Prominent SEO Expert and Author Stephan Spencer
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Hey everybody, what is up today is May 5th, 2015, and you’re listening to the Shoe Money Show on Webmaster Radio. Today with me is a good friend of mine that I’ve known for a very long time, Mr. Stephan Spencer. And I didn’t screw up his name, if I got it right, right, Mr. Spencer?
You got it on. Spot on there.
Spot on there. That’s right. So, yeah, it’s been for me an interesting week. All last week, I was with my family at Universal Studios. Very impressed with the Harry Potter stuff. Very, very impressed with that.
Oh, did you have the butterbeer?
You know, I didn’t, and my wife did, though.
Oh, it’s good stuff.
Yeah, the Simpsons thing.
No, the butterbeer is .in the Harry Potter world.
Maybe that’s where they got it.
Yeah. You missed the best part of Potter world, man.
Oh, You know it. I tell you what, I was so burnt out. Anyway, I was just so exhausted by the time we left because we did three full days, and one day was 7 am. Until I got home at 11 at night, and I mean just pounding it there. There were still some things we didn’t see, but the lines weren’t bad, and we stayed at a universal property. So we got, you know, the 8 am entrance and the express stuff and all that. But still, I mean, it was still just mapping everything out logistically and everything like that. Anyway, for those who don’t know, can you give us a little bit about your background? You’ve had, you’re pretty much the man, uh, when you’ve literally written the book on SEO and whatnot, but I’ll let you talk.
Well, back in the nineties, I founded Net Concepts, an SEO agency that was acquired by Covario in 2010. And actually Covario just got acquired last year. Dentsu Aegis is a big ad agency conglomerate that owns iProspect. And, yeah, I’ve written some books. I co-authored The Art of SEO. I co-authored Social Ecommerce. Thank you, Jeremy, for being the forward author of that book. And then Google Power Search. I solo-authored on how to like be a power user of Google, find anything confidential business plans, all that sort of stuff. But yeah, my claim to fame is pretty much SEO and some social media, too.
Yeah. And you sold that concept for like a billion dollars, right?
Yeah, pretty much.
Yeah, I mean it’s almost, I mean, it was close to, close to a billion. That’s what I was, yeah.
Yeah. Somewhere around there.
Yeah, same with me and my companies. You know, close to, close to a billion. It’s almost a billion. So, yeah, and um, I, gosh. Me and Stephan go back. But Stephan was a part of my original shoe money system product, and gosh, you’ve spoken at my elite retreat events. You’ve attended a lot of them. Just a lot of very cool stuff. We go back pretty far together. And. Now, um, you’re doing some stuff you mentioned with Kris Jones. Kris Jones!
Yeah, who also spoke at Elite Retreat.
Yeah, who never calls me back anymore. I don’t know why. I might not have the right contact info for him, actually.
You probably don’t, yeah. He’d respond to you. He’s a good guy. And, uh, yeah, he’s the founder of Pepper Jam Search and author of another SEO book about local or what’s visual SEO or something like that. I forget the title. I only remember my own titles. Yeah, so we’re going to do a personal and professional development event together in October, a several-day event. That’ll be fun because we actually hang out in some of the same circles in the Tony Robbins world. I’m a fan of Tony Robbins and some of the other self-development gurus. And we see each other at these different events. And so we’re like, yeah, we should do something together. We should put on an event or do something. And we finally decided to do it.
You know, we talked about this a little bit before, and I, and I told you, you know, I was kind of fascinated by it, and it and it’s only been in the last couple of years, you know, last three years or so since, I mean, I never really bought into the Tony Robbins thing and the, you know, all those kinds of things. And then some of my friends started to go to some of those events and started talking about just how amazing it was. You know, like the, in life-changing, you know, those were for them. Cause I had only had experience before with it, where it was like people who were kind of like your blue-collar guys who could barely afford to do it.
And then they came back, and they were all amp, but they never did anything. And I was like, uh, you know, they would, they would tell me, “Oh, you got to work smarter, not harder. And la la la la la.” And I’m like, yeah, what are you doing? You know? And so that was my whole take on that. But that drastically changed once, you know, like he and Frank Kern did stuff together, and John Reese, who are guys who are good friends of mine.
And I value them a lot and just talking with them like, Hey, okay, seriously, you know, and they’re like, “Dude, like it changed our lives. And Tony brought us in.” You know, like him and Frank, Frank Kern and Tony Robbins work together on some stuff, and they actually do some, well, I don’t know, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to say about it, but anyway, and then, one of my friends, Aaron Baker, who I believe you know as well.
The name sounds familiar.
He worked with Kris at Pepper Jam. I think they’re kind of mortal enemies now, to be honest. But anyway, they both speak into my leader tree. Aaron Baker is very, very successful and owns his own agency. Does really well. And he was telling me he’s in, like, all these Elite, Platinum Tony Robbins things and stuff. And he was just like, “Dude, I’m telling you, it has increased my profitability like 10 X since I started doing that.” And I was just like, “Really?” You know? And so, yeah, I mean the self-development and stuff like that, I gotta say, like when I did, I did a thing called the entrepreneur’s organization or EO or there’s YPO and all that.
Yeah. And that was huge for me. Ours got dissolved in LinkedIn. I committed a major sin of, uh, in the rule book of going into business with one of my, you know, founding members, and it didn’t go well. So, with us out of the mix, there were only a couple of people left, and they abandoned it, but I loved it. And actually want to get back into it. It was like five grand a year and then some more, but I mean, like, the stuff I got out of it from a personal. And business, you know, was amazing.
Five grand a year. That is nothing compared to what you’d spend to be a platinum partner with Tony Robbins, like 130 grand a year, cause each trip is like 10 grand or 15 grand.
Plus, there’s a 65 grand annual fee. It adds up fast. So for me, I did it for three years. It was worth it. I got the ROI out of it. And the peer group that you’re in is spectacular. There are literally billionaires in the group. I got to hang out with billionaires who were also Platinum members.
So that’s pretty cool. But for me, it all started in 2009, right before I sold Net Concepts. I was referred to Tony Robbins through another search marketing guru, Jessica Bowman. And, yeah, I was going through a divorce, and I was in desperate need of a makeover, a transformation, you know, whatever you want to call it. And do you remember what I used to look like?
I do. You became a pitch.
It’s like scary. I looked, I don’t know, 60, I looked terrible. Anyway, I went to this Tony Robbins event called Unleashed the Power Within. It was October, 2009. I walked on 2000 degrees, hot coals, you know, this firewalk thing. I’m like, “I can change my life. If I can do this, I can do anything.” And, yeah, I just went through this huge transformation, uh, made all these life changes. Uh, now I look 15, 20 years younger than I did seven or 10 years ago, which is kind of mind-blowing. It’s kind of weird, like Benjamin Button. So that’s kind of fun. And the first conference I went to after my transformation, nobody recognized me.
So, I think it was an SMX East conference. That was so weird. Like nobody recognized me. It was fun. And then I was sold on how transformational Tony was. I did business mastery, I did Date With Destiny, and all this. I did all these things. I was a serial seminar goer. I basically took three years following Tony around the world, going to so many of his events and everything, and yeah, it was totally worth it. And now I’m doing other personal development stuff, too. It certainly keeps me hopping. I’m in masterminds, I’m going to seminars, and now I’m going to be teaching some of this stuff, too.
Stephan, you sold your company, but you were, so this Tony Robbins thing, it just kind of enthralls me. So, like, what did it cost for you to go and walk on 2,000-degree coals and find yourself? What was the price tag for that?
That one was cheap. That was 700 bucks.
No shit!
That’s the entry level. It’s four days. It’s really intense. You basically maybe get four hours of sleep a night, but that’s the kind of, I don’t know, yeah, the entry point into his funnel. And then if you want to do Date with Destiny, that’s his best event. I think it is Date with Destiny. That’s a minimum of four grand, five grand. The prices vary depending on what your seating is and everything. And then, he’s got Business Mastery, which is 10,000. Business Mastery II, which I think might be even 15,000. But you get to go to a lot of these events. As a platinum partner, if you invest 65 grand in being a platinum, then you can go to most of the events for free, basically.
You just pay for your own travel to get there. So I do all those events, and then I do these four platinum trips a year. We went out of these crazy exotic locations, like Zambia and Botswana. We went and did safaris, and they flew us in helicopters and canyons and stuff. We saw the Victoria Falls in Zambia.
We did shark diving off the coast of South Africa. It was pretty wild. We went to India. We went to, you know, this is crazy. We went to Varanasi, India. And we saw bodies being burned on the banks of the Ganges River. So, that was one of the trips, among other things, that we did. But this stuff is indelibly marked on my brain. It’s beautiful. These are very powerful experiences that we went on.
What were they burning bodies for?
Just like, Well, that’s the Hindu culture and religion is that they would burn the bodies and then sweep the ashes into the river. Unless it was somebody who had suffered from it, what’s that disease where your skin falls off?
Leprosy?
Leprosy. Yeah, leprosy. A leper, they didn’t believe in burning the bodies. They just put the body directly into the Ganges.
Wow.
So you definitely want to swim in that river, in other words.
Yeah, sign me up for that. So, I mean, do you think you got, like, what would you say your biggest takeaway? Was it more professionally or personally? I guess they kind of run together.
But yeah, it’s both. Equally, I’d say.
I mean, but, I mean, like, did you come back, like, my friend Baker is just like, Dude, the financial benefit is ridiculous.
Oh yeah, well, for one, I got to speak on Tony’s stage at Business Mastery twice. Uh, that never would have happened if I hadn’t been a Platinum partner and been noticed by Tony because he has thousands of people in the audience at his events. How are you ever going to get to meet him and hang out with him unless you’re in his upper echelon, the top tier? So, that would never happen. Definitely generated business for me. Because I still do SEO consulting and, you know, I’m able to get clients out of those sorts of high-profile speaking gigs.
I also had met just hanging out at these platinum trips and so forth. Other clients, really cool people who became clients. So, there are lead gen opportunities and so forth, but the distinctions that I learned from Tony and from his guest speakers, like one of the most amazing speakers you’ll ever hear is Keith Cunningham. This guy is just hilarious. He’s super smart but very approachable and down to earth. And he demystifies a lot of the financial concepts. So I used to hate looking at my financials, even, you know, regardless of how good or bad they were. I didn’t care for looking through spreadsheets and doing pivot tables and all that sort of stuff.
Now, I’m much more interested in that because I see it as I’m piloting my ship or my plane. And you can’t fly a plane without seeing and understanding the dials, reading the readouts, and knowing what’s happening. I mean, you don’t want to just fly your business into the ocean. So you gotta understand the stuff, and he really simplified it and made it interesting. He’s got this thing called the four-day MBA. We took the two-day MBA on one of his plat trips. There was a finance plat trip. Each of these trips is themed.
So there’s a relationship plat trip, there’s a spirituality plat trip to India, there’s a plat trip on wealth building in Whistler. Yeah, so each one is so different from the other, but you can’t really do it justice just talking about it. You’d have to be there. And I’m in a bunch of different masterminds and elite groups and things like that, secret societies and things like that. And this has got to be one of the best.
Although Neil Strauss‘s Secret Society is way up there, too, I’d say it’s almost neck and neck. We learned on one of Neil’s trips how to break out of zip ties, how to pick handcuff locks, how to escape from kidnappers and, like, we were literally kidnapped at the end of the, on the last day of this.
