This is Stephan’s podcast appearance about Becoming an “Authority” The Fast Track to Link Building on the Search Talk Live.

Welcome to Search Talk Live with search engine optimization and marketing expert Robert O'Haver, powered by the Robert Palmer family of companies. All right. 

ROH: Welcome back to another episode of Search Talk Live. I'm your host, Robert O'Haver, along with Matt Weber of Roar Media or Roar Internet Marketing.

MW: Roar Internet Marketing. It's media.

ROH: Today is going to be a great show. We've got a lot to talk about, and our guests are amazing. Yeah, those of you listening to the show for the first time search talk live as a digital marketing podcast.

MW: We cover everything.

ROH: We talk about content marketing, SEO, and social media. I mean, you name it, and we cover it, really. I mean, did you think of anything we haven't covered?

MW: Not at all. By the way, did you happen to catch any of the live stream from Google today about the new product announcements?

ROH: No, I didn't.

MW: That's a lot of stuff that we're going to have to cover in the future. There's some big news coming out of Google.

ROH: Oh, nice. Yeah. Alright. Let's get on with the show. Our guest today is a three-time author and national, I'd say, international speaker. He has spoken at many conferences and won many awards—all kinds of awards here. He's the author of Google Power Search. He is co-author of Social e-commerce and, I would say, the Bible of SEO, The Art of SEO, Stephan Spencer. Stephan, how's it going?

Hey, it's going great. That was a nice intro. I am an international. Yes, I am.

RO: We're excited to have you. Stopped in Prague one time, huh? No, I'm just kidding.

I do impromptu presentations at airports, yes. Yes, actually, I will be speaking at Brighton SEO in September. So, yes, that is international. I do a fair amount of international speaking.

ROH: Nice. So, for people who haven't heard of you, I mean, obviously, you're an author. I've mentioned all that stuff, but tell us a little bit about yourself.

Sure. Yeah, so I was studying for a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and I decided to hop on the internet gravy train, and this was in 1994. I met some of the guys from Netscape back then, if you can believe it. And I'm like, wow, I gotta ride this train. So, I dropped out of my Ph.D. and started an agency. I ran it for 15 years and sold it in 2010 to Cavario.

I had a successful exit, and then they got acquired in 2014, so I made some money both times. So, that was cool. And yeah, The Art of SEO came out in its first edition in 2009. It started when Rand Fishkin and I were chatting in the speaker room at SCS Toronto, and we were like, we should do a book together. And he's like, "Yep, we should." And within two days, we had a book deal with O'Reilly.

MW: Wow. Two days. Wow.

Yeah. Danny Sullivan happened to be at the Foo Camp conference, the Friends of O'Reilly conference. So he was right there with all the important people at O'Reilly to ask them on our behalf if they'd want to be our publisher. And they said yes.

MW: Wow.

RO: That's cool.

MW: Yeah, that's great. Today's show is about helping people become authorities—not quite like you, but close to you.

Close friends with me. Yes.

RO: Well, before we get into that, I wanted to share with our listeners a side project I'm working on. One thing I thought was that I find hilarity in everything. A lot of our listeners were asking if we could get Elon Musk on. Everybody was, yeah, right.

MW: And you love a good challenge.

RO: Yeah, that's, yeah. So, I put a challenge on myself; I reached out to friends of friends and all that good stuff and really never got a response, and I was kind of down at that point. But then I started thinking kind of out of the box, and I wanted to share this with you guys because I'm putting this plan together right now, building the strategy, all the content, and everything for this. What I'm doing is I found a way. I've been playing around with Facebook targeting, and I found a way to target.

I'm down to about ten people. One of them has got to be based on knowing where he lives, his age and all this other stuff that just kind of correlates together to narrow the focus. You obviously can't target people on, God, could you imagine? But what I'm doing is I'm going to put a post on Facebook with a message titled "Message to Elon Musk." I'd like you guys to weigh in on this real quick, but I don't want to take too much time.

I'm going to build a landing page with these ads I'm going to promote to him on Facebook and then bring him back to the landing page on SearchTalkLive.com. Then I'm going to hit him with a cookie and then send different messages to him. But I'm trying to figure out what those messages are. I haven't got to that point yet. I'm just kind of playing around with different things, hoping to get the message to him. We would like to have him on the show.

MW: Well, it'd be a big coup, for sure. The plan has some interesting elements, but it looks like we might need a hook.

RO: What do you think, Stephan?

Exactly. Yeah. So. All right. First off, let me just clarify something that you said a few minutes ago: Facebook doesn't allow you to target individual people. Actually, you can target individual people. So, I could take my customer list, all my email addresses of my customers, and my clients and upload that to Facebook and create a custom audience.

You can target individuals who have bought from me in the past. So why couldn't you create a custom audience of Elon Musk and all of his colleagues, direct reports, etc.? Of course, you could.

RO: That is true. Right? Yeah, yeah. I was trying to narrow it down more than that, though, because he has several hundred employees.

Yeah. But you could go after his executive team.

RO: True.

As long as you have email addresses or phone numbers, you can build a custom audience from that. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. So, that's one thing, and you're exactly correct that you need a hook. You need something that is going to get his attention, interest, desire, and then action (AIDA), right?

So, what I would recommend is something that is counterintuitive or surprising. There's some cognitive dissonance in it. And it makes him do a double take, like, what? What is that? And it doesn't even have to be, like, creepy, as in, "Hey, Elon, we're watching you, or whatever, or like."

RO: Yeah, I wouldn't do that.

A little over the top. Instead, do something like, okay, let's just say that it was, let's say it was, around the end of the year that you're doing this. So, New Year's Day is coming up, and New Year's resolutions, you know, you're going to essentially News Jack on the topic of the day, which would be New Year's resolutions. So then you say, three New Year's resolutions that Elon Musk would never make.

RO: I gotcha. That's interesting.

It's counterintuitive, and there's some cognitive dissonance. Whoever thinks about New Year's resolutions that they would never make or that they should never make isn't thinking clearly. It's always about making these new resolutions, and then you screw up, and you don't follow through on them, or they fizzle out a weekend.

So, it's counterintuitive in that way, and it ties into something that is trending and, I think, has potential. If you can get some people behind it, which means that you're going to hopefully get this thing to go viral, then you're not just individually targeting him with a Facebook ad.

RO: Well, the last piece of that was going to, like, Haro and pitching them the story that I'm doing, you know, how I'm getting Elon, his attention. I think it's a huge story. It's a hunt for Elon Musk. The Great White Whale.

Yeah. So, Haro (help a reporter out) is a great resource both for journalists and for people looking for PR opportunities. But the thing is, again, we need to have a hook, and we need a larger strategy, so if we go after you on beforehand. With Haro as an engine to help create that opportunity for us. Maybe we do some sort of article. Let's say you write for Entrepreneur.com, and your pitch as a journalist in Haro is I'm looking for experts In public relations and marketing to weigh in with their best ideas on how you would target and get attention, interest, and desire, or you know, get some action from Elon Musk because we want to interview him.

How would you get an interview? How would you score an interview with Elon Musk? And the article could be titled something like 101 Ways to Score an Interview with Elon Musk. And let's say that in that article, you get some great tips and ideas from the contributors, from these different PR experts, and so forth.

Your article is killer, and it goes viral. You help seed it with some power users. So, you call in some favors with some influencers, power users on social sites, like Reddit and Facebook and get some traction, get the attention of Elon Musk, and he's like, okay, you baited me, but I'm going to, I'm going to give you guys an interview.

MW: Yeah, it's great. There's a buzz-creating element to it, too, when the other experts have to contribute. Sure.

Now, let's say that it doesn't get you that desired end result. It gets you some publicity and some links and so forth to get some SEO benefit, but you don't get that phone call or that email from Elon. You can then spin that up into other things you've gotten some traction on; let's recycle this. Let's repackage and repurpose.

Maybe we can create a Man on the Street viral video. Interview people, like how would you get the attention of Elon Musk to score an interview with him? And you interview enough people, man on the street style, you know, Times Square in front of Spago's and et cetera, et cetera.

You'll get some really great, funny, awesome responses back. You compile that into a viral video. You just take this idea and keep running with the repackaging. If it has traction, you keep doing it until you get his attention. Then you can also use that to retarget people inside of Tesla who are up, you know, upper-level executives, et cetera, people who are one step away from Elon.

RO: I love it.

It's all about strategy in The Art of War. Sun Tzu said, "Tactics without strategies are noise before defeat." So you're talking about a lot of tactical stuff, which is great and useful. Let's use Facebook ads as a vehicle to get to him, but without the strategy, and the key component of that strategy is the hook, it's just not going to work.

RO: I agree. Yeah. Yes. Fun. I brought it up on the right show. Yeah.

MW: Great opportunity to refine a good idea.

RO: So, let's get down to it. Those of you listening can ask questions or give your ideas for topics using #SearchTalkLive, and we'll give those questions to Stephan as we're going through our little.

MW: Talk here. And if you have Elon Musk's phone number, tweet that too.

And you'll end up making an enemy of Elon. So, let me just do a little spin-off idea on this Elon Musk thing that I think will help you and your listeners get more leverage. If you want to build authority and authority positioning, it's great to get an interview with Elon Musk. That's awesome, but it doesn't make you an authority. It just makes you a great interviewer.

So how would you spin that into becoming an authority with that Elon Musk opportunity? Well, let me give you an idea or two, and then you can chime in with some additional ones yourself. Let's say that you get Elon to ask you some questions about SEO and, online marketing, and so forth.

Right? Now, you turn that into a separate small episode. That's you're basically getting an interview. You are being interviewed by Elon Musk, who is interviewing Robert O'Haver on SEO and Google. Like what? Like that authority buildings, you know, like times 10, isn't that amazing?

So, I interviewed Jay Abraham, a marketing great, like one of the greats for my show Marketing Speak, which is a great podcast; by the way, everybody should subscribe. So, not only do you know, is that a big coup at the beginning in like episode 9? I think it was early on to get a huge name like that made it so much easier to get all these other big names. I've gotten Dan Kennedy to be a guest, etc. But I got Jay to interview me about SEO. He originally used that for a presentation or a workshop he was doing in Japan, and it was a video, and he showed that from the stage, me talking about SEO and him interviewing me about it.

And then I asked him, can I use that for my own episode and so forth? And he was like, yeah, use it for whatever you want. Score. Yeah. Right. Jay Abraham interviewed me about SEO. I mean, it's just amazing. So, of course, that's a featured episode on the homepage thing. So yeah, look for an opportunity like that. Imagine somebody of Elon Musk's caliber, or, I don't know, Brian Tracy, somebody like that, interviewing you on the topic that you're most known for.

RO: Good spin. Absolutely. So instead of asking for an interview, I'll just have him, Hey, come in. Just kidding.

A little bit of a stretch, but who knows, like.

RO: That was a joke. Let's get on with the topic. We're talking about becoming an authority today, and it's also a fast track to link-building, right? Yeah. Let's go into that.

MW: Yeah, tell us what your ground points are for establishing authority. Where are the places that you go first for someone to build expertise and authority on the internet? What are the places that are most valuable?

Yeah, so the way that you're going to have the most impact, I think, is either to have a book or to be on TV that establishes Not only authority but also, a lot of times, celebrity, Which is that's a crucial distinction if you are a celebrity. You've got name recognition, you get invited to exclusive events, you know, think of you as on the red carpet sort of situation, right?

So that's being a celebrity. That's way better than just being an authority. You can be both a celebrity and an authority figure. There are celebrities who are not authorities on anything. They're just famous at being famous. And then there are people who are both authorities and celebrities, aim for that.

And one of the best ways to do it is to get on TV. And so you got to work your way up. You start with smaller networks, like local networks and news programs. For example, small markets. Tucson, Arizona, Reno, Nevada,  you know, Madison, Wisconsin. So you start smaller, and you work your way up because if you want to get on Good Morning America or the Today Show, you can't just show up and say, Hey, I'm like, what's your experience?

Have you been on TV before? No, but I'm going to be. I've practiced. I'm going to be great.

MW: I look in the mirror. Trust me.

Yeah, it's not going to work. So you got to work your way up, and then you got that portfolio. You have your media page. What's the first thing that a TV producer is going to do when they're gauging whether you're any good? They're going to go to your website.

They're going to look for your media page. And if they can't find any TV appearances that you've done before, game over.

MW: Right. And for folks who stay in the digital domain, like Robert and me, book publishing has gotten a little simpler over the past decade or so, hasn't it? Can you help the listeners with how easy it's gotten to get your book published?

Well, you know, there's the easy way, and there's the effective way. So, let me just distinguish those two. The thing is, you can self-publish very easily. KDP, Kindle Direct Publishing. You can, yeah, heck, you can even do a PDF and post it on Docstock and Scribd. But the thing is, if you want to be effective, you want to be a bestseller. And I'm not just talking About and Amazon, like weird category bestsellers that, like nobody's in, go after the obscure topic and obscure genre or subtopic within Amazon. Like, there hasn't been a book published there for a while. Let me make it a book about that topic, and then I'll be a category bestseller.

Nobody cares that you are a basket weaving category bestseller on Amazon. So, you have to work the hard yards to get that real bestseller status. But let's just talk about being an author first off. And there, there are all sorts of shortcuts and nuances that make a world of difference for you if you do this right. So, let's say that you are self-publishing and want to offer this book for free because that will increase its reach.

So, Amazon is, of course, a crucial platform for you. Did you know that you are not allowed to offer a book for free permanently on Amazon? You can do, like with KDP, you can do sales, and there are certain opportunities that you'll get where you can offer it for free to drum up interest. But you cannot offer it permanently for free. Well, here's a workaround. It's called Permafree. So, you first submit it to Amazon and give it a price, right? But then you go to, let's say, Barnes and Noble.

I think that Barnes and Noble allow you to list it for free. Amazon has a price-matching guarantee. So you have somebody submit a price notice that "Hey, over here, Barnes and Noble. It's free, but you're charging 2.99 for it." You know, you're supposed to match that price, and they'll match it permanently. Now you have a free book on Amazon, a free Kindle book.

MW: That's a great secret.

Pretty cool. So, there are lots of little nuances, but honestly, I would say. Do not do self-publishing for your first book. Get a traditional publisher and all the difference. Now you could, if it's not that great of a book and you don't have the connections and so forth, it's really hard to get in front of, get the attention of the acquisitions editor. Even if you're doing Facebook ads for them,  then you could do a hybrid model like Morgan James Publishing, which allows you to do this hybrid model with them.

And, it's not quite the vanity. Publishing model or self-publishing, but it's also not your traditional publishing route. So they'll provide some other resources, like the illustrator or designer for the book cover, editors, and all sorts of good stuff that a traditional publisher would provide. And it's less if you want to. It costs you less if you want to buy a whole bunch of books and give them away at conferences.

Like every conference I speak at, I'll be at Internet Retailer in just a couple of weeks. And I will bring a whole bunch of books to give away in my session and afterwards. Right. So it's pretty good value, right? It's a thousand-page book. It's heavy, and I'm giving it on from the stage. I get people running to the stage copy of the book.

It's awesome. It's a lot of fun. So, if you want to buy a bunch of those books from the publisher, then you're going to pay a lot because, typically, the author discount is 50%. So, traditional publishers, it's going to hurt to be giving away a bunch of copies for free because you're not free for them. With the hybrid model, you can buy them for a few dollars each. And that's a lot better than if I had to. I have a special arrangement with O'Reilly, so that's cool. But otherwise, I'd be spending $25 a book to give away. I don't know, I'm probably going to give away 50 books in two weeks at that conference.

That's a lot of money. So, yeah, the hybrid model is pretty interesting. So, that's Morgan James. And, let's see. So traditional publishers. I love O'Reilly. They're just so cool. They're so fun to work with. if let's see, if you're looking at a genre that's more kind of self-helpish or something, then Hay House would be a good publisher. Yeah, there are just a lot of publishers, or, of course, the big guys, who end up owning a lot of the imprints, but the other brands you think are separate publishers. They're actually all. HarperCollins.

MW: Right under one roof. Yeah.

So, yeah, get a publisher. If possible, get a traditional publisher for your first book. Then you can self-publish and make more profit and whatever, but the authority positioning of having a traditional publisher is invaluable. It will change the course of your business.

It will be transformational. It was for me when the art of SEO came out in its first edition in 2009. It changed the game for me.

It's so incredible. Like imagine this huge business card. It's a thousand-page book that gets noticed, that gets attention, and that opens doors. So that's the first thing: get it to become an author, and the second Would be get on TV. And if you are an author, you can much more easily get on TV because you've got a nice hook. You're doing a book Launch or a book tour, and you're coming to their local city. So it's timely. It's local if you could even make it more timely and local like I pitched in Phoenix, which is a top 20 market.

I cold-called the TV producer on the phone and asked to Talk about what makes people geeks and how to optimize your inner geek. It was tied into Phoenix Comic Con, which was that weekend. I was called on Sunday. Phoenix Comic Con was that weekend. And they were like, can you come on Saturday? I'm like, yes, So I got in, but I also had an emotional hook, too. It made for good TV. It wasn't just Timely and local Phoenix comic con that weekend, timely and local, but it was also a great kind of Emotional hook, and that was I'm gonna transform your host into the ultimate geek live on TV.

Here she is gonna like completely nerd out. I'm gonna bring geeky gadgets like a sleep tracker with the headband that you put on your forehead. Your host is gonna like to look like a total nerd, And I'm gonna bring my Iron Man costume that I wore at Comic-Con.

And your host can put the helmet on and everything. That was awesome. He sold it. You try to get on TV and talk about SEO and good luck. Nobody's going to have you on because that's boring. Just saying that out loud makes me want to go take a dump. It's got to be good TV. It's got to be of interest to a wide audience.

RO: And it can't be self-serving. 

No, heck no. Right, so it was a very soft sell. In fact, there was no selling at all. I had 11 TV appearances last year. Most of them were about, "Are you a geek?" Take the quiz. I had this great quiz, and then I had this geek transformation thing with the host. I brought all the great props. It was awesome. But the hook that made it worthwhile for me wasn't just that, okay, I get to have a still image of me with a Fox News logo or something. I got to tie it into my other podcast show. So I have Marketing Speak. I also have the Get Yourself Optimized. Perfect tie-in, right? So, the Get Yourself Optimized isn't actually about optimizing your website.

It's about optimizing yourself as a person. So, self-help like personal development stuff, life hacking, biohacking, I've had Dave Asprey on from the bulletproof coffee and bulletproof diet. I've had Byron Katie on, who's like a huge self-help guru. It's an awesome podcast that has nothing to do with SEO and really nothing about my online marketing business and the consulting that I do.

But it would help me get more listeners for my show, and then when my self-help book comes out, I'm gonna have my thousand true fans ready to go Clamoring for my book, hitting the bookstores being my street team saying, hey "When Stephan Spencer's book coming Is it out yet? Do you have it?"

Carrying it, the managers of these bookstores are like, "Who the heck is this Stefan Spencer guy? And why are all these people bothering us about this book?" You go buy some copies, right? So it works. Get your street team and your thousand true fans clamoring for whatever you're doing.

And how do you get that? Well, you gotta create massive value and so forth and have the hooks. And, for me, I created an audience, and I created authority positioning for that whole new area that nobody knows me for of personal development by getting on TV and having a podcast that, you know, those two fed into each other.

MW: Yeah, you positioned it very nicely. It's just a short step from your already established expertise.

RO: I can see the slogan now. Not only can I optimize your website, but I can optimize you.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. Right. You can listen to Tim Ferriss, Dave Allen, and Dave Asprey on my show, Get Yourself Optimized. Pretty cool.

MW: So we've got TV. We've got a book and then another way to establish authority. Robert, you're an expert here.

RO: Yeah, let's talk about the podcast.

Yes. Let's talk podcast.

RO: So, how does that help with, oh, I can probably tell you that, but I'll let you say it.

I have no idea.

RO: Right?

Yeah, so now, there are two ways that we could talk about podcasts building your authority positioning. One is you are the host of the show or the talent, and the other is where you're on somebody else's show. So, how many shows are you guys podcasting all the time here every week? What about being on other people's shows? How many times a month are you on other people's shows being interviewed?

RO: I haven't been asked.

MW: Yeah, maybe once a year, but it's a great point. So, get your own show or follow up and start researching other shows.

Yes, you need to be, like, I think you should be on more shows, other people's shows, than you are doing on your own. That means a minimum of four episodes and four interviews a month on other people's shows.

RO: Gotcha.

Because if you don't, then how are you going to increase your reach and, I mean, you're getting in front of podcast listeners. Who are the best consumers of podcasts? People who are already consuming other podcasts. How do you get in front of those people? By getting on other people's podcasts. There are services like Interview Connections. Esther Kish has a service as well. So, InterviewConnections.com, you can sign up for as low as maybe a few hundred dollars a month, and they'll guarantee to get you on four or eight different shows a month depending on what service level you're at, you know, what price point, and they're great.

Jessica is the founder of the company. She's awesome. They really deliver. And then, like I said, Esther Kish is another person who does that. She has a different price point, like more expensive, but she's more of kind of your personal PR professional. So, yeah, get on other people's podcasts. That's a cool thing, a powerful weapon.

And then for your own podcasts, so I have two podcast shows, which is a lot of work. I think it's crucial that you set up your systems right at the beginning so that you have scalability. Because if this becomes a time suck, by the time you really get traction with your podcast, which may be a year or even 18 months, you've gotten tired, and you've given up.

So, I load up Skype, hit record, and afterwards drop the file into Dropbox. It's all done. I've washed my hands of it. So, my team does everything else. The episode art, click-to-tweets, social posts, audio editing, show notes, transcript—it's all done without me touching any of it. So, I use a service called Pro Podcasting Solutions. Daryl Darnell is awesome. I had to go through a few different vendors before I found him and I'm really happy. I don't get any commission out of mentioning his name, but he probably is going to be flooded with new business and get too busy to work with me.

But whatever, I'm serving the community. So, have a system in place so that this becomes scalable and doable. And then when you get you, so you, the main metric that everybody is paying attention to with podcasts is the number of downloads. Cause that's the easiest thing to track. Subscriptions are way more important, and in fact, listens, and you can't tell this stuff actually from. I use Libsyn as my hosting service for all my podcasts.

I don't get visibility in anything other than downloads. I can't see how many subscribers I have on iTunes or how many people are listening to the episodes that they're downloading. It's frustrating.

RO: Yeah.

So the best we can do is just try and improve our download numbers, but it's looking at the wrong stuff. It's like talking about hits. Remember, back in the day before Google Analytics, people were talking about hits. Remember this acronym? Maybe you have never heard of this "Hits how idiots track success."

There are so many more hits on my website. If you want more hits, just add a bunch more images, and that's a bunch more, right? Downloads to your page. It's not anymore for users, but you can say you got twice or ten times as many hits. So the download numbers are not a great metric but if you have, if you come into this with a powerful intention like I want to get Elon Musk on my podcast, that's a powerful intention.

So if you have a bigger outcome you're after than just, "I want to market my business or whatever," you'll get a better outcome from it. But having your own podcast show and positioning yourself as the authority—this is where your show format comes into play—and you always have to be. So consistent. Always, on the same day, at the same time, do not ever miss a week,  and people will grow to expect that and appreciate you delivering massive value if the show format gives you the opportunity to present yourself as an expert and not just as a great interviewer.

Yeah, that's critically important. So there are shows where it's just two co-hosts riffing back and forth doing case studies and stuff like James Schramko and Taki Moore have sales marketing profit. Great podcast. They riff back and forth, and they never have the guest on who, a guest on talking about the case study. It's always them talking about the case study.

RO: Yeah, we try to do that here, or we have, you know. Obviously, we have guests every week, but we try to give both sides of the coin, so that way, you know, I think our listeners really appreciate that.

MW: Yeah, different perspectives bring value.

When you interject with your own brilliant ideas, it helps establish your authority positioning. So, you are sharing that idea of how I want to get Elon Musk on my show, and here's a start to the idea of how we're going to do it. Let's brainstorm how to. Yeah. It's genius because a lot of people probably didn't even know you can target people on Facebook ads and instead of just like do blanket, you know, boosting of posts and stuff.

So very powerful. 

And then, as a way to build links, if you outreach to these guests after the interview is over, of course, during the interview itself, you should ask the guests to commit to sharing the episode with their social media followers. Have them do it live, not after the fact, via email, because it's easy for them to just ignore that.

Have them either commit or not commit. They could say no, like, I don't really do that usually, but you know, I appreciate you asking about it. Yeah, they say okay. Well, you know, you don't ask, you don't get that's fine. I'm not gonna cancel our show or whatever. I mean, you're amazing, and we're gonna interview each, you know, I'm gonna interview you so.

If you follow up afterward, make sure that they have added it to their media page, just like you take your TV appearances and put them on your media page, radio show appearances and so forth. Every podcast. Where I am the guest on somebody else's show goes on my media page. And if they haven't done that as the guest added your show, what like, Hey, this, I, made you the star. And now you really should feature that on your media page and on your website. And, of course, that'll be a link to your site.

MW: And what's your thought on pre-producing content to help the guests distribute the message? Do you pre-write emails, pre-write tweets, or pre-write content for them to distribute?

You know, I do provide one tweet as a starting point, but I would not go overboard because it seems like you're putting words in their mouths. I just want to make it seem like it's really easy for me. I'm easy for the recipient to blast out a tweet without having to think too hard. So, I provide just one tweet that I didn't use elsewhere. It's handcrafted specifically from their voice for them to use. Then, they could use that for Facebook, and I also provide episode art.

So, it's not just the show art. Which just, you know, has me on it, but they're the feature that, so they want to share that, hopefully, on Pinterest and Instagram and so forth because they're the feature, and I've had my team pull a quote from the episode that makes them look really smart and adds lots of value for the person reading that quote.

And that gets added, kind of like the inspirational quotes, you see all over on Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook, right?

So you see some image, and then you get some quote to go with it that makes you feel good, and then you just keep scrolling. So that's the sort of thing that makes it easy for them to say yes to. But the most important thing is the link, and that's where they'll forget it gets lost, and that's when you have to follow up and make sure that it ended up on their media page or interviews page or whatever. And if not, you gotta hound them a little bit.

RO: Yeah. I'm guilty of that. Forgetting sometimes so much going on, but, so you know, I can vouch for this. I mean, just doing this podcast, we've gotten hundreds of articles written about the show. And linking to the show and to the website. So, I mean, absolutely. I mean, it is a win-win  

Oh, yeah, it's amazing. And, the doors that you can open by inviting people to be on your podcast when and when you can name and drop some huge names like I've gotten incredible guests just because I was able to name-drop. Otherwise, they're asking, like how many downloads a month do you get? And I hate that question. I refuse to answer it.

I just want to tell them like this show is amazing and I've had Byron Katie on. Oh my God. I read all of her books. Oh my God. She's amazing. Yeah, okay. I'm in. So you have to focus on getting that huge name first. Then everybody else will fall in line, and they'll fall like dominoes. It'll be amazing.

RO: If I get Elon Musk, I should be good.  

MW: That'll pretty much cement the rest of the guest schedule for the year.

Yes. Then Bill Gates will be lined up.

RO: All right. So, cool. What would be your advice on where to start? I mean, like, I mean, obviously, with a podcast, it's not super expensive to set something like that up. Obviously, you have to know what you're talking about.

Yeah, but if you're not a great speaker and you shouldn't be doing this, it is a terrible idea.

RO: Yeah.

So, you have to identify whether you are a speaker who writes or a writer who speaks. So a speaker who writes is somebody like me. I'm a speaker who writes. It's very easy for me to just jump on stage somewhere at a conference and just riff. I'm doing that at Internet Retailer. For the session, I have not prepared a presentation. I'm just gonna wing it.

RO: Wow.

By the very nature of it, that's how it's designed because it's a live critique session. I'm gonna have AI, don't know, maybe a thousand people in the audience. I don't know who is going to come up to the microphone and offer their website URL to be critiqued, but almost certainly, none of those sites I will have ever visited before.

And I have to off the cuff, just riff about stuff they could do to massively increase their Google traffic. So you got to be quite a skilled SEO to be able to do that, but also you have to be great on stage, and it's just gotta be part of your gift. Some people are terrified, and a lot of people are terrified to be on stage and do public speaking.

Then, you should not be doing a podcast or trying to get speaking gigs as a way to build your authority. You should write and blog and then get article contributorships, columns and so forth. And, use that as your vehicle if you enjoy writing, so if you're a speaker who writes.

Start there, and then everything that's painful and not in your gift, you delegate that stuff. So, I have a ghostwriter helping me craft my articles for search engine lands. It's my content because I brainstorm and brain dump. My idea is to the person who interviews me. The ghostwriter interviews me and is also skilled in SEO, so it's not like a mess when I see it for the first time, but I'm not staring at a blank screen.

I hate that. It's so painful. I get writer's block. I'm like, no, this is just, I'd rather do anything. I'd rather watch Netflix, you know, and then you just. It's bad. So, have a team and structure processes in place that will help you leverage yourself and stay in your gift. So, the way I get stuff out of my head and into written form is through a ghostwriter who interviews me live over Skype instead of me talking to dead air, to a recorder.

And I'm a ghostwriter because then I'm not in flow. It's a lot harder for me to speak to dead air. So I make sure somebody is on the other end, and then that gets recorded and then that gets drafted. It works for me. So whatever your system is, first identify me as a writer who speaks or a speaker who writes and then set up those systems. Otherwise, it's going to be super painful.

RO: Let me ask you this, Stephan because some people are natural speakers that are born into it. At first, I used to get up on stage and just freeze. But over time, after doing it a couple of times, a few times, I became good at speaking. Like I hated it, it wasn't that I couldn't stand being in front of a camera, but it was just my own self-consciousness. But I got past that stuff.

Yeah. So it's definitely. Something you can learn. When I started speaking, I was horrible—just atrocious. This was 20 years ago. So I got a lot of speaking gigs in to master the craft, but at the beginning, it was a, yeah, I'm not gonna use swear words, but it was quite a show.

Yeah. So, I decided it was the driver for me to keep going because I was not okay with just being mediocre at it. I got those speaker scores, and, wow, okay. I'm doubling down now, and I said yes to every speaking opportunity I can get. I would do dozens and dozens of speaking engagements in a year, even when I was terrible, and I just knew that practice makes perfect.

So I'm just gonna keep hitting it, and  I'm not a big fan of using Toastmasters as a way to upskill. I much prefer to go to National Speakers Association meetings and conferences because those are folks who are in the business of speaking, and it's their livelihood, so they have to be amazing at it.

MW: This is one of those places where getting a coach helps.

For sure. And I have multiple coaches. I also go to a lot of Masterminds. It helps you with getting, doors open. Like you might end up meeting somebody who knows Elon Musk.

RO: Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I'm going to have dinner with him next week. Masterminds can be expensive, though. Like, Joe Polish's mastermind genius network is 25 grand a year.  

And the NSA is pricey. Hey, here's one that I don't think anything can match this one. Tony Robbin's Mastermind, which I was in for three years, was about 130 grand a year.

MW: Oh, man. Wow. Yeah.

Totally worth it.

MW: Today, everyone's mastermind is pretty up there, too. Well, let's talk about blogs because we've kind of gone through TV. Yeah. We've gone through podcasting and publishing and podcasting. But I think where most people are starting to establish themselves as authorities or at least trying to is in the blog space. But it's a lot of people doing that. Stephan, where do you see people go wrong in trying to create authority as a blog writer?  

Yeah. So, if you're starting with your own blog, good luck because you don't have a fan base. Read Kevin Kelly's article A Thousand True Fans. And that's part of your goal here: to get those rabid fans who will hit the streets asking for your book and all that from the bookstores.

And having a blog that nobody's heard of before on a site that gets very little traffic is just, it's a recipe for nothing happening. So if you can find a blog where they take a contributorship, like yours, it's a group blog. It is even better if it's listed in Google News, so it seems even more legit.

And you're not trying to get guest posts. Guest posts, that terminology makes Googlers, Google engineers cringe. Cause that's purely for SEO. It's just a link-building tactic. It's not great content. It's not great writing, usually. It's just trying to get links. So, I'd recommend that you're looking for a long-term contributorship. Or a column position, and you're going to look at things like their, MozRank and MozTrust, or Domain Authority, if you're using Open Site Explorer from Moz, or if you're using Majestic, you're going to look at TrustFlow and CitationFlow. and incidentally, these tools will give you this data for free.

You don't have to be a paid subscriber. You can put in the website, the domain of that group blog and see how it fares in terms of its trust flow and citation flow in Majestic. com or in Ahrefs. They have their metrics, DR and so forth. You also have link research tools, which is another awesome toolset.

It's pricey but worth it. So yeah, start by getting some free data on these link metrics for where you think you're contributing. Also, check to see if there's a lot of buzz happening about those sites. Search for the name of the blog in quotes on Google and see how much it's mentioned.

If it's kind of an unusual name, like Wise Bread or something like that's a financial blog. You can find people talking about it but not linking to it, and you see media mentions of it and so forth. And I, wow, that would be a great site to write for. And then get somebody to introduce you. Just like you don't, just cold call an acquisitions editor of a book publisher.

You don't do this with, you know, the editor of Inc Magazine. You gotta get an introduction. So, you still may not get in. Like, I got introduced to the editor at Inc. I didn't get accepted. So I'm like, okay,  I'm not gonna take it personally. Do you know how many times the author of the Harry Potter books got turned down?

MW: Yeah, that's an amazing statistic.

Yeah. Crazy. It's crazy. So it's just information. Don't take it personally. It's just information. Just like every time you don't get a yes from a prospect, it's fine. I don't, and I'm not attached to the outcome of landing them as a client. I'm not a tout attached to the outcome of writing for Inc magazine.

I could write for Entrepreneur. I could write for, I don't know, wherever. Yeah. Right? So, even sites that will have some contributor form for you, like Lifehack.org, have a contributor form you can fill out, business to community, business and then number two and community.com. It's super easy to pitch them.

I've gotten in as a contributor to Lifehack just by not knowing anybody and filling out the contributor form. I had amazing credentials when I filled out the form and some ideas for great articles that they liked. So that worked, but it's so much better if you get an introduction, especially if it's a big magazine or something like Fortune or Forbes or Inc.

Yeah, big difference. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of that. 

Also, I am a big fan of using conference speaking as a way to build your authority. And if you can get a gig speaking on a university campus, even if it's just to take an MBA class or something. I've spoken at Stanford University. You better believe in Stephanspenser.com.

There is a Stanford University logo. Oh yeah, as seen on Stanford University. So, if you can find opportunities to give value and useful information to an audience on campus, do so. For example, when I spoke at Stanford, it was a tech talk, a tech briefing, and it was mostly staff. It wasn't professors or students. It was mostly staff. And I was teaching them SEO.

MW: A lot of local universities have entrepreneurship-type programs. UCF here in Orlando has a giant entrepreneurship program. It has a separate website and is always seeking experts and people to do webinars, programs, and live events.

Yep. Yep. Another powerful way to get social proof is as far as speaking. I mean, it's great to get something like Stanford or Harvard under your belt, but TEDx Head is also an amazing brand. And if you can speak at a TEDx, you should be paying for your flights and hotel and whatever it costs, fly to Alaska or whatever TEDx, in, you know, some tiny little town in Alaska, it's worth it.

As long as you're going to get a video of it, find out beforehand if they're going to video it. And even if they're not. Which happens. Hire a videographer and get that thing videoed so that you can use that. It's amazing to get the TEDx logo behind you speaking very powerful. So do that. There are so many places that you can find to speak at TEDx. Just search on Google for calls for speakers in quotes and then TEDx. Gotcha. You'll find dozens and dozens of TEDx sites that are asking for speaking pitches.

RO: Nice. We are out of time, Stephan. Oh, no! We just ran through that hour pretty quickly.

Oh, I've got something that's going to be awesome for your listeners to take to the next level of interest.

RO: Absolutely. Yeah. 

First of all, I have a chapter on content marketing from the art of SEO. That's chapter seven, and I love this chapter. It's a great place to start if you're not super technical and you want to get lots of link-building ideas and so forth. You'll get that for free. I have an SEO Myths White Paper that demystifies a lot of the crazy nonsense and mythology about SEO.

Let's see the SEO Hiring Blueprint. That's another one that will be really valuable if you're looking to bring on an SEO, either as an employee, contractor, or agency. The Hiring Blueprint contains some things that will help you avoid all the riffraff and the snake oil. And then finally, the SEO BS Detector.

So I'm censoring how its real name is spelled out, but the SEO BS Detector is awesome. It's got trick questions that you work into the interview process. And it will cut through all the nonsense and you'll find out if these people are posers or not. And you don't have to be an SEO expert. You just slip these into the interview. It's really cool. So, for all of that stuff, I created a page on my marketing speak website, marketingspeak.com/stl. And I'll lowercase STL.

RO: Nice. And we'll put that in Twitter and we'll also put it the, on the page about the show. On the show notes. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, that is awesome. Thank you so much for being on the show. It's been fantastic. A lot of great nuggets. I'm glad I told everybody ahead of time, Hey, get your pen and paper. We've increased our

MW: Authority just on the show. What's that? We've increased our authority just on the show. Yeah.

If you were texting, in the ideas, or tweeting them in or whatever while you're driving, that would be very bad. Don't do that.

RO: Yeah, yes, don't try this at home. All right. Thanks a lot. We'd love to have you on again. I mean, we've had you on what, three times now?  

I can't even count how many it's been so many. Okay, I'll come back.

RO: All right, guys, another great episode of Search Talk Live. If you haven't yet gone to Spreaker, S P R E A K E R com and followed us there because you get notifications every time the show goes live. Or if a new episode comes up, you can visit searchtalklive.com and sign up for our newsletter there. You also get more information there on different topics and things we try to cover. Did you have something you wanted to add?

MW: No, just remember that website, don't forget it. Write it down. There's some great stuff there.

RO: Yeah, absolutely. Wanna thank everyone for your support? We have hit just about 7,000 followers on speaker now. what else? We're over almost 45,000 listeners, plays and downloads of the show. It's been great. I wanna thank everybody for your listening to the show.

I hope you've gotten something out of each and every episode, and, let's see, there was something else I want to bring up.

MW: Next week, Jeremy Allen is coming up. Oh, yes. Digital success. We're going to talk about programmatic advertising, probably one of the biggest seismic shifts in online advertising.

RO: Yeah, I definitely think it's the future in online advertising as far as paid goes. All right, guys. Thanks a lot. How much time have we got? We got 30? Oh, I see it. He put it there. My bad. All right, guys. See you next week. Bye.