Click on the video above to watch Episode 111 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.
Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.
Announcement
Bradley: Hey everybody. This is Bradley Benner with Semantic Mastery. This is Hump Day Hangouts episode 111. The week before Christmas, we’ve got some festive members on with us today. Chris how you’re doing bud?
Chris: Been good. Where’s your hat man?
Bradley: I don’t have my hat today, I didn’t have time to find it unfortunately. Hernan, how are you?
Hernan: Hey guys, hey everyone. It is really, really good to be here. Excited to be here.
Bradley: Oh, I thought those were elf ears, but they’re just headphones.
Hernan: Yeah, no, no, I have that on the back, you know? Just as a [crosstalk 00:00:34]-
Bradley: Okay, that’s out of bounds. Then Marco [crosstalk 00:00:37] on too, how are you doing Marco?
Marco: Yes sir. I’m celebrating Christmas Costa Rican style dude, tank top and shorts.
Bradley: Nice.
Chris: Love it.
Bradley: I think we had a couple of short announcements, obviously we want to wish everybody a Merry Christmas because this is the last Wednesday before Christmas. Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, all of that to you and all of your families as well. Also, I know we had a couple of announcements as far as we got a Christmas promotion going on right now. Hernan, you want to talk about that?
Hernan: Ah yeah, in fact tomorrow, we’re going to have a nice webinar about that. I mean, we’re going to go through syndication a little bit, it’s going to be a ton of fun and we’re also going to uncover some good promotion that we’re doing for Christmas, so, I’m going to leave here the link for the webinar in case you guys haven’t done it yet, you can do it. It’s going to be 3:30 PM. That’s that. Then, just so you know guys, 10 percent of whatever we make, I think we decided on 10 percent at the end of today, we’re going to be giving to charity so have that in mind. If you have been on the fence on purchasing anything related to Semantic Mastery, that is, okay?
Bradley: Yeah, and we’re donating to two children’s charities. One’s Toys for Tots, which is sponsored by the US Embassy, The United States Marine Corps, as well as the Shriners Hospital for Children, which is a great organization for helping kids with medical conditions, so, go ahead.
Marco: Have we enabled the donate button? Because if they don’t want to buy, but they still want to donate.
Bradley: Sure, I don’t know if we have or not.
Marco: I can’t remember if we did or if we were supposed to do that, so that you can just go ahead and donate even if they didn’t want to buy, if they’re in the Christmas spirit and they want to donate to the kids, then they’re more than welcome to do it. We haven’t done that, we need to [inaudible 00:02:36] that.
Bradley: Yeah, we should. Absolutely.
Hernan: Yeah, and worse case scenario, we will email them that tomorrow, so.
Bradley: Okay. Well, other than that, do we have anything else to announce, Hernan?
Hernan: I think, yeah, we’re going to have a big launch on January about Video Powerhouse, it’s going to be amazing guys. We have the whole team, Marco is cracking the whip on the team to get that going. It’s going to be amazing. It’s the whole shebang, the whole 9 yards. IFTTT SEO version 2.0 standards, it’s going to be good. It’s going to be like anything that you have seen before and it’s going to be really, really good product to have in mind, that’s pretty much it.
Bradley: You heard it hear first. All right guys, we’re going to jump into some questions, we’re going to grab the screen. Guys let me know if you’re not seeing me. Everything all right though?
Hernan: Yeah.
Tool That Can Estimate Pay-Per-Click Conversion Rates For A Specific Niche
Bradley: Okay, cool, we’ve got a few questions. Not many, apparently our redirect link was down for the last week because it was setup incorrectly. I apologize for that guys, it’s fixed now. Thanks for letting be known, we will make sure that we publicly punish the VA that did that, no I’m kidding. Thanks for letting me know. That shouldn’t have happened and apparently it was wrong. All right, Laurie is up. She says, “Hi there SM team, it took me a while to figure out how to find a way to post this question.” Yeah, that’s probably because that link was down Laurie and we apologize for that. It’s typically always setup correctly, but I don’t know what happened this past week.
“Thanks Bradley and Marco for the help, I was wondering if any of you know of a tool that can estimate pay per click conversion rates for a specific niche. Hmm, might be wishful thinking, but we have a potential PPC client with multiple US and international locations that wants to know this, just not sure of how to supply that info. Thanks in advance.”
I don’t know of any that would do that and I’m certainly open to hearing the opinions of Marco and Hernan and Chris but I don’t know of any that will do that. In my opinion, I don’t know that … There’s so many variables there about conversion rates that depending on your landing page, your offer, your ad, the quality of traffic, there’s so much, so many variables there. I don’t know if you can get a estimated conversion rate from any sort of software application, I could be wrong. Have you guys ever heard of something like that?
Hernan: No, I mean, there are some standards, like niche specific standards. You have X percent conversion rates for lawyers for XYZ, but yeah, I agree with. It’s hard without inputting data Laurie. For example, on AdWords, you can estimate how many conversions you can get, but after you have run the campaign long enough. You have been running the campaign for a month, the same with Facebook, they have just launched a new tool that will allow you to estimate and the conversions that you will get based on the daily budget that you’re investing in. That’s with data already, so, it’s hard to say of the bad because, again, there’s so many things that are affecting that and it’s a stab in the dark.
Bradley: Yeah, that’s the thing, the variables are … If you have your own data to input into a calculator, conversion calculator. Which those are … You can find those in Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs, things like that. Which are ROI calculators, return on investment calculators, that kind of stuff. You can find those, but you have to input your own data, so your own figures for what your click through rate is, what your cost per acquisition is, what your conversion rate is and that kind of stuff, and then it can estimate based upon your own data and historical data from your own account, but as far as just benchmarking specific niches with conversion rate, there’s just too many variables. I don’t know that that’s data offered anywhere. If it is, I can imagine it’s quite a range of instead of just a specific number, if that makes sense?
Marco: The way that I sell this to a client, is I always tell them that you can’t get this information. You can’t get an estimate on conversion rate. You can get general as Hernan said, a niche specific rate, but what you could do and the way that I sell this, is we’ll run the campaign, 3 to 5 days on a limited budget so that we can gather data and then from the data, we can go ahead and take the information and then … I have enough experience with AdWords where I can tell the client, “This is what you can expect, and we will be increasing it overtime. We can increase the conversion rates over time. We tweak the ads, we tweak the landing page.” It will go up as we go along, but there’s no way to give you an estimate, before as Hernan said, before we have data.
I need the data so that I can give you the estimates. The way you do that, is you run a limited campaign, 3 to 5 days, and then you’ll have all of the data that you need so that you can go back to the client and say, “Well, now, this is what we can do for you.”
Bradley: That’s right, and that’s what I was saying, AdWords ROI calculator, you can just Google that and you can probably find some here and help you. Just Google [inaudible 00:08:11], look for that, but again it’s going to ask you to input some data first. Based upon that data that you input, it will give you some estimations, but it’s going to require some of your own data, just like what Marco said. I mean, that’s exactly how I would do it took … Whenever I’m proposing per per click, which, guys. Most of you probably already know, I’ve done SEO most of my career. I’ve just started doing pay per click, PPC, search PPC stuff recently within the last 6 months, and so I approached a lot of my SEO clients with it. Because I think it’s necessary for local marketing now to do AdWords, I think it’s absolutely necessary.
The same thing is, I approached my SEO clients who had a bad taste about AdWords, right? Did the same thing, I said, “Look, let’s work with the limited budget. I’ll setup the campaign. We’ll run a few days worth of a data, or a couple of weeks worth of data.” Whatever, throw it, see what kind of results we can get. That’ll give us an estimation as to what our costs are going to be and what type of results, the number of leads we can estimate coming in, based upon the data and all that. That’s how I’ve pitched that service as well was the same way that Marco said and that works well too. I don’t know about anybody that would just give you some flat out data about a particular niche’s conversion rates, I wouldn’t trust that data anyways without verifying it on my own. If that makes sense?
Hernan: Yeah, if I can add to what you were saying Bradley. At some point, after you’ve done this enough, you will have some benchmarks on your own. You will know that the Ad for example, that we have been doing, let’s put the example of Semantic Mastery or Additional Marketing on this case. You know that we can … After doing many landing pages, you know that you can crank out a landing page that would convert at 30% minimum, you know? Or at 40% minimum. A webinar page that depending on the traffic source, but it needs to convert up to 30% minimum. You start having your own benchmarks because you know, after testing for a while on different landing pages, templates, whatever, you know what you can come up with.
I can setup a webinar that can convert at 50% minimum or at 8% minimum. You start working on those numbers, I usually like going with the worst case scenario. If I know that the minimum viable conversion rate on the landing page should be 20% for me to be profitable, or at least, breakeven. That’s data that you’re collecting with time and the more you dive into a niche, the more data that you can come up with and you can say, okay, I have these templates. I have these traffic sources, so I know that these templates or these traffic sources can convert at X percent. Once you have that data, but that’s after the fact, there’s little that you can do before the fact.
Where To Embed Facebook Post?
Bradley: Very good, we’re going to move on. Ivan says, “Hey guys, I just found out that you can embed a Facebook post. What will be a good place to put this?” Oh, that’s cool. I didn’t know that you can do that. I haven’t played with that either, because I wasn’t aware of that. I’ve embedded Tumblr posts, Google Plus posts, Tweets, done a lot of that but not … I’ve never done an actual Facebook post. Well, if you know anything about Iframe stacking, and we’ve got a webinar series on that, where we talk about that. RYS webinar series, if you haven’t gone through that Ivan, we encourage you to do so, it’s free. I don’t know if one of you guys want to drop the link for Ivan on the page to go through that, but we talk about Iframe stacking in one of the webinars in that series.
That’s a good place to start with. I haven’t done any testing with Facebook posts per so, Marco, have you?
Marco: No, not with Facebook but you can embed anything.
Hernan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bradley: Yup.
Marco: You can embed anything, Facebook, whatever. It makes no difference. As long as you have what’s called the Embed Pro, and you can do it … This JavaScript embeds and we can do HTML or Iframe embeds.
Bradley: Right.
Marco: You can do both, but you can take anything unless they have an Iframe breaker which … Websites like the New York Times, they don’t like being embedded anymore. I used to love embedding the New York Times everywhere, because I [inaudible 00:12:35] a lot of action and rank my clients that way. Now there’s Iframe breakers that they use, if they use, then you can’t … Well, yeah you probably could encode it, but just [inaudible 00:12:48]. O-U-3-C, that’s where you go for Iframe tutorials. It’s fabulous, all of the information is there that you need.
Bradley: Well, real quick Hernan, let me interrupt just for one second because I just want to show something here guys, for SEO Virginia. My Google site’s number 1 and number 2 is a wordpress.com site. That, look guys, there’s zero content on this page. There’s a title and a call to action and the rest of the page is just embedded files. Tweets, Google Drive files, all of those are just embedded. I think there’s even an embedded Tumblr post on here if there’s not … I’m not sure if there is or not. There’s zero content on this page guys, zero content. The only content on this page is this line of text here. Look, I’m ranked number 2 for SEO Virginia.
Iframe stacks work guys, essentially the Google site that’s ranked number one, is a spun piece of garbage content with a bunch of Iframes embedded drive stacked drive files right on the page. I’m taking the position number 1 and number 2 using Iframe stacks guys, get that? [crosstalk 00:14:01] RYS webinar series, I highly recommend you go through it.
Marco: I was just about to say, it’s called RYS Academy, get it. If you not in, get it when you fit in because, it works, like it’s still working. It’s to keep finding ways to rank more of our shit, excuse the language, Merry Christmas, but we still keep finding ways to do it. If you’re not, get in, it works.
Hernan: Yeah, I was about to say that. I put the RYS video series on the event page and also when it comes to Facebook posts, have in mind Ivan that you can also have an Iframe stacks within Facebook that is, you can embed a post that has a video embedded those kind of things that we are doing. Try to embed posts that are public. You can embed posts that are private too, but it’s just Google will not be able to crawl them because of privacy settings within Facebook. If you’re doing anything, just try that to be a post that it’s public. Public posts, and usually a page posts, not a user post. That’s the only caveat that I would have with embedded Facebook posts.
Pros And Cons And/Or Proper Procedure For Optimizing A Persona YouTube Channel
Bradley: Cool. Robert’s up, he says, “Merry Christmas to all. Dealing with persons or semi good money accounts or even a personal account,” Okay. “In YouTube, I am trying to recall what has been said about not using the personal person of the account but to build brand channels or just other channels for promoting videos. What if the personal channel is not going to be filled with hundreds of thousands of videos but a lot of say, hundred but optimized properly and not a spammy junk hole,” okay. I’m trying to interpret the question here but I think what you’re asking is, is it okay to use a profile channel instead of a business channel, which would be like a page channel, guys. Is that okay?
Sure, it’s okay. It’s fine. Guys, if you have for example, I have my YouTube for Bradley Benner, right? Which is not a page, it’s my own profile channel. I use it for stuff, I don’t use it for nearly as much as I used to, because I do everything through Semantic Mastery or Mastery PR, those brand channels. My point is, I have SEO videos and a lot of training videos and stuff on my channel because it makes sense, right? It’s what I do. It’s perfectly fine. By the way, my channel is super freaking powerful. If I want to rank a video for like a launch jack or something like that, I can do it through my channel, Bradley Benner, or I could do it through the Semantic Mastery channel. Either one, both of those channels are incredibly powerful, and it’s because they’re themed well and there’s been tons of activity over the years in both of those channels.
One’s a brand channel, one’s a profile channel, either one is okay to use. Okay, what I recommend though, is when you’re building out stuff for brands or for lead gen sites and things like that, is that you separate your page, your pages or your business channels, which are essentially paged channels, from one profile. In other words, don’t put all of your business channels under one profile. I recommend, for every new business, new lead gen site, new client, that you end up having the page owner under a different profile, right? That you don’t have like, let’s say, 10 money channels under one profile account and what happens if that profile account gets terminated? For some reason or another, you piss Google off and it terminates your account.
You’ve lost every single one of those channels. That’s what I’m talking about. Now, if you guys want to use a profile instead of a brand or a page channel, you certainly can, there’s nothing wrong with that, okay? It’s just typically … Part of the reason why we’ve ended up usually always creating a page channel for even a profile, when we’re just creating persona networks for example, we still create a page channel instead of just using a profile channel. The reason why we do that is because, for the longest time, you could only syndicate through a buffer to a Google Plus page. You could not syndicate to a Google Plus profile, it wouldn’t allow you to. It was against Google Plus’s terms of service for automated posting to a profile. You could, however, to a page.
Now, it looks like in buffer, you do have the option to actually connect a profile and syndicate to a profile as well. Again, if you want to use a profile, it’s absolutely, perfectly fine to do so, okay? All right, there you go.
Majestic SEO Metrics For Backlinks Or Domain Of A Website
Tommy’s up, he says, “When you use Majestic SEO, do you have to look at all the backlinks in the domain or only of the page that’s ranking in the search results page I’m looking at.” Okay, “So, to beat my competitor in the [inaudible 00:18:50], I have to replicate something similar to the links to that page or to the entire domain, I hope that makes sense.” Yeah, Tommy, it makes sense.
Okay, the official answer is that you should … Google doesn’t wake websites, it ranks pages, that’s the official answer, I’m using air quotes here. Because, in all reality, that’s not necessarily true, that’s not really the case. Because, Google does rank pages instead of websites, however if a website is particularly … Is weighted enough within Google, if it’s given enough weight, so it carries enough authority in Google’s eyes than pages will rank because of the authority of the domain itself. I’m not talking about Moz’s domain authority metric guys, I’m talking about the overall authority of the entire site, right? Not domain authority, don’t let me get you guys confused on that. I’m saying in Google’s eyes, what is the authority, how much weight does Google give the entire site? Because then, you can rank pages on that site a lot easier than let’s say a domain that’s new or that doesn’t have any history or any authority built in Google’s eyes, does that make sense?
The official answer is that technically, you should be able to just meet or exceed the page metrics and be able to outrank. That’s theoretically, hypothetically. That’s how it should work, but it doesn’t because Google does actually weight the pages based upon the overall authority to the domain itself, if that makes sense? You really need to straddle that line, Tommy, between trying to meet or exceed the page metrics but also making sure that the entire domain has good quality inbound links, it’s themed well, the structure of the site is done well, all of that. Okay, you guys want to comment on that?
Marco: Yeah, I just want to just jump in for some education for all of you guys here on these metrics and Moz and logistics [inaudible 00:20:58] whatever else. Guys, they’re third party metrics, they’re all guesses at what Google is doing. Nobody knows what Google is doing, when we talk about domain authority, your domain can actually be authoritative without having any domain authority in Moz.
Bradley: It’s true.
Marco: This site can be trusted without having any trust flow in Majestic. It’s up to Google to determine whether your website is authoritative and trusted. How do you do that? How do we do that? We call it IFTTT SEO, we’ve proven it time and again that with posting … When you set up your posting schedule and you stick to it, you produce quality content, you’re in social media, you had your SEO shield, people are going to come to your website, that’s going to send signals to Google, it’s going to tell them that it’s trusted, you’re setting up an entity. What’s called a semantic web entity, where Google now sees you as transparent. They know that you’re on social media, they know that you’re active, they know that you’re producing content, they know that you’re producing content that people actually go and consume.
Which is what Google wants. You can do all of this with actually zero metrics. We have domains in Video Powerhouse, that has zero metrics and have so much power that when a video is run or a playlist, it actually bumps up the trust flow and the domain authority metrics of the channel, of the video, and just overall. With the things that show zero as far as Majestic and Moz are concerned so don’t think so much, don’t get stuck on metrics. I know it’s pretty, it’s pretty to see 20 trust flow and 18 citation flow and topical trust flow, but the things that you need to look at is … Are you connected to a seed site or a seed set? If you are, how far are you? How far is the connection? How many hops is it? Because that’s what matters.
How close are you to one of the big websites that gives you all of the trust and authority that you need, so that Google takes a look. Those are the things that you need to look at. Guys, anyone that’s educating you on domain authority, trust flow, as the end all to it all is doing you a disservice and sorry for getting [inaudible 00:23:42], but you guys need to be educated. What you need to look at, is it themed?
Bradley: That’s right.
Marco: Yeah, when you go buy a PBN for a link, for whatever it is that you’re doing, is it themed? Is it relevant to whatever it is that you’re doing. Due diligence, find out where the links are coming from, if those are quality links, in the niche. You don’t need an EDU link, you don’t a .gov link, you need a trusted link in the niche. I hope that makes sense to you guys, if nothing, we probably need to do a webinar to re educate people on these metrics that are driving people crazy.
Using A Tier 1 YouTube Channel And Put Multiple Tiers On It
Bradley: Can I get an amen? Thanks Marco, I appreciate it man. All right, moving on, Michael says, “Merry Christmas to all of you IFTTT nerds out there. [inaudible 00:24:35] the question has probably been answered somewhere but I missed it, I have only done branded tier one rings around money sites so far and I’ve used the money site, tier 1 YouTube channel just as a place holder for all the link profiles. Can I take that tier 1 YouTube channel and put multiple tiers on it or leave it as is and start another related YouTube channel and add as many tiers as I want to. If so, does that new channel link to the money site and is it branded channel?”
No, no, just use the branded channel that you already have, there’s no reason to create a second channel for that, you already have. You can stack as many networks on top of that channel as you want. In fact, Damon Nelson just released a RSS service. It’s an app called RSS masher, it’s pretty freaking cool. He’s actually got a webinar for anybody that purchases, tonight at 7 pm, I’m going to be on it as well as another guest and we’re going to be talking about RSS and syndication and that kind of stuff. Using that, I now can say it’s okay in my opinion to setup second tier blog syndication networks. In other words, setup tier 2 for blog syndication. Where I’ve been, for the last year and a half preaching against doing that.
It can be done, as long as you have related content feeds as to your two triggers, to help theme your tier 2 networks as well as minimize footprint, and I’ve been talking about that for a year and a half, but I encouraged against doing that because it’s been a real pain in the ass to work with several multiple feeds from multiple sources. There’s a lot of things that can breakdown, but it’s a management nightmare. If you’re just managing just one network or a couple of networks, that’s one thing, but when you’ve got dozens or even hundreds of networks, it’s damn near impossible, it’s too cumbersome to manage all of that stuff with tier 2 blog syndication networks. Where you need related content feed and all that kind of stuff.
With RSS masher, that actually simplifies the process to a point where I think it is manageable and I’m not encouraging people to go out and build tier 2 networks, but if it’s something that you want to do, I can see that as being an absolutely viable option for feeding your tier 2 networks, minimizing footprint, updating and theming those networks on a consistent, regular basis and the same time, being able to drive traffic to particular offers because in RSS masher, you can put in what’s called web hooks or hooks, money hook as he calls them. Excuse me, money hooks. The money hooks are where you can insert your own links into the RSS feed, either above or below the content for each feed, each RSS feed. Very, very powerful guys and I think that that’s something that can be done now using tier 2 networks for even blog syndication.
For YouTube syndication, there’s never been a footprint issue. Provided that you’re using the recipes as they’re setup in the account workbook template. For that reason, you can stack as many networks, tier 2, tier 1 whatever, onto your YouTube channel, your branded channel already, that’s absolutely fine. Because think about it, you’re going to be pushing all that authority into that channel, which is now your branded channel, that’s intimately connected with your money site and your brand, right? You’re going to be basically powering up the whole structure by juicing you YouTube channel. Okay? Yes, don’t bother with another YouTube channel Michael, that would be unnecessary. It would actually not be as effective either. Very cool.
Laurie says, “Merry Christmas,” Merry Christmas, thank you, Chris G, “Hernan mentioned an upcoming launch but didn’t get what the product was for.” Video Powerhouse that’s coming up in January, and that’s are our video embed network as well as a Maps embed network.
Hernan: It’s going to be awesome.
Marco: We’re going to kill the video industry.
Hernan: Ah yeah.
Marco: We’re going to crush them.
Wordstream For Adwords Conversion Rates
Bradley: Steven says, “On the question of AdWords conversion rates, I agree with your analysis. Marco, Bradley and Hernan, here is something that I found that has some great info.” Yeah, wordstream.com guys is a great blog for AdWords stuff. Thank you Steven for pointing this out, that’s probably going to be worth. In fact, let me go add it to my pocket account now. I got a ton of really good AdWords articles in here now, so.
Hernan: Yeah, pocket it, I’m doing that too.
Handling Time Management Effectively
Bradley: Yup, absolutely. Okay, so thanks for that Steven. Let’s see, I think I lost the webby, uh oh. I guess not, looks like everybody else is on. Video series, okay that’s for RYS. Dylan says, “Can you discuss how you handle all time management effectively? Are there any programs or shortcuts that help you get more accomplished?” Yes, several of them. Probably the best … As more of a time management planning, like productivity type training or process or system, I guess I should say that has really, really helped me a lot, well, besides Work the System, which was by Sam Carpenter which really got me beyond a glass ceiling that I had hit as a solo prenuer, and that’s where I learned to start outsourcing those. Basically, from a 10 dollar book, I got it from Kendall, I think I paid like 9 bucks for Work the System by Sam Carpenter.
Fabulous, outstanding book, changed my entire mindset and really helped me to scale my business quite a bit. Because of it, it opened up my mind to how to outsource, when I all the time, I had always resisted it before. That was number 1, but as far as time management goes and I think one of the best books that I’ve found for that is The 12 Week Year. It’s called The 12 Week Year. It’s by one of the guys from the Keller Williams Realty office or whatever I think, no, no, no, I’m thinking of that one thing. Anyways, it’s called The 12 Week Year, there’s also recently been something very similar, I don’t know who originated it, the idea first, but I know that there’s been in the entrepreneurship world right now, there’s been some 90 week … What is it? A 90 day year plan or something like that, that’s being promoted.
It’s very similar, right? A 12 week year and a 90 day year. I don’t know who came first, which one was the chicken and which one was the egg, I don’t know, but I can tell you that The 12 Week Year was very effective for me as far as how to plan out projects in 90 day cycles, as opposed to 12 month cycles, and we’ve gotten a shit ton accomplished since we started using that. As far as just on a daily basis on how to organize your time the best, there’s a really good book. It’s rather long for the principle, but it’s called Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy. That’s been very effective for me as well, and essentially just means every night plan your day out for the following day. Just take 15 minutes and use a whiteboard or a scratch pad, something you can write on and write down what is your most important activity for the following day.
Just write a list, 1 through 5, 1 through 6 or whatever, typically, you’re not going to have more than 5 main items, but always put the highest priority, the thing that’s going to have the most effect or impact on your business or your finances, have that as your number 1 most important item. Prioritize that and put that at the top of the list and don’t work on anything else until that’s done. Now, if it’s a large project, you have to break the large project down into bite size pieces so to speak and then tackle a piece every single day. My point is, if you prioritize what is the most important activity, then you’re always focusing on the most important activity. Because guys remember, there’s a big difference between being busy and getting shit done, right? We can all be busy, checking emails and optimizing title tags of videos that have maybe dropped a couple spots in their rankings. We can always be busy, but are we going to be effective and are we going to get stuff done that’s really going to move our business forward, right?
That’s what you should always be thinking about. What am I doing right now? Is this the best use of my time? What other higher level tasks could I be doing that’s going to give me a … Advance my business further, other than what I’m doing right now. For all of that other stuff, a lot of the other stuff that we do to stay busy is oftentimes insignificant, and it’s stuff that we should be outsourcing anyways. Or, completely just ignore it and forget about it because it’s not really going to be move our business forward whether we do it or not anyways, right? It’s insignificant.
Marco: Yeah, I was just about to jump in and say, isn’t Dylan in our Mastermind?
Bradley: He is, yeah.
Marco: He has access to
Outsource Kingpin, apply Outsource Kingpin and you’re going to have a lot more free time to manage effectively. That’s going to free so much of your time just applying Outsource Kingpin, getting some VA’s to help you out, to take off all of the tedious crap that you get involved in that you shouldn’t be doing. Because you should be concentrating on how to grow your business, not having to do the grunt work and then everything else you have to do … Answering every single email, going through every single email until you find the important email, just tedious shit that you don’t need to be doing. Dylan, Outsource Kingpin man, you’re going to find a whole lot more free time once you go through that and apply it.
Bradley: Yup.
Hernan: Yup. Yeah, I totally agree with what you guys are saying and in fact, many of our students are afraid of outsourcing for two main reasons. One is that, they do not have a process in place so that they can hand over to somebody else, to do whatever you’re trying to do. Outsource Kingpin will put you in the place that you need to be in order to start generating those process, which do take time, it do take work, to start generating those process. The reality is that, once you generate them, you can handover those processes to anyone. That’s number 1, and number 2, many people and I was making this mistake in the past, and this happens to … I think that this applies to everything in life, not only our work, our businesses, but anything in life like, if you do your own gardening … Or if you do, I don’t know, if you’re trying to repair your own car.
If you’re trying to answer your old emails, if you could be getting paid, I don’t know, 250, 300, 500 dollars an hour and you’re making and you’re performing 50 bucks an hour tasks, than you’re not saving those 50 dollars. In fact, for every hour that you’re spending doing that, you have just lost 450 dollars.
Bradley: Opportunity costs.
Hernan: Exactly, because you have just lost 450 dollars, so every time I tend to do something that will cost me less than 10 dollars, or 20, even 50 dollars to complete and I say, “I could be doing something else that would give me 10 times that.” I’m not saving that money, I’m actually losing it. I’m losing the outside potential that I could have. Thinking like that will allow you to, instead of, I’m saving 50 bucks, I’m losing 450 every hour that I’m doing this, will put things into perspective enough so that you can take action and start outsourcing and start getting VA’s and the good thing about Outsource Kingpin is that it takes the guest work completely out of the equation. Because, it’s a proven process that will get you only the best and finest VA’s.
That’s another sinking point. Many people have hired VA’s, going to Upwork, got 200 thousand replies and then you need to handpick everything. It’s a cumbersome process and maybe even end up with subpar people that just disappear, et cetera. We have gone through that and we have developed a process so that you do not need to get that and 95% of it is automated. It’s magic, I mean really. Every time we need to go out and find somebody for Semantic Mastery, even for our own tasks, like Adam recently or my own, whatever. You go out there and you apply to Outsource Kingpin and you only get the best of the best. It’s crazy the quality of people that you can get working on your team for the price. Sometimes it’s mind blowing. It’s super powerful, you can develop a super strong company and a team of committed people without having to break the bank and without having to go through 95% of what’s stopping you to going through it.
Go ahead and check it. I know Dylan is in the Mastermind, so he gets access to that. If you guys are not, if you haven’t purchased Outsource Kingpin, I strongly suggest that you invest that money, which is nothing compared to the outside that you can get or you can join the Mastermind and you can get the whole shebang for free. The other products and the 300 dollars, et cetera.
Bradley: Just a thought on that, Dylan, because you were there, we had a brief one hour webinar for Mastermind members on Monday this week, and I was talking specifically about an affiliate campaign that I’ve been setting up in master class in Mastermind. You guys that are in that are aware of it, I’m learning on driving traffic through AdWords and now Google Display Network as well and so I’m doing a lot of traffic generation testing right now. I’ve got this affiliate funnel, an opt in funnel where I’m building an email list and I’m doing well at building right now, anywhere between 10 to 15 subscribers per day, based upon the
PPC campaigns that I have setup. I’m focusing on learning the traffic, the paid traffic side of things right now.
The email list that I’m building, the auto responder sequence is terrible because it takes me 2 hours, it’s very painful for me to write. I can write fairly well, but it just takes me forever. In order to have a decent auto responder sequence, it would literally take me 40, 50, 60 hours to write a 3 or 4 week auto responder sequence, I’m not kidding. It would literally take me a week to 2 weeks, steady writing, all day long or a few hours a day for 6 or 8 weeks, to me, it’s just not worth it. Just like what Hernan was saying, I just went to Upwork and I hired a copywriter. I sent a job invitation out to 5 different copywriters, told them to respond with a cover letter, some examples of their work and I found an outstanding copywriter that fits my niche specifically and I’m paying them to write the auto responder sequence.
Again, if I would’ve done it myself, I could’ve saved, in air quotes, 500 dollars or whatever I’m paying for the auto responder sequence. 500 bucks, 1,000 bucks, 250, doesn’t matter, theoretically, I could’ve saved that, right? That’s not really what … At what cost? If I was spending two hours a day writing an email that I could’ve been spending 2 hours a day generating more traffic to my opt in page, which would have a better monetary value for me in the long run? Either building my list or writing an email, to me, it’s just, it’s a no brainer. It’s one of those things, like Hernan said, there’s an opportunity cost to everything you do.
If you’re working on 10 dollar an hour stuff, you’re not getting the 200 dollar an hour stuff that you should be doing as your business owner. You’re the owner of your own business, you should be working on the high level 200 dollar an hour tasks and hiring out the 10 dollar an hour tasks, the 5 dollar an hour tasks or even the 50 dollar an hour task, if that makes sense. Anyways, hopefully that was helpful.
Google My Business Issues
Luis is up, he says, “Any idea on how I can get my Google business listed? Have attempted to several times and I’m on my last chance to get approved for a local business, I work my office out of my home, and I’ve listed in a local site for Yahoo, Bing and Apple, but not Google, any thoughts?”
I’m not sure what the problem is Luis. You shouldn’t be having any issues, if you added your site through Google My Business. If you created a listing in Google My Business, they should be sending you a verification postcard. It’s not really a post card, it looks like a post card, but you have it open it up, right? That’s really all that should be required, I don’t know why you’re not receiving that. It doesn’t really make any sense to me. I don’t know what other issues are there Luis, without any other details, it’s hard for me to give you any advice on that, go ahead Marco?
Marco: I’ve heard of people getting turned away because they’re in a residential area rather than a place where-
Bradley: I’ve never had that happen.
Marco: Yeah, I’ve had it happen. Maybe that’s the problem that he ran into. [crosstalk 00:42:07] to call them and get it straightened out and explain what it is that he’s doing.
Bradley: Yeah, Google My Business help, support or whatever is better than it used to be. I don’t know how responsive they are, like how quick they are to respond, so Luis, if you haven’t attempted reaching out to Google directly through their support channels and try to get that resolved, that can be a bit of a nightmare. The other way, and the only reason I say that, is because I mentioned this on the Mastermind webinar earlier this week, I had a client that their listing disappeared in Maps last year. It was around springtime last year in 2015, and we ended up having to get Google support involved and they did admit that it was a problem on their, but it took them 6 months to … Well, not 6 months, it was about 4 months, maybe 4 and half months to get it fixed. For 4 and a half months, my customers, my clients Maps listing was gone.
It just was gone and they were number one in Maps for 3 years up until that point and so it was really strange. Dealing with Google support sucked because it took 4 and a half months to get it resolved even though they admitted it was their problem. My guess is, if you have to deal with support, if you adamantly want your GMB listing tied to your home address, because you’ve got a home office, then for example, if you have customers for your business come to your location. I would assume you don’t since it’s at your house, you have a home office. Typically people that work out of their home, don’t have customers come to their location, so there’s no need to show your address and have a Maps pin.
People aren’t going to be requesting driving directions, if that’s the case for you then you’re probably going to want to do that anyways, right? My suggestion is that if you don’t require customers to come to you, then you can always register a P.O. box at your local post office, use the street address option and then register that as your business address, right? Then hide the address from Maps which is an option inside of Google My Business when you setup your listing. Don’t hide the address until after you get your verification post card in the mail though. That’s what I do, because I’ve got a lot of local lead gen sites setup that way, and I prefer it that way. Anyways, just try those and see.
Again, if you have to have a Maps pin at your house because of people coming, requesting driving directions, that kind of stuff, then you’re probably going to want to reach out to Google My Business support and get involved with them. I know they’re more responsive then they used to be, I don’t know how quick they are to resolve issues though. They’re like the federal government, they’re slow to move. If you don’t need a pin tied to your house, then I would recommend just getting a P.O. box because that would separate your business directly from your home address anyways. Which, in my opinion is the smarter way to go, just for … I don’t want people knowing my home address if possible, all right?
David’s up, “Sorry, could you repeat when the RSS Masher webinar with Damon is?” It’s tonight at 7 pm but it’s only for RSS masher buyers I believe. You have had to have purchased it to be on the webinar, because we’re going to be … It’s like a bonus webinar for purchasers, okay? Dylan says, “Thanks Bradley and Marco, makes sense. Break it down in smaller time increments, and set goals that way. Oh yeah, I’ve got two interviews going right now for a writer and website editor.” Awesome Dylan, congratulations man, keep it up.
Separate Local Phone Number For Each Business Location In GMaps
Kurt says, “For a local business with several locations in G Maps, does each location have to have a separate local phone number but can a toll free number work?”
Okay, a toll free number can work, Kurt, but there’s a few issues with that. Number 1, if you have the same business name, the brand name and you have the same phone number, but you have different … Okay, when it comes to citations, there is really 4 data points that Google is looking at for citations. There’s name, address, phone number and web address, those are the 4 main data points. People always say NAP, but the web address counts too. That’s NAP plus the URL or the web address, right? Typically you can have one of those data points be the same as long as the other 3 data points, whichever they are, are unique. There shouldn’t be any citation issues, this shouldn’t cause any NAP issues when you’re building citations to the individual locations. That typically means that the business name is going to be the same but, when you’re talking about a business with multiple locations. I just mentioned, typically it’s only one data point can be the same across multiple locations.
That is usually going to be the business name, right? Because the addresses, the locations are going to be different, the phone numbers should be unique in my opinion, the web addresses should be unique, because you should have, at the very least, separate location pages on your domain for each location or the way that I prefer to do it is setup sub domains for each location. Again, it doesn’t matter, you can have just separate pages for each location if you don’t want to build out separate sites on sub domains, that’s absolutely fine to do. Because then, at least with those unique other data points, there’s no NAP issues when you start building citations. When you start to share two or more of the same data points, that’s when it will start to create issues. Because now, you have the same name and in your case, the same phone number across multiple locations.
The only thing now, there’s only 2 unique data points, your physical location, your physical address and your web address, if you’ve got unique pages for each location, which you should. Now, it’s going to start to create some NAP issues which can negatively affect all of your listings for that business. You can do it Kurt, I don’t ever. In fact, I’ve had customers or clients that have asked me, resisted me when I encourage them to purchase local virtual phone numbers, forwarding numbers, from Vumber or Callfire or Twilio or whatever, I’ve had customers or clients resist that. No, we don’t want that, blah, blah, blah. I’ve always explain to them why … Basically told them, in order for me to be effective, I need it to have separate numbers.
The other part of that Kurt is, if you have a separate number for each location, you can also track call volume per location. Whereas, with the 1-800 number, unless you’re using something with extensions and stuff like which for tracking purposes you can have an 800 number and they press an extension and that kind of stuff, you can do that. Typically having individual phone numbers for each location, is going to give you that unique NAP which is critical in my opinion and also give you tracking abilities that you wouldn’t have otherwise had. Okay? Again, I really encourage you to use separate phone numbers if possible. You can attempt to do it that way with an 800 number, but just know that it could potentially cause problems and it will affect … All of the sites for that brand and not just one location.
Okay? Dylan says, “Thank you, great philosophy. Give yourself an hourly wage and outsource the tasks that are under that hourly wage.” That’s absolutely correct Dylan, you always got to be thinking about that. Luis says, “The card never arrives and they are saying it was sent. Called Google, but again, no help.” Yeah, okay, now I’ve had that issue Luis, where I’ve ordered the card and it doesn’t come, but I’ve got the email from Google, which they’ve just started doing within the last 6 months, sending an email and saying your card has arrived. I had that happen recently with a case study site that I setup in Richmond, Virginia which is like an hour and a half drive for me, and they sent me an email and said that the card had arrived, and I drive an hour and a half to the post office to get it and guess what? It wasn’t there.
That sucks when that happens. What I would encourage you to do is … I can’t, I’m not going to throw one of our Mastermind members under the bus, but if you can find somebody that has a … Is a Google local guide … I know one of our Mastermind members, I’m not going to throw his name out here on Hump Day Hangouts, but one of our Mastermind members is a level 5, Google local guide. Which, that takes a lot of work to get there and there’s benefits associated with Google level 5 local guides. I had a listing that the post card was coming for it either, and I requested it twice and both times, and it hadn’t come at all. I had him go actually upload a photo to the listing, it was unpublished listing and then write a review for that business, as a level 5 guide. About 3 days later, the post card arrived, because he was a Google level 5 guide and he added a photo and than he added a review for the business. Which verified the entity, it validated the entity, if that makes sense?
Because a level 5 guide validated it by commenting and engaging with that listing if that makes sense? That might be something Luis, that you have to try. I know it worked for me by leaning on one of our Mastermind members. Okay? Again, sorry but, I don’t know what else to tell you. I know I’ve never called Google for help, well, I have once. I’ve always gone vie their email system, and that’s how I’ve resolved issues when I’ve had to deal directly with Google support is via email. It’s kind of a pain in the ass, but I know you can access it through AdWords too because I’ve had to through the AdWords dashboard, you can get to Google help, so. “We go to our customers.”
Well then, there you go. No pin needed Luis, honestly, if you don’t need a pin, I would avoid going through Google, and I would go ahead and change the address on the Google My Business listing to a P.O. box that you go rent from your local post office and use the street address option, okay? In fact, if you Google USPS or US Post Office, P.O. box street address option. You’ll see there will be a PDF form that you can download and print out and you can fill that PDF form out and take it, it’s one page, doesn’t cost any extra and you can take that to the post office with you when you go to rent a P.O. box and hand them that, and they will give you the street address of the post office and a box number instead. You can verify it that way, if you don’t need the pin at your location, that’s the best way to go. Okay?
All right, we got to wrap it up. Laurie is asking, “Is there a link to purchase RSS Masher?” I don’t know, I think that it’s closed right now Laurie, because the launch is over. I know we do have, we still have backdoor access for people to buy it through our link, but I don’t have that link right off hand Laurie. I’ll make a note of it and I’ll see if I can get it today sometimes this evening and send it over to you Laurie. I’m pretty sure there will be a replay for Damon’s webinar inside the members area, but I’ll try to ping you or plus mention you on Google Plus here with the link, once I get that setup, okay? I’m actually making a note of that right now. I’ll try to get that to you, Laurie, before the webinar tonight if possible. If not, like I said, I’m sure there will be … Well, I’m not sure, because it’s Damon’s, but I’m pretty sure there will be a replay from the bonus webinar tonight inside the members area, okay?
Okay, Kurt’s got one took. Guys, you know what I’ll do? If I can pull it, if I can get it setup, I’m not sure if it’s setup already or not, but I’ll put it right here on the event page guys. Just come back and check the event page, okay? I’ll try to get it over here. All right? Okay everybody, thanks for being here, Merry Christmas to all. We will see you guys next week.
Hernan: Sounds good everybody, and I hope to see you guys tomorrow on the webinar. It’s going to be a ton of fun, so.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: Bye everyone, Merry Christmas.
Bradley: Cool, thanks guys. See y’all later. Bye
Marco: All right, bye.
Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 111 posted first on
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Step two is to map your organization's top-level goals to your SEO tactics, and that can look something like this.
