This is The Speaking Show. I’m David Newman, and you’re tuned in to the number one podcast for speakers, consultants, and experts who want to speak more profitably.

Get ready. I hope you’re sitting down. My special guest is Stephan Spencer. Welcome to The Speaking Show.

Thanks for having me.

And you are a guru of all things search engine optimization. SEO is one, let’s be fair, one of your areas of expertise. How did you get into that? How did that come to be your thing? And then kind of give us the professional journey that brought you to where you are today with your previous lives and previous careers.

Yeah, so it started when I was in graduate school studying for a degree in biochemistry. I started building websites on the side just for fun, built one for my department, and built a couple of websites just around passion projects of mine. And I realized, wow, this is an area I could just specialize in, and so I dropped out of my PhD. I started an agency, and that was in the mid-90s, so a long time ago, and then SEO came around shortly after that, and I started focusing on that. 

I started doing SEO as a standalone offering in the late 90s and early 2000s. But before that, we were building SEO into the websites we were creating for our clients. Oh, and then. Four years into this business, I decided I could do this internet thing from anywhere, and I moved to New Zealand. I’d never been there before, but I applied for residency and got in. So apparently you can do the internet thing from anywhere. I did it for almost eight years. That was really fun.

How about that? And along the way, you’ve written some fantastic books. So you’re the author of Google Power Search, the co-author of The Art of SEO, and then the co-author of The Social Ecommerce Book, all of whom are O’Reilly, correct?

That’s right.

These aren’t little self-published, little vanity projects. This is a serious mainstream internet publishing authority books. Which one came first?

The Art of SEO. Now, if you had told me back in 2000 or whatever that I was going to be an O’Reilly author, I would have said, “No way.” That would have been a dream for me because I learned Perl programming in 1992 from an O’Reilly book.

Now, I think you are like some of my other friends. You’re in this dilemma in that you are constantly updating your expertise because SEO changes constantly. Any book that you ever write must be incredibly frustrating because the moment it goes to print, one or more pages are already out of date, correct?

Yeah, that’s kind of true, but if you plan this in, you can avoid the stuff that you know is just gonna go obsolete so quickly. The more third-party tools that you screenshot and include in the book, the more likely it’s gonna look obsolete very quickly. We dodged a few bullets at different points, between editions, Bing, it rebranded, so it became Bing, and before that, it was live search, and we had all these live search screenshots, and they’re like, “Uh-oh.” So, we almost missed the deadline for that, but we were able to sneak in those new screenshots just before print. So that was good.

Do you do some supplements or updates or how do you keep these books current with people that might subscribe to the O’Reilly newsletter or just that end up on your email list?

Yeah, so I continually publish blog posts and articles. I write for Search Engine Land, Adweek and so forth. Always putting new stuff out there. But like I said, I’m trying to create a book that’s more tried and true, best practices, not flash in the pan sort of stuff. So 95% of what you would read in the third edition of The Art of SEO, I think, is still gonna be valuable and relevant. There’s gonna be new stuff that won’t be in the book, the latest algorithm update and so forth. 

Yeah, you can’t constantly be updating that sort of stuff, but if you follow the best practices around keyword research, content marketing and link building, technical on-page SEO, things that involve best practices, using canonical tags and 301 redirects and not overly long, overly complex URLs with lots of ampersands and so forth. If you get the basics right, you’re in pretty good shape. You’re not fully optimized necessarily, but you’re ahead of a lot of your competitors.

I always tell people, “Dudes, what’s up with the canonical references in the 301 redirects?” I mean, I’m saying that to people all the time. Well, maybe. Yeah, of course. I’m kidding because I only barely know what some of those might be, but you have a fantastic free resource on your website. It’s not just SEO myths. It’s these SEO myths must die. So whether we’re an entrepreneur, solopreneur, small business, or a big Fortune 500 company, and again, with your client base or the folks that you serve, what are some of those big myths? Either the ones that you wrote about in the fabulous ebook or other myths that are just common, common, common missteps and mistakes that you see people make when they’re trying to optimize their website for search.

Yeah. There are so many. I actually covered 72 in that ebook. So I won’t go through those because.

Give us the greatest hits.

Yeah, I’ll pick just randomly some that come to mind. So, a lot of times, folks will put content in the wrong places, thinking that this is good for SEO, and it actually shoots them in the foot. So, for example, they’ll put stuff on a third-party site where they get no link equity from it at all.

So, “Oh, well, this is a piece of content that I’m really proud of rather than post it to my blog. I’m going to post it to insert in the blank, famous website or whatever,” right? So, it used to be the Huffington Post, which was a popular platform for folks, but now they did away with all third-party contributors from HuffPost. 

So I used to contribute to them too, but you have to recognize that many of these third-party sites, they’re either no following their external links. Meaning that you don’t get any juice at all. If you have a link in the article, or a link in your byline, no juice for you. It’s like no soup for you. Have you ever seen Seinfeld? Or they will put it on a site where they haven’t done their due diligence and figured out that it has low metrics for authority trust and importance. So they haven’t pulled up a tool like Majestic, Link Research Tools or Ahrefs to discover the domain rating or DR or the trust flow, citation flow, these sorts of metrics that will give you a sense of is this even a good site from an SEO perspective for me to put it on? Is it much higher authority than my own site?

A lot of times you’re better off posting something to your own site and building up the reputation of your site. Cause that’s something that you get to take with you forever and ever. Like you can get the rug pulled out from under you by a site like Huffington Post where they’re like, okay, we’re not taking outside contributors anymore. Or Forbes went from followed links to all no-followed links externally. So you might’ve gotten some link juice that way and all that’s got cut off at the knees sort of thing. So you have to be cognizant of these sorts of issues. You have great content. You can’t just assume that it’s going to do wonders for you. Great content on its own is only half the equation, and the other half is where you place it and how you leverage it.

And I know that back in the day, and I apologize for being out of date with some of this terminology, but big picture macro level people say, well, there are two things that you have some influence over. There’s onsite SEO, and there’s offsite or on-page and off-page. And even when people do a good job on their website, put things in the right place and do it in the right way without being spammy or weird, but they really, you know, they help Google, and they follow the rules, and they help their ultimate visitors find things of relevance and value. The whole off-page thing is a mystery. Would you say that’s another big missing piece: are people just totally ignored, or are they oblivious to all the other off-page factors of being found online?

Yes, so the off-page factor is very misunderstood and not addressed. The worst thing you can do, though, is to address it in a very spammy or engineered sort of way that looks unnatural to Google, right? So if you leave things alone and just links happen naturally because you have great content and you’re out there in the world adding value, your conference is speaking, and so forth, you’ll get links. But if you’re creating engineered unnatural links by buying links or doing backroom deals and stuff, Google is able to figure that out. 

And then you end up with a penalty that’s very hard to get out of, either manual or algorithmic. So you want to be completely above board, which makes you much more future-proof against further algorithm updates where they try and just wipe out all the spammers and the unnatural linking patterns and everything. So be clean, white hat. And if you are going to try and outreach for links, which is a good strategy if you do it well, if you’re completely above board, because creating great content and just letting it sit out there isn’t gonna, you know, what was that movie? Field of Dreams, where, you know, build it and they will come. 

That doesn’t happen online. But if you outreach in the right way, you add value first. It’s give and then get. It’s what can I do to collaborate, to add value to your audience and on to your mission versus, hey, I’ve got a great piece of content that I would like you to post to your site and get your followers, your readers, your visitors to come over to my site and also send some link to use my way. It’s all about you, then. You’re not really thinking about them. And I get all these offers for free content constantly via email. I delete all of them. Well, I don’t delete them; my team does. I don’t even.

Right, right.

Inbox. Exactly. Yeah, it’s so icky.

Don’t be icky like that. Don’t be icky. There’s a new hashtag. I like that. Don’t be icky.

Hey, good looking. Are you currently getting paid to speak? Would you like to ramp that up? We can help. Book a confidential speaker strategy call with our team at doitmarketing.com/call and let’s see what we might do together. The call is free, but the results may be priceless.

Well, the other question, Stephan, is, you know, people think, okay, SEO is all about my website. Are they overlooking other things that they might want their customers or prospects to find, like their podcast? You have two fantastic podcasts yourself: the Get Yourself Optimized podcast and the Marketing Speak podcast. Do we do any work to get our podcasts found? Do we do any work to get our YouTube videos found? Do we do any work to get our Slideshare and Slidedecks found? What other things would be good to optimize?

All of it, of course. You don’t just set it and forget it, like, “Oh, I posted a YouTube video, and I’m done.” In fact, if you do that, you’ve destroyed your chances for that video to really spread because that first, say, 24 hours is a critical time period. If you show some momentum to the YouTube algorithms, then it’s gonna be part of the recommendation engine and gonna be shared with other YouTube users. You really have to think that through before you hit publish or go live or whatever, right? So you need to think about the strategically. Indeed, if you wanna go live, there are different implications for which platform you use, whether it’s YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Instagram Live or whatever. So, there’s a lot of thought that needs to go into this. It needs to be looked at strategically. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book The Art of War.

Sure. Yeah.

So, there’s a great quote in there that I love: “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

Amen. And how for sure.

So, there’s a lot of tactical stuff you could do with your SlideShare decks, YouTube videos, and live streams. And if you do infographics or viral videos or whatever, you know, sorts of content repackaging, repurposing that you do, it’s got to be done strategically, or you’re just making a lot of noise, and you’re out on the battlefield firing off fireworks, and you’re just going to get slaughtered.

And I’m imagining we could do a whole episode on each of these topics, how to optimize your YouTube channel, how to optimize your podcast, how to do this. I imagine when people go to your website, check out a webinar, get a download, get a checklist, get a cheat sheet, and sign up for stuff. This is exactly the kind of content that you put out on a regular basis. Is all of these different methods and media that people should be looking at and should be optimizing.

Yeah, for sure. Like for example, YouTube. There’s some strategic stuff and a lot of tactical stuff that I cover in an article I wrote called YouTube SEO 101. Publish that on Search Engine Land. Yeah, so I can send you a link to that. You can include it in the show notes.

Yes, we’ll link up to all the goodies and all the resources that you wanna share. That’d be super helpful, thank you. And that’s when people go to speakingshow.com and look up the Stephen Spencer episode. That’s where you’re gonna get all the goodies, all the links, links back to. Stephan’s world, and they’ll be following links, by the way. We’re not doing this no-follow nonsense around here. We always like to send some fun Google juice to our smart guests, especially if they’re in this business. So, you know.

Thank you.

Now talk a little bit about your clients because I’m seeing all these fantastic client logos on your website from, you know, some of the big large corporations CNBC. Sony, you know, you name it.

Chanel, Volvo.

Big pharmaceutical companies, right, exactly. Bed Bath & Beyond, Bloomberg, all the way into sort of the smaller entrepreneurial size companies, or what is your, do you have a certain niche or a target market that you specialize in?

I specialize in really interesting clients. If they’re trying to solve interesting problems, they’re adding value to the world, and they’re willing to be nimble and kind of go outside their comfort zone. That’s the ideal sort of client for me. I like to go across many different niches because you can learn stuff from one niche that you can apply to another. It’s very easy for companies to get myopic in their viewpoint. You know, they take all their SEO in-house and they never look outside of their competition. They don’t think, well, how can I apply some of the best practices that, let’s say, file sharing, video sharing type sites are applying?

To increase time on site and the session lengths, how can I apply that to what I’m doing with my e-commerce site and get more SEO value, more orders, average order value, lifetime value and so forth. So, there’s a lot you can learn across completely different verticals. And so I love that. I don’t wanna just be pigeonholed into one box and let’s say, “Oh, well, Stephen, he’s the SEO e-commerce guy. So he’s all about online retail and maximizing that for SEO.” Sure, I know a lot about that, but I also work with big publishers.

I work with CNET; you mentioned Bloomberg Business Week, CNBC, and digitaltrends.com. These are all examples of big publishers with lots and lots and lots of content. So if you’re a small e-commerce site with only, let’s say, a hundred products or something, there’s a lot you could learn from the best practices in terms of SEO that a publisher uses. It’s been around forever.

Right, absolutely right. Well, I know you’ve been in the agency business for quite a while, so you may have already answered this question decades ago. So I’m seeing Volvo, for example, on your website. When a Volvo comes to any speaker, some perhaps less than educated, less than enlightened buyers might ask you, well, Stephan, how many car companies have you worked with? And if the answer is zero, but you have this tremendous expertise, maybe it’s your first car company. What’s the talk track to get them focused on the right question and not so married to that wrong question?

Yeah, yeah, they want industry expertise, and that’s very misguided because they think that the competitors actually know all the right stuff, and oftentimes, the competitors are not the ones you should be copying. R&D-ing from, you know, rip-off and duplicate. So, let’s say that it’s a car company, actually Volvo. The division that I worked with is the construction equipment side of things. So probably didn’t even know that you can get things like excavators and stuff from Volvo.

Are they the safest excavators on the market?

Oh, I’m sure they are.

They have extra airbags, maybe.

That I don’t know, but anyway, if the prospect is asking for industry expertise, I do have hundreds of clients that I’ve worked with over the years because I’ve been in this game for so, so long. But let’s say that I only have one or two examples in their industry, and they’re like, well, here’s a company that we’re talking to that specializes in it. And I could pull up if they’re willing to share with me the name of the agency they’re talking to. I can poke holes in their SEO strategy and things; it’s like major screw-ups they’re making just with their own website. And that agency might say, “Well, in our defense, we never have time for our own website.” 

But in reality, if that’s your main marketing face to the prospect online, it’s your website, and you don’t have the time to even properly SEO it, that’s not a good look. So I can easily poke major holes in the competition. Just looking at some different tools and pulling up the HTML code, looking at the robots.txt, looking at the kind of redirects they have in place. So look, they have redirect chains of like four in a row, and this is a company that you’re gonna rely on for SEO advice. Probably not a great idea.

Right.

So it’s not about the industry. It’s about the depth of experience and expertise across SEO in the areas of SEO that matter to you, right? So, if you’re not really that interested or focused on local SEO because you’re a big brand, then you don’t need a local SEO expert and vice versa, right?

That’s great because it’s really about tailoring the answer to that question based on the information they’re presenting to you and then having a good, intelligent, authoritative comeback to, well, maybe you want to think about this or think about that. You don’t need this, but you do need that. Let’s talk a little bit about sort of inside baseball, if you will, about how you started out in the agency business, but now you have all these other ways that people can tap into your expertise. 

There are courses, there’s coaching, there’s masterminds. How did you build that portfolio of services and offerings? And then what came first? What came second? How did you kind of, you know, add things up? And then when people, you know, let’s say someone listening to this podcast says, “Man, I could really use Stephan’s expertise at our company.” When you have an exploratory conversation with someone, what do you listen for that would indicate, oh, this is a project client versus this is a one-on-one client versus might be a mastermind client. 

So, how do you plug people into that ladder? So let’s first talk about the ladder, the ladder of products and services and programs, and how it came to be. But then I’m also curious about new prospects coming in over the transom; what’s your admission process or your placement process to get them into the right type of offering?

Well, we’ll start with what the ladder looks like and how I built that. So, I’ve been doing SEO since the 90s, as we discussed. One thing that was painful for me was to turn away a lot of potential businesses because they couldn’t afford to work with me and my team. They couldn’t just, the scope didn’t support it, the budget didn’t support it. And once I sold my agency in 2010, I didn’t wanna recreate that all over again. So I decided I wanted to work more hands-on with a small number of clients because when you have an agency, and you’re the main thought leader and figurehead, there’s no time for you to get in the weeds with individual clients.

And so I would just hand these new clients over to the team, an account manager, an analyst, a consultant, and I would say, you know, I’ll see you around, which is very frustrating. So when I sold the agency, I didn’t want to recreate that. So then, I can only take on a handful of clients at any given time at that kind of level. So I’m just, there’s not enough of me to go around. So it was at that point I really was motivated to retool in a way that allowed my IP and my expertise to scale across many more potential clients and smaller businesses as well who couldn’t afford my consulting services. So I started playing around with information product marketing and creating online courses. And so, I started with my very first course, an SEO audit online course.

So you could learn how to do your own SEO audit. Yeah, you could pay me a fair amount of money to do an SEO audit, but you could do a lot on your own if you just know the tools to use, the kind of reports to run, the kind of insights to glean from these different tools, and then the actions to take to remedy these situations. So, I walk through in a six-module online course.

How to do your own SEO audit. And then after that, I decided, all right, I’m gonna create some more courses because that didn’t cover things like content marketing and conversion optimization and social media marketing and so forth and so on. 

Keyword research is only covered in one module of the DIY SEO audit course. So, I created an entire course around keyword research. By the end of it, I had six online courses. So, that took me a couple of years to get that filled out to six courses. And then I decided, well, I’m going to create a membership site so that people can kind of get a all you can eat buffet of all my online courses plus group coaching calls and so forth. And my membership site was born.

Now, just to set the context, because it’s fantastic. You, as a consultant, are really premium priced, as we all should be a hint, hint for folks listening. We all should be premium priced. These courses are also not cheap, correct? What’s the price range of most of the courses?

Yeah, so they’re typically $2,000. $4,000 would be more the top end. $4,500 is what the SEO audit course is. Now, I do offer some discounted pricing, but like on certain venues, webinars, and things like that.

Sure, do you also do the launch model where you proactively launch these every couple of months or not really?

No, I don’t do the launch.

You don’t? That’s a whole exhausting hamster wheel too.

I want to stay focused on my clients, and I speak at a lot of conferences. So, I don’t want to be trying to create scarcity and all that on an ongoing basis. I just want this value to be out there in the world. And if a client can’t afford my premium pricing, I also consider it value-based pricing as I deliver massive value and great ROI. The investment and working with me directly, but yeah, I’m not for everybody. 

My retainer starts at $15,000 a month. And, so when folks want to work with me one-on-one, and they can’t afford that price point, I turned away so many different clients. They don’t necessarily just want to learn SEO on their own from courses. They want to have their handheld through the whole process and have access to my brain. So then I decided to start offering coaching, and I’ve been doing that for a couple of years now. That is around the $5,000-a-month price point. But then they have to do all the heavy lifting. I give them a bunch of insights and ideas and strategies and so forth. We’ll troubleshoot on calls.

I’ll pull up my raft of different tools that I use and find amazing opportunities for them. Then, they have to implement those recommendations. If they don’t, there’s no ROI there. So that can be a stepping stone towards consulting because done for you, consulting is, I think, the ideal, but done with you in terms of the coaching arrangement is a really good starting point. Then, they get the ROI from that. Then, they have more budget to invest in consulting and can upscale to that other level.

Yeah. You bring up a really great point, which is that I talk about this three-level model: that we teach it, we coach it, or we do it for you. Right? So there’s teaching, which is like a seminar, webinar, course. There is coaching, which is what you said, done with you, done for you. You know, I think the difference is done for you is a guaranteed outcome that you will do the work, you will do the work the right way, and it’s a much greater chance of getting them results. 

Done for you depends on your skill and talent. Done with you depends on their skill, their talent, and their willingness to implement. Are there situations where people might call you, Stephan, and say, “Listen, well, let’s do the done with you,” and you ask some more probing questions, and you say, “Well, given what you shared with me, you’re probably better, because maybe it’s very complex,” maybe it’s a very ambitious goal they have? I’m not here to upsell you. But I will be of better service to you at $15,000 a month than I will at $5,000 a month. And it’s a pretty clear-cut recommendation on your part.

Yeah, that happens fairly often. And in that case, they can’t afford the $15,000 consulting retainer. Then I’ll refer them to my daughter who is also an SEO and trained by me. And she’s very skilled. So, different price points and different offerings, of course, but then. Maybe they are a good fit later on to work with me directly.

Right.

But yeah, if they’re not going to get the outcome because they’re not going to implement, I’m not going to take them on as a coaching client. I want referenceable, successful clients, whether they’re coaching with me, consulting with me, or just taking my courses.

Yeah.

And I’m very picky in that way.

For sure. And we all need to be because we really can’t afford to have unsuccessful clients, right? You’re either in, and I’m going to help you win, or you’re not going to come in.

And at the last traffic and conversion summit, there was a great bit of wisdom that Ryan Dice shared, which was that if you want to get references and referrals, don’t focus on creating happy clients. Focus on creating successful clients. It’s the successful clients who are referring business to you.

Right, exactly.

You might be a personal trainer and have somebody who’s really happy with you, and they haven’t lost any weight, and they’re like 50 pounds overweight. Nobody’s gonna ask them, like, “What’s your secret?” Right? But if somebody loses 50 pounds in a three-month period, like, “Holy cow, you look amazing. And what’s your secret?” And they’re not gonna say, well, I’m not gonna tell you. It’s like, no, it’s my personal trainer.

Right.

It’s the workout regimen and, even more importantly, the diet they put me on and the accountability they give me to stay on that diet and yeah, I’ve lost all this weight. That’s where you get your business. So successful clients, that’s the key.

What a great episode, wowza! Tell you what, if you wanna ramp up your revenue as an expert who speaks professionally, you should really check out our free online training at doitmarketing.com/webinar. I wanna hear about maybe the two ends of your business spectrum before I move off of the sort of inside Stephan’s brain. You have a membership program, which I think is your most affordable way of connecting with you, and you have your mastermind.

Which may be one of the more expensive ways to access you, your tribe, and your personal genius. Some folks would have a hard time saying, okay, I’ve got this thing. It is super cheap. I’ve got this thing up here. It is super expensive. And in both cases, you get me. So how do you differentiate? What’s the value prop of the membership? And let’s kind of unpack that for a minute. And then, what’s the value prop of the mastermind on the other end of the spectrum? And how do you unpack that?

Well, it’s pretty straightforward, really, because if you’re part of a membership site, you’re a member who has access to recordings of past calls, and you’re getting access to online courses that are in an all-you-can-eat buffet sort of scenario.

Now, is that included at no additional charge, or is there just simply a savings on the courses they choose to buy once they become a member?

Well, once you’re a member, you get access to all, but the do-it-yourself SEO audit course included. And then if you want to do the extra course, you have to pay the fee for the course. But then, let’s say you stop your membership. You immediately stop getting access to all those courses that you were used to getting. So that’s a disincentive to turn off the membership. I also do these jam sessions where you’ll be able to get questions answered from my team.

Those jam session recordings are also on the membership site. So there’s a bunch of things; you’re not getting much, if any, access directly to me, though. 

Just it doesn’t make financial sense for me to spend much time on my membership site in terms of direct interactions. Whereas with the mastermind, which is still in process, in the process of creating it, but it’s not that dissimilar from many of the other masterminds out there in terms of there being a certain number of meetings that we’ll have a year. It’s a multiple-day event, and you’ll get to network with high-level peers. 

You get to learn directly from me some ninja stuff. And we’re going to spend a lot of time mapping out the implementation roadmap and learning cutting-edge stuff that you’re not going to have access to normally. So that’s a high-level program. There’s a lot of. Direct in-person interaction happens, and knowledge transfer that you can’t get over virtual means, whether it’s a group Zoom call or anything really that’s virtual. It doesn’t compare with an in-person deep dive intensive.

And Stehan, is there also a different audience for the membership than for the mastermind? So is the mastermind gonna be for an SEO manager at Sony? or a high-level marketing executive who’s responsible for this area. Whereas the membership might be more for a solopreneur who just wants some do-it-yourself support and some insight.

Yeah. So, actually, I’d say the marketing manager at a big brand would probably not even be in the market for masterminds. They’d probably just want it done for you. Just be my agency, be my SEO consultant, create my audits, my keyword strategy, my link-building strategy, and all the different deliverables that need to be produced. I don’t want to have to worry about any of it. Just take care of it for me and then help me with the execution, the implementation, and all that. 

Let’s say it’s a business owner who kind of lives and dies off of their website, and they want to be cutting edge. They want to see what’s coming. They’d be a good fit for the mastermind. They’re going to learn from their peers as well as from myself. And folks who are part of a membership site or online course or those kinds of folks are more the implementation people. They’re either consultants or coaches themselves, or they are just getting started with their own business, and they want to learn by doing. 

And they’re probably not going to ascend to the mastermind or to the done-for-you consulting level. It’s a tough choice to make. Am I going to focus some of my time on a completely different market that I don’t see an ascension path to, but yet I want to make a difference for a lot of people? Nobody makes a lot, very few people make a lot of money off of writing a book. So it’s like maybe minimum wage for most of us who write a book if you do all the math on the effect of an hourly rate, but why do we do it? Because we wanna add value to a much larger audience and even people who couldn’t possibly afford to work with us one-on-one.

Yes, absolutely. Now the courses with the membership, I’m imagining that courses, everything is streaming, nothing is downloadable.

Yeah, it’s all streamed, but even if somebody could figure out how to download the videos. It’s not a good way to go to try and download this to your computer because you’ve got a snapshot in time. I mean, the same problem with the book is the obsolescence factor. Well, with an online course, if you’re not part of a subscription program updates, you’re not going to ever see if, uh, there are major changes to Facebook algorithm or whatever. And that completely changes module number three and how you implement that. Well, you need the latest information. So when those courses get updated, you’re gonna want access to all that.

Yeah. Well, I think the most important thing is probably the community.

Yeah, although a community of do-it-yourselfers who are all learning is only of somewhat small value, in my opinion. It’s great to have a community of people. If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

Oh, for sure, for sure.

So, if you’re part of a community where they’re all beginners and kind of learning by doing DIYers, you’re probably in the wrong room.

I think that’s the difference between a do-it-yourself type value prop versus the connect with Stephan value prop, where they’re less concerned about the other people in the room, and it’s more like a hub and a spoke that they wanna stay connected to you and you might be answering a question in a fishbowl type group setting, but then that just adds value to every single person, not just the person asking the question.

Yeah. So, if it’s a one-on-one situation or it’s a small group situation, it’s highly curated either way. So, if you’re a mastermind of mine, if you’re doing one-on-one coaching or consulting, it is highly curated. You’re only dealing with people who have been vetted by me and are top-notch.

Right. Exactly. Well, let me ask you: like I said earlier, we’re gonna link all kinds of fun things up in the show notes. I’m gonna ask you for some resources and some cool things that we can put into the show notes and how people can get connected and stay connected to you. But before we get to that, if folks were to take one central idea from our conversation today, either about the SEO, fantastic content that you shared, or about the inside baseball, how you built the business, what would you hope that one overarching idea would be?

Well, it’s to create content that is worthy of people sharing and linking to it and just spreading, virally potentially even. It’s gotta be content that is link-worthy. And for that content to find the most appropriate home, and that means potentially on your site, it means potentially on other people’s sites. You could even apply what Andy Crestodina calls the evil twin technique, which is to create one version that you publish out there on a third-party site that’s high authority, and then you kind of flip it on its head, and you do kind of the opposite of that idea that that article headline for your site for your blog. So, for example, if it’s the Seven Best Practices for SEO in 2019 and you publish it wherever the right Search Engine Lands or something you.

Do the evil twin of that, which is, let’s say, the seven biggest SEO mistakes that business owners make in 2019, right? So, all the same research, but you’re not just paraphrasing little bits and pieces here and there. It’s a restructuring of that article, and it’s a repositioning of that article so that if a search engine land sees that you publish your evil twin version on your blog, they’re not gonna feel like you just kinda skirted the rule that they have of not republishing your content you submit on any of your own sites for a period of whatever time period it is.

Right, exactly. Wow, brilliant, brilliant strategy. So talk to us about how we can get connected and stay connected to StephanWorld, guides, white papers, emails, downloads, checklists, and Cheat Sheets. Give us the whole gamut and we’re gonna lock these up into the show notes right under this episode at thespeakingshow.com.

All right, so StephanSpencer.com is the main site to go to. There’s a whole resources area, a learning center with guides and white papers and webinar replays and videos, all sorts of great stuff, presentations that I’ve spoken at conferences, and you’d be able to watch those videos, et cetera. So that’s all at StephanSpencer.com. I also have my two podcast show websites, MarketingSpeak.com and GetYourselfOptimized.com I actually recently rebranded the OptimizeGate to Get Yourself Optimized. So those are fantastic resources as well. Follow me on Twitter; SSpencer is my Twitter handle. Yeah, so just stephanspencer.com and then YouTube channels, LinkedIn from there and all sorts of great tips and resources. And I publish a blog post every week as well. Sign up for my newsletter, it’s called The Thursday Three. It’s really, really good. I get complimented all the time by people for that newsletter.

The Thursday Three. Yep. That’s three resources, three tips, three ideas. What’s in there?

What intrigued me, what concerned me, and what surprised me, something like that. And I guarantee you’ll find stuff that’s really interesting, fascinating, and immediately applicable.

I like it. And this is also; we can do a whole show on this, of course, is that you know, for even though your information is fantastically in-depth and relevant, information period is a commodity. What people are really coming to us for is our insight, our opinion, our recommendations, our slant, and our perspective. So I love that newsletter format. That is a huge bonus right there. Thank you for sharing that. And I’m going to sign up for it right now to see what you’re concerned about, what you’re surprised by, and what you’re excited by.

Awesome. Well, thank you.

Great. Well, Stephan, thank you for being on the show. More adventures to come. All right.

Thanks very much.

Well, that wraps up another episode of The Speaking Show. Hey, tell you what, if you like us, rate us and review us on iTunes, subscribe, tell a friend, go grab the notes and downloads and extras at thespeakingshow.com. See you next time.