#it is not hard to do a fucking automated mail for a list of people who ordered one specific thing

[a-s-levynn]

gotta love how my very much tier01 graphic nover isn't just not on it's way still, but they are not even replying to my single email inquireing about when it is gonna get shipped...

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Shifting $677m from the banks to the people, every year, forever

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

"Switching costs" are one of the great underappreciated evils in our world: the more it costs you to change from one product or service to another, the worse the vendor, provider, or service you're using today can treat you without risking your business.

Businesses set out to keep switching costs as high as possible. Literally. Mark Zuckerberg's capos send him memos chortling about how Facebook's new photos feature will punish anyone who leaves for a rival service with the loss of all their family photos – meaning Zuck can torment those users for profit and they'll still stick around so long as the abuse is less bad than the loss of all their cherished memories:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

It's often hard to quantify switching costs. We can tell when they're high, say, if your landlord ties your internet service to your lease (splitting the profits with a shitty ISP that overcharges and underdelivers), the switching cost of getting a new internet provider is the cost of moving house. We can tell when they're low, too: you can switch from one podcatcher program to another just by exporting your list of subscriptions from the old one and importing it into the new one:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

But sometimes, economists can get a rough idea of the dollar value of high switching costs. For example, a group of economists working for the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau calculated that the hassle of changing banks is costing Americans at least $677m per year (see page 526):

https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_personal-financial-data-rights-final-rule_2024-10.pdf

The CFPB economists used a very conservative methodology, so the number is likely higher, but let's stick with that figure for now. The switching costs of changing banks – determining which bank has the best deal for you, then transfering over your account histories, cards, payees, and automated bill payments – are costing everyday Americans more than half a billion dollars, every year.

Now, the CFPB wasn't gathering this data just to make you mad. They wanted to do something about all this money – to find a way to lower switching costs, and, in so doing, transfer all that money from bank shareholders and executives to the American public.

And that's just what they did. A newly finalized Personal Financial Data Rights rule will allow you to authorize third parties – other banks, comparison shopping sites, brokers, anyone who offers you a better deal, or help you find one – to request your account data from your bank. Your bank will be required to provide that data.

I loved this rule when they first proposed it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

And I like the final rule even better. They've really nailed this one, even down to the fine-grained details where interop wonks like me get very deep into the weeds. For example, a thorny problem with interop rules like this one is "who gets to decide how the interoperability works?" Where will the data-formats come from? How will we know they're fit for purpose?

This is a super-hard problem. If we put the monopolies whose power we're trying to undermine in charge of this, they can easily cheat by delivering data in uselessly obfuscated formats. For example, when I used California's privacy law to force Mailchimp to provide list of all the mailing lists I've been signed up for without my permission, they sent me thousands of folders containing more than 5,900 spreadsheets listing their internal serial numbers for the lists I'm on, with no way to find out what these lists are called or how to get off of them:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/22/degoogled/#kafka-as-a-service

So if we're not going to let the companies decide on data formats, who should be in charge of this? One possibility is to require the use of a standard, but again, which standard? We can ask a standards body to make a new standard, which they're often very good at, but not when the stakes are high like this. Standards bodies are very weak institutions that large companies are very good at capturing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Here's how the CFPB solved this: they listed out the characteristics of a good standards body, listed out the data types that the standard would have to encompass, and then told banks that so long as they used a standard from a good standards body that covered all the data-types, they'd be in the clear.

Once the rule is in effect, you'll be able to go to a comparison shopping site and authorize it to go to your bank for your transaction history, and then tell you which bank – out of all the banks in America – will pay you the most for your deposits and charge you the least for your debts. Then, after you open a new account, you can authorize the new bank to go back to your old bank and get all your data: payees, scheduled payments, payment history, all of it. Switching banks will be as easy as switching mobile phone carriers – just a few clicks and a few minutes' work to get your old number working on a phone with a new provider.

This will save Americans at least $677 million, every year. Which is to say, it will cost the banks at least $670 million every year.

Naturally, America's largest banks are suing to block the rule:

https://www.americanbanker.com/news/cfpbs-open-banking-rule-faces-suit-from-bank-policy-institute

Of course, the banks claim that they're only suing to protect you, and the $677m annual transfer from their investors to the public has nothing to do with it. The banks claim to be worried about bank-fraud, which is a real thing that we should be worried about. They say that an interoperability rule could make it easier for scammers to get at your data and even transfer your account to a sleazy fly-by-night operation without your consent. This is also true!

It is obviously true that a bad interop rule would be bad. But it doesn't follow that every interop rule is bad, or that it's impossible to make a good one. The CFPB has made a very good one.

For starters, you can't just authorize anyone to get your data. Eligible third parties have to meet stringent criteria and vetting. These third parties are only allowed to ask for the narrowest slice of your data needed to perform the task you've set for them. They aren't allowed to use that data for anything else, and as soon as they've finished, they must delete your data. You can also revoke their access to your data at any time, for any reason, with one click – none of this "call a customer service rep and wait on hold" nonsense.

What's more, if your bank has any doubts about a request for your data, they are empowered to (temporarily) refuse to provide it, until they confirm with you that everything is on the up-and-up.

I wrote about the lawsuit this week for @eff@mastodon.social's Deeplinks blog:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/no-matter-what-bank-says-its-your-money-your-data-and-your-choice

In that article, I point out the tedious, obvious ruses of securitywashing and privacywashing, where a company insists that its most abusive, exploitative, invasive conduct can't be challenged because that would expose their customers to security and privacy risks. This is such bullshit.

It's bullshit when printer companies say they can't let you use third party ink – for your own good:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-ceo-blocking-third-party-ink-from-printers-fights-viruses/

It's bullshit when car companies say they can't let you use third party mechanics – for your own good:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

It's bullshit when Apple says they can't let you use third party app stores – for your own good:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-bruce-schneier-senate-judiciary-regarding-app-store-security

It's bullshit when Facebook says you can't independently monitor the paid disinformation in your feed – for your own good:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck

And it's bullshit when the banks say you can't change to a bank that charges you less, and pays you more – for your own good.

CFPB boss Rohit Chopra is part of a cohort of Biden enforcers who've hit upon a devastatingly effective tactic for fighting corporate power: they read the law and found out what they're allowed to do, and then did it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

The CFPB was created in 2010 with the passage of the Consumer Financial Protection Act, which specifically empowers the CFPB to make this kind of data-sharing rule. Back when the CFPA was in Congress, the banks howled about this rule, whining that they were being forced to share their data with their competitors.

But your account data isn't your bank's data. It's your data. And the CFPB is gonna let you have it, and they're gonna save you and your fellow Americans at least $677m/year – forever.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/01/bankshot/#personal-financial-data-rights

[border-spam]

Wolf in wolf’s clothing

Gift fic for the lovely @artisthicc-nikyri​ of her oc’s Ari and Jameson, and her Troy!

Make sure to check out her art blog for more of her amazing shit

Jameson had been right.

This was so much easier than working in the kitchens...

Ari snorted to herself smugly as she popped another piece of hard candy into her mouth, lazily eying the slow crawl of the progress bar on her monitor as the file continued to render.

This was a piece of cake, this was so chilled out in comparison.

She’d thought at first it would have been terrifying, that working in such close proximity with the God King would have been even worse than dealing with the head cooks, but man, she’d had nothing to worry about in retrospect. A whole month now since she’d joined the editing team, and she’d not seen Troy once.

The other editors in his media team had filled her in, and it seemed for all J insisted God King Calypso was a “Pretty normal person under all the bullshit”, he was an enigma to work for. Fair, but weird. Quiet, but frightening. If you handed in your projects on time and didn’t get in his way? The job was piss as long as you had the skills he wanted. Safe lodgings within the main COV compound, food and medical care, and a position in the God King’s own media team was something followers would tear each other’s faces off for, and did according to the footage she was currently working on.

If you didn’t pull your weight though?

Well.

They’d not gone into details, but made clear through hushed warnings that she really should make sure she didn’t fuck this up.

Bobbing her head in time to the music thrumming through her earphones, she slid further into the huge custom chair, pulling her knees up to her chest with a shiver in the cool dark of the editing room. It was always cold in here she’d found, aircon set to suck the heat out of the machines and consoles that lined the rows of editing desks in the dim glow of the sleep mode displays, while Calypso’s throne-like personal station flickered data across the wall of monitors it faced that she’d yet to actually see him use. Helios had been so pompous and insufferably showy when it came to displays of wealth, but even living on the station for years with J before they ended up on Pandora, she’d never had access to tech or setups like this before. “The God Twins provide” really did have credence when you worked directly under them. Everything from the top end rigs to the leather high-backed editing chairs stamped with Troy’s emblem felt like it cost more than she’d ever earn, a sad reality she considered while running her thumb along the bottom row of keys on her backlit keyboard.

Ariana Serino shone at her from the custom board’s base, pulsing red light against matte black just like everything else in the room. For someone who was literally never here, Troy clearly had a tight grip on the department’s aesthetic.

She had hated the kitchens, she really had.

The head cooks were egotistical shitheads with superiority complexes who like so many of the Twins’s followers, saw any step up in authority as somehow being closer to their Gods. They knew she was like a sister to Jameson, and they knew how close Jameson was to Father Troy. It had painted a target on her she’d rather have avoided, and they had never, once, gotten off her damn back.

ANYTHING they could berate her over had been used against her, anything to make them feel like they were better than her. Better than someone so close to the King’s Pastor.

J knew, he’d seen how tired she had been, how stressed. It had been him that had gotten her this sweet gig, and she’d made sure to work her ass off for the last month straight. No one seemed to have actually noticed, but then again, no one was screaming abuse at her either, so she must be doing a good enough job. Troy didn’t come across as the sort of boss to hold back in letting her know if she wasn’t.

Checking in on her next task with a quick click on the flashing mail icon on her screen, she sighed and rolled her stiff shoulders with a stretch, tapping the keybinds to begin the asset download as she scanned the mail contents. _ _

“Let’s Flay 22.12.NL, due scheduling & upload 48 hours fn.

Focus on clip 4, 7, & 11, Ty closeups, keyframes 4-gore use @ clip 1-2. Get that shit visceral.

GKT” _ _

She’d certainly not had any negative feedback from the God King at least, then again, she’d not had any words from him bar these shorthand communications, and they seemed identical to the ones he sent to the full editing group. She’d wondered more than once how much he actually knew about her based on what Jameson had told him in order to get her this position, or, if he actually even knew about her at all.

J loved to gloat to her about all the effort he’d had to labor over to get her in, all the late night convincing and grandiose bullshitting he’d done in her favor to the God King’s ear, wheedling her into the editing team like his own personal project, but honestly? She was pretty sure Troy didn’t even know her name, let alone much else. She was a symbol on his mailing list, a faceless employee to pump out fuel for the COV media machine at his behest, and being so unimportant had some sweet benefits.

Ones like the 3am flashing on the wall clock facing her across the room, neon numbers burning red through the inky darkness.

Mannn, she thought with a smirk as she checked the open messenger app on screen. She’d had such a good lay in today…

Not being important meant no one actually cared when she showed up for her shift. She’d realised last week after oversleeping and arriving hours late in a panic, then not having anyone so much as bat an eye. Shifts here didn’t seem to actually matter. They had assigned ones, but people just seemed to really come and go as they pleased. Long as they clocked in the required amount of hours and sent on their completed tasks, there apparently wasn’t any consequences, and that suited her perfectly.

She could sleep as late in the day as she wanted, drag her ass out of bed and to her desk, and work away till the early AM hours. A nice empty editing studio with no distractions, no colleagues to deal with, and no J pinging her 40 times an hour with silly chatter, she confirmed as she checked the empty notifications in the chat app. He must be asleep, it was literally the only time the guy shut up, not that she’d change that for the world. Jameson filled the sad silences of Ari’s life with infectious positivity. She owed him so much…

The sudden flash of fluorescent light as the room’s door swung open startled her out of her thoughts, and immediately into habits formed a decade ago on Eden-6. She froze, silent, heart slowing as her eyes narrowed and then shifted smoothly towards the danger on the other side of the room as she heard the door slam shut.

Padded, heavy footsteps marked someone’s approach along the side of the low walled editing desk rows, and she sunk lower into the darkness of her cubicle, flattening her silhouette like dad had taught her years ago as she slid the headphones down around her neck. Stay low. Stay quiet. Listen closely. Don’t move. It won’t see you. You won’t be eaten.

She felt her heart skip a beat as the shadow appeared before the predator, the dim lights of the editing room just enough to cast it on the floor as they approached, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she for a moment recognised the narrow height of the shape prowling towards her row. Jameson. Thank God, for a second she’d thought…

No, not Jameson. It was still coming, and the silhouette was only getting larger. Jameson wasn’t this tall. Jameson wasn’t this graceful. She’d convinced herself for a moment that she was safe, but she wasn’t.

Ariana felt her bones turn to ice as the harsh light of the data flickering across the throne’s monitors revealed the towering outline of God King Troy.

He shifted slowly, back turning towards her as he faced his desk, unaware of the woman watching him from under the gaps of her monitors.

He looked.. tired? Smaller, softer. Not exactly as terrifying as she had prepared herself for, not as imposing in a loose sweater and low set glasses as he was in raised collars and draped fur. He was still very clearly Father Troy, but like he’d shucked off a heavy costume after a long day. Neater, less makeup, hair looser and not as spiked. No chains or accessories hanging from his belt, just his slacks and a rolled up sweater sleeve his massive prosthetic was connecting to its socket through.

She trembled nervously as he stiffly lowered his weight into the hulking chair in front of her, settling the cup of coffee he’d been carrying down next to his flesh arm as he deftly hit keys with the cybernetic fingers of his right and began to pull up files across the monitors flashing to life in front of him.

He had no idea she was here Ari realised, beginning to calm as the scent of his coffee filed the room alongside the quick tapping of his mismatched fingers across keys. What was she meant to do…?

He clearly thought he was alone here. She’d never heard of the God King looking like this, the twins were always pristine in their curated appearances when around others. Grunge psycho-chic or draped in gold and jewels, but never average. The idea of Troy looking relatively normal like this? It felt like she shouldn’t be seeing it at all. It felt private. She pressed her palms harder against the flat of her desk and eyed the distance between the curve of his shoulders and the entry doorway she was considering bolting through.

“Shit” she hissed through gritted teeth. He’d catch her, he’d either see her from the corner of his eye or hear the automated door as it opened for her, she was running out of options. If he caught her trying to sneak out, he’d probably be even angrier, right? He’d prefer if she just broke the silence and apologised for interrupting him, she decided as she swallowed the nervous lump insisting on tightening her throat. J said he liked it when people were honest. He liked it when people didn’t bullshit him, and J knew Troy. She should just.. greet him. Dad used to say it was better to face a Tyrant head first than die with its teeth in your back when you tried to run, right?

She slowly straightened, lifting her chest off the desk and leaning silently back into her seat as she carefully tucked her hair behind her ears and flattened out her tank. Wide eyes not leaving the back of his head as he hunched over his station while she began to pump herself up.

You got this Ariana. You’ve faced bigger fangs than this asshole has, he’s just a man. He can be reasonable, just say something.

She breathed out slowly, steadying her lungs before breaking the silence.

“Forgive me your majesty, I didn’t know y-”

She startled out of her sentence as he whipped round to face her, unprepared for the violent speed of his reaction as he rose out his seat.

“WHY ARE YOU HERE??” Troy bellowed over her quiet greeting, and her brain stalled in trying to respond as he stormed towards her desk.

“I.. I.. I’m just.. working some overtime, Father Troy, catching up on som - Ah!”

She flinched as he yanked the mouse out of her hand, ice cold metal digits tearing it out of her fingers and onto the desk in front of him, expertly pulling up her activity monitor script over the chat window where Jameson’s afk profile pic still flashed.

“Overtime? Fucking bullshit.” he growled, flashing gold capped teeth as he sneered inches from her face. “LOOK.”

She cleared her throat quietly, cowering under his looming torso as she snapped her eyes to the onscreen log he was referring to.

“You clocked in 3 hours ago.. Bunny..” -Her chat nick? He’d seen oh god this was so embarrassing oh g- “Overtime means working after your shift, not starting it in the middle of the fucking night. Did you just lie to me?!”

Wow. She was dead. This was it. It was the end. Why’d she ever listened to J, he was an idiot. She should have just run. She was going to be ripped apart by this lanky asshole and it was all J’s fault for insisting he was nice underneath. She was going to haunt that green bitch for the rest of his life. Nothing left to lose now, she accepted with finality. Just be honest. He was either going to break her neck or not.

“I’m.. sorry.” She whispered, then continued as she realised with rising surprise that he was waiting to hear the rest.

“I was very late today and I just wanted.. to make sure I finished these edits for you for tomorrow. I don’t have the right tech in my quarters, it felt like the right thing to do was just stay here and get it done..”

Ari waited as the silence continued, swallowing tightly as she raised her eyes slowly, hoping for a positive reaction. He was quiet, still hovering above her and leaning heavy on the massive prosthetic still resting on her desk as he massaged the bridge of his nose with his human fingers, but his face had relaxed, his mouth no longer a tight grimace. He just looked.. sad, and tired, and like he was done with this.

“You’re Ariana, right?” he muttered through an exhale as he pressed his fingers tighter into the corners of his closed eyes under the glasses.

“Yes Tr-SIR! Sir. Ariana Ser-”

“I don’t care.”

She jumped slightly as the metal limb to her right lifted off the desk as he stood.

“I don’t care when you get the work done. It’s fine.” he sighed, voice rough and quiet.

“I don’t shift people late because I don’t want people here late, but you can stay till you get your shit done.”

His hand dropped to his side as he looked down at her, meeting her worried gaze over the frames of his glasses.

“..but don’t ever lie to me again. You’re here because Jameson recommended you, and as much as a pain in the ass as he can be, I trust Jameson. This is your one strike.”

She slowly felt the tension relax out of her joints as he turned and began to walk back towards his station, flopping down into the massive chair with a sigh as he raised his eyes to hers again.

“If he hadn’t, and you were anyone else and lied to me like that? …You’d be dead where you sat.”

Ari twisted her fingers between her hands nervously as he swiveled towards his monitors and began to type once more. How the hell had she survived that. How had that worked out when she’d been so close to getting the axe, figuratively and literally. She checked the chat app once more while beginning to settle back into a more comfortable position. Jameson was still offline, he was probably sleeping soundly through the most stress she’d had in years, typical.

Opening the editing software again, she began to work on the next clip in her log, painfully aware of typing as quietly as possible so as not to interrupt her new colleague.

As the minutes ticked by, she found herself relaxing slowly. The atmosphere stayed desperately tense, and the God King’s heavy silence punctuated each harsh snap of a key or frustrated sigh he made all the more as they continued to work together. Troy was noticeably on edge, fidgeting in the corner of her vision every now and then, tugging at the rolled shoulder of his sweater or trying to sweep his hair forward as if his appearance was upsetting him, making him feel awkward in some way.

He was angry with himself, more than anything. This was Jameson’s friend. This was his only friend’s closest companion, the person he described as a sister, and this was going to be her first experience of him?

He hadn’t meant to snap earlier. She’d just caught him so unprepared. No one was meant to be here tonight, he should have been able to get these final shots compiled and queued for upload in peace. Instead, he was sitting in the same room as someone he’d probably just terrified, trying to work while hyper aware he was out of character, and he hated being out of character around others. He didn’t even have his fucking hair done, he looked like a tool. This was not the kind of cringe he enjoyed, and he had no experience in how to deal with this situation.

Should he say something? He wasn’t sure, she probably didn’t want to talk to him anyway he worried, glancing over his shoulder at the back of her monitors, just able to make out her hands working away under them. Jameson would tell him to say something, but he didn’t know what that something should even be. What if he just made this worse. This wheedling grip of anxiety in his gut was one of Troy’s least favorite feelings. It was the kind of stupid, unmanageable worry that left your heart beating just a little too fast, your palm sweaty, it was horrible. He liked to be in control, always. Of everything, but especially himself. Feeling like a nervous child in his own damn editing office, where he had come to clear his mind tonight so he could possibly get some sleep later? It was bullshit, and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat and tapped his fingers against the empty coffee cup to his left, trying to focus on what he should say rather than how awkward the atmosphere was. “You.. uh..”

He winced to himself at how his voice caught in his throat. Great start, God King. Fuck. Get your act on!

“-Ahem- You know Jameson a long time, right?” He prompted, noting the sounds of her typing had stopped in response, and the slight squeak of leather behind him meant she had shifted in her seat.

“Yes sir...” Ari responded meekly, barely audible over the wall of monitors between them.

“Troy. Troy is ok right now. It’s not like there’s anyone else around, huh?” He called back, feeling his confident act begin to fall back into place as his practiced nonchalant speaking tone shifted over the tightness in his voice from a moment ago.

He felt the pull of a smirk at the corners of his mouth as he heard a soft breath of a laugh from Ariana, and the tension beginning to disperse from the room.

“Yes, si-Troy! Sorry. Troy.” She called back, louder this time, and he leaned back a little more comfortably into his seat. “Yeah we’ve known each other a long time!” She continued, voice tilting upwards in obvious excitement.

“We met on Helios, when we were kids.” Ari offered, noting the slight turn of the Holy Twin’s head towards her as he listened.

“Well I was a kid, he was a bit older, but we were in the same class in what passed for a school on that place. He didn’t have many friends his age I guess, and I had no friends at all, so he kind of just attached to me! You know how some people are just like that?” A quiet snort of agreement from the desk in front of her making clear that yes, Troy knew exactly what ‘kind of people’ Jameson was exactly like.

“We just adopted each other then.” She followed. “We’ve kind of always been together since. He talked too much, he said, and that I talked too little! He’s been trying to make me get better at that.. actually.. uhh..” she trailed off, feeling a rush of returned awkwardness in the fact she was currently monologuing at a deity who could rip in her two if she irritated him.  

He shifted further in his seat, turning far enough for her to catch the reflection of his monitors in his eye as he glanced back at her. “No, go on.” he encouraged reassuringly. “Kind of interesting to hear someone else’s opinion of the caustic tool for once.”

She caught the wolfish smirk before he turned back towards his screens, and felt a genuine smile of her own blossom in the relief that she wasn’t talking too much, he actually seemed to be enjoying this in some way. “Sure. Umm... Oh! We left Helios before everything went crazy up there, not long after all that shit happened with Jack. I think the COV was just starting up around then..” she mused for a moment, then let out a short laugh. “He’s my brother now I guess, and like you said before, he’s a pain in the ass, but I wouldn’t trade him for anything!” Ari chuckled, before excitedly continuing. “Oh man! Sorry, I-I mean, I don’t need to explain that, do I! I guess you of all people know all about that kind of feeling for someone like a sibling, right?”

Her smile faded as the seconds ticked by to no response, just the quick tapping of his fingers across the keys as he continued to work. That cold tension began to creep back into the air, and for a moment, she wondered if she really should have shut up earlier. “Where were you before Helios?” he prompted, voice controlled and tone unsettlingly blasé as he deftly opened up 3 more windows and dragged clips into them, his head subtly moving with his eyes as they shifted from file to file. “You clearly weren’t born there.”

The misdirection didn’t escape her, but she knew he was purposefully attempting to put her at ease by continuing the conversation, and it wasn’t a gesture she’d reject. “No, no I was born on Eden-6. I was there my whole childhood with my family before we all moved to-”

His raucous barking laugh interrupted her mid sentence, and she blanched, unsure of what she had said that was funny.

“Eden-6! Mannnnn!” he balked, hiccuping laughter rolling into a growling chuckle. “Dude, sucks for you, that place is a fuckin’ swampass shithole.”

He broke into laughter again, tilting his head back and running his hand back through the thick hair that she realised had been falling in front of his face this whole time, and Ariana saw red.

What the hell was funny about Eden-6? They were living on fucking Pandora by choice, and he calls Eden-6 a shithole? Seriously? She squeezed her fists shut and barely registered the bite of her long nails as they dug into her palms, completely aware she was losing the battle to keep quiet and not say something she’d regret.

“Wow. Funny. So what kind of up-its-own-ass wealthy bullshit homeworld did you come from?” Ari snapped back, before almost instantly reeling from how stupid an idea that outburst was.

She recoiled back into her chair as fear crept up her spine again, and felt her stomach drop even further as he slowly stood out of his seat, turning towards her.

His icy eyes met hers as he crossed the distance between their desks, half hooded and lazy above the rims of his glasses, maintaining their contact as he stopped in front of her monitors and calmly reached his prosthetic over before gently plucking the empty soda can off the desk beside her. She felt a wave of confusion as he turned with one last glare in her direction, before he began to walk towards the wall near the entrance door. She finally noticed he was carrying his coffee cup in the other hand. 

Oh.

He wasn’t going to kill her. He was just.. getting more drinks. For both of them it seemed, considering she could hear the hiss of the team’s coffee machine in the dark, and the quiet open and close of their small stocked fridge. Ari stared down at her hands in her lap, cringing with each step as she heard him approach, desperately embarrassed by her overreaction. 

She winced as she heard the clunk of the soft drink can he’d placed on the desk inches in front of her, and muttered a breathy “Sorry.”, still avoiding looking at him directly. The tap of his prosthetic’s finger on the rim of the can was a clear signal he wanted her to however, and she reluctantly raised her eyes to meet his, painfully aware of her flushed cheeks. 

“Don’t worry about it.” he chuckled, still looming over the rise of her monitors like a lanky predator eying up its next meal. “J said you were good at speaking your mind. I kinda appreciate that with the people I have here. Means the feedback I get is uhh” he raised his eyebrows as he thoughtfully looked to the side “.. actually useful at times.”

“Besides, you’re wrong anyway, little miss thinks-she-knows-shit.” he scoffed, smiling into his coffee as he sipped from the refilled cup, then letting his gaze shift afterwards from the hot drink back to the extremely confused Ariana. “I’m from a shithole too.”

It took her a second for what he’d said to really register, and then Ari laughed. Really laughed, deep from her guts in snorting, gasping bursts. A moment later, he joined her, and for the first time that night it was truly genuine from him, even if it was quiet and tired, and still a little awkward.

The pause after was comfortable, and he stalked back to his chair, slumping into it as he nursed his drink. She eyed the can he’d brought her, the exact same energy drink as what had been empty on her desk, and the realisation he had been paying such attention felt oddly flattering to Ariana, like warmth deep in her belly. She reached out and touched the can, only the sounds of Troy sipping his drink and the fans and quiet clicks of the machine components around them breaking the silence. It wasn’t something she was used to. She was used to not mattering enough to notice things about, and wasn’t sure how to really handle this feeling. It felt welcoming, but frightening. Like being on the precipice of something. Like change.

“By the way” he smoothly interrupted her thoughts as he called over to her “I’m here most nights, around this time. If, you know, you do prefer working late, just keep in mind I’ll be around too. Long as it doesn’t affect your work, I’m ok to share the editing room with you like this.”

Ari was unsure why exactly, but that did something to her. It was innocent, it was an olive branch of friendship, she knew, but the reaction was visceral. Her instincts kicked in once more and a thrill of cold ran up her spine, prompting her to stand quickly and finally attempt to take her leave, approaching his desk nervously to bid her farewell.

“Troy, um, God King, thank you! For.. the chat, it was .. fun?” she stammered while eying the exit door as he lazily watched from over his raised cup.

“I’ve finished the tasks you queued for me so I’m going to, um, go to sleep hahhh.” she laughed unconvincingly, wringing her hands together as she awkwardly sidestepped towards the door, slowly turning away from him as she edged closer to her escape.  

“Mmhm.. sure. Night.” he mused, cocking an eyebrow as he considered her with deep set interest, before continuing just as she reached towards the door controls.

"Oh, and Bunny?“ Troy drawled, watching as she stopped in her tracks and slowly turned to face the editing chair he was draped over.

"Keep all of this - " He gestured lazily between them, and raised a finger to tap the frame of his glasses as he locked eyes with her over the lenses. "- to yourself."

"Being cute doesn't stop wolves from eating little rabbits alive... Understand?“

There was a pregnant silence as Ari parsed the threat, the roaring of her own pulse overpowering the background hum of the cooling fans thrumming in the darkness of the almost entirely empty editing room she was so close to escaping from.

"Yes... sir” she swallowed shakily “ I understand."

She winced at the streak of blue light that pierced the darkness when Troy's metallic canines caught the monitor's glow as his mouth split into a vicious grin.

"Good girl. Sleep tight then. Night night." the God King sneered through those sharp, sharp teeth...

---

But Ariana didn’t sleep tight, and she spent all night trying to work out exactly why.

************

If you enjoyed this I’d love to hear comments or feedback, and you can check the rest of my twins writing:

Here

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #294

“maybe it’s not too late to learn how to love and forget how to hate”

Is your bed big enough for two people? Yes. What is your favorite board game? I like Battleship. Have you ever been hospitalized for more than 2 weeks? I think one stay at the psych hospital stretched over two weeks, maybe three. I don't remember. When was the last time you heard someone scream? Irl, probably at some point visiting my sister's family and my baby niece was upset. If you include via audio, a couple days ago when watching Egoraptor's Kingdom Hearts 2 stream. He's a Loud Boy. Who was the last person to call you baby? I have no clue. Why did you last go to the airport? I was going home from Sara's. Have you ever showered with another person? Not since I was a little kid with my sister. Is there something you are keeping a secret from your parents? I mean, nothing major. There are small things I don't tell them, though. Are you able to forget people easily? FUCK to the NO. What disgusts you about bathrooms? Sharing a toilet with literally anybody. Have you ever had gum stuck in your hair? I mean maybe at some point, but I don't think so. What was the shortest amount of time you’ve known someone before you’ve dated them? If you’ve never been in a relationship before, do you watch Scrubs? I knew Jason maybe two/three weeks before he asked me out. We clicked so damn fast. Don’t you hate it when people talk about their relationships constantly? It can become a bit much. I have (had?) a friend who did this profusely to the point it was pretty impossible to have an actual conversation, and then she fell off the face of the planet. Being in love is an absolutely amazing thing, but like... that's not all you can talk about. Do you enjoy old movies? Yeah, there are some great ones. Do your neighbors annoy you in any way? Someone a few houses down has a dog that NEVER shuts the fuck up. I don't know how it doesn't lose its voice. What was the last party you were invited to? A Halloween party hosted by my friend Summer a few years ago. It was a good time. Are you honestly happy with your life right now? N O P E Do you find it fun to pray for people? I don't pray, but even if I did, "fun" seems like the wrong word. Generally when you pray for someone, there's something negative going on in their life, so like... I think "fulfilling" is maybe a better word? Has your mom ever crocheted you a blanket? My mom has deadass been working on a massive blanket since she was in her 20s (maybe even a tad younger), and she's at the tail end of her 50s. She works on it less than once in a blue moon. She started with the intention of passing it onto her kids. Do you regret letting a certain guy slip away? Debatable. It's questionable if I ever would have gotten competent help without Jason leaving, and if I didn't, what if he finally had enough when we were already married with kids (that's what I wanted at the time, anyway)? That would have broken me even worse. What show did you want to be on as a kid? Whatever the Nickelodeon one was where you got slimed lol. Do you have regrets? Of course I do. Does anyone really know you? My mom and Sara, at least. What song do you want played at your wedding? It depends on my partner and songs we consider special. Are you a fan of Taylor Swift? No. I do, however, love me some "Love Story." And you are LYYYYYYINNNNNGGGG if "Picture To Burn" doesn't make you feel like a Bad Bitch. Would you ever dye your hair unicorn colors? I would DIIIIIEEEEE to do that in pastel tints. I wish my damn hair took color well... I have literally only had ONE very effective hair dyeing experience, when my friend spent hours turning it red. It stuck for MONTHS. List 3 of your pet peeves. 1.) Turning tragedy into a competition; 2.) making mental illnesses "trendy;" and 3.) elitists of pretty much anything. Do you type fast? Very. What do you like to put on your pancakes? Typically just maple syrup, but I'll put butter on them if given it at a restaurant. Have you ever accidentally drank spoiled milk? I've taken a sip and immediately realized and spat it out. Have you ever had your heart broken? More like shattered into incalcuable pieces. When you were 3, was your natural hair color the same as it is now? No, I was dirty blonde. Have you ever received a scary message from someone online? Yes, I'm pretty sure. What does your first name rhyme with? "Infamy" is close enough, ig, if we're excluding other names. Do you have freckles on your face? No. I did as a kid, though. Who is your favorite Lisa Frank character? Probably the angel kitty (I had a coloring book, even), but they're all SO pretty. I love Lisa Frank stuff. Does your family always have your back? My mom and dad do, at least. My older sister does, meanwhile it's hard to tell with my little sister. She's not very affectionate and expressive of love to the point I question a lot if she even likes me. What type of wedding do you want to have? Gothic! Are you more of a leader or a follower? A follower, within reason. I'm definitely not a blind one. Do you know anyone with a profession in law? Quite a few, actually. Have you ever Googled yourself? Yeah, at some point. Do you have a regular vacation spot, or do you always go somewhere new? We don't really go on vacations. It's not an expense Mom can really afford. Where were you working 10 years ago? Nowhere. ... 5 years ago? Still nowhere. ... 1 year ago? Nowhere. What's the shortest amount of time you've had between relationships? Like a day. I know it sounds bad, but I left Girt already knowing I loved Sara, and I didn't really have anything to heal from. As a child, what comfort foods did your parents make for you when you were sick with a cold or flu? We'd have Saltines, chicken noodle soup (which I never really liked), and ginger ale. What's your favorite art style? Probably hyperrealistic fantasy stuff. What time period is considered to be your country's 'golden age?' I don't know, I'm not a history buff. Have you ever done LSD? I've never done any drugs. Are any of your coworkers currently out on maternity/paternity leave? N/A What is your favorite parody movie? Maybe the Paranormal Activity one. I barely remember it, though. What kind of first impression do you hope others have of you? That I'm kind and friendly and really care about their feelings. Do you have a good sense of balance? NOOOOOOOOOO. I stray like a motherfucker when I walk. Have for many years. It's weird. What is your least favorite ice cream flavor? Strawberry, ugh. Does your car have heated seats? No. What's something that has been in your local news lately? I don't watch it. What's your favorite internet meme? Oh, I have no clue, I love memes lmao. What is the strangest pizza topping you've ever eaten? Nothing, really. I'm not very adventurous with pizza. Can you name any books or movies where all the main characters die? Not off the top of my head. Do you live alone? No, I live with my mother. What’s the grossest thing you’ve encountered in/at a fast food joint? *shrug* Do you swallow chewing gum? No. Do you ever get goosebumps while listening to songs? EXTREMELY easily. Like that is so, so regular, be it from the lyrics, the singer's voice, or just the music. Are there any amusement park rides you refuse to go on? Why? Most, really. I get dizzy way, way too easily and don't want to faint. What is the best roller coaster you’ve ever been on? I'm afraid of roller coasters, so I can't answer this. Never touched one. Don’t you think black jellybeans are icky? Ugh, YES. What was the last thing you measured with a ruler? I helped Mom use the long, flexible kind to measure the couch because she was gonna move some furniture around. What’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen? Oh, I'm sure the mountains when driving to Tennessee. I was too young to remember it well, but I can never forget that I marveled over them. Would you rather have a Playstation or Xbox made console? I'm a Playstation gal. What if you were watching COPS and saw your significant other on there? I'm... not gonna lie, if it was Jason for doing something stupid and not, like, murderous, I'd probably cackle. Have you ever tried to write to any celebrities? No. When was the last time you blew bubbles? I ain't got a clue. Have you ever stumbled across a beehive? More like wasp nests. What food(s) make you cringe? Quite a lot, given my extreme selectiveness with textures. More than anything, probably egg yolk. Have you ever played an automated 20 Questions game and beat it? Ha, I actually had one of those! I have, but damn was that hard. Have you been to a restaurant where they cook the food in front of you? Yup, Ichiban. Pretty cool. Do you feel that presidential campaigns make people too competitive? I mean, no. People care about who is going to be the head of their country. Do you find Family Guy hilarious or offensive? Neither. Do you still write letters to people, even though there’s e-mail now? No. Have you ever had an accident involving a microwave? Ha, I'm a travesty of a cook, so yeah. I remember on one occasion I accidentally dialed in many minutes for popcorn and entirely forgot about it. Safe to say I didn't eat it. I've split hot dogs in there, and I'm certain there's more. Do you like the movie Forrest Gump? I adore that movie. One of the best films ever imo. Can you handle heat well? I honestly doubt you'll meet someone who handles it worse than me, especially physically. I have severe hyperhidrosis, so I will literally sweat like a pig in 70* weather. I absolutely cannot handle it. Do you smoke weed? What are your opinions on its legalization? No. Legalize it for at least medicinal purposes. Have you ever had a school shooting at your school? HA, I can promise you my high school must have at some point. Are you usually the first to do something, or are you more of a follower? I don't pay attention to this. What is your favorite way to eat a potato? Fries, yum. Are roses your favorite flower? No, but they're high on the list. Have you ever been to a horse race? No. I think they're abusive anyway. Do you like lobster? No. Have you ever swam in a lake? Yeah. There's one lake I swam in that was so clear you could see pretty far and just watch the fish and turtles. Have you ever convinced someone to show you their private parts? "Convinced"????? That's fucking coercion. I've seen people naked, but not by fucking pressure. What is the greatest treasure you have ever found? My older sister found a cracked amethyst geode once. Idk where it's at now, but I hope she (or we at the house, depending on where it is) finds it at some point, though. My niece has come to love smooth rocks and pebbles, and I think crystals would blow her away, never mind one that size. Do you eat beef? Regrettably. Are you good at card games? I mean, what's the game? I'm not exceptional at any I can think of. What is your favorite musical? I don't like musicals. Did you ever play the Oregon Trail game? Omg yes!!! I LOVED playing it as a kid, especially the 3rd one, I think? Do you watch It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia? No. Who is your favorite country singer? I actually do enjoy Tim McGraw pretty consistently, but I don't actually seek out his music. Do you know anyone who is Mormon? An old best friend was. Do you like grunge? Yeah. What’s your favorite kind of cheese? American. What’s the most historic thing that has happened in your lifetime? Most likely Covid. What’s your funniest story involving a car? It's not hilarious, but once we were behind someone whose license plate said "omw" lmao. What scientific discovery would change the course of humanity overnight if it was discovered? Well, a proven Covid vaccine. Do you think that humans will ever be able to live together in harmony? Nope. What’s the scariest non-horror movie? Idk. What’s the most amazing true story you’ve heard? I'm not sure. What’s the most awkward thing that happens to you on a regular basis? Having to explain my Mark tribute tattoo lmao. What was one of the most interesting concerts you’ve been to? I've only ever seen Alice Cooper, and while it was great, "interesting" seems like the wrong word. Where are you not welcome anymore? Probably Jason's house, at least not by him. Or Colleen's, probably. Idk how she feels about me by now. What’s the most recent show you’ve binge watched? Avatar: The Last Airbender w/ Sara. What’s a common experience for many people that you’ve never experienced? Paying bills. What’s the smartest thing you’ve seen an animal do? I kid you not, our first cat would look both ways twice before crossing the street across our house. (Please do not allow your cats outside.) She'd do it even more when bringing her kittens there too to hunt. Chance was truly incredible. I could really give a lot of examples of her intelligence. I also had another childhood cat (my favorite before Roman) who would respond to a certain clap pattern I'd do if Mom let me bring him inside. Wherever Charcoal was wandering, he'd come running. What’s the dumbest thing someone has argued with you about? Oh, I'm sure it was RP-related stuff as a kid. What’s the longest rabbit hole you’ve been down? I'unno. What’s the saddest scene in a movie or TV series? Possible spoiler warning for a super old movie??? Probably when the main character of Old Yeller had to put the dog down because of rabies. But I cry like a bitch easily, so maybe there's something that tears me up even more or just as badly. What odd smell do you really enjoy? None that are "odd," really. What’s the coolest animal you’ve seen in the wild? I've seen a mink once when fishing with Dad deep in the woods. What’s the best lesson you’ve learned from a work of fiction? Oh, I don't know. I'd have to think for a while & I don't feel like it. What food do you crave most often? Probably ice cream. Who in your life has the best/worst luck? I don't know about best, but my mom absolutely has the worst luck. Which apocalyptic dystopia do you think is most likely? A meteor, maybe? If you had a HUD that showed three stats about any person you looked at, what three stats would you want it to show? I'd want to know if they were criminals or just dangerous. What’s the funniest thing you’ve seen a kid do? Oh, my niece is so funny. One of the things that gave me the biggest laugh (and was most adorable) was this time I was taking family pictures for Ash at a local lake, and Aubree went running into the gazebo, span around totally like in a princess movie, and exclaimed, "It's enormous!" She is such a darling. If people could read your mind, what would they usually find? Just how bored I am, memories of Jason bc trauma, lamenting my disappointment in myself, "why is Mark so perfect," worrying about Sara, thinking of RP character developments... What celebrity would you like to meet? Mark. 100%. I would die to just thank him (if I could get words out, oof) and hug him and try not to soak his shirt in tears lmao. Do you need money to be happy? Don't bullshit me, you wouldn't be happy homeless because you can't afford a home. So to a degree, yes. What's a good idea you've had recently? Hm. What gift would you like to receive? At this current moment, Cloak's (Mark and Jacksepticeye's clothing brand) limited edition "life after death" design for a shirt. It is so fucking pretty, and I love the nature focus. What are you most excited about right now? Honestly? Getting my laptop back. I wanna play WoW lmao. What's your favorite song from a movie? Maybe uhhhhhh was "Supermassive Black Hole" actually written for Twilight? Where would you like to volunteer? I very, very badly want to volunteer to take pictures of animals up for adoption in shelters for like their social medias and stuff. I've asked like the two local places, but no bites yet. What's the last song you listened to? Metallica's cover of "Turn The Page." What's the last YouTube video you watched? I'm watching Gab Smolders play SOMA. Fantastic game.

[wolfpawn]

I Hate You, I Love You, Chapter 12

Chapter Summary - Danielle reacts to the article by hiding at Paul's, but she has to go home eventually, meaning she has to face Diana.Tom goes through with the fashion show with Taylor, seeing first hand how she can manipulate situations to suit her.

Previous Chapter

Rating - Mature (some chapters contain smut)

Triggers - references to Tom Hiddleston’s work with the #MeToo Movement. That chapter will be tagged accordingly.

authors Note - I have been working on this for the last 3 years, it is currently 180+ chapters long.  This will be updated daily, so long as I can get time to do so, obviously.

If you wish to be tagged, please let me know.

tags: @sweetkingdomstarlight-blog  @jessibelle-nerdy-mum @nonsensicalobsessions @damalseer @hiddlesbitch1

The article made Danielle sick to her stomach, she could not believe what that manipulative little harpy had stated. She could not bring herself to even go home, and had, for three days, stayed at Paul’s apartment. As a result, their relationship had progressed a slight bit faster than she would have elected for otherwise, but it felt better to have someone comfort her and try and show her affection than to be alone. The words repeated over and over in her head throughout the morning as she attempted to sleep, with Paul’s arm around her as she lay staring at the far wall.

“I can hear you thinking you know.” His voice was heavy with sleep.

“I…”

He pulled her in against him. “It’s all lies Danni, you know that, and I know that, nothing else matters.”

“My job…”

“The only ones who realise it is you being talked about know that it’s bullshit, so come here.” He turned her so she was lying with her head on his chest, her fingers sliding over the t-shirt he had put on getting into the bed. “Just get some rest.”

“It’s not that easy.” She whispered, but she gripped him tightly.

“I know sweetheart, I know.” He kissed her forehead and played with a few strands of her hair that had fallen out of the ponytail she had thrown it in.

Desperate to forget everything, she leant up and kissed him, trying to initiate his interest; when he responded, she seized her opportunity and put her hand down to toy with the hem of his boxers, grateful that for a few minutes at least, she would forget her woes.

Paul was called to work a few hours later; leaving Danielle with four hours alone in his home before she had to go to work. She was walking Mac Tíre outside to allow the dog relieve himself, cursing the text she received from the other paramedic she was going to be working with that evening, asking her to return the book she had borrowed on terrorist attack procedure, which unfortunately was at her home. She knew she would have to bring it with her, meaning she had to risk seeing Diana, something she had been avoiding, so after she grabbed her things from Paul’s, she packed Mac Tíre into her car and headed back to her home. She groaned when she saw not only Diana’s car, but Emma’s one also in the neighbouring driveway, she contemplated driving on and telling Graham that she forgot it, but the youngest Hiddleston had been getting something from her car, noticed Danielle and purposely stood in the road outside her mothers’ driveway, forcing Danielle to a halt.

“Are you out to kill yourself?”

“You weren’t going fast enough to kill me, and let’s face it, you are the person to call in such emergencies anyway.” Emma joked, but her face was solemn. “You haven’t been home in days.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Yeah, I know. I saw you and your boyfriend the other day, all kisses and holding hands on the beach.” She smiled, “When are the four of us going out for a meal?”

“What?”

“Oh come on Elle, mum’s met him and she adores him, and you look so cute together, and you have been staying at his place for days, so that tells me you are sleeping together, which with you never having a boyfriend in all the time you were here means it’s serious. I want to meet him.”

“Emma, with…”

“Yeah, I saw.” There was a disgusted look on her face. “Tom rang, apparently he has some sort of ‘explanation’ but mum didn’t even listen, she went off on an absolute rant about it to him, about all your hard work, everything you sacrificed, how you were never anything but nice to him, and he allowed you to be dragged through the dirt like this, seriously, I was getting second-hand fear from her.”

“She didn’t need to do that.”

“Well, she feels like it is some bit her fault,” Emma stated sadly.

“How the fuck is any of what that cow does your mum’s fault?” Danielle snapped.

“She allowed her into the house, it’s her son she is dating.” Emma began to list.

“This isn’t her fault, it never was her fault.” Danielle shook her head.

“Well, only one person can tell her that in a way she’ll listen.” Emma smiled, opening the car door.

“My car is in the middle of the road,” Danielle argued.

“Elle, please, she feels so bad,” Emma begged.

Unable to think of Diana being upset because of her, Danielle nodded slightly, causing Emma to close the car door and for Danielle to reverse into her driveway. Emma had the gate to the back garden open, so Mac Tíre trotted in happily as you got out. “I really should get some clothes sorted.”

Emma grinned widely. “Really?”

“I did not sleep with him.”

“So what, you played monopoly all day?”

“Well, we did stuff, just not everything.” She blushed, causing Emma to snigger. “You are such a child.”

“I am not the one getting all bothered about doing things with her boyfriend.” Emma retorted, linking her arm with Danielle’s. “So, when am I meeting him?”

“I’m not sure I want you to.”

“Spoil sport, I won’t be too embarrassing, I swear; I mean, I would never tell him about the time we got drunk and you started singing Mariah Carey, and of course I would never show him the video I took of it, that I still have.”

“I hate you.” Emma erupted in laughter at those words as they got to Diana’s front door.

“Emma?” Danielle froze when she saw Diana standing in the hallway in front of her. When the older woman saw her, her face became a mixture of delight and shame all at once. “Elle.”

“Hi.”

“I…I’m so sorry.” She had tears in her eyes.

Danielle did not even stop to think; she rushed over and embraced her. “It’s not your fault. I am sorry this is even happening, I should never have pissed her off.”

“Has Tom tried speaking to you?”

“Not since the day of the car accident.”

“I could not bare to even speak with him, he began by saying not to judge after the article came out, can you believe that?”

“I don’t…I can’t talk about it.” Danielle stated.

“Of course, I understand.” Diana nodded solemnly. A moment later, her face became one of interest. “Why do you smell of men’s shower gel?”

“Because someone has been staying with a handsome doctor the passed few days.” Emma sang from behind her, going into the kitchen to put on the kettle.

Diana’s eyes lit up at that information. “Really?”

“Oh God, not you too.”

“Well, as a surrogate for your mother, I have to say, I approve.”

“Of course you do, it was you that thought to try and set us up, to begin with,” Danielle stated.

“So, is he nice…”

“Mum, if you are asking Elle what he is like in bed, I swear to God, I will drop dead here and now of mortification!” Emma shouted from the kitchen. “Besides, I already asked, sort of.”

“I need to get new people to talk to, Brit’s are mental.” Danielle shook her head as she walked passed Diana and into the kitchen.

*

Automated voice - You have fourteen new messages. This message was left on the eighth of September at 4:30 am.

“Elle, its Tom, I…fuck I need you to call me back, as soon as you get in. Please.”

This message was left on the eighth of September at 6:30am.

“Elle, its Tom again, I never even thought, you might not even be working these few nights, but anyway, please, ring me when you get this.”

This message was left on the eighth of September at 9:05 am.

“Elle, I know you are finished work or awake if you didn’t have work last night, please ring me.”

This message was left on the eighth of September at 2:30 pm.

“Please Elle, look I know you are probably pissed about that piece, I am…I am trying to have it dealt with.”

This message was left on the eighth of September at…

The messages went on and on, all fourteen had been from Tom, and after a while, his tone became shorter, until the final one, left that morning. “I am just trying to make this right.” He had snapped on it. But the article came to her mind once more. She thought for a second that he had seen through that bitch, but when she Googled his name, she regretted it immediately, the first result was an article, from that day’s Daily Mail, declaring the pair to be the hottest thing in New York for that evening's fashion show.

Annoyed, Danielle decided to erase all the messages and went to get ready for work.

*

Tom looked at his phone, three missed calls but none from Danielle while he had been out for lunch with Taylor, having gone over everything with her over what they would say to the reporters that evening, making sure it was crystal clear that nothing ever happened between him and Danielle, and that the ‘source’ the magazine had was false.

“Ready?” he turned to see Taylor standing behind him, looking beautiful in a pair of shorts and high boots. He knew now that behind that beauty, there was a coldness that could rival that of a boardroom CEO that would fire every last subordinate, just because he could.

“Yes.” He gave as good a smile as he muster.

“After this, she’ll be cleared so try to make that smile more believable.”

“She never did anything to be cleared of, she is not on trial, she did nothing.” He stated.

“Whatever, she will have her sad pathetic life back, and we will get on with ours.” She smiled.

Tom frowned, the way Taylor was speaking, she seemed to think they were still in a good place in their relationship. “I just need to talk to Luke for a moment.”

“Chop chop.” She ordered.

Tom bared his teeth after she left the room, scrolling to Luke’s name and pressing the call button. “It’s nearly midnight, this better be good Tom.”

“Hey.”

“Hello,” Luke replied curtly, “Now what is it?”

“Luke…just don’t start.”

“Look, we spent years making you the nicest guy in Hollywood, remember that. No having public flings, no acting the fool, no drunken incidences and you are now the laughing stock of the free world, so after everything I sacrificed to make sure you got ahead, I really am not interested. Whatever it is, ask ‘PR Barbie’s’ people to deal with it.”

“I am going to a fashion show with her.”

“Because of course, you love those things,” Luke replied sarcastically.

“It’s all done as soon as the show finishes.”

There was silence on the line for a moment. “Why not before?”

“I have her agreeing to rubbish what was published about Danielle.”

“And she will willingly do that? I don’t buy it, Tom.”

“What else can I do, Danielle…?”

“There is no need to tell me about Ms Hughes, I have spent the passed week of my life trying to stop leeches getting anything on her, including photo’s.”

“I never thought to ask…”

“No, you didn’t; your mum did, though. Not that she had to. I was already on it.” The publicist snapped.

“Luke, I fucked up.”

“Thank you for stating that, I was not aware before now.”

Tom sighed at his friends’ sarcasm. “You were right.”

“Yet another obvious statement of fact.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah well, next time a narcissistic bitch who writes countless songs on his legion of ex’s sniffs around, will you listen to me?”

Tom could not help the smile on his face. “I think I can do that.”

“Good, now what are you doing about this statement?”

*

“Mr Hiddleston, please, Mr Hiddleston, this way please.” Tom turned obediently to face the photographers, their lights blinding him as he did. “Mr Hiddleston, have you anything to say about the claims being made that you forced your ex-girlfriend to get an abortion?”

Even hearing those words made Tom’s jaw clench. “Yes, actually, I do. I have not now, nor have I ever made such a request to any woman much less the woman in question. She has never been anything but a close family friend, and she is one of the most honourable women I have ever had the good fortune to befriend. These claims are wholly untrue and have been terribly hurtful to her, for which I can never apologise to her enough. Whoever put about that story is lying and is doing so to hurt a hard working and good woman.” He stated clearly.

“Taylor,” the same reporter looked to the blonde songstress, “the article stated it was a source close to you that leaked this story, and that you received the email, what have you to say?”

Tom had to force himself to remain calm at the manner in which the reporter had dismissed what he had just said, but he looked to Taylor to see if she would do as she had promised.

Taylor gave a small laugh. “Well, its rubbish of course, I mean, how would this person have even get my email address? My squad and I don’t need to talk about people we don’t know; our lives are interesting enough to occupy us. People just like profiting off my name, it’s something I have had to get used to sadly.” She gave a sad puppy face at that, trying to sway the journalist to see her as as much a victim in the situation as Danielle. Tom had to give her credit, Taylor knew how to play reporters and public image, and that worried him.

[andrewdburton]

Three Months of Slacking

Unsuccessfully but Refreshingly trying to climb the local waterfall

“MMM, are you still alive?” – somebody on Twitter

Holy Shit! I just realized that the last time I wrote a blog post for you was on April 18th, and now it’s late July. That’s an entire quarter of a year that I have let this wonderful, golden field of interesting opportunities and people sit untended.

 How could Mr. Money Mustache, a reliable stalwart of bossy financial advice since 2011 and usually good for at least one post per month, have drifted so far from his original dedication? It’s a question that earnest fans have been asking, and that I have even started asking myself.

When you break out of any habit, it can be hard to get back into it: the psychological barriers start to stack up and the pressure rises and you find yourself waiting for more and more unattainably perfect conditions that, surprise surprise, never really come.

If it’s a workout habit that you have broken, you might tell yourself,

“Oh, I just need to get over this injury or this cold.. And then my Mom is visiting next week but after that I’ll be ready to get back to the gym.“

With my blog-writing hobby I make excuses like,

“Oh, now that it has been so long, I have to wait until I have something really interesting or worthwhile to say. And yeah okay, maybe I have a few articles like that in the drafts folder, but those ones take a lot of thinking and focus to write, so I’d better wait until I am feeling really smart and focused to crack into that subject.”

But in both cases, the correct solution is just to say,

“Fuck it. I am going to just do something towards my goal, no matter how tiny.”

To get back in shape, you just need to start with at least a few pushups, which you can do right now on the floor of your office or kitchen. To resurrect the MMM Blog, Mustache just has to type some shit into the computer, and heck, why not just an easy breezy article telling you about some of the interesting things I’ve been doing in lieu of blogging?

Some stories from a real life of early retirement, which may be more relevant than plain old financial analysis and reader case studies anyway. And once we’re all caught up in life, maybe it’ll be easier to keep in touch on a more regular basis henceforth.

So in fairly rapidfire format, here’s what I’ve been up to this spring and summer:

1) Renovating The Shit Out of Our New Two-House Compound

We found the previous shower had been leaking for years and creating the most interesting scene of decay. We tore out and rebuilt the whole area, and cut in a nice window for good measure.

You may recall that back in January, I teamed up with a friend to buy the house next door, with cash, at a below-market price. Once she moved in, we realized that it needed even more renovations than we originally planned. So I’ve had a joyful time tearing down walls, framing in new windows and doors, reworking the floorplan and changing the wall surfaces, as well as fixing the shoddy plumbing and electrical work that was found along the way.

On my own house right next door, I’ve been going just a bit wild with metalworking, making all sorts of fences and decks and even a “Juliet Balcony” which features a fireman pole allowing me to slide quickly down from my master bedroom to the ground where we have a shared hot tub between our properties – in case of Hot Tub Emergencies, of course.

Cutting a giant hole in the back of my house (in February!), adding a sliding door where there was previously only a silly little shitty window, then many fun, casual days of metalworking. The last pic is my side deck, which I built mostly out of wood but also features lots of metal and a fun little outdoor kitchen including coffee machine and induction cooktop!

2) Working on a Pretty Big Documentary Project

Hmmm.. something seems different about the HQ kitchen.

I have said for years that I would never do it, but somehow a very persuasive filmmaker who has made some documentaries that I really respect, roped me into helping out with a probably-pretty-big documentary.

I did a casting call in March and found a couple that I am now coaching and working with throughout 2021. The film company doesn’t want me to talk about it much until they are ready to announce it, but suffice it to say that it is taking a lot of my time and energy, which comes out of what would otherwise be my blog-writing time budget.

However, this is the good kind of hardship – forcing me to experience things I wouldn’t otherwise get to do, and the end result will be reaching a lot more people than I could by just writing on this website alone. My fingers are crossed that it will come out the way I hope!

3) Switching 120,000 Underserved MMM Email Subscribers over for Better Newsletters

Easier signups, and better eventual emails.

Since the beginning, I’ve mostly ignored the fact that I sorta have a list of email subscribers, with predictable lackluster results. People were able to subscribe and unsubscribe themselves automatically, and the only thing it got them was an automated mailing of any new blog articles on the day that I posted them. The emails were poorly formatted, people who had non-gmail addresses often had trouble subscribing, and many probably wondered why I couldn’t make it work better.

Thankfully, a mini-crisis happened that has forced me to do the work to solve this problem, at last: Google announced that they were shutting down the aging Feedburner email service, so all of the old-school bloggers like me who were still using it were forced to migrate to a more modern platform.

I did some research, and in the end I decided to go with a higher-end option called ConvertKit, which is one of the most popular email services. It can do a lot more cool stuff, and I have taken advantage of this to create an automated (and free of course) “MMM Boot Camp” email series that people can sign up for. 

It’s just a curated feed of some of my most useful articles (about 35 out of the 500), which automatically go out to people once per week until they have graduated, so you’d think it would be pretty easy for me to create this.

But as I read through my old stuff, of course I realized that much of it was crappy and outdated so I ended up partially rewriting every one of those 35 posts as I went through, which took some time. The good news is, the updated versions are here on the website as well, so the work should benefit anyone who happens to read them in the future.

4) Having lots of Fun Times (and Hard Times) In Real Life

Just another cool sunset/storm in my back yard, taken during the traditional Evening Walk.

I’ve had a series of wonderful visitors who came and stayed at my house, sometimes for a week or more. Friends and I have hosted some big events at the HQ Coworking space, which left me both energized and drained at the same time. Then I got Strep Throat in mid-July, which knocked me out for the count for a full week or more – even well after the antibiotics worked their magic, I have still been having some ups and downs with energy. 

And then of course there’s the heat – I am always more energetic in cool weather (The typical 50 degree sunny days of a Colorado winter are some of my favorite for outdoor work in t-shirt and jeans). So the summer season here is always a challenge for me, with an endless procession of cloudless 95 degree desert days making me resent the very Sun I normally worship so much. I’ve been taking refuge indoor more than I should, hiding in my air conditioned house and making excuses and accomplishing less because of it. At least this has led me to the keyboard today, to write this blog post.

5) “Cutting the Pipe” at HQ and Installing a Giant Fancy Heat Pump system.

I had fun working alongside my co-owner Mr. 1500 for this work. Everything was easy about this install … except rebuilding some of the filthy century-old ductwork we found once we took out the old furnace.

Since I first bought the building in 2017, the MMM-HQ coworking space has been limping along with a clunky decades-old gas furnace, a gas water heater that was about 20 years overdue to spring a leak, no central air conditioning at all, and very high utility bills due to the way our local gas company charges commercial customers.

When you combine these irritants and contrast them with the fact that we happen to have a glorious solar electric array on the rooftop that makes a surplus of power, you can see why I would be itching to tear out all the gas appliances, cancel the service account permanently, and install all-electric replacements that are more efficient and will also save an estimated shit-ton of money each year.

I’ll save the full details of this for my very next blog article, but as a spoiler: we found and successfully installed a unit that should be able to cool and heat our building year-round, is very DIY-friendly, and cost only about $4000 to buy. It should prove to be a great annual return on investment, and I am excited to start installing these things on all of my properties and those of any friends who are doing upgrades.

And with that, I’d say we are all caught up.

In the comments: what have YOU been up to these past 3 months? And what subjects do you think we should be covering here on MMM in the next three?

from Finance https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2021/07/25/three-months-of-slacking/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[fictionaljournalofbbwomans-blog]

06.03.4040

DOLLAR DOLLAR BILL YO (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-LHFfFKCsY)

BB Womans wakes up; 08:45

Before opening her eyes or even feel conscious she throws a loud scream! She so angry this morning, her jaw hurts, it’s blood driping time for the month, and electro-postillions keep wetting her neck with discouragements on absolutely everything she needs to do. BW’s state is close to punch the walls, scream, jump, hurt herself but ventilates a while, opens the window, repeats a mantra, has a coffee and a cigaret and remembers how bad it was a few weeks ago, enabling pride to have gone this far and motivation to keep on. 

So she sits and types under constant pressure to stop: 

V2K: “Don’t do that BB, people are going to think you are crazy!”. This morning BB really wants to tackle the DIRTY CASH question! 

V2K: “No BB, what are people going to think about you? You don’t like money, remember?”. The question at the tip of her finger is do you dear readers? Do you like Money? 

BB: “Shut up ass-faces, let me concentrate… Mmmhhhh… Yes, how bad was it? BaaaaAAAAAd bitch baaAAAAD!… I tried to end my life for christ-sake… I had no hope to make it out of this misery… I was alone as always in my room, but loosing strength, remembering I never wished to live this life, and now that I am aware of being blood pumped, brain sucked and my limbs attempted to be controlled and automated this confirms how fucked I always thought it was and I figured dying could be my best exit plan… I might loose consciousness completely and just switch off… huh huh…?! Don’t EVEN have the right to fucking die!!! Fair? I have been lower though really... smashing dishes, cutting my hands, ripping my face, falling around, hitting myself… The G seemed so much more of a smoother idea… Wait that’s right, I am fucking Jesus and I don’t want to hurt or sadden anyone! Queen get the money!” 

The only contact BB had with the world was her phone, emails and social media… She attempted to message some people to hint at the fact that she was going to end her days, but without being too clear, saying she wants to die is a reason to lock her up in hospital for a days and harass her to cease to resist to her robotic fate as well as use real sick patients to participate. A few mails here and there, Polo, her dad, her mother… How did this guy made it to her VIP list for suicidal notes? Not sure who else but turning around all the options for perpetrators that are given by the evil orchestrators. The messages were accusatory, sad and menacing but with a romantic rave infused twist because she always has to tell stories or write poems to get her ass out of trouble. “The truth! I want to say the truth!… Pfffff… Let me write! What are you trying to achieve? You know harassing me now is only powering me through writing more! You think I write well?! Cool for you! I am not trying to show skills, play a character, I am trying to save my ass from your puppet show! Do me a favour and go fuck yourselves!” A few breaths in and out and, another cigaret she should not smoke! 

V2K: “C’est bien, C’est bien… On a compris… On va te libérer!”

BW: “I do not give a fuck what you do, nothing will stop me from expressing myself and exposing your despicable enterprise!”

It was day or night in a time and space that felt like in between life and death, she missed her friends nights and hang outs, because she did not want to impose her sorrow or provoke the Masters instructions for actions and loud laughter shooting orders. She was shaking and could not stand up anymore, had thrown her phone somewhere in her messy flat, but needed to find it now, she crawls around, thinking she heard it calling, and maybe that means someone wants her to live. Every time she fills up with another dose, neighbours are banging on her floor from under! 

BB: “Pffffff, leave me aloooOOOOne!”

Some miracle lets her access her phone and dive in a long scroll down facebook and Instagram. She is looking for signs, and isn’t disappointed; Posts are mostly about her, what she said, what she likes… etc… Let us explain that more in depth a bit further. These posts have for aim to keep on inducing schizophrenia but the psychosis social media circus has a saving effect strangely, she is not crazy, what she knows is real and there is a reason to keep standing, at least for a little while, at least to try and make a change before departing from this sick sick SICK world.

BB: “LOVE is SICK!” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXdWxFj0y3s)

 BB: “Anyway, let’s look forward now that we have made so much efforts to stay alive and healthy, let’s write a fucking budget with that pitiful amount of cash that is left for the whole month… Mmmmhhh… food… mmmmhhhh… fuck, I’ll never be able to repair my gear! And huuuuhhhh, people aren’t going to hire me with the rumours they spread… Are they? And I am fucking working all of the fucking time… and I need a flat… and I want a dog… and… wait a second… how much are people making for digging my brain, recording it’s waves and traumatising me? WAIT! First the V2K staff… Huh, how much are you making an hour to harass and rape me? I do more than half of your job! Care to share your salary hyenas?… What about the others? What could push someone to take action towards hurting someone else or induce their paranoid state?… Again I am wondering? Are they intimidated? Or are they being my datas to make some dirty cash? Make music? Produce series, films, advertisements? Code new websites and algorithms? Write thought reading studies and experimentation reports? Print billboards?… Again… wawaiwaiwaiWAIIIIIIT! Question is not only how much do they get for it but most importantly how much do they fucking MAKE from it…?”

Now we could write our beloved reader a poetic little paragraph to expose all the details BB backed up from what and how it is all organised around her, what acts are performed and capitalism produced, but BB has nothing to prove and certainly not that she can write, so here is a vulgar run down; 

Instagram + Facebook 

Instructed posts about: making sushi, nobody loves her, she likes to have brunch, she often hides under table, her sexual persona is named Mood, cuuuute, she wanna fuck, who are they? Dogs, rats, horses, Unicorns, pink, red… Yak, yak yaaaak. She has precise theories on how instructions present, here is the most likely; Members of her social media entourage probably receive a series of options to choose from and can fashion their stories or posts as wished. Instagram also provides animation to add on their images like the Rat or the Horse one, maybe the fire was a thing too?

Videos made by different video channels, an obvious one is “THE VIEW” on facebook with pop stars and actors; Woopy Goldberg, Alicia Keys (On Instagram: “You at the back, listen and shut up…”; referring to her joke about being a teacher and V2K bad actors being her pupils), Scarlet Johanson and questions about her underwear and body size!!!? What the fuck? Sometimes actuall speaking live of celebrities sometimes just picture montages with written quotes. On suicidal season, some of these videos were called: “If you are about to give up, watch this!”, people said things like, “It’s a story of numbers”… Bla blablablabla   

Tracks under- and over- different scenes 

Describing her actions, loneliness, her writing poems, being ridiculous, liking to walk in Paris, her fears, Her horoscopes, her obsessions…  

Actions 

As mentioned before people crossing her in the street reiterating what she has done the day before, where do they receive these? From whom? Whats app? 

scripts

With subjects to talk about, words to mention, things to remind her, ways of acting or falling down miming her… when to laugh and as loudly as possible please. Often these recent days, she can identify the speeches directed to her because it is performed obviously loud, making her feel like a theatre spectator, she guesses it is to make sure she does hear it over her repetitive thinking mantra loops she has developed and self defence and tactics to avoid repeating offensive and self incriminating sentences like: “I am a pedophile”, or “Black person... hhhmmm nooooo, Big dick” or getting blocked on a genital drumming thought session or “I find her ugly...” Etc EEETTTTCCCC...!

Adds

Relating to her teeth, selling fairy lights for your room, denouncing capitalistic routine, Job offers… this list is endless and could spiral towards unrealistic revelations.   

Audio announcements in Public spaces or billboards 

Radio 

Programme relating to her struggles, comments and jokes making fun of her 

Tape recording sold in shops she regularly visit

Talking about her refusal to work… “Warum Nicht?”, Her Birthday… 

Without counting weird emails

From company she uses telling her they like their customer well caffeinated, people advertising their music to be featured on her radio…

And we could keep that up for a while, but our tired anti-hero has it up up UP over her head to try and prove she really does know about it all while getting harassed with contents making her feel bad for placing herself in the middle of it all: “The world is not turning around you BB” Friends would say some years back. 

Now lets point out all the money she has had and still have to spend to survive, no wait, another waste of time? It is utterly obvious; medicines too calm down, machinery to find out more about the electro harassment, countless hard drives to save her datas, replacing her fucked up devices, or simply time spent researching and unveiling Patriarchal societies secret studies and machineries to learn and spread awareness so to build a network of allies. Then there is all the drug taking and urge to spend that is induced by the Bastards… Getting fired, not being able to find a job, what else… cream for wounds… food to eat her lack of affection… massages to undo her nerves that are conducting the electro current through her limbs to her brain, LUNCHES, BRUNCHES!

Do you believe BB deserves to get reimbursed? Do you believe she deserves to get paid even? How much could they have generate from their tests, products, results and new high tech machine building, or add placing on social medias, or could we go down in this darker deeper hole of wondering if they make money from the audience avid to follow the thinking series of her intimidation? She thinks 50/50 sounds right, but as it is a story of numbers, and hers is 33! 

BB: “Soooo Double that... Mmmhhh... What about 66% of your studies earnings nasty rat-bags? If you want to share your illegal cash born out of my fucking brain waves, do that! send me a fucking email or transfer direct into my bank account you know the passwords and details from by heart, I might be able to get on writing my book, make art, music, get onto my project to empower womxn to speak without fear, now that I am an expert at it!

[nicoladoeschina]

The Seedy Underbelly

In truth, I am really having a hard time with this new job.

So.... Why?

Why am I doing this now?

I think the answer is simple: so that I’m not tempted to try it again later.

This is a retrospective analysis.

From the outset my thinking was more upward looking.

I was curious. I still am curious. I wanted to know how Chinese companies operate.

My reasoning is that many foreign companies are doing business in China.

I thought it’d be a good angle to get to know them from the inside, so as to better deal with them on the outside.

But even before I formally took this job, I already knew how this one operated.

Horribly.

Already in May, the hiring process was chaotic.

The day after the fancy interview at headquarters, I was verbally told I’d been selected.

Nothing in writing.

I didn’t get more than a casual: you’ve passed, and your stated salary requirements will be met.

The HR employees then commissioned me to obtain many many documents so they could prepare a working visa, that would lead to huge spends of time and money on my part.

I didn’t even have an offer in hand! But if I failed to present the documents, then I Definitely wasn’t getting an offer. It was a Catch-22.

The month of running around Beijing admist garish uncertainty of employment was absolutely wrenching – for me, and for all my close friends/family that had to listen to me bitch for hours in frustration.

I had travel plans to execute on. I had, and still do have, a life to lead. How could they leave me in this limbo? Professionalism? Efficiency? Both null.

After much aggravation, I let them know that I was leaving the country on June 30. It was non-negotiable.

Over the course of the next 6 weeks, I continuall and more firmly, asked for my offer letter. Yet, I was continually met by garbage delays.

Truly, no good reasons were provided for such gross incompetency.

The night before my graduation, I raised hell. The morning of the ceremony, I got my offer. Then I promptly submitted all the pre-visa documents they requested of me. Phew.

Come mid-July two weeks later, I was contacted with my contract.

I was told that even though the stated working location was Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, that this was for government relations/taxation purposes.

As for signing the thing, I was already traveling, so I managed to print it, sign it, then had to scan it to my mom and trouble her to mail the parcel overseas.

Another big hassle.

At this point, I began to wonder about what a professional life in Beijing would look like. So it dawned on me to ask if they would provide assistance for finding housing in Beijing.

And what do you think I learned then?

Oh, by the way, don’t worry about housing in Beijing yet...because you’ll be training in Hohhot for three months at the beginning!!!

What?

You’re only telling me that... now? What if I didn't ask? ...

Knowing what I know now from other recent hires, they wouldn’t have told me. Period.

The Indo girl wasn’t informed of the three month Hohhot stint until after she bought her plane ticket to Beijing. And then she only had a week to prepare.

She’s still paying rent on her Beijing apartment now...

The others, they probably had even less notice.

Lucky me, I put the feelers out about housing in mid-July...

What the actual fuck?

How can any respecting corporation pull at stunt like that on their new hires?

What is the point? It’s not like the HR people don’t know the drill. All new management hires must complete the same process.

Did anyone care to tell us at the interview? No.

Did anyone care to tell us upon the offer? No.

Did anyone care to tell us on signing the contract? No.

Did anyone care at all to tell us one once of information about any fucking thing?

WHAT THE FUCK.

Back to the summer.

The third week of July, I received notice that my non-criminal record check was not sufficient.

Let’s see... that’s Three Weeks after I submitted my information.

As I was traveling, I told HR they must wait.

When I arrived home in mid-August. I went through hoops for the next two months collecting all the necessary documents to approve a new non-criminal record check.

Why did this take two months? Oh yeah, because no one had any clue how to help me and i was having trouble helping myself.

There’s little information online about it.

OHHHHH and best, the Chinese embassy official site hasn’t been updated since 2015.

I should have been smarter and contacted a visa agent from the beginning. But since the NYC consulate is fairly close, I thought I could manage on my own.

I was wrong. I needed the help and eventually wound up paying a service.

(At least I bought myself two amazing amazing months at home. Big upside)

Why was it that the HR for this huge company had no idea how to advise me?

I’m the first (of two) foreigners that they’ve ever hired at the entry level.

The company employs several foreign experts, but of course they are managed much differently...

Once I arrived in Hohhot, it became overwhelmingly apparent that none of the beyond the HR staff and foreigner stuff, no one in management has any knowledge of anything even so slightly removed from their narrow purview. 

Great.

No one knows a fucking thing about anything.

But they’re all generally really nice though...

Let me describe how Chinese companies really work, from the inside.

One umbrella, Three buzz words:

Inefficiency via Over-employment, Under-training and Lots-of-Ass-Kissing

Now, you might ask, how do they function at all?

The answer is very Very VERY slowly.

There are SO MANY people. And so LITTLE skills among them.

Imagine trying to make an assembly line out of a non-linear process. That’s Chinese corporations’ approach to management.

The Chinese government views employment like the Western governments view human rights: necessary for stability.

If Chinese organizations only staffed the number of people needed for the work, there’d be massive havoc in the streets.

There are 1.4 billion people in China. Every year, there are 10 million new college graduates.

Excess labor may be good for keeping blue collar wages low to boost competitiveness, but in white collar work, the mandated hiring of excess labor has led to rife inefficiency.

Now, you may be thinking, hasn’t the government been trying to tackle this problem by trimming massive State Owned Enterprises since the ‘80s?

They’ve definitely made strides in transforming SOEs from hugely unprofitable corporations with cradle-to-grave care for millions of employees and families, to profit-making firms that hold up reasonably well some to competition, right?

That’s right. But they’re still ungodly bloated with workers.

The private sector may have developed in the era of opening and reform, but many Many MANY Chinese companies still actively practice over-employment.

They play a numbers game. 

White collar labor is still fairly cheap. The employees are all responsible for little, but there lots and Lots and LOTS of them.

You can see how this quickly leads to bureaucracy – to keep everyone feeling important.

I can give countless examples from my own experience this month, describing in detail, just how many people become involved in even the simplest tasks.

The assembly line isn’t linear, remember?

In fact, it’s a good mix between horizontal, diagonal, and vertical. It’s 3-D, really.

I honestly don’t want to go into the examples because they make me too infuriated. But know that the problem is not only acute, but prolific.

It is overwhelmingly compounded by buzz word No.2: under-training.

So you have this huge bureaucratic fucked assembly line mess, and now imagine no one knows what they’re doing...

Why?

I can speak about Yili, though in regards to other Chinese firms, I can’t tell you anything concrete.

At Yili, all new management hires must complete three months of training in Hohhot. This includes: One month of courses about company culture, business practices, and rough overviews of Yili’s departments, and Two whole months of “interning” at Yili’s factories around the city.

In theory, this could provide a fantastic foundation of base knowledge for all incoming management employees.

But there is, of course, a big catch. Two actually.

One, is that the factory “internship” is a wash. After brief introductions to processes, we are made to sit or stand, observing automated processes for 8-to-13 hour shifts at a clip. Observing only. We don’t have any real knowledge about production, we’re in marketing or sales. If the training was actually training, than this could be a bit long, but a great experience. Instead we’re left milling around doing absolutely nothing for months.

Two, is that over the course of these three months training, we have absolutely ZERO job-specific training.

That’s right. Zero.

But once our training period ends, we’re thrust right into our roles in business development, or media coordination, or etcetera.

Our bosses are supposed to function as mentors. Though, from what I’ve learned about mentors or “internships” here in China, is that they’re shit.

So basically, we’ll finish the training and be handed a list of tasks as if we know how to complete them.

Where does that leave us? OH YEAH, asking colleagues for help.

But what happens when, in an over-staffed company, every colleague is asking everyone else for assistance on this, that or the other thing?

That, my friends, is inefficiency on a huge scale.

Buzz word number three is the last piece of the puzzle. Ass kissing. Lots of it.

Many people are familiar with Chinese culture’s deference and respect to status.

There are positives and negatives to this. Definitely many positives in an authoritarian system... cough*

But in a corporate setting, deference leads to dishonesty.

And worse yet, indifference to the circle of inefficiency it’s creating.

No one wants to make anyone look bad.

But, oh wait, THEY LOOK BAD. Almost everyone, LOOKS BAD, all the time because they don’t know their left from their right, nor their own shit from the chocolate-covered soybeans in Yili’s yogurt products.

No one will say that the factory internship is garbage, because then the internship supervisors will lose face and get in trouble. No one will say that they’ve received inefficient training for their required job, because the training school supervisors will meet similar consequences. But then the poorly-trained trainees, struggle greatly with their new tasks and must call for help constantly, miring everyone in the web.

The problem compounds and compound, both across departments and across rank.

The Chinese cultural element that breeds filial piety at home, also breeds horrible inefficiency in the workplace.

Rife inefficiency has still managed to render many Chinese firms successful at home in their government protected, sheltered economy. If they all operate similarly, then of course there can still be big winners.

Though, should these firms encounter international competition – where the leanest and meanest reign supreme - they’re in for very hard reckonings.

The large, very successful companies competition internationally such as Alibaba, I can’t speak for.

But i do believe i write with honesty that the three buzz words, one umbrella analysis of Chinese corporate culture is both spot on and scary, for me personally. I signed up for this, knowing i’d have a really hard time. But i committed. 

I still dearly hope that this is a positive building block that will help me moving forward. 

It is my goal to avoid complete disenchantment that will chase me away from China completely. There’s only so long as I can being the only competent one in the room. 

But I hope these fears are shattered soon by some fantastic coworkers at the Beijing branch. My fingers are crossed! February I’m looking at you! Come sooner!

In the meantime, I’m pursing things that interest me such as travel writing, and learning new things.

I’ve updated the inspirational quote on my desktop to:  What you’re doing is worth it.

It’s all too easy to get bogged down in the weeds of daily nonsense here, so i need to remind myself that the long game will bare fruit.

Peace.

[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

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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