Learn how to silo a YouTube channel because then you can actually use your playlists as ways to trigger syndication to specific networks if you wanted to do it that way. There’s a number of ways that you can configure it but my point in telling you this is the syndication networks from SerpSpace is one of the first things I would recommend for anybody that’s doing a video rank-and-rent business model. Okay. That’s number one.

Number two, anything that you want to give a push that’s already been syndicated out across your networks, that’s what Video Powerhouse is for. It’s great for that. Our Powerhouse networks have been themed and they’ve been used for over two years now or at least I think it’s been about two years. Anyways, the Video Powerhouse network, there’s a lot of power behind that, guys, because they’re aged and themed domains that have their own syndication networks. Then, you can also add secondary Web 2.0 network embeds as well as backlinks, everything else through that order process. If you have videos that need a boost, use the Video Powerhouse.

Lastly, or the next thing I would suggest, is to send traffic to your videos, preferably real traffic. I never recommend sending fake traffic to videos anymore at all or really to much of anything at all. There are a couple options there. The first one we’re going to mention is the MGYB.co which stands for make Google your bitch dot co. That’s our marketplace where you can buy YouTube views. They’re real YouTube views, guys. It’s not spam views like which you would buy from YouTube view services years ago. It’s not that at all. These are real, real people. This is real traffic. It’ll even show is traffic from ads in YouTube analytics. You can get targeted real visitors from our YouTube views service at MGYB.co.

Another option especially for local stuff is you can set up YouTube ads to drive local traffic but based upon your geographic targeting in the Google Ads dashboard. It’s no longer AdWords. It’s now called Google Ads but the Google Ads Dashboard you can set up location targeting so that you can get local IP clicks for your local videos, which is huge for ranking videos, guys. All you need to do is set up and I’ve talked about this many, many times in recent months on Hump Day Hangouts. I’m sure we probably even have this in our YouTube channel but how to use video ads or AdWords for video to rank local videos. If you just go to our channel and search, you’ll see where I’ve done extensive training on that already. That’s a great model as well.

You can use the YouTube View service, guys. Engagement is one of the biggest ranking factors for YouTube videos now. Even in Google search. If you can show engagement by either buying views direct from YouTube or AdWords or Google Ads, excuse me, or by using a service that can provide real traffic, although you don’t get the geographic targeting. You can’t get as specific or as narrow with geographic targeting through our YouTube view service yet but it’s really cost effective.

Marco: Can I stop you? Yes we can.

Bradley: Oh, you can?

Marco: [crosstalk 00:26:41]. We can get city.

Bradley: Oh, wow. Oh, even better, then.

Marco: You can get city and I believe, the last time I checked, we were really close on radius.

Bradley: That’s great. It’s evolving is what you’re saying.

Marco: It’s always evolving. Everything we do always evolves.

Bradley: Okay. I have to get in there and play with it more, then, because I have not in a few weeks.

There you go. Those are my recommendations. As far as what is the best way to sell and close video rank and rent model, that’s a whole nother can of worms. There’s several things. I would say the video email method is one of the best ways to do it although that is time consuming. It works well. We have a product called Video Lead-Gen System that teaches exactly how to do that. Also, we’re doing prospecting and I have been now for months in the Semantic Mastery mastermind, which by the way, I’ve made significant progress in the last few weeks and having really, really good results with the prospecting side of things now. We cover a lot of that in the mastermind. It’d be great to have you come join us there, but if not, you can check out Video Lead-Gen System for the video email process and how to do that. That works really well.

Cold calling, if you’re comfortable doing that, that absolutely works. It’s a pain in the ass. I can’t stand it. I hate it. I would rather have my toenails pulled off one by one than do cold calling and I mean that. I hate it but it does still work but prospecting video emails works well.

Also, again, I can’t get into it here, guys, because we don’t have the time plus this is basically what I’m teaching in the mastermind right now, which is how to set up prospecting funnels and such. If this is your primary business model, I would recommend that you learn how to set up a prospecting funnel because that’ll automate a lot of it for you. It will reduce your manual workload for prospecting. That’s essentially what I’ve been developing for months now in the mastermind is how to set up prospecting funnels and also how to hire virtual assistants to basically operate the prospecting funnel and manage their process, the leads that come in. We’ve, like I said in the last couple weeks, made really a lot of progress that and all this stuff is going to be taught to the mastermind members here and during the month of August and would encourage you to come check it out but yeah.

Again, video emails, probably the best way to do it, in my opinion, if you don’t want to call, if you want to pick up the phone, cold calling will help. It’s very discouraging to get rejected all the time. I can’t stand cold calling but if you can get through enough no’s, you’ll get a yes. That’s one of the quickest ways to get somebody signed up.

One other thing I just want to mention about that is in our MGYB marketplace, we have the video carpet bomb offer thing. I don’t know if we have the prospecting module or prospecting video carpet bomb offer available yet. Marco, is that available yet?

Marco: Is that the smaller offer?

Bradley: Yes.

Marco: I have to check if it was added.

Bradley: Okay. That should be available soon, if it’s not yet, guys. What I want to mention about that is if you have video marketing tools, you can do this on your own but we developed a process or I did using Video Marketing Blitz, which is one Ab’s products. It’s a good product. I trained a VA about a year and a half ago how to do it, how to run that tool. That’s his job is just to run the Video Marketing Blitz tool. We set up this campaign that we call video carpet bomb. Randy James actually came up with the name but we developed it out a little bit together.

One of the things that I’ve been doing recently is whenever we have a lead come in to our pipeline, so through our prospecting funnels essentially a lead comes in. Now, we’ve got an inbound lead. Once the contact has been made by our sales person to that contact and an initial call has been made and they literally spoke on the phone, then what we do is what they schedule for the next call because that first call is what we call a discovery call so they can just get to know the business owner a little bit, ask them some questions about their business, blah, blah, blah. Then, we always set the next appointment.

What happens is as soon as Roberto, my salesman, gets off the call with that prospect, he sends the company data, the business information over to our VA that runs video carpet bomb process for us, who takes just a PLR video, a local lead gen-type PLR video. There’s many sources you can get those made or you can buy already done for you videos. He takes a video and superimposes or does a text overlay with that prospect’s phone number and then also obviously optimize the description with the call to action to them and all that. Then, we do a 10- or a 15-mile radius from where their business is located and we target their primary keywords plus the locations, all within that 10- or 15-mile radius. What we do is maybe wind up like we’ll try to rank 60 videos.

Out of those 60 videos because I have a VA that does this, guys. The VA gets paid $4 an hour roughly. It might take him an hour to run a small campaign like this. It cost me essentially $4 to where now, when that second call occurs with that prospect, my salesman says, “Hey, look. By the way, we want to show you how serious we are about earning your business.”

You could do this with a lead gen service provider that you’re trying to sell somebody to lead like once you’re trying to get them to buy leads from you or ranked and rent. If you’re going to rent out videos. My point is, you could actually optimize a video for their brand, rank it for a bunch of keywords. Then, show them. “Look. This is how serious I am.” I don’t recommend you doing that if you’re manually doing the work because it does take a lot of time but that’s why, again, it’s so important about outsourcing, guys. This is what we’re trying to convey to you guys is how to delegate this work.

I got a VA I pay $4 essentially because it takes him an hour. Out of, say, sixty attempted keywords to rank, we end up ranking 15 or 20 of them or even if it’s 10, who cares? My point is, this is something we do for free to show the prospect during that second call, we can show them live results with videos ranked for their services, for their keywords, with their contact information on it. We use that as a trust-building process. We’d say to them, this is part of our script, “We want show you how serious we are about earning your trust and earning your business, so this is what we did for you and the last weeks since our previous call.” We present them with the data that shows them, “Hey, look. We ranked this video for 14 different keywords for your product and the services that you offer in your service area.”

What happens is we get people that are like, “Wow! Nobody’s ever taken the time to do something like that on a pitch call,” which is what it is. We’re pitching them on for our services. That’s something that we’re going to have available inside of MGYB.co, our marketplace, so that people can go in and for $20 or $25, I don’t know what the final price is going to be yet, they can buy it. It’ll get done and sent back to them with, I think what we’re trying to do is a three-day turnaround time. But if you’ve got your own tools that you can do it or hire somebody in-house to do it for you, hire a virtual assistant to do it for you.

I know I spent a lot of time on that, guys, but I think that was a great question and, again, for somebody just getting started with the rank-and-rent business model, whether it’s videos or maps listings or whatever, guys, I know because that’s how I got started. I know there’s a big learning curve on like how to set up your business in a way that you can scale it. It’s very difficult to do. That’s why I’m trying to share what I’ve learned over the years that you guys can get results faster, scale your business even faster. It’s a great question, though, by the way.

Okay. MJ’s up. He says, “Hey, guys. Great program. Love the information you share. I have a question about image optimization and Google My Business. Is it possible to optimize images uploaded to GMB by clients? I have a rental client who has several images uploaded by their customers. Can they be optimized and what can be done? Thanks, guys.”

No, because they have to be optimized before they’re uploaded. Essentially you could go into GMB and download them and then optimize them and upload them again but then you would be uploading them as the business owner. They would be duplicate photos anyway, so that really doesn’t make any sense but the important thing is if your business or your client’s business has customers that’s uploading photos from their mobile devices then they’re getting a lot of the relevant signals that you want anyways because most phones have the GPS enabled. When customers take photos with their phone and then upload them, you’ve got all that geo location, all that geo tag, the metadata information, the Exif data that is already appended to the file, so that you’re already sending really good signals.

I wouldn’t worry about trying to optimize photos that are uploaded by customers. That’s just a blessing that they’ve got customers that are uploading photos to their GMB anyways. I haven’t really found any of my clients where that’s occurred.

Marco, what do you have to say about that?

Marco: That’s gold. Don’t touch it. Don’t touch it. Leave it alone. Google got the message. Clients like the business enough to upload images unless they’re really crappy images of a complaint or whatever, of garbage. Something like that where you don’t want to think you’d get rid of it but you couldn’t because it was the customer who uploaded. It’s a double-edged sword. You got to walk that fine line but yeah. What you could do is educate more clients on what they need to do, which is actually have the GPS turned on, so that Google can get the message that they’re at the location.

Here’s the thing. Google knows so much right now that I’ve taken images at the location with the GPS turned off, with geolocation turned off. I’ve come home and gone to upload them. Google knew where they were taken. That’s how sophisticated they’ve gotten. No. Man, don’t touch those. That’s gold. Customers or clients uploading images into the GMB. As long as they’re great images, just leave it.

Bradley: That’s right.

Do MasterMind Members Have Access To Trello Boards Containing The Business Processes Of Semantic Mastery?

Dan’s up. Dan says, “Hey, gents. I have a question regarding the mastermind Trello boards for processes you use in your business. Are these accessible to mastermind members? If so, I’m in. If not, how can I talk you into getting those?” To be honest, no. They’re not available, Dan. When we first launched, I think it was Syndication Academy — Originally it was called IFTTT SEO Academy — we tried that route because, remember, I trained on my virtual assistants on the processes of how to build networks which you guys know is an intricate process but I’d built out all the process docs and then converted them all into Trello boards specifically so that it would make it so much easier to train builders at scale.

That was an enormous amount of work, guys. It took me four months of almost two hours a day five days a week, I’m not kidding, to do that. It was an enormous amount of work but we have our SerpSpace building team, our builder team. Some of those boaters have been with me for five years now. We’ve got a team that will have all been trained from that exact same process. In fact, that’s what the whole training was developed around, the Syndication Academy training from the processes that I developed for my virtual assistants.

The reason I mention that is because when we first launched IFTTT SEO Academy, at the time, one of the upgrades was the outsourcing or maybe that was mastermind. I don’t remember but we had what we called an outsourcer training portal, which was where I had all my Trello boards that I gave access to the members. I think that was mastermind not IFTTT SEO Academy. It was an upgrade.

But, yeah, what happened was the problem was a couple things. Number one anytime a board had to be edited, first of all, people would come in and I was supposed to add them. It’s very difficult to add people to boards because if you add them to the board then they can literally change the boards. At least several years ago when we did this, there was a problem with people would come in and instead of making a copy of the board and importing it into their own account and then saving a template copy. So, making a copy of one that you would keep as a template and then using the others, people would just start making changes and actually using the public board that they were supposed to just make a copy of. It created a ton of work for me to have to keep going back in and rearranging the board, putting it back to its original state. It’s a pain in the ass. “Fine,” I said. “That’s enough. I’m done. I’m sorry, guys. You guys can’t follow instructions so I’m no longer going to give that.” We discontinued that.

The other part of this, though, besides the fact that, Dan, I’m sure you could follow instructions, so that might not be an issue, but the other part of that is what I found is if I’m training virtual assistants for a very specific task and that’s going to be their main job duty or something that they’re going to repeat over and over and over again, something that doesn’t change often. Then, I will create Trello boards for that but I have actually reverted most of my process documentation now back to just Google Drive, Google Docs. The reason why is because they’re much more easy, at least for my business. I don’t know about my partners but for me most of my process docs are living, breathing documents that are constantly being edited and refined. It’s much more work to do that in Trello boards than it was to just keep a processed doc in Google Doc form that I can go in and edit or my virtual assistants might, my employees, my workers can go in and make comments on and all that stuff.

I’ve really reverted back to just using YouTube for training videos, screencast videos. I upload to YouTube and then I create process docs in Google Docs where I always start. Step one is always training video. I drop the URL. Then, it’s the step-by-step process in outline format in Google Docs. I’ve actually stopped using Trello, guys, unless, like I said, it’s for something very specific, in which case that isn’t going to change very often but the processes that I’ve been developing for prospecting. For example, I built my team now that’s handling the prospecting and we’ve got the sales and we’ve got people scraping lists and all that. All of that is all now held in Drive because we’re constantly finding ways to make the process more efficient. It just takes too much time to change it all out in Trello. It’s easier to edit inside of Drive.

That said, Dan, yes in the mastermind I’ve been sharing a lot of my processes as far as the prospecting module and stuff like that. If there’s something specific that you would want, you’d have to contact one of us or contact us at support or if you’re in the mastermind, you could just post about it in the group. We can certainly potentially give you process talks about stuff but I’m not going to go out and create process docs for stuff that we do that hasn’t already been created just to share. A lot of the stuff that we do have or that I have from my own business, it’s proprietary, in that it’s stuff that are specific to my business that really wouldn’t make sense to share anyway. I would have to make the process docs from my own business more generic for them to be able to fit for them to be usable for a lot of you.

That’s again, why I said it’s … In my opinion, Dan, the best thing to do is which I know that you said in your comment right here is that you’re running into trouble. You’re having a hard time keeping ahead of your virtual assistants. I know. It’s a pain in the ass, man, but that’s why [crosstalk 00:42:55] …

Adam: I think you’ve talked about the process stuff. Dan, if you join the mastermind, like you said, we’re happy to talk you through. There’s a bunch of different ways to do this but I actually had this exact question from a different angle come from a mastermind I’m in. They said I’m really scared about making my first couple of hires. I think that’s a common pain point because a lot of people, it’s good. By all means, hire someone because a lot of this is trial by fire but I think, Dan, one of the problems here is it sounds like you’ve got the problem. You’ve got the person but the in between hasn’t been bridged and so you’re feeling that pain, where beforehand, generally if you want … You haven’t built the process docs before you got the person. Now, you’re realizing that you have to run your business, provide the services, and train someone and do the processes.

The lesson to learn here that I learned, too, working with one of my first VAs was knowing ahead of time what it is you want them to do and starting to lay that out either hiring them with the clear goal that they’re going to write their own process docs off of videos or something or that you’re going to lay out the process for them ahead of time or something in between, because, yeah, it’s … What are you saying here? You’re struggling to put together boards while keeping your current customers serviced. Definitely, so maybe you work out something in between. If you have someone who can write decent English then maybe you have them. You say, “Hey, look. I’m going to pay you to watch the videos and as you do it, write down the list.” Then, you can go through and maybe edit that and make it nicer.

Bradley: Yep. That’s great advice. That’s what we teach in Outsource Kingpin is that you can hire somebody to create the process docs for you, as long as you record the training video. That’s something you can outsource the process docs is my point, guys. That’s a great way to do it because that’s where … I still do a lot of my own process docs just because typically it’s something comes up that we need a process for, so I just go ahead and draft the process doc myself as I’m going through the steps to do whatever needs to be done. That way it’s done. I do it one time. That’s the last damn time I have to do it, because then I immediately just hand it off to a VA.

But what I would also suggest, Dan, is to get ahead of this is try to find tasks that are repetitive in your business, create process docs for those first so that you can reduce your workload. The sooner you can unload repetitive tasks that you do to your VAs, then that’s going to free up that time that you have those tasks that you have to do over and over and over again. It’s going to free that time up to allow you to develop even more process docs for maybe some more of the complex processes or functions of your business.

Again, try to get all the menial stuff or the repetitive tasks outsourced first, delegated first so that you can work on the more complex process docs for the higher level stuff.

But you guys, honestly, guys. One of the biggest parts … Remember, if you’re trying to move from being self-employed to business owner, these are the kinds of things you have to do but the idea is yeah, it’s a lot of work. For example syndication networks, guys. Like I said, it took me four months to create the process docs, the entire process to train virtual assistants how to do it but it took me four months. It’s been like five years since I’ve had to build a … I’ve built a few syndication networks since then but it’s really been five years since I’ve had to create or build a syndication network myself because I’ve trained an army of builders to do it for me, if that makes sense, all from four months worth of work that I put in several years … I don’t have it’s been five years but three or four years ago, if that makes sense.

Again, you put the work in now and it’s going to free you up in the future, so you don’t have to do that shit anymore.

Marco: Yeah, great. If I can real quick add that the skill sets and the abilities that you have right now and that have taken you to where you’re at right now, Dan, will not take you from where you’re at to where you want to be. There’s a lot of re-education, there’s a lot of skill set that you need to learn, that all of us needed to learn like how to set up processes, how to coach teams, how to manage teams and whatnot that can take you to the next level.

That’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about pofu life because we’re sharing with you the skill set that you need to have in order to run a team because setting our processes, it’s a skill set that you need to learn. It was ranking websites at some point or ranking medias at some other point but then it becomes as managing people and sending out processes. That’s interesting to learn as well.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s a great question, Dan.

How Do You Use GMB Posts To Push Link To The Money Site And Tier 1 Syndication Network?

Ivan’s up. He says, “I have a GMB site, a dot-com site and a tier one syndication network. What’s the best use of the GMB post? Is it good idea to push links to your links in your tier one properties or just link to your dot com site?”

Link to everything, Ivan. Link to all your branded properties. My VA’s, they’ve just got to do the GMB post for us. They just have a spreadsheet with all the company, the contact, the client information for whatever business they’re working on. In there is a list of target URLs and also a list of keywords. Essentially, they just cycle through. Let’s say I’ve got 15 target URLs, which includes citations, obviously the money site, the Google Maps, URL, the share URL. There’s tier one syndication properties. Like I said, citations, press release organization pages. All those kind of things, we just put them in the target URL column. Then, the VAs, whenever they’re doing their GMB post, they just go right on down and just, post one gets link number one, post two gets link number two. They just go on down and cycle through that.

The idea here is just to continually be linking to your tier one properties. It helps to validate the entity, strengthen the brand. Over time, you’re just going to start seeing everything start rising up. Link to everything, all your tier one branded properties. Anything that’s really tier one. Guys, that’s what you can be linking to. Direct to your money site, direct your maps listings, your GMB website, if you have it, which you should. By the way, you can also link to other GMB posts. That’s like daisy-chaining. I can’t talk more about that you have to come to Local GMB Pro if you want to learn more about that stuff.

Is It Acceptable Practice to Have the Same Street Address in Multiple GMB Listings?

R. Bacon! What’s up, buddy? He says, “Hey, guys. Is it acceptable practice to have the same street address in multiple GMB listings? There is a realtor group that has four listings in GMB maps all with the exact same street address and two showing up in the three pack. I was thinking Google was not okay with that.”

They’re not supposed to be but real estate offices have been one of those types that I’ve seen that for years. That’s been an issue for years because technically the broker or the real estate company, let’s say Long & Foster or Century 21 is supposed to have a maps listing but each individual realtor, real estate agent within that office could potentially have their own maps listing with the same address. It’s supposed to not be that way but real estate companies have been doing that for many, many years. It’s something that’s pretty common. Yeah, again, it’s not supposed to be that way but it’s common. It’s been that way for years. I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon.

Any Concerns Of Using Linux Operating System For SEO?

He says, “On another topic, any concerns on using Linux operating system on your computer you use for SEO?”

I don’t know. I had Linux in my laptop when I first started. I had two operating systems. Whenever I opened my laptop, I would choose whether I wanted to go into Linux or Windows. That’s when I first started my business but about two years later, I switched to just Windows only. I haven’t even been on Linux. I don’t see why it would be any problem. It’s just an operating system. It’s just how you access software.

Marco: Yeah. I would say the same. In any case, if you’re using an Android phone, you’re using Linux. If you’re using …

Bradley: [inaudible 00:50:45] that.

Marco: Yeah. Chromebook, yeah. It’s all based on Linux. If you’re using a Chromebook to do SEO, for example, you’re using Linux. Yeah. At the end of the day, it’s all a matter of tracking and IPs and whatnot. It’s the same stuff.

Is There Any Drawback Of Changing A GMB Address To Not Showing It On The Page?

Bradley: Yup. Okay. Let’s roll through the next few. Nigel’s up. What’s up, buddy? He says, “Hey. Good day, gents. Thank you for all you do. I have a GMB service area business currently set up with address showing and active and have also been using the verified address in posts. Is there any drawback to changing it to not showing using address anymore and can you quickly explain how?”

Look, I try to follow what Google’s recommendations are. If you have a service area business where customers do not come to the location, you’re supposed to uncheck that box in the info section of the Google Maps or Google My Business info tab when you’re editing the info. If you go into the address, click the pencil link icon and then you go into the address where the street address is shown and such. Then, if it’s service area business, you start adding in the cities and/or zip codes or whatever to define the service area. Then, there’s that check box underneath that that says, “Your address will be hidden if this box is unchecked,” or not checked.

If you read what the Google’s recommended guidelines are is that if the customers never come to the business location. Let’s say a plumber runs a business from his home, the plumber’s always going to the customer location and the customers don’t ever come to the plumber’s home because he’s not selling plumbing fixtures there, if that makes sense. It’s not like a storefront. In that case, you’re supposed to uncheck that box. In other words, hide the street address. I’ve always set up all my business listings that way or my client’s listings that way because that’s what Google’s suggest to do.

However, I know that other people have said, “Well, if you leave the box checked and it shows the address you’ll rank better.” I think that really depends on where the business is physically located or in relation to the centroid of the city, of the location. Obviously, the closer you are to the centroid of that location that your business is physically located in, the better … Typically, one of the ranking signals for maps ranking has been proximity to city center. The closer the physical address was, typically the better it would rank.

I know that, for some service area businesses, people would still leave the address shown if it was close to the city center because it tended to rank better. However, it’s not something I’ve tested because I never wanted to … A lot of my addresses, guys, are spammed addresses. They’re PO boxes. I don’t want other people complaining about it. I typically hide the addresses. If you’re already doing well, here’s what you could do. You could always uncheck the box if that is the proper way that it should be. You could uncheck the box to hide the address and monitor rankings. See your results. If it drops, if you slip in from out of the three pack or whatever, then switch it back. It’s just a matter of checking or unchecking a box. That’s what I would suggest doing but I haven’t really tested that. I know other people have said, “Showing the address versus not showing it can sometimes create better results,” but I typically don’t do that because I don’t want an address showing.

Have You Had Any Success Using The Message Functionality Of GMB Posts?

“Anyone using or having success with message functionality in GMB posts?” Yeah. Some of my clients, they … It’s not often. They don’t get messaged nearly as much as they get phone calls or link clicks to their websites but some messages do come through. It’s not something I’ve seen a lot of activity in but some people do that.

Think about that, guys. Again, that’s Google trying to keep people on the Google platform. They’re giving people the ability to do a Google search, locate a business, and actually, text message them directly from Google so they never leave the platform. That’s what GMB Pro is all about. It’s about keeping the Google users on the Google platform. That’s why Google is rewarding all of us who are using all of the Google My Business services and posting and staying active in that ecosystem because we’re giving Google exactly what it wants by keeping Google users in the Google environment.

How Long Should You Wait Before Adding RYS To An Optimized GMB?

Quit This House says, “Good day, gentlemen. After optimizing GMB, should we wait to add RYS and start the once per month for four months press release or ramp both up right away?” That’s up to you. You don’t need to wait. After optimizing GMB, you can do an RYS stack immediately. You can start hitting it with press releases immediately. You don’t have to do just one per month.

Rob, he was doing four per week. I tend to do mine about once every two weeks. That’s the frequency I like. It tends to work really, really well. Again, 12 out of 15 properties that I applied this method to, I was able to rank in the three pack within six press releases or less doing one every two weeks. I would recommend increasing your frequency on press releases if you want quicker results. Also, there’s no reason to wait on a drive stack, man. It’s GMB stuff. Just fire away.

Will You Be Offering Done For You Local GMB Pro Services Anytime In The Near Future?

All right. We’re going to try to get through a couple more real quick, guys. Got to wrap it up. Click Star says, “Hey, guys, I have a question regarding your Local GMB Pro offerings. Will you be offering done-for-you Local GMB Pro services anytime in the near future? If so, how long before this is available and how much do you feel the services will cost?

Marco, how soon until we open that up?

Marco: She’s ready to go. We’re discussing prices.

Bradley: Okay. I’d say within a week, two weeks tops?

Marco: Yeah, yeah. She’s already working. I gave her one of my best clients to work on. Guys, I never do that. I never train anyone on a client but I said, “If this is going to work, if I’m going to put her to work on other people’s GMBs, then she should be working on something that I care about.” I did. I gave it to her. She’s doing a fantastic job. You saw the video she did, right?

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: The walkthrough?

Bradley: Yup.

Marco: You know the type of work that she can do. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t want to put a hard date on it because we won’t meet until Tuesday to decide on what we’re going to charge for it.

Bradley: Let’s say within two weeks, roughly.

Marco: Yeah. Two to three weeks.

Bradley: Okay. We don’t know the pricing just yet but what we’re likely going to have is tiered pricing depending on the posting frequency, correct?

Marco: Correct and whether you’re going to provide images …

Bradley: Images or not.

Marco: … in video or if we have to provide them, which we can. Yeah, so it depends on just how much work she has to do. Everything has a cost because it takes more time to do.

Bradley: That’s right. Within two to three weeks. You heard it here, guys. You can hold up hold our feet to the fire. We’ll get it done. I know we’re really going to be pushing GMB Pro stuff, guys, because it works so damn well, guys. We want you guys to be using it because it works. You can get your clients results almost overnight. It doesn’t require you to do any damn work. You just literally resell the service to your clients and make money, guys. It will work. We’re going to be pushing the shit out of this service and growing that done-for-you GMB Pro VA team, virtual assistant team, to be able to provide this at scale. I’d say, “Hold off. Wait,” because when it comes, it’s going to be good.

All right. I got time for just a couple more. It looks like we’re almost done anyway. If anybody has to bounce that hasn’t already, please feel free.

What Is Your Opinion On Cora After A Year Of Using It?

Jonathan says, “I thank God for you, guys.” Why, I will plus one that. Awesome, Jonathan. He says, “Came across an email from a year ago that I had not read on Cora. What is your opinion on Cora a year later? Again, many thanks.” I rank number one in YouTube because of you all. No, you ranked number one on YouTube because of what you did. All you did was follow instructions that we provided but you had to take action. You ranked number one in YouTube because of what you did.

All right. As far as Cora, yeah. It’s awesome. Cora’s great, guys. It’s freaking awesome. By the way we can run Cora reports for people. Do we have that available yet, by the way, in MGYB?

Marco: Yes, we do.

Bradley: All right. Good question, then, Jonathan, because you can go buy Cora or subscribe to Cora, if you’d like. We have an offer that I think is like 25% off or 30% off with this stated pricing is, anyways, if you go through our link. It’s rather expensive but, Ted, who is the developer of it, he’s perfectly cool with subscribing for a month. Then, running all the reports that you need. Let’s say you run an agency. You got 15 or 20 clients. You go run reports for all 15 or 20 clients and then cancel your subscription. Then, three or four months later, after you’ve tuned the sites based upon the data that the Cora report shows, you can go back and subscribe again for a month and run all the reports to see how much progress you’ve made. That’s perfectly fine with Ted. He even announced that on the webinar, which is rare because a lot of times people aren’t cool with that kind of stuff. He was.

You can do that or you can buy Cora reports from us because we provide that now. We have access to Cora and one of our virtual assistants will run the report. You can buy it from us, from MGYB.co. It’s a great product, guys. There’s no doubt. Cora reports give you so much data, it’s ridiculous and it gives you the points on which you can tune your on-page stuff mainly. You can do off-page stuff, too, but I would always start with on-page factors that the Cora report shows. It’s a great product.

Do You Still Suggest Using Tubesift For YouTube?

Okay. We’re almost done. I think we just got a couple. Dan says, “Do you still suggest using TubeSift or simply using placements for YouTube channels and YouTube videos within the AdWords platform okay now?” No, I still absolutely use TubeSift for placements, Dan. I’ve been doing a lot of YouTube ad stuff recently. I’m actually testing YouTube ads right now for prospecting for generating clients for our agencies. Also, I’m doing remarketing stuff.

Just keep in mind, guys, with remarketing and YouTube, you have to have a thousand people on the remarketing list. For the GDN, Google Display Network, you only need to have a hundred people on the remarketing list. Anyways, the reason I brought that up is because I’ve been doing a lot of remarketing stuff lately, too, and I’m still trying to build the pixel up with a thousand people for the YouTube remarketing.

But that said, yeah, I still absolutely use TubeSift. It’s a great tool. Not only that but I might even still have … No, I don’t have it open up still but I’ve been using it a lot lately. Ted Chen is behind that. He’s the developer behind it. It’s Justin’s product but Ted Chen’s the developer. It’s same developer from Power Suggest Pro, our favorite keyword tool of all time, as well as Leads Recon. It’s all the same developer, Ted. He’s a great guy, a great developer. It’s a great tool. They’ve actually added some really cool things in the TubeSift recently.

By the way, guys, we should drop the link for that if we have it because it is a great tool. They’ve added several things to it recently. Their keyword research is very similar to Power Suggest Pro. It’s the same developer, so it’s great for that. Also, he has a banner designer now built into the TubeSift tool, which is great if you’re doing in-stream ads. You know that there’s a companion banner that shows up in the top right corner of the YouTube watch page. Now, you can create those companion banners right inside TubeSift. They’re 300 pixels wide by 60 pixels tall. It’s great. Super simple to do. Placements are absolutely great. However, for running like local YouTube ad stuff, I just use geographic targeting and in-market audiences or life event audiences, if possible because in-market audiences and life event audiences, it’s called audience targeting. Those work really, really well for generating …

Remember, Google’s storing data on those people, guys. That’s how it knows that it’s in market for a particular product or service or has recently moved or like a life event or gotten married or something like that. Google knows because Google has all that data on those individuals.

If you can select an in-market audience or a life event audience with a category within those audiences that are close to what you’re promoting your product or service and then you select the proper geographic targeting, think about how highly valuable those clicks are to that ad or to that video because Google knows it’s a local IP so it’s 100% geographically relevant. It also knows that the visitor, the clicker, the person or the viewer of the video, whether they click or not, it depends, but the viewer of that video has also been in market or is completely relevant to the content of that video as well. That view is weighted a hell of a lot more than a view from somebody outside of a geographic area or that has no browsing history or profile history of looking for content related around that, if that makes sense.

Again, guys, is about engagement. TubeSift is great because it can help you to create great placement lists and also do keyword research and just a ton of stuff that it does. It’s a great tool.

Marco: By the way while we’ve been talking, the video carpet bomb offer has been added to MGYB.co, so we have both offers, the higher-priced model and the lower-priced model.

Bradley: Okay. Thanks, by the way, Marco.

Scott, I was reading your question. He says, “Showing the address in Google Maps listing is irrelevant for service businesses. I know, because my site ranks number one with no address showing.”

Yeah, Scott. I’ve got literally dozens of map listings ranking number one with no street address showing. Yeah, you can absolutely rank without street address showing. All I’m saying is that what I was mentioning earlier was that I know some people have said that in competitive areas, if they choose to hide their address, their rankings aren’t as good as if they show their address, even for service area businesses.

Again, guys, this just what I’ve heard. I’m not telling anybody to do that I prefer to do what it says to do, which is if customers don’t come your location, don’t show your street address. That’s how I’ve managed all of my listings and I have no problem ranking them. Again, it’s up to you whether you want to do that or not. Scott, I appreciate that. I agree with you.

He says also, “If you don’t have a physical location where you can meet with customers, your Google reviews will suffer. People don’t like it when they cannot find a business location.” That’s true if you have a storefront where people come to the business but again with like plumbers and a service area business, for example, if they never come to the business, that doesn’t mean that they won’t leave reviews. Again, I’ve got dozens of sites out there with lots of reviews where the street address isn’t shown because there’s no reason for it to be shown. People will never come to the business yet my reviews still show. Does that make sense? That really is irrelevant in my opinion because people will still leave reviews.

You’re right. If it’s a storefront and the address is hidden, that’s just stupid. People will leave bad reviews because they can’t find your damn business because you hid the address.

“Can we get a link for Cora?” Did somebody find that link for Cora, by the way?

Marco: Yeah. Actually, he says I gave him the link to MGYB.com, but he says it’s not in there. I’m going to talk to Caesar and see it’s probably already added but it’s not live.

Bradley: Okay. Sorry. We’ll get that worked out. Okay. We’ll get that worked out, Craig. If you want the actual link to the Cora offer itself, we have it. We have the webinar that we did with Ted and all that. It’s on our site. I’ll grab the link and I’ll drop it on the page. If you want to go through that, that’s perfectly fine, too. If you just want to buy the done for you Cora reports, Marco will get that squared away. He’ll tag you in the mastermind or something.

All right, guys, I’m going to wrap it up. We’re a little bit over. Thanks everybody for hanging out. No mastermind tomorrow. We’ll see everybody next week.

Marco: Yeah.

Adam: Yup.

Bradley: Okay, guys. Thanks, everybody.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Adam: Bye.

Marco: Goodbye.

Bradley: See …

  Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 195 published first on your-t1-blog-url https://ift.tt/1WMpNvB August 06, 2018 at 09:53PM Semantic Mastery https://ift.tt/2rWKl8L