#i only wrote one called ‘wonder chris’ and i’m thinking of possibly updating it or something like that because it’s been a WHILE

[fawnssy]

he’s like a little bug 🤲

[handsomelyhiddleston]

Stormy Sleepover - Tom Hiddleston x Reader

I haven’t written in like, years. I previously wrote for Colby Brock at @colbybrocksmolder and someone asked me to write for Tom so I figured I’d give it a shot. 

I hope you enjoy! 

_________________________

“Did you hear there was a storm coming?” one of your PA’s, Andi, asked you. You were in charge of making sure the cast all had assistants and that their life on set ran smoothly. You’d been working with these guys since the very first Thor movie.

“I got a notification on my phone a few hours ago, but this building is so big I doubt we’d know if it had actually hit yet.” You pulled up your weather app and clicked on the “!” checking to see what the “alert” was. “Oh god” you said, shocked to read that most of the county was already out of power.

“I told you, call me Chris.” Behind you, Hemsworth was chuckling leaning over to read what you were looking at on your phone.

“Ha, ha.” You laughed at his cheesy joke. “But seriously, has anyone been outside in the last few hours?”

Looking at your phone, Hemsworth shrugged and headed towards one of the truck bays.

In front of you, you watched Evans and Tom training with each other. There were various scenes in this movie involving water and a big thing the trainers had been working with them on was safely landing in water. It sounds funny, but you can break bones or knock yourself unconscious if you land wrong.

“Bad news” Hemsworth yelled out, getting everyone’s attention. “This building has been running on generators. There’s no power in the whole lot.” He dramatically shook his arms, flinging rain water on you and Andi.

“No wonder this water has gotten so cold” Evans added, shivering. “It’s usually warmed, but It’s ice right now.”

You sent a text to the director who was in a meeting with the writers. You received a text back fairly quickly. “Let everyone know we’ve got 6 more rooms at the Hyatt Hotel a few towns over for those who don’t have trailers on the lot. Tell everyone else that it looks like the power won’t be fixed until tomorrow afternoon. There’s a whole line of downed power lines that they can’t get to until the storm stops. The generators only run lights and a few outlets and it looks like they’re going to die soon too. The 16 seater van is outside with a driver to take people to the hotel.”

“Looks like we’re done for the day.” You said mostly to yourself, with Hemsworth and Andi hearing you.

“Everybody in.” Hemsworth hollered out so you wouldn’t have to yell.

“Thanks.” You shot him a smile.

“Any time” he replied, flinging his long wet hair towards you.

“I take it back.” You laughed, moving to stand on your chair.

“I know that not everyone has a trailer in the lot yet as we haven’t actually started filming, so for anyone that doesn’t have a home here there’s a van outside that will take to you the hotel that has power nearby. It’s already super chilly in here, so I imagine it’s freezing outside.” You spoke so everyone could hear you.

“Can confirm.” Hemsworth said, starting to shiver a bit.

“There’s umbrellas near the catering tables and there’s a bunch of old hoodies and jackets in the extras costume bay. Make sure you’re warm and dry before you head to the van.”

Everyone that didn’t have a trailer on set left once they had their instructions.

“As for the rest of us, we have to hunker down in our trailers until this passes. I have solar power and full solar batteries on my trailer so all of you are more than welcome to come crash with me if your trailer is too cold or you need electricity for anything.”

You, Hemsworth, Evans, Tom, and Scarlett were the only ones on set that had trailers so far.

“It can’t be THAT cold” Evans joked, grabbing his bag and heading towards the door.

“Scarlett went to her trailer a few hours ago” Tom shared. “I only got here last night so I don’t even have my trailer set up. Are you sure you’re okay if I go grab my bag and come steal some of your space?”

“Absolutely” you smiled at him. “And if I know Scarlett, she’s already in my trailer. I don’t think her trailer was even hooked up to power yet. Her’s was the newest one on the lot.”

“Thank you, darling. I’ll go grab my bag and check Scarlett’s trailer on my way to yours.” Tom replied and then jogged towards the door.

Andi left to catch the van once you passed your notes from the day on to her. “Be safe. Don’t worry about making it back tomorrow. I will email you any further updates I have for assignments.”

“I’m going to head back to my trailer and see if I have any cell services.” Hemsworth shared after everyone else had started leaving. “I know my wife probably has all of the weather and accident alerts on for the whole county and she’s probably worried.”

“Be safe.” You said, taking his offered hand so you could step off of your chair safely. “I’ll grab the satellite phone in the emergency kit and take it to my trailer just in case we need it.”

“It looks like you may have a full house tonight.” Hemsworth Joked.

“You’re welcome to join the insanity.” You teased, throwing your hoodie on and grabbing the satellite phone.

When you made it to your trailer, you were pretty soaked. Even with the umbrella, the rain was insane.

“Thank God you didn’t leave.” Scarlett startled you.

“I knew you’d already be in here.” You laughed. “Tom is on his way. His trailer is like yours. We didn’t even get a chance to get them hooked up before this crazy storm hit.”

“Oooo Lover boy is coming.” She teased.

“Oh, shut it. We’re friends, Scar. That’s it. We’ve never been more than friends.” You started stripping out of your wet clothes and slipped on a pair of soft black sweatpants and your favorite hoodie. It was dark green with “Mischief” written across the front. There were gold horns painted on the hood.

“I’ve known your friend almost as long as you have and the way he looks at you…I’m just saying. I think there’s something there.” She teased, gathering your wet clothes and putting them in a laundry bin that was tucked under one of the beds.

You both turned to the door hearing what sounded like a woman screaming bloody murder. “Let me in” Evans yelled, banging on the door.

Scarlett opened the door while you grabbed a towel. She laughed at him, seeing him drenched head to toe. “It was unlocked, tough guy.”

“You hit an octave I don’t think I can even reach, Cap” you teased, throwing him the towel and going back into your PJ drawer for an oversized t shirt and a baggy pair of sweats.

“I was wrong. I was so wrong. It’s fucking freezing in my trailer and I didn’t realize that the water would be cold because the power has been out for so long.” Evan’s teeth were chattering as he stripped out of his clothes, trying to dry off.

“I think I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen you naked, Evans.” Scarlett laughed, handing him the clothes you picked out for him.

“Thank god you aren’t seeing the front. It’s so cold I think my manhood has retreated fully into my body” Evans replied, throwing the clothes on and drying his hair with the towel.

Both of you laughed. You started brewing a pot of coffee and turned your water kettle on for tea. “Well, Scarlett already claimed the couch.” You mentioned. “Why don’t you take the regular bed so that if Hemsworth joins, you two can bunk together. It’s queen size so it should fit you both comfortably.”

Evans crawled into bed, wrapping himself in the blankets and trying to warm up. “Where will you sleep?”

“The dining room table and benches turn into a bed.” You replied. “It’s a full size, so almost as big as the one you’re in.”

“Did you hear that?” Evans perked up, trying to look out the tiny window he could still see through from the bed.

You and Scarlett quieted down. Getting louder you could hear Hemsworth yelling “NO, I AM THE GOD OF THUNDER!” every time lighting would strike and the sky would boom.

“Looks like it’s going to be a full house tonight.” Scarlett laughed, opening the door. “Get your godly ass in here, you crazy Australian.”

“He’s clearly the superior Chris” Evans joked. “Are you fucking crazy?” he asked as Hemsworth stepped into the trailer.

“Possibly. Probably.” Hemsworth laughed, trying not to get water all over the floor.

Scarlett grabbed the towel Evans had used to dry off and put it down on the floor by the door. “Here you go.”

“Much appreciated.” Hemsworth replied, dropping his duffle bag. “Can I change in your bathroom?”

“It’s all yours” you said. “Do you need clothes or did you bring some dry ones?”

“I brought some. I also brought some fun. I’ll show you after I get out of my sopping clothes.” He answered, leaving his shoes by the door and stepping into the bathroom.

When the bathroom door clicked, you heard a knock on the door. “Tom, come in” you hollered.

Tom was wearing a long poncho with an umbrella. He had a large bag with him and when he got inside he kicked his shoes off, putting them by Hemsworth’s shoes. You grabbed his bag from him, putting it by the second bed you had just finished setting up. He closed the umbrella and pulled his poncho off, his black sweatpants and black hoodie bone dry.

“You make the other two look like heathens.” Scarlett laughed. “They showed up soaking wet and screaming.”

“He is a gentleman.” You gave him a smirk, causing his cheeks to blush ever so slightly.

“Is there even room for all 5 of us?” he cleared his throat and laughed.

“Absolutely” you ushered him towards you. “Evans and Hemsworth are sharing that bed. Scarlett has the couch. I just set up the extra bed right here, for you.”

“For us” he replied with a stern look. “I know you too well, darling” he smirked. “You’re going to offer to sleep on the floor by the couch and I won’t have any of it.”

“Tom, it’s fine. I have a sleeping bag and…” You tried to ensure him you’d be okay, but he interrupted you.

“If you try to sleep on this floor I will walk back to my freezing trailer so you can have the bed to yourself.” The stern look softened as he pulled you into a tight hug. “You know you don’t always have to be the one to make the sacrifice. Plus, I promise I don’t talk in my sleep or have crazy dreams. I’ve even been told I’m quite comfy to cuddle with.” He dropped his eyes to yours, smirking.

“Oh, if I must.” You teased him, kissing his cheek as Hemsworth finally came out of the bathroom. “Scarlett knows where the laundry bin is.” You pointed him towards the hamper full of wet clothes.

“Do I smell coffee?” Evans sat up in bed, looking towards you. “Come cuddle, buddy” he laughed opening his arms for Hemsworth who let all of his body weight drop on Evans. “Jesus Christ, you’re a brick.”

You laughed, pulling down mugs from the cabinets and making everyone coffee. “Coffee or Tea, Tom?” you looked over at him. He was sitting on the edge of the bed you two would share.

“Tea, my sweet. But let me help you.” He stood and started grabbing sugars for everyone’s coffee, asking how many they normally added.

“There’s pasta in the crock-pot as well if anyone is hungry.” You announced.

“Food?” Hemsworth’s head shot up and he crawled off of Evans.

“God, men are so simple.” Scarlett laughed, grabbing the coffee you handed her.

“You are not wrong.” Evans added, asking if he could help with anything now that he wasn’t freezing to death.

“I think we’re good.” You replied, dishing up some pasta for Hemsworth and Evans and passing them off to the boys. “Scarlett?” you offered her food, as well.

“Actually, I’m craving something sweet.” She answered.

“I’ve prepared for this one” Tom answered, going to the large bag he brought with him. “It took me so long to get here because I walked to the catering room to grab some snacks. I’ve got a whole tub of cookie dough that probably needs to go in the refrigerator soon, a tub of sour sweets, and what looks like a large cherry pie.”

“Pass the cookie dough this way” Scarlett answered. “This man has his priorities straight”, she laughed.

After everyone had sat back on their beds, dug into their food, and warmed up with their coffee or tea, Hemsworth remembered his bag. “Since we are most likely going to be stuck in this trailer until tomorrow afternoon, I brought a different kind of treat.” He picked up his bag and started pulling out bottles of alcohol and putting them on the counter. “Anyone opposed?” he asked.

“What a G!” Evans laughed, crawling out of the bed to help Hemsworth make drinks. “What kind of mixers do you have, Y/n?”

“There’s some cans of soda, some energy drinks…there’s some juice…and then we’ve got coffee for that Bailey’s I see” you answered.

Tom was smirking next to you as the Chrises started making a make-shift bar out of what they had available to them.

“We’ve got to get this started with a bang” Hemsworth said, handing everyone two shots each. “The first one is to us having a great night reunited with our make-shift family.” He smiled at everyone and downed the first shot, everyone else following suit.

Evans spoke up after. “The second one goes to our incredible, gracious, and always prepared host. To Y/n!” He downed the second shot, everyone following his lead. Except for Tom.

You shivered as the second shot went down your throat and looked over at Tom who was still holding his full shot glass, sitting next to you on the bed. He had a small smile, giving you a look you couldn’t place. Quietly he spoke to you “I’d like to add a few things to his toast, but I think it may take a few more drinks to find the right words.” He downed the shot and took a sip of his tea to wash it down.

“Who wants what?” Evans asked, making everyone a strong drink.

For the first few drinks, everyone just talked and caught up. It had been a while since the group had been on a press run or a film set together.

“Y/n!” Evans spoke up.

“Yes, Cap?” you answered, starting to feel the alcohol course through you.

“Truth or Dare?” He smirked. His eyebrow raised like he was challenging you.

“Truth.” You answered, staring him down.

“Hmmm…Have you dated anyone working on any of these movies? Cast or crew?” He asked, finishing off his drink and standing to make another.

“I haven’t” you answered truthfully.

“Wait, let’s not do truth or dare, lets do truth or shot.” Scarlett suggested, wanting to get a few answers out of you and Tom.

“I like it.” Evans said, grabbing everyone’s shot glasses back and filling them so he could hand them out as needed.

“I answered, so I’m in the clear. Hemsworth has a higher alcohol tolerance than we do so I need him to catch up. Who is an actor in the MCU you hope you never have to work with again?” You asked, hearing Tom chuckle next to you.

“I can’t answer that!” he laughed, taking the shot Evans handed him.

“That’s the point.” You laughed.

He laughed, handing the empty shot glass back to Evans. “Fine, fine. Tom. In our last interview panel together, they kept asking you if you were seeing someone and you answered no. You then said that you were interested in someone, but that you hadn’t done anything about it. Who is she?”

“Oh no.” Tom laughed, feeling the alcohol a bit himself. “I think I need to take a shot. Are all of these going to be so hard?” He grabbed the shot that Evans passed off to him.

“I think you guys just need to not be pussies and answer the damn questions” Scarlett laughed, shooting you a look.

“Right?” Evans laughed, taking the empty shot glass from Tom.

Tom scooted a bit closer to you when he handed off his shot glass. “Okay, Evans. If you had to marry one of your on screen romantic co-stars, who would it be?”

“Oh, come on! It’s gotta be Scar Jo! The one and only.” Evans laughed, putting his hands over his heart and giving Scarlett a loving look. “We’ve been in movies together damn near my whole career.”

“We would annoy the hell out of each other.” Scarlett laughed.

“It’s true. We’re practically siblings. Okay, Y/n” Evans rubbed his hands together like he was plotting. “Favorite actor you’ve been able to work with ever.”

“Why do I feel like there’s a very specific question you want to ask, but instead you’re asking questions trying to fluster me?” you shot him a look, trying not to blush.

“Hey, I’m just playing the game.” Evans laughed, picking up a shot to let me know I didn’t have to answer.

“Keep your shot. I’ll answer this one. It’s definitely Mr. Mischief himself over here.” You pointed your thumb to your side at Tom, trying not to blush.

“No, there has to be someone cooler than me.” Tom blushed, hiding his glee by taking a sip of his tea.

You looked at him, summoning the strength of the drinks you’ve been throwing back. “You should give yourself more credit. You’re amazing.”

You stayed in the moment for a few seconds, just smiling at each other. “I think it’s your turn”, Tom said, putting his arm around your shoulders.

You blushed, realizing you had just been staring at him. Leaning into his side, you asked “Okay, Evans. Have you slept with any of your MCU co-stars?”

“Oh shit!” Scarlett laughed, standing up and handing Evans one of the shots.

“Yeah, yeah.” He laughed, downing the shot. “I’ll pick on someone else this time.” He filled up everyone’s drinks while thinking of his next question. “Okay, Scar. Who is the most attractive man in the current MCU?”

“Oooh, good question.” Scarlett thought about it, going through the movies outside of the Avengers. “I have a few different answers.”

“Explain.” Hemsworth replied.

“Well, There are a few people I find attractive for different reasons, I guess.” She answered.

“How about you share this list and we decide if you still need to drink for not picking one person?” You laughed.

“Well, Hemsworth is an amazing dad. Like, you look your happiest when you’re in the messiest, most chaotic situations with your kids. Most dads are the opposite. They’re trying to escape that.” Scarlett explained her first answer.

“Valid points made so far” Evans agreed, leaning against the counter.

“Hiddleston is the fucking epitome of a gentleman. You’re literally everything women want.” Scarlett turned towards tom, making him blush.

You quietly spoke “She’s not wrong” in Tom’s ear, feeling him pull you tighter to his side in response.

“You’re too kind”, Tom answered to her, downing the rest of his drink.  

Scarlett looked to Evans. “I think I have to go with…Idris Elba.”

“I want to be mad that I didn’t make your list, but that man is truly a god.” Evans responded.

The game started to wind down as it got later into the night. Seeing everyone kind of calm down and get settled, you walked around making sure everyone had what they needed.

“Anyone want water so you don’t wake up hungover?” you laughed, pulling some water out of the fridge.

“Here!” “Please!” you handed water bottles out to everyone.

“I’m not setting an alarm for the morning. It’s super late and I doubt anyone is going to be back on the lot before dinner time anyways.” You said, grabbing you and Tom each a water bottle before turning off the main light.

You turned on the small light above your bed so you could sort out your sleeping arrangements. You grabbed your toiletries bag and pulled out a make-up wipe, trying to clean your face since you didn’t really get to do your nightly routine.

“Can I use one of those?” Tom asked, realizing he hadn’t been able to wash his face either.

“Come here” you said, scooting against Tom so you could run the damp cloth over his face. He watched your gentle movements, feeling you run the cool cloth across his skin.

“Thank you” he said, kissing the back of your hand before scooting back in the bed and laying down.

You put your bag back and drank some of your water before crawling fully into the bed and turning off the light. “Are you good?” you asked, turning to face Tom in the dark. You could feel his hand reach out and settle on your arm.

“I am” he answered, running his hand down your arm, to rest on your hip. “I want to finish your toast” he whispered, scooting his pillow closer to yours. “What Evans said was true, but you’re so much more, y/n. You’re beautiful and incredibly intelligent and there is not a single person I look forward to seeing more than you.”

“I think you’re drunk” you replied, knowing that if the light was on your face would be bright red.

“I am” Tom chuckled. “I still stand by what I said.”

You reached forward and ran your hand up Tom’s chest until you felt your fingers graze the side of his face. “I’m going to have to thank Hemsworth for getting you tipsy” you laughed, teasing Tom. You scooted closer to him, feeling him wrap his arm around your back and hold you against him.

“I couldn’t have waited much longer to tell you anyways” Tom replied. “I was just nervous you didn’t feel the same. We’ve been such good friends for so long…”

You interrupted him, capturing his lips in a kiss. “I’ve wanted to do that for years” you said, connecting your lips in a second kiss.

“Oh, thank god.” Tom said, a little louder than intended. “Can I call you mine?”

You laughed, trying to stay quiet. “Please, do.” You answered reconnecting your lips.

Tom rolled to hover over you, deepening the kiss.

“Fucking finally!” you heard Scarlett call out, making Tom collapse on top of you in laughter.

“Right?” Evans added. “It’s been ages.”

“Fair warning, I am telling this story at your wedding” Hemsworth said.

“I think our friends are happy for us” Tom said in a much quieter voice, flipping the two of you so that you were laying against his chest.

“I mean, I’m pretty happy for us” you replied, snuggling into his warm chest.

“Me too, love. Get some sleep” he said, running his hand up and down your back as he felt your breaths even out.

[bltngames]

SAGE 2020: The Usual Suspects

Hi, folks! Back when I used to work at TSSZ a lot of people really enjoyed reading my articles where I’d talk about various games at the Sonic Amateur Games Expo (SAGE), and I’ve gotten more requests in the last month and a half to continue doing those types of articles than I think I’ve ever gotten about anything else I’ve ever done before. So, here we are!

But I also need to be real with you: there are a lot of games at SAGE. It was exhausting enough when there were 70, 80, or even 90 games. Heck, the one year I wrote about 85-something games by myself, I sort of felt like I was going to die. This year, there are over 220 games at SAGE. It is physically and emotionally impossible for me to talk about everything, and it may even be impossible for me to play everything. Things will fall through the cracks. Most things, probably. Though I am responsible for basically inventing SAGE 20 years ago, I am also a human. I have my limits, and I am sorry it has to be this way.

Structurally, we’re going to be doing things a little bit differently, and you should expect this to be a little fast and loose. Since I’m not talking about every single game on the show floor, articles are going to be broken up into types:

“Usual Suspects” will be for games that either appeared at previous SAGEs or that I’m at least aware of.

“Fan Games” should be obvious, and it’s whatever doesn’t fall under Usual Suspects.

“Indies” is the same deal, but for original games.

And finally, there will be a “Honorable Mentions” article for whatever random leftovers I don’t cover in the first three articles. Looking forward to me talking about your game, but I don’t mention it? Tell me about it and maybe it’ll end up here.

Without any more delay, let’s talk about those Usual Suspects...

Sonic GT

Sonic GT has always been kind of a difficult game to control, but usually it just took a little bit of getting used to. There was always a period of adjustment, where you had to learn the game’s quirks. But, over time, I feel like the game is also just getting… quirkier. Every time I come back to this, I slam head first into the Sonic GT’s learning curve, and it always feels just a little bit steeper. This is one of those games that tries to fit a lot of abilities into a tiny amount of buttons. It works, but it feels like you have to memorize an operator’s manual. It’s all about figuring out which button to hold when to get what state. But, man… when it clicks into place, it’s still kind of magic. And, at the very least, the levels have all been reworked to take better advantage of Sonic’s high-flying, death-defying acrobatics. You’ve just got to be willing to learn. The real downside of this new version is the inclusion of a proper story mode -- I don’t have anything against having cutscenes in your game or whatever, but for the purposes of reviewing these games, some ability to fast forward through the talking heads so I could get back to the gameplay would’ve been nice. You can skip ahead in cutscenes you’ve already watched, but that doesn’t help when it’s your first time through. Oh well. So it goes. (Update: in the process of getting this article posted, Sonic GT has been patched to make cutscenes always skippable.)

Project SXU (Sonic X-treme Unity)

Another year, another Sonic X-treme recreation. This one’s interesting because it seems to be the most “complete” yet, offering the four most famous levels: Jade Gully, Crystal Frost, Red Sands and Death Egg. Intentionally or unintentionally, this also seems to replicate quite a few quirks we’ve seen in Sonic X-treme’s controls in the videos that have been released of the in-development build. Which means that it, uh, kind of sucks to play. I realize that’s kind of rude, but I’m sort of allowed to say that. 15 years ago, I was basically the only person on the internet that cared what happened to Sonic X-treme, so... I started contacting developers, starting with the game's producer, Mike Wallis. He lead us to Chris Senn, and that broke the dam on information about this game. Now, I don’t claim ownership over everything that came out of this, I’m simply saying I was the one who got the ball rolling. I watched the mystery of Sonic X-treme slowly get uncovered with as much intent as one could possibly have. It is a fascinating piece of lost media, but as a game… well, I think it got canceled for a reason. SXU shows us a clear vision of that, with a game that’s disorienting to look at and hard to control. Heck, if you’re using a controller, you can’t even use the analog stick -- you have to use a d-pad, leading to controls that feel frustratingly twitchy. But that's true to the experience. I probably spent almost as long in this demo accidentally slipping into bottomless pits as I did exploring its levels. Again, this more or less feels accurate to what we’ve seen in videos, though I do think Sonic probably feels a little too sensitive, here. Regardless, it’s still absolutely fascinating.

“Sonic Infinity Engine” Games

I’m cheating a little bit, here. This is technically three entries, but it’s in “Usual Suspects” because there’s been Infinity Engine games at SAGE for a few years now. Listen, it’s my site, my rules, and we’re playing fast and loose, baby!

Adventure Pack 2

This claims to be a “pack” of multiple levels, but the one level I played went on for over 25 minutes without showing any signs of ending. The level is… well, it’s the kind of stuff we’ve seen at SAGE for years and years and years, a space previously occupied by SonicGDK and BlitzSonic before it, where somebody is clearly starting out learning 3D level design, has some prefab assets, and goes to town creating a huge, intricate environment… that doesn’t fit a Sonic game at all. Too many tight spaces, too much enemy spam, and too much labyrinthine pacing. This is “Sonic Visits Anor Londo,” and while it looks interesting visually, it’s easy to get lost, or worse, killed because something isn’t functioning right. Like a lot of Infinity Engine stuff, it’s a bit hit or miss.... And now, also cramped.

Infinity+ Colorful Combat

The primary goal of this seems to be to update the Infinity Engine with extra features, something that I think is pretty welcome. The Infinity Engine is okay, but it’s missing a little bit of polish that the original developer neglected to give it before abandoning the project. This helps tighten some of that stuff up, while also introducing Wisp powers and more playable characters. Some of the new characters could still use some work, yet, but given the project is still in active development, that’s pretty much a guarantee. This could end up being the defacto version of the Sonic Infinity Engine.

Sonic Reforge: Red Ridge (Blockout)

This is what’s called a “Grey Box.” Rather than build out a fully-detailed level, you get a rough estimate on how the stage will flow before you put all the graphics in. What’s here is okay, I guess, but the level loops back on itself in ways that can be kind of confusing. There are a few places where it’s not really clear where you’re supposed to go next, and I spent several minutes running in circles. I’m also not a huge fan of the changes to Infinity’s physics; jumping off of ramps is a key part of the Sonic experience, but there are several places here where that doesn’t work -- to get the height needed to progress, you just need to roll really fast. It works, but it doesn’t feel like the Sonic I’m familiar with.

Sonic World DX

I have a bit of history with this game. Or, well, with a different version of this game. I wasn’t kind to some of the original entries at SAGE many years ago, but over time, they’ve cleaned the game up and streamlined it a fair amount. Now we have the “DX” release, a further cleanup effort splintered off from the main project, but to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what’s different from the previous release. The main version of Sonic World supports an absolutely gargantuan amount of content, with 50 playable characters and at least that many levels. It was big, and weird, and impressive. This demo ships with three or four playable characters and eight stages. Beyond that, there’s not much else to say -- it’s still Sonic World, though this release doesn’t work right with my controller. It picks up the controller binds from the main version of Sonic World, correctly assuming I’m using a DualShock 4, but none of the buttons are correct. When it asks me to press the X button, I have to press Circle for it to properly register. Not only that, but the right stick camera control is completely broken. Switching to an Xbox controller fixes the camera issues, but now the face buttons have the opposite problem: when it asks me to press A to jump, I have to press X. Throws my whole vibe off, like wearing your shoes on the wrong feet. The menus are bizarre, too -- while adjusting the volume, you can’t push left or right to adjust the levels, you have to use controller face buttons for some reason. This whole thing feels like I stepped back in time to 2013 in a bad way.

Sonic Freedom

I feel like I’ve been waiting to see a major development from Sonic Freedom for half a decade at this point. The art considerations for this game are no joke, and I do not envy anyone trying to make a proper high-def 2D Sonic game that looks this good. But, well… it’s another year, and there’s not a lot here. It plays fine, I guess -- the controls are decent, at least. The problem is the level design. Does this level even end? I’m not sure. I know previous demos for Sonic Freedom have had more than one level, but the stage you start out in here is a confusing, empty labyrinth with respawning enemies and a finite number of rings. You climb up and up and up, but eventually I reached what felt like a dead end. Visually it will always look incredible, but I’m wondering if it’ll ever actually become a game at any point in the future.

BraSonic 20XX

Here’s a strange blast from the past I wasn’t expecting. BraSonic is an old fangame from probably more than a decade and a half ago. It was so long ago that I can’t even actually remember if I played the old version of the game or not, but I definitely remember the name. What really throws me for a loop playing the 20XX version now is how much it feels like a game from back in the early 2000’s. The artwork, the sound effects, the locations, all of it makes me feel like I’m 19 again. Thankfully, this doesn’t play like a fangame from 2004; physics seem pretty solid, level design flows pretty well, and it generally seems to be fun, weird, and most importantly, unique. There aren’t many fan games here at SAGE that open with their first boss fight being against Sonic the Hedgehog. If you find yourself getting burnt out from so many Sonic fan games feeling same-y, this could be a good change of pace.

Sonic Frenzy Adventure

Maybe it’s the fact that this is the 20th Anniversary of the Sonic Amateur Games Expo, but here’s another very old fangame coming back out of the woodwork for an enhanced modern re-release. This game was a mainstay of the mid-to-late 2000’s SAGE events, after which it disappeared before being finished. Well, maybe it was finished. Again, a lot of this stuff was so, so, so long ago that this poor old man’s memory just can’t recall it. Seeing Frenzy Adventure back warms my heart, though. It’s an old friend in what has proven to be a very challenging year. Admittedly, parts of it still feel a bit mid-2000’s, but I consider those charming quirks. Throwbacks to a simpler era. At the very least, controls have been improved, so it does play better than the old releases did. Good stuff. Glad to see you again, dude.

Sonic Speed Course

This was a game that turned up last year, but in the kerfuffle I didn’t get around to trying it, even though I really wanted to. This is clearly a game inspired by Kirby’s Dream Course, but instead of Nintendo’s pink puffball, we have Sonic and friends. Whereas Kirby gained abilities by bowling through enemies, this adapts a more traditional Sonic gameplay structure of item boxes filled with shields and other powerups. But here’s my deep dark secret: even though I love Kirby’s Dream Course in concept, there’s a part of me that feels an intense hatred for that game. I have distinct memories of renting Kirby’s Dream Course as a kid and getting really far into the game, but trying to play it as an adult I’m baffled at how difficult it is. The main problem I have is that every stroke you take subtracts from your health, meaning you can only hit the ball so many times before you just… die. This makes for a very, very steep learning curve that discourages play and experimentation. Every shot truly, deeply matters and eventually I find myself caught in a death spiral and staring at the game over screen. All of this is replicated in Sonic’s Speed Course, which, much like with Kirby, I find myself drawn to like a moth to the flame -- only to come away feeling dejected and like I’m just not good enough. For fans of Kirby’s Dream Course, this is undoubtedly good news, as this means Sonic Speed Course is faithful to the tone of that game. But I find myself wishing there was a practice mode or something that let me play these courses without the punitive health system, because I’m ready to love them.

Sonic: Triple Trouble 16-Bit

When you write about so many games at SAGE every year, things start to blur together... a lot. I seem to recall that Triple Trouble 16-Bit last year was good, but had room for improvement. Well, this year, this demo feels… really quite good. I’ll admit, I was a little skeptical about remaking this game. Sonic: Triple Trouble was among the first batch of Game Gear games I ever owned as a kid, and while I liked the game, in my adulthood, I feel like I’ve come to appreciate Sonic Chaos more. But so much has been added to this game that it’s really come into its own. It uses Triple Trouble more as a jumping off point to become something fresh and interesting, and on top of that, this demo is pretty polished. This game was kind of always on my radar, but it’s really turning into something special.

Battle Cross Fever

Every year, I download this game hoping for some kind of single player offering, and every year I’m let down. Battle Cross Fever is a fighting game that plays a lot like Smash Bros., but contains elements that pull it closer to traditional fighting games like Street Fighter. It’s the kind of game that can check with the server to make sure you’re playing the latest version, but doesn’t have true online multiplayer -- instead advertising that you should use a piece of screen sharing software like Parsec to accomplish online multiplayer. In their defense, the few times I’ve used Parsec, it’s basically been magic for how well it works. But I just want, like… anything that I can play by myself. Even if it’s just a super basic arcade mode with brain dead AI, anything is better than nothing. But, I suppose, I am an outlier. Judging by the horrific character select music I landed on, Battle Cross Fever has enough of a community that they could get fans to sing along to “Ghost Town” from Sonic Forces -- which is a fun idea, don’t get me wrong, but when you have loud voices over cheap microphones, well… I hope you aren’t wearing headphones like I was. Anyway, this game’s always seemed solid, but I’ve also never played it with another human being, so really, I’m speaking from the perspective of admiring the diverse roster and all of the fun arenas they’ve ported in. Maybe someday it’ll get some single player content.

I’ll be back with another article… uh, eventually. In truth, I was only going to feature five games here, but it ended up being ten, so we’ll see how many are in future articles when we get there!

[ladybugsfanfics]

Shut Up And Kiss Me [11/?]

Pairing: Tom Hiddleston x reader

Style: Multichapter

WC: 2k

Warnings: mention of blackout, exstreme awkwardness, 

Summary: You and Professor Hiddleston have been colleagues for many years now, and through those years the hatred for each other has only grown. Now, as a new school year starts, you’re being told that you have to share a classroom or a class. Neither are happy about the outcome, but knowing you’ll never come to an agreement, you let the class choose for you. Team-teaching is rare in 2019, but it is a lot harder to do when you can’t stand the person you’re doing it with. 

A/N: aaaa, i have been so absent, I know. This has taken forever, but now I can promise you I’m gonna be back. Not only will this, hopefully be updated more often (I have inspiration), but I also got like a ton of writing mojo (wrote 4k words yesterday) and a Loki!Piarate au is soon done and i have other shits, my requests are becoming easier though turns out they’re getting long. Anyways, I hope this can please you and I hope to be able to post more in the coming time. I love you all so much ^_^ P.S. it’s close to christmas and a christmas party... ;)

Previous | Seires Masterlist | Part Twelve

You can’t place the feeling. Not really. All you know is that something feels… off. Wrong. 

It’s Sunday, three days since halloween and you met Emma’s friends. Even though that was fun and all, the night could have been better had you stuck with the people you know. Not only would you be able to continue to get Tom being nice (which had your heart race a mile a minute), but you could also, maybe, have more fun seeing as you wouldn’t panic everytime you said something. 

However, three days later, something feels off. You’re not even sure if it has anything to do with Halloween (if it has anything to do with Tom lending you his coat because you were barely dressed in your costume),  or if it has something to do with the fact that you have no recollection of what you did last night. 

All you know is that something is not as it should be. 

You try to shake off the feeling and reach for your phone, where it lies on your nightstand. The clock on it reads 07.39 AM and you curse your annoying drunk self for always making sure you wake up early―it’s not that you go to bed early, no rather late actually (like you gotta stay up ‘til at least 3 AM), but more that whenever you do get drunk, you actually fall asleep right away and you actually sleep. Maybe that’s the cure. 

Despite wanting to continue your slumber, you decide to get up. Maybe you can figure out what’s giving you this feeling of something being amiss. 

One slightly wrong, though not that surprising, thing lies on your couch. Y/BFF/N has their face half planted in one of your pillows, though the angle works for them to breathe. One arm hangs loosely off the couch and their legs have tangled themselves in a blanket, where one is thrown over the back of the couch. You have no idea how that can be comfortable, and you bet they’ll tell you how much they regret it when they wake up. 

Yet, you know that’s not the feeling that haunts you. Seeing your best friend crashing on your couch is not a rare sight, though it is becoming rarer as time passes. 

Nothing is amiss in your apartment. Everything where you left it when you went out last night, even the now half-full bottle of wine you opened before leaving that sits on your countertop. 

The mystery continues, but the answers are not in your apartment. One thing’s for sure, you’re not about to go out and find out. 

Before you decide to check any messages or notifications, you find a glass, fill it with water and down it in seconds. Pulling your head back you become aware of the ache in it, and with the water helping you clear your mind a little, the pounding slowly creeps into a loud drum. 

Okay, so you’re not getting away from being hungover. Good to know. 

Not being able to focus with the drums really taking off in your head, you rush to the bathroom and find aspirin. You take two and swallow them with another glass of water. It’s gonna take a little while before they help so you slide down the bathroom wall and sit there to let yourself ease into the beating that keeps interrupting your thoughts. 

It feels like it takes forever, but when you check the clock, the pounding starts to wind down a little after more or less fifteen minutes. You don’t have the energy to get up from the warmth of the bathroom floor, so you continue to sit as you open your phone. 

You have three snaps, five messenger texts, two texts and eleven missed phone calls. The phonecalls belong to three people; three from Tom (your heart skips a beat at the thought that he thinks of you), six from Benedict, and surprisingly, two from Chris. 

The two texts are one message of having voicemails (three), and one message from Tom; I heard from Benedict. He’s worried, are you okay? - Tom. You ignore it, making a note to reply and listen to the voicemails after checking messenger and snap. 

It takes three seconds to regret checking snap. Two of the snaps are from people you have no idea who are, but who you probably added last night. The last one is a video of you from Y/BFF/N embarrassing yourself to the nth degree on the dance floor. You know they saved it, and you know there is no point in asking to delete it―no matter what, you know they won’t post it anywhere. 

In a state of shock, checking messenger becomes more automated that anything else. You read the messages; one with a similar name to one of the snap usernames that you ignore and delete the friend request seeing as the message itself is not one you want; one that’s from a groupchat with you, Y/BFF/N and another mutual friend that you don’t see that often as they live abroad, but whom you trust fully and therefore has replied to your drunk texts about wanting to fuck a certain person whose name shall not be mentioned; three texts from Chris asking what’s going on, if you’re okay and if there’s anything he can do to help. You only reply to Chris’s by asking why he wonders, saying yes and asking him if he knows anything about what happened last night―you do not admit to having no memory of the evening. 

Waiting for a reply you listen to the voicemails. All three are from Benedict; one he sounds mad in, one he sounds worried in, and one he threatens to call the police and tell them that you’re missing and that you might be in danger―it feels a little weird not knowing if that actually happened. 

You sigh, blowing your hair so it falls in your face. Well, well, gotta keep searching. 

In the living room, Y/BFF/N lies in the same position as before. You ignore them, instead focusing on the low rumble from your stomach. 

Hopefully, some food will help clear the mystery. 

The food itself doesn’t help. However, the replies from Chris does. 

Chris: asking because you seemed very drunk and i wanted to know you’re okay, good that you are, and no, i don’t know since you never really gave me anything to go on

You: okay, well, there are no other messages between us, anything I did to alert you??

Chris: uhh, no, actually it was Tom that called me

You: Tom?? Hiddleston?? The dude who I teach with?? 

Chris: yeah… i was surprised too, maybe talk to him?

You: yeah, im gonna 

Of course, that’s what you tell Chris. You know, with every ounce of your body, that you will not pick up the phone and either text or call him because you know that that would be the death of you. 

You will wait, as long as you can, to ask Tom why he called Chris. The thought of it alone just has that feeling of wrongness expand. You shake it off, put away your phone and return your attention to your food. 

 --

Going into work on Monday is not on your list of fun activities, but it is something you have to do. You suppose it would have been on your list of fun if not for the looming conversation you need to have with a certain professor. 

It takes little time after your first class to meet him. Usually, your schedules don’t coincide but you guess the universe isn’t on your side today. 

“Hi.” Tom purses his lips and puts his hands in his pockets. 

You nod. “Hi.”

“How was your weekend?” he asks. 

“It was good,” you say and nod. “You know what, I can’t really talk right now. Catch you later?” You shoot him a pained smile and hurry away before Tom can answer. There is no way you’ve ever been in a more awkward situation (and the worst part is that you don’t even know what it is that made it awkward―what the fuck did you say?!). 

You try not to think too hard about it as you make your way back to your office. With two hours of office time, you can get back to focusing on your research project and get your mind off Saturday night and your possibly very embarrassing utterance to Tom. 

God, what the fuck did you say?

It takes a solid five minutes for your mind to rush back to what’s been circling around the last twenty-four hours. 

“Okay, you know what?” you say out loud to the silence of your office. It does not reply back. However, in the need to say it out loud, you act as if it did. “I have to just ask. I’m gonna go to wherever he currently is and I’m gonna ask what I said and I’m gonna cut right to the chase and it’s gonna be alright. It’s gonna be okay. It’s probably not as bad as I think it is.” 

However, you don’t get up. It’s like you’re glued to your chair and no matter how much the nerves in your brain tells your legs to get up, they don’t move. 

For two hours, you just sit there. Almost so you’re late to class even. 

 --

“We’re doing a what?” 

Both you and Tom frown at Dean McHallan who, though with a slight roll of his eyes, nods. “You’re going to a conference in Scotland. I know it’s sudden and it seems weird, but they specifically asked for you two to speak.”

You raise a brow. “They asked for us to speak about what exactly? Do I have to prepare some kind of presentation or something now because, honestly, I’m not ready for that.” 

“They asked for you both to speak on team-teaching creative writing. They wanted input from your students as well so during the week now, ask them some questions that you can quote them on. And they wanted you, Y/N, to speak on your research project as they find it interesting and they weirdly enough hadn’t thought about it before. They would love to hear how you’re going about it.” 

Your mind races as you nod along to his words. What are you supposed to do? Say no, nope, you can’t do that. You literally have no choice because he’s already said you’re going and McHallan makes the final decisions and he also knows neither of you really have anything that important going on currently. 

“Okay, I guess we’re going to Scotland next week.” You’ve always wanted to go so maybe it’s an opportunity you should take anyway. 

“It’s settled then. Tom?”

The literature professor nods. “I can’t argue with your reasoning so I guess we’re going. I have some inquiries. Accomodations? Travel? Food? And when?”

McHallan hands each of you a piece of paper. “You will be in the same hotel, though different rooms. I think they’ll be just across from each other or something. You’ll fly there on wednesday morning, together, and have all wednesday evening to settle in and make the last preparations and so on. Food will be accounted for unless you eat above budget. There are breakfast and dinner included at the hotel, and lunch is served with the conference. If you eat anything outside of that it will be out of your own pocket. The schedule for the conference is on the back of that paper and the information you need about your flights just under there.”

You nod, going over the paper as McHallan talks and making different mental notes. Some of those make no sense, and one of them is ‘get trapped somewhere so you have to ask Tom what you did on Saturday’, though you’re afraid that one might be the hardest one to see through with.

[welllpthisishappening]

I feel like I should tell you that second last bullet point about PK and Matt made me cry immediately wow the emotions Laura

Hellooooooo anon. I AM HERE TO FORCE MY HOCKEY DOG EMOTIONS ON YOU, IN A WAY THAT SOUNDS FAR LESS THREATENING THAN THAT. Here are some more emotions that got decidedly more emotional as I wrote them. 

Age update because there are words here: Matt just got drafted. So he’s almost 21, Peggy is 17 closing in on 18 and Chris is 11. This is a few months after Getting in the Shooting Lanes and goes along with this post about the dog Will and Belle adopt. His name is PK. That story is here. 

I’ve got no excuse for this except how often Tyler Seguin posts about his dogs. Also, like, how much I want Chris Jones to be certain his older brother is the best player in the entire NHL ever. Alright, let’s get emotional:

“So, uh, Mom, you think you’re ever going to stop crying, or, like…what’s the deal?”

Emma glanced down, narrowing her eyes slightly at the smiling kid in front of her – decked in head to toe Rangers team apparel and that was actually pretty impressive because she could not begin to fathom where he got shoes with the appropriate color scheme.

Chris smiled, rocking back on the heels of those same shoes and he spent far too much time wth far too many professional athletes. It was doing wonders for his self-confidence. And, now, there was one more professional athlete to contend with.

Emma was never going to stop crying.

“That’s not an answer, you know,” Chris pointed out, hooking his thumb through the loop in his jeans and most of them had changed at some point between landing at JFK and finding their way back uptown and none of them had really slept. They were a whirlwind of brand-new jerseys that looked oddly familiar because they still said Jones above the number twenty and that was, at least, seventy-six percent of the reason Emma couldn’t stop crying, and there were FaceTime calls to be made and Roland Locksley actually screaming in Philadelphia  and Elsa nearly sobbing in Colorado and they should all probably eat something.

Emma couldn’t remember the last time they ate something.

“You’re not nearly as funny as you think you are, kid,” Emma muttered, tugging on the front of Chris’ shirt. He did something ridiculous with his eyebrows.

“And you’re going to set a record for crying in a single day.”

Emma inhaled, something potentially maternal and possibly a bit like grounding on the tip of her tongue, but the eleven-year-old in front of her had grown up far too much in the last few weeks, ankle a normal size again, and he’d spent most of those same few weeks reading any draft information he could find.

He regularly printed out reports that Matt was going to go anywhere except second overall to the Rangers, just so he could crumple them up and dramatically throw them into the corner of the room. Killian found a small mountain of them a few days ago. He made Chris take them out.

And then discussed draft options with Chris for several hours after.

Emma scowled when her kid didn’t stop smirking at her, lips twisted and eyebrows still just as high. She inhaled again, another quick pull of air through her teeth as several voices came from the kitchen.

“Yeah, that’s probably true,” she admitted, and Chris didn’t argue when she pulled him against her side, lips on the top of his hair and the very likely misplaced effort to keep him eleven for the rest of his life.

She was crying again.

“Although Aunt Elsa may give you a run for your money,” Chris added.

“That was just because she saw Dad crying.”

“Dad cried?”

“Oh definitely.”

Chris was silent for a moment, and for half a second Emma felt something dangerously close to terror slink down her spine, a cold rush of worry that landed in the pit of her stomach with an almost audible thump. She swallowed, licking her lips and willing her pulse to stay relatively human. It had been through enough already in the last twenty-four hours.

And she absolutely, positively was not prepared for the sniffle she heard.

Emma twisted on this spot, nearly losing her balance in the process, but Chris’ teeth were digging into his lower lip and he looked a little wobbly himself, eyes squeezed closed and shoulders shifting and—

“Kid,” Emma snapped, crouching in front of him and that was a mistake because he towered over her now. “Hey, hey, hey, what’s the matter? Is this a hunger thing?”

“I’m not an actual baby anymore, Mom, I’m not crying because I’m hungry.”

“Then…”

Chris clicked his tongue, exhaling with a put-upon sound that made him look far older than Emma ever wanted. That felt selfish. But one kid had already gotten drafted that night and the other was getting ready for college and she really had no idea why they’d agreed to come back to Will and Belle’s apartment.

Maybe they had food.

She couldn’t remember if they had food home. Probably not. They’d been far too preoccupied with draft stock and a whole week of prep in Chicago and picking out color-coordinated ties.

“He’s totally going to wreck in the league,” Chris mumbled, eyes still closed, but pointed towards his feet anyway and Emma’s heart could not cope with this. Her whole being could not cope with this. “Just like…he’s probably going to set some kind of rookie scoring record.”

“I think they may have him play in the AHL for awhile.”

“Yeah, right. You’ve seen how fast Matt is, right? We’re desperate for that kind of speed.”

“We?”

Chris’ eyes all but flew open – probably so they could get them as wide as humanly possible when he realized what he said. “Ah, that’s how it works or something, right? Even without my own speed.”

Emma swallowed, not sure she could actually voice the myriad of increasingly sentimental nonsense sitting in the back of her throat and she nearly fell over when she felt a hand on her shoulder. Matt was still wearing the jersey they’d  made him put on when they called his name, but there was an actual name on the back now and he smiled at his brother when he met his gaze.

“Keep using the collective pronoun, C,” Matt said. “But Mom may be right about the AHL. We’ll see how camp goes.”

Chris rolled his eyes. They were getting as good a workout as Emma’s pulse. “Are you serious?” he scoffed, and there were more footsteps and she didn’t even have to look up when Killian moved next to her.

“That’s usually how it works, kid,” Killian reasoned.

“You didn’t play in the AHL.”

“Ah, well, he’s got you on that one,” Emma muttered, glancing up and Killian’s smirk was a bit more fine-tuned than either one of their kids. They’d get there. Probably. They were all far too competitive not to.

“If this is about MD playing in the Garden on opening night, then I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Peggy shouted from the kitchen. She was probably sitting on the counter. Emma was almost surprised there was a plaque there, designating it as Margaret Elsa Jones’ space and solely for Margaret Elsa Jones.

Matt clicked his tongue. “Wow, that’s actually kind of rough, Mar.”

“And not true,” Chris added. “You seen our centermen? Their face-off percentage is the worst.”

“I mean not the worst,” Killian shrugged. “It got better last season.”

“Dad. It’s not good. It’s not totally your fault, you’re not a centermen. But I bet Matt could help out.”

“Wow, thanks for that incredible vote of confidence, C,” Matt mumbled, the smile still on his face when he tugged Chris towards him. “Although he’s right about that face-off percentage, Dad. Embarrassing.”

Killian groaned, holding out a hand for Emma and she didn’t quite stumble into his side, but it was awfully close and she’d blame the whole thing on dehydration via crying. So, naturally, there was something else to cry about immediately.

And maybe the real reason they’d come back to Will and Belle’s apartment.

Matt made a noise that somewhere closer to a yelp of excitement than anything else, Peggy all but leaping out of the kitchen and sprinting towards the living room, somehow sliding into both of her brothers when her socks proved unable to provide any traffic on the hardwood floor.

“Ah, of course,” Killian mumbled, mostly into Emma’s hair when his mouth landed there and her vision was already starting to swim in front of her eyes.

And, really, she should have known from the very beginning because, really, they’d been with that dog from the very beginning and Emma was almost surprised Roland didn’t demand to be put on this FaceTime phone call too. He and Matt regularly argued over who was PK’s favorite.

It might have been Chris.

“It’s definitely Chris,” Killian muttered. He winked when Emma gaped at him.

“God, you’re the only reason Chris thinks he’s as funny as he’s absolutely not. Why are you a mindreader?”

“You’re not very good at disguising your emotions when you’re weeping them out, love.”

“Oh, shut up. You could use some eye drops too.”

He didn’t quite blush, but the tips of his ears went read, eyebrows twisted and another kiss pressed to her temple. “I wouldn’t say no, honestly.”

“You guys are missing this moment,” Will announced, perched on the arm of his couch with his fingers wrapped around Belle’s shoulder and Matt was kneeling on the floor in the first Rangers jersey that was his, making faces at a dog that had been as much a part of his childhood as anything.

Emma was seriously never going to stop crying.

“Make sure you get the good angles,” Belle laughed, and Chris hummed in response, a phone in his hand and a smile on his face. “That way we get all the likes.”

“Ah, we’re going to get all the likes, aren’t we?” Matt asked, an absurd twist of facial expressions at a dog who was drifting very close to ancient, but still managed to get down the hallway when he realized the Jones Line had come to visit.

“This is honestly the best part of the weekend,” Peggy announced. “Way better than those facts we learned about Chicago.”

Kilian groaned. “You appreciated those facts. You had no idea the world’s first skyscraper was built in Chicago.”

“Somehow I feel like I’d have gotten by without this information.”

“But now you know and you can brag about it.”

“When would that ever come up?”

“Make it happen, Margaret.”

“Oh my God.”

Emma laughed, burrowing her head into Killian’s chest and that was a mistake because Belle mentioned angles again and Matt was still making faces when she looked up, mumbling a string of barely understandable words to a dog who absolutely could not hear him.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Matt laughed. He was on his stomach now, sprawled out across the floor without a single care to what it was doing to his jersey. “Listen, PK, listen, listen, I’ve got exciting news, man.”

PK barked in response.

“Yeah, that’s right. Listen, hey, remember when we were kids and we made Rol practice that one wrist shot and then you showed up and made sure we could get the puck back? Well, it totally worked, PK because I got drafted.”

Another bark.

And several sniffles.

A world record for crying. Right there in Belle and Will’s apartment.

“He’s going to get called up by Thanksgiving,” Chris announced, eyes flashing back to Emma and Killian like either of them would be wiling to contradict him. “I’ll bet you guys Matt’s signing bonus.”

“No deal,” Matt grinned. He hadn’t gotten off the floor yet, but no one told him to move and Chris handed Emma the phone so she could actually hit upload when all three Jones kids moved to brush their fingers over PK’s back.

“Thanksgiving,” Chris repeated. “At the latest.”

The video got an absolutely ridiculous amount of hits, Roland leaving several caps lock comments about MISSING OUT and, three days before Thanksgiving, with the Rangers playing in Vancouver, Emma’s phone rang – “Mom,” Matt said, and she could hear the giddy sound his voice, the way it managed to crack on three letters and one word and all that meaning. She sat down.

They almost missed puck drop, calling in every favor from every single person they knew and Graham met them at the airport, ignoring several laws on both sides of the border to get them there on time and Emma cried again.

So did Killian. So did Peggy. It made the phone in her hand shake.

Chris didn’t. He smiled.

“Told you.”

[obtusemedia]

Top 25 songs of 2019: Honorable Mentions

In 2019 — a commendable year to close out the decade, musically speaking — Gen Z’s budding stars fully arrived, while long-time stalwarts created some of the best work of their careers. There weren’t any albums that threatened the top of my decade-end chart, but the year still delivered a crop of solid records in a variety of genres.

This year, I’m doing my year-end list a bit early, because I plan on releasing my decade-end list around New Year’s. So before we do that, let’s kick off the celebration of 2019 with 15 great songs, listed in alphabetical order by artist, that just missed the top-25 cut off.

“People” by The 1975

Manchester pop-rock geniuses The 1975 have already dabbled in almost every genre under the sun. So a sharp pivot into near-screamo punk rock seemed inevitable.

“People” isn’t my favorite song of theirs — the best version of The 1975 is when they’re fully in ‘80s synthpop mode — but it’s still very effective. The crunchy, thrashing guitars fit perfectly with Matty Healy’s off-kilter vocals and apocalyptic lyrics. In a way, “People” is a sequel to their generation-defining 2018 single, “Love It If We Made It.” But while that song is anxious, the main emotion in “People” is fury. And it’s not hard to miss the message, as Healy screams it in the chorus: “STOP FUCKING WITH THE KIDS.”

“Baby Boy” by Kevin Abstract

BROCKHAMPTON’s boy-band/hip-hop collective is too chaotic to have a true frontman. But if there is one, it would be Kevin Abstract. And the Texan rapper/singer’s 2019 solo album, ARIZONA BABY, was a stellar showcase of his talent.

“Baby Boy,” a cooing, soft love ballad, is the record’s best track. Between the gorgeous melodies and the left-of-center production and singing, it seems destined for the soundtrack of a quirky rom-com. And it’s nice to hear Abstract flex his R&B chops.

“Everybody Here Hates You” by Courtney Barnett

This loosie single by Melbourne’s finest indie rocker is classic Courtney Barnett. All the ingredients are there: deserty guitars, a shuffling groove, and Barnett charmingly speak-singing her sardonic lyrics. Barnett’s clearly notched a lane for herself with “Everybody Here Hates You.” And frankly, if she never leaves it and keeps making solid songs like this, I wouldn’t mind.

“Twist The Knife” by Chromatics

Speaking of consistently excelling in your specific soundscape — here’s Chromatics! “Twist The Knife” has all the off-key synths, ghostly Ruth Radelet vocals and general nocturnal, cinematic sound you’d want from the mysterious group. Perhaps the one major difference is the thumping, 808-heavy disco beat. But, like with Barnett, Chromatics’ sound is solidified by this point. And luckily, they’re still the masters at soundtracking nighttime drives.

“Arabesque” by Coldplay

Coldplay returned this fall with two singles. One was “Orphans,” which had a conventional Coldplay sound (sing-along chorus! aggressive perkiness!) to contrast with an unconventional Coldplay topic (refugees). 

The other was “Arabesque,” which sounds like nothing Coldplay have ever done before. It’s got a hard-hitting Afropop beat, a French interlude, Chris Martin dropping the f-bomb, and most amazingly, a sax solo that’s nearly two minutes long. It’s a weird, jazzy detour for the group — and it’s incredible.

“Falling” by Dude York

Seattle indie rockers Dude York wrote a song about a topic you don’t hear much often in music: romantic complacency. The couple in “Falling” isn’t a bad one — lead singer Claire England makes it clear that she’s having a great time. But she also calls the relationship “practical,” and describes it as a very casual, low-stakes romance. “Falling” brings up the question many long-term couples ask themselves: Weren’t there supposed to be butterflies? Is it bad if our relationship is more cozy than passionate? It’s an intriguing subject, backed by killer rock production.

“Tough Enough” by Ex Hex

Ex Hex’s sound is knowingly old-school. The rip-roaring El Camino-rock of “Tough Enough” could’ve easily been a Pat Benatar or Joan Jett single in the early ‘80s. And that’s what makes it great — who doesn’t love Joan Jett? “Tough Enough” isn’t something you have to think too hard about; it just kicks ass.

“Summer Girl” by HAIM

Asking HAIM to give you a sleek retro-pop song is like asking Spoon to give you a nervy indie rock single: they’ll deliver the goods. But the San Fernando Valley sisters gave their formula a few tweaks with “Summer Girl,” their best single since their 2013 debut.

Instead of their typically slick production, HAIM opted for a barebone, funky ‘70s groove. The vocals rarely go above a whisper. And the most prominent element of the song is a honking sax riff, which sounds like it comes straight from A Tribe Called Quest song. But all these changes don’t erase HAIM’s strongest quality: their solid-gold hooks. And you’ll be humming that doo-doo-do-do-doo chorus for days after hearing “Summer Girl.”

“Nice To Meet Ya” by Niall Horan

I had no expectations for former One Direction member Niall Horan’s new single this year. I didn’t love his previous white-guy-with-acoustic-guitar style, so I didn’t plan on enjoying his new stuff.

But “Nice To Meet Ya” thankfully ditches the acoustic guitar. It’s an extremely late-‘90s breakbeat banger. It’s less Ed Sheeran and more classic Robbie Williams. The song it really reminds me of is Republica’s deathless jock-jam classic “Ready To Go” — all propulsive energy and power. “Nice To Meet Ya” is a bit less aggressive, but it’s still a ton of fun and shows that Harry Styles isn’t the only One Direction alum that can produce a great solo track.

“Hey, Ma” by Bon Iver

At this point, Bon Iver can write these beardy arena-folk anthems in his sleep. But that doesn’t make “Hey, Ma” any less of a great update of that song. Amidst the occasional synth bloop and awkward Boomer-esque weed references (not sure anyone’s unironically said “toking on dope” in a while), the single features one of Justin Vernon’s greatest melodies. If anyone’s wondering how Bon Iver became one of the decade’s premier indie acts, the soaring chorus and powerful melody of “Hey, Ma” is an indicative example.

“Juice” by Lizzo

If it weren’t for a certain baggy clothes-wearing teen, Lizzo would’ve easily been 2019′s biggest breakout artist. But although “Good As Hell” and “Truth Hurts” were her biggest hits, those two songs came out way before 2019. Out of the songs that the Minneapolis popstar actually released this year, “Juice” is the perfect demonstration of her irrepressible charisma.

“Juice” is the best-possible combination of Bruno Mars’ retro-funk exercises and a defiant Kelly Clarkson anthem. Lizzo sounds like the most confident, extroverted person on the planet, slyly bragging about her and her friends’ prowess. It’s not quite on the level of “Uptown Funk,” but “Juice” is still too fun to resist.

“Sucker Punch” by Sigrid

“Sucker Punch” is just the latest edition of a wonderful musical tradition: the sleek, icy Swedish pop song! Wait...*checks notes* turns out Sigrid is actually Norwegian. A country that has less ABBA-style pop and more death metal.

But regardless of what part of Scandinavia she’s from, Sigrid’s “Sucker Punch” is still a textbook-perfect bubblegum single. With its bouncy vibe and explosive chorus, it almost sounds like a lost hit from 2011 or 2012 — a golden age for pop. Sigrid’s thick accent and energy just adds to the charm. Old-school synthpop isn’t in vogue anymore, but at least Sigrid is keeping it alive for now.

“Hurry On Home” by Sleater-Kinney

2019 was not Sleater-Kinney’s best year. The Olympia indie legends’ new album, The Center Won’t Hold, received lukewarm reviews. The momentum from their 2015 reunion was mostly sapped. And most critically, longtime drummer Janet Weiss, one of the best in the biz, quit abruptly, saying she was essentially told that she was no longer a “creative equal” in the group.

But at least the trio delivered one stone-cold Sleater-Kinney classic single before they imploded. “Hurry On Home” is a sleazy, thunderous hard rock jam that would’ve snugly fit on their last album, No Cities To Love. It’s got a bit more of a robotic groove, thanks to producer St. Vincent, but the crunchy guitars are still there. Carrie Brownstein’s sardonic vocals are still there. And that trademark Sleater-Kinney intensity is absolutely still there.

“Superbike” by Jay Som

Jay Som’s stellar 2017 debut album, Everybody Works, dabbled in dream pop, but also dipped its toes into many other subgenres. But the lead single of her sophomore album, “Superbike,” is pure hazy ecstasy.

“Superbike” has a bit of Alvvays in its DNA, particularly in the atmospheric guitars and whispered vocals. But Melina Duterte added a bit more California bliss to that formula. The track sounds like the soundtrack to a tranquil jog down the beach, with the sunrise in the background.

“God Is” by Kanye West

Kanye West can’t sing. He’s warbly and incredibly off-key. And that’s why I love it when he genuinely tries to do so.

Jesus Is King is a mediocre, one-note first draft of an album, but it still has its moments. And my favorite moment on the record is when West puts his lack of vocal talent on display. “God Is” features West trying his darndest to belt over a sample of gospel composer James Cleveland’s song of the same name. And he falls pretty flat on his face. But there’s something still powerful about that, like someone badly singing in church, but with so much conviction. It humanizes West.

[junker-town]

Everything wonderful about Tim Duncan becoming a Spurs assistant, ranked

Photo by Ronald Cortes/Getty Images

We have that and more in Tuesday’s NBA newsletter.

On Monday, the San Antonio Spurs announced two new assistant coaches would be joining Gregg Popovich’s staff to fill vacancies left by Ime Udoka and Ettore Messina. Those two new assistant coaches: Will Hardy, who has climbed the ranks within the organization, and Tim Duncan, yes that Tim Duncan.

How wholesome and beautiful is Tim Duncan joining Pop’s bench in San Antonio? Let us count the ways, starting from the bottom.

11. The spectre of Tim Duncan, future NBA head coach

Is Duncan doing this only to be around Popovich and the Spurs more, or does he have aspirations to become an NBA head coach (maybe of the Spurs when Pop retires in three years or so)? Are we prepared for Duncan arguing calls from the bench, for Duncan giving the in-game interviews? I don’t think we’re prepared for that.

10. The Spurs staff could win the BIG 3 title

I don’t know anything about Will Hardy’s game. But Tim Duncan and Becky Hammon are two-thirds of a killer 3-on-3 squad. What a pick-and-roll duo.

9. Picture Tim Duncan keeping Spurs players from running onto the court during an altercation

One of the most important jobs assistant coaches have during games is keeping players from running onto the court during altercations. (Tim Duncan knows this intimately well, he may owe one of his five rings to the Suns failing to keep their players on the bench when Bob Horry hip checked Steve Nash!) I’m trying to imagine Duncan jumping up to hold back, like, Lonnie Walker. Glorious.

8. DeMar DeRozan bank shots!

”Alright guys, today’s drill is 15-foot bank shots.” “Again???”

7. The Spurs still have guys who played with Duncan

These players who played with Tim are going to bust him so bad. And vice versa. To be a bat on the wall.

6. More Tim Duncan!

There has been a painful lack of Tim Duncan in our lives since his retirement a few years ago. No longer! Now we know we can just put on the Spurs on League Pass and get a dose of Big Fun.

5. Tim Duncan has to wear a suit, like, every day

Bwahahaha no more jorts with long-sleeve tropical print button-downs, my man. (In reality, Duncan became a much more snappy dresser in his later years in the league. I miss island casual Tim, to be honest.)

4. Best assistant coach ever

We ran through the ranks and determined that there has never been a better NBA player than Tim Duncan serve as an assistant coach. Guys like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson went straight into head coaching jobs when they took the bench. Bill Russell was a player-coach. No. 2 on this list might be, like, Patrick Ewing? Think about it: in a league where any number of players have gone straight into head coaching jobs fresh out of the league, one of the five best players ever is taking an assistant coach job. It’s wild.

3. How the Spurs describe Duncan’s path in the press release

The top three most wonderful things about Duncan becoming an assistant coach are all from the Spurs’ master-class press release announcing it. (That’s right: this wasn’t leaked, the Spurs and Duncan got to announce it on their own terms. Spurs gonna Spur.)

First, here’s how Duncan is described in the release: “Duncan, a 1997 Wake Forest graduate, played 19 seasons with the Spurs before retiring in the summer of 2016.”

That’s it! Nothing about the five rings, the two NBA MVPs, the three Finals MVPs, the 15 All-Star nods, the 13-year streak on the All-NBA and All-Defense teams. In a league where every achievement is screamed from the rooftops, this is just hilarious.

2. The Spurs’ press release leads with Hardy

Tim didn’t even get his own press release: the Spurs’ press release -- the headline, the release itself, the tweet promoting it -- all lead with Will Hardy. What a come-up for Will Hardy! Bonus wonderful thing: the URL path for the press release on the Spurs’ website is “spurs-announce-assistant-coach-updates.”

1. Pop’s quote about Duncan in the press release

And finally, here’s Popovich’s quote about Duncan in the press release: “It is only fitting, that after I served loyally for 19 years as Tim Duncan’s assistant, that he returns the favor.” Pure, unadulterated Pop. I love it.

Three cheers to the Spurs for a shower of sunlight in dark times.

Programming Notes

While the NBA has turned into a 12-month sport, we do have about a month here where less is happening and it’s hard to put together a robust newsletter five times a week. So for the next month or so, Good Morning It’s Basketball will be a twice-a-week affair. And, in fact, next week it will take a full break. Expect an issue Thursday and then again on August 6.

If something big happens, you can certainly expect a special edition or two. Thanks for subscribing.

Links

More stars, including Bradley Beal and Tobias Harris, have dropped out of USA Basketball’s quest to defend the FIBA World Cup in China next month. I wrote about why USA Basketball is struggling to get top-level guys to play. Here’s Dan Devine on Damian Lillard needing to save the day.

The Wizards have a front office now. A very interesting one! Kudos for trying something different after being a very static, old-fashioned franchise for so long.

Meanwhile, Wizards governor Ted Leonsis is arguing this could be a quick rebuild (possible, sure) and heralding the importance of depth over star power. Leonsis bemoans his previous belief in the power of getting three stars, as if that strategy were the problem and not the fact that he thought in 2011 that his three stars were John Wall, Andray Blatche, and Jordan Crawford. I’m not making that up. He wrote that.

The talented Kennedi Landry asks a crucial question: what type of basketball does the BIG3 want to be?

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Grainy Footage of Ben Simmons Shooting Jumpers Season! Can some clips of Markelle Fultz in central Florida be too far behind???

CANDACE PARKER ANALYST ROLE BIDDING WAR.

How Russell Westbrook in Houston can work.

Kevin O’Connor on the supremacy of LeBron and Anthony Davis in the new era of dynamic duos.

Chris Herring is worried about the Warriors’ defense next season.

Surprising no one, the Wizards will offer Bradley Beal a 3-year, $112 million extension when they officially can on Friday. It’d be a surprise if Beal took it.

How close is the NBA to fully sanctioning the use of cannabis?

All the big NBA stars have people pulling media and entertainment strings behind them. Meet Stephen Curry’s guy.

Are the Thunder too good?

On Zhaire Smith’s development. I’m going to write about this when we get a little closer to training camp, but Zhaire Smith and Thybulle Matisse are the players that can turn the Sixers into a superteam.

The Lakers claimed Kostas Antetokounmpo off of waivers. People are noting this could be about chasing Giannis in 2021. That’s true. Also, Kostas might be the ninth best player on the Lakers roster even though he spent last season in the G League.

Not basketball but wow do I want the next NBA champion to adopt this high-speed parade format from the Tour de France and please throw sausages too.

Be excellent to each other.

[michaelok]

Fun with Java Deserialization

Down the Rabbit Hole

I’ve just been scrambling down the rabbit hole to patch an app that Qualys is complaining has a deserialization vulnerability. What should have been a simple effort has turned into a mystery because, while we appear to have the correct libraries already in place, Qualys is still complaining about the error. A report that should be clean, to indicate compliance with GDPR, is instead “yellow”, or “orange”, or “red”, so fingers point, tempers flare, e-mails fly about, cc’ing higher and higher ups, so now we have assumptions, and based on those assumptions, tersely written orders, involvement by 3rd party vendors. Time to panic? Shall we be careful and tip-toe through the eggs?[0]

Well, it turns out to be a rather interesting mystery.

What is Java serialization?

First, some definitions are in order. What is Java serialization and why is it important? Perhaps Wikipedia[1] defines it the simplest:

A method for transferring data through the wires

Java serialization is a mechanism to store an object in a non-object form, i.e. a flat, serial stream rather than an object, so that it can be easily sent somewhere, such as to a filesystem, for example. It is also known as “marshaling”, “pickling”, “freezing” or “flattening”. Java programmers should be familiar with the concept, and with the Serializable interface, since it is required in various situations. For example, this technique is used for Oracle Coherence’s “Portable Object Format” to improve performance and support language independence.

Early Days of Java Serialization

Amazing to think that, back in the day, we used all the various tools required for distributed communication, whether simple like RMI and JMX, or more involved specs like CORBA and EJB, and we never thought much about the security aspects. I’m sure if I peruse my copy Henning and Vinoski’s definitive work on C++ and CORBA, I’ll find a chapter or so focusing on security[1], but I’m figuring, we, like everyone else, focused on the business details, getting the apps to communicate reliably, adding features, improving stability, etc, and not on whether there were any security holes, such as tricking a server into running cryptocurrency mining malware[2]. Yes, Bitcoin and the like did not even exist then.

The Biggest Wave of Remote Execution Bugs in History

Well, times change, and the twenty-year-old Java deserialization capability is the source of “nearly half of the vulnerabilities that have been patched in the JDK in the last 2 years” [3], so Oracle has plans in the works to completely revamp object serialization. Further note that this is not solely Oracle’s issue, nor is it limited to Java. Many other software vendors, and open source projects, whether tools or languages, have this weakness, such as Apache Commons Collections, Google Guava, Groovy, Jackson, and Spring.

It seems all the excitement, at least in the Java world, started when Chris Frohoff and Garbriel Lawrence presented their research on Java serialization “ultimately resulting in what can be readily described as the biggest wave of remote code execution bugs in Java history.” [6] However, it is important to note that this flaw is not limited to Java. While Frohoff and Lawrence focused on Java deserialization, Moritz Bechler wrote a paper that focuses on various Java open-source marshalling libraries:

Research into that matter indicated that these vulnerabilities are not exclusive to mechanisms as expressive as Java serialization or XStream, but some could possibly be applied to other mechanisms as well.

I think Moritz describes the heart of the issue the best:

Giving an attacker the opportunity to specify an arbitrary type to unmarshal into enables him to invoke a certain set of methods on an object of that type. Clearly the expectation is that these will be well-behaved – what could possibly go wrong?

Java deserialization

For our purposes, we focused on Java serialization and Apache Commons Collections. From the bug report COLLECTIONS-580[4]:

With InvokerTransformer serializable collections can be build that execute arbitrary Java code. sun.reflect.annotation.AnnotationInvocationHandler#readObject invokes #entrySet and #get on a deserialized collection.

If you have an endpoint that accepts serialized Java objects (JMX, RMI, remote EJB, …) you can combine the two to create arbitrary remote code execution vulnerability.

The Qualys report didn’t have much in the way of details, other than a port and the commons-collections payloads that illustrated the vulnerability, but I guessed from that info that the scanner simply uses the work done by the original folks (Frohoff and Lawrence) [5] that discovered the flaw available as the ysoserial project below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSA7vUkXGSg

Source code here: https://github.com/frohoff/ysoserial

Now, in the flurry of trying to fix this error, given the annoyingly vague details from Qualys, I had looked at all sorts of issues, after noticing a few extra JVM arguments in the Tomcat configuration that happened to be set for the instances that were failing with this error, but were not set on other instances. Apparently someone had decided to add these, without informing our team. Interesting.

Now, remember that according to the original bug report, this exploit requires (1) untrusted deserialization, it (2) some way to send a payload, i.e. something listening on a port, such as a JMX service. In fact, These extra JVM args were for supporting remote access via JMX, so unraveling the thread, I researched Tomcat 8 vulnerabilities especially related to JMX. While it turns out that JMX is a weak point (JBoss in particular had quite a well-known major JMX flaw), I did have any luck convincing the customer that they should shut down the port. It is used to gather monitoring metrics useful in determining application performance such as CPU load, memory, and even cache information. Ok, easy but drastic solutions were off the table. I was back to the drawing board.

Next, I tried to see why it was flagging Apache collections in the first place. Going back to the ysoserial project, was it incorrectly flagging Apache Commons Collections 3.2.2, or Collections4-4.1, despite the fact that the libs were fixed? Further looking at the specific payloads, Qualys/Ysoserial was complaining about Collections 3.2.1, which limited the test scenarios to try to get working

Now here’s the interesting part: with ysoserial, I was unable to get the exploit to work, as depicted in the Marshalling Pickles video. It was failing with a strange error I hadn’t seen before, something about filter setting a “rejected” status. Now, this led me to finding info about Oracle’s critical patch update (_121). I was running with latest & greatest JDK, release _192, however our production servers were running a very out-of-date version - surprise surprise.

Apparently, with Oracle JDK at release 121 or later, Oracle has started to address this vulnerability in an official way, rather than what exists currently which is a bunch of ad-hoc solutions, mainly whitelisting/blacklisting, which is a difficult without library support. Some would call this ‘whack-a-mole’, but I think this illustrates quite well the idea of a “patch”, i.e. there’s a leak, so run over and put some tape over it, but we aren’t solving the fundamental issue. In other words, the current defense against this attach is limited because we can’t possibly know what libraries customers will use, so the library maintainer has to scramble to plug the holes whenever they are discovered. Note that even the best of libraries like Groovy, Apache and Spring have had to fix this flaw.

So kudos to Oracle for taking some much needed steps in solving this problem. Here’s a little detail on the new feature that works to make the deserialization process more secure:

The core mechanism of deserialization filtering is based on an ObjectInputFilter interface which provides a configuration capability so that incoming data streams can be validated during the deserialization process. The status check on the incoming stream is determined by Status.ALLOWED, Status.REJECTED, or Status.UNDECIDED arguments of an enum type within ObjectInputFilter interface.

https://access.redhat.com/blogs/766093/posts/3135411

While it is the “official” way to deal with the deserialization issue, it remains to be seen how well this strategy will work. As a further research project, I’m curious whether this model might be used beyond Java serialization, i.e. in projects like Jackson. Does it add anything more than Jackson already has, or does it simplify it, etc.

This feature is targeted for Java 9, but was backported to 8, though it looks like it doesn’t have all the functionality that Java 9 supports.

So you are probably wondering what happened? Did we fix all of the above, and even throw in an upgrade Tomcat, like the Monty Python “Meaning of Life” movie “everything, with a cherry on top!” Well, finally, given a little guidance on where to look, the 3rd party developers - turned out that not only had they added the JVM args, they had also added in some extra code to handle the authentication. Which used - you guessed it - the _old_ 3.2.1 version of commons-collections. This code was also manually maintained, so while the app our team maintained received the updated commons jar in an automated fashion along with all the other updates, this little bit of code, tucked away on the server, was never updated.

Lessons learned? Off-the-wall custom authentication? Don’t do this. But if you do, don’t leave manually updated chunks of code lying around, and further, keep up with the patches!

[0] Yes, I’m reading William Finnegan’s “Barbarian Days: The Surfing Life”, Finnegan’s hilarious and fascinating account of being a surfer in the early days of the sport. At one point, he complains to his friend and fellow surfer, who is getting on his nerves, that he is tired of walking on eggs around him. Of course, in his anger, he mixed up the quote, and meant “walking on eggshells”.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialization

[2] A quick look at the omniORB doc shows it has a feature called the “Dynamic Invocation Interface…Thus using the DII applications may invoke operations on any CORBA object, possibly determining the object’s interface dynamically by using an Interface Repository.” Sounds like reflection doesn’t it? I’m not aware of any specific vulnerabilities, but it does seem we’ve traded a bit of the security that invoking statically-compiled objects brings for convenience.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/attarchive/omniORB/doc/3.0/omniORB/omniORB011.html

[3] https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/cryptocurrency-malware-monero-secureworks

The Java Object Serialization Specification for Java references a good set of guidelines on how to mitigate the vulnerability:

https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/seccodeguide-139067.html#8

[4] https://www.securityinfowatch.com/cybersecurity/information-security/article/12420169/oracle-plans-to-end-java-serialization-but-thats-not-the-end-of-the-story

[5] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COLLECTIONS-580

[6]Which seems to be a pretty standard strategy these days, i.e. proprietary companies like Qualys leveraging open source and adding it to their toolset. AWS does this to great effect, and we, as the consumer, benefit by getting simple interfaces. However, we should not forget that much of the code we use today is Open-source software, in some way or another.

Stratechery, as usual, has a very thoughtful post about this very idea:

It’s hard to not be sympathetic to MongoDB Inc. and Redis Labs: both spent a lot of money and effort building their products, and now Amazon is making money off of them. But that’s the thing: Amazon isn’t making money by selling software, they are making money by providing a service that enterprises value, and both MongoDB and Redis are popular in large part because they were open source to begin with.

[snip]

That, though, should give pause to AWS, Microsoft, and Google. It is hard to imagine them ever paying for open source software, but at the same time, writing (public-facing) software isn’t necessarily the core competency of their cloud businesses. They too have benefited from open-source companies: they provide the means by which their performance, scalability, and availability are realized. Right now everyone is winning: simply following economic realities could, in the long run, mean everyone is worse off.

https://stratechery.com/2019/aws-mongodb-and-the-economic-realities-of-open-source/

[7] https://www.github.com/mbechler/marshalsec/blob/master/marshalsec.pdf?raw=true

[8] https://medium.com/@cowtowncoder/on-jackson-cves-dont-panic-here-is-what-you-need-to-know-54cd0d6e8062

[cstesttaken]

Cool It: You Don’t Have to Be on Every Social Media App

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.14.17

11:30 am

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

Do I have to try every social media app?

You’ve Got Mail starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and was an awful movie. I watched it in a hotel room recently and found myself thinking about you—thinking about all of us, really. To summarize: It is 1998. Hanks is the cocky, hard-charging scion of a massive Barnes & Noble-ish bookstore chain, about to open a new location on the Upper West Side. Ryan, meanwhile—vulnerable, sappy, like a human kitten—owns a tiny children’s bookstore nearby called the Shop Around the Corner. Ryan’s shop is everything that Hanks’ is not: quaint, neighborly, beloved. And, of course, it stands to be crushed by this encroaching tentacle of Hanks’ Machiavellian empire.

There’s a lot of anxiety in the air. Thematically, the film is concerned with what modernity (symbolized by Hanks and maybe also his high-octane girlfriend, who literally shouts, “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” at her espresso machine) might be doing to our souls (symbolized by Ryan and her boyfriend, who is referred to at a party as the “greatest living expert on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg”). This anxiety is everywhere. It’s a shame kids don’t know what handkerchiefs are, someone says. When office workers play solitaire on their computers, it’s lamented as “the end of Western civilization.”

It’s all so heavy-handed. But here’s the thing: As the bitter Hanks-Ryan bookstore rivalry escalates on the street, Hanks and Ryan are falling in love with each other via email, anonymously. They meet in some kind of chat room and begin emailing each other relentlessly, pouring out their feelings and the poignant whispers of their simpleton hearts. It’s dramatic irony, you see—they love each other in cyberspace, hate each other in meatspace—and the filmmakers milk it for all it’s worth. Scene after scene cuts back and forth between Hanks and Ryan, reading emails on their laughably briefcaselike laptops. Every time that cheery voice tells them “Welcome. You’ve got mail,” it’s a Pavlovian cue that flutters their stomachs and tingles their privates. It’s hard to think of two happier people in the history of film.

But you know what? Joke’s on them. Because what Hanks and Ryan do not know, and can’t possibly predict, is that the same series of tubes that’s serving as a conduit for their love will soon obliterate both their businesses! Soon they’ll both be irrelevant! They’re just too blissed out by each other’s electronic mail messages to recognize that this thing in front of them—this Internet—is also a merciless destroyer of worlds.

Reader, they are us; we are them. We’re blind to the transience of so many things we feel attached to, or else we are so attuned to their transience that we don’t allow ourselves to get attached. The truth is, even as I type this, laughing and smirking at You’ve Got Mail, I understand that someone in the near future will be similarly laughing and smirking at me. (“Typing?!” they’ll say.)

Are you obligated to try new social media apps? Not at all. Use what you enjoy. Try what you think you’d enjoy. Or don’t. You alone get to map out the borders of your online life. But you are, I think, obligated to stay open to exploring new social media apps—to keep yourself from becoming too jaded, too dismissive—and to always entertain the possibility that one of them might become meaningful and useful to you. I mean, I sunk a lot of time into Friendster back in the day, and I don’t regret it. I recognize that, like Hanks and Ryan, I was merely living contentedly in the present, without knowing that the magic of that moment would inevitably crumble—or even worrying about whether it might.

“Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life … And sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it or because I haven’t been brave?” Ryan typed that, sent it to Hanks. Now I’m putting the question to you.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.10.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I’m horrible at emoji—it’s like a foreign language for me. I always get “???” replies from friends. What should I do?

In 1918, a moderately but fleetingly famous Belgian man named Jean Pierre Pierard published an intriguing column in an American newspaper. Pierard was an actor, sometimes billed as “Le Colosse,” since he happened to weigh 342 pounds. (He was just a tremendous, tremendous fellow.) He was also the “Most Married Man in the World,” and this was the particular expertise with which he was writing. What does it mean to be the Most Married Man in the World? Well, at the time, Pierard was on his 23rd wife. Since 1886 he’d averaged one marriage every 1.4 years. But still, he felt strongly that “it is not good for man to be alone.”

This is the most important thing for you to know about Pierard—and I mean you specifically, my weird emoji-aphasic friend: Jean Pierre Pierard loved being married. He loved the institution of marriage—held it in the highest esteem—and felt a strong obligation to defend and venerate it against anyone who was starting to view it with the least bit of cynicism. “I believe in marriage,” he wrote. Deep down in the hallows of his giant being, the man was a romantic. And an optimist. And nothing about the clumsiness with which his optimism or romanticism kept colliding with reality was going to drain those feelings out of him. “It may surprise you to hear it,” Pierard wrote, “but it’s the truth, that every one of these 23 times I’ve taken out a marriage license I’ve done so with the same glow of hope and faith that I had the first time.” Being married brought him joy, so he kept getting married, even if he was lousy at it. Then he kept getting married some more.

I assume that you see where I’m going. It should be obvious, especially since I’ve written it all in not-fun alphabet letters. You’re correct that emoji are essentially a foreign language. So the only way to increase your fluency in them is with real-world practice—which is to say, by failing a lot, but paying enough attention to your failures to learn from them, and by asking more skillful speakers, people you feel totally supported and unjudged by, for help and safe opportunities to practice. But most important, don’t let anyone, with their snide ???s, spoil the pleasure those emoji bring to you. Don’t be ashamed!

OK? Just one more thing about Pierard: For a time, he attempted a career as a professional wrestler. It seems like the ideal job for Le Colosse—he could just fall on people and flatten them—and yet he was terrible at this too, maybe even more terrible than he was at marriage. Because he was ticklish—tremendously ticklish. He simply could not “permit of any contact with his ribs while wrestling,” The New York Times wrote, without being debilitated by his own giggling. All that his opponents had to do, no matter how small they were, was flutter their fingers around Le Colosse’s colossal midsection, topple him, and hold him down for the count. It was basically over before it began.

And, honestly, that’s how I’d love to picture you: joyously thumb-typing your syntactically jumbled, incomprehensible kissy faces, fires, whales, and eggplants without a care in the world, pinned on the mat but laughing and laughing and laughing. Do that and you’re .

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.09.17

11:00 am

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

My girlfriend got me a Fitbit, but the data makes me feel lazy and ashamed. Do I have to keep using it?

I was in my kitchen the other night, slow dancing with my toddler before bedtime, when the Coldplay song “Fix You” came on—a song, I remembered reading, that Chris Martin wrote for then-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow after her father died—and I found myself feeling genuinely bummed, all over again, that Chris and Gwyneth had split up. I wondered what had torn them apart or whether—as these things often go—they hadn’t been torn apart but slowly undone by some dark, unspoken dissatisfaction or resentment that gradually multiplied until there was so much cumulative darkness between them that it blotted out whatever had been luminescent about their love. And that’s when I thought about you and your girlfriend and your Fitbit.

I also thought about Steve Etkin. Etkin is an engineer by training and by temperament who enjoys walking. And so a year ago, his daughter, Jordan, bought him a Fitbit. It seemed like the perfect gift. “I started receiving daily updates,” she told me, “about the number of steps he walked, the stairs he climbed. After a few weeks, I was like, ‘Hey, Dad, you’re really treating this like a job.’ ” (She was also like, hey, Dad, I don’t need all these updates.)

Anyway, it got her thinking. And, because she studies consumer behavior at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, she designed a study to test whether, as she put it to me, trackers like Fitbits have the capacity to “suck the enjoyment” out of previously pleasurable activities. Guess what. They do.

Etkin’s study was published in the Journal of Consumer Research. She ran a series of six experiments. In one, for example, she gave her subjects a 16-pack of Crayolas, then made a big show of tracking how many shapes one group colored in while letting others color freely, unencumbered by quantification. She did similar experiments with walking and reading, and in every one discovered the same basic result. “Measurement led participants to color more shapes, walk more steps, and read more pages. At the same time, however, it led people to enjoy coloring, walking, and reading less.” In short, people did more but felt worse doing it. Tracking redefined fun activities as work.

One problem here is that by focusing on quantifiable outcomes, trackers can diminish intrinsic motivation, which makes people stick with activities. Therefore, “measurement may sometimes actually undermine sustainable behavior change,” Etkin writes. Those insurance companies giving Fitbits to their policyholders might be shooting themselves in the (demotivated, stationary) foot.

But you know all this. It’s precisely the cycle of incentivizing and disincentivizing, of judgment and anxiety, afflicting you: that feeling that you can never take enough steps or unlock enough REM sleep. (“When you try your best but you don’t succeed … When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep.”) And, as it afflicts you, it widens the emotional space between you and your girlfriend—it feeds a smoldering grudge, because she handcuffed you with this thing. She tried to fix you, my friend. But her fixing made you feel more broken.

So you’ve got to talk to your girlfriend and take the Fitbit off, even though Etkin’s research suggests this is the worst thing you could do. (When people start tracking then suddenly stop, the fun is still ruined, but they also lose the benefit of increased output—a double whammy of underperformance and joylessness.) But who cares? It could be the only way for you and your partner to remain consciously coupled.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.08.17

7:00 am

Christoph Niemann

When my 5-year-old asks a question, is there a difference between looking it up in a book and just using my phone?

Recently, I watched David Kwong do some sleight of hand in a crowded theater lobby. Kwong is a magician who often consults on Hollywood films. (When a director needs, say, Jesse Eisenberg to learn a magic trick, they send him to Kwong.) Anyway, Kwong sauntered over to a guy with a deck of cards and asked him to pick one.

Honestly, I don’t know how to describe what happened next. For 30 minutes, Kwong made cards materialize in outrageous, stupefying ways, as though he were nonchalantly sliding them in and out of a parallel universe. Someone’s card flew out of the deck, spinning through the air. Another turned up in a guy’s back pocket—and not just in his back pocket, but buried deep, between his wallet and a bundle of crumpled receipts. Kwong asked someone to rip a card into four pieces, then hold them in his fist; when he opened his hand, the card was reassembled!

Maybe this doesn’t sound that impressive, written down. We all know card tricks are a thing. But the way Kwong kept relentlessly confronting us with the impossible—seeing this sorcery at close range—seemed to not just entertain people but to make them feel vulnerable and a little scared. People mewled and screamed, “No!” One poor man was reduced to crouching on the floor, laughing so euphorically he couldn’t catch his breath. (OK, that was me.) The guy with the ripped-up card in his fist refused to open it at first, shaking his head like a child terrified to look at his boo-boo, afraid of what he’d find. “He has total power over us,” one woman said quietly, gravely. She sounded creeped out. It was so much fun!

Now, I’m sure everyone in that crowd wondered how Kwong was doing it, but it’s a rare bird who goes home and actually labors to understand the mechanics of how such tricks are engineered. (Those rare birds become magicians—it’s how Kwong got his start.) Most of us perceive magic tricks to be unreplicable, to violate the reality we inhabit. They’re, you know, magic.

To a 5-year-old, phones are magic. The internet is magic. An older kid might be able to understand the technology and infrastructure involved, the nature of Wikipedia, and so on, but for a child so young, the answer just appears, miraculously, like a playing card yanked from a bystander’s back pocket. Leafing through a book together, by comparison, is a more collaborative, tactile, self-evident process. It’s a journey toward the answer, one that your child gets to go on.

What I’m talking about is the difference between learning and being told, between answering a specific question and getting a child excited about answering it on their own. It’s fun to amaze your 5-year-old, sure. But it’s more gratifying to set your kid up to one day amaze you.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.06.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

Is flirting on LinkedIn less weird than on other social media? After all, it can vouch for you in a substantive way.

Whoa. Hang on. Let’s first poke at the premise of your question, because the implications here are huge. Notice how you casually presume your résumé offers a more substantive representation of your basic humanity than, say, all the tweets you’ve tweeted or all the digital artifacts amassed on your Facebook page. Think of the photos on Facebook alone: You in a rowboat with the gentle-looking man playing a banjo whom we understand to be your deceased (too young) father. You being silly—but not obnoxiously silly, just innocently, endearingly silly—in the Halloween aisle of a big-box store. You tagged in a photo of that kid you mentored that one summer, as he graduates from Berkeley. You climbing a goddamned mountain! Like, with pickaxes and stuff!

Do these not substantively communicate the substance of your life? Don’t they “vouch” for you to potential dates as a safe, noncreepy, sufficiently together human being, a sympathetic soul tumbling through the fundamental experience of being alive and looking for companionship? Or is that better captured with a line like this: “January 2013-November 2014, Senior Operations Associate, Mobitly Inc.”?

You seem to think it is. And I’ll admit—begrudgingly—that you may have a point. Because the lines have been blurred between our work lives and our emotional lives, our careers and our intrinsic selves. We subconsciously gauge a person’s character by their professional standing, and our experiences and attitude toward our work aren’t only sometimes relevant to our love lives. In fact, the two can feel crucially interwoven: The best startup founders are those who operate out of passion and devotion and with a kind of hyper-monogamous obsession. On the other hand, we all feel obligated to work on our relationships with the same myopic, idealistic intensity. And it can feel natural to apply the lessons we learn relating to people in one realm to our relationships in the other.

Take, for example, Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO. I confess, I’m not a LinkedIn user, but I’ve been reading up on Weiner and, I have to say, he seems like a wonderful guy—a principled, thoughtful man who says very grounded, Jerry Maguire-type things like, “I’ve never been title-driven; for the most part, I’ve been purpose-driven.” He also reads books by the Dalai Lama, contemplates the difference between compassion and empathy, and practices mindfulness techniques like “being a spectator to my own thoughts,” which enhance his ability to relate to and motivate his employees. He calls his style “compassionate management.”

In an essay he wrote a few years ago, Weiner described leaving work one evening, feeling proud of the strides he’d made as a compassionate manager, only to be felled by the epiphany that he’d been very uncompassionately neglecting his wife. He was working so hard, he wrote, that at night, “when my wife would try to bring up her day, or talk about the things we need to get done, I would reflexively say something to the effect that it had been a long day, I was exhausted, and could we talk about it some other time?” In other words: “For as hard as I worked to manage compassionately at the office, I was not always actively applying the same approach with my family.” So Weiner applied the same compassionate management style to his marriage and made things right.

I worry that sounds off, like the emotionally tone-deaf insights of a stereotypical tech baron. But trust me, the way Weiner explained it, it sounded cool—real. (And know this too: Worried that I’d gush in this column about Weiner’s coolness and realness only to learn later that Weiner is actually not cool and not real and is, in truth, as imperious as Genghis Khan or a Grade A, misogynistic, steroidal jerk, I sat down and Googled “Jeff Weiner LinkedIn jerk” and was happy to find, as the first result, a post singling him out as a “counterweight” to the industry’s many other CEO-jerks. So that was reassuring—even if the post was published on LinkedIn. But even that can be interpreted as a testament to Weiner’s character, because it was Weiner, I learned, who had the vision to expand LinkedIn from a bland résumé farm into a successful publishing platform.)

I’ll go even further. I wouldn’t be surprised if a man as smart as Weiner already knows all this, knows that we live in an age where one of the prime, romantically reassuring things about another person—the thing that “vouches” for them best as a potential mate—is that they’re a trustworthy, hardworking, successful employee. And therefore, he also secretly knows that LinkedIn could be the ultimate dating site, though he wisely stops short of saying it. Instead, he just dog-whistles about that potential to attentive users and eagle-eyed investors, thus preserving the opportunity to pivot the company explicitly in that direction should the climate change and the need arise. Recently, for example, he told an interviewer, “Our core value proposition to members is to help them connect to opportunity,” and touted “the power of this as a platform to enable capital”—especially “human capital”—“to flow where it can best be leveraged.”

Isn’t he talking about dating, about setting people up? When Tevye and Golde’s daughters sang, “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match,” weren’t they basically asking a kind of social networking platform to send their own human capital flowing toward whichever shtetl boy would give it the highest valuation and invest? Why shouldn’t you flirt on LinkedIn? Why shouldn’t love be one of the opportunities LinkedIn connects us with?

So, yes. You are right. And you’ve taught me a lot—you and Jeff Weiner both. I can see clearly now how we’ve all tied ourselves into a knot of careerism and affection and equity and sex, and maybe that’s just the way it has to be. I’m remembering now what happened when Jerry Maguire—the real Jerry Maguire—showed up in that living room, shivering, trying to win back his wife, who also happened to be his business partner at their new sports-agenting startup, how he told her, “You … you complete me.” But, more important, there was the line he slipped her right before that famous line. Suddenly, in the middle of his monologue, he was compelled to say, like a man giving a keynote at a conference, “We live in a cynical world, a cynical world, and we work in a business of tough competitors.”

Why? Why include that? What could Jerry Maguire possibly have meant? I think he meant: The internet is full of sinister strangers. It’s a hostile place in which to offer up your soul. But here I am. Look at me. View my profile. I’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.03.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I work in a casual tech setting and I’m shocked by how much everyone swears. Should I say something?

Imagine what it was like to be a Puritan in 1642. You’ve come to America. The landscape is crude and endless; the soundtrack, all hissing insects and howling wolves. “Everything about the place seemed godforsaken,” writes the natural historian Tim Flannery in his book The Eternal Frontier. That lawless emptiness is why you’re here—it means freedom. But in all free and empty places, there’s also room for wickedness to grow. Everybody in your little settlement is aware of this, which is why they panic when, one day, someone happens upon a young man named Thomas Granger having sex with a horse.

It’s worse than you thought: When confronted, Granger rapidly admits he’s also had intercourse with three cows, two goats, five sheep, and a turkey. This behavior is so savage—and feels like such a threat to the ethical society you’re laboring to build there in the wild—that you respond with a campaign of ruthless cleansing. You round up each animal Granger has had sex with and force the young man to watch while you slaughter it. (Not the turkey, though; for some reason, Flannery notes, no one bothers with the turkey.) And since you can’t tell which of the village’s sheep were the particular sheep Granger penetrated—his descrip­tions are imprecise—you herd every sheep in front of him, like a police lineup, and force him to ID the five in question. Then you kill those five sheep too. Then you kill Granger. Then you throw all their bodies together in one big pit.

Now, fast-forward 373 years. Let’s talk about you.

It’s easy to imagine you, hunched in your tech company’s open floor plan, forced to sit on an inflatable ball or perhaps issued one of those iconoclastic standing desks without a chair at all. You are a wary pilgrim on the wild, godless edge of America’s economic frontier. And, as such, you under­stand that the foul language your colleagues are using isn’t just unpleasant but morally precarious; if it continues unchecked, it could lead you all—your entire industry, really—to much darker places. You know, just as the Puritans did, that this kind of impropriety needs to be nipped in the bud.

That’s how you feel, right? Well, you’re wrong.

You’re not the Puritans. You’re the kid shtupping the cows. Because the lesson of the Granger story—as I read it—isn’t that morality always wins. It’s that the mob always wins. The majority’s norms always beat back and outlast the minority’s. And the mob can be cruel: They’ll kill the thing you love right in front of you, then dump you in the ground.

I think you need to go along with the mob.

Does it matter if my kid’s handwriting is terrible?

Well, I happen to love handwriting. I think it’s curiously fun to look at and a considerable, if mostly esoteric, value-add to the written language—even in an era of tablets and smartwatches and speech-recognition software. But does it matter if your child writes illegibly? My answer is no, probably not. Handwriting is an old technology—about 5,000 years old. And as with newer old technologies (muskets or floppy disks or cars with human beings driving them), some people may inevitably feel a tinge of melancholy watching it sputter into oblivion. And yet the truth is that humanity has always replaced old tools with new ones, and often, once we’ve pushed through the emotionally charged transitional phase and come out the other end, everything feels fine again.

Take, for example, a woman named Kristin Gulick in Bend, Oregon, who often has trouble reading messages scribbled by her chronically illegible office receptionist. “Yesterday I tried to dial a number that she’d written down, and I couldn’t read it,” Gulick told me recently. “I had to go back out and ask, ‘What does this say?’” And the receptionist was just like, ha ha ha, I know my handwriting’s terrible—you know, giggling the annoyance away. Was Gulick peeved? Yes. But was this a fireable offense or some irrevocable inconvenience? Not even close. In fact, Gulick really had no choice but to laugh the whole thing off too. “Thank God she’s good at other things!” she said, and life went on.

So there’s your answer. But who is Kristin Gulick, anyway? So glad you asked!

Handwriting may be one of those fundamentally human abilities—one that binds us to our own identities.

Gulick has been an occupational therapist for 28 years, specializ­ing in arms and hands. She’s in private practice now, but shortly after 9/11 she found herself working at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. A recent government report disclosed that more than 1,000 of the 50,000 soldiers who’ve been wounded in action in Iraq and Afghanistan—2.6 percent—have come back missing limbs, and Gulick was there to greet some of the first ones, helping them work around their loss and rejoin their life. Part of this work involved “transferring dominance” from one hand to the other; if a righty lost their right arm, say, they needed to learn to be a lefty now. And part of that was relearning handwriting—even just enough to fill out the deluge of hospital forms and sign their name.

Gulick found a total dearth of tools and curricula. Really, there was nothing. While she encouraged people to use first-grade handwriting primers early in her career, they were full of infantilizing penmanship exercises involving anthro­pomorphic animals. These books were not only unhelpful but degrading: Having lost a limb, many of these people were already feeling vulnerable and diminished. Now they were being treated—literally—like children. Gulick and an officer in the Army Medical Specialist Corps, Katie Yancosek, decided they could do better. “We’d give them exercises about balancing their checkbook and not about a little bunny or whatever,” Gulick said. The result was a six-week program, laid out in a workbook called Handwriting for Heroes. (The third edition was published this year.)

Look, I don’t mean to play some righteous, wounded-veteran card and make anyone feel bad. But I think we all see where this is going: It’s easy to write off handwriting only because most of us take it for granted. But I listened to Gulick talk about handwriting for a while, about what the ability to jot off a simple grocery list or be-right-back note for your spouse—functional but maybe also aesthetically pleasing or expressive, something you have created—does for a person’s sense of self-sufficiency and pride after working hard to regain that skill. How handwriting, really, may be one of those fundamentally human abilities—one that binds us, in a tiny way, to each other and to our own identities.

Your child won’t feel anything remotely like that sense of loss if they let their handwriting go to seed. Their lives will move forward in standardized fonts. If they absolutely have to write anything by hand, it may be disordered and illegible, but they can just laugh it off and explain (or text) what they meant. And that’s why I’ll stick with my first answer: It probably doesn’t matter. But I also think that, if we’re prepared to let handwriting go—to not care how ugly it gets—we should, at least, take a second to think about how beautiful it can be.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.01.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

The same person keeps accidentally pocket-dialing me. Should I confront him?

Let's zoom out for a second: For more than 40 years, scientists have been debating whether we should be actively sending messages into outer space or just using projects like SETI to listen for messages sent to us—and not just whether we should broadcast anything, but what and how. Do we shoot out a bunch of math, to show aliens we understand math? Do we send pictures? Music? And if so, what math? What pictures? What music? There have been scientific workshops to hash this out in Toulouse, Paris, Zagreb, Houston, and Mountain View. There have been peer-reviewed journal articles with titles like “The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition.” It's a big, messy, excruciatingly meticulous back-and-forth.

And yet—all this time, while all those eggheads have been arguing—gobs and gobs of our satellite transmissions, television broadcasts, radio shows, and cell phone conversations have been quietly, sloppily spilling into outer space. It's all just oozing off our planet and into the cosmos like so much electromagnetic sewage—a phenomenon scientists call leakage. In other words, we're already beaming messages into the void—weak signals, but millions of them every day, without even realizing it or being careful about what we say. We are butt-dialing the universe!

Now say someone out there actually picks up that call. Wouldn't you like to know? Yes, it's embarrassing to realize we've made that sort of clumsy connection. But isn't it always just a little bit nice to know we've made a connection at all? So my advice is: Tell this person. Tell him he reached you. Tell him you were there.

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

Is it unethical to crowdfund a project I don't totally believe in?

A month after the Boston Tea Party, in January 1774—with the idea of rebellion gaining momentum in Boston and patriots feeling more powerful than the remaining loyalists in town—a strange character who called himself Joyce Junior started stoking that new sense of boldness on the streets. Junior walked around elaborately costumed, like some anarchist harlequin, and posted flyers threatening any “vile ingrates” who were still loyal to the crown. Loyalists should be punished, he wrote. And he slyly suggested precisely how, signing his treatises: “Chairman of the Committee for Tarring and Feathering.”

Ten days later, a low-level British government customs official, John Malcom, got into an argument with a well-known patriot shoemaker on the street.

One thing led to another, and soon an angry mob had “swarmed around [Malcom's] house,” wrote Nathaniel Philbrick in his book Bunker Hill. Very quickly, all of Boston's frustration and resentment with England began to come down on this one middling bureaucrat. The rioters bum-rushed Malcom's home with ladders and axes. Once inside, they lashed him with sticks, then pushed him on a sled for hours through the snowy, unlit streets and bitter cold, collecting more irate Bostonians as they went. The mob mocked him. They threatened to cut off his ears. They beat him and beat him. Soon more than a thousand people had joined in. They ripped off Malcom's clothes. They coated his skin with steaming tar. They covered him with feathers.

The abuse went on for hours. When they finally dumped Malcom in front of his house, Philbrick wrote: “his frozen body had begun to thaw, his tarred flesh started to peel off in ‘steaks.’”

It was awful—all of it. And apparently, it was particularly distressing to Joyce Junior, the Wavy Gravy-esque performance artist who'd threatened British loyalists with tarring and feathering in the first place—the man who'd hammered that idea into the public consciousness, inspiring all that brutality. We know Junior felt culpable, because he immediately started doing damage control, scrambling to disown his idea. Junior issued another statement. It began: “This is to certify that the modern punishment lately inflicted on the ignoble John Malcom was not done by our order.”

Now, I don't think this project you want to crowdfund is likely to inadvertently encourage an angry mob to parboil an innocent man in his own flesh, then blanket him with feathers. But it's important to remember that ideas are volatile, powerful things. And so are crowds. They have a way of infecting each other and taking on a life of their own. So all I'm saying is, be honest—be real. If you only kind of think it's a good idea, it's OK to say so. The crowd will decide for itself if you're right. And it may surprise you.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.28.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

My dad leaves incredibly embarrassing comments under every photo I post to Facebook and Instagram. What should I do?

Let’s face it: Dads are embarrassing. I remember, a couple of years ago, reading a newspaper story about a boy named Brooklyn who was so distressed by the prospect of his friends catching sight of his dweeby father that he insisted his dad drop him off around the corner from school and stay out of view. Why was this a newspaper story, you ask? Don’t millions of mortified children do this every day? Yes, and that’s my point. In this case, however, the dad in question was David Beckham.

See, dad-­barrassment is universal—a condition of existence, like the weather. What matters is how well we endure it: whether we slough it off or allow it to seep inside us.

Consider another famous dad: Teddy Roosevelt. Yes, that guy—America’s first presidential man’s man. This is a guy who hunted bears and lions, who got into bar fights with cowboys, who resigned as assistant secretary of the Navy to actually fight a war rather than just plan one. Teddy Roosevelt loved war. War was his jam. As the historian Alexis Coe told me recently, “He treated everything like a battlefield.” In October 1912, Roosevelt was about to give a campaign speech in Milwaukee when a would-be assassin shot him in the chest. The bullet ripped through the copy of his speech in his pocket. There was a big bloody wound. Still, Roosevelt spoke for more than an hour, like a wounded infantryman still bayoneting people on the battlefield.

I’d called Coe after listening to the podcast , which she cohosts with former Daily Show head writer Elliott Kalan. Their Roosevelt episode suggested that Teddy’s warmongering machismo was bound up in his dad. During the Civil War, Roosevelt had watched his father, Theodore senior, pay for a surrogate to fight in his place. For Teddy, Coe says, “this was always a great source of shame. His celebration of masculinity and war, his romanticization of war as an experience to all men, is a reaction to his dad.” And if, to overcompensate for this excruciating embarrassment, Roosevelt felt compelled to speechify for over an hour while his torso hemorrhaged, then that’s his decision. But it also affected his own parenting.

Roosevelt had four sons, and he wanted his boys to be the valorous warriors his own father hadn’t been. When World War I broke out, the youngest, Quentin, memorized an eye chart to ensure he’d pass his exam and be able to serve. He was, in short order, shot down and killed by the Germans. Roosevelt was crestfallen. “To feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death has a pretty serious side for a father,” he wrote. He died himself six months later.

But the misery he wrought continued. One son, Archibald, had his knee ripped apart by a grenade. Another, Ted Jr., was wounded in France, then died of a heart attack while serving in World War II. Kermit, Roosevelt’s second son, served in both wars, then ultimately shot himself in the head on a base in Alaska.

You wrote because you didn’t like some comments on Instagram and Facebook. I’m talking about shame and war and death. It’s hardly fair, you’ll say, and you’re right. But this story shows, I think, that dad-­barrassment is a powerful and unpredictable force; it warps the imagination, it pollutes the soul. The perpetrators are, inevitably, also victims.

By all means, ask your father—gently—if he wouldn’t mind toning down the comments. Tell him to text you privately instead, if you’d prefer. But ultimately the onus is not on your father to stop embarrassing you, but on you to reconcile the embarrassment you feel. I worry you’ve started seeing your father primarily as an engine of embarrassment, not as a complex human being entitled to express his wit, his playfulness, his love.

So, stomach it. Take the bullet, carry on.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.27.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I’m an omnivore, but are there animals that are just too intelligent to eat?

During high school, I went to visit a friend in Louisiana. Because I was a Northerner who’d never been to the South, I was given a lot of exotically Southern stuff to eat, like alligator and rattlesnake. Then came the big Louisianan feast: heaps of spicy crayfish, which we savagely twisted the heads off of then washed down with gallons and gallons of Dr Pepper.

When I got up to go pee, one of the men at the table told me to be sure to wash my hands first. He said it with a tinge of darkness, a whiff of trauma. He explained that it was unwise for a man to go from handling spicy crayfish to handling his penis. He’d been careless once and paid the price. So I washed my hands. But I still remember how worried I was, unzipping, and how hesitantly I moved my hand down, like a kid playing Operation, dreading that horrible bzzz. I’d absorbed the trauma vicariously, but my anxiety was real.

I thought of this when I read that researchers at the University of Bordeaux in France detected a similar kind of intelligently learned anxiety in crayfish. (After suffering a trauma, the crayfish were reluctant to venture into brightly lit, risky areas.) The scientists also found they could alleviate that anxiety by giving the crayfish a Valium-style drug. And while the scientists were careful not to embellish these findings with any anthropomorphic presumptions, I think we all sense the underlying epiphany here: Crayfish are a little more like us than we expected.

These days, it seems, everybody wants to know how smart their meat is. There are all kinds of startling farm-­animal-cognition studies. We know that cows enjoy solving problems and have been known to jump into the air excitedly when they finally crack a tough one. Chickens are exceptionally good at delaying gratification, understand small numbers and basic physics, and can adroitly manage the thermostat of their coop. Sheep can remember and recognize as many as 50 human faces without making a mistake. Pigs excel at videogames played with special pig joysticks. And even opossums—yes, some people eat them—turn out to be excellent maze runners. One study ranked opossums’ “probability learning” skills second only to humans’ and higher than dogs’. Opossums! Those things that do very little and look dead most of the time!

The upshot, I’d argue, is that all animals are likely too intelligent to eat. Whether you go on eating them, with that knowledge, is up to you. You probably will. I do—proof that intelligence may be massively overrated.

Should I worry that my kid can’t spell? Does spelling matter anymore?

Did you hear about Thomas Hurley III? He was on Jeopardy! last year as an eighth grader—a likable kid from Connecticut with Peter Brady bangs and a blue dress shirt buttoned up to the jugular. He lost. And he lost, in part, because in Final Jeopardy, he wrote “Emanciptation Proclamation” instead of “Emancipation Proclamation.”

Does spelling matter anymore? Honestly, I don’t think so. I mean, initially, even schoolmarmy Alex Trebek read right over Hurley’s mistake. As a defiant Hurley told his local newspaper, “It was just a spelling error.”

Then again, spelling isn’t just about communicating. The culture still views it as a sign of intelligence, diligence, and sophistication. Bad, lackadaisical spellers are not looked at kindly. And neither was Hurley’s contention that he’d been “cheated.” (“Learn how to accept defeat, kid, or you will be disappointed for the rest of your life,” one Facebook comment read.) Clearly, autocorrect and other technologies have started a slow sea change, and maybe one day the persnickety spelling police among us will all have died out and we’ll be free to spel thingz howeEVA weeeeeeeeeee wonte. But, until that day, allowing your kids to blow off spelling may empower them to go against a societal norm without considering the day-to-day discomfort and judgment it could bring: the consequences for them but also for you, their parent.

“He was a little stunned by it,” Hurley’s mom said after the defeat. “He felt embarrassed. It was hard to watch.”

Should I give myself a weekend phone time-out? What if I miss important work?

What kind of job do you have? What kind of boss do you have? How tolerant? How demanding? One possibility is that you’re a senior adviser to the secretary of state, and your inability to be reached during a flare-up by a North African paramilitary group—because you’re lying in a park with a kale-and-bee-pollen smoothie and that copy of The Goldfinch you’ve been meaning to get to—leads to a severe diplomatic misstep and a weeks-long umbrage carnival on Fox News that can only be quelled by the semi-ritualistic firing and public shaming of the bureaucrat responsible: i.e., you. Another is that you’re a beverage distribution middle­man, and your boss—who happens to be triple-checking stuff at the office on a Saturday night because he’s going through a divorce and doesn’t know what to do with himself—discovers a niggling glitch in your paperwork that may have sent an extra case of Fresca to Denver, but because your phone’s off he calls Greta, and after a couple minutes of digging she assures him that all the Frescas are, in fact, where they need to be.

See the difference? You’ve given me absolutely no information—just dashed off your question as quickly as possible without a second of reflection. And this suggests that you’re whizzing recklessly through life and, still accelerating, throttled by permanent urgency. You need a break. Your soul needs a break. I have no idea what the consequences might be—how could I?—but I think you should switch off that phone.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.24.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I read that mice injected with blood from younger mice improve on cognitive tests. Should I bank my blood?

So yeah, I went and read about this too. I read that for years scientists have been taking an old mouse and a young mouse, putting them next to each other, and stitching their circulatory systems together, just like jump-starting a car. Then they let the blood of one mouse circulate through the other—a process called parabiosis. And introducing the young mouse's blood—or even just introducing one particular protein found in the blood, called GDF11—to an old mouse does all sorts of wonderful stuff: It allows the old mouse to run longer on a treadmill. It changes the old mouse's brain in ways that suggests its memory has been improved. I read that it even rejuvenates a crusty old-mouse heart. Like, voilà! The heart isn't crusty anymore.

I also read that a Harvard scientist named Amy Wagers was “already working to commercialize” GDF11, which is found in human blood too. And this was the eye-opener for me: Even as scientists are always cautioning the media that it's way to soon to speculate about their studies' implications, one of these scientists—the one named Wagers, aptly—was already placing her bet.

Good for her, I say. I'm all for capitalism! But I'm also all for hematological self-determination. (Or, say, blood freedom.) I'd hate, one day, to have to pay some multinational corporation for a synthetic knockoff of my own younger self's blood—the very stuff that was pumping through my body for decades without costing me a damn cent. What a dystopia that would be! There'd be kids on the corner with clipboards, asking for donations so Americans for Hematological Self-Determination could sue these corporations. There'd be Blood Freedom teach-ins and Blood Freedom protest songs—which would be hard because “Blood Freedom” really doesn't rhyme with much.

So my answer is yes, absolutely. Stockpile your blood now, as much as can be squirreled away at the proper temperature. Just in case. Think of it as a tiny hedge against the Wagers of the future.

I get a lot of swag from startups—messenger bags, fleeces, hats, T-shirts—and my girlfriend makes fun of me for wearing it. Which is the douchiest to wear? Like, is a fleece cooler than a hat?

Look, I don't care what you wear, but I do think that a startup fleece is definitely not cooler than a startup hat, because a startup fleece puts the name and logo of the startup in closer proximity to your heart than a startup hat would. My instinct is, keep this stuff away from your heart. Far away. The closer to your heart, the douchier.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.23.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

My best friend dropped our Snapchat streak, and I’m hurt. What should I do?

Oof. I know how it feels. Streaks are magic; streaks are wild. There you are, you and your bestie, slinging those pictures and videos back and forth, getting that sacred pendulum of digital adorableness and hilarity moving between you, and you start to feel momentum, don’t you? A rhythmic bond—a fellowship, a closeness—taking hold. You’re in it together! And, better still, that little flaming number keeps ticking up, higher and higher. You’re watching your progress, reciprocally micro­dosing the endorphins. Then suddenly, all that excitement stops. You send a snap, and no snap comes back. It’s a gut punch. It’s over. You’re dropped.

Like I said: Oof. I empathize. And yet I can’t claim to understand the hurt of being dropped nearly as well as Maica Folch, who has been literally dropped and literally hurt from the dropping.

Folch is an aerialist in San Francisco who spent much of her adult life working as a trapeze artist. She started when she was just a teenager. Has Folch ever been dropped? Yes. Yes, she has. And, somewhere beneath the acute pain of impact, did she also feel something akin to the abandonment and resentment you’re dealing with? No, she did not.

It’s 1987, Barcelona. Dress rehearsal, the day before a big aerial dance performance. Folch has been hoisted 80 feet off the ground in a meticulously engineered elastic harness. And yet not so meticulously, because there’s been a miscalculation with the rigging and, before Folch can comprehend what’s happening, she sees the floor racing toward her.

She is falling, most likely to her death. And it’s just like everyone says: “I saw the movie of my life,” she tells me. She hears her gasping colleagues calling out as she speeds down at them. What happens next is unexpected, and yet it happens so naturally. “I was so peaceful,” Folch says. “And I fell down like a feather.”

She hits the ground. She bounces. Bounces! Remember, she’s basically tied to an enormous rubber band, and this serene feather of a woman bounces so high that she’s able to grab a rope up there and steady herself. “If I had freaked out and come down with an intense energy,” Folch says—if she’d stiffened and steeled herself—her body would have shattered. Instead she was bruised, like a fallen apple, but “didn’t break a bone.”

And here’s the most helpful part of the story: It never occurred to Folch, after being dropped, to feel jilted or angry. “When something goes wrong,” she says, “there is no one to blame.” It’s a kind of aerialist credo, really—put loyalty and trust first. You say to each other, “I love what I do, I love doing it with you, and if I start doing it with you, it’s because I trust you,” she explains.

“We don’t live in a perfect world,” Folch says. Carabiners fail. People fail. Friends don’t always return your snap. And it’s probably not because they don’t love you but likely just because none of us, zipping around on our phones and in real life simultaneously, swinging like trapeze artists between these two platforms of frenetic distraction, can be expected to do it all perfectly or to recognize the many distant and private emotional burdens our little snaps might bear. We will let each other down. It’s just a fact. But we all deserve some slack, some good faith—especially from our best friends.

The secret to a thriving trapeze partnership, Folch says, is not necessarily forgiveness but refusing to think of the inevitable disappointments of life as requiring forgiveness in the first place. “You create unconditional relationships. There is pain. There is guilt. But you don’t disappear from the picture.”

And so my answer is: Move on. You’re fine. Learn to love more. Learn from Folch, who knew, deep down, how to handle being dropped and how to bounce back too.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

10.28.16

7:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I pictured this Nest Cam looming over you—pictured its one dark eye, unblinking—and I immediately thought of that nasty old Cyclops who terrorizes Odysseus and his men in The Odyssey. What was his name? What was the story, exactly? I figured I better reread that bit.

In a nutshell, Odysseus and his men are returning from a long, atrocious war. Landing for a stopover on the island of the Cyclopes, Odysseus confesses he’s at a loss to understand this mountaintop-dwelling race of one-eyed savages: They don’t fear the gods! They have no laws! They are just too alien to be intelligible; Odysseus sees them only as “brutes,” beneath his regard. So he leads his men into a cave—the home of one particular Cyclops who isn’t home—and ransacks it. They build a fire and help themselves to all his many cheeses.

Well, the Cyclops—his name is Polyphemus—is pretty ticked off when he returns (the original “Who moved my cheese?”). And Odysseus suddenly turns diffident and cloying: “We’re at your knees in hopes of a warm welcome,” he tells the Cyclops. But does he apologize for what essentially amounts to home invasion? No, he does not. Instead, he demands a gift! That’s right, Odysseus asks the giant for a “guest-gift,” the giving of which, he explains, is a mandatory and sacred custom between guests and their hosts, as dictated by his Greek gods.

Let’s pause the narrative right there. I was sure the story had something instructive to say about what happens when the expectations of a guest and the expectations of his host don’t match up. Because your problem seems to be that you expect privacy, while your hosts expect to continue protecting their home with the latest Wi-Fi–enabled surveillance tools. They’d like to keep their minds at ease; you’d like to keep their eyes off your privates. And I felt obligated to defend their interests—privilege them—and conclude that the host-guest power dynamic is tilted toward the host and that, like it or not (and in your case I certainly wouldn’t like it either), being a guest means accepting a degree of powerlessness. Keeping the camera running is disrespectful to you, and creepy, but maybe that’s just how it’s got to be.

But then, back in The Odyssey, things escalated. Polyphemus bashes two of the men on the ground of his cave until “their brains gushed out all over,” then rips off their limbs and eats them. So Odysseus sharpens a stake, heats it in a fire, and stabs it through the Cyclops’ single peeper. It’s an ugly story, in other words. And its ugliness snapped me back to reality. Because you are not some pea-sized Odysseus trapped in a terrible colossus’s cave. You are a human being staying in another human being’s house, and part of what makes us human is our willingness to engage in empathic back-and-forths to reconcile conflicting expectations. We compro­mise. We try to act decently toward each other.

And suddenly I pictured you, alone in another person’s cavernous house, with that ominous, unyielding eyeball trained on you 24/7, and I imagined how vulnerable and exposed you must feel—how stripped of self-respect—and also how resentful. Because why else would the first solution that occurred to you be, essentially, to blind the camera? No, you don’t have a right to do so. But couldn’t you take a more obvious, less defiant tack? Couldn’t you just respectfully ask your host to deactivate the camera? Or to program it around your daily schedule, so it only flicks on when you leave?

I really don’t think it will be a hard conversation to have; part of me assumes it never occurred to the homeowners how uncomfortable leaving that camera on would make you feel. But I get it: Sometimes we stew for so long that we get lost overthinking these things. Maybe what we learn from Homer, ultimately, is that not every problem is epic.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

09.25.16

6:40 am

christoph Niemann

My cat will only drink from a running tap—not even a cat fountain. But I live in a drought-stricken state. Help?

You’re familiar with the Misfits, I assume. They are iconic, the so-called horror-punk band that played hard and demonically fast while singer Glenn Danzig—a huge, dark creature from New Jersey with a forbidding curtain of long black hair—screamed. Danzig’s songs had titles like “Skulls” and “Die, Die My Darling” and, of course, “Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight?” That last one could, arguably, be read as a bloodthirsty anthem written in solidarity with America’s imprisoned house cats because, as the world would eventually discover, Danzig is a cat fancier.

A few years ago, pockets of the Internet had a good laugh at Danzig’s expense when a photograph surfaced of him walking out of a grocery store carrying a tub of Fresh Step kitty litter. (If you don’t understand why this was funny, one incredibly left-brained commenter on the site Metalsucks.net provided this analysis: “It is funny because it is something of an ironic satire to see someone who has widely been written about as an offbeat satanist buying kitty litter.”) Danzig himself had another take: “Why do people even care?” he shot back. “Why are they wasting their lives on this?” He had a point. People laughed at him for not being punk enough; he outpunked them all by not caring.

“Glenn Danzig is my spirit animal,” Daniel Quagliozzi told me recently. Quagliozzi is the proprietor of Go, Cat, Go!, a feline behavioral consultancy in San Francisco; he comes to your house and troubleshoots your cat problems. DQ, as he’s known, also grew up in New Jersey and spent his formative years deep in the punk scene, whipping his then-­mohawked head around to the Misfits. “They don’t want to be told what to do. They don’t want your hands on them or their lifestyle,” DQ explains—and this, he adds, is precisely what he appreciates about cats as well.

“I relate to them. I relate to their F U attitude toward society. They make you wonder, ‘Why the hell did I invite them in the house in the first place?’” In fact, DQ has regularly seen owners of defiant felines reduced to “wearing shrouds of cardboard to protect themselves from their swatting cats, or carrying water pistols or air horns to blast their cats away.” One guy resigned himself to keeping the litter box on his couch, because that’s where the cat insisted on pissing and crapping. All too often, DQ says, people are “just not ready for the hostile takeover.”

When I asked DQ about your problem, he let out a long sigh and said, “The running water thing is so … God.” There are countless reasons why a cat would demand a running faucet. “Maybe the water in the bowl is stale or not the right temperature, or the bowl might be too small and it’s creating whisker stress.” (Yes, whisker stress: Google it.) Maybe the cat feels more secure on the counter. “Or it could be boredom.” Maybe your cat leads such a dreary life that trickling water qualifies as fun.

My advice? Hire DQ. Fly him in if you have to; frankly, the guy’s aptitude with cats blew me away. Otherwise, he suggested trying to “mimic what’s happening in the same location.” Start by putting a recirculating fountain next to the sink; often, DQ says, we overlook the importance of location when assessing cat problems. (Maybe, for example, your cat just wants its water separate from its food, or up off the ground.)

But most of all: Steel yourself for confrontation—for a kind of protracted, brutal brinkmanship. Your cat isn’t likely to go on strike and die of thirst, DQ says, but any change you make will likely leave the animal “anxious and unsettled.” And that is “definitely going to be harder on the guardian than it is on the cat.” That is, the cat will try to own you—belittle you. Find your inner Danzig and flip the script.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

05.24.16

9:00 am

I think someone is hate-retweeting me. She has 25K followers! Should I call her out?

Easy. Couldn’t be easier. Hate-favoriting and hate-retweeting is childish behavior. So if you want to be bold, by all means call her out. And if you want to be less bold but perhaps more effective, just block her: Game over.

And yet, can I be honest? This may be the most subtly perplexing question I’ve ever had to pretend to be a know-it-all about. Because if I push just a bit on your premise, it all goes soft. I can see ancillary dilemmas, qualifications, and niggling unknowns pile up until the kind of clear, objective truth I’m required to find gets hopelessly boxed in. There’s a lot here to pick apart. Let’s start with the corrosive, discombobulating nature of spite.

Ever heard of the Spite Fence? Go back to 1876. San Francisco’s Big Four—the four main bazillionaire railroad barons—all decided to build mansions on a scenic, empty hilltop: Nob Hill. At least, it was mostly empty. Bounded within the large property purchased by one of these magnates, Charles Crocker, was a little house on a small, separate parcel owned by an undertaker named Nicholas Yung. Crocker wanted Yung gone; Yung wouldn’t sell. Crocker, bewildered that his money hadn’t made this inconvenience go away, kept making offers. Yung kept declining. So Crocker—overcome with spite—started a flame war. Or a wall war.

Crocker built his mansion. Then he built a 30-foot-high wall on his land that effectively surrounded Yung’s property. It shut out the light. It shut Yung in. It was ridiculous looking, and people came from all over to gawk at it. There was a kind of class war brewing in the city at the time, and one activist pamphlet singled out Crocker’s fence as a “very obnoxious” symbol of “the domineering spirit” of the wealthy. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Spite Fence an “inartistic monument of resentment” and a “memorial of malignity and malevolence.” Yet Yung—the simple undertaker, just wanting to live his life, in his house—didn’t sell. The undertaker was himself essentially buried, though still aboveground. But he just took it, took the high road, and let that towering manifestation of Crocker’s out-of-control id speak for itself. Yung never even retaliated, though he thought about it. His wife said, “There are some things to which people like ourselves do not care to stoop.”

You must feel like Nicholas Yung: tweeting through your life in a pure, happy-go-lucky way, only to see a wall of spite building up in this other person’s timeline, one hateful retweet at a time, to rebuke you. And like I said at the outset: How nasty that is; how immature. But why do you think these likes and retweets are hate-likes and hate-retweets, as opposed to supportive likes and supportive retweets? What would lead you to this conclusion? I can’t help but wonder if there’s something you’re not telling me—if you yourself worry there’s an arrogant, airheaded, obnoxious, or self-congratulatory tone to what you’re tweeting, the sort of attitude that typically elicits that kind of resentment online. Are you, for example, relentlessly issuing tidbits like “So lucky my baby sleeps for 12 hours each night!!!!!! Almost enough time for tantric sex with my amazing partner!” or “Just had lunch with Bon Jovi! #blessed”?

I’m not saying you are. I’m just wondering. Honestly. I don’t want to blame the victim. My point is, the victim of one kind of obnoxiousness can be a perpetrator of another. You ought to give that a hard think and figure out which side of this Spite Fence you’re actually standing on, before you poke your head over and start shouting.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

04.07.16

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

Two stories. Try to hold them together in your mind.

The first involves a man named Muki Bácsi, at a Hungarian wedding in 1879. Muki was a drunk, apparently, but a beloved and awe-inspiring one. He was the region’s “champion drinkist,” according to the London Telegraph. And so, arriving at the wedding banquet, Muki found a tremendous 3-pint glass at his place and was told that, as the party proceeded through toast after toast, he was expected, each time, to suck this hulking receptacle dry, then fill it up again.

Muki sighed. “Lads, I am about to die,” he began. He was certain he was on the verge of a stroke, and the last thing he wanted was to flood his ailing innards with wine. And yet, Muki also knew he was at a gosh darn wedding and that weddings are specially charged, sacred days that temporarily reorganize the universe entirely around love and joyousness and mirth. Muki considered this, considered his glass, and pushed a great gust of air out of his weathered lungs. His lips formed that air into words: “So be it! A man can die but once!” And then Muki started to drink and drink. He drank until 2 in the morning. Then Muki asked to be carried to a bed, groaned once, and died. He was, the paper reported, “the merriest wedding guest of them all.”

The second story is shorter: In 1912, Elizabeth Lang shot a woman dead in Indiana. The case was open-and-shut, according to The New York Times. Elizabeth offered a clear confession. “She said I was ugly. She said I was old. I killed her for that, and I am not a bit sorry for it,” she told police. If it sounds extreme, it is—I’m not going to excuse it. And yet, monitor the slight shift in your own understanding and feelings when I reveal that this incident occurred at Elizabeth’s wedding.

It’s possible these stories aren’t entirely true—that they are, instead, the truth extruded through the melodramatic, yellowish journalistic conventions of their time. But even as fables, they offer some relevant lessons.

From Muki, we learn that the ideal wedding guest is submissive. Making the day a success requires that, to some degree, everyone subsume their needs and join with a larger collective spirit of conviviality. We guests arrive when we’re told to. We wear what we’re told to. If Abba comes on, we dance to Abba—even subpar Abba, like “Fernando.” We do these things because we care; it’s the Muki in us.

And from Elizabeth, we learn never to piss off the bride and groom. Even as all of us guests work to put our individual feelings aside for the day, we must understand that the bride and groom’s desires can become grotesquely elephantine and should be allowed to carry extra weight.

These are extreme examples, of course. But you are not being asked to festively drink yourself to death. You are being asked to use a hashtag on Instagram. And if you didn’t use the hashtag, and the bride murdered you for it, that would be nuts. So no, I can’t claim you are “required” to use the hashtag. But whatever your objections, using it seems like such a trivial sacrifice. The couple is merely asking for help gathering your photos into a larger virtual collection, easily viewed by them, their guests, and their would-have-been guests (excluded by head count costs, travel expenses, family feuds, and so on).

Hashtags can be dumb. I get it, I do. But this hashtag genuinely feels like a force for good. Like the wedding itself, it’s a mechanism for bringing people together. Why stand in its way?

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.10.16

4:35 pm

Christoph Niemann

I’ve declared evenings and weekends a digital holiday. Should I set up an email autoreply to let people know?

Compassion. Sensitivity. Openness. Tolerance. I’d like to think that these are the core values of the Mr. Know-It-All column—the imperturbable foundations on which, every month, I try to build this tiny chapel of words. I’m not going to lie: This job is intimidating! Your questions come ricocheting into my inbox from WIRED HQ, sweeping toward me like a flurry of screeching bats from the mouth of a dark cave. And it’s up to me—only me—to lasso one of those unruly mammal-birds and tame it, transmute it into something more approachable, a gentle, sweetly singing canary whose song is Truth. Admittedly, sometimes it goes better than others. (Like that weird bat-and-canary bit—that one kind of got away from me.) But my feeling is, if I approach your questions with an open heart—if I try to locate, within that cryptic line or two you’ve submitted, some glint of shared humanity and try to understand you—then I cannot fail.

But I don’t understand you. I just don’t. I read your question on Friday evening, after a hectic week. I typically like to get an early jump on knowing-it-all, but I figured—just this once—I could mull over your question all weekend and bang out a thoughtful answer just before it was due. Then I thought to myself: “Why wouldn’t you set up an email autoreply?” I assumed I was missing something.

I fell asleep wondering what it might be—wondering about you. I slept very well. On Saturday I woke up to discover my car was dead in the driveway. I jump-started it. Then my sister-in-law visited. I made some soup. Sunday: took my kids on a hike, learned to use a chain saw, caught a few minutes of The Bourne Ultimatum, cooked a so-so chicken dish.

Now it’s Monday morning. The sun is rising; the column is due. I still don’t understand you. Do you have a justifiable reason to not set up an autoreply? I can’t imagine one. (How much of an inconvenience can it be? It’s automated!) I also wondered if, in a society where we all seem slavishly and often necessarily tied to our devices—where so many of us feel perpetually on call—you worry that your obstinate rejection of email every weekend will come off, to the rest of us, as a preposterous, selfish luxury. Does an automated email responder rub your privilege in our faces?

Yes, maybe a little. But guess what else it does: IT TELLS US YOU’RE NOT THERE. Imagine if I’d reached out to you for clarification on your question on Friday. Now imagine me waiting for a reply, consulting my phone as I continued to turn your question over in my mind. Imagine how that would have colored my weekend—impinged, just a bit, on my enjoyment of my family, my soup, my chainsawing, my Jason Bourne, my chicken. And, as you depleted my various joys with your unresponsiveness all weekend long, imagine how I might have come to resent you for it.

But I don’t resent you. Because, although you say you’ve declared your weekends a digital holiday, you’ve so far only declared it to me. And thanks for that. It saved me some hassle. Me and you are totally cool.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.09.16

4:40 pm

Christoph Niemann

How long should you wait before shutting down someone’s Facebook account after they die?

“This is for all you lovers out there.” That’s how it begins—one of the most existentially horrifying moments in American cinema.

I’m talking about the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance in Back to the Future, in which we see a temporally displaced Marty McFly onstage, sitting in with the band on “Earth Angel” with a guitar, while his teenage parents, George and Lorraine, move toward their first kiss.

This is it: the precise, excruciatingly brief moment in which the cosmos will offer up the possibility for them to fall in love—a doorway they can step through or not step through. But if they do, it’s a straight shot from here through the sinews of the spacetime continuum to marriage, and to Marty’s birth, and to all the circumstances of life that Marty had always mistaken for the one and only, inviolable reality. But he’s wising up now. While traveling through time, he’s learning that his life, like all of our lives, is only an exquisite and provisional fluke—a haphazard product of so many collisions and coincidences that were never guaranteed. Up on the stage, he’s about to be confronted with this truth in a deep and terrible way.

You know the scene, right? It turns on an obnoxious redhead who tells George to “scram,” then cuts in between him and Lorraine and sweeps her away. Slowly, a warped and nightmarish score rises over “Earth Angel.” Marty becomes disoriented, diminished. His strength—his selfhood—is draining out of him as, out on the dance floor, that insufferable ginger cackles and whips Lorraine around like a rag doll. He is dragging Lorraine farther and farther from George—and dragging our universe (or maybe all of this is proof of a multiverse?) farther from its capacity to produce Marty’s life, diverting the sacred headwaters of his personal history.

Marty’s compromised hands batter his guitar, making a discordant mess of “Earth Angel.” He raises one hand and watches it turn … translucent! His face is stupefied, powerless. Somehow Michael J. Fox—that cocky scion of 1980s precociousness—pulls it off: this look of violated innocence and panic, of a carefree boy suddenly thrown down and dying on the battlefield of time.

What is happening to Marty? Doc Brown has already explained the process: Marty is being “erased from existence.” Stop and think about those words for a second. They are horrifying. (A thrash metal band from Belfast called Scimitar even wrote an abrasive, ear-­pummeling song called “Erased from Existence,” inspired by this scene. It’s very hard to listen to.) But the worst part isn’t even that Marty himself is being erased. The true, piercing horror comes when he looks at the photograph slipped through the strings of his guitar: the one of his brother and sister and him standing against a low rock wall. Earlier in the film we’ve seen the images of his two siblings vanish from that photo, and now Marty’s image is fading too. This is what it means to be erased from existence. And this is what frightens me most: not just that Marty is vanishing but that all evidence of his life will vanish. No one will know who he was, because—here’s the thing—he wasn’t.

You ask how long you should wait before shutting down the Facebook page of a loved one who’s died. I ask why you’d ever want to delete it. Consider the ripple effects—the many ways their absence would be felt across that platform, on so many other ­people’s pages and their community’s collective, digital memory. Everything the deceased had said, not just on their own page but on others, would be gone. And so would everything people had said to them. They’d be instantaneously untagged from hundreds or even thousands of other people’s photos, exiled into some anonymous interloper status: a nameless human void.

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https://www.wired.com/2017/03/kia-social-media-apps/

[oltnews]

Click to enlarge NEXT "One World: Together at Home" has relied on dozens of prominent celebrities to help spread joy during a time when much of the world is closed by the coronavirus pandemic.Saturday's broadcast started with a six-hour live broadcast on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, then moved on to prime time on ABC, CBS and NBC for two hours. The stars who appeared on the television portion of the event were Billie Eilish, Jennifer Lopez, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Oprah Winfrey and Stevie Wonder. © Presley Ann, Getty Images for Haus Laboratori SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA - SEPTEMBER 16: Lady Gaga attends Lady Gaga celebrates the launch of Haus Labs at the Barker Hangar on September 16, 2019 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Presley Ann / Getty Images for Haus Laboratories) ORG XMIT: 775406144 ORIG FILE ID: 1175171746 Music legends Lady Gaga, Céline Dion, John Legend and others closed the two-hour broadcast with powerful collaboration.Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox every morning.Kesha, Matthew McConaughey and Heidi Klum were among those who appeared in the early hours of the livestream. Everyone took the time to thank the medical professionals who worked tirelessly to treat Americans with COVID-19."If you see a healthcare worker, you will want to give them a high-five, but not because we don't want them to be contaminated," warned late CBS host Stephen Colbert. VAs of Saturday evening, there were nearly 700,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States, according to the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University. To date, there have been more than 31,000 deaths in the United States due to COVID-19."I miss my fans so much," said Kesha shortly after the livestream started. "I know there are so many people who work and don't sleep and sacrifice so much to help understand this for everyone, and I just think the vulnerability of all of us as human beings in this moment really shows a very beautiful side to humanity. "Here are some of the highlights you may have missed during prime time: © Getty Images, Getty Images for Global Citizen Late evening hosts Jimmy Kimmel, left, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon directed "One World: Together at Home". "We love you, we thank you"At the start of the television portion of the show, McCartney was quick to join these health care rental companies."We love you, we thank you," he said before singing "Lady Madonna" as shots of health care professionals wearing protective gear cascaded across the screen."As this COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis, we must unite to find a solution," he said.ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel joked, "You know the coronavirus is in trouble when the Beatles get involved." He noted that IBM, a company his father once worked for, had arranged to donate millions of masks to first responders.Kimmel then surprised a food delivery man who brought his dinner with a homemade pizza, a bag full of "clean" money and a roll of toilet paper."Blinded by colors""It's going to be fine," reassured Kacey Musgraves. "Stay strong. Stay inside.""I just wanted to say a sincere" thank you "to everyone risking their lives to get people across," she said, before singing her hit song "Rainbow". "It means so much to me.""Sesame Street" is recordedAbby Cadabby, a relatively new but still beloved resident of "Sesame Street", intervened to reassure young people - and, let's be honest, adults too."I know many of us have big feelings right now," she said, before reassuring people that the "hugs" were A-OK in this time when close contact is frowned upon."I stand very tight, then I take a deep breath and I feel comforted," she said. © Getty Images, Getty Images for Global Citizen Elton John treated fans to his rendition of "I'm Still Standing". "People risk everything"Football superstar David Beckham and his wife Victoria Adams had the honor of introducing the great musician Elton John."We know there are people who risk everything to keep us safe," said Beckham.John then came to the screen, playing the piano in a lush green garden."It's for everyone who works on the front lines 24 hours a day, 7 days a week," he said, before saying "I'm still standing." © Getty Images, Getty Images for Global Citizen Chris Martin was one of the artists who worked to delight viewers on Saturday evening. Reach a new audienceAfter watching Jimmy Fallon of NBC singing "Safety Dance" of Men Without Hats via Zoom with members of Roots, Chris Martin of Coldplay appeared "One World: Together at Home", singing a classic, "Yellow"."It's been 20 years now," he laughed. "He may be older than some of you."He was followed by the musical power couple Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes. © Getty Images, Getty Images for Global Citizen Kerry Washington encouraged viewers to accept their feelings rather than hide them. Consider your mental and emotional well-beingWhile encouraging social distancing, actress Kerry Washington took a moment to encourage viewers to recognize their feelings, rather than hide them."We also need to consider how isolation can affect our mental and emotional well-being," she said.Washington then called on Dr. Sue Varma, a New York psychiatrist, for some advice."Many people experience fear, anxiety and grief during this crisis," said Varma. "This is perfectly normal."Everyone has to take time for the four M's of mental health: movement, mindfulness, mastery ... and meaningful connections."Contributor: The Associated Press Even Hollywood is not immune to the coronavirus pandemic that has hit much of the world. Many celebrities share their thoughts on the epidemic and how they coped with the virus, including Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson, both of whom tested positive for coronavirus in Australia. Hanks and Wilson, both 63, were released from an Australian hospital on March 16, five days after being admitted and tested positive for coronavirus, said their son Chet Hanks. Hanks said he and Wilson were in solitary confinement "one day at a time." In isolation, Hanks offered an Australian-themed Instagram photo update, with a stuffed kangaroo holding an Australian flag, a tiny stuffed koala, and two pieces of toast with huge portions of Vegemite. Wilson shared it "Quarantines" playlist. The couple shared another positive update on March 22, announcing that they were feeling better two weeks after experiencing their first symptoms. "An on-site shelter works like this: you don't give it to anyone - you don't receive it from anyone. Common sense, right?" Hanks tweeted. "It's going to take a while, but if we take care of each other, let's help where we can, and give up all the comforts ... that too will pass." We can understand that. Idris Elba revealed on Twitter on March 17 that he had tested positive for the coronavirus. "This morning, I tested positive for COVID-19. I feel good, I have no symptoms so far but I have been isolated since I discovered my possible exposure to the virus", said said the actor in caption of a video. "Stay at home and be pragmatic. I'll keep you posted on how I'm going 👊🏾👊🏾 Don't panic." Elbe's wife Sabrina Dhowre revealed on March 21 during the couple's interview with Oprah Winfrey that she had also tested positive. Andy Cohen said he was only focusing on his recovery on Instagram on March 20 after being diagnosed with COVID-19. "After a few days of self-quarantine, and not feeling well, I tested positive for the coronavirus," he captioned a solemn selfie. "As much as I felt like I could get through everything I felt to do #WWHL from home, we're putting a pin on it right now so I can focus on improving myself." Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan announced on Saturday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus. "I've been sick for a week and I'm feeling better every day," wrote Bryan in an Instagram article. "Don't be afraid !!! It's the flu and not the plague. I was quarantined for one week and will be quarantined for another week. And when I feel better, I will be tested again make sure I'm free from this nasty virus. Please help each other. It will be over soon ... with the help of all Americans !! " Opera singer Placido Domingo announced on Facebook on Sunday that he had tested positive for the virus, citing fever and cough as the symptoms that led him to get tested. "I urge everyone to be extremely careful, to follow basic guidelines by washing your hands frequently, standing at least 6 feet from others, doing everything in your power to prevent the virus from spread and most importantly, stay home if you can, "he wrote. Together, we can fight this virus and end the current global crisis, so that we can hopefully resume our daily lives very quickly. Please follow the guidelines and regulations of your local government to stay safe and protect not only yourself, but our entire community. " Actress Debi Mazar, best known for playing the publicist without prisoners on HBO's "Entourage" and an artist on TV Land's "Younger" announced on March 22 that she had tested positive for COVID-19. On March 15, Mazar says she woke up with the same symptoms (mild fever, headache, sore throat, body aches, ringing in the ears and dry cough) that her husband Gabriele Corcos and two teenage girls had fought in February. Her doctor initially refused to test the coronavirus because she did not meet the criteria, which usually include travel to an affected area and contact with a confirmed positive or suspected positive. After finally being tested and diagnosed, she said, "I found these crazy criteria for a NY because I took the metro, I went to the theater, the grocery store, the pharmacy, the living room hairdressing, etc. " "Bachelor" star Colton Underwood revealed his diagnosis of COVID-19 on Instagram on March 20. "I want to let you know: I am 28 years old, I consider myself quite healthy, I train regularly, I eat healthy and I became symptomatic a few days ago, I got my test results today and they are positive, "he said in an Instagram video. "I'm exhausted." "Lost" and "Hawaii Five-0" star Daniel Dae Kim said he would "be fine" after being tested positive for coronavirus. "Ready for a fight? I am. Yesterday I was diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus," he tweeted on March 19. Kristofer Hivju, the actor of "Game of Thrones" known to play the famous warrior Tormund Giantsbane, confirmed on Instagram on March 16 that he had the virus. "Sorry to say that today I tested positive for COVID19, the Corona virus." "My (family) and I isolate ourselves at home for as long as it takes. We are healthy - I have only mild cold symptoms," said Hivju from Norway. Singer Charlotte Lawrence revealed that she had tested positive for the coronavirus. "A few days ago, my doctor informed me that I too had COVID-19," she wrote on March 18. "It is I who beg you to protect all those who are less able to survive this virus ... Think of your parents. Think of Your grandparents. " Christian music singer Sandi Patty, 63, revealed on Twitter that it has tested positive for coronavirus. She self-quarantines and has encouraged her supporters to take action against the spread of the disease. "If you are not far from society and you STAY AT HOME, DO IT NOW!" she wrote on March 17. "God gave us faith, but He also gave us wisdom. Be good and wise!" "Frozen 2" actress Rachel Matthews revealed her positive coronavirus diagnosis on March 16. "I tested positive for Covid-19 and I was in quarantine last week. I'm not sure what to do next (having obtained mixed information, so you will be notified), but I will of course remain in quarantine until you are told to do otherwise. I'm feeling better, "she wrote on Instagram. Tekashi 6ix9ine's lawyer asked a judge to change the rapper's jail sentence on Sunday, citing a recently discovered coronavirus case with an inmate at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and Tekashi's history of hospitalization for seizures asthma, according to a legal document. obtained by USA TODAY. The artist, whose real name is Daniel Hernandez, was sentenced to two years in prison in December for his entanglement with a violent street gang that fueled his rise to fame. Model Bella Hadid encouraged her subscribers to stay at home in a lengthy Instagram post. "It's crazy because all we have to do is work together to slow this virus down and people are still struggling to understand it," wrote Hadid, captioned a photo of his shirtless chest. In addition to listing ideas for indoor activities, Hadid noted that she is thinking of "people who are still working and those who can't." Will Smith, who played the role of virologist in the 2007 post-apocalyptic film "I Am Legend", took preparation for this role seriously - and it paid off during the coronavirus pandemic. In an appearance on "Red Table Talk" on March 18, Smith shared what he had learned from visiting the CDC and researching infectious diseases for the game. He said, "A virus wants your whole body to be the virus and uses your cells to make itself more". Later, he broke down what it means to "flatten the curve". Bob Saget took Twitter March 19 to share how the coronavirus pandemic turned him into his "Full House" character. Saget played in the sitcom from 1987 to 1995. "Oh. My God," he wrote. "I spend my day cleaning, vacuuming and disinfecting everything in the house. I became Danny Tanner." David Beckham participated in the hashtag #IStayHomeFor on Instagram to promote self-isolation. He said he was staying at home "for those we love". On a sign, he wrote the hashtag with the words "VB (abbreviation of Victoria Beckham) and my children". Demi Lovato also participated in the trend, writing on Instagram that she stays at home for "my parents ... my neighbors ... my health". "Bachelor" star Peter Weber thinks of his former employer Compass Airlines during the coronavirus after learning that the regional airline "ceased operations" due to financial problems caused by the pandemic. "People, please take this virus seriously and practice social distancing. This virus forces businesses to close and seriously affect people's lives. Stay strong and stay safe," he wrote on Instagram. . Bono harnessed his emotions amidst the coronavirus, writing and releasing a moving new song called "Let Your Love Be Known" on March 17. The song is the first release of the U2 frontman in three years, and is dedicated to "doctors, nurses, caregivers, it's you we're singing about," he wrote on Instagram. The lyrics include: You can't touch but you can sing / On the rooftops / Sing the phone / Sing and promise me you won't stop / Sing your love, be known, let your love be known. JoJo remixed his 2004 single, "Leave (Get Out)", with lyrics related to the global coronavirus pandemic and social distancing. She named the new coronavirus remix: "Chill (Stay In)". In a video from TikTok, JoJo sings to the tune of his single, "Tell me why you act so confused, when the CDC prepared it for you. Come on, I know you're not stupid. To go behind my back and hitting the bar, shows how immature you really are. Keep the exposure to a minimum! " "Stay! Now! Do it for humanity. I am (explanatory) about it, but we will survive," she added. Gal Gadot gathered some of his famous friends for a quarantine cover of "Imagine", which she shared on her Instagram. Who is in the video? Natalie Portman, Jimmy Fallon, Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig to name a few! Do you like comments on "terrible movies"? Seth Rogen took Twitter to suggest his "favorite podcast" titled "How did it happen?" anyone looking for something to do while in isolation. New Zealand-born actor Russell Crowe went to Instagram on March 18 to cheer on his Australian followers amid the pandemic. "Hey Australia, just a reminder, we've been dealing with serious (expletive) stuff already, and we're going to be dealing with what we're facing now," he wrote, captioned photos of burnt trees in a nod to the Australian wildfire crisis earlier this year. "Together (spaced at least 1.5 meters)." Hilary Duff encouraged her fans to practice social distancing in an Instagram post on March 17. "I know for all the parents out there ... these days are hard to pass by entertaining many little ones ... becoming teachers, cooking, cleaning, no breaks, repeating," she writes. "People who can sit on their couch at home, be responsible and do it. We can get through it together if we all do what is recommended." Taylor Swift urged her supporters to take the coronavirus seriously on her Instagram stories on March 16. "Things are not being taken seriously enough at the moment. I see a lot of meetings, blockages and parties happening," she wrote. "It's time to cancel plans, really isolate as much as you can, and don't assume that because you don't feel sick, you're probably not passing anything on to an elderly or vulnerable person. is a really scary time, but we have to make social sacrifices right now. " Jared Leto was one of the last people to find out about the coronavirus pandemic. He emerged from complete isolation during a desert retreat after 12 days to find the closure of much of the world. "We left yesterday in a very different world," Leto tweeted on March 17. "The one that has been changed forever. It's mind-blowing - to say the least. I get messages from friends and family from around the world and catch up with what's going on. In progress." Kim Kardashian West implored her Instagram followers on Tuesday to follow the guidelines for social estrangement and stay at home, "especially young and healthy people. "Unless you are leaving your home to go to work, stock up on food and essentials, see your doctor, or help someone in need, such as an elderly neighbor, please be aware of the severity of the warnings to stay at inside to stop the spread of this virus, "she said. Matthew McConaughey reminded his Twitter followers in a video Tuesday to take care of themselves and others "in these crazy times", stressing the importance of focusing on "fairness, kindness, responsibility, resilience, respect (and) courage. He added: "Right now, more than ever, we are more dependent on each other than we have ever been. But we have an enemy in the coronavirus that is faceless, that is, without race, without sex, without denomination and bipartisan. And it is an enemy that we all agree that we will fight. " On March 13, Mariah Carey shared a TikTok video of herself washing her hands alongside her children on a song: "Do this for 20 seconds with Ol 'Dirty Bastard! Wash your hands! Stay safe !!! " Lady Gaga encouraged her disciples to be kind to each other. "Now, it is more important than ever to be nice. For those who are sick or those who are not and who are afraid," she wrote on Twitter on March 12. "We are in the same boat. I love you, my world." On March 17, Brad Paisley announced that The Store, his free Nashville-based grocery store, has launched a volunteer-run delivery service that will provide one week of grocery shopping for seniors in certain neighborhoods. "The store is still open, but in light of how times have changed, we decided to change the way we do things a bit," said Paisley, explaining that the groceries would be delivered to "people seniors who shouldn't be shopping. " their own at these times. " In a joint interview with Witherspoon, Kerry Washington agreed: "As Reese said, (I'm trying) to gather the information we need to take care of ourselves and our loved ones, but also remembering that your stress level can have an impact on your immunity, and therefore try to be calm too. " Miley Cyrus offered direct advice. "Wash your hands," she tweeted on March 10 next to a step-by-step poster of good hand washing with soap and water. Billie Eilish said she was not taking the pandemic seriously until she realized "it's not about me ... I should be worried about the people around me". "I have seen a lot of young people all over the world, going to the club or going to the beach or just going out and going out, and that is really irresponsible," she said on March 16. John Legend followed suit, announcing that he would accept live requests from his official Instagram account on March 17 for a virtual concert. "My friend Chris Martin had a nice little concert from his house today," said Legend. "See you soon. We will try to get through this together!" Keith Urban was joined by his wife Nicole Kidman as an impromptu singer and dancer during a performance for fans on March 16. "I was supposed to be playing with my whole group tonight and obviously we can't, and that disappointed me huge," Urban told the fans between songs. "I really wanted to be able to play, so here we are in the warehouse - this is our joint, where we store everything - and we thought we were going to break the camera, the iPhone and broadcast live." Amy Adams has teamed up with Garner to create the "Save With Stories" Instagram page. It features celebrities, such as Adams, Garner, Reese Witherspoon and Natalie Portman, reading children's stories to children affected by school closings. Alicia Keys offered an uplifting message. "Send you light right now Just a reminder to keep your energy high. There are many things but take care of yourself, love your family and remember to take a deep breath and stay calm", artist "Fallin '" wrote to Twitter on March 11. "Remember I love you." Mark Ruffalo urged his supporters to seek advice from experts. "People, although the coronavirus may be benign for some, it is devastating for others, especially the elderly. Listen to scientists and doctors not Fox News and the White House. They are misleading you," a wrote the actor on March 12. is more deadly and much more contagious. " Ellen Pompeo sent a special cry to "nurses and doctors and all health workers". "Many of us have the privilege of self-quarantining and isolating and trying to stay healthy and none of you have that privilege," said Pompeo in an Instagram video. March 13. "Anyone who works in a hospital or in the healthcare industry, you rock. We love you. Stay safe." Kristen Bell shared a heartfelt message after posting memes about the virus. "There are a lot of coronavirus jokes at the moment. I just want to be clear: my deepest condolences go to the people and families affected by this virus," she wrote on Instagram. Stories. "I also know there are tons of us trying to figure out how to deal with the panic of it all. So let the joke and memes help us get through this together. People feel calmer and closer when they laugh together. " Comedy binds people. " Amid concerns about Betty White's well-being, her rep Jeff Witjas assured fans that the 98-year-old icon was fine. "Betty is doing well," Witjas told USA TODAY. "The View" co-host Joy Behar announced on March 13 that she would temporarily step away from the show for safety reasons, citing her age. "I am in a higher risk group because of my age, but I am in perfect health," said Behar, 77, on ABC. "I'm not looking at my age, but I'm actually up there. The number makes me dizzy." "Modern Family" star Jesse Tyler Ferguson turned to books as a way out of this period. "I will read in my spare time. Please recommend good books to me," he wrote on Twitter on March 16. Kumail Nanjiani urged people to stay home in a tweet on March 15: "People get angry and annoy me when I tweet about coronavirus, when I urge people to stay and avoid the crowds. My person favorite in the world is immunocompromised. Go ahead and don't follow me. I'll tweet about it until I have zero. " George Takei shared a tweet on an open letter posted on USA TODAY on March 15 by health care leaders: "We may not have a president, but we still have great leaders. Hear them when they say #StayHome. " Padma Lakshmi shared her support for the #FlattenTheCurve movement on March 14: "We can prevent as many unnecessary deaths by following Italy in self-quarantine and social distancing as much as possible to contain COVID-19." Comedian Patton Oswalt took inspiration from a viral video of Italians singing out the window during the lockout. "Watching the videos from Italy inspired me. Artists must offer hope and humor to their neighbors during this quarantine period," he captioned a funny video of himself telling jokes on a sidewalk filled with one person. In the distance, two other people are watching. Trevor Noah was also inspired by the Italian video and attempted to recreate his own in New York on March 17. In a Twitter video, the actor stands on a balcony and begins to sing Aladdin's "A Whole New World" - but was quickly interrupted by a loud voice telling him to "close the (expletive)". Bette Midler directed his frustrations with Donald Trump and his politics on March 12. "Alors ... qu'est-ce qui a poussé Trump à démanteler l'équipe américaine de réponse à une pandémie mise en place par #Obama, pour un événement comme celui que nous vivons actuellement? #JEALOUSY!" elle a tweeté. "Ce schmuck est tellement égocentrique, égoïste et COLOSSALEMENT STUPIDE." Le 10 mars, Gloria Gaynor a utilisé sa chanson à succès "I Will Survive" pour démontrer sa technique de lavage des mains de 20 secondes aux fans sur TikTok. "Il ne faut que 20 secondes pour" SURVIVRE "!" elle a écrit, sous-titrant une vidéo d'elle se frottant les mains tout en se synchronisant avec les lèvres au classique disco de 1978. Le poste de Gaynor est venu exactement un jour après qu'elle a célébré le 40e anniversaire de sa chanson en tête des charts Billboard. Denise Richards a envoyé des prières à "beaucoup de gens qui souffrent" sur ses histoires Instagram le 13 mars, partageant une photo d'elle portant un masque dans un aéroport "vide" en Espagne: "Tellement triste toutes les entreprises du monde entier en sont affectées. .. Prier pour la santé et la sécurité de chacun. " Kirstie Alley fait face à la pandémie de coronavirus avec de l'alcool et des bonbons. "Je mange de la vodka et des doigts de beurre pour le dîner. C'est vrai. C'est ainsi que je gère ce gâchis", a écrit Alley sur Twitter le 17 mars. Kylie Jenner a déclaré qu'elle espérait que "tout le monde se sent bien". Elle a tweeté le 17 mars: "Il est si important en ce moment de se mettre en quarantaine pour s'assurer que nous ne nous mettons pas en danger nous-mêmes ou quiconque ne peut pas gérer ce virus." Judi Dench sait comment élever le moral des gens en ces temps étranges. L'actrice "Cats" a publié une vidéo idiote sur Twitter Le 18 mars d'elle-même portant des oreilles de chien tout en encourageant les autres à "Continuez à rire. C'est tout ce que nous pouvons faire." 58/58 DIAPOSITIVES Cet article a été initialement publié sur USA AUJOURD'HUI: Paul McCartney, Elton John, Jennifer Lopez, d'autres éloges sur les agents de santé lors de "One World: Together at Home" https://oltnews.com/paul-mccartney-elton-john-jennifer-lopez-and-others-praise-health-workers-for-one-world-together-at-home-msnnow?_unique_id=5ea131e2808e2

[lawrenceseitz22]

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

Click on the video above to watch Episode 161 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

  Announcement

Adam: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is episode 161. Today is the sixth of December. First one in December, we’re rolling towards the end of the year but not quite there. Speaking of closer to the end of the year, we’re going to have a pretty awesome Hump Day Hangout coming up later in December but stay tuned for that, we’ll tell you more about that coming. Real quick, we want to go down and say hi to everybody and see how everyone is doing. Chris, how are you doing today?

Chris: Looking good. It’s glad to be here.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan, how about yourself?

Hernan: Good. It’s actually quite warm right now in Buenos Aires. Yeah, I’m excited for what’s coming. We have a lot of stuff coming. Oh, what? Are you cold?

Adam: No, I don’t know. I’m perfectly warm.

Hernan: Okay, right, okay.

Adam: Hey, Marco. How’s it going?

Marco: Well, the doctor took a look at my MRI today and said, “Holy shit.” Those are not words that you want to hear when the fucking doctor takes a look at your MRI of your fucking back, dude so that’s what I’m doing.

Adam: All right, fair enough. Bradley, how about you, man?

Bradley: I went to a doctor once with an ear infection and it hurt like a son of a bitch. The doctor put the thing in the ear to look at it and he goes, “Whoa.” I was like, “Doc, you’re not supposed to do that.” “I’ve never seen an eardrum look like that.”

Adam: Well, make it not look like that.

Bradley: No wonder it hurts, right? Anyway, this is great, guys. Today has been a really good day, really productive day. I got a shit ton of stuff done. I’m just excited to be here and answer some questions, and hang out.

Adam: Cool. Well, before we get into it, I got a couple of quick announcements. I’m going to post some stuff on the page. If you’ve never have come to Hump Day Hangouts, first of all, thank you very much for being here. It’s awesome and we love having more people join us. We got some good stuff for you, some resources I’m going to post on the page for you. If you were around over the Thanksgiving time period and for Black Friday then you saw the e-mails and you saw the page we got, you know that Syndication Academy is increasing a price. It’s going to be like a 50% jump. It’s something we’ve been putting off for a long time and this is last announcement that it’s happening, and the price is going up to $97 a month here shortly in seven days. We want to give everyone fair notice a nice reminder here before that happens, and you can get that for free if you join the Mastermind, all right? We want to remind people about that, that’s one of the many, many perks of being a Mastermind member.

Something else we wanted to talk about, obviously there’s been ongoing updates with RYSP loaded. There’s been a ton of new contents, stuff going on there. I’ll let Marco talk about this.

Marco: Yeah, we have in fact a new webinar coming up on Monday. We’re calling it Multi-Location Domination with Automation.

Bradley: Wow.

Marco: Yes, sir. We’re going there. We got in fact two scripts that we’re rolling out to make things easier just to allow people to make it as simple as possible to go and take over not only their local niche, right? The local area but surrounding areas and just take shit down city by city, that’s how we do it, that’s what we’re teaching. We’re also going to show how it’s done globally by the way because we’re in the lab taking a look at that, and as a matter of fact, when we roll out the Multi-Location Domination webinar, we’re going to raise the price on RYS reload. The price is going up. I don’t know how much. You know I always push as much as possible as much as you guys will allow but price is going up. I suggest if you’re on the fence, it’s time to get in. Get in where you fit in or get left behind. We’re going to teach people how to take over, it’s really that simple.

Adam: Nice. Yeah, it’ll be going up. We’ll have some more information coming out about that you guys if you’re watching. If you’re curious, I’ll also post the links obviously. If you’ve been thinking, “Oh, I’ve heard about RYS and it’s neat and maybe I should do that.” One, you should, it’s awesome. If not that then you should be checking out the [inaudible 00:04:05] services if you’re more of the outsourcing type, but if you’ve been thinking about getting in, now would be obviously a great time. Before we start answering questions, I think Bradley, you had something you wanted to share with people, right?

Bradley: A couple of things, number one, go to bradleybanner.com. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and also my daily Mindset updates. I just posted another video just a few minutes ago like literally 15 minutes ago that I recorded today kind of impromptu. I wasn’t planning on it but I had something that I wanted to share so I recorded a 20-minute video. I just posted it on Facebook as well as my YouTube channel. Going through those e-mails every single day, consistently every single day now, it takes me anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes to write an e-mail everyday but I’m developing a habit and it’s been … I can see … It’s like today I wrote e-mail number 20 and I can see the results already like it’s already improving my ability to write and convey thoughts better. In other words like it’s a habit worth developing. I’ve put it off for years and finally I’m developing the habit with intention and it’s working well like for example I had a bunch of VSLs video sales letter stuff that I had to record today and I had some scripts to write for some re-marketing videos and stuff.

Typically a VSL script would take me or a re-market whatever, a video script would take me hours to write but I was able to bang out three of them in about an hour’s time today. I attribute that to a habit of writing that I’ve started to develop. I encourage you guys to do something similar even if it’s journaling whatever. I’m just using the e-mail list as my vehicle. I would encourage you to go check it out because I basically talk about some pretty cool stuff as far as goal setting and mindset and that kind of thing. Anyway, that’s it. I do want to tease one thing rather quickly because we’re going to talk about this at the beginning part of next week’s Hump Day Hangouts briefly maybe 10 minutes or so. I’m going to cover this a little bit more in depth but today I just want to tease you guys with it. Oh, also check this out. I got my Mastermind shirt on. Thank you, Adam for sending it.

Adam: That’s pretty cool. Nice.

Bradley: Yeah, I meant to drop this down a little bit. There you go, how is that?

Adam: Nice.

Bradley: One of the thing, I just wanted to tease very quickly is guys the prospecting funnel stuff that I’ve been working on developing for a few months, I had to put it on hold for a bit while I worked on some other stuff. The last two weeks I’ve really been working on it hard again and it improved the process quite a bit, and the results are fucking astounding like I don’t know how else to say it other than that. I’m just going to give you guys a very quick sneak peek of this and then we’re going to talk about a little bit more next week. I’m not going to go into details, guys. This is more conceptual because this is going to be shared. This is being shared in the Mastermind. We are starting a new Mastermind educational track in January 2018 where we’re going to be basically building two businesses throughout the year from soup to nuts, start to finish.

One is a physical business like a brick and mortar type business, it’s a gym and then the other one obviously the emphasis is on the digital marketing but it’s going to be more than just digital marketing, right? It’s going to be traditional marketing as well as like setting up businesses, setting up a business, entity structuring, all that kind of stuff because I think that’s important. As marketing consultants, we should know about this stuff anyway, right? Number two, the second business. I was going to do two local businesses but I made an executive decision last week to make our local agency that we’re building right now as the second project that we’re going to highlight and cover as part of the Mastermind training next year. All of these is going to be revealed in very fine detail starting in January.

In fact I’ve already started sharing a lot of this agency building stuff which is an automated scalable agency. The way that i should’ve built mine originally but you can’t know which you don’t know, right? I’ve already started sharing a lot of that in the Mastermind but I’m just teasing you guys with this to encourage you to come join the Mastermind especially if you’re doing local because the results are undisputable, indisputable as far as like how well this is working on the prospecting side of things. Still working on the sale side, the fulfillment side, all of that is coming but the prospecting side is working. Enough teasing, let me just show you very quickly, I’m going to grab the screen. Guys, I’m not going to put this up for long but I want to show you something.

This is an image of the prospecting funnel. I told you I’m not going to put it up for long. I’m about to switch screens, take a screenshot fast, fast, fast. All right, moving on, that’s the prospecting funnel and take a look at this for example. This is the … I’m using drip.com as our auto responder for all contractors that are being put into this funnel, this prospecting funnel. These are only people that have taken action and you can see that like … I know it’s probably small on you, let me zoom in just a little bit, guys. [inaudible 00:09:08] look at just yesterday at it at 12-5 so December 5, we scroll down. We had 10 new contacts out of just yesterday alone. Those are inbound needs, guys. You guys see that? If we take a look at … Let me pull over here for just a moment.

This is our pipe drive account. This is what we’re using for our sales pipe line, it’s called pipe drive, it’s awesome. You can see that when I share a little bit of information about this a few weeks ago. I had run 125 e-mails through the system, 25 e-mails a day for five days and we had 13 inbound leads from that which is a 10% response rate. Since that time I’ve increased the outbound e-mails to 75 per day, it’s been about six days. We’ve had about another 150 e-mails go out and look we’re up to 48 leads now. We had 12 so we’ve added 36 more leads out of 150 e-mails, guys, that’s almost a 20% response rate. It’s absolutely incredible what we’re getting through here.

Again I just wanted to point that out because I’m really hoping that many of you guys that are thinking about joining the Mastermind or if you’re doing any sort local, I would highly encourage to come join us starting in January, well now is a good time too by the way but because I’m going to be literally dissecting exactly how that’s built step by step throughout the year so that by the end of the year, you could build your own automated agency if you so choose, or you can wait until we can build it for you and you can pay us and we’ll build it for you. Now that’s coming too but that probably won’t be for at least another year. Anyways, with that said, I’m going to move on. If you guys have any questions about that specifically, come join the Mastermind, I’ll be happy to answer them, all right? You guys got any comments on that before I move on?

Adam: I do. I’m [inaudible 00:10:57]. I think this is awesome.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Such a cool process because it pulls in just a ton of stuff I won’t go into but just yeah, I love it. I’m excited for this.

Bradley: Yeah, me too, man.

Marco: For anyone who’s new and watching this, those are people who got e-mails and contacted us back.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: It’s no longer just a cold e-mail going out. Hopefully you’ll be able to find some of these people contacting us and saying, “We’re interested. Tell me more,” which is I mean that’s just awesome so now you have a pool of people to contact.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Anyone that’s new, that’s what’s going on. We go really in depth as you said in the Mastermind. The Mastermind is the place to be in 2018. If you’re not there, you should be.

What Are The Points You Need To Convey To The Client When It Comes To Service Costing?

Bradley: Totally agree, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thank you, Marco. All right, enough of that. Let’s get into some questions. We’ve got several. I’m excited. Let’s get into it. Mel, she’s up. She says, “I’m sending video e-mails and it’s getting some traction but when asked for price, I’m having some trouble. What kind of points do you try to convey when they ask how much does it cost.” I swear this question was asked last week. I swear this was … Anyways, how much does it cost? Now if that’s the first question out of a prospect’s mouth, they’re probably not going to be a good client. I’ve experienced that many, many times. Those are price-conscious people. I understand we all are price-conscious to a degree but the problem with people that come right out of the gate with how much does it cost is it’s because they have already made assumptions and all they’re looking at … They look at marketing as an expense, not an investment. It’s very hard to satisfy any client that thinks of marketing as an expense instead of an investment.

Marketing should create an ROI. If it creates a return on investment then it’s an investment, it’s an ROI. Investment is right in that title, you know what I mean? When they come right out of the gate with thinking of it as an expense and asking how much does it cost then even if you were to land them as a client, you’re probably going to have difficulty with them. They’re never going to be satisfied. There always going to be questioning, what’s going on because they’re penny pinching, right, and because they’re … Again I just want to explain it, that’s a red flag. For me over the years after doing this so many years, that’s a red flag for me. I would recommend that when it comes down to that, I try to avoid pricing stuff upfront until after I’ve had the chance to talk with them and analyze like a particular property. That said, sometimes you just have to talk them up front like what it is and you’re going to lose them. A lot of the times you’re going to lose them but don’t cut undercut your services just to try to land clients.

I get how important it is especially when you’re starting out or you’re trying to go to an agency because I’ve done it, guys like I have taken any client on that was willing to give me money regardless of my gut feeling. We’ve all talked about this all of my partners, all of us at [inaudible 00:14:08] had similar expenses. I’m looking forward to hearing some comments about this again in just a moment. My point is every time I’ve done it as well where many times over the years where I’ve said okay it’s money I’m going to take it, and I’ve had a bad gut feeling and then it ends up being a nightmare. It requires so much additional work, so much hand holding, so much convincing that what I’m doing is valuable that it’s just not worth it. You’re better off just prospecting more clients until you find those that don’t put up as much resistance or to understand that it’s an investment that should produce a return on investment, excuse me, should produce a return instead of an expense.

Again when it comes down to somebody says how much does it cost, typically that’s if you want to just answer him, get him out of your life like thank you very much, that’s what Bill Goodin in Hot Prospects says. He says it all in one word, no spaces between them, “Thankyouverymuch” click like hang up. You know what I mean? I don’t mean be a prick about it. I just mean like give him the price and let them say, “Oh no, that’s too much.” Let them hang up on you then, that’s fine. Don’t take it personally, move on. Prospect like what I just showed you over here, fill your pipeline full of prospects and you won’t have to worry about that. Does that make sense? Now I know you’re doing video e-mails and I know that’s a much slower process and that’s why I recommend that with the video e-mails, you keep them very short because you don’t want to spend … Here’s the thing, Mel, when I get a get a client referral and I do a video e-mail with an analysis of their properties and stuffs, sometimes those go 20, 25 minutes long.

I’m not kidding but that’s because it was a client referral so there’s a much better chance of me landing that client anyways. It’s a high quality lead because it was a client referral but when I’m doing cold prospecting and I’m sending video e-mails which I don’t really do so much anymore because it’s so time consuming. I like the shotgun approach better because you could scale it. With starting out that rifle approach of doing video e-mails is very effective but I would try to keep your initial video, your outreach video, down to five minutes or less so that you can bang out several of them within an hour and get them out because again it’s a numbers game.

You might get out of sending 10, you might get three. My consistent number is worth three or four responses out of every 10 e-mails that I sent. Out of every three or four responses, I would typically get one client, sometimes two, and so again that’s what I recommend that you try to keep it short. Otherwise you end up with 15 or 20-minute videos for every potential client, cold e-mail that you send and that’s just way too much work. What are your comments, guys?

Hernan: I totally agree with you, Bradley in terms of the quality of the clients that you’re getting. It’s funny because I wasn’t franker with one of the Mastermind’s call like five minutes before they hang up. One thing he said really resonated with me and he was saying, “It’s way easier to increase the quality of the clients that you get than to try to reeducate them into why your stuff that you’re doing is worth it.” In other words, instead of trying to reeducate themselves on why they will need to take your marketing serious, and why they’re doing an investment and why they should be doing and should be doing that, that puts you in a perspective of, “Well, I need now to educate them into why my stuff is valuable.” The perfect client, which is something that you need to come up with. There’s nothing that … You need to come up with what’s your perfect type of client, which sometimes like I would say 9 times out 10, we don’t do. We just go and try to find as many clients as possible and that puts you in the position of getting the worst type of clients on earth pretty much, right?

Number one, ask yourself what your perfect type of client is and number two, try to find those clients in a way that they already understand that marketing is an investment. Bradley would tell you yeah go after the ad works guys. Go after the guys that are already advertising because they already know. Go after the guys that are doing SEO that you can actually pinpoint that they’re doing SEO or they have their maps already set up. Maybe not perfect but they understand the value that ad works can bring to their business et cetera, et cetera so that’s why I think it’s way easier and way more rewarding. You will end up working with better clients, getting better quality and try to enhance your process of getting clients to get better quality clients than try to turn someone’s minds over, which is nearly impossible and it will wear you out. You know what I’m saying? That would be my comment.

Adam: All right, I’ll play devil’s advocate real quick and not disagreeing actually, just offering the counterpoint and I would say that also you got to do your homework on this one. I’ve seen people go in and try to just sell videos. Let’s say they are selling video rankings or something like that. They go in and they get to the money part and they don’t know what their potential client’s cost is or what their business model is and then it becomes really hard for people to talk because they don’t understand or they go in with the completely wrong offer. Make sure you do your homework and find out how much is a lead work to this person. You don’t have to know down to the dollar but do you know the market? Do you know how much it’s worth? Is the lead worth $5 or $50? Figuring that out and then you can at least talk until it leads you to the right people.

Bradley: Yeah, and to expand on what Adam said, if you understand the market. Your potential customer base, which will be like local businesses or whatever kind. In my case like contractors, tree service contractors, right? Let’s just use that as an example. I understand about how much a good tree service lead is worth to a contractor because I understand from being in that industry what a qualified lead could produce for a contractor as far as revenue. With that said, you can frame or stir the conversation into a let me show you how instead of how much does it cost, let me show you what it can produce. Does that make sense because then you’re taking the cost equation. You’re taking cost out of the equation, right? The focus isn’t on the cost. The focus is on the return and that when you reframe their question in that light or in that manner then they start to see the return on investment potential but as Hernan said I 100% agree with him. If you have to first convince somebody as to why your service is valuable or important then before you then have to sell it to him then you’re doing twice as much work because first you have to convince then you have to sell so avoid that.

If you feel like you’re catching resistance where you’re trying to convince them then let them go, thank you very much, click. Thank you very much, click. Get the hell out of my life. Next like SWSWSWSW, some will, some won’t, excuse me. Some will, some won’t, so what, someone’s waiting, and that’s really what it comes down to. Just fill your pipeline with quality leads. Know your market. Know the potential what a lead is worth so that you can stir the conversation towards a return on investment versus cost price. Does that make sense?

Marco: I’m reading this just a touch differently and I don’t disagree with either you or Hernan but I’m more inclined with Adam. If she’s having trouble understanding how to price her services, I mean that’s a bit different and that’s just understanding the market and what are leads worth. I mean if a guy … If a lead is worth $2,000 to that person and you can produce, you should be concentrating on what you’re going to do, right? You get paid for what you produce rather than getting paid for whatever for something nebulous that the client doesn’t understand. I’m going to affect your bottom line positively, that’s what I’m going to do for you. As long as you take that approach, you understand the market, you understand the client. You understand what a lead is worth then you won’t have trouble pricing yourself and your services, that’s how I’m seeing this question.

Bradley: Yeah, and last thing, that’s a great question by the way, Mel so I’m going to plus one at number one. I’m sorry we spent so much time on this, guys but that’s a fantastic question. What happened? It didn’t plus one. The last thing I would say about that, Mel is you can always have a foot in the door product or service that you can provide even for free, right? I don’t recommend … Guys, don’t work for free for often but you can have a foot in the door offer some sort of product or service that you provide for free to prove yourself to a potential client, to a prospect, that works really well like I do that. I’ll talk to a potential client and I’ll say, “Look, let’s talk about pricing.” If that comes up then I’ll say, “Let me just prove to you that I’m capable of producing some results and then we’ll talk about that. This is what I’m going to do.”

A lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll do some video marketing campaign so I can get them some quick wins that they can see by going to search results and seeing videos ranked for various keywords, various locations whatever. I’ll just do a quick … It might take me 30 minutes to set up a video campaign and blast it out using some spam tools or whatever. Get them ranked for a few keywords and then I just show them the results and say, “Look, this is what I was able to do in a few days and then imagine what I could do if you hired for this or that.” Does that make sense? You can give them something for free just to whet their appetite so to speak and then you can upsell them into or sell them into an actual service at that point you’ve already … You’ve given them results in advance.

Again video marketing is fantastic for that because it’s something that you can get done very, very quickly. You can get results quickly. It’s almost tangible, right? They can see the results and because of that, you can oftentimes upsell, that’s why I use video primarily as my opening product or service, okay. Again, great, great question, Mel.

How Would You Optimize A Maps Listing For A Potential Client Located In The Midst Of Small Counties?

All right, Shibga’s up. He says … Or Shibga, I’m sorry if I butchered that. “My potential client is located in the midst of a bunch of small counties. Since I’m only doing maps, he won’t be showing up in counties even just 10 miles from him. The competitor’s currently up there are getting traffic from difficult keywords organically and that is not something I want to do. What would you suggest? Thank you.” Well-

Marco: If I may?

Bradley: Go ahead.

Marco: He’s in RYS Academy reloaded and that’s Monday’s webinar, dude.

Bradley: Perfect. There you go. As far as everybody else, it’s not an RYS. My suggestion in that case would be, well I’m going to give you number one, ad words, right? You can do that rather quickly and you can just set up GO targeting so it’s very easy to get them to start generating traffic for all the different areas that way plus if you’ve got a Google My Business, you use the location extension for your ad words ad then you can actually have your maps, your Google Maps, your Google My Business Maps listing show up in Maps in the actual Maps. Now I’m starting to see the Maps listed, the first listing in the three-pack is now an ad for a lot of queries like that’s been rolling out slowly but I’m starting to see that appear more and more in various industries now where there’s an actual four-pack instead of a three-pack because the first listing is an ad, and that’s something that you can absolutely do. All you need is a location extension, which means you need a Google My Business listings verified, and then you can use the location extension and ad words, so that’s number one.

Number two would be to rank organically. I don’t see a lot of value in that for local lead [inaudible 00:26:22] type of stuff. I’ve got mixed results on that but that’s all you could do short of setting up PO boxes in all the various areas, which can be a pain in the ass, and then you’ve got a ton of Google My Business listings to optimize, a bunch of citations, all that kind of stuff to do. It’s really up to you. I would do what Marco was talking about with RYS stuff, he’s doing multi-location training on Monday but I would also consider ad words and go after some organic stuff unless you’re willing and capable of setting up a bunch of Google My Business profiles listings for various locations using PO boxes or something, okay.

What Are Your Thoughts On AMP?

Eliza says, “Hey guys, have you heard of AMP? If so, what are your thoughts on it?” Marco, I’ll let you talk on that since you developed the plug-in.

Marco: We have an AMP plug-in. All you have to do is go to the Facebook group, AMP Creators Mastermind in Facebook and join then download the plug-in. It’s working for news more than anything else, that’s where AMP really helps. It speeds up the page. A very light version of the page is served up through AMP. I think as Google goes more into mobile, it will have greater weight. It will become more important. Right now it hasn’t had the impact that it should’ve had but that’s because if you’re not producing news, the Accelerated Mobile Page experience isn’t really necessary. Your website is fast enough as it is or should be fast enough as it is, right? I mean that’s just my take on it. We do have the plug-in so you can experiment with it and see whether it works for you, whether it has any effect in your niche. We haven’t seen any effects as a matter of fact with AMP on anything local unless you produce news, something that’s newsworthy like Google’s going to pick up.

Bradley: Yeah. I don’t have much of a comment because I haven’t really played with it much.

What Do You Think Are Some Issues With Writing Blog Posts And Repurpose Them To Videos, Embeds, And Syndication?

All right, quit this house says, “Good day. I want to write blog posts. Create a video of each blog with content samurai then syndicate the video. Take that link of video embedded in the blog then syndicate the blog. Any issues? PS, get better soon, Marco.” No, that’s fine. In fact I’ve talked about this in Mastermind in Master class when we used to have a Master class as well. One of the strategies that I’ve used with some of my contractors, the ones that are willing to do it, which is a great strategy is their technicians basically give instructions to their technicians. Let’s say plumber, that’s one of the industries that I’ve done this for, it’s a plumbing company.

They had I think six employees or technicians. Six plumbers that were out there working with vans and all that kind of stuff. They just go out on job site and take their phone, iPhone, Android whatever and record a very short video from the jobs that they go out on. Just say, “Hey, this is Joe from Joe’s Plumbing in Fairfax, Virginia. We’re out on location in Fairfax, Virginia, we got a call for a water heater that needed replaced and this what I found.” He takes his phone and shows where the water heater was. The heating element went bad, we basically replaced the water heater and now this customer has hot water again, and they’re happy. If you have any water heater problems in Fairfax, Virginia, contact us at an in-call to action. Very, very simple like a 60-second video, 60 to 90 seconds, sometimes even less and then they send me the video file and then I upload it to YouTube.

I send it to a transcription service, have it transcribed then I go post the video with the transcription on the blog, which then syndicates out across the syndication network, and it gives me the ability to optimize the YouTube video and rank that for keywords like water heater repair, Fairfax, Virginia for example and as well as the blog post, which adds additional content to the site that’s a 100% relevant, it’s a 100% unique user or 100% created, unique created content. Does that make sense? It’s a very, very good strategy because it’s something that you don’t even have to do like to me, it’s very simple to just … They send me the video, I upload it to YouTube, optimize the videos, send that to rev.com to get it transcribed, get the transcription back within usually a couple of hours, and then I can post that as the actual post content, which has its keyword rich.

It’s got the call to action and ends up going into silos so I interlink that up to the silo heading, and then that goes out across the syndication network which in turn helps to boost the overall site; very, very powerful strategy. I don’t see anything wrong with that at all. I would encourage you to do it. Test with it to see. I haven’t done it specifically talking about what you’re talking about here but I can’t imagine why that would be any different. It’s a good strategy, check it out.

How Would You Sell Map Embeds To Somebody?

Muhammad, what’s up, Muhammad? He’s here every week asking questions and being very engaged, it’s awesome. We’re glad to have you, buddy. He says, “Hey guys, how would you sell Map Embeds to somebody?” You don’t, Muhammad. You wouldn’t sell Map Embeds unless it’s an SEO or somebody that understands it. My first reaction would be don’t. Don’t even try to explain. I mean some people are inquisitive and you can try to explain it in a way but a lot of the times like when you start talking about that kind of stuff with prospects, their eyes glass over because they really don’t understand it anyways. I try to avoid that like technical kind of stuff with most clients if possible, but anyways “I never really thought of a Map ranking as something to include in SEO [inaudible 00:32:12]. Is it something you guys would include?”

Yeah, when I’m selling SEO services, I typically for the most part am selling Maps ranking, local SEO Maps ranking for the most part but I don’t particularly tell them all the different things that I’m doing to get them ranked. Not stuff like Map Embeds because they wouldn’t understand like for the most part. I might tell them I’m going to produce content. I’m going to optimize your listing, your photos. We’re going to create corresponding content on your website. We’re going to do some link building stuff and syndicate content out across your social media properties to get you some exposure and traffic, all that kind stuff but I don’t talk about Map Embeds and that kind of stuff. What do you guys think about that?

Marco: I totally agree. Don’t ever sell rankings, dude, Muhammad. You cannot control rankings. If you can’t control rankings then you cannot sell what you can’t be sure that you’re going to do. I mean you can be really good at it but then run into a stubborn niche or stubborn sub niche where you just can’t rank them out, and you just sold the client on ranking them out so now what are you going to do? Sell results, guys, everyone, everyone in this. When you’re out there and you’re selling your services, you’re going to produce results. What those results are, that’s up to you. It’s not up to the client to decide what the results are. The results will be reflected in the bottom line through visitors to the website, leads and close leads and all of that. How you go about it, that’s what they’re hiring for you the expert. Approach it that way, don’t ever, ever sell rankings ever.

Bradley: I would only comment that I actually do often sell rankings. What I do is I preface. I say, “Look, I don’t work for Google,” so Google can change its algorithm at any time. They’re constantly adjusting your algorithm so things change but the trend is, the idea or the goal is to get you ranked in the Maps like that’s what I say when I’m talking to a prospect. I say, “This is what I know works and I’m going to do this.” I don’t sell them rankings but I tell them that they can expect to see some movement and we’re likely going to get the goal, the end goal what my intention is to get them ranked in Maps, but what I’m selling are the services that have shown to prove that is the end result. Does that make sense?

It’s like I don’t say or guarantee rankings, I don’t because I’m not … If I’m going to guarantee rankings, I’m going to own the asset. It’s going to be lead gen thing because I’m not guaranteeing it to anybody but me but I don’t guarantee rankings to clients. Unless for example I got a video production company that I do a lot of wholesale SEO for, I basically don’t guarantee rankings but I tell them if we’re not ranked on page one then you just don’t pay for it. Does that make sense? So that’s what I do, I don’t guarantee rankings but I tell them they don’t pay unless they’re ranked. Keep moving, we got two more questions from him. We’re going to try to roll through these. I know we’re running short on time today already.

How Would You Sell Syndication Networks To Bloggers And YouTubers?

“For sales practices and extra money, I���m trying to sell syndication networks to bloggers and YouTubers. How would I best approach this? I’ve bought BB’s recommended book on cold e-mail and use his practices but I must be doing something wrong because I haven’t seen much interest.” All right, so a couple of things, Muhammad, my thoughts on trying to contact and sell to bloggers and YouTubers is that they’re in the marketing space so to speak, they’re in the digital space maybe not marketing but they’re in the whole digital space, and they’re probably numb. I’m trying to think about the right word here. They’re probably used to just ignoring pitch type stuff especially probably a lot of YouTubers because I know like our YouTube channels like we’ve got our [inaudible 00:36:18] Master generals as well as my own channel, we got a lot of subscribers and I get pitched shit all day long all the time. We get spam e-mails from people trying to sell us on YouTube services like stuff all the time. They’re probably just ignoring a lot of that. They’re numb to it so to speak.

Bloggers are very similar because bloggers get pitched all the time on guest post and link swaps and link exchanges, all that kind of stuff as well. It could just be that, I don’t know because I haven’t really pitched to those kind of people but the other thing would be maybe … I’m not sure about cold e-mailing those. I would have to think about it and obviously, Muhammad, I would recommend that you just test different … You’re going to have to split test your different cold e-mail approaches. What I’m doing for contractors is working incredibly well but I don’t know that that method would work for YouTubers and bloggers. I would just try different types of cold outreach e-mails until you found one that seems to work well and then repeat that, scale that, right? It’s going to requite some split testing on your part. It’s a lot of work I know. It’s a lot of trial and error but once you find something that works like what I found with the contractor prospecting that I’m doing then you can scale it and you can just see massive results, okay?

As far as when I started selling networks like when I first built, started outsourcing that and I trained some virtual assistants, and I started selling networks, I sold them retail to local businesses and then I sold them wholesale to SEO agencies. What I did was I just went to the various marketplaces like SEO Mojo was one of them, SEO Clerks was another one of them, and I just put up listings for networks to sell syndication networks, and that’s how I ended up landing a lot of SEO agency clients was through those service sites by selling networks. I would sell it for like … I believe I was selling networks at the time for $297 or $299 around $300 for a single network but for agencies, I had an agency from Australia contact me and he wanted 10 per month, 10 syndication networks per month.

At the time I actually I wouldn’t do it, well, I actually probably would do it now still but I ended up selling those networks at $100 a piece to him so he’d pay me $1,000 a month. I’d sell them. I have my team would build him 10 networks and my networks cost me about $50 to build so I would literally pocket about $500 to not really do a damn thing, which was awesome. You may want to consider doing that too like putting your service up on some of these sites, all right?

How Would You Explain The Benefits Of PR In Layman’s Terms To A Client?

Last is, “How would you explain the benefits of PR in layman’s term to a client?” Exposure, brand building and traffic, that’s it. You don’t sell the SEO part of it. You can mention that it should have an SEO benefit, should help them it will likely or often will help them to rank better but would you want to sell is the exposure, the brand building and the traffic that it will produce, those are the things.

You want to talk about the benefits not the features. Essentially you want to tell them how, what are the end results that a press release can provide that’s traffic, authority and brand building and exposure, massive exposure. Anybody else would comment on that? All right, we’re going to keep moving.

Marco: Yeah, I know. I was about to say that, yeah. I agree with you, Bradley in terms of … Business owners they all care about how many new clients, how many new leads they can get. Usually they don’t care about rankings or positions or whatever like keywords and all of that jazz. If you talk about in business terms like again this is an investment, I like the different … The comparison between assets and liabilities but the way [inaudible 00:40:30] gets it. For example, you would have money that you throw away every week pretty much. You buy stuff, you go to Starbucks, you go out to dinner whatever, you buy clothes, that’s money that goes out and never comes back, right? Assets and the way millionaires think is that they invest their money into stuff like real estate or stocks or whatever, now would put more money into their pockets so that’s how they’re thinking. Well, you can do the same because you can say this is a service that would put more money to your pocket because that will increase the visibility of your website, the traffic and ultimately if the website converts, the leads, right?

If you think about it, you’re investing the money. We always backtrack to the investment versus the spending side of things so that’s how I usually frame it and it works.

How Do You Get Viewers To A Niche YouTube Channel That Contains Other People’s Popular Videos?

Bradley: Yeah, awesome, thanks. All right, the next one is Eddie Grim. Eddie, I read this question ahead of time and I’m not sure how you’re going to get viewers to your videos. I understand you’re saying that you’re starting a niche top-based YouTube channel. [inaudible 00:41:38] a lot of other people’s popular videos to my channel. The question that I would have for you, Eddie is if you’re just adding other people’s popular videos to playlists because that’s really the only way you can do it. You can’t really add their videos to your channel unless you download their videos and then upload to your channel, which is against terms of service, right? I’m not saying you can’t do that, hint, hint but I am telling you that it’s against terms of service and you may get a copyright claim or something like that from one of those people if you are to download and re-upload on to your channel so keep that in mind. However, you can put other people’s videos into your own playlist and there’s some benefit for doing that.

The only problem with the next part of your question is you say, “the goal is to gain viewers that I can re-target with ads.” Unless, the video is on your channel like it’s your video uploaded to your channel then even if you have other people’s popular videos and playlist and somebody were to click through from your playlist to that other person’s video, you won’t be able to re-target them because you won’t get a re-marketing cookie from somebody clicking on to their video. Does that make sense? As far as I know you can’t and again I may be mistaken here but I don’t think you can set up a re-marketing list for videos within a playlist like I think it’s only for individual videos or a channel, which in that case you can re-target them if they land on your channel, right? I’d have to go in and look at ad words to see.

I’m not going to do that right now obviously we’re running short on time anyways but I’m going to be doing a lot of ad word stuff starting in January with the new Mastermind training curriculum. The first month or the first module is all about PPC (Pay Per Click) and YouTube is going to be included in that so it’s something that I will probably have soon, I’ll know for sure. I know that you can re-target people that interact with any videos on your channel. I don’t know if that also includes other people’s videos that you’ve embedded or added to playlist from your channel or not, I don’t know. Can anybody else confirm that?

Marco: Yeah, I know. I think that is the exact same thing that you’re saying, Bradley like you need to own the asset in order for Google to count the cookie towards your re-marketing list. What I would say, Eddie is see why these videos are so popular, try to emulate them, try to do the same title, keywords, et cetera, et cetera and then try to rank them on YouTube because that will put you like for example on semantic mastery channel and on my own channel, I’m pretty sure that will probably is channel two. 20% of the videos bring 80% of the views. Is that big? Is that cute? You will have, I don’t know, I probably have a couple of 100 videos semantic mastery has at this point thousands of videos but only a small fraction of those videos will for some reason will get … Not for some reason but because they are really targeting really high volume keywords on YouTube, right? They’re targeting really high volume keywords and they’re getting shared. They’re getting a lot of comments so YouTube will increase their view cap, and that will trickle down into the rest of the channel.

Here’s the thing, you want to try to emulate these popular videos, record your own version, curate them whatever, and try to run them on YouTube so that you can now own the asset. Once you have that, again, you need to create a bunch of videos so that 20% of those videos will get 80% of the traffic and once you have that then you can start re-targeting those people with that. You can also do pay-per-view. You can try to use the ad words to a video, and that’s something that you can do as long as you own the video. You can do with [inaudible 00:45:29] but there’s absolutely zero sense on spending money to do that but the point here is that you own the video but that’s a number scale. The pay-per-view needs to be lower than the re-targeting cost and that’s usually not the case, right? You’re paying more per view than that the ROI that you’re getting when you’re re-targeting these people so have that mind.

The best way to go, in my opinion, will be to get a lot of organic traffic from YouTube. Rank your videos on YouTube so that you can get a lot of organic traffic and then go to channel re-targeting.

Bradley: By the way, there are ways to siphon some authority off of those videos that are really popular that get a shit ton of views. Eddie, that way that you do that is scrape the tags from the videos that are ranking really well or that are getting a lot of views, the really popular videos. Scrape the tags. There are tools that can do that. You can also right click and view page source. Get the first two or three tags but there are tools that will scrape tags for you. Scrape the tags. Use those same tags in your video as well as the channel name of the channel that has the popular video and put that video into a playlist from your channel alongside of your other videos. In other words, when you go to optimize your own video targeting the same type of keywords as the popular videos that you want to siphon some authority from, you want to scrape the tags from that popular video, place it into your video.

You also want to scrape the channel or add the channel name as a tag in your video. You also want to create a playlist with that popular video next to your video. What happens is a lot of the times, it’s not 100% of the time and I don’t know what the threshold like what the circumstances are to make it work sometimes and not others but what I’ve seen a lot of that, when you do that is your video will end up popping on the end screen of a video when they show related videos like checkerboard of related videos. Your video will pop into there as well as in the right-hand sidebar on the watch page of the related … The right-hand sidebar where they show related videos. You’ll end up popping into there and you end up getting a lot of referral traffic just because you’re in the related video section if that makes sense, and that’s a great way to siphon authority off of other people’s videos, okay? Good question though, Eddie.

Do You Know A Tool Like Cinch Tweet From Mastery PR Intended For Linkedin?

Jonathan says, “I purchased Cinch Tweet for mastery PR and this tool works like crazy.” Awesome, that’s great to hear. “Do you have similar tool for LinkedIn?” I don’t know, Jonathan. I don’t even know Cinch Tweet is. I just know that I know we did a promo for it for mastery PR but I’m not a tweet guy or Twitter guy so I haven’t played with that at all. I don’t know of one for LinkedIn, sorry.

Adam: Yeah, Jonathan. What you could do is probably hop into the group if you’re not already a part of the semantic mastery, our free Facebook group and ask in there because I think Chris has been at least playing around with it so that would be the place to ask.

How Would You Reinstate The Previous Top Ranking Of A Client Site That Targets 3 Main Keywords?

Bradley: Yeah. All right, Ralph’s new. He says, “Hey guys, I’m a rookie when it comes to SEO for site. I have a client in Minneapolis area. He used to rank on page one for his key phrase, something changed a couple of years ago and now he’s back on page three, if even that. I just took over his site trying to get him back on page one. His company specializes in three areas. Okay, the way the site seems to be set up, they’re trying to shoot for all three targets on the front page at once.” Yeah, that’s pretty common actually. “Should I redo the title of description in H1 tags to shoot for keyword one and put keyword two and three on other pages? I tried using video to get them on page one, that doesn’t seem to work.”

Okay, yeah, Ralph, I would absolutely recommend that … I don’t typically try to rank the homepage guys. I mean it happens and there’s ways that you can force the homepage to rank but I usually optimize for again for contractors if they have separate services. I always like to try to optimize a specific service page for basically one primary service, right? I have separate pages for each one of those. In your case, it would be a separate page for keyword one, one for keyword two and one for keyword three because what happens is each one of those pages can be highly optimized for that particular keyword, that service in that location. It’s likely that you can end up ranking that as long as there’s not other domain health issues, Ralph. Assuming that everything else is fine, I would recommend that you would target specifically each keyword or service with its own page and then optimize it for that but then what you do is obviously you just internally link from each one of those pages up to the homepage.

In Maps you’re usually going to rank their homepage in Maps, not always the case but usually but then for organic, you would end up ranking the individual pages based upon the keywords search query, right?

Marco: I have a question. Sorry to stop you while you’re going through this but do we still have a backdoor to SEO bootcamp?

Bradley: I think we do.

Marco: Because I mean I was just going through that over the weekend.

Bradley: It’s amazing.

Marco: And I couldn’t stop. I went and I was lying down in bed and just listening and I went through. I forget how many videos I went through just listening. The guy is amazing on his keyword research and how to set this up. Ralph, everything that you’re looking for and how to set this up, how to target the keyword whether it’s a category, whether it is the top of the silo, whether it’s supporting LSI and whatever, this is covered in there. I have yet to see anyone who covers on page SEO as thoroughly as what’s covered in SEO bootcamp.

Bradley: Yeah, dude. He’s bad ass, man. I don’t know if it’s … I think the $500 price is now doubled unfortunately. I think it’s $1,000 now but it’s worth it even at $1,000. I’m not kidding, Ralph. It’s fantastic. It really is that good. If somebody didn’t already drop the link, it’s http://ift.tt/2BIn92b, I believe, that will take you over to it if you want to check it out. I’m not sure if that’s the link or not. If not, if somebody-

Adam: Yeah, I’m looking for it right now just to confirm.

Bradley: Yeah, that’s what I would suggest, Ralph is obviously optimize a separate page for each one of those and then you can link from those pages up to your homepage, that would be the better route to go than trying to be … If you’re trying to cover too many topics on one page and they’re not closely related enough then you dilute the optimization of any one of the keywords if that makes sense, okay? All right, we’re almost out of time, guys. Unfortunately we didn’t get … Well, I guess we got the most of them.

Will A Syndicated Content About Recipe Triggers Duplicate Content Issue?

All right so next question, “Hi. We are selling a new sweetener on our blog e-com site. Bloggers started to create recipes with it on their blogs, which is awesome. Now I started to create blog posts with those recipes by cloning them on our blog inside my recipe silo and these posts are then syndicated to a syndication network too. I’m doing this for obvious reasons, easy content and creation for me and additional publicity for them. Question, will this trigger and kind of duplicate content issues for me or not?”

No, it won’t because … Well, first of all just make sure that you are attributing. As long as you are citing the source … Okay, it won’t create any content issues for you anyways regardless, okay, period but to do it legally and properly the way that you should do it ethically as well is you make sure that you are getting attribution to the source where you got those recipes. Always cite the source. Give credit where credit is due, that’s not going to cost you any issues if you don’t as far as SEO issues, but it can cause … You can get DMCA complaints, which are basically copyright infringement complaints. If one of those bloggers decided that you were infringing upon their intellectual property, and they decided do a DMCA complaint then Google can de-index that page or post and that’s a bad sign for you and it’s a bad sign for the domain. I would recommend that you just you are always linking back to the source.

You can no-follow the links, that’s what I do. No-follow them but make sure that you link back to the source and give them the credit where it’s due, okay?

Should You Link Back To The Original Post Or Just Cite Them On The Syndicated Blog Post?

Question two, “Is it enough to cite their blog in the bottom of my current recipe without …” No, I would always link back to it, always. If you’re worried about passing dues, no-follow the link, okay? “As I link back to it, cite their blog at the bottom of my current or should I also link back to their original post?” Yeah, always link back to the original source of the content that you’re curating, that’s essentially what you’re doing. You’re curating content which is perfectly legit, that’s how most of the content is produced for all of my blogs, and client blogs and lead gen sites and all that is through curation. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just make sure that you cite the source.

By the way when you’re curating content, guys, sometimes you’re still going to get people that are pissed off about it, which is dumb in my opinion but sometimes because you are providing them a link, potential exposure, potential traffic but you are giving credit where it’s due. I still have gotten some cease and desist, take-down notices type stuff from curating, it happens from time to time. It’s just part of the game. Just don’t freak out when it happens. “I’m asking this because they all link to different pages on my site in their recipes. This would be some sort of reciprocal linking, I guess, which I heard is not good.” No, it’s fine. In that case, in this particular circumstance, that’s absolutely fine because it’s not like you’re trying to gain for SEO. You guys are just cross-promoting because it makes sense, it’s relevant. It’s not an SEO thing, right? I mean it provides SEO value but the intent is not strictly for SEOs. Does that make sense?

Reciprocal linking was something that was a no-no years ago. I don’t know if it’s still considered a no-no in Google’s eyes because there is a lot of crosslinking between and co-citation and things like that now. I’m talking about old directories, guys. A lot of web directories, they would only publish your link if you put a widget in the footer that linked to their directory. Those are reciprocal links that are frowned upon but two bloggers cross-promoting each other’s post, that’s not really … I don’t work for Google so I don’t know but I can tell you it’s logical for that to not be a reciprocal link penalty type thing. Any comments on that, guys?

Marco: Yeah, I haven’t been doing a lot of reciprocity like reciprocal links lately so I wouldn’t … I don’t have data like recent data.

Which Should You Get First, RYS Stack Or Syndication Network Or Both?

Bradley: All right, we’re almost out of time. Fortunately we got through almost all of the questions. Harold asks, “Hey guys, what’s up? Quick question, should I get an RYS stack, a syndication network or both?” Well, my go-to answer is going to be both. Of course, Harold. No, I mean that for real. I always start with syndication networks is always standard operating procedure but as soon as that gets built, I order the RYS drive stack as well, but it is really standard operating procedure, so I would say yes to both. Any comments, guys?

Marco: No, absolutely. Set up your syndication network, prime it just like we teach in the syndication academy. Once that’s done, get the RYS stack going and link to everything in T1. I mean it’s really that simple, and you can power everything up through link building through your drive stack, which will protect your T1, and your money site.

Which Company Provides The Best Citation Services?

Bradley: All right, Dan says, “Hey, gents. What are your suggestion for best source to have citations done?” Serpspace of course, Dan, duh. Dan, I’m giving you a hard time but yeah Serpspace. You can go in there and like … If you’re looking for the Cadillac, the Ferrari of citations, you’re going to spend more money but they are fabulous. They are done very, very well. I would say Loganix, they’ve got some really good packages. http://ift.tt/2bbLT53 but for new sites typically, I would just go with what we have in Serpspace and just order the big citation directory sites, which is like the national type sites and then I try to go with the hyper local type citations, which are a lot more like niche specific or local specific type directories. Those are always like standard operating procedure.

I usually start right off the bat with new sites with about anywhere between 40 to 60 citations, which is about 20 or so of the big national directories like the big heavy hitters, Yelp and Angie’s List, Yellowpages that kind of stuff, and then we try to find … We scrape citation or directory sites that are either niche specific or more localized and then build the additional citations there. Also don’t forget, Dan, to order citations or aggregate listing submissions like New Stark Louise. What are the other ones? Info USA, several of those. The other one is Factual is one. The other one is Axiom. Those are all really good because you get listed in those and about three to six months later, you’ll have citations and a ton of different directories because other directories scrape or pull data from those, and create listings for you. It’s more of a long-term thing but you want to do that right upfront because in about six months you’ll start seeing a whole bunch of new citations start popping up and you didn’t have to build them or create them.

All right, last question, I know we’re right at the five o'clock mark, “Is Cinch Twitter good for tier one? Can it be used on the Twitter attached to RSY stack?” Honestly, I have no response for that because I don’t even know what Cinch Tweet does. Anybody else have an answer to that?

Adam: No, I don’t. Good one to hop in the group probably and ask there.

Bradley: All right. We’re done, guys. Oh, wow. Everybody else bailed out. Thanks, everybody for being here. We’ll see everybody else next week, I guess because we don’t have any other webinars this week, do we?

Adam: I don’t think so.

Bradley: Sweet. All right, everybody, thanks for being here.

Adam: See you.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Bradley: See you.

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

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

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 Announcement

Adam: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is episode 161. Today is the sixth of December. First one in December, we’re rolling towards the end of the year but not quite there. Speaking of closer to the end of the year, we’re going to have a pretty awesome Hump Day Hangout coming up later in December but stay tuned for that, we’ll tell you more about that coming. Real quick, we want to go down and say hi to everybody and see how everyone is doing. Chris, how are you doing today?

Chris: Looking good. It’s glad to be here.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan, how about yourself?

Hernan: Good. It’s actually quite warm right now in Buenos Aires. Yeah, I’m excited for what’s coming. We have a lot of stuff coming. Oh, what? Are you cold?

Adam: No, I don’t know. I’m perfectly warm.

Hernan: Okay, right, okay.

Adam: Hey, Marco. How’s it going?

Marco: Well, the doctor took a look at my MRI today and said, “Holy shit.” Those are not words that you want to hear when the fucking doctor takes a look at your MRI of your fucking back, dude so that’s what I’m doing.

Adam: All right, fair enough. Bradley, how about you, man?

Bradley: I went to a doctor once with an ear infection and it hurt like a son of a bitch. The doctor put the thing in the ear to look at it and he goes, “Whoa.” I was like, “Doc, you’re not supposed to do that.” “I’ve never seen an eardrum look like that.”

Adam: Well, make it not look like that.

Bradley: No wonder it hurts, right? Anyway, this is great, guys. Today has been a really good day, really productive day. I got a shit ton of stuff done. I’m just excited to be here and answer some questions, and hang out.

Adam: Cool. Well, before we get into it, I got a couple of quick announcements. I’m going to post some stuff on the page. If you’ve never have come to Hump Day Hangouts, first of all, thank you very much for being here. It’s awesome and we love having more people join us. We got some good stuff for you, some resources I’m going to post on the page for you. If you were around over the Thanksgiving time period and for Black Friday then you saw the e-mails and you saw the page we got, you know that Syndication Academy is increasing a price. It’s going to be like a 50% jump. It’s something we’ve been putting off for a long time and this is last announcement that it’s happening, and the price is going up to $97 a month here shortly in seven days. We want to give everyone fair notice a nice reminder here before that happens, and you can get that for free if you join the Mastermind, all right? We want to remind people about that, that’s one of the many, many perks of being a Mastermind member.

Something else we wanted to talk about, obviously there’s been ongoing updates with RYSP loaded. There’s been a ton of new contents, stuff going on there. I’ll let Marco talk about this.

Marco: Yeah, we have in fact a new webinar coming up on Monday. We’re calling it Multi-Location Domination with Automation.

Bradley: Wow.

Marco: Yes, sir. We’re going there. We got in fact two scripts that we’re rolling out to make things easier just to allow people to make it as simple as possible to go and take over not only their local niche, right? The local area but surrounding areas and just take shit down city by city, that’s how we do it, that’s what we’re teaching. We’re also going to show how it’s done globally by the way because we’re in the lab taking a look at that, and as a matter of fact, when we roll out the Multi-Location Domination webinar, we’re going to raise the price on RYS reload. The price is going up. I don’t know how much. You know I always push as much as possible as much as you guys will allow but price is going up. I suggest if you’re on the fence, it’s time to get in. Get in where you fit in or get left behind. We’re going to teach people how to take over, it’s really that simple.

Adam: Nice. Yeah, it’ll be going up. We’ll have some more information coming out about that you guys if you’re watching. If you’re curious, I’ll also post the links obviously. If you’ve been thinking, “Oh, I’ve heard about RYS and it’s neat and maybe I should do that.” One, you should, it’s awesome. If not that then you should be checking out the [inaudible 00:04:05] services if you’re more of the outsourcing type, but if you’ve been thinking about getting in, now would be obviously a great time. Before we start answering questions, I think Bradley, you had something you wanted to share with people, right?

Bradley: A couple of things, number one, go to bradleybanner.com. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and also my daily Mindset updates. I just posted another video just a few minutes ago like literally 15 minutes ago that I recorded today kind of impromptu. I wasn’t planning on it but I had something that I wanted to share so I recorded a 20-minute video. I just posted it on Facebook as well as my YouTube channel. Going through those e-mails every single day, consistently every single day now, it takes me anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes to write an e-mail everyday but I’m developing a habit and it’s been … I can see … It’s like today I wrote e-mail number 20 and I can see the results already like it’s already improving my ability to write and convey thoughts better. In other words like it’s a habit worth developing. I’ve put it off for years and finally I’m developing the habit with intention and it’s working well like for example I had a bunch of VSLs video sales letter stuff that I had to record today and I had some scripts to write for some re-marketing videos and stuff.

Typically a VSL script would take me or a re-market whatever, a video script would take me hours to write but I was able to bang out three of them in about an hour’s time today. I attribute that to a habit of writing that I’ve started to develop. I encourage you guys to do something similar even if it’s journaling whatever. I’m just using the e-mail list as my vehicle. I would encourage you to go check it out because I basically talk about some pretty cool stuff as far as goal setting and mindset and that kind of thing. Anyway, that’s it. I do want to tease one thing rather quickly because we’re going to talk about this at the beginning part of next week’s Hump Day Hangouts briefly maybe 10 minutes or so. I’m going to cover this a little bit more in depth but today I just want to tease you guys with it. Oh, also check this out. I got my Mastermind shirt on. Thank you, Adam for sending it.

Adam: That’s pretty cool. Nice.

Bradley: Yeah, I meant to drop this down a little bit. There you go, how is that?

Adam: Nice.

Bradley: One of the thing, I just wanted to tease very quickly is guys the prospecting funnel stuff that I’ve been working on developing for a few months, I had to put it on hold for a bit while I worked on some other stuff. The last two weeks I’ve really been working on it hard again and it improved the process quite a bit, and the results are fucking astounding like I don’t know how else to say it other than that. I’m just going to give you guys a very quick sneak peek of this and then we’re going to talk about a little bit more next week. I’m not going to go into details, guys. This is more conceptual because this is going to be shared. This is being shared in the Mastermind. We are starting a new Mastermind educational track in January 2018 where we’re going to be basically building two businesses throughout the year from soup to nuts, start to finish.

One is a physical business like a brick and mortar type business, it’s a gym and then the other one obviously the emphasis is on the digital marketing but it’s going to be more than just digital marketing, right? It’s going to be traditional marketing as well as like setting up businesses, setting up a business, entity structuring, all that kind of stuff because I think that’s important. As marketing consultants, we should know about this stuff anyway, right? Number two, the second business. I was going to do two local businesses but I made an executive decision last week to make our local agency that we’re building right now as the second project that we’re going to highlight and cover as part of the Mastermind training next year. All of these is going to be revealed in very fine detail starting in January.

In fact I’ve already started sharing a lot of this agency building stuff which is an automated scalable agency. The way that i should’ve built mine originally but you can’t know which you don’t know, right? I’ve already started sharing a lot of that in the Mastermind but I’m just teasing you guys with this to encourage you to come join the Mastermind especially if you’re doing local because the results are undisputable, indisputable as far as like how well this is working on the prospecting side of things. Still working on the sale side, the fulfillment side, all of that is coming but the prospecting side is working. Enough teasing, let me just show you very quickly, I’m going to grab the screen. Guys, I’m not going to put this up for long but I want to show you something.

This is an image of the prospecting funnel. I told you I’m not going to put it up for long. I’m about to switch screens, take a screenshot fast, fast, fast. All right, moving on, that’s the prospecting funnel and take a look at this for example. This is the … I’m using drip.com as our auto responder for all contractors that are being put into this funnel, this prospecting funnel. These are only people that have taken action and you can see that like … I know it’s probably small on you, let me zoom in just a little bit, guys. [inaudible 00:09:08] look at just yesterday at it at 12-5 so December 5, we scroll down. We had 10 new contacts out of just yesterday alone. Those are inbound needs, guys. You guys see that? If we take a look at … Let me pull over here for just a moment.

This is our pipe drive account. This is what we’re using for our sales pipe line, it’s called pipe drive, it’s awesome. You can see that when I share a little bit of information about this a few weeks ago. I had run 125 e-mails through the system, 25 e-mails a day for five days and we had 13 inbound leads from that which is a 10% response rate. Since that time I’ve increased the outbound e-mails to 75 per day, it’s been about six days. We’ve had about another 150 e-mails go out and look we’re up to 48 leads now. We had 12 so we’ve added 36 more leads out of 150 e-mails, guys, that’s almost a 20% response rate. It’s absolutely incredible what we’re getting through here.

Again I just wanted to point that out because I’m really hoping that many of you guys that are thinking about joining the Mastermind or if you’re doing any sort local, I would highly encourage to come join us starting in January, well now is a good time too by the way but because I’m going to be literally dissecting exactly how that’s built step by step throughout the year so that by the end of the year, you could build your own automated agency if you so choose, or you can wait until we can build it for you and you can pay us and we’ll build it for you. Now that’s coming too but that probably won’t be for at least another year. Anyways, with that said, I’m going to move on. If you guys have any questions about that specifically, come join the Mastermind, I’ll be happy to answer them, all right? You guys got any comments on that before I move on?

Adam: I do. I’m [inaudible 00:10:57]. I think this is awesome.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Such a cool process because it pulls in just a ton of stuff I won’t go into but just yeah, I love it. I’m excited for this.

Bradley: Yeah, me too, man.

Marco: For anyone who’s new and watching this, those are people who got e-mails and contacted us back.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: It’s no longer just a cold e-mail going out. Hopefully you’ll be able to find some of these people contacting us and saying, “We’re interested. Tell me more,” which is I mean that’s just awesome so now you have a pool of people to contact.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Anyone that’s new, that’s what’s going on. We go really in depth as you said in the Mastermind. The Mastermind is the place to be in 2018. If you’re not there, you should be.

What Are The Points You Need To Convey To The Client When It Comes To Service Costing?

Bradley: Totally agree, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thank you, Marco. All right, enough of that. Let’s get into some questions. We’ve got several. I’m excited. Let’s get into it. Mel, she’s up. She says, “I’m sending video e-mails and it’s getting some traction but when asked for price, I’m having some trouble. What kind of points do you try to convey when they ask how much does it cost.” I swear this question was asked last week. I swear this was … Anyways, how much does it cost? Now if that’s the first question out of a prospect’s mouth, they’re probably not going to be a good client. I’ve experienced that many, many times. Those are price-conscious people. I understand we all are price-conscious to a degree but the problem with people that come right out of the gate with how much does it cost is it’s because they have already made assumptions and all they’re looking at … They look at marketing as an expense, not an investment. It’s very hard to satisfy any client that thinks of marketing as an expense instead of an investment.

Marketing should create an ROI. If it creates a return on investment then it’s an investment, it’s an ROI. Investment is right in that title, you know what I mean? When they come right out of the gate with thinking of it as an expense and asking how much does it cost then even if you were to land them as a client, you’re probably going to have difficulty with them. They’re never going to be satisfied. There always going to be questioning, what’s going on because they’re penny pinching, right, and because they’re … Again I just want to explain it, that’s a red flag. For me over the years after doing this so many years, that’s a red flag for me. I would recommend that when it comes down to that, I try to avoid pricing stuff upfront until after I’ve had the chance to talk with them and analyze like a particular property. That said, sometimes you just have to talk them up front like what it is and you’re going to lose them. A lot of the times you’re going to lose them but don’t cut undercut your services just to try to land clients.

I get how important it is especially when you’re starting out or you’re trying to go to an agency because I’ve done it, guys like I have taken any client on that was willing to give me money regardless of my gut feeling. We’ve all talked about this all of my partners, all of us at [inaudible 00:14:08] had similar expenses. I’m looking forward to hearing some comments about this again in just a moment. My point is every time I’ve done it as well where many times over the years where I’ve said okay it’s money I’m going to take it, and I’ve had a bad gut feeling and then it ends up being a nightmare. It requires so much additional work, so much hand holding, so much convincing that what I’m doing is valuable that it’s just not worth it. You’re better off just prospecting more clients until you find those that don’t put up as much resistance or to understand that it’s an investment that should produce a return on investment, excuse me, should produce a return instead of an expense.

Again when it comes down to somebody says how much does it cost, typically that’s if you want to just answer him, get him out of your life like thank you very much, that’s what Bill Goodin in Hot Prospects says. He says it all in one word, no spaces between them, “Thankyouverymuch” click like hang up. You know what I mean? I don’t mean be a prick about it. I just mean like give him the price and let them say, “Oh no, that’s too much.” Let them hang up on you then, that’s fine. Don’t take it personally, move on. Prospect like what I just showed you over here, fill your pipeline full of prospects and you won’t have to worry about that. Does that make sense? Now I know you’re doing video e-mails and I know that’s a much slower process and that’s why I recommend that with the video e-mails, you keep them very short because you don’t want to spend … Here’s the thing, Mel, when I get a get a client referral and I do a video e-mail with an analysis of their properties and stuffs, sometimes those go 20, 25 minutes long.

I’m not kidding but that’s because it was a client referral so there’s a much better chance of me landing that client anyways. It’s a high quality lead because it was a client referral but when I’m doing cold prospecting and I’m sending video e-mails which I don’t really do so much anymore because it’s so time consuming. I like the shotgun approach better because you could scale it. With starting out that rifle approach of doing video e-mails is very effective but I would try to keep your initial video, your outreach video, down to five minutes or less so that you can bang out several of them within an hour and get them out because again it’s a numbers game.

You might get out of sending 10, you might get three. My consistent number is worth three or four responses out of every 10 e-mails that I sent. Out of every three or four responses, I would typically get one client, sometimes two, and so again that’s what I recommend that you try to keep it short. Otherwise you end up with 15 or 20-minute videos for every potential client, cold e-mail that you send and that’s just way too much work. What are your comments, guys?

Hernan: I totally agree with you, Bradley in terms of the quality of the clients that you’re getting. It’s funny because I wasn’t franker with one of the Mastermind’s call like five minutes before they hang up. One thing he said really resonated with me and he was saying, “It’s way easier to increase the quality of the clients that you get than to try to reeducate them into why your stuff that you’re doing is worth it.” In other words, instead of trying to reeducate themselves on why they will need to take your marketing serious, and why they’re doing an investment and why they should be doing and should be doing that, that puts you in a perspective of, “Well, I need now to educate them into why my stuff is valuable.” The perfect client, which is something that you need to come up with. There’s nothing that … You need to come up with what’s your perfect type of client, which sometimes like I would say 9 times out 10, we don’t do. We just go and try to find as many clients as possible and that puts you in the position of getting the worst type of clients on earth pretty much, right?

Number one, ask yourself what your perfect type of client is and number two, try to find those clients in a way that they already understand that marketing is an investment. Bradley would tell you yeah go after the ad works guys. Go after the guys that are already advertising because they already know. Go after the guys that are doing SEO that you can actually pinpoint that they’re doing SEO or they have their maps already set up. Maybe not perfect but they understand the value that ad works can bring to their business et cetera, et cetera so that’s why I think it’s way easier and way more rewarding. You will end up working with better clients, getting better quality and try to enhance your process of getting clients to get better quality clients than try to turn someone’s minds over, which is nearly impossible and it will wear you out. You know what I’m saying? That would be my comment.

Adam: All right, I’ll play devil’s advocate real quick and not disagreeing actually, just offering the counterpoint and I would say that also you got to do your homework on this one. I’ve seen people go in and try to just sell videos. Let’s say they are selling video rankings or something like that. They go in and they get to the money part and they don’t know what their potential client’s cost is or what their business model is and then it becomes really hard for people to talk because they don’t understand or they go in with the completely wrong offer. Make sure you do your homework and find out how much is a lead work to this person. You don’t have to know down to the dollar but do you know the market? Do you know how much it’s worth? Is the lead worth $5 or $50? Figuring that out and then you can at least talk until it leads you to the right people.

Bradley: Yeah, and to expand on what Adam said, if you understand the market. Your potential customer base, which will be like local businesses or whatever kind. In my case like contractors, tree service contractors, right? Let’s just use that as an example. I understand about how much a good tree service lead is worth to a contractor because I understand from being in that industry what a qualified lead could produce for a contractor as far as revenue. With that said, you can frame or stir the conversation into a let me show you how instead of how much does it cost, let me show you what it can produce. Does that make sense because then you’re taking the cost equation. You’re taking cost out of the equation, right? The focus isn’t on the cost. The focus is on the return and that when you reframe their question in that light or in that manner then they start to see the return on investment potential but as Hernan said I 100% agree with him. If you have to first convince somebody as to why your service is valuable or important then before you then have to sell it to him then you’re doing twice as much work because first you have to convince then you have to sell so avoid that.

If you feel like you’re catching resistance where you’re trying to convince them then let them go, thank you very much, click. Thank you very much, click. Get the hell out of my life. Next like SWSWSWSW, some will, some won’t, excuse me. Some will, some won’t, so what, someone’s waiting, and that’s really what it comes down to. Just fill your pipeline with quality leads. Know your market. Know the potential what a lead is worth so that you can stir the conversation towards a return on investment versus cost price. Does that make sense?

Marco: I’m reading this just a touch differently and I don’t disagree with either you or Hernan but I’m more inclined with Adam. If she’s having trouble understanding how to price her services, I mean that’s a bit different and that’s just understanding the market and what are leads worth. I mean if a guy … If a lead is worth $2,000 to that person and you can produce, you should be concentrating on what you’re going to do, right? You get paid for what you produce rather than getting paid for whatever for something nebulous that the client doesn’t understand. I’m going to affect your bottom line positively, that’s what I’m going to do for you. As long as you take that approach, you understand the market, you understand the client. You understand what a lead is worth then you won’t have trouble pricing yourself and your services, that’s how I’m seeing this question.

Bradley: Yeah, and last thing, that’s a great question by the way, Mel so I’m going to plus one at number one. I’m sorry we spent so much time on this, guys but that’s a fantastic question. What happened? It didn’t plus one. The last thing I would say about that, Mel is you can always have a foot in the door product or service that you can provide even for free, right? I don’t recommend … Guys, don’t work for free for often but you can have a foot in the door offer some sort of product or service that you provide for free to prove yourself to a potential client, to a prospect, that works really well like I do that. I’ll talk to a potential client and I’ll say, “Look, let’s talk about pricing.” If that comes up then I’ll say, “Let me just prove to you that I’m capable of producing some results and then we’ll talk about that. This is what I’m going to do.”

A lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll do some video marketing campaign so I can get them some quick wins that they can see by going to search results and seeing videos ranked for various keywords, various locations whatever. I’ll just do a quick … It might take me 30 minutes to set up a video campaign and blast it out using some spam tools or whatever. Get them ranked for a few keywords and then I just show them the results and say, “Look, this is what I was able to do in a few days and then imagine what I could do if you hired for this or that.” Does that make sense? You can give them something for free just to whet their appetite so to speak and then you can upsell them into or sell them into an actual service at that point you’ve already … You’ve given them results in advance.

Again video marketing is fantastic for that because it’s something that you can get done very, very quickly. You can get results quickly. It’s almost tangible, right? They can see the results and because of that, you can oftentimes upsell, that’s why I use video primarily as my opening product or service, okay. Again, great, great question, Mel.

How Would You Optimize A Maps Listing For A Potential Client Located In The Midst Of Small Counties?

All right, Shibga’s up. He says … Or Shibga, I’m sorry if I butchered that. “My potential client is located in the midst of a bunch of small counties. Since I’m only doing maps, he won’t be showing up in counties even just 10 miles from him. The competitor’s currently up there are getting traffic from difficult keywords organically and that is not something I want to do. What would you suggest? Thank you.” Well-

Marco: If I may?

Bradley: Go ahead.

Marco: He’s in RYS Academy reloaded and that’s Monday’s webinar, dude.

Bradley: Perfect. There you go. As far as everybody else, it’s not an RYS. My suggestion in that case would be, well I’m going to give you number one, ad words, right? You can do that rather quickly and you can just set up GO targeting so it’s very easy to get them to start generating traffic for all the different areas that way plus if you’ve got a Google My Business, you use the location extension for your ad words ad then you can actually have your maps, your Google Maps, your Google My Business Maps listing show up in Maps in the actual Maps. Now I’m starting to see the Maps listed, the first listing in the three-pack is now an ad for a lot of queries like that’s been rolling out slowly but I’m starting to see that appear more and more in various industries now where there’s an actual four-pack instead of a three-pack because the first listing is an ad, and that’s something that you can absolutely do. All you need is a location extension, which means you need a Google My Business listings verified, and then you can use the location extension and ad words, so that’s number one.

Number two would be to rank organically. I don’t see a lot of value in that for local lead [inaudible 00:26:22] type of stuff. I’ve got mixed results on that but that’s all you could do short of setting up PO boxes in all the various areas, which can be a pain in the ass, and then you’ve got a ton of Google My Business listings to optimize, a bunch of citations, all that kind of stuff to do. It’s really up to you. I would do what Marco was talking about with RYS stuff, he’s doing multi-location training on Monday but I would also consider ad words and go after some organic stuff unless you’re willing and capable of setting up a bunch of Google My Business profiles listings for various locations using PO boxes or something, okay.

What Are Your Thoughts On AMP?

Eliza says, “Hey guys, have you heard of AMP? If so, what are your thoughts on it?” Marco, I’ll let you talk on that since you developed the plug-in.

Marco: We have an AMP plug-in. All you have to do is go to the Facebook group, AMP Creators Mastermind in Facebook and join then download the plug-in. It’s working for news more than anything else, that’s where AMP really helps. It speeds up the page. A very light version of the page is served up through AMP. I think as Google goes more into mobile, it will have greater weight. It will become more important. Right now it hasn’t had the impact that it should’ve had but that’s because if you’re not producing news, the Accelerated Mobile Page experience isn’t really necessary. Your website is fast enough as it is or should be fast enough as it is, right? I mean that’s just my take on it. We do have the plug-in so you can experiment with it and see whether it works for you, whether it has any effect in your niche. We haven’t seen any effects as a matter of fact with AMP on anything local unless you produce news, something that’s newsworthy like Google’s going to pick up.

Bradley: Yeah. I don’t have much of a comment because I haven’t really played with it much.

What Do You Think Are Some Issues With Writing Blog Posts And Repurpose Them To Videos, Embeds, And Syndication?

All right, quit this house says, “Good day. I want to write blog posts. Create a video of each blog with content samurai then syndicate the video. Take that link of video embedded in the blog then syndicate the blog. Any issues? PS, get better soon, Marco.” No, that’s fine. In fact I’ve talked about this in Mastermind in Master class when we used to have a Master class as well. One of the strategies that I’ve used with some of my contractors, the ones that are willing to do it, which is a great strategy is their technicians basically give instructions to their technicians. Let’s say plumber, that’s one of the industries that I’ve done this for, it’s a plumbing company.

They had I think six employees or technicians. Six plumbers that were out there working with vans and all that kind of stuff. They just go out on job site and take their phone, iPhone, Android whatever and record a very short video from the jobs that they go out on. Just say, “Hey, this is Joe from Joe’s Plumbing in Fairfax, Virginia. We’re out on location in Fairfax, Virginia, we got a call for a water heater that needed replaced and this what I found.” He takes his phone and shows where the water heater was. The heating element went bad, we basically replaced the water heater and now this customer has hot water again, and they’re happy. If you have any water heater problems in Fairfax, Virginia, contact us at an in-call to action. Very, very simple like a 60-second video, 60 to 90 seconds, sometimes even less and then they send me the video file and then I upload it to YouTube.

I send it to a transcription service, have it transcribed then I go post the video with the transcription on the blog, which then syndicates out across the syndication network, and it gives me the ability to optimize the YouTube video and rank that for keywords like water heater repair, Fairfax, Virginia for example and as well as the blog post, which adds additional content to the site that’s a 100% relevant, it’s a 100% unique user or 100% created, unique created content. Does that make sense? It’s a very, very good strategy because it’s something that you don’t even have to do like to me, it’s very simple to just … They send me the video, I upload it to YouTube, optimize the videos, send that to rev.com to get it transcribed, get the transcription back within usually a couple of hours, and then I can post that as the actual post content, which has its keyword rich.

It’s got the call to action and ends up going into silos so I interlink that up to the silo heading, and then that goes out across the syndication network which in turn helps to boost the overall site; very, very powerful strategy. I don’t see anything wrong with that at all. I would encourage you to do it. Test with it to see. I haven’t done it specifically talking about what you’re talking about here but I can’t imagine why that would be any different. It’s a good strategy, check it out.

How Would You Sell Map Embeds To Somebody?

Muhammad, what’s up, Muhammad? He’s here every week asking questions and being very engaged, it’s awesome. We’re glad to have you, buddy. He says, “Hey guys, how would you sell Map Embeds to somebody?” You don’t, Muhammad. You wouldn’t sell Map Embeds unless it’s an SEO or somebody that understands it. My first reaction would be don’t. Don’t even try to explain. I mean some people are inquisitive and you can try to explain it in a way but a lot of the times like when you start talking about that kind of stuff with prospects, their eyes glass over because they really don’t understand it anyways. I try to avoid that like technical kind of stuff with most clients if possible, but anyways “I never really thought of a Map ranking as something to include in SEO [inaudible 00:32:12]. Is it something you guys would include?”

Yeah, when I’m selling SEO services, I typically for the most part am selling Maps ranking, local SEO Maps ranking for the most part but I don’t particularly tell them all the different things that I’m doing to get them ranked. Not stuff like Map Embeds because they wouldn’t understand like for the most part. I might tell them I’m going to produce content. I’m going to optimize your listing, your photos. We’re going to create corresponding content on your website. We’re going to do some link building stuff and syndicate content out across your social media properties to get you some exposure and traffic, all that kind stuff but I don’t talk about Map Embeds and that kind of stuff. What do you guys think about that?

Marco: I totally agree. Don’t ever sell rankings, dude, Muhammad. You cannot control rankings. If you can’t control rankings then you cannot sell what you can’t be sure that you’re going to do. I mean you can be really good at it but then run into a stubborn niche or stubborn sub niche where you just can’t rank them out, and you just sold the client on ranking them out so now what are you going to do? Sell results, guys, everyone, everyone in this. When you’re out there and you’re selling your services, you’re going to produce results. What those results are, that’s up to you. It’s not up to the client to decide what the results are. The results will be reflected in the bottom line through visitors to the website, leads and close leads and all of that. How you go about it, that’s what they’re hiring for you the expert. Approach it that way, don’t ever, ever sell rankings ever.

Bradley: I would only comment that I actually do often sell rankings. What I do is I preface. I say, “Look, I don’t work for Google,” so Google can change its algorithm at any time. They’re constantly adjusting your algorithm so things change but the trend is, the idea or the goal is to get you ranked in the Maps like that’s what I say when I’m talking to a prospect. I say, “This is what I know works and I’m going to do this.” I don’t sell them rankings but I tell them that they can expect to see some movement and we’re likely going to get the goal, the end goal what my intention is to get them ranked in Maps, but what I’m selling are the services that have shown to prove that is the end result. Does that make sense?

It’s like I don’t say or guarantee rankings, I don’t because I’m not … If I’m going to guarantee rankings, I’m going to own the asset. It’s going to be lead gen thing because I’m not guaranteeing it to anybody but me but I don’t guarantee rankings to clients. Unless for example I got a video production company that I do a lot of wholesale SEO for, I basically don’t guarantee rankings but I tell them if we’re not ranked on page one then you just don’t pay for it. Does that make sense? So that’s what I do, I don’t guarantee rankings but I tell them they don’t pay unless they’re ranked. Keep moving, we got two more questions from him. We’re going to try to roll through these. I know we’re running short on time today already.

How Would You Sell Syndication Networks To Bloggers And YouTubers?

“For sales practices and extra money, I’m trying to sell syndication networks to bloggers and YouTubers. How would I best approach this? I’ve bought BB’s recommended book on cold e-mail and use his practices but I must be doing something wrong because I haven’t seen much interest.” All right, so a couple of things, Muhammad, my thoughts on trying to contact and sell to bloggers and YouTubers is that they’re in the marketing space so to speak, they’re in the digital space maybe not marketing but they’re in the whole digital space, and they’re probably numb. I’m trying to think about the right word here. They’re probably used to just ignoring pitch type stuff especially probably a lot of YouTubers because I know like our YouTube channels like we’ve got our [inaudible 00:36:18] Master generals as well as my own channel, we got a lot of subscribers and I get pitched shit all day long all the time. We get spam e-mails from people trying to sell us on YouTube services like stuff all the time. They’re probably just ignoring a lot of that. They’re numb to it so to speak.

Bloggers are very similar because bloggers get pitched all the time on guest post and link swaps and link exchanges, all that kind of stuff as well. It could just be that, I don’t know because I haven’t really pitched to those kind of people but the other thing would be maybe … I’m not sure about cold e-mailing those. I would have to think about it and obviously, Muhammad, I would recommend that you just test different … You’re going to have to split test your different cold e-mail approaches. What I’m doing for contractors is working incredibly well but I don’t know that that method would work for YouTubers and bloggers. I would just try different types of cold outreach e-mails until you found one that seems to work well and then repeat that, scale that, right? It’s going to requite some split testing on your part. It’s a lot of work I know. It’s a lot of trial and error but once you find something that works like what I found with the contractor prospecting that I’m doing then you can scale it and you can just see massive results, okay?

As far as when I started selling networks like when I first built, started outsourcing that and I trained some virtual assistants, and I started selling networks, I sold them retail to local businesses and then I sold them wholesale to SEO agencies. What I did was I just went to the various marketplaces like SEO Mojo was one of them, SEO Clerks was another one of them, and I just put up listings for networks to sell syndication networks, and that’s how I ended up landing a lot of SEO agency clients was through those service sites by selling networks. I would sell it for like … I believe I was selling networks at the time for $297 or $299 around $300 for a single network but for agencies, I had an agency from Australia contact me and he wanted 10 per month, 10 syndication networks per month.

At the time I actually I wouldn’t do it, well, I actually probably would do it now still but I ended up selling those networks at $100 a piece to him so he’d pay me $1,000 a month. I’d sell them. I have my team would build him 10 networks and my networks cost me about $50 to build so I would literally pocket about $500 to not really do a damn thing, which was awesome. You may want to consider doing that too like putting your service up on some of these sites, all right?

How Would You Explain The Benefits Of PR In Layman’s Terms To A Client?

Last is, “How would you explain the benefits of PR in layman’s term to a client?” Exposure, brand building and traffic, that’s it. You don’t sell the SEO part of it. You can mention that it should have an SEO benefit, should help them it will likely or often will help them to rank better but would you want to sell is the exposure, the brand building and the traffic that it will produce, those are the things.

You want to talk about the benefits not the features. Essentially you want to tell them how, what are the end results that a press release can provide that’s traffic, authority and brand building and exposure, massive exposure. Anybody else would comment on that? All right, we’re going to keep moving.

Marco: Yeah, I know. I was about to say that, yeah. I agree with you, Bradley in terms of … Business owners they all care about how many new clients, how many new leads they can get. Usually they don’t care about rankings or positions or whatever like keywords and all of that jazz. If you talk about in business terms like again this is an investment, I like the different … The comparison between assets and liabilities but the way [inaudible 00:40:30] gets it. For example, you would have money that you throw away every week pretty much. You buy stuff, you go to Starbucks, you go out to dinner whatever, you buy clothes, that’s money that goes out and never comes back, right? Assets and the way millionaires think is that they invest their money into stuff like real estate or stocks or whatever, now would put more money into their pockets so that’s how they’re thinking. Well, you can do the same because you can say this is a service that would put more money to your pocket because that will increase the visibility of your website, the traffic and ultimately if the website converts, the leads, right?

If you think about it, you’re investing the money. We always backtrack to the investment versus the spending side of things so that’s how I usually frame it and it works.

How Do You Get Viewers To A Niche YouTube Channel That Contains Other People’s Popular Videos?

Bradley: Yeah, awesome, thanks. All right, the next one is Eddie Grim. Eddie, I read this question ahead of time and I’m not sure how you’re going to get viewers to your videos. I understand you’re saying that you’re starting a niche top-based YouTube channel. [inaudible 00:41:38] a lot of other people’s popular videos to my channel. The question that I would have for you, Eddie is if you’re just adding other people’s popular videos to playlists because that’s really the only way you can do it. You can’t really add their videos to your channel unless you download their videos and then upload to your channel, which is against terms of service, right? I’m not saying you can’t do that, hint, hint but I am telling you that it’s against terms of service and you may get a copyright claim or something like that from one of those people if you are to download and re-upload on to your channel so keep that in mind. However, you can put other people’s videos into your own playlist and there’s some benefit for doing that.

The only problem with the next part of your question is you say, “the goal is to gain viewers that I can re-target with ads.” Unless, the video is on your channel like it’s your video uploaded to your channel then even if you have other people’s popular videos and playlist and somebody were to click through from your playlist to that other person’s video, you won’t be able to re-target them because you won’t get a re-marketing cookie from somebody clicking on to their video. Does that make sense? As far as I know you can’t and again I may be mistaken here but I don’t think you can set up a re-marketing list for videos within a playlist like I think it’s only for individual videos or a channel, which in that case you can re-target them if they land on your channel, right? I’d have to go in and look at ad words to see.

I’m not going to do that right now obviously we’re running short on time anyways but I’m going to be doing a lot of ad word stuff starting in January with the new Mastermind training curriculum. The first month or the first module is all about PPC (Pay Per Click) and YouTube is going to be included in that so it’s something that I will probably have soon, I’ll know for sure. I know that you can re-target people that interact with any videos on your channel. I don’t know if that also includes other people’s videos that you’ve embedded or added to playlist from your channel or not, I don’t know. Can anybody else confirm that?

Marco: Yeah, I know. I think that is the exact same thing that you’re saying, Bradley like you need to own the asset in order for Google to count the cookie towards your re-marketing list. What I would say, Eddie is see why these videos are so popular, try to emulate them, try to do the same title, keywords, et cetera, et cetera and then try to rank them on YouTube because that will put you like for example on semantic mastery channel and on my own channel, I’m pretty sure that will probably is channel two. 20% of the videos bring 80% of the views. Is that big? Is that cute? You will have, I don’t know, I probably have a couple of 100 videos semantic mastery has at this point thousands of videos but only a small fraction of those videos will for some reason will get … Not for some reason but because they are really targeting really high volume keywords on YouTube, right? They’re targeting really high volume keywords and they’re getting shared. They’re getting a lot of comments so YouTube will increase their view cap, and that will trickle down into the rest of the channel.

Here’s the thing, you want to try to emulate these popular videos, record your own version, curate them whatever, and try to run them on YouTube so that you can now own the asset. Once you have that, again, you need to create a bunch of videos so that 20% of those videos will get 80% of the traffic and once you have that then you can start re-targeting those people with that. You can also do pay-per-view. You can try to use the ad words to a video, and that’s something that you can do as long as you own the video. You can do with [inaudible 00:45:29] but there’s absolutely zero sense on spending money to do that but the point here is that you own the video but that’s a number scale. The pay-per-view needs to be lower than the re-targeting cost and that’s usually not the case, right? You’re paying more per view than that the ROI that you’re getting when you’re re-targeting these people so have that mind.

The best way to go, in my opinion, will be to get a lot of organic traffic from YouTube. Rank your videos on YouTube so that you can get a lot of organic traffic and then go to channel re-targeting.

Bradley: By the way, there are ways to siphon some authority off of those videos that are really popular that get a shit ton of views. Eddie, that way that you do that is scrape the tags from the videos that are ranking really well or that are getting a lot of views, the really popular videos. Scrape the tags. There are tools that can do that. You can also right click and view page source. Get the first two or three tags but there are tools that will scrape tags for you. Scrape the tags. Use those same tags in your video as well as the channel name of the channel that has the popular video and put that video into a playlist from your channel alongside of your other videos. In other words, when you go to optimize your own video targeting the same type of keywords as the popular videos that you want to siphon some authority from, you want to scrape the tags from that popular video, place it into your video.

You also want to scrape the channel or add the channel name as a tag in your video. You also want to create a playlist with that popular video next to your video. What happens is a lot of the times, it’s not 100% of the time and I don’t know what the threshold like what the circumstances are to make it work sometimes and not others but what I’ve seen a lot of that, when you do that is your video will end up popping on the end screen of a video when they show related videos like checkerboard of related videos. Your video will pop into there as well as in the right-hand sidebar on the watch page of the related … The right-hand sidebar where they show related videos. You’ll end up popping into there and you end up getting a lot of referral traffic just because you’re in the related video section if that makes sense, and that’s a great way to siphon authority off of other people’s videos, okay? Good question though, Eddie.

Do You Know A Tool Like Cinch Tweet From Mastery PR Intended For Linkedin?

Jonathan says, “I purchased Cinch Tweet for mastery PR and this tool works like crazy.” Awesome, that’s great to hear. “Do you have similar tool for LinkedIn?” I don’t know, Jonathan. I don’t even know Cinch Tweet is. I just know that I know we did a promo for it for mastery PR but I’m not a tweet guy or Twitter guy so I haven’t played with that at all. I don’t know of one for LinkedIn, sorry.

Adam: Yeah, Jonathan. What you could do is probably hop into the group if you’re not already a part of the semantic mastery, our free Facebook group and ask in there because I think Chris has been at least playing around with it so that would be the place to ask.

How Would You Reinstate The Previous Top Ranking Of A Client Site That Targets 3 Main Keywords?

Bradley: Yeah. All right, Ralph’s new. He says, “Hey guys, I’m a rookie when it comes to SEO for site. I have a client in Minneapolis area. He used to rank on page one for his key phrase, something changed a couple of years ago and now he’s back on page three, if even that. I just took over his site trying to get him back on page one. His company specializes in three areas. Okay, the way the site seems to be set up, they’re trying to shoot for all three targets on the front page at once.” Yeah, that’s pretty common actually. “Should I redo the title of description in H1 tags to shoot for keyword one and put keyword two and three on other pages? I tried using video to get them on page one, that doesn’t seem to work.”

Okay, yeah, Ralph, I would absolutely recommend that … I don’t typically try to rank the homepage guys. I mean it happens and there’s ways that you can force the homepage to rank but I usually optimize for again for contractors if they have separate services. I always like to try to optimize a specific service page for basically one primary service, right? I have separate pages for each one of those. In your case, it would be a separate page for keyword one, one for keyword two and one for keyword three because what happens is each one of those pages can be highly optimized for that particular keyword, that service in that location. It’s likely that you can end up ranking that as long as there’s not other domain health issues, Ralph. Assuming that everything else is fine, I would recommend that you would target specifically each keyword or service with its own page and then optimize it for that but then what you do is obviously you just internally link from each one of those pages up to the homepage.

In Maps you’re usually going to rank their homepage in Maps, not always the case but usually but then for organic, you would end up ranking the individual pages based upon the keywords search query, right?

Marco: I have a question. Sorry to stop you while you’re going through this but do we still have a backdoor to SEO bootcamp?

Bradley: I think we do.

Marco: Because I mean I was just going through that over the weekend.

Bradley: It’s amazing.

Marco: And I couldn’t stop. I went and I was lying down in bed and just listening and I went through. I forget how many videos I went through just listening. The guy is amazing on his keyword research and how to set this up. Ralph, everything that you’re looking for and how to set this up, how to target the keyword whether it’s a category, whether it is the top of the silo, whether it’s supporting LSI and whatever, this is covered in there. I have yet to see anyone who covers on page SEO as thoroughly as what’s covered in SEO bootcamp.

Bradley: Yeah, dude. He’s bad ass, man. I don’t know if it’s … I think the $500 price is now doubled unfortunately. I think it’s $1,000 now but it’s worth it even at $1,000. I’m not kidding, Ralph. It’s fantastic. It really is that good. If somebody didn’t already drop the link, it’s http://ift.tt/2BIn92b, I believe, that will take you over to it if you want to check it out. I’m not sure if that’s the link or not. If not, if somebody-

Adam: Yeah, I’m looking for it right now just to confirm.

Bradley: Yeah, that’s what I would suggest, Ralph is obviously optimize a separate page for each one of those and then you can link from those pages up to your homepage, that would be the better route to go than trying to be … If you’re trying to cover too many topics on one page and they’re not closely related enough then you dilute the optimization of any one of the keywords if that makes sense, okay? All right, we’re almost out of time, guys. Unfortunately we didn’t get … Well, I guess we got the most of them.

Will A Syndicated Content About Recipe Triggers Duplicate Content Issue?

All right so next question, “Hi. We are selling a new sweetener on our blog e-com site. Bloggers started to create recipes with it on their blogs, which is awesome. Now I started to create blog posts with those recipes by cloning them on our blog inside my recipe silo and these posts are then syndicated to a syndication network too. I’m doing this for obvious reasons, easy content and creation for me and additional publicity for them. Question, will this trigger and kind of duplicate content issues for me or not?”

No, it won’t because … Well, first of all just make sure that you are attributing. As long as you are citing the source … Okay, it won’t create any content issues for you anyways regardless, okay, period but to do it legally and properly the way that you should do it ethically as well is you make sure that you are getting attribution to the source where you got those recipes. Always cite the source. Give credit where credit is due, that’s not going to cost you any issues if you don’t as far as SEO issues, but it can cause … You can get DMCA complaints, which are basically copyright infringement complaints. If one of those bloggers decided that you were infringing upon their intellectual property, and they decided do a DMCA complaint then Google can de-index that page or post and that’s a bad sign for you and it’s a bad sign for the domain. I would recommend that you just you are always linking back to the source.

You can no-follow the links, that’s what I do. No-follow them but make sure that you link back to the source and give them the credit where it’s due, okay?

Should You Link Back To The Original Post Or Just Cite Them On The Syndicated Blog Post?

Question two, “Is it enough to cite their blog in the bottom of my current recipe without …” No, I would always link back to it, always. If you’re worried about passing dues, no-follow the link, okay? “As I link back to it, cite their blog at the bottom of my current or should I also link back to their original post?” Yeah, always link back to the original source of the content that you’re curating, that’s essentially what you’re doing. You’re curating content which is perfectly legit, that’s how most of the content is produced for all of my blogs, and client blogs and lead gen sites and all that is through curation. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just make sure that you cite the source.

By the way when you’re curating content, guys, sometimes you’re still going to get people that are pissed off about it, which is dumb in my opinion but sometimes because you are providing them a link, potential exposure, potential traffic but you are giving credit where it’s due. I still have gotten some cease and desist, take-down notices type stuff from curating, it happens from time to time. It’s just part of the game. Just don’t freak out when it happens. “I’m asking this because they all link to different pages on my site in their recipes. This would be some sort of reciprocal linking, I guess, which I heard is not good.” No, it’s fine. In that case, in this particular circumstance, that’s absolutely fine because it’s not like you’re trying to gain for SEO. You guys are just cross-promoting because it makes sense, it’s relevant. It’s not an SEO thing, right? I mean it provides SEO value but the intent is not strictly for SEOs. Does that make sense?

Reciprocal linking was something that was a no-no years ago. I don’t know if it’s still considered a no-no in Google’s eyes because there is a lot of crosslinking between and co-citation and things like that now. I’m talking about old directories, guys. A lot of web directories, they would only publish your link if you put a widget in the footer that linked to their directory. Those are reciprocal links that are frowned upon but two bloggers cross-promoting each other’s post, that’s not really … I don’t work for Google so I don’t know but I can tell you it’s logical for that to not be a reciprocal link penalty type thing. Any comments on that, guys?

Marco: Yeah, I haven’t been doing a lot of reciprocity like reciprocal links lately so I wouldn’t … I don’t have data like recent data.

Which Should You Get First, RYS Stack Or Syndication Network Or Both?

Bradley: All right, we’re almost out of time. Fortunately we got through almost all of the questions. Harold asks, “Hey guys, what’s up? Quick question, should I get an RYS stack, a syndication network or both?” Well, my go-to answer is going to be both. Of course, Harold. No, I mean that for real. I always start with syndication networks is always standard operating procedure but as soon as that gets built, I order the RYS drive stack as well, but it is really standard operating procedure, so I would say yes to both. Any comments, guys?

Marco: No, absolutely. Set up your syndication network, prime it just like we teach in the syndication academy. Once that’s done, get the RYS stack going and link to everything in T1. I mean it’s really that simple, and you can power everything up through link building through your drive stack, which will protect your T1, and your money site.

Which Company Provides The Best Citation Services?

Bradley: All right, Dan says, “Hey, gents. What are your suggestion for best source to have citations done?” Serpspace of course, Dan, duh. Dan, I’m giving you a hard time but yeah Serpspace. You can go in there and like … If you’re looking for the Cadillac, the Ferrari of citations, you’re going to spend more money but they are fabulous. They are done very, very well. I would say Loganix, they’ve got some really good packages. http://ift.tt/2bbLT53 but for new sites typically, I would just go with what we have in Serpspace and just order the big citation directory sites, which is like the national type sites and then I try to go with the hyper local type citations, which are a lot more like niche specific or local specific type directories. Those are always like standard operating procedure.

I usually start right off the bat with new sites with about anywhere between 40 to 60 citations, which is about 20 or so of the big national directories like the big heavy hitters, Yelp and Angie’s List, Yellowpages that kind of stuff, and then we try to find … We scrape citation or directory sites that are either niche specific or more localized and then build the additional citations there. Also don’t forget, Dan, to order citations or aggregate listing submissions like New Stark Louise. What are the other ones? Info USA, several of those. The other one is Factual is one. The other one is Axiom. Those are all really good because you get listed in those and about three to six months later, you’ll have citations and a ton of different directories because other directories scrape or pull data from those, and create listings for you. It’s more of a long-term thing but you want to do that right upfront because in about six months you’ll start seeing a whole bunch of new citations start popping up and you didn’t have to build them or create them.

All right, last question, I know we’re right at the five o'clock mark, “Is Cinch Twitter good for tier one? Can it be used on the Twitter attached to RSY stack?” Honestly, I have no response for that because I don’t even know what Cinch Tweet does. Anybody else have an answer to that?

Adam: No, I don’t. Good one to hop in the group probably and ask there.

Bradley: All right. We’re done, guys. Oh, wow. Everybody else bailed out. Thanks, everybody for being here. We’ll see everybody else next week, I guess because we don’t have any other webinars this week, do we?

Adam: I don’t think so.

Bradley: Sweet. All right, everybody, thanks for being here.

Adam: See you.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Bradley: See you.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 160 posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnZU8p

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

Click on the video above to watch Episode 161 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

 Announcement

Adam: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is episode 161. Today is the sixth of December. First one in December, we’re rolling towards the end of the year but not quite there. Speaking of closer to the end of the year, we’re going to have a pretty awesome Hump Day Hangout coming up later in December but stay tuned for that, we’ll tell you more about that coming. Real quick, we want to go down and say hi to everybody and see how everyone is doing. Chris, how are you doing today?

Chris: Looking good. It’s glad to be here.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan, how about yourself?

Hernan: Good. It’s actually quite warm right now in Buenos Aires. Yeah, I’m excited for what’s coming. We have a lot of stuff coming. Oh, what? Are you cold?

Adam: No, I don’t know. I’m perfectly warm.

Hernan: Okay, right, okay.

Adam: Hey, Marco. How’s it going?

Marco: Well, the doctor took a look at my MRI today and said, “Holy shit.” Those are not words that you want to hear when the fucking doctor takes a look at your MRI of your fucking back, dude so that’s what I’m doing.

Adam: All right, fair enough. Bradley, how about you, man?

Bradley: I went to a doctor once with an ear infection and it hurt like a son of a bitch. The doctor put the thing in the ear to look at it and he goes, “Whoa.” I was like, “Doc, you’re not supposed to do that.” “I’ve never seen an eardrum look like that.”

Adam: Well, make it not look like that.

Bradley: No wonder it hurts, right? Anyway, this is great, guys. Today has been a really good day, really productive day. I got a shit ton of stuff done. I’m just excited to be here and answer some questions, and hang out.

Adam: Cool. Well, before we get into it, I got a couple of quick announcements. I’m going to post some stuff on the page. If you’ve never have come to Hump Day Hangouts, first of all, thank you very much for being here. It’s awesome and we love having more people join us. We got some good stuff for you, some resources I’m going to post on the page for you. If you were around over the Thanksgiving time period and for Black Friday then you saw the e-mails and you saw the page we got, you know that Syndication Academy is increasing a price. It’s going to be like a 50% jump. It’s something we’ve been putting off for a long time and this is last announcement that it’s happening, and the price is going up to $97 a month here shortly in seven days. We want to give everyone fair notice a nice reminder here before that happens, and you can get that for free if you join the Mastermind, all right? We want to remind people about that, that’s one of the many, many perks of being a Mastermind member.

Something else we wanted to talk about, obviously there’s been ongoing updates with RYSP loaded. There’s been a ton of new contents, stuff going on there. I’ll let Marco talk about this.

Marco: Yeah, we have in fact a new webinar coming up on Monday. We’re calling it Multi-Location Domination with Automation.

Bradley: Wow.

Marco: Yes, sir. We’re going there. We got in fact two scripts that we’re rolling out to make things easier just to allow people to make it as simple as possible to go and take over not only their local niche, right? The local area but surrounding areas and just take shit down city by city, that’s how we do it, that’s what we’re teaching. We’re also going to show how it’s done globally by the way because we’re in the lab taking a look at that, and as a matter of fact, when we roll out the Multi-Location Domination webinar, we’re going to raise the price on RYS reload. The price is going up. I don’t know how much. You know I always push as much as possible as much as you guys will allow but price is going up. I suggest if you’re on the fence, it’s time to get in. Get in where you fit in or get left behind. We’re going to teach people how to take over, it’s really that simple.

Adam: Nice. Yeah, it’ll be going up. We’ll have some more information coming out about that you guys if you’re watching. If you’re curious, I’ll also post the links obviously. If you’ve been thinking, “Oh, I’ve heard about RYS and it’s neat and maybe I should do that.” One, you should, it’s awesome. If not that then you should be checking out the [inaudible 00:04:05] services if you’re more of the outsourcing type, but if you’ve been thinking about getting in, now would be obviously a great time. Before we start answering questions, I think Bradley, you had something you wanted to share with people, right?

Bradley: A couple of things, number one, go to bradleybanner.com. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and also my daily Mindset updates. I just posted another video just a few minutes ago like literally 15 minutes ago that I recorded today kind of impromptu. I wasn’t planning on it but I had something that I wanted to share so I recorded a 20-minute video. I just posted it on Facebook as well as my YouTube channel. Going through those e-mails every single day, consistently every single day now, it takes me anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes to write an e-mail everyday but I’m developing a habit and it’s been … I can see … It’s like today I wrote e-mail number 20 and I can see the results already like it’s already improving my ability to write and convey thoughts better. In other words like it’s a habit worth developing. I’ve put it off for years and finally I’m developing the habit with intention and it’s working well like for example I had a bunch of VSLs video sales letter stuff that I had to record today and I had some scripts to write for some re-marketing videos and stuff.

Typically a VSL script would take me or a re-market whatever, a video script would take me hours to write but I was able to bang out three of them in about an hour’s time today. I attribute that to a habit of writing that I’ve started to develop. I encourage you guys to do something similar even if it’s journaling whatever. I’m just using the e-mail list as my vehicle. I would encourage you to go check it out because I basically talk about some pretty cool stuff as far as goal setting and mindset and that kind of thing. Anyway, that’s it. I do want to tease one thing rather quickly because we’re going to talk about this at the beginning part of next week’s Hump Day Hangouts briefly maybe 10 minutes or so. I’m going to cover this a little bit more in depth but today I just want to tease you guys with it. Oh, also check this out. I got my Mastermind shirt on. Thank you, Adam for sending it.

Adam: That’s pretty cool. Nice.

Bradley: Yeah, I meant to drop this down a little bit. There you go, how is that?

Adam: Nice.

Bradley: One of the thing, I just wanted to tease very quickly is guys the prospecting funnel stuff that I’ve been working on developing for a few months, I had to put it on hold for a bit while I worked on some other stuff. The last two weeks I’ve really been working on it hard again and it improved the process quite a bit, and the results are fucking astounding like I don’t know how else to say it other than that. I’m just going to give you guys a very quick sneak peek of this and then we’re going to talk about a little bit more next week. I’m not going to go into details, guys. This is more conceptual because this is going to be shared. This is being shared in the Mastermind. We are starting a new Mastermind educational track in January 2018 where we’re going to be basically building two businesses throughout the year from soup to nuts, start to finish.

One is a physical business like a brick and mortar type business, it’s a gym and then the other one obviously the emphasis is on the digital marketing but it’s going to be more than just digital marketing, right? It’s going to be traditional marketing as well as like setting up businesses, setting up a business, entity structuring, all that kind of stuff because I think that’s important. As marketing consultants, we should know about this stuff anyway, right? Number two, the second business. I was going to do two local businesses but I made an executive decision last week to make our local agency that we’re building right now as the second project that we’re going to highlight and cover as part of the Mastermind training next year. All of these is going to be revealed in very fine detail starting in January.

In fact I’ve already started sharing a lot of this agency building stuff which is an automated scalable agency. The way that i should’ve built mine originally but you can’t know which you don’t know, right? I’ve already started sharing a lot of that in the Mastermind but I’m just teasing you guys with this to encourage you to come join the Mastermind especially if you’re doing local because the results are undisputable, indisputable as far as like how well this is working on the prospecting side of things. Still working on the sale side, the fulfillment side, all of that is coming but the prospecting side is working. Enough teasing, let me just show you very quickly, I’m going to grab the screen. Guys, I’m not going to put this up for long but I want to show you something.

This is an image of the prospecting funnel. I told you I’m not going to put it up for long. I’m about to switch screens, take a screenshot fast, fast, fast. All right, moving on, that’s the prospecting funnel and take a look at this for example. This is the … I’m using drip.com as our auto responder for all contractors that are being put into this funnel, this prospecting funnel. These are only people that have taken action and you can see that like … I know it’s probably small on you, let me zoom in just a little bit, guys. [inaudible 00:09:08] look at just yesterday at it at 12-5 so December 5, we scroll down. We had 10 new contacts out of just yesterday alone. Those are inbound needs, guys. You guys see that? If we take a look at … Let me pull over here for just a moment.

This is our pipe drive account. This is what we’re using for our sales pipe line, it’s called pipe drive, it’s awesome. You can see that when I share a little bit of information about this a few weeks ago. I had run 125 e-mails through the system, 25 e-mails a day for five days and we had 13 inbound leads from that which is a 10% response rate. Since that time I’ve increased the outbound e-mails to 75 per day, it’s been about six days. We’ve had about another 150 e-mails go out and look we’re up to 48 leads now. We had 12 so we’ve added 36 more leads out of 150 e-mails, guys, that’s almost a 20% response rate. It’s absolutely incredible what we’re getting through here.

Again I just wanted to point that out because I’m really hoping that many of you guys that are thinking about joining the Mastermind or if you’re doing any sort local, I would highly encourage to come join us starting in January, well now is a good time too by the way but because I’m going to be literally dissecting exactly how that’s built step by step throughout the year so that by the end of the year, you could build your own automated agency if you so choose, or you can wait until we can build it for you and you can pay us and we’ll build it for you. Now that’s coming too but that probably won’t be for at least another year. Anyways, with that said, I’m going to move on. If you guys have any questions about that specifically, come join the Mastermind, I’ll be happy to answer them, all right? You guys got any comments on that before I move on?

Adam: I do. I’m [inaudible 00:10:57]. I think this is awesome.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Such a cool process because it pulls in just a ton of stuff I won’t go into but just yeah, I love it. I’m excited for this.

Bradley: Yeah, me too, man.

Marco: For anyone who’s new and watching this, those are people who got e-mails and contacted us back.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: It’s no longer just a cold e-mail going out. Hopefully you’ll be able to find some of these people contacting us and saying, “We’re interested. Tell me more,” which is I mean that’s just awesome so now you have a pool of people to contact.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Anyone that’s new, that’s what’s going on. We go really in depth as you said in the Mastermind. The Mastermind is the place to be in 2018. If you’re not there, you should be.

What Are The Points You Need To Convey To The Client When It Comes To Service Costing?

Bradley: Totally agree, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thank you, Marco. All right, enough of that. Let’s get into some questions. We’ve got several. I’m excited. Let’s get into it. Mel, she’s up. She says, “I’m sending video e-mails and it’s getting some traction but when asked for price, I’m having some trouble. What kind of points do you try to convey when they ask how much does it cost.” I swear this question was asked last week. I swear this was … Anyways, how much does it cost? Now if that’s the first question out of a prospect’s mouth, they’re probably not going to be a good client. I’ve experienced that many, many times. Those are price-conscious people. I understand we all are price-conscious to a degree but the problem with people that come right out of the gate with how much does it cost is it’s because they have already made assumptions and all they’re looking at … They look at marketing as an expense, not an investment. It’s very hard to satisfy any client that thinks of marketing as an expense instead of an investment.

Marketing should create an ROI. If it creates a return on investment then it’s an investment, it’s an ROI. Investment is right in that title, you know what I mean? When they come right out of the gate with thinking of it as an expense and asking how much does it cost then even if you were to land them as a client, you’re probably going to have difficulty with them. They’re never going to be satisfied. There always going to be questioning, what’s going on because they’re penny pinching, right, and because they’re … Again I just want to explain it, that’s a red flag. For me over the years after doing this so many years, that’s a red flag for me. I would recommend that when it comes down to that, I try to avoid pricing stuff upfront until after I’ve had the chance to talk with them and analyze like a particular property. That said, sometimes you just have to talk them up front like what it is and you’re going to lose them. A lot of the times you’re going to lose them but don’t cut undercut your services just to try to land clients.

I get how important it is especially when you’re starting out or you’re trying to go to an agency because I’ve done it, guys like I have taken any client on that was willing to give me money regardless of my gut feeling. We’ve all talked about this all of my partners, all of us at [inaudible 00:14:08] had similar expenses. I’m looking forward to hearing some comments about this again in just a moment. My point is every time I’ve done it as well where many times over the years where I’ve said okay it’s money I’m going to take it, and I’ve had a bad gut feeling and then it ends up being a nightmare. It requires so much additional work, so much hand holding, so much convincing that what I’m doing is valuable that it’s just not worth it. You’re better off just prospecting more clients until you find those that don’t put up as much resistance or to understand that it’s an investment that should produce a return on investment, excuse me, should produce a return instead of an expense.

Again when it comes down to somebody says how much does it cost, typically that’s if you want to just answer him, get him out of your life like thank you very much, that’s what Bill Goodin in Hot Prospects says. He says it all in one word, no spaces between them, “Thankyouverymuch” click like hang up. You know what I mean? I don’t mean be a prick about it. I just mean like give him the price and let them say, “Oh no, that’s too much.” Let them hang up on you then, that’s fine. Don’t take it personally, move on. Prospect like what I just showed you over here, fill your pipeline full of prospects and you won’t have to worry about that. Does that make sense? Now I know you’re doing video e-mails and I know that’s a much slower process and that’s why I recommend that with the video e-mails, you keep them very short because you don’t want to spend … Here’s the thing, Mel, when I get a get a client referral and I do a video e-mail with an analysis of their properties and stuffs, sometimes those go 20, 25 minutes long.

I’m not kidding but that’s because it was a client referral so there’s a much better chance of me landing that client anyways. It’s a high quality lead because it was a client referral but when I’m doing cold prospecting and I’m sending video e-mails which I don’t really do so much anymore because it’s so time consuming. I like the shotgun approach better because you could scale it. With starting out that rifle approach of doing video e-mails is very effective but I would try to keep your initial video, your outreach video, down to five minutes or less so that you can bang out several of them within an hour and get them out because again it’s a numbers game.

You might get out of sending 10, you might get three. My consistent number is worth three or four responses out of every 10 e-mails that I sent. Out of every three or four responses, I would typically get one client, sometimes two, and so again that’s what I recommend that you try to keep it short. Otherwise you end up with 15 or 20-minute videos for every potential client, cold e-mail that you send and that’s just way too much work. What are your comments, guys?

Hernan: I totally agree with you, Bradley in terms of the quality of the clients that you’re getting. It’s funny because I wasn’t franker with one of the Mastermind’s call like five minutes before they hang up. One thing he said really resonated with me and he was saying, “It’s way easier to increase the quality of the clients that you get than to try to reeducate them into why your stuff that you’re doing is worth it.” In other words, instead of trying to reeducate themselves on why they will need to take your marketing serious, and why they’re doing an investment and why they should be doing and should be doing that, that puts you in a perspective of, “Well, I need now to educate them into why my stuff is valuable.” The perfect client, which is something that you need to come up with. There’s nothing that … You need to come up with what’s your perfect type of client, which sometimes like I would say 9 times out 10, we don’t do. We just go and try to find as many clients as possible and that puts you in the position of getting the worst type of clients on earth pretty much, right?

Number one, ask yourself what your perfect type of client is and number two, try to find those clients in a way that they already understand that marketing is an investment. Bradley would tell you yeah go after the ad works guys. Go after the guys that are already advertising because they already know. Go after the guys that are doing SEO that you can actually pinpoint that they’re doing SEO or they have their maps already set up. Maybe not perfect but they understand the value that ad works can bring to their business et cetera, et cetera so that’s why I think it’s way easier and way more rewarding. You will end up working with better clients, getting better quality and try to enhance your process of getting clients to get better quality clients than try to turn someone’s minds over, which is nearly impossible and it will wear you out. You know what I’m saying? That would be my comment.

Adam: All right, I’ll play devil’s advocate real quick and not disagreeing actually, just offering the counterpoint and I would say that also you got to do your homework on this one. I’ve seen people go in and try to just sell videos. Let’s say they are selling video rankings or something like that. They go in and they get to the money part and they don’t know what their potential client’s cost is or what their business model is and then it becomes really hard for people to talk because they don’t understand or they go in with the completely wrong offer. Make sure you do your homework and find out how much is a lead work to this person. You don’t have to know down to the dollar but do you know the market? Do you know how much it’s worth? Is the lead worth $5 or $50? Figuring that out and then you can at least talk until it leads you to the right people.

Bradley: Yeah, and to expand on what Adam said, if you understand the market. Your potential customer base, which will be like local businesses or whatever kind. In my case like contractors, tree service contractors, right? Let’s just use that as an example. I understand about how much a good tree service lead is worth to a contractor because I understand from being in that industry what a qualified lead could produce for a contractor as far as revenue. With that said, you can frame or stir the conversation into a let me show you how instead of how much does it cost, let me show you what it can produce. Does that make sense because then you’re taking the cost equation. You’re taking cost out of the equation, right? The focus isn’t on the cost. The focus is on the return and that when you reframe their question in that light or in that manner then they start to see the return on investment potential but as Hernan said I 100% agree with him. If you have to first convince somebody as to why your service is valuable or important then before you then have to sell it to him then you’re doing twice as much work because first you have to convince then you have to sell so avoid that.

If you feel like you’re catching resistance where you’re trying to convince them then let them go, thank you very much, click. Thank you very much, click. Get the hell out of my life. Next like SWSWSWSW, some will, some won’t, excuse me. Some will, some won’t, so what, someone’s waiting, and that’s really what it comes down to. Just fill your pipeline with quality leads. Know your market. Know the potential what a lead is worth so that you can stir the conversation towards a return on investment versus cost price. Does that make sense?

Marco: I’m reading this just a touch differently and I don’t disagree with either you or Hernan but I’m more inclined with Adam. If she’s having trouble understanding how to price her services, I mean that’s a bit different and that’s just understanding the market and what are leads worth. I mean if a guy … If a lead is worth $2,000 to that person and you can produce, you should be concentrating on what you’re going to do, right? You get paid for what you produce rather than getting paid for whatever for something nebulous that the client doesn’t understand. I’m going to affect your bottom line positively, that’s what I’m going to do for you. As long as you take that approach, you understand the market, you understand the client. You understand what a lead is worth then you won’t have trouble pricing yourself and your services, that’s how I’m seeing this question.

Bradley: Yeah, and last thing, that’s a great question by the way, Mel so I’m going to plus one at number one. I’m sorry we spent so much time on this, guys but that’s a fantastic question. What happened? It didn’t plus one. The last thing I would say about that, Mel is you can always have a foot in the door product or service that you can provide even for free, right? I don’t recommend … Guys, don’t work for free for often but you can have a foot in the door offer some sort of product or service that you provide for free to prove yourself to a potential client, to a prospect, that works really well like I do that. I’ll talk to a potential client and I’ll say, “Look, let’s talk about pricing.” If that comes up then I’ll say, “Let me just prove to you that I’m capable of producing some results and then we’ll talk about that. This is what I’m going to do.”

A lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll do some video marketing campaign so I can get them some quick wins that they can see by going to search results and seeing videos ranked for various keywords, various locations whatever. I’ll just do a quick … It might take me 30 minutes to set up a video campaign and blast it out using some spam tools or whatever. Get them ranked for a few keywords and then I just show them the results and say, “Look, this is what I was able to do in a few days and then imagine what I could do if you hired for this or that.” Does that make sense? You can give them something for free just to whet their appetite so to speak and then you can upsell them into or sell them into an actual service at that point you’ve already … You’ve given them results in advance.

Again video marketing is fantastic for that because it’s something that you can get done very, very quickly. You can get results quickly. It’s almost tangible, right? They can see the results and because of that, you can oftentimes upsell, that’s why I use video primarily as my opening product or service, okay. Again, great, great question, Mel.

How Would You Optimize A Maps Listing For A Potential Client Located In The Midst Of Small Counties?

All right, Shibga’s up. He says … Or Shibga, I’m sorry if I butchered that. “My potential client is located in the midst of a bunch of small counties. Since I’m only doing maps, he won’t be showing up in counties even just 10 miles from him. The competitor’s currently up there are getting traffic from difficult keywords organically and that is not something I want to do. What would you suggest? Thank you.” Well-

Marco: If I may?

Bradley: Go ahead.

Marco: He’s in RYS Academy reloaded and that’s Monday’s webinar, dude.

Bradley: Perfect. There you go. As far as everybody else, it’s not an RYS. My suggestion in that case would be, well I’m going to give you number one, ad words, right? You can do that rather quickly and you can just set up GO targeting so it’s very easy to get them to start generating traffic for all the different areas that way plus if you’ve got a Google My Business, you use the location extension for your ad words ad then you can actually have your maps, your Google Maps, your Google My Business Maps listing show up in Maps in the actual Maps. Now I’m starting to see the Maps listed, the first listing in the three-pack is now an ad for a lot of queries like that’s been rolling out slowly but I’m starting to see that appear more and more in various industries now where there’s an actual four-pack instead of a three-pack because the first listing is an ad, and that’s something that you can absolutely do. All you need is a location extension, which means you need a Google My Business listings verified, and then you can use the location extension and ad words, so that’s number one.

Number two would be to rank organically. I don’t see a lot of value in that for local lead [inaudible 00:26:22] type of stuff. I’ve got mixed results on that but that’s all you could do short of setting up PO boxes in all the various areas, which can be a pain in the ass, and then you’ve got a ton of Google My Business listings to optimize, a bunch of citations, all that kind of stuff to do. It’s really up to you. I would do what Marco was talking about with RYS stuff, he’s doing multi-location training on Monday but I would also consider ad words and go after some organic stuff unless you’re willing and capable of setting up a bunch of Google My Business profiles listings for various locations using PO boxes or something, okay.

What Are Your Thoughts On AMP?

Eliza says, “Hey guys, have you heard of AMP? If so, what are your thoughts on it?” Marco, I’ll let you talk on that since you developed the plug-in.

Marco: We have an AMP plug-in. All you have to do is go to the Facebook group, AMP Creators Mastermind in Facebook and join then download the plug-in. It’s working for news more than anything else, that’s where AMP really helps. It speeds up the page. A very light version of the page is served up through AMP. I think as Google goes more into mobile, it will have greater weight. It will become more important. Right now it hasn’t had the impact that it should’ve had but that’s because if you’re not producing news, the Accelerated Mobile Page experience isn’t really necessary. Your website is fast enough as it is or should be fast enough as it is, right? I mean that’s just my take on it. We do have the plug-in so you can experiment with it and see whether it works for you, whether it has any effect in your niche. We haven’t seen any effects as a matter of fact with AMP on anything local unless you produce news, something that’s newsworthy like Google’s going to pick up.

Bradley: Yeah. I don’t have much of a comment because I haven’t really played with it much.

What Do You Think Are Some Issues With Writing Blog Posts And Repurpose Them To Videos, Embeds, And Syndication?

All right, quit this house says, “Good day. I want to write blog posts. Create a video of each blog with content samurai then syndicate the video. Take that link of video embedded in the blog then syndicate the blog. Any issues? PS, get better soon, Marco.” No, that’s fine. In fact I’ve talked about this in Mastermind in Master class when we used to have a Master class as well. One of the strategies that I’ve used with some of my contractors, the ones that are willing to do it, which is a great strategy is their technicians basically give instructions to their technicians. Let’s say plumber, that’s one of the industries that I’ve done this for, it’s a plumbing company.

They had I think six employees or technicians. Six plumbers that were out there working with vans and all that kind of stuff. They just go out on job site and take their phone, iPhone, Android whatever and record a very short video from the jobs that they go out on. Just say, “Hey, this is Joe from Joe’s Plumbing in Fairfax, Virginia. We’re out on location in Fairfax, Virginia, we got a call for a water heater that needed replaced and this what I found.” He takes his phone and shows where the water heater was. The heating element went bad, we basically replaced the water heater and now this customer has hot water again, and they’re happy. If you have any water heater problems in Fairfax, Virginia, contact us at an in-call to action. Very, very simple like a 60-second video, 60 to 90 seconds, sometimes even less and then they send me the video file and then I upload it to YouTube.

I send it to a transcription service, have it transcribed then I go post the video with the transcription on the blog, which then syndicates out across the syndication network, and it gives me the ability to optimize the YouTube video and rank that for keywords like water heater repair, Fairfax, Virginia for example and as well as the blog post, which adds additional content to the site that’s a 100% relevant, it’s a 100% unique user or 100% created, unique created content. Does that make sense? It’s a very, very good strategy because it’s something that you don’t even have to do like to me, it’s very simple to just … They send me the video, I upload it to YouTube, optimize the videos, send that to rev.com to get it transcribed, get the transcription back within usually a couple of hours, and then I can post that as the actual post content, which has its keyword rich.

It’s got the call to action and ends up going into silos so I interlink that up to the silo heading, and then that goes out across the syndication network which in turn helps to boost the overall site; very, very powerful strategy. I don’t see anything wrong with that at all. I would encourage you to do it. Test with it to see. I haven’t done it specifically talking about what you’re talking about here but I can’t imagine why that would be any different. It’s a good strategy, check it out.

How Would You Sell Map Embeds To Somebody?

Muhammad, what’s up, Muhammad? He’s here every week asking questions and being very engaged, it’s awesome. We’re glad to have you, buddy. He says, “Hey guys, how would you sell Map Embeds to somebody?” You don’t, Muhammad. You wouldn’t sell Map Embeds unless it’s an SEO or somebody that understands it. My first reaction would be don’t. Don’t even try to explain. I mean some people are inquisitive and you can try to explain it in a way but a lot of the times like when you start talking about that kind of stuff with prospects, their eyes glass over because they really don’t understand it anyways. I try to avoid that like technical kind of stuff with most clients if possible, but anyways “I never really thought of a Map ranking as something to include in SEO [inaudible 00:32:12]. Is it something you guys would include?”

Yeah, when I’m selling SEO services, I typically for the most part am selling Maps ranking, local SEO Maps ranking for the most part but I don’t particularly tell them all the different things that I’m doing to get them ranked. Not stuff like Map Embeds because they wouldn’t understand like for the most part. I might tell them I’m going to produce content. I’m going to optimize your listing, your photos. We’re going to create corresponding content on your website. We’re going to do some link building stuff and syndicate content out across your social media properties to get you some exposure and traffic, all that kind stuff but I don’t talk about Map Embeds and that kind of stuff. What do you guys think about that?

Marco: I totally agree. Don’t ever sell rankings, dude, Muhammad. You cannot control rankings. If you can’t control rankings then you cannot sell what you can’t be sure that you’re going to do. I mean you can be really good at it but then run into a stubborn niche or stubborn sub niche where you just can’t rank them out, and you just sold the client on ranking them out so now what are you going to do? Sell results, guys, everyone, everyone in this. When you’re out there and you’re selling your services, you’re going to produce results. What those results are, that’s up to you. It’s not up to the client to decide what the results are. The results will be reflected in the bottom line through visitors to the website, leads and close leads and all of that. How you go about it, that’s what they’re hiring for you the expert. Approach it that way, don’t ever, ever sell rankings ever.

Bradley: I would only comment that I actually do often sell rankings. What I do is I preface. I say, “Look, I don’t work for Google,” so Google can change its algorithm at any time. They’re constantly adjusting your algorithm so things change but the trend is, the idea or the goal is to get you ranked in the Maps like that’s what I say when I’m talking to a prospect. I say, “This is what I know works and I’m going to do this.” I don’t sell them rankings but I tell them that they can expect to see some movement and we’re likely going to get the goal, the end goal what my intention is to get them ranked in Maps, but what I’m selling are the services that have shown to prove that is the end result. Does that make sense?

It’s like I don’t say or guarantee rankings, I don’t because I’m not … If I’m going to guarantee rankings, I’m going to own the asset. It’s going to be lead gen thing because I’m not guaranteeing it to anybody but me but I don’t guarantee rankings to clients. Unless for example I got a video production company that I do a lot of wholesale SEO for, I basically don’t guarantee rankings but I tell them if we’re not ranked on page one then you just don’t pay for it. Does that make sense? So that’s what I do, I don’t guarantee rankings but I tell them they don’t pay unless they’re ranked. Keep moving, we got two more questions from him. We’re going to try to roll through these. I know we’re running short on time today already.

How Would You Sell Syndication Networks To Bloggers And YouTubers?

“For sales practices and extra money, I’m trying to sell syndication networks to bloggers and YouTubers. How would I best approach this? I’ve bought BB’s recommended book on cold e-mail and use his practices but I must be doing something wrong because I haven’t seen much interest.” All right, so a couple of things, Muhammad, my thoughts on trying to contact and sell to bloggers and YouTubers is that they’re in the marketing space so to speak, they’re in the digital space maybe not marketing but they’re in the whole digital space, and they’re probably numb. I’m trying to think about the right word here. They’re probably used to just ignoring pitch type stuff especially probably a lot of YouTubers because I know like our YouTube channels like we’ve got our [inaudible 00:36:18] Master generals as well as my own channel, we got a lot of subscribers and I get pitched shit all day long all the time. We get spam e-mails from people trying to sell us on YouTube services like stuff all the time. They’re probably just ignoring a lot of that. They’re numb to it so to speak.

Bloggers are very similar because bloggers get pitched all the time on guest post and link swaps and link exchanges, all that kind of stuff as well. It could just be that, I don’t know because I haven’t really pitched to those kind of people but the other thing would be maybe … I’m not sure about cold e-mailing those. I would have to think about it and obviously, Muhammad, I would recommend that you just test different … You’re going to have to split test your different cold e-mail approaches. What I’m doing for contractors is working incredibly well but I don’t know that that method would work for YouTubers and bloggers. I would just try different types of cold outreach e-mails until you found one that seems to work well and then repeat that, scale that, right? It’s going to requite some split testing on your part. It’s a lot of work I know. It’s a lot of trial and error but once you find something that works like what I found with the contractor prospecting that I’m doing then you can scale it and you can just see massive results, okay?

As far as when I started selling networks like when I first built, started outsourcing that and I trained some virtual assistants, and I started selling networks, I sold them retail to local businesses and then I sold them wholesale to SEO agencies. What I did was I just went to the various marketplaces like SEO Mojo was one of them, SEO Clerks was another one of them, and I just put up listings for networks to sell syndication networks, and that’s how I ended up landing a lot of SEO agency clients was through those service sites by selling networks. I would sell it for like … I believe I was selling networks at the time for $297 or $299 around $300 for a single network but for agencies, I had an agency from Australia contact me and he wanted 10 per month, 10 syndication networks per month.

At the time I actually I wouldn’t do it, well, I actually probably would do it now still but I ended up selling those networks at $100 a piece to him so he’d pay me $1,000 a month. I’d sell them. I have my team would build him 10 networks and my networks cost me about $50 to build so I would literally pocket about $500 to not really do a damn thing, which was awesome. You may want to consider doing that too like putting your service up on some of these sites, all right?

How Would You Explain The Benefits Of PR In Layman’s Terms To A Client?

Last is, “How would you explain the benefits of PR in layman’s term to a client?” Exposure, brand building and traffic, that’s it. You don’t sell the SEO part of it. You can mention that it should have an SEO benefit, should help them it will likely or often will help them to rank better but would you want to sell is the exposure, the brand building and the traffic that it will produce, those are the things.

You want to talk about the benefits not the features. Essentially you want to tell them how, what are the end results that a press release can provide that’s traffic, authority and brand building and exposure, massive exposure. Anybody else would comment on that? All right, we’re going to keep moving.

Marco: Yeah, I know. I was about to say that, yeah. I agree with you, Bradley in terms of … Business owners they all care about how many new clients, how many new leads they can get. Usually they don’t care about rankings or positions or whatever like keywords and all of that jazz. If you talk about in business terms like again this is an investment, I like the different … The comparison between assets and liabilities but the way [inaudible 00:40:30] gets it. For example, you would have money that you throw away every week pretty much. You buy stuff, you go to Starbucks, you go out to dinner whatever, you buy clothes, that’s money that goes out and never comes back, right? Assets and the way millionaires think is that they invest their money into stuff like real estate or stocks or whatever, now would put more money into their pockets so that’s how they’re thinking. Well, you can do the same because you can say this is a service that would put more money to your pocket because that will increase the visibility of your website, the traffic and ultimately if the website converts, the leads, right?

If you think about it, you’re investing the money. We always backtrack to the investment versus the spending side of things so that’s how I usually frame it and it works.

How Do You Get Viewers To A Niche YouTube Channel That Contains Other People’s Popular Videos?

Bradley: Yeah, awesome, thanks. All right, the next one is Eddie Grim. Eddie, I read this question ahead of time and I’m not sure how you’re going to get viewers to your videos. I understand you’re saying that you’re starting a niche top-based YouTube channel. [inaudible 00:41:38] a lot of other people’s popular videos to my channel. The question that I would have for you, Eddie is if you’re just adding other people’s popular videos to playlists because that’s really the only way you can do it. You can’t really add their videos to your channel unless you download their videos and then upload to your channel, which is against terms of service, right? I’m not saying you can’t do that, hint, hint but I am telling you that it’s against terms of service and you may get a copyright claim or something like that from one of those people if you are to download and re-upload on to your channel so keep that in mind. However, you can put other people’s videos into your own playlist and there’s some benefit for doing that.

The only problem with the next part of your question is you say, “the goal is to gain viewers that I can re-target with ads.” Unless, the video is on your channel like it’s your video uploaded to your channel then even if you have other people’s popular videos and playlist and somebody were to click through from your playlist to that other person’s video, you won’t be able to re-target them because you won’t get a re-marketing cookie from somebody clicking on to their video. Does that make sense? As far as I know you can’t and again I may be mistaken here but I don’t think you can set up a re-marketing list for videos within a playlist like I think it’s only for individual videos or a channel, which in that case you can re-target them if they land on your channel, right? I’d have to go in and look at ad words to see.

I’m not going to do that right now obviously we’re running short on time anyways but I’m going to be doing a lot of ad word stuff starting in January with the new Mastermind training curriculum. The first month or the first module is all about PPC (Pay Per Click) and YouTube is going to be included in that so it’s something that I will probably have soon, I’ll know for sure. I know that you can re-target people that interact with any videos on your channel. I don’t know if that also includes other people’s videos that you’ve embedded or added to playlist from your channel or not, I don’t know. Can anybody else confirm that?

Marco: Yeah, I know. I think that is the exact same thing that you’re saying, Bradley like you need to own the asset in order for Google to count the cookie towards your re-marketing list. What I would say, Eddie is see why these videos are so popular, try to emulate them, try to do the same title, keywords, et cetera, et cetera and then try to rank them on YouTube because that will put you like for example on semantic mastery channel and on my own channel, I’m pretty sure that will probably is channel two. 20% of the videos bring 80% of the views. Is that big? Is that cute? You will have, I don’t know, I probably have a couple of 100 videos semantic mastery has at this point thousands of videos but only a small fraction of those videos will for some reason will get … Not for some reason but because they are really targeting really high volume keywords on YouTube, right? They’re targeting really high volume keywords and they’re getting shared. They’re getting a lot of comments so YouTube will increase their view cap, and that will trickle down into the rest of the channel.

Here’s the thing, you want to try to emulate these popular videos, record your own version, curate them whatever, and try to run them on YouTube so that you can now own the asset. Once you have that, again, you need to create a bunch of videos so that 20% of those videos will get 80% of the traffic and once you have that then you can start re-targeting those people with that. You can also do pay-per-view. You can try to use the ad words to a video, and that’s something that you can do as long as you own the video. You can do with [inaudible 00:45:29] but there’s absolutely zero sense on spending money to do that but the point here is that you own the video but that’s a number scale. The pay-per-view needs to be lower than the re-targeting cost and that’s usually not the case, right? You’re paying more per view than that the ROI that you’re getting when you’re re-targeting these people so have that mind.

The best way to go, in my opinion, will be to get a lot of organic traffic from YouTube. Rank your videos on YouTube so that you can get a lot of organic traffic and then go to channel re-targeting.

Bradley: By the way, there are ways to siphon some authority off of those videos that are really popular that get a shit ton of views. Eddie, that way that you do that is scrape the tags from the videos that are ranking really well or that are getting a lot of views, the really popular videos. Scrape the tags. There are tools that can do that. You can also right click and view page source. Get the first two or three tags but there are tools that will scrape tags for you. Scrape the tags. Use those same tags in your video as well as the channel name of the channel that has the popular video and put that video into a playlist from your channel alongside of your other videos. In other words, when you go to optimize your own video targeting the same type of keywords as the popular videos that you want to siphon some authority from, you want to scrape the tags from that popular video, place it into your video.

You also want to scrape the channel or add the channel name as a tag in your video. You also want to create a playlist with that popular video next to your video. What happens is a lot of the times, it’s not 100% of the time and I don’t know what the threshold like what the circumstances are to make it work sometimes and not others but what I’ve seen a lot of that, when you do that is your video will end up popping on the end screen of a video when they show related videos like checkerboard of related videos. Your video will pop into there as well as in the right-hand sidebar on the watch page of the related … The right-hand sidebar where they show related videos. You’ll end up popping into there and you end up getting a lot of referral traffic just because you’re in the related video section if that makes sense, and that’s a great way to siphon authority off of other people’s videos, okay? Good question though, Eddie.

Do You Know A Tool Like Cinch Tweet From Mastery PR Intended For Linkedin?

Jonathan says, “I purchased Cinch Tweet for mastery PR and this tool works like crazy.” Awesome, that’s great to hear. “Do you have similar tool for LinkedIn?” I don’t know, Jonathan. I don’t even know Cinch Tweet is. I just know that I know we did a promo for it for mastery PR but I’m not a tweet guy or Twitter guy so I haven’t played with that at all. I don’t know of one for LinkedIn, sorry.

Adam: Yeah, Jonathan. What you could do is probably hop into the group if you’re not already a part of the semantic mastery, our free Facebook group and ask in there because I think Chris has been at least playing around with it so that would be the place to ask.

How Would You Reinstate The Previous Top Ranking Of A Client Site That Targets 3 Main Keywords?

Bradley: Yeah. All right, Ralph’s new. He says, “Hey guys, I’m a rookie when it comes to SEO for site. I have a client in Minneapolis area. He used to rank on page one for his key phrase, something changed a couple of years ago and now he’s back on page three, if even that. I just took over his site trying to get him back on page one. His company specializes in three areas. Okay, the way the site seems to be set up, they’re trying to shoot for all three targets on the front page at once.” Yeah, that’s pretty common actually. “Should I redo the title of description in H1 tags to shoot for keyword one and put keyword two and three on other pages? I tried using video to get them on page one, that doesn’t seem to work.”

Okay, yeah, Ralph, I would absolutely recommend that … I don’t typically try to rank the homepage guys. I mean it happens and there’s ways that you can force the homepage to rank but I usually optimize for again for contractors if they have separate services. I always like to try to optimize a specific service page for basically one primary service, right? I have separate pages for each one of those. In your case, it would be a separate page for keyword one, one for keyword two and one for keyword three because what happens is each one of those pages can be highly optimized for that particular keyword, that service in that location. It’s likely that you can end up ranking that as long as there’s not other domain health issues, Ralph. Assuming that everything else is fine, I would recommend that you would target specifically each keyword or service with its own page and then optimize it for that but then what you do is obviously you just internally link from each one of those pages up to the homepage.

In Maps you’re usually going to rank their homepage in Maps, not always the case but usually but then for organic, you would end up ranking the individual pages based upon the keywords search query, right?

Marco: I have a question. Sorry to stop you while you’re going through this but do we still have a backdoor to SEO bootcamp?

Bradley: I think we do.

Marco: Because I mean I was just going through that over the weekend.

Bradley: It’s amazing.

Marco: And I couldn’t stop. I went and I was lying down in bed and just listening and I went through. I forget how many videos I went through just listening. The guy is amazing on his keyword research and how to set this up. Ralph, everything that you’re looking for and how to set this up, how to target the keyword whether it’s a category, whether it is the top of the silo, whether it’s supporting LSI and whatever, this is covered in there. I have yet to see anyone who covers on page SEO as thoroughly as what’s covered in SEO bootcamp.

Bradley: Yeah, dude. He’s bad ass, man. I don’t know if it’s … I think the $500 price is now doubled unfortunately. I think it’s $1,000 now but it’s worth it even at $1,000. I’m not kidding, Ralph. It’s fantastic. It really is that good. If somebody didn’t already drop the link, it’s semanticmastery.com/seobootcamp, I believe, that will take you over to it if you want to check it out. I’m not sure if that’s the link or not. If not, if somebody-

Adam: Yeah, I’m looking for it right now just to confirm.

Bradley: Yeah, that’s what I would suggest, Ralph is obviously optimize a separate page for each one of those and then you can link from those pages up to your homepage, that would be the better route to go than trying to be … If you’re trying to cover too many topics on one page and they’re not closely related enough then you dilute the optimization of any one of the keywords if that makes sense, okay? All right, we’re almost out of time, guys. Unfortunately we didn’t get … Well, I guess we got the most of them.

Will A Syndicated Content About Recipe Triggers Duplicate Content Issue?

All right so next question, “Hi. We are selling a new sweetener on our blog e-com site. Bloggers started to create recipes with it on their blogs, which is awesome. Now I started to create blog posts with those recipes by cloning them on our blog inside my recipe silo and these posts are then syndicated to a syndication network too. I’m doing this for obvious reasons, easy content and creation for me and additional publicity for them. Question, will this trigger and kind of duplicate content issues for me or not?”

No, it won’t because … Well, first of all just make sure that you are attributing. As long as you are citing the source … Okay, it won’t create any content issues for you anyways regardless, okay, period but to do it legally and properly the way that you should do it ethically as well is you make sure that you are getting attribution to the source where you got those recipes. Always cite the source. Give credit where credit is due, that’s not going to cost you any issues if you don’t as far as SEO issues, but it can cause … You can get DMCA complaints, which are basically copyright infringement complaints. If one of those bloggers decided that you were infringing upon their intellectual property, and they decided do a DMCA complaint then Google can de-index that page or post and that’s a bad sign for you and it’s a bad sign for the domain. I would recommend that you just you are always linking back to the source.

You can no-follow the links, that’s what I do. No-follow them but make sure that you link back to the source and give them the credit where it’s due, okay?

Should You Link Back To The Original Post Or Just Cite Them On The Syndicated Blog Post?

Question two, “Is it enough to cite their blog in the bottom of my current recipe without …” No, I would always link back to it, always. If you’re worried about passing dues, no-follow the link, okay? “As I link back to it, cite their blog at the bottom of my current or should I also link back to their original post?” Yeah, always link back to the original source of the content that you’re curating, that’s essentially what you’re doing. You’re curating content which is perfectly legit, that’s how most of the content is produced for all of my blogs, and client blogs and lead gen sites and all that is through curation. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just make sure that you cite the source.

By the way when you’re curating content, guys, sometimes you’re still going to get people that are pissed off about it, which is dumb in my opinion but sometimes because you are providing them a link, potential exposure, potential traffic but you are giving credit where it’s due. I still have gotten some cease and desist, take-down notices type stuff from curating, it happens from time to time. It’s just part of the game. Just don’t freak out when it happens. “I’m asking this because they all link to different pages on my site in their recipes. This would be some sort of reciprocal linking, I guess, which I heard is not good.” No, it’s fine. In that case, in this particular circumstance, that’s absolutely fine because it’s not like you’re trying to gain for SEO. You guys are just cross-promoting because it makes sense, it’s relevant. It’s not an SEO thing, right? I mean it provides SEO value but the intent is not strictly for SEOs. Does that make sense?

Reciprocal linking was something that was a no-no years ago. I don’t know if it’s still considered a no-no in Google’s eyes because there is a lot of crosslinking between and co-citation and things like that now. I’m talking about old directories, guys. A lot of web directories, they would only publish your link if you put a widget in the footer that linked to their directory. Those are reciprocal links that are frowned upon but two bloggers cross-promoting each other’s post, that’s not really … I don’t work for Google so I don’t know but I can tell you it’s logical for that to not be a reciprocal link penalty type thing. Any comments on that, guys?

Marco: Yeah, I haven’t been doing a lot of reciprocity like reciprocal links lately so I wouldn’t … I don’t have data like recent data.

Which Should You Get First, RYS Stack Or Syndication Network Or Both?

Bradley: All right, we’re almost out of time. Fortunately we got through almost all of the questions. Harold asks, “Hey guys, what’s up? Quick question, should I get an RYS stack, a syndication network or both?” Well, my go-to answer is going to be both. Of course, Harold. No, I mean that for real. I always start with syndication networks is always standard operating procedure but as soon as that gets built, I order the RYS drive stack as well, but it is really standard operating procedure, so I would say yes to both. Any comments, guys?

Marco: No, absolutely. Set up your syndication network, prime it just like we teach in the syndication academy. Once that’s done, get the RYS stack going and link to everything in T1. I mean it’s really that simple, and you can power everything up through link building through your drive stack, which will protect your T1, and your money site.

Which Company Provides The Best Citation Services?

Bradley: All right, Dan says, “Hey, gents. What are your suggestion for best source to have citations done?” Serpspace of course, Dan, duh. Dan, I’m giving you a hard time but yeah Serpspace. You can go in there and like … If you’re looking for the Cadillac, the Ferrari of citations, you’re going to spend more money but they are fabulous. They are done very, very well. I would say Loganix, they’ve got some really good packages. Semanticmastery.com/loganix but for new sites typically, I would just go with what we have in Serpspace and just order the big citation directory sites, which is like the national type sites and then I try to go with the hyper local type citations, which are a lot more like niche specific or local specific type directories. Those are always like standard operating procedure.

I usually start right off the bat with new sites with about anywhere between 40 to 60 citations, which is about 20 or so of the big national directories like the big heavy hitters, Yelp and Angie’s List, Yellowpages that kind of stuff, and then we try to find … We scrape citation or directory sites that are either niche specific or more localized and then build the additional citations there. Also don’t forget, Dan, to order citations or aggregate listing submissions like New Stark Louise. What are the other ones? Info USA, several of those. The other one is Factual is one. The other one is Axiom. Those are all really good because you get listed in those and about three to six months later, you’ll have citations and a ton of different directories because other directories scrape or pull data from those, and create listings for you. It’s more of a long-term thing but you want to do that right upfront because in about six months you’ll start seeing a whole bunch of new citations start popping up and you didn’t have to build them or create them.

All right, last question, I know we’re right at the five o'clock mark, “Is Cinch Twitter good for tier one? Can it be used on the Twitter attached to RSY stack?” Honestly, I have no response for that because I don’t even know what Cinch Tweet does. Anybody else have an answer to that?

Adam: No, I don’t. Good one to hop in the group probably and ask there.

Bradley: All right. We’re done, guys. Oh, wow. Everybody else bailed out. Thanks, everybody for being here. We’ll see everybody else next week, I guess because we don’t have any other webinars this week, do we?

Adam: I don’t think so.

Bradley: Sweet. All right, everybody, thanks for being here.

Adam: See you.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Bradley: See you.

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

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

Click on the video above to watch Episode 161 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

  Announcement

Adam: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is episode 161. Today is the sixth of December. First one in December, we’re rolling towards the end of the year but not quite there. Speaking of closer to the end of the year, we’re going to have a pretty awesome Hump Day Hangout coming up later in December but stay tuned for that, we’ll tell you more about that coming. Real quick, we want to go down and say hi to everybody and see how everyone is doing. Chris, how are you doing today?

Chris: Looking good. It’s glad to be here.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan, how about yourself?

Hernan: Good. It’s actually quite warm right now in Buenos Aires. Yeah, I’m excited for what’s coming. We have a lot of stuff coming. Oh, what? Are you cold?

Adam: No, I don’t know. I’m perfectly warm.

Hernan: Okay, right, okay.

Adam: Hey, Marco. How’s it going?

Marco: Well, the doctor took a look at my MRI today and said, “Holy shit.” Those are not words that you want to hear when the fucking doctor takes a look at your MRI of your fucking back, dude so that’s what I’m doing.

Adam: All right, fair enough. Bradley, how about you, man?

Bradley: I went to a doctor once with an ear infection and it hurt like a son of a bitch. The doctor put the thing in the ear to look at it and he goes, “Whoa.” I was like, “Doc, you’re not supposed to do that.” “I’ve never seen an eardrum look like that.”

Adam: Well, make it not look like that.

Bradley: No wonder it hurts, right? Anyway, this is great, guys. Today has been a really good day, really productive day. I got a shit ton of stuff done. I’m just excited to be here and answer some questions, and hang out.

Adam: Cool. Well, before we get into it, I got a couple of quick announcements. I’m going to post some stuff on the page. If you’ve never have come to Hump Day Hangouts, first of all, thank you very much for being here. It’s awesome and we love having more people join us. We got some good stuff for you, some resources I’m going to post on the page for you. If you were around over the Thanksgiving time period and for Black Friday then you saw the e-mails and you saw the page we got, you know that Syndication Academy is increasing a price. It’s going to be like a 50% jump. It’s something we’ve been putting off for a long time and this is last announcement that it’s happening, and the price is going up to $97 a month here shortly in seven days. We want to give everyone fair notice a nice reminder here before that happens, and you can get that for free if you join the Mastermind, all right? We want to remind people about that, that’s one of the many, many perks of being a Mastermind member.

Something else we wanted to talk about, obviously there’s been ongoing updates with RYSP loaded. There’s been a ton of new contents, stuff going on there. I’ll let Marco talk about this.

Marco: Yeah, we have in fact a new webinar coming up on Monday. We’re calling it Multi-Location Domination with Automation.

Bradley: Wow.

Marco: Yes, sir. We’re going there. We got in fact two scripts that we’re rolling out to make things easier just to allow people to make it as simple as possible to go and take over not only their local niche, right? The local area but surrounding areas and just take shit down city by city, that’s how we do it, that’s what we’re teaching. We’re also going to show how it’s done globally by the way because we’re in the lab taking a look at that, and as a matter of fact, when we roll out the Multi-Location Domination webinar, we’re going to raise the price on RYS reload. The price is going up. I don’t know how much. You know I always push as much as possible as much as you guys will allow but price is going up. I suggest if you’re on the fence, it’s time to get in. Get in where you fit in or get left behind. We’re going to teach people how to take over, it’s really that simple.

Adam: Nice. Yeah, it’ll be going up. We’ll have some more information coming out about that you guys if you’re watching. If you’re curious, I’ll also post the links obviously. If you’ve been thinking, “Oh, I’ve heard about RYS and it’s neat and maybe I should do that.” One, you should, it’s awesome. If not that then you should be checking out the [inaudible 00:04:05] services if you’re more of the outsourcing type, but if you’ve been thinking about getting in, now would be obviously a great time. Before we start answering questions, I think Bradley, you had something you wanted to share with people, right?

Bradley: A couple of things, number one, go to bradleybanner.com. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and also my daily Mindset updates. I just posted another video just a few minutes ago like literally 15 minutes ago that I recorded today kind of impromptu. I wasn’t planning on it but I had something that I wanted to share so I recorded a 20-minute video. I just posted it on Facebook as well as my YouTube channel. Going through those e-mails every single day, consistently every single day now, it takes me anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes to write an e-mail everyday but I’m developing a habit and it’s been … I can see … It’s like today I wrote e-mail number 20 and I can see the results already like it’s already improving my ability to write and convey thoughts better. In other words like it’s a habit worth developing. I’ve put it off for years and finally I’m developing the habit with intention and it’s working well like for example I had a bunch of VSLs video sales letter stuff that I had to record today and I had some scripts to write for some re-marketing videos and stuff.

Typically a VSL script would take me or a re-market whatever, a video script would take me hours to write but I was able to bang out three of them in about an hour’s time today. I attribute that to a habit of writing that I’ve started to develop. I encourage you guys to do something similar even if it’s journaling whatever. I’m just using the e-mail list as my vehicle. I would encourage you to go check it out because I basically talk about some pretty cool stuff as far as goal setting and mindset and that kind of thing. Anyway, that’s it. I do want to tease one thing rather quickly because we’re going to talk about this at the beginning part of next week’s Hump Day Hangouts briefly maybe 10 minutes or so. I’m going to cover this a little bit more in depth but today I just want to tease you guys with it. Oh, also check this out. I got my Mastermind shirt on. Thank you, Adam for sending it.

Adam: That’s pretty cool. Nice.

Bradley: Yeah, I meant to drop this down a little bit. There you go, how is that?

Adam: Nice.

Bradley: One of the thing, I just wanted to tease very quickly is guys the prospecting funnel stuff that I’ve been working on developing for a few months, I had to put it on hold for a bit while I worked on some other stuff. The last two weeks I’ve really been working on it hard again and it improved the process quite a bit, and the results are fucking astounding like I don’t know how else to say it other than that. I’m just going to give you guys a very quick sneak peek of this and then we’re going to talk about a little bit more next week. I’m not going to go into details, guys. This is more conceptual because this is going to be shared. This is being shared in the Mastermind. We are starting a new Mastermind educational track in January 2018 where we’re going to be basically building two businesses throughout the year from soup to nuts, start to finish.

One is a physical business like a brick and mortar type business, it’s a gym and then the other one obviously the emphasis is on the digital marketing but it’s going to be more than just digital marketing, right? It’s going to be traditional marketing as well as like setting up businesses, setting up a business, entity structuring, all that kind of stuff because I think that’s important. As marketing consultants, we should know about this stuff anyway, right? Number two, the second business. I was going to do two local businesses but I made an executive decision last week to make our local agency that we’re building right now as the second project that we’re going to highlight and cover as part of the Mastermind training next year. All of these is going to be revealed in very fine detail starting in January.

In fact I’ve already started sharing a lot of this agency building stuff which is an automated scalable agency. The way that i should’ve built mine originally but you can’t know which you don’t know, right? I’ve already started sharing a lot of that in the Mastermind but I’m just teasing you guys with this to encourage you to come join the Mastermind especially if you’re doing local because the results are undisputable, indisputable as far as like how well this is working on the prospecting side of things. Still working on the sale side, the fulfillment side, all of that is coming but the prospecting side is working. Enough teasing, let me just show you very quickly, I’m going to grab the screen. Guys, I’m not going to put this up for long but I want to show you something.

This is an image of the prospecting funnel. I told you I’m not going to put it up for long. I’m about to switch screens, take a screenshot fast, fast, fast. All right, moving on, that’s the prospecting funnel and take a look at this for example. This is the … I’m using drip.com as our auto responder for all contractors that are being put into this funnel, this prospecting funnel. These are only people that have taken action and you can see that like … I know it’s probably small on you, let me zoom in just a little bit, guys. [inaudible 00:09:08] look at just yesterday at it at 12-5 so December 5, we scroll down. We had 10 new contacts out of just yesterday alone. Those are inbound needs, guys. You guys see that? If we take a look at … Let me pull over here for just a moment.

This is our pipe drive account. This is what we’re using for our sales pipe line, it’s called pipe drive, it’s awesome. You can see that when I share a little bit of information about this a few weeks ago. I had run 125 e-mails through the system, 25 e-mails a day for five days and we had 13 inbound leads from that which is a 10% response rate. Since that time I’ve increased the outbound e-mails to 75 per day, it’s been about six days. We’ve had about another 150 e-mails go out and look we’re up to 48 leads now. We had 12 so we’ve added 36 more leads out of 150 e-mails, guys, that’s almost a 20% response rate. It’s absolutely incredible what we’re getting through here.

Again I just wanted to point that out because I’m really hoping that many of you guys that are thinking about joining the Mastermind or if you’re doing any sort local, I would highly encourage to come join us starting in January, well now is a good time too by the way but because I’m going to be literally dissecting exactly how that’s built step by step throughout the year so that by the end of the year, you could build your own automated agency if you so choose, or you can wait until we can build it for you and you can pay us and we’ll build it for you. Now that’s coming too but that probably won’t be for at least another year. Anyways, with that said, I’m going to move on. If you guys have any questions about that specifically, come join the Mastermind, I’ll be happy to answer them, all right? You guys got any comments on that before I move on?

Adam: I do. I’m [inaudible 00:10:57]. I think this is awesome.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Such a cool process because it pulls in just a ton of stuff I won’t go into but just yeah, I love it. I’m excited for this.

Bradley: Yeah, me too, man.

Marco: For anyone who’s new and watching this, those are people who got e-mails and contacted us back.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: It’s no longer just a cold e-mail going out. Hopefully you’ll be able to find some of these people contacting us and saying, “We’re interested. Tell me more,” which is I mean that’s just awesome so now you have a pool of people to contact.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Anyone that’s new, that’s what’s going on. We go really in depth as you said in the Mastermind. The Mastermind is the place to be in 2018. If you’re not there, you should be.

What Are The Points You Need To Convey To The Client When It Comes To Service Costing?

Bradley: Totally agree, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thank you, Marco. All right, enough of that. Let’s get into some questions. We’ve got several. I’m excited. Let’s get into it. Mel, she’s up. She says, “I’m sending video e-mails and it’s getting some traction but when asked for price, I’m having some trouble. What kind of points do you try to convey when they ask how much does it cost.” I swear this question was asked last week. I swear this was … Anyways, how much does it cost? Now if that’s the first question out of a prospect’s mouth, they’re probably not going to be a good client. I’ve experienced that many, many times. Those are price-conscious people. I understand we all are price-conscious to a degree but the problem with people that come right out of the gate with how much does it cost is it’s because they have already made assumptions and all they’re looking at … They look at marketing as an expense, not an investment. It’s very hard to satisfy any client that thinks of marketing as an expense instead of an investment.

Marketing should create an ROI. If it creates a return on investment then it’s an investment, it’s an ROI. Investment is right in that title, you know what I mean? When they come right out of the gate with thinking of it as an expense and asking how much does it cost then even if you were to land them as a client, you’re probably going to have difficulty with them. They’re never going to be satisfied. There always going to be questioning, what’s going on because they’re penny pinching, right, and because they’re … Again I just want to explain it, that’s a red flag. For me over the years after doing this so many years, that’s a red flag for me. I would recommend that when it comes down to that, I try to avoid pricing stuff upfront until after I’ve had the chance to talk with them and analyze like a particular property. That said, sometimes you just have to talk them up front like what it is and you’re going to lose them. A lot of the times you’re going to lose them but don’t cut undercut your services just to try to land clients.

I get how important it is especially when you’re starting out or you’re trying to go to an agency because I’ve done it, guys like I have taken any client on that was willing to give me money regardless of my gut feeling. We’ve all talked about this all of my partners, all of us at [inaudible 00:14:08] had similar expenses. I’m looking forward to hearing some comments about this again in just a moment. My point is every time I’ve done it as well where many times over the years where I’ve said okay it’s money I’m going to take it, and I’ve had a bad gut feeling and then it ends up being a nightmare. It requires so much additional work, so much hand holding, so much convincing that what I’m doing is valuable that it’s just not worth it. You’re better off just prospecting more clients until you find those that don’t put up as much resistance or to understand that it’s an investment that should produce a return on investment, excuse me, should produce a return instead of an expense.

Again when it comes down to somebody says how much does it cost, typically that’s if you want to just answer him, get him out of your life like thank you very much, that’s what Bill Goodin in Hot Prospects says. He says it all in one word, no spaces between them, “Thankyouverymuch” click like hang up. You know what I mean? I don’t mean be a prick about it. I just mean like give him the price and let them say, “Oh no, that’s too much.” Let them hang up on you then, that’s fine. Don’t take it personally, move on. Prospect like what I just showed you over here, fill your pipeline full of prospects and you won’t have to worry about that. Does that make sense? Now I know you’re doing video e-mails and I know that’s a much slower process and that’s why I recommend that with the video e-mails, you keep them very short because you don’t want to spend … Here’s the thing, Mel, when I get a get a client referral and I do a video e-mail with an analysis of their properties and stuffs, sometimes those go 20, 25 minutes long.

I’m not kidding but that’s because it was a client referral so there’s a much better chance of me landing that client anyways. It’s a high quality lead because it was a client referral but when I’m doing cold prospecting and I’m sending video e-mails which I don’t really do so much anymore because it’s so time consuming. I like the shotgun approach better because you could scale it. With starting out that rifle approach of doing video e-mails is very effective but I would try to keep your initial video, your outreach video, down to five minutes or less so that you can bang out several of them within an hour and get them out because again it’s a numbers game.

You might get out of sending 10, you might get three. My consistent number is worth three or four responses out of every 10 e-mails that I sent. Out of every three or four responses, I would typically get one client, sometimes two, and so again that’s what I recommend that you try to keep it short. Otherwise you end up with 15 or 20-minute videos for every potential client, cold e-mail that you send and that’s just way too much work. What are your comments, guys?

Hernan: I totally agree with you, Bradley in terms of the quality of the clients that you’re getting. It’s funny because I wasn’t franker with one of the Mastermind’s call like five minutes before they hang up. One thing he said really resonated with me and he was saying, “It’s way easier to increase the quality of the clients that you get than to try to reeducate them into why your stuff that you’re doing is worth it.” In other words, instead of trying to reeducate themselves on why they will need to take your marketing serious, and why they’re doing an investment and why they should be doing and should be doing that, that puts you in a perspective of, “Well, I need now to educate them into why my stuff is valuable.” The perfect client, which is something that you need to come up with. There’s nothing that … You need to come up with what’s your perfect type of client, which sometimes like I would say 9 times out 10, we don’t do. We just go and try to find as many clients as possible and that puts you in the position of getting the worst type of clients on earth pretty much, right?

Number one, ask yourself what your perfect type of client is and number two, try to find those clients in a way that they already understand that marketing is an investment. Bradley would tell you yeah go after the ad works guys. Go after the guys that are already advertising because they already know. Go after the guys that are doing SEO that you can actually pinpoint that they’re doing SEO or they have their maps already set up. Maybe not perfect but they understand the value that ad works can bring to their business et cetera, et cetera so that’s why I think it’s way easier and way more rewarding. You will end up working with better clients, getting better quality and try to enhance your process of getting clients to get better quality clients than try to turn someone’s minds over, which is nearly impossible and it will wear you out. You know what I’m saying? That would be my comment.

Adam: All right, I’ll play devil’s advocate real quick and not disagreeing actually, just offering the counterpoint and I would say that also you got to do your homework on this one. I’ve seen people go in and try to just sell videos. Let’s say they are selling video rankings or something like that. They go in and they get to the money part and they don’t know what their potential client’s cost is or what their business model is and then it becomes really hard for people to talk because they don’t understand or they go in with the completely wrong offer. Make sure you do your homework and find out how much is a lead work to this person. You don’t have to know down to the dollar but do you know the market? Do you know how much it’s worth? Is the lead worth $5 or $50? Figuring that out and then you can at least talk until it leads you to the right people.

Bradley: Yeah, and to expand on what Adam said, if you understand the market. Your potential customer base, which will be like local businesses or whatever kind. In my case like contractors, tree service contractors, right? Let’s just use that as an example. I understand about how much a good tree service lead is worth to a contractor because I understand from being in that industry what a qualified lead could produce for a contractor as far as revenue. With that said, you can frame or stir the conversation into a let me show you how instead of how much does it cost, let me show you what it can produce. Does that make sense because then you’re taking the cost equation. You’re taking cost out of the equation, right? The focus isn’t on the cost. The focus is on the return and that when you reframe their question in that light or in that manner then they start to see the return on investment potential but as Hernan said I 100% agree with him. If you have to first convince somebody as to why your service is valuable or important then before you then have to sell it to him then you’re doing twice as much work because first you have to convince then you have to sell so avoid that.

If you feel like you’re catching resistance where you’re trying to convince them then let them go, thank you very much, click. Thank you very much, click. Get the hell out of my life. Next like SWSWSWSW, some will, some won’t, excuse me. Some will, some won’t, so what, someone’s waiting, and that’s really what it comes down to. Just fill your pipeline with quality leads. Know your market. Know the potential what a lead is worth so that you can stir the conversation towards a return on investment versus cost price. Does that make sense?

Marco: I’m reading this just a touch differently and I don’t disagree with either you or Hernan but I’m more inclined with Adam. If she’s having trouble understanding how to price her services, I mean that’s a bit different and that’s just understanding the market and what are leads worth. I mean if a guy … If a lead is worth $2,000 to that person and you can produce, you should be concentrating on what you’re going to do, right? You get paid for what you produce rather than getting paid for whatever for something nebulous that the client doesn’t understand. I’m going to affect your bottom line positively, that’s what I’m going to do for you. As long as you take that approach, you understand the market, you understand the client. You understand what a lead is worth then you won’t have trouble pricing yourself and your services, that’s how I’m seeing this question.

Bradley: Yeah, and last thing, that’s a great question by the way, Mel so I’m going to plus one at number one. I’m sorry we spent so much time on this, guys but that’s a fantastic question. What happened? It didn’t plus one. The last thing I would say about that, Mel is you can always have a foot in the door product or service that you can provide even for free, right? I don’t recommend … Guys, don’t work for free for often but you can have a foot in the door offer some sort of product or service that you provide for free to prove yourself to a potential client, to a prospect, that works really well like I do that. I’ll talk to a potential client and I’ll say, “Look, let’s talk about pricing.” If that comes up then I’ll say, “Let me just prove to you that I’m capable of producing some results and then we’ll talk about that. This is what I’m going to do.”

A lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll do some video marketing campaign so I can get them some quick wins that they can see by going to search results and seeing videos ranked for various keywords, various locations whatever. I’ll just do a quick … It might take me 30 minutes to set up a video campaign and blast it out using some spam tools or whatever. Get them ranked for a few keywords and then I just show them the results and say, “Look, this is what I was able to do in a few days and then imagine what I could do if you hired for this or that.” Does that make sense? You can give them something for free just to whet their appetite so to speak and then you can upsell them into or sell them into an actual service at that point you’ve already … You’ve given them results in advance.

Again video marketing is fantastic for that because it’s something that you can get done very, very quickly. You can get results quickly. It’s almost tangible, right? They can see the results and because of that, you can oftentimes upsell, that’s why I use video primarily as my opening product or service, okay. Again, great, great question, Mel.

How Would You Optimize A Maps Listing For A Potential Client Located In The Midst Of Small Counties?

All right, Shibga’s up. He says … Or Shibga, I’m sorry if I butchered that. “My potential client is located in the midst of a bunch of small counties. Since I’m only doing maps, he won’t be showing up in counties even just 10 miles from him. The competitor’s currently up there are getting traffic from difficult keywords organically and that is not something I want to do. What would you suggest? Thank you.” Well-

Marco: If I may?

Bradley: Go ahead.

Marco: He’s in RYS Academy reloaded and that’s Monday’s webinar, dude.

Bradley: Perfect. There you go. As far as everybody else, it’s not an RYS. My suggestion in that case would be, well I’m going to give you number one, ad words, right? You can do that rather quickly and you can just set up GO targeting so it’s very easy to get them to start generating traffic for all the different areas that way plus if you’ve got a Google My Business, you use the location extension for your ad words ad then you can actually have your maps, your Google Maps, your Google My Business Maps listing show up in Maps in the actual Maps. Now I’m starting to see the Maps listed, the first listing in the three-pack is now an ad for a lot of queries like that’s been rolling out slowly but I’m starting to see that appear more and more in various industries now where there’s an actual four-pack instead of a three-pack because the first listing is an ad, and that’s something that you can absolutely do. All you need is a location extension, which means you need a Google My Business listings verified, and then you can use the location extension and ad words, so that’s number one.

Number two would be to rank organically. I don’t see a lot of value in that for local lead [inaudible 00:26:22] type of stuff. I’ve got mixed results on that but that’s all you could do short of setting up PO boxes in all the various areas, which can be a pain in the ass, and then you’ve got a ton of Google My Business listings to optimize, a bunch of citations, all that kind of stuff to do. It’s really up to you. I would do what Marco was talking about with RYS stuff, he’s doing multi-location training on Monday but I would also consider ad words and go after some organic stuff unless you’re willing and capable of setting up a bunch of Google My Business profiles listings for various locations using PO boxes or something, okay.

What Are Your Thoughts On AMP?

Eliza says, “Hey guys, have you heard of AMP? If so, what are your thoughts on it?” Marco, I’ll let you talk on that since you developed the plug-in.

Marco: We have an AMP plug-in. All you have to do is go to the Facebook group, AMP Creators Mastermind in Facebook and join then download the plug-in. It’s working for news more than anything else, that’s where AMP really helps. It speeds up the page. A very light version of the page is served up through AMP. I think as Google goes more into mobile, it will have greater weight. It will become more important. Right now it hasn’t had the impact that it should’ve had but that’s because if you’re not producing news, the Accelerated Mobile Page experience isn’t really necessary. Your website is fast enough as it is or should be fast enough as it is, right? I mean that’s just my take on it. We do have the plug-in so you can experiment with it and see whether it works for you, whether it has any effect in your niche. We haven’t seen any effects as a matter of fact with AMP on anything local unless you produce news, something that’s newsworthy like Google’s going to pick up.

Bradley: Yeah. I don’t have much of a comment because I haven’t really played with it much.

What Do You Think Are Some Issues With Writing Blog Posts And Repurpose Them To Videos, Embeds, And Syndication?

All right, quit this house says, “Good day. I want to write blog posts. Create a video of each blog with content samurai then syndicate the video. Take that link of video embedded in the blog then syndicate the blog. Any issues? PS, get better soon, Marco.” No, that’s fine. In fact I’ve talked about this in Mastermind in Master class when we used to have a Master class as well. One of the strategies that I’ve used with some of my contractors, the ones that are willing to do it, which is a great strategy is their technicians basically give instructions to their technicians. Let’s say plumber, that’s one of the industries that I’ve done this for, it’s a plumbing company.

They had I think six employees or technicians. Six plumbers that were out there working with vans and all that kind of stuff. They just go out on job site and take their phone, iPhone, Android whatever and record a very short video from the jobs that they go out on. Just say, “Hey, this is Joe from Joe’s Plumbing in Fairfax, Virginia. We’re out on location in Fairfax, Virginia, we got a call for a water heater that needed replaced and this what I found.” He takes his phone and shows where the water heater was. The heating element went bad, we basically replaced the water heater and now this customer has hot water again, and they’re happy. If you have any water heater problems in Fairfax, Virginia, contact us at an in-call to action. Very, very simple like a 60-second video, 60 to 90 seconds, sometimes even less and then they send me the video file and then I upload it to YouTube.

I send it to a transcription service, have it transcribed then I go post the video with the transcription on the blog, which then syndicates out across the syndication network, and it gives me the ability to optimize the YouTube video and rank that for keywords like water heater repair, Fairfax, Virginia for example and as well as the blog post, which adds additional content to the site that’s a 100% relevant, it’s a 100% unique user or 100% created, unique created content. Does that make sense? It’s a very, very good strategy because it’s something that you don’t even have to do like to me, it’s very simple to just … They send me the video, I upload it to YouTube, optimize the videos, send that to rev.com to get it transcribed, get the transcription back within usually a couple of hours, and then I can post that as the actual post content, which has its keyword rich.

It’s got the call to action and ends up going into silos so I interlink that up to the silo heading, and then that goes out across the syndication network which in turn helps to boost the overall site; very, very powerful strategy. I don’t see anything wrong with that at all. I would encourage you to do it. Test with it to see. I haven’t done it specifically talking about what you’re talking about here but I can’t imagine why that would be any different. It’s a good strategy, check it out.

How Would You Sell Map Embeds To Somebody?

Muhammad, what’s up, Muhammad? He’s here every week asking questions and being very engaged, it’s awesome. We’re glad to have you, buddy. He says, “Hey guys, how would you sell Map Embeds to somebody?” You don’t, Muhammad. You wouldn’t sell Map Embeds unless it’s an SEO or somebody that understands it. My first reaction would be don’t. Don’t even try to explain. I mean some people are inquisitive and you can try to explain it in a way but a lot of the times like when you start talking about that kind of stuff with prospects, their eyes glass over because they really don’t understand it anyways. I try to avoid that like technical kind of stuff with most clients if possible, but anyways “I never really thought of a Map ranking as something to include in SEO [inaudible 00:32:12]. Is it something you guys would include?”

Yeah, when I’m selling SEO services, I typically for the most part am selling Maps ranking, local SEO Maps ranking for the most part but I don’t particularly tell them all the different things that I’m doing to get them ranked. Not stuff like Map Embeds because they wouldn’t understand like for the most part. I might tell them I’m going to produce content. I’m going to optimize your listing, your photos. We’re going to create corresponding content on your website. We’re going to do some link building stuff and syndicate content out across your social media properties to get you some exposure and traffic, all that kind stuff but I don’t talk about Map Embeds and that kind of stuff. What do you guys think about that?

Marco: I totally agree. Don’t ever sell rankings, dude, Muhammad. You cannot control rankings. If you can’t control rankings then you cannot sell what you can’t be sure that you’re going to do. I mean you can be really good at it but then run into a stubborn niche or stubborn sub niche where you just can’t rank them out, and you just sold the client on ranking them out so now what are you going to do? Sell results, guys, everyone, everyone in this. When you’re out there and you’re selling your services, you’re going to produce results. What those results are, that’s up to you. It’s not up to the client to decide what the results are. The results will be reflected in the bottom line through visitors to the website, leads and close leads and all of that. How you go about it, that’s what they’re hiring for you the expert. Approach it that way, don’t ever, ever sell rankings ever.

Bradley: I would only comment that I actually do often sell rankings. What I do is I preface. I say, “Look, I don’t work for Google,” so Google can change its algorithm at any time. They’re constantly adjusting your algorithm so things change but the trend is, the idea or the goal is to get you ranked in the Maps like that’s what I say when I’m talking to a prospect. I say, “This is what I know works and I’m going to do this.” I don’t sell them rankings but I tell them that they can expect to see some movement and we’re likely going to get the goal, the end goal what my intention is to get them ranked in Maps, but what I’m selling are the services that have shown to prove that is the end result. Does that make sense?

It’s like I don’t say or guarantee rankings, I don’t because I’m not … If I’m going to guarantee rankings, I’m going to own the asset. It’s going to be lead gen thing because I’m not guaranteeing it to anybody but me but I don’t guarantee rankings to clients. Unless for example I got a video production company that I do a lot of wholesale SEO for, I basically don’t guarantee rankings but I tell them if we’re not ranked on page one then you just don’t pay for it. Does that make sense? So that’s what I do, I don’t guarantee rankings but I tell them they don’t pay unless they’re ranked. Keep moving, we got two more questions from him. We’re going to try to roll through these. I know we’re running short on time today already.

How Would You Sell Syndication Networks To Bloggers And YouTubers?

“For sales practices and extra money, I’m trying to sell syndication networks to bloggers and YouTubers. How would I best approach this? I’ve bought BB’s recommended book on cold e-mail and use his practices but I must be doing something wrong because I haven’t seen much interest.” All right, so a couple of things, Muhammad, my thoughts on trying to contact and sell to bloggers and YouTubers is that they’re in the marketing space so to speak, they’re in the digital space maybe not marketing but they’re in the whole digital space, and they’re probably numb. I’m trying to think about the right word here. They’re probably used to just ignoring pitch type stuff especially probably a lot of YouTubers because I know like our YouTube channels like we’ve got our [inaudible 00:36:18] Master generals as well as my own channel, we got a lot of subscribers and I get pitched shit all day long all the time. We get spam e-mails from people trying to sell us on YouTube services like stuff all the time. They’re probably just ignoring a lot of that. They’re numb to it so to speak.

Bloggers are very similar because bloggers get pitched all the time on guest post and link swaps and link exchanges, all that kind of stuff as well. It could just be that, I don’t know because I haven’t really pitched to those kind of people but the other thing would be maybe … I’m not sure about cold e-mailing those. I would have to think about it and obviously, Muhammad, I would recommend that you just test different … You’re going to have to split test your different cold e-mail approaches. What I’m doing for contractors is working incredibly well but I don’t know that that method would work for YouTubers and bloggers. I would just try different types of cold outreach e-mails until you found one that seems to work well and then repeat that, scale that, right? It’s going to requite some split testing on your part. It’s a lot of work I know. It’s a lot of trial and error but once you find something that works like what I found with the contractor prospecting that I’m doing then you can scale it and you can just see massive results, okay?

As far as when I started selling networks like when I first built, started outsourcing that and I trained some virtual assistants, and I started selling networks, I sold them retail to local businesses and then I sold them wholesale to SEO agencies. What I did was I just went to the various marketplaces like SEO Mojo was one of them, SEO Clerks was another one of them, and I just put up listings for networks to sell syndication networks, and that’s how I ended up landing a lot of SEO agency clients was through those service sites by selling networks. I would sell it for like … I believe I was selling networks at the time for $297 or $299 around $300 for a single network but for agencies, I had an agency from Australia contact me and he wanted 10 per month, 10 syndication networks per month.

At the time I actually I wouldn’t do it, well, I actually probably would do it now still but I ended up selling those networks at $100 a piece to him so he’d pay me $1,000 a month. I’d sell them. I have my team would build him 10 networks and my networks cost me about $50 to build so I would literally pocket about $500 to not really do a damn thing, which was awesome. You may want to consider doing that too like putting your service up on some of these sites, all right?

How Would You Explain The Benefits Of PR In Layman’s Terms To A Client?

Last is, “How would you explain the benefits of PR in layman’s term to a client?” Exposure, brand building and traffic, that’s it. You don’t sell the SEO part of it. You can mention that it should have an SEO benefit, should help them it will likely or often will help them to rank better but would you want to sell is the exposure, the brand building and the traffic that it will produce, those are the things.

You want to talk about the benefits not the features. Essentially you want to tell them how, what are the end results that a press release can provide that’s traffic, authority and brand building and exposure, massive exposure. Anybody else would comment on that? All right, we’re going to keep moving.

Marco: Yeah, I know. I was about to say that, yeah. I agree with you, Bradley in terms of … Business owners they all care about how many new clients, how many new leads they can get. Usually they don’t care about rankings or positions or whatever like keywords and all of that jazz. If you talk about in business terms like again this is an investment, I like the different … The comparison between assets and liabilities but the way [inaudible 00:40:30] gets it. For example, you would have money that you throw away every week pretty much. You buy stuff, you go to Starbucks, you go out to dinner whatever, you buy clothes, that’s money that goes out and never comes back, right? Assets and the way millionaires think is that they invest their money into stuff like real estate or stocks or whatever, now would put more money into their pockets so that’s how they’re thinking. Well, you can do the same because you can say this is a service that would put more money to your pocket because that will increase the visibility of your website, the traffic and ultimately if the website converts, the leads, right?

If you think about it, you’re investing the money. We always backtrack to the investment versus the spending side of things so that’s how I usually frame it and it works.

How Do You Get Viewers To A Niche YouTube Channel That Contains Other People’s Popular Videos?

Bradley: Yeah, awesome, thanks. All right, the next one is Eddie Grim. Eddie, I read this question ahead of time and I’m not sure how you’re going to get viewers to your videos. I understand you’re saying that you’re starting a niche top-based YouTube channel. [inaudible 00:41:38] a lot of other people’s popular videos to my channel. The question that I would have for you, Eddie is if you’re just adding other people’s popular videos to playlists because that’s really the only way you can do it. You can’t really add their videos to your channel unless you download their videos and then upload to your channel, which is against terms of service, right? I’m not saying you can’t do that, hint, hint but I am telling you that it’s against terms of service and you may get a copyright claim or something like that from one of those people if you are to download and re-upload on to your channel so keep that in mind. However, you can put other people’s videos into your own playlist and there’s some benefit for doing that.

The only problem with the next part of your question is you say, “the goal is to gain viewers that I can re-target with ads.” Unless, the video is on your channel like it’s your video uploaded to your channel then even if you have other people’s popular videos and playlist and somebody were to click through from your playlist to that other person’s video, you won’t be able to re-target them because you won’t get a re-marketing cookie from somebody clicking on to their video. Does that make sense? As far as I know you can’t and again I may be mistaken here but I don’t think you can set up a re-marketing list for videos within a playlist like I think it’s only for individual videos or a channel, which in that case you can re-target them if they land on your channel, right? I’d have to go in and look at ad words to see.

I’m not going to do that right now obviously we’re running short on time anyways but I’m going to be doing a lot of ad word stuff starting in January with the new Mastermind training curriculum. The first month or the first module is all about PPC (Pay Per Click) and YouTube is going to be included in that so it’s something that I will probably have soon, I’ll know for sure. I know that you can re-target people that interact with any videos on your channel. I don’t know if that also includes other people’s videos that you’ve embedded or added to playlist from your channel or not, I don’t know. Can anybody else confirm that?

Marco: Yeah, I know. I think that is the exact same thing that you’re saying, Bradley like you need to own the asset in order for Google to count the cookie towards your re-marketing list. What I would say, Eddie is see why these videos are so popular, try to emulate them, try to do the same title, keywords, et cetera, et cetera and then try to rank them on YouTube because that will put you like for example on semantic mastery channel and on my own channel, I’m pretty sure that will probably is channel two. 20% of the videos bring 80% of the views. Is that big? Is that cute? You will have, I don’t know, I probably have a couple of 100 videos semantic mastery has at this point thousands of videos but only a small fraction of those videos will for some reason will get … Not for some reason but because they are really targeting really high volume keywords on YouTube, right? They’re targeting really high volume keywords and they’re getting shared. They’re getting a lot of comments so YouTube will increase their view cap, and that will trickle down into the rest of the channel.

Here’s the thing, you want to try to emulate these popular videos, record your own version, curate them whatever, and try to run them on YouTube so that you can now own the asset. Once you have that, again, you need to create a bunch of videos so that 20% of those videos will get 80% of the traffic and once you have that then you can start re-targeting those people with that. You can also do pay-per-view. You can try to use the ad words to a video, and that’s something that you can do as long as you own the video. You can do with [inaudible 00:45:29] but there’s absolutely zero sense on spending money to do that but the point here is that you own the video but that’s a number scale. The pay-per-view needs to be lower than the re-targeting cost and that’s usually not the case, right? You’re paying more per view than that the ROI that you’re getting when you’re re-targeting these people so have that mind.

The best way to go, in my opinion, will be to get a lot of organic traffic from YouTube. Rank your videos on YouTube so that you can get a lot of organic traffic and then go to channel re-targeting.

Bradley: By the way, there are ways to siphon some authority off of those videos that are really popular that get a shit ton of views. Eddie, that way that you do that is scrape the tags from the videos that are ranking really well or that are getting a lot of views, the really popular videos. Scrape the tags. There are tools that can do that. You can also right click and view page source. Get the first two or three tags but there are tools that will scrape tags for you. Scrape the tags. Use those same tags in your video as well as the channel name of the channel that has the popular video and put that video into a playlist from your channel alongside of your other videos. In other words, when you go to optimize your own video targeting the same type of keywords as the popular videos that you want to siphon some authority from, you want to scrape the tags from that popular video, place it into your video.

You also want to scrape the channel or add the channel name as a tag in your video. You also want to create a playlist with that popular video next to your video. What happens is a lot of the times, it’s not 100% of the time and I don’t know what the threshold like what the circumstances are to make it work sometimes and not others but what I’ve seen a lot of that, when you do that is your video will end up popping on the end screen of a video when they show related videos like checkerboard of related videos. Your video will pop into there as well as in the right-hand sidebar on the watch page of the related … The right-hand sidebar where they show related videos. You’ll end up popping into there and you end up getting a lot of referral traffic just because you’re in the related video section if that makes sense, and that’s a great way to siphon authority off of other people’s videos, okay? Good question though, Eddie.

Do You Know A Tool Like Cinch Tweet From Mastery PR Intended For Linkedin?

Jonathan says, “I purchased Cinch Tweet for mastery PR and this tool works like crazy.” Awesome, that’s great to hear. “Do you have similar tool for LinkedIn?” I don’t know, Jonathan. I don’t even know Cinch Tweet is. I just know that I know we did a promo for it for mastery PR but I’m not a tweet guy or Twitter guy so I haven’t played with that at all. I don’t know of one for LinkedIn, sorry.

Adam: Yeah, Jonathan. What you could do is probably hop into the group if you’re not already a part of the semantic mastery, our free Facebook group and ask in there because I think Chris has been at least playing around with it so that would be the place to ask.

How Would You Reinstate The Previous Top Ranking Of A Client Site That Targets 3 Main Keywords?

Bradley: Yeah. All right, Ralph’s new. He says, “Hey guys, I’m a rookie when it comes to SEO for site. I have a client in Minneapolis area. He used to rank on page one for his key phrase, something changed a couple of years ago and now he’s back on page three, if even that. I just took over his site trying to get him back on page one. His company specializes in three areas. Okay, the way the site seems to be set up, they’re trying to shoot for all three targets on the front page at once.” Yeah, that’s pretty common actually. “Should I redo the title of description in H1 tags to shoot for keyword one and put keyword two and three on other pages? I tried using video to get them on page one, that doesn’t seem to work.”

Okay, yeah, Ralph, I would absolutely recommend that … I don’t typically try to rank the homepage guys. I mean it happens and there’s ways that you can force the homepage to rank but I usually optimize for again for contractors if they have separate services. I always like to try to optimize a specific service page for basically one primary service, right? I have separate pages for each one of those. In your case, it would be a separate page for keyword one, one for keyword two and one for keyword three because what happens is each one of those pages can be highly optimized for that particular keyword, that service in that location. It’s likely that you can end up ranking that as long as there’s not other domain health issues, Ralph. Assuming that everything else is fine, I would recommend that you would target specifically each keyword or service with its own page and then optimize it for that but then what you do is obviously you just internally link from each one of those pages up to the homepage.

In Maps you’re usually going to rank their homepage in Maps, not always the case but usually but then for organic, you would end up ranking the individual pages based upon the keywords search query, right?

Marco: I have a question. Sorry to stop you while you’re going through this but do we still have a backdoor to SEO bootcamp?

Bradley: I think we do.

Marco: Because I mean I was just going through that over the weekend.

Bradley: It’s amazing.

Marco: And I couldn’t stop. I went and I was lying down in bed and just listening and I went through. I forget how many videos I went through just listening. The guy is amazing on his keyword research and how to set this up. Ralph, everything that you’re looking for and how to set this up, how to target the keyword whether it’s a category, whether it is the top of the silo, whether it’s supporting LSI and whatever, this is covered in there. I have yet to see anyone who covers on page SEO as thoroughly as what’s covered in SEO bootcamp.

Bradley: Yeah, dude. He’s bad ass, man. I don’t know if it’s … I think the $500 price is now doubled unfortunately. I think it’s $1,000 now but it’s worth it even at $1,000. I’m not kidding, Ralph. It’s fantastic. It really is that good. If somebody didn’t already drop the link, it’s http://ift.tt/2BIn92b, I believe, that will take you over to it if you want to check it out. I’m not sure if that’s the link or not. If not, if somebody-

Adam: Yeah, I’m looking for it right now just to confirm.

Bradley: Yeah, that’s what I would suggest, Ralph is obviously optimize a separate page for each one of those and then you can link from those pages up to your homepage, that would be the better route to go than trying to be … If you’re trying to cover too many topics on one page and they’re not closely related enough then you dilute the optimization of any one of the keywords if that makes sense, okay? All right, we’re almost out of time, guys. Unfortunately we didn’t get … Well, I guess we got the most of them.

Will A Syndicated Content About Recipe Triggers Duplicate Content Issue?

All right so next question, “Hi. We are selling a new sweetener on our blog e-com site. Bloggers started to create recipes with it on their blogs, which is awesome. Now I started to create blog posts with those recipes by cloning them on our blog inside my recipe silo and these posts are then syndicated to a syndication network too. I’m doing this for obvious reasons, easy content and creation for me and additional publicity for them. Question, will this trigger and kind of duplicate content issues for me or not?”

No, it won’t because … Well, first of all just make sure that you are attributing. As long as you are citing the source … Okay, it won’t create any content issues for you anyways regardless, okay, period but to do it legally and properly the way that you should do it ethically as well is you make sure that you are getting attribution to the source where you got those recipes. Always cite the source. Give credit where credit is due, that’s not going to cost you any issues if you don’t as far as SEO issues, but it can cause … You can get DMCA complaints, which are basically copyright infringement complaints. If one of those bloggers decided that you were infringing upon their intellectual property, and they decided do a DMCA complaint then Google can de-index that page or post and that’s a bad sign for you and it’s a bad sign for the domain. I would recommend that you just you are always linking back to the source.

You can no-follow the links, that’s what I do. No-follow them but make sure that you link back to the source and give them the credit where it’s due, okay?

Should You Link Back To The Original Post Or Just Cite Them On The Syndicated Blog Post?

Question two, “Is it enough to cite their blog in the bottom of my current recipe without …” No, I would always link back to it, always. If you’re worried about passing dues, no-follow the link, okay? “As I link back to it, cite their blog at the bottom of my current or should I also link back to their original post?” Yeah, always link back to the original source of the content that you’re curating, that’s essentially what you’re doing. You’re curating content which is perfectly legit, that’s how most of the content is produced for all of my blogs, and client blogs and lead gen sites and all that is through curation. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just make sure that you cite the source.

By the way when you’re curating content, guys, sometimes you’re still going to get people that are pissed off about it, which is dumb in my opinion but sometimes because you are providing them a link, potential exposure, potential traffic but you are giving credit where it’s due. I still have gotten some cease and desist, take-down notices type stuff from curating, it happens from time to time. It’s just part of the game. Just don’t freak out when it happens. “I’m asking this because they all link to different pages on my site in their recipes. This would be some sort of reciprocal linking, I guess, which I heard is not good.” No, it’s fine. In that case, in this particular circumstance, that’s absolutely fine because it’s not like you’re trying to gain for SEO. You guys are just cross-promoting because it makes sense, it’s relevant. It’s not an SEO thing, right? I mean it provides SEO value but the intent is not strictly for SEOs. Does that make sense?

Reciprocal linking was something that was a no-no years ago. I don’t know if it’s still considered a no-no in Google’s eyes because there is a lot of crosslinking between and co-citation and things like that now. I’m talking about old directories, guys. A lot of web directories, they would only publish your link if you put a widget in the footer that linked to their directory. Those are reciprocal links that are frowned upon but two bloggers cross-promoting each other’s post, that’s not really … I don’t work for Google so I don’t know but I can tell you it’s logical for that to not be a reciprocal link penalty type thing. Any comments on that, guys?

Marco: Yeah, I haven’t been doing a lot of reciprocity like reciprocal links lately so I wouldn’t … I don’t have data like recent data.

Which Should You Get First, RYS Stack Or Syndication Network Or Both?

Bradley: All right, we’re almost out of time. Fortunately we got through almost all of the questions. Harold asks, “Hey guys, what’s up? Quick question, should I get an RYS stack, a syndication network or both?” Well, my go-to answer is going to be both. Of course, Harold. No, I mean that for real. I always start with syndication networks is always standard operating procedure but as soon as that gets built, I order the RYS drive stack as well, but it is really standard operating procedure, so I would say yes to both. Any comments, guys?

Marco: No, absolutely. Set up your syndication network, prime it just like we teach in the syndication academy. Once that’s done, get the RYS stack going and link to everything in T1. I mean it’s really that simple, and you can power everything up through link building through your drive stack, which will protect your T1, and your money site.

Which Company Provides The Best Citation Services?

Bradley: All right, Dan says, “Hey, gents. What are your suggestion for best source to have citations done?” Serpspace of course, Dan, duh. Dan, I’m giving you a hard time but yeah Serpspace. You can go in there and like … If you’re looking for the Cadillac, the Ferrari of citations, you’re going to spend more money but they are fabulous. They are done very, very well. I would say Loganix, they’ve got some really good packages. http://ift.tt/2bbLT53 but for new sites typically, I would just go with what we have in Serpspace and just order the big citation directory sites, which is like the national type sites and then I try to go with the hyper local type citations, which are a lot more like niche specific or local specific type directories. Those are always like standard operating procedure.

I usually start right off the bat with new sites with about anywhere between 40 to 60 citations, which is about 20 or so of the big national directories like the big heavy hitters, Yelp and Angie’s List, Yellowpages that kind of stuff, and then we try to find … We scrape citation or directory sites that are either niche specific or more localized and then build the additional citations there. Also don’t forget, Dan, to order citations or aggregate listing submissions like New Stark Louise. What are the other ones? Info USA, several of those. The other one is Factual is one. The other one is Axiom. Those are all really good because you get listed in those and about three to six months later, you’ll have citations and a ton of different directories because other directories scrape or pull data from those, and create listings for you. It’s more of a long-term thing but you want to do that right upfront because in about six months you’ll start seeing a whole bunch of new citations start popping up and you didn’t have to build them or create them.

All right, last question, I know we’re right at the five o'clock mark, “Is Cinch Twitter good for tier one? Can it be used on the Twitter attached to RSY stack?” Honestly, I have no response for that because I don’t even know what Cinch Tweet does. Anybody else have an answer to that?

Adam: No, I don’t. Good one to hop in the group probably and ask there.

Bradley: All right. We’re done, guys. Oh, wow. Everybody else bailed out. Thanks, everybody for being here. We’ll see everybody else next week, I guess because we don’t have any other webinars this week, do we?

Adam: I don’t think so.

Bradley: Sweet. All right, everybody, thanks for being here.

Adam: See you.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Bradley: See you.

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

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

Click on the video above to watch Episode 161 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

  Announcement

Adam: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is episode 161. Today is the sixth of December. First one in December, we’re rolling towards the end of the year but not quite there. Speaking of closer to the end of the year, we’re going to have a pretty awesome Hump Day Hangout coming up later in December but stay tuned for that, we’ll tell you more about that coming. Real quick, we want to go down and say hi to everybody and see how everyone is doing. Chris, how are you doing today?

Chris: Looking good. It’s glad to be here.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan, how about yourself?

Hernan: Good. It’s actually quite warm right now in Buenos Aires. Yeah, I’m excited for what’s coming. We have a lot of stuff coming. Oh, what? Are you cold?

Adam: No, I don’t know. I’m perfectly warm.

Hernan: Okay, right, okay.

Adam: Hey, Marco. How’s it going?

Marco: Well, the doctor took a look at my MRI today and said, “Holy shit.” Those are not words that you want to hear when the fucking doctor takes a look at your MRI of your fucking back, dude so that’s what I’m doing.

Adam: All right, fair enough. Bradley, how about you, man?

Bradley: I went to a doctor once with an ear infection and it hurt like a son of a bitch. The doctor put the thing in the ear to look at it and he goes, “Whoa.” I was like, “Doc, you’re not supposed to do that.” “I’ve never seen an eardrum look like that.”

Adam: Well, make it not look like that.

Bradley: No wonder it hurts, right? Anyway, this is great, guys. Today has been a really good day, really productive day. I got a shit ton of stuff done. I’m just excited to be here and answer some questions, and hang out.

Adam: Cool. Well, before we get into it, I got a couple of quick announcements. I’m going to post some stuff on the page. If you’ve never have come to Hump Day Hangouts, first of all, thank you very much for being here. It’s awesome and we love having more people join us. We got some good stuff for you, some resources I’m going to post on the page for you. If you were around over the Thanksgiving time period and for Black Friday then you saw the e-mails and you saw the page we got, you know that Syndication Academy is increasing a price. It’s going to be like a 50% jump. It’s something we’ve been putting off for a long time and this is last announcement that it’s happening, and the price is going up to $97 a month here shortly in seven days. We want to give everyone fair notice a nice reminder here before that happens, and you can get that for free if you join the Mastermind, all right? We want to remind people about that, that’s one of the many, many perks of being a Mastermind member.

Something else we wanted to talk about, obviously there’s been ongoing updates with RYSP loaded. There’s been a ton of new contents, stuff going on there. I’ll let Marco talk about this.

Marco: Yeah, we have in fact a new webinar coming up on Monday. We’re calling it Multi-Location Domination with Automation.

Bradley: Wow.

Marco: Yes, sir. We’re going there. We got in fact two scripts that we’re rolling out to make things easier just to allow people to make it as simple as possible to go and take over not only their local niche, right? The local area but surrounding areas and just take shit down city by city, that’s how we do it, that’s what we’re teaching. We’re also going to show how it’s done globally by the way because we’re in the lab taking a look at that, and as a matter of fact, when we roll out the Multi-Location Domination webinar, we’re going to raise the price on RYS reload. The price is going up. I don’t know how much. You know I always push as much as possible as much as you guys will allow but price is going up. I suggest if you’re on the fence, it’s time to get in. Get in where you fit in or get left behind. We’re going to teach people how to take over, it’s really that simple.

Adam: Nice. Yeah, it’ll be going up. We’ll have some more information coming out about that you guys if you’re watching. If you’re curious, I’ll also post the links obviously. If you’ve been thinking, “Oh, I’ve heard about RYS and it’s neat and maybe I should do that.” One, you should, it’s awesome. If not that then you should be checking out the [inaudible 00:04:05] services if you’re more of the outsourcing type, but if you’ve been thinking about getting in, now would be obviously a great time. Before we start answering questions, I think Bradley, you had something you wanted to share with people, right?

Bradley: A couple of things, number one, go to bradleybanner.com. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and also my daily Mindset updates. I just posted another video just a few minutes ago like literally 15 minutes ago that I recorded today kind of impromptu. I wasn’t planning on it but I had something that I wanted to share so I recorded a 20-minute video. I just posted it on Facebook as well as my YouTube channel. Going through those e-mails every single day, consistently every single day now, it takes me anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes to write an e-mail everyday but I’m developing a habit and it’s been … I can see … It’s like today I wrote e-mail number 20 and I can see the results already like it’s already improving my ability to write and convey thoughts better. In other words like it’s a habit worth developing. I’ve put it off for years and finally I’m developing the habit with intention and it’s working well like for example I had a bunch of VSLs video sales letter stuff that I had to record today and I had some scripts to write for some re-marketing videos and stuff.

Typically a VSL script would take me or a re-market whatever, a video script would take me hours to write but I was able to bang out three of them in about an hour’s time today. I attribute that to a habit of writing that I’ve started to develop. I encourage you guys to do something similar even if it’s journaling whatever. I’m just using the e-mail list as my vehicle. I would encourage you to go check it out because I basically talk about some pretty cool stuff as far as goal setting and mindset and that kind of thing. Anyway, that’s it. I do want to tease one thing rather quickly because we’re going to talk about this at the beginning part of next week’s Hump Day Hangouts briefly maybe 10 minutes or so. I’m going to cover this a little bit more in depth but today I just want to tease you guys with it. Oh, also check this out. I got my Mastermind shirt on. Thank you, Adam for sending it.

Adam: That’s pretty cool. Nice.

Bradley: Yeah, I meant to drop this down a little bit. There you go, how is that?

Adam: Nice.

Bradley: One of the thing, I just wanted to tease very quickly is guys the prospecting funnel stuff that I’ve been working on developing for a few months, I had to put it on hold for a bit while I worked on some other stuff. The last two weeks I’ve really been working on it hard again and it improved the process quite a bit, and the results are fucking astounding like I don’t know how else to say it other than that. I’m just going to give you guys a very quick sneak peek of this and then we’re going to talk about a little bit more next week. I’m not going to go into details, guys. This is more conceptual because this is going to be shared. This is being shared in the Mastermind. We are starting a new Mastermind educational track in January 2018 where we’re going to be basically building two businesses throughout the year from soup to nuts, start to finish.

One is a physical business like a brick and mortar type business, it’s a gym and then the other one obviously the emphasis is on the digital marketing but it’s going to be more than just digital marketing, right? It’s going to be traditional marketing as well as like setting up businesses, setting up a business, entity structuring, all that kind of stuff because I think that’s important. As marketing consultants, we should know about this stuff anyway, right? Number two, the second business. I was going to do two local businesses but I made an executive decision last week to make our local agency that we’re building right now as the second project that we’re going to highlight and cover as part of the Mastermind training next year. All of these is going to be revealed in very fine detail starting in January.

In fact I’ve already started sharing a lot of this agency building stuff which is an automated scalable agency. The way that i should’ve built mine originally but you can’t know which you don’t know, right? I’ve already started sharing a lot of that in the Mastermind but I’m just teasing you guys with this to encourage you to come join the Mastermind especially if you’re doing local because the results are undisputable, indisputable as far as like how well this is working on the prospecting side of things. Still working on the sale side, the fulfillment side, all of that is coming but the prospecting side is working. Enough teasing, let me just show you very quickly, I’m going to grab the screen. Guys, I’m not going to put this up for long but I want to show you something.

This is an image of the prospecting funnel. I told you I’m not going to put it up for long. I’m about to switch screens, take a screenshot fast, fast, fast. All right, moving on, that’s the prospecting funnel and take a look at this for example. This is the … I’m using drip.com as our auto responder for all contractors that are being put into this funnel, this prospecting funnel. These are only people that have taken action and you can see that like … I know it’s probably small on you, let me zoom in just a little bit, guys. [inaudible 00:09:08] look at just yesterday at it at 12-5 so December 5, we scroll down. We had 10 new contacts out of just yesterday alone. Those are inbound needs, guys. You guys see that? If we take a look at … Let me pull over here for just a moment.

This is our pipe drive account. This is what we’re using for our sales pipe line, it’s called pipe drive, it’s awesome. You can see that when I share a little bit of information about this a few weeks ago. I had run 125 e-mails through the system, 25 e-mails a day for five days and we had 13 inbound leads from that which is a 10% response rate. Since that time I’ve increased the outbound e-mails to 75 per day, it’s been about six days. We’ve had about another 150 e-mails go out and look we’re up to 48 leads now. We had 12 so we’ve added 36 more leads out of 150 e-mails, guys, that’s almost a 20% response rate. It’s absolutely incredible what we’re getting through here.

Again I just wanted to point that out because I’m really hoping that many of you guys that are thinking about joining the Mastermind or if you’re doing any sort local, I would highly encourage to come join us starting in January, well now is a good time too by the way but because I’m going to be literally dissecting exactly how that’s built step by step throughout the year so that by the end of the year, you could build your own automated agency if you so choose, or you can wait until we can build it for you and you can pay us and we’ll build it for you. Now that’s coming too but that probably won’t be for at least another year. Anyways, with that said, I’m going to move on. If you guys have any questions about that specifically, come join the Mastermind, I’ll be happy to answer them, all right? You guys got any comments on that before I move on?

Adam: I do. I’m [inaudible 00:10:57]. I think this is awesome.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Such a cool process because it pulls in just a ton of stuff I won’t go into but just yeah, I love it. I’m excited for this.

Bradley: Yeah, me too, man.

Marco: For anyone who’s new and watching this, those are people who got e-mails and contacted us back.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: It’s no longer just a cold e-mail going out. Hopefully you’ll be able to find some of these people contacting us and saying, “We’re interested. Tell me more,” which is I mean that’s just awesome so now you have a pool of people to contact.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Anyone that’s new, that’s what’s going on. We go really in depth as you said in the Mastermind. The Mastermind is the place to be in 2018. If you’re not there, you should be.

What Are The Points You Need To Convey To The Client When It Comes To Service Costing?

Bradley: Totally agree, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thank you, Marco. All right, enough of that. Let’s get into some questions. We’ve got several. I’m excited. Let’s get into it. Mel, she’s up. She says, “I’m sending video e-mails and it’s getting some traction but when asked for price, I’m having some trouble. What kind of points do you try to convey when they ask how much does it cost.” I swear this question was asked last week. I swear this was … Anyways, how much does it cost? Now if that’s the first question out of a prospect’s mouth, they’re probably not going to be a good client. I’ve experienced that many, many times. Those are price-conscious people. I understand we all are price-conscious to a degree but the problem with people that come right out of the gate with how much does it cost is it’s because they have already made assumptions and all they’re looking at … They look at marketing as an expense, not an investment. It’s very hard to satisfy any client that thinks of marketing as an expense instead of an investment.

Marketing should create an ROI. If it creates a return on investment then it’s an investment, it’s an ROI. Investment is right in that title, you know what I mean? When they come right out of the gate with thinking of it as an expense and asking how much does it cost then even if you were to land them as a client, you’re probably going to have difficulty with them. They’re never going to be satisfied. There always going to be questioning, what’s going on because they’re penny pinching, right, and because they’re … Again I just want to explain it, that’s a red flag. For me over the years after doing this so many years, that’s a red flag for me. I would recommend that when it comes down to that, I try to avoid pricing stuff upfront until after I’ve had the chance to talk with them and analyze like a particular property. That said, sometimes you just have to talk them up front like what it is and you’re going to lose them. A lot of the times you’re going to lose them but don’t cut undercut your services just to try to land clients.

I get how important it is especially when you’re starting out or you’re trying to go to an agency because I’ve done it, guys like I have taken any client on that was willing to give me money regardless of my gut feeling. We’ve all talked about this all of my partners, all of us at [inaudible 00:14:08] had similar expenses. I’m looking forward to hearing some comments about this again in just a moment. My point is every time I’ve done it as well where many times over the years where I’ve said okay it’s money I’m going to take it, and I’ve had a bad gut feeling and then it ends up being a nightmare. It requires so much additional work, so much hand holding, so much convincing that what I’m doing is valuable that it’s just not worth it. You’re better off just prospecting more clients until you find those that don’t put up as much resistance or to understand that it’s an investment that should produce a return on investment, excuse me, should produce a return instead of an expense.

Again when it comes down to somebody says how much does it cost, typically that’s if you want to just answer him, get him out of your life like thank you very much, that’s what Bill Goodin in Hot Prospects says. He says it all in one word, no spaces between them, “Thankyouverymuch” click like hang up. You know what I mean? I don’t mean be a prick about it. I just mean like give him the price and let them say, “Oh no, that’s too much.” Let them hang up on you then, that’s fine. Don’t take it personally, move on. Prospect like what I just showed you over here, fill your pipeline full of prospects and you won’t have to worry about that. Does that make sense? Now I know you’re doing video e-mails and I know that’s a much slower process and that’s why I recommend that with the video e-mails, you keep them very short because you don’t want to spend … Here’s the thing, Mel, when I get a get a client referral and I do a video e-mail with an analysis of their properties and stuffs, sometimes those go 20, 25 minutes long.

I’m not kidding but that’s because it was a client referral so there’s a much better chance of me landing that client anyways. It’s a high quality lead because it was a client referral but when I’m doing cold prospecting and I’m sending video e-mails which I don’t really do so much anymore because it’s so time consuming. I like the shotgun approach better because you could scale it. With starting out that rifle approach of doing video e-mails is very effective but I would try to keep your initial video, your outreach video, down to five minutes or less so that you can bang out several of them within an hour and get them out because again it’s a numbers game.

You might get out of sending 10, you might get three. My consistent number is worth three or four responses out of every 10 e-mails that I sent. Out of every three or four responses, I would typically get one client, sometimes two, and so again that’s what I recommend that you try to keep it short. Otherwise you end up with 15 or 20-minute videos for every potential client, cold e-mail that you send and that’s just way too much work. What are your comments, guys?

Hernan: I totally agree with you, Bradley in terms of the quality of the clients that you’re getting. It’s funny because I wasn’t franker with one of the Mastermind’s call like five minutes before they hang up. One thing he said really resonated with me and he was saying, “It’s way easier to increase the quality of the clients that you get than to try to reeducate them into why your stuff that you’re doing is worth it.” In other words, instead of trying to reeducate themselves on why they will need to take your marketing serious, and why they’re doing an investment and why they should be doing and should be doing that, that puts you in a perspective of, “Well, I need now to educate them into why my stuff is valuable.” The perfect client, which is something that you need to come up with. There’s nothing that … You need to come up with what’s your perfect type of client, which sometimes like I would say 9 times out 10, we don’t do. We just go and try to find as many clients as possible and that puts you in the position of getting the worst type of clients on earth pretty much, right?

Number one, ask yourself what your perfect type of client is and number two, try to find those clients in a way that they already understand that marketing is an investment. Bradley would tell you yeah go after the ad works guys. Go after the guys that are already advertising because they already know. Go after the guys that are doing SEO that you can actually pinpoint that they’re doing SEO or they have their maps already set up. Maybe not perfect but they understand the value that ad works can bring to their business et cetera, et cetera so that’s why I think it’s way easier and way more rewarding. You will end up working with better clients, getting better quality and try to enhance your process of getting clients to get better quality clients than try to turn someone’s minds over, which is nearly impossible and it will wear you out. You know what I’m saying? That would be my comment.

Adam: All right, I’ll play devil’s advocate real quick and not disagreeing actually, just offering the counterpoint and I would say that also you got to do your homework on this one. I’ve seen people go in and try to just sell videos. Let’s say they are selling video rankings or something like that. They go in and they get to the money part and they don’t know what their potential client’s cost is or what their business model is and then it becomes really hard for people to talk because they don’t understand or they go in with the completely wrong offer. Make sure you do your homework and find out how much is a lead work to this person. You don’t have to know down to the dollar but do you know the market? Do you know how much it’s worth? Is the lead worth $5 or $50? Figuring that out and then you can at least talk until it leads you to the right people.

Bradley: Yeah, and to expand on what Adam said, if you understand the market. Your potential customer base, which will be like local businesses or whatever kind. In my case like contractors, tree service contractors, right? Let’s just use that as an example. I understand about how much a good tree service lead is worth to a contractor because I understand from being in that industry what a qualified lead could produce for a contractor as far as revenue. With that said, you can frame or stir the conversation into a let me show you how instead of how much does it cost, let me show you what it can produce. Does that make sense because then you’re taking the cost equation. You’re taking cost out of the equation, right? The focus isn’t on the cost. The focus is on the return and that when you reframe their question in that light or in that manner then they start to see the return on investment potential but as Hernan said I 100% agree with him. If you have to first convince somebody as to why your service is valuable or important then before you then have to sell it to him then you’re doing twice as much work because first you have to convince then you have to sell so avoid that.

If you feel like you’re catching resistance where you’re trying to convince them then let them go, thank you very much, click. Thank you very much, click. Get the hell out of my life. Next like SWSWSWSW, some will, some won’t, excuse me. Some will, some won’t, so what, someone’s waiting, and that’s really what it comes down to. Just fill your pipeline with quality leads. Know your market. Know the potential what a lead is worth so that you can stir the conversation towards a return on investment versus cost price. Does that make sense?

Marco: I’m reading this just a touch differently and I don’t disagree with either you or Hernan but I’m more inclined with Adam. If she’s having trouble understanding how to price her services, I mean that’s a bit different and that’s just understanding the market and what are leads worth. I mean if a guy … If a lead is worth $2,000 to that person and you can produce, you should be concentrating on what you’re going to do, right? You get paid for what you produce rather than getting paid for whatever for something nebulous that the client doesn’t understand. I’m going to affect your bottom line positively, that’s what I’m going to do for you. As long as you take that approach, you understand the market, you understand the client. You understand what a lead is worth then you won’t have trouble pricing yourself and your services, that’s how I’m seeing this question.

Bradley: Yeah, and last thing, that’s a great question by the way, Mel so I’m going to plus one at number one. I’m sorry we spent so much time on this, guys but that’s a fantastic question. What happened? It didn’t plus one. The last thing I would say about that, Mel is you can always have a foot in the door product or service that you can provide even for free, right? I don’t recommend … Guys, don’t work for free for often but you can have a foot in the door offer some sort of product or service that you provide for free to prove yourself to a potential client, to a prospect, that works really well like I do that. I’ll talk to a potential client and I’ll say, “Look, let’s talk about pricing.” If that comes up then I’ll say, “Let me just prove to you that I’m capable of producing some results and then we’ll talk about that. This is what I’m going to do.”

A lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll do some video marketing campaign so I can get them some quick wins that they can see by going to search results and seeing videos ranked for various keywords, various locations whatever. I’ll just do a quick … It might take me 30 minutes to set up a video campaign and blast it out using some spam tools or whatever. Get them ranked for a few keywords and then I just show them the results and say, “Look, this is what I was able to do in a few days and then imagine what I could do if you hired for this or that.” Does that make sense? You can give them something for free just to whet their appetite so to speak and then you can upsell them into or sell them into an actual service at that point you’ve already … You’ve given them results in advance.

Again video marketing is fantastic for that because it’s something that you can get done very, very quickly. You can get results quickly. It’s almost tangible, right? They can see the results and because of that, you can oftentimes upsell, that’s why I use video primarily as my opening product or service, okay. Again, great, great question, Mel.

How Would You Optimize A Maps Listing For A Potential Client Located In The Midst Of Small Counties?

All right, Shibga’s up. He says … Or Shibga, I’m sorry if I butchered that. “My potential client is located in the midst of a bunch of small counties. Since I’m only doing maps, he won’t be showing up in counties even just 10 miles from him. The competitor’s currently up there are getting traffic from difficult keywords organically and that is not something I want to do. What would you suggest? Thank you.” Well-

Marco: If I may?

Bradley: Go ahead.

Marco: He’s in RYS Academy reloaded and that’s Monday’s webinar, dude.

Bradley: Perfect. There you go. As far as everybody else, it’s not an RYS. My suggestion in that case would be, well I’m going to give you number one, ad words, right? You can do that rather quickly and you can just set up GO targeting so it’s very easy to get them to start generating traffic for all the different areas that way plus if you’ve got a Google My Business, you use the location extension for your ad words ad then you can actually have your maps, your Google Maps, your Google My Business Maps listing show up in Maps in the actual Maps. Now I’m starting to see the Maps listed, the first listing in the three-pack is now an ad for a lot of queries like that’s been rolling out slowly but I’m starting to see that appear more and more in various industries now where there’s an actual four-pack instead of a three-pack because the first listing is an ad, and that’s something that you can absolutely do. All you need is a location extension, which means you need a Google My Business listings verified, and then you can use the location extension and ad words, so that’s number one.

Number two would be to rank organically. I don’t see a lot of value in that for local lead [inaudible 00:26:22] type of stuff. I’ve got mixed results on that but that’s all you could do short of setting up PO boxes in all the various areas, which can be a pain in the ass, and then you’ve got a ton of Google My Business listings to optimize, a bunch of citations, all that kind of stuff to do. It’s really up to you. I would do what Marco was talking about with RYS stuff, he’s doing multi-location training on Monday but I would also consider ad words and go after some organic stuff unless you’re willing and capable of setting up a bunch of Google My Business profiles listings for various locations using PO boxes or something, okay.

What Are Your Thoughts On AMP?

Eliza says, “Hey guys, have you heard of AMP? If so, what are your thoughts on it?” Marco, I’ll let you talk on that since you developed the plug-in.

Marco: We have an AMP plug-in. All you have to do is go to the Facebook group, AMP Creators Mastermind in Facebook and join then download the plug-in. It’s working for news more than anything else, that’s where AMP really helps. It speeds up the page. A very light version of the page is served up through AMP. I think as Google goes more into mobile, it will have greater weight. It will become more important. Right now it hasn’t had the impact that it should’ve had but that’s because if you’re not producing news, the Accelerated Mobile Page experience isn’t really necessary. Your website is fast enough as it is or should be fast enough as it is, right? I mean that’s just my take on it. We do have the plug-in so you can experiment with it and see whether it works for you, whether it has any effect in your niche. We haven’t seen any effects as a matter of fact with AMP on anything local unless you produce news, something that’s newsworthy like Google’s going to pick up.

Bradley: Yeah. I don’t have much of a comment because I haven’t really played with it much.

What Do You Think Are Some Issues With Writing Blog Posts And Repurpose Them To Videos, Embeds, And Syndication?

All right, quit this house says, “Good day. I want to write blog posts. Create a video of each blog with content samurai then syndicate the video. Take that link of video embedded in the blog then syndicate the blog. Any issues? PS, get better soon, Marco.” No, that’s fine. In fact I’ve talked about this in Mastermind in Master class when we used to have a Master class as well. One of the strategies that I’ve used with some of my contractors, the ones that are willing to do it, which is a great strategy is their technicians basically give instructions to their technicians. Let’s say plumber, that’s one of the industries that I’ve done this for, it’s a plumbing company.

They had I think six employees or technicians. Six plumbers that were out there working with vans and all that kind of stuff. They just go out on job site and take their phone, iPhone, Android whatever and record a very short video from the jobs that they go out on. Just say, “Hey, this is Joe from Joe’s Plumbing in Fairfax, Virginia. We’re out on location in Fairfax, Virginia, we got a call for a water heater that needed replaced and this what I found.” He takes his phone and shows where the water heater was. The heating element went bad, we basically replaced the water heater and now this customer has hot water again, and they’re happy. If you have any water heater problems in Fairfax, Virginia, contact us at an in-call to action. Very, very simple like a 60-second video, 60 to 90 seconds, sometimes even less and then they send me the video file and then I upload it to YouTube.

I send it to a transcription service, have it transcribed then I go post the video with the transcription on the blog, which then syndicates out across the syndication network, and it gives me the ability to optimize the YouTube video and rank that for keywords like water heater repair, Fairfax, Virginia for example and as well as the blog post, which adds additional content to the site that’s a 100% relevant, it’s a 100% unique user or 100% created, unique created content. Does that make sense? It’s a very, very good strategy because it’s something that you don’t even have to do like to me, it’s very simple to just … They send me the video, I upload it to YouTube, optimize the videos, send that to rev.com to get it transcribed, get the transcription back within usually a couple of hours, and then I can post that as the actual post content, which has its keyword rich.

It’s got the call to action and ends up going into silos so I interlink that up to the silo heading, and then that goes out across the syndication network which in turn helps to boost the overall site; very, very powerful strategy. I don’t see anything wrong with that at all. I would encourage you to do it. Test with it to see. I haven’t done it specifically talking about what you’re talking about here but I can’t imagine why that would be any different. It’s a good strategy, check it out.

How Would You Sell Map Embeds To Somebody?

Muhammad, what’s up, Muhammad? He’s here every week asking questions and being very engaged, it’s awesome. We’re glad to have you, buddy. He says, “Hey guys, how would you sell Map Embeds to somebody?” You don’t, Muhammad. You wouldn’t sell Map Embeds unless it’s an SEO or somebody that understands it. My first reaction would be don’t. Don’t even try to explain. I mean some people are inquisitive and you can try to explain it in a way but a lot of the times like when you start talking about that kind of stuff with prospects, their eyes glass over because they really don’t understand it anyways. I try to avoid that like technical kind of stuff with most clients if possible, but anyways “I never really thought of a Map ranking as something to include in SEO [inaudible 00:32:12]. Is it something you guys would include?”

Yeah, when I’m selling SEO services, I typically for the most part am selling Maps ranking, local SEO Maps ranking for the most part but I don’t particularly tell them all the different things that I’m doing to get them ranked. Not stuff like Map Embeds because they wouldn’t understand like for the most part. I might tell them I’m going to produce content. I’m going to optimize your listing, your photos. We’re going to create corresponding content on your website. We’re going to do some link building stuff and syndicate content out across your social media properties to get you some exposure and traffic, all that kind stuff but I don’t talk about Map Embeds and that kind of stuff. What do you guys think about that?

Marco: I totally agree. Don’t ever sell rankings, dude, Muhammad. You cannot control rankings. If you can’t control rankings then you cannot sell what you can’t be sure that you’re going to do. I mean you can be really good at it but then run into a stubborn niche or stubborn sub niche where you just can’t rank them out, and you just sold the client on ranking them out so now what are you going to do? Sell results, guys, everyone, everyone in this. When you’re out there and you’re selling your services, you’re going to produce results. What those results are, that’s up to you. It’s not up to the client to decide what the results are. The results will be reflected in the bottom line through visitors to the website, leads and close leads and all of that. How you go about it, that’s what they’re hiring for you the expert. Approach it that way, don’t ever, ever sell rankings ever.

Bradley: I would only comment that I actually do often sell rankings. What I do is I preface. I say, “Look, I don’t work for Google,” so Google can change its algorithm at any time. They’re constantly adjusting your algorithm so things change but the trend is, the idea or the goal is to get you ranked in the Maps like that’s what I say when I’m talking to a prospect. I say, “This is what I know works and I’m going to do this.” I don’t sell them rankings but I tell them that they can expect to see some movement and we’re likely going to get the goal, the end goal what my intention is to get them ranked in Maps, but what I’m selling are the services that have shown to prove that is the end result. Does that make sense?

It’s like I don’t say or guarantee rankings, I don’t because I’m not … If I’m going to guarantee rankings, I’m going to own the asset. It’s going to be lead gen thing because I’m not guaranteeing it to anybody but me but I don’t guarantee rankings to clients. Unless for example I got a video production company that I do a lot of wholesale SEO for, I basically don’t guarantee rankings but I tell them if we’re not ranked on page one then you just don’t pay for it. Does that make sense? So that’s what I do, I don’t guarantee rankings but I tell them they don’t pay unless they’re ranked. Keep moving, we got two more questions from him. We’re going to try to roll through these. I know we’re running short on time today already.

How Would You Sell Syndication Networks To Bloggers And YouTubers?

“For sales practices and extra money, I’m trying to sell syndication networks to bloggers and YouTubers. How would I best approach this? I’ve bought BB’s recommended book on cold e-mail and use his practices but I must be doing something wrong because I haven’t seen much interest.” All right, so a couple of things, Muhammad, my thoughts on trying to contact and sell to bloggers and YouTubers is that they’re in the marketing space so to speak, they’re in the digital space maybe not marketing but they’re in the whole digital space, and they’re probably numb. I’m trying to think about the right word here. They’re probably used to just ignoring pitch type stuff especially probably a lot of YouTubers because I know like our YouTube channels like we’ve got our [inaudible 00:36:18] Master generals as well as my own channel, we got a lot of subscribers and I get pitched shit all day long all the time. We get spam e-mails from people trying to sell us on YouTube services like stuff all the time. They’re probably just ignoring a lot of that. They’re numb to it so to speak.

Bloggers are very similar because bloggers get pitched all the time on guest post and link swaps and link exchanges, all that kind of stuff as well. It could just be that, I don’t know because I haven’t really pitched to those kind of people but the other thing would be maybe … I’m not sure about cold e-mailing those. I would have to think about it and obviously, Muhammad, I would recommend that you just test different … You’re going to have to split test your different cold e-mail approaches. What I’m doing for contractors is working incredibly well but I don’t know that that method would work for YouTubers and bloggers. I would just try different types of cold outreach e-mails until you found one that seems to work well and then repeat that, scale that, right? It’s going to requite some split testing on your part. It’s a lot of work I know. It’s a lot of trial and error but once you find something that works like what I found with the contractor prospecting that I’m doing then you can scale it and you can just see massive results, okay?

As far as when I started selling networks like when I first built, started outsourcing that and I trained some virtual assistants, and I started selling networks, I sold them retail to local businesses and then I sold them wholesale to SEO agencies. What I did was I just went to the various marketplaces like SEO Mojo was one of them, SEO Clerks was another one of them, and I just put up listings for networks to sell syndication networks, and that’s how I ended up landing a lot of SEO agency clients was through those service sites by selling networks. I would sell it for like … I believe I was selling networks at the time for $297 or $299 around $300 for a single network but for agencies, I had an agency from Australia contact me and he wanted 10 per month, 10 syndication networks per month.

At the time I actually I wouldn’t do it, well, I actually probably would do it now still but I ended up selling those networks at $100 a piece to him so he’d pay me $1,000 a month. I’d sell them. I have my team would build him 10 networks and my networks cost me about $50 to build so I would literally pocket about $500 to not really do a damn thing, which was awesome. You may want to consider doing that too like putting your service up on some of these sites, all right?

How Would You Explain The Benefits Of PR In Layman’s Terms To A Client?

Last is, “How would you explain the benefits of PR in layman’s term to a client?” Exposure, brand building and traffic, that’s it. You don’t sell the SEO part of it. You can mention that it should have an SEO benefit, should help them it will likely or often will help them to rank better but would you want to sell is the exposure, the brand building and the traffic that it will produce, those are the things.

You want to talk about the benefits not the features. Essentially you want to tell them how, what are the end results that a press release can provide that’s traffic, authority and brand building and exposure, massive exposure. Anybody else would comment on that? All right, we’re going to keep moving.

Marco: Yeah, I know. I was about to say that, yeah. I agree with you, Bradley in terms of … Business owners they all care about how many new clients, how many new leads they can get. Usually they don’t care about rankings or positions or whatever like keywords and all of that jazz. If you talk about in business terms like again this is an investment, I like the different … The comparison between assets and liabilities but the way [inaudible 00:40:30] gets it. For example, you would have money that you throw away every week pretty much. You buy stuff, you go to Starbucks, you go out to dinner whatever, you buy clothes, that’s money that goes out and never comes back, right? Assets and the way millionaires think is that they invest their money into stuff like real estate or stocks or whatever, now would put more money into their pockets so that’s how they’re thinking. Well, you can do the same because you can say this is a service that would put more money to your pocket because that will increase the visibility of your website, the traffic and ultimately if the website converts, the leads, right?

If you think about it, you’re investing the money. We always backtrack to the investment versus the spending side of things so that’s how I usually frame it and it works.

How Do You Get Viewers To A Niche YouTube Channel That Contains Other People’s Popular Videos?

Bradley: Yeah, awesome, thanks. All right, the next one is Eddie Grim. Eddie, I read this question ahead of time and I’m not sure how you’re going to get viewers to your videos. I understand you’re saying that you’re starting a niche top-based YouTube channel. [inaudible 00:41:38] a lot of other people’s popular videos to my channel. The question that I would have for you, Eddie is if you’re just adding other people’s popular videos to playlists because that’s really the only way you can do it. You can’t really add their videos to your channel unless you download their videos and then upload to your channel, which is against terms of service, right? I’m not saying you can’t do that, hint, hint but I am telling you that it’s against terms of service and you may get a copyright claim or something like that from one of those people if you are to download and re-upload on to your channel so keep that in mind. However, you can put other people’s videos into your own playlist and there’s some benefit for doing that.

The only problem with the next part of your question is you say, “the goal is to gain viewers that I can re-target with ads.” Unless, the video is on your channel like it’s your video uploaded to your channel then even if you have other people’s popular videos and playlist and somebody were to click through from your playlist to that other person’s video, you won’t be able to re-target them because you won’t get a re-marketing cookie from somebody clicking on to their video. Does that make sense? As far as I know you can’t and again I may be mistaken here but I don’t think you can set up a re-marketing list for videos within a playlist like I think it’s only for individual videos or a channel, which in that case you can re-target them if they land on your channel, right? I’d have to go in and look at ad words to see.

I’m not going to do that right now obviously we’re running short on time anyways but I’m going to be doing a lot of ad word stuff starting in January with the new Mastermind training curriculum. The first month or the first module is all about PPC (Pay Per Click) and YouTube is going to be included in that so it’s something that I will probably have soon, I’ll know for sure. I know that you can re-target people that interact with any videos on your channel. I don’t know if that also includes other people’s videos that you’ve embedded or added to playlist from your channel or not, I don’t know. Can anybody else confirm that?

Marco: Yeah, I know. I think that is the exact same thing that you’re saying, Bradley like you need to own the asset in order for Google to count the cookie towards your re-marketing list. What I would say, Eddie is see why these videos are so popular, try to emulate them, try to do the same title, keywords, et cetera, et cetera and then try to rank them on YouTube because that will put you like for example on semantic mastery channel and on my own channel, I’m pretty sure that will probably is channel two. 20% of the videos bring 80% of the views. Is that big? Is that cute? You will have, I don’t know, I probably have a couple of 100 videos semantic mastery has at this point thousands of videos but only a small fraction of those videos will for some reason will get … Not for some reason but because they are really targeting really high volume keywords on YouTube, right? They’re targeting really high volume keywords and they’re getting shared. They’re getting a lot of comments so YouTube will increase their view cap, and that will trickle down into the rest of the channel.

Here’s the thing, you want to try to emulate these popular videos, record your own version, curate them whatever, and try to run them on YouTube so that you can now own the asset. Once you have that, again, you need to create a bunch of videos so that 20% of those videos will get 80% of the traffic and once you have that then you can start re-targeting those people with that. You can also do pay-per-view. You can try to use the ad words to a video, and that’s something that you can do as long as you own the video. You can do with [inaudible 00:45:29] but there’s absolutely zero sense on spending money to do that but the point here is that you own the video but that’s a number scale. The pay-per-view needs to be lower than the re-targeting cost and that’s usually not the case, right? You’re paying more per view than that the ROI that you’re getting when you’re re-targeting these people so have that mind.

The best way to go, in my opinion, will be to get a lot of organic traffic from YouTube. Rank your videos on YouTube so that you can get a lot of organic traffic and then go to channel re-targeting.

Bradley: By the way, there are ways to siphon some authority off of those videos that are really popular that get a shit ton of views. Eddie, that way that you do that is scrape the tags from the videos that are ranking really well or that are getting a lot of views, the really popular videos. Scrape the tags. There are tools that can do that. You can also right click and view page source. Get the first two or three tags but there are tools that will scrape tags for you. Scrape the tags. Use those same tags in your video as well as the channel name of the channel that has the popular video and put that video into a playlist from your channel alongside of your other videos. In other words, when you go to optimize your own video targeting the same type of keywords as the popular videos that you want to siphon some authority from, you want to scrape the tags from that popular video, place it into your video.

You also want to scrape the channel or add the channel name as a tag in your video. You also want to create a playlist with that popular video next to your video. What happens is a lot of the times, it’s not 100% of the time and I don’t know what the threshold like what the circumstances are to make it work sometimes and not others but what I’ve seen a lot of that, when you do that is your video will end up popping on the end screen of a video when they show related videos like checkerboard of related videos. Your video will pop into there as well as in the right-hand sidebar on the watch page of the related … The right-hand sidebar where they show related videos. You’ll end up popping into there and you end up getting a lot of referral traffic just because you’re in the related video section if that makes sense, and that’s a great way to siphon authority off of other people’s videos, okay? Good question though, Eddie.

Do You Know A Tool Like Cinch Tweet From Mastery PR Intended For Linkedin?

Jonathan says, “I purchased Cinch Tweet for mastery PR and this tool works like crazy.” Awesome, that’s great to hear. “Do you have similar tool for LinkedIn?” I don’t know, Jonathan. I don’t even know Cinch Tweet is. I just know that I know we did a promo for it for mastery PR but I’m not a tweet guy or Twitter guy so I haven’t played with that at all. I don’t know of one for LinkedIn, sorry.

Adam: Yeah, Jonathan. What you could do is probably hop into the group if you’re not already a part of the semantic mastery, our free Facebook group and ask in there because I think Chris has been at least playing around with it so that would be the place to ask.

How Would You Reinstate The Previous Top Ranking Of A Client Site That Targets 3 Main Keywords?

Bradley: Yeah. All right, Ralph’s new. He says, “Hey guys, I’m a rookie when it comes to SEO for site. I have a client in Minneapolis area. He used to rank on page one for his key phrase, something changed a couple of years ago and now he’s back on page three, if even that. I just took over his site trying to get him back on page one. His company specializes in three areas. Okay, the way the site seems to be set up, they’re trying to shoot for all three targets on the front page at once.” Yeah, that’s pretty common actually. “Should I redo the title of description in H1 tags to shoot for keyword one and put keyword two and three on other pages? I tried using video to get them on page one, that doesn’t seem to work.”

Okay, yeah, Ralph, I would absolutely recommend that … I don’t typically try to rank the homepage guys. I mean it happens and there’s ways that you can force the homepage to rank but I usually optimize for again for contractors if they have separate services. I always like to try to optimize a specific service page for basically one primary service, right? I have separate pages for each one of those. In your case, it would be a separate page for keyword one, one for keyword two and one for keyword three because what happens is each one of those pages can be highly optimized for that particular keyword, that service in that location. It’s likely that you can end up ranking that as long as there’s not other domain health issues, Ralph. Assuming that everything else is fine, I would recommend that you would target specifically each keyword or service with its own page and then optimize it for that but then what you do is obviously you just internally link from each one of those pages up to the homepage.

In Maps you’re usually going to rank their homepage in Maps, not always the case but usually but then for organic, you would end up ranking the individual pages based upon the keywords search query, right?

Marco: I have a question. Sorry to stop you while you’re going through this but do we still have a backdoor to SEO bootcamp?

Bradley: I think we do.

Marco: Because I mean I was just going through that over the weekend.

Bradley: It’s amazing.

Marco: And I couldn’t stop. I went and I was lying down in bed and just listening and I went through. I forget how many videos I went through just listening. The guy is amazing on his keyword research and how to set this up. Ralph, everything that you’re looking for and how to set this up, how to target the keyword whether it’s a category, whether it is the top of the silo, whether it’s supporting LSI and whatever, this is covered in there. I have yet to see anyone who covers on page SEO as thoroughly as what’s covered in SEO bootcamp.

Bradley: Yeah, dude. He’s bad ass, man. I don’t know if it’s … I think the $500 price is now doubled unfortunately. I think it’s $1,000 now but it’s worth it even at $1,000. I’m not kidding, Ralph. It’s fantastic. It really is that good. If somebody didn’t already drop the link, it’s http://ift.tt/2BIn92b, I believe, that will take you over to it if you want to check it out. I’m not sure if that’s the link or not. If not, if somebody-

Adam: Yeah, I’m looking for it right now just to confirm.

Bradley: Yeah, that’s what I would suggest, Ralph is obviously optimize a separate page for each one of those and then you can link from those pages up to your homepage, that would be the better route to go than trying to be … If you’re trying to cover too many topics on one page and they’re not closely related enough then you dilute the optimization of any one of the keywords if that makes sense, okay? All right, we’re almost out of time, guys. Unfortunately we didn’t get … Well, I guess we got the most of them.

Will A Syndicated Content About Recipe Triggers Duplicate Content Issue?

All right so next question, “Hi. We are selling a new sweetener on our blog e-com site. Bloggers started to create recipes with it on their blogs, which is awesome. Now I started to create blog posts with those recipes by cloning them on our blog inside my recipe silo and these posts are then syndicated to a syndication network too. I’m doing this for obvious reasons, easy content and creation for me and additional publicity for them. Question, will this trigger and kind of duplicate content issues for me or not?”

No, it won’t because … Well, first of all just make sure that you are attributing. As long as you are citing the source … Okay, it won’t create any content issues for you anyways regardless, okay, period but to do it legally and properly the way that you should do it ethically as well is you make sure that you are getting attribution to the source where you got those recipes. Always cite the source. Give credit where credit is due, that’s not going to cost you any issues if you don’t as far as SEO issues, but it can cause … You can get DMCA complaints, which are basically copyright infringement complaints. If one of those bloggers decided that you were infringing upon their intellectual property, and they decided do a DMCA complaint then Google can de-index that page or post and that’s a bad sign for you and it’s a bad sign for the domain. I would recommend that you just you are always linking back to the source.

You can no-follow the links, that’s what I do. No-follow them but make sure that you link back to the source and give them the credit where it’s due, okay?

Should You Link Back To The Original Post Or Just Cite Them On The Syndicated Blog Post?

Question two, “Is it enough to cite their blog in the bottom of my current recipe without …” No, I would always link back to it, always. If you’re worried about passing dues, no-follow the link, okay? “As I link back to it, cite their blog at the bottom of my current or should I also link back to their original post?” Yeah, always link back to the original source of the content that you’re curating, that’s essentially what you’re doing. You’re curating content which is perfectly legit, that’s how most of the content is produced for all of my blogs, and client blogs and lead gen sites and all that is through curation. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just make sure that you cite the source.

By the way when you’re curating content, guys, sometimes you’re still going to get people that are pissed off about it, which is dumb in my opinion but sometimes because you are providing them a link, potential exposure, potential traffic but you are giving credit where it’s due. I still have gotten some cease and desist, take-down notices type stuff from curating, it happens from time to time. It’s just part of the game. Just don’t freak out when it happens. “I’m asking this because they all link to different pages on my site in their recipes. This would be some sort of reciprocal linking, I guess, which I heard is not good.” No, it’s fine. In that case, in this particular circumstance, that’s absolutely fine because it’s not like you’re trying to gain for SEO. You guys are just cross-promoting because it makes sense, it’s relevant. It’s not an SEO thing, right? I mean it provides SEO value but the intent is not strictly for SEOs. Does that make sense?

Reciprocal linking was something that was a no-no years ago. I don’t know if it’s still considered a no-no in Google’s eyes because there is a lot of crosslinking between and co-citation and things like that now. I’m talking about old directories, guys. A lot of web directories, they would only publish your link if you put a widget in the footer that linked to their directory. Those are reciprocal links that are frowned upon but two bloggers cross-promoting each other’s post, that’s not really … I don’t work for Google so I don’t know but I can tell you it’s logical for that to not be a reciprocal link penalty type thing. Any comments on that, guys?

Marco: Yeah, I haven’t been doing a lot of reciprocity like reciprocal links lately so I wouldn’t … I don’t have data like recent data.

Which Should You Get First, RYS Stack Or Syndication Network Or Both?

Bradley: All right, we’re almost out of time. Fortunately we got through almost all of the questions. Harold asks, “Hey guys, what’s up? Quick question, should I get an RYS stack, a syndication network or both?” Well, my go-to answer is going to be both. Of course, Harold. No, I mean that for real. I always start with syndication networks is always standard operating procedure but as soon as that gets built, I order the RYS drive stack as well, but it is really standard operating procedure, so I would say yes to both. Any comments, guys?

Marco: No, absolutely. Set up your syndication network, prime it just like we teach in the syndication academy. Once that’s done, get the RYS stack going and link to everything in T1. I mean it’s really that simple, and you can power everything up through link building through your drive stack, which will protect your T1, and your money site.

Which Company Provides The Best Citation Services?

Bradley: All right, Dan says, “Hey, gents. What are your suggestion for best source to have citations done?” Serpspace of course, Dan, duh. Dan, I’m giving you a hard time but yeah Serpspace. You can go in there and like … If you’re looking for the Cadillac, the Ferrari of citations, you’re going to spend more money but they are fabulous. They are done very, very well. I would say Loganix, they’ve got some really good packages. http://ift.tt/2bbLT53 but for new sites typically, I would just go with what we have in Serpspace and just order the big citation directory sites, which is like the national type sites and then I try to go with the hyper local type citations, which are a lot more like niche specific or local specific type directories. Those are always like standard operating procedure.

I usually start right off the bat with new sites with about anywhere between 40 to 60 citations, which is about 20 or so of the big national directories like the big heavy hitters, Yelp and Angie’s List, Yellowpages that kind of stuff, and then we try to find … We scrape citation or directory sites that are either niche specific or more localized and then build the additional citations there. Also don’t forget, Dan, to order citations or aggregate listing submissions like New Stark Louise. What are the other ones? Info USA, several of those. The other one is Factual is one. The other one is Axiom. Those are all really good because you get listed in those and about three to six months later, you’ll have citations and a ton of different directories because other directories scrape or pull data from those, and create listings for you. It’s more of a long-term thing but you want to do that right upfront because in about six months you’ll start seeing a whole bunch of new citations start popping up and you didn’t have to build them or create them.

All right, last question, I know we’re right at the five o'clock mark, “Is Cinch Twitter good for tier one? Can it be used on the Twitter attached to RSY stack?” Honestly, I have no response for that because I don’t even know what Cinch Tweet does. Anybody else have an answer to that?

Adam: No, I don’t. Good one to hop in the group probably and ask there.

Bradley: All right. We’re done, guys. Oh, wow. Everybody else bailed out. Thanks, everybody for being here. We’ll see everybody else next week, I guess because we don’t have any other webinars this week, do we?

Adam: I don’t think so.

Bradley: Sweet. All right, everybody, thanks for being here.

Adam: See you.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Bradley: See you.

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

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

Click on the video above to watch Episode 161 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

  Announcement

Adam: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is episode 161. Today is the sixth of December. First one in December, we’re rolling towards the end of the year but not quite there. Speaking of closer to the end of the year, we’re going to have a pretty awesome Hump Day Hangout coming up later in December but stay tuned for that, we’ll tell you more about that coming. Real quick, we want to go down and say hi to everybody and see how everyone is doing. Chris, how are you doing today?

Chris: Looking good. It’s glad to be here.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan, how about yourself?

Hernan: Good. It’s actually quite warm right now in Buenos Aires. Yeah, I’m excited for what’s coming. We have a lot of stuff coming. Oh, what? Are you cold?

Adam: No, I don’t know. I’m perfectly warm.

Hernan: Okay, right, okay.

Adam: Hey, Marco. How’s it going?

Marco: Well, the doctor took a look at my MRI today and said, “Holy shit.” Those are not words that you want to hear when the fucking doctor takes a look at your MRI of your fucking back, dude so that’s what I’m doing.

Adam: All right, fair enough. Bradley, how about you, man?

Bradley: I went to a doctor once with an ear infection and it hurt like a son of a bitch. The doctor put the thing in the ear to look at it and he goes, “Whoa.” I was like, “Doc, you’re not supposed to do that.” “I’ve never seen an eardrum look like that.”

Adam: Well, make it not look like that.

Bradley: No wonder it hurts, right? Anyway, this is great, guys. Today has been a really good day, really productive day. I got a shit ton of stuff done. I’m just excited to be here and answer some questions, and hang out.

Adam: Cool. Well, before we get into it, I got a couple of quick announcements. I’m going to post some stuff on the page. If you’ve never have come to Hump Day Hangouts, first of all, thank you very much for being here. It’s awesome and we love having more people join us. We got some good stuff for you, some resources I’m going to post on the page for you. If you were around over the Thanksgiving time period and for Black Friday then you saw the e-mails and you saw the page we got, you know that Syndication Academy is increasing a price. It’s going to be like a 50% jump. It’s something we’ve been putting off for a long time and this is last announcement that it’s happening, and the price is going up to $97 a month here shortly in seven days. We want to give everyone fair notice a nice reminder here before that happens, and you can get that for free if you join the Mastermind, all right? We want to remind people about that, that’s one of the many, many perks of being a Mastermind member.

Something else we wanted to talk about, obviously there’s been ongoing updates with RYSP loaded. There’s been a ton of new contents, stuff going on there. I’ll let Marco talk about this.

Marco: Yeah, we have in fact a new webinar coming up on Monday. We’re calling it Multi-Location Domination with Automation.

Bradley: Wow.

Marco: Yes, sir. We’re going there. We got in fact two scripts that we’re rolling out to make things easier just to allow people to make it as simple as possible to go and take over not only their local niche, right? The local area but surrounding areas and just take shit down city by city, that’s how we do it, that’s what we’re teaching. We’re also going to show how it’s done globally by the way because we’re in the lab taking a look at that, and as a matter of fact, when we roll out the Multi-Location Domination webinar, we’re going to raise the price on RYS reload. The price is going up. I don’t know how much. You know I always push as much as possible as much as you guys will allow but price is going up. I suggest if you’re on the fence, it’s time to get in. Get in where you fit in or get left behind. We’re going to teach people how to take over, it’s really that simple.

Adam: Nice. Yeah, it’ll be going up. We’ll have some more information coming out about that you guys if you’re watching. If you’re curious, I’ll also post the links obviously. If you’ve been thinking, “Oh, I’ve heard about RYS and it’s neat and maybe I should do that.” One, you should, it’s awesome. If not that then you should be checking out the [inaudible 00:04:05] services if you’re more of the outsourcing type, but if you’ve been thinking about getting in, now would be obviously a great time. Before we start answering questions, I think Bradley, you had something you wanted to share with people, right?

Bradley: A couple of things, number one, go to bradleybanner.com. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and also my daily Mindset updates. I just posted another video just a few minutes ago like literally 15 minutes ago that I recorded today kind of impromptu. I wasn’t planning on it but I had something that I wanted to share so I recorded a 20-minute video. I just posted it on Facebook as well as my YouTube channel. Going through those e-mails every single day, consistently every single day now, it takes me anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes to write an e-mail everyday but I’m developing a habit and it’s been … I can see … It’s like today I wrote e-mail number 20 and I can see the results already like it’s already improving my ability to write and convey thoughts better. In other words like it’s a habit worth developing. I’ve put it off for years and finally I’m developing the habit with intention and it’s working well like for example I had a bunch of VSLs video sales letter stuff that I had to record today and I had some scripts to write for some re-marketing videos and stuff.

Typically a VSL script would take me or a re-market whatever, a video script would take me hours to write but I was able to bang out three of them in about an hour’s time today. I attribute that to a habit of writing that I’ve started to develop. I encourage you guys to do something similar even if it’s journaling whatever. I’m just using the e-mail list as my vehicle. I would encourage you to go check it out because I basically talk about some pretty cool stuff as far as goal setting and mindset and that kind of thing. Anyway, that’s it. I do want to tease one thing rather quickly because we’re going to talk about this at the beginning part of next week’s Hump Day Hangouts briefly maybe 10 minutes or so. I’m going to cover this a little bit more in depth but today I just want to tease you guys with it. Oh, also check this out. I got my Mastermind shirt on. Thank you, Adam for sending it.

Adam: That’s pretty cool. Nice.

Bradley: Yeah, I meant to drop this down a little bit. There you go, how is that?

Adam: Nice.

Bradley: One of the thing, I just wanted to tease very quickly is guys the prospecting funnel stuff that I’ve been working on developing for a few months, I had to put it on hold for a bit while I worked on some other stuff. The last two weeks I’ve really been working on it hard again and it improved the process quite a bit, and the results are fucking astounding like I don’t know how else to say it other than that. I’m just going to give you guys a very quick sneak peek of this and then we’re going to talk about a little bit more next week. I’m not going to go into details, guys. This is more conceptual because this is going to be shared. This is being shared in the Mastermind. We are starting a new Mastermind educational track in January 2018 where we’re going to be basically building two businesses throughout the year from soup to nuts, start to finish.

One is a physical business like a brick and mortar type business, it’s a gym and then the other one obviously the emphasis is on the digital marketing but it’s going to be more than just digital marketing, right? It’s going to be traditional marketing as well as like setting up businesses, setting up a business, entity structuring, all that kind of stuff because I think that’s important. As marketing consultants, we should know about this stuff anyway, right? Number two, the second business. I was going to do two local businesses but I made an executive decision last week to make our local agency that we’re building right now as the second project that we’re going to highlight and cover as part of the Mastermind training next year. All of these is going to be revealed in very fine detail starting in January.

In fact I’ve already started sharing a lot of this agency building stuff which is an automated scalable agency. The way that i should’ve built mine originally but you can’t know which you don’t know, right? I’ve already started sharing a lot of that in the Mastermind but I’m just teasing you guys with this to encourage you to come join the Mastermind especially if you’re doing local because the results are undisputable, indisputable as far as like how well this is working on the prospecting side of things. Still working on the sale side, the fulfillment side, all of that is coming but the prospecting side is working. Enough teasing, let me just show you very quickly, I’m going to grab the screen. Guys, I’m not going to put this up for long but I want to show you something.

This is an image of the prospecting funnel. I told you I’m not going to put it up for long. I’m about to switch screens, take a screenshot fast, fast, fast. All right, moving on, that’s the prospecting funnel and take a look at this for example. This is the … I’m using drip.com as our auto responder for all contractors that are being put into this funnel, this prospecting funnel. These are only people that have taken action and you can see that like … I know it’s probably small on you, let me zoom in just a little bit, guys. [inaudible 00:09:08] look at just yesterday at it at 12-5 so December 5, we scroll down. We had 10 new contacts out of just yesterday alone. Those are inbound needs, guys. You guys see that? If we take a look at … Let me pull over here for just a moment.

This is our pipe drive account. This is what we’re using for our sales pipe line, it’s called pipe drive, it’s awesome. You can see that when I share a little bit of information about this a few weeks ago. I had run 125 e-mails through the system, 25 e-mails a day for five days and we had 13 inbound leads from that which is a 10% response rate. Since that time I’ve increased the outbound e-mails to 75 per day, it’s been about six days. We’ve had about another 150 e-mails go out and look we’re up to 48 leads now. We had 12 so we’ve added 36 more leads out of 150 e-mails, guys, that’s almost a 20% response rate. It’s absolutely incredible what we’re getting through here.

Again I just wanted to point that out because I’m really hoping that many of you guys that are thinking about joining the Mastermind or if you’re doing any sort local, I would highly encourage to come join us starting in January, well now is a good time too by the way but because I’m going to be literally dissecting exactly how that’s built step by step throughout the year so that by the end of the year, you could build your own automated agency if you so choose, or you can wait until we can build it for you and you can pay us and we’ll build it for you. Now that’s coming too but that probably won’t be for at least another year. Anyways, with that said, I’m going to move on. If you guys have any questions about that specifically, come join the Mastermind, I’ll be happy to answer them, all right? You guys got any comments on that before I move on?

Adam: I do. I’m [inaudible 00:10:57]. I think this is awesome.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Such a cool process because it pulls in just a ton of stuff I won’t go into but just yeah, I love it. I’m excited for this.

Bradley: Yeah, me too, man.

Marco: For anyone who’s new and watching this, those are people who got e-mails and contacted us back.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: It’s no longer just a cold e-mail going out. Hopefully you’ll be able to find some of these people contacting us and saying, “We’re interested. Tell me more,” which is I mean that’s just awesome so now you have a pool of people to contact.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Anyone that’s new, that’s what’s going on. We go really in depth as you said in the Mastermind. The Mastermind is the place to be in 2018. If you’re not there, you should be.

What Are The Points You Need To Convey To The Client When It Comes To Service Costing?

Bradley: Totally agree, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thank you, Marco. All right, enough of that. Let’s get into some questions. We’ve got several. I’m excited. Let’s get into it. Mel, she’s up. She says, “I’m sending video e-mails and it’s getting some traction but when asked for price, I’m having some trouble. What kind of points do you try to convey when they ask how much does it cost.” I swear this question was asked last week. I swear this was … Anyways, how much does it cost? Now if that’s the first question out of a prospect’s mouth, they’re probably not going to be a good client. I’ve experienced that many, many times. Those are price-conscious people. I understand we all are price-conscious to a degree but the problem with people that come right out of the gate with how much does it cost is it’s because they have already made assumptions and all they’re looking at … They look at marketing as an expense, not an investment. It’s very hard to satisfy any client that thinks of marketing as an expense instead of an investment.

Marketing should create an ROI. If it creates a return on investment then it’s an investment, it’s an ROI. Investment is right in that title, you know what I mean? When they come right out of the gate with thinking of it as an expense and asking how much does it cost then even if you were to land them as a client, you’re probably going to have difficulty with them. They’re never going to be satisfied. There always going to be questioning, what’s going on because they’re penny pinching, right, and because they’re … Again I just want to explain it, that’s a red flag. For me over the years after doing this so many years, that’s a red flag for me. I would recommend that when it comes down to that, I try to avoid pricing stuff upfront until after I’ve had the chance to talk with them and analyze like a particular property. That said, sometimes you just have to talk them up front like what it is and you’re going to lose them. A lot of the times you’re going to lose them but don’t cut undercut your services just to try to land clients.

I get how important it is especially when you’re starting out or you’re trying to go to an agency because I’ve done it, guys like I have taken any client on that was willing to give me money regardless of my gut feeling. We’ve all talked about this all of my partners, all of us at [inaudible 00:14:08] had similar expenses. I’m looking forward to hearing some comments about this again in just a moment. My point is every time I’ve done it as well where many times over the years where I’ve said okay it’s money I’m going to take it, and I’ve had a bad gut feeling and then it ends up being a nightmare. It requires so much additional work, so much hand holding, so much convincing that what I’m doing is valuable that it’s just not worth it. You’re better off just prospecting more clients until you find those that don’t put up as much resistance or to understand that it’s an investment that should produce a return on investment, excuse me, should produce a return instead of an expense.

Again when it comes down to somebody says how much does it cost, typically that’s if you want to just answer him, get him out of your life like thank you very much, that’s what Bill Goodin in Hot Prospects says. He says it all in one word, no spaces between them, “Thankyouverymuch” click like hang up. You know what I mean? I don’t mean be a prick about it. I just mean like give him the price and let them say, “Oh no, that’s too much.” Let them hang up on you then, that’s fine. Don’t take it personally, move on. Prospect like what I just showed you over here, fill your pipeline full of prospects and you won’t have to worry about that. Does that make sense? Now I know you’re doing video e-mails and I know that’s a much slower process and that’s why I recommend that with the video e-mails, you keep them very short because you don’t want to spend … Here’s the thing, Mel, when I get a get a client referral and I do a video e-mail with an analysis of their properties and stuffs, sometimes those go 20, 25 minutes long.

I’m not kidding but that’s because it was a client referral so there’s a much better chance of me landing that client anyways. It’s a high quality lead because it was a client referral but when I’m doing cold prospecting and I’m sending video e-mails which I don’t really do so much anymore because it’s so time consuming. I like the shotgun approach better because you could scale it. With starting out that rifle approach of doing video e-mails is very effective but I would try to keep your initial video, your outreach video, down to five minutes or less so that you can bang out several of them within an hour and get them out because again it’s a numbers game.

You might get out of sending 10, you might get three. My consistent number is worth three or four responses out of every 10 e-mails that I sent. Out of every three or four responses, I would typically get one client, sometimes two, and so again that’s what I recommend that you try to keep it short. Otherwise you end up with 15 or 20-minute videos for every potential client, cold e-mail that you send and that’s just way too much work. What are your comments, guys?

Hernan: I totally agree with you, Bradley in terms of the quality of the clients that you’re getting. It’s funny because I wasn’t franker with one of the Mastermind’s call like five minutes before they hang up. One thing he said really resonated with me and he was saying, “It’s way easier to increase the quality of the clients that you get than to try to reeducate them into why your stuff that you’re doing is worth it.” In other words, instead of trying to reeducate themselves on why they will need to take your marketing serious, and why they’re doing an investment and why they should be doing and should be doing that, that puts you in a perspective of, “Well, I need now to educate them into why my stuff is valuable.” The perfect client, which is something that you need to come up with. There’s nothing that … You need to come up with what’s your perfect type of client, which sometimes like I would say 9 times out 10, we don’t do. We just go and try to find as many clients as possible and that puts you in the position of getting the worst type of clients on earth pretty much, right?

Number one, ask yourself what your perfect type of client is and number two, try to find those clients in a way that they already understand that marketing is an investment. Bradley would tell you yeah go after the ad works guys. Go after the guys that are already advertising because they already know. Go after the guys that are doing SEO that you can actually pinpoint that they’re doing SEO or they have their maps already set up. Maybe not perfect but they understand the value that ad works can bring to their business et cetera, et cetera so that’s why I think it’s way easier and way more rewarding. You will end up working with better clients, getting better quality and try to enhance your process of getting clients to get better quality clients than try to turn someone’s minds over, which is nearly impossible and it will wear you out. You know what I’m saying? That would be my comment.

Adam: All right, I’ll play devil’s advocate real quick and not disagreeing actually, just offering the counterpoint and I would say that also you got to do your homework on this one. I’ve seen people go in and try to just sell videos. Let’s say they are selling video rankings or something like that. They go in and they get to the money part and they don’t know what their potential client’s cost is or what their business model is and then it becomes really hard for people to talk because they don’t understand or they go in with the completely wrong offer. Make sure you do your homework and find out how much is a lead work to this person. You don’t have to know down to the dollar but do you know the market? Do you know how much it’s worth? Is the lead worth $5 or $50? Figuring that out and then you can at least talk until it leads you to the right people.

Bradley: Yeah, and to expand on what Adam said, if you understand the market. Your potential customer base, which will be like local businesses or whatever kind. In my case like contractors, tree service contractors, right? Let’s just use that as an example. I understand about how much a good tree service lead is worth to a contractor because I understand from being in that industry what a qualified lead could produce for a contractor as far as revenue. With that said, you can frame or stir the conversation into a let me show you how instead of how much does it cost, let me show you what it can produce. Does that make sense because then you’re taking the cost equation. You’re taking cost out of the equation, right? The focus isn’t on the cost. The focus is on the return and that when you reframe their question in that light or in that manner then they start to see the return on investment potential but as Hernan said I 100% agree with him. If you have to first convince somebody as to why your service is valuable or important then before you then have to sell it to him then you’re doing twice as much work because first you have to convince then you have to sell so avoid that.

If you feel like you’re catching resistance where you’re trying to convince them then let them go, thank you very much, click. Thank you very much, click. Get the hell out of my life. Next like SWSWSWSW, some will, some won’t, excuse me. Some will, some won’t, so what, someone’s waiting, and that’s really what it comes down to. Just fill your pipeline with quality leads. Know your market. Know the potential what a lead is worth so that you can stir the conversation towards a return on investment versus cost price. Does that make sense?

Marco: I’m reading this just a touch differently and I don’t disagree with either you or Hernan but I’m more inclined with Adam. If she’s having trouble understanding how to price her services, I mean that’s a bit different and that’s just understanding the market and what are leads worth. I mean if a guy … If a lead is worth $2,000 to that person and you can produce, you should be concentrating on what you’re going to do, right? You get paid for what you produce rather than getting paid for whatever for something nebulous that the client doesn’t understand. I’m going to affect your bottom line positively, that’s what I’m going to do for you. As long as you take that approach, you understand the market, you understand the client. You understand what a lead is worth then you won’t have trouble pricing yourself and your services, that’s how I’m seeing this question.

Bradley: Yeah, and last thing, that’s a great question by the way, Mel so I’m going to plus one at number one. I’m sorry we spent so much time on this, guys but that’s a fantastic question. What happened? It didn’t plus one. The last thing I would say about that, Mel is you can always have a foot in the door product or service that you can provide even for free, right? I don’t recommend … Guys, don’t work for free for often but you can have a foot in the door offer some sort of product or service that you provide for free to prove yourself to a potential client, to a prospect, that works really well like I do that. I’ll talk to a potential client and I’ll say, “Look, let’s talk about pricing.” If that comes up then I’ll say, “Let me just prove to you that I’m capable of producing some results and then we’ll talk about that. This is what I’m going to do.”

A lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll do some video marketing campaign so I can get them some quick wins that they can see by going to search results and seeing videos ranked for various keywords, various locations whatever. I’ll just do a quick … It might take me 30 minutes to set up a video campaign and blast it out using some spam tools or whatever. Get them ranked for a few keywords and then I just show them the results and say, “Look, this is what I was able to do in a few days and then imagine what I could do if you hired for this or that.” Does that make sense? You can give them something for free just to whet their appetite so to speak and then you can upsell them into or sell them into an actual service at that point you’ve already … You’ve given them results in advance.

Again video marketing is fantastic for that because it’s something that you can get done very, very quickly. You can get results quickly. It’s almost tangible, right? They can see the results and because of that, you can oftentimes upsell, that’s why I use video primarily as my opening product or service, okay. Again, great, great question, Mel.

How Would You Optimize A Maps Listing For A Potential Client Located In The Midst Of Small Counties?

All right, Shibga’s up. He says … Or Shibga, I’m sorry if I butchered that. “My potential client is located in the midst of a bunch of small counties. Since I’m only doing maps, he won’t be showing up in counties even just 10 miles from him. The competitor’s currently up there are getting traffic from difficult keywords organically and that is not something I want to do. What would you suggest? Thank you.” Well-

Marco: If I may?

Bradley: Go ahead.

Marco: He’s in RYS Academy reloaded and that’s Monday’s webinar, dude.

Bradley: Perfect. There you go. As far as everybody else, it’s not an RYS. My suggestion in that case would be, well I’m going to give you number one, ad words, right? You can do that rather quickly and you can just set up GO targeting so it’s very easy to get them to start generating traffic for all the different areas that way plus if you’ve got a Google My Business, you use the location extension for your ad words ad then you can actually have your maps, your Google Maps, your Google My Business Maps listing show up in Maps in the actual Maps. Now I’m starting to see the Maps listed, the first listing in the three-pack is now an ad for a lot of queries like that’s been rolling out slowly but I’m starting to see that appear more and more in various industries now where there’s an actual four-pack instead of a three-pack because the first listing is an ad, and that’s something that you can absolutely do. All you need is a location extension, which means you need a Google My Business listings verified, and then you can use the location extension and ad words, so that’s number one.

Number two would be to rank organically. I don’t see a lot of value in that for local lead [inaudible 00:26:22] type of stuff. I’ve got mixed results on that but that’s all you could do short of setting up PO boxes in all the various areas, which can be a pain in the ass, and then you’ve got a ton of Google My Business listings to optimize, a bunch of citations, all that kind of stuff to do. It’s really up to you. I would do what Marco was talking about with RYS stuff, he’s doing multi-location training on Monday but I would also consider ad words and go after some organic stuff unless you’re willing and capable of setting up a bunch of Google My Business profiles listings for various locations using PO boxes or something, okay.

What Are Your Thoughts On AMP?

Eliza says, “Hey guys, have you heard of AMP? If so, what are your thoughts on it?” Marco, I’ll let you talk on that since you developed the plug-in.

Marco: We have an AMP plug-in. All you have to do is go to the Facebook group, AMP Creators Mastermind in Facebook and join then download the plug-in. It’s working for news more than anything else, that’s where AMP really helps. It speeds up the page. A very light version of the page is served up through AMP. I think as Google goes more into mobile, it will have greater weight. It will become more important. Right now it hasn’t had the impact that it should’ve had but that’s because if you’re not producing news, the Accelerated Mobile Page experience isn’t really necessary. Your website is fast enough as it is or should be fast enough as it is, right? I mean that’s just my take on it. We do have the plug-in so you can experiment with it and see whether it works for you, whether it has any effect in your niche. We haven’t seen any effects as a matter of fact with AMP on anything local unless you produce news, something that’s newsworthy like Google’s going to pick up.

Bradley: Yeah. I don’t have much of a comment because I haven’t really played with it much.

What Do You Think Are Some Issues With Writing Blog Posts And Repurpose Them To Videos, Embeds, And Syndication?

All right, quit this house says, “Good day. I want to write blog posts. Create a video of each blog with content samurai then syndicate the video. Take that link of video embedded in the blog then syndicate the blog. Any issues? PS, get better soon, Marco.” No, that’s fine. In fact I’ve talked about this in Mastermind in Master class when we used to have a Master class as well. One of the strategies that I’ve used with some of my contractors, the ones that are willing to do it, which is a great strategy is their technicians basically give instructions to their technicians. Let’s say plumber, that’s one of the industries that I’ve done this for, it’s a plumbing company.

They had I think six employees or technicians. Six plumbers that were out there working with vans and all that kind of stuff. They just go out on job site and take their phone, iPhone, Android whatever and record a very short video from the jobs that they go out on. Just say, “Hey, this is Joe from Joe’s Plumbing in Fairfax, Virginia. We’re out on location in Fairfax, Virginia, we got a call for a water heater that needed replaced and this what I found.” He takes his phone and shows where the water heater was. The heating element went bad, we basically replaced the water heater and now this customer has hot water again, and they’re happy. If you have any water heater problems in Fairfax, Virginia, contact us at an in-call to action. Very, very simple like a 60-second video, 60 to 90 seconds, sometimes even less and then they send me the video file and then I upload it to YouTube.

I send it to a transcription service, have it transcribed then I go post the video with the transcription on the blog, which then syndicates out across the syndication network, and it gives me the ability to optimize the YouTube video and rank that for keywords like water heater repair, Fairfax, Virginia for example and as well as the blog post, which adds additional content to the site that’s a 100% relevant, it’s a 100% unique user or 100% created, unique created content. Does that make sense? It’s a very, very good strategy because it’s something that you don’t even have to do like to me, it’s very simple to just … They send me the video, I upload it to YouTube, optimize the videos, send that to rev.com to get it transcribed, get the transcription back within usually a couple of hours, and then I can post that as the actual post content, which has its keyword rich.

It’s got the call to action and ends up going into silos so I interlink that up to the silo heading, and then that goes out across the syndication network which in turn helps to boost the overall site; very, very powerful strategy. I don’t see anything wrong with that at all. I would encourage you to do it. Test with it to see. I haven’t done it specifically talking about what you’re talking about here but I can’t imagine why that would be any different. It’s a good strategy, check it out.

How Would You Sell Map Embeds To Somebody?

Muhammad, what’s up, Muhammad? He’s here every week asking questions and being very engaged, it’s awesome. We’re glad to have you, buddy. He says, “Hey guys, how would you sell Map Embeds to somebody?” You don’t, Muhammad. You wouldn’t sell Map Embeds unless it’s an SEO or somebody that understands it. My first reaction would be don’t. Don’t even try to explain. I mean some people are inquisitive and you can try to explain it in a way but a lot of the times like when you start talking about that kind of stuff with prospects, their eyes glass over because they really don’t understand it anyways. I try to avoid that like technical kind of stuff with most clients if possible, but anyways “I never really thought of a Map ranking as something to include in SEO [inaudible 00:32:12]. Is it something you guys would include?”

Yeah, when I’m selling SEO services, I typically for the most part am selling Maps ranking, local SEO Maps ranking for the most part but I don’t particularly tell them all the different things that I’m doing to get them ranked. Not stuff like Map Embeds because they wouldn’t understand like for the most part. I might tell them I’m going to produce content. I’m going to optimize your listing, your photos. We’re going to create corresponding content on your website. We’re going to do some link building stuff and syndicate content out across your social media properties to get you some exposure and traffic, all that kind stuff but I don’t talk about Map Embeds and that kind of stuff. What do you guys think about that?

Marco: I totally agree. Don’t ever sell rankings, dude, Muhammad. You cannot control rankings. If you can’t control rankings then you cannot sell what you can’t be sure that you’re going to do. I mean you can be really good at it but then run into a stubborn niche or stubborn sub niche where you just can’t rank them out, and you just sold the client on ranking them out so now what are you going to do? Sell results, guys, everyone, everyone in this. When you’re out there and you’re selling your services, you’re going to produce results. What those results are, that’s up to you. It’s not up to the client to decide what the results are. The results will be reflected in the bottom line through visitors to the website, leads and close leads and all of that. How you go about it, that’s what they’re hiring for you the expert. Approach it that way, don’t ever, ever sell rankings ever.

Bradley: I would only comment that I actually do often sell rankings. What I do is I preface. I say, “Look, I don’t work for Google,” so Google can change its algorithm at any time. They’re constantly adjusting your algorithm so things change but the trend is, the idea or the goal is to get you ranked in the Maps like that’s what I say when I’m talking to a prospect. I say, “This is what I know works and I’m going to do this.” I don’t sell them rankings but I tell them that they can expect to see some movement and we’re likely going to get the goal, the end goal what my intention is to get them ranked in Maps, but what I’m selling are the services that have shown to prove that is the end result. Does that make sense?

It’s like I don’t say or guarantee rankings, I don’t because I’m not … If I’m going to guarantee rankings, I’m going to own the asset. It’s going to be lead gen thing because I’m not guaranteeing it to anybody but me but I don’t guarantee rankings to clients. Unless for example I got a video production company that I do a lot of wholesale SEO for, I basically don’t guarantee rankings but I tell them if we’re not ranked on page one then you just don’t pay for it. Does that make sense? So that’s what I do, I don’t guarantee rankings but I tell them they don’t pay unless they’re ranked. Keep moving, we got two more questions from him. We’re going to try to roll through these. I know we’re running short on time today already.

How Would You Sell Syndication Networks To Bloggers And YouTubers?

“For sales practices and extra money, I’m trying to sell syndication networks to bloggers and YouTubers. How would I best approach this? I’ve bought BB’s recommended book on cold e-mail and use his practices but I must be doing something wrong because I haven’t seen much interest.” All right, so a couple of things, Muhammad, my thoughts on trying to contact and sell to bloggers and YouTubers is that they’re in the marketing space so to speak, they’re in the digital space maybe not marketing but they’re in the whole digital space, and they’re probably numb. I’m trying to think about the right word here. They’re probably used to just ignoring pitch type stuff especially probably a lot of YouTubers because I know like our YouTube channels like we’ve got our [inaudible 00:36:18] Master generals as well as my own channel, we got a lot of subscribers and I get pitched shit all day long all the time. We get spam e-mails from people trying to sell us on YouTube services like stuff all the time. They’re probably just ignoring a lot of that. They’re numb to it so to speak.

Bloggers are very similar because bloggers get pitched all the time on guest post and link swaps and link exchanges, all that kind of stuff as well. It could just be that, I don’t know because I haven’t really pitched to those kind of people but the other thing would be maybe … I’m not sure about cold e-mailing those. I would have to think about it and obviously, Muhammad, I would recommend that you just test different … You’re going to have to split test your different cold e-mail approaches. What I’m doing for contractors is working incredibly well but I don’t know that that method would work for YouTubers and bloggers. I would just try different types of cold outreach e-mails until you found one that seems to work well and then repeat that, scale that, right? It’s going to requite some split testing on your part. It’s a lot of work I know. It’s a lot of trial and error but once you find something that works like what I found with the contractor prospecting that I’m doing then you can scale it and you can just see massive results, okay?

As far as when I started selling networks like when I first built, started outsourcing that and I trained some virtual assistants, and I started selling networks, I sold them retail to local businesses and then I sold them wholesale to SEO agencies. What I did was I just went to the various marketplaces like SEO Mojo was one of them, SEO Clerks was another one of them, and I just put up listings for networks to sell syndication networks, and that’s how I ended up landing a lot of SEO agency clients was through those service sites by selling networks. I would sell it for like … I believe I was selling networks at the time for $297 or $299 around $300 for a single network but for agencies, I had an agency from Australia contact me and he wanted 10 per month, 10 syndication networks per month.

At the time I actually I wouldn’t do it, well, I actually probably would do it now still but I ended up selling those networks at $100 a piece to him so he’d pay me $1,000 a month. I’d sell them. I have my team would build him 10 networks and my networks cost me about $50 to build so I would literally pocket about $500 to not really do a damn thing, which was awesome. You may want to consider doing that too like putting your service up on some of these sites, all right?

How Would You Explain The Benefits Of PR In Layman’s Terms To A Client?

Last is, “How would you explain the benefits of PR in layman’s term to a client?” Exposure, brand building and traffic, that’s it. You don’t sell the SEO part of it. You can mention that it should have an SEO benefit, should help them it will likely or often will help them to rank better but would you want to sell is the exposure, the brand building and the traffic that it will produce, those are the things.

You want to talk about the benefits not the features. Essentially you want to tell them how, what are the end results that a press release can provide that’s traffic, authority and brand building and exposure, massive exposure. Anybody else would comment on that? All right, we’re going to keep moving.

Marco: Yeah, I know. I was about to say that, yeah. I agree with you, Bradley in terms of … Business owners they all care about how many new clients, how many new leads they can get. Usually they don’t care about rankings or positions or whatever like keywords and all of that jazz. If you talk about in business terms like again this is an investment, I like the different … The comparison between assets and liabilities but the way [inaudible 00:40:30] gets it. For example, you would have money that you throw away every week pretty much. You buy stuff, you go to Starbucks, you go out to dinner whatever, you buy clothes, that’s money that goes out and never comes back, right? Assets and the way millionaires think is that they invest their money into stuff like real estate or stocks or whatever, now would put more money into their pockets so that’s how they’re thinking. Well, you can do the same because you can say this is a service that would put more money to your pocket because that will increase the visibility of your website, the traffic and ultimately if the website converts, the leads, right?

If you think about it, you’re investing the money. We always backtrack to the investment versus the spending side of things so that’s how I usually frame it and it works.

How Do You Get Viewers To A Niche YouTube Channel That Contains Other People’s Popular Videos?

Bradley: Yeah, awesome, thanks. All right, the next one is Eddie Grim. Eddie, I read this question ahead of time and I’m not sure how you’re going to get viewers to your videos. I understand you’re saying that you’re starting a niche top-based YouTube channel. [inaudible 00:41:38] a lot of other people’s popular videos to my channel. The question that I would have for you, Eddie is if you’re just adding other people’s popular videos to playlists because that’s really the only way you can do it. You can’t really add their videos to your channel unless you download their videos and then upload to your channel, which is against terms of service, right? I’m not saying you can’t do that, hint, hint but I am telling you that it’s against terms of service and you may get a copyright claim or something like that from one of those people if you are to download and re-upload on to your channel so keep that in mind. However, you can put other people’s videos into your own playlist and there’s some benefit for doing that.

The only problem with the next part of your question is you say, “the goal is to gain viewers that I can re-target with ads.” Unless, the video is on your channel like it’s your video uploaded to your channel then even if you have other people’s popular videos and playlist and somebody were to click through from your playlist to that other person’s video, you won’t be able to re-target them because you won’t get a re-marketing cookie from somebody clicking on to their video. Does that make sense? As far as I know you can’t and again I may be mistaken here but I don’t think you can set up a re-marketing list for videos within a playlist like I think it’s only for individual videos or a channel, which in that case you can re-target them if they land on your channel, right? I’d have to go in and look at ad words to see.

I’m not going to do that right now obviously we’re running short on time anyways but I’m going to be doing a lot of ad word stuff starting in January with the new Mastermind training curriculum. The first month or the first module is all about PPC (Pay Per Click) and YouTube is going to be included in that so it’s something that I will probably have soon, I’ll know for sure. I know that you can re-target people that interact with any videos on your channel. I don’t know if that also includes other people’s videos that you’ve embedded or added to playlist from your channel or not, I don’t know. Can anybody else confirm that?

Marco: Yeah, I know. I think that is the exact same thing that you’re saying, Bradley like you need to own the asset in order for Google to count the cookie towards your re-marketing list. What I would say, Eddie is see why these videos are so popular, try to emulate them, try to do the same title, keywords, et cetera, et cetera and then try to rank them on YouTube because that will put you like for example on semantic mastery channel and on my own channel, I’m pretty sure that will probably is channel two. 20% of the videos bring 80% of the views. Is that big? Is that cute? You will have, I don’t know, I probably have a couple of 100 videos semantic mastery has at this point thousands of videos but only a small fraction of those videos will for some reason will get … Not for some reason but because they are really targeting really high volume keywords on YouTube, right? They’re targeting really high volume keywords and they’re getting shared. They’re getting a lot of comments so YouTube will increase their view cap, and that will trickle down into the rest of the channel.

Here’s the thing, you want to try to emulate these popular videos, record your own version, curate them whatever, and try to run them on YouTube so that you can now own the asset. Once you have that, again, you need to create a bunch of videos so that 20% of those videos will get 80% of the traffic and once you have that then you can start re-targeting those people with that. You can also do pay-per-view. You can try to use the ad words to a video, and that’s something that you can do as long as you own the video. You can do with [inaudible 00:45:29] but there’s absolutely zero sense on spending money to do that but the point here is that you own the video but that’s a number scale. The pay-per-view needs to be lower than the re-targeting cost and that’s usually not the case, right? You’re paying more per view than that the ROI that you’re getting when you’re re-targeting these people so have that mind.

The best way to go, in my opinion, will be to get a lot of organic traffic from YouTube. Rank your videos on YouTube so that you can get a lot of organic traffic and then go to channel re-targeting.

Bradley: By the way, there are ways to siphon some authority off of those videos that are really popular that get a shit ton of views. Eddie, that way that you do that is scrape the tags from the videos that are ranking really well or that are getting a lot of views, the really popular videos. Scrape the tags. There are tools that can do that. You can also right click and view page source. Get the first two or three tags but there are tools that will scrape tags for you. Scrape the tags. Use those same tags in your video as well as the channel name of the channel that has the popular video and put that video into a playlist from your channel alongside of your other videos. In other words, when you go to optimize your own video targeting the same type of keywords as the popular videos that you want to siphon some authority from, you want to scrape the tags from that popular video, place it into your video.

You also want to scrape the channel or add the channel name as a tag in your video. You also want to create a playlist with that popular video next to your video. What happens is a lot of the times, it’s not 100% of the time and I don’t know what the threshold like what the circumstances are to make it work sometimes and not others but what I’ve seen a lot of that, when you do that is your video will end up popping on the end screen of a video when they show related videos like checkerboard of related videos. Your video will pop into there as well as in the right-hand sidebar on the watch page of the related … The right-hand sidebar where they show related videos. You’ll end up popping into there and you end up getting a lot of referral traffic just because you’re in the related video section if that makes sense, and that’s a great way to siphon authority off of other people’s videos, okay? Good question though, Eddie.

Do You Know A Tool Like Cinch Tweet From Mastery PR Intended For Linkedin?

Jonathan says, “I purchased Cinch Tweet for mastery PR and this tool works like crazy.” Awesome, that’s great to hear. “Do you have similar tool for LinkedIn?” I don’t know, Jonathan. I don’t even know Cinch Tweet is. I just know that I know we did a promo for it for mastery PR but I’m not a tweet guy or Twitter guy so I haven’t played with that at all. I don’t know of one for LinkedIn, sorry.

Adam: Yeah, Jonathan. What you could do is probably hop into the group if you’re not already a part of the semantic mastery, our free Facebook group and ask in there because I think Chris has been at least playing around with it so that would be the place to ask.

How Would You Reinstate The Previous Top Ranking Of A Client Site That Targets 3 Main Keywords?

Bradley: Yeah. All right, Ralph’s new. He says, “Hey guys, I’m a rookie when it comes to SEO for site. I have a client in Minneapolis area. He used to rank on page one for his key phrase, something changed a couple of years ago and now he’s back on page three, if even that. I just took over his site trying to get him back on page one. His company specializes in three areas. Okay, the way the site seems to be set up, they’re trying to shoot for all three targets on the front page at once.” Yeah, that’s pretty common actually. “Should I redo the title of description in H1 tags to shoot for keyword one and put keyword two and three on other pages? I tried using video to get them on page one, that doesn’t seem to work.”

Okay, yeah, Ralph, I would absolutely recommend that … I don’t typically try to rank the homepage guys. I mean it happens and there’s ways that you can force the homepage to rank but I usually optimize for again for contractors if they have separate services. I always like to try to optimize a specific service page for basically one primary service, right? I have separate pages for each one of those. In your case, it would be a separate page for keyword one, one for keyword two and one for keyword three because what happens is each one of those pages can be highly optimized for that particular keyword, that service in that location. It’s likely that you can end up ranking that as long as there’s not other domain health issues, Ralph. Assuming that everything else is fine, I would recommend that you would target specifically each keyword or service with its own page and then optimize it for that but then what you do is obviously you just internally link from each one of those pages up to the homepage.

In Maps you’re usually going to rank their homepage in Maps, not always the case but usually but then for organic, you would end up ranking the individual pages based upon the keywords search query, right?

Marco: I have a question. Sorry to stop you while you’re going through this but do we still have a backdoor to SEO bootcamp?

Bradley: I think we do.

Marco: Because I mean I was just going through that over the weekend.

Bradley: It’s amazing.

Marco: And I couldn’t stop. I went and I was lying down in bed and just listening and I went through. I forget how many videos I went through just listening. The guy is amazing on his keyword research and how to set this up. Ralph, everything that you’re looking for and how to set this up, how to target the keyword whether it’s a category, whether it is the top of the silo, whether it’s supporting LSI and whatever, this is covered in there. I have yet to see anyone who covers on page SEO as thoroughly as what’s covered in SEO bootcamp.

Bradley: Yeah, dude. He’s bad ass, man. I don’t know if it’s … I think the $500 price is now doubled unfortunately. I think it’s $1,000 now but it’s worth it even at $1,000. I’m not kidding, Ralph. It’s fantastic. It really is that good. If somebody didn’t already drop the link, it’s http://ift.tt/2BIn92b, I believe, that will take you over to it if you want to check it out. I’m not sure if that’s the link or not. If not, if somebody-

Adam: Yeah, I’m looking for it right now just to confirm.

Bradley: Yeah, that’s what I would suggest, Ralph is obviously optimize a separate page for each one of those and then you can link from those pages up to your homepage, that would be the better route to go than trying to be … If you’re trying to cover too many topics on one page and they’re not closely related enough then you dilute the optimization of any one of the keywords if that makes sense, okay? All right, we’re almost out of time, guys. Unfortunately we didn’t get … Well, I guess we got the most of them.

Will A Syndicated Content About Recipe Triggers Duplicate Content Issue?

All right so next question, “Hi. We are selling a new sweetener on our blog e-com site. Bloggers started to create recipes with it on their blogs, which is awesome. Now I started to create blog posts with those recipes by cloning them on our blog inside my recipe silo and these posts are then syndicated to a syndication network too. I’m doing this for obvious reasons, easy content and creation for me and additional publicity for them. Question, will this trigger and kind of duplicate content issues for me or not?”

No, it won’t because … Well, first of all just make sure that you are attributing. As long as you are citing the source … Okay, it won’t create any content issues for you anyways regardless, okay, period but to do it legally and properly the way that you should do it ethically as well is you make sure that you are getting attribution to the source where you got those recipes. Always cite the source. Give credit where credit is due, that’s not going to cost you any issues if you don’t as far as SEO issues, but it can cause … You can get DMCA complaints, which are basically copyright infringement complaints. If one of those bloggers decided that you were infringing upon their intellectual property, and they decided do a DMCA complaint then Google can de-index that page or post and that’s a bad sign for you and it’s a bad sign for the domain. I would recommend that you just you are always linking back to the source.

You can no-follow the links, that’s what I do. No-follow them but make sure that you link back to the source and give them the credit where it’s due, okay?

Should You Link Back To The Original Post Or Just Cite Them On The Syndicated Blog Post?

Question two, “Is it enough to cite their blog in the bottom of my current recipe without …” No, I would always link back to it, always. If you’re worried about passing dues, no-follow the link, okay? “As I link back to it, cite their blog at the bottom of my current or should I also link back to their original post?” Yeah, always link back to the original source of the content that you’re curating, that’s essentially what you’re doing. You’re curating content which is perfectly legit, that’s how most of the content is produced for all of my blogs, and client blogs and lead gen sites and all that is through curation. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just make sure that you cite the source.

By the way when you’re curating content, guys, sometimes you’re still going to get people that are pissed off about it, which is dumb in my opinion but sometimes because you are providing them a link, potential exposure, potential traffic but you are giving credit where it’s due. I still have gotten some cease and desist, take-down notices type stuff from curating, it happens from time to time. It’s just part of the game. Just don’t freak out when it happens. “I’m asking this because they all link to different pages on my site in their recipes. This would be some sort of reciprocal linking, I guess, which I heard is not good.” No, it’s fine. In that case, in this particular circumstance, that’s absolutely fine because it’s not like you’re trying to gain for SEO. You guys are just cross-promoting because it makes sense, it’s relevant. It’s not an SEO thing, right? I mean it provides SEO value but the intent is not strictly for SEOs. Does that make sense?

Reciprocal linking was something that was a no-no years ago. I don’t know if it’s still considered a no-no in Google’s eyes because there is a lot of crosslinking between and co-citation and things like that now. I’m talking about old directories, guys. A lot of web directories, they would only publish your link if you put a widget in the footer that linked to their directory. Those are reciprocal links that are frowned upon but two bloggers cross-promoting each other’s post, that’s not really … I don’t work for Google so I don’t know but I can tell you it’s logical for that to not be a reciprocal link penalty type thing. Any comments on that, guys?

Marco: Yeah, I haven’t been doing a lot of reciprocity like reciprocal links lately so I wouldn’t … I don’t have data like recent data.

Which Should You Get First, RYS Stack Or Syndication Network Or Both?

Bradley: All right, we’re almost out of time. Fortunately we got through almost all of the questions. Harold asks, “Hey guys, what’s up? Quick question, should I get an RYS stack, a syndication network or both?” Well, my go-to answer is going to be both. Of course, Harold. No, I mean that for real. I always start with syndication networks is always standard operating procedure but as soon as that gets built, I order the RYS drive stack as well, but it is really standard operating procedure, so I would say yes to both. Any comments, guys?

Marco: No, absolutely. Set up your syndication network, prime it just like we teach in the syndication academy. Once that’s done, get the RYS stack going and link to everything in T1. I mean it’s really that simple, and you can power everything up through link building through your drive stack, which will protect your T1, and your money site.

Which Company Provides The Best Citation Services?

Bradley: All right, Dan says, “Hey, gents. What are your suggestion for best source to have citations done?” Serpspace of course, Dan, duh. Dan, I’m giving you a hard time but yeah Serpspace. You can go in there and like … If you’re looking for the Cadillac, the Ferrari of citations, you’re going to spend more money but they are fabulous. They are done very, very well. I would say Loganix, they’ve got some really good packages. http://ift.tt/2bbLT53 but for new sites typically, I would just go with what we have in Serpspace and just order the big citation directory sites, which is like the national type sites and then I try to go with the hyper local type citations, which are a lot more like niche specific or local specific type directories. Those are always like standard operating procedure.

I usually start right off the bat with new sites with about anywhere between 40 to 60 citations, which is about 20 or so of the big national directories like the big heavy hitters, Yelp and Angie’s List, Yellowpages that kind of stuff, and then we try to find … We scrape citation or directory sites that are either niche specific or more localized and then build the additional citations there. Also don’t forget, Dan, to order citations or aggregate listing submissions like New Stark Louise. What are the other ones? Info USA, several of those. The other one is Factual is one. The other one is Axiom. Those are all really good because you get listed in those and about three to six months later, you’ll have citations and a ton of different directories because other directories scrape or pull data from those, and create listings for you. It’s more of a long-term thing but you want to do that right upfront because in about six months you’ll start seeing a whole bunch of new citations start popping up and you didn’t have to build them or create them.

All right, last question, I know we’re right at the five o'clock mark, “Is Cinch Twitter good for tier one? Can it be used on the Twitter attached to RSY stack?” Honestly, I have no response for that because I don’t even know what Cinch Tweet does. Anybody else have an answer to that?

Adam: No, I don’t. Good one to hop in the group probably and ask there.

Bradley: All right. We’re done, guys. Oh, wow. Everybody else bailed out. Thanks, everybody for being here. We’ll see everybody else next week, I guess because we don’t have any other webinars this week, do we?

Adam: I don’t think so.

Bradley: Sweet. All right, everybody, thanks for being here.

Adam: See you.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Bradley: See you.

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