#like I work next to an incredible busy square like 300 people at one time and it was completely mouse silent for 2 minutes

[princemick]

sorry if this is insensitive, but what is 4th of may remembrance for in the netherlands?

no not insensitive at all dude ur completely welcome to be curious!

basically the 5th is when we got freed from german occupation in '45 so we have rememberance day on the 4th, is to mourn the 18000 dutch people that died during the 2nd ww originally and over time it morphed into remembering all those that are lost to any and all war.

especially Indonesia bc that was a fucking disgusting crime that we caused so we remember and talk about how that happened and how many people died there.

its basically just a day of mourning those lost in different major wars and having a collective moment to mourn and remember, its kind of like a national two minute prayer but you dont have to pray.

and then on the 5th we party and get very very drunk.

[matrixaffiliate]

Choreograph

New Story! FFN and AO3

Lily does not dance. She has no desire to be on national television. But when she's surprisingly selected as a contestant for Dancing With the Stars and she finds out how much money there is to fund her research on carbon capture, she becomes a reluctant contestant for the latest season. She just didn't count on being placed with the favorite dancer to win this year, James Potter.

This little story is for the wonderful @constancezin! (And if you go to her Tumblr you can see some amazing Harry Potter artwork!) She brought up the idea of a Dancing With the Stars (American) Jily AU and I volunteered to write a version of it for her. Thank you for sharing your ideas, @constancezin! I hope you love this little story!

Choreograph

"No, Mary," Lily shook her head and made another note in her notebook.

"Lily, you didn't even think about it!" Mary pouted.

"I didn't need to, Mary."

"But Lily," Mary whined.

"No, Mary." Lily closed the window in her computer and stood up. "I've never even been able to sit through an entire episode. I won't do it."

"Lily, think of the kind of publicity this would give you, and the companies that are looking to fund your research, and the public that would hail you!" Mary blocked the way out of her office.

"Mary," Lily sighed. "I don't dance."

"None of the contestants do," Marry shook her head. "That's the whole point! You get partnered with an accomplished ballroom performer, and they teach you how to do each week's dance, you perform it on national television, and the judges give you scores, but the viewing public keep you on the show by voting for you!"

Mary's explanation had grown progressively more and more animated as she went on. But Lily was not having it.

"Mary, no, I don't dance, I certainly don't dance in public, and I'd honestly rather have a go with a giant squid than dance on national television with some man that's more concerned with what his hair looks like than I am about mine."

"Lily, wait!" Mary cried as Lily pushed past her.

Lily turned in a huff. "What?"

"If you sign on and agree to perform for the first two weeks it's 125 thousand dollars."

Lily gawked.

"And," Mary smiled seeing that the money had caught Lily's attention, "you get more money for every week you stay on the show. The winner ends up with like 300 thousand dollars. Lily, just the 125 thousand would pay for the next iteration of the project. Imagine if you made it further? Think of what we could accomplish with the grand prize!"

Lily bit her lip, all of her resolve that she was not going to do this silly television show cracking.

"How did they even get my name, Mary?"

"I don't know but they contacted the company this morning and they want your answer by tomorrow."

Lily sighed and leaned against the wall. "Mary…"

"Lily, come on, the benefits are huge, think of everything we'd be able to do and how it could change our work on carbon capture!"

"You're sure I only need to stay on for the first two weeks to get the 125 thousand?"

"Yes, that's what they said."

"I can't believe I'm doing this," Lily shook her head.

But really, she could. In exchange for two weeks of humiliation, she would get more money to put towards her research than two weeks' worth of grant filing would give her - it even came with equal levels of frustration.

"Oh my gosh! Are you going to do it?"

Lily rolled her eyes but nodded. "Yes, Mary, I'm probably going insane but you're right, the money is too much to walk away from."

Mary screamed and threw her arms around Lily. "This is going to be amazing! Oh, I hope you get James Potter or Sirius Black, they're so good! And really hot too! I wonder if we can put in a request for your first pick. Or at least tell them not to pair you with Albus Dumbledore, he and his partner are always one of the first voted off."

"Then let's hope I end up with him," Lily moved back towards her office. "Do you have the number I'm supposed to call?"

"Right here," Mary texted the number to her and Lily sat down before hitting dial.

Mary had raved about how great it was that she was doing the show, and kept going on about how amazing it would be for Lily to be paired with James Potter, who'd finished top five the last three years he'd been on the show, or Sirius Black, who'd won last season. Lily adamantly refused Mary's plea to spend an evening watching complications of greatest moments of James Potter and Sirius Black on YouTube.

A few days after she called and confirmed, Lily received a time and place to be at for paper signing and the promise of finding out who her partner was. Lily didn't care for the time out of her workday it would require, but she reminded herself this was the same sort of sacrifice of time that she would have to make applying for grants, but this came with a guarantee of funds whereas the grants were always anyone's guess as to whether or not the group would get the money. Besides, this money could be what gave her the breakthrough to a patented, marketable item in order to fund her bigger research ideas.

And the next day, Lily walked in the door of the office. But of course, the receptionist wasn't there to tell her what to do next. She let out an audible groan.

"Everything alright?"

The man addressing her was tall, with dark hair that was messy and stood on end. His square rimmed glasses framed warm hazel eyes that reminded her of her dad's favorite imported maple syrup; her mom always bought it for him for Christmas every year without fail.

James Potter looked good on camera, but he was blinding in person.

"Oh, yes, just, um, I'm not sure what to do next."

"I'm happy to point you where you need to be," he held out his hand, "I'm James by the way."

"It's nice to meet you," Lily took his hand and gave herself a firm mental shake to stop ogling him. "I'm the contestant that's going home the moment I have to rely on votes to stay in."

James laughed. "Is that so?"

"I'm no one special, there's no fan base to keep me on the show." Lily shrugged and tried to push down the part of her that suddenly wanted James Potter to be her assigned dance partner.

"No fan base, huh?"

"Just my best friend, no one else is around to vote for me." Lily looked down at her phone and looked back around for the receptionist.

"I can show you where to go to get your paperwork signed and completed?"

She looked back up at him to see his hand shoved in his hair.

"Oh, yes, thank you," Lily nodded, feeling incredibly awkward at how scattered she must seem.

James grinned and started moving down one of the hallways. "So, what is your claim to have been invited to be a contestant on the show?"

Lily scoffed. "I have no idea. I'm a scientist, and I had a breakthrough on carbon capture last year that managed to make a brief mention on the four o'clock local news broadcast and most of the science journals. I've not done anything the general viewership is going to care about."

"Really? What's your name? If you don't mind my asking."

"Lily Evans," she smirked at him. "See you've never heard of me."

James looked sheepish, "Well, no, I haven't, but I mean the most important people are usually people that have no media presence in my opinion."

Lily laughed, "That's nice of you to say."

"So, you just really wanted to learn how to dance?" He leaned up against an open door jam.

Lily gave a nervous laugh. "Just hope you don't get paired with me. I don't dance, and I'm really only in this because the money from the first two weeks might be able to get me to a point where I can fund the research I want to do."

"A famous innovator like yourself needs the money?" James laughed at her. "You mean the grants aren't just spilling in?"

Lily scoffed, "Yeah I'm rolling in the dough right now. The Bentley out front is mine."

"Which one?"

Lily laughed, "The white '95 Corolla."

"Ah, a great year for Bentley Corollas," James laughed with her. The conversation went silent in an almost awkward way. James took a deep breath and gestured to the room they were standing outside of. "So, um, this is it. I guess I'll see you around then."

"Yeah, thank you, and good luck this season. I'm sure you'll do great."

"You too," his hand jumped back to his hair.

Lily nodded and stood awkwardly at the door a moment before remembering how to human.

"Well, I'll see you around."

"Yeah," James pushed off the wall, "See you."

Lily ducked into the office and was able to get her contract signed and all the particulars determined.

At the end of it all, the man that had been helping her clicked a few things on his computer.

"Alright, I've just sent the email with all your instructions and your partner for the show. You get eight tickets per show-"

"I'll only need one," Lily interrupted him as she opened the email on her phone.

"Boyfriend?" He smiled at her.

Lily's eyes went wide as she looked at the name of her partner.

"Um, no, but this says my partner is James Potter."

"Yep, producers assigned you two together on Monday."

"I, um, is that a good idea. I mean you saw all my paperwork; I'm probably going to be the first one voted off, and James is one of your best."

"I'm sure it will be fine, but if you'd like you can talk to the producers about it." He handed her a business card. "Here's all of Marlene's information, and I'm sure she can help you feel better about it. I wouldn't worry, though. James is good at what he does and that's what will really get you to through the show."

"Thanks," Lily nodded and moved to the door, already dialing Marlene's number.

"This is Marlene," she answered as Lily climbed in her car.

"Hi Marlene, this is Lily Evans, I'm one of your contestants this season."

"Yes, Lily! I just got the scan of all your paperwork. We're excited to have you. What can I do for you?"

"I know this is probably going to sound silly, but I need you to resign me. I know James is one of the favorites to win this year, and I have absolutely no coordination. I don't want to be the reason he doesn't make it to the top five. I'm sure you've got an athlete or something that can switch with me."

Marlene laughed. "Lily, I'm sure James would appreciate the sentiment, but we put a lot of thought into this and tried to make it fair for everyone. Besides, if you know then James just got his email. Don't worry, James is a good teacher and he'll make sure you can do your best out there."

"Marlene, really," Lily gripped her phone a little tighter, "I once had to perform in front of a middle school crowd and completely forgot the words to the song I'd signed on to sing. There's a real possibility that I'll get up there for the first dance and freeze and get sent home the first week."

"That's really sweet of you to be so concerned, Lily, but don't forget that it's the votes that keep you in, not necessarily your skill as a dancer or your points from the judges."

"And I'm a nobody scientist that has a fan base of zero."

Marlene laughed, "Just trust us. We've been doing this for years now. Stranger people than you have advanced to the top five."

Lily huffed, "Well, I guess I'll tell James I tried."

"Don't worry about James," Marlene dismissed. "He'll be just fine."

Lily tried to believe those words on the day she drove to the gym or whatever you'd call a building with rooms for them to practice in. These were the things that made Lily feel like she couldn't do this.

The camera crew was waiting for her and went through a whole bunch of things that Lily fully planned on ignoring before letting her finally go inside to meet James.

She opened the door and tried to smile. Then her eyes landed on James and she felt a little less nervous. The smile he directed her way made her heart stutter.

"No way!" He looked at the camera on him. "This woman's going to save the planet!"

Lily gave a nervous chuckle as she walked up to shake his hand. "I don't know about saving the planet."

James moved her proffered handshake into a dance position, bringing his hand to her back and spinning her around.

"The great Lily Evans is brilliant and humble, ladies and gentlemen."

Lily pulled out of his embrace and fidgeted with her hair.

"Well, I'm sure there will be plenty of time for you to reform that opinion. But I'm looking forward to working with you, James. I hope I can live up to your previous seasons. I'm sorry to say I'm a very inexperienced dancer."

"You never had me for a teacher." James waved off her concerns. "You'll see, we'll have you dancing like you've been doing it all your life in no time."

"Cut!"

Lily jumped. She had forgotten about the crew around them.

"Great work you two, we'll be back to film you again on Friday."

"Sounds good, see you then." James saluted as the crew cleared up and moved out of the dance studio.

"So, are you disappointed to not be assigned to me?" James chuckled once the door had been closed for a moment.

Lily bit her lip, "I would think you would be upset more than me. I even asked one of the producers to switch me to someone else so you could have a chance at winning this season."

"Yeah, Marlene told me about it." James chuckled. "But I'm the dancer, so let me worry about the dancing and you worry about climate science."

"I'm really not going to save the world," Lily sat down on one of the chairs against the wall. "I might ask the producers to cut that out."

"You can ask, but since we only did one take, they would need to have us film that whole first meeting over again. Don't worry about it. All it does is create interest in you which could gain us more votes."

Lily wanted to protest, but James put his hands on her shoulders and pulled back on them.

"What?"

"We have to fix your posture. I need you to be able to stand up straight all the time so we can get you into practice."

Lily frowned at it as she tried to sit up straighter.

"Here," James pulled her to stand up "Like this."

His hands pulled her shoulders back, but then smoothed down her spine, almost caressingly, to her hips where he brought them inline. Lily felt her mouth go dry.

"I bet all your past partners called you an awful taskmaster." She tried for humor to distance herself from the way her heart was pounding in her ears.

"My experience says that by the end of today you're going to call me all sorts of unpleasant names for what we're going to do."

Lily forced a laugh and suggested they get on with it. Their first dance was the foxtrot which seemed like a nice way to ease into this experience. But despite Lily's hopes, by the time seven o'clock rolled around she was sure she'd never make it through the next week of practices.

"You can go ahead and call me whatever you want," James sat down next to her as she collapsed in her chair.

"No," she panted, "I mean, I signed on for this, right? I can only be upset with myself. I'm just sorry I'm so bad at it."

"You're not bad at it," James shook his head and sat down next to her.

"James, there are mirrors on every wall, and I have eyes. I'm not good at this."

"You're too wrapped up in believing you're bad at this. Look, if I told you that there was no hope for climate science to make any real difference so why try, would you bite my head off?"

Lily laughed, "Yes, I probably wouldn't try to eat you, but I'd say you were wrong."

James looked dubious but continued. "Alright, I'm the dance expert in this room, and I say that you're not bad at this. You have a ton of the routine memorized now as far as where we're moving around the room on the floor and that's huge." He bumped her shoulder with his own. "Now say it with me, 'I can dance'."

Lily shook her head but chuckled, "I can dance."

"No one would believe that," James laughed. "Come on, again, like you mean it now."

Lily took a deep breath, "I can dance."

"Is that all you've got, Evans?" James goaded her.

"I CAN DANCE!" She yelled at him and laughed when he jumped up from his seat.

"Then dance, Lily!" He held out his hand to her and Lily pushed up to step into their routine again, James counting the steps as he led her around and around the room, her feet only stepping on his every third step this time, rather than every step they took together.

The days leading up to their first performance seemed to go both in slow motion and warp speed simultaneously. But soon it was Sunday and she and James were running through the routine for the last time before they'd do the dress rehearsal the next day.

"I'm still not getting it, James." Lily sat down on the floor and hung her head as she rested her arms on her legs.

"You're doing just fine," he sat down next to her.

"Don't lie to me."

James was silent for a long moment before he held out his hand to her.

"We're a team, Evans, and I would never lie to a teammate. Come on, let's try it again."

Lily sighed before taking his hand and letting him pull her up from the floor to run through the routine again.

She wished all of these hours she was putting in were paying off, but all it seemed to do was make her exhausted. She was in the office from seven till nearly eleven, then she would eat something while she drove to the dance studio and dance with James until seven or eight, and then drive home, sometimes to remember to eat something, before finally passing out cold until her alarm went off to start it all over again.

Dress rehearsal Monday morning seemed to only cement in her brain how much she didn't belong in this world. All the other contestants were so much more coordinated than her, and they seemed to be more at ease in the environment than she was.

Lily's nerves were overpowering and she botched their first run through. She couldn't manage to keep her dress from getting caught around her legs and her feet kept misstepping and James kept rubbing the part of her back that he used to signal her she was slouching. It was a disaster.

"James," one of the dancers approached them as Lily tried to get through the steps again.

James let her hand drop and stepped away. "Just sec, let me see what Sirius needs."

Lily turned and watched the two men talk quietly. James' hand pushed into his hair as he talked but he didn't look her way. She felt horrible about it all. James wasn't going to make it past the first elimination because he'd ended up with her and she was only doing these two weeks for the money. She had been assuaging her pride with the assurance that she just needed the 125 thousand dollars and then she could go back to her work and not worry about dancing ever again. But seeing how hard James was trying, and how patient and supportive he was with her as she floundered through the steps and routine, she didn't think she could walk away and leave him without a second thought. She cared too much to do that now.

As a friend, of course, she reminded herself.

James gave Sirius an attempt at a smile before moving back to Lily.

"Let's try it again," Lily squared her shoulders and smiled. "I think I can do it."

"Alright," James' smile didn't reach his eyes, but he stepped up to her and pulled her hand into his.

It wasn't perfect by any stretch but Lily could feel it was better, surer maybe. And she could tell that James felt it too as the weariness on his face slowly faded.

"You're getting it!" He laughed as they finished the routine. "See! You can dance!"

Lily grinned as she tried to catch her breath. "I just need to improve ten times more before tonight."

"We'll be fine," he nodded as the stagehand told them their time was up. "Let's see if they can pull up the hem of your dress another two or three inches and take out one of the panels before tonight. I think that will make a huge difference for you." He took her hand and Lily felt her breath catch at the feeling of his hand holding hers. "That was what Sirius pulled me aside for. He saw that the dress was too long and too full."

"That was nice of him," Lily tried to convince herself that the catch in her breath was just her being out of breath from the dance.

"Sirius is a good guy; we've been looking out for each other for a long time now." James grinned over at him as Sirius talked with Marlene.

He let go of her hand then and Lily tried to convince herself that the falling feeling she had when he released her hand was completely due to her exhaustion and had nothing to do with her wanting him to keep holding her hand.

James talked to the costume coordinator and Lily stood still as they went over the skirt of her dress until James felt sure it would be perfect for that evening's opening night, and the costume coordinator sent them to get out of their performance clothes. Then she was whisked away by the television crew to have her hair and makeup done with the other stars and dancers. In a whirlwind, it was suddenly their turn to dance.

Before the music started for their live performance, the stage lights were dim; a ticking sound started to give the countdown to start. Lily thought it sounded a lot like a time bomb.

"We've got this," James whispered.

And then the lights flashed on and the music started and Lily threw herself into the routine she'd been trying desperately to learn. There were a few stumbles, but James caught her through all of them, and in what felt both like an eternity and the blink of an eye, the music ended and people were applauding. Lily turned to the audience and found Mary jumping up and down and screaming through the noise. She waved as James pulled her over to the part of this competition Lily was dreading most of all, the judging.

They had, of course, seen her stumbles, but they were impressed with other things, McGonagall mentioned her excellent posture twice. Flitwick wasn't pleased with how they'd kept more or less to the steps with a couple of spins. But Slughorn kept telling them how wonderful it was that she had managed to learn the steps so well in such a short time.

"You're a natural!" He'd beamed at her.

James kept his arm around her middle as the judges gave their final scores, a five from both McGonagall and Slughorn, and a four from Flitwick.

"You were amazing," James spoke next to her ear as they moved backstage.

"Those scores say differently," Lily swallowed the lump in her throat.

"Hey," James pulled her to a far corner. "Those are good scores for week one. And no one is going home this week. You did an amazing job, believe me."

Lily nodded and tried to swallow again, "Ok."

She didn't particularly believe him, but she wasn't going to argue with him when there were cameras everywhere that could paint it as something awful.

They ended up finishing in the bottom five that night. And while Mary wanted to come over and stay up late talking about everything that had happened, Lily told her it would have to wait. She still needed to be at her desk by six the next morning.

When she managed to make it to the studio the next morning, James was already set to go.

"We've got the cha-cha this week." He motioned for her to come stand next to him. "We'll start just like we did with the foxtrot. I'll show you how to do the steps on your own and then we'll move to doing them together."

His smile was encouraging, and though the morning had already been full of work, Lily wanted to smile back at him. She wanted to be here with him. She didn't want to let James down.

Because they were friends, of course.

"Let's do this."

"Great," James reached into his bag and pulled out a Jenga set. "We start with this."

"With a game?" Lily watched perplexed as James set up the Jenga tower on one of the chairs, gesturing for her to sit opposite him and the game.

"There's a lot to be learned from Jenga."

"About dancing?"

"There's a dancing metaphor in almost anything, Evans. Now," he gestured to the tower, "Ladies first."

Lily pulled an easy block from the tower.

"That's a lame move," James smirked at her before pulling a block out that nearly toppled the tower down.

*I don't like to take enormous risks," Lily stuck her tongue out at him and found another easy block.

"That doesn't sound true at all. If it were, I don't think you would have agreed to this whole stunt."

"I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but I only agreed to it because of the money."

James pulled a difficult block and half-heartedly tossed it at her. "And what is all this money going towards?"

Lily smiled; it was easy to talk about work. "I want to make carbon capture something that can be done in anyone's backyard. Think about it, what if every home in every suburb had a carbon capture system set up, but cheaper and easier than solar. If I can make this work, this could buy us more than just a few years, it could be buying us decades of time to find better ways of creating power than burning coal."

James stared at her silently, his eyes intense and dark as he looked directly into her own eyes.

"Sorry, I guess that was a little much." Lily pulled another easy block from the tower.

"No," James' smirk finally found its way back to his face, but he continued to stare at her. "No, I personally think it was inspiring."

Lily pulled another easy block to avoid his stare and then held her breath as James pulled one that nearly toppled the whole tower over.

"James," Lily kept her gaze on the game as she spoke, "Can you honestly tell me that I'm a good dancer?" She knew it was a silly question to ask, but if she was a good dancer, then why not be dancing right now instead of playing Jenga?

"Yes," he answered immediately, but Lily scoffed.

"Lily, listen, for having never danced in your life, you're doing really well! Don't try to compare yourself to Julianne Hough. We have a real chance here, and I've done this long enough to know."

Lily wanted to believe him, but she didn't, and it must have shown on her face.

"Lily, what if you believed me? What if you were to take the risk?" He pointed to a block in the Jenga tower that was wedged tightly between the surrounding blocks. "Take a risk, pull this block here."

"That could make the whole tower fall," Lily objected.

"But it might not, it might give you the advantage in the game. Just try, and accept that the tower is going to wobble a little bit; if it falls, we'll rebuild it again."

Lily eyed the block before cautiously pulling on it. The tower wobbled dangerously.

"It's going to fall," she pulled her hand back.

"Then let it fall," James shrugged.

"And if it does, I'll lose the game!"

"No," James grinned at her, "We're a team, remember, we win and lose together."

"Fine, then we lose the game if I make the tower fall."

"Not if we build the tower up again." He leaned forward. "Change your perspective, Evans. There's no losing, just new starting points. Now, pull that block out."

Lily looked into his warm hazel eyes and something about how he was looking at her made her feel like she could try.

"Fine, but don't get upset if I make this whole tower come crashing down around us."

James just laughed and nodded her on.

Lily pulled carefully on the block, drawing in a sharp breath when it started to pull the tower with it. But as she turned the block around and moved it small bits at a time, the block slowly pulled free of the tower.

"I did it!" She held the block above her head like a trophy and James' smile was so proud that Lily felt certain that she could look at that smile forever and never tire of it.

"You did it!" He cheered. Then he stood and held out his hand. "Now take a chance, and let's teach you how to cha-cha-cha."

Lily laughed and took his hand. By the end of the day, she felt like she had a better grip on not just the cha-cha, but dancing as well. A week in and her body already was in better shape and she wasn't as exhausted when she finally made it home that evening. The routine ended up much like their foxtrot, with little flair but with Lily's ability to do the steps well being their focus. She was also grateful that no one put her in something that looked more like a swimsuit than a costume for the cha-cha. She already had to pointedly ignore the quiet part of her mind that would react to James holding her as close as he had to for the dance, she didn't need to also be half-naked. Lily needed every barrier between her and James she could procure.

Their scores that week were better, though Flitwick still wanted to see more excitement in their routines. Still, he gave them a five, and McGonagall and Slughorn both gave them a six. Lily was just happy it kept her out of the bottom two. She was certain the moment she ended up there, it would be over, and James wouldn't get any further.

Their third week went well too. They danced the quickstep, which wasn't so different from the foxtrot in that she picked it up quickly, enough so that they were able to work some more complex moves into the dance as well. That was the performance that finally got Flitwick on her side, and they were safe from the bottom two again with three scores of six.

Lily walked into week four feeling like maybe she could do this. She felt fit and she was starting to feel budding confidence that she at least could learn to dance.

But she was back on her guard when she walked into the dance studio and James handed her a blindfold.

"No."

He laughed at her.

"Potter, there can't possibly be a good reason for me to wear a blindfold."

"Actually, Evans, you've pointed out the reason for this blindfold more times than I can count." He smirked at her.

"Oh, really? Explain then, why am I supposed to wear a blindfold?"

"Because, there are mirrors on every wall of this room," he gestured around them. "And I need you to do something before I get started on teaching you our dance this week."

"What dance do we have?" Lily fidgeted with the blindfold he'd pressed into her hands.

"I'll tell you after we do this little exercise."

"James, this better not be anything stupid."

"I promise, it isn't anything stupid. I need you to trust me."

Lily rolled her eyes. "I do trust you."

"No, I need you to fully trust me."

"You promise, this isn't going to be something weird?"

"Dancer's honor," James put his hand over his heart.

Lily examined the blindfold carefully before looking back at James.

"Okay, but remember, you promised."

"I promise." James nodded her on.

Lily took a deep breath and tied the blindfold over her eyes. She let her hands fall to her side and tried to not let the disoriented feeling that hit overcome her.

James' hand took hers, and it was so familiar now that Lily wondered briefly at how when this was over, she'd never feel it again. The thought left a small ache in her chest.

"Walk with me," he spoke quietly.

Lily took cautious steps forward, feeling awkward and anxious that she would trip and fall on her face.

James stopped her and let go of her hand and Lily immediately felt lost.

"Now," James' voice was suddenly behind her, "When I tell you to, I want you to put out your arms, and fall backward, trusting that I will catch you."

"You're kidding!" Lily almost pulled her blindfold off, but James put his hands gently on her shoulders, causing Lily's frantic heartbeat to spike.

"No, I told you, I need you to really trust me. This next dance needs you to trust me completely."

Lily bit her lip and reached back for James. He grabbed her hand.

"Take a risk, Lily." He gave her hand a squeeze before letting go.

"Are you ready?" He sounded like he was on the other side of the room.

"You promise you'll catch me?"

"I promise." He sounded farther away this time.

Lily clenched her fists and held her arms out to the sides.

"Fall," James' voice was calm, in stark contrast to the way Lily's heart was beating so fast she was certain she might faint.

It happened quickly, but a part of Lily felt like it was in slow motion. She locked her legs and shifted her weight backward over her heels, then past them. Her body shifted and she began falling. The fall kept her from breathing, but as James' arms caught her, she gasped in a deep breath.

"Take off your blindfold," James' smile was evident in his voice.

Lily pulled the blindfold off and smiled as she looked up at James.

"Hi."

James chuckled, "Do you trust me?"

Lily nodded.

"Look in the mirror."

She turned her head and watched her smile fall off her face. She was no more than five inches from the ground.

"You let me fall that far?!"

James pushed her back up on her feet. "A little less than that far, notice you didn't hit your head on the floor. But there was a purpose behind it."

Lily glared at him, "Alright, relate this to dancing, oh wise teacher."

"We're dancing the paso doble this week, and that's going to come with me pushing you outside of your comfort zone in a lot of ways this week. I need you to trust me."

Lily pursed her lips. "I do trust you, but let's get all of this out in the open, no more surprises."

James motioned for her to sit with him and they walked to the chairs as he explained.

"The paso doble is going to require you to act. I'm the bullfighter and you're my cape. I need you to cling to me. I need you to let me throw you and flip you and I need you to fall and know that I'm going to catch you. I need you to trust me."

Lily took a deep breath and kept her arms folded across her chest.

"So, we're done with the easy platonic dances?"

James grinned, "Don't worry, those will come back. But this dance is better when we act the part."

Lily tried to keep her emotions in check. She'd seen Mary's favorite paso doble dances from past seasons, and she knew what James was getting at. Lily had put conscious effort into not letting her mind linger on how close she and James had to be in many of these dances. She wouldn't let her thoughts pull up those moments where James would keep his hand on the small of her back. She ignored everything that suggested she might be attracted to James; because she was very attracted to James.

"Ok," Lily nodded slowly. "I think I can act the part."

"We're going to be raising the bar for ourselves with this dance," James rested his arms on his legs and moved closer to her. "Are you game, Evans?"

Lily wasn't sure if she really was game for this. She'd been doing a fine job pretending that she wasn't attracted to him, and it showed in her dancing, she never got too close, never stayed too long in his embrace, never thought about his hands on her, never thought about how his eyes would watch her like she was captivating to him.

"I, yeah, yeah I'm game."

James jumped up and held out his hand. "Then let's dance!"

It was too easy. James commented on how well she was picking up on her part, but really Lily just had to let some slack out on her very tightly controlled emotions. Clinging to James wasn't unnatural, having him throw her into a spin before pulling her back flush against him was an action that felt innate within her, and when James flipped her around his arm, she had no problem moving in sync with his actions. It was all what she naturally wanted to do.

"This is going to be amazing!" James grinned at her. "You've been holding back on me, Evans. We've got a real shot at winning if you keep this up."

Lily forced a chuckle to keep herself from admitting how much she was still holding back. James' magnetic pull was strong, and she'd been building stone around her to keep from falling into it. But she felt like that stone was crumbling under this need to "act the part" as James had put it.

There was very little acting involved for Lily.

And as the week went on, the more she let those stone walls crumble the more James praised her, the happier he looked, and the more excited he was.

When the dress rehearsal came, Lily found that she wasn't nearly as nervous as she had been in the weeks prior. She felt like she could do this, like she could dance, and she tried to ignore the part of herself that realized it was all because she'd let those walls she had built up break and crumble around her heart and give in to the magnetic pull that was James Potter.

Their live performance was stunning. Even Lily could tell when they finished that it was amazing. The judges gave her a standing ovation. Flitwick cheered her for her daring and willingness to push herself. They earned a ten from Slughorn and a nine from McGonagall and Flitwick. They finished first.

It was the start of a new phase for Lily. She went from being certain that she would have no fan base when she ended up in the bottom two to being a minor star. Talk shows wanted to have her and James on with them. Her dormant Twitter account was suddenly awash with followers. But they still needed to keep the momentum up. James pushed them harder and harder every week, and Lily felt like she had to give him everything she could because James deserved to win. They consistently finished in the top three for the next five weeks, even when Lily had to start learning two dances a week.

Everything was moving in fast forward, and Lily tried to keep it that way. Because if she was exhausted, then she would be too tired to dream about having James' hand run up her neck to cup her face, or his forehead pressed against hers as his breath came in heavy gasps, or his arms wrapped around her middle, or the way he watched her like he was holding himself back.

It was all an act, it was all for the dance, but the deepest darkest part of Lily's heart hated that it was an act, and wanted desperately for it all to end so that she could start trying to forget how hard she was falling for one James Potter.

"What's this?" James asked as she walked into the studio and handed him a gift bag.

"A congratulations gift," Lily tried to make it feel nonchalant even as her emotions ran at top speed through her. "I happen to know this is the first time you've made it to the last two weeks."

James' smile made her chest hurt. "That has everything to do with you though."

"You're the teacher," Lily shook her head.

"And you are my best student," James' gaze had shifted to the one he used when they were acting the part and Lily found it hard to breathe. She needed something, anything to get him to stop looking at her like that off the dance floor.

"Lily-"

"James-"

"You first," James gave a chuckle and shoved his hand in his hair.

"Aren't you going to open the present?"

James combed his hand through his hair and reached into the gift bag. He laughed when he pulled out a miniature replica of the show's trophy.

"In case we don't win, you'll have a trophy, and," Lily picked at a hair on her shirt, "And, I wanted you to know that all of this has meant so much to me, and I'm so glad I met you. Even if we don't win, this has been amazing."

James grinned at the little trophy and turned it around his fingers.

"Thanks, Lils, I'm glad we got to be friends."

Lily blocked off the part of her heart that died at James' use of the word friends. That's all they were supposed to be - friends.

"Me too."

They finished second that week. Slughorn said he'd never seen a tango he enjoyed more on the show. McGonagall praised their contemporary dance and everything they managed to work into it. Flitwick told her he couldn't believe how far she'd come.

But what had made the entire night was James holding her flush against him for most of the night. Lily told herself that it didn't mean anything to him, that this was how dancers were. But her heart wanted it to be real, and she indulged in pretending it was real.

"We're in the finals!" James spun her around after the broadcast had finished.

"We're in the finals!" Lily laughed and spun back into him.

James pulled her closer, "Hey, Lily-"

"James!" One of the stagehands came running over. "You left this in the dressing rooms." He handed him the little trophy that Lily had given James.

James thanked him but Lily had taken advantage of the moment to step out of his embrace.

"So, I'll see you tomorrow morning," she slung her bag higher on her shoulder and tried to not let the ache in her chest manifest itself through her face.

James looked momentarily torn. "Yeah, yeah, I'll see you tomorrow morning."

Lily nodded and nearly ran to her car.

The last week of the competition was torture, and Lily was a glutton for punishment. James was constantly touching her, even if they weren't dancing: his arm was around her shoulders or his hand on her back, him smiling with his warm hazel eyes always watching her.

Lily had never been so torn in her entire life.

Finally, the finale came and Lily threw everything she had into the performances. She owed James that much. This was his career and since he'd helped her to get nearly 300 thousand dollars to pour into her research. She wanted to give James the real trophy, she wanted him to be able to say he won, that he was the best, because she honestly believed he was.

Their final dance was the contemporary, and when they finished, Lily was surprised when James pulled her into him, wrapping his arm around her neck and holding head against his own.

"You're perfect," he murmured into her ear, "Absolutely perfect."

"I think you are too," Lily clung to him through the cheers of the crowd.

"Lils-"

"Come on over you two!" The host interrupted him, and James sighed as he pulled back to lead them over to the judging, keeping her flush against him.

They scored first, and while Lily was ecstatic, a part of her wondered what James had meant to say before they had been interrupted. But as the night wore on, she never found out. There wasn't a quiet moment for the rest of the night, and especially not when they won the trophy.

Lily had felt like the air was sucked out of her when they announced she and James had won. And then she thought she might faint when James pulled her into him for how tightly he held her. It seemed like whatever spark she might have felt when they finished their final dance ended with the dance as well. She went home feeling a little empty after it all.

"Where are you going to put it?" Mary was holding the trophy in Lily's office as Lily tried to catch up on some of the things she had missed in the three months she'd spent competing.

"I don't know," Lily laughed at the mammoth thing. She'd spent that morning doing interviews with James and was only now making it into her lab after lunch. The interviews had been weird, not because she and James were the winners, but because James had been almost shy around her. He managed to turn it off for the cameras, but he seemed much less confident and sure of himself when it was just the two of them.

"I wonder where James is going to put his," Mary tried to carefully set Lily's trophy down on her desk. "Why did you bring yours here?"

"I was asked to have it with me for the interview." Lily frowned at one of the emails and flagged it so she could come back to it.

"What if you kept it here?" Mary teased her.

"Very funny," Lily laughed, "don't you have work to do?"

"Actually, now that you've brought in all this research money, I do." Mary blew her a kiss before sliding out the door.

Lily sighed as she looked at the trophy now on her desk. She picked it up and set it in a drawer in her desk and flinched at the clanging noise it made. The interviews had been weird, but it had also been hard. It had been hard to see James and not touch him. It had been hard to see James and not fall into the rhythm that they'd set for themselves during the competition. But it was for the best. She needed to get these feelings out of her system; they may have been why she was able to win the competition with him, but now she had to stop; those feelings were not reciprocated, but they were also wildly inappropriate.

At least she had her research to throw herself into. She could hide in her research until her heart put itself back together.

"So, this is where you save the planet?"

Lily looked up to see James leaning against her door frame.

"Hi!" She jumped up with a smile but then paused, not sure what to do next. "Um, yeah, I, this is my office."

James shoved his hand in his hair. "Hope it's alright I looked you up."

"Of course, I," Lily struggled to think of what to do or what to say. Her office suddenly felt fifty yards across. "What's up?"

James gripped his hair. "I know this could be out of line, and you can totally throw me out, but um, would you want to grab dinner with me sometime?"

Lily could feel her heartbeat in her ears. "Like, like a date?"

James looked at her with that same stare he'd used when they were performing, the one that had made Lily wish he wasn't acting because it looked like he wanted her. "Yeah, a date."

Lily felt her smile break wide across her face. "I'd really like to get dinner with you."

James' whole face lit up like the stage lights when their dances would start, "Tonight? Can I pick you up here at 5?"

"Yeah," Lily laughed, feeling like all the awkwardness from that morning was fading away.

"Great," James pushed off the door frame, "I'll see you in four hours."

Lily watched him walk away and it felt like he pulled the air out of her with it.

That was it? She had been so wrapped up in crossing a line, in doing something wrong, that she had never let herself even consider what life with James might look like. But she knew James, and she knew that he was anything but status quo; he was nothing like the stagnant air that surrounded her. James took risks.

And he once told her she could too.

Lily bolted from her office.

"James!" She watched him turn the corner at the end of the hall and went running after him. "James!"

Lily nearly fell as she rounded the corner, but James jumped for her, his arm keeping her from hitting the floor.

"Alright there, Evans?" James looked down at her with apprehension.

"Yeah, just," Lily swallowed, "um, I." Lily summoned all her courage and stepped up to him, pushing forward to lightly press her lips to his. James stiffened and Lily immediately pulled away. "Ok, I, um, I'll see you in a few hours."

She moved to step back but James grabbed her arm and pulled her back into him, his arms wrapped around her back, his hands pressing against her spine and holding her close to his chest. His lips captured hers and Lily sighed as she fisted her hands in his t-shirt.

"I've wanted to do that for weeks," James rested his forehead against hers and smiled down at her.

"Me too," Lily laughed as she smiled back up at him. "And now I'm not going to get anything done today."

"Want to take off? Start our date early?" James moved closer to speak against her lips.

A part of Lily within her brain immediately responded with no, that she had work to do. But the part that had James' lips ghosting over hers overruled all objections. After all, she could take risks.

"I need to grab my purse," Lily pressed forward to kiss him again.

James moved his hand to take hers and then began dancing them down the hall to her office.

"Let's get out of here."

Lily laughed and once they'd made it to her office, she shut down her computer before grabbing her purse. She took James' proffered hand and leaned over to kiss him.

"Lily, did you get…" Mary trailed off. Her shocked face quickly turned to an excited smile as Lily pulled her lips from James'. "Never mind, never mind, I saw nothing, my lips are sealed, and I want a ticket for next season as my Christmas present this year!" She gave an excited squeal and then retreated out of Lily's office.

"Think you can get her a ticket?" Lily laughed up at James.

"Probably," he shrugged, "but I'll look into that later." He kissed her. "Now, I want to find a place to be with you that doesn't involve anything to do with either of our jobs."

"That's an idea I can get behind." Lily kissed him before letting James lead her out of her office and on to their date.

[prorevenge]

You want to mug me? Enjoy the wheel chair and permanent brain damage.

Okay, to preface this entire fucked up story, this all took place 30 years ago. My memory is not that great, and I might get some things wrong. Also, I go into some graphic details, you have been warned. TL;DR at the end.

In 1989 I was a 19 year old kid living in NYC. I was working as a delivery guy at a dingy hole-in-the-wall pizza place in Hell's Kitchen that's long since gone out of business, and living paycheck to paycheck. I had moved to New York looking for work after my uncle's construction company went under, and had found a tiny shit hole of an apartment which was the only thing I could afford on the salary I got from the pizza place. The only reason I took the job was I needed money and it was extremely close to my apartment, only a short walk down a back alley (hint hint, the alley is important).

I want you all to keep in mind while reading this, the New York of 30 years ago was not the touristy New York of today. Murders were a lot more common, you would see hookers working the corner pretty often, Times Square was a cesspool of nudey-bars and porn theaters, gangs would rob people on the subway, and it was almost every day where I lived that you would see a druggie passed out in an alley or along the side of the road.

The whole ordeal started just after closing one night in July. The guy who owned the joint, Paulo, said that I could take some leftover pizza home with me that had been sitting under the heat lamp all day, but hey, at least it was free. I had been working at the pizza place for about a year by this point, and I was on really good terms with Paulo and his brother Joseph who both ran the joint. Paulo was easily pushing 300 pounds and had a habit of smoking a giant cigar while cooking. Joseph was always in the back handling the money side of things and taking phone orders. The restaurant had an exit into the alley which I would take to get back to my place. There would usually be a homeless vet named Alfonso that would sleep next to the hot air vent behind the place who would bum a smoke off me and we would shoot the shit for a few minutes after my shift. After talking with him I started to walk home, and after I had gotten quite a distance away down the alley I heard some bottles rustling behind a dumpster that was right ahead of me. My first thought was it was some rats, until this crazy-eyed dude swung out from behind it with a hunting knife in one hand and a metal bat in the other.

I remember this guy looked like your stereotypical druggie, track marks all over his arms, disgusting clothes on, wild dirty hair, and fidgeting like no tomorrow. He started yelling and half screaming at me to give him my wallet. At that point my adrenaline was through the roof as I had never been mugged before. I was carrying the pizza box with two hands, and when I shifted it to my left hand to reach into my back pocket for my wallet with my right, he started advancing on me. He started muttering to himself asking why I was doing that and sort of grunting while jabbing at the air in front of him. At this point I know this guy is high off his ass on something or a definite head case.

He was really close to me by this point, and before I could take my wallet out he loaded up his right arm and slashed me across my face with the hunting knife just below my left eye. At first it didn't really hit me, and I was stunned for a second. It was at that point I started thinking, "this is it, I'm gonna die in a fucking alley over the 4 bucks I have in my wallet". That's when I decided to start fighting, if I was going down, I was doing it swinging.

I threw the pizza box in his face which made him step back a little bit, and using both hands I grabbed the bat out of his left hand that he was still holding. I flipped it around, and aimed for the outside of his left knee which was the one closest to me. It connected and I heard a snap when it buckled inwards. This brought him to one knee, but he started to get back up again like he couldn't even feel it. I swung as hard as I could and hit the left side of his temple which made a crunch sound before he crumpled to the concrete.

I remember being so incredibly scared, absolutely terrified. I don't remember much after this. Years after this happened when I went to see a psychiatrist for other reasons and this was brought up, and she told me it is likely because my mind was trying to shield me from the trauma of the whole experience. The next thing I remember is being soaked in blood and standing above this guy. I knew he was still alive, as he was gurgling blood out of his mouth and his chest was still rising and falling. There was blood coming out of his ears, nose, and mouth. His right hand and arm that had been holding the knife was a mangled mess with fingers jutting out every which way while the knife was a good 4 feet away on the ground.

I dropped the bat and half stumbled, half walked back to the pizza place. Alfonso had heard the screaming and come to look. He told me that I had a glazed over look to me and I was almost entirely soaked in blood. He led me back to the pizza joint where Joseph started called the cops and Paulo grabbed a bottle of cheap Prosecco we had from below the counter to douse my slash with while stemming the bleeding with table napkins.

I spent the night in the hospital because apparently I was disorientated and so confused I didn't know where I was because of blood loss. The next day I was doing better, and there were two cops that came to take my statement. After I had told my side of the story the older looking of the two cops said that after 10 years on the job that guy took the worst beating he'd seen anyone take and survive. The younger looking one started telling me what I had done to the guy which included: severed knee ligaments, broken and dislocated fingers, broken ribs which had punctured a lung, a broken femur, multiple crushed and pulverized bones, a severed spinal cord with a couple broken vertebrae, a burst ear drum, multiple teeth knocked out, completely fractured jaw, a broken nose, a burst eye, a destroyed eye socket, and a completely destroyed cheek bone. He also told me that I had hit his skull so hard there was spinal fluid leaking out of his ears.

They said that they had spoken to Alfonso, Paulo and Joseph, and they corroborated my story that the bat was the junkie's and I had most likely acted in self defense. Although I had no answer to their question of why didn't I stop after he went down besides "I don't know" and "I don't remember". After a couple days I was discharged and after just a little while I was back to working at the pizza place. Although I now had a massive scar running down the side of my face and Paulo jokingly called me scarface all the time. Even now I jokingly say to my wife before sexy time "say hello to my little friend" which we still giggle maniacally about together. I was also super jumpy right after the fact whenever I heard bottles clanging together, which unfortunately happened a lot because Joseph used to take the empty coke bottles to the recycling plant at the end of every week.

What made me tell this story here is that recently I thought about how much of the junkie's blood might have gotten in my mouth or in the slash across my face. At the time it happened the whole HIV/AIDS panic was in full swing, and the guy being a junkie instantly made me realize how much shit I could be in. If I was infected without knowing it I could have passed it onto my wife or even my children by accident. After quite the panic between me and my wife because of overlooking this we got the blood results back just a bit ago and thankfully I'm completely clean. My doctor said that if I was infected back then symptoms would have likely manifested by now as well.

So there, that is my incredibly long winded story about one of the scariest events in my life, and the resurgent panic it brought up just a bit ago. I would be happy to answer any questions you have about it, but I'm taking a flight for work in a bit so you probably won't get a response from me for a few hours.

TL;DR: Used to work at a dingy pizza place, was slashed across the face by a mugger, beat him half to death, got a cool scar, and 30 years after the fact had a panic that I might have gotten HIV.

(source) story by (/u/Squalkinsaid1)

[vieuxnoyesrp]

Dani. We’ve been reading your paras on our dash for over a year now, but that hasn’t dulled our eager anticipation. You have an incredible talent for capturing the wit and tone of your characters, and after reading your application, we are confident your Rebekah will be no different. In fact, Rebekah comes at a critical moment for the Mikaelson siblings, who will be facing some difficult decisions in the upcoming months. With your keen eye for Rebekah’s many idiosyncracies, we look forward to seeing how you tackle her complex mental landscape.

Dani, thank you very much for applying. As for Rebekah…

            ⚜ ~ WELCOME TO VIEUX NOYÉS!!! ~ ⚜

Wondering what to do next? Click here and let the good times roll!

⤜ Name/alias: Dani

⤜ Pronouns: She/Her

⤜ Age: 21

⤜ Timezone: EST

⤜ Activity: Excluding the last few months of mayhem I try to be on and up to date as often as possible.  Now that things have been more stable I plan to be on more often than I have been which is good!

⤜ Best form of contact:  Katherine’s blog!

⤜ Any Triggers? (If so, please tell us how you want the subject to be treated in this roleplay (whether to be tagged accordingly or avoided completely, etc.) Shootings, Eating Disorders, Sexual Assault

⤜ How did you find Vieux Noyés? Rose!

⤜ What drew you to the RP? Working with you lot before I knew how creative you all are, and how hardworking. The rp was incredibly detailed and inventive off the bat, and since I’ve been here, the community has been overwhelmingly positive and motivating.

⤜ What is one subplot/element from the Plot page that you are particularly looking forward to seeing in this roleplay?

I’m looking forward to seeing the plotline between the New Orleans coven and the Salem witches unfold! It sounds brilliant.

⚜ Desired Character:

⤜ Why do you want this character?

I want to play Rebekah because I really want to explore what I feel is the most complex part of her: the way she loves. I think Rebekah’s way of loving people, the way she attempts to build relationships as an Original vampire, and as a young woman who’s always had men at the helm of her greater decisions, opens up a lot of opportunity for self-discovery, character growth, and resolution of past traumas. I’d love to give that writing a go.

⤜ What are your future plans for this character?

Along with the arc that’s already been set in motion for her in her bio, I want to see Rebekah get to a point where she realizes that the way out of abusive relationships, isn’t through the development of more abusive relationships. I think as much as she does genuinely want to love and be loved in return, she has a history of choosing one love over another instead of choosing herself, or teaming up with a love of hers to take down a worse, more abusive love in her life ( by love i mean any type, familial/platonic/romantic/etc). I would like to see Rebekah also come to a better understanding of what love is, and how love/loyalty, and gratitude/responsibility play a part in the development of her relationships.

⤜ Put yourself in your character’s shoes. Give us a few lines to describe a day in the life of your character… Where do they live? Where and how do they spend their time?

Rebekah Mikaelson lives in a very nice parisian-style apartment by Jackson Square. She seldom holes herself up inside though, and uses her apartment largely to pamper herself or relax after a long day of family drama. Bex gets bored pretty easily when there’s nothing to do but stay in all day. So she keeps herself busy.. She’s pretty sociable when she isn’t focused on family, plotting, or getting something done,, so she knows a few of the people in her neighborhood well. The only neighbor she talks to regularly is the older woman on the floor below her. She’s been doubling as the wife and caretaker of her husband of forty-three years. Rebekah gets coffee at one of the charming cafe’s in Jackson Square whenever she’s on the go before noon, and goes to her favorite boutique salon south of Bourbon Street every week. With her plans to take down Nic in the works, she spends a good amount of time at the compound, well aware that going too long without seeing or hearing from her might raise suspicions. And yes, even with her hands full, Rebekah makes time for the nightlife. But the best bars in her area always get crowded by his ex and his band of misfit toys, so she’s calculating about who she runs into in a $500 cocktail dress.

⤜ Give us three headcanons regarding your character of choice.

Running from her father, Mikael, for the last several centuries, and being daggered and shoved into a box for decades has made Rebekah less of a sentimental fool when it comes to knickknacks and keepsakes. She can be materialistic, but if there’s one thing she’s learned it’s that there’s no point in being a hoarder when one is immortal. The only things she keeps from her past are a handful of objects from her human life, some which are stowed safely in their more memorable homes ( and the secret rooms within those walls ), while others are at the hands of astoundingly plain dopplegangers. When it comes to those keepsakes, Rebekah remains viciously attached.

Rebekah has always loved music and dancing, and though there are some exceptions, presently it isn’t easy for her to sit through anything top 40. Music changes so rapidly that in her lifetimes she’s developed a bit of a versatile, and incredibly picky taste for most of it. Dance music is tolerable under the right circumstances, but for the most part, she prefers alternative R&B and Indie.

The 1920s was Rebekah’s favorite decade right before Klaus daggered her. For a while she had the best of both worlds, Stefan’s love and her brother’s approval. To this day she reminisces about how those few months had brought her and her older brother closer than they’d been in centuries. She’s still bitter about everything that’s happened since, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’d been happy once, and that it counts even after all the bad that followed.

⤜ What are some plots you’d like to explore with your character?

I’m really hoping to explore the tug-of-war relationship Klaus and Rebekah have with Elijah. She’s always felt like the one left out whenever the two are on good terms, or whenever Elijah’s seeking Klaus’ redemption, and Elijah’s always played the mediator, perhaps despite Klaus’ personal preferences as to who should be head of the household.. I think it’d be really cool to see that trio interacting and reaching a point where Elijah may end up on the opposing side of both of them.

I’d also like to explore Rebekah’s relationship with Marcel. The scattered bits of history between them hint at a lot of betrayal and mistakes on both their parts, I think it’d be cool to see them duke it out on who really broke who’s heart at the end of all things, and whether blame is really enough to soothe those wounds at this point.

Lastly, I’d want to explore Rebekah’s inner turmoil when it comes to liberty versus loyalty. I feel like Rebekah has always wanted freedom and has always wanted love and family, but believes she can never have one without giving up the other - mostly where Klaus and Elijah are involved. I’d like to find out what it is that makes her fight for freedom a second priority. Is it only circumstantial, or is freedom what she actually wants? Does she ever hope to have both?

⤜ Para sample: (The sample must be in character, in third-person, and at least 300 words. Samples with dialogue are encouraged.)

     (RFP)

⤜ Would you like to be considered for another character if not accepted as your primary choice? Nope nope

⤜ Have you read the rules?: Yes, I have.

⤜ Anything else? That’s it!

[patdsnaps]

Panic! at the Disco Guitar Tech Kyle Henderson: Behind the Scenes with a Veteran Backline Specialist

[…] What other groups have you worked with?

I have worked for Linkin Park and Frank Ocean. I spent three years working for Underoath, which was another really great opportunity, and I worked for a band called Say Anything. I worked for about two years with Gym Class Heroes before Panic! at the Disco. So I’ve kind of been everywhere, from hip-hop to large radio rock to smaller rock and everything in-between. I’ve been with Panic! at the Disco just at three years. I picked up with them in January 2014.

How did the most recent Panic! at the Disco tour go?

We had a busy 15 months. It was a really good, fun cycle for us. We were able to reach a lot of new kids and make some good impressions on people. The record did really well and the tour went really well. Roland definitely helped us out. We were in a position to go on this arena tour, and we needed more pianos than we’ve ever used before. And by chance, our tour manager was in contact with the guys at Roland. They sent over some pianos for our singer (Brendon Urie) to try out, and for him it was like, pretty immediately, no question. The stage pianos that Roland makes are just superb. We had three of them out on that whole arena tour this winter.

I understand you housed FP-90models in grand piano shells.

Yes, two of them. We had one on the main stage, and then we had a B stage. They were super-dependable and super-consistent. The playability was the big thing, how close the response was to an actual piano. That was one of the main factors for Brendon—that the piano “feels” real. I think it helps to have that incredible Roland piano key response live.

You mentioned a third piano. Was there another keyboard player?

No, but that was like our backup. It’s always a good policy to have backup in this business. [Laughs.] And sometimes we would send it to the rehearsal room. We also had a Roland TD-11K electronic drum kit for the guys to warm up and mess around with. One of my phrases is, “It’s not my fault, but it’s my problem.” So if someone like a local crew member drops an FP-90, then we have to have a contingency plan. Or, God forbid, you’re at an outdoor festival and it starts pissing down rain. [Laughs.]

What are your daily duties as a guitar tech for Panic! at the Disco?

[…]

For Panic! at the Disco, I’ll build the the shells for the FP-90s, and get them installed so that people can dress the stage around them, because they’re centerpieces for our stages. And then I’ll head over to guitar world after that. I think I have about 13 guitars with Panic! at the Disco. I have a rotation of guitars that I restring every day, and I do a lot of general maintenance. The guitar players like their guitars to behave the same way every night. I try to be super detail-oriented and use my ear and my problem-solving abilities to give them something that literally sounds exactly the same every time they pick it up, no matter whether they’re in Russia or Baltimore or Los Angeles.

So you’re primarily focused on working with Kenneth Harris, the guitar player?

Yeah, I am primarily. And we have BOSS on every pedalboard that ends up on our stage. We use the BOSS tuners a lot. Stage left is the bass player; I’m not really familiar with his rig, but I know he has the tuner and I think one of the distortion pedals. On stage right, which is my world, the board is almost completely BOSS at this point. We have some of the Waza Craft gear, we have the DD-500 Delay, and a number of other BOSS pedals.

Is he using the SY-300 guitar synth too?

Yes. It kind of comes and goes, but when we’re headlining, we definitely bring it out. It’s a really fun pedal, because you can do so much with it. You can write entire intros with it and get a lot of soundscapes out of it. It doesn’t sound like a guitar, you know. We have a lot of fun with it because Kenny’s kind of a hands-on analog guy. He likes to be able to get down and make the signal really unique every night. The show’s pretty consistent, but there are also these little tricks and things. If you’re really listening, you hear something different happening every night.

So he’s basically using the synth in improvised parts of the set?

Yeah, like intros and transitions. And sometimes they restructure songs for larger tours and there will be little breaks in them, and he’ll put in a little ear candy. You know, things that wouldn’t be on the record, but that are unique to Kenny and unique to the vibe the guys are feeling at the time. When you go see Panic! at the Disco, you see a rock show for sure, but it’s not sterile.

Has he created his own patches for the SY-300, or does he use the presets?

We’ve created three or four patches that he likes. Because he’s so hands-on, he even modifies those from day to day. That’s one of the benefits of that panel; you can interface like you would any sort of synthesizer, and get your hands on a lot of controls. It’s bankable too—you can go in and write your presets in order, and for a live application that’s infinitely valuable. You build the set list in the pedal, so you know the next time that you hit the next bank over you’re in the correct song and the correct patch.

Do you put together different size pedalboards depending on the gig that you’re doing?

Yeah. We kind of bounce back and forth between two configurations. If we’re flying somewhere, we don’t always have the space available to bring everything, so we get creative in other ways. That’s another thing that’s great about the BOSS stuff—you can pull stuff out, put it back in, and make it up with other effects if you need to shed weight.

One of the interesting aspects of the music world is that you might see a band on Good Morning America, but you don’t know that they just flew in from London, and they have other crews setting up for a show at Madison Square Garden. So sometimes we have to piece things out. If we’re just going to do two songs for television, we’ll take the key components out and leave them for the larger show. That way, it’s easy to transport. It becomes a logistics game at that point. If we’re doing one single on Good Morning America, I only need X amount of things for that. I can leave the rest of it at a another venue if we’re crunched on time.

[…]

Dan Pawlovich, the drummer for Panic! at the Disco, is using some Roland gear too.

He’s using the BT-1 pads and the TM-2module. He’ll strap the pads on in addition to his acoustic drum kit. He has the KT-10 Kick Trigger Pedal, and he has two pads at various places on the kit. They’re used to trigger samples of different things. Sometimes, when we’re at soundcheck, he’ll put a joke into one of the sample slots and play that and try to mess everybody up. [Laughs.] That’s a good part of the versatility of the TM-2 brain; you can just load samples up willy-nilly and they’re ready to go. It’s pretty seamless as far as where you want to use them.

Read more: bossus.com

[mellyroses23-blog]

Beautiful Tourist Spots in the Philippines

   We Filipinos are notorious for having extreme levels of “pinoy pride”. This is the term used to describe how proud they are of anything remotely Filipino. Anything made in the Philippines or done by a Filipino, especially when recognized abroad, sets off a barrage of national pride. In a country as stunning and as naturally endowed as the Philippines, with such a richness of islands and other beautiful destinations here in the Philippines, there really is much to be proud of. (Escalona,2018)

El Nido 

      It’s difficult for a place as beautiful as El Nido to not top a list like this. With its gorgeous rock formations, pristine beaches, and clear aquamarine waters, El Nido is a place that makes Filipinos beam with pride. Located on the northern tip of mainland Palawan, the municipality of El Nido has been increasingly drawing tourists in year after year, with more travellers, both local and foreign, discovering its beauty. It is largely responsible for why Palawan is recognized (and has been, for the past few years) as the best island in the world. (Fabio, 2018).  El Nido is about 240 kilometers north of Puerto Princesa, the capital city of Palawan province. In terms of marine sanctuary conservation, this town is considered the largest in the country because of its diverse ecosystem. 45 islands and islets surrounds’ in town with geological limestone karst formations, white sand beaches, caves, and waterfalls you have to enjoy and explore. (Mendoza,2018)

    According to Dagot (2019) aside from being paradise which resulted many recognitions, you can explore El Nido by the following things to do: kayaking at the most popular spot, Bacuit Bay, and hit the magical Big Lagoon, the secret Small Lagoon, and Miniloc Island on your adventure. You can also do snorkeling there.

Coron, Palawan

        Also within the gorgeous province of Palawan is the municipality of Coron. Perhaps the other major factor to thank for Palawan’s “best island” recognition, Coron boasts of similar gems as El Nido — crystal clear waters perfect for snorkelling, powdery white sandy beaches, and inescapable picture perfect landscapes. As in El Nido, travellers can charter a small boat or join organized tour groups for a day’s trip including the most famous islands and lagoons. One stop that should not be missed by anyone visiting Coron is the breathtaking Kayangan Lake, dubbed the cleanest in the country and surrounded by stunning karst walls, truly a sight to behold, both above and below the water. (Galeos,2017). According to Jonas (2018) one of the main draws for visitors is the fleet of Japanese warships at the bottom of the sea in Coron. Here you can find 12 well-preserved World War II wrecks at diveable depths which is pretty incredible. I dove four of the wrecks as part of my Advanced Open Water Certification with Corto Divers.

      Relax in the Maquinit Springs after a busy trip of diving and exploring the beautiful islands of Coron. The water in the springs is warm and cozy at just over 100 degrees F. Located outside of town you can either arrange a local guide or hire a driver to bring you there too. This is a great place for sunset to relax after a busy day exploring Coron Philippines. (Solayao,2018) 

      According to Manley (2018) this is a great place to get certified to dive, there are incredibly unique places to explore while diving in Coron. The shipwrecks are a great place to complete an advanced open water certificate.There is a lot to see on the required dives as opposed to other places where there you may just go through the skills. Here in Coron Philippines on your deep dive training, you can swim around the shipwrecks which are deeper than 35 meters at some points.For the other specialty dives, you can again use the shipwreck to fill your wreck dive training. Coron is also an awesome place for a night dive with lots to see including bioluminescent plankton glowing in the dark. 

 Tubbataha Reefs 

      Southeast of the island of Palawan, within the Sulu Sea, lies one of the best marine reserves and dive sites in the world, the Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park. Home to thousands of hectares of coral reef (containing about half of the world’s coral species) and an extensive variety of fish, shark, dolphin, and whale species, the Tubbataha Reefs is one of the most sought-after waters for divers. For anyone interested in making the trip, the limited three-month-long dive season runs from mid-March to mid-June, and the only way to explore its spectacular waters is by visiting on a live-aboard boat. (Fernandez, 2018)

      According to Hudson (2018)  diving Tubbataha Reef is sought after for its incredible marine biodiversity, dynamic underwater terrain,  and a wide variety of large marine animals including sea turtles, manta rays, various sharks, including the occasional whale sharks. Amos Rock, or Southwest Rock, is a popular dive site on the North Atoll of Tubbataha featuring various types of beautiful corals and massive gorgonian fans and large fish, such as snappers, mackerels and groupers, and the fascinating Napoleon wrasses. Various reef sharks are also commonly seen here and the night diving at this site offers great macro opportunities.

Banaue Rice Terraces

      The Philippines is studded with natural beauty from below its seas to the top of its mountains. Another site in the archipelago that Filipinos can rightfully brag about are the rice terraces of Banaue. Over 2,000 years old, these rice terraces are a product of manual hard work by the ancestors of the region’s indigenous people. The picturesque terraces are still valuable to locals to this day, providing them an efficient space to farm. Though the Banaue Rice Terraces are the most prominent, there are several other scenic rice terraces within the mountainous region of the Cordilleras.(Andrew and Anna, 2017)

      The Philippines has all sorts of fascinating places to see and adventures to witness. From absolutely stunning beaches to beautiful mountains to adventurous scuba diving experiences to pulsing city explorations; it’s all there – right on the platter, ready for tourists to be taken.One of the most incredible ones that I have experienced was a journey to Banaue, a small area in the north of Luzon, which is also the island where the capital Manila is located. Banaue is a small mountain area surrounded by deeply vegetated jungles. It’s quite remote, but it has a lot of highlights to see and cool things to do.The main thing that people do when they visit Banaue is go on a trekking tour. You can decide between various options. Most visitors go for a 2 day/1 night tour, which is what I did, as well. Once you get dropped off from the bus (overnight bus from Manila to Banaue), you will be brought to a small hostel, where you can choose from the different options. (Vollmert, 2018)

Chocolate Hills

        The pride of the Bohol Province (alongside their adorable Tarsiers — the world’s tiniest primates endemic to the Philippines) is easily the rolling landscapes of the Chocolate Hills. They were named so for their color transition between the wet and dry seasons, turning brown during the latter, and closely resembling the famous Hershey’s Kisses chocolates. Over a thousand hills are estimated to be scattered across the 50 square kilometer area. (Ridols,2018)

      Chocolate Hills Adventure Park, also known as CHAP, gives tourists an adrenaline-pumping experience you would not normally expect from the laid-back island of Bohol. It is famous for “The Rush”, a bicycle zip line 150 feet in the air that spans two hills 550 meters apart.  I think the best time to visit would be during the summer so that the hills are really brown. In our case, as you can see below, the hills are quite green and covered in grass. This meant they didn’t quite contrast as much agains the green trees below. (Bell,2017)

Intramuros, Manila

         Intramuros, nestled within today’s restless Metro Manila, is a walled area that played an important role in the country’s history. It can be said that Intramuros was once the old “Manila” and essentially was the established center during the Spanish occupation. Over half a square kilometer in size, Intramuros today contains traces of the past with its cobblestone streets and conserved ruins and architecture. Visitors can go on walking tours to learn about Intramuros and the country’s history and take kalesa (horse-drawn calash) rides around the historic walled city. (Nicdao,2016)

          According to Santiago (2017) travelling to Intramuros is a great way to appreciate the rich history of the Philippines. Intramuros was built 300 years ago by Spaniards when the Philippines was still a colony of Spain. It is the original Manila enclosed within the walls. While my friends and I are Filipinos, we’re glad that we hired a personal tour guide as it made our trip more convenient and informative. Otherwise, our trip will be merely sightseeing.

Boracay, Island

       Visitors should never run out of ideas on what to do in Boracay Island. Whether you are a slow traveller wanting to immerse on the island for a long time, or a weekend backpacker who wishes to make the most out of a short stay, Boracay caters for every kind of wanderer. For adventure-seekers in particular, Boracay Island offers not just frolicking by the beach or hanging out in bars, it has an array of thrilling experiences waiting to be experienced. Here’s some to try. (Dumaraos, 2017)

      Perhaps the second most popular Philippine island next to Palawan is the island of Boracay. Known for its powdery white sand, spectacular sunsets, and vibrant night life, Boracay has long been a tourist hotspot Filipinos could brag about. With the long list of activities and water sports available, visitors will never run out of things to do on the island. However, it has recently been shut for six months due to a large-scale pollution problem, which has dramatically affected tourism in the area.  The caves will always have much to offer when it comes to the curious traveller. In Boracay Island, where the longest cave in the Philippines is housed, tourists can immerse themselves on an Indiana Jones tour. Basang Cave in Nabas awaits adventure seekers who love freshwater springs, forests, and wildlife. Cap off your tour with a hearty barbecue lunch. (Valentine, 2018)

   Siargao

         Gaining more and more popularity in recent years is the country’s “surf capital” of Siargao. Strategically located along the country’s eastern coast, Siargao receives strong winds and currents that flow in steadily from the Pacific Ocean. To the delight of surfers, this gives the island solid swells they can enjoy, including the famous Cloud 9. (Kabias,2018)

          The beauty of surfing on Siargao is that there is a surf break for all levels. Personally, I suck at surfing so I hit up the beginner waves at Jacking Horse. I did enjoy watching the seasoned surfers tearing up the bigger waves out at Cloud 9. This wave barrels and is not only one of the best waves in the Philippines but is ranked in the top ten waves of the world.  The most accessible beginner wave on the island. A great spot for learning how to catch a wave but often crowded with surf lessons and it has a strong tide. Lots of paddling if you aren’t a gun. Some of the local long boarders tear it up here! (Nombres, 2017)

        One of my favorite things to do in Siargao was to wake up for sunrise and chill out on the end of the Cloud 9 pier. Sometimes surfers were tearing it up and watching that was awesome. Other times I watched the sun slowly rise in the distance. Hardly anyone wakes up to head out there except for a few others, quietly enjoying the start of the day at Cloud 9. It could be something to consider when you are thinking about where to stay in Siargao. Somewhere near Cloud 9 pier means you will have your sunrise spot sorted! If you had out here for sunset you will find yourself sharing the hut at the end of the pier with quite the crowd. It doesn’t get the perfect sunrise or sunset due to its location but it’s one of your best bets if you are in General Luna. (Ramos, 2018)

Mt. Mayon

       A natural wonder locals are truly proud of is Mount Mayon in the province of Albay. Mayon is an active volcano (the most active in the country) that is famous for its seemingly perfect symmetry. Standing nearly 2,500 metres tall, its flawless conical shape captivates anyone who sets eyes on it. And while viewing it from afar is a sensational sight to see, it can also be experienced up close through a multi-day hike. (Eraya,2017)

         Mayon is the most beautiful mountain I have ever seen, the world-renowned Fujiyama (Mt. Fuji) of Japan sinking into perfect insignificance by comparison.  Since I was a kid, I had heard a lot of great things about the Mayon Volcano — active, most active, unstable, volatile, angry, beautiful, grand, great, perfect. I had never been this excited to see this restless terrain.  Mayon Volcano, or Mount Mayon, is well-known around the world as the “perfect cone” volcano, thanks to its almost symmetric conical shape — a unique feature. It is also the most active volcano in the Philippines, having erupted almost 50 times in the past 400 years alone. The site is also a protected landscape and a natural park. (Landor, 2018)

Hinatuan Enchanted River

        This deep spring river in the province of Surigao del Sur takes its name from the mystical qualities locals believe surround the body of water. With its enchanting shades of deep blues and greens, the river is locally believed to be guarded by fairies and other nature spirits known as engkanto. Contributing to its mystical nature is the unexplained source of its clear saltwater. (Decena,2018)

Hidden in the Philippine jungle is a short stretch of river that seems to pop up out the ground just to send its miraculously clear, blue water out to sea. The Hinatuan Enchanted River in Mindanao, Philippines, is a flawless saltwater river that flows into the Pacific Ocean. It is around 80-feet deep, and just barely long enough to be considered a river, yet the flow attracts visitors from around the world who want to experience the beautiful waters that locals have long thought to be miraculous.  In fact, no one is sure exactly where the saltwater emanates from, although the prevailing theory involves an underground cave system which spits the river out, free of any dirt or silt which would usually cloud such a stream. Whatever the explanation, the clean waters are a natural wonder unlike any other. (Gutierrez,2017)

       These beautiful tourist spots in the Philippines are all perfect to all people who loves travelling and adventures. All your efforts and money that you will spend in your travel will be worth it because you will feel like you’re in a paradise because of the beautiful scenery in every places. Fresh air, white powdery sand in every beaches, and other beautiful things that created by God. I’ll promise that you will love to go there every vacations to relax and create a good memories with your family and friends.

[ges-sa]

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Comic Con Africa 2019: A Resounding Success

With Comic Con Africa over we look at a round-up of what the weekend was about. There was some unfortunate cancellation just before the event with the likes of Falcon and Bran Stark actors cancelling but that didn’t keep anyone from enjoying the rest of what Comic Con Africa had to offer.

The GES team ran the CCA Championships of Cosplay again and we has a blast. The Cosplayers were amazing and the Novices brought it all. Our Masters yet again did not disappoint and even the casual Cosplayers shown off what they had. It was a great success and we cannot wait to see what 2020 holds.

Wrap from Comic Con Africa:

Last night the doors of Comic Con Africa 2019 closed for the final time, but the buzz and excitement generated by four days of the greatest celebration of pop-culture that South Africa has ever seen shows no signs of abating. The sheer magnitude of this Con was something to behold – Reed Exhibitions and Reedpop promised that Comic Con Africa would be bigger and better, and on that promise they delivered. With an astounding 71,000 visitors, seven halls packed with 300 exhibitors, four international film, TV series, and gaming celebrities, 12 international comic artists and writers, 12 local comic creators, one international cosplayer, two international DJs, competitions, specials, and giveaways, an esports prize pool of R1.3 million, 26,000 square meters of event space, 120 hours of content, and one incredible Wingman in the form of KFC, Comic Con Africa 2019 exceeded all expectations.

This year the guests in Artist Alley tripled in numbers and the incredible line-up left fans spoilt for choice. In the feature area artists and illustrators engaged in live drawings and sketch offs, sharing anecdotes and artistic tips as they did so. Ecstatic fans watched their favourite characters drawn in real time on large screens mounted above the easels. Under the grading organisation CGC’s watchful eye, comic books were signed and sent for evaluation and protective casing to preserve investment pieces. Alongside in the Writers Block, local novelists and authors signed their books and spoke on educational panels to encourage local writers to pick up their pens. The Block was filled with handmade creativity including pop-culture inspired clothing, décor, and jewellery.

The Cosplay of Comic Con Africa 2019 was a visual feast. You’d be forgiven for thinking you’d bumped into Iron Man or Wonder Woman walking straight off a Marvel film set, such was the level of detail and skill evidenced in these pieces of walking art. Cosplay Central was buzzing all weekend long with skits and well-known local and international Cosplayers signing prints. Fascinating panels for newbies and pros alike gave insight into crafting the perfect wig, applying make-up, or how to cosplay with confidence. The Cosplay Karaoke Café was a real hit with Cosplayers belting out magnificent renditions of well-known songs. Casual Cosplay competitions took place every day on the main stage, and on Tuesday the highly anticipated Championships of Cosplay winners were announced. The overall Cosplay winner Jinxkitty, who wowed with her Priestess Bathory cosplay, will be representing Africa at the Championships of Cosplay Quest for the Crown at C2E2 in America. Leon de Bruin of GES, Comic Con Africa’s Cosplay partner, was blown away by the level of this year’s Cosplay and called on any interested Cosplayers to sign up for 2020’s competition.

Hall 5 housed Pop-Culture retailers and exhibitors, many of whom had special deals that were snapped up by happy visitors. Comics, figurines, collectibles, clothing and other merchandise absolutely flew off the shelves and into the hands of thrilled collectors. Radio partner to the Con, 5fm provided the musical vibes with live broadcasts from their DJs who were happy to chat with fans. TikTok’s WoahTikTok competition on the main stage was a fun addition from the Con’s digital media partner. Television Media partner Viacom celebrated 25 years of the series Friends and brought THE show’s couch where fans queued up to have their picture taken. There was one particularly special exhibitor in this hall. The presenting sponsor of Comic Con Africa 2019, The Ultimate Wingman, the makers of finger lickin’ goodness KFC, made their home here with a gigantic KFC bucket housing a greenscreen set up where visitors could photograph themselves in a setting of their imagination. Also on their stand was a caricaturist and a special edition of local arcade game Boetfighter, along with cosplayers in the costumes of the especially commissioned Comic Con Africa KFC Captain Colonel.

Hall 5 was also the location of the KFC main stage where panels, Q&As, competitions, and interviews were held with international film and TV series celebrities like Star Trek’s William Shatner, The Originals’ Daniel Gillies, and video game voice actors Nolan North and Troy Baker. Audiences were awed in the presence of these pop-culture giants. The stars themselves were charmed by our South African audiences – in the words of Daniel Gillies, we are “the most polite people I ever met… the fans are so warm, and kind, and polite.” Just off the main stage, Hall 6 was the scene of photo ops and autographs with the celebrities, and fans came out ecstatically gripping these souvenirs and treasuring their

Comic Con Africa’s 2019 gaming offering was nothing short of a paradise for both casual and avid gamers. The absolutely enormous esports set up of the Con’s gaming and connectivity partner Telkom VS Gaming filled an entire wall, giving Con goers a panoramic-like view of the action. Featuring nail-biting finals of the likes of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota2, local esports teams kept their cool playing for their share of a R1,3 million prize pool – the largest prize pool at any esports event in South Africa. The spectators were captivated, their eyes glued to the live action. Freeplay areas had gamers trying their skills on the latest titles such as Mortal Kombat, PUBG, and Fortnite, while Xbox exhibited exclusively at the Con. Playstation gave away a highly sought-after limited edition 20th Anniversary PS4, and ATK had state of the art equipment on display for players to test run. Red Bull’s Hit the Streets, a nationwide contest of the best Street Fighter V players from across the country, hosted their finals on last day of the Con. In line with Comic Con Africa’s aim to uplift and develop local talent, Project Springbok provided a platform for up-and-coming developers to showcase their work.

Comic Con Africa’s newest addition, the first kid-focussed convention in South Africa, was KidsCon. But don’t be fooled – KidsCon delighted adults too. The African continent’s largest LEGO® activation saw visitors swallowed up in pools of LEGO® bricks surrounded by LEGO® characters come to life. Kids could meet the My Little Ponies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Nintendo brought Mario and Luigi along with the opportunity to play Splatoon, Mario Kart, and Supersmash Bros Ultimate. BIC and Exclusive Books were there to encourage creativity among other edutainment offerings from Hasbro and ToyZone. Sponsored by Jaguar Landrover, KidsCon was masterminded by our Little Board of Experts, 11 kids who shared their ideas and made KidsCon an event for kids, by kids. Those little experts were very much a part of the Con and strutted their stuff on the KidsCon main stage in the Cotton On fashion shows.

The Ballroom of Gallagher Convention Centre was the scene of a tabletop gaming extravaganza. With bottomless coffee supplied by KFC, tabletop gamers met and engaged in epic battles with cards, dice, and miniature figurines. As the organising partner of this impressive battlefield, Solarpop encouraged players to engage in the connection and creativity of Tabletop Gaming with their Unplug Yourself arena. Next door in the auditorium were exclusive screenings of Abominable, along with The Angry Birds, films by Black Sands, and many more exciting showings. LARPing took place in the trees of Gallagher Estate, with players battling each other with safe play swords, giant shields, maces, and jousting lances.

The Business of Gaming Forum, now in its second year, was held on Monday. Fascinating keynote addresses, panel discussions, and shared ideas from the gaming industry were the order of the event. Speakers from South Africa, the African continent, and international thought leaders flew in for the day, sharing fascinating content on maximising the value of gaming as a marketing tool or a commercial product, and the direction of the modern gaming ecosystem.

There truly was something for every fandom at Comic Con Africa 2019. As positive feedback comes flying in from visitors and exhibitors alike, Reed Exhibitions and Reedpop are thrilled to have hosted a second successful Comic Con Africa that remained true to our driving force: always put our fans FIRST! And what comes next? Comic Con Cape Town of course. Put 1 – 3 May 2020 in your diaries to experience the inaugural Comic Con Cape Town at the Cape Town Stadium.

[dantelaw21]

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 299

Click on the video above to watch Episode 299 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

All right, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 299. We’re one away from big Episode 300. I’m gonna call this episode where everyone is getting old and wearing glasses except Chris. I just realized all of us are now wearing glasses except Chris. Yeah, well, you guys spending too much time in front of your computers. There we go. Yeah, gotta change it around. This is the year we try to get ourselves off to the computer. So anyways, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. We’re gonna say hi, real quick catch up with everybody. And then we got a couple quick announcements before diving into the questions. So I’ll start on the bottom here since it’s cloudy weather element Marco. How you doing today? I have my lights on. That’s why it looks so bright. Yeah, it’s raining. It’s supposed to be raining. So finally got me with the lights on. But I can’t complain this nice a warm, actually. I’m kind of trying to hide trying to blend into the background. So Google doesn’t see me.

It’s all good man. I’m gonna

Having a good time.

Outstanding All right. Well, let’s work our way around. Hernan you got those new glasses what’s going on with you?

Yeah, man, I’m just trying to trying to blend in. I got I got glasses and now you got glasses. I mean yeah man we get rid of this and have a beard and growing a beard. Damn it. You’re doing the 50 K I might do the 50 now, so good man these are blue light blocking glasses, you know? Because there’s one this one guy show me one this really nerdy yellow like super like

orangey glasses and they make you look stupid. I know I won’t be wearing next week.

Yeah, do you don’t think the big square bc birth control glasses make you look stupid though right now, man. No, I can’t I can talk like this. Nobody will.

But a lady repellent. Yeah, exactly. say wait a second. Are you wearing those or are you being forced to wear this?

What this one glasses. Yeah, I’m just kidding.

You look good. I was just wondering maybe you’re making you know this light and blue light blue light blocking. I’m still confused. Why are you wearing blue light blocking glasses in the middle of the day or now? Yeah, well, it’s time. 5pm So, five 6pm So, all right. Well, before we tell everyone all about our AI problems, let’s see Chris, how you doing today? Man? Doing good, man. I hit the gym for like, I don’t know, like after another two week break for the first time again. Sore all over again. Hit the leg so hard. So yeah, like, I’m pretty sure you’re gonna feel the same way. Next week?

Yes, definitely. Yeah, I’m headed out. Taking a couple of weeks and hitting the road literally going to be gone for a couple of weeks and doing some trail running. So for those of you in the northwest, you know what mountain trail was? Yeah. We’re going to be doing a run around Mount St. Helens, as well as doing some visiting up there. Go to some campgrounds and stuff. So, Bradley, how about you? How are things on the East Coast today. Good. Happy to be here I’ve been trying to

do I’ve got a bunch of lead gen projects I’m working on. And so I’m trying to spend as much time on those as possible. But I’ve had a really good month in real estate flipping land and I’ve got a lot of deals coming in right now. So it’s kind of hard because I’m, I’m conflicted, the real estate money is really damn good. So I have to do I have to pursue that when it comes in. But at the same time, I’ve got other projects I’m trying to work on. So it’s kind of difficult balancing right now, but I’m happy to be here and got a lot of stuff coming up. So that’s the end. Well, we got a few things I want to mention to everybody real quick. First of all, is kofu. Live as we’ve been saying that is still on, we got a lot of cool,

cool stuff we’re going to be talking about. You can find out more about that at Boku live.com not just the cool stuff, but also what you can get. So head over there, check out the VIP ticket, I highly recommend it. We have priced it accordingly. We really want people to grab the VIP ticket and get

The most out of this. But if you want, you can grab the VIP plus as well and get some one on one time with us, which if you were going to book that separately, I mean, we know roughly what each other charge but I didn’t sit down and like calculate it out, but it’s a hell of a deal. So if that’s something you want to take advantage of, go grab one of those. There are limited number of those because we can’t just sit around talking to everybody all day. Unfortunately, we do have our own businesses and agencies to run. So go and check those out. We got some more information coming out later in August about the guest speakers and exactly what they’re going to be covering. But we got some great stuff. Jeffrey Smith is going to be joining us again and we’ve got two more agency owners along with Rob Beal and dedhia is going to be giving a case study to so tons of stuff and more. More to come. So again, poku live.com. Now, something else I want to talk about and Bradley, maybe you can share some info. I just got the link to this. You’re going to be talking with Jeremy from Press Advantage on Monday. Correct.

Yes, Monday at 3:30pm.

We’ve got another webinar with Jeremy, one of the CO owners of Press Advantage, which is the press release service that we’ve been using. I mean, primarily for several years now I’ve been with Press Advantage for six since. They’ve pretty much since they launched, so five or six years, maybe even longer than that. But anyways, he only opens up the subscription offers that he’s done for us. Rarely, let’s put it that way. Very rarely does he open up those subscription offers. And he’s, um, he’s prepared or planning to do that again next week. There are some new features that are been rolling out for Press Advantage and it’s just a good time to do so. And we’ve been asking him to open that back up again for some time. So he’s, he’s actually doing that for us next Monday at 3:30pm. So be on the lookout for the link. If you don’t, if Adam doesn’t post it here, you’ll get it via email plus in the groups and sign up for that any of you that are using press releases consistently for your marketing, whether it’s for clients or your own projects, we highly recommend them. They work incredibly well. I use them a lot. And so if you’re doing a lot of them, it’s probably best in your best interest to have your own subscription. And next week’s a good time to get it. So be there. Definitely, yeah, so that’ll be Monday. 3pm Eastern, and I thought will be Say that again. I believe it’s 330 Let me double-check. No, it’s 3 pm. I’m sorry. Yes. 3pm. Okay, so 3pm Eastern, and we will be sending out an email about that. I did just post the link. So stay tuned for that. But if you are interested in what press releases can do for you, then I highly suggest showing up plus Jeremy like Bradley said it’s gonna have a very special offer going with that. Yeah, real quick, guys. If anybody you know, before you even go on the webinar for that if, if you want to see how to use press releases in a way that just works incredibly well. Just go to our YouTube channel and search for press release SEO, and you’ll find

The webinar that we did, it’s also at MGYB. If you look in the webinar section on MGYB, the store, you’ll see that there’s we did a Marco and I did a webinar about how we use press releases and PR silo stacking. So essentially siloing press releases together. And it works really, really well. And I would highly recommend it if you’re on the fence or considering getting your own press release subscription that you go watch that webinar first so that you have an idea of how powerful they are and how to use them the best way. Definitely, will Bradley beat me to it. I was going to say speaking of MGYB and a lot of you guys took advantage of the awesome Fourth of July sale we had last month. There’s still some good stuff going on. If you had some updates coming so go check out mg y v.co for your done for you services. But yeah, as Bradley said up there, you’ll see the little webinar button click on that. And then there’s a bunch of the best practices webinars which is just basically free, great training information. So go check those out. So here’s a bit of something Why don’t we bundle the Press Advantage offer with Local PR Pro I’m just throwing it out there we don’t have to decide right now but I mean it just it goes hand in hand let’s let’s work it out and make them an offer they can’t refuse so they get results right away the way we do that. And one more thing before we go I don’t want to set any hard dates because it’s a work in progress. But there’s something coming for Syndication Academy. Yeah, look new flavor.

We’re working on it. We’re working on it guys. Let’s say sometime towards the fourth quarter of the year sometime. Look for it. It revamped updated when I bought properties. I don’t know how you can make the best better but we are.

Yeah, yes. Yeah. And I was gonna say I was gonna turn into t test I’ll keep this one short because we can’t really say much about it. But yeah, the webinar go get signed up for that. Keep your eyes and ears peeled about Syndication Academy and Bradley’s going to be doing some testing for some additional link building based stuff. And we’ll just leave it at that for now and say that, should that go? Well, that’s definitely something we’ll be letting everyone know about. Yep.

Cool. All right, guys. Anything else before we dive in? We’re good. All right. Let’s do it. Grab the screen.

You guys are seeing my screen correct?

Yep. So yeah, right.

What Phone Number To Use When Setting Up The GMB For A Local Lead Gen Site?

jump right into it. So olana says, Hi guys. Setting up a local lead gen site. Haven’t got a phone number for it yet. Would you wait until after you have the number to set up the GMB? Yes, I think you have to actually you have to have a phone number. As far as I remember. I haven’t set up a GMB in quite some time, but I’m pretty sure you have to have a phone number. Also, which of the following Do you use for lead gen an 800 number, a one 300 number. I’ve never even heard of that mobile or local landline with a reader.

I prefer using call rail. I still use call rail. I’ve used call fire in the past and I’ve got a ton of numbers in call fire comm that I would like to port over to call rail is a better platform. It gives you a ton more features. It’s inexpensive, but it takes it’s a long process of porting numbers. So I just have two accounts. I’ve got call firing call rail. I prefer using call rail. Again, I use call rail for several of my lead gen assets as well as my own real estate business. Because I use a lot of phone numbers for tracking marketing purposes and stuff. But I really, really like call rail. Does anybody else have any suggestions?

Call rail. I can’t say anything else. It’s what I use. Yeah. And no, not an 800 number. All right. So if you’re going to work local, which your car it no matter where you go, you don’t want that 800 number you want that local number you want people kind of like that local numbers I’ve seen better results with a local number than an ad hundred number unless you’re widely known for having that 800 number. Does that make sense? Or did I lose everybody? So 100 works when you’re widely known like like, something like roto rooter, let’s say or plumbers nine one, that kind of thing. But if you’re local and you want people to you to want to create that familiarity it really helps to have that local number.

Yes, I agree. I use answerconnect.com to send phone calls into a call center so that the phone always gets answered. It screens the calls there’s a ton of benefits for using a call center. And I have been since 2013, the same account, answer Connect comm I really can’t say enough good things about them. And so they give you an 800 number but you can forward or redirect local numbers to the 800 number which is what I do. That way. You know, I can have multiple lead gen assets all funneling into that with their own separate local numbers, but all funneling into the same call center if it’s for the same service provider, essentially.

But there’s a lot of really cool things. And by the way, guys, I’m working on a lot of lead gen stuff right now, and I’ve got some case studies I’m working on that I’ll be making public, not just within our groups. And I’ve also got some things that I’m going to be introducing to everybody when I do make that case studies public that I think will help a lot of you with your lead gen business. I can’t really talk much about it right now, but I just kind of wanted to tease it. So there you go.

How To Generate Quality Content For A Niche Blog If You Don’t Like Writing?

The next question is, Hey, guys, I want to set up a niche blog, but I don’t like writing How can I generate the quality content myself for my niche blog? Will the generated content be good enough for niche blogging? Thanks, Content Kingpin.

When I first started in SEO and local lead gen way back in, you know, 2010 timeframe. I was actually doing blog posts. Right after, I’d kind of developed the Syndication Academy method, and because it was just working like crazy good, I knew that blogging was going to be the way to populate the networks and get results. And so I was actually blogging for industries that I knew nothing about. I was actually writing the posts myself. And it was incredibly time-consuming. And it’s frustrating because I had to learn a lot about the businesses and the topics and such. And I, fortunately, I got introduced to content curating, and I don’t remember who introduced me to it or whatever, but I kind of started reading about it. And then I bought a couple of courses about content curating, and some plugins and all kinds of stuff. And I started curating content and I got much more efficient at generating content. And he also I didn’t have to know as much about a topic because you can just find subject matter, you know, find articles on the web or content. It doesn’t have to be articles. It can be podcasts, videos, infographics, slide presentations, it could be a number of things that are based around the topic that you are writing about that are written by or produce the contents produced by subject matter experts or SMEs. And you can get really good and really efficient at producing content by just being able to find and locate content developed or produced by subject matter experts. And then curating it and creating a unique post based upon using, you know, snippets of content from the subject matter experts, it’s already been published. So that’s, you know, been my preferred method. And I was actually doing that on my own. I use some tools and some plugins at the time. But once my business got to a certain level, it was just way too time-consuming. Even with using curated content, I was too time-consuming for me to produce it myself. So I developed training and hired a virtual assistant and handed it over to them and she’s still with me today. By the way, her name is Esther she’s still my primary number one blogger that works for me right now.

But anyway, long story short, I ended up training multiple virtual assistants or bloggers or curators as what they are really, with that training. So I kind of polished it up a bit. And that’s what Content Kingpin is, which is one of our training courses. And it’s the same process that my bloggers all use today, I talked about a couple of tools, but we still primarily do everything manually. Just using like a like Feedly. For example, to the group and categorize content feeds that we know like and trust that then we can use to all So a quick glimpse my bloggers go in for whenever they’ve got to produce or publish a post, they’ll go in and just look at Feedly select that particular category or folder for the project that they’re working on. And it will show all the content that’s available than the recent content that’s available around that particular topic. And then they can choose a topic to blog about to curate a post about and then pick and choose a few articles that will either reinforce that the idea that they’re trying to convey with their posts, or sometimes they’ll do like argumentative posts where they’ll try to show in a different opinion from what perhaps others are saying. So they’ll show two sides of the coin, if that makes sense, as two different competing opinions about the same topic anyway, it’s great, it works incredibly well, it also creates co-citation. And so we highly recommend you check out Content Kingpin, it’s one of the best ways to do it. Not only that but if you were to use that site type of the system, the Content Kingpin method, then you can get away from doing it yourself. So you don’t have to publish I mean, I would learn it first. You know, learn it and understand how to do it first, but then you can actually put a virtual assistant that you hire through the course and have them do it for you, and you can kind of just managing and guide them until they get up to your standards. But that’s the best way to do it. Guys. I call it hands-free content marketing and it’s a great revenue source too because it really is simple.

Once you understand the topic concept is really, really good to anybody want to comment on that Content Kingpin doesn’t get enough credit for does what it does. People don’t understand it, I think because they get all the all this different information about unique content and duplicate content and all this bullshit that’s out there. That’s nothing. Really if it were so places like Huffington Post’s would not exist. Google News would not exist unless curated content was okay. But not only Okay, whether it was good I’d be how much traffic does it get Bing, Yahoo. All they do all day long is republish story. Huffington Post is a collection of republish story that all it is and all you’re doing with Content Kingpin is republishing the story. You’re summarizing them right taking power, whatever it is that you do it. And you’re adding your own commentary and proper attribution and it’s a done deal. I mean, it’s so simple. And yet people try to make it so much more difficult than it really should be. But yeah, totally Content Kingpin for the win. You know, and it’s interesting. I’ve just pulled this up because I did this and if you guys remember masterclass, we had a, we had a kind of a middle-tier webinar coaching program that we had called masterclass for a number of years. And I did this as a local case study, Gainesville home pros, and I’ve never done anything with it since I think that was back in 2015. Oh, look at that. It says account suspended. That’s interesting. That’s one of my Okay, well, anyway, I would sure like to show you that blog because that was curated content, the same method. My blogger Esther, who was the first one I trained using that method, produced all the content on that site using curated content, and they were beautiful posts and unfortunately, it looks like that account has been that hosting account perhaps has been suspended. I have done anything with it years. But I would like to show you guys some examples of that. But I don’t have anything that I can show you right now off the top of my head. But anyway, it’s it works really, really well the posts come out beautiful if you do it right. I would highly recommend going through Content Kingpin.

No, because there are a few things that you have to do in order to not infringe on copyright. So for example, you don’t want to curate images that can get you into trouble, asked me how I know.

Because you’ll get extortion letters from like Getty Images and other you know, asshole law firms out there that are just looking for people that have republished images without copyright, without rights to it. So there’s like a lot of things. There’s not a lot of things, but there are a few things that you really should do to make sure that you’re covering your ass when you’re curating content. So again, I highly recommend you go through the product, it’s through that program. It’s a really, really good program. It’s the same that we use today. You know, there are a lot of tools out there that can help you to manage content curating, but we’ve already.

He’s found that it really just is just as quick and easy because what happens with a lot of these tools is they stop being supported over time. We know one of them was Curation Suite that we actually promoted. And fortunately after promoting it, and after a year or so, like the support just stopped and it kind of fell off the face of the earth. The same thing with a bunch of curating plugins that I’ve used over the years, they just eventually fall off the market and they just don’t get supported. So we’ve learned to just stick with the manual process and it’s you know, once somebody becomes efficient with that process is really is a very efficient way to produce content. So you don’t need all the additional tools and plugins and things like that. So that’s why I recommend that product because it’s a Content Kingpin because it will teach you how to do it manually and then you can teach a VA how to do it by just putting them right through the same training. It’s a great question though.

What Training Do You Offer In The MasterMind That You Can’t Get In The Syndication Academy?

Jason says I’m currently in the Syndication Academy 2.0 and I was wanting to know all of the different features and benefits in the mastermind that you don’t get in the Academy. Is this all of these different training you offer in the mastermind if I joined the mastermind, can I get a discount for the cost of the academy? Okay, so first of all the mastermind you have direct access to my partners and me, as well as all the other members of the group, which we have a lot of really savvy marketers and agency owners and CEOs and such in our group. But you also have direct access to all of us to where you can ask us questions in the Facebook group at any time. We’re in there answering questions often. Plus, we each host our own separate webinars inside the mastermind. They’re bi-weekly webinars. So every two weeks each one of us hosts our own webinar. So you get to come to ask us questions at length during the webinars. Like you can post questions ahead of time for the webinars, we’ll do site audits, we’ll you know, look at your, your SEO, your you know, on-page stuff off-page stuff, we’ll help you with projects if you need it. Plus, as I said, you get to you know, come to ask me stuff, or Marco stuff or Adam, or Hernan or Chris any one of us. So there’s a lot of benefits in there that we don’t provide anywhere else we’ll go as deep into, whatever subject you want to go into, you know, and that’s one of the things that we can’t do on a free setting like this or any in any of our other groups. So the mastermind is definitely where you want to be if you want to get all that, as well as Syndication Academy is included in that. So you can cancel your Syndication Academy account if you join the mastermind because it’s included in that as well as all of our products under $300. Anything over $300 you get a significant discount. So there’s a ton of benefits to be in the mastermind. Anybody else wanna?

Yeah, I would just say Jason, if you just started Syndication Academy, if you’re just getting into it, then contact support and we’ll refund whatever you paid for Syndication Academy and you can or you can apply it towards them. However, you want to work that out, we’ll work it out for you. We always do. Why because membership has its privileges. So that’s why we do things the way we do and yes, I mean, above all else is this group of people like-minded people who are working towards what we call POFU position of Fuck you, where you have the kind of power and money where you can pick and choose your clients, your clients come to you instead of you going knocking on doors on $500 clients who are a pain in the ass. So rather than doing all that you getting all you get all of this training, you get the mindset training, you get the how-to get all of the collective knowledge, and then you have five, almost six years of webinars. Now some of them of course are dated, but we do we’re not doing webinars every week. It’s either Bradley or me like we take every other Thursday. You got Hernan, you got Adam. Yeah, Chris, everyone is giving you their perspective and their take on things so you get all of these different points of view, all of this all of these different experiences coming to you and helping you in whatever it is that you’re trying to do whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve. So it’s not just what you get as far as training. It’s the people and the relationships, the networking that you can do inside the mastermind like I know people who are working together in different projects, and we tell people to become the big fish in a little pond. But then some of them go on to and I’m gonna mention his name, for example, to dominate in the Fort Worth area. And you got another one in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the Twin Cities you got someone in the Dirty South, right South Carolina, Georgia area, who are Domini who may have started as the big fish in the little pile or becomes the little fish in the big fish in the little pond. But then they move to a bigger pond. So that we’re always pushing. We’re always encouraging people. That growth means you go to make more money until you reach a stepping point where you say, Okay, I met, hopefully, this is where I want to be, this is how I want to do it. And if I choose not to work tomorrow, I can do that because the process and the systems and everything else that I’ve gained through being in the mastermind, will take care of me not being it, the system is there, so I don’t have to be there. And I mean, just the way that this happened and how this happened, and how people finally are able to step away and say, Man, I can spend time with my family and I can relax and I can do the things I want to do, rather than having to do the things that I have to do things that I must with no other choice. So I think that that’s just one of the greater things about the mastermind is that mindset that awful, you’re going after that poof hopefully you get on that path. And it’s it becomes your magnificent obsession. I thank you CTF letcher for that. But it becomes your magnificent obsession. You’re going after that and there is nothing that can get in your way of achieving that powerful, that’s when you know that you’re there. And that’s what we’re there for. So, just because you brought up CT, and we don’t have a lot of questions, so I know we got time when we did the interview with CT Fletcher, I’ve created this text document. It’s been on my desktop ever since. And hopefully, nobody gets offended because CT Fletcher likes to cuss a lot. Say but here’s a lot of here are the quotes that struck me when we were at when we really were Marco interviewing him. I was on the webinar, but it was really Marco interviewing CT Fletcher, who’s a powerlifter. He broke a ton of records for a while. But anyway, some of these are really funny. I’m not gonna read them out to you, but you remember these Marco? Absolutely. I love them so awesome. I still watch them. Will will is king. Yeah, man. Oh, man. Oh, man. He’s so good. You ain’t pretty motherfucker. Yeah, you ain’t that birdie.

So funny. I mean, that one right there cracks me up too. I laughed out loud. Anyways, I just thought that was funny because I happen to notice it on my desktop the other day and I giggled about it. You just brought it up.

Would You Recommend A Subdirectory Or Subfolder On The Same Domain When Creating The Blog?

So anyway, Jason, next question says, Hey, guys, I have an e-commerce website using WordPress with WooCommerce. Would you recommend a subdirectory? Or folder on the same domain and load a new WordPress and create a blog? Yes, that’s what we’ve always recommended. I mean, I don’t do any e-commerce stuff. But I mean, in the past, I have done some SEO for some e-commerce clients. But it’s not something I’d like to do. So I got out of doing it, but we’ve always recommended it. So do you have control over like essentially a content distribution engine, right, and that’s WordPress is great for that? So you can either put it in a subfolder or directory of the root domain or what we always recommended was to put it in a subdomain instead. And that’s because a subdomain is still treated as content have a separate web entity or separate site, I should say, a separate website than the root domain. So that if you’re in your content distribution, you do something spammy, which if you follow our methods, you won’t have any trouble, at least, we, you know, as it stands right now, but Google could change everything in a moment’s notice. But we’ve never had any issues. But if you put in a subdomain, and you were doing something spammy or something, Google changed its rules, all of a sudden, and something became spammy, they wouldn’t affect the root domain, which is where your e-commerce site resides, it would affect the subdomain only. So we always prefer, like, you know, you could put blog as a subdomain to whatever your domain is, or whatever you want it to be news or something like that. And that’s what we prefer to do. But you could put it in a subdirectory. But yeah, that gives you the opportunity then to do all your content marketing. Remember, if you’ve got an e-commerce site, and you’ve got product categories, for example, you can mirror those same categories. We talked about theme mirroring all the time.

If you don’t know what that is, you know, it’s essentially duplicating or mirroring your site structure on other assets. So you have if you have product categories in your eCommerce site, you could mirror those same categories as content categories, or you know, in WordPress, just categories are the same. You could title them and everything the same as what they are on your eCommerce site. And then you can publish posts, blog posts, or sporting posts. That’s kind of a link building method that in place them within those particular silos or categories in the WordPress site, distribute them out to a syndication network, mirror, all of that stuff on a G site, and our ys drive stack, press releases, all that kind of stuff. You mirror all of that together, and it works really, really well to push power to your, you know, your ultimate destination, which would be your e-commerce product pages. So you want to comment on that. Yeah, we used to recommend going to a subdomain because we wanted to protect the root cause we were doing. let’s admit it, we were doing a lot of evil stuff yes to the subdomains, we were blasting them to the point where if we had them connected to the route, any penalty would pass to the root. What we’ve done is we’ve taken a step out, because now everything goes through our SEO power shield. And so now the route is protected.

And so in order to push even more power, by all means, put it in a subdirectory because then you’re accruing everything inside the root when you go into that subdirectory rather than stepping in a subdomain, which is treated as a separate website, so you’re one hop away from your root domain anyway and you’re losing link equity. When you’re anytime that you’re one hop or more away, you lose link equity at the top. When you’re in a subdomain, you don’t lose that link equity is even when you’re in the root. You don’t lose that link equity when you’re in a folder inside the root. You don’t lose that link equity because you’re not a hub away. You’re in the root, now if you do want to protect it, then you just install in the dub dub dub. So that’s where you would do the root because that’s a subdomain anyway.

So that’s how you do it. But we have the SEO PowerShell it’s not necessary anymore. Because everything that we do goes through our SEO power shield, which amplifies and protects. That’s why we call it the SEO, power shield. It powers it up, it amplifies and it protects it shields it and so that my recommendation would be totally totally unless you’re planning on doing a whole lot of evil stuff to that subdomain go with a sub but with it should be with a folder inside the root.

What Type Of Brand Property Link To Use In A Press Release?

Awesome. So next is BB BB. Look, you’ve gotten better, buddy. Your questions are a lot shorter and not quite as many. So I think we’re finally getting through to you, man. And I’m just giving you our time baby. It’s we’re always like having you here but he says Hey guys, number one does that the link to a branded property in the press release should be to the property or to one of its pages that were syndicated by RSS. Well, it depends on what you’re doing. But so, my strategy and again, it’s covered in the press release SEO, or piece PR silo stacking webinar that we did Marco and I did. Again, you can find that at MGYB or just go to youtube.com slash semantic mastery use the channel search feature search for press release SEO and you’ll find it you know, right at the top go watch that. Because what I prefer to do is we you know, we’re constantly blogging for clients or for projects period. So that populates syndication network, right, we’re building topical relevancy and depth to our silos, right depth to a particular topic. And then they syndicate out to syndication networks, right. And within every single post, within the proper silo architecture, we’re always linking back up from the post back up to the top of the silo page, which is the page that we’re trying to drive traffic to. Right. So what we do what I do is I always, you know, I like to publish press releases that are highlighting or showcasing a recent blog post. And that links to the blog post URL, which within the blog post, actually links back up to the page on the site. But I mean, you don’t have to use that strategy all the time. That’s what I do. Because I consistently publish press, we’re consistently blogging and we’re consistently publishing press releases for all of my clients or my lead gen asset. So it just works out really well because we’re providing deep links, so links further down into a silo that helps to power up with proper silo architecture, it helps to power up the entire silo and helps all of the different keywords that we’re targeting within the silo start to rise or surface in the search engines because of those deep links, right. So that’s my preferred method because it adds more diversity and it’s linking to multiple points.

Within the main money site, as opposed to always constantly hitting the homepage or just the product or service pages, the top of silo pages in other words, so I like to do deep links, but it depends on what you’re doing. If you’re not doing a lot of press releases, if you’re you know, you only got a budget for a handful of them, then it might be better to actually hit your homepage and or your top of silo pages, that kind of thing. So it really just depends on what your overall content marketing strategy is, and what you’re going to be linking to, you know that that’s going to determine where you’re going to link to from within your site. Okay.

That’s it that said, I always almost not 100% but we almost always link from within press releases to a page or post on the money site. Unless we’re doing a two-step which again, go watch the press release SEO webinar, and you’ll understand what I mean. But for example, if a client as all my local clients have Google My Business profiles. So if we publish a post when we publish a blog post on the blog, my blogger also for most of my clients will end up publishing a GMB post that points a link back to the blog post. So essentially, the GMB post is nothing other than a summary of the blog post itself with the same featured image as the image for the GMB post the photo, and then the button link, the Learn More button link links back to the blog post. So sometimes our press releases will actually link to the GMB post URL, because that ultimately links to the blog post URL, so the two-step process there. But you can also and I’ve talked about this almost every week now for the last like two months on Hump Day hangouts baby so I’m sure you’re aware of what I was what I’ve said. But you know, if you’ve got particular keywords that you’re trying to push, then you can actually go extract the post URLs from like, for example, the blogs on your syndication network, so blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, you can go extract these post URLs that are where the re-syndication or of the published the post that you publish targeting those keywords. And you can link to those within press releases too if you want to because again, that’s tiered link building. So it’s helpful in anyone, but you don’t have to. I prefer to link to those blog post URLs using daddy as link building from an MGYB because I like to use the press releases to link directly back to the money site, or two primary tier one assets, such as a GMB profile, GMB map, Id page, any one of those types of things when it comes to that.

That was a good question. By the way, bb though. Yeah, that that was a really good question. Now, I mean, the link building varies it depends on how much power you’re trying to push and where and everything is gonna be where it’s needed, where everything’s needed. Because sometimes it’s just one press release, push, can get you to where you need to be. Other times, you’re going to need way more. Yeah, there are other times when you’re going to need even link building into the press releases. There’s no one set rule because sometimes it’s just the SEO power shield coming, coming in, right coming online. And that’s enough. And sometimes it doesn’t even have to do with the competition because we’ve seen it even in some tough keyword sets that you start ranking like right from the SEO power shield. So this totally ended depends on the no definitive answer for this, other than, you’re going to have to get your press release. If you’ve set it up correctly. And you hit your top-level category rather than just like everybody does your homepage. Then your top-level category will flow and it’ll push all of that power so that everything benefits from it, including the top-level category, not just the longtail keywords, it’s how we teach it now. We teach people to go from the top-down instead of bottom-up it

It’s a little different, it’s kind of the same thing except we’re going. For example, if we want to rank for gold futures, this is just an example. It’s incredibly difficult to rank for that. But we would go even one, one level higher, we would go after the gold category, the entire gold category to pull up the gold features category instead of trying to push it up with all of the long tails. And I’ve seen that it has a greater effect when you try to go for that top-level category. on everything else, not only the longtail but the subcategory that you’re after. So I’m always telling people you go one level up. So keeping this in mind, then it’s up to you. I always tell people that we have to be scientists when we’re gauging how it is that we’re going to do this. What effect we’re trying to create, you’re going to have to create your link building and press releases are part of link building. You’re going to create it so that whatever you’re trying to benefit the most guests

The most benefit out of what you’re doing. And so you approach it that way. Yeah. So it varies. That’s the short answer. It varies. It depends, right?

Can We Use The PR Stacking Strategies With Article Directories?

Next, can we treat an article direct article, an article directory as press releases, meaning publishing, as the PR stacking and also linking to actual prs? Okay, I don’t do any article directory stuff I haven’t for years, not saying that it can’t still be useful. I just haven’t because they’ve been known to be spammy. I think a lot of the links from those get discredited. It’s much better to get like, you know, articles instead of being published on article directories, which were always known as SEO like, honey, honey, what do you call them honey, honey holes or whatever you call them. But I’m not saying that it won’t work because I don’t know. I haven’t tested it in years. If I was going to do it, maybe I would do it. Where I was only linking to SEO shield assets or like you say, can you link to PRs? Yes, that would be fun because press release wherever press releases published is going to be able to handle those type of links, you may be able to push good link equity to them, or even, it doesn’t really matter because they’re not your money site. So I, I, again, I haven’t used article directories in probably five or six years.

And so I don’t really know whether they’re still viable or if they’re still helping at any level. But if I was going to use them, I would do it too. I would use them to link only back to tier one asset not directly to the money site. And press releases are a great thing to link to. So, Marco, I know you don’t use article directories either.

I used to, it’s not necessary anymore. I don’t need to go that far. Right. The way that we’re doing it pushes so much power that we don’t need to go. I mean, when you’re already at number one, like how much better can you go than the number one.

So maybe at some point with some of the case studies that we’re doing and everything else that we have coming on e-commerce and everything else that we’re experimenting. Yeah, I would say that we can do that. But right now, or maybe we need to do that. But right now the way that we’re doing things is not necessary.

What Do You Mean By Kitchen Sink Spam?

Agreed. The last question was, what do you mean when you say kitchen sink? It gets me confused. Yeah, when I say kitchen sink spam, or when we say that, that just means using link building tools and throwing every kind of link like even some real spammy stuff, at whatever your target is. So like when we say you can throw kitchen sink spam at it, it means you could use some of the most god awful links in the world and throw them at, you know, point them at a particular target and still benefit from it. We would never encourage anybody to do that with their money site. And in fact, we prefer to still use better links.

Even if you’re using spam tools, for example, like you know, our link building master dedhia he uses a ton of link building tools but he always recommends that your the links that he builds to whatever your targets are, which we always recommend tier-one entity targets or your SEO shield essentially. But he always likes to suggest recommends using two layers two levels of contextual web two Dotto links. And then throwing if you want a third tier of links, you can throw kitchen sink spam at those contextual web two dot o links. So that’s what we mean by kitchen sink spam, it means pretty much anything under the sun, that’s a link. And a lot of those would be toxic if they’re not used properly, but they can still provide a benefit if used properly. And that’s what we talk about when we talk about you know, you can hit SEO power shields with kitchen sink spam, and they’ll end up ranking. We don’t recommend it. We still recommend using the contextual web to Dotto links. Add your first and second-tier links that are being built to your tier one assets. But you can always throw kitchen sink spam behind that if you wanted and still receive a benefit Mark has done several tests I have to, but we even did the Marco and Rob did the kind of public case study for the DC plumber and just hit it with like over a million kitchen sink spam style links, including porn porn links, and it ranked and it’s probably still ranking today. So and we just had someone in RYS Academy reloaded last week, come in and tell us that they tried the million kitchen sink, spam link test and got really good results and 89% increase in traffic month to month. Wow. So it works. However, think of it this way. If garbage links work, how much better? Will quality links work? How much better will the way that we do the tiered link building right? contextual tiered link building

How much better is that, not only for now but long term when they come looking? The first thing that they look for is that kitchen sink spam, that that the automation is is what Google is looking for. And we’re kind of hiding in plain sight because we’re not giving them what everybody else is doing. We’re doing it a little bit differently. And it just playing work. So when you’re thinking about going after that, that million links, and yeah, you can pay 50 bucks in fiber, and there’s going to be complete TSA, and it’s going to be truly, truly garbage type of stuff that you don’t want to look at. Why would you do that to your project? Why would you do that when it can show up in your link profile? Do you want that? Because we had that showing up for DC plumbing. We had those links index, man. And seriously, you didn’t want your kids looking at that you didn’t want you to want to be sitting there with your wife. Looking at some of that stuff that was coming through it was it was like, the really bad garbage man.

So why would so when I’m talking to people, my question is if you want to test and you don’t care, you don’t care what shows up in the link profile, you don’t care about anything. You’re just trying to make you make some money. It’s a fun test, then, by all means, do it. But if it’s something that you care about, why would you mistreat something that you care about that one?

Agreed.

Can You Blast The Press Release And Drive Stacks With Backlinks Without Negative Impact On The Money Site And GMB?

Okay, next is Gordon, what’s up Gord? It’s been a while he says, Hey, guys, hope you’re safe. And well just have a quick question. When using press releases or an ROI S Drive stack through the MGYB store. Can you blast either or both of them with hundreds or even thousands of backlinks without any negative effect on your money site? Or GMB listing? And if so, will that increase the SEO juice flowing to either entity and help them to rank? Thank you very much. Yeah. And that’s, I mean, that’s exactly what we were just talking about.

We prefer to build links to our tier one entity assets such as the SEO power shield, our last drive stack, g site press releases the organic press release organization page, you know, the idx page, anything like that. And that’s if you set it up correctly, you’re not going to have any negative results whatsoever, which is why we set the things up the way that we do. That’s why we call it the SEO power shield because it shields it’s like, I’ve always called it an SEO firewall, right? It creates a firewall around your money site. And so that’s exactly what we’re talking about. embeds and or backlinks work really, really well. In fact, you can even take your money site it for example, and you know, embed it in a G site and then hammer the G site page with backlinks. And that’s going to help your money site page benefit without there being an actual direct hyperlink on that page. Does that make sense? So yeah, that’s what we were just talking about. With Bibi’s question when we just hammer our assets with backlinks because it helps to push ultimately it flows down through to whatever our target destination is, which could be a GMB asset.

Could be a Google Site could be a money site. It could be all three of those. So yes, that would work. Any comments on that?

Should You Interlink A Post If The Main Article Has 5 Jump Links?

No, that’s perfect. Pavlos up, he says, Hey guys last time, I missed an opportunity to say thank you. Well, you’re welcome. Pavlo He says, question in one of your videos, you said that I can copy main silo page content and create a post. The Post will be canonicalized back to the main article, the canonical link itself will be a jump link to the Main article.

The question is should I interlink these posts if I have if the Main article has five jump links, and I’ve created five posts from the main content? I think I kind of vaguely remember this conversation we had on Hump Day Hangouts, but I’m not quite following the question. I think what, what I was talking about if and hopefully, I’m not off base here, but prefer using long-form content now for content for websites or for money sites, instead of in the past, like, you know, five years ago, you know, you could create a kind of thin content type of silo page. And then each supporting a keyword that you would find within your with your keyword research. So all of the supporting keywords that you would stack within a particular silo, I just always use spreadsheets for that. So I create a column but my top-level keyword at the top, you know, the column header, and then I would go extract all of the relevant supporting keywords and key phrases and put them in underneath that in that same column right in a spreadsheet. And then that would be that that goes to my bloggers, for them to produce content around so that they highlight one of the supporting keywords within the correct silo. And it used to be that I would create kind of thin content, top of silo pages, and then target individual longer tail keywords with blog posts, but that becomes repetitive redundant. And it doesn’t work as well what I found as having a long-form top of silo page now, that contains a lot of those supporting keywords so that broken down into subheadings, right, so and I think that’s what you were talking about is when I mentioned that you can create long-form content, and even put a table of contents with jump links at the top of the content, which is really good for SEO. And then you can actually create blog posts targeting those longer tail phrases that are already present on the silo page itself right to top of silo page that have jump links to them and then link from those supporting articles within the blog post to those jump links. Because then it’s, it’s, it’s linking to the top of silo page, but it’s also reinforcing that longer tail subheading or keyword, right, so that’s supporting keyword. If that’s what you’re talking about, then let’s see. The question is should I interlink these posts with the Main article as well? Five jump links. And I’ve created five posts from the main content. Yeah, I mean, I don’t I can’t get too far into this Marco would kill me if I did.

But if you’re interlinking, your supporting posts correctly, daisy-chaining them together then and they’re just linking from post to post. And from within each post linking back to the top of silo page, even if it’s at a jump link, a jump link to the top of silo page to some section on the top of silo page. Yes, that would work. That would work really, really well. Actually. Any comments on that Marco?

Sorry about that.

A lot. Ah, no, it’s not really something that I’m willing to talk about in a free gotten a free forum like this. They are not going to get into that because it just puts so much power and it gets around everything that Google can throw at you. So no, that’s fine. We’ll leave it at that. Okay.

But yeah, just get creative with it. Think about you know what you’re doing with your structure. And I don’t like to if I don’t know where you say you can just clone copy main silo page content and create a post, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t do that on the same site what I was talking about with cloning or copying or mirroring, right is within the G site. Right. So if you’ve got your top of silo page, and you’ve got all the content on the page, you can always create, we recommend mirroring that top of silo page on the G site. And then if you had supporting posts within that category on your money site, I don’t typically duplicate or mirror posts onto a G site unless I’m having trouble ranking a particular keyword in which case then I will create child pages on the G site that is each child a one to one ratio, child page for every post within that silo, and then just embed those in there and that’s what I was talking about with the jumping links, you can actually create jump links from the G site back to the money site there. But again, that’s more kind of mastermind stuff or heavy hitter club stuff. So hopefully you got some value out of that. But I wouldn’t copy top of silo content and republish it on the same blog from your money site. I wouldn’t. Personally I wouldn’t do that I would have new content curated, not written because I use curated content for blog posts, the curated targeting the keywords that I’m trying to push that is on the top of the silo page if that makes sense. Okay.

So another good question.

Jason says thank you. Yeah, so he’s already watched all the Syndication Academy videos, that’s okay. If you join the mastermind if you just joined recently, the Syndication Academy join the mastermind will up make it worth your while we’ll refund your Syndication Academy purchase or apply it towards your first month of mastermind or something like that, and then you can cancel that subscription. So, yep, baby says great. We’re almost

What Are Your Thoughts On The Statement That You Can Flatten A Complex Silo Into A Simple Silo?

Got a timer almost out of question. So this is good timing maybe says great. What do you think of the statement that each complex silo can be flattened to a simple silo? And if a site isn’t that big, is it better to do the flat? Yes, I always, always recommend using simple silos where possible and guys, I’m going to be updating the training, I was really hoping to get that done for today, but I didn’t. And so I’ll try to have it done by next Wednesday. But in the process, street process doc that I created for our methods and for me, you know, our methods are what we sell as done for you services and MGYB for those of you that aren’t aware of it, if you go to semantic mastery comm slash process, I’m going to bring it up. It’ll you guys can take a look at this. For those of you that haven’t already been exposed to it, this is the process street process doc that I created to that has a lot of training in there with a lot of it’s the why we do what we do.

And what you can expect from it the How is we point to our training products for the how but or the where to get it as the links over to MGYB but these are the website silo architecture, the training videos that I created, you know, five years ago or whatever, they’re, they’re still valid, but my overall process has changed slightly right it’s evolved slightly and so I’m going to redo those silo training videos where I go into what a simple silo is what a complex silo is a difference between a physical silo and a virtual silo and what I prefer to use and why I’m going to redo those videos and that will go into here the website section of the worry list entity based SEO process doc and when I do hope I’ll have this done by next week guys I really wanted to get it done by this week but I haven’t even started on it. So I’ll try to get it done by next week. And then again guys you go to semantic mastery comm slash process and you take a look at all the stuff that’s in here. There’s a lot of training here. And so anyway, that said, Yes, I always recommend a simple silo. For most projects. I’m not going to say for the most projects for most local projects, which is what I do, almost exclusively, simple silos will suffice. I used to always try to build complex solids because I thought it was going to be better. And then maybe there is some benefit to it. But what I found is a complex silo is complicated. Hence the name complex silo. And so it’s difficult to build it create some kind of funny issues that are hard to reconcile with the URLs with the slugs and that kind of with permalinks and that kind of stuff. So I prefer to stick with a simple silo, it’s much easier to manage, it’s easier to map out when you’re in the build process. So I like using simple silos for most local projects. That’s all that is ever needed. In fact, with a simple silo, if you’re using our methods, you’re going to be the on-page SEO is going to be far superior to what most of your competitors are doing anyways. So it’s not really necessary to do a complex silo. If you’re doing a very broad site with a lot of categories and subcategories, then you might be necessary to do a complex silo. But, as I said, I always try to simplify where possible. We’ve had a ton of people over the years, join one of our groups, and they map out this incredibly intricate silo map of a site. And they, you know, probably spend hours and hours and hours mapping it out and creating drawings to show the silo structure and everything and then they present it and say, What do you think you think this would work? And it’s like, Well, yeah, but it could have worked, you know, eight levels previous, where it was like a much simpler build, and you got to save yourself a ton of time. And we don’t say that to pick on anybody, but it’s because I think we as SEO types, try to overcomplicate stuff all the time, and I’ve learned over the years to try to simplify as much as possible and get results with a much simpler process and simple silo structure is the way that I prefer to build 90 95% of my sites.

commenting. I totally agree. I don’t know why people get themselves into trouble with complex silos like right from the start. Yeah, if it’s a brand new project that there’s no need for for a complex silo, unless it’s like, I don’t know, like some type of e-commerce website and you’ve seen those where there’s a bunch of complex subcategories and while category, subcategory, sub-sub categories and all of these things that really complicated but I tell people to look in the beginning, you’re good with your homepage, and three categories, three top-level categories, the three main keywords that you’re going to go after to start making money, push all the power that way, as needed. And as you see more opportunities for top-level categories. You add them, right because then your whole setup is done. And whatever you add is going to benefit from everything you’ve done previously. But if you start mapping it

Out complex from the beginning. How are you going to push the power that that’s going to need for every page and post and subcategory and sub subcategory that you’re trying to create? you’re dividing up the PageRank in such a way that it’s not going to push the initial power that it could have. There’s no way because there’s no way to keep the link flow going the right way. Let’s put it that way. Yeah, but if you keep it simple, minimize the number of categories Don’t try to go after everything at once. But just three, three categories. That gives you enough to write for about four months when you get our D keyword research. I’m sorry, that that’s not available right now. But I did keyword research gives you enough to write about four months on those three top market level categories on those silos. And then you can go and see like which one is more complicated, and you just break it up instead of making it a subcategory? You just make it another category that’s related to that one category that you already have no need to overcomplicate things I hate when people try to do that. It doesn’t have to be all that difficult. Yeah, and it’s fine because like I said, we’ve experienced that a lot over the years, and I’m not gonna lie. In years past I did the same thing, I would always approach new projects with the complex silo, trying to map all that out. And it just it became overwhelming, it became too much of a bitch too, you know, too difficult to manage the projects. And again, it creates a lot of funky issues, if you’re trying to share subcategories with other categories, especially in local like, for example, if you have, you know, your topical or service-based silos, which would be like, you know, like Tree Removal would be one silo, for example, and another silo could be tree trimming, which in reality, I’ve learned over the years that you really don’t even need to create silos for Tree Service sites because they’re all synonyms for each other. Google considers tree removal and tree trimming as synonyms anyways. But most of my tree service projects are

Still siloed like that. And if you were trying to duplicate location-based silos within each one of the topical or service-based silos, it creates some real funny URL issues that you have to reconcile. And it becomes difficult to do so or vice versa, if you had location-based silos, as your top-level silos, and then you tried to have subcategories of services, then it creates some issues too. So I learned a long time ago just to go with the simple silo structure, so much easier to manage so much easier to handle. So anyway, yeah, I totally recommend going with simple silos where possible. The last question and we’re at five o'clock. So this is a good stopping point is BB says should we have a form in the branded properties for collecting leads? Absolutely. If you’ve got form code that can be embedded in other sites, absolutely. I’m actually using I’m not going to talk about what I’m using just yet because it’s part of the case studies and I’m working on but I’m using a new lead generation tool.

It helps that has a form builder in it that works really, really good. And I’m actually embedding the form and multiple properties. Now g sites, you know, a lot of different places that I’m actually embedding the forms now because they work really, really well. And they direct all the leads back to one central location that then gets distributed out. So yeah, absolutely, there’s no doubt, I always try to put most of my businesses run on phone calls more than a phone like. In other words, the leads that I generate for businesses are more phone call leads than they are web form submissions, but I don’t ever want to not provide that as an option. So I used to, I used to really just push phone calls, but now I’m pushing the lead form submits as well, because I’ve got a really cool application that I’m using that helps to distribute the leads to wherever I want them to go. And again, I’ll reveal some of that in the coming week’s guys, but I absolutely recommend if you have a form, form code that can be embedded on other sites use it. Okay.

All right. Thanks, everybody for being here.

We will see you guys next week. Thanks, Marco for sticking around. All right. Have a good one. Thanks, everybody

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 299 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 299

Click on the video above to watch Episode 299 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

All right, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 299. We’re one away from big Episode 300. I’m gonna call this episode where everyone is getting old and wearing glasses except Chris. I just realized all of us are now wearing glasses except Chris. Yeah, well, you guys spending too much time in front of your computers. There we go. Yeah, gotta change it around. This is the year we try to get ourselves off to the computer. So anyways, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. We’re gonna say hi, real quick catch up with everybody. And then we got a couple quick announcements before diving into the questions. So I’ll start on the bottom here since it’s cloudy weather element Marco. How you doing today? I have my lights on. That’s why it looks so bright. Yeah, it’s raining. It’s supposed to be raining. So finally got me with the lights on. But I can’t complain this nice a warm, actually. I’m kind of trying to hide trying to blend into the background. So Google doesn’t see me.

It’s all good man. I’m gonna

Having a good time.

Outstanding All right. Well, let’s work our way around. Hernan you got those new glasses what’s going on with you?

Yeah, man, I’m just trying to trying to blend in. I got I got glasses and now you got glasses. I mean yeah man we get rid of this and have a beard and growing a beard. Damn it. You’re doing the 50 K I might do the 50 now, so good man these are blue light blocking glasses, you know? Because there’s one this one guy show me one this really nerdy yellow like super like

orangey glasses and they make you look stupid. I know I won’t be wearing next week.

Yeah, do you don’t think the big square bc birth control glasses make you look stupid though right now, man. No, I can’t I can talk like this. Nobody will.

But a lady repellent. Yeah, exactly. say wait a second. Are you wearing those or are you being forced to wear this?

What this one glasses. Yeah, I’m just kidding.

You look good. I was just wondering maybe you’re making you know this light and blue light blue light blocking. I’m still confused. Why are you wearing blue light blocking glasses in the middle of the day or now? Yeah, well, it’s time. 5pm So, five 6pm So, all right. Well, before we tell everyone all about our AI problems, let’s see Chris, how you doing today? Man? Doing good, man. I hit the gym for like, I don’t know, like after another two week break for the first time again. Sore all over again. Hit the leg so hard. So yeah, like, I’m pretty sure you’re gonna feel the same way. Next week?

Yes, definitely. Yeah, I’m headed out. Taking a couple of weeks and hitting the road literally going to be gone for a couple of weeks and doing some trail running. So for those of you in the northwest, you know what mountain trail was? Yeah. We’re going to be doing a run around Mount St. Helens, as well as doing some visiting up there. Go to some campgrounds and stuff. So, Bradley, how about you? How are things on the East Coast today. Good. Happy to be here I’ve been trying to

do I’ve got a bunch of lead gen projects I’m working on. And so I’m trying to spend as much time on those as possible. But I’ve had a really good month in real estate flipping land and I’ve got a lot of deals coming in right now. So it’s kind of hard because I’m, I’m conflicted, the real estate money is really damn good. So I have to do I have to pursue that when it comes in. But at the same time, I’ve got other projects I’m trying to work on. So it’s kind of difficult balancing right now, but I’m happy to be here and got a lot of stuff coming up. So that’s the end. Well, we got a few things I want to mention to everybody real quick. First of all, is kofu. Live as we’ve been saying that is still on, we got a lot of cool,

cool stuff we’re going to be talking about. You can find out more about that at Boku live.com not just the cool stuff, but also what you can get. So head over there, check out the VIP ticket, I highly recommend it. We have priced it accordingly. We really want people to grab the VIP ticket and get

The most out of this. But if you want, you can grab the VIP plus as well and get some one on one time with us, which if you were going to book that separately, I mean, we know roughly what each other charge but I didn’t sit down and like calculate it out, but it’s a hell of a deal. So if that’s something you want to take advantage of, go grab one of those. There are limited number of those because we can’t just sit around talking to everybody all day. Unfortunately, we do have our own businesses and agencies to run. So go and check those out. We got some more information coming out later in August about the guest speakers and exactly what they’re going to be covering. But we got some great stuff. Jeffrey Smith is going to be joining us again and we’ve got two more agency owners along with Rob Beal and dedhia is going to be giving a case study to so tons of stuff and more. More to come. So again, poku live.com. Now, something else I want to talk about and Bradley, maybe you can share some info. I just got the link to this. You’re going to be talking with Jeremy from Press Advantage on Monday. Correct.

Yes, Monday at 3:30pm.

We’ve got another webinar with Jeremy, one of the CO owners of Press Advantage, which is the press release service that we’ve been using. I mean, primarily for several years now I’ve been with Press Advantage for six since. They’ve pretty much since they launched, so five or six years, maybe even longer than that. But anyways, he only opens up the subscription offers that he’s done for us. Rarely, let’s put it that way. Very rarely does he open up those subscription offers. And he’s, um, he’s prepared or planning to do that again next week. There are some new features that are been rolling out for Press Advantage and it’s just a good time to do so. And we’ve been asking him to open that back up again for some time. So he’s, he’s actually doing that for us next Monday at 3:30pm. So be on the lookout for the link. If you don’t, if Adam doesn’t post it here, you’ll get it via email plus in the groups and sign up for that any of you that are using press releases consistently for your marketing, whether it’s for clients or your own projects, we highly recommend them. They work incredibly well. I use them a lot. And so if you’re doing a lot of them, it’s probably best in your best interest to have your own subscription. And next week’s a good time to get it. So be there. Definitely, yeah, so that’ll be Monday. 3pm Eastern, and I thought will be Say that again. I believe it’s 330 Let me double-check. No, it’s 3 pm. I’m sorry. Yes. 3pm. Okay, so 3pm Eastern, and we will be sending out an email about that. I did just post the link. So stay tuned for that. But if you are interested in what press releases can do for you, then I highly suggest showing up plus Jeremy like Bradley said it’s gonna have a very special offer going with that. Yeah, real quick, guys. If anybody you know, before you even go on the webinar for that if, if you want to see how to use press releases in a way that just works incredibly well. Just go to our YouTube channel and search for press release SEO, and you’ll find

The webinar that we did, it’s also at MGYB. If you look in the webinar section on MGYB, the store, you’ll see that there’s we did a Marco and I did a webinar about how we use press releases and PR silo stacking. So essentially siloing press releases together. And it works really, really well. And I would highly recommend it if you’re on the fence or considering getting your own press release subscription that you go watch that webinar first so that you have an idea of how powerful they are and how to use them the best way. Definitely, will Bradley beat me to it. I was going to say speaking of MGYB and a lot of you guys took advantage of the awesome Fourth of July sale we had last month. There’s still some good stuff going on. If you had some updates coming so go check out mg y v.co for your done for you services. But yeah, as Bradley said up there, you’ll see the little webinar button click on that. And then there’s a bunch of the best practices webinars which is just basically free, great training information. So go check those out. So here’s a bit of something Why don’t we bundle the Press Advantage offer with Local PR Pro I’m just throwing it out there we don’t have to decide right now but I mean it just it goes hand in hand let’s let’s work it out and make them an offer they can’t refuse so they get results right away the way we do that. And one more thing before we go I don’t want to set any hard dates because it’s a work in progress. But there’s something coming for Syndication Academy. Yeah, look new flavor.

We’re working on it. We’re working on it guys. Let’s say sometime towards the fourth quarter of the year sometime. Look for it. It revamped updated when I bought properties. I don’t know how you can make the best better but we are.

Yeah, yes. Yeah. And I was gonna say I was gonna turn into t test I’ll keep this one short because we can’t really say much about it. But yeah, the webinar go get signed up for that. Keep your eyes and ears peeled about Syndication Academy and Bradley’s going to be doing some testing for some additional link building based stuff. And we’ll just leave it at that for now and say that, should that go? Well, that’s definitely something we’ll be letting everyone know about. Yep.

Cool. All right, guys. Anything else before we dive in? We’re good. All right. Let’s do it. Grab the screen.

You guys are seeing my screen correct?

Yep. So yeah, right.

What Phone Number To Use When Setting Up The GMB For A Local Lead Gen Site?

jump right into it. So olana says, Hi guys. Setting up a local lead gen site. Haven’t got a phone number for it yet. Would you wait until after you have the number to set up the GMB? Yes, I think you have to actually you have to have a phone number. As far as I remember. I haven’t set up a GMB in quite some time, but I’m pretty sure you have to have a phone number. Also, which of the following Do you use for lead gen an 800 number, a one 300 number. I’ve never even heard of that mobile or local landline with a reader.

I prefer using call rail. I still use call rail. I’ve used call fire in the past and I’ve got a ton of numbers in call fire comm that I would like to port over to call rail is a better platform. It gives you a ton more features. It’s inexpensive, but it takes it’s a long process of porting numbers. So I just have two accounts. I’ve got call firing call rail. I prefer using call rail. Again, I use call rail for several of my lead gen assets as well as my own real estate business. Because I use a lot of phone numbers for tracking marketing purposes and stuff. But I really, really like call rail. Does anybody else have any suggestions?

Call rail. I can’t say anything else. It’s what I use. Yeah. And no, not an 800 number. All right. So if you’re going to work local, which your car it no matter where you go, you don’t want that 800 number you want that local number you want people kind of like that local numbers I’ve seen better results with a local number than an ad hundred number unless you’re widely known for having that 800 number. Does that make sense? Or did I lose everybody? So 100 works when you’re widely known like like, something like roto rooter, let’s say or plumbers nine one, that kind of thing. But if you’re local and you want people to you to want to create that familiarity it really helps to have that local number.

Yes, I agree. I use answerconnect.com to send phone calls into a call center so that the phone always gets answered. It screens the calls there’s a ton of benefits for using a call center. And I have been since 2013, the same account, answer Connect comm I really can’t say enough good things about them. And so they give you an 800 number but you can forward or redirect local numbers to the 800 number which is what I do. That way. You know, I can have multiple lead gen assets all funneling into that with their own separate local numbers, but all funneling into the same call center if it’s for the same service provider, essentially.

But there’s a lot of really cool things. And by the way, guys, I’m working on a lot of lead gen stuff right now, and I’ve got some case studies I’m working on that I’ll be making public, not just within our groups. And I’ve also got some things that I’m going to be introducing to everybody when I do make that case studies public that I think will help a lot of you with your lead gen business. I can’t really talk much about it right now, but I just kind of wanted to tease it. So there you go.

How To Generate Quality Content For A Niche Blog If You Don’t Like Writing?

The next question is, Hey, guys, I want to set up a niche blog, but I don’t like writing How can I generate the quality content myself for my niche blog? Will the generated content be good enough for niche blogging? Thanks, Content Kingpin.

When I first started in SEO and local lead gen way back in, you know, 2010 timeframe. I was actually doing blog posts. Right after, I’d kind of developed the Syndication Academy method, and because it was just working like crazy good, I knew that blogging was going to be the way to populate the networks and get results. And so I was actually blogging for industries that I knew nothing about. I was actually writing the posts myself. And it was incredibly time-consuming. And it’s frustrating because I had to learn a lot about the businesses and the topics and such. And I, fortunately, I got introduced to content curating, and I don’t remember who introduced me to it or whatever, but I kind of started reading about it. And then I bought a couple of courses about content curating, and some plugins and all kinds of stuff. And I started curating content and I got much more efficient at generating content. And he also I didn’t have to know as much about a topic because you can just find subject matter, you know, find articles on the web or content. It doesn’t have to be articles. It can be podcasts, videos, infographics, slide presentations, it could be a number of things that are based around the topic that you are writing about that are written by or produce the contents produced by subject matter experts or SMEs. And you can get really good and really efficient at producing content by just being able to find and locate content developed or produced by subject matter experts. And then curating it and creating a unique post based upon using, you know, snippets of content from the subject matter experts, it’s already been published. So that’s, you know, been my preferred method. And I was actually doing that on my own. I use some tools and some plugins at the time. But once my business got to a certain level, it was just way too time-consuming. Even with using curated content, I was too time-consuming for me to produce it myself. So I developed training and hired a virtual assistant and handed it over to them and she’s still with me today. By the way, her name is Esther she’s still my primary number one blogger that works for me right now.

But anyway, long story short, I ended up training multiple virtual assistants or bloggers or curators as what they are really, with that training. So I kind of polished it up a bit. And that’s what Content Kingpin is, which is one of our training courses. And it’s the same process that my bloggers all use today, I talked about a couple of tools, but we still primarily do everything manually. Just using like a like Feedly. For example, to the group and categorize content feeds that we know like and trust that then we can use to all So a quick glimpse my bloggers go in for whenever they’ve got to produce or publish a post, they’ll go in and just look at Feedly select that particular category or folder for the project that they’re working on. And it will show all the content that’s available than the recent content that’s available around that particular topic. And then they can choose a topic to blog about to curate a post about and then pick and choose a few articles that will either reinforce that the idea that they’re trying to convey with their posts, or sometimes they’ll do like argumentative posts where they’ll try to show in a different opinion from what perhaps others are saying. So they’ll show two sides of the coin, if that makes sense, as two different competing opinions about the same topic anyway, it’s great, it works incredibly well, it also creates co-citation. And so we highly recommend you check out Content Kingpin, it’s one of the best ways to do it. Not only that but if you were to use that site type of the system, the Content Kingpin method, then you can get away from doing it yourself. So you don’t have to publish I mean, I would learn it first. You know, learn it and understand how to do it first, but then you can actually put a virtual assistant that you hire through the course and have them do it for you, and you can kind of just managing and guide them until they get up to your standards. But that’s the best way to do it. Guys. I call it hands-free content marketing and it’s a great revenue source too because it really is simple.

Once you understand the topic concept is really, really good to anybody want to comment on that Content Kingpin doesn’t get enough credit for does what it does. People don’t understand it, I think because they get all the all this different information about unique content and duplicate content and all this bullshit that’s out there. That’s nothing. Really if it were so places like Huffington Post’s would not exist. Google News would not exist unless curated content was okay. But not only Okay, whether it was good I’d be how much traffic does it get Bing, Yahoo. All they do all day long is republish story. Huffington Post is a collection of republish story that all it is and all you’re doing with Content Kingpin is republishing the story. You’re summarizing them right taking power, whatever it is that you do it. And you’re adding your own commentary and proper attribution and it’s a done deal. I mean, it’s so simple. And yet people try to make it so much more difficult than it really should be. But yeah, totally Content Kingpin for the win. You know, and it’s interesting. I’ve just pulled this up because I did this and if you guys remember masterclass, we had a, we had a kind of a middle-tier webinar coaching program that we had called masterclass for a number of years. And I did this as a local case study, Gainesville home pros, and I’ve never done anything with it since I think that was back in 2015. Oh, look at that. It says account suspended. That’s interesting. That’s one of my Okay, well, anyway, I would sure like to show you that blog because that was curated content, the same method. My blogger Esther, who was the first one I trained using that method, produced all the content on that site using curated content, and they were beautiful posts and unfortunately, it looks like that account has been that hosting account perhaps has been suspended. I have done anything with it years. But I would like to show you guys some examples of that. But I don’t have anything that I can show you right now off the top of my head. But anyway, it’s it works really, really well the posts come out beautiful if you do it right. I would highly recommend going through Content Kingpin.

No, because there are a few things that you have to do in order to not infringe on copyright. So for example, you don’t want to curate images that can get you into trouble, asked me how I know.

Because you’ll get extortion letters from like Getty Images and other you know, asshole law firms out there that are just looking for people that have republished images without copyright, without rights to it. So there’s like a lot of things. There’s not a lot of things, but there are a few things that you really should do to make sure that you’re covering your ass when you’re curating content. So again, I highly recommend you go through the product, it’s through that program. It’s a really, really good program. It’s the same that we use today. You know, there are a lot of tools out there that can help you to manage content curating, but we’ve already.

He’s found that it really just is just as quick and easy because what happens with a lot of these tools is they stop being supported over time. We know one of them was Curation Suite that we actually promoted. And fortunately after promoting it, and after a year or so, like the support just stopped and it kind of fell off the face of the earth. The same thing with a bunch of curating plugins that I’ve used over the years, they just eventually fall off the market and they just don’t get supported. So we’ve learned to just stick with the manual process and it’s you know, once somebody becomes efficient with that process is really is a very efficient way to produce content. So you don’t need all the additional tools and plugins and things like that. So that’s why I recommend that product because it’s a Content Kingpin because it will teach you how to do it manually and then you can teach a VA how to do it by just putting them right through the same training. It’s a great question though.

What Training Do You Offer In The MasterMind That You Can’t Get In The Syndication Academy?

Jason says I’m currently in the Syndication Academy 2.0 and I was wanting to know all of the different features and benefits in the mastermind that you don’t get in the Academy. Is this all of these different training you offer in the mastermind if I joined the mastermind, can I get a discount for the cost of the academy? Okay, so first of all the mastermind you have direct access to my partners and me, as well as all the other members of the group, which we have a lot of really savvy marketers and agency owners and CEOs and such in our group. But you also have direct access to all of us to where you can ask us questions in the Facebook group at any time. We’re in there answering questions often. Plus, we each host our own separate webinars inside the mastermind. They’re bi-weekly webinars. So every two weeks each one of us hosts our own webinar. So you get to come to ask us questions at length during the webinars. Like you can post questions ahead of time for the webinars, we’ll do site audits, we’ll you know, look at your, your SEO, your you know, on-page stuff off-page stuff, we’ll help you with projects if you need it. Plus, as I said, you get to you know, come to ask me stuff, or Marco stuff or Adam, or Hernan or Chris any one of us. So there’s a lot of benefits in there that we don’t provide anywhere else we’ll go as deep into, whatever subject you want to go into, you know, and that’s one of the things that we can’t do on a free setting like this or any in any of our other groups. So the mastermind is definitely where you want to be if you want to get all that, as well as Syndication Academy is included in that. So you can cancel your Syndication Academy account if you join the mastermind because it’s included in that as well as all of our products under $300. Anything over $300 you get a significant discount. So there’s a ton of benefits to be in the mastermind. Anybody else wanna?

Yeah, I would just say Jason, if you just started Syndication Academy, if you’re just getting into it, then contact support and we’ll refund whatever you paid for Syndication Academy and you can or you can apply it towards them. However, you want to work that out, we’ll work it out for you. We always do. Why because membership has its privileges. So that’s why we do things the way we do and yes, I mean, above all else is this group of people like-minded people who are working towards what we call POFU position of Fuck you, where you have the kind of power and money where you can pick and choose your clients, your clients come to you instead of you going knocking on doors on $500 clients who are a pain in the ass. So rather than doing all that you getting all you get all of this training, you get the mindset training, you get the how-to get all of the collective knowledge, and then you have five, almost six years of webinars. Now some of them of course are dated, but we do we’re not doing webinars every week. It’s either Bradley or me like we take every other Thursday. You got Hernan, you got Adam. Yeah, Chris, everyone is giving you their perspective and their take on things so you get all of these different points of view, all of this all of these different experiences coming to you and helping you in whatever it is that you’re trying to do whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve. So it’s not just what you get as far as training. It’s the people and the relationships, the networking that you can do inside the mastermind like I know people who are working together in different projects, and we tell people to become the big fish in a little pond. But then some of them go on to and I’m gonna mention his name, for example, to dominate in the Fort Worth area. And you got another one in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the Twin Cities you got someone in the Dirty South, right South Carolina, Georgia area, who are Domini who may have started as the big fish in the little pile or becomes the little fish in the big fish in the little pond. But then they move to a bigger pond. So that we’re always pushing. We’re always encouraging people. That growth means you go to make more money until you reach a stepping point where you say, Okay, I met, hopefully, this is where I want to be, this is how I want to do it. And if I choose not to work tomorrow, I can do that because the process and the systems and everything else that I’ve gained through being in the mastermind, will take care of me not being it, the system is there, so I don’t have to be there. And I mean, just the way that this happened and how this happened, and how people finally are able to step away and say, Man, I can spend time with my family and I can relax and I can do the things I want to do, rather than having to do the things that I have to do things that I must with no other choice. So I think that that’s just one of the greater things about the mastermind is that mindset that awful, you’re going after that poof hopefully you get on that path. And it’s it becomes your magnificent obsession. I thank you CTF letcher for that. But it becomes your magnificent obsession. You’re going after that and there is nothing that can get in your way of achieving that powerful, that’s when you know that you’re there. And that’s what we’re there for. So, just because you brought up CT, and we don’t have a lot of questions, so I know we got time when we did the interview with CT Fletcher, I’ve created this text document. It’s been on my desktop ever since. And hopefully, nobody gets offended because CT Fletcher likes to cuss a lot. Say but here’s a lot of here are the quotes that struck me when we were at when we really were Marco interviewing him. I was on the webinar, but it was really Marco interviewing CT Fletcher, who’s a powerlifter. He broke a ton of records for a while. But anyway, some of these are really funny. I’m not gonna read them out to you, but you remember these Marco? Absolutely. I love them so awesome. I still watch them. Will will is king. Yeah, man. Oh, man. Oh, man. He’s so good. You ain’t pretty motherfucker. Yeah, you ain’t that birdie.

So funny. I mean, that one right there cracks me up too. I laughed out loud. Anyways, I just thought that was funny because I happen to notice it on my desktop the other day and I giggled about it. You just brought it up.

Would You Recommend A Subdirectory Or Subfolder On The Same Domain When Creating The Blog?

So anyway, Jason, next question says, Hey, guys, I have an e-commerce website using WordPress with WooCommerce. Would you recommend a subdirectory? Or folder on the same domain and load a new WordPress and create a blog? Yes, that’s what we’ve always recommended. I mean, I don’t do any e-commerce stuff. But I mean, in the past, I have done some SEO for some e-commerce clients. But it’s not something I’d like to do. So I got out of doing it, but we’ve always recommended it. So do you have control over like essentially a content distribution engine, right, and that’s WordPress is great for that? So you can either put it in a subfolder or directory of the root domain or what we always recommended was to put it in a subdomain instead. And that’s because a subdomain is still treated as content have a separate web entity or separate site, I should say, a separate website than the root domain. So that if you’re in your content distribution, you do something spammy, which if you follow our methods, you won’t have any trouble, at least, we, you know, as it stands right now, but Google could change everything in a moment’s notice. But we’ve never had any issues. But if you put in a subdomain, and you were doing something spammy or something, Google changed its rules, all of a sudden, and something became spammy, they wouldn’t affect the root domain, which is where your e-commerce site resides, it would affect the subdomain only. So we always prefer, like, you know, you could put blog as a subdomain to whatever your domain is, or whatever you want it to be news or something like that. And that’s what we prefer to do. But you could put it in a subdirectory. But yeah, that gives you the opportunity then to do all your content marketing. Remember, if you’ve got an e-commerce site, and you’ve got product categories, for example, you can mirror those same categories. We talked about theme mirroring all the time.

If you don’t know what that is, you know, it’s essentially duplicating or mirroring your site structure on other assets. So you have if you have product categories in your eCommerce site, you could mirror those same categories as content categories, or you know, in WordPress, just categories are the same. You could title them and everything the same as what they are on your eCommerce site. And then you can publish posts, blog posts, or sporting posts. That’s kind of a link building method that in place them within those particular silos or categories in the WordPress site, distribute them out to a syndication network, mirror, all of that stuff on a G site, and our ys drive stack, press releases, all that kind of stuff. You mirror all of that together, and it works really, really well to push power to your, you know, your ultimate destination, which would be your e-commerce product pages. So you want to comment on that. Yeah, we used to recommend going to a subdomain because we wanted to protect the root cause we were doing. let’s admit it, we were doing a lot of evil stuff yes to the subdomains, we were blasting them to the point where if we had them connected to the route, any penalty would pass to the root. What we’ve done is we’ve taken a step out, because now everything goes through our SEO power shield. And so now the route is protected.

And so in order to push even more power, by all means, put it in a subdirectory because then you’re accruing everything inside the root when you go into that subdirectory rather than stepping in a subdomain, which is treated as a separate website, so you’re one hop away from your root domain anyway and you’re losing link equity. When you’re anytime that you’re one hop or more away, you lose link equity at the top. When you’re in a subdomain, you don’t lose that link equity is even when you’re in the root. You don’t lose that link equity when you’re in a folder inside the root. You don’t lose that link equity because you’re not a hub away. You’re in the root, now if you do want to protect it, then you just install in the dub dub dub. So that’s where you would do the root because that’s a subdomain anyway.

So that’s how you do it. But we have the SEO PowerShell it’s not necessary anymore. Because everything that we do goes through our SEO power shield, which amplifies and protects. That’s why we call it the SEO, power shield. It powers it up, it amplifies and it protects it shields it and so that my recommendation would be totally totally unless you’re planning on doing a whole lot of evil stuff to that subdomain go with a sub but with it should be with a folder inside the root.

What Type Of Brand Property Link To Use In A Press Release?

Awesome. So next is BB BB. Look, you’ve gotten better, buddy. Your questions are a lot shorter and not quite as many. So I think we’re finally getting through to you, man. And I’m just giving you our time baby. It’s we’re always like having you here but he says Hey guys, number one does that the link to a branded property in the press release should be to the property or to one of its pages that were syndicated by RSS. Well, it depends on what you’re doing. But so, my strategy and again, it’s covered in the press release SEO, or piece PR silo stacking webinar that we did Marco and I did. Again, you can find that at MGYB or just go to youtube.com slash semantic mastery use the channel search feature search for press release SEO and you’ll find it you know, right at the top go watch that. Because what I prefer to do is we you know, we’re constantly blogging for clients or for projects period. So that populates syndication network, right, we’re building topical relevancy and depth to our silos, right depth to a particular topic. And then they syndicate out to syndication networks, right. And within every single post, within the proper silo architecture, we’re always linking back up from the post back up to the top of the silo page, which is the page that we’re trying to drive traffic to. Right. So what we do what I do is I always, you know, I like to publish press releases that are highlighting or showcasing a recent blog post. And that links to the blog post URL, which within the blog post, actually links back up to the page on the site. But I mean, you don’t have to use that strategy all the time. That’s what I do. Because I consistently publish press, we’re consistently blogging and we’re consistently publishing press releases for all of my clients or my lead gen asset. So it just works out really well because we’re providing deep links, so links further down into a silo that helps to power up with proper silo architecture, it helps to power up the entire silo and helps all of the different keywords that we’re targeting within the silo start to rise or surface in the search engines because of those deep links, right. So that’s my preferred method because it adds more diversity and it’s linking to multiple points.

Within the main money site, as opposed to always constantly hitting the homepage or just the product or service pages, the top of silo pages in other words, so I like to do deep links, but it depends on what you’re doing. If you’re not doing a lot of press releases, if you’re you know, you only got a budget for a handful of them, then it might be better to actually hit your homepage and or your top of silo pages, that kind of thing. So it really just depends on what your overall content marketing strategy is, and what you’re going to be linking to, you know that that’s going to determine where you’re going to link to from within your site. Okay.

That’s it that said, I always almost not 100% but we almost always link from within press releases to a page or post on the money site. Unless we’re doing a two-step which again, go watch the press release SEO webinar, and you’ll understand what I mean. But for example, if a client as all my local clients have Google My Business profiles. So if we publish a post when we publish a blog post on the blog, my blogger also for most of my clients will end up publishing a GMB post that points a link back to the blog post. So essentially, the GMB post is nothing other than a summary of the blog post itself with the same featured image as the image for the GMB post the photo, and then the button link, the Learn More button link links back to the blog post. So sometimes our press releases will actually link to the GMB post URL, because that ultimately links to the blog post URL, so the two-step process there. But you can also and I’ve talked about this almost every week now for the last like two months on Hump Day hangouts baby so I’m sure you’re aware of what I was what I’ve said. But you know, if you’ve got particular keywords that you’re trying to push, then you can actually go extract the post URLs from like, for example, the blogs on your syndication network, so blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, you can go extract these post URLs that are where the re-syndication or of the published the post that you publish targeting those keywords. And you can link to those within press releases too if you want to because again, that’s tiered link building. So it’s helpful in anyone, but you don’t have to. I prefer to link to those blog post URLs using daddy as link building from an MGYB because I like to use the press releases to link directly back to the money site, or two primary tier one assets, such as a GMB profile, GMB map, Id page, any one of those types of things when it comes to that.

That was a good question. By the way, bb though. Yeah, that that was a really good question. Now, I mean, the link building varies it depends on how much power you’re trying to push and where and everything is gonna be where it’s needed, where everything’s needed. Because sometimes it’s just one press release, push, can get you to where you need to be. Other times, you’re going to need way more. Yeah, there are other times when you’re going to need even link building into the press releases. There’s no one set rule because sometimes it’s just the SEO power shield coming, coming in, right coming online. And that’s enough. And sometimes it doesn’t even have to do with the competition because we’ve seen it even in some tough keyword sets that you start ranking like right from the SEO power shield. So this totally ended depends on the no definitive answer for this, other than, you’re going to have to get your press release. If you’ve set it up correctly. And you hit your top-level category rather than just like everybody does your homepage. Then your top-level category will flow and it’ll push all of that power so that everything benefits from it, including the top-level category, not just the longtail keywords, it’s how we teach it now. We teach people to go from the top-down instead of bottom-up it

It’s a little different, it’s kind of the same thing except we’re going. For example, if we want to rank for gold futures, this is just an example. It’s incredibly difficult to rank for that. But we would go even one, one level higher, we would go after the gold category, the entire gold category to pull up the gold features category instead of trying to push it up with all of the long tails. And I’ve seen that it has a greater effect when you try to go for that top-level category. on everything else, not only the longtail but the subcategory that you’re after. So I’m always telling people you go one level up. So keeping this in mind, then it’s up to you. I always tell people that we have to be scientists when we’re gauging how it is that we’re going to do this. What effect we’re trying to create, you’re going to have to create your link building and press releases are part of link building. You’re going to create it so that whatever you’re trying to benefit the most guests

The most benefit out of what you’re doing. And so you approach it that way. Yeah. So it varies. That’s the short answer. It varies. It depends, right?

Can We Use The PR Stacking Strategies With Article Directories?

Next, can we treat an article direct article, an article directory as press releases, meaning publishing, as the PR stacking and also linking to actual prs? Okay, I don’t do any article directory stuff I haven’t for years, not saying that it can’t still be useful. I just haven’t because they’ve been known to be spammy. I think a lot of the links from those get discredited. It’s much better to get like, you know, articles instead of being published on article directories, which were always known as SEO like, honey, honey, what do you call them honey, honey holes or whatever you call them. But I’m not saying that it won’t work because I don’t know. I haven’t tested it in years. If I was going to do it, maybe I would do it. Where I was only linking to SEO shield assets or like you say, can you link to PRs? Yes, that would be fun because press release wherever press releases published is going to be able to handle those type of links, you may be able to push good link equity to them, or even, it doesn’t really matter because they’re not your money site. So I, I, again, I haven’t used article directories in probably five or six years.

And so I don’t really know whether they’re still viable or if they’re still helping at any level. But if I was going to use them, I would do it too. I would use them to link only back to tier one asset not directly to the money site. And press releases are a great thing to link to. So, Marco, I know you don’t use article directories either.

I used to, it’s not necessary anymore. I don’t need to go that far. Right. The way that we’re doing it pushes so much power that we don’t need to go. I mean, when you’re already at number one, like how much better can you go than the number one.

So maybe at some point with some of the case studies that we’re doing and everything else that we have coming on e-commerce and everything else that we’re experimenting. Yeah, I would say that we can do that. But right now, or maybe we need to do that. But right now the way that we’re doing things is not necessary.

What Do You Mean By Kitchen Sink Spam?

Agreed. The last question was, what do you mean when you say kitchen sink? It gets me confused. Yeah, when I say kitchen sink spam, or when we say that, that just means using link building tools and throwing every kind of link like even some real spammy stuff, at whatever your target is. So like when we say you can throw kitchen sink spam at it, it means you could use some of the most god awful links in the world and throw them at, you know, point them at a particular target and still benefit from it. We would never encourage anybody to do that with their money site. And in fact, we prefer to still use better links.

Even if you’re using spam tools, for example, like you know, our link building master dedhia he uses a ton of link building tools but he always recommends that your the links that he builds to whatever your targets are, which we always recommend tier-one entity targets or your SEO shield essentially. But he always likes to suggest recommends using two layers two levels of contextual web two Dotto links. And then throwing if you want a third tier of links, you can throw kitchen sink spam at those contextual web two dot o links. So that’s what we mean by kitchen sink spam, it means pretty much anything under the sun, that’s a link. And a lot of those would be toxic if they’re not used properly, but they can still provide a benefit if used properly. And that’s what we talk about when we talk about you know, you can hit SEO power shields with kitchen sink spam, and they’ll end up ranking. We don’t recommend it. We still recommend using the contextual web to Dotto links. Add your first and second-tier links that are being built to your tier one assets. But you can always throw kitchen sink spam behind that if you wanted and still receive a benefit Mark has done several tests I have to, but we even did the Marco and Rob did the kind of public case study for the DC plumber and just hit it with like over a million kitchen sink spam style links, including porn porn links, and it ranked and it’s probably still ranking today. So and we just had someone in RYS Academy reloaded last week, come in and tell us that they tried the million kitchen sink, spam link test and got really good results and 89% increase in traffic month to month. Wow. So it works. However, think of it this way. If garbage links work, how much better? Will quality links work? How much better will the way that we do the tiered link building right? contextual tiered link building

How much better is that, not only for now but long term when they come looking? The first thing that they look for is that kitchen sink spam, that that the automation is is what Google is looking for. And we’re kind of hiding in plain sight because we’re not giving them what everybody else is doing. We’re doing it a little bit differently. And it just playing work. So when you’re thinking about going after that, that million links, and yeah, you can pay 50 bucks in fiber, and there’s going to be complete TSA, and it’s going to be truly, truly garbage type of stuff that you don’t want to look at. Why would you do that to your project? Why would you do that when it can show up in your link profile? Do you want that? Because we had that showing up for DC plumbing. We had those links index, man. And seriously, you didn’t want your kids looking at that you didn’t want you to want to be sitting there with your wife. Looking at some of that stuff that was coming through it was it was like, the really bad garbage man.

So why would so when I’m talking to people, my question is if you want to test and you don’t care, you don’t care what shows up in the link profile, you don’t care about anything. You’re just trying to make you make some money. It’s a fun test, then, by all means, do it. But if it’s something that you care about, why would you mistreat something that you care about that one?

Agreed.

Can You Blast The Press Release And Drive Stacks With Backlinks Without Negative Impact On The Money Site And GMB?

Okay, next is Gordon, what’s up Gord? It’s been a while he says, Hey, guys, hope you’re safe. And well just have a quick question. When using press releases or an ROI S Drive stack through the MGYB store. Can you blast either or both of them with hundreds or even thousands of backlinks without any negative effect on your money site? Or GMB listing? And if so, will that increase the SEO juice flowing to either entity and help them to rank? Thank you very much. Yeah. And that’s, I mean, that’s exactly what we were just talking about.

We prefer to build links to our tier one entity assets such as the SEO power shield, our last drive stack, g site press releases the organic press release organization page, you know, the idx page, anything like that. And that’s if you set it up correctly, you’re not going to have any negative results whatsoever, which is why we set the things up the way that we do. That’s why we call it the SEO power shield because it shields it’s like, I’ve always called it an SEO firewall, right? It creates a firewall around your money site. And so that’s exactly what we’re talking about. embeds and or backlinks work really, really well. In fact, you can even take your money site it for example, and you know, embed it in a G site and then hammer the G site page with backlinks. And that’s going to help your money site page benefit without there being an actual direct hyperlink on that page. Does that make sense? So yeah, that’s what we were just talking about. With Bibi’s question when we just hammer our assets with backlinks because it helps to push ultimately it flows down through to whatever our target destination is, which could be a GMB asset.

Could be a Google Site could be a money site. It could be all three of those. So yes, that would work. Any comments on that?

Should You Interlink A Post If The Main Article Has 5 Jump Links?

No, that’s perfect. Pavlos up, he says, Hey guys last time, I missed an opportunity to say thank you. Well, you’re welcome. Pavlo He says, question in one of your videos, you said that I can copy main silo page content and create a post. The Post will be canonicalized back to the main article, the canonical link itself will be a jump link to the Main article.

The question is should I interlink these posts if I have if the Main article has five jump links, and I’ve created five posts from the main content? I think I kind of vaguely remember this conversation we had on Hump Day Hangouts, but I’m not quite following the question. I think what, what I was talking about if and hopefully, I’m not off base here, but prefer using long-form content now for content for websites or for money sites, instead of in the past, like, you know, five years ago, you know, you could create a kind of thin content type of silo page. And then each supporting a keyword that you would find within your with your keyword research. So all of the supporting keywords that you would stack within a particular silo, I just always use spreadsheets for that. So I create a column but my top-level keyword at the top, you know, the column header, and then I would go extract all of the relevant supporting keywords and key phrases and put them in underneath that in that same column right in a spreadsheet. And then that would be that that goes to my bloggers, for them to produce content around so that they highlight one of the supporting keywords within the correct silo. And it used to be that I would create kind of thin content, top of silo pages, and then target individual longer tail keywords with blog posts, but that becomes repetitive redundant. And it doesn’t work as well what I found as having a long-form top of silo page now, that contains a lot of those supporting keywords so that broken down into subheadings, right, so and I think that’s what you were talking about is when I mentioned that you can create long-form content, and even put a table of contents with jump links at the top of the content, which is really good for SEO. And then you can actually create blog posts targeting those longer tail phrases that are already present on the silo page itself right to top of silo page that have jump links to them and then link from those supporting articles within the blog post to those jump links. Because then it’s, it’s, it’s linking to the top of silo page, but it’s also reinforcing that longer tail subheading or keyword, right, so that’s supporting keyword. If that’s what you’re talking about, then let’s see. The question is should I interlink these posts with the Main article as well? Five jump links. And I’ve created five posts from the main content. Yeah, I mean, I don’t I can’t get too far into this Marco would kill me if I did.

But if you’re interlinking, your supporting posts correctly, daisy-chaining them together then and they’re just linking from post to post. And from within each post linking back to the top of silo page, even if it’s at a jump link, a jump link to the top of silo page to some section on the top of silo page. Yes, that would work. That would work really, really well. Actually. Any comments on that Marco?

Sorry about that.

A lot. Ah, no, it’s not really something that I’m willing to talk about in a free gotten a free forum like this. They are not going to get into that because it just puts so much power and it gets around everything that Google can throw at you. So no, that’s fine. We’ll leave it at that. Okay.

But yeah, just get creative with it. Think about you know what you’re doing with your structure. And I don’t like to if I don’t know where you say you can just clone copy main silo page content and create a post, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t do that on the same site what I was talking about with cloning or copying or mirroring, right is within the G site. Right. So if you’ve got your top of silo page, and you’ve got all the content on the page, you can always create, we recommend mirroring that top of silo page on the G site. And then if you had supporting posts within that category on your money site, I don’t typically duplicate or mirror posts onto a G site unless I’m having trouble ranking a particular keyword in which case then I will create child pages on the G site that is each child a one to one ratio, child page for every post within that silo, and then just embed those in there and that’s what I was talking about with the jumping links, you can actually create jump links from the G site back to the money site there. But again, that’s more kind of mastermind stuff or heavy hitter club stuff. So hopefully you got some value out of that. But I wouldn’t copy top of silo content and republish it on the same blog from your money site. I wouldn’t. Personally I wouldn’t do that I would have new content curated, not written because I use curated content for blog posts, the curated targeting the keywords that I’m trying to push that is on the top of the silo page if that makes sense. Okay.

So another good question.

Jason says thank you. Yeah, so he’s already watched all the Syndication Academy videos, that’s okay. If you join the mastermind if you just joined recently, the Syndication Academy join the mastermind will up make it worth your while we’ll refund your Syndication Academy purchase or apply it towards your first month of mastermind or something like that, and then you can cancel that subscription. So, yep, baby says great. We’re almost

What Are Your Thoughts On The Statement That You Can Flatten A Complex Silo Into A Simple Silo?

Got a timer almost out of question. So this is good timing maybe says great. What do you think of the statement that each complex silo can be flattened to a simple silo? And if a site isn’t that big, is it better to do the flat? Yes, I always, always recommend using simple silos where possible and guys, I’m going to be updating the training, I was really hoping to get that done for today, but I didn’t. And so I’ll try to have it done by next Wednesday. But in the process, street process doc that I created for our methods and for me, you know, our methods are what we sell as done for you services and MGYB for those of you that aren’t aware of it, if you go to semantic mastery comm slash process, I’m going to bring it up. It’ll you guys can take a look at this. For those of you that haven’t already been exposed to it, this is the process street process doc that I created to that has a lot of training in there with a lot of it’s the why we do what we do.

And what you can expect from it the How is we point to our training products for the how but or the where to get it as the links over to MGYB but these are the website silo architecture, the training videos that I created, you know, five years ago or whatever, they’re, they’re still valid, but my overall process has changed slightly right it’s evolved slightly and so I’m going to redo those silo training videos where I go into what a simple silo is what a complex silo is a difference between a physical silo and a virtual silo and what I prefer to use and why I’m going to redo those videos and that will go into here the website section of the worry list entity based SEO process doc and when I do hope I’ll have this done by next week guys I really wanted to get it done by this week but I haven’t even started on it. So I’ll try to get it done by next week. And then again guys you go to semantic mastery comm slash process and you take a look at all the stuff that’s in here. There’s a lot of training here. And so anyway, that said, Yes, I always recommend a simple silo. For most projects. I’m not going to say for the most projects for most local projects, which is what I do, almost exclusively, simple silos will suffice. I used to always try to build complex solids because I thought it was going to be better. And then maybe there is some benefit to it. But what I found is a complex silo is complicated. Hence the name complex silo. And so it’s difficult to build it create some kind of funny issues that are hard to reconcile with the URLs with the slugs and that kind of with permalinks and that kind of stuff. So I prefer to stick with a simple silo, it’s much easier to manage, it’s easier to map out when you’re in the build process. So I like using simple silos for most local projects. That’s all that is ever needed. In fact, with a simple silo, if you’re using our methods, you’re going to be the on-page SEO is going to be far superior to what most of your competitors are doing anyways. So it’s not really necessary to do a complex silo. If you’re doing a very broad site with a lot of categories and subcategories, then you might be necessary to do a complex silo. But, as I said, I always try to simplify where possible. We’ve had a ton of people over the years, join one of our groups, and they map out this incredibly intricate silo map of a site. And they, you know, probably spend hours and hours and hours mapping it out and creating drawings to show the silo structure and everything and then they present it and say, What do you think you think this would work? And it’s like, Well, yeah, but it could have worked, you know, eight levels previous, where it was like a much simpler build, and you got to save yourself a ton of time. And we don’t say that to pick on anybody, but it’s because I think we as SEO types, try to overcomplicate stuff all the time, and I’ve learned over the years to try to simplify as much as possible and get results with a much simpler process and simple silo structure is the way that I prefer to build 90 95% of my sites.

commenting. I totally agree. I don’t know why people get themselves into trouble with complex silos like right from the start. Yeah, if it’s a brand new project that there’s no need for for a complex silo, unless it’s like, I don’t know, like some type of e-commerce website and you’ve seen those where there’s a bunch of complex subcategories and while category, subcategory, sub-sub categories and all of these things that really complicated but I tell people to look in the beginning, you’re good with your homepage, and three categories, three top-level categories, the three main keywords that you’re going to go after to start making money, push all the power that way, as needed. And as you see more opportunities for top-level categories. You add them, right because then your whole setup is done. And whatever you add is going to benefit from everything you’ve done previously. But if you start mapping it

Out complex from the beginning. How are you going to push the power that that’s going to need for every page and post and subcategory and sub subcategory that you’re trying to create? you’re dividing up the PageRank in such a way that it’s not going to push the initial power that it could have. There’s no way because there’s no way to keep the link flow going the right way. Let’s put it that way. Yeah, but if you keep it simple, minimize the number of categories Don’t try to go after everything at once. But just three, three categories. That gives you enough to write for about four months when you get our D keyword research. I’m sorry, that that’s not available right now. But I did keyword research gives you enough to write about four months on those three top market level categories on those silos. And then you can go and see like which one is more complicated, and you just break it up instead of making it a subcategory? You just make it another category that’s related to that one category that you already have no need to overcomplicate things I hate when people try to do that. It doesn’t have to be all that difficult. Yeah, and it’s fine because like I said, we’ve experienced that a lot over the years, and I’m not gonna lie. In years past I did the same thing, I would always approach new projects with the complex silo, trying to map all that out. And it just it became overwhelming, it became too much of a bitch too, you know, too difficult to manage the projects. And again, it creates a lot of funky issues, if you’re trying to share subcategories with other categories, especially in local like, for example, if you have, you know, your topical or service-based silos, which would be like, you know, like Tree Removal would be one silo, for example, and another silo could be tree trimming, which in reality, I’ve learned over the years that you really don’t even need to create silos for Tree Service sites because they’re all synonyms for each other. Google considers tree removal and tree trimming as synonyms anyways. But most of my tree service projects are

Still siloed like that. And if you were trying to duplicate location-based silos within each one of the topical or service-based silos, it creates some real funny URL issues that you have to reconcile. And it becomes difficult to do so or vice versa, if you had location-based silos, as your top-level silos, and then you tried to have subcategories of services, then it creates some issues too. So I learned a long time ago just to go with the simple silo structure, so much easier to manage so much easier to handle. So anyway, yeah, I totally recommend going with simple silos where possible. The last question and we’re at five o'clock. So this is a good stopping point is BB says should we have a form in the branded properties for collecting leads? Absolutely. If you’ve got form code that can be embedded in other sites, absolutely. I’m actually using I’m not going to talk about what I’m using just yet because it’s part of the case studies and I’m working on but I’m using a new lead generation tool.

It helps that has a form builder in it that works really, really good. And I’m actually embedding the form and multiple properties. Now g sites, you know, a lot of different places that I’m actually embedding the forms now because they work really, really well. And they direct all the leads back to one central location that then gets distributed out. So yeah, absolutely, there’s no doubt, I always try to put most of my businesses run on phone calls more than a phone like. In other words, the leads that I generate for businesses are more phone call leads than they are web form submissions, but I don’t ever want to not provide that as an option. So I used to, I used to really just push phone calls, but now I’m pushing the lead form submits as well, because I’ve got a really cool application that I’m using that helps to distribute the leads to wherever I want them to go. And again, I’ll reveal some of that in the coming week’s guys, but I absolutely recommend if you have a form, form code that can be embedded on other sites use it. Okay.

All right. Thanks, everybody for being here.

We will see you guys next week. Thanks, Marco for sticking around. All right. Have a good one. Thanks, everybody

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 299 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 299

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Announcement

All right, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 299. We’re one away from big Episode 300. I’m gonna call this episode where everyone is getting old and wearing glasses except Chris. I just realized all of us are now wearing glasses except Chris. Yeah, well, you guys spending too much time in front of your computers. There we go. Yeah, gotta change it around. This is the year we try to get ourselves off to the computer. So anyways, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. We’re gonna say hi, real quick catch up with everybody. And then we got a couple quick announcements before diving into the questions. So I’ll start on the bottom here since it’s cloudy weather element Marco. How you doing today? I have my lights on. That’s why it looks so bright. Yeah, it’s raining. It’s supposed to be raining. So finally got me with the lights on. But I can’t complain this nice a warm, actually. I’m kind of trying to hide trying to blend into the background. So Google doesn’t see me.

It’s all good man. I’m gonna

Having a good time.

Outstanding All right. Well, let’s work our way around. Hernan you got those new glasses what’s going on with you?

Yeah, man, I’m just trying to trying to blend in. I got I got glasses and now you got glasses. I mean yeah man we get rid of this and have a beard and growing a beard. Damn it. You’re doing the 50 K I might do the 50 now, so good man these are blue light blocking glasses, you know? Because there’s one this one guy show me one this really nerdy yellow like super like

orangey glasses and they make you look stupid. I know I won’t be wearing next week.

Yeah, do you don’t think the big square bc birth control glasses make you look stupid though right now, man. No, I can’t I can talk like this. Nobody will.

But a lady repellent. Yeah, exactly. say wait a second. Are you wearing those or are you being forced to wear this?

What this one glasses. Yeah, I’m just kidding.

You look good. I was just wondering maybe you’re making you know this light and blue light blue light blocking. I’m still confused. Why are you wearing blue light blocking glasses in the middle of the day or now? Yeah, well, it’s time. 5pm So, five 6pm So, all right. Well, before we tell everyone all about our AI problems, let’s see Chris, how you doing today? Man? Doing good, man. I hit the gym for like, I don’t know, like after another two week break for the first time again. Sore all over again. Hit the leg so hard. So yeah, like, I’m pretty sure you’re gonna feel the same way. Next week?

Yes, definitely. Yeah, I’m headed out. Taking a couple of weeks and hitting the road literally going to be gone for a couple of weeks and doing some trail running. So for those of you in the northwest, you know what mountain trail was? Yeah. We’re going to be doing a run around Mount St. Helens, as well as doing some visiting up there. Go to some campgrounds and stuff. So, Bradley, how about you? How are things on the East Coast today. Good. Happy to be here I’ve been trying to

do I’ve got a bunch of lead gen projects I’m working on. And so I’m trying to spend as much time on those as possible. But I’ve had a really good month in real estate flipping land and I’ve got a lot of deals coming in right now. So it’s kind of hard because I’m, I’m conflicted, the real estate money is really damn good. So I have to do I have to pursue that when it comes in. But at the same time, I’ve got other projects I’m trying to work on. So it’s kind of difficult balancing right now, but I’m happy to be here and got a lot of stuff coming up. So that’s the end. Well, we got a few things I want to mention to everybody real quick. First of all, is kofu. Live as we’ve been saying that is still on, we got a lot of cool,

cool stuff we’re going to be talking about. You can find out more about that at Boku live.com not just the cool stuff, but also what you can get. So head over there, check out the VIP ticket, I highly recommend it. We have priced it accordingly. We really want people to grab the VIP ticket and get

The most out of this. But if you want, you can grab the VIP plus as well and get some one on one time with us, which if you were going to book that separately, I mean, we know roughly what each other charge but I didn’t sit down and like calculate it out, but it’s a hell of a deal. So if that’s something you want to take advantage of, go grab one of those. There are limited number of those because we can’t just sit around talking to everybody all day. Unfortunately, we do have our own businesses and agencies to run. So go and check those out. We got some more information coming out later in August about the guest speakers and exactly what they’re going to be covering. But we got some great stuff. Jeffrey Smith is going to be joining us again and we’ve got two more agency owners along with Rob Beal and dedhia is going to be giving a case study to so tons of stuff and more. More to come. So again, poku live.com. Now, something else I want to talk about and Bradley, maybe you can share some info. I just got the link to this. You’re going to be talking with Jeremy from Press Advantage on Monday. Correct.

Yes, Monday at 3:30pm.

We’ve got another webinar with Jeremy, one of the CO owners of Press Advantage, which is the press release service that we’ve been using. I mean, primarily for several years now I’ve been with Press Advantage for six since. They’ve pretty much since they launched, so five or six years, maybe even longer than that. But anyways, he only opens up the subscription offers that he’s done for us. Rarely, let’s put it that way. Very rarely does he open up those subscription offers. And he’s, um, he’s prepared or planning to do that again next week. There are some new features that are been rolling out for Press Advantage and it’s just a good time to do so. And we’ve been asking him to open that back up again for some time. So he’s, he’s actually doing that for us next Monday at 3:30pm. So be on the lookout for the link. If you don’t, if Adam doesn’t post it here, you’ll get it via email plus in the groups and sign up for that any of you that are using press releases consistently for your marketing, whether it’s for clients or your own projects, we highly recommend them. They work incredibly well. I use them a lot. And so if you’re doing a lot of them, it’s probably best in your best interest to have your own subscription. And next week’s a good time to get it. So be there. Definitely, yeah, so that’ll be Monday. 3pm Eastern, and I thought will be Say that again. I believe it’s 330 Let me double-check. No, it’s 3 pm. I’m sorry. Yes. 3pm. Okay, so 3pm Eastern, and we will be sending out an email about that. I did just post the link. So stay tuned for that. But if you are interested in what press releases can do for you, then I highly suggest showing up plus Jeremy like Bradley said it’s gonna have a very special offer going with that. Yeah, real quick, guys. If anybody you know, before you even go on the webinar for that if, if you want to see how to use press releases in a way that just works incredibly well. Just go to our YouTube channel and search for press release SEO, and you’ll find

The webinar that we did, it’s also at MGYB. If you look in the webinar section on MGYB, the store, you’ll see that there’s we did a Marco and I did a webinar about how we use press releases and PR silo stacking. So essentially siloing press releases together. And it works really, really well. And I would highly recommend it if you’re on the fence or considering getting your own press release subscription that you go watch that webinar first so that you have an idea of how powerful they are and how to use them the best way. Definitely, will Bradley beat me to it. I was going to say speaking of MGYB and a lot of you guys took advantage of the awesome Fourth of July sale we had last month. There’s still some good stuff going on. If you had some updates coming so go check out mg y v.co for your done for you services. But yeah, as Bradley said up there, you’ll see the little webinar button click on that. And then there’s a bunch of the best practices webinars which is just basically free, great training information. So go check those out. So here’s a bit of something Why don’t we bundle the Press Advantage offer with Local PR Pro I’m just throwing it out there we don’t have to decide right now but I mean it just it goes hand in hand let’s let’s work it out and make them an offer they can’t refuse so they get results right away the way we do that. And one more thing before we go I don’t want to set any hard dates because it’s a work in progress. But there’s something coming for Syndication Academy. Yeah, look new flavor.

We’re working on it. We’re working on it guys. Let’s say sometime towards the fourth quarter of the year sometime. Look for it. It revamped updated when I bought properties. I don’t know how you can make the best better but we are.

Yeah, yes. Yeah. And I was gonna say I was gonna turn into t test I’ll keep this one short because we can’t really say much about it. But yeah, the webinar go get signed up for that. Keep your eyes and ears peeled about Syndication Academy and Bradley’s going to be doing some testing for some additional link building based stuff. And we’ll just leave it at that for now and say that, should that go? Well, that’s definitely something we’ll be letting everyone know about. Yep.

Cool. All right, guys. Anything else before we dive in? We’re good. All right. Let’s do it. Grab the screen.

You guys are seeing my screen correct?

Yep. So yeah, right.

What Phone Number To Use When Setting Up The GMB For A Local Lead Gen Site?

jump right into it. So olana says, Hi guys. Setting up a local lead gen site. Haven’t got a phone number for it yet. Would you wait until after you have the number to set up the GMB? Yes, I think you have to actually you have to have a phone number. As far as I remember. I haven’t set up a GMB in quite some time, but I’m pretty sure you have to have a phone number. Also, which of the following Do you use for lead gen an 800 number, a one 300 number. I’ve never even heard of that mobile or local landline with a reader.

I prefer using call rail. I still use call rail. I’ve used call fire in the past and I’ve got a ton of numbers in call fire comm that I would like to port over to call rail is a better platform. It gives you a ton more features. It’s inexpensive, but it takes it’s a long process of porting numbers. So I just have two accounts. I’ve got call firing call rail. I prefer using call rail. Again, I use call rail for several of my lead gen assets as well as my own real estate business. Because I use a lot of phone numbers for tracking marketing purposes and stuff. But I really, really like call rail. Does anybody else have any suggestions?

Call rail. I can’t say anything else. It’s what I use. Yeah. And no, not an 800 number. All right. So if you’re going to work local, which your car it no matter where you go, you don’t want that 800 number you want that local number you want people kind of like that local numbers I’ve seen better results with a local number than an ad hundred number unless you’re widely known for having that 800 number. Does that make sense? Or did I lose everybody? So 100 works when you’re widely known like like, something like roto rooter, let’s say or plumbers nine one, that kind of thing. But if you’re local and you want people to you to want to create that familiarity it really helps to have that local number.

Yes, I agree. I use answerconnect.com to send phone calls into a call center so that the phone always gets answered. It screens the calls there’s a ton of benefits for using a call center. And I have been since 2013, the same account, answer Connect comm I really can’t say enough good things about them. And so they give you an 800 number but you can forward or redirect local numbers to the 800 number which is what I do. That way. You know, I can have multiple lead gen assets all funneling into that with their own separate local numbers, but all funneling into the same call center if it’s for the same service provider, essentially.

But there’s a lot of really cool things. And by the way, guys, I’m working on a lot of lead gen stuff right now, and I’ve got some case studies I’m working on that I’ll be making public, not just within our groups. And I’ve also got some things that I’m going to be introducing to everybody when I do make that case studies public that I think will help a lot of you with your lead gen business. I can’t really talk much about it right now, but I just kind of wanted to tease it. So there you go.

How To Generate Quality Content For A Niche Blog If You Don’t Like Writing?

The next question is, Hey, guys, I want to set up a niche blog, but I don’t like writing How can I generate the quality content myself for my niche blog? Will the generated content be good enough for niche blogging? Thanks, Content Kingpin.

When I first started in SEO and local lead gen way back in, you know, 2010 timeframe. I was actually doing blog posts. Right after, I’d kind of developed the Syndication Academy method, and because it was just working like crazy good, I knew that blogging was going to be the way to populate the networks and get results. And so I was actually blogging for industries that I knew nothing about. I was actually writing the posts myself. And it was incredibly time-consuming. And it’s frustrating because I had to learn a lot about the businesses and the topics and such. And I, fortunately, I got introduced to content curating, and I don’t remember who introduced me to it or whatever, but I kind of started reading about it. And then I bought a couple of courses about content curating, and some plugins and all kinds of stuff. And I started curating content and I got much more efficient at generating content. And he also I didn’t have to know as much about a topic because you can just find subject matter, you know, find articles on the web or content. It doesn’t have to be articles. It can be podcasts, videos, infographics, slide presentations, it could be a number of things that are based around the topic that you are writing about that are written by or produce the contents produced by subject matter experts or SMEs. And you can get really good and really efficient at producing content by just being able to find and locate content developed or produced by subject matter experts. And then curating it and creating a unique post based upon using, you know, snippets of content from the subject matter experts, it’s already been published. So that’s, you know, been my preferred method. And I was actually doing that on my own. I use some tools and some plugins at the time. But once my business got to a certain level, it was just way too time-consuming. Even with using curated content, I was too time-consuming for me to produce it myself. So I developed training and hired a virtual assistant and handed it over to them and she’s still with me today. By the way, her name is Esther she’s still my primary number one blogger that works for me right now.

But anyway, long story short, I ended up training multiple virtual assistants or bloggers or curators as what they are really, with that training. So I kind of polished it up a bit. And that’s what Content Kingpin is, which is one of our training courses. And it’s the same process that my bloggers all use today, I talked about a couple of tools, but we still primarily do everything manually. Just using like a like Feedly. For example, to the group and categorize content feeds that we know like and trust that then we can use to all So a quick glimpse my bloggers go in for whenever they’ve got to produce or publish a post, they’ll go in and just look at Feedly select that particular category or folder for the project that they’re working on. And it will show all the content that’s available than the recent content that’s available around that particular topic. And then they can choose a topic to blog about to curate a post about and then pick and choose a few articles that will either reinforce that the idea that they’re trying to convey with their posts, or sometimes they’ll do like argumentative posts where they’ll try to show in a different opinion from what perhaps others are saying. So they’ll show two sides of the coin, if that makes sense, as two different competing opinions about the same topic anyway, it’s great, it works incredibly well, it also creates co-citation. And so we highly recommend you check out Content Kingpin, it’s one of the best ways to do it. Not only that but if you were to use that site type of the system, the Content Kingpin method, then you can get away from doing it yourself. So you don’t have to publish I mean, I would learn it first. You know, learn it and understand how to do it first, but then you can actually put a virtual assistant that you hire through the course and have them do it for you, and you can kind of just managing and guide them until they get up to your standards. But that’s the best way to do it. Guys. I call it hands-free content marketing and it’s a great revenue source too because it really is simple.

Once you understand the topic concept is really, really good to anybody want to comment on that Content Kingpin doesn’t get enough credit for does what it does. People don’t understand it, I think because they get all the all this different information about unique content and duplicate content and all this bullshit that’s out there. That’s nothing. Really if it were so places like Huffington Post’s would not exist. Google News would not exist unless curated content was okay. But not only Okay, whether it was good I’d be how much traffic does it get Bing, Yahoo. All they do all day long is republish story. Huffington Post is a collection of republish story that all it is and all you’re doing with Content Kingpin is republishing the story. You’re summarizing them right taking power, whatever it is that you do it. And you’re adding your own commentary and proper attribution and it’s a done deal. I mean, it’s so simple. And yet people try to make it so much more difficult than it really should be. But yeah, totally Content Kingpin for the win. You know, and it’s interesting. I’ve just pulled this up because I did this and if you guys remember masterclass, we had a, we had a kind of a middle-tier webinar coaching program that we had called masterclass for a number of years. And I did this as a local case study, Gainesville home pros, and I’ve never done anything with it since I think that was back in 2015. Oh, look at that. It says account suspended. That’s interesting. That’s one of my Okay, well, anyway, I would sure like to show you that blog because that was curated content, the same method. My blogger Esther, who was the first one I trained using that method, produced all the content on that site using curated content, and they were beautiful posts and unfortunately, it looks like that account has been that hosting account perhaps has been suspended. I have done anything with it years. But I would like to show you guys some examples of that. But I don’t have anything that I can show you right now off the top of my head. But anyway, it’s it works really, really well the posts come out beautiful if you do it right. I would highly recommend going through Content Kingpin.

No, because there are a few things that you have to do in order to not infringe on copyright. So for example, you don’t want to curate images that can get you into trouble, asked me how I know.

Because you’ll get extortion letters from like Getty Images and other you know, asshole law firms out there that are just looking for people that have republished images without copyright, without rights to it. So there’s like a lot of things. There’s not a lot of things, but there are a few things that you really should do to make sure that you’re covering your ass when you’re curating content. So again, I highly recommend you go through the product, it’s through that program. It’s a really, really good program. It’s the same that we use today. You know, there are a lot of tools out there that can help you to manage content curating, but we’ve already.

He’s found that it really just is just as quick and easy because what happens with a lot of these tools is they stop being supported over time. We know one of them was Curation Suite that we actually promoted. And fortunately after promoting it, and after a year or so, like the support just stopped and it kind of fell off the face of the earth. The same thing with a bunch of curating plugins that I’ve used over the years, they just eventually fall off the market and they just don’t get supported. So we’ve learned to just stick with the manual process and it’s you know, once somebody becomes efficient with that process is really is a very efficient way to produce content. So you don’t need all the additional tools and plugins and things like that. So that’s why I recommend that product because it’s a Content Kingpin because it will teach you how to do it manually and then you can teach a VA how to do it by just putting them right through the same training. It’s a great question though.

What Training Do You Offer In The MasterMind That You Can’t Get In The Syndication Academy?

Jason says I’m currently in the Syndication Academy 2.0 and I was wanting to know all of the different features and benefits in the mastermind that you don’t get in the Academy. Is this all of these different training you offer in the mastermind if I joined the mastermind, can I get a discount for the cost of the academy? Okay, so first of all the mastermind you have direct access to my partners and me, as well as all the other members of the group, which we have a lot of really savvy marketers and agency owners and CEOs and such in our group. But you also have direct access to all of us to where you can ask us questions in the Facebook group at any time. We’re in there answering questions often. Plus, we each host our own separate webinars inside the mastermind. They’re bi-weekly webinars. So every two weeks each one of us hosts our own webinar. So you get to come to ask us questions at length during the webinars. Like you can post questions ahead of time for the webinars, we’ll do site audits, we’ll you know, look at your, your SEO, your you know, on-page stuff off-page stuff, we’ll help you with projects if you need it. Plus, as I said, you get to you know, come to ask me stuff, or Marco stuff or Adam, or Hernan or Chris any one of us. So there’s a lot of benefits in there that we don’t provide anywhere else we’ll go as deep into, whatever subject you want to go into, you know, and that’s one of the things that we can’t do on a free setting like this or any in any of our other groups. So the mastermind is definitely where you want to be if you want to get all that, as well as Syndication Academy is included in that. So you can cancel your Syndication Academy account if you join the mastermind because it’s included in that as well as all of our products under $300. Anything over $300 you get a significant discount. So there’s a ton of benefits to be in the mastermind. Anybody else wanna?

Yeah, I would just say Jason, if you just started Syndication Academy, if you’re just getting into it, then contact support and we’ll refund whatever you paid for Syndication Academy and you can or you can apply it towards them. However, you want to work that out, we’ll work it out for you. We always do. Why because membership has its privileges. So that’s why we do things the way we do and yes, I mean, above all else is this group of people like-minded people who are working towards what we call POFU position of Fuck you, where you have the kind of power and money where you can pick and choose your clients, your clients come to you instead of you going knocking on doors on $500 clients who are a pain in the ass. So rather than doing all that you getting all you get all of this training, you get the mindset training, you get the how-to get all of the collective knowledge, and then you have five, almost six years of webinars. Now some of them of course are dated, but we do we’re not doing webinars every week. It’s either Bradley or me like we take every other Thursday. You got Hernan, you got Adam. Yeah, Chris, everyone is giving you their perspective and their take on things so you get all of these different points of view, all of this all of these different experiences coming to you and helping you in whatever it is that you’re trying to do whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve. So it’s not just what you get as far as training. It’s the people and the relationships, the networking that you can do inside the mastermind like I know people who are working together in different projects, and we tell people to become the big fish in a little pond. But then some of them go on to and I’m gonna mention his name, for example, to dominate in the Fort Worth area. And you got another one in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the Twin Cities you got someone in the Dirty South, right South Carolina, Georgia area, who are Domini who may have started as the big fish in the little pile or becomes the little fish in the big fish in the little pond. But then they move to a bigger pond. So that we’re always pushing. We’re always encouraging people. That growth means you go to make more money until you reach a stepping point where you say, Okay, I met, hopefully, this is where I want to be, this is how I want to do it. And if I choose not to work tomorrow, I can do that because the process and the systems and everything else that I’ve gained through being in the mastermind, will take care of me not being it, the system is there, so I don’t have to be there. And I mean, just the way that this happened and how this happened, and how people finally are able to step away and say, Man, I can spend time with my family and I can relax and I can do the things I want to do, rather than having to do the things that I have to do things that I must with no other choice. So I think that that’s just one of the greater things about the mastermind is that mindset that awful, you’re going after that poof hopefully you get on that path. And it’s it becomes your magnificent obsession. I thank you CTF letcher for that. But it becomes your magnificent obsession. You’re going after that and there is nothing that can get in your way of achieving that powerful, that’s when you know that you’re there. And that’s what we’re there for. So, just because you brought up CT, and we don’t have a lot of questions, so I know we got time when we did the interview with CT Fletcher, I’ve created this text document. It’s been on my desktop ever since. And hopefully, nobody gets offended because CT Fletcher likes to cuss a lot. Say but here’s a lot of here are the quotes that struck me when we were at when we really were Marco interviewing him. I was on the webinar, but it was really Marco interviewing CT Fletcher, who’s a powerlifter. He broke a ton of records for a while. But anyway, some of these are really funny. I’m not gonna read them out to you, but you remember these Marco? Absolutely. I love them so awesome. I still watch them. Will will is king. Yeah, man. Oh, man. Oh, man. He’s so good. You ain’t pretty motherfucker. Yeah, you ain’t that birdie.

So funny. I mean, that one right there cracks me up too. I laughed out loud. Anyways, I just thought that was funny because I happen to notice it on my desktop the other day and I giggled about it. You just brought it up.

Would You Recommend A Subdirectory Or Subfolder On The Same Domain When Creating The Blog?

So anyway, Jason, next question says, Hey, guys, I have an e-commerce website using WordPress with WooCommerce. Would you recommend a subdirectory? Or folder on the same domain and load a new WordPress and create a blog? Yes, that’s what we’ve always recommended. I mean, I don’t do any e-commerce stuff. But I mean, in the past, I have done some SEO for some e-commerce clients. But it’s not something I’d like to do. So I got out of doing it, but we’ve always recommended it. So do you have control over like essentially a content distribution engine, right, and that’s WordPress is great for that? So you can either put it in a subfolder or directory of the root domain or what we always recommended was to put it in a subdomain instead. And that’s because a subdomain is still treated as content have a separate web entity or separate site, I should say, a separate website than the root domain. So that if you’re in your content distribution, you do something spammy, which if you follow our methods, you won’t have any trouble, at least, we, you know, as it stands right now, but Google could change everything in a moment’s notice. But we’ve never had any issues. But if you put in a subdomain, and you were doing something spammy or something, Google changed its rules, all of a sudden, and something became spammy, they wouldn’t affect the root domain, which is where your e-commerce site resides, it would affect the subdomain only. So we always prefer, like, you know, you could put blog as a subdomain to whatever your domain is, or whatever you want it to be news or something like that. And that’s what we prefer to do. But you could put it in a subdirectory. But yeah, that gives you the opportunity then to do all your content marketing. Remember, if you’ve got an e-commerce site, and you’ve got product categories, for example, you can mirror those same categories. We talked about theme mirroring all the time.

If you don’t know what that is, you know, it’s essentially duplicating or mirroring your site structure on other assets. So you have if you have product categories in your eCommerce site, you could mirror those same categories as content categories, or you know, in WordPress, just categories are the same. You could title them and everything the same as what they are on your eCommerce site. And then you can publish posts, blog posts, or sporting posts. That’s kind of a link building method that in place them within those particular silos or categories in the WordPress site, distribute them out to a syndication network, mirror, all of that stuff on a G site, and our ys drive stack, press releases, all that kind of stuff. You mirror all of that together, and it works really, really well to push power to your, you know, your ultimate destination, which would be your e-commerce product pages. So you want to comment on that. Yeah, we used to recommend going to a subdomain because we wanted to protect the root cause we were doing. let’s admit it, we were doing a lot of evil stuff yes to the subdomains, we were blasting them to the point where if we had them connected to the route, any penalty would pass to the root. What we’ve done is we’ve taken a step out, because now everything goes through our SEO power shield. And so now the route is protected.

And so in order to push even more power, by all means, put it in a subdirectory because then you’re accruing everything inside the root when you go into that subdirectory rather than stepping in a subdomain, which is treated as a separate website, so you’re one hop away from your root domain anyway and you’re losing link equity. When you’re anytime that you’re one hop or more away, you lose link equity at the top. When you’re in a subdomain, you don’t lose that link equity is even when you’re in the root. You don’t lose that link equity when you’re in a folder inside the root. You don’t lose that link equity because you’re not a hub away. You’re in the root, now if you do want to protect it, then you just install in the dub dub dub. So that’s where you would do the root because that’s a subdomain anyway.

So that’s how you do it. But we have the SEO PowerShell it’s not necessary anymore. Because everything that we do goes through our SEO power shield, which amplifies and protects. That’s why we call it the SEO, power shield. It powers it up, it amplifies and it protects it shields it and so that my recommendation would be totally totally unless you’re planning on doing a whole lot of evil stuff to that subdomain go with a sub but with it should be with a folder inside the root.

What Type Of Brand Property Link To Use In A Press Release?

Awesome. So next is BB BB. Look, you’ve gotten better, buddy. Your questions are a lot shorter and not quite as many. So I think we’re finally getting through to you, man. And I’m just giving you our time baby. It’s we’re always like having you here but he says Hey guys, number one does that the link to a branded property in the press release should be to the property or to one of its pages that were syndicated by RSS. Well, it depends on what you’re doing. But so, my strategy and again, it’s covered in the press release SEO, or piece PR silo stacking webinar that we did Marco and I did. Again, you can find that at MGYB or just go to youtube.com slash semantic mastery use the channel search feature search for press release SEO and you’ll find it you know, right at the top go watch that. Because what I prefer to do is we you know, we’re constantly blogging for clients or for projects period. So that populates syndication network, right, we’re building topical relevancy and depth to our silos, right depth to a particular topic. And then they syndicate out to syndication networks, right. And within every single post, within the proper silo architecture, we’re always linking back up from the post back up to the top of the silo page, which is the page that we’re trying to drive traffic to. Right. So what we do what I do is I always, you know, I like to publish press releases that are highlighting or showcasing a recent blog post. And that links to the blog post URL, which within the blog post, actually links back up to the page on the site. But I mean, you don’t have to use that strategy all the time. That’s what I do. Because I consistently publish press, we’re consistently blogging and we’re consistently publishing press releases for all of my clients or my lead gen asset. So it just works out really well because we’re providing deep links, so links further down into a silo that helps to power up with proper silo architecture, it helps to power up the entire silo and helps all of the different keywords that we’re targeting within the silo start to rise or surface in the search engines because of those deep links, right. So that’s my preferred method because it adds more diversity and it’s linking to multiple points.

Within the main money site, as opposed to always constantly hitting the homepage or just the product or service pages, the top of silo pages in other words, so I like to do deep links, but it depends on what you’re doing. If you’re not doing a lot of press releases, if you’re you know, you only got a budget for a handful of them, then it might be better to actually hit your homepage and or your top of silo pages, that kind of thing. So it really just depends on what your overall content marketing strategy is, and what you’re going to be linking to, you know that that’s going to determine where you’re going to link to from within your site. Okay.

That’s it that said, I always almost not 100% but we almost always link from within press releases to a page or post on the money site. Unless we’re doing a two-step which again, go watch the press release SEO webinar, and you’ll understand what I mean. But for example, if a client as all my local clients have Google My Business profiles. So if we publish a post when we publish a blog post on the blog, my blogger also for most of my clients will end up publishing a GMB post that points a link back to the blog post. So essentially, the GMB post is nothing other than a summary of the blog post itself with the same featured image as the image for the GMB post the photo, and then the button link, the Learn More button link links back to the blog post. So sometimes our press releases will actually link to the GMB post URL, because that ultimately links to the blog post URL, so the two-step process there. But you can also and I’ve talked about this almost every week now for the last like two months on Hump Day hangouts baby so I’m sure you’re aware of what I was what I’ve said. But you know, if you’ve got particular keywords that you’re trying to push, then you can actually go extract the post URLs from like, for example, the blogs on your syndication network, so blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, you can go extract these post URLs that are where the re-syndication or of the published the post that you publish targeting those keywords. And you can link to those within press releases too if you want to because again, that’s tiered link building. So it’s helpful in anyone, but you don’t have to. I prefer to link to those blog post URLs using daddy as link building from an MGYB because I like to use the press releases to link directly back to the money site, or two primary tier one assets, such as a GMB profile, GMB map, Id page, any one of those types of things when it comes to that.

That was a good question. By the way, bb though. Yeah, that that was a really good question. Now, I mean, the link building varies it depends on how much power you’re trying to push and where and everything is gonna be where it’s needed, where everything’s needed. Because sometimes it’s just one press release, push, can get you to where you need to be. Other times, you’re going to need way more. Yeah, there are other times when you’re going to need even link building into the press releases. There’s no one set rule because sometimes it’s just the SEO power shield coming, coming in, right coming online. And that’s enough. And sometimes it doesn’t even have to do with the competition because we’ve seen it even in some tough keyword sets that you start ranking like right from the SEO power shield. So this totally ended depends on the no definitive answer for this, other than, you’re going to have to get your press release. If you’ve set it up correctly. And you hit your top-level category rather than just like everybody does your homepage. Then your top-level category will flow and it’ll push all of that power so that everything benefits from it, including the top-level category, not just the longtail keywords, it’s how we teach it now. We teach people to go from the top-down instead of bottom-up it

It’s a little different, it’s kind of the same thing except we’re going. For example, if we want to rank for gold futures, this is just an example. It’s incredibly difficult to rank for that. But we would go even one, one level higher, we would go after the gold category, the entire gold category to pull up the gold features category instead of trying to push it up with all of the long tails. And I’ve seen that it has a greater effect when you try to go for that top-level category. on everything else, not only the longtail but the subcategory that you’re after. So I’m always telling people you go one level up. So keeping this in mind, then it’s up to you. I always tell people that we have to be scientists when we’re gauging how it is that we’re going to do this. What effect we’re trying to create, you’re going to have to create your link building and press releases are part of link building. You’re going to create it so that whatever you’re trying to benefit the most guests

The most benefit out of what you’re doing. And so you approach it that way. Yeah. So it varies. That’s the short answer. It varies. It depends, right?

Can We Use The PR Stacking Strategies With Article Directories?

Next, can we treat an article direct article, an article directory as press releases, meaning publishing, as the PR stacking and also linking to actual prs? Okay, I don’t do any article directory stuff I haven’t for years, not saying that it can’t still be useful. I just haven’t because they’ve been known to be spammy. I think a lot of the links from those get discredited. It’s much better to get like, you know, articles instead of being published on article directories, which were always known as SEO like, honey, honey, what do you call them honey, honey holes or whatever you call them. But I’m not saying that it won’t work because I don’t know. I haven’t tested it in years. If I was going to do it, maybe I would do it. Where I was only linking to SEO shield assets or like you say, can you link to PRs? Yes, that would be fun because press release wherever press releases published is going to be able to handle those type of links, you may be able to push good link equity to them, or even, it doesn’t really matter because they’re not your money site. So I, I, again, I haven’t used article directories in probably five or six years.

And so I don’t really know whether they’re still viable or if they’re still helping at any level. But if I was going to use them, I would do it too. I would use them to link only back to tier one asset not directly to the money site. And press releases are a great thing to link to. So, Marco, I know you don’t use article directories either.

I used to, it’s not necessary anymore. I don’t need to go that far. Right. The way that we’re doing it pushes so much power that we don’t need to go. I mean, when you’re already at number one, like how much better can you go than the number one.

So maybe at some point with some of the case studies that we’re doing and everything else that we have coming on e-commerce and everything else that we’re experimenting. Yeah, I would say that we can do that. But right now, or maybe we need to do that. But right now the way that we’re doing things is not necessary.

What Do You Mean By Kitchen Sink Spam?

Agreed. The last question was, what do you mean when you say kitchen sink? It gets me confused. Yeah, when I say kitchen sink spam, or when we say that, that just means using link building tools and throwing every kind of link like even some real spammy stuff, at whatever your target is. So like when we say you can throw kitchen sink spam at it, it means you could use some of the most god awful links in the world and throw them at, you know, point them at a particular target and still benefit from it. We would never encourage anybody to do that with their money site. And in fact, we prefer to still use better links.

Even if you’re using spam tools, for example, like you know, our link building master dedhia he uses a ton of link building tools but he always recommends that your the links that he builds to whatever your targets are, which we always recommend tier-one entity targets or your SEO shield essentially. But he always likes to suggest recommends using two layers two levels of contextual web two Dotto links. And then throwing if you want a third tier of links, you can throw kitchen sink spam at those contextual web two dot o links. So that’s what we mean by kitchen sink spam, it means pretty much anything under the sun, that’s a link. And a lot of those would be toxic if they’re not used properly, but they can still provide a benefit if used properly. And that’s what we talk about when we talk about you know, you can hit SEO power shields with kitchen sink spam, and they’ll end up ranking. We don’t recommend it. We still recommend using the contextual web to Dotto links. Add your first and second-tier links that are being built to your tier one assets. But you can always throw kitchen sink spam behind that if you wanted and still receive a benefit Mark has done several tests I have to, but we even did the Marco and Rob did the kind of public case study for the DC plumber and just hit it with like over a million kitchen sink spam style links, including porn porn links, and it ranked and it’s probably still ranking today. So and we just had someone in RYS Academy reloaded last week, come in and tell us that they tried the million kitchen sink, spam link test and got really good results and 89% increase in traffic month to month. Wow. So it works. However, think of it this way. If garbage links work, how much better? Will quality links work? How much better will the way that we do the tiered link building right? contextual tiered link building

How much better is that, not only for now but long term when they come looking? The first thing that they look for is that kitchen sink spam, that that the automation is is what Google is looking for. And we’re kind of hiding in plain sight because we’re not giving them what everybody else is doing. We’re doing it a little bit differently. And it just playing work. So when you’re thinking about going after that, that million links, and yeah, you can pay 50 bucks in fiber, and there’s going to be complete TSA, and it’s going to be truly, truly garbage type of stuff that you don’t want to look at. Why would you do that to your project? Why would you do that when it can show up in your link profile? Do you want that? Because we had that showing up for DC plumbing. We had those links index, man. And seriously, you didn’t want your kids looking at that you didn’t want you to want to be sitting there with your wife. Looking at some of that stuff that was coming through it was it was like, the really bad garbage man.

So why would so when I’m talking to people, my question is if you want to test and you don’t care, you don’t care what shows up in the link profile, you don’t care about anything. You’re just trying to make you make some money. It’s a fun test, then, by all means, do it. But if it’s something that you care about, why would you mistreat something that you care about that one?

Agreed.

Can You Blast The Press Release And Drive Stacks With Backlinks Without Negative Impact On The Money Site And GMB?

Okay, next is Gordon, what’s up Gord? It’s been a while he says, Hey, guys, hope you’re safe. And well just have a quick question. When using press releases or an ROI S Drive stack through the MGYB store. Can you blast either or both of them with hundreds or even thousands of backlinks without any negative effect on your money site? Or GMB listing? And if so, will that increase the SEO juice flowing to either entity and help them to rank? Thank you very much. Yeah. And that’s, I mean, that’s exactly what we were just talking about.

We prefer to build links to our tier one entity assets such as the SEO power shield, our last drive stack, g site press releases the organic press release organization page, you know, the idx page, anything like that. And that’s if you set it up correctly, you’re not going to have any negative results whatsoever, which is why we set the things up the way that we do. That’s why we call it the SEO power shield because it shields it’s like, I’ve always called it an SEO firewall, right? It creates a firewall around your money site. And so that’s exactly what we’re talking about. embeds and or backlinks work really, really well. In fact, you can even take your money site it for example, and you know, embed it in a G site and then hammer the G site page with backlinks. And that’s going to help your money site page benefit without there being an actual direct hyperlink on that page. Does that make sense? So yeah, that’s what we were just talking about. With Bibi’s question when we just hammer our assets with backlinks because it helps to push ultimately it flows down through to whatever our target destination is, which could be a GMB asset.

Could be a Google Site could be a money site. It could be all three of those. So yes, that would work. Any comments on that?

Should You Interlink A Post If The Main Article Has 5 Jump Links?

No, that’s perfect. Pavlos up, he says, Hey guys last time, I missed an opportunity to say thank you. Well, you’re welcome. Pavlo He says, question in one of your videos, you said that I can copy main silo page content and create a post. The Post will be canonicalized back to the main article, the canonical link itself will be a jump link to the Main article.

The question is should I interlink these posts if I have if the Main article has five jump links, and I’ve created five posts from the main content? I think I kind of vaguely remember this conversation we had on Hump Day Hangouts, but I’m not quite following the question. I think what, what I was talking about if and hopefully, I’m not off base here, but prefer using long-form content now for content for websites or for money sites, instead of in the past, like, you know, five years ago, you know, you could create a kind of thin content type of silo page. And then each supporting a keyword that you would find within your with your keyword research. So all of the supporting keywords that you would stack within a particular silo, I just always use spreadsheets for that. So I create a column but my top-level keyword at the top, you know, the column header, and then I would go extract all of the relevant supporting keywords and key phrases and put them in underneath that in that same column right in a spreadsheet. And then that would be that that goes to my bloggers, for them to produce content around so that they highlight one of the supporting keywords within the correct silo. And it used to be that I would create kind of thin content, top of silo pages, and then target individual longer tail keywords with blog posts, but that becomes repetitive redundant. And it doesn’t work as well what I found as having a long-form top of silo page now, that contains a lot of those supporting keywords so that broken down into subheadings, right, so and I think that’s what you were talking about is when I mentioned that you can create long-form content, and even put a table of contents with jump links at the top of the content, which is really good for SEO. And then you can actually create blog posts targeting those longer tail phrases that are already present on the silo page itself right to top of silo page that have jump links to them and then link from those supporting articles within the blog post to those jump links. Because then it’s, it’s, it’s linking to the top of silo page, but it’s also reinforcing that longer tail subheading or keyword, right, so that’s supporting keyword. If that’s what you’re talking about, then let’s see. The question is should I interlink these posts with the Main article as well? Five jump links. And I’ve created five posts from the main content. Yeah, I mean, I don’t I can’t get too far into this Marco would kill me if I did.

But if you’re interlinking, your supporting posts correctly, daisy-chaining them together then and they’re just linking from post to post. And from within each post linking back to the top of silo page, even if it’s at a jump link, a jump link to the top of silo page to some section on the top of silo page. Yes, that would work. That would work really, really well. Actually. Any comments on that Marco?

Sorry about that.

A lot. Ah, no, it’s not really something that I’m willing to talk about in a free gotten a free forum like this. They are not going to get into that because it just puts so much power and it gets around everything that Google can throw at you. So no, that’s fine. We’ll leave it at that. Okay.

But yeah, just get creative with it. Think about you know what you’re doing with your structure. And I don’t like to if I don’t know where you say you can just clone copy main silo page content and create a post, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t do that on the same site what I was talking about with cloning or copying or mirroring, right is within the G site. Right. So if you’ve got your top of silo page, and you’ve got all the content on the page, you can always create, we recommend mirroring that top of silo page on the G site. And then if you had supporting posts within that category on your money site, I don’t typically duplicate or mirror posts onto a G site unless I’m having trouble ranking a particular keyword in which case then I will create child pages on the G site that is each child a one to one ratio, child page for every post within that silo, and then just embed those in there and that’s what I was talking about with the jumping links, you can actually create jump links from the G site back to the money site there. But again, that’s more kind of mastermind stuff or heavy hitter club stuff. So hopefully you got some value out of that. But I wouldn’t copy top of silo content and republish it on the same blog from your money site. I wouldn’t. Personally I wouldn’t do that I would have new content curated, not written because I use curated content for blog posts, the curated targeting the keywords that I’m trying to push that is on the top of the silo page if that makes sense. Okay.

So another good question.

Jason says thank you. Yeah, so he’s already watched all the Syndication Academy videos, that’s okay. If you join the mastermind if you just joined recently, the Syndication Academy join the mastermind will up make it worth your while we’ll refund your Syndication Academy purchase or apply it towards your first month of mastermind or something like that, and then you can cancel that subscription. So, yep, baby says great. We’re almost

What Are Your Thoughts On The Statement That You Can Flatten A Complex Silo Into A Simple Silo?

Got a timer almost out of question. So this is good timing maybe says great. What do you think of the statement that each complex silo can be flattened to a simple silo? And if a site isn’t that big, is it better to do the flat? Yes, I always, always recommend using simple silos where possible and guys, I’m going to be updating the training, I was really hoping to get that done for today, but I didn’t. And so I’ll try to have it done by next Wednesday. But in the process, street process doc that I created for our methods and for me, you know, our methods are what we sell as done for you services and MGYB for those of you that aren’t aware of it, if you go to semantic mastery comm slash process, I’m going to bring it up. It’ll you guys can take a look at this. For those of you that haven’t already been exposed to it, this is the process street process doc that I created to that has a lot of training in there with a lot of it’s the why we do what we do.

And what you can expect from it the How is we point to our training products for the how but or the where to get it as the links over to MGYB but these are the website silo architecture, the training videos that I created, you know, five years ago or whatever, they’re, they’re still valid, but my overall process has changed slightly right it’s evolved slightly and so I’m going to redo those silo training videos where I go into what a simple silo is what a complex silo is a difference between a physical silo and a virtual silo and what I prefer to use and why I’m going to redo those videos and that will go into here the website section of the worry list entity based SEO process doc and when I do hope I’ll have this done by next week guys I really wanted to get it done by this week but I haven’t even started on it. So I’ll try to get it done by next week. And then again guys you go to semantic mastery comm slash process and you take a look at all the stuff that’s in here. There’s a lot of training here. And so anyway, that said, Yes, I always recommend a simple silo. For most projects. I’m not going to say for the most projects for most local projects, which is what I do, almost exclusively, simple silos will suffice. I used to always try to build complex solids because I thought it was going to be better. And then maybe there is some benefit to it. But what I found is a complex silo is complicated. Hence the name complex silo. And so it’s difficult to build it create some kind of funny issues that are hard to reconcile with the URLs with the slugs and that kind of with permalinks and that kind of stuff. So I prefer to stick with a simple silo, it’s much easier to manage, it’s easier to map out when you’re in the build process. So I like using simple silos for most local projects. That’s all that is ever needed. In fact, with a simple silo, if you’re using our methods, you’re going to be the on-page SEO is going to be far superior to what most of your competitors are doing anyways. So it’s not really necessary to do a complex silo. If you’re doing a very broad site with a lot of categories and subcategories, then you might be necessary to do a complex silo. But, as I said, I always try to simplify where possible. We’ve had a ton of people over the years, join one of our groups, and they map out this incredibly intricate silo map of a site. And they, you know, probably spend hours and hours and hours mapping it out and creating drawings to show the silo structure and everything and then they present it and say, What do you think you think this would work? And it’s like, Well, yeah, but it could have worked, you know, eight levels previous, where it was like a much simpler build, and you got to save yourself a ton of time. And we don’t say that to pick on anybody, but it’s because I think we as SEO types, try to overcomplicate stuff all the time, and I’ve learned over the years to try to simplify as much as possible and get results with a much simpler process and simple silo structure is the way that I prefer to build 90 95% of my sites.

commenting. I totally agree. I don’t know why people get themselves into trouble with complex silos like right from the start. Yeah, if it’s a brand new project that there’s no need for for a complex silo, unless it’s like, I don’t know, like some type of e-commerce website and you’ve seen those where there’s a bunch of complex subcategories and while category, subcategory, sub-sub categories and all of these things that really complicated but I tell people to look in the beginning, you’re good with your homepage, and three categories, three top-level categories, the three main keywords that you’re going to go after to start making money, push all the power that way, as needed. And as you see more opportunities for top-level categories. You add them, right because then your whole setup is done. And whatever you add is going to benefit from everything you’ve done previously. But if you start mapping it

Out complex from the beginning. How are you going to push the power that that’s going to need for every page and post and subcategory and sub subcategory that you’re trying to create? you’re dividing up the PageRank in such a way that it’s not going to push the initial power that it could have. There’s no way because there’s no way to keep the link flow going the right way. Let’s put it that way. Yeah, but if you keep it simple, minimize the number of categories Don’t try to go after everything at once. But just three, three categories. That gives you enough to write for about four months when you get our D keyword research. I’m sorry, that that’s not available right now. But I did keyword research gives you enough to write about four months on those three top market level categories on those silos. And then you can go and see like which one is more complicated, and you just break it up instead of making it a subcategory? You just make it another category that’s related to that one category that you already have no need to overcomplicate things I hate when people try to do that. It doesn’t have to be all that difficult. Yeah, and it’s fine because like I said, we’ve experienced that a lot over the years, and I’m not gonna lie. In years past I did the same thing, I would always approach new projects with the complex silo, trying to map all that out. And it just it became overwhelming, it became too much of a bitch too, you know, too difficult to manage the projects. And again, it creates a lot of funky issues, if you’re trying to share subcategories with other categories, especially in local like, for example, if you have, you know, your topical or service-based silos, which would be like, you know, like Tree Removal would be one silo, for example, and another silo could be tree trimming, which in reality, I’ve learned over the years that you really don’t even need to create silos for Tree Service sites because they’re all synonyms for each other. Google considers tree removal and tree trimming as synonyms anyways. But most of my tree service projects are

Still siloed like that. And if you were trying to duplicate location-based silos within each one of the topical or service-based silos, it creates some real funny URL issues that you have to reconcile. And it becomes difficult to do so or vice versa, if you had location-based silos, as your top-level silos, and then you tried to have subcategories of services, then it creates some issues too. So I learned a long time ago just to go with the simple silo structure, so much easier to manage so much easier to handle. So anyway, yeah, I totally recommend going with simple silos where possible. The last question and we’re at five o'clock. So this is a good stopping point is BB says should we have a form in the branded properties for collecting leads? Absolutely. If you’ve got form code that can be embedded in other sites, absolutely. I’m actually using I’m not going to talk about what I’m using just yet because it’s part of the case studies and I’m working on but I’m using a new lead generation tool.

It helps that has a form builder in it that works really, really good. And I’m actually embedding the form and multiple properties. Now g sites, you know, a lot of different places that I’m actually embedding the forms now because they work really, really well. And they direct all the leads back to one central location that then gets distributed out. So yeah, absolutely, there’s no doubt, I always try to put most of my businesses run on phone calls more than a phone like. In other words, the leads that I generate for businesses are more phone call leads than they are web form submissions, but I don’t ever want to not provide that as an option. So I used to, I used to really just push phone calls, but now I’m pushing the lead form submits as well, because I’ve got a really cool application that I’m using that helps to distribute the leads to wherever I want them to go. And again, I’ll reveal some of that in the coming week’s guys, but I absolutely recommend if you have a form, form code that can be embedded on other sites use it. Okay.

All right. Thanks, everybody for being here.

We will see you guys next week. Thanks, Marco for sticking around. All right. Have a good one. Thanks, everybody

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 299 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 299

Click on the video above to watch Episode 299 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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Announcement

All right, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 299. We’re one away from big Episode 300. I’m gonna call this episode where everyone is getting old and wearing glasses except Chris. I just realized all of us are now wearing glasses except Chris. Yeah, well, you guys spending too much time in front of your computers. There we go. Yeah, gotta change it around. This is the year we try to get ourselves off to the computer. So anyways, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. We’re gonna say hi, real quick catch up with everybody. And then we got a couple quick announcements before diving into the questions. So I’ll start on the bottom here since it’s cloudy weather element Marco. How you doing today? I have my lights on. That’s why it looks so bright. Yeah, it’s raining. It’s supposed to be raining. So finally got me with the lights on. But I can’t complain this nice a warm, actually. I’m kind of trying to hide trying to blend into the background. So Google doesn’t see me.

It’s all good man. I’m gonna

Having a good time.

Outstanding All right. Well, let’s work our way around. Hernan you got those new glasses what’s going on with you?

Yeah, man, I’m just trying to trying to blend in. I got I got glasses and now you got glasses. I mean yeah man we get rid of this and have a beard and growing a beard. Damn it. You’re doing the 50 K I might do the 50 now, so good man these are blue light blocking glasses, you know? Because there’s one this one guy show me one this really nerdy yellow like super like

orangey glasses and they make you look stupid. I know I won’t be wearing next week.

Yeah, do you don’t think the big square bc birth control glasses make you look stupid though right now, man. No, I can’t I can talk like this. Nobody will.

But a lady repellent. Yeah, exactly. say wait a second. Are you wearing those or are you being forced to wear this?

What this one glasses. Yeah, I’m just kidding.

You look good. I was just wondering maybe you’re making you know this light and blue light blue light blocking. I’m still confused. Why are you wearing blue light blocking glasses in the middle of the day or now? Yeah, well, it’s time. 5pm So, five 6pm So, all right. Well, before we tell everyone all about our AI problems, let’s see Chris, how you doing today? Man? Doing good, man. I hit the gym for like, I don’t know, like after another two week break for the first time again. Sore all over again. Hit the leg so hard. So yeah, like, I’m pretty sure you’re gonna feel the same way. Next week?

Yes, definitely. Yeah, I’m headed out. Taking a couple of weeks and hitting the road literally going to be gone for a couple of weeks and doing some trail running. So for those of you in the northwest, you know what mountain trail was? Yeah. We’re going to be doing a run around Mount St. Helens, as well as doing some visiting up there. Go to some campgrounds and stuff. So, Bradley, how about you? How are things on the East Coast today. Good. Happy to be here I’ve been trying to

do I’ve got a bunch of lead gen projects I’m working on. And so I’m trying to spend as much time on those as possible. But I’ve had a really good month in real estate flipping land and I’ve got a lot of deals coming in right now. So it’s kind of hard because I’m, I’m conflicted, the real estate money is really damn good. So I have to do I have to pursue that when it comes in. But at the same time, I’ve got other projects I’m trying to work on. So it’s kind of difficult balancing right now, but I’m happy to be here and got a lot of stuff coming up. So that’s the end. Well, we got a few things I want to mention to everybody real quick. First of all, is kofu. Live as we’ve been saying that is still on, we got a lot of cool,

cool stuff we’re going to be talking about. You can find out more about that at Boku live.com not just the cool stuff, but also what you can get. So head over there, check out the VIP ticket, I highly recommend it. We have priced it accordingly. We really want people to grab the VIP ticket and get

The most out of this. But if you want, you can grab the VIP plus as well and get some one on one time with us, which if you were going to book that separately, I mean, we know roughly what each other charge but I didn’t sit down and like calculate it out, but it’s a hell of a deal. So if that’s something you want to take advantage of, go grab one of those. There are limited number of those because we can’t just sit around talking to everybody all day. Unfortunately, we do have our own businesses and agencies to run. So go and check those out. We got some more information coming out later in August about the guest speakers and exactly what they’re going to be covering. But we got some great stuff. Jeffrey Smith is going to be joining us again and we’ve got two more agency owners along with Rob Beal and dedhia is going to be giving a case study to so tons of stuff and more. More to come. So again, poku live.com. Now, something else I want to talk about and Bradley, maybe you can share some info. I just got the link to this. You’re going to be talking with Jeremy from Press Advantage on Monday. Correct.

Yes, Monday at 3:30pm.

We’ve got another webinar with Jeremy, one of the CO owners of Press Advantage, which is the press release service that we’ve been using. I mean, primarily for several years now I’ve been with Press Advantage for six since. They’ve pretty much since they launched, so five or six years, maybe even longer than that. But anyways, he only opens up the subscription offers that he’s done for us. Rarely, let’s put it that way. Very rarely does he open up those subscription offers. And he’s, um, he’s prepared or planning to do that again next week. There are some new features that are been rolling out for Press Advantage and it’s just a good time to do so. And we’ve been asking him to open that back up again for some time. So he’s, he’s actually doing that for us next Monday at 3:30pm. So be on the lookout for the link. If you don’t, if Adam doesn’t post it here, you’ll get it via email plus in the groups and sign up for that any of you that are using press releases consistently for your marketing, whether it’s for clients or your own projects, we highly recommend them. They work incredibly well. I use them a lot. And so if you’re doing a lot of them, it’s probably best in your best interest to have your own subscription. And next week’s a good time to get it. So be there. Definitely, yeah, so that’ll be Monday. 3pm Eastern, and I thought will be Say that again. I believe it’s 330 Let me double-check. No, it’s 3 pm. I’m sorry. Yes. 3pm. Okay, so 3pm Eastern, and we will be sending out an email about that. I did just post the link. So stay tuned for that. But if you are interested in what press releases can do for you, then I highly suggest showing up plus Jeremy like Bradley said it’s gonna have a very special offer going with that. Yeah, real quick, guys. If anybody you know, before you even go on the webinar for that if, if you want to see how to use press releases in a way that just works incredibly well. Just go to our YouTube channel and search for press release SEO, and you’ll find

The webinar that we did, it’s also at MGYB. If you look in the webinar section on MGYB, the store, you’ll see that there’s we did a Marco and I did a webinar about how we use press releases and PR silo stacking. So essentially siloing press releases together. And it works really, really well. And I would highly recommend it if you’re on the fence or considering getting your own press release subscription that you go watch that webinar first so that you have an idea of how powerful they are and how to use them the best way. Definitely, will Bradley beat me to it. I was going to say speaking of MGYB and a lot of you guys took advantage of the awesome Fourth of July sale we had last month. There’s still some good stuff going on. If you had some updates coming so go check out mg y v.co for your done for you services. But yeah, as Bradley said up there, you’ll see the little webinar button click on that. And then there’s a bunch of the best practices webinars which is just basically free, great training information. So go check those out. So here’s a bit of something Why don’t we bundle the Press Advantage offer with Local PR Pro I’m just throwing it out there we don’t have to decide right now but I mean it just it goes hand in hand let’s let’s work it out and make them an offer they can’t refuse so they get results right away the way we do that. And one more thing before we go I don’t want to set any hard dates because it’s a work in progress. But there’s something coming for Syndication Academy. Yeah, look new flavor.

We’re working on it. We’re working on it guys. Let’s say sometime towards the fourth quarter of the year sometime. Look for it. It revamped updated when I bought properties. I don’t know how you can make the best better but we are.

Yeah, yes. Yeah. And I was gonna say I was gonna turn into t test I’ll keep this one short because we can’t really say much about it. But yeah, the webinar go get signed up for that. Keep your eyes and ears peeled about Syndication Academy and Bradley’s going to be doing some testing for some additional link building based stuff. And we’ll just leave it at that for now and say that, should that go? Well, that’s definitely something we’ll be letting everyone know about. Yep.

Cool. All right, guys. Anything else before we dive in? We’re good. All right. Let’s do it. Grab the screen.

You guys are seeing my screen correct?

Yep. So yeah, right.

What Phone Number To Use When Setting Up The GMB For A Local Lead Gen Site?

jump right into it. So olana says, Hi guys. Setting up a local lead gen site. Haven’t got a phone number for it yet. Would you wait until after you have the number to set up the GMB? Yes, I think you have to actually you have to have a phone number. As far as I remember. I haven’t set up a GMB in quite some time, but I’m pretty sure you have to have a phone number. Also, which of the following Do you use for lead gen an 800 number, a one 300 number. I’ve never even heard of that mobile or local landline with a reader.

I prefer using call rail. I still use call rail. I’ve used call fire in the past and I’ve got a ton of numbers in call fire comm that I would like to port over to call rail is a better platform. It gives you a ton more features. It’s inexpensive, but it takes it’s a long process of porting numbers. So I just have two accounts. I’ve got call firing call rail. I prefer using call rail. Again, I use call rail for several of my lead gen assets as well as my own real estate business. Because I use a lot of phone numbers for tracking marketing purposes and stuff. But I really, really like call rail. Does anybody else have any suggestions?

Call rail. I can’t say anything else. It’s what I use. Yeah. And no, not an 800 number. All right. So if you’re going to work local, which your car it no matter where you go, you don’t want that 800 number you want that local number you want people kind of like that local numbers I’ve seen better results with a local number than an ad hundred number unless you’re widely known for having that 800 number. Does that make sense? Or did I lose everybody? So 100 works when you’re widely known like like, something like roto rooter, let’s say or plumbers nine one, that kind of thing. But if you’re local and you want people to you to want to create that familiarity it really helps to have that local number.

Yes, I agree. I use answerconnect.com to send phone calls into a call center so that the phone always gets answered. It screens the calls there’s a ton of benefits for using a call center. And I have been since 2013, the same account, answer Connect comm I really can’t say enough good things about them. And so they give you an 800 number but you can forward or redirect local numbers to the 800 number which is what I do. That way. You know, I can have multiple lead gen assets all funneling into that with their own separate local numbers, but all funneling into the same call center if it’s for the same service provider, essentially.

But there’s a lot of really cool things. And by the way, guys, I’m working on a lot of lead gen stuff right now, and I’ve got some case studies I’m working on that I’ll be making public, not just within our groups. And I’ve also got some things that I’m going to be introducing to everybody when I do make that case studies public that I think will help a lot of you with your lead gen business. I can’t really talk much about it right now, but I just kind of wanted to tease it. So there you go.

How To Generate Quality Content For A Niche Blog If You Don’t Like Writing?

The next question is, Hey, guys, I want to set up a niche blog, but I don’t like writing How can I generate the quality content myself for my niche blog? Will the generated content be good enough for niche blogging? Thanks, Content Kingpin.

When I first started in SEO and local lead gen way back in, you know, 2010 timeframe. I was actually doing blog posts. Right after, I’d kind of developed the Syndication Academy method, and because it was just working like crazy good, I knew that blogging was going to be the way to populate the networks and get results. And so I was actually blogging for industries that I knew nothing about. I was actually writing the posts myself. And it was incredibly time-consuming. And it’s frustrating because I had to learn a lot about the businesses and the topics and such. And I, fortunately, I got introduced to content curating, and I don’t remember who introduced me to it or whatever, but I kind of started reading about it. And then I bought a couple of courses about content curating, and some plugins and all kinds of stuff. And I started curating content and I got much more efficient at generating content. And he also I didn’t have to know as much about a topic because you can just find subject matter, you know, find articles on the web or content. It doesn’t have to be articles. It can be podcasts, videos, infographics, slide presentations, it could be a number of things that are based around the topic that you are writing about that are written by or produce the contents produced by subject matter experts or SMEs. And you can get really good and really efficient at producing content by just being able to find and locate content developed or produced by subject matter experts. And then curating it and creating a unique post based upon using, you know, snippets of content from the subject matter experts, it’s already been published. So that’s, you know, been my preferred method. And I was actually doing that on my own. I use some tools and some plugins at the time. But once my business got to a certain level, it was just way too time-consuming. Even with using curated content, I was too time-consuming for me to produce it myself. So I developed training and hired a virtual assistant and handed it over to them and she’s still with me today. By the way, her name is Esther she’s still my primary number one blogger that works for me right now.

But anyway, long story short, I ended up training multiple virtual assistants or bloggers or curators as what they are really, with that training. So I kind of polished it up a bit. And that’s what Content Kingpin is, which is one of our training courses. And it’s the same process that my bloggers all use today, I talked about a couple of tools, but we still primarily do everything manually. Just using like a like Feedly. For example, to the group and categorize content feeds that we know like and trust that then we can use to all So a quick glimpse my bloggers go in for whenever they’ve got to produce or publish a post, they’ll go in and just look at Feedly select that particular category or folder for the project that they’re working on. And it will show all the content that’s available than the recent content that’s available around that particular topic. And then they can choose a topic to blog about to curate a post about and then pick and choose a few articles that will either reinforce that the idea that they’re trying to convey with their posts, or sometimes they’ll do like argumentative posts where they’ll try to show in a different opinion from what perhaps others are saying. So they’ll show two sides of the coin, if that makes sense, as two different competing opinions about the same topic anyway, it’s great, it works incredibly well, it also creates co-citation. And so we highly recommend you check out Content Kingpin, it’s one of the best ways to do it. Not only that but if you were to use that site type of the system, the Content Kingpin method, then you can get away from doing it yourself. So you don’t have to publish I mean, I would learn it first. You know, learn it and understand how to do it first, but then you can actually put a virtual assistant that you hire through the course and have them do it for you, and you can kind of just managing and guide them until they get up to your standards. But that’s the best way to do it. Guys. I call it hands-free content marketing and it’s a great revenue source too because it really is simple.

Once you understand the topic concept is really, really good to anybody want to comment on that Content Kingpin doesn’t get enough credit for does what it does. People don’t understand it, I think because they get all the all this different information about unique content and duplicate content and all this bullshit that’s out there. That’s nothing. Really if it were so places like Huffington Post’s would not exist. Google News would not exist unless curated content was okay. But not only Okay, whether it was good I’d be how much traffic does it get Bing, Yahoo. All they do all day long is republish story. Huffington Post is a collection of republish story that all it is and all you’re doing with Content Kingpin is republishing the story. You’re summarizing them right taking power, whatever it is that you do it. And you’re adding your own commentary and proper attribution and it’s a done deal. I mean, it’s so simple. And yet people try to make it so much more difficult than it really should be. But yeah, totally Content Kingpin for the win. You know, and it’s interesting. I’ve just pulled this up because I did this and if you guys remember masterclass, we had a, we had a kind of a middle-tier webinar coaching program that we had called masterclass for a number of years. And I did this as a local case study, Gainesville home pros, and I’ve never done anything with it since I think that was back in 2015. Oh, look at that. It says account suspended. That’s interesting. That’s one of my Okay, well, anyway, I would sure like to show you that blog because that was curated content, the same method. My blogger Esther, who was the first one I trained using that method, produced all the content on that site using curated content, and they were beautiful posts and unfortunately, it looks like that account has been that hosting account perhaps has been suspended. I have done anything with it years. But I would like to show you guys some examples of that. But I don’t have anything that I can show you right now off the top of my head. But anyway, it’s it works really, really well the posts come out beautiful if you do it right. I would highly recommend going through Content Kingpin.

No, because there are a few things that you have to do in order to not infringe on copyright. So for example, you don’t want to curate images that can get you into trouble, asked me how I know.

Because you’ll get extortion letters from like Getty Images and other you know, asshole law firms out there that are just looking for people that have republished images without copyright, without rights to it. So there’s like a lot of things. There’s not a lot of things, but there are a few things that you really should do to make sure that you’re covering your ass when you’re curating content. So again, I highly recommend you go through the product, it’s through that program. It’s a really, really good program. It’s the same that we use today. You know, there are a lot of tools out there that can help you to manage content curating, but we’ve already.

He’s found that it really just is just as quick and easy because what happens with a lot of these tools is they stop being supported over time. We know one of them was Curation Suite that we actually promoted. And fortunately after promoting it, and after a year or so, like the support just stopped and it kind of fell off the face of the earth. The same thing with a bunch of curating plugins that I’ve used over the years, they just eventually fall off the market and they just don’t get supported. So we’ve learned to just stick with the manual process and it’s you know, once somebody becomes efficient with that process is really is a very efficient way to produce content. So you don’t need all the additional tools and plugins and things like that. So that’s why I recommend that product because it’s a Content Kingpin because it will teach you how to do it manually and then you can teach a VA how to do it by just putting them right through the same training. It’s a great question though.

What Training Do You Offer In The MasterMind That You Can’t Get In The Syndication Academy?

Jason says I’m currently in the Syndication Academy 2.0 and I was wanting to know all of the different features and benefits in the mastermind that you don’t get in the Academy. Is this all of these different training you offer in the mastermind if I joined the mastermind, can I get a discount for the cost of the academy? Okay, so first of all the mastermind you have direct access to my partners and me, as well as all the other members of the group, which we have a lot of really savvy marketers and agency owners and CEOs and such in our group. But you also have direct access to all of us to where you can ask us questions in the Facebook group at any time. We’re in there answering questions often. Plus, we each host our own separate webinars inside the mastermind. They’re bi-weekly webinars. So every two weeks each one of us hosts our own webinar. So you get to come to ask us questions at length during the webinars. Like you can post questions ahead of time for the webinars, we’ll do site audits, we’ll you know, look at your, your SEO, your you know, on-page stuff off-page stuff, we’ll help you with projects if you need it. Plus, as I said, you get to you know, come to ask me stuff, or Marco stuff or Adam, or Hernan or Chris any one of us. So there’s a lot of benefits in there that we don’t provide anywhere else we’ll go as deep into, whatever subject you want to go into, you know, and that’s one of the things that we can’t do on a free setting like this or any in any of our other groups. So the mastermind is definitely where you want to be if you want to get all that, as well as Syndication Academy is included in that. So you can cancel your Syndication Academy account if you join the mastermind because it’s included in that as well as all of our products under $300. Anything over $300 you get a significant discount. So there’s a ton of benefits to be in the mastermind. Anybody else wanna?

Yeah, I would just say Jason, if you just started Syndication Academy, if you’re just getting into it, then contact support and we’ll refund whatever you paid for Syndication Academy and you can or you can apply it towards them. However, you want to work that out, we’ll work it out for you. We always do. Why because membership has its privileges. So that’s why we do things the way we do and yes, I mean, above all else is this group of people like-minded people who are working towards what we call POFU position of Fuck you, where you have the kind of power and money where you can pick and choose your clients, your clients come to you instead of you going knocking on doors on $500 clients who are a pain in the ass. So rather than doing all that you getting all you get all of this training, you get the mindset training, you get the how-to get all of the collective knowledge, and then you have five, almost six years of webinars. Now some of them of course are dated, but we do we’re not doing webinars every week. It’s either Bradley or me like we take every other Thursday. You got Hernan, you got Adam. Yeah, Chris, everyone is giving you their perspective and their take on things so you get all of these different points of view, all of this all of these different experiences coming to you and helping you in whatever it is that you’re trying to do whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve. So it’s not just what you get as far as training. It’s the people and the relationships, the networking that you can do inside the mastermind like I know people who are working together in different projects, and we tell people to become the big fish in a little pond. But then some of them go on to and I’m gonna mention his name, for example, to dominate in the Fort Worth area. And you got another one in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the Twin Cities you got someone in the Dirty South, right South Carolina, Georgia area, who are Domini who may have started as the big fish in the little pile or becomes the little fish in the big fish in the little pond. But then they move to a bigger pond. So that we’re always pushing. We’re always encouraging people. That growth means you go to make more money until you reach a stepping point where you say, Okay, I met, hopefully, this is where I want to be, this is how I want to do it. And if I choose not to work tomorrow, I can do that because the process and the systems and everything else that I’ve gained through being in the mastermind, will take care of me not being it, the system is there, so I don’t have to be there. And I mean, just the way that this happened and how this happened, and how people finally are able to step away and say, Man, I can spend time with my family and I can relax and I can do the things I want to do, rather than having to do the things that I have to do things that I must with no other choice. So I think that that’s just one of the greater things about the mastermind is that mindset that awful, you’re going after that poof hopefully you get on that path. And it’s it becomes your magnificent obsession. I thank you CTF letcher for that. But it becomes your magnificent obsession. You’re going after that and there is nothing that can get in your way of achieving that powerful, that’s when you know that you’re there. And that’s what we’re there for. So, just because you brought up CT, and we don’t have a lot of questions, so I know we got time when we did the interview with CT Fletcher, I’ve created this text document. It’s been on my desktop ever since. And hopefully, nobody gets offended because CT Fletcher likes to cuss a lot. Say but here’s a lot of here are the quotes that struck me when we were at when we really were Marco interviewing him. I was on the webinar, but it was really Marco interviewing CT Fletcher, who’s a powerlifter. He broke a ton of records for a while. But anyway, some of these are really funny. I’m not gonna read them out to you, but you remember these Marco? Absolutely. I love them so awesome. I still watch them. Will will is king. Yeah, man. Oh, man. Oh, man. He’s so good. You ain’t pretty motherfucker. Yeah, you ain’t that birdie.

So funny. I mean, that one right there cracks me up too. I laughed out loud. Anyways, I just thought that was funny because I happen to notice it on my desktop the other day and I giggled about it. You just brought it up.

Would You Recommend A Subdirectory Or Subfolder On The Same Domain When Creating The Blog?

So anyway, Jason, next question says, Hey, guys, I have an e-commerce website using WordPress with WooCommerce. Would you recommend a subdirectory? Or folder on the same domain and load a new WordPress and create a blog? Yes, that’s what we’ve always recommended. I mean, I don’t do any e-commerce stuff. But I mean, in the past, I have done some SEO for some e-commerce clients. But it’s not something I’d like to do. So I got out of doing it, but we’ve always recommended it. So do you have control over like essentially a content distribution engine, right, and that’s WordPress is great for that? So you can either put it in a subfolder or directory of the root domain or what we always recommended was to put it in a subdomain instead. And that’s because a subdomain is still treated as content have a separate web entity or separate site, I should say, a separate website than the root domain. So that if you’re in your content distribution, you do something spammy, which if you follow our methods, you won’t have any trouble, at least, we, you know, as it stands right now, but Google could change everything in a moment’s notice. But we’ve never had any issues. But if you put in a subdomain, and you were doing something spammy or something, Google changed its rules, all of a sudden, and something became spammy, they wouldn’t affect the root domain, which is where your e-commerce site resides, it would affect the subdomain only. So we always prefer, like, you know, you could put blog as a subdomain to whatever your domain is, or whatever you want it to be news or something like that. And that’s what we prefer to do. But you could put it in a subdirectory. But yeah, that gives you the opportunity then to do all your content marketing. Remember, if you’ve got an e-commerce site, and you’ve got product categories, for example, you can mirror those same categories. We talked about theme mirroring all the time.

If you don’t know what that is, you know, it’s essentially duplicating or mirroring your site structure on other assets. So you have if you have product categories in your eCommerce site, you could mirror those same categories as content categories, or you know, in WordPress, just categories are the same. You could title them and everything the same as what they are on your eCommerce site. And then you can publish posts, blog posts, or sporting posts. That’s kind of a link building method that in place them within those particular silos or categories in the WordPress site, distribute them out to a syndication network, mirror, all of that stuff on a G site, and our ys drive stack, press releases, all that kind of stuff. You mirror all of that together, and it works really, really well to push power to your, you know, your ultimate destination, which would be your e-commerce product pages. So you want to comment on that. Yeah, we used to recommend going to a subdomain because we wanted to protect the root cause we were doing. let’s admit it, we were doing a lot of evil stuff yes to the subdomains, we were blasting them to the point where if we had them connected to the route, any penalty would pass to the root. What we’ve done is we’ve taken a step out, because now everything goes through our SEO power shield. And so now the route is protected.

And so in order to push even more power, by all means, put it in a subdirectory because then you’re accruing everything inside the root when you go into that subdirectory rather than stepping in a subdomain, which is treated as a separate website, so you’re one hop away from your root domain anyway and you’re losing link equity. When you’re anytime that you’re one hop or more away, you lose link equity at the top. When you’re in a subdomain, you don’t lose that link equity is even when you’re in the root. You don’t lose that link equity when you’re in a folder inside the root. You don’t lose that link equity because you’re not a hub away. You’re in the root, now if you do want to protect it, then you just install in the dub dub dub. So that’s where you would do the root because that’s a subdomain anyway.

So that’s how you do it. But we have the SEO PowerShell it’s not necessary anymore. Because everything that we do goes through our SEO power shield, which amplifies and protects. That’s why we call it the SEO, power shield. It powers it up, it amplifies and it protects it shields it and so that my recommendation would be totally totally unless you’re planning on doing a whole lot of evil stuff to that subdomain go with a sub but with it should be with a folder inside the root.

What Type Of Brand Property Link To Use In A Press Release?

Awesome. So next is BB BB. Look, you’ve gotten better, buddy. Your questions are a lot shorter and not quite as many. So I think we’re finally getting through to you, man. And I’m just giving you our time baby. It’s we’re always like having you here but he says Hey guys, number one does that the link to a branded property in the press release should be to the property or to one of its pages that were syndicated by RSS. Well, it depends on what you’re doing. But so, my strategy and again, it’s covered in the press release SEO, or piece PR silo stacking webinar that we did Marco and I did. Again, you can find that at MGYB or just go to youtube.com slash semantic mastery use the channel search feature search for press release SEO and you’ll find it you know, right at the top go watch that. Because what I prefer to do is we you know, we’re constantly blogging for clients or for projects period. So that populates syndication network, right, we’re building topical relevancy and depth to our silos, right depth to a particular topic. And then they syndicate out to syndication networks, right. And within every single post, within the proper silo architecture, we’re always linking back up from the post back up to the top of the silo page, which is the page that we’re trying to drive traffic to. Right. So what we do what I do is I always, you know, I like to publish press releases that are highlighting or showcasing a recent blog post. And that links to the blog post URL, which within the blog post, actually links back up to the page on the site. But I mean, you don’t have to use that strategy all the time. That’s what I do. Because I consistently publish press, we’re consistently blogging and we’re consistently publishing press releases for all of my clients or my lead gen asset. So it just works out really well because we’re providing deep links, so links further down into a silo that helps to power up with proper silo architecture, it helps to power up the entire silo and helps all of the different keywords that we’re targeting within the silo start to rise or surface in the search engines because of those deep links, right. So that’s my preferred method because it adds more diversity and it’s linking to multiple points.

Within the main money site, as opposed to always constantly hitting the homepage or just the product or service pages, the top of silo pages in other words, so I like to do deep links, but it depends on what you’re doing. If you’re not doing a lot of press releases, if you’re you know, you only got a budget for a handful of them, then it might be better to actually hit your homepage and or your top of silo pages, that kind of thing. So it really just depends on what your overall content marketing strategy is, and what you’re going to be linking to, you know that that’s going to determine where you’re going to link to from within your site. Okay.

That’s it that said, I always almost not 100% but we almost always link from within press releases to a page or post on the money site. Unless we’re doing a two-step which again, go watch the press release SEO webinar, and you’ll understand what I mean. But for example, if a client as all my local clients have Google My Business profiles. So if we publish a post when we publish a blog post on the blog, my blogger also for most of my clients will end up publishing a GMB post that points a link back to the blog post. So essentially, the GMB post is nothing other than a summary of the blog post itself with the same featured image as the image for the GMB post the photo, and then the button link, the Learn More button link links back to the blog post. So sometimes our press releases will actually link to the GMB post URL, because that ultimately links to the blog post URL, so the two-step process there. But you can also and I’ve talked about this almost every week now for the last like two months on Hump Day hangouts baby so I’m sure you’re aware of what I was what I’ve said. But you know, if you’ve got particular keywords that you’re trying to push, then you can actually go extract the post URLs from like, for example, the blogs on your syndication network, so blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, you can go extract these post URLs that are where the re-syndication or of the published the post that you publish targeting those keywords. And you can link to those within press releases too if you want to because again, that’s tiered link building. So it’s helpful in anyone, but you don’t have to. I prefer to link to those blog post URLs using daddy as link building from an MGYB because I like to use the press releases to link directly back to the money site, or two primary tier one assets, such as a GMB profile, GMB map, Id page, any one of those types of things when it comes to that.

That was a good question. By the way, bb though. Yeah, that that was a really good question. Now, I mean, the link building varies it depends on how much power you’re trying to push and where and everything is gonna be where it’s needed, where everything’s needed. Because sometimes it’s just one press release, push, can get you to where you need to be. Other times, you’re going to need way more. Yeah, there are other times when you’re going to need even link building into the press releases. There’s no one set rule because sometimes it’s just the SEO power shield coming, coming in, right coming online. And that’s enough. And sometimes it doesn’t even have to do with the competition because we’ve seen it even in some tough keyword sets that you start ranking like right from the SEO power shield. So this totally ended depends on the no definitive answer for this, other than, you’re going to have to get your press release. If you’ve set it up correctly. And you hit your top-level category rather than just like everybody does your homepage. Then your top-level category will flow and it’ll push all of that power so that everything benefits from it, including the top-level category, not just the longtail keywords, it’s how we teach it now. We teach people to go from the top-down instead of bottom-up it

It’s a little different, it’s kind of the same thing except we’re going. For example, if we want to rank for gold futures, this is just an example. It’s incredibly difficult to rank for that. But we would go even one, one level higher, we would go after the gold category, the entire gold category to pull up the gold features category instead of trying to push it up with all of the long tails. And I’ve seen that it has a greater effect when you try to go for that top-level category. on everything else, not only the longtail but the subcategory that you’re after. So I’m always telling people you go one level up. So keeping this in mind, then it’s up to you. I always tell people that we have to be scientists when we’re gauging how it is that we’re going to do this. What effect we’re trying to create, you’re going to have to create your link building and press releases are part of link building. You’re going to create it so that whatever you’re trying to benefit the most guests

The most benefit out of what you’re doing. And so you approach it that way. Yeah. So it varies. That’s the short answer. It varies. It depends, right?

Can We Use The PR Stacking Strategies With Article Directories?

Next, can we treat an article direct article, an article directory as press releases, meaning publishing, as the PR stacking and also linking to actual prs? Okay, I don’t do any article directory stuff I haven’t for years, not saying that it can’t still be useful. I just haven’t because they’ve been known to be spammy. I think a lot of the links from those get discredited. It’s much better to get like, you know, articles instead of being published on article directories, which were always known as SEO like, honey, honey, what do you call them honey, honey holes or whatever you call them. But I’m not saying that it won’t work because I don’t know. I haven’t tested it in years. If I was going to do it, maybe I would do it. Where I was only linking to SEO shield assets or like you say, can you link to PRs? Yes, that would be fun because press release wherever press releases published is going to be able to handle those type of links, you may be able to push good link equity to them, or even, it doesn’t really matter because they’re not your money site. So I, I, again, I haven’t used article directories in probably five or six years.

And so I don’t really know whether they’re still viable or if they’re still helping at any level. But if I was going to use them, I would do it too. I would use them to link only back to tier one asset not directly to the money site. And press releases are a great thing to link to. So, Marco, I know you don’t use article directories either.

I used to, it’s not necessary anymore. I don’t need to go that far. Right. The way that we’re doing it pushes so much power that we don’t need to go. I mean, when you’re already at number one, like how much better can you go than the number one.

So maybe at some point with some of the case studies that we’re doing and everything else that we have coming on e-commerce and everything else that we’re experimenting. Yeah, I would say that we can do that. But right now, or maybe we need to do that. But right now the way that we’re doing things is not necessary.

What Do You Mean By Kitchen Sink Spam?

Agreed. The last question was, what do you mean when you say kitchen sink? It gets me confused. Yeah, when I say kitchen sink spam, or when we say that, that just means using link building tools and throwing every kind of link like even some real spammy stuff, at whatever your target is. So like when we say you can throw kitchen sink spam at it, it means you could use some of the most god awful links in the world and throw them at, you know, point them at a particular target and still benefit from it. We would never encourage anybody to do that with their money site. And in fact, we prefer to still use better links.

Even if you’re using spam tools, for example, like you know, our link building master dedhia he uses a ton of link building tools but he always recommends that your the links that he builds to whatever your targets are, which we always recommend tier-one entity targets or your SEO shield essentially. But he always likes to suggest recommends using two layers two levels of contextual web two Dotto links. And then throwing if you want a third tier of links, you can throw kitchen sink spam at those contextual web two dot o links. So that’s what we mean by kitchen sink spam, it means pretty much anything under the sun, that’s a link. And a lot of those would be toxic if they’re not used properly, but they can still provide a benefit if used properly. And that’s what we talk about when we talk about you know, you can hit SEO power shields with kitchen sink spam, and they’ll end up ranking. We don’t recommend it. We still recommend using the contextual web to Dotto links. Add your first and second-tier links that are being built to your tier one assets. But you can always throw kitchen sink spam behind that if you wanted and still receive a benefit Mark has done several tests I have to, but we even did the Marco and Rob did the kind of public case study for the DC plumber and just hit it with like over a million kitchen sink spam style links, including porn porn links, and it ranked and it’s probably still ranking today. So and we just had someone in RYS Academy reloaded last week, come in and tell us that they tried the million kitchen sink, spam link test and got really good results and 89% increase in traffic month to month. Wow. So it works. However, think of it this way. If garbage links work, how much better? Will quality links work? How much better will the way that we do the tiered link building right? contextual tiered link building

How much better is that, not only for now but long term when they come looking? The first thing that they look for is that kitchen sink spam, that that the automation is is what Google is looking for. And we’re kind of hiding in plain sight because we’re not giving them what everybody else is doing. We’re doing it a little bit differently. And it just playing work. So when you’re thinking about going after that, that million links, and yeah, you can pay 50 bucks in fiber, and there’s going to be complete TSA, and it’s going to be truly, truly garbage type of stuff that you don’t want to look at. Why would you do that to your project? Why would you do that when it can show up in your link profile? Do you want that? Because we had that showing up for DC plumbing. We had those links index, man. And seriously, you didn’t want your kids looking at that you didn’t want you to want to be sitting there with your wife. Looking at some of that stuff that was coming through it was it was like, the really bad garbage man.

So why would so when I’m talking to people, my question is if you want to test and you don’t care, you don’t care what shows up in the link profile, you don’t care about anything. You’re just trying to make you make some money. It’s a fun test, then, by all means, do it. But if it’s something that you care about, why would you mistreat something that you care about that one?

Agreed.

Can You Blast The Press Release And Drive Stacks With Backlinks Without Negative Impact On The Money Site And GMB?

Okay, next is Gordon, what’s up Gord? It’s been a while he says, Hey, guys, hope you’re safe. And well just have a quick question. When using press releases or an ROI S Drive stack through the MGYB store. Can you blast either or both of them with hundreds or even thousands of backlinks without any negative effect on your money site? Or GMB listing? And if so, will that increase the SEO juice flowing to either entity and help them to rank? Thank you very much. Yeah. And that’s, I mean, that’s exactly what we were just talking about.

We prefer to build links to our tier one entity assets such as the SEO power shield, our last drive stack, g site press releases the organic press release organization page, you know, the idx page, anything like that. And that’s if you set it up correctly, you’re not going to have any negative results whatsoever, which is why we set the things up the way that we do. That’s why we call it the SEO power shield because it shields it’s like, I’ve always called it an SEO firewall, right? It creates a firewall around your money site. And so that’s exactly what we’re talking about. embeds and or backlinks work really, really well. In fact, you can even take your money site it for example, and you know, embed it in a G site and then hammer the G site page with backlinks. And that’s going to help your money site page benefit without there being an actual direct hyperlink on that page. Does that make sense? So yeah, that’s what we were just talking about. With Bibi’s question when we just hammer our assets with backlinks because it helps to push ultimately it flows down through to whatever our target destination is, which could be a GMB asset.

Could be a Google Site could be a money site. It could be all three of those. So yes, that would work. Any comments on that?

Should You Interlink A Post If The Main Article Has 5 Jump Links?

No, that’s perfect. Pavlos up, he says, Hey guys last time, I missed an opportunity to say thank you. Well, you’re welcome. Pavlo He says, question in one of your videos, you said that I can copy main silo page content and create a post. The Post will be canonicalized back to the main article, the canonical link itself will be a jump link to the Main article.

The question is should I interlink these posts if I have if the Main article has five jump links, and I’ve created five posts from the main content? I think I kind of vaguely remember this conversation we had on Hump Day Hangouts, but I’m not quite following the question. I think what, what I was talking about if and hopefully, I’m not off base here, but prefer using long-form content now for content for websites or for money sites, instead of in the past, like, you know, five years ago, you know, you could create a kind of thin content type of silo page. And then each supporting a keyword that you would find within your with your keyword research. So all of the supporting keywords that you would stack within a particular silo, I just always use spreadsheets for that. So I create a column but my top-level keyword at the top, you know, the column header, and then I would go extract all of the relevant supporting keywords and key phrases and put them in underneath that in that same column right in a spreadsheet. And then that would be that that goes to my bloggers, for them to produce content around so that they highlight one of the supporting keywords within the correct silo. And it used to be that I would create kind of thin content, top of silo pages, and then target individual longer tail keywords with blog posts, but that becomes repetitive redundant. And it doesn’t work as well what I found as having a long-form top of silo page now, that contains a lot of those supporting keywords so that broken down into subheadings, right, so and I think that’s what you were talking about is when I mentioned that you can create long-form content, and even put a table of contents with jump links at the top of the content, which is really good for SEO. And then you can actually create blog posts targeting those longer tail phrases that are already present on the silo page itself right to top of silo page that have jump links to them and then link from those supporting articles within the blog post to those jump links. Because then it’s, it’s, it’s linking to the top of silo page, but it’s also reinforcing that longer tail subheading or keyword, right, so that’s supporting keyword. If that’s what you’re talking about, then let’s see. The question is should I interlink these posts with the Main article as well? Five jump links. And I’ve created five posts from the main content. Yeah, I mean, I don’t I can’t get too far into this Marco would kill me if I did.

But if you’re interlinking, your supporting posts correctly, daisy-chaining them together then and they’re just linking from post to post. And from within each post linking back to the top of silo page, even if it’s at a jump link, a jump link to the top of silo page to some section on the top of silo page. Yes, that would work. That would work really, really well. Actually. Any comments on that Marco?

Sorry about that.

A lot. Ah, no, it’s not really something that I’m willing to talk about in a free gotten a free forum like this. They are not going to get into that because it just puts so much power and it gets around everything that Google can throw at you. So no, that’s fine. We’ll leave it at that. Okay.

But yeah, just get creative with it. Think about you know what you’re doing with your structure. And I don’t like to if I don’t know where you say you can just clone copy main silo page content and create a post, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t do that on the same site what I was talking about with cloning or copying or mirroring, right is within the G site. Right. So if you’ve got your top of silo page, and you’ve got all the content on the page, you can always create, we recommend mirroring that top of silo page on the G site. And then if you had supporting posts within that category on your money site, I don’t typically duplicate or mirror posts onto a G site unless I’m having trouble ranking a particular keyword in which case then I will create child pages on the G site that is each child a one to one ratio, child page for every post within that silo, and then just embed those in there and that’s what I was talking about with the jumping links, you can actually create jump links from the G site back to the money site there. But again, that’s more kind of mastermind stuff or heavy hitter club stuff. So hopefully you got some value out of that. But I wouldn’t copy top of silo content and republish it on the same blog from your money site. I wouldn’t. Personally I wouldn’t do that I would have new content curated, not written because I use curated content for blog posts, the curated targeting the keywords that I’m trying to push that is on the top of the silo page if that makes sense. Okay.

So another good question.

Jason says thank you. Yeah, so he’s already watched all the Syndication Academy videos, that’s okay. If you join the mastermind if you just joined recently, the Syndication Academy join the mastermind will up make it worth your while we’ll refund your Syndication Academy purchase or apply it towards your first month of mastermind or something like that, and then you can cancel that subscription. So, yep, baby says great. We’re almost

What Are Your Thoughts On The Statement That You Can Flatten A Complex Silo Into A Simple Silo?

Got a timer almost out of question. So this is good timing maybe says great. What do you think of the statement that each complex silo can be flattened to a simple silo? And if a site isn’t that big, is it better to do the flat? Yes, I always, always recommend using simple silos where possible and guys, I’m going to be updating the training, I was really hoping to get that done for today, but I didn’t. And so I’ll try to have it done by next Wednesday. But in the process, street process doc that I created for our methods and for me, you know, our methods are what we sell as done for you services and MGYB for those of you that aren’t aware of it, if you go to semantic mastery comm slash process, I’m going to bring it up. It’ll you guys can take a look at this. For those of you that haven’t already been exposed to it, this is the process street process doc that I created to that has a lot of training in there with a lot of it’s the why we do what we do.

And what you can expect from it the How is we point to our training products for the how but or the where to get it as the links over to MGYB but these are the website silo architecture, the training videos that I created, you know, five years ago or whatever, they’re, they’re still valid, but my overall process has changed slightly right it’s evolved slightly and so I’m going to redo those silo training videos where I go into what a simple silo is what a complex silo is a difference between a physical silo and a virtual silo and what I prefer to use and why I’m going to redo those videos and that will go into here the website section of the worry list entity based SEO process doc and when I do hope I’ll have this done by next week guys I really wanted to get it done by this week but I haven’t even started on it. So I’ll try to get it done by next week. And then again guys you go to semantic mastery comm slash process and you take a look at all the stuff that’s in here. There’s a lot of training here. And so anyway, that said, Yes, I always recommend a simple silo. For most projects. I’m not going to say for the most projects for most local projects, which is what I do, almost exclusively, simple silos will suffice. I used to always try to build complex solids because I thought it was going to be better. And then maybe there is some benefit to it. But what I found is a complex silo is complicated. Hence the name complex silo. And so it’s difficult to build it create some kind of funny issues that are hard to reconcile with the URLs with the slugs and that kind of with permalinks and that kind of stuff. So I prefer to stick with a simple silo, it’s much easier to manage, it’s easier to map out when you’re in the build process. So I like using simple silos for most local projects. That’s all that is ever needed. In fact, with a simple silo, if you’re using our methods, you’re going to be the on-page SEO is going to be far superior to what most of your competitors are doing anyways. So it’s not really necessary to do a complex silo. If you’re doing a very broad site with a lot of categories and subcategories, then you might be necessary to do a complex silo. But, as I said, I always try to simplify where possible. We’ve had a ton of people over the years, join one of our groups, and they map out this incredibly intricate silo map of a site. And they, you know, probably spend hours and hours and hours mapping it out and creating drawings to show the silo structure and everything and then they present it and say, What do you think you think this would work? And it’s like, Well, yeah, but it could have worked, you know, eight levels previous, where it was like a much simpler build, and you got to save yourself a ton of time. And we don’t say that to pick on anybody, but it’s because I think we as SEO types, try to overcomplicate stuff all the time, and I’ve learned over the years to try to simplify as much as possible and get results with a much simpler process and simple silo structure is the way that I prefer to build 90 95% of my sites.

commenting. I totally agree. I don’t know why people get themselves into trouble with complex silos like right from the start. Yeah, if it’s a brand new project that there’s no need for for a complex silo, unless it’s like, I don’t know, like some type of e-commerce website and you’ve seen those where there’s a bunch of complex subcategories and while category, subcategory, sub-sub categories and all of these things that really complicated but I tell people to look in the beginning, you’re good with your homepage, and three categories, three top-level categories, the three main keywords that you’re going to go after to start making money, push all the power that way, as needed. And as you see more opportunities for top-level categories. You add them, right because then your whole setup is done. And whatever you add is going to benefit from everything you’ve done previously. But if you start mapping it

Out complex from the beginning. How are you going to push the power that that’s going to need for every page and post and subcategory and sub subcategory that you’re trying to create? you’re dividing up the PageRank in such a way that it’s not going to push the initial power that it could have. There’s no way because there’s no way to keep the link flow going the right way. Let’s put it that way. Yeah, but if you keep it simple, minimize the number of categories Don’t try to go after everything at once. But just three, three categories. That gives you enough to write for about four months when you get our D keyword research. I’m sorry, that that’s not available right now. But I did keyword research gives you enough to write about four months on those three top market level categories on those silos. And then you can go and see like which one is more complicated, and you just break it up instead of making it a subcategory? You just make it another category that’s related to that one category that you already have no need to overcomplicate things I hate when people try to do that. It doesn’t have to be all that difficult. Yeah, and it’s fine because like I said, we’ve experienced that a lot over the years, and I’m not gonna lie. In years past I did the same thing, I would always approach new projects with the complex silo, trying to map all that out. And it just it became overwhelming, it became too much of a bitch too, you know, too difficult to manage the projects. And again, it creates a lot of funky issues, if you’re trying to share subcategories with other categories, especially in local like, for example, if you have, you know, your topical or service-based silos, which would be like, you know, like Tree Removal would be one silo, for example, and another silo could be tree trimming, which in reality, I’ve learned over the years that you really don’t even need to create silos for Tree Service sites because they’re all synonyms for each other. Google considers tree removal and tree trimming as synonyms anyways. But most of my tree service projects are

Still siloed like that. And if you were trying to duplicate location-based silos within each one of the topical or service-based silos, it creates some real funny URL issues that you have to reconcile. And it becomes difficult to do so or vice versa, if you had location-based silos, as your top-level silos, and then you tried to have subcategories of services, then it creates some issues too. So I learned a long time ago just to go with the simple silo structure, so much easier to manage so much easier to handle. So anyway, yeah, I totally recommend going with simple silos where possible. The last question and we’re at five o'clock. So this is a good stopping point is BB says should we have a form in the branded properties for collecting leads? Absolutely. If you’ve got form code that can be embedded in other sites, absolutely. I’m actually using I’m not going to talk about what I’m using just yet because it’s part of the case studies and I’m working on but I’m using a new lead generation tool.

It helps that has a form builder in it that works really, really good. And I’m actually embedding the form and multiple properties. Now g sites, you know, a lot of different places that I’m actually embedding the forms now because they work really, really well. And they direct all the leads back to one central location that then gets distributed out. So yeah, absolutely, there’s no doubt, I always try to put most of my businesses run on phone calls more than a phone like. In other words, the leads that I generate for businesses are more phone call leads than they are web form submissions, but I don’t ever want to not provide that as an option. So I used to, I used to really just push phone calls, but now I’m pushing the lead form submits as well, because I’ve got a really cool application that I’m using that helps to distribute the leads to wherever I want them to go. And again, I’ll reveal some of that in the coming week’s guys, but I absolutely recommend if you have a form, form code that can be embedded on other sites use it. Okay.

All right. Thanks, everybody for being here.

We will see you guys next week. Thanks, Marco for sticking around. All right. Have a good one. Thanks, everybody

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 299 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 299

Click on the video above to watch Episode 299 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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Announcement

All right, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 299. We’re one away from big Episode 300. I’m gonna call this episode where everyone is getting old and wearing glasses except Chris. I just realized all of us are now wearing glasses except Chris. Yeah, well, you guys spending too much time in front of your computers. There we go. Yeah, gotta change it around. This is the year we try to get ourselves off to the computer. So anyways, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. We’re gonna say hi, real quick catch up with everybody. And then we got a couple quick announcements before diving into the questions. So I’ll start on the bottom here since it’s cloudy weather element Marco. How you doing today? I have my lights on. That’s why it looks so bright. Yeah, it’s raining. It’s supposed to be raining. So finally got me with the lights on. But I can’t complain this nice a warm, actually. I’m kind of trying to hide trying to blend into the background. So Google doesn’t see me.

It’s all good man. I’m gonna

Having a good time.

Outstanding All right. Well, let’s work our way around. Hernan you got those new glasses what’s going on with you?

Yeah, man, I’m just trying to trying to blend in. I got I got glasses and now you got glasses. I mean yeah man we get rid of this and have a beard and growing a beard. Damn it. You’re doing the 50 K I might do the 50 now, so good man these are blue light blocking glasses, you know? Because there’s one this one guy show me one this really nerdy yellow like super like

orangey glasses and they make you look stupid. I know I won’t be wearing next week.

Yeah, do you don’t think the big square bc birth control glasses make you look stupid though right now, man. No, I can’t I can talk like this. Nobody will.

But a lady repellent. Yeah, exactly. say wait a second. Are you wearing those or are you being forced to wear this?

What this one glasses. Yeah, I’m just kidding.

You look good. I was just wondering maybe you’re making you know this light and blue light blue light blocking. I’m still confused. Why are you wearing blue light blocking glasses in the middle of the day or now? Yeah, well, it’s time. 5pm So, five 6pm So, all right. Well, before we tell everyone all about our AI problems, let’s see Chris, how you doing today? Man? Doing good, man. I hit the gym for like, I don’t know, like after another two week break for the first time again. Sore all over again. Hit the leg so hard. So yeah, like, I’m pretty sure you’re gonna feel the same way. Next week?

Yes, definitely. Yeah, I’m headed out. Taking a couple of weeks and hitting the road literally going to be gone for a couple of weeks and doing some trail running. So for those of you in the northwest, you know what mountain trail was? Yeah. We’re going to be doing a run around Mount St. Helens, as well as doing some visiting up there. Go to some campgrounds and stuff. So, Bradley, how about you? How are things on the East Coast today. Good. Happy to be here I’ve been trying to

do I’ve got a bunch of lead gen projects I’m working on. And so I’m trying to spend as much time on those as possible. But I’ve had a really good month in real estate flipping land and I’ve got a lot of deals coming in right now. So it’s kind of hard because I’m, I’m conflicted, the real estate money is really damn good. So I have to do I have to pursue that when it comes in. But at the same time, I’ve got other projects I’m trying to work on. So it’s kind of difficult balancing right now, but I’m happy to be here and got a lot of stuff coming up. So that’s the end. Well, we got a few things I want to mention to everybody real quick. First of all, is kofu. Live as we’ve been saying that is still on, we got a lot of cool,

cool stuff we’re going to be talking about. You can find out more about that at Boku live.com not just the cool stuff, but also what you can get. So head over there, check out the VIP ticket, I highly recommend it. We have priced it accordingly. We really want people to grab the VIP ticket and get

The most out of this. But if you want, you can grab the VIP plus as well and get some one on one time with us, which if you were going to book that separately, I mean, we know roughly what each other charge but I didn’t sit down and like calculate it out, but it’s a hell of a deal. So if that’s something you want to take advantage of, go grab one of those. There are limited number of those because we can’t just sit around talking to everybody all day. Unfortunately, we do have our own businesses and agencies to run. So go and check those out. We got some more information coming out later in August about the guest speakers and exactly what they’re going to be covering. But we got some great stuff. Jeffrey Smith is going to be joining us again and we’ve got two more agency owners along with Rob Beal and dedhia is going to be giving a case study to so tons of stuff and more. More to come. So again, poku live.com. Now, something else I want to talk about and Bradley, maybe you can share some info. I just got the link to this. You’re going to be talking with Jeremy from Press Advantage on Monday. Correct.

Yes, Monday at 3:30pm.

We’ve got another webinar with Jeremy, one of the CO owners of Press Advantage, which is the press release service that we’ve been using. I mean, primarily for several years now I’ve been with Press Advantage for six since. They’ve pretty much since they launched, so five or six years, maybe even longer than that. But anyways, he only opens up the subscription offers that he’s done for us. Rarely, let’s put it that way. Very rarely does he open up those subscription offers. And he’s, um, he’s prepared or planning to do that again next week. There are some new features that are been rolling out for Press Advantage and it’s just a good time to do so. And we’ve been asking him to open that back up again for some time. So he’s, he’s actually doing that for us next Monday at 3:30pm. So be on the lookout for the link. If you don’t, if Adam doesn’t post it here, you’ll get it via email plus in the groups and sign up for that any of you that are using press releases consistently for your marketing, whether it’s for clients or your own projects, we highly recommend them. They work incredibly well. I use them a lot. And so if you’re doing a lot of them, it’s probably best in your best interest to have your own subscription. And next week’s a good time to get it. So be there. Definitely, yeah, so that’ll be Monday. 3pm Eastern, and I thought will be Say that again. I believe it’s 330 Let me double-check. No, it’s 3 pm. I’m sorry. Yes. 3pm. Okay, so 3pm Eastern, and we will be sending out an email about that. I did just post the link. So stay tuned for that. But if you are interested in what press releases can do for you, then I highly suggest showing up plus Jeremy like Bradley said it’s gonna have a very special offer going with that. Yeah, real quick, guys. If anybody you know, before you even go on the webinar for that if, if you want to see how to use press releases in a way that just works incredibly well. Just go to our YouTube channel and search for press release SEO, and you’ll find

The webinar that we did, it’s also at MGYB. If you look in the webinar section on MGYB, the store, you’ll see that there’s we did a Marco and I did a webinar about how we use press releases and PR silo stacking. So essentially siloing press releases together. And it works really, really well. And I would highly recommend it if you’re on the fence or considering getting your own press release subscription that you go watch that webinar first so that you have an idea of how powerful they are and how to use them the best way. Definitely, will Bradley beat me to it. I was going to say speaking of MGYB and a lot of you guys took advantage of the awesome Fourth of July sale we had last month. There’s still some good stuff going on. If you had some updates coming so go check out mg y v.co for your done for you services. But yeah, as Bradley said up there, you’ll see the little webinar button click on that. And then there’s a bunch of the best practices webinars which is just basically free, great training information. So go check those out. So here’s a bit of something Why don’t we bundle the Press Advantage offer with Local PR Pro I’m just throwing it out there we don’t have to decide right now but I mean it just it goes hand in hand let’s let’s work it out and make them an offer they can’t refuse so they get results right away the way we do that. And one more thing before we go I don’t want to set any hard dates because it’s a work in progress. But there’s something coming for Syndication Academy. Yeah, look new flavor.

We’re working on it. We’re working on it guys. Let’s say sometime towards the fourth quarter of the year sometime. Look for it. It revamped updated when I bought properties. I don’t know how you can make the best better but we are.

Yeah, yes. Yeah. And I was gonna say I was gonna turn into t test I’ll keep this one short because we can’t really say much about it. But yeah, the webinar go get signed up for that. Keep your eyes and ears peeled about Syndication Academy and Bradley’s going to be doing some testing for some additional link building based stuff. And we’ll just leave it at that for now and say that, should that go? Well, that’s definitely something we’ll be letting everyone know about. Yep.

Cool. All right, guys. Anything else before we dive in? We’re good. All right. Let’s do it. Grab the screen.

You guys are seeing my screen correct?

Yep. So yeah, right.

What Phone Number To Use When Setting Up The GMB For A Local Lead Gen Site?

jump right into it. So olana says, Hi guys. Setting up a local lead gen site. Haven’t got a phone number for it yet. Would you wait until after you have the number to set up the GMB? Yes, I think you have to actually you have to have a phone number. As far as I remember. I haven’t set up a GMB in quite some time, but I’m pretty sure you have to have a phone number. Also, which of the following Do you use for lead gen an 800 number, a one 300 number. I’ve never even heard of that mobile or local landline with a reader.

I prefer using call rail. I still use call rail. I’ve used call fire in the past and I’ve got a ton of numbers in call fire comm that I would like to port over to call rail is a better platform. It gives you a ton more features. It’s inexpensive, but it takes it’s a long process of porting numbers. So I just have two accounts. I’ve got call firing call rail. I prefer using call rail. Again, I use call rail for several of my lead gen assets as well as my own real estate business. Because I use a lot of phone numbers for tracking marketing purposes and stuff. But I really, really like call rail. Does anybody else have any suggestions?

Call rail. I can’t say anything else. It’s what I use. Yeah. And no, not an 800 number. All right. So if you’re going to work local, which your car it no matter where you go, you don’t want that 800 number you want that local number you want people kind of like that local numbers I’ve seen better results with a local number than an ad hundred number unless you’re widely known for having that 800 number. Does that make sense? Or did I lose everybody? So 100 works when you’re widely known like like, something like roto rooter, let’s say or plumbers nine one, that kind of thing. But if you’re local and you want people to you to want to create that familiarity it really helps to have that local number.

Yes, I agree. I use answerconnect.com to send phone calls into a call center so that the phone always gets answered. It screens the calls there’s a ton of benefits for using a call center. And I have been since 2013, the same account, answer Connect comm I really can’t say enough good things about them. And so they give you an 800 number but you can forward or redirect local numbers to the 800 number which is what I do. That way. You know, I can have multiple lead gen assets all funneling into that with their own separate local numbers, but all funneling into the same call center if it’s for the same service provider, essentially.

But there’s a lot of really cool things. And by the way, guys, I’m working on a lot of lead gen stuff right now, and I’ve got some case studies I’m working on that I’ll be making public, not just within our groups. And I’ve also got some things that I’m going to be introducing to everybody when I do make that case studies public that I think will help a lot of you with your lead gen business. I can’t really talk much about it right now, but I just kind of wanted to tease it. So there you go.

How To Generate Quality Content For A Niche Blog If You Don’t Like Writing?

The next question is, Hey, guys, I want to set up a niche blog, but I don’t like writing How can I generate the quality content myself for my niche blog? Will the generated content be good enough for niche blogging? Thanks, Content Kingpin.

When I first started in SEO and local lead gen way back in, you know, 2010 timeframe. I was actually doing blog posts. Right after, I’d kind of developed the Syndication Academy method, and because it was just working like crazy good, I knew that blogging was going to be the way to populate the networks and get results. And so I was actually blogging for industries that I knew nothing about. I was actually writing the posts myself. And it was incredibly time-consuming. And it’s frustrating because I had to learn a lot about the businesses and the topics and such. And I, fortunately, I got introduced to content curating, and I don’t remember who introduced me to it or whatever, but I kind of started reading about it. And then I bought a couple of courses about content curating, and some plugins and all kinds of stuff. And I started curating content and I got much more efficient at generating content. And he also I didn’t have to know as much about a topic because you can just find subject matter, you know, find articles on the web or content. It doesn’t have to be articles. It can be podcasts, videos, infographics, slide presentations, it could be a number of things that are based around the topic that you are writing about that are written by or produce the contents produced by subject matter experts or SMEs. And you can get really good and really efficient at producing content by just being able to find and locate content developed or produced by subject matter experts. And then curating it and creating a unique post based upon using, you know, snippets of content from the subject matter experts, it’s already been published. So that’s, you know, been my preferred method. And I was actually doing that on my own. I use some tools and some plugins at the time. But once my business got to a certain level, it was just way too time-consuming. Even with using curated content, I was too time-consuming for me to produce it myself. So I developed training and hired a virtual assistant and handed it over to them and she’s still with me today. By the way, her name is Esther she’s still my primary number one blogger that works for me right now.

But anyway, long story short, I ended up training multiple virtual assistants or bloggers or curators as what they are really, with that training. So I kind of polished it up a bit. And that’s what Content Kingpin is, which is one of our training courses. And it’s the same process that my bloggers all use today, I talked about a couple of tools, but we still primarily do everything manually. Just using like a like Feedly. For example, to the group and categorize content feeds that we know like and trust that then we can use to all So a quick glimpse my bloggers go in for whenever they’ve got to produce or publish a post, they’ll go in and just look at Feedly select that particular category or folder for the project that they’re working on. And it will show all the content that’s available than the recent content that’s available around that particular topic. And then they can choose a topic to blog about to curate a post about and then pick and choose a few articles that will either reinforce that the idea that they’re trying to convey with their posts, or sometimes they’ll do like argumentative posts where they’ll try to show in a different opinion from what perhaps others are saying. So they’ll show two sides of the coin, if that makes sense, as two different competing opinions about the same topic anyway, it’s great, it works incredibly well, it also creates co-citation. And so we highly recommend you check out Content Kingpin, it’s one of the best ways to do it. Not only that but if you were to use that site type of the system, the Content Kingpin method, then you can get away from doing it yourself. So you don’t have to publish I mean, I would learn it first. You know, learn it and understand how to do it first, but then you can actually put a virtual assistant that you hire through the course and have them do it for you, and you can kind of just managing and guide them until they get up to your standards. But that’s the best way to do it. Guys. I call it hands-free content marketing and it’s a great revenue source too because it really is simple.

Once you understand the topic concept is really, really good to anybody want to comment on that Content Kingpin doesn’t get enough credit for does what it does. People don’t understand it, I think because they get all the all this different information about unique content and duplicate content and all this bullshit that’s out there. That’s nothing. Really if it were so places like Huffington Post’s would not exist. Google News would not exist unless curated content was okay. But not only Okay, whether it was good I’d be how much traffic does it get Bing, Yahoo. All they do all day long is republish story. Huffington Post is a collection of republish story that all it is and all you’re doing with Content Kingpin is republishing the story. You’re summarizing them right taking power, whatever it is that you do it. And you’re adding your own commentary and proper attribution and it’s a done deal. I mean, it’s so simple. And yet people try to make it so much more difficult than it really should be. But yeah, totally Content Kingpin for the win. You know, and it’s interesting. I’ve just pulled this up because I did this and if you guys remember masterclass, we had a, we had a kind of a middle-tier webinar coaching program that we had called masterclass for a number of years. And I did this as a local case study, Gainesville home pros, and I’ve never done anything with it since I think that was back in 2015. Oh, look at that. It says account suspended. That’s interesting. That’s one of my Okay, well, anyway, I would sure like to show you that blog because that was curated content, the same method. My blogger Esther, who was the first one I trained using that method, produced all the content on that site using curated content, and they were beautiful posts and unfortunately, it looks like that account has been that hosting account perhaps has been suspended. I have done anything with it years. But I would like to show you guys some examples of that. But I don’t have anything that I can show you right now off the top of my head. But anyway, it’s it works really, really well the posts come out beautiful if you do it right. I would highly recommend going through Content Kingpin.

No, because there are a few things that you have to do in order to not infringe on copyright. So for example, you don’t want to curate images that can get you into trouble, asked me how I know.

Because you’ll get extortion letters from like Getty Images and other you know, asshole law firms out there that are just looking for people that have republished images without copyright, without rights to it. So there’s like a lot of things. There’s not a lot of things, but there are a few things that you really should do to make sure that you’re covering your ass when you’re curating content. So again, I highly recommend you go through the product, it’s through that program. It’s a really, really good program. It’s the same that we use today. You know, there are a lot of tools out there that can help you to manage content curating, but we’ve already.

He’s found that it really just is just as quick and easy because what happens with a lot of these tools is they stop being supported over time. We know one of them was Curation Suite that we actually promoted. And fortunately after promoting it, and after a year or so, like the support just stopped and it kind of fell off the face of the earth. The same thing with a bunch of curating plugins that I’ve used over the years, they just eventually fall off the market and they just don’t get supported. So we’ve learned to just stick with the manual process and it’s you know, once somebody becomes efficient with that process is really is a very efficient way to produce content. So you don’t need all the additional tools and plugins and things like that. So that’s why I recommend that product because it’s a Content Kingpin because it will teach you how to do it manually and then you can teach a VA how to do it by just putting them right through the same training. It’s a great question though.

What Training Do You Offer In The MasterMind That You Can’t Get In The Syndication Academy?

Jason says I’m currently in the Syndication Academy 2.0 and I was wanting to know all of the different features and benefits in the mastermind that you don’t get in the Academy. Is this all of these different training you offer in the mastermind if I joined the mastermind, can I get a discount for the cost of the academy? Okay, so first of all the mastermind you have direct access to my partners and me, as well as all the other members of the group, which we have a lot of really savvy marketers and agency owners and CEOs and such in our group. But you also have direct access to all of us to where you can ask us questions in the Facebook group at any time. We’re in there answering questions often. Plus, we each host our own separate webinars inside the mastermind. They’re bi-weekly webinars. So every two weeks each one of us hosts our own webinar. So you get to come to ask us questions at length during the webinars. Like you can post questions ahead of time for the webinars, we’ll do site audits, we’ll you know, look at your, your SEO, your you know, on-page stuff off-page stuff, we’ll help you with projects if you need it. Plus, as I said, you get to you know, come to ask me stuff, or Marco stuff or Adam, or Hernan or Chris any one of us. So there’s a lot of benefits in there that we don’t provide anywhere else we’ll go as deep into, whatever subject you want to go into, you know, and that’s one of the things that we can’t do on a free setting like this or any in any of our other groups. So the mastermind is definitely where you want to be if you want to get all that, as well as Syndication Academy is included in that. So you can cancel your Syndication Academy account if you join the mastermind because it’s included in that as well as all of our products under $300. Anything over $300 you get a significant discount. So there’s a ton of benefits to be in the mastermind. Anybody else wanna?

Yeah, I would just say Jason, if you just started Syndication Academy, if you’re just getting into it, then contact support and we’ll refund whatever you paid for Syndication Academy and you can or you can apply it towards them. However, you want to work that out, we’ll work it out for you. We always do. Why because membership has its privileges. So that’s why we do things the way we do and yes, I mean, above all else is this group of people like-minded people who are working towards what we call POFU position of Fuck you, where you have the kind of power and money where you can pick and choose your clients, your clients come to you instead of you going knocking on doors on $500 clients who are a pain in the ass. So rather than doing all that you getting all you get all of this training, you get the mindset training, you get the how-to get all of the collective knowledge, and then you have five, almost six years of webinars. Now some of them of course are dated, but we do we’re not doing webinars every week. It’s either Bradley or me like we take every other Thursday. You got Hernan, you got Adam. Yeah, Chris, everyone is giving you their perspective and their take on things so you get all of these different points of view, all of this all of these different experiences coming to you and helping you in whatever it is that you’re trying to do whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve. So it’s not just what you get as far as training. It’s the people and the relationships, the networking that you can do inside the mastermind like I know people who are working together in different projects, and we tell people to become the big fish in a little pond. But then some of them go on to and I’m gonna mention his name, for example, to dominate in the Fort Worth area. And you got another one in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the Twin Cities you got someone in the Dirty South, right South Carolina, Georgia area, who are Domini who may have started as the big fish in the little pile or becomes the little fish in the big fish in the little pond. But then they move to a bigger pond. So that we’re always pushing. We’re always encouraging people. That growth means you go to make more money until you reach a stepping point where you say, Okay, I met, hopefully, this is where I want to be, this is how I want to do it. And if I choose not to work tomorrow, I can do that because the process and the systems and everything else that I’ve gained through being in the mastermind, will take care of me not being it, the system is there, so I don’t have to be there. And I mean, just the way that this happened and how this happened, and how people finally are able to step away and say, Man, I can spend time with my family and I can relax and I can do the things I want to do, rather than having to do the things that I have to do things that I must with no other choice. So I think that that’s just one of the greater things about the mastermind is that mindset that awful, you’re going after that poof hopefully you get on that path. And it’s it becomes your magnificent obsession. I thank you CTF letcher for that. But it becomes your magnificent obsession. You’re going after that and there is nothing that can get in your way of achieving that powerful, that’s when you know that you’re there. And that’s what we’re there for. So, just because you brought up CT, and we don’t have a lot of questions, so I know we got time when we did the interview with CT Fletcher, I’ve created this text document. It’s been on my desktop ever since. And hopefully, nobody gets offended because CT Fletcher likes to cuss a lot. Say but here’s a lot of here are the quotes that struck me when we were at when we really were Marco interviewing him. I was on the webinar, but it was really Marco interviewing CT Fletcher, who’s a powerlifter. He broke a ton of records for a while. But anyway, some of these are really funny. I’m not gonna read them out to you, but you remember these Marco? Absolutely. I love them so awesome. I still watch them. Will will is king. Yeah, man. Oh, man. Oh, man. He’s so good. You ain’t pretty motherfucker. Yeah, you ain’t that birdie.

So funny. I mean, that one right there cracks me up too. I laughed out loud. Anyways, I just thought that was funny because I happen to notice it on my desktop the other day and I giggled about it. You just brought it up.

Would You Recommend A Subdirectory Or Subfolder On The Same Domain When Creating The Blog?

So anyway, Jason, next question says, Hey, guys, I have an e-commerce website using WordPress with WooCommerce. Would you recommend a subdirectory? Or folder on the same domain and load a new WordPress and create a blog? Yes, that’s what we’ve always recommended. I mean, I don’t do any e-commerce stuff. But I mean, in the past, I have done some SEO for some e-commerce clients. But it’s not something I’d like to do. So I got out of doing it, but we’ve always recommended it. So do you have control over like essentially a content distribution engine, right, and that’s WordPress is great for that? So you can either put it in a subfolder or directory of the root domain or what we always recommended was to put it in a subdomain instead. And that’s because a subdomain is still treated as content have a separate web entity or separate site, I should say, a separate website than the root domain. So that if you’re in your content distribution, you do something spammy, which if you follow our methods, you won’t have any trouble, at least, we, you know, as it stands right now, but Google could change everything in a moment’s notice. But we’ve never had any issues. But if you put in a subdomain, and you were doing something spammy or something, Google changed its rules, all of a sudden, and something became spammy, they wouldn’t affect the root domain, which is where your e-commerce site resides, it would affect the subdomain only. So we always prefer, like, you know, you could put blog as a subdomain to whatever your domain is, or whatever you want it to be news or something like that. And that’s what we prefer to do. But you could put it in a subdirectory. But yeah, that gives you the opportunity then to do all your content marketing. Remember, if you’ve got an e-commerce site, and you’ve got product categories, for example, you can mirror those same categories. We talked about theme mirroring all the time.

If you don’t know what that is, you know, it’s essentially duplicating or mirroring your site structure on other assets. So you have if you have product categories in your eCommerce site, you could mirror those same categories as content categories, or you know, in WordPress, just categories are the same. You could title them and everything the same as what they are on your eCommerce site. And then you can publish posts, blog posts, or sporting posts. That’s kind of a link building method that in place them within those particular silos or categories in the WordPress site, distribute them out to a syndication network, mirror, all of that stuff on a G site, and our ys drive stack, press releases, all that kind of stuff. You mirror all of that together, and it works really, really well to push power to your, you know, your ultimate destination, which would be your e-commerce product pages. So you want to comment on that. Yeah, we used to recommend going to a subdomain because we wanted to protect the root cause we were doing. let’s admit it, we were doing a lot of evil stuff yes to the subdomains, we were blasting them to the point where if we had them connected to the route, any penalty would pass to the root. What we’ve done is we’ve taken a step out, because now everything goes through our SEO power shield. And so now the route is protected.

And so in order to push even more power, by all means, put it in a subdirectory because then you’re accruing everything inside the root when you go into that subdirectory rather than stepping in a subdomain, which is treated as a separate website, so you’re one hop away from your root domain anyway and you’re losing link equity. When you’re anytime that you’re one hop or more away, you lose link equity at the top. When you’re in a subdomain, you don’t lose that link equity is even when you’re in the root. You don’t lose that link equity when you’re in a folder inside the root. You don’t lose that link equity because you’re not a hub away. You’re in the root, now if you do want to protect it, then you just install in the dub dub dub. So that’s where you would do the root because that’s a subdomain anyway.

So that’s how you do it. But we have the SEO PowerShell it’s not necessary anymore. Because everything that we do goes through our SEO power shield, which amplifies and protects. That’s why we call it the SEO, power shield. It powers it up, it amplifies and it protects it shields it and so that my recommendation would be totally totally unless you’re planning on doing a whole lot of evil stuff to that subdomain go with a sub but with it should be with a folder inside the root.

What Type Of Brand Property Link To Use In A Press Release?

Awesome. So next is BB BB. Look, you’ve gotten better, buddy. Your questions are a lot shorter and not quite as many. So I think we’re finally getting through to you, man. And I’m just giving you our time baby. It’s we’re always like having you here but he says Hey guys, number one does that the link to a branded property in the press release should be to the property or to one of its pages that were syndicated by RSS. Well, it depends on what you’re doing. But so, my strategy and again, it’s covered in the press release SEO, or piece PR silo stacking webinar that we did Marco and I did. Again, you can find that at MGYB or just go to youtube.com slash semantic mastery use the channel search feature search for press release SEO and you’ll find it you know, right at the top go watch that. Because what I prefer to do is we you know, we’re constantly blogging for clients or for projects period. So that populates syndication network, right, we’re building topical relevancy and depth to our silos, right depth to a particular topic. And then they syndicate out to syndication networks, right. And within every single post, within the proper silo architecture, we’re always linking back up from the post back up to the top of the silo page, which is the page that we’re trying to drive traffic to. Right. So what we do what I do is I always, you know, I like to publish press releases that are highlighting or showcasing a recent blog post. And that links to the blog post URL, which within the blog post, actually links back up to the page on the site. But I mean, you don’t have to use that strategy all the time. That’s what I do. Because I consistently publish press, we’re consistently blogging and we’re consistently publishing press releases for all of my clients or my lead gen asset. So it just works out really well because we’re providing deep links, so links further down into a silo that helps to power up with proper silo architecture, it helps to power up the entire silo and helps all of the different keywords that we’re targeting within the silo start to rise or surface in the search engines because of those deep links, right. So that’s my preferred method because it adds more diversity and it’s linking to multiple points.

Within the main money site, as opposed to always constantly hitting the homepage or just the product or service pages, the top of silo pages in other words, so I like to do deep links, but it depends on what you’re doing. If you’re not doing a lot of press releases, if you’re you know, you only got a budget for a handful of them, then it might be better to actually hit your homepage and or your top of silo pages, that kind of thing. So it really just depends on what your overall content marketing strategy is, and what you’re going to be linking to, you know that that’s going to determine where you’re going to link to from within your site. Okay.

That’s it that said, I always almost not 100% but we almost always link from within press releases to a page or post on the money site. Unless we’re doing a two-step which again, go watch the press release SEO webinar, and you’ll understand what I mean. But for example, if a client as all my local clients have Google My Business profiles. So if we publish a post when we publish a blog post on the blog, my blogger also for most of my clients will end up publishing a GMB post that points a link back to the blog post. So essentially, the GMB post is nothing other than a summary of the blog post itself with the same featured image as the image for the GMB post the photo, and then the button link, the Learn More button link links back to the blog post. So sometimes our press releases will actually link to the GMB post URL, because that ultimately links to the blog post URL, so the two-step process there. But you can also and I’ve talked about this almost every week now for the last like two months on Hump Day hangouts baby so I’m sure you’re aware of what I was what I’ve said. But you know, if you’ve got particular keywords that you’re trying to push, then you can actually go extract the post URLs from like, for example, the blogs on your syndication network, so blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, you can go extract these post URLs that are where the re-syndication or of the published the post that you publish targeting those keywords. And you can link to those within press releases too if you want to because again, that’s tiered link building. So it’s helpful in anyone, but you don’t have to. I prefer to link to those blog post URLs using daddy as link building from an MGYB because I like to use the press releases to link directly back to the money site, or two primary tier one assets, such as a GMB profile, GMB map, Id page, any one of those types of things when it comes to that.

That was a good question. By the way, bb though. Yeah, that that was a really good question. Now, I mean, the link building varies it depends on how much power you’re trying to push and where and everything is gonna be where it’s needed, where everything’s needed. Because sometimes it’s just one press release, push, can get you to where you need to be. Other times, you’re going to need way more. Yeah, there are other times when you’re going to need even link building into the press releases. There’s no one set rule because sometimes it’s just the SEO power shield coming, coming in, right coming online. And that’s enough. And sometimes it doesn’t even have to do with the competition because we’ve seen it even in some tough keyword sets that you start ranking like right from the SEO power shield. So this totally ended depends on the no definitive answer for this, other than, you’re going to have to get your press release. If you’ve set it up correctly. And you hit your top-level category rather than just like everybody does your homepage. Then your top-level category will flow and it’ll push all of that power so that everything benefits from it, including the top-level category, not just the longtail keywords, it’s how we teach it now. We teach people to go from the top-down instead of bottom-up it

It’s a little different, it’s kind of the same thing except we’re going. For example, if we want to rank for gold futures, this is just an example. It’s incredibly difficult to rank for that. But we would go even one, one level higher, we would go after the gold category, the entire gold category to pull up the gold features category instead of trying to push it up with all of the long tails. And I’ve seen that it has a greater effect when you try to go for that top-level category. on everything else, not only the longtail but the subcategory that you’re after. So I’m always telling people you go one level up. So keeping this in mind, then it’s up to you. I always tell people that we have to be scientists when we’re gauging how it is that we’re going to do this. What effect we’re trying to create, you’re going to have to create your link building and press releases are part of link building. You’re going to create it so that whatever you’re trying to benefit the most guests

The most benefit out of what you’re doing. And so you approach it that way. Yeah. So it varies. That’s the short answer. It varies. It depends, right?

Can We Use The PR Stacking Strategies With Article Directories?

Next, can we treat an article direct article, an article directory as press releases, meaning publishing, as the PR stacking and also linking to actual prs? Okay, I don’t do any article directory stuff I haven’t for years, not saying that it can’t still be useful. I just haven’t because they’ve been known to be spammy. I think a lot of the links from those get discredited. It’s much better to get like, you know, articles instead of being published on article directories, which were always known as SEO like, honey, honey, what do you call them honey, honey holes or whatever you call them. But I’m not saying that it won’t work because I don’t know. I haven’t tested it in years. If I was going to do it, maybe I would do it. Where I was only linking to SEO shield assets or like you say, can you link to PRs? Yes, that would be fun because press release wherever press releases published is going to be able to handle those type of links, you may be able to push good link equity to them, or even, it doesn’t really matter because they’re not your money site. So I, I, again, I haven’t used article directories in probably five or six years.

And so I don’t really know whether they’re still viable or if they’re still helping at any level. But if I was going to use them, I would do it too. I would use them to link only back to tier one asset not directly to the money site. And press releases are a great thing to link to. So, Marco, I know you don’t use article directories either.

I used to, it’s not necessary anymore. I don’t need to go that far. Right. The way that we’re doing it pushes so much power that we don’t need to go. I mean, when you’re already at number one, like how much better can you go than the number one.

So maybe at some point with some of the case studies that we’re doing and everything else that we have coming on e-commerce and everything else that we’re experimenting. Yeah, I would say that we can do that. But right now, or maybe we need to do that. But right now the way that we’re doing things is not necessary.

What Do You Mean By Kitchen Sink Spam?

Agreed. The last question was, what do you mean when you say kitchen sink? It gets me confused. Yeah, when I say kitchen sink spam, or when we say that, that just means using link building tools and throwing every kind of link like even some real spammy stuff, at whatever your target is. So like when we say you can throw kitchen sink spam at it, it means you could use some of the most god awful links in the world and throw them at, you know, point them at a particular target and still benefit from it. We would never encourage anybody to do that with their money site. And in fact, we prefer to still use better links.

Even if you’re using spam tools, for example, like you know, our link building master dedhia he uses a ton of link building tools but he always recommends that your the links that he builds to whatever your targets are, which we always recommend tier-one entity targets or your SEO shield essentially. But he always likes to suggest recommends using two layers two levels of contextual web two Dotto links. And then throwing if you want a third tier of links, you can throw kitchen sink spam at those contextual web two dot o links. So that’s what we mean by kitchen sink spam, it means pretty much anything under the sun, that’s a link. And a lot of those would be toxic if they’re not used properly, but they can still provide a benefit if used properly. And that’s what we talk about when we talk about you know, you can hit SEO power shields with kitchen sink spam, and they’ll end up ranking. We don’t recommend it. We still recommend using the contextual web to Dotto links. Add your first and second-tier links that are being built to your tier one assets. But you can always throw kitchen sink spam behind that if you wanted and still receive a benefit Mark has done several tests I have to, but we even did the Marco and Rob did the kind of public case study for the DC plumber and just hit it with like over a million kitchen sink spam style links, including porn porn links, and it ranked and it’s probably still ranking today. So and we just had someone in RYS Academy reloaded last week, come in and tell us that they tried the million kitchen sink, spam link test and got really good results and 89% increase in traffic month to month. Wow. So it works. However, think of it this way. If garbage links work, how much better? Will quality links work? How much better will the way that we do the tiered link building right? contextual tiered link building

How much better is that, not only for now but long term when they come looking? The first thing that they look for is that kitchen sink spam, that that the automation is is what Google is looking for. And we’re kind of hiding in plain sight because we’re not giving them what everybody else is doing. We’re doing it a little bit differently. And it just playing work. So when you’re thinking about going after that, that million links, and yeah, you can pay 50 bucks in fiber, and there’s going to be complete TSA, and it’s going to be truly, truly garbage type of stuff that you don’t want to look at. Why would you do that to your project? Why would you do that when it can show up in your link profile? Do you want that? Because we had that showing up for DC plumbing. We had those links index, man. And seriously, you didn’t want your kids looking at that you didn’t want you to want to be sitting there with your wife. Looking at some of that stuff that was coming through it was it was like, the really bad garbage man.

So why would so when I’m talking to people, my question is if you want to test and you don’t care, you don’t care what shows up in the link profile, you don’t care about anything. You’re just trying to make you make some money. It’s a fun test, then, by all means, do it. But if it’s something that you care about, why would you mistreat something that you care about that one?

Agreed.

Can You Blast The Press Release And Drive Stacks With Backlinks Without Negative Impact On The Money Site And GMB?

Okay, next is Gordon, what’s up Gord? It’s been a while he says, Hey, guys, hope you’re safe. And well just have a quick question. When using press releases or an ROI S Drive stack through the MGYB store. Can you blast either or both of them with hundreds or even thousands of backlinks without any negative effect on your money site? Or GMB listing? And if so, will that increase the SEO juice flowing to either entity and help them to rank? Thank you very much. Yeah. And that’s, I mean, that’s exactly what we were just talking about.

We prefer to build links to our tier one entity assets such as the SEO power shield, our last drive stack, g site press releases the organic press release organization page, you know, the idx page, anything like that. And that’s if you set it up correctly, you’re not going to have any negative results whatsoever, which is why we set the things up the way that we do. That’s why we call it the SEO power shield because it shields it’s like, I’ve always called it an SEO firewall, right? It creates a firewall around your money site. And so that’s exactly what we’re talking about. embeds and or backlinks work really, really well. In fact, you can even take your money site it for example, and you know, embed it in a G site and then hammer the G site page with backlinks. And that’s going to help your money site page benefit without there being an actual direct hyperlink on that page. Does that make sense? So yeah, that’s what we were just talking about. With Bibi’s question when we just hammer our assets with backlinks because it helps to push ultimately it flows down through to whatever our target destination is, which could be a GMB asset.

Could be a Google Site could be a money site. It could be all three of those. So yes, that would work. Any comments on that?

Should You Interlink A Post If The Main Article Has 5 Jump Links?

No, that’s perfect. Pavlos up, he says, Hey guys last time, I missed an opportunity to say thank you. Well, you’re welcome. Pavlo He says, question in one of your videos, you said that I can copy main silo page content and create a post. The Post will be canonicalized back to the main article, the canonical link itself will be a jump link to the Main article.

The question is should I interlink these posts if I have if the Main article has five jump links, and I’ve created five posts from the main content? I think I kind of vaguely remember this conversation we had on Hump Day Hangouts, but I’m not quite following the question. I think what, what I was talking about if and hopefully, I’m not off base here, but prefer using long-form content now for content for websites or for money sites, instead of in the past, like, you know, five years ago, you know, you could create a kind of thin content type of silo page. And then each supporting a keyword that you would find within your with your keyword research. So all of the supporting keywords that you would stack within a particular silo, I just always use spreadsheets for that. So I create a column but my top-level keyword at the top, you know, the column header, and then I would go extract all of the relevant supporting keywords and key phrases and put them in underneath that in that same column right in a spreadsheet. And then that would be that that goes to my bloggers, for them to produce content around so that they highlight one of the supporting keywords within the correct silo. And it used to be that I would create kind of thin content, top of silo pages, and then target individual longer tail keywords with blog posts, but that becomes repetitive redundant. And it doesn’t work as well what I found as having a long-form top of silo page now, that contains a lot of those supporting keywords so that broken down into subheadings, right, so and I think that’s what you were talking about is when I mentioned that you can create long-form content, and even put a table of contents with jump links at the top of the content, which is really good for SEO. And then you can actually create blog posts targeting those longer tail phrases that are already present on the silo page itself right to top of silo page that have jump links to them and then link from those supporting articles within the blog post to those jump links. Because then it’s, it’s, it’s linking to the top of silo page, but it’s also reinforcing that longer tail subheading or keyword, right, so that’s supporting keyword. If that’s what you’re talking about, then let’s see. The question is should I interlink these posts with the Main article as well? Five jump links. And I’ve created five posts from the main content. Yeah, I mean, I don’t I can’t get too far into this Marco would kill me if I did.

But if you’re interlinking, your supporting posts correctly, daisy-chaining them together then and they’re just linking from post to post. And from within each post linking back to the top of silo page, even if it’s at a jump link, a jump link to the top of silo page to some section on the top of silo page. Yes, that would work. That would work really, really well. Actually. Any comments on that Marco?

Sorry about that.

A lot. Ah, no, it’s not really something that I’m willing to talk about in a free gotten a free forum like this. They are not going to get into that because it just puts so much power and it gets around everything that Google can throw at you. So no, that’s fine. We’ll leave it at that. Okay.

But yeah, just get creative with it. Think about you know what you’re doing with your structure. And I don’t like to if I don’t know where you say you can just clone copy main silo page content and create a post, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t do that on the same site what I was talking about with cloning or copying or mirroring, right is within the G site. Right. So if you’ve got your top of silo page, and you’ve got all the content on the page, you can always create, we recommend mirroring that top of silo page on the G site. And then if you had supporting posts within that category on your money site, I don’t typically duplicate or mirror posts onto a G site unless I’m having trouble ranking a particular keyword in which case then I will create child pages on the G site that is each child a one to one ratio, child page for every post within that silo, and then just embed those in there and that’s what I was talking about with the jumping links, you can actually create jump links from the G site back to the money site there. But again, that’s more kind of mastermind stuff or heavy hitter club stuff. So hopefully you got some value out of that. But I wouldn’t copy top of silo content and republish it on the same blog from your money site. I wouldn’t. Personally I wouldn’t do that I would have new content curated, not written because I use curated content for blog posts, the curated targeting the keywords that I’m trying to push that is on the top of the silo page if that makes sense. Okay.

So another good question.

Jason says thank you. Yeah, so he’s already watched all the Syndication Academy videos, that’s okay. If you join the mastermind if you just joined recently, the Syndication Academy join the mastermind will up make it worth your while we’ll refund your Syndication Academy purchase or apply it towards your first month of mastermind or something like that, and then you can cancel that subscription. So, yep, baby says great. We’re almost

What Are Your Thoughts On The Statement That You Can Flatten A Complex Silo Into A Simple Silo?

Got a timer almost out of question. So this is good timing maybe says great. What do you think of the statement that each complex silo can be flattened to a simple silo? And if a site isn’t that big, is it better to do the flat? Yes, I always, always recommend using simple silos where possible and guys, I’m going to be updating the training, I was really hoping to get that done for today, but I didn’t. And so I’ll try to have it done by next Wednesday. But in the process, street process doc that I created for our methods and for me, you know, our methods are what we sell as done for you services and MGYB for those of you that aren’t aware of it, if you go to semantic mastery comm slash process, I’m going to bring it up. It’ll you guys can take a look at this. For those of you that haven’t already been exposed to it, this is the process street process doc that I created to that has a lot of training in there with a lot of it’s the why we do what we do.

And what you can expect from it the How is we point to our training products for the how but or the where to get it as the links over to MGYB but these are the website silo architecture, the training videos that I created, you know, five years ago or whatever, they’re, they’re still valid, but my overall process has changed slightly right it’s evolved slightly and so I’m going to redo those silo training videos where I go into what a simple silo is what a complex silo is a difference between a physical silo and a virtual silo and what I prefer to use and why I’m going to redo those videos and that will go into here the website section of the worry list entity based SEO process doc and when I do hope I’ll have this done by next week guys I really wanted to get it done by this week but I haven’t even started on it. So I’ll try to get it done by next week. And then again guys you go to semantic mastery comm slash process and you take a look at all the stuff that’s in here. There’s a lot of training here. And so anyway, that said, Yes, I always recommend a simple silo. For most projects. I’m not going to say for the most projects for most local projects, which is what I do, almost exclusively, simple silos will suffice. I used to always try to build complex solids because I thought it was going to be better. And then maybe there is some benefit to it. But what I found is a complex silo is complicated. Hence the name complex silo. And so it’s difficult to build it create some kind of funny issues that are hard to reconcile with the URLs with the slugs and that kind of with permalinks and that kind of stuff. So I prefer to stick with a simple silo, it’s much easier to manage, it’s easier to map out when you’re in the build process. So I like using simple silos for most local projects. That’s all that is ever needed. In fact, with a simple silo, if you’re using our methods, you’re going to be the on-page SEO is going to be far superior to what most of your competitors are doing anyways. So it’s not really necessary to do a complex silo. If you’re doing a very broad site with a lot of categories and subcategories, then you might be necessary to do a complex silo. But, as I said, I always try to simplify where possible. We’ve had a ton of people over the years, join one of our groups, and they map out this incredibly intricate silo map of a site. And they, you know, probably spend hours and hours and hours mapping it out and creating drawings to show the silo structure and everything and then they present it and say, What do you think you think this would work? And it’s like, Well, yeah, but it could have worked, you know, eight levels previous, where it was like a much simpler build, and you got to save yourself a ton of time. And we don’t say that to pick on anybody, but it’s because I think we as SEO types, try to overcomplicate stuff all the time, and I’ve learned over the years to try to simplify as much as possible and get results with a much simpler process and simple silo structure is the way that I prefer to build 90 95% of my sites.

commenting. I totally agree. I don’t know why people get themselves into trouble with complex silos like right from the start. Yeah, if it’s a brand new project that there’s no need for for a complex silo, unless it’s like, I don’t know, like some type of e-commerce website and you’ve seen those where there’s a bunch of complex subcategories and while category, subcategory, sub-sub categories and all of these things that really complicated but I tell people to look in the beginning, you’re good with your homepage, and three categories, three top-level categories, the three main keywords that you’re going to go after to start making money, push all the power that way, as needed. And as you see more opportunities for top-level categories. You add them, right because then your whole setup is done. And whatever you add is going to benefit from everything you’ve done previously. But if you start mapping it

Out complex from the beginning. How are you going to push the power that that’s going to need for every page and post and subcategory and sub subcategory that you’re trying to create? you’re dividing up the PageRank in such a way that it’s not going to push the initial power that it could have. There’s no way because there’s no way to keep the link flow going the right way. Let’s put it that way. Yeah, but if you keep it simple, minimize the number of categories Don’t try to go after everything at once. But just three, three categories. That gives you enough to write for about four months when you get our D keyword research. I’m sorry, that that’s not available right now. But I did keyword research gives you enough to write about four months on those three top market level categories on those silos. And then you can go and see like which one is more complicated, and you just break it up instead of making it a subcategory? You just make it another category that’s related to that one category that you already have no need to overcomplicate things I hate when people try to do that. It doesn’t have to be all that difficult. Yeah, and it’s fine because like I said, we’ve experienced that a lot over the years, and I’m not gonna lie. In years past I did the same thing, I would always approach new projects with the complex silo, trying to map all that out. And it just it became overwhelming, it became too much of a bitch too, you know, too difficult to manage the projects. And again, it creates a lot of funky issues, if you’re trying to share subcategories with other categories, especially in local like, for example, if you have, you know, your topical or service-based silos, which would be like, you know, like Tree Removal would be one silo, for example, and another silo could be tree trimming, which in reality, I’ve learned over the years that you really don’t even need to create silos for Tree Service sites because they’re all synonyms for each other. Google considers tree removal and tree trimming as synonyms anyways. But most of my tree service projects are

Still siloed like that. And if you were trying to duplicate location-based silos within each one of the topical or service-based silos, it creates some real funny URL issues that you have to reconcile. And it becomes difficult to do so or vice versa, if you had location-based silos, as your top-level silos, and then you tried to have subcategories of services, then it creates some issues too. So I learned a long time ago just to go with the simple silo structure, so much easier to manage so much easier to handle. So anyway, yeah, I totally recommend going with simple silos where possible. The last question and we’re at five o'clock. So this is a good stopping point is BB says should we have a form in the branded properties for collecting leads? Absolutely. If you’ve got form code that can be embedded in other sites, absolutely. I’m actually using I’m not going to talk about what I’m using just yet because it’s part of the case studies and I’m working on but I’m using a new lead generation tool.

It helps that has a form builder in it that works really, really good. And I’m actually embedding the form and multiple properties. Now g sites, you know, a lot of different places that I’m actually embedding the forms now because they work really, really well. And they direct all the leads back to one central location that then gets distributed out. So yeah, absolutely, there’s no doubt, I always try to put most of my businesses run on phone calls more than a phone like. In other words, the leads that I generate for businesses are more phone call leads than they are web form submissions, but I don’t ever want to not provide that as an option. So I used to, I used to really just push phone calls, but now I’m pushing the lead form submits as well, because I’ve got a really cool application that I’m using that helps to distribute the leads to wherever I want them to go. And again, I’ll reveal some of that in the coming week’s guys, but I absolutely recommend if you have a form, form code that can be embedded on other sites use it. Okay.

All right. Thanks, everybody for being here.

We will see you guys next week. Thanks, Marco for sticking around. All right. Have a good one. Thanks, everybody

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 299 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 299

Click on the video above to watch Episode 299 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

All right, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 299. We’re one away from big Episode 300. I’m gonna call this episode where everyone is getting old and wearing glasses except Chris. I just realized all of us are now wearing glasses except Chris. Yeah, well, you guys spending too much time in front of your computers. There we go. Yeah, gotta change it around. This is the year we try to get ourselves off to the computer. So anyways, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. We’re gonna say hi, real quick catch up with everybody. And then we got a couple quick announcements before diving into the questions. So I’ll start on the bottom here since it’s cloudy weather element Marco. How you doing today? I have my lights on. That’s why it looks so bright. Yeah, it’s raining. It’s supposed to be raining. So finally got me with the lights on. But I can’t complain this nice a warm, actually. I’m kind of trying to hide trying to blend into the background. So Google doesn’t see me.

It’s all good man. I’m gonna

Having a good time.

Outstanding All right. Well, let’s work our way around. Hernan you got those new glasses what’s going on with you?

Yeah, man, I’m just trying to trying to blend in. I got I got glasses and now you got glasses. I mean yeah man we get rid of this and have a beard and growing a beard. Damn it. You’re doing the 50 K I might do the 50 now, so good man these are blue light blocking glasses, you know? Because there’s one this one guy show me one this really nerdy yellow like super like

orangey glasses and they make you look stupid. I know I won’t be wearing next week.

Yeah, do you don’t think the big square bc birth control glasses make you look stupid though right now, man. No, I can’t I can talk like this. Nobody will.

But a lady repellent. Yeah, exactly. say wait a second. Are you wearing those or are you being forced to wear this?

What this one glasses. Yeah, I’m just kidding.

You look good. I was just wondering maybe you’re making you know this light and blue light blue light blocking. I’m still confused. Why are you wearing blue light blocking glasses in the middle of the day or now? Yeah, well, it’s time. 5pm So, five 6pm So, all right. Well, before we tell everyone all about our AI problems, let’s see Chris, how you doing today? Man? Doing good, man. I hit the gym for like, I don’t know, like after another two week break for the first time again. Sore all over again. Hit the leg so hard. So yeah, like, I’m pretty sure you’re gonna feel the same way. Next week?

Yes, definitely. Yeah, I’m headed out. Taking a couple of weeks and hitting the road literally going to be gone for a couple of weeks and doing some trail running. So for those of you in the northwest, you know what mountain trail was? Yeah. We’re going to be doing a run around Mount St. Helens, as well as doing some visiting up there. Go to some campgrounds and stuff. So, Bradley, how about you? How are things on the East Coast today. Good. Happy to be here I’ve been trying to

do I’ve got a bunch of lead gen projects I’m working on. And so I’m trying to spend as much time on those as possible. But I’ve had a really good month in real estate flipping land and I’ve got a lot of deals coming in right now. So it’s kind of hard because I’m, I’m conflicted, the real estate money is really damn good. So I have to do I have to pursue that when it comes in. But at the same time, I’ve got other projects I’m trying to work on. So it’s kind of difficult balancing right now, but I’m happy to be here and got a lot of stuff coming up. So that’s the end. Well, we got a few things I want to mention to everybody real quick. First of all, is kofu. Live as we’ve been saying that is still on, we got a lot of cool,

cool stuff we’re going to be talking about. You can find out more about that at Boku live.com not just the cool stuff, but also what you can get. So head over there, check out the VIP ticket, I highly recommend it. We have priced it accordingly. We really want people to grab the VIP ticket and get

The most out of this. But if you want, you can grab the VIP plus as well and get some one on one time with us, which if you were going to book that separately, I mean, we know roughly what each other charge but I didn’t sit down and like calculate it out, but it’s a hell of a deal. So if that’s something you want to take advantage of, go grab one of those. There are limited number of those because we can’t just sit around talking to everybody all day. Unfortunately, we do have our own businesses and agencies to run. So go and check those out. We got some more information coming out later in August about the guest speakers and exactly what they’re going to be covering. But we got some great stuff. Jeffrey Smith is going to be joining us again and we’ve got two more agency owners along with Rob Beal and dedhia is going to be giving a case study to so tons of stuff and more. More to come. So again, poku live.com. Now, something else I want to talk about and Bradley, maybe you can share some info. I just got the link to this. You’re going to be talking with Jeremy from Press Advantage on Monday. Correct.

Yes, Monday at 3:30pm.

We’ve got another webinar with Jeremy, one of the CO owners of Press Advantage, which is the press release service that we’ve been using. I mean, primarily for several years now I’ve been with Press Advantage for six since. They’ve pretty much since they launched, so five or six years, maybe even longer than that. But anyways, he only opens up the subscription offers that he’s done for us. Rarely, let’s put it that way. Very rarely does he open up those subscription offers. And he’s, um, he’s prepared or planning to do that again next week. There are some new features that are been rolling out for Press Advantage and it’s just a good time to do so. And we’ve been asking him to open that back up again for some time. So he’s, he’s actually doing that for us next Monday at 3:30pm. So be on the lookout for the link. If you don’t, if Adam doesn’t post it here, you’ll get it via email plus in the groups and sign up for that any of you that are using press releases consistently for your marketing, whether it’s for clients or your own projects, we highly recommend them. They work incredibly well. I use them a lot. And so if you’re doing a lot of them, it’s probably best in your best interest to have your own subscription. And next week’s a good time to get it. So be there. Definitely, yeah, so that’ll be Monday. 3pm Eastern, and I thought will be Say that again. I believe it’s 330 Let me double-check. No, it’s 3 pm. I’m sorry. Yes. 3pm. Okay, so 3pm Eastern, and we will be sending out an email about that. I did just post the link. So stay tuned for that. But if you are interested in what press releases can do for you, then I highly suggest showing up plus Jeremy like Bradley said it’s gonna have a very special offer going with that. Yeah, real quick, guys. If anybody you know, before you even go on the webinar for that if, if you want to see how to use press releases in a way that just works incredibly well. Just go to our YouTube channel and search for press release SEO, and you’ll find

The webinar that we did, it’s also at MGYB. If you look in the webinar section on MGYB, the store, you’ll see that there’s we did a Marco and I did a webinar about how we use press releases and PR silo stacking. So essentially siloing press releases together. And it works really, really well. And I would highly recommend it if you’re on the fence or considering getting your own press release subscription that you go watch that webinar first so that you have an idea of how powerful they are and how to use them the best way. Definitely, will Bradley beat me to it. I was going to say speaking of MGYB and a lot of you guys took advantage of the awesome Fourth of July sale we had last month. There’s still some good stuff going on. If you had some updates coming so go check out mg y v.co for your done for you services. But yeah, as Bradley said up there, you’ll see the little webinar button click on that. And then there’s a bunch of the best practices webinars which is just basically free, great training information. So go check those out. So here’s a bit of something Why don’t we bundle the Press Advantage offer with Local PR Pro I’m just throwing it out there we don’t have to decide right now but I mean it just it goes hand in hand let’s let’s work it out and make them an offer they can’t refuse so they get results right away the way we do that. And one more thing before we go I don’t want to set any hard dates because it’s a work in progress. But there’s something coming for Syndication Academy. Yeah, look new flavor.

We’re working on it. We’re working on it guys. Let’s say sometime towards the fourth quarter of the year sometime. Look for it. It revamped updated when I bought properties. I don’t know how you can make the best better but we are.

Yeah, yes. Yeah. And I was gonna say I was gonna turn into t test I’ll keep this one short because we can’t really say much about it. But yeah, the webinar go get signed up for that. Keep your eyes and ears peeled about Syndication Academy and Bradley’s going to be doing some testing for some additional link building based stuff. And we’ll just leave it at that for now and say that, should that go? Well, that’s definitely something we’ll be letting everyone know about. Yep.

Cool. All right, guys. Anything else before we dive in? We’re good. All right. Let’s do it. Grab the screen.

You guys are seeing my screen correct?

Yep. So yeah, right.

What Phone Number To Use When Setting Up The GMB For A Local Lead Gen Site?

jump right into it. So olana says, Hi guys. Setting up a local lead gen site. Haven’t got a phone number for it yet. Would you wait until after you have the number to set up the GMB? Yes, I think you have to actually you have to have a phone number. As far as I remember. I haven’t set up a GMB in quite some time, but I’m pretty sure you have to have a phone number. Also, which of the following Do you use for lead gen an 800 number, a one 300 number. I’ve never even heard of that mobile or local landline with a reader.

I prefer using call rail. I still use call rail. I’ve used call fire in the past and I’ve got a ton of numbers in call fire comm that I would like to port over to call rail is a better platform. It gives you a ton more features. It’s inexpensive, but it takes it’s a long process of porting numbers. So I just have two accounts. I’ve got call firing call rail. I prefer using call rail. Again, I use call rail for several of my lead gen assets as well as my own real estate business. Because I use a lot of phone numbers for tracking marketing purposes and stuff. But I really, really like call rail. Does anybody else have any suggestions?

Call rail. I can’t say anything else. It’s what I use. Yeah. And no, not an 800 number. All right. So if you’re going to work local, which your car it no matter where you go, you don’t want that 800 number you want that local number you want people kind of like that local numbers I’ve seen better results with a local number than an ad hundred number unless you’re widely known for having that 800 number. Does that make sense? Or did I lose everybody? So 100 works when you’re widely known like like, something like roto rooter, let’s say or plumbers nine one, that kind of thing. But if you’re local and you want people to you to want to create that familiarity it really helps to have that local number.

Yes, I agree. I use answerconnect.com to send phone calls into a call center so that the phone always gets answered. It screens the calls there’s a ton of benefits for using a call center. And I have been since 2013, the same account, answer Connect comm I really can’t say enough good things about them. And so they give you an 800 number but you can forward or redirect local numbers to the 800 number which is what I do. That way. You know, I can have multiple lead gen assets all funneling into that with their own separate local numbers, but all funneling into the same call center if it’s for the same service provider, essentially.

But there’s a lot of really cool things. And by the way, guys, I’m working on a lot of lead gen stuff right now, and I’ve got some case studies I’m working on that I’ll be making public, not just within our groups. And I’ve also got some things that I’m going to be introducing to everybody when I do make that case studies public that I think will help a lot of you with your lead gen business. I can’t really talk much about it right now, but I just kind of wanted to tease it. So there you go.

How To Generate Quality Content For A Niche Blog If You Don’t Like Writing?

The next question is, Hey, guys, I want to set up a niche blog, but I don’t like writing How can I generate the quality content myself for my niche blog? Will the generated content be good enough for niche blogging? Thanks, Content Kingpin.

When I first started in SEO and local lead gen way back in, you know, 2010 timeframe. I was actually doing blog posts. Right after, I’d kind of developed the Syndication Academy method, and because it was just working like crazy good, I knew that blogging was going to be the way to populate the networks and get results. And so I was actually blogging for industries that I knew nothing about. I was actually writing the posts myself. And it was incredibly time-consuming. And it’s frustrating because I had to learn a lot about the businesses and the topics and such. And I, fortunately, I got introduced to content curating, and I don’t remember who introduced me to it or whatever, but I kind of started reading about it. And then I bought a couple of courses about content curating, and some plugins and all kinds of stuff. And I started curating content and I got much more efficient at generating content. And he also I didn’t have to know as much about a topic because you can just find subject matter, you know, find articles on the web or content. It doesn’t have to be articles. It can be podcasts, videos, infographics, slide presentations, it could be a number of things that are based around the topic that you are writing about that are written by or produce the contents produced by subject matter experts or SMEs. And you can get really good and really efficient at producing content by just being able to find and locate content developed or produced by subject matter experts. And then curating it and creating a unique post based upon using, you know, snippets of content from the subject matter experts, it’s already been published. So that’s, you know, been my preferred method. And I was actually doing that on my own. I use some tools and some plugins at the time. But once my business got to a certain level, it was just way too time-consuming. Even with using curated content, I was too time-consuming for me to produce it myself. So I developed training and hired a virtual assistant and handed it over to them and she’s still with me today. By the way, her name is Esther she’s still my primary number one blogger that works for me right now.

But anyway, long story short, I ended up training multiple virtual assistants or bloggers or curators as what they are really, with that training. So I kind of polished it up a bit. And that’s what Content Kingpin is, which is one of our training courses. And it’s the same process that my bloggers all use today, I talked about a couple of tools, but we still primarily do everything manually. Just using like a like Feedly. For example, to the group and categorize content feeds that we know like and trust that then we can use to all So a quick glimpse my bloggers go in for whenever they’ve got to produce or publish a post, they’ll go in and just look at Feedly select that particular category or folder for the project that they’re working on. And it will show all the content that’s available than the recent content that’s available around that particular topic. And then they can choose a topic to blog about to curate a post about and then pick and choose a few articles that will either reinforce that the idea that they’re trying to convey with their posts, or sometimes they’ll do like argumentative posts where they’ll try to show in a different opinion from what perhaps others are saying. So they’ll show two sides of the coin, if that makes sense, as two different competing opinions about the same topic anyway, it’s great, it works incredibly well, it also creates co-citation. And so we highly recommend you check out Content Kingpin, it’s one of the best ways to do it. Not only that but if you were to use that site type of the system, the Content Kingpin method, then you can get away from doing it yourself. So you don’t have to publish I mean, I would learn it first. You know, learn it and understand how to do it first, but then you can actually put a virtual assistant that you hire through the course and have them do it for you, and you can kind of just managing and guide them until they get up to your standards. But that’s the best way to do it. Guys. I call it hands-free content marketing and it’s a great revenue source too because it really is simple.

Once you understand the topic concept is really, really good to anybody want to comment on that Content Kingpin doesn’t get enough credit for does what it does. People don’t understand it, I think because they get all the all this different information about unique content and duplicate content and all this bullshit that’s out there. That’s nothing. Really if it were so places like Huffington Post’s would not exist. Google News would not exist unless curated content was okay. But not only Okay, whether it was good I’d be how much traffic does it get Bing, Yahoo. All they do all day long is republish story. Huffington Post is a collection of republish story that all it is and all you’re doing with Content Kingpin is republishing the story. You’re summarizing them right taking power, whatever it is that you do it. And you’re adding your own commentary and proper attribution and it’s a done deal. I mean, it’s so simple. And yet people try to make it so much more difficult than it really should be. But yeah, totally Content Kingpin for the win. You know, and it’s interesting. I’ve just pulled this up because I did this and if you guys remember masterclass, we had a, we had a kind of a middle-tier webinar coaching program that we had called masterclass for a number of years. And I did this as a local case study, Gainesville home pros, and I’ve never done anything with it since I think that was back in 2015. Oh, look at that. It says account suspended. That’s interesting. That’s one of my Okay, well, anyway, I would sure like to show you that blog because that was curated content, the same method. My blogger Esther, who was the first one I trained using that method, produced all the content on that site using curated content, and they were beautiful posts and unfortunately, it looks like that account has been that hosting account perhaps has been suspended. I have done anything with it years. But I would like to show you guys some examples of that. But I don’t have anything that I can show you right now off the top of my head. But anyway, it’s it works really, really well the posts come out beautiful if you do it right. I would highly recommend going through Content Kingpin.

No, because there are a few things that you have to do in order to not infringe on copyright. So for example, you don’t want to curate images that can get you into trouble, asked me how I know.

Because you’ll get extortion letters from like Getty Images and other you know, asshole law firms out there that are just looking for people that have republished images without copyright, without rights to it. So there’s like a lot of things. There’s not a lot of things, but there are a few things that you really should do to make sure that you’re covering your ass when you’re curating content. So again, I highly recommend you go through the product, it’s through that program. It’s a really, really good program. It’s the same that we use today. You know, there are a lot of tools out there that can help you to manage content curating, but we’ve already.

He’s found that it really just is just as quick and easy because what happens with a lot of these tools is they stop being supported over time. We know one of them was Curation Suite that we actually promoted. And fortunately after promoting it, and after a year or so, like the support just stopped and it kind of fell off the face of the earth. The same thing with a bunch of curating plugins that I’ve used over the years, they just eventually fall off the market and they just don’t get supported. So we’ve learned to just stick with the manual process and it’s you know, once somebody becomes efficient with that process is really is a very efficient way to produce content. So you don’t need all the additional tools and plugins and things like that. So that’s why I recommend that product because it’s a Content Kingpin because it will teach you how to do it manually and then you can teach a VA how to do it by just putting them right through the same training. It’s a great question though.

What Training Do You Offer In The MasterMind That You Can’t Get In The Syndication Academy?

Jason says I’m currently in the Syndication Academy 2.0 and I was wanting to know all of the different features and benefits in the mastermind that you don’t get in the Academy. Is this all of these different training you offer in the mastermind if I joined the mastermind, can I get a discount for the cost of the academy? Okay, so first of all the mastermind you have direct access to my partners and me, as well as all the other members of the group, which we have a lot of really savvy marketers and agency owners and CEOs and such in our group. But you also have direct access to all of us to where you can ask us questions in the Facebook group at any time. We’re in there answering questions often. Plus, we each host our own separate webinars inside the mastermind. They’re bi-weekly webinars. So every two weeks each one of us hosts our own webinar. So you get to come to ask us questions at length during the webinars. Like you can post questions ahead of time for the webinars, we’ll do site audits, we’ll you know, look at your, your SEO, your you know, on-page stuff off-page stuff, we’ll help you with projects if you need it. Plus, as I said, you get to you know, come to ask me stuff, or Marco stuff or Adam, or Hernan or Chris any one of us. So there’s a lot of benefits in there that we don’t provide anywhere else we’ll go as deep into, whatever subject you want to go into, you know, and that’s one of the things that we can’t do on a free setting like this or any in any of our other groups. So the mastermind is definitely where you want to be if you want to get all that, as well as Syndication Academy is included in that. So you can cancel your Syndication Academy account if you join the mastermind because it’s included in that as well as all of our products under $300. Anything over $300 you get a significant discount. So there’s a ton of benefits to be in the mastermind. Anybody else wanna?

Yeah, I would just say Jason, if you just started Syndication Academy, if you’re just getting into it, then contact support and we’ll refund whatever you paid for Syndication Academy and you can or you can apply it towards them. However, you want to work that out, we’ll work it out for you. We always do. Why because membership has its privileges. So that’s why we do things the way we do and yes, I mean, above all else is this group of people like-minded people who are working towards what we call POFU position of Fuck you, where you have the kind of power and money where you can pick and choose your clients, your clients come to you instead of you going knocking on doors on $500 clients who are a pain in the ass. So rather than doing all that you getting all you get all of this training, you get the mindset training, you get the how-to get all of the collective knowledge, and then you have five, almost six years of webinars. Now some of them of course are dated, but we do we’re not doing webinars every week. It’s either Bradley or me like we take every other Thursday. You got Hernan, you got Adam. Yeah, Chris, everyone is giving you their perspective and their take on things so you get all of these different points of view, all of this all of these different experiences coming to you and helping you in whatever it is that you’re trying to do whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve. So it’s not just what you get as far as training. It’s the people and the relationships, the networking that you can do inside the mastermind like I know people who are working together in different projects, and we tell people to become the big fish in a little pond. But then some of them go on to and I’m gonna mention his name, for example, to dominate in the Fort Worth area. And you got another one in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the Twin Cities you got someone in the Dirty South, right South Carolina, Georgia area, who are Domini who may have started as the big fish in the little pile or becomes the little fish in the big fish in the little pond. But then they move to a bigger pond. So that we’re always pushing. We’re always encouraging people. That growth means you go to make more money until you reach a stepping point where you say, Okay, I met, hopefully, this is where I want to be, this is how I want to do it. And if I choose not to work tomorrow, I can do that because the process and the systems and everything else that I’ve gained through being in the mastermind, will take care of me not being it, the system is there, so I don’t have to be there. And I mean, just the way that this happened and how this happened, and how people finally are able to step away and say, Man, I can spend time with my family and I can relax and I can do the things I want to do, rather than having to do the things that I have to do things that I must with no other choice. So I think that that’s just one of the greater things about the mastermind is that mindset that awful, you’re going after that poof hopefully you get on that path. And it’s it becomes your magnificent obsession. I thank you CTF letcher for that. But it becomes your magnificent obsession. You’re going after that and there is nothing that can get in your way of achieving that powerful, that’s when you know that you’re there. And that’s what we’re there for. So, just because you brought up CT, and we don’t have a lot of questions, so I know we got time when we did the interview with CT Fletcher, I’ve created this text document. It’s been on my desktop ever since. And hopefully, nobody gets offended because CT Fletcher likes to cuss a lot. Say but here’s a lot of here are the quotes that struck me when we were at when we really were Marco interviewing him. I was on the webinar, but it was really Marco interviewing CT Fletcher, who’s a powerlifter. He broke a ton of records for a while. But anyway, some of these are really funny. I’m not gonna read them out to you, but you remember these Marco? Absolutely. I love them so awesome. I still watch them. Will will is king. Yeah, man. Oh, man. Oh, man. He’s so good. You ain’t pretty motherfucker. Yeah, you ain’t that birdie.

So funny. I mean, that one right there cracks me up too. I laughed out loud. Anyways, I just thought that was funny because I happen to notice it on my desktop the other day and I giggled about it. You just brought it up.

Would You Recommend A Subdirectory Or Subfolder On The Same Domain When Creating The Blog?

So anyway, Jason, next question says, Hey, guys, I have an e-commerce website using WordPress with WooCommerce. Would you recommend a subdirectory? Or folder on the same domain and load a new WordPress and create a blog? Yes, that’s what we’ve always recommended. I mean, I don’t do any e-commerce stuff. But I mean, in the past, I have done some SEO for some e-commerce clients. But it’s not something I’d like to do. So I got out of doing it, but we’ve always recommended it. So do you have control over like essentially a content distribution engine, right, and that’s WordPress is great for that? So you can either put it in a subfolder or directory of the root domain or what we always recommended was to put it in a subdomain instead. And that’s because a subdomain is still treated as content have a separate web entity or separate site, I should say, a separate website than the root domain. So that if you’re in your content distribution, you do something spammy, which if you follow our methods, you won’t have any trouble, at least, we, you know, as it stands right now, but Google could change everything in a moment’s notice. But we’ve never had any issues. But if you put in a subdomain, and you were doing something spammy or something, Google changed its rules, all of a sudden, and something became spammy, they wouldn’t affect the root domain, which is where your e-commerce site resides, it would affect the subdomain only. So we always prefer, like, you know, you could put blog as a subdomain to whatever your domain is, or whatever you want it to be news or something like that. And that’s what we prefer to do. But you could put it in a subdirectory. But yeah, that gives you the opportunity then to do all your content marketing. Remember, if you’ve got an e-commerce site, and you’ve got product categories, for example, you can mirror those same categories. We talked about theme mirroring all the time.

If you don’t know what that is, you know, it’s essentially duplicating or mirroring your site structure on other assets. So you have if you have product categories in your eCommerce site, you could mirror those same categories as content categories, or you know, in WordPress, just categories are the same. You could title them and everything the same as what they are on your eCommerce site. And then you can publish posts, blog posts, or sporting posts. That’s kind of a link building method that in place them within those particular silos or categories in the WordPress site, distribute them out to a syndication network, mirror, all of that stuff on a G site, and our ys drive stack, press releases, all that kind of stuff. You mirror all of that together, and it works really, really well to push power to your, you know, your ultimate destination, which would be your e-commerce product pages. So you want to comment on that. Yeah, we used to recommend going to a subdomain because we wanted to protect the root cause we were doing. let’s admit it, we were doing a lot of evil stuff yes to the subdomains, we were blasting them to the point where if we had them connected to the route, any penalty would pass to the root. What we’ve done is we’ve taken a step out, because now everything goes through our SEO power shield. And so now the route is protected.

And so in order to push even more power, by all means, put it in a subdirectory because then you’re accruing everything inside the root when you go into that subdirectory rather than stepping in a subdomain, which is treated as a separate website, so you’re one hop away from your root domain anyway and you’re losing link equity. When you’re anytime that you’re one hop or more away, you lose link equity at the top. When you’re in a subdomain, you don’t lose that link equity is even when you’re in the root. You don’t lose that link equity when you’re in a folder inside the root. You don’t lose that link equity because you’re not a hub away. You’re in the root, now if you do want to protect it, then you just install in the dub dub dub. So that’s where you would do the root because that’s a subdomain anyway.

So that’s how you do it. But we have the SEO PowerShell it’s not necessary anymore. Because everything that we do goes through our SEO power shield, which amplifies and protects. That’s why we call it the SEO, power shield. It powers it up, it amplifies and it protects it shields it and so that my recommendation would be totally totally unless you’re planning on doing a whole lot of evil stuff to that subdomain go with a sub but with it should be with a folder inside the root.

What Type Of Brand Property Link To Use In A Press Release?

Awesome. So next is BB BB. Look, you’ve gotten better, buddy. Your questions are a lot shorter and not quite as many. So I think we’re finally getting through to you, man. And I’m just giving you our time baby. It’s we’re always like having you here but he says Hey guys, number one does that the link to a branded property in the press release should be to the property or to one of its pages that were syndicated by RSS. Well, it depends on what you’re doing. But so, my strategy and again, it’s covered in the press release SEO, or piece PR silo stacking webinar that we did Marco and I did. Again, you can find that at MGYB or just go to youtube.com slash semantic mastery use the channel search feature search for press release SEO and you’ll find it you know, right at the top go watch that. Because what I prefer to do is we you know, we’re constantly blogging for clients or for projects period. So that populates syndication network, right, we’re building topical relevancy and depth to our silos, right depth to a particular topic. And then they syndicate out to syndication networks, right. And within every single post, within the proper silo architecture, we’re always linking back up from the post back up to the top of the silo page, which is the page that we’re trying to drive traffic to. Right. So what we do what I do is I always, you know, I like to publish press releases that are highlighting or showcasing a recent blog post. And that links to the blog post URL, which within the blog post, actually links back up to the page on the site. But I mean, you don’t have to use that strategy all the time. That’s what I do. Because I consistently publish press, we’re consistently blogging and we’re consistently publishing press releases for all of my clients or my lead gen asset. So it just works out really well because we’re providing deep links, so links further down into a silo that helps to power up with proper silo architecture, it helps to power up the entire silo and helps all of the different keywords that we’re targeting within the silo start to rise or surface in the search engines because of those deep links, right. So that’s my preferred method because it adds more diversity and it’s linking to multiple points.

Within the main money site, as opposed to always constantly hitting the homepage or just the product or service pages, the top of silo pages in other words, so I like to do deep links, but it depends on what you’re doing. If you’re not doing a lot of press releases, if you’re you know, you only got a budget for a handful of them, then it might be better to actually hit your homepage and or your top of silo pages, that kind of thing. So it really just depends on what your overall content marketing strategy is, and what you’re going to be linking to, you know that that’s going to determine where you’re going to link to from within your site. Okay.

That’s it that said, I always almost not 100% but we almost always link from within press releases to a page or post on the money site. Unless we’re doing a two-step which again, go watch the press release SEO webinar, and you’ll understand what I mean. But for example, if a client as all my local clients have Google My Business profiles. So if we publish a post when we publish a blog post on the blog, my blogger also for most of my clients will end up publishing a GMB post that points a link back to the blog post. So essentially, the GMB post is nothing other than a summary of the blog post itself with the same featured image as the image for the GMB post the photo, and then the button link, the Learn More button link links back to the blog post. So sometimes our press releases will actually link to the GMB post URL, because that ultimately links to the blog post URL, so the two-step process there. But you can also and I’ve talked about this almost every week now for the last like two months on Hump Day hangouts baby so I’m sure you’re aware of what I was what I’ve said. But you know, if you’ve got particular keywords that you’re trying to push, then you can actually go extract the post URLs from like, for example, the blogs on your syndication network, so blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, you can go extract these post URLs that are where the re-syndication or of the published the post that you publish targeting those keywords. And you can link to those within press releases too if you want to because again, that’s tiered link building. So it’s helpful in anyone, but you don’t have to. I prefer to link to those blog post URLs using daddy as link building from an MGYB because I like to use the press releases to link directly back to the money site, or two primary tier one assets, such as a GMB profile, GMB map, Id page, any one of those types of things when it comes to that.

That was a good question. By the way, bb though. Yeah, that that was a really good question. Now, I mean, the link building varies it depends on how much power you’re trying to push and where and everything is gonna be where it’s needed, where everything’s needed. Because sometimes it’s just one press release, push, can get you to where you need to be. Other times, you’re going to need way more. Yeah, there are other times when you’re going to need even link building into the press releases. There’s no one set rule because sometimes it’s just the SEO power shield coming, coming in, right coming online. And that’s enough. And sometimes it doesn’t even have to do with the competition because we’ve seen it even in some tough keyword sets that you start ranking like right from the SEO power shield. So this totally ended depends on the no definitive answer for this, other than, you’re going to have to get your press release. If you’ve set it up correctly. And you hit your top-level category rather than just like everybody does your homepage. Then your top-level category will flow and it’ll push all of that power so that everything benefits from it, including the top-level category, not just the longtail keywords, it’s how we teach it now. We teach people to go from the top-down instead of bottom-up it

It’s a little different, it’s kind of the same thing except we’re going. For example, if we want to rank for gold futures, this is just an example. It’s incredibly difficult to rank for that. But we would go even one, one level higher, we would go after the gold category, the entire gold category to pull up the gold features category instead of trying to push it up with all of the long tails. And I’ve seen that it has a greater effect when you try to go for that top-level category. on everything else, not only the longtail but the subcategory that you’re after. So I’m always telling people you go one level up. So keeping this in mind, then it’s up to you. I always tell people that we have to be scientists when we’re gauging how it is that we’re going to do this. What effect we’re trying to create, you’re going to have to create your link building and press releases are part of link building. You’re going to create it so that whatever you’re trying to benefit the most guests

The most benefit out of what you’re doing. And so you approach it that way. Yeah. So it varies. That’s the short answer. It varies. It depends, right?

Can We Use The PR Stacking Strategies With Article Directories?

Next, can we treat an article direct article, an article directory as press releases, meaning publishing, as the PR stacking and also linking to actual prs? Okay, I don’t do any article directory stuff I haven’t for years, not saying that it can’t still be useful. I just haven’t because they’ve been known to be spammy. I think a lot of the links from those get discredited. It’s much better to get like, you know, articles instead of being published on article directories, which were always known as SEO like, honey, honey, what do you call them honey, honey holes or whatever you call them. But I’m not saying that it won’t work because I don’t know. I haven’t tested it in years. If I was going to do it, maybe I would do it. Where I was only linking to SEO shield assets or like you say, can you link to PRs? Yes, that would be fun because press release wherever press releases published is going to be able to handle those type of links, you may be able to push good link equity to them, or even, it doesn’t really matter because they’re not your money site. So I, I, again, I haven’t used article directories in probably five or six years.

And so I don’t really know whether they’re still viable or if they’re still helping at any level. But if I was going to use them, I would do it too. I would use them to link only back to tier one asset not directly to the money site. And press releases are a great thing to link to. So, Marco, I know you don’t use article directories either.

I used to, it’s not necessary anymore. I don’t need to go that far. Right. The way that we’re doing it pushes so much power that we don’t need to go. I mean, when you’re already at number one, like how much better can you go than the number one.

So maybe at some point with some of the case studies that we’re doing and everything else that we have coming on e-commerce and everything else that we’re experimenting. Yeah, I would say that we can do that. But right now, or maybe we need to do that. But right now the way that we’re doing things is not necessary.

What Do You Mean By Kitchen Sink Spam?

Agreed. The last question was, what do you mean when you say kitchen sink? It gets me confused. Yeah, when I say kitchen sink spam, or when we say that, that just means using link building tools and throwing every kind of link like even some real spammy stuff, at whatever your target is. So like when we say you can throw kitchen sink spam at it, it means you could use some of the most god awful links in the world and throw them at, you know, point them at a particular target and still benefit from it. We would never encourage anybody to do that with their money site. And in fact, we prefer to still use better links.

Even if you’re using spam tools, for example, like you know, our link building master dedhia he uses a ton of link building tools but he always recommends that your the links that he builds to whatever your targets are, which we always recommend tier-one entity targets or your SEO shield essentially. But he always likes to suggest recommends using two layers two levels of contextual web two Dotto links. And then throwing if you want a third tier of links, you can throw kitchen sink spam at those contextual web two dot o links. So that’s what we mean by kitchen sink spam, it means pretty much anything under the sun, that’s a link. And a lot of those would be toxic if they’re not used properly, but they can still provide a benefit if used properly. And that’s what we talk about when we talk about you know, you can hit SEO power shields with kitchen sink spam, and they’ll end up ranking. We don’t recommend it. We still recommend using the contextual web to Dotto links. Add your first and second-tier links that are being built to your tier one assets. But you can always throw kitchen sink spam behind that if you wanted and still receive a benefit Mark has done several tests I have to, but we even did the Marco and Rob did the kind of public case study for the DC plumber and just hit it with like over a million kitchen sink spam style links, including porn porn links, and it ranked and it’s probably still ranking today. So and we just had someone in RYS Academy reloaded last week, come in and tell us that they tried the million kitchen sink, spam link test and got really good results and 89% increase in traffic month to month. Wow. So it works. However, think of it this way. If garbage links work, how much better? Will quality links work? How much better will the way that we do the tiered link building right? contextual tiered link building

How much better is that, not only for now but long term when they come looking? The first thing that they look for is that kitchen sink spam, that that the automation is is what Google is looking for. And we’re kind of hiding in plain sight because we’re not giving them what everybody else is doing. We’re doing it a little bit differently. And it just playing work. So when you’re thinking about going after that, that million links, and yeah, you can pay 50 bucks in fiber, and there’s going to be complete TSA, and it’s going to be truly, truly garbage type of stuff that you don’t want to look at. Why would you do that to your project? Why would you do that when it can show up in your link profile? Do you want that? Because we had that showing up for DC plumbing. We had those links index, man. And seriously, you didn’t want your kids looking at that you didn’t want you to want to be sitting there with your wife. Looking at some of that stuff that was coming through it was it was like, the really bad garbage man.

So why would so when I’m talking to people, my question is if you want to test and you don’t care, you don’t care what shows up in the link profile, you don’t care about anything. You’re just trying to make you make some money. It’s a fun test, then, by all means, do it. But if it’s something that you care about, why would you mistreat something that you care about that one?

Agreed.

Can You Blast The Press Release And Drive Stacks With Backlinks Without Negative Impact On The Money Site And GMB?

Okay, next is Gordon, what’s up Gord? It’s been a while he says, Hey, guys, hope you’re safe. And well just have a quick question. When using press releases or an ROI S Drive stack through the MGYB store. Can you blast either or both of them with hundreds or even thousands of backlinks without any negative effect on your money site? Or GMB listing? And if so, will that increase the SEO juice flowing to either entity and help them to rank? Thank you very much. Yeah. And that’s, I mean, that’s exactly what we were just talking about.

We prefer to build links to our tier one entity assets such as the SEO power shield, our last drive stack, g site press releases the organic press release organization page, you know, the idx page, anything like that. And that’s if you set it up correctly, you’re not going to have any negative results whatsoever, which is why we set the things up the way that we do. That’s why we call it the SEO power shield because it shields it’s like, I’ve always called it an SEO firewall, right? It creates a firewall around your money site. And so that’s exactly what we’re talking about. embeds and or backlinks work really, really well. In fact, you can even take your money site it for example, and you know, embed it in a G site and then hammer the G site page with backlinks. And that’s going to help your money site page benefit without there being an actual direct hyperlink on that page. Does that make sense? So yeah, that’s what we were just talking about. With Bibi’s question when we just hammer our assets with backlinks because it helps to push ultimately it flows down through to whatever our target destination is, which could be a GMB asset.

Could be a Google Site could be a money site. It could be all three of those. So yes, that would work. Any comments on that?

Should You Interlink A Post If The Main Article Has 5 Jump Links?

No, that’s perfect. Pavlos up, he says, Hey guys last time, I missed an opportunity to say thank you. Well, you’re welcome. Pavlo He says, question in one of your videos, you said that I can copy main silo page content and create a post. The Post will be canonicalized back to the main article, the canonical link itself will be a jump link to the Main article.

The question is should I interlink these posts if I have if the Main article has five jump links, and I’ve created five posts from the main content? I think I kind of vaguely remember this conversation we had on Hump Day Hangouts, but I’m not quite following the question. I think what, what I was talking about if and hopefully, I’m not off base here, but prefer using long-form content now for content for websites or for money sites, instead of in the past, like, you know, five years ago, you know, you could create a kind of thin content type of silo page. And then each supporting a keyword that you would find within your with your keyword research. So all of the supporting keywords that you would stack within a particular silo, I just always use spreadsheets for that. So I create a column but my top-level keyword at the top, you know, the column header, and then I would go extract all of the relevant supporting keywords and key phrases and put them in underneath that in that same column right in a spreadsheet. And then that would be that that goes to my bloggers, for them to produce content around so that they highlight one of the supporting keywords within the correct silo. And it used to be that I would create kind of thin content, top of silo pages, and then target individual longer tail keywords with blog posts, but that becomes repetitive redundant. And it doesn’t work as well what I found as having a long-form top of silo page now, that contains a lot of those supporting keywords so that broken down into subheadings, right, so and I think that’s what you were talking about is when I mentioned that you can create long-form content, and even put a table of contents with jump links at the top of the content, which is really good for SEO. And then you can actually create blog posts targeting those longer tail phrases that are already present on the silo page itself right to top of silo page that have jump links to them and then link from those supporting articles within the blog post to those jump links. Because then it’s, it’s, it’s linking to the top of silo page, but it’s also reinforcing that longer tail subheading or keyword, right, so that’s supporting keyword. If that’s what you’re talking about, then let’s see. The question is should I interlink these posts with the Main article as well? Five jump links. And I’ve created five posts from the main content. Yeah, I mean, I don’t I can’t get too far into this Marco would kill me if I did.

But if you’re interlinking, your supporting posts correctly, daisy-chaining them together then and they’re just linking from post to post. And from within each post linking back to the top of silo page, even if it’s at a jump link, a jump link to the top of silo page to some section on the top of silo page. Yes, that would work. That would work really, really well. Actually. Any comments on that Marco?

Sorry about that.

A lot. Ah, no, it’s not really something that I’m willing to talk about in a free gotten a free forum like this. They are not going to get into that because it just puts so much power and it gets around everything that Google can throw at you. So no, that’s fine. We’ll leave it at that. Okay.

But yeah, just get creative with it. Think about you know what you’re doing with your structure. And I don’t like to if I don’t know where you say you can just clone copy main silo page content and create a post, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t do that on the same site what I was talking about with cloning or copying or mirroring, right is within the G site. Right. So if you’ve got your top of silo page, and you’ve got all the content on the page, you can always create, we recommend mirroring that top of silo page on the G site. And then if you had supporting posts within that category on your money site, I don’t typically duplicate or mirror posts onto a G site unless I’m having trouble ranking a particular keyword in which case then I will create child pages on the G site that is each child a one to one ratio, child page for every post within that silo, and then just embed those in there and that’s what I was talking about with the jumping links, you can actually create jump links from the G site back to the money site there. But again, that’s more kind of mastermind stuff or heavy hitter club stuff. So hopefully you got some value out of that. But I wouldn’t copy top of silo content and republish it on the same blog from your money site. I wouldn’t. Personally I wouldn’t do that I would have new content curated, not written because I use curated content for blog posts, the curated targeting the keywords that I’m trying to push that is on the top of the silo page if that makes sense. Okay.

So another good question.

Jason says thank you. Yeah, so he’s already watched all the Syndication Academy videos, that’s okay. If you join the mastermind if you just joined recently, the Syndication Academy join the mastermind will up make it worth your while we’ll refund your Syndication Academy purchase or apply it towards your first month of mastermind or something like that, and then you can cancel that subscription. So, yep, baby says great. We’re almost

What Are Your Thoughts On The Statement That You Can Flatten A Complex Silo Into A Simple Silo?

Got a timer almost out of question. So this is good timing maybe says great. What do you think of the statement that each complex silo can be flattened to a simple silo? And if a site isn’t that big, is it better to do the flat? Yes, I always, always recommend using simple silos where possible and guys, I’m going to be updating the training, I was really hoping to get that done for today, but I didn’t. And so I’ll try to have it done by next Wednesday. But in the process, street process doc that I created for our methods and for me, you know, our methods are what we sell as done for you services and MGYB for those of you that aren’t aware of it, if you go to semantic mastery comm slash process, I’m going to bring it up. It’ll you guys can take a look at this. For those of you that haven’t already been exposed to it, this is the process street process doc that I created to that has a lot of training in there with a lot of it’s the why we do what we do.

And what you can expect from it the How is we point to our training products for the how but or the where to get it as the links over to MGYB but these are the website silo architecture, the training videos that I created, you know, five years ago or whatever, they’re, they’re still valid, but my overall process has changed slightly right it’s evolved slightly and so I’m going to redo those silo training videos where I go into what a simple silo is what a complex silo is a difference between a physical silo and a virtual silo and what I prefer to use and why I’m going to redo those videos and that will go into here the website section of the worry list entity based SEO process doc and when I do hope I’ll have this done by next week guys I really wanted to get it done by this week but I haven’t even started on it. So I’ll try to get it done by next week. And then again guys you go to semantic mastery comm slash process and you take a look at all the stuff that’s in here. There’s a lot of training here. And so anyway, that said, Yes, I always recommend a simple silo. For most projects. I’m not going to say for the most projects for most local projects, which is what I do, almost exclusively, simple silos will suffice. I used to always try to build complex solids because I thought it was going to be better. And then maybe there is some benefit to it. But what I found is a complex silo is complicated. Hence the name complex silo. And so it’s difficult to build it create some kind of funny issues that are hard to reconcile with the URLs with the slugs and that kind of with permalinks and that kind of stuff. So I prefer to stick with a simple silo, it’s much easier to manage, it’s easier to map out when you’re in the build process. So I like using simple silos for most local projects. That’s all that is ever needed. In fact, with a simple silo, if you’re using our methods, you’re going to be the on-page SEO is going to be far superior to what most of your competitors are doing anyways. So it’s not really necessary to do a complex silo. If you’re doing a very broad site with a lot of categories and subcategories, then you might be necessary to do a complex silo. But, as I said, I always try to simplify where possible. We’ve had a ton of people over the years, join one of our groups, and they map out this incredibly intricate silo map of a site. And they, you know, probably spend hours and hours and hours mapping it out and creating drawings to show the silo structure and everything and then they present it and say, What do you think you think this would work? And it’s like, Well, yeah, but it could have worked, you know, eight levels previous, where it was like a much simpler build, and you got to save yourself a ton of time. And we don’t say that to pick on anybody, but it’s because I think we as SEO types, try to overcomplicate stuff all the time, and I’ve learned over the years to try to simplify as much as possible and get results with a much simpler process and simple silo structure is the way that I prefer to build 90 95% of my sites.

commenting. I totally agree. I don’t know why people get themselves into trouble with complex silos like right from the start. Yeah, if it’s a brand new project that there’s no need for for a complex silo, unless it’s like, I don’t know, like some type of e-commerce website and you’ve seen those where there’s a bunch of complex subcategories and while category, subcategory, sub-sub categories and all of these things that really complicated but I tell people to look in the beginning, you’re good with your homepage, and three categories, three top-level categories, the three main keywords that you’re going to go after to start making money, push all the power that way, as needed. And as you see more opportunities for top-level categories. You add them, right because then your whole setup is done. And whatever you add is going to benefit from everything you’ve done previously. But if you start mapping it

Out complex from the beginning. How are you going to push the power that that’s going to need for every page and post and subcategory and sub subcategory that you’re trying to create? you’re dividing up the PageRank in such a way that it’s not going to push the initial power that it could have. There’s no way because there’s no way to keep the link flow going the right way. Let’s put it that way. Yeah, but if you keep it simple, minimize the number of categories Don’t try to go after everything at once. But just three, three categories. That gives you enough to write for about four months when you get our D keyword research. I’m sorry, that that’s not available right now. But I did keyword research gives you enough to write about four months on those three top market level categories on those silos. And then you can go and see like which one is more complicated, and you just break it up instead of making it a subcategory? You just make it another category that’s related to that one category that you already have no need to overcomplicate things I hate when people try to do that. It doesn’t have to be all that difficult. Yeah, and it’s fine because like I said, we’ve experienced that a lot over the years, and I’m not gonna lie. In years past I did the same thing, I would always approach new projects with the complex silo, trying to map all that out. And it just it became overwhelming, it became too much of a bitch too, you know, too difficult to manage the projects. And again, it creates a lot of funky issues, if you’re trying to share subcategories with other categories, especially in local like, for example, if you have, you know, your topical or service-based silos, which would be like, you know, like Tree Removal would be one silo, for example, and another silo could be tree trimming, which in reality, I’ve learned over the years that you really don’t even need to create silos for Tree Service sites because they’re all synonyms for each other. Google considers tree removal and tree trimming as synonyms anyways. But most of my tree service projects are

Still siloed like that. And if you were trying to duplicate location-based silos within each one of the topical or service-based silos, it creates some real funny URL issues that you have to reconcile. And it becomes difficult to do so or vice versa, if you had location-based silos, as your top-level silos, and then you tried to have subcategories of services, then it creates some issues too. So I learned a long time ago just to go with the simple silo structure, so much easier to manage so much easier to handle. So anyway, yeah, I totally recommend going with simple silos where possible. The last question and we’re at five o'clock. So this is a good stopping point is BB says should we have a form in the branded properties for collecting leads? Absolutely. If you’ve got form code that can be embedded in other sites, absolutely. I’m actually using I’m not going to talk about what I’m using just yet because it’s part of the case studies and I’m working on but I’m using a new lead generation tool.

It helps that has a form builder in it that works really, really good. And I’m actually embedding the form and multiple properties. Now g sites, you know, a lot of different places that I’m actually embedding the forms now because they work really, really well. And they direct all the leads back to one central location that then gets distributed out. So yeah, absolutely, there’s no doubt, I always try to put most of my businesses run on phone calls more than a phone like. In other words, the leads that I generate for businesses are more phone call leads than they are web form submissions, but I don’t ever want to not provide that as an option. So I used to, I used to really just push phone calls, but now I’m pushing the lead form submits as well, because I’ve got a really cool application that I’m using that helps to distribute the leads to wherever I want them to go. And again, I’ll reveal some of that in the coming week’s guys, but I absolutely recommend if you have a form, form code that can be embedded on other sites use it. Okay.

All right. Thanks, everybody for being here.

We will see you guys next week. Thanks, Marco for sticking around. All right. Have a good one. Thanks, everybody

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 299 published first on your-t1-blog-url https://ift.tt/1WMpNvB August 07, 2020 at 02:42PM Semantic Mastery https://ift.tt/2YeHIxM

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 299

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  Announcement

All right, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 299. We're one away from big Episode 300. I'm gonna call this episode where everyone is getting old and wearing glasses except Chris. I just realized all of us are now wearing glasses except Chris. Yeah, well, you guys spending too much time in front of your computers. There we go. Yeah, gotta change it around. This is the year we try to get ourselves off to the computer. So anyways, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. We're gonna say hi, real quick catch up with everybody. And then we got a couple quick announcements before diving into the questions. So I'll start on the bottom here since it's cloudy weather element Marco. How you doing today? I have my lights on. That's why it looks so bright. Yeah, it's raining. It's supposed to be raining. So finally got me with the lights on. But I can't complain this nice a warm, actually. I'm kind of trying to hide trying to blend into the background. So Google doesn't see me.

It's all good man. I'm gonna

Having a good time.

Outstanding All right. Well, let's work our way around. Hernan you got those new glasses what's going on with you?

Yeah, man, I'm just trying to trying to blend in. I got I got glasses and now you got glasses. I mean yeah man we get rid of this and have a beard and growing a beard. Damn it. You're doing the 50 K I might do the 50 now, so good man these are blue light blocking glasses, you know? Because there's one this one guy show me one this really nerdy yellow like super like

orangey glasses and they make you look stupid. I know I won't be wearing next week.

Yeah, do you don't think the big square bc birth control glasses make you look stupid though right now, man. No, I can't I can talk like this. Nobody will.

But a lady repellent. Yeah, exactly. say wait a second. Are you wearing those or are you being forced to wear this?

What this one glasses. Yeah, I'm just kidding.

You look good. I was just wondering maybe you're making you know this light and blue light blue light blocking. I'm still confused. Why are you wearing blue light blocking glasses in the middle of the day or now? Yeah, well, it's time. 5pm So, five 6pm So, all right. Well, before we tell everyone all about our AI problems, let's see Chris, how you doing today? Man? Doing good, man. I hit the gym for like, I don't know, like after another two week break for the first time again. Sore all over again. Hit the leg so hard. So yeah, like, I'm pretty sure you're gonna feel the same way. Next week?

Yes, definitely. Yeah, I'm headed out. Taking a couple of weeks and hitting the road literally going to be gone for a couple of weeks and doing some trail running. So for those of you in the northwest, you know what mountain trail was? Yeah. We're going to be doing a run around Mount St. Helens, as well as doing some visiting up there. Go to some campgrounds and stuff. So, Bradley, how about you? How are things on the East Coast today. Good. Happy to be here I've been trying to

do I've got a bunch of lead gen projects I'm working on. And so I'm trying to spend as much time on those as possible. But I've had a really good month in real estate flipping land and I've got a lot of deals coming in right now. So it's kind of hard because I'm, I'm conflicted, the real estate money is really damn good. So I have to do I have to pursue that when it comes in. But at the same time, I've got other projects I'm trying to work on. So it's kind of difficult balancing right now, but I'm happy to be here and got a lot of stuff coming up. So that's the end. Well, we got a few things I want to mention to everybody real quick. First of all, is kofu. Live as we've been saying that is still on, we got a lot of cool,

cool stuff we're going to be talking about. You can find out more about that at Boku live.com not just the cool stuff, but also what you can get. So head over there, check out the VIP ticket, I highly recommend it. We have priced it accordingly. We really want people to grab the VIP ticket and get

The most out of this. But if you want, you can grab the VIP plus as well and get some one on one time with us, which if you were going to book that separately, I mean, we know roughly what each other charge but I didn't sit down and like calculate it out, but it's a hell of a deal. So if that's something you want to take advantage of, go grab one of those. There are limited number of those because we can't just sit around talking to everybody all day. Unfortunately, we do have our own businesses and agencies to run. So go and check those out. We got some more information coming out later in August about the guest speakers and exactly what they're going to be covering. But we got some great stuff. Jeffrey Smith is going to be joining us again and we've got two more agency owners along with Rob Beal and dedhia is going to be giving a case study to so tons of stuff and more. More to come. So again, poku live.com. Now, something else I want to talk about and Bradley, maybe you can share some info. I just got the link to this. You're going to be talking with Jeremy from Press Advantage on Monday. Correct.

Yes, Monday at 3:30pm.

We've got another webinar with Jeremy, one of the CO owners of Press Advantage, which is the press release service that we've been using. I mean, primarily for several years now I've been with Press Advantage for six since. They've pretty much since they launched, so five or six years, maybe even longer than that. But anyways, he only opens up the subscription offers that he's done for us. Rarely, let's put it that way. Very rarely does he open up those subscription offers. And he's, um, he's prepared or planning to do that again next week. There are some new features that are been rolling out for Press Advantage and it's just a good time to do so. And we've been asking him to open that back up again for some time. So he's, he's actually doing that for us next Monday at 3:30pm. So be on the lookout for the link. If you don't, if Adam doesn't post it here, you'll get it via email plus in the groups and sign up for that any of you that are using press releases consistently for your marketing, whether it's for clients or your own projects, we highly recommend them. They work incredibly well. I use them a lot. And so if you're doing a lot of them, it's probably best in your best interest to have your own subscription. And next week's a good time to get it. So be there. Definitely, yeah, so that'll be Monday. 3pm Eastern, and I thought will be Say that again. I believe it's 330 Let me double-check. No, it's 3 pm. I'm sorry. Yes. 3pm. Okay, so 3pm Eastern, and we will be sending out an email about that. I did just post the link. So stay tuned for that. But if you are interested in what press releases can do for you, then I highly suggest showing up plus Jeremy like Bradley said it's gonna have a very special offer going with that. Yeah, real quick, guys. If anybody you know, before you even go on the webinar for that if, if you want to see how to use press releases in a way that just works incredibly well. Just go to our YouTube channel and search for press release SEO, and you'll find

The webinar that we did, it's also at MGYB. If you look in the webinar section on MGYB, the store, you'll see that there's we did a Marco and I did a webinar about how we use press releases and PR silo stacking. So essentially siloing press releases together. And it works really, really well. And I would highly recommend it if you're on the fence or considering getting your own press release subscription that you go watch that webinar first so that you have an idea of how powerful they are and how to use them the best way. Definitely, will Bradley beat me to it. I was going to say speaking of MGYB and a lot of you guys took advantage of the awesome Fourth of July sale we had last month. There's still some good stuff going on. If you had some updates coming so go check out mg y v.co for your done for you services. But yeah, as Bradley said up there, you'll see the little webinar button click on that. And then there's a bunch of the best practices webinars which is just basically free, great training information. So go check those out. So here's a bit of something Why don't we bundle the Press Advantage offer with Local PR Pro I'm just throwing it out there we don't have to decide right now but I mean it just it goes hand in hand let's let's work it out and make them an offer they can't refuse so they get results right away the way we do that. And one more thing before we go I don't want to set any hard dates because it's a work in progress. But there's something coming for Syndication Academy. Yeah, look new flavor.

We're working on it. We're working on it guys. Let's say sometime towards the fourth quarter of the year sometime. Look for it. It revamped updated when I bought properties. I don't know how you can make the best better but we are.

Yeah, yes. Yeah. And I was gonna say I was gonna turn into t test I'll keep this one short because we can't really say much about it. But yeah, the webinar go get signed up for that. Keep your eyes and ears peeled about Syndication Academy and Bradley's going to be doing some testing for some additional link building based stuff. And we'll just leave it at that for now and say that, should that go? Well, that's definitely something we'll be letting everyone know about. Yep.

Cool. All right, guys. Anything else before we dive in? We're good. All right. Let's do it. Grab the screen.

You guys are seeing my screen correct?

Yep. So yeah, right.

What Phone Number To Use When Setting Up The GMB For A Local Lead Gen Site?

jump right into it. So olana says, Hi guys. Setting up a local lead gen site. Haven't got a phone number for it yet. Would you wait until after you have the number to set up the GMB? Yes, I think you have to actually you have to have a phone number. As far as I remember. I haven't set up a GMB in quite some time, but I'm pretty sure you have to have a phone number. Also, which of the following Do you use for lead gen an 800 number, a one 300 number. I've never even heard of that mobile or local landline with a reader.

I prefer using call rail. I still use call rail. I've used call fire in the past and I've got a ton of numbers in call fire comm that I would like to port over to call rail is a better platform. It gives you a ton more features. It's inexpensive, but it takes it's a long process of porting numbers. So I just have two accounts. I've got call firing call rail. I prefer using call rail. Again, I use call rail for several of my lead gen assets as well as my own real estate business. Because I use a lot of phone numbers for tracking marketing purposes and stuff. But I really, really like call rail. Does anybody else have any suggestions?

Call rail. I can't say anything else. It's what I use. Yeah. And no, not an 800 number. All right. So if you're going to work local, which your car it no matter where you go, you don't want that 800 number you want that local number you want people kind of like that local numbers I've seen better results with a local number than an ad hundred number unless you're widely known for having that 800 number. Does that make sense? Or did I lose everybody? So 100 works when you're widely known like like, something like roto rooter, let's say or plumbers nine one, that kind of thing. But if you're local and you want people to you to want to create that familiarity it really helps to have that local number.

Yes, I agree. I use answerconnect.com to send phone calls into a call center so that the phone always gets answered. It screens the calls there's a ton of benefits for using a call center. And I have been since 2013, the same account, answer Connect comm I really can't say enough good things about them. And so they give you an 800 number but you can forward or redirect local numbers to the 800 number which is what I do. That way. You know, I can have multiple lead gen assets all funneling into that with their own separate local numbers, but all funneling into the same call center if it's for the same service provider, essentially.

But there's a lot of really cool things. And by the way, guys, I'm working on a lot of lead gen stuff right now, and I've got some case studies I'm working on that I'll be making public, not just within our groups. And I've also got some things that I'm going to be introducing to everybody when I do make that case studies public that I think will help a lot of you with your lead gen business. I can't really talk much about it right now, but I just kind of wanted to tease it. So there you go.

How To Generate Quality Content For A Niche Blog If You Don't Like Writing?

The next question is, Hey, guys, I want to set up a niche blog, but I don't like writing How can I generate the quality content myself for my niche blog? Will the generated content be good enough for niche blogging? Thanks, Content Kingpin.

When I first started in SEO and local lead gen way back in, you know, 2010 timeframe. I was actually doing blog posts. Right after, I'd kind of developed the Syndication Academy method, and because it was just working like crazy good, I knew that blogging was going to be the way to populate the networks and get results. And so I was actually blogging for industries that I knew nothing about. I was actually writing the posts myself. And it was incredibly time-consuming. And it's frustrating because I had to learn a lot about the businesses and the topics and such. And I, fortunately, I got introduced to content curating, and I don't remember who introduced me to it or whatever, but I kind of started reading about it. And then I bought a couple of courses about content curating, and some plugins and all kinds of stuff. And I started curating content and I got much more efficient at generating content. And he also I didn't have to know as much about a topic because you can just find subject matter, you know, find articles on the web or content. It doesn't have to be articles. It can be podcasts, videos, infographics, slide presentations, it could be a number of things that are based around the topic that you are writing about that are written by or produce the contents produced by subject matter experts or SMEs. And you can get really good and really efficient at producing content by just being able to find and locate content developed or produced by subject matter experts. And then curating it and creating a unique post based upon using, you know, snippets of content from the subject matter experts, it's already been published. So that's, you know, been my preferred method. And I was actually doing that on my own. I use some tools and some plugins at the time. But once my business got to a certain level, it was just way too time-consuming. Even with using curated content, I was too time-consuming for me to produce it myself. So I developed training and hired a virtual assistant and handed it over to them and she's still with me today. By the way, her name is Esther she's still my primary number one blogger that works for me right now.

But anyway, long story short, I ended up training multiple virtual assistants or bloggers or curators as what they are really, with that training. So I kind of polished it up a bit. And that's what Content Kingpin is, which is one of our training courses. And it's the same process that my bloggers all use today, I talked about a couple of tools, but we still primarily do everything manually. Just using like a like Feedly. For example, to the group and categorize content feeds that we know like and trust that then we can use to all So a quick glimpse my bloggers go in for whenever they've got to produce or publish a post, they'll go in and just look at Feedly select that particular category or folder for the project that they're working on. And it will show all the content that's available than the recent content that's available around that particular topic. And then they can choose a topic to blog about to curate a post about and then pick and choose a few articles that will either reinforce that the idea that they're trying to convey with their posts, or sometimes they'll do like argumentative posts where they'll try to show in a different opinion from what perhaps others are saying. So they'll show two sides of the coin, if that makes sense, as two different competing opinions about the same topic anyway, it's great, it works incredibly well, it also creates co-citation. And so we highly recommend you check out Content Kingpin, it's one of the best ways to do it. Not only that but if you were to use that site type of the system, the Content Kingpin method, then you can get away from doing it yourself. So you don't have to publish I mean, I would learn it first. You know, learn it and understand how to do it first, but then you can actually put a virtual assistant that you hire through the course and have them do it for you, and you can kind of just managing and guide them until they get up to your standards. But that's the best way to do it. Guys. I call it hands-free content marketing and it's a great revenue source too because it really is simple.

Once you understand the topic concept is really, really good to anybody want to comment on that Content Kingpin doesn't get enough credit for does what it does. People don't understand it, I think because they get all the all this different information about unique content and duplicate content and all this bullshit that's out there. That's nothing. Really if it were so places like Huffington Post's would not exist. Google News would not exist unless curated content was okay. But not only Okay, whether it was good I'd be how much traffic does it get Bing, Yahoo. All they do all day long is republish story. Huffington Post is a collection of republish story that all it is and all you're doing with Content Kingpin is republishing the story. You're summarizing them right taking power, whatever it is that you do it. And you're adding your own commentary and proper attribution and it's a done deal. I mean, it's so simple. And yet people try to make it so much more difficult than it really should be. But yeah, totally Content Kingpin for the win. You know, and it's interesting. I've just pulled this up because I did this and if you guys remember masterclass, we had a, we had a kind of a middle-tier webinar coaching program that we had called masterclass for a number of years. And I did this as a local case study, Gainesville home pros, and I've never done anything with it since I think that was back in 2015. Oh, look at that. It says account suspended. That's interesting. That's one of my Okay, well, anyway, I would sure like to show you that blog because that was curated content, the same method. My blogger Esther, who was the first one I trained using that method, produced all the content on that site using curated content, and they were beautiful posts and unfortunately, it looks like that account has been that hosting account perhaps has been suspended. I have done anything with it years. But I would like to show you guys some examples of that. But I don't have anything that I can show you right now off the top of my head. But anyway, it's it works really, really well the posts come out beautiful if you do it right. I would highly recommend going through Content Kingpin.

No, because there are a few things that you have to do in order to not infringe on copyright. So for example, you don't want to curate images that can get you into trouble, asked me how I know.

Because you'll get extortion letters from like Getty Images and other you know, asshole law firms out there that are just looking for people that have republished images without copyright, without rights to it. So there's like a lot of things. There's not a lot of things, but there are a few things that you really should do to make sure that you're covering your ass when you're curating content. So again, I highly recommend you go through the product, it's through that program. It's a really, really good program. It's the same that we use today. You know, there are a lot of tools out there that can help you to manage content curating, but we've already.

He's found that it really just is just as quick and easy because what happens with a lot of these tools is they stop being supported over time. We know one of them was Curation Suite that we actually promoted. And fortunately after promoting it, and after a year or so, like the support just stopped and it kind of fell off the face of the earth. The same thing with a bunch of curating plugins that I've used over the years, they just eventually fall off the market and they just don't get supported. So we've learned to just stick with the manual process and it's you know, once somebody becomes efficient with that process is really is a very efficient way to produce content. So you don't need all the additional tools and plugins and things like that. So that's why I recommend that product because it's a Content Kingpin because it will teach you how to do it manually and then you can teach a VA how to do it by just putting them right through the same training. It's a great question though.

What Training Do You Offer In The MasterMind That You Can't Get In The Syndication Academy?

Jason says I'm currently in the Syndication Academy 2.0 and I was wanting to know all of the different features and benefits in the mastermind that you don't get in the Academy. Is this all of these different training you offer in the mastermind if I joined the mastermind, can I get a discount for the cost of the academy? Okay, so first of all the mastermind you have direct access to my partners and me, as well as all the other members of the group, which we have a lot of really savvy marketers and agency owners and CEOs and such in our group. But you also have direct access to all of us to where you can ask us questions in the Facebook group at any time. We're in there answering questions often. Plus, we each host our own separate webinars inside the mastermind. They're bi-weekly webinars. So every two weeks each one of us hosts our own webinar. So you get to come to ask us questions at length during the webinars. Like you can post questions ahead of time for the webinars, we'll do site audits, we'll you know, look at your, your SEO, your you know, on-page stuff off-page stuff, we'll help you with projects if you need it. Plus, as I said, you get to you know, come to ask me stuff, or Marco stuff or Adam, or Hernan or Chris any one of us. So there's a lot of benefits in there that we don't provide anywhere else we'll go as deep into, whatever subject you want to go into, you know, and that's one of the things that we can't do on a free setting like this or any in any of our other groups. So the mastermind is definitely where you want to be if you want to get all that, as well as Syndication Academy is included in that. So you can cancel your Syndication Academy account if you join the mastermind because it's included in that as well as all of our products under $300. Anything over $300 you get a significant discount. So there's a ton of benefits to be in the mastermind. Anybody else wanna?

Yeah, I would just say Jason, if you just started Syndication Academy, if you're just getting into it, then contact support and we'll refund whatever you paid for Syndication Academy and you can or you can apply it towards them. However, you want to work that out, we'll work it out for you. We always do. Why because membership has its privileges. So that's why we do things the way we do and yes, I mean, above all else is this group of people like-minded people who are working towards what we call POFU position of Fuck you, where you have the kind of power and money where you can pick and choose your clients, your clients come to you instead of you going knocking on doors on $500 clients who are a pain in the ass. So rather than doing all that you getting all you get all of this training, you get the mindset training, you get the how-to get all of the collective knowledge, and then you have five, almost six years of webinars. Now some of them of course are dated, but we do we're not doing webinars every week. It's either Bradley or me like we take every other Thursday. You got Hernan, you got Adam. Yeah, Chris, everyone is giving you their perspective and their take on things so you get all of these different points of view, all of this all of these different experiences coming to you and helping you in whatever it is that you're trying to do whatever it is that you're trying to achieve. So it's not just what you get as far as training. It's the people and the relationships, the networking that you can do inside the mastermind like I know people who are working together in different projects, and we tell people to become the big fish in a little pond. But then some of them go on to and I'm gonna mention his name, for example, to dominate in the Fort Worth area. And you got another one in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the Twin Cities you got someone in the Dirty South, right South Carolina, Georgia area, who are Domini who may have started as the big fish in the little pile or becomes the little fish in the big fish in the little pond. But then they move to a bigger pond. So that we're always pushing. We're always encouraging people. That growth means you go to make more money until you reach a stepping point where you say, Okay, I met, hopefully, this is where I want to be, this is how I want to do it. And if I choose not to work tomorrow, I can do that because the process and the systems and everything else that I've gained through being in the mastermind, will take care of me not being it, the system is there, so I don't have to be there. And I mean, just the way that this happened and how this happened, and how people finally are able to step away and say, Man, I can spend time with my family and I can relax and I can do the things I want to do, rather than having to do the things that I have to do things that I must with no other choice. So I think that that's just one of the greater things about the mastermind is that mindset that awful, you're going after that poof hopefully you get on that path. And it's it becomes your magnificent obsession. I thank you CTF letcher for that. But it becomes your magnificent obsession. You're going after that and there is nothing that can get in your way of achieving that powerful, that's when you know that you're there. And that's what we're there for. So, just because you brought up CT, and we don't have a lot of questions, so I know we got time when we did the interview with CT Fletcher, I've created this text document. It's been on my desktop ever since. And hopefully, nobody gets offended because CT Fletcher likes to cuss a lot. Say but here's a lot of here are the quotes that struck me when we were at when we really were Marco interviewing him. I was on the webinar, but it was really Marco interviewing CT Fletcher, who's a powerlifter. He broke a ton of records for a while. But anyway, some of these are really funny. I'm not gonna read them out to you, but you remember these Marco? Absolutely. I love them so awesome. I still watch them. Will will is king. Yeah, man. Oh, man. Oh, man. He's so good. You ain't pretty motherfucker. Yeah, you ain't that birdie.

So funny. I mean, that one right there cracks me up too. I laughed out loud. Anyways, I just thought that was funny because I happen to notice it on my desktop the other day and I giggled about it. You just brought it up.

Would You Recommend A Subdirectory Or Subfolder On The Same Domain When Creating The Blog?

So anyway, Jason, next question says, Hey, guys, I have an e-commerce website using WordPress with WooCommerce. Would you recommend a subdirectory? Or folder on the same domain and load a new WordPress and create a blog? Yes, that's what we've always recommended. I mean, I don't do any e-commerce stuff. But I mean, in the past, I have done some SEO for some e-commerce clients. But it's not something I'd like to do. So I got out of doing it, but we've always recommended it. So do you have control over like essentially a content distribution engine, right, and that's WordPress is great for that? So you can either put it in a subfolder or directory of the root domain or what we always recommended was to put it in a subdomain instead. And that's because a subdomain is still treated as content have a separate web entity or separate site, I should say, a separate website than the root domain. So that if you're in your content distribution, you do something spammy, which if you follow our methods, you won't have any trouble, at least, we, you know, as it stands right now, but Google could change everything in a moment's notice. But we've never had any issues. But if you put in a subdomain, and you were doing something spammy or something, Google changed its rules, all of a sudden, and something became spammy, they wouldn't affect the root domain, which is where your e-commerce site resides, it would affect the subdomain only. So we always prefer, like, you know, you could put blog as a subdomain to whatever your domain is, or whatever you want it to be news or something like that. And that's what we prefer to do. But you could put it in a subdirectory. But yeah, that gives you the opportunity then to do all your content marketing. Remember, if you've got an e-commerce site, and you've got product categories, for example, you can mirror those same categories. We talked about theme mirroring all the time.

If you don't know what that is, you know, it's essentially duplicating or mirroring your site structure on other assets. So you have if you have product categories in your eCommerce site, you could mirror those same categories as content categories, or you know, in WordPress, just categories are the same. You could title them and everything the same as what they are on your eCommerce site. And then you can publish posts, blog posts, or sporting posts. That's kind of a link building method that in place them within those particular silos or categories in the WordPress site, distribute them out to a syndication network, mirror, all of that stuff on a G site, and our ys drive stack, press releases, all that kind of stuff. You mirror all of that together, and it works really, really well to push power to your, you know, your ultimate destination, which would be your e-commerce product pages. So you want to comment on that. Yeah, we used to recommend going to a subdomain because we wanted to protect the root cause we were doing. let's admit it, we were doing a lot of evil stuff yes to the subdomains, we were blasting them to the point where if we had them connected to the route, any penalty would pass to the root. What we've done is we've taken a step out, because now everything goes through our SEO power shield. And so now the route is protected.

And so in order to push even more power, by all means, put it in a subdirectory because then you're accruing everything inside the root when you go into that subdirectory rather than stepping in a subdomain, which is treated as a separate website, so you're one hop away from your root domain anyway and you're losing link equity. When you're anytime that you're one hop or more away, you lose link equity at the top. When you're in a subdomain, you don't lose that link equity is even when you're in the root. You don't lose that link equity when you're in a folder inside the root. You don't lose that link equity because you're not a hub away. You're in the root, now if you do want to protect it, then you just install in the dub dub dub. So that's where you would do the root because that's a subdomain anyway.

So that's how you do it. But we have the SEO PowerShell it's not necessary anymore. Because everything that we do goes through our SEO power shield, which amplifies and protects. That's why we call it the SEO, power shield. It powers it up, it amplifies and it protects it shields it and so that my recommendation would be totally totally unless you're planning on doing a whole lot of evil stuff to that subdomain go with a sub but with it should be with a folder inside the root.

What Type Of Brand Property Link To Use In A Press Release?

Awesome. So next is BB BB. Look, you've gotten better, buddy. Your questions are a lot shorter and not quite as many. So I think we're finally getting through to you, man. And I'm just giving you our time baby. It's we're always like having you here but he says Hey guys, number one does that the link to a branded property in the press release should be to the property or to one of its pages that were syndicated by RSS. Well, it depends on what you're doing. But so, my strategy and again, it's covered in the press release SEO, or piece PR silo stacking webinar that we did Marco and I did. Again, you can find that at MGYB or just go to youtube.com slash semantic mastery use the channel search feature search for press release SEO and you'll find it you know, right at the top go watch that. Because what I prefer to do is we you know, we're constantly blogging for clients or for projects period. So that populates syndication network, right, we're building topical relevancy and depth to our silos, right depth to a particular topic. And then they syndicate out to syndication networks, right. And within every single post, within the proper silo architecture, we're always linking back up from the post back up to the top of the silo page, which is the page that we're trying to drive traffic to. Right. So what we do what I do is I always, you know, I like to publish press releases that are highlighting or showcasing a recent blog post. And that links to the blog post URL, which within the blog post, actually links back up to the page on the site. But I mean, you don't have to use that strategy all the time. That's what I do. Because I consistently publish press, we're consistently blogging and we're consistently publishing press releases for all of my clients or my lead gen asset. So it just works out really well because we're providing deep links, so links further down into a silo that helps to power up with proper silo architecture, it helps to power up the entire silo and helps all of the different keywords that we're targeting within the silo start to rise or surface in the search engines because of those deep links, right. So that's my preferred method because it adds more diversity and it's linking to multiple points.

Within the main money site, as opposed to always constantly hitting the homepage or just the product or service pages, the top of silo pages in other words, so I like to do deep links, but it depends on what you're doing. If you're not doing a lot of press releases, if you're you know, you only got a budget for a handful of them, then it might be better to actually hit your homepage and or your top of silo pages, that kind of thing. So it really just depends on what your overall content marketing strategy is, and what you're going to be linking to, you know that that's going to determine where you're going to link to from within your site. Okay.

That's it that said, I always almost not 100% but we almost always link from within press releases to a page or post on the money site. Unless we're doing a two-step which again, go watch the press release SEO webinar, and you'll understand what I mean. But for example, if a client as all my local clients have Google My Business profiles. So if we publish a post when we publish a blog post on the blog, my blogger also for most of my clients will end up publishing a GMB post that points a link back to the blog post. So essentially, the GMB post is nothing other than a summary of the blog post itself with the same featured image as the image for the GMB post the photo, and then the button link, the Learn More button link links back to the blog post. So sometimes our press releases will actually link to the GMB post URL, because that ultimately links to the blog post URL, so the two-step process there. But you can also and I've talked about this almost every week now for the last like two months on Hump Day hangouts baby so I'm sure you're aware of what I was what I've said. But you know, if you've got particular keywords that you're trying to push, then you can actually go extract the post URLs from like, for example, the blogs on your syndication network, so blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, you can go extract these post URLs that are where the re-syndication or of the published the post that you publish targeting those keywords. And you can link to those within press releases too if you want to because again, that's tiered link building. So it's helpful in anyone, but you don't have to. I prefer to link to those blog post URLs using daddy as link building from an MGYB because I like to use the press releases to link directly back to the money site, or two primary tier one assets, such as a GMB profile, GMB map, Id page, any one of those types of things when it comes to that.

That was a good question. By the way, bb though. Yeah, that that was a really good question. Now, I mean, the link building varies it depends on how much power you're trying to push and where and everything is gonna be where it's needed, where everything's needed. Because sometimes it's just one press release, push, can get you to where you need to be. Other times, you're going to need way more. Yeah, there are other times when you're going to need even link building into the press releases. There's no one set rule because sometimes it's just the SEO power shield coming, coming in, right coming online. And that's enough. And sometimes it doesn't even have to do with the competition because we've seen it even in some tough keyword sets that you start ranking like right from the SEO power shield. So this totally ended depends on the no definitive answer for this, other than, you're going to have to get your press release. If you've set it up correctly. And you hit your top-level category rather than just like everybody does your homepage. Then your top-level category will flow and it'll push all of that power so that everything benefits from it, including the top-level category, not just the longtail keywords, it's how we teach it now. We teach people to go from the top-down instead of bottom-up it

It's a little different, it's kind of the same thing except we're going. For example, if we want to rank for gold futures, this is just an example. It's incredibly difficult to rank for that. But we would go even one, one level higher, we would go after the gold category, the entire gold category to pull up the gold features category instead of trying to push it up with all of the long tails. And I've seen that it has a greater effect when you try to go for that top-level category. on everything else, not only the longtail but the subcategory that you're after. So I'm always telling people you go one level up. So keeping this in mind, then it's up to you. I always tell people that we have to be scientists when we're gauging how it is that we're going to do this. What effect we're trying to create, you're going to have to create your link building and press releases are part of link building. You're going to create it so that whatever you're trying to benefit the most guests

The most benefit out of what you're doing. And so you approach it that way. Yeah. So it varies. That's the short answer. It varies. It depends, right?

Can We Use The PR Stacking Strategies With Article Directories?

Next, can we treat an article direct article, an article directory as press releases, meaning publishing, as the PR stacking and also linking to actual prs? Okay, I don't do any article directory stuff I haven't for years, not saying that it can't still be useful. I just haven't because they've been known to be spammy. I think a lot of the links from those get discredited. It's much better to get like, you know, articles instead of being published on article directories, which were always known as SEO like, honey, honey, what do you call them honey, honey holes or whatever you call them. But I'm not saying that it won't work because I don't know. I haven't tested it in years. If I was going to do it, maybe I would do it. Where I was only linking to SEO shield assets or like you say, can you link to PRs? Yes, that would be fun because press release wherever press releases published is going to be able to handle those type of links, you may be able to push good link equity to them, or even, it doesn't really matter because they're not your money site. So I, I, again, I haven't used article directories in probably five or six years.

And so I don't really know whether they're still viable or if they're still helping at any level. But if I was going to use them, I would do it too. I would use them to link only back to tier one asset not directly to the money site. And press releases are a great thing to link to. So, Marco, I know you don't use article directories either.

I used to, it's not necessary anymore. I don't need to go that far. Right. The way that we're doing it pushes so much power that we don't need to go. I mean, when you're already at number one, like how much better can you go than the number one.

So maybe at some point with some of the case studies that we're doing and everything else that we have coming on e-commerce and everything else that we're experimenting. Yeah, I would say that we can do that. But right now, or maybe we need to do that. But right now the way that we're doing things is not necessary.

What Do You Mean By Kitchen Sink Spam?

Agreed. The last question was, what do you mean when you say kitchen sink? It gets me confused. Yeah, when I say kitchen sink spam, or when we say that, that just means using link building tools and throwing every kind of link like even some real spammy stuff, at whatever your target is. So like when we say you can throw kitchen sink spam at it, it means you could use some of the most god awful links in the world and throw them at, you know, point them at a particular target and still benefit from it. We would never encourage anybody to do that with their money site. And in fact, we prefer to still use better links.

Even if you're using spam tools, for example, like you know, our link building master dedhia he uses a ton of link building tools but he always recommends that your the links that he builds to whatever your targets are, which we always recommend tier-one entity targets or your SEO shield essentially. But he always likes to suggest recommends using two layers two levels of contextual web two Dotto links. And then throwing if you want a third tier of links, you can throw kitchen sink spam at those contextual web two dot o links. So that's what we mean by kitchen sink spam, it means pretty much anything under the sun, that's a link. And a lot of those would be toxic if they're not used properly, but they can still provide a benefit if used properly. And that's what we talk about when we talk about you know, you can hit SEO power shields with kitchen sink spam, and they'll end up ranking. We don't recommend it. We still recommend using the contextual web to Dotto links. Add your first and second-tier links that are being built to your tier one assets. But you can always throw kitchen sink spam behind that if you wanted and still receive a benefit Mark has done several tests I have to, but we even did the Marco and Rob did the kind of public case study for the DC plumber and just hit it with like over a million kitchen sink spam style links, including porn porn links, and it ranked and it's probably still ranking today. So and we just had someone in RYS Academy reloaded last week, come in and tell us that they tried the million kitchen sink, spam link test and got really good results and 89% increase in traffic month to month. Wow. So it works. However, think of it this way. If garbage links work, how much better? Will quality links work? How much better will the way that we do the tiered link building right? contextual tiered link building

How much better is that, not only for now but long term when they come looking? The first thing that they look for is that kitchen sink spam, that that the automation is is what Google is looking for. And we're kind of hiding in plain sight because we're not giving them what everybody else is doing. We're doing it a little bit differently. And it just playing work. So when you're thinking about going after that, that million links, and yeah, you can pay 50 bucks in fiber, and there's going to be complete TSA, and it's going to be truly, truly garbage type of stuff that you don't want to look at. Why would you do that to your project? Why would you do that when it can show up in your link profile? Do you want that? Because we had that showing up for DC plumbing. We had those links index, man. And seriously, you didn't want your kids looking at that you didn't want you to want to be sitting there with your wife. Looking at some of that stuff that was coming through it was it was like, the really bad garbage man.

So why would so when I'm talking to people, my question is if you want to test and you don't care, you don't care what shows up in the link profile, you don't care about anything. You're just trying to make you make some money. It's a fun test, then, by all means, do it. But if it's something that you care about, why would you mistreat something that you care about that one?

Agreed.

Can You Blast The Press Release And Drive Stacks With Backlinks Without Negative Impact On The Money Site And GMB?

Okay, next is Gordon, what's up Gord? It's been a while he says, Hey, guys, hope you're safe. And well just have a quick question. When using press releases or an ROI S Drive stack through the MGYB store. Can you blast either or both of them with hundreds or even thousands of backlinks without any negative effect on your money site? Or GMB listing? And if so, will that increase the SEO juice flowing to either entity and help them to rank? Thank you very much. Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's exactly what we were just talking about.

We prefer to build links to our tier one entity assets such as the SEO power shield, our last drive stack, g site press releases the organic press release organization page, you know, the idx page, anything like that. And that's if you set it up correctly, you're not going to have any negative results whatsoever, which is why we set the things up the way that we do. That's why we call it the SEO power shield because it shields it's like, I've always called it an SEO firewall, right? It creates a firewall around your money site. And so that's exactly what we're talking about. embeds and or backlinks work really, really well. In fact, you can even take your money site it for example, and you know, embed it in a G site and then hammer the G site page with backlinks. And that's going to help your money site page benefit without there being an actual direct hyperlink on that page. Does that make sense? So yeah, that's what we were just talking about. With Bibi's question when we just hammer our assets with backlinks because it helps to push ultimately it flows down through to whatever our target destination is, which could be a GMB asset.

Could be a Google Site could be a money site. It could be all three of those. So yes, that would work. Any comments on that?

Should You Interlink A Post If The Main Article Has 5 Jump Links?

No, that's perfect. Pavlos up, he says, Hey guys last time, I missed an opportunity to say thank you. Well, you're welcome. Pavlo He says, question in one of your videos, you said that I can copy main silo page content and create a post. The Post will be canonicalized back to the main article, the canonical link itself will be a jump link to the Main article.

The question is should I interlink these posts if I have if the Main article has five jump links, and I've created five posts from the main content? I think I kind of vaguely remember this conversation we had on Hump Day Hangouts, but I'm not quite following the question. I think what, what I was talking about if and hopefully, I'm not off base here, but prefer using long-form content now for content for websites or for money sites, instead of in the past, like, you know, five years ago, you know, you could create a kind of thin content type of silo page. And then each supporting a keyword that you would find within your with your keyword research. So all of the supporting keywords that you would stack within a particular silo, I just always use spreadsheets for that. So I create a column but my top-level keyword at the top, you know, the column header, and then I would go extract all of the relevant supporting keywords and key phrases and put them in underneath that in that same column right in a spreadsheet. And then that would be that that goes to my bloggers, for them to produce content around so that they highlight one of the supporting keywords within the correct silo. And it used to be that I would create kind of thin content, top of silo pages, and then target individual longer tail keywords with blog posts, but that becomes repetitive redundant. And it doesn't work as well what I found as having a long-form top of silo page now, that contains a lot of those supporting keywords so that broken down into subheadings, right, so and I think that's what you were talking about is when I mentioned that you can create long-form content, and even put a table of contents with jump links at the top of the content, which is really good for SEO. And then you can actually create blog posts targeting those longer tail phrases that are already present on the silo page itself right to top of silo page that have jump links to them and then link from those supporting articles within the blog post to those jump links. Because then it's, it's, it's linking to the top of silo page, but it's also reinforcing that longer tail subheading or keyword, right, so that's supporting keyword. If that's what you're talking about, then let's see. The question is should I interlink these posts with the Main article as well? Five jump links. And I've created five posts from the main content. Yeah, I mean, I don't I can't get too far into this Marco would kill me if I did.

But if you're interlinking, your supporting posts correctly, daisy-chaining them together then and they're just linking from post to post. And from within each post linking back to the top of silo page, even if it's at a jump link, a jump link to the top of silo page to some section on the top of silo page. Yes, that would work. That would work really, really well. Actually. Any comments on that Marco?

Sorry about that.

A lot. Ah, no, it's not really something that I'm willing to talk about in a free gotten a free forum like this. They are not going to get into that because it just puts so much power and it gets around everything that Google can throw at you. So no, that's fine. We'll leave it at that. Okay.

But yeah, just get creative with it. Think about you know what you're doing with your structure. And I don't like to if I don't know where you say you can just clone copy main silo page content and create a post, I wouldn't, I wouldn't do that on the same site what I was talking about with cloning or copying or mirroring, right is within the G site. Right. So if you've got your top of silo page, and you've got all the content on the page, you can always create, we recommend mirroring that top of silo page on the G site. And then if you had supporting posts within that category on your money site, I don't typically duplicate or mirror posts onto a G site unless I'm having trouble ranking a particular keyword in which case then I will create child pages on the G site that is each child a one to one ratio, child page for every post within that silo, and then just embed those in there and that's what I was talking about with the jumping links, you can actually create jump links from the G site back to the money site there. But again, that's more kind of mastermind stuff or heavy hitter club stuff. So hopefully you got some value out of that. But I wouldn't copy top of silo content and republish it on the same blog from your money site. I wouldn't. Personally I wouldn't do that I would have new content curated, not written because I use curated content for blog posts, the curated targeting the keywords that I'm trying to push that is on the top of the silo page if that makes sense. Okay.

So another good question.

Jason says thank you. Yeah, so he's already watched all the Syndication Academy videos, that's okay. If you join the mastermind if you just joined recently, the Syndication Academy join the mastermind will up make it worth your while we'll refund your Syndication Academy purchase or apply it towards your first month of mastermind or something like that, and then you can cancel that subscription. So, yep, baby says great. We're almost

What Are Your Thoughts On The Statement That You Can Flatten A Complex Silo Into A Simple Silo?

Got a timer almost out of question. So this is good timing maybe says great. What do you think of the statement that each complex silo can be flattened to a simple silo? And if a site isn't that big, is it better to do the flat? Yes, I always, always recommend using simple silos where possible and guys, I'm going to be updating the training, I was really hoping to get that done for today, but I didn't. And so I'll try to have it done by next Wednesday. But in the process, street process doc that I created for our methods and for me, you know, our methods are what we sell as done for you services and MGYB for those of you that aren't aware of it, if you go to semantic mastery comm slash process, I'm going to bring it up. It'll you guys can take a look at this. For those of you that haven't already been exposed to it, this is the process street process doc that I created to that has a lot of training in there with a lot of it's the why we do what we do.

And what you can expect from it the How is we point to our training products for the how but or the where to get it as the links over to MGYB but these are the website silo architecture, the training videos that I created, you know, five years ago or whatever, they're, they're still valid, but my overall process has changed slightly right it's evolved slightly and so I'm going to redo those silo training videos where I go into what a simple silo is what a complex silo is a difference between a physical silo and a virtual silo and what I prefer to use and why I'm going to redo those videos and that will go into here the website section of the worry list entity based SEO process doc and when I do hope I'll have this done by next week guys I really wanted to get it done by this week but I haven't even started on it. So I'll try to get it done by next week. And then again guys you go to semantic mastery comm slash process and you take a look at all the stuff that's in here. There's a lot of training here. And so anyway, that said, Yes, I always recommend a simple silo. For most projects. I'm not going to say for the most projects for most local projects, which is what I do, almost exclusively, simple silos will suffice. I used to always try to build complex solids because I thought it was going to be better. And then maybe there is some benefit to it. But what I found is a complex silo is complicated. Hence the name complex silo. And so it's difficult to build it create some kind of funny issues that are hard to reconcile with the URLs with the slugs and that kind of with permalinks and that kind of stuff. So I prefer to stick with a simple silo, it's much easier to manage, it's easier to map out when you're in the build process. So I like using simple silos for most local projects. That's all that is ever needed. In fact, with a simple silo, if you're using our methods, you're going to be the on-page SEO is going to be far superior to what most of your competitors are doing anyways. So it's not really necessary to do a complex silo. If you're doing a very broad site with a lot of categories and subcategories, then you might be necessary to do a complex silo. But, as I said, I always try to simplify where possible. We've had a ton of people over the years, join one of our groups, and they map out this incredibly intricate silo map of a site. And they, you know, probably spend hours and hours and hours mapping it out and creating drawings to show the silo structure and everything and then they present it and say, What do you think you think this would work? And it's like, Well, yeah, but it could have worked, you know, eight levels previous, where it was like a much simpler build, and you got to save yourself a ton of time. And we don't say that to pick on anybody, but it's because I think we as SEO types, try to overcomplicate stuff all the time, and I've learned over the years to try to simplify as much as possible and get results with a much simpler process and simple silo structure is the way that I prefer to build 90 95% of my sites.

commenting. I totally agree. I don't know why people get themselves into trouble with complex silos like right from the start. Yeah, if it's a brand new project that there's no need for for a complex silo, unless it's like, I don't know, like some type of e-commerce website and you've seen those where there's a bunch of complex subcategories and while category, subcategory, sub-sub categories and all of these things that really complicated but I tell people to look in the beginning, you're good with your homepage, and three categories, three top-level categories, the three main keywords that you're going to go after to start making money, push all the power that way, as needed. And as you see more opportunities for top-level categories. You add them, right because then your whole setup is done. And whatever you add is going to benefit from everything you've done previously. But if you start mapping it

Out complex from the beginning. How are you going to push the power that that's going to need for every page and post and subcategory and sub subcategory that you're trying to create? you're dividing up the PageRank in such a way that it's not going to push the initial power that it could have. There's no way because there's no way to keep the link flow going the right way. Let's put it that way. Yeah, but if you keep it simple, minimize the number of categories Don't try to go after everything at once. But just three, three categories. That gives you enough to write for about four months when you get our D keyword research. I'm sorry, that that's not available right now. But I did keyword research gives you enough to write about four months on those three top market level categories on those silos. And then you can go and see like which one is more complicated, and you just break it up instead of making it a subcategory? You just make it another category that's related to that one category that you already have no need to overcomplicate things I hate when people try to do that. It doesn't have to be all that difficult. Yeah, and it's fine because like I said, we've experienced that a lot over the years, and I'm not gonna lie. In years past I did the same thing, I would always approach new projects with the complex silo, trying to map all that out. And it just it became overwhelming, it became too much of a bitch too, you know, too difficult to manage the projects. And again, it creates a lot of funky issues, if you're trying to share subcategories with other categories, especially in local like, for example, if you have, you know, your topical or service-based silos, which would be like, you know, like Tree Removal would be one silo, for example, and another silo could be tree trimming, which in reality, I've learned over the years that you really don't even need to create silos for Tree Service sites because they're all synonyms for each other. Google considers tree removal and tree trimming as synonyms anyways. But most of my tree service projects are

Still siloed like that. And if you were trying to duplicate location-based silos within each one of the topical or service-based silos, it creates some real funny URL issues that you have to reconcile. And it becomes difficult to do so or vice versa, if you had location-based silos, as your top-level silos, and then you tried to have subcategories of services, then it creates some issues too. So I learned a long time ago just to go with the simple silo structure, so much easier to manage so much easier to handle. So anyway, yeah, I totally recommend going with simple silos where possible. The last question and we're at five o'clock. So this is a good stopping point is BB says should we have a form in the branded properties for collecting leads? Absolutely. If you've got form code that can be embedded in other sites, absolutely. I'm actually using I'm not going to talk about what I'm using just yet because it's part of the case studies and I'm working on but I'm using a new lead generation tool.

It helps that has a form builder in it that works really, really good. And I'm actually embedding the form and multiple properties. Now g sites, you know, a lot of different places that I'm actually embedding the forms now because they work really, really well. And they direct all the leads back to one central location that then gets distributed out. So yeah, absolutely, there's no doubt, I always try to put most of my businesses run on phone calls more than a phone like. In other words, the leads that I generate for businesses are more phone call leads than they are web form submissions, but I don't ever want to not provide that as an option. So I used to, I used to really just push phone calls, but now I'm pushing the lead form submits as well, because I've got a really cool application that I'm using that helps to distribute the leads to wherever I want them to go. And again, I'll reveal some of that in the coming week's guys, but I absolutely recommend if you have a form, form code that can be embedded on other sites use it. Okay.

All right. Thanks, everybody for being here.

We will see you guys next week. Thanks, Marco for sticking around. All right. Have a good one. Thanks, everybody

[travelteatv]

I adore Split. I went there a few years ago on the first of many road trips with my friend Hamilton (blog post here). We travelled from Zagreb, down to Plitvice, then onto Split and Hvar before finishing in Dubrovnik. It was out of season, just before everyone and their Mother started planning trips and the entire trip cost us £300 each (car rental/food/accommodation/activities – everything), it wasn’t too busy and we had a blast.

Cut to a couple of years ago, when my boyfriend and I were planning our summer trip and Split was high on our list of where we wanted to go. Unfortunately all of the flights were around £300/£400 each. In fairness, we had left it very late to book and so all flight prices were extortionate but considering I had paid £300 all in for a trip a few years before, I wasn’t ready to dish out more than that on the flight alone (we ended up going to Corfu that summer, if you’re wondering).

So, how did we end up going to Split this time?

Well, one of the many problems that come with forgetting/not bothering to unsubscribe from mailing lists, is that sometimes companies send emails with flight sales, and sometimes those flight deals are actually very good. Then, all of a sudden, you find yourself booking flights when you hadn’t really planned on it.

In other words, my boyfriend and I ended up going to Split because we saw crazy cheap flights and had a bit of a mad moment. We went in September (out of season again, like the first time I went) and it was still warm enough to walk around in a t-shirt/shorts but not so hot I got sunburnt – perfect weather for me.

I think our flights cost us around £65 return with Norwegian – one of my favourite airlines, fyi and our accommodation was £120 each. I think we ended up spending more like £350/£400 in total but I wasn’t surprised by that, seeing as Split has become so much more popular in recent years.

As with most trips recently, this was more of a relaxing getaway than a busy trip trying to fit everything possible in. Nonetheless, I would say we did a lot – the perfect amount for the duration of the holiday, in my opinion.

Having been before, we ventured to do things that I generally hadn’t already done, which meant we explored a few options which were a bit off the beaten track:

  What to Do 

We only went for four nights/five days but I think still managed to fit a lot in, without being stressed about cramming in too much (especially as I had been before). Here’s what we prioritised:

Beaches – oddly I’ve never been a big fan of beaches but when in Rome (/on a summer holiday), it makes sense to. Within Split, my favourite was Kasjuni Beach, which has a beach bar and curves around slightly, meaning it was a bit less windy than some other places. We also went to a lot of beaches on Hvar, my next point.

Visit Hvar Island – (This is actually deserving of its own post, which I will write next and link back to here). There are a few islands off Split – I would say Hvar is the most well known and if you only have a short amount of time, it makes the most sense to visit. Having said that, if you’re there for longer then definitely island hop. They’re stunning and each have their own character.

Get lost in the Old Town Streets – I have an awful sense of direction so this was very easy for me. Genuinely though, they’re lovely walkways with lots of twists, turns and hidden surprises (the surprises are mostly restaurants but still). If you’re into Game of Thrones, I’m aware they filmed some of it there and even if you’re not, it’s crazy walking along knowing that the streets you’re walking have stood the test of time of real life history (I don’t think GoT is based on fact, I just mean it’s set in the past FYI).

Rub Gregory of Nin’s Big Toe – I won’t lie, I know nothing about this statue other than it’s meant to be lucky to rub the big toe. You can tell immediately which one based on how much shinier it is than the rest of him! I don’t know if I got any luck per say but how often do you get to say you rubbed a giant big toe on holiday? (Maybe don’t answer that)

Go to Krka National Park for the day – Krka is absolutely stunning and not that far from Split. It’s not as big as Plitvice Lakes but still beautiful, and unlike Plitvice you can swim in the water there, which is pretty fun. Also, they call waterfalls ‘Slaps’ which is pretty enjoyable to say. I’m going to write a separate post on how to get there/what to do because I personally found it a bit excruciating working out the best value way of doing it within a day. It was a bit of trial and error but I really wish I knew at the time, what I know now. Basically, if you want an easy but pricey day then book a day trip otherwise, I’ll do a post on how to get there by public transport to save some money (I personally found a few things I read online while trying to figure things out a bit convoluted and unclear – things that should seem simple like how to get on the boat, actually could have done with some slightly clearer instructions on the National Park’s website).

  Processed with VSCO with p5 preset

Separate to what we did this trip, I would also recommend the below from my previous trip (post here):

Froggyland

Split Tower

  Where to Eat

This time, I found it harder to find affordable food – when I first went most meals were around £5-£7 but this time I noticed that a lot of places looked a fair bit fancier and upon closer inspection, the prices reflected this.

Out of where we ate, these two places were the most memorable:

Pizzeria Portas – recommended to me by a friend who had just been to Split, it’s a super cosy place with a lot of variety on it’s menu. It’s also in a gorgeous location and pretty damn romantic (if you’re into that).

Bepa! – you know a place is good, when you go there multiple times on holiday. Ok, in fairness it was right below our apartment which made it very easy. But also, the food is good and the people are lovely.

  Where to Drink 

Marvlvs Jazz Library Bar – again, if it’s good then it’s good and judging by the amount of times we visited here in a short space of time, we were basically in a committed relationship by the end of the trip. It’s rare to find a bar that feels like home but this one really pulls it off – amazing music (jazz of course, at just the right volume), perfect lighting (not pitch black but also not bright lights stolen from Greggs) and a great selection of whisky (and everything else). We ended up here during a rainstorm which was incredibly lucky, as it’s a delightful place to wait something out. Unfortunately, the storm didn’t end for a few hours until after we had run through the flooded streets and got completely soaked through, which was slightly less lucky I guess.

  Where to Stay 

Personally I prefer to stay in an apartment when I’m away, I just feel that it gives me more space and freedom to relax. I like to be able to get up when I want, without being interrupted by room service and then keep whatever I want in the fridge (mostly milk for a tea because I’m super cool and crazy like that).

Below are the two apartments I stayed in while visiting and I highly recommend them both as they’re affordable and in good locations; the top one is right in the centre of the old town and the other is slightly outside. Nevertheless, they’re a short distance from one another and you’ll still be able to explore the neighbourhood with ease.

Old Town Square Apartment (Link)

Apartments Tea (Link)

  Of course, Split is also a bit of a party city and you’ll find a lot of stag/hen dos running around but don’t let that put you off. They’re easy to avoid (if you want to) and generally if you spend a trip in the way we did, it’s unlikely you’d have a reason to bump into them anyway!

  I’m aware it’s likely I’ve missed some glaringly obvious places off my list but the above are what I would genuinely recommend to friends and strangers alike, so I hope they come in handy.

  Abi

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@travelteatv

  An Offbeat Weekend in Split, Croatia I adore Split. I went there a few years ago on the first of many road trips with my friend Hamilton (blog post…

[charllieeldridge]

Where To Stay in New Orleans: Neighborhood & Accommodation Guide

I fell in love with New Orleans immediately on my first visit. The energy of the city is just amazing— it really sucks you in. After a 2nd trip there, I’m already planning a third. There’s just no shortage of fun things to do in New Orleans!

With so much going on here, it’s important to figure out where to stay in New Orleans. Early birds and light sleepers will want to avoid the madness of Bourbon Street, while party animals will feel right at home there. 

The good news is that there are plenty of excellent choices when it comes to places to stay in New Orleans.

In this post, I’ll provide a detailed look at the best areas in the city for tourists, along with a few hotel recommendations for each.

The French Quarter: Where to Stay in New Orleans for First Time Visitors

The French Quarter is a great place to stay in New Orleans if you’re looking for:

Historic Buildings

Boutique Hotels

Mississippi River Views

Famous Restaurants

Vibrant Nightlife

If it’s your first visit and you’re wondering where to stay in New Orleans, you can’t go wrong with the French Quarter. It’s also known as Vieux Carré, which actually translates to “Old Square.” 

This is the historic heart of the city and is even known as the “Crown Jewel of New Orleans.” Although it’s called the French Quarter, much of the architecture you see is actually Spanish. That’s because the area was ravaged by fire and was later rebuilt during the brief period of Spanish rule.

The French Quarter is also the center of tourism in NOLA. It’s home to a vast array of hotels, restaurants, shops, and bars, making it a convenient base to explore the city. You’ll never be hungry or bored in this part of the city!

Located right on the Mississippi River, the French Quarter is a very scenic place to stay. There are a few riverside parks that make for a nice stroll. The area is also home to the historic Jackson Square and St. Louis Cathedral. If you enjoy discovering a city on foot, then the French Quarter is one of the best places to stay in New Orleans.

Here are a few of the best New Orleans hotels located in the French Quarter:

Omni Royal

Location: 621 St. Louis Street

Rating on Booking.com: 8.9/10

Price: Rooms from $269

This place consistently comes up when you search for where to stay in New Orleans, and for good reason. It’s a historic hotel that dates all the way back to 1838.

Fun fact: gumbo, one of the most famous dishes from New Orleans, was invented here! You can try this and other classic New Orleans cuisine in their award-winning Rib Room. 

This excellent hotel also boasts a heated rooftop pool and a nice fitness center for when you need to work off those extra calories! Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.

W New Orleans French Quarter

Location: 316 Charles Street

Rating on Booking.com: 8.4/10

Price: Rooms from $242

The courtyard-style architecture of this hotel makes it one of the coolest places to stay in New Orleans. It’s located right in the heart of the French Quarter, just a short walk from both Jackson Square and Bourbon Street.

After a big day of exploring the Crescent City, it’s great to return here to lounge by the pool in the courtyard. Some rooms even come equipped with their own private hot tub and patio for extra relaxation!

If you’re in town on a weekend, this is a great place to stay. Their “Legs and Eggs” Sunday brunch at the on-site SoBu features a burlesque show and is tons of fun. Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.

Hotel Monteleone

Location: 214 Royal Street

Rating on Booking.com: 8.9/10

Price: Rooms from $199

This charming hotel is located close enough to Bourbon Street to be near the action but far away enough to not deal with the noise. It’s a great choice if you want to party there but also want to get some decent sleep afterward.

One of the best things about staying here is the Carousel Bar. It’s not just a clever name as the bar is centered around an actual carousel. It’s definitely one of the best bars in New Orleans to grab a drink at! Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.

Bourbon Street: Where to Stay in New Orleans to Party

Bourbon Street is a great place to stay in New Orleans if you’re looking for:

Raucous Nightlife

Mardi Gras Celebrations

LGBT-Friendly Bars

Center of Tourism

While it’s technically a part of the French Quarter, Bourbon Street deserves its own section in this guide on where to stay in New Orleans. Famous for its raucous nightlife, epic Mardi Gras celebrations and other fun festivals, this is a pretty wild place to stay.

Many of the hotels on Bourbon Street are literally right on top of the party, so this isn’t the place to stay if you want some peace and quiet on your trip. It’s better to stick with one of the French Quarter hotels mentioned above.

Click here for an in-depth look at staying on Bourbon Street. This post goes into detail about the layout and history of the street. There are recommendations for 10 different hotels to choose from as well.

For now, here are 3 of the best hotels located on or near Bourbon Street:

Royal Sonesta

Location: 300 Bourbon Street

Rating on Booking.com: 8.6/10

Price: Rooms from $359

This is definitely one of the top places to stay in New Orleans. It’s actually more like a resort than a hotel, with several on-site restaurants and bars. 

Many rooms feature wrought-iron balconies overlooking Bourbon Street — the perfect spot for some people watching. If you can snag one of these for Mardi Gras you’ll be right in the thick of all the action.

It’s hard to imagine all the chaos of Bourbon Street is just outside when you’re sitting in the tranquil courtyard here. It’s an oasis in the middle of the huge party that’s raging just beyond the hotel walls. Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.

Lafitte’s Guest House

Location: 1003 Bourbon Street

Rating on Booking.com: 8.7/10

Price: Rooms from $189

Whereas the Royal Sonesta is a massive hotel with some 500 rooms, this place feels more like staying in someone’s home. After all, this boutique hotel is actually set in a restored house. With only 14 rooms, it certainly has a homey vibe.

If you’re not a fan of the typical Bourbon Street bars with their offensively loud music, you’ll enjoy staying here. It’s right next door to Lafitte’s Blacksmith Bar & Shop, which is the oldest, and one of the best bars in New Orleans. It’s still candle-lit to this day. Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.

Hotel Mazarin

Location: 730 Bienville Street

Rating on Booking.com: 9.1/10

Price: Rooms from $179

Ok, so this hotel isn’t technically on Bourbon Street, but it’s right around the corner. You’re still within stumbling distance from the party if you stay here! 

Before you hit the party on Bourbon, make sure you grab a drink in their 21st Amendment Bar. This Prohibition Era-inspired speakeasy is the perfect spot to kick off a night out in NOLA with a cocktail or two.

As far as the rooms here, they’re definitely pretty fancy. We’re talking crystal chandeliers and gold leaf accents! Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.

Garden District: One of the Most Beautiful Places to Stay in New Orleans

Garden District is a great place to stay in New Orleans if you’re looking for:

Antebellum Mansions

Oak-Lined Streets

Fine Dining

Boutique Shops

If the over-the-top party vibe of Bourbon Street is too much for you, then the Garden District is a solid choice. This is one of the most scenic and peaceful places to stay in New Orleans.

When it was first developed, there were only a few homes per block here. The extra space allowed for large gardens, hence the name given to the area.

Thanks to development, there aren’t that many actual gardens here anymore. These days there are some pretty incredible mansions here, many of which are owned by celebrities. 

Staying in the Garden District is a good choice for those who are looking for a more laidback experience in New Orleans. There are still plenty of choices for accommodation, dining, and shopping here, but it’s not overly touristy. 

Here are some of the best places to stay in New Orleans in the Garden District:

Hotel Indigo

Location: 2203 St. Charles Avenue

Rating on Booking.com: 8.5/10

Price: Rooms from $110

Rooms at this Garden District hotel are well-appointed with chic decor. They have several options ranging from standard rooms to huge suites. 

Those looking to squeeze a workout in will be happy to hear that there’s a nice fitness center here. There’s also a business center if you actually need to get some work done on your trip.

Getting to and from the French Quarter is easy as this hotel is located right across from a streetcar stop. Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.

Parisian Courtyard Inn

Location: 1726 Prytania Street

Rating on Booking.com: 9.1/10

Price: Rooms from $188

This is a proper B&B and a beautiful place to stay. As the name would suggest, a delicious breakfast is included when you stay at the Parisian Courtyard Inn.

Guests who have stayed here rave about the amazing staff. If you’re trying to figure out where to stay in New Orleans where you’ll have a more personalized experience, this is a great choice.

There are only 10 rooms here, all featuring hardwood floors and antique furniture. Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.

Henry Howard Hotel

Location: 2041 Prytania Street

Rating on Booking.com: 9.0/10

Price: Rooms from $179

There’s no doubt that this is one of the most gorgeous places to stay in New Orleans. Set in a historic 18-room townhouse, this place is a real beauty.

Even the decorations in the rooms just scream New Orleans here, with trumpets and saxophones hanging from the walls. You’ll also enjoy hanging out in their Parlor room, which feels more like a friend’s living room than a hotel lobby. Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.

Faubourg Marigny/Bywater: Where to Stay in New Orleans for a Local Experience

Faubourg Marigny/Bywater is a great place to stay in New Orleans if you’re looking for:

Bohemian Atmosphere

Live Music

Affordable Restaurants

Artsy Vibe

Just east of the French Quarter along the river is the small neighborhood of Faubourg Marigny. Known by locals simply as “The Marigny,” this is one of the oldest ‘hoods in the Big Easy.

When the city of New Orleans began to grow, some plantation owners decided to break up their land to develop residential property. Bernard Marigny was one of the first to do this in the early 1800s and the neighborhood still has his name. 

The Marigny has gone through lots of changes over the years. One significant development occurred on Frenchmen Street, which grew to become the premier location for live music in the city. There are tons of music clubs as well as roaming marching bands, making this one of the best places to stay in New Orleans for music lovers.

The adjacent Bywater has become somewhat of a hipster haven in recent years. This began in the 1980s when real estate speculation and profiteering led many residents to move downriver to the Marigny and Bywater areas.

The artistic community once found in the French Quarter is now largely based here. In the Bywater, you’ll find the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts — a school that’s training the next generation of Crescent City artists and creatives.

Staying in either the Marigny or Bywater is a great choice if you want a more local perspective on your trip to New Orleans. Here are some of the best hotels in this area:

Royal Frenchmen Hotel & Bar

Location: 700 Frenchmen St #1614

Rating on Booking.com: 8.9/10

Price: Rooms from $240

Set in a 19th-century Creole home, this boutique hotel is the perfect place to stay for bar-hopping on Frenchmen Street. Rooms here feature elegant furnishings and neighborhood views, some from private balconies overlooking the famous street.

Before hitting the town, hang out in their scenic courtyard or at the Royal Bar. Even if you’re not staying here, it’s worth it to drop by for the $3 martinis during their Happy Hour from 4-8 PM. Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.

Hotel Peter and Paul

Location: 2317 Burgundy Street

Rating on Booking.com: 9.4/10 

Price: Rooms from $120

There’s a lot of history in this Marigny hotel. The former church, schoolhouse, convent, and rectory dates all the way back to 1860. A 4-year restoration process turned it into the upmarket hotel you see today.

The result is an absolutely stunning hotel. A lot of attention to detail went into the design of the rooms, and no two are alike. It’s definitely one of the most beautiful places to stay in New Orleans.

In addition to the gorgeous guest rooms, this hotel boasts a few parlors for relaxing and socializing, a sunroom, cafe, bar, and even an ice cream shop. Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.

Royal Street Courtyard

Location: 2438 Royal Street

Rating on Booking.com: 8.4/10

Price: Rooms from $275

This excellent B&B is set in a 1850s Greek Revival mansion. It features eleven well-appointed suites, each with a unique design. It’s just a few blocks from Frenchmen Street as well as the riverside Crescent Park, making for a great home base to explore the area.

There’s a lot to discover beyond your room here. You can relax in a rocking chair on their front porch or take a dip in the hot tub in the backyard. How cool is that?

You can even rent out the entire B&B for a wedding or other special event. Talk about an awesome event venue! Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.

Central Business District (CBD): Where to Stay in New Orleans for Events

Central Business District is a great place to stay in New Orleans if you’re looking for:

Proximity to Arena and Stadium

Sporting Events and Concerts

Local Restaurants and Bars

If you’re headed to the Big Easy for a conference, sporting event, or a big concert/festival, you may want to choose an area closer to the action. The city’s Central Business District is a great place to stay if you’re going to an event at the Superdome or the Smoothie King Center. 

Home to the NFL’s New Orleans Saints, the Superdome also hosts events like the NCAA Final Four and the Essence Music Festival. I went to WrestleMania there a few years ago and had an absolute blast!

Over at the arena, the NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans play ball. The season lasts from the fall through the end of spring, and there are home games very often during this time. They also have big concerts here quite often. 

Staying in the CBD puts you super close to the stadium and arena and it’s really not that far to get to the French Quarter. The streetcar makes a quick and affordable trip between the two. 

Here are a few of the best choices for accommodation in the Big Easy’s Central Business District:

Hyatt Regency

Location: 601 Loyola Avenue

Rating on Booking.com: 8.9/10

Price: Rooms from $189

It’s hard to beat this location if you’re headed to a sporting event in New Orleans. This 4-star hotel is just a stone’s throw from both the Superdome and the Smoothie King Center. 

They have a wide variety of rooms here to suit all budgets, all the way up to some super fancy executive suites. There are quite a few restaurants and bars on-site, as well as a well-stocked fitness center if you need to work off all those calories! Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.

Drury Plaza

Location: 820 Poydras Street

Rating on Booking.com: 9.3/10

Price: Rooms from $196

There’s a lot to love about this hotel, starting with the location. You’re close to landmarks like Lafayette Square and the World War II Museum and right up the street from the scenic Riverwalk. It’s also just a few steps from the streetcar that’ll bring you to the Quarter.

The Drury Plaza has a nice outdoor pool with a jacuzzi and 24-hour fitness and business centers. Oh yeah, and you also get breakfast as well as free snacks and drinks in the evening when you stay here.

This place has thousands of positive reviews! Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.

Ace Hotel

Location: 600 Carondelet Street

Rating on Booking.com: 8.6/10

Price: Rooms from $161

This hip boutique hotel is an excellent choice if you prefer something a bit more exciting than average chain hotels. Suites here come with living rooms featuring things like turntables and guitars, a nod to the importance of music in NOLA.

Speaking of music, there’s a venue right on-site here. Three Keys is open late and has live music most nights as well as a full bar and snacks. 

During the day, you can recover up at the rooftop pool. There’s also a bar up there for when you want to get the party going again! Click here to see the latest price from Booking.com.​

Now You Know Where To Stay in New Orleans!

As you can see, you have plenty of awesome choices when it comes to places to stay in New Orleans. Wherever you decide to stay, I’m sure you’ll have a blast in the Big Easy. 

One word of advice about booking a place during big events like Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest -—do it early! Rooms go fast and the prices keep on rising during these types of events in New Orleans.

Have you been to New Orleans and have a great recommendation for where to stay, eat, or drink? Drop a comment below and let us hear about it!

Looking for more New Orleans articles? Check out these posts:

21 Awesome Things To Do in New Orleans

7 Best Swamp Tours in New Orleans

Top 10 New Orleans Festivals – A Guide To The City’s Best Events

New Orleans Bars: 10 Best Places To Grab a Drink

New Orleans Food: 10 Must-Try Dishes in The Big Easy

New Orleans Cocktails: 7 Must-Try Cocktails

10 Best Hotels on Bourbon Street: A Guide To The French Quarter

Images in this article are courtesy of Shutterstock.com. Check them out for beautiful royalty-free photos.

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