In episode 137 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked where one can get double verified Gmail accounts.
The exact question was:
Can you suggest a place to get double verified gmail accounts. I cannot seem to find a source on Fiverr that I once used.
Posted by randfish
Getting readers on board with your ideas isn't the only way to achieve content success. Sometimes, stirring up a little controversy and earning a few rivals can work incredibly well — but there's certainly a right and a wrong way to do it. Rand details how to use the power of making enemies work to your advantage in today's Whiteboard Friday.
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Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today, we're going to chat about something a little interesting — how content can succeed by making enemies. I know you're thinking to yourself, "Wait a minute, I thought my job was to make friends with my content." Yes, and one of the best ways to make close friends is to make enemies too.
So, in my opinion, I think that companies and businesses, programs, organizations of all kinds, efforts of all kinds tend to do really well when they get people on their side. So if I'm trying to create a movement or I'm trying to get people to believe in what I'm doing, I need to have positions, data, stories, and content that can bring people to my site. One of the best ways to do that is actually to think about it in opposition to something else, basically try and figure out how you can earn some enemies.
I'll give you a few examples, because I think that will help add some context here. I did a little bit of research. My share data is from BuzzSumo, and my link data here is from Ahrefs. But for example, this piece called "There Are Now Twice as Many Solar Jobs as Coal Jobs in the US," this is essentially just data-driven content, but it clearly makes friends and enemies. It makes enemies with sort of this classic, old-school Americana belief set around how important coal jobs are, and it creates, through the enemy that it builds around that, simply by sharing data, it also creates allies, people who are on the side of this story, who want to share it and amplify it and have it reach its potential and reach more people.
Same is true here. So this is a story called "Yoga Is a Good Alternative to Physical Therapy." Clearly, it did extremely well, tens of thousands of shares and thousands of links, lots of ranking keywords for it. But it creates some enemies. Physical therapists are not going to be thrilled that this is the case. Despite the research behind it, this is frustrating for many of those folks. So you've created friends, allies, people who are yoga practitioners and yoga instructors. You've also created enemies, potentially those folks who don't believe that this might be the case despite what the research might show.
Third one, "The 50 Most Powerful Public Relations Firms in America," I think this was actually from The Observer. So they're writing in the UK, but they managed to rank for lots and lots of keywords around "best PR firms" and all those sorts of things. They have thousands of shares, thousands of links. I mean 11,000 links, that's darn impressive for a story of this nature. And they've created enemies. They've created enemies of all the people who are not in the 50 most powerful, who feel that they should be, and they've created allies of the people who are in there. They've also created some allies and enemies deeper inside the story, which you can check out.
"Replace Your Lawn with These Superior Alternatives," well, guess what? You have now created some enemies in the lawn care world and in the lawn supply world and in the passionate communities, very passionate communities, especially here in the United States, around people who sort of believe that homes should have lawns and nothing else, grass lawns in this case. This piece didn't do that well in terms of shares, but did phenomenally well in terms of links. This was on Lifehacker, and it ranks for all sorts of things, 11,000+ links.
So you can see that these might not be things that you naturally think of as earning enemies. But when you're creating content, if you can go through this exercise, I have this rule, that I've talked about many times over the years, for content success, especially content amplification success. That is before you ever create something, before you brainstorm the idea, come up with the title, come up with the content, before you do that, ask yourself: Who will help amplify this and why? Why will they help?
One of the great things about framing things in terms of who are my allies, the people on my side, and who are the enemies I'm going to create is that the "who" becomes much more clear. The people who support your ideas, your ethics, or your position, your logic, your data and want to help amplify that, those are people who are potential amplifiers. The people, the detractors, the enemies that you're going to build help you often to identify that group.
The "why" becomes much more clear too. The existence of that common enemy, the chance to show that you have support and beliefs in people, that's a powerful catalyst for that amplification, for the behavior you're attempting to drive in your community and your content consumers. I've found that thinking about it this way often gets content creators and SEOs in the right frame of mind to build stuff that can do really well.
A few dos and don'ts if you're pursuing this path of content generation and ideation. Do back up as much as you can with facts and data, not just opinion. That should be relatively obvious, but it can be dangerous in this kind of world, as you go down this path, to not do that.
I do suggest that you try and convey a world view, not necessarily if you're thinking on the political spectrum of like from all the way left to all the way right or those kinds of things. I think it's okay to convey a world view around it, but I would urge you to provide multiple angles of appeal.
So if you're saying, "Hey, you should replace your lawn with these superior alternatives," don't make it purely that it's about conservation and ecological health. You can also make it about financial responsibility. You can also make it about the ease with which you can care for these lawns versus other ones. So now it becomes something that appeals across a broader range of the spectrum.
Same thing with something like solar jobs versus coal jobs. If you can get it to be economically focused and you can give it a capitalist bent, you can potentially appeal to multiple ends of the ideological spectrum with that world view.
Third, I would urge you to get inputs from notable folks before you create and publish this content, especially if the issue that you're talking about is going to be culturally or socially or politically charged. Some of these fit into that. Yoga probably not so much, but potentially the solar jobs/coal jobs one, that might be something to run the actual content that you've created by some folks who are in the energy space so that they can help you along those lines, potentially the energy and the political space if you can.
Some don'ts. I do not urge you and I'm not suggesting that you should create provocative content purely to be provocative. Instead, I'm urging you to think about the content that you create and how you angle it using this framing of mind rather than saying, "Okay, what could we say that would really piss people off?" That's not what I'm urging you to do. I'm urging you to say, "How can we take things that we already have, beliefs and positions, data, stories, whatever content and how do we angle them in such a way that we think about who are the enemies, who are the allies, how do we get that buy-in, how do we get that amplification?"
Second, I would not choose enemies or positions that you can't defend against. So, for example, if you were considering a path that you think might get you into a world of litigious danger, you should probably stay away from that. Likewise, if your positions are relatively indefensible and you've talked to some folks in the field and done the dues and they're like, "I don't know about that," you might not want to pursue it.
Third, do not give up if your first attempts in this sort of framing don't work. You should expect that you will have to, just like any other form of content, practice, iterate, and do this multiple times before you have success.
Don't be unprofessional when you do this type of content. It can be a little bit tempting when you're framing things in terms of, "How do I make enemies out of this?" to get on the attack. That is not necessary. I think that actually content that builds enemies does so even better when it does it from a non-attack vector mode.
Don't forget that if you're getting some Haterade for the content you create, a lot of people when they start drinking the Haterade online, they run. They think, "Okay, we've done something wrong." That's actually not the case. In my experience, that means you're doing something right. You're building something special. People don't tend to fight against and argue against ideas and people and organizations for no reason. They do so because they're a threat.
If you've created a threat to your enemies, you have also generally created something special for your allies and the people on your side. That means you're doing something right. In Moz's early days, I can tell you, back when we were called SEOmoz, for years and years and years we got all sorts of hate, and it was actually a pretty good sign that we were doing something right, that we were building something special.
So I look forward to your comments. I'd love to see any examples of stuff that you have as well, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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In episode 136 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked how the rank and rent method can be used to rank videos for a sales keynote speaker.
The exact question was:
Let’s remove the spot from Benner: #wwsmd – what would Semantic Mastery do? lol²
Question: I know, own my assets. That’s my plan for 2017 and on.
But on theory is easier then in pratic.
I have now a client – sales keynote speaker – that wants his videos ranked.I know that I should add his videos on some of my channels, rank & rent, but, how should be the steps to it?
1 – build a generic channel, with a generic “”sales speaker”” brand (or maybe a channel about speakers), optimize channel;
2 – build a playlist focused on one of his keywords, optimize playlist and its videos;
3 – add his main vídeo + more LSI kw videos to help it rank, optimized;
4 – all the IFTTT + links and tricks from Semantic MasteyMy concern is that I can’t rank in this case “”generic videos””, must be his own videos. So should I build a big generic channel to rank another speakers from other knowledge areas OR just a sales speaker channel, only for him, and rent it?
I would preffer to have many playlists and rank for other speakers to reuse the IFTTT rings attached to it.Any tips? Good opportunity for me now, thanks for the knowledge guys!
Posted by ronell-smith
MozCon 2013 (left to right): Greg Gifford, Nathan Bylof, Nathan Hammer, Susan Wenograd, and myself
I remember my first MozCon like it was yesterday.
It’s the place where I would hear the quote that would forever change the arc of my career.
“The world is freaking complicated, so let me start with everything I don’t know,” said Google’s Avinash Kaushik, during the Q&A, after speaking at MozCon 2013. “Nine hundred years from now, I will fix what’s broken today. …Get good at what you do.”
Though I didn’t know it at the the time, those were words I needed to hear, and that would lead me to make some career decisions I desperately needed to make. Decisions I never would have made if I hadn’t chosen to attend MozCon, the Super Bowl of marketing events (in my opinion).
Walking into the large (gigantic) room for the first time felt like being on the Space Mountain ride at Disneyland. I hurriedly raced to the front to find a seat so I could take in all of the action.
Once settled in, I sat back and enjoyed the music as lights danced along the walls.
Who wouldn’t want to be here? I thought.
Once the show started and Rand walked out, I was immediately sold: The decision to attend MozCon was the right one. By the end of the show, I would be saying it was one of the best career decisions I could have made.
But I almost missed it.
I discovered MozCon like most of you: while reading the Moz blog, which I had been perusing since 2010, when I started building a website for an online, members-only newsletter.
One of my friends, an executive at a large company, had recently shared with me that online marketing was blistering hot.
“If you’re focusing your energy anywhere else, Ronell, you’re making a mistake,” he said. “We just hired a digital marketing manager, and we’re paying her more than $90,000.”
Those words served as an imprimatur for me to eagerly study and read SEO blogs and set up Twitter lists to follow prominent SEO authors.
Learning SEO was far less fun than applying it to the website I was in the process of helping to build.
In the years that followed, I continued reading the blog while making steps to meet members of the community, both locally and online.
One of the first people I met in the Moz SEO community was Greg Gifford, who agreed to meet me for lunch after I reached out to him via DM on Twitter.
He mentioned MozCon, which at the time wasn’t on my radar. (As a bonus, he said if I attended, he’d introduce me to Ruth Burr, who I’d been following on Twitter, and was a hyooge fan of.)
I started doing some investigating, wondering if it was an event I should invest in.
Also, during this same period, I was getting my content strategy sea legs and had reached out to Jon Colman, who was nice enough to mentor me. He also recommended that I attend MozCon, not the least because content strategy and UX superstar Karen McGrane was speaking.
I was officially sold.
That night, I put a plan into action:
Then I used to following weeks to devise a plan to help me get everything I could out of the show.
Honestly, I didn’t expect to be blow away by MozCon.
For seven of the 10 previous years, I edited a magazine that helped finance a trade show that hosted tens of thousands of people, from all over the world.
Nothing could top that, I thought. I was wrong.
The show, the lights, the people — and the single-track focus — blew me away. Right away.
I remember Richard Baxter was the first speaker up that first morning.
By the time he was done sharing strategies for effective outreach, I was thinking, “I’ve already recouped my expense. I don’t plan to ever miss this show again.”
And I haven’t.
So important did MozCon become to me after that first show, that I began to plan summer travel around it.
How could one event become that important?
Five key reasons:
I’ll explore each in detail since I think they each help make my point about the value of MozCon. (Also, if you haven’t read it already, check out Rand’s post, The Case For & Against Attending Marketing Conferences, which also touches on the value of these events.)
You expect me to say the content you’ll be privy to at MozCon is the best you’ll hear anywhere.
Yeah, but…
The show hand-picks only the best speakers. But these same speakers present elsewhere, too, right?
What I mean by "content" is that the information you glean holistically from the show can help marketers from all areas of the business better do their work.
For example, when I came to my first MozCon, I had a handful of clients who’d reached out to me for PR, media relations, branding, and content work.
But I was starting to get calls and emails for this thing called “content marketing,” of which I was only vaguely familiar.
The information I learned from the speakers (and the informal conversations between speakers and after the show), made it possible for me to take on content marketing clients and, six months later, head content marketing for one of the most successful digital strategy agencies in Dallas/Fort Worth.
There really is something for everyone at MozCon.
Most of the folks I talk to on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis are folks I met at one of the last four MozCons.
For example, I met Susan E. Wenograd at MozCon 2013, where we shared a seat next to one another for the entire event. She’s been one of my closest friends ever since.
MozCon 2015: I'm chastising Damon Gochneaur for trying to sell me some links — I'm kidding, Google.
The folks seated beside you or roaming the halls during the event are some of the sharpest and most accomplished you’ll meet anywhere.
They are also some of the most helpful and genuine.
I felt this during my first event; I learned the truth of this sentiment in the weeks, months, and years that have followed.
Whether you’re as green as I was, or an advanced T-shaped marketer with a decade of experience behind you, the event will be fun, exciting, and full of new tips, tactics, and strategies you can immediately put to use.
I know most people make decisions about attending events based on the cost and the known value — that is, based on previous similar events, how much they are likely to earn, either in a new job, new work, or additional responsibilities.
That’s the wrong way to look at MozCon, or any event.
Let’s keep it real for a moment: No matter who you are, where you work, what you do, or how much you enjoy your work, you’re are ALWAYS in the process of getting fired or (hopefully) changing jobs.
You should (must) be attending events to keep yourself relevant, visible, and on top of your game, whether that’s in paid media, content, social media, SEO, email marketing, etc.
That’s why the “Is it worth it?” argument is not beneficial at all.
I cannot tell you how many times, over the last four years, when I’ve been stuck on a content strategy, SEO or web design issue and been able to reach out to someone I would never have met were it not for MozCon.
For example, every time I share the benefits of Paid Social with a local business owner, I feel I should cut Kane Jamison (met at MozCon 2014) a check.
So, go to MozCon, not because you can see the tangible benefits (you cannot know those); go to MozCon because your career and your personal development will be nourished by it far beyond any financial reward.
Now you know how I feel and what I’ve gleaned from MozCon, you’re probably saying, “Yeah, but how can I be certain to get the most out of the event?”
I’m glad you asked.
First, start following and interacting with Twitter and Facebook groups to find folks attending MozCon.
Dive in and ask questions, answer questions, or set up a get-together during the event.
Next, during the event, follow the #mozcon Twitter hashtag, making note of folks who are tweeting info from the event. Pay close attention to not simply the info, but also what they are gleaning and how they plan to use the event for their work.
If you find a few folks sharing info germane to your work or experiences, it wouldn’t hurt to retweet them and, maybe later during the show, send a group text asking to get together during the pub crawl or maybe join up for breakfast.
Then, once the show is over, continue to follow folks on social media, in addition to reading (and leaving comments on) their blogs, sending them “Great meeting you. Let’s stay in touch” emails, and looking for other opportunities to stay in their orbit, including meeting up at future events.
Many of the folks I initially met at MozCon have become friends I see throughout the year at other events.
But, wait!
I mentioned nothing about how to get the most out of the event itself.
Well, I have a different philosophy than most folks: Instead of writing copious notes and trying to capture every word from each speaker, I think of and jot down a theme for each talk while the speaker is still presenting. Along with that theme, I’ll include some notes that encapsulate the main nuggets of the talk and that will help me remember it later.
For example, Dr. Pete’s 2016 talk, You Can't Type a Concept: Why Keywords Still Matter, spurred me to redouble my focus (and my learning with regard to content and SEO) on search intent, on-page SEO, and knowing the audience’s needs as well as possible.
Then, once the show is over, I create a theme to encapsulate the entire event by asking myself three questions:
For the 2013 show, my answers were…
After hearing Avinash’s quote, I had the theme in my head, for me and for the handful of brands I was consulting at the time: “You won’t win by running the competition’s race; make them chase you.”
MozCon 2013: Avinash Kaushik of Google
This meant I helped them think beyond content, social media, and SEO, and instead had them focus on creating the best content experience possible, which would help them more easily accomplish their goals.
I’ve repeated the process each year since, including in 2016, when I doubled-down on Featured Snippets after seeing Taking the Top Spot: How to Earn More Featured Snippets, by Rob Bucci.
You can do the same.
It all begins with attending the show and being willing to step outside your comfort zone.
What say you?
Are you MozCon bound?
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
In episode 136 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked about the best strategy for a domain with a city name to rank in a state wide search.
The exact question was:
Appreciate you and the fact that you put out exceptional quality products. I am a testimony if You follow what you teach You will make money. Period!
Now, I have a question. My client has an exact match domain that has the name of the city in it. They now want to go state wide with their services and purchased a generic niche domain.
What is the best way for me to help them with ranking that domain…
is it better to clone the site and have all of that content including articles duplicated on new site and do a 301 redirect from old site to new?
Or just rewrite all of the content for new site and keep them both?
#WWBD (what would benner do?) LOL!
In episode 136 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked if the strategies or methods being offered in Serp Space would work for ranking Amazon products.
The exact question was:
Are the strategies you teach, and more importantly in my case the strategies and methods offered in Serpspace, such syndication networks, social signals, and other programs offered as part of Organic SEO usable with Amazon products? I have an Amazon product that I want to rank on page one in its very competitive niche, and hope that using SEO to do so, through social signals, syndication, link building, etc etc can build brand awareness and drive potential target buyers to the listing.
On this episode we talk about how to get more prospects offering you business.
Ask your next Marketing question here: hdho.semanticmastery.com
Music: Springsight – Fight ‘til the End
All rights reserved
Posted by lkolowich
You just ran what you thought was a really promising conversion test. In an effort to raise the number of visitors that convert into demo requests on your product pages, you test an attractive new redesign on one of your pages using a good ol’ A/B test. Half of the people who visit that page see the original product page design, and half see the new, attractive design.
You run the test for an entire month, and as you expected, conversions are up — from 2% to 10%. Boy, do you feel great! You take these results to your boss and advise that, based on your findings, all product pages should be moved over to your redesign. She gives you the go-ahead.
But when you roll out the new design, you notice the number of demo requests goes down. You wonder if it’s seasonality, so you wait a few more months. That’s when you start to notice MRR is decreasing, too. What gives?
Turns out, you didn’t test that page long enough for results to be statistically significant. Because that product page only saw 50 views per day, you would’ve needed to wait until over 150,000 people viewed the page before you could achieve a 95% confidence level — which would take over eight years to accomplish. Because you failed to calculate those numbers correctly, your company is losing business.
Miscalculating sample size is just one of the many CRO mistakes marketers make in the CRO space. It’s easy for marketers to trick themselves into thinking they’re improving their marketing, when in fact, they’re leading their business down a dangerous path by basing tests on incomplete research, small sample sizes, and so on.
But remember: The primary goal of CRO is to find the truth. Basing a critical decision on faulty assumptions and tests lacking statistical significance won’t get you there.
To help save you time and overcome that steep learning curve, here are some of the most common mistakes marketers make with conversion rate optimization. As you test and tweak and fine-tune your marketing, keep these mistakes in mind, and keep learning.
Equating A/B testing with CRO is like calling a square a rectangle. While A/B testing is a type of CRO, it’s just one tool of many. A/B testing only covers testing a single variable against another to see which performs better, while CRO includes all manner of testing methodologies, all with the goal of leading your website visitors to take a desired action.
If you think you’re "doing CRO" just by A/B testing everything, you’re not being very smart about your testing. There are plenty of occasions where A/B testing isn’t helpful at all — for example, if your sample size isn’t large enough to collect the proper amount of data. Does the webpage you want to test get only a few hundred visits per month? Then it could take months to round up enough traffic to achieve statistical significance.
If you A/B test a page with low traffic and then decide six weeks down the line that you want to stop the test, then that’s your prerogative — but your test results won’t be based on anything scientific.
A/B testing is a great place to start with your CRO education, but it’s important to educate yourself on many different testing methodologies so you aren’t restricting yourself. For example, if you want to see a major lift in conversions on a webpage in only a few weeks, try making multiple, radical changes instead of testing one variable at a time. Take Weather.com, for example: They changed many different variables on one of their landing pages all at once, including the page design, headline, navigation, and more. The result? A whopping 225% increase in conversions.
When you read that line about the 225% lift in conversions on Weather.com, did you wonder what I meant by "conversions?"
If you did, then you’re thinking like a CRO.
Conversion rates can measure any number of things: purchases, leads, prospects, subscribers, users — it all depends on the goal of the page. Just saying “we saw a huge increase in conversions” doesn’t mean much if you don’t provide people with what the conversion means. In the case of Weather.com, I was referring specifically to trial subscriptions: Weather.com saw a 225% increase in trial subscriptions on that page. Now the meaning of that conversion rate increase is a lot more clear.
But even stating the metric isn’t telling the whole story. When exactly was that test run? Different days of the week and of the month can yield very different conversion rates.
For that reason, even if your test achieves 98% significance after three days, you still need to run that test for the rest of the full week because of how different conversion rate can be on different days. Same goes for months: Don’t run a test during the holiday-heavy month of December and expect the results to be the same as if you’d run it for the month of March. Seasonality will affect your conversion rate.
Other things that can have a major impact on conversion rate? Device type is one. Visitors might be willing to fill out that longer form on desktop, but are mobile visitors converting at the same rate? Better investigate. Channel is another: Be wary of reporting “average” conversion rates. If some channels have much higher conversion rates than others, you should consider treating the channels differently.
Finally, remember that conversion rate isn’t the most important metric for your business. It’s important that your conversions are leading to revenue for the company. If you made your product free, I’ll bet your conversion rates would skyrocket — but you wouldn’t be making any money, would you? Conversion rate doesn’t always tell you whether your business is doing better than it was. Be careful that you aren’t thinking of conversions in a vacuum so you don’t steer off-course.
One of the biggest mistakes I made when I first started learning CRO was thinking I could rely on what I remembered from my college statistics courses to run conversion tests. Just because you’re running experiments does not make you a scientist.
Statistics is the backbone of CRO, and if you don’t understand it inside and out, then you won’t be able to run proper tests and could seriously derail your marketing efforts.
What if you stop your test too early because you didn’t wait to achieve 98% statistical significance? After all, isn’t 90% good enough?
No, and here’s why: Think of statistical significance like placing a bet. Are you really willing to bet on 90% odds on your test results? Running a test to 90% significance and then declaring a winner is like saying, "I'm 90% sure this is the right design and I'm willing to bet everything on it.” It’s just not good enough.
If you’re in need of a statistics refresh, don’t panic. It’ll take discipline and practice, but it’ll make you into a much better marketer — and it’ll make your testing methodology much, much tighter. Start by reading this Moz post by Craig Bradford, which covers sample size, statistical significance, confidence intervals, and percentage change.
Just because something is doing well doesn’t mean you should just leave it be. Often, it’s these marketing assets that have the highest potential to perform even better when optimized. Some of our biggest CRO wins here at HubSpot have come from assets that were already performing well.
I’ll give you two examples.
The first comes from a project run by Pam Vaughan on HubSpot’s web strategy team, called “historical optimization.” The project involved updating and republishing old blog posts to generate more traffic and leads.
But this didn’t mean updating just any old blog posts; it meant updating the blog posts that were already the most influential in generating traffic and leads. In her attribution analysis, Pam made two surprising discoveries:
Why? Because these were the blog posts that had slowly built up search authority and were ranking on search engines like Google. They were generating a ton of organic traffic month after month after month.
The goal of the project, then, was to figure out: a) how to get more leads from our high-traffic but low-converting blog posts; and b) how to get more traffic to our high-converting posts. By optimizing these already high-performing posts for traffic and conversions, we more than doubled the number of monthly leads generated by the old posts we've optimized.
Another example? In the last few weeks, Nick Barrasso from our marketing acquisition team did a leads audit of our blog. He discovered that some of our best-performing blog posts for traffic were actually leading readers to some of our worst-performing offers.
To give a lead conversion lift to 50 of these high-traffic, low-converting posts, Nick conducted a test in which he replaced each post’s primary call-to-action with a call-to-action leading visitors to an offer that was most tightly aligned with the post’s topic and had the highest submission rate. After one week, these posts generated 100% more leads than average.
The bottom line is this: Don’t focus solely on optimizing marketing assets that need the most work. Many times, you’ll find that the lowest-hanging fruit are pages that are already performing well for traffic and/or leads and, when optimized even further, can result in much bigger lifts.
When it comes to CRO, process is everything. Remove your ego and assumptions from the equation, stop relying on individual tactics to optimize your marketing, and instead take a systematic approach to CRO.
Your CRO process should always start with research. In fact, conducting research should be the step you spend the most time on. Why? Because the research and analysis you do in this step will lead you to the problems — and it’s only when you know where the problems lie that you can come up with a hypothesis for overcoming them.
Remember that test I just talked about that doubled leads for 50 top HubSpot blog posts in a week? Nick didn’t just wake up one day and realize our high-traffic blog posts might be leading to low-performing offers. He discovered this only by doing hours and hours of research into our lead gen strategy from the blog.
Paddy Moogan wrote a great post on Moz on where to look for data in the research stage. What does your sales process look like, for example? Have you ever reviewed the full funnel? “Try to find where the most common drop-off points are and take a deeper dive into why,” he suggests.
Here’s an (oversimplified) overview of what a CRO process should look like:
As you go through these steps, be sure you’re recording your hypothesis, test methodology, success criteria, and analysis in a replicable way. My team at HubSpot uses the template below, which was inspired by content from Brian Balfour’s online Reforge Growth programs. We’ve created an editable version in Google Sheets here that you can copy and customize yourself.
Don’t forget the last step in the process: Conduct a follow-up experiment. What can you refine for your next test? How can you make improvements?
One of the most important pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten around CRO is this: “A test doesn’t ‘fail’ unless something breaks. You either get the result you want, or you learned something.”
It came from Sam Woods, a growth marketer, CRO, and copywriter at HubSpot, after I used the word “fail” a few too many times after months of unsuccessful tests on a single landing page.
What he taught me was a major part of the CRO mindset: Don’t give up after the first test. (Or the second, or the third.) Instead, approach every test systematically and objectively, putting aside your previous assumptions and any hope that the results would swing one way or the other.
As Peep Laja said, “Genuine CROs are always willing to change their minds.” Learn from tests that didn’t go the way you expected, use them to tweak your hypothesis, and then iterate, iterate, iterate.
I hope this list has inspired you to double down on your CRO skills and take a more systematic approach to your experiments. Mastering conversion rate optimization comes with a steep learning curve — and there’s really no cutting corners. You can save a whole lot of time (and money) by avoiding the mistakes I outlined above.
Have you ever made any of these CRO mistakes? Do you have any CRO mistakes to add to the list? Tell us about your experiences and ideas in the comments.
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Click on the video above to watch Episode 137 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.
Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.
Adam: I got some, but … okay. All right, well, there we are. Hey everybody. We are live, only one minute late. We were scrambling; not gonna lie, but Bradley got everything sorted out so here we are, and this is Hump Day Hangouts episode 137. Today is the 21st of June, so we’ll do our thing real quick and say, “Hi” to everybody, and then we will get started. So Chris, how’s it going man?
Chris: Been good. In a heat wave here in Austria.
Adam: Yeah? What do you … What kind of temperatures are you dealing with?
Chris: 34 degrees celsius-
Adam: Yikes. That’s like 90 something I think, right?
Chris: Yeah, 93 or so.
Adam: Yuck. All right. I’ll pass. I’m living in luxury, man. It’s like 75. This has been awesome. Hernan, how about yourself? You got like six feet of snow or something or what’s going on down there?
Hernan: No, doesn’t snow actually. It doesn’t actually snow in Buenos Aires, so it’s not even funny. You know?
Adam: Okay.
Hernan: Yeah, get the all humid cold, but it’s not even fun to go out and … But anyways, yeah, I’m excited to be here. I’m excited for tomorrow’s webinar for the Battleplan members so it’s gonna be a lot of fun and I’m excited to be here.
Adam: Awesome, awesome. Marco, how you doing man? It looks pretty nice there. I’m guessing the weather’s probably pretty good. Maybe.
Bradley: Maybe he’s muted.
Adam: Maybe not. All right. Well. I’m gonna go with the weather is probably pretty good but we’ll fill that in later. So Bradley, how you doing man?
Bradley: Good. I’m glad that I got it fired up at the last minute, man. It was my Chrome cache was, I guess, clogged up I guess two gigabytes of cache is enough to slow down a browser.
Adam: Imagine that.
Bradley: So I had to shut everything down, run CCleaner and then start it back up and it took longer than I expected, but we’re here, so better late than never.
Adam: Good deal. All right, well, just real quick, if you’re new to Semantic Mastery, first of all, thanks for showing up to Hump Day Hangouts. We certainly appreciate it. You should definitely check out the Battleplan. I’ll share that link shortly below and then, also if you haven’t yet, for some reason, signed up for your free account at SERP Space, head over there. We got the Done-For-You services there and also a couple free tools with more coming, stuff like Mark Up and stuff like that.
And then, before we dive into stuff I just wanted to share this. This is like Adam’s little book report minute. I’ve been taking my book reading up a notch. I’m trying to knock out a book like every week or two, and so this is “High Profit Prospecting.” Let’s see; who’s this by? Mark Hunter. So, good book so far. It’s exactly what it sounds like. If you’re someone who does outreach for customers, who, I’m guessing nearly everybody here should probably be doing that, I think it’s a good read. The big one, it’s on prospecting, obviously, and then attitude as well as getting into the specifics of how you can approach people, which is really good. I don’t come from a sales background, so it’s been a good refresher. You know, we always hear about, you know, “Okay, here’s the ABC’s of this,” but definitely good to go into that and get some more detail, so, pretty good read. I think it was like 10 bucks on Amazon, so if you’re interested in that, you should check it out.
Bradley: Awesome. That’s a really good recommendation. I haven’t read that one yet, but I’m gonna add it to my list. I’m trying to do the same thing, Adam, is read about a book every two weeks or so, and I only got 30 minutes scheduled every day to read, but I’m trying to keep to that schedule so that I actually get it done, and I’ve just finished reading, for the second time, Bill Good’s “Hot Prospects” book, so that one’s probably gonna be a good one to follow up with so I appreciate you pointing that out.
Adam: Yeah, and I’ll probably put something on the page, on the Semantic Mastery page if people are interested. If you guys are interested or if you have any questions or anything, just pop the question on this page if you’re at the event and I’ll answer that but, anyways, you guys have any announcements, anything we need to cover today?
Hernan: I think we’re good.
Bradley: I think so.
Adam: All right, let’s roll.
Bradley: All right, cool. Let’s see, before I get into-
Marco: [inaudible 00:03:52] Before you get into that-
Bradley: I’m sorry.
Marco: For you guys dealing with the heat, I just want to show you something. I just want to show you something, man. Dig that motherfuckers, dig that. 75 degrees. Beautiful weather. Come on, man.
Bradley: Tropical climate.
Marco: [crosstalk 00:04:13] Why deal with the cold? I have a little waterfall in the background, just keeping me peaceful. While you guys [crosstalk 00:04:26]
Adam: I’m beginning to think Marco is subsidized by the government, you know, to boost [crosstalk 00:04:31]-
Marco: You know, right? Ed’s trying to log in, man. He’s using my login but … So if you see two Marcos, it’s Ed.
Chris: Ed’s cool.
Bradley: Ed is one of our newer Mastermind members. He’s a real hustler. He’s been out just crushing it and getting new clients. I mean, it’s just amazing how much action that dude’s taking, so, he’s down there visiting Marco right now, and, if he can, he’ll jump on.
All right. So let’s get to questions and stuff. There’s something I do want to share in just a moment, though. Just very quickly, ‘cause I want to show you guys something. Let me zoom in on all this first. All right, cool.
So this is something … You guys should be seeing my full screen, correct?
Adam: Yeah, I got your whole desktop.
Hernan: Yep.
Chris: Okay.
Bradley: I’m gonna zoom in on this a little bit. All right, this is from Pro Rank Tracker. This is a screenshot I just took yesterday of a local video that I had done for the video production company that I do a ton of work for. They had a client, or one of their customers had been paying for SEO services for their video for about 6 months and then they allowed their subscription to lapse or to expire, I guess, and so I unlisted the video, which was in the number one position for the six or eight months, whatever it was, that it was running before their subscription expired, and once it had expired, I just went through and unlisted the video, but it had been sitting at number one for, you know, six or eight months.
So, when I unlisted the video obviously it fell out of the index for a while, and it was probably, I don’t know, three or four months had passed before they resubscribed to the service for whatever reason. I don’t know why they went so long without renewing but, whatever. They contacted the video production company and renewed their Video Boost subscription. That’s what they call it.
So I went in and just reset the video back to public instead of unlisted. However, it didn’t just appear back in number one position, and I didn’t expect it to. In fact, I even charged the company, the video production company, another setup fee, even though all I had to do was go in and unlist it. I mean, set it from unlisted to public, I still charged them the additional setup fee, which is a one-time fee for whenever I initially add a new video to a marketing campaign, and I told them, “It’s been paused for the last few months, so I’m going to have to charge you an additional setup fee.” And they said, “That’s fine.” Blah blah blah.
So I was only tracking two keywords for this one video but you can see when it did re-index, it re-indexed at position nine and position 12 or 13, respectively. What was crazy was … All I did … I put it … Sent this video through a video powerhouse blast. I did an embed blast of about 50 embeds. I did both primary and secondary embeds of only 50. And then I went in and I set up a YouTube AdWords campaign. An AdWords for video campaign using the video as the actual … So let me just explain how I did this, guys. I set up, inside of AdWords, I used in-stream video option, right? So it wasn’t a video discovery ad, it was … I just took the same video that I wanted ranked, right? And I used that URL as the in-stream video ad URL, and then the landing page link that you click on from the in-stream ad, right? That’s always the link that’s in the bottom left corner of the video when an in-stream ad is playing, that … All I did was use that YouTube URL, the same video that was the ad itself. I used that URL as the landing page URL, right? So does that make sense? So essentially an in-stream ad that when clicked will take somebody to a YouTube video, and it’s the same YouTube video.
But what I did was I set up geographic targeting, and I went into interest targeting using the in-market or ROI interest based targeting, which is called in-market targeting. Very very very powerful. I started playing with that a lot recently, and I’m getting really good results, especially for local.
So I set geo-targeting and I used interest-based targeting, the in-market, ROI targeting, and I went and I found that specific category, and this is a home services-type of business, and I selected that proper category, and I set my budget for one dollar per day, guys. One dollar per day. Now, if anybody’s been following us for long, you know that, for like the video production companies, I only charge 100 dollars per month per video to rank or per keyword to rank for them. That’s what I provide as wholesale services.
So I’m only making 100 bucks a month, but I set up a one dollar a day budget that has local IP’s with people that are in-market. Let me explain what I mean by that. Google understands now, through browsing history, recent browsing history, what people are looking for. Like, if they’re in-market, so to speak, for a particular product or service, then Google knows that because they’ve been searching buyer-type keywords, commercial intent keywords. Recently, it’s in their recent browsing history, right? And so Google places those people into a bucket that means that they’re highly likely or they’re really engaged with that particular product or service or keyword at that moment, so it’s highly likely that they’re in the market. That’s why it’s called, “in-market,” for that product or service.
So it doesn’t matter what videos they were going to look at. The people in that bucket, doesn’t matter what videos they were going to look at on YouTube. My ad can play in front of any video. A silly cat video. It doesn’t matter because they were … By Google’s own … Google has categorized them as being in-market, so they’re likely to convert.
So the reason I’m explaining this to you is because, with something so simple as setting up a one dollar a day ad and I got 10 clicks in the first day, or, no, I’m sorry. It was five clicks in the first day. I had 10 impressions, five clicks. So it was a 50% click-through rate on the video, which was interesting, but they’re all from local IP’s from people that are in-market, so that means it’s highly relevant traffic.
It’s relevant for two reasons: the geographic location, so local IP’s essentially, which will count as a local IP click to that video, plus those were in-market visitors or viewers, right? Clickers, so to speak. YouTube users. They’re in-market for that particular product or service category, anyways. So that means it’s highly relevant.
Well Google and YouTube knows that. So now the traffic that … The engagement that I just purchased from Google AdWords to that video was locally relevant and topically relevant, and it shot it direct … The very next day, it had jumped from whatever this is, nine and 13 or whatever to the number one position, and in fact, one of these keywords is now triggering the great big video. I know you guys know what I’m talking about. It doesn’t happen very often, but where the video is ranked number one and it’s freaking huge and it takes up where the maps pack would normally be.
And all I did, guys, like I said was just set up a local … I ran a 50-embed blast through video powerhouse and then I set up a local YouTube ad, and this was just yesterday. You can see that … You know, yesterday is when I took this screenshot, and it jumped, basically in 48 hours from … It went from not being indexed to being indexed at like nine and 13 for that variant, for that keyword, to being number one and also triggering that great big large video in the SERP, which is amazing, and I just wanted to point that out, guys, 'cause I know we’ve talked about that here on Hump Day Hangouts a lot, about using AdWords, because you’re buying engagement signals from … And you can specifically pinpoint where you want the engagement signals to come from, right?
You’re paying Google for engagement signals. Instead of buying views or buying fake social signals, you can buy real, organic … I say they’re organic because they’re real. They’re real click-throughs and real views from real people on real IP’s and real devices, with real browsing histories in a real location, if that makes sense, and it just works like crazy.
So any of you guys that are doing video SEO stuff, especially local, guys, this should just be a standard operating procedure for any one of your local campaigns, is set up an ad, run the targeting like I just mentioned, geographic targeting, and even if you just do a dollar a day, just until you get it ranked and then pause your ad campaign, it’ll help immensely.
So, brief little tutorial. Hopefully that was helpful. Anybody want to comment on that before we get any questions?
Chris: That was pretty amazing, Bradley.
Bradley: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. It’s quite … I mean, it’s just amazing and the fact that I saw that it triggered those big big videos, which is crazy, 'cause that’s rare that that happens. The six or eight months that it was ranked number one before I had unlisted it, it was never a big video, so it had quite an effect.
Okay, cool. Earl’s up first. He says, “Can you suggest a place to get double-verified Gmail accounts? I cannot seem to find a source on Fiverr that I once used.”
Okay. I’m going to recommend a guy that we have been using for, I’d say over a year now, but one of our Mastermind members, Beau, who’s also our moderator in the Syndication Academy Facebook group said that he’s had terrible communication experience with this dude. So, anyways, I’ve never had any problems with him. He’s always been really good about replacing any accounts, the communication’s been good, so I’m going to point it out anyways, but I just want to mention, full disclosure, that one of our members is having issues with him, so just take that into account.
Marco: Yeah, I’d-
Bradley: Go ahead.
Marco: I’d like to mention, too, that we ordered accounts and they were resold, and so-
Bradley: Okay, so don’t use them is what you’re saying.
Marco: No, I’m not saying, “Don’t.” I’m saying that, when you get them, you have to change the phone number and the email, right? The email that you used to recover the password. Switch that up right away in all, whatever accounts that you order. Because they’re a pain in the ass, which is why you should have a VA.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: Because they did get resold and so it was a whole big mess, and so, you know, we talked to him and he just gets so many orders that he’s swamped, and so I think it’s more a case of him not paying attention to what he’s doing, rather than being dishonest.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: But I wanna add that that happened to us.
Bradley: Well thanks. I appreciate that, because again, and that’s why I wanted to fully disclose what Beau had mentioned, too because like I said, I’ve never had any issues with him, but in part, the reason that Marco just said that he thinks it’s because he’s getting too many damn orders. It’s probably because I’ve recommended the dude quite a bit. He was extremely happy when I started recommending him because he was like … And maybe that’s why I never have any issues with him, because he always takes care of me because I sent so much business to him.
But regardless, like I said, you know, be careful, Earl. That’s the only guy I’ve used but apparently some people have been having issues recently, so there you go.
Chris, that’s gonna happen from time to time. No matter what you do, there are gonna be times where one of your Web 2s, even a branded property that you’ve taken well care of will sometimes still get terminated because of the automation that we’re using. That sometimes will trigger it. There’s just a number of reasons. It’s rare … We go to great lengths through how we set up these accounts to prevent from that happening, but it does happen from time to time and there’s nothing any of us can do about it, right? Except try to prevent it, right?
So Chris, yeah, we’ve even had some of ours terminated, and what you mentioned about a short code, so like if you were using a plugin or something on your main money site that inserted short codes into the post which would obviously, when the page was loaded, would convert into a script or an image or whatever it was that you needed it to be, when it gets syndicated, that’s not going to occur because that plugin’s not present on the WordPress.com site, if that makes sense.
So you’ve gotta be careful about that. We’ve had that same issue on a number of occasions with some of the stuff that we’ve syndicated from our own blog, causing problems. Like, you know, form code for example. Opt-in form code that just looks like raw code on the page because it doesn’t translate 'cause it’s not in the short code and the plugin’s not present. That kind of stuff, so … You just gotta be wary of all of that.
Something that you can do if you are going to continue to use those kind of like short code plugins and things like that on your money site … Excuse me, I’ve got somebody calling in. Hold on a minute, let me hang up on them. Sorry guys. Give me a second. It’s my Google Voice number. It’s a spam call, I’m sure. Okay, so if you’re gonna continue to use those kind of, um … It’s still ringing. I’m going to have to just let it ring out.
If you’re still going to use those kind of plugins, I would recommend that you just set your WordPress post to your RSS settings from “full post” to “summary.” Now I know for branded properties we like to recommend using the full post, the full text of the post, instead of just the summary, but if you’re using short codes and things like that from your main money site that aren’t going to syndicate and post into the blogs of your syndication network, then you may want to use the summary post instead. Okay? Or reconsider what you’re posting within the content of your posts so that you don’t have those issues. You could do that as well.
All right. Dave’s up. He says, “I have a new tier one network for YouTube.” Uh, oh. It’s, by the way, just so you know, do try … I would say start a new WordPress.com site and then just start syndicating posts from that point forward. The moment of origin forward, if that makes sense, because I wouldn’t worry about going back and publishing all the already published posts on the new WordPress site. I wouldn’t worry about that. It’s too much manual work. If you’ve got a VA you can send it to, fine, but I wouldn’t do it yourself. If it were me, I would just create a new account, attach it to the Network. Set up the automation that triggers and all that, and then I would just post from that point forward, okay?
Yeah, I wouldn’t do that Dave. I would probably not do more than like five posts per day. [crosstalk 00:20:48] But you could do that, you know, five posts per day over six days. That’s what I would do. And it’s not … It’s just because when you hit a … especially a new network with like a whole bunch of posts all at once like that, it’s likely gonna be terminated. Okay? So you don’t want to do that.
In fact, like we always mention, or it’s mentioned in the training, you should post a few posts, as we call seed posts, and leave it sit for a few days. Post with no links, by the way, or only links to other blog posts on that same platform. So in other words, if it’s a Blogger blog, you can link to another Blogger blog post from somebody else’s Blogger blog because it’s still the Blogger domain. I wouldn’t have any external links, okay? It would be an internal link to another Blogger blog. Might not be yours, but somebody else’s. That’s the only type of link I would have, and then I’d let it sit for about seven days before starting to do any automated posting. And then when you do, ramp up slowly. Don’t do thirty at once. Do something like maybe one or two a day for a couple of days, and then you can ramp it up from there. If you’ve only got thirty videos, I’d probably spread that over, you know, a week to 10 days, something like that. If it’s a new network. If it’s an established network, you can be a little bit more aggressive. All right.
Columbia! She’s been crushing it. She’s been a go-getter. Columbia, I’ve been really proud of you, coming here every week and asking questions, and I seek that you’re going with the agency model and it sounds like you’re well on your way and I just wanted to say that that’s awesome. We appreciate you being here and taking action. She says, “My goal is to promote videos in five to eight niches, with each niche having a YouTube channel and associated website to support videos from multiple cities, as I am wholesaling video promotion service.” Very good. She says, “If I set up five to eight YouTube channels with each having an associated website, could I put all of those on my main Google and YouTube account, or do I need to break them up under some separate persona Google accounts? Each associated websites would just have a tier one network, but I will likely want to stack two or more tier twos on some of or most of the YouTube channels.”
Which is, yeah, that’s a good idea, Columbia. Is it a good idea to your main Google account? Okay, again, and this is the same advice that I always use, even though your problem … I can tell, Columbia, that you’re gonna be taking care of these networks, and you’re not gonna be doing anything real spammy, your setting up for long term, I still recommend that you would create each of the five to eight YouTube channels under a different persona account and then add yourself, Columbia Jones, your profile as a manager of all of them.
So after you’ve created the YouTube channel under a persona account, then you go in and you add yourself as a manager so that you can access, manage and maintain all of those channels from your main Google profile. It’ll make it convenient and much easier to work on, but it will protect each one of those channels in the event, God forbid, that something were to happen to your account, Columbia, that you wouldn’t use all of those assets, because even if your account got terminated, and again, that’s worst case scenario, but if your account got terminated for some reason or another, all of those other channels would still be present and available because they weren’t your … You, as the profile Columbia Jones, wasn’t the channel owner. You were just a manager, if that makes sense. So I’d do that specifically for risk mitigation, right? Just set up different … create a different persona account. Set up the channel, and then make yourself the manager. And that way you protect yourself.
“So how many channels with each associated website can I run on my main Google account without running into problems, as I would be setting up five to eight niches all within a single month?” Again if you … You can manage up to 50 channels from any one profile. So, again, set them all up underneath different … So the channel owners are different personas. Different Google accounts. And then add yourself as a manager. And you can add as many channels, I mean, up to 50 channels as a manager to your account, Columbia, and that won’t look weird at all because there’s a lot of people out there that are, you know, digital marketing consultants, and they manage a lot of channels and stuff, so it’s natural to do that. I wouldn’t worry about it.
It is, in my experience Mohammed. So the reason why I say that is because I get … Any call that goes … Okay, so, on the lead-gen sites that I have that … I’m just about on 90% of them. I have an answering service call center set up that I pay for. It’s my expense, but the reason I do that is because any call that comes through, it first … It does several things. Number one: it screens the calls because anybody here that has been doing … Either has your own local business or you provide local business marketing services and you, so you manage stuff for clients, you already know that you get freaking hammered with solicitation calls all day long from every type of business out there. From credit card processing machines to marketing services to Yelp. Yelp’ll call you 15 times a freaking week. It’s ridiculous.
And so I use an answering service, number one: because it’s an automated call screening system. Any solicitation call gets screened out by the answering service, so it doesn’t bother the contractor or the service provider who’s purchasing the leads with a bunch of spam calls. Right? So that’s number one.
Number two: any lead that’s a valid lead is going to answer the call screener’s questions, which means once that lead is done, or once the call is over, that’s a bona fide lead that I can go for. Now obviously I still get some solicitation leads that come through. In other words, they’re people that answer some questions from the call screener so the lead still gets pushed through, but it’s very clearly identified as such when it goes through. So what happens is, with AnswerConnect, that’s the service I use, by the way. Answerconnect.com. I’ve been using them for about five years. Great service.
Anyways, I get an email copy of every lead call that comes through, and then it also gets emailed and texted to the service provider, and so again, I like to use it because it’s a call screening system. I have a record of everything. I’ve got an email and a text record, plus AnswerConnect keeps records of everything as well. And so, for me, that’s how I validate everything.
Now, if somebody submits a web form, a contact form, you know, contact request form, on a lead-gen page instead of calling, then I get a copy of the email that also gets sent to the service provider, and now I’m using Zapier, I don’t know the proper way to pronounce it, but I’m using Zapier to send an SMS text alert, it connects with Twilio, but it’ll basically monitors a Gmail address and every time a new lead comes in from that lead-gen funnel, it triggers Zapier to send a text message via Twilio to the contractor notifying him that a new lead had come in and to check his email for the lead data. And that’s only for contract request form submissions, if that makes sense. Phone calls go through AnswerConnect.
Hernan: Mm. May I?
Hernan: May I add something, Bradley? I think that this really valuable and you first told me about AnswerConnect, back in the day. I think it was two years ago, but I think that you’re adding a lot of value to the process, right? Because if you can sell a qualified lead … Because, here’s the deal: you can sell that lead to one contractor for example, or to one client. That would be like an exclusive lead. Or you can get it qualified and sell it to multiple contractors or to multiple business, right? You will need to be really clear that that lead will be, you know, sold to many, so that … The value of that lead usually decreases. You know, if it’s qualified plus exclusive lead, you can charge premium for that because they’re going through … It’s not completely automated. They are going through some kind of interaction with a person, right? So I think that adds a lot of value and it will solve a lot of problems in terms of tracking and in terms of qualifying the leads. Again, because, you know, you want to send a contractor the best possible leads, you know?
Bradley: Yeah.
Hernan: So I think that adds a lot of value. It’s a little bit more expensive to run it that way, but I think it’s sort of worth it because, again, you can charge a premium for your leads because they are coming through a verified source, right? They are going through human interaction first, and then they are going to be pushed through the contractor.
That doesn’t mean that the contractor doesn’t have to … or your client, they will have to act fast because that lead is warm [inaudible 00:30:56]. Right? They’re hot. They’ve gone through one interaction. They are going through another. So they’re willing to the purchase process. That adds something that you can 100% outsource. It’s a little bit more expensive but this is kind of … The little things that add a lot of value to your business and will make those businesses stick with you for a longer time than any other lead generation company that does this massively and all they’re doing are pushing calls. Does that make sense?
Bradley: Yeah. And the other part of that is, you know, by providing the answering service, we’re doing the service provider a favor, too because the calls are automatically screened and it prevents them wasting time and energy on answering the phone for spam calls or solicitation calls, and that’s a huge selling benefit for contractors or for service providers. Again, mostly for me it’s contractors so …
But, and like Hernan said, I also, you know, if you’re going to sell exclu- … I promote my services as exclusivity of leads. It’s rare that I will ever sell a lead to more than one service provider. It does happen from time to time, but it’s usually rare and it’s usually because there’s a specific reason for it, so I always just charge more per lead if I’m selling on a per-lead basis, or if it’s a revenue share, like what you’re talking about, Mohammed, then it’s an exclusive lead anyways. That’s just a given.
The last part of your question, “Is it normal for keyword lists from AdWords to have names of different cities? Despite my living in Alberta, Canada, a large portion of my AdWords list contains American cities and states.” Yeah, that’s because the vast majority of search traffic is coming from Google U.S., but just, Mohammed, what you can do is … This isn’t an AdWords tutorial, guys, I’m certainly not going to log in to my AdWords dashboard to show you this, but Mohammed, what you can do is make sure that you set your advanced location targeting or advanced location options to where you are only … That only include people that are in your target location, not that are in or show interest in. That’s number one. So do that number one.
Number two is set an exclusion list. That’s something else you can do. Again, I can’t go into it and show it to you here, but you can set an exclusion list and actually specifically exclude all 50, or the United States for example. And if you set that as your exclusion list, then people that are searching, even if they’re in your target location, so let’s say Alberta, Canada, but they search for, let’s say, you know, “Remodeling company New York City.” Then if you have New York or all of the United States in your exclusion list, then it will prevent the ad from showing to them, even if they’re in your Alberta Canada and they’re searching for one of your keywords, which might be, you know, “Remodeling contractor,” or, you know, “Home builder,” or whatever it is that your keyword is. It’ll prevent it from showing to them because they’re showing an interest in a location that’s on your exclusion list, if that makes sense.
That’s also really important for call-only ads, guys, that you set your exclusion list to. All right. All right. So Greg’s up. He says, “Hi. Wondering really how to test a new YouTube syndication network. How do we download a video from YouTube to test our new YouTube syndication network?” Well, you can download it. Use Firefox and use something like Video DownloadHelper extension or something like that. There’s a ton of them, guys. They’re a dime a dozen. Just go search, “Firefox YouTube download extension” or something like that and just pick one. The one that I use is Video DownloadHelper. Been using it for years and you can view and just about any video, in the Firefox browser when you have that extension, and then you can just click the extension itself and download the video. You can do that, but why would … You don’t even need to do that, Greg.
What I would suggest doing is setting up either a like trigger applet or setting up a subscription trigger applet. So, and then publicly subscribe to another channel or something that you can upload a video … What I’m saying is you don’t need to download … In fact, for what you’re specifically asking, I would say just set up a like trigger applet and just go like one of the videos on one of your other channels or at least, if you don’t have a video in that specific niche that’s your own video, then just go like somebody else’s video that’s in that niche so it’ll help to theme your network, too, because I see what you’re saying about … “Once it’s tested, do we need to go into network properties and remove the syndicated video?” Well, if it’s a thematically relevant video, right? If it’s themed, if it’s relevant, then there’s really on reason to go in and do that and delete the post from the network. My point is: set up a like recipe and just go like a video, whether it’s yours or somebody else’s, preferably one that’s gonna be relevant to what the network’s about so that you don’t have to go in and delete it later. And that’s how you can test it. Okay?
Okay, Alexander, he comes every week now and asks questions as well, so Alexander: What’s up buddy? He says, “Hi guys. It’s good to be here again. Let’s get down to business. I’ll do my first video gig for a client.” Sweet. “He said he’d pay me to set up … set him … to set up to him but not enough money so I could make another one for me and use to rank videos as a service.” Okay. “Does using aged/expired Web 2.0 accounts in the persona rings would help boost rankings or will be worse because we have some random anchor text from referring domains theme?”
No, aged Web 2.0s will certainly help. I mean, look, if you’re doing it specifically for SEO purposes, then yes, using aged Web 2.0s will help. There’s no doubt. I’ve seen some really strong Tumblrs that can do some really amazing things with some strong Tumblrs and there’s a million Tumblr scrapers out there now, guys. Shit, you can go to Fiverr and like SEOClerks and those different types of services and buy Tumblrs now, so it’s simple to do, and yeah, those work. For purely SEO purposes? You can absolutely do that.
Now, for branding purposes, I recommend that you set up your own with the branded username. But again, for purely SEO purposes, expired Web 2.0s are certainly going to help. Okay? “Should I add some RSS feeds to the endpoint accounts/accounts that don’t trigger others so that way I get more related content to build their theme/topical relevance?” You can. That’s what, like out at tier two and stuff like that, if that’s what you’re doing, and you said this was a video gig, so chances are they’re … You’ve got multi-tiered networks anyways, then yeah, absolutely you can, guys.
That’s the thing: if you guys are … I mean, even for YouTube, but especially for blogs … But here’s the thing, guys, if you’ve got, let’s say a two tier network for YouTube, and remember YouTube, we don’t have to worry about footprint issues or anything else. My point is if you’re uploading videos but you’re not staying consistent and you’re not uploading a lot of videos, but you want to keep increasing the power of the network, then yeah, set up some related content triggers on the tier two networks, even for YouTube networks, guys, because you can start feeding relevant content into those secondary networks.
Okay, “Or is there a way to do it even for lower tier feeder rings, uh, a way to send content to tier one that would not be syndicated again on the other tiers.” No, I wouldn’t do that. Again, I wouldn’t … If it’s persona-based tier one network you can add content into there and that’ll take care of the second tier networks because you can set the trigger up on tier one, but if you’re doing branded tier one, then on the … Then I would set the related content triggers up on tier two because I don’t like to feed other people’s content into branded tier ones, if that makes sense. Persona-based is fine. Branded, no.
“If you can, would like to hear more about backlinking strategies to those kind of persona accounts. Thanks guys.” Backlinking strategies is just contextual links to those properties. If it’s out at tier two, you can be even more aggressive, more spammy. Generally, what we like to do is contextual at tier ones to the network properties. Typically on domains that have, not the pages … We’ve had some issues with people saying, “I just got our link report and the PA is one on every link page that was created.” Well, that’s what happens when you create a new page online; it is a PA of one. Period. It doesn’t start with anything higher than one.
And so, anyways, my point is that you … We try to use domains with higher decent metrics, relatively speaking, right? Compared to all the other spam sites out there, and then set contextual links, we try not to hammer our network properties, anywhere between 50 to 125 contextual links per property, and then we throw spam behind those. Okay?
Adam: Real quick, Bradley to … Alexander was asking if, for the related content feeds, what tool would you recommend? RSS Masher or Rank Whizz or something else?
Bradley: Uh, yes. Any one of those. You know, it really doesn’t matter. Rank Feeder, which is Lisa Allen’s tool, it’s a great tool, that’s more of an SEO tool, which is great, it’s very very powerful. It works really well. It basically is running on the principle of co-citation and it works really really well. RSS Masher, which is Damon Nelson’s product, that’s also good. That’s more of a … There are some SEO benefits that you can do with that, but it’s more of a, in my opinion, more of a traffic tool than it is just an SEO tool. I think Rank Feeder is very specifically an SEO tool and RSS Masher has a little bit … It’s not as good for SEO but it has other functionalities that make it better for other things, if that makes sense. You have to figure out what your objective is and select the correct product based upon that. Okay?
Okay, cool. You think that answered that? Hopefully.
Adam: Yeah.
Marco: Nah.
Yes, I’m still using my own channel. Now, listen, what I’ll do is I will take … When a client has a video, or if I have a video made for a client, which happens a lot, then I will upload that video to their channel, but then I’ll also upload it to my channel because my channel is the one that has all of the SEO all the networks. It’s got the authority, the relevancy, all that kind of stuff. Typically, because, again, I’ve already … Most of my con- my … Unless it’s a client that I don’t have a network built for, like that’s in an industry that I have nothing for, in which case I’ll just do it on their channel because I’m not, like … But that’s why I try to stick with just clients or lead-gen assets that are in this categories that I’ve already built the infrastructure for, if that makes sense.
I don’t like to take … I did just take on a new client three or four … Nah, I guess it’s been about five weeks now because I got the first subscription payment from them. So it’s been about five weeks and they’re preschool. I’ve never done any preschool marketing but it was a client referral from one of my best clients that I’ve had for five years so that’s why I took the job, and so I don’t have a network for them, if that makes sense. So, basically … And I’ve already done a couple videos for them but I put it on their channel. Because, again, I don’t have a network built for preschools and I don’t plan on building one, either.
So, my point is, I use my network where it fits for the SEO part of it, and then yes, I’ll just use, because I’m trying to rank the video through my channel and my network, then that’s the same video that I will use in the YouTube ad, if I’m setting up the local clicks campaign, which is essentially what I’m doing.
But again, I can still upload the video to their channel as well. That way they feel all nice and warm and fuzzy that their video is on their channel, but all the benefit of that video is coming from my channel because that’s the one that’s ranked and providing the clicks and the leads and the exposure and all that kind of stuff. All right?
Adam: Just real quick. I’m having a conversation with somebody on a YouTube channel. I know some people get lost there and go over to YouTube channel instead of the Google event and check and make sure everyone’s able to get to the event page, but I see that you’re commenting on this page, too, but sorry, we don’t have time to call everyone out by name and ask them to leave their comment, so. If anyone else is watching this and is confused, the way we do it is you just come to this page, write your questions on the event page right here, and, you know, we do first come first served, so sometimes we don’t get to all the questions, but that’s the way it is.
Bradley: This is pretty cool. Thank you, Paul. Paul says, “I use this guy for Google and YouTube accounts, haven’t had any problems and Is very reasonable.” Livemono … I don’t know what the hell that says, but he’s on Skype. I assuming that’s his Skype username.
Adam: Yeah, it must be.
Bradley: I’m not sure what the live colon means, but-
Adam: That might be part of his name. I know that you can use periods and other things as part of your Skype name, so that might be it.
Bradley: That’s pretty cool. I’m actually going to put that in a Notepad file 'cause I might reach out and I’ll say, “Hey, you want some business buddy? ‘Cause this other dude, like we blew his business up, man, because we sent him so much damn work and now he can’t keep up with it and its quality starting to slip.” So maybe I’ll reach out to this dude. See if he’s interested in some additional work. Thanks, Paul.
Okay. EntrepreN8 Consulting. “Are we able to join the group with video?” I’m not sure what you mean.
Adam: Yeah, don’t worry. I answered him.
Bradley: Okay. All right. Yeah, Adam, if you want to … Yeah, go ahead. We’ve still got about ten minutes.
Bradley: Yeah, it’s not gonna be like … We’re not hosting a live event type thing, guys. It’s gonna be literally a meet-up, like a casual get-together. If anybody wants to come out and see and hang out with us and have a few drinks and just talk marketing, and really it’s more about networking. It’s not like we’re gonna just have some training session. It’s not like that at all. It’s about networking. Rubbing elbows. Meet-and-greet. That kind of stuff, and obviously we’ll be talking shop. There’s no doubt. But it’s gonna be … And it’s … It’s just gonna be a way we’re gonna start trying to do that.
At least, we’re planning on wanting to do that a couple times a year, so, in various parts of the country, so. In the U.S., at least, as far as we know. I don’t like to travel. All right, cool. [crosstalk 00:48:33]
Adam: Also, real quick. Sorry, real quick. I was gonna say Alexander, are you asking a question about the webinar and Zapier? If you are, before we hop off, say something.
Chris: Can I get one of those in my webpage? [inaudible 00:48:44]
Bradley: All right. Alexander says, “You guys have already get into the limit of playlists on a channel because if I want to create one playlist for each focused keyword on a city … I’ll end up with a …” Yeah, no, I don’t … I mean, I don’t do that. Look, I don’t create play … Like, Bill Cousins, he’s got a great software, Rocket Video Ranker or whatever. He’s got a playlist option in there that will create a single playlist for each keyword as well. I don’t do that. To me, that is just way too much overkill, and if …
Honestly, I just always use playlists as like a container. It’s like a silo. That’s it. So I try to go broad, so broader type keywords, more top of funnel type keywords with a playlist and then I put all of the supporting keywords, longer-tail stuff within that playlist, if that makes sense.
I don’t know if there’s a limit to how many videos you can put in a playlist or how many playlists you can have in a channel. I don’t know that because, again, I don’t use them like that, so I’ve never played with that. All right? That’s just too much work in my opinion.
“The other idea is to get just one playlist per city and inside it work one main keyword plus internal link where is for other important keywords.” Yeah, I mean again, I would recommend doing, you know, it depends on how you’re gonna categorize or silo out your channel, right? You can do a city playlist and that is … And remember, you can have a video in more than one playlist, guys.
So let’s say that you are providing marketing services in Atlanta, Georgia, and … Well, let’s say in all of Georgia, for example, and Atlanta is one of the cities, so and, let’s say that you work with plumbers, electricians, and HVAC contractors. Let’s just say that those are the three types of businesses that you work with. I recommend you work with one and one only, but let’s just say three. Then you could have an Atlanta business playlist that has all three of those business types in it because the common denominator, the common theme is they’re all Atlanta-based businesses. Then you could have an electrician silo or playlist, and all electrician videos go in there. One for plumbers, one for HVAC, right? So you could do that, and then again, you could have the electrician playlist, for example, you could have Atlanta, and, what, Savannah is another city in Georgia because the common denominator there is they’re all electrician videos. Right? So you could have electrician videos from different cities in that playlist, if that makes sense.
So the point is that you can have a video in more than one playlist. The idea is to keep the category or the theme relevant throughout. Does that make sense? So that, again … I wouldn’t … You can have multiple playlists and there’s a reason for using multiple playlists, so that you can increase relevancy across different keywords or across different geographic locations as needed. All right?
Let’s see. Are we almost done? “Bradley, where’s the link to the webinar about … Oh man, awesome. Zapier. Thanks.” Yeah, that’s the last update webinar we did in syndication academy. And for whatever reason it wasn’t posted in the members area after we did it and I just posted it a couple days ago, maybe it was Friday of last week. So it is in the members area now in the update section.
“Hundreds of accounts … ” Thanks, Paul. We appreciate that. Let’s see.
Fuck you, Wayne. That’s awesome. Yeah, “Tell me where to get access to … The IF-?” Uh, yeah. That’s the syndication academy. The member’s area, so it should be members.syndication.academy. That’s the login screen. All right?
Bradley: Yes. I mentioned it.
Adam: Okay.
Bradley: Somebody asked about it and I mentioned it.
Adam: Cool. So you still use it?
Bradley: Yeah, I mean … I’m not building WordPress sites that much anymore. Very rare. Usually now when I build a WordPress site it’s only for the blog and that’s it because I’m using ClickFunnels now as my website builder for just about everything.
Adam: Gotcha.
Bradley: However, I’m about to start a project that I am gonna need to build a silos, and so, it … Just so you guys know, on all the sites that I have that are existing sites that have been siloed for the last four years, I’ve been using that plugin, yes. It was originally called the DWS Silo Builder.
Adam: Mm-hmm.
Bradley: I don’t know what it’s called now. It’s a very simple plugin. As far as I know, it’s free. It used to be free. That’s what I’ve used. Now, again, if I’m going to silo out another site … I don’t even know what the other options are now because I’ve just never used anything other than that. So.
Adam: Cool.
Bradley: Anything else?
Adam: Think we’re good. Uh, last call. We’ve got a couple minutes here. I think … That’s about it. Anybody got any more announcements or anything else coming up? Let me check our calendar real quick before we hop off. Nope. Hernan mentioned it. The Battleplan buyers update webinar. I’ll pop a link in if you want to grab the Battleplan. I would suggest you do that. We’ll have the update webinar tomorrow, and then we’ll have some news going out about good webinar with Keith Mallinson on Monday. So we’ve got some good stuff coming just in the next week.
Bradley: Yeah, I won’t be here next week, guys, 'cause I’m going on vacation. So I might pop in, depending on what’s going on. Looks like my video’s all choppy. It’s weird. Anyways, I won’t be here next week but it looks like the rest of the team has got it covered, so. Marco’s going to be rubbing his weather in everybody’s faces as usual.
Marco: Of course I am. Why else would I live in Costa Rica in paradise if I couldn’t rub the weather in your face?
Bradley: That’s right. All right guys. Well everybody, have a good day. Let’s see. We have a webinar tomorrow, don’t we?
Adam: Correct, we-
Bradley: A Battleplan webinar.
Adam: Correct, correct. Yup.
Bradley: That’s right. Okay. So we’ll see a lot of you on that. Otherwise, we’ll see everybody next week. Thanks everyone.
Adam: Bye everybody!
Hernan: Thanks! [crosstalk 00:54:55]
Chris: Bye everyone.
