This is the Real Magic Podcast. Learn about great design and use it to get great results. Now your hosts, Greg Merlis and Alan Nunez.

GM: Hello, listener, and thank you for joining Alan and me for the Real Magic Design Podcast, where we try to unpack our experience to help designers and business owners understand how to create amazing designs and work together to make designs that are profitable. I’m Greg from Studio On Design, and here’s my partner Alan from Pixel Partners HQ. How are you, man?

AN: Man, I am sick. I have the flu, which is not very exciting, but you know what? I am excited about this episode. We have got a phenomenal guest on today. We’ll tell you more about him in just a moment, but before that, Greg, what have you been doing this week?

GM: Well, I’m just getting prepared to go away skiing in New Zealand, and I’m not sure when this episode’s coming out; it might have already happened. But yeah, just getting excited about that. My family’s excited, and my eight-year-old daughter is just over the moon. She’s pretending she’s skiing down the steps and things like that.

AN: Mate, I think we’ve done an episode in the past where you were heading to New Zealand. Is this an annual thing for you?

GM: An annual thing, exactly. Yeah, yeah, we love it over there.

AN: Life is tough.

GM: Well, we work hard so that we can take a break every year, you know how it is. Yeah. So, yeah, the snow is amazing over there. So, can’t wait to get there. What are you up to, buddy?

AN: Mate, for the last few days, I’ve actually caught the tail end of winter flu here in Sydney, which is almost inevitable when you’ve got three little kids, and they tend to bring it home. But you know what, honestly, it makes me feel good and feel proud about my team and Pixel Partners when we’re still, you know, we’re still producing great quality work, we’re still winning, you know, thousands of dollars worth of work and all while I’m, you know curled up on the lounge with a ginger and lemon tea trying to get well.

GM: Man, okay, well yeah, that’s a good thing that your team can handle things without you. That’s, you know, hats off to you, that’s for sure.

AN: Well, look, this is one of the things I’m trying to get across when I launch Creative Profit Academy is that you know, you’ve gotta have the support structure behind you, you know, and be able to deliver without necessarily you having to do every single piece of the work.

GM: Yeah, cool, man. All right, you know, we’ve got an episode with an amazing guest just coming up. So, let’s give him an intro.

AN: Today, we have Stephan Spencer. Man, I don’t even know where to start describing this guy. I mean, he is an expert in SEO and e-commerce. He’s an author. He’s a professional speaker. He’s got multiple books. He’s launching podcasts and live events. Have I missed anything there, Greg?

GM: No, he does a lot of things. So yeah, let’s get stuck into the episode.

AN: Yeah, let’s get him in.

GM: So, Stephan, welcome. So, you’ve had an amazing journey over the last few years. Can you share with our listeners how you got to where you are today?

Well, sure. I started, I was studying for a biochemistry PhD, and I saw the internet coming, well, the web specifically. This was in the mid-90s, and I just thought, “Wow, this is quite a ride. I think I’m gonna go ahead and jump on.” So, I dropped out of my PhD program and started a company, which was actually a web design firm at the beginning. It morphed into an SEO firm as time went on. But yeah, we started doing web design back in 1995, believe it or not.

GM: What did it look like back then?

Oh, my goodness. It was pretty ugly. But the work that my team and I did was cutting edge for the time. So yeah, it was really exciting. My journey kind of started when I went to the second international worldwide web conference. It was keynoted by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. And I met some of the guys from Netscape. I had never heard of Netscape. Mosaic was the browser everybody was using. But I met a guy named Rob McCool. Do you know who Rob McCool is?

GM: Oh, I don’t. What an awesome name.

AN: It doesn’t ring a bell, but I’m keen to hear more.

GM: Yeah, yeah.

He is the creator of Apache.

GM: Right. Oh, wow.

As well as Netscape server, but yeah, he’s the guy who wrote Apache. And I met him in the speaker room. I’d gotten in as a “Speaker” because I had a poster that I was presenting on how to convey structural information about biological viruses on the web. So I guess my whole career in the web started with design because I had these really cool radially depth-cued virus visualizations in 3D that I had rendered using silicon graphics computers. And I showed this off at this conference, and I’m like, what am I doing studying for a biochemistry degree? I need to be out there on the web building really cool stuff. So yeah, that’s why. Stopped my PhD and started NetConcepts.

GM: That’s amazing. So you were there when the internet started pretty much.

Well, when the web started, the internet’s been around for years and DARPA.

GM: Yeah.

AN: Oh, look, I think the web’s just a passing fad.

GM: Is that thing still around? That’s what Homer thinks.

I’ve been on since Al Gore invented it. Yeah.

AN: Look, Stephan, you know, it’s obvious that, you know, you’ve had quite a bit of success in business, right? And at the moment you’re going through a bit of an online brand update. You’ve had an amazing transformation of your personal brand. Can you sort of just tell us how, you know, what impact design has played in your business journey?

Well, quite a lot. For example well, when I started with web design, it was all about building beautiful websites. It had a lot of limitations back then. Over time, we continued to build websites until 2008, when I sold that part of the business to another company, and we kept the SEO side of our business, which we had been doing since the late 90s. So the design had been throughout that business, but also, when I did my personal rebranding, as you call it, I went through like an extreme makeover. Squandered divorce and so forth, I’d discovered Tony Robbins.

AN: Hang on the ground. You are still the same gender, right?

No no. I look about fifteen years younger than the guy I was five years ago.

GM: Listener, do some research on Stephan Spencer in the images, and you’ll see that the transformation is in stock, and that’s quite incredible.

Yeah, so I discovered Tony Robins. Referred to him by several friends simultaneously. It was kind of, you know, as the universe knocking at my door saying, hello, you need to do something different. So yeah, I went to this Unleash the Power Within event. It was a very full four days. At the end of the first day, I did a fire walk on 2,000-degree hot coals. Never thought I’d do that. But at the end of that, I decided, you know what? I can do anything. I can completely transform myself. Complete reboot. And so two weeks later, I’d gotten Lasik. Two months later, after that, I got a hair transplant. I lost 25 pounds. I went to the gym. I changed my diet. I stopped eating a bunch of processed food and went vegan for a while. And yeah, it was a big transformation, but the internal changes were actually greater than the external changes. Sure, people didn’t recognize me anymore when I went to conferences. I’d been speaking at conferences since 1995. 

That was my primary vehicle for marketing my company, which was through speaking engagements, and then I started showing up at conferences. People didn’t recognize me anymore. So that was a lot of fun. And then I just felt so much more confident, so much more centered, present, and powerful. And it’s been an incredible journey. So that’s just on a personal level. And then I reinvented my whole business life too, because I sold my company, my agency, Net Concepts, in 2010, and then I just started anew with a new venture. Did some SEO consulting.

I still do SEO consulting, but I also have these other projects that I’m building, like a three-day seminar on personal and professional development called Passions into Profits. I have another three-day seminar I’m doing on SEO called Traffic Control. Got a self-help book on personal transformation I’m doing. I just finished with my co-authors The Art of SEO third edition now, which is, believe it or not, 950 pages now. It just keeps growing and growing. So, lots of projects are on the go. I’ll eventually have a second edition to do of Social Ecommerce and work on another edition of Google Power Search.

I got a lot of balls in the air.

GM: You certainly do. That’s incredible.

AN: I just wanted to ask you a little bit more about sort of the personal branding transformation that you went through. All those things that you did, did you go and seek professional help and professional advice for the way you wanted to style yourself? Or is that something you sort of came up with in your own head and moved forward with it?

You know, I knew that I wanted to dress like my hairline, I wanted to get rid of the glasses, I wanted to have more muscle and better posture. So I had kind of the rough blueprint in mind, but as far as like the style of my wardrobe and things like that, I had no business picking out my clothes. So, I had to hire a stylist who came in and gutted my closet. About 95% of my clothes went to Goodwill, and we went shopping at Banana Republic and Express, Barneys in New York, and John Varvatos. 

So I got some really awesome, cool new clothes. It was a whole process, but I knew I needed a certain point solution along the way. Like I needed a stylist to redo my wardrobe. I needed an expert to do the surgeries. I needed the, for my, you know, LASIK and for the hair transplant, and I’m not gonna just go on the cheap. I needed to do it well, but then I also got a lot of a good kind of brain food in terms of seminars, masterminds, and, you know, secret societies and things, so I joined Neil Strauss‘s Secret Society. That’s been amazing and very transformational. I was in Tony Robbins Platinum Partnership, and that was hugely transformational as well. I mean, for me and for most of the people in these groups, they would tell you that peer group is everything because you are the average of the top, the five people or so that you hang out with the most. 

So having billionaires and super successful, very contributive, and growth-focused people in your vicinity all the time, traveling around the world on these amazing excursions with Tony Robbins and all these platinum partners, and so forth, has been phenomenal. So I did that for three years. I’ve been doing Neil Strauss’s Secret Society for four and a half years or so. Yeah, so I’m a big proponent of the power of the mastermind and of personal development seminars and professional development seminars, too.

GM: That’s incredible. For a start, I just wanna say thanks for sharing all that. I mean, that’s really going deep, personally, so we really appreciate that. And I just love the fact that you invested in, you know, getting professional help in every aspect of designing your life the way you wanted it to turn out. So I just want to know how long was that transformation period, roughly?

Over the course of a year, from the point where I went to Tony Robbins Unleash the Power Within, that was October 2009 to my first big speaking gig in, I think it actually was October 2010. It was SMX East. Yeah, I looked completely different. Yeah, like I said, 15 years younger. I was the talk of the conference. That was pretty fun.

GM: That’s incredible. And it must have felt pretty good on the inside.

Oh yeah, I mean, it was a huge ego boost to like have people just, especially women, give me lots of attention. It was pretty cool.

GM: Yes. Well, if you don’t mind me saying, you have a very beautiful wife, fiance, sorry.

Yeah. I tell you, I wouldn’t have had her if I was the guy from five years ago. That’s for sure.

AN: Yeah. I’m just going to take a few more notes. Oh, hang on. I’m already married. Stephan, if we could just dig into some of your huge wealth of knowledge, right? You are undoubtedly a world expert in SEO, right? And I find it interesting that online today, Google and the search engines are perceiving websites very differently. They want mixed media, they want unique images, they want video, they want all these different types of things on the web page. I’m interested to know how that impacts SEO. I know that Greg and I have talked before about making sure you have completely unique images because Google is starting to not only the metadata of the images but also, you know, if you look at the Google image search, you can literally drag an image into the image search and it’ll find instances of where those images are shown. How does that impact on SEO today?

Well, SEO is very much a visual medium as well as a programmatic one. So when we’re talking about videos, there’s a whole set of methodologies for optimizing videos for high rankings on YouTube, which happens to be the number two search engine. By query volume, there are more searches on YouTube than on Yahoo or Bing. So that’s a very important area for focus for everybody. And we can talk about specific strategies and tactics for optimizing videos. 

But you’ve got YouTube and other image search engines, Google Video Search and so forth. And then you have images. You’ve got optimization tactics and strategies for higher rankings in Google Images and the other search engines, image search. There’s also sites like Flickr and so forth that you could try and rank high for, PhotoBucket, et cetera. So, people are using those sites as search engines, too. With regard to podcasts, there’s a whole set of strategies and tactics. Multimedia is the name of the game, so if you are not optimizing your multimedia, you’re gonna be painting yourself in a corner, basically.

AN: So I’m interested because, you know, I’ve watched SEO change over a number of years, and you know, one of the things is that people often try and play the game they’re trying to their advantage and those doors often get closed, and people have a bad run if they’ve done things that are a little left of center or maybe not so ethical. Do you think that with things like images and videos, the search engines are gonna get to the point where they actually recognize the content in the images and they actually recognize the content in the videos? So, for example, at the moment, you really need to add the words to the video to the metadata of the video. Is that correct? Do you think it’ll get to a point where, no matter what you put in, Google or the search engines are gonna recognize what’s being said in those clips?

Of course, they’ve been doing it for a while now. So, you could easily get a penalty for playing games with CSS image replacement techniques. For example, you think, oh, I’m gonna outsmart the search engines. I know that I’ll get more bang, kind of more emphasis the whatever I write if it’s part of an image if I were to use the CSS image replacement technique and have that show up as actual text when CSS is turned off and thus that gets picked up as an H1 tag and so forth instead of part of an image with an alt attribute. 

Then I’m gonna stick in a few extra words here, a few more keywords into the version that has the H1 tag instead of the version that’s the actual image if it’s not exact, the image and the image replacement if it’s not one and the same as far as exact word for word, you are going to get penalized. It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when. It might be very quick because even if it’s not an algorithm that catches you, an algorithm will probably flag you. And then Manual Human Raiders, what they’re called, there’s a whole army of them working for Google, and they will catch what you’re doing. 

And so playing games with, I’ve seen all sorts of crazy stuff with CSS where people have put text at the bottom of the page in the footer and then using CSS, it is at the top of the HTML. It renders at the bottom of the page in the footer, so it’s tucked away from the user, but it looks like it’s super prominent to the search engine spiders, and what kind of idiot would do that thinking that that’s gonna outsmart Google? I mean, that’s just like putting a painting a bit or putting a big target on your back, essentially. A really bad idea.

GM: That’s amazing. So obviously, you’ve got a lot of technical information, and probably the average listener like myself doesn’t know what you’re talking about. But I do understand, like, from a broad sort of knowledge base.

But let’s put it this way. So there’s a black hat, there’s a gray hat, and there’s a white hat.

GM: Yeah, I was going to say black hat. So you’re saying black hat techniques do not work at all anymore.

They work if you are all about churn and burn. If you don’t care about the site being permanently damaged in terms of its reputation, its Google reputation, then have at it. But that’s a really dumb way to go because it’s very short-term. And if you’re working with clients and you wanna help them rank better, you’ll get some lawsuits from those clients if you’re playing with black hat stuff or even gray hat stuff.

GM: So, what’s a gray hat?

Gray hat is stuff that you think, well, is a little bit on the line. I definitely wouldn’t tell a Google engineer that I’m doing it, but I think it’s kind of skating on the line. I don’t think it’s like a total black hat. And you don’t do that-

AN: Where would you rank? Where would you rank keyword stuffing just into your copy?

Keyword stuffing? Blackhat. I mean, it’s not even Blackhat because Blackhat can actually work. I mean keyword stuffing is stupid because it doesn’t even work. Like, I don’t know. It just, you can play the short-term game, but you are gonna suffer. Think of it this way: It’s like you are creating a rap sheet for yourself. Google is keeping it for you and has been for years and years.

So, whichever websites you touch or work on, Google is tracking you as a human contributor to these websites. That’s why they have this thing called Author Rank. Now there’s Page Rank, which assigns importance, trust, and authority to web pages on the internet. But there’s also this thing called Author Rank, where Google is assigning trust, authority, and importance to human beings. Right? So you might be a really sketchy human being to Google, and then you start writing over on this site over here. 

Then, that reputation that you have in the eyes of Google follows you, and then you stop writing there. You write it somewhere else, and, yeah, so whatever you do now you think you’re getting away with will come back to haunt you for years to come because Google does not forget they might not have caught you yet. Still, they can retroactively figure out what you’ve been doing for years and years, and maybe you didn’t suffer a penalty back in, let’s say, 2009 when you were playing some Black Hat games, but then they figure out what you’re up to in 2012 or whatever, and then your reputation is forever sullied. Not a good idea.

AN: Yeah. And I’ve seen this happen with clients of mine who’ve had some pretty average SEO companies working on their site, and the work was done three, four years ago. In recent times, they’ve been punished for that work. We just went through a process where, you know, we actually had to contact Google and ask them to disavow a whole heap of really bad-quality links. You know it’s painful when stuff like that happens. You think it’s long gone, and it’s in the past. 

Still, it does follow you around. Look, I think you know SEO and any online activities need to be aligned with how you design anything. You know, design it for real people, you know, make it so that it is informative and it’s don’t don’t keyword stuff. Write it as if you’re talking to your perfect avatar and do everything around that. And then Google’s gonna respect that and show you to the right people. Would you agree with that, Stephan?

Absolutely. I love that analogy. In fact, you could take it a step further and say, design your link profile in that same way for humans and then for the search engines as an afterthought. It’s like if I acquire really high-quality links, high authority, high trust, and high importance links because they’re going to be really valuable to those communities. These pieces of content are what I’m creating. The buzzword of the year is content marketing. It’s no longer called Link Building. It’s Content Marketing because that sounds sexy, and it really is designed much more so than just saying, well, I want to acquire these links from these sites.

I want to create an experience for all these influential internet users, people who have authority in various social media sites and in the blogosphere and so forth. Then, hopefully, my stuff is going to spread like wildfire. It will go viral because it’s so high quality, so amazing. It has a great hook to it, a great angle, humor, controversy, utility, whatever. Then, I want to create an experience for all these influential internet users, people who I’m going to get long-term benefits because I’m basically creating an asset in a high-powered link profile.

AN: This is just sort of a left-field question and just out of curiosity, but have you ever said no to a client to do their SEO because their design of their web presence was just so bad that it’s not respecting the work that you’re going to do on the SEO?

I’ve certainly turned down prospective clients for various reasons all the time. My dance card gets full pretty quick. But specifically because of design, not necessarily, it’s like if they’re willing to upskill and change to be kind of best practice, and that includes all aspects: design, usability, content creation, creating remarkable content that’s worth spreading and so forth. If they’re willing to play that game, then great. I’m willing to work with them and happy to work with them. But if they’re unwilling to be flexible in their design, they’re unwilling, certainly, to be, they’re inflexible in many other areas too that I haven’t identified yet. And I will identify through a kind of a questionnaire process.

That’s the kind of client I’m not gonna take. Now occasionally I take on clients where design is everything, like Chanel, and then I can hardly get anything done because with design being the trump card, I can’t put any content, textual content, on all these important category level pages and so forth. Even product pages have almost no words on them. It’s really hard to get those pages to rank. So, that’s a recipe for frustration.

Yeah, I’ve had those scenarios where I’ve taken on the client, and I’m like, yeah, this is painful. I can’t really get them the result they’re after because I can’t get any content on the page.

GM: Right. Yeah, because there’s a big trend these days going towards larger images and a lot of images used instead of copy. So, is that something that you can’t rank if there are just images on a page?

Well, if you want to rank in Google Image Search, that’s fine. But what about the rest of Google? You’re going to be in a world of hurt if you want to rank in Google web search and have no textual content on your website.

GM: Sure, sure. Okay, it’s amazing. So, all right, now back to say you and your website. So tell us about the choice you’ve made lately to keep up the quality of design in your business and how you think it will give you a return on investment.

Well, sure. One of the benefits of being in one of my recent masterminds. I’m in Taki Moore’s Black Belt. And I would say one of the biggest benefits of being in that program was learning about you, Greg. And Studio One Design. I have just found this gold mine and brilliant design, usability and just structure. It’s been really a joy to work with you.

So, we’ve been cranking on a few different projects. I mentioned I’m doing a three-day seminar on SEO called Traffic Control. We’re in the midst of building that site out now. I am also in the midst of building out a site for my self-help seminar that I’m doing in conjunction with my business partner Kris Jones, and that’s called Passions into Profits. So we’re actually in development now.

Signed off on the design, which looks beautiful. Thank you again. And then another project is a big site redesign of StephanSpencer.com. So that one, again, we’ve signed off on the design. Thank you very much. And then the coding is in process as well. We’ve got about, I don’t know, a couple of weeks more to go, and we can launch that one. So yeah, lots of projects on the go. I’m gonna really be really excited. Oh, and two more projects. Both are podcast shows. I’m really excited to be just joining.

GM:What are those podcasts? Let’s give them a plug.

Yeah, cool. So one of those is called Get Yourself Optimized, and that’s going to launch here very soon. It might be launched by the time this episode goes live. The website is live. It’s GetYourselfOptimized.com. And that design is courtesy of Studio One. And another, so I’ll tell you that the topic is all about things like biohacking and personal transformation, style and presence, creating intimacy with your significant other, and just so much cool stuff. So I’m a big fan of things like biohacking and stuff, so we got some really great episodes that are going to go live here shortly on that topic, boosting your testosterone naturally, brain enhancing supplements, get really great stuff. So that’s the optimized geek. Then the other show is called Marketing Speak. And that design also, courtesy of Studio One, is still in development. The design’s been signed off on, and then we’ll probably launch the new skin on that site. Probably in two weeks, maybe three weeks. So that’s MarketingSpeak.com.

AN: Yeah, they might be live by the time we go live with this episode. But yeah, cool.

GM: Thanks for the plug for my business, too. I appreciate that. You’re welcome.

Well, you’ve been instrumental in really portraying my brand in such an amazing light. I mean, I don’t look like a one-man band. Even though I’m not a one-man band, I’m the consultant that you would hire for an SEO engagement. I don’t have a whole team of consultants, analysts, and so forth working for me. I have a small team, like assistants and more like administrative help and content-creating help, not consultant-type help. So, I compete with big agencies for work for projects, and I get it. I get the work.

The kinds of clients I’ve had in the last few years have included not only Chanel but also Zappos and Bed Bath & Beyond, Best Buy Canada, Bloomberg Business Week, CNBC, Sony Store, Quicksilver, yeah, some really big brands. Also, small companies, startups and mid-size companies, too, but yeah, those are some of the more recognized brands that I’ve worked with. I’ll tell you, my favorite definition of a brand is a promise. A brand is a promise. So when I present a powerful brand to my marketplace, that’s a promise that I’m going to be able to deliver. 

That I’m not just a fly by night, that I’m not rinking ink, that I’m not all washed up because I sold my company and cashed out and now I can just sit on the beach all the time. No. I am like just full-on in the SEO world and the online marketing world because I’m just passionate about it. I love it. I would never retire. So I gotta present this brand of like super contemporary on the cutting edge because that’s where I am. And that’s what you allow me to do. Thank you.

GM: Ha, awesome.

AN: I think that’s wonderful that you’ve, the way you frame that and say, look, your brand is your promise. And I think if you design everything around that, you know, what is the promise you’re making when you design every piece of collateral, whether it be an ebook, whether it be a website, then you’re going to position yourself well. Look, I think this is also just an interesting case study. I’m sure more than one of our listeners is sitting there thinking, wow, this guy has just got so much going on. But the reason why you are able to have so much going on is you find the right people to do the right jobs to help you leverage your dreams.

Absolutely, I am all about leverage. I’ll tell you, I have such a process for finding, vetting, onboarding, hiring and then onboarding really great staff. I have a small team, but they are a high performing team. So I don’t try to replicate myself. I try to surround myself with people who are better at certain things than I am. And so I can delegate. Because there are four Ds: defer, delegate, delete, or do. And I prefer to do the other three D’s more than I’d prefer to do because that’s when you make the magic happen, is when you don’t say yes to everything, but you selectively say yes to just the most important things, everything else gets cleared off your table. So, yeah, I have this process for finding really great staff. 

Let’s say that you were to post an ad on, I don’t know, let’s say, Craigslist, LinkedIn or Onlinejobs.ph wherever right most people ask for you know, please provide your resume cover letter and these whatever things what if you included a riddle in the ad, what would that do that would have significantly increase your signal to noise ratio and that’s just one of many optimizations that you can apply to your hiring process so you’re gonna end up with such a better pool of candidates, it will be a smaller pool for sure because most people are lazy and they’re not going to go through some problem-solving kind of SAT or ACT problem just to apply for your job. But those who do are highly motivated, and they can solve problems, or at least they can Google the answer, right? 

So that’s just one of many different things you can do. It’s pretty cool and I’ve gotten some great staff by applying these sorts of concepts. Also, you are not an expert in a particular area. Let’s say you’re hiring somebody who’s gonna help you with online marketing, including SEO, and you wanna know if they actually have some SEO chops. A great way to test that is I created an SEO Hiring Blueprint where I go through all the process of finding, vetting, and hiring onboarding staff, but also I’ve got this SEO BS Detector, and in that is like five key questions to slip into the interview.

As you’re interviewing, whether it’s a candidate who would be on staff, or it’s an agency that you would hire, or an outside contractor, you can ask them questions, like, for example, with SEO, tell me about meta keywords, what’s your process for optimizing meta keywords across my site, and how long would it take? You know, just ask some questions around meta keywords. There’s only one right answer in regards to anything meta keyword related, and that’s a complete and utter waste in time waste of time and always has been. 

They never counted in Google. So, unless they know that they are just selling down the river and they need to be escorted to the door, that’s just one of the trick questions that you can just slip into the interview: tell me about this and that and the other and tell me about meta keywords too. And then you just basically give them enough rope to hang themselves. So if they give any other answer, then Google never counted meta keywords. It’s a complete waste of time. Then you know this is a snake oil salesman.

AN: So, Stephan, the SEO BS Detector, as you call it, is that something that you’ve published and given away for people who are trying to hire an SEO person?

Yep. So again, I had Studio One to do the design of the PDF. I advertise that PDF on Facebook. I have a whole sales funnel built out. So, the way a sales funnel or marketing funnel works, you have a lead magnet. You feed people to a landing page. I use lead pages. And then from that Facebook ad or whatever other channels that I’m using to drive traffic to that landing page, people opt in for that free PDF download. Now they’re on my list, but I will immediately upsell them for a free webinar. 

It’s an upsell where I’m not actually charging them anything, but I’m asking them to get a little bit more involved with me and to take the next step in the funnel, which would be, in this case, a webinar, a free 60-minute webinar. So then, after they take that webinar, they get an opportunity, which is for them to sign up for my three-day seminar on SEO. And so then, if they’re at the event, they’re going to have an opportunity to join my mastermind. And so that’s how the funnel goes. So, the BS Detector and the Hiring Blueprint, I also have an SEO Myths white paper. I have an SEO Tools tip sheet. These are all PDF deliverables that I offer for free to prospects who come in at the top of the funnel.

AN: I think our listener would love to see some of this stuff. So, if we could get some links of you to put in the show notes, they can head over to your site, see how you’ve designed that sales funnel, and get this great information. That’d be very helpful.

Yeah, absolutely. Happy to do that.

GM: That’s super cool. All right, Stephan, well, look, you’ve delivered them you know, some amazing knowledge. Your tips are incredible. And I really loved hearing about what I call your man’s formation. So, just before we go and close out, what is, say, one tip you would give to the listener? In your opinion, what are the most important elements to consider when creating a brand?

Oh, okay. So, my biggest tip for people who want to build a strong brand online is to really focus on YouTube because that is the future. Multimedia is the future. They don’t read nearly as much anymore. It’s kind of like they’ve lost their ability to focus for long periods of time once they’re in front of the screen, and also they get this road rage thing if you have a slow-loading web page, forget about it, they’re gonna get really upset really fast so deliver really punchy valuable remarkable content when I say remarkable. I mean, like, use Seth Godin‘s definition of what it’s worth remarking about from the Purple Cow to create remarkable video content for your YouTube channel. 

A great YouTube channel with tons of great videos that have been well-optimized. You’ve got great video thumbnails, image thumbnails and great titles with keywords and descriptions with keywords and links in them. And you’ve got a good transcript there that you’ve overridden the auto-generated transcript that YouTube created and corrected all their errors, and you’ve uploaded foreign language translations and the most important foreign languages that you want to rank for as well.

You’ve done all this optimization on a technical level to your videos on YouTube, and you created a really compelling strategy in terms of how to be remarkable with compelling content. You’ve got great hooks, humor hooks, controversy, utility, newsworthy, that sort of stuff. You’re going to have staying power. If you’re, on the other hand, all you’re doing is just writing content day after day. Maybe you’re posting it to medium.com or LinkedIn or whatever. That works now but I don’t think that’s gonna have staying power in three or five years.

AN: Wow. Yeah, that’s a great tip. You know, really think about the long-term effect.

I’m all about the written word because I’ve got three books under my belt and soon-to-be. Yeah. You gotta be doing a video, too.

AN: Yeah, absolutely. Normally, we would ask our listener, our guest, you know, what they’ve got that’s exciting over the next 12 months in their business, but I mean, you’ve already told us, you’ve got multiple live events, you’ve got two podcasts going live, you’ve got books. I mean, is there anything that you haven’t mentioned that you’d like to tell the listener about? We’ll make sure we include links to all of these because they’re all extremely valuable.

I can give a little bit of a sneak peek into the book I’m writing, which is all about personal transformation and it’s specifically across all dimensions. You have physical transformation, emotional, career, business, intimate relationships, peer group, spiritual. You can transform all aspects of your life. So it’s a kind of a compilation and condensation of everything I learned over the last five years, spending, I don’t know, at least a half million dollars on personal development stuff, seminars, masterminds, all that sort of stuff. I’ve distilled all the best stuff that’s been the most transformational for me into one book. So I’m going to be really excited to come out with that. I got to still find a publisher and finish the book. It’s about 80% done. But yeah, that’s going to be pretty cool.

AN: Well, it’d be great if you let us know when you do get it finished because I know our listeners would love an update and love to hear when that goes live. And maybe we can get you back on the podcast to go into a bit more detail once your book is published.

I hope it’s coming out in an audio book because I’m one of those people that’s lost the ability to sit there and read a long book. Maybe not video for me, I’m happy with the audio. So yeah, look, that’s awesome. Very exciting.

Thank you. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. This has been really a lot of fun.

GM: It’s a pleasure. So, where can people connect with you, Stephan, and learn more about you and your business?

Yeah, sure. So they can find out about me and connect with me on my website, StephanSpencer.com. That’s S-T-E-P-H-A-N. They could also find me on Twitter at SSpencer. That’s my handle. And on Facebook, Stephan Spencer is my personal Facebook. So facebook.com/StephanSpencer. My professional page is facebook.com/StefanSpencerSEO. Also, I’ve got a Pinterest channel or Pinterest account with lots of really cool stuff. Great infographics, if you love great visual content, that I’m pretty good at curating cool stuff. So, Pinterest.com/StephanSpencer. Let’s see, where else? Also, the Traffic Control seminar is TrafficControl.co and Passions into Profits, that seminar is PassionsIntoProfit.com.

AN:  I dare say that if you just Google Stephen Spencer, I would hope that his SEO is pretty good, and you’d find most of his stuff.

Yeah, I pretty much control all whatever number of pages of the search results for my name. It’s all stuff that I’ve created or is about me. I speak at a lot of conferences, and I write for Search Engine Land, the Huffington Post, and all that. So yeah, that fills up all the first few pages. I’m easy to find.

GM: Fantastic. Well, thanks again, Stephan. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you here. Thank you.

Well, thank you.

AN: Thanks, Stephan. We’ll catch you next time.

Greg, wasn’t that just a phenomenal episode? I mean, we could have gone on for hours and look, I’d encourage everyone to go and have a look at Stefan’s work because there is, he gives away some extremely valuable information. Even if you can’t afford his services, you’ll be miles ahead if you check out what he has available. Greg, what’s your killer tip and action piece for this episode?

GM: Yeah, I just love how, you know, the search engines are getting a lot smarter these days. So, you know, stop doing any black hat tricks and all, or even gray hats, and just create remarkable content because Google will see it as remarkable as well. And it’ll just get, you know, I mean, you want to do it obviously for your listener, but you’ll also get favored by Google by doing that.

AN: Yeah. And I look for me, it’s, it’s all about being authentic. You know, make your content for real people, you know, don’t try and game the system. Don’t try and be spammy and try and work out. What Google wants, work out what your audience wants, work out what your perfect avatar wants and deliver that. And then you’re gonna gain respect in the search engines.

GM: Yeah, nice. Cool man. All right, well, thank you, Al. We should let the listener get back to it. We’ll catch you on the next episode.

AN: Yeah, definitely listener. If you haven’t already, register at The Real Magic for our episode updates. That way we can let you know when Stephan’s published his book. And any comments, we would love reviews on iTunes, and comments on the website. Have a great day, and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode.

GM: Thanks, listener.