Click on the video above to watch Episode 200 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.
Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.
Announcement
Adam: Happy 200th episode to everyone watching. For those of you who are new to Semantic Mastery, thanks for being here. To everyone else, thanks for coming and making this possible while Bradley and the rest of us help answer questions. This is episode 200 of Hump Day Hangouts on the 5th of September 2018, and we got almost the whole team here. We told Hernan that it was episode 200 and I think he got scared and I’m like I don’t think so, but let’s say hi to everyone real quick, and then we got a few announcements and then we’re going to get into it. We got some good stuff to announce today, so Chris how you doing man?
Chris: Doing good, super excited to be here today, big day.
Adam: Outstanding. Marco how you doing mam?
Chris: Man, I’m having fun. I haven’t had so much fun in quite a while and I mean 200, 200, that’s a huge number when you consider that this is the web and how it changes often from day to day week to week. We’re still here and we’re still killing it. I mean we do the do we do.
Adam: Hump, hump, hump. Bradley how you doing?
Bradley: I’m doing good. Sorry, I just got distracted by email from my ex-wife about I got my daughter this weekend or this upcoming weekend and she’s got softball tryouts. Anyways, sorry. I’m doing well, things are good. Just like Marco said, I’m excited too, got some really, really good shit cooking up right now for POFU live. I’m super excited about it, I can’t really say much about it, but it’s pretty powerful. I mean I was actually like just working on that right before the webinar, so that’s why it’s fresh on my mind and I so want to spill the beans, but I’m not going to, I’m not going to so happy to be here.
Adam: Oh go ahead, sorry.
Adam: Definitely. Well, let’s go ahead and do that then we’ll circle back to POFU live. Marco you want to tell people what we’re doing today?
Marco: Well, I announced it, it pays to attend live because we always have like around holidays and stuff like that, we always drop good stuff and what we’re dropping today for those who attend and for whoever has the best question, we’re going to give you a drive stack completely on our dime and it’s going to be up to our standards of course because it’s going to be built by the MGYB team, MGYB.co. It’s like a co-celebration since my RYS rank your shit academy reloaded is coming to MGYB.co. I’m happy and we’re going to give you a drive stack for the best question, for whatever I consider the best question.
Yes, I know, it’s up to me or it’s up to my partners or whatever, but that’s how we do it and that’s how it’s going to be done, and so congratulations for being live. One of you is going to get a drive stack that’s worth a few hundred bucks guys.
Bradley: You’re going to clear the D side too?
Marco: Yeah, we’re going to give them … It’s 200 man, we’re going to give them the works.
Bradley: All right.
Adam: Yeah, RYS kitchen sink, so cool. I think that Marco you’re going to choose the best question, is that how you can do it?
Marco: Yeah, I’m going to be … Well, let’s see because we usually say well that was a great question, right?
Adam: Yup, so when we …
Marco: Go ahead.
Adam: No, no, I was just going to say so yeah everyone watching will wait till the end and we’ll announce it at the end of the episode.
Marco: Yup. Can I just add so that we can flip back to POFU? For those of you people thinking that it’s going to be just a bunch of geeks talking about SEO, you got it wrong.
Bradley: Yeah. In fact, SEO is it’s not going to be a whole lot of SEO training, it’s going to be a lot higher level training if I’m correct in saying that.
Bradley: It’s awesome. Can I carry on about POFU live for a minute?
Adam: Yeah, just real quick I wanted to say for people watching that today an email went out, the price is going up as the tickets are … Well, we’re running out of tickets since we did cap it at 25. The price has gone up at 5 p.m. today, so in an hour, the prices are going up across the board on the ticket. I know I’ve talked to a few of you. You said you were going to grab tickets and this was a few days ago. Now is the time to do it and the link is on the page for those of you who either haven’t checked it out or if you’re on the fence, now is a great, great time to go ahead and snag your tickets.
Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, and my contribution to POFU live originally was going to be like two separate sessions like speeches and training sessions type thing, but I just requested yesterday that I get three because of this new method that I’m working on. It’s actually a full business model, it’s an entire business model, business in a box. I’m actually impressed with myself on that one just because it’s nothing special, it’s just stumbled upon something that’s working really, really well and it’s scalable. Again, it’s something that I’m actually developing right now and just specifically for POFU live. I’m going to do a scaled-down version of it for a product that we’re going to we’re launching with some other like co-collaborators.
It’s more of an entrepreneurial type of product instead of just an internet marketing product, and we’ll give you guys details as we get closer to the launch of that. Again, it’s a collaboration with some other other entrepreneur consultants and professionals and stuff like that, not just internet marketing stuff. I think we’re going to have a scaled-down version of it for that. but the version that I’m going to be teaching at POFU live is about how to scale it into where it’s pretty much like a hands-off business, almost, almost hands-off, but something that you can build quite a portfolio of your own assets which is great guys because even though I’m expanding my own agency and then we’re building another agency as a sister company of Semantic Mastery, working with clients is a pain the ass and it’s tough.
What I found is the prospecting side of things, I’ve got that nailed down pretty good now. We’re getting a lot of leads coming in, but that the sales part is incredibly difficult. Guys if you think about it, the reason why is so many … I deal mainly with contractors, but so many small businesses period and local business owners get hammered with marketing pitches all the time, and the problem with that is how do we cut through all that noise, like how do we rise above everybody else to where we’re not just looked at as a commodity. I’m finding it incredibly difficult.
We have a lot of unique value propositions that we’re bringing to the table and yet we’re still having trouble making sales, and so this alternative method that I’m working on developing right now puts us in a much higher position of authority position of fuck you with potential prospects because we can show results in advance, but they’re our own assets that we’re going to maintain and control, which is it’s really incredible. That leaves the power to us, right? It leaves the power in our hands as the consultants and as the agency owners, the providers, that sort of thing. Again, I can’t reveal too much about it here. If you’re in the mastermind, you know a little bit about what I’m talking about.
I’m going to be talking a lot more about it tomorrow on the mastermind webinar. If you want the inside scoop before POFU live, come join the mastermind. Otherwise, you have to come join us there at the live event to get the full training. Take it away Adam.
Adam: Well, and I was just posting the links on the page for everybody. I just want to say I mentioned it at the beginning, but if you’re new to Semantic Mastery and this may be your first or one of your first Hump Day Hangouts, first of all thanks for watching. I know a lot of people watch it on the replays, literally thousands of people check it out, following the actual live stream. Thank you for doing that and you can always find the links in the description or on the page if you’re watching the live to grab the Battleplan. That’s the first place we suggest, you start with Semantic Mastery, pick up the Battleplan. It’s worth the price of a couple cups of coffee and the value behind it is a hell of a lot more than that.
Then if you’re looking to take things up a notch, as always we want to let about our mastermind. I can’t say enough good things about masterminds and this is ours, so I’m really going to talk about. If you’re ready to take things up at local digital marketing, you’re ready to pump things up and get things going and start growing your business, then that’s the place to be. Like I said, links are below, check it out and join us when you’re ready.
Adam: Go for it.s
Bradley: Okay, so we did a webinar with Eric Christopher, otherwise known as Erock for the G hypnosis protocol. We did it on Monday last week. I don’t think we had the replay available last Wednesday. Adam if you’ve got that link available and you want to drop that on the page. It was a really, really good webinar. Guys this obviously was a webinar at the very end which was a 2-hour webinar, there was a pitch, but the first for it for a product and it’s fantastic product. Whether you’re planning on buying the product or not, I highly recommend you check out the webinar because the whole first hour of it was essentially prospecting in sales training.
Well, more about sales psychology than anything, but what’s interesting about it is so the training is phenomenal. For a free webinar guys, I’m telling you it’s work that. Any of you guys trying to sell services to local businesses, do client work, that kind of stuff, just go watch the webinar. Whether you buy the product or not, again I don’t care. I would encourage you to do so, but honestly it doesn’t matter just go watch the webinar because it’s got some seriously good training. The reason I’m talking so highly about it is because what’s funny is, and I said it during the webinar with Eric.
I was like, “Man, I wish you would have presented this webinar to our group five months ago because for the last five or six months, my salesperson has been really banging his head against the wall trying to refine our sales process for our agency,” and what he’s found out through trial and error throughout all these months now is exactly what Eric was training about on the webinar in the first hour on like what is working now for approaching business owners to provide. It’s not as easy as it used to be to sell services to business owners, right? You’ve got to court them, almost like you’re courting a woman and he talks about this for the whole first hour, and it’s exactly what we have discovered through trial and error on our own in the last five months.
It could have saved us months and months and months of effort if we had just been presented with this training from Eric five or six months ago. Again, I’m hard head and as I’m sure a lot of you guys are too. Sometimes I listen to others and I’m like yeah, I’m still going to do it my way and I still go through trial and error just to end up to the same conclusion, so that may have been the case even if I had seen the webinar, but it’s interesting because it was good to see reassurance that his business is very successful.
For his method to be exactly what we’ve ended up finding again through our own discovery that that is what works, again you guys could save yourself a lot of headache and a lot of trial and error by just watching the webinar, so highly encourage you to check it out. Okay. Is that it? Can we get any questions?
Marco: Yup.
How Long Do You Typically Wait To Create RYS Stack For A New Site?
Bradley: All right guys, here we go. Well, they filled up quick earlier, there weren’t many comments on the page. All right. Sam is up. What’s up Sam? He says, “How long do you typically wait to create an RYS stack for a new site?” Do it right away. I don’t have any issues with doing it right off the bat. Is there an RYS stack less effective if it’s added too early? I don’t think so, but Marco what do you say?
Where Can We Find Semantic Mastery’s DIY Keyword Research Gig?
Bradley: There you go shorten, short and sweet. Jeff’s up. He says, “Happy 200th episode.” Thank you Jeff, appreciate that. He says, “You mentioned a done-for-you keyword research gig in one of the last Hump Day Hangouts. Where can we find it so we can give you more money?” I’ll plus that again if a good, love that attitude. Adam or Marco is that available yet for sale?
Marco: We don’t have the product added yet because we’re adding another product into our … Guys we just keep trying to improve it, trying to make it better, and trying to decide which product we should offer ahead of whatever, but we did offer three at like half price last week. Three people took us up on it. One of the orders has already been delivered. What we’re waiting on is the two other people to give us, everybody called it their niche. All we need is your niche. We don’t need just a ton of keywords, we don’t need you to do any of the research.
We just need to know what the fuck you’re working on and then we just go and do it, and I’ve incorporated as a matter of fact since we last talked and Adam I have to get that to you for the person that ordered the drive stack. We’ve incorporated near me term research …
Bradley: Awesome.
Marco: Into all of our keyword research that we’re already doing. If what we were doing before weren’t enough, we’re doing more.
Bradley: That’s awesome.
Adam: How about this? Hey Marco, I realize it put me on the spot here, but could we open up one spot for him since he was kind enough to ask and if we got time, we could turn it around for him in like a week?
Marco: Yeah, let’s do it.
Adam: Sounds good. All right. I didn’t see the name … Oh Jeff, yeah if you want to message support and include, make sure it’s from your email and your name on there and I’ll hook you up with the buy button that you can use.
Marco: It’s our 200th episode, how can I say no?
Bradley: All right, look I paused the screen for a minute because I wanted to just point out why the near me keywords are so damn important guys and so I’m going to show you live example of something here. All right, so this is the case study that I had set up for the local GMB Pro Course and I want you guys to see this, okay. This is for the last 30 days for this Mario’s cab service, the taxi company in Charlottesville. Look what the primary driver of traffic is to his GMB, to his Google Maps listing guys. They’re near me keywords. You know why the primary driver of traffic and engagement to his listing are near me keywords? Because we target near me keywords in the GMB posts.
I mean again just for a month, he’s had 134 maps impressions and 62 actions which is damn near 50%. Think about that, so that’s really, really good and that’s why if you guys are not targeting near me keywords, you’re nuts, you’re missing out on a shit ton of traffic especially now with the mobile first indexing or mobile index first I should say. Okay. All right, we’re going to keep moving, but yeah that’s why the near me stuff is really, really important.
How Do You Start Building Your Own Rank And Rent Video Business Using VLS?
Designer framework says, “Hey I signed about video rank and rent. I am better off start selling the service to clients with VLS.” Okay, you must be video lead gen system. “First I will go to try to land 10 clients and try scaling it with what you said.
I don’t have one client in my resume, so I can’t scale if I don’t have proper systems that I’ve implemented in my head. I would build IFTTT tiers after I land clients.” Yeah. I wish I don’t know your name, but you what I would recommend to you is pick one niche. Okay guys, I recommend this all the time, but I mean this guys. Pick one industry, one vertical, one niche, target that, get good at that okay because again you just need to do keyword research one time, right? The keywords are going to remain the same in every location … No matter what location you’re in, there might be some slight variations which you can determine those variations if you use Google Trends and set your geographic targeting, then you can determine if there’s slight variations of keywords, but most of the time there’s not guys.
Once you learn in industry, you’re pretty much going to have the same set of keywords or search queries all the time. Remember, location modifiers as part of the search query is becoming obsolete guys. It’s not entirely yet, but it is becoming obsolete. It’s being phased out because of mobile first index, right? Because of GPS enabled phones, it’s no longer needed to add the local modifier. Now unless you’re looking for something in another location which is why it’s not going to entirely go away, but the vast majority of local searches now do not contain the actual location modifier, right? Again, I’m seeing that over and over again through GMB insights data, right?
The reason I’m telling you this because if you target one industry you can build a themed YouTube channel for that industry for that client type, that business type. Then you can theme your networks for that, right? Then you got all the research done, you can develop sales messaging and sales copy for selling this service. You’ll know from talking to the same type of business owner over and over again what’s important to them. You’ll know what their customers need or what their customer value is the things that their customers expect from them, the types of hot buttons in the keywords and the things that are important to that business.
You’ll learn all that stuff so that you can craft your sales message specifically to that industry which makes you like a boutique provider, something that differentiates you from everybody else that just will work with any business that will work with them, which again it’s going to require a lot more work on your part because you have to study, you have to research, you have to learn all this new every time you got a new business type. Okay. Then with that, once you’ve got all that research done for that one particular industry type, get a PLR video or have a couple videos made so that you have a couple different versions of it, right? You can do that on fiber with a minimal investment.
It’ll cost you more than $5, but for a small investment, you can end up with two or three or four different versions of some nice-looking videos that you could use for lead generation or rank and rent, right? Then what do as you start targeting easier target, so suburbs of larger metropolitan areas guys. Target suburbs, target some longer tail keywords, stuff that you’re going to be able to rank for somewhat easily, and start building your own that you just start ranking for. Go pick a target city, generate all the location information within a specific radius, then target each one of those locations, use a good tool that can help you poke those keywords really quickly. We recommend Live Rank Sniper which is Peter Drew’s tool.
That’s a great tool for poking keywords, but test all those keywords, then you’ll come back, you’ll have an idea of which areas are the easiest to rank for. You should have some good results and then you can start contacting people to try to rent those videos to. Here’s the other thing. Don’t try to just run out one singular video for a set price. I always try to do package deals, right? My point is like if you do what I just say … By the way, we have a service inside of MGYB that will do this for you if you don’t have all the tools and everything else. It’s called the video carpet bomb. Again, Randy James came up with that name. He’s doing a similar service on a larger scale.
This is a smaller scale version of it, but my point is you can use like the video carpet bomb method for 20-mile radius of all the keyword appended to the location information for all the locations in the 20 mile radius. Let’s say you end up with, I don’t know, 120 keyword plus location combinations, poke all those keywords and you end up with 25 ranked keywords, and that’s not uncommon. We run that VCB or video carpet bomb campaign all the time because we use that as part of our prospecting process or prospecting and sales process. We run it all the time and it’s not uncommon for us to end up 20, 25 and 30 videos ranked in a specific radius around the target business, right? Now you have that you can present to a potential prospect all in one lump sum.
You could say look I got 20 videos here ranked for keywords in the areas, in your service area if you’re dealing with a service area business and say I can rent you all 20 of these videos for, and you name your price, right? The reason why I’m telling you to do that is because I know there’s a lot of people out there that tell you to go run out single videos for $5 a month and good luck to you. If you can do that, by all means do that. I’ve always found so much resistance for that kind of pricing. Even if you can show that it’s actually producing a lot of traffic, I’ve still found resistance on that.
I just like to do that what the easy route which is like I said run a poking tool like that, generate all these results, and sell it as a package deal because when you go to a business owner with 20 videos ranked and you ask them for $5 a month, that’s a lot easier for them to comprehend or for them to accept than one video for $500, right? Again, every situation is going to be different guys, but the way that I’ve dealt with contractors typically that’s what I found works well, and the last part of that is, here’s the thing guys. You can go out and spend a lot of time optimizing one particular video for a tough keyword that yes was very likely going to generate a lot of results, a lot of traffic, a lot of maybe perhaps phone calls, link clicks, that kind of stuff.
My point is you run that, you get 20 videos results that are ranked. Those are videos that ranked with no effort other than just running the tool or buying a campaign from us, right? You didn’t have to do anything and you’ve got results. With that, you can sell that result and let’s say, I mean for me I’d sell it for a lot cheaper. I might do 20 videos for $250 a month and I know some of you might think I’m crazy, but I’m telling you that’s how I retain clients because I don’t beat them over the head with pricing, right? I might do 20 videos for $250 a month. Here’s the thing, the next month, I’m going to run the same campaign again, right? Even though they might still have out of those 20 videos, 12 of them might still be ranked.
I’m still going to run that same campaign all over again and I’m going to end up with another 20-ish or so videos ranked. Some are going to be for different keywords that didn’t rank the first time, that makes sense? Some are going to have two videos now ranked for the same keyword and I’m going to keep doing that every single month. The client might be paying me $250 a month, but every month I’m going to run that campaign again, so over time they’re going to have more and more keywords coming, right? I’m saying that’s how I like to sell that service now. I used to do the whole singular video thing when I did it for video production companies. The problem with that is it’s a pain the ass to maintain those video rankings long term.
Every time they start to slip or they fall off page one, then you have to answer to the client, right? Whereas if you do this method, which is where it’s like a churn and burn, I don’t like churn and burn for web assets, but for videos, it seems to work really well because every month you just refresh the campaign. You run the campaign again and you end up with a new set of results. Sometimes you’re going to have overlap, same result. Sometimes it’s going to be new results, but that way you’re constantly giving that client new data, like here’s more results, here’s more results, here more results. I’m not saying only charge $250 a month. You can charge whatever you want, whatever the client is willing to pay.
I’m just saying that is a way that I’ve found you retain that customer for a lot longer because now every month they’re seeing that their reach is expanding if that makes sense, right? Again, this is all stuff that you can outsource. You can hire this right off of MGYB.co and you don’t even have to do the work. You can just go out and sell the which is what you should be doing because you don’t make your money in fulfillment, you make your money in selling it, right? Anybody want to comment on that. I know that was a long-winded answer, but that was a great question and for anybody trying to do the video rank and rent stuff, it’s getting harder to do, and so I’m just trying to impart some of what I found to work better. Okay. Anybody? Okay.
Marco: I agree 100% with your Bradley.
Can You Upload A PLR Video With Images Only?
Bradley: All right, well thank you. All right. “About the PR videos, can I upload videos with images only?” I wouldn’t recommend that. This is not 2010 anymore, those old-school like Animoto is probably way better now, but back in the day, they used to just be images with some background music like splash images and stuff and like. That used to work but the internet users are so much savvier now, they expect more. If you’re trying to get away with just image slideshow videos, you’re probably not going to convert very well. That means they’re they’re likely not going to fetch much of a rental price or a lease price if that makes sense. Okay.
What Price Is A Video Rent Out?
“What price is a video rent out?” That’s going to really depend on a number of factors.
As Marco always talks about like what is a lead worth to a client or to a prospect, what is the lead worth to their business, what is the average a customer value or contract value or lifetime value of that customer, and then you can base it upon that, but what you need to do … I’ll tell you I still have some videos up with the local video production company that I was doing a lot of wholesale SEO video. They call it the video boost, excuse me. In fact, they even trademarked that name which was crazy, I didn’t know that you could do that, but anyways. I was doing it for a $100 a month per video, that’s it a $100 a month per video.
They were charging $250 a month per video to their clients, so they were making a $150 off of me when I was only making a 100, but they were out selling it. I wasn’t selling it, they were selling it. Could I have gotten more share? I could have, but at the same time, I would do this what I just mentioned to you, I do it with them. Also they would send me a work order and say okay we just did this new video this, they opted for the video boost program, here’s the keywords that they desire and I would go do my own poking campaign based upon their keywords, plus the locations that they said that they wanted. I would come back with a report and say okay here are the keywords that I can rank for you.
They would go back and relay it to him and come back and say yeah they took you up on the offer. I would have three videos that I would ran out for say 150 bucks or 200 bucks or something like that, right? Again, it’s all going to depend on what you’re doing guys. It depends on the industry, it depends on what they’re typically used to paying, it depends on how many leads the videos are generating. There is no set answer for that, okay. I prefer to keep it on the lower side guys though because like I said, I like client retention. If I can get a client willing to pay me $200 a month and he stays with me for four years, that’s a hell of a lot better than getting a client to pay me $500 a month that only stays with me for three months because they get tired of paying that much.
Does that make sense? For video stuff guys, so much of the time it’s really not that difficult, it really isn’t. Anyways, we’re going to move on. Sorry, I spent so much time on that, but I thought that was a good question for anybody trying to start a rank and rent business. Scott, “Thanks buddy.”
How Do You Create Your Own Team When Doing Some Local SEO Service?
Jason says, “If you had to do an entire local SEO strategy by hiring partner only, who would you use for each step? What if you couldn’t use any of your own team? Just trying to get ideas of partners you believe in or how you think when trying to execute on a high level? Someone gave you a 100k and said let’s smash this vertical and local and you weren’t using your own team, how would you go about making it happen?Who would you call? Why would you choose that partner, et cetera?” That’s a really good question Jason. I would have to think on that. The thing is besides my partners who I haven’t trained because they were all experts in their own right regardless, when you say our own team, our team has been trained by me or by Marco or by Hernan. They’ve all been trained by us, right? My point is if I couldn’t use my own team, what would I do? I’d hire a virtual assistant and train them and then they’d be my team. Does that make sense? I mean that’s all we’ve done. Again, I didn’t train Adam and Hernan and Marco and Chris, they’re all my partners, so I didn’t train them, so they are my partners.
Yes, but you’re asking like what would I do if I didn’t have my own team, I would still just like I did with my own business, right? I was a solopreneur for several years and then I learned how to finally outsource and start delegating work, and that’s when I started building teams and next thing you know I hooked up with my partners here at Semantic Mastery and we started building teams together. I would probably have still taken that same approach. As far as is there any other person in this industry that I would partner with specifically for local, I don’t know it. Again, I have to think about it. What do you guys say?
Hernan: If I can chime in here with what … There’s like the partnerships are hard, right? There’s a weird thing that we have here at Semantic Mastery, I’m not afraid to say it because I have had some failed partnerships.
Bradley: Me too.
Hernan: Partnership is really, really hard, but with that said, I think that at some point you need to draw the line, Jason. Here’s the thing, if you want to get a partner that will help you smash a local marketplace, you will need to have the confidence that the guy could actually do it, so that takes time, that takes building and takes a lot of networking or B, you will need to hire a rock star because otherwise you’re doing everything yourself if that makes sense. For example, I was on a mastermind earlier today and one of the guys is like his sole purpose is to have great ideas and then he goes out and find rock stars, right?
He finds like truth in people and he says okay guys this is the idea, go kill it and if those people make more money, he was saying if those people make more money than I am, I don’t care because they’re out there killing themselves and I’m not doing anything, right? I just had the idea. It’s all a matter of how you approach the business. I think that partnerships, they can be great if they work out. They take a long time to put together and then also if you want to hire a rock star, that also takes time and it’s 100% about networking I think.
Marco: Yeah, this one is hard, right? Because how do whether or whether you can trust or what that person can do until you’re actually there. We’ve had failed partnerships. I mean …
Bradley: Yes, we have.
Marco: We’ve bond with some when we go outside of us five and believe me, we’ve tried it over and over and over again, which is why we’re no longer doing partnerships. We’re doing JVs wherever possible and if it fits into whatever model it is that we’re trying to do. This is a difficult question. Someone comes at me with 100k and I’m like, “Okay, why are you coming to me. I mean what’s involved in? What are you expecting for this 100k?” To smash a vertical might not be enough. It might take a bit money than a 100k. I know you just threw a number out there, but I mean you have to gauge the expertise of the person whether that person is ethical.
Had we done our due diligence, I don’t think the five of us would have ever met because we would have found out before we paid for that mastermind that we shouldn’t be paying for the mastermind we were paying for.
Bradley: Yeah, you’re right.
Marco: Then this would have never happened, we would have never met. I like the question, I’d like more time to think about it and come up with a really awesome answer, how do you smash a vertical local. Partnerships of course, but yeah building a team, team building. Go ahead.
Adam: I was going to say I’m going to take it a step back because I think Marco your insights on how to actually execute would be interesting to Jason and everyone else too. I would take a step back and say that Marco talked about the mastermind where we met so did Hernan, and Jason it’s one of those things where you want to be ready when the opportunity presents itself. If somebody comes to you and they have 100k in hand, now is not the time to find out how to build a team and it’s not that it can’t be done because this could be an excellent chance if this is a real scenario. Sometimes things work out and people say oh man that was so lucky or like Marco mentioned, how did you guys end up coming together that’s so much luck.
It’s not fucking luck, it’s putting yourself over time in the right positions, so that it can happen, you’re allowing it to happen. None of us if we just sat around in the basement fucking around on our computers all day, we would never have met each other, but we put ourselves in that position. There are two things here, like that building a team, that’s a skill you want to develop no matter what you’re doing and especially if you’re trying to build a business, that is going to pay off, so start today if you haven’t already and then networking. I think as far as I know each of us are a part of some other groups outside of our own or some masterminds, and it’s not about sniping information or something like that.
Bradley: Yeah, and as Adam said luck is when opportunity meets preparedness, right? That’s number one and that’s absolutely true. It’s funny but we did an interview with CT. Fletcher several years ago now, but he was talking about everybody talked about the overnight success that took me 40 fucking years to build and that’s usually the case. We always hear about people that are credibly successful when it always sounds like it’s an overnight success story, but typically it’s because they’ve been toiling away for years, honing their craft or their skill or whatever and then opportunity presented himself and they were ready, they were prepared, right?
That’s what makes it look like an overnight success story, but as Adam just said and there’s a quote that I don’t know if you guys heard me flipping, but I was flipping through the pages of my best self journal because my best self journal, there’s a daily quote, and one of them that I just saw a couple days ago was from Mark Twain. It says the secret of getting ahead is getting started, right? That’s just the case. If you haven’t started building a team yet, start today. Honestly there’s another cliche I guess or saying that can be thought of like as glass half-empty or glass half-full and that is a year from today, you will have wish you started today, right?
A year from now you will have wish you started today or the other way to look at that a year from now, you will be glad that you started today, right? It’s up to you as to how you want to do that. As far as the partnership thing, I totally agree with what Marco and what Hernan said as well. I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was a teenager, I’m not kidding. I even had businesses before I was a legal adult and I have had multiple partnerships and every single one of them has failed, except for my partnership with Semantic Mastery,, my partners here at Semantic Mastery. That’s the honest-to-god truth, like every partnership has failed except for this one.
I would recommend if you were going to do partnering that first of all you have some very, very clear expectations and what the roles and responsibilities are for each partner. Make sure all that is set out ahead of time because otherwise, resentment can build very, very quickly. Trust me, we know. Again, that’s the other thing, like is if you were going to partner with somebody, the way I look at it nowadays guys and I mean this, even though I’m coming from a technical background and doing SEO and doing all the fulfillment execution of everything, right?
I’m telling you if I had to start all over, I would focus my energy entirely on prospecting and sales and building teams and that kind of stuff and hiring out professionals to do the work because the money is made in the sale, not in the fulfillment, right? Learning how to do all this technical stuff is great if you’re curious, but honestly you’re not going to make money learning how to do SEO unless you can learn how to sell it to or partner with somebody that sells it for you. If I was going to start all over I would focus more on the prospecting and sales side and the team building and scaling part of the business, the higher level stuff and I would hire out that the technical fulfillment, right?
You could do it the other way. If you want to be the technical person and do the fulfillment work, if that’s what gets you excited, then hire a sales person or partner with somebody that will do that part of the business because I honestly, it’s very rare to find people in this industry that are good at both. They do exist, but it’s rare, right? It’s rare that somebody’s really good at the technical side of digital marketing fulfillment and also really good at prospecting in sales and managing a team and building. It’s very rare to see that. Typically people are good at one particular thing, right? They’re either good at technical stuff or they’re good at people skills and prospecting and sales or they’re good at managing people, but not all of the above.
How To Estimate A Reasonable Price Per Lead For Managing A GMB Listing For Plastic Surgeons In Large Cities?
Again, find out what your strengths are and what the things are that you desire to do because again if you’re working on stuff that you desire that you actually like doing, it’s not going to feel like work. Okay. That was a great question, that might be the winner by the way because it got all of us talking for 20 minutes. You might be the winner. Anthony, “Thank you for all the great knowledge.” You’re welcome. He says, “What would be a reasonable price per lead for plastic surgeons in large cities via us managing their GMB listing, like what Marco described for personal injury a few weeks ago using our call center number and their listings? Gracias.”
It’s a really good question. What I would look at as just a benchmark as like a starting point would be look at some of the paper called exchange networks like RingPartner for example. I don’t know if they have cosmetic surgeon calls in there or not, but I would go look at paper call exchange networks on Google and just start site going through some of them. Essentially what they pay out are like wholesale lead charges because you’d be selling leads to a pay per call exchange like RingPartner. I’m just explaining how RingPartner works guys and that’s just one of many, but essentially you become a publisher, the digital marketer that gets leads to call through your phone numbers because of the stuff that you have published on the web, your digital assets.
They call in, if it meets the specific criteria, then you get paid a wholesale lead fee because then RingPartner sells that at a retail cost to the people that are their advertisers, right? The people that buy the leads, and so there’s publishers and advertisers. The advertisers buy, the publishers market, right? Find out what the pay per call payout is for cosmetic surgery stuff leads for these pay per call pay per call exchange networks. That would be a good starting point and remember that those are wholesale lead costs. You can obviously mark those up, so that would be my suggestion. Marco what do you say?
Bradley: Very good.
Marco: For cosmetic surgery. I mean that’s a high ticket item, right? Plastic surgeons, I mean that’s a lot of money because a lot of these people are repeat. Once they get in, they’re going to want this done, they’re going to want that done. Over time, it’s the customer value is really high for plastic surgeons. In personal injury in big cities, 250 to 300 bucks is the going rate and that’s what you should be selling your calls for. If you can get higher, that’s fine, but you’d be pushing it because they’ll get some leads that aren’t really worth all that much which they then sell to somebody else at a lower price than they paid you plus a percentage of whatever. They have all sorts of arrangements and lawyers are like that.
I’m sure that plastic surgeons might be that way, although medical field is estrange to me. I’ve worked in it and it’s still an enigma, but plastic surgeons, it shouldn’t be any less than that $200 to $250 per qualified call of course, and you establish the parameters. It could be a minute and if they stay on for that long and they mentioned anything about anything that’s relevant to the plastic surgery, then you’re in, they got to pay. Make sure you’re recording everything, right? Make sure that you’re tracking everything, but not just the number.
Guys if you’re thinking about just the number, then you’re going to miss out on money because there are people that are going to visit the website, there are people they don’t do their research, they might fill out a contact form, they might call from the website, they might ask for driving directions and going and actually visit and ask for an appointment. That way if they’re called by, just drop in. We see that happening all the time with the attorney. Me, I’m a control freak when it comes to this. You have to give me total control over everything so that I can track everything or I’m not going to work, I’m not going to do it, it’s just not worth the time. Now if you let me into everything, into all the numbers and you’re transparent, I know I can trust you, then we can work.
Bradley: Yeah, and the other part of that is like Marco said look at AdWords average cost-per-click for the keywords that you’re going to be targeting because like, for example, personal injury they might pay 200 CPC, right? $200 cost per click and it might take five clicks for it to be a lead, right guys? One click doesn’t equal one lead, right? It’s very rare that one click equals one lead. A lot of times it’s multiple clicks, like you get three clicks for three to five clicks for one conversion. A conversion would be somebody submitting a contact form or calling, right? If a phone call is a conversion action or, excuse me, a conversion goal, so my point is not every click.
With $200 being average cost per click, if that were the case in the city that you’re targeting and it takes five calls on average for it to be a conversion to become a lead, then you’re talking a $1000. Now I’m not saying you sell a phone call for a 1000 because not every phone call is going to convert to an actual like lead either. What I think what Marco said is very correct. You can use some of those metrics like average cost per click for it for Google Ads and also like pay per call exchange network pricing for wholesale type lead stuff, okay.
Why Is It That A Local Term In A Less Competitive Niche That Ranked Number 1 On SERPs For About A Year Drops Its Position To #10?
Another one from Jason. He says, “I had an article of mine ranking number one on a local term for almost a year, now it’s in position number. It doesn’t appear like the competition got any fiercer. If anything, pages with no links or ranking higher than me, what are the possibilities and how do you think about something like this?” Well, likely Jason it’s a traffic issue, and I don’t know that to be the case. There could be a number of variables. It could be an inbound link issue which would be like a penguin type filter, although if you’re still on page one it’s likely not the case. My guess with such limited information in this question is that it’s likely a traffic issue. In other words, you’re not getting a lot of traffic to the page even though it’s on page one or when people are clicking through.
In other words, you’re not getting a lot of click-throughs from the search results page to your web page that could be part of it. It could also be that if you are getting the click-throughs, there’s not much dwell time or they’re bouncing, they’re landing on the page, but they’re not dwelling on it very long or they’re clicking the back button. There’s are a number of things that I’ve seen you can be ranked number one position, but if Google users that are searching for that particular search query are always clicking on number two and number three and number four, Google’s going to start moving you down because you’re not getting the click-through from that search result page that the other listings below you are getting, so that could be how do you fix that.
Guys engagement metrics are huge right now and it’s only going to continue to get stronger because they’re harder and harder to spoof than traditional SEO tactics, right? I mean I would say it’s probably an engagement thing, but it could be a number of variables. There’s a lot of stuff that could be analyzed to determine what could be going on. Any comments on that guys?
Marco: Yeah. It should be in the search console. You should have this website totally in search console so that you could go in and look at the clicks, the impressions, and the CTR. You can look at the page and see any the action that’s taking place on that page. You should have a heat map to know what people are doing on your page, but I think a really good one is CTR, right? The click-through rate in search console because that’s telling you the impressions that Google is giving you for that keyword and then how many times people are seeing that and clicking on them.
If that’s really low, then that means people are not liking what you’re serving them right at the beginning, so you need to go and take a look at what your competition did with their SEO title and their description which is the first thing they’re going to see about you and how you can go and adjust your copy, so that you get better CTR so that you get better traffic and you have to make sure that the person who’s landing on is what they’re looking for because you don’t want them going to that page, and then having to go back to the homepage go into another page, having to come back to the home page, plus all that clicking back and forth is a negative signal now. It’s not a good signal.
When a person goes in and doesn’t find and they click back to the home page and then they go to another one and they come back, Google will kill you for that now as Bradley was talking about it. It’s not just engagement but it’s dwell time on the page and whether people interact with whatever it is that you’re serving them. There’s a bunch of things that you could do, but the very first thing, make sure you have this in search console so that you can take a look at the shit that Google is giving you to fix the numbers, the metrics and you can start working with that.
Bradley: Yup. Yup, absolutely and for those of you that are like well I don’t even have analytics on my site, how does Google know. Well because Google Chrome is the biggest, most used browser on the planet and if anybody’s viewing your site on Chrome or from a Chrome browser, Google knows what they’re doing. Google also knows if you’re using WordPress. You probably have Google font code in the header of your WordPress site, the HTML header of your WordPress site. Google has code on your site, it knows what’s going on. I’m telling if they’re doing searching from a mobile device, it’s an Android, guess what? Google knows exactly what’s going on on your site, right?
As Marco said, you should have search console installed anyways, and so that again more code. Google knows what’s going on site. Engagement signals are a huge ranking factor. Okay. If you stack your content properly through Silos structure and keyword theming and that kind of stuff, then you shouldn’t have issues with people clicking back and forth trying to find the correct content anyways.
What Are Your Thoughts On Google’s Quality Ratings Guide And How It Affects Rankings?
Jordan says, “How much do you feel Google’s quality readers guide actually affects ranking?” I don’t know, I’ve never read it. Probably should but I haven’t even looked at that yet Jordan so I can’t comment on that at all, sorry. Anybody got any comment for that?
Hernan: Not me.
Marco: I mean my only comment is that since we do so much RYS and the frame, we don’t really care about rating the quality or whatever. I don’t know if it’s intrinsic if it’s by default, but Google just likes it and so we don’t set off a lot of the negative or a lot of the red flags that other people set off that have people coming looking and seeing what it is that you’re doing. I don’t really pay attention to that honestly, and the latest update, it was like meaningless to me because nothing was affected.
Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, I experienced the same thing. The only reason why I knew there was an update is that we had some people in the mastermind group talking about it and I was like oh we had an update. That’s funny. Nigel where’s your shameless plug question? I was looking on the … Oh shit, I already closed it. When I was logged in under the Semantic Mastery brand page, I noticed that there was one comment that Google determined to a spam and it won’t allow me to even open it. I don’t know why they do that now, but anyways that might have been your question. I’m just wondering what you had that was a shameless plug if that was what got caught up in the spam filter, anyways.
Marco: I have it in Facebook. He dropped it in my chat because he didn’t want to miss out on the possibility of winning but …
Bradley: Do you want to read the question then?
Marco: It’s really long.
Bradley: Oh, well we’ve only got four minutes.
Marco: Yeah.
Bradley: All right, we’re going to have to keep moving in. Nigel sorry buddy. The long questions especially Dan just in going to work so, sorry I couldn’t get to you sooner.
Marco: Yeah, come back and drop it in there for episode …
Bradley: 201.
Bradley: Oh 208, okay.
Marco: 208 and we’ll be giving away more good stuff in 208.
Do You Plan Of Offering A Service On New Methods In Verifying GMB Pages?
Bradley: If it’s a type of question that can wait, then yeah wait until then, drop it again. Okay, Mikah is up. Mikah said, “Have you or are you considering a service or offer with the new update to GMB verify methods? I read from the X blog that it’s a major update, so it might be a game-changer for lead gen.” I haven’t read. Mikah I’m not even familiar with what you’re talking about. Again I’ve over the years seen so many predictions about stuff that get a lot of people worried about what if and I learned a long time ago to stop what-iffing in the digital marketing world because you’ll like scare yourself into inaction, right?
In other words, if you’re always worried about what could possibly happen and this and that, then you’ll never take action because you’re always going to … Again, I’m not picking on you Mikah I’m just saying I haven’t got caught up in that. Until it affects me and what I’m doing for generating lead gen properties and verifying profiles and all that, when it starts affecting me, then I’ll worry about it. Until then I’m not going to worry about it so I have not considered that yet Mikah just because it’s not something that is affecting my business yet. Good question but I again I don’t have an answer for you right now.
Does Using Multiple Drive Stacks Be Beneficial In Ranking A Niche Site?
Jim says, “Hey everybody, I have a niche site that is very difficult to rank. If I were to use multiple drive stacks, would it be more beneficial to point both at the money site or have stacked to point to stack one like stacked stacks, I like that, or one would one be safer than the other? Thanks for the feedback.” That’s a good question for you Marco.
Marco: Yeah, but this would be like a really good question for RYS Academy Reloaded. I don’t know how deep I want to get into this.
Bradley: Well, answer it as if you were trying to explain to somebody that wanted to buy drive stacks from the store.
Marco: Yeah, but there’s actually a better way to do this. I mean both of these would be effective. I’m not worried about safety when I’m doing drive stacks because it’s safe on unless you run the script in every folder in the same drive, so stacking stacks yeah or both at the money site, yeah. I mean yeah, this is yes and yes. Money site yes, drive stacks yes, stacking stacks yes, but there’s actually a better way.
Is It Okay For A Real Estate Agent GMB Page To Link Out To From The Office To The City Halls Of The Cities?
Bradley: Okay. I would also link to like silo headers and stuff like that too, but anyways so we’re almost out of time guys. I’ll try to run through … Let’s see. “Quit this house, good day and thanks for helping us out here. It is appreciated. When creating a GMB site as a real estate agent, is it a good idea to link out from my office to the city halls of the cities I work in? I don’t know if linking out is a bad idea? Thanks in advance.” Well, I mean I don’t know about linking to them, unless it makes sense in the sense of the content, like in the context of the content if it makes sense to link to them, then yeah.
Again, five years ago it used to be where you’d link out to .gov or .edu websites that were just somewhat remotely related to whatever topic it was and that was supposed to like pass authority back to your site. I stopped doing that years ago because unless it’s relevant, don’t link to it, period. You’re going to hurt your overall quality score for the page if you’re linking the stuff that’s non-relevant. Now is it relevant because you service those areas? Yes, but what’s a better way to do it? Create driving directions, right? Create geo posts, geo posts that talk about the area, give historical facts or landmark facts or popular places.
Especially for real estate agents, you could just talk about that the location and the amenities of the location and the attractions of the location, all of that stuff is completely relevant. Linking the city hall, I don’t know. If it’s relevant within the context of the content, yes but I would recommend again you could just go look at a Wikipedia page for the location you’re talking about and pull snippets of content from there to create a geographic post about that area, and then create driving directions from that area to the real estate office or vice versa the real estate office to that area and embed that driving directions map on that page.
That makes more sense than just linking out to the city hall, unless like I said there’s a reason in the context of the content of that post or article body to actually link to there. Okay, I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m saying only do it if it’s relevant. Okay. It’s a good question. Okay, we are out of time. Only got a couple questions left. I’ll stick around for two more if you guys can or if anybody can.
What’s The Best Place For RYS Stack?
Lee Witcher, “Best place for an RYS stack on a website, on GMB, both C.” Both.
Marco: It’s always C.
Bradley: Or D, all of the above.
Marco: All of the above, yup.
What Would Be Your Battle Plan If You Had To Start From Scratch Today?
Bradley: Yup, absolutely. Okay. Joe Dara, “Marco if you had to start from scratch today, what would be your battle plan? Adam, Bradley please time to chime in, thanks.” What would be your business plan I guess Marco?
Marco: My battle plan would be the Semantic Mastery Battleplan. I mean that’s why we developed that for people just starting out.
Bradley: Yeah.
Adam: Yeah, I got some context, so I had a quick chat with Joe about this. I was telling him and just in terms of he’s got the groundwork laid out, he’s able to rank a site, he’s built it himself, but then he’s taken the longer approach where it’s going to take longer to do the rank and rent model for lack of a better term. My advice at the time was to figure out what services you can offer to clients and although you hear us talking about it and we mean it, we say we’re eventually working towards not having as many clients or clients at all, but that in my mind is the faster to replacing your income, is to market your services to clients in the meantime build out your own properties.
Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, well honestly Joe I know you’re a new addition to our mastermind and is Joe coming to POFU live?
Adam: Yes.
Bradley: Oh dude, then your question will be answered at POFU live Joe. Honestly, the plan that I’m working on right now is the exact plan that I would do if I had to start all over knowing what I know today. The plan that I’m going to be revealing at POFU live is exactly what I would be doing, but it’s a hybrid model between lead gen and client work. It’s a hybrid model and that’s why I would do it that way because there are some benefits to lead gen which is maintaining control, but they’re also like Adam said benefits to client work because it’s immediate income. If you can combine the two in a way which is exactly what I’m working on, then you’ve got the best of both worlds and that’s exactly what you’re going to learn at POFU live.
Anybody in the mastermind I already talked about this, well two weeks ago on the mastermind webinar, some of the members were asking because I was giving a real high-level conceptual explanation of what this method is and people were like well if you’re just going to give us out of POFU, how are we going to get it. Well, no, I always talk about mastermind has privileges. POFU live is in October, but what I’m going to do is we’re going to package up the training for that particular method and mastermind members will get that access to that training. That’s going to be my holiday present to the mastermind members, so sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas you guys will get that training, but POFU live members will get it first, okay. All right.
Is There A New Update One Must Take Action For An IFTTT 2 Tier Network That Was Bought 2 Years Ago?
Wood wine boxes, that’s Roger is it? I can’t remember your name. I know who you are though, I’m sorry. He says, “I bought an IFTTT 2-tier network two years ago, do you have a touch-up service to make any updates changes to existing or new properties?” I believe we do. I would just contact support. Right now it’s still under SerpSpace, so support@serpspace.com you should be able to just request that. It’s just going to be a custom order, so they’ll quote you a price or whatever. I’m pretty sure that that’s something that we can do for you, as long as we can still get access to the account, so that’s the problem. That could be the problem, okay.
Actually probably the way that we would do this would have you add Google my business manager or, excuse me, the brand manager and all that stuff so that we can still access the Google properties without having to log in if that make sense, so just contact support. Okay. All right, last one. Yeah, this would be the last one. It looks like that’s it anyways. Yeah, all right, cool.
How Do You Scale A Lead Gen GMBs Into Multiple Niches In The Largest City Of A Small Country Of 5 Million People?
I would use pseudo businesses like pseudo brands, right? I don’t know if you’re in the US or what, but I mentioned this I think last week. You could use doing business as like DBAs, so you have one company but you have multiple DBAs, right? Each lead-gen asset has its own DBA. That’s the way I would do it, although I highly recommend … Guys again, do whatever business model you want, but I see what you’re saying you’re in a small country, so I don’t think you’re in the US obviously. You’re saying you want to target multiple niches in the largest city and as I just mentioned on this webinar alone, that requires a lot more work than doing one niche across multiple locations.
Again, you might be in a unique situation where that’s the way you have to build your business or structure your business and if that’s the case, so be it, do what you got to do. What I would do is I would do … Again I don’t know how your laws work, your corporate laws work, but I know here in the US, I would set up my marketing agency or I’ve got multiple companies. It’s not just all under one company, but I would have a shell company essentially and then I would have a bunch of DBAs who are doing businesses as for each one of the lead gen assets, that’s how I would do it. Okay. “Would you use keyword plus modifier for the GMB listing or something else?”
No. Well, first of all I would just use a generic name, a pseudo-brand name or whatever, but if you’re doing lead gen where you’re selling the leads, then you can likely keep your own like pseudo brand name. If you end up doing like a lease of the property to a contractor or excuse me to a business owner, then I would recommend rebranding it and I’ve been doing that somewhat recently quite a bit where I’ll rank a GMB listing and then rebrand it for somebody. I’ve been able to do that successfully without triggering verification, so that’s something that you can do. I don’t really ever recommend putting the keywords guys in the GMB titles anymore just because it looks spammy. One of the things that can trigger a verification sooner, okay.
“Which WP lead gen templates would you use?” Probably none. I mean honestly, I’m getting away from like the last five GMBs that I’ve verified. I’m just using the Google my business website. What’s the point of going out and buying domains and building WordPress sites and paying for hosting and dealing with all the updates and plugin, all that shit when you don’t need it? If you’re just going to be focusing on Google, just use the Google my business website and by the way, the Google my business website you can use that as your primary website in Bing for Bing local and Yahoo local and everything else guys. I mean save yourself the time and headache.
I mean if you want to use WordPress, then fine, just find a good lead gen template from one developer and use that same one over and over again because it’ll make you more efficient in your fulfillment. Okay. “What does your prospect to sell those leads and phone calls to local businesses?” Well, I use prospecting funnels which we teach in mastermind, it’s the only place you can learn that from us anyways. We will be targeting contractors and multiple niches, thanks in advance. Okay. Well, got to go guys, I’m already late. Thanks everybody for sticking around. Did we decide who’s getting the RYS stack?
Marco: Yeah, I like that question where we all chimed in about partnering so Jason. Send a ticket to support@symantecmastery.com.
Adam: In view, awesome Jason. You have taking the page, send something into support and we will hook you up.
Bradley: Awesome. Yeah Jason, that was a great question man. You got all of our gears turning, so very good question, you deserve a drive stack so happy 200th guys. We’ll see everybody next week. Don’t forget mastermind members tomorrow, we have a webinar where we’re going to get into that strategy a little bit more, so see you then. Thanks guys.
Hernan:Yeah guys.
Marco: Bye everyone.
Chris: Yeah thanks.
Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 200 posted first on https://healinghealthservicesny.tumblr.com
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