Who here has thought about or perhaps already has canceled some expenses in an effort to cut down on costs? These are difficult times for sure, but it's not the time to slow your momentum. You can adapt to the situation in ways that won't strain your budget. You're about to learn about five amazing tools that will help you outmaneuver and outperform your competition from SEO and digital marketing expert Stephan Spencer.

Stefan has Search Engine Optimized the websites of some of the biggest brands in the world, including Chanel, Volvo, Sony, and Zappos. Stephan Is also a best-selling author of three books published by O'Reilly: The Art of SEO, Social e-Commerce, and Google Power Search. He founded the SEO agency NetConcepts, which was acquired in 2010 and is now part of a multi-billion dollar ad agency conglomerate, Dentsu Aegis.

I never say it but how do you say it, Stephan? 

Dentsu Aegis.

I was close. Stephan consults, speaks and writes on SEO and other digital marketing topics. He also hosts two popular podcasts, Get Yourself Optimized and Marketing Speak. Every time this guy gives a presentation, we get such incredible feedback on it. It's always so useful. Stephan, take it away. Thank you. 

Thank you so much, Joe. And I don't mind that you butcher my name. Can everybody see my screen?  

I can see it.

Perfect. I'm going to cover five simple but insanely powerful tools to multiply your capabilities as a results leader. Here's what we're going to cover.

Where does your market hang out online, and what questions your market has, like for Google,  how to make social videos using AI in a snap, how to find cheap staff in the Philippines who are incredible and loyal, and finally, what motivates and triggers you, your loved ones, your staff, pretty much everybody you care about. 

The first tool will unveil your market's favorite social accounts and podcasts. The website is called SparkToro. You can put in a keyword that would be popular with your audience or ideal customer prospect, but you could also put in the URL of your website. 

You could put it in your social profile. You could put in a competitor, social profile, or website, and then you'll learn what social accounts they follow and what websites they visit podcasts. They listen to YouTube channels. They subscribe to hashtags they use and so much more. Let's have a look.  Can you guys see my screen with the SparkToro results already displayed? 

Yes.

Perfect. This is Joe's social following. I put in his Twitter, but I could have put in his YouTube or his Facebook, and it's all connected up into one mega-profile for you, we don't have to check on multiple accounts. This is 12,000 different people who follow you across all social platforms, and what you'll find is that a lot of these folks that they're following are people that you're friends with,  that are in masterminds with you, that are going to the same events, etc.

But then there'll be people who are hidden gems that you wouldn't have thought of. People you hadn't even heard of before. So there are a lot of folks who you overlap with quite heavily between your audience and theirs, like Jeff Walker, product launch formula, Ryan Dice, DigitalMarketer.com, and Brian Tracy.

But then there are other folks that you probably won't have even heard of before potentially. This is great for identifying folks to have on your podcast. To be on their podcast, collaborate on a joint YouTube video, etc. Let's look at some websites now that your social media following is visiting in addition to your website. 

And so they're visiting Seth Godin's blog, for example, KimGarst.com, etc. What podcasts are they listening to? Pollyhood. I don't know what that one is, but we'll leave that to the imagination and then YouTube channels, and it sorts by default into the percentage of audience. But if you sort by subscribers, you might find, for example, Casey Neistat on the list.

And Casey, if you haven't heard of him as a huge YouTuber, he's got a massive following, and to do a collab, that's what YouTubers call a collab with Casey, Joe. That would be huge that you would blow up so just an FYI, you should check out Casey. These are some of the hashtags that your fans and followers use in their post-sales.

For example, in hashtag sales, they're using certain keywords in their profile about bios such as marketer, strategist, and speaker. The words they're using in their shares on social media, where they're located. Cities, states, et cetera. This is all just a click away. Think of using this as insight, for example, targeting Facebook audiences.

You might already be targeting, let's say, fans and followers, people who like Brian Tracy. But what about Casey Neistat, et cetera, that's a premium freemium tool actually from my co-author of the first two editions of this big book, The Art of SEO. His name is Ran Fishkin. 

Also, the founder of Moz. He created this amazing tool, and he wrote this blog post on how to use your first 10 free SparkTor searches. You get 10 free searches per month. It only gives you a certain set of results. You're not going to see piles and piles of YouTube accounts, for example, but you'll be able to get some really great data from that.

Next is a tool called Answer the Public. Answer the Public gives you insight into your markets, questions, and concerns that people are asking Google. Here's how it works: It scrapes the Google Suggest Results as you type in Google and does this autocomplete thing. It scrapes all that data.

Let's see how that works. I already put the keyword Paleo into the tool. It has this really beautiful visualization, but it's not handy to use because I have to crack my neck here to type it. So, I go into data view. And by the way, all of this is easily exportable out of this tool, which again is freemium.

This tool gives you some free data. For a small premium subscription, like $10 a month, you unlock a lot more features. Download the CSV file, and you can see people are asking questions of Google, like how healthy our paleo pancakes are. When does paleo not work? Where should I start with paleo?

These are all just phenomenal questions that you could answer on your FAQs(Frequently Ask Questions) page. You could put this into your editorial calendar and use it for the content diamond. That is what Rory was talking about in the previous presentation; you can use all this to create 80% of the videos. What Marcus Sheridan refers to as a sales video that answers most 80% of your prospect's questions. And this is just an incredibly insightful tool. Again, you get lots of free data with that tool, that's tool number two. 

Number three: Create professional videos using AI in seconds or minutes at least. The tool for that is called Lumen5.com. Here's how it works: Let's say you get an email because you just posted a blog post or, in my case, a podcast episode with all the show notes. 

It tells me, "View my video; it's already created using an AI." Next thing I know, I go in here, click that link, that button, and it's created based on this long-form blog post. That's the entire transcript. My episode turned into concise and summarized content using an AI, and the AI also picks great imagery, stock video, and stock photography, all royalty-free parts of the platform. 

And then I can change any of it, or I can just keep it the same. For example, I might want to move this guy's head over to the right more and down so that the text that's part of the image is out of view. I hit publish, and boom. Now, I have almost instantaneously made a video. So that's pretty darn amazing. That's tool Number three. 

Number four is having your own headhunter in the Philippines. Now, I have a team in the Philippines, and this headhunting firm. It's more of a service than it is a tool, but a virtual staff finder for a fee of about $500 will bring you three qualified candidates they have thoroughly vetted background checks.

They've checked their internet speed, typing speed, English proficiency, and all that. You can have them do other assessments as well. For example, I have all of them do disk and Demartini values determination process or hierarchy. Then they've been vetted, interviewed, and the top three candidates are presented to me on a silver platter. 

And then I can have my team or myself interview them, and see who I want to hire. If I don't like any of them, I tell them, to go back to the well, start all over again, and bring me three more. And that's all included for the 500 bucks. Pretty amazing. 

And then tool number five. I just love this one. Many of you are probably already familiar with it because you're a strategic coach. But you get to learn what your unconscious motivators and triggers are, things that put you into your shadow self. You get to learn this about others, like your loved one. If you have your partner take this assessment as well, and your staff should all take this assessment.

It's called PRINT. Print Assessment, Joe. I know you're a fan of it. I just interviewed Debra Levine, co-creator of PRINT,  and this was on the Get Yourself Optimized podcast. The episode airs on June 11th. I'm really excited about it. There are so many gold nuggets in that episode. Please listen to that episode.

You can get it at GetYourSelfOptimized.com or your favorite pet podcatcher. She very graciously offered to let us use the special offer code that she provided, strategic coach, which gives us a hundred dollars off. So it's 150 instead of two 50, and it comes with a whole bunch of training videos.

It's super invaluable and not normally included. That's it. PrintSurvey.com slash special offer with an access code of P8768. I will put this stuff into the chat. I did drop the PowerPoint presentation URL into the chat. You can download this whole PowerPoint, but I'll individually include all the links to all these different tools as soon as I'm done with my presentation.

Let me show you what this tool, what this particular assessment tool looks like. If I were to go into my PRINT assessment, I'm a two major eight minor. What that means is that I need to be appreciated. I feel like I need to be appreciated and needed. So that remembers this is unconscious. It's like the iceberg where underneath the surface is where.

Most of it—the bulk of it—is right. So, under the surface, the unconscious is driving a lot of my behaviors. To be needed and appreciated and then to be strong and self-reliant is number two. That's my minor. Based on that, it knows what my shadow self is, what my best self is, and what my triggers are.

Let me show you what some of my triggers are. Please don't do this in the Q&A. For example, if you were to not acknowledge or appreciate my efforts.  But see, if I know these things about myself, then I know to be on high alert about not getting triggered by them. And this was amazing.

Debra and her husband, the other co-creator of PRINT, have their trigger pages on the website. They're also on their refrigerator, a constant reminder not to trigger each other. It's really amazing. 

Those are my five tools. I also have an episode of Joe that aired on my other show, Marketing Speak, last month.

There's so much gold in that episode, too. I highly recommend that one. 

Again, Sparktoro, Answer The Public, Lumen5, Virtual Staff Finder, and PRINT Survey. Each of these will change your life. I could do a 10-minute talk on each of them. They are powerful and I think they're 250K ideas each. Thank you very much. 

I love it. That was really awesome. 

Yeah. Feel free to unmute yourself to woohoo!

You know what? I didn't even go look at any of the comments until just now because I was glued to everything you're talking about. There are a few questions here. Stephan asked early on. Do you know what proportion of searches go down those different paths?  Stephan, do you want to come back to that or just unmute yourself and then ask?

Yeah.

Which tool was it? 

It was the Answer the Public. 

Do we know what proportion of those searches are in those different branches of the tree?  

No, the same problem you have with Google suggests where it doesn't give you a number of search queries that people are typing in; you'd actually have to use a different tool for that.

Such as SEMrush, Searchmetrics, or Google Keyword Planner. There are a bunch of these tools out there that will give you the number of searches. This just gives you the top ones that relate to that question. Plus that keyword, who types questions, what questions, where, when, why, etc.

Also, implied questions. I didn't show you that. These are taking those. The keyword you specified in my case of paleo, or I think that's the one I used to use, was paleo. It added what, and it scraped all these suggestion results to give us. It's like a brainstorming list. If you want to hone in on actual numbers, then you're going to use that in conjunction with another tool. Moz Keyword Explorer would be a great one. 

By the way, for everything that Stefan just went over, Gina just put a link where you can all of his slides she wrote; here are his slides. You don't need to scramble to write down all the tools. So, everyone has a link there. Everything he went over, you can just download it right there.

Also, on that note, regarding the search terms Moz and SEMrush, of course, are the big ones. The other one that's super easy is Keywords Everywhere. And it's a Google Chrome plugin. And when you type into the search bar into Google, it'll tell you directly underneath the search bar.

How many times a month is that term searched? What is the average CPC, and what is the competition level? I'm sure you've heard of it.

We could trade tools all day long. That's a great one. Keyword Hero is another amazing one. I don't know if you've heard of that one, right? 

I haven't heard of that.

Goodness, that one, how all of your Google Analytics keywords are listed as not provided, have that repopulated with the keyword now the keywords. That is a tool called Keyword Hero that integrates with Google Analytics to give you that insight again that Google took away years ago Amazing. 

Love it. Hey Rem, you've not said anything today. Do you want to say anything? Just gonna call you out and unmute yourself.  

If you or any of you guys want me to enter a keyword, your website, or your social profile into SparkToro or run any tool reports, I'm happy to do that live during this Q&A.

Yeah, I'd like to since I did annoyingly call on Rem you don't have to say anything actually unless you want to.

I have another question for you, Stephan. Is the Virtual Staff Finder, is that for any position, or is that just for executive assistants, or is it basically they're gonna go get a bunch of resumes for you, so if you say "Hey, I want a copywriter" will they go get that position, or a video editor, or is it just I need an assistant?

Within reason, they can go outside the core of virtual assistants. Most people come to them looking for virtual assistance. My most valuable person in the Philippines, who manages my Filipino team, came from a Virtual Staff Finder. She's been with me for over three years. She's incredible, and she has a lot of skills.

She's able to create videos with Lumen 5, infographics, and all these other tools. There are so many of these other tools out there that I could go over a hundred different tools if you gave me a whole afternoon, right? There's a great tool, a construction kit, for creating infographics.

That Piktochart is the name of that one. If you really like to churn out lots of infographics, but don't want to pay an agency 500 each, have them use PiktoChart, teach somebody on your team, and bring on somebody. That's another thing, too, if you're looking for a specialist in, let's say, PiktoChart or Lumen5 or something in the Philippines, you can start without not even you don't have to use a headhunter.

You could use a tool called Onlinejobs.ph. Put in Lumen5 or PiktoChart, and see who in the Philippines has a profile in this equivalent to Craigslist for job seekers and job postings. Take a DIY approach.  

That was what? OnlineJobs.com?

Ph for the Philippines. I dropped all of those links into the chat just a couple of minutes ago. 

Who else? Who else has a question? 

Somebody wants to see what SparkToro returns for their competitor or themselves because you can it's definitely.

Joe, I included it in this chat, but if you want to go to Your Life After Work, let's do that. 

All right. So, I'm going to share the screen again.

Can you try the keyword strawberry worms? That's funny.  I had to eat them all real quick before I watched the video.  

YourLifeAfterWork.com

Now, one of the challenges that this tool will have is if you don't have a lot of visitors to your site or if you don't have hardly any social followers, it doesn't have enough data to come back with anything meaningful.

Put it in big Joe Clark. I hate that, but that's the deal. 

Is this your like your Twitter or something, or is this your website? 

It's LinkedIn. That's everything. It's Facebook. I'm going to put it on Twitter, but it's not going to be much.  

That's the basis or foundation, and it connects all of your accounts, not just Twitter but Facebook, Instagram, and everything.

So it'll find all of you on social media, just from your Twitter. You can use your YouTube or whatever. It doesn't matter. It'll be the same report.  Cross your fingers. Hopefully, you have a big enough following that. It's a small following; this is not very statistically significant in terms of the number of sources or people who are following you on social media. It's only 206, but you can see that they are the whole city. I don't know where the whole city is or what that is, but that's a popular keyword for the bios hashtags that they're using. Be things like the tigers.  

Wow. Weird words. 

Yeah, are you sure this is your Twitter? 

We don't use Twitter nearly as much as we do Facebook and LinkedIn; that's why I said that. 

Okay, so this isn't you. 

Use somebody else. There were a couple of other people, but Randy put in Vital Choice. Vital Choice is much better known, and it'll be a better illustration for you. 

Okay, is this you, Joe? 

No.

We used the wrong URL there, or the wrong Twitter username. You don't have Big Joe Clark on Twitter. 

It's Big underscore Joe underscore Clark. 

Okay. Let's have a look. I want to get this right. There you are. We didn't have the underscores, let's rerun this and let's see what your audience listens to, subscribes to on YouTube, visits on the web, and social accounts that they follow. 

Now we get some logical sorts of keywords showing up. They're using hashtags like #retirement, #social security, and #financial planning. Let's look at some of the social accounts that they're also following, remember this is sorted in order of the overlap between you, your audience, and these other audiences.

Do you know who Michael Kitces is? 

Yeah, he's one of my competitors and another key supplier of information in the industry. 

What you can do is you can steal his, not steal you. You can gain insight into his following and fan base by just clicking on this link, and analyze social profile, and social following. We'll learn what his people listen to subscribe to on YouTube, follow, visit, et cetera.  

More friends of mine.

Brilliant. 

That's brilliant. 

You can use this as intel to decide who am I going to have on my podcast or invite. We're pitched to be on their podcast YouTube collabs. Who am I going to target? And my Facebook ads, people who like not just Michael, your competitor, but other folks in this industry. Or other popular accounts, investment news, not sure what investment news is, but I'm guessing you do. So that could be audience you target is people who follow investment news on social media, in this case, Twitter and Facebook. Pretty cool, right?  

It's very cool. And this is something that the people in the Philippines are able to go through, or is this stuff that you go through? For us to figure out how to target. 

Initially, I would go through that so that you can come up with some SOPs that you can provide to the folks in the Philippines. My team in the Philippines gets me guests for my podcast. I have a wishlist of 200 people. Joe had been on there for a long time, for example. They just relentlessly year after year, we'll keep chasing after these people, even if they say no. No, it means not yet. I had somebody say no three years in a row, Scott Oldford, for example, three years in a row.

He said no. And then this time, he said, yes, he has a book out coming out. So that's why he said yes. That's up to my team in the Philippines. They just crush it with that sort of stuff. They can get me booked on other podcasts as well. They create Lumen5 videos not just for me but for my clients as well.

I don't even know what I'm tweeting on Twitter. This is just mind-blowing for a lot of people. I have over a hundred, not over a million, impressions on Twitter per month, and I have no idea what I'm tweeting. Apparently, it's seven or eight times a day. My team in the Philippines completely handles that.

The person who virtual staff finder found. That's been with me for three years. She's heading that up. She's got my voice down and what matters to me, my kind of values, and everything and stuff that she posts. That's not just promotions of podcast episodes and blog posts and so forth that I don't write myself, by the way.

And I don't even review, I don't even know what I've posted to my blog. Because another team member a state native English speaker does all that blog post writing for me.

What are the rates these days for talent in the Philippines? 

Stephan: What's that? 

How much do you pay, and what's its cost, like the hourly rates these days in the Philippines?

4 or 5 dollars an hour is really good and I have team members who get that kind of pay and they're happy with that's a really good provides a really good lifestyle. You might pay more for a specialist in a particular area, for somebody doing SEO will charge more if they're good.

Most people who say that they do SEO in the Philippines turn and run because they're terrible at it. I was just saying I do have an SEO BS detector by the way, on my website, on StephanSpenser.com, which has some trick questions. You can slip into the interview process to see if they're fakers or charlatans. 

Because you don't know which tool you ask them about an SEO tool and what they use it for and stuff. And they could totally snow you if that's not your world, but with trick questions where there's only one right answer and you've got it on your cheat sheet if they slip up and they say the wrong thing, then you know how to kick them to the curb. 

You know what? We have a wonderful team member. The only team member I have in the Philippines named Maria, who's fantastic. And I think I paid her 11,000 last year, compared to all my other team members who are watching who are getting grossly overpaid compared to Maria. This is really great, Stephan.

Man, let's do this because we've got, it's 227 Pacific, which would make it we're going to wrap up in approximately 32 minutes and 28 seconds or something. Unless I'm usually my typical self, which has always gone over a few minutes and then I just completely lied to all of you about when we're going to wrap up, but we'll shoot for that timeframe.

Any final last words of wisdom, Stephan, you're welcome to contribute, continue with this marketing discussion we're going to have, but I'm going to ask Patrick Gentempo, Dean Jackson, John Weeble, and Brian Kurtz to say something because I mentioned that earlier, but what else didn't you share that  People need to know before we wrap this session up. 

There's so much the assessment thing is just so critical and I actually would point you to an episode of Marketing Speak where I interviewed Cameron Herold, where we went into a bunch of different assessments,  because if you have your staff or just even candidates take DISC,  Demartini Values Determination, StrengthsFinder, Predictive Index, Sally Hogshead's Fascinate Index, Kolbe.

You are going to find those folks that like I'm a quick start nine, I need somebody who cleans up the mess, follows me around, and just makes everything happen because I'm prolific with ideas, but I'm a three with finishing. If I know everybody on the teams, Kolbe and Strengthsinder and all these different assessments.

Then, I can match them to their best fit, and I can apply them to the things that matter the most to them. I use the values determination process to find out their values hierarchy and make sure that I map all their highest values to their job functions. If they're one of their jobs is to book travel for me.

And one of their highest values is traveling the world or having location freedom. They're going to love that because they're going to learn all sorts of travel hacks and things like how to use Priceline in ways that they've never thought of and so forth, all the assessments, and then utilize that information.

That's gold because you're never getting a hundred percent out of any of your staff. We can ratchet that number up just by making sure they're a good fit and they're on the right seat, on the right bus.  

Awesome.  Wonderful. Thank you everyone. Give him a hand. Bam. Thank you. Thanks, Orion. Since you're married to this dude, is there anything you want to say?  

I just love him. I think he is one of the smartest people in the universe.