The Bob Pritchard Major Issues Facing Small Business (The Bob Pritchard Radio Show)

This is Stephan’s podcast appearance about Major Issues Facing Small Business on Bob Pritchard Radio Show.

Welcome to the Bob Pritchard Radio Show. Did you know that over 95% of all businesses fail within the first 10 years? By listening in to what Bob's guests have to say, plus direction from Bob Pritchard himself, it's our intention that you won't be among those statistics. Now, here's your host, Bob Pritchard.

Hello world. Welcome to the Bob Pritchard Radio Show. We're on Voice America Business Channel, and we're broadcasting to over 60 countries around the world from the middle of the third most important center in the world for entrepreneurs, startups, angels, VCs and incubators, Silicon Beach in California. We're broadcasting from Hollywood Boulevard, where technology meets entertainment. I want to thank you for making us the number one business radio show in the world for entrepreneurs.

I really do appreciate it. The other day I saw a video on the incredible new liquid lens adjustable glasses. The technology in the glasses automatically determines what you're focusing on and adjusts the lens accordingly. So, if you're looking at something five feet away, the glasses adjust the focal length so that you can see clearly five feet away. If it's 200 feet away, again, the liquid in the glass changes and the focal point changes. How brilliant is that? I also heard this week about the work Samsung is doing with contact lenses.

Boy, Samsung's been granted a patent for contact lenses with a display that projects images directly into the wearer's eyes. A built-in camera and sensors are controlled by the wearer, blinking to beam content to an external smartphone-like device for processing. Now, smart contact lenses would allow augmented reality to project right onto the person's eyes and be more invisible at the same time. How fantastic is that? There was a feature on Google Glass, if you remember that let users take pictures with a wink. So, the blinking input is not that different.

And Google owns two patents for smart contact lenses with flexible electronics and sensors. These read the chemicals in the tear fluid of the wearer's eyes to determine if their blood sugar levels have fallen to dangerous lows. So, for example, I'm a diabetic. I simply put in my contact lenses. And when my sugars vary a bit from normal, then there's this blinking that goes on in the contact lens, and I know that I'm a bit out of whack. So that's incredible.

Everything starts with a dream, doesn't it? It's amazing. Now, this program's all about entrepreneurs, and we promote entrepreneurs whenever we can. We love this story about a young guy who turned a hobby he began as a teenager into a business that earns over 200 grand a month. Now, Dan Faggella was 17 when he first learned Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

At 25, he was building his own business in his hometown of Wakefield, Rhode Island. This was a martial arts gym focusing on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So when his teacher's studio closed, he used the money he'd saved to open his own studio. He saw a need to open the studio. It grew from a rented space in somebody else's gym to 2,500 square feet.

That's pretty good growth. At the same time, he was using his earnings from the studio to pursue a master's of applied positive psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania. So, for his degree, he was required to be in Philadelphia, and it's a five to seven-hour drive away from Wakefield. So, depending on the traffic. He'd do his classes all day and make sales calls to book appointments while driving backward and forwards. And then the roof fell in, literally, due to the weight of the snow. So he spent all his life savings to expand the gym. He put up the drywall and painted it himself, but then bang, the roof came down and pretty much destroyed everything. He went very close to bankruptcy.

And he realized that he probably should do something rather than be at the mercy of the snow. And as we know, Mother Nature can be pretty nasty when she wants to be. In order to scale his business beyond Wakefield, which is only a pretty small place, Dan expanded into online courses. This was in 2013. He used footage from his competitions, seminars and classes to reach a much wider audience. So he sold his physical gym a few months later and moved to Boston to focus on expanding the online business that was called Science of Skill. Today's business is a resource for online fitness and self-defense curricula. And he flogs a range of products. After six months, the online business was earning 20,000 a month, which was a lot more than he was earning in his four-year-old gym.

And now the business is averaging about 230,000 a month in revenue. So he's gone from all the hard work of physically running a gym and worrying about all the things that go with it to being online and picking up a cool quarter of a million a month. He recommends nailing the marketing and automation side of the business to ensure that everybody who steps in stops by your site and you convert into paying customers. At least make sure you get their database and get them on your database. So just ask, sit down, ask yourself, are people turning up on your site and you don't know who they are or you're not converting them into a dollar? If they are, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of free apps that you can get that will pull down a lot of this information going to stay with the company until it's earning about six million a year in revenue and that he's going to sell it. He said he doesn't want to be the guy who sits there working and working and working and builds it into a 40 million dollar company. 

He's not looking to run the business until he's 55 years old. He wants to get out and enjoy the money, get into it, doing other things. In my view, that is fantastic advice. I remember once that I was talking with Tim Draper, and Tim said, "You know, if you've got the world's best idea, get out of it, you know, pretty much as soon as you can get a good dollar from it because someone out there is building a better mousetrap. Also, technology changes, attitudes change, regulations change, and all sorts of things can go against you. Maximize what you can and leave a bit for the next guy."

Small businesses face a whole range of problems on a daily basis, both internally and externally. External problems are countless and include, you know, the state of the economy, the high cost of insurance, taxes, red tape, health and safety, lack of bank lending, and competition within their own country and also competition from abroad, transport issues, employee skill gaps and shortages. God, the list just goes on and on. There are a whole bunch of things that can easily bite you in the ass. Internal problems are no less strenuous. 

You know, some of the issues facing small businesses are, well, first, finding enough cash and managing the cash flow. If you're a fast-growing company, you can rapidly outgrow your available resources. And if you're an underperforming company, you can't access it. And the majority of companies do not manage their cash flow well. It's difficult, and you've got a plan ahead, and too many businesses don't. And you know, who knows when some of your customers are gonna pay you or what their situation is.

And a lot of companies have one major client who provides them, maybe not with all of their revenue, but a good chunk of it. And if something goes wrong, oops, and good credit control helps to prevent this from becoming a serious problem. But poor financial management leads to a surprisingly large proportion of firms having a bad credit rating. And then, once you've got a bad credit score, it's hard to borrow money, and you're pretty much screwed. Having a good credit score enables you to borrow funds, but it also enables you to secure terms on trade credit that are favourable.

The second issue facing small businesses is a lack of a clear plan. Most businesses have never written a business plan. They don't know how to plan. A lack of a plan, of course, worsens the cash flow problem by wasting cash chasing and tempting diversions. You know, you go off on all sorts of tangents, and you throw money at problems that you'd be better off conserving. Equally important is ensuring your plan is fluid and revising it constantly according to changed economic and business conditions and your competition.

And this will ensure your long-term survival. You've got to have a business plan. I was talking to a client today, actually by email, and there's a good idea but no plan.

You need a detailed plan, and it's not. I'm going to do this, and this is how I'm going to do it, and it's going to be wonderful. I'm going to make a shitload of money and have a look at these financials, and they, wow. It's about having all of the elements, looking at all the risks, doing a SWOT analysis, and working out what your catchment area is. Who are your target customers? Who are your second and tertiary customers? You know.

What are the possible downfalls? How much money are you going to need? Where are your cash flow dips going to be? All of that needs to go into a business plan that most people do not have a clue. And those who don't have a business plan don't succeed. Clear as that. The third issue facing small businesses is ratchet leadership. You know, this takes many forms. It's frequently in the form of depth of leadership.

The founder of the company is too hands-on, doesn't concentrate enough on the primary role as leader rather than a manager, and secondly, they fail to enlist the support of competent managers and staff behind them. You know, either through recruitment or outsourcing or training in-house personnel. 

But they just, most leaders don't lead. Most leaders do not undertake further learning after they leave college. Most leaders don't study what their competition is doing. They don't understand the market. They don't try to project ahead. And this eventually causes the company to stop growing. And eventually, failure. Directors should always remember their core roles and responsibilities, and that's keeping the leader in check setting the direction of the company. The fourth issue facing small businesses is the ineffectiveness of their sales and marketing. This leads back to planning and leadership. 

Many businesses just don't take enough time to decide what their major emotional point of difference in their consumer purchasing benefit is. Most of them don't even know what it is. They don't think about how they can strengthen their message and their equity in the marketplace with knock-your-socks-off customer service, with added value, risk reversals, and the other valuable techniques that close business. They try to compete in conflicting areas, such as the lowest price. If you compete on price, you know what happens? You make less profit.

You make less return on investment. You become less competitive. You commoditize your product, and eventually, you disappear up your own ass. It is not a plan. Now, part of the planning process for a new product should include a very clear answer to one simple question. With all of the products and services available to my customers, why should they buy from me?

Bloody good question. Make sure you've got a clear answer. The fifth issue facing small businesses is lack of execution, and this may be the biggest problem of all of them. Too many companies develop strategies and never execute them. It's a tragic fact that most business leaders spend less than one hour a month on strategy. Then, they execute the strategy so poorly that most employees don't even know what the company's strategy is.

It's a direct result of top management not documenting and communicating the strategy. Communication with employees is critical. And you know, with today's technology, it's possible to measure every single element of a company's performance. But the overwhelming majority of organizations don't have meaningful performance measures in place or even carry out regular performance analysis.

So, the result of neglecting just these five simple issues in the rough and tumble of today's business is a disaster. And there are only five; there's a whole bunch more. If you're a regular listener to this program, you know that I was recently appointed the honorary president of the American Institute for Sales, Marketing and Management, which is the premier organization for business in the US. Now, if you're serious about improving your skill level, your status and your network, you should join today.

Now, if you're just doing it for the glory, apart from being able to put the initials AISMM after your name and receiving a great plaque for your foyer or boardroom, there's a wealth of latest information, complete business audits, webinars, and a 26-person advisory board with reputation and skill levels to rival any on the planet. So, if you're not a member, go to AISMM.US and join now. My guest after the break is Stephan Spencer. He's a great guy, and he's an internationally recognized SEO expert, and he's a bestselling author. He invented the SEO technology Gravity Stream. He now works as a sought after SEO and digital strategy consultant.

He's got some clients that you may have heard of, like Zappos, Sony Store, Quicksilver, Bed, Bath and Beyond, Chanel and a whole truckload more. So, for those of you who are looking to increase your Google ranking, this is a must-hear interview. Stephan will dispel a number of the myths that surround SEO.

Welcome back to the Bob Pritchard Straight Talking Absolutely No Bullshit Radio Show. Over the past five years, we've given you insights into the lives of over 250 of the world's most interesting business people. What they do, who they admire, what makes them tick. You know, it's extremely difficult to create a successful business. And we all need all the help that we can get. That's why it's so important, if you listen to this program, to go to the archives and listen back to some of the interviews with some of these successful people. You know, it's so easy to fall into traps.

When you've got a new business. And by learning from people who've been there, done that, been successful, and overcome the issues, you can help yourself a great deal. And that's the other reason it's really important to have mentors. If you surround yourself with mentors, people who give you straight advice, if something sucks, they'll tell you. But people who have been successful know the ropes. It's really, really important. 

I can't stress it. It's also important to join groups like METAL, which I've talked about, and my next guest is also a member of, as I have. METAL is Media Entertainment Technology Alpha Leaders. It's people who are really the leading lights in all of those areas who meet once a week. Once a week, from about 9 o'clock in the morning until about 1 o'clock in the afternoon, simply share ideas and talk about new technologies, and it really stands you in great stead for success in business. Now, everybody in business faces the same challenges; it doesn't matter what you are or who you are, whether it's technology or whether you've got a dry cleaning business.

Everybody thinks that their product's great, and they think that they've got fantastic customer service, and that people are just going to beat a path to their door. But it doesn't work like that. Most entrepreneurs are experts at what they do, but the majority of businesses fail because they have no knowledge of all the other aspects that go into making a successful business. If you've got a successful business, you've got to be able to do it. And if you've got a successful business, you've got to be able to do it.

You've got to wear a lot of hats. You've not only got to be good at whatever you're doing, but you've got to be good at accounting. You've got to be good at raising money. You've got to be good at HR.

You've got to be good at customer service. You've got to be good at a whole range of things. And that's very difficult. So that's why it's so critical that you follow and listen to those who have overcome these challenges that we all face. I know a lot of entrepreneurs that think that they're alone in their challenges. Well, let me tell you, you're not. Now, Stephan Spencer is an internationally recognized SEO expert and bestselling author. He's the co-author of The Art of SEO, author of Google Power Search, and co-author of Social E-Commerce. And they're all published by O'Reilly. I don't know about you, but I get confused about SEO. And we'll talk to Stephan about that. It's an area that we all need to know about, with over one billion websites out there.

And there's no use having a website if you don't get noticed. So we'll talk about how you go about doing that. Stefan founded Net Concepts in 1995 and grew it into a multinational SEO agency before he sold it out, no doubt, for loads of Lamborghinis in 2010 to Cavario.

Stephan invented the SEO technology Gravity Stream. He now works as a sought-after SEO and digital strategy consultant. His past clients include Zappos, the Sony Store, Quicksilver, Bed Bath & Beyond and Chanel. He's spoken at hundreds of marketing events all over the world. This guy travels constantly all over the planet, giving presentations, including SES, SMX, Pubcom, and internet retailer shop.org. 

He's a contributor to my favorite early morning read, Huffington Post, Multichannel Merchant, Practical Ecommerce, Search Engine Land and DM News. He's a creator of Traffic Control, a three-day SEO seminar and co-creator of the three-day professional development seminar, Passions into Profit with Chris Jones. He hosts two podcasts, Get Yourself Optimized and Marketing Speak

Hi Stephan, welcome to the Bob Pritchard radio show.

Hey Bob, great to be here.

We hear so much about SEO and the information. You know everybody's interested in it because we all want to have better rankings on our websites. But the information we often get from different people seems, well seems, to me anyway, to conflict. So many SEO experts give you different advice and then blame the constantly changing algorithms of Google for a lack of results. How does one get to the top of Google?

Great. Well, first of all, I want to address the fact that there is a lot of misinformation out there. When you talk about SEO (search engine optimization) and how to get to the top of Google, people can just make up their own BS and state that as fact. And if they say it with such emphasis and bravado and uncertainty, you'd believe it.

Well, most of us don't understand it. We don't understand the intricacy. So, anybody who comes across as confident and waves a few credentials in front of your eyes, you tend to believe them.

Yeah, so we'll get to how to sniff out the fakers and the charlatans in just a minute. But let me give an overall kind of framework and structure for your listeners so they can understand what SEO is and what SEO isn't because Google is kind of a big black box to pretty much everybody. It has all these secret algorithms and things, and Google is not publishing all the inner workings of all that to us SEOs. So we have to figure it out from trial and error, from just applying the scientific method to SEO and seeing what works and what doesn't work. So, the way I would describe SEO is that there are three pillars to it. 

So, that means there are three kinds of main areas of SEO, and those include content, architecture, and links. If any of those three are weak, it's like sitting on a two-legged stool. It's going to fall over, so you need all three to be strong. So content, architecture, links, and what I mean by content are simply the words that you've chosen and the way you've represented yourself on your website with textual content, video content, imagery, etc.

That's the content piece, the content pillar. Then you have the architecture pillar, which includes how you structure your site, what the internal linking structure looks like, and how deep down into the site is your About page. Is it right there one page deep, or do we have to click around for quite a while and finally get to about page five levels down?

Because if it's really deep, not a good thing. Doesn't look important to Google. So there are other things, technical geeky things that we don't need to get into that go into that architecture pillar, but that's architecture. And then, finally, links. And this is the most misunderstood and underutilized area of SEO. People think that they can just hire a company out of India for $500, get a bunch of links, and point them to their site.

And that's going to make them look important to Google. And it doesn't work that way. In fact, it'll get them a penalty. So you really need to focus on essentially PR, public relations on the internet, and trying to get bloggers for the Huffington Post and other reputable sites to link to you because your content is so good and because you have such great things to say. You have these different hooks that maybe you employ, just like you would use hooks to get onto TV: controversy hooks, utility hooks, newsworthy hooks, humor hooks. You'd use similar sorts of hooks to get noticed by bloggers and online influencers. So those are the three pillars: content, architecture, and links, and you need to focus on all three. So, hopefully, that'll help kind of structure the conversation. For our listeners because, it is kind of a black box. And so pretty much everything fits those three.

Can you talk about content? Is it important to have a wide range of content, video content, information, news, and blogs? Is it important to have as many different types of content as possible, or are some more important than others?

That's a great question. So essentially, what you're trying to do is stand out from the crowd and rise above the noise. So, if you can do a fantastic job with that and create remarkable content without using all sorts of different formats, that's totally fine. I mean, if you are incredible at writing blog posts that are remarkable and worth remarking about, that might be your platform. If you're great at creating infographics, like visual representations of complex topics and lots of statistics and so forth, really simplified into a graphical format, that might be your thing. Great, do that. Viral videos, explainer videos, or just really helpful informational videos. 

And by the way, if you're not doing any video content, then the number two search engine is YouTube; most people would guess either Yahoo or Bing YouTube; you're gonna be invisible on YouTube if you don't have great video content that you've uploaded to your YouTube channel. So you need to be present and visible in that number two search engine, YouTube. So, having video content is a necessity. So it's not so much the formats. I mean, you could do listicles that are like the top 10 list types of articles. You could do, like I said, infographics. You could do personality tests or quizzes. There's a lot of great content out there that you just notice in your Facebook news feed. Which city should you actually live in? Take the quiz, that sort of stuff. Informational, great infographics and things like that. 

But just pick something to start with that you can be remarkable with. And when I say remarkable, like I said, I'm using the definition worth remarking about that definition comes from Seth Godin, who's one of the best marketers of our day, that incredible books out there. The Purple Cow is all about how to be remarkable. So start there instead of trying to spread yourself across all sorts of different formats. Yeah, just I'd say focus is the starting point.

So are you saying that, really, of the one billion websites out there, 999,000 of them are by people who are average business people that have got a small business or whatever and they've got a website? Are you saying that only people who are expert copywriters or funny as fuck or can create fantastic videos with remarkable thoughtful content? They're the only ones that are really going to get noticed.

If we're talking about getting to the top of Google, then That gives you a leg up. I mean, it's possible that you could rank, for example, like I worked with Chanel, I worked with Zappos and so forth. And they don't have to create remarkable content marketing campaigns because they're just remarkable businesses. Remarkable brand. Right. You look at what they're doing, and it's just really good business, and you could do that, and you could still win. But you're competing. When I say you as the listeners competing with brands like Chanel Zappos and Sony, you're going to have a hard time competing on Google unless you do something to punch above your weight to get noticed to rise above all the noise, and most new websites are spam. 

When Google discovers a brand new website, it assumes that it's spam because it usually is. So, just creating a useful informational website that adds value to that, does educational marketing, separates you out from all the spam, all the majority of new websites. But in order to get to the first page of Google for an important keyword, it's easy to rank in Google for a really lousy keyword that nobody searches for. And that's something most people don't think about. You have to rank for keywords that actually matter.

That people are searching for, and a great way to check that is to use a free tool provided by Google called the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. So the Google Keyword Planner is something that you can just use for free. You have to have a Google AdWords account, which means you're going to supply your credit card to Google to get an account setup. So you don't have to use it. You don't have to start setting up ad campaigns and running ad campaigns on Google. You can just let it sit there and then use this free tool to see what people are searching for. So I had a client ages ago, Kohl's, the department store chain, and one of the keywords that they were really passionate about ranking for was kitchen electrics, which was to me ridiculous because who's ever used the phrase kitchen electrics in a sentence, like in the general population? Nobody.

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. They really wanted to rank for that because that's a whole category of product that they sell, including food processors and blenders and other small kitchen appliances. And I'm like, "No, this is not useful for you to rank for that. Look at the data." The Google keyword tool at the time was called the keyword tool "shows that nobody's searching for that. That's probably you, your CEO and a few other people in your marketing department, and that's it."

Nobody else is searching for kitchen electric, so it's irrelevant you rank for that. So, pick keywords that are important that your prospects and your target audience are searching for. Then, make sure to create really valuable content around those keyword themes, publish that on your website, and keep it fresh and up to date. Don't let stuff get stale with old content that links to places that have become websites, etc.

So, all of that, I guess to put all that together takes some time. So if I've got a new website, I'm out there, I've got a new business, I've got a new website, I'm starting today, what's the most important thing to get up there? What's the most important thing to start with?

Well, the most important thing is the ability to get up there. The thing to start with is to get a good partner to work with, a good service provider to help you with your online marketing and SEO, and there are a lot of them out there. I mean, I have tons of competitors, so you won't be want for finding an SEO. Person to help you. The problem is, though, and this gets back to what we talked about at the very beginning of the episode. 

There are a lot of snake oil salesmen and charlatans out there that just say something that sounds authoritative, and like they know what they're talking about, but it isn't. It's just nonsense, it's misinformation, it's mythology, and you just don't know any better. So, the first thing I would do is I would interview an SEO candidate. Probably, these would be contractors or agencies rather than hiring an employee. So you're probably not ready to start there.

You start with a service provider who's an outside 1099 contractor or an SEO firm. And you have to sneak into the interview process a few trick questions. Just a handful, and they don't know that they're trick questions. This is the genius of it. You're going to know, and if you go to my website, StephanSpencer.com, I have a PDF document with a bunch of cheat sheets. It's a cheat sheet of questions that you can ask, and it explains in that PDF why they're trick questions, so if you read this before you do the interview.

You'll know, like, for example, that meta keywords, which you may or may not have ever heard of; you just know that meta keywords are a thing that people talk about in SEO because it's something that there's a lot of mythology around. So you could ask the question about your process for optimizing my meta keywords, and you know that there's only one right answer. But you're not letting on that you know this. You are just innocently asking the question. You ask other questions, too, like, tell me what your process is for doing SEO, how you figure out what keywords are the right keywords, and so forth. 

You already know from earlier in this conversation that the Google AdWords Keyword Planner is a great tool for this. This should be an easy answer for them. They would say, well, yeah, of course, you're going to use the Google Keyword Planner. But in this instance, when we're talking about meta keywords, the only right answer is that meta keywords are never counted in Google.

Okay.

So, if somebody says, "Oh well, they don't count as much as they used to. We don't really spend a lot of time with that," that's the wrong answer. Right. Because the only right answer is that they never counted. If they say that they counted more back in the old days or whatever, you know, to let them, you know, out the door because they're just spouting misinformation. They don't know what they're talking about. 

So, have at least a few questions that you're going to slip into the interview process and you'll know by 20 minutes in easily that these guys are legit or they are fakers. So that's a free download if you go onto StephanSpencer.com. Then, just click on resources, and the white papers and guides inside the resources are called the SEO BS Detector. That's the first thing I would do.

So, if I'm out there, I'm setting up my website; I've had a website for a while, and the first thing I should really do is hire an SEO consultant. What's that going to run? What's that going to set me back? I'm just a small firm out there, you know, I've got a shop or I've got a product or something. What sort of costs should I be looking at?

Okay, so here's where it gets, hopefully you're all sitting down to hear this. For a good SEO, it's at least $5,000 a month. Now, if you are looking at an SEO who is, let's say, $500 or $1,000 a month, turn and run because they are inevitably going to just not be very good or just do very little to nothing for you for that, just to, you know, blow smoke. So don't spend $500, $1,000, or $2,000 a month on SEO because you're going to. It's trying to find the equivalent of finding a house with your $5,000 budget. Good luck with that. So be prepared if you're going to talk to really good SEOs. 

$5,000 a month is the starting point for that. If you're going to talk to really bad SEOs and get prices below that, realize the cost of that is very painful. Once they get you penalized by buying lousy links or building low-quality links and then you get hit by a Google algorithm penalty like Penguin, it's really hard to recover from that. So be very careful because it's easy to do a lot of damage. You could very easily be in a situation where it would have been better for you to do nothing rather than have hired an SEO.

So, even at $5,000 a month or more, you could end up with a really lousy SEO. So do not neglect the step that I recommended of downloading the SEO BS detector. Also, I have an SEO Hiring Blueprint that has additional details on things that you can do to find really great people to do your SEO for you. And it's also on my stuffinspenser.com website. And so then you've got a framework to work with, and if your budget doesn't allow for 5,000 hours a month, then simply just buy a one-time SEO audit and get a forensic analysis of what's wrong with your website and then work on it yourself and with your webmaster to try and fix as many of the important issues as possible. So that might run you.

As little as $5,000 or as much as $35,000, $45,000, $55,000. So that's a one-time cost, and then it gives you kind of a roadmap that you can work off of to fix some inherent issues with your site. That's not going to address all the other areas of SEO that you're going to need to address as well, such as having great link building to get high-quality links, links that are important, trusted and authoritative. That's a whole other thing, but at least fix the big issues with your site using an SEO audit.

Okay, so does it help me if I spend some money with Google?

No, it doesn't. It only helps with the advertising side.

Right.

So SEO and advertising, essentially it's the equivalent of editorial and advertising in the newspapers. Just because you run a full-page ad in the New York Times does not mean you are going to get a really nice mention in a front-page article in the New York Times.

Sure. Okay. Gotcha. We hear the term marketing funnel. What does an effective marketing funnel look like?

Yeah, so if I were to kind of structure it, let me kind of draw another framework for you and your listeners to help answer this. So, there are three main areas in your online media. This includes earned media, which is where I primarily focus. Those are things like social media and SEO and just things that will get you free traffic essentially. So that's earned media. Then you have paid media, which we just alluded to a moment ago when talking about advertising with Google. So there are other ways that you can advertise and spend money to get traffic. You could advertise with Facebook, for example, or other smaller social media sites like StumbleUpon.

You can advertise with Twitter and just a bunch of different places. So you're spending money to get eyeballs. So that's paid media. And then, finally, you have owned media. These are assets that you own, that you created, whether it's your email list, your blog, your website, and all the content, your viral videos that you've created, whatever, that need a home somewhere on the internet. Maybe you've posted it to your website, but you haven't gotten free traffic or paid traffic to those content pieces yet because you just haven't done it yet. 

So, you have some great viral videos, but you haven't uploaded them to YouTube yet. They're just on your website. Or you've created some great blog posts, but you haven't promoted them on social media, for example. Or then, when I say promoted, it could be just putting that there, trying to get free traffic or paying for traffic on Facebook, for example, boosting posts and using the Facebook ad platform to get more traffic. So those are the three major areas for your media. And if you were to think about, well, what am I gonna do to get earned media, which is what we've really been focusing on in this episode is that you've got SEO as the primary platform, but you also have social media.

So, social media is a way to feed more SEO goodness into what you're doing. And most people don't think of it that way. They think of those as two separate areas that have nothing to do with each other, but they're very much intertwined. It's not that Google looks at the likes and the shares and the retweets and the plus ones and all that and considers those to be factors in the rankings algorithm. It's not that way. It's more that you are trying to spread your content virally, and a great place to do that is on social media. 

If you get noticed by influencers, Linkarati, and social media mavens, then you're going to stand a chance to get a lot of visibility. Hopefully, the end game here for SEO is to get links. So if some of those influencers are bloggers, not just social media people, then they're going to blog about you, and they're going to link to you. And that's going to get you to the rising tide that lifts all boats, essentially. You're going to get your entire website ranking better, not just that viral article that you wrote. So that's an overall kind of structure.

 And now back to the question of a marketing funnel, also known as a sales funnel. So what you wanna do is feed people into the top of the funnel through things like advertising on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, wherever you wanna advertise, doing SEO, like we've been talking about. Maybe you're doing some offline marketing such as, I don't know, newspaper ads, magazine ads, billboards or whatever you have. But you're feeding people into the top of the funnel, getting them to a particular page on your site and that's known as a landing page where then they will decide what to do next. Hopefully, it's not hit the back button. That happens a lot. That's called a bounce.

But if they like what they see on that landing page, they're going to take action. So, that takes them further down the funnel. So the next action for them to take, hopefully, is to opt in and give their email address in exchange for something that in the industry is known as a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a really compelling piece of content, usually a PDF download. For example, I mentioned this SEO BS detector a couple of times, and you can download it for free. That's the lead magnet. That's something that you guys are going to hear and say, wow, that sounds really cool. I need to get that thing. 

So in order to get it, you need to supply your email address. Now you're on my email list, and I'll deliver more valuable content over time via email to you after you've opted in. So now they have this free, valuable piece of content, this lead magnet, and we want to take them to the next stage down in the funnel. Hopefully, it's going to be a no-brainer for them to take that next leap with you. Maybe it's to watch a webinar, so they're dedicating an hour of their time, for example, to watching a webinar with you, or perhaps it's a paid thing that they're getting from you like a video training, or it could be a physical product right so an example and that's cited a lot of times by online marketers is this credit card knife that you can get for five dollars it's basically at or below cost and basically what you're trying to do is get people to spend money with you just a little bit of money a tripwire is what this is called.

They're spending a little bit of money with you for this tripwire, whether it's an electronic Download or a physical product they're gonna get in the mail. And then They're essentially over that hurdle of trusting you with their credit card. So they spent a little bit of money, and I'd say no more than 20 bucks. The good price point will be like five bucks seven bucks now. It's a lot easier to get them to spend more money, and that could be your core product. And so I could give away a free PDF download and then for $5 some more extensive ebook or video-based training and then a whole core program that I charge $300 for that could be like an eight-week training program. 

And then once that, and that's a core product. So they've basically gotten through that hurdle of I trust you with my credit card. Now it's a lot easier to get the core product, and then from there, you can do lots of upsells, cross-sells, and those are called profit maximizers, and that is a sales funnel or a marketing funnel, and it's a great way to frame up how to get people from coming into your website for the first time. Hopefully not balancing, but then taking the next step with you and then, over time taking further steps so that they finally eventually become really valuable lifetime customers with you.

Stephan, we've run out of time, but I've got a whole bunch more questions. So I think that I might get you rescheduled again in a month or so, and there's a lot more to cover.

Stephan, thank you very much for speaking with me on the Bob Pritchard radio show. Now, you can learn more about Stephan Spencer by going to StephanSpencer.com. And don't forget the SEO BS Detector on Stephan's site, which I think we're all probably convinced that we need a consultant, an SEO consultant, and it gives you the questions to ask to sort out the real from the bullshit.

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