We were known as a web agency building websites and e-commerce sites that had good SEO for the first seven years that we were in business. It wasn’t until about 2002, when we did that SEO audit for Target put us on the map as an SEO firm where you could be a huge brand and hire out SEO services to this agency. Ours, Netconcepts, and then you can essentially outsource your SEO department. That was not how we were known up until that point. We were known as a web development shop that knew SEO.

How have you been, man?

I’m great. Good to see you.

Good to see you too. Good to see you too. I think we just kick off. I like this to be a fly on the wall. So just two cool people talking about cool stuff, right?

Okay

All right, Stephan, welcome to the show. So good to have you. I was really excited to speak with you for multiple reasons. Not just because you’re an amazing marketer, you’re an incredible marketer. Think it would not be an exaggeration to say you’re one of the leading authorities on SEO in the world. You’re one of the coauthors of the Art of SEO now, I think, in the fourth edition. And that’s, you know, known everywhere as really probably one of the most authoritative books, if not the most authoritative book on SEO.

But more than that, every time I speak to you, I get this feeling of peace, right? Inner calm and peace. I know you’ve gone down a real spiritual and found something there, and you are a very successful podcaster. So, That’s just me bragging about you for a little bit, but where am I on track? Where am I off track? And how do you normally introduce yourself?

Oh, that’s all perfect and beautiful. Thank you so much. I feel like I just want to reveal light in everything I do. And if it’s in a marketing context, a spiritual context, a personal development context, or any kind of general business context, I’m happy to do that. Yeah, that’s what I look to do if that’s your intention. You will achieve much more of that than if you just don’t show up with an intention or just try to build your business or whatever without a higher arching, a more overarching desire to serve

So, yeah, The Art of SEO is kind of my claim to fame at this point, fourth edition, 750 pages, but it’s not who I am. It’s just something I’ve created with collaborators with my co-authors. And it continues over, you know, all these years since 2009 to add a lot of value in the world and to educate a lot of SEO practitioners. And that’s pretty cool.

That is really cool. So I’ve known you for a few years, but I don’t really know your origin story or your background. So maybe can you go into that a little bit? How did you get started? What was your career early on? How did you get started in business and in marketing? And then I’d love to hear more about where you’ve gone beyond that.

Yeah. It started actually when I was a kid. I taught myself how to program, and I wrote my own bulletin board system. This was prior to the World Wide Web. And I coded the whole thing in BASIC, and I used my home telephone line. You know, that’s not a cool thing to do if that’s your only phone line for your family.

Yeah, but it’s been intriguing and interesting to me for a long time. So I would stay up all night coding during the summer, and I was like 13 years old, 12, 13 to doing this. And then I decided I needed to get more healthy habits and, you know, just, you know, I go cold turkey. I gave away all my software and sold my Commodore 64, and then I joined the track team and, cross country team and bicycle club.

And then I just, you know, went in the other direction completely. And then, when I was studying biochemistry and a PhD program years later, I decided I was going to play with this internet thing. That was, you know, a thing. And it was 1994. I was building websites just for fun. I built one for my department as well as I built one or two, just out of hobbies that I was interested in when I was writing.

So I created WritersNet, writers.net, and I created a bed and breakfast directory, Insite, I N S I T E. And not even a year later, I dropped out of my PhD and started an internet agency. This was really early days before SEO was a thing. So 1995, and pretty quickly, I figured that SEO was going to be a thing. So I started playing around with web position gold and, Google hadn’t even existed at that point. So, I was optimizing for search engines like InfoSeek and Lycos, AltaVista, WebCrawler, et cetera. And yeah, and you know, it was really kind of cool crazy, I don’t know if I could say this word, ballsy to do what I did because I was up to my eyeballs in student loan debt.

And I talked my way into a conference as a volunteer because I had no speaking experience and no portfolio other than the couple of websites I designed for fun myself on the side. So when I went to this conference, it was several thousand dollars, how to market on the internet. I was given the job of mic runner.

Cause I wasn’t paying for the event. I was being put to work. So I was a very cheeky, 24-year-old kid still. And I just decided to start chiming in and helping the panelists answer the questions. Cause I had the mic and. By the end of the day one, I had a big stack of business cards, and I also was de-invited from day two by the conference organizer. I think I ticked off some of the panelists and speakers, who then complained to the organizer. But yeah, it ended up being a huge blessing because I got two big accounts from doing that. I was making nothing, and then, a month later, I had two huge accounts.

Instead of having to go and take out a big loan or whatever, the accounts ended up being a half million dollars each worth of revenue, which that’s like getting an angel investor. And all it was me just being really cheeky. Yeah, not really knowing better that It’s bad etiquette to help kind of answer some of the questions that are stumping the panelists.

Amazing. I mean, there are a couple of lessons really that you know, and I see this on a recurring basis from people who’ve been incredibly successful. They’re not afraid to just get themselves out there but also. Really offer their services for free initially, like a lot of people talk about, you know, how do I get started in X, they’re like, look, I’m really good at this.

And I need to get my first client, my second client. And often, some of the best ways to get noticed is to just provide a lot of value to someone in the space for free. And get noticed. And I’ve had several people who now work for me who got their jobs not by pitching me on their service or whatever but by actually doing something valuable for me for free without being prompted, without being asked.

And that naturally leads to, “Hey, How can I get more of this? How can I get more of you?” And I love that. I know Zig Ziglar often said, you know, timid salespeople have skinny children, right? So really being a little bit bold and just getting yourself out there and, you know, kind of taking that risk of looking foolish, right? Because, you know, as a year old, you’re showing up to a conference, you’re answering questions, and a lot of people will be like, know, what are my qualifications? Who am I? All of this sort of stuff. I should just shut up, right? But you’re bold, and you put yourself.

Well, that who am I thing is that’s poison, right? It’s imposter syndrome. Who am I? To be so bold or so magnificent to deserve the attention and interest of a Fortune 500 company or whatever? And Marianne Williamson famously said, who are you not to be? That’s your nature. That’s who you are. I don’t know if you’re, do you know who Marianne Williamson is?

No, I don’t.

Oh, she’s an amazing author and personal development expert. And the quote is so beautiful. It’s from her book, A Return to Love Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles. And it goes like this, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.” We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.

I love that. I love

How beautiful is that? This sort of thing of just putting yourself out there, being bold and not fearing rejection, or at least just pushing through the fear, is a way to just be in the world to not fear rejection. Be worried that you’re taking up space in the world. You know, for years, I would do other things that were bold like that. Not necessarily poor etiquette, but things that would put myself out there in a way that you know, I took a big risk. For example, we did a full-blown SEO audit, a very expensive SEO audit for free to target. Target.com, which is a huge brand here in the States, and it was a risk because we did it in the hopes of getting a testimonial and use of their logo on our client list.

And they said that’s going to depend on the quality of the audit. If you do a great job, then sure. And we did. And that turned into so much business. The testimonial quote was amazing. And having that logo target on our client list was a big deal. Yeah. And, Greg, Marilee’s, he’s got a great story too, of doing something bold like that. He reached out. In fact, you know him because of this bold move.

Okay.

He sent out t-shirts that he had handmade with a logo that was incredible that he had made for James Schramko. Oh, who is his podcast co-host?

Tim Reed, was it at the time?

No, who’s the e-commerce guy?

Ezra Firestone?

Ezra Firestone. So they had a podcast back then called Think, Act, Get. And Greg made a beautiful logo for that podcast and put it on two t-shirts and, sent a t-shirt to James and went to Ezra. And they were just gobsmacked. They loved it. They didn’t know who Greg was. They didn’t know Studio One Design, but they just contacted him, and James ended up inviting Greg to a conference that was a super-fast business event.

He then started sending business to Greg and Studio One, and the rest is history. It all started because of Greg’s willingness to put himself out there, and it wasn’t as a ploy; it was him genuinely being giving and wanting to serve and appreciate what James and Ezra were doing because that podcast was life-changing for Greg. How cool is that? And you know Greg because of James.

I do know Greg, and in fact, I’ll talk to Greg later today. So, got an episode lined up with Greg. Yeah. I see one commonality of people who’ve just kicked butt in life; it’s that they provide value in advance, and they’re bold, right? I read almost anybody’s biography.

I read almost anybody’s story or heard anybody’s story, and they did bold things. And in fact, every year, I come up with a word for the year for myself.

And this year, it’s asked. I’m going to ask more than I’ve ever asked before. A lot of people feel like asking kind of is like you’re begging or you’re lowering your status. But when I look at all of the highest status people, including people like Steve Jobs, they were really good askers. Asking begins the receiving process. And so that’s the word I’ve got for the year. I write that down literally every single day when I’m writing out my goals.

Well, a nice corollary to that, I think, is to expect miracles.

I love that.

I was on the sign behind Joe Vitale and I interviewed him. He was an incredible guest on my podcast, Get Yourself Optimized. He’s famous for the Law of Attraction, Ho’oponopono, which is the Hawaiian Prayer of Forgiveness. He’s got all these books published, but probably the thing he’s most famous for was being very prominently positioned in the book.

The movie The Secret went hugely viral. And yeah, I just think that Joe is a beautiful human. And when I saw that sign behind him on the video, I just thought, this is a sign for me that I need to remember. Just like you need to remember to ask. And not expectation as in entitlement; it’s positive expectancy. It’s believing that the universe has your back, that everything is divinely orchestrated, and that this is a game rigged in your favor.

I love that. I actually use that phrase all the time: that life is rigged in my favor. I love that. There was a guy in Australia who was sort of famous for, I’m not sure if he’s still alive. He was pretty old at the time, but he was giving out little business cards that just said, expect a miracle.

He’d be at a coffee shop and just give it to someone or whatever. And he had some incredible stories and was an amazing speaker. That’s awesome. I want to come back to some of your sort of spiritual insights in a moment, but getting back to your work as a marketer, as an SEO person.

If you looked in the marketing space and there was anything that you would consider, I guess, a commodity, it would be SEO services. Literally, everybody’s spam inbox is littered with people saying, “Hey, I’ll get you on page one of Google. An SEO person and all of that sort of stuff.” In terms of positioning and in terms of fees are at the highest level, I think in the space of anybody, like you command enormous fees deservedly.

So, how do you compete in a market that is so saturated that has everybody making the same kind of claims. How are you standing out? How are you positioning yourself differently? What effect has the book had in that space for you, if any? And yes, I’d love to hear your thoughts because a lot of people feel like, Hey, my industry or my market is supersaturated, or there’s a lot of competition, but I couldn’t think of any market that is probably more saturated, more competitive than SEO services.

Stephan: Yeah. Think of it this way. I learned this from Bob Allen. Who wrote many huge bestselling books. Cash in a Flash, Multiple Streams of Income, The One Minute Millionaire. He’s sold tens of millions of books. And the way he describes this is that you need to be the only one in your field. The only and then insert in the blank. So, how does that manifest for me? Because I have the book, and it is a textbook in universities on SEO. It is the go-to reference book. It has all the big names in the SEO industry and marketing and business who have provided blurbs the Testimonial quotes in the front matter of the book.

It’s super legit. It’s super credible. And having that makes me the only, or me and my two coauthors, the only, and that is something you can’t buy. And there are ways to create lower quality books with AI, with, you know, hiring out. To a firm that creates books for you and so forth, but it won’t be the kind of caliber that will make you the only one. That each edition took two years to produce is a huge project, labor, a love really, because it is probably minimum wage, the amount of work involved in the amount of royalties that I’ve gotten.

And my co-authors have gotten it, but it is an incredible, huge business card. If I’m speaking at a conference and I give some books away, then I will get people who say, wow, this is a huge book. And it was even bigger. The previous edition, the third edition, was a thousand pages.

So they would say, I don’t think I’m going to be able to read this. Can I just hire you? And that’s, of course, music to my ears. I know that is going to happen time and time again. So I end up buying a bunch of books and then giving them away.

Author discount: it’s still much more cost-effective to do that penny-wise, pound foolish with the books. You know, when you have a publisher, like O’Reilly’s, my publisher, I don’t have the rights to give away digital copies, to create an audiobook, nothing. I have to buy copies from the publisher or from Amazon, and then I can give those away, but that might cost me 25 bucks a piece, which is not cheap if you’re going to give away 50 copies at a conference, for example, but it pays for itself time and time again.

And that’s just one way to be the only. I mean, if you’re the only guy with a one-page marketing plan blueprint on how to do it. Like talk about simplifying and providing a framework that is memorable and impactful. It’s a game-changer. So you’re the only one in that space. No one else can come after you and say, “Hey, I’ve got a one-page marketing plan. Look at me.” And they’re like, wait a second. No. Allan Dib already, he already has dibs on that. And that’s what. What our listener needs to do is find that slot where they can be the only one. It’s pretty simple, but it’s not easy. It’s straightforward, but it’s a lot of work. It might take two years.

It might take just creating that 35,000 SEO audit that you give away for free that takes you a month to produce in the hopes that you get a great testimonial, and then you do and that changes the whole trajectory of your business, which is what happened for us. You know, because we were known as a web agency building websites and e-commerce sites that had good SEO for the first seven years that we were in business.

It wasn’t until about 2002, that we did that SEO audit for Target put us on the map as an SEO firm where you could be a huge brand and hire out SEO services to this agency. Ours, Netconcepts, and then you can essentially outsource your SEO department. That was not how we were known up until that point. We were known as a web development shop that knew SEO.

I love the book strategy. You know, I’ve seen that be a huge moat in my business in terms of. It’s a huge competitive advantage just because so few people will actually do it. Like, like I’ve just released or just about to release my new book, Lean Marketing. I’ve sent you an advanced copy. But, so much effort is front-loaded. I mean, that book was two years of work. And that’s not even including, you know, thinking about it prior, and all of that was just like the work to write it, to get it out, to edit it, to do all of that. So much of the work is front-loaded, and so few people are willing to do that.

So, it is a massive competitive advantage, especially when you’ve come up with a concept that is unique. However, having said that, The answer is more than just, Hey, I wrote a book because there are tons of people who wrote a book, right? And there are tons of people who’ve written SEO books, and they don’t have anywhere near your level of success. So, something more to what you’re doing than, okay, yes, you wrote an incredible book, one that’s super comprehensive, but something more than just, Hey, I’m an author on a book.

You think about this as kind of predestined. That I will, whatever, and the bigger the dream, the more likely you’re going to hit it, and if you aim for the stars, you may only hit the moon, but you’re certainly not going to hit the moon if your sights are set on, I don’t know, three stories up. If you want to really make a big impact in this world, help humanity, and so forth, dream big and make it a moonshot. What I did in the early years of building my business didn’t make me a moonshot.

It was just building a business. I wasn’t a really successful entrepreneur in the first few years. I was just an entrepreneur. There are entrepreneurs who grow hundred, six hundred million dollar businesses and so forth. I think it needs to be something along the lines of the more people you impact. The more your success will be, so if you want to be a millionaire, help a million people; if you want to be a billionaire, help a billion people.

I didn’t get that for a number of years, and I didn’t have my spiritual awakening to see this bigger picture of how this is all like a game until, into my business life, so I went a good two decades and a half without having any spiritual connection at all. I was agnostic, and it felt like I was swimming upstream. Things didn’t really turn for me until I had this awakening, and then everything just started to happen for me instead of feeling like it was happening to me.

I can’t resist now. Talk me through some of your awakenings. Because I feel like I’m sort of at, the stage where you were initially that sort of agnostic stage where you don’t really, I mean, there’s, you definitely feel there’s something else other than what we see, you know, everyday reality, but, You really don’t know what you don’t know where there’s not a, I think once you and I, we were talking about certainty and definitely I don’t have that certainty that you do. So, I’d love to hear about your spiritual awakening and how you get to that level of certainty.

Yeah, so first, I’ll give you a very practical, quick example of how these synchronicities and chance occurrences, seemingly chance occurrences, happen in my everyday life. This just happened yesterday, so it’s fresh in my mind. I was doing an interview of a guy that was, had nothing to do with you know, business or spirituality even. It was just kind of an I don’t really know what I was supposed to talk about with him. I just showed up hoping that it would, just kind of more knowing that it would just present itself. And we had a great conversation. I had interviewed him just on an intuition that he’d be a great guest.

His name is Daniel Brown and I know him through Genius Network. Turns out this was only his second podcast interview ever. It was kind of, you know, a leap of faith for me to have him on the show without all the experience and accolades and all that. But here’s where the magic came in.

We were talking about all these books that have made a difference in his life. And he had a whole bunch that we went through and why each one. And I’ve read a lot of books, too, but I shared a couple that just popped into my head. One of them I haven’t looked at in well over a year; it’s called Mind to Matter, and I didn’t even remember the name of the author, so I was Googling it while I was talking to this guy to Daniel.

It’s Dawson Church. I just never go into my, like, all the podcast pitches. I stay out of there. I try to stay out of my inbox altogether. I have an EA to an executive assistant to manage that stuff for me. She puts stuff in my action folder. That’s where I look at the read review folder secondarily. And I try to stay out of there, and she archives everything else. Guess who was pitching to be on my podcast. Just four hours after I mentioned him.

Wow.

Yeah. I mean, it was a staff person for Dawson.

Synchronicity is something that I have definitely a hundred percent experienced in my life and is a thing. It’s like, I’ll be thinking about something, or I’ve been talking, or I’ve been working on something, and then five other instances pop up. And I know a lot of people will say, Hey, you know, if you think of, you know, Red Volkswagen, you’ll see Red Volkswagens everywhere, but it’s not. It goes far beyond coincidence.

It’s stuff that, like, you know, I was looking to call someone or whatever, then their name pops up somewhere else, then their name pops up. And it’s like, there is no way that this is a coincidence. So, synchronicity is something that I’ve definitely started paying a lot more attention to lately.

And I read a book called The Human Mind Owner’s Manual. I really liked it by Sean Webb or Weber. I can’t remember, but. He basically talks about how essentially our brain is essentially like a transceiver into consciousness. Consciousness exists outside of us where says we’re consciousness having a human experience. So that works.

And look, I don’t know if I agree with everything that he says and things like that, but for a hundred percent certainty, I’ve experienced synchronicity in my life. The other thing that I’ve experienced several times, and I know a lot of people who come up with big ideas say that the idea, they didn’t come up with it.

They just essentially liked it. Caught it, or it came from somewhere else, and they were just the conduit for it. And I think some of my biggest ideas have come about that way as well, where it’s not something that I’ve actually, you know, invented. It’s just something that I’ve just suddenly picked up, you know, and I’ve had that experience as well.

So other than those sort of things, I don’t have a lot of clarity around, you know, spiritual life, you know, I was raised in sort of Christian fundamentalism, so that put me off a lot of organized religion. So that’s why it sort of repelled me for a long time, but I’ve started sort of tapping back into a spiritual idea or spiritual thought lately.

Yeah, so there’s a great quote. I think it might be from Wayne Dyer, “That we are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Yes.

And you’re getting a taste of that through these synchronicities, these chance occurrences that don’t really make sense. Other than that, there’s a bigger picture going on, which is that the unseen world is more real than the seen world. And then, all the other questions around. The existence of God or a grand design, infinite intelligence you know, consciousness, all that sort of stuff. Does it survive the body? You know, that sort of stuff. We’ll get to it later, but at least this has cracked the door open for you that you can see there’s more to life than just materialism kind of viewpoint. Magic is going on.

How did you make that shift? Because, you know, as an entrepreneur, I think even as a human being, I read a quote the other day that said every living thing wants to live beyond its means. Right. And so, as an entrepreneur, you’re always chasing the next revenue goal, the next profit goal, the next project, the next whatever.

And that’s something that I’ve been thinking about lately is like, what’s that Goldilocks zone where, because I mean, having too little, you know, you That’s bad. Having too much can be a pain in the ass as well. That finding that Goldilocks zone in not just business but in every area of life. I think it applies to physical fitness.

It applies to money. It applies to relationships. There’s a zone where there’s too little, and there’s a zone where there’s too much and finding that. Real Goldilocks zone. I hate when they say balance, you know, it’s balance is not what I mean. But finding that zone that is right. Kind of that in economics, I think they call it the efficient frontier when there’s sort of a perfect correlation of utility. So how did you find it?

I stumbled into it, but it was all by divine orchestration. I just didn’t realize it at the time. I had an experience in India. I got touched on the head by a monk and given a blessing. This was as part of a Tony Robbins’ Platinum Partner Trip. So, I was in his highest-level program. This particular event was a spirituality-themed Intensive, and it was for his upper-echelon folks who are spending upwards of a hundred grand a year To be in his kind of inner circle.

This was back in 2012, and it was one monk in particular. I remember his name even, and when he touched me on my head, It was like a psychedelic experience. I had never done drugs before, but everything was in technicolor, as if I had done LSD. So, I don’t know what LSD is like. I’ve never even done marijuana.

And I know that This was like a supernatural experience. Everything was the brightest technicolor colors, like a cartoon I’ve ever seen. I felt this deep sense of peace and connection to the Creator and to all that is, to the fabric of creation. And remember, I was agnostic and didn’t believe in anything. I didn’t even think that the universe was friendly.

I thought it was kind of malevolent, you know, dark dystopian place. And, of course, when that’s your expectation, that’s what you attract into your reality, and that’s no fun. But this was a powerful turning point in my life. Now, it wasn’t until January 22nd, 2021, that I had my second awakening, and that one changed everything even more.

It was an even bigger shift because I was shown at that point the nature of reality, that this is a holographic kind of Matrix, a simulation of sorts, an illusion. And this is not a new concept that physical reality is an illusion. This is in a lot of major religions. Including Judeo Christian, Hinduism, and Buddhism, right?

The name in Buddhism is Samsara, and in Hinduism, it’s Maya. It’s not real. Time, space, and time. And motion is all an illusion. That’s a fundamental precept in Kabbalah and mystical Judaism, that this is all illusion. Nothing like a loss is an illusion. Evil is an illusion. Everything is an illusion other than love, other than God.

And God is everything and everywhere. Like there’s nothing that doesn’t have consciousness, including this table that my computer sits on including the toys that my little son plays with. There’s nothing that doesn’t have consciousness. There’s nothing that is independent of God. And so once you start experiencing God, then you can’t unsee it. It’s like you are Neo in the Matrix, and you see the green code. And now reality is malleable.

What happened in 2021 that made you see all of this?

It started because of a prayer. The prayer came about because a few months earlier, I did a podcast interview of this pretty famous psychic, Sheila Gillette, who I met through Genius Network, Joe Polish‘s Mastermind, Connection Network; and Sheila has been channeling 12 archangels for 50 years.

She had a near-death experience when she was bearing a child; she had a pulmonary embolism, and she was not going to make it. Her baby was fine, but she was not going to make it. And then she started a fever. She prayed to God, please let me stay on this planet. Let me raise my kids. Give me a job.

Please give me a job. I’ll do anything. And I just remembered for months, This, please give me a job request and spontaneously, in the middle of the night, three months later, I started praying to God for a job, and I had no idea what I was asking for on the surface look like it made any sense because I’m a successful entrepreneur and you know, whatever, what do I need a job for?

I didn’t know what I was praying for. I was shown the Matrix, I was shown the simulation, and it was as if, imagine terabytes of data being jammed into a one gigabyte thumb drive. I was not able to retain any of it or very little of it, but it changed everything for me. People who tell you that they had a plant medicine journey, And they saw the nature of reality, they saw God, they saw angels, or what have you. In that kind of scenario, you might just say that’s the medicine, or that’s the whatever. But I just prayed. That’s all. Not all, because every prayer is heard.

But what made you spontaneously just pray in the middle of the night? You know, like you’re agnostic or whatever.

No, I was not agnostic at that point. I had the awakening in 2012, but this was 2012. nine years later, but I don’t know exactly. It was like my higher self, you know, something deep in my soul just said, pray for this, like nudge, nudge, nudge, like poke, poke, pray for this. I just started praying. I just started really praying for this.

And what it turned out, and this might really turn off some of the listeners who don’t believe in things like psychic abilities. So Sheila Gillette, who’s been channeling these 12 archangels, her psychic abilities were not online at that point that she was on her deathbed. So she had that near-death experience and everything, and she was granted a second chance. Part of the assignment for her was having psychic abilities and then starting to channel and stuff.

So you talked earlier about, you know, sometimes a book title or something just pops into your head, and you feel like this did not come from me. She can receive stuff psychically and distinguish that it’s not coming from her consciousness, but it’s coming from, you know, infinite intelligence. That’s what awakened in me too. So that’s where, you know, you have some, you might lose some of your listeners here at this point in the episode.

Okay. We’re okay.

Clairvoyance, clairaudience psychometry, medical intuition, animal communication, all that sort of nonsense. You’re telling me that this guy can do that. Yeah. Yeah, I can. And It’s tricky to talk to somebody who is, let’s say, completely atheistic, and I have to calibrate. I have to rely on my intuition and my guidance on what to say and how much to say. Some people, like even relatives, I’ll never speak about this to them, you know, maybe in my memoir or whatever, they’ll find out, but until then, they just think of me as an SEO geek, and that’s okay because they’re not ready to hear this.

And that’s okay. You know, there’s no judgment. It’s like, we’re, I love this quote from Ram Dass. We’re all just walking each other home. And if, you know, someone’s two steps behind me or two steps ahead of me, it doesn’t matter. We’re all heading to the same place. It’s just, are we going to take detours? Are we going to help each other on the way?

You know, that’s all our choice. And if you’re in a place of service instead of self-service, then you’re gonna attract more miracles, more synchronicities, more of those chance occurrences that aren’t change, and it becomes just part of how the universe works.

I love it. I love it. So where does someone go where someone who’s like me, you know, I feel like I’m definitely at a spiritual crossroads. I’m successful beyond my dreams in terms of business, in terms of life, you know, everyday life is incredible for me, but I definitely feel like I’m at a spiritual crossroads. Where does someone like me go?

That’s the trap, also, by the way; the concept is known as The Drift. I learned about it from the; it’s a book called Outwitting the Devil, which wasn’t even published during Napoleon Hill’s lifetime. So he wrote this, channeled it really, and it’s conversations with the devil. And the devil is sharing his secrets of like, yeah, this is how I get people to do the bad stuff. I just allow them to drift. I invite them to drift. You know, sit in front of the TV, just kind of veg out. Ah, you know, I’m going to have a lazy day today.

That sort of stuff is just spiritual death. So if you allow yourself to drift, that’s where he’s got you. he’s taking you off the path. And if, on the other hand, you’re in a place of service and surrender, and you know that you’re an instrument for the creator, however, you want to refer to him or her, but that you are in a place of service, then these sorts of synchronicities and so forth will accelerate.

But the question that you posed is, do I crack open that door even more so that you can see that, Oh, just saw the black cat go twice in front of my, you know, doorway. This is a sign I need to do something. I’m like Mr. Anderson, and I’m having a good life as a computer programmer. Actually, in the movie, he wasn’t having a very good life. You know, it, on the surface, would look fairly successful. He’s making enough money and dah. But there is so much more to this game that we’re playing. So much more. It’s beyond human comprehension.

So what I would recommend as a starting point is to, whatever your interest or kind of curiosity is focused on, some sort of psychic thing or spiritual phenomenon, You know if it’s having a psychedelic experience doing some ayahuasca and in a jungle somewhere with a shaman who’s like legit and not printing out his own kind of certificate.

You are curious about, I don’t know, reading the Akashic Records, opening your Akashic Records, so you want to take a class on Akashic Records. If you simply want to read something that’s almost kind of like The Matrix from a hundred years ago, there’s a book called The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn, published literally a hundred years ago.

And it’s so forward-thinking in terms of how this illusion works and how to break open the illusion, you know, and how to attract things, the law of attraction and manifesting and all this from a hundred years ago. Yeah, there are courses. There’s, you know, for example, Sheila Gillette has courses on developing your psychic abilities. Anne Marie Pizarro, who is a well-known Akashic Records reader, has a course on the Akashic Records and how to open your records.

And once you get that experience, you think, wow, what else is possible? And it’s just the rabbit hole goes deep; let’s say that you open your Akashic records, and you learn how to do that. It’s a pretty simple prayer that you say, and then you feel what’s called the Akashic headache, which is this band of energy kind of, I don’t know, buzzing or kind of electric or, you know, prickly wrapped around your head.

And you know your records are open, and you’re communicating with the record keepers, and then you do the closing prayer, and it just vanishes. It’s like, whoa, this is amazing. You know, freaky maybe is what might, you know, be your first inclination to describe it. But I would say, be careful about your words if you’re talking about this as crazy or freaky or weird or whatever.

It’s kind of disrespectful because it is magic and how the universe is meant to work. 

Synchronicity isn’t just this. Spooky action at a distance sort of thing, you know, like, quantum entanglement. No, it is the scaffolding of the universe. This is how the universe is meant to work. Chance occurrences, people that you like, who end up becoming your soulmate or your business partner or whatever. This is destiny.

That chance occurrence, Oh, I missed the train. And then they did, too. And then we had a conversation like, what are the odds? We ended up becoming soulmates or becoming business partners or whatever. The odds are a hundred percent, you know, it’s one out of one. Because it is a rigged game, 100 percent rigged. So the more you just surrender to it, relax, trust and allow, the more of the magic happens. 

And then all of these things like, Oh, being bold and putting yourself out there and all that is just a mechanism to do your little 2% and then allowing the creator and all the angels and all of your unseen support team to do the 98% and then anything and everything is possible, and it just becomes this incredible game, and you’re just in love with life. 

Even when things go really sideways, you know that, hey, this is for my highest good because I know and trust that have that experience, that relationship with the creator that tells me to just relax and trust even through the bumpy road. Yeah.

Allan: Fascinating. Stephan. You know, to a lot of people listening, they’ll be like, you know, this stuff is really far out. This is all you know. And to be honest I’ve not experienced a lot of what you’ve said as well. But one thing I do know is that. Stuff that I once thought was far out is now just everyday practice.

Like, once upon a time, I thought it’d be far out to run a business that pays me enough to live. And then, at one stage, I thought it’d be far out to have a business where I could employ five people, 10 people or whatever. At one stage, I thought it was far out to think that the words that we use make a difference in our lives in, and practically in copy that we write and things like that, it’s really the product that people buy or the pricing or whatever.

So, things that I take for granted now as fact, as things that I see for certainty at one stage, I thought we were far out. And so I’m much more open these days to think things that I now see as far out. I’m like, in a year and two years and five years, will I just see this as fact? Like I do these things. So, that’s what I would say to both myself and to anyone else listening who is thinking, Hey, this stuff is, you know, far out there. I don’t know, to be honest, you know, like, I’m not there yet, but.

You know what I would say about this: if you are on the fence about it, look for practical applications. And then that will be further reinforcement when you get these miracles happening like, okay, there’s something to this. I need to accelerate this. I need to keep going. For example, Vishen Lakhiani is the founder of Mindvalley.

And he tells this story about before he founded Mindvalley, he worked as a commission-only salesperson at a SaaS. A company that served law firms, and he would get his assigned territories and lists of law firms to call. He was barely making it, and he was commissioned only, so he was 100 percent reliant on Yes in order to pay the bills.

Not making enough, right? So he was eating ramen noodles, essentially. He then went to the Silva Method seminar. He learned some of these things about how the universe works and how you can attract manifestations. Then he went back to work, and instead of calling A through Z the law firms that he was assigned, he would only call the ones that he felt like a tug, a pull, a spiritual or kind of energetic kind of nudge.

And guess what? His sales doubled, and he kept doing it. And guess what? His sales doubled again, and his sales doubled again, and within months, which is like three, four or five months, he was a VP at that company. Well, of course, he figured out that, you know, he was playing small, so he quit, and he started Mindvalley, but wow, what a great practical application of this idea that the unseen world is more real than the seen world.

You know, it’s just a great experiment that you can try yourself. Get in a high vibration and place of trust. Even if you’re not, if you’re agnostic and you’re thinking, I don’t know about this, but just give it a try. And that’s just one example. You know, you have probably a list of prospects, the list of past clients and email lists that you could go through and just feel like, okay, I need a sign. I need some guidance here. I want to become more spiritually connected, and so I’d really love to get this to, work, so please help me out here.

Yeah, often the non-spiritual term for that is you trusting your gut, right? Like so many times I’ve like ignored it and been regretful. I’d like would say it’s never steered me wrong. It steered me wrong when I’ve ignored it, when I’ve like, you know, I’ve got a bad feeling about this person, but you know, I think there’s going to be a profitable deal. They seem they’re saying they’re all the right things, and your gut feel is there. So, a lot of entrepreneurs will be familiar with that. But yeah, I mean.

But where is that coming from? You know, if you just say that’s just me. If you’re not you know, that comes from ego. If, instead, you’re realizing that we’re all connected, that, Or at least willing to consider it. You know what I would refer to as the willing suspension of disbelief.

That’s a term. I didn’t invent that, but I love thinking in those terms, right? So if somebody is talking to me about, I don’t know, let’s say an alien abduction or something. It wasn’t long ago where I just went, my eyes kind of involuntarily rolled backward. I was so dubious of that. And that’s just even in the last few years.

So if you are willing to suspend disbelief and just hear somebody out or try something, you’re going to have many more miraculous experiences than if you just. Shut the door on that and say you know what? It’s got to be proven to me first. You know, it’s not seeing is believing in this reality. It’s, and you create this reality in this video game we’re playing. It’s believing and seeing. When you believe it, then you see it.

I love it. Stephan, always a treat to speak with you. I always come away from speaking with you more inspired and open. So it’s fantastic to speak with you as always. Thank you so much. Where can people find you? I know you’ve got a couple of podcasts and you’ve got. a bunch of resources as well. There’s your book; there’s The Art of SEO, an incredible book for anyone who wants a very deep dive into SEO. Where else can people find you?

So the main place is StephanSpencer.com. My two podcasts are Marketing Speak and Get Yourself Optimized. And those are at marketingspeak.com and getyourselfoptimized.com. The Art of SEO is, of course, available on Amazon and Barnes Noble and everywhere else, but it also has a website, ArtofSEO.com.

My agency, Netconcepts, is at Netconcepts.com. And actually do. I was kind of joking about the memoir thing, but I am actually working on a memoir. So, at some point, that’ll be out and maybe that’ll be the thing I’m known for, not the art of SEO. You know, it’s all possible and infinite possibilities.

So, if you believe that you have a book in you, then you do. And it could be. It doesn’t have to be like years for like it was for me. Do you know how long it took to write The Alchemist? You know, the book that sold 150 million copies?

No, I don’t.

12 days.

12 days. Wow. That is incredible.

He downloaded it from above, right?

I need to figure out how to write a book in 12 days. Cause it took me nearly two years.

Yeah. I feel you.

Incredible. Incredible. Thank you so much, Stephan. Oh, it is such a pleasure to speak.

Likewise.