all right welcome to humpty hangouts just kidding me and chris we're just uh flexing in the background and uh joking around but i want to welcome you to humpty hangouts episode 376 today is the 26th of january 2022 uh looking like we got a good amount of questions we've also got at least a one really cool announcement i think you're gonna really like and we probably got more than that but uh real quick one to say hi to the guys before we jump in make some announcements and then hop into your questions so uh chris uh start with you man how you doing today doing good was out uh earlier today um i don't know like two hours in the cold two degrees celsius so um she's quite quite a bit frosty out here um i was not used to that but um yeah like doing the best as i can get into fresh air relax a bit and back to work and get some things done nice nice i'm gonna be doing the same after humpty hangouts it's about three degrees celsius here so i'm gonna go out and run around in that so long as it's for me it's that like uh i can't do the conversions off top of my head probably like five below celsius that gets like getting colder than that then it starts getting real cold so uh speaking of cold bradley how you doing what's uh what's going on the east coast you got uh snow again or what's going on this week uh no it's i mean it's cold but that's it i mean it's been pretty pretty clear so not much to complain about right now fair enough well i know you've been busy what are you uh you mind telling people a little bit about what you've been up to or is that uh no that's oh there it goes i couldn't figure out how to make the zoom window bigger again uh yeah working on the sops for the google business process checklist um i've been saying that i was going to have them completely done the full sops and people sometimes confuse the difference okay the checklist is a checklist hence the name checklist because some people want to you know say well it's not an sop and i never said it was an sop i said it's a checklist that's the title but uh anyways uh the checklist was a point of reference like it's a it's just to help you to kind of follow along with items that should be done and there's also a misconception about the checklist which i'm pretty sure there's a video the first module that specifically states not everything needs to be done in the checklist to get results that's only for the most competitive locations um you know a lot of the times you get the first three modules done which is all the on-page factors setting up the tier one entity assets and then doing the google business post silos and once you're done with those three things you start on the tier one link building module and just start going through that and just as your complete separate tier one link building modules or you know tasks within that module a lot of the times you'll start to rank if it's a low to medium competition area most of the time you will rank at some point during that process um if it's a medium you know a higher competition or as i would call like an extreme competition you may have to go through all of that tier one link building module and then begin the second tier link uh you know tier two link building module um and you know it's very rare that i have to complete 100 of that checklist in order to get results it's only in the very most competitive spaces that i've had to do that so i think there's a misconception people look at that checklist and they go man that's a lot of work i don't want to do all that okay well you know you don't have to do all of it first of all but if if it for the most part um in some cases perhaps but at least it's a guideline right but so for mastermind members i've been promising for two months that i was going to have it done by january 28th all of the sops which is not just a checklist it's full-on training it's video training with step-by-step checklist underneath on how to execute each one of those tests and uh you know how it is when you were in school and you want you know like you had a big project and you knew about it for three months and then like you waited the last week to do it well you get 90 of the work done in the last week yeah yeah you sprint at the end uh that's kind of what happened uh well i started that deep work man deep work yeah i mean that's true and i started doing it weeks or months ago but i was also concerned about starting to do all those processes and then with the shake up with google business kind of wanting to push people to making edits in the serps instead of in the dashboard and all this kind of stuff i was worried about that so i put it off and i just started on monday really trying to complete that and i spent three entire days uh recording videos and creating the process dock inside of floester and um i'm i'm a little bit probably close to maybe 60 percent done um and i've still got a lot more to do but uh you know i don't think it's gonna be a hundred percent on friday i doubt it would be 100 but it's gonna be very very far along and i can give that to the mastermind members um on friday and what's beautiful thing about flowster is the template that i'm building anytime i add additional stuff to it i just hit the refresh button and it will automatically refresh everybody's template who has imported it into their account so i'm going to suggest that people get flowster which is on our hunter hangouts page guys it's free go get a free account uh if you want the template i'm thinking about possibly selling the template in the flowster marketplace um you can get it for free as part of the mastermind membership but it may be something that we add to the marketplace in the fl the flowster marketplace where you can buy playbooks and templates and things like that for people that don't want to join the mastermind for whatever reason so it may be in there i'm not 100 sure on that but like i said what's cool about it is people can import the playbook or the template into their account and what i always recommend is make a copy of that and then you can edit the copy to assign it to va's or to add your own you know specific instructions and things to it but that way you have a copy of the original so that when i update it and i hit the update but update all button it will update the original but not whatever edits you've made in your copy of the of the template so um that way if you have like proprietary stuff in your own template that you edited in it won't affect that it'll just you'll be able to see what changes were made if that makes sense so um for all of you mastermind members are watching the humpty hangouts on friday i'm going to be releasing however far it is uh which is still going to be plenty because all i'll do is over the next few days beyond friday is finish finish the rest of it so it might be another you know three or four days beyond friday that i actually get it 100 complete which is fine because trust me it's so thorough it's going to take you three days to go through what i have anyway but to give me enough time to get the rest of it done very nice very nice well i i gotta tag on to that so if you're interested in that that really in-depth training bradley of course mentioned that this is only for the mastermind if you're watching live you can find the link there find the link there uh and if you're not watching this on the humpty hangouts hangout staging just go to mastermind.smanicmastery.com come join us not just uh for that but also for the community right we talk about this a lot agency owners consultants maybe you're doing legion some brick and mortar business owners if you're really looking uh to form you know the network as well as get access to us and the training and one-on-one questions and answers that's the place to be so check it out mastermind.semanicmastery.com and i wanted to share one other thing i was uh hopping on facebook it was letting people know that humpty hangouts was going to be starting soon and shortly before that excuse me came across a note that jasper put on a facebook post that we had up in the facebook group and i he didn't even send us anything he just uh popped it in there and said hey i want to give everyone a hundred dollars off of of my courses so if you didn't see him go back and check out uh what are we on 376 go look at episode 375 great guest helped answer questions uh we talked a little bit about how bradley came across him and his great training and so what he's decided to do is give 100 off for his ultimate package that has three courses so let me just share my screen real quick so if you come across the link it looks like this and then this one right here the ultimate course combines all three of these and it'll give a hundred dollars off if you use uh the coupon code semantic gift all one word so that was super nice of him he just commented in the post and said yeah great feedback i appreciate it everybody here you go hundred dollars off if you buy that nice that's a badass deal and uh you know justin was a good dude um real nice guy we've chatted a few times now had him on last last week for humpty hangouts he's got so a lot of really cool things going on so um yeah he's he's a good guy i appreciate him uh so i would recommend you guys go pick it up especially with 100 off coupon for all three courses that's 200 bucks for all three it's just a no-brainer so go do it they're great courses quick question i think here i think this is harry he's asking where's the hump day hangouts page flowster link um well i would think up at the very top of the page is the gbp process link which will take you um to get the gbp process and when you're done with that that's in process street look at the humpty hangouts page guys the flowster link is like the big banner on the right side that says please not seeing it you don't see it on the humpty hangout page no i'll be damned how do you not see that i see it man wow or if you have a small screen you gotta scroll down yeah let me know the semantic mastery mastermind uh image of the three i think maybe let me check the resolution on my screen maybe i got something weird going on here well anyways uh in the background i'll try to grab the uh grab a link and post that on the page um i'll take care of that while we're while we're running here because i guess i'm not the only one cool the image where bradley is looking like uh i don't know like i'm pissed off cool besides that guys uh was there any other announcements we you have that we need to go through before we dive into it because if not uh we can get into it and i'll go uh grab this link and put on the page sure uh i don't have anything else nope all right let's do it okay well i'm gonna share my screen and you can see where i s what i'm seeing adam which is yeah it's great big enough i've seen it before and now that you mentioned it i'm like yeah yeah yeah it's right there no idea all right i'll get that it is posted on the page yeah there it is all right well let's get into questions and uh i think we start with bb what's up baby fancy seeing you here again that's pretty good man all right so first one is hey guys how much time do you invest in your business making money and how much time do you invest in r d research and development for future payback do you work over overtime for it yeah i do uh i've got a bit of an obsession so um i'm working like 14 15 hours a day seven days a week except for every two weeks when i get my daughter for two days so i work 12 days on two days off 12 days on two days off and it's because it's winter time right now when it starts to get nicer out i'll start going on atv riding trips and stuff but yeah i work a lot um we've got we're we're building two other businesses and that's kind of like you know subsidiaries of uh semantic mastery one of one of them is our content business um another one is uh my link building service which is only available to mastermind members currently um but it's like a link building and consultation service and so right now between the you know commitments to semantic mastery as far as training in um you know the mastermind and mastermind webinars and the sops that i've been promising and then building content kings and managing my link building business and then i still have an agency and i also have my legion business um it's requiring that much time for me to kind of juggle all that stuff so it's very difficult but yes do i invest in r d i have to um research and development have to because you know i lead a group of people that are looking for you know new techniques and uh stuff that works and so i have to do it um and you know it's fine because i enjoy it if i did you can't be in that seo business unless you're passionate about it um you can't um so fortunately i have a passion for it i enjoy it i like to kind of research and development side of things as well um you know you just got a budget timeout for that um but yeah i mean as far as you know trying to also grow the business unfortunately i'm not really prospecting for my agency right now because i've got so many commitments with semantic mastery and the other businesses that we're building the content business link building business and such and it's unfortunate because it's a very this is the best time of year for me to be prospecting for agency clients because uh tree service contractors are typically a lot slower now because it's the winter season um so i actually went to hire a set of cold callers i had an appointment with a cold calling company last week that was supposed to be a closing call we had a discovery call i pretty much agreed to what the terms were going to be and we had a closing call scheduled last week on thursday that i was supposed to hire two cold callers like appointment centers for my agency so that i could you know have utilize them for prospecting my warm leads through my directory uh you know i started a directory site that i use for prospecting and that's been incredibly successful the bottleneck is me because i get a lot of warm leads coming in but i don't have the time right now or the bandwidth to process those leads because i'm working on these other businesses so i was going to hire uh two cold callers to you know basically call follow up with the warm leads and set appointments on my calendar for me to have the discovery call with them which then leads to a closing call anyway long story short the son of a didn't that was supposed to close me didn't show up on for the zoom call and about two hours later i sent him three emails while i was in there for 10 zoom call for 10 minutes waiting on him send him three separate emails didn't get a reply two hours later i get a call from him and he said i'm really sorry something came up and blah blah blah if you'd like to proceed and i was like no i'm sorry dude you lost me you know what i mean like you you're supposed to close me on selling me appointment setters and you didn't show up you were a no-show for the appointment so i'll go somewhere else uh so i i ended up hiring uh ross christa fully has a what's called rent-a-caller if you just go search google you'll see it's rent-a-caller.com i think but there might be some hyphens in there go.renicaller.com is i think what it is anyway um i'm familiar with him i bought some of his training uh in the past so i just went directly to his site after the no show and um i rented a a cold caller for a week but the earliest i could get because they're booked up was um the first well it was like march 8th through the 12th or something like that so it's like the first or second week in march so i went ahead and hired them um it's 495 or four it's 95 a day for five days minimum so whatever that is 475 for a week um but i just figured i'll try them because he he runs an agency uh so i know that you know his callers ought to be pretty familiar with the type of type of um cold calls that i would and they're not necessarily cold calls because they're warm leads that i've generated through my directory which by the way i do want to bring that up um i'm going to be doing a full-on directory site build i've already built mine but i don't like the theme that i've been using so i i found another one one of my mastermind members turned me on to another um directory theme and plug-in it's a whole suite of tools specifically geared around directory stuff um that i'm going to rebuild my site in because i just don't like the particular theme that the developers keep changing all the time and it breaks stuff so um i have a group called build with bradley that i do every other thursday it's just an hour long um it doesn't necessarily all mastermind members are invited they're always welcome to uh um attend but not not everybody has to be a mastermind member that some people that are there aren't mastermind members because they were came in on bonuses from other things uh mike martin um magic page plug-in that was originally why i created that although i haven't been doing much with magic page just for various reasons it's not anything wrong with that i just haven't gotten around to that yet long story short i'm going to be doing uh i posted a poll in the mastermind about anybody interested in building a directory site and we had like 20 at last count i think it was 23 votes for yes no votes for no so uh so i'm going to convert the build with bradley group the next build would rather group is tomorrow and it's going to be the last one under its current format it's still going to be called builder bradley it's going to be every other thursday but we're going to shift the focus as of i think what is it february 10th or whatever that not tomorrow but two weeks from tomorrow will be when we start the directory build process it's been my most successful method for prospecting in my 10-year digital marketing or seo career um so i think i've been trying to encourage mastermind members to build their own directory site because i've got a whole system that i built with high level for prospecting that automates the follow-up and just i mean just it works great um i've got over 320 warm leads in my pipeline right now that i haven't followed up with so it's very successful it works great uh but i kept telling people just build your directory side on whatever theme you want don't use the theme i'm using because it's awful but build it your directory site and then i can show you how to build the whole prospecting machine around that and everybody stops right right there they don't they don't want to build their directory they want guidance on how to do that first and so i decided that i'll i'm going to rebuild my site um starting from scratch uh you know like a staging domain or whatever and then i'll transfer it onto the existing domain once i get it built and so i'm going to guide the group on how to build a directory site first so that then we can move on to the next phase which is like using high level which is what i'm using now for building the rest of the automations and the prospecting machine which again is 100 automated and took me months to build it but it shouldn't take anybody else that long because i've already done it right so with my guidance my plan is to do like the whole directory build and prospecting machine build over about a 12-week period um so if anybody's interested in that wants to do a niche directory i mean you can do a local business directory i don't recommend that you should niche down it's much easier that way you got the entire country or the world uh as your um you know market if you're doing a niche industry specific directory um but if anybody's interested in that again join the mastermind it's um you know we've got a stupid stupid deal for quarterly membership um so there's no reason why you can't join if uh if you're interested in using a directory for prospecting so um anybody want to comment on that real quick yeah definitely i like that one i just want to circle back to what bradley said towards the beginning i think like the time i invest in my business making money and how much to r d like i don't think that it really matters and i wouldn't like i could say i spend 31 and a half hours and i'm not saying it's a bad question bb i'm just saying it doesn't really matter um and that's why i don't want to address it i would just say that yes there's a split i spend time invested in my business to make money but also you know it changes as you go too like i spend time having a weekly team meeting um i talk with my project manager for 90 minutes a week and like that's maybe not billable time to a client but it sure as hell is money or time i'm putting in the results and you know a better team more money so there's things like that too um and then you know how much time do you invest in r d i agree with bradley i would say that there's no like set time but you know there needs to be time set for that and what that looks like to you could really change for me when i'm maxed out hours like during the week i don't think creatively as well i don't like subconscious isn't working so i know that i just have to keep my active hours down i cannot be booked up eight hours a day like i just i don't work well i need to have an afternoon off and it's not like i'm going out and staring at the wall like i'll read i've got a backlog of stuff to check out i'll talk to people i'll send some notes or you know annotate stuff go and do the r and d type of stuff but i have to have that stuff blocked out and i think a lot of people need that right our calendars will get booked up if we don't book it out ahead of time so i think that's really important to block some time out once or twice a week again this could look totally different for you but i think the core idea there is making sure you have time and not just saying i'll do it when i have time available because you'll never have time available and then last but not least i think bradley touched on this but being passionate about it really helped uh and you can push for so long and get so far but at the end of the day like are you gonna work that overtime are you gonna work on a saturday uh to get something going for the business if you're not really passionate or interested about it it's like yeah maybe but if you don't know if you're going to get paid off or not because some of this stuff is a gamble it's a risk right you're starting a new business or you're starting a new service um you minimize that but it could be a risk so it does help you know if you're passionate about what you're getting into that that will take you really far well yeah like um the truth is like making money should always be the number one priority right and especially in our niche research and development is usually the fun part you know like for bradley definitely is for me it is not sure about adam but i guess it is so um basically the making money part needs to be first should be your first part of the uh of the time of the day and r d can be like later on as well at least for me like since the easiest things are fun on research and development i'm always excited about doing those things so that stuff is not hard to do like the only thing that i can say is like we have one benefit um we basically need to do more research and developments to actually build our courses out and keep you guys up to date so you guys can make more money so i highly recommend you leverage that yeah and then one one thing i want to add on to that is um you know i i think what adam said is absolutely true you have to pay yourself first if you've ever taken any sort of kind of like financial you know um whatever like responsibility courses or whatever on how to save money and all that kind of stuff they always tell you say pay yourself first right so if you if you're earning a paycheck take the first 10 and put that away in a bank like and before you pay your bills or anything else right you pay yourself first that way you know that you're saving um you you become accustomed to live on a little bit less money uh just it just tends to work out but that way you know it's being paid instead of like people always you know a lot of people will say you know i'll save if i have money left over well you never have money left over so you pay yourself first that way you're guaranteeing to build that kind of savings account what's the same thing with like r d pay yourself first right um we i i host a monday group accountability group with some of our mastermind members every monday we meet um for 30 to 30 to 60 minutes and we just talk about various things but um one of our members i'm not going to call him out by name here but uh you know it's taken him a few months to really get around to that point he had intentions to pay himself first with which is to block out you know as an agency owner or a consultant right we we oftentimes get caught up in putting out fires or playing whack-a-mole with our clients all the time instead of working on building our own business right we're always building our clients businesses not our own and you have to budget time out to build your own business and if that's r d i mean there's a component of that right r d is a component of building your business studying or uh you know putting in building marketing materials for your own agency or your own business as opposed to just always doing seo for whatever you're doing for your clients that's all important and so you kind of have to block that time out and for me and for the member that i was talking about in my accountability group we both agree that it's like first thing in the morning so like if i've got to learn a new technique or if i got to do work on learning how to do a new software or a new tool or something like that a new app like i'm in click up right now i've oh god i've spent an enormous amount of time and click up in the last few weeks just and i've built stuff in click up and then throw it all away and then rebuild it again because you know what i mean like it's just it's irritating as hell but it's one of those things that it's necessary it needs to be done so i'm best at that first thing in the morning so i'll schedule about 90 minutes or two hours depending on the day to just focus on that first thing in the morning because i know in the evening i'm burned out by the end the end of the day i don't want to work on that then um like in the evening that's when i like do domain hunting because that's like i can have the tv on and do that on my laptop when i'm you know kind of not even really paying attention but like in the morning when i've got to learn something new that's where i'm the most creative i know it's different for everybody else but for me that's what i'm the freshest so that's when i'll do r d i'll learn new techniques i'll study i'll learn how to use a new app i'll work on marketing materials for my own business or for semantic mastery or whatever you know what i mean so pay yourself first is my point budget time out first thing in the day like there's another there's great book by um uh brian tracy called eat that frog and it's all about you know prior to prioritizing things and get the thing off your plate that is the most pressing first right the thing that uh and a lot of times the stuff that we procrastinate on is the stuff that's the most pressing so if you just get it done get it out of the way then you know it's done and the rest of your day is going to be productive anyway so i love that yeah that's the one like what's the one thing you're procrastinating like that's probably what you should be working on i agree so anyway that was a great question uh we spent a lot of time on that so we're going to move on alif says hey guys i started a small seo agency and helped a client many months ago they gave me two keywords they wanted to rank and i got them ranked before now after many months they are wanting a refund and calling my services can because they didn't get traffic from the links i built how do you deal with these types of issues tell them to piss off i mean honestly i don't know you know i don't i would know what else to say about something like that there's no you know there unless you if you offered a guarantee then you may have to eat the words but if you didn't offer the guarantee you said they are still ranked for two keywords yeah then you you did what you were supposed to do you did your job you put in your end whether you know here's the thing like for client work for example i can rank a gmb for a client and i could make i can make sure that they're getting you know 40 50 calls for tree service jobs a month and if they can't close because they're not answering the phone which is why whenever i work with clients i highly suggest that they run all the calls to a call center but if they're not answering the phone or if they're not following up with leads or if they just can't sell and they can't close that's not my fault that's their fault my job was to get the phone ringing my job was to get them ranked and to get leads coming into their business and you know as a as a business advisor right i want to help to help them to build systems and processes so that they can process those leads and make money from that and that's something that can significantly increase your value if you can help them not only doing seo and link building and stuff like that but help them to become better at their business you know business processes uh sales things like that now that might not be you know what you were hired to do but i'm just saying you know that's something you may want to consider going forward but if my job if my initial job with a company and oftentimes we will ease into kind of more you know more of a business consultancy it's not usually right off the bat that's how it occurs the engagement usually it's an seo thing like hey i can help you to generate more leads and then after we built a relationship then i you know nudged them along with okay let's build some processes and systems into your business so that you can manage these leads better you're more efficient with them you'll close more of them you know what i mean but if initially my job is to get the phone to call ring which that's initially usually what my job is and i get the phone to ring and they're not making any damn sales is that my fault or their fault that's their fault it's not my fault i did my job does that make sense so uh you know again i don't know what kind of commitments you made to them but if you committed to them to uh if you held up your end of the deal which was two keywords ranked and you did that then if they're asking for a refund piss off man like i mean i don't know how to say that in a very uh you got to be more diplomatic about it than that but um but honestly i don't know what to tell you i tell them like you know i did what i was supposed to do there's your my results it's proven you got rank trackers everything else you can show that if that's what you committed to and you did that then you know i don't know what else to tell you i have been in that situation as well the key here is managing expectations and basically getting an agreement on which kpi is important so and only have one kpi that uh you're doing for them so it's either traffic it's either leads um rankings or any of those like even facebook if you ever ran facebook advertisements they call this objective so like you either have an engagement you have a like you have like a lead you have like as year traffic uh my conversion so like that's that literally the key so once that kpi or objective is locked in that's exactly what you deliver and you both agreed on and if later it's like there's a disagreement or they come to you as that then it's like ideally you have that in written form then you have clearly a discrepancy because like either they want traffic or they want the ranking in that case yeah yeah i think that's good yeah to take something away from this i totally agree with what uh bradley and chris said and in this case i tell them tough like you did your job and you know if they need something else but you know moving forward now you can see ahead what potential issues there could be with a client and sidestep that by making sure like chris said you have the right kpis identified or saying if i rank them and i did my homework i know that's still not going to bring up traffic so even if we did agree on that kpi they might not be happy so how can i deal with that ahead of time and just kind of learning that process and that's how you do it by getting clients doing it again do it again that's a good point yeah i mean that's that's the whole thing is and chris made a good point too like you know same with google ads when you set up a campaign with google ads is always an objective what is the goal of the campaign is it leads is it exposure is it traffic is it phone calls is it sales you know opt-ins like what there's there's a number of um you know conversion goals essentially that um and so that's pretty much the same thing like and again for me typically what what i'm selling is leads um whether i'm selling my own leads to a contractor or i'm telling them that i will have their digital presence produce more leads based on the work that i do for them and that's my lead in that's usually what i go for is my one kpi initially is leads then once we establish a relationship then i try to get them to become more you know build some efficiencies into their business so that they can close more of those leads and make more revenue which means they invest more back more money back in with my services and it just you know everybody's happy so i'm sorry you're going through that it is what it is um you know welcome to the world of consultancy and agencies it is what it is uh braden says how would you approach content production and monetization for a local citywide directory i am thinking to offer free listings to all my clients for six months to populate it and then power up the domain before charging a monthly subscription also with an seo shield work for a site like this how would you approach this shield with different categories well yeah okay braden i you know if if you're out if you're if you you're decided that's what you want to do as a city-wide um directory then you know good uh good for you and i hope that that works out i i don't particularly like that approach um it makes sense to have a you know a city directory that it's authoritative in the city but there is kind of a it's kind of a finite number of businesses that you can bring into that um and also you know depending on that there's there's complexity in that of which part of your question brings that up which is there's a ton of different categories here's the problem with here's what i see is an issue with a general business directory is there are so many different categories the site is not an authority on any one of them so it's very hard to gain traction yes you can make it locally relevant and that's kind of the point but it's hard to compete with a lot of the big national directories that have the same kind of number of general categories right business categories but have you know locations like they have business categories for every location and so yelp is incredibly powerful if you do any backlink analysis for local businesses you'll see that like yelp and in my case like angie formerly angie's list homeadvisor lawn starter some of those you know big directory sites that are um uh you know when i go look at backlink analysis and i'm looking at competitors like top ranked competitors the directory sites have little to no no kidding you can check it yourself little to like close to zero external backlinks and yet they're ranking top of you know in the top five results all the time why is that it's because they're authoritative domains and you're going to be competing with that and it's hard to do on a local level with like local clients i can compete with yelp in angie's list and homeadvisor and all that kind of stuff because the site that we're going to build even though there's not near as much authority and i don't mean mazda domain authority although that is part of it i just mean like that the brand authority the authority of the entity because i'm going to have a super topically relevant site that's going to be competing and i'm going to have external backlinks right and but what i'm saying is a lot of the times those general business directories they're ranking on their authority alone in internal links not on external backlinks and so my point is they have a lot of authority built into them because they're so large if you're staying on a local level with a directory and you have all these different categories you're not topically an authority you're not a topical authority on any one of them if that makes sense so it's very difficult to make way in organic ranking with a general business directory um unless like it's super top um geographically locally relevant um and so there's things that you can do for that but personally i think you're way better off if you select a particular industry uh like if you search for tree service directory my directory site's number one and there's not an enormous amount of seo done to that it's just decent structure logical structure and some backlinks mostly press releases and i'm ranked number one for tree service directory nationwide so it's much easier to get um traction with a niche specific directory right an industry specific and besides that you get to know that industry really well so all of your marketing messages all of the the vocabulary that you speak can be completely or hyper targeted towards that specific business or industry it's much easier to rank i mean think about it my directory site's less than a year and a half old it's maybe 14 months old and i'm right number one so for me like i get a lot i get i've got another two different organic leads i also get spammers that uh submit listings that we go and delete immediately that aren't tree related tree service related but i get a lot of organic leads now from all over the country meaning i get people that come submit tree contractors that submit their listings and that's with none of not me doing i mean we do outbound prospecting we're not doing it right now but that's just organic user submitted listings and so i would highly encourage you to consider doing an industry specific directory however that all said if you are still want to do a local business directory and be a general business you like all these different categories there's a lot of complexity with that it's it's very difficult you have to have separate like if you're going to do an seo shield which yes it's still powerful i have an seo shield from my tree service directory but i have it's all tree service related right if you look on my home page in my tree service directory you'll see there's the different you know tree removal tree trimming stump grinding land clearing uh you know there's there's those different categories and so i have like an seo shield with a g site and then a drive stack and i have the primary folder which is branded and in the subfolders which are like silos for each one of the subcategories and i don't have them all done i think i got the top five done a couple of them like snow removal and um anyways landscaping and things like that i don't i don't have that built into the shield because that's not really my market those are just kind of what are called tangent markets but um so the main ones are there and so it's much easier in that way to build authority and get traction that way and as far as like the directory and doing monetized listings like paid listings that's a monetization method you can certainly do that i don't i just like to use the directory for prospecting for starting a conversation with my target prospects so that i can upsell them into marketing services but you can you can sell premium listings one of the things if you're going to do that though is to make your authority strong enough to where those pages rank does that make sense so like the directory page for the client ranks and not just for their brand search that's helpful to at least initially that you can usually get that to rank for the brand search fairly easily but for a category search right so like their industry a generic keyword search for their industry plus location if you're able to get your directory page or their directory page ranked for that now you've got something that you can you can charge for um i just find it hard like again i i don't think until the directory is at a point where when somebody's doing a generic keyword search your directory page listing for that company can can rank i don't think it's it's hard to pay to to monetize that or to justify any more than just you know a few dollars a month for that so all of that is to say the directory uh i think it's a great method it's been my most successful in 10 years of doing seo digital marketing uh it's been the most successful prospecting method i've ever used um so i really think it's a great model but i don't think on a local level it's a good model i think you're better off selecting a niche that you have some sort of interest in that is um lucrative um and then building a niche based directory around that it's not that difficult to rank those to be the number one directory for that right because then you've got the entire country or even more than that if you want as your prospect your base right that's your target market whereas with your local business mark uh directory in whatever city it is that you're in you have kind of a finite amount of businesses i mean yeah there's probably a lot of businesses but a lot of them aren't gonna be interested anyways and uh you know what i mean and then again it's very hard to build authority into that site because it's not topically focused around any one thing it's so general it's very difficult to get gain traction in that so that's just my experience um yes you can do an seo shield and all that would have to be massive because you'd have to have all the different subcategories you can have you know hierarchy in that with like you know big categories and then sub their subcategories within each one of those large categories like you know for example like home services and health and legal right those would be like top level categories but then in each one of those how many sub niches are there right like in legal there's personal injury law divorce law family law like immigration law you know there's all that in for home services there's hvac and plumbers and electricians and fencing contractors and roofers and landscapers and lawn care and i mean it goes on and on and on so how do you build authority in any one of those it's incredibly difficult i think you're much much better off selecting one industry and going after that and that's just my opinion so um hopefully i didn't shoot you down i want to take the wind out of your sail man i'm just trying to prevent you from going after something that's going to take so long to get any traction that you're going to lose interest you're better off picking something that um you have an interest in that is you know i i again i'm not in a home services industry i always have been so there's you know pick one pic pic pick something that interests you and um start to build a directory on that come join the mastermind join the build with bradley group with uh directory build it starts not tomorrow but two weeks from tomorrow and uh select a niche i'm gonna walk you through how to build it and then after there how to build a prospecting machine and everything else and how to monetize it um it's a good opportunity so but if you decide to do a local business directory by all means you know keep me posted let me know how it goes i'm not trying to kill your kill your dreams man that's not it at all i just want would rather you be successful faster and i think you would do do that with a industry specific directory okay tiny head says howdy crew how do you approach gmb rankings and citations for a service business that has multiple service area listings with no physical address will media citations work from like marketer center thanks appreciate your input as always yeah you can rank um i mean certainly citations help but if you're doing legion stuff or you have unpublished street address which a lot of service area businesses do um as per google servers as a service but not only that a lot of contractors like again i work with tree service contractors a lot of them don't want their street address published and somebody doesn't want the street address published so you might want to be wary about working with them like no i'm kidding uh because it makes sense a lot of those work out of their homes like they're you know they have their business registered to their home and they don't want that published and i get that um so in that case we don't build citations not structured citations not traditional citations which are business directory listings um we build unstructured citations or non-traditional citations which are uh you know social citations press releases you know as you mentioned you meet uh media citations which are you know press releases and social citations um videos citations image citations uh document citations there's a number of ways to do it and yes we for years we've been doing that uh ranking google business locations without traditional citations in fact like i said i'm developing the sops right now for the full google business process checklist which you can get at the top of this page for free you can get the checklist for free but the full sop's i'm working on been working on that all week and i go through a whole entire section about that about building citations only if it's a valid business location that has a public street address if not i go through because most of the businesses i work with are do not publish for street address so i've been doing that for years is ranking them without traditional citations um and what i call non-traditional citations and uh and it works it works fine it takes a little longer you can certainly get a little bit um faster results with typical business directory listings but you don't need them it helps if you can use them but you don't need them is what i'm saying so by the way i also you know i share all of my providers and everything um and where i use those providers and how i use them all of that is part of the sops so the whole goal with that was that i could my our mastermind members could plug could assign the template or a workflow run a workflow from the template but assign a workflow to a virtual assistant and they can go through and optimize a google business listing the same way that i do uh just by following a training it's not the checklist does that but it doesn't have the training the checklist is like okay here's all the items it doesn't tell you how to do those items the sop does with full-on training video training checklist items uh helper text for everything links to everything super elaborate so and it's only about 60 done after three full days of working on it anyway george says um hey bradley and sm crew can we republish blog content from our money sites into the drive stacks and cloud stacks or will this cause duplicate content issues no it won't um lastly are you regularly adding content into your cloud stacks and drive stack thanks no not really i mean you not not adding like new pages and posts to that but i embed my money site all the time i embed my press release or press advantage organization pages um you can embed rss feeds you can do a number of things i embed uh you know you can embed your syndication network properties so tumblr and wordpress and blogger if you're syndicating to those whenever you're publishing content from your money site and so again i like to embed all of my money assets into those kind of shield properties so that when i'm publishing content on the money sites they're getting automatically updated with new content it's not creating new pages but they're getting new content on the existing structure that is built with the drive stack in the g sites and stuff and that's typically how i do it the id page all that we do a lot of embeds iframe stacking and so that's dynamically updated content through the iframes if that makes sense we build the initial structure with the g site and the drive stack and all that which kind of mirrors the site structure it's called the mirroring talked about that for years so once we have the initial structure in place then it's mostly run through embeds now i did talk about the content mirroring method which i we gave away for free from black friday to cyber monday now you can get it in the mastermind but you can't get it outside of the mastermind that's we only gave it away through that three-day window but the content mirroring method is a very specific and unique technique for using like google business posts that then you mirror into youtube videos and then you mirror that into um g site like sub pages so a silo on the g site and then you can do that with press releases you can you can add blogger another layer of blogger in there and do the same thing and so that's where you'd go in and manually and i don't recommend anybody here do that except for once and then hire a va that's what the sops are that i create so that you can plug a va into it and have them do it for you still go through it once but you learn the process and then you hand it off delegate it so that you don't have to do it's time consuming but it works so uh again the process docs i'm creating for the mastermind right now for the google business process it talks about doing the three push silos which is always required if again go through the google business process checklist you can get it right at the top of this page it's free you'll see what i'm talking about push silos i always do three for every google business asset there's one that links the top of silo posts links to the google business website then there's one for the map url and one for the location landing page it's called three push silos that's a base and we use that you can mirror that same structure into blogger g sites press releases youtube videos you can do a youtube silo out of the same like mirror those google business posts right 200 to 225 words of text turn them into videos now you've got a youtube silo you then you solder that into a blogger silo and then you silo that into a g site right and then you can do press release silence to promote all that now you've got all these like structured urls that you can now put just hammer with links and embeds it all flows through eventually to the money site the google business website and google map boom there you've ranked that's part of the process right so um so yeah i mean as far as constantly adding new pages and stuff to that structure i don't like to do that it's um very very time i mean if i got a va doing it's fine but it's still very time intensive so the idea is to build the structure right and then you have embeds in place so that you can just dynamically update those with content that's being published through google business posts which you should be doing regularly anyways rss feeds and your money site those three things right there can update all of your structure that you build again it's all build the structure right one time and then it will pay off over and over and over again over time by just adding new content through other methods press release is one of my favorite methods for content marketing and link building press release organization page on press advantage has an iframe version of it if anybody has press advantage they have an organization page where there's the for after press advantage.com forward slashers organization if you put an i underscore in front of organization after the first forward slash then it turns it into an iframe version of that page that's what you iframe into stuff then every time you publish a press release it dynamically updates and the press advantage organization page is an iframe stack in and of itself was that on accident or do you think it was on purpose it was on purpose so a lot of the stuff that we do again it's you know you can continually add silos and depth to silos or more silos right but it's not really necessary if you have a good solid structure that you can build and then mirror across multiple properties then you can again with iframes inserted in strategic locations you can update every one of those structures from just publishing from three locations the ones that i use are the google business website blog posts from the money site and press releases those three things right there update the whole structure right very powerful method and um it works it works every time it has been for years um knock on wood it'll continue to work gordon says hey guys if you have a multi-city local legion site and you're linking either from or to a city page you start that again if you have a multi-city local legion site and you're linking either from or to a city page or an seo geolocation booster page what kind of anchor text should you use should it just be the raw url of either page or if linking from the city page the geolocation page should the anchor text be the city name i use the city name it's about relevance link relevance right so um you know if you go to the local prominence plug-in um they've got some couple good use um youtube videos on their page about how to use their plug-in even whether you use their plug-in or not you can build geopay pages or posts manually it's fine the plugin just helps to automate that um to a degree um but they have some pretty good training on there about how to do it and you know i don't like to do like for example if i'm going to create geo posts to add location relevance to a particular silo for example or to a you know a location landing page for example most of the time i'm not going to make those like posts that are found in the navigation menu or like in other words they're not prominent posts on the site because that's not they're literally optimized specifically for location terms not necessarily location plus service i like topically relevant blogs or supporting posts to be uh found and part of the overall you know main site structure because that adds topical authority right it builds topical authority but the geo posts are really about just you know helping to push location relevance into it for ranking purposes it's not really you know it doesn't really make sense to go to tree service site and find a post specifically about a nearby park right that doesn't really make sense but it does help to add location relevance so there's a there's a reason and a way to use those properly to build that geographic relevance but i don't make those like a very prominent post so why i'm saying this gordon is because i might have one mention of one of the geopost locations that i have published a post for right in the main top of silo page the location landing page and then that page when that mention occurs that will be a link to that first geo post and um you know you can even mask the text or the link anchor text to where it doesn't it doesn't appear to be a link at all right but it's still a link it's a hyperlink and then from there i daisy chained the geo post together and then on the last post there's a link back up to that location landing page right the top of silo page usually and that's again because it basically hides all those other posts they don't have to be present um you know on the blog roll page or anything else but so they're like orphaned post not really because there's a link from at the top of the uh into the first post in that you know location silo so to speak and then there's a link at the bottom of it links back so that it completes the loop right it completes the circle um and it's a way to just kind of push relevance from one post to another to another all within one specific area and then back up to location landing page but i don't i don't like to you know put like a menu at the bottom with all the different locations and link out to all of them because then i think you dilute the topical relevance a bit of that page which is really what i want people to focus on if they're remember guys most time people aren't landing on your local websites to read about the content they're just there to you know find a contact information to call or make a purchase or whatever schedule an estimate whatever we do all this that we do most of the time it's not really for people to become more educated on tree service methods in my case it's uh so that they can be found in google and they can call them because they got a tree they want down does that make sense um so to get back to your question gordon i think uh you know um yeah i use the city name because it's about link relevance but like i said i only do it usually in one location from the top of silo page it goes into like the location silo so to speak and all the supporting posts are daisy chained together with the last one linking back up so it you know closes the loop if that makes sense um anyway you mentioned two weeks ago regarding multi-city local lead gen sites that if you prefer to use a that you prefer to use a non-amd domain and use the city and niche in the city page meta title yes meta description h1 tagging content but i wasn't quite sure how you format your city page urls these page slugs that also contain a city in the niche no for me the way that i do it is just the city name because you again most of the tree service sites that i have have tree service in the domain whatever the brand name is tree service or tree removal or tree care something you know synonymous with tree service so that will be in the domain name so when i do a location page it's usually forward slash city name that's it and that's just the way i like it i like it short and succinct because in the title tag the seo title i have the keyword plus location and so again if there's four data points that the google bot first looks at right seo title the slug the url the meta description and then the h1 tag and if you have the exact match keyword in all four locations then already you've like you know you've got a real high optimization score that can trigger over optimization very easily so i like to kind of de-optimize the url um the seo title is where i think the most important place to have the exact match keyword is i like to use synonyms or variations variants of the exact match keyword in the h1 tag and then i'll use another variant in the meta meta tag or the meta meta description excuse me um so hopefully that makes sense for for me i like to de-optimize the url that's my like that's and then h1 tag and the meta description are usually where i have variants of the exact match keyword so the exact match keyword is typically going to be in the seo title and that's it that's just the way that i do it it's been working for years so okay all right so i'm going to move on dan says hey guys i have a new physiotherapy client he had two dmds registered at the same location i had him remove one but there are still two other businesses at the same location yoga and registered massage therapists would that be a problem ranking his gmb moving forward thanks much no and the reason why is we just had one of our mastermind members ask the questions uh well it wasn't related to what you're asking but it's the same answer which is um you know like for example you have a multilocation business if the brand name is going to be the same like you know if a lot of when i have multi-location businesses which i deal with a lot of those i always recommend that we append the city name to the end of the brand name for each location so there could be the initial location is just the brand name but then for each subsequent location we add we append the city name so it's brand plus city as that the official kind of name for that location and i do that because it does help a little bit with the gmb ranking but also it differentiates it creates a more unique name because each city name is unique right but what i'm saying is not every client wants that um and it's not necessary because here's the thing there's four data points included with the nap there's the name address phone number and in the website url any one of those can be common across all multiple locations but you have to keep the other three data points whatever those may be unique or else you cause ambiguation issues right you can invigorate the nip and it will cause significant problems for ranking any of those assets that share more than one data point in common in other words if you have the same location name business name across multiple locations that's perfectly fine provided that each address street address is different or unique each phone number is unique and each website url is unique so it's easy to do because if you have the same brand name across multiple locations you have a unique street address a unique local phone number and you should have a unique landing page right location landing page so it's okay to have the same data point as the same name it can be the same way if you have you know the same address with multiple businesses at the same address as long as there's a unique business name a unique uh the address could be common but then unique phone numbers for each business and unique website or urls for each business right that's associated with the google business profile so it's okay as long as you have only one commonality among those four data points if you have more than one then that causes problems so and um i've seen that over the years many many times bibi says well the new store will include backlinking service um we're not we're not we're not having we're not launching a store bb uh we're launching a content business done for you content seo tuned content and then i have a link building business right now that will eventually come under as a separate business but will come under semantic mastery right now i'm managing that my through my agency but it will it will come under semantic mastery once our content business gets off the ground so there's a link building business and a content business it's not a store we're not we got out of the store business um what about the show in the prs now we won't be doing shields as my link building business there might be some components that are similar to that they won't be seo shields uh that is purely with the heavy hitter club store that's not part of what we're going to be doing there might be some similar type of stuff but not copies at all i'm developing my own stuff and have been for months now um and that's what we will be selling as part of the link building okay prs press releases yes absolutely are you kidding me press release is such an integral part of what i do we have a great relationship with jeremy press advantage it will absolutely be part of both our content business and our link building business because it serves both right what kind of content service will include money site content uh super well optimized content there will be link building content as well which will be about half the price of money site content because tier one link building content should be well tuned as well it should also be well tuned i should say um it's so much more effective that way will it include the writing yes what about the technical side yeah keyword research uh yes schema maybe not right off the bat but that's probably going to be part of an add-on service available but yeah we're going to do my goal with that is to create a topical map when somebody comes to us they give us a keyword we develop a full topical map for them to show them what it's going to take to become the topical authority for that keyword set and then we sell it here's the plan you can determine how aggressive you want to be at accomplishing that plan there will be different levels that you can buy content from us subscription models that sort of thing so all of that will be kind of announced in two weeks guys or roughly two well roughly two weeks we're going to try to get that opened up uh to the rest of everybody outside of the mastermind mid february we're gonna try okay jim dubs says you recently mentioned that you are now using wpx for hosting their hosting is extremely fast due to their heavy caching i'm considering moving a number of sites over to them but i've heard a number of negative reviews with regards to hosting dynamic content or pages due to the very limited resources they provide to each domain or app one reviewer said one core and two 56 megabytes of ram have you tested a site with dynamic context such as using external api feeds no i have a gem it's kind of i don't do anything with that um i've not had any problems with anything that i've done with wpx at all their support has been phenomenal for me i'm really happy with wpx so i haven't had any problems but i haven't done anything that you're talking about so i can't i can't speak on that i'm sorry dude we're almost out of time guys i'm gonna try to blast through a couple of these really quick ralph says hey guys i've been using link processor create backlinks to hopefully improve rankings for both website blog posts and videos on youtube um i'm using link processor i think that integrates with damon nelson's um vid penguin too it's the first time i'd even heard of it um so i do have a subscription with them uh it's just so it automatically backlinks the videos that i submit through vid penguin but i don't really have any experience with it i don't can't say whether it's good or not so i'm wondering if you guys have ever used this and i'm wondering if it's helpful or hopeful to use linkprocessorprocessor.net again i i've only i've got very i just bought uh vidpenguin 2 from appsumo about three codes um i don't know three four weeks ago and i've only i've only syndic you know added a couple of videos to it i've got plans to do a lot of stuff but i've got uh with some other stuff which we'll talk about another time and so i just i got link processor because it automatically integrates with that i don't have any experience with that outside of that i can't tell you um the best indexers we've talked about many times over the last several weeks the best indexers that i know of right now are speedlinks.speed dashlinks.net which is here um speedlink stat speed links.net this omega indexer still works but it doesn't work as good as it used to um and then there is um indexmenow.com which uh that's very expensive but they have a 10 10 day guarantee if it's not if the link isn't indexed in 10 days then you get the credit back it's very expensive but it's you know it i haven't really seen anything that it can't index yet i had one url that it couldn't index and i got the credit back um again it's very expensive but it works well um as far as what you're asking about i just can't speak on it i don't know other than i've got it connected to for youtube pinging like you know indexing youtube stuff next question if you have time i'm wondering about the viper tools do you think big google will catch on to this and penalize accounts i don't know um i know mark excuse me michael um has put an enormous amount of work into that to randomize stuff so that that's not an issue and i trust him um i'm using viper tools i don't think it's gonna be a problem um or else i wouldn't use it so okay guys did i miss anything that needs to be answered are we good uh i think uh just one at the bottom we could pick that up next week i think we're out of time so i think we're good okay guys so i can get them to all of them come join the mastermind i'll be happy to spend some more time with you bye everybody gotta get that last pitch in i love it all right guys see you thanks everybody for being here cheers
