Mastering SEO optimization with expert Stephan Spencer

This is Stephan’s podcast appearance about Mastering SEO optimization on the Eventual Millionaire.

Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jamie Masters and today on the show, we have Stephan Spencer. You can find him at stefanspenser.com. He is a genius at SEO. I just came on his show. He has a podcast called Get Yourself Optimized and another one called Marketing Speak, and he has had amazing clients. You should check out his testimonial page. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Well, thanks for having me.

Well, and it's funny, when I was on your show, we were both debatings because you had worked with Steven Spangler, who had a really big thing online and the people that I worked with, Diet Coke and Mentos EepyBird guys, were online at the same time. And you totally beat us in online marketing. Just as a side note, I was new. You totally did. I'm so glad you came to the show, and we could talk about it. But you are sort of heralded as an SEO whiz. SEO has changed like crazy, especially from back in the day to now. So, do you think it was better back then, or do you feel like we still have lots of opportunities now?

Oh, we have, I think, more opportunity now than ever before.

Good. We're so glad you say that.

Yeah. I mean, if you think about where things are heading with AI, machine learning and all that and how you can just be on top of the cutting edge of stuff, if you put the time in and you've got the interest, it's not so much the gaming that used to work and doesn't anymore. It's that you have to outsmart an AI to win. And I think the best way to outsmart an AI is with your own AI. So, you have to get familiar with artificial intelligence and how to utilize these things in order to win the game, but I'm excited for the future.

Okay. So, we geeked out on your podcast before. So you are a futurist and love singularity. And so when we talk about AI, I love this stuff. The thing is that I know my audience is a little like I am just a small business owner, just staying in my lane. I only have minimum time. How can I actually optimize and use SEO? What would you say are the core things that they can do besides getting their own robot?

No. Yeah. We did geek out a lot. That was really fun. We talked about your sword wall and everything. Okay. So, the basic fundamentals for SEO that anybody who's going to have a website needs to do is they need to identify the keywords that matter and those are the words that are relevant to your business. They are popular with searchers. And they're attainable to rank on page one-four. Okay, so that's one piece of it. You gotta identify the keywords. And those keywords, you're gonna create editorial calendars out of those lists. You're going to optimize existing product pages, landing pages and so forth around those keywords. So, there's a lot of utility you're gonna get out of that keyword list. 

So next, you're going to look at your content, and you're gonna look at it from a lens of, is this content remarkable? Is it worthy of remark? So, if you're familiar with Seth Godin and the Purple Cow, one of my favorite books, it's awesome. And Seth is like a marketing hero to me. I actually had him on the show Marketing Speak on the other show about six months ago. It's a fabulous interview. So, definitely check that out. But if you have something that's worthy of remark, then you've got something that is spreadable, linkable, link-worthy, and can perform well on social media as a nice bonus. 

Just as an FYI, as an aside, if you have something that kind of goes viral on social media or does really well on social media, it doesn't mean that you're gonna get any SEO benefit out of it. So that's an important distinction because all these social sites like YouTube and Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, even Wikipedia, all the social sites they know follow their external links. This means those links don't count for SEO juice or Google juice, oversimplifying its authority, trust, and importance. But you need that in terms of links from other sites, and you're not going to get any of it from social networks.

Thank you for saying that because a lot, no offense, but I have clients that have SEO guys, and they're like, "Oh, let's build up the social profile, and we're going to do this." And I was like," Is that how they're trying to do the SEO? Because I don't know if that's going to work for you." No, don't get me wrong. You can start to know what goes well on those sites, and that's good, but like you said, the backlinks don't actually matter. Thank you.

Yeah. And it's not that you should not do social media marketing. It's that you need to plan appropriately and think of this as an indirect channel, an indirect means to the end of getting to the top of Google. You could get in front of influencers who have powerful blogs as far as Google is concerned because of your social spread, Facebook, and so forth. That can work. That can be very effective, but it's an indirect way to get to the top of Google. So you've got remarkable content, you've got the keywords identified, and now you've got to get out there and network the heck out of your amazing, remarkable stuff because you can't just build it, and they will come. What was the movie? Field of Dreams.

Field of Dreams, yes.

Right?

I know. Everybody wants that.

You have to outreach.

Okay, tell me more about this because I feel like everybody figures on-page SEO. They're like, oh, I did the keyword stuff. I did what I was supposed to do. And then they sort of leave it, and it just goes into the ether. And they're like, it didn't work for me. So tell me all of the things I'm trying to actually get.

Yes. Yeah. So, the high-value links that you're going after are ones where the sites are trusted by Google. They're important. They're authoritative. The way to identify these influential websites and blogs is to use a tool, one that identifies authority and even trust as individual metrics, like Majestic, for example, or LinkResearchTool.com or Ahref, although they don't have a trust metric. I love that tool, and their authority metric is DR (domain rating).

So there are tools out there; Moz has domain authority or DA, et cetera, et cetera. And you're going to get a sense of which are the more important and trusted and authoritative sites and which ones are not worthy or worth your time to chase after. How do you know what level that is, though? I know each one has its own sort of category, but is there a metric that we can use to go on that would be like, "Ooh, this and above is really good?"

Yeah. It depends on the metric, but let's say it's a trust flow and citation flow from majestic.com. Let's say that it's a single-digit number of trust flow and or citation flow. That's probably not worth your time to chase after. If it's domain authority and, let's say, it's under 30, maybe if it's really niche-specific to your industry. Okay. But probably more in the 40s, 50s and up is a domain authority that would be much better.

Awesome. So you're really, really just trying to get the high-quality stuff. Okay.

Yeah. Because it's the 80-20 rule, but it's more like 90-10 or more, you know, because it's the Pareto principle.

Well, the question, though, is whether those bigger sites are harder to get on. So that's what everyone is saying. They're harder to get on. So yes, they definitely weigh more, but maybe we get a whole bunch of little sites. So how do you actually trump that?

Yeah. So, the little sites that have low authority and trust scores could actually hurt you. So, you have to be very deliberate and very picky about which sites you target because they might have toxic links pointing to their sites, and that toxicity passes on to you. Then, you need to use a detoxing tool like Link Detox to try and find all the toxic links and remove those. Do a disavow, submit a disavow file to Google through the search console, reach out to these spammy websites and insist that they remove the link. It's a real mess.

That sounds hellish. Yeah, nobody wants that. Okay. All the people who don't know SEOs are like, oh my gosh, that's why I didn't get into SEO. I don't want to screw it up. But how do you get the links from the big guys, then?

Okay. So here are a few different powerful strategies. I use this very effectively with a client who owns, I don't know, a billion dollars or more in real estate. They specialize in Section 8 housing, really nice Section 8 housing. They're not slumlords. They were rehabbing and doing a grand reopening of a building in downtown Denver. It was going to be beautiful and really high-end Section 8 housing. They were going to send out a press release. I'm like, "No journalists hate press releases. It makes them feel so not special." It's the opposite of a scoop, right?

I found a recent article on the Denver Post website that was related to rising rents in downtown Denver. So it was recent, and it was spot-on as far as the topic is concerned. Of course, the journalist was listed there as the author of that article and their email address. So, now we have our in, we're going to comment, not on the article itself. It was like a Facebook comment or a WordPress comment, no. We're going to send an email. In the first version of the email that he sent me, thank goodness I asked him to send me the draft first. It was a mini press release.

Oh, no!

He took his press release and made it like two paragraphs. Oh, my goodness. So I'm like, don't do that. Back to the drawing board, make it insightful and thought-provoking, and you, with your status as general manager of this big company, with an insightful thing to say about his great article, will probably respond. And sure enough, he did. So, the version that he came up with as round two was amazing, and he sent it off. 

He got a response within minutes, and the journalist sent a colleague from the paper to cover the grand reopening of a full-page article that week in the Denver Post. And, of course, it went online on denverpost.com as well. So this stuff can work. It just requires outside-the-box thinking. So that's one example of a strategy. You don't need to hire an expensive PR firm.

Well, the question was, so you're really good at this. He had hired you, thank goodness. He was going to screw it up and send out a press release, right? And this is what I feel like business owners do. They're like, I think I heard something like this. But just to recap, you made the journalist's job easier. Like you hand delivered, especially because you're great with copyright, I'm assuming, hand-delivered some marketing that was a hook that all they do is take it and run with it.

Yeah. But the thing is, I didn't write that piece. I just asked my client to write something insightful or thought-provoking from his standpoint as being in that industry. He read the article. He had some thought-provoking things to say. I reviewed it. I'm like, "This is awesome. I didn't have a hand in writing it at all."

Okay. Because other people would be like, well, of course, he hired you, and you're amazing. So, therefore, okay. So he actually wrote the article, and within minutes, he got it, too. That's amazing. Okay. What else do you have?

So, he wrote the commentary about the article.

Yes. Perfect. I adore that. Okay. So I want more of your tactics and tips, but what came up to me is how do you pick, if we've got a humongous content calendar and a humongous list of keywords, how do you pick which ones we go after especially journalists. Because that does take effort to research if there's an article and all fun stuff like that.

Yeah. I would say sort the list of keywords by popularity. So that's the search volume, monthly search volume typically. And then which ones can give you an opportunity to say something worthy of remark that's kind of either controversial or a little bit counterintuitive or makes people do a double take if they see that keyword in a thought-provoking interesting headline, you know, kind of a cognitive dissonance sort of angle. 

So, you're looking for a hook and whether that hook allows you to write a great piece for your own blog or to pitch it to a journalist or what Andy Crestodina calls the evil twin strategy where you do both with the one piece of content that you've done all the research on. And you just flip the headline essentially, right? So you're saying these are the seven best practices for whatever, right? Whatever the keyword is. And then the evil twin is the seven, what?

Mistakes.

Biggest mistakes. Yeah. Right? And it's the same research. You're just kind of rewriting the piece of content with that new headline.

Okay. So question. Because I actually wrote a post about thinking when there was a whole bunch of buzz online for Napoleon Hill and was he a fraud or was he not? I was like, that's a really good hook, and I've interviewed almost 500 millionaires. So, I looked up the keywords, and I found one specific one. We ended up giving away the PDF for free, and we ranked number one in tons and tons of traffic. The problem that I wasn't totally paying attention to is that it is not my audience. 

So, like, holy, it's not my audience. A lot of people from India come from a bunch of different places. So, do you actually try to vet keywords per what you think the avatar would be, or do you just write the article and try and rank it and hope that I was getting, I think, like 50,000 visits or something crazy? And I was like, I'm paying for a lot more server space for this now. That's very interesting. I'm going to let that one go a little low and not worry about it. Right. But all I was trying to do is hit the number one. How do you manage that?

Oh, what a great insight! When you have something that is not meant for your target audience, it can actually still help you reach your target audience, but in an indirect way. So that article about Think and Grow Rich, and maybe it's from a contrarian angle, like no, it's hooey or whatever, right? Incidentally, I just had John Shin, who's running the Think and Grow Rich world tour and made the Think and Grow Rich documentary possible, as a guest on the Get Yourself Optimized podcast.

That's amazing. I've talked to them, too, about all of this stuff. No, mine was a wonderful piece about it. I don't think he's a fraud, but yes, it was hilarious. I was going on the spin, but you're right because I needed a hook.

Yeah, yeah, and it's a great hook. So what if it's not going to bring in a single person who is your exact avatar? That's totally fine if you're going to reach Linkerati, the influencers who are authoritative, highly trusted, and important as far as Google is concerned, because then it's the rising tide that lifts all boats. Every page of your site, every landing page, every sales page, every product page, and your homepage will all rise in the rankings because of that one article.

I love it. And the other thing that I did was I went to the affiliate people that did the documentary for Think and Courage, and I chatted with them. They wanted to know because I had this highly trafficked page, and now I have an affiliate for them on the thing. So, and that was the thing. I was like, oh, I got to meet them at least. Cause I was like, I don't know what to do with this. Let's see if we can optimize something. Cause I care about optimizing, too. So I appreciate, though, that it raises everything instead of me going, well, that was worth all the time and the effort, right? Okay. So thank you for that. So can we? I don't know if you can predict this, but can you predict if keywords are going to be good or bad? Is there any way that you can kind of know who would be good for your avatar or not, or you guess?

Yeah, as far as which keywords your avatar is actually typing into Google.

You could do focus groups; you could do online surveys of your audience, of your customer base, of your email list subscribers, and things like that. But if you're laser targeting in on certain demographics, psychographics, clickographics, actually, the best place to start then isn't with Google. It's with Facebook. So, if you think, like, okay, what is an ideal avatar or persona in terms of their hobbies, their income brackets, their gender, age group, all that. 

You can laser target in on Facebook, get those folks on your list, and then create a lookalike audience on Facebook and get an even larger audience of those people. Then, you offer some sort of quiz or fun game, survey, or contest with prizes so that you can get the data from them. They're your avatar, and you got a whole lot of them, so you're going to get statistical significance, and now you understand how they think, what their buying criteria are, what the buyer journey looks like.

That makes so much sense. Okay. It's interesting though that you. So I was thinking that you'd test it in sort of PPC like Google PPC or something like that to try and see if it's actually converting for you instead of wasting, not wasting time, but taking all the time to try and rank for SEO. You can sort of test the tools.

Well, you're going to be wasting money, though. That's even worse.

Exactly. But that's why I like your Facebook idea. That makes a lot of logical sense though it's a long, you're still spending a lot of money, and it's a long process, but you'll get actual data that you can actually vet and use.

I think of Facebook as a part of a whole ecosystem, and if you're not doing Facebook advertising, you're missing the boat. Let's say that you just have a website that's doing well and so forth, and you're neglecting Facebook. That is an asset that you could have built up. I think of assets in terms of Rich Dad Poor Dad. An asset puts money in your pocket, and a liability takes money out of your pocket. So, the house that you live in is probably a liability, not an asset. Renting out that's an asset. Well, there are lots of online assets. There's your email list. Your retargeting audience is on Facebook and Google.

 However, Google calls it remarketing instead of retargeting. Still, it's the audience that's been to your website that you've pixeled, and now you can follow them as they're scrolling around on Facebook or as they're surfing the internet, if it's Google, you know, the display network or in retargeting for search, remarketing for search is what they call it.

Isn't it hilarious that you have to change the name? Yeah, same thing.

I know, it's silly. So silly. But, you know, it's like this is an asset that you can nurture, and you're neglecting that asset by just not doing anything about it. If you're not even collecting that data, if you're not building a retargeting audience, even if you're just spending a little bit of money.

That's just a waste. When somebody goes to buy your site, and they're like, okay, how big is your email list? What's your retargeting audience look like?

 And you're like, what? What? Like, oh yeah, we haven't been doing much as far as email. We didn't really ask for email addresses. But we've got some sales and we got some affiliate revenue. It's like, well, yeah, you've got a piece of the equation, but you've missed a whole bunch of the other things.

So, how do you? I'll loop it back around to the other tactics. So I still want some of those. But how do you deal with it? Because this is what all the people say, especially when they're not doing Facebook marketing. They're like, Facebook is dying, and the costs are going up like crazy, and you have to pay just to have a boost, anything. So anybody sees you at all or emails, the other one, open rates are going down, blah, everybody is chicken little. What do you say to all that?

Just, I don't know, tough it up.

Suck it up, Buttercup. Okay.

Yes, suck it up, yes. So, if you think about what Facebook needs to do in order for them to succeed, they need to keep people on the platform. They need to keep them happy and engaged. So if your ad is trying to draw people off of the platform to a landing page and it's an opt-in, it's some sort of lead gen form or something, that's not going to be a great experience. That doesn't make for happy Facebook users.

Whereas if you keep them on the platform and they're watching the videos natively on the platform that you've uploaded and that you're spending money advertising to expand your reach, that's great. Then, you can do a retargeting ad as a follow-up to people who watch, let's say, 75% of the video or more. You can upload your customer list, create a custom audience from that and target those people. You can create a lookalike of your customers based on that custom audience of the customer list or your email subscribers. There's so much opportunity. The key here is you gotta make sure these people are happy. And one of the keys to that is the share-to-reaction ratio. If your stuff is so darn good, your ads don't even really look like ads. 

You look real and human and like you're part of the ecosystem. It's not all professionally shot. You didn't do all your makeup and everything, and you look human, right? And you're sharing a valuable message, or you're saying something that's worthy of remark, you know, an idea worth spreading sort of thing, then you'll get a lot of shares. And if that's at least as high as the amount of reactions, the likes, the wows, the loves, and so forth, you're winning. You've got something that Facebook wants you to get a lot of reach out of. So, a little bit.

They've got lots of self-interest, which makes sense. They're in business also. It's funny because Stu McLaren posted one of his ads, and he's like in a pool making a crazy face. I follow him anyway, and I just thought it was a regular thing of him. You're right. It feels like people, especially advertisers, are getting better and better at making it look native. To me, it's only not a liability if you have a funnel that converts. If the people who are on Facebook don't have a funnel that actually converts, then it is a liability. And I feel like that's where people go like this. Do you know what I mean? And because they've done it for so long or they've tried it, and it didn't work for them, what do you tell them to try and test it again? Because it's an asset like you said.

Yeah. Well, the funnel that converts isn't the only way that they can turn that into a positive ROI. Let's say that you are targeting, let's say journalists. No, let's say even the editors or editorial managers of big magazines and trade journals in your industry, right? So there's no funnel you're going to send them through. But you want to reach them. You want them to get to know your brand and your personality and see the depth of your subject matter expertise.

 So that might seem like a waste of money from the outside looking in, but it's not because what if you contact them in three months after they keep seeing all your brilliant stuff, your thought leadership pieces that you're pushing out to a laser target audience, maybe it's 300 people, and you're spending, I don't know, 400 bucks a month on that. That is totally worth it.

Totally worth it. So, in that case, though, having somebody who is a Facebook ad manager on your team would also be really helpful, right? Do you feel like it's easier? To train somebody on your team to be up to speed on marketing tactics or hire agencies, or what do you think is sort of the best way? Because agencies are expensive and that's why it's sometimes hit or miss.

My preferred model is working with an individual consultant because if it's a jack-of-all-trades sort of agency, oh yes, we do SEO, we do Google Ads, we do Facebook Ads, we do copywriting, conversion optimization, analytics, social media. Like, okay, is there anything you don't do? And, of course, you're awesome, like a grade-A top shelf on every single one of these things.

Yes, the 80-20 rule. Totally. You're great at all of them. Totally. Yeah.

Totally don't buy that. So if you work with a consultant who gets the internet and the marketing kind of mix, you know, like I do, for example.

That's what I was going to say. You either have to tell me, you, or somebody, you have to refer us. So we'll put links and stuff like that, too, because it's hard to find somebody. No offense, but it's hard to find somebody good at that, especially if the person who's hiring them doesn't understand SEO or Facebook or whatever. I just have had so many clients who are like, well, I just signed up with this guy, and then he just, he's not, okay, no, right? And it's hard to vet if you don't actually know. So, anyone besides you and that, too, give us links so that way we can put them in the show notes for everybody, okay?

Yeah. So, one of the things I do for my clients is help them vet. People, if they're looking to hire an in-house SEO, an in-house marketing manager, or a social media manager, I will grill that person in a nice way as a second interview and make sure that they are not blowing smoke.

I'm laughing because that's what I do, too. I love that part.

Yeah. In fact, I have an SEO BS Detector worksheet that has all these trick questions that you can have available in the interview process. You just pick some questions from that and slip those questions into the interview process, and there's only one right answer for each. So then you know if you got snookered or not like there's a question in there, tell me your process for optimizing meta keywords. That is a trick question because meta keywords never counted in Google, ever, not even on day one.

I want that list. I literally have a call in two days with an SEO guy who's working with one of my clients. So thank you. I want that list. That's killer.

Well, I'll tell you what. I'll put that on a special page just for your listeners. It's going to be at MarketingSpeak.com/millionaire.

Perfect. So, to bring it back, I love the tactics that you mentioned about the journalists. Do you have any other tactics like that to help build up those big site links?

Oh yeah, so many. So, let's say that you wanted to become a contributor, ideally a columnist somewhere big. I just got published for the first time in the HBR (Harvard Business Review).

Ooh, that's a good one.

Yeah, that was huge. And, of course, I got a link with it. So I published the article, or they published my article, which was all about travel hacks for business travelers. Then, in the byline portion that gives my old bio, it links back to my site. So, that's a really high-value link from a very high-trust website that's hard to break into. It's not likely you're going to have any spammy links coming from that site.

Definitely not. How did you get that? Are you allowed to tell me?

No, I'm not. It was a lot of work and a lot of back and forth and took about four months, maybe five. But yeah, I pulled some strings. I leveraged some friendships and connections that I have.

It's all networking though, like you said before. But which site did you link to because you have more than one site?

Yeah, I linked to StephanSpencer.com.

Okay. So, and that's the other piece that when one of my clients was just mentioned in all sorts of places, Yahoo and NBC and all these things, right? She got mentioned. But I was like, "Oh, but did we ask for a link?" And she has two sites; one's local for her local offices, and one's not. And we mentioned the local offices. And I was like, so that's not ideal. At least we got them. All right. Darn it. I should have said something beforehand. But how do you pick? Do you have one site that you're really building up the SEO for? Is that how you decide?

Yes. In fact, this is a bigger question: Do I consolidate all of my remarkable content under one brand? One domain, or do I spread it out across multiple ones? Now, in some cases, I consolidate around one site. In other cases, I set up a separate domain and brand. For example, in the case of my podcasts, MarketingSpeak.com is the website for Marketing Speak the podcast and then Get Yourself Optimized has GetYourselfOptimized.com. Why did I not just do StephanSpencer.com/podcast/MarketingSpeak?

It's because it looks clunky. It doesn't look as legit and as big of a brand as there are books that are New York Times bestsellers that have been on huge talk shows and so forth. The authors talking about their books. You would imagine that a book that's a big deal, like, I don't know, Rachel Hollis's book, which should have a website dedicated just to the book. Right. And if it doesn't, it makes you question how big of a deal that thing really is, that book or that podcast or that show. If you have a YouTube channel and you don't have a microsite dedicated to that YouTube channel and that YouTube show, for example, what Blendtec did with the Will It Blend videos.

I remember them, yeah.

Well, they're still around. I just spoke to their customers.

I have a Blendtec. Yes, no, I love it.

I have a Blendtec, too. I love it. And the Will It Blend videos put them on the map. They were already a very successful, I'm guessing, eight-figure business by the time they came up with this campaign. But the idea was let's jam two-by-fours into the blenders, golf clubs, rake handles, let's put light bulbs in there.

The iPhone one made me hurt. I was like, oh, don't put an iPhone.

Not an iPhone, I know. I'm an Apple fan. So this was really made for really good TV, right? Really very clever idea. And if you're a journalist and you're writing about the latest Will It Blend video, do you really want to link to the YouTube channel?

Or would it be better to go to so that's the question, though, right? So, for the podcast, you wouldn't actually have the domain, so you could say go to whatever it is, willblend.com, or whatever the thing is, and then have it redirected to their actual site. I mean, this doesn't really matter either way, but then you have everything on the one site, so you can technically point things out. Or does it not matter?

Well, I think it matters, and I think it's a positioning play. If somebody sees that you redirected them from marketingspeak.com to stephanspencer.com/podcast/marketingspeak/index or whatever, then they'll like that PHP. All right. What just happened here? They're going to copy and paste that URL, which is going to be the link. And now when somebody mouses over in that article that talks about the ten best podcasts on marketing, and there's marketing speak, and then they look at the link, and it's like a mile long, like, Oh, what's that? Is that so legit that they don't like why? Why don't they have just marketingspeak.com?

Well, if they, if you own it, but then you redirect that URL. Then, at least, they type it in, or they feel it. I get it. So we're talking nuances here. I totally get it. But I love this stuff, especially because I've been talking a lot more about doing my own personal brand because everyone knows me as me and Eventually Millionaire is the show. But I built up SEO on Eventually Millionaire, and I can't lose that. And I had a coach that told me to just SEO and switch it over. And I have heard horror stories from doing that. So you don't recommend it either, right?

No. I recommend building up both brands. And like the Jamie Tardy brand, it is a brand you're going to take to the grave.

Well, actually, Jamie Masters is because Tardy was my married name, but yes, the one that I have now is the one I'm going to take to the grave.

Okay. Scratch that. So, Jamie Masters, I just saw your name on something.

It's my old name. Yeah. With the old, your, with the old name.

Question then. So, cause you're a geek, and I like this. So, but I don't own Jamie Masters, spelled wrong. So Jamie is spelled weirdly, and I've been trying to buy it from this lady forever, and she doesn't respond. So everybody should email her and tell her to sell it to me, just as a side note. But what would you do?

Actually, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do that. I would have a domainer contact her because they know how to persuade people, and they buy domains all the time, and they sell domains and everything. So, you get a domainer or a domain broker to contact this person on your behalf.

I've tried the nice anyway, we'll talk about this. I will look for a domain broker and just let them try and ride with it because the one reason why I haven't switched over to that is because I know everybody, even my first-grade teachers, spelled my name wrong and told me I was lying when I was a kid. So it's kind of a big deal for everybody to spell URLs right.

You are lying. Wow, that's extreme.

Right? First-grader lying is great. But I have issues with my name, as you can tell. So I really appreciate your info. I'll probably wait and then build up that other brand. Give me some more tactics and tips for getting more of these links.

Yeah. You have to think outside the box in terms of campaigns that are worthy of being spread, and these could take the form of personality tests and quizzes, infographics, viral videos, worksheets or workbooks, checklists, planners, guides, how-to's, anything that's really going to add a lot of value and differentiate yourself and your content from everything else that's out there. You can do contests as well, competitions, it could be video competitions or image competitions. Even scavenger hunts are lots of different ways that you could do this.

What would a video competition be like a competition? I've talked to a lot of people, and we've done a lot of challenges, which brings a lot of backlinks specifically to certain things for the challenge side. But what would be a video competition, and what type of competition would it be? Can you walk me through what that would look like for getting links?

Yeah. So, Intuit has their TurboTax division, and they did a contest called the TaxRap contest. And you had to create a video.

Oh, so it doesn't have to be cool. It can be very uncool. Okay, good.

Yeah. So it's cognitive dissonance. Like, who's ever heard the words taxes and rap in the same sentence unless it's like a rapper who got into trouble for tax evasion, right? So if you capitalize on that cognitive dissonance and you require that people make a music video that is a rap music video, and they have to rap about doing their taxes and ideally using the TurboTax software to do it, you're going to get some pretty remarkable entries.

They might be remarkably bad, or they might be remarkably good. The ones that were remarkably good were so good that they put a prize purse out there. I think 25 grand was the grand prize, which is substantial. The winning entry was really, really good. It was a great music video. Well done. Nice post-production. It was great. But even the second- and third-prize entries are really, really good. And what made this different, like made it stand out as being remarkable, even more than the cognitive dissonance of taxes and rap music, was this. They got a spokesperson, a spokesman. And who do you think they got as their spokesman that would make this really, really remarkable?

Some great rappers or bad rappers. What is it now?

Yeah, so counterintuitively, or again, writing on this cognitive dissonance sort of surprise thing, a bad rapper would be better than a good one. So, who do you think they got as their spokesman?

I have no idea.

Think back to, you know, years and years ago, the early days of rap.

Okay, I was like nine, so. I don't know. I used to listen to Dr. Dre like he's cool, but he's not bad.

He was cool.

Ice-T? No, I don't know. I guess he was cool.

No, he wasn't bad. He was cool.

Who's bad? You have to tell me. I'm bad at this game.

So, okay. Well, the word ice is in his name.

Ice Cube?

No.

I don't know. Who is it?

He's a white guy.

Oh, Vanilla Ice.

Vanilla Ice.

I love Vanilla Ice. I thought he was good besides stealing.

We're all entitled to our opinions.

I love that. Don't even, that's why I wasn't up here.

Anyway, so he's pretty well known. He's got lots of name recognition, but nobody takes him seriously, especially not these days.

Yes, no kidding.

So he's very available.

He's a real estate guy or something like that now, right?

He's got a DIY show on the DIY Network.

Wow.

So, he was very inexpensive to buy a couple of hours of his time. The video team from Intuit flew down to his home in Florida, and they shot videos of him introducing the contest and introducing the winner, even though they didn't know who it was going to be. They leave, and yeah, for a very small amount of money, they had Vanilla Ice as the name to really make this contest, this video competition, pop.

Good, I'm going to hire a vanilla.

And it did really, really well. Vanilla, I see.

What's so funny is that you say that. So, Diet Coke and Meadow Sky's EP Bird, the reason why they made their initial video, was a Coca-Cola contest. That's the only reason why they even did the entire thing, and it was viral, but it was because they only made it for the contest. So go them. So, the question, though, is how do you get backlinks on that? Are you just looking for high-quality videos that you know will get shared a lot, and then that's what gets the backlinks?

Yeah, so in the case of Intuit, they created a separate microsite dedicated just to the tax wrap contest. And I think they put it as a subdomain, so TaxRap on Intuit.com or something like that. The silly thing they did was after, I don't know, a couple of years, they took the site down, and it's not redirected anywhere. It's just basically a broken image and a copyright of 2000 and whatever.

So they really blew it after building all these great links, inadvertently by having a very successful, remarkable contest that people were like, oh my God, you got to check out these entries. And so instead of linking to the YouTube channel or linking to individual videos, I mean, it's still good to embed individual videos, but you know, it's, there's only so many, like, what if there are, you know, 200 videos that were submitted and you. You don't want to embed 200 videos into your blog post. Maybe the winner or the one you thought should have won. 

And then here's a link to watch all the other videos, and it happens to be on the microsite, not on the YouTube channel because the YouTube channel has got all the kind of distraction devices in there like, "Oh, shiny object over here, squirrel over there," right? And you're like suddenly watching, I don't know, music videos from Katy Perry and reality show spoofs, and in three hours, you're in the Twilight Zone. You're like, where did I go?

My vortex, that is YouTube. I know. It's like, wait, where am I? My children get in that way too often. The goal, though with that is to create such a viral campaign by using everybody, a wide array of audiences so that you can potentially get it distributed and picked up everywhere and get all the backlinks. That makes sense. Okay. That's awesome.

You need to proactively go out with outreach that would care about this contest or about whatever it is: infographic, viral video, a workbook or whatever.

How do you find those people who care about this stuff, and what do you write to them?

Well, there's this really great search engine called Google.

Wait, how do you spell that?

I'm being cheeky, but a better answer would be to use a third-party tool that's designed to do the outreach. So it's not just going to find you these influencers. The influencers who matter as far as Google is concerned are the high authority and high trust, but also that will do the outreach for you. You load in templates, and then it does the mail merge with the information in the database on these people and maybe even holds those messages in a moderation queue before they get sent out so you can add an additional sentence like, "Oh my God, this is somebody I know. I know this blogger, so I'm going to say something in the PS or whatever."

Having a moderation queue that you can look at and then hit send to all these emails comes into an SEO inbox instead of clogging up your regular email inbox and tracking pitch box.

What's that for? Tell me all the things.

Pitchbox.

I didn't even know that. Okay, because we use MailShake for cold email outreach, and it doesn't integrate. So you're saying you can actually find the influencers and email them all in the pitch box.

Yes. It tracks the workflow and gives you pipeline reports instead of salesforce.com giving you sales pipeline reports, but this is an outreach pipeline report. Isn't that cool?

Smart.

Yeah. So pitchbox.com. Awesome. Yeah.

Give me one more. I know we have to start wrapping up because we are going over, but I really like your tips. So give me one more.

Okay. So, let's go back to this idea of getting a column or a contributorship. Like, you might wonder how the heck do I get that. You know, it's fine for Stephan to get it.

It took him four months and new people.

Exactly.

I'm not him.

Yes. So start small. Start with sites like Business to Community or your Tango or whatever your niche covers. And as you build your way up, you're building your reputation. You can apply this strategy not just to print or digital magazines but also to TV or radio. I was just interviewed on a radio station in Ireland just three hours ago. So, that's going to air in a week. It's pretty cool. They reached out to me from one of my websites. So if, let's say, you start small, you go for a business to Community.com, it's not that difficult to get into. And let's say you're in the productivity space. And so then you parlay that into getting a columnist gig for LifeHack.org or LifeHacker.com, right?

Lifehacker.com is harder than lifehack.org, I remember, because I got it at lifehack.org, and I kept thinking it was lifehacker.com. I was like, no, I thought it was the other one. This is back in the day.

I know. I got in for a lifehack.org too.

We still have backlinks. We're still happy. We still like you, too. It was just not as much domain authority as the other one, for sure.

But it was pretty good. If you looked at the metrics, it was pretty darn good for an org that I had never heard of before that kind of.

Well, do you spin your article? That's the other piece of Intuit. Can you take the content that you have instead of writing it? Because that's the other thing I'll tell clients about. I've had tons and tons of journalists contact me, which is amazing because I've built up relationships. But writing new content for all these things was a pain. And so when I tell my clients, I'm like, we can just take it and spin it. But SEO-wise, where are we now?

That's black hat, black hat territory.

I don't mean like spin it, spin it. I mean, like rewrite.

Like article spinners?

No, no, no. Oh, no, I will use those.

Okay, good.

Oh, where they replace the word. Sorry, I used the terminology.

Yeah, like, oh, synonym goes here, and synonym goes there. No, no, no, don't do that.

Those would come out, and you'd be reading it, and you'd be like, oh, you don't speak English very well. That's awesome. No, so not those. I mean rewrite but similar style of content.

Like, paraphrase it.

Yeah, like have your ghostwriter just make a couple of articles that look very similar but not.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of that because it's pretty obvious that it's been done. The director has this policy that you can't republish the same content, and they see that "Oh, there's a paraphrased version on your blog or some competitor's site." They're not going to be happy with you. They might kick you off the contributorship. So again, back to the beginning of our discussion, I mentioned the evil twin strategy. So, instead of the seven best practices, now it's the seven biggest mistakes. 

That's not the same thing. No. I feel like that's the same thing as just tweaking it.

No, it's a different article; the headline is different, and thus, the hook is different, and the article is different. It's still all the same research.

There are so nuances. That's what I, okay, that's interesting. Okay.

Right? So, let's take something that you've recently written about as an example. Give me a topic. Give me a headline.

Sales, oh, I don't even remember. I don't even write the headline. Somebody else says sales workflow.

But give me a topic.

Yeah, sales workflow.

Sales workflow. Okay. So, sales workflows that work might be the headline. I just made that up. So, these are the biggest, and then the evil twin would be sales disasters that happen because of bad workflows.

So, to you, that's a different hook?

So, it's not the same exact that's a different hook. So, it's not the same exact kind. Well, it's a different hook, and you're going to bring in different stories from your research because these are the bad examples that you didn't use. You used the best practices. Now you're using the worst practices, and you're kind of deconstructing what those are. You're still giving the best practice tips in there, but you're saying this is another screw-up here. Do you see what they did wrong here?

See, when I used to write.  So, we have ghost writers now, but when I used to do it, I hated writing, so I would have templatized things, but it would be like this. What is the main keyword in hook, right? And then I would go, millionaire one says this about that topic, millionaire two says this about, but it was all different. And I'm like, just go beep, here's another little thing. Oh, there's another little. And every single one was different, but at least I had a little format that made it easier for me to write all of them. Right? But would that, if I spun it and made it different, would that be good enough for you and your X level of excellence?

I think it matters only to the editor who makes the decision whether you played by the rules or you tried to skate around them.

It's not writing an article. Okay, I get it. Because there are a lot of people that'll just make crappy, crappy articles, and that's not what they're looking for. As long as it's well written and it's not just swiped from somewhere else, and you did a really good job, then that makes sense.

But to each his own. But let's say that if you get a gig writing for or column writing for HBR, you're going to submit your very best stuff there, and you're not going to hold back. And you're not going to try just paraphrasing that HBR article and posting it to your blog. You don't want to take the chance that the editor is going to see that. And remember, you're starting at the bottom, and you're working your way up with the smaller media outlets that say yes to you as being a contributor or columnist, and then you work your way up.

 And again, back to this idea that you're working your way up, but in other media like TV, you start with small TV stations, local markets, really small local markets. Albuquerque, for example, or Tucson or Reno. They're a lot easier to get on, and you can make mistakes, and some even pre-record, so you could mess up and they're like, "Oh, can we do another take," right? And then you earn your chops because you're not gonna end up the first time out of the gate as a newbie on TV doing Good Morning America. That would be a disaster for everybody.

So you got to work your way up, and you can cold call TV producers, pitch them at four in the morning, they're up, and nobody else is calling them. 

See, this is great. I love how you intertwine the old school with the online new school, right? Because it does make a difference. That stuff still works and it's even more rare now than all the people that are just trying to go the conventional route, which I really appreciate. 

And guess what happens with these TV appearances? They end up where? Online.

Everywhere, right? And then they'll distribute them to other networks. I had no idea that it was so interconnected.

With links.

Yes. I was on Yahoo, and then I was like, oh, I'm on Business Insider's homepage. Oh, I'm on this. I'm on, I'm like, it just went crazy because it was part of the network and I had no idea at the time. I was like, shoot, I should have prepared better. But if you did it on purpose, it makes a lot more sense. Now, for the people who hate writing, I know we have to wrap up, but for the people who hate writing, do you still suggest they write, or should they find a go? I hate writing. I'll do TV shows all day long. But I have ghostwriters. For the people that don't have ghostwriters, what do you suggest? Should they just go down the TV route instead or really try to get the backlinks to the articles because it's easy, easier-ish?

Yeah. It is easier-ish. But here's what I do, and I think it works well because I've identified myself as a speaker who writes, not a writer who speaks. I got that distinction from Bob Allen, who wrote a whole bunch of fabulous books, such as Cash in a Flash, The One Minute Millionaire, and so forth. So he says either your writer who speaks or your speaker who writes, figure out which one you are and then focus on that. And then the other piece that you're not as good at is not as much of a natural state for you. You convert the stuff that, let's say, you're a speaker who writes, the stuff that you spoke, and you get that converted into writing. 

So you have a ghostwriter, and you'll have an editor, transcriptionists, you'll have all these people who will kind of follow along and take that stuff that raw material that you're speaking either from interviews or TV appearances or you're on stage at a conference speaking or in a panel somewhere. Take all that content, or you're just getting interviewed by your executive assistant, right? And then they're turning that into a draft of the article. I hate looking at a blank screen or a blank sheet of paper, and like, okay, what am I supposed to start writing? I hate that. If we can just have a draft in front of me, I can do something with that. Now, I've gotten to the point where my team gets my voice; they get my vision and my values. I don't even review the stuff that gets posted.

They ghostwrite articles for my blog on stephanspencer.com every week, and a new post makes its way to the blog. I never even see them. I don't even know what I've been blogging about for the last six months. I have no idea what I'm tweeting on my Twitter. I'm tweeting apparently seven or eight times a day. My team is handling that. I have 158,000 followers and 1.2 million reach, impressions, and reach on Twitter. I have no idea what I'm saying there, but I know it's awesome.

And I'm also doing a newsletter every week, which is amazing. I'm so proud of this newsletter. It's Thursday 3. So, something that I found challenging, something I found exhilarating or inspiring, and something I found interesting or surprising, right? So, I put this out every week. Well, I don't. I don't even write it. I have no idea what I've even published in the last X number of weeks or months of the Thursday 3 newsletter, but it is amazing. And I get positive comments everywhere I go, at networking functions conferences. "Hey, I just loved your last week's Thursday 3. It was awesome." I'm like, "Thank you." And I hope they don't ask me for details.

Right. Well, when you asked me the blog post name, I was like, "I don't even have a clue what we just posted." OK. I so appreciate you saying that because I'm not like that either. And I know a lot of people who use that as the stopping ground. But know that you can do this way easier. Thank goodness we have the technology that we have now and have voice recorders and we can have content everywhere, even if you suck at grammar. Like I do. I know we have to start wrapping up this way longer than I thought cause you're awesome. What's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward toward their goal of a million?

Yeah. I would recommend identifying things that are going to make them stand out in a crowded market. Like how can they be remarkable? Maybe they start by reading the book The Purple Cow or the new book by Seth Godin, which is This is Marketing. So that would be a good way to think in terms of remarkable content. Or they could start with my book, The Art of SEO, in chapter seven, that's all about content marketing. 

And in fact, I'll include that in that special page of gifts for your listeners and viewers. So, MarketingSpeak.com/millionaire. I'll include chapter seven of The Art of SEO. And this is a big book, so I don't expect your listeners to read all of it. I'm gonna look at this thing. It is a thousand pages almost.

That's insane. They're gonna give it to their team, be like, here, this is gonna be fun. Wow.

This is daunting. You might get people quitting on you if you don't approve.

And you're not a writer, and you wrote a book that's like a thousand pages. I love that.

Well, I had co-authors and I had ghost writers that helped me. And I had a whole raft of, of many, many dozens of articles already written for search engine land that we were able to use as, as raw material. I had stuff that I'd written as guides and white papers over the years and everything. So all that raw material went into the book, too. Yeah. But that's not my only book. It's just one. I've got three and working on a fourth.

We'll have to have you back on the show when you have the next book come out. I so appreciate this. Where do they find your podcast? Even though I think we talked about the microsites, but save them again. And where can we find more about you online too?

Yeah. So, getyourselfoptimized.com, which is all about biohacking, life hacking, productivity, personal development. That's a passion of mine. And so that's Get Yourself Optimized. My marketing podcast is marketingspeak.com. Seth Godin has been on that, but also Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham, some of the big marketing legends, some of my heroes, and just all sorts of subject matter experts and everything from YouTube to Facebook and SEO and paid search and all that. And then my main site is StephanSpencer.com. You can find a whole raft of helpful guides and materials on SEO and online marketing there as well. I've got a whole learning center and yeah, and you can follow me on Twitter. I've got apparently good things to say there. I'll add lots of value. I have no idea what it is, but it's SSpencer, which is the username, and I hope you follow me and say hi to my team.

Do you know that you just tweeted this DMM and are like, oh, is this you? But I loved your site, especially because you had a list of business problems that you could click on, and then you got the answers for each one of them. I thought that was really helpful and eye-opening. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it.

Well, thank you. This was a lot of fun.

Would you consider yourself a high-level entrepreneur? Now, most likely, if you're listening to this, you definitely are. And what I've heard over and over and over again is it's hard to find like-minded people who are like that, too. Again, I'm from Maine, so I totally understand how difficult it can be. Thank goodness I have an amazing online community. So I know tons of them. That is exactly why we are starting this brand new mastermind group with high-level, like-minded entrepreneurs. The ones that you know you can go alongside with that will help move you to the next level, let alone with kick butt coaching for me because I like to slap you around, both on focus.

And on strategy. So if you're looking to double or triple this year, which I know most of you are, I want you to go ahead and apply and see if it's a good fit for you. I will totally tell you if it's not and if I wouldn't do it if I were you, but go to even slash apply. We are looking for amazing, like-minded entrepreneurs. My previous Mastermind members have told me it is life-changing. So take the time today to fill out the very quick application, and we'll see if it's a fit. Take care.

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