I think you should consider in your business and when people think about making money online, they oftentimes get overwhelmed or confused what it’s all about and, like we talked about so many times before, it’s about selling something you have to give something in return. You know for money right, so people want this and you get this, it’s it’s so basic, and so how? How do you do that? How you know what can you sell and the three types of methods I use is Kindle or like ebooks? I do affiliate marketing and I have my own products now.
All of these versions are all these methods are something that refers to take it out products. Okay, so in this case you know we’re selling ebooks on Amazon for $ 2.99 and actually I’m also doing paperbacks paperbacks for round yeah. Like ten bucks, you might be asking you know, are you doing physical products? Well, you know Amazon takes care of this. I never have to do anything extra except you know, create paperback version like a format and Amazon takes care for the rest.
So it’s just a really fast method to like leverage your already made books, and then you might, you know like ask: why should you do came to isn’t just for writers or people that are skilled with writing? Absolutely not everybody can do this. You actually should not, or you know you don’t have to be a writer, because you should you, you can go into the nonfiction niche and sell all kinds of books and have them written for you or or easily write them yourself.
I teach people how to. I show them how they can get that books created, even though they’re, not a writer. Why I promote this method is because it’s a really simple and easy way to break into making money on line making money. It’s a really good point of entry. If you haven’t made a dollar before a lot of people, you know start here and because it’s easy, it’s simplified Amazon takes care of the traffic.
You just have to focus on creating really simple ebooks, and then you upload it to Amazon and basically that’s it. You don’t have to it’s basically hands-off after that, and I was making money in my first month doing this and it kind of clarifies – and you know you know, realizes or makes you believe that this is possible. You know the first dollar we always talk about. The first dollar is the hardest one.
You know when people have already made one dollar they’re kind of think like well. Why can’t I make ten or why can’t I make you know a hundred, so it’s all about you know just breaking into the game, and this is a really good way of doing that, because it doesn’t require a lot of investment and you can actually create ebooks For free and if you can create something and sell it and there’s no cost of producing it, I mean how many books can you create? So and the thing is, you know, a lot of people are making 1k a month.
I would say, with this kind of business: it’s I I mean it’s possible to go. Well, I would say it’s like anywhere between 1k to 10k. A month is a lot of people are, is having this kind of success. All right, I would say, you’re – probably not going to go much further than 100k a year, then a lot of you know people making 501k. There are some people, I’ve heard of some people that are making thirty to forty K a month, but that’s an exception.
Okay, now with affiliate marketing, I think you know you have a much higher profit market margin. You know you’re, not selling $ 2.99 ebooks you, you are selling products that cost anywhere from it b-47 up to could be anywhere up to maybe you know 197. In case you would be doing high ticket affiliate marketing, then it’s possible to promote products that cost up to two thousand dollars and in that case, you’re getting a lot more for each commission, and this is the reason I moved into affiliate marketing.
Basically, because Kindle is you know, Amazon owns kimple. There are a lot of variables in this kind of business like you have to in many cases, if you want to reviews for your books, you have to hire bas. Amazon is always changing the terms, and you know that everything has its pros and cons. So, even though it’s really simple and easy, it has, of course, some downsides and that’s why a lot of people move into affiliate marketing.
They maybe start promoting their success and and courses on simple, I mean I I’m doing that and they can make high commissions and they can make more money, and I would say there is more control, you’re, not as restricted as with you know, a Kindle business yeah. You can diversify a little bit more you’re still on the product creators terms, you’re, promoting somebody else’s product, of course, and that person of course sets the terms you know he sets the price the Commission you get and basically how you can promote the product.
How and when he can pull the plug, of course on the product if he wants, but in my case you know you can have, you can be promoting a lot of these products and I it’s just more control than Kindle and where you can take affiliate marketing. I mean you can be doing, I would say, 1 to 2 million a year and then you know having your own product. I mean this is how the the big guys on the internet – the big goes.
I don’t know what’s this supposed to be, but I guess this is a guy with a you know. What is it called the Kings where you know the crown you know having your own product. That’s that all teammates control you set the terms you set the price. You can charge at anything you, you know anything, you desire, you can charge twenty thousand. If you want. If you have that kind of you know, high-priced item like maybe coaching or something it can be an online course, you can charge $ 1,000 for it.
You set the terms use of the terms on how you promote it. Basically, it’s more control, it’s more more secure, ready and yeah you’re, not limited by other people as much. You know you can put it up on any platform. You, like you of course, can promote it yourself and then get you know: 100 percent of the sale, because you don’t have to pay affiliates or you can don’t have to pay any fees or well. Maybe there’s like a small fee to PayPal stripe.
But basically you know once your product is done. You know it’s almost 100 percent profits. If you manage to sell it yourself, of course, so you can see how this here is much more powerful than perhaps getting you know. Fifty fifty percent commission of a forty seven dollar product and when you could be getting one hundred percent for let’s say two hundred ninety seven dollars, like my my online course: first lost profits.
So if you want the ultimate business, you the ultimate freedom, the ultimate security and the ultimate authority, because people look at you with much more authority when you have your own product, I mean doing affiliate. Marketing is really lucrative, but there are just so many people. So many sharks fighting in the same pool that I mean this can be, of course tough it. This requires work, and so you see how this goes.
You know people go into this. They move on to affiliate marketing and eventually you know you won’t be over here. I’m not saying you know, like I said these numbers are theoretical, but in my opinion, and with all the things that I have been you know looking at online, all the people I follow and I see what’s happening then this is something that I would say was Not something that is impossible, I mean with your own product, I mean 1 million and beyond you know, sky’s the limit, that’s supposed to be a cloud and Sun alright.
So this is this is online marketing. This is making money online. Of course, there are other ways. Also, I mean I’m not saying you can’t make money with cryptocurrency or or some kind of other methods, but basically you know this is what you should be looking into these other main ones. Having these three income streams I mean you could have. Of course, this would be a one income stream. You could have, of course, a lot of campaigns, affiliate marketing campaigns.
You could have a lot of products and that way you can have five 10 20 income streams. They say that you know the average millionaire has seven. So I would mix these ones up and you could be on your way to financial security. You know pretty fast alright, so this was today’s article. I hope you know this made some sense to you. If it did, then please, like the article and hit subscribe and talk later,
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This is sheri bell revolt. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of step up the article interview program in which I interviewed smart people making smart moves and their businesses so that we can learn their tips and tools and move our businesses forward as well. I guess this week, Carrie Snowden the professional marketer and blogger here in the salt lake city area and before we get to carries interview in which he gives us some great blogging tips.
I just wanted to do a shout-out for his website. Business. Blogger tips come in which he shares lots of information about blogging, including an excellent resource list. I also wanted to make sure that you knew that he had a itunes, podcast called business bloggers tips and there are at least fifty podcasts that you can listen to again. Specific to blogging so right now, let’s hear from Carrie Snowden and get his tips on adding blogging to our small businesses.
So we can move our businesses forward, hi Carrie thanks so much for joining me on this episode of step up. My pleasure sherry glad to be here. Thank you. I love talking to you so today we’re going to talk about blogging, and I know that you have a service that provides content for people who are interested in blogging and perhaps don’t want to start out doing it. Why don’t you give us a little background on list 5 and then we’ll go from there? We work with franchise groups to build out basically a blog for each of their sites, and then we provide regular customized content into each of those blogs.
So, quite literally, we can provide an unlimited number of customized unique blogs for a wide range of you know: distributors or sales people, or even you know, brick and mortar kind of shops all around, and our our key really is in being able to provide compliant content. That is completely unique for each site and just explain to people who are new to blogging. What does compliance you know compliant has to do with with corporate rules and sometimes even government rules and regulations, and that is saying things that are not only appropriate but legal.
So compliance has to do with either you know matching corporate rate rules and regulations or government rules and regulations, and that’s a big problem for a lot of franchise groups in particular that are worried about their brand and worried about what some of their bloggers out there Might be saying about their products right, okay, great! So let me just jump right in um. Why should people be blogging primarily because it becomes a very strong voice in in two primary areas of marketing? One is web based marketing, so marketing to the search engines and getting your content out in the search engines and another is that you know.
Lately. It’s been very important for companies to connect with their consumers. They’re cut their customers in a very personalized kind of way and a blog allows that to happen as well, so you’re, you’re kind of killing two birds with one stone, you’re you’re, appealing to the search engines in possibly the best way that you can, when you’re, providing Regular content on your blog you’re, giving search engines what they need, and that is content to delivery.
People who are searching for your keywords, so blogging is a great way to get your SEO out of the way and connect with your customers. Okay. So, let’s just talk briefly about keywords, then, if you had three tips for bloggers, keywords would definitely be one of the tips. Then yeah, that’s a that’s actually, a pretty huge one. The important thing about using a blog for marketing is to maintain relevancy.
So you know you don’t want your blog to meander through lots of different topics. You really want to focus on a specific topic, and usually that is your company or your products or the value or in benefits that they provide to your customers. So using kind of those three building blocks company products value, there’s a million one things that you can write about and you’re staying on topic. Basically, so it makes it easier to gather an audience because people are flocking to some content that they like to read and then you’re also looking at being able to maintain some search engine kind of rank based on those keywords to so consistency, there is important.
Okay, so before even writing that first blog post, what are things that a company needs to think about? What do they need to know about their own product or service or what they’re trying to do? But what do they need to know about their prospects or their target market? So you’ve got two questions in there. One is what do I need to know about my topic and then the other is. What do I need to know about the people who are going to read about that right? And this is where a lot of people kind of get hung up on blogging.
You’ll find a lot of people say, I’m just not ready to start, because I don’t know everything that I need to know and that’s not necessarily true. You’ll find that blogging becomes an experience where you can actually learn a lot more about your own products, and you start to meet an audience that you may not know you ever had. So I would say to start with it’s important to know your elevator pitch.
What is it that you’re talking about, and can you can you describe that in just a few sentences? You know an elevator pitch is, is the idea of if we both get on an elevator at the first floor and you’re getting off on the second floor, can I describe to you what my company does in that amount of time and you walk away understanding what We’ve got if you can, if you have your elevator pitch kind of worked out, that can be the basis for starting a quite wonderful blog because now you’re starting to share that story with your customers and you go out now.
Let’s talk about the audience side to just for a minute I want to when I start a blog I’ll have an audience in mind, and anyone that has a small business should have at least in a segment of their audience in mind. But I don’t – I don’t really know my entire audience this product that I have may appeal to someone that I haven’t even considered yet, hopefully that’s the case as an entrepreneur. We’re experimenting with ideas and products and getting them out there in a way that maybe attracts more people than we thought we could so split.
But it is important to start with an audience that you think is going to apply. You know I i’m not going to start talking about swimsuits to people who ride horses, for instance, so you can at least kind of start in in an area. But it’s not important to refine that audience down to the finest segment, because, when you’re blogging you’re appealing to a pretty wide range of people. I kind of think of this in terms of what I like to call the considered purchase cycle and blogging is a great way to generate interest at a very early stage of a considered, purchase and and along that considered purchase that the closer somebody gets to buying Your product, the more specific the information they’re going to need.
Okay and that’s when you get into personalized contact or delivering spec sheets or data sheets about your product. We’re talking early on we’re talking almost the same kind of information that you would see in a in a television commercial, so very broad, very emotional, based information about your product. Getting people excited about it, sharing some benefits and features and getting people interested in asking questions about those, and then you can refine it from there.
But what do you need to know about your product start with your elevator pitch and kind of work with that? And just be very general about the kind of information and consider that you’re going to a very general audience and the people who are really interested will start to refine as they go down that considered purchase cycle. Okay, um. This might be a strange question totally off base, but I was actually listening to a guy sort of teach at blogging class and he said never embed links that can take someone away from your you’re making or your website and take it to someone else.
I know that you can have when you’re liking, WordPress and you’re adding a link. You can have it open into an in page so that they they don’t lose you but sure. I know the new, your information. You do talk about linking a lot so give us your tip specific to lady. Should they do it specific to linking, should they do it, and the answer is yes and – and I have a very different opinion about linking – and it all has to do with what search engines are really looking for and what people who use search engines are looking For so let’s, let’s take Google, for example, Google delivers a product and that product is information that is relevant to your search term.
When you get to the site that you found through google, google wants that site to be as informational as possible. They also want that site to be very connected and think about connections being even social connections. The person you want to meet is the person who knows everyone, because now you become part of that culture and you can meet everyone through that. One link. Think of your website. In the same way, when I provide links to other relevant sites through my own site, I essentially become a hub to that community and Google will recognize my hub position in that community and will link to me more often because they know people would get to those Other sites through me and I can become most relevant by linking to other sites from mine, so in other words, Google will say of all of these people that I can introduce you to.
I want to introduce you to the one who knows the most people and those people then become. Are the links essentially to your website. So, linking out from your website is a great idea when you, when you want to establish yourself, is that central hub? Okay and how do you get links back? How do you get links back and that’s that’s a tricky one, because you know there’s link farming and there’s there’s these call groups that will literally spend all day calling people just ask for a link back.
There are the linkbacks that you get, are kind of graded and linked back from a very relevant site are very highly ranked links back from just junk sites out there are ranked fairly very low, and the problem is, if you have a lot of those low ranks, It won’t help you a lot in some cases. It can hurt you if you have lots of links from a topic that you’re not discussing. Google might think that you are selling horses instead of bathing suits, so you want to be real careful about the kind of links you’re getting back so how to get those links.
There are a number of ways using a blog in particular, is a great way to get links back to your home site. So you want to be linking to your home site from your blog, and there are a few strategies for doing that. Building a blog externals to your site is one not necessarily the best strategy. The other best way to get links is to get engaged with your community. So if you happen to be a saddle, salesman go out and engage with other people who are selling saddles discussing, saddles, making saddles talk to those people, make comments on their blogs and comments.
Usually contain a link back to your site, so the more engaged you are with your community, the more links you can get back and those are good, solid, relevant links, really quick. Another great way to get links in a very important way to get links is to use press relations every time your company or your entrepreneurial venture does something that is newsworthy, create a press release about that event and send that out to the multitude of free press Sites out there and that becomes good, solid content coming back to you from from new sites and those are very highly regarded links back to your site.
So don’t forget, don’t forget the PR angle to that as well thats, a good reminder. So how do you find? Let’s say you want to find the five most influential blogs that are in your niche. Do you what we want your tip for doing that? Well, so all of this might start with a visit to the google keyword tool. Just do a google search for google keyword tool and you’ll find it. If I’m that tool, you can find the top 100 search terms that are related to a search term that you type in so FL I’ll.
Stick with the horse analogy and say all right: i’m selling saddles so i’ll enter saddle into the keyword, search tool and Google will give me the top 100 search terms that are related to that. So now I have a list of things that I can begin to. Search for and find other blogs that are using those same search terms, and that’s that’s how I would do it there’s a couple of easy ways to do this. I can run down to Barnes & Noble and grab a horse magazine and in that horse magazine are going to be hundreds of websites that I can visit.
Bloggers. People are selling other types of horse tack and I might visit those sites and just really get engaged with the community so finding it is just a matter of sticking to the search terms and really going after the relevant content that is out on the web. And let me throw one more thing in there when I do find those. I want to gauge those sites. If you can find out what those sites are ranked and now you can literally make a list of sites in order of priority with the highest ranked site.
Being your top priority to become engaged with and to get links from both of those important you, don’t you don’t want to just go out there and get links for the sake of links. The the links will be stronger and more beneficial to you. If you are engaged in those communities, so engaged means I’m making comments on their sites. I’m talking to people in a forum or I’m even developing a relationship with the owner of that other site, but specific to finding out how a page is ranked.
I know there’s a: is it a Google tool that you can use? You know, there’s a lot of plugins if you’re using Firefox for your browser, which I do there are a couple of PageRank plugins. So, every time I visit a site, the PageRank is displayed right at the bottom of the page. I can see it right off if you just go to your plugins for your browser and do a search for pagerank you’ll find dozens of them.
Most of them are using the same data, so that would be the first step is to install some type of browser plug-in that it shows page range. This problem have that do roam. Yeah chrome does have page rank okay, um, let’s see one of the other things that I noticed that you give a tip for 2. New bloggers is if they are a local business, how are they? How are they establishing a local presence versus you know just trying to attach themselves to the world right? So the idea there is that if I am a brick-and-mortar type shop, let’s say a hair salon, my clientele for a hair salon are going to be within 20 or 30 miles of my hair salon.
Most of the activity I’ll see is going to be within 10 or 15 miles of my of my brick and mortar shop. So it doesn’t make sense to me for me to market my shop to people who are in another state, for instance. So now we talk about localization and there are a couple of ways that you can optimize for localized search, optimization. One of them is to add your address to your blog content. So I might add the name of my state or the name of my city and especially here’s a tip, especially my zip code.
Adding your address to your blog posts will help you in the local search traffic rankings. I do a lot of keyword, modification or keyword. Optimization so if I have a keyword, is hair salon, I would put the name of my city in front of that because I know a lot of people search for that. If i’m looking for a hair salon, I might type the name of my city and then the words hair salon, because that’s where I’m looking, the other thing I might do is actually register my site on google maps.
Now there everybody – you actually hurt mine ring a few minutes ago, but we’ve all got iPhones and other types of mobile devices, and many of these now have GPS in them. So literally, when I do a search on my phone, Google knows where I’m searching from and they’re going to give me results, even if I don’t ask for them. They’ll try to give me results that are within 10 or 15 miles of where I’m standing.
So they know that that’s exactly where I want to find goods and services close to me so registering with Google Maps is another great way, but I would say primarily in terms of writing, and that’s really. My focus is on the writing side of this and creating organic search rank. Adding your address components to your blog and modifying your keywords with your location is one of the most important things you can do.
So how would you work in your address, though you just say, hey, be sure to visit us at at the end of your blog post or yeah yeah. There’s there’s a couple of ways you know and you can get pretty creative with it, but that would be the basic just throwing your contact information along the bottom and important to to maybe mix it up a little bit. Don’t just create a signature stamp and at that every time I would write the information differently as often as you can and and of course, modifying your keywords and also incorporating it into a sentence.
You might say if you’re looking for a hair salon in orem utah, come visit me at my name of shop. So you can incorporate your your city and state and even your zip code right into the content and that’s where it’s important. It’s a good idea to block it down at the bottom, but if you can work it into the content, that’s even more powerful! Okay and how important our comments? You know it becomes like this popularity thing.
People spend so much time writing a blog post and any this has been having to me I’ll write, a blog post and absolutely no one will comment on it, but they’ll say to me, via Facebook or via Twitter or via email, personal email. That was a great black buzzing, like my god, please put that juice over there. You know if that’s a tough one, it’s it’s tough to get people to engage because we’re all busy – and you know, we’ve got things to do, and it’s not always easy to just go and make some comments.
One of the ways you can help kind of prime the pump a little bit is to have a culture of people that you rely on to to get comments. Going so have some friends make some comments? Some might regard that a little bit as cheating. But if you work with a community of people that are that are kind of in it with you, you can generate a conversation and that’s really what you’re trying to do. The other thing is there.
There are a lot of ways to block or kind of restrict comments, and every small restriction you create is one more barrier to getting comments. So a lot of people put CAPTCHAs on their comment window so that I have to type in some strange yeah. You know word to get access to the blog, I’ll, probably avoid it. In fact, I myself I’ve even written comments, and you get to that point. You think I don’t have time or I’ve got to move on right.
So every little barrier you put in place means you’re going to get fewer and fewer comments. You’re. The first part of your question had to do with how important comments are and there’s there’s a kind of a yes and a note to that question comments can be very important because it’s kind of free content right. It’s it’s additional content that goes on your blog and the more content that you have and the more frequent that content is posted.
The more popular your blog will be in the search engines, so comments can be extremely valuable. They are not the end of the world, though there are lots of very popular blogs out there that do not allow comments, so you know that it becomes a moderation issue. In some cases you may not want to do that either. So comments can be extremely powerful, but they are not the end of the world. Okay. So to really look at the effectiveness of your blog or the traffic you’re.
Looking at what to line up Google Analytics or what are you using? I use google analytics it’s free. It’s tied right into Google, I mean as soon as I light as soon as I start up. My google account you know or push a blog into google analytics. Google knows who I am and they’re starting to analyze. My account it’s kind of a window into what google can see about my site and that’s important to me because I like to what Google is thinking right.
I I don’t get. I don’t have a lot of time, so I don’t study my google analytics for hours and hours and try to make modifications every day and that sort of thing there are some people who do and google it analytics will allow you to do that for a free, App, it does just about everything you could ever want. I pay attention to just a few basic things, though, really kind of three things: one is overall traffic.
How am I doing, and if you’re familiar with Google Analytics, you know it gives you a big long chart right up at the top and it shows your traffic, whether it’s going up or down, and you can usually see exactly where the weekends are or things like That so I pay attention to how many people are visiting my site. I also pay attention to where people are visiting from so I have some blogs that are local community blogs and it’s very interesting when I see traffic coming from outside of the state and then I have blogs that are more nationally oriented and it’s very interesting to See where you know which states are more heavily involved and what those aligned with the other thing I look at is what key search terms are bringing people to my site, and I think that’s probably the most important of them all is to understand what content is Bringing people to your site and that’s where you start to refine your search terms and refine your elevator pitch a little bit to match what people are looking for and if I could revisit that first point we made a few minutes ago when you first start, don’t Be afraid to just put a stake in the ground and get moving and pretty soon you’ll you’ll start reading your analytics and you’ll start getting feedback from people and you’ll see where you need to steer your company a little bit to to meet up with the largest Number of customers, or or to meet your goals whatever they are, so you have this blog.
How do you use it for your across-the-board branding like how are you connecting your blog to your social sites to your? If you have a static website? How do you personally recommend decline and to have this be an effective tool? That’s working for you, 24, 7. So a lot of things that you can do there, so I use wordpress wordpress is my favorite blogging software. It’s very easy to install and it’s very robust and is very popular.
The neat thing about wordpress also, is that there are thousands and thousands of plugins that extend the you know the versatility of my blog. Many of those plugins will automatically repost my content to Twitter and Facebook, for instance. So I have a few of those installed so that whenever I put a post up and I hit save it automatically reposts to the favourite places that I wanted to go so then I’ve got my facebook audience seeing my new posts, I’ve got my Twitter audience seeing My new post and I’m taking advantage of those social networks without wasting a lot of time.
Reposting and you know you could literally spend hours and hours taking care of a single blog post or with the right plugins. You can do it all in half an hour. This is some other social things that are important to do, dig and stumble upon are two of my favorite post sharing mechanisms and you’ll see some traffic come from those sites as well, so there you know. Obviously, there are a couple of neat places to repost your content.
There are also mechanisms that are kind of the old standbys, using email, for instance, to re-distribute a blog post, and let people know that i’m still active on a particular blog. So, there’s a lot of things you can do there, but primarily whenever I I use my blog is 10 of my home base. I go there first, that’s where I’m putting my content, so everybody has a home that they can come to that I’m managing and then from there.
I share links out to all the social networks to point people back to the block. Okay. How often do you repost a blog post link on twitter? So if i’m really trying to be active, I might do it four times through the day. If i’m really trying to generate some some activity, you know if it’s an event or something I might do. It may be a few more, but typically I’ll. Do it once or twice and then, if I really want to try to get some attention I’ll, do it three or four times and it all kind of depends on the audience as well? But you don’t want to redo the same one all the time you might want to add a new twist, and maybe even do some experimenting on what kind of headline is attracting the most people.
So typically you’ll add a question right. I’ve posted a new blog out there and I might ask a question as to whether you know what might be in my blog. You know: did you know that saddles are made of leather? No, of course you did, but you might be compelled to visit my website to learn why that’s important. You know as an example a bad one. Maybe I love you period. Ok, so we’ve talked pretty much about all the highlights that I wanted to get to you, because I know that you have you need to go soon.
So I don’t remember if I told you that I wanted you to come up with an assignment for both me and my viewers, an assignment. So what it be. One of the important things about blogging is frequency, especially when you’re dealing with with search engines, but also very important for your readership for your audience. In fact, you kind of caught me earlier today when we were discussing this interview.
You mentioned that one of my blogs didn’t have a post for quite a while now, and you kind of you taught me – and it’s got me thinking about that yeah, oh so frequency is, is probably one of the most important things you can do with a blog. When you start a blog, you really have to commit to doing something with it. Some form of activity at least once a week, if you’re a business blogger once a week is really the minimum.
If you really want to keep your audience attention twice a week, if you are a crazy, rockin news website, you know – and we all know of these there – you can post two or three times a day and, and that is great stuff, but at a minimum once One to two times per week – and that would be my tip verb tip / assignment – is to recommit to a frequency schedule that you can manage. You don’t want your blog to take over your life, but if you want your blog to work for your business, commit to at least once per week for your business blog so that the search engines recognize who you are and your audience doesn’t lose you okay and Should you mix that up, should it be a article blog once and or give you off all written content for yourself it so there’s there’s a yes to both of those.
Whenever I add article to my blog, it has to contain a written explanation. The search engines don’t care about article; they can see that article is there and they recognize that that’s important, but article is really for your reading audience to capture their attention and give them something to read. If you’re, not posting text content on your blog each week, the search engines won’t be finding you with the keyword, strength that you want them to.
So so I would say it’s always text and especially when you post a article, don’t forget to explain the article. It only takes two or three sentences to satisfy the requirement, but you always need to include some text. Okay, and you also offer people the option of listening to your blog posts. Do you record an audio version you make? I do. I have a podcast actually at business, blogger tips, com, and you know it’s it’s less frequent now, but for last year I did one per week and I recorded that using GarageBand here on my mac and there’s pc versions of that too, that you can use to Record your track, convert it to a podcast.
I use a blueberry press to post that up to my blog and yes, I give people the option to listen to my my blog as well, and the neat thing about that. Is there a lot of people that ride trains or bicycles, or you know, commuting to work and they don’t always have access to the internet, but they can download it to their phone, their ipod or whatever, and listen to your blog on the way? So it’s a great way for people to double up on their time on the way to and from somewhere and listen to you while they’re on the go.
Okay. So that’s that’s been a lot of fun yeah! I, like your site, I’ve visited it’s great um, so you’re, let’s just wrap this up by your three most important tips when it comes to blogging. What do you tell your clients from the Gecko these? You must do so it and that’s just going to be kind of a review of what we’ve already talked about. Most important is going to be frequency at least once per week of your business blogger, otherwise, you’re wasting your time to is really relevancy, maintaining focus on a handful of keywords, and I usually tell people to pick three keywords that we’re going to focus on and then To make another list of about 15 that are sort of peripheral keywords, so frequency keywords and localization is really big right now, especially if you’re a brick-and-mortar type shop, that services a region and if you’re in a region, use your city name and don’t be afraid to Use city names from a few other people around you too and I’ll add a fourth really quick and that is linking don’t be afraid to link to and from your competitors or other people’s sites, so that you will be seen as a hub to the community and Not just a dead end, okay and is one of the services that you provide is if someone has a blog and they just want you to look at and tell them what they’re not doing perhaps most effectively.
Is that something that you do you know it’s something I do kind of as a friend? So if anybody has some questions about blogging, I’d be happy to answer them. A lot of the advice that I would give can be found on my podcast site, which is business, bloggers, tips com, so there’s some great information up there or send me an email through that site as well. I’d be happy to answer some questions. Okay, thank you.
Carry this is your bubbles. Thank you so much for joining me. You know what there’s a lot of fun and good to see you again.
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This is sheri bell revolt. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of step up the article interview program in which I interviewed smart people making smart moves and their businesses so that we can learn their tips and tools and move our businesses forward as well. I guess this week, Carrie Snowden the professional marketer and blogger here in the salt lake city area and before we get to carries interview in which he gives us some great blogging tips.
I just wanted to do a shout-out for his website. Business. Blogger tips come in which he shares lots of information about blogging, including an excellent resource list. I also wanted to make sure that you knew that he had a itunes, podcast called business bloggers tips and there are at least fifty podcasts that you can listen to again. Specific to blogging so right now, let’s hear from Carrie Snowden and get his tips on adding blogging to our small businesses.
So we can move our businesses forward, hi Carrie thanks so much for joining me on this episode of step up. My pleasure sherry glad to be here. Thank you. I love talking to you so today we’re going to talk about blogging, and I know that you have a service that provides content for people who are interested in blogging and perhaps don’t want to start out doing it. Why don’t you give us a little background on list 5 and then we’ll go from there? We work with franchise groups to build out basically a blog for each of their sites, and then we provide regular customized content into each of those blogs.
So, quite literally, we can provide an unlimited number of customized unique blogs for a wide range of you know: distributors or sales people, or even you know, brick and mortar kind of shops all around, and our our key really is in being able to provide compliant content. That is completely unique for each site and just explain to people who are new to blogging. What does compliance you know compliant has to do with with corporate rules and sometimes even government rules and regulations, and that is saying things that are not only appropriate but legal.
So compliance has to do with either you know matching corporate rate rules and regulations or government rules and regulations, and that’s a big problem for a lot of franchise groups in particular that are worried about their brand and worried about what some of their bloggers out there Might be saying about their products right, okay, great! So let me just jump right in um. Why should people be blogging primarily because it becomes a very strong voice in in two primary areas of marketing? One is web based marketing, so marketing to the search engines and getting your content out in the search engines and another is that you know.
Lately. It’s been very important for companies to connect with their consumers. They’re cut their customers in a very personalized kind of way and a blog allows that to happen as well, so you’re, you’re kind of killing two birds with one stone, you’re you’re, appealing to the search engines in possibly the best way that you can, when you’re, providing Regular content on your blog you’re, giving search engines what they need, and that is content to delivery.
People who are searching for your keywords, so blogging is a great way to get your SEO out of the way and connect with your customers. Okay. So, let’s just talk briefly about keywords, then, if you had three tips for bloggers, keywords would definitely be one of the tips. Then yeah, that’s a that’s actually, a pretty huge one. The important thing about using a blog for marketing is to maintain relevancy.
So you know you don’t want your blog to meander through lots of different topics. You really want to focus on a specific topic, and usually that is your company or your products or the value or in benefits that they provide to your customers. So using kind of those three building blocks company products value, there’s a million one things that you can write about and you’re staying on topic. Basically, so it makes it easier to gather an audience because people are flocking to some content that they like to read and then you’re also looking at being able to maintain some search engine kind of rank based on those keywords to so consistency, there is important.
Okay, so before even writing that first blog post, what are things that a company needs to think about? What do they need to know about their own product or service or what they’re trying to do? But what do they need to know about their prospects or their target market? So you’ve got two questions in there. One is what do I need to know about my topic and then the other is. What do I need to know about the people who are going to read about that right? And this is where a lot of people kind of get hung up on blogging.
You’ll find a lot of people say, I’m just not ready to start, because I don’t know everything that I need to know and that’s not necessarily true. You’ll find that blogging becomes an experience where you can actually learn a lot more about your own products, and you start to meet an audience that you may not know you ever had. So I would say to start with it’s important to know your elevator pitch.
What is it that you’re talking about, and can you can you describe that in just a few sentences? You know an elevator pitch is, is the idea of if we both get on an elevator at the first floor and you’re getting off on the second floor, can I describe to you what my company does in that amount of time and you walk away understanding what We’ve got if you can, if you have your elevator pitch kind of worked out, that can be the basis for starting a quite wonderful blog because now you’re starting to share that story with your customers and you go out now.
Let’s talk about the audience side to just for a minute I want to when I start a blog I’ll have an audience in mind, and anyone that has a small business should have at least in a segment of their audience in mind. But I don’t – I don’t really know my entire audience this product that I have may appeal to someone that I haven’t even considered yet, hopefully that’s the case as an entrepreneur. We’re experimenting with ideas and products and getting them out there in a way that maybe attracts more people than we thought we could so split.
But it is important to start with an audience that you think is going to apply. You know I i’m not going to start talking about swimsuits to people who ride horses, for instance, so you can at least kind of start in in an area. But it’s not important to refine that audience down to the finest segment, because, when you’re blogging you’re appealing to a pretty wide range of people. I kind of think of this in terms of what I like to call the considered purchase cycle and blogging is a great way to generate interest at a very early stage of a considered, purchase and and along that considered purchase that the closer somebody gets to buying Your product, the more specific the information they’re going to need.
Okay and that’s when you get into personalized contact or delivering spec sheets or data sheets about your product. We’re talking early on we’re talking almost the same kind of information that you would see in a in a television commercial, so very broad, very emotional, based information about your product. Getting people excited about it, sharing some benefits and features and getting people interested in asking questions about those, and then you can refine it from there.
But what do you need to know about your product start with your elevator pitch and kind of work with that? And just be very general about the kind of information and consider that you’re going to a very general audience and the people who are really interested will start to refine as they go down that considered purchase cycle. Okay, um. This might be a strange question totally off base, but I was actually listening to a guy sort of teach at blogging class and he said never embed links that can take someone away from your you’re making or your website and take it to someone else.
I know that you can have when you’re liking, WordPress and you’re adding a link. You can have it open into an in page so that they they don’t lose you but sure. I know the new, your information. You do talk about linking a lot so give us your tip specific to lady. Should they do it specific to linking, should they do it, and the answer is yes and – and I have a very different opinion about linking – and it all has to do with what search engines are really looking for and what people who use search engines are looking For so let’s, let’s take Google, for example, Google delivers a product and that product is information that is relevant to your search term.
When you get to the site that you found through google, google wants that site to be as informational as possible. They also want that site to be very connected and think about connections being even social connections. The person you want to meet is the person who knows everyone, because now you become part of that culture and you can meet everyone through that. One link. Think of your website. In the same way, when I provide links to other relevant sites through my own site, I essentially become a hub to that community and Google will recognize my hub position in that community and will link to me more often because they know people would get to those Other sites through me and I can become most relevant by linking to other sites from mine, so in other words, Google will say of all of these people that I can introduce you to.
I want to introduce you to the one who knows the most people and those people then become. Are the links essentially to your website. So, linking out from your website is a great idea when you, when you want to establish yourself, is that central hub? Okay and how do you get links back? How do you get links back and that’s that’s a tricky one, because you know there’s link farming and there’s there’s these call groups that will literally spend all day calling people just ask for a link back.
There are the linkbacks that you get, are kind of graded and linked back from a very relevant site are very highly ranked links back from just junk sites out there are ranked fairly very low, and the problem is, if you have a lot of those low ranks, It won’t help you a lot in some cases. It can hurt you if you have lots of links from a topic that you’re not discussing. Google might think that you are selling horses instead of bathing suits, so you want to be real careful about the kind of links you’re getting back so how to get those links.
There are a number of ways using a blog in particular, is a great way to get links back to your home site. So you want to be linking to your home site from your blog, and there are a few strategies for doing that. Building a blog externals to your site is one not necessarily the best strategy. The other best way to get links is to get engaged with your community. So if you happen to be a saddle, salesman go out and engage with other people who are selling saddles discussing, saddles, making saddles talk to those people, make comments on their blogs and comments.
Usually contain a link back to your site, so the more engaged you are with your community, the more links you can get back and those are good, solid, relevant links, really quick. Another great way to get links in a very important way to get links is to use press relations every time your company or your entrepreneurial venture does something that is newsworthy, create a press release about that event and send that out to the multitude of free press Sites out there and that becomes good, solid content coming back to you from from new sites and those are very highly regarded links back to your site.
So don’t forget, don’t forget the PR angle to that as well thats, a good reminder. So how do you find? Let’s say you want to find the five most influential blogs that are in your niche. Do you what we want your tip for doing that? Well, so all of this might start with a visit to the google keyword tool. Just do a google search for google keyword tool and you’ll find it. If I’m that tool, you can find the top 100 search terms that are related to a search term that you type in so FL I’ll.
Stick with the horse analogy and say all right: i’m selling saddles so i’ll enter saddle into the keyword, search tool and Google will give me the top 100 search terms that are related to that. So now I have a list of things that I can begin to. Search for and find other blogs that are using those same search terms, and that’s that’s how I would do it there’s a couple of easy ways to do this. I can run down to Barnes & Noble and grab a horse magazine and in that horse magazine are going to be hundreds of websites that I can visit.
Bloggers. People are selling other types of horse tack and I might visit those sites and just really get engaged with the community so finding it is just a matter of sticking to the search terms and really going after the relevant content that is out on the web. And let me throw one more thing in there when I do find those. I want to gauge those sites. If you can find out what those sites are ranked and now you can literally make a list of sites in order of priority with the highest ranked site.
Being your top priority to become engaged with and to get links from both of those important you, don’t you don’t want to just go out there and get links for the sake of links. The the links will be stronger and more beneficial to you. If you are engaged in those communities, so engaged means I’m making comments on their sites. I’m talking to people in a forum or I’m even developing a relationship with the owner of that other site, but specific to finding out how a page is ranked.
I know there’s a: is it a Google tool that you can use? You know, there’s a lot of plugins if you’re using Firefox for your browser, which I do there are a couple of PageRank plugins. So, every time I visit a site, the PageRank is displayed right at the bottom of the page. I can see it right off if you just go to your plugins for your browser and do a search for pagerank you’ll find dozens of them.
Most of them are using the same data, so that would be the first step is to install some type of browser plug-in that it shows page range. This problem have that do roam. Yeah chrome does have page rank okay, um, let’s see one of the other things that I noticed that you give a tip for 2. New bloggers is if they are a local business, how are they? How are they establishing a local presence versus you know just trying to attach themselves to the world right? So the idea there is that if I am a brick-and-mortar type shop, let’s say a hair salon, my clientele for a hair salon are going to be within 20 or 30 miles of my hair salon.
Most of the activity I’ll see is going to be within 10 or 15 miles of my of my brick and mortar shop. So it doesn’t make sense to me for me to market my shop to people who are in another state, for instance. So now we talk about localization and there are a couple of ways that you can optimize for localized search, optimization. One of them is to add your address to your blog content. So I might add the name of my state or the name of my city and especially here’s a tip, especially my zip code.
Adding your address to your blog posts will help you in the local search traffic rankings. I do a lot of keyword, modification or keyword. Optimization so if I have a keyword, is hair salon, I would put the name of my city in front of that because I know a lot of people search for that. If i’m looking for a hair salon, I might type the name of my city and then the words hair salon, because that’s where I’m looking, the other thing I might do is actually register my site on google maps.
Now there everybody – you actually hurt mine ring a few minutes ago, but we’ve all got iPhones and other types of mobile devices, and many of these now have GPS in them. So literally, when I do a search on my phone, Google knows where I’m searching from and they’re going to give me results, even if I don’t ask for them. They’ll try to give me results that are within 10 or 15 miles of where I’m standing.
So they know that that’s exactly where I want to find goods and services close to me so registering with Google Maps is another great way, but I would say primarily in terms of writing, and that’s really. My focus is on the writing side of this and creating organic search rank. Adding your address components to your blog and modifying your keywords with your location is one of the most important things you can do.
So how would you work in your address, though you just say, hey, be sure to visit us at at the end of your blog post or yeah yeah. There’s there’s a couple of ways you know and you can get pretty creative with it, but that would be the basic just throwing your contact information along the bottom and important to to maybe mix it up a little bit. Don’t just create a signature stamp and at that every time I would write the information differently as often as you can and and of course, modifying your keywords and also incorporating it into a sentence.
You might say if you’re looking for a hair salon in orem utah, come visit me at my name of shop. So you can incorporate your your city and state and even your zip code right into the content and that’s where it’s important. It’s a good idea to block it down at the bottom, but if you can work it into the content, that’s even more powerful! Okay and how important our comments? You know it becomes like this popularity thing.
People spend so much time writing a blog post and any this has been having to me I’ll write, a blog post and absolutely no one will comment on it, but they’ll say to me, via Facebook or via Twitter or via email, personal email. That was a great black buzzing, like my god, please put that juice over there. You know if that’s a tough one, it’s it’s tough to get people to engage because we’re all busy – and you know, we’ve got things to do, and it’s not always easy to just go and make some comments.
One of the ways you can help kind of prime the pump a little bit is to have a culture of people that you rely on to to get comments. Going so have some friends make some comments? Some might regard that a little bit as cheating. But if you work with a community of people that are that are kind of in it with you, you can generate a conversation and that’s really what you’re trying to do. The other thing is there.
There are a lot of ways to block or kind of restrict comments, and every small restriction you create is one more barrier to getting comments. So a lot of people put CAPTCHAs on their comment window so that I have to type in some strange yeah. You know word to get access to the blog, I’ll, probably avoid it. In fact, I myself I’ve even written comments, and you get to that point. You think I don’t have time or I’ve got to move on right.
So every little barrier you put in place means you’re going to get fewer and fewer comments. You’re. The first part of your question had to do with how important comments are and there’s there’s a kind of a yes and a note to that question comments can be very important because it’s kind of free content right. It’s it’s additional content that goes on your blog and the more content that you have and the more frequent that content is posted.
The more popular your blog will be in the search engines, so comments can be extremely valuable. They are not the end of the world, though there are lots of very popular blogs out there that do not allow comments, so you know that it becomes a moderation issue. In some cases you may not want to do that either. So comments can be extremely powerful, but they are not the end of the world. Okay. So to really look at the effectiveness of your blog or the traffic you’re.
Looking at what to line up Google Analytics or what are you using? I use google analytics it’s free. It’s tied right into Google, I mean as soon as I light as soon as I start up. My google account you know or push a blog into google analytics. Google knows who I am and they’re starting to analyze. My account it’s kind of a window into what google can see about my site and that’s important to me because I like to what Google is thinking right.
I I don’t get. I don’t have a lot of time, so I don’t study my google analytics for hours and hours and try to make modifications every day and that sort of thing there are some people who do and google it analytics will allow you to do that for a free, App, it does just about everything you could ever want. I pay attention to just a few basic things, though, really kind of three things: one is overall traffic.
How am I doing, and if you’re familiar with Google Analytics, you know it gives you a big long chart right up at the top and it shows your traffic, whether it’s going up or down, and you can usually see exactly where the weekends are or things like That so I pay attention to how many people are visiting my site. I also pay attention to where people are visiting from so I have some blogs that are local community blogs and it’s very interesting when I see traffic coming from outside of the state and then I have blogs that are more nationally oriented and it’s very interesting to See where you know which states are more heavily involved and what those aligned with the other thing I look at is what key search terms are bringing people to my site, and I think that’s probably the most important of them all is to understand what content is Bringing people to your site and that’s where you start to refine your search terms and refine your elevator pitch a little bit to match what people are looking for and if I could revisit that first point we made a few minutes ago when you first start, don’t Be afraid to just put a stake in the ground and get moving and pretty soon you’ll you’ll start reading your analytics and you’ll start getting feedback from people and you’ll see where you need to steer your company a little bit to to meet up with the largest Number of customers, or or to meet your goals whatever they are, so you have this blog.
How do you use it for your across-the-board branding like how are you connecting your blog to your social sites to your? If you have a static website? How do you personally recommend decline and to have this be an effective tool? That’s working for you, 24, 7. So a lot of things that you can do there, so I use wordpress wordpress is my favorite blogging software. It’s very easy to install and it’s very robust and is very popular.
The neat thing about wordpress also, is that there are thousands and thousands of plugins that extend the you know the versatility of my blog. Many of those plugins will automatically repost my content to Twitter and Facebook, for instance. So I have a few of those installed so that whenever I put a post up and I hit save it automatically reposts to the favourite places that I wanted to go so then I’ve got my facebook audience seeing my new posts, I’ve got my Twitter audience seeing My new post and I’m taking advantage of those social networks without wasting a lot of time.
Reposting and you know you could literally spend hours and hours taking care of a single blog post or with the right plugins. You can do it all in half an hour. This is some other social things that are important to do, dig and stumble upon are two of my favorite post sharing mechanisms and you’ll see some traffic come from those sites as well, so there you know. Obviously, there are a couple of neat places to repost your content.
There are also mechanisms that are kind of the old standbys, using email, for instance, to re-distribute a blog post, and let people know that i’m still active on a particular blog. So, there’s a lot of things you can do there, but primarily whenever I I use my blog is 10 of my home base. I go there first, that’s where I’m putting my content, so everybody has a home that they can come to that I’m managing and then from there.
I share links out to all the social networks to point people back to the block. Okay. How often do you repost a blog post link on twitter? So if i’m really trying to be active, I might do it four times through the day. If i’m really trying to generate some some activity, you know if it’s an event or something I might do. It may be a few more, but typically I’ll. Do it once or twice and then, if I really want to try to get some attention I’ll, do it three or four times and it all kind of depends on the audience as well? But you don’t want to redo the same one all the time you might want to add a new twist, and maybe even do some experimenting on what kind of headline is attracting the most people.
So typically you’ll add a question right. I’ve posted a new blog out there and I might ask a question as to whether you know what might be in my blog. You know: did you know that saddles are made of leather? No, of course you did, but you might be compelled to visit my website to learn why that’s important. You know as an example a bad one. Maybe I love you period. Ok, so we’ve talked pretty much about all the highlights that I wanted to get to you, because I know that you have you need to go soon.
So I don’t remember if I told you that I wanted you to come up with an assignment for both me and my viewers, an assignment. So what it be. One of the important things about blogging is frequency, especially when you’re dealing with with search engines, but also very important for your readership for your audience. In fact, you kind of caught me earlier today when we were discussing this interview.
You mentioned that one of my blogs didn’t have a post for quite a while now, and you kind of you taught me – and it’s got me thinking about that yeah, oh so frequency is, is probably one of the most important things you can do with a blog. When you start a blog, you really have to commit to doing something with it. Some form of activity at least once a week, if you’re a business blogger once a week is really the minimum.
If you really want to keep your audience attention twice a week, if you are a crazy, rockin news website, you know – and we all know of these there – you can post two or three times a day and, and that is great stuff, but at a minimum once One to two times per week – and that would be my tip verb tip / assignment – is to recommit to a frequency schedule that you can manage. You don’t want your blog to take over your life, but if you want your blog to work for your business, commit to at least once per week for your business blog so that the search engines recognize who you are and your audience doesn’t lose you okay and Should you mix that up, should it be a article blog once and or give you off all written content for yourself it so there’s there’s a yes to both of those.
Whenever I add article to my blog, it has to contain a written explanation. The search engines don’t care about article; they can see that article is there and they recognize that that’s important, but article is really for your reading audience to capture their attention and give them something to read. If you’re, not posting text content on your blog each week, the search engines won’t be finding you with the keyword, strength that you want them to.
So so I would say it’s always text and especially when you post a article, don’t forget to explain the article. It only takes two or three sentences to satisfy the requirement, but you always need to include some text. Okay, and you also offer people the option of listening to your blog posts. Do you record an audio version you make? I do. I have a podcast actually at business, blogger tips, com, and you know it’s it’s less frequent now, but for last year I did one per week and I recorded that using GarageBand here on my mac and there’s pc versions of that too, that you can use to Record your track, convert it to a podcast.
I use a blueberry press to post that up to my blog and yes, I give people the option to listen to my my blog as well, and the neat thing about that. Is there a lot of people that ride trains or bicycles, or you know, commuting to work and they don’t always have access to the internet, but they can download it to their phone, their ipod or whatever, and listen to your blog on the way? So it’s a great way for people to double up on their time on the way to and from somewhere and listen to you while they’re on the go.
Okay. So that’s that’s been a lot of fun yeah! I, like your site, I’ve visited it’s great um, so you’re, let’s just wrap this up by your three most important tips when it comes to blogging. What do you tell your clients from the Gecko these? You must do so it and that’s just going to be kind of a review of what we’ve already talked about. Most important is going to be frequency at least once per week of your business blogger, otherwise, you’re wasting your time to is really relevancy, maintaining focus on a handful of keywords, and I usually tell people to pick three keywords that we’re going to focus on and then To make another list of about 15 that are sort of peripheral keywords, so frequency keywords and localization is really big right now, especially if you’re a brick-and-mortar type shop, that services a region and if you’re in a region, use your city name and don’t be afraid to Use city names from a few other people around you too and I’ll add a fourth really quick and that is linking don’t be afraid to link to and from your competitors or other people’s sites, so that you will be seen as a hub to the community and Not just a dead end, okay and is one of the services that you provide is if someone has a blog and they just want you to look at and tell them what they’re not doing perhaps most effectively.
Is that something that you do you know it’s something I do kind of as a friend? So if anybody has some questions about blogging, I’d be happy to answer them. A lot of the advice that I would give can be found on my podcast site, which is business, bloggers, tips com, so there’s some great information up there or send me an email through that site as well. I’d be happy to answer some questions. Okay, thank you.
Carry this is your bubbles. Thank you so much for joining me. You know what there’s a lot of fun and good to see you again.
Now This is a local business, So it doesn’t matter if you’re a real estate agent, chiropractor, Dennis local restaurant local gym really the strategy all works the same way. So this is Kathy right here. Kathy is a real estate agent that I’ve worked with in the past and she’s based out of Southern California, And this right here is her Facebook page and then we’ve got her website right here And then I just pulled up a simple.
This is not her actual Landing page right here. I didn’t go into her account and go get that, but you can see like kind of the idea here. So this is where we would be running the Facebook ads to go. Send him to this type of an opt-in page and we’ve got. I mean, Obviously, a number of different opt-ins and landing pages that we can go through and offer on the lead magnets, But those are kind of her assets right.
She got the website. You got her. Facebook page – and I don’t honestly, don’t even know how many followers she has she’s got about 200 people and so He’d go through. Let’s see if she’s got any articles, I honestly did not even checked so she’s got some articles. You can see 272 people view that 151 1.3 thousand Some are more popular than others, But so, okay, So that’s some good data to go through and start out in a workplace.
We’ve got Facebook page We’ve got some article views. We’ve got some page engagement people. We probably have people that have visited her website over here. You can see, she’s got her Facebook pixel all there and tracking Okay and then we’ve got the Listing leads or you’ve got the the lead magnet right here. Okay, So let’s just go to the drawing board over here And let’s map this out. So if we grab the pen so we’re going to be sending people to This initial Landing page cave because remember we don’t want to send.
If we’re running Facebook Ads, We don’t want to be signing in to our main website. We don’t want to be sending them to our blog anywhere else. We want to send them to a simple lead capture, page with a lead magnet with an offer That we can go through and grab their contact information, So their name phone number and email address now. Initially, because she’s not completely brand new Kathy has some assets that we can go through work with, so we can go through and create custom Audiences.
So we can go and we’ll run a Facebook ad right here. Okay right We’re on a Facebook ad and we’re sending people to that landing page to this one right here: Let’s just map out She’s got her website visitors. So anyone this visitor web site She’s got that Facebook pixel on there, so she can go through and retarget. Those people She’s now got people that have engaged with her page, So page engagement, okay.
So that means if she’s made a post anyone this light commented or Follows her on Facebook or anything like that, And then she also has the article views right And then I think that’s probably about it for right now, Oh and then, if there’s anyone that does You know hit this landing page, but doesn’t opt-in. We can set up a little retargeting ad right here To get them coming back up here, Okay, which these ones up here – They’re, not necessarily a retargeting ad, because they haven’t necessarily seen this Facebook post already or this Facebook ad, and they haven’t already gone to this Landing page where, Whereas, if they’ve already seen this added they’ve already gotten this landing page at that point, They this would be a retarding ad showing to those specific people All right.
So now we come over here. This is going to be more of that warm audience. Slash that tier Two okay, So now she comes over here, She gets them on her email list and her ideal Situation is to go through and get them to book an appointment with her Okay. So now what she’s doing is going through she’s getting the lead? The contact information, their name phone and email. So if we come over here to this landing page, they hit give me the list We’re getting their name, email and phone number.
So then she can go through call them up right away and You know get get an appointment schedule and then what we’re also doing is we’re setting them We’re putting them into a follow-up email Sequence right here. That is then getting them with a real estate agent. Right, a real estate agent or a dentist or a chiropractor any other, these little local business owners You’re not necessarily selling something to online.
So the whole goal Is to come over here and your sales mechanism is to get an appointment scheduled because with her she’s either helping people buy a home or Go through and sell their home list their home. So she can go through and sell to help him sell it right. So now we’re going to be following up with Emails, okay And then also what I like to do is follow up with SMS as well, Okay, which the nice thing about the Arsenal system which she uses.
It’s all integrated in there, So she’s got email, SMS and then even Facebook Messenger. So we’ll do Facebook Messenger right there. Okay! So now We’re at this point where we’ve got all these people: Okay, so we’re initially targeting that this small audience of people who visit our website. Okay, that custom audience people that have engaged with their Facebook, page people that have viewed her article, We’re targeting that that warm slash that tier-2 and then also part of this, is any existing existing clients and existing Leads.
Okay. Now, because, when you’re running a local business, especially if you’re in a smaller town now Kathy She’s in Southern California, So she actually has a pretty big area of pretty big community. But with this audience right here you can be spending literally like five to ten dollars per day and Hitting this whole entire audience Right, because you don’t really need much more than that, because there’s probably not going to be.
You know Millions of people that audience is probably just going to be thousands or even tens to tens of tens of thousands right so going through, hitting that up and setting these all here where we should, because this is all this low-hanging fruit, beginning pretty dang good Results and then having the retargeting ads, Collect anyone that hits this landing page. Let’s say this landing page converts at twenty five percent, So out of a hundred people, twenty five become leads, and out of those 175 do not so we’re now retargeting the seventy-five right here.
Okay, but then we go through and we’re getting people to go and discuss an appointment and out of the twenty five leads. Maybe let’s say five skills appointments? Okay, so then that means that there are 20 that we can go through and not only send emails to Send. Also text messages also send Facebook messages, but then we can also spend let’s say $ 1 a day, Reminding them to go back and set an appointment up with Kathy okay or with your dentist or with the you know, If you’re marking agency, with with your sales Guy or you, if you’re the sales person right, So this is really the simple setup right here And then, when you went to go, you want to go really scale up then guys this landing page right here It could be for whatever offer It could be.
A number of offers for a chiropractor, It could be a free massage. It could be a free consultation getting in for a desk. It can be free teeth, whitening for real estate, for example right here. It’s getting a list of homes under $ 300,000 for $ 500,000 or whatever The number is, it could be Hey. You know, we’ve got this listing, like maybe you’re, promoting this listing and you’re trying to get it sold.
So you say: hey get up the price pictures and Address of this property just put in your contact information, So it could be a number of different things and then, when we go through and we want to scale this up, Okay, we went to the wrong page. We want to go through and scale this up. We now we’re going to hit our look-alike audiences, So our 1 % look like audiences of our. Ideally, if you have a hundred plus past clients, okay, Then you want to use one percent, look like audience of them or one percent.
Look like a Belize or article views, page engagement or website visitors, and then this is going to get us a two million person audience and Obviously, if you’re running a local business, If you’re just targeting people specifically in that business. Obviously, it’s going to be a lot smaller than the two million, But then we are now sending them to This same landing page as well, And then you’ve got all of the Machine already set up on the back end.
So they go through, 25 percent of the people are going to actually opt in, so the other 75 % are going to be hit up with this retargeting ad And then of the 25 %. They’ve opted in we’re going to invite them to schedule an appointment of those 25. What is that 5 out of 25? Is that, like 20 %, something like that Yeah? I think 20 % are going to actually schedule an appointment. So the other 80 % Right here are going to be hit with another retarding ad.
But it’s not going to be this same retargeting ad, because we’ve already excluded them, Okay, which we’ve covered that in in previous modules, we excluded them because we already know we had their contact information But we’re just pushing them along To the next step. Okay, so if they viewed our website or article or something like that, We’re pushing them to opt in they’ve already opted in we’re pushing them to schedule.
Appointment, They’ve already scheduled an appointment, We’re pushing them to actually, like you know, list their home with us or buy their home with us, or something like that and then so. The goal is to get them on this appointment and then see. Are they looking to buy? Are they looking to sell and whatever they’re looking to do and then once you go through and get a buyer or a seller, Then with both of these, especially in the real estate market and if you’re in any other market? Really It’s the same type of thing, Then we’re going to go through and we’re going to look for Referrals from those people because obviously they went through and they just bought a house.
It’s not like they’re going to buy a house anytime soon in the next six months or even a year, even probably a couple of years, But you can say like hey, okay, Do you know anyone else looking to buy a home in this area, but also, if They’re looking to sell their home and you go through and you sell their home, So you make some money on that and then you can go help them Buy a home. So you kind of like double up on that.
So that’s that’s something! That’s really nice there! So a lot of times we’ve had real estate agents They go through and they run an ad to help someone buy a home and so because they know they’re looking to buy a home They like. Well, you don’t need the other home. So, let’s hope you sell that other home, And so you kind of can double-dip like that. So that’s obviously the real estate business. But if you look at any other business same type of thing, If you’re a dentist, you get them in with free teeth.
Whitening up here: Okay: where is it up here? Free, teeth, whitening and Then once they come in set an appointment. You get them in the seat right here and then it’s not like buyer or seller, but it’s like okay, a teeth, cleaning, a root canal or Whatever the different products, and offers that they have to offer so same thing with the chiropractor Of a gym like if You’re going through instead of Fitness, you got nutritional plans, You can break down workout plans, private coaching, just a normal, typical membership, There’s a lot of different things, but the nice thing is with this process: you can now market to them with email can market with them.
Sms with Facebook, Messenger and all of these retarding ads, which, with those retargeting ads, you can hit them up on Instagram and on Facebook, So you’re, basically omnipresent in all of these different locations. Okay, So anyway, guys, if you guys have any questions specifically to this case study and how this works for a local business Go ahead post a question in the Facebook group that this is exactly where I would go through and start.
Obviously, if you guys do not have an existing business and you don’t have any website visitors, article views or anything like that, The first thing I would do is shoot a article talking about your products or services post that on Facebook Put some money behind it. Maybe five to ten bucks a day get a few thousand people Viewing that article and then start the same process go and set up in facebook ad targeting only those people that viewed the article Okay get them to a landing page with your offer.
And then you can initially create a one percent. Look like audience off of those Video viewers to get them to your landing page as well, And then once you’ve, gotten 100 plus leads Create a custom audience of all your leads and create a look like audience of those leads, And then once you scale up and You’ve got, you know, Let’s say a thousand leads, and now you’ve got a hundred customers at this point, then you go.
The same thing create a custom audience of those 100 customers create a 1 % look-alike audience of those customers, and You continue to grow like that. So, anyway, once again post your questions, comments whatever in the facebook group and with that said guys, I will see you in the next
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What’s a key word, my best explanation of what a key word is a key word can either be a single word or most commonly a string of words or Freight. A phrase for example, that the search bots will travel through your website and determine exactly what your content is all about. What’s a search bot, a search bot is a tool used by the search engines.
For example the Google bot the Bing bot the Yahoo slur. Those are all BOTS sent out by those companies to determine exactly what content and and to collect and gather data from our websites to determine exactly where they should be placed in these search engines. So the search engines compiled all of this data and they take these keywords and and they’ll determine exactly what keywords your website might rank for now.
Believe me, it’s a lot more complicated than how they determine which websites will rank where based solely on keywords. There’s many more factors that go into it. In fact, there’s over 200 known factors involved in the algorithm at Google anyways to determine exactly where your website will rank in search. Ok right back to keywords, so we know already that a keyword can either be a single word or a phrase, and we know that search BOTS use those keywords to help determine exactly what your website is about.
The third thing about keywords is some keywords: can be much more competitive than others to rank for so what determines, if a a word is competitive, obviously supply and demand? How many people are trying to rank their websites or or competing for that popular keyword or a phrase? So for an example: if we were to take the term lawyer, let’s say we’re in the city of Orlando Florida and we have a law firm and we want to write our law firm for the term lawyer, probably very competitive.
It’s actually one of the toughest niches to write for it’s a highly competitive, very expensive niche to rank for if you’re, a lawyer, sorry lawyers, you guys do make lots of money, though so lawyer is a broad term that we want to rank for as opposed to Family law, which is more of a niche down, subject we’re probably not as much competition if you were just ranking for lawyer. So if we want to narrow it down a little more, we could go family law or business law.
So those are keywords and then, as we niche them down, you would have less competition, so less competition means easier to rank for right. So it’s something to take into consideration now. I do not want you to think okay. Well, we’re just going to avoid all the general terms, because we’ll never have a chance of ranking for them. For the most part, that’s true. There’s established large websites with lots of Link’s pointing to them that have been around for years and it’s tough to overwrite those kind of websites with popular keywords.
But that’s not necessarily true of me. If they are ranking for popular keywords, that pie, we’ll call it a pie, is a very large pie that has a ton of searches per month. For that keyword and a chance, even getting a sliver of that pie is still quite good, as opposed to going for the small little pie of, say, family law vs. Lawyer. You could rank higher, say on page one for a family law as opposed to page three.
For the term lawyer, if you’re a lawyer in Orlando and just coming up with a new website, okay, so what if I told you, there was actually a way that we could determine or measure how. Often a certain keyword or phrase was searched for monthly. So in our example, we use the term lawyer in the city of Orlando or also family law. So if we compare those two and I plug it in to my free Google Keyword planner tool, I tells me that the term lawyer is searched for five hundred ninety times a month in the city of Orlando versus a hundred and forty times a month.
For the term family law, so approximately you know four times more popularly. The broad term lawyer is so, but still family law at one hundred and forty searches per month is still a valuable term that we could try and rank for. So how do you get that access to that free tool? I’ll show you right now I’ll walk you through how you can sign up for the free Google search tool and just follow along okay, so beings we’ve signed up for a gmail account or also, if you already have one in the previous module in step one.
We can step our sorry. We can skip that step and just simply when you’re logged into your Gmail account open up another tab and simply make you do a search for Google Adwords. Okay. So up top here we have Google AdWords pay-per-click online advertising. Now we want to simply sign up and create a Google AdWords account doesn’t mean you’re going to do any advertising and they have this free tool. The keyword planner tool within the Google Adwords so I’ll, simply click on start now.
Okay, once you land on this page, it’s very important to get this point here, we’re simply going to click on skip the guided setup and that will allow us to get to the keyword planner tool much easier than if we, if we have to go through the Whole setup process, basically it’s asking for your website and your email address and and we’ll get to that later on in module 3. If you are interested in setting up google adwords completely so for right now, we’re just simply going to click on skip the guided setup, and now it’s simply going to ask you for your email address, select which country you’re from and I’m just simply going to select Canada, most, you will probably be in the US, select your time zone and then your currency.
Now your time zone and currency cannot be changed once you set those up so make sure you set them up correctly. Just quickly enter my email address here. This is a demonstration account, so actually this email address will be gone after. I create this article so do not try and get all of me there and then we simply click on save and continue now here it will ask us to enter our Google account so we’ll click on next they’ve already pre-loaded, the email and it’ll ask you for The password once you’ve entered your password click on sign in and then it asks about a having some recovery stuff.
We’re not going to worry about that right. Now, click on done, you can add a backup phone number if you want or a recovery email again. This is just a temporary account for demonstration purposes, so I haven’t set those ax and then you will land at this page and you’ll notice a whole bunch of options. You can click on. We will look at more of those in more depth in module 3, but for right now all we’re interested in is at the top here, where it says, tools simply click on tools, then the drop-down appears and what you’re looking for is the Keyword planner.
So click on keyword, planner and here it says, find new keywords and get search volume data. So we want to search for new keywords using a phrase website or category or get search volume, data and trends and here’s another option that we can get new keywords. So we’re just going to simply select this. This middle one here get search volume, data and trends. So click on that and the first thing it says, is enter keywords so I’ll just simply type in lawyer and the next thing we wanted to under targeting right now.
It’s has all locations, so this is would give us the results for the entire world. We want to narrow that down so I’ll, just simply: click on that little pencil or pin there and where it says, enter a location to target I mean you could enter United States. You could enter Canada if you’re, you know a global audience or most likely. You are a local business and want to enter your city, or maybe even state or depending on the size of the service area.
You service so right now, I’m just going to put in Orlando so right up here, Orlando Florida, United States and I will click on save and so right now I’ve got one keyword in here lawyer, we’re searching in the City of Orlando USA, and I want to Get the search volume, so click on get search, volume and right now average monthly search for all ideas. It shows up 100 to 1000, so it gives you a range now that number I got earlier.
My Google AdWords account that I have is a an AdWords account. That’s had thousands almost you know tens of thousands of dollars through it lots of advertising. It’s it’s many years old and beings. I’m a longtime customer of Google. I get a little more accurate picture of data, so here you can see. There’s a big range. There might be 100 to 1000 monthly searches so for new years users of Google AdWords.
Until you build up a, I don’t know a history with with Google. You do not have access to dead, accurate numbers like I do so anyways. This is the tool that gives you an idea, at least what that search volume is so let’s say we wanted to be beings. This is not that accurate. Maybe we could change Orlando, let’s go and change this to United States, oops. So we’ll add the country of United States and I’ll just simply remove Orlando, so click on remove here and then click on save.
So now we have 100,000 to 1 million. The reason I did that so, each month, average monthly searches for the term lawyer in the United States is anywhere from 100,000 to 1 million. So it gives us a little more of an idea in the whole country what kind of search volume that is, let’s add another term here, so I’m going to simply put a comma space and my next term will be family law and over here I’ll click on Get search volume, so we know if we’re comparing the two okay.
Obviously family law gets lower search volume than lawyer, so anyways. It can give us an idea of the search volumes if you just start typing, in related keywords, to get an idea how popular those words are and if you should be including them on your website and and which ones are the other most popular, also you’ll notice. Over the to the side, here, it’s got suggested bid. If you are actually running ads now lawyer happens to be one of the most expensive pay-per-click advertising categories.
I guess you would call it and you know eight and a half dollars seventeen dollars, twenty seven cents. For somebody in your city clicking on family law, if you’re a lawyer trying to gain clients, anyways just gives you an idea of this of the AdWords tool and how we can use it to determine search volume of certain keywords related to your website. Okay, I need to show you another feature of the Google Keyword planner so to get to this page again.
Just simply, you would click on tools up top here and go down to keyword, planner, and that would bring you once again right to this page. Here will be where we have the three options so the first time we went through the middle option. This time we will select on the top option here, search for new keywords using a phrase website or a category, so click on that this pops down this time. You know for your small business.
You can type in whatever, let’s say your lawn care business type in lawn care, your a painting, business type in painting, services or painting beings. We worked with a lawyer before I’m just going to punch in family law here and then, if you wanted you could you know if you had a product category, if you wanted to niche this down, you could enter a few things here or competitors website, even if He wanted to or your website and it will crawl your website or your competitors website and give you some keyword, ideas but anyways we’ll stick with this.
We we have a keyword of our key phrase of family law. Again, we have Orlando here selected and at the bottom we will so we’ll click on get ideas. Now, what its going to do is spit out a whole bunch of terms related to family law that you could perhaps target and you’ll notice. In my account, I have a much more accurate data here, collection of how many searches per month and you’ll notice in the second column here competition, you know how competitive is it to rank for that or to advertise more specifically to advertise for those terms, so you’ll See here you know, beings were in family law, you’ll see divorce in the City of Orlando, roughly three hundred and ninety times a month.
That term is search divorce lawyers would be an excellent phrase to rank for. If you were a lawyer in the city of Orlando 170 searches per month, obviously it’s high competition. Somebody typing in divorce, lawyers is looking for a divorce lawyer. Obviously, and chances are if they hire your services as a lawyer, it’s you know the thousands and thousands of dollars. You could end up billing your client and that’s why over you’re here, you can see and again these aren’t Canadian dollars, not US dollars, twenty dollars and seventy one cents for that click.
That’s crazy! A lot of businesses that I advertise for again. You know landscaping or whatnot one two dollars for a click. This is just a general guide. I mean it doesn’t mean every click that you get if, if you’re a divorce lawyer in Orlando advertising, for that term doesn’t mean you’re going to pay $ 21, it might only be $ 4 or $ 5. This is just a guy died. It’s not anything! You know exact science to go by so anyways just going down here.
We can click up top here and just like Excel. We can arrange all the terms in ascending or descending order, so child supports a huge one here, right, search for or 5,400 times, but the term child support. If you’re looking you’re a lawyer and you’re trying to gain clients, is that really a term that you think will land you paying clients? That’s why it’s only you know four dollars and 24 cents a click here.
That’s why it’s low competition, it’s probably not going to generate people, it’s not at the end of that sales, funnel where people have their credit card out and they’re. Looking for that term and trying to hire your services lawyer 590 times a month attorney 480, so it just gives you an idea. You know what people are typing in in your business. So let’s change this to painting your painting business.
So now I wasn’t too accurate here. I guess abstract art, acrylic paint, paintings spray paint, probably not the best one, how about how about lawn care and we type in lawn care. You can see landscaping, lawn service, landscaping, ideas if you look at these high ones. Those are the ones. No, that’s not a good example lawn mowers, not something if you’re a landscaping company you’re not wanting to put in the term lawn more on your website.
People are not looking for landscaping services when they’re typing in lawn mower. They would be looking for lawn service. I mean that they’re. Looking for your for your services again here, you can see that’s a seven dollar and twenty two cent click lawn care services, Wow almost twelve dollars, that’s showing again, it’s not searched a whole lot. Seventy times a month, these are just general guidelines by the way they’re, not exact dead-on, so one maintenance, 7oa, so yeah lawn lawn care can be an expensive category as well, just showing you basically in the city of Atlanta.
How competitive is now that can change from city to city depending again on supply and demand? How many people are competing for those keywords, so that’s the Google Keyword planner tool and again, that is just looking for giving you keyword, ideas to use on your website. So what exactly do you do with those keywords, once you have a list of popular keywords? That’s great your your a lawn care service here or landscaper, and you say, yeah okay, lawn service looks like a you know, really good one that I need on my website.
People are in the you know, looking for those services lawn care services just start writing all those key ones down that you think people would be typing in lawn. Maintenance is another good one yeah. I know it’s only search fifty times, but those are the people at the end of the sales funnel looking for your services write all those down and what do you do with them? Well, let’s have a look, let’s type in Orlando family-law whoops, and I really can’t spell here: can I so Orlando family law and let’s see what comes up so you’ll notice in this in the results? Look at this one, two, three four ads at the top.
This map thingy, which will go in more detail in module four, if you want to figure out how to get your business on the map here, you look, you’ll see different attorneys and you know on these little red dots here that are listed. The large dots are these ones that are the top three here I’ll show. You we’ll discuss that as well how to get your business on the map, so we go down. Ok, now we’re into the actual organic as they call them or organic.
Is you know, unpaid for we’re not paying for ads? These are the firms that are ranking at the top for the term family law. So what? Let’s figure out? Why are they ranking for the term family law, so I’ll click on the number one result? Let’s have a look at their website, okay, so this one he has the word family and the title up here again family. Here, it’s quite prevalent right at the very top. One of the first things you can click on is family law he’s ranking for the term.
He I should say he or she, or this firm is ranking for the term family law. I mean kudos to the web designer, whoever designed this website they ranked first in a large city for a very competitive term, and – and these are you know again right here – the term family law. So those search bots that I was talking about earlier – they go through. They crawl this site; they they see the term family law.
Okay, this this page must be about family law. Now I want to give you one caveat here: one warning: do not go and stuff your web page with the term family law. If you’re a lawyer, saying okay tom says, I need to you, know, put this keyword in here a bunch of times and then I’ll rank for it. That’s no! No, please do not do that, make it as natural as possible right, you’re content with natural flow and include that keyword.
You know two or three times, maybe in a clickable link, if that’s an important term, that you’re actually trying to rank for and that’s it do not overdo it. If you overdo it, you’re going to get yourself a penalty, the again the search engines are brilliantly smart. They’re there they will pick that up, they will say okay, this particular page has you know 300 words and the keyword has been used seven times.
That’s. You know obviously way too much they’re trying to game the system, and we will assess a penalty to this webpage. Just letting you know you know there are rules against it, so don’t get yourself a penalty just make it look. Naturally you know I would be you know with this many words. Three four: the most times I would use family law, but I think they’ve gotten away with maybe five times here.
So let’s go back again. This is you know. What do you do with these keywords? Look at that, so they ranked number one and two in a large city kudos to them. Excellent. Let’s have a look at this one. So again, the term is family law, their websites taking a little long to load but they’ve ranked fairly well in a large city. Here we go family law right at the top, so good for you, Donna, okay, again family law at the top here in a drop-down menu, family and right, family law here and family law and again another that’s just their menu family.
A lot at the bottom, just showing you what keywords do and why certain websites get ranked for certain terms of certain keywords, because they actually use it in their content wisely. They don’t overuse it they and it and again, like I say, there’s 200 different variables that go into deciding why a web shuts website should rank highly, and this particular website is not only using the keywords, but it’s an attractive website.
It’s it’s. It probably has great metrics from Google there they’re picking up that people are spending. You know a fair amount of time on the website they’re clicking through, and those send signals back to Google that that website is valuable for people looking for the term family law. So they rank it high every every new website. I find if you come up with a new website. It’s going to be you know, given a chance, Google says: ok, yeah your new.
If, if you submit it, you have to submit it first of all, ok and I’ll I’ll show you how to submit it later. That’s that comes in in later how you can, in module 3, how you can submit your website in order for Google to actually yeah crawl. It say: hey, Google, I’m over here, come check. My website out it’ll, give your website a shot and you’ll notice early on all of a sudden, maybe not necessarily the first week, the second week or even the first month.
Your website will appear, but then all of a sudden, it will be there up near the top for certain keywords and it will grade your website. Basically, it’s giving you a shot, saying: ok, you’re new, let’s see how you make out and people will have an opportunity. There’ll be a few people, just you know, showing in the search results. Oh there’s there’s your website, they’ll click on it and and it’s basically a rating.
You know how long did they spend on that website? Did they like bounce right back to they say uh? This isn’t a very good website, or it’s taking too long to load. Forget it, I’m hitting the back button button and checking out the next search results. If they’re spending lots of time on your website, that’s good for you! Google will give you some more time to evaluate your site and see if it deserves to be on the first page or you know in the top near the top of the rankings.
That’s just my experience, my gut feeling. That’s that’s from my experience. What actually happens? Okay, so we we know about keywords. We know how to find keywords: I’ve, given you an idea how you should use them in your site. Now, let’s say you have, you know four different main services, let’s say you’re a landscaping company and you want to rank for the term lawn care. You want to rank for the term snow removal.
You want to rank for the term landscaping. The those are all different keywords, so should you have one page with all those different keywords on it and then it gets kind of confusing. I find, if you focus you know to like snow removal, for example, would have its own page, and you would talk about some. Your snow removal services and your value to the customer and your snow removal quote form there and, and that would be the most effective way for Google to say.
Okay, this page is about snow removal and that’s in the search results we’re going to serve that up. For people looking for the term snow removal, surfaces of snow plowing, you get the point, but if it has snow removal, landscaping lawn care all on the same site. Google says okay yeah. It has snow removal on there. But it’s got these other things and it’s probably going to waste. You know the visitors time and they’re they’re not going to spend as much time on it necessarily so we’re not going to rank it as high.
That’s again, that’s my personal experience, try and focus if you have different services and within your business, dedicate a page to each that’s my my personal tip when you’re when you’re making your website so anyways moving on I’ve shown you what you can do with these keywords. Again, these keywords also come into play when you’re doing any pay-per-click advertising very important, that you have those keywords within your content.
If you’re trying to market your business in these ads up here, okay, so family law, firm family law, family law, those are right in the title – the term family law and this this ad. Here, I’m just going to guess: I’m just trying to see if the term family law is in it, I’m going to guess that this particular ad they’re playing a lot more just because they don’t actually have the term family law in it.
When we did the search for family law, so these three ads do and – and that’s important I’ll, show you and I’ll cover that in module 3. Why you want to include those keywords in your content and also in your ads, so moving on I’ll show you another tool. Uber suggests: okay, uber suggests dot, IO ubersuggest dot, IO, just a quick. You know tidbit here, dot IO. I said what what say. Oh, you know you usually have dot-com dot CA.
That’s Indian Ocean anyways. Just for those that want to know so uber suggests is a is a keyword idea, generating tool. So, let’s type in the term lawn care, and then we just simply you can select. You know on the web or what is this for we’ll leave it on the web. Yeah English select your language click on suggest, and it’s going to come up with a bunch of keyword, ideas for us, okay, so a long Caroline care service, lawn care tips, lawn care near me.
Lawn care companies, ok lawn care business. These are not necessarily keywords that you would find on the Google Keyword planner tool, and it just gives you some more ideas when generating keywords. Okay, my final tool that I want to explain to you a process that I to use that’s often very effective, is the good old-fashioned, noggin right, so try and use you know, put all your marketing cap and think put yourself in your customers, shoes.
You know your business best and try to imagine what kind of key terms would your customers be typing into the search bar in order to search for your business, your services, your product. So, let’s you know, you grab a pen, you grab a piece of paper and you you just start coming up with those a list of those key terms. Now keep in mind. Every excellent marketer will be using those tools that I just showed you and they’ll have access to those same words and phrases key words that you are also competing for.
So I like to be I like to try me unique, try to be different, separate yourself and come up with unique phrases. Sometimes they flop sometimes they’re that golden nugget that sets you apart. So lets. You know, okay, let’s, let’s pretend I’m going to pretend. I don’t know landscaping company and I’m just going to put on my marketing hat close my eyes and just start thinking of what I would type in if I was looking for some kind of services by a landscaping company.
So it goes lawncare’ lawn care, lens cake and company. No, no, keep in mind when you’re typing these in in your own city. The results that come up luckily search engines are smart enough to did sector okay, this person’s looking for a service, something that’s offered locally. So you’re not going to get results for if you’re living in New York you’re not going to get results for a Boston landscaping company on the first page, you’re going to get local results around wherever you are so ok, let’s continue on one care quotes.
Somebody looking for you know, they’re deep in the sales funnel they’re looking for they’ve got their credit card out, they’re looking for services right away, just start, making a list write those down and try implementing those and putting some of those into the keyword planner tool, see If they come up see what kind of volume they have and if you want to implement those put, those on your website give them a try.
Okay, so that almost concludes the second module on keywords. If you’re looking for some bonus material would like to see some of the resources that I use you’re, more than welcome. I have them listed on my website at Tong telecom, slash traffic, so type in your URL bar Tom Telecom, slash traffic and you’ll, see the all four modules will be listed. There you’ll have an opportunity to go through each and you’ll see at the bottom.
I I will list some resources that I would use for keyword, research, some of the experts in the industry, some of the people that I look up to and follow and you can check their stuff out too. One thing I will mention shameless plug here. If keyword, research is not something you’re interested in, I get it you’re busy, you’re a business owner, you’re an entrepreneur – and you say: hey Tom, I you know this is great stuff, but I’ve got no time for this and you would like me to hire me for Right now currently have a $ 99 package.
If you go to Tom Telecom and look under services, I will personally there’s a form for you to fill out I’ll, get to know about your business and your customers in your geographical location. I will do some research and give you the top ten words that you should be targeting and anyways. You can check that up. As always, I encourage you to LIKE and subscribe. If you found this content and the least bit helpful are valuable.
I it really helps me with my audience to help grow. My audience get the word out there and I appreciate it if you take the time to hit that thumbs up button below this article or more importantly, subscribe, and you can get more great content. Lots of. I constantly produce lots of great free information liking this article to help you grow your business, so please subscribe. Ok, I also encourage comments in the comment section below.
If you should have any questions, I’m more than happy to answer them and just to get the ball rolling, I’m going to ask you a question and if you wouldn’t mind leaving a response below my question is to you: did you take keywords into consideration when you Designed your website or had your website design. Okay. That concludes module. 2. I hope you enjoyed it and I encourage you to move on to module 3, where we will learn all about pay-per-click advertising to me, the most effective tool in try and attracting targeted traffic to your small business website Bar None.
This is the best tool right now in 2016 and beyond. This is basically where you want to be playing and have a good grasp of how it works.
The small business marketing minute show the show that gives you the busy small business owner, simple, affordable and practical tips to grow your business and, of course, teaches you. The famous duct tape marketing system have some breaking news to report this week from the very key key and technical world of search engine, optimization, which I know is a topic that you all absolutely love being sarcastic.
Of course here. I know that the typical local small business owner does not want to think at all about search engine optimization, but unfortunately this is an area where what you don’t know can in fact hurt you – and this is the case with the news I have to report this Week last week, Google started rolling out a change that could potentially have some significant impact on some of you out there.
Most of you are probably familiar with the concept of when you, when you do a search for a local business. Some of the results that will come up on page one of the search results will be the map listings for the google maps, so you’ll see a list of businesses and you’ll have little icon next to them. That says, ABCD and E and so on and it well let some information about the business like their name and phone number, and if that business has any ratings, it will show their star rating there and the reviews and number of reviews and all that.
So in the world of SEO that we call these listings, that’s the seven pack, because there’s usually about five to seven businesses listed there well, starting last week that has changed. Google is now only going to list three businesses in that maps listing section. So what that means is that if your business was not in the top three of the listings that showed up in that seven pack, it won’t show up anymore now.
This doesn’t affect the rest of the organic listings for page one of the search results. So if the keyword that people were searching for is something that you show up for elsewhere on page one, that will still be there, but you just won’t be in the maps listing section unless you’re in that top three. So how do you get in the top? Three: well: it’s not really public information as part of Google’s super-secret algorithm, but some things that we know contribute to.
It are having lots of positive ratings and reviews on Google and having your Google+ page setup and claimed, and things like that. So definitely make sure you’re on top of those things now, along with the reduction of the maps listing from seven businesses to three businesses, there were a few other changes made as well. For one thing, the exact address of the business works removed from that first screen that you can see in the actual search results.
The phone numbers remove from that area, links to your Google+ page or remove from that area, and all this information is still available. But people have to actually click the listing, so one of those three businesses that’s listed in the Maps listening section actually have to click the listing in order to get all that additional information. It’s not entirely clear why Google is doing this in what direction they’re going here.
I’ve heard some people hypothesized that this might be a move towards making the maps listing a paid listing, in other words, where businesses might have to pay to show up in that maps. Listing section so maybe they’d be three businesses that are available for free and then additional businesses. If they’re not in that top three, maybe they have to pay to be there. That’s just a theory, I’m not sure if I agree with that theory or not, but it is a possibility.
So this is just something to keep an eye on and see how it starts affecting businesses. But the bottom line is that things change very quickly in the world of search engine optimization and, like I said at the top of the podcast, it is a situation, unfortunately we’re what you don’t know can hurt you and foremost local business owners there. Never even going to know that they’re being hurt so last spring when google rolled out the change to the algorithm that caused web sites that aren’t mobile friendly to get bumped way down in the search results.
That’s another great example of something like this, where a business might all of a sudden just stop getting as many leads from their website and not really know why. This is another thing that could lead to that kind of situation. So if you don’t have someone in your business, that’s at least keeping their ear to the ground and paying attention to things that are developing in the world of search engine optimization.
You really should be outsourcing that to someone in some capacity just so that you at least know what’s going on and can have someone taking care of that area of your business, because it’s just so so important these days to especially for a local business to be Able to be found in local search results for people who are searching for your type of business. So that’s all I’ve got for this week’s episode be sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.
So you get next episode as soon as it’s published, and I will see you next week. Are you looking for a step-by-step manual that teaches you how to create a lead generation system for your local business? If so, my new book entitled the small business owners guide to local lead generation might be the perfect resource for you. It teaches you about everything from direct mail and referral, marketing to website design and search engine optimization and much more, and it’s been endorsed by numerous top small business experts, including BNI founder dr.
Ivan meissner in freshbooks. Ceo mike mcdermott pick up your copy today at local lead gen book
If you own or manage a small business I’d like you to ask yourself following five questions. First, do you have trouble differentiating your business from your competition? Do you ever find yourself competing based on price alone, because of that fact second, do you ever feel like you’re moving from one marketing tactic to the next, without any strategy tying them together? Do you find it difficult to track the return on investment from the money you spend on marketing and advertising? Do you have trouble generating enough leads for your business or converting the leads you get into customers? Finally, when you examine all of the elements of your business’s online marketing, such as your website, social media presence, search engine, optimization email, marketing and online advertising, do you find that some of those elements are lacking or even non-existent? If you answered yes to any of these questions, your company might benefit from the unique marketing method I teach to small business owners.
The method is called duct tape, marketing because just like duct tape, it’s simple, affordable and most of all practical. This method has been used by thousands of small businesses all over the world, including my own, to great effect. In fact, it was so effective at growing my business that I decided to join the network of authorized duct tape, marketing consultant, so I could teach it to other business owners.
So what is the duct tape? Marketing method? It’s basically a seven step process for your business. That starts with the development of a marketing strategy then takes a systematic approach to developing a set of tactics that serve that strategy. The process addresses every element required in a well-run marketing system, including lead generation, lead conversion. In all the online marketing elements I mentioned previously, once a business completes, the seven step process will know exactly what their ideal customer looks like and where to find them.
They’ll know what their customers value about them that makes them different from the competition will know what marketing tactics to use to get the best return on investment and they’ll even have a marketing calendar so that they’ll know what tasks need to be done on a daily Weekly and monthly basis to run their new marketing system now, if this approach to marketing sounds like something that might benefit your business, here’s what I want you to do: first download and read our to ebooks about the seven steps to small business marketing success and creating A total online presence for your business then come back to our website and complete a signature brand audit, which is basically a questionnaire that allows us to evaluate your marketing as it stands right now, once you do that I’ll schedule, a free, 30 minute session with you To help you think, through how you can apply some of the duct tape marketing principles to your business.
This is not a sales presentation, there’s no obligation on your part whatsoever, and I guarantee that you’ll walk away with at least three ideas. You can take action on immediately to improve your marketing. Don’t miss this opportunity to get some valuable feedback about your marketing. Take action right now by downloading those ebooks and completing your signature brand audit or, if you’d like to keep learning stay tuned for the next article.
About the unique way that I define marketing you
Who is helping with your digital business footprint?
You know five or six years ago. It used to be enough just to have a website for your business, and you could treat it almost like an online brochure where you, just you know, put up your five pages about your location and your about Us page and a quick just description of your your Products and and sort of just left it at that that just doesn’t work anymore.
You need to have a living breathing online presence, not just on your website, but on your social media profiles on your blog, your podcast, your review sites, your ratings and review sites, and you want all these to be interacting with your website and with each other, and So that no matter where people go online to look for you you’re, going to show up if your head hasn’t started to explode at some point during this presentation.
This is usually when it happens, and I’m going to warn you. This can be very overwhelming, but the key is just to take it one step at a time and instead of throwing up your hands and I and giving up just to pick one or two things to get started and to take action on them. When I work with people and work with businesses to develop their total online presence, I actually use a year-long action plan to take them from Ground Zero.
All the way through having a complete marketing strategy or online marketing strategy for their business. So I’ll go ahead and share you share with you what that plan looks like, so you can start to use it on your own. The first thing you want to do is set up a what we call a lessening station. In other words, you want to follow other people’s blogs. You want to follow other people’s podcasts or listen to other people’s podcasts start following people on Twitter, and these can be your competitors or customers.
Experts in your industry or all of the above. You also want to start to do some basic keyword, research, in other words, looking into what terms people use when they search for your type of business online and when you get started. That’s really. All you want to do is just set up that listening station and read and observe for a a month or two just see what everybody else is doing. What they’re saying what they’re writing about what their podcasting about step two is to set up your content platform or, what’s also known as a website.
This is going to be the hub of your online presence and what all your the various folks come out of, and the spokes being your social media profiles and the ratings and reviews sites and and all of that, if you’re, not using the wordpress content management system. Right now to manage your website, I would highly recommend taking a good long look at moving your website to WordPress and if you haven’t set up your website yet you’re just getting started with that.
That process I’d highly recommend using WordPress to do that, actually teach it entire a seminar just on WordPress. So it’s it’s not a subject that I can cover really well here, but I will say that it started out as a blogging platform, but it is growing into much much more than that. It is now a very versatile and easy-to-use system for managing a small business website. It’s also a free by the way, at least through the the software is all you have to pay for is the web hosting so take take a good long look at using WordPress for your website.
Once we’ve got your website set up. You want to continue your keyword, research and begin to integrate those keywords into your website, and this process is what we call search engine optimization. It’s also a billion-dollar industry and a subject for a workshop in and of itself, but suffice it to say that there are ways when you set up your website and produce your content, that you can do it in a way that makes your website show up in Search results when, when people are searching for terms related to your industry and that’s something that you need to be doing, the next step in the total online presence action plan is to start doing some email marketing.
This is by far the most cost-effective way for a small business to communicate with with customers and one of the most cost effective marketing tactics that a small business can use. You can literally for twenty to thirty dollars a month, send thousand root, or even tens of thousands of emails to your customers or to prospective customers. You want to make sure you’re doing this legally. There is there’s laws like that: govern email, marketing that fall into that.
The can-spam act, one of the best ways to make sure that you are complying with the law, is to use an email service provider like aweber, constant contact, MailChimp or long list of other quality email service providers. These systems will also allow you to see who’s opening. Your emails, what links they clicked on in your emails at a long list of other analytics that you can use to to tweak and improve your marketing.
These systems also allow you to set up a series of autoresponders so that when someone is added to a particular email list, they automatically get a series of emails based out over time that you only have to write once and then just get sent automatically. So it’s a great time-saving tool after you’ve gotten your email marketing started and only after you’ve gotten your email marketing started. You want to begin to use your social media platforms.
Places like facebook, twitter, linkedin and google+ are where you need to get started. These are the sort of the big four and I would also add YouTube to that. As you might be aware, YouTube is actually owned by google. It is currently the second largest search engine on the internet, so there’s more people searching for things using YouTube, then with search engines like yahoo and being combined, so it’s definitely a place where you want to be showing up once you have your profile set up on These sites and have begun to build your list of followers you want to move on to online advertising and integrate that into your action plan.
Online advertising is by far the most trackable form of advertising that a small business or any type of business can use. You can actually see things like which adds people looked at which ads they, they clicked on. Imagine for a second going to your local newspaper and asking it if you could put an ad in the paper, but only actually pay for it. When somebody read to add the newspaper would laugh in your face, this is this is impossible right, well, online advertising actually does that with pay-per-click advertising.
You don’t pay one penny. Unless somebody actually clicks on the ad and gets to your website, you can define a budget that you want to use. Every month. You can target the ads to certain geographic areas. When we get into facebook advertising, it gets even more detailed and the types of demographics. You can target with your pay-per-click ads for your paper impression ads. In fact, I’ve even heard of people writing ads for facebook that we’re so targeting that only their family members could see them.
So it’s really got some great potential for some very highly targeted and trackable advertising once you’ve tested online advertising and integrated that into your action plan. The last piece of the puzzle is mobile. Marketing. You can do things like develop a mobile app for your business that people can put on their cell phones in some industries that might be more practical than others. But if you get a little creative, I think there’s some great potential there for ways that you can use a mobile app in your business.
We can also think about mobile marketing in terms of SMS messaging or text messaging. This is a great marketing tool for businesses like restaurants or other other businesses that get their customers back in the door on a regular basis. You can use it to send out alerts. Customer service alerts about sales that are going on, or deadlines that are coming up or specials that your customers might want to know about, and people can actually sign up for these alerts if they want to get them and unlike emails, which currently for a good email Campaign well written email campaign, open rates are going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty five to forty percent.
Typically, however, with text messaging rates, the open rates for those are upwards of ninety five percent. So when you stand out a text message, you can almost guarantee that it’s going to get read so this is this: is the online present action plan and again it’s a year-long process, so don’t let it get overwhelming. Take it one step at a time pick out. One or two pieces that you’re most comfortable with and start there and then just make it a regular part of your routine that you continue to work on.
There are a lot of tools out there that you can use to make this easier and I can list dozens of them, but just to to help you get started, I’m going to list a couple here that I think you should take a look at first. One is a tool called LastPass com. A lot of these other tools from about to mention require you to set up an account and have a username and password. What LastPass does is automatically generate a password for you and every time you go back to that site.
Automatically logs you in so you don’t have to remember all these different passwords and each password is completely unique and very secure. The tool called feedly.Com is something you should use to help you set up your listening station. This is a place. You can our service. You can use to subscribe to other people’s blogs and then go to this one website and read all the blogs in one place and scan through the headlines.
So you can see what content you might want to look at some more or share with your followers again. WordPress, an excellent tool for setting up your website and managing your content. If you’re not using it right now, go ahead and investigate what that might be able to do for you over 23,000 plugins available for WordPress to add functionality to a basic WordPress site, and most of them are free. Adwords is a tool used by out online advertisers from google for managing pay-per-click advertising campaigns, but it also has a great a keyword, research tool in there that you can use to help you with your keyword, research and setting up an account with AdWords is free.
You don’t actually have to pay for advertising or pay for access to that. So that’s probably something you should put in your toolbox. Another great tool for your listening station is mentioned net. This is a service that sends you an alert every time your brand is mentioned online or other terms from your industry that that you specify so you can set up alerts for your competitors for your brand for industry keywords and every time somebody mentioned sees it on A social media site, or in a blog or anywhere online you’re, going to get an alert, so you can keep track of who’s talking about your company and what they’re saying both good and bad.
So you can go out and respond to that. A tool called outs by food calm is one that I like to help research your competitors. You can actually go in and see what keywords your competitors are using on their website. That is getting them traffic. You can see if they’re doing any online advertising or not and what keywords are targeting for that advertising. If they are so it’s a great way of doing a little spying on the competition, then last but not least, a tool called marketing greater calm as a free tool that allows you to plug in your website or your competitors websites and get a grade that actually Tells you how you’re doing right now with your online marketing it.
You can do this as many times as you want. It’s completely free and it’s going to give you some specific action steps that they recommend you take to improve your website, so a very great free tool for you to help. Give you some ideas to get started and, like I said I could go on for quite some time: you’re just listing different tools to help you with your online action plan. But I would start with those that I mentioned there again pick one or two things that you’re going to start with and just keep coming back and building on this over time.
You
Who is helping with your digital business footprint?
Com, and if this is the first time that you’re reading one of my articles, thank you very much. I really do appreciate it. Welcome my name is Mike: I’m an entrepreneur in Japan, I’m from Ohio. Originally I own an English conversation school here. I also do online marketing because I do things such as affiliate marketing and I did with this blog much my youtube blog.
The blog is all about entrepreneurship, so it’s called my daily hustle things that I do in my life. So it’s things related to entrepreneurship. It’s things related to affiliate marketing, online marketing and recently I’ve started learning day trade in which I’m going to be adding to the journal. Also so if that’s kind of stuff that you like, but that’s the kind of stuff that you enjoy, if that’s kind of stuff that you want to learn about, then please consider hitting that subscribe button down below.
And I would appreciate that also very much. But enough of me, you know trying to promote my blog and begging for subscribers, let’s get into why you are reading this article and that’s because I’m assuming you want to learn how to do keyword, research using Google’s keyword, planner, so yeah anyway doing keep doing research Keyword, research when making your contents for your blog or for your website is very important, and you know luckily, for us there’s a fruit, there’s a free tool that we can use from Google.
It’s called the Keyword planner, and so I’m going to show you exactly how to use that in this article, I’m on my computer right now, and so let me get myself out of the way and we will get into it. Let me minimize myself so Google great, if you have it in order to do this, if you haven’t done so already, you need a Google Ads account in order to use the free Google Keyword planner. So if you just type in goog or I’m sure like if you type in let’s say, like Google ad account, Google Adwords even keyword planner well, let’s type in Google Keyword planner first, you need a Google ad account in order to do this.
Yeah there’s group of planner, Google Apps, Google Keyword planner, and so, if you don’t have a Google AdWords account yet then you need to set one up in order to use this. Google Keyword planner, and that is because it’s for Google Ads and so with Google eyes. They ask for your credit card information in order to pay for ads, and this is my school and let me I’m logged in to my school account. Let me log out of here whoa crap anyway.
You do need where’s that coming up on Monday MIT signed in get started, but anyway you do need a Google Ads account. They do ask for your credit card to put your credit card in to pay for the ad, but as soon as you get it set up, then you immediately need to pause the ad so, as you know, you’re not charged for it because there’s a review process. So if you pause the ad, you won’t be charged for anything but go ahead and set up an account and then once you have it set up, then you can come back and read the rest of this article.
But so let me I’m going to sign in first to mine. Let me sign in to my account. I don’t want to send it to my school and I want to sign in to I want to switch. I want to sign in to this one my I have two ones for my school, so I have a couple. Google Ads accounts yeah. This is the one I want to sign in to I consider how any ads running at the moment they get. Let it get once it gets loaded on here: okay, yeah stalking, about setting up an odd, but I don’t want you right now.
So bat. If you go under tools and settings, it will be here. It says, keyword, it says, planning and under planning. You will have keyword planner, and so once you get your Google ad account set up just go under tools and settings and planning and then keyword planner. How do we fry your keywords in just a few steps jot down? Okay, so once you are actually in – and this is kind of a walk through – I actually don’t want to go through this.
I don’t need to go through. It takes it to god, yes, go back, I’m stupid leave anyway, once you set the Google account and you get your tools and settings and then you go on through the keyword planner. You come to this page, where it has discover new keywords or get search, volume and forecasts, and some filters you’re down here. What we’re going to want to do is you want to want to click on, discover new keywords and for this example, I want to I’m just going to do like keyword, research, right, free keyword, tools, I’m going to do keyword, research, I’m looking for keyword tools, and I don’t know where to go, we’re going to pretend that’s when I’m the content, I’m trying to think about making.
So, first of all, I want to change this from Japan. I want to get rid of that and I don’t want it in Japanese and I don’t want to Japan. I’m in Japan like I said so. That’s why I comes up as a default. Let me take that off. I’m going to change this to English and not Japan or in the United States, and you can just type that in here. So this is like, if you’re trying to target certain countries – and I usually do for english-speaking countries – you need to go in here and change.
It to whatever country or language that you’re trying to target so I’m just going to put the United States of America and save it key words at and Sal. You can start with new word keywords that you type in here or you can start with a website. So let me just add a few key words now with the website. That’s like, if you do comput, if you know who your competitors are right, if you know what their website is, then what you can do is you can put the website in here and then it will show you key words that they use, which is good.
When you do competition research going to a website that can help you out a lot, but we are just going to go with they’re saying we don’t know a competition with this, so we’re just going to start with some keywords, and so I am going to use. I’m going to use keywords, I’m just going to type in here keywords and you need to put. I think you need to separate it by comma and keyword tools, and maybe you just need to hit enter.
This look for a free keyword tool and let’s look for keyword, research, because that’s what my article is going to be about all right, keyword, research, yeah, so just type it in and then hit enter and automatically for any new keywords that you want to bring up. Alright, so, and then, once you do that all you have to do now is hit, get results so instantly States, English and the results to come up soon.
Okay, so here that there they have come up. So if I was going to do a article about keyword research, I would you know getting free tools, use keyword, research, but coming here didn’t the plan. I don’t know what kind of article I want to make. What we’re going to want to do is look up. Look at this column here, the average monthly searches this competition – that’s competition for Google eggs. This ad impressions is top of page that stuff matters if you’re making a Google ad, but for just for making content it doesn’t matter.
We just want to look at like the average monthly searches, because we want to say what is being searched the most and that’s what we’re going to want to use in our title for making our content and keywords that we’re going to want to use we’re. Making. Our content so, for example, on this one, if you look under here keywords, let me make this bigger all right, so it looks like they all have about the same amount right keywords: right: 10k to 100k, a month keywords everywhere: a 10k to 100k Google Keyword, planner 10K.
200K keyword, planner, 10k, 100k. What’s that youtuber suggests 10k and 100k. I don’t know what uber suggests has anything to do with keyword, research and I’m pretty sure, there’s a way that you can filter, filter, stuff, that’s not related out with the older, and I knew how to do it. But with this new and I’m not quite sure, so I’m just going to ignore it for now and I’m just going to look at here’s some keyword, ideas that Google gives you kW finder at Google Keyword tool: that’s 1k, the 10k.
So if you, you can scroll down through here and look at these, but the main ones are these ones on top these 10k 100k – and you can tell what comes up Google Keyword, planner right keywords everywhere – is an application you suggest so anyway for the content. I want to make using this example. I would put keyword research using the Google using Google’s keyword planner because keyword, planner, keyword, planner accurate, and so that’s exactly how I made the article in doing this.
It’s that simple. We could try another one. Let’s go in here. Let’s try let’s say I want to I’m making content. Let’s say on, I don’t know chef and I want to make content about cooking French food right. So, let’s, let’s change this just get rid of all these cooking French food. Okay. So what would we put in this case if I think about cooking okay, so we’re talking about like cooking cuisine, French food, French meal, French recipe, cooking cuisine, French food, French meal? First recipe, click on the make French I’m going to make French food on my website.
That’s good enough now, let’s get results to see what comes up this’ll just take a sec for it to come up and then it’ll be done. I just want to show you. This is really easy to do now. Look at this French for toast 100k to a million recipes with chicken breasts 100k 2 million recipe for a cookies 100k to man, recipe for pork, tenderloin 100k for a million, ah sweet v-day, maybe 100 cakes a million.
My French isn’t that! Well, sorry, slow cooker recipes hundred k, 2 million beeps honey, k, 2 million. These all have a hundred and K a memo down to a black black stone griddle. So I could use these ideas. Ok, French, for toast recipes with chicken breast. So I could make a you know an article titled. You know how recipe for because, like with for for recipe for making whatever cookies or a French recipe for making chicken breast – or you know French recipe for making cookies or something like that French recipe for making pork tenderloin or how to make a recipe to make French recipe for making cookies the French way or something any of those keywords that I want to use, and I would throw in some of these.
You know that that’ll search for the most there, because that’s what’s people’s looking for and that’s what we want so my example made been stupid or but anyway, that’s how you do it. It’s very simple. Let me get out of here. Let me actually close it out. Make myself bigger, because that is the end of this article, truly easy. I know that was short, simple and sweet, but that’s exactly how you do it if you read the article all the way to the end, I really appreciate it.
Thank you very much. If you do subscribe, don’t forget to hit the bell down below so you’ll be notified whenever another article comes out – and you guys have a good morning afternoon evening, wherever you happen to be stay safe out there under this we’re in 2020. Now and this we are dealing with this epidemic, this pandemic, with coronavirus in 2020. So I hope you all stay safe, do what you need to do and I will catch you in my next article.
Gaps that need to be filled and will also help you create the perfect road map to crush your competitors, An in-depth local SEO audit can cost Several hundred dollars, sometimes thousands if you Commission, an agency to Do it for you, But today I’m going to show you how to do a quick SEO.
Audit Yourself, so you can start improving your online presence straight away without Spending a dime I’ve even put together an SEO audit checklist, which includes a Ton of free tools and recommendations which you can download in the Description below so you can go through each step of the process for your own Business from the comfort of your home and at your own pace At the end of it, you’ll know exactly what you need to work on Hi there.
This is your first time, Here, welcome to the community. My name is Luc Durand, the founder of rankingacademy.Co.Uk, which I created to help local business owners like you, thrive, Online and run successful businesses If you want to join the thousands of people, Who are already part of this growing family? It’s simple and free. Just click. On the subscribe button and the Bell notification – and you will automatically Be alerted when I publish a new article If you’re ready, let’s jump in Google, my Business listing audit: Do you have a Google my business listing? I know this Sounds obvious for many of you, but they are tons of businesses out there who Have yet to claim their Google listing Like this one face: painting fairies, Google, my business is crucial to your online success and will have a major Influence on your overall online visibility, If you haven’t claimed your Listing yet do it now, if you don’t know how read my article, how to set up Google My business for best results.
If you have a listing and it is verified, it’s Important to get it right Here is what you need to look out for Business name Use the same business name that you would use in real life and that Is printed on any of your legal documentation or business cards? Do not Add any additional keywords in a hope: you will rank higher It’s against Google’s policy and you may get suspended, Address and phone number Make sure your address and phone number are accurate, get this wrong and you will Be in a world of pain, you will mislead Google and your customers too.
Business Categories Ensure you’ve selected the right primary category for your business. As it will influence your rankings enormously, This can sometimes be a Tough choice, dentist cosmetic dentist and dental clinic are three different. Categories so make sure you choose wisely Once you’re done with your Primary category, you can add secondary categories that apply to your business. Business hours Have you entered your business hours? If not make sure you do.
People look at this stuff, Don’t cheat and pretend you’re open when you’re not To avoid frustration and potential bad reviews, which leads me to my next point: Reviews Reviews are a major influence when it comes to rankings. It could make The difference between your competitors ranking and not you, How many do you have? How positive are they have you responded to all of them? You can encourage Customers to leave you more reviews with this nice little tool that will generate A link which will automatically trigger a Google my business review pop up and Ease the review process For more info on this just check my article on how to Collect reviews Website Link your Google, my business listing to your website.
If You haven’t done it yet FAQs. Have you added frequently asked Questions to your profile, FAQ will help people make informed decision about your Business People also use the FAQ option to ask about services you provide, which Can often generate fresh leads, so there are not to be ignored If you’re stuck About what to write in there here is a tool that might help answerthepublic.Com Throw a keyword in there and it will spit out a list of common questions.
You can use Photos. Photos are probably the best way of showcasing your Business and capturing attention so add some photos regularly. You can also add Articles and 360 panoramic views for better engagement. Google posts. Do you Publish any post, You can increase your visibility with Google posts Posts can Be used to provide an update about your business, promote a product, a service or An event They increase your listing prominence in search results, especially On mobile and are used automatically to answer FAQs in the FAQ section, Although they expire every 7 days, it’s a great feature, not Many businesses are using so make the most of it.
Business description. Have you Added a business description: if you haven’t time to start typing, You can add A description to tell customers a bit more about your business in up to 750 Characters: Google, my business, has more options available. Some of them industry specific, but if you can nail these down for now, you will Have a solid profile Time to move on to citations audit, If you don’t know what A citation is, it is a mention of your business in major directories and social Media platforms, which generally includes your business name, your business, address your business phone number and sometimes a link to your site like in this example.
On yell.Com, which is a major directory in the UK Having your business listed in These is the foundation of any local SEO strategy and is important for two Reasons these directories very often rank at the top of search engine results. For local searches, which may include your business and drive traffic to your Site but more importantly, it helps create trust and legitimacy with Google Who will be discovering your business across all these platforms, But for Google, to establish trust your business information needs to be accurate and Consistent everywhere your business is mentioned.
You could check the Consistency and accuracy of your business information across the web, Manually, but to be honest with you, it is a very tedious exercise and can still Lead to errors Instead use a tool that will do the legwork for you in my Opinion bright, local is one of the best tools to just do that. You can create a free account for 14 days without using a credit card which Is more than enough time to check if your business is mentioned in all the Right places, and if there are any errors, You can even download a full citation.
Report and will also have access to tons of additional information once you’ve. Set up your profile, The next thing we’re going to check is: if your website is Responsive Checking, if your website is responsive, is just ensuring that your Website works on all types of devices and, more specifically, on mobile phones. When it comes to local search, most of your visitors will come across your site. Via a mobile phone, so if your website is not compatible, your business is really Going to suffer To quickly check if your website is adapted to multiple devices, Download this free, resizer app in Google Chrome then simulate your website view.
On the various devices available, The next thing we’re going to look at is Your home page Since the home page of your site is your most important page. It Deserves to be analyzed separately, as there are many things to take into Consideration To really maximize your SEO opportunities: this is what you Should check Is your title tag optimized and includes the keywords and the city Name, you are targeting.
Have you added a Meta Description to your page, compelling Enough, so that people will want to click on your listing in Google when they come Across your business is there a main title, also known as h1, which stands for Header, which also includes your main keyword and city name, Is there an Obvious call to action on the page, such as a phone number that is visible Without scrolling down Is the call to action visible on the mobile version of Your site, without scrolling down, is there enough content on your page? Think Of including your services and products, and whatever else you think, is relevant Are you linking to important sub pages from your home page, which you’d like Visitors to click to and Google to discover Do all your images have an alt Tag Are you talking about your location where your business operates? Have you embedded a Google map related to your business, so visitors can check Directions straight to you from your homepage: Does your page include your Name address and phone number, which is consistent with your Google, my business Listing Once you’ve completed all of the above, it’s time to analyze the rest of Your pages For this we’re going to use a tool which is going to speed up the Process enormously Go to ubersuggest.
Com And in the search box add your domain name. I am going to use the example of This dentist located in tampa florida Click on search. This will initially give You an overview of your website, which includes the number of organic keywords: You’re ranking for the estimated organic traffic and the number of links pointing To your site, On the left hand, side choose site audit at the bottom of the Menu and click on search to trigger an automatic scan of your site, which should Take up to three minutes Once completed, you should see a breakdown of errors.
Warnings and recommendations Click on the first box to bring up the full list. In there you will be able to uncover issues with your pages, such as duplicate, Meta title low word count and missing headers across your site and fix them If You are unfamiliar with the errors, highlighted just click on the. What is This and how do I fix it, which is very helpful Since this is an automated scan? It doesn’t include every recommendation so once you’ve fixed the highlighted issues, I recommend you also check the following items for all your pages: Include the main, targeted keywords you are trying to rank for with your page And the city name in your main title tag Include the main targeted keywords: you Are trying to rank for with your page and the city name in your main header? Make sure the keywords is different from the home page and unique for each page.
Ensure your content is well structured and includes subheadings Add keywords in your subheadings, which are related to the main keywords you are Targeting for these pages Look at this example, One heading includes fuse box. And the other consumer unit, which are closely related. Finally, don’t forget to Add alt tags to your images Time to now. Look at how well your business is ranking in Google When it comes to local search.
Your business is likely to show in two distinctive areas within Google, The First, one is in Google Maps with your Google, my business listing, which will Also include the map pack, The second one is what I call the more traditional Results which sit below the map pack, which is where your business website Will be listed, It’s important to know how well your business ranks and for What keywords so you can monitor if any of the improvements that you have Implemented have made a difference to your ranking Head back to ubersuggest And re-enter your domain name, if needed On the main screen, click on the organic Keywords tab: This will show you all the keywords your website is ranking for in the Traditional results, you can even export the results in Excel, save the data and Recheck a few weeks later, so you can compare rankings and check if you have Gained any positions, If you are not ranking for any keywords between Position 1 and 10: it means you’re not on the first page of Google for any Keywords, so there is a lot of work to do To make things simpler, moving forward.
I suggest you create a profile in ubersuggest for your website, which will Track your progress automatically, so you don’t have to keep downloading Excel. Spreadsheets and see in seconds, if your doing well or not Unfortunately, ubersuggest doesn’t track rankings for Google. My business listings In Google Maps, so it only gives you half of the picture To do this head over to a Site called localFalcon.
Com Local Falcon is a software that allows you to Track how well your Google, my business listings, ranks directly on Google Maps For a given keyword, I love this tool as it is very visual and you can instantly Get a feel of how well or badly your business is doing. Local Falcon is not a Free tool, however, you can create an account and run one free scan, which will Give you a good idea of how powerful this can be for your business.
Let me run Through an example with another dentist, called Denton dental located in Nashville USA, Once you’ve created an account click on scan on the main menu Start typing your business name in the business field. It should come up. Automatically, Please note that if you have decided to hide Your business address in your Google, my business listing you won’t be able to Run the scan Add the keyword you want to target.
In this instance, we’re going to use “ dentist Nashville” Choose the radius you want to target and then the distance Either in miles or in kilometers, Then select the grid size, Click on run, search, You will see dots showing where your business ranks and in what position. Based on your criterias, Any position beyond three means: your business is not Featured in the map pack, which really is where you want to be Clicking on the Dots will give you access to more details and check which businesses Rank above you and how far down you are on the list, Local Falcon stores all your scans, so you can easily compare them and Understand if you are making any progress over time Time to move on to our last item external links, External links, pointing To your site are one of the most important factors that will influence Your online visibility, In summary, the more quality links you have pointing to Your website, the more relevant it will appear to Google, who will reward you With higher rankings, But how strong is your link profile? To check this go back to ubersuggest.
Com once more and search for your Domain On the main screen check what your domain score is. This score is Calculated on the basis of external links pointing to your site, The lower the score, the weaker the site Run the same scan for your competitor’s Site and look at their domain scores If your score is lower than theirs is Because they have more valuable links pointing to their site than you do This Means there is a great chance you will be ranking lower than they are for the Keywords, you are targeting.
The solution. Try getting more web sites to link to Yours, If you don’t know where to start, you can spy on your competitors, links by Clicking on their domain score, This will show all the links pointing to their Site Just try to get the same links as they do. That’s it for today now it’s Your turn Download the SEO audit checklist and run through each item. One By one, I’ve made this very simple to use just put a cross in Yes or no box and it will change color automatically Once completed.
You will See how well or badly you’re doing just by looking at the overall color scheme, And which item you need to address based on priority Hope you liked the article if You have any comments or questions post them below and until next time, happy Marketing
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