Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 126

By April

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Click on the video above to watch Episode 126 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.






Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Hey. All right.

Bradley: There we go.

Adam: We're finally live after like a minute. All right. Everybody, welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. Today is the 5th of April. This is episode 126, and we got, almost, the whole crew here, so we'll do our thing, and go around and do some introductions, real quick, check in. Then, we'll get rolling. Marco, give us the weekly weather update, man.

Marco: We're in our rainy season, dude. It's raining every afternoon. If I cut out, storm rolled in and just washed me out.

Adam: It's nice and warm, right? You're not freezing down there are you?

Marco: Costa Rica, we have two types of weather. Warm and sunny, or warm and raining. There is no other. It could be cold, 70 degrees cold, but other than that, no. Two things, it rains or it's sunny. When it doesn't rain it's like, four or five months. It's cool.

Adam: Oh, God. Hernan, how is it going with you? You're entering, what, it's fall for you, isn't it?

Hernan: We're entering, yeah, entering fall. It's looking good. The days are looking good. I just hope a webinar jam storm doesn't kick me out. [inaudible 00:01:19]. Anyways, it's good to be here, guys.

Adam: Cool. All right. Bradley, how you doing, man?

Bradley: Did he say webinar jam storm? Is that what he said?

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Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Who knows when that thunderstorm is going to hit. Right? That's a crapshoot, every time. I'm good, man. I'm happy to be here. We got some [inaudible 00:01:42] ready to go. Do we have any announcements?

Adam: Yeah. We do. We got a webinar coming up on Monday, the Rocket Video Ranker. Bradley, remind me, have you used this, or did you talk to these guys? I didn't.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: [inaudible 00:01:58] talk to them, so I didn't want to-

Bradley: Yeah. It's Bill Cousins-

Adam: Sorry.

Bradley: And Anthony Aires.

Adam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bradley: We did a webinar a few weeks ago, but we had a webinar jam technical difficulty. We're going to have kind of an encore webinar. We didn't promote it real heavily before, either, anyways, but I've had a chance since then to play [inaudible 00:02:20] with the software, and I'm using the [inaudible 00:02:23] I had created for Live Rank Sniper, as kind of like, I'm extending those case studies in using this application with it as well. It's really exciting. I've got some really, really good results. Think the two of those tools combined are really, really powerful.

I use Live Rank Sniper to identify keywords that you can rank for, but little or no SEO and then use this Rocket Video Ranker, fill channels full of videos and it's really cool the technique that's used. It seems to be very, very effective. I've been testing it a lot over the last week. That webinar is coming up and the study is very much like what I did for Live Rank Sniper, the same case studies, I'm just going to be extending those to after the fact, like Live Rank Sniper identified the keywords, now what do we do? Then, that's where this new app picks up. If that makes sense.

Marco: Cool.

Adam: Yeah. Definitely. All right. You link on the page, definitely signup, come check out the [inaudible 00:03:21] interesting and I got some good stuff to share. Also, Hernan's secret [crosstalk 00:03:28].

Bradley: Adam-

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Adam: Finishing touches up. Yeah.

Bradley: Adam, can you turn your camera off, because you're breaking up, pretty bad?

Adam: I'm just having issue, it seems like everybody is. Is this better?

Bradley: I'll turn mine off, as well, then. How about that?

Adam: Just creepy. I'm staring at a screen of faces. Anyways. All right. [inaudible 00:03:49] touches on some awesome stuff with the SEO Battle plan. Hernan, you got anything you want to share with that, or we're creeping closer, it's coming guys, it's getting close.

Hernan: Yeah. It is. Yeah. It's going to be really, I think it's going to be ready for our own, like by the end of this week.

Adam: Cool.

Hernan: But, it should be ready, yeah, but it should be ready to release over the next, I would say, week, or two.

Adam: Got you.

Hernan: Potentially, we'll tell you more about it, but it's coming up. It's coming up.

Adam: Definitely. The Mastermind members are going to get an early peek at that, but more on that later. Real quick, if you haven't joined us, or you're new to us, by all means please check out the Syndication Academy. I'm going to pop the link in there, if you're not a member check it out. We've got some awesome stuff. It's a great place to start as well as continue if you're looking for content syndication, all sorts of other good stuff. It's something that we definitely keep up to date with update webinars, and all sorts of good stuff. I think that's about it for announcements. If you guys are good to go, I think we'll get into it.

Hernan: Let's do it.

Bradley: All right. I'm going to grab the screen. Hopefully, this will work all right.

Adam: Cool. I got your whole screen.

Bradley: Can you hear me, now?

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay. Cool.

Adam: Man, that picture is disturbing.

Bradley: Very disturbing photo from Wayne, again, as usual. Thanks Wayne. He's going to be on with us for MasterClass, following today's webinar, I believe, which is going to be kind of cool.

Adding Goo.gl For YouTube Video & Channel Descriptions

Paul [inaudible 00:05:32] is up, and I could swear we answered this question, last week, can you guys confirm that we did answer this last week? “Hey, Bradley. What are your thoughts on coding the goo.gl  to our videos, and channel, and into our syndicated,” I think somebody asked about doing that, it might have been Paul, actually.

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Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: He asked about using that for AdWords ads, remember?

Adam: Yeah.

Hernan: Yeah. I think we already answered that.

Bradley: This is the same question, except instead of it being for the landing page, for the AdWords campaign its videos and channels, YouTube channel. Yeah. I mean, the answer is still the same, Paul. I mean, essentially it's the same answer from last week, except, last week we were talking about quality for it. It's a good, the Google short links are good for when you want Google to know what's happening with the link, at all times. In other words, I don't, you can send, we talked about using CrowdSearch, for example, using the [inaudible 00:06:30] strategy for, let's say that you want to do a post on Tumbler or Blogger, or WordPress, or something like that, and you want a link to a webpage, or to-

Hernan: Yeah.

Bradley: So, you get the embed that's great, but I'm talking about a [inaudible 00:06:49] the Google short link, so that basically Google will know what's going on with that link and when it's clicked and coming from and obviously it knows where it's setting it up in the redirect. Right? My point is, you can set up referral traffic campaigns where you have, CrowdSearch goes to search for a phrase or something from your post, and then it finds your Tumbler property. Click [inaudible 00:07:17] property in the Google search results, clicks on it, and then once that page loads, it clicks on the [inaudible 00:07:22] short link, which takes you to the ultimate destination, either your money site, or wherever you want to send traffic. It could be a video, whatever. So, you're telling, you're allowing Google to inject analytics in that click stream, in other words, [inaudible 00:07:37] activity is happening, so now that's going to count as referral, social referral, or just referral traffic period.

Particularly, from some sites, you can do this with Twitter by the way guys, because tweets will index, and that's a really good traffic signal, to have clicks coming through from tweets, because those are really powerful social signals. That's something you can absolutely do. I don't like spamming with Google links, unless I'm spamming drive stacks stuff, but I don't typically like to do a bunch of spam stuff, like I wouldn't be building GSA links using [inaudible 00:08:10] short links, if that makes sense. We do use a lot of the Google Short Links in drive stacks, and do some pretty cool stuff with that. Also, like I mentioned setting up social referral traffic, those kinds of this are always really good, but you just want to make sure that you're aware of where you're going to be placing that link, because I don't like sending, I don't want Google knowing exactly what's going on, on some of the more spammy stuff that we do. If that makes sense. You guys want to comment on that, at all?

Hernan: No. I think, you nailed it Bradley, because I will pretty much do the same as you described.

Does A Custom Domain Carry The Domain Authority Of A Google Site?

Bradley: Okay. All right. Next, he says, “Bradley, if I change a Google [inaudible 00:08:52] does the [inaudible 00:08:53] carry over to the custom domain?” No. It does not. Marco, and I were discussing this earlier, it does not carry over, but it doesn't matter, because you still benefit from, like guys remember that the domain, like the metric thing isn't so important anymore. I mean, at least, according to what, and through our own testing and all of our properties and things like that, it's more about relevancy than it is about metrics, because metrics are proprietary. They're not Googles metrics, Moz's domain authority page, authority metrics, their proprietary. Majestic's, TrustFlow, and Topical Trust Flow, Citation Flow, and Citation Flow, excuse me, those are also proprietary metrics, so they're only measures or gauges of what they determine is a quality, the quality of a domain, and it's inbound link profile, and that kind of stuff.

I stopped worrying about metrics well over a year a go, now, and I really just don't care about them anymore, but specifically to mapping a custom domain to a Google site domain, you won't get the metrics carrying over, again, I can care less about the metrics, but you will get benefit. You will get the benefit of using the Google sites, because it's Googles own property, and Google knows your domains map to it, and it wants to rank its own properties, that's Googles narcissism at work. I know, because I proved this across several different tests, some of which are in the RYS Academy local case study, but where I mapped a custom domain over to a Google site, and ranked it in the maps pack almost overnight, just using the Google sites it's a horrid site. The site looks awful, but it's ranking, and it's been ranking. I haven't had to do anything else to it. Again, you will benefit from mapping the domain over, the domain metrics [inaudible 00:10:44]. Marco, I know you probably wanted to comment on that. Am I right?

Marco: The only thing that I would add is what we're looking for is the canonical. That's it. Once we get that, then we have all the benefits we need.

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Bradley: That's right. What you'll notice is when you do map a custom domain to a Google site, you'll still be able to see the site on both URLs. Your own custom domain, and the Google sites domain, and if you look at the page source, you'll see that the canonical is set from the Google site over to the custom domain. Both pages will exist, but you'll see the canonical set to what your custom domain is.

Google Update FRED

Bill says, “What's up with Fred?” You know, from what my understanding is, that it's a low quality content and people that have too much ad space on their sites and also low quality content, that's from what my understanding is, is what happened, or what the Fred update was about.

However, I haven't done a lot of research on it guys, because I really didn't have any issues with it, but my point is I read that there was, you know, I don't know, Google if this was, you know, they're always throwing smokescreens out, Google is, but apparently that's like from now on, that's what the updates are going to be called, is just Fred, and I don't know whether that's true or not, but that's what I had heard. So, from what my understanding is, there's a pretty good blog Sistrix, I don't know if you guys are familiar with this, but S-I-S-T-R-I-X dot com, they've got a blog, and they analyzed about 300 websites, from the Fred update, and what they determined at least what they saw the vast majority of sites that got hit, that they analyzed it was because they had poor content, like low quality content, and also ad spaces, and too many ad blocks. Too many ad spaces within a page to make it difficult for viewers to read the content. Right? That's what I hear from the little bit of research that I've done, that's basically my understanding of it, do you guys have any other additional insights about it?

Marco: No. Because I think it's all a smokescreen, it's the same stuff just relabeled, if it's quality then we know what it is, and if it's link based, if it's content quality we know what it is, if it's link based, we know what it is, and so let them call it what they want it's always the same thing. If you're following our train, if you're following the syndication strategy, the RYS strategy, then you can just, oh, I cannot say it, I cannot drop an F-bomb on Hump Day Hangouts, sorry. You can just say, screw Fred. Screw, Penguin, and Panda, and whoever else comes along. Slap him in the ass and tell him to get along.

Using Aged Domain To Help A New Brand Domain

Bradley: There you go. All right. Ivan is up. He says, “Hey, guys, I have created two branded tier one syndication networks. The first the one is attached to my main branded domain, which is an aged domain. The second network, I created recently doesn't have a website, yet, now, I want to create a new website for second brand, how can I use my aged domain to help my new brand of domain? Both are in the same general niche. Thank you.” Let's see. First one branded domain, which is an aged domain, the second network, I want to create a new, how can I use the aged domain to help your new domain? Well, I mean, the only thing I can think of right off the top of my head would be to link over to it, which you could do, and you could do it in an actual legit way, too.

For example, let's say that you take the new domain that you're setting up and the one that you want to push authority to, right, so let's say that you put a good page, or a good post on the site, good content, something that is of value, and then link to it from your aged domain. Right? You can do that, you can actually curate a piece of that content from the new domain on your old domain, that's probably how I would do it, because then it would be absolutely legit. Right? They're in the same topical category, anyways. If you have good content, then other people would want to link to, and possibly reference, which is what you'd be doing if you curate a snippet of that content.

Then, it's perfectly normal for people to do that, so it wouldn't cause any issues. You know, off the top of my head, the first thing I thought about was I'd put a footer link in, but no, because that can actually get you into trouble, so you're better off just doing something like, just referencing, like curating a piece from the new domain on the existing, or aged domain, and then giving attribution link to where you got it, that's going to push good authority over to that site, or you could just do a straight, standard typical link, but I prefer using the curated method, because then you're referencing the content and everything else. That's my own preferred method, but that's what I would do. I would just curate a new piece of content from the new domain onto the existing, or aged domain and then just link via attribution to site the source. Any other ideas, guys? Okay. Derrick is up.

Adam: We're lagging. Sorry.

Schema For Images

Bradley: No worries. Derrick, he says, “How and where do you write the schema for images?” Well, as far as I know there are microdata tags for images, so you can wrap an image within the content, with basically microdata tags. I know, you can also use JSON-LD header scripts that you can link or reference the image URL, and still wrap it in whatever structured data that you want within the code itself, because all it does is reference the element later on in the page, within the header, that's another way you can do it. I know that you could also write JSON-LD directly in the post body now, or article body, as well. How and where do you write the schema for images? It really just depends on, I guess, what's going to be required for the particular page, or site that you're working on. Marco, you want to comment on that a little bit?

Marco: No. I think you answered it perfectly. I mean, there's two ways to do, those are the two ways, you go with Jason or go with HTML, it depends on what is that you want to do and how deep you want to go into schema.

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative). There you go. Derrick, it just really depends. Obviously, microdata is beneficial at times to use, because you can mark up elements within the content body, I know, again, JSON-LD, apparently you can do that as well. I've never done that, I've only used JSON-LD as a header script before, and I've used microdata within the post bodies, so that's typically the way that we would do it, either mark up the actual element within the body of the article itself, or put it in the JSON-LD header, and there's JSON-LD builder, by the way. Structure data builder in SERPSpace. It's a free tool. Right, guys? I mean, that's part of it. As long as you have a subscription, or a membership, or even if it's free, you get access to the JSON-LD tool. Correct? That ones for Adam, really.

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Adam: Yeah. Sorry. I was copying something on to the page and honestly didn't hear what the question was.

Bradley: SERPSpace, the JSON-LD Builder, that's available for anybody that has even a free membership. Correct?

Adam: Yeah. I pull up the link and paste it on the page. If you don't have an account hop over there, create on, it's free, and then you can use it.

Bradley: Okay. There you go. I don't know if there is image markup in it, or not, you'll have to take a look. I haven't played with it, yet, but I know that's a recently added tool that's available.

Adam: Nice.

Bradley: Columbia Jones, is up. By the way, Derrick, let me point this out while you guys are on. Hopefully, last time I looked for these my bookmarks are all screwed up, but let's see if I can pull up a couple of them, here. This is it right here, one of them. I'm going to pull up three articles, these are my three go to articles, guys, for anytime I have to deal with JSON-LD, or any sort of microdata markups, structured data markup, that's what I was looking for, that word. Let me just drop these links here for you guys in just a moment. These are hands down the best, the three best, articles that I've ever come across, or at least I haven't been searching for any other articles since I've collected these three. They're really, really good. This one, especially, the built visible one is really, really good. You can go through here, these guides, every time I have to do anything with structured data, I just always come reference these, because it's not something I know off the top of my head. I always have to come double check everything as I do it. Okay. Check those out. Those are really, really good articles.

Adding Other People's Video In Your YouTube Playlist

Next. Columbia Jones says, “What is the SEO impact of including other people's videos in a playlist on your channel? Is that a good idea? If so, are there any particular suggestions for things to do, or not to do when you add it to your playlist, or feature other people's videos on your channel? Thanks.” Columbia, yeah, you can actually siphon some authority, and actually end up rubbing, like being associated with other high traffic videos. Let me explain. If you take other people's content, particularly videos that have a lot of views, and a lot of social activity like comments, and likes, and that kind of stuff, and you add them to a playlist then especially if in your videos, the ones that you have control over, if you go scrape the tags from the videos that you're going to add to your playlist that aren't yours, so you can do a right click and do a view page source on the watch page and look at the tags.

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There's tools out there that can scrape tags, whatever. Just find out what the tags are and try to find, match a couple of the tags, particularly if there's a brand tag in the video that you're going to be adding to the playlist, like if there's a channel name tag. Some people do that, they'll always put their brand name or their channel name in the tag section. What you can do is take two or three of the tags from the video that you're adding to your playlist, and then also the channel name and add that as a tag for the channel that it's coming from, and what happens is your video, because it's in a playlist alongside those videos you end up having some of those tags in your videos, then what you'll end up with, often times, your video will show up in the related video section on the right hand side, when people are watching the really popular videos, so it's a way to siphon traffic, in other words. You can rub off, like you can glean some authority from just being in close proximity to those videos.

Then, when you use that tag trick, you'll end up starting to get listed in the right hand sidebar for the related videos. Then also you can start coming up at the end screen, when the video ends and there's the suggested videos that comes up at the end, and you can just click inside the video player and go to the next video, or whatever. You'll start popping up in there, too. If you use that particular method, it's not so much, there's probably some SEO benefit to it, as well, because first of all you're adding a themed, a topically themed, or topically relevant video to a playlist, so that's going to increase, reinforce the theme of that playlist if that makes sense, but just take the SEO portion out of it for a minute, you'll get additional traffic, and that's huge for YouTube SEO. If that makes sense, guys. Just engagement on YouTube alone can rank videos, with no additional SEO work, just engagement alone can rank videos.

Again, there's probably some SEO benefit to it. I mean, I know there is, but I think the bigger benefit is the actual traffic that you can get by doing so. If that makes sense. All right. Something else that you can do when you're linking, since, if you're familiar with YouTube silo method and using playlists, we always talk about within the video description of every video that we put in the playlist we always link back up to the playlist, then depending on what type of silo structure you're using will determine what other types of internal links you're going to link with from within the description area. Guys, let's not forget about comments in YouTube. YouTube comments are internal comment links do follow links within YouTube. There very, very powerful. All right.

What you want to do when you setup a YouTube silo is you can go into the comments and comment and then add a link to the next video, or to the playlist, or to both, depending on how you want to set it up. You can do the same thing with other people's videos, because you cannot go edit the other people's video descriptions. Right? You don't have the access to edit their descriptions. However, you can add their video to one of your playlists, and then put a relevant comment that adds value into the comment section of that other persons video, and mention, and it's not 100% success rate, by the way, sometimes their going to get moderated out. But, sometimes they stick. I know, because I've done it. You could write into the comment section and say something like, hey, great video, I really liked this point that you made and make sure that it's somewhere in the middle of the video that you're referencing, so that they know that you watched the video, and that's just a way to get the comment to stick. Then, say, your video is so awesome. Don't lay it on that thick, but you know, it's a good video, by the way, I compiled a playlist of other videos around this same topic, blah, blah, blah. You can check it out. Here.

You can link to the playlist, so now you're actually funneling authority and link juice from that highly trafficked, high authority YouTube video through the comment section up to your playlist where that video also resides along next to all of your other videos. Does that make sense? You'll not only get the SEO benefit, but you'll also get people clicking in the comment section on your playlist URL, and sending traffic to your playlist. Again, another positive signal. Okay. You can absolutely do that. You got to manipulate the comment section, because you don't have access to description, and so you have to be a little bit like, you know, you have to social engineer your comment to where it's likely to stick and not be moderated out as spam. Okay. All right.

Next. Jordan. Okay. He says, “I apologize for having”-

Marco: [crosstalk 00:25:38].

Bradley: I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Marco: Can I just jump in real quick? He asked the same question in the syndication academy group. Can we answer it there, because it's kind of, well, not kind of, it's a silo question.

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Bradley: Okay.

Marco: It gets intricate. That's where I think it's better answered there or either Masterclass, or Mastermind. I'm not sure, Jordan is in either one, but I think this is higher level than Hump Day.

Bradley: Yeah. Sure. That's fine. Jordan, you hear that? You said, this was already posted in syndication academy?

Marco: Yes. I remember seeing it earlier.

Bradley: Okay. All right. We'll make it a point to jump over there and comment on it. I'm going to probably need to be reminded of that, though. Let me make a note of it, I guess. Just a moment.

Marco: I can go in and look for his question and tag you.

Bradley: Yeah. Please, do. If you don't mind.

Marco: Yeah.

Checking Status Of Syndication Network Properties

Bradley: Then, that way we can give him some proper attention. All right, Jordan, we're going to skip your question for now, because he's right, if I get into silo stuff, here, first of all, it will take up the rest of the webinar. Second of all, it will confuse a lot of people that aren't as advanced, yet. You know what I'm saying. Yeah. We'll answer that in Syndication Academy, Jordan. Harvey's up. He says, “I paid someone to create an IFTTT network for my YouTube channel, is there a simple way to check to see if it's actually setup and working? Yes. I uploaded a video to YouTube channel and checked one of my mini blogs to see if it was sent. I didn't see the video forwarded to the blog. Does it take days, or seconds for the IFTTT links to become active?” Harvey, if it's setup right it should be within an hour of you uploading a video, or live streaming a video provided that the video was public on your channel. When you upload a video, if it's set to unlisted or private, it's not going to syndicate, but if it's set to public it will. It should within an hour at tops.

It used to be that it would take up to about 15 minutes, but IFTTT they've changed it now on free accounts and such. I think it can take up to an hour. Just be aware that sometimes when you first connect a syndication network, and you send out your first post, whether it's a blog post with RSS syndication, or if it's a YouTube syndication network. It doesn't matter. Sometimes that first post won't syndicate, to many of the properties, if not all of them. That's why we always call, we call priming the network. Right? You have to post a couple posts. First of all test make sure everything is working, then usually by the second or third post everything seems to be firing. Something that you can do, what I would suggest doing is if you upload a second video, and you make sure that it's set to public, and you still see that it hasn't syndicated within an hour or so, you can login to IFTTT and just go to the services menu, the dropdown, hit services and that's going to pull up all of the channels, they used to be called channels, but now, they're called services, so all of the apps that are connected Blogger, WordPress, Tumbler, your YouTube channels.

Start with the trigger. Reconnect the trigger. What I mean by that is go to Firefox, clear your browser, cache cookies, whatever. Login to that YouTube account, okay, that's supposed to be the trigger for the network, then login to IFTTT, go to services menu, search for YouTube, click on YouTube, click settings, and click reconnect, or edit connection. That's of your trigger. Always start with reconnecting your trigger first, before starting to reconnect your action channels, because a lot of times if it's your trigger channel, obviously, it's not going to work correctly for any of your actions, that you've got set up. Again, start with reconnecting your YouTube channel, then test again. Try to upload another video. See what happens. That's why it's important to test guys before you setup a marketing campaign with your new network and start publishing content to your blog or your YouTube channel, make sure it's working, first.

Marco: If I can add something.

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Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Because this came up during a webinar that we just did, why people should purchase things from us, the originators, from the ones who actually created the training and trained the VA's, to do it correctly. If you had come to us we would be doing all of this for you, Harvey, instead of you having to go and find out why your IFTTT.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: Doesn't seem to be working, correctly. If it's our issue, and if we cause it, we would do everything that's in our power to get it right, or to do right by you, because we have, we've done it before. We've gone in and fixed it, and changed it, and done tons of things, when we don't deliver the product as promised, which we usually tend to do, there's always human error, because we have people creating networks hooking them together, whatever. Sometimes, something slips and so when this happens, you can come to us, and say, “Hey, guys, I'm having problems. What can I do?” Instead of having to figure out, now. Now, you're going to spend your valuable time fixing something that should have been fixed by the person who delivered it.

Bradley: I agree with [crosstalk 00:30:47].

Marco: Reasons why. This is why.

Bradley: I agree with that. The thing is, is part of the process, remember our networks are built a 100% manually, guys, there's absolutely zero automation used. Okay. It's a 100% manually built by hand, and our team, excuse me, our builders, our team of builders, they know as part of the process to set that to publish a seed post, or a video, or whatever, to test it. Again, Harvey, it's kind of a pain in the ass, if you've got to do it yourself, I totally agree. But, you should check in any way. Even when you get them from us, guys, make sure you check them, because sometimes and it's just the nature of the syndication network, sometimes IFTTT doesn't fire correctly, and it could be just as simple, it could just be that you need to upload a second video, or publish a second post and it will start to fire, correctly. Sometimes, it's just a matter of reconnecting the channels, because something happened and the connection was lost. Even though, it might show that it's connected, just reconnecting the channel, reauthorizing IFTTT to that app will help it to start firing, correctly.

Marco: You can go to SERPSpace and monitor these networks.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: I mean, we have that available in SERPSpace.

Selling Syndication Networks To Clients

Bradley: Okay. Alexander is up. He says, “What's up, guys? Shit I cannot believe I lost to Marco's webinar. Damn. Question about selling networks. How do you guys approach the selling? You explained the syndication idea and then sell the network? Sell links, and use a network to it, or just sell the results? You'll rank just post on the blog. I see that network selling as a huge opportunity to make money, while getting new clients learn more about SEO, Semantic Mastery style.” All right. Alexander, the way that I sold them, when I was selling a lot of networks to local businesses, is I would come at it at more of the social media approach, then SEO, because SEO, you start talking SEO with most local businesses, and you're going to turn them off. Their eyes are going to glaze over, or they've already had some shitty experience with some idiot that didn't know what they were doing, or whatever. They lost money, blah, blah, blah.

I try to approach it as more of the social media and the content marketing side of things. What I do, when I was selling a lot of networks to businesses, I would talk about, you know, I would ask, I would always ask questions. There's a great book, I believe it's called, Spin Selling. It's a way that you, the process for pitching and closing clients is asking questions to where, you're asking them questions that leads them to actually answer your questions in a way that leads them to realize that your solution is the best fit for them. What I would always do is start asking the business owner, are you doing any social media marketing? Most of the time, people would say, no, and I would ask them, may I ask you why you're not doing social media? Then, they would tell me about how complicated it was, and there's too many different networks to post to, and it just takes too much time. How are they supposed to do that when their running their business? All this.

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You let them start talking about all these pain points as to why their not doing it, even though, that they know they should, because you say that. Are you doing social media marketing? Would you agree Mr. or Mrs. Business Owner that you should have a presence on Facebook, and potentially Twitter, and maybe even LinkedIn? Depending on what type of business they have. Maybe have a YouTube channel, because there's so much traffic there, and there's a lot of customers hanging out in those areas that need your products or services. Wouldn't you agree that it's pretty important to have a presence on those, and not just a presence, but be active on a regular basis? Oh, yeah, absolutely, I totally agree. Why aren't you there, then? May I ask what's preventing you, or stopping you from having all of those working for you, 24 hour a day salesmen, and saleswomen sending leads into your business without you needing to be there? Oh, because it's too complicated. There's too many properties. There's too much setup. I don't have the time. I'm running my business. Somebody's got to manage all of those properties, blah, blah, blah.

That would be a perfect lead in for me to say, well, what if I was to show you a way, where we can get all of those properties populated with content, consistently, and all you have to do is manage one property. Meaning your blog. In fact, what if I was able to provide you your blogging services, as well? If you didn't even have to worry about that, what if we were to update your social media, all of your properties, and update your blog on a weekly basis, blah, blah, blah. That's what I would do. Alexander, I didn't sell the networks as standalone networks, because that wouldn't do anything for the client. Right? That wouldn't do anything for the business. I would always use it as a way to sell them on content marketing services. If that makes sense. Because I would tell them, what good is having a presence on all of these social media networks, if you don't have content. Right?

You have to posting regularly. Why Mr. or Mrs. Business Owner aren't you content marketing? You're aware of the fact that it's important to update social media properties. You know that it can provide results, but why aren't you doing it? Again, let them talk about all the reasons why it sucks, and they hate, and they don't want to do it, but, they know that it's valuable. That's the whole point. You constantly allow them to keep talking themselves into why the need somebody to do it, and then you're that person. That's what I would do, I would always sell the networks as a front end sale that would lead me to ongoing marketing services, such as content marketing. Obviously, sometimes, a lot of the times, search engine rankings, or positioning would come up, but I always try to approach it as a content marketing service, more than anything else, because they seem to grasp that more than search engine optimization. You can use that as kind of an added benefit. Right?

My point is you can sell it to them as a content marketing service and this is going to be your syndication network that your brand announcement channel. Right? You can state it that way. You can say, this is going to give you ubiquity. Right? You're going to be ubiquitous on the web. Your brand is going to be all over the place, and your content is going to constantly be getting in front of people to remind them that you're there, because you've got this syndication network and you're producing content, and publishing content on a consistent basis, that's useful, or helpful, or blah, blah, blah to your customers and your services, or your customers and clients. All right.

Then, you could say, but as a benefit, for doing this, this being in front of people and getting your brand out there, out across the web to as many places as you can, as a benefit of that you should also start to see your search positioning start to increase. Your rankings will improve. If we set it up, correctly, we can get it to where that would be an added benefit. That's an additional benefit of being in front of your customers, and building an audience.

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If you approach it that way, guys, that was the easiest way for me to sell them. At the height of me selling syndication networks to local businesses, I would sell anywhere between six to 10 of them a month, and I would sell them at 600 bucks or 700 bucks a piece. I was outsourcing them for about 50 bucks. There's a lot of money to be made in selling syndication networks. Just so you guys know. I remember, the first, there was a market place like SEO Clerks, or something like that, I don't remember the name of the site, but I put up an ad, a listing, this is before Syndication Academy was made public, guys. This was when I was just using it for my own business, and I had already trained some virtual assistants to build them for me, and I was selling them to local businesses, but I put up a page, a sales page on one of these SEO Clerk sites, or like Conquer, it's similar to that. Right?

I put up a page, it said, I'll build these IFTTT networks, I put the graphic up, I think I said, 200, or maybe it was 199, or something like that per network. I was outsourcing them at that point, I had virtual assistants full-time, basically on staff. Working for me for full-time building networks. Some of those, by the way, those two original builders are still with us, today. They're on the SERPSpace builders, now. One of them is the team leader, actually, but this was I mean four years ago.

I put this listing up and I said, I think it was $199.00 or something like that, and I had a guy from Australia contact me. He was an SEO agency owner. He contacted me and said, man, I really like the idea of these things, these syndication networks, would you be able to produce volume for me, if I was to buy 10 at a time, for example? I was like, hell, yeah. I sold them 10 at a time. 10 networks at a time, just branded tier one networks, guys. I sold them 10 networks at a time for a 1,000 bucks, so a $100.00 per network, and I was outsourcing them for roughly $45.00 to $50.00 a piece. I ended up, basically, doubling up my money for doing nothing.

I would just collect the details and send them over to my virtual assistants, and he was [inaudible 00:40:00] volume buyer, this guy ended up buying like 20, 30 networks a month, for several months in a row. That was just another nice stream of income just selling wholesale networks to an SEO agency. It's just because all I did was have my virtual assistants that were building for me, I just kept feeding them the work. This is something that you guys can do, because if you have access to Syndication Academy, we've told you if you want to hire your own virtual assistants and put them through the training, do it. We're totally cool with that, guys.

You can buy them from us, too, buy the way, and you can just resell our own network, the networks that we build, and you don't even have to hire your own virtual assistants. That's an even better way, because then you know they are up to specs, to our standards. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that, because again, Alexander, if you approach it from not an SEO standpoint, you'll scare more people away if you start mentioning links, and back links, and Google SEO, and all that stuff. Approach it from a content marketing, and a social media, and brand building, a branding thing. If you do that, you'll end up landing more clients, that way.

Marco: I would just add a caution. Don't sell rankings. You cannot do that.

Bradley: That's correct.

Marco: You cannot guarantee them. Guarantee traffic, you can guarantee results, just not traffic, I'm sorry, just not rankings. There's no way.

Drive Stacks Issues

Bradley: Awesome. All right. Shane's up. He says, “Question regarding drive stacks. I put one together, and the next day I had two Google Plus posts rankings,” oh, Google Plus posts, he was probably seeing personalized results, “positions three and four for my top keyword. Then, I thought, how can I mess this up? And, I went into one of the posts and added a link, the next day, poof, they were gone and haven't returned. Should I scrape the stack, and rebuild? Keep sending links to drive properties, or route it out?” Okay. Shane, if you saw a Google Plus post in the search results, it's about an 80% chance that it was because you're seeing personalized results, when you searched. I would recommend, what I mean by that, guys, is if we go over here to Google for a minute. Let's just search for something, I don't know, what should I search for? I'm just going to look our own, Semantic Mastery. All right.

If I come over here, if you see right here where it says, settings. You see how it says, let's see, where is search settings, turn ons, maybe because I have it turned off? I don't know. There is usually, where it says, hide private results, I have it, I think that's because I have it actually turned off in my Chrome settings, but if I go into Firefox and do it, same thing. You see, if I log into a profile in Firefox, and I search through one of my mini personas, and I see a Google Plus post, a lot of times there will be a little square image, too, alongside of it. Then, I know that my personalized results are showing. I'll come up and I'll click that, they've changed the serps again, recently, as far as the tools and stuff, but you click settings and you'll see, it will say hide personalized results, and if you click that, it will refresh the page, and those posts will be gone. Chances are that's what you saw.

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Yes, Google Plus posts are indexing, guys, but it's rare that you see a Google Plus post on page one, or even the first couple of pages for keyword. I mean, it's not impossible, but it's rare. Most of the time when you see Google Plus post in search results is because it's showing personalized results. Okay. First of all, I would say turn that off. Something that you can do, Shane, is open up a different browser. I use Firefox as my SEO browser, because I always clean cache in cookies, so that I can have a clean browser, a clean search environment, with no cookies, no cache, no browsing history, so that I can see more normalized results. If that makes sense. All right.

Marco: As far as-

Bradley: As far as, that, just one moment. The other thing is I noticed, I know your talking about Google Plus posts, but drive stack properties they will bounce in and out of the index, especially when their new. They'll bounce in and out for a while, I don't know what, maybe Marco has some insight on how long that happens, but eventually they'll settle in and they should stick. Go ahead, Marco.

Marco: No. I was going to add for people that want to know, in Chrome, now, you just go into settings, search settings, and you check whether you want to use private results, or not to use them, that's how that's filtered out, now.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: As far as getting things to show, or excuse me, or drive files and folders, and whatever ranking or not ranking, they'll not only come in and out of the rankings, they'll come in and out of the index. It depends-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: On how often you hit them. It depends on what else you're doing, if you're adding properties. Everything depends. Right? Everything on the web depends on other actions, and it's something that you cannot control, but eventually, once it clears, if you just set it and leave it alone, if you can, I cannot wait that long, but it's around the 60 to 70 day mark, you'll see that it finally just settles and sticks. The SEO general result, it's been unmovable.

Bradley: For years.

Marco: Yeah. It's coming on its birthday.

Bradley: Shane, that's what I'm trying to say about the drive files is they'll bounce a lot when you first set them up. They'll bounce in and out of the index a lot, but after, like Marco said, I don't know what the threshold is, but I know that after several weeks they'll end up settling in and sticking, and staying indexed, and that's what I'm seeing. I've got a case study that we're doing for Local Kingpin, right now. Which, by the way, I forgot to mention this at the beginning, anybody that bought Local Kingpin, we just added the Facebook ads for local modules that Hernan recorded.

That was just added today, it's module eight in Local Kingpin, so you've got that full video training series about Facebook ads for local, and I forgot to mention that at the beginning. Yeah. One of the properties for that, a local case study was my maps, Google My Maps, and it was bouncing a lot, but now it's permanently placed on page one, and it's been there for may weeks now. Those are one of those things that just takes time, but once it settles in they typically stick, and they won't budge. All right.

BrowSEO For Local Marketing

[inaudible 00:46:19] says, “Hey, Bradley and the whole team. Bradley what is the number one thing you use Browseo for relating to your local marketing efforts?” Right now, for me, I'm using it a ton for YouTube, because I'm doing a lot of YouTube spam stuff. For about a year, I'd gotten away from doing much spam stuff, because I was doing all paid traffic, I'm still doing the paid traffic, but recently just because of a couple tools, Live Rank Sniper, and now Rocket Video Pro, or excuse me Rocket Video Ranker, for next week. I've had to start spamming the web with YouTube, again. It's been fun. I kind of missed my spamming days. It's kind of fun to get back into the swing of things. I'm using Browseo, I mean, I've got it open, right here, you can see. I'm in it all the time, now.

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For somebody that's been in SEO's as long as I have been, I never used ScrapeBox, and people used to say, that's blasphemy, how could you be in SEO and not use ScrapeBox. Well, I can see Browseo as being like that tool, now. They just opened up a monthly, recently, too, by the way. I use it just so I can login and out of properties, now, with a signed IP's or proxies, and start building, and I started building digital footprints for these personas, here, because guys I was just telling Shane about using Firefox for doing all your SEO activities, and I constantly am cleaning that browser. Right? I'm doing the same process that we teach in Syndication Academy, where you clear browsing history. If you have the add on bar in Firefox, any used proxy tool, which is a plugin, and you right click and do, clean every cookie, and clear flash cookies.

Then, you close down the browser, then you run c-cleaner. Then, you open up the browser again and then you swap out proxies, if you're using proxies, you got to go into Foxy Proxy, it's just a pain in the ass. Not only that, but every time you switch profiles, you go through that process and you wipe the browser clean, now, you log back in, and you're logging into a clean session. With no browsing history. No cookies. No footprint at all. Right? So, it looks a bit odd. One of the ways that Google is validating entities, now, guys, is it's looking for those digital footprints. That's why Syndication Academy works so well when we build out these syndication networks, because we're cleaning our digital footprint and we're telling Google this is us. This is us all over the web, and we're interlinking everything so there's no mistake made. That this is us. Right?

Well, the same thing occurs with our profiles. You want to start building digital footprints with your profiles. Browseo is a tool that allows us to do that. Every time I log into any one of these profiles, guys, and all the different folders That I got and stuff, here, I'm already logged in. There's a browsing history there. There's cookies that have accrued. Those are real live looking profiles to Google and to Facebook. You can actually create spam on Facebook profiles in Browseo. I don't recommend doing it from your main IP, or if you were doing it from home, after a couple of login sessions, and different login sessions, excuse me, you'll end up with IP lock, but with Browseo you won't get that. Again, this is one of those tools, guys, because I'm starting to do more spam stuff, I'm still doing paid advertising, but I'm doing a lot more spam testing, again, Browseo is like it's just open from the moment I sit down in front of my computer until the moment I get off. Okay. Great, great tool, by the way.

We're almost out of time. I see that, guys. “PS, loved the Semantic rants from you all, and great to hear your perspectives on things not always related to SEO. Thanks.” I appreciate that, Jeff. We really did that intentionally so that we could just connect with you guys more so than just on a training level. I think that's important. He said, “I was considering posting a rant question on how to install a chimney in one's butt hole,” Google Plus on that, that's awesome.

Marco: That's funny. I already did.

Bradley: “To release all the smoke that is trying be blown up there by some other SES,” that's awesome. All right, guys. We've got, oh, yeah, okay, I'm going to answer Paul's question real quick, guys, then we're going to wrap it up, because we've got Masterclass in just a couple minutes, and guys, anybody that is a Masterclass member, be sure you are there today. We've got some announcements and things we're going to go through. We got a couple special guests coming on, too. All right. Paul says, “Bradley, do you have anything planned as far as video training for Browseo in the pipeline?” Funny you should say that, Paul, actually because I am using it so much, right now, and during our corporate meeting, yesterday, I brought that up with my partners and said, I think very well within the next couple months I could have a how I use Browseo for YouTube spam training course, or it's probably going to be on just, right now, because I'm using it specifically for a lot of YouTube spam stuff, that's where at least my initial direction or thought is how I'm going to take this course.

If I proceed with it, which I think I'm going to. I'm going to do a training course on how I'm using Browseo and spamming the web, and monetizing it. At the same time, it could end up morphing into something beyond just YouTube stuff, and it very may well, because it's part of building digital footprints. I'm going to have the profiles with Facebook accounts, and LinkedIn accounts, and all that kind of stuff. I'm going to have to start building them, as well. We were talking about possibly figuring out a way to set up a process to where we could train virtual assistants on how to do that kind of stuff, and that might be something that could be included in the training. I don't know. Guys, it's just a thought. These are just some ideas. Paul, just know that it is being considered. It's probably something that we'll come out with in the next few months, just remind me, again, from time to time and I'll give you updates. All right. Okay, guys, we've got to wrap it up to get ready for Masterclass. Thanks, everybody for being here.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Adam: See you, everyone.

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