#you really wanna reduce waste your talking point should lead with

[x0401x]

Jeweler Richard Fanbook Short Story #5

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Iolite of Cloudy Skies

Iolite. Its Japanese name was “blue flower stone”. The gem was blue with a purple tint stronger than that of a sapphire and had a unique viscosity that made it seem as if it was coated with a bit of dew. The level of hardness was seven. It was called iolite when treated as a gemstone, but when treated as a type of mineral, it was also called cordierite. It was an eccentric stone, which also appeared to have a grayish brown color instead of blue depending on the angle that one looked at it. Etc., etc.

“What happened, Seigi? Your eyes are dead.”

“How can I put it...? Surfeit, I guess.”

“Haah?”

I couldn’t memorize the stones’ names. They were too many.

The client who left just now had come because they wanted to see many sorts of blue stones, so Richard’s treasure box was packed with a great variety of blues. There were sapphires, of course, and also tanzanites, lapis lazuli, blue chalcedonies and this iolite.

Half a year before I had started working part-time in Etranger, the image I had of gemstones was limited to things such as diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds, I believed. Now I knew about the existence of a stone named zircon, which shone in the same way as a diamond, and also knew about the spinel, which was red like a ruby, as well as that the color of sapphires was not just blue, having a wide range from purple to yellow, and I had seen transparent jades that were impossible to tell apart from emeralds.

If I had as much knowledge of minerals as Tanimoto-san, I would’ve managed to sort stones inside my head by the differences the in chemical composition of each, but unfortunately, I was unfamiliar with such things, and I currently didn’t have enough enthusiasm or willpower to study them. If I were to explain figuratively, it felt like going out to hunt for clams at a beach, and when you innocently dove into the lake, you’d see the Mariana Trench spreading out below. It was a beautiful world, thus also too wide and too deep. And endless. To a terrifying extent.

When I told him roughly this, Richard laughed, the depths of his throat trembling with giggles. “It is not as if you are aiming to obtain a GIA or FGA qualification or anything, right? Isn’t it all right for you to observe as much as you like?”

“That might be the case, but...”

I found myself thinking that it was a waste.

After all, I’d be on my knees listening as Richard went, in earnest, through the trouble of introducing all kinds of stones to me one by one. I often heard from my senpais that “job hunting is a connection for people”, so I felt sorry that my connection with stones remained scoreless. Regardless, it wasn’t like I was suddenly going to get any smarter.

As I said this, Richard laughed again and beckoned me with a hand gesture. He then took something out of his suit’s pocket. One of those subdivision vinyl bags that I’d often see when he was handling jewels in the back room. It seemed there was an iolite inside. There was a label stuck to the bag packed with absorbent cotton, and something was written on it in horizontal letters. “Viking sunstone,” it read. Vikings? Like the ones that you’d imagine wearing horned helmets, carrying axes and coming from the sea on a ship? As I asked for confirmation, the jeweler nodded with a “precisely”.

“The words written on this label are associated with the former ‘purpose’ of the iolite. In the past, people used iolites as sun stones.”

“‘Used’ them as ‘sun stones’...?”

I didn’t understand anything from A to Z. What did that mean? For starters, why was gem of such a cold-looking color made into a stone of the sun?

Before I even had a breach to ask, the beautiful shopkeeper began talking, a smile ghosting his lips, “You might already know this, but a portion of the people residing in the current Britain are descendants of those who went through the Norman Conquest that began around the ninth century - in other words, of the Vikings. They were famous for having the skills to travel long distances, which was unusual at the time, so Seigi. If you were someone who travels the sea for long periods, how would you know your way?” Richard asked me.

A means to know the cardinal directions in the open sea. So it was a situation where there’d be no piece of land to act as a mark. The only thing I could use in such a case was a magnet. No, wait. Richard had said earlier that it was the ninth century. The compass would be invented only much later. I recalled memorizing that this was the invention that triggered the Age of Discovery back in high school for history class. If so, I recalled the words on the label. “Sunstone”. Yeah, it connected.

“They knew the directions by using the stone of the sun?”

“Good for you. Exactly. Isn’t it clear?”

“K-Kinda!”

“Then, what about under cloudy skies, when the sun is not visible, Mr. Enlightened Part-Timer?”

Speaking of which, the weather changed easily at sea. I had also heard that England was a country where the skies tended to be overcast. Bad weather must be frequent in those coastal waters. If the sky stayed cloudy for three or four days, what should I do? Was there nothing more that could be done at sea?

When I made a puzzled face, Richard smiled as though he had hit the nail on the head, his white hands displaying the iolite under a fluorescent light. “For instance, let’s try to put a mark on any of this iolite’s faceted sides with ink. Another one on a different side. On sunny days, we would record in which direction we can see the sun from one of these two points at given times, and on cloudy days, we would look for parts where the two points overlap. When doing so, since this stone can detect even the faintest light, we would be able to tell the sun’s position,” he said.

“So we can know the position of light with that stone...? Then couldn’t it be any other stone?”

“Light refracts. If it were passing through thick clouds, the human eye would find its shine in a different direction from the sun’s actual position. Iolites acted as polarized lenses, so to speak. By using this stone, the sailors could tell the correct position of the sun. Yet the most famous sunstone is not iolite, but a type of refraction stone called ‘Iceland spar’.”

A polarized lens. Now he was talking about physics? But I did remember the stuff about light refraction. Got it; so that was why it was a “stone of the sun”.

“I don’t get it very well, but I feel the gemstone romance from it. I like that kinda thing,” I said enthusiastically, Richard giving me a calm smile.

“You do get it. Just as you said, you ‘don’t understand stones very well but like them either way’. That is exactly why your eyes were open, so you thought only about how far your destination was and felt your teeth set on edge at it. You mustn’t expect to be able to understand everything overnight. Go steady, without rushing. Do not waver at the impatience stuck back-to-back to your ambitions. That is different from having no one to depend on due to not knowing where you are headed. The hardest times are probably the ones when you have no idea where you should go, but you know the exact position of the sun.”

So, in short, I knew exactly where I wanted to be?

While I remained quiet, Richard shrugged and added, “Of course, this is a metaphor. Even if little by little, the stones should definitely be leaving a trace inside you. Aren’t you supposed to be treasuring this instead of chasing after what goes away?”

Lastly, Richard threw in the trivia that, in the world of power stones, the iolite was said to be a stone that showed people the “right direction”. Taking the backbone of it into consideration, that was indeed a convincing talk. But more than that...

“It’d be great if you were by my side forever.”

“Hah?”

“You’re an expert at noticing what’s troubling other people, aren’t you? I really think you’re a handy guy, like a compass. Aah, ‘the world’s most beautiful compass’, huh?”

“Those are quite irrational words, on top of being illogical. You were born in Japan, raised in Japan and aspire to become a public servant of Japan, so why are you calling an English jeweler a ‘compass’?”

“Well, I don’t plan to ask you about how to prepare for the public servant exams, but I can rely on you when I run into bigger problems, right?”

Richard sighed with a face of thorough dismay. I could understand how he felt. This was like a child in nursery school saying, “It’d be great if my teacher could always be there to help me out.” Long story short, I was acting spoiled. Even though he was my superior at work.

“That’s right; about the custard pie that today’s costumer brought, it looks like it’s quick to expire. Wanna eat it? I’ll make some tea.”

“If you would. Aah, the sugar...”

“Holding back on it this month, right? I know.”

“Help me with half of it. The amount of sugar in it concerns me.”

“Leave it to me.”

This guy was truly good at leading the mood around, and the same applied for the not-too-straightforward way that he phrased himself when recommending gemstones to the customers. Apparently, he thought I was feeling down.

I cut the crunchy pie in half while the tea leaves boiled, then shared it with Richard in the reception room and we both ate it. Covered with powdered sugar, the pie was a dangerous white little thing, as the colorless powder could scatter around from the pie’s surface just by us breathing on it a tiny bit, so the snack time turned into a moment of silence. I felt like laughing at the much too surreal sight several times, but if I happened to cause a big damage to the beautiful shopkeeper’s high-grade suit by doing that, my pay would be reduced. In the end, I ate the pie entirely while looking at the wall.

On the way back home that day, as I looked up at the night sky, I thought about the Vikings of over a thousand years ago. It was said that they were after new lands. What about me? Where was I headed? Would there ever be a day when I would fall into a philosophical concern, like, “I have no idea where I’m trying to go”? Perhaps Richard too? I insolently prayed that the stones may help us out at least in times like those.

Stars were beginning to twinkle in the purplish-blue night sky. There was no doubt that the stars appearing in the sky had not changed ever since the Vikings’ era. Thinking about that as I walked, I mistook one of the streets I should have turned. I had the feeling that I heard Richard’s voice, telling me to mind at least my own steps. I get it, geez.

I decided to wait patiently for the benefits of the stone. It was best for something like that not to happen, but there was no guarantee that both of us wouldn’t lose our ways at the same time one day.

#the case files of jeweler richard #jeweler richard #housekishou richard #housekishou richard shi no nazo kantei #nakata seigi #richard ranashinghe de vulpian #richard #jr short story collection #tsujimura nanako #novel #my translation

[nahimjustfeelingit-writes]

Creed Imagine:

There is a sex tape with Adonis and his girl released to the internet.

Warnings: Smut.

This will most likely end up being two parts because I’m trying to shorten my imagines so that I don’t burn myself out. This is the first Adonis Creed imagine that I have done in a long while. This was a request from my girl @therealmrsmbjordan​

Adonis Creed’s ex-girlfriend of two years, Y/N, is now dating celebrity personal trainer, Jamal Anderson. The new couple were spotted in LA entering a red Audi R8 after celebrating a mutual friend’s birthday during a dinner party at Yamashiro; a Japanese restaurant in Hollywood...

Anger thrummed through Adonis’s veins while reading a Shade Room post about his ex girlfriend. Paparazzi took 10+ photos of Jamal and Y/N boo’d up on the hood of his car with their tongues down each other’s throats. The last photo is a picture of a visibly wasted Y/N giving pap’s the finger like she always did whenever she was seen with Adonis out in public. 

What did she expect? You were just dating a professional athlete; a celebrity about five months ago. What really has molten anger rolling through Adonis is Jamal’s hands all over Y/N’s ass, face, and titties. Each and every photo Jamal has his hands on the warm, sweet flesh of his ex. Adonis grits his teeth and clenches his fists. That’s where his hands should be. He should be the one stroking her silky brown skin with his calloused hands. 

“You wanna finish this last session out, Donnie, or do you plan on being on your damn phone?” 

Adonis cut his dark brown eyes at the son of his father’s trainer. Tony ‘Little Duke’ Evers' tall, lanky body came into view with an annoyed look on his face, “Who’s the one that has a fight coming up? Not me.”

“Chill, Unc, I’ve been training for two hours,” Adonis says with an abrasive tone, “Some shit just came to my attention…”

“Shit that can wait. I got two new guys that I need to train; guys that you want to promote, remember? J’Leon Love, Charvis Grant…” 

“You’re not about to keep talking to me like you own me or some shit,” Adonis stands to his full height and intimidating weight making his uncle look like a five year old kid, “Like I said, I have something more important on my mind right now-

“This,” Tony shows Donnie the post on Shade Room about Y/N with a smirk, “She moved on, so can you.”

Adonis kisses his teeth, grabbing the front of his Under Armor shirt to wipe sweat from the tip of his nose. Yeah, clearly she did move on. Didn’t take her long at all to hop on some new dick and leave Apollo Creed’s legacy in the wind. 

“Just forget about that bitch and let’s put in some work,” Tony slips adonis his Hayabusa T3 boxing gloves in black and gold that are snatched from his hands, “J’Leon is a hot-head just like you...work with him for a little while, see if he can keep up with a Creed.”

“J’Leon better keep up,” Adonis responded before giving his uncle a sly smirk, “I can use a human punching bag right now with how pissed off I am.”

“Don’t make the boy go home second guessing becoming a pro boxer,” Tony playfully jabs Adonis in his eight back abs before blocking a lead hook from Adonis that would have caught him in his ribcage. Adonis strolled back to the boxing ring that is 3 to 4 feet from the ground and 20 feet wide with the Delphi boxing Academy logo centered in the middle. Ducking his body, Adonis climbs inside between the ropes,  approaching J’Leon sparring with Macky, one of Tony’s good friends. 

“Remember, one step at a time, one punch at a time,” A sweaty faced Macky says to J’Leon, “You usually do so well, what’s up with you today, young man?”

“Less talking, more sparring,” J’Leon starts delivering crosses and uppercuts to macky with all of his might, a wheezing sound escaping his mouth with each punch so that he doesn’t fatigue himself. Macky shoves J’Leon back with his Everlast punching mitts, causing him to stumble and blow air through his cheeks.

“Ayo, J’Le,” Adonis holds his arms out with a confused look on his face, “This is how you train signed under me? You’re supposed to be an elite fighter, right? Get up.”

J’Leon looked daggers at Adonis while standing back up, the 168 lb super middleweight boxer shaking out his arms. Adonis is much bigger than him, a super heavyweight at 215 lbs. He chuckled at J’Leon’s fierceness before getting into his orhtodox stance, his left foot and left hand in front of him. Tony places his mouth guard in his mouth before Adonis circled J’Leon in the ring. Adonis hits J’Leon with a quick jab and a left hook, J’Leon’s shoulders squared too much leaving Adonis room to hit him. 

“You ain’t see that coming did you?”  Adonis says with a slight lisp from the mouth guard, “Try and hit me back, J’Le, come on.”

J’Leon came at Adonis with a left body hook that Adonis easily deflected while bouncing on his toes. 

“You want to be a champ like me you better come at me harder than that, nigga,” J’Lean started charging Adonis with sloppy jabs, Adonis swiftly dodging them before hitting J’Leon with a hook. The outer ring grew crowded as they snickered at J’Leon’s anger stricken face. 

“Something is definitely on your mind, man,” Adonis takes off one of his gloves to help J’Leon off of the ring floor but he refuses, standing on his own two feet. 

“Look, I was in the same position as you, J’Le. I remember walking in here five years ago and challenging Danny Wheeler to a fight. He had me on the floor just like you with the keys to my car in his hand.”

J’Leon looked like he wanted to kill Adonis but instead he walked away and out of the ring.

“Next time I won’t be so easy on you then!” Adonis yells after J’Leon’s retreating body. 

“I don’t know about this one, Adonis. He seems too weak for Creed Promotions,” Tony whispered to Adonis.

“That sounds like something you said to me when I came asking for help almost five years ago, remember that?” Adonis reminds Tony, “Charvis seems to be taking my advice though.” 

Both Tony and Adonis watch Charvis practice on one of the speed bags, finally doing it the proper way. 

“I’m gonna do a little more for my session before I leave, let me know how it goes, Aight Unc?” 

“Yeah, I’ll let you know. You're coming in tomorrow afternoon, right?”

“Of course! I’m supposed to be doing an interview with sports illustrated.”

Adonis exits the ring himself and decides to use the new set of punching bags from Everlast. Adonis circled the Powercore Dual Bag before delivering quick jabs and rear crosses. He exhaled when punching and striking, the heavy hissing, grunting, and exhaling coming from his core, sweat rippling over the chiseled peeks of his eight pack. He tightened his core while breathing before going back at it with jabs that he would deliver to his opponents body in the ring. 

“Ayo, Donnie,” Cory, Adonis’s personal trainer and nutritionist walked over with his phone in hand, “Why is Jamal Anderson talking shit about you to TMZ?”

“The fuck are you talking about?” Adonis says with sweat flying from his skin with every powerful blow of his fists to the bag. 

“Well, he got your name in his mouth,” Cory played the video, holding it up to Adonis’s face for him to see, “This nigga is bold.”

Adonis entertained the video with his dark brown eyes but as soon as his name popped up his jaw muscles tightened painfully, almost to the point of shattering his molars. 

Adonis Creed...I ain’t worried about that man. His loss, my gain right? Whatever he didn’t do I’m doing for her. He fucked up. All he had to do was appreciate the beauty in front of him instead of worrying about being the heavyweight champion of the world. It’s okay...I’m taking good care of Y/N.

“Hmm,” Adonis grunts angrily, his eyes blazing, “Jamal need to shut his big ass mouth before I break his fucking face...have that nigga speaking through a wired jaw.”

“Y/N is messed up for letting this dude talk shit about you like that. Y’all have history, she needs to put him in check,” Cory says while placing his phone in his Nike track pants.

“She cries for some attention from me that’s all,” Adonis moves on to a speed bag while Cory follows. He started hitting the bag with his fingers to control the pace of the bag and get used to the rhythm. He hit it in small circles with a right-right-left-left rhythm, standing square in front of the bag.

“You think this is her way of telling you she wants you back?” Cory watched Adonis’s movements.

“Yep. That’s Y/N though,” Adonis stops the bag with both of his hands, “Ima give her a call when I leave...she needs to hear what I gotta say,” he says while repeatedly hitting the speed bag again.

__________

Painting her toenails a dark purple, Y/N mouthed the words to Kehlani’s song toxic. She flexed her pretty toes before leaning forward to blow on them. Home on a Friday evening with no intentions on going out. She knew if she went out she would be cornered by paparazzi about the recent photos that surfaced with her and Jamal Anderson. She was drunk, Jamal is handsome, and she missed the male attention. 

Her phone was currently flipped over and buzzing with notifications and phone calls on her bed. Adonis left her the luxury loft they both shared and moved into his own. If she wanted to end things he didn’t want to be in the same place as her and he wasn’t going to kick her out. As pissed off as he was he still thought about her well being and left her his old place while he purchased a new, much smaller one. 

The master bedroom didn’t feel the same. It didn’t smell the same. She missed Adonis’s Nautica cologne attached to every piece of fabric. She missed hearing him in the early mornings doing push-ups on the floor near the bed, she missed watching him cook healthy; high protein meals that Cory sent him via PDF, shirtless with just a pair of sweatpants on and bare feet while cooking. She missed his deep, raspy voice calling her his cinnamon swirl and running his hands through her curls. She still watered his Aloe Vera plants because he used to love using it to reduce pain and inflammation on his skin from a fight. 

Yes, she missed all of these things but it came with Adonis being too busy for her, making decisions like moving to LA without consulting her or saying she’s being ridiculous and overreacting about his female fans being too touchy feely with him. Maybe she was being a little bit dramatic with breaking up with him. In the beginning, she felt good. She liked the little bit of freedom but now she craved for him. Her and Jamal aren’t in a relationship but he is going around telling everyone about them. She saw his TMZ post, that’s why she’s been avoiding him all day. 

Buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz

Y/N’s phone couldn’t stop shaking on her bed. Picking it up for the first time within the past couple of hours, Y/N sees that it is Adonis calling her. She hesitated but eventually Y/N answered.

“Yeah,” She spoke with no enthusiasm.

“What’s up.” He greeted her so casually through the phone. 

“I should be asking you that since you’re calling me.”

“Okay, fair point...your new nigga...he got a lot of mouth...you hyping his head up or something?”

Y/N rolled her eyes shut, “No...that’s just how Jamal is. I thought you said you wouldn’t let words get to you anymore? If he’s just talking why does it matter, Donnie?”

“It matters because he’s making me look like a fucking joke. You didn’t take long to move on I see, makes me think you planned this all along,”  He spoke with malice.

“I didn’t plan anything, Donnie. It’s been months since we’ve been together DON'T sit up here on this phone acting like I’m out to get you or something!” 

“I can’t fucking tell, out here letting this clown ass nigga stick his tongue done your throat and grab you up and shit.”

“We’re not together, Adonis. I can do whatever I want with whoever I want. My mouth, and my body doesn’t belong to you anymore.” 

“I call bullshit but I’ll let you have your moment...so when are you coming back to me?” 

Y/N went wide-eyed, “Excuse me?”

“Let’s stop fucking around, girl. I know you miss me...did you let him hit?”

“Adonis, please,” Y/N put one of her hands up as if he were in front of her.

“Did you? Just answer the question.” His voice appeared calm but she knew he was shaking with fury. Adonis didn’t like that what used to be his was his no longer. Seeing Jamal touch on her and kiss on her made Adonis feel like he was robbed of one of his trophies or his championship belt. 

“Yeah, we fucked...twice,” Y/N finally spoke up with her voice smaller than she would have liked.

“Hmm,” That same deep, ragged grunt he always did when he was enraged about something was loud in her ear, “So that’s what we’re doing, huh? Okay…”

“Donnie, don’t do anything stupid it was my decision, I chose to sleep with him, just cool off. I’ll have a talk with him tomorrow about what he said to TMZ, okay? I’m not even going to deal with him anymore.”

“I’m done talking about it, Y/N.”

He cut her off coldly. She snapped her lips shut, hurt in her eyes at his abrasive voice. 

“So now you have an attitude with me? Yeah, I do miss you, Donnie, but with that comes your lack of respect for me as your girl. You didn’t care about how I felt when it came down to moving here, your career, and some of the wild shit your fans do! Jamal was there for me, we had sex twice, it was good, real good, and I’m not gonna sit up here and lie! What do you want me to do? Sit up here and cry, cry, cry every fucking day?! Don’t call me on this shit when you didn’t even think twice to pack your shit and leave me!” 

“Girl, please, I gave you everything, I was there for you when shit went down with your family, I did nothing but respect you, the fans, the lifestyle, none of that shit mattered. And I already heard that you fucked Jamal… you let him have all of that? Like I wasn’t just up in it five months ago? He AINT me, Y/N. He AINT stepping up for shit.”

“Oh, my God,” Y/N groans, “I’m hanging up. This is a constant circle with you. I don’t owe you any explanation, Adonis. What we used to do, we don’t do anymore. Goodbye-

“Don’t hang up on me,” He spoke with a warning.

Click 

______________

A stream of air passed through Adonis’s teeth sounding like a barista steaming wand foaming milk in a Starbucks or the type of sound snakes make in warning their prey. His fists clenched strongly, almost popping the vessels in his arms. His cock-diesel frame was charged up and ready to knock Jamal out. Adonis picks up his bottle of Don Julio 1942 drinking it down in big gulps, the taste of warm oak with hints of caramel and toffee lingering in the back of his throat. 

This was usually what him and Y/N did on a Friday evening whenever he was home; drink and fuck. The fucking he wouldn’t be doing but his ten inches of steel was pulsating in his sweatpants. The girthy length is curved downward and creating a large bulge. Usually, Y/N would be on her knees between his legs saying ooooh, Daddy, how did you know I wanted some dick in my mouth? Giving him a sloppy suck that had him busting fat load after fat load down her throat. 

Adonis pauses his music on his phone, his entire bedroom going silent before grabbing his laptop from the opposite side of his California King. Opening it, Adonis pulls up his folders, scrolling through and finding the one that he would NEVER bring himself to delete. Home movies was the name of the folder. Adonis double-clicked it, his eyes scanning the screen while each file popped up in rows. Pictures, videos, and audios occupied the folder. Dragging his pouty bottom lip between his teeth, Adonis started from the beginning. 

File number one...

“Mmm,” He made a deep moan of appreciation at the image before him. It’s Y/N arched over their old bed that she was currently sleeping in alone. It didn’t have the grainy effect that webcam photos tend to give since Adonis used his Canon EOS 5D camera to take them. Her beautiful pussy and asshole were waiting for him like she was serving him dinner. That goddess of a body she has, all natural and velvety smooth. Clicking through there is a video of her rubbing her clit from behind while Adonis angled the camera to get the best pussy shot.

“Oh, you’re ready,” Adonis says in the video, “you’re gonna be walking a little different when I’m done, baby.”

“Please fuck me, daddy,” Y/N moaned sweetly while rubbing her clit from the back, “Come and fuck me…”

Adonis brings the camera above him so that he could record himself fucking Y/N from behind. The view showed off Adonis’s lips down to his defined pectorals and eight pack abs. He used his free hand to give Y/N’s ass a playful smack before pulling down the front of his black sweatpants, his downward curved dick springing free while he moved his hips from side to side. 

“Baby…”she called out to him, reaching back to feel him, “Please...I want you inside me...I want you- OH GODDD.”

Adonis was sinking deeply into Y/N’s tight and creamy pussy with a hissing sound escaping his mouth. 

“Yes, baby,” Adonis lightly slaps each ass cheek; left cheek, right cheek before gripping the flesh and stroking her slowly, “Mmmmh, yes...you always feel so good.” 

He started stroking at a moderate pace, Y/N’s ass softly clapping against his brick wall of a body. 

“Fuck,” he says, biting his bottom lip, “Mhm,” Adonis grabs one of Y/N’s ass cheeks, grinding his hips against her ass, “I feel you baby...you’re gonna cum for daddy?”

“Unh,” She moans, her body shaking beneath him, “Yes, Daddy!!”

Adonis pauses the video, his body overly heated from the Don Julio and his dick as stiff as concrete between his thighs. With a deep grunt, Adonis frees his dick from his sweatpants before grabbing the warm, solid, flesh to stroke it lightly. Even with her not here she still got his pipe iron-hard and his balls tight. Adonis clicked through a few photos before spotting one that he cracked a dimpled smile at. This video needed to be seen through and through. He clicked on it, a visual of Y/N sitting on the kitchen counter with her legs spread wide and limber, naked body illuminated by the light above the oven. Adonis was recording her playing with her phat clit, rubbing it in tight circles. 

Grabbing his 1942 Adonis takes a big sip from the bottle while his other hand swings his dick from side to side. The counter is covered with all types of treats and sweet toppings. Whipped cream, peach and strawberry preserves, caramel syrup, fudge syrup, honey and what looked like a birthday cake. This was recorded on Adonis’s 33rd birthday. They had just come from a night of partying and Y/N said she had something special for him at home that requires his appetite. The mess they made, the drunken sex, and the overall fun of it all has Adonis both angry and aroused. He really missed Y/N but at the same time he was beyond pissed that she would break up with him and then fuck another man that disrespected him any chance he got on social media. That’s right, Jamal is entertaining Twitter with the memes they created about Adonis.

-This nigga Adonis is punching the air right now! 

-How you let this clown fuck your girl?

-We’ll pay big money to see Jamal Anderson go toe-to-toe with Adonis Creed.

-He don’t like being called Baby Creed but I bet that nigga prolly sucking his thumb and crying in the fetal positon LMAO!

-Creed didn’t respond to this yet… 🤔 I wonder why.

-His shawty bad AF. Damn, Creed ain’t winning this battle. 

-Damn! So Jamal is putting it on Y/N better than Creed?!!! Embarrassing!!!

That didn’t even include the jokes in his DMs about the situation. It’s been a while since Adonis made a reckless decision. The last time he did that he ended up in a hospital bed with broken ribs, a ruptured kidney, and a concussion. He became increasingly distant from Y/N and Mary Anne, tensions rising in his relationships. Now, he was starting to feel that same foolhardy feeling while staring at his computer screen, wordless with rage. 

____________

Buzz buzz buzz buzz

Y/N’s phone is off the hook at 9:00 AM on a Saturday. She was still buried beneath her covers with her bonnet on and one of Adonis’s old t-shirts. Lifting her head from beneath the sheets, Y/N squinted her sleepy eyes around her bed, searching for her phone. With a big yawn that has her jaw muscles sore, Y/N finally finds it, picking it up to look at the screen. Her friend  and personal Esthetician, Ava, was calling her. She wondered what for. Y/N’s wasn’t due for another wax set until two weeks from now. 

“Hello?” Y/N flips over onto her back.

“Sorry to wake you, but, girl...you need to look at Twitter like NOW! They are talking about you and Adonis on a sex tape-

“Hold up… A WHAT?!!!!!!” Y/N is 100% awake now. With the mention of a sex tape Y/N nearly jumped out of her skin. 

“Girl...what’s going on between you and Adonis? Are y’all together? What?-

“No, Ava, me and Donnie aren’t together and what do you mean a sex tape?!” Y/N places Ava on speaker, frantically going to her Twitter app to see exactly what she meant. Sure enough, there is a trending topic about Adonis and Y/N. Multiple full length videos, clips, and pictures from a video that they made almost a year ago is out there for the world to see. Y/N gaped at her phone screen. Her nude body, Adonis’s nude body, the sex, the moans, and the nasty talk has her speechless. 

“Oh my fucking God,” Y/N shot up out of bed, pacing back and forth quickly, “Why would he do this?!!!!”

“You think Donnie leaked it?!”  Ava asked with a shocked voice.

“Who else would have?!! Wasn’t me!” Y/N spoke defensively.

Y/N does have copies herself on her laptop that she occasionally looks at but she wouldn’t have leaked a sex tape of them two unless they both agreed to it or something. For Adonis to do this without her consent pissed Y/N off. 

“Girl, you better call his ass right fucking now!” Ava practically yelled into the phone, “This shit is wild-

“Ava, I’m gonna have to call you back,” Y/N hung up the phone before Ava could even speak her last words. Y/N checked her inbox. Over 100 text messages and that didn’t even include notifications from Instagram, and Twitter. Checking her messages, she reads through a few from her friends.

Noel: Baby, I didn’t know you were this nasty!! Damn! 

Kristina: So are y’all back together then? What’s going on with this sex tape, girl?!!

Tiffany: EXPLAIN! Why did I wake up to my friend trending on Twitter!!! You making sex tapes and leaking them?!! Call me back bitch!!!

Joey: Wassup big head 👀

Jamal: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON Y/N! 

“Fuck,” Y/N says with a shaky voice. She stopped pacing, exhaling calmly before going back to Twitter. There is no way she wanted to look at the tweets directed towards her but the more she thought about it the harder it became. Scrolling, Y/N finds the full video of the sex tape. Sitting on the edge of her bed, Y/N watches from start to finish, her mouth agape and a warmth filling her chest cavity. Even through being pissed off about it, she is STILL turned on. 

Y/N sat on the counter with her legs spread wide, her fingers working her clit into an erect bud. Leaning back on her elbow, Y/N looked into the camera that Adonis panned around her. She grinned and gave him a wink before bringing her wet, cream covered fingers to her mouth to suck her mess off. Adonis’s deep chuckle came through on the other side of the camera before his hand reached out to grab the whipped cream bottle. 

“Lay on your back,” He says before stepping between her legs. Adonis places the camera on an elevated surface so that the side of Y/N’s naked body and his naked hips could be seen in profile. 

There are shadows in the video but there is no denying that big ass dick she used to fuck and suck on. That downward curve and those heavy balls called to her attention and watered her mouth the more she watched the scene unfold. 

“I love how your legs are spread like that...you ready for some fun, girl?” 

“Yes,” Y/N says while watching Adonis shake the whipped cream bottle. 

“Stick your tongue out for me,” He says while stepping in between her legs. Holding the nozzle against her tongue, Adonis squirts some whipped cream into Y/N’s mouth. She brought her hands up to rub her erect nipples while licking and sucking on the nozzle with a moan. 

“Mmm, you sucking on that nozzle like it’s my dick…”

“I want your dick in my mouth covered in whipped cream,” Y/N dragged her sweet tasting tongue across her upper lip, “Put some on my nipples, daddy.”

Hearing herself call Adonis daddy while watching that video made her shiver. She was supposed to be angry with him and not sexually aroused. 

Adonis squirts whipped cream on Y/N’s nipples before placing the bottle on the counter and leaning forward. His beautiful russet skin and the gold chain around his neck glowed from the little bit of light within the kitchen the closer he got to Y/N’s breasts. That long, curled tongue of his swirled around her left nipple, cleaning up all of the whipped cream in one swipe before sucking her nipple into his mouth. 

“Unh,” Y/N’s body arched while she ran her hands over the back of his head. 

Adonis dragged his tongue along the center of her chest before reaching her right breast and doing the same exact thing with his wicked tongue. Y/N’s head extended back, sweet, angelic moans filling the kitchen. Adonis sucked a little more before rising back up to grab something else. Back in view, Adonis has some raw honey in his hand with an actual honeycomb stick. 

“Yummy baby girl, look at you, laid out for me to do whatever I want, right?” Adonis twirls the stick inside of the honey before pulling it out and drizzling it all over Y/N’s front from her neck down to the top of her pussy, “I’m about to lick and suck all this shit off of you, spread your legs, girl.” 

Y/N spreads her legs, bringing her knees to her chest and sitting up on her elbows. With keen eyes, Y/N watches Adonis’s every move while his tongue swipes across both sides of her neck before grabbing her jaw  lightly to keep her still while he sucks on her flesh. 

Y/N could almost feel his lips tightly sucking on her neck and his wet tongue tickling her deliciously with every swipe. When he licked her throat Y/N moaned in unison with herself on the video. She stifled her other moans with a bite of her bottom lip. She hated the way he was currently making her feel after what he did. Who else would have leaked the video? Adonis is very careful and he wouldn’t disclose any information like that to a friend for them to leak it. Loud sucking came from the video and Y/N’s focus was back on that screen.

“Mmm,” Adonis continued to suck the honey from Y/N’s flesh all the way down to her pussy. He teased her outer lips with his tongue but he didn’t lick her clit. Biting her inner thighs now, Adonis grabs for more honey, drizzling it all over her pussy.

“Mmh, yes,” Y/N licks her lips, bringing a finger down to catch some honey to taste, “Make my pussy nice and sticky, daddy.” 

“This is just the beginning, ma, we still got other treats to run through,” Adonis takes his entire mouth to wrap around Y/N’s inner lips, no waiting whatsoever. She flexed her hips off of the counter, driving her pussy into his sticky mouth while palming the back of his head. Adonis’s strong arms trapped her and held her still while he angled her hips so that the light could catch him sucking on her sultry pussy. Her skin kept sticking to the counter from the honey on the surface and her ass cheeks were glued together from the sweet nectar as well.

“Just like that daddy,” Y/N reached down to pull her pussy lips apart, sticky, wet sounds filling the kitchen, “Oooh, right there...eat my pussy...Ooooo, yes, right on that clit.”

Her body shined with residues of honey and saliva. Adonis held one of her legs in the air to admire her pussy before dragging his other hand over it. 

“Grab that whipped cream, girl...yeah...now squirt some on this pussy...mmmh, yessssssssss, Good girl, so sexy, baby…”

His tongue wiggles against her labia and clit, whipped cream staining her inner thighs now from his sloppy head. Y/N’s head extended back, choked up moans directed towards the ceiling. 

“You just love to eat my pussy, daddy, mmmm!!”

Adonis didn’t say a word while he devoured her pussy like it was pie filling. Adonis pinched her outer lips together so that he could see how fat her pussy is before leaning down to kiss it softly. Her puffy, wet pussy called for the attention of his fingers while his tongue danced across her clit back and forth, up and down, and in circles. Her wetness made the loudest sounds ever. Three thick fingers deep in her pussy, Adonis jerks his fat dick at the same time. 

“Hold just like that, girl, just like that, look at all this cream...you know your pussy is already sweet, daddy doesn’t even have to tell you does he?”

“Umph!!” Y/N‘s legs came up in the air while Adonis rang her dry with his fingers. She squirted all over the counter top and it dripped to the floor over the edge. Adonis brings his fingers up to her mouth for her to suck on. He fucked her mouth slowly with his fingers while staring into her pretty brown eyes. 

“My dick is throbbing...what are you gonna eat off of me?” He spoke with a whisper in her ear, “You’re gonna make my dick a sticky mess?”

“Yes, with this,” Y/N picks up the jar of homemade peach preserves and heavy syrup that she created herself, “Let me down so I can suck that big ass dick.”

Adonis picks Y/N up from the counter bringing her down to her feet before him. She instantly dropped to her knees while Adonis grabs the camera to focus down on her kneeling before him. Unscrewing the mason jar top to the preserves, Y/N licks the rim before grabbing Adonis’s dick with one hand, bringing the jar of peach preserves down to the wide tip of his dick. It was chilled from being in the fridge, the cold glass sweating in her hand. 

“Goddamn, girl,” Adonis shivers when Y/N puts his dick inside of the jar. He braces the edge of the counter with one hand while losing control of his grip on the camera. His grip tightened on the camera the same time Y/N pulled his dick from the jar. Chunks of chopped peaches and heavy syrup dripped from his pipe and stained the tile floor of the kitchen. 

“Ooh, look at all this sweet, sweet goodness on your dick, daddy,” Looking into the camera, Y/N licks the side of his shaft with no hands, the tang and sugar seeping deeply into her taste buds the more she licked and licked. 

“Fuck, just like that girl, dick taste better doesn’t it? Look at you cleaning my dick off like a good girl, mmmm, that tongue…”

“This tongue?” Y/N sucks the preserves off of the tip of his dick before dragging her tongue down the underside of his shaft causing his dick to throb against her pointed tongue. 

“Yeah...that good tongue and juicy lips,” Adonis fists Y/N’s hair, “Suck my dick baby…look into the camera and show me what that mouth do.” 

With urgency Y/N draws Adonis’s dick into her mouth and starts sucking him with only her jaws doing all of the work. His dick was no match for her mouth. Y/N was trained well to suck all of that fat dick.

His moans, damn, Adonis loves it when Y/N really got into it like that, sucking his dick with so much passion and concentration. She thoroughly enjoyed sucking dick and now she was sitting with her thighs spread to cool her heated, wet folds and her tongue poked out like she was waiting for his dick to enter her mouth.

“Somebody is hungry,” Adonis chuckles, “grab that whipped cream and put it on my balls…”

Y/N grabs the whipped cream, getting back on her knees. Adonis holds his dick up while Y/N squirts whipped cream all over his balls. Tossing the can carelessly on the floor Y/N began to suck on his balls. Adonis jerked his dick, occasionally slapping her face with it. 

“Please stroke my dick, baby,” Adonis let’s his dick go for Y/N to grab, “you had my dick hard all night long now it’s time for you to make me cum.” 

Y/N blinked her eyes up at Adonis past his meaty, long pipe while drooling on his balls. He was close, the veins in his dick seemed to spring to life and thicken in her hand. Oh, she was about to drain him. Her mouth was back on his wide tip sucking the life out of him, aiming to wring him dry like a soaking wet rag. 

“Unh, this is where you wanted to be all night I can tell by the way you’re sucking me fucking dick, yes, baby, Unh Fuckkkk-

Y/N hummed with satisfaction when his thick nut entered her mouth. The noises from her sucking mixed with Adonis’s heavy breathing was like a sensual beat. The video seemed to skip and now Y/N was back on the counter lying flat on her stomach. Adonis popped the cap to the caramel syrup, tipping it over and squeezing some all over Y/N’s ass. She starts to make her cheeks bounce while Adonis creates sticky patterns all over her flesh and back. Y/N reached behind her to rub it in before arching her back. She sucked on her fingers to clean the caramel while moaning at the same time. 

“Look at that cream, makes me so fucking hard,” The caramel has Y/N’s cheeks sticking together, “that’s what I’m talking about.” 

“Unh,” Y/N reaches beneath her to spread her pussy lips open while shaking her ass, “That shit is sticking to my asshole,” Y/N giggles. 

Adonis didn’t say a word since that was an open invitation to lick the caramel from her ass. Y/N started thrusting her hips back, smashing Adonis’s face between her cheeks. Caramel stained his face and matted his facial hair but he kept on going. 

“Damn, Donnie, fuck.”

He lifts for air, before slapping her ass, his fingers sticking to her skin like adhesive. The only things they haven’t touched yet were the fudge syrup and cake. Y/N drags the cake towards her, using her hand to grab some of it and smashes it in Adonis’s face. He didn’t expect that change at all. Adonis stumbles backward while Y/N giggles drunkenly on the counter. She’s on her back now, clutching her stomach with her cake covered fingers. 

“You got jokes now!!! After I just ate your ass!!! This is how you thank me, Y/N,” Adonis pulls on her ankles. 

“Aww but you look so sexy with cake on your face,” She lifts up from the counter, attempting to sooth him by rubbing the buttercream frosting from his cheek but Adonis slickly grabs cake, smashing it on her face. Y/N writhed in his arms, both of them having a food fight with the cake all over the kitchen. They slipped as they ran around the kitchen counter before Adonis got the upper hand, pulling her to the messy floor. They were out of view for a second but the video skips again to Adonis pinning Y/N down to the floor with her back arched. 

“You wanna make a mess on daddy you better make a mess on this dick with this creamy pussy.” 

Holding the camera high above his head, Adonis spanks his dick on Y/N’s pussy before sinking into her with one long stroke. His free hand rubbed the frosting and cake pieces all over her round ass before stroking her at a moderate pace, relishing in her sweet cream coating his dick. 

“Cream all over daddy’s dick baby,” Adonis spoke roughly while looking up into the camera with his cake stained face, “this beautiful brown ass...my cinnamon swirl...show me how much you really wanna make my birthday special, fuck my dick.” 

“Donnie-

“I told you to call me Daddy,” Adonis reminded her. He sits the camera down, propping it up so that it could record him fucking her from below. All you can see is Y/N’s breasts bouncing, Adonis’s balls smacking her clit, and his hard dick going in and out of her pussy. 

“My daddy...my champ,” Y/N spoke breathlessly, “Oooh shit-

Adonis started fucking her hard from behind, something he liked to do especially when he’s riled up. He loved it when Y/N called him her champ, it boosted his ego and made his dick harder knowing that he is indeed the super heavyweight champion of the world. He was delivering heavy, G spot stimulating strokes that had Y/N trembling. 

“Talk to me, baby, tell me where I’m at?” 

“Big black dick is in my stomach.” Y/N whimpered. 

“Bounce that ass baby, bounce it,” Adonis grabs the camera to focus on Y/N fucking his dick, “You got that bubble butt on you, daddy’s favorite, you got my dick throbbing you know what that means, right?”

“Fuck me like that, daddy, ooooh God, mmm, yes, shove that big dick in my pussy ooooh God,” Y/N’s pussy slips off of Adonis’s dick, her squirt gushing out like water would when you untangle a water hose. 

“That’s how I always get you,” Adonis grabs Y/N’s arm, turning her around onto her back, “legs up...I want you to look into the camera...look into the lens like you have an audience…show them how daddy’s dick makes you react.”

Y/N sucked cake from her lips while staring into the camera with focused eyes. Adonis has the bottle of fudge syrup in his hands now, turning it over and covering Y/N’s chest, stomach, and inner thighs with it. 

“Legs up, girl,” Adonis commands. Y/N’s legs went up and out causing Adonis to shudder. The contrast of her pretty pink pussy against the dark brown of the fudge reminded him of a surprise chocolate with filling.

“This shit is so sexy...after this I’m licking you up and down,” Adonis rubs his dick back and forth over Y/N’s pussy lips before massaging her clit with it, “My favorite thing to do with you is go nice and slow so you can feel all of me.”

“Daddy, yess, you are in my pussy,” She kept her eyes focused on that camera no matter how hard she wanted to tear her eyes away to watch his dick beat her pussy up, “shit that Goddamn curve...that shit is hitting the bottom of my pussy,” Y/N’s mouth widened, “ooooh, fuckkkkkk you ain’t playing!”

All you can see is Y/N’s breasts slowly bouncing and her pretty face. At that moment, she closed her eyes, every feeling of happiness and ecstasy going through her immediately. She began to experience chills the more he fucked her deeply. He was stroking her A-spot, the lower part of her vagina. Adonis focused the pressure of his dick right there, never stopping.

“Ooooomigodddd,” She spoke all in one sentence, “His dick was bottoming out in her pussy the more his strong, toned hips met hers. That slow stroke has Y/N’s vaginal walls tingling around his dick, “Don’t stop, don’t stop you’re right there on my spot oooooo!!”

Adonis went fast with a few strokes before going at a leisure pace again. Sitting up on his knees, Adonis focuses the camera on his messy dick and Y/N’s creamy pussy. 

“Goddamn, baby, love seeing you get like this...mmm just how I love it...taking all of my thickness...daddy is about to cum…”

“Ahhhhh fuckkk!” Y/N tried sitting up on her elbows but the floor was too slippery, “Yes yes yes yes yes!!!” Y/N rubbed the fudge syrup into her skin like lotion before bringing her fingers to her mouth to suck on like a pacifier. With her eyes low and hazy, Adonis pounds her pussy desperate, his strong arms wrapped around her thighs while his dick burrows deep into the bottom of her pussy. 

“Fuck me...fuck me...oh yeah that dick is getting thicker fuck meeee.”

UGH YES,” Adonis held himself still inside of her while his dick emptied his cum, “just draining my nut,” Adonis pulls his dick out, his cum oozing from Y/N’s pussyz. Y/N reached down to spread her pussy lips open while Adonis got a close up of the cream pie that he created. 

“How does it look?” Y/N asks with her soft spoken voice.

“Sticky sweet,” Adonis says before the video ends. 

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#creed ii #Creed 2 #creedimagine #adonis x reader #adonis creed

[kickingitwithkirk]

Regina Coeli, Regina Infernum

Pairing: Boyking!Sam Winchester x Reader x Knightofhell!Dean Winchester

Prompt: If you really wanna try it, experiment on me *Sense-Taste

Word Count: 3213

Warnings: 18+ cursing, dirty talk, flirting m/m f/m, kissing m/m m/f, oral m/f giving/receiving, p/v, p/a, dp m/f/m, grace/blood consumption, mentions of death/killing, wincest(kissing only)

**Blasphemy for content- if you are offended by religious tenets or altering of religious tenets please skip this story.

A/N: This is the original version I wrote for #bees5Ksenseschallange before realizing it was way over the max word limit. I’m linking the toned down other version too.

Edited version

Please drop me a comment, it’s appreciated.

A/N II: Latin terms: Puer Rex Infernum-boy king of hell. Regina Coeli- queen of heaven, Regina Infernum-queen of hell. Yeah, my Latin sucks

Divider: created by @writeyourmindaway​​ -I flipped original version for story.

*no beta, all mistakes are mine

Sam entered the room without acknowledging his council walked straight to his throne throwing himself onto it.

“Get out.” He said flatly. They looked at each other confused. “Sir, you summoned us here...” The demon exploded in a cloud of fire and smoke before finishing.

“Do I have to repeat myself?” Sam kept his voice level as he raised his left hand and placed his thumb against his middle finger ready to snap the rest of these sycophants out of existence.

Bowing deeply his subordinates back out of the room as fast as possible.

“What crawled up your ass and died today Sammy?” A disembodied voice inquired from a dark corner.

“Watch your mouth or you can get the hell out too Dean.” Sam says abrasively, not in the mood for his brother.

“Hey, I’m just concerned about you. That’s the fourth time this week you’ve called in the council and blew someone up.”

Sam tipped his head back, closing his eyes against the throbbing pain he felt. He barely hears the soughing of Dean's jeans coming towards him.

When he was human, Dean generally was loud on a regular basis unless they were hunting. As a demon, his brother can move so silently even the hell hounds, with their superior auditory senses, can’t detect him.

Dean stops next to his beautiful brother studying him. The strain of ruling hell by himself was showing the longer he sat upon this throne alone.

It had been over five decades since the Demon Curing Ritual had rendered Dean’s restraints useless allowing him to escape. After using a sigil to dispatch Castiel, he hunted Sam mercilessly throughout the bunker before knocking him out with that hammer.

Dean hauled his brother back to the dungeon and after securing him to the chair raided the infirmary searching for the blood transfusion equipment. He ignored a pleading Sam, finally begging to allow him finish the cure.

“Dean, I love you.”

He paused.

Dean’s green eyes shined with all the love he had always felt for his little brother, even before he was born saying, ”I love you too Sammy, but I like the disease,” proceeds to infuse him, pumping tainted blood until he couldn’t pass any more from his body, then sat back and waited.

The bunker's warding burned and its steel reinforced walls groaned from the pressure of an unseen power radiating outwards from the dungeon.

Receiving multiple calls of a strange glow the fire department arrived to find the multistory bunker reduced to nothing but smoldering rubble. When interviewed, the police chief decreed it to be a structure failure and the final resting place of its only known occupants, the eccentric Campbell brothers.

The inferno regions of the Underlands paled in comparison to the ferocity of the Winchester brothers as they stormed the Citadels hallowed halls.

Sam embraced his rightful place as the Puer Rex Infernum with his brother, The Knight of Hell, at his side for eternity.

Long live the Boy King of Hell.

Dean had been standing in front of him staring for nearly an half hour when Sam's sarcasm surfaced, “Take a picture, it'll last longer,” finally opening his onyx eyes. Dean knew he was physically in pain, Sam never wore those eyes otherwise when they were alone.

“What you need..”

“You made it obvious what you think I need Dean, they didn’t help.”

“How many did you get through?” His curiosity peaked.

“All of them.” Sam's voice was strangely dissociated.

Dean blinked in surprise, “You fucked all of them?”

“Fuck and drained, including the guards watching them.”

“Damn Sammy, I’m proud of you!” Dean couldn’t contain his elation, even after all these years, of his brother embracing this life.

Before giving in to their dark sides, Sam was his complete opposite when it came to sex. His encounters were few and far between, preferring, unlike Dean, to have a connection, not just a roll in the hay.

Sam should have been flying high on demon blood topped off by all that pussy and cock, but it was having the opposite effect. He was utterly melancholy.

Dean reached out and gently cupped his cheek, running a calloused thumb over his surprisingly soft, pink lips. Sam’s eyes shifted back to their engaging multi colored hues, softening with the forbidden love for his brother he’s always felt as he gazed at Dean.

Giving into temptation Dean leaned down to taste those lips, whispering against them, “Don’t worry baby brother, I’ll find what you need to stop your pain.”

Dean slammed the heavy ornate door of his private rooms having wasted his time on another fruitless, dead end pursuit. It had been nearly a year since he started his search with nothing to show for it but disappointment and a trail of corpses.

“You look like you need a drink.” A gruff voice called out from his bedroom.

***

Sam had negotiated a truce between Heaven and Hell shortly after taking over. Many of the stipulations we’re only known to the parties directly involved there was one specific item made public.

Someone was chosen to reside in the other's domain as a diplomatic hostage, anything happens to them, the truce was void and all out war would ensue on Earth.

Castiel was the obvious choice for Heaven, believing his close relationship with the brothers could be exploited. He was also granted the ability to freely go between Heaven, Hell and Earth.

What Heaven didn’t expect was his continued loyalty to the Winchesters after they became demons, informing his angelic brethren he refused to be a spy, saying he was neutral like Swedish fish.

Sam’s choice was controversial. He eventually convinced Heaven it was in their best interest for The Cage to be interred there. If it’s corrupted inhabitants were to escape, well, they’d be Heaven's problem to deal with.

Sam then eradicated all of Lucifer’s remaining followers, permitting Dean a public display of what would happen to those who challenged his reign.

***

Dean walked in to find the angel on his bed, casually reclining against the large headboard reading an ancient scroll.

“What are you doing in my bed Cas?”

“Waiting on you Dean.”

Dean’s talented tongue peaked out as he toed off his boots and climbed up onto the bed, crawling across to straddle the angels thighs leaning towards him, “Should've sent for me…” Castiel placed a firm hand in the middle of Dean’s chest halting him.

“I’m not here for that and have no intention of fornicating with you.”

“Come on, play with me Cas, you know you’re dying to know what it’s like to have a big cock deep down your throat,” Dean, using his whiskey roughened tone, blinks slowly as his sexy, makes women instantly wet smile graced his plush lips, “or would you prefer I slip it up that tight ass of yours, help you release those pent up frustrations? If you really wanna try it, experiment on me.”

“You're trying to provoke me only because you are frustrated,” Dean’s expression turned frosty, “but I have found information that will lead us to what you’ve been searching for,” Castiel holds up the scroll for him to read.

Dean takes the scroll from him frowning, “What language is this shit?” He asked, sliding off Cas onto the bed.

“An obscure form of an unpronounceable language. It has taken me the better part of the year and I called in several favors to gain access to Metatron. After persuading him to translate what he could of it, I have now obtained the location of the Regina Coeli.”

“Who?”

“The Queen of Heaven? You want me to take the Virgin Mary as my consort!”

Incredulousness was written on Sam’s face as he looked between Dean and Cas as they sat across from him in his private receiving room.

“I can just see it Sammy, you and the blessed mother. Damn, if we weren’t already in hell.” Dean smarted off, earning “It’s Sam,” and bitchface #127 in response.

Castiel released a long-suffering sigh at his friend's inappropriateness.

“No Sam, I was not referring to her nor the ancient sky goddesses erroneously given the illustrious title,” Cas points to a nondescript illustration of a woman seated upon the throne of Heaven, “I am referring to the one true queen God himself chose to rule over all of his domains in his stead.”

“Chuck's firstborn was an Archangel girl? What’d she do to piss off dear old dad, take the family car without permission for a joyride?” Dean's joke falls flat.

“The translation was vague on the specifics but she is not an Archangel, more of a composite, created from the Light and the Darkness. The rumors indicate she took the Darkness’s side in a disagreement between them. God banished her here as punishment with the stipulation that only a descendant of the First Ones of Father can lay a claim for consort and make her their queen.”

“First Ones? I thought those were the Archangels,” Dean asked, giving Cas a confused look.

“According to the eldest demons Lucifer did try on more than one occasion. Obviously, he was not the one nor any of the other rulers that followed.”

Traveling into the labyrinth beneath the Citadel, Castiel led them through an ancient part of the Underlands neither brother knew existed and stopped in front of a nondescript wall.

Dean cocked his head to the side scrutinizing it, “Fandamntastic wall Cas.”

“Yes, it is.” The Angel replied and walked through it.

Dean reached out his hand coming into contact with the solid surface, “The fuck?”

Castiel’s upper torso reappeared, “Coming Sam?”

Sam shrugs and stepping forward is pulled in. He finds himself in a large catacomb, torches placed statically around to illuminate it. He turns to ask Cas where they are and stops.

In the center sits a raised, polished, black marble obelisk.

Sam stands in front of it studying the carved inscriptions in the same language as the scroll. “It’s a nice piece of marble Cas.” He comments unimpressed.

Castiel did something strange. He smiled at Sam, a full on grinning like the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland smile.

Sam’s ingrained hunter’s instincts kick in before his eyes shift to their onyx color, using his demonic powers to scan the area around them searching for an immediate threat but encounters something unexpected.

“I have been waiting a long time for you.”

Sam found himself standing in an expanse of pure white, it’s vastness of nothing surrounding him. There is the barest of sounds behind him and in what was empty space seconds ago now sits two high backed thrones. One is from illustration on the scroll, the other his. Sam wonders how he missed the fact they were matching except for color.

Drawing up to his imposing height ready to defend himself he walks towards them cautiously. Sensing no imminent danger Sam takes a seat upon his and waits for what is to happen next.

Sam's eyes snapped towards a subtle sound of feathers rustling beside him. On the throne sits a woman staring at him.

“Are you the Regina Coeli?” Sam inquires in awe that she isn’t anything like he imagined.

Slowly blinking Y/C/E, she nods once.

“Why did you bring me here?” Sam gestures to the empty space surrounding them.

“It was necessary, I have no other way of communicating otherwise.”

Sam cocked his head unable to figure out how she is projecting her thoughts to him.

Long ago he learned how to shield himself from others when one of the late Princes of Hell tried using a telepath to oust him from the throne. It had taken ages for the cleaners to remove all the bits left after Dean eviscerated them.

She dropped her chin given him a coy smile, “It is because you were made for me.”

“What do you mean made for you? I don’t understand.”

“The one who can claim me as consort is descended from the First Ones of Father and that is you.”

“The First Ones were the Archangels.”

“The Archangels were created from The Nothing. The First Ones of Father were created on Earth.”

“The First Ones...you mean Adam and Eve?”

“Adam and Lilith.”

“They didn’t have any children before God cast Lilith out as a demon.”

“Yes, they did. You and your brother are their descendants.”

“We’re descended from Cain and Abel...”

“Who were Lilith’s offspring, not Eve. It is why those directly descended from her were marked for the Apocalypse.”

Sam ponders this information a while, yet another piece of the puzzle that was their lives clicking into place.

“Lilith possessed free will, unlike Eve. It was passed on to her descendants as punishment.”

“And has led you here to me.”

“What's your name? I can’t just call you Regina Coeli.”

“Father gave me no name like his son’s, he only called me daughter.” She told him sounding sad, “what name do you like?”

“You want me to give you a name?” She nodded eagerly waiting for his answer. Sam looked at her contemplatively never having had a favorite female name, the only one that truly mattered in his life was Dean.

“I’ll call you Y/N.”

She stood up and moved to stand in front of Sam.

“Before you commit to this, know that this is a symbiotic relationship, you won’t need to feed on demon blood anymore, we’ll feed off each other.”

Y/N produces a knife more delicate than Ruby’s and runs it across her wrist leaking some of her grace, and offering it to Sam, he takes her arm and sucks on the wound briefly.

“But there’s one stipulation....”

“Whatever it is you can have it.” Sam breaths out, his body craving more than just a taste of her grace.

“All domains are mine, including the Underlands, as decreed by Father.”

Sam's eyes shifted onyx with displeasure, “Hell is my domain and I don’t play well with others who try to subvert me.”

Y/N smiled mischievously and climbed onto his lap, “I freely give it to you but remember, the others are mine and I don’t play well either. Do you agree to my terms?” she retorts in a dark, cheeky manner. Sam picks up her long braid, playing with the trailing silver ribbons tied around its end.

“Agreed.”

Sam and Y/N stepped through the wall to find a relieved Dean and pissed off Castiel, who took his leave.

As they traveled back to the Citadel Dean couldn’t take his eyes off of Y/N. This would have normally angered Sam but she had informed him even though they were technically demons, Dean was still his soulmate so she could bond with him too if Sam wished.

After introducing her to the court, who insisted their bonding was completed in front of a witness, they retreated to Sam’s private chambers.

Dean moved in front of her, caressing her cheek and licked his plush lips, “She looks so sweet Sammy.”

Sam hums in agreement moving behind her drawing her flush against him and kissing along her neck asks, “You wanna taste Y/N Dean,” as he grips the material around her waist and lifts her dress upwards, slowly unveiling her body to his brother. Dean’s eyes dilate with hunger as it teasingly travels upward, revealing she is nude under it.

“Lift your arms,” Sam tells her and pulls it completely off, dropping it and resting his chin on Y/N’s shoulder and starts playing with her nipples as she wraps her arms behind his neck for balance, spreading her legs to give Dean access between them.

Dean dropped to his knees and looking to Sam for permission, runs his tongue over her outer lips, tasting that she’s already wet before parting them, making her quiver with pleasure.

“Dean loves the taste of pussy, he could eat you out for hours. Would you like that Y/N?” Sam moaned at her response, “He will later,” reaching down gripped his brother's short hair tugging him back roughly, “it’s my turn now.”

Sam laid back on his bed high on her grace as Y/N straddles him, pinning his arms down next to his head and leaned in brushing her lips across his in a tender kiss.

“Keep your hands to yourself till I’m done with you.”

She kissed down the long line of his neck pausing below his tattoo to tease his left nipple with her tongue before biting down making him shiver in pleasure. Sam’s cock hardened even more as her lips, light as the dusting of a feather, traversed downwards over his abs halting at the v of his hips and gripping his cock in her hand dipped the tip of her tongue into his slit, tasting precum pearling out before taking just the head into her mouth sucking on it, her tongue over moving in random patterns over the sensitive nerves underneath it.

Sam groaned in pleasure feeling the sweetest sting of the blade along the crease of his leg, his hot blood pulsating to the surface. He watched as she released his cock, lowering her head and, without breaking eye contact, licked along the flowing wound, tasting his deliciously tainted blood.

Y/N continuously moved her hands over every bit of his skin she could reach while nursing at the wound. Sam started feeling light headed from being drained but at the same time euphoric with desire as he unabatedly cums on his stomach.

Dean, writhing in his seat observing them, presses down on his cock to deny himself cumming watches Y/N using her tongue to clean Sam’s spending's as he’s still spurting.

Resting her head on his hip Y/N asks Sam something making him smile, “Y/N wants to know if I will allow you to join us now,” his eyes telling Dean to hurry the hell up and get naked.

He strips in record time, climbs on the enormous bed straddling him behind Y/N, teasingly rubbing his cock through her folds. “How do you want us sweetheart? You want Sammy’s unrelenting cock pounding this scrumptious pussy and me down your throat?” Dean strokes her throat, “How about both us in your tight cunt, ravaging it together?” He trailed his left hand down Y/N’s torso and inserted two of his thick fingers in her feeling her clenching.

“Or maybe prefer me here,” tapping his cock head against her tight little hole before slipping his dripping tip in past the tight ring of muscle making her jolt then quiver with pleasure as she pushes back till he’s fully seated in her.

“That’s it, get nice and stretched out on my cock,” Dean bit his lip moaning as she worked herself up and down on him, “ ‘cause once Sammy’s been in here, you’ll know it for a long time.

Sam, unwilling to wait any longer, grabs his self and pushes in next to Dean’s thick fingers, ramming his massive cock into her drenched cunt, forcing her to stretch around him and not stopping until he was balls deep in her. Y/N gasped silently, overwhelmed by the sensations she hadn’t felt in millennia.

“Easy there tiger, we have eternity to play with our new toy.”

Forever tags: @donnaintx

#all saints day reblog #boyking!sam winchester x reader #sam winchester x reader #sam winchester x y/n #supernatural #knightofhell!dean winchester #supernatural fanfic #supernatural au #dean winchester x reader #knightofhell!dean winchester x reader

[naturallyweirdedout]

Okay here I go

The Steven Universe Future Finale Was Not That Great

Just a note this is my own opinion.

Honestly I feel like the finale for SUF was decent at best and lack luster at worst. I’ll break these up into my views on each episode.

Homeworld Bound

Honestly this is one of the two episodes that disappointed me the most in this finale. Intially I went, yay Homeworld! We’ll get to see the Diamonds and Spinel and hopefully they’ll be helpful to Steven. And in all honesty it seemed like, they weren’t even trying. Firstly Spinel. I feel like Rebecca did Spinel really dirty in this episode simply because she was reduced to, comidic relief. And I feel as if that’s such a waste of her character potential. Imagine if every character that had a completed arc was just turned into “oh that goofball who doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about”. That’s literally Spinel now. All she does is annoy Steven and well, act like a bafoon. She could’ve offered him some insight, her struggles to change and adjust to her new life and be satisfied with herself. But nope, she simply was there just to annoy the main character and provide nothing useful. Then onto the Diamonds. Another wasted potential in all honesty. Yellow, Blue, and White didn’t even really TRY to help Steven at all. They basically shrugged it off and went ah shit well I can’t do anything for you bud even though we only talked for like 2 minutes and all I did was try to force the only way I know to improve onto you. It feels as if, they were only there just to show Steven “wow look at how these former murders and dictators improved! You sure are shit when compared to them now”. And White. White was the biggest waste compared to Yellow and Blue considering what potential she had. The one who caused all of Steven’s problems and issues. But nope, she was just like “ah Steven just project into me and this is surely to go fine even though you just basically acknowledged you don’t like your Diamond powers and this will most likely not help you”. I feel like this episode would have gone a lot better if the Diamonds and Steven had time to have proper interactions, or even just Steven, Spinel, and White due to the impact those two had on him directly. Just a lot of wasted potential in this episode that could’ve made the episode a lot better in my honest opinion.

Everything’s Fine

Now this episode was the better of the finale episodes, but still had its fair share of flaws. Steven comes back, and he has a good ol fashion mental breakdown essentially and tries to talk himself out of it and reassure himself. Good shit. However my problem was when the Gems showed up. It’s VERY VERY painfully obvious that Steven is not okay. I mean, all they commented on was that he looks weird. The dude literally had DIAMOND EYES. The fact that the FUCKING DIAMOND EYES went the ENTIRE EPISODE ignored just doesn’t make any sense. The Cyrstal Gems and the gems on Little Homeworld should have all been shocked at this but they all act like it’s nothing?? Anyways going to Little Homeworld and trying to act like everything was fine and dandy was really well done. I’m a bit annoyed though at just showing us Pink Pearl but not showing us her eye because that’s just a fucking tease at this point. Anyways, no other complaints really. Steven breaking down at the end was really intense to watch and my heart rate was actually speeding up. But then, that lead to the thing I did not want to happen.

I Am My Monster

To be fucking honest, I should’ve known. I really should have known but I just REALLY didn’t want it to be true. Steven turning into a monster literally is just. Oof. For starters, I do not support the corruption theory and I STILL do not, because what we saw wasn’t corruption. Steven shapeshifted. Corruption was shown to have only two causes. Either an attack on a Gem by Yellow, Blue, and White Diamond OR because of fusing with a corrupted Gem. There was no other hint or sign that a Gem could corrupt for any other reason. And there still is not. Yes Gem’s can poof because of extreme emotional stress and yes Volleyball was so damaged that the trauma manifested physically, but those were not examples that could support the corruption theory. Anyways, for starters I hate the design of Monster Steven. I really wish the color scheme could have been darker because that just would’ve been more aesthetically pleasing but I digress. There were so many ways I wished that the monster in the intro could’ve played a role in the series that didn’t involve Steven being corrupted. Perhaps a sort of mindscape battle between Steven and this monster, perhaps Pink Steven makes a return and turns into this monster and it’s a race against time to return the two Steven’s together, perhaps Pink Steven even took over normal Steven! But nope, it just HAD to be this way. Anyways enough of Monster Steven talk. My other issue was with well, everybody else. For starters, the Diamonds showing up? Convinient as fucking hell considering how a whole episode passed before they showed up again. Secondly, I hate the dismissal of Blue asking if Steven was corrupted or not because gosh shouldn’t we as an audience know what the hell is happening to our protagonist?? Also how did Garnet know that Yellow could make her big? As far as we know, perfecting physical forms is a new ability that Yellow discovered. I really liked Greg finally taking a stand in this episode to save his son, it kinda redeems how he was acting in Mr. Universe. But gosh I just hate how, everything broke into a crying fest? I’m gonna be honest and say that tears are a cheap way to invoke feeling in your audience and it can be overdone when EVERYONE ON SCREEN IS CRYING. And I hate the Diamonds blabbering about how “oh this is all my fault. No, no it’s all MY fault” because just, are you all just now acknowledging that you fucked Steven over. You mean in the entire time you’ve been buddy buddy with Steven you haven’t addressed this to him ONCE?! Bullshit. And Spinel, I was taking her a bit seriously until the fucking cartoonish nose blow then I just gave up with her. Way to degrade one of the best characters this show has provided. And the Cluster was just, deus ex machina. That was REALLY fucking convenient for the Cluster to just show up and help restrain Monster Steven. Anyways that’s all my complaints for that episode, now onto the final one.

The Future

The final episode of the series. Several years worth of progression have led to this point. And it was extremely lack luster. Honestly this episode felt like a fizzling end to the series. I’m glad that Steven decided to move out because honestly fuck that entire town it was harmful to the boy. I’m glad he finally got a therapist too. But this episode was essentially just, a good bye episode? And I feel like that alone cannot drive an episode along. Also Jasper’s character arc was ABSOLUTELY WASTED. Basically her entire arc is just being abused and putting that on repeat up until the end where they just disregard her as “hmph I’m angy now”. The only part of the episode I really liked, or can even properly remember for that sake, was Steven leaving at the very end and hugging the Gems. But tbh, Steven doesn’t have a high school diploma, legal papers, he’s not going to college, and he doesn’t have a job. So can someone tell me. How. Is. He. Gonna. SURVIVE.

Anyways that’s all I have left to say about the finale. Overall I feel pretty dissatisfied with it and this picture describes exactly how I feel.

If you wanna complain to me shout at my main @thespiffyspiffiestspif $5 a complaint

Also @salty-sapphire I got inspired to write a critique by you :) thanks for enlightening me to how legitimately bad this show is.

#steven universe future #suf #suf finale #steven universe future finale #fragments #everything’s fine #i am my monster #corrupted steven #corrupted steven theory #pearl #garnet #amethyst #bismuth #lapis #peridot #greg #connie #steven universe #su #su connie #su pearl #su garnet #su amethyst #su greg #su bismuth #su peridot #bs #su critical #su spoilers #su future spoilers

[estephaniacasa-blog]

This is the Sound of Settling

I actually can’t believe where this life is standing. 24 years and there’s still no distinctive correct answer. I’m not sure if there was ever any reason to believe I would know the moment I would feel like I’m not young anymore. I always felt that “age” was irrelevant anyways. And of course, in thinking so, I never left myself to doubt it. There are many thoughts similar to this, where I was so stubbornly sure I’d left no room for error, that I didn’t allow myself to contemplate or prepare for the idea that I could be a little mistaken. 24. That’s big to me. For some reason, I was able to slide right past my 23rd. That’s not to say I wasn’t uncomfortable with every birthday I’ve had since “teenager”. I could probably attribute my comfort with 23 to drugs. But nothing eases my mind from this year.

Less than a week. It’s goddamn surreal . I recall so many moments where I simply studied the clock. “Endless.” But it’s hard to even give consideration to something being “endless” now. Everything is so absolute, yet it’s unpredictable until that “absolute” arrives. Some days I’m full of optimism, appreciating that I’m enjoying things and people. And on others, that joy is simply pointless, as what effect will it really have? Even when I’m sullen, though, I’m constantly seeking companionship and beautiful connections and friendships, as these things are the most effective at slowing down this windmill of a mind.

Oddly, those same reasons would probably scoff at the idea of my mind “slowing down” with them. The immense amount of thought I’m “fondling” (I drew a blank on what word to use there, I ended up using fondling. Marijuana.) constantly is likely irregular. But if I’m being honest, I can’t say that I’d trade this perceived understanding I’ve gained for even momentary peace of mind. I’m actually actively avoiding getting personal in this fucking free writing because I’m afraid to even be honest enough with myself to state some things, as I wouldn’t want to be inaccurate, and sometimes “personal” constitutes as emotional. Emotion is not necessarily something I don’t experience, but likely less heavily than most.

That’s not to lead you to believe it’s always been that way. But, alas, I’ve somehow grown into a logical (mostly) and unsympathetic asshole, per sé. So, when something happens to be thought-consuming enough to actually affect my usual train, I’m not necessarily good at logically processing it anymore. Now, don’t you get presumptive and assume that means I tend to express these rare occasions irrationally. Believe it or not, I’ve grown to just avoid. I’ll fall silent, “suffer” whilst “acting” unaffected or merely stop investing thought as immediately as possible.

It actually works out well for me, though it certainly does also have the ability to affect people I care for. I can involve myself in an “argument” or misunderstanding, cause emotional reaction from merely stating my factual “feelings” (damn me and these quotation marks) without gauging the extent, because to me it’s ineffective to state anything but your actual thoughts when you affect someone. So, in doing just that, I offend emotionally. The compromise on whatever I’ve “done wrong” when being confronted would be a form of dishonesty, as I am firmly set in continuing to exist “freely” as it makes me happy, and I‘m not brought joy by causing any grief.  And I’m honestly not willing to compromise on those brain-clearing moments of happiness.

People certainly expect me to, and I can’t deny clearly understanding their stance. It simply doesn’t cause me to want to change, or even seem apologetic. I am fully aware this makes me sound goddamn awful, and fuck I might be. But I am always very clear that this is the way I am. I think. But of course these happiness factors fluctuate, and I do understand that me changing habits or routines may be unfortunate, but the risk was made clear.

I am not what I would choose as a partner, but I would absolutely desire to know a person like me. (That sounded both cocky and self-deprecating simultaneously.) Unfortunately, I am fluid. My thoughts move forward and so do my inclinations. It’s fortunate for those who are dependant on my “affection” and companionship, and unfortunate for those who are just unable to continue accepting my self-perceived progression. Certainly not stating these people are in any way less deserving or that they’re inferior, just that if they are offended by my distance when thought-provocation in a positive form becomes stagnant, or negative, that we will struggle to remain compatible conversationalists, and conversation (through being vocal, or body language) is the key to life for me. I live to have to contemplate something inquired, and to be required to provide feedback. Not just conversations, so many words are empty. I mean the ability to expect something more than a forced conversation filled with small talk and wondering what is being discussed.

People who have thought-provoking minds are phenomenal to me. Whether it be provoking intellect, a rare tinge of emotion, humor, or almost fucking anything. Coming to a monotonous point in any friendship is a very clear and good reason to discontinue wasting both’s precious tic-toc.

For some reason, (I can explain it to you if you really wanna know, Stephanie) some are satisfied with continuing unvarying companionships, and are offended when you suggest what I’ve explained. Why do I even fucking think it’s important to elaborate this to myself? (Answers own question) I guess it’s because I think fully contemplating my thought process is slowing my waste of thought (LOL) or just clearing it up to myself in black & white. (Making sure I’m able to comfortably justify each standpoint to myself.) And I can.

You may see this and be able to personally classify it as “emotional.” Make no mistake, I am merely ascetic. I cannot settle with the inability to express my accuracy, even if only to myself. (Insanity) I “feel” that I want to bask in joyful and stimulating experience, and it would be a disservice to someone if anyone pretended to be satisfied with the previously mentioned bland interaction. Is that cleared up, Stephanie? I think I’ve cleared it up.

Continuing…(OMG I know)

When I earlier mentioned provoking thought and reaction, I stated that it could be verbal or with body language. Even that may have been to specific (Goddamnit I’m contradicting my ‘clear’) But we’ll go with it. Body language is so fucking major. When I’m referring to it, don’t think I’m alluding to any specific movements or a fucking movement rubric. I’m trying to accomplish the opposite. What provokes a reaction is curiosity, and nothing does this like the ability to captivate with simply the way you exist.

Nobody can perfect this skill, as no one existence is going to affect everyone even remotely similarly. But you will meet people who are captivating. Now when it happens, there’s really no question. If you don’t know if you enjoy a presence after you’ve invested effort, you don’t. NEVER settle for avoiding ‘loneliness’. Wasting this time proves detrimental, as lack of interest merely proceeds negativity. This negativity hinders happiness, and greatly reduces your time with joyful surroundings and goal for progression. Instead, focus energy and time on this joy. Surround yourself with those who heighten your mood and knowledge, as well as curiosity.

HERE IS THE CATCH.

When you choose to be a brash cunt, you choose to risk this “nasty” emotion shit. Because everything you stated is true. Sometimes that person that fails to provoke curiosity is you. And sometimes the brash cunt doesn’t want to waste your time. And you’ve got to be willing to risk accepting that, what you’ve “ridiculed.” That wave of “gross” (also known as em[barf]otion) can happen to you, too. Because even though you’re encouraging this mindset that is ultimately beneficial for all involved, you’re not past being on the end that’s pained.

(Refer back to the first page where you told yourself you should leave room for error, question entire existence)

So, when it does happen, deal with your emotions healthily. Grieve, but do so briefly and discreetly. Embrace time with yourself, and know that as fucking banal as this may sound, happiness comes from within, and you will be happier alone and thinking than continuing to entertain stagnancy.

You merely must realize that this “pain” is so very temporary compared to the continuance of failing at an impossibility. And you just might find someone who can’t divert their eyes from your curious glances, hungering to learn something. Never getting too comfortable. And never forgetting to gain knowledge.

#tldr #spilled thoughts #journaling #learning #understanding #narcissism

[ncmagroup]

December 12, 2017

10 “Must Have’s” for an Effective Sales Meeting

Meetings have long been considered an annoying waste of time by sales professionals, but they’re an absolutely essential component of a great sales culture. The only reason to hold a meeting as an owner or manager is because you have something you feel is important enough for everyone to hear.

No one does them to keep their team from closing deals, believe me.

They’re considered such a drain because they eat an extraordinary amount of the most valuable resource – time.

This leads your team to completely sabotage the message by not taking it seriously, not showing up, twiddling their thumbs or being on their phone.

In addition to making it productive and efficient, you need to keep the audience engaged.

Get your message across in an effective way and you’ll increase the chances of promoting your objectives, motivating your team and seeing an uptick in results.

10 Musts of Effective Sales Meetings

#1  |  Find Your Purpose

Why are you gathering everyone together, why is everyone here? Some of the most common topics covered are short-term and long-term sales objectives, the most recent metrics, sales competitions, and training. If you’re just going over numbers, there needs to be action step to take away.

Every productive meeting has a purpose beyond just what you’re going to say. This is going to define your main desired outcome.

This is the action step your team is going to take away from the sales meeting and implement into their day-to-day process. It needs to be relevant to everyone in the room. If it’s not, why are you wasting their time?

#2  |  Have an Agenda

Too many managers don’t have a repeatable process for their meetings. It makes it difficult for their message to be well received, and it makes it more challenging for them to develop the topics to discuss.

Having a standard and consistent agenda gives you a formula for success each and every time. You’ll be much more focused and remain on track. An easy-to-follow agenda is like a script you give to your team.

The most important thing to build into your agenda for each meeting is training. Too many door to door sales organizations don’t provide enough training when new reps are hired or have an ongoing training program to develop their skill set.

There’s a variety of resources available to build in a quick session. For example, you could teach your team how to use the 6 principles of persuasion in their pitch.

With an agenda, not only will you know the flow or your talking points, you’ll significantly reduce your preparation and meeting time. Be sure to keep your old agendas so you don’t repeat any creative segments and the message is always fresh.

#3  |  Focus On 1 Key Issue

One of the biggest mistakes managers make in running a sales meeting is trying to build too much into the agenda. Your meeting needs to have a purpose, and that purpose needs to be focused on one central thought or idea.

Don’t try to cover everything, there’s not enough time. When you get laser-focused on one specific thing, it allows you to really dig into the importance of the topic you’re discussing. By talking about one point instead of five, you control the flow of the conversation and present a more clear and concise message.

#4  |  Start With An Energizer

Who the hell really likes meetings? Probably only the slackers who want to sit around do nothing – AKA, the people who are going to screw up your meeting.

Your best shot at grabbing their attention, or anyone else’s, is to start your meeting with something that gets the blood flowing. Start with something that’s fun, go over a current contest to get everyone jabbering back and forth, or hand out a few rewards.

The energizer can be anything from a trivia game to a funny story. You could even talk about a sales movie and what you learned from it or go old school high school coach and do some jumping jacks.

#5  |  Keep It Simple Stupid

Ahhh… The ole K.I.S.S. rule. This is essential in proper sales meetings. Anything you build into your agenda should be asked the following question:

“Does this item need to be in the meeting or could it be done outside the meeting or as pre-work?”

Follow these 4 steps to keep your sales meetings as simple as possible:

1. Make the pace of the meeting fast, but thorough 2. Create the right atmosphere to ensure it’s fun 3. Add value by helping the team better execute on a key sales skill 4. Share content on a regular basis

Don’t over complicate things and get off topic. Tell them what needs to be told and get back to work. Everyone will thank you for it.

#6  |  3 Rules For Individual Updates

Who doesn’t want to just pretend they’re Toby Keith and say, “I wanna talk about me!”

Am I right, or am I right!

It’s great for people to be involved, feel important and be heard. The topics need to be small and the answers need to be timed. While everyone loves themselves, most don’t like hearing about it, especially if it drags on.

Use these 3 rules to ensure they don’t take up too much of the meeting:

Set time limits

Create different themes around successes, like key learnings/future focus

Know when to take the issue offline

#7  |  Motivate & Reward / Share Successes

Science proves how to motivate your sales team and it’s a key component of effective meetings. You have to build motivation into every meeting. Sales reps have a tough challenge in the field and need to feel like they’re being recognized.

Think about sorting the rewards into different categories. You can make them fun, competitive, team-based, recognition-based or even externally focused, such as getting input or recognizing someone outside of the sales team.

Motivating salespeople also makes them feel like they’re part of the meeting. They feel like you’re speaking right to them. Sharing successes is a great way to keep them performing at a high level.

#8  |  Capability Activity

Every sales meeting needs to be designed to challenge your team’s skill set to keep them at the top of their game. Capability activities can focus on prospecting, networking, lead generation, client meetings, presenting solutions or closing.

The capability activity is all about the sales rep’s ongoing development. This is the key to creating value at the meeting.

#9  |  Allow For Discussion & Input

A sales presentation without input from the customer isn’t much of a sales pitch. The same can be said for any sales meeting.

You want active engagement from everyone in the room so that the energy level remains high and people don’t fall asleep from your boring rambling. You also want them engaged so that they’re not just hearing the message, but processing it. Allow for discussion and encourage it.

#10  |  Start & End On Time

If your sales reps have to respect their customer’s time, you have to respect theirs as a sales staff. Think of your sales meeting as a reflection of a sales presentation and set the standard for how it should go. Not starting and ending on time sends a signal to your team that you don’t value their time and what they have to do.

As it is, field sales reps only spend 22% of their time actively selling, while 23% is spent on administrative tasks. Don’t keep them from working in the field any less than they already are. Check out how you can double your team’s selling time.

Final Words on Effective Sales Meetings

Take advantage of the opportunity to use meetings as a way to provide ongoing training. It’s the perfect time when you have everyone together and you need to be invested in developing your team’s skill set.

Mark Cuban said:

“The greatest competitive advantage is knowledge”

Use these 10 tips to present a better message and keep everyone engaged. You’ll be surprised at how much time you save by having a standard agenda, and the lack of people trying to skip out the second you start talking.

    Go to our website:   www.ncmalliance.com

10 “Must Have’s” for an Effective Sales Meeting December 12, 2017 10 "Must Have’s" for an Effective Sales Meeting Meetings have long been considered an annoying waste of time by sales professionals, but they’re an absolutely essential component of a great sales culture.

[lawrenceseitz22]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210

Click on the video above to watch Episode 202 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: Hello and welcome to Episode 210 of Hump Day Hangouts. I am Adam Moody with Semantic Mastery. We are gonna say hi to everyone real quick before we dive into some announcements and questions from everybody watching us live. Also, if you’re watching this on YouTube, we noticed from time to time that we get questions over there, but you need to come to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions and ask your questions there, that’s where we’re monitoring. Before we dive in, real quick, Chris, how are you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Good weather in Florida always the last couple weeks. I highly recommend it, like I love it. How are you doing?

Adam: Not bad. It’s like 60 here, which is perfect. Everyone in California thinks it’s like the middle of winter and I’m just enjoying myself. This is good. Marco, how about you? How’s the weather for you, man?

Marco: Things are good here, man, transitioning to the dry season. So we’re gonna have about five and a half months of absolutely no rain, not even a drop. I’m looking forward to … Yeah, but then, it’s seven months of afternoon showers. You gotta pay the price for the life you live, right?

Adam: Yeah, fair enough.

Marco: But always warm, like if it were 60 here, we’d all be dying literally. It’s freezing cold.

Chris: [Inaudible 00:01:19] stay in Florida.

Adam: Definitely. Bradley, how about you, man? How are you doing?

Bradley: I’m good, I’m happy to be here. Got lots of stuff going on at the moment. Just been really, really busy. In last week, well, I took off for a couple days because my sister got married again. I actually got to go down to Hilton Head, South Carolina and meet one of our members, Ed, who also went to POFU Live; he’s in the Mastermind also. That was cool because I got to spend an hour with him just chatting. It was really, really cool. I always enjoy getting to meet members whenever we have the opportunity. So that was a lot of fun. But I had to take really Friday and Monday off, so now I’m behind.

Besides that, I got a quick little story to tell very, very quickly. Just last week, it was funny because I was actually reviewing the Hump Day Hangout from last week and I was talking about mitigating risk. Marco and I, we were talking about reducing exposure and trying to mitigate risk because, if you put all your eggs in one basket and Google takes that basket, you’re screwed, you’ve lost all those assets.

Well, I was using a test with what’s called GMB Location Groups. It’s a setting inside of Google My Business. I was running a test on a set of GMB assets for a particular metro area, so one metropolitan city area. I had seven assets in there that were fully optimized, 100% done. In fact, they were the seven assets that my VAs has been training on as he’s been learning the processes for doing this whole method, the Local Lease Pro model, essentially.

Long story short, on Saturday, I was down at the Hilton Head and I happened to get an email saying that the account that was used as the recovery email for that particular GMB manager account, which had to be turned into an owner in order to use location groups, had been terminated for violating Google’s spam policies. I lost all those damn assets, every single one of them, and I can’t even access them through the original Google accounts now, guys.

That was three weeks work, not necessarily my work, but my VA’s work wasted. Now, is it all bad? No, because I learned a valuable lesson. Number one, don’t use GMB location groups, it’s like a trap, number one, lesson number one. Number two is always mitigate risk. Don’t set yourself up with vulnerabilities that Google can take … We exploit Google’s vulnerabilities. Don’t you think Google will exploit ours? So I learned that … In fact, I’m actually updating the entire process for how to first log in and set up and manage a lot of GMB assets. I’m updating all those processes this week, in fact, because we have to do something new that reduces our overall risk.

Anyways, that was my little story. I’m a little bit behind now because all the work that I’ve done for the last several weeks on all the processes now has to be updated and redone. But that’s the cat and mouse game that we play.

Marco: Yeah. One of the great things about our Mastermind is that we do all of the testing, we take all of the risk, we were the ones who go in the lab. I mean, we do encourage our own people to test so that they can verify that our results are what we’re saying they are. But it’s one of the things that we do, we go, we blow things up and it happens, and then now we know what not to do. And right into our Mastermind, we’ll share all of test result with the membership exactly what was done so that they don’t repeat the process and get stuck losing assets because nobody wants to lose an asset, especially not seven. But so be it, lesson well-learned and it’s a lesson that the Mastermind doesn’t have to repeat.

Bradley: That’s true and, just real quick segue, that leads me to, that’s kind of like what the Mastermind is about. The scaling option, like doing all these heavy processes and stuff, is really reserved to the POFU Live group attendees at the moment, but we’re polishing all this stuff. Obviously, the Mastermind, we update, like tomorrow we’ve got a Mastermind webinar and I’m certainly gonna be talking about what not to do because I want to make sure all of our members are fully aware of what not to do so they don’t lose assets.

But once we have this 12-week process done, that the POFU Live attendees are kind of in accountability group with me right now, and we’ve got a target that we’re trying to hit at the end of 12 weeks, which is 50 GMB assets fully developed and ready for monetization, if they’re not already monetized by that point, and so when we’re done at that 12-week period, we will have discovered or perfected, really fine-tuned the method and all of the processes to get us there, to get us to that point. That’s when we’re gonna release in its entirety the Mastermind.

That training will not be released outside of the Mastermind, period, and that’s only because it’s highly valuable and we put a lot of work. In fact, the other members of the POFU accountability group with us, that’s like 12 of us in there, and so that’s a lot of intellectual property, a lot of a work that goes into that. So the Mastermind members will get that.

But that’s just one of many things that we do there. For example, we had some questions about how to structure ad ID pages and set up as three buckets with HTTP, SSL protocol, and all that stuff. Two weeks ago, we went in and showed exactly how to do that. I mean, it’s just stuff like that that we do in the Mastermind all the time.

Adam: Yeah. Something else that I just remembered, that reminded me of, Bradley, was, I think it was Jason who posted yesterday, who’s one of our Mastermind members, just out of the blue was like, hey, I’ve seen some questions about blah blah blah-, not blah blah blah, but some heavy-duty IT stuff. He’s like, “Hey, if anybody needs help just ping me. I’ll do it for free if you’re a Mastermind member.”

That’s just awesome to see. Again, you get that in a tight-knit group like that. It’s cool having that ability. Everyone who knows our story kind of knows where we came from and how we were part of a Mastermind. That’s why part of why we do this to get that community, it’s not just a jumble of people, you do have a community.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Well, cool. I also want to say then to you guys, we mentioned the GMB stuff, we’ve got a sale going on right now at MGYB. It’s wrapping up today. So if you’re interested or you need a GMB verification service, whether it’s for your clients, it’s for yourself, you’re doing some lead gen, head over there. I posted it on the page. If you’re watching the replay, sorry, it’s probably too late. But a good reason to watch live and open the emails is you get a 35% discount on that service right now. So head over there do that.

Real quick, too, if you’re joining us for the first time, thank you so much for watching us. If you want the right place to start, because it is one of the questions we get, “Hey, where should I start? Should I take this course and do that?” start with Battle Plan. No matter what you’re doing, even if you want to hop into Mastermind, get the Battle Plan, come join the Mastermind. That’s the path. The link is on there. It’s a great way to get repeatable results, which is why we put it together, so that we can have that. It’s our home processes put into an easy-to-digest format.

Then, obviously, like we’ve been talking about it, if you’re ready to take things up a notch, if you wanna scale, you wanna grow, then the Mastermind is the place to be.

Bradley: Did you open up Local Lease Pro as a standalone product now?

Adam: Yes.

Bradley: I’ll be damned. I didn’t realize that was available yet. Okay.

Adam: Sneaking that onto the page, if people are interested.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay.

Adam: I’m gonna say no more.

Bradley: Everything I’ve been talking about with this Local Lease Pro method, that’s it. Most of you guys are probably aware of it because of the Side Hustle Toolbox promotion, that was our contribution. But now that that’s closed, it’s a standalone product. I’m gonna be updating that in a couple of weeks with some of the new processes that I’ve just discovered.

Again, GMB, like the actual optimization process has changed slightly. Not much, but slightly, and I’m updating the processes for my VAs right now. So next week, I’ll kind of polish it up a bit and then add that into the Local Lease Pro training. So if you guys don’t have it yet, I recommend you get it. This method is freaking killing it. I think it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career. I mean that, so check it out.

All right. Can we get into questions?

Adam: I think so. If you guys are good, let’s do this.

Do I Need Access To A Client’s Website If I Do Local SEO For Them?

Bradley: All right. Starting off with Chris Green posted a support question from Vincent. He says, “I’m considering to join the RYS Reloaded or the GMB course. My question is this: if I do SEO for local businesses in my country, which is Malaysia, do I need to have access to my clients website?” No. It can help. You don’t have to have access to the client’s website, but it would certainly help because you could take care of some on-page SEO issues. In other words, you can optimize the site itself, which is considered on-page SEO, and that can help that can help quite a bit.

In fact, with proper on-page SEO, a lot of the times you can rank a site with a fraction of the off-page SEO because any off-page SEO that … If on site is proper, if it’s tight, if it’s strong, then any off-page will significantly affect, it will have a strong impact on the site because then the site will respond well to off-page because it is a well-built, well-structured site.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to have access to the site because you can accomplish through off-page. You can still rank a site with off-page. If the on-page is terrible, then you probably are fighting a losing battle. But if it’s decent, then you could probably still accomplish what you need to, depending on how competitive the keywords are that you’re targeting. But it’s likely that you could still accomplish what you needed to with off-page alone. But again, there are benefits certainly to being able to access the client’s website. Right? If you’re starting with garbage, it’s gonna be difficult to rank. So just keep that in mind. Okay.

It helps, it’s not 100% necessary. Well, it depends, right? It depends on what the status of the site is currently. If it’s a shitty site, if it was built poorly, optimized poorly, or if it’s spammed to death or whatever, then you may never be able to rank that site. But if it’s decent, if it’s fairly okay, then you could still just apply off-page methods and probably get the results that you want. However, if you can do both, manage the on-page and the-off page, you will get the best results. Right?

Are The SEO Methods In RYS Reloaded And GMB Work On WordPress.com And Wix.com Websites?

Number two, he says, “If my client has a WordPress.com or Wix.com website, can the SEO methods taught in RYS Reloaded and GMB work and getting first page ranking on Google?” Well, yes. Well, Local GMB Pro course is not really anything that have to do with websites, right? Local GMB Pro is how to optimize Google My Business and set up all of the Google assets to rank. Well, not even to rank, but to just generate leads from Google, independent of ranking. That’s what Local GMB Pro is about. It’s about getting leads, getting exposure from Google My Business, whether it ranks or not, and that’s what that whole … Again, despite traditional SEO, Local GMB Pro can generate leads from Google. Okay. So that’s what local GMB Pro is.

RYS is about using Google’s assets as an off-page tool as well as an entity validator, an authority builder, and multiple other things. But it’s more of an off-page thing. Again, it has nothing to do with the website structure or the platform itself, WordPress or Wix. It doesn’t matter because all you’re doing is using Google properties to push relevancy and authority over to whatever property is that you’re trying to rank.

Marco, do you wanna chat about that a little bit?

Marco: Yeah. It’s just one of the pillars that we teach, ART, the art of ART, activity, relevance, trust and authority, both on the link origin and on the link destination. What that means is you get visitors no matter how you show activity and Google reward you as long as everything is relevant and you’re working with trusted and authoritative entities. If you become along with that, a trusted and authoritative entity, then you get rewarded. Google will also reward you for being in Google because Google trusts itself. It’s the ultimate as far as what it trusts. So working in what we call working inside the belly of the beast also has its rewards.

Yeah. As Bradley said, it makes absolutely no difference. I mean, you work with whatever. I mean, you have a free WordPress blog ranking for … what is it? Free-, no, not free. SEO Virginia. Yeah. I mean, it just goes to show that if you get that activity in there, everything else just fall into place as long as it’s relevant, trusted and authoritative.

I keep telling people, and I just mentioned it in our Semantic Mastery Facebook group, the Mastermind, that ART, A-R-T, will trump anything. It will even overcome any of the negative factors, of the algorithm, penalties and all of that. You become almost immune to anything that Google has to throw at you because you’re signaling rank pot-, excuse me, rank brain in the way that it wants to be signaled. You’re doing the Google tickle, the T tickle. I mean, it blows up. It becomes a self-feeding monster once you get all that activity in there.

Bradley: Yeah. This is an example of what Marco was just talking about, this is that WordPress.com. So free wordpress.com blog, guys. If you take a look at this, there’s no content on this page. It looks like there’s content, but the only content on this page is this right here. That’s it. The rest of those are embedded files. That’s RYS at work there, guys. That’s RYS Academy right there at work. Okay. Again, go view page source, the post body, the article body of this post. The content body is this right here. That’s the only text on the page. The rest of it is all embedded files RYS style, and that’s all.

Look at that, guys. It’s ranked number three in organic for SEO Virginia. I mean, that’s pretty powerful. Again, that’s all off-page stuff. There is some on-page going on there because of the iframes that are actually embedded in this page, but it’s primarily an off-page thing that’s got this ranking. And that’s the power of RYS, right?

By the way, the Google site as part of the stack and that’s been number one since May of 2015. Guys, that’s been number one since May of 2015, or within a few weeks anyways, that’s when it was published. Look at that, it’s a horrid site. It was just for a test purpose, guys. Still ranked. Still ranked, it’s three and a half years now. Still ranked. Anyways, there you go. Will it work? It damn sure does.

How Do You Get The URL Of A Scheduled Post In The MGYB GMB Service?

Dustin’s up, or Da B. “Hey there. I’m using the MGYB post scheduling service but I was wondering, in the Local GMB course you link to the previous post but when I scheduled a post, then I don’t have the URL of the last URL because it will be scheduled. How do I link to the post then if the last post yet is not published or is not published yet? Greetings. Dustin.” That’s a good question Dustin.

Marco, that’s something that I think Rob was talking about that was going to be a feature, that was going to be released soon within the auto poster was the ability to silo a post. Is that correct?

Marco: Yeah. We keep going back and forth with Shripad. I’m not sure if that’s available yet. But I mean, there’s an easy solution to that. Link in the body or you’re still not gonna have the post URL. You would need the original post URL, and then the next one, then the next one. So Shripad will have to come up with something regarding that so that we can solve that issue. But, yes, he is working on it so we can silo GMB posts.

Bradley: Yeah. I’m thinking if the script would wait until a published one was pulled and then grab the short URL and then link to that before the next one that’s scheduled publishes. You know what I mean? That would work to build a silo on that. I know that if you post the post … So you publish the post, then you grab the URL and link to it from the next post. But, you’re right, if you wanna schedule out multiple posts in advance, right now there’s not an ability to do that yet.

But that’s something, Marco, if you wanna make a note of that specifically, silo posts together, schedule post together, which I’m sure that can be integrated at some point. Right now that’s not something that can be done, Dustin, but we’re working on that. It’s a great feature.

Marco: No. Dustin, what I would suggest is you just have your VA go in and add links as needed.

Bradley: As they’re published.

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Right. As they publish, go grab the URL, and then go post the next one. That’s the only thing we can do to daisy chain them together right now until we have the automation such that it will be able to do it. Okay.

Jordan says, “On one of the, or …” Okay. One of the guys, here we go. “One of the guys on our SEO team said after an SEO pitch this probably sounds like magic to them. I still can’t believe we get paid for this stuff, almost like grownup version of video games. Haha.” That’s funny. Well, I can believe we’d get paid for it, man. Think about all the testing and all the studying and all the learning and stuff that you, guys, and the money that you invest in your education and to tools and all that stuff.

I mean, we spend a lot of time learning this stuff, guys, we should be paid for it. I mean, think about that. We spend all our time learning how to perform this SEO magic stuff. A business owner that’s doing plumbing, for example, he’s out unclogging drains and that kind of stuff. He wouldn’t have time to learn all this stuff. How do I know? Because I was an electrical contractor and I had to learn how to do this shit while I was doing electrical work. It just so happens I found that I could make more money at this, that’s why I switched to this all together.

What are you gonna say, Marco?

Marco: Yeah. I was gonna say we deserve to be paid and be paid well. I mean, do you know how much time we’ve spent between RYS Academy, RYS Reloaded, Local GMB Pro, Local PR Pro, Local Lease Pro? Do you know how many hours have gone into researching that and making it work? Making that all work hand in hand so that one pushes the other and you’re pushing ultimate power to whatever destination so that that client’s phone rings?

Yeah. It may seem like magic. “Well, my phone rang. You did all that.” But it’s actually just hours and hours and hours of being a total geek.

Are There Ways We Can Use Press Releases Based On The Battleplan Aside From Launching A New Site?

Bradley: Rabbit-hole time. Yeah. Dan’s up. He says, “I’ve looked using press releases based off the Battle Plan and saw that you have them at the store. Besides using them for launching a new site would there be other places that I could use them? I do some consulting on the side for local businesses and build sites, lead gen, et cetera?”

Yeah, Dan. “Press releases are my favorite off-page or link building method really. Like no question, I absolutely love press releases. I use them as my primary off-page link building tool or method. I still use spam links from time to time for certain things, but for the most part I’m using press releases for link building.”

Yeah. You can use them. Guys, there’s dozens and dozens of things that you can publish press releases about. I’ve talked about them. Dan, we have a course called Local PR Pro which is specifically about how to use press releases to rank in the Maps pack, to get Google GMB, Google My Business profiles ranked in the maps pack using press releases. Right?

That’s what that course, Local PR Pro, is all about. In that course, I talk about how there’s multiple different things that you could publish a press release about. Because that’s a question that comes up often, “Well, I don’t think my client has anything that’s really newsworthy to publish a press release about.”

But think about it, getting a five-star review, you could publish a press release about receiving a five-star review or your client. Or you could publish a press release about a new employee being hired. Or a seasonal change to the product line that’s available. Or the services that are available, depending on what kind of business you’re dealing with. Or an accolade that the company receives, some sort of award or something like that. Or any charitable things, any charity events that they’re hosting or that they contribute to or participate in. Right?

There’s just dozens and dozens of things, hooks, angles that you could use to write a news release or something that can be … Guys, you can even publish a press release about a new blog post that’s been published on the website. No kidding. I mean, you just have to get a little bit creative. Dan, when I say you have to get creative, I don’t mean you. I mean, what I would recommend is hiring a PR writer, from Upwork or something like that, that can come up with these angles. A good press release writer can come up with a newsworthy angle for just about anything.

Again, if you’re doing a lot of this work, you could hire a PR writer, a good PR writer from like Upwork or something like that. Or if you’ve got a good press release distribution service that you subscribe to for monthly press releases or whatever, if they’ve got good writers in-house, which most good services do now, then they’ll have writers that are already trained on how to find news where the angles or to create hooks or their stories for the press releases. Right?

For example, if you use the MGYB press release service, the writers there from the Press Advantage distribution network, if that’s what you’re using, it’s fabulous, and there the press releases are almost twice the content length of typical press releases. There’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 words as opposed to 300 to 400, which is what most of them are. So those writers are really, really good, like their sole purpose in life is to find an angle or to create an angle to write a press release about. Those are the same writers that you have access to when you buy a press releases from us individually.

Okay. Anybody wanna comment on that before we move on? It’s a good one, Dan.

Marco: No. I think you hit the nail on the head. They’re great for just about everything. The only thing that you have to avoid is self-promotion, but you get that from most of them. You just have to define what self-promotion is. You go and you advertise. Well, we’re in Facebook, if you’ve just started your Facebook page, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. It’s still self-promotion. It’s just not getting sales. That’s what you wanna try to avoid.

Other than that, it’s fantastic for link building. Not only that, if you hit the press release, whatever the distribution network is with link building, it’ll push through. You’re putting a filter in between the destination so that you hit that with link building. It’ll power it up even more. They just work really well for everything.

Bradley: They damn sure do. Like Marco said, you can actually do self promotional PRs, but the salesy part is what you gotta leave out. They shouldn’t be salesy. But they can be self-promotional. Again, a good PR writer will be able to disguise a promotion as a story, a news story, and that’s really what you wanna do. That’s why I say don’t do it yourself. If I had to write press releases, I’d be a very miserable person. I wouldn’t wanna do it, but some people enjoy that stuff and they’re good at it. All right.

Is It Okay To Start With Battleplan Before Going Into The Mastermind and Syndication Academy Courses?

Andrew Walker’s up. Andrew is a local guy to me. I was in lead share, like a breakfast lead share group with him for several years that I don’t attend those things much anymore. Andrew is a great guy. Anyways, it’s good to see you here, Andrew. I haven’t seen him in a while. He says, “Hey guys, it’s been a long time since I’ve been on Hump Day Hangouts. I got caught up in the cold calling strategy to build my business and also had a case of the shiny object syndrome.” Well, we all do, Andrew. Don’t beat yourself up, buddy. We all go through that. I promise you, I’ve been through it. I still struggle with that, to be honest.

“I don’t fully understand how powerful-,” or excuse me, “I didn’t fully understand how powerful digital marketing is and what it can do for your business. You would think that that’s a no-brainer for an IT guy. Anyway, I’m back for real and I’m ready to learn this stuff. I’ve just downloaded the Battle Plan. I’d love to get involved in the Mastermind, but I’m not able to afford that at this time. Syndication Academy looks to be a great runner up. Can I start there to get things going or just start with the Battle Plan? Thanks, guys, and congrats on your four year anniversary.”

Okay. Great question, Andrew. Again, glad to see you back, man. The Syndication Academy is, yeah, it’s good, however, because, I’m not gonna knock Syndication Academy, but what we recommend is, especially for you, Andrew, you’re running your IT business, your IT services business, and so it depends on how much time you have. If you’ve got a lot of time and no money then, yes, pick up Syndication Academy because then you can learn how to build your own syndication network, which is gonna be one of the critical components to your business in expanding your reach and helping to generate more leads, it’ll help with your SEO and all that kind of stuff.

However, there’s a lot of time that goes into learning how to build a syndication network and, unless you plan on building syndication networks for others or selling them to others, I wouldn’t recommend that you go through all the trouble of learning how to build all that stuff for your own branded syndication network, for your own business. If you’re looking to try to grow your business, then your time is better spent not learning how to build a syndication network that you’re only gonna build one for your own business.

Your time is better spent marketing your business. You can instead just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us and we will build it to our specifications, which is exactly what we teach in the training. You can save yourself weeks of study and implementation by just buying a Done For You Syndication Network and you still reap the benefits of it without having to spend weeks of your time. Does that make sense? They’re inexpensive enough that there’s really no reason that you can’t just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us. It’s cheaper or about the same price as the cost of a month tuition to Syndication Academy. Right?

Anyways, my point is, if you want, Andrew, since you can’t join the Mastermind yet, what I recommend is that you attend our Hump Day Hangouts regularly on Wednesdays, ask your questions here try, keep it to one question per post. In other words, you can post a few times, but try to keep it one question per post please. Ask questions here and we will try to guide you in the best way possible to help you to start growing your IT business, just from these Hump Day Hangouts. Then once you have generated some revenue you can always come join the Mastermind, which is your best bet, because the Mastermind is not just about marketing stuff.

Guys, we’ve gotten away from just teaching SEO or just teaching marketing methods. It’s more about building your business regardless of whether you’re building a local agency or consulting firm, or you want to build your own brick and mortar business, or virtual business for that matter. We want to teach you how to do all of that, which includes marketing and includes SEO, and includes all that stuff, but we’re not pigeon holing our training into just marketing training, if that makes sense. A lot more goes into it than that.

I would suggest, Andrew, that what you do is come back and join us here in Hump Day Hangouts, get involved, stay engaged, ask questions. We also have our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials Facebook group that you could ask questions there. As soon as you’re able to, I would invest in joining the Mastermind so that you can get, basically, almost one-on-one guidance from each one of us my partners and I as well as all of the other members in the Mastermind that are also savvy business owners. Right? That’s part of why it’s Mastermind because it’s not just about us teaching all the time, it’s about everybody in there contributing and helping each other, which is fabulous. Okay.

By the way, one of our top members, longtime members, Jason Johnson, who is what Adam was just talking about at the very beginning of this Hump Day Hangout, he was mentioning somebody was having difficulty setting up their MX records for G suite email to use their domain for their email within G suite. Jason Johnson posted, “Hey, I saw somebody was having trouble with MX records. Hey, I’m an IT guy. If anybody has any questions or any problems, tell them to reach out to me. I’ll help them for free as long as they’re a Mastermind member.”

Andrew, what I’m saying is, Jason is an IT guy who’s been in our Mastermind. He does digital marketing on the side, but also markets his own business and somebody that you could absolutely click with. Probably the two of you could chat about what he’s doing for his business and what’s working for him in generating leads for his IT business and all that kind of stuff. Right?

Again, that’s part of the power of a Mastermind. It’s not just learning from me or Marco when, you know, I’m gonna teach you how to generate leads for your business, but I generate leads for contracting businesses. Right? You’re trying to generate leads for IT services, and computer repair networking, and that kind of stuff, so why not get the advice direct from somebody that’s already generating leads for that type of a business, which we have members in our group to do that? Does that make sense?

That’s the power of a Mastermind. Okay. So that’s what I recommend. In the meantime, if you don’t have the money, come back here, ask questions, implement what you can, go through our YouTube channel Semantic Mastery, youtube.com/semanticmastery. Use the channel search function, ask questions over there. You’re likely going to find already video answers for many of your questions. Then, like I said, anything that you can’t find answers to, post in either the Facebook group or post back here on the event page every week and we’ll come in and answer your questions. As soon as you can generate a little bit of positive revenue, I would reinvest that back into your education and into building your business by joining the Mastermind, getting guidance from us as well as our other members.

Marco: I’m gonna give him just a couple of weeks. First of all, welcome back, Andrew. Sorry that you had a shiny object syndrome. I mean, that sucks and it makes you spend a whole lot of money and time chasing. It becomes a useless path. You fill up your computer with a whole bunch of garbage that you’re never going to use and you realize how much money you spent and then you get caught up at where you are right now where you ended, and dropped all that money and you have nothing to show for it.

But that’s okay, lesson learned. The two examples that I’m gonna give you is, I’m gonna give you Paul Fussell, who’s always in these Hump Day Hangouts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he drops in today; or if he isn’t, it’s because he’s out making money. He was at POFU Live, as a matter of fact, our event. The way he went about doing it, he come into Hump Day Hangouts, ask questions, and then go and go and apply. Ask questions, go and apply. then he started purchasing our drive stacks to rank. I know that he was doing dental for a while, I don’t know what he’s doing now.

Anyway, the thing about Paul is that he just went and he got Done For You services, and then he was chasing clients. Every time he’d get a client, drive stack, and that’s how he would he would rank them. But that’s Paul and that’s how he did it, so Hump Day Hangouts and Done For You services.

Then, we get to Jordan in Syndication Academy. Jordan lives in Syndication Academy, he’s always there. He’s one of our, I don’t know, one of our long-running and most active members of Syndication Academy. He runs an agency and I think he just got a huge nationwide client, but it’s from Syndication Academy. I’m not gonna say that he got everything from Syndication Academy, but I know that that’s his foundation and I know that that’s what he’s doing to rank his clients, to help his clients and to help his agency.

He has an agency, actually he’s an agency owner, but he decided that Syndication Academy was the thing for him. But, of course, they’ll all tell you, and Jordan will tell you that the Battle Plan is the place where you start, and you have to follow it. If you follow the Battle Plan, then you’re going to get to our Done For You services.

It’s a whole lot easier to go and buy a Syndication Academy Network, as Bradley mentioned, than to learn how to build a one-of-a-kind that you only need that one time. Why not go buy it and pay that than to pay a monthly membership to learn how to build one, or you might not wanna learn how to build one, or you might need?

It’s just to buy them and then go and sell it to clients, to people you know. Then, you pitch the benefits of being branded of having that footprint of being seen, of your content being seen everywhere, pushing your content to where the people are hanging out. So that’s one of the benefits.

You could do it many ways. Now, of course, we’re always going to tell you that the Mastermind is the place to be because that’s where like-minded entrepreneurs hang out, people who want to grow their business and get away from just that weekly paycheck and having to wait until the next one so that you could do whatever it is that you wanna do. We wanna push you, guys, past that. We call it POFU, position of fuck you.

Whatever that position is for you, Andrew, we want you to get there. There isn’t just one way to get there, but we do wanna help you get there. So whether you choose Hump Day Hangouts, whether you choose Syndication Academy, or what we suggest, whether you join our Mastermind, we’re going to help you any way we can. That’s what we’re here for.

Bradley: That’s right. Let’s not forget Mohammad. He’s a shining example. Mohammad Mackey. He started by just joining Hump Day Hangouts and coming and asking questions week in and week out and for months. Eventually, he got to a point where he landed a couple of his first clients and started making enough money. He came and joined the Mastermind. Then, he went through a little bit of a struggle for over-promising to clients and ended up losing some clients and had to drop out of the Mastermind for a little bit.

But he kept coming to Hump Day Hangouts and asking more questions, even during that time where he had to back out of the Mastermind, and he got the education that he needed and he implemented it. Right? It’s nothing we did, all we did was provide him with information, but he’s the one that took action and kept at it. He kept persisting in working and he kept finding stuff that wasn’t working until he found stuff that did work. Then, he landed some clients again, got his money back up, and joined the Mastermind again.

We have multiple examples of people that have done that just by starting here, right here at Hump Day Hangouts, Andrew, and you can do that too. Right? The Battle Plan, like I said, will tell you do this, this, this, and this, and you’re going to start getting results. It doesn’t say that you have to learn how to do those things, it just tells you apply these things. Right?

You can either learn how to do those things and do them yourself or, as a business owner, it would be much more efficient with your time to just purchase the Done For You services and apply them in the order that they’re recommended and reap the benefits of those without having to learn how to do it. Okay. Great question. Again, glad to have you back, Andrew. We’re happy to see you participate and be a lot more engaged over the coming weeks.

What Are The Factors You Consider When Finding The Best Keywords For Ranking Opportunity In Local Lead Gen Campaigns?

Gordon’s up. He says, “Hey guys, thank you very much again for the help you provide on Hump Days. It’s greatly appreciated.” You’re welcome, Gordon. “If you’re looking to find a low hanging fruit where you can easily rank in the GMB 3-pack, other than looking at the reviews of the current businesses in the 3-pack in their citation profile, what else do you do to decide whether or not you have found a golden goose ranking opportunity? Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls? Thanks again, Gordon.”

Okay. First of all, Gordon, Local Lease Pro, I showed the exact simple method, it’s kind of time-consuming, but the simple method using it, a free software that we show, we use to identify what I call slam-dunk opportunities, which is which you’re calling a golden goose in your question, okay? Again, that was in Local Lease Pro. If you have access to that, which I’m hoping you do because it was on sale for a very, very ridiculously low price for about eight days during the Side Hustle Toolbox launch. That’s close now, but it is available, Local Lease Pro, but we teach the method specifically how to find low-hanging opportunities.

Now I can’t go into the details of that right here, but it is very, very simple to do using the Easy Local Cash software, which is a free software. It’s Chad Kimball’s software. It just shows you, basically, ever since July of this year, when mobile implemented or switched to the mobile first index, that opened up just massive, massive opportunity. I’m telling you, guys, it opened up more opportunity than I’ve seen since I started my local marketing career in 2010. And that is what we teach on how to find those opportunities that have been opened up by this major change in the algorithm or which index is used first. Right? The mobile first index.

That’s all in Local Lease Pro. I can’t obviously say that right here. It is in the course. Also, you can find out, certainly, if you joined a Mastermind, because Local Lease Pro is one of the first courses that Mastermind members get now when they join.

Marco: Yeah, the how. I mean, that’s the course, the how is, you know, if we gave you that, then why have a course in the first place? So, sorry, that’s something that we can’t do. I’m glad that you mentioned again the Mastermind. I was in our mini, we have the mini-Mastermind and mine is on Tuesday nights for an hour. I have three great people. I have Jamina, I have Will Kenderdine, and John Wypick. We were going over my method for using the software and we went over it in detail. I don’t mind for an hour. I mean, I decided to give my time, right?

So this is what it’s all about. Membership has its privileges. I do things a little bit differently. I find targets a little bit differently, but it all works just the same way. The same way that you teach it, the way that I do it, I already decided to do it. The thing is that membership has its privileges. You have to be a member in order to get the information that you’re asking about. It’s not something that we can give away for free.

Bradley: Yeah. “Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls?” Well, that’s a good question. If you do your research properly upfront, you should know. First of all, you should research your industry or the niche that you’re targeting. Now if you followed us at all for any length of time, Gordon, which I know you have, you know that I’ve been telling you and I’ve been preaching this and beating this drum for years now, which is: specialize. Focus on one industry, guys. Become a big fish in one industry instead of a me-too agency or a me-too consultant or me-too local marketer that will just accommodate any business that will talk to you.

Trust me, you will never gain any traction in your business, or you will have a much harder time gaining traction in your business, if you just offer marketing services to any business that will talk to you. Because your amount of work multiplies exponentially because you have to do keyword research, you have to do market research, you have to understand the vocabulary of the industry, you have to figure out what the pain points are in those industries both for the consumer and for the business owner.

Because if you’re the business owner that you can help them market their products and services, you need to understand the consumer’s mindset, but you also have to understand the business owner’s mindset. So that you can talk to them and speak their language, build rapport with them. So you have to learn two different markets for every industry you enter, the consumer market and the business market. Right?

There’s just so much work that goes into learning, becoming a marketing special or professional in any industry. It requires a ton of research. So if you try to just say, “Oh, I’m gonna be a local marketing guy and I’ll talk to any business in my area that will talk to me,” you’re gonna create a shit ton of additional work that you can significantly reduce. You’ll gain a lot more traction a lot faster in your business if you focus in on one particular industry because then you can craft everything you do in your business around that particular industry. All your marketing messages, all your keyword research, your content templates, everything that you do can be designed around that one particular industry. Now you become a specialist.

I use this as an example. Would you go to a general health practitioner for a heart surgery? No, you go to a cardiologist. Why do you think businesses, like let’s say home remodeling contractors or general contractors, would they want to go to a me-too agency or would they want to go to a contractor media, contractor marketing agency that specializes in general and remodeling contractor marketing? Does that make sense? Which one would you prefer?

Gordon, I recommend specializing in on one industry. But don’t just arbitrarily decide on what industry you wanna focus in on and say, “I’m gonna build my business around that,” you need to research that industry and determine, is there a call volume? Is there significant interest in that? Is there money there?

What’s one of the ways that you can determine that? An easy and simple and a quick way is go do a search for the product and/or service as if you were a customer looking for that product or service. Just go do a Google search for it and take a look and see, are there ads? Are there Google ads? If so, that means there’s paying advertisers. If there’s Google ads, that means people are paying to bid on those keywords, which means there’s likely traffic for those keywords. If there wasn’t traffic for those keywords and if those keywords didn’t convert, there wouldn’t be ads. Does that make sense? People don’t pay and bid on keywords-, well, good advertisers don’t pay and bid on keywords that don’t convert or don’t generate traffic that converts. Right? So if you’re seeing Google ads, that’s a good indication.

Now I wouldn’t stop there. I’d research it further. You could do things, like use Google Trends to find out where in the country, or in the world for that matter, but I always do US-based searches, you can find out where the hotspots are for where the search traffic is the most or the search interest is the most for the types of products or services that you’d be promoting in that industry. Right? So then, you can start to develop out which locations you’re gonna target first for your business. Does that make sense?

Remember, specialize on one industry, guys, because then you can scale your business by geography instead of by type or kind. Does that make sense? Instead of trying to scale your business by taking on new industries where you’re gonna create so much additional work, scale your business by continuing with the same industry but expanding your service area or your territory, your target area. Right?

That’s a hell of a lot better or much more efficient way to build your business. Not only that, in time you will build a name and a reputation for being that type of a marketing specialist for that particular industry. People will start to seek you out as opposed to you having a force or push your marketing, your services onto others. People will start to seek you out because they know that you’re the specialist. Does that make sense?

How do you determine whether there’s enough search traffic? You have to research it. Make sure it’s an industry that has paying advertisers. Make sure that there is significant search interest for those types of things and that it’s profitable.

As I said about in the past, carpet cleaning, there’s a ton of search interest for carpet cleaning but there’s very, very, very small margins in the carpet cleaning industry. Right? Carpet cleaning companies don’t particularly like to pay for marketing services or for lead generation services, they don’t have the budgets for it because their margins are very small.

But if you just did keyword research, which is, when I first started, the very first lead gen site I ever built was carpetcleaningalexandriava.com. I don’t own that anymore, but it was a lead gen site that I built because all I did was base my decision on which industry I was gonna target based upon keyword search volume from the Google Keyword Planner. It said something like 600 exact match searches for that term “carpet cleaning Alexandria VA” per month. It was like 660 or something like that, 600 searches per month. So I said, “Oh man, there’s a lot of search volume there. I can make money with that.”

Well, I built the site and got it ranked number one. We were getting 30 to 40 calls a week through that lead gen site and I had trouble monetizing it for even a hundred dollars a month. No shit. Then when I finally got down to the chewy center of why that was by sitting down with the contractor that was renting that site from me or leasing that site from me, he told me, “Because the carpet cleaning business has very, very small margins.” Right? Very small margins. He was making something ridiculous, per carpet cleaning job $8 or $9 or $10, or $12 in profit. It was something stupid. After paying his labor and insurance costs and, the cleaning solution costs, and all of this overhead, he had a very small margin so he had trouble paying for that.

What happened? I ended up switching into other higher margin businesses. That’s why I love the tree service industry because it’s huge margin. That’s why I like remodeling contractors, home builders, HVAC repair, any sort of repair, roofers, all those types because the margins are so much larger. Does that make sense?

Again, you have to do the research, Gordon. There’s no real easy answer there. You just got to be logical and do the research and you should be able to find the opportunities as well as the perfect industry. Also, one last thing I would suggest about that is, seriously, guys, try to find an industry that you, not only has all the correct signals or markers of being a good industry to work at, but also one that you have a genuine interest in because it’ll make it feel less like work. Okay.

Honestly, I don’t have any interest in tree services, except for the fact that that does make me some damn good money, which kind of makes it interesting. But if you can find an industry that you have a genuine interest in, it’ll feel less like work while you’re building your business.

Anybody wanna comment on that before I move on? That was a long-winded answer I know.

Marco: No, but it was perfect. There’s no need to go into that any further.

How Do You Set Up The Syndication Network Of Several GMB Sites In Same Metro Area?

Bradley: He says, “Hey guys, so if I have a group of GMB sites in the same metro area and a WordPress site ranked on page one and Serps, a YouTube channel with videos ranking on page one of Google’s video page and I want to lease all of these as a total package deal to a business owner operating an area, how do I set up a syndication network for this? Can I feed the RSS feeds from all the GMB sites into the WordPress site blog into one generically branded syndication network? Or do I need to set up separate networks for each GMB site or WordPress site? Thank you very much for your comment.”

Michael, I don’t recommend a syndication network for lead gen assets unless you need them. For example, if you’re having trouble getting a lead gen asset to push another 3-pack, can a syndication network will help for that? Then, absolutely.

The other thing is, if you have a cluster of Google My Business profiles for a metropolitan area that are all branded the same, then you could use one syndication network for those. When you talk about grabbing the GMB RSS feeds, I’m not sure what you mean from that, unless you’re using our GMB auto poster which will generate an RSS feed, but you can’t just get an RSS feed, at least not that I’m aware of.

Marco, this may have changed, but is there an RSS feed from the GMB websites yet?

Marco: Not that I know of. Not that I’m aware of.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah. As far as I’m aware, there is not an RSS feed from the GMB websites. So our GMB auto poster will create an RSS feed from the GMB posts that are connected through that auto poster or that are posted with that auto poster. So you can do it that way. But like I said, you should have a common brand for all of those assets, if that’s the case. If you want to feed them all into one network, which again, I’m gonna be 100% transparent with you guys, I’m not building syndication networks for my lead gen assets. I build syndication networks for clients because I tell them that it’s critical. It is because it’s brand building, it’s entity validation and brand authority building, right?

So any client, I’m gonna tell them. “You should have a syndication network to protect your brand and to amplify your brand, expand your reach. It also helps to build your authority and all that kind of stuff.” For content marketing, all my clients, I suggest we do regular content marketing, blogging that gets syndicated out to the syndication network. That’s all true. It’s not just because I wanna charge them money, guys, it’s to protect their brand and to help them to stay ranked.

But for lead gen assets, that’s an additional expense. So why implement that? Until and unless you need to, right? So for my lead gen assets that I’m building right now, I’m not using syndication networks. If I have lead gen assets that I do all the other magic that I work to them and they don’t end up producing, because maybe they’re not ranking well or that area ended up being more competitive than I originally thought, then I may add a syndication network. But that’s only if and when it’s absolutely needed. It’s kind of like a last resort thing because it’s an additional expense that I don’t wanna have to put up for a lead gen asset if I can get results without it.

Now once you’ve monetized an asset, a lead gen or, in this case, a multiple assets, once you’ve monetized them, I’ve talked about this too, if once you’ve developed it … Like for me, when I monetize a lead gen asset, what I do is after several months, two or three months of the service provider paying on time and there’s no issues, if we develop a decent relationship, then I offer at that point to rebrand those lead gen assets after the client, certainly their name. It’s a lot more legit that way, right?

Like I said, at that point, once I would offer the rebranding, then that’s where I could upsell them on, “Hey, since we’re gonna be rebranding these, we should also go to syndication network because it’s gonna help to protect your brand and we can use that to help continue to push the lead gen assets that I’m gonna rebrand. It’ll help to continue to keep them producing for you, blah blah blah blah blah.”

At that point, we set up syndication network. Might even set them up on content marketing services. That’s an additional charge beyond the lead gen leasing or pay per lead fees that I’m charging. Depending on how I’ve monetized that asset, this is now starting to build their asset, syndication network with their branding, building, doing content marketing on their website.

So now I’m double dipping, right? Now I’m generating money from my lead gen assets and also working on the client’s assets as a separate fee. Right? So it gives you a whole lot of opportunity, Michael. But for your lead gen assets, I don’t recommend setting up syndication network unless you absolutely need to. Try to get results without it. Guys, I am the firm believer of trying to get the most results or trying to get the best results with the least amount of effort possible and least amount of money invested too.

Should You Create A Blog Post If You Syndicate A GMB Post?

Okay. It’s a good Hump Day today, by the way. I’m liking these questions. It’s a good question, Michael. All right. Ray had some confusion earlier. We’ll pass over that. Quit This House, he says, “If I wanted to syndicate my GMB post, should I create a blog post with the post details and link or should I post to one of the social media sites and create a trigger from there?”

Quit This House, use the GMB auto poster. I’m telling you, it’s stupid and expensive, it’s super convenient and efficient, and it can generate an RSS feed from your GMB posts, and then you can just connect that directly to a syndication network, and then, viola, it’s done. You don’t have to go … Right now, what you’re talking about would require a manual action for every post. Right?

If you just set it up through the auto poster, you can, not only schedule out your GMB post all in one setting so that they automatically publish on the day and time that you select, but it will also generate an RSS feed that then you can populate or trigger a syndication network with, and all of that is automated.

Marco: By the way, since we’re back on the auto poster, I got an answer from Rob and he says, yes, we’ll be able to silo based on tagging. So you can create multiple silos within the auto poster just by tagging, by using different tags. The function isn’t integrated yet, but it’s coming. It’s already being developed, guys. Those of you who are looking to get into this, get in there now because it just keeps …

Shripad is a master programmer. He just keeps adding to it more and more functionality and he’s now charging more. We’re not gonna charge more monthly yet. If it gets to the point where there’s just a ton of programming that needs to be done, the price will probably need to go up. But we usually grandfather people into the prices where they are, so remember that.

Bradley: Yeah. Michael says, “Holy crap, I can’t believe I got the $1,000 Local Lease Pro course for $47.” Yeah, Michael. Look, for eight days, we promoted shit out of that and told everybody that once the Side Hustle Toolbox offer closed that it was gonna, I originally said it was gonna go to 500, but it’s such a damn good course. I mean, I’m telling you, this is I think the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career, that Local Lease Pro method right there. That’s why we made it $1,000.

Not only that, but we’re gonna be updating the course. Like I said, I’ve got some new stuff to add to it. That as soon as I get my VA on track for the new changes and I polish up the processes a little bit, I’m gonna be sharing that, I’ll be updating Local Lease Pro. So, yeah, you’re right. Good thing that you got in on it.

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have … ” By the way, guys, if you want Local Lease Pro, if you don’t have it, there’s only two options, you can buy it for 1,000 bucks or you can join the Mastermind and you can get it included in your Mastermind membership. So it’s entirely up to you, but I would recommend it. I mean, guys, it’s even worth $1,000, I’m not kidding, because of the opportunity. I’m telling you, it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my eight, almost nine year career now. Okay.

Does It Hurt Or Help To Have Multiple Syndication Networks?

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have multiple syndication networks?” Yes, it can, Abe. Not for YouTube channels-, well, depending on how they were set up, but if you’re using syndication networks for blog syndication to try to rank your own domain, like a self-hosted site, then, yes, multiple syndication networks can hurt you, depending on how you have it set up and how you have a syndication set up,

I’ve said for years now, like we teach branded tier one syndication networks and we also talked about when we teach how to build two-tier syndication networks. You can take it out multiple tiers. But I’ve also recommended for years that you only use two-tier syndication networks on YouTube channels or multi-tiered syndication networks on YouTube channels or for YouTube syndication, not for blog syndication.

However, if you wanna do it for blog syndication, I do teach in Syndication Academy and I’ve talked about it multiple times how you can use multi-tiered syndication networks and reduce the chance of getting a Google slap. You cannot eliminate it because you are still leaving a footprint. But you can significantly reduce the footprint if you add additional content feeds as triggers into your second or third tiers. Right? Because what you wanna do is you wanna mask or bury your content among a whole lot of additional route relevant and related type content so that the blogs don’t show or appear to be solely for manipulating search rankings. Right? And that’s essentially what they are.

Again, with multi-tiered syndication networks, I don’t recommend them for blog syndication unless you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to put forth all the additional effort. Also, multitude syndication networks can break down because there’s a lot of moving pieces, there’s a lot of different content sources, which can cause you know different RSS feeds that you don’t have control over because they’re not your RSS feeds, which can cause problems. Multi-tiered syndication networks can be a bitch to maintain for that reason and so that’s another reason I don’t recommend them.

If you are just flatly syndicating your content to multiple syndication networks and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, then you are absolutely causing damage because it is clearly, the algorithm can pick that up in a split second. Right? Again, Abe, if you were gonna be building these types of stuff, like I said, the only way that … We have Syndication Academy where I talk about all of that stuff, seriously, I go into your best practices and everything about how to use them and where to use them. But for blog syndication, I highly recommend that you just use a one-tier branded syndication network and then you can boost the hell out of that. Okay.

Marco: Yeah. He also says that he’s used lower standard contractors in the past and he’s considering using our services on top. Dude, if you’ve done that, then don’t get a syndication network from us until you fix whatever it is that you’ve done. I suggest totally getting into Syndication Academy, seeing how it’s all supposed to work. I hope that you have access to all of these networks and multiple rings that have been done for you so that you can just stop whatever madness it was that was created and you could do it the right way. The way that it’s supposed to be done, which is branding. It’s done for branding and for syndicating your network. Yeah. It is done to manipulate but to manipulate in the right way. If you get caught manipulating the wrong way, you’re going to get slapped down.

What’s The Difference Between The Press Release Service In Serp Space And MGYB?

Bradley: That’s right. Ray says, “What is the difference between press release service from Serp Space, and MGYB? Are they overlapping and/or equivalent? They’re equivalent now, Ray, because, well, there’s two different levels of press releases orders from Serb Space. There was the press release and then press release plus. The press release was, the press advantage network, the distribution network, and that’s we have now a separate account. We have our own press advantage distribution network agreement with them that is available in MGYB. It’s basically the same distribution network. So it’s up to you if you wanna order from Serp Space or if you wanna come to MGYB which is owned and controlled entirely by Semantic Mastery and my partners. If that makes sense.

Serp Space was a collaboration. We are no longer part of that. There’s no issues there or anything like that. I’m just letting you know, if you wanna order directly from us, it’s through MGYB. Okay. Good question.

Should We Link From GMB Biz.Site Description?

Doodle Digital Marketing, I like that. He says, “Hey guys, I love Hump Day Hangouts. Tons of value. “Should we link out from the GMB biz site description?” Not … Well, wait a minute, the GMB, yes. You can link from the GMB website content. I don’t know about the description. But if you’re talking about the GMB business description, no, you can’t put links in that; that’s short. I think it only allows 750 characters. But if you’re talking about the GMB website, yes, you can link out to that.

What I don’t recommend doing a lot of external links, unless it makes sense, it has to be relevant guys, remember, this is a Google property, so I would not be doing some stupid “I’m gonna link to a .gov or .edu site for authority” because that’s bullshit and it has been for years. If it’s relevant, then, yes. If it’s not relevant, you’re just doing it because you learn that somewhere on some stupid SEO program somewhere, don’t do it because that’s dumb.

But what I would recommend doing is, I always link, and I teach this, but I always link from the GMB website text, the content body of the website, I always link to the GMB maps share URL, as well as to the GMB website. So it’s linking to itself, right? If you have an external website, so self-hosted website, you can link to that. That makes sense. You could also link to some of your social media stuff. That makes sense. Any type of branded property that you could link out.

Again, I wouldn’t spam the description or the GMB website content with a bunch of exterior external links, I would keep it … Really that’s why I usually just link from the GMB website to itself and also to the GMB maps share URL because those are Google properties. Right? So just consider that.

It’s after five o'clock, I don’t have to get my daughter-, or I don’t get to have my daughter for dinner tonight, so I do have a couple extra minutes. Marco, can you hang out for a few extra?

Marco: Yeah, I can hang out for a few extra. My daughter isn’t crying it.

Bradley: We’ve only got a few questions left.

Marco: Let’s go.

Bradley: All right. John says, “I’ve got a Semantic Mastery syndrome. I have no doubt it’s the place to be.” “Thanks, John. John is one in Marco’s small group that he was talking about. Jordan says, “Marco’s right. We learned the why behind all these Semantic Mastery tactics, Syndication Academy, RYS stack, Press Releases, et cetera, and then just sell them along with some other deep rooted stuff we had developed in the lab.” He’s talking about his own business specifically, Jordan.

“Then we also create all the content via writing and optimizing it, which we charge for, and then we do web design with SEO strategy pre-launch. I couldn’t build a drive stack if my life depended on it. Haha.” Yeah, that’s great. I mean, honestly, guys, those are the audience that are tech nerds and like to get their hands dirty, so to speak, roll up their sleeves and get to work. Then, RYS Academy will teach you how to build drive stacks. It’s a lot of work. You can benefit from RYS stacks without having to learn how to build them, by just buying them done for you and you’ll save yourself a shit ton of time and energy.

Again, I’m not trying to discourage anybody from buying the course, I’m just saying you got to consider where to spend your time. Is learning how to build drive stacks going to progress your business? It might. You have to make that decision. I can’t make that decision for you. Or is the benefit and the result that the drive stack can produce going to help your business? And if so, then why go through the trouble of learning how to build them when you could just purchase them done for you and receive the benefit that you were seeking to begin with? Does that make sense? Then that way you could spend your time focusing on how to sell it or how to monetize it or how to apply it to get the result that you’re seeking. Does that make sense?

Again, guys, you have to think about it on a higher level. That’s what I think is really wrong with our industry, is that everybody teaches, or the vast majority of products tell you, “Hey, we’re gonna teach you how to do this one skill.” Yeah, I’m not trying to take that away from anybody. That skill is valuable. Whatever that skill may be, it’s valuable. But just because you know how to get a result from it, one particular skill does not make you a business owner, it does not make it a profitable business for you. Right?

So you got to think about how are you going to make money from whatever it is you choose to do? Is doing that thing, being the mechanic or the technician, is that actually going to make you the money or is selling that service and the result that that service produces going to make you the money? If that’s the case, then why don’t you focus on learning how to sell it and find people that are already good at doing it, fulfilling it, to do it for you right.

That’s what we’re trying to get at, guys, and Jordan understands that. That’s why Jordan’s business is cranking, it’s just kicking ass. Okay.

Any Black Friday Sales For Done For You Services Or Training?

Luis, he’s a new Mastermind member. “Hey guys, any Black Friday sales?” By the way, welcome, Luis. “Any Black Friday sales for Done For You services or training?” Yeah. Isn’t that with the GMB stuff was the pre-Black Friday sale?

Marco: It’s the pre. We will have something. Something’s coming your way and it’s gonna be good. Trust me. It’s not Black Friday yet, dude. But we will have something. It’ll be big. We control MGYB now. As Bradley mentioned, it’s ours. Semantic Mastery is our own store. So we’ve got some really good stuff coming your way.

Luis, I will be talking to you on Monday, as a matter of, fact. It’s his onboarding call. Again, I’m sorry, all these Mastermind questions keep coming up or Mastermind people. As part of the onboarding process, we give people a half hour call just to get them pointed in the right direction, to see where they’re going, where they want to be. So we ask questions, we try to provide guidance. I just happened to get Luis.

Guys, you can’t ask for who you want. You’re going to get whoever is up on the calendar, because we rotate since there’s five of us. But whoever you get, you’re going to get the direction that you need and you’re going to get your questions answered so that you can get started on your way to POFU.

That’s what we want you to do. We want you to get started getting to that place where you’re going to be and say, “Okay. Now I don’t have to deal with shitty clients. I don’t have to deal with shitty people. I am at a place where I can go into any negotiation from a position of power. I know what I’m worth. If this guy gives me any flack, I’m gonna have to say ‘Fuck you. I’m gonna go to your competitor and charge them half price just because I feel like it, because I don’t need you.‘” That’s what we want you to be.

Bradley: There you go so. Yes, Black Friday is this Friday. So, yeah, there will be some other specials. I don’t usually get involved with what promotions we’re doing, guys, so I couldn’t answer that. But I’m glad Marco said, yeah, we do have something coming Friday.

Should You Use Only The Main Keyword Phrase Or Should You Diversify Them When Building Links To All Assets?

Jay Turner. What’s up, Jay? He says, “I’ve been able to get my client ranked in the 3-pack for the second most trafficked keyword phrase with an RYS stack. High five, Marco.”

Marco: High five, dude.

Bradley: “But now I want to take on the main and most competitive keyword. I’m adding a silo of content to the RYS stack targeting the main keyword. So far so good. My question is when embarking on link building to all assets, like RYS, Syndication Network, GMB website, et cetera, should I use only the main keyword phrase or must I diversify the keyword phrases?”

Jay, diversify. What I recommend you do is go pool your … You should have probably already done keyword research anyways, so if you’re gonna be siloing, you should have your keyword themes relatively tight for the silos anyways. So make sure that if you’re gonna be direct targeting link building on a silo basis, that you’re only using a set of keywords that fall within that particular silo or keyword theme. Right? Does that make sense?

Let me take this down to a local level because what I wanna explain is, guys, when you’re doing a ton of like spam link building and such to power up tier one entities, which would be like drive stacks, press release, organization pages, syndication networks, even citations, you don’t want to hit, and I’m gonna say local because that’s primarily what I work on, and I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about here anyways. You said client ranks, so it’s likely it’s locally You said 3-pack. Right?

So you don’t wanna use the keywords with the location modifiers. You can use a very small percentage of your overall keywords that you’re gonna add to the anchor text or the link building that you’re gonna be either doing or buying a package or whatever. You can have a very, very small percentage with location modifiers, but I would keep that to an absolute bare minimum. Because it’s more about pushing the theme, the keyword theme, not the location, or the geographic theme, if that makes sense, it’s not about pushing location relevancy.

Because think about it, the further you move away from a local business the more broader the market segment is. In other words, you don’t wanna be targeting keywords or link building to tier 1 assets all the way down to the local level, including local location modifier, because it’s, remember your link building to tier one assets is two hops away from your target which would be your GMB asset or your primary website, the client’s website, or whatever, the further you get away from the ultimate target, the ultimate destination, the broader your keyword set should be, the broader the theme of the keyword set.

That’s why I say I don’t like to include local modifiers and anchor text when I’m building links to tier one assets. Instead I use higher or market-level keywords, broader market keywords. What do I mean by that? Instead of water heater repair Fairfax Virginia or Fairfax VA as a keyword that I would use as an anchor, it would be water heater repair and plumbing and plumbing repair and plumbing service, if that makes sense. I’d lose the local modifier and use more broader market-level keywords. Okay.

Also, you don’t wanna do entirely 100% on anchor text links, even with a diverse set of keywords. You wanna also include naked URLs and some generics. You can even use some brand terms at that point. It’s a little bit odd to use brand terms at tier two links because that’s again two steps away from your target URL. But it does make sense if you’re link building to, for example, if it’s a tier one branded property it can make sense to also include the brand name in some of those anchor text too. Right? I would just use those sparingly as well. It’s more about the keyword relevancy at that point in naked URLs, which is just pushing link equity to those tier one assets regardless of anchor text.

Marco, do you wanna comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, thanks, Bradley. What I would recommend is reach out to Dedia. We have a Dedia, he knows exactly what to do with your RYS stack to get the most out of it.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: If needed, then get our keyword research gig because we will come up with thousands upon thousands of keyword targets for you to either add relevance or to push, we provide what’s called buoyancy. “Buoyancy,” that’s one of the words that I have difficulty with. But we help push up the main keyword by providing relevance throughout the keyword silo. We give you all that with the keyword research.

Then, all you do is turn that over to Dedia and say, “Here, this is the folder that I’ve created, this is the keyword that I’m targeting, have at it.” Dedia has been with us long enough that he just knows, okay, this is what I need to do. He’ll blast it. He’ll hammer that RYS stack so that it produces.

Bradley: That’s right. You don’t have to worry about all those ratios and stuff, Jay. I know. I mean, honestly, I don’t worry about any of that stuff anymore because I don’t ever do any of that stuff anymore. If I need it, I just contact Dedia, exactly what Marco said, and I just say, “Hey, this is what I got. This is what I’m trying to accomplish. Make it happen,” and he does it.

Honestly, guys, that’s what I’m talking about. Jay, again, I don’t wanna get back on this pitch again, but if you have your own tools and you’re running your own link building tools and stuff like that, that’s great, if you’re efficient and all that. But if you’re not, which I am not, I have no desire to run those tools, just let the expert do it and Dedia has an absolute ninja. He’s an expert, a link building expert, so that’s why I just turned it over to him, defer to him anytime I have something that I need to spam to push additional link equity to. I just contact him say, “This what I got is what I need you do, make it happen,” and he does it. All right.

Jay vouches for the GMB auto poster. He says, “It’s great and Shripad does great work. He is very responsive in Support. I can attest to that too, not just because it’s me, but every time there’s an issue a little support bubble on the bottom right corner of the auto poster, you can just contact Support through there and he’s very, very responsive.”

Would You Recommend Using One Website For Multiple GMB Locations?

Abe says, “Also, I would like to know about using one website for multiple GMB locations. Is this recommended and possible?” It can be. You can just create separate location pages. So each location each, GMB locations should have its own dedicated page on the website and that’s the URL that you would submit as the website URL in the Google My Business profile. Does that make sense?

So instead of just using the home root domain, so the home page of the website for that brand across all different GMB assets, create a location specific page on that domain and then use that URL as that landing page URL as the website in GMB. It’s perfectly fine to do that, guys. But what you want is, if it’s the same brand, you can share the same brand name across all GMB locations. That’s fine. But you want a unique URL and a unique phone number and a unique address, if possible. Okay.

Strange NAP issues occur if you have two or more of the data points, the primary data points in a citation or NAP, which would be name, address, phone number, and also website URL. If you have two or more common data points among multiple locations, that’s going to cause NAP issues, which is going to make it very difficult to rank. You can have one common data point, typically the business name, because it’s a brand that can be used across multiple GMBs as long as the other primary data points are unique, physical address, phone number, website address. Does that make sense? So, yes, it’s possible.

Now one other thing I would mention is go back through, Abe, watch some of our previous Hump Day Hangouts. We’ll talk about the difference between using location pages, which would be pages on the root domain, or using location-specific sub-domains, which are separate WordPress installations, but there’s a reason to do, that’s to help mitigate risk, potential losing all of your assets if you were to catch a penalty. Again, we just talked about this last week, go back and watch the replay from last week and I’m pretty sure we talked about that extensively, about the benefit of using sub-domains over sub-folders or sub-directories. That’s pretty much the same thing I’m talking about here.

“Where’s the GMB auto poster?” John, just posting the Mastermind, we’ll get to the link.

Marco: I posted the link higher up.

Bradley: Yeah. I just didn’t have it. Thank you, Marco. Nestor says, Hey, I got to go guys. I got to wrap this up. So, anyways, and there’s Rob with the yearly discount for the GMB agency offer. That’s the enterprise account level or subscription level, which is 200 posts per month-, or excuse me 500 posts per month capacity. If you buy it on a monthly basis, subscribe month to month, it’s $200. If you buy the yearly license … It’s $200 per month, excuse me. If you buy the yearly license, it’s 1,000 bucks, divided by 12, comes out to be $84 dollars or $83 per month. So it’s a hell of a lot cheaper that way.

By the way, if you’re scheduling out 31 posts, which there’s a post scheduling feature, which is amazing in the GMB auto poster, so you can schedule out one post a day or however many you want. Let’s just say you’re doing one post a day, you could do 31 days. Then, there’s a republish option to where it can republish the post based upon the interval that you set. For example, if you set every 31 days, you can publish, you can schedule out 31 posts and then have them republish 31 days later, each post thereafter. Right? Does that make sense?

So day one and then day 32, that post publishes again. Day two and day 33, that post publishes again. Does that make sense? That way you can set up all of your posting and in an automated fashion. Well, with 500 posts per month, if you were to actually fill out or post one per day for each location, you can essentially put 16 locations in one enterprise account. Sixteen times 31 comes out to be 496, so you get 496 posts. Essentially, you can serve 16 locations, 100% one post per day with a single enterprise account. Does that make sense?

That’s how I’m clustering my sites right now. I gave you a little insight on that.

Marco: Yeah. I mean, it’s an awesome deal because it saves so much money and then the auto poster just saves so much time and effort. Once your VAs get proficient with going in there and just scheduling and putting everything up, it just saves you a ton of time of money. So you’ll make the money back that you invest in this just by the time you’re gonna save with your VAs, or even if you try to do it on your own, which you shouldn’t be doing.

Bradley: Yeah. Just so you guys are aware, for clients, I have a VA that goes in and manually posts for all the clients. I do that for a reason because every post is 100% unique that way. She still has content templates, but she goes in and she puts in a new image every time, and the content templates she uses, there’s tokens that she swaps out with different keywords and such. The target URLs are always being recycled to whatever we’re linking to from the GMB post and all that. So they become unique for clients.

I pay my VA on a per post basis. So I pay her, for every post that she publishes she gets paid. It varies between $3.50 to $5 per post. But I charge my clients $10 to $15 per post, depending on what the volume is. So my point is, I make money on that even though she’s manually posting.

However, for lead gen assets, guys, once again, just like I was telling … Shit, who was I telling earlier? Michael. I was telling Michael earlier not to worry about syndication networks for lead gen assets because you wanna reduce expenses. Well, I don’t want to pay a VA to manually post to lead gen assets because that’s an additional expense when I can pay for-, or subscribe to the auto poster, schedule all the posts.

Do I do all these guys? Hell, no. I’ve trained a VA to go in and set up or schedule all the posts within the GMB auto poster and then schedule them to republish. So that, literally, I can pay a VA for three or four hours to schedule out, however long it takes them, to schedule all those posts out. Then, it’s done and those GMB assets will continually update posts because of the auto poster and I’m not paying anymore other than for the auto poster subscription. Does that make sense? So it’s a hell of a lot more efficient with money too. Right? It’s more cost-effective. Okay.

Nestor says … And I’m so over, we got to get out of here. Nestor says, “Hey guys, how about webs 2.0 example mybrand.wordpress.com point to my GMB property three links as a press release?” Okay. First of all, I’m not familiar with their example. I know that’s kind of a competitor that does, you know, they have their own store and blah blah blah. I’m not real familiar with what they teach or what they say, so I can’t really speak on that.

I’m not quite sure I understand, in the wording of your question, what you mean by mybrand.wordPress. I understand WordPress.com, that’s fine. That’s a brand identity property that you can create on the WordPress.com site, kind of like what I showed earlier. But, yeah, that’s normal. That goes into Syndication Network, right? You try to get your brand name as a sub-domain blah blah blah. That’s pretty standard.

But, “point to GMB property three links as a press release,” I’m not sure what that means. Can you point to a GMB property from your WordPress.com site? Sure. Can you also use press releases to link to that WordPress.com site? Sure. You can also link to your GMB.

I’m doing a press releases, Local PR Pro method is what I use and, as standard operating procedure, I published a press releases with every GMB asset, it gets created. Usually, my preferred method is to link from the first press release to the GMB, the Google Maps share URL, to the Google the GMB website URL, and to the GMB the first post URL. We teach that at Local Lease Pro and that’s just essentially my method. So I’m going direct from the press releases to the Google assets. Okay.

Yeah. Guys, there’s a thousand ways to skin a cat, right? So our method isn’t the be-all end-all. It’s just our method works for what we want it to work for and that’s what we teach. Other people have other methods that may very well work as good as ours. I’m not trying to say that ours is better than anybody else’s. I’m just telling you what we teach, I don’t know what they teach. I’m sorry. It’s likely that that would work too.

Will says, “Bradley, speaking about syndication networks, I finally figured out how to syndicate to Medium.com. I’ve been testing it for a while with a few posts now and it works well to syndicate your WordPress post with images and YouTube video embeds, and from there, you could syndicate to your tier two, if you’d like. I’ll send you an update to support@semanticmastery.”

Thanks, Will. That’s awesome. In fact, Will, if you would, I mean, if you’re cool with it, you can even send the update right in the Mastermind community so that everybody else could benefit from it. If not, send it to me and I’ll update everybody in the Mastermind, and Syndication Academy for that matter, once I see it. Thank you for that, Will.

Okay. “Link to pre-Black Friday deals, please.” Yeah. Luis, just contact us at Support.

That’s it. Okay, guys, we’re way over. We got all questions answered, though.

Marco: That was a good one.

Bradley: Thanks, Marco, for hanging out, man, I appreciate it.

Marco: Marathon. All right, dude.

Bradley: All right, everybody. Mastermind webinar tomorrow. Be there or be square. See y'all.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210 posted first on your-t1-blog-url from Blogger https://ift.tt/2OWtr3G via IFTTT

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210

Click on the video above to watch Episode 202 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: Hello and welcome to Episode 210 of Hump Day Hangouts. I am Adam Moody with Semantic Mastery. We are gonna say hi to everyone real quick before we dive into some announcements and questions from everybody watching us live. Also, if you’re watching this on YouTube, we noticed from time to time that we get questions over there, but you need to come to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions and ask your questions there, that’s where we’re monitoring. Before we dive in, real quick, Chris, how are you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Good weather in Florida always the last couple weeks. I highly recommend it, like I love it. How are you doing?

Adam: Not bad. It’s like 60 here, which is perfect. Everyone in California thinks it’s like the middle of winter and I’m just enjoying myself. This is good. Marco, how about you? How’s the weather for you, man?

Marco: Things are good here, man, transitioning to the dry season. So we’re gonna have about five and a half months of absolutely no rain, not even a drop. I’m looking forward to … Yeah, but then, it’s seven months of afternoon showers. You gotta pay the price for the life you live, right?

Adam: Yeah, fair enough.

Marco: But always warm, like if it were 60 here, we’d all be dying literally. It’s freezing cold.

Chris: [Inaudible 00:01:19] stay in Florida.

Adam: Definitely. Bradley, how about you, man? How are you doing?

Bradley: I’m good, I’m happy to be here. Got lots of stuff going on at the moment. Just been really, really busy. In last week, well, I took off for a couple days because my sister got married again. I actually got to go down to Hilton Head, South Carolina and meet one of our members, Ed, who also went to POFU Live; he’s in the Mastermind also. That was cool because I got to spend an hour with him just chatting. It was really, really cool. I always enjoy getting to meet members whenever we have the opportunity. So that was a lot of fun. But I had to take really Friday and Monday off, so now I’m behind.

Besides that, I got a quick little story to tell very, very quickly. Just last week, it was funny because I was actually reviewing the Hump Day Hangout from last week and I was talking about mitigating risk. Marco and I, we were talking about reducing exposure and trying to mitigate risk because, if you put all your eggs in one basket and Google takes that basket, you’re screwed, you’ve lost all those assets.

Well, I was using a test with what’s called GMB Location Groups. It’s a setting inside of Google My Business. I was running a test on a set of GMB assets for a particular metro area, so one metropolitan city area. I had seven assets in there that were fully optimized, 100% done. In fact, they were the seven assets that my VAs has been training on as he’s been learning the processes for doing this whole method, the Local Lease Pro model, essentially.

Long story short, on Saturday, I was down at the Hilton Head and I happened to get an email saying that the account that was used as the recovery email for that particular GMB manager account, which had to be turned into an owner in order to use location groups, had been terminated for violating Google’s spam policies. I lost all those damn assets, every single one of them, and I can’t even access them through the original Google accounts now, guys.

That was three weeks work, not necessarily my work, but my VA’s work wasted. Now, is it all bad? No, because I learned a valuable lesson. Number one, don’t use GMB location groups, it’s like a trap, number one, lesson number one. Number two is always mitigate risk. Don’t set yourself up with vulnerabilities that Google can take … We exploit Google’s vulnerabilities. Don’t you think Google will exploit ours? So I learned that … In fact, I’m actually updating the entire process for how to first log in and set up and manage a lot of GMB assets. I’m updating all those processes this week, in fact, because we have to do something new that reduces our overall risk.

Anyways, that was my little story. I’m a little bit behind now because all the work that I’ve done for the last several weeks on all the processes now has to be updated and redone. But that’s the cat and mouse game that we play.

Marco: Yeah. One of the great things about our Mastermind is that we do all of the testing, we take all of the risk, we were the ones who go in the lab. I mean, we do encourage our own people to test so that they can verify that our results are what we’re saying they are. But it’s one of the things that we do, we go, we blow things up and it happens, and then now we know what not to do. And right into our Mastermind, we’ll share all of test result with the membership exactly what was done so that they don’t repeat the process and get stuck losing assets because nobody wants to lose an asset, especially not seven. But so be it, lesson well-learned and it’s a lesson that the Mastermind doesn’t have to repeat.

Bradley: That’s true and, just real quick segue, that leads me to, that’s kind of like what the Mastermind is about. The scaling option, like doing all these heavy processes and stuff, is really reserved to the POFU Live group attendees at the moment, but we’re polishing all this stuff. Obviously, the Mastermind, we update, like tomorrow we’ve got a Mastermind webinar and I’m certainly gonna be talking about what not to do because I want to make sure all of our members are fully aware of what not to do so they don’t lose assets.

But once we have this 12-week process done, that the POFU Live attendees are kind of in accountability group with me right now, and we’ve got a target that we’re trying to hit at the end of 12 weeks, which is 50 GMB assets fully developed and ready for monetization, if they’re not already monetized by that point, and so when we’re done at that 12-week period, we will have discovered or perfected, really fine-tuned the method and all of the processes to get us there, to get us to that point. That’s when we’re gonna release in its entirety the Mastermind.

That training will not be released outside of the Mastermind, period, and that’s only because it’s highly valuable and we put a lot of work. In fact, the other members of the POFU accountability group with us, that’s like 12 of us in there, and so that’s a lot of intellectual property, a lot of a work that goes into that. So the Mastermind members will get that.

But that’s just one of many things that we do there. For example, we had some questions about how to structure ad ID pages and set up as three buckets with HTTP, SSL protocol, and all that stuff. Two weeks ago, we went in and showed exactly how to do that. I mean, it’s just stuff like that that we do in the Mastermind all the time.

Adam: Yeah. Something else that I just remembered, that reminded me of, Bradley, was, I think it was Jason who posted yesterday, who’s one of our Mastermind members, just out of the blue was like, hey, I’ve seen some questions about blah blah blah-, not blah blah blah, but some heavy-duty IT stuff. He’s like, “Hey, if anybody needs help just ping me. I’ll do it for free if you’re a Mastermind member.”

That’s just awesome to see. Again, you get that in a tight-knit group like that. It’s cool having that ability. Everyone who knows our story kind of knows where we came from and how we were part of a Mastermind. That’s why part of why we do this to get that community, it’s not just a jumble of people, you do have a community.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Well, cool. I also want to say then to you guys, we mentioned the GMB stuff, we’ve got a sale going on right now at MGYB. It’s wrapping up today. So if you’re interested or you need a GMB verification service, whether it’s for your clients, it’s for yourself, you’re doing some lead gen, head over there. I posted it on the page. If you’re watching the replay, sorry, it’s probably too late. But a good reason to watch live and open the emails is you get a 35% discount on that service right now. So head over there do that.

Real quick, too, if you’re joining us for the first time, thank you so much for watching us. If you want the right place to start, because it is one of the questions we get, “Hey, where should I start? Should I take this course and do that?” start with Battle Plan. No matter what you’re doing, even if you want to hop into Mastermind, get the Battle Plan, come join the Mastermind. That’s the path. The link is on there. It’s a great way to get repeatable results, which is why we put it together, so that we can have that. It’s our home processes put into an easy-to-digest format.

Then, obviously, like we’ve been talking about it, if you’re ready to take things up a notch, if you wanna scale, you wanna grow, then the Mastermind is the place to be.

Bradley: Did you open up Local Lease Pro as a standalone product now?

Adam: Yes.

Bradley: I’ll be damned. I didn’t realize that was available yet. Okay.

Adam: Sneaking that onto the page, if people are interested.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay.

Adam: I’m gonna say no more.

Bradley: Everything I’ve been talking about with this Local Lease Pro method, that’s it. Most of you guys are probably aware of it because of the Side Hustle Toolbox promotion, that was our contribution. But now that that’s closed, it’s a standalone product. I’m gonna be updating that in a couple of weeks with some of the new processes that I’ve just discovered.

Again, GMB, like the actual optimization process has changed slightly. Not much, but slightly, and I’m updating the processes for my VAs right now. So next week, I’ll kind of polish it up a bit and then add that into the Local Lease Pro training. So if you guys don’t have it yet, I recommend you get it. This method is freaking killing it. I think it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career. I mean that, so check it out.

All right. Can we get into questions?

Adam: I think so. If you guys are good, let’s do this.

Do I Need Access To A Client’s Website If I Do Local SEO For Them?

Bradley: All right. Starting off with Chris Green posted a support question from Vincent. He says, “I’m considering to join the RYS Reloaded or the GMB course. My question is this: if I do SEO for local businesses in my country, which is Malaysia, do I need to have access to my clients website?” No. It can help. You don’t have to have access to the client’s website, but it would certainly help because you could take care of some on-page SEO issues. In other words, you can optimize the site itself, which is considered on-page SEO, and that can help that can help quite a bit.

In fact, with proper on-page SEO, a lot of the times you can rank a site with a fraction of the off-page SEO because any off-page SEO that … If on site is proper, if it’s tight, if it’s strong, then any off-page will significantly affect, it will have a strong impact on the site because then the site will respond well to off-page because it is a well-built, well-structured site.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to have access to the site because you can accomplish through off-page. You can still rank a site with off-page. If the on-page is terrible, then you probably are fighting a losing battle. But if it’s decent, then you could probably still accomplish what you need to, depending on how competitive the keywords are that you’re targeting. But it’s likely that you could still accomplish what you needed to with off-page alone. But again, there are benefits certainly to being able to access the client’s website. Right? If you’re starting with garbage, it’s gonna be difficult to rank. So just keep that in mind. Okay.

It helps, it’s not 100% necessary. Well, it depends, right? It depends on what the status of the site is currently. If it’s a shitty site, if it was built poorly, optimized poorly, or if it’s spammed to death or whatever, then you may never be able to rank that site. But if it’s decent, if it’s fairly okay, then you could still just apply off-page methods and probably get the results that you want. However, if you can do both, manage the on-page and the-off page, you will get the best results. Right?

Are The SEO Methods In RYS Reloaded And GMB Work On WordPress.com And Wix.com Websites?

Number two, he says, “If my client has a WordPress.com or Wix.com website, can the SEO methods taught in RYS Reloaded and GMB work and getting first page ranking on Google?” Well, yes. Well, Local GMB Pro course is not really anything that have to do with websites, right? Local GMB Pro is how to optimize Google My Business and set up all of the Google assets to rank. Well, not even to rank, but to just generate leads from Google, independent of ranking. That’s what Local GMB Pro is about. It’s about getting leads, getting exposure from Google My Business, whether it ranks or not, and that’s what that whole … Again, despite traditional SEO, Local GMB Pro can generate leads from Google. Okay. So that’s what local GMB Pro is.

RYS is about using Google’s assets as an off-page tool as well as an entity validator, an authority builder, and multiple other things. But it’s more of an off-page thing. Again, it has nothing to do with the website structure or the platform itself, WordPress or Wix. It doesn’t matter because all you’re doing is using Google properties to push relevancy and authority over to whatever property is that you’re trying to rank.

Marco, do you wanna chat about that a little bit?

Marco: Yeah. It’s just one of the pillars that we teach, ART, the art of ART, activity, relevance, trust and authority, both on the link origin and on the link destination. What that means is you get visitors no matter how you show activity and Google reward you as long as everything is relevant and you’re working with trusted and authoritative entities. If you become along with that, a trusted and authoritative entity, then you get rewarded. Google will also reward you for being in Google because Google trusts itself. It’s the ultimate as far as what it trusts. So working in what we call working inside the belly of the beast also has its rewards.

Yeah. As Bradley said, it makes absolutely no difference. I mean, you work with whatever. I mean, you have a free WordPress blog ranking for … what is it? Free-, no, not free. SEO Virginia. Yeah. I mean, it just goes to show that if you get that activity in there, everything else just fall into place as long as it’s relevant, trusted and authoritative.

I keep telling people, and I just mentioned it in our Semantic Mastery Facebook group, the Mastermind, that ART, A-R-T, will trump anything. It will even overcome any of the negative factors, of the algorithm, penalties and all of that. You become almost immune to anything that Google has to throw at you because you’re signaling rank pot-, excuse me, rank brain in the way that it wants to be signaled. You’re doing the Google tickle, the T tickle. I mean, it blows up. It becomes a self-feeding monster once you get all that activity in there.

Bradley: Yeah. This is an example of what Marco was just talking about, this is that WordPress.com. So free wordpress.com blog, guys. If you take a look at this, there’s no content on this page. It looks like there’s content, but the only content on this page is this right here. That’s it. The rest of those are embedded files. That’s RYS at work there, guys. That’s RYS Academy right there at work. Okay. Again, go view page source, the post body, the article body of this post. The content body is this right here. That’s the only text on the page. The rest of it is all embedded files RYS style, and that’s all.

Look at that, guys. It’s ranked number three in organic for SEO Virginia. I mean, that’s pretty powerful. Again, that’s all off-page stuff. There is some on-page going on there because of the iframes that are actually embedded in this page, but it’s primarily an off-page thing that’s got this ranking. And that’s the power of RYS, right?

By the way, the Google site as part of the stack and that’s been number one since May of 2015. Guys, that’s been number one since May of 2015, or within a few weeks anyways, that’s when it was published. Look at that, it’s a horrid site. It was just for a test purpose, guys. Still ranked. Still ranked, it’s three and a half years now. Still ranked. Anyways, there you go. Will it work? It damn sure does.

How Do You Get The URL Of A Scheduled Post In The MGYB GMB Service?

Dustin’s up, or Da B. “Hey there. I’m using the MGYB post scheduling service but I was wondering, in the Local GMB course you link to the previous post but when I scheduled a post, then I don’t have the URL of the last URL because it will be scheduled. How do I link to the post then if the last post yet is not published or is not published yet? Greetings. Dustin.” That’s a good question Dustin.

Marco, that’s something that I think Rob was talking about that was going to be a feature, that was going to be released soon within the auto poster was the ability to silo a post. Is that correct?

Marco: Yeah. We keep going back and forth with Shripad. I’m not sure if that’s available yet. But I mean, there’s an easy solution to that. Link in the body or you’re still not gonna have the post URL. You would need the original post URL, and then the next one, then the next one. So Shripad will have to come up with something regarding that so that we can solve that issue. But, yes, he is working on it so we can silo GMB posts.

Bradley: Yeah. I’m thinking if the script would wait until a published one was pulled and then grab the short URL and then link to that before the next one that’s scheduled publishes. You know what I mean? That would work to build a silo on that. I know that if you post the post … So you publish the post, then you grab the URL and link to it from the next post. But, you’re right, if you wanna schedule out multiple posts in advance, right now there’s not an ability to do that yet.

But that’s something, Marco, if you wanna make a note of that specifically, silo posts together, schedule post together, which I’m sure that can be integrated at some point. Right now that’s not something that can be done, Dustin, but we’re working on that. It’s a great feature.

Marco: No. Dustin, what I would suggest is you just have your VA go in and add links as needed.

Bradley: As they’re published.

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Right. As they publish, go grab the URL, and then go post the next one. That’s the only thing we can do to daisy chain them together right now until we have the automation such that it will be able to do it. Okay.

Jordan says, “On one of the, or …” Okay. One of the guys, here we go. “One of the guys on our SEO team said after an SEO pitch this probably sounds like magic to them. I still can’t believe we get paid for this stuff, almost like grownup version of video games. Haha.” That’s funny. Well, I can believe we’d get paid for it, man. Think about all the testing and all the studying and all the learning and stuff that you, guys, and the money that you invest in your education and to tools and all that stuff.

I mean, we spend a lot of time learning this stuff, guys, we should be paid for it. I mean, think about that. We spend all our time learning how to perform this SEO magic stuff. A business owner that’s doing plumbing, for example, he’s out unclogging drains and that kind of stuff. He wouldn’t have time to learn all this stuff. How do I know? Because I was an electrical contractor and I had to learn how to do this shit while I was doing electrical work. It just so happens I found that I could make more money at this, that’s why I switched to this all together.

What are you gonna say, Marco?

Marco: Yeah. I was gonna say we deserve to be paid and be paid well. I mean, do you know how much time we’ve spent between RYS Academy, RYS Reloaded, Local GMB Pro, Local PR Pro, Local Lease Pro? Do you know how many hours have gone into researching that and making it work? Making that all work hand in hand so that one pushes the other and you’re pushing ultimate power to whatever destination so that that client’s phone rings?

Yeah. It may seem like magic. “Well, my phone rang. You did all that.” But it’s actually just hours and hours and hours of being a total geek.

Are There Ways We Can Use Press Releases Based On The Battleplan Aside From Launching A New Site?

Bradley: Rabbit-hole time. Yeah. Dan’s up. He says, “I’ve looked using press releases based off the Battle Plan and saw that you have them at the store. Besides using them for launching a new site would there be other places that I could use them? I do some consulting on the side for local businesses and build sites, lead gen, et cetera?”

Yeah, Dan. “Press releases are my favorite off-page or link building method really. Like no question, I absolutely love press releases. I use them as my primary off-page link building tool or method. I still use spam links from time to time for certain things, but for the most part I’m using press releases for link building.”

Yeah. You can use them. Guys, there’s dozens and dozens of things that you can publish press releases about. I’ve talked about them. Dan, we have a course called Local PR Pro which is specifically about how to use press releases to rank in the Maps pack, to get Google GMB, Google My Business profiles ranked in the maps pack using press releases. Right?

That’s what that course, Local PR Pro, is all about. In that course, I talk about how there’s multiple different things that you could publish a press release about. Because that’s a question that comes up often, “Well, I don’t think my client has anything that’s really newsworthy to publish a press release about.”

But think about it, getting a five-star review, you could publish a press release about receiving a five-star review or your client. Or you could publish a press release about a new employee being hired. Or a seasonal change to the product line that’s available. Or the services that are available, depending on what kind of business you’re dealing with. Or an accolade that the company receives, some sort of award or something like that. Or any charitable things, any charity events that they’re hosting or that they contribute to or participate in. Right?

There’s just dozens and dozens of things, hooks, angles that you could use to write a news release or something that can be … Guys, you can even publish a press release about a new blog post that’s been published on the website. No kidding. I mean, you just have to get a little bit creative. Dan, when I say you have to get creative, I don’t mean you. I mean, what I would recommend is hiring a PR writer, from Upwork or something like that, that can come up with these angles. A good press release writer can come up with a newsworthy angle for just about anything.

Again, if you’re doing a lot of this work, you could hire a PR writer, a good PR writer from like Upwork or something like that. Or if you’ve got a good press release distribution service that you subscribe to for monthly press releases or whatever, if they’ve got good writers in-house, which most good services do now, then they’ll have writers that are already trained on how to find news where the angles or to create hooks or their stories for the press releases. Right?

For example, if you use the MGYB press release service, the writers there from the Press Advantage distribution network, if that’s what you’re using, it’s fabulous, and there the press releases are almost twice the content length of typical press releases. There’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 words as opposed to 300 to 400, which is what most of them are. So those writers are really, really good, like their sole purpose in life is to find an angle or to create an angle to write a press release about. Those are the same writers that you have access to when you buy a press releases from us individually.

Okay. Anybody wanna comment on that before we move on? It’s a good one, Dan.

Marco: No. I think you hit the nail on the head. They’re great for just about everything. The only thing that you have to avoid is self-promotion, but you get that from most of them. You just have to define what self-promotion is. You go and you advertise. Well, we’re in Facebook, if you’ve just started your Facebook page, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. It’s still self-promotion. It’s just not getting sales. That’s what you wanna try to avoid.

Other than that, it’s fantastic for link building. Not only that, if you hit the press release, whatever the distribution network is with link building, it’ll push through. You’re putting a filter in between the destination so that you hit that with link building. It’ll power it up even more. They just work really well for everything.

Bradley: They damn sure do. Like Marco said, you can actually do self promotional PRs, but the salesy part is what you gotta leave out. They shouldn’t be salesy. But they can be self-promotional. Again, a good PR writer will be able to disguise a promotion as a story, a news story, and that’s really what you wanna do. That’s why I say don’t do it yourself. If I had to write press releases, I’d be a very miserable person. I wouldn’t wanna do it, but some people enjoy that stuff and they’re good at it. All right.

Is It Okay To Start With Battleplan Before Going Into The Mastermind and Syndication Academy Courses?

Andrew Walker’s up. Andrew is a local guy to me. I was in lead share, like a breakfast lead share group with him for several years that I don’t attend those things much anymore. Andrew is a great guy. Anyways, it’s good to see you here, Andrew. I haven’t seen him in a while. He says, “Hey guys, it’s been a long time since I’ve been on Hump Day Hangouts. I got caught up in the cold calling strategy to build my business and also had a case of the shiny object syndrome.” Well, we all do, Andrew. Don’t beat yourself up, buddy. We all go through that. I promise you, I’ve been through it. I still struggle with that, to be honest.

“I don’t fully understand how powerful-,” or excuse me, “I didn’t fully understand how powerful digital marketing is and what it can do for your business. You would think that that’s a no-brainer for an IT guy. Anyway, I’m back for real and I’m ready to learn this stuff. I’ve just downloaded the Battle Plan. I’d love to get involved in the Mastermind, but I’m not able to afford that at this time. Syndication Academy looks to be a great runner up. Can I start there to get things going or just start with the Battle Plan? Thanks, guys, and congrats on your four year anniversary.”

Okay. Great question, Andrew. Again, glad to see you back, man. The Syndication Academy is, yeah, it’s good, however, because, I’m not gonna knock Syndication Academy, but what we recommend is, especially for you, Andrew, you’re running your IT business, your IT services business, and so it depends on how much time you have. If you’ve got a lot of time and no money then, yes, pick up Syndication Academy because then you can learn how to build your own syndication network, which is gonna be one of the critical components to your business in expanding your reach and helping to generate more leads, it’ll help with your SEO and all that kind of stuff.

However, there’s a lot of time that goes into learning how to build a syndication network and, unless you plan on building syndication networks for others or selling them to others, I wouldn’t recommend that you go through all the trouble of learning how to build all that stuff for your own branded syndication network, for your own business. If you’re looking to try to grow your business, then your time is better spent not learning how to build a syndication network that you’re only gonna build one for your own business.

Your time is better spent marketing your business. You can instead just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us and we will build it to our specifications, which is exactly what we teach in the training. You can save yourself weeks of study and implementation by just buying a Done For You Syndication Network and you still reap the benefits of it without having to spend weeks of your time. Does that make sense? They’re inexpensive enough that there’s really no reason that you can’t just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us. It’s cheaper or about the same price as the cost of a month tuition to Syndication Academy. Right?

Anyways, my point is, if you want, Andrew, since you can’t join the Mastermind yet, what I recommend is that you attend our Hump Day Hangouts regularly on Wednesdays, ask your questions here try, keep it to one question per post. In other words, you can post a few times, but try to keep it one question per post please. Ask questions here and we will try to guide you in the best way possible to help you to start growing your IT business, just from these Hump Day Hangouts. Then once you have generated some revenue you can always come join the Mastermind, which is your best bet, because the Mastermind is not just about marketing stuff.

Guys, we’ve gotten away from just teaching SEO or just teaching marketing methods. It’s more about building your business regardless of whether you’re building a local agency or consulting firm, or you want to build your own brick and mortar business, or virtual business for that matter. We want to teach you how to do all of that, which includes marketing and includes SEO, and includes all that stuff, but we’re not pigeon holing our training into just marketing training, if that makes sense. A lot more goes into it than that.

I would suggest, Andrew, that what you do is come back and join us here in Hump Day Hangouts, get involved, stay engaged, ask questions. We also have our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials Facebook group that you could ask questions there. As soon as you’re able to, I would invest in joining the Mastermind so that you can get, basically, almost one-on-one guidance from each one of us my partners and I as well as all of the other members in the Mastermind that are also savvy business owners. Right? That’s part of why it’s Mastermind because it’s not just about us teaching all the time, it’s about everybody in there contributing and helping each other, which is fabulous. Okay.

By the way, one of our top members, longtime members, Jason Johnson, who is what Adam was just talking about at the very beginning of this Hump Day Hangout, he was mentioning somebody was having difficulty setting up their MX records for G suite email to use their domain for their email within G suite. Jason Johnson posted, “Hey, I saw somebody was having trouble with MX records. Hey, I’m an IT guy. If anybody has any questions or any problems, tell them to reach out to me. I’ll help them for free as long as they’re a Mastermind member.”

Andrew, what I’m saying is, Jason is an IT guy who’s been in our Mastermind. He does digital marketing on the side, but also markets his own business and somebody that you could absolutely click with. Probably the two of you could chat about what he’s doing for his business and what’s working for him in generating leads for his IT business and all that kind of stuff. Right?

Again, that’s part of the power of a Mastermind. It’s not just learning from me or Marco when, you know, I’m gonna teach you how to generate leads for your business, but I generate leads for contracting businesses. Right? You’re trying to generate leads for IT services, and computer repair networking, and that kind of stuff, so why not get the advice direct from somebody that’s already generating leads for that type of a business, which we have members in our group to do that? Does that make sense?

That’s the power of a Mastermind. Okay. So that’s what I recommend. In the meantime, if you don’t have the money, come back here, ask questions, implement what you can, go through our YouTube channel Semantic Mastery, youtube.com/semanticmastery. Use the channel search function, ask questions over there. You’re likely going to find already video answers for many of your questions. Then, like I said, anything that you can’t find answers to, post in either the Facebook group or post back here on the event page every week and we’ll come in and answer your questions. As soon as you can generate a little bit of positive revenue, I would reinvest that back into your education and into building your business by joining the Mastermind, getting guidance from us as well as our other members.

Marco: I’m gonna give him just a couple of weeks. First of all, welcome back, Andrew. Sorry that you had a shiny object syndrome. I mean, that sucks and it makes you spend a whole lot of money and time chasing. It becomes a useless path. You fill up your computer with a whole bunch of garbage that you’re never going to use and you realize how much money you spent and then you get caught up at where you are right now where you ended, and dropped all that money and you have nothing to show for it.

But that’s okay, lesson learned. The two examples that I’m gonna give you is, I’m gonna give you Paul Fussell, who’s always in these Hump Day Hangouts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he drops in today; or if he isn’t, it’s because he’s out making money. He was at POFU Live, as a matter of fact, our event. The way he went about doing it, he come into Hump Day Hangouts, ask questions, and then go and go and apply. Ask questions, go and apply. then he started purchasing our drive stacks to rank. I know that he was doing dental for a while, I don’t know what he’s doing now.

Anyway, the thing about Paul is that he just went and he got Done For You services, and then he was chasing clients. Every time he’d get a client, drive stack, and that’s how he would he would rank them. But that’s Paul and that’s how he did it, so Hump Day Hangouts and Done For You services.

Then, we get to Jordan in Syndication Academy. Jordan lives in Syndication Academy, he’s always there. He’s one of our, I don’t know, one of our long-running and most active members of Syndication Academy. He runs an agency and I think he just got a huge nationwide client, but it’s from Syndication Academy. I’m not gonna say that he got everything from Syndication Academy, but I know that that’s his foundation and I know that that’s what he’s doing to rank his clients, to help his clients and to help his agency.

He has an agency, actually he’s an agency owner, but he decided that Syndication Academy was the thing for him. But, of course, they’ll all tell you, and Jordan will tell you that the Battle Plan is the place where you start, and you have to follow it. If you follow the Battle Plan, then you’re going to get to our Done For You services.

It’s a whole lot easier to go and buy a Syndication Academy Network, as Bradley mentioned, than to learn how to build a one-of-a-kind that you only need that one time. Why not go buy it and pay that than to pay a monthly membership to learn how to build one, or you might not wanna learn how to build one, or you might need?

It’s just to buy them and then go and sell it to clients, to people you know. Then, you pitch the benefits of being branded of having that footprint of being seen, of your content being seen everywhere, pushing your content to where the people are hanging out. So that’s one of the benefits.

You could do it many ways. Now, of course, we’re always going to tell you that the Mastermind is the place to be because that’s where like-minded entrepreneurs hang out, people who want to grow their business and get away from just that weekly paycheck and having to wait until the next one so that you could do whatever it is that you wanna do. We wanna push you, guys, past that. We call it POFU, position of fuck you.

Whatever that position is for you, Andrew, we want you to get there. There isn’t just one way to get there, but we do wanna help you get there. So whether you choose Hump Day Hangouts, whether you choose Syndication Academy, or what we suggest, whether you join our Mastermind, we’re going to help you any way we can. That’s what we’re here for.

Bradley: That’s right. Let’s not forget Mohammad. He’s a shining example. Mohammad Mackey. He started by just joining Hump Day Hangouts and coming and asking questions week in and week out and for months. Eventually, he got to a point where he landed a couple of his first clients and started making enough money. He came and joined the Mastermind. Then, he went through a little bit of a struggle for over-promising to clients and ended up losing some clients and had to drop out of the Mastermind for a little bit.

But he kept coming to Hump Day Hangouts and asking more questions, even during that time where he had to back out of the Mastermind, and he got the education that he needed and he implemented it. Right? It’s nothing we did, all we did was provide him with information, but he’s the one that took action and kept at it. He kept persisting in working and he kept finding stuff that wasn’t working until he found stuff that did work. Then, he landed some clients again, got his money back up, and joined the Mastermind again.

We have multiple examples of people that have done that just by starting here, right here at Hump Day Hangouts, Andrew, and you can do that too. Right? The Battle Plan, like I said, will tell you do this, this, this, and this, and you’re going to start getting results. It doesn’t say that you have to learn how to do those things, it just tells you apply these things. Right?

You can either learn how to do those things and do them yourself or, as a business owner, it would be much more efficient with your time to just purchase the Done For You services and apply them in the order that they’re recommended and reap the benefits of those without having to learn how to do it. Okay. Great question. Again, glad to have you back, Andrew. We’re happy to see you participate and be a lot more engaged over the coming weeks.

What Are The Factors You Consider When Finding The Best Keywords For Ranking Opportunity In Local Lead Gen Campaigns?

Gordon’s up. He says, “Hey guys, thank you very much again for the help you provide on Hump Days. It’s greatly appreciated.” You’re welcome, Gordon. “If you’re looking to find a low hanging fruit where you can easily rank in the GMB 3-pack, other than looking at the reviews of the current businesses in the 3-pack in their citation profile, what else do you do to decide whether or not you have found a golden goose ranking opportunity? Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls? Thanks again, Gordon.”

Okay. First of all, Gordon, Local Lease Pro, I showed the exact simple method, it’s kind of time-consuming, but the simple method using it, a free software that we show, we use to identify what I call slam-dunk opportunities, which is which you’re calling a golden goose in your question, okay? Again, that was in Local Lease Pro. If you have access to that, which I’m hoping you do because it was on sale for a very, very ridiculously low price for about eight days during the Side Hustle Toolbox launch. That’s close now, but it is available, Local Lease Pro, but we teach the method specifically how to find low-hanging opportunities.

Now I can’t go into the details of that right here, but it is very, very simple to do using the Easy Local Cash software, which is a free software. It’s Chad Kimball’s software. It just shows you, basically, ever since July of this year, when mobile implemented or switched to the mobile first index, that opened up just massive, massive opportunity. I’m telling you, guys, it opened up more opportunity than I’ve seen since I started my local marketing career in 2010. And that is what we teach on how to find those opportunities that have been opened up by this major change in the algorithm or which index is used first. Right? The mobile first index.

That’s all in Local Lease Pro. I can’t obviously say that right here. It is in the course. Also, you can find out, certainly, if you joined a Mastermind, because Local Lease Pro is one of the first courses that Mastermind members get now when they join.

Marco: Yeah, the how. I mean, that’s the course, the how is, you know, if we gave you that, then why have a course in the first place? So, sorry, that’s something that we can’t do. I’m glad that you mentioned again the Mastermind. I was in our mini, we have the mini-Mastermind and mine is on Tuesday nights for an hour. I have three great people. I have Jamina, I have Will Kenderdine, and John Wypick. We were going over my method for using the software and we went over it in detail. I don’t mind for an hour. I mean, I decided to give my time, right?

So this is what it’s all about. Membership has its privileges. I do things a little bit differently. I find targets a little bit differently, but it all works just the same way. The same way that you teach it, the way that I do it, I already decided to do it. The thing is that membership has its privileges. You have to be a member in order to get the information that you’re asking about. It’s not something that we can give away for free.

Bradley: Yeah. “Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls?” Well, that’s a good question. If you do your research properly upfront, you should know. First of all, you should research your industry or the niche that you’re targeting. Now if you followed us at all for any length of time, Gordon, which I know you have, you know that I’ve been telling you and I’ve been preaching this and beating this drum for years now, which is: specialize. Focus on one industry, guys. Become a big fish in one industry instead of a me-too agency or a me-too consultant or me-too local marketer that will just accommodate any business that will talk to you.

Trust me, you will never gain any traction in your business, or you will have a much harder time gaining traction in your business, if you just offer marketing services to any business that will talk to you. Because your amount of work multiplies exponentially because you have to do keyword research, you have to do market research, you have to understand the vocabulary of the industry, you have to figure out what the pain points are in those industries both for the consumer and for the business owner.

Because if you’re the business owner that you can help them market their products and services, you need to understand the consumer’s mindset, but you also have to understand the business owner’s mindset. So that you can talk to them and speak their language, build rapport with them. So you have to learn two different markets for every industry you enter, the consumer market and the business market. Right?

There’s just so much work that goes into learning, becoming a marketing special or professional in any industry. It requires a ton of research. So if you try to just say, “Oh, I’m gonna be a local marketing guy and I’ll talk to any business in my area that will talk to me,” you’re gonna create a shit ton of additional work that you can significantly reduce. You’ll gain a lot more traction a lot faster in your business if you focus in on one particular industry because then you can craft everything you do in your business around that particular industry. All your marketing messages, all your keyword research, your content templates, everything that you do can be designed around that one particular industry. Now you become a specialist.

I use this as an example. Would you go to a general health practitioner for a heart surgery? No, you go to a cardiologist. Why do you think businesses, like let’s say home remodeling contractors or general contractors, would they want to go to a me-too agency or would they want to go to a contractor media, contractor marketing agency that specializes in general and remodeling contractor marketing? Does that make sense? Which one would you prefer?

Gordon, I recommend specializing in on one industry. But don’t just arbitrarily decide on what industry you wanna focus in on and say, “I’m gonna build my business around that,” you need to research that industry and determine, is there a call volume? Is there significant interest in that? Is there money there?

What’s one of the ways that you can determine that? An easy and simple and a quick way is go do a search for the product and/or service as if you were a customer looking for that product or service. Just go do a Google search for it and take a look and see, are there ads? Are there Google ads? If so, that means there’s paying advertisers. If there’s Google ads, that means people are paying to bid on those keywords, which means there’s likely traffic for those keywords. If there wasn’t traffic for those keywords and if those keywords didn’t convert, there wouldn’t be ads. Does that make sense? People don’t pay and bid on keywords-, well, good advertisers don’t pay and bid on keywords that don’t convert or don’t generate traffic that converts. Right? So if you’re seeing Google ads, that’s a good indication.

Now I wouldn’t stop there. I’d research it further. You could do things, like use Google Trends to find out where in the country, or in the world for that matter, but I always do US-based searches, you can find out where the hotspots are for where the search traffic is the most or the search interest is the most for the types of products or services that you’d be promoting in that industry. Right? So then, you can start to develop out which locations you’re gonna target first for your business. Does that make sense?

Remember, specialize on one industry, guys, because then you can scale your business by geography instead of by type or kind. Does that make sense? Instead of trying to scale your business by taking on new industries where you’re gonna create so much additional work, scale your business by continuing with the same industry but expanding your service area or your territory, your target area. Right?

That’s a hell of a lot better or much more efficient way to build your business. Not only that, in time you will build a name and a reputation for being that type of a marketing specialist for that particular industry. People will start to seek you out as opposed to you having a force or push your marketing, your services onto others. People will start to seek you out because they know that you’re the specialist. Does that make sense?

How do you determine whether there’s enough search traffic? You have to research it. Make sure it’s an industry that has paying advertisers. Make sure that there is significant search interest for those types of things and that it’s profitable.

As I said about in the past, carpet cleaning, there’s a ton of search interest for carpet cleaning but there’s very, very, very small margins in the carpet cleaning industry. Right? Carpet cleaning companies don’t particularly like to pay for marketing services or for lead generation services, they don’t have the budgets for it because their margins are very small.

But if you just did keyword research, which is, when I first started, the very first lead gen site I ever built was carpetcleaningalexandriava.com. I don’t own that anymore, but it was a lead gen site that I built because all I did was base my decision on which industry I was gonna target based upon keyword search volume from the Google Keyword Planner. It said something like 600 exact match searches for that term “carpet cleaning Alexandria VA” per month. It was like 660 or something like that, 600 searches per month. So I said, “Oh man, there’s a lot of search volume there. I can make money with that.”

Well, I built the site and got it ranked number one. We were getting 30 to 40 calls a week through that lead gen site and I had trouble monetizing it for even a hundred dollars a month. No shit. Then when I finally got down to the chewy center of why that was by sitting down with the contractor that was renting that site from me or leasing that site from me, he told me, “Because the carpet cleaning business has very, very small margins.” Right? Very small margins. He was making something ridiculous, per carpet cleaning job $8 or $9 or $10, or $12 in profit. It was something stupid. After paying his labor and insurance costs and, the cleaning solution costs, and all of this overhead, he had a very small margin so he had trouble paying for that.

What happened? I ended up switching into other higher margin businesses. That’s why I love the tree service industry because it’s huge margin. That’s why I like remodeling contractors, home builders, HVAC repair, any sort of repair, roofers, all those types because the margins are so much larger. Does that make sense?

Again, you have to do the research, Gordon. There’s no real easy answer there. You just got to be logical and do the research and you should be able to find the opportunities as well as the perfect industry. Also, one last thing I would suggest about that is, seriously, guys, try to find an industry that you, not only has all the correct signals or markers of being a good industry to work at, but also one that you have a genuine interest in because it’ll make it feel less like work. Okay.

Honestly, I don’t have any interest in tree services, except for the fact that that does make me some damn good money, which kind of makes it interesting. But if you can find an industry that you have a genuine interest in, it’ll feel less like work while you’re building your business.

Anybody wanna comment on that before I move on? That was a long-winded answer I know.

Marco: No, but it was perfect. There’s no need to go into that any further.

How Do You Set Up The Syndication Network Of Several GMB Sites In Same Metro Area?

Bradley: He says, “Hey guys, so if I have a group of GMB sites in the same metro area and a WordPress site ranked on page one and Serps, a YouTube channel with videos ranking on page one of Google’s video page and I want to lease all of these as a total package deal to a business owner operating an area, how do I set up a syndication network for this? Can I feed the RSS feeds from all the GMB sites into the WordPress site blog into one generically branded syndication network? Or do I need to set up separate networks for each GMB site or WordPress site? Thank you very much for your comment.”

Michael, I don’t recommend a syndication network for lead gen assets unless you need them. For example, if you’re having trouble getting a lead gen asset to push another 3-pack, can a syndication network will help for that? Then, absolutely.

The other thing is, if you have a cluster of Google My Business profiles for a metropolitan area that are all branded the same, then you could use one syndication network for those. When you talk about grabbing the GMB RSS feeds, I’m not sure what you mean from that, unless you’re using our GMB auto poster which will generate an RSS feed, but you can’t just get an RSS feed, at least not that I’m aware of.

Marco, this may have changed, but is there an RSS feed from the GMB websites yet?

Marco: Not that I know of. Not that I’m aware of.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah. As far as I’m aware, there is not an RSS feed from the GMB websites. So our GMB auto poster will create an RSS feed from the GMB posts that are connected through that auto poster or that are posted with that auto poster. So you can do it that way. But like I said, you should have a common brand for all of those assets, if that’s the case. If you want to feed them all into one network, which again, I’m gonna be 100% transparent with you guys, I’m not building syndication networks for my lead gen assets. I build syndication networks for clients because I tell them that it’s critical. It is because it’s brand building, it’s entity validation and brand authority building, right?

So any client, I’m gonna tell them. “You should have a syndication network to protect your brand and to amplify your brand, expand your reach. It also helps to build your authority and all that kind of stuff.” For content marketing, all my clients, I suggest we do regular content marketing, blogging that gets syndicated out to the syndication network. That’s all true. It’s not just because I wanna charge them money, guys, it’s to protect their brand and to help them to stay ranked.

But for lead gen assets, that’s an additional expense. So why implement that? Until and unless you need to, right? So for my lead gen assets that I’m building right now, I’m not using syndication networks. If I have lead gen assets that I do all the other magic that I work to them and they don’t end up producing, because maybe they’re not ranking well or that area ended up being more competitive than I originally thought, then I may add a syndication network. But that’s only if and when it’s absolutely needed. It’s kind of like a last resort thing because it’s an additional expense that I don’t wanna have to put up for a lead gen asset if I can get results without it.

Now once you’ve monetized an asset, a lead gen or, in this case, a multiple assets, once you’ve monetized them, I’ve talked about this too, if once you’ve developed it … Like for me, when I monetize a lead gen asset, what I do is after several months, two or three months of the service provider paying on time and there’s no issues, if we develop a decent relationship, then I offer at that point to rebrand those lead gen assets after the client, certainly their name. It’s a lot more legit that way, right?

Like I said, at that point, once I would offer the rebranding, then that’s where I could upsell them on, “Hey, since we’re gonna be rebranding these, we should also go to syndication network because it’s gonna help to protect your brand and we can use that to help continue to push the lead gen assets that I’m gonna rebrand. It’ll help to continue to keep them producing for you, blah blah blah blah blah.”

At that point, we set up syndication network. Might even set them up on content marketing services. That’s an additional charge beyond the lead gen leasing or pay per lead fees that I’m charging. Depending on how I’ve monetized that asset, this is now starting to build their asset, syndication network with their branding, building, doing content marketing on their website.

So now I’m double dipping, right? Now I’m generating money from my lead gen assets and also working on the client’s assets as a separate fee. Right? So it gives you a whole lot of opportunity, Michael. But for your lead gen assets, I don’t recommend setting up syndication network unless you absolutely need to. Try to get results without it. Guys, I am the firm believer of trying to get the most results or trying to get the best results with the least amount of effort possible and least amount of money invested too.

Should You Create A Blog Post If You Syndicate A GMB Post?

Okay. It’s a good Hump Day today, by the way. I’m liking these questions. It’s a good question, Michael. All right. Ray had some confusion earlier. We’ll pass over that. Quit This House, he says, “If I wanted to syndicate my GMB post, should I create a blog post with the post details and link or should I post to one of the social media sites and create a trigger from there?”

Quit This House, use the GMB auto poster. I’m telling you, it’s stupid and expensive, it’s super convenient and efficient, and it can generate an RSS feed from your GMB posts, and then you can just connect that directly to a syndication network, and then, viola, it’s done. You don’t have to go … Right now, what you’re talking about would require a manual action for every post. Right?

If you just set it up through the auto poster, you can, not only schedule out your GMB post all in one setting so that they automatically publish on the day and time that you select, but it will also generate an RSS feed that then you can populate or trigger a syndication network with, and all of that is automated.

Marco: By the way, since we’re back on the auto poster, I got an answer from Rob and he says, yes, we’ll be able to silo based on tagging. So you can create multiple silos within the auto poster just by tagging, by using different tags. The function isn’t integrated yet, but it’s coming. It’s already being developed, guys. Those of you who are looking to get into this, get in there now because it just keeps …

Shripad is a master programmer. He just keeps adding to it more and more functionality and he’s now charging more. We’re not gonna charge more monthly yet. If it gets to the point where there’s just a ton of programming that needs to be done, the price will probably need to go up. But we usually grandfather people into the prices where they are, so remember that.

Bradley: Yeah. Michael says, “Holy crap, I can’t believe I got the $1,000 Local Lease Pro course for $47.” Yeah, Michael. Look, for eight days, we promoted shit out of that and told everybody that once the Side Hustle Toolbox offer closed that it was gonna, I originally said it was gonna go to 500, but it’s such a damn good course. I mean, I’m telling you, this is I think the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career, that Local Lease Pro method right there. That’s why we made it $1,000.

Not only that, but we’re gonna be updating the course. Like I said, I’ve got some new stuff to add to it. That as soon as I get my VA on track for the new changes and I polish up the processes a little bit, I’m gonna be sharing that, I’ll be updating Local Lease Pro. So, yeah, you’re right. Good thing that you got in on it.

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have … ” By the way, guys, if you want Local Lease Pro, if you don’t have it, there’s only two options, you can buy it for 1,000 bucks or you can join the Mastermind and you can get it included in your Mastermind membership. So it’s entirely up to you, but I would recommend it. I mean, guys, it’s even worth $1,000, I’m not kidding, because of the opportunity. I’m telling you, it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my eight, almost nine year career now. Okay.

Does It Hurt Or Help To Have Multiple Syndication Networks?

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have multiple syndication networks?” Yes, it can, Abe. Not for YouTube channels-, well, depending on how they were set up, but if you’re using syndication networks for blog syndication to try to rank your own domain, like a self-hosted site, then, yes, multiple syndication networks can hurt you, depending on how you have it set up and how you have a syndication set up,

I’ve said for years now, like we teach branded tier one syndication networks and we also talked about when we teach how to build two-tier syndication networks. You can take it out multiple tiers. But I’ve also recommended for years that you only use two-tier syndication networks on YouTube channels or multi-tiered syndication networks on YouTube channels or for YouTube syndication, not for blog syndication.

However, if you wanna do it for blog syndication, I do teach in Syndication Academy and I’ve talked about it multiple times how you can use multi-tiered syndication networks and reduce the chance of getting a Google slap. You cannot eliminate it because you are still leaving a footprint. But you can significantly reduce the footprint if you add additional content feeds as triggers into your second or third tiers. Right? Because what you wanna do is you wanna mask or bury your content among a whole lot of additional route relevant and related type content so that the blogs don’t show or appear to be solely for manipulating search rankings. Right? And that’s essentially what they are.

Again, with multi-tiered syndication networks, I don’t recommend them for blog syndication unless you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to put forth all the additional effort. Also, multitude syndication networks can break down because there’s a lot of moving pieces, there’s a lot of different content sources, which can cause you know different RSS feeds that you don’t have control over because they’re not your RSS feeds, which can cause problems. Multi-tiered syndication networks can be a bitch to maintain for that reason and so that’s another reason I don’t recommend them.

If you are just flatly syndicating your content to multiple syndication networks and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, then you are absolutely causing damage because it is clearly, the algorithm can pick that up in a split second. Right? Again, Abe, if you were gonna be building these types of stuff, like I said, the only way that … We have Syndication Academy where I talk about all of that stuff, seriously, I go into your best practices and everything about how to use them and where to use them. But for blog syndication, I highly recommend that you just use a one-tier branded syndication network and then you can boost the hell out of that. Okay.

Marco: Yeah. He also says that he’s used lower standard contractors in the past and he’s considering using our services on top. Dude, if you’ve done that, then don’t get a syndication network from us until you fix whatever it is that you’ve done. I suggest totally getting into Syndication Academy, seeing how it’s all supposed to work. I hope that you have access to all of these networks and multiple rings that have been done for you so that you can just stop whatever madness it was that was created and you could do it the right way. The way that it’s supposed to be done, which is branding. It’s done for branding and for syndicating your network. Yeah. It is done to manipulate but to manipulate in the right way. If you get caught manipulating the wrong way, you’re going to get slapped down.

What’s The Difference Between The Press Release Service In Serp Space And MGYB?

Bradley: That’s right. Ray says, “What is the difference between press release service from Serp Space, and MGYB? Are they overlapping and/or equivalent? They’re equivalent now, Ray, because, well, there’s two different levels of press releases orders from Serb Space. There was the press release and then press release plus. The press release was, the press advantage network, the distribution network, and that’s we have now a separate account. We have our own press advantage distribution network agreement with them that is available in MGYB. It’s basically the same distribution network. So it’s up to you if you wanna order from Serp Space or if you wanna come to MGYB which is owned and controlled entirely by Semantic Mastery and my partners. If that makes sense.

Serp Space was a collaboration. We are no longer part of that. There’s no issues there or anything like that. I’m just letting you know, if you wanna order directly from us, it’s through MGYB. Okay. Good question.

Should We Link From GMB Biz.Site Description?

Doodle Digital Marketing, I like that. He says, “Hey guys, I love Hump Day Hangouts. Tons of value. “Should we link out from the GMB biz site description?” Not … Well, wait a minute, the GMB, yes. You can link from the GMB website content. I don’t know about the description. But if you’re talking about the GMB business description, no, you can’t put links in that; that’s short. I think it only allows 750 characters. But if you’re talking about the GMB website, yes, you can link out to that.

What I don’t recommend doing a lot of external links, unless it makes sense, it has to be relevant guys, remember, this is a Google property, so I would not be doing some stupid “I’m gonna link to a .gov or .edu site for authority” because that’s bullshit and it has been for years. If it’s relevant, then, yes. If it’s not relevant, you’re just doing it because you learn that somewhere on some stupid SEO program somewhere, don’t do it because that’s dumb.

But what I would recommend doing is, I always link, and I teach this, but I always link from the GMB website text, the content body of the website, I always link to the GMB maps share URL, as well as to the GMB website. So it’s linking to itself, right? If you have an external website, so self-hosted website, you can link to that. That makes sense. You could also link to some of your social media stuff. That makes sense. Any type of branded property that you could link out.

Again, I wouldn’t spam the description or the GMB website content with a bunch of exterior external links, I would keep it … Really that’s why I usually just link from the GMB website to itself and also to the GMB maps share URL because those are Google properties. Right? So just consider that.

It’s after five o’clock, I don’t have to get my daughter-, or I don’t get to have my daughter for dinner tonight, so I do have a couple extra minutes. Marco, can you hang out for a few extra?

Marco: Yeah, I can hang out for a few extra. My daughter isn’t crying it.

Bradley: We’ve only got a few questions left.

Marco: Let’s go.

Bradley: All right. John says, “I’ve got a Semantic Mastery syndrome. I have no doubt it’s the place to be.” “Thanks, John. John is one in Marco’s small group that he was talking about. Jordan says, “Marco’s right. We learned the why behind all these Semantic Mastery tactics, Syndication Academy, RYS stack, Press Releases, et cetera, and then just sell them along with some other deep rooted stuff we had developed in the lab.” He’s talking about his own business specifically, Jordan.

“Then we also create all the content via writing and optimizing it, which we charge for, and then we do web design with SEO strategy pre-launch. I couldn’t build a drive stack if my life depended on it. Haha.” Yeah, that’s great. I mean, honestly, guys, those are the audience that are tech nerds and like to get their hands dirty, so to speak, roll up their sleeves and get to work. Then, RYS Academy will teach you how to build drive stacks. It’s a lot of work. You can benefit from RYS stacks without having to learn how to build them, by just buying them done for you and you’ll save yourself a shit ton of time and energy.

Again, I’m not trying to discourage anybody from buying the course, I’m just saying you got to consider where to spend your time. Is learning how to build drive stacks going to progress your business? It might. You have to make that decision. I can’t make that decision for you. Or is the benefit and the result that the drive stack can produce going to help your business? And if so, then why go through the trouble of learning how to build them when you could just purchase them done for you and receive the benefit that you were seeking to begin with? Does that make sense? Then that way you could spend your time focusing on how to sell it or how to monetize it or how to apply it to get the result that you’re seeking. Does that make sense?

Again, guys, you have to think about it on a higher level. That’s what I think is really wrong with our industry, is that everybody teaches, or the vast majority of products tell you, “Hey, we’re gonna teach you how to do this one skill.” Yeah, I’m not trying to take that away from anybody. That skill is valuable. Whatever that skill may be, it’s valuable. But just because you know how to get a result from it, one particular skill does not make you a business owner, it does not make it a profitable business for you. Right?

So you got to think about how are you going to make money from whatever it is you choose to do? Is doing that thing, being the mechanic or the technician, is that actually going to make you the money or is selling that service and the result that that service produces going to make you the money? If that’s the case, then why don’t you focus on learning how to sell it and find people that are already good at doing it, fulfilling it, to do it for you right.

That’s what we’re trying to get at, guys, and Jordan understands that. That’s why Jordan’s business is cranking, it’s just kicking ass. Okay.

Any Black Friday Sales For Done For You Services Or Training?

Luis, he’s a new Mastermind member. “Hey guys, any Black Friday sales?” By the way, welcome, Luis. “Any Black Friday sales for Done For You services or training?” Yeah. Isn’t that with the GMB stuff was the pre-Black Friday sale?

Marco: It’s the pre. We will have something. Something’s coming your way and it’s gonna be good. Trust me. It’s not Black Friday yet, dude. But we will have something. It’ll be big. We control MGYB now. As Bradley mentioned, it’s ours. Semantic Mastery is our own store. So we’ve got some really good stuff coming your way.

Luis, I will be talking to you on Monday, as a matter of, fact. It’s his onboarding call. Again, I’m sorry, all these Mastermind questions keep coming up or Mastermind people. As part of the onboarding process, we give people a half hour call just to get them pointed in the right direction, to see where they’re going, where they want to be. So we ask questions, we try to provide guidance. I just happened to get Luis.

Guys, you can’t ask for who you want. You’re going to get whoever is up on the calendar, because we rotate since there’s five of us. But whoever you get, you’re going to get the direction that you need and you’re going to get your questions answered so that you can get started on your way to POFU.

That’s what we want you to do. We want you to get started getting to that place where you’re going to be and say, “Okay. Now I don’t have to deal with shitty clients. I don’t have to deal with shitty people. I am at a place where I can go into any negotiation from a position of power. I know what I’m worth. If this guy gives me any flack, I’m gonna have to say ‘Fuck you. I’m gonna go to your competitor and charge them half price just because I feel like it, because I don’t need you.‘” That’s what we want you to be.

Bradley: There you go so. Yes, Black Friday is this Friday. So, yeah, there will be some other specials. I don’t usually get involved with what promotions we’re doing, guys, so I couldn’t answer that. But I’m glad Marco said, yeah, we do have something coming Friday.

Should You Use Only The Main Keyword Phrase Or Should You Diversify Them When Building Links To All Assets?

Jay Turner. What’s up, Jay? He says, “I’ve been able to get my client ranked in the 3-pack for the second most trafficked keyword phrase with an RYS stack. High five, Marco.”

Marco: High five, dude.

Bradley: “But now I want to take on the main and most competitive keyword. I’m adding a silo of content to the RYS stack targeting the main keyword. So far so good. My question is when embarking on link building to all assets, like RYS, Syndication Network, GMB website, et cetera, should I use only the main keyword phrase or must I diversify the keyword phrases?”

Jay, diversify. What I recommend you do is go pool your … You should have probably already done keyword research anyways, so if you’re gonna be siloing, you should have your keyword themes relatively tight for the silos anyways. So make sure that if you’re gonna be direct targeting link building on a silo basis, that you’re only using a set of keywords that fall within that particular silo or keyword theme. Right? Does that make sense?

Let me take this down to a local level because what I wanna explain is, guys, when you’re doing a ton of like spam link building and such to power up tier one entities, which would be like drive stacks, press release, organization pages, syndication networks, even citations, you don’t want to hit, and I’m gonna say local because that’s primarily what I work on, and I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about here anyways. You said client ranks, so it’s likely it’s locally You said 3-pack. Right?

So you don’t wanna use the keywords with the location modifiers. You can use a very small percentage of your overall keywords that you’re gonna add to the anchor text or the link building that you’re gonna be either doing or buying a package or whatever. You can have a very, very small percentage with location modifiers, but I would keep that to an absolute bare minimum. Because it’s more about pushing the theme, the keyword theme, not the location, or the geographic theme, if that makes sense, it’s not about pushing location relevancy.

Because think about it, the further you move away from a local business the more broader the market segment is. In other words, you don’t wanna be targeting keywords or link building to tier 1 assets all the way down to the local level, including local location modifier, because it’s, remember your link building to tier one assets is two hops away from your target which would be your GMB asset or your primary website, the client’s website, or whatever, the further you get away from the ultimate target, the ultimate destination, the broader your keyword set should be, the broader the theme of the keyword set.

That’s why I say I don’t like to include local modifiers and anchor text when I’m building links to tier one assets. Instead I use higher or market-level keywords, broader market keywords. What do I mean by that? Instead of water heater repair Fairfax Virginia or Fairfax VA as a keyword that I would use as an anchor, it would be water heater repair and plumbing and plumbing repair and plumbing service, if that makes sense. I’d lose the local modifier and use more broader market-level keywords. Okay.

Also, you don’t wanna do entirely 100% on anchor text links, even with a diverse set of keywords. You wanna also include naked URLs and some generics. You can even use some brand terms at that point. It’s a little bit odd to use brand terms at tier two links because that’s again two steps away from your target URL. But it does make sense if you’re link building to, for example, if it’s a tier one branded property it can make sense to also include the brand name in some of those anchor text too. Right? I would just use those sparingly as well. It’s more about the keyword relevancy at that point in naked URLs, which is just pushing link equity to those tier one assets regardless of anchor text.

Marco, do you wanna comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, thanks, Bradley. What I would recommend is reach out to Dedia. We have a Dedia, he knows exactly what to do with your RYS stack to get the most out of it.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: If needed, then get our keyword research gig because we will come up with thousands upon thousands of keyword targets for you to either add relevance or to push, we provide what’s called buoyancy. “Buoyancy,” that’s one of the words that I have difficulty with. But we help push up the main keyword by providing relevance throughout the keyword silo. We give you all that with the keyword research.

Then, all you do is turn that over to Dedia and say, “Here, this is the folder that I’ve created, this is the keyword that I’m targeting, have at it.” Dedia has been with us long enough that he just knows, okay, this is what I need to do. He’ll blast it. He’ll hammer that RYS stack so that it produces.

Bradley: That’s right. You don’t have to worry about all those ratios and stuff, Jay. I know. I mean, honestly, I don’t worry about any of that stuff anymore because I don’t ever do any of that stuff anymore. If I need it, I just contact Dedia, exactly what Marco said, and I just say, “Hey, this is what I got. This is what I’m trying to accomplish. Make it happen,” and he does it.

Honestly, guys, that’s what I’m talking about. Jay, again, I don’t wanna get back on this pitch again, but if you have your own tools and you’re running your own link building tools and stuff like that, that’s great, if you’re efficient and all that. But if you’re not, which I am not, I have no desire to run those tools, just let the expert do it and Dedia has an absolute ninja. He’s an expert, a link building expert, so that’s why I just turned it over to him, defer to him anytime I have something that I need to spam to push additional link equity to. I just contact him say, “This what I got is what I need you do, make it happen,” and he does it. All right.

Jay vouches for the GMB auto poster. He says, “It’s great and Shripad does great work. He is very responsive in Support. I can attest to that too, not just because it’s me, but every time there’s an issue a little support bubble on the bottom right corner of the auto poster, you can just contact Support through there and he’s very, very responsive.”

Would You Recommend Using One Website For Multiple GMB Locations?

Abe says, “Also, I would like to know about using one website for multiple GMB locations. Is this recommended and possible?” It can be. You can just create separate location pages. So each location each, GMB locations should have its own dedicated page on the website and that’s the URL that you would submit as the website URL in the Google My Business profile. Does that make sense?

So instead of just using the home root domain, so the home page of the website for that brand across all different GMB assets, create a location specific page on that domain and then use that URL as that landing page URL as the website in GMB. It’s perfectly fine to do that, guys. But what you want is, if it’s the same brand, you can share the same brand name across all GMB locations. That’s fine. But you want a unique URL and a unique phone number and a unique address, if possible. Okay.

Strange NAP issues occur if you have two or more of the data points, the primary data points in a citation or NAP, which would be name, address, phone number, and also website URL. If you have two or more common data points among multiple locations, that’s going to cause NAP issues, which is going to make it very difficult to rank. You can have one common data point, typically the business name, because it’s a brand that can be used across multiple GMBs as long as the other primary data points are unique, physical address, phone number, website address. Does that make sense? So, yes, it’s possible.

Now one other thing I would mention is go back through, Abe, watch some of our previous Hump Day Hangouts. We’ll talk about the difference between using location pages, which would be pages on the root domain, or using location-specific sub-domains, which are separate WordPress installations, but there’s a reason to do, that’s to help mitigate risk, potential losing all of your assets if you were to catch a penalty. Again, we just talked about this last week, go back and watch the replay from last week and I’m pretty sure we talked about that extensively, about the benefit of using sub-domains over sub-folders or sub-directories. That’s pretty much the same thing I’m talking about here.

“Where’s the GMB auto poster?” John, just posting the Mastermind, we’ll get to the link.

Marco: I posted the link higher up.

Bradley: Yeah. I just didn’t have it. Thank you, Marco. Nestor says, Hey, I got to go guys. I got to wrap this up. So, anyways, and there’s Rob with the yearly discount for the GMB agency offer. That’s the enterprise account level or subscription level, which is 200 posts per month-, or excuse me 500 posts per month capacity. If you buy it on a monthly basis, subscribe month to month, it’s $200. If you buy the yearly license … It’s $200 per month, excuse me. If you buy the yearly license, it’s 1,000 bucks, divided by 12, comes out to be $84 dollars or $83 per month. So it’s a hell of a lot cheaper that way.

By the way, if you’re scheduling out 31 posts, which there’s a post scheduling feature, which is amazing in the GMB auto poster, so you can schedule out one post a day or however many you want. Let’s just say you’re doing one post a day, you could do 31 days. Then, there’s a republish option to where it can republish the post based upon the interval that you set. For example, if you set every 31 days, you can publish, you can schedule out 31 posts and then have them republish 31 days later, each post thereafter. Right? Does that make sense?

So day one and then day 32, that post publishes again. Day two and day 33, that post publishes again. Does that make sense? That way you can set up all of your posting and in an automated fashion. Well, with 500 posts per month, if you were to actually fill out or post one per day for each location, you can essentially put 16 locations in one enterprise account. Sixteen times 31 comes out to be 496, so you get 496 posts. Essentially, you can serve 16 locations, 100% one post per day with a single enterprise account. Does that make sense?

That’s how I’m clustering my sites right now. I gave you a little insight on that.

Marco: Yeah. I mean, it’s an awesome deal because it saves so much money and then the auto poster just saves so much time and effort. Once your VAs get proficient with going in there and just scheduling and putting everything up, it just saves you a ton of time of money. So you’ll make the money back that you invest in this just by the time you’re gonna save with your VAs, or even if you try to do it on your own, which you shouldn’t be doing.

Bradley: Yeah. Just so you guys are aware, for clients, I have a VA that goes in and manually posts for all the clients. I do that for a reason because every post is 100% unique that way. She still has content templates, but she goes in and she puts in a new image every time, and the content templates she uses, there’s tokens that she swaps out with different keywords and such. The target URLs are always being recycled to whatever we’re linking to from the GMB post and all that. So they become unique for clients.

I pay my VA on a per post basis. So I pay her, for every post that she publishes she gets paid. It varies between $3.50 to $5 per post. But I charge my clients $10 to $15 per post, depending on what the volume is. So my point is, I make money on that even though she’s manually posting.

However, for lead gen assets, guys, once again, just like I was telling … Shit, who was I telling earlier? Michael. I was telling Michael earlier not to worry about syndication networks for lead gen assets because you wanna reduce expenses. Well, I don’t want to pay a VA to manually post to lead gen assets because that’s an additional expense when I can pay for-, or subscribe to the auto poster, schedule all the posts.

Do I do all these guys? Hell, no. I’ve trained a VA to go in and set up or schedule all the posts within the GMB auto poster and then schedule them to republish. So that, literally, I can pay a VA for three or four hours to schedule out, however long it takes them, to schedule all those posts out. Then, it’s done and those GMB assets will continually update posts because of the auto poster and I’m not paying anymore other than for the auto poster subscription. Does that make sense? So it’s a hell of a lot more efficient with money too. Right? It’s more cost-effective. Okay.

Nestor says … And I’m so over, we got to get out of here. Nestor says, “Hey guys, how about webs 2.0 example mybrand.wordpress.com point to my GMB property three links as a press release?” Okay. First of all, I’m not familiar with their example. I know that’s kind of a competitor that does, you know, they have their own store and blah blah blah. I’m not real familiar with what they teach or what they say, so I can’t really speak on that.

I’m not quite sure I understand, in the wording of your question, what you mean by mybrand.wordPress. I understand WordPress.com, that’s fine. That’s a brand identity property that you can create on the WordPress.com site, kind of like what I showed earlier. But, yeah, that’s normal. That goes into Syndication Network, right? You try to get your brand name as a sub-domain blah blah blah. That’s pretty standard.

But, “point to GMB property three links as a press release,” I’m not sure what that means. Can you point to a GMB property from your WordPress.com site? Sure. Can you also use press releases to link to that WordPress.com site? Sure. You can also link to your GMB.

I’m doing a press releases, Local PR Pro method is what I use and, as standard operating procedure, I published a press releases with every GMB asset, it gets created. Usually, my preferred method is to link from the first press release to the GMB, the Google Maps share URL, to the Google the GMB website URL, and to the GMB the first post URL. We teach that at Local Lease Pro and that’s just essentially my method. So I’m going direct from the press releases to the Google assets. Okay.

Yeah. Guys, there’s a thousand ways to skin a cat, right? So our method isn’t the be-all end-all. It’s just our method works for what we want it to work for and that’s what we teach. Other people have other methods that may very well work as good as ours. I’m not trying to say that ours is better than anybody else’s. I’m just telling you what we teach, I don’t know what they teach. I’m sorry. It’s likely that that would work too.

Will says, “Bradley, speaking about syndication networks, I finally figured out how to syndicate to Medium.com. I’ve been testing it for a while with a few posts now and it works well to syndicate your WordPress post with images and YouTube video embeds, and from there, you could syndicate to your tier two, if you’d like. I’ll send you an update to support@semanticmastery.”

Thanks, Will. That’s awesome. In fact, Will, if you would, I mean, if you’re cool with it, you can even send the update right in the Mastermind community so that everybody else could benefit from it. If not, send it to me and I’ll update everybody in the Mastermind, and Syndication Academy for that matter, once I see it. Thank you for that, Will.

Okay. “Link to pre-Black Friday deals, please.” Yeah. Luis, just contact us at Support.

That’s it. Okay, guys, we’re way over. We got all questions answered, though.

Marco: That was a good one.

Bradley: Thanks, Marco, for hanging out, man, I appreciate it.

Marco: Marathon. All right, dude.

Bradley: All right, everybody. Mastermind webinar tomorrow. Be there or be square. See y’all.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210 syndicated from https://medium.com/@SpanishFly

[howardkuester22]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210

Click on the video above to watch Episode 202 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: Hello and welcome to Episode 210 of Hump Day Hangouts. I am Adam Moody with Semantic Mastery. We are gonna say hi to everyone real quick before we dive into some announcements and questions from everybody watching us live. Also, if you’re watching this on YouTube, we noticed from time to time that we get questions over there, but you need to come to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions and ask your questions there, that’s where we’re monitoring. Before we dive in, real quick, Chris, how are you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Good weather in Florida always the last couple weeks. I highly recommend it, like I love it. How are you doing?

Adam: Not bad. It’s like 60 here, which is perfect. Everyone in California thinks it’s like the middle of winter and I’m just enjoying myself. This is good. Marco, how about you? How’s the weather for you, man?

Marco: Things are good here, man, transitioning to the dry season. So we’re gonna have about five and a half months of absolutely no rain, not even a drop. I’m looking forward to … Yeah, but then, it’s seven months of afternoon showers. You gotta pay the price for the life you live, right?

Adam: Yeah, fair enough.

Marco: But always warm, like if it were 60 here, we’d all be dying literally. It’s freezing cold.

Chris: [Inaudible 00:01:19] stay in Florida.

Adam: Definitely. Bradley, how about you, man? How are you doing?

Bradley: I’m good, I’m happy to be here. Got lots of stuff going on at the moment. Just been really, really busy. In last week, well, I took off for a couple days because my sister got married again. I actually got to go down to Hilton Head, South Carolina and meet one of our members, Ed, who also went to POFU Live; he’s in the Mastermind also. That was cool because I got to spend an hour with him just chatting. It was really, really cool. I always enjoy getting to meet members whenever we have the opportunity. So that was a lot of fun. But I had to take really Friday and Monday off, so now I’m behind.

Besides that, I got a quick little story to tell very, very quickly. Just last week, it was funny because I was actually reviewing the Hump Day Hangout from last week and I was talking about mitigating risk. Marco and I, we were talking about reducing exposure and trying to mitigate risk because, if you put all your eggs in one basket and Google takes that basket, you’re screwed, you’ve lost all those assets.

Well, I was using a test with what’s called GMB Location Groups. It’s a setting inside of Google My Business. I was running a test on a set of GMB assets for a particular metro area, so one metropolitan city area. I had seven assets in there that were fully optimized, 100% done. In fact, they were the seven assets that my VAs has been training on as he’s been learning the processes for doing this whole method, the Local Lease Pro model, essentially.

Long story short, on Saturday, I was down at the Hilton Head and I happened to get an email saying that the account that was used as the recovery email for that particular GMB manager account, which had to be turned into an owner in order to use location groups, had been terminated for violating Google’s spam policies. I lost all those damn assets, every single one of them, and I can’t even access them through the original Google accounts now, guys.

That was three weeks work, not necessarily my work, but my VA’s work wasted. Now, is it all bad? No, because I learned a valuable lesson. Number one, don’t use GMB location groups, it’s like a trap, number one, lesson number one. Number two is always mitigate risk. Don’t set yourself up with vulnerabilities that Google can take … We exploit Google’s vulnerabilities. Don’t you think Google will exploit ours? So I learned that … In fact, I’m actually updating the entire process for how to first log in and set up and manage a lot of GMB assets. I’m updating all those processes this week, in fact, because we have to do something new that reduces our overall risk.

Anyways, that was my little story. I’m a little bit behind now because all the work that I’ve done for the last several weeks on all the processes now has to be updated and redone. But that’s the cat and mouse game that we play.

Marco: Yeah. One of the great things about our Mastermind is that we do all of the testing, we take all of the risk, we were the ones who go in the lab. I mean, we do encourage our own people to test so that they can verify that our results are what we’re saying they are. But it’s one of the things that we do, we go, we blow things up and it happens, and then now we know what not to do. And right into our Mastermind, we’ll share all of test result with the membership exactly what was done so that they don’t repeat the process and get stuck losing assets because nobody wants to lose an asset, especially not seven. But so be it, lesson well-learned and it’s a lesson that the Mastermind doesn’t have to repeat.

Bradley: That’s true and, just real quick segue, that leads me to, that’s kind of like what the Mastermind is about. The scaling option, like doing all these heavy processes and stuff, is really reserved to the POFU Live group attendees at the moment, but we’re polishing all this stuff. Obviously, the Mastermind, we update, like tomorrow we’ve got a Mastermind webinar and I’m certainly gonna be talking about what not to do because I want to make sure all of our members are fully aware of what not to do so they don’t lose assets.

But once we have this 12-week process done, that the POFU Live attendees are kind of in accountability group with me right now, and we’ve got a target that we’re trying to hit at the end of 12 weeks, which is 50 GMB assets fully developed and ready for monetization, if they’re not already monetized by that point, and so when we’re done at that 12-week period, we will have discovered or perfected, really fine-tuned the method and all of the processes to get us there, to get us to that point. That’s when we’re gonna release in its entirety the Mastermind.

That training will not be released outside of the Mastermind, period, and that’s only because it’s highly valuable and we put a lot of work. In fact, the other members of the POFU accountability group with us, that’s like 12 of us in there, and so that’s a lot of intellectual property, a lot of a work that goes into that. So the Mastermind members will get that.

But that’s just one of many things that we do there. For example, we had some questions about how to structure ad ID pages and set up as three buckets with HTTP, SSL protocol, and all that stuff. Two weeks ago, we went in and showed exactly how to do that. I mean, it’s just stuff like that that we do in the Mastermind all the time.

Adam: Yeah. Something else that I just remembered, that reminded me of, Bradley, was, I think it was Jason who posted yesterday, who’s one of our Mastermind members, just out of the blue was like, hey, I’ve seen some questions about blah blah blah-, not blah blah blah, but some heavy-duty IT stuff. He’s like, “Hey, if anybody needs help just ping me. I’ll do it for free if you’re a Mastermind member.”

That’s just awesome to see. Again, you get that in a tight-knit group like that. It’s cool having that ability. Everyone who knows our story kind of knows where we came from and how we were part of a Mastermind. That’s why part of why we do this to get that community, it’s not just a jumble of people, you do have a community.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Well, cool. I also want to say then to you guys, we mentioned the GMB stuff, we’ve got a sale going on right now at MGYB. It’s wrapping up today. So if you’re interested or you need a GMB verification service, whether it’s for your clients, it’s for yourself, you’re doing some lead gen, head over there. I posted it on the page. If you’re watching the replay, sorry, it’s probably too late. But a good reason to watch live and open the emails is you get a 35% discount on that service right now. So head over there do that.

Real quick, too, if you’re joining us for the first time, thank you so much for watching us. If you want the right place to start, because it is one of the questions we get, “Hey, where should I start? Should I take this course and do that?” start with Battle Plan. No matter what you’re doing, even if you want to hop into Mastermind, get the Battle Plan, come join the Mastermind. That’s the path. The link is on there. It’s a great way to get repeatable results, which is why we put it together, so that we can have that. It’s our home processes put into an easy-to-digest format.

Then, obviously, like we’ve been talking about it, if you’re ready to take things up a notch, if you wanna scale, you wanna grow, then the Mastermind is the place to be.

Bradley: Did you open up Local Lease Pro as a standalone product now?

Adam: Yes.

Bradley: I’ll be damned. I didn’t realize that was available yet. Okay.

Adam: Sneaking that onto the page, if people are interested.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay.

Adam: I’m gonna say no more.

Bradley: Everything I’ve been talking about with this Local Lease Pro method, that’s it. Most of you guys are probably aware of it because of the Side Hustle Toolbox promotion, that was our contribution. But now that that’s closed, it’s a standalone product. I’m gonna be updating that in a couple of weeks with some of the new processes that I’ve just discovered.

Again, GMB, like the actual optimization process has changed slightly. Not much, but slightly, and I’m updating the processes for my VAs right now. So next week, I’ll kind of polish it up a bit and then add that into the Local Lease Pro training. So if you guys don’t have it yet, I recommend you get it. This method is freaking killing it. I think it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career. I mean that, so check it out.

All right. Can we get into questions?

Adam: I think so. If you guys are good, let’s do this.

Do I Need Access To A Client’s Website If I Do Local SEO For Them?

Bradley: All right. Starting off with Chris Green posted a support question from Vincent. He says, “I’m considering to join the RYS Reloaded or the GMB course. My question is this: if I do SEO for local businesses in my country, which is Malaysia, do I need to have access to my clients website?” No. It can help. You don’t have to have access to the client’s website, but it would certainly help because you could take care of some on-page SEO issues. In other words, you can optimize the site itself, which is considered on-page SEO, and that can help that can help quite a bit.

In fact, with proper on-page SEO, a lot of the times you can rank a site with a fraction of the off-page SEO because any off-page SEO that … If on site is proper, if it’s tight, if it’s strong, then any off-page will significantly affect, it will have a strong impact on the site because then the site will respond well to off-page because it is a well-built, well-structured site.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to have access to the site because you can accomplish through off-page. You can still rank a site with off-page. If the on-page is terrible, then you probably are fighting a losing battle. But if it’s decent, then you could probably still accomplish what you need to, depending on how competitive the keywords are that you’re targeting. But it’s likely that you could still accomplish what you needed to with off-page alone. But again, there are benefits certainly to being able to access the client’s website. Right? If you’re starting with garbage, it’s gonna be difficult to rank. So just keep that in mind. Okay.

It helps, it’s not 100% necessary. Well, it depends, right? It depends on what the status of the site is currently. If it’s a shitty site, if it was built poorly, optimized poorly, or if it’s spammed to death or whatever, then you may never be able to rank that site. But if it’s decent, if it’s fairly okay, then you could still just apply off-page methods and probably get the results that you want. However, if you can do both, manage the on-page and the-off page, you will get the best results. Right?

Are The SEO Methods In RYS Reloaded And GMB Work On WordPress.com And Wix.com Websites?

Number two, he says, “If my client has a WordPress.com or Wix.com website, can the SEO methods taught in RYS Reloaded and GMB work and getting first page ranking on Google?” Well, yes. Well, Local GMB Pro course is not really anything that have to do with websites, right? Local GMB Pro is how to optimize Google My Business and set up all of the Google assets to rank. Well, not even to rank, but to just generate leads from Google, independent of ranking. That’s what Local GMB Pro is about. It’s about getting leads, getting exposure from Google My Business, whether it ranks or not, and that’s what that whole … Again, despite traditional SEO, Local GMB Pro can generate leads from Google. Okay. So that’s what local GMB Pro is.

RYS is about using Google’s assets as an off-page tool as well as an entity validator, an authority builder, and multiple other things. But it’s more of an off-page thing. Again, it has nothing to do with the website structure or the platform itself, WordPress or Wix. It doesn’t matter because all you’re doing is using Google properties to push relevancy and authority over to whatever property is that you’re trying to rank.

Marco, do you wanna chat about that a little bit?

Marco: Yeah. It’s just one of the pillars that we teach, ART, the art of ART, activity, relevance, trust and authority, both on the link origin and on the link destination. What that means is you get visitors no matter how you show activity and Google reward you as long as everything is relevant and you’re working with trusted and authoritative entities. If you become along with that, a trusted and authoritative entity, then you get rewarded. Google will also reward you for being in Google because Google trusts itself. It’s the ultimate as far as what it trusts. So working in what we call working inside the belly of the beast also has its rewards.

Yeah. As Bradley said, it makes absolutely no difference. I mean, you work with whatever. I mean, you have a free WordPress blog ranking for … what is it? Free-, no, not free. SEO Virginia. Yeah. I mean, it just goes to show that if you get that activity in there, everything else just fall into place as long as it’s relevant, trusted and authoritative.

I keep telling people, and I just mentioned it in our Semantic Mastery Facebook group, the Mastermind, that ART, A-R-T, will trump anything. It will even overcome any of the negative factors, of the algorithm, penalties and all of that. You become almost immune to anything that Google has to throw at you because you’re signaling rank pot-, excuse me, rank brain in the way that it wants to be signaled. You’re doing the Google tickle, the T tickle. I mean, it blows up. It becomes a self-feeding monster once you get all that activity in there.

Bradley: Yeah. This is an example of what Marco was just talking about, this is that WordPress.com. So free wordpress.com blog, guys. If you take a look at this, there’s no content on this page. It looks like there’s content, but the only content on this page is this right here. That’s it. The rest of those are embedded files. That’s RYS at work there, guys. That’s RYS Academy right there at work. Okay. Again, go view page source, the post body, the article body of this post. The content body is this right here. That’s the only text on the page. The rest of it is all embedded files RYS style, and that’s all.

Look at that, guys. It’s ranked number three in organic for SEO Virginia. I mean, that’s pretty powerful. Again, that’s all off-page stuff. There is some on-page going on there because of the iframes that are actually embedded in this page, but it’s primarily an off-page thing that’s got this ranking. And that’s the power of RYS, right?

By the way, the Google site as part of the stack and that’s been number one since May of 2015. Guys, that’s been number one since May of 2015, or within a few weeks anyways, that’s when it was published. Look at that, it’s a horrid site. It was just for a test purpose, guys. Still ranked. Still ranked, it’s three and a half years now. Still ranked. Anyways, there you go. Will it work? It damn sure does.

How Do You Get The URL Of A Scheduled Post In The MGYB GMB Service?

Dustin’s up, or Da B. “Hey there. I’m using the MGYB post scheduling service but I was wondering, in the Local GMB course you link to the previous post but when I scheduled a post, then I don’t have the URL of the last URL because it will be scheduled. How do I link to the post then if the last post yet is not published or is not published yet? Greetings. Dustin.” That’s a good question Dustin.

Marco, that’s something that I think Rob was talking about that was going to be a feature, that was going to be released soon within the auto poster was the ability to silo a post. Is that correct?

Marco: Yeah. We keep going back and forth with Shripad. I’m not sure if that’s available yet. But I mean, there’s an easy solution to that. Link in the body or you’re still not gonna have the post URL. You would need the original post URL, and then the next one, then the next one. So Shripad will have to come up with something regarding that so that we can solve that issue. But, yes, he is working on it so we can silo GMB posts.

Bradley: Yeah. I’m thinking if the script would wait until a published one was pulled and then grab the short URL and then link to that before the next one that’s scheduled publishes. You know what I mean? That would work to build a silo on that. I know that if you post the post … So you publish the post, then you grab the URL and link to it from the next post. But, you’re right, if you wanna schedule out multiple posts in advance, right now there’s not an ability to do that yet.

But that’s something, Marco, if you wanna make a note of that specifically, silo posts together, schedule post together, which I’m sure that can be integrated at some point. Right now that’s not something that can be done, Dustin, but we’re working on that. It’s a great feature.

Marco: No. Dustin, what I would suggest is you just have your VA go in and add links as needed.

Bradley: As they’re published.

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Right. As they publish, go grab the URL, and then go post the next one. That’s the only thing we can do to daisy chain them together right now until we have the automation such that it will be able to do it. Okay.

Jordan says, “On one of the, or …” Okay. One of the guys, here we go. “One of the guys on our SEO team said after an SEO pitch this probably sounds like magic to them. I still can’t believe we get paid for this stuff, almost like grownup version of video games. Haha.” That’s funny. Well, I can believe we’d get paid for it, man. Think about all the testing and all the studying and all the learning and stuff that you, guys, and the money that you invest in your education and to tools and all that stuff.

I mean, we spend a lot of time learning this stuff, guys, we should be paid for it. I mean, think about that. We spend all our time learning how to perform this SEO magic stuff. A business owner that’s doing plumbing, for example, he’s out unclogging drains and that kind of stuff. He wouldn’t have time to learn all this stuff. How do I know? Because I was an electrical contractor and I had to learn how to do this shit while I was doing electrical work. It just so happens I found that I could make more money at this, that’s why I switched to this all together.

What are you gonna say, Marco?

Marco: Yeah. I was gonna say we deserve to be paid and be paid well. I mean, do you know how much time we’ve spent between RYS Academy, RYS Reloaded, Local GMB Pro, Local PR Pro, Local Lease Pro? Do you know how many hours have gone into researching that and making it work? Making that all work hand in hand so that one pushes the other and you’re pushing ultimate power to whatever destination so that that client’s phone rings?

Yeah. It may seem like magic. “Well, my phone rang. You did all that.” But it’s actually just hours and hours and hours of being a total geek.

Are There Ways We Can Use Press Releases Based On The Battleplan Aside From Launching A New Site?

Bradley: Rabbit-hole time. Yeah. Dan’s up. He says, “I’ve looked using press releases based off the Battle Plan and saw that you have them at the store. Besides using them for launching a new site would there be other places that I could use them? I do some consulting on the side for local businesses and build sites, lead gen, et cetera?”

Yeah, Dan. “Press releases are my favorite off-page or link building method really. Like no question, I absolutely love press releases. I use them as my primary off-page link building tool or method. I still use spam links from time to time for certain things, but for the most part I’m using press releases for link building.”

Yeah. You can use them. Guys, there’s dozens and dozens of things that you can publish press releases about. I’ve talked about them. Dan, we have a course called Local PR Pro which is specifically about how to use press releases to rank in the Maps pack, to get Google GMB, Google My Business profiles ranked in the maps pack using press releases. Right?

That’s what that course, Local PR Pro, is all about. In that course, I talk about how there’s multiple different things that you could publish a press release about. Because that’s a question that comes up often, “Well, I don’t think my client has anything that’s really newsworthy to publish a press release about.”

But think about it, getting a five-star review, you could publish a press release about receiving a five-star review or your client. Or you could publish a press release about a new employee being hired. Or a seasonal change to the product line that’s available. Or the services that are available, depending on what kind of business you’re dealing with. Or an accolade that the company receives, some sort of award or something like that. Or any charitable things, any charity events that they’re hosting or that they contribute to or participate in. Right?

There’s just dozens and dozens of things, hooks, angles that you could use to write a news release or something that can be … Guys, you can even publish a press release about a new blog post that’s been published on the website. No kidding. I mean, you just have to get a little bit creative. Dan, when I say you have to get creative, I don’t mean you. I mean, what I would recommend is hiring a PR writer, from Upwork or something like that, that can come up with these angles. A good press release writer can come up with a newsworthy angle for just about anything.

Again, if you’re doing a lot of this work, you could hire a PR writer, a good PR writer from like Upwork or something like that. Or if you’ve got a good press release distribution service that you subscribe to for monthly press releases or whatever, if they’ve got good writers in-house, which most good services do now, then they’ll have writers that are already trained on how to find news where the angles or to create hooks or their stories for the press releases. Right?

For example, if you use the MGYB press release service, the writers there from the Press Advantage distribution network, if that’s what you’re using, it’s fabulous, and there the press releases are almost twice the content length of typical press releases. There’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 words as opposed to 300 to 400, which is what most of them are. So those writers are really, really good, like their sole purpose in life is to find an angle or to create an angle to write a press release about. Those are the same writers that you have access to when you buy a press releases from us individually.

Okay. Anybody wanna comment on that before we move on? It’s a good one, Dan.

Marco: No. I think you hit the nail on the head. They’re great for just about everything. The only thing that you have to avoid is self-promotion, but you get that from most of them. You just have to define what self-promotion is. You go and you advertise. Well, we’re in Facebook, if you’ve just started your Facebook page, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. It’s still self-promotion. It’s just not getting sales. That’s what you wanna try to avoid.

Other than that, it’s fantastic for link building. Not only that, if you hit the press release, whatever the distribution network is with link building, it’ll push through. You’re putting a filter in between the destination so that you hit that with link building. It’ll power it up even more. They just work really well for everything.

Bradley: They damn sure do. Like Marco said, you can actually do self promotional PRs, but the salesy part is what you gotta leave out. They shouldn’t be salesy. But they can be self-promotional. Again, a good PR writer will be able to disguise a promotion as a story, a news story, and that’s really what you wanna do. That’s why I say don’t do it yourself. If I had to write press releases, I’d be a very miserable person. I wouldn’t wanna do it, but some people enjoy that stuff and they’re good at it. All right.

Is It Okay To Start With Battleplan Before Going Into The Mastermind and Syndication Academy Courses?

Andrew Walker’s up. Andrew is a local guy to me. I was in lead share, like a breakfast lead share group with him for several years that I don’t attend those things much anymore. Andrew is a great guy. Anyways, it’s good to see you here, Andrew. I haven’t seen him in a while. He says, “Hey guys, it’s been a long time since I’ve been on Hump Day Hangouts. I got caught up in the cold calling strategy to build my business and also had a case of the shiny object syndrome.” Well, we all do, Andrew. Don’t beat yourself up, buddy. We all go through that. I promise you, I’ve been through it. I still struggle with that, to be honest.

“I don’t fully understand how powerful-,” or excuse me, “I didn’t fully understand how powerful digital marketing is and what it can do for your business. You would think that that’s a no-brainer for an IT guy. Anyway, I’m back for real and I’m ready to learn this stuff. I’ve just downloaded the Battle Plan. I’d love to get involved in the Mastermind, but I’m not able to afford that at this time. Syndication Academy looks to be a great runner up. Can I start there to get things going or just start with the Battle Plan? Thanks, guys, and congrats on your four year anniversary.”

Okay. Great question, Andrew. Again, glad to see you back, man. The Syndication Academy is, yeah, it’s good, however, because, I’m not gonna knock Syndication Academy, but what we recommend is, especially for you, Andrew, you’re running your IT business, your IT services business, and so it depends on how much time you have. If you’ve got a lot of time and no money then, yes, pick up Syndication Academy because then you can learn how to build your own syndication network, which is gonna be one of the critical components to your business in expanding your reach and helping to generate more leads, it’ll help with your SEO and all that kind of stuff.

However, there’s a lot of time that goes into learning how to build a syndication network and, unless you plan on building syndication networks for others or selling them to others, I wouldn’t recommend that you go through all the trouble of learning how to build all that stuff for your own branded syndication network, for your own business. If you’re looking to try to grow your business, then your time is better spent not learning how to build a syndication network that you’re only gonna build one for your own business.

Your time is better spent marketing your business. You can instead just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us and we will build it to our specifications, which is exactly what we teach in the training. You can save yourself weeks of study and implementation by just buying a Done For You Syndication Network and you still reap the benefits of it without having to spend weeks of your time. Does that make sense? They’re inexpensive enough that there’s really no reason that you can’t just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us. It’s cheaper or about the same price as the cost of a month tuition to Syndication Academy. Right?

Anyways, my point is, if you want, Andrew, since you can’t join the Mastermind yet, what I recommend is that you attend our Hump Day Hangouts regularly on Wednesdays, ask your questions here try, keep it to one question per post. In other words, you can post a few times, but try to keep it one question per post please. Ask questions here and we will try to guide you in the best way possible to help you to start growing your IT business, just from these Hump Day Hangouts. Then once you have generated some revenue you can always come join the Mastermind, which is your best bet, because the Mastermind is not just about marketing stuff.

Guys, we’ve gotten away from just teaching SEO or just teaching marketing methods. It’s more about building your business regardless of whether you’re building a local agency or consulting firm, or you want to build your own brick and mortar business, or virtual business for that matter. We want to teach you how to do all of that, which includes marketing and includes SEO, and includes all that stuff, but we’re not pigeon holing our training into just marketing training, if that makes sense. A lot more goes into it than that.

I would suggest, Andrew, that what you do is come back and join us here in Hump Day Hangouts, get involved, stay engaged, ask questions. We also have our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials Facebook group that you could ask questions there. As soon as you’re able to, I would invest in joining the Mastermind so that you can get, basically, almost one-on-one guidance from each one of us my partners and I as well as all of the other members in the Mastermind that are also savvy business owners. Right? That’s part of why it’s Mastermind because it’s not just about us teaching all the time, it’s about everybody in there contributing and helping each other, which is fabulous. Okay.

By the way, one of our top members, longtime members, Jason Johnson, who is what Adam was just talking about at the very beginning of this Hump Day Hangout, he was mentioning somebody was having difficulty setting up their MX records for G suite email to use their domain for their email within G suite. Jason Johnson posted, “Hey, I saw somebody was having trouble with MX records. Hey, I’m an IT guy. If anybody has any questions or any problems, tell them to reach out to me. I’ll help them for free as long as they’re a Mastermind member.”

Andrew, what I’m saying is, Jason is an IT guy who’s been in our Mastermind. He does digital marketing on the side, but also markets his own business and somebody that you could absolutely click with. Probably the two of you could chat about what he’s doing for his business and what’s working for him in generating leads for his IT business and all that kind of stuff. Right?

Again, that’s part of the power of a Mastermind. It’s not just learning from me or Marco when, you know, I’m gonna teach you how to generate leads for your business, but I generate leads for contracting businesses. Right? You’re trying to generate leads for IT services, and computer repair networking, and that kind of stuff, so why not get the advice direct from somebody that’s already generating leads for that type of a business, which we have members in our group to do that? Does that make sense?

That’s the power of a Mastermind. Okay. So that’s what I recommend. In the meantime, if you don’t have the money, come back here, ask questions, implement what you can, go through our YouTube channel Semantic Mastery, youtube.com/semanticmastery. Use the channel search function, ask questions over there. You’re likely going to find already video answers for many of your questions. Then, like I said, anything that you can’t find answers to, post in either the Facebook group or post back here on the event page every week and we’ll come in and answer your questions. As soon as you can generate a little bit of positive revenue, I would reinvest that back into your education and into building your business by joining the Mastermind, getting guidance from us as well as our other members.

Marco: I’m gonna give him just a couple of weeks. First of all, welcome back, Andrew. Sorry that you had a shiny object syndrome. I mean, that sucks and it makes you spend a whole lot of money and time chasing. It becomes a useless path. You fill up your computer with a whole bunch of garbage that you’re never going to use and you realize how much money you spent and then you get caught up at where you are right now where you ended, and dropped all that money and you have nothing to show for it.

But that’s okay, lesson learned. The two examples that I’m gonna give you is, I’m gonna give you Paul Fussell, who’s always in these Hump Day Hangouts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he drops in today; or if he isn’t, it’s because he’s out making money. He was at POFU Live, as a matter of fact, our event. The way he went about doing it, he come into Hump Day Hangouts, ask questions, and then go and go and apply. Ask questions, go and apply. then he started purchasing our drive stacks to rank. I know that he was doing dental for a while, I don’t know what he’s doing now.

Anyway, the thing about Paul is that he just went and he got Done For You services, and then he was chasing clients. Every time he’d get a client, drive stack, and that’s how he would he would rank them. But that’s Paul and that’s how he did it, so Hump Day Hangouts and Done For You services.

Then, we get to Jordan in Syndication Academy. Jordan lives in Syndication Academy, he’s always there. He’s one of our, I don’t know, one of our long-running and most active members of Syndication Academy. He runs an agency and I think he just got a huge nationwide client, but it’s from Syndication Academy. I’m not gonna say that he got everything from Syndication Academy, but I know that that’s his foundation and I know that that’s what he’s doing to rank his clients, to help his clients and to help his agency.

He has an agency, actually he’s an agency owner, but he decided that Syndication Academy was the thing for him. But, of course, they’ll all tell you, and Jordan will tell you that the Battle Plan is the place where you start, and you have to follow it. If you follow the Battle Plan, then you’re going to get to our Done For You services.

It’s a whole lot easier to go and buy a Syndication Academy Network, as Bradley mentioned, than to learn how to build a one-of-a-kind that you only need that one time. Why not go buy it and pay that than to pay a monthly membership to learn how to build one, or you might not wanna learn how to build one, or you might need?

It’s just to buy them and then go and sell it to clients, to people you know. Then, you pitch the benefits of being branded of having that footprint of being seen, of your content being seen everywhere, pushing your content to where the people are hanging out. So that’s one of the benefits.

You could do it many ways. Now, of course, we’re always going to tell you that the Mastermind is the place to be because that’s where like-minded entrepreneurs hang out, people who want to grow their business and get away from just that weekly paycheck and having to wait until the next one so that you could do whatever it is that you wanna do. We wanna push you, guys, past that. We call it POFU, position of fuck you.

Whatever that position is for you, Andrew, we want you to get there. There isn’t just one way to get there, but we do wanna help you get there. So whether you choose Hump Day Hangouts, whether you choose Syndication Academy, or what we suggest, whether you join our Mastermind, we’re going to help you any way we can. That’s what we’re here for.

Bradley: That’s right. Let’s not forget Mohammad. He’s a shining example. Mohammad Mackey. He started by just joining Hump Day Hangouts and coming and asking questions week in and week out and for months. Eventually, he got to a point where he landed a couple of his first clients and started making enough money. He came and joined the Mastermind. Then, he went through a little bit of a struggle for over-promising to clients and ended up losing some clients and had to drop out of the Mastermind for a little bit.

But he kept coming to Hump Day Hangouts and asking more questions, even during that time where he had to back out of the Mastermind, and he got the education that he needed and he implemented it. Right? It’s nothing we did, all we did was provide him with information, but he’s the one that took action and kept at it. He kept persisting in working and he kept finding stuff that wasn’t working until he found stuff that did work. Then, he landed some clients again, got his money back up, and joined the Mastermind again.

We have multiple examples of people that have done that just by starting here, right here at Hump Day Hangouts, Andrew, and you can do that too. Right? The Battle Plan, like I said, will tell you do this, this, this, and this, and you’re going to start getting results. It doesn’t say that you have to learn how to do those things, it just tells you apply these things. Right?

You can either learn how to do those things and do them yourself or, as a business owner, it would be much more efficient with your time to just purchase the Done For You services and apply them in the order that they’re recommended and reap the benefits of those without having to learn how to do it. Okay. Great question. Again, glad to have you back, Andrew. We’re happy to see you participate and be a lot more engaged over the coming weeks.

What Are The Factors You Consider When Finding The Best Keywords For Ranking Opportunity In Local Lead Gen Campaigns?

Gordon’s up. He says, “Hey guys, thank you very much again for the help you provide on Hump Days. It’s greatly appreciated.” You’re welcome, Gordon. “If you’re looking to find a low hanging fruit where you can easily rank in the GMB 3-pack, other than looking at the reviews of the current businesses in the 3-pack in their citation profile, what else do you do to decide whether or not you have found a golden goose ranking opportunity? Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls? Thanks again, Gordon.”

Okay. First of all, Gordon, Local Lease Pro, I showed the exact simple method, it’s kind of time-consuming, but the simple method using it, a free software that we show, we use to identify what I call slam-dunk opportunities, which is which you’re calling a golden goose in your question, okay? Again, that was in Local Lease Pro. If you have access to that, which I’m hoping you do because it was on sale for a very, very ridiculously low price for about eight days during the Side Hustle Toolbox launch. That’s close now, but it is available, Local Lease Pro, but we teach the method specifically how to find low-hanging opportunities.

Now I can’t go into the details of that right here, but it is very, very simple to do using the Easy Local Cash software, which is a free software. It’s Chad Kimball’s software. It just shows you, basically, ever since July of this year, when mobile implemented or switched to the mobile first index, that opened up just massive, massive opportunity. I’m telling you, guys, it opened up more opportunity than I’ve seen since I started my local marketing career in 2010. And that is what we teach on how to find those opportunities that have been opened up by this major change in the algorithm or which index is used first. Right? The mobile first index.

That’s all in Local Lease Pro. I can’t obviously say that right here. It is in the course. Also, you can find out, certainly, if you joined a Mastermind, because Local Lease Pro is one of the first courses that Mastermind members get now when they join.

Marco: Yeah, the how. I mean, that’s the course, the how is, you know, if we gave you that, then why have a course in the first place? So, sorry, that’s something that we can’t do. I’m glad that you mentioned again the Mastermind. I was in our mini, we have the mini-Mastermind and mine is on Tuesday nights for an hour. I have three great people. I have Jamina, I have Will Kenderdine, and John Wypick. We were going over my method for using the software and we went over it in detail. I don’t mind for an hour. I mean, I decided to give my time, right?

So this is what it’s all about. Membership has its privileges. I do things a little bit differently. I find targets a little bit differently, but it all works just the same way. The same way that you teach it, the way that I do it, I already decided to do it. The thing is that membership has its privileges. You have to be a member in order to get the information that you’re asking about. It’s not something that we can give away for free.

Bradley: Yeah. “Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls?” Well, that’s a good question. If you do your research properly upfront, you should know. First of all, you should research your industry or the niche that you’re targeting. Now if you followed us at all for any length of time, Gordon, which I know you have, you know that I’ve been telling you and I’ve been preaching this and beating this drum for years now, which is: specialize. Focus on one industry, guys. Become a big fish in one industry instead of a me-too agency or a me-too consultant or me-too local marketer that will just accommodate any business that will talk to you.

Trust me, you will never gain any traction in your business, or you will have a much harder time gaining traction in your business, if you just offer marketing services to any business that will talk to you. Because your amount of work multiplies exponentially because you have to do keyword research, you have to do market research, you have to understand the vocabulary of the industry, you have to figure out what the pain points are in those industries both for the consumer and for the business owner.

Because if you’re the business owner that you can help them market their products and services, you need to understand the consumer’s mindset, but you also have to understand the business owner’s mindset. So that you can talk to them and speak their language, build rapport with them. So you have to learn two different markets for every industry you enter, the consumer market and the business market. Right?

There’s just so much work that goes into learning, becoming a marketing special or professional in any industry. It requires a ton of research. So if you try to just say, “Oh, I’m gonna be a local marketing guy and I’ll talk to any business in my area that will talk to me,” you’re gonna create a shit ton of additional work that you can significantly reduce. You’ll gain a lot more traction a lot faster in your business if you focus in on one particular industry because then you can craft everything you do in your business around that particular industry. All your marketing messages, all your keyword research, your content templates, everything that you do can be designed around that one particular industry. Now you become a specialist.

I use this as an example. Would you go to a general health practitioner for a heart surgery? No, you go to a cardiologist. Why do you think businesses, like let’s say home remodeling contractors or general contractors, would they want to go to a me-too agency or would they want to go to a contractor media, contractor marketing agency that specializes in general and remodeling contractor marketing? Does that make sense? Which one would you prefer?

Gordon, I recommend specializing in on one industry. But don’t just arbitrarily decide on what industry you wanna focus in on and say, “I’m gonna build my business around that,” you need to research that industry and determine, is there a call volume? Is there significant interest in that? Is there money there?

What’s one of the ways that you can determine that? An easy and simple and a quick way is go do a search for the product and/or service as if you were a customer looking for that product or service. Just go do a Google search for it and take a look and see, are there ads? Are there Google ads? If so, that means there’s paying advertisers. If there’s Google ads, that means people are paying to bid on those keywords, which means there’s likely traffic for those keywords. If there wasn’t traffic for those keywords and if those keywords didn’t convert, there wouldn’t be ads. Does that make sense? People don’t pay and bid on keywords-, well, good advertisers don’t pay and bid on keywords that don’t convert or don’t generate traffic that converts. Right? So if you’re seeing Google ads, that’s a good indication.

Now I wouldn’t stop there. I’d research it further. You could do things, like use Google Trends to find out where in the country, or in the world for that matter, but I always do US-based searches, you can find out where the hotspots are for where the search traffic is the most or the search interest is the most for the types of products or services that you’d be promoting in that industry. Right? So then, you can start to develop out which locations you’re gonna target first for your business. Does that make sense?

Remember, specialize on one industry, guys, because then you can scale your business by geography instead of by type or kind. Does that make sense? Instead of trying to scale your business by taking on new industries where you’re gonna create so much additional work, scale your business by continuing with the same industry but expanding your service area or your territory, your target area. Right?

That’s a hell of a lot better or much more efficient way to build your business. Not only that, in time you will build a name and a reputation for being that type of a marketing specialist for that particular industry. People will start to seek you out as opposed to you having a force or push your marketing, your services onto others. People will start to seek you out because they know that you’re the specialist. Does that make sense?

How do you determine whether there’s enough search traffic? You have to research it. Make sure it’s an industry that has paying advertisers. Make sure that there is significant search interest for those types of things and that it’s profitable.

As I said about in the past, carpet cleaning, there’s a ton of search interest for carpet cleaning but there’s very, very, very small margins in the carpet cleaning industry. Right? Carpet cleaning companies don’t particularly like to pay for marketing services or for lead generation services, they don’t have the budgets for it because their margins are very small.

But if you just did keyword research, which is, when I first started, the very first lead gen site I ever built was carpetcleaningalexandriava.com. I don’t own that anymore, but it was a lead gen site that I built because all I did was base my decision on which industry I was gonna target based upon keyword search volume from the Google Keyword Planner. It said something like 600 exact match searches for that term “carpet cleaning Alexandria VA” per month. It was like 660 or something like that, 600 searches per month. So I said, “Oh man, there’s a lot of search volume there. I can make money with that.”

Well, I built the site and got it ranked number one. We were getting 30 to 40 calls a week through that lead gen site and I had trouble monetizing it for even a hundred dollars a month. No shit. Then when I finally got down to the chewy center of why that was by sitting down with the contractor that was renting that site from me or leasing that site from me, he told me, “Because the carpet cleaning business has very, very small margins.” Right? Very small margins. He was making something ridiculous, per carpet cleaning job $8 or $9 or $10, or $12 in profit. It was something stupid. After paying his labor and insurance costs and, the cleaning solution costs, and all of this overhead, he had a very small margin so he had trouble paying for that.

What happened? I ended up switching into other higher margin businesses. That’s why I love the tree service industry because it’s huge margin. That’s why I like remodeling contractors, home builders, HVAC repair, any sort of repair, roofers, all those types because the margins are so much larger. Does that make sense?

Again, you have to do the research, Gordon. There’s no real easy answer there. You just got to be logical and do the research and you should be able to find the opportunities as well as the perfect industry. Also, one last thing I would suggest about that is, seriously, guys, try to find an industry that you, not only has all the correct signals or markers of being a good industry to work at, but also one that you have a genuine interest in because it’ll make it feel less like work. Okay.

Honestly, I don’t have any interest in tree services, except for the fact that that does make me some damn good money, which kind of makes it interesting. But if you can find an industry that you have a genuine interest in, it’ll feel less like work while you’re building your business.

Anybody wanna comment on that before I move on? That was a long-winded answer I know.

Marco: No, but it was perfect. There’s no need to go into that any further.

How Do You Set Up The Syndication Network Of Several GMB Sites In Same Metro Area?

Bradley: He says, “Hey guys, so if I have a group of GMB sites in the same metro area and a WordPress site ranked on page one and Serps, a YouTube channel with videos ranking on page one of Google’s video page and I want to lease all of these as a total package deal to a business owner operating an area, how do I set up a syndication network for this? Can I feed the RSS feeds from all the GMB sites into the WordPress site blog into one generically branded syndication network? Or do I need to set up separate networks for each GMB site or WordPress site? Thank you very much for your comment.”

Michael, I don’t recommend a syndication network for lead gen assets unless you need them. For example, if you’re having trouble getting a lead gen asset to push another 3-pack, can a syndication network will help for that? Then, absolutely.

The other thing is, if you have a cluster of Google My Business profiles for a metropolitan area that are all branded the same, then you could use one syndication network for those. When you talk about grabbing the GMB RSS feeds, I’m not sure what you mean from that, unless you’re using our GMB auto poster which will generate an RSS feed, but you can’t just get an RSS feed, at least not that I’m aware of.

Marco, this may have changed, but is there an RSS feed from the GMB websites yet?

Marco: Not that I know of. Not that I’m aware of.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah. As far as I’m aware, there is not an RSS feed from the GMB websites. So our GMB auto poster will create an RSS feed from the GMB posts that are connected through that auto poster or that are posted with that auto poster. So you can do it that way. But like I said, you should have a common brand for all of those assets, if that’s the case. If you want to feed them all into one network, which again, I’m gonna be 100% transparent with you guys, I’m not building syndication networks for my lead gen assets. I build syndication networks for clients because I tell them that it’s critical. It is because it’s brand building, it’s entity validation and brand authority building, right?

So any client, I’m gonna tell them. “You should have a syndication network to protect your brand and to amplify your brand, expand your reach. It also helps to build your authority and all that kind of stuff.” For content marketing, all my clients, I suggest we do regular content marketing, blogging that gets syndicated out to the syndication network. That’s all true. It’s not just because I wanna charge them money, guys, it’s to protect their brand and to help them to stay ranked.

But for lead gen assets, that’s an additional expense. So why implement that? Until and unless you need to, right? So for my lead gen assets that I’m building right now, I’m not using syndication networks. If I have lead gen assets that I do all the other magic that I work to them and they don’t end up producing, because maybe they’re not ranking well or that area ended up being more competitive than I originally thought, then I may add a syndication network. But that’s only if and when it’s absolutely needed. It’s kind of like a last resort thing because it’s an additional expense that I don’t wanna have to put up for a lead gen asset if I can get results without it.

Now once you’ve monetized an asset, a lead gen or, in this case, a multiple assets, once you’ve monetized them, I’ve talked about this too, if once you’ve developed it … Like for me, when I monetize a lead gen asset, what I do is after several months, two or three months of the service provider paying on time and there’s no issues, if we develop a decent relationship, then I offer at that point to rebrand those lead gen assets after the client, certainly their name. It’s a lot more legit that way, right?

Like I said, at that point, once I would offer the rebranding, then that’s where I could upsell them on, “Hey, since we’re gonna be rebranding these, we should also go to syndication network because it’s gonna help to protect your brand and we can use that to help continue to push the lead gen assets that I’m gonna rebrand. It’ll help to continue to keep them producing for you, blah blah blah blah blah.”

At that point, we set up syndication network. Might even set them up on content marketing services. That’s an additional charge beyond the lead gen leasing or pay per lead fees that I’m charging. Depending on how I’ve monetized that asset, this is now starting to build their asset, syndication network with their branding, building, doing content marketing on their website.

So now I’m double dipping, right? Now I’m generating money from my lead gen assets and also working on the client’s assets as a separate fee. Right? So it gives you a whole lot of opportunity, Michael. But for your lead gen assets, I don’t recommend setting up syndication network unless you absolutely need to. Try to get results without it. Guys, I am the firm believer of trying to get the most results or trying to get the best results with the least amount of effort possible and least amount of money invested too.

Should You Create A Blog Post If You Syndicate A GMB Post?

Okay. It’s a good Hump Day today, by the way. I’m liking these questions. It’s a good question, Michael. All right. Ray had some confusion earlier. We’ll pass over that. Quit This House, he says, “If I wanted to syndicate my GMB post, should I create a blog post with the post details and link or should I post to one of the social media sites and create a trigger from there?”

Quit This House, use the GMB auto poster. I’m telling you, it’s stupid and expensive, it’s super convenient and efficient, and it can generate an RSS feed from your GMB posts, and then you can just connect that directly to a syndication network, and then, viola, it’s done. You don’t have to go … Right now, what you’re talking about would require a manual action for every post. Right?

If you just set it up through the auto poster, you can, not only schedule out your GMB post all in one setting so that they automatically publish on the day and time that you select, but it will also generate an RSS feed that then you can populate or trigger a syndication network with, and all of that is automated.

Marco: By the way, since we’re back on the auto poster, I got an answer from Rob and he says, yes, we’ll be able to silo based on tagging. So you can create multiple silos within the auto poster just by tagging, by using different tags. The function isn’t integrated yet, but it’s coming. It’s already being developed, guys. Those of you who are looking to get into this, get in there now because it just keeps …

Shripad is a master programmer. He just keeps adding to it more and more functionality and he’s now charging more. We’re not gonna charge more monthly yet. If it gets to the point where there’s just a ton of programming that needs to be done, the price will probably need to go up. But we usually grandfather people into the prices where they are, so remember that.

Bradley: Yeah. Michael says, “Holy crap, I can’t believe I got the $1,000 Local Lease Pro course for $47.” Yeah, Michael. Look, for eight days, we promoted shit out of that and told everybody that once the Side Hustle Toolbox offer closed that it was gonna, I originally said it was gonna go to 500, but it’s such a damn good course. I mean, I’m telling you, this is I think the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career, that Local Lease Pro method right there. That’s why we made it $1,000.

Not only that, but we’re gonna be updating the course. Like I said, I’ve got some new stuff to add to it. That as soon as I get my VA on track for the new changes and I polish up the processes a little bit, I’m gonna be sharing that, I’ll be updating Local Lease Pro. So, yeah, you’re right. Good thing that you got in on it.

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have … ” By the way, guys, if you want Local Lease Pro, if you don’t have it, there’s only two options, you can buy it for 1,000 bucks or you can join the Mastermind and you can get it included in your Mastermind membership. So it’s entirely up to you, but I would recommend it. I mean, guys, it’s even worth $1,000, I’m not kidding, because of the opportunity. I’m telling you, it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my eight, almost nine year career now. Okay.

Does It Hurt Or Help To Have Multiple Syndication Networks?

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have multiple syndication networks?” Yes, it can, Abe. Not for YouTube channels-, well, depending on how they were set up, but if you’re using syndication networks for blog syndication to try to rank your own domain, like a self-hosted site, then, yes, multiple syndication networks can hurt you, depending on how you have it set up and how you have a syndication set up,

I’ve said for years now, like we teach branded tier one syndication networks and we also talked about when we teach how to build two-tier syndication networks. You can take it out multiple tiers. But I’ve also recommended for years that you only use two-tier syndication networks on YouTube channels or multi-tiered syndication networks on YouTube channels or for YouTube syndication, not for blog syndication.

However, if you wanna do it for blog syndication, I do teach in Syndication Academy and I’ve talked about it multiple times how you can use multi-tiered syndication networks and reduce the chance of getting a Google slap. You cannot eliminate it because you are still leaving a footprint. But you can significantly reduce the footprint if you add additional content feeds as triggers into your second or third tiers. Right? Because what you wanna do is you wanna mask or bury your content among a whole lot of additional route relevant and related type content so that the blogs don’t show or appear to be solely for manipulating search rankings. Right? And that’s essentially what they are.

Again, with multi-tiered syndication networks, I don’t recommend them for blog syndication unless you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to put forth all the additional effort. Also, multitude syndication networks can break down because there’s a lot of moving pieces, there’s a lot of different content sources, which can cause you know different RSS feeds that you don’t have control over because they’re not your RSS feeds, which can cause problems. Multi-tiered syndication networks can be a bitch to maintain for that reason and so that’s another reason I don’t recommend them.

If you are just flatly syndicating your content to multiple syndication networks and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, then you are absolutely causing damage because it is clearly, the algorithm can pick that up in a split second. Right? Again, Abe, if you were gonna be building these types of stuff, like I said, the only way that … We have Syndication Academy where I talk about all of that stuff, seriously, I go into your best practices and everything about how to use them and where to use them. But for blog syndication, I highly recommend that you just use a one-tier branded syndication network and then you can boost the hell out of that. Okay.

Marco: Yeah. He also says that he’s used lower standard contractors in the past and he’s considering using our services on top. Dude, if you’ve done that, then don’t get a syndication network from us until you fix whatever it is that you’ve done. I suggest totally getting into Syndication Academy, seeing how it’s all supposed to work. I hope that you have access to all of these networks and multiple rings that have been done for you so that you can just stop whatever madness it was that was created and you could do it the right way. The way that it’s supposed to be done, which is branding. It’s done for branding and for syndicating your network. Yeah. It is done to manipulate but to manipulate in the right way. If you get caught manipulating the wrong way, you’re going to get slapped down.

What’s The Difference Between The Press Release Service In Serp Space And MGYB?

Bradley: That’s right. Ray says, “What is the difference between press release service from Serp Space, and MGYB? Are they overlapping and/or equivalent? They’re equivalent now, Ray, because, well, there’s two different levels of press releases orders from Serb Space. There was the press release and then press release plus. The press release was, the press advantage network, the distribution network, and that’s we have now a separate account. We have our own press advantage distribution network agreement with them that is available in MGYB. It’s basically the same distribution network. So it’s up to you if you wanna order from Serp Space or if you wanna come to MGYB which is owned and controlled entirely by Semantic Mastery and my partners. If that makes sense.

Serp Space was a collaboration. We are no longer part of that. There’s no issues there or anything like that. I’m just letting you know, if you wanna order directly from us, it’s through MGYB. Okay. Good question.

Should We Link From GMB Biz.Site Description?

Doodle Digital Marketing, I like that. He says, “Hey guys, I love Hump Day Hangouts. Tons of value. “Should we link out from the GMB biz site description?” Not … Well, wait a minute, the GMB, yes. You can link from the GMB website content. I don’t know about the description. But if you’re talking about the GMB business description, no, you can’t put links in that; that’s short. I think it only allows 750 characters. But if you’re talking about the GMB website, yes, you can link out to that.

What I don’t recommend doing a lot of external links, unless it makes sense, it has to be relevant guys, remember, this is a Google property, so I would not be doing some stupid “I’m gonna link to a .gov or .edu site for authority” because that’s bullshit and it has been for years. If it’s relevant, then, yes. If it’s not relevant, you’re just doing it because you learn that somewhere on some stupid SEO program somewhere, don’t do it because that’s dumb.

But what I would recommend doing is, I always link, and I teach this, but I always link from the GMB website text, the content body of the website, I always link to the GMB maps share URL, as well as to the GMB website. So it’s linking to itself, right? If you have an external website, so self-hosted website, you can link to that. That makes sense. You could also link to some of your social media stuff. That makes sense. Any type of branded property that you could link out.

Again, I wouldn’t spam the description or the GMB website content with a bunch of exterior external links, I would keep it … Really that’s why I usually just link from the GMB website to itself and also to the GMB maps share URL because those are Google properties. Right? So just consider that.

It’s after five o'clock, I don’t have to get my daughter-, or I don’t get to have my daughter for dinner tonight, so I do have a couple extra minutes. Marco, can you hang out for a few extra?

Marco: Yeah, I can hang out for a few extra. My daughter isn’t crying it.

Bradley: We’ve only got a few questions left.

Marco: Let’s go.

Bradley: All right. John says, “I’ve got a Semantic Mastery syndrome. I have no doubt it’s the place to be.” “Thanks, John. John is one in Marco’s small group that he was talking about. Jordan says, “Marco’s right. We learned the why behind all these Semantic Mastery tactics, Syndication Academy, RYS stack, Press Releases, et cetera, and then just sell them along with some other deep rooted stuff we had developed in the lab.” He’s talking about his own business specifically, Jordan.

“Then we also create all the content via writing and optimizing it, which we charge for, and then we do web design with SEO strategy pre-launch. I couldn’t build a drive stack if my life depended on it. Haha.” Yeah, that’s great. I mean, honestly, guys, those are the audience that are tech nerds and like to get their hands dirty, so to speak, roll up their sleeves and get to work. Then, RYS Academy will teach you how to build drive stacks. It’s a lot of work. You can benefit from RYS stacks without having to learn how to build them, by just buying them done for you and you’ll save yourself a shit ton of time and energy.

Again, I’m not trying to discourage anybody from buying the course, I’m just saying you got to consider where to spend your time. Is learning how to build drive stacks going to progress your business? It might. You have to make that decision. I can’t make that decision for you. Or is the benefit and the result that the drive stack can produce going to help your business? And if so, then why go through the trouble of learning how to build them when you could just purchase them done for you and receive the benefit that you were seeking to begin with? Does that make sense? Then that way you could spend your time focusing on how to sell it or how to monetize it or how to apply it to get the result that you’re seeking. Does that make sense?

Again, guys, you have to think about it on a higher level. That’s what I think is really wrong with our industry, is that everybody teaches, or the vast majority of products tell you, “Hey, we’re gonna teach you how to do this one skill.” Yeah, I’m not trying to take that away from anybody. That skill is valuable. Whatever that skill may be, it’s valuable. But just because you know how to get a result from it, one particular skill does not make you a business owner, it does not make it a profitable business for you. Right?

So you got to think about how are you going to make money from whatever it is you choose to do? Is doing that thing, being the mechanic or the technician, is that actually going to make you the money or is selling that service and the result that that service produces going to make you the money? If that’s the case, then why don’t you focus on learning how to sell it and find people that are already good at doing it, fulfilling it, to do it for you right.

That’s what we’re trying to get at, guys, and Jordan understands that. That’s why Jordan’s business is cranking, it’s just kicking ass. Okay.

Any Black Friday Sales For Done For You Services Or Training?

Luis, he’s a new Mastermind member. “Hey guys, any Black Friday sales?” By the way, welcome, Luis. “Any Black Friday sales for Done For You services or training?” Yeah. Isn’t that with the GMB stuff was the pre-Black Friday sale?

Marco: It’s the pre. We will have something. Something’s coming your way and it’s gonna be good. Trust me. It’s not Black Friday yet, dude. But we will have something. It’ll be big. We control MGYB now. As Bradley mentioned, it’s ours. Semantic Mastery is our own store. So we’ve got some really good stuff coming your way.

Luis, I will be talking to you on Monday, as a matter of, fact. It’s his onboarding call. Again, I’m sorry, all these Mastermind questions keep coming up or Mastermind people. As part of the onboarding process, we give people a half hour call just to get them pointed in the right direction, to see where they’re going, where they want to be. So we ask questions, we try to provide guidance. I just happened to get Luis.

Guys, you can’t ask for who you want. You’re going to get whoever is up on the calendar, because we rotate since there’s five of us. But whoever you get, you’re going to get the direction that you need and you’re going to get your questions answered so that you can get started on your way to POFU.

That’s what we want you to do. We want you to get started getting to that place where you’re going to be and say, “Okay. Now I don’t have to deal with shitty clients. I don’t have to deal with shitty people. I am at a place where I can go into any negotiation from a position of power. I know what I’m worth. If this guy gives me any flack, I’m gonna have to say ‘Fuck you. I’m gonna go to your competitor and charge them half price just because I feel like it, because I don’t need you.‘” That’s what we want you to be.

Bradley: There you go so. Yes, Black Friday is this Friday. So, yeah, there will be some other specials. I don’t usually get involved with what promotions we’re doing, guys, so I couldn’t answer that. But I’m glad Marco said, yeah, we do have something coming Friday.

Should You Use Only The Main Keyword Phrase Or Should You Diversify Them When Building Links To All Assets?

Jay Turner. What’s up, Jay? He says, “I’ve been able to get my client ranked in the 3-pack for the second most trafficked keyword phrase with an RYS stack. High five, Marco.”

Marco: High five, dude.

Bradley: “But now I want to take on the main and most competitive keyword. I’m adding a silo of content to the RYS stack targeting the main keyword. So far so good. My question is when embarking on link building to all assets, like RYS, Syndication Network, GMB website, et cetera, should I use only the main keyword phrase or must I diversify the keyword phrases?”

Jay, diversify. What I recommend you do is go pool your … You should have probably already done keyword research anyways, so if you’re gonna be siloing, you should have your keyword themes relatively tight for the silos anyways. So make sure that if you’re gonna be direct targeting link building on a silo basis, that you’re only using a set of keywords that fall within that particular silo or keyword theme. Right? Does that make sense?

Let me take this down to a local level because what I wanna explain is, guys, when you’re doing a ton of like spam link building and such to power up tier one entities, which would be like drive stacks, press release, organization pages, syndication networks, even citations, you don’t want to hit, and I’m gonna say local because that’s primarily what I work on, and I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about here anyways. You said client ranks, so it’s likely it’s locally You said 3-pack. Right?

So you don’t wanna use the keywords with the location modifiers. You can use a very small percentage of your overall keywords that you’re gonna add to the anchor text or the link building that you’re gonna be either doing or buying a package or whatever. You can have a very, very small percentage with location modifiers, but I would keep that to an absolute bare minimum. Because it’s more about pushing the theme, the keyword theme, not the location, or the geographic theme, if that makes sense, it’s not about pushing location relevancy.

Because think about it, the further you move away from a local business the more broader the market segment is. In other words, you don’t wanna be targeting keywords or link building to tier 1 assets all the way down to the local level, including local location modifier, because it’s, remember your link building to tier one assets is two hops away from your target which would be your GMB asset or your primary website, the client’s website, or whatever, the further you get away from the ultimate target, the ultimate destination, the broader your keyword set should be, the broader the theme of the keyword set.

That’s why I say I don’t like to include local modifiers and anchor text when I’m building links to tier one assets. Instead I use higher or market-level keywords, broader market keywords. What do I mean by that? Instead of water heater repair Fairfax Virginia or Fairfax VA as a keyword that I would use as an anchor, it would be water heater repair and plumbing and plumbing repair and plumbing service, if that makes sense. I’d lose the local modifier and use more broader market-level keywords. Okay.

Also, you don’t wanna do entirely 100% on anchor text links, even with a diverse set of keywords. You wanna also include naked URLs and some generics. You can even use some brand terms at that point. It’s a little bit odd to use brand terms at tier two links because that’s again two steps away from your target URL. But it does make sense if you’re link building to, for example, if it’s a tier one branded property it can make sense to also include the brand name in some of those anchor text too. Right? I would just use those sparingly as well. It’s more about the keyword relevancy at that point in naked URLs, which is just pushing link equity to those tier one assets regardless of anchor text.

Marco, do you wanna comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, thanks, Bradley. What I would recommend is reach out to Dedia. We have a Dedia, he knows exactly what to do with your RYS stack to get the most out of it.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: If needed, then get our keyword research gig because we will come up with thousands upon thousands of keyword targets for you to either add relevance or to push, we provide what’s called buoyancy. “Buoyancy,” that’s one of the words that I have difficulty with. But we help push up the main keyword by providing relevance throughout the keyword silo. We give you all that with the keyword research.

Then, all you do is turn that over to Dedia and say, “Here, this is the folder that I’ve created, this is the keyword that I’m targeting, have at it.” Dedia has been with us long enough that he just knows, okay, this is what I need to do. He’ll blast it. He’ll hammer that RYS stack so that it produces.

Bradley: That’s right. You don’t have to worry about all those ratios and stuff, Jay. I know. I mean, honestly, I don’t worry about any of that stuff anymore because I don’t ever do any of that stuff anymore. If I need it, I just contact Dedia, exactly what Marco said, and I just say, “Hey, this is what I got. This is what I’m trying to accomplish. Make it happen,” and he does it.

Honestly, guys, that’s what I’m talking about. Jay, again, I don’t wanna get back on this pitch again, but if you have your own tools and you’re running your own link building tools and stuff like that, that’s great, if you’re efficient and all that. But if you’re not, which I am not, I have no desire to run those tools, just let the expert do it and Dedia has an absolute ninja. He’s an expert, a link building expert, so that’s why I just turned it over to him, defer to him anytime I have something that I need to spam to push additional link equity to. I just contact him say, “This what I got is what I need you do, make it happen,” and he does it. All right.

Jay vouches for the GMB auto poster. He says, “It’s great and Shripad does great work. He is very responsive in Support. I can attest to that too, not just because it’s me, but every time there’s an issue a little support bubble on the bottom right corner of the auto poster, you can just contact Support through there and he’s very, very responsive.”

Would You Recommend Using One Website For Multiple GMB Locations?

Abe says, “Also, I would like to know about using one website for multiple GMB locations. Is this recommended and possible?” It can be. You can just create separate location pages. So each location each, GMB locations should have its own dedicated page on the website and that’s the URL that you would submit as the website URL in the Google My Business profile. Does that make sense?

So instead of just using the home root domain, so the home page of the website for that brand across all different GMB assets, create a location specific page on that domain and then use that URL as that landing page URL as the website in GMB. It’s perfectly fine to do that, guys. But what you want is, if it’s the same brand, you can share the same brand name across all GMB locations. That’s fine. But you want a unique URL and a unique phone number and a unique address, if possible. Okay.

Strange NAP issues occur if you have two or more of the data points, the primary data points in a citation or NAP, which would be name, address, phone number, and also website URL. If you have two or more common data points among multiple locations, that’s going to cause NAP issues, which is going to make it very difficult to rank. You can have one common data point, typically the business name, because it’s a brand that can be used across multiple GMBs as long as the other primary data points are unique, physical address, phone number, website address. Does that make sense? So, yes, it’s possible.

Now one other thing I would mention is go back through, Abe, watch some of our previous Hump Day Hangouts. We’ll talk about the difference between using location pages, which would be pages on the root domain, or using location-specific sub-domains, which are separate WordPress installations, but there’s a reason to do, that’s to help mitigate risk, potential losing all of your assets if you were to catch a penalty. Again, we just talked about this last week, go back and watch the replay from last week and I’m pretty sure we talked about that extensively, about the benefit of using sub-domains over sub-folders or sub-directories. That’s pretty much the same thing I’m talking about here.

“Where’s the GMB auto poster?” John, just posting the Mastermind, we’ll get to the link.

Marco: I posted the link higher up.

Bradley: Yeah. I just didn’t have it. Thank you, Marco. Nestor says, Hey, I got to go guys. I got to wrap this up. So, anyways, and there’s Rob with the yearly discount for the GMB agency offer. That’s the enterprise account level or subscription level, which is 200 posts per month-, or excuse me 500 posts per month capacity. If you buy it on a monthly basis, subscribe month to month, it’s $200. If you buy the yearly license … It’s $200 per month, excuse me. If you buy the yearly license, it’s 1,000 bucks, divided by 12, comes out to be $84 dollars or $83 per month. So it’s a hell of a lot cheaper that way.

By the way, if you’re scheduling out 31 posts, which there’s a post scheduling feature, which is amazing in the GMB auto poster, so you can schedule out one post a day or however many you want. Let’s just say you’re doing one post a day, you could do 31 days. Then, there’s a republish option to where it can republish the post based upon the interval that you set. For example, if you set every 31 days, you can publish, you can schedule out 31 posts and then have them republish 31 days later, each post thereafter. Right? Does that make sense?

So day one and then day 32, that post publishes again. Day two and day 33, that post publishes again. Does that make sense? That way you can set up all of your posting and in an automated fashion. Well, with 500 posts per month, if you were to actually fill out or post one per day for each location, you can essentially put 16 locations in one enterprise account. Sixteen times 31 comes out to be 496, so you get 496 posts. Essentially, you can serve 16 locations, 100% one post per day with a single enterprise account. Does that make sense?

That’s how I’m clustering my sites right now. I gave you a little insight on that.

Marco: Yeah. I mean, it’s an awesome deal because it saves so much money and then the auto poster just saves so much time and effort. Once your VAs get proficient with going in there and just scheduling and putting everything up, it just saves you a ton of time of money. So you’ll make the money back that you invest in this just by the time you’re gonna save with your VAs, or even if you try to do it on your own, which you shouldn’t be doing.

Bradley: Yeah. Just so you guys are aware, for clients, I have a VA that goes in and manually posts for all the clients. I do that for a reason because every post is 100% unique that way. She still has content templates, but she goes in and she puts in a new image every time, and the content templates she uses, there’s tokens that she swaps out with different keywords and such. The target URLs are always being recycled to whatever we’re linking to from the GMB post and all that. So they become unique for clients.

I pay my VA on a per post basis. So I pay her, for every post that she publishes she gets paid. It varies between $3.50 to $5 per post. But I charge my clients $10 to $15 per post, depending on what the volume is. So my point is, I make money on that even though she’s manually posting.

However, for lead gen assets, guys, once again, just like I was telling … Shit, who was I telling earlier? Michael. I was telling Michael earlier not to worry about syndication networks for lead gen assets because you wanna reduce expenses. Well, I don’t want to pay a VA to manually post to lead gen assets because that’s an additional expense when I can pay for-, or subscribe to the auto poster, schedule all the posts.

Do I do all these guys? Hell, no. I’ve trained a VA to go in and set up or schedule all the posts within the GMB auto poster and then schedule them to republish. So that, literally, I can pay a VA for three or four hours to schedule out, however long it takes them, to schedule all those posts out. Then, it’s done and those GMB assets will continually update posts because of the auto poster and I’m not paying anymore other than for the auto poster subscription. Does that make sense? So it’s a hell of a lot more efficient with money too. Right? It’s more cost-effective. Okay.

Nestor says … And I’m so over, we got to get out of here. Nestor says, “Hey guys, how about webs 2.0 example mybrand.wordpress.com point to my GMB property three links as a press release?” Okay. First of all, I’m not familiar with their example. I know that’s kind of a competitor that does, you know, they have their own store and blah blah blah. I’m not real familiar with what they teach or what they say, so I can’t really speak on that.

I’m not quite sure I understand, in the wording of your question, what you mean by mybrand.wordPress. I understand WordPress.com, that’s fine. That’s a brand identity property that you can create on the WordPress.com site, kind of like what I showed earlier. But, yeah, that’s normal. That goes into Syndication Network, right? You try to get your brand name as a sub-domain blah blah blah. That’s pretty standard.

But, “point to GMB property three links as a press release,” I’m not sure what that means. Can you point to a GMB property from your WordPress.com site? Sure. Can you also use press releases to link to that WordPress.com site? Sure. You can also link to your GMB.

I’m doing a press releases, Local PR Pro method is what I use and, as standard operating procedure, I published a press releases with every GMB asset, it gets created. Usually, my preferred method is to link from the first press release to the GMB, the Google Maps share URL, to the Google the GMB website URL, and to the GMB the first post URL. We teach that at Local Lease Pro and that’s just essentially my method. So I’m going direct from the press releases to the Google assets. Okay.

Yeah. Guys, there’s a thousand ways to skin a cat, right? So our method isn’t the be-all end-all. It’s just our method works for what we want it to work for and that’s what we teach. Other people have other methods that may very well work as good as ours. I’m not trying to say that ours is better than anybody else’s. I’m just telling you what we teach, I don’t know what they teach. I’m sorry. It’s likely that that would work too.

Will says, “Bradley, speaking about syndication networks, I finally figured out how to syndicate to Medium.com. I’ve been testing it for a while with a few posts now and it works well to syndicate your WordPress post with images and YouTube video embeds, and from there, you could syndicate to your tier two, if you’d like. I’ll send you an update to support@semanticmastery.”

Thanks, Will. That’s awesome. In fact, Will, if you would, I mean, if you’re cool with it, you can even send the update right in the Mastermind community so that everybody else could benefit from it. If not, send it to me and I’ll update everybody in the Mastermind, and Syndication Academy for that matter, once I see it. Thank you for that, Will.

Okay. “Link to pre-Black Friday deals, please.” Yeah. Luis, just contact us at Support.

That’s it. Okay, guys, we’re way over. We got all questions answered, though.

Marco: That was a good one.

Bradley: Thanks, Marco, for hanging out, man, I appreciate it.

Marco: Marathon. All right, dude.

Bradley: All right, everybody. Mastermind webinar tomorrow. Be there or be square. See y'all.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210

Click on the video above to watch Episode 202 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: Hello and welcome to Episode 210 of Hump Day Hangouts. I am Adam Moody with Semantic Mastery. We are gonna say hi to everyone real quick before we dive into some announcements and questions from everybody watching us live. Also, if you’re watching this on YouTube, we noticed from time to time that we get questions over there, but you need to come to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions and ask your questions there, that’s where we’re monitoring. Before we dive in, real quick, Chris, how are you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Good weather in Florida always the last couple weeks. I highly recommend it, like I love it. How are you doing?

Adam: Not bad. It’s like 60 here, which is perfect. Everyone in California thinks it’s like the middle of winter and I’m just enjoying myself. This is good. Marco, how about you? How’s the weather for you, man?

Marco: Things are good here, man, transitioning to the dry season. So we’re gonna have about five and a half months of absolutely no rain, not even a drop. I’m looking forward to … Yeah, but then, it’s seven months of afternoon showers. You gotta pay the price for the life you live, right?

Adam: Yeah, fair enough.

Marco: But always warm, like if it were 60 here, we’d all be dying literally. It’s freezing cold.

Chris: [Inaudible 00:01:19] stay in Florida.

Adam: Definitely. Bradley, how about you, man? How are you doing?

Bradley: I’m good, I’m happy to be here. Got lots of stuff going on at the moment. Just been really, really busy. In last week, well, I took off for a couple days because my sister got married again. I actually got to go down to Hilton Head, South Carolina and meet one of our members, Ed, who also went to POFU Live; he’s in the Mastermind also. That was cool because I got to spend an hour with him just chatting. It was really, really cool. I always enjoy getting to meet members whenever we have the opportunity. So that was a lot of fun. But I had to take really Friday and Monday off, so now I’m behind.

Besides that, I got a quick little story to tell very, very quickly. Just last week, it was funny because I was actually reviewing the Hump Day Hangout from last week and I was talking about mitigating risk. Marco and I, we were talking about reducing exposure and trying to mitigate risk because, if you put all your eggs in one basket and Google takes that basket, you’re screwed, you’ve lost all those assets.

Well, I was using a test with what’s called GMB Location Groups. It’s a setting inside of Google My Business. I was running a test on a set of GMB assets for a particular metro area, so one metropolitan city area. I had seven assets in there that were fully optimized, 100% done. In fact, they were the seven assets that my VAs has been training on as he’s been learning the processes for doing this whole method, the Local Lease Pro model, essentially.

Long story short, on Saturday, I was down at the Hilton Head and I happened to get an email saying that the account that was used as the recovery email for that particular GMB manager account, which had to be turned into an owner in order to use location groups, had been terminated for violating Google’s spam policies. I lost all those damn assets, every single one of them, and I can’t even access them through the original Google accounts now, guys.

That was three weeks work, not necessarily my work, but my VA’s work wasted. Now, is it all bad? No, because I learned a valuable lesson. Number one, don’t use GMB location groups, it’s like a trap, number one, lesson number one. Number two is always mitigate risk. Don’t set yourself up with vulnerabilities that Google can take … We exploit Google’s vulnerabilities. Don’t you think Google will exploit ours? So I learned that … In fact, I’m actually updating the entire process for how to first log in and set up and manage a lot of GMB assets. I’m updating all those processes this week, in fact, because we have to do something new that reduces our overall risk.

Anyways, that was my little story. I’m a little bit behind now because all the work that I’ve done for the last several weeks on all the processes now has to be updated and redone. But that’s the cat and mouse game that we play.

Marco: Yeah. One of the great things about our Mastermind is that we do all of the testing, we take all of the risk, we were the ones who go in the lab. I mean, we do encourage our own people to test so that they can verify that our results are what we’re saying they are. But it’s one of the things that we do, we go, we blow things up and it happens, and then now we know what not to do. And right into our Mastermind, we’ll share all of test result with the membership exactly what was done so that they don’t repeat the process and get stuck losing assets because nobody wants to lose an asset, especially not seven. But so be it, lesson well-learned and it’s a lesson that the Mastermind doesn’t have to repeat.

Bradley: That’s true and, just real quick segue, that leads me to, that’s kind of like what the Mastermind is about. The scaling option, like doing all these heavy processes and stuff, is really reserved to the POFU Live group attendees at the moment, but we’re polishing all this stuff. Obviously, the Mastermind, we update, like tomorrow we’ve got a Mastermind webinar and I’m certainly gonna be talking about what not to do because I want to make sure all of our members are fully aware of what not to do so they don’t lose assets.

But once we have this 12-week process done, that the POFU Live attendees are kind of in accountability group with me right now, and we’ve got a target that we’re trying to hit at the end of 12 weeks, which is 50 GMB assets fully developed and ready for monetization, if they’re not already monetized by that point, and so when we’re done at that 12-week period, we will have discovered or perfected, really fine-tuned the method and all of the processes to get us there, to get us to that point. That’s when we’re gonna release in its entirety the Mastermind.

That training will not be released outside of the Mastermind, period, and that’s only because it’s highly valuable and we put a lot of work. In fact, the other members of the POFU accountability group with us, that’s like 12 of us in there, and so that’s a lot of intellectual property, a lot of a work that goes into that. So the Mastermind members will get that.

But that’s just one of many things that we do there. For example, we had some questions about how to structure ad ID pages and set up as three buckets with HTTP, SSL protocol, and all that stuff. Two weeks ago, we went in and showed exactly how to do that. I mean, it’s just stuff like that that we do in the Mastermind all the time.

Adam: Yeah. Something else that I just remembered, that reminded me of, Bradley, was, I think it was Jason who posted yesterday, who’s one of our Mastermind members, just out of the blue was like, hey, I’ve seen some questions about blah blah blah-, not blah blah blah, but some heavy-duty IT stuff. He’s like, “Hey, if anybody needs help just ping me. I’ll do it for free if you’re a Mastermind member.”

That’s just awesome to see. Again, you get that in a tight-knit group like that. It’s cool having that ability. Everyone who knows our story kind of knows where we came from and how we were part of a Mastermind. That’s why part of why we do this to get that community, it’s not just a jumble of people, you do have a community.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Well, cool. I also want to say then to you guys, we mentioned the GMB stuff, we’ve got a sale going on right now at MGYB. It’s wrapping up today. So if you’re interested or you need a GMB verification service, whether it’s for your clients, it’s for yourself, you’re doing some lead gen, head over there. I posted it on the page. If you’re watching the replay, sorry, it’s probably too late. But a good reason to watch live and open the emails is you get a 35% discount on that service right now. So head over there do that.

Real quick, too, if you’re joining us for the first time, thank you so much for watching us. If you want the right place to start, because it is one of the questions we get, “Hey, where should I start? Should I take this course and do that?” start with Battle Plan. No matter what you’re doing, even if you want to hop into Mastermind, get the Battle Plan, come join the Mastermind. That’s the path. The link is on there. It’s a great way to get repeatable results, which is why we put it together, so that we can have that. It’s our home processes put into an easy-to-digest format.

Then, obviously, like we’ve been talking about it, if you’re ready to take things up a notch, if you wanna scale, you wanna grow, then the Mastermind is the place to be.

Bradley: Did you open up Local Lease Pro as a standalone product now?

Adam: Yes.

Bradley: I’ll be damned. I didn’t realize that was available yet. Okay.

Adam: Sneaking that onto the page, if people are interested.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay.

Adam: I’m gonna say no more.

Bradley: Everything I’ve been talking about with this Local Lease Pro method, that’s it. Most of you guys are probably aware of it because of the Side Hustle Toolbox promotion, that was our contribution. But now that that’s closed, it’s a standalone product. I’m gonna be updating that in a couple of weeks with some of the new processes that I’ve just discovered.

Again, GMB, like the actual optimization process has changed slightly. Not much, but slightly, and I’m updating the processes for my VAs right now. So next week, I’ll kind of polish it up a bit and then add that into the Local Lease Pro training. So if you guys don’t have it yet, I recommend you get it. This method is freaking killing it. I think it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career. I mean that, so check it out.

All right. Can we get into questions?

Adam: I think so. If you guys are good, let’s do this.

Do I Need Access To A Client’s Website If I Do Local SEO For Them?

Bradley: All right. Starting off with Chris Green posted a support question from Vincent. He says, “I’m considering to join the RYS Reloaded or the GMB course. My question is this: if I do SEO for local businesses in my country, which is Malaysia, do I need to have access to my clients website?” No. It can help. You don’t have to have access to the client’s website, but it would certainly help because you could take care of some on-page SEO issues. In other words, you can optimize the site itself, which is considered on-page SEO, and that can help that can help quite a bit.

In fact, with proper on-page SEO, a lot of the times you can rank a site with a fraction of the off-page SEO because any off-page SEO that … If on site is proper, if it’s tight, if it’s strong, then any off-page will significantly affect, it will have a strong impact on the site because then the site will respond well to off-page because it is a well-built, well-structured site.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to have access to the site because you can accomplish through off-page. You can still rank a site with off-page. If the on-page is terrible, then you probably are fighting a losing battle. But if it’s decent, then you could probably still accomplish what you need to, depending on how competitive the keywords are that you’re targeting. But it’s likely that you could still accomplish what you needed to with off-page alone. But again, there are benefits certainly to being able to access the client’s website. Right? If you’re starting with garbage, it’s gonna be difficult to rank. So just keep that in mind. Okay.

It helps, it’s not 100% necessary. Well, it depends, right? It depends on what the status of the site is currently. If it’s a shitty site, if it was built poorly, optimized poorly, or if it’s spammed to death or whatever, then you may never be able to rank that site. But if it’s decent, if it’s fairly okay, then you could still just apply off-page methods and probably get the results that you want. However, if you can do both, manage the on-page and the-off page, you will get the best results. Right?

Are The SEO Methods In RYS Reloaded And GMB Work On WordPress.com And Wix.com Websites?

Number two, he says, “If my client has a WordPress.com or Wix.com website, can the SEO methods taught in RYS Reloaded and GMB work and getting first page ranking on Google?” Well, yes. Well, Local GMB Pro course is not really anything that have to do with websites, right? Local GMB Pro is how to optimize Google My Business and set up all of the Google assets to rank. Well, not even to rank, but to just generate leads from Google, independent of ranking. That’s what Local GMB Pro is about. It’s about getting leads, getting exposure from Google My Business, whether it ranks or not, and that’s what that whole … Again, despite traditional SEO, Local GMB Pro can generate leads from Google. Okay. So that’s what local GMB Pro is.

RYS is about using Google’s assets as an off-page tool as well as an entity validator, an authority builder, and multiple other things. But it’s more of an off-page thing. Again, it has nothing to do with the website structure or the platform itself, WordPress or Wix. It doesn’t matter because all you’re doing is using Google properties to push relevancy and authority over to whatever property is that you’re trying to rank.

Marco, do you wanna chat about that a little bit?

Marco: Yeah. It’s just one of the pillars that we teach, ART, the art of ART, activity, relevance, trust and authority, both on the link origin and on the link destination. What that means is you get visitors no matter how you show activity and Google reward you as long as everything is relevant and you’re working with trusted and authoritative entities. If you become along with that, a trusted and authoritative entity, then you get rewarded. Google will also reward you for being in Google because Google trusts itself. It’s the ultimate as far as what it trusts. So working in what we call working inside the belly of the beast also has its rewards.

Yeah. As Bradley said, it makes absolutely no difference. I mean, you work with whatever. I mean, you have a free WordPress blog ranking for … what is it? Free-, no, not free. SEO Virginia. Yeah. I mean, it just goes to show that if you get that activity in there, everything else just fall into place as long as it’s relevant, trusted and authoritative.

I keep telling people, and I just mentioned it in our Semantic Mastery Facebook group, the Mastermind, that ART, A-R-T, will trump anything. It will even overcome any of the negative factors, of the algorithm, penalties and all of that. You become almost immune to anything that Google has to throw at you because you’re signaling rank pot-, excuse me, rank brain in the way that it wants to be signaled. You’re doing the Google tickle, the T tickle. I mean, it blows up. It becomes a self-feeding monster once you get all that activity in there.

Bradley: Yeah. This is an example of what Marco was just talking about, this is that WordPress.com. So free wordpress.com blog, guys. If you take a look at this, there’s no content on this page. It looks like there’s content, but the only content on this page is this right here. That’s it. The rest of those are embedded files. That’s RYS at work there, guys. That’s RYS Academy right there at work. Okay. Again, go view page source, the post body, the article body of this post. The content body is this right here. That’s the only text on the page. The rest of it is all embedded files RYS style, and that’s all.

Look at that, guys. It’s ranked number three in organic for SEO Virginia. I mean, that’s pretty powerful. Again, that’s all off-page stuff. There is some on-page going on there because of the iframes that are actually embedded in this page, but it’s primarily an off-page thing that’s got this ranking. And that’s the power of RYS, right?

By the way, the Google site as part of the stack and that’s been number one since May of 2015. Guys, that’s been number one since May of 2015, or within a few weeks anyways, that’s when it was published. Look at that, it’s a horrid site. It was just for a test purpose, guys. Still ranked. Still ranked, it’s three and a half years now. Still ranked. Anyways, there you go. Will it work? It damn sure does.

How Do You Get The URL Of A Scheduled Post In The MGYB GMB Service?

Dustin’s up, or Da B. “Hey there. I’m using the MGYB post scheduling service but I was wondering, in the Local GMB course you link to the previous post but when I scheduled a post, then I don’t have the URL of the last URL because it will be scheduled. How do I link to the post then if the last post yet is not published or is not published yet? Greetings. Dustin.” That’s a good question Dustin.

Marco, that’s something that I think Rob was talking about that was going to be a feature, that was going to be released soon within the auto poster was the ability to silo a post. Is that correct?

Marco: Yeah. We keep going back and forth with Shripad. I’m not sure if that’s available yet. But I mean, there’s an easy solution to that. Link in the body or you’re still not gonna have the post URL. You would need the original post URL, and then the next one, then the next one. So Shripad will have to come up with something regarding that so that we can solve that issue. But, yes, he is working on it so we can silo GMB posts.

Bradley: Yeah. I’m thinking if the script would wait until a published one was pulled and then grab the short URL and then link to that before the next one that’s scheduled publishes. You know what I mean? That would work to build a silo on that. I know that if you post the post … So you publish the post, then you grab the URL and link to it from the next post. But, you’re right, if you wanna schedule out multiple posts in advance, right now there’s not an ability to do that yet.

But that’s something, Marco, if you wanna make a note of that specifically, silo posts together, schedule post together, which I’m sure that can be integrated at some point. Right now that’s not something that can be done, Dustin, but we’re working on that. It’s a great feature.

Marco: No. Dustin, what I would suggest is you just have your VA go in and add links as needed.

Bradley: As they’re published.

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Right. As they publish, go grab the URL, and then go post the next one. That’s the only thing we can do to daisy chain them together right now until we have the automation such that it will be able to do it. Okay.

Jordan says, “On one of the, or …” Okay. One of the guys, here we go. “One of the guys on our SEO team said after an SEO pitch this probably sounds like magic to them. I still can’t believe we get paid for this stuff, almost like grownup version of video games. Haha.” That’s funny. Well, I can believe we’d get paid for it, man. Think about all the testing and all the studying and all the learning and stuff that you, guys, and the money that you invest in your education and to tools and all that stuff.

I mean, we spend a lot of time learning this stuff, guys, we should be paid for it. I mean, think about that. We spend all our time learning how to perform this SEO magic stuff. A business owner that’s doing plumbing, for example, he’s out unclogging drains and that kind of stuff. He wouldn’t have time to learn all this stuff. How do I know? Because I was an electrical contractor and I had to learn how to do this shit while I was doing electrical work. It just so happens I found that I could make more money at this, that’s why I switched to this all together.

What are you gonna say, Marco?

Marco: Yeah. I was gonna say we deserve to be paid and be paid well. I mean, do you know how much time we’ve spent between RYS Academy, RYS Reloaded, Local GMB Pro, Local PR Pro, Local Lease Pro? Do you know how many hours have gone into researching that and making it work? Making that all work hand in hand so that one pushes the other and you’re pushing ultimate power to whatever destination so that that client’s phone rings?

Yeah. It may seem like magic. “Well, my phone rang. You did all that.” But it’s actually just hours and hours and hours of being a total geek.

Are There Ways We Can Use Press Releases Based On The Battleplan Aside From Launching A New Site?

Bradley: Rabbit-hole time. Yeah. Dan’s up. He says, “I’ve looked using press releases based off the Battle Plan and saw that you have them at the store. Besides using them for launching a new site would there be other places that I could use them? I do some consulting on the side for local businesses and build sites, lead gen, et cetera?”

Yeah, Dan. “Press releases are my favorite off-page or link building method really. Like no question, I absolutely love press releases. I use them as my primary off-page link building tool or method. I still use spam links from time to time for certain things, but for the most part I’m using press releases for link building.”

Yeah. You can use them. Guys, there’s dozens and dozens of things that you can publish press releases about. I’ve talked about them. Dan, we have a course called Local PR Pro which is specifically about how to use press releases to rank in the Maps pack, to get Google GMB, Google My Business profiles ranked in the maps pack using press releases. Right?

That’s what that course, Local PR Pro, is all about. In that course, I talk about how there’s multiple different things that you could publish a press release about. Because that’s a question that comes up often, “Well, I don’t think my client has anything that’s really newsworthy to publish a press release about.”

But think about it, getting a five-star review, you could publish a press release about receiving a five-star review or your client. Or you could publish a press release about a new employee being hired. Or a seasonal change to the product line that’s available. Or the services that are available, depending on what kind of business you’re dealing with. Or an accolade that the company receives, some sort of award or something like that. Or any charitable things, any charity events that they’re hosting or that they contribute to or participate in. Right?

There’s just dozens and dozens of things, hooks, angles that you could use to write a news release or something that can be … Guys, you can even publish a press release about a new blog post that’s been published on the website. No kidding. I mean, you just have to get a little bit creative. Dan, when I say you have to get creative, I don’t mean you. I mean, what I would recommend is hiring a PR writer, from Upwork or something like that, that can come up with these angles. A good press release writer can come up with a newsworthy angle for just about anything.

Again, if you’re doing a lot of this work, you could hire a PR writer, a good PR writer from like Upwork or something like that. Or if you’ve got a good press release distribution service that you subscribe to for monthly press releases or whatever, if they’ve got good writers in-house, which most good services do now, then they’ll have writers that are already trained on how to find news where the angles or to create hooks or their stories for the press releases. Right?

For example, if you use the MGYB press release service, the writers there from the Press Advantage distribution network, if that’s what you’re using, it’s fabulous, and there the press releases are almost twice the content length of typical press releases. There’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 words as opposed to 300 to 400, which is what most of them are. So those writers are really, really good, like their sole purpose in life is to find an angle or to create an angle to write a press release about. Those are the same writers that you have access to when you buy a press releases from us individually.

Okay. Anybody wanna comment on that before we move on? It’s a good one, Dan.

Marco: No. I think you hit the nail on the head. They’re great for just about everything. The only thing that you have to avoid is self-promotion, but you get that from most of them. You just have to define what self-promotion is. You go and you advertise. Well, we’re in Facebook, if you’ve just started your Facebook page, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. It’s still self-promotion. It’s just not getting sales. That’s what you wanna try to avoid.

Other than that, it’s fantastic for link building. Not only that, if you hit the press release, whatever the distribution network is with link building, it’ll push through. You’re putting a filter in between the destination so that you hit that with link building. It’ll power it up even more. They just work really well for everything.

Bradley: They damn sure do. Like Marco said, you can actually do self promotional PRs, but the salesy part is what you gotta leave out. They shouldn’t be salesy. But they can be self-promotional. Again, a good PR writer will be able to disguise a promotion as a story, a news story, and that’s really what you wanna do. That’s why I say don’t do it yourself. If I had to write press releases, I’d be a very miserable person. I wouldn’t wanna do it, but some people enjoy that stuff and they’re good at it. All right.

Is It Okay To Start With Battleplan Before Going Into The Mastermind and Syndication Academy Courses?

Andrew Walker’s up. Andrew is a local guy to me. I was in lead share, like a breakfast lead share group with him for several years that I don’t attend those things much anymore. Andrew is a great guy. Anyways, it’s good to see you here, Andrew. I haven’t seen him in a while. He says, “Hey guys, it’s been a long time since I’ve been on Hump Day Hangouts. I got caught up in the cold calling strategy to build my business and also had a case of the shiny object syndrome.” Well, we all do, Andrew. Don’t beat yourself up, buddy. We all go through that. I promise you, I’ve been through it. I still struggle with that, to be honest.

“I don’t fully understand how powerful-,” or excuse me, “I didn’t fully understand how powerful digital marketing is and what it can do for your business. You would think that that’s a no-brainer for an IT guy. Anyway, I’m back for real and I’m ready to learn this stuff. I’ve just downloaded the Battle Plan. I’d love to get involved in the Mastermind, but I’m not able to afford that at this time. Syndication Academy looks to be a great runner up. Can I start there to get things going or just start with the Battle Plan? Thanks, guys, and congrats on your four year anniversary.”

Okay. Great question, Andrew. Again, glad to see you back, man. The Syndication Academy is, yeah, it’s good, however, because, I’m not gonna knock Syndication Academy, but what we recommend is, especially for you, Andrew, you’re running your IT business, your IT services business, and so it depends on how much time you have. If you’ve got a lot of time and no money then, yes, pick up Syndication Academy because then you can learn how to build your own syndication network, which is gonna be one of the critical components to your business in expanding your reach and helping to generate more leads, it’ll help with your SEO and all that kind of stuff.

However, there’s a lot of time that goes into learning how to build a syndication network and, unless you plan on building syndication networks for others or selling them to others, I wouldn’t recommend that you go through all the trouble of learning how to build all that stuff for your own branded syndication network, for your own business. If you’re looking to try to grow your business, then your time is better spent not learning how to build a syndication network that you’re only gonna build one for your own business.

Your time is better spent marketing your business. You can instead just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us and we will build it to our specifications, which is exactly what we teach in the training. You can save yourself weeks of study and implementation by just buying a Done For You Syndication Network and you still reap the benefits of it without having to spend weeks of your time. Does that make sense? They’re inexpensive enough that there’s really no reason that you can’t just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us. It’s cheaper or about the same price as the cost of a month tuition to Syndication Academy. Right?

Anyways, my point is, if you want, Andrew, since you can’t join the Mastermind yet, what I recommend is that you attend our Hump Day Hangouts regularly on Wednesdays, ask your questions here try, keep it to one question per post. In other words, you can post a few times, but try to keep it one question per post please. Ask questions here and we will try to guide you in the best way possible to help you to start growing your IT business, just from these Hump Day Hangouts. Then once you have generated some revenue you can always come join the Mastermind, which is your best bet, because the Mastermind is not just about marketing stuff.

Guys, we’ve gotten away from just teaching SEO or just teaching marketing methods. It’s more about building your business regardless of whether you’re building a local agency or consulting firm, or you want to build your own brick and mortar business, or virtual business for that matter. We want to teach you how to do all of that, which includes marketing and includes SEO, and includes all that stuff, but we’re not pigeon holing our training into just marketing training, if that makes sense. A lot more goes into it than that.

I would suggest, Andrew, that what you do is come back and join us here in Hump Day Hangouts, get involved, stay engaged, ask questions. We also have our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials Facebook group that you could ask questions there. As soon as you’re able to, I would invest in joining the Mastermind so that you can get, basically, almost one-on-one guidance from each one of us my partners and I as well as all of the other members in the Mastermind that are also savvy business owners. Right? That’s part of why it’s Mastermind because it’s not just about us teaching all the time, it’s about everybody in there contributing and helping each other, which is fabulous. Okay.

By the way, one of our top members, longtime members, Jason Johnson, who is what Adam was just talking about at the very beginning of this Hump Day Hangout, he was mentioning somebody was having difficulty setting up their MX records for G suite email to use their domain for their email within G suite. Jason Johnson posted, “Hey, I saw somebody was having trouble with MX records. Hey, I’m an IT guy. If anybody has any questions or any problems, tell them to reach out to me. I’ll help them for free as long as they’re a Mastermind member.”

Andrew, what I’m saying is, Jason is an IT guy who’s been in our Mastermind. He does digital marketing on the side, but also markets his own business and somebody that you could absolutely click with. Probably the two of you could chat about what he’s doing for his business and what’s working for him in generating leads for his IT business and all that kind of stuff. Right?

Again, that’s part of the power of a Mastermind. It’s not just learning from me or Marco when, you know, I’m gonna teach you how to generate leads for your business, but I generate leads for contracting businesses. Right? You’re trying to generate leads for IT services, and computer repair networking, and that kind of stuff, so why not get the advice direct from somebody that’s already generating leads for that type of a business, which we have members in our group to do that? Does that make sense?

That’s the power of a Mastermind. Okay. So that’s what I recommend. In the meantime, if you don’t have the money, come back here, ask questions, implement what you can, go through our YouTube channel Semantic Mastery, youtube.com/semanticmastery. Use the channel search function, ask questions over there. You’re likely going to find already video answers for many of your questions. Then, like I said, anything that you can’t find answers to, post in either the Facebook group or post back here on the event page every week and we’ll come in and answer your questions. As soon as you can generate a little bit of positive revenue, I would reinvest that back into your education and into building your business by joining the Mastermind, getting guidance from us as well as our other members.

Marco: I’m gonna give him just a couple of weeks. First of all, welcome back, Andrew. Sorry that you had a shiny object syndrome. I mean, that sucks and it makes you spend a whole lot of money and time chasing. It becomes a useless path. You fill up your computer with a whole bunch of garbage that you’re never going to use and you realize how much money you spent and then you get caught up at where you are right now where you ended, and dropped all that money and you have nothing to show for it.

But that’s okay, lesson learned. The two examples that I’m gonna give you is, I’m gonna give you Paul Fussell, who’s always in these Hump Day Hangouts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he drops in today; or if he isn’t, it’s because he’s out making money. He was at POFU Live, as a matter of fact, our event. The way he went about doing it, he come into Hump Day Hangouts, ask questions, and then go and go and apply. Ask questions, go and apply. then he started purchasing our drive stacks to rank. I know that he was doing dental for a while, I don’t know what he’s doing now.

Anyway, the thing about Paul is that he just went and he got Done For You services, and then he was chasing clients. Every time he’d get a client, drive stack, and that’s how he would he would rank them. But that’s Paul and that’s how he did it, so Hump Day Hangouts and Done For You services.

Then, we get to Jordan in Syndication Academy. Jordan lives in Syndication Academy, he’s always there. He’s one of our, I don’t know, one of our long-running and most active members of Syndication Academy. He runs an agency and I think he just got a huge nationwide client, but it’s from Syndication Academy. I’m not gonna say that he got everything from Syndication Academy, but I know that that’s his foundation and I know that that’s what he’s doing to rank his clients, to help his clients and to help his agency.

He has an agency, actually he’s an agency owner, but he decided that Syndication Academy was the thing for him. But, of course, they’ll all tell you, and Jordan will tell you that the Battle Plan is the place where you start, and you have to follow it. If you follow the Battle Plan, then you’re going to get to our Done For You services.

It’s a whole lot easier to go and buy a Syndication Academy Network, as Bradley mentioned, than to learn how to build a one-of-a-kind that you only need that one time. Why not go buy it and pay that than to pay a monthly membership to learn how to build one, or you might not wanna learn how to build one, or you might need?

It’s just to buy them and then go and sell it to clients, to people you know. Then, you pitch the benefits of being branded of having that footprint of being seen, of your content being seen everywhere, pushing your content to where the people are hanging out. So that’s one of the benefits.

You could do it many ways. Now, of course, we’re always going to tell you that the Mastermind is the place to be because that’s where like-minded entrepreneurs hang out, people who want to grow their business and get away from just that weekly paycheck and having to wait until the next one so that you could do whatever it is that you wanna do. We wanna push you, guys, past that. We call it POFU, position of fuck you.

Whatever that position is for you, Andrew, we want you to get there. There isn’t just one way to get there, but we do wanna help you get there. So whether you choose Hump Day Hangouts, whether you choose Syndication Academy, or what we suggest, whether you join our Mastermind, we’re going to help you any way we can. That’s what we’re here for.

Bradley: That’s right. Let’s not forget Mohammad. He’s a shining example. Mohammad Mackey. He started by just joining Hump Day Hangouts and coming and asking questions week in and week out and for months. Eventually, he got to a point where he landed a couple of his first clients and started making enough money. He came and joined the Mastermind. Then, he went through a little bit of a struggle for over-promising to clients and ended up losing some clients and had to drop out of the Mastermind for a little bit.

But he kept coming to Hump Day Hangouts and asking more questions, even during that time where he had to back out of the Mastermind, and he got the education that he needed and he implemented it. Right? It’s nothing we did, all we did was provide him with information, but he’s the one that took action and kept at it. He kept persisting in working and he kept finding stuff that wasn’t working until he found stuff that did work. Then, he landed some clients again, got his money back up, and joined the Mastermind again.

We have multiple examples of people that have done that just by starting here, right here at Hump Day Hangouts, Andrew, and you can do that too. Right? The Battle Plan, like I said, will tell you do this, this, this, and this, and you’re going to start getting results. It doesn’t say that you have to learn how to do those things, it just tells you apply these things. Right?

You can either learn how to do those things and do them yourself or, as a business owner, it would be much more efficient with your time to just purchase the Done For You services and apply them in the order that they’re recommended and reap the benefits of those without having to learn how to do it. Okay. Great question. Again, glad to have you back, Andrew. We’re happy to see you participate and be a lot more engaged over the coming weeks.

What Are The Factors You Consider When Finding The Best Keywords For Ranking Opportunity In Local Lead Gen Campaigns?

Gordon’s up. He says, “Hey guys, thank you very much again for the help you provide on Hump Days. It’s greatly appreciated.” You’re welcome, Gordon. “If you’re looking to find a low hanging fruit where you can easily rank in the GMB 3-pack, other than looking at the reviews of the current businesses in the 3-pack in their citation profile, what else do you do to decide whether or not you have found a golden goose ranking opportunity? Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls? Thanks again, Gordon.”

Okay. First of all, Gordon, Local Lease Pro, I showed the exact simple method, it’s kind of time-consuming, but the simple method using it, a free software that we show, we use to identify what I call slam-dunk opportunities, which is which you’re calling a golden goose in your question, okay? Again, that was in Local Lease Pro. If you have access to that, which I’m hoping you do because it was on sale for a very, very ridiculously low price for about eight days during the Side Hustle Toolbox launch. That’s close now, but it is available, Local Lease Pro, but we teach the method specifically how to find low-hanging opportunities.

Now I can’t go into the details of that right here, but it is very, very simple to do using the Easy Local Cash software, which is a free software. It’s Chad Kimball’s software. It just shows you, basically, ever since July of this year, when mobile implemented or switched to the mobile first index, that opened up just massive, massive opportunity. I’m telling you, guys, it opened up more opportunity than I’ve seen since I started my local marketing career in 2010. And that is what we teach on how to find those opportunities that have been opened up by this major change in the algorithm or which index is used first. Right? The mobile first index.

That’s all in Local Lease Pro. I can’t obviously say that right here. It is in the course. Also, you can find out, certainly, if you joined a Mastermind, because Local Lease Pro is one of the first courses that Mastermind members get now when they join.

Marco: Yeah, the how. I mean, that’s the course, the how is, you know, if we gave you that, then why have a course in the first place? So, sorry, that’s something that we can’t do. I’m glad that you mentioned again the Mastermind. I was in our mini, we have the mini-Mastermind and mine is on Tuesday nights for an hour. I have three great people. I have Jamina, I have Will Kenderdine, and John Wypick. We were going over my method for using the software and we went over it in detail. I don’t mind for an hour. I mean, I decided to give my time, right?

So this is what it’s all about. Membership has its privileges. I do things a little bit differently. I find targets a little bit differently, but it all works just the same way. The same way that you teach it, the way that I do it, I already decided to do it. The thing is that membership has its privileges. You have to be a member in order to get the information that you’re asking about. It’s not something that we can give away for free.

Bradley: Yeah. “Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls?” Well, that’s a good question. If you do your research properly upfront, you should know. First of all, you should research your industry or the niche that you’re targeting. Now if you followed us at all for any length of time, Gordon, which I know you have, you know that I’ve been telling you and I’ve been preaching this and beating this drum for years now, which is: specialize. Focus on one industry, guys. Become a big fish in one industry instead of a me-too agency or a me-too consultant or me-too local marketer that will just accommodate any business that will talk to you.

Trust me, you will never gain any traction in your business, or you will have a much harder time gaining traction in your business, if you just offer marketing services to any business that will talk to you. Because your amount of work multiplies exponentially because you have to do keyword research, you have to do market research, you have to understand the vocabulary of the industry, you have to figure out what the pain points are in those industries both for the consumer and for the business owner.

Because if you’re the business owner that you can help them market their products and services, you need to understand the consumer’s mindset, but you also have to understand the business owner’s mindset. So that you can talk to them and speak their language, build rapport with them. So you have to learn two different markets for every industry you enter, the consumer market and the business market. Right?

There’s just so much work that goes into learning, becoming a marketing special or professional in any industry. It requires a ton of research. So if you try to just say, “Oh, I’m gonna be a local marketing guy and I’ll talk to any business in my area that will talk to me,” you’re gonna create a shit ton of additional work that you can significantly reduce. You’ll gain a lot more traction a lot faster in your business if you focus in on one particular industry because then you can craft everything you do in your business around that particular industry. All your marketing messages, all your keyword research, your content templates, everything that you do can be designed around that one particular industry. Now you become a specialist.

I use this as an example. Would you go to a general health practitioner for a heart surgery? No, you go to a cardiologist. Why do you think businesses, like let’s say home remodeling contractors or general contractors, would they want to go to a me-too agency or would they want to go to a contractor media, contractor marketing agency that specializes in general and remodeling contractor marketing? Does that make sense? Which one would you prefer?

Gordon, I recommend specializing in on one industry. But don’t just arbitrarily decide on what industry you wanna focus in on and say, “I’m gonna build my business around that,” you need to research that industry and determine, is there a call volume? Is there significant interest in that? Is there money there?

What’s one of the ways that you can determine that? An easy and simple and a quick way is go do a search for the product and/or service as if you were a customer looking for that product or service. Just go do a Google search for it and take a look and see, are there ads? Are there Google ads? If so, that means there’s paying advertisers. If there’s Google ads, that means people are paying to bid on those keywords, which means there’s likely traffic for those keywords. If there wasn’t traffic for those keywords and if those keywords didn’t convert, there wouldn’t be ads. Does that make sense? People don’t pay and bid on keywords-, well, good advertisers don’t pay and bid on keywords that don’t convert or don’t generate traffic that converts. Right? So if you’re seeing Google ads, that’s a good indication.

Now I wouldn’t stop there. I’d research it further. You could do things, like use Google Trends to find out where in the country, or in the world for that matter, but I always do US-based searches, you can find out where the hotspots are for where the search traffic is the most or the search interest is the most for the types of products or services that you’d be promoting in that industry. Right? So then, you can start to develop out which locations you’re gonna target first for your business. Does that make sense?

Remember, specialize on one industry, guys, because then you can scale your business by geography instead of by type or kind. Does that make sense? Instead of trying to scale your business by taking on new industries where you’re gonna create so much additional work, scale your business by continuing with the same industry but expanding your service area or your territory, your target area. Right?

That’s a hell of a lot better or much more efficient way to build your business. Not only that, in time you will build a name and a reputation for being that type of a marketing specialist for that particular industry. People will start to seek you out as opposed to you having a force or push your marketing, your services onto others. People will start to seek you out because they know that you’re the specialist. Does that make sense?

How do you determine whether there’s enough search traffic? You have to research it. Make sure it’s an industry that has paying advertisers. Make sure that there is significant search interest for those types of things and that it’s profitable.

As I said about in the past, carpet cleaning, there’s a ton of search interest for carpet cleaning but there’s very, very, very small margins in the carpet cleaning industry. Right? Carpet cleaning companies don’t particularly like to pay for marketing services or for lead generation services, they don’t have the budgets for it because their margins are very small.

But if you just did keyword research, which is, when I first started, the very first lead gen site I ever built was carpetcleaningalexandriava.com. I don’t own that anymore, but it was a lead gen site that I built because all I did was base my decision on which industry I was gonna target based upon keyword search volume from the Google Keyword Planner. It said something like 600 exact match searches for that term “carpet cleaning Alexandria VA” per month. It was like 660 or something like that, 600 searches per month. So I said, “Oh man, there’s a lot of search volume there. I can make money with that.”

Well, I built the site and got it ranked number one. We were getting 30 to 40 calls a week through that lead gen site and I had trouble monetizing it for even a hundred dollars a month. No shit. Then when I finally got down to the chewy center of why that was by sitting down with the contractor that was renting that site from me or leasing that site from me, he told me, “Because the carpet cleaning business has very, very small margins.” Right? Very small margins. He was making something ridiculous, per carpet cleaning job $8 or $9 or $10, or $12 in profit. It was something stupid. After paying his labor and insurance costs and, the cleaning solution costs, and all of this overhead, he had a very small margin so he had trouble paying for that.

What happened? I ended up switching into other higher margin businesses. That’s why I love the tree service industry because it’s huge margin. That’s why I like remodeling contractors, home builders, HVAC repair, any sort of repair, roofers, all those types because the margins are so much larger. Does that make sense?

Again, you have to do the research, Gordon. There’s no real easy answer there. You just got to be logical and do the research and you should be able to find the opportunities as well as the perfect industry. Also, one last thing I would suggest about that is, seriously, guys, try to find an industry that you, not only has all the correct signals or markers of being a good industry to work at, but also one that you have a genuine interest in because it’ll make it feel less like work. Okay.

Honestly, I don’t have any interest in tree services, except for the fact that that does make me some damn good money, which kind of makes it interesting. But if you can find an industry that you have a genuine interest in, it’ll feel less like work while you’re building your business.

Anybody wanna comment on that before I move on? That was a long-winded answer I know.

Marco: No, but it was perfect. There’s no need to go into that any further.

How Do You Set Up The Syndication Network Of Several GMB Sites In Same Metro Area?

Bradley: He says, “Hey guys, so if I have a group of GMB sites in the same metro area and a WordPress site ranked on page one and Serps, a YouTube channel with videos ranking on page one of Google’s video page and I want to lease all of these as a total package deal to a business owner operating an area, how do I set up a syndication network for this? Can I feed the RSS feeds from all the GMB sites into the WordPress site blog into one generically branded syndication network? Or do I need to set up separate networks for each GMB site or WordPress site? Thank you very much for your comment.”

Michael, I don’t recommend a syndication network for lead gen assets unless you need them. For example, if you’re having trouble getting a lead gen asset to push another 3-pack, can a syndication network will help for that? Then, absolutely.

The other thing is, if you have a cluster of Google My Business profiles for a metropolitan area that are all branded the same, then you could use one syndication network for those. When you talk about grabbing the GMB RSS feeds, I’m not sure what you mean from that, unless you’re using our GMB auto poster which will generate an RSS feed, but you can’t just get an RSS feed, at least not that I’m aware of.

Marco, this may have changed, but is there an RSS feed from the GMB websites yet?

Marco: Not that I know of. Not that I’m aware of.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah. As far as I’m aware, there is not an RSS feed from the GMB websites. So our GMB auto poster will create an RSS feed from the GMB posts that are connected through that auto poster or that are posted with that auto poster. So you can do it that way. But like I said, you should have a common brand for all of those assets, if that’s the case. If you want to feed them all into one network, which again, I’m gonna be 100% transparent with you guys, I’m not building syndication networks for my lead gen assets. I build syndication networks for clients because I tell them that it’s critical. It is because it’s brand building, it’s entity validation and brand authority building, right?

So any client, I’m gonna tell them. “You should have a syndication network to protect your brand and to amplify your brand, expand your reach. It also helps to build your authority and all that kind of stuff.” For content marketing, all my clients, I suggest we do regular content marketing, blogging that gets syndicated out to the syndication network. That’s all true. It’s not just because I wanna charge them money, guys, it’s to protect their brand and to help them to stay ranked.

But for lead gen assets, that’s an additional expense. So why implement that? Until and unless you need to, right? So for my lead gen assets that I’m building right now, I’m not using syndication networks. If I have lead gen assets that I do all the other magic that I work to them and they don’t end up producing, because maybe they’re not ranking well or that area ended up being more competitive than I originally thought, then I may add a syndication network. But that’s only if and when it’s absolutely needed. It’s kind of like a last resort thing because it’s an additional expense that I don’t wanna have to put up for a lead gen asset if I can get results without it.

Now once you’ve monetized an asset, a lead gen or, in this case, a multiple assets, once you’ve monetized them, I’ve talked about this too, if once you’ve developed it … Like for me, when I monetize a lead gen asset, what I do is after several months, two or three months of the service provider paying on time and there’s no issues, if we develop a decent relationship, then I offer at that point to rebrand those lead gen assets after the client, certainly their name. It’s a lot more legit that way, right?

Like I said, at that point, once I would offer the rebranding, then that’s where I could upsell them on, “Hey, since we’re gonna be rebranding these, we should also go to syndication network because it’s gonna help to protect your brand and we can use that to help continue to push the lead gen assets that I’m gonna rebrand. It’ll help to continue to keep them producing for you, blah blah blah blah blah.”

At that point, we set up syndication network. Might even set them up on content marketing services. That’s an additional charge beyond the lead gen leasing or pay per lead fees that I’m charging. Depending on how I’ve monetized that asset, this is now starting to build their asset, syndication network with their branding, building, doing content marketing on their website.

So now I’m double dipping, right? Now I’m generating money from my lead gen assets and also working on the client’s assets as a separate fee. Right? So it gives you a whole lot of opportunity, Michael. But for your lead gen assets, I don’t recommend setting up syndication network unless you absolutely need to. Try to get results without it. Guys, I am the firm believer of trying to get the most results or trying to get the best results with the least amount of effort possible and least amount of money invested too.

Should You Create A Blog Post If You Syndicate A GMB Post?

Okay. It’s a good Hump Day today, by the way. I’m liking these questions. It’s a good question, Michael. All right. Ray had some confusion earlier. We’ll pass over that. Quit This House, he says, “If I wanted to syndicate my GMB post, should I create a blog post with the post details and link or should I post to one of the social media sites and create a trigger from there?”

Quit This House, use the GMB auto poster. I’m telling you, it’s stupid and expensive, it’s super convenient and efficient, and it can generate an RSS feed from your GMB posts, and then you can just connect that directly to a syndication network, and then, viola, it’s done. You don’t have to go … Right now, what you’re talking about would require a manual action for every post. Right?

If you just set it up through the auto poster, you can, not only schedule out your GMB post all in one setting so that they automatically publish on the day and time that you select, but it will also generate an RSS feed that then you can populate or trigger a syndication network with, and all of that is automated.

Marco: By the way, since we’re back on the auto poster, I got an answer from Rob and he says, yes, we’ll be able to silo based on tagging. So you can create multiple silos within the auto poster just by tagging, by using different tags. The function isn’t integrated yet, but it’s coming. It’s already being developed, guys. Those of you who are looking to get into this, get in there now because it just keeps …

Shripad is a master programmer. He just keeps adding to it more and more functionality and he’s now charging more. We’re not gonna charge more monthly yet. If it gets to the point where there’s just a ton of programming that needs to be done, the price will probably need to go up. But we usually grandfather people into the prices where they are, so remember that.

Bradley: Yeah. Michael says, “Holy crap, I can’t believe I got the $1,000 Local Lease Pro course for $47.” Yeah, Michael. Look, for eight days, we promoted shit out of that and told everybody that once the Side Hustle Toolbox offer closed that it was gonna, I originally said it was gonna go to 500, but it’s such a damn good course. I mean, I’m telling you, this is I think the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career, that Local Lease Pro method right there. That’s why we made it $1,000.

Not only that, but we’re gonna be updating the course. Like I said, I’ve got some new stuff to add to it. That as soon as I get my VA on track for the new changes and I polish up the processes a little bit, I’m gonna be sharing that, I’ll be updating Local Lease Pro. So, yeah, you’re right. Good thing that you got in on it.

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have … ” By the way, guys, if you want Local Lease Pro, if you don’t have it, there’s only two options, you can buy it for 1,000 bucks or you can join the Mastermind and you can get it included in your Mastermind membership. So it’s entirely up to you, but I would recommend it. I mean, guys, it’s even worth $1,000, I’m not kidding, because of the opportunity. I’m telling you, it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my eight, almost nine year career now. Okay.

Does It Hurt Or Help To Have Multiple Syndication Networks?

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have multiple syndication networks?” Yes, it can, Abe. Not for YouTube channels-, well, depending on how they were set up, but if you’re using syndication networks for blog syndication to try to rank your own domain, like a self-hosted site, then, yes, multiple syndication networks can hurt you, depending on how you have it set up and how you have a syndication set up,

I’ve said for years now, like we teach branded tier one syndication networks and we also talked about when we teach how to build two-tier syndication networks. You can take it out multiple tiers. But I’ve also recommended for years that you only use two-tier syndication networks on YouTube channels or multi-tiered syndication networks on YouTube channels or for YouTube syndication, not for blog syndication.

However, if you wanna do it for blog syndication, I do teach in Syndication Academy and I’ve talked about it multiple times how you can use multi-tiered syndication networks and reduce the chance of getting a Google slap. You cannot eliminate it because you are still leaving a footprint. But you can significantly reduce the footprint if you add additional content feeds as triggers into your second or third tiers. Right? Because what you wanna do is you wanna mask or bury your content among a whole lot of additional route relevant and related type content so that the blogs don’t show or appear to be solely for manipulating search rankings. Right? And that’s essentially what they are.

Again, with multi-tiered syndication networks, I don’t recommend them for blog syndication unless you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to put forth all the additional effort. Also, multitude syndication networks can break down because there’s a lot of moving pieces, there’s a lot of different content sources, which can cause you know different RSS feeds that you don’t have control over because they’re not your RSS feeds, which can cause problems. Multi-tiered syndication networks can be a bitch to maintain for that reason and so that’s another reason I don’t recommend them.

If you are just flatly syndicating your content to multiple syndication networks and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, then you are absolutely causing damage because it is clearly, the algorithm can pick that up in a split second. Right? Again, Abe, if you were gonna be building these types of stuff, like I said, the only way that … We have Syndication Academy where I talk about all of that stuff, seriously, I go into your best practices and everything about how to use them and where to use them. But for blog syndication, I highly recommend that you just use a one-tier branded syndication network and then you can boost the hell out of that. Okay.

Marco: Yeah. He also says that he’s used lower standard contractors in the past and he’s considering using our services on top. Dude, if you’ve done that, then don’t get a syndication network from us until you fix whatever it is that you’ve done. I suggest totally getting into Syndication Academy, seeing how it’s all supposed to work. I hope that you have access to all of these networks and multiple rings that have been done for you so that you can just stop whatever madness it was that was created and you could do it the right way. The way that it’s supposed to be done, which is branding. It’s done for branding and for syndicating your network. Yeah. It is done to manipulate but to manipulate in the right way. If you get caught manipulating the wrong way, you’re going to get slapped down.

What’s The Difference Between The Press Release Service In Serp Space And MGYB?

Bradley: That’s right. Ray says, “What is the difference between press release service from Serp Space, and MGYB? Are they overlapping and/or equivalent? They’re equivalent now, Ray, because, well, there’s two different levels of press releases orders from Serb Space. There was the press release and then press release plus. The press release was, the press advantage network, the distribution network, and that’s we have now a separate account. We have our own press advantage distribution network agreement with them that is available in MGYB. It’s basically the same distribution network. So it’s up to you if you wanna order from Serp Space or if you wanna come to MGYB which is owned and controlled entirely by Semantic Mastery and my partners. If that makes sense.

Serp Space was a collaboration. We are no longer part of that. There’s no issues there or anything like that. I’m just letting you know, if you wanna order directly from us, it’s through MGYB. Okay. Good question.

Should We Link From GMB Biz.Site Description?

Doodle Digital Marketing, I like that. He says, “Hey guys, I love Hump Day Hangouts. Tons of value. “Should we link out from the GMB biz site description?” Not … Well, wait a minute, the GMB, yes. You can link from the GMB website content. I don’t know about the description. But if you’re talking about the GMB business description, no, you can’t put links in that; that’s short. I think it only allows 750 characters. But if you’re talking about the GMB website, yes, you can link out to that.

What I don’t recommend doing a lot of external links, unless it makes sense, it has to be relevant guys, remember, this is a Google property, so I would not be doing some stupid “I’m gonna link to a .gov or .edu site for authority” because that’s bullshit and it has been for years. If it’s relevant, then, yes. If it’s not relevant, you’re just doing it because you learn that somewhere on some stupid SEO program somewhere, don’t do it because that’s dumb.

But what I would recommend doing is, I always link, and I teach this, but I always link from the GMB website text, the content body of the website, I always link to the GMB maps share URL, as well as to the GMB website. So it’s linking to itself, right? If you have an external website, so self-hosted website, you can link to that. That makes sense. You could also link to some of your social media stuff. That makes sense. Any type of branded property that you could link out.

Again, I wouldn’t spam the description or the GMB website content with a bunch of exterior external links, I would keep it … Really that’s why I usually just link from the GMB website to itself and also to the GMB maps share URL because those are Google properties. Right? So just consider that.

It’s after five o'clock, I don’t have to get my daughter-, or I don’t get to have my daughter for dinner tonight, so I do have a couple extra minutes. Marco, can you hang out for a few extra?

Marco: Yeah, I can hang out for a few extra. My daughter isn’t crying it.

Bradley: We’ve only got a few questions left.

Marco: Let’s go.

Bradley: All right. John says, “I’ve got a Semantic Mastery syndrome. I have no doubt it’s the place to be.” “Thanks, John. John is one in Marco’s small group that he was talking about. Jordan says, “Marco’s right. We learned the why behind all these Semantic Mastery tactics, Syndication Academy, RYS stack, Press Releases, et cetera, and then just sell them along with some other deep rooted stuff we had developed in the lab.” He’s talking about his own business specifically, Jordan.

“Then we also create all the content via writing and optimizing it, which we charge for, and then we do web design with SEO strategy pre-launch. I couldn’t build a drive stack if my life depended on it. Haha.” Yeah, that’s great. I mean, honestly, guys, those are the audience that are tech nerds and like to get their hands dirty, so to speak, roll up their sleeves and get to work. Then, RYS Academy will teach you how to build drive stacks. It’s a lot of work. You can benefit from RYS stacks without having to learn how to build them, by just buying them done for you and you’ll save yourself a shit ton of time and energy.

Again, I’m not trying to discourage anybody from buying the course, I’m just saying you got to consider where to spend your time. Is learning how to build drive stacks going to progress your business? It might. You have to make that decision. I can’t make that decision for you. Or is the benefit and the result that the drive stack can produce going to help your business? And if so, then why go through the trouble of learning how to build them when you could just purchase them done for you and receive the benefit that you were seeking to begin with? Does that make sense? Then that way you could spend your time focusing on how to sell it or how to monetize it or how to apply it to get the result that you’re seeking. Does that make sense?

Again, guys, you have to think about it on a higher level. That’s what I think is really wrong with our industry, is that everybody teaches, or the vast majority of products tell you, “Hey, we’re gonna teach you how to do this one skill.” Yeah, I’m not trying to take that away from anybody. That skill is valuable. Whatever that skill may be, it’s valuable. But just because you know how to get a result from it, one particular skill does not make you a business owner, it does not make it a profitable business for you. Right?

So you got to think about how are you going to make money from whatever it is you choose to do? Is doing that thing, being the mechanic or the technician, is that actually going to make you the money or is selling that service and the result that that service produces going to make you the money? If that’s the case, then why don’t you focus on learning how to sell it and find people that are already good at doing it, fulfilling it, to do it for you right.

That’s what we’re trying to get at, guys, and Jordan understands that. That’s why Jordan’s business is cranking, it’s just kicking ass. Okay.

Any Black Friday Sales For Done For You Services Or Training?

Luis, he’s a new Mastermind member. “Hey guys, any Black Friday sales?” By the way, welcome, Luis. “Any Black Friday sales for Done For You services or training?” Yeah. Isn’t that with the GMB stuff was the pre-Black Friday sale?

Marco: It’s the pre. We will have something. Something’s coming your way and it’s gonna be good. Trust me. It’s not Black Friday yet, dude. But we will have something. It’ll be big. We control MGYB now. As Bradley mentioned, it’s ours. Semantic Mastery is our own store. So we’ve got some really good stuff coming your way.

Luis, I will be talking to you on Monday, as a matter of, fact. It’s his onboarding call. Again, I’m sorry, all these Mastermind questions keep coming up or Mastermind people. As part of the onboarding process, we give people a half hour call just to get them pointed in the right direction, to see where they’re going, where they want to be. So we ask questions, we try to provide guidance. I just happened to get Luis.

Guys, you can’t ask for who you want. You’re going to get whoever is up on the calendar, because we rotate since there’s five of us. But whoever you get, you’re going to get the direction that you need and you’re going to get your questions answered so that you can get started on your way to POFU.

That’s what we want you to do. We want you to get started getting to that place where you’re going to be and say, “Okay. Now I don’t have to deal with shitty clients. I don’t have to deal with shitty people. I am at a place where I can go into any negotiation from a position of power. I know what I’m worth. If this guy gives me any flack, I’m gonna have to say ‘Fuck you. I’m gonna go to your competitor and charge them half price just because I feel like it, because I don’t need you.‘” That’s what we want you to be.

Bradley: There you go so. Yes, Black Friday is this Friday. So, yeah, there will be some other specials. I don’t usually get involved with what promotions we’re doing, guys, so I couldn’t answer that. But I’m glad Marco said, yeah, we do have something coming Friday.

Should You Use Only The Main Keyword Phrase Or Should You Diversify Them When Building Links To All Assets?

Jay Turner. What’s up, Jay? He says, “I’ve been able to get my client ranked in the 3-pack for the second most trafficked keyword phrase with an RYS stack. High five, Marco.”

Marco: High five, dude.

Bradley: “But now I want to take on the main and most competitive keyword. I’m adding a silo of content to the RYS stack targeting the main keyword. So far so good. My question is when embarking on link building to all assets, like RYS, Syndication Network, GMB website, et cetera, should I use only the main keyword phrase or must I diversify the keyword phrases?”

Jay, diversify. What I recommend you do is go pool your … You should have probably already done keyword research anyways, so if you’re gonna be siloing, you should have your keyword themes relatively tight for the silos anyways. So make sure that if you’re gonna be direct targeting link building on a silo basis, that you’re only using a set of keywords that fall within that particular silo or keyword theme. Right? Does that make sense?

Let me take this down to a local level because what I wanna explain is, guys, when you’re doing a ton of like spam link building and such to power up tier one entities, which would be like drive stacks, press release, organization pages, syndication networks, even citations, you don’t want to hit, and I’m gonna say local because that’s primarily what I work on, and I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about here anyways. You said client ranks, so it’s likely it’s locally You said 3-pack. Right?

So you don’t wanna use the keywords with the location modifiers. You can use a very small percentage of your overall keywords that you’re gonna add to the anchor text or the link building that you’re gonna be either doing or buying a package or whatever. You can have a very, very small percentage with location modifiers, but I would keep that to an absolute bare minimum. Because it’s more about pushing the theme, the keyword theme, not the location, or the geographic theme, if that makes sense, it’s not about pushing location relevancy.

Because think about it, the further you move away from a local business the more broader the market segment is. In other words, you don’t wanna be targeting keywords or link building to tier 1 assets all the way down to the local level, including local location modifier, because it’s, remember your link building to tier one assets is two hops away from your target which would be your GMB asset or your primary website, the client’s website, or whatever, the further you get away from the ultimate target, the ultimate destination, the broader your keyword set should be, the broader the theme of the keyword set.

That’s why I say I don’t like to include local modifiers and anchor text when I’m building links to tier one assets. Instead I use higher or market-level keywords, broader market keywords. What do I mean by that? Instead of water heater repair Fairfax Virginia or Fairfax VA as a keyword that I would use as an anchor, it would be water heater repair and plumbing and plumbing repair and plumbing service, if that makes sense. I’d lose the local modifier and use more broader market-level keywords. Okay.

Also, you don’t wanna do entirely 100% on anchor text links, even with a diverse set of keywords. You wanna also include naked URLs and some generics. You can even use some brand terms at that point. It’s a little bit odd to use brand terms at tier two links because that’s again two steps away from your target URL. But it does make sense if you’re link building to, for example, if it’s a tier one branded property it can make sense to also include the brand name in some of those anchor text too. Right? I would just use those sparingly as well. It’s more about the keyword relevancy at that point in naked URLs, which is just pushing link equity to those tier one assets regardless of anchor text.

Marco, do you wanna comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, thanks, Bradley. What I would recommend is reach out to Dedia. We have a Dedia, he knows exactly what to do with your RYS stack to get the most out of it.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: If needed, then get our keyword research gig because we will come up with thousands upon thousands of keyword targets for you to either add relevance or to push, we provide what’s called buoyancy. “Buoyancy,” that’s one of the words that I have difficulty with. But we help push up the main keyword by providing relevance throughout the keyword silo. We give you all that with the keyword research.

Then, all you do is turn that over to Dedia and say, “Here, this is the folder that I’ve created, this is the keyword that I’m targeting, have at it.” Dedia has been with us long enough that he just knows, okay, this is what I need to do. He’ll blast it. He’ll hammer that RYS stack so that it produces.

Bradley: That’s right. You don’t have to worry about all those ratios and stuff, Jay. I know. I mean, honestly, I don’t worry about any of that stuff anymore because I don’t ever do any of that stuff anymore. If I need it, I just contact Dedia, exactly what Marco said, and I just say, “Hey, this is what I got. This is what I’m trying to accomplish. Make it happen,” and he does it.

Honestly, guys, that’s what I’m talking about. Jay, again, I don’t wanna get back on this pitch again, but if you have your own tools and you’re running your own link building tools and stuff like that, that’s great, if you’re efficient and all that. But if you’re not, which I am not, I have no desire to run those tools, just let the expert do it and Dedia has an absolute ninja. He’s an expert, a link building expert, so that’s why I just turned it over to him, defer to him anytime I have something that I need to spam to push additional link equity to. I just contact him say, “This what I got is what I need you do, make it happen,” and he does it. All right.

Jay vouches for the GMB auto poster. He says, “It’s great and Shripad does great work. He is very responsive in Support. I can attest to that too, not just because it’s me, but every time there’s an issue a little support bubble on the bottom right corner of the auto poster, you can just contact Support through there and he’s very, very responsive.”

Would You Recommend Using One Website For Multiple GMB Locations?

Abe says, “Also, I would like to know about using one website for multiple GMB locations. Is this recommended and possible?” It can be. You can just create separate location pages. So each location each, GMB locations should have its own dedicated page on the website and that’s the URL that you would submit as the website URL in the Google My Business profile. Does that make sense?

So instead of just using the home root domain, so the home page of the website for that brand across all different GMB assets, create a location specific page on that domain and then use that URL as that landing page URL as the website in GMB. It’s perfectly fine to do that, guys. But what you want is, if it’s the same brand, you can share the same brand name across all GMB locations. That’s fine. But you want a unique URL and a unique phone number and a unique address, if possible. Okay.

Strange NAP issues occur if you have two or more of the data points, the primary data points in a citation or NAP, which would be name, address, phone number, and also website URL. If you have two or more common data points among multiple locations, that’s going to cause NAP issues, which is going to make it very difficult to rank. You can have one common data point, typically the business name, because it’s a brand that can be used across multiple GMBs as long as the other primary data points are unique, physical address, phone number, website address. Does that make sense? So, yes, it’s possible.

Now one other thing I would mention is go back through, Abe, watch some of our previous Hump Day Hangouts. We’ll talk about the difference between using location pages, which would be pages on the root domain, or using location-specific sub-domains, which are separate WordPress installations, but there’s a reason to do, that’s to help mitigate risk, potential losing all of your assets if you were to catch a penalty. Again, we just talked about this last week, go back and watch the replay from last week and I’m pretty sure we talked about that extensively, about the benefit of using sub-domains over sub-folders or sub-directories. That’s pretty much the same thing I’m talking about here.

“Where’s the GMB auto poster?” John, just posting the Mastermind, we’ll get to the link.

Marco: I posted the link higher up.

Bradley: Yeah. I just didn’t have it. Thank you, Marco. Nestor says, Hey, I got to go guys. I got to wrap this up. So, anyways, and there’s Rob with the yearly discount for the GMB agency offer. That’s the enterprise account level or subscription level, which is 200 posts per month-, or excuse me 500 posts per month capacity. If you buy it on a monthly basis, subscribe month to month, it’s $200. If you buy the yearly license … It’s $200 per month, excuse me. If you buy the yearly license, it’s 1,000 bucks, divided by 12, comes out to be $84 dollars or $83 per month. So it’s a hell of a lot cheaper that way.

By the way, if you’re scheduling out 31 posts, which there’s a post scheduling feature, which is amazing in the GMB auto poster, so you can schedule out one post a day or however many you want. Let’s just say you’re doing one post a day, you could do 31 days. Then, there’s a republish option to where it can republish the post based upon the interval that you set. For example, if you set every 31 days, you can publish, you can schedule out 31 posts and then have them republish 31 days later, each post thereafter. Right? Does that make sense?

So day one and then day 32, that post publishes again. Day two and day 33, that post publishes again. Does that make sense? That way you can set up all of your posting and in an automated fashion. Well, with 500 posts per month, if you were to actually fill out or post one per day for each location, you can essentially put 16 locations in one enterprise account. Sixteen times 31 comes out to be 496, so you get 496 posts. Essentially, you can serve 16 locations, 100% one post per day with a single enterprise account. Does that make sense?

That’s how I’m clustering my sites right now. I gave you a little insight on that.

Marco: Yeah. I mean, it’s an awesome deal because it saves so much money and then the auto poster just saves so much time and effort. Once your VAs get proficient with going in there and just scheduling and putting everything up, it just saves you a ton of time of money. So you’ll make the money back that you invest in this just by the time you’re gonna save with your VAs, or even if you try to do it on your own, which you shouldn’t be doing.

Bradley: Yeah. Just so you guys are aware, for clients, I have a VA that goes in and manually posts for all the clients. I do that for a reason because every post is 100% unique that way. She still has content templates, but she goes in and she puts in a new image every time, and the content templates she uses, there’s tokens that she swaps out with different keywords and such. The target URLs are always being recycled to whatever we’re linking to from the GMB post and all that. So they become unique for clients.

I pay my VA on a per post basis. So I pay her, for every post that she publishes she gets paid. It varies between $3.50 to $5 per post. But I charge my clients $10 to $15 per post, depending on what the volume is. So my point is, I make money on that even though she’s manually posting.

However, for lead gen assets, guys, once again, just like I was telling … Shit, who was I telling earlier? Michael. I was telling Michael earlier not to worry about syndication networks for lead gen assets because you wanna reduce expenses. Well, I don’t want to pay a VA to manually post to lead gen assets because that’s an additional expense when I can pay for-, or subscribe to the auto poster, schedule all the posts.

Do I do all these guys? Hell, no. I’ve trained a VA to go in and set up or schedule all the posts within the GMB auto poster and then schedule them to republish. So that, literally, I can pay a VA for three or four hours to schedule out, however long it takes them, to schedule all those posts out. Then, it’s done and those GMB assets will continually update posts because of the auto poster and I’m not paying anymore other than for the auto poster subscription. Does that make sense? So it’s a hell of a lot more efficient with money too. Right? It’s more cost-effective. Okay.

Nestor says … And I’m so over, we got to get out of here. Nestor says, “Hey guys, how about webs 2.0 example mybrand.wordpress.com point to my GMB property three links as a press release?” Okay. First of all, I’m not familiar with their example. I know that’s kind of a competitor that does, you know, they have their own store and blah blah blah. I’m not real familiar with what they teach or what they say, so I can’t really speak on that.

I’m not quite sure I understand, in the wording of your question, what you mean by mybrand.wordPress. I understand WordPress.com, that’s fine. That’s a brand identity property that you can create on the WordPress.com site, kind of like what I showed earlier. But, yeah, that’s normal. That goes into Syndication Network, right? You try to get your brand name as a sub-domain blah blah blah. That’s pretty standard.

But, “point to GMB property three links as a press release,” I’m not sure what that means. Can you point to a GMB property from your WordPress.com site? Sure. Can you also use press releases to link to that WordPress.com site? Sure. You can also link to your GMB.

I’m doing a press releases, Local PR Pro method is what I use and, as standard operating procedure, I published a press releases with every GMB asset, it gets created. Usually, my preferred method is to link from the first press release to the GMB, the Google Maps share URL, to the Google the GMB website URL, and to the GMB the first post URL. We teach that at Local Lease Pro and that’s just essentially my method. So I’m going direct from the press releases to the Google assets. Okay.

Yeah. Guys, there’s a thousand ways to skin a cat, right? So our method isn’t the be-all end-all. It’s just our method works for what we want it to work for and that’s what we teach. Other people have other methods that may very well work as good as ours. I’m not trying to say that ours is better than anybody else’s. I’m just telling you what we teach, I don’t know what they teach. I’m sorry. It’s likely that that would work too.

Will says, “Bradley, speaking about syndication networks, I finally figured out how to syndicate to Medium.com. I’ve been testing it for a while with a few posts now and it works well to syndicate your WordPress post with images and YouTube video embeds, and from there, you could syndicate to your tier two, if you’d like. I’ll send you an update to support@semanticmastery.”

Thanks, Will. That’s awesome. In fact, Will, if you would, I mean, if you’re cool with it, you can even send the update right in the Mastermind community so that everybody else could benefit from it. If not, send it to me and I’ll update everybody in the Mastermind, and Syndication Academy for that matter, once I see it. Thank you for that, Will.

Okay. “Link to pre-Black Friday deals, please.” Yeah. Luis, just contact us at Support.

That’s it. Okay, guys, we’re way over. We got all questions answered, though.

Marco: That was a good one.

Bradley: Thanks, Marco, for hanging out, man, I appreciate it.

Marco: Marathon. All right, dude.

Bradley: All right, everybody. Mastermind webinar tomorrow. Be there or be square. See y'all.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210

Click on the video above to watch Episode 202 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: Hello and welcome to Episode 210 of Hump Day Hangouts. I am Adam Moody with Semantic Mastery. We are gonna say hi to everyone real quick before we dive into some announcements and questions from everybody watching us live. Also, if you’re watching this on YouTube, we noticed from time to time that we get questions over there, but you need to come to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions and ask your questions there, that’s where we’re monitoring. Before we dive in, real quick, Chris, how are you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Good weather in Florida always the last couple weeks. I highly recommend it, like I love it. How are you doing?

Adam: Not bad. It’s like 60 here, which is perfect. Everyone in California thinks it’s like the middle of winter and I’m just enjoying myself. This is good. Marco, how about you? How’s the weather for you, man?

Marco: Things are good here, man, transitioning to the dry season. So we’re gonna have about five and a half months of absolutely no rain, not even a drop. I’m looking forward to … Yeah, but then, it’s seven months of afternoon showers. You gotta pay the price for the life you live, right?

Adam: Yeah, fair enough.

Marco: But always warm, like if it were 60 here, we’d all be dying literally. It’s freezing cold.

Chris: [Inaudible 00:01:19] stay in Florida.

Adam: Definitely. Bradley, how about you, man? How are you doing?

Bradley: I’m good, I’m happy to be here. Got lots of stuff going on at the moment. Just been really, really busy. In last week, well, I took off for a couple days because my sister got married again. I actually got to go down to Hilton Head, South Carolina and meet one of our members, Ed, who also went to POFU Live; he’s in the Mastermind also. That was cool because I got to spend an hour with him just chatting. It was really, really cool. I always enjoy getting to meet members whenever we have the opportunity. So that was a lot of fun. But I had to take really Friday and Monday off, so now I’m behind.

Besides that, I got a quick little story to tell very, very quickly. Just last week, it was funny because I was actually reviewing the Hump Day Hangout from last week and I was talking about mitigating risk. Marco and I, we were talking about reducing exposure and trying to mitigate risk because, if you put all your eggs in one basket and Google takes that basket, you’re screwed, you’ve lost all those assets.

Well, I was using a test with what’s called GMB Location Groups. It’s a setting inside of Google My Business. I was running a test on a set of GMB assets for a particular metro area, so one metropolitan city area. I had seven assets in there that were fully optimized, 100% done. In fact, they were the seven assets that my VAs has been training on as he’s been learning the processes for doing this whole method, the Local Lease Pro model, essentially.

Long story short, on Saturday, I was down at the Hilton Head and I happened to get an email saying that the account that was used as the recovery email for that particular GMB manager account, which had to be turned into an owner in order to use location groups, had been terminated for violating Google’s spam policies. I lost all those damn assets, every single one of them, and I can’t even access them through the original Google accounts now, guys.

That was three weeks work, not necessarily my work, but my VA’s work wasted. Now, is it all bad? No, because I learned a valuable lesson. Number one, don’t use GMB location groups, it’s like a trap, number one, lesson number one. Number two is always mitigate risk. Don’t set yourself up with vulnerabilities that Google can take … We exploit Google’s vulnerabilities. Don’t you think Google will exploit ours? So I learned that … In fact, I’m actually updating the entire process for how to first log in and set up and manage a lot of GMB assets. I’m updating all those processes this week, in fact, because we have to do something new that reduces our overall risk.

Anyways, that was my little story. I’m a little bit behind now because all the work that I’ve done for the last several weeks on all the processes now has to be updated and redone. But that’s the cat and mouse game that we play.

Marco: Yeah. One of the great things about our Mastermind is that we do all of the testing, we take all of the risk, we were the ones who go in the lab. I mean, we do encourage our own people to test so that they can verify that our results are what we’re saying they are. But it’s one of the things that we do, we go, we blow things up and it happens, and then now we know what not to do. And right into our Mastermind, we’ll share all of test result with the membership exactly what was done so that they don’t repeat the process and get stuck losing assets because nobody wants to lose an asset, especially not seven. But so be it, lesson well-learned and it’s a lesson that the Mastermind doesn’t have to repeat.

Bradley: That’s true and, just real quick segue, that leads me to, that’s kind of like what the Mastermind is about. The scaling option, like doing all these heavy processes and stuff, is really reserved to the POFU Live group attendees at the moment, but we’re polishing all this stuff. Obviously, the Mastermind, we update, like tomorrow we’ve got a Mastermind webinar and I’m certainly gonna be talking about what not to do because I want to make sure all of our members are fully aware of what not to do so they don’t lose assets.

But once we have this 12-week process done, that the POFU Live attendees are kind of in accountability group with me right now, and we’ve got a target that we’re trying to hit at the end of 12 weeks, which is 50 GMB assets fully developed and ready for monetization, if they’re not already monetized by that point, and so when we’re done at that 12-week period, we will have discovered or perfected, really fine-tuned the method and all of the processes to get us there, to get us to that point. That’s when we’re gonna release in its entirety the Mastermind.

That training will not be released outside of the Mastermind, period, and that’s only because it’s highly valuable and we put a lot of work. In fact, the other members of the POFU accountability group with us, that’s like 12 of us in there, and so that’s a lot of intellectual property, a lot of a work that goes into that. So the Mastermind members will get that.

But that’s just one of many things that we do there. For example, we had some questions about how to structure ad ID pages and set up as three buckets with HTTP, SSL protocol, and all that stuff. Two weeks ago, we went in and showed exactly how to do that. I mean, it’s just stuff like that that we do in the Mastermind all the time.

Adam: Yeah. Something else that I just remembered, that reminded me of, Bradley, was, I think it was Jason who posted yesterday, who’s one of our Mastermind members, just out of the blue was like, hey, I’ve seen some questions about blah blah blah-, not blah blah blah, but some heavy-duty IT stuff. He’s like, “Hey, if anybody needs help just ping me. I’ll do it for free if you’re a Mastermind member.”

That’s just awesome to see. Again, you get that in a tight-knit group like that. It’s cool having that ability. Everyone who knows our story kind of knows where we came from and how we were part of a Mastermind. That’s why part of why we do this to get that community, it’s not just a jumble of people, you do have a community.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Well, cool. I also want to say then to you guys, we mentioned the GMB stuff, we’ve got a sale going on right now at MGYB. It’s wrapping up today. So if you’re interested or you need a GMB verification service, whether it’s for your clients, it’s for yourself, you’re doing some lead gen, head over there. I posted it on the page. If you’re watching the replay, sorry, it’s probably too late. But a good reason to watch live and open the emails is you get a 35% discount on that service right now. So head over there do that.

Real quick, too, if you’re joining us for the first time, thank you so much for watching us. If you want the right place to start, because it is one of the questions we get, “Hey, where should I start? Should I take this course and do that?” start with Battle Plan. No matter what you’re doing, even if you want to hop into Mastermind, get the Battle Plan, come join the Mastermind. That’s the path. The link is on there. It’s a great way to get repeatable results, which is why we put it together, so that we can have that. It’s our home processes put into an easy-to-digest format.

Then, obviously, like we’ve been talking about it, if you’re ready to take things up a notch, if you wanna scale, you wanna grow, then the Mastermind is the place to be.

Bradley: Did you open up Local Lease Pro as a standalone product now?

Adam: Yes.

Bradley: I’ll be damned. I didn’t realize that was available yet. Okay.

Adam: Sneaking that onto the page, if people are interested.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay.

Adam: I’m gonna say no more.

Bradley: Everything I’ve been talking about with this Local Lease Pro method, that’s it. Most of you guys are probably aware of it because of the Side Hustle Toolbox promotion, that was our contribution. But now that that’s closed, it’s a standalone product. I’m gonna be updating that in a couple of weeks with some of the new processes that I’ve just discovered.

Again, GMB, like the actual optimization process has changed slightly. Not much, but slightly, and I’m updating the processes for my VAs right now. So next week, I’ll kind of polish it up a bit and then add that into the Local Lease Pro training. So if you guys don’t have it yet, I recommend you get it. This method is freaking killing it. I think it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career. I mean that, so check it out.

All right. Can we get into questions?

Adam: I think so. If you guys are good, let’s do this.

Do I Need Access To A Client’s Website If I Do Local SEO For Them?

Bradley: All right. Starting off with Chris Green posted a support question from Vincent. He says, “I’m considering to join the RYS Reloaded or the GMB course. My question is this: if I do SEO for local businesses in my country, which is Malaysia, do I need to have access to my clients website?” No. It can help. You don’t have to have access to the client’s website, but it would certainly help because you could take care of some on-page SEO issues. In other words, you can optimize the site itself, which is considered on-page SEO, and that can help that can help quite a bit.

In fact, with proper on-page SEO, a lot of the times you can rank a site with a fraction of the off-page SEO because any off-page SEO that … If on site is proper, if it’s tight, if it’s strong, then any off-page will significantly affect, it will have a strong impact on the site because then the site will respond well to off-page because it is a well-built, well-structured site.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to have access to the site because you can accomplish through off-page. You can still rank a site with off-page. If the on-page is terrible, then you probably are fighting a losing battle. But if it’s decent, then you could probably still accomplish what you need to, depending on how competitive the keywords are that you’re targeting. But it’s likely that you could still accomplish what you needed to with off-page alone. But again, there are benefits certainly to being able to access the client’s website. Right? If you’re starting with garbage, it’s gonna be difficult to rank. So just keep that in mind. Okay.

It helps, it’s not 100% necessary. Well, it depends, right? It depends on what the status of the site is currently. If it’s a shitty site, if it was built poorly, optimized poorly, or if it’s spammed to death or whatever, then you may never be able to rank that site. But if it’s decent, if it’s fairly okay, then you could still just apply off-page methods and probably get the results that you want. However, if you can do both, manage the on-page and the-off page, you will get the best results. Right?

Are The SEO Methods In RYS Reloaded And GMB Work On WordPress.com And Wix.com Websites?

Number two, he says, “If my client has a WordPress.com or Wix.com website, can the SEO methods taught in RYS Reloaded and GMB work and getting first page ranking on Google?” Well, yes. Well, Local GMB Pro course is not really anything that have to do with websites, right? Local GMB Pro is how to optimize Google My Business and set up all of the Google assets to rank. Well, not even to rank, but to just generate leads from Google, independent of ranking. That’s what Local GMB Pro is about. It’s about getting leads, getting exposure from Google My Business, whether it ranks or not, and that’s what that whole … Again, despite traditional SEO, Local GMB Pro can generate leads from Google. Okay. So that’s what local GMB Pro is.

RYS is about using Google’s assets as an off-page tool as well as an entity validator, an authority builder, and multiple other things. But it’s more of an off-page thing. Again, it has nothing to do with the website structure or the platform itself, WordPress or Wix. It doesn’t matter because all you’re doing is using Google properties to push relevancy and authority over to whatever property is that you’re trying to rank.

Marco, do you wanna chat about that a little bit?

Marco: Yeah. It’s just one of the pillars that we teach, ART, the art of ART, activity, relevance, trust and authority, both on the link origin and on the link destination. What that means is you get visitors no matter how you show activity and Google reward you as long as everything is relevant and you’re working with trusted and authoritative entities. If you become along with that, a trusted and authoritative entity, then you get rewarded. Google will also reward you for being in Google because Google trusts itself. It’s the ultimate as far as what it trusts. So working in what we call working inside the belly of the beast also has its rewards.

Yeah. As Bradley said, it makes absolutely no difference. I mean, you work with whatever. I mean, you have a free WordPress blog ranking for … what is it? Free-, no, not free. SEO Virginia. Yeah. I mean, it just goes to show that if you get that activity in there, everything else just fall into place as long as it’s relevant, trusted and authoritative.

I keep telling people, and I just mentioned it in our Semantic Mastery Facebook group, the Mastermind, that ART, A-R-T, will trump anything. It will even overcome any of the negative factors, of the algorithm, penalties and all of that. You become almost immune to anything that Google has to throw at you because you’re signaling rank pot-, excuse me, rank brain in the way that it wants to be signaled. You’re doing the Google tickle, the T tickle. I mean, it blows up. It becomes a self-feeding monster once you get all that activity in there.

Bradley: Yeah. This is an example of what Marco was just talking about, this is that WordPress.com. So free wordpress.com blog, guys. If you take a look at this, there’s no content on this page. It looks like there’s content, but the only content on this page is this right here. That’s it. The rest of those are embedded files. That’s RYS at work there, guys. That’s RYS Academy right there at work. Okay. Again, go view page source, the post body, the article body of this post. The content body is this right here. That’s the only text on the page. The rest of it is all embedded files RYS style, and that’s all.

Look at that, guys. It’s ranked number three in organic for SEO Virginia. I mean, that’s pretty powerful. Again, that’s all off-page stuff. There is some on-page going on there because of the iframes that are actually embedded in this page, but it’s primarily an off-page thing that’s got this ranking. And that’s the power of RYS, right?

By the way, the Google site as part of the stack and that’s been number one since May of 2015. Guys, that’s been number one since May of 2015, or within a few weeks anyways, that’s when it was published. Look at that, it’s a horrid site. It was just for a test purpose, guys. Still ranked. Still ranked, it’s three and a half years now. Still ranked. Anyways, there you go. Will it work? It damn sure does.

How Do You Get The URL Of A Scheduled Post In The MGYB GMB Service?

Dustin’s up, or Da B. “Hey there. I’m using the MGYB post scheduling service but I was wondering, in the Local GMB course you link to the previous post but when I scheduled a post, then I don’t have the URL of the last URL because it will be scheduled. How do I link to the post then if the last post yet is not published or is not published yet? Greetings. Dustin.” That’s a good question Dustin.

Marco, that’s something that I think Rob was talking about that was going to be a feature, that was going to be released soon within the auto poster was the ability to silo a post. Is that correct?

Marco: Yeah. We keep going back and forth with Shripad. I’m not sure if that’s available yet. But I mean, there’s an easy solution to that. Link in the body or you’re still not gonna have the post URL. You would need the original post URL, and then the next one, then the next one. So Shripad will have to come up with something regarding that so that we can solve that issue. But, yes, he is working on it so we can silo GMB posts.

Bradley: Yeah. I’m thinking if the script would wait until a published one was pulled and then grab the short URL and then link to that before the next one that’s scheduled publishes. You know what I mean? That would work to build a silo on that. I know that if you post the post … So you publish the post, then you grab the URL and link to it from the next post. But, you’re right, if you wanna schedule out multiple posts in advance, right now there’s not an ability to do that yet.

But that’s something, Marco, if you wanna make a note of that specifically, silo posts together, schedule post together, which I’m sure that can be integrated at some point. Right now that’s not something that can be done, Dustin, but we’re working on that. It’s a great feature.

Marco: No. Dustin, what I would suggest is you just have your VA go in and add links as needed.

Bradley: As they’re published.

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Right. As they publish, go grab the URL, and then go post the next one. That’s the only thing we can do to daisy chain them together right now until we have the automation such that it will be able to do it. Okay.

Jordan says, “On one of the, or …” Okay. One of the guys, here we go. “One of the guys on our SEO team said after an SEO pitch this probably sounds like magic to them. I still can’t believe we get paid for this stuff, almost like grownup version of video games. Haha.” That’s funny. Well, I can believe we’d get paid for it, man. Think about all the testing and all the studying and all the learning and stuff that you, guys, and the money that you invest in your education and to tools and all that stuff.

I mean, we spend a lot of time learning this stuff, guys, we should be paid for it. I mean, think about that. We spend all our time learning how to perform this SEO magic stuff. A business owner that’s doing plumbing, for example, he’s out unclogging drains and that kind of stuff. He wouldn’t have time to learn all this stuff. How do I know? Because I was an electrical contractor and I had to learn how to do this shit while I was doing electrical work. It just so happens I found that I could make more money at this, that’s why I switched to this all together.

What are you gonna say, Marco?

Marco: Yeah. I was gonna say we deserve to be paid and be paid well. I mean, do you know how much time we’ve spent between RYS Academy, RYS Reloaded, Local GMB Pro, Local PR Pro, Local Lease Pro? Do you know how many hours have gone into researching that and making it work? Making that all work hand in hand so that one pushes the other and you’re pushing ultimate power to whatever destination so that that client’s phone rings?

Yeah. It may seem like magic. “Well, my phone rang. You did all that.” But it’s actually just hours and hours and hours of being a total geek.

Are There Ways We Can Use Press Releases Based On The Battleplan Aside From Launching A New Site?

Bradley: Rabbit-hole time. Yeah. Dan’s up. He says, “I’ve looked using press releases based off the Battle Plan and saw that you have them at the store. Besides using them for launching a new site would there be other places that I could use them? I do some consulting on the side for local businesses and build sites, lead gen, et cetera?”

Yeah, Dan. “Press releases are my favorite off-page or link building method really. Like no question, I absolutely love press releases. I use them as my primary off-page link building tool or method. I still use spam links from time to time for certain things, but for the most part I’m using press releases for link building.”

Yeah. You can use them. Guys, there’s dozens and dozens of things that you can publish press releases about. I’ve talked about them. Dan, we have a course called Local PR Pro which is specifically about how to use press releases to rank in the Maps pack, to get Google GMB, Google My Business profiles ranked in the maps pack using press releases. Right?

That’s what that course, Local PR Pro, is all about. In that course, I talk about how there’s multiple different things that you could publish a press release about. Because that’s a question that comes up often, “Well, I don’t think my client has anything that’s really newsworthy to publish a press release about.”

But think about it, getting a five-star review, you could publish a press release about receiving a five-star review or your client. Or you could publish a press release about a new employee being hired. Or a seasonal change to the product line that’s available. Or the services that are available, depending on what kind of business you’re dealing with. Or an accolade that the company receives, some sort of award or something like that. Or any charitable things, any charity events that they’re hosting or that they contribute to or participate in. Right?

There’s just dozens and dozens of things, hooks, angles that you could use to write a news release or something that can be … Guys, you can even publish a press release about a new blog post that’s been published on the website. No kidding. I mean, you just have to get a little bit creative. Dan, when I say you have to get creative, I don’t mean you. I mean, what I would recommend is hiring a PR writer, from Upwork or something like that, that can come up with these angles. A good press release writer can come up with a newsworthy angle for just about anything.

Again, if you’re doing a lot of this work, you could hire a PR writer, a good PR writer from like Upwork or something like that. Or if you’ve got a good press release distribution service that you subscribe to for monthly press releases or whatever, if they’ve got good writers in-house, which most good services do now, then they’ll have writers that are already trained on how to find news where the angles or to create hooks or their stories for the press releases. Right?

For example, if you use the MGYB press release service, the writers there from the Press Advantage distribution network, if that’s what you’re using, it’s fabulous, and there the press releases are almost twice the content length of typical press releases. There’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 words as opposed to 300 to 400, which is what most of them are. So those writers are really, really good, like their sole purpose in life is to find an angle or to create an angle to write a press release about. Those are the same writers that you have access to when you buy a press releases from us individually.

Okay. Anybody wanna comment on that before we move on? It’s a good one, Dan.

Marco: No. I think you hit the nail on the head. They’re great for just about everything. The only thing that you have to avoid is self-promotion, but you get that from most of them. You just have to define what self-promotion is. You go and you advertise. Well, we’re in Facebook, if you’ve just started your Facebook page, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. It’s still self-promotion. It’s just not getting sales. That’s what you wanna try to avoid.

Other than that, it’s fantastic for link building. Not only that, if you hit the press release, whatever the distribution network is with link building, it’ll push through. You’re putting a filter in between the destination so that you hit that with link building. It’ll power it up even more. They just work really well for everything.

Bradley: They damn sure do. Like Marco said, you can actually do self promotional PRs, but the salesy part is what you gotta leave out. They shouldn’t be salesy. But they can be self-promotional. Again, a good PR writer will be able to disguise a promotion as a story, a news story, and that’s really what you wanna do. That’s why I say don’t do it yourself. If I had to write press releases, I’d be a very miserable person. I wouldn’t wanna do it, but some people enjoy that stuff and they’re good at it. All right.

Is It Okay To Start With Battleplan Before Going Into The Mastermind and Syndication Academy Courses?

Andrew Walker’s up. Andrew is a local guy to me. I was in lead share, like a breakfast lead share group with him for several years that I don’t attend those things much anymore. Andrew is a great guy. Anyways, it’s good to see you here, Andrew. I haven’t seen him in a while. He says, “Hey guys, it’s been a long time since I’ve been on Hump Day Hangouts. I got caught up in the cold calling strategy to build my business and also had a case of the shiny object syndrome.” Well, we all do, Andrew. Don’t beat yourself up, buddy. We all go through that. I promise you, I’ve been through it. I still struggle with that, to be honest.

“I don’t fully understand how powerful-,” or excuse me, “I didn’t fully understand how powerful digital marketing is and what it can do for your business. You would think that that’s a no-brainer for an IT guy. Anyway, I’m back for real and I’m ready to learn this stuff. I’ve just downloaded the Battle Plan. I’d love to get involved in the Mastermind, but I’m not able to afford that at this time. Syndication Academy looks to be a great runner up. Can I start there to get things going or just start with the Battle Plan? Thanks, guys, and congrats on your four year anniversary.”

Okay. Great question, Andrew. Again, glad to see you back, man. The Syndication Academy is, yeah, it’s good, however, because, I’m not gonna knock Syndication Academy, but what we recommend is, especially for you, Andrew, you’re running your IT business, your IT services business, and so it depends on how much time you have. If you’ve got a lot of time and no money then, yes, pick up Syndication Academy because then you can learn how to build your own syndication network, which is gonna be one of the critical components to your business in expanding your reach and helping to generate more leads, it’ll help with your SEO and all that kind of stuff.

However, there’s a lot of time that goes into learning how to build a syndication network and, unless you plan on building syndication networks for others or selling them to others, I wouldn’t recommend that you go through all the trouble of learning how to build all that stuff for your own branded syndication network, for your own business. If you’re looking to try to grow your business, then your time is better spent not learning how to build a syndication network that you’re only gonna build one for your own business.

Your time is better spent marketing your business. You can instead just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us and we will build it to our specifications, which is exactly what we teach in the training. You can save yourself weeks of study and implementation by just buying a Done For You Syndication Network and you still reap the benefits of it without having to spend weeks of your time. Does that make sense? They’re inexpensive enough that there’s really no reason that you can’t just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us. It’s cheaper or about the same price as the cost of a month tuition to Syndication Academy. Right?

Anyways, my point is, if you want, Andrew, since you can’t join the Mastermind yet, what I recommend is that you attend our Hump Day Hangouts regularly on Wednesdays, ask your questions here try, keep it to one question per post. In other words, you can post a few times, but try to keep it one question per post please. Ask questions here and we will try to guide you in the best way possible to help you to start growing your IT business, just from these Hump Day Hangouts. Then once you have generated some revenue you can always come join the Mastermind, which is your best bet, because the Mastermind is not just about marketing stuff.

Guys, we’ve gotten away from just teaching SEO or just teaching marketing methods. It’s more about building your business regardless of whether you’re building a local agency or consulting firm, or you want to build your own brick and mortar business, or virtual business for that matter. We want to teach you how to do all of that, which includes marketing and includes SEO, and includes all that stuff, but we’re not pigeon holing our training into just marketing training, if that makes sense. A lot more goes into it than that.

I would suggest, Andrew, that what you do is come back and join us here in Hump Day Hangouts, get involved, stay engaged, ask questions. We also have our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials Facebook group that you could ask questions there. As soon as you’re able to, I would invest in joining the Mastermind so that you can get, basically, almost one-on-one guidance from each one of us my partners and I as well as all of the other members in the Mastermind that are also savvy business owners. Right? That’s part of why it’s Mastermind because it’s not just about us teaching all the time, it’s about everybody in there contributing and helping each other, which is fabulous. Okay.

By the way, one of our top members, longtime members, Jason Johnson, who is what Adam was just talking about at the very beginning of this Hump Day Hangout, he was mentioning somebody was having difficulty setting up their MX records for G suite email to use their domain for their email within G suite. Jason Johnson posted, “Hey, I saw somebody was having trouble with MX records. Hey, I’m an IT guy. If anybody has any questions or any problems, tell them to reach out to me. I’ll help them for free as long as they’re a Mastermind member.”

Andrew, what I’m saying is, Jason is an IT guy who’s been in our Mastermind. He does digital marketing on the side, but also markets his own business and somebody that you could absolutely click with. Probably the two of you could chat about what he’s doing for his business and what’s working for him in generating leads for his IT business and all that kind of stuff. Right?

Again, that’s part of the power of a Mastermind. It’s not just learning from me or Marco when, you know, I’m gonna teach you how to generate leads for your business, but I generate leads for contracting businesses. Right? You’re trying to generate leads for IT services, and computer repair networking, and that kind of stuff, so why not get the advice direct from somebody that’s already generating leads for that type of a business, which we have members in our group to do that? Does that make sense?

That’s the power of a Mastermind. Okay. So that’s what I recommend. In the meantime, if you don’t have the money, come back here, ask questions, implement what you can, go through our YouTube channel Semantic Mastery, youtube.com/semanticmastery. Use the channel search function, ask questions over there. You’re likely going to find already video answers for many of your questions. Then, like I said, anything that you can’t find answers to, post in either the Facebook group or post back here on the event page every week and we’ll come in and answer your questions. As soon as you can generate a little bit of positive revenue, I would reinvest that back into your education and into building your business by joining the Mastermind, getting guidance from us as well as our other members.

Marco: I’m gonna give him just a couple of weeks. First of all, welcome back, Andrew. Sorry that you had a shiny object syndrome. I mean, that sucks and it makes you spend a whole lot of money and time chasing. It becomes a useless path. You fill up your computer with a whole bunch of garbage that you’re never going to use and you realize how much money you spent and then you get caught up at where you are right now where you ended, and dropped all that money and you have nothing to show for it.

But that’s okay, lesson learned. The two examples that I’m gonna give you is, I’m gonna give you Paul Fussell, who’s always in these Hump Day Hangouts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he drops in today; or if he isn’t, it’s because he’s out making money. He was at POFU Live, as a matter of fact, our event. The way he went about doing it, he come into Hump Day Hangouts, ask questions, and then go and go and apply. Ask questions, go and apply. then he started purchasing our drive stacks to rank. I know that he was doing dental for a while, I don’t know what he’s doing now.

Anyway, the thing about Paul is that he just went and he got Done For You services, and then he was chasing clients. Every time he’d get a client, drive stack, and that’s how he would he would rank them. But that’s Paul and that’s how he did it, so Hump Day Hangouts and Done For You services.

Then, we get to Jordan in Syndication Academy. Jordan lives in Syndication Academy, he’s always there. He’s one of our, I don’t know, one of our long-running and most active members of Syndication Academy. He runs an agency and I think he just got a huge nationwide client, but it’s from Syndication Academy. I’m not gonna say that he got everything from Syndication Academy, but I know that that’s his foundation and I know that that’s what he’s doing to rank his clients, to help his clients and to help his agency.

He has an agency, actually he’s an agency owner, but he decided that Syndication Academy was the thing for him. But, of course, they’ll all tell you, and Jordan will tell you that the Battle Plan is the place where you start, and you have to follow it. If you follow the Battle Plan, then you’re going to get to our Done For You services.

It’s a whole lot easier to go and buy a Syndication Academy Network, as Bradley mentioned, than to learn how to build a one-of-a-kind that you only need that one time. Why not go buy it and pay that than to pay a monthly membership to learn how to build one, or you might not wanna learn how to build one, or you might need?

It’s just to buy them and then go and sell it to clients, to people you know. Then, you pitch the benefits of being branded of having that footprint of being seen, of your content being seen everywhere, pushing your content to where the people are hanging out. So that’s one of the benefits.

You could do it many ways. Now, of course, we’re always going to tell you that the Mastermind is the place to be because that’s where like-minded entrepreneurs hang out, people who want to grow their business and get away from just that weekly paycheck and having to wait until the next one so that you could do whatever it is that you wanna do. We wanna push you, guys, past that. We call it POFU, position of fuck you.

Whatever that position is for you, Andrew, we want you to get there. There isn’t just one way to get there, but we do wanna help you get there. So whether you choose Hump Day Hangouts, whether you choose Syndication Academy, or what we suggest, whether you join our Mastermind, we’re going to help you any way we can. That’s what we’re here for.

Bradley: That’s right. Let’s not forget Mohammad. He’s a shining example. Mohammad Mackey. He started by just joining Hump Day Hangouts and coming and asking questions week in and week out and for months. Eventually, he got to a point where he landed a couple of his first clients and started making enough money. He came and joined the Mastermind. Then, he went through a little bit of a struggle for over-promising to clients and ended up losing some clients and had to drop out of the Mastermind for a little bit.

But he kept coming to Hump Day Hangouts and asking more questions, even during that time where he had to back out of the Mastermind, and he got the education that he needed and he implemented it. Right? It’s nothing we did, all we did was provide him with information, but he’s the one that took action and kept at it. He kept persisting in working and he kept finding stuff that wasn’t working until he found stuff that did work. Then, he landed some clients again, got his money back up, and joined the Mastermind again.

We have multiple examples of people that have done that just by starting here, right here at Hump Day Hangouts, Andrew, and you can do that too. Right? The Battle Plan, like I said, will tell you do this, this, this, and this, and you’re going to start getting results. It doesn’t say that you have to learn how to do those things, it just tells you apply these things. Right?

You can either learn how to do those things and do them yourself or, as a business owner, it would be much more efficient with your time to just purchase the Done For You services and apply them in the order that they’re recommended and reap the benefits of those without having to learn how to do it. Okay. Great question. Again, glad to have you back, Andrew. We’re happy to see you participate and be a lot more engaged over the coming weeks.

What Are The Factors You Consider When Finding The Best Keywords For Ranking Opportunity In Local Lead Gen Campaigns?

Gordon’s up. He says, “Hey guys, thank you very much again for the help you provide on Hump Days. It’s greatly appreciated.” You’re welcome, Gordon. “If you’re looking to find a low hanging fruit where you can easily rank in the GMB 3-pack, other than looking at the reviews of the current businesses in the 3-pack in their citation profile, what else do you do to decide whether or not you have found a golden goose ranking opportunity? Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls? Thanks again, Gordon.”

Okay. First of all, Gordon, Local Lease Pro, I showed the exact simple method, it’s kind of time-consuming, but the simple method using it, a free software that we show, we use to identify what I call slam-dunk opportunities, which is which you’re calling a golden goose in your question, okay? Again, that was in Local Lease Pro. If you have access to that, which I’m hoping you do because it was on sale for a very, very ridiculously low price for about eight days during the Side Hustle Toolbox launch. That’s close now, but it is available, Local Lease Pro, but we teach the method specifically how to find low-hanging opportunities.

Now I can’t go into the details of that right here, but it is very, very simple to do using the Easy Local Cash software, which is a free software. It’s Chad Kimball’s software. It just shows you, basically, ever since July of this year, when mobile implemented or switched to the mobile first index, that opened up just massive, massive opportunity. I’m telling you, guys, it opened up more opportunity than I’ve seen since I started my local marketing career in 2010. And that is what we teach on how to find those opportunities that have been opened up by this major change in the algorithm or which index is used first. Right? The mobile first index.

That’s all in Local Lease Pro. I can’t obviously say that right here. It is in the course. Also, you can find out, certainly, if you joined a Mastermind, because Local Lease Pro is one of the first courses that Mastermind members get now when they join.

Marco: Yeah, the how. I mean, that’s the course, the how is, you know, if we gave you that, then why have a course in the first place? So, sorry, that’s something that we can’t do. I’m glad that you mentioned again the Mastermind. I was in our mini, we have the mini-Mastermind and mine is on Tuesday nights for an hour. I have three great people. I have Jamina, I have Will Kenderdine, and John Wypick. We were going over my method for using the software and we went over it in detail. I don’t mind for an hour. I mean, I decided to give my time, right?

So this is what it’s all about. Membership has its privileges. I do things a little bit differently. I find targets a little bit differently, but it all works just the same way. The same way that you teach it, the way that I do it, I already decided to do it. The thing is that membership has its privileges. You have to be a member in order to get the information that you’re asking about. It’s not something that we can give away for free.

Bradley: Yeah. “Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls?” Well, that’s a good question. If you do your research properly upfront, you should know. First of all, you should research your industry or the niche that you’re targeting. Now if you followed us at all for any length of time, Gordon, which I know you have, you know that I’ve been telling you and I’ve been preaching this and beating this drum for years now, which is: specialize. Focus on one industry, guys. Become a big fish in one industry instead of a me-too agency or a me-too consultant or me-too local marketer that will just accommodate any business that will talk to you.

Trust me, you will never gain any traction in your business, or you will have a much harder time gaining traction in your business, if you just offer marketing services to any business that will talk to you. Because your amount of work multiplies exponentially because you have to do keyword research, you have to do market research, you have to understand the vocabulary of the industry, you have to figure out what the pain points are in those industries both for the consumer and for the business owner.

Because if you’re the business owner that you can help them market their products and services, you need to understand the consumer’s mindset, but you also have to understand the business owner’s mindset. So that you can talk to them and speak their language, build rapport with them. So you have to learn two different markets for every industry you enter, the consumer market and the business market. Right?

There’s just so much work that goes into learning, becoming a marketing special or professional in any industry. It requires a ton of research. So if you try to just say, “Oh, I’m gonna be a local marketing guy and I’ll talk to any business in my area that will talk to me,” you’re gonna create a shit ton of additional work that you can significantly reduce. You’ll gain a lot more traction a lot faster in your business if you focus in on one particular industry because then you can craft everything you do in your business around that particular industry. All your marketing messages, all your keyword research, your content templates, everything that you do can be designed around that one particular industry. Now you become a specialist.

I use this as an example. Would you go to a general health practitioner for a heart surgery? No, you go to a cardiologist. Why do you think businesses, like let’s say home remodeling contractors or general contractors, would they want to go to a me-too agency or would they want to go to a contractor media, contractor marketing agency that specializes in general and remodeling contractor marketing? Does that make sense? Which one would you prefer?

Gordon, I recommend specializing in on one industry. But don’t just arbitrarily decide on what industry you wanna focus in on and say, “I’m gonna build my business around that,” you need to research that industry and determine, is there a call volume? Is there significant interest in that? Is there money there?

What’s one of the ways that you can determine that? An easy and simple and a quick way is go do a search for the product and/or service as if you were a customer looking for that product or service. Just go do a Google search for it and take a look and see, are there ads? Are there Google ads? If so, that means there’s paying advertisers. If there’s Google ads, that means people are paying to bid on those keywords, which means there’s likely traffic for those keywords. If there wasn’t traffic for those keywords and if those keywords didn’t convert, there wouldn’t be ads. Does that make sense? People don’t pay and bid on keywords-, well, good advertisers don’t pay and bid on keywords that don’t convert or don’t generate traffic that converts. Right? So if you’re seeing Google ads, that’s a good indication.

Now I wouldn’t stop there. I’d research it further. You could do things, like use Google Trends to find out where in the country, or in the world for that matter, but I always do US-based searches, you can find out where the hotspots are for where the search traffic is the most or the search interest is the most for the types of products or services that you’d be promoting in that industry. Right? So then, you can start to develop out which locations you’re gonna target first for your business. Does that make sense?

Remember, specialize on one industry, guys, because then you can scale your business by geography instead of by type or kind. Does that make sense? Instead of trying to scale your business by taking on new industries where you’re gonna create so much additional work, scale your business by continuing with the same industry but expanding your service area or your territory, your target area. Right?

That’s a hell of a lot better or much more efficient way to build your business. Not only that, in time you will build a name and a reputation for being that type of a marketing specialist for that particular industry. People will start to seek you out as opposed to you having a force or push your marketing, your services onto others. People will start to seek you out because they know that you’re the specialist. Does that make sense?

How do you determine whether there’s enough search traffic? You have to research it. Make sure it’s an industry that has paying advertisers. Make sure that there is significant search interest for those types of things and that it’s profitable.

As I said about in the past, carpet cleaning, there’s a ton of search interest for carpet cleaning but there’s very, very, very small margins in the carpet cleaning industry. Right? Carpet cleaning companies don’t particularly like to pay for marketing services or for lead generation services, they don’t have the budgets for it because their margins are very small.

But if you just did keyword research, which is, when I first started, the very first lead gen site I ever built was carpetcleaningalexandriava.com. I don’t own that anymore, but it was a lead gen site that I built because all I did was base my decision on which industry I was gonna target based upon keyword search volume from the Google Keyword Planner. It said something like 600 exact match searches for that term “carpet cleaning Alexandria VA” per month. It was like 660 or something like that, 600 searches per month. So I said, “Oh man, there’s a lot of search volume there. I can make money with that.”

Well, I built the site and got it ranked number one. We were getting 30 to 40 calls a week through that lead gen site and I had trouble monetizing it for even a hundred dollars a month. No shit. Then when I finally got down to the chewy center of why that was by sitting down with the contractor that was renting that site from me or leasing that site from me, he told me, “Because the carpet cleaning business has very, very small margins.” Right? Very small margins. He was making something ridiculous, per carpet cleaning job $8 or $9 or $10, or $12 in profit. It was something stupid. After paying his labor and insurance costs and, the cleaning solution costs, and all of this overhead, he had a very small margin so he had trouble paying for that.

What happened? I ended up switching into other higher margin businesses. That’s why I love the tree service industry because it’s huge margin. That’s why I like remodeling contractors, home builders, HVAC repair, any sort of repair, roofers, all those types because the margins are so much larger. Does that make sense?

Again, you have to do the research, Gordon. There’s no real easy answer there. You just got to be logical and do the research and you should be able to find the opportunities as well as the perfect industry. Also, one last thing I would suggest about that is, seriously, guys, try to find an industry that you, not only has all the correct signals or markers of being a good industry to work at, but also one that you have a genuine interest in because it’ll make it feel less like work. Okay.

Honestly, I don’t have any interest in tree services, except for the fact that that does make me some damn good money, which kind of makes it interesting. But if you can find an industry that you have a genuine interest in, it’ll feel less like work while you’re building your business.

Anybody wanna comment on that before I move on? That was a long-winded answer I know.

Marco: No, but it was perfect. There’s no need to go into that any further.

How Do You Set Up The Syndication Network Of Several GMB Sites In Same Metro Area?

Bradley: He says, “Hey guys, so if I have a group of GMB sites in the same metro area and a WordPress site ranked on page one and Serps, a YouTube channel with videos ranking on page one of Google’s video page and I want to lease all of these as a total package deal to a business owner operating an area, how do I set up a syndication network for this? Can I feed the RSS feeds from all the GMB sites into the WordPress site blog into one generically branded syndication network? Or do I need to set up separate networks for each GMB site or WordPress site? Thank you very much for your comment.”

Michael, I don’t recommend a syndication network for lead gen assets unless you need them. For example, if you’re having trouble getting a lead gen asset to push another 3-pack, can a syndication network will help for that? Then, absolutely.

The other thing is, if you have a cluster of Google My Business profiles for a metropolitan area that are all branded the same, then you could use one syndication network for those. When you talk about grabbing the GMB RSS feeds, I’m not sure what you mean from that, unless you’re using our GMB auto poster which will generate an RSS feed, but you can’t just get an RSS feed, at least not that I’m aware of.

Marco, this may have changed, but is there an RSS feed from the GMB websites yet?

Marco: Not that I know of. Not that I’m aware of.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah. As far as I’m aware, there is not an RSS feed from the GMB websites. So our GMB auto poster will create an RSS feed from the GMB posts that are connected through that auto poster or that are posted with that auto poster. So you can do it that way. But like I said, you should have a common brand for all of those assets, if that’s the case. If you want to feed them all into one network, which again, I’m gonna be 100% transparent with you guys, I’m not building syndication networks for my lead gen assets. I build syndication networks for clients because I tell them that it’s critical. It is because it’s brand building, it’s entity validation and brand authority building, right?

So any client, I’m gonna tell them. “You should have a syndication network to protect your brand and to amplify your brand, expand your reach. It also helps to build your authority and all that kind of stuff.” For content marketing, all my clients, I suggest we do regular content marketing, blogging that gets syndicated out to the syndication network. That’s all true. It’s not just because I wanna charge them money, guys, it’s to protect their brand and to help them to stay ranked.

But for lead gen assets, that’s an additional expense. So why implement that? Until and unless you need to, right? So for my lead gen assets that I’m building right now, I’m not using syndication networks. If I have lead gen assets that I do all the other magic that I work to them and they don’t end up producing, because maybe they’re not ranking well or that area ended up being more competitive than I originally thought, then I may add a syndication network. But that’s only if and when it’s absolutely needed. It’s kind of like a last resort thing because it’s an additional expense that I don’t wanna have to put up for a lead gen asset if I can get results without it.

Now once you’ve monetized an asset, a lead gen or, in this case, a multiple assets, once you’ve monetized them, I’ve talked about this too, if once you’ve developed it … Like for me, when I monetize a lead gen asset, what I do is after several months, two or three months of the service provider paying on time and there’s no issues, if we develop a decent relationship, then I offer at that point to rebrand those lead gen assets after the client, certainly their name. It’s a lot more legit that way, right?

Like I said, at that point, once I would offer the rebranding, then that’s where I could upsell them on, “Hey, since we’re gonna be rebranding these, we should also go to syndication network because it’s gonna help to protect your brand and we can use that to help continue to push the lead gen assets that I’m gonna rebrand. It’ll help to continue to keep them producing for you, blah blah blah blah blah.”

At that point, we set up syndication network. Might even set them up on content marketing services. That’s an additional charge beyond the lead gen leasing or pay per lead fees that I’m charging. Depending on how I’ve monetized that asset, this is now starting to build their asset, syndication network with their branding, building, doing content marketing on their website.

So now I’m double dipping, right? Now I’m generating money from my lead gen assets and also working on the client’s assets as a separate fee. Right? So it gives you a whole lot of opportunity, Michael. But for your lead gen assets, I don’t recommend setting up syndication network unless you absolutely need to. Try to get results without it. Guys, I am the firm believer of trying to get the most results or trying to get the best results with the least amount of effort possible and least amount of money invested too.

Should You Create A Blog Post If You Syndicate A GMB Post?

Okay. It’s a good Hump Day today, by the way. I’m liking these questions. It’s a good question, Michael. All right. Ray had some confusion earlier. We’ll pass over that. Quit This House, he says, “If I wanted to syndicate my GMB post, should I create a blog post with the post details and link or should I post to one of the social media sites and create a trigger from there?”

Quit This House, use the GMB auto poster. I’m telling you, it’s stupid and expensive, it’s super convenient and efficient, and it can generate an RSS feed from your GMB posts, and then you can just connect that directly to a syndication network, and then, viola, it’s done. You don’t have to go … Right now, what you’re talking about would require a manual action for every post. Right?

If you just set it up through the auto poster, you can, not only schedule out your GMB post all in one setting so that they automatically publish on the day and time that you select, but it will also generate an RSS feed that then you can populate or trigger a syndication network with, and all of that is automated.

Marco: By the way, since we’re back on the auto poster, I got an answer from Rob and he says, yes, we’ll be able to silo based on tagging. So you can create multiple silos within the auto poster just by tagging, by using different tags. The function isn’t integrated yet, but it’s coming. It’s already being developed, guys. Those of you who are looking to get into this, get in there now because it just keeps …

Shripad is a master programmer. He just keeps adding to it more and more functionality and he’s now charging more. We’re not gonna charge more monthly yet. If it gets to the point where there’s just a ton of programming that needs to be done, the price will probably need to go up. But we usually grandfather people into the prices where they are, so remember that.

Bradley: Yeah. Michael says, “Holy crap, I can’t believe I got the $1,000 Local Lease Pro course for $47.” Yeah, Michael. Look, for eight days, we promoted shit out of that and told everybody that once the Side Hustle Toolbox offer closed that it was gonna, I originally said it was gonna go to 500, but it’s such a damn good course. I mean, I’m telling you, this is I think the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career, that Local Lease Pro method right there. That’s why we made it $1,000.

Not only that, but we’re gonna be updating the course. Like I said, I’ve got some new stuff to add to it. That as soon as I get my VA on track for the new changes and I polish up the processes a little bit, I’m gonna be sharing that, I’ll be updating Local Lease Pro. So, yeah, you’re right. Good thing that you got in on it.

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have … ” By the way, guys, if you want Local Lease Pro, if you don’t have it, there’s only two options, you can buy it for 1,000 bucks or you can join the Mastermind and you can get it included in your Mastermind membership. So it’s entirely up to you, but I would recommend it. I mean, guys, it’s even worth $1,000, I’m not kidding, because of the opportunity. I’m telling you, it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my eight, almost nine year career now. Okay.

Does It Hurt Or Help To Have Multiple Syndication Networks?

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have multiple syndication networks?” Yes, it can, Abe. Not for YouTube channels-, well, depending on how they were set up, but if you’re using syndication networks for blog syndication to try to rank your own domain, like a self-hosted site, then, yes, multiple syndication networks can hurt you, depending on how you have it set up and how you have a syndication set up,

I’ve said for years now, like we teach branded tier one syndication networks and we also talked about when we teach how to build two-tier syndication networks. You can take it out multiple tiers. But I’ve also recommended for years that you only use two-tier syndication networks on YouTube channels or multi-tiered syndication networks on YouTube channels or for YouTube syndication, not for blog syndication.

However, if you wanna do it for blog syndication, I do teach in Syndication Academy and I’ve talked about it multiple times how you can use multi-tiered syndication networks and reduce the chance of getting a Google slap. You cannot eliminate it because you are still leaving a footprint. But you can significantly reduce the footprint if you add additional content feeds as triggers into your second or third tiers. Right? Because what you wanna do is you wanna mask or bury your content among a whole lot of additional route relevant and related type content so that the blogs don’t show or appear to be solely for manipulating search rankings. Right? And that’s essentially what they are.

Again, with multi-tiered syndication networks, I don’t recommend them for blog syndication unless you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to put forth all the additional effort. Also, multitude syndication networks can break down because there’s a lot of moving pieces, there’s a lot of different content sources, which can cause you know different RSS feeds that you don’t have control over because they’re not your RSS feeds, which can cause problems. Multi-tiered syndication networks can be a bitch to maintain for that reason and so that’s another reason I don’t recommend them.

If you are just flatly syndicating your content to multiple syndication networks and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, then you are absolutely causing damage because it is clearly, the algorithm can pick that up in a split second. Right? Again, Abe, if you were gonna be building these types of stuff, like I said, the only way that … We have Syndication Academy where I talk about all of that stuff, seriously, I go into your best practices and everything about how to use them and where to use them. But for blog syndication, I highly recommend that you just use a one-tier branded syndication network and then you can boost the hell out of that. Okay.

Marco: Yeah. He also says that he’s used lower standard contractors in the past and he’s considering using our services on top. Dude, if you’ve done that, then don’t get a syndication network from us until you fix whatever it is that you’ve done. I suggest totally getting into Syndication Academy, seeing how it’s all supposed to work. I hope that you have access to all of these networks and multiple rings that have been done for you so that you can just stop whatever madness it was that was created and you could do it the right way. The way that it’s supposed to be done, which is branding. It’s done for branding and for syndicating your network. Yeah. It is done to manipulate but to manipulate in the right way. If you get caught manipulating the wrong way, you’re going to get slapped down.

What’s The Difference Between The Press Release Service In Serp Space And MGYB?

Bradley: That’s right. Ray says, “What is the difference between press release service from Serp Space, and MGYB? Are they overlapping and/or equivalent? They’re equivalent now, Ray, because, well, there’s two different levels of press releases orders from Serb Space. There was the press release and then press release plus. The press release was, the press advantage network, the distribution network, and that’s we have now a separate account. We have our own press advantage distribution network agreement with them that is available in MGYB. It’s basically the same distribution network. So it’s up to you if you wanna order from Serp Space or if you wanna come to MGYB which is owned and controlled entirely by Semantic Mastery and my partners. If that makes sense.

Serp Space was a collaboration. We are no longer part of that. There’s no issues there or anything like that. I’m just letting you know, if you wanna order directly from us, it’s through MGYB. Okay. Good question.

Should We Link From GMB Biz.Site Description?

Doodle Digital Marketing, I like that. He says, “Hey guys, I love Hump Day Hangouts. Tons of value. “Should we link out from the GMB biz site description?” Not … Well, wait a minute, the GMB, yes. You can link from the GMB website content. I don’t know about the description. But if you’re talking about the GMB business description, no, you can’t put links in that; that’s short. I think it only allows 750 characters. But if you’re talking about the GMB website, yes, you can link out to that.

What I don’t recommend doing a lot of external links, unless it makes sense, it has to be relevant guys, remember, this is a Google property, so I would not be doing some stupid “I’m gonna link to a .gov or .edu site for authority” because that’s bullshit and it has been for years. If it’s relevant, then, yes. If it’s not relevant, you’re just doing it because you learn that somewhere on some stupid SEO program somewhere, don’t do it because that’s dumb.

But what I would recommend doing is, I always link, and I teach this, but I always link from the GMB website text, the content body of the website, I always link to the GMB maps share URL, as well as to the GMB website. So it’s linking to itself, right? If you have an external website, so self-hosted website, you can link to that. That makes sense. You could also link to some of your social media stuff. That makes sense. Any type of branded property that you could link out.

Again, I wouldn’t spam the description or the GMB website content with a bunch of exterior external links, I would keep it … Really that’s why I usually just link from the GMB website to itself and also to the GMB maps share URL because those are Google properties. Right? So just consider that.

It’s after five o'clock, I don’t have to get my daughter-, or I don’t get to have my daughter for dinner tonight, so I do have a couple extra minutes. Marco, can you hang out for a few extra?

Marco: Yeah, I can hang out for a few extra. My daughter isn’t crying it.

Bradley: We’ve only got a few questions left.

Marco: Let’s go.

Bradley: All right. John says, “I’ve got a Semantic Mastery syndrome. I have no doubt it’s the place to be.” “Thanks, John. John is one in Marco’s small group that he was talking about. Jordan says, “Marco’s right. We learned the why behind all these Semantic Mastery tactics, Syndication Academy, RYS stack, Press Releases, et cetera, and then just sell them along with some other deep rooted stuff we had developed in the lab.” He’s talking about his own business specifically, Jordan.

“Then we also create all the content via writing and optimizing it, which we charge for, and then we do web design with SEO strategy pre-launch. I couldn’t build a drive stack if my life depended on it. Haha.” Yeah, that’s great. I mean, honestly, guys, those are the audience that are tech nerds and like to get their hands dirty, so to speak, roll up their sleeves and get to work. Then, RYS Academy will teach you how to build drive stacks. It’s a lot of work. You can benefit from RYS stacks without having to learn how to build them, by just buying them done for you and you’ll save yourself a shit ton of time and energy.

Again, I’m not trying to discourage anybody from buying the course, I’m just saying you got to consider where to spend your time. Is learning how to build drive stacks going to progress your business? It might. You have to make that decision. I can’t make that decision for you. Or is the benefit and the result that the drive stack can produce going to help your business? And if so, then why go through the trouble of learning how to build them when you could just purchase them done for you and receive the benefit that you were seeking to begin with? Does that make sense? Then that way you could spend your time focusing on how to sell it or how to monetize it or how to apply it to get the result that you’re seeking. Does that make sense?

Again, guys, you have to think about it on a higher level. That’s what I think is really wrong with our industry, is that everybody teaches, or the vast majority of products tell you, “Hey, we’re gonna teach you how to do this one skill.” Yeah, I’m not trying to take that away from anybody. That skill is valuable. Whatever that skill may be, it’s valuable. But just because you know how to get a result from it, one particular skill does not make you a business owner, it does not make it a profitable business for you. Right?

So you got to think about how are you going to make money from whatever it is you choose to do? Is doing that thing, being the mechanic or the technician, is that actually going to make you the money or is selling that service and the result that that service produces going to make you the money? If that’s the case, then why don’t you focus on learning how to sell it and find people that are already good at doing it, fulfilling it, to do it for you right.

That’s what we’re trying to get at, guys, and Jordan understands that. That’s why Jordan’s business is cranking, it’s just kicking ass. Okay.

Any Black Friday Sales For Done For You Services Or Training?

Luis, he’s a new Mastermind member. “Hey guys, any Black Friday sales?” By the way, welcome, Luis. “Any Black Friday sales for Done For You services or training?” Yeah. Isn’t that with the GMB stuff was the pre-Black Friday sale?

Marco: It’s the pre. We will have something. Something’s coming your way and it’s gonna be good. Trust me. It’s not Black Friday yet, dude. But we will have something. It’ll be big. We control MGYB now. As Bradley mentioned, it’s ours. Semantic Mastery is our own store. So we’ve got some really good stuff coming your way.

Luis, I will be talking to you on Monday, as a matter of, fact. It’s his onboarding call. Again, I’m sorry, all these Mastermind questions keep coming up or Mastermind people. As part of the onboarding process, we give people a half hour call just to get them pointed in the right direction, to see where they’re going, where they want to be. So we ask questions, we try to provide guidance. I just happened to get Luis.

Guys, you can’t ask for who you want. You’re going to get whoever is up on the calendar, because we rotate since there’s five of us. But whoever you get, you’re going to get the direction that you need and you’re going to get your questions answered so that you can get started on your way to POFU.

That’s what we want you to do. We want you to get started getting to that place where you’re going to be and say, “Okay. Now I don’t have to deal with shitty clients. I don’t have to deal with shitty people. I am at a place where I can go into any negotiation from a position of power. I know what I’m worth. If this guy gives me any flack, I’m gonna have to say ‘Fuck you. I’m gonna go to your competitor and charge them half price just because I feel like it, because I don’t need you.‘” That’s what we want you to be.

Bradley: There you go so. Yes, Black Friday is this Friday. So, yeah, there will be some other specials. I don’t usually get involved with what promotions we’re doing, guys, so I couldn’t answer that. But I’m glad Marco said, yeah, we do have something coming Friday.

Should You Use Only The Main Keyword Phrase Or Should You Diversify Them When Building Links To All Assets?

Jay Turner. What’s up, Jay? He says, “I’ve been able to get my client ranked in the 3-pack for the second most trafficked keyword phrase with an RYS stack. High five, Marco.”

Marco: High five, dude.

Bradley: “But now I want to take on the main and most competitive keyword. I’m adding a silo of content to the RYS stack targeting the main keyword. So far so good. My question is when embarking on link building to all assets, like RYS, Syndication Network, GMB website, et cetera, should I use only the main keyword phrase or must I diversify the keyword phrases?”

Jay, diversify. What I recommend you do is go pool your … You should have probably already done keyword research anyways, so if you’re gonna be siloing, you should have your keyword themes relatively tight for the silos anyways. So make sure that if you’re gonna be direct targeting link building on a silo basis, that you’re only using a set of keywords that fall within that particular silo or keyword theme. Right? Does that make sense?

Let me take this down to a local level because what I wanna explain is, guys, when you’re doing a ton of like spam link building and such to power up tier one entities, which would be like drive stacks, press release, organization pages, syndication networks, even citations, you don’t want to hit, and I’m gonna say local because that’s primarily what I work on, and I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about here anyways. You said client ranks, so it’s likely it’s locally You said 3-pack. Right?

So you don’t wanna use the keywords with the location modifiers. You can use a very small percentage of your overall keywords that you’re gonna add to the anchor text or the link building that you’re gonna be either doing or buying a package or whatever. You can have a very, very small percentage with location modifiers, but I would keep that to an absolute bare minimum. Because it’s more about pushing the theme, the keyword theme, not the location, or the geographic theme, if that makes sense, it’s not about pushing location relevancy.

Because think about it, the further you move away from a local business the more broader the market segment is. In other words, you don’t wanna be targeting keywords or link building to tier 1 assets all the way down to the local level, including local location modifier, because it’s, remember your link building to tier one assets is two hops away from your target which would be your GMB asset or your primary website, the client’s website, or whatever, the further you get away from the ultimate target, the ultimate destination, the broader your keyword set should be, the broader the theme of the keyword set.

That’s why I say I don’t like to include local modifiers and anchor text when I’m building links to tier one assets. Instead I use higher or market-level keywords, broader market keywords. What do I mean by that? Instead of water heater repair Fairfax Virginia or Fairfax VA as a keyword that I would use as an anchor, it would be water heater repair and plumbing and plumbing repair and plumbing service, if that makes sense. I’d lose the local modifier and use more broader market-level keywords. Okay.

Also, you don’t wanna do entirely 100% on anchor text links, even with a diverse set of keywords. You wanna also include naked URLs and some generics. You can even use some brand terms at that point. It’s a little bit odd to use brand terms at tier two links because that’s again two steps away from your target URL. But it does make sense if you’re link building to, for example, if it’s a tier one branded property it can make sense to also include the brand name in some of those anchor text too. Right? I would just use those sparingly as well. It’s more about the keyword relevancy at that point in naked URLs, which is just pushing link equity to those tier one assets regardless of anchor text.

Marco, do you wanna comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, thanks, Bradley. What I would recommend is reach out to Dedia. We have a Dedia, he knows exactly what to do with your RYS stack to get the most out of it.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: If needed, then get our keyword research gig because we will come up with thousands upon thousands of keyword targets for you to either add relevance or to push, we provide what’s called buoyancy. “Buoyancy,” that’s one of the words that I have difficulty with. But we help push up the main keyword by providing relevance throughout the keyword silo. We give you all that with the keyword research.

Then, all you do is turn that over to Dedia and say, “Here, this is the folder that I’ve created, this is the keyword that I’m targeting, have at it.” Dedia has been with us long enough that he just knows, okay, this is what I need to do. He’ll blast it. He’ll hammer that RYS stack so that it produces.

Bradley: That’s right. You don’t have to worry about all those ratios and stuff, Jay. I know. I mean, honestly, I don’t worry about any of that stuff anymore because I don’t ever do any of that stuff anymore. If I need it, I just contact Dedia, exactly what Marco said, and I just say, “Hey, this is what I got. This is what I’m trying to accomplish. Make it happen,” and he does it.

Honestly, guys, that’s what I’m talking about. Jay, again, I don’t wanna get back on this pitch again, but if you have your own tools and you’re running your own link building tools and stuff like that, that’s great, if you’re efficient and all that. But if you’re not, which I am not, I have no desire to run those tools, just let the expert do it and Dedia has an absolute ninja. He’s an expert, a link building expert, so that’s why I just turned it over to him, defer to him anytime I have something that I need to spam to push additional link equity to. I just contact him say, “This what I got is what I need you do, make it happen,” and he does it. All right.

Jay vouches for the GMB auto poster. He says, “It’s great and Shripad does great work. He is very responsive in Support. I can attest to that too, not just because it’s me, but every time there’s an issue a little support bubble on the bottom right corner of the auto poster, you can just contact Support through there and he’s very, very responsive.”

Would You Recommend Using One Website For Multiple GMB Locations?

Abe says, “Also, I would like to know about using one website for multiple GMB locations. Is this recommended and possible?” It can be. You can just create separate location pages. So each location each, GMB locations should have its own dedicated page on the website and that’s the URL that you would submit as the website URL in the Google My Business profile. Does that make sense?

So instead of just using the home root domain, so the home page of the website for that brand across all different GMB assets, create a location specific page on that domain and then use that URL as that landing page URL as the website in GMB. It’s perfectly fine to do that, guys. But what you want is, if it’s the same brand, you can share the same brand name across all GMB locations. That’s fine. But you want a unique URL and a unique phone number and a unique address, if possible. Okay.

Strange NAP issues occur if you have two or more of the data points, the primary data points in a citation or NAP, which would be name, address, phone number, and also website URL. If you have two or more common data points among multiple locations, that’s going to cause NAP issues, which is going to make it very difficult to rank. You can have one common data point, typically the business name, because it’s a brand that can be used across multiple GMBs as long as the other primary data points are unique, physical address, phone number, website address. Does that make sense? So, yes, it’s possible.

Now one other thing I would mention is go back through, Abe, watch some of our previous Hump Day Hangouts. We’ll talk about the difference between using location pages, which would be pages on the root domain, or using location-specific sub-domains, which are separate WordPress installations, but there’s a reason to do, that’s to help mitigate risk, potential losing all of your assets if you were to catch a penalty. Again, we just talked about this last week, go back and watch the replay from last week and I’m pretty sure we talked about that extensively, about the benefit of using sub-domains over sub-folders or sub-directories. That’s pretty much the same thing I’m talking about here.

“Where’s the GMB auto poster?” John, just posting the Mastermind, we’ll get to the link.

Marco: I posted the link higher up.

Bradley: Yeah. I just didn’t have it. Thank you, Marco. Nestor says, Hey, I got to go guys. I got to wrap this up. So, anyways, and there’s Rob with the yearly discount for the GMB agency offer. That’s the enterprise account level or subscription level, which is 200 posts per month-, or excuse me 500 posts per month capacity. If you buy it on a monthly basis, subscribe month to month, it’s $200. If you buy the yearly license … It’s $200 per month, excuse me. If you buy the yearly license, it’s 1,000 bucks, divided by 12, comes out to be $84 dollars or $83 per month. So it’s a hell of a lot cheaper that way.

By the way, if you’re scheduling out 31 posts, which there’s a post scheduling feature, which is amazing in the GMB auto poster, so you can schedule out one post a day or however many you want. Let’s just say you’re doing one post a day, you could do 31 days. Then, there’s a republish option to where it can republish the post based upon the interval that you set. For example, if you set every 31 days, you can publish, you can schedule out 31 posts and then have them republish 31 days later, each post thereafter. Right? Does that make sense?

So day one and then day 32, that post publishes again. Day two and day 33, that post publishes again. Does that make sense? That way you can set up all of your posting and in an automated fashion. Well, with 500 posts per month, if you were to actually fill out or post one per day for each location, you can essentially put 16 locations in one enterprise account. Sixteen times 31 comes out to be 496, so you get 496 posts. Essentially, you can serve 16 locations, 100% one post per day with a single enterprise account. Does that make sense?

That’s how I’m clustering my sites right now. I gave you a little insight on that.

Marco: Yeah. I mean, it’s an awesome deal because it saves so much money and then the auto poster just saves so much time and effort. Once your VAs get proficient with going in there and just scheduling and putting everything up, it just saves you a ton of time of money. So you’ll make the money back that you invest in this just by the time you’re gonna save with your VAs, or even if you try to do it on your own, which you shouldn’t be doing.

Bradley: Yeah. Just so you guys are aware, for clients, I have a VA that goes in and manually posts for all the clients. I do that for a reason because every post is 100% unique that way. She still has content templates, but she goes in and she puts in a new image every time, and the content templates she uses, there’s tokens that she swaps out with different keywords and such. The target URLs are always being recycled to whatever we’re linking to from the GMB post and all that. So they become unique for clients.

I pay my VA on a per post basis. So I pay her, for every post that she publishes she gets paid. It varies between $3.50 to $5 per post. But I charge my clients $10 to $15 per post, depending on what the volume is. So my point is, I make money on that even though she’s manually posting.

However, for lead gen assets, guys, once again, just like I was telling … Shit, who was I telling earlier? Michael. I was telling Michael earlier not to worry about syndication networks for lead gen assets because you wanna reduce expenses. Well, I don’t want to pay a VA to manually post to lead gen assets because that’s an additional expense when I can pay for-, or subscribe to the auto poster, schedule all the posts.

Do I do all these guys? Hell, no. I’ve trained a VA to go in and set up or schedule all the posts within the GMB auto poster and then schedule them to republish. So that, literally, I can pay a VA for three or four hours to schedule out, however long it takes them, to schedule all those posts out. Then, it’s done and those GMB assets will continually update posts because of the auto poster and I’m not paying anymore other than for the auto poster subscription. Does that make sense? So it’s a hell of a lot more efficient with money too. Right? It’s more cost-effective. Okay.

Nestor says … And I’m so over, we got to get out of here. Nestor says, “Hey guys, how about webs 2.0 example mybrand.wordpress.com point to my GMB property three links as a press release?” Okay. First of all, I’m not familiar with their example. I know that’s kind of a competitor that does, you know, they have their own store and blah blah blah. I’m not real familiar with what they teach or what they say, so I can’t really speak on that.

I’m not quite sure I understand, in the wording of your question, what you mean by mybrand.wordPress. I understand WordPress.com, that’s fine. That’s a brand identity property that you can create on the WordPress.com site, kind of like what I showed earlier. But, yeah, that’s normal. That goes into Syndication Network, right? You try to get your brand name as a sub-domain blah blah blah. That’s pretty standard.

But, “point to GMB property three links as a press release,” I’m not sure what that means. Can you point to a GMB property from your WordPress.com site? Sure. Can you also use press releases to link to that WordPress.com site? Sure. You can also link to your GMB.

I’m doing a press releases, Local PR Pro method is what I use and, as standard operating procedure, I published a press releases with every GMB asset, it gets created. Usually, my preferred method is to link from the first press release to the GMB, the Google Maps share URL, to the Google the GMB website URL, and to the GMB the first post URL. We teach that at Local Lease Pro and that’s just essentially my method. So I’m going direct from the press releases to the Google assets. Okay.

Yeah. Guys, there’s a thousand ways to skin a cat, right? So our method isn’t the be-all end-all. It’s just our method works for what we want it to work for and that’s what we teach. Other people have other methods that may very well work as good as ours. I’m not trying to say that ours is better than anybody else’s. I’m just telling you what we teach, I don’t know what they teach. I’m sorry. It’s likely that that would work too.

Will says, “Bradley, speaking about syndication networks, I finally figured out how to syndicate to Medium.com. I’ve been testing it for a while with a few posts now and it works well to syndicate your WordPress post with images and YouTube video embeds, and from there, you could syndicate to your tier two, if you’d like. I’ll send you an update to support@semanticmastery.”

Thanks, Will. That’s awesome. In fact, Will, if you would, I mean, if you’re cool with it, you can even send the update right in the Mastermind community so that everybody else could benefit from it. If not, send it to me and I’ll update everybody in the Mastermind, and Syndication Academy for that matter, once I see it. Thank you for that, Will.

Okay. “Link to pre-Black Friday deals, please.” Yeah. Luis, just contact us at Support.

That’s it. Okay, guys, we’re way over. We got all questions answered, though.

Marco: That was a good one.

Bradley: Thanks, Marco, for hanging out, man, I appreciate it.

Marco: Marathon. All right, dude.

Bradley: All right, everybody. Mastermind webinar tomorrow. Be there or be square. See y'all.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210 posted first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210

Click on the video above to watch Episode 202 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: Hello and welcome to Episode 210 of Hump Day Hangouts. I am Adam Moody with Semantic Mastery. We are gonna say hi to everyone real quick before we dive into some announcements and questions from everybody watching us live. Also, if you’re watching this on YouTube, we noticed from time to time that we get questions over there, but you need to come to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions and ask your questions there, that’s where we’re monitoring. Before we dive in, real quick, Chris, how are you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Good weather in Florida always the last couple weeks. I highly recommend it, like I love it. How are you doing?

Adam: Not bad. It’s like 60 here, which is perfect. Everyone in California thinks it’s like the middle of winter and I’m just enjoying myself. This is good. Marco, how about you? How’s the weather for you, man?

Marco: Things are good here, man, transitioning to the dry season. So we’re gonna have about five and a half months of absolutely no rain, not even a drop. I’m looking forward to … Yeah, but then, it’s seven months of afternoon showers. You gotta pay the price for the life you live, right?

Adam: Yeah, fair enough.

Marco: But always warm, like if it were 60 here, we’d all be dying literally. It’s freezing cold.

Chris: [Inaudible 00:01:19] stay in Florida.

Adam: Definitely. Bradley, how about you, man? How are you doing?

Bradley: I’m good, I’m happy to be here. Got lots of stuff going on at the moment. Just been really, really busy. In last week, well, I took off for a couple days because my sister got married again. I actually got to go down to Hilton Head, South Carolina and meet one of our members, Ed, who also went to POFU Live; he’s in the Mastermind also. That was cool because I got to spend an hour with him just chatting. It was really, really cool. I always enjoy getting to meet members whenever we have the opportunity. So that was a lot of fun. But I had to take really Friday and Monday off, so now I’m behind.

Besides that, I got a quick little story to tell very, very quickly. Just last week, it was funny because I was actually reviewing the Hump Day Hangout from last week and I was talking about mitigating risk. Marco and I, we were talking about reducing exposure and trying to mitigate risk because, if you put all your eggs in one basket and Google takes that basket, you’re screwed, you’ve lost all those assets.

Well, I was using a test with what’s called GMB Location Groups. It’s a setting inside of Google My Business. I was running a test on a set of GMB assets for a particular metro area, so one metropolitan city area. I had seven assets in there that were fully optimized, 100% done. In fact, they were the seven assets that my VAs has been training on as he’s been learning the processes for doing this whole method, the Local Lease Pro model, essentially.

Long story short, on Saturday, I was down at the Hilton Head and I happened to get an email saying that the account that was used as the recovery email for that particular GMB manager account, which had to be turned into an owner in order to use location groups, had been terminated for violating Google’s spam policies. I lost all those damn assets, every single one of them, and I can’t even access them through the original Google accounts now, guys.

That was three weeks work, not necessarily my work, but my VA’s work wasted. Now, is it all bad? No, because I learned a valuable lesson. Number one, don’t use GMB location groups, it’s like a trap, number one, lesson number one. Number two is always mitigate risk. Don’t set yourself up with vulnerabilities that Google can take … We exploit Google’s vulnerabilities. Don’t you think Google will exploit ours? So I learned that … In fact, I’m actually updating the entire process for how to first log in and set up and manage a lot of GMB assets. I’m updating all those processes this week, in fact, because we have to do something new that reduces our overall risk.

Anyways, that was my little story. I’m a little bit behind now because all the work that I’ve done for the last several weeks on all the processes now has to be updated and redone. But that’s the cat and mouse game that we play.

Marco: Yeah. One of the great things about our Mastermind is that we do all of the testing, we take all of the risk, we were the ones who go in the lab. I mean, we do encourage our own people to test so that they can verify that our results are what we’re saying they are. But it’s one of the things that we do, we go, we blow things up and it happens, and then now we know what not to do. And right into our Mastermind, we’ll share all of test result with the membership exactly what was done so that they don’t repeat the process and get stuck losing assets because nobody wants to lose an asset, especially not seven. But so be it, lesson well-learned and it’s a lesson that the Mastermind doesn’t have to repeat.

Bradley: That’s true and, just real quick segue, that leads me to, that’s kind of like what the Mastermind is about. The scaling option, like doing all these heavy processes and stuff, is really reserved to the POFU Live group attendees at the moment, but we’re polishing all this stuff. Obviously, the Mastermind, we update, like tomorrow we’ve got a Mastermind webinar and I’m certainly gonna be talking about what not to do because I want to make sure all of our members are fully aware of what not to do so they don’t lose assets.

But once we have this 12-week process done, that the POFU Live attendees are kind of in accountability group with me right now, and we’ve got a target that we’re trying to hit at the end of 12 weeks, which is 50 GMB assets fully developed and ready for monetization, if they’re not already monetized by that point, and so when we’re done at that 12-week period, we will have discovered or perfected, really fine-tuned the method and all of the processes to get us there, to get us to that point. That’s when we’re gonna release in its entirety the Mastermind.

That training will not be released outside of the Mastermind, period, and that’s only because it’s highly valuable and we put a lot of work. In fact, the other members of the POFU accountability group with us, that’s like 12 of us in there, and so that’s a lot of intellectual property, a lot of a work that goes into that. So the Mastermind members will get that.

But that’s just one of many things that we do there. For example, we had some questions about how to structure ad ID pages and set up as three buckets with HTTP, SSL protocol, and all that stuff. Two weeks ago, we went in and showed exactly how to do that. I mean, it’s just stuff like that that we do in the Mastermind all the time.

Adam: Yeah. Something else that I just remembered, that reminded me of, Bradley, was, I think it was Jason who posted yesterday, who’s one of our Mastermind members, just out of the blue was like, hey, I’ve seen some questions about blah blah blah-, not blah blah blah, but some heavy-duty IT stuff. He’s like, “Hey, if anybody needs help just ping me. I’ll do it for free if you’re a Mastermind member.”

That’s just awesome to see. Again, you get that in a tight-knit group like that. It’s cool having that ability. Everyone who knows our story kind of knows where we came from and how we were part of a Mastermind. That’s why part of why we do this to get that community, it’s not just a jumble of people, you do have a community.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Well, cool. I also want to say then to you guys, we mentioned the GMB stuff, we’ve got a sale going on right now at MGYB. It’s wrapping up today. So if you’re interested or you need a GMB verification service, whether it’s for your clients, it’s for yourself, you’re doing some lead gen, head over there. I posted it on the page. If you’re watching the replay, sorry, it’s probably too late. But a good reason to watch live and open the emails is you get a 35% discount on that service right now. So head over there do that.

Real quick, too, if you’re joining us for the first time, thank you so much for watching us. If you want the right place to start, because it is one of the questions we get, “Hey, where should I start? Should I take this course and do that?” start with Battle Plan. No matter what you’re doing, even if you want to hop into Mastermind, get the Battle Plan, come join the Mastermind. That’s the path. The link is on there. It’s a great way to get repeatable results, which is why we put it together, so that we can have that. It’s our home processes put into an easy-to-digest format.

Then, obviously, like we’ve been talking about it, if you’re ready to take things up a notch, if you wanna scale, you wanna grow, then the Mastermind is the place to be.

Bradley: Did you open up Local Lease Pro as a standalone product now?

Adam: Yes.

Bradley: I’ll be damned. I didn’t realize that was available yet. Okay.

Adam: Sneaking that onto the page, if people are interested.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay.

Adam: I’m gonna say no more.

Bradley: Everything I’ve been talking about with this Local Lease Pro method, that’s it. Most of you guys are probably aware of it because of the Side Hustle Toolbox promotion, that was our contribution. But now that that’s closed, it’s a standalone product. I’m gonna be updating that in a couple of weeks with some of the new processes that I’ve just discovered.

Again, GMB, like the actual optimization process has changed slightly. Not much, but slightly, and I’m updating the processes for my VAs right now. So next week, I’ll kind of polish it up a bit and then add that into the Local Lease Pro training. So if you guys don’t have it yet, I recommend you get it. This method is freaking killing it. I think it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career. I mean that, so check it out.

All right. Can we get into questions?

Adam: I think so. If you guys are good, let’s do this.

Do I Need Access To A Client’s Website If I Do Local SEO For Them?

Bradley: All right. Starting off with Chris Green posted a support question from Vincent. He says, “I’m considering to join the RYS Reloaded or the GMB course. My question is this: if I do SEO for local businesses in my country, which is Malaysia, do I need to have access to my clients website?” No. It can help. You don’t have to have access to the client’s website, but it would certainly help because you could take care of some on-page SEO issues. In other words, you can optimize the site itself, which is considered on-page SEO, and that can help that can help quite a bit.

In fact, with proper on-page SEO, a lot of the times you can rank a site with a fraction of the off-page SEO because any off-page SEO that … If on site is proper, if it’s tight, if it’s strong, then any off-page will significantly affect, it will have a strong impact on the site because then the site will respond well to off-page because it is a well-built, well-structured site.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to have access to the site because you can accomplish through off-page. You can still rank a site with off-page. If the on-page is terrible, then you probably are fighting a losing battle. But if it’s decent, then you could probably still accomplish what you need to, depending on how competitive the keywords are that you’re targeting. But it’s likely that you could still accomplish what you needed to with off-page alone. But again, there are benefits certainly to being able to access the client’s website. Right? If you’re starting with garbage, it’s gonna be difficult to rank. So just keep that in mind. Okay.

It helps, it’s not 100% necessary. Well, it depends, right? It depends on what the status of the site is currently. If it’s a shitty site, if it was built poorly, optimized poorly, or if it’s spammed to death or whatever, then you may never be able to rank that site. But if it’s decent, if it’s fairly okay, then you could still just apply off-page methods and probably get the results that you want. However, if you can do both, manage the on-page and the-off page, you will get the best results. Right?

Are The SEO Methods In RYS Reloaded And GMB Work On WordPress.com And Wix.com Websites?

Number two, he says, “If my client has a WordPress.com or Wix.com website, can the SEO methods taught in RYS Reloaded and GMB work and getting first page ranking on Google?” Well, yes. Well, Local GMB Pro course is not really anything that have to do with websites, right? Local GMB Pro is how to optimize Google My Business and set up all of the Google assets to rank. Well, not even to rank, but to just generate leads from Google, independent of ranking. That’s what Local GMB Pro is about. It’s about getting leads, getting exposure from Google My Business, whether it ranks or not, and that’s what that whole … Again, despite traditional SEO, Local GMB Pro can generate leads from Google. Okay. So that’s what local GMB Pro is.

RYS is about using Google’s assets as an off-page tool as well as an entity validator, an authority builder, and multiple other things. But it’s more of an off-page thing. Again, it has nothing to do with the website structure or the platform itself, WordPress or Wix. It doesn’t matter because all you’re doing is using Google properties to push relevancy and authority over to whatever property is that you’re trying to rank.

Marco, do you wanna chat about that a little bit?

Marco: Yeah. It’s just one of the pillars that we teach, ART, the art of ART, activity, relevance, trust and authority, both on the link origin and on the link destination. What that means is you get visitors no matter how you show activity and Google reward you as long as everything is relevant and you’re working with trusted and authoritative entities. If you become along with that, a trusted and authoritative entity, then you get rewarded. Google will also reward you for being in Google because Google trusts itself. It’s the ultimate as far as what it trusts. So working in what we call working inside the belly of the beast also has its rewards.

Yeah. As Bradley said, it makes absolutely no difference. I mean, you work with whatever. I mean, you have a free WordPress blog ranking for … what is it? Free-, no, not free. SEO Virginia. Yeah. I mean, it just goes to show that if you get that activity in there, everything else just fall into place as long as it’s relevant, trusted and authoritative.

I keep telling people, and I just mentioned it in our Semantic Mastery Facebook group, the Mastermind, that ART, A-R-T, will trump anything. It will even overcome any of the negative factors, of the algorithm, penalties and all of that. You become almost immune to anything that Google has to throw at you because you’re signaling rank pot-, excuse me, rank brain in the way that it wants to be signaled. You’re doing the Google tickle, the T tickle. I mean, it blows up. It becomes a self-feeding monster once you get all that activity in there.

Bradley: Yeah. This is an example of what Marco was just talking about, this is that WordPress.com. So free wordpress.com blog, guys. If you take a look at this, there’s no content on this page. It looks like there’s content, but the only content on this page is this right here. That’s it. The rest of those are embedded files. That’s RYS at work there, guys. That’s RYS Academy right there at work. Okay. Again, go view page source, the post body, the article body of this post. The content body is this right here. That’s the only text on the page. The rest of it is all embedded files RYS style, and that’s all.

Look at that, guys. It’s ranked number three in organic for SEO Virginia. I mean, that’s pretty powerful. Again, that’s all off-page stuff. There is some on-page going on there because of the iframes that are actually embedded in this page, but it’s primarily an off-page thing that’s got this ranking. And that’s the power of RYS, right?

By the way, the Google site as part of the stack and that’s been number one since May of 2015. Guys, that’s been number one since May of 2015, or within a few weeks anyways, that’s when it was published. Look at that, it’s a horrid site. It was just for a test purpose, guys. Still ranked. Still ranked, it’s three and a half years now. Still ranked. Anyways, there you go. Will it work? It damn sure does.

How Do You Get The URL Of A Scheduled Post In The MGYB GMB Service?

Dustin’s up, or Da B. “Hey there. I’m using the MGYB post scheduling service but I was wondering, in the Local GMB course you link to the previous post but when I scheduled a post, then I don’t have the URL of the last URL because it will be scheduled. How do I link to the post then if the last post yet is not published or is not published yet? Greetings. Dustin.” That’s a good question Dustin.

Marco, that’s something that I think Rob was talking about that was going to be a feature, that was going to be released soon within the auto poster was the ability to silo a post. Is that correct?

Marco: Yeah. We keep going back and forth with Shripad. I’m not sure if that’s available yet. But I mean, there’s an easy solution to that. Link in the body or you’re still not gonna have the post URL. You would need the original post URL, and then the next one, then the next one. So Shripad will have to come up with something regarding that so that we can solve that issue. But, yes, he is working on it so we can silo GMB posts.

Bradley: Yeah. I’m thinking if the script would wait until a published one was pulled and then grab the short URL and then link to that before the next one that’s scheduled publishes. You know what I mean? That would work to build a silo on that. I know that if you post the post … So you publish the post, then you grab the URL and link to it from the next post. But, you’re right, if you wanna schedule out multiple posts in advance, right now there’s not an ability to do that yet.

But that’s something, Marco, if you wanna make a note of that specifically, silo posts together, schedule post together, which I’m sure that can be integrated at some point. Right now that’s not something that can be done, Dustin, but we’re working on that. It’s a great feature.

Marco: No. Dustin, what I would suggest is you just have your VA go in and add links as needed.

Bradley: As they’re published.

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Right. As they publish, go grab the URL, and then go post the next one. That’s the only thing we can do to daisy chain them together right now until we have the automation such that it will be able to do it. Okay.

Jordan says, “On one of the, or …” Okay. One of the guys, here we go. “One of the guys on our SEO team said after an SEO pitch this probably sounds like magic to them. I still can’t believe we get paid for this stuff, almost like grownup version of video games. Haha.” That’s funny. Well, I can believe we’d get paid for it, man. Think about all the testing and all the studying and all the learning and stuff that you, guys, and the money that you invest in your education and to tools and all that stuff.

I mean, we spend a lot of time learning this stuff, guys, we should be paid for it. I mean, think about that. We spend all our time learning how to perform this SEO magic stuff. A business owner that’s doing plumbing, for example, he’s out unclogging drains and that kind of stuff. He wouldn’t have time to learn all this stuff. How do I know? Because I was an electrical contractor and I had to learn how to do this shit while I was doing electrical work. It just so happens I found that I could make more money at this, that’s why I switched to this all together.

What are you gonna say, Marco?

Marco: Yeah. I was gonna say we deserve to be paid and be paid well. I mean, do you know how much time we’ve spent between RYS Academy, RYS Reloaded, Local GMB Pro, Local PR Pro, Local Lease Pro? Do you know how many hours have gone into researching that and making it work? Making that all work hand in hand so that one pushes the other and you’re pushing ultimate power to whatever destination so that that client’s phone rings?

Yeah. It may seem like magic. “Well, my phone rang. You did all that.” But it’s actually just hours and hours and hours of being a total geek.

Are There Ways We Can Use Press Releases Based On The Battleplan Aside From Launching A New Site?

Bradley: Rabbit-hole time. Yeah. Dan’s up. He says, “I’ve looked using press releases based off the Battle Plan and saw that you have them at the store. Besides using them for launching a new site would there be other places that I could use them? I do some consulting on the side for local businesses and build sites, lead gen, et cetera?”

Yeah, Dan. “Press releases are my favorite off-page or link building method really. Like no question, I absolutely love press releases. I use them as my primary off-page link building tool or method. I still use spam links from time to time for certain things, but for the most part I’m using press releases for link building.”

Yeah. You can use them. Guys, there’s dozens and dozens of things that you can publish press releases about. I’ve talked about them. Dan, we have a course called Local PR Pro which is specifically about how to use press releases to rank in the Maps pack, to get Google GMB, Google My Business profiles ranked in the maps pack using press releases. Right?

That’s what that course, Local PR Pro, is all about. In that course, I talk about how there’s multiple different things that you could publish a press release about. Because that’s a question that comes up often, “Well, I don’t think my client has anything that’s really newsworthy to publish a press release about.”

But think about it, getting a five-star review, you could publish a press release about receiving a five-star review or your client. Or you could publish a press release about a new employee being hired. Or a seasonal change to the product line that’s available. Or the services that are available, depending on what kind of business you’re dealing with. Or an accolade that the company receives, some sort of award or something like that. Or any charitable things, any charity events that they’re hosting or that they contribute to or participate in. Right?

There’s just dozens and dozens of things, hooks, angles that you could use to write a news release or something that can be … Guys, you can even publish a press release about a new blog post that’s been published on the website. No kidding. I mean, you just have to get a little bit creative. Dan, when I say you have to get creative, I don’t mean you. I mean, what I would recommend is hiring a PR writer, from Upwork or something like that, that can come up with these angles. A good press release writer can come up with a newsworthy angle for just about anything.

Again, if you’re doing a lot of this work, you could hire a PR writer, a good PR writer from like Upwork or something like that. Or if you’ve got a good press release distribution service that you subscribe to for monthly press releases or whatever, if they’ve got good writers in-house, which most good services do now, then they’ll have writers that are already trained on how to find news where the angles or to create hooks or their stories for the press releases. Right?

For example, if you use the MGYB press release service, the writers there from the Press Advantage distribution network, if that’s what you’re using, it’s fabulous, and there the press releases are almost twice the content length of typical press releases. There’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 words as opposed to 300 to 400, which is what most of them are. So those writers are really, really good, like their sole purpose in life is to find an angle or to create an angle to write a press release about. Those are the same writers that you have access to when you buy a press releases from us individually.

Okay. Anybody wanna comment on that before we move on? It’s a good one, Dan.

Marco: No. I think you hit the nail on the head. They’re great for just about everything. The only thing that you have to avoid is self-promotion, but you get that from most of them. You just have to define what self-promotion is. You go and you advertise. Well, we’re in Facebook, if you’ve just started your Facebook page, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. It’s still self-promotion. It’s just not getting sales. That’s what you wanna try to avoid.

Other than that, it’s fantastic for link building. Not only that, if you hit the press release, whatever the distribution network is with link building, it’ll push through. You’re putting a filter in between the destination so that you hit that with link building. It’ll power it up even more. They just work really well for everything.

Bradley: They damn sure do. Like Marco said, you can actually do self promotional PRs, but the salesy part is what you gotta leave out. They shouldn’t be salesy. But they can be self-promotional. Again, a good PR writer will be able to disguise a promotion as a story, a news story, and that’s really what you wanna do. That’s why I say don’t do it yourself. If I had to write press releases, I’d be a very miserable person. I wouldn’t wanna do it, but some people enjoy that stuff and they’re good at it. All right.

Is It Okay To Start With Battleplan Before Going Into The Mastermind and Syndication Academy Courses?

Andrew Walker’s up. Andrew is a local guy to me. I was in lead share, like a breakfast lead share group with him for several years that I don’t attend those things much anymore. Andrew is a great guy. Anyways, it’s good to see you here, Andrew. I haven’t seen him in a while. He says, “Hey guys, it’s been a long time since I’ve been on Hump Day Hangouts. I got caught up in the cold calling strategy to build my business and also had a case of the shiny object syndrome.” Well, we all do, Andrew. Don’t beat yourself up, buddy. We all go through that. I promise you, I’ve been through it. I still struggle with that, to be honest.

“I don’t fully understand how powerful-,” or excuse me, “I didn’t fully understand how powerful digital marketing is and what it can do for your business. You would think that that’s a no-brainer for an IT guy. Anyway, I’m back for real and I’m ready to learn this stuff. I’ve just downloaded the Battle Plan. I’d love to get involved in the Mastermind, but I’m not able to afford that at this time. Syndication Academy looks to be a great runner up. Can I start there to get things going or just start with the Battle Plan? Thanks, guys, and congrats on your four year anniversary.”

Okay. Great question, Andrew. Again, glad to see you back, man. The Syndication Academy is, yeah, it’s good, however, because, I’m not gonna knock Syndication Academy, but what we recommend is, especially for you, Andrew, you’re running your IT business, your IT services business, and so it depends on how much time you have. If you’ve got a lot of time and no money then, yes, pick up Syndication Academy because then you can learn how to build your own syndication network, which is gonna be one of the critical components to your business in expanding your reach and helping to generate more leads, it’ll help with your SEO and all that kind of stuff.

However, there’s a lot of time that goes into learning how to build a syndication network and, unless you plan on building syndication networks for others or selling them to others, I wouldn’t recommend that you go through all the trouble of learning how to build all that stuff for your own branded syndication network, for your own business. If you’re looking to try to grow your business, then your time is better spent not learning how to build a syndication network that you’re only gonna build one for your own business.

Your time is better spent marketing your business. You can instead just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us and we will build it to our specifications, which is exactly what we teach in the training. You can save yourself weeks of study and implementation by just buying a Done For You Syndication Network and you still reap the benefits of it without having to spend weeks of your time. Does that make sense? They’re inexpensive enough that there’s really no reason that you can’t just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us. It’s cheaper or about the same price as the cost of a month tuition to Syndication Academy. Right?

Anyways, my point is, if you want, Andrew, since you can’t join the Mastermind yet, what I recommend is that you attend our Hump Day Hangouts regularly on Wednesdays, ask your questions here try, keep it to one question per post. In other words, you can post a few times, but try to keep it one question per post please. Ask questions here and we will try to guide you in the best way possible to help you to start growing your IT business, just from these Hump Day Hangouts. Then once you have generated some revenue you can always come join the Mastermind, which is your best bet, because the Mastermind is not just about marketing stuff.

Guys, we’ve gotten away from just teaching SEO or just teaching marketing methods. It’s more about building your business regardless of whether you’re building a local agency or consulting firm, or you want to build your own brick and mortar business, or virtual business for that matter. We want to teach you how to do all of that, which includes marketing and includes SEO, and includes all that stuff, but we’re not pigeon holing our training into just marketing training, if that makes sense. A lot more goes into it than that.

I would suggest, Andrew, that what you do is come back and join us here in Hump Day Hangouts, get involved, stay engaged, ask questions. We also have our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials Facebook group that you could ask questions there. As soon as you’re able to, I would invest in joining the Mastermind so that you can get, basically, almost one-on-one guidance from each one of us my partners and I as well as all of the other members in the Mastermind that are also savvy business owners. Right? That’s part of why it’s Mastermind because it’s not just about us teaching all the time, it’s about everybody in there contributing and helping each other, which is fabulous. Okay.

By the way, one of our top members, longtime members, Jason Johnson, who is what Adam was just talking about at the very beginning of this Hump Day Hangout, he was mentioning somebody was having difficulty setting up their MX records for G suite email to use their domain for their email within G suite. Jason Johnson posted, “Hey, I saw somebody was having trouble with MX records. Hey, I’m an IT guy. If anybody has any questions or any problems, tell them to reach out to me. I’ll help them for free as long as they’re a Mastermind member.”

Andrew, what I’m saying is, Jason is an IT guy who’s been in our Mastermind. He does digital marketing on the side, but also markets his own business and somebody that you could absolutely click with. Probably the two of you could chat about what he’s doing for his business and what’s working for him in generating leads for his IT business and all that kind of stuff. Right?

Again, that’s part of the power of a Mastermind. It’s not just learning from me or Marco when, you know, I’m gonna teach you how to generate leads for your business, but I generate leads for contracting businesses. Right? You’re trying to generate leads for IT services, and computer repair networking, and that kind of stuff, so why not get the advice direct from somebody that’s already generating leads for that type of a business, which we have members in our group to do that? Does that make sense?

That’s the power of a Mastermind. Okay. So that’s what I recommend. In the meantime, if you don’t have the money, come back here, ask questions, implement what you can, go through our YouTube channel Semantic Mastery, youtube.com/semanticmastery. Use the channel search function, ask questions over there. You’re likely going to find already video answers for many of your questions. Then, like I said, anything that you can’t find answers to, post in either the Facebook group or post back here on the event page every week and we’ll come in and answer your questions. As soon as you can generate a little bit of positive revenue, I would reinvest that back into your education and into building your business by joining the Mastermind, getting guidance from us as well as our other members.

Marco: I’m gonna give him just a couple of weeks. First of all, welcome back, Andrew. Sorry that you had a shiny object syndrome. I mean, that sucks and it makes you spend a whole lot of money and time chasing. It becomes a useless path. You fill up your computer with a whole bunch of garbage that you’re never going to use and you realize how much money you spent and then you get caught up at where you are right now where you ended, and dropped all that money and you have nothing to show for it.

But that’s okay, lesson learned. The two examples that I’m gonna give you is, I’m gonna give you Paul Fussell, who’s always in these Hump Day Hangouts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he drops in today; or if he isn’t, it’s because he’s out making money. He was at POFU Live, as a matter of fact, our event. The way he went about doing it, he come into Hump Day Hangouts, ask questions, and then go and go and apply. Ask questions, go and apply. then he started purchasing our drive stacks to rank. I know that he was doing dental for a while, I don’t know what he’s doing now.

Anyway, the thing about Paul is that he just went and he got Done For You services, and then he was chasing clients. Every time he’d get a client, drive stack, and that’s how he would he would rank them. But that’s Paul and that’s how he did it, so Hump Day Hangouts and Done For You services.

Then, we get to Jordan in Syndication Academy. Jordan lives in Syndication Academy, he’s always there. He’s one of our, I don’t know, one of our long-running and most active members of Syndication Academy. He runs an agency and I think he just got a huge nationwide client, but it’s from Syndication Academy. I’m not gonna say that he got everything from Syndication Academy, but I know that that’s his foundation and I know that that’s what he’s doing to rank his clients, to help his clients and to help his agency.

He has an agency, actually he’s an agency owner, but he decided that Syndication Academy was the thing for him. But, of course, they’ll all tell you, and Jordan will tell you that the Battle Plan is the place where you start, and you have to follow it. If you follow the Battle Plan, then you’re going to get to our Done For You services.

It’s a whole lot easier to go and buy a Syndication Academy Network, as Bradley mentioned, than to learn how to build a one-of-a-kind that you only need that one time. Why not go buy it and pay that than to pay a monthly membership to learn how to build one, or you might not wanna learn how to build one, or you might need?

It’s just to buy them and then go and sell it to clients, to people you know. Then, you pitch the benefits of being branded of having that footprint of being seen, of your content being seen everywhere, pushing your content to where the people are hanging out. So that’s one of the benefits.

You could do it many ways. Now, of course, we’re always going to tell you that the Mastermind is the place to be because that’s where like-minded entrepreneurs hang out, people who want to grow their business and get away from just that weekly paycheck and having to wait until the next one so that you could do whatever it is that you wanna do. We wanna push you, guys, past that. We call it POFU, position of fuck you.

Whatever that position is for you, Andrew, we want you to get there. There isn’t just one way to get there, but we do wanna help you get there. So whether you choose Hump Day Hangouts, whether you choose Syndication Academy, or what we suggest, whether you join our Mastermind, we’re going to help you any way we can. That’s what we’re here for.

Bradley: That’s right. Let’s not forget Mohammad. He’s a shining example. Mohammad Mackey. He started by just joining Hump Day Hangouts and coming and asking questions week in and week out and for months. Eventually, he got to a point where he landed a couple of his first clients and started making enough money. He came and joined the Mastermind. Then, he went through a little bit of a struggle for over-promising to clients and ended up losing some clients and had to drop out of the Mastermind for a little bit.

But he kept coming to Hump Day Hangouts and asking more questions, even during that time where he had to back out of the Mastermind, and he got the education that he needed and he implemented it. Right? It’s nothing we did, all we did was provide him with information, but he’s the one that took action and kept at it. He kept persisting in working and he kept finding stuff that wasn’t working until he found stuff that did work. Then, he landed some clients again, got his money back up, and joined the Mastermind again.

We have multiple examples of people that have done that just by starting here, right here at Hump Day Hangouts, Andrew, and you can do that too. Right? The Battle Plan, like I said, will tell you do this, this, this, and this, and you’re going to start getting results. It doesn’t say that you have to learn how to do those things, it just tells you apply these things. Right?

You can either learn how to do those things and do them yourself or, as a business owner, it would be much more efficient with your time to just purchase the Done For You services and apply them in the order that they’re recommended and reap the benefits of those without having to learn how to do it. Okay. Great question. Again, glad to have you back, Andrew. We’re happy to see you participate and be a lot more engaged over the coming weeks.

What Are The Factors You Consider When Finding The Best Keywords For Ranking Opportunity In Local Lead Gen Campaigns?

Gordon’s up. He says, “Hey guys, thank you very much again for the help you provide on Hump Days. It’s greatly appreciated.” You’re welcome, Gordon. “If you’re looking to find a low hanging fruit where you can easily rank in the GMB 3-pack, other than looking at the reviews of the current businesses in the 3-pack in their citation profile, what else do you do to decide whether or not you have found a golden goose ranking opportunity? Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls? Thanks again, Gordon.”

Okay. First of all, Gordon, Local Lease Pro, I showed the exact simple method, it’s kind of time-consuming, but the simple method using it, a free software that we show, we use to identify what I call slam-dunk opportunities, which is which you’re calling a golden goose in your question, okay? Again, that was in Local Lease Pro. If you have access to that, which I’m hoping you do because it was on sale for a very, very ridiculously low price for about eight days during the Side Hustle Toolbox launch. That’s close now, but it is available, Local Lease Pro, but we teach the method specifically how to find low-hanging opportunities.

Now I can’t go into the details of that right here, but it is very, very simple to do using the Easy Local Cash software, which is a free software. It’s Chad Kimball’s software. It just shows you, basically, ever since July of this year, when mobile implemented or switched to the mobile first index, that opened up just massive, massive opportunity. I’m telling you, guys, it opened up more opportunity than I’ve seen since I started my local marketing career in 2010. And that is what we teach on how to find those opportunities that have been opened up by this major change in the algorithm or which index is used first. Right? The mobile first index.

That’s all in Local Lease Pro. I can’t obviously say that right here. It is in the course. Also, you can find out, certainly, if you joined a Mastermind, because Local Lease Pro is one of the first courses that Mastermind members get now when they join.

Marco: Yeah, the how. I mean, that’s the course, the how is, you know, if we gave you that, then why have a course in the first place? So, sorry, that’s something that we can’t do. I’m glad that you mentioned again the Mastermind. I was in our mini, we have the mini-Mastermind and mine is on Tuesday nights for an hour. I have three great people. I have Jamina, I have Will Kenderdine, and John Wypick. We were going over my method for using the software and we went over it in detail. I don’t mind for an hour. I mean, I decided to give my time, right?

So this is what it’s all about. Membership has its privileges. I do things a little bit differently. I find targets a little bit differently, but it all works just the same way. The same way that you teach it, the way that I do it, I already decided to do it. The thing is that membership has its privileges. You have to be a member in order to get the information that you’re asking about. It’s not something that we can give away for free.

Bradley: Yeah. “Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls?” Well, that’s a good question. If you do your research properly upfront, you should know. First of all, you should research your industry or the niche that you’re targeting. Now if you followed us at all for any length of time, Gordon, which I know you have, you know that I’ve been telling you and I’ve been preaching this and beating this drum for years now, which is: specialize. Focus on one industry, guys. Become a big fish in one industry instead of a me-too agency or a me-too consultant or me-too local marketer that will just accommodate any business that will talk to you.

Trust me, you will never gain any traction in your business, or you will have a much harder time gaining traction in your business, if you just offer marketing services to any business that will talk to you. Because your amount of work multiplies exponentially because you have to do keyword research, you have to do market research, you have to understand the vocabulary of the industry, you have to figure out what the pain points are in those industries both for the consumer and for the business owner.

Because if you’re the business owner that you can help them market their products and services, you need to understand the consumer’s mindset, but you also have to understand the business owner’s mindset. So that you can talk to them and speak their language, build rapport with them. So you have to learn two different markets for every industry you enter, the consumer market and the business market. Right?

There’s just so much work that goes into learning, becoming a marketing special or professional in any industry. It requires a ton of research. So if you try to just say, “Oh, I’m gonna be a local marketing guy and I’ll talk to any business in my area that will talk to me,” you’re gonna create a shit ton of additional work that you can significantly reduce. You’ll gain a lot more traction a lot faster in your business if you focus in on one particular industry because then you can craft everything you do in your business around that particular industry. All your marketing messages, all your keyword research, your content templates, everything that you do can be designed around that one particular industry. Now you become a specialist.

I use this as an example. Would you go to a general health practitioner for a heart surgery? No, you go to a cardiologist. Why do you think businesses, like let’s say home remodeling contractors or general contractors, would they want to go to a me-too agency or would they want to go to a contractor media, contractor marketing agency that specializes in general and remodeling contractor marketing? Does that make sense? Which one would you prefer?

Gordon, I recommend specializing in on one industry. But don’t just arbitrarily decide on what industry you wanna focus in on and say, “I’m gonna build my business around that,” you need to research that industry and determine, is there a call volume? Is there significant interest in that? Is there money there?

What’s one of the ways that you can determine that? An easy and simple and a quick way is go do a search for the product and/or service as if you were a customer looking for that product or service. Just go do a Google search for it and take a look and see, are there ads? Are there Google ads? If so, that means there’s paying advertisers. If there’s Google ads, that means people are paying to bid on those keywords, which means there’s likely traffic for those keywords. If there wasn’t traffic for those keywords and if those keywords didn’t convert, there wouldn’t be ads. Does that make sense? People don’t pay and bid on keywords-, well, good advertisers don’t pay and bid on keywords that don’t convert or don’t generate traffic that converts. Right? So if you’re seeing Google ads, that’s a good indication.

Now I wouldn’t stop there. I’d research it further. You could do things, like use Google Trends to find out where in the country, or in the world for that matter, but I always do US-based searches, you can find out where the hotspots are for where the search traffic is the most or the search interest is the most for the types of products or services that you’d be promoting in that industry. Right? So then, you can start to develop out which locations you’re gonna target first for your business. Does that make sense?

Remember, specialize on one industry, guys, because then you can scale your business by geography instead of by type or kind. Does that make sense? Instead of trying to scale your business by taking on new industries where you’re gonna create so much additional work, scale your business by continuing with the same industry but expanding your service area or your territory, your target area. Right?

That’s a hell of a lot better or much more efficient way to build your business. Not only that, in time you will build a name and a reputation for being that type of a marketing specialist for that particular industry. People will start to seek you out as opposed to you having a force or push your marketing, your services onto others. People will start to seek you out because they know that you’re the specialist. Does that make sense?

How do you determine whether there’s enough search traffic? You have to research it. Make sure it’s an industry that has paying advertisers. Make sure that there is significant search interest for those types of things and that it’s profitable.

As I said about in the past, carpet cleaning, there’s a ton of search interest for carpet cleaning but there’s very, very, very small margins in the carpet cleaning industry. Right? Carpet cleaning companies don’t particularly like to pay for marketing services or for lead generation services, they don’t have the budgets for it because their margins are very small.

But if you just did keyword research, which is, when I first started, the very first lead gen site I ever built was carpetcleaningalexandriava.com. I don’t own that anymore, but it was a lead gen site that I built because all I did was base my decision on which industry I was gonna target based upon keyword search volume from the Google Keyword Planner. It said something like 600 exact match searches for that term “carpet cleaning Alexandria VA” per month. It was like 660 or something like that, 600 searches per month. So I said, “Oh man, there’s a lot of search volume there. I can make money with that.”

Well, I built the site and got it ranked number one. We were getting 30 to 40 calls a week through that lead gen site and I had trouble monetizing it for even a hundred dollars a month. No shit. Then when I finally got down to the chewy center of why that was by sitting down with the contractor that was renting that site from me or leasing that site from me, he told me, “Because the carpet cleaning business has very, very small margins.” Right? Very small margins. He was making something ridiculous, per carpet cleaning job $8 or $9 or $10, or $12 in profit. It was something stupid. After paying his labor and insurance costs and, the cleaning solution costs, and all of this overhead, he had a very small margin so he had trouble paying for that.

What happened? I ended up switching into other higher margin businesses. That’s why I love the tree service industry because it’s huge margin. That’s why I like remodeling contractors, home builders, HVAC repair, any sort of repair, roofers, all those types because the margins are so much larger. Does that make sense?

Again, you have to do the research, Gordon. There’s no real easy answer there. You just got to be logical and do the research and you should be able to find the opportunities as well as the perfect industry. Also, one last thing I would suggest about that is, seriously, guys, try to find an industry that you, not only has all the correct signals or markers of being a good industry to work at, but also one that you have a genuine interest in because it’ll make it feel less like work. Okay.

Honestly, I don’t have any interest in tree services, except for the fact that that does make me some damn good money, which kind of makes it interesting. But if you can find an industry that you have a genuine interest in, it’ll feel less like work while you’re building your business.

Anybody wanna comment on that before I move on? That was a long-winded answer I know.

Marco: No, but it was perfect. There’s no need to go into that any further.

How Do You Set Up The Syndication Network Of Several GMB Sites In Same Metro Area?

Bradley: He says, “Hey guys, so if I have a group of GMB sites in the same metro area and a WordPress site ranked on page one and Serps, a YouTube channel with videos ranking on page one of Google’s video page and I want to lease all of these as a total package deal to a business owner operating an area, how do I set up a syndication network for this? Can I feed the RSS feeds from all the GMB sites into the WordPress site blog into one generically branded syndication network? Or do I need to set up separate networks for each GMB site or WordPress site? Thank you very much for your comment.”

Michael, I don’t recommend a syndication network for lead gen assets unless you need them. For example, if you’re having trouble getting a lead gen asset to push another 3-pack, can a syndication network will help for that? Then, absolutely.

The other thing is, if you have a cluster of Google My Business profiles for a metropolitan area that are all branded the same, then you could use one syndication network for those. When you talk about grabbing the GMB RSS feeds, I’m not sure what you mean from that, unless you’re using our GMB auto poster which will generate an RSS feed, but you can’t just get an RSS feed, at least not that I’m aware of.

Marco, this may have changed, but is there an RSS feed from the GMB websites yet?

Marco: Not that I know of. Not that I’m aware of.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah. As far as I’m aware, there is not an RSS feed from the GMB websites. So our GMB auto poster will create an RSS feed from the GMB posts that are connected through that auto poster or that are posted with that auto poster. So you can do it that way. But like I said, you should have a common brand for all of those assets, if that’s the case. If you want to feed them all into one network, which again, I’m gonna be 100% transparent with you guys, I’m not building syndication networks for my lead gen assets. I build syndication networks for clients because I tell them that it’s critical. It is because it’s brand building, it’s entity validation and brand authority building, right?

So any client, I’m gonna tell them. “You should have a syndication network to protect your brand and to amplify your brand, expand your reach. It also helps to build your authority and all that kind of stuff.” For content marketing, all my clients, I suggest we do regular content marketing, blogging that gets syndicated out to the syndication network. That’s all true. It’s not just because I wanna charge them money, guys, it’s to protect their brand and to help them to stay ranked.

But for lead gen assets, that’s an additional expense. So why implement that? Until and unless you need to, right? So for my lead gen assets that I’m building right now, I’m not using syndication networks. If I have lead gen assets that I do all the other magic that I work to them and they don’t end up producing, because maybe they’re not ranking well or that area ended up being more competitive than I originally thought, then I may add a syndication network. But that’s only if and when it’s absolutely needed. It’s kind of like a last resort thing because it’s an additional expense that I don’t wanna have to put up for a lead gen asset if I can get results without it.

Now once you’ve monetized an asset, a lead gen or, in this case, a multiple assets, once you’ve monetized them, I’ve talked about this too, if once you’ve developed it … Like for me, when I monetize a lead gen asset, what I do is after several months, two or three months of the service provider paying on time and there’s no issues, if we develop a decent relationship, then I offer at that point to rebrand those lead gen assets after the client, certainly their name. It’s a lot more legit that way, right?

Like I said, at that point, once I would offer the rebranding, then that’s where I could upsell them on, “Hey, since we’re gonna be rebranding these, we should also go to syndication network because it’s gonna help to protect your brand and we can use that to help continue to push the lead gen assets that I’m gonna rebrand. It’ll help to continue to keep them producing for you, blah blah blah blah blah.”

At that point, we set up syndication network. Might even set them up on content marketing services. That’s an additional charge beyond the lead gen leasing or pay per lead fees that I’m charging. Depending on how I’ve monetized that asset, this is now starting to build their asset, syndication network with their branding, building, doing content marketing on their website.

So now I’m double dipping, right? Now I’m generating money from my lead gen assets and also working on the client’s assets as a separate fee. Right? So it gives you a whole lot of opportunity, Michael. But for your lead gen assets, I don’t recommend setting up syndication network unless you absolutely need to. Try to get results without it. Guys, I am the firm believer of trying to get the most results or trying to get the best results with the least amount of effort possible and least amount of money invested too.

Should You Create A Blog Post If You Syndicate A GMB Post?

Okay. It’s a good Hump Day today, by the way. I’m liking these questions. It’s a good question, Michael. All right. Ray had some confusion earlier. We’ll pass over that. Quit This House, he says, “If I wanted to syndicate my GMB post, should I create a blog post with the post details and link or should I post to one of the social media sites and create a trigger from there?”

Quit This House, use the GMB auto poster. I’m telling you, it’s stupid and expensive, it’s super convenient and efficient, and it can generate an RSS feed from your GMB posts, and then you can just connect that directly to a syndication network, and then, viola, it’s done. You don’t have to go … Right now, what you’re talking about would require a manual action for every post. Right?

If you just set it up through the auto poster, you can, not only schedule out your GMB post all in one setting so that they automatically publish on the day and time that you select, but it will also generate an RSS feed that then you can populate or trigger a syndication network with, and all of that is automated.

Marco: By the way, since we’re back on the auto poster, I got an answer from Rob and he says, yes, we’ll be able to silo based on tagging. So you can create multiple silos within the auto poster just by tagging, by using different tags. The function isn’t integrated yet, but it’s coming. It’s already being developed, guys. Those of you who are looking to get into this, get in there now because it just keeps …

Shripad is a master programmer. He just keeps adding to it more and more functionality and he’s now charging more. We’re not gonna charge more monthly yet. If it gets to the point where there’s just a ton of programming that needs to be done, the price will probably need to go up. But we usually grandfather people into the prices where they are, so remember that.

Bradley: Yeah. Michael says, “Holy crap, I can’t believe I got the $1,000 Local Lease Pro course for $47.” Yeah, Michael. Look, for eight days, we promoted shit out of that and told everybody that once the Side Hustle Toolbox offer closed that it was gonna, I originally said it was gonna go to 500, but it’s such a damn good course. I mean, I’m telling you, this is I think the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career, that Local Lease Pro method right there. That’s why we made it $1,000.

Not only that, but we’re gonna be updating the course. Like I said, I’ve got some new stuff to add to it. That as soon as I get my VA on track for the new changes and I polish up the processes a little bit, I’m gonna be sharing that, I’ll be updating Local Lease Pro. So, yeah, you’re right. Good thing that you got in on it.

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have … ” By the way, guys, if you want Local Lease Pro, if you don’t have it, there’s only two options, you can buy it for 1,000 bucks or you can join the Mastermind and you can get it included in your Mastermind membership. So it’s entirely up to you, but I would recommend it. I mean, guys, it’s even worth $1,000, I’m not kidding, because of the opportunity. I’m telling you, it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my eight, almost nine year career now. Okay.

Does It Hurt Or Help To Have Multiple Syndication Networks?

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have multiple syndication networks?” Yes, it can, Abe. Not for YouTube channels-, well, depending on how they were set up, but if you’re using syndication networks for blog syndication to try to rank your own domain, like a self-hosted site, then, yes, multiple syndication networks can hurt you, depending on how you have it set up and how you have a syndication set up,

I’ve said for years now, like we teach branded tier one syndication networks and we also talked about when we teach how to build two-tier syndication networks. You can take it out multiple tiers. But I’ve also recommended for years that you only use two-tier syndication networks on YouTube channels or multi-tiered syndication networks on YouTube channels or for YouTube syndication, not for blog syndication.

However, if you wanna do it for blog syndication, I do teach in Syndication Academy and I’ve talked about it multiple times how you can use multi-tiered syndication networks and reduce the chance of getting a Google slap. You cannot eliminate it because you are still leaving a footprint. But you can significantly reduce the footprint if you add additional content feeds as triggers into your second or third tiers. Right? Because what you wanna do is you wanna mask or bury your content among a whole lot of additional route relevant and related type content so that the blogs don’t show or appear to be solely for manipulating search rankings. Right? And that’s essentially what they are.

Again, with multi-tiered syndication networks, I don’t recommend them for blog syndication unless you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to put forth all the additional effort. Also, multitude syndication networks can break down because there’s a lot of moving pieces, there’s a lot of different content sources, which can cause you know different RSS feeds that you don’t have control over because they’re not your RSS feeds, which can cause problems. Multi-tiered syndication networks can be a bitch to maintain for that reason and so that’s another reason I don’t recommend them.

If you are just flatly syndicating your content to multiple syndication networks and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, then you are absolutely causing damage because it is clearly, the algorithm can pick that up in a split second. Right? Again, Abe, if you were gonna be building these types of stuff, like I said, the only way that … We have Syndication Academy where I talk about all of that stuff, seriously, I go into your best practices and everything about how to use them and where to use them. But for blog syndication, I highly recommend that you just use a one-tier branded syndication network and then you can boost the hell out of that. Okay.

Marco: Yeah. He also says that he’s used lower standard contractors in the past and he’s considering using our services on top. Dude, if you’ve done that, then don’t get a syndication network from us until you fix whatever it is that you’ve done. I suggest totally getting into Syndication Academy, seeing how it’s all supposed to work. I hope that you have access to all of these networks and multiple rings that have been done for you so that you can just stop whatever madness it was that was created and you could do it the right way. The way that it’s supposed to be done, which is branding. It’s done for branding and for syndicating your network. Yeah. It is done to manipulate but to manipulate in the right way. If you get caught manipulating the wrong way, you’re going to get slapped down.

What’s The Difference Between The Press Release Service In Serp Space And MGYB?

Bradley: That’s right. Ray says, “What is the difference between press release service from Serp Space, and MGYB? Are they overlapping and/or equivalent? They’re equivalent now, Ray, because, well, there’s two different levels of press releases orders from Serb Space. There was the press release and then press release plus. The press release was, the press advantage network, the distribution network, and that’s we have now a separate account. We have our own press advantage distribution network agreement with them that is available in MGYB. It’s basically the same distribution network. So it’s up to you if you wanna order from Serp Space or if you wanna come to MGYB which is owned and controlled entirely by Semantic Mastery and my partners. If that makes sense.

Serp Space was a collaboration. We are no longer part of that. There’s no issues there or anything like that. I’m just letting you know, if you wanna order directly from us, it’s through MGYB. Okay. Good question.

Should We Link From GMB Biz.Site Description?

Doodle Digital Marketing, I like that. He says, “Hey guys, I love Hump Day Hangouts. Tons of value. “Should we link out from the GMB biz site description?” Not … Well, wait a minute, the GMB, yes. You can link from the GMB website content. I don’t know about the description. But if you’re talking about the GMB business description, no, you can’t put links in that; that’s short. I think it only allows 750 characters. But if you’re talking about the GMB website, yes, you can link out to that.

What I don’t recommend doing a lot of external links, unless it makes sense, it has to be relevant guys, remember, this is a Google property, so I would not be doing some stupid “I’m gonna link to a .gov or .edu site for authority” because that’s bullshit and it has been for years. If it’s relevant, then, yes. If it’s not relevant, you’re just doing it because you learn that somewhere on some stupid SEO program somewhere, don’t do it because that’s dumb.

But what I would recommend doing is, I always link, and I teach this, but I always link from the GMB website text, the content body of the website, I always link to the GMB maps share URL, as well as to the GMB website. So it’s linking to itself, right? If you have an external website, so self-hosted website, you can link to that. That makes sense. You could also link to some of your social media stuff. That makes sense. Any type of branded property that you could link out.

Again, I wouldn’t spam the description or the GMB website content with a bunch of exterior external links, I would keep it … Really that’s why I usually just link from the GMB website to itself and also to the GMB maps share URL because those are Google properties. Right? So just consider that.

It’s after five o'clock, I don’t have to get my daughter-, or I don’t get to have my daughter for dinner tonight, so I do have a couple extra minutes. Marco, can you hang out for a few extra?

Marco: Yeah, I can hang out for a few extra. My daughter isn’t crying it.

Bradley: We’ve only got a few questions left.

Marco: Let’s go.

Bradley: All right. John says, “I’ve got a Semantic Mastery syndrome. I have no doubt it’s the place to be.” “Thanks, John. John is one in Marco’s small group that he was talking about. Jordan says, “Marco’s right. We learned the why behind all these Semantic Mastery tactics, Syndication Academy, RYS stack, Press Releases, et cetera, and then just sell them along with some other deep rooted stuff we had developed in the lab.” He’s talking about his own business specifically, Jordan.

“Then we also create all the content via writing and optimizing it, which we charge for, and then we do web design with SEO strategy pre-launch. I couldn’t build a drive stack if my life depended on it. Haha.” Yeah, that’s great. I mean, honestly, guys, those are the audience that are tech nerds and like to get their hands dirty, so to speak, roll up their sleeves and get to work. Then, RYS Academy will teach you how to build drive stacks. It’s a lot of work. You can benefit from RYS stacks without having to learn how to build them, by just buying them done for you and you’ll save yourself a shit ton of time and energy.

Again, I’m not trying to discourage anybody from buying the course, I’m just saying you got to consider where to spend your time. Is learning how to build drive stacks going to progress your business? It might. You have to make that decision. I can’t make that decision for you. Or is the benefit and the result that the drive stack can produce going to help your business? And if so, then why go through the trouble of learning how to build them when you could just purchase them done for you and receive the benefit that you were seeking to begin with? Does that make sense? Then that way you could spend your time focusing on how to sell it or how to monetize it or how to apply it to get the result that you’re seeking. Does that make sense?

Again, guys, you have to think about it on a higher level. That’s what I think is really wrong with our industry, is that everybody teaches, or the vast majority of products tell you, “Hey, we’re gonna teach you how to do this one skill.” Yeah, I’m not trying to take that away from anybody. That skill is valuable. Whatever that skill may be, it’s valuable. But just because you know how to get a result from it, one particular skill does not make you a business owner, it does not make it a profitable business for you. Right?

So you got to think about how are you going to make money from whatever it is you choose to do? Is doing that thing, being the mechanic or the technician, is that actually going to make you the money or is selling that service and the result that that service produces going to make you the money? If that’s the case, then why don’t you focus on learning how to sell it and find people that are already good at doing it, fulfilling it, to do it for you right.

That’s what we’re trying to get at, guys, and Jordan understands that. That’s why Jordan’s business is cranking, it’s just kicking ass. Okay.

Any Black Friday Sales For Done For You Services Or Training?

Luis, he’s a new Mastermind member. “Hey guys, any Black Friday sales?” By the way, welcome, Luis. “Any Black Friday sales for Done For You services or training?” Yeah. Isn’t that with the GMB stuff was the pre-Black Friday sale?

Marco: It’s the pre. We will have something. Something’s coming your way and it’s gonna be good. Trust me. It’s not Black Friday yet, dude. But we will have something. It’ll be big. We control MGYB now. As Bradley mentioned, it’s ours. Semantic Mastery is our own store. So we’ve got some really good stuff coming your way.

Luis, I will be talking to you on Monday, as a matter of, fact. It’s his onboarding call. Again, I’m sorry, all these Mastermind questions keep coming up or Mastermind people. As part of the onboarding process, we give people a half hour call just to get them pointed in the right direction, to see where they’re going, where they want to be. So we ask questions, we try to provide guidance. I just happened to get Luis.

Guys, you can’t ask for who you want. You’re going to get whoever is up on the calendar, because we rotate since there’s five of us. But whoever you get, you’re going to get the direction that you need and you’re going to get your questions answered so that you can get started on your way to POFU.

That’s what we want you to do. We want you to get started getting to that place where you’re going to be and say, “Okay. Now I don’t have to deal with shitty clients. I don’t have to deal with shitty people. I am at a place where I can go into any negotiation from a position of power. I know what I’m worth. If this guy gives me any flack, I’m gonna have to say ‘Fuck you. I’m gonna go to your competitor and charge them half price just because I feel like it, because I don’t need you.‘” That’s what we want you to be.

Bradley: There you go so. Yes, Black Friday is this Friday. So, yeah, there will be some other specials. I don’t usually get involved with what promotions we’re doing, guys, so I couldn’t answer that. But I’m glad Marco said, yeah, we do have something coming Friday.

Should You Use Only The Main Keyword Phrase Or Should You Diversify Them When Building Links To All Assets?

Jay Turner. What’s up, Jay? He says, “I’ve been able to get my client ranked in the 3-pack for the second most trafficked keyword phrase with an RYS stack. High five, Marco.”

Marco: High five, dude.

Bradley: “But now I want to take on the main and most competitive keyword. I’m adding a silo of content to the RYS stack targeting the main keyword. So far so good. My question is when embarking on link building to all assets, like RYS, Syndication Network, GMB website, et cetera, should I use only the main keyword phrase or must I diversify the keyword phrases?”

Jay, diversify. What I recommend you do is go pool your … You should have probably already done keyword research anyways, so if you’re gonna be siloing, you should have your keyword themes relatively tight for the silos anyways. So make sure that if you’re gonna be direct targeting link building on a silo basis, that you’re only using a set of keywords that fall within that particular silo or keyword theme. Right? Does that make sense?

Let me take this down to a local level because what I wanna explain is, guys, when you’re doing a ton of like spam link building and such to power up tier one entities, which would be like drive stacks, press release, organization pages, syndication networks, even citations, you don’t want to hit, and I’m gonna say local because that’s primarily what I work on, and I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about here anyways. You said client ranks, so it’s likely it’s locally You said 3-pack. Right?

So you don’t wanna use the keywords with the location modifiers. You can use a very small percentage of your overall keywords that you’re gonna add to the anchor text or the link building that you’re gonna be either doing or buying a package or whatever. You can have a very, very small percentage with location modifiers, but I would keep that to an absolute bare minimum. Because it’s more about pushing the theme, the keyword theme, not the location, or the geographic theme, if that makes sense, it’s not about pushing location relevancy.

Because think about it, the further you move away from a local business the more broader the market segment is. In other words, you don’t wanna be targeting keywords or link building to tier 1 assets all the way down to the local level, including local location modifier, because it’s, remember your link building to tier one assets is two hops away from your target which would be your GMB asset or your primary website, the client’s website, or whatever, the further you get away from the ultimate target, the ultimate destination, the broader your keyword set should be, the broader the theme of the keyword set.

That’s why I say I don’t like to include local modifiers and anchor text when I’m building links to tier one assets. Instead I use higher or market-level keywords, broader market keywords. What do I mean by that? Instead of water heater repair Fairfax Virginia or Fairfax VA as a keyword that I would use as an anchor, it would be water heater repair and plumbing and plumbing repair and plumbing service, if that makes sense. I’d lose the local modifier and use more broader market-level keywords. Okay.

Also, you don’t wanna do entirely 100% on anchor text links, even with a diverse set of keywords. You wanna also include naked URLs and some generics. You can even use some brand terms at that point. It’s a little bit odd to use brand terms at tier two links because that’s again two steps away from your target URL. But it does make sense if you’re link building to, for example, if it’s a tier one branded property it can make sense to also include the brand name in some of those anchor text too. Right? I would just use those sparingly as well. It’s more about the keyword relevancy at that point in naked URLs, which is just pushing link equity to those tier one assets regardless of anchor text.

Marco, do you wanna comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, thanks, Bradley. What I would recommend is reach out to Dedia. We have a Dedia, he knows exactly what to do with your RYS stack to get the most out of it.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: If needed, then get our keyword research gig because we will come up with thousands upon thousands of keyword targets for you to either add relevance or to push, we provide what’s called buoyancy. “Buoyancy,” that’s one of the words that I have difficulty with. But we help push up the main keyword by providing relevance throughout the keyword silo. We give you all that with the keyword research.

Then, all you do is turn that over to Dedia and say, “Here, this is the folder that I’ve created, this is the keyword that I’m targeting, have at it.” Dedia has been with us long enough that he just knows, okay, this is what I need to do. He’ll blast it. He’ll hammer that RYS stack so that it produces.

Bradley: That’s right. You don’t have to worry about all those ratios and stuff, Jay. I know. I mean, honestly, I don’t worry about any of that stuff anymore because I don’t ever do any of that stuff anymore. If I need it, I just contact Dedia, exactly what Marco said, and I just say, “Hey, this is what I got. This is what I’m trying to accomplish. Make it happen,” and he does it.

Honestly, guys, that’s what I’m talking about. Jay, again, I don’t wanna get back on this pitch again, but if you have your own tools and you’re running your own link building tools and stuff like that, that’s great, if you’re efficient and all that. But if you’re not, which I am not, I have no desire to run those tools, just let the expert do it and Dedia has an absolute ninja. He’s an expert, a link building expert, so that’s why I just turned it over to him, defer to him anytime I have something that I need to spam to push additional link equity to. I just contact him say, “This what I got is what I need you do, make it happen,” and he does it. All right.

Jay vouches for the GMB auto poster. He says, “It’s great and Shripad does great work. He is very responsive in Support. I can attest to that too, not just because it’s me, but every time there’s an issue a little support bubble on the bottom right corner of the auto poster, you can just contact Support through there and he’s very, very responsive.”

Would You Recommend Using One Website For Multiple GMB Locations?

Abe says, “Also, I would like to know about using one website for multiple GMB locations. Is this recommended and possible?” It can be. You can just create separate location pages. So each location each, GMB locations should have its own dedicated page on the website and that’s the URL that you would submit as the website URL in the Google My Business profile. Does that make sense?

So instead of just using the home root domain, so the home page of the website for that brand across all different GMB assets, create a location specific page on that domain and then use that URL as that landing page URL as the website in GMB. It’s perfectly fine to do that, guys. But what you want is, if it’s the same brand, you can share the same brand name across all GMB locations. That’s fine. But you want a unique URL and a unique phone number and a unique address, if possible. Okay.

Strange NAP issues occur if you have two or more of the data points, the primary data points in a citation or NAP, which would be name, address, phone number, and also website URL. If you have two or more common data points among multiple locations, that’s going to cause NAP issues, which is going to make it very difficult to rank. You can have one common data point, typically the business name, because it’s a brand that can be used across multiple GMBs as long as the other primary data points are unique, physical address, phone number, website address. Does that make sense? So, yes, it’s possible.

Now one other thing I would mention is go back through, Abe, watch some of our previous Hump Day Hangouts. We’ll talk about the difference between using location pages, which would be pages on the root domain, or using location-specific sub-domains, which are separate WordPress installations, but there’s a reason to do, that’s to help mitigate risk, potential losing all of your assets if you were to catch a penalty. Again, we just talked about this last week, go back and watch the replay from last week and I’m pretty sure we talked about that extensively, about the benefit of using sub-domains over sub-folders or sub-directories. That’s pretty much the same thing I’m talking about here.

“Where’s the GMB auto poster?” John, just posting the Mastermind, we’ll get to the link.

Marco: I posted the link higher up.

Bradley: Yeah. I just didn’t have it. Thank you, Marco. Nestor says, Hey, I got to go guys. I got to wrap this up. So, anyways, and there’s Rob with the yearly discount for the GMB agency offer. That’s the enterprise account level or subscription level, which is 200 posts per month-, or excuse me 500 posts per month capacity. If you buy it on a monthly basis, subscribe month to month, it’s $200. If you buy the yearly license … It’s $200 per month, excuse me. If you buy the yearly license, it’s 1,000 bucks, divided by 12, comes out to be $84 dollars or $83 per month. So it’s a hell of a lot cheaper that way.

By the way, if you’re scheduling out 31 posts, which there’s a post scheduling feature, which is amazing in the GMB auto poster, so you can schedule out one post a day or however many you want. Let’s just say you’re doing one post a day, you could do 31 days. Then, there’s a republish option to where it can republish the post based upon the interval that you set. For example, if you set every 31 days, you can publish, you can schedule out 31 posts and then have them republish 31 days later, each post thereafter. Right? Does that make sense?

So day one and then day 32, that post publishes again. Day two and day 33, that post publishes again. Does that make sense? That way you can set up all of your posting and in an automated fashion. Well, with 500 posts per month, if you were to actually fill out or post one per day for each location, you can essentially put 16 locations in one enterprise account. Sixteen times 31 comes out to be 496, so you get 496 posts. Essentially, you can serve 16 locations, 100% one post per day with a single enterprise account. Does that make sense?

That’s how I’m clustering my sites right now. I gave you a little insight on that.

Marco: Yeah. I mean, it’s an awesome deal because it saves so much money and then the auto poster just saves so much time and effort. Once your VAs get proficient with going in there and just scheduling and putting everything up, it just saves you a ton of time of money. So you’ll make the money back that you invest in this just by the time you’re gonna save with your VAs, or even if you try to do it on your own, which you shouldn’t be doing.

Bradley: Yeah. Just so you guys are aware, for clients, I have a VA that goes in and manually posts for all the clients. I do that for a reason because every post is 100% unique that way. She still has content templates, but she goes in and she puts in a new image every time, and the content templates she uses, there’s tokens that she swaps out with different keywords and such. The target URLs are always being recycled to whatever we’re linking to from the GMB post and all that. So they become unique for clients.

I pay my VA on a per post basis. So I pay her, for every post that she publishes she gets paid. It varies between $3.50 to $5 per post. But I charge my clients $10 to $15 per post, depending on what the volume is. So my point is, I make money on that even though she’s manually posting.

However, for lead gen assets, guys, once again, just like I was telling … Shit, who was I telling earlier? Michael. I was telling Michael earlier not to worry about syndication networks for lead gen assets because you wanna reduce expenses. Well, I don’t want to pay a VA to manually post to lead gen assets because that’s an additional expense when I can pay for-, or subscribe to the auto poster, schedule all the posts.

Do I do all these guys? Hell, no. I’ve trained a VA to go in and set up or schedule all the posts within the GMB auto poster and then schedule them to republish. So that, literally, I can pay a VA for three or four hours to schedule out, however long it takes them, to schedule all those posts out. Then, it’s done and those GMB assets will continually update posts because of the auto poster and I’m not paying anymore other than for the auto poster subscription. Does that make sense? So it’s a hell of a lot more efficient with money too. Right? It’s more cost-effective. Okay.

Nestor says … And I’m so over, we got to get out of here. Nestor says, “Hey guys, how about webs 2.0 example mybrand.wordpress.com point to my GMB property three links as a press release?” Okay. First of all, I’m not familiar with their example. I know that’s kind of a competitor that does, you know, they have their own store and blah blah blah. I’m not real familiar with what they teach or what they say, so I can’t really speak on that.

I’m not quite sure I understand, in the wording of your question, what you mean by mybrand.wordPress. I understand WordPress.com, that’s fine. That’s a brand identity property that you can create on the WordPress.com site, kind of like what I showed earlier. But, yeah, that’s normal. That goes into Syndication Network, right? You try to get your brand name as a sub-domain blah blah blah. That’s pretty standard.

But, “point to GMB property three links as a press release,” I’m not sure what that means. Can you point to a GMB property from your WordPress.com site? Sure. Can you also use press releases to link to that WordPress.com site? Sure. You can also link to your GMB.

I’m doing a press releases, Local PR Pro method is what I use and, as standard operating procedure, I published a press releases with every GMB asset, it gets created. Usually, my preferred method is to link from the first press release to the GMB, the Google Maps share URL, to the Google the GMB website URL, and to the GMB the first post URL. We teach that at Local Lease Pro and that’s just essentially my method. So I’m going direct from the press releases to the Google assets. Okay.

Yeah. Guys, there’s a thousand ways to skin a cat, right? So our method isn’t the be-all end-all. It’s just our method works for what we want it to work for and that’s what we teach. Other people have other methods that may very well work as good as ours. I’m not trying to say that ours is better than anybody else’s. I’m just telling you what we teach, I don’t know what they teach. I’m sorry. It’s likely that that would work too.

Will says, “Bradley, speaking about syndication networks, I finally figured out how to syndicate to Medium.com. I’ve been testing it for a while with a few posts now and it works well to syndicate your WordPress post with images and YouTube video embeds, and from there, you could syndicate to your tier two, if you’d like. I’ll send you an update to support@semanticmastery.”

Thanks, Will. That’s awesome. In fact, Will, if you would, I mean, if you’re cool with it, you can even send the update right in the Mastermind community so that everybody else could benefit from it. If not, send it to me and I’ll update everybody in the Mastermind, and Syndication Academy for that matter, once I see it. Thank you for that, Will.

Okay. “Link to pre-Black Friday deals, please.” Yeah. Luis, just contact us at Support.

That’s it. Okay, guys, we’re way over. We got all questions answered, though.

Marco: That was a good one.

Bradley: Thanks, Marco, for hanging out, man, I appreciate it.

Marco: Marathon. All right, dude.

Bradley: All right, everybody. Mastermind webinar tomorrow. Be there or be square. See y'all.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210 published first on your-t1-blog-url

[localwebmgmt]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210

Click on the video above to watch Episode 202 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: Hello and welcome to Episode 210 of Hump Day Hangouts. I am Adam Moody with Semantic Mastery. We are gonna say hi to everyone real quick before we dive into some announcements and questions from everybody watching us live. Also, if you’re watching this on YouTube, we noticed from time to time that we get questions over there, but you need to come to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions and ask your questions there, that’s where we’re monitoring. Before we dive in, real quick, Chris, how are you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Good weather in Florida always the last couple weeks. I highly recommend it, like I love it. How are you doing?

Adam: Not bad. It’s like 60 here, which is perfect. Everyone in California thinks it’s like the middle of winter and I’m just enjoying myself. This is good. Marco, how about you? How’s the weather for you, man?

Marco: Things are good here, man, transitioning to the dry season. So we’re gonna have about five and a half months of absolutely no rain, not even a drop. I’m looking forward to … Yeah, but then, it’s seven months of afternoon showers. You gotta pay the price for the life you live, right?

Adam: Yeah, fair enough.

Marco: But always warm, like if it were 60 here, we’d all be dying literally. It’s freezing cold.

Chris: [Inaudible 00:01:19] stay in Florida.

Adam: Definitely. Bradley, how about you, man? How are you doing?

Bradley: I’m good, I’m happy to be here. Got lots of stuff going on at the moment. Just been really, really busy. In last week, well, I took off for a couple days because my sister got married again. I actually got to go down to Hilton Head, South Carolina and meet one of our members, Ed, who also went to POFU Live; he’s in the Mastermind also. That was cool because I got to spend an hour with him just chatting. It was really, really cool. I always enjoy getting to meet members whenever we have the opportunity. So that was a lot of fun. But I had to take really Friday and Monday off, so now I’m behind.

Besides that, I got a quick little story to tell very, very quickly. Just last week, it was funny because I was actually reviewing the Hump Day Hangout from last week and I was talking about mitigating risk. Marco and I, we were talking about reducing exposure and trying to mitigate risk because, if you put all your eggs in one basket and Google takes that basket, you’re screwed, you’ve lost all those assets.

Well, I was using a test with what’s called GMB Location Groups. It’s a setting inside of Google My Business. I was running a test on a set of GMB assets for a particular metro area, so one metropolitan city area. I had seven assets in there that were fully optimized, 100% done. In fact, they were the seven assets that my VAs has been training on as he’s been learning the processes for doing this whole method, the Local Lease Pro model, essentially.

Long story short, on Saturday, I was down at the Hilton Head and I happened to get an email saying that the account that was used as the recovery email for that particular GMB manager account, which had to be turned into an owner in order to use location groups, had been terminated for violating Google’s spam policies. I lost all those damn assets, every single one of them, and I can’t even access them through the original Google accounts now, guys.

That was three weeks work, not necessarily my work, but my VA’s work wasted. Now, is it all bad? No, because I learned a valuable lesson. Number one, don’t use GMB location groups, it’s like a trap, number one, lesson number one. Number two is always mitigate risk. Don’t set yourself up with vulnerabilities that Google can take … We exploit Google’s vulnerabilities. Don’t you think Google will exploit ours? So I learned that … In fact, I’m actually updating the entire process for how to first log in and set up and manage a lot of GMB assets. I’m updating all those processes this week, in fact, because we have to do something new that reduces our overall risk.

Anyways, that was my little story. I’m a little bit behind now because all the work that I’ve done for the last several weeks on all the processes now has to be updated and redone. But that’s the cat and mouse game that we play.

Marco: Yeah. One of the great things about our Mastermind is that we do all of the testing, we take all of the risk, we were the ones who go in the lab. I mean, we do encourage our own people to test so that they can verify that our results are what we’re saying they are. But it’s one of the things that we do, we go, we blow things up and it happens, and then now we know what not to do. And right into our Mastermind, we’ll share all of test result with the membership exactly what was done so that they don’t repeat the process and get stuck losing assets because nobody wants to lose an asset, especially not seven. But so be it, lesson well-learned and it’s a lesson that the Mastermind doesn’t have to repeat.

Bradley: That’s true and, just real quick segue, that leads me to, that’s kind of like what the Mastermind is about. The scaling option, like doing all these heavy processes and stuff, is really reserved to the POFU Live group attendees at the moment, but we’re polishing all this stuff. Obviously, the Mastermind, we update, like tomorrow we’ve got a Mastermind webinar and I’m certainly gonna be talking about what not to do because I want to make sure all of our members are fully aware of what not to do so they don’t lose assets.

But once we have this 12-week process done, that the POFU Live attendees are kind of in accountability group with me right now, and we’ve got a target that we’re trying to hit at the end of 12 weeks, which is 50 GMB assets fully developed and ready for monetization, if they’re not already monetized by that point, and so when we’re done at that 12-week period, we will have discovered or perfected, really fine-tuned the method and all of the processes to get us there, to get us to that point. That’s when we’re gonna release in its entirety the Mastermind.

That training will not be released outside of the Mastermind, period, and that’s only because it’s highly valuable and we put a lot of work. In fact, the other members of the POFU accountability group with us, that’s like 12 of us in there, and so that’s a lot of intellectual property, a lot of a work that goes into that. So the Mastermind members will get that.

But that’s just one of many things that we do there. For example, we had some questions about how to structure ad ID pages and set up as three buckets with HTTP, SSL protocol, and all that stuff. Two weeks ago, we went in and showed exactly how to do that. I mean, it’s just stuff like that that we do in the Mastermind all the time.

Adam: Yeah. Something else that I just remembered, that reminded me of, Bradley, was, I think it was Jason who posted yesterday, who’s one of our Mastermind members, just out of the blue was like, hey, I’ve seen some questions about blah blah blah-, not blah blah blah, but some heavy-duty IT stuff. He’s like, “Hey, if anybody needs help just ping me. I’ll do it for free if you’re a Mastermind member.”

That’s just awesome to see. Again, you get that in a tight-knit group like that. It’s cool having that ability. Everyone who knows our story kind of knows where we came from and how we were part of a Mastermind. That’s why part of why we do this to get that community, it’s not just a jumble of people, you do have a community.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Well, cool. I also want to say then to you guys, we mentioned the GMB stuff, we’ve got a sale going on right now at MGYB. It’s wrapping up today. So if you’re interested or you need a GMB verification service, whether it’s for your clients, it’s for yourself, you’re doing some lead gen, head over there. I posted it on the page. If you’re watching the replay, sorry, it’s probably too late. But a good reason to watch live and open the emails is you get a 35% discount on that service right now. So head over there do that.

Real quick, too, if you’re joining us for the first time, thank you so much for watching us. If you want the right place to start, because it is one of the questions we get, “Hey, where should I start? Should I take this course and do that?” start with Battle Plan. No matter what you’re doing, even if you want to hop into Mastermind, get the Battle Plan, come join the Mastermind. That’s the path. The link is on there. It’s a great way to get repeatable results, which is why we put it together, so that we can have that. It’s our home processes put into an easy-to-digest format.

Then, obviously, like we’ve been talking about it, if you’re ready to take things up a notch, if you wanna scale, you wanna grow, then the Mastermind is the place to be.

Bradley: Did you open up Local Lease Pro as a standalone product now?

Adam: Yes.

Bradley: I’ll be damned. I didn’t realize that was available yet. Okay.

Adam: Sneaking that onto the page, if people are interested.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay.

Adam: I’m gonna say no more.

Bradley: Everything I’ve been talking about with this Local Lease Pro method, that’s it. Most of you guys are probably aware of it because of the Side Hustle Toolbox promotion, that was our contribution. But now that that’s closed, it’s a standalone product. I’m gonna be updating that in a couple of weeks with some of the new processes that I’ve just discovered.

Again, GMB, like the actual optimization process has changed slightly. Not much, but slightly, and I’m updating the processes for my VAs right now. So next week, I’ll kind of polish it up a bit and then add that into the Local Lease Pro training. So if you guys don’t have it yet, I recommend you get it. This method is freaking killing it. I think it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career. I mean that, so check it out.

All right. Can we get into questions?

Adam: I think so. If you guys are good, let’s do this.

Do I Need Access To A Client’s Website If I Do Local SEO For Them?

Bradley: All right. Starting off with Chris Green posted a support question from Vincent. He says, “I’m considering to join the RYS Reloaded or the GMB course. My question is this: if I do SEO for local businesses in my country, which is Malaysia, do I need to have access to my clients website?” No. It can help. You don’t have to have access to the client’s website, but it would certainly help because you could take care of some on-page SEO issues. In other words, you can optimize the site itself, which is considered on-page SEO, and that can help that can help quite a bit.

In fact, with proper on-page SEO, a lot of the times you can rank a site with a fraction of the off-page SEO because any off-page SEO that … If on site is proper, if it’s tight, if it’s strong, then any off-page will significantly affect, it will have a strong impact on the site because then the site will respond well to off-page because it is a well-built, well-structured site.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to have access to the site because you can accomplish through off-page. You can still rank a site with off-page. If the on-page is terrible, then you probably are fighting a losing battle. But if it’s decent, then you could probably still accomplish what you need to, depending on how competitive the keywords are that you’re targeting. But it’s likely that you could still accomplish what you needed to with off-page alone. But again, there are benefits certainly to being able to access the client’s website. Right? If you’re starting with garbage, it’s gonna be difficult to rank. So just keep that in mind. Okay.

It helps, it’s not 100% necessary. Well, it depends, right? It depends on what the status of the site is currently. If it’s a shitty site, if it was built poorly, optimized poorly, or if it’s spammed to death or whatever, then you may never be able to rank that site. But if it’s decent, if it’s fairly okay, then you could still just apply off-page methods and probably get the results that you want. However, if you can do both, manage the on-page and the-off page, you will get the best results. Right?

Are The SEO Methods In RYS Reloaded And GMB Work On WordPress.com And Wix.com Websites?

Number two, he says, “If my client has a WordPress.com or Wix.com website, can the SEO methods taught in RYS Reloaded and GMB work and getting first page ranking on Google?” Well, yes. Well, Local GMB Pro course is not really anything that have to do with websites, right? Local GMB Pro is how to optimize Google My Business and set up all of the Google assets to rank. Well, not even to rank, but to just generate leads from Google, independent of ranking. That’s what Local GMB Pro is about. It’s about getting leads, getting exposure from Google My Business, whether it ranks or not, and that’s what that whole … Again, despite traditional SEO, Local GMB Pro can generate leads from Google. Okay. So that’s what local GMB Pro is.

RYS is about using Google’s assets as an off-page tool as well as an entity validator, an authority builder, and multiple other things. But it’s more of an off-page thing. Again, it has nothing to do with the website structure or the platform itself, WordPress or Wix. It doesn’t matter because all you’re doing is using Google properties to push relevancy and authority over to whatever property is that you’re trying to rank.

Marco, do you wanna chat about that a little bit?

Marco: Yeah. It’s just one of the pillars that we teach, ART, the art of ART, activity, relevance, trust and authority, both on the link origin and on the link destination. What that means is you get visitors no matter how you show activity and Google reward you as long as everything is relevant and you’re working with trusted and authoritative entities. If you become along with that, a trusted and authoritative entity, then you get rewarded. Google will also reward you for being in Google because Google trusts itself. It’s the ultimate as far as what it trusts. So working in what we call working inside the belly of the beast also has its rewards.

Yeah. As Bradley said, it makes absolutely no difference. I mean, you work with whatever. I mean, you have a free WordPress blog ranking for … what is it? Free-, no, not free. SEO Virginia. Yeah. I mean, it just goes to show that if you get that activity in there, everything else just fall into place as long as it’s relevant, trusted and authoritative.

I keep telling people, and I just mentioned it in our Semantic Mastery Facebook group, the Mastermind, that ART, A-R-T, will trump anything. It will even overcome any of the negative factors, of the algorithm, penalties and all of that. You become almost immune to anything that Google has to throw at you because you’re signaling rank pot-, excuse me, rank brain in the way that it wants to be signaled. You’re doing the Google tickle, the T tickle. I mean, it blows up. It becomes a self-feeding monster once you get all that activity in there.

Bradley: Yeah. This is an example of what Marco was just talking about, this is that WordPress.com. So free wordpress.com blog, guys. If you take a look at this, there’s no content on this page. It looks like there’s content, but the only content on this page is this right here. That’s it. The rest of those are embedded files. That’s RYS at work there, guys. That’s RYS Academy right there at work. Okay. Again, go view page source, the post body, the article body of this post. The content body is this right here. That’s the only text on the page. The rest of it is all embedded files RYS style, and that’s all.

Look at that, guys. It’s ranked number three in organic for SEO Virginia. I mean, that’s pretty powerful. Again, that’s all off-page stuff. There is some on-page going on there because of the iframes that are actually embedded in this page, but it’s primarily an off-page thing that’s got this ranking. And that’s the power of RYS, right?

By the way, the Google site as part of the stack and that’s been number one since May of 2015. Guys, that’s been number one since May of 2015, or within a few weeks anyways, that’s when it was published. Look at that, it’s a horrid site. It was just for a test purpose, guys. Still ranked. Still ranked, it’s three and a half years now. Still ranked. Anyways, there you go. Will it work? It damn sure does.

How Do You Get The URL Of A Scheduled Post In The MGYB GMB Service?

Dustin’s up, or Da B. “Hey there. I’m using the MGYB post scheduling service but I was wondering, in the Local GMB course you link to the previous post but when I scheduled a post, then I don’t have the URL of the last URL because it will be scheduled. How do I link to the post then if the last post yet is not published or is not published yet? Greetings. Dustin.” That’s a good question Dustin.

Marco, that’s something that I think Rob was talking about that was going to be a feature, that was going to be released soon within the auto poster was the ability to silo a post. Is that correct?

Marco: Yeah. We keep going back and forth with Shripad. I’m not sure if that’s available yet. But I mean, there’s an easy solution to that. Link in the body or you’re still not gonna have the post URL. You would need the original post URL, and then the next one, then the next one. So Shripad will have to come up with something regarding that so that we can solve that issue. But, yes, he is working on it so we can silo GMB posts.

Bradley: Yeah. I’m thinking if the script would wait until a published one was pulled and then grab the short URL and then link to that before the next one that’s scheduled publishes. You know what I mean? That would work to build a silo on that. I know that if you post the post … So you publish the post, then you grab the URL and link to it from the next post. But, you’re right, if you wanna schedule out multiple posts in advance, right now there’s not an ability to do that yet.

But that’s something, Marco, if you wanna make a note of that specifically, silo posts together, schedule post together, which I’m sure that can be integrated at some point. Right now that’s not something that can be done, Dustin, but we’re working on that. It’s a great feature.

Marco: No. Dustin, what I would suggest is you just have your VA go in and add links as needed.

Bradley: As they’re published.

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Right. As they publish, go grab the URL, and then go post the next one. That’s the only thing we can do to daisy chain them together right now until we have the automation such that it will be able to do it. Okay.

Jordan says, “On one of the, or …” Okay. One of the guys, here we go. “One of the guys on our SEO team said after an SEO pitch this probably sounds like magic to them. I still can’t believe we get paid for this stuff, almost like grownup version of video games. Haha.” That’s funny. Well, I can believe we’d get paid for it, man. Think about all the testing and all the studying and all the learning and stuff that you, guys, and the money that you invest in your education and to tools and all that stuff.

I mean, we spend a lot of time learning this stuff, guys, we should be paid for it. I mean, think about that. We spend all our time learning how to perform this SEO magic stuff. A business owner that’s doing plumbing, for example, he’s out unclogging drains and that kind of stuff. He wouldn’t have time to learn all this stuff. How do I know? Because I was an electrical contractor and I had to learn how to do this shit while I was doing electrical work. It just so happens I found that I could make more money at this, that’s why I switched to this all together.

What are you gonna say, Marco?

Marco: Yeah. I was gonna say we deserve to be paid and be paid well. I mean, do you know how much time we’ve spent between RYS Academy, RYS Reloaded, Local GMB Pro, Local PR Pro, Local Lease Pro? Do you know how many hours have gone into researching that and making it work? Making that all work hand in hand so that one pushes the other and you’re pushing ultimate power to whatever destination so that that client’s phone rings?

Yeah. It may seem like magic. “Well, my phone rang. You did all that.” But it’s actually just hours and hours and hours of being a total geek.

Are There Ways We Can Use Press Releases Based On The Battleplan Aside From Launching A New Site?

Bradley: Rabbit-hole time. Yeah. Dan’s up. He says, “I’ve looked using press releases based off the Battle Plan and saw that you have them at the store. Besides using them for launching a new site would there be other places that I could use them? I do some consulting on the side for local businesses and build sites, lead gen, et cetera?”

Yeah, Dan. “Press releases are my favorite off-page or link building method really. Like no question, I absolutely love press releases. I use them as my primary off-page link building tool or method. I still use spam links from time to time for certain things, but for the most part I’m using press releases for link building.”

Yeah. You can use them. Guys, there’s dozens and dozens of things that you can publish press releases about. I’ve talked about them. Dan, we have a course called Local PR Pro which is specifically about how to use press releases to rank in the Maps pack, to get Google GMB, Google My Business profiles ranked in the maps pack using press releases. Right?

That’s what that course, Local PR Pro, is all about. In that course, I talk about how there’s multiple different things that you could publish a press release about. Because that’s a question that comes up often, “Well, I don’t think my client has anything that’s really newsworthy to publish a press release about.”

But think about it, getting a five-star review, you could publish a press release about receiving a five-star review or your client. Or you could publish a press release about a new employee being hired. Or a seasonal change to the product line that’s available. Or the services that are available, depending on what kind of business you’re dealing with. Or an accolade that the company receives, some sort of award or something like that. Or any charitable things, any charity events that they’re hosting or that they contribute to or participate in. Right?

There’s just dozens and dozens of things, hooks, angles that you could use to write a news release or something that can be … Guys, you can even publish a press release about a new blog post that’s been published on the website. No kidding. I mean, you just have to get a little bit creative. Dan, when I say you have to get creative, I don’t mean you. I mean, what I would recommend is hiring a PR writer, from Upwork or something like that, that can come up with these angles. A good press release writer can come up with a newsworthy angle for just about anything.

Again, if you’re doing a lot of this work, you could hire a PR writer, a good PR writer from like Upwork or something like that. Or if you’ve got a good press release distribution service that you subscribe to for monthly press releases or whatever, if they’ve got good writers in-house, which most good services do now, then they’ll have writers that are already trained on how to find news where the angles or to create hooks or their stories for the press releases. Right?

For example, if you use the MGYB press release service, the writers there from the Press Advantage distribution network, if that’s what you’re using, it’s fabulous, and there the press releases are almost twice the content length of typical press releases. There’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 words as opposed to 300 to 400, which is what most of them are. So those writers are really, really good, like their sole purpose in life is to find an angle or to create an angle to write a press release about. Those are the same writers that you have access to when you buy a press releases from us individually.

Okay. Anybody wanna comment on that before we move on? It’s a good one, Dan.

Marco: No. I think you hit the nail on the head. They’re great for just about everything. The only thing that you have to avoid is self-promotion, but you get that from most of them. You just have to define what self-promotion is. You go and you advertise. Well, we’re in Facebook, if you’ve just started your Facebook page, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. It’s still self-promotion. It’s just not getting sales. That’s what you wanna try to avoid.

Other than that, it’s fantastic for link building. Not only that, if you hit the press release, whatever the distribution network is with link building, it’ll push through. You’re putting a filter in between the destination so that you hit that with link building. It’ll power it up even more. They just work really well for everything.

Bradley: They damn sure do. Like Marco said, you can actually do self promotional PRs, but the salesy part is what you gotta leave out. They shouldn’t be salesy. But they can be self-promotional. Again, a good PR writer will be able to disguise a promotion as a story, a news story, and that’s really what you wanna do. That’s why I say don’t do it yourself. If I had to write press releases, I’d be a very miserable person. I wouldn’t wanna do it, but some people enjoy that stuff and they’re good at it. All right.

Is It Okay To Start With Battleplan Before Going Into The Mastermind and Syndication Academy Courses?

Andrew Walker’s up. Andrew is a local guy to me. I was in lead share, like a breakfast lead share group with him for several years that I don’t attend those things much anymore. Andrew is a great guy. Anyways, it’s good to see you here, Andrew. I haven’t seen him in a while. He says, “Hey guys, it’s been a long time since I’ve been on Hump Day Hangouts. I got caught up in the cold calling strategy to build my business and also had a case of the shiny object syndrome.” Well, we all do, Andrew. Don’t beat yourself up, buddy. We all go through that. I promise you, I’ve been through it. I still struggle with that, to be honest.

“I don’t fully understand how powerful-,” or excuse me, “I didn’t fully understand how powerful digital marketing is and what it can do for your business. You would think that that’s a no-brainer for an IT guy. Anyway, I’m back for real and I’m ready to learn this stuff. I’ve just downloaded the Battle Plan. I’d love to get involved in the Mastermind, but I’m not able to afford that at this time. Syndication Academy looks to be a great runner up. Can I start there to get things going or just start with the Battle Plan? Thanks, guys, and congrats on your four year anniversary.”

Okay. Great question, Andrew. Again, glad to see you back, man. The Syndication Academy is, yeah, it’s good, however, because, I’m not gonna knock Syndication Academy, but what we recommend is, especially for you, Andrew, you’re running your IT business, your IT services business, and so it depends on how much time you have. If you’ve got a lot of time and no money then, yes, pick up Syndication Academy because then you can learn how to build your own syndication network, which is gonna be one of the critical components to your business in expanding your reach and helping to generate more leads, it’ll help with your SEO and all that kind of stuff.

However, there’s a lot of time that goes into learning how to build a syndication network and, unless you plan on building syndication networks for others or selling them to others, I wouldn’t recommend that you go through all the trouble of learning how to build all that stuff for your own branded syndication network, for your own business. If you’re looking to try to grow your business, then your time is better spent not learning how to build a syndication network that you’re only gonna build one for your own business.

Your time is better spent marketing your business. You can instead just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us and we will build it to our specifications, which is exactly what we teach in the training. You can save yourself weeks of study and implementation by just buying a Done For You Syndication Network and you still reap the benefits of it without having to spend weeks of your time. Does that make sense? They’re inexpensive enough that there’s really no reason that you can’t just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us. It’s cheaper or about the same price as the cost of a month tuition to Syndication Academy. Right?

Anyways, my point is, if you want, Andrew, since you can’t join the Mastermind yet, what I recommend is that you attend our Hump Day Hangouts regularly on Wednesdays, ask your questions here try, keep it to one question per post. In other words, you can post a few times, but try to keep it one question per post please. Ask questions here and we will try to guide you in the best way possible to help you to start growing your IT business, just from these Hump Day Hangouts. Then once you have generated some revenue you can always come join the Mastermind, which is your best bet, because the Mastermind is not just about marketing stuff.

Guys, we’ve gotten away from just teaching SEO or just teaching marketing methods. It’s more about building your business regardless of whether you’re building a local agency or consulting firm, or you want to build your own brick and mortar business, or virtual business for that matter. We want to teach you how to do all of that, which includes marketing and includes SEO, and includes all that stuff, but we’re not pigeon holing our training into just marketing training, if that makes sense. A lot more goes into it than that.

I would suggest, Andrew, that what you do is come back and join us here in Hump Day Hangouts, get involved, stay engaged, ask questions. We also have our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials Facebook group that you could ask questions there. As soon as you’re able to, I would invest in joining the Mastermind so that you can get, basically, almost one-on-one guidance from each one of us my partners and I as well as all of the other members in the Mastermind that are also savvy business owners. Right? That’s part of why it’s Mastermind because it’s not just about us teaching all the time, it’s about everybody in there contributing and helping each other, which is fabulous. Okay.

By the way, one of our top members, longtime members, Jason Johnson, who is what Adam was just talking about at the very beginning of this Hump Day Hangout, he was mentioning somebody was having difficulty setting up their MX records for G suite email to use their domain for their email within G suite. Jason Johnson posted, “Hey, I saw somebody was having trouble with MX records. Hey, I’m an IT guy. If anybody has any questions or any problems, tell them to reach out to me. I’ll help them for free as long as they’re a Mastermind member.”

Andrew, what I’m saying is, Jason is an IT guy who’s been in our Mastermind. He does digital marketing on the side, but also markets his own business and somebody that you could absolutely click with. Probably the two of you could chat about what he’s doing for his business and what’s working for him in generating leads for his IT business and all that kind of stuff. Right?

Again, that’s part of the power of a Mastermind. It’s not just learning from me or Marco when, you know, I’m gonna teach you how to generate leads for your business, but I generate leads for contracting businesses. Right? You’re trying to generate leads for IT services, and computer repair networking, and that kind of stuff, so why not get the advice direct from somebody that’s already generating leads for that type of a business, which we have members in our group to do that? Does that make sense?

That’s the power of a Mastermind. Okay. So that’s what I recommend. In the meantime, if you don’t have the money, come back here, ask questions, implement what you can, go through our YouTube channel Semantic Mastery, youtube.com/semanticmastery. Use the channel search function, ask questions over there. You’re likely going to find already video answers for many of your questions. Then, like I said, anything that you can’t find answers to, post in either the Facebook group or post back here on the event page every week and we’ll come in and answer your questions. As soon as you can generate a little bit of positive revenue, I would reinvest that back into your education and into building your business by joining the Mastermind, getting guidance from us as well as our other members.

Marco: I’m gonna give him just a couple of weeks. First of all, welcome back, Andrew. Sorry that you had a shiny object syndrome. I mean, that sucks and it makes you spend a whole lot of money and time chasing. It becomes a useless path. You fill up your computer with a whole bunch of garbage that you’re never going to use and you realize how much money you spent and then you get caught up at where you are right now where you ended, and dropped all that money and you have nothing to show for it.

But that’s okay, lesson learned. The two examples that I’m gonna give you is, I’m gonna give you Paul Fussell, who’s always in these Hump Day Hangouts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he drops in today; or if he isn’t, it’s because he’s out making money. He was at POFU Live, as a matter of fact, our event. The way he went about doing it, he come into Hump Day Hangouts, ask questions, and then go and go and apply. Ask questions, go and apply. then he started purchasing our drive stacks to rank. I know that he was doing dental for a while, I don’t know what he’s doing now.

Anyway, the thing about Paul is that he just went and he got Done For You services, and then he was chasing clients. Every time he’d get a client, drive stack, and that’s how he would he would rank them. But that’s Paul and that’s how he did it, so Hump Day Hangouts and Done For You services.

Then, we get to Jordan in Syndication Academy. Jordan lives in Syndication Academy, he’s always there. He’s one of our, I don’t know, one of our long-running and most active members of Syndication Academy. He runs an agency and I think he just got a huge nationwide client, but it’s from Syndication Academy. I’m not gonna say that he got everything from Syndication Academy, but I know that that’s his foundation and I know that that’s what he’s doing to rank his clients, to help his clients and to help his agency.

He has an agency, actually he’s an agency owner, but he decided that Syndication Academy was the thing for him. But, of course, they’ll all tell you, and Jordan will tell you that the Battle Plan is the place where you start, and you have to follow it. If you follow the Battle Plan, then you’re going to get to our Done For You services.

It’s a whole lot easier to go and buy a Syndication Academy Network, as Bradley mentioned, than to learn how to build a one-of-a-kind that you only need that one time. Why not go buy it and pay that than to pay a monthly membership to learn how to build one, or you might not wanna learn how to build one, or you might need?

It’s just to buy them and then go and sell it to clients, to people you know. Then, you pitch the benefits of being branded of having that footprint of being seen, of your content being seen everywhere, pushing your content to where the people are hanging out. So that’s one of the benefits.

You could do it many ways. Now, of course, we’re always going to tell you that the Mastermind is the place to be because that’s where like-minded entrepreneurs hang out, people who want to grow their business and get away from just that weekly paycheck and having to wait until the next one so that you could do whatever it is that you wanna do. We wanna push you, guys, past that. We call it POFU, position of fuck you.

Whatever that position is for you, Andrew, we want you to get there. There isn’t just one way to get there, but we do wanna help you get there. So whether you choose Hump Day Hangouts, whether you choose Syndication Academy, or what we suggest, whether you join our Mastermind, we’re going to help you any way we can. That’s what we’re here for.

Bradley: That’s right. Let’s not forget Mohammad. He’s a shining example. Mohammad Mackey. He started by just joining Hump Day Hangouts and coming and asking questions week in and week out and for months. Eventually, he got to a point where he landed a couple of his first clients and started making enough money. He came and joined the Mastermind. Then, he went through a little bit of a struggle for over-promising to clients and ended up losing some clients and had to drop out of the Mastermind for a little bit.

But he kept coming to Hump Day Hangouts and asking more questions, even during that time where he had to back out of the Mastermind, and he got the education that he needed and he implemented it. Right? It’s nothing we did, all we did was provide him with information, but he’s the one that took action and kept at it. He kept persisting in working and he kept finding stuff that wasn’t working until he found stuff that did work. Then, he landed some clients again, got his money back up, and joined the Mastermind again.

We have multiple examples of people that have done that just by starting here, right here at Hump Day Hangouts, Andrew, and you can do that too. Right? The Battle Plan, like I said, will tell you do this, this, this, and this, and you’re going to start getting results. It doesn’t say that you have to learn how to do those things, it just tells you apply these things. Right?

You can either learn how to do those things and do them yourself or, as a business owner, it would be much more efficient with your time to just purchase the Done For You services and apply them in the order that they’re recommended and reap the benefits of those without having to learn how to do it. Okay. Great question. Again, glad to have you back, Andrew. We’re happy to see you participate and be a lot more engaged over the coming weeks.

What Are The Factors You Consider When Finding The Best Keywords For Ranking Opportunity In Local Lead Gen Campaigns?

Gordon’s up. He says, “Hey guys, thank you very much again for the help you provide on Hump Days. It’s greatly appreciated.” You’re welcome, Gordon. “If you’re looking to find a low hanging fruit where you can easily rank in the GMB 3-pack, other than looking at the reviews of the current businesses in the 3-pack in their citation profile, what else do you do to decide whether or not you have found a golden goose ranking opportunity? Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls? Thanks again, Gordon.”

Okay. First of all, Gordon, Local Lease Pro, I showed the exact simple method, it’s kind of time-consuming, but the simple method using it, a free software that we show, we use to identify what I call slam-dunk opportunities, which is which you’re calling a golden goose in your question, okay? Again, that was in Local Lease Pro. If you have access to that, which I’m hoping you do because it was on sale for a very, very ridiculously low price for about eight days during the Side Hustle Toolbox launch. That’s close now, but it is available, Local Lease Pro, but we teach the method specifically how to find low-hanging opportunities.

Now I can’t go into the details of that right here, but it is very, very simple to do using the Easy Local Cash software, which is a free software. It’s Chad Kimball’s software. It just shows you, basically, ever since July of this year, when mobile implemented or switched to the mobile first index, that opened up just massive, massive opportunity. I’m telling you, guys, it opened up more opportunity than I’ve seen since I started my local marketing career in 2010. And that is what we teach on how to find those opportunities that have been opened up by this major change in the algorithm or which index is used first. Right? The mobile first index.

That’s all in Local Lease Pro. I can’t obviously say that right here. It is in the course. Also, you can find out, certainly, if you joined a Mastermind, because Local Lease Pro is one of the first courses that Mastermind members get now when they join.

Marco: Yeah, the how. I mean, that’s the course, the how is, you know, if we gave you that, then why have a course in the first place? So, sorry, that’s something that we can’t do. I’m glad that you mentioned again the Mastermind. I was in our mini, we have the mini-Mastermind and mine is on Tuesday nights for an hour. I have three great people. I have Jamina, I have Will Kenderdine, and John Wypick. We were going over my method for using the software and we went over it in detail. I don’t mind for an hour. I mean, I decided to give my time, right?

So this is what it’s all about. Membership has its privileges. I do things a little bit differently. I find targets a little bit differently, but it all works just the same way. The same way that you teach it, the way that I do it, I already decided to do it. The thing is that membership has its privileges. You have to be a member in order to get the information that you’re asking about. It’s not something that we can give away for free.

Bradley: Yeah. “Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls?” Well, that’s a good question. If you do your research properly upfront, you should know. First of all, you should research your industry or the niche that you’re targeting. Now if you followed us at all for any length of time, Gordon, which I know you have, you know that I’ve been telling you and I’ve been preaching this and beating this drum for years now, which is: specialize. Focus on one industry, guys. Become a big fish in one industry instead of a me-too agency or a me-too consultant or me-too local marketer that will just accommodate any business that will talk to you.

Trust me, you will never gain any traction in your business, or you will have a much harder time gaining traction in your business, if you just offer marketing services to any business that will talk to you. Because your amount of work multiplies exponentially because you have to do keyword research, you have to do market research, you have to understand the vocabulary of the industry, you have to figure out what the pain points are in those industries both for the consumer and for the business owner.

Because if you’re the business owner that you can help them market their products and services, you need to understand the consumer’s mindset, but you also have to understand the business owner’s mindset. So that you can talk to them and speak their language, build rapport with them. So you have to learn two different markets for every industry you enter, the consumer market and the business market. Right?

There’s just so much work that goes into learning, becoming a marketing special or professional in any industry. It requires a ton of research. So if you try to just say, “Oh, I’m gonna be a local marketing guy and I’ll talk to any business in my area that will talk to me,” you’re gonna create a shit ton of additional work that you can significantly reduce. You’ll gain a lot more traction a lot faster in your business if you focus in on one particular industry because then you can craft everything you do in your business around that particular industry. All your marketing messages, all your keyword research, your content templates, everything that you do can be designed around that one particular industry. Now you become a specialist.

I use this as an example. Would you go to a general health practitioner for a heart surgery? No, you go to a cardiologist. Why do you think businesses, like let’s say home remodeling contractors or general contractors, would they want to go to a me-too agency or would they want to go to a contractor media, contractor marketing agency that specializes in general and remodeling contractor marketing? Does that make sense? Which one would you prefer?

Gordon, I recommend specializing in on one industry. But don’t just arbitrarily decide on what industry you wanna focus in on and say, “I’m gonna build my business around that,” you need to research that industry and determine, is there a call volume? Is there significant interest in that? Is there money there?

What’s one of the ways that you can determine that? An easy and simple and a quick way is go do a search for the product and/or service as if you were a customer looking for that product or service. Just go do a Google search for it and take a look and see, are there ads? Are there Google ads? If so, that means there’s paying advertisers. If there’s Google ads, that means people are paying to bid on those keywords, which means there’s likely traffic for those keywords. If there wasn’t traffic for those keywords and if those keywords didn’t convert, there wouldn’t be ads. Does that make sense? People don’t pay and bid on keywords-, well, good advertisers don’t pay and bid on keywords that don’t convert or don’t generate traffic that converts. Right? So if you’re seeing Google ads, that’s a good indication.

Now I wouldn’t stop there. I’d research it further. You could do things, like use Google Trends to find out where in the country, or in the world for that matter, but I always do US-based searches, you can find out where the hotspots are for where the search traffic is the most or the search interest is the most for the types of products or services that you’d be promoting in that industry. Right? So then, you can start to develop out which locations you’re gonna target first for your business. Does that make sense?

Remember, specialize on one industry, guys, because then you can scale your business by geography instead of by type or kind. Does that make sense? Instead of trying to scale your business by taking on new industries where you’re gonna create so much additional work, scale your business by continuing with the same industry but expanding your service area or your territory, your target area. Right?

That’s a hell of a lot better or much more efficient way to build your business. Not only that, in time you will build a name and a reputation for being that type of a marketing specialist for that particular industry. People will start to seek you out as opposed to you having a force or push your marketing, your services onto others. People will start to seek you out because they know that you’re the specialist. Does that make sense?

How do you determine whether there’s enough search traffic? You have to research it. Make sure it’s an industry that has paying advertisers. Make sure that there is significant search interest for those types of things and that it’s profitable.

As I said about in the past, carpet cleaning, there’s a ton of search interest for carpet cleaning but there’s very, very, very small margins in the carpet cleaning industry. Right? Carpet cleaning companies don’t particularly like to pay for marketing services or for lead generation services, they don’t have the budgets for it because their margins are very small.

But if you just did keyword research, which is, when I first started, the very first lead gen site I ever built was carpetcleaningalexandriava.com. I don’t own that anymore, but it was a lead gen site that I built because all I did was base my decision on which industry I was gonna target based upon keyword search volume from the Google Keyword Planner. It said something like 600 exact match searches for that term “carpet cleaning Alexandria VA” per month. It was like 660 or something like that, 600 searches per month. So I said, “Oh man, there’s a lot of search volume there. I can make money with that.”

Well, I built the site and got it ranked number one. We were getting 30 to 40 calls a week through that lead gen site and I had trouble monetizing it for even a hundred dollars a month. No shit. Then when I finally got down to the chewy center of why that was by sitting down with the contractor that was renting that site from me or leasing that site from me, he told me, “Because the carpet cleaning business has very, very small margins.” Right? Very small margins. He was making something ridiculous, per carpet cleaning job $8 or $9 or $10, or $12 in profit. It was something stupid. After paying his labor and insurance costs and, the cleaning solution costs, and all of this overhead, he had a very small margin so he had trouble paying for that.

What happened? I ended up switching into other higher margin businesses. That’s why I love the tree service industry because it’s huge margin. That’s why I like remodeling contractors, home builders, HVAC repair, any sort of repair, roofers, all those types because the margins are so much larger. Does that make sense?

Again, you have to do the research, Gordon. There’s no real easy answer there. You just got to be logical and do the research and you should be able to find the opportunities as well as the perfect industry. Also, one last thing I would suggest about that is, seriously, guys, try to find an industry that you, not only has all the correct signals or markers of being a good industry to work at, but also one that you have a genuine interest in because it’ll make it feel less like work. Okay.

Honestly, I don’t have any interest in tree services, except for the fact that that does make me some damn good money, which kind of makes it interesting. But if you can find an industry that you have a genuine interest in, it’ll feel less like work while you’re building your business.

Anybody wanna comment on that before I move on? That was a long-winded answer I know.

Marco: No, but it was perfect. There’s no need to go into that any further.

How Do You Set Up The Syndication Network Of Several GMB Sites In Same Metro Area?

Bradley: He says, “Hey guys, so if I have a group of GMB sites in the same metro area and a WordPress site ranked on page one and Serps, a YouTube channel with videos ranking on page one of Google’s video page and I want to lease all of these as a total package deal to a business owner operating an area, how do I set up a syndication network for this? Can I feed the RSS feeds from all the GMB sites into the WordPress site blog into one generically branded syndication network? Or do I need to set up separate networks for each GMB site or WordPress site? Thank you very much for your comment.”

Michael, I don’t recommend a syndication network for lead gen assets unless you need them. For example, if you’re having trouble getting a lead gen asset to push another 3-pack, can a syndication network will help for that? Then, absolutely.

The other thing is, if you have a cluster of Google My Business profiles for a metropolitan area that are all branded the same, then you could use one syndication network for those. When you talk about grabbing the GMB RSS feeds, I’m not sure what you mean from that, unless you’re using our GMB auto poster which will generate an RSS feed, but you can’t just get an RSS feed, at least not that I’m aware of.

Marco, this may have changed, but is there an RSS feed from the GMB websites yet?

Marco: Not that I know of. Not that I’m aware of.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah. As far as I’m aware, there is not an RSS feed from the GMB websites. So our GMB auto poster will create an RSS feed from the GMB posts that are connected through that auto poster or that are posted with that auto poster. So you can do it that way. But like I said, you should have a common brand for all of those assets, if that’s the case. If you want to feed them all into one network, which again, I’m gonna be 100% transparent with you guys, I’m not building syndication networks for my lead gen assets. I build syndication networks for clients because I tell them that it’s critical. It is because it’s brand building, it’s entity validation and brand authority building, right?

So any client, I’m gonna tell them. “You should have a syndication network to protect your brand and to amplify your brand, expand your reach. It also helps to build your authority and all that kind of stuff.” For content marketing, all my clients, I suggest we do regular content marketing, blogging that gets syndicated out to the syndication network. That’s all true. It’s not just because I wanna charge them money, guys, it’s to protect their brand and to help them to stay ranked.

But for lead gen assets, that’s an additional expense. So why implement that? Until and unless you need to, right? So for my lead gen assets that I’m building right now, I’m not using syndication networks. If I have lead gen assets that I do all the other magic that I work to them and they don’t end up producing, because maybe they’re not ranking well or that area ended up being more competitive than I originally thought, then I may add a syndication network. But that’s only if and when it’s absolutely needed. It’s kind of like a last resort thing because it’s an additional expense that I don’t wanna have to put up for a lead gen asset if I can get results without it.

Now once you’ve monetized an asset, a lead gen or, in this case, a multiple assets, once you’ve monetized them, I’ve talked about this too, if once you’ve developed it … Like for me, when I monetize a lead gen asset, what I do is after several months, two or three months of the service provider paying on time and there’s no issues, if we develop a decent relationship, then I offer at that point to rebrand those lead gen assets after the client, certainly their name. It’s a lot more legit that way, right?

Like I said, at that point, once I would offer the rebranding, then that’s where I could upsell them on, “Hey, since we’re gonna be rebranding these, we should also go to syndication network because it’s gonna help to protect your brand and we can use that to help continue to push the lead gen assets that I’m gonna rebrand. It’ll help to continue to keep them producing for you, blah blah blah blah blah.”

At that point, we set up syndication network. Might even set them up on content marketing services. That’s an additional charge beyond the lead gen leasing or pay per lead fees that I’m charging. Depending on how I’ve monetized that asset, this is now starting to build their asset, syndication network with their branding, building, doing content marketing on their website.

So now I’m double dipping, right? Now I’m generating money from my lead gen assets and also working on the client’s assets as a separate fee. Right? So it gives you a whole lot of opportunity, Michael. But for your lead gen assets, I don’t recommend setting up syndication network unless you absolutely need to. Try to get results without it. Guys, I am the firm believer of trying to get the most results or trying to get the best results with the least amount of effort possible and least amount of money invested too.

Should You Create A Blog Post If You Syndicate A GMB Post?

Okay. It’s a good Hump Day today, by the way. I’m liking these questions. It’s a good question, Michael. All right. Ray had some confusion earlier. We’ll pass over that. Quit This House, he says, “If I wanted to syndicate my GMB post, should I create a blog post with the post details and link or should I post to one of the social media sites and create a trigger from there?”

Quit This House, use the GMB auto poster. I’m telling you, it’s stupid and expensive, it’s super convenient and efficient, and it can generate an RSS feed from your GMB posts, and then you can just connect that directly to a syndication network, and then, viola, it’s done. You don’t have to go … Right now, what you’re talking about would require a manual action for every post. Right?

If you just set it up through the auto poster, you can, not only schedule out your GMB post all in one setting so that they automatically publish on the day and time that you select, but it will also generate an RSS feed that then you can populate or trigger a syndication network with, and all of that is automated.

Marco: By the way, since we’re back on the auto poster, I got an answer from Rob and he says, yes, we’ll be able to silo based on tagging. So you can create multiple silos within the auto poster just by tagging, by using different tags. The function isn’t integrated yet, but it’s coming. It’s already being developed, guys. Those of you who are looking to get into this, get in there now because it just keeps …

Shripad is a master programmer. He just keeps adding to it more and more functionality and he’s now charging more. We’re not gonna charge more monthly yet. If it gets to the point where there’s just a ton of programming that needs to be done, the price will probably need to go up. But we usually grandfather people into the prices where they are, so remember that.

Bradley: Yeah. Michael says, “Holy crap, I can’t believe I got the $1,000 Local Lease Pro course for $47.” Yeah, Michael. Look, for eight days, we promoted shit out of that and told everybody that once the Side Hustle Toolbox offer closed that it was gonna, I originally said it was gonna go to 500, but it’s such a damn good course. I mean, I’m telling you, this is I think the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career, that Local Lease Pro method right there. That’s why we made it $1,000.

Not only that, but we’re gonna be updating the course. Like I said, I’ve got some new stuff to add to it. That as soon as I get my VA on track for the new changes and I polish up the processes a little bit, I’m gonna be sharing that, I’ll be updating Local Lease Pro. So, yeah, you’re right. Good thing that you got in on it.

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have … ” By the way, guys, if you want Local Lease Pro, if you don’t have it, there’s only two options, you can buy it for 1,000 bucks or you can join the Mastermind and you can get it included in your Mastermind membership. So it’s entirely up to you, but I would recommend it. I mean, guys, it’s even worth $1,000, I’m not kidding, because of the opportunity. I’m telling you, it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my eight, almost nine year career now. Okay.

Does It Hurt Or Help To Have Multiple Syndication Networks?

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have multiple syndication networks?” Yes, it can, Abe. Not for YouTube channels-, well, depending on how they were set up, but if you’re using syndication networks for blog syndication to try to rank your own domain, like a self-hosted site, then, yes, multiple syndication networks can hurt you, depending on how you have it set up and how you have a syndication set up,

I’ve said for years now, like we teach branded tier one syndication networks and we also talked about when we teach how to build two-tier syndication networks. You can take it out multiple tiers. But I’ve also recommended for years that you only use two-tier syndication networks on YouTube channels or multi-tiered syndication networks on YouTube channels or for YouTube syndication, not for blog syndication.

However, if you wanna do it for blog syndication, I do teach in Syndication Academy and I’ve talked about it multiple times how you can use multi-tiered syndication networks and reduce the chance of getting a Google slap. You cannot eliminate it because you are still leaving a footprint. But you can significantly reduce the footprint if you add additional content feeds as triggers into your second or third tiers. Right? Because what you wanna do is you wanna mask or bury your content among a whole lot of additional route relevant and related type content so that the blogs don’t show or appear to be solely for manipulating search rankings. Right? And that’s essentially what they are.

Again, with multi-tiered syndication networks, I don’t recommend them for blog syndication unless you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to put forth all the additional effort. Also, multitude syndication networks can break down because there’s a lot of moving pieces, there’s a lot of different content sources, which can cause you know different RSS feeds that you don’t have control over because they’re not your RSS feeds, which can cause problems. Multi-tiered syndication networks can be a bitch to maintain for that reason and so that’s another reason I don’t recommend them.

If you are just flatly syndicating your content to multiple syndication networks and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, then you are absolutely causing damage because it is clearly, the algorithm can pick that up in a split second. Right? Again, Abe, if you were gonna be building these types of stuff, like I said, the only way that … We have Syndication Academy where I talk about all of that stuff, seriously, I go into your best practices and everything about how to use them and where to use them. But for blog syndication, I highly recommend that you just use a one-tier branded syndication network and then you can boost the hell out of that. Okay.

Marco: Yeah. He also says that he’s used lower standard contractors in the past and he’s considering using our services on top. Dude, if you’ve done that, then don’t get a syndication network from us until you fix whatever it is that you’ve done. I suggest totally getting into Syndication Academy, seeing how it’s all supposed to work. I hope that you have access to all of these networks and multiple rings that have been done for you so that you can just stop whatever madness it was that was created and you could do it the right way. The way that it’s supposed to be done, which is branding. It’s done for branding and for syndicating your network. Yeah. It is done to manipulate but to manipulate in the right way. If you get caught manipulating the wrong way, you’re going to get slapped down.

What’s The Difference Between The Press Release Service In Serp Space And MGYB?

Bradley: That’s right. Ray says, “What is the difference between press release service from Serp Space, and MGYB? Are they overlapping and/or equivalent? They’re equivalent now, Ray, because, well, there’s two different levels of press releases orders from Serb Space. There was the press release and then press release plus. The press release was, the press advantage network, the distribution network, and that’s we have now a separate account. We have our own press advantage distribution network agreement with them that is available in MGYB. It’s basically the same distribution network. So it’s up to you if you wanna order from Serp Space or if you wanna come to MGYB which is owned and controlled entirely by Semantic Mastery and my partners. If that makes sense.

Serp Space was a collaboration. We are no longer part of that. There’s no issues there or anything like that. I’m just letting you know, if you wanna order directly from us, it’s through MGYB. Okay. Good question.

Should We Link From GMB Biz.Site Description?

Doodle Digital Marketing, I like that. He says, “Hey guys, I love Hump Day Hangouts. Tons of value. “Should we link out from the GMB biz site description?” Not … Well, wait a minute, the GMB, yes. You can link from the GMB website content. I don’t know about the description. But if you’re talking about the GMB business description, no, you can’t put links in that; that’s short. I think it only allows 750 characters. But if you’re talking about the GMB website, yes, you can link out to that.

What I don’t recommend doing a lot of external links, unless it makes sense, it has to be relevant guys, remember, this is a Google property, so I would not be doing some stupid “I’m gonna link to a .gov or .edu site for authority” because that’s bullshit and it has been for years. If it’s relevant, then, yes. If it’s not relevant, you’re just doing it because you learn that somewhere on some stupid SEO program somewhere, don’t do it because that’s dumb.

But what I would recommend doing is, I always link, and I teach this, but I always link from the GMB website text, the content body of the website, I always link to the GMB maps share URL, as well as to the GMB website. So it’s linking to itself, right? If you have an external website, so self-hosted website, you can link to that. That makes sense. You could also link to some of your social media stuff. That makes sense. Any type of branded property that you could link out.

Again, I wouldn’t spam the description or the GMB website content with a bunch of exterior external links, I would keep it … Really that’s why I usually just link from the GMB website to itself and also to the GMB maps share URL because those are Google properties. Right? So just consider that.

It’s after five o'clock, I don’t have to get my daughter-, or I don’t get to have my daughter for dinner tonight, so I do have a couple extra minutes. Marco, can you hang out for a few extra?

Marco: Yeah, I can hang out for a few extra. My daughter isn’t crying it.

Bradley: We’ve only got a few questions left.

Marco: Let’s go.

Bradley: All right. John says, “I’ve got a Semantic Mastery syndrome. I have no doubt it’s the place to be.” “Thanks, John. John is one in Marco’s small group that he was talking about. Jordan says, “Marco’s right. We learned the why behind all these Semantic Mastery tactics, Syndication Academy, RYS stack, Press Releases, et cetera, and then just sell them along with some other deep rooted stuff we had developed in the lab.” He’s talking about his own business specifically, Jordan.

“Then we also create all the content via writing and optimizing it, which we charge for, and then we do web design with SEO strategy pre-launch. I couldn’t build a drive stack if my life depended on it. Haha.” Yeah, that’s great. I mean, honestly, guys, those are the audience that are tech nerds and like to get their hands dirty, so to speak, roll up their sleeves and get to work. Then, RYS Academy will teach you how to build drive stacks. It’s a lot of work. You can benefit from RYS stacks without having to learn how to build them, by just buying them done for you and you’ll save yourself a shit ton of time and energy.

Again, I’m not trying to discourage anybody from buying the course, I’m just saying you got to consider where to spend your time. Is learning how to build drive stacks going to progress your business? It might. You have to make that decision. I can’t make that decision for you. Or is the benefit and the result that the drive stack can produce going to help your business? And if so, then why go through the trouble of learning how to build them when you could just purchase them done for you and receive the benefit that you were seeking to begin with? Does that make sense? Then that way you could spend your time focusing on how to sell it or how to monetize it or how to apply it to get the result that you’re seeking. Does that make sense?

Again, guys, you have to think about it on a higher level. That’s what I think is really wrong with our industry, is that everybody teaches, or the vast majority of products tell you, “Hey, we’re gonna teach you how to do this one skill.” Yeah, I’m not trying to take that away from anybody. That skill is valuable. Whatever that skill may be, it’s valuable. But just because you know how to get a result from it, one particular skill does not make you a business owner, it does not make it a profitable business for you. Right?

So you got to think about how are you going to make money from whatever it is you choose to do? Is doing that thing, being the mechanic or the technician, is that actually going to make you the money or is selling that service and the result that that service produces going to make you the money? If that’s the case, then why don’t you focus on learning how to sell it and find people that are already good at doing it, fulfilling it, to do it for you right.

That’s what we’re trying to get at, guys, and Jordan understands that. That’s why Jordan’s business is cranking, it’s just kicking ass. Okay.

Any Black Friday Sales For Done For You Services Or Training?

Luis, he’s a new Mastermind member. “Hey guys, any Black Friday sales?” By the way, welcome, Luis. “Any Black Friday sales for Done For You services or training?” Yeah. Isn’t that with the GMB stuff was the pre-Black Friday sale?

Marco: It’s the pre. We will have something. Something’s coming your way and it’s gonna be good. Trust me. It’s not Black Friday yet, dude. But we will have something. It’ll be big. We control MGYB now. As Bradley mentioned, it’s ours. Semantic Mastery is our own store. So we’ve got some really good stuff coming your way.

Luis, I will be talking to you on Monday, as a matter of, fact. It’s his onboarding call. Again, I’m sorry, all these Mastermind questions keep coming up or Mastermind people. As part of the onboarding process, we give people a half hour call just to get them pointed in the right direction, to see where they’re going, where they want to be. So we ask questions, we try to provide guidance. I just happened to get Luis.

Guys, you can’t ask for who you want. You’re going to get whoever is up on the calendar, because we rotate since there’s five of us. But whoever you get, you’re going to get the direction that you need and you’re going to get your questions answered so that you can get started on your way to POFU.

That’s what we want you to do. We want you to get started getting to that place where you’re going to be and say, “Okay. Now I don’t have to deal with shitty clients. I don’t have to deal with shitty people. I am at a place where I can go into any negotiation from a position of power. I know what I’m worth. If this guy gives me any flack, I’m gonna have to say ‘Fuck you. I’m gonna go to your competitor and charge them half price just because I feel like it, because I don’t need you.‘” That’s what we want you to be.

Bradley: There you go so. Yes, Black Friday is this Friday. So, yeah, there will be some other specials. I don’t usually get involved with what promotions we’re doing, guys, so I couldn’t answer that. But I’m glad Marco said, yeah, we do have something coming Friday.

Should You Use Only The Main Keyword Phrase Or Should You Diversify Them When Building Links To All Assets?

Jay Turner. What’s up, Jay? He says, “I’ve been able to get my client ranked in the 3-pack for the second most trafficked keyword phrase with an RYS stack. High five, Marco.”

Marco: High five, dude.

Bradley: “But now I want to take on the main and most competitive keyword. I’m adding a silo of content to the RYS stack targeting the main keyword. So far so good. My question is when embarking on link building to all assets, like RYS, Syndication Network, GMB website, et cetera, should I use only the main keyword phrase or must I diversify the keyword phrases?”

Jay, diversify. What I recommend you do is go pool your … You should have probably already done keyword research anyways, so if you’re gonna be siloing, you should have your keyword themes relatively tight for the silos anyways. So make sure that if you’re gonna be direct targeting link building on a silo basis, that you’re only using a set of keywords that fall within that particular silo or keyword theme. Right? Does that make sense?

Let me take this down to a local level because what I wanna explain is, guys, when you’re doing a ton of like spam link building and such to power up tier one entities, which would be like drive stacks, press release, organization pages, syndication networks, even citations, you don’t want to hit, and I’m gonna say local because that’s primarily what I work on, and I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about here anyways. You said client ranks, so it’s likely it’s locally You said 3-pack. Right?

So you don’t wanna use the keywords with the location modifiers. You can use a very small percentage of your overall keywords that you’re gonna add to the anchor text or the link building that you’re gonna be either doing or buying a package or whatever. You can have a very, very small percentage with location modifiers, but I would keep that to an absolute bare minimum. Because it’s more about pushing the theme, the keyword theme, not the location, or the geographic theme, if that makes sense, it’s not about pushing location relevancy.

Because think about it, the further you move away from a local business the more broader the market segment is. In other words, you don’t wanna be targeting keywords or link building to tier 1 assets all the way down to the local level, including local location modifier, because it’s, remember your link building to tier one assets is two hops away from your target which would be your GMB asset or your primary website, the client’s website, or whatever, the further you get away from the ultimate target, the ultimate destination, the broader your keyword set should be, the broader the theme of the keyword set.

That’s why I say I don’t like to include local modifiers and anchor text when I’m building links to tier one assets. Instead I use higher or market-level keywords, broader market keywords. What do I mean by that? Instead of water heater repair Fairfax Virginia or Fairfax VA as a keyword that I would use as an anchor, it would be water heater repair and plumbing and plumbing repair and plumbing service, if that makes sense. I’d lose the local modifier and use more broader market-level keywords. Okay.

Also, you don’t wanna do entirely 100% on anchor text links, even with a diverse set of keywords. You wanna also include naked URLs and some generics. You can even use some brand terms at that point. It’s a little bit odd to use brand terms at tier two links because that’s again two steps away from your target URL. But it does make sense if you’re link building to, for example, if it’s a tier one branded property it can make sense to also include the brand name in some of those anchor text too. Right? I would just use those sparingly as well. It’s more about the keyword relevancy at that point in naked URLs, which is just pushing link equity to those tier one assets regardless of anchor text.

Marco, do you wanna comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, thanks, Bradley. What I would recommend is reach out to Dedia. We have a Dedia, he knows exactly what to do with your RYS stack to get the most out of it.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: If needed, then get our keyword research gig because we will come up with thousands upon thousands of keyword targets for you to either add relevance or to push, we provide what’s called buoyancy. “Buoyancy,” that’s one of the words that I have difficulty with. But we help push up the main keyword by providing relevance throughout the keyword silo. We give you all that with the keyword research.

Then, all you do is turn that over to Dedia and say, “Here, this is the folder that I’ve created, this is the keyword that I’m targeting, have at it.” Dedia has been with us long enough that he just knows, okay, this is what I need to do. He’ll blast it. He’ll hammer that RYS stack so that it produces.

Bradley: That’s right. You don’t have to worry about all those ratios and stuff, Jay. I know. I mean, honestly, I don’t worry about any of that stuff anymore because I don’t ever do any of that stuff anymore. If I need it, I just contact Dedia, exactly what Marco said, and I just say, “Hey, this is what I got. This is what I’m trying to accomplish. Make it happen,” and he does it.

Honestly, guys, that’s what I’m talking about. Jay, again, I don’t wanna get back on this pitch again, but if you have your own tools and you’re running your own link building tools and stuff like that, that’s great, if you’re efficient and all that. But if you’re not, which I am not, I have no desire to run those tools, just let the expert do it and Dedia has an absolute ninja. He’s an expert, a link building expert, so that’s why I just turned it over to him, defer to him anytime I have something that I need to spam to push additional link equity to. I just contact him say, “This what I got is what I need you do, make it happen,” and he does it. All right.

Jay vouches for the GMB auto poster. He says, “It’s great and Shripad does great work. He is very responsive in Support. I can attest to that too, not just because it’s me, but every time there’s an issue a little support bubble on the bottom right corner of the auto poster, you can just contact Support through there and he’s very, very responsive.”

Would You Recommend Using One Website For Multiple GMB Locations?

Abe says, “Also, I would like to know about using one website for multiple GMB locations. Is this recommended and possible?” It can be. You can just create separate location pages. So each location each, GMB locations should have its own dedicated page on the website and that’s the URL that you would submit as the website URL in the Google My Business profile. Does that make sense?

So instead of just using the home root domain, so the home page of the website for that brand across all different GMB assets, create a location specific page on that domain and then use that URL as that landing page URL as the website in GMB. It’s perfectly fine to do that, guys. But what you want is, if it’s the same brand, you can share the same brand name across all GMB locations. That’s fine. But you want a unique URL and a unique phone number and a unique address, if possible. Okay.

Strange NAP issues occur if you have two or more of the data points, the primary data points in a citation or NAP, which would be name, address, phone number, and also website URL. If you have two or more common data points among multiple locations, that’s going to cause NAP issues, which is going to make it very difficult to rank. You can have one common data point, typically the business name, because it’s a brand that can be used across multiple GMBs as long as the other primary data points are unique, physical address, phone number, website address. Does that make sense? So, yes, it’s possible.

Now one other thing I would mention is go back through, Abe, watch some of our previous Hump Day Hangouts. We’ll talk about the difference between using location pages, which would be pages on the root domain, or using location-specific sub-domains, which are separate WordPress installations, but there’s a reason to do, that’s to help mitigate risk, potential losing all of your assets if you were to catch a penalty. Again, we just talked about this last week, go back and watch the replay from last week and I’m pretty sure we talked about that extensively, about the benefit of using sub-domains over sub-folders or sub-directories. That’s pretty much the same thing I’m talking about here.

“Where’s the GMB auto poster?” John, just posting the Mastermind, we’ll get to the link.

Marco: I posted the link higher up.

Bradley: Yeah. I just didn’t have it. Thank you, Marco. Nestor says, Hey, I got to go guys. I got to wrap this up. So, anyways, and there’s Rob with the yearly discount for the GMB agency offer. That’s the enterprise account level or subscription level, which is 200 posts per month-, or excuse me 500 posts per month capacity. If you buy it on a monthly basis, subscribe month to month, it’s $200. If you buy the yearly license … It’s $200 per month, excuse me. If you buy the yearly license, it’s 1,000 bucks, divided by 12, comes out to be $84 dollars or $83 per month. So it’s a hell of a lot cheaper that way.

By the way, if you’re scheduling out 31 posts, which there’s a post scheduling feature, which is amazing in the GMB auto poster, so you can schedule out one post a day or however many you want. Let’s just say you’re doing one post a day, you could do 31 days. Then, there’s a republish option to where it can republish the post based upon the interval that you set. For example, if you set every 31 days, you can publish, you can schedule out 31 posts and then have them republish 31 days later, each post thereafter. Right? Does that make sense?

So day one and then day 32, that post publishes again. Day two and day 33, that post publishes again. Does that make sense? That way you can set up all of your posting and in an automated fashion. Well, with 500 posts per month, if you were to actually fill out or post one per day for each location, you can essentially put 16 locations in one enterprise account. Sixteen times 31 comes out to be 496, so you get 496 posts. Essentially, you can serve 16 locations, 100% one post per day with a single enterprise account. Does that make sense?

That’s how I’m clustering my sites right now. I gave you a little insight on that.

Marco: Yeah. I mean, it’s an awesome deal because it saves so much money and then the auto poster just saves so much time and effort. Once your VAs get proficient with going in there and just scheduling and putting everything up, it just saves you a ton of time of money. So you’ll make the money back that you invest in this just by the time you’re gonna save with your VAs, or even if you try to do it on your own, which you shouldn’t be doing.

Bradley: Yeah. Just so you guys are aware, for clients, I have a VA that goes in and manually posts for all the clients. I do that for a reason because every post is 100% unique that way. She still has content templates, but she goes in and she puts in a new image every time, and the content templates she uses, there’s tokens that she swaps out with different keywords and such. The target URLs are always being recycled to whatever we’re linking to from the GMB post and all that. So they become unique for clients.

I pay my VA on a per post basis. So I pay her, for every post that she publishes she gets paid. It varies between $3.50 to $5 per post. But I charge my clients $10 to $15 per post, depending on what the volume is. So my point is, I make money on that even though she’s manually posting.

However, for lead gen assets, guys, once again, just like I was telling … Shit, who was I telling earlier? Michael. I was telling Michael earlier not to worry about syndication networks for lead gen assets because you wanna reduce expenses. Well, I don’t want to pay a VA to manually post to lead gen assets because that’s an additional expense when I can pay for-, or subscribe to the auto poster, schedule all the posts.

Do I do all these guys? Hell, no. I’ve trained a VA to go in and set up or schedule all the posts within the GMB auto poster and then schedule them to republish. So that, literally, I can pay a VA for three or four hours to schedule out, however long it takes them, to schedule all those posts out. Then, it’s done and those GMB assets will continually update posts because of the auto poster and I’m not paying anymore other than for the auto poster subscription. Does that make sense? So it’s a hell of a lot more efficient with money too. Right? It’s more cost-effective. Okay.

Nestor says … And I’m so over, we got to get out of here. Nestor says, “Hey guys, how about webs 2.0 example mybrand.wordpress.com point to my GMB property three links as a press release?” Okay. First of all, I’m not familiar with their example. I know that’s kind of a competitor that does, you know, they have their own store and blah blah blah. I’m not real familiar with what they teach or what they say, so I can’t really speak on that.

I’m not quite sure I understand, in the wording of your question, what you mean by mybrand.wordPress. I understand WordPress.com, that’s fine. That’s a brand identity property that you can create on the WordPress.com site, kind of like what I showed earlier. But, yeah, that’s normal. That goes into Syndication Network, right? You try to get your brand name as a sub-domain blah blah blah. That’s pretty standard.

But, “point to GMB property three links as a press release,” I’m not sure what that means. Can you point to a GMB property from your WordPress.com site? Sure. Can you also use press releases to link to that WordPress.com site? Sure. You can also link to your GMB.

I’m doing a press releases, Local PR Pro method is what I use and, as standard operating procedure, I published a press releases with every GMB asset, it gets created. Usually, my preferred method is to link from the first press release to the GMB, the Google Maps share URL, to the Google the GMB website URL, and to the GMB the first post URL. We teach that at Local Lease Pro and that’s just essentially my method. So I’m going direct from the press releases to the Google assets. Okay.

Yeah. Guys, there’s a thousand ways to skin a cat, right? So our method isn’t the be-all end-all. It’s just our method works for what we want it to work for and that’s what we teach. Other people have other methods that may very well work as good as ours. I’m not trying to say that ours is better than anybody else’s. I’m just telling you what we teach, I don’t know what they teach. I’m sorry. It’s likely that that would work too.

Will says, “Bradley, speaking about syndication networks, I finally figured out how to syndicate to Medium.com. I’ve been testing it for a while with a few posts now and it works well to syndicate your WordPress post with images and YouTube video embeds, and from there, you could syndicate to your tier two, if you’d like. I’ll send you an update to support@semanticmastery.”

Thanks, Will. That’s awesome. In fact, Will, if you would, I mean, if you’re cool with it, you can even send the update right in the Mastermind community so that everybody else could benefit from it. If not, send it to me and I’ll update everybody in the Mastermind, and Syndication Academy for that matter, once I see it. Thank you for that, Will.

Okay. “Link to pre-Black Friday deals, please.” Yeah. Luis, just contact us at Support.

That’s it. Okay, guys, we’re way over. We got all questions answered, though.

Marco: That was a good one.

Bradley: Thanks, Marco, for hanging out, man, I appreciate it.

Marco: Marathon. All right, dude.

Bradley: All right, everybody. Mastermind webinar tomorrow. Be there or be square. See y'all.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210

Click on the video above to watch Episode 202 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: Hello and welcome to Episode 210 of Hump Day Hangouts. I am Adam Moody with Semantic Mastery. We are gonna say hi to everyone real quick before we dive into some announcements and questions from everybody watching us live. Also, if you’re watching this on YouTube, we noticed from time to time that we get questions over there, but you need to come to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions and ask your questions there, that’s where we’re monitoring. Before we dive in, real quick, Chris, how are you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Good weather in Florida always the last couple weeks. I highly recommend it, like I love it. How are you doing?

Adam: Not bad. It’s like 60 here, which is perfect. Everyone in California thinks it’s like the middle of winter and I’m just enjoying myself. This is good. Marco, how about you? How’s the weather for you, man?

Marco: Things are good here, man, transitioning to the dry season. So we’re gonna have about five and a half months of absolutely no rain, not even a drop. I’m looking forward to … Yeah, but then, it’s seven months of afternoon showers. You gotta pay the price for the life you live, right?

Adam: Yeah, fair enough.

Marco: But always warm, like if it were 60 here, we’d all be dying literally. It’s freezing cold.

Chris: [Inaudible 00:01:19] stay in Florida.

Adam: Definitely. Bradley, how about you, man? How are you doing?

Bradley: I’m good, I’m happy to be here. Got lots of stuff going on at the moment. Just been really, really busy. In last week, well, I took off for a couple days because my sister got married again. I actually got to go down to Hilton Head, South Carolina and meet one of our members, Ed, who also went to POFU Live; he’s in the Mastermind also. That was cool because I got to spend an hour with him just chatting. It was really, really cool. I always enjoy getting to meet members whenever we have the opportunity. So that was a lot of fun. But I had to take really Friday and Monday off, so now I’m behind.

Besides that, I got a quick little story to tell very, very quickly. Just last week, it was funny because I was actually reviewing the Hump Day Hangout from last week and I was talking about mitigating risk. Marco and I, we were talking about reducing exposure and trying to mitigate risk because, if you put all your eggs in one basket and Google takes that basket, you’re screwed, you’ve lost all those assets.

Well, I was using a test with what’s called GMB Location Groups. It’s a setting inside of Google My Business. I was running a test on a set of GMB assets for a particular metro area, so one metropolitan city area. I had seven assets in there that were fully optimized, 100% done. In fact, they were the seven assets that my VAs has been training on as he’s been learning the processes for doing this whole method, the Local Lease Pro model, essentially.

Long story short, on Saturday, I was down at the Hilton Head and I happened to get an email saying that the account that was used as the recovery email for that particular GMB manager account, which had to be turned into an owner in order to use location groups, had been terminated for violating Google’s spam policies. I lost all those damn assets, every single one of them, and I can’t even access them through the original Google accounts now, guys.

That was three weeks work, not necessarily my work, but my VA’s work wasted. Now, is it all bad? No, because I learned a valuable lesson. Number one, don’t use GMB location groups, it’s like a trap, number one, lesson number one. Number two is always mitigate risk. Don’t set yourself up with vulnerabilities that Google can take … We exploit Google’s vulnerabilities. Don’t you think Google will exploit ours? So I learned that … In fact, I’m actually updating the entire process for how to first log in and set up and manage a lot of GMB assets. I’m updating all those processes this week, in fact, because we have to do something new that reduces our overall risk.

Anyways, that was my little story. I’m a little bit behind now because all the work that I’ve done for the last several weeks on all the processes now has to be updated and redone. But that’s the cat and mouse game that we play.

Marco: Yeah. One of the great things about our Mastermind is that we do all of the testing, we take all of the risk, we were the ones who go in the lab. I mean, we do encourage our own people to test so that they can verify that our results are what we’re saying they are. But it’s one of the things that we do, we go, we blow things up and it happens, and then now we know what not to do. And right into our Mastermind, we’ll share all of test result with the membership exactly what was done so that they don’t repeat the process and get stuck losing assets because nobody wants to lose an asset, especially not seven. But so be it, lesson well-learned and it’s a lesson that the Mastermind doesn’t have to repeat.

Bradley: That’s true and, just real quick segue, that leads me to, that’s kind of like what the Mastermind is about. The scaling option, like doing all these heavy processes and stuff, is really reserved to the POFU Live group attendees at the moment, but we’re polishing all this stuff. Obviously, the Mastermind, we update, like tomorrow we’ve got a Mastermind webinar and I’m certainly gonna be talking about what not to do because I want to make sure all of our members are fully aware of what not to do so they don’t lose assets.

But once we have this 12-week process done, that the POFU Live attendees are kind of in accountability group with me right now, and we’ve got a target that we’re trying to hit at the end of 12 weeks, which is 50 GMB assets fully developed and ready for monetization, if they’re not already monetized by that point, and so when we’re done at that 12-week period, we will have discovered or perfected, really fine-tuned the method and all of the processes to get us there, to get us to that point. That’s when we’re gonna release in its entirety the Mastermind.

That training will not be released outside of the Mastermind, period, and that’s only because it’s highly valuable and we put a lot of work. In fact, the other members of the POFU accountability group with us, that’s like 12 of us in there, and so that’s a lot of intellectual property, a lot of a work that goes into that. So the Mastermind members will get that.

But that’s just one of many things that we do there. For example, we had some questions about how to structure ad ID pages and set up as three buckets with HTTP, SSL protocol, and all that stuff. Two weeks ago, we went in and showed exactly how to do that. I mean, it’s just stuff like that that we do in the Mastermind all the time.

Adam: Yeah. Something else that I just remembered, that reminded me of, Bradley, was, I think it was Jason who posted yesterday, who’s one of our Mastermind members, just out of the blue was like, hey, I’ve seen some questions about blah blah blah-, not blah blah blah, but some heavy-duty IT stuff. He’s like, “Hey, if anybody needs help just ping me. I’ll do it for free if you’re a Mastermind member.”

That’s just awesome to see. Again, you get that in a tight-knit group like that. It’s cool having that ability. Everyone who knows our story kind of knows where we came from and how we were part of a Mastermind. That’s why part of why we do this to get that community, it’s not just a jumble of people, you do have a community.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Well, cool. I also want to say then to you guys, we mentioned the GMB stuff, we’ve got a sale going on right now at MGYB. It’s wrapping up today. So if you’re interested or you need a GMB verification service, whether it’s for your clients, it’s for yourself, you’re doing some lead gen, head over there. I posted it on the page. If you’re watching the replay, sorry, it’s probably too late. But a good reason to watch live and open the emails is you get a 35% discount on that service right now. So head over there do that.

Real quick, too, if you’re joining us for the first time, thank you so much for watching us. If you want the right place to start, because it is one of the questions we get, “Hey, where should I start? Should I take this course and do that?” start with Battle Plan. No matter what you’re doing, even if you want to hop into Mastermind, get the Battle Plan, come join the Mastermind. That’s the path. The link is on there. It’s a great way to get repeatable results, which is why we put it together, so that we can have that. It’s our home processes put into an easy-to-digest format.

Then, obviously, like we’ve been talking about it, if you’re ready to take things up a notch, if you wanna scale, you wanna grow, then the Mastermind is the place to be.

Bradley: Did you open up Local Lease Pro as a standalone product now?

Adam: Yes.

Bradley: I’ll be damned. I didn’t realize that was available yet. Okay.

Adam: Sneaking that onto the page, if people are interested.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay.

Adam: I’m gonna say no more.

Bradley: Everything I’ve been talking about with this Local Lease Pro method, that’s it. Most of you guys are probably aware of it because of the Side Hustle Toolbox promotion, that was our contribution. But now that that’s closed, it’s a standalone product. I’m gonna be updating that in a couple of weeks with some of the new processes that I’ve just discovered.

Again, GMB, like the actual optimization process has changed slightly. Not much, but slightly, and I’m updating the processes for my VAs right now. So next week, I’ll kind of polish it up a bit and then add that into the Local Lease Pro training. So if you guys don’t have it yet, I recommend you get it. This method is freaking killing it. I think it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career. I mean that, so check it out.

All right. Can we get into questions?

Adam: I think so. If you guys are good, let’s do this.

Do I Need Access To A Client’s Website If I Do Local SEO For Them?

Bradley: All right. Starting off with Chris Green posted a support question from Vincent. He says, “I’m considering to join the RYS Reloaded or the GMB course. My question is this: if I do SEO for local businesses in my country, which is Malaysia, do I need to have access to my clients website?” No. It can help. You don’t have to have access to the client’s website, but it would certainly help because you could take care of some on-page SEO issues. In other words, you can optimize the site itself, which is considered on-page SEO, and that can help that can help quite a bit.

In fact, with proper on-page SEO, a lot of the times you can rank a site with a fraction of the off-page SEO because any off-page SEO that … If on site is proper, if it’s tight, if it’s strong, then any off-page will significantly affect, it will have a strong impact on the site because then the site will respond well to off-page because it is a well-built, well-structured site.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to have access to the site because you can accomplish through off-page. You can still rank a site with off-page. If the on-page is terrible, then you probably are fighting a losing battle. But if it’s decent, then you could probably still accomplish what you need to, depending on how competitive the keywords are that you’re targeting. But it’s likely that you could still accomplish what you needed to with off-page alone. But again, there are benefits certainly to being able to access the client’s website. Right? If you’re starting with garbage, it’s gonna be difficult to rank. So just keep that in mind. Okay.

It helps, it’s not 100% necessary. Well, it depends, right? It depends on what the status of the site is currently. If it’s a shitty site, if it was built poorly, optimized poorly, or if it’s spammed to death or whatever, then you may never be able to rank that site. But if it’s decent, if it’s fairly okay, then you could still just apply off-page methods and probably get the results that you want. However, if you can do both, manage the on-page and the-off page, you will get the best results. Right?

Are The SEO Methods In RYS Reloaded And GMB Work On WordPress.com And Wix.com Websites?

Number two, he says, “If my client has a WordPress.com or Wix.com website, can the SEO methods taught in RYS Reloaded and GMB work and getting first page ranking on Google?” Well, yes. Well, Local GMB Pro course is not really anything that have to do with websites, right? Local GMB Pro is how to optimize Google My Business and set up all of the Google assets to rank. Well, not even to rank, but to just generate leads from Google, independent of ranking. That’s what Local GMB Pro is about. It’s about getting leads, getting exposure from Google My Business, whether it ranks or not, and that’s what that whole … Again, despite traditional SEO, Local GMB Pro can generate leads from Google. Okay. So that’s what local GMB Pro is.

RYS is about using Google’s assets as an off-page tool as well as an entity validator, an authority builder, and multiple other things. But it’s more of an off-page thing. Again, it has nothing to do with the website structure or the platform itself, WordPress or Wix. It doesn’t matter because all you’re doing is using Google properties to push relevancy and authority over to whatever property is that you’re trying to rank.

Marco, do you wanna chat about that a little bit?

Marco: Yeah. It’s just one of the pillars that we teach, ART, the art of ART, activity, relevance, trust and authority, both on the link origin and on the link destination. What that means is you get visitors no matter how you show activity and Google reward you as long as everything is relevant and you’re working with trusted and authoritative entities. If you become along with that, a trusted and authoritative entity, then you get rewarded. Google will also reward you for being in Google because Google trusts itself. It’s the ultimate as far as what it trusts. So working in what we call working inside the belly of the beast also has its rewards.

Yeah. As Bradley said, it makes absolutely no difference. I mean, you work with whatever. I mean, you have a free WordPress blog ranking for … what is it? Free-, no, not free. SEO Virginia. Yeah. I mean, it just goes to show that if you get that activity in there, everything else just fall into place as long as it’s relevant, trusted and authoritative.

I keep telling people, and I just mentioned it in our Semantic Mastery Facebook group, the Mastermind, that ART, A-R-T, will trump anything. It will even overcome any of the negative factors, of the algorithm, penalties and all of that. You become almost immune to anything that Google has to throw at you because you’re signaling rank pot-, excuse me, rank brain in the way that it wants to be signaled. You’re doing the Google tickle, the T tickle. I mean, it blows up. It becomes a self-feeding monster once you get all that activity in there.

Bradley: Yeah. This is an example of what Marco was just talking about, this is that WordPress.com. So free wordpress.com blog, guys. If you take a look at this, there’s no content on this page. It looks like there’s content, but the only content on this page is this right here. That’s it. The rest of those are embedded files. That’s RYS at work there, guys. That’s RYS Academy right there at work. Okay. Again, go view page source, the post body, the article body of this post. The content body is this right here. That’s the only text on the page. The rest of it is all embedded files RYS style, and that’s all.

Look at that, guys. It’s ranked number three in organic for SEO Virginia. I mean, that’s pretty powerful. Again, that’s all off-page stuff. There is some on-page going on there because of the iframes that are actually embedded in this page, but it’s primarily an off-page thing that’s got this ranking. And that’s the power of RYS, right?

By the way, the Google site as part of the stack and that’s been number one since May of 2015. Guys, that’s been number one since May of 2015, or within a few weeks anyways, that’s when it was published. Look at that, it’s a horrid site. It was just for a test purpose, guys. Still ranked. Still ranked, it’s three and a half years now. Still ranked. Anyways, there you go. Will it work? It damn sure does.

How Do You Get The URL Of A Scheduled Post In The MGYB GMB Service?

Dustin’s up, or Da B. “Hey there. I’m using the MGYB post scheduling service but I was wondering, in the Local GMB course you link to the previous post but when I scheduled a post, then I don’t have the URL of the last URL because it will be scheduled. How do I link to the post then if the last post yet is not published or is not published yet? Greetings. Dustin.” That’s a good question Dustin.

Marco, that’s something that I think Rob was talking about that was going to be a feature, that was going to be released soon within the auto poster was the ability to silo a post. Is that correct?

Marco: Yeah. We keep going back and forth with Shripad. I’m not sure if that’s available yet. But I mean, there’s an easy solution to that. Link in the body or you’re still not gonna have the post URL. You would need the original post URL, and then the next one, then the next one. So Shripad will have to come up with something regarding that so that we can solve that issue. But, yes, he is working on it so we can silo GMB posts.

Bradley: Yeah. I’m thinking if the script would wait until a published one was pulled and then grab the short URL and then link to that before the next one that’s scheduled publishes. You know what I mean? That would work to build a silo on that. I know that if you post the post … So you publish the post, then you grab the URL and link to it from the next post. But, you’re right, if you wanna schedule out multiple posts in advance, right now there’s not an ability to do that yet.

But that’s something, Marco, if you wanna make a note of that specifically, silo posts together, schedule post together, which I’m sure that can be integrated at some point. Right now that’s not something that can be done, Dustin, but we’re working on that. It’s a great feature.

Marco: No. Dustin, what I would suggest is you just have your VA go in and add links as needed.

Bradley: As they’re published.

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Right. As they publish, go grab the URL, and then go post the next one. That’s the only thing we can do to daisy chain them together right now until we have the automation such that it will be able to do it. Okay.

Jordan says, “On one of the, or …” Okay. One of the guys, here we go. “One of the guys on our SEO team said after an SEO pitch this probably sounds like magic to them. I still can’t believe we get paid for this stuff, almost like grownup version of video games. Haha.” That’s funny. Well, I can believe we’d get paid for it, man. Think about all the testing and all the studying and all the learning and stuff that you, guys, and the money that you invest in your education and to tools and all that stuff.

I mean, we spend a lot of time learning this stuff, guys, we should be paid for it. I mean, think about that. We spend all our time learning how to perform this SEO magic stuff. A business owner that’s doing plumbing, for example, he’s out unclogging drains and that kind of stuff. He wouldn’t have time to learn all this stuff. How do I know? Because I was an electrical contractor and I had to learn how to do this shit while I was doing electrical work. It just so happens I found that I could make more money at this, that’s why I switched to this all together.

What are you gonna say, Marco?

Marco: Yeah. I was gonna say we deserve to be paid and be paid well. I mean, do you know how much time we’ve spent between RYS Academy, RYS Reloaded, Local GMB Pro, Local PR Pro, Local Lease Pro? Do you know how many hours have gone into researching that and making it work? Making that all work hand in hand so that one pushes the other and you’re pushing ultimate power to whatever destination so that that client’s phone rings?

Yeah. It may seem like magic. “Well, my phone rang. You did all that.” But it’s actually just hours and hours and hours of being a total geek.

Are There Ways We Can Use Press Releases Based On The Battleplan Aside From Launching A New Site?

Bradley: Rabbit-hole time. Yeah. Dan’s up. He says, “I’ve looked using press releases based off the Battle Plan and saw that you have them at the store. Besides using them for launching a new site would there be other places that I could use them? I do some consulting on the side for local businesses and build sites, lead gen, et cetera?”

Yeah, Dan. “Press releases are my favorite off-page or link building method really. Like no question, I absolutely love press releases. I use them as my primary off-page link building tool or method. I still use spam links from time to time for certain things, but for the most part I’m using press releases for link building.”

Yeah. You can use them. Guys, there’s dozens and dozens of things that you can publish press releases about. I’ve talked about them. Dan, we have a course called Local PR Pro which is specifically about how to use press releases to rank in the Maps pack, to get Google GMB, Google My Business profiles ranked in the maps pack using press releases. Right?

That’s what that course, Local PR Pro, is all about. In that course, I talk about how there’s multiple different things that you could publish a press release about. Because that’s a question that comes up often, “Well, I don’t think my client has anything that’s really newsworthy to publish a press release about.”

But think about it, getting a five-star review, you could publish a press release about receiving a five-star review or your client. Or you could publish a press release about a new employee being hired. Or a seasonal change to the product line that’s available. Or the services that are available, depending on what kind of business you’re dealing with. Or an accolade that the company receives, some sort of award or something like that. Or any charitable things, any charity events that they’re hosting or that they contribute to or participate in. Right?

There’s just dozens and dozens of things, hooks, angles that you could use to write a news release or something that can be … Guys, you can even publish a press release about a new blog post that’s been published on the website. No kidding. I mean, you just have to get a little bit creative. Dan, when I say you have to get creative, I don’t mean you. I mean, what I would recommend is hiring a PR writer, from Upwork or something like that, that can come up with these angles. A good press release writer can come up with a newsworthy angle for just about anything.

Again, if you’re doing a lot of this work, you could hire a PR writer, a good PR writer from like Upwork or something like that. Or if you’ve got a good press release distribution service that you subscribe to for monthly press releases or whatever, if they’ve got good writers in-house, which most good services do now, then they’ll have writers that are already trained on how to find news where the angles or to create hooks or their stories for the press releases. Right?

For example, if you use the MGYB press release service, the writers there from the Press Advantage distribution network, if that’s what you’re using, it’s fabulous, and there the press releases are almost twice the content length of typical press releases. There’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 words as opposed to 300 to 400, which is what most of them are. So those writers are really, really good, like their sole purpose in life is to find an angle or to create an angle to write a press release about. Those are the same writers that you have access to when you buy a press releases from us individually.

Okay. Anybody wanna comment on that before we move on? It’s a good one, Dan.

Marco: No. I think you hit the nail on the head. They’re great for just about everything. The only thing that you have to avoid is self-promotion, but you get that from most of them. You just have to define what self-promotion is. You go and you advertise. Well, we’re in Facebook, if you’ve just started your Facebook page, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. It’s still self-promotion. It’s just not getting sales. That’s what you wanna try to avoid.

Other than that, it’s fantastic for link building. Not only that, if you hit the press release, whatever the distribution network is with link building, it’ll push through. You’re putting a filter in between the destination so that you hit that with link building. It’ll power it up even more. They just work really well for everything.

Bradley: They damn sure do. Like Marco said, you can actually do self promotional PRs, but the salesy part is what you gotta leave out. They shouldn’t be salesy. But they can be self-promotional. Again, a good PR writer will be able to disguise a promotion as a story, a news story, and that’s really what you wanna do. That’s why I say don’t do it yourself. If I had to write press releases, I’d be a very miserable person. I wouldn’t wanna do it, but some people enjoy that stuff and they’re good at it. All right.

Is It Okay To Start With Battleplan Before Going Into The Mastermind and Syndication Academy Courses?

Andrew Walker’s up. Andrew is a local guy to me. I was in lead share, like a breakfast lead share group with him for several years that I don’t attend those things much anymore. Andrew is a great guy. Anyways, it’s good to see you here, Andrew. I haven’t seen him in a while. He says, “Hey guys, it’s been a long time since I’ve been on Hump Day Hangouts. I got caught up in the cold calling strategy to build my business and also had a case of the shiny object syndrome.” Well, we all do, Andrew. Don’t beat yourself up, buddy. We all go through that. I promise you, I’ve been through it. I still struggle with that, to be honest.

“I don’t fully understand how powerful-,” or excuse me, “I didn’t fully understand how powerful digital marketing is and what it can do for your business. You would think that that’s a no-brainer for an IT guy. Anyway, I’m back for real and I’m ready to learn this stuff. I’ve just downloaded the Battle Plan. I’d love to get involved in the Mastermind, but I’m not able to afford that at this time. Syndication Academy looks to be a great runner up. Can I start there to get things going or just start with the Battle Plan? Thanks, guys, and congrats on your four year anniversary.”

Okay. Great question, Andrew. Again, glad to see you back, man. The Syndication Academy is, yeah, it’s good, however, because, I’m not gonna knock Syndication Academy, but what we recommend is, especially for you, Andrew, you’re running your IT business, your IT services business, and so it depends on how much time you have. If you’ve got a lot of time and no money then, yes, pick up Syndication Academy because then you can learn how to build your own syndication network, which is gonna be one of the critical components to your business in expanding your reach and helping to generate more leads, it’ll help with your SEO and all that kind of stuff.

However, there’s a lot of time that goes into learning how to build a syndication network and, unless you plan on building syndication networks for others or selling them to others, I wouldn’t recommend that you go through all the trouble of learning how to build all that stuff for your own branded syndication network, for your own business. If you’re looking to try to grow your business, then your time is better spent not learning how to build a syndication network that you’re only gonna build one for your own business.

Your time is better spent marketing your business. You can instead just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us and we will build it to our specifications, which is exactly what we teach in the training. You can save yourself weeks of study and implementation by just buying a Done For You Syndication Network and you still reap the benefits of it without having to spend weeks of your time. Does that make sense? They’re inexpensive enough that there’s really no reason that you can’t just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us. It’s cheaper or about the same price as the cost of a month tuition to Syndication Academy. Right?

Anyways, my point is, if you want, Andrew, since you can’t join the Mastermind yet, what I recommend is that you attend our Hump Day Hangouts regularly on Wednesdays, ask your questions here try, keep it to one question per post. In other words, you can post a few times, but try to keep it one question per post please. Ask questions here and we will try to guide you in the best way possible to help you to start growing your IT business, just from these Hump Day Hangouts. Then once you have generated some revenue you can always come join the Mastermind, which is your best bet, because the Mastermind is not just about marketing stuff.

Guys, we’ve gotten away from just teaching SEO or just teaching marketing methods. It’s more about building your business regardless of whether you’re building a local agency or consulting firm, or you want to build your own brick and mortar business, or virtual business for that matter. We want to teach you how to do all of that, which includes marketing and includes SEO, and includes all that stuff, but we’re not pigeon holing our training into just marketing training, if that makes sense. A lot more goes into it than that.

I would suggest, Andrew, that what you do is come back and join us here in Hump Day Hangouts, get involved, stay engaged, ask questions. We also have our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials Facebook group that you could ask questions there. As soon as you’re able to, I would invest in joining the Mastermind so that you can get, basically, almost one-on-one guidance from each one of us my partners and I as well as all of the other members in the Mastermind that are also savvy business owners. Right? That’s part of why it’s Mastermind because it’s not just about us teaching all the time, it’s about everybody in there contributing and helping each other, which is fabulous. Okay.

By the way, one of our top members, longtime members, Jason Johnson, who is what Adam was just talking about at the very beginning of this Hump Day Hangout, he was mentioning somebody was having difficulty setting up their MX records for G suite email to use their domain for their email within G suite. Jason Johnson posted, “Hey, I saw somebody was having trouble with MX records. Hey, I’m an IT guy. If anybody has any questions or any problems, tell them to reach out to me. I’ll help them for free as long as they’re a Mastermind member.”

Andrew, what I’m saying is, Jason is an IT guy who’s been in our Mastermind. He does digital marketing on the side, but also markets his own business and somebody that you could absolutely click with. Probably the two of you could chat about what he’s doing for his business and what’s working for him in generating leads for his IT business and all that kind of stuff. Right?

Again, that’s part of the power of a Mastermind. It’s not just learning from me or Marco when, you know, I’m gonna teach you how to generate leads for your business, but I generate leads for contracting businesses. Right? You’re trying to generate leads for IT services, and computer repair networking, and that kind of stuff, so why not get the advice direct from somebody that’s already generating leads for that type of a business, which we have members in our group to do that? Does that make sense?

That’s the power of a Mastermind. Okay. So that’s what I recommend. In the meantime, if you don’t have the money, come back here, ask questions, implement what you can, go through our YouTube channel Semantic Mastery, youtube.com/semanticmastery. Use the channel search function, ask questions over there. You’re likely going to find already video answers for many of your questions. Then, like I said, anything that you can’t find answers to, post in either the Facebook group or post back here on the event page every week and we’ll come in and answer your questions. As soon as you can generate a little bit of positive revenue, I would reinvest that back into your education and into building your business by joining the Mastermind, getting guidance from us as well as our other members.

Marco: I’m gonna give him just a couple of weeks. First of all, welcome back, Andrew. Sorry that you had a shiny object syndrome. I mean, that sucks and it makes you spend a whole lot of money and time chasing. It becomes a useless path. You fill up your computer with a whole bunch of garbage that you’re never going to use and you realize how much money you spent and then you get caught up at where you are right now where you ended, and dropped all that money and you have nothing to show for it.

But that’s okay, lesson learned. The two examples that I’m gonna give you is, I’m gonna give you Paul Fussell, who’s always in these Hump Day Hangouts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he drops in today; or if he isn’t, it’s because he’s out making money. He was at POFU Live, as a matter of fact, our event. The way he went about doing it, he come into Hump Day Hangouts, ask questions, and then go and go and apply. Ask questions, go and apply. then he started purchasing our drive stacks to rank. I know that he was doing dental for a while, I don’t know what he’s doing now.

Anyway, the thing about Paul is that he just went and he got Done For You services, and then he was chasing clients. Every time he’d get a client, drive stack, and that’s how he would he would rank them. But that’s Paul and that’s how he did it, so Hump Day Hangouts and Done For You services.

Then, we get to Jordan in Syndication Academy. Jordan lives in Syndication Academy, he’s always there. He’s one of our, I don’t know, one of our long-running and most active members of Syndication Academy. He runs an agency and I think he just got a huge nationwide client, but it’s from Syndication Academy. I’m not gonna say that he got everything from Syndication Academy, but I know that that’s his foundation and I know that that’s what he’s doing to rank his clients, to help his clients and to help his agency.

He has an agency, actually he’s an agency owner, but he decided that Syndication Academy was the thing for him. But, of course, they’ll all tell you, and Jordan will tell you that the Battle Plan is the place where you start, and you have to follow it. If you follow the Battle Plan, then you’re going to get to our Done For You services.

It’s a whole lot easier to go and buy a Syndication Academy Network, as Bradley mentioned, than to learn how to build a one-of-a-kind that you only need that one time. Why not go buy it and pay that than to pay a monthly membership to learn how to build one, or you might not wanna learn how to build one, or you might need?

It’s just to buy them and then go and sell it to clients, to people you know. Then, you pitch the benefits of being branded of having that footprint of being seen, of your content being seen everywhere, pushing your content to where the people are hanging out. So that’s one of the benefits.

You could do it many ways. Now, of course, we’re always going to tell you that the Mastermind is the place to be because that’s where like-minded entrepreneurs hang out, people who want to grow their business and get away from just that weekly paycheck and having to wait until the next one so that you could do whatever it is that you wanna do. We wanna push you, guys, past that. We call it POFU, position of fuck you.

Whatever that position is for you, Andrew, we want you to get there. There isn’t just one way to get there, but we do wanna help you get there. So whether you choose Hump Day Hangouts, whether you choose Syndication Academy, or what we suggest, whether you join our Mastermind, we’re going to help you any way we can. That’s what we’re here for.

Bradley: That’s right. Let’s not forget Mohammad. He’s a shining example. Mohammad Mackey. He started by just joining Hump Day Hangouts and coming and asking questions week in and week out and for months. Eventually, he got to a point where he landed a couple of his first clients and started making enough money. He came and joined the Mastermind. Then, he went through a little bit of a struggle for over-promising to clients and ended up losing some clients and had to drop out of the Mastermind for a little bit.

But he kept coming to Hump Day Hangouts and asking more questions, even during that time where he had to back out of the Mastermind, and he got the education that he needed and he implemented it. Right? It’s nothing we did, all we did was provide him with information, but he’s the one that took action and kept at it. He kept persisting in working and he kept finding stuff that wasn’t working until he found stuff that did work. Then, he landed some clients again, got his money back up, and joined the Mastermind again.

We have multiple examples of people that have done that just by starting here, right here at Hump Day Hangouts, Andrew, and you can do that too. Right? The Battle Plan, like I said, will tell you do this, this, this, and this, and you’re going to start getting results. It doesn’t say that you have to learn how to do those things, it just tells you apply these things. Right?

You can either learn how to do those things and do them yourself or, as a business owner, it would be much more efficient with your time to just purchase the Done For You services and apply them in the order that they’re recommended and reap the benefits of those without having to learn how to do it. Okay. Great question. Again, glad to have you back, Andrew. We’re happy to see you participate and be a lot more engaged over the coming weeks.

What Are The Factors You Consider When Finding The Best Keywords For Ranking Opportunity In Local Lead Gen Campaigns?

Gordon’s up. He says, “Hey guys, thank you very much again for the help you provide on Hump Days. It’s greatly appreciated.” You’re welcome, Gordon. “If you’re looking to find a low hanging fruit where you can easily rank in the GMB 3-pack, other than looking at the reviews of the current businesses in the 3-pack in their citation profile, what else do you do to decide whether or not you have found a golden goose ranking opportunity? Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls? Thanks again, Gordon.”

Okay. First of all, Gordon, Local Lease Pro, I showed the exact simple method, it’s kind of time-consuming, but the simple method using it, a free software that we show, we use to identify what I call slam-dunk opportunities, which is which you’re calling a golden goose in your question, okay? Again, that was in Local Lease Pro. If you have access to that, which I’m hoping you do because it was on sale for a very, very ridiculously low price for about eight days during the Side Hustle Toolbox launch. That’s close now, but it is available, Local Lease Pro, but we teach the method specifically how to find low-hanging opportunities.

Now I can’t go into the details of that right here, but it is very, very simple to do using the Easy Local Cash software, which is a free software. It’s Chad Kimball’s software. It just shows you, basically, ever since July of this year, when mobile implemented or switched to the mobile first index, that opened up just massive, massive opportunity. I’m telling you, guys, it opened up more opportunity than I’ve seen since I started my local marketing career in 2010. And that is what we teach on how to find those opportunities that have been opened up by this major change in the algorithm or which index is used first. Right? The mobile first index.

That’s all in Local Lease Pro. I can’t obviously say that right here. It is in the course. Also, you can find out, certainly, if you joined a Mastermind, because Local Lease Pro is one of the first courses that Mastermind members get now when they join.

Marco: Yeah, the how. I mean, that’s the course, the how is, you know, if we gave you that, then why have a course in the first place? So, sorry, that’s something that we can’t do. I’m glad that you mentioned again the Mastermind. I was in our mini, we have the mini-Mastermind and mine is on Tuesday nights for an hour. I have three great people. I have Jamina, I have Will Kenderdine, and John Wypick. We were going over my method for using the software and we went over it in detail. I don’t mind for an hour. I mean, I decided to give my time, right?

So this is what it’s all about. Membership has its privileges. I do things a little bit differently. I find targets a little bit differently, but it all works just the same way. The same way that you teach it, the way that I do it, I already decided to do it. The thing is that membership has its privileges. You have to be a member in order to get the information that you’re asking about. It’s not something that we can give away for free.

Bradley: Yeah. “Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls?” Well, that’s a good question. If you do your research properly upfront, you should know. First of all, you should research your industry or the niche that you’re targeting. Now if you followed us at all for any length of time, Gordon, which I know you have, you know that I’ve been telling you and I’ve been preaching this and beating this drum for years now, which is: specialize. Focus on one industry, guys. Become a big fish in one industry instead of a me-too agency or a me-too consultant or me-too local marketer that will just accommodate any business that will talk to you.

Trust me, you will never gain any traction in your business, or you will have a much harder time gaining traction in your business, if you just offer marketing services to any business that will talk to you. Because your amount of work multiplies exponentially because you have to do keyword research, you have to do market research, you have to understand the vocabulary of the industry, you have to figure out what the pain points are in those industries both for the consumer and for the business owner.

Because if you’re the business owner that you can help them market their products and services, you need to understand the consumer’s mindset, but you also have to understand the business owner’s mindset. So that you can talk to them and speak their language, build rapport with them. So you have to learn two different markets for every industry you enter, the consumer market and the business market. Right?

There’s just so much work that goes into learning, becoming a marketing special or professional in any industry. It requires a ton of research. So if you try to just say, “Oh, I’m gonna be a local marketing guy and I’ll talk to any business in my area that will talk to me,” you’re gonna create a shit ton of additional work that you can significantly reduce. You’ll gain a lot more traction a lot faster in your business if you focus in on one particular industry because then you can craft everything you do in your business around that particular industry. All your marketing messages, all your keyword research, your content templates, everything that you do can be designed around that one particular industry. Now you become a specialist.

I use this as an example. Would you go to a general health practitioner for a heart surgery? No, you go to a cardiologist. Why do you think businesses, like let’s say home remodeling contractors or general contractors, would they want to go to a me-too agency or would they want to go to a contractor media, contractor marketing agency that specializes in general and remodeling contractor marketing? Does that make sense? Which one would you prefer?

Gordon, I recommend specializing in on one industry. But don’t just arbitrarily decide on what industry you wanna focus in on and say, “I’m gonna build my business around that,” you need to research that industry and determine, is there a call volume? Is there significant interest in that? Is there money there?

What’s one of the ways that you can determine that? An easy and simple and a quick way is go do a search for the product and/or service as if you were a customer looking for that product or service. Just go do a Google search for it and take a look and see, are there ads? Are there Google ads? If so, that means there’s paying advertisers. If there’s Google ads, that means people are paying to bid on those keywords, which means there’s likely traffic for those keywords. If there wasn’t traffic for those keywords and if those keywords didn’t convert, there wouldn’t be ads. Does that make sense? People don’t pay and bid on keywords-, well, good advertisers don’t pay and bid on keywords that don’t convert or don’t generate traffic that converts. Right? So if you’re seeing Google ads, that’s a good indication.

Now I wouldn’t stop there. I’d research it further. You could do things, like use Google Trends to find out where in the country, or in the world for that matter, but I always do US-based searches, you can find out where the hotspots are for where the search traffic is the most or the search interest is the most for the types of products or services that you’d be promoting in that industry. Right? So then, you can start to develop out which locations you’re gonna target first for your business. Does that make sense?

Remember, specialize on one industry, guys, because then you can scale your business by geography instead of by type or kind. Does that make sense? Instead of trying to scale your business by taking on new industries where you’re gonna create so much additional work, scale your business by continuing with the same industry but expanding your service area or your territory, your target area. Right?

That’s a hell of a lot better or much more efficient way to build your business. Not only that, in time you will build a name and a reputation for being that type of a marketing specialist for that particular industry. People will start to seek you out as opposed to you having a force or push your marketing, your services onto others. People will start to seek you out because they know that you’re the specialist. Does that make sense?

How do you determine whether there’s enough search traffic? You have to research it. Make sure it’s an industry that has paying advertisers. Make sure that there is significant search interest for those types of things and that it’s profitable.

As I said about in the past, carpet cleaning, there’s a ton of search interest for carpet cleaning but there’s very, very, very small margins in the carpet cleaning industry. Right? Carpet cleaning companies don’t particularly like to pay for marketing services or for lead generation services, they don’t have the budgets for it because their margins are very small.

But if you just did keyword research, which is, when I first started, the very first lead gen site I ever built was carpetcleaningalexandriava.com. I don’t own that anymore, but it was a lead gen site that I built because all I did was base my decision on which industry I was gonna target based upon keyword search volume from the Google Keyword Planner. It said something like 600 exact match searches for that term “carpet cleaning Alexandria VA” per month. It was like 660 or something like that, 600 searches per month. So I said, “Oh man, there’s a lot of search volume there. I can make money with that.”

Well, I built the site and got it ranked number one. We were getting 30 to 40 calls a week through that lead gen site and I had trouble monetizing it for even a hundred dollars a month. No shit. Then when I finally got down to the chewy center of why that was by sitting down with the contractor that was renting that site from me or leasing that site from me, he told me, “Because the carpet cleaning business has very, very small margins.” Right? Very small margins. He was making something ridiculous, per carpet cleaning job $8 or $9 or $10, or $12 in profit. It was something stupid. After paying his labor and insurance costs and, the cleaning solution costs, and all of this overhead, he had a very small margin so he had trouble paying for that.

What happened? I ended up switching into other higher margin businesses. That’s why I love the tree service industry because it’s huge margin. That’s why I like remodeling contractors, home builders, HVAC repair, any sort of repair, roofers, all those types because the margins are so much larger. Does that make sense?

Again, you have to do the research, Gordon. There’s no real easy answer there. You just got to be logical and do the research and you should be able to find the opportunities as well as the perfect industry. Also, one last thing I would suggest about that is, seriously, guys, try to find an industry that you, not only has all the correct signals or markers of being a good industry to work at, but also one that you have a genuine interest in because it’ll make it feel less like work. Okay.

Honestly, I don’t have any interest in tree services, except for the fact that that does make me some damn good money, which kind of makes it interesting. But if you can find an industry that you have a genuine interest in, it’ll feel less like work while you’re building your business.

Anybody wanna comment on that before I move on? That was a long-winded answer I know.

Marco: No, but it was perfect. There’s no need to go into that any further.

How Do You Set Up The Syndication Network Of Several GMB Sites In Same Metro Area?

Bradley: He says, “Hey guys, so if I have a group of GMB sites in the same metro area and a WordPress site ranked on page one and Serps, a YouTube channel with videos ranking on page one of Google’s video page and I want to lease all of these as a total package deal to a business owner operating an area, how do I set up a syndication network for this? Can I feed the RSS feeds from all the GMB sites into the WordPress site blog into one generically branded syndication network? Or do I need to set up separate networks for each GMB site or WordPress site? Thank you very much for your comment.”

Michael, I don’t recommend a syndication network for lead gen assets unless you need them. For example, if you’re having trouble getting a lead gen asset to push another 3-pack, can a syndication network will help for that? Then, absolutely.

The other thing is, if you have a cluster of Google My Business profiles for a metropolitan area that are all branded the same, then you could use one syndication network for those. When you talk about grabbing the GMB RSS feeds, I’m not sure what you mean from that, unless you’re using our GMB auto poster which will generate an RSS feed, but you can’t just get an RSS feed, at least not that I’m aware of.

Marco, this may have changed, but is there an RSS feed from the GMB websites yet?

Marco: Not that I know of. Not that I’m aware of.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah. As far as I’m aware, there is not an RSS feed from the GMB websites. So our GMB auto poster will create an RSS feed from the GMB posts that are connected through that auto poster or that are posted with that auto poster. So you can do it that way. But like I said, you should have a common brand for all of those assets, if that’s the case. If you want to feed them all into one network, which again, I’m gonna be 100% transparent with you guys, I’m not building syndication networks for my lead gen assets. I build syndication networks for clients because I tell them that it’s critical. It is because it’s brand building, it’s entity validation and brand authority building, right?

So any client, I’m gonna tell them. “You should have a syndication network to protect your brand and to amplify your brand, expand your reach. It also helps to build your authority and all that kind of stuff.” For content marketing, all my clients, I suggest we do regular content marketing, blogging that gets syndicated out to the syndication network. That’s all true. It’s not just because I wanna charge them money, guys, it’s to protect their brand and to help them to stay ranked.

But for lead gen assets, that’s an additional expense. So why implement that? Until and unless you need to, right? So for my lead gen assets that I’m building right now, I’m not using syndication networks. If I have lead gen assets that I do all the other magic that I work to them and they don’t end up producing, because maybe they’re not ranking well or that area ended up being more competitive than I originally thought, then I may add a syndication network. But that’s only if and when it’s absolutely needed. It’s kind of like a last resort thing because it’s an additional expense that I don’t wanna have to put up for a lead gen asset if I can get results without it.

Now once you’ve monetized an asset, a lead gen or, in this case, a multiple assets, once you’ve monetized them, I’ve talked about this too, if once you’ve developed it … Like for me, when I monetize a lead gen asset, what I do is after several months, two or three months of the service provider paying on time and there’s no issues, if we develop a decent relationship, then I offer at that point to rebrand those lead gen assets after the client, certainly their name. It’s a lot more legit that way, right?

Like I said, at that point, once I would offer the rebranding, then that’s where I could upsell them on, “Hey, since we’re gonna be rebranding these, we should also go to syndication network because it’s gonna help to protect your brand and we can use that to help continue to push the lead gen assets that I’m gonna rebrand. It’ll help to continue to keep them producing for you, blah blah blah blah blah.”

At that point, we set up syndication network. Might even set them up on content marketing services. That’s an additional charge beyond the lead gen leasing or pay per lead fees that I’m charging. Depending on how I’ve monetized that asset, this is now starting to build their asset, syndication network with their branding, building, doing content marketing on their website.

So now I’m double dipping, right? Now I’m generating money from my lead gen assets and also working on the client’s assets as a separate fee. Right? So it gives you a whole lot of opportunity, Michael. But for your lead gen assets, I don’t recommend setting up syndication network unless you absolutely need to. Try to get results without it. Guys, I am the firm believer of trying to get the most results or trying to get the best results with the least amount of effort possible and least amount of money invested too.

Should You Create A Blog Post If You Syndicate A GMB Post?

Okay. It’s a good Hump Day today, by the way. I’m liking these questions. It’s a good question, Michael. All right. Ray had some confusion earlier. We’ll pass over that. Quit This House, he says, “If I wanted to syndicate my GMB post, should I create a blog post with the post details and link or should I post to one of the social media sites and create a trigger from there?”

Quit This House, use the GMB auto poster. I’m telling you, it’s stupid and expensive, it’s super convenient and efficient, and it can generate an RSS feed from your GMB posts, and then you can just connect that directly to a syndication network, and then, viola, it’s done. You don’t have to go … Right now, what you’re talking about would require a manual action for every post. Right?

If you just set it up through the auto poster, you can, not only schedule out your GMB post all in one setting so that they automatically publish on the day and time that you select, but it will also generate an RSS feed that then you can populate or trigger a syndication network with, and all of that is automated.

Marco: By the way, since we’re back on the auto poster, I got an answer from Rob and he says, yes, we’ll be able to silo based on tagging. So you can create multiple silos within the auto poster just by tagging, by using different tags. The function isn’t integrated yet, but it’s coming. It’s already being developed, guys. Those of you who are looking to get into this, get in there now because it just keeps …

Shripad is a master programmer. He just keeps adding to it more and more functionality and he’s now charging more. We’re not gonna charge more monthly yet. If it gets to the point where there’s just a ton of programming that needs to be done, the price will probably need to go up. But we usually grandfather people into the prices where they are, so remember that.

Bradley: Yeah. Michael says, “Holy crap, I can’t believe I got the $1,000 Local Lease Pro course for $47.” Yeah, Michael. Look, for eight days, we promoted shit out of that and told everybody that once the Side Hustle Toolbox offer closed that it was gonna, I originally said it was gonna go to 500, but it’s such a damn good course. I mean, I’m telling you, this is I think the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career, that Local Lease Pro method right there. That’s why we made it $1,000.

Not only that, but we’re gonna be updating the course. Like I said, I’ve got some new stuff to add to it. That as soon as I get my VA on track for the new changes and I polish up the processes a little bit, I’m gonna be sharing that, I’ll be updating Local Lease Pro. So, yeah, you’re right. Good thing that you got in on it.

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have … ” By the way, guys, if you want Local Lease Pro, if you don’t have it, there’s only two options, you can buy it for 1,000 bucks or you can join the Mastermind and you can get it included in your Mastermind membership. So it’s entirely up to you, but I would recommend it. I mean, guys, it’s even worth $1,000, I’m not kidding, because of the opportunity. I’m telling you, it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my eight, almost nine year career now. Okay.

Does It Hurt Or Help To Have Multiple Syndication Networks?

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have multiple syndication networks?” Yes, it can, Abe. Not for YouTube channels-, well, depending on how they were set up, but if you’re using syndication networks for blog syndication to try to rank your own domain, like a self-hosted site, then, yes, multiple syndication networks can hurt you, depending on how you have it set up and how you have a syndication set up,

I’ve said for years now, like we teach branded tier one syndication networks and we also talked about when we teach how to build two-tier syndication networks. You can take it out multiple tiers. But I’ve also recommended for years that you only use two-tier syndication networks on YouTube channels or multi-tiered syndication networks on YouTube channels or for YouTube syndication, not for blog syndication.

However, if you wanna do it for blog syndication, I do teach in Syndication Academy and I’ve talked about it multiple times how you can use multi-tiered syndication networks and reduce the chance of getting a Google slap. You cannot eliminate it because you are still leaving a footprint. But you can significantly reduce the footprint if you add additional content feeds as triggers into your second or third tiers. Right? Because what you wanna do is you wanna mask or bury your content among a whole lot of additional route relevant and related type content so that the blogs don’t show or appear to be solely for manipulating search rankings. Right? And that’s essentially what they are.

Again, with multi-tiered syndication networks, I don’t recommend them for blog syndication unless you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to put forth all the additional effort. Also, multitude syndication networks can break down because there’s a lot of moving pieces, there’s a lot of different content sources, which can cause you know different RSS feeds that you don’t have control over because they’re not your RSS feeds, which can cause problems. Multi-tiered syndication networks can be a bitch to maintain for that reason and so that’s another reason I don’t recommend them.

If you are just flatly syndicating your content to multiple syndication networks and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, then you are absolutely causing damage because it is clearly, the algorithm can pick that up in a split second. Right? Again, Abe, if you were gonna be building these types of stuff, like I said, the only way that … We have Syndication Academy where I talk about all of that stuff, seriously, I go into your best practices and everything about how to use them and where to use them. But for blog syndication, I highly recommend that you just use a one-tier branded syndication network and then you can boost the hell out of that. Okay.

Marco: Yeah. He also says that he’s used lower standard contractors in the past and he’s considering using our services on top. Dude, if you’ve done that, then don’t get a syndication network from us until you fix whatever it is that you’ve done. I suggest totally getting into Syndication Academy, seeing how it’s all supposed to work. I hope that you have access to all of these networks and multiple rings that have been done for you so that you can just stop whatever madness it was that was created and you could do it the right way. The way that it’s supposed to be done, which is branding. It’s done for branding and for syndicating your network. Yeah. It is done to manipulate but to manipulate in the right way. If you get caught manipulating the wrong way, you’re going to get slapped down.

What’s The Difference Between The Press Release Service In Serp Space And MGYB?

Bradley: That’s right. Ray says, “What is the difference between press release service from Serp Space, and MGYB? Are they overlapping and/or equivalent? They’re equivalent now, Ray, because, well, there’s two different levels of press releases orders from Serb Space. There was the press release and then press release plus. The press release was, the press advantage network, the distribution network, and that’s we have now a separate account. We have our own press advantage distribution network agreement with them that is available in MGYB. It’s basically the same distribution network. So it’s up to you if you wanna order from Serp Space or if you wanna come to MGYB which is owned and controlled entirely by Semantic Mastery and my partners. If that makes sense.

Serp Space was a collaboration. We are no longer part of that. There’s no issues there or anything like that. I’m just letting you know, if you wanna order directly from us, it’s through MGYB. Okay. Good question.

Should We Link From GMB Biz.Site Description?

Doodle Digital Marketing, I like that. He says, “Hey guys, I love Hump Day Hangouts. Tons of value. “Should we link out from the GMB biz site description?” Not … Well, wait a minute, the GMB, yes. You can link from the GMB website content. I don’t know about the description. But if you’re talking about the GMB business description, no, you can’t put links in that; that’s short. I think it only allows 750 characters. But if you’re talking about the GMB website, yes, you can link out to that.

What I don’t recommend doing a lot of external links, unless it makes sense, it has to be relevant guys, remember, this is a Google property, so I would not be doing some stupid “I’m gonna link to a .gov or .edu site for authority” because that’s bullshit and it has been for years. If it’s relevant, then, yes. If it’s not relevant, you’re just doing it because you learn that somewhere on some stupid SEO program somewhere, don’t do it because that’s dumb.

But what I would recommend doing is, I always link, and I teach this, but I always link from the GMB website text, the content body of the website, I always link to the GMB maps share URL, as well as to the GMB website. So it’s linking to itself, right? If you have an external website, so self-hosted website, you can link to that. That makes sense. You could also link to some of your social media stuff. That makes sense. Any type of branded property that you could link out.

Again, I wouldn’t spam the description or the GMB website content with a bunch of exterior external links, I would keep it … Really that’s why I usually just link from the GMB website to itself and also to the GMB maps share URL because those are Google properties. Right? So just consider that.

It’s after five o'clock, I don’t have to get my daughter-, or I don’t get to have my daughter for dinner tonight, so I do have a couple extra minutes. Marco, can you hang out for a few extra?

Marco: Yeah, I can hang out for a few extra. My daughter isn’t crying it.

Bradley: We’ve only got a few questions left.

Marco: Let’s go.

Bradley: All right. John says, “I’ve got a Semantic Mastery syndrome. I have no doubt it’s the place to be.” “Thanks, John. John is one in Marco’s small group that he was talking about. Jordan says, “Marco’s right. We learned the why behind all these Semantic Mastery tactics, Syndication Academy, RYS stack, Press Releases, et cetera, and then just sell them along with some other deep rooted stuff we had developed in the lab.” He’s talking about his own business specifically, Jordan.

“Then we also create all the content via writing and optimizing it, which we charge for, and then we do web design with SEO strategy pre-launch. I couldn’t build a drive stack if my life depended on it. Haha.” Yeah, that’s great. I mean, honestly, guys, those are the audience that are tech nerds and like to get their hands dirty, so to speak, roll up their sleeves and get to work. Then, RYS Academy will teach you how to build drive stacks. It’s a lot of work. You can benefit from RYS stacks without having to learn how to build them, by just buying them done for you and you’ll save yourself a shit ton of time and energy.

Again, I’m not trying to discourage anybody from buying the course, I’m just saying you got to consider where to spend your time. Is learning how to build drive stacks going to progress your business? It might. You have to make that decision. I can’t make that decision for you. Or is the benefit and the result that the drive stack can produce going to help your business? And if so, then why go through the trouble of learning how to build them when you could just purchase them done for you and receive the benefit that you were seeking to begin with? Does that make sense? Then that way you could spend your time focusing on how to sell it or how to monetize it or how to apply it to get the result that you’re seeking. Does that make sense?

Again, guys, you have to think about it on a higher level. That’s what I think is really wrong with our industry, is that everybody teaches, or the vast majority of products tell you, “Hey, we’re gonna teach you how to do this one skill.” Yeah, I’m not trying to take that away from anybody. That skill is valuable. Whatever that skill may be, it’s valuable. But just because you know how to get a result from it, one particular skill does not make you a business owner, it does not make it a profitable business for you. Right?

So you got to think about how are you going to make money from whatever it is you choose to do? Is doing that thing, being the mechanic or the technician, is that actually going to make you the money or is selling that service and the result that that service produces going to make you the money? If that’s the case, then why don’t you focus on learning how to sell it and find people that are already good at doing it, fulfilling it, to do it for you right.

That’s what we’re trying to get at, guys, and Jordan understands that. That’s why Jordan’s business is cranking, it’s just kicking ass. Okay.

Any Black Friday Sales For Done For You Services Or Training?

Luis, he’s a new Mastermind member. “Hey guys, any Black Friday sales?” By the way, welcome, Luis. “Any Black Friday sales for Done For You services or training?” Yeah. Isn’t that with the GMB stuff was the pre-Black Friday sale?

Marco: It’s the pre. We will have something. Something’s coming your way and it’s gonna be good. Trust me. It’s not Black Friday yet, dude. But we will have something. It’ll be big. We control MGYB now. As Bradley mentioned, it’s ours. Semantic Mastery is our own store. So we’ve got some really good stuff coming your way.

Luis, I will be talking to you on Monday, as a matter of, fact. It’s his onboarding call. Again, I’m sorry, all these Mastermind questions keep coming up or Mastermind people. As part of the onboarding process, we give people a half hour call just to get them pointed in the right direction, to see where they’re going, where they want to be. So we ask questions, we try to provide guidance. I just happened to get Luis.

Guys, you can’t ask for who you want. You’re going to get whoever is up on the calendar, because we rotate since there’s five of us. But whoever you get, you’re going to get the direction that you need and you’re going to get your questions answered so that you can get started on your way to POFU.

That’s what we want you to do. We want you to get started getting to that place where you’re going to be and say, “Okay. Now I don’t have to deal with shitty clients. I don’t have to deal with shitty people. I am at a place where I can go into any negotiation from a position of power. I know what I’m worth. If this guy gives me any flack, I’m gonna have to say ‘Fuck you. I’m gonna go to your competitor and charge them half price just because I feel like it, because I don’t need you.‘” That’s what we want you to be.

Bradley: There you go so. Yes, Black Friday is this Friday. So, yeah, there will be some other specials. I don’t usually get involved with what promotions we’re doing, guys, so I couldn’t answer that. But I’m glad Marco said, yeah, we do have something coming Friday.

Should You Use Only The Main Keyword Phrase Or Should You Diversify Them When Building Links To All Assets?

Jay Turner. What’s up, Jay? He says, “I’ve been able to get my client ranked in the 3-pack for the second most trafficked keyword phrase with an RYS stack. High five, Marco.”

Marco: High five, dude.

Bradley: “But now I want to take on the main and most competitive keyword. I’m adding a silo of content to the RYS stack targeting the main keyword. So far so good. My question is when embarking on link building to all assets, like RYS, Syndication Network, GMB website, et cetera, should I use only the main keyword phrase or must I diversify the keyword phrases?”

Jay, diversify. What I recommend you do is go pool your … You should have probably already done keyword research anyways, so if you’re gonna be siloing, you should have your keyword themes relatively tight for the silos anyways. So make sure that if you’re gonna be direct targeting link building on a silo basis, that you’re only using a set of keywords that fall within that particular silo or keyword theme. Right? Does that make sense?

Let me take this down to a local level because what I wanna explain is, guys, when you’re doing a ton of like spam link building and such to power up tier one entities, which would be like drive stacks, press release, organization pages, syndication networks, even citations, you don’t want to hit, and I’m gonna say local because that’s primarily what I work on, and I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about here anyways. You said client ranks, so it’s likely it’s locally You said 3-pack. Right?

So you don’t wanna use the keywords with the location modifiers. You can use a very small percentage of your overall keywords that you’re gonna add to the anchor text or the link building that you’re gonna be either doing or buying a package or whatever. You can have a very, very small percentage with location modifiers, but I would keep that to an absolute bare minimum. Because it’s more about pushing the theme, the keyword theme, not the location, or the geographic theme, if that makes sense, it’s not about pushing location relevancy.

Because think about it, the further you move away from a local business the more broader the market segment is. In other words, you don’t wanna be targeting keywords or link building to tier 1 assets all the way down to the local level, including local location modifier, because it’s, remember your link building to tier one assets is two hops away from your target which would be your GMB asset or your primary website, the client’s website, or whatever, the further you get away from the ultimate target, the ultimate destination, the broader your keyword set should be, the broader the theme of the keyword set.

That’s why I say I don’t like to include local modifiers and anchor text when I’m building links to tier one assets. Instead I use higher or market-level keywords, broader market keywords. What do I mean by that? Instead of water heater repair Fairfax Virginia or Fairfax VA as a keyword that I would use as an anchor, it would be water heater repair and plumbing and plumbing repair and plumbing service, if that makes sense. I’d lose the local modifier and use more broader market-level keywords. Okay.

Also, you don’t wanna do entirely 100% on anchor text links, even with a diverse set of keywords. You wanna also include naked URLs and some generics. You can even use some brand terms at that point. It’s a little bit odd to use brand terms at tier two links because that’s again two steps away from your target URL. But it does make sense if you’re link building to, for example, if it’s a tier one branded property it can make sense to also include the brand name in some of those anchor text too. Right? I would just use those sparingly as well. It’s more about the keyword relevancy at that point in naked URLs, which is just pushing link equity to those tier one assets regardless of anchor text.

Marco, do you wanna comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, thanks, Bradley. What I would recommend is reach out to Dedia. We have a Dedia, he knows exactly what to do with your RYS stack to get the most out of it.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: If needed, then get our keyword research gig because we will come up with thousands upon thousands of keyword targets for you to either add relevance or to push, we provide what’s called buoyancy. “Buoyancy,” that’s one of the words that I have difficulty with. But we help push up the main keyword by providing relevance throughout the keyword silo. We give you all that with the keyword research.

Then, all you do is turn that over to Dedia and say, “Here, this is the folder that I’ve created, this is the keyword that I’m targeting, have at it.” Dedia has been with us long enough that he just knows, okay, this is what I need to do. He’ll blast it. He’ll hammer that RYS stack so that it produces.

Bradley: That’s right. You don’t have to worry about all those ratios and stuff, Jay. I know. I mean, honestly, I don’t worry about any of that stuff anymore because I don’t ever do any of that stuff anymore. If I need it, I just contact Dedia, exactly what Marco said, and I just say, “Hey, this is what I got. This is what I’m trying to accomplish. Make it happen,” and he does it.

Honestly, guys, that’s what I’m talking about. Jay, again, I don’t wanna get back on this pitch again, but if you have your own tools and you’re running your own link building tools and stuff like that, that’s great, if you’re efficient and all that. But if you’re not, which I am not, I have no desire to run those tools, just let the expert do it and Dedia has an absolute ninja. He’s an expert, a link building expert, so that’s why I just turned it over to him, defer to him anytime I have something that I need to spam to push additional link equity to. I just contact him say, “This what I got is what I need you do, make it happen,” and he does it. All right.

Jay vouches for the GMB auto poster. He says, “It’s great and Shripad does great work. He is very responsive in Support. I can attest to that too, not just because it’s me, but every time there’s an issue a little support bubble on the bottom right corner of the auto poster, you can just contact Support through there and he’s very, very responsive.”

Would You Recommend Using One Website For Multiple GMB Locations?

Abe says, “Also, I would like to know about using one website for multiple GMB locations. Is this recommended and possible?” It can be. You can just create separate location pages. So each location each, GMB locations should have its own dedicated page on the website and that’s the URL that you would submit as the website URL in the Google My Business profile. Does that make sense?

So instead of just using the home root domain, so the home page of the website for that brand across all different GMB assets, create a location specific page on that domain and then use that URL as that landing page URL as the website in GMB. It’s perfectly fine to do that, guys. But what you want is, if it’s the same brand, you can share the same brand name across all GMB locations. That’s fine. But you want a unique URL and a unique phone number and a unique address, if possible. Okay.

Strange NAP issues occur if you have two or more of the data points, the primary data points in a citation or NAP, which would be name, address, phone number, and also website URL. If you have two or more common data points among multiple locations, that’s going to cause NAP issues, which is going to make it very difficult to rank. You can have one common data point, typically the business name, because it’s a brand that can be used across multiple GMBs as long as the other primary data points are unique, physical address, phone number, website address. Does that make sense? So, yes, it’s possible.

Now one other thing I would mention is go back through, Abe, watch some of our previous Hump Day Hangouts. We’ll talk about the difference between using location pages, which would be pages on the root domain, or using location-specific sub-domains, which are separate WordPress installations, but there’s a reason to do, that’s to help mitigate risk, potential losing all of your assets if you were to catch a penalty. Again, we just talked about this last week, go back and watch the replay from last week and I’m pretty sure we talked about that extensively, about the benefit of using sub-domains over sub-folders or sub-directories. That’s pretty much the same thing I’m talking about here.

“Where’s the GMB auto poster?” John, just posting the Mastermind, we’ll get to the link.

Marco: I posted the link higher up.

Bradley: Yeah. I just didn’t have it. Thank you, Marco. Nestor says, Hey, I got to go guys. I got to wrap this up. So, anyways, and there’s Rob with the yearly discount for the GMB agency offer. That’s the enterprise account level or subscription level, which is 200 posts per month-, or excuse me 500 posts per month capacity. If you buy it on a monthly basis, subscribe month to month, it’s $200. If you buy the yearly license … It’s $200 per month, excuse me. If you buy the yearly license, it’s 1,000 bucks, divided by 12, comes out to be $84 dollars or $83 per month. So it’s a hell of a lot cheaper that way.

By the way, if you’re scheduling out 31 posts, which there’s a post scheduling feature, which is amazing in the GMB auto poster, so you can schedule out one post a day or however many you want. Let’s just say you’re doing one post a day, you could do 31 days. Then, there’s a republish option to where it can republish the post based upon the interval that you set. For example, if you set every 31 days, you can publish, you can schedule out 31 posts and then have them republish 31 days later, each post thereafter. Right? Does that make sense?

So day one and then day 32, that post publishes again. Day two and day 33, that post publishes again. Does that make sense? That way you can set up all of your posting and in an automated fashion. Well, with 500 posts per month, if you were to actually fill out or post one per day for each location, you can essentially put 16 locations in one enterprise account. Sixteen times 31 comes out to be 496, so you get 496 posts. Essentially, you can serve 16 locations, 100% one post per day with a single enterprise account. Does that make sense?

That’s how I’m clustering my sites right now. I gave you a little insight on that.

Marco: Yeah. I mean, it’s an awesome deal because it saves so much money and then the auto poster just saves so much time and effort. Once your VAs get proficient with going in there and just scheduling and putting everything up, it just saves you a ton of time of money. So you’ll make the money back that you invest in this just by the time you’re gonna save with your VAs, or even if you try to do it on your own, which you shouldn’t be doing.

Bradley: Yeah. Just so you guys are aware, for clients, I have a VA that goes in and manually posts for all the clients. I do that for a reason because every post is 100% unique that way. She still has content templates, but she goes in and she puts in a new image every time, and the content templates she uses, there’s tokens that she swaps out with different keywords and such. The target URLs are always being recycled to whatever we’re linking to from the GMB post and all that. So they become unique for clients.

I pay my VA on a per post basis. So I pay her, for every post that she publishes she gets paid. It varies between $3.50 to $5 per post. But I charge my clients $10 to $15 per post, depending on what the volume is. So my point is, I make money on that even though she’s manually posting.

However, for lead gen assets, guys, once again, just like I was telling … Shit, who was I telling earlier? Michael. I was telling Michael earlier not to worry about syndication networks for lead gen assets because you wanna reduce expenses. Well, I don’t want to pay a VA to manually post to lead gen assets because that’s an additional expense when I can pay for-, or subscribe to the auto poster, schedule all the posts.

Do I do all these guys? Hell, no. I’ve trained a VA to go in and set up or schedule all the posts within the GMB auto poster and then schedule them to republish. So that, literally, I can pay a VA for three or four hours to schedule out, however long it takes them, to schedule all those posts out. Then, it’s done and those GMB assets will continually update posts because of the auto poster and I’m not paying anymore other than for the auto poster subscription. Does that make sense? So it’s a hell of a lot more efficient with money too. Right? It’s more cost-effective. Okay.

Nestor says … And I’m so over, we got to get out of here. Nestor says, “Hey guys, how about webs 2.0 example mybrand.wordpress.com point to my GMB property three links as a press release?” Okay. First of all, I’m not familiar with their example. I know that’s kind of a competitor that does, you know, they have their own store and blah blah blah. I’m not real familiar with what they teach or what they say, so I can’t really speak on that.

I’m not quite sure I understand, in the wording of your question, what you mean by mybrand.wordPress. I understand WordPress.com, that’s fine. That’s a brand identity property that you can create on the WordPress.com site, kind of like what I showed earlier. But, yeah, that’s normal. That goes into Syndication Network, right? You try to get your brand name as a sub-domain blah blah blah. That’s pretty standard.

But, “point to GMB property three links as a press release,” I’m not sure what that means. Can you point to a GMB property from your WordPress.com site? Sure. Can you also use press releases to link to that WordPress.com site? Sure. You can also link to your GMB.

I’m doing a press releases, Local PR Pro method is what I use and, as standard operating procedure, I published a press releases with every GMB asset, it gets created. Usually, my preferred method is to link from the first press release to the GMB, the Google Maps share URL, to the Google the GMB website URL, and to the GMB the first post URL. We teach that at Local Lease Pro and that’s just essentially my method. So I’m going direct from the press releases to the Google assets. Okay.

Yeah. Guys, there’s a thousand ways to skin a cat, right? So our method isn’t the be-all end-all. It’s just our method works for what we want it to work for and that’s what we teach. Other people have other methods that may very well work as good as ours. I’m not trying to say that ours is better than anybody else’s. I’m just telling you what we teach, I don’t know what they teach. I’m sorry. It’s likely that that would work too.

Will says, “Bradley, speaking about syndication networks, I finally figured out how to syndicate to Medium.com. I’ve been testing it for a while with a few posts now and it works well to syndicate your WordPress post with images and YouTube video embeds, and from there, you could syndicate to your tier two, if you’d like. I’ll send you an update to support@semanticmastery.”

Thanks, Will. That’s awesome. In fact, Will, if you would, I mean, if you’re cool with it, you can even send the update right in the Mastermind community so that everybody else could benefit from it. If not, send it to me and I’ll update everybody in the Mastermind, and Syndication Academy for that matter, once I see it. Thank you for that, Will.

Okay. “Link to pre-Black Friday deals, please.” Yeah. Luis, just contact us at Support.

That’s it. Okay, guys, we’re way over. We got all questions answered, though.

Marco: That was a good one.

Bradley: Thanks, Marco, for hanging out, man, I appreciate it.

Marco: Marathon. All right, dude.

Bradley: All right, everybody. Mastermind webinar tomorrow. Be there or be square. See y'all.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210

Click on the video above to watch Episode 202 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: Hello and welcome to Episode 210 of Hump Day Hangouts. I am Adam Moody with Semantic Mastery. We are gonna say hi to everyone real quick before we dive into some announcements and questions from everybody watching us live. Also, if you’re watching this on YouTube, we noticed from time to time that we get questions over there, but you need to come to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions and ask your questions there, that’s where we’re monitoring. Before we dive in, real quick, Chris, how are you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Good weather in Florida always the last couple weeks. I highly recommend it, like I love it. How are you doing?

Adam: Not bad. It’s like 60 here, which is perfect. Everyone in California thinks it’s like the middle of winter and I’m just enjoying myself. This is good. Marco, how about you? How’s the weather for you, man?

Marco: Things are good here, man, transitioning to the dry season. So we’re gonna have about five and a half months of absolutely no rain, not even a drop. I’m looking forward to … Yeah, but then, it’s seven months of afternoon showers. You gotta pay the price for the life you live, right?

Adam: Yeah, fair enough.

Marco: But always warm, like if it were 60 here, we’d all be dying literally. It’s freezing cold.

Chris: [Inaudible 00:01:19] stay in Florida.

Adam: Definitely. Bradley, how about you, man? How are you doing?

Bradley: I’m good, I’m happy to be here. Got lots of stuff going on at the moment. Just been really, really busy. In last week, well, I took off for a couple days because my sister got married again. I actually got to go down to Hilton Head, South Carolina and meet one of our members, Ed, who also went to POFU Live; he’s in the Mastermind also. That was cool because I got to spend an hour with him just chatting. It was really, really cool. I always enjoy getting to meet members whenever we have the opportunity. So that was a lot of fun. But I had to take really Friday and Monday off, so now I’m behind.

Besides that, I got a quick little story to tell very, very quickly. Just last week, it was funny because I was actually reviewing the Hump Day Hangout from last week and I was talking about mitigating risk. Marco and I, we were talking about reducing exposure and trying to mitigate risk because, if you put all your eggs in one basket and Google takes that basket, you’re screwed, you’ve lost all those assets.

Well, I was using a test with what’s called GMB Location Groups. It’s a setting inside of Google My Business. I was running a test on a set of GMB assets for a particular metro area, so one metropolitan city area. I had seven assets in there that were fully optimized, 100% done. In fact, they were the seven assets that my VAs has been training on as he’s been learning the processes for doing this whole method, the Local Lease Pro model, essentially.

Long story short, on Saturday, I was down at the Hilton Head and I happened to get an email saying that the account that was used as the recovery email for that particular GMB manager account, which had to be turned into an owner in order to use location groups, had been terminated for violating Google’s spam policies. I lost all those damn assets, every single one of them, and I can’t even access them through the original Google accounts now, guys.

That was three weeks work, not necessarily my work, but my VA’s work wasted. Now, is it all bad? No, because I learned a valuable lesson. Number one, don’t use GMB location groups, it’s like a trap, number one, lesson number one. Number two is always mitigate risk. Don’t set yourself up with vulnerabilities that Google can take … We exploit Google’s vulnerabilities. Don’t you think Google will exploit ours? So I learned that … In fact, I’m actually updating the entire process for how to first log in and set up and manage a lot of GMB assets. I’m updating all those processes this week, in fact, because we have to do something new that reduces our overall risk.

Anyways, that was my little story. I’m a little bit behind now because all the work that I’ve done for the last several weeks on all the processes now has to be updated and redone. But that’s the cat and mouse game that we play.

Marco: Yeah. One of the great things about our Mastermind is that we do all of the testing, we take all of the risk, we were the ones who go in the lab. I mean, we do encourage our own people to test so that they can verify that our results are what we’re saying they are. But it’s one of the things that we do, we go, we blow things up and it happens, and then now we know what not to do. And right into our Mastermind, we’ll share all of test result with the membership exactly what was done so that they don’t repeat the process and get stuck losing assets because nobody wants to lose an asset, especially not seven. But so be it, lesson well-learned and it’s a lesson that the Mastermind doesn’t have to repeat.

Bradley: That’s true and, just real quick segue, that leads me to, that’s kind of like what the Mastermind is about. The scaling option, like doing all these heavy processes and stuff, is really reserved to the POFU Live group attendees at the moment, but we’re polishing all this stuff. Obviously, the Mastermind, we update, like tomorrow we’ve got a Mastermind webinar and I’m certainly gonna be talking about what not to do because I want to make sure all of our members are fully aware of what not to do so they don’t lose assets.

But once we have this 12-week process done, that the POFU Live attendees are kind of in accountability group with me right now, and we’ve got a target that we’re trying to hit at the end of 12 weeks, which is 50 GMB assets fully developed and ready for monetization, if they’re not already monetized by that point, and so when we’re done at that 12-week period, we will have discovered or perfected, really fine-tuned the method and all of the processes to get us there, to get us to that point. That’s when we’re gonna release in its entirety the Mastermind.

That training will not be released outside of the Mastermind, period, and that’s only because it’s highly valuable and we put a lot of work. In fact, the other members of the POFU accountability group with us, that’s like 12 of us in there, and so that’s a lot of intellectual property, a lot of a work that goes into that. So the Mastermind members will get that.

But that’s just one of many things that we do there. For example, we had some questions about how to structure ad ID pages and set up as three buckets with HTTP, SSL protocol, and all that stuff. Two weeks ago, we went in and showed exactly how to do that. I mean, it’s just stuff like that that we do in the Mastermind all the time.

Adam: Yeah. Something else that I just remembered, that reminded me of, Bradley, was, I think it was Jason who posted yesterday, who’s one of our Mastermind members, just out of the blue was like, hey, I’ve seen some questions about blah blah blah-, not blah blah blah, but some heavy-duty IT stuff. He’s like, “Hey, if anybody needs help just ping me. I’ll do it for free if you’re a Mastermind member.”

That’s just awesome to see. Again, you get that in a tight-knit group like that. It’s cool having that ability. Everyone who knows our story kind of knows where we came from and how we were part of a Mastermind. That’s why part of why we do this to get that community, it’s not just a jumble of people, you do have a community.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Well, cool. I also want to say then to you guys, we mentioned the GMB stuff, we’ve got a sale going on right now at MGYB. It’s wrapping up today. So if you’re interested or you need a GMB verification service, whether it’s for your clients, it’s for yourself, you’re doing some lead gen, head over there. I posted it on the page. If you’re watching the replay, sorry, it’s probably too late. But a good reason to watch live and open the emails is you get a 35% discount on that service right now. So head over there do that.

Real quick, too, if you’re joining us for the first time, thank you so much for watching us. If you want the right place to start, because it is one of the questions we get, “Hey, where should I start? Should I take this course and do that?” start with Battle Plan. No matter what you’re doing, even if you want to hop into Mastermind, get the Battle Plan, come join the Mastermind. That’s the path. The link is on there. It’s a great way to get repeatable results, which is why we put it together, so that we can have that. It’s our home processes put into an easy-to-digest format.

Then, obviously, like we’ve been talking about it, if you’re ready to take things up a notch, if you wanna scale, you wanna grow, then the Mastermind is the place to be.

Bradley: Did you open up Local Lease Pro as a standalone product now?

Adam: Yes.

Bradley: I’ll be damned. I didn’t realize that was available yet. Okay.

Adam: Sneaking that onto the page, if people are interested.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay.

Adam: I’m gonna say no more.

Bradley: Everything I’ve been talking about with this Local Lease Pro method, that’s it. Most of you guys are probably aware of it because of the Side Hustle Toolbox promotion, that was our contribution. But now that that’s closed, it’s a standalone product. I’m gonna be updating that in a couple of weeks with some of the new processes that I’ve just discovered.

Again, GMB, like the actual optimization process has changed slightly. Not much, but slightly, and I’m updating the processes for my VAs right now. So next week, I’ll kind of polish it up a bit and then add that into the Local Lease Pro training. So if you guys don’t have it yet, I recommend you get it. This method is freaking killing it. I think it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career. I mean that, so check it out.

All right. Can we get into questions?

Adam: I think so. If you guys are good, let’s do this.

Do I Need Access To A Client’s Website If I Do Local SEO For Them?

Bradley: All right. Starting off with Chris Green posted a support question from Vincent. He says, “I’m considering to join the RYS Reloaded or the GMB course. My question is this: if I do SEO for local businesses in my country, which is Malaysia, do I need to have access to my clients website?” No. It can help. You don’t have to have access to the client’s website, but it would certainly help because you could take care of some on-page SEO issues. In other words, you can optimize the site itself, which is considered on-page SEO, and that can help that can help quite a bit.

In fact, with proper on-page SEO, a lot of the times you can rank a site with a fraction of the off-page SEO because any off-page SEO that … If on site is proper, if it’s tight, if it’s strong, then any off-page will significantly affect, it will have a strong impact on the site because then the site will respond well to off-page because it is a well-built, well-structured site.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to have access to the site because you can accomplish through off-page. You can still rank a site with off-page. If the on-page is terrible, then you probably are fighting a losing battle. But if it’s decent, then you could probably still accomplish what you need to, depending on how competitive the keywords are that you’re targeting. But it’s likely that you could still accomplish what you needed to with off-page alone. But again, there are benefits certainly to being able to access the client’s website. Right? If you’re starting with garbage, it’s gonna be difficult to rank. So just keep that in mind. Okay.

It helps, it’s not 100% necessary. Well, it depends, right? It depends on what the status of the site is currently. If it’s a shitty site, if it was built poorly, optimized poorly, or if it’s spammed to death or whatever, then you may never be able to rank that site. But if it’s decent, if it’s fairly okay, then you could still just apply off-page methods and probably get the results that you want. However, if you can do both, manage the on-page and the-off page, you will get the best results. Right?

Are The SEO Methods In RYS Reloaded And GMB Work On WordPress.com And Wix.com Websites?

Number two, he says, “If my client has a WordPress.com or Wix.com website, can the SEO methods taught in RYS Reloaded and GMB work and getting first page ranking on Google?” Well, yes. Well, Local GMB Pro course is not really anything that have to do with websites, right? Local GMB Pro is how to optimize Google My Business and set up all of the Google assets to rank. Well, not even to rank, but to just generate leads from Google, independent of ranking. That’s what Local GMB Pro is about. It’s about getting leads, getting exposure from Google My Business, whether it ranks or not, and that’s what that whole … Again, despite traditional SEO, Local GMB Pro can generate leads from Google. Okay. So that’s what local GMB Pro is.

RYS is about using Google’s assets as an off-page tool as well as an entity validator, an authority builder, and multiple other things. But it’s more of an off-page thing. Again, it has nothing to do with the website structure or the platform itself, WordPress or Wix. It doesn’t matter because all you’re doing is using Google properties to push relevancy and authority over to whatever property is that you’re trying to rank.

Marco, do you wanna chat about that a little bit?

Marco: Yeah. It’s just one of the pillars that we teach, ART, the art of ART, activity, relevance, trust and authority, both on the link origin and on the link destination. What that means is you get visitors no matter how you show activity and Google reward you as long as everything is relevant and you’re working with trusted and authoritative entities. If you become along with that, a trusted and authoritative entity, then you get rewarded. Google will also reward you for being in Google because Google trusts itself. It’s the ultimate as far as what it trusts. So working in what we call working inside the belly of the beast also has its rewards.

Yeah. As Bradley said, it makes absolutely no difference. I mean, you work with whatever. I mean, you have a free WordPress blog ranking for … what is it? Free-, no, not free. SEO Virginia. Yeah. I mean, it just goes to show that if you get that activity in there, everything else just fall into place as long as it’s relevant, trusted and authoritative.

I keep telling people, and I just mentioned it in our Semantic Mastery Facebook group, the Mastermind, that ART, A-R-T, will trump anything. It will even overcome any of the negative factors, of the algorithm, penalties and all of that. You become almost immune to anything that Google has to throw at you because you’re signaling rank pot-, excuse me, rank brain in the way that it wants to be signaled. You’re doing the Google tickle, the T tickle. I mean, it blows up. It becomes a self-feeding monster once you get all that activity in there.

Bradley: Yeah. This is an example of what Marco was just talking about, this is that WordPress.com. So free wordpress.com blog, guys. If you take a look at this, there’s no content on this page. It looks like there’s content, but the only content on this page is this right here. That’s it. The rest of those are embedded files. That’s RYS at work there, guys. That’s RYS Academy right there at work. Okay. Again, go view page source, the post body, the article body of this post. The content body is this right here. That’s the only text on the page. The rest of it is all embedded files RYS style, and that’s all.

Look at that, guys. It’s ranked number three in organic for SEO Virginia. I mean, that’s pretty powerful. Again, that’s all off-page stuff. There is some on-page going on there because of the iframes that are actually embedded in this page, but it’s primarily an off-page thing that’s got this ranking. And that’s the power of RYS, right?

By the way, the Google site as part of the stack and that’s been number one since May of 2015. Guys, that’s been number one since May of 2015, or within a few weeks anyways, that’s when it was published. Look at that, it’s a horrid site. It was just for a test purpose, guys. Still ranked. Still ranked, it’s three and a half years now. Still ranked. Anyways, there you go. Will it work? It damn sure does.

How Do You Get The URL Of A Scheduled Post In The MGYB GMB Service?

Dustin’s up, or Da B. “Hey there. I’m using the MGYB post scheduling service but I was wondering, in the Local GMB course you link to the previous post but when I scheduled a post, then I don’t have the URL of the last URL because it will be scheduled. How do I link to the post then if the last post yet is not published or is not published yet? Greetings. Dustin.” That’s a good question Dustin.

Marco, that’s something that I think Rob was talking about that was going to be a feature, that was going to be released soon within the auto poster was the ability to silo a post. Is that correct?

Marco: Yeah. We keep going back and forth with Shripad. I’m not sure if that’s available yet. But I mean, there’s an easy solution to that. Link in the body or you’re still not gonna have the post URL. You would need the original post URL, and then the next one, then the next one. So Shripad will have to come up with something regarding that so that we can solve that issue. But, yes, he is working on it so we can silo GMB posts.

Bradley: Yeah. I’m thinking if the script would wait until a published one was pulled and then grab the short URL and then link to that before the next one that’s scheduled publishes. You know what I mean? That would work to build a silo on that. I know that if you post the post … So you publish the post, then you grab the URL and link to it from the next post. But, you’re right, if you wanna schedule out multiple posts in advance, right now there’s not an ability to do that yet.

But that’s something, Marco, if you wanna make a note of that specifically, silo posts together, schedule post together, which I’m sure that can be integrated at some point. Right now that’s not something that can be done, Dustin, but we’re working on that. It’s a great feature.

Marco: No. Dustin, what I would suggest is you just have your VA go in and add links as needed.

Bradley: As they’re published.

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Right. As they publish, go grab the URL, and then go post the next one. That’s the only thing we can do to daisy chain them together right now until we have the automation such that it will be able to do it. Okay.

Jordan says, “On one of the, or …” Okay. One of the guys, here we go. “One of the guys on our SEO team said after an SEO pitch this probably sounds like magic to them. I still can’t believe we get paid for this stuff, almost like grownup version of video games. Haha.” That’s funny. Well, I can believe we’d get paid for it, man. Think about all the testing and all the studying and all the learning and stuff that you, guys, and the money that you invest in your education and to tools and all that stuff.

I mean, we spend a lot of time learning this stuff, guys, we should be paid for it. I mean, think about that. We spend all our time learning how to perform this SEO magic stuff. A business owner that’s doing plumbing, for example, he’s out unclogging drains and that kind of stuff. He wouldn’t have time to learn all this stuff. How do I know? Because I was an electrical contractor and I had to learn how to do this shit while I was doing electrical work. It just so happens I found that I could make more money at this, that’s why I switched to this all together.

What are you gonna say, Marco?

Marco: Yeah. I was gonna say we deserve to be paid and be paid well. I mean, do you know how much time we’ve spent between RYS Academy, RYS Reloaded, Local GMB Pro, Local PR Pro, Local Lease Pro? Do you know how many hours have gone into researching that and making it work? Making that all work hand in hand so that one pushes the other and you’re pushing ultimate power to whatever destination so that that client’s phone rings?

Yeah. It may seem like magic. “Well, my phone rang. You did all that.” But it’s actually just hours and hours and hours of being a total geek.

Are There Ways We Can Use Press Releases Based On The Battleplan Aside From Launching A New Site?

Bradley: Rabbit-hole time. Yeah. Dan’s up. He says, “I’ve looked using press releases based off the Battle Plan and saw that you have them at the store. Besides using them for launching a new site would there be other places that I could use them? I do some consulting on the side for local businesses and build sites, lead gen, et cetera?”

Yeah, Dan. “Press releases are my favorite off-page or link building method really. Like no question, I absolutely love press releases. I use them as my primary off-page link building tool or method. I still use spam links from time to time for certain things, but for the most part I’m using press releases for link building.”

Yeah. You can use them. Guys, there’s dozens and dozens of things that you can publish press releases about. I’ve talked about them. Dan, we have a course called Local PR Pro which is specifically about how to use press releases to rank in the Maps pack, to get Google GMB, Google My Business profiles ranked in the maps pack using press releases. Right?

That’s what that course, Local PR Pro, is all about. In that course, I talk about how there’s multiple different things that you could publish a press release about. Because that’s a question that comes up often, “Well, I don’t think my client has anything that’s really newsworthy to publish a press release about.”

But think about it, getting a five-star review, you could publish a press release about receiving a five-star review or your client. Or you could publish a press release about a new employee being hired. Or a seasonal change to the product line that’s available. Or the services that are available, depending on what kind of business you’re dealing with. Or an accolade that the company receives, some sort of award or something like that. Or any charitable things, any charity events that they’re hosting or that they contribute to or participate in. Right?

There’s just dozens and dozens of things, hooks, angles that you could use to write a news release or something that can be … Guys, you can even publish a press release about a new blog post that’s been published on the website. No kidding. I mean, you just have to get a little bit creative. Dan, when I say you have to get creative, I don’t mean you. I mean, what I would recommend is hiring a PR writer, from Upwork or something like that, that can come up with these angles. A good press release writer can come up with a newsworthy angle for just about anything.

Again, if you’re doing a lot of this work, you could hire a PR writer, a good PR writer from like Upwork or something like that. Or if you’ve got a good press release distribution service that you subscribe to for monthly press releases or whatever, if they’ve got good writers in-house, which most good services do now, then they’ll have writers that are already trained on how to find news where the angles or to create hooks or their stories for the press releases. Right?

For example, if you use the MGYB press release service, the writers there from the Press Advantage distribution network, if that’s what you’re using, it’s fabulous, and there the press releases are almost twice the content length of typical press releases. There’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 words as opposed to 300 to 400, which is what most of them are. So those writers are really, really good, like their sole purpose in life is to find an angle or to create an angle to write a press release about. Those are the same writers that you have access to when you buy a press releases from us individually.

Okay. Anybody wanna comment on that before we move on? It’s a good one, Dan.

Marco: No. I think you hit the nail on the head. They’re great for just about everything. The only thing that you have to avoid is self-promotion, but you get that from most of them. You just have to define what self-promotion is. You go and you advertise. Well, we’re in Facebook, if you’ve just started your Facebook page, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. It’s still self-promotion. It’s just not getting sales. That’s what you wanna try to avoid.

Other than that, it’s fantastic for link building. Not only that, if you hit the press release, whatever the distribution network is with link building, it’ll push through. You’re putting a filter in between the destination so that you hit that with link building. It’ll power it up even more. They just work really well for everything.

Bradley: They damn sure do. Like Marco said, you can actually do self promotional PRs, but the salesy part is what you gotta leave out. They shouldn’t be salesy. But they can be self-promotional. Again, a good PR writer will be able to disguise a promotion as a story, a news story, and that’s really what you wanna do. That’s why I say don’t do it yourself. If I had to write press releases, I’d be a very miserable person. I wouldn’t wanna do it, but some people enjoy that stuff and they’re good at it. All right.

Is It Okay To Start With Battleplan Before Going Into The Mastermind and Syndication Academy Courses?

Andrew Walker’s up. Andrew is a local guy to me. I was in lead share, like a breakfast lead share group with him for several years that I don’t attend those things much anymore. Andrew is a great guy. Anyways, it’s good to see you here, Andrew. I haven’t seen him in a while. He says, “Hey guys, it’s been a long time since I’ve been on Hump Day Hangouts. I got caught up in the cold calling strategy to build my business and also had a case of the shiny object syndrome.” Well, we all do, Andrew. Don’t beat yourself up, buddy. We all go through that. I promise you, I’ve been through it. I still struggle with that, to be honest.

“I don’t fully understand how powerful-,” or excuse me, “I didn’t fully understand how powerful digital marketing is and what it can do for your business. You would think that that’s a no-brainer for an IT guy. Anyway, I’m back for real and I’m ready to learn this stuff. I’ve just downloaded the Battle Plan. I’d love to get involved in the Mastermind, but I’m not able to afford that at this time. Syndication Academy looks to be a great runner up. Can I start there to get things going or just start with the Battle Plan? Thanks, guys, and congrats on your four year anniversary.”

Okay. Great question, Andrew. Again, glad to see you back, man. The Syndication Academy is, yeah, it’s good, however, because, I’m not gonna knock Syndication Academy, but what we recommend is, especially for you, Andrew, you’re running your IT business, your IT services business, and so it depends on how much time you have. If you’ve got a lot of time and no money then, yes, pick up Syndication Academy because then you can learn how to build your own syndication network, which is gonna be one of the critical components to your business in expanding your reach and helping to generate more leads, it’ll help with your SEO and all that kind of stuff.

However, there’s a lot of time that goes into learning how to build a syndication network and, unless you plan on building syndication networks for others or selling them to others, I wouldn’t recommend that you go through all the trouble of learning how to build all that stuff for your own branded syndication network, for your own business. If you’re looking to try to grow your business, then your time is better spent not learning how to build a syndication network that you’re only gonna build one for your own business.

Your time is better spent marketing your business. You can instead just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us and we will build it to our specifications, which is exactly what we teach in the training. You can save yourself weeks of study and implementation by just buying a Done For You Syndication Network and you still reap the benefits of it without having to spend weeks of your time. Does that make sense? They’re inexpensive enough that there’s really no reason that you can’t just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us. It’s cheaper or about the same price as the cost of a month tuition to Syndication Academy. Right?

Anyways, my point is, if you want, Andrew, since you can’t join the Mastermind yet, what I recommend is that you attend our Hump Day Hangouts regularly on Wednesdays, ask your questions here try, keep it to one question per post. In other words, you can post a few times, but try to keep it one question per post please. Ask questions here and we will try to guide you in the best way possible to help you to start growing your IT business, just from these Hump Day Hangouts. Then once you have generated some revenue you can always come join the Mastermind, which is your best bet, because the Mastermind is not just about marketing stuff.

Guys, we’ve gotten away from just teaching SEO or just teaching marketing methods. It’s more about building your business regardless of whether you’re building a local agency or consulting firm, or you want to build your own brick and mortar business, or virtual business for that matter. We want to teach you how to do all of that, which includes marketing and includes SEO, and includes all that stuff, but we’re not pigeon holing our training into just marketing training, if that makes sense. A lot more goes into it than that.

I would suggest, Andrew, that what you do is come back and join us here in Hump Day Hangouts, get involved, stay engaged, ask questions. We also have our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials Facebook group that you could ask questions there. As soon as you’re able to, I would invest in joining the Mastermind so that you can get, basically, almost one-on-one guidance from each one of us my partners and I as well as all of the other members in the Mastermind that are also savvy business owners. Right? That’s part of why it’s Mastermind because it’s not just about us teaching all the time, it’s about everybody in there contributing and helping each other, which is fabulous. Okay.

By the way, one of our top members, longtime members, Jason Johnson, who is what Adam was just talking about at the very beginning of this Hump Day Hangout, he was mentioning somebody was having difficulty setting up their MX records for G suite email to use their domain for their email within G suite. Jason Johnson posted, “Hey, I saw somebody was having trouble with MX records. Hey, I’m an IT guy. If anybody has any questions or any problems, tell them to reach out to me. I’ll help them for free as long as they’re a Mastermind member.”

Andrew, what I’m saying is, Jason is an IT guy who’s been in our Mastermind. He does digital marketing on the side, but also markets his own business and somebody that you could absolutely click with. Probably the two of you could chat about what he’s doing for his business and what’s working for him in generating leads for his IT business and all that kind of stuff. Right?

Again, that’s part of the power of a Mastermind. It’s not just learning from me or Marco when, you know, I’m gonna teach you how to generate leads for your business, but I generate leads for contracting businesses. Right? You’re trying to generate leads for IT services, and computer repair networking, and that kind of stuff, so why not get the advice direct from somebody that’s already generating leads for that type of a business, which we have members in our group to do that? Does that make sense?

That’s the power of a Mastermind. Okay. So that’s what I recommend. In the meantime, if you don’t have the money, come back here, ask questions, implement what you can, go through our YouTube channel Semantic Mastery, youtube.com/semanticmastery. Use the channel search function, ask questions over there. You’re likely going to find already video answers for many of your questions. Then, like I said, anything that you can’t find answers to, post in either the Facebook group or post back here on the event page every week and we’ll come in and answer your questions. As soon as you can generate a little bit of positive revenue, I would reinvest that back into your education and into building your business by joining the Mastermind, getting guidance from us as well as our other members.

Marco: I’m gonna give him just a couple of weeks. First of all, welcome back, Andrew. Sorry that you had a shiny object syndrome. I mean, that sucks and it makes you spend a whole lot of money and time chasing. It becomes a useless path. You fill up your computer with a whole bunch of garbage that you’re never going to use and you realize how much money you spent and then you get caught up at where you are right now where you ended, and dropped all that money and you have nothing to show for it.

But that’s okay, lesson learned. The two examples that I’m gonna give you is, I’m gonna give you Paul Fussell, who’s always in these Hump Day Hangouts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he drops in today; or if he isn’t, it’s because he’s out making money. He was at POFU Live, as a matter of fact, our event. The way he went about doing it, he come into Hump Day Hangouts, ask questions, and then go and go and apply. Ask questions, go and apply. then he started purchasing our drive stacks to rank. I know that he was doing dental for a while, I don’t know what he’s doing now.

Anyway, the thing about Paul is that he just went and he got Done For You services, and then he was chasing clients. Every time he’d get a client, drive stack, and that’s how he would he would rank them. But that’s Paul and that’s how he did it, so Hump Day Hangouts and Done For You services.

Then, we get to Jordan in Syndication Academy. Jordan lives in Syndication Academy, he’s always there. He’s one of our, I don’t know, one of our long-running and most active members of Syndication Academy. He runs an agency and I think he just got a huge nationwide client, but it’s from Syndication Academy. I’m not gonna say that he got everything from Syndication Academy, but I know that that’s his foundation and I know that that’s what he’s doing to rank his clients, to help his clients and to help his agency.

He has an agency, actually he’s an agency owner, but he decided that Syndication Academy was the thing for him. But, of course, they’ll all tell you, and Jordan will tell you that the Battle Plan is the place where you start, and you have to follow it. If you follow the Battle Plan, then you’re going to get to our Done For You services.

It’s a whole lot easier to go and buy a Syndication Academy Network, as Bradley mentioned, than to learn how to build a one-of-a-kind that you only need that one time. Why not go buy it and pay that than to pay a monthly membership to learn how to build one, or you might not wanna learn how to build one, or you might need?

It’s just to buy them and then go and sell it to clients, to people you know. Then, you pitch the benefits of being branded of having that footprint of being seen, of your content being seen everywhere, pushing your content to where the people are hanging out. So that’s one of the benefits.

You could do it many ways. Now, of course, we’re always going to tell you that the Mastermind is the place to be because that’s where like-minded entrepreneurs hang out, people who want to grow their business and get away from just that weekly paycheck and having to wait until the next one so that you could do whatever it is that you wanna do. We wanna push you, guys, past that. We call it POFU, position of fuck you.

Whatever that position is for you, Andrew, we want you to get there. There isn’t just one way to get there, but we do wanna help you get there. So whether you choose Hump Day Hangouts, whether you choose Syndication Academy, or what we suggest, whether you join our Mastermind, we’re going to help you any way we can. That’s what we’re here for.

Bradley: That’s right. Let’s not forget Mohammad. He’s a shining example. Mohammad Mackey. He started by just joining Hump Day Hangouts and coming and asking questions week in and week out and for months. Eventually, he got to a point where he landed a couple of his first clients and started making enough money. He came and joined the Mastermind. Then, he went through a little bit of a struggle for over-promising to clients and ended up losing some clients and had to drop out of the Mastermind for a little bit.

But he kept coming to Hump Day Hangouts and asking more questions, even during that time where he had to back out of the Mastermind, and he got the education that he needed and he implemented it. Right? It’s nothing we did, all we did was provide him with information, but he’s the one that took action and kept at it. He kept persisting in working and he kept finding stuff that wasn’t working until he found stuff that did work. Then, he landed some clients again, got his money back up, and joined the Mastermind again.

We have multiple examples of people that have done that just by starting here, right here at Hump Day Hangouts, Andrew, and you can do that too. Right? The Battle Plan, like I said, will tell you do this, this, this, and this, and you’re going to start getting results. It doesn’t say that you have to learn how to do those things, it just tells you apply these things. Right?

You can either learn how to do those things and do them yourself or, as a business owner, it would be much more efficient with your time to just purchase the Done For You services and apply them in the order that they’re recommended and reap the benefits of those without having to learn how to do it. Okay. Great question. Again, glad to have you back, Andrew. We’re happy to see you participate and be a lot more engaged over the coming weeks.

What Are The Factors You Consider When Finding The Best Keywords For Ranking Opportunity In Local Lead Gen Campaigns?

Gordon’s up. He says, “Hey guys, thank you very much again for the help you provide on Hump Days. It’s greatly appreciated.” You’re welcome, Gordon. “If you’re looking to find a low hanging fruit where you can easily rank in the GMB 3-pack, other than looking at the reviews of the current businesses in the 3-pack in their citation profile, what else do you do to decide whether or not you have found a golden goose ranking opportunity? Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls? Thanks again, Gordon.”

Okay. First of all, Gordon, Local Lease Pro, I showed the exact simple method, it’s kind of time-consuming, but the simple method using it, a free software that we show, we use to identify what I call slam-dunk opportunities, which is which you’re calling a golden goose in your question, okay? Again, that was in Local Lease Pro. If you have access to that, which I’m hoping you do because it was on sale for a very, very ridiculously low price for about eight days during the Side Hustle Toolbox launch. That’s close now, but it is available, Local Lease Pro, but we teach the method specifically how to find low-hanging opportunities.

Now I can’t go into the details of that right here, but it is very, very simple to do using the Easy Local Cash software, which is a free software. It’s Chad Kimball’s software. It just shows you, basically, ever since July of this year, when mobile implemented or switched to the mobile first index, that opened up just massive, massive opportunity. I’m telling you, guys, it opened up more opportunity than I’ve seen since I started my local marketing career in 2010. And that is what we teach on how to find those opportunities that have been opened up by this major change in the algorithm or which index is used first. Right? The mobile first index.

That’s all in Local Lease Pro. I can’t obviously say that right here. It is in the course. Also, you can find out, certainly, if you joined a Mastermind, because Local Lease Pro is one of the first courses that Mastermind members get now when they join.

Marco: Yeah, the how. I mean, that’s the course, the how is, you know, if we gave you that, then why have a course in the first place? So, sorry, that’s something that we can’t do. I’m glad that you mentioned again the Mastermind. I was in our mini, we have the mini-Mastermind and mine is on Tuesday nights for an hour. I have three great people. I have Jamina, I have Will Kenderdine, and John Wypick. We were going over my method for using the software and we went over it in detail. I don’t mind for an hour. I mean, I decided to give my time, right?

So this is what it’s all about. Membership has its privileges. I do things a little bit differently. I find targets a little bit differently, but it all works just the same way. The same way that you teach it, the way that I do it, I already decided to do it. The thing is that membership has its privileges. You have to be a member in order to get the information that you’re asking about. It’s not something that we can give away for free.

Bradley: Yeah. “Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls?” Well, that’s a good question. If you do your research properly upfront, you should know. First of all, you should research your industry or the niche that you’re targeting. Now if you followed us at all for any length of time, Gordon, which I know you have, you know that I’ve been telling you and I’ve been preaching this and beating this drum for years now, which is: specialize. Focus on one industry, guys. Become a big fish in one industry instead of a me-too agency or a me-too consultant or me-too local marketer that will just accommodate any business that will talk to you.

Trust me, you will never gain any traction in your business, or you will have a much harder time gaining traction in your business, if you just offer marketing services to any business that will talk to you. Because your amount of work multiplies exponentially because you have to do keyword research, you have to do market research, you have to understand the vocabulary of the industry, you have to figure out what the pain points are in those industries both for the consumer and for the business owner.

Because if you’re the business owner that you can help them market their products and services, you need to understand the consumer’s mindset, but you also have to understand the business owner’s mindset. So that you can talk to them and speak their language, build rapport with them. So you have to learn two different markets for every industry you enter, the consumer market and the business market. Right?

There’s just so much work that goes into learning, becoming a marketing special or professional in any industry. It requires a ton of research. So if you try to just say, “Oh, I’m gonna be a local marketing guy and I’ll talk to any business in my area that will talk to me,” you’re gonna create a shit ton of additional work that you can significantly reduce. You’ll gain a lot more traction a lot faster in your business if you focus in on one particular industry because then you can craft everything you do in your business around that particular industry. All your marketing messages, all your keyword research, your content templates, everything that you do can be designed around that one particular industry. Now you become a specialist.

I use this as an example. Would you go to a general health practitioner for a heart surgery? No, you go to a cardiologist. Why do you think businesses, like let’s say home remodeling contractors or general contractors, would they want to go to a me-too agency or would they want to go to a contractor media, contractor marketing agency that specializes in general and remodeling contractor marketing? Does that make sense? Which one would you prefer?

Gordon, I recommend specializing in on one industry. But don’t just arbitrarily decide on what industry you wanna focus in on and say, “I’m gonna build my business around that,” you need to research that industry and determine, is there a call volume? Is there significant interest in that? Is there money there?

What’s one of the ways that you can determine that? An easy and simple and a quick way is go do a search for the product and/or service as if you were a customer looking for that product or service. Just go do a Google search for it and take a look and see, are there ads? Are there Google ads? If so, that means there’s paying advertisers. If there’s Google ads, that means people are paying to bid on those keywords, which means there’s likely traffic for those keywords. If there wasn’t traffic for those keywords and if those keywords didn’t convert, there wouldn’t be ads. Does that make sense? People don’t pay and bid on keywords-, well, good advertisers don’t pay and bid on keywords that don’t convert or don’t generate traffic that converts. Right? So if you’re seeing Google ads, that’s a good indication.

Now I wouldn’t stop there. I’d research it further. You could do things, like use Google Trends to find out where in the country, or in the world for that matter, but I always do US-based searches, you can find out where the hotspots are for where the search traffic is the most or the search interest is the most for the types of products or services that you’d be promoting in that industry. Right? So then, you can start to develop out which locations you’re gonna target first for your business. Does that make sense?

Remember, specialize on one industry, guys, because then you can scale your business by geography instead of by type or kind. Does that make sense? Instead of trying to scale your business by taking on new industries where you’re gonna create so much additional work, scale your business by continuing with the same industry but expanding your service area or your territory, your target area. Right?

That’s a hell of a lot better or much more efficient way to build your business. Not only that, in time you will build a name and a reputation for being that type of a marketing specialist for that particular industry. People will start to seek you out as opposed to you having a force or push your marketing, your services onto others. People will start to seek you out because they know that you’re the specialist. Does that make sense?

How do you determine whether there’s enough search traffic? You have to research it. Make sure it’s an industry that has paying advertisers. Make sure that there is significant search interest for those types of things and that it’s profitable.

As I said about in the past, carpet cleaning, there’s a ton of search interest for carpet cleaning but there’s very, very, very small margins in the carpet cleaning industry. Right? Carpet cleaning companies don’t particularly like to pay for marketing services or for lead generation services, they don’t have the budgets for it because their margins are very small.

But if you just did keyword research, which is, when I first started, the very first lead gen site I ever built was carpetcleaningalexandriava.com. I don’t own that anymore, but it was a lead gen site that I built because all I did was base my decision on which industry I was gonna target based upon keyword search volume from the Google Keyword Planner. It said something like 600 exact match searches for that term “carpet cleaning Alexandria VA” per month. It was like 660 or something like that, 600 searches per month. So I said, “Oh man, there’s a lot of search volume there. I can make money with that.”

Well, I built the site and got it ranked number one. We were getting 30 to 40 calls a week through that lead gen site and I had trouble monetizing it for even a hundred dollars a month. No shit. Then when I finally got down to the chewy center of why that was by sitting down with the contractor that was renting that site from me or leasing that site from me, he told me, “Because the carpet cleaning business has very, very small margins.” Right? Very small margins. He was making something ridiculous, per carpet cleaning job $8 or $9 or $10, or $12 in profit. It was something stupid. After paying his labor and insurance costs and, the cleaning solution costs, and all of this overhead, he had a very small margin so he had trouble paying for that.

What happened? I ended up switching into other higher margin businesses. That’s why I love the tree service industry because it’s huge margin. That’s why I like remodeling contractors, home builders, HVAC repair, any sort of repair, roofers, all those types because the margins are so much larger. Does that make sense?

Again, you have to do the research, Gordon. There’s no real easy answer there. You just got to be logical and do the research and you should be able to find the opportunities as well as the perfect industry. Also, one last thing I would suggest about that is, seriously, guys, try to find an industry that you, not only has all the correct signals or markers of being a good industry to work at, but also one that you have a genuine interest in because it’ll make it feel less like work. Okay.

Honestly, I don’t have any interest in tree services, except for the fact that that does make me some damn good money, which kind of makes it interesting. But if you can find an industry that you have a genuine interest in, it’ll feel less like work while you’re building your business.

Anybody wanna comment on that before I move on? That was a long-winded answer I know.

Marco: No, but it was perfect. There’s no need to go into that any further.

How Do You Set Up The Syndication Network Of Several GMB Sites In Same Metro Area?

Bradley: He says, “Hey guys, so if I have a group of GMB sites in the same metro area and a WordPress site ranked on page one and Serps, a YouTube channel with videos ranking on page one of Google’s video page and I want to lease all of these as a total package deal to a business owner operating an area, how do I set up a syndication network for this? Can I feed the RSS feeds from all the GMB sites into the WordPress site blog into one generically branded syndication network? Or do I need to set up separate networks for each GMB site or WordPress site? Thank you very much for your comment.”

Michael, I don’t recommend a syndication network for lead gen assets unless you need them. For example, if you’re having trouble getting a lead gen asset to push another 3-pack, can a syndication network will help for that? Then, absolutely.

The other thing is, if you have a cluster of Google My Business profiles for a metropolitan area that are all branded the same, then you could use one syndication network for those. When you talk about grabbing the GMB RSS feeds, I’m not sure what you mean from that, unless you’re using our GMB auto poster which will generate an RSS feed, but you can’t just get an RSS feed, at least not that I’m aware of.

Marco, this may have changed, but is there an RSS feed from the GMB websites yet?

Marco: Not that I know of. Not that I’m aware of.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah. As far as I’m aware, there is not an RSS feed from the GMB websites. So our GMB auto poster will create an RSS feed from the GMB posts that are connected through that auto poster or that are posted with that auto poster. So you can do it that way. But like I said, you should have a common brand for all of those assets, if that’s the case. If you want to feed them all into one network, which again, I’m gonna be 100% transparent with you guys, I’m not building syndication networks for my lead gen assets. I build syndication networks for clients because I tell them that it’s critical. It is because it’s brand building, it’s entity validation and brand authority building, right?

So any client, I’m gonna tell them. “You should have a syndication network to protect your brand and to amplify your brand, expand your reach. It also helps to build your authority and all that kind of stuff.” For content marketing, all my clients, I suggest we do regular content marketing, blogging that gets syndicated out to the syndication network. That’s all true. It’s not just because I wanna charge them money, guys, it’s to protect their brand and to help them to stay ranked.

But for lead gen assets, that’s an additional expense. So why implement that? Until and unless you need to, right? So for my lead gen assets that I’m building right now, I’m not using syndication networks. If I have lead gen assets that I do all the other magic that I work to them and they don’t end up producing, because maybe they’re not ranking well or that area ended up being more competitive than I originally thought, then I may add a syndication network. But that’s only if and when it’s absolutely needed. It’s kind of like a last resort thing because it’s an additional expense that I don’t wanna have to put up for a lead gen asset if I can get results without it.

Now once you’ve monetized an asset, a lead gen or, in this case, a multiple assets, once you’ve monetized them, I’ve talked about this too, if once you’ve developed it … Like for me, when I monetize a lead gen asset, what I do is after several months, two or three months of the service provider paying on time and there’s no issues, if we develop a decent relationship, then I offer at that point to rebrand those lead gen assets after the client, certainly their name. It’s a lot more legit that way, right?

Like I said, at that point, once I would offer the rebranding, then that’s where I could upsell them on, “Hey, since we’re gonna be rebranding these, we should also go to syndication network because it’s gonna help to protect your brand and we can use that to help continue to push the lead gen assets that I’m gonna rebrand. It’ll help to continue to keep them producing for you, blah blah blah blah blah.”

At that point, we set up syndication network. Might even set them up on content marketing services. That’s an additional charge beyond the lead gen leasing or pay per lead fees that I’m charging. Depending on how I’ve monetized that asset, this is now starting to build their asset, syndication network with their branding, building, doing content marketing on their website.

So now I’m double dipping, right? Now I’m generating money from my lead gen assets and also working on the client’s assets as a separate fee. Right? So it gives you a whole lot of opportunity, Michael. But for your lead gen assets, I don’t recommend setting up syndication network unless you absolutely need to. Try to get results without it. Guys, I am the firm believer of trying to get the most results or trying to get the best results with the least amount of effort possible and least amount of money invested too.

Should You Create A Blog Post If You Syndicate A GMB Post?

Okay. It’s a good Hump Day today, by the way. I’m liking these questions. It’s a good question, Michael. All right. Ray had some confusion earlier. We’ll pass over that. Quit This House, he says, “If I wanted to syndicate my GMB post, should I create a blog post with the post details and link or should I post to one of the social media sites and create a trigger from there?”

Quit This House, use the GMB auto poster. I’m telling you, it’s stupid and expensive, it’s super convenient and efficient, and it can generate an RSS feed from your GMB posts, and then you can just connect that directly to a syndication network, and then, viola, it’s done. You don’t have to go … Right now, what you’re talking about would require a manual action for every post. Right?

If you just set it up through the auto poster, you can, not only schedule out your GMB post all in one setting so that they automatically publish on the day and time that you select, but it will also generate an RSS feed that then you can populate or trigger a syndication network with, and all of that is automated.

Marco: By the way, since we’re back on the auto poster, I got an answer from Rob and he says, yes, we’ll be able to silo based on tagging. So you can create multiple silos within the auto poster just by tagging, by using different tags. The function isn’t integrated yet, but it’s coming. It’s already being developed, guys. Those of you who are looking to get into this, get in there now because it just keeps …

Shripad is a master programmer. He just keeps adding to it more and more functionality and he’s now charging more. We’re not gonna charge more monthly yet. If it gets to the point where there’s just a ton of programming that needs to be done, the price will probably need to go up. But we usually grandfather people into the prices where they are, so remember that.

Bradley: Yeah. Michael says, “Holy crap, I can’t believe I got the $1,000 Local Lease Pro course for $47.” Yeah, Michael. Look, for eight days, we promoted shit out of that and told everybody that once the Side Hustle Toolbox offer closed that it was gonna, I originally said it was gonna go to 500, but it’s such a damn good course. I mean, I’m telling you, this is I think the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career, that Local Lease Pro method right there. That’s why we made it $1,000.

Not only that, but we’re gonna be updating the course. Like I said, I’ve got some new stuff to add to it. That as soon as I get my VA on track for the new changes and I polish up the processes a little bit, I’m gonna be sharing that, I’ll be updating Local Lease Pro. So, yeah, you’re right. Good thing that you got in on it.

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have … ” By the way, guys, if you want Local Lease Pro, if you don’t have it, there’s only two options, you can buy it for 1,000 bucks or you can join the Mastermind and you can get it included in your Mastermind membership. So it’s entirely up to you, but I would recommend it. I mean, guys, it’s even worth $1,000, I’m not kidding, because of the opportunity. I’m telling you, it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my eight, almost nine year career now. Okay.

Does It Hurt Or Help To Have Multiple Syndication Networks?

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have multiple syndication networks?” Yes, it can, Abe. Not for YouTube channels-, well, depending on how they were set up, but if you’re using syndication networks for blog syndication to try to rank your own domain, like a self-hosted site, then, yes, multiple syndication networks can hurt you, depending on how you have it set up and how you have a syndication set up,

I’ve said for years now, like we teach branded tier one syndication networks and we also talked about when we teach how to build two-tier syndication networks. You can take it out multiple tiers. But I’ve also recommended for years that you only use two-tier syndication networks on YouTube channels or multi-tiered syndication networks on YouTube channels or for YouTube syndication, not for blog syndication.

However, if you wanna do it for blog syndication, I do teach in Syndication Academy and I’ve talked about it multiple times how you can use multi-tiered syndication networks and reduce the chance of getting a Google slap. You cannot eliminate it because you are still leaving a footprint. But you can significantly reduce the footprint if you add additional content feeds as triggers into your second or third tiers. Right? Because what you wanna do is you wanna mask or bury your content among a whole lot of additional route relevant and related type content so that the blogs don’t show or appear to be solely for manipulating search rankings. Right? And that’s essentially what they are.

Again, with multi-tiered syndication networks, I don’t recommend them for blog syndication unless you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to put forth all the additional effort. Also, multitude syndication networks can break down because there’s a lot of moving pieces, there’s a lot of different content sources, which can cause you know different RSS feeds that you don’t have control over because they’re not your RSS feeds, which can cause problems. Multi-tiered syndication networks can be a bitch to maintain for that reason and so that’s another reason I don’t recommend them.

If you are just flatly syndicating your content to multiple syndication networks and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, then you are absolutely causing damage because it is clearly, the algorithm can pick that up in a split second. Right? Again, Abe, if you were gonna be building these types of stuff, like I said, the only way that … We have Syndication Academy where I talk about all of that stuff, seriously, I go into your best practices and everything about how to use them and where to use them. But for blog syndication, I highly recommend that you just use a one-tier branded syndication network and then you can boost the hell out of that. Okay.

Marco: Yeah. He also says that he’s used lower standard contractors in the past and he’s considering using our services on top. Dude, if you’ve done that, then don’t get a syndication network from us until you fix whatever it is that you’ve done. I suggest totally getting into Syndication Academy, seeing how it’s all supposed to work. I hope that you have access to all of these networks and multiple rings that have been done for you so that you can just stop whatever madness it was that was created and you could do it the right way. The way that it’s supposed to be done, which is branding. It’s done for branding and for syndicating your network. Yeah. It is done to manipulate but to manipulate in the right way. If you get caught manipulating the wrong way, you’re going to get slapped down.

What’s The Difference Between The Press Release Service In Serp Space And MGYB?

Bradley: That’s right. Ray says, “What is the difference between press release service from Serp Space, and MGYB? Are they overlapping and/or equivalent? They’re equivalent now, Ray, because, well, there’s two different levels of press releases orders from Serb Space. There was the press release and then press release plus. The press release was, the press advantage network, the distribution network, and that’s we have now a separate account. We have our own press advantage distribution network agreement with them that is available in MGYB. It’s basically the same distribution network. So it’s up to you if you wanna order from Serp Space or if you wanna come to MGYB which is owned and controlled entirely by Semantic Mastery and my partners. If that makes sense.

Serp Space was a collaboration. We are no longer part of that. There’s no issues there or anything like that. I’m just letting you know, if you wanna order directly from us, it’s through MGYB. Okay. Good question.

Should We Link From GMB Biz.Site Description?

Doodle Digital Marketing, I like that. He says, “Hey guys, I love Hump Day Hangouts. Tons of value. “Should we link out from the GMB biz site description?” Not … Well, wait a minute, the GMB, yes. You can link from the GMB website content. I don’t know about the description. But if you’re talking about the GMB business description, no, you can’t put links in that; that’s short. I think it only allows 750 characters. But if you’re talking about the GMB website, yes, you can link out to that.

What I don’t recommend doing a lot of external links, unless it makes sense, it has to be relevant guys, remember, this is a Google property, so I would not be doing some stupid “I’m gonna link to a .gov or .edu site for authority” because that’s bullshit and it has been for years. If it’s relevant, then, yes. If it’s not relevant, you’re just doing it because you learn that somewhere on some stupid SEO program somewhere, don’t do it because that’s dumb.

But what I would recommend doing is, I always link, and I teach this, but I always link from the GMB website text, the content body of the website, I always link to the GMB maps share URL, as well as to the GMB website. So it’s linking to itself, right? If you have an external website, so self-hosted website, you can link to that. That makes sense. You could also link to some of your social media stuff. That makes sense. Any type of branded property that you could link out.

Again, I wouldn’t spam the description or the GMB website content with a bunch of exterior external links, I would keep it … Really that’s why I usually just link from the GMB website to itself and also to the GMB maps share URL because those are Google properties. Right? So just consider that.

It’s after five o'clock, I don’t have to get my daughter-, or I don’t get to have my daughter for dinner tonight, so I do have a couple extra minutes. Marco, can you hang out for a few extra?

Marco: Yeah, I can hang out for a few extra. My daughter isn’t crying it.

Bradley: We’ve only got a few questions left.

Marco: Let’s go.

Bradley: All right. John says, “I’ve got a Semantic Mastery syndrome. I have no doubt it’s the place to be.” “Thanks, John. John is one in Marco’s small group that he was talking about. Jordan says, “Marco’s right. We learned the why behind all these Semantic Mastery tactics, Syndication Academy, RYS stack, Press Releases, et cetera, and then just sell them along with some other deep rooted stuff we had developed in the lab.” He’s talking about his own business specifically, Jordan.

“Then we also create all the content via writing and optimizing it, which we charge for, and then we do web design with SEO strategy pre-launch. I couldn’t build a drive stack if my life depended on it. Haha.” Yeah, that’s great. I mean, honestly, guys, those are the audience that are tech nerds and like to get their hands dirty, so to speak, roll up their sleeves and get to work. Then, RYS Academy will teach you how to build drive stacks. It’s a lot of work. You can benefit from RYS stacks without having to learn how to build them, by just buying them done for you and you’ll save yourself a shit ton of time and energy.

Again, I’m not trying to discourage anybody from buying the course, I’m just saying you got to consider where to spend your time. Is learning how to build drive stacks going to progress your business? It might. You have to make that decision. I can’t make that decision for you. Or is the benefit and the result that the drive stack can produce going to help your business? And if so, then why go through the trouble of learning how to build them when you could just purchase them done for you and receive the benefit that you were seeking to begin with? Does that make sense? Then that way you could spend your time focusing on how to sell it or how to monetize it or how to apply it to get the result that you’re seeking. Does that make sense?

Again, guys, you have to think about it on a higher level. That’s what I think is really wrong with our industry, is that everybody teaches, or the vast majority of products tell you, “Hey, we’re gonna teach you how to do this one skill.” Yeah, I’m not trying to take that away from anybody. That skill is valuable. Whatever that skill may be, it’s valuable. But just because you know how to get a result from it, one particular skill does not make you a business owner, it does not make it a profitable business for you. Right?

So you got to think about how are you going to make money from whatever it is you choose to do? Is doing that thing, being the mechanic or the technician, is that actually going to make you the money or is selling that service and the result that that service produces going to make you the money? If that’s the case, then why don’t you focus on learning how to sell it and find people that are already good at doing it, fulfilling it, to do it for you right.

That’s what we’re trying to get at, guys, and Jordan understands that. That’s why Jordan’s business is cranking, it’s just kicking ass. Okay.

Any Black Friday Sales For Done For You Services Or Training?

Luis, he’s a new Mastermind member. “Hey guys, any Black Friday sales?” By the way, welcome, Luis. “Any Black Friday sales for Done For You services or training?” Yeah. Isn’t that with the GMB stuff was the pre-Black Friday sale?

Marco: It’s the pre. We will have something. Something’s coming your way and it’s gonna be good. Trust me. It’s not Black Friday yet, dude. But we will have something. It’ll be big. We control MGYB now. As Bradley mentioned, it’s ours. Semantic Mastery is our own store. So we’ve got some really good stuff coming your way.

Luis, I will be talking to you on Monday, as a matter of, fact. It’s his onboarding call. Again, I’m sorry, all these Mastermind questions keep coming up or Mastermind people. As part of the onboarding process, we give people a half hour call just to get them pointed in the right direction, to see where they’re going, where they want to be. So we ask questions, we try to provide guidance. I just happened to get Luis.

Guys, you can’t ask for who you want. You’re going to get whoever is up on the calendar, because we rotate since there’s five of us. But whoever you get, you’re going to get the direction that you need and you’re going to get your questions answered so that you can get started on your way to POFU.

That’s what we want you to do. We want you to get started getting to that place where you’re going to be and say, “Okay. Now I don’t have to deal with shitty clients. I don’t have to deal with shitty people. I am at a place where I can go into any negotiation from a position of power. I know what I’m worth. If this guy gives me any flack, I’m gonna have to say ‘Fuck you. I’m gonna go to your competitor and charge them half price just because I feel like it, because I don’t need you.‘” That’s what we want you to be.

Bradley: There you go so. Yes, Black Friday is this Friday. So, yeah, there will be some other specials. I don’t usually get involved with what promotions we’re doing, guys, so I couldn’t answer that. But I’m glad Marco said, yeah, we do have something coming Friday.

Should You Use Only The Main Keyword Phrase Or Should You Diversify Them When Building Links To All Assets?

Jay Turner. What’s up, Jay? He says, “I’ve been able to get my client ranked in the 3-pack for the second most trafficked keyword phrase with an RYS stack. High five, Marco.”

Marco: High five, dude.

Bradley: “But now I want to take on the main and most competitive keyword. I’m adding a silo of content to the RYS stack targeting the main keyword. So far so good. My question is when embarking on link building to all assets, like RYS, Syndication Network, GMB website, et cetera, should I use only the main keyword phrase or must I diversify the keyword phrases?”

Jay, diversify. What I recommend you do is go pool your … You should have probably already done keyword research anyways, so if you’re gonna be siloing, you should have your keyword themes relatively tight for the silos anyways. So make sure that if you’re gonna be direct targeting link building on a silo basis, that you’re only using a set of keywords that fall within that particular silo or keyword theme. Right? Does that make sense?

Let me take this down to a local level because what I wanna explain is, guys, when you’re doing a ton of like spam link building and such to power up tier one entities, which would be like drive stacks, press release, organization pages, syndication networks, even citations, you don’t want to hit, and I’m gonna say local because that’s primarily what I work on, and I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about here anyways. You said client ranks, so it’s likely it’s locally You said 3-pack. Right?

So you don’t wanna use the keywords with the location modifiers. You can use a very small percentage of your overall keywords that you’re gonna add to the anchor text or the link building that you’re gonna be either doing or buying a package or whatever. You can have a very, very small percentage with location modifiers, but I would keep that to an absolute bare minimum. Because it’s more about pushing the theme, the keyword theme, not the location, or the geographic theme, if that makes sense, it’s not about pushing location relevancy.

Because think about it, the further you move away from a local business the more broader the market segment is. In other words, you don’t wanna be targeting keywords or link building to tier 1 assets all the way down to the local level, including local location modifier, because it’s, remember your link building to tier one assets is two hops away from your target which would be your GMB asset or your primary website, the client’s website, or whatever, the further you get away from the ultimate target, the ultimate destination, the broader your keyword set should be, the broader the theme of the keyword set.

That’s why I say I don’t like to include local modifiers and anchor text when I’m building links to tier one assets. Instead I use higher or market-level keywords, broader market keywords. What do I mean by that? Instead of water heater repair Fairfax Virginia or Fairfax VA as a keyword that I would use as an anchor, it would be water heater repair and plumbing and plumbing repair and plumbing service, if that makes sense. I’d lose the local modifier and use more broader market-level keywords. Okay.

Also, you don’t wanna do entirely 100% on anchor text links, even with a diverse set of keywords. You wanna also include naked URLs and some generics. You can even use some brand terms at that point. It’s a little bit odd to use brand terms at tier two links because that’s again two steps away from your target URL. But it does make sense if you’re link building to, for example, if it’s a tier one branded property it can make sense to also include the brand name in some of those anchor text too. Right? I would just use those sparingly as well. It’s more about the keyword relevancy at that point in naked URLs, which is just pushing link equity to those tier one assets regardless of anchor text.

Marco, do you wanna comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, thanks, Bradley. What I would recommend is reach out to Dedia. We have a Dedia, he knows exactly what to do with your RYS stack to get the most out of it.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: If needed, then get our keyword research gig because we will come up with thousands upon thousands of keyword targets for you to either add relevance or to push, we provide what’s called buoyancy. “Buoyancy,” that’s one of the words that I have difficulty with. But we help push up the main keyword by providing relevance throughout the keyword silo. We give you all that with the keyword research.

Then, all you do is turn that over to Dedia and say, “Here, this is the folder that I’ve created, this is the keyword that I’m targeting, have at it.” Dedia has been with us long enough that he just knows, okay, this is what I need to do. He’ll blast it. He’ll hammer that RYS stack so that it produces.

Bradley: That’s right. You don’t have to worry about all those ratios and stuff, Jay. I know. I mean, honestly, I don’t worry about any of that stuff anymore because I don’t ever do any of that stuff anymore. If I need it, I just contact Dedia, exactly what Marco said, and I just say, “Hey, this is what I got. This is what I’m trying to accomplish. Make it happen,” and he does it.

Honestly, guys, that’s what I’m talking about. Jay, again, I don’t wanna get back on this pitch again, but if you have your own tools and you’re running your own link building tools and stuff like that, that’s great, if you’re efficient and all that. But if you’re not, which I am not, I have no desire to run those tools, just let the expert do it and Dedia has an absolute ninja. He’s an expert, a link building expert, so that’s why I just turned it over to him, defer to him anytime I have something that I need to spam to push additional link equity to. I just contact him say, “This what I got is what I need you do, make it happen,” and he does it. All right.

Jay vouches for the GMB auto poster. He says, “It’s great and Shripad does great work. He is very responsive in Support. I can attest to that too, not just because it’s me, but every time there’s an issue a little support bubble on the bottom right corner of the auto poster, you can just contact Support through there and he’s very, very responsive.”

Would You Recommend Using One Website For Multiple GMB Locations?

Abe says, “Also, I would like to know about using one website for multiple GMB locations. Is this recommended and possible?” It can be. You can just create separate location pages. So each location each, GMB locations should have its own dedicated page on the website and that’s the URL that you would submit as the website URL in the Google My Business profile. Does that make sense?

So instead of just using the home root domain, so the home page of the website for that brand across all different GMB assets, create a location specific page on that domain and then use that URL as that landing page URL as the website in GMB. It’s perfectly fine to do that, guys. But what you want is, if it’s the same brand, you can share the same brand name across all GMB locations. That’s fine. But you want a unique URL and a unique phone number and a unique address, if possible. Okay.

Strange NAP issues occur if you have two or more of the data points, the primary data points in a citation or NAP, which would be name, address, phone number, and also website URL. If you have two or more common data points among multiple locations, that’s going to cause NAP issues, which is going to make it very difficult to rank. You can have one common data point, typically the business name, because it’s a brand that can be used across multiple GMBs as long as the other primary data points are unique, physical address, phone number, website address. Does that make sense? So, yes, it’s possible.

Now one other thing I would mention is go back through, Abe, watch some of our previous Hump Day Hangouts. We’ll talk about the difference between using location pages, which would be pages on the root domain, or using location-specific sub-domains, which are separate WordPress installations, but there’s a reason to do, that’s to help mitigate risk, potential losing all of your assets if you were to catch a penalty. Again, we just talked about this last week, go back and watch the replay from last week and I’m pretty sure we talked about that extensively, about the benefit of using sub-domains over sub-folders or sub-directories. That’s pretty much the same thing I’m talking about here.

“Where’s the GMB auto poster?” John, just posting the Mastermind, we’ll get to the link.

Marco: I posted the link higher up.

Bradley: Yeah. I just didn’t have it. Thank you, Marco. Nestor says, Hey, I got to go guys. I got to wrap this up. So, anyways, and there’s Rob with the yearly discount for the GMB agency offer. That’s the enterprise account level or subscription level, which is 200 posts per month-, or excuse me 500 posts per month capacity. If you buy it on a monthly basis, subscribe month to month, it’s $200. If you buy the yearly license … It’s $200 per month, excuse me. If you buy the yearly license, it’s 1,000 bucks, divided by 12, comes out to be $84 dollars or $83 per month. So it’s a hell of a lot cheaper that way.

By the way, if you’re scheduling out 31 posts, which there’s a post scheduling feature, which is amazing in the GMB auto poster, so you can schedule out one post a day or however many you want. Let’s just say you’re doing one post a day, you could do 31 days. Then, there’s a republish option to where it can republish the post based upon the interval that you set. For example, if you set every 31 days, you can publish, you can schedule out 31 posts and then have them republish 31 days later, each post thereafter. Right? Does that make sense?

So day one and then day 32, that post publishes again. Day two and day 33, that post publishes again. Does that make sense? That way you can set up all of your posting and in an automated fashion. Well, with 500 posts per month, if you were to actually fill out or post one per day for each location, you can essentially put 16 locations in one enterprise account. Sixteen times 31 comes out to be 496, so you get 496 posts. Essentially, you can serve 16 locations, 100% one post per day with a single enterprise account. Does that make sense?

That’s how I’m clustering my sites right now. I gave you a little insight on that.

Marco: Yeah. I mean, it’s an awesome deal because it saves so much money and then the auto poster just saves so much time and effort. Once your VAs get proficient with going in there and just scheduling and putting everything up, it just saves you a ton of time of money. So you’ll make the money back that you invest in this just by the time you’re gonna save with your VAs, or even if you try to do it on your own, which you shouldn’t be doing.

Bradley: Yeah. Just so you guys are aware, for clients, I have a VA that goes in and manually posts for all the clients. I do that for a reason because every post is 100% unique that way. She still has content templates, but she goes in and she puts in a new image every time, and the content templates she uses, there’s tokens that she swaps out with different keywords and such. The target URLs are always being recycled to whatever we’re linking to from the GMB post and all that. So they become unique for clients.

I pay my VA on a per post basis. So I pay her, for every post that she publishes she gets paid. It varies between $3.50 to $5 per post. But I charge my clients $10 to $15 per post, depending on what the volume is. So my point is, I make money on that even though she’s manually posting.

However, for lead gen assets, guys, once again, just like I was telling … Shit, who was I telling earlier? Michael. I was telling Michael earlier not to worry about syndication networks for lead gen assets because you wanna reduce expenses. Well, I don’t want to pay a VA to manually post to lead gen assets because that’s an additional expense when I can pay for-, or subscribe to the auto poster, schedule all the posts.

Do I do all these guys? Hell, no. I’ve trained a VA to go in and set up or schedule all the posts within the GMB auto poster and then schedule them to republish. So that, literally, I can pay a VA for three or four hours to schedule out, however long it takes them, to schedule all those posts out. Then, it’s done and those GMB assets will continually update posts because of the auto poster and I’m not paying anymore other than for the auto poster subscription. Does that make sense? So it’s a hell of a lot more efficient with money too. Right? It’s more cost-effective. Okay.

Nestor says … And I’m so over, we got to get out of here. Nestor says, “Hey guys, how about webs 2.0 example mybrand.wordpress.com point to my GMB property three links as a press release?” Okay. First of all, I’m not familiar with their example. I know that’s kind of a competitor that does, you know, they have their own store and blah blah blah. I’m not real familiar with what they teach or what they say, so I can’t really speak on that.

I’m not quite sure I understand, in the wording of your question, what you mean by mybrand.wordPress. I understand WordPress.com, that’s fine. That’s a brand identity property that you can create on the WordPress.com site, kind of like what I showed earlier. But, yeah, that’s normal. That goes into Syndication Network, right? You try to get your brand name as a sub-domain blah blah blah. That’s pretty standard.

But, “point to GMB property three links as a press release,” I’m not sure what that means. Can you point to a GMB property from your WordPress.com site? Sure. Can you also use press releases to link to that WordPress.com site? Sure. You can also link to your GMB.

I’m doing a press releases, Local PR Pro method is what I use and, as standard operating procedure, I published a press releases with every GMB asset, it gets created. Usually, my preferred method is to link from the first press release to the GMB, the Google Maps share URL, to the Google the GMB website URL, and to the GMB the first post URL. We teach that at Local Lease Pro and that’s just essentially my method. So I’m going direct from the press releases to the Google assets. Okay.

Yeah. Guys, there’s a thousand ways to skin a cat, right? So our method isn’t the be-all end-all. It’s just our method works for what we want it to work for and that’s what we teach. Other people have other methods that may very well work as good as ours. I’m not trying to say that ours is better than anybody else’s. I’m just telling you what we teach, I don’t know what they teach. I’m sorry. It’s likely that that would work too.

Will says, “Bradley, speaking about syndication networks, I finally figured out how to syndicate to Medium.com. I’ve been testing it for a while with a few posts now and it works well to syndicate your WordPress post with images and YouTube video embeds, and from there, you could syndicate to your tier two, if you’d like. I’ll send you an update to support@semanticmastery.”

Thanks, Will. That’s awesome. In fact, Will, if you would, I mean, if you’re cool with it, you can even send the update right in the Mastermind community so that everybody else could benefit from it. If not, send it to me and I’ll update everybody in the Mastermind, and Syndication Academy for that matter, once I see it. Thank you for that, Will.

Okay. “Link to pre-Black Friday deals, please.” Yeah. Luis, just contact us at Support.

That’s it. Okay, guys, we’re way over. We got all questions answered, though.

Marco: That was a good one.

Bradley: Thanks, Marco, for hanging out, man, I appreciate it.

Marco: Marathon. All right, dude.

Bradley: All right, everybody. Mastermind webinar tomorrow. Be there or be square. See y'all.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210

Click on the video above to watch Episode 202 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: Hello and welcome to Episode 210 of Hump Day Hangouts. I am Adam Moody with Semantic Mastery. We are gonna say hi to everyone real quick before we dive into some announcements and questions from everybody watching us live. Also, if you’re watching this on YouTube, we noticed from time to time that we get questions over there, but you need to come to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions and ask your questions there, that’s where we’re monitoring. Before we dive in, real quick, Chris, how are you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Good weather in Florida always the last couple weeks. I highly recommend it, like I love it. How are you doing?

Adam: Not bad. It’s like 60 here, which is perfect. Everyone in California thinks it’s like the middle of winter and I’m just enjoying myself. This is good. Marco, how about you? How’s the weather for you, man?

Marco: Things are good here, man, transitioning to the dry season. So we’re gonna have about five and a half months of absolutely no rain, not even a drop. I’m looking forward to … Yeah, but then, it’s seven months of afternoon showers. You gotta pay the price for the life you live, right?

Adam: Yeah, fair enough.

Marco: But always warm, like if it were 60 here, we’d all be dying literally. It’s freezing cold.

Chris: [Inaudible 00:01:19] stay in Florida.

Adam: Definitely. Bradley, how about you, man? How are you doing?

Bradley: I’m good, I’m happy to be here. Got lots of stuff going on at the moment. Just been really, really busy. In last week, well, I took off for a couple days because my sister got married again. I actually got to go down to Hilton Head, South Carolina and meet one of our members, Ed, who also went to POFU Live; he’s in the Mastermind also. That was cool because I got to spend an hour with him just chatting. It was really, really cool. I always enjoy getting to meet members whenever we have the opportunity. So that was a lot of fun. But I had to take really Friday and Monday off, so now I’m behind.

Besides that, I got a quick little story to tell very, very quickly. Just last week, it was funny because I was actually reviewing the Hump Day Hangout from last week and I was talking about mitigating risk. Marco and I, we were talking about reducing exposure and trying to mitigate risk because, if you put all your eggs in one basket and Google takes that basket, you’re screwed, you’ve lost all those assets.

Well, I was using a test with what’s called GMB Location Groups. It’s a setting inside of Google My Business. I was running a test on a set of GMB assets for a particular metro area, so one metropolitan city area. I had seven assets in there that were fully optimized, 100% done. In fact, they were the seven assets that my VAs has been training on as he’s been learning the processes for doing this whole method, the Local Lease Pro model, essentially.

Long story short, on Saturday, I was down at the Hilton Head and I happened to get an email saying that the account that was used as the recovery email for that particular GMB manager account, which had to be turned into an owner in order to use location groups, had been terminated for violating Google’s spam policies. I lost all those damn assets, every single one of them, and I can’t even access them through the original Google accounts now, guys.

That was three weeks work, not necessarily my work, but my VA’s work wasted. Now, is it all bad? No, because I learned a valuable lesson. Number one, don’t use GMB location groups, it’s like a trap, number one, lesson number one. Number two is always mitigate risk. Don’t set yourself up with vulnerabilities that Google can take … We exploit Google’s vulnerabilities. Don’t you think Google will exploit ours? So I learned that … In fact, I’m actually updating the entire process for how to first log in and set up and manage a lot of GMB assets. I’m updating all those processes this week, in fact, because we have to do something new that reduces our overall risk.

Anyways, that was my little story. I’m a little bit behind now because all the work that I’ve done for the last several weeks on all the processes now has to be updated and redone. But that’s the cat and mouse game that we play.

Marco: Yeah. One of the great things about our Mastermind is that we do all of the testing, we take all of the risk, we were the ones who go in the lab. I mean, we do encourage our own people to test so that they can verify that our results are what we’re saying they are. But it’s one of the things that we do, we go, we blow things up and it happens, and then now we know what not to do. And right into our Mastermind, we’ll share all of test result with the membership exactly what was done so that they don’t repeat the process and get stuck losing assets because nobody wants to lose an asset, especially not seven. But so be it, lesson well-learned and it’s a lesson that the Mastermind doesn’t have to repeat.

Bradley: That’s true and, just real quick segue, that leads me to, that’s kind of like what the Mastermind is about. The scaling option, like doing all these heavy processes and stuff, is really reserved to the POFU Live group attendees at the moment, but we’re polishing all this stuff. Obviously, the Mastermind, we update, like tomorrow we’ve got a Mastermind webinar and I’m certainly gonna be talking about what not to do because I want to make sure all of our members are fully aware of what not to do so they don’t lose assets.

But once we have this 12-week process done, that the POFU Live attendees are kind of in accountability group with me right now, and we’ve got a target that we’re trying to hit at the end of 12 weeks, which is 50 GMB assets fully developed and ready for monetization, if they’re not already monetized by that point, and so when we’re done at that 12-week period, we will have discovered or perfected, really fine-tuned the method and all of the processes to get us there, to get us to that point. That’s when we’re gonna release in its entirety the Mastermind.

That training will not be released outside of the Mastermind, period, and that’s only because it’s highly valuable and we put a lot of work. In fact, the other members of the POFU accountability group with us, that’s like 12 of us in there, and so that’s a lot of intellectual property, a lot of a work that goes into that. So the Mastermind members will get that.

But that’s just one of many things that we do there. For example, we had some questions about how to structure ad ID pages and set up as three buckets with HTTP, SSL protocol, and all that stuff. Two weeks ago, we went in and showed exactly how to do that. I mean, it’s just stuff like that that we do in the Mastermind all the time.

Adam: Yeah. Something else that I just remembered, that reminded me of, Bradley, was, I think it was Jason who posted yesterday, who’s one of our Mastermind members, just out of the blue was like, hey, I’ve seen some questions about blah blah blah-, not blah blah blah, but some heavy-duty IT stuff. He’s like, “Hey, if anybody needs help just ping me. I’ll do it for free if you’re a Mastermind member.”

That’s just awesome to see. Again, you get that in a tight-knit group like that. It’s cool having that ability. Everyone who knows our story kind of knows where we came from and how we were part of a Mastermind. That’s why part of why we do this to get that community, it’s not just a jumble of people, you do have a community.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Well, cool. I also want to say then to you guys, we mentioned the GMB stuff, we’ve got a sale going on right now at MGYB. It’s wrapping up today. So if you’re interested or you need a GMB verification service, whether it’s for your clients, it’s for yourself, you’re doing some lead gen, head over there. I posted it on the page. If you’re watching the replay, sorry, it’s probably too late. But a good reason to watch live and open the emails is you get a 35% discount on that service right now. So head over there do that.

Real quick, too, if you’re joining us for the first time, thank you so much for watching us. If you want the right place to start, because it is one of the questions we get, “Hey, where should I start? Should I take this course and do that?” start with Battle Plan. No matter what you’re doing, even if you want to hop into Mastermind, get the Battle Plan, come join the Mastermind. That’s the path. The link is on there. It’s a great way to get repeatable results, which is why we put it together, so that we can have that. It’s our home processes put into an easy-to-digest format.

Then, obviously, like we’ve been talking about it, if you’re ready to take things up a notch, if you wanna scale, you wanna grow, then the Mastermind is the place to be.

Bradley: Did you open up Local Lease Pro as a standalone product now?

Adam: Yes.

Bradley: I’ll be damned. I didn’t realize that was available yet. Okay.

Adam: Sneaking that onto the page, if people are interested.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay.

Adam: I’m gonna say no more.

Bradley: Everything I’ve been talking about with this Local Lease Pro method, that’s it. Most of you guys are probably aware of it because of the Side Hustle Toolbox promotion, that was our contribution. But now that that’s closed, it’s a standalone product. I’m gonna be updating that in a couple of weeks with some of the new processes that I’ve just discovered.

Again, GMB, like the actual optimization process has changed slightly. Not much, but slightly, and I’m updating the processes for my VAs right now. So next week, I’ll kind of polish it up a bit and then add that into the Local Lease Pro training. So if you guys don’t have it yet, I recommend you get it. This method is freaking killing it. I think it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career. I mean that, so check it out.

All right. Can we get into questions?

Adam: I think so. If you guys are good, let’s do this.

Do I Need Access To A Client’s Website If I Do Local SEO For Them?

Bradley: All right. Starting off with Chris Green posted a support question from Vincent. He says, “I’m considering to join the RYS Reloaded or the GMB course. My question is this: if I do SEO for local businesses in my country, which is Malaysia, do I need to have access to my clients website?” No. It can help. You don’t have to have access to the client’s website, but it would certainly help because you could take care of some on-page SEO issues. In other words, you can optimize the site itself, which is considered on-page SEO, and that can help that can help quite a bit.

In fact, with proper on-page SEO, a lot of the times you can rank a site with a fraction of the off-page SEO because any off-page SEO that … If on site is proper, if it’s tight, if it’s strong, then any off-page will significantly affect, it will have a strong impact on the site because then the site will respond well to off-page because it is a well-built, well-structured site.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to have access to the site because you can accomplish through off-page. You can still rank a site with off-page. If the on-page is terrible, then you probably are fighting a losing battle. But if it’s decent, then you could probably still accomplish what you need to, depending on how competitive the keywords are that you’re targeting. But it’s likely that you could still accomplish what you needed to with off-page alone. But again, there are benefits certainly to being able to access the client’s website. Right? If you’re starting with garbage, it’s gonna be difficult to rank. So just keep that in mind. Okay.

It helps, it’s not 100% necessary. Well, it depends, right? It depends on what the status of the site is currently. If it’s a shitty site, if it was built poorly, optimized poorly, or if it’s spammed to death or whatever, then you may never be able to rank that site. But if it’s decent, if it’s fairly okay, then you could still just apply off-page methods and probably get the results that you want. However, if you can do both, manage the on-page and the-off page, you will get the best results. Right?

Are The SEO Methods In RYS Reloaded And GMB Work On WordPress.com And Wix.com Websites?

Number two, he says, “If my client has a WordPress.com or Wix.com website, can the SEO methods taught in RYS Reloaded and GMB work and getting first page ranking on Google?” Well, yes. Well, Local GMB Pro course is not really anything that have to do with websites, right? Local GMB Pro is how to optimize Google My Business and set up all of the Google assets to rank. Well, not even to rank, but to just generate leads from Google, independent of ranking. That’s what Local GMB Pro is about. It’s about getting leads, getting exposure from Google My Business, whether it ranks or not, and that’s what that whole … Again, despite traditional SEO, Local GMB Pro can generate leads from Google. Okay. So that’s what local GMB Pro is.

RYS is about using Google’s assets as an off-page tool as well as an entity validator, an authority builder, and multiple other things. But it’s more of an off-page thing. Again, it has nothing to do with the website structure or the platform itself, WordPress or Wix. It doesn’t matter because all you’re doing is using Google properties to push relevancy and authority over to whatever property is that you’re trying to rank.

Marco, do you wanna chat about that a little bit?

Marco: Yeah. It’s just one of the pillars that we teach, ART, the art of ART, activity, relevance, trust and authority, both on the link origin and on the link destination. What that means is you get visitors no matter how you show activity and Google reward you as long as everything is relevant and you’re working with trusted and authoritative entities. If you become along with that, a trusted and authoritative entity, then you get rewarded. Google will also reward you for being in Google because Google trusts itself. It’s the ultimate as far as what it trusts. So working in what we call working inside the belly of the beast also has its rewards.

Yeah. As Bradley said, it makes absolutely no difference. I mean, you work with whatever. I mean, you have a free WordPress blog ranking for … what is it? Free-, no, not free. SEO Virginia. Yeah. I mean, it just goes to show that if you get that activity in there, everything else just fall into place as long as it’s relevant, trusted and authoritative.

I keep telling people, and I just mentioned it in our Semantic Mastery Facebook group, the Mastermind, that ART, A-R-T, will trump anything. It will even overcome any of the negative factors, of the algorithm, penalties and all of that. You become almost immune to anything that Google has to throw at you because you’re signaling rank pot-, excuse me, rank brain in the way that it wants to be signaled. You’re doing the Google tickle, the T tickle. I mean, it blows up. It becomes a self-feeding monster once you get all that activity in there.

Bradley: Yeah. This is an example of what Marco was just talking about, this is that WordPress.com. So free wordpress.com blog, guys. If you take a look at this, there’s no content on this page. It looks like there’s content, but the only content on this page is this right here. That’s it. The rest of those are embedded files. That’s RYS at work there, guys. That’s RYS Academy right there at work. Okay. Again, go view page source, the post body, the article body of this post. The content body is this right here. That’s the only text on the page. The rest of it is all embedded files RYS style, and that’s all.

Look at that, guys. It’s ranked number three in organic for SEO Virginia. I mean, that’s pretty powerful. Again, that’s all off-page stuff. There is some on-page going on there because of the iframes that are actually embedded in this page, but it’s primarily an off-page thing that’s got this ranking. And that’s the power of RYS, right?

By the way, the Google site as part of the stack and that’s been number one since May of 2015. Guys, that’s been number one since May of 2015, or within a few weeks anyways, that’s when it was published. Look at that, it’s a horrid site. It was just for a test purpose, guys. Still ranked. Still ranked, it’s three and a half years now. Still ranked. Anyways, there you go. Will it work? It damn sure does.

How Do You Get The URL Of A Scheduled Post In The MGYB GMB Service?

Dustin’s up, or Da B. “Hey there. I’m using the MGYB post scheduling service but I was wondering, in the Local GMB course you link to the previous post but when I scheduled a post, then I don’t have the URL of the last URL because it will be scheduled. How do I link to the post then if the last post yet is not published or is not published yet? Greetings. Dustin.” That’s a good question Dustin.

Marco, that’s something that I think Rob was talking about that was going to be a feature, that was going to be released soon within the auto poster was the ability to silo a post. Is that correct?

Marco: Yeah. We keep going back and forth with Shripad. I’m not sure if that’s available yet. But I mean, there’s an easy solution to that. Link in the body or you’re still not gonna have the post URL. You would need the original post URL, and then the next one, then the next one. So Shripad will have to come up with something regarding that so that we can solve that issue. But, yes, he is working on it so we can silo GMB posts.

Bradley: Yeah. I’m thinking if the script would wait until a published one was pulled and then grab the short URL and then link to that before the next one that’s scheduled publishes. You know what I mean? That would work to build a silo on that. I know that if you post the post … So you publish the post, then you grab the URL and link to it from the next post. But, you’re right, if you wanna schedule out multiple posts in advance, right now there’s not an ability to do that yet.

But that’s something, Marco, if you wanna make a note of that specifically, silo posts together, schedule post together, which I’m sure that can be integrated at some point. Right now that’s not something that can be done, Dustin, but we’re working on that. It’s a great feature.

Marco: No. Dustin, what I would suggest is you just have your VA go in and add links as needed.

Bradley: As they’re published.

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Right. As they publish, go grab the URL, and then go post the next one. That’s the only thing we can do to daisy chain them together right now until we have the automation such that it will be able to do it. Okay.

Jordan says, “On one of the, or …” Okay. One of the guys, here we go. “One of the guys on our SEO team said after an SEO pitch this probably sounds like magic to them. I still can’t believe we get paid for this stuff, almost like grownup version of video games. Haha.” That’s funny. Well, I can believe we’d get paid for it, man. Think about all the testing and all the studying and all the learning and stuff that you, guys, and the money that you invest in your education and to tools and all that stuff.

I mean, we spend a lot of time learning this stuff, guys, we should be paid for it. I mean, think about that. We spend all our time learning how to perform this SEO magic stuff. A business owner that’s doing plumbing, for example, he’s out unclogging drains and that kind of stuff. He wouldn’t have time to learn all this stuff. How do I know? Because I was an electrical contractor and I had to learn how to do this shit while I was doing electrical work. It just so happens I found that I could make more money at this, that’s why I switched to this all together.

What are you gonna say, Marco?

Marco: Yeah. I was gonna say we deserve to be paid and be paid well. I mean, do you know how much time we’ve spent between RYS Academy, RYS Reloaded, Local GMB Pro, Local PR Pro, Local Lease Pro? Do you know how many hours have gone into researching that and making it work? Making that all work hand in hand so that one pushes the other and you’re pushing ultimate power to whatever destination so that that client’s phone rings?

Yeah. It may seem like magic. “Well, my phone rang. You did all that.” But it’s actually just hours and hours and hours of being a total geek.

Are There Ways We Can Use Press Releases Based On The Battleplan Aside From Launching A New Site?

Bradley: Rabbit-hole time. Yeah. Dan’s up. He says, “I’ve looked using press releases based off the Battle Plan and saw that you have them at the store. Besides using them for launching a new site would there be other places that I could use them? I do some consulting on the side for local businesses and build sites, lead gen, et cetera?”

Yeah, Dan. “Press releases are my favorite off-page or link building method really. Like no question, I absolutely love press releases. I use them as my primary off-page link building tool or method. I still use spam links from time to time for certain things, but for the most part I’m using press releases for link building.”

Yeah. You can use them. Guys, there’s dozens and dozens of things that you can publish press releases about. I’ve talked about them. Dan, we have a course called Local PR Pro which is specifically about how to use press releases to rank in the Maps pack, to get Google GMB, Google My Business profiles ranked in the maps pack using press releases. Right?

That’s what that course, Local PR Pro, is all about. In that course, I talk about how there’s multiple different things that you could publish a press release about. Because that’s a question that comes up often, “Well, I don’t think my client has anything that’s really newsworthy to publish a press release about.”

But think about it, getting a five-star review, you could publish a press release about receiving a five-star review or your client. Or you could publish a press release about a new employee being hired. Or a seasonal change to the product line that’s available. Or the services that are available, depending on what kind of business you’re dealing with. Or an accolade that the company receives, some sort of award or something like that. Or any charitable things, any charity events that they’re hosting or that they contribute to or participate in. Right?

There’s just dozens and dozens of things, hooks, angles that you could use to write a news release or something that can be … Guys, you can even publish a press release about a new blog post that’s been published on the website. No kidding. I mean, you just have to get a little bit creative. Dan, when I say you have to get creative, I don’t mean you. I mean, what I would recommend is hiring a PR writer, from Upwork or something like that, that can come up with these angles. A good press release writer can come up with a newsworthy angle for just about anything.

Again, if you’re doing a lot of this work, you could hire a PR writer, a good PR writer from like Upwork or something like that. Or if you’ve got a good press release distribution service that you subscribe to for monthly press releases or whatever, if they’ve got good writers in-house, which most good services do now, then they’ll have writers that are already trained on how to find news where the angles or to create hooks or their stories for the press releases. Right?

For example, if you use the MGYB press release service, the writers there from the Press Advantage distribution network, if that’s what you’re using, it’s fabulous, and there the press releases are almost twice the content length of typical press releases. There’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 words as opposed to 300 to 400, which is what most of them are. So those writers are really, really good, like their sole purpose in life is to find an angle or to create an angle to write a press release about. Those are the same writers that you have access to when you buy a press releases from us individually.

Okay. Anybody wanna comment on that before we move on? It’s a good one, Dan.

Marco: No. I think you hit the nail on the head. They’re great for just about everything. The only thing that you have to avoid is self-promotion, but you get that from most of them. You just have to define what self-promotion is. You go and you advertise. Well, we’re in Facebook, if you’ve just started your Facebook page, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. It’s still self-promotion. It’s just not getting sales. That’s what you wanna try to avoid.

Other than that, it’s fantastic for link building. Not only that, if you hit the press release, whatever the distribution network is with link building, it’ll push through. You’re putting a filter in between the destination so that you hit that with link building. It’ll power it up even more. They just work really well for everything.

Bradley: They damn sure do. Like Marco said, you can actually do self promotional PRs, but the salesy part is what you gotta leave out. They shouldn’t be salesy. But they can be self-promotional. Again, a good PR writer will be able to disguise a promotion as a story, a news story, and that’s really what you wanna do. That’s why I say don’t do it yourself. If I had to write press releases, I’d be a very miserable person. I wouldn’t wanna do it, but some people enjoy that stuff and they’re good at it. All right.

Is It Okay To Start With Battleplan Before Going Into The Mastermind and Syndication Academy Courses?

Andrew Walker’s up. Andrew is a local guy to me. I was in lead share, like a breakfast lead share group with him for several years that I don’t attend those things much anymore. Andrew is a great guy. Anyways, it’s good to see you here, Andrew. I haven’t seen him in a while. He says, “Hey guys, it’s been a long time since I’ve been on Hump Day Hangouts. I got caught up in the cold calling strategy to build my business and also had a case of the shiny object syndrome.” Well, we all do, Andrew. Don’t beat yourself up, buddy. We all go through that. I promise you, I’ve been through it. I still struggle with that, to be honest.

“I don’t fully understand how powerful-,” or excuse me, “I didn’t fully understand how powerful digital marketing is and what it can do for your business. You would think that that’s a no-brainer for an IT guy. Anyway, I’m back for real and I’m ready to learn this stuff. I’ve just downloaded the Battle Plan. I’d love to get involved in the Mastermind, but I’m not able to afford that at this time. Syndication Academy looks to be a great runner up. Can I start there to get things going or just start with the Battle Plan? Thanks, guys, and congrats on your four year anniversary.”

Okay. Great question, Andrew. Again, glad to see you back, man. The Syndication Academy is, yeah, it’s good, however, because, I’m not gonna knock Syndication Academy, but what we recommend is, especially for you, Andrew, you’re running your IT business, your IT services business, and so it depends on how much time you have. If you’ve got a lot of time and no money then, yes, pick up Syndication Academy because then you can learn how to build your own syndication network, which is gonna be one of the critical components to your business in expanding your reach and helping to generate more leads, it’ll help with your SEO and all that kind of stuff.

However, there’s a lot of time that goes into learning how to build a syndication network and, unless you plan on building syndication networks for others or selling them to others, I wouldn’t recommend that you go through all the trouble of learning how to build all that stuff for your own branded syndication network, for your own business. If you’re looking to try to grow your business, then your time is better spent not learning how to build a syndication network that you’re only gonna build one for your own business.

Your time is better spent marketing your business. You can instead just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us and we will build it to our specifications, which is exactly what we teach in the training. You can save yourself weeks of study and implementation by just buying a Done For You Syndication Network and you still reap the benefits of it without having to spend weeks of your time. Does that make sense? They’re inexpensive enough that there’s really no reason that you can’t just buy a Done For You Syndication Network from us. It’s cheaper or about the same price as the cost of a month tuition to Syndication Academy. Right?

Anyways, my point is, if you want, Andrew, since you can’t join the Mastermind yet, what I recommend is that you attend our Hump Day Hangouts regularly on Wednesdays, ask your questions here try, keep it to one question per post. In other words, you can post a few times, but try to keep it one question per post please. Ask questions here and we will try to guide you in the best way possible to help you to start growing your IT business, just from these Hump Day Hangouts. Then once you have generated some revenue you can always come join the Mastermind, which is your best bet, because the Mastermind is not just about marketing stuff.

Guys, we’ve gotten away from just teaching SEO or just teaching marketing methods. It’s more about building your business regardless of whether you’re building a local agency or consulting firm, or you want to build your own brick and mortar business, or virtual business for that matter. We want to teach you how to do all of that, which includes marketing and includes SEO, and includes all that stuff, but we’re not pigeon holing our training into just marketing training, if that makes sense. A lot more goes into it than that.

I would suggest, Andrew, that what you do is come back and join us here in Hump Day Hangouts, get involved, stay engaged, ask questions. We also have our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials Facebook group that you could ask questions there. As soon as you’re able to, I would invest in joining the Mastermind so that you can get, basically, almost one-on-one guidance from each one of us my partners and I as well as all of the other members in the Mastermind that are also savvy business owners. Right? That’s part of why it’s Mastermind because it’s not just about us teaching all the time, it’s about everybody in there contributing and helping each other, which is fabulous. Okay.

By the way, one of our top members, longtime members, Jason Johnson, who is what Adam was just talking about at the very beginning of this Hump Day Hangout, he was mentioning somebody was having difficulty setting up their MX records for G suite email to use their domain for their email within G suite. Jason Johnson posted, “Hey, I saw somebody was having trouble with MX records. Hey, I’m an IT guy. If anybody has any questions or any problems, tell them to reach out to me. I’ll help them for free as long as they’re a Mastermind member.”

Andrew, what I’m saying is, Jason is an IT guy who’s been in our Mastermind. He does digital marketing on the side, but also markets his own business and somebody that you could absolutely click with. Probably the two of you could chat about what he’s doing for his business and what’s working for him in generating leads for his IT business and all that kind of stuff. Right?

Again, that’s part of the power of a Mastermind. It’s not just learning from me or Marco when, you know, I’m gonna teach you how to generate leads for your business, but I generate leads for contracting businesses. Right? You’re trying to generate leads for IT services, and computer repair networking, and that kind of stuff, so why not get the advice direct from somebody that’s already generating leads for that type of a business, which we have members in our group to do that? Does that make sense?

That’s the power of a Mastermind. Okay. So that’s what I recommend. In the meantime, if you don’t have the money, come back here, ask questions, implement what you can, go through our YouTube channel Semantic Mastery, youtube.com/semanticmastery. Use the channel search function, ask questions over there. You’re likely going to find already video answers for many of your questions. Then, like I said, anything that you can’t find answers to, post in either the Facebook group or post back here on the event page every week and we’ll come in and answer your questions. As soon as you can generate a little bit of positive revenue, I would reinvest that back into your education and into building your business by joining the Mastermind, getting guidance from us as well as our other members.

Marco: I’m gonna give him just a couple of weeks. First of all, welcome back, Andrew. Sorry that you had a shiny object syndrome. I mean, that sucks and it makes you spend a whole lot of money and time chasing. It becomes a useless path. You fill up your computer with a whole bunch of garbage that you’re never going to use and you realize how much money you spent and then you get caught up at where you are right now where you ended, and dropped all that money and you have nothing to show for it.

But that’s okay, lesson learned. The two examples that I’m gonna give you is, I’m gonna give you Paul Fussell, who’s always in these Hump Day Hangouts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he drops in today; or if he isn’t, it’s because he’s out making money. He was at POFU Live, as a matter of fact, our event. The way he went about doing it, he come into Hump Day Hangouts, ask questions, and then go and go and apply. Ask questions, go and apply. then he started purchasing our drive stacks to rank. I know that he was doing dental for a while, I don’t know what he’s doing now.

Anyway, the thing about Paul is that he just went and he got Done For You services, and then he was chasing clients. Every time he’d get a client, drive stack, and that’s how he would he would rank them. But that’s Paul and that’s how he did it, so Hump Day Hangouts and Done For You services.

Then, we get to Jordan in Syndication Academy. Jordan lives in Syndication Academy, he’s always there. He’s one of our, I don’t know, one of our long-running and most active members of Syndication Academy. He runs an agency and I think he just got a huge nationwide client, but it’s from Syndication Academy. I’m not gonna say that he got everything from Syndication Academy, but I know that that’s his foundation and I know that that’s what he’s doing to rank his clients, to help his clients and to help his agency.

He has an agency, actually he’s an agency owner, but he decided that Syndication Academy was the thing for him. But, of course, they’ll all tell you, and Jordan will tell you that the Battle Plan is the place where you start, and you have to follow it. If you follow the Battle Plan, then you’re going to get to our Done For You services.

It’s a whole lot easier to go and buy a Syndication Academy Network, as Bradley mentioned, than to learn how to build a one-of-a-kind that you only need that one time. Why not go buy it and pay that than to pay a monthly membership to learn how to build one, or you might not wanna learn how to build one, or you might need?

It’s just to buy them and then go and sell it to clients, to people you know. Then, you pitch the benefits of being branded of having that footprint of being seen, of your content being seen everywhere, pushing your content to where the people are hanging out. So that’s one of the benefits.

You could do it many ways. Now, of course, we’re always going to tell you that the Mastermind is the place to be because that’s where like-minded entrepreneurs hang out, people who want to grow their business and get away from just that weekly paycheck and having to wait until the next one so that you could do whatever it is that you wanna do. We wanna push you, guys, past that. We call it POFU, position of fuck you.

Whatever that position is for you, Andrew, we want you to get there. There isn’t just one way to get there, but we do wanna help you get there. So whether you choose Hump Day Hangouts, whether you choose Syndication Academy, or what we suggest, whether you join our Mastermind, we’re going to help you any way we can. That’s what we’re here for.

Bradley: That’s right. Let’s not forget Mohammad. He’s a shining example. Mohammad Mackey. He started by just joining Hump Day Hangouts and coming and asking questions week in and week out and for months. Eventually, he got to a point where he landed a couple of his first clients and started making enough money. He came and joined the Mastermind. Then, he went through a little bit of a struggle for over-promising to clients and ended up losing some clients and had to drop out of the Mastermind for a little bit.

But he kept coming to Hump Day Hangouts and asking more questions, even during that time where he had to back out of the Mastermind, and he got the education that he needed and he implemented it. Right? It’s nothing we did, all we did was provide him with information, but he’s the one that took action and kept at it. He kept persisting in working and he kept finding stuff that wasn’t working until he found stuff that did work. Then, he landed some clients again, got his money back up, and joined the Mastermind again.

We have multiple examples of people that have done that just by starting here, right here at Hump Day Hangouts, Andrew, and you can do that too. Right? The Battle Plan, like I said, will tell you do this, this, this, and this, and you’re going to start getting results. It doesn’t say that you have to learn how to do those things, it just tells you apply these things. Right?

You can either learn how to do those things and do them yourself or, as a business owner, it would be much more efficient with your time to just purchase the Done For You services and apply them in the order that they’re recommended and reap the benefits of those without having to learn how to do it. Okay. Great question. Again, glad to have you back, Andrew. We’re happy to see you participate and be a lot more engaged over the coming weeks.

What Are The Factors You Consider When Finding The Best Keywords For Ranking Opportunity In Local Lead Gen Campaigns?

Gordon’s up. He says, “Hey guys, thank you very much again for the help you provide on Hump Days. It’s greatly appreciated.” You’re welcome, Gordon. “If you’re looking to find a low hanging fruit where you can easily rank in the GMB 3-pack, other than looking at the reviews of the current businesses in the 3-pack in their citation profile, what else do you do to decide whether or not you have found a golden goose ranking opportunity? Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls? Thanks again, Gordon.”

Okay. First of all, Gordon, Local Lease Pro, I showed the exact simple method, it’s kind of time-consuming, but the simple method using it, a free software that we show, we use to identify what I call slam-dunk opportunities, which is which you’re calling a golden goose in your question, okay? Again, that was in Local Lease Pro. If you have access to that, which I’m hoping you do because it was on sale for a very, very ridiculously low price for about eight days during the Side Hustle Toolbox launch. That’s close now, but it is available, Local Lease Pro, but we teach the method specifically how to find low-hanging opportunities.

Now I can’t go into the details of that right here, but it is very, very simple to do using the Easy Local Cash software, which is a free software. It’s Chad Kimball’s software. It just shows you, basically, ever since July of this year, when mobile implemented or switched to the mobile first index, that opened up just massive, massive opportunity. I’m telling you, guys, it opened up more opportunity than I’ve seen since I started my local marketing career in 2010. And that is what we teach on how to find those opportunities that have been opened up by this major change in the algorithm or which index is used first. Right? The mobile first index.

That’s all in Local Lease Pro. I can’t obviously say that right here. It is in the course. Also, you can find out, certainly, if you joined a Mastermind, because Local Lease Pro is one of the first courses that Mastermind members get now when they join.

Marco: Yeah, the how. I mean, that’s the course, the how is, you know, if we gave you that, then why have a course in the first place? So, sorry, that’s something that we can’t do. I’m glad that you mentioned again the Mastermind. I was in our mini, we have the mini-Mastermind and mine is on Tuesday nights for an hour. I have three great people. I have Jamina, I have Will Kenderdine, and John Wypick. We were going over my method for using the software and we went over it in detail. I don’t mind for an hour. I mean, I decided to give my time, right?

So this is what it’s all about. Membership has its privileges. I do things a little bit differently. I find targets a little bit differently, but it all works just the same way. The same way that you teach it, the way that I do it, I already decided to do it. The thing is that membership has its privileges. You have to be a member in order to get the information that you’re asking about. It’s not something that we can give away for free.

Bradley: Yeah. “Also, how do you determine whether or not there’s enough search traffic to generate adequate phone calls?” Well, that’s a good question. If you do your research properly upfront, you should know. First of all, you should research your industry or the niche that you’re targeting. Now if you followed us at all for any length of time, Gordon, which I know you have, you know that I’ve been telling you and I’ve been preaching this and beating this drum for years now, which is: specialize. Focus on one industry, guys. Become a big fish in one industry instead of a me-too agency or a me-too consultant or me-too local marketer that will just accommodate any business that will talk to you.

Trust me, you will never gain any traction in your business, or you will have a much harder time gaining traction in your business, if you just offer marketing services to any business that will talk to you. Because your amount of work multiplies exponentially because you have to do keyword research, you have to do market research, you have to understand the vocabulary of the industry, you have to figure out what the pain points are in those industries both for the consumer and for the business owner.

Because if you’re the business owner that you can help them market their products and services, you need to understand the consumer’s mindset, but you also have to understand the business owner’s mindset. So that you can talk to them and speak their language, build rapport with them. So you have to learn two different markets for every industry you enter, the consumer market and the business market. Right?

There’s just so much work that goes into learning, becoming a marketing special or professional in any industry. It requires a ton of research. So if you try to just say, “Oh, I’m gonna be a local marketing guy and I’ll talk to any business in my area that will talk to me,” you’re gonna create a shit ton of additional work that you can significantly reduce. You’ll gain a lot more traction a lot faster in your business if you focus in on one particular industry because then you can craft everything you do in your business around that particular industry. All your marketing messages, all your keyword research, your content templates, everything that you do can be designed around that one particular industry. Now you become a specialist.

I use this as an example. Would you go to a general health practitioner for a heart surgery? No, you go to a cardiologist. Why do you think businesses, like let’s say home remodeling contractors or general contractors, would they want to go to a me-too agency or would they want to go to a contractor media, contractor marketing agency that specializes in general and remodeling contractor marketing? Does that make sense? Which one would you prefer?

Gordon, I recommend specializing in on one industry. But don’t just arbitrarily decide on what industry you wanna focus in on and say, “I’m gonna build my business around that,” you need to research that industry and determine, is there a call volume? Is there significant interest in that? Is there money there?

What’s one of the ways that you can determine that? An easy and simple and a quick way is go do a search for the product and/or service as if you were a customer looking for that product or service. Just go do a Google search for it and take a look and see, are there ads? Are there Google ads? If so, that means there’s paying advertisers. If there’s Google ads, that means people are paying to bid on those keywords, which means there’s likely traffic for those keywords. If there wasn’t traffic for those keywords and if those keywords didn’t convert, there wouldn’t be ads. Does that make sense? People don’t pay and bid on keywords-, well, good advertisers don’t pay and bid on keywords that don’t convert or don’t generate traffic that converts. Right? So if you’re seeing Google ads, that’s a good indication.

Now I wouldn’t stop there. I’d research it further. You could do things, like use Google Trends to find out where in the country, or in the world for that matter, but I always do US-based searches, you can find out where the hotspots are for where the search traffic is the most or the search interest is the most for the types of products or services that you’d be promoting in that industry. Right? So then, you can start to develop out which locations you’re gonna target first for your business. Does that make sense?

Remember, specialize on one industry, guys, because then you can scale your business by geography instead of by type or kind. Does that make sense? Instead of trying to scale your business by taking on new industries where you’re gonna create so much additional work, scale your business by continuing with the same industry but expanding your service area or your territory, your target area. Right?

That’s a hell of a lot better or much more efficient way to build your business. Not only that, in time you will build a name and a reputation for being that type of a marketing specialist for that particular industry. People will start to seek you out as opposed to you having a force or push your marketing, your services onto others. People will start to seek you out because they know that you’re the specialist. Does that make sense?

How do you determine whether there’s enough search traffic? You have to research it. Make sure it’s an industry that has paying advertisers. Make sure that there is significant search interest for those types of things and that it’s profitable.

As I said about in the past, carpet cleaning, there’s a ton of search interest for carpet cleaning but there’s very, very, very small margins in the carpet cleaning industry. Right? Carpet cleaning companies don’t particularly like to pay for marketing services or for lead generation services, they don’t have the budgets for it because their margins are very small.

But if you just did keyword research, which is, when I first started, the very first lead gen site I ever built was carpetcleaningalexandriava.com. I don’t own that anymore, but it was a lead gen site that I built because all I did was base my decision on which industry I was gonna target based upon keyword search volume from the Google Keyword Planner. It said something like 600 exact match searches for that term “carpet cleaning Alexandria VA” per month. It was like 660 or something like that, 600 searches per month. So I said, “Oh man, there’s a lot of search volume there. I can make money with that.”

Well, I built the site and got it ranked number one. We were getting 30 to 40 calls a week through that lead gen site and I had trouble monetizing it for even a hundred dollars a month. No shit. Then when I finally got down to the chewy center of why that was by sitting down with the contractor that was renting that site from me or leasing that site from me, he told me, “Because the carpet cleaning business has very, very small margins.” Right? Very small margins. He was making something ridiculous, per carpet cleaning job $8 or $9 or $10, or $12 in profit. It was something stupid. After paying his labor and insurance costs and, the cleaning solution costs, and all of this overhead, he had a very small margin so he had trouble paying for that.

What happened? I ended up switching into other higher margin businesses. That’s why I love the tree service industry because it’s huge margin. That’s why I like remodeling contractors, home builders, HVAC repair, any sort of repair, roofers, all those types because the margins are so much larger. Does that make sense?

Again, you have to do the research, Gordon. There’s no real easy answer there. You just got to be logical and do the research and you should be able to find the opportunities as well as the perfect industry. Also, one last thing I would suggest about that is, seriously, guys, try to find an industry that you, not only has all the correct signals or markers of being a good industry to work at, but also one that you have a genuine interest in because it’ll make it feel less like work. Okay.

Honestly, I don’t have any interest in tree services, except for the fact that that does make me some damn good money, which kind of makes it interesting. But if you can find an industry that you have a genuine interest in, it’ll feel less like work while you’re building your business.

Anybody wanna comment on that before I move on? That was a long-winded answer I know.

Marco: No, but it was perfect. There’s no need to go into that any further.

How Do You Set Up The Syndication Network Of Several GMB Sites In Same Metro Area?

Bradley: He says, “Hey guys, so if I have a group of GMB sites in the same metro area and a WordPress site ranked on page one and Serps, a YouTube channel with videos ranking on page one of Google’s video page and I want to lease all of these as a total package deal to a business owner operating an area, how do I set up a syndication network for this? Can I feed the RSS feeds from all the GMB sites into the WordPress site blog into one generically branded syndication network? Or do I need to set up separate networks for each GMB site or WordPress site? Thank you very much for your comment.”

Michael, I don’t recommend a syndication network for lead gen assets unless you need them. For example, if you’re having trouble getting a lead gen asset to push another 3-pack, can a syndication network will help for that? Then, absolutely.

The other thing is, if you have a cluster of Google My Business profiles for a metropolitan area that are all branded the same, then you could use one syndication network for those. When you talk about grabbing the GMB RSS feeds, I’m not sure what you mean from that, unless you’re using our GMB auto poster which will generate an RSS feed, but you can’t just get an RSS feed, at least not that I’m aware of.

Marco, this may have changed, but is there an RSS feed from the GMB websites yet?

Marco: Not that I know of. Not that I’m aware of.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah. As far as I’m aware, there is not an RSS feed from the GMB websites. So our GMB auto poster will create an RSS feed from the GMB posts that are connected through that auto poster or that are posted with that auto poster. So you can do it that way. But like I said, you should have a common brand for all of those assets, if that’s the case. If you want to feed them all into one network, which again, I’m gonna be 100% transparent with you guys, I’m not building syndication networks for my lead gen assets. I build syndication networks for clients because I tell them that it’s critical. It is because it’s brand building, it’s entity validation and brand authority building, right?

So any client, I’m gonna tell them. “You should have a syndication network to protect your brand and to amplify your brand, expand your reach. It also helps to build your authority and all that kind of stuff.” For content marketing, all my clients, I suggest we do regular content marketing, blogging that gets syndicated out to the syndication network. That’s all true. It’s not just because I wanna charge them money, guys, it’s to protect their brand and to help them to stay ranked.

But for lead gen assets, that’s an additional expense. So why implement that? Until and unless you need to, right? So for my lead gen assets that I’m building right now, I’m not using syndication networks. If I have lead gen assets that I do all the other magic that I work to them and they don’t end up producing, because maybe they’re not ranking well or that area ended up being more competitive than I originally thought, then I may add a syndication network. But that’s only if and when it’s absolutely needed. It’s kind of like a last resort thing because it’s an additional expense that I don’t wanna have to put up for a lead gen asset if I can get results without it.

Now once you’ve monetized an asset, a lead gen or, in this case, a multiple assets, once you’ve monetized them, I’ve talked about this too, if once you’ve developed it … Like for me, when I monetize a lead gen asset, what I do is after several months, two or three months of the service provider paying on time and there’s no issues, if we develop a decent relationship, then I offer at that point to rebrand those lead gen assets after the client, certainly their name. It’s a lot more legit that way, right?

Like I said, at that point, once I would offer the rebranding, then that’s where I could upsell them on, “Hey, since we’re gonna be rebranding these, we should also go to syndication network because it’s gonna help to protect your brand and we can use that to help continue to push the lead gen assets that I’m gonna rebrand. It’ll help to continue to keep them producing for you, blah blah blah blah blah.”

At that point, we set up syndication network. Might even set them up on content marketing services. That’s an additional charge beyond the lead gen leasing or pay per lead fees that I’m charging. Depending on how I’ve monetized that asset, this is now starting to build their asset, syndication network with their branding, building, doing content marketing on their website.

So now I’m double dipping, right? Now I’m generating money from my lead gen assets and also working on the client’s assets as a separate fee. Right? So it gives you a whole lot of opportunity, Michael. But for your lead gen assets, I don’t recommend setting up syndication network unless you absolutely need to. Try to get results without it. Guys, I am the firm believer of trying to get the most results or trying to get the best results with the least amount of effort possible and least amount of money invested too.

Should You Create A Blog Post If You Syndicate A GMB Post?

Okay. It’s a good Hump Day today, by the way. I’m liking these questions. It’s a good question, Michael. All right. Ray had some confusion earlier. We’ll pass over that. Quit This House, he says, “If I wanted to syndicate my GMB post, should I create a blog post with the post details and link or should I post to one of the social media sites and create a trigger from there?”

Quit This House, use the GMB auto poster. I’m telling you, it’s stupid and expensive, it’s super convenient and efficient, and it can generate an RSS feed from your GMB posts, and then you can just connect that directly to a syndication network, and then, viola, it’s done. You don’t have to go … Right now, what you’re talking about would require a manual action for every post. Right?

If you just set it up through the auto poster, you can, not only schedule out your GMB post all in one setting so that they automatically publish on the day and time that you select, but it will also generate an RSS feed that then you can populate or trigger a syndication network with, and all of that is automated.

Marco: By the way, since we’re back on the auto poster, I got an answer from Rob and he says, yes, we’ll be able to silo based on tagging. So you can create multiple silos within the auto poster just by tagging, by using different tags. The function isn’t integrated yet, but it’s coming. It’s already being developed, guys. Those of you who are looking to get into this, get in there now because it just keeps …

Shripad is a master programmer. He just keeps adding to it more and more functionality and he’s now charging more. We’re not gonna charge more monthly yet. If it gets to the point where there’s just a ton of programming that needs to be done, the price will probably need to go up. But we usually grandfather people into the prices where they are, so remember that.

Bradley: Yeah. Michael says, “Holy crap, I can’t believe I got the $1,000 Local Lease Pro course for $47.” Yeah, Michael. Look, for eight days, we promoted shit out of that and told everybody that once the Side Hustle Toolbox offer closed that it was gonna, I originally said it was gonna go to 500, but it’s such a damn good course. I mean, I’m telling you, this is I think the most opportunity I’ve seen in my local marketing career, that Local Lease Pro method right there. That’s why we made it $1,000.

Not only that, but we’re gonna be updating the course. Like I said, I’ve got some new stuff to add to it. That as soon as I get my VA on track for the new changes and I polish up the processes a little bit, I’m gonna be sharing that, I’ll be updating Local Lease Pro. So, yeah, you’re right. Good thing that you got in on it.

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have … ” By the way, guys, if you want Local Lease Pro, if you don’t have it, there’s only two options, you can buy it for 1,000 bucks or you can join the Mastermind and you can get it included in your Mastermind membership. So it’s entirely up to you, but I would recommend it. I mean, guys, it’s even worth $1,000, I’m not kidding, because of the opportunity. I’m telling you, it’s the most opportunity I’ve seen in my eight, almost nine year career now. Okay.

Does It Hurt Or Help To Have Multiple Syndication Networks?

Abe says, “Hi. Can it hurt or help to have multiple syndication networks?” Yes, it can, Abe. Not for YouTube channels-, well, depending on how they were set up, but if you’re using syndication networks for blog syndication to try to rank your own domain, like a self-hosted site, then, yes, multiple syndication networks can hurt you, depending on how you have it set up and how you have a syndication set up,

I’ve said for years now, like we teach branded tier one syndication networks and we also talked about when we teach how to build two-tier syndication networks. You can take it out multiple tiers. But I’ve also recommended for years that you only use two-tier syndication networks on YouTube channels or multi-tiered syndication networks on YouTube channels or for YouTube syndication, not for blog syndication.

However, if you wanna do it for blog syndication, I do teach in Syndication Academy and I’ve talked about it multiple times how you can use multi-tiered syndication networks and reduce the chance of getting a Google slap. You cannot eliminate it because you are still leaving a footprint. But you can significantly reduce the footprint if you add additional content feeds as triggers into your second or third tiers. Right? Because what you wanna do is you wanna mask or bury your content among a whole lot of additional route relevant and related type content so that the blogs don’t show or appear to be solely for manipulating search rankings. Right? And that’s essentially what they are.

Again, with multi-tiered syndication networks, I don’t recommend them for blog syndication unless you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to put forth all the additional effort. Also, multitude syndication networks can break down because there’s a lot of moving pieces, there’s a lot of different content sources, which can cause you know different RSS feeds that you don’t have control over because they’re not your RSS feeds, which can cause problems. Multi-tiered syndication networks can be a bitch to maintain for that reason and so that’s another reason I don’t recommend them.

If you are just flatly syndicating your content to multiple syndication networks and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, then you are absolutely causing damage because it is clearly, the algorithm can pick that up in a split second. Right? Again, Abe, if you were gonna be building these types of stuff, like I said, the only way that … We have Syndication Academy where I talk about all of that stuff, seriously, I go into your best practices and everything about how to use them and where to use them. But for blog syndication, I highly recommend that you just use a one-tier branded syndication network and then you can boost the hell out of that. Okay.

Marco: Yeah. He also says that he’s used lower standard contractors in the past and he’s considering using our services on top. Dude, if you’ve done that, then don’t get a syndication network from us until you fix whatever it is that you’ve done. I suggest totally getting into Syndication Academy, seeing how it’s all supposed to work. I hope that you have access to all of these networks and multiple rings that have been done for you so that you can just stop whatever madness it was that was created and you could do it the right way. The way that it’s supposed to be done, which is branding. It’s done for branding and for syndicating your network. Yeah. It is done to manipulate but to manipulate in the right way. If you get caught manipulating the wrong way, you’re going to get slapped down.

What’s The Difference Between The Press Release Service In Serp Space And MGYB?

Bradley: That’s right. Ray says, “What is the difference between press release service from Serp Space, and MGYB? Are they overlapping and/or equivalent? They’re equivalent now, Ray, because, well, there’s two different levels of press releases orders from Serb Space. There was the press release and then press release plus. The press release was, the press advantage network, the distribution network, and that’s we have now a separate account. We have our own press advantage distribution network agreement with them that is available in MGYB. It’s basically the same distribution network. So it’s up to you if you wanna order from Serp Space or if you wanna come to MGYB which is owned and controlled entirely by Semantic Mastery and my partners. If that makes sense.

Serp Space was a collaboration. We are no longer part of that. There’s no issues there or anything like that. I’m just letting you know, if you wanna order directly from us, it’s through MGYB. Okay. Good question.

Should We Link From GMB Biz.Site Description?

Doodle Digital Marketing, I like that. He says, “Hey guys, I love Hump Day Hangouts. Tons of value. “Should we link out from the GMB biz site description?” Not … Well, wait a minute, the GMB, yes. You can link from the GMB website content. I don’t know about the description. But if you’re talking about the GMB business description, no, you can’t put links in that; that’s short. I think it only allows 750 characters. But if you’re talking about the GMB website, yes, you can link out to that.

What I don’t recommend doing a lot of external links, unless it makes sense, it has to be relevant guys, remember, this is a Google property, so I would not be doing some stupid “I’m gonna link to a .gov or .edu site for authority” because that’s bullshit and it has been for years. If it’s relevant, then, yes. If it’s not relevant, you’re just doing it because you learn that somewhere on some stupid SEO program somewhere, don’t do it because that’s dumb.

But what I would recommend doing is, I always link, and I teach this, but I always link from the GMB website text, the content body of the website, I always link to the GMB maps share URL, as well as to the GMB website. So it’s linking to itself, right? If you have an external website, so self-hosted website, you can link to that. That makes sense. You could also link to some of your social media stuff. That makes sense. Any type of branded property that you could link out.

Again, I wouldn’t spam the description or the GMB website content with a bunch of exterior external links, I would keep it … Really that’s why I usually just link from the GMB website to itself and also to the GMB maps share URL because those are Google properties. Right? So just consider that.

It’s after five o'clock, I don’t have to get my daughter-, or I don’t get to have my daughter for dinner tonight, so I do have a couple extra minutes. Marco, can you hang out for a few extra?

Marco: Yeah, I can hang out for a few extra. My daughter isn’t crying it.

Bradley: We’ve only got a few questions left.

Marco: Let’s go.

Bradley: All right. John says, “I’ve got a Semantic Mastery syndrome. I have no doubt it’s the place to be.” “Thanks, John. John is one in Marco’s small group that he was talking about. Jordan says, “Marco’s right. We learned the why behind all these Semantic Mastery tactics, Syndication Academy, RYS stack, Press Releases, et cetera, and then just sell them along with some other deep rooted stuff we had developed in the lab.” He’s talking about his own business specifically, Jordan.

“Then we also create all the content via writing and optimizing it, which we charge for, and then we do web design with SEO strategy pre-launch. I couldn’t build a drive stack if my life depended on it. Haha.” Yeah, that’s great. I mean, honestly, guys, those are the audience that are tech nerds and like to get their hands dirty, so to speak, roll up their sleeves and get to work. Then, RYS Academy will teach you how to build drive stacks. It’s a lot of work. You can benefit from RYS stacks without having to learn how to build them, by just buying them done for you and you’ll save yourself a shit ton of time and energy.

Again, I’m not trying to discourage anybody from buying the course, I’m just saying you got to consider where to spend your time. Is learning how to build drive stacks going to progress your business? It might. You have to make that decision. I can’t make that decision for you. Or is the benefit and the result that the drive stack can produce going to help your business? And if so, then why go through the trouble of learning how to build them when you could just purchase them done for you and receive the benefit that you were seeking to begin with? Does that make sense? Then that way you could spend your time focusing on how to sell it or how to monetize it or how to apply it to get the result that you’re seeking. Does that make sense?

Again, guys, you have to think about it on a higher level. That’s what I think is really wrong with our industry, is that everybody teaches, or the vast majority of products tell you, “Hey, we’re gonna teach you how to do this one skill.” Yeah, I’m not trying to take that away from anybody. That skill is valuable. Whatever that skill may be, it’s valuable. But just because you know how to get a result from it, one particular skill does not make you a business owner, it does not make it a profitable business for you. Right?

So you got to think about how are you going to make money from whatever it is you choose to do? Is doing that thing, being the mechanic or the technician, is that actually going to make you the money or is selling that service and the result that that service produces going to make you the money? If that’s the case, then why don’t you focus on learning how to sell it and find people that are already good at doing it, fulfilling it, to do it for you right.

That’s what we’re trying to get at, guys, and Jordan understands that. That’s why Jordan’s business is cranking, it’s just kicking ass. Okay.

Any Black Friday Sales For Done For You Services Or Training?

Luis, he’s a new Mastermind member. “Hey guys, any Black Friday sales?” By the way, welcome, Luis. “Any Black Friday sales for Done For You services or training?” Yeah. Isn’t that with the GMB stuff was the pre-Black Friday sale?

Marco: It’s the pre. We will have something. Something’s coming your way and it’s gonna be good. Trust me. It’s not Black Friday yet, dude. But we will have something. It’ll be big. We control MGYB now. As Bradley mentioned, it’s ours. Semantic Mastery is our own store. So we’ve got some really good stuff coming your way.

Luis, I will be talking to you on Monday, as a matter of, fact. It’s his onboarding call. Again, I’m sorry, all these Mastermind questions keep coming up or Mastermind people. As part of the onboarding process, we give people a half hour call just to get them pointed in the right direction, to see where they’re going, where they want to be. So we ask questions, we try to provide guidance. I just happened to get Luis.

Guys, you can’t ask for who you want. You’re going to get whoever is up on the calendar, because we rotate since there’s five of us. But whoever you get, you’re going to get the direction that you need and you’re going to get your questions answered so that you can get started on your way to POFU.

That’s what we want you to do. We want you to get started getting to that place where you’re going to be and say, “Okay. Now I don’t have to deal with shitty clients. I don’t have to deal with shitty people. I am at a place where I can go into any negotiation from a position of power. I know what I’m worth. If this guy gives me any flack, I’m gonna have to say ‘Fuck you. I’m gonna go to your competitor and charge them half price just because I feel like it, because I don’t need you.‘” That’s what we want you to be.

Bradley: There you go so. Yes, Black Friday is this Friday. So, yeah, there will be some other specials. I don’t usually get involved with what promotions we’re doing, guys, so I couldn’t answer that. But I’m glad Marco said, yeah, we do have something coming Friday.

Should You Use Only The Main Keyword Phrase Or Should You Diversify Them When Building Links To All Assets?

Jay Turner. What’s up, Jay? He says, “I’ve been able to get my client ranked in the 3-pack for the second most trafficked keyword phrase with an RYS stack. High five, Marco.”

Marco: High five, dude.

Bradley: “But now I want to take on the main and most competitive keyword. I’m adding a silo of content to the RYS stack targeting the main keyword. So far so good. My question is when embarking on link building to all assets, like RYS, Syndication Network, GMB website, et cetera, should I use only the main keyword phrase or must I diversify the keyword phrases?”

Jay, diversify. What I recommend you do is go pool your … You should have probably already done keyword research anyways, so if you’re gonna be siloing, you should have your keyword themes relatively tight for the silos anyways. So make sure that if you’re gonna be direct targeting link building on a silo basis, that you’re only using a set of keywords that fall within that particular silo or keyword theme. Right? Does that make sense?

Let me take this down to a local level because what I wanna explain is, guys, when you’re doing a ton of like spam link building and such to power up tier one entities, which would be like drive stacks, press release, organization pages, syndication networks, even citations, you don’t want to hit, and I’m gonna say local because that’s primarily what I work on, and I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about here anyways. You said client ranks, so it’s likely it’s locally You said 3-pack. Right?

So you don’t wanna use the keywords with the location modifiers. You can use a very small percentage of your overall keywords that you’re gonna add to the anchor text or the link building that you’re gonna be either doing or buying a package or whatever. You can have a very, very small percentage with location modifiers, but I would keep that to an absolute bare minimum. Because it’s more about pushing the theme, the keyword theme, not the location, or the geographic theme, if that makes sense, it’s not about pushing location relevancy.

Because think about it, the further you move away from a local business the more broader the market segment is. In other words, you don’t wanna be targeting keywords or link building to tier 1 assets all the way down to the local level, including local location modifier, because it’s, remember your link building to tier one assets is two hops away from your target which would be your GMB asset or your primary website, the client’s website, or whatever, the further you get away from the ultimate target, the ultimate destination, the broader your keyword set should be, the broader the theme of the keyword set.

That’s why I say I don’t like to include local modifiers and anchor text when I’m building links to tier one assets. Instead I use higher or market-level keywords, broader market keywords. What do I mean by that? Instead of water heater repair Fairfax Virginia or Fairfax VA as a keyword that I would use as an anchor, it would be water heater repair and plumbing and plumbing repair and plumbing service, if that makes sense. I’d lose the local modifier and use more broader market-level keywords. Okay.

Also, you don’t wanna do entirely 100% on anchor text links, even with a diverse set of keywords. You wanna also include naked URLs and some generics. You can even use some brand terms at that point. It’s a little bit odd to use brand terms at tier two links because that’s again two steps away from your target URL. But it does make sense if you’re link building to, for example, if it’s a tier one branded property it can make sense to also include the brand name in some of those anchor text too. Right? I would just use those sparingly as well. It’s more about the keyword relevancy at that point in naked URLs, which is just pushing link equity to those tier one assets regardless of anchor text.

Marco, do you wanna comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, thanks, Bradley. What I would recommend is reach out to Dedia. We have a Dedia, he knows exactly what to do with your RYS stack to get the most out of it.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: If needed, then get our keyword research gig because we will come up with thousands upon thousands of keyword targets for you to either add relevance or to push, we provide what’s called buoyancy. “Buoyancy,” that’s one of the words that I have difficulty with. But we help push up the main keyword by providing relevance throughout the keyword silo. We give you all that with the keyword research.

Then, all you do is turn that over to Dedia and say, “Here, this is the folder that I’ve created, this is the keyword that I’m targeting, have at it.” Dedia has been with us long enough that he just knows, okay, this is what I need to do. He’ll blast it. He’ll hammer that RYS stack so that it produces.

Bradley: That’s right. You don’t have to worry about all those ratios and stuff, Jay. I know. I mean, honestly, I don’t worry about any of that stuff anymore because I don’t ever do any of that stuff anymore. If I need it, I just contact Dedia, exactly what Marco said, and I just say, “Hey, this is what I got. This is what I’m trying to accomplish. Make it happen,” and he does it.

Honestly, guys, that’s what I’m talking about. Jay, again, I don’t wanna get back on this pitch again, but if you have your own tools and you’re running your own link building tools and stuff like that, that’s great, if you’re efficient and all that. But if you’re not, which I am not, I have no desire to run those tools, just let the expert do it and Dedia has an absolute ninja. He’s an expert, a link building expert, so that’s why I just turned it over to him, defer to him anytime I have something that I need to spam to push additional link equity to. I just contact him say, “This what I got is what I need you do, make it happen,” and he does it. All right.

Jay vouches for the GMB auto poster. He says, “It’s great and Shripad does great work. He is very responsive in Support. I can attest to that too, not just because it’s me, but every time there’s an issue a little support bubble on the bottom right corner of the auto poster, you can just contact Support through there and he’s very, very responsive.”

Would You Recommend Using One Website For Multiple GMB Locations?

Abe says, “Also, I would like to know about using one website for multiple GMB locations. Is this recommended and possible?” It can be. You can just create separate location pages. So each location each, GMB locations should have its own dedicated page on the website and that’s the URL that you would submit as the website URL in the Google My Business profile. Does that make sense?

So instead of just using the home root domain, so the home page of the website for that brand across all different GMB assets, create a location specific page on that domain and then use that URL as that landing page URL as the website in GMB. It’s perfectly fine to do that, guys. But what you want is, if it’s the same brand, you can share the same brand name across all GMB locations. That’s fine. But you want a unique URL and a unique phone number and a unique address, if possible. Okay.

Strange NAP issues occur if you have two or more of the data points, the primary data points in a citation or NAP, which would be name, address, phone number, and also website URL. If you have two or more common data points among multiple locations, that’s going to cause NAP issues, which is going to make it very difficult to rank. You can have one common data point, typically the business name, because it’s a brand that can be used across multiple GMBs as long as the other primary data points are unique, physical address, phone number, website address. Does that make sense? So, yes, it’s possible.

Now one other thing I would mention is go back through, Abe, watch some of our previous Hump Day Hangouts. We’ll talk about the difference between using location pages, which would be pages on the root domain, or using location-specific sub-domains, which are separate WordPress installations, but there’s a reason to do, that’s to help mitigate risk, potential losing all of your assets if you were to catch a penalty. Again, we just talked about this last week, go back and watch the replay from last week and I’m pretty sure we talked about that extensively, about the benefit of using sub-domains over sub-folders or sub-directories. That’s pretty much the same thing I’m talking about here.

“Where’s the GMB auto poster?” John, just posting the Mastermind, we’ll get to the link.

Marco: I posted the link higher up.

Bradley: Yeah. I just didn’t have it. Thank you, Marco. Nestor says, Hey, I got to go guys. I got to wrap this up. So, anyways, and there’s Rob with the yearly discount for the GMB agency offer. That’s the enterprise account level or subscription level, which is 200 posts per month-, or excuse me 500 posts per month capacity. If you buy it on a monthly basis, subscribe month to month, it’s $200. If you buy the yearly license … It’s $200 per month, excuse me. If you buy the yearly license, it’s 1,000 bucks, divided by 12, comes out to be $84 dollars or $83 per month. So it’s a hell of a lot cheaper that way.

By the way, if you’re scheduling out 31 posts, which there’s a post scheduling feature, which is amazing in the GMB auto poster, so you can schedule out one post a day or however many you want. Let’s just say you’re doing one post a day, you could do 31 days. Then, there’s a republish option to where it can republish the post based upon the interval that you set. For example, if you set every 31 days, you can publish, you can schedule out 31 posts and then have them republish 31 days later, each post thereafter. Right? Does that make sense?

So day one and then day 32, that post publishes again. Day two and day 33, that post publishes again. Does that make sense? That way you can set up all of your posting and in an automated fashion. Well, with 500 posts per month, if you were to actually fill out or post one per day for each location, you can essentially put 16 locations in one enterprise account. Sixteen times 31 comes out to be 496, so you get 496 posts. Essentially, you can serve 16 locations, 100% one post per day with a single enterprise account. Does that make sense?

That’s how I’m clustering my sites right now. I gave you a little insight on that.

Marco: Yeah. I mean, it’s an awesome deal because it saves so much money and then the auto poster just saves so much time and effort. Once your VAs get proficient with going in there and just scheduling and putting everything up, it just saves you a ton of time of money. So you’ll make the money back that you invest in this just by the time you’re gonna save with your VAs, or even if you try to do it on your own, which you shouldn’t be doing.

Bradley: Yeah. Just so you guys are aware, for clients, I have a VA that goes in and manually posts for all the clients. I do that for a reason because every post is 100% unique that way. She still has content templates, but she goes in and she puts in a new image every time, and the content templates she uses, there’s tokens that she swaps out with different keywords and such. The target URLs are always being recycled to whatever we’re linking to from the GMB post and all that. So they become unique for clients.

I pay my VA on a per post basis. So I pay her, for every post that she publishes she gets paid. It varies between $3.50 to $5 per post. But I charge my clients $10 to $15 per post, depending on what the volume is. So my point is, I make money on that even though she’s manually posting.

However, for lead gen assets, guys, once again, just like I was telling … Shit, who was I telling earlier? Michael. I was telling Michael earlier not to worry about syndication networks for lead gen assets because you wanna reduce expenses. Well, I don’t want to pay a VA to manually post to lead gen assets because that’s an additional expense when I can pay for-, or subscribe to the auto poster, schedule all the posts.

Do I do all these guys? Hell, no. I’ve trained a VA to go in and set up or schedule all the posts within the GMB auto poster and then schedule them to republish. So that, literally, I can pay a VA for three or four hours to schedule out, however long it takes them, to schedule all those posts out. Then, it’s done and those GMB assets will continually update posts because of the auto poster and I’m not paying anymore other than for the auto poster subscription. Does that make sense? So it’s a hell of a lot more efficient with money too. Right? It’s more cost-effective. Okay.

Nestor says … And I’m so over, we got to get out of here. Nestor says, “Hey guys, how about webs 2.0 example mybrand.wordpress.com point to my GMB property three links as a press release?” Okay. First of all, I’m not familiar with their example. I know that’s kind of a competitor that does, you know, they have their own store and blah blah blah. I’m not real familiar with what they teach or what they say, so I can’t really speak on that.

I’m not quite sure I understand, in the wording of your question, what you mean by mybrand.wordPress. I understand WordPress.com, that’s fine. That’s a brand identity property that you can create on the WordPress.com site, kind of like what I showed earlier. But, yeah, that’s normal. That goes into Syndication Network, right? You try to get your brand name as a sub-domain blah blah blah. That’s pretty standard.

But, “point to GMB property three links as a press release,” I’m not sure what that means. Can you point to a GMB property from your WordPress.com site? Sure. Can you also use press releases to link to that WordPress.com site? Sure. You can also link to your GMB.

I’m doing a press releases, Local PR Pro method is what I use and, as standard operating procedure, I published a press releases with every GMB asset, it gets created. Usually, my preferred method is to link from the first press release to the GMB, the Google Maps share URL, to the Google the GMB website URL, and to the GMB the first post URL. We teach that at Local Lease Pro and that’s just essentially my method. So I’m going direct from the press releases to the Google assets. Okay.

Yeah. Guys, there’s a thousand ways to skin a cat, right? So our method isn’t the be-all end-all. It’s just our method works for what we want it to work for and that’s what we teach. Other people have other methods that may very well work as good as ours. I’m not trying to say that ours is better than anybody else’s. I’m just telling you what we teach, I don’t know what they teach. I’m sorry. It’s likely that that would work too.

Will says, “Bradley, speaking about syndication networks, I finally figured out how to syndicate to Medium.com. I’ve been testing it for a while with a few posts now and it works well to syndicate your WordPress post with images and YouTube video embeds, and from there, you could syndicate to your tier two, if you’d like. I’ll send you an update to support@semanticmastery.”

Thanks, Will. That’s awesome. In fact, Will, if you would, I mean, if you’re cool with it, you can even send the update right in the Mastermind community so that everybody else could benefit from it. If not, send it to me and I’ll update everybody in the Mastermind, and Syndication Academy for that matter, once I see it. Thank you for that, Will.

Okay. “Link to pre-Black Friday deals, please.” Yeah. Luis, just contact us at Support.

That’s it. Okay, guys, we’re way over. We got all questions answered, though.

Marco: That was a good one.

Bradley: Thanks, Marco, for hanging out, man, I appreciate it.

Marco: Marathon. All right, dude.

Bradley: All right, everybody. Mastermind webinar tomorrow. Be there or be square. See y'all.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 210 published first on your-t1-blog-url