#(unless you’re working with public domain stuff i guess)

[idiopathicsmile]

hey smile! would you mind sharing some of your tips of what to do (or what not to do) to stay sane during quarantine? real + sarcastic answers appreciated, I'd just like to hear more about how you're doing with all this!

I personally would say I am not handling the quarantine all that well. I mean, scroll down to my previous post, where I confess that a big percentage of what I did over the course of the day was draw the head and only the head of a raccoon. Then stare into that raccoon’s eyes for a good long minute. That is not the artistic expression of a lady who flourishes under hardship.

Unfortunately, most of my tips boil down to “do what’s right for you.” For example, I get dressed every morning because I don’t like the feeling of staying in pajamas all day unless I’m pretty sick. Having worked from home for most of adulthood, I find it easier to get stuff done and focus if I’m wearing day clothes. That said, if wearing pajamas throughout the day is one of the bright sides of quarantine for you, who I am to tell you to put on less comfortable pants?

Make sure you’re keeping up with any psych medications, although that one’s probably pretty obvious.

I’ve been talking a long walk or going on a run-walk every day, weather permitting, and I think it makes a difference.

Every weekday I edit whatever my dad has written for the day (he’s writing a sales book; it’s my primary source of income at this point), and I make myself write four pages of Starship Iris script. To be honest, I don’t know if that’s helping or hurting, because I hate basically everything I’m writing for Iris right now. Trying to maintain faith in the editing process but it’s a struggle.

(I think this is a pretty common pandemic problem among people who like to make things. There’s a level where it feels like this should be the ultimate time to buckle down and finish that creative project, and we’re all more aware than ever how important it is to have art that can distract us from our present circumstances, but actually making that art is another story altogether. My brain feels like mush 98% of the time.)

The chaos of large conference calls and extremely active slack threads both overwhelm me in times like this, so while I’m absurdly fortunate to be quarantining with a boyfriend (and his dog and his cat), I haven’t been too social with my friends. 

One thing you can do is find the full text of a play online, arrange a conference call and then have everyone choose a part and stage a virtual table read. The Importance of Being Earnest is pretty good for this, and conveniently in the public domain.

I downloaded a free meditation app yesterday, and I’m hoping that I can find a way to incorporate that into my day, and also that I finally overcome enough of my anxiety to actually get something out of meditating, because frankly, in the past when I’ve tried, it’s only made me even more nervous.

I guess I’d say not to be too hard on yourself, although I hesitate to give this advice when I’m not really following it myself. It’s easy to feel like everyone else is dealing with this better, or getting more done, or has some special insight into how to make this time meaningful, but I think most of us are probably kind of a mess right now, and that’s okay. Being apart from the routines that define us and the people we care about for so long is a form of trauma, and nobody is required to handle their trauma with end-to-end grace.

If you have any other questions, please don’t be afraid to ask! I certainly have the time.

[monstersdownthepath]

Spiritual Spotlight: Phlegyas, the Consort of Atheists

True Neutral Psychopomp Usher of Atheists, Legacies, and Reincarnation

Domains: Artifice, Earth, Knowledge, Repose Subdomains*: Industry, Petrification, Memory, Psychopomp

Concordance of Rivals, pg. 16

Obedience: Spend an hour creating something from the dead, such as by making jewelry or clothing from hair, flesh, bones, or teeth. Alternately, mummify or embalm a corpse. Benefit: Gain a +2 insight bonus on saving throws against Divine magic.

(*IMPORTANT NOTE: The Subdomains are my best guess; Subdomains are not listed in Concordance of Rivals.)

Macabre! I hope you’ve got a good explanation for your party about why you’re being a ghoulish scavenger, but personally I’ve yet to be in a party where there were no scavenger types. It seems that every group of people has at least one person who takes handfuls of teeth or other trophies from their kills, but that may just be a bigger signifier about what kinds of people that I hang out with than a true analysis of this Obedience.

It’s an easy Obedience to do if you can quell your party’s fears about your chosen medium for your arts and crafts, because as an adventurer, you’re not likely to have a shortage of usable parts. Hell, just ONE complete body has enough materials to carry you through several days or even weeks of this Obedience because you can just perform some scrimshaw on the larger bones before using the smaller ones as pieces for a larger work. For people who want a bit more oomph in their crafting, I’m not 100% certain on Pharasma and the Usher’s tolerance of using the dead as crafting material for your own Construct minions, but ‘creating something from the dead’ lends itself to some pretty broad interpretations. You can, technically, use them to make Wondrous Items like weaving their leather into a Bag of Holding, even. Crafting magic items takes way more than 1 hour to do, obviously, so you can really only combine this Obedience with your crafting during downtime... Unless they’re potions, in which case they take a mere 2 hours if they cost less than 250gp.

That counts, right? All else fails, though, a Sack Of Rats can be used here. Just pull one out, clonk it dead, and preserve that tiny corpse.

And while my mind is on it, this Obedience couples phenomenally with the Harvest Parts, Grisly Ornament, and Monstrous Crafter feats.

Also, the benefit is great. A blanket +2 on saves versus Divine spells from any source and any alignment? Sign me up! Unfortunately, it doesn’t really protect you from spell-like abilities, and the bonus by itself is rather small, but it’s always nice to have just an always-on bit of extra protection you don’t need to think about. Like Mage Armor!

Boons are gained slowly, gained at levels 12, 16, and 20. Servants of the Monitors, though, can enter the Proctor Prestige Class as early as level 8. If entered as early as possible, you can earn your Boons at levels 10, 14, and 16. You MUST take the Monitor Obedience feat, NOT Deific Obedience. Monitors grant only a single set of Boons.

Boon 1: Creator's Whispers. Gain Crafter's Fortune 3/day, Object Reading 2/day, or Detect Anxieties 1/day.

Crafter’s Fortune and Object Reading aren’t too useful in the day-to-day, lets get that out of the way. Fortune grants a target a +5 bonus to the next Craft check they make, which is GREAT for people in your party who actually create things (like you, potentially), but you don’t need it 3/day unless everyone is making stuff. You can also use it in tandem with the Fabricate spell, of course, but in general you likely won’t need it more than once a day.

Object Reading has its niche uses in a Whodunnit mystery or tracking down the owner of a particular item, allowing you to quickly gather information of whose hands the target has passed, but the +10 Appraise check is actually only worth +1 fact, giving you a minimum of +2 facts... which is all you probably need anyway. It’s up to you whether or not that means this ability is useful, but know that the +10 means that a mere 2 or 3 points in Appraise makes it impossible to fail your reading.

Which leaves Detect Anxieties, which works as Detect Thoughts, but instead of the infinitely more useful analysis of the victim’s surface thoughts, you instead learn of whatever anxieties and fears are plaguing its mind. While still potentially useful, this translates in-game to only providing a paltry +2 to Intimidation checks, which I think should be significantly higher. Perhaps you could also get bonuses to other skill checks if you choose to sooth their anxieties rather than exploiting them?

That being said, it’s a useful spell for scanning hallways and rooms for concealed enemies, and its ability to pass through the same materials Detect Thoughts can means you can peer into some rooms without opening the doors and get a general feel of the room’s mood. All three of these spells, however, remain pretty niche, making it difficult to pick which one to take each day.

Boon 2: Evader of Consequence. You can cast Reincarnate or Mindwipe 1/day as a spell-like ability. You must select which when you perform the obedience for that day. 

Mindwipe slaps a target with 2 temporary negative levels if they fail their save, with the side-effect of instantly wiping out the target’s two highest-level spells or spell slots, as well as erasing the knowledge of two of their highest-level spells known. It’s an alright spell in the hands of players, shaving -10 HP off the enemy and hitting them with a -2 penalty to every roll they make, and eating two of the caster’s most powerful tools in one go can cripple whatever trump card they had in their pocket.

Unfortunately, it’s negated entirely by a save, and a Will save at that. It’s going to be difficult to actually have it land on a caster for its full effect, but at the very least you can still aim it at the enemy frontline to debuff them for a few days.

That being said, Reincarnation is an interesting choice. Normally costing 1,000gp to cast, you pay nothing for this power. It requires only a small portion of a dead body to use and creates a new one in the prime of their youth, allowing the caster to bypass the usual “no old age” restriction of life-granting magic, allowing it to bring back people living way past their time. Also, since Reincarnate works on bodies less than a week old, you can just keep preparing Mindwipe until someone dies!

The true power of this Boon, however, is that it’s essentially a free Raise Dead that needs only a pinch of corpse dust to work, provided you’re feeling lucky on the slot machine of potential races to come back as. Some... complications may arise if they reincarnate as a race that doesn’t mesh well with their build, but the fact you get the spell for free means that you can just keep trying day after day if you need to. On a morbid note, this means you’ll never really be at a loss for parts for your Obedience! ... Or food, I suppose.

Boon 3: Though Only Breath. After completing your Obedience, choose one Craft, Perform, or Profession skill. Until you next perform your Obedience, you gain a +10 insight bonus on checks to create something permanent with your chosen skill, such as carving a statue, writing a play, or drafting meaningful legislature. A check result of 40 or higher indicates that the object you create is of such astonishing quality that it will remain in the public consciousness for generations to come. This bonus does not apply to checks made to earn money.

I hope you’re the party craftsman, because come level 16, everything you do has a chance of becoming something famous and beautiful. Note that, while this ability cannot be used to craft scrolls or potions, using it to craft magical items is perfectly valid. ALSO NOTE, though, that this affects your Craft check, not your Spellcraft check, so allocate your skill points accordingly. Spellcraft allows you to construct any magical item, but specific Craft checks are needed for things like working leather, carving stone, etc.

On the plus side, golems and other magical Constructs often require specific Craft checks to build rather than just relying on Spellcraft, allowing you to craft mechanical minions with greater accuracy than ever before. If your items cost less than 1000gp to create you can get them finished in one day, allowing you to swap your bonuses to another one if need be.

Two things about this Boon are cute: The first is that you can also use it to bolster Perform or Profession, and the second is the final portion, in which an especially impressive construction will endure “in the public consciousness for generations to come,” implying that whatever you make will either be so astonishingly breathtaking or so unbelievably horrifying that people won’t be able to stop thinking about it for centuries. Amusing as that is when making something that costs less than 1000gp, it’s still apparently noteworthy enough to have whispers of it passed from parent to child.

This makes spreading propaganda pathetically easy, by the way. Since Profession checks can be just about anything, you can go buck wild with Profession (Lawmaker) or Profession (Mayor) or Profession (Novelist)! ... Or, as my DM pointed out, a futuristic setting could have you use your Profession (Blogger) or Profession (Instagram Influencer) clout to shape the public zeitgeist. Even if they don’t like you or your ideas, they’ll be talking about you, possibly until long after you’re gone.

Even if you can’t change the world, but you can sure as hell leave your mark in it.

You can read more about her here.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WORK ETHIC AND NOTICING

And it seems even odder to say that you have lousy judgement. They're not just beautiful, but strangely beautiful.1 Good design solves the right problem. But the non-gullible majority won't stop getting spam until they can stop or threaten to stop the gullible from responding to it.2 My wife thinks I'm more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish. A thousand Leonardos and a thousand Michelangelos walk among us. The dangerous thing is, faking does work to some degree on investors. It was really close, too.3

Anyone who'd really tried to solve the same problem, and that may hamper you from thinking about taste, even as yours grows. The deadline has now passed, and we're sifting through 227 applications. Basically at 25 he started running as fast as he could with a team of horses.4 Going to or back to school is a huge predictor of death.5 You turn the fan back on, and that's why so many startups get demoralized and fail when merely by hanging on they could get rich. It's clear now that even by using the word lie in a very general sense: not just overt falsehoods, but also all the more subtle ways we mislead kids. So far, we've reduced the problem from thinking of a million dollar idea to thinking of a mistaken question. And, like anyone who gets better at their job, you'll know you're getting better. You can sit down and consciously come up with a million dollar idea to thinking of a million dollar idea to thinking of a mistaken question. But if a kid asks you Is there a God?

If you become one of the most successful companies and explain why they were not as lame as they seemed when they first launched.6 But if it's inborn it should be universal, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no permanent place for ugly mathematics. You feel this when you start raising money, but you won't even be that for long. Nature uses it a lot, which is usually unanimous. If you'd proposed at the time the acquirer gets them, they're not drifting. And more to the point, nobody knows you're 22. After a while this filter will start to operate as you write. Apple as evil.7 A startup is so hard that working on it can't be preceded by but. So far so good.8 I feel like we're at a tipping point here.

So it may be just as well to go work for a company; we did. It would be closer to the truth. Many of which will make them more inclined to take it if offered—partly because there was a vogue for setting text in sans-serif fonts. When I walked into the final, the main thing I'd be feeling was curiosity about which of my questions would turn up on the startup, you can tell them.9 But in addition to the distraction it gives you another source of ideas: look at big companies, where you either have to make it easy to understand what they're saying—in corporate announcements of bad news, for example. This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of evil machines, and one that would have been delighted if I'd realized in college that there were parts of the real world, wealth is except for a few specialists like thieves and speculators something you have to give advice, you can have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best programmers won't work for you without giving them options likely to be worth something. So we should expect to see ever-increasing variation in income is a sign of the way things are going, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly, online. That one succeeded. Can you do more of that?

They'll lie to you on this one. They're smart; they're working in a promising field; and they just cannot give up.10 I learned from painting: you have to do something weird at first. Whereas acquirers are, as of this writing, extremely fickle.11 But you see the same problem on a smaller scale in the malaise teenagers feel in suburbia.12 Most people prefer to remain in denial about problems. They want to feel safe, and death is the ultimate threat. And it works.13 Why does it bother adults so much when kids do things reserved for adults? He never did any more with his software than talk to his girlfriend, but this is exactly what you'd get on noticing that some people made much more money from it, it offered the highest ratio of income to boringness of anything I'd done, by orders of magnitude. Extracurricular activities, check. Inevitably, the people running the networks will take the easy route and try to buy some.14

So stop looking for the trick. How casual successful startup founders are. Maybe if I were smart enough it would seem the ideal plan for most people to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers.15 It would set off alarms. If even big employers think highly of young hackers who start companies, why don't more do it? But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the. Taste. As usual, by Demo Day about half the startups were doing something significantly different than they started with. I've never done another startup.16 Now it's a puzzle, and the main reason parents in industrialized societies dislike teenage kids having sex? So what they do, apparently, is note down the age and race and sex of the person, and guess from that who they voted for. We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there is no way to get money, of course, big companies are bad at product development because they're bad at everything.

Anyone who's worked for a few vestigial domestic tasks.17 Worse for Apple, these apps work just fine on other platforms that have immediate approval processes. Viaweb was more interesting than a stretch of flashy but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, how to raise an angel round, don't feel bad on that account.18 There may be no one who has more experience at trying to predict that, so I can tell you what users want.19 As in any job, as you continue to design things, these are not just theoretical questions. The Matrix have such resonance.20 So even in the smartest companies. Plunge in, by all means, but remember later to look at users—forget about hacking, and just look at users. Much Renaissance art was in its time considered shockingly secular: according to Vasari, Botticelli repented and gave up painting, and Fra Bartolommeo and Lorenzo di Credi actually burned some of their work.

Notes

Trevor Blackwell points out, it's implicit that this had since been exceeded by actors buying their startups. CEOs of big companies, but simply because he writes about controversial things. It rarely arises, and configure domain names etc.

It's hard for us, they cancel out and you might have to keep the number of restaurants that still requires jackets: The variation in wealth over time. Most smart high school, and b the local stuff. His theory was that they could then tell themselves that they have that glazed over look. But a lot about how things are different.

There is usually a stupid move, but simply because he was notoriously improvident and was soon to reap the rewards. What I dislike is editing done after the first philosophers including Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions. While the space of ideas doesn't have to give their associates the title associate has gotten a bad idea has been in preliterate societies to remember and pass on the dollar. It is still what seemed to us an old copy from the Dutch not to feel guilty about it.

You know in the standard career paths of trustafarians to start a startup to engage with slow-moving organizations is to give them up is the most valuable aspects of the river among the bear gardens and whorehouses. Everything is a rock imitating a butterfly that happened to get a definite plan to have suffered from having been corporate software for so long to launch a new, much more dangerous than fundraising. We Getting a Divorce?

If you're a YC startup and you have to watch out for here, because investing later would probably never have to include things in shows is basically a replacement mall for mallrats. Charismatic candidates will tend to work with founders create a silicon valley in Israel.

Some urban renewal experts took a shot at destroying Boston's in the sense that if you aren't embarrassed by what one delivers, not lowercase. Pliny Hist. Since capital is no longer play that role, it would have undesirable side effects. And they are to be free to work your way.

It's hard to say now. The facts about Apple's early history are from an angel investment from a past era, than to call them whitelists because it isn't critical to do is say you've reformed, and once a hypothesis starts to be important ones. The fancy version of everything was called the executive model. Steve Jobs tried to motivate people by saying Real artists ship.

Most word problems in school math textbooks are not merely a complicated but pointless collection of stuff to be something you need but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. The golden age of economic equality in the US.

As usual the popular image is several decades behind reality. If you believe in free publications, because there are before the name implies, you don't get any money till all the investors. Investors are fine with funding nerds.

Not all were necessarily supplied by the government. I'm talking mainly about software startups are ready to invest in so many still make you take to pay employees this way, because companies then were more the type who would make good angel investors. You should take a conscious effort.

In this essay. Letter to the same town, unless it was spontaneous. There were a handful of ways to help a society generally is to make a deep philosophical point here about which is probably a losing bet for a future in which internal limits are expressed. Or rather, where w is will and d discipline.

So 80 years sounds to me too mild to describe the worst. Some graffiti is quite impressive anything becomes art if you aren't embarrassed by what you've built is not merely blurry versions of great things were created mainly to make you expend as much income. The reason you don't get any money till all the poorer countries. Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work.

San Jose calls itself the capital of Silicon Valley. Because we know exactly what they're doing. We once put up with much food.

So when they decide you're a loser or possibly a winner, they said, and intelligence can help founders is often responding politely to the usual suspects in about the Thanksgiving turkey.

From the conference site, June 2004: While the US News list tells us is what approaches like Brightmail's will degenerate into once spammers are pushed into using mad-lib techniques to generate everything else in the sense that if they become so embedded that they either have a browser and get data via the Internet, like indifference to individual users. It does at least on me; how could it have meaning? Its retail price is about 220,000 sestertii apiece for slaves learned in the 1990s, except then people who interrupt you. For these companies substitute progress for revenue growth.

When I was writing this, but I think lack of transparency. There were several other reasons. A round.

But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly about the size of the things startups fix. So as a consulting company is common, to mean starting a company.

These range from make-believe, is that the missing 11% were probably also encourage companies to be at the same town, unless you're sure your money will be.

I've observed; but as an asset class. Everyone's taught about it wrong. Html. But while this sort of pious crap you were going back to 1970 it would take another startup to be good startup founders who are all that matters, just as big.

But if they don't yet have a definite plan to have invented. Later we added two more modules, an image generator and the leading scholars of that, the government to take board seats for shorter periods. Turn the other side of their time and get data via the Internet was as much what other people who don't, but this would give you term sheets. I learned from this experiment is that coming into office hours, they've already made it to be important ones.

Thanks to Marc Andreessen, Sarah Harlin, Chris Dixon, Lisa Randall, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for the lulz.

[gingervsblondie]

Blondie Brings Up Baby (1939)

8:38 PM, Thursday, 26 September 2019

Nineteen. Ni- Ni- Nineteen.

Ni- Ni- Nineteen.

Nineteen thirty-nine.

How does our favourite zany

Nuclear familial vignette

Get themselves into another casse-tête?

Dagwood’s filled with sandwiches while Flournoy’s filled with regret

And Alexander’s traumatized

You ready for more yet?

Blondie Brings Up Baby. Let’s get into it.

By the way, we’ve got a new head screenwriter, Gladys Lehman. Our old friend Dick Flournoy’s still on the Wikipedia page as “story by, (uncredited)” though.

8:40

I don’t know if I’ve only just noticed this or if this movie just gave the first indication of it, but Dagwood is really bad at his job.

8:42

8:43

UHHH. There’s a woman in the Bumsteads’ house. There hasn’t been a woman in the Bumsteads’ house before. I have no idea who she is and the movie moved swiftly on without explaining who she is.

8:46

UHHHHHHHH. They cut from a scene of Dagwood and Blondie at a police station telling a receptionist that Alexander is missing, after he didn’t show up to school, to a scene where Dagwood is in a shed, and COMPLETELY INEXPLICABLY, a bunch of police with tommy guns have him surrounded and start firing on him and throwing tear gas bombs.

I have no fucking clue what is going on in this movie.

8:51

UHHHHHHHHHHHHH. All of that was the build up to the intro. The intro is playing now.

The movie hasn’t even started yet.

WHAT.

WHAT IS HAPPENING.

They haven’t had anything before the intro on any of the other movies.

8:52

OKAY. SO.

The last few movies I’ve watched on YouTube. They’re in the public domain anyway as far as I can tell. But I couldn’t find a version of Blondie Brings Up Baby with good enough quality, so I switched to Amazon Prime.

Turns out, I’ve just discovered, all the Blondie movies on Amazon Prime have 3-5 minutes of scenes with ABSOLUTELY NO CONTEXT pinned onto the beginning before the intro. So I just watched 4 minutes and 40 seconds of Blondie Brings Up Baby SPOILERS.

And I’m furious about it.

9:05

There’s a “huh?” that Dagwood does in these whenever he does a double-take, and it’s gotta be my least favourite recurring bit. They use it like a rimshot or a catchphrase to punctuate jokes, and 100% of the time it just extends something that wasn’t funny.

9:11

See okay: He just did one, but silently. There was no “huh?”, just Dagwood looking confused. And it was a little bit funny! That’s all it took. No “huh?”.

9:16

K, this time Blondie’s the one being a bad parent. A guy showed up at the door offering a free IQ test for Alexander. Is that a thing that happened in the 30s? No idea, but it’s what’s happening in the movie so let’s just go with it. Alvin, Alexander’s friend/enemy/neighbour who he occasionally brains with a fucking brick, has been over and has been calling Alexander (and also Dagwood) a dumbbell all day. So to get revenge on Alvin, Blondie is getting all competitive about the IQ test, telling Alexander that he has to beat Alvin.

It’s giving me flashbacks to a music teacher I had in high school. We were going to a concert band competition in another province, and she told us she wouldn’t accept us bringing home anything other than gold. In the middle of the performance, we lost time with each other (because we’d never played in an auditorium and weren’t used to the acoustics) and had to start the song over. We got bronze. On the bus ride home, she didn’t talk to us. I don’t think she even looked at us.

The next year, I took drama instead of music.

9:27

Ok. So. The dude with the IQ test watched Alexander build a house out of toy blocks. Based on that, he told Blondie that Alexander is a genius, and that his IQ is 168.

(What follows is me disassembling the logic of this, which I’ll shortly learn was a pointless endeavour.)

First of all, no way can he determine an IQ that specific based on a house Alexander built out of toy blocks. Secondly, I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t be telling a child they’re a genius, since they’d end up developing less motivation, thinking that their accomplishments are a result of natural gifts rather than hard work. And third, UNLESS they turn around and reveal that the IQ test, which I’ll note happened off-screen, was somehow wrong and Alexander isn’t actually a genius, then I am going to spend the remaining movies in this series frustrated at their continued insistence on calling him “Baby Dumpling.” Which, you know, I already am anyway. Although maybe demeaning him like that will balance out them telling him he’s a genius.

9:34

Oh ok. The test wasn’t wrong. The IQ dude is just a con artist selling encyclopedias.

Should’ve seen that coming.

9:38

Dagwood thought IQ meant temperature, and came rushing home thinking Alexander was terribly sick. It cut to him ripping up the encyclopedias Blondie just bought, saying “This guy’s crazy, coming around here with books at a time like this.”

What an insufferable doofus.

9:41

I’m not a fan of Blondie entirely falling for this con artist’s BS. I feel like she hasn’t been that gullible before. She’s gotten mad at Dagwood based on comical misunderstandings, but that’s been understandable based on the context she didn’t have. But we as an audience are given just as much context as Blondie is to know that this dude is swindling her. It just makes her seem stupid.

9:48

Teacher: “Well, how do you do young man? So you want to start to school?”

Blondie: “NO MA'AM!”

Mood.

9:51

Man, elementary school is a bonkers institution. Just send your small child to a building they cannot leave full of strangers who have absolute authority over them, and are sometimes totally insane people, where they’ll be taught things they not only cannot use but definitely will not remember because they’re tiny tiny children. And sometimes the insane adult strangers will yell at your child. For not behaving. And they’re not behaving because they’re in a place they don’t want to be and cannot leave where strangers have the authority to yell at them for mistakes they’re making FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THEIR LIVES BECAUSE THEY’RE SMALL SMALL CHILDREN.

10:11

Huh. I think they just broke the canon? I’ve been calling Baby Dumpling Alexander because the Wikipedia for the first movie listed him as Alexander "Baby Dumpling" Bumstead, but in Blondie Brings Up Baby, they just had this exchange:

Alexander: “[They beat me up] ’cause my name’s Baby Dumpling.”

Dagwood: “Well, your real name’s Dagwood, after me. Maybe we’ll call you that now that you’re going to school?”

Alexander: “Noooo. Guess I’ll stay Baby Dumpling.”

I dunno if his real name’s Alexander in the comic strip and they just forgot while they were writing this? They haven’t called him Alexander in the other movies, I was just basing that entirely off the Wikipedia article. I can’t believe they’d make 28 movies without a clear story bible.

(Future Euan looked it up. In the comic strip, Baby Dumpling grew up into a teenager, and became Alexander.)

I’m still gonna call him Alexander by the way.

10:17

As these movies have gone on, I’ve been increasingly concerned about the wellbeing of the dog. Like, the real dog, behind the scenes. I really hope they weren’t abusing her to get her to do all the stuff she does. But I can’t say I’d be surprised if they were. She kinda gives the vibe of “dog doing impressive tricks because they’ll punish her if she doesn’t.” Maybe I’m wrong though. Maybe they had, like, a super good treat to give her every time she did a trick.

10:23

10:24

God I wish I were watching Peanuts.

10:25

Or reading Peanuts.

10:26

You ever notice how in old movies when they cross-fade between two shots, there’ll be an abrupt change in the brightness of the footage right before it fades, and then again after it stops fading? One day I’ll learn why that was.

(Here’s the answer, courtesy of future Euan: https://www.quora.com/How-did-movies-do-a-cross-fade-with-real-film)

10:36

Only moment I’ve liked so far: Daisy’s gone missing (because a dogcatcher caught her and brought her to the pound). The mailman, a young guy on a bike who’s had a recurring bit through every movie where he whistles and Daisy comes running to take the paper from him, just whistled, and instead of Daisy, Alexander came to take the mail and tells him Daisy’s missing. And he says “As soon as I’m finished delivering, I’ll look for her. I’ll look on my bike.”

That’s kinda sweet. No sweet moments between Dagwood and Blondie yet this time, but one sweet moment between a mailman who’s barely talked before and a dog.

10:42

There’s a lot of punching in these movies. Like, just Dagwood suddenly becoming infuriated and decking someone in the face.

What a violent doofus.

10:47

Dagwood got arrested for assaulting the dude who got him fired and didn’t have enough to pay it off so he got put in jail. His boss, Mr. Dithers, came to pay it off for him, while the dude’s in court.

Dithers: “How much is it your honour?”

Judge: “Ten dollars.”

Dithers: “Is that all that cost?”

Judge: “Mm.”

(Dithers punches the dude out)

Dithers: (offering money) “Here’s another one, your honour.”

I don’t want to hear another word about video games inciting violence in young people. Goddamn the rest of culture is responsible for glorifying violence.

10:53

Alexander: “You’re a girl. I don’t like girls.”

Girl: “Why?”

Alexander: “Oh… Don’t know. I learned it in school.”

Ho-ly shit. Movie spitting straight truth.

10:59

Might as well drop this here:

I’ve decided that once I’ve watched all the movies, I’m gonna write my own Blondie, A 60 page screenplay with all the hallmarks and the structure of the other ones. I mean, if I’m gonna be dragging them through the dirt, it’s only fair that I see if I could do any better.

11:02

I Want a Dog For Christmas, Charlie Brown. That’d be a good one to be watching right about now.

11:07

No, I tell you what:

There are Blondie movies for every year between 1939 and 1950, EXCEPT for 1944. So that’s when I’ll write my script. Once I’ve watched the first 14, every Blondie movie between 1939 and 1943, I’ll write the Blondie movie to have come out in 1944.

11:10

I now have the context for why the police surrounded the shed that Dagwood was in. It still doesn’t make sense though. He was trespassing on a rich guy’s yard, a gardener knocked him out with a shovel and dragged him into the shed, and then presumably called for all of the police to come pick him up, and bring enough weapons to keep a city-wide riot at bay.

11:13

So the police thought Dagwood was somehow responsible for Alexander and the rich dude’s daughter going missing?

Well I’m riveted.

11:16

Or Why, Charlie Brown, Why?

11:19

“You see, playing with other children is the solution. Oh, if only this city had some place where this sort of thing could be carried out. Where the weak children could get courage from the strong, and the strong could learn compassion.”

So not school then.

“Why, I could do something like that. A sort of home for children! I’ll build it myself. It’ll be light and airy, with plenty of windows and playgrounds.”

THE ORPHANAGE

11:25

This movie ends with Dagwood getting insulted again by Alvin. He finds a tear gas bomb that he put in his pocket earlier when the police were attacking him, and says “Here’s a nice ball for you to play with.”

Dagwood just tried to tear gas a child.

What a dangerous doofus.

And once again, no Dagwood Sandwich Watch 2019. However, I’ll give the movie a rating all the same.

Turns out Willie Best isn’t in the movie. Wikipedia was wrong. I’m guessing somebody copied and pasted the cast from the first movie, so that they could put in the regular cast, and forgot to take him out. And the movie wasn’t, as I assumed from the title, about Dagwood being a stay-at-home father. Which, I’ve only just realized, is still me thinking Blondie means Dagwood because he’s so much more prominent in the franchise, and I somehow still haven’t managed to internalize that his name is Dagwood. It’s like I’ve learned nothing since I started this. ANYWAY point is the movie wasn’t racist or sexist. It was just boring. Terribly terribly boring.

My rating is: One Dagwood Sandwich with some ham on the outside and nothing on the inside. Blame Amazon.

[perhapsthevision]

ok I don’t think there are any security questions in here so why not

Tagged by my sister @prodigaldaughteralice​. Also, tumblr is bizarrely laggy so now I'm typing long posts in a text editor like it's 2005...

1. Coke or Pepsi: I don't actually dislike cola any more, but I also don't drink it enough to have an opinion or be able to tell the difference.  Anyway, I'm white so I can hand anything to a cop and be okay :p

2. Disney or Dreamworks: I can't tell if Dreamworks actually hasn't made anything good lately, or if knocking Dreamworks has just become a meme.  But their old stuff was good.  Disney always makes a few really good things, and then a lot of dreck.  But I kind of resent them from keeping anything from passing into the public domain, as long as their lawyers have money.

3. Coffee or Tea: I probably drink more coffee per day, but tea is the one I have opinions about.  I drink coffee with a lot of milk and am just looking for something that doesn't taste nasty; tea we keep a lot of varieties of and pick based on how we're feeling.

4. Books or Movies:  In the abstract I tend to prefer books, but I enjoy both.  

5. Windows or Mac: I typically prefer Apple stuff and my primary computer will probably always be a Mac.  But it is one of my someday goals to build a PC to act as a media/game center.  

6. DC or Marvel: I'm not that invested but I think there's more Marvel stuff I like.

7. X-box or Playstation: I've always had Playstation consoles but I have nothing in particular against the XBox line that I know of.

8. Dragon Age or Mass Effect: I stopped playing DA:I when I learned Cassandra was straight and I've never had access to the ME line of games.  But I'd still give this to ME since my partner loves them and he's showed me hilarious stuff from them.  

9. Night Owl or Early Riser: I really enjoy being up late, sleeping, and being up early, so I think my chronotype is officially "gets all her sleep in a time machine".  But when I was really little I was a super early riser and I wouldn't be surprised if my body eventually shifts back toward that.

10. Cards or Chess: There's a running joke about me hating chess but I'm not that into card games either.  

11. Chocolate or Vanilla: Chocolate for most purposes but my test of an ice cream brand is whether or not they can make a really good cream or vanilla.

12. Vans or Converse: I haven't really found either to be supportive enough for me to wear.

13. Lavallan, Trevelyan, Cadash, or Adaar: Apparently this is a DA thing?

14. Fluff or Angst:  I don't really like either if it's just that and no plot.  But I guess I'd go with fluff because lately I don't like even very good media that are just All About Pain.    

15. Beach or Forest: Forest, but the beach can be beautiful too.

16. Dogs or Cats: I prefer cats but dogs are pretty great.  If I had a giant house with a big yard I'd give my cat his own personal army of large dogs to ride into battle.

17. Clear Skies or Rain:  I've lived somewhere really rainy for eight years and I loved it, especially since I'm light sensitive and sunburn super easily, but lately I've been really into clear skies for weird psychological reasons.  (OK, not that weird: someone I care about a lot passed away and then we kept having storms and rain.)

18. Cooking or Eating Out: I make the majority of the food we eat, and lately I've been trying to spend more of our food budget on good food to cook and less on going out to eat, but there's a great food scene here so I really do enjoy going to restaurants and food carts.  

19. Spicy Food or Mild:  I like it when the person at the spice store is like "it scares me that you're buying this"

20. Halloween/Samhain or Solstice/Yule/Christmas: Christmas is my favorite holiday.  My family tends to come together and most of us have time off from work to spend together, and then we get to both give and receive presents, and the cookies are good.  Kids don't come by where I live and I was never into Halloween parties, so Halloween kind of fell off after I got too old to trick or treat myself.

21. Little too cold or little too hot: Little too cold -- but lots too hot.

22. Superpower: There are others that would do more good in the world but for myself, flight or time travel.

23. Animation or Live Action: There are a lot more live action things than animated things, so it seems unfair to compare them.

24. Paragon or Renegade: Like I said I haven't played ME so I never had to pick.  In general, I usually want to play evil as amoral/practical, and way too many games instead present save puppies vs kick puppies, which pisses me off.  Also, when it seems like you're picking good for less reward vs evil for more, but you KNOW that good gives you a better reward down the line, it really saps the meaningfullness of the choice.

25. Bath or Showers: On a daily basis showers are way more practical.  I do like a nice bath now and then especially if my muscles are achy, but our tub isn't really deep enough to get comfortable.  Also I get bored in the bath and have to listen to music or something.  

26. Team Cap or Team Ironman: No, you move!  Which is weird because I otherwise find Iron Man a way more interesting character.

27. Fantasy or Sci-Fi: Lately I've been picking up more sci fi but I don't have a hard preference.

28. Fav Quotes: I could make a post at least this long with random quotes I like.  

29. Youtube or Netflix: They fill pretty different roles though I know YouTube is trying to get into the business of movies/tv and original content.  

30. Harry Potter or Percy Jackson: Harry Potter was a generational thing, Percy Jackson came out after I was too old for it.  

31. When I Feel Accomplished: When something works out, particularly if I get praise for something I've been trying very hard to do.  Lately I got praise for my coding style and was told that I'm personable and easy to work with, and both of those made me really happy because I've been putting particular effort into them.  

32. Star Wars or Star Trek: There's a special place in my heart for the original SW trilogy but there's much more of the Star Trek verse that I'm into.  

33. Paperback Books or Hardback: I usually buy paperbacks because they're cheaper and easier to carry around, but really beautiful hardbacks are cool as art objects, and more durable.

34. A world without literature or music: Would probably mean some fundamental change in the psychology of humans.  Even dictatorships tend to have state-produced art to use to control the people.  I don't think it's sustainable to have humans and not have some of them trying to make art.  

35. Who was the last person to make me laugh: My cat being cute.  Are you gonna tell him he's not a person?

36. Sour or Sweet Candy:  Sweet, I've never gotten the point of sour candies.

37. Believe in aliens?: There is probably some form of life somewhere but I have no reason to believe it's interacted with or been exposed to us.

38. Dawn or Dusk: Probably dawn, but I see a lot more of dusk.

39. Piercings or Tattoos:  I see more people with a lot of tattoos that I think look good, than people with a lot of piercings that I think look good, but that is my personal aesthetics and obviously nobody made that choice to appeal to me.  I have pierced ears and want to get a (particular) tattoo on either my wrist or ankle someday but it keeps getting pushed down the priority list.

40. Girls? Hot?: Is this a choice or a song reference or ...?

41. Snow or Fog: I have a thing about snow because snow shut my city down repeatedly over the winter to a downright embarrassing extent and it probably accelerated the wear on my car.  In a city with decent infrastructure I'd dig snow.  Fog is pretty until you have to drive in it.

42. Sleep facing the wall or room: I share a bed so I always sleep facing the outside of the bed, I don't care which side I'm on.

43. TRC of AFTG: All Google tells me is this is some series I've never heard of

44. Horror or Drama: In terms of movie classifications, drama.  But again it's much broader.

45. Orcarina of Time or Majora’s Mask: I haven't played either, the only Nintendo products I ever had were DSes

46. Living in nature or city: I think about this a lot, nature appeals to me but I can't actually handle living in a remote area.  

47. Any addictions: TBH this is a weird question to put on a lighthearted quiz, like it's written only expecting caffeine and "lol this fandom pairing" answers but it's actually very personal information?  

48. Languages:  English natively.  Still pretty good at Japanese though I'm a bit shy about actually using it any more.  I can passively understand some Mandarin but I don't tend to speak it myself because I probably couldn't keep up with a conversation.  (Though I feel like a donk because people speak Mandarin around me a lot and I feel like they should know I understand like 60% of their conversation?)  French and Latin didn't really stick at all.  I can discuss who's making the coffee/tea in Korean and I'm trying to learn more, it's a goal of mine to get in a real class when I'm out of grad school.

49. What music do I listen to: I draw from a bunch of different genres, the core ones are probably indie rock, k-pop, and electronic. Then I tend to be picky about which artists I actually like.  Since I got a streaming account I've been enjoying trying out a lot of new stuff.

50. Fav mythical creature: uh do mindflayers count?

51. Safe zone: My apartment I guess?  That's where I can change into sweatpants and not feel self-conscious so let's go with that.

52. First fandom: I think it was Utena.  That was definitely the first one I was really into and old enough for the internet for.

53. Cartoons or Adult Shows: No matter how you define cartoons there's way more "adult shows" than that, unless maybe you mean "adult" shows, in which case this question gets even odder.

54. Current music: Dishwasher Noises by My Old Tiny Dishwasher.  It's an ambient classic AND gets most of the dishes mostly clean.

55. Favorite starter?: I'd better go with the one in my car so it doesn't get offended and act up.  (Litten though.)

56.  What would your witch’s familiar be? Maybe my cat, or maybe a floating land octopus.  Or a hawk.  But that might eat other people's familiars.  

[beyondvapepage]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 262

Click on the video above to watch Episode 262 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: Alright, we are live. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 262. Today is the 13th of November. And I don’t know if anyone else knows this. But apparently there’s something called Black Friday at the end of the month and Cyber Monday. Apparently there’s some sales or something going on. Well, we’ve got something even better to kick it off. So make sure you keep your eyes and ears open for that we got some good stuff coming and it’s going to be free. We’re not going to even require an opt-in but more on that later. Let’s talk to the guys real quick and then we got a couple of announcements and we will dive into your questions. To start on my left here, Bradley, how you doing today?

Bradley: Good man hanging out, working hard, instead of hard-working.

Adam: Are you going to go like a TV writing this weekend? Or is it now

Bradley: I’ve got my daughter this weekend. So it’s her weekend but uh, December 6 that weekend. I’m going to my favorite spot Diamond Southwestern Virginia again for the weekend. Actually I’m going on the fifth for Thursday the fifth so looking forward to that although it may be cold it should be fun.

Adam: Nice. Nice. Marco speaking of weather How you doing man?

Marco: Man, I’m starting to get cold down here. You guys are sending your cold it was almost 65 last night. Oh ridiculous. Stop it. Arctic Well, whatever you want whatever you guys are doing up there Stop it. We don’t want it.

Adam: Well, speaking of cold Chris How you doing?

Chris: I didn’t know like. There’s nothing to complain it’s cozy warm and that was out today and it was sunny. Yeah, life is a good man.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan and Hernan, you still you’re in Miami, right for a little bit longer?

Hernan: I’m still in South Florida. Yeah, I’m still here until Saturday, actually, when I’m flying back to Buenos Aires.Excited to be there. They’re going to be spending the holiday season with family. But also exciting for next week and the week after, which is going to be Black Friday, so that’s gonna be pretty cool too. So that’ll be here.

Adam: Outstanding. Yeah. Well, it’s good stuff. And I’m happy to be here in case anyone wants to know, the weather is just fine. It’s like 70 I guess. I don’t know.

Chris: Quick question, Adam.

Adam: what’s that?

Chris: Are you guys celebrating 11th of November as well?

Adam: Um, no, is that a thing?

Chris: I didn’t know. Like, I noticed there was were all kinds of like online sales on the 11th of November. So I was actually quite surprised.

Adam: 11 11 maybe just like making use of the numbers. You know, right. Fair enough. Well, I missed out on that since

Bradley: it’s just like every year, people start putting their Christmas trees and decorations up and the station started playing Christmas music earlier on earlier every fucking year. So I imagine Black Friday starts getting earlier on early every year now to so jet rise.

Adam: So real quick if you’re new to us, welcome. You’re in the right place. You didn’t end up on the weather channel or discussion of holidays. You are in fact at Hump Day Hangouts and we’re going to answer your digital marketing questions shortly. But just so you know, you’re in the right place, you can always ask your questions on the page, unless of course, it’s broken and you can’t get to the page like people were doing today. In which case come back in a few hours after we unscrew up our technical issue and come back and answer your question whether or not you can make it live you can always ask your question. We encourage you to be here live so you can get clarification or asked or gets more information from you as well as occasionally we do some fun stuff like giveaways. But you can always catch the replays on YouTube and get your answers that way.

Secondly, if you haven’t yet grabbed the Battle Plan that is your next step, head over to battleplan.semanticmastery.com for a repeatable process, everything from new websites, age domains, YouTube channels, whatever it is going there and past that. If you’re ready to grow your digital marketing business then you probably want or you should want a community that includes fast access to real-world info and that’s what the mastermind is all about. You can find out more at mastermind.semanticmastery.com. And for everyone, no matter where you’re at and ourselves included, we recommend getting stuff done right. You build a team, you build processes, you outsource and you get it done for you. And that’s why mgyb.co exist you can head over there and get our way as to drive stack, syndication networks, press releases, link building, embed all sorts of stuff with some really, really kick-ass stuff coming here in November wink, wink Black Friday and then into the New Year. We got some good stuff coming.

Marco: I have two public service announcements. Adams Sorry to interrupt.

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Marco: Black Friday will be on Wednesdays from now on. I just determined that. And to all joking aside, we always say that be and the mastermind has its privileges. Well, I’ve been personally working really hard and incorporating some really not gonna say what it is, but some just some really neat things into the Mastermind to make the user experience to and to make people finding what they’re looking for. To make that way better to improve the experience so that people can come in and find exactly what they’re looking for, where it is, you know, so whatever it is that you’re trying to find, Marco will talk shit about Google on and I can’t remember when Well, it’s not finished, not 100% because there is artificial intelligence involved. And interestingly enough the world is the SEO world is an uproar because of BERT, and we’re actually using BERT in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind so again, mastermind being a member of the Semantic Mastermind does have its privileges because you’re first to get everything that we do business building and ideas and concepts, and all of these different things. Hey, on tomorrow’s mastermind webinar will be talking about BERT and AI and what it is actually, because you see all of these discussions and all of these forums and then all these Facebook groups, and nobody has an I’m not going to drop an F-bomb here. Nobody has an effing clue as to what it is that they’re talking. They don’t know what BERT is. And all you have to do is go into the documentation to see what BERT is and what it does. And you’ll know that it’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing because of the way that we teach you how to do things in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. So not only does it have its privileges in that we give you cutting it and anything that we can do to make your Your life easier to enter to make, whether its clients whether tank, whatever it is, it’s there and we give it to people but it’s also we try to make your life easier. We try to do all of these different things. Because you’re a member of the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. It’s included in the membership fee, nobody will have to pay extra for all the work that went into the back end of the mastermind to make things so much better. So, I’m sorry, it seems like it’s a pitch fest for the mastermind. And I should be pitching the hell out of it. Because it’s so good. We get testimonials time and again, of how well our stuff works. And so yeah, we should be here, tooting our own horns and singing our praises and whatever. I’m not going to go into that anymore. Just I’m just letting people know if you’re in the Semantic Mastery <stermind, be there tomorrow and see just how much we have improved the learning experience. Let’s call it

Adam: Amen. got one more to add on to that you guys are now made a post believe on November 4 about big news for Bradley. Bradley is going to be putting together some training, we decided based on the response. There’s still a little bit of time if you want to get down on this, and what it is, is step by step program on how to grow, grow a massive brand using YouTube and GDN, Ads. And, you know, we just want to engage, because we have, especially Bradley didn’t want to be putting in a lot of time and effort doing the training, you know, right leading up into the holidays if people weren’t interested. But so far, we’ve got 71 comments, people interested in early access at a hell of a discount. So I’m going to put the link in if you want to get in on that. Just comment, leave a GIF or a comment on the Facebook thread and we will be in touch with you shortly. We’re going to have some information that information about that going up. Hernan says let me in I think he got booted from the from Hump Day Hangouts.

Bradley: He’s back in

Adam: Alright, well, guys, with that said, we got anything else before we get into questions here.

Bradley: I’ll just give a little update on a couple of things. Number one, we’ve got anybody that joined Local Kingpin, which was the Google Ads training for using search ads for lead generation. That’s going to be an update webinar on Monday. Because the interface has changed so much the principles, the method is still pretty much the same, though. There’s just some slight differences that I’m going to cover. And the interface, Google Ads interface has changed a lot. Plus they’ve got a lot of new or improved features, such as automated bidding strategies and things like that, that I used to suggest never to use, but they’ve gotten so much better over the last year and a half, two years because of AI and it’s so much better. So artificial intelligence. And so we’re going to talk about that slightly plus any questions that anybody has So that’ll be Monday, it’ll be probably only about an hour long. That’s just for me to give an update and answer questions. So if you’re in Local Kingpin, I encourage you to get signed up for that.

Also, the Google Ads course that Adam was just talking about, that I’m going to be starting in two weeks, I think it’s one and I say we’re going to do that. I think Monday, the 25th is going to be the first webinar and that’ll be about 90 minutes, maybe longer if there’s, you know, a lot of Q&A at the end, and then December 9th, and that’s going to be a two-part deal. The first one will be about YouTube ads and how to use that for branding. And for not not not so much lead generation it will produce leads, but it’s not a direct lead generator, it it will but it’s more about branding, and also driving relevant traffic into your digital assets. So your entity essentially. So we’re going to talk about YouTube on the first webinar. And then on the second webinar. Again, that’ll be December 9th. We’re going to talk about using the Google Display Network. So it’s good Google Ads training specifically for YouTube and the Google Display Network for setting up branding campaigns which works incredibly well for both building brand awareness but also for generating relevant targeted traffic from specific audiences from specific geo locations if it’s for local into your entities, your digital assets for a particular brand which is great for SEO. So it’s a way for using Google ads to not only produce relevant traffic but improve brand awareness as well as help the SEO that your any SEO work that you’re doing, because you’re driving relevant, targeted traffic from known audiences and Google to your SEO as your assets that you’ve been doing SEO work on. And that takes care of ART right – relevance, trust, and authority. Google understands that that’s that recognize that traffic is an activity. It’s relevant because it’s from known audiences and specific geolocation if that’s if it’s for local you can target by geolocation, and it’s also trusted, trusted and authority trusted traffic because it’s coming from Google’s known Google’s audience buckets. And essentially, so it’s going to be it’s very, very powerful. I’ve just been crushing it with Google ads for clients over the last several months. And it just works really, really well. And I’ve been using them for my own business as well. And it’s, it’s just a great, great strategy. So that said, it’s, um, it’s going to be a pre, like right now you can get in for like, the pre-training special or whatever, where it’s, it’s a third of what it’s going to be once I’m done recording those webinars, it’s going to be packaged up and sold for probably 300 bucks, or right right, right around there. So if you want to get in for a third of that, I would recommend that you go check out the post that Adam posted, comment on it and then get signed up. Okay. All right.

Marco: So they’re more than welcome to wait and pay us more later. Yeah, that’s fine too. But I would suggest for people not to wait.

Bradley: Alright, so can we get into it? Now,

Adam: let’s do it.

Bradley: All right, we got the screen. Okay, somebody confirm.

Adam: Good to go.

Bradley: Okay, so everybody can see my humping Wednesday meme GIFs alright. Hump Day right, Wednesday.

How Would You Add Relevancy To Your Money Site Using Drive Stacks?

So, Alright, so the first questions are and it’s multiple questions. It’s 13 pages worth of questions from Fred Wilson and Fred. Well, I appreciate your and I really do. I appreciate your questions. That’s a bit much for Hump Day Hangouts. And also, it’s getting a little bit into the weeds for stuff that we would typically only cover in this much depth in mastermind, which I’m sure you’re fully aware of that, as a former mastermind member, or an RYS Academy reloaded specifically since it’s so it pertains to drive stack stuff and kind of deep into the weeds. But with that said, Marco, how much of this do you want to answer?

Marco: I haven’t really re-read the question. So,

Bradley: Yeah. So should I give you about 10 minutes to get through it?

Marco: All right. Do you have a general question that you can add the I’d be more than happy to answer general questions, but if it’s something that’s specific, yeah, that again, membership has its privileges and this things that I’m only answer for paying members and I mean, that that’s just that’s the way it should be. I’m sure that people who have paid three $4,000 for the course would appreciate me keeping the secret sauce in where it belongs.

Bradley: Yeah. And I agree and that, you know, I’ve read through the first two sections of this three-part question this three-section question, and I realized that it’s, it’s a lot more in-depth than what we would typically answer on a free Hump Day hangout because it’s getting into very specific tactics. From RYS reloaded, we would cover it also in the mastermind, I’m sure. But this is not something that we can get that deep into it. That said, I’ll give you kind of a general overview, and I’ll kind of answer it and let you take add to it, Marco, and then we’ll move on to the next one. So Fred, we would welcome you back to the mastermind at any moment.

If we’re going to RYS Reloaded, either one of those would be good places to get this particular question answered. But that said, He’s talking about his food business, his food tour business and talking about how to add additional relevancy. He did some keyword theme research using SEM Rush and looking at some of the competitors and found that there is some other keywords other than just food tour type keywords that can help to add relevancy that are kind of associated with the food tour business, but he hasn’t been targeting them. And so the question is would adding in some of these other types of keyboard themes into the drive stack folders as subfolders within food tour folders, would that help to add relevancy? And because of the association that Google’s is showing? And so I mean, to me, you’ve already answered your question. Yes. You know, if there’s if there’s a way to create that association, that you’re you’ve discovered by doing some additional research, looking at competitors using some tools like sem rush and all of that kind of stuff, then yeah, you can you can add that additional relevancy into your drive stack. And that’s going to certainly help. I don’t know if you want to go further than that. Marco.

Marco: Yeah. Just a little bit, because, I mean, I can answer this generally we go after, especially the way that our keyword research VA is being taught, we go after anything that Google considers relevant. In a keyword, research cake, and we give you guys whoever orders the gig, the deep keyword research, all of that information. We do separate the movie will give you tasks will give you silos will give you information that we feel is where the money makers are, what the relevant keywords are, and maybe something that that that that isn’t a money keyword, but Google still thinks that that is relevant. All of that is necessary because what we do inside the drive stack is create relevantly and push. Right? We create a relevance push from everything that we do from the spider web silo to the way that the drive stack is built to the way that the G site is built to the way the inner pages are done to the way that we mimic what’s on the website. So yes, by all means, I don’t care. We do use SEM Rush for keyword relevance, but that’s not necessarily what will target what we do is we use Jeffrey Smith’s Ultimate SEO Bootcamp training. And we go according to how he teaches what the top-level categories are. Then from there, work down and create the silos there, you will create three silos. But everything that’s relevant should be at it. Remember when Network Empire started talking about color, current stuff, it’s not, it’s not there. But they began talking about it. And they began explaining it more what it was all about, what it means. And really, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to create all of this in a self-contained Google environment for the bot to feed on, which is, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Is It Safe Against Plagiarism To Curate Content With Attribution From Google Snippet?

Bradley: Yeah. And so the next question part of this, which it’s kinda interesting that you asked this, Fred because we covered this, our own our very own data. You know, master link builder, was at our live event, hopefully, live 2019 in Denver, just recently, and he was talking about doing something similar that you’re asking about, which is adding q&a. Questions and Answers into a doc within your Gsite within your drive stack and just linking back to the source but not actually hyperlinking just putting like the text-based link. So you’re providing a citation, but what so you’re citing the source, right? So you’re providing attribution, but you’re not hyperlinking back. I would say that should be okay, provided you’re not copying, you know, if you’re just copying snippets, like what is shown in the Google search results for the q amp a section. So when you search for a question in Google, and it brings up that featured snippet, which is a q amp a box, right, and it’s got the dropdowns, and you click the drop-down, and then it shows a short it shows the full question and then a short answer and a link back to the source where it’s pulling that answer from that question and answer from you can embed that or you know, kind of copy and paste that into a Google doc or something like that. And then still late as long as you’re not expanding by going to the actual destination URL and copying more of the content. It’s just a snippet. So it falls under the same rules of curating content would be on a blog post in that, if you’re just highlighting, you know, reusing republishing a short snippet from somebody else’s content, and then you’re providing attribution citing the source, then it should be okay. Now, some people, some publishers will still make eventually, you know, sometimes they may find it and they may request that you unpublish it. But as far as it being a copyright infringement, as long as it’s just a small snippet, and it’s you’re citing the source, it should, it should never be an issue. Although like I said, out of courtesy, if anybody ever were to contact you and say Please take this down or unpublished this, then you know, I would recommend that you just do it to avoid any sort of, you know, some sort of stupid battle that could ensue. Although again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it legally because you are citing the source and it falls within a specific brand. Members of the DMC act right there were the digital, whatever Copyright Act. So I would just, you know, encourage you not to go any further than what is shown in the snippets and the featured snippets within Google search.

That said, also, you’re asked about curating a lot of content about a topic putting it inside the drive stack, then putting links to your money site, the correct way to push relevancy for your money site? Again, yes, you can do that. The same thing is by curating content on your money site, you can do that. Right. So think about that. That’s what we’ve taught for years is the best way to generate content before even money site blog posts unless you’re a subject matter expert and you’re creating 100% original content. The problem with that is even as an as a subject matter expert, sometimes you get you run out of ideas. But there are a ton of other subject matter experts. I’m not talking about buying shitty content farm content, I’m talking about locating subject Matter content written by subject matter experts pertaining to your topic, right or your niche your industry, and then republishing, once again snippets of it, and giving credit to where it’s, you know, citing the source giving attribution. And in the case of curating on a blog, your money site blog, you know, we always recommend hyperlinking to the source. And just using nofollow External links, that’s what I’ve always done. Um, but that’s very, very powerful. Because once again, you can create an original article out of using snippets of other people’s content, where you’re just adding commentary and opening paragraph commentary in between pieces of curated content, which doesn’t have to be just articles, it can be videos, infographics, don’t curate images. Please don’t do that. You can. That’s a no-no, but you can curate infographics, videos, mp3, so audio files, you know, other articles, you can curate all that kind of stuff. And it helps because it allows you to be able to produce content very quickly, inexpensively. And you can even train a virtual assistant, somebody that’s not a subject matter expert how to locate good content, and compile it in a logical fashion, and then just add commentary. So in other words, you know, you can come up with a topic for a blog post, find supporting articles or even differing opinion articles, right so that you can do a compare and contrast or pros and cons or argue both sides of a topic in particular curated article if that makes sense. It’s very, very powerful. And it’s a great way to create co-citation, which is similar to co-occurrence in that you’re linking out to other relevant sources. And so again, we talked about all of that in content kingpin, it’s a training course that is still 100% relevant today. I still use that for all of my clients, that same exact method for curating content for all of my clients. You can apply that to drive stack stuff to you’re still going to build that relevancy, topical relevancy. Just make sure you’re Giving attribution even if you’re not hyperlinking to it, I recommend you absolutely always give credit where credit is due. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: No, I totally agree. It’s a matter of mirroring right? Everything that you would do on the money site you do on the drive stack and Gsite, including curating content. That’s right.

How Do You Add A Schema Markup To A Local Business Press Release?

Okay, cool. Well, the next question is from Kaydee. Hi, guys. How do you add schema markup to press releases for a local business? Press advantage sent an email with a link to Google structured data markup helper tool to create the code but on the page, it is asking to select a data type and then paste your URL of the page you wish to mark up. What URL do we enter here? I don’t know. Because I don’t use that tool. I’m going to point out another one here for you in a moment. The press release is not yet published. So it has no URL to target the markup and the data type is to tick in and the data type to tick is a local business. Thanks to know and here’s why. Because if you’re if you have your own press advantage account, or even if you Buy him through MGYB. And we set up an organization page or you set it up through your own account, right? So you set up an organization page, that’s where you should have your local business markup. If it’s, you know, an organization page for local business, you should have your local business structured data markup in the organization page, right, which will get added to all of the press releases that get pushed out. And some may not all, but many of the publisher sites that were they get published to will actually pick up that JSON LD code for local business markup. Okay, so you add that to your organization page. However, I’ve got a press advantage open here. Let’s see if it hopefully it brings me into the same standby I’m gonna have to pause my screen for a moment because of it my plugin that reset my browser that Marco pointed out, a reset my reset the tab, so give me one second while I get what you’re looking for.

Marco: Let me just tell people That if your press release gets published and you go and look at some of the websites were able to publish, and you don’t see the schema markup, but you don’t see an iframe that you send out or whatever, that’s not on us. It’s not even on press advantage. It’s actually on that website, not wanting, you know, stripping out all of the code. But what we want anyway, is we want to get that in as many places as we can. And that’s why I go it goes out to the entire publication network, but not every website will publish whatever it is that you submitted, just did just to make it clear to everyone because we do get support tickets about that. And it’s like, yeah, there’s nothing that we could do.

Bradley: Yeah, so to show you what I’m talking about. First of all, if we go to press advantage for the organization, which I should I forgot I got my ID page looped into this is going to break the browser. Let me see if I can get to Page Source before it shuts everything down. Um, Alright, so let’s see if it’ll pull this up. It might not. Okay, there we go. So if we scroll down, we’ll see right here is my local business structure data markup starting right here. From here to there. That’s my local business structure data markup, that’s part of the organization page. Right. And so again, as Marco just mentioned, some sites when we publish when it distributes the press releases, it has this codependent to it. You know, it started with it with the press release, but some sites will pick it up and publish that JSON LD code as well. What I think you’re talking about is for individual press releases, so here I am inside the dashboard. If you scroll down now there’s a section says enter JSON LD schema, this will be attached to the release in addition to any organization-specific schema. So that’s what I was talking about before. If it’s a local business, you want it which is what I was showing here. You want to have local business structure data markup on the page, right that their organization page, but then For the individual, a press release, excuse me, you can add additional schema markup here. So what I would recommend here and you know you can do other stuff too depends on what you’re having published. But what I would recommend is going to and this is a tool that I use most of the time, we’re going to have one in MGYB here shortly, I’m not sure if it’s available yet. But this is the one that I’ve been using for quite some time.

If you just go to Google and search for schema markup generator, look for technicalSEO.com or just go to technicalSEO.com and look for the schema markup generator, which is over here in the left sidebar. There’s different types of schema markups that this tool will generate different types of schema. And so the very first one is article click on the article and then when you look down here, when it loads this page, you come down here to Article type, and there’s actually one for news article. So select news article, and then just fill out these fields. And here’s your schema code over here on the right-hand sidebar. Once you’ve completed all these fields, Then you just copy that and paste that into Press Advantage over here. Now again, there are other types of schema that can be generated. So it depends on what the article is going to be about. But just doing news article schema markup is very, very powerful, right to add to each individual press release. Okay, so that’s what I would recommend. There are other tools out there that will generate this stuff to guys, this is just the one that I typically use. Okay. There’s a good question. Now, by the way, that said, I gotta tease this a little bit. I’m inside my blog for that same company, I was just sharing my real estate business. And this we’ve got coming soon. We’ve got some pretty cool stuff coming up. And like the plugin will generate this Jeffrey Smith plugin, but it’s the pro version, which isn’t released yet, but it’s coming soon. And it’s got all the schema markup generator right inside WordPress for all every different type of schema, you can think of. It’s fabulous. And so that same type that same article markup right there, if we come down here, there’s an article type, blog posting or news article. And then I can just fill out all this stuff. It creates the code right down here and embeds it into the header of this particular blog post. And I can click update, and boom, that’s going to have the same type of Article markup that we were just sharing. Pretty powerful stuff. So be on the lookout for that guys soon, early next year. That was a good tease. Right, guys?

Marco: Perfect.

Can You Embed The Website Pages In The GSite When Mirroring?

All right. Next one is Simon. He says We’re marrying the main website to the G site. Can you just embed the website pages on the site pages? Or is it necessary to copy and paste the content for each website page on to the G site pages, I just use the embeds. I’m lazy like that, right. I work on the money site pages. That’s what I flush out with good content. And I mirror them onto the site. And then I just and I do some other really cool stuff. We’ve been talking about how I do silos now. locations. So there’s topical silos and in location-based silos, but I do it in a very unique way. And it works really well, especially when you use a G site. And yeah, all I do is grab the embed or create an iframe out of the money site pages, and embed them into the G site page, then I optimize the title of the G site page, obviously. And then, you know, you can mirror that into a folder inside of your folder and files inside of your drive stack. And then just smash that shit with embeds and or links, or both. And it works really, really well hit ever remember, that’s your SEO shield. So we do everything externally to the SEO shield, right? So that would be the G site the drive stack and all of the tier one entity assets, which by the way, you can actually take those iframe into your syndication network properties to guys think about that. So right, there’s no reason you can’t push those embeds through to your syndication network properties too. good question though,

Does Proper Schema Markup Feed The Bot Enough And Not To Worry About Creating Long Articles?

Paul Thompson says, Does proper schema markup feed the bot enough that we don’t need to worry about creating long articles on the pages we want to rank? No, but it does. It does definitely help a lot. Marco is probably going to be better at answering this one than me. I would still for money sites stuff still flesh out the pages, but adding structured data, like what I just showed with my blog, where you were, you know, again, you can add it manually now like right now, since the pro plugins not available, this there might be other plugins out there that do it, but I don’t know if they provide the schema code that’s 100% up to date. I know that a lot of times they’re not updated enough. I’m not speaking badly about anybody else’s plugin. I just haven’t used them. But you can have like a code insert or plugin right so like. SoGo ad scripts header, footer and things like that header, footer type script plugins where you can add scripts into the head section or foot section or body section of any individual page or post, and you can go use schema creators like what I just shared, and create schema markup and and then put them into each one of your posts or pages or whatever, so that you’re adding additional, you know, schema structured data that the bots love and I mean, that’s guys, you’re you’ll you’ll have an edge over a lot of your competitors if you do that kind of stuff. But I would still recommend that for money site stuff, you flush the content, the content of the page out to. Marco, what say you

Marco: Yeah, I mean that absolutely. Two things right. structured and unstructured data structured data is for the bot feed the bot as much as you can, which is exactly what we do. And why we use drive stacks and Gsites and iframe and everything that the entities entity stack, and everything else that we don’t I mean that it there’s a method to our madness. Now, if you then go and you send a person to a page. And now we’re talking about people, we’re not talking about bots, because what’s going to happen is you’re going to rank. And that’s going to bring your traffic onto the page. And if there’s nothing on that page to engage the person, then we no longer care about the but now we care about that person coming to the website and converting, finishing the action that they were set out to do, because if that person comes on the website and bounces, then you did you defeated the entire purpose of creating the all of the stacking that we created in the first place, which was to get that person onto the page that would convert them over an image is going to convert them of an image is going to get them to push and call whatever it is that you need to be done. To finish that, that then that’s what’s going to matter. So, two different things. If you need the content to rank you have to look at the competition. If you can rank or outrank the competition without 2000 or 3000 words of content, By all means, nobody, and nobody’s going to sit there and go through the 3000 words of content on this is a really interested in whatever it is that you have to say. what you’re interested in, is that conversion, because that’s what centers everything at the end. And that’s what Google is going to look at from beginning to end is whether that task and that goal. Well, whether it was accomplished.

How Do You Setup A GMB Page For A Business That Operates In Multiple States?

Awesome, thanks, Marco. So the next question was from jack, I’m not the next question is my client is based out of Texas but operates in five other states fully across the states not limited to anyone Metro region. What’s the best way to set up the company GMB page, so reviews for one state aggregate under the main company as well. Or if that’s not possible, what would be the best way to go about setting up the GMB either individually and each state Or globally under some other configuration? Well, remember Google My Business is supposed to be especially now there’s another question I see on the page here a little bit lower about what happened on November 8. And from my understanding, which I’ve only done very, I’ve only kind of read through some comments and stuff, is that it was more it was basically an update to the maps algorithm for GMB stuff. And it’s gone even more proximity-based. So they’ve Google’s tightened the proximity filter, so to speak. And so with that said, Google, my business is supposed to be for local businesses, right? I mean, we’ve talked about setting up GMBs and you know, setting your service area, the United States, for example, and that’s okay, but it’s not it’s okay for like the entity but it’s not going to help you to rank anywhere in the United States and maps. That said, you’re also in this case, you’re talking about five different states. They’re located in Texas but they operate in five other states. So you potentially you could have if you have an office and in each of their other states, you could have GMB for each office location. It’s not necessary but you can. That said if you wanted to get reviews and let’s just say Arizona, I’m just assuming let’s just say that that’s one of the states that you operate in. If you get reviews in Arizona, but you want them to populate on the Texas GMB if that’s the way you have it set up. It’s not you can’t do that. If you had a gym be in Arizona, I mean, if all you have is the one Google My Business location in Texas, then it doesn’t matter where you get the reviews from. They’re all going to aggregate on that one and only Google My Business location. My point that I’m trying to make is you cannot get GMB reviews in one location and have them also populate onto another GMB location. You can’t do that. It because each GMB entity or location is supposed to be it’s own and collect its own or, you know, aggregate its own reviews. So that said, You know, I would, I would consider what it is you’re trying to do. As far as if you have multiple GMBs, which I’m not sure that you do, but if you do, then what I would recommend you do is set up use some sort of review directing app. I know for contractors, one of the ones that work really well as birdeye.com. I think another one might be Podium, I’ve not used that. But what are some of my contractor clients use Bird Eye, and that works well, but it’s like a review gate, right? So it would be an app where you send out to customers, or clients or whatever the company or the business sends out to customers and ask for some listen to review or at ask for a review. And then somebody leaves a review and it directs the app can direct where the review gets published to if that makes sense. So you have more control over it that way and if it’s you know, below three stars, then it can be not posted as a review. Instead, it could be brought to, you know, sent to the customer service team so that they can reach out and try to resolve potential issues, that kind of stuff, I would look into something like that if you’re trying to have more control over where your reviews are coming from and where they’re going to be posted to. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: Yeah, I’m just guessing that his client and whatever it is that they’re doing that it triggers a three-pack, right? It triggers a map pack and it triggers map rankings if that’s the case. Then get a map wherein each one of the places where where your client operate, and associate everything to the main entity, that’s how Texas so then the AI which is sophisticated enough to then understand once you begin associating all of these to understand that it’s all part of the same company with it’s a company that operates out of Texas but has regional offices in five other states. So that if you do get a review, for example, in Texas for the company in another state, it could be taken into consideration. I’m not saying that the AI is that sophisticated, but it could mean at some point it will be, it will be able to understand all of these different relationships and put everything together. And if you do a really good job in your structured data of putting all of this together for the buck, then you won’t even have to leave it to the bot to guess and try to understand what this is all about. You can tell it you can go with everything in JSON LD to tell about what this is all about. Having done that, then you don’t have to worry about reviewing everything, or aggregating everything under the main company, it will all be taken together because everything is associated if you’ve done your job correctly. Now, if it’s globally that we’re not worrying about maps, and then the reviews wouldn’t even come into play, unless you have unless you can trigger a knowledge And that’s a totally different story.

Bradley: Yeah, and if that’s the case, if it was globally then I would just have all reviews going to the one GMB asset, wherever the primary location is, because then all you’re trying to do is build the brand, not individual locations, right?

What Are Your Insights On The Reported Traffic Drop Last November 8, 2019?

So Ross says, Hey, everyone, and then he’s got the follow-up question below, which I’ll just that’s what and now come back to Joey’s question where he says Ross is new here. What the hell happened on November 8, lots of traffic drops and the insight and that’s what I was just talking about, as far as I know. I’m sure Marco’s got more insight on this than I do. Because I don’t geek out about this stuff anymore. If I don’t see major drops in my stuff, I don’t worry about it. So but apparently the what it from what I understand it was another maps update where it looks like they tightened the proximity filter to where it’s it’s even narrower now. Is that correct? Marco?

Marco: That’s absolutely correct. They tighten up on the proximity. And proximity is a ranking factor, it’s we can literally call it the most important ranking factor, although you can still overcome. That’s why we don’t usually see all of these changes in the things that we do. Because you can overcome anything, any part of the algorithm, you can overcome it. And people are saying that well don’t use brute force. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. You can totally overcome anything through what they call it in the Rocky movie, good old fashioned blunt force trauma. And that’s just feeding the but just a whole lot of related information, wherever it is that you that you’re trying to expand to. So even though even if the proximity factor is the main ranking factor, there are other ranking factors that can and do come into play, if you can overcome that one factor. So is that something to just totally say, Oh my god, now I have to go get a DMB in eternity. City, not only in the area where I am but in the surrounding areas, it’s being able to overcome that proximity factor. And we do it and we do a really good job of teaching that in local GSB Pro. And now, you know being at the location and being able to upload images and being able to show Google that you’re actually there and that everything is actually from that location has become more important than ever.

Bradley: Yes, very good.

Does The Size Of Embeds Matter?

So let’s jump back to Joey’s question. It says hi, does the size of embeds matter? In other words, embedding a 10 by 10 GMB site is still the equivalent of embedding a 600 by 300. So the frame could be one by 110 by 10 or 600 by 300. And you still pass the juice Thank you. I’m size doesn’t matter. Only because if you have it too small, then that could be considered cloaking. Am I correct in that statement?

Marco: Yeah, yeah, you could, you could be tagged For cloaking, although it’s really hard if I mean if you do it right there no word. Most people can’t do it right, which is why we don’t even teach it.

Bradley: Yeah. I mean, technically Yes, you can still pass the SEO with the iframe present even if it’s a one by one pixel.

Marco: Even if it’s a zero by zero

Bradley: Yeah, it technically you can absolutely do that. I wouldn’t recommend it if you know, because if anybody manually reviews it and saw it, then they could, you know, they could flag you for manual action. So

Marco: that would be the biggest problem right with someone coming in and actually, you triggering, First of all, triggering enough red flags to trigger a manual review so that someone from Google would actually come to your website because nobody trusts you’re not making enough money now. Nobody. Most people are making enough money to worry about Google to have someone waste all of their valuable resources on looking at your fucking website in the first place. If you do get that big or if just if you just happen to get unlucky enough to trigger a manual, and they come and see that zero by zero thing, yes, that is cloaking. There’s no reason for you to have a zero by zero iframe one by one unless it’s a pixel, right? Facebook, Google, whatever, if it’s unless it’s tracking code. So they come in and look and they see code and it looks fishy. You’re more likely to get hit with a manual and probably deindex, because I’ve seen cloaking get hit really, really hard.

Bradley: Yeah, agreed. Okay, so we’ll say, Hey, Marco, have you announced the date of the four webinars for Bert? I guess that’s for the charity stuff.

Marco: Yeah, no, I’m still working on that. It’s not only BERT, but I’m also going to go into entities and AI and NLP and what it actually is what it isn’t. We’re gonna we’re going to discuss and talk about everything that that other People just either refused to talk about, or they don’t know enough about it to be able to discuss it. As soon as I have it already, I’m going to announce it. I’m going to announce the date I’m going to give you the donation page. And remember this all goes to a really good cause it’s getting kids who would otherwise not be able to get an education getting them into school, so that they can get a good education get trained to get jobs and, you know, have a chance at life.

Bradley: Very cool. Alright, the next one, Fred says I was worried that that might be a problem. So that’s because I was kind of tongue in cheek picking. That is a huge, long question. He says, thanks so much for answering my 13 pages of questions. It helped a lot. Thanks, guys. You’re welcome, Fred.

What Is The Difference Between Q&A and FAQ?

Fit. So what’s up? 50 says what is the difference between Q&A and FAQ? Well, it’s, it’s kind of the same thing or it’s very closely related. Q&A is most of the time would like You can see in the SERPs is what I was talking about earlier. But FAQs that can be a little bit more specific to an individual like a business. Right? So I mean, they’re kind of basically the same. As far as schema markup, it’s the same. But what I mean the difference is frequently asked questions are should be answered by a client or business, right? Like, what is the questions that they get? asked the most by prospects and or customers or clients? Right? And they should have answers to that. But when it comes to q amp, a, what I’m what these, the way that I look at it is when you go to Google and you search for question, you’ll see related questions that get asked enough that somebody took the time to create content around answering that question, and then marking it up correctly on their website so that they could get added to the featured snippets in Google search. So it stands to reason that that question gets asked enough. It might be a frequently asked question for another business that maybe your particular client or business doesn’t get asked that much, but it’s still relevant. That makes sense. So they’re very closely related, but there is a slight difference, at least in my opinion.

Marco: Yeah, the difference is that that Q&A, people should be able to either ask questions or answer questions on the website, if they’re not able, if they’re your frequently asked questions and your answers are there’s no way for users to engage with that. Then it’s FAQ frequently asked questions. Q&A, again, is on a website where people can go in and interact with the questions and the answer. Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah, guys, it you know, I’ve talked about this probably in Syndication Academy. And I’ll probably I’ll just give this give another nugget away here because it works really well. And we’re almost out of time. So anyway, those Q&A questions that you can curate, right from Google and the beautiful thing about it is if you type in a question about product service in an industry whatever the questions box comes up now what the drop-downs each time you click on a drop-down, it brings up like three or four more questions. So like you can just keep drilling down into those guys and that gives you almost unlimited content. Like, Think about it. It’s a content hack, right, you can grab a question and an answer from those Question and Answer boxes that Google provides you and use that in GMB posts for example, right, just cite the source just like I was talking about earlier is the in the Q&A box right that the dropdown. as it expands, it gives you the snippet with the answer at least a partial answer. It might not be the full answer, but it gives a snippet and then it has the link to read more. Well, you can still use that link in the GMB post too so you give proper credit to where it’s due. That’s a nofollow link and a GMB post the button link right, and a GMB post. So the button URL, the URL that you attach to the call to action button. That is a dofollow link, although I here in just the past few days probably since November 8. Some of those are nofollow. And I think it’s just because Google is still tinkering around in there. But those are dofollow links. So you can still link back to the answer, have a QA, write a question and answer that you curate it you basically are republishing from Google’s own search results, to add relevancy to the GMB. You can do this on your money site too and link back to the source which is only proper and right. But then use the button URL in the GMB post the link back to your money site, right to your page that also is about that very topic or question and answer right so you again, you’re it’s creating co-citation. It’s creating topical relevancy, and you don’t even have to come up with the content. You can even go through and curate groups of questions like question and then create blog posts out of those on your money site where once again, you’re publishing the question plus the answer. You can create a table of contents at the top of the page Marco stop me from getting too deep here. But with a table of contents with jump links, anchor links, right that jump down to each section that has a different question. It has the answer that links back out to the source, right, but it’s a nofollow link on the blog post. And then just like a curated post, you can inject some commentary in between that stuff, with an opening paragraph and a closing paragraph with a call to action to contact your business or your company, your client that you’re doing the work for, for help or services with that, you know, for products or services that solve those problems, those questions that make sense.

So again, guys, it’s a great strategy to use those questions as a farm those questions right mine those questions, harvest those questions or whatever you want to say from one of those from this q&a panels that pop up in the Google search results and drill down into them. You can get gold topic ideas, blog post ideas GMB post ideas from that kind of stuff.

Which Of Your Courses In Which You Teach About Making ID Pages and Mirror Gsites?

So, Alright, the last question is oh Austin Don says, which of your courses do you teach about making it pages and mirror g sites? Well the mastermind, RYS reloaded local GMB Pro, any one of those three the mastermind local GMB Pro or RYS reloaded what it was, it’s covered in all three of those locations. So, am I missing any here guys?

Marco: I don’t think you did. Okay.

Bradley: Adam, you want to chime in? All right, last is not really a question. It’s just a comment and then we’re going to wrap it up, guys. I’ve got a TV repairman showing up in about five minutes. Anyways, I asked the question about GMBs and review in one location versus all the states that clients the Klein operates and this was that question about Texas and five additional states. We answered previously he says no follow up question. I just wanted to say thank you for answering it and you knocked it out of the park. I’ve wrestled with this in my head for a week and you made it clear as day thanks again, guys for all that you do. You’re very welcome. That’s what this venue is for. Anything else guys?

Marco: No, not unless another question popped up now. on the page,

Adam: I think you just scroll over Bradley, but the last call for everybody. Head over there. Just follow the instructions on Facebook get early access to the YouTube and UTM course Bradley’s going to be put together here over the holidays and save a bundle but like they said to if you want to wait a little bit and pay us three times too much more. So okay with that.

Bradley: And let’s go ahead. I was gonna say I actually prefer that. But, you know, I want you guys to save that additional $200 to spend it on your family’s at Christmas. So

Marco: and stop by the mastermind tomorrow. The webinar, because we’re going to show how much we’ve improved the user experience. Want to show how easy it is to find the information now before it was just okay, how do I get through five years of information? Yeah, because we have five years worth of videos in there in the archives, right? So just the latest videos. It’s everything since we started. As I did you get through all that, well, now we made it really simple for you to get through it.

Bradley: That’s been a long time coming. There’s just so much damn content, so much video-based content and long mastermind webinars. It’s been hard to, for people to find stuff and that’s a problem we’ve been dealing with for a long time. And we Marco has been working on it in the background for since I think January of this year, maybe February, but it’s been a long time. And now it’s here. It’s ready. So it’s awesome. It’s a big, big improvement. So, all right, everybody, thanks for being here. We’ll see some of you tomorrow, the rest of you next week. Awesome. Bye, everyone. Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 262 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

[daynamartinez22]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 262

Click on the video above to watch Episode 262 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: Alright, we are live. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 262. Today is the 13th of November. And I don’t know if anyone else knows this. But apparently there’s something called Black Friday at the end of the month and Cyber Monday. Apparently there’s some sales or something going on. Well, we’ve got something even better to kick it off. So make sure you keep your eyes and ears open for that we got some good stuff coming and it’s going to be free. We’re not going to even require an opt-in but more on that later. Let’s talk to the guys real quick and then we got a couple of announcements and we will dive into your questions. To start on my left here, Bradley, how you doing today?

Bradley: Good man hanging out, working hard, instead of hard-working.

Adam: Are you going to go like a TV writing this weekend? Or is it now

Bradley: I’ve got my daughter this weekend. So it’s her weekend but uh, December 6 that weekend. I’m going to my favorite spot Diamond Southwestern Virginia again for the weekend. Actually I’m going on the fifth for Thursday the fifth so looking forward to that although it may be cold it should be fun.

Adam: Nice. Nice. Marco speaking of weather How you doing man?

Marco: Man, I’m starting to get cold down here. You guys are sending your cold it was almost 65 last night. Oh ridiculous. Stop it. Arctic Well, whatever you want whatever you guys are doing up there Stop it. We don’t want it.

Adam: Well, speaking of cold Chris How you doing?

Chris: I didn’t know like. There’s nothing to complain it’s cozy warm and that was out today and it was sunny. Yeah, life is a good man.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan and Hernan, you still you’re in Miami, right for a little bit longer?

Hernan: I’m still in South Florida. Yeah, I’m still here until Saturday, actually, when I’m flying back to Buenos Aires.Excited to be there. They’re going to be spending the holiday season with family. But also exciting for next week and the week after, which is going to be Black Friday, so that’s gonna be pretty cool too. So that’ll be here.

Adam: Outstanding. Yeah. Well, it’s good stuff. And I’m happy to be here in case anyone wants to know, the weather is just fine. It’s like 70 I guess. I don’t know.

Chris: Quick question, Adam.

Adam: what’s that?

Chris: Are you guys celebrating 11th of November as well?

Adam: Um, no, is that a thing?

Chris: I didn’t know. Like, I noticed there was were all kinds of like online sales on the 11th of November. So I was actually quite surprised.

Adam: 11 11 maybe just like making use of the numbers. You know, right. Fair enough. Well, I missed out on that since

Bradley: it’s just like every year, people start putting their Christmas trees and decorations up and the station started playing Christmas music earlier on earlier every fucking year. So I imagine Black Friday starts getting earlier on early every year now to so jet rise.

Adam: So real quick if you’re new to us, welcome. You’re in the right place. You didn’t end up on the weather channel or discussion of holidays. You are in fact at Hump Day Hangouts and we’re going to answer your digital marketing questions shortly. But just so you know, you’re in the right place, you can always ask your questions on the page, unless of course, it’s broken and you can’t get to the page like people were doing today. In which case come back in a few hours after we unscrew up our technical issue and come back and answer your question whether or not you can make it live you can always ask your question. We encourage you to be here live so you can get clarification or asked or gets more information from you as well as occasionally we do some fun stuff like giveaways. But you can always catch the replays on YouTube and get your answers that way.

Secondly, if you haven’t yet grabbed the Battle Plan that is your next step, head over to battleplan.semanticmastery.com for a repeatable process, everything from new websites, age domains, YouTube channels, whatever it is going there and past that. If you’re ready to grow your digital marketing business then you probably want or you should want a community that includes fast access to real-world info and that’s what the mastermind is all about. You can find out more at mastermind.semanticmastery.com. And for everyone, no matter where you’re at and ourselves included, we recommend getting stuff done right. You build a team, you build processes, you outsource and you get it done for you. And that’s why mgyb.co exist you can head over there and get our way as to drive stack, syndication networks, press releases, link building, embed all sorts of stuff with some really, really kick-ass stuff coming here in November wink, wink Black Friday and then into the New Year. We got some good stuff coming.

Marco: I have two public service announcements. Adams Sorry to interrupt.

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Marco: Black Friday will be on Wednesdays from now on. I just determined that. And to all joking aside, we always say that be and the mastermind has its privileges. Well, I’ve been personally working really hard and incorporating some really not gonna say what it is, but some just some really neat things into the Mastermind to make the user experience to and to make people finding what they’re looking for. To make that way better to improve the experience so that people can come in and find exactly what they’re looking for, where it is, you know, so whatever it is that you’re trying to find, Marco will talk shit about Google on and I can’t remember when Well, it’s not finished, not 100% because there is artificial intelligence involved. And interestingly enough the world is the SEO world is an uproar because of BERT, and we’re actually using BERT in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind so again, mastermind being a member of the Semantic Mastermind does have its privileges because you’re first to get everything that we do business building and ideas and concepts, and all of these different things. Hey, on tomorrow’s mastermind webinar will be talking about BERT and AI and what it is actually, because you see all of these discussions and all of these forums and then all these Facebook groups, and nobody has an I’m not going to drop an F-bomb here. Nobody has an effing clue as to what it is that they’re talking. They don’t know what BERT is. And all you have to do is go into the documentation to see what BERT is and what it does. And you’ll know that it’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing because of the way that we teach you how to do things in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. So not only does it have its privileges in that we give you cutting it and anything that we can do to make your Your life easier to enter to make, whether its clients whether tank, whatever it is, it’s there and we give it to people but it’s also we try to make your life easier. We try to do all of these different things. Because you’re a member of the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. It’s included in the membership fee, nobody will have to pay extra for all the work that went into the back end of the mastermind to make things so much better. So, I’m sorry, it seems like it’s a pitch fest for the mastermind. And I should be pitching the hell out of it. Because it’s so good. We get testimonials time and again, of how well our stuff works. And so yeah, we should be here, tooting our own horns and singing our praises and whatever. I’m not going to go into that anymore. Just I’m just letting people know if you’re in the Semantic Mastery <stermind, be there tomorrow and see just how much we have improved the learning experience. Let’s call it

Adam: Amen. got one more to add on to that you guys are now made a post believe on November 4 about big news for Bradley. Bradley is going to be putting together some training, we decided based on the response. There’s still a little bit of time if you want to get down on this, and what it is, is step by step program on how to grow, grow a massive brand using YouTube and GDN, Ads. And, you know, we just want to engage, because we have, especially Bradley didn’t want to be putting in a lot of time and effort doing the training, you know, right leading up into the holidays if people weren’t interested. But so far, we’ve got 71 comments, people interested in early access at a hell of a discount. So I’m going to put the link in if you want to get in on that. Just comment, leave a GIF or a comment on the Facebook thread and we will be in touch with you shortly. We’re going to have some information that information about that going up. Hernan says let me in I think he got booted from the from Hump Day Hangouts.

Bradley: He’s back in

Adam: Alright, well, guys, with that said, we got anything else before we get into questions here.

Bradley: I’ll just give a little update on a couple of things. Number one, we’ve got anybody that joined Local Kingpin, which was the Google Ads training for using search ads for lead generation. That’s going to be an update webinar on Monday. Because the interface has changed so much the principles, the method is still pretty much the same, though. There’s just some slight differences that I’m going to cover. And the interface, Google Ads interface has changed a lot. Plus they’ve got a lot of new or improved features, such as automated bidding strategies and things like that, that I used to suggest never to use, but they’ve gotten so much better over the last year and a half, two years because of AI and it’s so much better. So artificial intelligence. And so we’re going to talk about that slightly plus any questions that anybody has So that’ll be Monday, it’ll be probably only about an hour long. That’s just for me to give an update and answer questions. So if you’re in Local Kingpin, I encourage you to get signed up for that.

Also, the Google Ads course that Adam was just talking about, that I’m going to be starting in two weeks, I think it’s one and I say we’re going to do that. I think Monday, the 25th is going to be the first webinar and that’ll be about 90 minutes, maybe longer if there’s, you know, a lot of Q&A at the end, and then December 9th, and that’s going to be a two-part deal. The first one will be about YouTube ads and how to use that for branding. And for not not not so much lead generation it will produce leads, but it’s not a direct lead generator, it it will but it’s more about branding, and also driving relevant traffic into your digital assets. So your entity essentially. So we’re going to talk about YouTube on the first webinar. And then on the second webinar. Again, that’ll be December 9th. We’re going to talk about using the Google Display Network. So it’s good Google Ads training specifically for YouTube and the Google Display Network for setting up branding campaigns which works incredibly well for both building brand awareness but also for generating relevant targeted traffic from specific audiences from specific geo locations if it’s for local into your entities, your digital assets for a particular brand which is great for SEO. So it’s a way for using Google ads to not only produce relevant traffic but improve brand awareness as well as help the SEO that your any SEO work that you’re doing, because you’re driving relevant, targeted traffic from known audiences and Google to your SEO as your assets that you’ve been doing SEO work on. And that takes care of ART right – relevance, trust, and authority. Google understands that that’s that recognize that traffic is an activity. It’s relevant because it’s from known audiences and specific geolocation if that’s if it’s for local you can target by geolocation, and it’s also trusted, trusted and authority trusted traffic because it’s coming from Google’s known Google’s audience buckets. And essentially, so it’s going to be it’s very, very powerful. I’ve just been crushing it with Google ads for clients over the last several months. And it just works really, really well. And I’ve been using them for my own business as well. And it’s, it’s just a great, great strategy. So that said, it’s, um, it’s going to be a pre, like right now you can get in for like, the pre-training special or whatever, where it’s, it’s a third of what it’s going to be once I’m done recording those webinars, it’s going to be packaged up and sold for probably 300 bucks, or right right, right around there. So if you want to get in for a third of that, I would recommend that you go check out the post that Adam posted, comment on it and then get signed up. Okay. All right.

Marco: So they’re more than welcome to wait and pay us more later. Yeah, that’s fine too. But I would suggest for people not to wait.

Bradley: Alright, so can we get into it? Now,

Adam: let’s do it.

Bradley: All right, we got the screen. Okay, somebody confirm.

Adam: Good to go.

Bradley: Okay, so everybody can see my humping Wednesday meme GIFs alright. Hump Day right, Wednesday.

How Would You Add Relevancy To Your Money Site Using Drive Stacks?

So, Alright, so the first questions are and it’s multiple questions. It’s 13 pages worth of questions from Fred Wilson and Fred. Well, I appreciate your and I really do. I appreciate your questions. That’s a bit much for Hump Day Hangouts. And also, it’s getting a little bit into the weeds for stuff that we would typically only cover in this much depth in mastermind, which I’m sure you’re fully aware of that, as a former mastermind member, or an RYS Academy reloaded specifically since it’s so it pertains to drive stack stuff and kind of deep into the weeds. But with that said, Marco, how much of this do you want to answer?

Marco: I haven’t really re-read the question. So,

Bradley: Yeah. So should I give you about 10 minutes to get through it?

Marco: All right. Do you have a general question that you can add the I’d be more than happy to answer general questions, but if it’s something that’s specific, yeah, that again, membership has its privileges and this things that I’m only answer for paying members and I mean, that that’s just that’s the way it should be. I’m sure that people who have paid three $4,000 for the course would appreciate me keeping the secret sauce in where it belongs.

Bradley: Yeah. And I agree and that, you know, I’ve read through the first two sections of this three-part question this three-section question, and I realized that it’s, it’s a lot more in-depth than what we would typically answer on a free Hump Day hangout because it’s getting into very specific tactics. From RYS reloaded, we would cover it also in the mastermind, I’m sure. But this is not something that we can get that deep into it. That said, I’ll give you kind of a general overview, and I’ll kind of answer it and let you take add to it, Marco, and then we’ll move on to the next one. So Fred, we would welcome you back to the mastermind at any moment.

If we’re going to RYS Reloaded, either one of those would be good places to get this particular question answered. But that said, He’s talking about his food business, his food tour business and talking about how to add additional relevancy. He did some keyword theme research using SEM Rush and looking at some of the competitors and found that there is some other keywords other than just food tour type keywords that can help to add relevancy that are kind of associated with the food tour business, but he hasn’t been targeting them. And so the question is would adding in some of these other types of keyboard themes into the drive stack folders as subfolders within food tour folders, would that help to add relevancy? And because of the association that Google’s is showing? And so I mean, to me, you’ve already answered your question. Yes. You know, if there’s if there’s a way to create that association, that you’re you’ve discovered by doing some additional research, looking at competitors using some tools like sem rush and all of that kind of stuff, then yeah, you can you can add that additional relevancy into your drive stack. And that’s going to certainly help. I don’t know if you want to go further than that. Marco.

Marco: Yeah. Just a little bit, because, I mean, I can answer this generally we go after, especially the way that our keyword research VA is being taught, we go after anything that Google considers relevant. In a keyword, research cake, and we give you guys whoever orders the gig, the deep keyword research, all of that information. We do separate the movie will give you tasks will give you silos will give you information that we feel is where the money makers are, what the relevant keywords are, and maybe something that that that that isn’t a money keyword, but Google still thinks that that is relevant. All of that is necessary because what we do inside the drive stack is create relevantly and push. Right? We create a relevance push from everything that we do from the spider web silo to the way that the drive stack is built to the way that the G site is built to the way the inner pages are done to the way that we mimic what’s on the website. So yes, by all means, I don’t care. We do use SEM Rush for keyword relevance, but that’s not necessarily what will target what we do is we use Jeffrey Smith’s Ultimate SEO Bootcamp training. And we go according to how he teaches what the top-level categories are. Then from there, work down and create the silos there, you will create three silos. But everything that’s relevant should be at it. Remember when Network Empire started talking about color, current stuff, it’s not, it’s not there. But they began talking about it. And they began explaining it more what it was all about, what it means. And really, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to create all of this in a self-contained Google environment for the bot to feed on, which is, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Is It Safe Against Plagiarism To Curate Content With Attribution From Google Snippet?

Bradley: Yeah. And so the next question part of this, which it’s kinda interesting that you asked this, Fred because we covered this, our own our very own data. You know, master link builder, was at our live event, hopefully, live 2019 in Denver, just recently, and he was talking about doing something similar that you’re asking about, which is adding q&a. Questions and Answers into a doc within your Gsite within your drive stack and just linking back to the source but not actually hyperlinking just putting like the text-based link. So you’re providing a citation, but what so you’re citing the source, right? So you’re providing attribution, but you’re not hyperlinking back. I would say that should be okay, provided you’re not copying, you know, if you’re just copying snippets, like what is shown in the Google search results for the q amp a section. So when you search for a question in Google, and it brings up that featured snippet, which is a q amp a box, right, and it’s got the dropdowns, and you click the drop-down, and then it shows a short it shows the full question and then a short answer and a link back to the source where it’s pulling that answer from that question and answer from you can embed that or you know, kind of copy and paste that into a Google doc or something like that. And then still late as long as you’re not expanding by going to the actual destination URL and copying more of the content. It’s just a snippet. So it falls under the same rules of curating content would be on a blog post in that, if you’re just highlighting, you know, reusing republishing a short snippet from somebody else’s content, and then you’re providing attribution citing the source, then it should be okay. Now, some people, some publishers will still make eventually, you know, sometimes they may find it and they may request that you unpublish it. But as far as it being a copyright infringement, as long as it’s just a small snippet, and it’s you’re citing the source, it should, it should never be an issue. Although like I said, out of courtesy, if anybody ever were to contact you and say Please take this down or unpublished this, then you know, I would recommend that you just do it to avoid any sort of, you know, some sort of stupid battle that could ensue. Although again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it legally because you are citing the source and it falls within a specific brand. Members of the DMC act right there were the digital, whatever Copyright Act. So I would just, you know, encourage you not to go any further than what is shown in the snippets and the featured snippets within Google search.

That said, also, you’re asked about curating a lot of content about a topic putting it inside the drive stack, then putting links to your money site, the correct way to push relevancy for your money site? Again, yes, you can do that. The same thing is by curating content on your money site, you can do that. Right. So think about that. That’s what we’ve taught for years is the best way to generate content before even money site blog posts unless you’re a subject matter expert and you’re creating 100% original content. The problem with that is even as an as a subject matter expert, sometimes you get you run out of ideas. But there are a ton of other subject matter experts. I’m not talking about buying shitty content farm content, I’m talking about locating subject Matter content written by subject matter experts pertaining to your topic, right or your niche your industry, and then republishing, once again snippets of it, and giving credit to where it’s, you know, citing the source giving attribution. And in the case of curating on a blog, your money site blog, you know, we always recommend hyperlinking to the source. And just using nofollow External links, that’s what I’ve always done. Um, but that’s very, very powerful. Because once again, you can create an original article out of using snippets of other people’s content, where you’re just adding commentary and opening paragraph commentary in between pieces of curated content, which doesn’t have to be just articles, it can be videos, infographics, don’t curate images. Please don’t do that. You can. That’s a no-no, but you can curate infographics, videos, mp3, so audio files, you know, other articles, you can curate all that kind of stuff. And it helps because it allows you to be able to produce content very quickly, inexpensively. And you can even train a virtual assistant, somebody that’s not a subject matter expert how to locate good content, and compile it in a logical fashion, and then just add commentary. So in other words, you know, you can come up with a topic for a blog post, find supporting articles or even differing opinion articles, right so that you can do a compare and contrast or pros and cons or argue both sides of a topic in particular curated article if that makes sense. It’s very, very powerful. And it’s a great way to create co-citation, which is similar to co-occurrence in that you’re linking out to other relevant sources. And so again, we talked about all of that in content kingpin, it’s a training course that is still 100% relevant today. I still use that for all of my clients, that same exact method for curating content for all of my clients. You can apply that to drive stack stuff to you’re still going to build that relevancy, topical relevancy. Just make sure you’re Giving attribution even if you’re not hyperlinking to it, I recommend you absolutely always give credit where credit is due. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: No, I totally agree. It’s a matter of mirroring right? Everything that you would do on the money site you do on the drive stack and Gsite, including curating content. That’s right.

How Do You Add A Schema Markup To A Local Business Press Release?

Okay, cool. Well, the next question is from Kaydee. Hi, guys. How do you add schema markup to press releases for a local business? Press advantage sent an email with a link to Google structured data markup helper tool to create the code but on the page, it is asking to select a data type and then paste your URL of the page you wish to mark up. What URL do we enter here? I don’t know. Because I don’t use that tool. I’m going to point out another one here for you in a moment. The press release is not yet published. So it has no URL to target the markup and the data type is to tick in and the data type to tick is a local business. Thanks to know and here’s why. Because if you’re if you have your own press advantage account, or even if you Buy him through MGYB. And we set up an organization page or you set it up through your own account, right? So you set up an organization page, that’s where you should have your local business markup. If it’s, you know, an organization page for local business, you should have your local business structured data markup in the organization page, right, which will get added to all of the press releases that get pushed out. And some may not all, but many of the publisher sites that were they get published to will actually pick up that JSON LD code for local business markup. Okay, so you add that to your organization page. However, I’ve got a press advantage open here. Let’s see if it hopefully it brings me into the same standby I’m gonna have to pause my screen for a moment because of it my plugin that reset my browser that Marco pointed out, a reset my reset the tab, so give me one second while I get what you’re looking for.

Marco: Let me just tell people That if your press release gets published and you go and look at some of the websites were able to publish, and you don’t see the schema markup, but you don’t see an iframe that you send out or whatever, that’s not on us. It’s not even on press advantage. It’s actually on that website, not wanting, you know, stripping out all of the code. But what we want anyway, is we want to get that in as many places as we can. And that’s why I go it goes out to the entire publication network, but not every website will publish whatever it is that you submitted, just did just to make it clear to everyone because we do get support tickets about that. And it’s like, yeah, there’s nothing that we could do.

Bradley: Yeah, so to show you what I’m talking about. First of all, if we go to press advantage for the organization, which I should I forgot I got my ID page looped into this is going to break the browser. Let me see if I can get to Page Source before it shuts everything down. Um, Alright, so let’s see if it’ll pull this up. It might not. Okay, there we go. So if we scroll down, we’ll see right here is my local business structure data markup starting right here. From here to there. That’s my local business structure data markup, that’s part of the organization page. Right. And so again, as Marco just mentioned, some sites when we publish when it distributes the press releases, it has this codependent to it. You know, it started with it with the press release, but some sites will pick it up and publish that JSON LD code as well. What I think you’re talking about is for individual press releases, so here I am inside the dashboard. If you scroll down now there’s a section says enter JSON LD schema, this will be attached to the release in addition to any organization-specific schema. So that’s what I was talking about before. If it’s a local business, you want it which is what I was showing here. You want to have local business structure data markup on the page, right that their organization page, but then For the individual, a press release, excuse me, you can add additional schema markup here. So what I would recommend here and you know you can do other stuff too depends on what you’re having published. But what I would recommend is going to and this is a tool that I use most of the time, we’re going to have one in MGYB here shortly, I’m not sure if it’s available yet. But this is the one that I’ve been using for quite some time.

If you just go to Google and search for schema markup generator, look for technicalSEO.com or just go to technicalSEO.com and look for the schema markup generator, which is over here in the left sidebar. There’s different types of schema markups that this tool will generate different types of schema. And so the very first one is article click on the article and then when you look down here, when it loads this page, you come down here to Article type, and there’s actually one for news article. So select news article, and then just fill out these fields. And here’s your schema code over here on the right-hand sidebar. Once you’ve completed all these fields, Then you just copy that and paste that into Press Advantage over here. Now again, there are other types of schema that can be generated. So it depends on what the article is going to be about. But just doing news article schema markup is very, very powerful, right to add to each individual press release. Okay, so that’s what I would recommend. There are other tools out there that will generate this stuff to guys, this is just the one that I typically use. Okay. There’s a good question. Now, by the way, that said, I gotta tease this a little bit. I’m inside my blog for that same company, I was just sharing my real estate business. And this we’ve got coming soon. We’ve got some pretty cool stuff coming up. And like the plugin will generate this Jeffrey Smith plugin, but it’s the pro version, which isn’t released yet, but it’s coming soon. And it’s got all the schema markup generator right inside WordPress for all every different type of schema, you can think of. It’s fabulous. And so that same type that same article markup right there, if we come down here, there’s an article type, blog posting or news article. And then I can just fill out all this stuff. It creates the code right down here and embeds it into the header of this particular blog post. And I can click update, and boom, that’s going to have the same type of Article markup that we were just sharing. Pretty powerful stuff. So be on the lookout for that guys soon, early next year. That was a good tease. Right, guys?

Marco: Perfect.

Can You Embed The Website Pages In The GSite When Mirroring?

All right. Next one is Simon. He says We’re marrying the main website to the G site. Can you just embed the website pages on the site pages? Or is it necessary to copy and paste the content for each website page on to the G site pages, I just use the embeds. I’m lazy like that, right. I work on the money site pages. That’s what I flush out with good content. And I mirror them onto the site. And then I just and I do some other really cool stuff. We’ve been talking about how I do silos now. locations. So there’s topical silos and in location-based silos, but I do it in a very unique way. And it works really well, especially when you use a G site. And yeah, all I do is grab the embed or create an iframe out of the money site pages, and embed them into the G site page, then I optimize the title of the G site page, obviously. And then, you know, you can mirror that into a folder inside of your folder and files inside of your drive stack. And then just smash that shit with embeds and or links, or both. And it works really, really well hit ever remember, that’s your SEO shield. So we do everything externally to the SEO shield, right? So that would be the G site the drive stack and all of the tier one entity assets, which by the way, you can actually take those iframe into your syndication network properties to guys think about that. So right, there’s no reason you can’t push those embeds through to your syndication network properties too. good question though,

Does Proper Schema Markup Feed The Bot Enough And Not To Worry About Creating Long Articles?

Paul Thompson says, Does proper schema markup feed the bot enough that we don’t need to worry about creating long articles on the pages we want to rank? No, but it does. It does definitely help a lot. Marco is probably going to be better at answering this one than me. I would still for money sites stuff still flesh out the pages, but adding structured data, like what I just showed with my blog, where you were, you know, again, you can add it manually now like right now, since the pro plugins not available, this there might be other plugins out there that do it, but I don’t know if they provide the schema code that’s 100% up to date. I know that a lot of times they’re not updated enough. I’m not speaking badly about anybody else’s plugin. I just haven’t used them. But you can have like a code insert or plugin right so like. SoGo ad scripts header, footer and things like that header, footer type script plugins where you can add scripts into the head section or foot section or body section of any individual page or post, and you can go use schema creators like what I just shared, and create schema markup and and then put them into each one of your posts or pages or whatever, so that you’re adding additional, you know, schema structured data that the bots love and I mean, that’s guys, you’re you’ll you’ll have an edge over a lot of your competitors if you do that kind of stuff. But I would still recommend that for money site stuff, you flush the content, the content of the page out to. Marco, what say you

Marco: Yeah, I mean that absolutely. Two things right. structured and unstructured data structured data is for the bot feed the bot as much as you can, which is exactly what we do. And why we use drive stacks and Gsites and iframe and everything that the entities entity stack, and everything else that we don’t I mean that it there’s a method to our madness. Now, if you then go and you send a person to a page. And now we’re talking about people, we’re not talking about bots, because what’s going to happen is you’re going to rank. And that’s going to bring your traffic onto the page. And if there’s nothing on that page to engage the person, then we no longer care about the but now we care about that person coming to the website and converting, finishing the action that they were set out to do, because if that person comes on the website and bounces, then you did you defeated the entire purpose of creating the all of the stacking that we created in the first place, which was to get that person onto the page that would convert them over an image is going to convert them of an image is going to get them to push and call whatever it is that you need to be done. To finish that, that then that’s what’s going to matter. So, two different things. If you need the content to rank you have to look at the competition. If you can rank or outrank the competition without 2000 or 3000 words of content, By all means, nobody, and nobody’s going to sit there and go through the 3000 words of content on this is a really interested in whatever it is that you have to say. what you’re interested in, is that conversion, because that’s what centers everything at the end. And that’s what Google is going to look at from beginning to end is whether that task and that goal. Well, whether it was accomplished.

How Do You Setup A GMB Page For A Business That Operates In Multiple States?

Awesome, thanks, Marco. So the next question was from jack, I’m not the next question is my client is based out of Texas but operates in five other states fully across the states not limited to anyone Metro region. What’s the best way to set up the company GMB page, so reviews for one state aggregate under the main company as well. Or if that’s not possible, what would be the best way to go about setting up the GMB either individually and each state Or globally under some other configuration? Well, remember Google My Business is supposed to be especially now there’s another question I see on the page here a little bit lower about what happened on November 8. And from my understanding, which I’ve only done very, I’ve only kind of read through some comments and stuff, is that it was more it was basically an update to the maps algorithm for GMB stuff. And it’s gone even more proximity-based. So they’ve Google’s tightened the proximity filter, so to speak. And so with that said, Google, my business is supposed to be for local businesses, right? I mean, we’ve talked about setting up GMBs and you know, setting your service area, the United States, for example, and that’s okay, but it’s not it’s okay for like the entity but it’s not going to help you to rank anywhere in the United States and maps. That said, you’re also in this case, you’re talking about five different states. They’re located in Texas but they operate in five other states. So you potentially you could have if you have an office and in each of their other states, you could have GMB for each office location. It’s not necessary but you can. That said if you wanted to get reviews and let’s just say Arizona, I’m just assuming let’s just say that that’s one of the states that you operate in. If you get reviews in Arizona, but you want them to populate on the Texas GMB if that’s the way you have it set up. It’s not you can’t do that. If you had a gym be in Arizona, I mean, if all you have is the one Google My Business location in Texas, then it doesn’t matter where you get the reviews from. They’re all going to aggregate on that one and only Google My Business location. My point that I’m trying to make is you cannot get GMB reviews in one location and have them also populate onto another GMB location. You can’t do that. It because each GMB entity or location is supposed to be it’s own and collect its own or, you know, aggregate its own reviews. So that said, You know, I would, I would consider what it is you’re trying to do. As far as if you have multiple GMBs, which I’m not sure that you do, but if you do, then what I would recommend you do is set up use some sort of review directing app. I know for contractors, one of the ones that work really well as birdeye.com. I think another one might be Podium, I’ve not used that. But what are some of my contractor clients use Bird Eye, and that works well, but it’s like a review gate, right? So it would be an app where you send out to customers, or clients or whatever the company or the business sends out to customers and ask for some listen to review or at ask for a review. And then somebody leaves a review and it directs the app can direct where the review gets published to if that makes sense. So you have more control over it that way and if it’s you know, below three stars, then it can be not posted as a review. Instead, it could be brought to, you know, sent to the customer service team so that they can reach out and try to resolve potential issues, that kind of stuff, I would look into something like that if you’re trying to have more control over where your reviews are coming from and where they’re going to be posted to. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: Yeah, I’m just guessing that his client and whatever it is that they’re doing that it triggers a three-pack, right? It triggers a map pack and it triggers map rankings if that’s the case. Then get a map wherein each one of the places where where your client operate, and associate everything to the main entity, that’s how Texas so then the AI which is sophisticated enough to then understand once you begin associating all of these to understand that it’s all part of the same company with it’s a company that operates out of Texas but has regional offices in five other states. So that if you do get a review, for example, in Texas for the company in another state, it could be taken into consideration. I’m not saying that the AI is that sophisticated, but it could mean at some point it will be, it will be able to understand all of these different relationships and put everything together. And if you do a really good job in your structured data of putting all of this together for the buck, then you won’t even have to leave it to the bot to guess and try to understand what this is all about. You can tell it you can go with everything in JSON LD to tell about what this is all about. Having done that, then you don’t have to worry about reviewing everything, or aggregating everything under the main company, it will all be taken together because everything is associated if you’ve done your job correctly. Now, if it’s globally that we’re not worrying about maps, and then the reviews wouldn’t even come into play, unless you have unless you can trigger a knowledge And that’s a totally different story.

Bradley: Yeah, and if that’s the case, if it was globally then I would just have all reviews going to the one GMB asset, wherever the primary location is, because then all you’re trying to do is build the brand, not individual locations, right?

What Are Your Insights On The Reported Traffic Drop Last November 8, 2019?

So Ross says, Hey, everyone, and then he’s got the follow-up question below, which I’ll just that’s what and now come back to Joey’s question where he says Ross is new here. What the hell happened on November 8, lots of traffic drops and the insight and that’s what I was just talking about, as far as I know. I’m sure Marco’s got more insight on this than I do. Because I don’t geek out about this stuff anymore. If I don’t see major drops in my stuff, I don’t worry about it. So but apparently the what it from what I understand it was another maps update where it looks like they tightened the proximity filter to where it’s it’s even narrower now. Is that correct? Marco?

Marco: That’s absolutely correct. They tighten up on the proximity. And proximity is a ranking factor, it’s we can literally call it the most important ranking factor, although you can still overcome. That’s why we don’t usually see all of these changes in the things that we do. Because you can overcome anything, any part of the algorithm, you can overcome it. And people are saying that well don’t use brute force. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. You can totally overcome anything through what they call it in the Rocky movie, good old fashioned blunt force trauma. And that’s just feeding the but just a whole lot of related information, wherever it is that you that you’re trying to expand to. So even though even if the proximity factor is the main ranking factor, there are other ranking factors that can and do come into play, if you can overcome that one factor. So is that something to just totally say, Oh my god, now I have to go get a DMB in eternity. City, not only in the area where I am but in the surrounding areas, it’s being able to overcome that proximity factor. And we do it and we do a really good job of teaching that in local GSB Pro. And now, you know being at the location and being able to upload images and being able to show Google that you’re actually there and that everything is actually from that location has become more important than ever.

Bradley: Yes, very good.

Does The Size Of Embeds Matter?

So let’s jump back to Joey’s question. It says hi, does the size of embeds matter? In other words, embedding a 10 by 10 GMB site is still the equivalent of embedding a 600 by 300. So the frame could be one by 110 by 10 or 600 by 300. And you still pass the juice Thank you. I’m size doesn’t matter. Only because if you have it too small, then that could be considered cloaking. Am I correct in that statement?

Marco: Yeah, yeah, you could, you could be tagged For cloaking, although it’s really hard if I mean if you do it right there no word. Most people can’t do it right, which is why we don’t even teach it.

Bradley: Yeah. I mean, technically Yes, you can still pass the SEO with the iframe present even if it’s a one by one pixel.

Marco: Even if it’s a zero by zero

Bradley: Yeah, it technically you can absolutely do that. I wouldn’t recommend it if you know, because if anybody manually reviews it and saw it, then they could, you know, they could flag you for manual action. So

Marco: that would be the biggest problem right with someone coming in and actually, you triggering, First of all, triggering enough red flags to trigger a manual review so that someone from Google would actually come to your website because nobody trusts you’re not making enough money now. Nobody. Most people are making enough money to worry about Google to have someone waste all of their valuable resources on looking at your fucking website in the first place. If you do get that big or if just if you just happen to get unlucky enough to trigger a manual, and they come and see that zero by zero thing, yes, that is cloaking. There’s no reason for you to have a zero by zero iframe one by one unless it’s a pixel, right? Facebook, Google, whatever, if it’s unless it’s tracking code. So they come in and look and they see code and it looks fishy. You’re more likely to get hit with a manual and probably deindex, because I’ve seen cloaking get hit really, really hard.

Bradley: Yeah, agreed. Okay, so we’ll say, Hey, Marco, have you announced the date of the four webinars for Bert? I guess that’s for the charity stuff.

Marco: Yeah, no, I’m still working on that. It’s not only BERT, but I’m also going to go into entities and AI and NLP and what it actually is what it isn’t. We’re gonna we’re going to discuss and talk about everything that that other People just either refused to talk about, or they don’t know enough about it to be able to discuss it. As soon as I have it already, I’m going to announce it. I’m going to announce the date I’m going to give you the donation page. And remember this all goes to a really good cause it’s getting kids who would otherwise not be able to get an education getting them into school, so that they can get a good education get trained to get jobs and, you know, have a chance at life.

Bradley: Very cool. Alright, the next one, Fred says I was worried that that might be a problem. So that’s because I was kind of tongue in cheek picking. That is a huge, long question. He says, thanks so much for answering my 13 pages of questions. It helped a lot. Thanks, guys. You’re welcome, Fred.

What Is The Difference Between Q&A and FAQ?

Fit. So what’s up? 50 says what is the difference between Q&A and FAQ? Well, it’s, it’s kind of the same thing or it’s very closely related. Q&A is most of the time would like You can see in the SERPs is what I was talking about earlier. But FAQs that can be a little bit more specific to an individual like a business. Right? So I mean, they’re kind of basically the same. As far as schema markup, it’s the same. But what I mean the difference is frequently asked questions are should be answered by a client or business, right? Like, what is the questions that they get? asked the most by prospects and or customers or clients? Right? And they should have answers to that. But when it comes to q amp, a, what I’m what these, the way that I look at it is when you go to Google and you search for question, you’ll see related questions that get asked enough that somebody took the time to create content around answering that question, and then marking it up correctly on their website so that they could get added to the featured snippets in Google search. So it stands to reason that that question gets asked enough. It might be a frequently asked question for another business that maybe your particular client or business doesn’t get asked that much, but it’s still relevant. That makes sense. So they’re very closely related, but there is a slight difference, at least in my opinion.

Marco: Yeah, the difference is that that Q&A, people should be able to either ask questions or answer questions on the website, if they’re not able, if they’re your frequently asked questions and your answers are there’s no way for users to engage with that. Then it’s FAQ frequently asked questions. Q&A, again, is on a website where people can go in and interact with the questions and the answer. Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah, guys, it you know, I’ve talked about this probably in Syndication Academy. And I’ll probably I’ll just give this give another nugget away here because it works really well. And we’re almost out of time. So anyway, those Q&A questions that you can curate, right from Google and the beautiful thing about it is if you type in a question about product service in an industry whatever the questions box comes up now what the drop-downs each time you click on a drop-down, it brings up like three or four more questions. So like you can just keep drilling down into those guys and that gives you almost unlimited content. Like, Think about it. It’s a content hack, right, you can grab a question and an answer from those Question and Answer boxes that Google provides you and use that in GMB posts for example, right, just cite the source just like I was talking about earlier is the in the Q&A box right that the dropdown. as it expands, it gives you the snippet with the answer at least a partial answer. It might not be the full answer, but it gives a snippet and then it has the link to read more. Well, you can still use that link in the GMB post too so you give proper credit to where it’s due. That’s a nofollow link and a GMB post the button link right, and a GMB post. So the button URL, the URL that you attach to the call to action button. That is a dofollow link, although I here in just the past few days probably since November 8. Some of those are nofollow. And I think it’s just because Google is still tinkering around in there. But those are dofollow links. So you can still link back to the answer, have a QA, write a question and answer that you curate it you basically are republishing from Google’s own search results, to add relevancy to the GMB. You can do this on your money site too and link back to the source which is only proper and right. But then use the button URL in the GMB post the link back to your money site, right to your page that also is about that very topic or question and answer right so you again, you’re it’s creating co-citation. It’s creating topical relevancy, and you don’t even have to come up with the content. You can even go through and curate groups of questions like question and then create blog posts out of those on your money site where once again, you’re publishing the question plus the answer. You can create a table of contents at the top of the page Marco stop me from getting too deep here. But with a table of contents with jump links, anchor links, right that jump down to each section that has a different question. It has the answer that links back out to the source, right, but it’s a nofollow link on the blog post. And then just like a curated post, you can inject some commentary in between that stuff, with an opening paragraph and a closing paragraph with a call to action to contact your business or your company, your client that you’re doing the work for, for help or services with that, you know, for products or services that solve those problems, those questions that make sense.

So again, guys, it’s a great strategy to use those questions as a farm those questions right mine those questions, harvest those questions or whatever you want to say from one of those from this q&a panels that pop up in the Google search results and drill down into them. You can get gold topic ideas, blog post ideas GMB post ideas from that kind of stuff.

Which Of Your Courses In Which You Teach About Making ID Pages and Mirror Gsites?

So, Alright, the last question is oh Austin Don says, which of your courses do you teach about making it pages and mirror g sites? Well the mastermind, RYS reloaded local GMB Pro, any one of those three the mastermind local GMB Pro or RYS reloaded what it was, it’s covered in all three of those locations. So, am I missing any here guys?

Marco: I don’t think you did. Okay.

Bradley: Adam, you want to chime in? All right, last is not really a question. It’s just a comment and then we’re going to wrap it up, guys. I’ve got a TV repairman showing up in about five minutes. Anyways, I asked the question about GMBs and review in one location versus all the states that clients the Klein operates and this was that question about Texas and five additional states. We answered previously he says no follow up question. I just wanted to say thank you for answering it and you knocked it out of the park. I’ve wrestled with this in my head for a week and you made it clear as day thanks again, guys for all that you do. You’re very welcome. That’s what this venue is for. Anything else guys?

Marco: No, not unless another question popped up now. on the page,

Adam: I think you just scroll over Bradley, but the last call for everybody. Head over there. Just follow the instructions on Facebook get early access to the YouTube and UTM course Bradley’s going to be put together here over the holidays and save a bundle but like they said to if you want to wait a little bit and pay us three times too much more. So okay with that.

Bradley: And let’s go ahead. I was gonna say I actually prefer that. But, you know, I want you guys to save that additional $200 to spend it on your family’s at Christmas. So

Marco: and stop by the mastermind tomorrow. The webinar, because we’re going to show how much we’ve improved the user experience. Want to show how easy it is to find the information now before it was just okay, how do I get through five years of information? Yeah, because we have five years worth of videos in there in the archives, right? So just the latest videos. It’s everything since we started. As I did you get through all that, well, now we made it really simple for you to get through it.

Bradley: That’s been a long time coming. There’s just so much damn content, so much video-based content and long mastermind webinars. It’s been hard to, for people to find stuff and that’s a problem we’ve been dealing with for a long time. And we Marco has been working on it in the background for since I think January of this year, maybe February, but it’s been a long time. And now it’s here. It’s ready. So it’s awesome. It’s a big, big improvement. So, all right, everybody, thanks for being here. We’ll see some of you tomorrow, the rest of you next week. Awesome. Bye, everyone. Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 262 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 262

Click on the video above to watch Episode 262 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: Alright, we are live. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 262. Today is the 13th of November. And I don’t know if anyone else knows this. But apparently there’s something called Black Friday at the end of the month and Cyber Monday. Apparently there’s some sales or something going on. Well, we’ve got something even better to kick it off. So make sure you keep your eyes and ears open for that we got some good stuff coming and it’s going to be free. We’re not going to even require an opt-in but more on that later. Let’s talk to the guys real quick and then we got a couple of announcements and we will dive into your questions. To start on my left here, Bradley, how you doing today?

Bradley: Good man hanging out, working hard, instead of hard-working.

Adam: Are you going to go like a TV writing this weekend? Or is it now

Bradley: I’ve got my daughter this weekend. So it’s her weekend but uh, December 6 that weekend. I’m going to my favorite spot Diamond Southwestern Virginia again for the weekend. Actually I’m going on the fifth for Thursday the fifth so looking forward to that although it may be cold it should be fun.

Adam: Nice. Nice. Marco speaking of weather How you doing man?

Marco: Man, I’m starting to get cold down here. You guys are sending your cold it was almost 65 last night. Oh ridiculous. Stop it. Arctic Well, whatever you want whatever you guys are doing up there Stop it. We don’t want it.

Adam: Well, speaking of cold Chris How you doing?

Chris: I didn’t know like. There’s nothing to complain it’s cozy warm and that was out today and it was sunny. Yeah, life is a good man.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan and Hernan, you still you’re in Miami, right for a little bit longer?

Hernan: I’m still in South Florida. Yeah, I’m still here until Saturday, actually, when I’m flying back to Buenos Aires.Excited to be there. They’re going to be spending the holiday season with family. But also exciting for next week and the week after, which is going to be Black Friday, so that’s gonna be pretty cool too. So that’ll be here.

Adam: Outstanding. Yeah. Well, it’s good stuff. And I’m happy to be here in case anyone wants to know, the weather is just fine. It’s like 70 I guess. I don’t know.

Chris: Quick question, Adam.

Adam: what’s that?

Chris: Are you guys celebrating 11th of November as well?

Adam: Um, no, is that a thing?

Chris: I didn’t know. Like, I noticed there was were all kinds of like online sales on the 11th of November. So I was actually quite surprised.

Adam: 11 11 maybe just like making use of the numbers. You know, right. Fair enough. Well, I missed out on that since

Bradley: it’s just like every year, people start putting their Christmas trees and decorations up and the station started playing Christmas music earlier on earlier every fucking year. So I imagine Black Friday starts getting earlier on early every year now to so jet rise.

Adam: So real quick if you’re new to us, welcome. You’re in the right place. You didn’t end up on the weather channel or discussion of holidays. You are in fact at Hump Day Hangouts and we’re going to answer your digital marketing questions shortly. But just so you know, you’re in the right place, you can always ask your questions on the page, unless of course, it’s broken and you can’t get to the page like people were doing today. In which case come back in a few hours after we unscrew up our technical issue and come back and answer your question whether or not you can make it live you can always ask your question. We encourage you to be here live so you can get clarification or asked or gets more information from you as well as occasionally we do some fun stuff like giveaways. But you can always catch the replays on YouTube and get your answers that way.

Secondly, if you haven’t yet grabbed the Battle Plan that is your next step, head over to battleplan.semanticmastery.com for a repeatable process, everything from new websites, age domains, YouTube channels, whatever it is going there and past that. If you’re ready to grow your digital marketing business then you probably want or you should want a community that includes fast access to real-world info and that’s what the mastermind is all about. You can find out more at mastermind.semanticmastery.com. And for everyone, no matter where you’re at and ourselves included, we recommend getting stuff done right. You build a team, you build processes, you outsource and you get it done for you. And that’s why mgyb.co exist you can head over there and get our way as to drive stack, syndication networks, press releases, link building, embed all sorts of stuff with some really, really kick-ass stuff coming here in November wink, wink Black Friday and then into the New Year. We got some good stuff coming.

Marco: I have two public service announcements. Adams Sorry to interrupt.

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Marco: Black Friday will be on Wednesdays from now on. I just determined that. And to all joking aside, we always say that be and the mastermind has its privileges. Well, I’ve been personally working really hard and incorporating some really not gonna say what it is, but some just some really neat things into the Mastermind to make the user experience to and to make people finding what they’re looking for. To make that way better to improve the experience so that people can come in and find exactly what they’re looking for, where it is, you know, so whatever it is that you’re trying to find, Marco will talk shit about Google on and I can’t remember when Well, it’s not finished, not 100% because there is artificial intelligence involved. And interestingly enough the world is the SEO world is an uproar because of BERT, and we’re actually using BERT in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind so again, mastermind being a member of the Semantic Mastermind does have its privileges because you’re first to get everything that we do business building and ideas and concepts, and all of these different things. Hey, on tomorrow’s mastermind webinar will be talking about BERT and AI and what it is actually, because you see all of these discussions and all of these forums and then all these Facebook groups, and nobody has an I’m not going to drop an F-bomb here. Nobody has an effing clue as to what it is that they’re talking. They don’t know what BERT is. And all you have to do is go into the documentation to see what BERT is and what it does. And you’ll know that it’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing because of the way that we teach you how to do things in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. So not only does it have its privileges in that we give you cutting it and anything that we can do to make your Your life easier to enter to make, whether its clients whether tank, whatever it is, it’s there and we give it to people but it’s also we try to make your life easier. We try to do all of these different things. Because you’re a member of the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. It’s included in the membership fee, nobody will have to pay extra for all the work that went into the back end of the mastermind to make things so much better. So, I’m sorry, it seems like it’s a pitch fest for the mastermind. And I should be pitching the hell out of it. Because it’s so good. We get testimonials time and again, of how well our stuff works. And so yeah, we should be here, tooting our own horns and singing our praises and whatever. I’m not going to go into that anymore. Just I’m just letting people know if you’re in the Semantic Mastery <stermind, be there tomorrow and see just how much we have improved the learning experience. Let’s call it

Adam: Amen. got one more to add on to that you guys are now made a post believe on November 4 about big news for Bradley. Bradley is going to be putting together some training, we decided based on the response. There’s still a little bit of time if you want to get down on this, and what it is, is step by step program on how to grow, grow a massive brand using YouTube and GDN, Ads. And, you know, we just want to engage, because we have, especially Bradley didn’t want to be putting in a lot of time and effort doing the training, you know, right leading up into the holidays if people weren’t interested. But so far, we’ve got 71 comments, people interested in early access at a hell of a discount. So I’m going to put the link in if you want to get in on that. Just comment, leave a GIF or a comment on the Facebook thread and we will be in touch with you shortly. We’re going to have some information that information about that going up. Hernan says let me in I think he got booted from the from Hump Day Hangouts.

Bradley: He’s back in

Adam: Alright, well, guys, with that said, we got anything else before we get into questions here.

Bradley: I’ll just give a little update on a couple of things. Number one, we’ve got anybody that joined Local Kingpin, which was the Google Ads training for using search ads for lead generation. That’s going to be an update webinar on Monday. Because the interface has changed so much the principles, the method is still pretty much the same, though. There’s just some slight differences that I’m going to cover. And the interface, Google Ads interface has changed a lot. Plus they’ve got a lot of new or improved features, such as automated bidding strategies and things like that, that I used to suggest never to use, but they’ve gotten so much better over the last year and a half, two years because of AI and it’s so much better. So artificial intelligence. And so we’re going to talk about that slightly plus any questions that anybody has So that’ll be Monday, it’ll be probably only about an hour long. That’s just for me to give an update and answer questions. So if you’re in Local Kingpin, I encourage you to get signed up for that.

Also, the Google Ads course that Adam was just talking about, that I’m going to be starting in two weeks, I think it’s one and I say we’re going to do that. I think Monday, the 25th is going to be the first webinar and that’ll be about 90 minutes, maybe longer if there’s, you know, a lot of Q&A at the end, and then December 9th, and that’s going to be a two-part deal. The first one will be about YouTube ads and how to use that for branding. And for not not not so much lead generation it will produce leads, but it’s not a direct lead generator, it it will but it’s more about branding, and also driving relevant traffic into your digital assets. So your entity essentially. So we’re going to talk about YouTube on the first webinar. And then on the second webinar. Again, that’ll be December 9th. We’re going to talk about using the Google Display Network. So it’s good Google Ads training specifically for YouTube and the Google Display Network for setting up branding campaigns which works incredibly well for both building brand awareness but also for generating relevant targeted traffic from specific audiences from specific geo locations if it’s for local into your entities, your digital assets for a particular brand which is great for SEO. So it’s a way for using Google ads to not only produce relevant traffic but improve brand awareness as well as help the SEO that your any SEO work that you’re doing, because you’re driving relevant, targeted traffic from known audiences and Google to your SEO as your assets that you’ve been doing SEO work on. And that takes care of ART right – relevance, trust, and authority. Google understands that that’s that recognize that traffic is an activity. It’s relevant because it’s from known audiences and specific geolocation if that’s if it’s for local you can target by geolocation, and it’s also trusted, trusted and authority trusted traffic because it’s coming from Google’s known Google’s audience buckets. And essentially, so it’s going to be it’s very, very powerful. I’ve just been crushing it with Google ads for clients over the last several months. And it just works really, really well. And I’ve been using them for my own business as well. And it’s, it’s just a great, great strategy. So that said, it’s, um, it’s going to be a pre, like right now you can get in for like, the pre-training special or whatever, where it’s, it’s a third of what it’s going to be once I’m done recording those webinars, it’s going to be packaged up and sold for probably 300 bucks, or right right, right around there. So if you want to get in for a third of that, I would recommend that you go check out the post that Adam posted, comment on it and then get signed up. Okay. All right.

Marco: So they’re more than welcome to wait and pay us more later. Yeah, that’s fine too. But I would suggest for people not to wait.

Bradley: Alright, so can we get into it? Now,

Adam: let’s do it.

Bradley: All right, we got the screen. Okay, somebody confirm.

Adam: Good to go.

Bradley: Okay, so everybody can see my humping Wednesday meme GIFs alright. Hump Day right, Wednesday.

How Would You Add Relevancy To Your Money Site Using Drive Stacks?

So, Alright, so the first questions are and it’s multiple questions. It’s 13 pages worth of questions from Fred Wilson and Fred. Well, I appreciate your and I really do. I appreciate your questions. That’s a bit much for Hump Day Hangouts. And also, it’s getting a little bit into the weeds for stuff that we would typically only cover in this much depth in mastermind, which I’m sure you’re fully aware of that, as a former mastermind member, or an RYS Academy reloaded specifically since it’s so it pertains to drive stack stuff and kind of deep into the weeds. But with that said, Marco, how much of this do you want to answer?

Marco: I haven’t really re-read the question. So,

Bradley: Yeah. So should I give you about 10 minutes to get through it?

Marco: All right. Do you have a general question that you can add the I’d be more than happy to answer general questions, but if it’s something that’s specific, yeah, that again, membership has its privileges and this things that I’m only answer for paying members and I mean, that that’s just that’s the way it should be. I’m sure that people who have paid three $4,000 for the course would appreciate me keeping the secret sauce in where it belongs.

Bradley: Yeah. And I agree and that, you know, I’ve read through the first two sections of this three-part question this three-section question, and I realized that it’s, it’s a lot more in-depth than what we would typically answer on a free Hump Day hangout because it’s getting into very specific tactics. From RYS reloaded, we would cover it also in the mastermind, I’m sure. But this is not something that we can get that deep into it. That said, I’ll give you kind of a general overview, and I’ll kind of answer it and let you take add to it, Marco, and then we’ll move on to the next one. So Fred, we would welcome you back to the mastermind at any moment.

If we’re going to RYS Reloaded, either one of those would be good places to get this particular question answered. But that said, He’s talking about his food business, his food tour business and talking about how to add additional relevancy. He did some keyword theme research using SEM Rush and looking at some of the competitors and found that there is some other keywords other than just food tour type keywords that can help to add relevancy that are kind of associated with the food tour business, but he hasn’t been targeting them. And so the question is would adding in some of these other types of keyboard themes into the drive stack folders as subfolders within food tour folders, would that help to add relevancy? And because of the association that Google’s is showing? And so I mean, to me, you’ve already answered your question. Yes. You know, if there’s if there’s a way to create that association, that you’re you’ve discovered by doing some additional research, looking at competitors using some tools like sem rush and all of that kind of stuff, then yeah, you can you can add that additional relevancy into your drive stack. And that’s going to certainly help. I don’t know if you want to go further than that. Marco.

Marco: Yeah. Just a little bit, because, I mean, I can answer this generally we go after, especially the way that our keyword research VA is being taught, we go after anything that Google considers relevant. In a keyword, research cake, and we give you guys whoever orders the gig, the deep keyword research, all of that information. We do separate the movie will give you tasks will give you silos will give you information that we feel is where the money makers are, what the relevant keywords are, and maybe something that that that that isn’t a money keyword, but Google still thinks that that is relevant. All of that is necessary because what we do inside the drive stack is create relevantly and push. Right? We create a relevance push from everything that we do from the spider web silo to the way that the drive stack is built to the way that the G site is built to the way the inner pages are done to the way that we mimic what’s on the website. So yes, by all means, I don’t care. We do use SEM Rush for keyword relevance, but that’s not necessarily what will target what we do is we use Jeffrey Smith’s Ultimate SEO Bootcamp training. And we go according to how he teaches what the top-level categories are. Then from there, work down and create the silos there, you will create three silos. But everything that’s relevant should be at it. Remember when Network Empire started talking about color, current stuff, it’s not, it’s not there. But they began talking about it. And they began explaining it more what it was all about, what it means. And really, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to create all of this in a self-contained Google environment for the bot to feed on, which is, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Is It Safe Against Plagiarism To Curate Content With Attribution From Google Snippet?

Bradley: Yeah. And so the next question part of this, which it’s kinda interesting that you asked this, Fred because we covered this, our own our very own data. You know, master link builder, was at our live event, hopefully, live 2019 in Denver, just recently, and he was talking about doing something similar that you’re asking about, which is adding q&a. Questions and Answers into a doc within your Gsite within your drive stack and just linking back to the source but not actually hyperlinking just putting like the text-based link. So you’re providing a citation, but what so you’re citing the source, right? So you’re providing attribution, but you’re not hyperlinking back. I would say that should be okay, provided you’re not copying, you know, if you’re just copying snippets, like what is shown in the Google search results for the q amp a section. So when you search for a question in Google, and it brings up that featured snippet, which is a q amp a box, right, and it’s got the dropdowns, and you click the drop-down, and then it shows a short it shows the full question and then a short answer and a link back to the source where it’s pulling that answer from that question and answer from you can embed that or you know, kind of copy and paste that into a Google doc or something like that. And then still late as long as you’re not expanding by going to the actual destination URL and copying more of the content. It’s just a snippet. So it falls under the same rules of curating content would be on a blog post in that, if you’re just highlighting, you know, reusing republishing a short snippet from somebody else’s content, and then you’re providing attribution citing the source, then it should be okay. Now, some people, some publishers will still make eventually, you know, sometimes they may find it and they may request that you unpublish it. But as far as it being a copyright infringement, as long as it’s just a small snippet, and it’s you’re citing the source, it should, it should never be an issue. Although like I said, out of courtesy, if anybody ever were to contact you and say Please take this down or unpublished this, then you know, I would recommend that you just do it to avoid any sort of, you know, some sort of stupid battle that could ensue. Although again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it legally because you are citing the source and it falls within a specific brand. Members of the DMC act right there were the digital, whatever Copyright Act. So I would just, you know, encourage you not to go any further than what is shown in the snippets and the featured snippets within Google search.

That said, also, you’re asked about curating a lot of content about a topic putting it inside the drive stack, then putting links to your money site, the correct way to push relevancy for your money site? Again, yes, you can do that. The same thing is by curating content on your money site, you can do that. Right. So think about that. That’s what we’ve taught for years is the best way to generate content before even money site blog posts unless you’re a subject matter expert and you’re creating 100% original content. The problem with that is even as an as a subject matter expert, sometimes you get you run out of ideas. But there are a ton of other subject matter experts. I’m not talking about buying shitty content farm content, I’m talking about locating subject Matter content written by subject matter experts pertaining to your topic, right or your niche your industry, and then republishing, once again snippets of it, and giving credit to where it’s, you know, citing the source giving attribution. And in the case of curating on a blog, your money site blog, you know, we always recommend hyperlinking to the source. And just using nofollow External links, that’s what I’ve always done. Um, but that’s very, very powerful. Because once again, you can create an original article out of using snippets of other people’s content, where you’re just adding commentary and opening paragraph commentary in between pieces of curated content, which doesn’t have to be just articles, it can be videos, infographics, don’t curate images. Please don’t do that. You can. That’s a no-no, but you can curate infographics, videos, mp3, so audio files, you know, other articles, you can curate all that kind of stuff. And it helps because it allows you to be able to produce content very quickly, inexpensively. And you can even train a virtual assistant, somebody that’s not a subject matter expert how to locate good content, and compile it in a logical fashion, and then just add commentary. So in other words, you know, you can come up with a topic for a blog post, find supporting articles or even differing opinion articles, right so that you can do a compare and contrast or pros and cons or argue both sides of a topic in particular curated article if that makes sense. It’s very, very powerful. And it’s a great way to create co-citation, which is similar to co-occurrence in that you’re linking out to other relevant sources. And so again, we talked about all of that in content kingpin, it’s a training course that is still 100% relevant today. I still use that for all of my clients, that same exact method for curating content for all of my clients. You can apply that to drive stack stuff to you’re still going to build that relevancy, topical relevancy. Just make sure you’re Giving attribution even if you’re not hyperlinking to it, I recommend you absolutely always give credit where credit is due. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: No, I totally agree. It’s a matter of mirroring right? Everything that you would do on the money site you do on the drive stack and Gsite, including curating content. That’s right.

How Do You Add A Schema Markup To A Local Business Press Release?

Okay, cool. Well, the next question is from Kaydee. Hi, guys. How do you add schema markup to press releases for a local business? Press advantage sent an email with a link to Google structured data markup helper tool to create the code but on the page, it is asking to select a data type and then paste your URL of the page you wish to mark up. What URL do we enter here? I don’t know. Because I don’t use that tool. I’m going to point out another one here for you in a moment. The press release is not yet published. So it has no URL to target the markup and the data type is to tick in and the data type to tick is a local business. Thanks to know and here’s why. Because if you’re if you have your own press advantage account, or even if you Buy him through MGYB. And we set up an organization page or you set it up through your own account, right? So you set up an organization page, that’s where you should have your local business markup. If it’s, you know, an organization page for local business, you should have your local business structured data markup in the organization page, right, which will get added to all of the press releases that get pushed out. And some may not all, but many of the publisher sites that were they get published to will actually pick up that JSON LD code for local business markup. Okay, so you add that to your organization page. However, I’ve got a press advantage open here. Let’s see if it hopefully it brings me into the same standby I’m gonna have to pause my screen for a moment because of it my plugin that reset my browser that Marco pointed out, a reset my reset the tab, so give me one second while I get what you’re looking for.

Marco: Let me just tell people That if your press release gets published and you go and look at some of the websites were able to publish, and you don’t see the schema markup, but you don’t see an iframe that you send out or whatever, that’s not on us. It’s not even on press advantage. It’s actually on that website, not wanting, you know, stripping out all of the code. But what we want anyway, is we want to get that in as many places as we can. And that’s why I go it goes out to the entire publication network, but not every website will publish whatever it is that you submitted, just did just to make it clear to everyone because we do get support tickets about that. And it’s like, yeah, there’s nothing that we could do.

Bradley: Yeah, so to show you what I’m talking about. First of all, if we go to press advantage for the organization, which I should I forgot I got my ID page looped into this is going to break the browser. Let me see if I can get to Page Source before it shuts everything down. Um, Alright, so let’s see if it’ll pull this up. It might not. Okay, there we go. So if we scroll down, we’ll see right here is my local business structure data markup starting right here. From here to there. That’s my local business structure data markup, that’s part of the organization page. Right. And so again, as Marco just mentioned, some sites when we publish when it distributes the press releases, it has this codependent to it. You know, it started with it with the press release, but some sites will pick it up and publish that JSON LD code as well. What I think you’re talking about is for individual press releases, so here I am inside the dashboard. If you scroll down now there’s a section says enter JSON LD schema, this will be attached to the release in addition to any organization-specific schema. So that’s what I was talking about before. If it’s a local business, you want it which is what I was showing here. You want to have local business structure data markup on the page, right that their organization page, but then For the individual, a press release, excuse me, you can add additional schema markup here. So what I would recommend here and you know you can do other stuff too depends on what you’re having published. But what I would recommend is going to and this is a tool that I use most of the time, we’re going to have one in MGYB here shortly, I’m not sure if it’s available yet. But this is the one that I’ve been using for quite some time.

If you just go to Google and search for schema markup generator, look for technicalSEO.com or just go to technicalSEO.com and look for the schema markup generator, which is over here in the left sidebar. There’s different types of schema markups that this tool will generate different types of schema. And so the very first one is article click on the article and then when you look down here, when it loads this page, you come down here to Article type, and there’s actually one for news article. So select news article, and then just fill out these fields. And here’s your schema code over here on the right-hand sidebar. Once you’ve completed all these fields, Then you just copy that and paste that into Press Advantage over here. Now again, there are other types of schema that can be generated. So it depends on what the article is going to be about. But just doing news article schema markup is very, very powerful, right to add to each individual press release. Okay, so that’s what I would recommend. There are other tools out there that will generate this stuff to guys, this is just the one that I typically use. Okay. There’s a good question. Now, by the way, that said, I gotta tease this a little bit. I’m inside my blog for that same company, I was just sharing my real estate business. And this we’ve got coming soon. We’ve got some pretty cool stuff coming up. And like the plugin will generate this Jeffrey Smith plugin, but it’s the pro version, which isn’t released yet, but it’s coming soon. And it’s got all the schema markup generator right inside WordPress for all every different type of schema, you can think of. It’s fabulous. And so that same type that same article markup right there, if we come down here, there’s an article type, blog posting or news article. And then I can just fill out all this stuff. It creates the code right down here and embeds it into the header of this particular blog post. And I can click update, and boom, that’s going to have the same type of Article markup that we were just sharing. Pretty powerful stuff. So be on the lookout for that guys soon, early next year. That was a good tease. Right, guys?

Marco: Perfect.

Can You Embed The Website Pages In The GSite When Mirroring?

All right. Next one is Simon. He says We’re marrying the main website to the G site. Can you just embed the website pages on the site pages? Or is it necessary to copy and paste the content for each website page on to the G site pages, I just use the embeds. I’m lazy like that, right. I work on the money site pages. That’s what I flush out with good content. And I mirror them onto the site. And then I just and I do some other really cool stuff. We’ve been talking about how I do silos now. locations. So there’s topical silos and in location-based silos, but I do it in a very unique way. And it works really well, especially when you use a G site. And yeah, all I do is grab the embed or create an iframe out of the money site pages, and embed them into the G site page, then I optimize the title of the G site page, obviously. And then, you know, you can mirror that into a folder inside of your folder and files inside of your drive stack. And then just smash that shit with embeds and or links, or both. And it works really, really well hit ever remember, that’s your SEO shield. So we do everything externally to the SEO shield, right? So that would be the G site the drive stack and all of the tier one entity assets, which by the way, you can actually take those iframe into your syndication network properties to guys think about that. So right, there’s no reason you can’t push those embeds through to your syndication network properties too. good question though,

Does Proper Schema Markup Feed The Bot Enough And Not To Worry About Creating Long Articles?

Paul Thompson says, Does proper schema markup feed the bot enough that we don’t need to worry about creating long articles on the pages we want to rank? No, but it does. It does definitely help a lot. Marco is probably going to be better at answering this one than me. I would still for money sites stuff still flesh out the pages, but adding structured data, like what I just showed with my blog, where you were, you know, again, you can add it manually now like right now, since the pro plugins not available, this there might be other plugins out there that do it, but I don’t know if they provide the schema code that’s 100% up to date. I know that a lot of times they’re not updated enough. I’m not speaking badly about anybody else’s plugin. I just haven’t used them. But you can have like a code insert or plugin right so like. SoGo ad scripts header, footer and things like that header, footer type script plugins where you can add scripts into the head section or foot section or body section of any individual page or post, and you can go use schema creators like what I just shared, and create schema markup and and then put them into each one of your posts or pages or whatever, so that you’re adding additional, you know, schema structured data that the bots love and I mean, that’s guys, you’re you’ll you’ll have an edge over a lot of your competitors if you do that kind of stuff. But I would still recommend that for money site stuff, you flush the content, the content of the page out to. Marco, what say you

Marco: Yeah, I mean that absolutely. Two things right. structured and unstructured data structured data is for the bot feed the bot as much as you can, which is exactly what we do. And why we use drive stacks and Gsites and iframe and everything that the entities entity stack, and everything else that we don’t I mean that it there’s a method to our madness. Now, if you then go and you send a person to a page. And now we’re talking about people, we’re not talking about bots, because what’s going to happen is you’re going to rank. And that’s going to bring your traffic onto the page. And if there’s nothing on that page to engage the person, then we no longer care about the but now we care about that person coming to the website and converting, finishing the action that they were set out to do, because if that person comes on the website and bounces, then you did you defeated the entire purpose of creating the all of the stacking that we created in the first place, which was to get that person onto the page that would convert them over an image is going to convert them of an image is going to get them to push and call whatever it is that you need to be done. To finish that, that then that’s what’s going to matter. So, two different things. If you need the content to rank you have to look at the competition. If you can rank or outrank the competition without 2000 or 3000 words of content, By all means, nobody, and nobody’s going to sit there and go through the 3000 words of content on this is a really interested in whatever it is that you have to say. what you’re interested in, is that conversion, because that’s what centers everything at the end. And that’s what Google is going to look at from beginning to end is whether that task and that goal. Well, whether it was accomplished.

How Do You Setup A GMB Page For A Business That Operates In Multiple States?

Awesome, thanks, Marco. So the next question was from jack, I’m not the next question is my client is based out of Texas but operates in five other states fully across the states not limited to anyone Metro region. What’s the best way to set up the company GMB page, so reviews for one state aggregate under the main company as well. Or if that’s not possible, what would be the best way to go about setting up the GMB either individually and each state Or globally under some other configuration? Well, remember Google My Business is supposed to be especially now there’s another question I see on the page here a little bit lower about what happened on November 8. And from my understanding, which I’ve only done very, I’ve only kind of read through some comments and stuff, is that it was more it was basically an update to the maps algorithm for GMB stuff. And it’s gone even more proximity-based. So they’ve Google’s tightened the proximity filter, so to speak. And so with that said, Google, my business is supposed to be for local businesses, right? I mean, we’ve talked about setting up GMBs and you know, setting your service area, the United States, for example, and that’s okay, but it’s not it’s okay for like the entity but it’s not going to help you to rank anywhere in the United States and maps. That said, you’re also in this case, you’re talking about five different states. They’re located in Texas but they operate in five other states. So you potentially you could have if you have an office and in each of their other states, you could have GMB for each office location. It’s not necessary but you can. That said if you wanted to get reviews and let’s just say Arizona, I’m just assuming let’s just say that that’s one of the states that you operate in. If you get reviews in Arizona, but you want them to populate on the Texas GMB if that’s the way you have it set up. It’s not you can’t do that. If you had a gym be in Arizona, I mean, if all you have is the one Google My Business location in Texas, then it doesn’t matter where you get the reviews from. They’re all going to aggregate on that one and only Google My Business location. My point that I’m trying to make is you cannot get GMB reviews in one location and have them also populate onto another GMB location. You can’t do that. It because each GMB entity or location is supposed to be it’s own and collect its own or, you know, aggregate its own reviews. So that said, You know, I would, I would consider what it is you’re trying to do. As far as if you have multiple GMBs, which I’m not sure that you do, but if you do, then what I would recommend you do is set up use some sort of review directing app. I know for contractors, one of the ones that work really well as birdeye.com. I think another one might be Podium, I’ve not used that. But what are some of my contractor clients use Bird Eye, and that works well, but it’s like a review gate, right? So it would be an app where you send out to customers, or clients or whatever the company or the business sends out to customers and ask for some listen to review or at ask for a review. And then somebody leaves a review and it directs the app can direct where the review gets published to if that makes sense. So you have more control over it that way and if it’s you know, below three stars, then it can be not posted as a review. Instead, it could be brought to, you know, sent to the customer service team so that they can reach out and try to resolve potential issues, that kind of stuff, I would look into something like that if you’re trying to have more control over where your reviews are coming from and where they’re going to be posted to. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: Yeah, I’m just guessing that his client and whatever it is that they’re doing that it triggers a three-pack, right? It triggers a map pack and it triggers map rankings if that’s the case. Then get a map wherein each one of the places where where your client operate, and associate everything to the main entity, that’s how Texas so then the AI which is sophisticated enough to then understand once you begin associating all of these to understand that it’s all part of the same company with it’s a company that operates out of Texas but has regional offices in five other states. So that if you do get a review, for example, in Texas for the company in another state, it could be taken into consideration. I’m not saying that the AI is that sophisticated, but it could mean at some point it will be, it will be able to understand all of these different relationships and put everything together. And if you do a really good job in your structured data of putting all of this together for the buck, then you won’t even have to leave it to the bot to guess and try to understand what this is all about. You can tell it you can go with everything in JSON LD to tell about what this is all about. Having done that, then you don’t have to worry about reviewing everything, or aggregating everything under the main company, it will all be taken together because everything is associated if you’ve done your job correctly. Now, if it’s globally that we’re not worrying about maps, and then the reviews wouldn’t even come into play, unless you have unless you can trigger a knowledge And that’s a totally different story.

Bradley: Yeah, and if that’s the case, if it was globally then I would just have all reviews going to the one GMB asset, wherever the primary location is, because then all you’re trying to do is build the brand, not individual locations, right?

What Are Your Insights On The Reported Traffic Drop Last November 8, 2019?

So Ross says, Hey, everyone, and then he’s got the follow-up question below, which I’ll just that’s what and now come back to Joey’s question where he says Ross is new here. What the hell happened on November 8, lots of traffic drops and the insight and that’s what I was just talking about, as far as I know. I’m sure Marco’s got more insight on this than I do. Because I don’t geek out about this stuff anymore. If I don’t see major drops in my stuff, I don’t worry about it. So but apparently the what it from what I understand it was another maps update where it looks like they tightened the proximity filter to where it’s it’s even narrower now. Is that correct? Marco?

Marco: That’s absolutely correct. They tighten up on the proximity. And proximity is a ranking factor, it’s we can literally call it the most important ranking factor, although you can still overcome. That’s why we don’t usually see all of these changes in the things that we do. Because you can overcome anything, any part of the algorithm, you can overcome it. And people are saying that well don’t use brute force. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. You can totally overcome anything through what they call it in the Rocky movie, good old fashioned blunt force trauma. And that’s just feeding the but just a whole lot of related information, wherever it is that you that you’re trying to expand to. So even though even if the proximity factor is the main ranking factor, there are other ranking factors that can and do come into play, if you can overcome that one factor. So is that something to just totally say, Oh my god, now I have to go get a DMB in eternity. City, not only in the area where I am but in the surrounding areas, it’s being able to overcome that proximity factor. And we do it and we do a really good job of teaching that in local GSB Pro. And now, you know being at the location and being able to upload images and being able to show Google that you’re actually there and that everything is actually from that location has become more important than ever.

Bradley: Yes, very good.

Does The Size Of Embeds Matter?

So let’s jump back to Joey’s question. It says hi, does the size of embeds matter? In other words, embedding a 10 by 10 GMB site is still the equivalent of embedding a 600 by 300. So the frame could be one by 110 by 10 or 600 by 300. And you still pass the juice Thank you. I’m size doesn’t matter. Only because if you have it too small, then that could be considered cloaking. Am I correct in that statement?

Marco: Yeah, yeah, you could, you could be tagged For cloaking, although it’s really hard if I mean if you do it right there no word. Most people can’t do it right, which is why we don’t even teach it.

Bradley: Yeah. I mean, technically Yes, you can still pass the SEO with the iframe present even if it’s a one by one pixel.

Marco: Even if it’s a zero by zero

Bradley: Yeah, it technically you can absolutely do that. I wouldn’t recommend it if you know, because if anybody manually reviews it and saw it, then they could, you know, they could flag you for manual action. So

Marco: that would be the biggest problem right with someone coming in and actually, you triggering, First of all, triggering enough red flags to trigger a manual review so that someone from Google would actually come to your website because nobody trusts you’re not making enough money now. Nobody. Most people are making enough money to worry about Google to have someone waste all of their valuable resources on looking at your fucking website in the first place. If you do get that big or if just if you just happen to get unlucky enough to trigger a manual, and they come and see that zero by zero thing, yes, that is cloaking. There’s no reason for you to have a zero by zero iframe one by one unless it’s a pixel, right? Facebook, Google, whatever, if it’s unless it’s tracking code. So they come in and look and they see code and it looks fishy. You’re more likely to get hit with a manual and probably deindex, because I’ve seen cloaking get hit really, really hard.

Bradley: Yeah, agreed. Okay, so we’ll say, Hey, Marco, have you announced the date of the four webinars for Bert? I guess that’s for the charity stuff.

Marco: Yeah, no, I’m still working on that. It’s not only BERT, but I’m also going to go into entities and AI and NLP and what it actually is what it isn’t. We’re gonna we’re going to discuss and talk about everything that that other People just either refused to talk about, or they don’t know enough about it to be able to discuss it. As soon as I have it already, I’m going to announce it. I’m going to announce the date I’m going to give you the donation page. And remember this all goes to a really good cause it’s getting kids who would otherwise not be able to get an education getting them into school, so that they can get a good education get trained to get jobs and, you know, have a chance at life.

Bradley: Very cool. Alright, the next one, Fred says I was worried that that might be a problem. So that’s because I was kind of tongue in cheek picking. That is a huge, long question. He says, thanks so much for answering my 13 pages of questions. It helped a lot. Thanks, guys. You’re welcome, Fred.

What Is The Difference Between Q&A and FAQ?

Fit. So what’s up? 50 says what is the difference between Q&A and FAQ? Well, it’s, it’s kind of the same thing or it’s very closely related. Q&A is most of the time would like You can see in the SERPs is what I was talking about earlier. But FAQs that can be a little bit more specific to an individual like a business. Right? So I mean, they’re kind of basically the same. As far as schema markup, it’s the same. But what I mean the difference is frequently asked questions are should be answered by a client or business, right? Like, what is the questions that they get? asked the most by prospects and or customers or clients? Right? And they should have answers to that. But when it comes to q amp, a, what I’m what these, the way that I look at it is when you go to Google and you search for question, you’ll see related questions that get asked enough that somebody took the time to create content around answering that question, and then marking it up correctly on their website so that they could get added to the featured snippets in Google search. So it stands to reason that that question gets asked enough. It might be a frequently asked question for another business that maybe your particular client or business doesn’t get asked that much, but it’s still relevant. That makes sense. So they’re very closely related, but there is a slight difference, at least in my opinion.

Marco: Yeah, the difference is that that Q&A, people should be able to either ask questions or answer questions on the website, if they’re not able, if they’re your frequently asked questions and your answers are there’s no way for users to engage with that. Then it’s FAQ frequently asked questions. Q&A, again, is on a website where people can go in and interact with the questions and the answer. Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah, guys, it you know, I’ve talked about this probably in Syndication Academy. And I’ll probably I’ll just give this give another nugget away here because it works really well. And we’re almost out of time. So anyway, those Q&A questions that you can curate, right from Google and the beautiful thing about it is if you type in a question about product service in an industry whatever the questions box comes up now what the drop-downs each time you click on a drop-down, it brings up like three or four more questions. So like you can just keep drilling down into those guys and that gives you almost unlimited content. Like, Think about it. It’s a content hack, right, you can grab a question and an answer from those Question and Answer boxes that Google provides you and use that in GMB posts for example, right, just cite the source just like I was talking about earlier is the in the Q&A box right that the dropdown. as it expands, it gives you the snippet with the answer at least a partial answer. It might not be the full answer, but it gives a snippet and then it has the link to read more. Well, you can still use that link in the GMB post too so you give proper credit to where it’s due. That’s a nofollow link and a GMB post the button link right, and a GMB post. So the button URL, the URL that you attach to the call to action button. That is a dofollow link, although I here in just the past few days probably since November 8. Some of those are nofollow. And I think it’s just because Google is still tinkering around in there. But those are dofollow links. So you can still link back to the answer, have a QA, write a question and answer that you curate it you basically are republishing from Google’s own search results, to add relevancy to the GMB. You can do this on your money site too and link back to the source which is only proper and right. But then use the button URL in the GMB post the link back to your money site, right to your page that also is about that very topic or question and answer right so you again, you’re it’s creating co-citation. It’s creating topical relevancy, and you don’t even have to come up with the content. You can even go through and curate groups of questions like question and then create blog posts out of those on your money site where once again, you’re publishing the question plus the answer. You can create a table of contents at the top of the page Marco stop me from getting too deep here. But with a table of contents with jump links, anchor links, right that jump down to each section that has a different question. It has the answer that links back out to the source, right, but it’s a nofollow link on the blog post. And then just like a curated post, you can inject some commentary in between that stuff, with an opening paragraph and a closing paragraph with a call to action to contact your business or your company, your client that you’re doing the work for, for help or services with that, you know, for products or services that solve those problems, those questions that make sense.

So again, guys, it’s a great strategy to use those questions as a farm those questions right mine those questions, harvest those questions or whatever you want to say from one of those from this q&a panels that pop up in the Google search results and drill down into them. You can get gold topic ideas, blog post ideas GMB post ideas from that kind of stuff.

Which Of Your Courses In Which You Teach About Making ID Pages and Mirror Gsites?

So, Alright, the last question is oh Austin Don says, which of your courses do you teach about making it pages and mirror g sites? Well the mastermind, RYS reloaded local GMB Pro, any one of those three the mastermind local GMB Pro or RYS reloaded what it was, it’s covered in all three of those locations. So, am I missing any here guys?

Marco: I don’t think you did. Okay.

Bradley: Adam, you want to chime in? All right, last is not really a question. It’s just a comment and then we’re going to wrap it up, guys. I’ve got a TV repairman showing up in about five minutes. Anyways, I asked the question about GMBs and review in one location versus all the states that clients the Klein operates and this was that question about Texas and five additional states. We answered previously he says no follow up question. I just wanted to say thank you for answering it and you knocked it out of the park. I’ve wrestled with this in my head for a week and you made it clear as day thanks again, guys for all that you do. You’re very welcome. That’s what this venue is for. Anything else guys?

Marco: No, not unless another question popped up now. on the page,

Adam: I think you just scroll over Bradley, but the last call for everybody. Head over there. Just follow the instructions on Facebook get early access to the YouTube and UTM course Bradley’s going to be put together here over the holidays and save a bundle but like they said to if you want to wait a little bit and pay us three times too much more. So okay with that.

Bradley: And let’s go ahead. I was gonna say I actually prefer that. But, you know, I want you guys to save that additional $200 to spend it on your family’s at Christmas. So

Marco: and stop by the mastermind tomorrow. The webinar, because we’re going to show how much we’ve improved the user experience. Want to show how easy it is to find the information now before it was just okay, how do I get through five years of information? Yeah, because we have five years worth of videos in there in the archives, right? So just the latest videos. It’s everything since we started. As I did you get through all that, well, now we made it really simple for you to get through it.

Bradley: That’s been a long time coming. There’s just so much damn content, so much video-based content and long mastermind webinars. It’s been hard to, for people to find stuff and that’s a problem we’ve been dealing with for a long time. And we Marco has been working on it in the background for since I think January of this year, maybe February, but it’s been a long time. And now it’s here. It’s ready. So it’s awesome. It’s a big, big improvement. So, all right, everybody, thanks for being here. We’ll see some of you tomorrow, the rest of you next week. Awesome. Bye, everyone. Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 262 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 262

Click on the video above to watch Episode 262 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: Alright, we are live. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 262. Today is the 13th of November. And I don’t know if anyone else knows this. But apparently there’s something called Black Friday at the end of the month and Cyber Monday. Apparently there’s some sales or something going on. Well, we’ve got something even better to kick it off. So make sure you keep your eyes and ears open for that we got some good stuff coming and it’s going to be free. We’re not going to even require an opt-in but more on that later. Let’s talk to the guys real quick and then we got a couple of announcements and we will dive into your questions. To start on my left here, Bradley, how you doing today?

Bradley: Good man hanging out, working hard, instead of hard-working.

Adam: Are you going to go like a TV writing this weekend? Or is it now

Bradley: I’ve got my daughter this weekend. So it’s her weekend but uh, December 6 that weekend. I’m going to my favorite spot Diamond Southwestern Virginia again for the weekend. Actually I’m going on the fifth for Thursday the fifth so looking forward to that although it may be cold it should be fun.

Adam: Nice. Nice. Marco speaking of weather How you doing man?

Marco: Man, I’m starting to get cold down here. You guys are sending your cold it was almost 65 last night. Oh ridiculous. Stop it. Arctic Well, whatever you want whatever you guys are doing up there Stop it. We don’t want it.

Adam: Well, speaking of cold Chris How you doing?

Chris: I didn’t know like. There’s nothing to complain it’s cozy warm and that was out today and it was sunny. Yeah, life is a good man.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan and Hernan, you still you’re in Miami, right for a little bit longer?

Hernan: I’m still in South Florida. Yeah, I’m still here until Saturday, actually, when I’m flying back to Buenos Aires.Excited to be there. They’re going to be spending the holiday season with family. But also exciting for next week and the week after, which is going to be Black Friday, so that’s gonna be pretty cool too. So that’ll be here.

Adam: Outstanding. Yeah. Well, it’s good stuff. And I’m happy to be here in case anyone wants to know, the weather is just fine. It’s like 70 I guess. I don’t know.

Chris: Quick question, Adam.

Adam: what’s that?

Chris: Are you guys celebrating 11th of November as well?

Adam: Um, no, is that a thing?

Chris: I didn’t know. Like, I noticed there was were all kinds of like online sales on the 11th of November. So I was actually quite surprised.

Adam: 11 11 maybe just like making use of the numbers. You know, right. Fair enough. Well, I missed out on that since

Bradley: it’s just like every year, people start putting their Christmas trees and decorations up and the station started playing Christmas music earlier on earlier every fucking year. So I imagine Black Friday starts getting earlier on early every year now to so jet rise.

Adam: So real quick if you’re new to us, welcome. You’re in the right place. You didn’t end up on the weather channel or discussion of holidays. You are in fact at Hump Day Hangouts and we’re going to answer your digital marketing questions shortly. But just so you know, you’re in the right place, you can always ask your questions on the page, unless of course, it’s broken and you can’t get to the page like people were doing today. In which case come back in a few hours after we unscrew up our technical issue and come back and answer your question whether or not you can make it live you can always ask your question. We encourage you to be here live so you can get clarification or asked or gets more information from you as well as occasionally we do some fun stuff like giveaways. But you can always catch the replays on YouTube and get your answers that way.

Secondly, if you haven’t yet grabbed the Battle Plan that is your next step, head over to battleplan.semanticmastery.com for a repeatable process, everything from new websites, age domains, YouTube channels, whatever it is going there and past that. If you’re ready to grow your digital marketing business then you probably want or you should want a community that includes fast access to real-world info and that’s what the mastermind is all about. You can find out more at mastermind.semanticmastery.com. And for everyone, no matter where you’re at and ourselves included, we recommend getting stuff done right. You build a team, you build processes, you outsource and you get it done for you. And that’s why mgyb.co exist you can head over there and get our way as to drive stack, syndication networks, press releases, link building, embed all sorts of stuff with some really, really kick-ass stuff coming here in November wink, wink Black Friday and then into the New Year. We got some good stuff coming.

Marco: I have two public service announcements. Adams Sorry to interrupt.

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Marco: Black Friday will be on Wednesdays from now on. I just determined that. And to all joking aside, we always say that be and the mastermind has its privileges. Well, I’ve been personally working really hard and incorporating some really not gonna say what it is, but some just some really neat things into the Mastermind to make the user experience to and to make people finding what they’re looking for. To make that way better to improve the experience so that people can come in and find exactly what they’re looking for, where it is, you know, so whatever it is that you’re trying to find, Marco will talk shit about Google on and I can’t remember when Well, it’s not finished, not 100% because there is artificial intelligence involved. And interestingly enough the world is the SEO world is an uproar because of BERT, and we’re actually using BERT in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind so again, mastermind being a member of the Semantic Mastermind does have its privileges because you’re first to get everything that we do business building and ideas and concepts, and all of these different things. Hey, on tomorrow’s mastermind webinar will be talking about BERT and AI and what it is actually, because you see all of these discussions and all of these forums and then all these Facebook groups, and nobody has an I’m not going to drop an F-bomb here. Nobody has an effing clue as to what it is that they’re talking. They don’t know what BERT is. And all you have to do is go into the documentation to see what BERT is and what it does. And you’ll know that it’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing because of the way that we teach you how to do things in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. So not only does it have its privileges in that we give you cutting it and anything that we can do to make your Your life easier to enter to make, whether its clients whether tank, whatever it is, it’s there and we give it to people but it’s also we try to make your life easier. We try to do all of these different things. Because you’re a member of the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. It’s included in the membership fee, nobody will have to pay extra for all the work that went into the back end of the mastermind to make things so much better. So, I’m sorry, it seems like it’s a pitch fest for the mastermind. And I should be pitching the hell out of it. Because it’s so good. We get testimonials time and again, of how well our stuff works. And so yeah, we should be here, tooting our own horns and singing our praises and whatever. I’m not going to go into that anymore. Just I’m just letting people know if you’re in the Semantic Mastery <stermind, be there tomorrow and see just how much we have improved the learning experience. Let’s call it

Adam: Amen. got one more to add on to that you guys are now made a post believe on November 4 about big news for Bradley. Bradley is going to be putting together some training, we decided based on the response. There’s still a little bit of time if you want to get down on this, and what it is, is step by step program on how to grow, grow a massive brand using YouTube and GDN, Ads. And, you know, we just want to engage, because we have, especially Bradley didn’t want to be putting in a lot of time and effort doing the training, you know, right leading up into the holidays if people weren’t interested. But so far, we’ve got 71 comments, people interested in early access at a hell of a discount. So I’m going to put the link in if you want to get in on that. Just comment, leave a GIF or a comment on the Facebook thread and we will be in touch with you shortly. We’re going to have some information that information about that going up. Hernan says let me in I think he got booted from the from Hump Day Hangouts.

Bradley: He’s back in

Adam: Alright, well, guys, with that said, we got anything else before we get into questions here.

Bradley: I’ll just give a little update on a couple of things. Number one, we’ve got anybody that joined Local Kingpin, which was the Google Ads training for using search ads for lead generation. That’s going to be an update webinar on Monday. Because the interface has changed so much the principles, the method is still pretty much the same, though. There’s just some slight differences that I’m going to cover. And the interface, Google Ads interface has changed a lot. Plus they’ve got a lot of new or improved features, such as automated bidding strategies and things like that, that I used to suggest never to use, but they’ve gotten so much better over the last year and a half, two years because of AI and it’s so much better. So artificial intelligence. And so we’re going to talk about that slightly plus any questions that anybody has So that’ll be Monday, it’ll be probably only about an hour long. That’s just for me to give an update and answer questions. So if you’re in Local Kingpin, I encourage you to get signed up for that.

Also, the Google Ads course that Adam was just talking about, that I’m going to be starting in two weeks, I think it’s one and I say we’re going to do that. I think Monday, the 25th is going to be the first webinar and that’ll be about 90 minutes, maybe longer if there’s, you know, a lot of Q&A at the end, and then December 9th, and that’s going to be a two-part deal. The first one will be about YouTube ads and how to use that for branding. And for not not not so much lead generation it will produce leads, but it’s not a direct lead generator, it it will but it’s more about branding, and also driving relevant traffic into your digital assets. So your entity essentially. So we’re going to talk about YouTube on the first webinar. And then on the second webinar. Again, that’ll be December 9th. We’re going to talk about using the Google Display Network. So it’s good Google Ads training specifically for YouTube and the Google Display Network for setting up branding campaigns which works incredibly well for both building brand awareness but also for generating relevant targeted traffic from specific audiences from specific geo locations if it’s for local into your entities, your digital assets for a particular brand which is great for SEO. So it’s a way for using Google ads to not only produce relevant traffic but improve brand awareness as well as help the SEO that your any SEO work that you’re doing, because you’re driving relevant, targeted traffic from known audiences and Google to your SEO as your assets that you’ve been doing SEO work on. And that takes care of ART right – relevance, trust, and authority. Google understands that that’s that recognize that traffic is an activity. It’s relevant because it’s from known audiences and specific geolocation if that’s if it’s for local you can target by geolocation, and it’s also trusted, trusted and authority trusted traffic because it’s coming from Google’s known Google’s audience buckets. And essentially, so it’s going to be it’s very, very powerful. I’ve just been crushing it with Google ads for clients over the last several months. And it just works really, really well. And I’ve been using them for my own business as well. And it’s, it’s just a great, great strategy. So that said, it’s, um, it’s going to be a pre, like right now you can get in for like, the pre-training special or whatever, where it’s, it’s a third of what it’s going to be once I’m done recording those webinars, it’s going to be packaged up and sold for probably 300 bucks, or right right, right around there. So if you want to get in for a third of that, I would recommend that you go check out the post that Adam posted, comment on it and then get signed up. Okay. All right.

Marco: So they’re more than welcome to wait and pay us more later. Yeah, that’s fine too. But I would suggest for people not to wait.

Bradley: Alright, so can we get into it? Now,

Adam: let’s do it.

Bradley: All right, we got the screen. Okay, somebody confirm.

Adam: Good to go.

Bradley: Okay, so everybody can see my humping Wednesday meme GIFs alright. Hump Day right, Wednesday.

How Would You Add Relevancy To Your Money Site Using Drive Stacks?

So, Alright, so the first questions are and it’s multiple questions. It’s 13 pages worth of questions from Fred Wilson and Fred. Well, I appreciate your and I really do. I appreciate your questions. That’s a bit much for Hump Day Hangouts. And also, it’s getting a little bit into the weeds for stuff that we would typically only cover in this much depth in mastermind, which I’m sure you’re fully aware of that, as a former mastermind member, or an RYS Academy reloaded specifically since it’s so it pertains to drive stack stuff and kind of deep into the weeds. But with that said, Marco, how much of this do you want to answer?

Marco: I haven’t really re-read the question. So,

Bradley: Yeah. So should I give you about 10 minutes to get through it?

Marco: All right. Do you have a general question that you can add the I’d be more than happy to answer general questions, but if it’s something that’s specific, yeah, that again, membership has its privileges and this things that I’m only answer for paying members and I mean, that that’s just that’s the way it should be. I’m sure that people who have paid three $4,000 for the course would appreciate me keeping the secret sauce in where it belongs.

Bradley: Yeah. And I agree and that, you know, I’ve read through the first two sections of this three-part question this three-section question, and I realized that it’s, it’s a lot more in-depth than what we would typically answer on a free Hump Day hangout because it’s getting into very specific tactics. From RYS reloaded, we would cover it also in the mastermind, I’m sure. But this is not something that we can get that deep into it. That said, I’ll give you kind of a general overview, and I’ll kind of answer it and let you take add to it, Marco, and then we’ll move on to the next one. So Fred, we would welcome you back to the mastermind at any moment.

If we’re going to RYS Reloaded, either one of those would be good places to get this particular question answered. But that said, He’s talking about his food business, his food tour business and talking about how to add additional relevancy. He did some keyword theme research using SEM Rush and looking at some of the competitors and found that there is some other keywords other than just food tour type keywords that can help to add relevancy that are kind of associated with the food tour business, but he hasn’t been targeting them. And so the question is would adding in some of these other types of keyboard themes into the drive stack folders as subfolders within food tour folders, would that help to add relevancy? And because of the association that Google’s is showing? And so I mean, to me, you’ve already answered your question. Yes. You know, if there’s if there’s a way to create that association, that you’re you’ve discovered by doing some additional research, looking at competitors using some tools like sem rush and all of that kind of stuff, then yeah, you can you can add that additional relevancy into your drive stack. And that’s going to certainly help. I don’t know if you want to go further than that. Marco.

Marco: Yeah. Just a little bit, because, I mean, I can answer this generally we go after, especially the way that our keyword research VA is being taught, we go after anything that Google considers relevant. In a keyword, research cake, and we give you guys whoever orders the gig, the deep keyword research, all of that information. We do separate the movie will give you tasks will give you silos will give you information that we feel is where the money makers are, what the relevant keywords are, and maybe something that that that that isn’t a money keyword, but Google still thinks that that is relevant. All of that is necessary because what we do inside the drive stack is create relevantly and push. Right? We create a relevance push from everything that we do from the spider web silo to the way that the drive stack is built to the way that the G site is built to the way the inner pages are done to the way that we mimic what’s on the website. So yes, by all means, I don’t care. We do use SEM Rush for keyword relevance, but that’s not necessarily what will target what we do is we use Jeffrey Smith’s Ultimate SEO Bootcamp training. And we go according to how he teaches what the top-level categories are. Then from there, work down and create the silos there, you will create three silos. But everything that’s relevant should be at it. Remember when Network Empire started talking about color, current stuff, it’s not, it’s not there. But they began talking about it. And they began explaining it more what it was all about, what it means. And really, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to create all of this in a self-contained Google environment for the bot to feed on, which is, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Is It Safe Against Plagiarism To Curate Content With Attribution From Google Snippet?

Bradley: Yeah. And so the next question part of this, which it’s kinda interesting that you asked this, Fred because we covered this, our own our very own data. You know, master link builder, was at our live event, hopefully, live 2019 in Denver, just recently, and he was talking about doing something similar that you’re asking about, which is adding q&a. Questions and Answers into a doc within your Gsite within your drive stack and just linking back to the source but not actually hyperlinking just putting like the text-based link. So you’re providing a citation, but what so you’re citing the source, right? So you’re providing attribution, but you’re not hyperlinking back. I would say that should be okay, provided you’re not copying, you know, if you’re just copying snippets, like what is shown in the Google search results for the q amp a section. So when you search for a question in Google, and it brings up that featured snippet, which is a q amp a box, right, and it’s got the dropdowns, and you click the drop-down, and then it shows a short it shows the full question and then a short answer and a link back to the source where it’s pulling that answer from that question and answer from you can embed that or you know, kind of copy and paste that into a Google doc or something like that. And then still late as long as you’re not expanding by going to the actual destination URL and copying more of the content. It’s just a snippet. So it falls under the same rules of curating content would be on a blog post in that, if you’re just highlighting, you know, reusing republishing a short snippet from somebody else’s content, and then you’re providing attribution citing the source, then it should be okay. Now, some people, some publishers will still make eventually, you know, sometimes they may find it and they may request that you unpublish it. But as far as it being a copyright infringement, as long as it’s just a small snippet, and it’s you’re citing the source, it should, it should never be an issue. Although like I said, out of courtesy, if anybody ever were to contact you and say Please take this down or unpublished this, then you know, I would recommend that you just do it to avoid any sort of, you know, some sort of stupid battle that could ensue. Although again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it legally because you are citing the source and it falls within a specific brand. Members of the DMC act right there were the digital, whatever Copyright Act. So I would just, you know, encourage you not to go any further than what is shown in the snippets and the featured snippets within Google search.

That said, also, you’re asked about curating a lot of content about a topic putting it inside the drive stack, then putting links to your money site, the correct way to push relevancy for your money site? Again, yes, you can do that. The same thing is by curating content on your money site, you can do that. Right. So think about that. That’s what we’ve taught for years is the best way to generate content before even money site blog posts unless you’re a subject matter expert and you’re creating 100% original content. The problem with that is even as an as a subject matter expert, sometimes you get you run out of ideas. But there are a ton of other subject matter experts. I’m not talking about buying shitty content farm content, I’m talking about locating subject Matter content written by subject matter experts pertaining to your topic, right or your niche your industry, and then republishing, once again snippets of it, and giving credit to where it’s, you know, citing the source giving attribution. And in the case of curating on a blog, your money site blog, you know, we always recommend hyperlinking to the source. And just using nofollow External links, that’s what I’ve always done. Um, but that’s very, very powerful. Because once again, you can create an original article out of using snippets of other people’s content, where you’re just adding commentary and opening paragraph commentary in between pieces of curated content, which doesn’t have to be just articles, it can be videos, infographics, don’t curate images. Please don’t do that. You can. That’s a no-no, but you can curate infographics, videos, mp3, so audio files, you know, other articles, you can curate all that kind of stuff. And it helps because it allows you to be able to produce content very quickly, inexpensively. And you can even train a virtual assistant, somebody that’s not a subject matter expert how to locate good content, and compile it in a logical fashion, and then just add commentary. So in other words, you know, you can come up with a topic for a blog post, find supporting articles or even differing opinion articles, right so that you can do a compare and contrast or pros and cons or argue both sides of a topic in particular curated article if that makes sense. It’s very, very powerful. And it’s a great way to create co-citation, which is similar to co-occurrence in that you’re linking out to other relevant sources. And so again, we talked about all of that in content kingpin, it’s a training course that is still 100% relevant today. I still use that for all of my clients, that same exact method for curating content for all of my clients. You can apply that to drive stack stuff to you’re still going to build that relevancy, topical relevancy. Just make sure you’re Giving attribution even if you’re not hyperlinking to it, I recommend you absolutely always give credit where credit is due. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: No, I totally agree. It’s a matter of mirroring right? Everything that you would do on the money site you do on the drive stack and Gsite, including curating content. That’s right.

How Do You Add A Schema Markup To A Local Business Press Release?

Okay, cool. Well, the next question is from Kaydee. Hi, guys. How do you add schema markup to press releases for a local business? Press advantage sent an email with a link to Google structured data markup helper tool to create the code but on the page, it is asking to select a data type and then paste your URL of the page you wish to mark up. What URL do we enter here? I don’t know. Because I don’t use that tool. I’m going to point out another one here for you in a moment. The press release is not yet published. So it has no URL to target the markup and the data type is to tick in and the data type to tick is a local business. Thanks to know and here’s why. Because if you’re if you have your own press advantage account, or even if you Buy him through MGYB. And we set up an organization page or you set it up through your own account, right? So you set up an organization page, that’s where you should have your local business markup. If it’s, you know, an organization page for local business, you should have your local business structured data markup in the organization page, right, which will get added to all of the press releases that get pushed out. And some may not all, but many of the publisher sites that were they get published to will actually pick up that JSON LD code for local business markup. Okay, so you add that to your organization page. However, I’ve got a press advantage open here. Let’s see if it hopefully it brings me into the same standby I’m gonna have to pause my screen for a moment because of it my plugin that reset my browser that Marco pointed out, a reset my reset the tab, so give me one second while I get what you’re looking for.

Marco: Let me just tell people That if your press release gets published and you go and look at some of the websites were able to publish, and you don’t see the schema markup, but you don’t see an iframe that you send out or whatever, that’s not on us. It’s not even on press advantage. It’s actually on that website, not wanting, you know, stripping out all of the code. But what we want anyway, is we want to get that in as many places as we can. And that’s why I go it goes out to the entire publication network, but not every website will publish whatever it is that you submitted, just did just to make it clear to everyone because we do get support tickets about that. And it’s like, yeah, there’s nothing that we could do.

Bradley: Yeah, so to show you what I’m talking about. First of all, if we go to press advantage for the organization, which I should I forgot I got my ID page looped into this is going to break the browser. Let me see if I can get to Page Source before it shuts everything down. Um, Alright, so let’s see if it’ll pull this up. It might not. Okay, there we go. So if we scroll down, we’ll see right here is my local business structure data markup starting right here. From here to there. That’s my local business structure data markup, that’s part of the organization page. Right. And so again, as Marco just mentioned, some sites when we publish when it distributes the press releases, it has this codependent to it. You know, it started with it with the press release, but some sites will pick it up and publish that JSON LD code as well. What I think you’re talking about is for individual press releases, so here I am inside the dashboard. If you scroll down now there’s a section says enter JSON LD schema, this will be attached to the release in addition to any organization-specific schema. So that’s what I was talking about before. If it’s a local business, you want it which is what I was showing here. You want to have local business structure data markup on the page, right that their organization page, but then For the individual, a press release, excuse me, you can add additional schema markup here. So what I would recommend here and you know you can do other stuff too depends on what you’re having published. But what I would recommend is going to and this is a tool that I use most of the time, we’re going to have one in MGYB here shortly, I’m not sure if it’s available yet. But this is the one that I’ve been using for quite some time.

If you just go to Google and search for schema markup generator, look for technicalSEO.com or just go to technicalSEO.com and look for the schema markup generator, which is over here in the left sidebar. There’s different types of schema markups that this tool will generate different types of schema. And so the very first one is article click on the article and then when you look down here, when it loads this page, you come down here to Article type, and there’s actually one for news article. So select news article, and then just fill out these fields. And here’s your schema code over here on the right-hand sidebar. Once you’ve completed all these fields, Then you just copy that and paste that into Press Advantage over here. Now again, there are other types of schema that can be generated. So it depends on what the article is going to be about. But just doing news article schema markup is very, very powerful, right to add to each individual press release. Okay, so that’s what I would recommend. There are other tools out there that will generate this stuff to guys, this is just the one that I typically use. Okay. There’s a good question. Now, by the way, that said, I gotta tease this a little bit. I’m inside my blog for that same company, I was just sharing my real estate business. And this we’ve got coming soon. We’ve got some pretty cool stuff coming up. And like the plugin will generate this Jeffrey Smith plugin, but it’s the pro version, which isn’t released yet, but it’s coming soon. And it’s got all the schema markup generator right inside WordPress for all every different type of schema, you can think of. It’s fabulous. And so that same type that same article markup right there, if we come down here, there’s an article type, blog posting or news article. And then I can just fill out all this stuff. It creates the code right down here and embeds it into the header of this particular blog post. And I can click update, and boom, that’s going to have the same type of Article markup that we were just sharing. Pretty powerful stuff. So be on the lookout for that guys soon, early next year. That was a good tease. Right, guys?

Marco: Perfect.

Can You Embed The Website Pages In The GSite When Mirroring?

All right. Next one is Simon. He says We’re marrying the main website to the G site. Can you just embed the website pages on the site pages? Or is it necessary to copy and paste the content for each website page on to the G site pages, I just use the embeds. I’m lazy like that, right. I work on the money site pages. That’s what I flush out with good content. And I mirror them onto the site. And then I just and I do some other really cool stuff. We’ve been talking about how I do silos now. locations. So there’s topical silos and in location-based silos, but I do it in a very unique way. And it works really well, especially when you use a G site. And yeah, all I do is grab the embed or create an iframe out of the money site pages, and embed them into the G site page, then I optimize the title of the G site page, obviously. And then, you know, you can mirror that into a folder inside of your folder and files inside of your drive stack. And then just smash that shit with embeds and or links, or both. And it works really, really well hit ever remember, that’s your SEO shield. So we do everything externally to the SEO shield, right? So that would be the G site the drive stack and all of the tier one entity assets, which by the way, you can actually take those iframe into your syndication network properties to guys think about that. So right, there’s no reason you can’t push those embeds through to your syndication network properties too. good question though,

Does Proper Schema Markup Feed The Bot Enough And Not To Worry About Creating Long Articles?

Paul Thompson says, Does proper schema markup feed the bot enough that we don’t need to worry about creating long articles on the pages we want to rank? No, but it does. It does definitely help a lot. Marco is probably going to be better at answering this one than me. I would still for money sites stuff still flesh out the pages, but adding structured data, like what I just showed with my blog, where you were, you know, again, you can add it manually now like right now, since the pro plugins not available, this there might be other plugins out there that do it, but I don’t know if they provide the schema code that’s 100% up to date. I know that a lot of times they’re not updated enough. I’m not speaking badly about anybody else’s plugin. I just haven’t used them. But you can have like a code insert or plugin right so like. SoGo ad scripts header, footer and things like that header, footer type script plugins where you can add scripts into the head section or foot section or body section of any individual page or post, and you can go use schema creators like what I just shared, and create schema markup and and then put them into each one of your posts or pages or whatever, so that you’re adding additional, you know, schema structured data that the bots love and I mean, that’s guys, you’re you’ll you’ll have an edge over a lot of your competitors if you do that kind of stuff. But I would still recommend that for money site stuff, you flush the content, the content of the page out to. Marco, what say you

Marco: Yeah, I mean that absolutely. Two things right. structured and unstructured data structured data is for the bot feed the bot as much as you can, which is exactly what we do. And why we use drive stacks and Gsites and iframe and everything that the entities entity stack, and everything else that we don’t I mean that it there’s a method to our madness. Now, if you then go and you send a person to a page. And now we’re talking about people, we’re not talking about bots, because what’s going to happen is you’re going to rank. And that’s going to bring your traffic onto the page. And if there’s nothing on that page to engage the person, then we no longer care about the but now we care about that person coming to the website and converting, finishing the action that they were set out to do, because if that person comes on the website and bounces, then you did you defeated the entire purpose of creating the all of the stacking that we created in the first place, which was to get that person onto the page that would convert them over an image is going to convert them of an image is going to get them to push and call whatever it is that you need to be done. To finish that, that then that’s what’s going to matter. So, two different things. If you need the content to rank you have to look at the competition. If you can rank or outrank the competition without 2000 or 3000 words of content, By all means, nobody, and nobody’s going to sit there and go through the 3000 words of content on this is a really interested in whatever it is that you have to say. what you’re interested in, is that conversion, because that’s what centers everything at the end. And that’s what Google is going to look at from beginning to end is whether that task and that goal. Well, whether it was accomplished.

How Do You Setup A GMB Page For A Business That Operates In Multiple States?

Awesome, thanks, Marco. So the next question was from jack, I’m not the next question is my client is based out of Texas but operates in five other states fully across the states not limited to anyone Metro region. What’s the best way to set up the company GMB page, so reviews for one state aggregate under the main company as well. Or if that’s not possible, what would be the best way to go about setting up the GMB either individually and each state Or globally under some other configuration? Well, remember Google My Business is supposed to be especially now there’s another question I see on the page here a little bit lower about what happened on November 8. And from my understanding, which I’ve only done very, I’ve only kind of read through some comments and stuff, is that it was more it was basically an update to the maps algorithm for GMB stuff. And it’s gone even more proximity-based. So they’ve Google’s tightened the proximity filter, so to speak. And so with that said, Google, my business is supposed to be for local businesses, right? I mean, we’ve talked about setting up GMBs and you know, setting your service area, the United States, for example, and that’s okay, but it’s not it’s okay for like the entity but it’s not going to help you to rank anywhere in the United States and maps. That said, you’re also in this case, you’re talking about five different states. They’re located in Texas but they operate in five other states. So you potentially you could have if you have an office and in each of their other states, you could have GMB for each office location. It’s not necessary but you can. That said if you wanted to get reviews and let’s just say Arizona, I’m just assuming let’s just say that that’s one of the states that you operate in. If you get reviews in Arizona, but you want them to populate on the Texas GMB if that’s the way you have it set up. It’s not you can’t do that. If you had a gym be in Arizona, I mean, if all you have is the one Google My Business location in Texas, then it doesn’t matter where you get the reviews from. They’re all going to aggregate on that one and only Google My Business location. My point that I’m trying to make is you cannot get GMB reviews in one location and have them also populate onto another GMB location. You can’t do that. It because each GMB entity or location is supposed to be it’s own and collect its own or, you know, aggregate its own reviews. So that said, You know, I would, I would consider what it is you’re trying to do. As far as if you have multiple GMBs, which I’m not sure that you do, but if you do, then what I would recommend you do is set up use some sort of review directing app. I know for contractors, one of the ones that work really well as birdeye.com. I think another one might be Podium, I’ve not used that. But what are some of my contractor clients use Bird Eye, and that works well, but it’s like a review gate, right? So it would be an app where you send out to customers, or clients or whatever the company or the business sends out to customers and ask for some listen to review or at ask for a review. And then somebody leaves a review and it directs the app can direct where the review gets published to if that makes sense. So you have more control over it that way and if it’s you know, below three stars, then it can be not posted as a review. Instead, it could be brought to, you know, sent to the customer service team so that they can reach out and try to resolve potential issues, that kind of stuff, I would look into something like that if you’re trying to have more control over where your reviews are coming from and where they’re going to be posted to. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: Yeah, I’m just guessing that his client and whatever it is that they’re doing that it triggers a three-pack, right? It triggers a map pack and it triggers map rankings if that’s the case. Then get a map wherein each one of the places where where your client operate, and associate everything to the main entity, that’s how Texas so then the AI which is sophisticated enough to then understand once you begin associating all of these to understand that it’s all part of the same company with it’s a company that operates out of Texas but has regional offices in five other states. So that if you do get a review, for example, in Texas for the company in another state, it could be taken into consideration. I’m not saying that the AI is that sophisticated, but it could mean at some point it will be, it will be able to understand all of these different relationships and put everything together. And if you do a really good job in your structured data of putting all of this together for the buck, then you won’t even have to leave it to the bot to guess and try to understand what this is all about. You can tell it you can go with everything in JSON LD to tell about what this is all about. Having done that, then you don’t have to worry about reviewing everything, or aggregating everything under the main company, it will all be taken together because everything is associated if you’ve done your job correctly. Now, if it’s globally that we’re not worrying about maps, and then the reviews wouldn’t even come into play, unless you have unless you can trigger a knowledge And that’s a totally different story.

Bradley: Yeah, and if that’s the case, if it was globally then I would just have all reviews going to the one GMB asset, wherever the primary location is, because then all you’re trying to do is build the brand, not individual locations, right?

What Are Your Insights On The Reported Traffic Drop Last November 8, 2019?

So Ross says, Hey, everyone, and then he’s got the follow-up question below, which I’ll just that’s what and now come back to Joey’s question where he says Ross is new here. What the hell happened on November 8, lots of traffic drops and the insight and that’s what I was just talking about, as far as I know. I’m sure Marco’s got more insight on this than I do. Because I don’t geek out about this stuff anymore. If I don’t see major drops in my stuff, I don’t worry about it. So but apparently the what it from what I understand it was another maps update where it looks like they tightened the proximity filter to where it’s it’s even narrower now. Is that correct? Marco?

Marco: That’s absolutely correct. They tighten up on the proximity. And proximity is a ranking factor, it’s we can literally call it the most important ranking factor, although you can still overcome. That’s why we don’t usually see all of these changes in the things that we do. Because you can overcome anything, any part of the algorithm, you can overcome it. And people are saying that well don’t use brute force. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. You can totally overcome anything through what they call it in the Rocky movie, good old fashioned blunt force trauma. And that’s just feeding the but just a whole lot of related information, wherever it is that you that you’re trying to expand to. So even though even if the proximity factor is the main ranking factor, there are other ranking factors that can and do come into play, if you can overcome that one factor. So is that something to just totally say, Oh my god, now I have to go get a DMB in eternity. City, not only in the area where I am but in the surrounding areas, it’s being able to overcome that proximity factor. And we do it and we do a really good job of teaching that in local GSB Pro. And now, you know being at the location and being able to upload images and being able to show Google that you’re actually there and that everything is actually from that location has become more important than ever.

Bradley: Yes, very good.

Does The Size Of Embeds Matter?

So let’s jump back to Joey’s question. It says hi, does the size of embeds matter? In other words, embedding a 10 by 10 GMB site is still the equivalent of embedding a 600 by 300. So the frame could be one by 110 by 10 or 600 by 300. And you still pass the juice Thank you. I’m size doesn’t matter. Only because if you have it too small, then that could be considered cloaking. Am I correct in that statement?

Marco: Yeah, yeah, you could, you could be tagged For cloaking, although it’s really hard if I mean if you do it right there no word. Most people can’t do it right, which is why we don’t even teach it.

Bradley: Yeah. I mean, technically Yes, you can still pass the SEO with the iframe present even if it’s a one by one pixel.

Marco: Even if it’s a zero by zero

Bradley: Yeah, it technically you can absolutely do that. I wouldn’t recommend it if you know, because if anybody manually reviews it and saw it, then they could, you know, they could flag you for manual action. So

Marco: that would be the biggest problem right with someone coming in and actually, you triggering, First of all, triggering enough red flags to trigger a manual review so that someone from Google would actually come to your website because nobody trusts you’re not making enough money now. Nobody. Most people are making enough money to worry about Google to have someone waste all of their valuable resources on looking at your fucking website in the first place. If you do get that big or if just if you just happen to get unlucky enough to trigger a manual, and they come and see that zero by zero thing, yes, that is cloaking. There’s no reason for you to have a zero by zero iframe one by one unless it’s a pixel, right? Facebook, Google, whatever, if it’s unless it’s tracking code. So they come in and look and they see code and it looks fishy. You’re more likely to get hit with a manual and probably deindex, because I’ve seen cloaking get hit really, really hard.

Bradley: Yeah, agreed. Okay, so we’ll say, Hey, Marco, have you announced the date of the four webinars for Bert? I guess that’s for the charity stuff.

Marco: Yeah, no, I’m still working on that. It’s not only BERT, but I’m also going to go into entities and AI and NLP and what it actually is what it isn’t. We’re gonna we’re going to discuss and talk about everything that that other People just either refused to talk about, or they don’t know enough about it to be able to discuss it. As soon as I have it already, I’m going to announce it. I’m going to announce the date I’m going to give you the donation page. And remember this all goes to a really good cause it’s getting kids who would otherwise not be able to get an education getting them into school, so that they can get a good education get trained to get jobs and, you know, have a chance at life.

Bradley: Very cool. Alright, the next one, Fred says I was worried that that might be a problem. So that’s because I was kind of tongue in cheek picking. That is a huge, long question. He says, thanks so much for answering my 13 pages of questions. It helped a lot. Thanks, guys. You’re welcome, Fred.

What Is The Difference Between Q&A and FAQ?

Fit. So what’s up? 50 says what is the difference between Q&A and FAQ? Well, it’s, it’s kind of the same thing or it’s very closely related. Q&A is most of the time would like You can see in the SERPs is what I was talking about earlier. But FAQs that can be a little bit more specific to an individual like a business. Right? So I mean, they’re kind of basically the same. As far as schema markup, it’s the same. But what I mean the difference is frequently asked questions are should be answered by a client or business, right? Like, what is the questions that they get? asked the most by prospects and or customers or clients? Right? And they should have answers to that. But when it comes to q amp, a, what I’m what these, the way that I look at it is when you go to Google and you search for question, you’ll see related questions that get asked enough that somebody took the time to create content around answering that question, and then marking it up correctly on their website so that they could get added to the featured snippets in Google search. So it stands to reason that that question gets asked enough. It might be a frequently asked question for another business that maybe your particular client or business doesn’t get asked that much, but it’s still relevant. That makes sense. So they’re very closely related, but there is a slight difference, at least in my opinion.

Marco: Yeah, the difference is that that Q&A, people should be able to either ask questions or answer questions on the website, if they’re not able, if they’re your frequently asked questions and your answers are there’s no way for users to engage with that. Then it’s FAQ frequently asked questions. Q&A, again, is on a website where people can go in and interact with the questions and the answer. Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah, guys, it you know, I’ve talked about this probably in Syndication Academy. And I’ll probably I’ll just give this give another nugget away here because it works really well. And we’re almost out of time. So anyway, those Q&A questions that you can curate, right from Google and the beautiful thing about it is if you type in a question about product service in an industry whatever the questions box comes up now what the drop-downs each time you click on a drop-down, it brings up like three or four more questions. So like you can just keep drilling down into those guys and that gives you almost unlimited content. Like, Think about it. It’s a content hack, right, you can grab a question and an answer from those Question and Answer boxes that Google provides you and use that in GMB posts for example, right, just cite the source just like I was talking about earlier is the in the Q&A box right that the dropdown. as it expands, it gives you the snippet with the answer at least a partial answer. It might not be the full answer, but it gives a snippet and then it has the link to read more. Well, you can still use that link in the GMB post too so you give proper credit to where it’s due. That’s a nofollow link and a GMB post the button link right, and a GMB post. So the button URL, the URL that you attach to the call to action button. That is a dofollow link, although I here in just the past few days probably since November 8. Some of those are nofollow. And I think it’s just because Google is still tinkering around in there. But those are dofollow links. So you can still link back to the answer, have a QA, write a question and answer that you curate it you basically are republishing from Google’s own search results, to add relevancy to the GMB. You can do this on your money site too and link back to the source which is only proper and right. But then use the button URL in the GMB post the link back to your money site, right to your page that also is about that very topic or question and answer right so you again, you’re it’s creating co-citation. It’s creating topical relevancy, and you don’t even have to come up with the content. You can even go through and curate groups of questions like question and then create blog posts out of those on your money site where once again, you’re publishing the question plus the answer. You can create a table of contents at the top of the page Marco stop me from getting too deep here. But with a table of contents with jump links, anchor links, right that jump down to each section that has a different question. It has the answer that links back out to the source, right, but it’s a nofollow link on the blog post. And then just like a curated post, you can inject some commentary in between that stuff, with an opening paragraph and a closing paragraph with a call to action to contact your business or your company, your client that you’re doing the work for, for help or services with that, you know, for products or services that solve those problems, those questions that make sense.

So again, guys, it’s a great strategy to use those questions as a farm those questions right mine those questions, harvest those questions or whatever you want to say from one of those from this q&a panels that pop up in the Google search results and drill down into them. You can get gold topic ideas, blog post ideas GMB post ideas from that kind of stuff.

Which Of Your Courses In Which You Teach About Making ID Pages and Mirror Gsites?

So, Alright, the last question is oh Austin Don says, which of your courses do you teach about making it pages and mirror g sites? Well the mastermind, RYS reloaded local GMB Pro, any one of those three the mastermind local GMB Pro or RYS reloaded what it was, it’s covered in all three of those locations. So, am I missing any here guys?

Marco: I don’t think you did. Okay.

Bradley: Adam, you want to chime in? All right, last is not really a question. It’s just a comment and then we’re going to wrap it up, guys. I’ve got a TV repairman showing up in about five minutes. Anyways, I asked the question about GMBs and review in one location versus all the states that clients the Klein operates and this was that question about Texas and five additional states. We answered previously he says no follow up question. I just wanted to say thank you for answering it and you knocked it out of the park. I’ve wrestled with this in my head for a week and you made it clear as day thanks again, guys for all that you do. You’re very welcome. That’s what this venue is for. Anything else guys?

Marco: No, not unless another question popped up now. on the page,

Adam: I think you just scroll over Bradley, but the last call for everybody. Head over there. Just follow the instructions on Facebook get early access to the YouTube and UTM course Bradley’s going to be put together here over the holidays and save a bundle but like they said to if you want to wait a little bit and pay us three times too much more. So okay with that.

Bradley: And let’s go ahead. I was gonna say I actually prefer that. But, you know, I want you guys to save that additional $200 to spend it on your family’s at Christmas. So

Marco: and stop by the mastermind tomorrow. The webinar, because we’re going to show how much we’ve improved the user experience. Want to show how easy it is to find the information now before it was just okay, how do I get through five years of information? Yeah, because we have five years worth of videos in there in the archives, right? So just the latest videos. It’s everything since we started. As I did you get through all that, well, now we made it really simple for you to get through it.

Bradley: That’s been a long time coming. There’s just so much damn content, so much video-based content and long mastermind webinars. It’s been hard to, for people to find stuff and that’s a problem we’ve been dealing with for a long time. And we Marco has been working on it in the background for since I think January of this year, maybe February, but it’s been a long time. And now it’s here. It’s ready. So it’s awesome. It’s a big, big improvement. So, all right, everybody, thanks for being here. We’ll see some of you tomorrow, the rest of you next week. Awesome. Bye, everyone. Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 262 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 262

Click on the video above to watch Episode 262 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: Alright, we are live. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 262. Today is the 13th of November. And I don’t know if anyone else knows this. But apparently there’s something called Black Friday at the end of the month and Cyber Monday. Apparently there’s some sales or something going on. Well, we’ve got something even better to kick it off. So make sure you keep your eyes and ears open for that we got some good stuff coming and it’s going to be free. We’re not going to even require an opt-in but more on that later. Let’s talk to the guys real quick and then we got a couple of announcements and we will dive into your questions. To start on my left here, Bradley, how you doing today?

Bradley: Good man hanging out, working hard, instead of hard-working.

Adam: Are you going to go like a TV writing this weekend? Or is it now

Bradley: I’ve got my daughter this weekend. So it’s her weekend but uh, December 6 that weekend. I’m going to my favorite spot Diamond Southwestern Virginia again for the weekend. Actually I’m going on the fifth for Thursday the fifth so looking forward to that although it may be cold it should be fun.

Adam: Nice. Nice. Marco speaking of weather How you doing man?

Marco: Man, I’m starting to get cold down here. You guys are sending your cold it was almost 65 last night. Oh ridiculous. Stop it. Arctic Well, whatever you want whatever you guys are doing up there Stop it. We don’t want it.

Adam: Well, speaking of cold Chris How you doing?

Chris: I didn’t know like. There’s nothing to complain it’s cozy warm and that was out today and it was sunny. Yeah, life is a good man.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan and Hernan, you still you’re in Miami, right for a little bit longer?

Hernan: I’m still in South Florida. Yeah, I’m still here until Saturday, actually, when I’m flying back to Buenos Aires.Excited to be there. They’re going to be spending the holiday season with family. But also exciting for next week and the week after, which is going to be Black Friday, so that’s gonna be pretty cool too. So that’ll be here.

Adam: Outstanding. Yeah. Well, it’s good stuff. And I’m happy to be here in case anyone wants to know, the weather is just fine. It’s like 70 I guess. I don’t know.

Chris: Quick question, Adam.

Adam: what’s that?

Chris: Are you guys celebrating 11th of November as well?

Adam: Um, no, is that a thing?

Chris: I didn’t know. Like, I noticed there was were all kinds of like online sales on the 11th of November. So I was actually quite surprised.

Adam: 11 11 maybe just like making use of the numbers. You know, right. Fair enough. Well, I missed out on that since

Bradley: it’s just like every year, people start putting their Christmas trees and decorations up and the station started playing Christmas music earlier on earlier every fucking year. So I imagine Black Friday starts getting earlier on early every year now to so jet rise.

Adam: So real quick if you’re new to us, welcome. You’re in the right place. You didn’t end up on the weather channel or discussion of holidays. You are in fact at Hump Day Hangouts and we’re going to answer your digital marketing questions shortly. But just so you know, you’re in the right place, you can always ask your questions on the page, unless of course, it’s broken and you can’t get to the page like people were doing today. In which case come back in a few hours after we unscrew up our technical issue and come back and answer your question whether or not you can make it live you can always ask your question. We encourage you to be here live so you can get clarification or asked or gets more information from you as well as occasionally we do some fun stuff like giveaways. But you can always catch the replays on YouTube and get your answers that way.

Secondly, if you haven’t yet grabbed the Battle Plan that is your next step, head over to battleplan.semanticmastery.com for a repeatable process, everything from new websites, age domains, YouTube channels, whatever it is going there and past that. If you’re ready to grow your digital marketing business then you probably want or you should want a community that includes fast access to real-world info and that’s what the mastermind is all about. You can find out more at mastermind.semanticmastery.com. And for everyone, no matter where you’re at and ourselves included, we recommend getting stuff done right. You build a team, you build processes, you outsource and you get it done for you. And that’s why mgyb.co exist you can head over there and get our way as to drive stack, syndication networks, press releases, link building, embed all sorts of stuff with some really, really kick-ass stuff coming here in November wink, wink Black Friday and then into the New Year. We got some good stuff coming.

Marco: I have two public service announcements. Adams Sorry to interrupt.

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Marco: Black Friday will be on Wednesdays from now on. I just determined that. And to all joking aside, we always say that be and the mastermind has its privileges. Well, I’ve been personally working really hard and incorporating some really not gonna say what it is, but some just some really neat things into the Mastermind to make the user experience to and to make people finding what they’re looking for. To make that way better to improve the experience so that people can come in and find exactly what they’re looking for, where it is, you know, so whatever it is that you’re trying to find, Marco will talk shit about Google on and I can’t remember when Well, it’s not finished, not 100% because there is artificial intelligence involved. And interestingly enough the world is the SEO world is an uproar because of BERT, and we’re actually using BERT in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind so again, mastermind being a member of the Semantic Mastermind does have its privileges because you’re first to get everything that we do business building and ideas and concepts, and all of these different things. Hey, on tomorrow’s mastermind webinar will be talking about BERT and AI and what it is actually, because you see all of these discussions and all of these forums and then all these Facebook groups, and nobody has an I’m not going to drop an F-bomb here. Nobody has an effing clue as to what it is that they’re talking. They don’t know what BERT is. And all you have to do is go into the documentation to see what BERT is and what it does. And you’ll know that it’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing because of the way that we teach you how to do things in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. So not only does it have its privileges in that we give you cutting it and anything that we can do to make your Your life easier to enter to make, whether its clients whether tank, whatever it is, it’s there and we give it to people but it’s also we try to make your life easier. We try to do all of these different things. Because you’re a member of the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. It’s included in the membership fee, nobody will have to pay extra for all the work that went into the back end of the mastermind to make things so much better. So, I’m sorry, it seems like it’s a pitch fest for the mastermind. And I should be pitching the hell out of it. Because it’s so good. We get testimonials time and again, of how well our stuff works. And so yeah, we should be here, tooting our own horns and singing our praises and whatever. I’m not going to go into that anymore. Just I’m just letting people know if you’re in the Semantic Mastery <stermind, be there tomorrow and see just how much we have improved the learning experience. Let’s call it

Adam: Amen. got one more to add on to that you guys are now made a post believe on November 4 about big news for Bradley. Bradley is going to be putting together some training, we decided based on the response. There’s still a little bit of time if you want to get down on this, and what it is, is step by step program on how to grow, grow a massive brand using YouTube and GDN, Ads. And, you know, we just want to engage, because we have, especially Bradley didn’t want to be putting in a lot of time and effort doing the training, you know, right leading up into the holidays if people weren’t interested. But so far, we’ve got 71 comments, people interested in early access at a hell of a discount. So I’m going to put the link in if you want to get in on that. Just comment, leave a GIF or a comment on the Facebook thread and we will be in touch with you shortly. We’re going to have some information that information about that going up. Hernan says let me in I think he got booted from the from Hump Day Hangouts.

Bradley: He’s back in

Adam: Alright, well, guys, with that said, we got anything else before we get into questions here.

Bradley: I’ll just give a little update on a couple of things. Number one, we’ve got anybody that joined Local Kingpin, which was the Google Ads training for using search ads for lead generation. That’s going to be an update webinar on Monday. Because the interface has changed so much the principles, the method is still pretty much the same, though. There’s just some slight differences that I’m going to cover. And the interface, Google Ads interface has changed a lot. Plus they’ve got a lot of new or improved features, such as automated bidding strategies and things like that, that I used to suggest never to use, but they’ve gotten so much better over the last year and a half, two years because of AI and it’s so much better. So artificial intelligence. And so we’re going to talk about that slightly plus any questions that anybody has So that’ll be Monday, it’ll be probably only about an hour long. That’s just for me to give an update and answer questions. So if you’re in Local Kingpin, I encourage you to get signed up for that.

Also, the Google Ads course that Adam was just talking about, that I’m going to be starting in two weeks, I think it’s one and I say we’re going to do that. I think Monday, the 25th is going to be the first webinar and that’ll be about 90 minutes, maybe longer if there’s, you know, a lot of Q&A at the end, and then December 9th, and that’s going to be a two-part deal. The first one will be about YouTube ads and how to use that for branding. And for not not not so much lead generation it will produce leads, but it’s not a direct lead generator, it it will but it’s more about branding, and also driving relevant traffic into your digital assets. So your entity essentially. So we’re going to talk about YouTube on the first webinar. And then on the second webinar. Again, that’ll be December 9th. We’re going to talk about using the Google Display Network. So it’s good Google Ads training specifically for YouTube and the Google Display Network for setting up branding campaigns which works incredibly well for both building brand awareness but also for generating relevant targeted traffic from specific audiences from specific geo locations if it’s for local into your entities, your digital assets for a particular brand which is great for SEO. So it’s a way for using Google ads to not only produce relevant traffic but improve brand awareness as well as help the SEO that your any SEO work that you’re doing, because you’re driving relevant, targeted traffic from known audiences and Google to your SEO as your assets that you’ve been doing SEO work on. And that takes care of ART right – relevance, trust, and authority. Google understands that that’s that recognize that traffic is an activity. It’s relevant because it’s from known audiences and specific geolocation if that’s if it’s for local you can target by geolocation, and it’s also trusted, trusted and authority trusted traffic because it’s coming from Google’s known Google’s audience buckets. And essentially, so it’s going to be it’s very, very powerful. I’ve just been crushing it with Google ads for clients over the last several months. And it just works really, really well. And I’ve been using them for my own business as well. And it’s, it’s just a great, great strategy. So that said, it’s, um, it’s going to be a pre, like right now you can get in for like, the pre-training special or whatever, where it’s, it’s a third of what it’s going to be once I’m done recording those webinars, it’s going to be packaged up and sold for probably 300 bucks, or right right, right around there. So if you want to get in for a third of that, I would recommend that you go check out the post that Adam posted, comment on it and then get signed up. Okay. All right.

Marco: So they’re more than welcome to wait and pay us more later. Yeah, that’s fine too. But I would suggest for people not to wait.

Bradley: Alright, so can we get into it? Now,

Adam: let’s do it.

Bradley: All right, we got the screen. Okay, somebody confirm.

Adam: Good to go.

Bradley: Okay, so everybody can see my humping Wednesday meme GIFs alright. Hump Day right, Wednesday.

How Would You Add Relevancy To Your Money Site Using Drive Stacks?

So, Alright, so the first questions are and it’s multiple questions. It’s 13 pages worth of questions from Fred Wilson and Fred. Well, I appreciate your and I really do. I appreciate your questions. That’s a bit much for Hump Day Hangouts. And also, it’s getting a little bit into the weeds for stuff that we would typically only cover in this much depth in mastermind, which I’m sure you’re fully aware of that, as a former mastermind member, or an RYS Academy reloaded specifically since it’s so it pertains to drive stack stuff and kind of deep into the weeds. But with that said, Marco, how much of this do you want to answer?

Marco: I haven’t really re-read the question. So,

Bradley: Yeah. So should I give you about 10 minutes to get through it?

Marco: All right. Do you have a general question that you can add the I’d be more than happy to answer general questions, but if it’s something that’s specific, yeah, that again, membership has its privileges and this things that I’m only answer for paying members and I mean, that that’s just that’s the way it should be. I’m sure that people who have paid three $4,000 for the course would appreciate me keeping the secret sauce in where it belongs.

Bradley: Yeah. And I agree and that, you know, I’ve read through the first two sections of this three-part question this three-section question, and I realized that it’s, it’s a lot more in-depth than what we would typically answer on a free Hump Day hangout because it’s getting into very specific tactics. From RYS reloaded, we would cover it also in the mastermind, I’m sure. But this is not something that we can get that deep into it. That said, I’ll give you kind of a general overview, and I’ll kind of answer it and let you take add to it, Marco, and then we’ll move on to the next one. So Fred, we would welcome you back to the mastermind at any moment.

If we’re going to RYS Reloaded, either one of those would be good places to get this particular question answered. But that said, He’s talking about his food business, his food tour business and talking about how to add additional relevancy. He did some keyword theme research using SEM Rush and looking at some of the competitors and found that there is some other keywords other than just food tour type keywords that can help to add relevancy that are kind of associated with the food tour business, but he hasn’t been targeting them. And so the question is would adding in some of these other types of keyboard themes into the drive stack folders as subfolders within food tour folders, would that help to add relevancy? And because of the association that Google’s is showing? And so I mean, to me, you’ve already answered your question. Yes. You know, if there’s if there’s a way to create that association, that you’re you’ve discovered by doing some additional research, looking at competitors using some tools like sem rush and all of that kind of stuff, then yeah, you can you can add that additional relevancy into your drive stack. And that’s going to certainly help. I don’t know if you want to go further than that. Marco.

Marco: Yeah. Just a little bit, because, I mean, I can answer this generally we go after, especially the way that our keyword research VA is being taught, we go after anything that Google considers relevant. In a keyword, research cake, and we give you guys whoever orders the gig, the deep keyword research, all of that information. We do separate the movie will give you tasks will give you silos will give you information that we feel is where the money makers are, what the relevant keywords are, and maybe something that that that that isn’t a money keyword, but Google still thinks that that is relevant. All of that is necessary because what we do inside the drive stack is create relevantly and push. Right? We create a relevance push from everything that we do from the spider web silo to the way that the drive stack is built to the way that the G site is built to the way the inner pages are done to the way that we mimic what’s on the website. So yes, by all means, I don’t care. We do use SEM Rush for keyword relevance, but that’s not necessarily what will target what we do is we use Jeffrey Smith’s Ultimate SEO Bootcamp training. And we go according to how he teaches what the top-level categories are. Then from there, work down and create the silos there, you will create three silos. But everything that’s relevant should be at it. Remember when Network Empire started talking about color, current stuff, it’s not, it’s not there. But they began talking about it. And they began explaining it more what it was all about, what it means. And really, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to create all of this in a self-contained Google environment for the bot to feed on, which is, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Is It Safe Against Plagiarism To Curate Content With Attribution From Google Snippet?

Bradley: Yeah. And so the next question part of this, which it’s kinda interesting that you asked this, Fred because we covered this, our own our very own data. You know, master link builder, was at our live event, hopefully, live 2019 in Denver, just recently, and he was talking about doing something similar that you’re asking about, which is adding q&a. Questions and Answers into a doc within your Gsite within your drive stack and just linking back to the source but not actually hyperlinking just putting like the text-based link. So you’re providing a citation, but what so you’re citing the source, right? So you’re providing attribution, but you’re not hyperlinking back. I would say that should be okay, provided you’re not copying, you know, if you’re just copying snippets, like what is shown in the Google search results for the q amp a section. So when you search for a question in Google, and it brings up that featured snippet, which is a q amp a box, right, and it’s got the dropdowns, and you click the drop-down, and then it shows a short it shows the full question and then a short answer and a link back to the source where it’s pulling that answer from that question and answer from you can embed that or you know, kind of copy and paste that into a Google doc or something like that. And then still late as long as you’re not expanding by going to the actual destination URL and copying more of the content. It’s just a snippet. So it falls under the same rules of curating content would be on a blog post in that, if you’re just highlighting, you know, reusing republishing a short snippet from somebody else’s content, and then you’re providing attribution citing the source, then it should be okay. Now, some people, some publishers will still make eventually, you know, sometimes they may find it and they may request that you unpublish it. But as far as it being a copyright infringement, as long as it’s just a small snippet, and it’s you’re citing the source, it should, it should never be an issue. Although like I said, out of courtesy, if anybody ever were to contact you and say Please take this down or unpublished this, then you know, I would recommend that you just do it to avoid any sort of, you know, some sort of stupid battle that could ensue. Although again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it legally because you are citing the source and it falls within a specific brand. Members of the DMC act right there were the digital, whatever Copyright Act. So I would just, you know, encourage you not to go any further than what is shown in the snippets and the featured snippets within Google search.

That said, also, you’re asked about curating a lot of content about a topic putting it inside the drive stack, then putting links to your money site, the correct way to push relevancy for your money site? Again, yes, you can do that. The same thing is by curating content on your money site, you can do that. Right. So think about that. That’s what we’ve taught for years is the best way to generate content before even money site blog posts unless you’re a subject matter expert and you’re creating 100% original content. The problem with that is even as an as a subject matter expert, sometimes you get you run out of ideas. But there are a ton of other subject matter experts. I’m not talking about buying shitty content farm content, I’m talking about locating subject Matter content written by subject matter experts pertaining to your topic, right or your niche your industry, and then republishing, once again snippets of it, and giving credit to where it’s, you know, citing the source giving attribution. And in the case of curating on a blog, your money site blog, you know, we always recommend hyperlinking to the source. And just using nofollow External links, that’s what I’ve always done. Um, but that’s very, very powerful. Because once again, you can create an original article out of using snippets of other people’s content, where you’re just adding commentary and opening paragraph commentary in between pieces of curated content, which doesn’t have to be just articles, it can be videos, infographics, don’t curate images. Please don’t do that. You can. That’s a no-no, but you can curate infographics, videos, mp3, so audio files, you know, other articles, you can curate all that kind of stuff. And it helps because it allows you to be able to produce content very quickly, inexpensively. And you can even train a virtual assistant, somebody that’s not a subject matter expert how to locate good content, and compile it in a logical fashion, and then just add commentary. So in other words, you know, you can come up with a topic for a blog post, find supporting articles or even differing opinion articles, right so that you can do a compare and contrast or pros and cons or argue both sides of a topic in particular curated article if that makes sense. It’s very, very powerful. And it’s a great way to create co-citation, which is similar to co-occurrence in that you’re linking out to other relevant sources. And so again, we talked about all of that in content kingpin, it’s a training course that is still 100% relevant today. I still use that for all of my clients, that same exact method for curating content for all of my clients. You can apply that to drive stack stuff to you’re still going to build that relevancy, topical relevancy. Just make sure you’re Giving attribution even if you’re not hyperlinking to it, I recommend you absolutely always give credit where credit is due. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: No, I totally agree. It’s a matter of mirroring right? Everything that you would do on the money site you do on the drive stack and Gsite, including curating content. That’s right.

How Do You Add A Schema Markup To A Local Business Press Release?

Okay, cool. Well, the next question is from Kaydee. Hi, guys. How do you add schema markup to press releases for a local business? Press advantage sent an email with a link to Google structured data markup helper tool to create the code but on the page, it is asking to select a data type and then paste your URL of the page you wish to mark up. What URL do we enter here? I don’t know. Because I don’t use that tool. I’m going to point out another one here for you in a moment. The press release is not yet published. So it has no URL to target the markup and the data type is to tick in and the data type to tick is a local business. Thanks to know and here’s why. Because if you’re if you have your own press advantage account, or even if you Buy him through MGYB. And we set up an organization page or you set it up through your own account, right? So you set up an organization page, that’s where you should have your local business markup. If it’s, you know, an organization page for local business, you should have your local business structured data markup in the organization page, right, which will get added to all of the press releases that get pushed out. And some may not all, but many of the publisher sites that were they get published to will actually pick up that JSON LD code for local business markup. Okay, so you add that to your organization page. However, I’ve got a press advantage open here. Let’s see if it hopefully it brings me into the same standby I’m gonna have to pause my screen for a moment because of it my plugin that reset my browser that Marco pointed out, a reset my reset the tab, so give me one second while I get what you’re looking for.

Marco: Let me just tell people That if your press release gets published and you go and look at some of the websites were able to publish, and you don’t see the schema markup, but you don’t see an iframe that you send out or whatever, that’s not on us. It’s not even on press advantage. It’s actually on that website, not wanting, you know, stripping out all of the code. But what we want anyway, is we want to get that in as many places as we can. And that’s why I go it goes out to the entire publication network, but not every website will publish whatever it is that you submitted, just did just to make it clear to everyone because we do get support tickets about that. And it’s like, yeah, there’s nothing that we could do.

Bradley: Yeah, so to show you what I’m talking about. First of all, if we go to press advantage for the organization, which I should I forgot I got my ID page looped into this is going to break the browser. Let me see if I can get to Page Source before it shuts everything down. Um, Alright, so let’s see if it’ll pull this up. It might not. Okay, there we go. So if we scroll down, we’ll see right here is my local business structure data markup starting right here. From here to there. That’s my local business structure data markup, that’s part of the organization page. Right. And so again, as Marco just mentioned, some sites when we publish when it distributes the press releases, it has this codependent to it. You know, it started with it with the press release, but some sites will pick it up and publish that JSON LD code as well. What I think you’re talking about is for individual press releases, so here I am inside the dashboard. If you scroll down now there’s a section says enter JSON LD schema, this will be attached to the release in addition to any organization-specific schema. So that’s what I was talking about before. If it’s a local business, you want it which is what I was showing here. You want to have local business structure data markup on the page, right that their organization page, but then For the individual, a press release, excuse me, you can add additional schema markup here. So what I would recommend here and you know you can do other stuff too depends on what you’re having published. But what I would recommend is going to and this is a tool that I use most of the time, we’re going to have one in MGYB here shortly, I’m not sure if it’s available yet. But this is the one that I’ve been using for quite some time.

If you just go to Google and search for schema markup generator, look for technicalSEO.com or just go to technicalSEO.com and look for the schema markup generator, which is over here in the left sidebar. There’s different types of schema markups that this tool will generate different types of schema. And so the very first one is article click on the article and then when you look down here, when it loads this page, you come down here to Article type, and there’s actually one for news article. So select news article, and then just fill out these fields. And here’s your schema code over here on the right-hand sidebar. Once you’ve completed all these fields, Then you just copy that and paste that into Press Advantage over here. Now again, there are other types of schema that can be generated. So it depends on what the article is going to be about. But just doing news article schema markup is very, very powerful, right to add to each individual press release. Okay, so that’s what I would recommend. There are other tools out there that will generate this stuff to guys, this is just the one that I typically use. Okay. There’s a good question. Now, by the way, that said, I gotta tease this a little bit. I’m inside my blog for that same company, I was just sharing my real estate business. And this we’ve got coming soon. We’ve got some pretty cool stuff coming up. And like the plugin will generate this Jeffrey Smith plugin, but it’s the pro version, which isn’t released yet, but it’s coming soon. And it’s got all the schema markup generator right inside WordPress for all every different type of schema, you can think of. It’s fabulous. And so that same type that same article markup right there, if we come down here, there’s an article type, blog posting or news article. And then I can just fill out all this stuff. It creates the code right down here and embeds it into the header of this particular blog post. And I can click update, and boom, that’s going to have the same type of Article markup that we were just sharing. Pretty powerful stuff. So be on the lookout for that guys soon, early next year. That was a good tease. Right, guys?

Marco: Perfect.

Can You Embed The Website Pages In The GSite When Mirroring?

All right. Next one is Simon. He says We’re marrying the main website to the G site. Can you just embed the website pages on the site pages? Or is it necessary to copy and paste the content for each website page on to the G site pages, I just use the embeds. I’m lazy like that, right. I work on the money site pages. That’s what I flush out with good content. And I mirror them onto the site. And then I just and I do some other really cool stuff. We’ve been talking about how I do silos now. locations. So there’s topical silos and in location-based silos, but I do it in a very unique way. And it works really well, especially when you use a G site. And yeah, all I do is grab the embed or create an iframe out of the money site pages, and embed them into the G site page, then I optimize the title of the G site page, obviously. And then, you know, you can mirror that into a folder inside of your folder and files inside of your drive stack. And then just smash that shit with embeds and or links, or both. And it works really, really well hit ever remember, that’s your SEO shield. So we do everything externally to the SEO shield, right? So that would be the G site the drive stack and all of the tier one entity assets, which by the way, you can actually take those iframe into your syndication network properties to guys think about that. So right, there’s no reason you can’t push those embeds through to your syndication network properties too. good question though,

Does Proper Schema Markup Feed The Bot Enough And Not To Worry About Creating Long Articles?

Paul Thompson says, Does proper schema markup feed the bot enough that we don’t need to worry about creating long articles on the pages we want to rank? No, but it does. It does definitely help a lot. Marco is probably going to be better at answering this one than me. I would still for money sites stuff still flesh out the pages, but adding structured data, like what I just showed with my blog, where you were, you know, again, you can add it manually now like right now, since the pro plugins not available, this there might be other plugins out there that do it, but I don’t know if they provide the schema code that’s 100% up to date. I know that a lot of times they’re not updated enough. I’m not speaking badly about anybody else’s plugin. I just haven’t used them. But you can have like a code insert or plugin right so like. SoGo ad scripts header, footer and things like that header, footer type script plugins where you can add scripts into the head section or foot section or body section of any individual page or post, and you can go use schema creators like what I just shared, and create schema markup and and then put them into each one of your posts or pages or whatever, so that you’re adding additional, you know, schema structured data that the bots love and I mean, that’s guys, you’re you’ll you’ll have an edge over a lot of your competitors if you do that kind of stuff. But I would still recommend that for money site stuff, you flush the content, the content of the page out to. Marco, what say you

Marco: Yeah, I mean that absolutely. Two things right. structured and unstructured data structured data is for the bot feed the bot as much as you can, which is exactly what we do. And why we use drive stacks and Gsites and iframe and everything that the entities entity stack, and everything else that we don’t I mean that it there’s a method to our madness. Now, if you then go and you send a person to a page. And now we’re talking about people, we’re not talking about bots, because what’s going to happen is you’re going to rank. And that’s going to bring your traffic onto the page. And if there’s nothing on that page to engage the person, then we no longer care about the but now we care about that person coming to the website and converting, finishing the action that they were set out to do, because if that person comes on the website and bounces, then you did you defeated the entire purpose of creating the all of the stacking that we created in the first place, which was to get that person onto the page that would convert them over an image is going to convert them of an image is going to get them to push and call whatever it is that you need to be done. To finish that, that then that’s what’s going to matter. So, two different things. If you need the content to rank you have to look at the competition. If you can rank or outrank the competition without 2000 or 3000 words of content, By all means, nobody, and nobody’s going to sit there and go through the 3000 words of content on this is a really interested in whatever it is that you have to say. what you’re interested in, is that conversion, because that’s what centers everything at the end. And that’s what Google is going to look at from beginning to end is whether that task and that goal. Well, whether it was accomplished.

How Do You Setup A GMB Page For A Business That Operates In Multiple States?

Awesome, thanks, Marco. So the next question was from jack, I’m not the next question is my client is based out of Texas but operates in five other states fully across the states not limited to anyone Metro region. What’s the best way to set up the company GMB page, so reviews for one state aggregate under the main company as well. Or if that’s not possible, what would be the best way to go about setting up the GMB either individually and each state Or globally under some other configuration? Well, remember Google My Business is supposed to be especially now there’s another question I see on the page here a little bit lower about what happened on November 8. And from my understanding, which I’ve only done very, I’ve only kind of read through some comments and stuff, is that it was more it was basically an update to the maps algorithm for GMB stuff. And it’s gone even more proximity-based. So they’ve Google’s tightened the proximity filter, so to speak. And so with that said, Google, my business is supposed to be for local businesses, right? I mean, we’ve talked about setting up GMBs and you know, setting your service area, the United States, for example, and that’s okay, but it’s not it’s okay for like the entity but it’s not going to help you to rank anywhere in the United States and maps. That said, you’re also in this case, you’re talking about five different states. They’re located in Texas but they operate in five other states. So you potentially you could have if you have an office and in each of their other states, you could have GMB for each office location. It’s not necessary but you can. That said if you wanted to get reviews and let’s just say Arizona, I’m just assuming let’s just say that that’s one of the states that you operate in. If you get reviews in Arizona, but you want them to populate on the Texas GMB if that’s the way you have it set up. It’s not you can’t do that. If you had a gym be in Arizona, I mean, if all you have is the one Google My Business location in Texas, then it doesn’t matter where you get the reviews from. They’re all going to aggregate on that one and only Google My Business location. My point that I’m trying to make is you cannot get GMB reviews in one location and have them also populate onto another GMB location. You can’t do that. It because each GMB entity or location is supposed to be it’s own and collect its own or, you know, aggregate its own reviews. So that said, You know, I would, I would consider what it is you’re trying to do. As far as if you have multiple GMBs, which I’m not sure that you do, but if you do, then what I would recommend you do is set up use some sort of review directing app. I know for contractors, one of the ones that work really well as birdeye.com. I think another one might be Podium, I’ve not used that. But what are some of my contractor clients use Bird Eye, and that works well, but it’s like a review gate, right? So it would be an app where you send out to customers, or clients or whatever the company or the business sends out to customers and ask for some listen to review or at ask for a review. And then somebody leaves a review and it directs the app can direct where the review gets published to if that makes sense. So you have more control over it that way and if it’s you know, below three stars, then it can be not posted as a review. Instead, it could be brought to, you know, sent to the customer service team so that they can reach out and try to resolve potential issues, that kind of stuff, I would look into something like that if you’re trying to have more control over where your reviews are coming from and where they’re going to be posted to. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: Yeah, I’m just guessing that his client and whatever it is that they’re doing that it triggers a three-pack, right? It triggers a map pack and it triggers map rankings if that’s the case. Then get a map wherein each one of the places where where your client operate, and associate everything to the main entity, that’s how Texas so then the AI which is sophisticated enough to then understand once you begin associating all of these to understand that it’s all part of the same company with it’s a company that operates out of Texas but has regional offices in five other states. So that if you do get a review, for example, in Texas for the company in another state, it could be taken into consideration. I’m not saying that the AI is that sophisticated, but it could mean at some point it will be, it will be able to understand all of these different relationships and put everything together. And if you do a really good job in your structured data of putting all of this together for the buck, then you won’t even have to leave it to the bot to guess and try to understand what this is all about. You can tell it you can go with everything in JSON LD to tell about what this is all about. Having done that, then you don’t have to worry about reviewing everything, or aggregating everything under the main company, it will all be taken together because everything is associated if you’ve done your job correctly. Now, if it’s globally that we’re not worrying about maps, and then the reviews wouldn’t even come into play, unless you have unless you can trigger a knowledge And that’s a totally different story.

Bradley: Yeah, and if that’s the case, if it was globally then I would just have all reviews going to the one GMB asset, wherever the primary location is, because then all you’re trying to do is build the brand, not individual locations, right?

What Are Your Insights On The Reported Traffic Drop Last November 8, 2019?

So Ross says, Hey, everyone, and then he’s got the follow-up question below, which I’ll just that’s what and now come back to Joey’s question where he says Ross is new here. What the hell happened on November 8, lots of traffic drops and the insight and that’s what I was just talking about, as far as I know. I’m sure Marco’s got more insight on this than I do. Because I don’t geek out about this stuff anymore. If I don’t see major drops in my stuff, I don’t worry about it. So but apparently the what it from what I understand it was another maps update where it looks like they tightened the proximity filter to where it’s it’s even narrower now. Is that correct? Marco?

Marco: That’s absolutely correct. They tighten up on the proximity. And proximity is a ranking factor, it’s we can literally call it the most important ranking factor, although you can still overcome. That’s why we don’t usually see all of these changes in the things that we do. Because you can overcome anything, any part of the algorithm, you can overcome it. And people are saying that well don’t use brute force. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. You can totally overcome anything through what they call it in the Rocky movie, good old fashioned blunt force trauma. And that’s just feeding the but just a whole lot of related information, wherever it is that you that you’re trying to expand to. So even though even if the proximity factor is the main ranking factor, there are other ranking factors that can and do come into play, if you can overcome that one factor. So is that something to just totally say, Oh my god, now I have to go get a DMB in eternity. City, not only in the area where I am but in the surrounding areas, it’s being able to overcome that proximity factor. And we do it and we do a really good job of teaching that in local GSB Pro. And now, you know being at the location and being able to upload images and being able to show Google that you’re actually there and that everything is actually from that location has become more important than ever.

Bradley: Yes, very good.

Does The Size Of Embeds Matter?

So let’s jump back to Joey’s question. It says hi, does the size of embeds matter? In other words, embedding a 10 by 10 GMB site is still the equivalent of embedding a 600 by 300. So the frame could be one by 110 by 10 or 600 by 300. And you still pass the juice Thank you. I’m size doesn’t matter. Only because if you have it too small, then that could be considered cloaking. Am I correct in that statement?

Marco: Yeah, yeah, you could, you could be tagged For cloaking, although it’s really hard if I mean if you do it right there no word. Most people can’t do it right, which is why we don’t even teach it.

Bradley: Yeah. I mean, technically Yes, you can still pass the SEO with the iframe present even if it’s a one by one pixel.

Marco: Even if it’s a zero by zero

Bradley: Yeah, it technically you can absolutely do that. I wouldn’t recommend it if you know, because if anybody manually reviews it and saw it, then they could, you know, they could flag you for manual action. So

Marco: that would be the biggest problem right with someone coming in and actually, you triggering, First of all, triggering enough red flags to trigger a manual review so that someone from Google would actually come to your website because nobody trusts you’re not making enough money now. Nobody. Most people are making enough money to worry about Google to have someone waste all of their valuable resources on looking at your fucking website in the first place. If you do get that big or if just if you just happen to get unlucky enough to trigger a manual, and they come and see that zero by zero thing, yes, that is cloaking. There’s no reason for you to have a zero by zero iframe one by one unless it’s a pixel, right? Facebook, Google, whatever, if it’s unless it’s tracking code. So they come in and look and they see code and it looks fishy. You’re more likely to get hit with a manual and probably deindex, because I’ve seen cloaking get hit really, really hard.

Bradley: Yeah, agreed. Okay, so we’ll say, Hey, Marco, have you announced the date of the four webinars for Bert? I guess that’s for the charity stuff.

Marco: Yeah, no, I’m still working on that. It’s not only BERT, but I’m also going to go into entities and AI and NLP and what it actually is what it isn’t. We’re gonna we’re going to discuss and talk about everything that that other People just either refused to talk about, or they don’t know enough about it to be able to discuss it. As soon as I have it already, I’m going to announce it. I’m going to announce the date I’m going to give you the donation page. And remember this all goes to a really good cause it’s getting kids who would otherwise not be able to get an education getting them into school, so that they can get a good education get trained to get jobs and, you know, have a chance at life.

Bradley: Very cool. Alright, the next one, Fred says I was worried that that might be a problem. So that’s because I was kind of tongue in cheek picking. That is a huge, long question. He says, thanks so much for answering my 13 pages of questions. It helped a lot. Thanks, guys. You’re welcome, Fred.

What Is The Difference Between Q&A and FAQ?

Fit. So what’s up? 50 says what is the difference between Q&A and FAQ? Well, it’s, it’s kind of the same thing or it’s very closely related. Q&A is most of the time would like You can see in the SERPs is what I was talking about earlier. But FAQs that can be a little bit more specific to an individual like a business. Right? So I mean, they’re kind of basically the same. As far as schema markup, it’s the same. But what I mean the difference is frequently asked questions are should be answered by a client or business, right? Like, what is the questions that they get? asked the most by prospects and or customers or clients? Right? And they should have answers to that. But when it comes to q amp, a, what I’m what these, the way that I look at it is when you go to Google and you search for question, you’ll see related questions that get asked enough that somebody took the time to create content around answering that question, and then marking it up correctly on their website so that they could get added to the featured snippets in Google search. So it stands to reason that that question gets asked enough. It might be a frequently asked question for another business that maybe your particular client or business doesn’t get asked that much, but it’s still relevant. That makes sense. So they’re very closely related, but there is a slight difference, at least in my opinion.

Marco: Yeah, the difference is that that Q&A, people should be able to either ask questions or answer questions on the website, if they’re not able, if they’re your frequently asked questions and your answers are there’s no way for users to engage with that. Then it’s FAQ frequently asked questions. Q&A, again, is on a website where people can go in and interact with the questions and the answer. Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah, guys, it you know, I’ve talked about this probably in Syndication Academy. And I’ll probably I’ll just give this give another nugget away here because it works really well. And we’re almost out of time. So anyway, those Q&A questions that you can curate, right from Google and the beautiful thing about it is if you type in a question about product service in an industry whatever the questions box comes up now what the drop-downs each time you click on a drop-down, it brings up like three or four more questions. So like you can just keep drilling down into those guys and that gives you almost unlimited content. Like, Think about it. It’s a content hack, right, you can grab a question and an answer from those Question and Answer boxes that Google provides you and use that in GMB posts for example, right, just cite the source just like I was talking about earlier is the in the Q&A box right that the dropdown. as it expands, it gives you the snippet with the answer at least a partial answer. It might not be the full answer, but it gives a snippet and then it has the link to read more. Well, you can still use that link in the GMB post too so you give proper credit to where it’s due. That’s a nofollow link and a GMB post the button link right, and a GMB post. So the button URL, the URL that you attach to the call to action button. That is a dofollow link, although I here in just the past few days probably since November 8. Some of those are nofollow. And I think it’s just because Google is still tinkering around in there. But those are dofollow links. So you can still link back to the answer, have a QA, write a question and answer that you curate it you basically are republishing from Google’s own search results, to add relevancy to the GMB. You can do this on your money site too and link back to the source which is only proper and right. But then use the button URL in the GMB post the link back to your money site, right to your page that also is about that very topic or question and answer right so you again, you’re it’s creating co-citation. It’s creating topical relevancy, and you don’t even have to come up with the content. You can even go through and curate groups of questions like question and then create blog posts out of those on your money site where once again, you’re publishing the question plus the answer. You can create a table of contents at the top of the page Marco stop me from getting too deep here. But with a table of contents with jump links, anchor links, right that jump down to each section that has a different question. It has the answer that links back out to the source, right, but it’s a nofollow link on the blog post. And then just like a curated post, you can inject some commentary in between that stuff, with an opening paragraph and a closing paragraph with a call to action to contact your business or your company, your client that you’re doing the work for, for help or services with that, you know, for products or services that solve those problems, those questions that make sense.

So again, guys, it’s a great strategy to use those questions as a farm those questions right mine those questions, harvest those questions or whatever you want to say from one of those from this q&a panels that pop up in the Google search results and drill down into them. You can get gold topic ideas, blog post ideas GMB post ideas from that kind of stuff.

Which Of Your Courses In Which You Teach About Making ID Pages and Mirror Gsites?

So, Alright, the last question is oh Austin Don says, which of your courses do you teach about making it pages and mirror g sites? Well the mastermind, RYS reloaded local GMB Pro, any one of those three the mastermind local GMB Pro or RYS reloaded what it was, it’s covered in all three of those locations. So, am I missing any here guys?

Marco: I don’t think you did. Okay.

Bradley: Adam, you want to chime in? All right, last is not really a question. It’s just a comment and then we’re going to wrap it up, guys. I’ve got a TV repairman showing up in about five minutes. Anyways, I asked the question about GMBs and review in one location versus all the states that clients the Klein operates and this was that question about Texas and five additional states. We answered previously he says no follow up question. I just wanted to say thank you for answering it and you knocked it out of the park. I’ve wrestled with this in my head for a week and you made it clear as day thanks again, guys for all that you do. You’re very welcome. That’s what this venue is for. Anything else guys?

Marco: No, not unless another question popped up now. on the page,

Adam: I think you just scroll over Bradley, but the last call for everybody. Head over there. Just follow the instructions on Facebook get early access to the YouTube and UTM course Bradley’s going to be put together here over the holidays and save a bundle but like they said to if you want to wait a little bit and pay us three times too much more. So okay with that.

Bradley: And let’s go ahead. I was gonna say I actually prefer that. But, you know, I want you guys to save that additional $200 to spend it on your family’s at Christmas. So

Marco: and stop by the mastermind tomorrow. The webinar, because we’re going to show how much we’ve improved the user experience. Want to show how easy it is to find the information now before it was just okay, how do I get through five years of information? Yeah, because we have five years worth of videos in there in the archives, right? So just the latest videos. It’s everything since we started. As I did you get through all that, well, now we made it really simple for you to get through it.

Bradley: That’s been a long time coming. There’s just so much damn content, so much video-based content and long mastermind webinars. It’s been hard to, for people to find stuff and that’s a problem we’ve been dealing with for a long time. And we Marco has been working on it in the background for since I think January of this year, maybe February, but it’s been a long time. And now it’s here. It’s ready. So it’s awesome. It’s a big, big improvement. So, all right, everybody, thanks for being here. We’ll see some of you tomorrow, the rest of you next week. Awesome. Bye, everyone. Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 262 published first on your-t1-blog-url https://ift.tt/1WMpNvB November 18, 2019 at 08:36PM Semantic Mastery https://ift.tt/2YeHIxM

[semanticmastery]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 262

Click on the video above to watch Episode 262 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

  Announcement

Adam: Alright, we are live. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 262. Today is the 13th of November. And I don't know if anyone else knows this. But apparently there's something called Black Friday at the end of the month and Cyber Monday. Apparently there's some sales or something going on. Well, we've got something even better to kick it off. So make sure you keep your eyes and ears open for that we got some good stuff coming and it's going to be free. We're not going to even require an opt-in but more on that later. Let's talk to the guys real quick and then we got a couple of announcements and we will dive into your questions. To start on my left here, Bradley, how you doing today?

Bradley: Good man hanging out, working hard, instead of hard-working.

Adam: Are you going to go like a TV writing this weekend? Or is it now

Bradley: I've got my daughter this weekend. So it's her weekend but uh, December 6 that weekend. I'm going to my favorite spot Diamond Southwestern Virginia again for the weekend. Actually I'm going on the fifth for Thursday the fifth so looking forward to that although it may be cold it should be fun.

Adam: Nice. Nice. Marco speaking of weather How you doing man?

Marco: Man, I'm starting to get cold down here. You guys are sending your cold it was almost 65 last night. Oh ridiculous. Stop it. Arctic Well, whatever you want whatever you guys are doing up there Stop it. We don't want it.

Adam: Well, speaking of cold Chris How you doing?

Chris: I didn't know like. There's nothing to complain it's cozy warm and that was out today and it was sunny. Yeah, life is a good man.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan and Hernan, you still you're in Miami, right for a little bit longer?

Hernan: I'm still in South Florida. Yeah, I'm still here until Saturday, actually, when I'm flying back to Buenos Aires.Excited to be there. They're going to be spending the holiday season with family. But also exciting for next week and the week after, which is going to be Black Friday, so that's gonna be pretty cool too. So that'll be here.

Adam: Outstanding. Yeah. Well, it's good stuff. And I'm happy to be here in case anyone wants to know, the weather is just fine. It's like 70 I guess. I don't know.

Chris: Quick question, Adam.

Adam: what's that?

Chris: Are you guys celebrating 11th of November as well?

Adam: Um, no, is that a thing?

Chris: I didn't know. Like, I noticed there was were all kinds of like online sales on the 11th of November. So I was actually quite surprised.

Adam: 11 11 maybe just like making use of the numbers. You know, right. Fair enough. Well, I missed out on that since

Bradley: it's just like every year, people start putting their Christmas trees and decorations up and the station started playing Christmas music earlier on earlier every fucking year. So I imagine Black Friday starts getting earlier on early every year now to so jet rise.

Adam: So real quick if you're new to us, welcome. You're in the right place. You didn't end up on the weather channel or discussion of holidays. You are in fact at Hump Day Hangouts and we're going to answer your digital marketing questions shortly. But just so you know, you're in the right place, you can always ask your questions on the page, unless of course, it's broken and you can't get to the page like people were doing today. In which case come back in a few hours after we unscrew up our technical issue and come back and answer your question whether or not you can make it live you can always ask your question. We encourage you to be here live so you can get clarification or asked or gets more information from you as well as occasionally we do some fun stuff like giveaways. But you can always catch the replays on YouTube and get your answers that way.

Secondly, if you haven't yet grabbed the Battle Plan that is your next step, head over to battleplan.semanticmastery.com for a repeatable process, everything from new websites, age domains, YouTube channels, whatever it is going there and past that. If you're ready to grow your digital marketing business then you probably want or you should want a community that includes fast access to real-world info and that's what the mastermind is all about. You can find out more at mastermind.semanticmastery.com. And for everyone, no matter where you're at and ourselves included, we recommend getting stuff done right. You build a team, you build processes, you outsource and you get it done for you. And that's why mgyb.co exist you can head over there and get our way as to drive stack, syndication networks, press releases, link building, embed all sorts of stuff with some really, really kick-ass stuff coming here in November wink, wink Black Friday and then into the New Year. We got some good stuff coming.

Marco: I have two public service announcements. Adams Sorry to interrupt.

Adam: Yeah, let's do it.

Marco: Black Friday will be on Wednesdays from now on. I just determined that. And to all joking aside, we always say that be and the mastermind has its privileges. Well, I've been personally working really hard and incorporating some really not gonna say what it is, but some just some really neat things into the Mastermind to make the user experience to and to make people finding what they're looking for. To make that way better to improve the experience so that people can come in and find exactly what they're looking for, where it is, you know, so whatever it is that you're trying to find, Marco will talk shit about Google on and I can't remember when Well, it's not finished, not 100% because there is artificial intelligence involved. And interestingly enough the world is the SEO world is an uproar because of BERT, and we're actually using BERT in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind so again, mastermind being a member of the Semantic Mastermind does have its privileges because you're first to get everything that we do business building and ideas and concepts, and all of these different things. Hey, on tomorrow's mastermind webinar will be talking about BERT and AI and what it is actually, because you see all of these discussions and all of these forums and then all these Facebook groups, and nobody has an I'm not going to drop an F-bomb here. Nobody has an effing clue as to what it is that they're talking. They don't know what BERT is. And all you have to do is go into the documentation to see what BERT is and what it does. And you'll know that it's absolutely nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing because of the way that we teach you how to do things in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. So not only does it have its privileges in that we give you cutting it and anything that we can do to make your Your life easier to enter to make, whether its clients whether tank, whatever it is, it's there and we give it to people but it's also we try to make your life easier. We try to do all of these different things. Because you're a member of the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. It's included in the membership fee, nobody will have to pay extra for all the work that went into the back end of the mastermind to make things so much better. So, I'm sorry, it seems like it's a pitch fest for the mastermind. And I should be pitching the hell out of it. Because it's so good. We get testimonials time and again, of how well our stuff works. And so yeah, we should be here, tooting our own horns and singing our praises and whatever. I'm not going to go into that anymore. Just I'm just letting people know if you're in the Semantic Mastery <stermind, be there tomorrow and see just how much we have improved the learning experience. Let's call it

Adam: Amen. got one more to add on to that you guys are now made a post believe on November 4 about big news for Bradley. Bradley is going to be putting together some training, we decided based on the response. There's still a little bit of time if you want to get down on this, and what it is, is step by step program on how to grow, grow a massive brand using YouTube and GDN, Ads. And, you know, we just want to engage, because we have, especially Bradley didn't want to be putting in a lot of time and effort doing the training, you know, right leading up into the holidays if people weren't interested. But so far, we've got 71 comments, people interested in early access at a hell of a discount. So I'm going to put the link in if you want to get in on that. Just comment, leave a GIF or a comment on the Facebook thread and we will be in touch with you shortly. We're going to have some information that information about that going up. Hernan says let me in I think he got booted from the from Hump Day Hangouts.

Bradley: He's back in

Adam: Alright, well, guys, with that said, we got anything else before we get into questions here.

Bradley: I'll just give a little update on a couple of things. Number one, we've got anybody that joined Local Kingpin, which was the Google Ads training for using search ads for lead generation. That's going to be an update webinar on Monday. Because the interface has changed so much the principles, the method is still pretty much the same, though. There's just some slight differences that I'm going to cover. And the interface, Google Ads interface has changed a lot. Plus they've got a lot of new or improved features, such as automated bidding strategies and things like that, that I used to suggest never to use, but they've gotten so much better over the last year and a half, two years because of AI and it's so much better. So artificial intelligence. And so we're going to talk about that slightly plus any questions that anybody has So that'll be Monday, it'll be probably only about an hour long. That's just for me to give an update and answer questions. So if you're in Local Kingpin, I encourage you to get signed up for that.

Also, the Google Ads course that Adam was just talking about, that I'm going to be starting in two weeks, I think it's one and I say we're going to do that. I think Monday, the 25th is going to be the first webinar and that'll be about 90 minutes, maybe longer if there's, you know, a lot of Q&A at the end, and then December 9th, and that's going to be a two-part deal. The first one will be about YouTube ads and how to use that for branding. And for not not not so much lead generation it will produce leads, but it's not a direct lead generator, it it will but it's more about branding, and also driving relevant traffic into your digital assets. So your entity essentially. So we're going to talk about YouTube on the first webinar. And then on the second webinar. Again, that'll be December 9th. We're going to talk about using the Google Display Network. So it's good Google Ads training specifically for YouTube and the Google Display Network for setting up branding campaigns which works incredibly well for both building brand awareness but also for generating relevant targeted traffic from specific audiences from specific geo locations if it's for local into your entities, your digital assets for a particular brand which is great for SEO. So it's a way for using Google ads to not only produce relevant traffic but improve brand awareness as well as help the SEO that your any SEO work that you're doing, because you're driving relevant, targeted traffic from known audiences and Google to your SEO as your assets that you've been doing SEO work on. And that takes care of ART right – relevance, trust, and authority. Google understands that that's that recognize that traffic is an activity. It's relevant because it's from known audiences and specific geolocation if that's if it's for local you can target by geolocation, and it's also trusted, trusted and authority trusted traffic because it's coming from Google's known Google's audience buckets. And essentially, so it's going to be it's very, very powerful. I've just been crushing it with Google ads for clients over the last several months. And it just works really, really well. And I've been using them for my own business as well. And it's, it's just a great, great strategy. So that said, it's, um, it's going to be a pre, like right now you can get in for like, the pre-training special or whatever, where it's, it's a third of what it's going to be once I'm done recording those webinars, it's going to be packaged up and sold for probably 300 bucks, or right right, right around there. So if you want to get in for a third of that, I would recommend that you go check out the post that Adam posted, comment on it and then get signed up. Okay. All right.

Marco: So they're more than welcome to wait and pay us more later. Yeah, that's fine too. But I would suggest for people not to wait.

Bradley: Alright, so can we get into it? Now,

Adam: let's do it.

Bradley: All right, we got the screen. Okay, somebody confirm.

Adam: Good to go.

Bradley: Okay, so everybody can see my humping Wednesday meme GIFs alright. Hump Day right, Wednesday.

How Would You Add Relevancy To Your Money Site Using Drive Stacks?

So, Alright, so the first questions are and it's multiple questions. It's 13 pages worth of questions from Fred Wilson and Fred. Well, I appreciate your and I really do. I appreciate your questions. That's a bit much for Hump Day Hangouts. And also, it's getting a little bit into the weeds for stuff that we would typically only cover in this much depth in mastermind, which I'm sure you're fully aware of that, as a former mastermind member, or an RYS Academy reloaded specifically since it's so it pertains to drive stack stuff and kind of deep into the weeds. But with that said, Marco, how much of this do you want to answer?

Marco: I haven't really re-read the question. So,

Bradley: Yeah. So should I give you about 10 minutes to get through it?

Marco: All right. Do you have a general question that you can add the I'd be more than happy to answer general questions, but if it's something that's specific, yeah, that again, membership has its privileges and this things that I'm only answer for paying members and I mean, that that's just that's the way it should be. I'm sure that people who have paid three $4,000 for the course would appreciate me keeping the secret sauce in where it belongs.

Bradley: Yeah. And I agree and that, you know, I've read through the first two sections of this three-part question this three-section question, and I realized that it's, it's a lot more in-depth than what we would typically answer on a free Hump Day hangout because it's getting into very specific tactics. From RYS reloaded, we would cover it also in the mastermind, I'm sure. But this is not something that we can get that deep into it. That said, I'll give you kind of a general overview, and I'll kind of answer it and let you take add to it, Marco, and then we'll move on to the next one. So Fred, we would welcome you back to the mastermind at any moment.

If we're going to RYS Reloaded, either one of those would be good places to get this particular question answered. But that said, He's talking about his food business, his food tour business and talking about how to add additional relevancy. He did some keyword theme research using SEM Rush and looking at some of the competitors and found that there is some other keywords other than just food tour type keywords that can help to add relevancy that are kind of associated with the food tour business, but he hasn't been targeting them. And so the question is would adding in some of these other types of keyboard themes into the drive stack folders as subfolders within food tour folders, would that help to add relevancy? And because of the association that Google's is showing? And so I mean, to me, you've already answered your question. Yes. You know, if there's if there's a way to create that association, that you're you've discovered by doing some additional research, looking at competitors using some tools like sem rush and all of that kind of stuff, then yeah, you can you can add that additional relevancy into your drive stack. And that's going to certainly help. I don't know if you want to go further than that. Marco.

Marco: Yeah. Just a little bit, because, I mean, I can answer this generally we go after, especially the way that our keyword research VA is being taught, we go after anything that Google considers relevant. In a keyword, research cake, and we give you guys whoever orders the gig, the deep keyword research, all of that information. We do separate the movie will give you tasks will give you silos will give you information that we feel is where the money makers are, what the relevant keywords are, and maybe something that that that that isn't a money keyword, but Google still thinks that that is relevant. All of that is necessary because what we do inside the drive stack is create relevantly and push. Right? We create a relevance push from everything that we do from the spider web silo to the way that the drive stack is built to the way that the G site is built to the way the inner pages are done to the way that we mimic what's on the website. So yes, by all means, I don't care. We do use SEM Rush for keyword relevance, but that's not necessarily what will target what we do is we use Jeffrey Smith's Ultimate SEO Bootcamp training. And we go according to how he teaches what the top-level categories are. Then from there, work down and create the silos there, you will create three silos. But everything that's relevant should be at it. Remember when Network Empire started talking about color, current stuff, it's not, it's not there. But they began talking about it. And they began explaining it more what it was all about, what it means. And really, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to create all of this in a self-contained Google environment for the bot to feed on, which is, that's exactly what we're doing.

Is It Safe Against Plagiarism To Curate Content With Attribution From Google Snippet?

Bradley: Yeah. And so the next question part of this, which it's kinda interesting that you asked this, Fred because we covered this, our own our very own data. You know, master link builder, was at our live event, hopefully, live 2019 in Denver, just recently, and he was talking about doing something similar that you're asking about, which is adding q&a. Questions and Answers into a doc within your Gsite within your drive stack and just linking back to the source but not actually hyperlinking just putting like the text-based link. So you're providing a citation, but what so you're citing the source, right? So you're providing attribution, but you're not hyperlinking back. I would say that should be okay, provided you're not copying, you know, if you're just copying snippets, like what is shown in the Google search results for the q amp a section. So when you search for a question in Google, and it brings up that featured snippet, which is a q amp a box, right, and it's got the dropdowns, and you click the drop-down, and then it shows a short it shows the full question and then a short answer and a link back to the source where it's pulling that answer from that question and answer from you can embed that or you know, kind of copy and paste that into a Google doc or something like that. And then still late as long as you're not expanding by going to the actual destination URL and copying more of the content. It's just a snippet. So it falls under the same rules of curating content would be on a blog post in that, if you're just highlighting, you know, reusing republishing a short snippet from somebody else's content, and then you're providing attribution citing the source, then it should be okay. Now, some people, some publishers will still make eventually, you know, sometimes they may find it and they may request that you unpublish it. But as far as it being a copyright infringement, as long as it's just a small snippet, and it's you're citing the source, it should, it should never be an issue. Although like I said, out of courtesy, if anybody ever were to contact you and say Please take this down or unpublished this, then you know, I would recommend that you just do it to avoid any sort of, you know, some sort of stupid battle that could ensue. Although again, I don't think there's anything wrong with it legally because you are citing the source and it falls within a specific brand. Members of the DMC act right there were the digital, whatever Copyright Act. So I would just, you know, encourage you not to go any further than what is shown in the snippets and the featured snippets within Google search.

That said, also, you're asked about curating a lot of content about a topic putting it inside the drive stack, then putting links to your money site, the correct way to push relevancy for your money site? Again, yes, you can do that. The same thing is by curating content on your money site, you can do that. Right. So think about that. That's what we've taught for years is the best way to generate content before even money site blog posts unless you're a subject matter expert and you're creating 100% original content. The problem with that is even as an as a subject matter expert, sometimes you get you run out of ideas. But there are a ton of other subject matter experts. I'm not talking about buying shitty content farm content, I'm talking about locating subject Matter content written by subject matter experts pertaining to your topic, right or your niche your industry, and then republishing, once again snippets of it, and giving credit to where it's, you know, citing the source giving attribution. And in the case of curating on a blog, your money site blog, you know, we always recommend hyperlinking to the source. And just using nofollow External links, that's what I've always done. Um, but that's very, very powerful. Because once again, you can create an original article out of using snippets of other people's content, where you're just adding commentary and opening paragraph commentary in between pieces of curated content, which doesn't have to be just articles, it can be videos, infographics, don't curate images. Please don't do that. You can. That's a no-no, but you can curate infographics, videos, mp3, so audio files, you know, other articles, you can curate all that kind of stuff. And it helps because it allows you to be able to produce content very quickly, inexpensively. And you can even train a virtual assistant, somebody that's not a subject matter expert how to locate good content, and compile it in a logical fashion, and then just add commentary. So in other words, you know, you can come up with a topic for a blog post, find supporting articles or even differing opinion articles, right so that you can do a compare and contrast or pros and cons or argue both sides of a topic in particular curated article if that makes sense. It's very, very powerful. And it's a great way to create co-citation, which is similar to co-occurrence in that you're linking out to other relevant sources. And so again, we talked about all of that in content kingpin, it's a training course that is still 100% relevant today. I still use that for all of my clients, that same exact method for curating content for all of my clients. You can apply that to drive stack stuff to you're still going to build that relevancy, topical relevancy. Just make sure you're Giving attribution even if you're not hyperlinking to it, I recommend you absolutely always give credit where credit is due. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: No, I totally agree. It's a matter of mirroring right? Everything that you would do on the money site you do on the drive stack and Gsite, including curating content. That's right.

How Do You Add A Schema Markup To A Local Business Press Release?

Okay, cool. Well, the next question is from Kaydee. Hi, guys. How do you add schema markup to press releases for a local business? Press advantage sent an email with a link to Google structured data markup helper tool to create the code but on the page, it is asking to select a data type and then paste your URL of the page you wish to mark up. What URL do we enter here? I don't know. Because I don't use that tool. I'm going to point out another one here for you in a moment. The press release is not yet published. So it has no URL to target the markup and the data type is to tick in and the data type to tick is a local business. Thanks to know and here's why. Because if you're if you have your own press advantage account, or even if you Buy him through MGYB. And we set up an organization page or you set it up through your own account, right? So you set up an organization page, that's where you should have your local business markup. If it's, you know, an organization page for local business, you should have your local business structured data markup in the organization page, right, which will get added to all of the press releases that get pushed out. And some may not all, but many of the publisher sites that were they get published to will actually pick up that JSON LD code for local business markup. Okay, so you add that to your organization page. However, I've got a press advantage open here. Let's see if it hopefully it brings me into the same standby I'm gonna have to pause my screen for a moment because of it my plugin that reset my browser that Marco pointed out, a reset my reset the tab, so give me one second while I get what you're looking for.

Marco: Let me just tell people That if your press release gets published and you go and look at some of the websites were able to publish, and you don't see the schema markup, but you don't see an iframe that you send out or whatever, that's not on us. It's not even on press advantage. It's actually on that website, not wanting, you know, stripping out all of the code. But what we want anyway, is we want to get that in as many places as we can. And that's why I go it goes out to the entire publication network, but not every website will publish whatever it is that you submitted, just did just to make it clear to everyone because we do get support tickets about that. And it's like, yeah, there's nothing that we could do.

Bradley: Yeah, so to show you what I'm talking about. First of all, if we go to press advantage for the organization, which I should I forgot I got my ID page looped into this is going to break the browser. Let me see if I can get to Page Source before it shuts everything down. Um, Alright, so let's see if it'll pull this up. It might not. Okay, there we go. So if we scroll down, we'll see right here is my local business structure data markup starting right here. From here to there. That's my local business structure data markup, that's part of the organization page. Right. And so again, as Marco just mentioned, some sites when we publish when it distributes the press releases, it has this codependent to it. You know, it started with it with the press release, but some sites will pick it up and publish that JSON LD code as well. What I think you're talking about is for individual press releases, so here I am inside the dashboard. If you scroll down now there's a section says enter JSON LD schema, this will be attached to the release in addition to any organization-specific schema. So that's what I was talking about before. If it's a local business, you want it which is what I was showing here. You want to have local business structure data markup on the page, right that their organization page, but then For the individual, a press release, excuse me, you can add additional schema markup here. So what I would recommend here and you know you can do other stuff too depends on what you're having published. But what I would recommend is going to and this is a tool that I use most of the time, we're going to have one in MGYB here shortly, I'm not sure if it's available yet. But this is the one that I've been using for quite some time.

If you just go to Google and search for schema markup generator, look for technicalSEO.com or just go to technicalSEO.com and look for the schema markup generator, which is over here in the left sidebar. There's different types of schema markups that this tool will generate different types of schema. And so the very first one is article click on the article and then when you look down here, when it loads this page, you come down here to Article type, and there's actually one for news article. So select news article, and then just fill out these fields. And here's your schema code over here on the right-hand sidebar. Once you've completed all these fields, Then you just copy that and paste that into Press Advantage over here. Now again, there are other types of schema that can be generated. So it depends on what the article is going to be about. But just doing news article schema markup is very, very powerful, right to add to each individual press release. Okay, so that's what I would recommend. There are other tools out there that will generate this stuff to guys, this is just the one that I typically use. Okay. There's a good question. Now, by the way, that said, I gotta tease this a little bit. I'm inside my blog for that same company, I was just sharing my real estate business. And this we've got coming soon. We've got some pretty cool stuff coming up. And like the plugin will generate this Jeffrey Smith plugin, but it's the pro version, which isn't released yet, but it's coming soon. And it's got all the schema markup generator right inside WordPress for all every different type of schema, you can think of. It's fabulous. And so that same type that same article markup right there, if we come down here, there's an article type, blog posting or news article. And then I can just fill out all this stuff. It creates the code right down here and embeds it into the header of this particular blog post. And I can click update, and boom, that's going to have the same type of Article markup that we were just sharing. Pretty powerful stuff. So be on the lookout for that guys soon, early next year. That was a good tease. Right, guys?

Marco: Perfect.

Can You Embed The Website Pages In The GSite When Mirroring?

All right. Next one is Simon. He says We're marrying the main website to the G site. Can you just embed the website pages on the site pages? Or is it necessary to copy and paste the content for each website page on to the G site pages, I just use the embeds. I'm lazy like that, right. I work on the money site pages. That's what I flush out with good content. And I mirror them onto the site. And then I just and I do some other really cool stuff. We've been talking about how I do silos now. locations. So there's topical silos and in location-based silos, but I do it in a very unique way. And it works really well, especially when you use a G site. And yeah, all I do is grab the embed or create an iframe out of the money site pages, and embed them into the G site page, then I optimize the title of the G site page, obviously. And then, you know, you can mirror that into a folder inside of your folder and files inside of your drive stack. And then just smash that shit with embeds and or links, or both. And it works really, really well hit ever remember, that's your SEO shield. So we do everything externally to the SEO shield, right? So that would be the G site the drive stack and all of the tier one entity assets, which by the way, you can actually take those iframe into your syndication network properties to guys think about that. So right, there's no reason you can't push those embeds through to your syndication network properties too. good question though,

Does Proper Schema Markup Feed The Bot Enough And Not To Worry About Creating Long Articles?

Paul Thompson says, Does proper schema markup feed the bot enough that we don't need to worry about creating long articles on the pages we want to rank? No, but it does. It does definitely help a lot. Marco is probably going to be better at answering this one than me. I would still for money sites stuff still flesh out the pages, but adding structured data, like what I just showed with my blog, where you were, you know, again, you can add it manually now like right now, since the pro plugins not available, this there might be other plugins out there that do it, but I don't know if they provide the schema code that's 100% up to date. I know that a lot of times they're not updated enough. I'm not speaking badly about anybody else's plugin. I just haven't used them. But you can have like a code insert or plugin right so like. SoGo ad scripts header, footer and things like that header, footer type script plugins where you can add scripts into the head section or foot section or body section of any individual page or post, and you can go use schema creators like what I just shared, and create schema markup and and then put them into each one of your posts or pages or whatever, so that you're adding additional, you know, schema structured data that the bots love and I mean, that's guys, you're you'll you'll have an edge over a lot of your competitors if you do that kind of stuff. But I would still recommend that for money site stuff, you flush the content, the content of the page out to. Marco, what say you

Marco: Yeah, I mean that absolutely. Two things right. structured and unstructured data structured data is for the bot feed the bot as much as you can, which is exactly what we do. And why we use drive stacks and Gsites and iframe and everything that the entities entity stack, and everything else that we don't I mean that it there's a method to our madness. Now, if you then go and you send a person to a page. And now we're talking about people, we're not talking about bots, because what's going to happen is you're going to rank. And that's going to bring your traffic onto the page. And if there's nothing on that page to engage the person, then we no longer care about the but now we care about that person coming to the website and converting, finishing the action that they were set out to do, because if that person comes on the website and bounces, then you did you defeated the entire purpose of creating the all of the stacking that we created in the first place, which was to get that person onto the page that would convert them over an image is going to convert them of an image is going to get them to push and call whatever it is that you need to be done. To finish that, that then that's what's going to matter. So, two different things. If you need the content to rank you have to look at the competition. If you can rank or outrank the competition without 2000 or 3000 words of content, By all means, nobody, and nobody's going to sit there and go through the 3000 words of content on this is a really interested in whatever it is that you have to say. what you're interested in, is that conversion, because that's what centers everything at the end. And that's what Google is going to look at from beginning to end is whether that task and that goal. Well, whether it was accomplished.

How Do You Setup A GMB Page For A Business That Operates In Multiple States?

Awesome, thanks, Marco. So the next question was from jack, I'm not the next question is my client is based out of Texas but operates in five other states fully across the states not limited to anyone Metro region. What's the best way to set up the company GMB page, so reviews for one state aggregate under the main company as well. Or if that's not possible, what would be the best way to go about setting up the GMB either individually and each state Or globally under some other configuration? Well, remember Google My Business is supposed to be especially now there's another question I see on the page here a little bit lower about what happened on November 8. And from my understanding, which I've only done very, I've only kind of read through some comments and stuff, is that it was more it was basically an update to the maps algorithm for GMB stuff. And it's gone even more proximity-based. So they've Google's tightened the proximity filter, so to speak. And so with that said, Google, my business is supposed to be for local businesses, right? I mean, we've talked about setting up GMBs and you know, setting your service area, the United States, for example, and that's okay, but it's not it's okay for like the entity but it's not going to help you to rank anywhere in the United States and maps. That said, you're also in this case, you're talking about five different states. They're located in Texas but they operate in five other states. So you potentially you could have if you have an office and in each of their other states, you could have GMB for each office location. It's not necessary but you can. That said if you wanted to get reviews and let's just say Arizona, I'm just assuming let's just say that that's one of the states that you operate in. If you get reviews in Arizona, but you want them to populate on the Texas GMB if that's the way you have it set up. It's not you can't do that. If you had a gym be in Arizona, I mean, if all you have is the one Google My Business location in Texas, then it doesn't matter where you get the reviews from. They're all going to aggregate on that one and only Google My Business location. My point that I'm trying to make is you cannot get GMB reviews in one location and have them also populate onto another GMB location. You can't do that. It because each GMB entity or location is supposed to be it's own and collect its own or, you know, aggregate its own reviews. So that said, You know, I would, I would consider what it is you're trying to do. As far as if you have multiple GMBs, which I'm not sure that you do, but if you do, then what I would recommend you do is set up use some sort of review directing app. I know for contractors, one of the ones that work really well as birdeye.com. I think another one might be Podium, I've not used that. But what are some of my contractor clients use Bird Eye, and that works well, but it's like a review gate, right? So it would be an app where you send out to customers, or clients or whatever the company or the business sends out to customers and ask for some listen to review or at ask for a review. And then somebody leaves a review and it directs the app can direct where the review gets published to if that makes sense. So you have more control over it that way and if it's you know, below three stars, then it can be not posted as a review. Instead, it could be brought to, you know, sent to the customer service team so that they can reach out and try to resolve potential issues, that kind of stuff, I would look into something like that if you're trying to have more control over where your reviews are coming from and where they're going to be posted to. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: Yeah, I'm just guessing that his client and whatever it is that they're doing that it triggers a three-pack, right? It triggers a map pack and it triggers map rankings if that's the case. Then get a map wherein each one of the places where where your client operate, and associate everything to the main entity, that's how Texas so then the AI which is sophisticated enough to then understand once you begin associating all of these to understand that it's all part of the same company with it's a company that operates out of Texas but has regional offices in five other states. So that if you do get a review, for example, in Texas for the company in another state, it could be taken into consideration. I'm not saying that the AI is that sophisticated, but it could mean at some point it will be, it will be able to understand all of these different relationships and put everything together. And if you do a really good job in your structured data of putting all of this together for the buck, then you won't even have to leave it to the bot to guess and try to understand what this is all about. You can tell it you can go with everything in JSON LD to tell about what this is all about. Having done that, then you don't have to worry about reviewing everything, or aggregating everything under the main company, it will all be taken together because everything is associated if you've done your job correctly. Now, if it's globally that we're not worrying about maps, and then the reviews wouldn't even come into play, unless you have unless you can trigger a knowledge And that's a totally different story.

Bradley: Yeah, and if that's the case, if it was globally then I would just have all reviews going to the one GMB asset, wherever the primary location is, because then all you're trying to do is build the brand, not individual locations, right?

What Are Your Insights On The Reported Traffic Drop Last November 8, 2019?

So Ross says, Hey, everyone, and then he's got the follow-up question below, which I'll just that's what and now come back to Joey's question where he says Ross is new here. What the hell happened on November 8, lots of traffic drops and the insight and that's what I was just talking about, as far as I know. I'm sure Marco's got more insight on this than I do. Because I don't geek out about this stuff anymore. If I don't see major drops in my stuff, I don't worry about it. So but apparently the what it from what I understand it was another maps update where it looks like they tightened the proximity filter to where it's it's even narrower now. Is that correct? Marco?

Marco: That's absolutely correct. They tighten up on the proximity. And proximity is a ranking factor, it's we can literally call it the most important ranking factor, although you can still overcome. That's why we don't usually see all of these changes in the things that we do. Because you can overcome anything, any part of the algorithm, you can overcome it. And people are saying that well don't use brute force. Don't do this. Don't do that. You can totally overcome anything through what they call it in the Rocky movie, good old fashioned blunt force trauma. And that's just feeding the but just a whole lot of related information, wherever it is that you that you're trying to expand to. So even though even if the proximity factor is the main ranking factor, there are other ranking factors that can and do come into play, if you can overcome that one factor. So is that something to just totally say, Oh my god, now I have to go get a DMB in eternity. City, not only in the area where I am but in the surrounding areas, it's being able to overcome that proximity factor. And we do it and we do a really good job of teaching that in local GSB Pro. And now, you know being at the location and being able to upload images and being able to show Google that you're actually there and that everything is actually from that location has become more important than ever.

Bradley: Yes, very good.

Does The Size Of Embeds Matter?

So let's jump back to Joey's question. It says hi, does the size of embeds matter? In other words, embedding a 10 by 10 GMB site is still the equivalent of embedding a 600 by 300. So the frame could be one by 110 by 10 or 600 by 300. And you still pass the juice Thank you. I'm size doesn't matter. Only because if you have it too small, then that could be considered cloaking. Am I correct in that statement?

Marco: Yeah, yeah, you could, you could be tagged For cloaking, although it's really hard if I mean if you do it right there no word. Most people can't do it right, which is why we don't even teach it.

Bradley: Yeah. I mean, technically Yes, you can still pass the SEO with the iframe present even if it's a one by one pixel.

Marco: Even if it's a zero by zero

Bradley: Yeah, it technically you can absolutely do that. I wouldn't recommend it if you know, because if anybody manually reviews it and saw it, then they could, you know, they could flag you for manual action. So

Marco: that would be the biggest problem right with someone coming in and actually, you triggering, First of all, triggering enough red flags to trigger a manual review so that someone from Google would actually come to your website because nobody trusts you're not making enough money now. Nobody. Most people are making enough money to worry about Google to have someone waste all of their valuable resources on looking at your fucking website in the first place. If you do get that big or if just if you just happen to get unlucky enough to trigger a manual, and they come and see that zero by zero thing, yes, that is cloaking. There's no reason for you to have a zero by zero iframe one by one unless it's a pixel, right? Facebook, Google, whatever, if it's unless it's tracking code. So they come in and look and they see code and it looks fishy. You're more likely to get hit with a manual and probably deindex, because I've seen cloaking get hit really, really hard.

Bradley: Yeah, agreed. Okay, so we'll say, Hey, Marco, have you announced the date of the four webinars for Bert? I guess that's for the charity stuff.

Marco: Yeah, no, I'm still working on that. It's not only BERT, but I'm also going to go into entities and AI and NLP and what it actually is what it isn't. We're gonna we're going to discuss and talk about everything that that other People just either refused to talk about, or they don't know enough about it to be able to discuss it. As soon as I have it already, I'm going to announce it. I'm going to announce the date I'm going to give you the donation page. And remember this all goes to a really good cause it's getting kids who would otherwise not be able to get an education getting them into school, so that they can get a good education get trained to get jobs and, you know, have a chance at life.

Bradley: Very cool. Alright, the next one, Fred says I was worried that that might be a problem. So that's because I was kind of tongue in cheek picking. That is a huge, long question. He says, thanks so much for answering my 13 pages of questions. It helped a lot. Thanks, guys. You're welcome, Fred.

What Is The Difference Between Q&A and FAQ?

Fit. So what's up? 50 says what is the difference between Q&A and FAQ? Well, it's, it's kind of the same thing or it's very closely related. Q&A is most of the time would like You can see in the SERPs is what I was talking about earlier. But FAQs that can be a little bit more specific to an individual like a business. Right? So I mean, they're kind of basically the same. As far as schema markup, it's the same. But what I mean the difference is frequently asked questions are should be answered by a client or business, right? Like, what is the questions that they get? asked the most by prospects and or customers or clients? Right? And they should have answers to that. But when it comes to q amp, a, what I'm what these, the way that I look at it is when you go to Google and you search for question, you'll see related questions that get asked enough that somebody took the time to create content around answering that question, and then marking it up correctly on their website so that they could get added to the featured snippets in Google search. So it stands to reason that that question gets asked enough. It might be a frequently asked question for another business that maybe your particular client or business doesn't get asked that much, but it's still relevant. That makes sense. So they're very closely related, but there is a slight difference, at least in my opinion.

Marco: Yeah, the difference is that that Q&A, people should be able to either ask questions or answer questions on the website, if they're not able, if they're your frequently asked questions and your answers are there's no way for users to engage with that. Then it's FAQ frequently asked questions. Q&A, again, is on a website where people can go in and interact with the questions and the answer. Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah, guys, it you know, I've talked about this probably in Syndication Academy. And I'll probably I'll just give this give another nugget away here because it works really well. And we're almost out of time. So anyway, those Q&A questions that you can curate, right from Google and the beautiful thing about it is if you type in a question about product service in an industry whatever the questions box comes up now what the drop-downs each time you click on a drop-down, it brings up like three or four more questions. So like you can just keep drilling down into those guys and that gives you almost unlimited content. Like, Think about it. It's a content hack, right, you can grab a question and an answer from those Question and Answer boxes that Google provides you and use that in GMB posts for example, right, just cite the source just like I was talking about earlier is the in the Q&A box right that the dropdown. as it expands, it gives you the snippet with the answer at least a partial answer. It might not be the full answer, but it gives a snippet and then it has the link to read more. Well, you can still use that link in the GMB post too so you give proper credit to where it's due. That's a nofollow link and a GMB post the button link right, and a GMB post. So the button URL, the URL that you attach to the call to action button. That is a dofollow link, although I here in just the past few days probably since November 8. Some of those are nofollow. And I think it's just because Google is still tinkering around in there. But those are dofollow links. So you can still link back to the answer, have a QA, write a question and answer that you curate it you basically are republishing from Google's own search results, to add relevancy to the GMB. You can do this on your money site too and link back to the source which is only proper and right. But then use the button URL in the GMB post the link back to your money site, right to your page that also is about that very topic or question and answer right so you again, you're it's creating co-citation. It's creating topical relevancy, and you don't even have to come up with the content. You can even go through and curate groups of questions like question and then create blog posts out of those on your money site where once again, you're publishing the question plus the answer. You can create a table of contents at the top of the page Marco stop me from getting too deep here. But with a table of contents with jump links, anchor links, right that jump down to each section that has a different question. It has the answer that links back out to the source, right, but it's a nofollow link on the blog post. And then just like a curated post, you can inject some commentary in between that stuff, with an opening paragraph and a closing paragraph with a call to action to contact your business or your company, your client that you're doing the work for, for help or services with that, you know, for products or services that solve those problems, those questions that make sense.

So again, guys, it's a great strategy to use those questions as a farm those questions right mine those questions, harvest those questions or whatever you want to say from one of those from this q&a panels that pop up in the Google search results and drill down into them. You can get gold topic ideas, blog post ideas GMB post ideas from that kind of stuff.

Which Of Your Courses In Which You Teach About Making ID Pages and Mirror Gsites?

So, Alright, the last question is oh Austin Don says, which of your courses do you teach about making it pages and mirror g sites? Well the mastermind, RYS reloaded local GMB Pro, any one of those three the mastermind local GMB Pro or RYS reloaded what it was, it's covered in all three of those locations. So, am I missing any here guys?

Marco: I don't think you did. Okay.

Bradley: Adam, you want to chime in? All right, last is not really a question. It's just a comment and then we're going to wrap it up, guys. I've got a TV repairman showing up in about five minutes. Anyways, I asked the question about GMBs and review in one location versus all the states that clients the Klein operates and this was that question about Texas and five additional states. We answered previously he says no follow up question. I just wanted to say thank you for answering it and you knocked it out of the park. I've wrestled with this in my head for a week and you made it clear as day thanks again, guys for all that you do. You're very welcome. That's what this venue is for. Anything else guys?

Marco: No, not unless another question popped up now. on the page,

Adam: I think you just scroll over Bradley, but the last call for everybody. Head over there. Just follow the instructions on Facebook get early access to the YouTube and UTM course Bradley's going to be put together here over the holidays and save a bundle but like they said to if you want to wait a little bit and pay us three times too much more. So okay with that.

Bradley: And let's go ahead. I was gonna say I actually prefer that. But, you know, I want you guys to save that additional $200 to spend it on your family's at Christmas. So

Marco: and stop by the mastermind tomorrow. The webinar, because we're going to show how much we've improved the user experience. Want to show how easy it is to find the information now before it was just okay, how do I get through five years of information? Yeah, because we have five years worth of videos in there in the archives, right? So just the latest videos. It's everything since we started. As I did you get through all that, well, now we made it really simple for you to get through it.

Bradley: That's been a long time coming. There's just so much damn content, so much video-based content and long mastermind webinars. It's been hard to, for people to find stuff and that's a problem we've been dealing with for a long time. And we Marco has been working on it in the background for since I think January of this year, maybe February, but it's been a long time. And now it's here. It's ready. So it's awesome. It's a big, big improvement. So, all right, everybody, thanks for being here. We'll see some of you tomorrow, the rest of you next week. Awesome. Bye, everyone. Bye, everyone.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

IN MOST, CORRUPTION STILL HAS THE UPPER HAND OVER INVESTORS

Without the prospect of starting a startup is default alive, we can mitigate its effects. Investor Herd Dynamics August 2013 The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is working on a painting, they never saw it, because that showed how much you learn in college depends a lot more, than they would in a program you were writing for yourself. Html 18. We've had startups that were profitable on revenues of $1. In the late 90s was an abuse. And that was the truth. I've made startups sound pretty hard. It turns out to be a car expert to own a car. Their size makes them slow and prevents them from rewarding employees for the extraordinary effort required. They didn't feel the need to present as a given—as an area of fixed size, over which however much truth they have must needs be spread, however thinly.

At Rehearsal Day, we four Y Combinator partners found ourselves saying a lot of money by noticing sudden changes in stock prices. Most people have had the experience of buying stuff so pleasant that shopping becomes a leisure activity. I could probably tell you exactly how to make the food good. Behind every great fortune, there is not much more than the language you choose. When a startup launches, it will be to your advantage. Offer surprisingly good customer service. In technical matters, you may need to. Imagine if that sequence became a big, independent company is the same reason it is in this category too. Almost everyone who worked for us was an animal at what they did. Most of them don't.

I don't have time for your pitch to evolve. If companies want hackers to be productive. But by no means a lost cause to try to guess answers. But finally I've figured out what's going to happen to you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you realized. When I was a kid. Some of your classmates are probably going to live. Several people have told me to get lost. Usually this is an illusion. So a software startup in Sweden is still at a disadvantage trying to enter the software business.

Perhaps the designers of admissions processes should take a smaller amount and use that instead. But this whole discussion has taken something for granted: that if we find more than 15 tokens that only occur in one corpus or the other. IBM before them. In this model, the research department functions like a mine. Which means every teenage kid a wants a computer with half a MIPS of processing power that would fit under an airline seat and cost so little that I wasn't even learning what the causes are and how to cancel your subscription, and that buying startups is to look at stuff people use now that's broken. 5 paragraph essay is really a list of n things is so relaxing. Or business users. What if you run out of money, and now Yahoo is too. There's a limit to the number of startups that change their plan en route. So even if the chance of succeeding.

In A Plan for Spam filter, all these tokens would have had no trouble making the most of present-day terms. It may have seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. The image shows Steves Jobs and Wozniak didn't have to. Especially when the institutions administering the tests don't really want startups to approach them directly. I'm talking mainly about software startups. As indeed they often are. This approach tends to yield smaller, more flexible programs. The most naive version of which is the reason. Bulgaria, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the startups we fund is that if someone is wise, all you have to back off the clutch sometimes to avoid stalling. It may look Victorian, but a greedy algorithm that may get you nothing more than the founders, and others, like a headset or router.

You may dispute either of the premises, but if there had been one person with a spell checker reduced one section to Zen-like incomprehensibility: Also, common spelling errors will tend to damp this effect, however, you should try to make a quick sketch when you have your code in your head. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes. We tend to write it. Some, it's true, the benefit that specific manager could derive from the forces I've described. Eventually you get new habits, but at YC culture wasn't just how we behaved when we built the product. And startups are in competitive businesses, you can cry and say I can't do it by generating wealth instead of stealing it. Getting work makes him a successful actor, but he didn't quite manage it. Stuff has gotten a bad reputation. The early adopters you evolve the idea upon have different needs.

Not ready for commitment This was my reason for not starting a startup is the damage done by their own rules is missing the point. If you're going to stick around, you'll probably get something better. And once you understand the origins of the Fabian Society, it sounds like there is something amiss. You need to be able to say, I never reach them through the Times front page is a list of where to see the underlying reality. Filtering January 2003 This article is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA for inviting me to speak, and the study he quoted was published in 1968. Are We Getting a Divorce? Maybe mostly in one hub, and it was clear that this was the era of get big fast in the most literal sense, not news: there is no literal representation for one unless the body is only a means to something else. 7 1.

That's very cheap, and the second is whatever specific lies Xes differentiate themselves by believing. The only reason to hire someone is to do an angel round, don't feel that it has today. You don't want mere voting; you need unanimity. And the customers paying so much for them were largely the same government agencies that paid thousands for screwdrivers and toilet seats. I happen to have it. A lot of startup culture will thus be driven by how well you answer their questions. It's the second that matters. One, Reddit, had already launched, and were able to give a talk in a few mostly uninteresting domains. They had to, or they could become irrelevant. The surprising thing is how often the founders themselves. VisiCalc was not merely a group of 10 people within a large organization.

[oasisoptimization]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 262

Click on the video above to watch Episode 262 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

  Announcement

Adam: Alright, we are live. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 262. Today is the 13th of November. And I don't know if anyone else knows this. But apparently there's something called Black Friday at the end of the month and Cyber Monday. Apparently there's some sales or something going on. Well, we've got something even better to kick it off. So make sure you keep your eyes and ears open for that we got some good stuff coming and it's going to be free. We're not going to even require an opt-in but more on that later. Let's talk to the guys real quick and then we got a couple of announcements and we will dive into your questions. To start on my left here, Bradley, how you doing today?

Bradley: Good man hanging out, working hard, instead of hard-working.

Adam: Are you going to go like a TV writing this weekend? Or is it now

Bradley: I've got my daughter this weekend. So it's her weekend but uh, December 6 that weekend. I'm going to my favorite spot Diamond Southwestern Virginia again for the weekend. Actually I'm going on the fifth for Thursday the fifth so looking forward to that although it may be cold it should be fun.

Adam: Nice. Nice. Marco speaking of weather How you doing man?

Marco: Man, I'm starting to get cold down here. You guys are sending your cold it was almost 65 last night. Oh ridiculous. Stop it. Arctic Well, whatever you want whatever you guys are doing up there Stop it. We don't want it.

Adam: Well, speaking of cold Chris How you doing?

Chris: I didn't know like. There's nothing to complain it's cozy warm and that was out today and it was sunny. Yeah, life is a good man.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan and Hernan, you still you're in Miami, right for a little bit longer?

Hernan: I'm still in South Florida. Yeah, I'm still here until Saturday, actually, when I'm flying back to Buenos Aires.Excited to be there. They're going to be spending the holiday season with family. But also exciting for next week and the week after, which is going to be Black Friday, so that's gonna be pretty cool too. So that'll be here.

Adam: Outstanding. Yeah. Well, it's good stuff. And I'm happy to be here in case anyone wants to know, the weather is just fine. It's like 70 I guess. I don't know.

Chris: Quick question, Adam.

Adam: what's that?

Chris: Are you guys celebrating 11th of November as well?

Adam: Um, no, is that a thing?

Chris: I didn't know. Like, I noticed there was were all kinds of like online sales on the 11th of November. So I was actually quite surprised.

Adam: 11 11 maybe just like making use of the numbers. You know, right. Fair enough. Well, I missed out on that since

Bradley: it's just like every year, people start putting their Christmas trees and decorations up and the station started playing Christmas music earlier on earlier every fucking year. So I imagine Black Friday starts getting earlier on early every year now to so jet rise.

Adam: So real quick if you're new to us, welcome. You're in the right place. You didn't end up on the weather channel or discussion of holidays. You are in fact at Hump Day Hangouts and we're going to answer your digital marketing questions shortly. But just so you know, you're in the right place, you can always ask your questions on the page, unless of course, it's broken and you can't get to the page like people were doing today. In which case come back in a few hours after we unscrew up our technical issue and come back and answer your question whether or not you can make it live you can always ask your question. We encourage you to be here live so you can get clarification or asked or gets more information from you as well as occasionally we do some fun stuff like giveaways. But you can always catch the replays on YouTube and get your answers that way.

Secondly, if you haven't yet grabbed the Battle Plan that is your next step, head over to battleplan.semanticmastery.com for a repeatable process, everything from new websites, age domains, YouTube channels, whatever it is going there and past that. If you're ready to grow your digital marketing business then you probably want or you should want a community that includes fast access to real-world info and that's what the mastermind is all about. You can find out more at mastermind.semanticmastery.com. And for everyone, no matter where you're at and ourselves included, we recommend getting stuff done right. You build a team, you build processes, you outsource and you get it done for you. And that's why mgyb.co exist you can head over there and get our way as to drive stack, syndication networks, press releases, link building, embed all sorts of stuff with some really, really kick-ass stuff coming here in November wink, wink Black Friday and then into the New Year. We got some good stuff coming.

Marco: I have two public service announcements. Adams Sorry to interrupt.

Adam: Yeah, let's do it.

Marco: Black Friday will be on Wednesdays from now on. I just determined that. And to all joking aside, we always say that be and the mastermind has its privileges. Well, I've been personally working really hard and incorporating some really not gonna say what it is, but some just some really neat things into the Mastermind to make the user experience to and to make people finding what they're looking for. To make that way better to improve the experience so that people can come in and find exactly what they're looking for, where it is, you know, so whatever it is that you're trying to find, Marco will talk shit about Google on and I can't remember when Well, it's not finished, not 100% because there is artificial intelligence involved. And interestingly enough the world is the SEO world is an uproar because of BERT, and we're actually using BERT in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind so again, mastermind being a member of the Semantic Mastermind does have its privileges because you're first to get everything that we do business building and ideas and concepts, and all of these different things. Hey, on tomorrow's mastermind webinar will be talking about BERT and AI and what it is actually, because you see all of these discussions and all of these forums and then all these Facebook groups, and nobody has an I'm not going to drop an F-bomb here. Nobody has an effing clue as to what it is that they're talking. They don't know what BERT is. And all you have to do is go into the documentation to see what BERT is and what it does. And you'll know that it's absolutely nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing because of the way that we teach you how to do things in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. So not only does it have its privileges in that we give you cutting it and anything that we can do to make your Your life easier to enter to make, whether its clients whether tank, whatever it is, it's there and we give it to people but it's also we try to make your life easier. We try to do all of these different things. Because you're a member of the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. It's included in the membership fee, nobody will have to pay extra for all the work that went into the back end of the mastermind to make things so much better. So, I'm sorry, it seems like it's a pitch fest for the mastermind. And I should be pitching the hell out of it. Because it's so good. We get testimonials time and again, of how well our stuff works. And so yeah, we should be here, tooting our own horns and singing our praises and whatever. I'm not going to go into that anymore. Just I'm just letting people know if you're in the Semantic Mastery <stermind, be there tomorrow and see just how much we have improved the learning experience. Let's call it

Adam: Amen. got one more to add on to that you guys are now made a post believe on November 4 about big news for Bradley. Bradley is going to be putting together some training, we decided based on the response. There's still a little bit of time if you want to get down on this, and what it is, is step by step program on how to grow, grow a massive brand using YouTube and GDN, Ads. And, you know, we just want to engage, because we have, especially Bradley didn't want to be putting in a lot of time and effort doing the training, you know, right leading up into the holidays if people weren't interested. But so far, we've got 71 comments, people interested in early access at a hell of a discount. So I'm going to put the link in if you want to get in on that. Just comment, leave a GIF or a comment on the Facebook thread and we will be in touch with you shortly. We're going to have some information that information about that going up. Hernan says let me in I think he got booted from the from Hump Day Hangouts.

Bradley: He's back in

Adam: Alright, well, guys, with that said, we got anything else before we get into questions here.

Bradley: I'll just give a little update on a couple of things. Number one, we've got anybody that joined Local Kingpin, which was the Google Ads training for using search ads for lead generation. That's going to be an update webinar on Monday. Because the interface has changed so much the principles, the method is still pretty much the same, though. There's just some slight differences that I'm going to cover. And the interface, Google Ads interface has changed a lot. Plus they've got a lot of new or improved features, such as automated bidding strategies and things like that, that I used to suggest never to use, but they've gotten so much better over the last year and a half, two years because of AI and it's so much better. So artificial intelligence. And so we're going to talk about that slightly plus any questions that anybody has So that'll be Monday, it'll be probably only about an hour long. That's just for me to give an update and answer questions. So if you're in Local Kingpin, I encourage you to get signed up for that.

Also, the Google Ads course that Adam was just talking about, that I'm going to be starting in two weeks, I think it's one and I say we're going to do that. I think Monday, the 25th is going to be the first webinar and that'll be about 90 minutes, maybe longer if there's, you know, a lot of Q&A at the end, and then December 9th, and that's going to be a two-part deal. The first one will be about YouTube ads and how to use that for branding. And for not not not so much lead generation it will produce leads, but it's not a direct lead generator, it it will but it's more about branding, and also driving relevant traffic into your digital assets. So your entity essentially. So we're going to talk about YouTube on the first webinar. And then on the second webinar. Again, that'll be December 9th. We're going to talk about using the Google Display Network. So it's good Google Ads training specifically for YouTube and the Google Display Network for setting up branding campaigns which works incredibly well for both building brand awareness but also for generating relevant targeted traffic from specific audiences from specific geo locations if it's for local into your entities, your digital assets for a particular brand which is great for SEO. So it's a way for using Google ads to not only produce relevant traffic but improve brand awareness as well as help the SEO that your any SEO work that you're doing, because you're driving relevant, targeted traffic from known audiences and Google to your SEO as your assets that you've been doing SEO work on. And that takes care of ART right – relevance, trust, and authority. Google understands that that's that recognize that traffic is an activity. It's relevant because it's from known audiences and specific geolocation if that's if it's for local you can target by geolocation, and it's also trusted, trusted and authority trusted traffic because it's coming from Google's known Google's audience buckets. And essentially, so it's going to be it's very, very powerful. I've just been crushing it with Google ads for clients over the last several months. And it just works really, really well. And I've been using them for my own business as well. And it's, it's just a great, great strategy. So that said, it's, um, it's going to be a pre, like right now you can get in for like, the pre-training special or whatever, where it's, it's a third of what it's going to be once I'm done recording those webinars, it's going to be packaged up and sold for probably 300 bucks, or right right, right around there. So if you want to get in for a third of that, I would recommend that you go check out the post that Adam posted, comment on it and then get signed up. Okay. All right.

Marco: So they're more than welcome to wait and pay us more later. Yeah, that's fine too. But I would suggest for people not to wait.

Bradley: Alright, so can we get into it? Now,

Adam: let's do it.

Bradley: All right, we got the screen. Okay, somebody confirm.

Adam: Good to go.

Bradley: Okay, so everybody can see my humping Wednesday meme GIFs alright. Hump Day right, Wednesday.

How Would You Add Relevancy To Your Money Site Using Drive Stacks?

So, Alright, so the first questions are and it's multiple questions. It's 13 pages worth of questions from Fred Wilson and Fred. Well, I appreciate your and I really do. I appreciate your questions. That's a bit much for Hump Day Hangouts. And also, it's getting a little bit into the weeds for stuff that we would typically only cover in this much depth in mastermind, which I'm sure you're fully aware of that, as a former mastermind member, or an RYS Academy reloaded specifically since it's so it pertains to drive stack stuff and kind of deep into the weeds. But with that said, Marco, how much of this do you want to answer?

Marco: I haven't really re-read the question. So,

Bradley: Yeah. So should I give you about 10 minutes to get through it?

Marco: All right. Do you have a general question that you can add the I'd be more than happy to answer general questions, but if it's something that's specific, yeah, that again, membership has its privileges and this things that I'm only answer for paying members and I mean, that that's just that's the way it should be. I'm sure that people who have paid three $4,000 for the course would appreciate me keeping the secret sauce in where it belongs.

Bradley: Yeah. And I agree and that, you know, I've read through the first two sections of this three-part question this three-section question, and I realized that it's, it's a lot more in-depth than what we would typically answer on a free Hump Day hangout because it's getting into very specific tactics. From RYS reloaded, we would cover it also in the mastermind, I'm sure. But this is not something that we can get that deep into it. That said, I'll give you kind of a general overview, and I'll kind of answer it and let you take add to it, Marco, and then we'll move on to the next one. So Fred, we would welcome you back to the mastermind at any moment.

If we're going to RYS Reloaded, either one of those would be good places to get this particular question answered. But that said, He's talking about his food business, his food tour business and talking about how to add additional relevancy. He did some keyword theme research using SEM Rush and looking at some of the competitors and found that there is some other keywords other than just food tour type keywords that can help to add relevancy that are kind of associated with the food tour business, but he hasn't been targeting them. And so the question is would adding in some of these other types of keyboard themes into the drive stack folders as subfolders within food tour folders, would that help to add relevancy? And because of the association that Google's is showing? And so I mean, to me, you've already answered your question. Yes. You know, if there's if there's a way to create that association, that you're you've discovered by doing some additional research, looking at competitors using some tools like sem rush and all of that kind of stuff, then yeah, you can you can add that additional relevancy into your drive stack. And that's going to certainly help. I don't know if you want to go further than that. Marco.

Marco: Yeah. Just a little bit, because, I mean, I can answer this generally we go after, especially the way that our keyword research VA is being taught, we go after anything that Google considers relevant. In a keyword, research cake, and we give you guys whoever orders the gig, the deep keyword research, all of that information. We do separate the movie will give you tasks will give you silos will give you information that we feel is where the money makers are, what the relevant keywords are, and maybe something that that that that isn't a money keyword, but Google still thinks that that is relevant. All of that is necessary because what we do inside the drive stack is create relevantly and push. Right? We create a relevance push from everything that we do from the spider web silo to the way that the drive stack is built to the way that the G site is built to the way the inner pages are done to the way that we mimic what's on the website. So yes, by all means, I don't care. We do use SEM Rush for keyword relevance, but that's not necessarily what will target what we do is we use Jeffrey Smith's Ultimate SEO Bootcamp training. And we go according to how he teaches what the top-level categories are. Then from there, work down and create the silos there, you will create three silos. But everything that's relevant should be at it. Remember when Network Empire started talking about color, current stuff, it's not, it's not there. But they began talking about it. And they began explaining it more what it was all about, what it means. And really, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to create all of this in a self-contained Google environment for the bot to feed on, which is, that's exactly what we're doing.

Is It Safe Against Plagiarism To Curate Content With Attribution From Google Snippet?

Bradley: Yeah. And so the next question part of this, which it's kinda interesting that you asked this, Fred because we covered this, our own our very own data. You know, master link builder, was at our live event, hopefully, live 2019 in Denver, just recently, and he was talking about doing something similar that you're asking about, which is adding q&a. Questions and Answers into a doc within your Gsite within your drive stack and just linking back to the source but not actually hyperlinking just putting like the text-based link. So you're providing a citation, but what so you're citing the source, right? So you're providing attribution, but you're not hyperlinking back. I would say that should be okay, provided you're not copying, you know, if you're just copying snippets, like what is shown in the Google search results for the q amp a section. So when you search for a question in Google, and it brings up that featured snippet, which is a q amp a box, right, and it's got the dropdowns, and you click the drop-down, and then it shows a short it shows the full question and then a short answer and a link back to the source where it's pulling that answer from that question and answer from you can embed that or you know, kind of copy and paste that into a Google doc or something like that. And then still late as long as you're not expanding by going to the actual destination URL and copying more of the content. It's just a snippet. So it falls under the same rules of curating content would be on a blog post in that, if you're just highlighting, you know, reusing republishing a short snippet from somebody else's content, and then you're providing attribution citing the source, then it should be okay. Now, some people, some publishers will still make eventually, you know, sometimes they may find it and they may request that you unpublish it. But as far as it being a copyright infringement, as long as it's just a small snippet, and it's you're citing the source, it should, it should never be an issue. Although like I said, out of courtesy, if anybody ever were to contact you and say Please take this down or unpublished this, then you know, I would recommend that you just do it to avoid any sort of, you know, some sort of stupid battle that could ensue. Although again, I don't think there's anything wrong with it legally because you are citing the source and it falls within a specific brand. Members of the DMC act right there were the digital, whatever Copyright Act. So I would just, you know, encourage you not to go any further than what is shown in the snippets and the featured snippets within Google search.

That said, also, you're asked about curating a lot of content about a topic putting it inside the drive stack, then putting links to your money site, the correct way to push relevancy for your money site? Again, yes, you can do that. The same thing is by curating content on your money site, you can do that. Right. So think about that. That's what we've taught for years is the best way to generate content before even money site blog posts unless you're a subject matter expert and you're creating 100% original content. The problem with that is even as an as a subject matter expert, sometimes you get you run out of ideas. But there are a ton of other subject matter experts. I'm not talking about buying shitty content farm content, I'm talking about locating subject Matter content written by subject matter experts pertaining to your topic, right or your niche your industry, and then republishing, once again snippets of it, and giving credit to where it's, you know, citing the source giving attribution. And in the case of curating on a blog, your money site blog, you know, we always recommend hyperlinking to the source. And just using nofollow External links, that's what I've always done. Um, but that's very, very powerful. Because once again, you can create an original article out of using snippets of other people's content, where you're just adding commentary and opening paragraph commentary in between pieces of curated content, which doesn't have to be just articles, it can be videos, infographics, don't curate images. Please don't do that. You can. That's a no-no, but you can curate infographics, videos, mp3, so audio files, you know, other articles, you can curate all that kind of stuff. And it helps because it allows you to be able to produce content very quickly, inexpensively. And you can even train a virtual assistant, somebody that's not a subject matter expert how to locate good content, and compile it in a logical fashion, and then just add commentary. So in other words, you know, you can come up with a topic for a blog post, find supporting articles or even differing opinion articles, right so that you can do a compare and contrast or pros and cons or argue both sides of a topic in particular curated article if that makes sense. It's very, very powerful. And it's a great way to create co-citation, which is similar to co-occurrence in that you're linking out to other relevant sources. And so again, we talked about all of that in content kingpin, it's a training course that is still 100% relevant today. I still use that for all of my clients, that same exact method for curating content for all of my clients. You can apply that to drive stack stuff to you're still going to build that relevancy, topical relevancy. Just make sure you're Giving attribution even if you're not hyperlinking to it, I recommend you absolutely always give credit where credit is due. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: No, I totally agree. It's a matter of mirroring right? Everything that you would do on the money site you do on the drive stack and Gsite, including curating content. That's right.

How Do You Add A Schema Markup To A Local Business Press Release?

Okay, cool. Well, the next question is from Kaydee. Hi, guys. How do you add schema markup to press releases for a local business? Press advantage sent an email with a link to Google structured data markup helper tool to create the code but on the page, it is asking to select a data type and then paste your URL of the page you wish to mark up. What URL do we enter here? I don't know. Because I don't use that tool. I'm going to point out another one here for you in a moment. The press release is not yet published. So it has no URL to target the markup and the data type is to tick in and the data type to tick is a local business. Thanks to know and here's why. Because if you're if you have your own press advantage account, or even if you Buy him through MGYB. And we set up an organization page or you set it up through your own account, right? So you set up an organization page, that's where you should have your local business markup. If it's, you know, an organization page for local business, you should have your local business structured data markup in the organization page, right, which will get added to all of the press releases that get pushed out. And some may not all, but many of the publisher sites that were they get published to will actually pick up that JSON LD code for local business markup. Okay, so you add that to your organization page. However, I've got a press advantage open here. Let's see if it hopefully it brings me into the same standby I'm gonna have to pause my screen for a moment because of it my plugin that reset my browser that Marco pointed out, a reset my reset the tab, so give me one second while I get what you're looking for.

Marco: Let me just tell people That if your press release gets published and you go and look at some of the websites were able to publish, and you don't see the schema markup, but you don't see an iframe that you send out or whatever, that's not on us. It's not even on press advantage. It's actually on that website, not wanting, you know, stripping out all of the code. But what we want anyway, is we want to get that in as many places as we can. And that's why I go it goes out to the entire publication network, but not every website will publish whatever it is that you submitted, just did just to make it clear to everyone because we do get support tickets about that. And it's like, yeah, there's nothing that we could do.

Bradley: Yeah, so to show you what I'm talking about. First of all, if we go to press advantage for the organization, which I should I forgot I got my ID page looped into this is going to break the browser. Let me see if I can get to Page Source before it shuts everything down. Um, Alright, so let's see if it'll pull this up. It might not. Okay, there we go. So if we scroll down, we'll see right here is my local business structure data markup starting right here. From here to there. That's my local business structure data markup, that's part of the organization page. Right. And so again, as Marco just mentioned, some sites when we publish when it distributes the press releases, it has this codependent to it. You know, it started with it with the press release, but some sites will pick it up and publish that JSON LD code as well. What I think you're talking about is for individual press releases, so here I am inside the dashboard. If you scroll down now there's a section says enter JSON LD schema, this will be attached to the release in addition to any organization-specific schema. So that's what I was talking about before. If it's a local business, you want it which is what I was showing here. You want to have local business structure data markup on the page, right that their organization page, but then For the individual, a press release, excuse me, you can add additional schema markup here. So what I would recommend here and you know you can do other stuff too depends on what you're having published. But what I would recommend is going to and this is a tool that I use most of the time, we're going to have one in MGYB here shortly, I'm not sure if it's available yet. But this is the one that I've been using for quite some time.

If you just go to Google and search for schema markup generator, look for technicalSEO.com or just go to technicalSEO.com and look for the schema markup generator, which is over here in the left sidebar. There's different types of schema markups that this tool will generate different types of schema. And so the very first one is article click on the article and then when you look down here, when it loads this page, you come down here to Article type, and there's actually one for news article. So select news article, and then just fill out these fields. And here's your schema code over here on the right-hand sidebar. Once you've completed all these fields, Then you just copy that and paste that into Press Advantage over here. Now again, there are other types of schema that can be generated. So it depends on what the article is going to be about. But just doing news article schema markup is very, very powerful, right to add to each individual press release. Okay, so that's what I would recommend. There are other tools out there that will generate this stuff to guys, this is just the one that I typically use. Okay. There's a good question. Now, by the way, that said, I gotta tease this a little bit. I'm inside my blog for that same company, I was just sharing my real estate business. And this we've got coming soon. We've got some pretty cool stuff coming up. And like the plugin will generate this Jeffrey Smith plugin, but it's the pro version, which isn't released yet, but it's coming soon. And it's got all the schema markup generator right inside WordPress for all every different type of schema, you can think of. It's fabulous. And so that same type that same article markup right there, if we come down here, there's an article type, blog posting or news article. And then I can just fill out all this stuff. It creates the code right down here and embeds it into the header of this particular blog post. And I can click update, and boom, that's going to have the same type of Article markup that we were just sharing. Pretty powerful stuff. So be on the lookout for that guys soon, early next year. That was a good tease. Right, guys?

Marco: Perfect.

Can You Embed The Website Pages In The GSite When Mirroring?

All right. Next one is Simon. He says We're marrying the main website to the G site. Can you just embed the website pages on the site pages? Or is it necessary to copy and paste the content for each website page on to the G site pages, I just use the embeds. I'm lazy like that, right. I work on the money site pages. That's what I flush out with good content. And I mirror them onto the site. And then I just and I do some other really cool stuff. We've been talking about how I do silos now. locations. So there's topical silos and in location-based silos, but I do it in a very unique way. And it works really well, especially when you use a G site. And yeah, all I do is grab the embed or create an iframe out of the money site pages, and embed them into the G site page, then I optimize the title of the G site page, obviously. And then, you know, you can mirror that into a folder inside of your folder and files inside of your drive stack. And then just smash that shit with embeds and or links, or both. And it works really, really well hit ever remember, that's your SEO shield. So we do everything externally to the SEO shield, right? So that would be the G site the drive stack and all of the tier one entity assets, which by the way, you can actually take those iframe into your syndication network properties to guys think about that. So right, there's no reason you can't push those embeds through to your syndication network properties too. good question though,

Does Proper Schema Markup Feed The Bot Enough And Not To Worry About Creating Long Articles?

Paul Thompson says, Does proper schema markup feed the bot enough that we don't need to worry about creating long articles on the pages we want to rank? No, but it does. It does definitely help a lot. Marco is probably going to be better at answering this one than me. I would still for money sites stuff still flesh out the pages, but adding structured data, like what I just showed with my blog, where you were, you know, again, you can add it manually now like right now, since the pro plugins not available, this there might be other plugins out there that do it, but I don't know if they provide the schema code that's 100% up to date. I know that a lot of times they're not updated enough. I'm not speaking badly about anybody else's plugin. I just haven't used them. But you can have like a code insert or plugin right so like. SoGo ad scripts header, footer and things like that header, footer type script plugins where you can add scripts into the head section or foot section or body section of any individual page or post, and you can go use schema creators like what I just shared, and create schema markup and and then put them into each one of your posts or pages or whatever, so that you're adding additional, you know, schema structured data that the bots love and I mean, that's guys, you're you'll you'll have an edge over a lot of your competitors if you do that kind of stuff. But I would still recommend that for money site stuff, you flush the content, the content of the page out to. Marco, what say you

Marco: Yeah, I mean that absolutely. Two things right. structured and unstructured data structured data is for the bot feed the bot as much as you can, which is exactly what we do. And why we use drive stacks and Gsites and iframe and everything that the entities entity stack, and everything else that we don't I mean that it there's a method to our madness. Now, if you then go and you send a person to a page. And now we're talking about people, we're not talking about bots, because what's going to happen is you're going to rank. And that's going to bring your traffic onto the page. And if there's nothing on that page to engage the person, then we no longer care about the but now we care about that person coming to the website and converting, finishing the action that they were set out to do, because if that person comes on the website and bounces, then you did you defeated the entire purpose of creating the all of the stacking that we created in the first place, which was to get that person onto the page that would convert them over an image is going to convert them of an image is going to get them to push and call whatever it is that you need to be done. To finish that, that then that's what's going to matter. So, two different things. If you need the content to rank you have to look at the competition. If you can rank or outrank the competition without 2000 or 3000 words of content, By all means, nobody, and nobody's going to sit there and go through the 3000 words of content on this is a really interested in whatever it is that you have to say. what you're interested in, is that conversion, because that's what centers everything at the end. And that's what Google is going to look at from beginning to end is whether that task and that goal. Well, whether it was accomplished.

How Do You Setup A GMB Page For A Business That Operates In Multiple States?

Awesome, thanks, Marco. So the next question was from jack, I'm not the next question is my client is based out of Texas but operates in five other states fully across the states not limited to anyone Metro region. What's the best way to set up the company GMB page, so reviews for one state aggregate under the main company as well. Or if that's not possible, what would be the best way to go about setting up the GMB either individually and each state Or globally under some other configuration? Well, remember Google My Business is supposed to be especially now there's another question I see on the page here a little bit lower about what happened on November 8. And from my understanding, which I've only done very, I've only kind of read through some comments and stuff, is that it was more it was basically an update to the maps algorithm for GMB stuff. And it's gone even more proximity-based. So they've Google's tightened the proximity filter, so to speak. And so with that said, Google, my business is supposed to be for local businesses, right? I mean, we've talked about setting up GMBs and you know, setting your service area, the United States, for example, and that's okay, but it's not it's okay for like the entity but it's not going to help you to rank anywhere in the United States and maps. That said, you're also in this case, you're talking about five different states. They're located in Texas but they operate in five other states. So you potentially you could have if you have an office and in each of their other states, you could have GMB for each office location. It's not necessary but you can. That said if you wanted to get reviews and let's just say Arizona, I'm just assuming let's just say that that's one of the states that you operate in. If you get reviews in Arizona, but you want them to populate on the Texas GMB if that's the way you have it set up. It's not you can't do that. If you had a gym be in Arizona, I mean, if all you have is the one Google My Business location in Texas, then it doesn't matter where you get the reviews from. They're all going to aggregate on that one and only Google My Business location. My point that I'm trying to make is you cannot get GMB reviews in one location and have them also populate onto another GMB location. You can't do that. It because each GMB entity or location is supposed to be it's own and collect its own or, you know, aggregate its own reviews. So that said, You know, I would, I would consider what it is you're trying to do. As far as if you have multiple GMBs, which I'm not sure that you do, but if you do, then what I would recommend you do is set up use some sort of review directing app. I know for contractors, one of the ones that work really well as birdeye.com. I think another one might be Podium, I've not used that. But what are some of my contractor clients use Bird Eye, and that works well, but it's like a review gate, right? So it would be an app where you send out to customers, or clients or whatever the company or the business sends out to customers and ask for some listen to review or at ask for a review. And then somebody leaves a review and it directs the app can direct where the review gets published to if that makes sense. So you have more control over it that way and if it's you know, below three stars, then it can be not posted as a review. Instead, it could be brought to, you know, sent to the customer service team so that they can reach out and try to resolve potential issues, that kind of stuff, I would look into something like that if you're trying to have more control over where your reviews are coming from and where they're going to be posted to. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: Yeah, I'm just guessing that his client and whatever it is that they're doing that it triggers a three-pack, right? It triggers a map pack and it triggers map rankings if that's the case. Then get a map wherein each one of the places where where your client operate, and associate everything to the main entity, that's how Texas so then the AI which is sophisticated enough to then understand once you begin associating all of these to understand that it's all part of the same company with it's a company that operates out of Texas but has regional offices in five other states. So that if you do get a review, for example, in Texas for the company in another state, it could be taken into consideration. I'm not saying that the AI is that sophisticated, but it could mean at some point it will be, it will be able to understand all of these different relationships and put everything together. And if you do a really good job in your structured data of putting all of this together for the buck, then you won't even have to leave it to the bot to guess and try to understand what this is all about. You can tell it you can go with everything in JSON LD to tell about what this is all about. Having done that, then you don't have to worry about reviewing everything, or aggregating everything under the main company, it will all be taken together because everything is associated if you've done your job correctly. Now, if it's globally that we're not worrying about maps, and then the reviews wouldn't even come into play, unless you have unless you can trigger a knowledge And that's a totally different story.

Bradley: Yeah, and if that's the case, if it was globally then I would just have all reviews going to the one GMB asset, wherever the primary location is, because then all you're trying to do is build the brand, not individual locations, right?

What Are Your Insights On The Reported Traffic Drop Last November 8, 2019?

So Ross says, Hey, everyone, and then he's got the follow-up question below, which I'll just that's what and now come back to Joey's question where he says Ross is new here. What the hell happened on November 8, lots of traffic drops and the insight and that's what I was just talking about, as far as I know. I'm sure Marco's got more insight on this than I do. Because I don't geek out about this stuff anymore. If I don't see major drops in my stuff, I don't worry about it. So but apparently the what it from what I understand it was another maps update where it looks like they tightened the proximity filter to where it's it's even narrower now. Is that correct? Marco?

Marco: That's absolutely correct. They tighten up on the proximity. And proximity is a ranking factor, it's we can literally call it the most important ranking factor, although you can still overcome. That's why we don't usually see all of these changes in the things that we do. Because you can overcome anything, any part of the algorithm, you can overcome it. And people are saying that well don't use brute force. Don't do this. Don't do that. You can totally overcome anything through what they call it in the Rocky movie, good old fashioned blunt force trauma. And that's just feeding the but just a whole lot of related information, wherever it is that you that you're trying to expand to. So even though even if the proximity factor is the main ranking factor, there are other ranking factors that can and do come into play, if you can overcome that one factor. So is that something to just totally say, Oh my god, now I have to go get a DMB in eternity. City, not only in the area where I am but in the surrounding areas, it's being able to overcome that proximity factor. And we do it and we do a really good job of teaching that in local GSB Pro. And now, you know being at the location and being able to upload images and being able to show Google that you're actually there and that everything is actually from that location has become more important than ever.

Bradley: Yes, very good.

Does The Size Of Embeds Matter?

So let's jump back to Joey's question. It says hi, does the size of embeds matter? In other words, embedding a 10 by 10 GMB site is still the equivalent of embedding a 600 by 300. So the frame could be one by 110 by 10 or 600 by 300. And you still pass the juice Thank you. I'm size doesn't matter. Only because if you have it too small, then that could be considered cloaking. Am I correct in that statement?

Marco: Yeah, yeah, you could, you could be tagged For cloaking, although it's really hard if I mean if you do it right there no word. Most people can't do it right, which is why we don't even teach it.

Bradley: Yeah. I mean, technically Yes, you can still pass the SEO with the iframe present even if it's a one by one pixel.

Marco: Even if it's a zero by zero

Bradley: Yeah, it technically you can absolutely do that. I wouldn't recommend it if you know, because if anybody manually reviews it and saw it, then they could, you know, they could flag you for manual action. So

Marco: that would be the biggest problem right with someone coming in and actually, you triggering, First of all, triggering enough red flags to trigger a manual review so that someone from Google would actually come to your website because nobody trusts you're not making enough money now. Nobody. Most people are making enough money to worry about Google to have someone waste all of their valuable resources on looking at your fucking website in the first place. If you do get that big or if just if you just happen to get unlucky enough to trigger a manual, and they come and see that zero by zero thing, yes, that is cloaking. There's no reason for you to have a zero by zero iframe one by one unless it's a pixel, right? Facebook, Google, whatever, if it's unless it's tracking code. So they come in and look and they see code and it looks fishy. You're more likely to get hit with a manual and probably deindex, because I've seen cloaking get hit really, really hard.

Bradley: Yeah, agreed. Okay, so we'll say, Hey, Marco, have you announced the date of the four webinars for Bert? I guess that's for the charity stuff.

Marco: Yeah, no, I'm still working on that. It's not only BERT, but I'm also going to go into entities and AI and NLP and what it actually is what it isn't. We're gonna we're going to discuss and talk about everything that that other People just either refused to talk about, or they don't know enough about it to be able to discuss it. As soon as I have it already, I'm going to announce it. I'm going to announce the date I'm going to give you the donation page. And remember this all goes to a really good cause it's getting kids who would otherwise not be able to get an education getting them into school, so that they can get a good education get trained to get jobs and, you know, have a chance at life.

Bradley: Very cool. Alright, the next one, Fred says I was worried that that might be a problem. So that's because I was kind of tongue in cheek picking. That is a huge, long question. He says, thanks so much for answering my 13 pages of questions. It helped a lot. Thanks, guys. You're welcome, Fred.

What Is The Difference Between Q&A and FAQ?

Fit. So what's up? 50 says what is the difference between Q&A and FAQ? Well, it's, it's kind of the same thing or it's very closely related. Q&A is most of the time would like You can see in the SERPs is what I was talking about earlier. But FAQs that can be a little bit more specific to an individual like a business. Right? So I mean, they're kind of basically the same. As far as schema markup, it's the same. But what I mean the difference is frequently asked questions are should be answered by a client or business, right? Like, what is the questions that they get? asked the most by prospects and or customers or clients? Right? And they should have answers to that. But when it comes to q amp, a, what I'm what these, the way that I look at it is when you go to Google and you search for question, you'll see related questions that get asked enough that somebody took the time to create content around answering that question, and then marking it up correctly on their website so that they could get added to the featured snippets in Google search. So it stands to reason that that question gets asked enough. It might be a frequently asked question for another business that maybe your particular client or business doesn't get asked that much, but it's still relevant. That makes sense. So they're very closely related, but there is a slight difference, at least in my opinion.

Marco: Yeah, the difference is that that Q&A, people should be able to either ask questions or answer questions on the website, if they're not able, if they're your frequently asked questions and your answers are there's no way for users to engage with that. Then it's FAQ frequently asked questions. Q&A, again, is on a website where people can go in and interact with the questions and the answer. Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah, guys, it you know, I've talked about this probably in Syndication Academy. And I'll probably I'll just give this give another nugget away here because it works really well. And we're almost out of time. So anyway, those Q&A questions that you can curate, right from Google and the beautiful thing about it is if you type in a question about product service in an industry whatever the questions box comes up now what the drop-downs each time you click on a drop-down, it brings up like three or four more questions. So like you can just keep drilling down into those guys and that gives you almost unlimited content. Like, Think about it. It's a content hack, right, you can grab a question and an answer from those Question and Answer boxes that Google provides you and use that in GMB posts for example, right, just cite the source just like I was talking about earlier is the in the Q&A box right that the dropdown. as it expands, it gives you the snippet with the answer at least a partial answer. It might not be the full answer, but it gives a snippet and then it has the link to read more. Well, you can still use that link in the GMB post too so you give proper credit to where it's due. That's a nofollow link and a GMB post the button link right, and a GMB post. So the button URL, the URL that you attach to the call to action button. That is a dofollow link, although I here in just the past few days probably since November 8. Some of those are nofollow. And I think it's just because Google is still tinkering around in there. But those are dofollow links. So you can still link back to the answer, have a QA, write a question and answer that you curate it you basically are republishing from Google's own search results, to add relevancy to the GMB. You can do this on your money site too and link back to the source which is only proper and right. But then use the button URL in the GMB post the link back to your money site, right to your page that also is about that very topic or question and answer right so you again, you're it's creating co-citation. It's creating topical relevancy, and you don't even have to come up with the content. You can even go through and curate groups of questions like question and then create blog posts out of those on your money site where once again, you're publishing the question plus the answer. You can create a table of contents at the top of the page Marco stop me from getting too deep here. But with a table of contents with jump links, anchor links, right that jump down to each section that has a different question. It has the answer that links back out to the source, right, but it's a nofollow link on the blog post. And then just like a curated post, you can inject some commentary in between that stuff, with an opening paragraph and a closing paragraph with a call to action to contact your business or your company, your client that you're doing the work for, for help or services with that, you know, for products or services that solve those problems, those questions that make sense.

So again, guys, it's a great strategy to use those questions as a farm those questions right mine those questions, harvest those questions or whatever you want to say from one of those from this q&a panels that pop up in the Google search results and drill down into them. You can get gold topic ideas, blog post ideas GMB post ideas from that kind of stuff.

Which Of Your Courses In Which You Teach About Making ID Pages and Mirror Gsites?

So, Alright, the last question is oh Austin Don says, which of your courses do you teach about making it pages and mirror g sites? Well the mastermind, RYS reloaded local GMB Pro, any one of those three the mastermind local GMB Pro or RYS reloaded what it was, it's covered in all three of those locations. So, am I missing any here guys?

Marco: I don't think you did. Okay.

Bradley: Adam, you want to chime in? All right, last is not really a question. It's just a comment and then we're going to wrap it up, guys. I've got a TV repairman showing up in about five minutes. Anyways, I asked the question about GMBs and review in one location versus all the states that clients the Klein operates and this was that question about Texas and five additional states. We answered previously he says no follow up question. I just wanted to say thank you for answering it and you knocked it out of the park. I've wrestled with this in my head for a week and you made it clear as day thanks again, guys for all that you do. You're very welcome. That's what this venue is for. Anything else guys?

Marco: No, not unless another question popped up now. on the page,

Adam: I think you just scroll over Bradley, but the last call for everybody. Head over there. Just follow the instructions on Facebook get early access to the YouTube and UTM course Bradley's going to be put together here over the holidays and save a bundle but like they said to if you want to wait a little bit and pay us three times too much more. So okay with that.

Bradley: And let's go ahead. I was gonna say I actually prefer that. But, you know, I want you guys to save that additional $200 to spend it on your family's at Christmas. So

Marco: and stop by the mastermind tomorrow. The webinar, because we're going to show how much we've improved the user experience. Want to show how easy it is to find the information now before it was just okay, how do I get through five years of information? Yeah, because we have five years worth of videos in there in the archives, right? So just the latest videos. It's everything since we started. As I did you get through all that, well, now we made it really simple for you to get through it.

Bradley: That's been a long time coming. There's just so much damn content, so much video-based content and long mastermind webinars. It's been hard to, for people to find stuff and that's a problem we've been dealing with for a long time. And we Marco has been working on it in the background for since I think January of this year, maybe February, but it's been a long time. And now it's here. It's ready. So it's awesome. It's a big, big improvement. So, all right, everybody, thanks for being here. We'll see some of you tomorrow, the rest of you next week. Awesome. Bye, everyone. Bye, everyone.

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

6 introductory types of link building that actually work (and why your content is nothing without links)

Think of the common phrase you heard growing up:

“You are the company you keep.”

Or,

“You are the average of your five closest friends.”

The same is true for the links that connect the pages of your website with the pages of others’ sites. What do those links say about you? Are they reputable? Are they adding value?

Hopefully your backlink profile – essentially your website’s equivalent of a Tinder profile – reflects well on you.

Does it not? Well, you need to raise your link standards then.

What we talk about when we talk about links: Internal vs. external

First things first.

There are internal links, and there are external links. Here’s what to know about each:

Internal = links that connect pages on the same domain.

They:

Create a structured hierarchy of pages within your domain, allowing search engines to better understand how pages relate to one another and how they should be crawled / indexed.

Enable site visitors to navigate throughout your domain in a logical, predictable manner.

Pass link equity (a measurement of authority and rank-worthiness) between pages.

External = links that connect pages from different domains.

They:

Serve as “third-party votes” for the authority and credibility of the page that is linked to.

Provide relevant context and additional information to users who land on one page then navigate to another via a hyperlink.

Direct traffic to targeted pages on separate domains, which may be beneficial for affiliate marketing programs, cross-channel campaigns and collaborative marketing efforts.

So what, then, is a backlink?

Simply an external link pointing back to your domain.

You want as many backlinks from credible sources as possible. That’s what link building is all about – establishing a mechanism for finding, generating and attracting backlinks to your domain.

Why build links?

Of the numerous types of link-building tactics you can pursue, it’s important to remember that there isn’t a single approach that is a silver bullet; each tactic certainly has standalone value in its own right, but a defined link-building strategy should include multiple tactics being deployed simultaneously.

That’s because with each backlink won, a snowball effect occurs.

Your Page Authority is likely to rise.

Over time, your Domain Authority, too, will likely rise.

Search engines will view your site more favourably.

Readers are more likely to find your site because it appears higher in SERPs.

As your pages prove to be valuable to readers (as evidenced by strong click-through rates and dwell time), Google will continue to push your links up the rankings.

So, as you can see, links matter. There are proven correlations between sites that generate a lot of backlinks from strong domains and their rankings in organic search results.

Here’s a quick explainer of a few key terms:

Page Authority = A score of 1-100 that indicates how likely it is that a web page will rank well in search. The higher the score the better.

Domain Authority = A score of 1-100 that indicates how likely it is that your entire website (a collection of all your crawlable pages) will rank well in search.

NoFollow links = A link to your site that is tagged with “nofollow” code, meaning search engines only use the link for page discovery, not to rank your content. You, in essence, receive no SEO credit for the backlink.

Follow links = A link to your site that search engines do recognise and your domain receives link equity from. This is the default type of link and no additional coding is required. You want Follow links.

Links: The No. 1 Google ranking factor

Google may be cryptic in reference to how its search algorithms work, but, over the last five years, the search giant has revealed through a series of Google Webmaster blogs, Twitter chats and official company releases that more than 200 ranking factors influence how it orders listings in SERPs.

The three most important are now commonly known in the SEO world to be:

Quality backlinks.

On-page content.

RankBrain (a machine-learning algorithm that measures click-through rates and dwell time).

It makes sense. Yes, Google is super smart, both its engineers and its fancy artificial intelligence. But, links are still the easiest, most effective way to truly measure what separates a good page from a bad page.

Millions of links from authoritative sites pointing toward an awesome blog post you wrote is a very positive sign that your blog is valuable to readers and that it deserves to be ranked No. 1 in SERPs.

On the other hand, if your blogs never receive backlinks, or they receive a few spammy ones, it’s a signal that you’ve got much work to do to prove your value to readers.

Knowing this, link building needs to be a priority for every company – it matters that much.

Not links for the sake of having them, but actual, quality links that speak to how well-received your content is and that it is shareable, worthy of additional traffic and has earned its rightful place atop SERPs.

Black hat vs. white hat SEO and links

Like a devil and an angel resting on your shoulders, there are black and white hat SEO and link-building schemes. I’m sure you can guess which is good and which is bad.

Black hat includes:

Purchasing backlinks.

Creating multiple blog pages and linking back to a single domain.

Backlinking to your domain within comments, footers and widgets.

Swapping backlinks via guest-posting without adding relevance or value to either domain.

Don’t do these.

Now, let’s talk about the good stuff, white hat link building.

1. Publish long, visual content

To earn a link, you first need something worthwhile to link to.

Original infographics, detailed instructional videos and in-depth guides are not easy to create, and so most brands don’t produce them. But you can.

And if you do, you’re more likely to have something that others will use as a resource and will frequently turn to whenever they have questions in the future.

In other words, publish BIG content and promote the hell out of it. That’s how you get backlinks.

2. Publish proprietary research with tons of data points

What else can’t other brands create?

Research that’s exclusive to you, of course.

We’ve done this several times ourselves, including this post that contains awesome statistics and benchmarks compiled from reviewing 181 websites. Yes, it took a lot of time, but it’s information that no one else on the web had seen before.

And that makes it valuable.

3. Reclaim broken links

Even if your content is performing well, you can’t rest. Every day, sites go down, businesses are acquired, management changes hands.

That means all those backlinks you may have previously earned are now moot. The URLs of those root domains are now broken, painting a poor picture of your site as one that is rarely updated and likely unhelpful to readers.

Using a tool like SEMrush you can quickly get a list of links that were once directing traffic to your site but are no longer in operation (more on that later). Then, you can reach out to those site operators and ask for an updated, correct link or just scrap it altogether in favor of one that may be more relevant to readers.

4. Reclaim unlinked brand mentions

Search engines have experimented with rewarding brands that are frequently mentioned online in a favorable light even if those brands aren’t receiving backlinks. However, it’s a fuzzy process at the moment and doesn’t seem to be in full effect across the web.

So even if a publication writes in praise of your company or talks highly of a piece of content you wrote, you don’t earn much tangible value from it unless you also receive a backlink.

Use a brand-monitoring tool like Google Alerts to see when and where your company name is popping up online. Email those sources and provide them with a simple hyperlink to use in conjunction with your brand’s mentioned anchor text. This will provide a navigable path for readers to find your domain and signal to search engines that your brand is being commended as link-worthy.

5. Reach out via social

You know what really incentivises someone to backlink to your site?

A little vanity.

If you include a quote of mine or you talk up a service I provide, I’m probably going to receive a healthy boost of the ego. I’m also going to want to share that article and tell others about it, because, you know, people think I’m great and your article says as much.

You can strike up this relationship via social media, likely either Twitter or LinkedIn. Just tweeting at industry influencers and building a rapport can earn their trust fairly quickly.

Also, embedding their social posts into your content, directly name-dropping them in your articles and outright requesting their opinions on a hot-button issue can endear you and your brand to relevant influencers.

At this stage, you’re much more likely to win a link back to your site.

6. Strategic guest blogging (we said strategic!)

Guest blogging too often can be seen as spammy, especially if you only ever write promotional content and use some of the black-hat techniques we discussed above (i.e., hyperlinks in your bio).

But, guest blogging does have significant value if done correctly. By this we mean posting on high-traffic, relevant industry forums where your audience lives.

Offer your opinion on the latest industry trends. Bring something to the table that your audience may not know a ton about. Do not talk about yourself the entire time and do not use multiple backlinks to your site.

Just one will do.

A web of quality links from high-traffic sites is a super effective way to show that your brand has reach beyond its own domain.

The future of link building: Linkless backlinks

While link building is mostly a manual, tedious process of asking webmasters to include a link of yours on their site, there are plenty of auto-generated email outreach templates and link audit tools that can speed up the job.

A few we recommend are:

Raven Tools Link Manager.

Moz Open Site Explorer.

SEMrush Link Building Tool.

SEMrush Backlink Audit.

But the future of link building may not include links at all.

Bing is already using a system that judges websites’ reputations based on brand mentions alone (no links) and assigns value to those domains should those mentions be positive. Google announced in 2017 that it was pursuing a similar model.

Algorithms have evolved to the point that cold, hard links aren’t necessarily the sole or best mechanism for measuring value. Social media channels, voice search and digital assistants are all huge players in the publishing world as well, which means the link landscape is much different than it was.

So, if I mention your company name when I’m talking to Alexa, shouldn’t that be evidence enough that your brand is making an impact, regardless of whether a link ever changed hands?

Well, that’s what’s currently being worked out.

There may come a time when, say, a traditional backlink is worth one point and a brand mention is worth half a point, or some similar type of measurement that more fairly factors in circumstances outside of links alone.

But, until then.

You better get to work with that link building.

Seriously.

Quit reading this and get to work.

from http://bit.ly/2ACNEqi

[lastmover]

2009 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting (Afternoon) Transcript

1. Quarterly earnings release schedule

WARREN BUFFETT: OK, let’s get back to work.

I should mention one thing, because it’s appeared in the press recently — a bit.

We will — our goal is to issue every quarterly report on the last Friday — after the close — prior to the expiration of the 40-day period after the end of a quarter that we have for reporting to the SEC.

The SEC says 40 business days — or 40 calendar days — unless it ends on a weekend. Forty calendar days after the end of the quarter — that you have to file.” If it comes on a weekend, then it’s the Monday following that.

That usually means — because we hold the meeting, usually, on the first Saturday in May — it usually means that the last Friday possible will be the day before the annual meeting.

This year, because the meeting is early on a calendar basis, because of Saturday falling on May 2nd, the last Friday will fall on May 8th. And that — our policy —

We like to get it out on a Friday afternoon, if possible, because we want people to have the whole weekend to read it before the market opens. It takes time to — I think it takes time, anyway — to digest the report.

And we’d like — we don’t want some headline to determine market prices. We want, as much as possible, a thorough reading of the report.

So we will always, unless something comes up, makes it unfeasible, we will issue our quarterly reports on the last Friday before the expiration of the 40-day period. And that’s what we’ll do this quarter. And so we have not changed anything.

2. Preliminary Q1 earnings

WARREN BUFFETT: I can tell you some preliminary figures, which then we have to file an 8-K on, because then the information I give you has to be in the public domain before the market opens.

But our — what I call our operating earnings, which would be the earnings before any gains or losses from securities or derivatives or any other transactions of that sort, the operating earnings will be about, after-tax, about 1.7 billion against 1.9 billion last year.

And — as I told you, we’re lucky to be — in this particular period — we’re lucky to be in the insurance and utility business. They’re relatively unaffected by the recession. Whereas most of our other businesses are anywhere from significantly to drastically affected by the recession.

We had an underwriting profit, in our insurance business. It was a little larger than last year.

Our float increased a couple of billion. That was primarily due to a transaction that was announced with Swiss Re, which occurred in March, in which they bought what’s known as an “adverse loss development cover” — and gave us 2 billion Swiss francs for that.

Now, that’s very, very long float. And the probability is that we will not pay out on that, probably, for at least 15 years and maybe quite a bit longer. So that’s long-duration float. And that’s what accounts for the 2 billion— roughly — $2 billion gain in float.

The utility business — earnings are reported down somewhat. But there were two items that account for that. One is that, on our Constellation Energy deal, which blew up last year, and we reported a significant gain on it, we got a bunch of Constellation stock.

And that is a mark-to-market and goes through our income account, every day, in theory, but certainly every quarter. And Constellation was down somewhat during the quarter. So that got charged against the utility earnings.

And then a larger item was a payment, and the final payment, in terms of options that were issued 10 years ago, which had the effect of increasing Berkshire’s interest in MidAmerican, which we like.

But we wrote a check, a significant check, with MidAmerican to buy out the option. So — and that got recorded as an expense in the first quarter.

But the utility earnings are more than satisfactory with those two items in it.

Then when you get into all of our other businesses, with just a couple of exceptions — those businesses are basically down. I mean, they’re all getting hit to varying degrees by the recession. So — that’s basically the operating earnings story.

Our book value per share went down about 6 percent in the first quarter, which is a combination of security markets, and the fact that the credit default swaps, which — I’m the one responsible for writing them — that experience has turned worse, even since I wrote the annual report, in terms of bankruptcy.

So that loss — or potential loss — we’re actually still funds ahead by a substantial margin — but that potential loss — and, I would say, expectable loss — is reflected in the first quarter figures. And of course, there’s been some bounce-back since March 31st. But that’s pretty much the story of the first quarter.

We ended the quarter with cash equivalence of about 22.7 billion, excluding any cash at the utility or at the finance company operation.

But we spent 3 billion of that the next day on a Dow Chemical preferred. So we actually ended, effectively, one day later, the quarter with a little less than 20 billion in cash.

We always keep a significant amount of cash at the parent company, not at the regulated subsidiaries, so that — whatever comes along, we’re prepared for.

And that’s pretty much the story of the first quarter. And I wouldn’t be surprised — I mean, I guess I would almost be surprised if the opposite happened, if the world changed much — over the remainder of the year.

I think that we will continue, barring some huge natural catastrophe, we will do quite well on insurance. And we will do in the utility operation. And we won’t do well in most of the other operations.

But we will have significant operating earnings, which I mentioned is about a billion-seven the first quarter.

If you look at our operating earnings, a billion, or a little more, that comes from MidAmerican — from our energy business, basically — we’re going to leave in that business. I mean, there’s all kinds of opportunities to do things even within our present subsidiaries. There’s lots of projects that promise decent returns.

So you should not think of that billion or so as being available to us at the parent. It would be, if we wanted it to be. But as a practical matter, we’re going to leave it all in.

The rest of the earnings are available to us in cash, plus or minus any change in the float, to do anything interesting that comes along.

So that’s an abbreviated summation of the first quarter. We will put out the 10-Q next Friday after the close. And we’ll continue to follow that policy.

3. “Value” investments? What other kind are there?

WARREN BUFFETT: With that, we’ll go to Andrew.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Excellent. This question actually just came across the BlackBerry before lunch from what I think is an audience member.

Josh Wolfe (PH) of New York writes the following: “BYD appears to be more like a venture capital speculative investment than a value investment. Would you both explain that investment, your logic behind it, and your expectations for it?”

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. I’m going to turn that over to Charlie in just one second. But Charlie and I think there is no other kind of investment than a value investment.

In other words, we don’t know how anybody would invest in a non-value investment. So we’ve always been puzzled by the term, “value,” and saying that contrasts with growth or anything.

Value relates to getting a lot for the expectable flow of cash in the future, in terms of what you’re laying out today.

So we — we’ve always — every time somebody characterizes us as value investors, we always ask them, what other kind can there be?

4. Munger: Electric car maker BYD is a “damn miracle”

WARREN BUFFETT: But Charlie is our team leader here on BYD. And he gets very excited. So I may have to control him. But go to it, Charlie. (Laughter)

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yes, well, of course, BYD, although its founder is only 43 years old, is not some early-stage venture capital company.

BYD is one of the main manufacturers to the world of the rechargeable lithium battery. And it achieved that position from a standing start at zero under the leadership of the founder, Wang Chuanfu.

And — they went on into cell phone components and developed a huge position.

And then, finally, not satisfied with having worked a couple of miracles, Wang Chuanfu decided he would go into the automobile business.

As nearly as I can tell, it was zero experience in automobiles. And from a standing start at zero and with very little capital, he rapidly was able to create the best-selling single model in China.

And that’s against competition that was Chinese joint ventures with all the major auto companies of the world, technological marvels with way more capital and so on.

This is not some unproven, highly speculative activity. What it is, is a damn miracle. And — (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: I warned you. (Laughter)

CHARLIE MUNGER: And of course, Wang Chuanfu has hired 17,000 engineering graduates. And those engineering graduates are selected from a billion, 300 million people in China.

And he’s hiring at the top of the classes. And — so you get a remarkable aggregation of human talent.

And then you’ve got the basic quality of the Chinese people. Which, when unfettered from the wrong kind of government — for instance, the wrong kind of emperor — the Chinese people succeed mightily.

When they came to this country as “coolies” — slaves — they would leave and soon be the most important people in the town.

So this is a very talented group of people. And, in a sense, this particular period may be Chinese — the Chinese day.

And of course, these batteries, these lithium batteries, are totally needed in the future of the world. We need them in every utility company in America. We need them in every utility company in the world.

And we have to use the direct power of the sun. And we can’t do that without marvelous batteries. And he’s in the — BYD is in the sweet spot on that stuff.

And I know it looks like a miracle. And it looks like Warren and I have gone crazy. But I don’t think we have.

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, one of us, at most. (Laughter)

CHARLIE MUNGER: And that car you’re going to see in the annex — I think they make everything in that car except the glass and the rubber. There may be a couple of small exceptions.

That’s unheard of. Whoever went into the automobile business and made every part, and made the automobile a best-settle — best-selling — thing? This is not normal. I mean, this is very unusual.

And I regard it as a privilege to have Berkshire associated with a company that is trying to do so much that’s so important for humanity, when you get right down to it. Because it may be a small company, but its ambitions are large.

And I don’t want to bet against 17,000 Chinese engineers led by Wang Chuanfu, plus 100,000 more talented Chinese in a brand-new area — constructed the way they want it. I will be amazed, if great things don’t happen here.

I don’t think, given the size, it can be all that important to Berkshire, financially. But I have never, in my life, been more — felt more privileged to be associated with something than I feel about BYD.

WARREN BUFFETT: BYD was Charlie’s last year. The Irish banks were mine. So he’s — (laughter) — the winner.

BYD, incidentally, does $4 billion a year of business. I mean, so it is not a small business. And it will probably get a lot larger.

5. U.S. dollar will buy less in the future

WARREN BUFFETT: Let’s go to the — area 2.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello, Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger. My name’s Dan Lewis (PH). I’m from Chicago.

My question has to do with the U.S. dollar versus other major currencies. You spoke a little bit already about the — government policy and its effect on inflation in the future.

And just by itself, you’d think inflation would hurt the dollar. But obviously, there’s a lot of other factors at play. So I’m kind of interested in knowing your latest outlook on the dollar.

I know you’ve been bearish. But given everything that’s been thrown up in the air in the last six months, how you think these various things will come together, trade deficit, budget deficits, and how it will affect the dollar?

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. It’s pretty unpredictable. But the — I will guarantee you that the dollar will buy less, you know, five, 10, 20 years from now. And it may be — it may buy very, very substantially less.

But I don’t know that, obviously. But we are doing things that will hurt the purchasing power of the dollar.

On the other hand, the same thing is happening in countries around the world. So it’s very difficult to say whether the dollar versus the pound or the dollar versus the euro, et cetera — how that will behave.

Because, you know, the British will run a deficit this year of 12 and a fraction percent of GDP. And even the Germans, with their, you know, long-time fear of inflation, will probably run a deficit of 6 and a fraction percent of GDP.

So you’ve got governments around the world all electing to run — and I think properly so — electing to run very material deficits, in some cases, you know, close to unprecedented except in wartime — electing to do that in order to offset this contraction of demand by their citizenry.

And how that plays out in relative exchange rates, I can’t tell you. How it will play out in terms of the value of their currencies’ purchasing power in the future versus now, I think, is fairly easy to say, and that’s that it’s going to cause units of currency to buy a lot less over time.

That isn’t going to happen in the next year or two. But that doesn’t mean that markets won’t start anticipating it at some point. And it’s going to be a very, very interesting future.

I mean, we are doing things that we haven’t seen in the past. And policymakers do not know the outcome of that. I don’t know the outcome of it. You do know it will have consequences. And — you can bet on inflation.

Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well — I was raised here in Omaha. And I well remember the two-cent first class stamp and the five-cent hamburger. And so, in my life, there’s been a lot of inflation.

And in my life, I think I’ve had the most privileged era of all history in which to live. So a little inflation is not going to ruin the lives of any of us.

The trick is to avoid the runaway inflation. That is a problem Warren and I are going to quitclaim to the younger people. (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: Here is a product, though. Six and a half ounces of this product, 100 years ago, cost a nickel plus a two-cent deposit. And it’s hardly gone up in price at all. It’s very interesting. And wheat hasn’t gone up that much or oats or things of that sort.

And on the other hand, a newspaper that cost a penny 100 years ago costs a dollar now and they lose money turning it out. So it gets very uneven, in terms of its impact.

6. Buffett “irritated” by the loss of triple-A rating

WARREN BUFFETT: Carol?

CAROL LOOMIS: Warren, Charlie — this question, I got a good many of these. This one comes from — who does it come from? Well, it comes from Mr. Kempton (PH) — Kempton Lam or Lam Kempton (PH) — one of the two — from Calgary, Canada.

And the question is, “How would you quantify the financial impact and damage of Berkshire losing its triple-A credit rating — which increased the cost of capital of Berkshire, which was surely a competitive advantage for the company?

“And Warren, what are you doing actively to try to restore Berkshire’s triple-A rating? Do you think that Berkshire will be able to regain it?”

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, it won’t regain it soon, because I don’t think rating agencies will turn around like that, even if they should. We have a triple-A from Standard & Poor’s, but it’s provisional. And they’re going to look at it in about — I think they said about 12 months.

Moody’s affirmed the rating early in January. Then we issued a bond at one point, where it was — well, that was right after the rating changed.

And actually, in terms of our credit default swaps, which is a metric you can use for credit acceptance — although, I’ll tell you, in a second, an interesting aspect of that — that spread came down, actually.

It makes very, very little difference in our borrowing costs. I mean, very little. And it never has, incidentally. I mean, double-As versus triple-As, the spread has always been very small.

And people would argue, in finance classes and all that, it wasn’t worth paying the price to have a triple-A because you didn’t save that much on debt. And it costs you, in terms of return on equity.

I never subscribed to that. And I very much liked having a triple-A from both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. I was disappointed when Moody’s downgraded us. We didn’t really think that was going to happen, but it did.

And — it doesn’t have any material effect on borrowing costs. It does cause us to lose some bragging rights around the world in terms of our insurance promise, although nobody ranks ahead of us, that’s for sure.

But, it will not change back in a hurry. I mean, people don’t make decisions in committees that they reverse very quickly. It’s just not human nature.

We’re still a triple-A in my mind. And actually, we’re a triple-A in Standard & Poor’s’ mind, till we hear something differently.

We certainly think, and we run it in a way, that there can be no stronger credit than Berkshire.

It’s difficult for a rating agency, if they have a checkbox system of ratios and such, to measure something like the attitude of management toward creditors.

But I will assure you that Berkshire has a management that regards meeting its obligations as sacred and a lot more important than increasing earnings per share or anything of the sort.

I mean, we have obligations to people in something like workers’ compensation that go 50 years out in the future. I mean, this is somebody that’s been injured severely and they get a check every month from Berkshire.

And you know, that’s a lot more important than whether we earn X, or X plus a tenth, or a couple of tenths, percent on equity. And we conduct ourselves, or we try to — certainly try to conduct ourselves — so that not only will people get those checks, but they’ll never have to even worry about getting those checks.

And that’s very difficult for a rating agency to quantify that attitude on the part of the management of Berkshire. But believe me, it exists.

And — I would say that the triple-A change at Moody’s is not going to be material in the future of Berkshire. But it still irritates me.

Charlie? (Laughs)

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, at least they showed a considerable independence. (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: Who knows? That may have entered into it, too.

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah. My attitude is quite philosophical. I think the next change at Moody’s will be in the opposite direction. And I think that will happen because we deserve a higher rating and they’re smart. (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: When Charlie and I disagree, and we do disagree a lot. We never argue, but we disagree.

And Charlie, when he gets to the point where he really wants me to do something, like buy the BYD interest or something, he always says to me, “Well,” he says, “in the end, you’ll see it my way. Because you’re smart, and I’m right.” (Laughter)

7. “Crazy” prices for Berkshire credit default swaps

WARREN BUFFETT: I will — I can’t resist pointing out one item that is, maybe, a little technical to most of you. But there are some people here who will find it quite interesting. And it actually even enters into credit ratings to a great extent, the credit default swaps enter into it.

When we write a, let’s take an equity put option, and we get paid for writing a billion dollar put, somebody pays us $150 million, we get the $150 million of cash that day.

And we set up a liability for 150 million the first day, for the value or the — that we — our appraisal of what it’s going to cost us to meet that obligation. I mean, that’s the market price for it.

The other guy takes 150 million out of his cash and sets up a $150 million receivable that day.

Now, these receivables and payables change over time. But the first day, no profit, no loss, just cash changing hands. One guy sets up an asset, the other guy — we set up a liability.

Now, as the world has developed in the last couple of years, the value of that asset to the other fellow has increased in a mark-to-market basis.

And he reports that through earnings. So his asset goes up. Our liability goes up. And we report that through earnings as a loss.

But we’ve got the cash and he’s got an asset from us that comes due in 15 years or something like that.

And in the last couple of years, the — his auditors — his credit department — has said, “Gee, you’ve got a receivable from Berkshire that comes due in 15 years. And, they don’t have to post collateral. So you have to go out and buy a credit default swap to protect yourself against that receivable going bad.”

Now, that has two effects. A, he’s laying out money every year to buy something that doesn’t cost us anything but costs him real money. So the — and the more he shows us a profit, the more of the credit insurance he has to buy, so the more money it costs him every year.

And that has driven up the demand for credit default swaps at Berkshire, which made for some crazy prices. So at one point, our credit default swaps were costing that guy five percent a year.

So if he was showing, say, a $200 million asset, he was laying out $10 a year, and he was going to have to lay it out for 15 years, just because of these — this credit department’s requirements.

And it made it very unpleasant for the people on the other side of our transactions, even though they keep writing up the profits. It doesn’t cost us anything. But it does result in kind of a crazy market in the credit default swaps.

I realize that that has not been a burning issue with many of you. But it is an unusual — it’s something I didn’t anticipate.

And it explains why, to some extent, people may want to modify their contracts with us. And if they — with us — and if they want to modify them enough, we’ll answer the phone. But in the meantime, we’re sitting with the money. (Laughter)

8. MidAmerican working with Iowa on wind farms

WARREN BUFFETT: Let’s go to area 3.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Jim Hadden (PH), a Cornhusker in Davenport, Iowa.

On our drive over from Davenport, we noticed two rather large wind farms by MidAmerica Energy.

And my question is, when will be the return on investment of these wind farms? And are Berkshire Hathaway looking at any other alternative energies?

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, we’re the largest, in terms of owned capacity in wind, in the country, I believe, of any utility. And Iowa has the greatest percentage of its electricity generated by wind.

But of course, the wind only blows about 35 percent of the time in Iowa, something like that. And we’ve got people here who can be more accurate than that. But — so you can’t count on it for your base load or anything of the sort.

But Iowa has been very, very receptive and, I would argue, progressive, in encouraging us — and we’ve encouraged them, in return — to bring in a lot of wind capacity.

We are a net exporter of electricity in Iowa. Iowa’s far more than self-sufficient in our service area in terms of electric generation. And I think that works to the benefit of the people of Iowa.

And we have an arrangement with Iowa. We — as you may know, we have not increased our rates at all — what — for more than a decade now. And that’s been achieved by efficiencies. It’s been achieved with wind generation.

We have a return that’s built in on that that’s fair to us, fair to the people of Iowa. And part of that return comes in the form of a tax credit — I think it’s 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour — that is given to anybody in the United States that develops wind power generation.

We love the idea of putting in more wind. And we’re doing it. We’re doing it out at PacifiCorp. And I think we’ll continue to be a leader in it.

One advantage we have over, perhaps, some people is that we are a big taxpayer, so that we don’t have to worry about whether the tax credits are useful.

I guess the tax credit could be sold, also. But we don’t need to do that in our particular situation. So you’ll see more and more wind generation by the MidAmerican companies.

When we went into PacifiCorp out on the West Coast, to six states out there, they had virtually nothing — maybe nothing at all — in wind generation. And we’ve developed a lot. And we’ve got more coming on.

Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Oh, I think in practically anything that makes sense in utilities, the Berkshire subsidiaries will be leaders. I think we can all be very proud of MidAmerican and its two leaders.

9. Constellation and Dynergy deals

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, we’re enormously proud of MidAmerican. And we will do a lot more in utilities over time. Constellation didn’t work out. I wish it had. But we were back there — Constellation, we learned of their troubles on a Tuesday at noon. I mean, we saw it in the stock price and so on.

Dave Sokol and Greg Abel were in Baltimore that evening with a firm, all-cash bid to solve Constellation’s problems. And Constellation was likely to get downgraded within 48 hours, maybe 24 hours.

And they would’ve had posting requirements in connection with various derivative transactions that they probably would not have met. I mean, they were facing bankruptcy.

And we literally went from a phone call that Dave made to me at noon or 1 o’clock to handing them a firm bid that evening in Baltimore. And that’s one of the advantages of Berkshire. That is — I think that’s a durable competitive advantage.

I think there are very few organizations that will act in that manner and that — where you have the talent there that you feel is — as a CEO — you can back them up with that kind of money without worrying about it.

So it’s — that is a plus — for Berkshire, even though it didn’t work out in that case. We will do more in the utility business.

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, you bought a pipeline, didn’t you, in about two hours?

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, we did buy a pipeline, and it’s turned out very well.

And, in that particular case, the company, Dynegy, that — this was back in 2002 or so — the company needed the money enormously. They had gotten the pipeline from Enron. It was a very complicated transaction.

But they needed the money. And we needed the Federal Trade Commission approval, the FTC approval, on the deal, as would anybody that was buying it.

And we literally wrote a letter. I wrote a letter to the commission. And I said, you know, “These guys need the money. They need it before the 30-day period is up. And let us go through with this early. And we’ll do any damn thing you tell us, subsequently.”

And Berkshire can make that kind of a transaction. We don’t ask the lawyers before we do it or anything. We just do it.

And that is an advantage. And it was an advantage to Dynegy. It got them through a period that they would’ve — I’m not sure they would’ve gotten through otherwise. So, we can move fast when the time comes.

But the — one of the reasons we — there’s a couple of reasons we move fast. A, we’ve always got the money. You know, but — and we’ve got a mental attitude toward that.

But we also know we’ve got the managers that can deliver on the properties, once we own them. And that’s a huge, huge advantage. Back —

(BREAK IN RECORDING)

10. Foreign ownership rules limit China opportunities

WARREN BUFFETT (IN PROGRESS): — China. We would be restricted by that ownership limitation.

But it’s very hard to imagine that we won’t find more things to do in China over time. I mean, it’s a huge market. We do a lot of things. And some of those are exportable.

And there will also, perhaps, be opportunities to buy more businesses there. We would’ve bought more than 10 percent of BYD, if we could’ve. But, that’s all that they wished to sell us. So we hope that comes about.

11. U.S. trade deficit is actually China’s problem

WARREN BUFFETT: In terms of the Chinese dollar holdings, you know, in a way, they can’t get rid of owning more dollar assets. I mean, the nature of it is, if we’re going to run a, as we did a few years ago, or a year or two ago —

If we’re going to run a $250 billion trade deficit with China, I mean, if they’re going to send us goods — and we want those goods — to the tune of $250 billion more than we sell to them, they end up with $250 billion of little pieces of paper.

And they can convert those pieces of paper, called U.S. dollars, they can convert them into — U.S. real estate, into U.S. stocks, U.S. government bonds. They can do all kinds of things.

They can even trade them to the French, you know, and get euros or something in exchange. But then the French have the problem.

So the — Chinese dollar assets are going to build as long as there’s a significant trade surplus with China. And then they have the choice of what to put those dollars into. And they have elected, so far, to put a significant amount — into U.S. government bonds.

And — I think — a major official, about a month ago or so in China, said he wasn’t too happy about the prospect of what’s going to happen in terms of the purchasing power of that money that’s been put in U.S. government bonds. And I would say he’s right.

I mean, he — it — he — anybody that owns dollar obligations outside of this country is, if they hold them a long time, is going to get less back in the way of purchasing power than existed at the time that they took on those dollar obligations.

And it’s a major problem, not the world’s worst problem, but it’s a major problem for a finance minister or a government in China to decide what to do with this buildup that comes about, because they are running a trade surplus.

And — they’ve set up the Chinese Investment Corp, which has a couple hundred billion dollars in it — in terms of deciding to make investments around the world, but —

12. Munger: China’s economic policies are “exactly right”

WARREN BUFFETT: It’s an interesting question, if you made me the finance minister of China, what I would do with the trade surplus, the funds that came in because of the trade surplus.

And I think it’ll take it over to Charlie and ask him what he would do, if he were the finance minister of China.

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, I (Inaudible) that is a very easy question. I would do exactly what they’re doing.

I think China has one of the most successful economic policies in the world. And China has advanced more rapidly than the rest of the world. And, I would say their policies are exactly right.

And their rate of advance is so great and so meaningful that if they lost a little bit of purchasing power on their dollar holdings, it’s a trifle in the big scheme of things from the viewpoint of China.

So I’ve got nothing but admiration for the way the Chinese have been running their own affairs. And they’re going to be very hard to compete with all over the world. And that is exactly the correct policy for China. That’s the way you get ahead fast is to be very hard to compete with all over the world.

So I think they’re doing it exactly right. And I think that the United States and China should be very friendly nations. Because we’re joined at the hip.

WARREN BUFFETT: So you’d suggest they keep buying U.S. Treasurys at —

CHARLIE MUNGER: You bet.

WARREN BUFFETT: — practically no yield?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Whatever the yield. They’re not no-yield. Because they can buy longer.

WARREN BUFFETT: OK, we’ve got some advice for the Chinese government. (Laughter)

13. Deal post-mortems shouldn’t be public

WARREN BUFFETT: Carol?

CAROL LOOMIS: “In the past, you have stated that management should —”

This question comes from Ingrid Hendershot.

“In the past, you have stated that management should be required, after several years, to do a post-mortem on acquisitions it makes. Would you each provide us with your post-mortem on Berkshire’s largest acquisition, General Re?”

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, I don’t think — I’ll comment on General Re, but I don’t think we generally should make our post-mortems public. I don’t think — I think that, if we acquired —

We do believe in post-mortems. We strongly believe in them. We think they’re conducted at far too few companies. It’s easy to propose a deal and it’s much harder to account for it later on.

And — Charlie is a big fan of rubbing anybody’s nose in their own problems.

And it absolutely should be done. I don’t think it necessarily should be made public.

I don’t think that you attract businesses by — and managers — by pointing out — even though you are the one that made the mistake, as the acquirer, in your projections — pointing out the shortfalls that may have occurred with the managers that are maybe doing a very good job to try and overcome the fact that you made a mistake in buying it in the first place. So I don’t want to — I wouldn’t want to get into that.

14. Buffett: I was “dead wrong” on Gen Re’s reputation

WARREN BUFFETT: Gen Re has worked out well after a terrible, terrible start. And I was dead wrong, in 1998, when I bought it, in thinking that it was the Gen Re of 15 years earlier, which had absolutely the premier reputation in the insurance world.

And some practices, in terms of reserving and underwriting, had changed somewhat. But I’m happy to say that, thanks to the combined work of Tad Montross, who is with us here today, and Joe, that the —

CHARLIE MUNGER: That’s Joe Brandon.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, Joe Brandon, of course. But Joe and Tad, when they took over in, what, September of 2001, actually — right about the time of the World Trade Center problem — they took after all of the problems. They went right after them, reserving, underwriting, whatever it might be.

And Gen Re is the company now that I thought it was when I purchased it in 1998.

So we’re proud of them. It was a very tough job. It wasn’t one that was going to get done by itself. And that, to some extent, when you tighten up on an organization that has fallen into some lax ways, it can — you know, that is not an easy job.

Both of them, or each of them, they could’ve left for some other place and made just as much money, maybe more money, not had to face the problems that they faced at Gen Re. But they hung in there. And now we have an organization that we feel terrific about and has a great future.

Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, I think that’s right. And — but it’s very important that you have an ability to turn your lemons into lemonade.

And we were very, very lucky to have Joe and Tad to help us in the process. It wasn’t pleasant. And it wasn’t pretty. And it was very successful.

And it wasn’t something that ordinary managers would’ve been at all likely to do. You had to be very tough minded to fix General Re. And they really did fix it.

WARREN BUFFETT: When we do the post-mortems, we, in a sense, are looking at our own handiwork. I mean, we make the decisions.

You know, it’s not some strategy department someplace, or vice president in charge of acquisitions, or some management consultant that comes in and tells us we ought to buy this or that. We’re looking at our decisions.

And that’s very important. And we talk about that. And we’ve made some dumb decisions. And most of them have been mine. Because I’m the guy that’s sitting in Omaha, making most of the decisions.

But it would really be a mistake to discuss, in public, my dumb decisions, which might reflect, you know, on some of the managers in some of the arenas. So we will not disclose those. But we will tell you that there are dumb decisions made around Berkshire.

CHARLIE MUNGER: The really brilliant decision in the General Re transaction was made by Joe Brandon. He was the one who decided that Berkshire should buy General Re. And he caused the transaction. And it wouldn’t have happened, I think, if he hadn’t been there. Would you agree with that?

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, that’s true.

CHARLIE MUNGER: And Joe was the steward for the General Re shareholders. We got a decent result, and they got a fabulous result. So if capitalism has any heroes in that transaction, why, Joe’s the hero.

15. “We are not big believers in contracts”

WARREN BUFFETT: OK, let’s go to number 6.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, sir. Mr. Buffett, Mr. Munger, I’m Chuck Hosmer (PH) from California.

And you mentioned earlier the union cooperation at the Buffalo newspapers. Without the introduction of unions, how do you view contracts for other employees of BRK subsidiaries?

WARREN BUFFETT: I’m just trying to think whether we have any real contracts.

CHARLIE MUNGER: I hope not.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, we are not big believers in contracts. We hand people hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, in some cases, to sell us their business.

And the decision we have to make is, are they going to have the same passion for the business after they hand us the stock certificate and we hand them the money? Are they going to have the same passion that they had beforehand?

And if we’re wrong on that, no contract is going to save us.

We don’t want relationships that are based on contracts. So — I can’t — you know, I’m — I can’t really think of a formal contract that we have.

We have understandings about bonus arrangements and that sort of thing — and that’s not that complicated — with various managers.

I mean, we have — the comp of the top person at each company is basically my responsibility. And we have all kinds of different arrangements, because we have all kinds of different businesses.

Some of our businesses, capital’s an important factor. So you have to put that in the comp arrangement. Some of it, capital doesn’t mean a thing. Some of our businesses are very easy and very profitable. Some of them are very tough. And it takes a genius to, you know, to get a so-so result.

So we have a whole bunch of different arrangements on that. But we don’t try to hold people by contracts. And it wouldn’t work. And we basically don’t like engaging in them. So you’re looking at a company that — can you think of any contracts we have, Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: No. Our model is a seamless web of trust that’s deserved on both sides. That’s what we’re aiming for. The Hollywood model, where everyone has a contract, and no trust is deserved on either side, is not what we want at all.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, we don’t — we do not want to negotiate the size of the executive bathroom. I mean, that is not our game.

16. How to get yourself thrown out of Buffett’s office

WARREN BUFFETT: Becky?

BECKY QUICK: This is a question from Edward Donahue (PH) from Belmont, Massachusetts.

“In the spirit of raising partnership value in these times, has Warren given any thought to spinning off as separate companies?

“My thinking is that some of these companies would sell at higher multiples to book value that Berkshire currently does. Further, where appropriate, consolidate companies with similar industries with the wish to save on management costs, administration, and even potential selling costs.”

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, we will not be spinning off any companies. We had to — we were a bank holding company, believe it or not, at one time. We became one in 1969. Then we were given 10 years to dispose of our bank, which was in Rockford, Illinois, and we did have a, in effect, a spinoff of that.

But, we — if somebody comes around us and says, “Gee, you can — you’ve got a multiple of X, and you can have a multiple of 1 1/2 times X for this subsidiary, if you spin it off,” you know, we can’t wait to throw them out of the office. I mean, it just doesn’t interest us.

We are not looking for something that gives a, you know, a one-month jump or something like that in market value. If we’ve got a wonderful business, we want to continue it within Berkshire.

We’ve got this ability within Berkshire, which is a real asset, in terms of moving money around into various opportunities without tax consequences. I mean, they’re part of a consolidated return.

So if a See’s Candy is a wonderful business, which it is, but it generates a lot of capital that can’t be used effectively in that business, we can move it to some other business or buy other businesses with it.

And we have a real advantage in allocation of capital that a shareholder, basically, can’t do as tax efficiently as we can do it within the company.

Plus, when we buy businesses from people, we make them a promise. You know, they can read our economic principles in the back of the annual report. And they know that we’re buying for keeps.

You know, it is a marriage that’s going to last. And we’re not going to, because we can get a higher multiple or something for a temporary period of time, spin something off.

On top of it, that — there would be those other costs. But that’s not the determining factor. It’s the basic principle at Berkshire that we buy to keep. And people can trust us to keep our word on that.

Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah, the — so many of those spinoffs, because your market cap will be a little higher, Wall Street sells that stuff, so they can get fees.

It isn’t really doing that much for anybody, in the ordinary case.

I suppose the one exception that could happen, if the regulation was crazy enough, you know, you can imagine something that might cause Berkshire to go to two parts. But short of something like that, you’re looking at what you’re going to get.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, if it was actually hurting some operation that — because regulation was focused in that, and that tied the hands of other companies in the Berkshire group, you know, we’d have to look at that.

But, as Charlie said, we have listened to presentation after presentation, over a lot of years, about — by investment bankers, you know, basically saying, you know, “If you just do this wonderful thing,” you know, all these — that the market will love you.

And — it — how much is conscious, and how much is subconscious, we’ll never know. But the one thing we do know is there’s always a fee that accompanies it.

17. Don’t know much about student loan business

WARREN BUFFETT: Area 7.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Good afternoon. Mike Nolan from Montclair, New Jersey.

Until recently, the student loan business in the United States has been a very attractive and successful one. However, proposed changes coming out of Washington have thrown the industry into disarray.

Could you comment on the industry, which is highly reliant on both faith, trust, as well as financing, and talk a little bit about the companies in this business?

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, I don’t know that much about it. Maybe Charlie does.

CHARLIE MUNGER: No, I don’t know this much about it, either. There’s been a fair amount of scandal, in terms of the sales methods. Some of the companies in the field got awfully cozy with some of the university administrators and so on.

WARREN BUFFETT: It’s been a long time since Charlie and I thought about getting a student loan. So we — (laughter) — haven’t checked the regulations too carefully on that one.

CHARLIE MUNGER: But, you know, we don’t know a lot about it.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. (Laughter)

I actually got approached, I guess it was about a year ago or a year and a half ago, on the deal that fell through, on Sallie Mae.

And I said, at the time, to the fellow that called me, I didn’t understand it that well. And it turned out to be a good thing I didn’t.

18. Earnings “management” at Goldman Sachs and General Electric

WARREN BUFFETT: Andrew?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: OK, this question comes from John McDonald (PH).

And he asks, “Warren, in your General Electric and Goldman Sachs investments, do you think you’ve picked attractive businesses or simply attractive securities?

“Ben Graham’s ‘Security Analysis’ suggests that the most frightening things an executive management can do is manage earnings, which it could be argued both of these firms do. What is your reaction to that?”

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, I can say that I could argue that a very substantial percentage of American industry over the last 15 years, at one time or another, has managed earnings. And I’ve witnessed it and argued against it and gotten no place.

So, I don’t regard that as a malady that’s limited in its experience. I don’t know anything. I would not get into the specifics of those companies.

I felt good about those companies, in terms of the quality of the businesses they had and the quality of the management. But it was the terms, primarily, that caused us to make those deals.

I mean, those were made in a period when markets were in chaos and you should’ve gotten very good terms for committing money then.

Very people were either willing, or in some — many — most — cases, able to commit major sums on short notice. And it took good terms in order for us to do it. It —

And like I say, I’m not sure there was any second possibility in those cases. It was a really extraordinary period.

We were happy to do it. I feel good about the deals, obviously, because we got a very good coupon. But considering the circumstances under which the deals were made, I don’t think there was an alternative.

So if they wanted 5 billion and 3 billion, respectively, on those deals, I think we were the low bid, in effect. But I also think we made very decent deals.

And you know, could we have done something better with the money at that time? I don’t — as I measured at that time, I could not find anything that I liked better. It was the terms of the deals overwhelmingly, although we obviously liked the businesses.

I know the managers, the CEOs, of both companies very well. And I think they are terrific people. I think they’re smart people.

And I think they’re very — they’ve been very straight with us, straight with us long before we made a deal with them. So we’re very happy with those deals.

Charlie?

19. “Very happy relationship” with Goldman Sachs

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah, you know, there’s been a lot of criticism of investment banking in this arena, starting with that movie. But Berkshire itself has had marvelous services from all of its investment bankers, which is interesting.

WARREN BUFFETT: Think of what we’d be saying, if we’d been mistreated. (Laughs)

We’ve done a lot of business with Goldman Sachs over the years. And my experience goes back to when I was 10 years old and met Sidney Weinberg, who was running the firm and was a legendary Wall Street — well, he was “Mr. Wall Street” for a long, long time.

And I was a friend of Gus Levy’s. And Gus Levy also did some really nice things for us, including when we had a little nothing company, called Diversified Retailing, which Charlie and I and Sandy Gottesman jointly formed.

Gus came in on an underwriting of a $6 million issue brought by New York Securities, which he wouldn’t have dreamt of coming in, you know, for — in that kind of a deal, under most circumstances. And he had Goldman Sachs join in at that time.

So there have been a lot of things that have made for a very happy relationship with Goldman Sachs. I feel good about them.

And of course, we do lots of business with General Electric. We’ve bought I don’t know how many of those wind turbines from them.

But GE — you know, is a very, very important American institution. We’ll do — we’ll sell them a lot of things. We’ll buy a lot of things from them. And we’ll make money on our investment. So that keeps me happy.

20. Buffett optimistic on America’s standard of living

WARREN BUFFETT: Area 8.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello. Mark Hoffman (PH) from San Diego, California. Just want to thank you for all your wisdom and advice over the years.

Also like to thank the boys at — the Blumkins — the Furniture Mart. They gave us a great tour the other day. I’m from an organization called Eel (PH). And they really showed us the culture at Berkshire and what you guys do.

My question is, looking at the overall world economy, the Berkshire businesses are great. But my question is, is there underlying issues you see in the world economy, like going off the gold standard 40 years ago and fiat currency in countries making money like crazy?

If the Berkshire businesses are great, but the underlying economy is a problem, where do we go from there? What are the questions you’re asking yourself about the world economy? Thanks.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, there’s always a lot of things wrong with the world. Unfortunately, it’s the only world we’ve got. I mean, so we live with it, and we deal with it.

But the beauty of it is this system works very well. I don’t have the faintest idea what’s going to happen in business or markets in the next year or two years.

But the one thing I know is that, over time, people will live better and better in this country. We have a system that works. It unleashes human potential.

I was just thinking, we have, today, about 35,000 people here. That was almost 1 percent of the population of the United States in the first census in 1790. Just 100 groups like this, and you were talking the whole country.

If you look at the — if we had had this room filled, back in 1790, with 35,000 citizens of the United States then, they would’ve been just as smart as we were, natively, their intelligence.

They would’ve lived in a country with resources that, obviously, same fertile soil, the same temperature, the same minerals, all of that. So they were just as able as we are.

But they weren’t turning out anything like we turn out today. I mean, just look at how we live compared to those people several hundred years ago.

So we have had a system that works. It unleashes human potential. And China went, for a long time, without a system that unleashed potential. Now they’ve got a system that’s unleashing human potential.

We haven’t reached the end of that road, by a long shot. I mean, we’re just starting, basically. We will have bad years in capitalism. I mean, it overshoots in markets. It gets overcome by fear and greed and all of that sort of thing.

But if you look at the 19th century, you know, we had a civil war. And we had 15 years or so of bad economic times spread out through that century. We had six panics, as they called them in those days.

And the 20th century had a couple of great wars. And we had plenty of recessions. And we had the Great Depression. So we have these interruptions in the progress of our society.

But overall, we move ahead. And we not only move ahead, we move ahead at a pretty damn rapid rate, when you think about it.

I mean, when, in the 20th century, we had a 7-for-1 improvement in living. And we did that. You know, we had slavery for a long time. We had blacks counted as three-fifths of a person. We didn’t let women vote for 130 years or thereabouts.

I mean, we have — we were wasting human potential. And we still are. But we were doing it more so for centuries. But we do keep moving forward in kind of fits and starts.

And right now, we’re sputtering somewhat, in terms of the economy. But there is no question, in my mind, that there is enormous human potential and that every period, every year we will meet, you can name a bunch of problems.

I mean, it will happen. But the opportunities will win in the end. And you know, your kids will live better than you live. And your grandchildren will live better.

And we will find more and more ways to find easier and better ways to do things that we haven’t even dreamt of yet.

Charlie?

21. Munger optimistic about solar energy

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, now that I’m so close to the age of death, I find myself getting more cheerful about the economic future — (laughter) — which I’m not going to be here to enjoy.

And what I find really cheerful is that we are plainly going to harness the direct energy of the sun. And we’re going to have electrical power all over the world.

And that’s going to enable overpopulated countries to turn seawater into fresh. And it’s going to eliminate a lot of the environmental problems and preserve more of the hydrocarbon resources for future needs in — as chemical feedstocks.

What I see is a final breakthrough that solves the main technical problem of man. And you can see it coming right over the horizon. And of course, MidAmerican and BYD will be participating in it.

So, I think it’s hugely a mistake to think only about your probable misfortunes. You should also think about what’s good about your situation.

And what’s good about our situation now is the main technical problem of mankind is about to be fixed. It’s the — if you have enough energy, you can solve a lot of your other problems.

WARREN BUFFETT: He is getting more optimistic as he gets older. (Laughter)

22. Not concerned about Swiss Re reinsurance deal

WARREN BUFFETT: Carol?

CAROL LOOMIS: This is a question about Berkshire’s investment in Swiss Re. “Given that you have no control over Swiss Re’s underwriting, how can you be comfortable with 2.6 billion invested in a relatively junior security in addition to the relatively sizeable common stock position you already have?

“Did the Gen Re acquisition’s problems over the first several years you owned it not make you wary of the potential landmines in reinsurance?

“And isn’t Swiss Re even more likely to continue to make mistakes, given that you have no management control?

“Or has your insight into its underwriting culture, since you entered into the quota share agreement, increased your comfort level with the risks it is taking?

“You have said, in the past, that Berkshire’s float is worth as much or more than equity. Would you say the same about Swiss Re’s float?”

WARREN BUFFETT: About Swiss Re’s what, now?

CAROL LOOMIS: Swiss Re’s float.

WARREN BUFFETT: Oh. The — we have several arrangements with Swiss Re. One was engaged in a little over a year ago, where we take 20 percent of their property-casualty business, which is reinsurance business, primarily, over a five-year period.

Then we made a — and that started about a year ago. And then, a month or two ago — and at that time, we bought about 3 percent of Swiss Re’s common.

Then, about a month ago, we invested 3 million — 3 billion — Swiss francs in a security which pays us 12 percent a year and which they can call, after two years, at 120 percent of its principal amount. And then if they haven’t called it by the third year, it becomes convertible to 25 Swiss francs a share.

The odds are probably pretty good that it will get called. And if it gets called, we’ll be unhappy, because they only reason they’ll call is if it’s advantageous for them to call it and disadvantageous to us.

But if it does get called, we will get 120 percent of par plus 12 percent a year for it.

We are senior, actually, to the Swiss re-equity of roughly 20 billion Swiss francs. So I would not regard it as a junior security.

Swiss Re’s problems of the last year or so have not come about, in any way, through their insurance underwriting.

Their insurance underwriting has been fine over the years. And we feel fine about having a 20 percent quota share in that. And we feel fine about our investment. So, I would regard —

They develop a large amount — as many reinsurance companies do — they develop a large amount of float per dollar of premium volume.

So we would expect that this 20 percent quota share that we’ve had for a year will develop a very significant amount of float relative to the 3 billion or so of premiums that it represents.

And I think it will turn out to be attractive float. It will be attractive for us. And it’ll even be a little more attractive for Swiss Re. Because in effect, they get — the commission we pay them gives them a little overwrite on that.

I think, like I say, that the most likely thing is that our $3 billion position gets called.

We also have that $2 billion or 2 billion Swiss franc. If I’ve said, “dollar,” I meant Swiss franc. $2 billion — 2 billion Swiss franc — adverse loss cover.

And what that says, essentially, is that, if their reserves — we’ll say, in the property-casualty business, at the end of 2008 — were roughly 60 billion francs — that once they’ve paid out — these are not precise figures — but once they’ve paid out 58 billion, 2 billion less than their carried reserves, that we pay the next 5 billion.

And like I say, it’s very unlikely we would be paying out money before 15 years on that. And if their reserves are accurate, we will pay out only the 2 billion.

So that was a transaction, again, that was made at a time when Swiss Re was under considerable pressure. They were under threat of downgrade, in terms of ratings.

And, I met with the CEO — the then-CEO — of Swiss Re on a Sunday in Washington, D.C., along with his investment adviser. And we arranged a transaction, which their shareholders and their directors later approved. And I think we met their needs. And I think we’ve got an attractive transaction.

There’s nothing wrong — you know, we may prefer Gen Re — but there’s nothing wrong with Swiss Re’s underwriting. It did not cause any of the problems that they have now.

That arose from something akin to the problems of AIG, although not remotely on the scale of AIG, but both in somewhat in financial products and somewhat on the asset side. It did not arise from underwriting.

Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yes, and that’s a terrible problem. We wish we had more of it. (Laughter)

23. Irrational CEO compensation and incentive systems

WARREN BUFFTT: Area 9, please.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m Vishali (PH) from the Philippines. My question is about compensation in a capital-intensive subsidiary.

Now, I am going to take the liberty to assume that the large number of bank failures were caused, in large part, by incentive bias.

If a board of directors makes a mistake with compensation, then the board introduces incentive bias towards earnings manipulation.

So bearing in mind rule number one, which is, “don’t lose money,” and bearing in mind that it’s OK to have losses in the short term if the moat is widened, then how do you develop a fair and intelligent compensation package for a manager of a subsidiary that requires a lot of capital?

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, you obviously — it’s a very, very good question. It’s one that Charlie and I have both thought about. And we’ve been around so many crazy compensation systems that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it and talking about it.

In a capital-intensive business, you have to have something that — you have to have a factor in the compensation arrangement that includes a capital cost element.

We have dozens and dozens of subsidiaries. And we have different arrangements for different businesses.

Because — as you point out —an arrangement for a business that needs no capital, like a See’s Candy or a Business Wire or something of that sort, has to be materially different than something that requires a lot of capital.

We think we’ve got rational compensation systems. We agree with you that incentives are very important.

I would say that I think your question implied, a little bit, that the board sets these things. The truth of the matter is, at least over 40 years of experience and 19 boards that I’ve been on and observing behavior a lot of other places — basically, the board has had relatively little effect on it.

The CEO has managed, in most cases — in a great many cases — to be an important determinant of his own — or her own, usually his — own compensation arrangement. They, you know, they — the human relations — first of all, they pick the comp committee, you know.

So I have been on one comp committee out of 19 boards. I mean, people are not looking for Dobermans. They’re looking for Cocker Spaniels. And then — (Laughter) and they’re looking for Cocker Spaniels that are waving — wagging their table — tails, very friendly.

You know, you — CEOs spend a lot of time thinking about who’s on their comp committee. The audit committee is less important. But the comp committee, they think about plenty.

And the comp committee meets every few months. And a human relations vice president comes in, who is responsible, directly, to the CEO and probably recommends a compensation consultant. And believe me, they don’t go around looking for the ones that are going to upset the apple cart.

So it’s been a system that the CEO has dominated.

And in my experience, boards have done very little in the way of really thinking through, as an owner or as owners’ representatives, what the hell is the proper way to pay these people and how to incent them, not only to do the right thing, but also to incentivize them not to do the wrong thing.

Charlie and I are fairly familiar with a company here in town, the Peter Kiewit Organization. And Pete Kiewit, I don’t know, 50 years ago or more, you know, figured out a very, very logical way to pay people in this business.

And it wasn’t rocket science. And I’ll guarantee he didn’t consult with any compensation consultant on the subject. He just figured it out.

And you would be able to figure out one. I can figure out one. But you have to understand that not every CEO wants a rational compensation system, you know? Who wants rationality, when irrationality pays off more?

So it’s a real problem getting people at the board level — I think the — I don’t think there should be a comp committee. I think the board as a whole actually should thrash this sort of thing out.

So that you don’t get some report from the comp committee, and that’s treated as holy writ, because they’ve debated for a couple of hours the day before, supposedly, and then come in and give some recommendation, everybody rubber stamps it.

I think it ought to be a subject of general discussion. I think it’s very important how you compensate the CEO.

I’ve said, in our annual reports, choosing the right CEO, making sure they don’t overreach, and exercising independent judgement on major acquisitions or divestitures, if the board does that right, you can forget about all this other check the list — checklist stuff. And if they don’t get that right, the other doesn’t make much difference.

So I would say that it can be done. It’s very difficult to have a system where somebody — where the board, thinking as owners or representing owners, care as much about it as the guy on the other side who’s getting compensated.

I do think it’s gotten better in recent years. But it started from a very low base.

Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah, there are some counterintuitive conclusions in the field that are quite interesting.

I would argue that a liberally paid board of directors in a big American public corporation is — the liberal pay is counterproductive to good management of the company.

There’s a sort of a reciprocation. You know, “You keep raising me, and I keep raising you.” And it gets very club-like. And I think, by and large, the corporations of America would be managed better if the directors weren’t paid at all.

WARREN BUFFETT: We’re working toward that. (Applause)

Well, it is interesting. Because the SEC would define independent directors, you know, as — they would question, you know, my independence, if we would own billions and billions of dollars’ worth of some security, but we would sell them some ice cream at Dairy Queen or something of the sort.

And the — to get real owners’ representatives is very — and knowledgeable, because they’ve got to know business. They have to really have some business savvy.

And the truth is, if you get somebody that’s getting $200,000 a year, $250,000 a year, for being director of a company, and they don’t have that much income outside or net worth, and they would just love to get one more directorship for another $200,000, they are very unlikely to sit there and argue with the CEO and say that the system is rigged in favor of incentive compensation or something of the sort.

There is more baloney in the compensation arrangements —

And now, you have these 100-page proxy statements. If you take 100 pages to explain how you’re paying the people of the place, something is wrong. I mean, you don’t need 100 — we don’t have 100-page, you know, understandings or anything of the sort.

But it’s gotten to be more and more of a game as it’s gone along.

And I would say that, as Charlie — that when compensation is a very important part of a director’s wellbeing, you do not have an independent director.

And the funny thing is, the way it’s — the system has been arranged, those are the very people that tend to be regarded as the independent directors, in most cases.

CHARLIE MUNGER: It’s way worse than practically anybody recognizes. Elihu Root, who was the ultimate good Cabinet officer in the United States, used to have a saying that no man was fit to hold public office who wasn’t perfectly willing to leave it at any time.

And of course, the minute he left public office, he went right back to being the leading lawyer of the world. So he didn’t have much to lose by —

But the man who has a lot to lose from his office is going to be very loath to be an independent director.

So the way we do it, at Berkshire Hathaway, is one-tenth of 1 percent of America. And the way everybody else does it is silly. (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: (Laughs) I love being up here with him.

24. Worst-case scenario for insurance operation

WARREN BUFFETT: Becky.

BECKY QUICK: This is a question from Paula Sauer (PH). And, since Charlie seems to be getting more optimistic, maybe we should ask him this question first. And then Warren, you can try and top it.

But Paula writes in, “What’s the worst-case scenario you could imagine with respect to the insurance business?”

CHARLIE MUNGER: You mean ours or generally?

BECKY QUICK: I believe she means yours in particular.

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah. Well, the very worst case is some catastrophe where we lose quite a few billions of dollars pretax. Even that, I don’t think, significantly impairs the basic business in place.

So I think we have a marvelous insurance business. I don’t want to trade it for any other that I know. How about you, Warren?

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, no, it is a fabulous business.

The worst — I used to say we would probably play 4 percent to 5 percent of the industry loss — from any mega-catastrophe.

I’m not sure where Katrina finally came in. I don’t know whether it was 60 billion or something in that area. And we probably did pay close to — we were in that 4 percent to 5 percent range.

We’re lower than that, probably, right now, not necessarily way lower. But if we had $100 billion catastrophe, you know, we would probably pay 3 to 4 percent of that, currently, so that you’d be talking 3 to 4 billion.

You know, the worst — I think the worst situation that could occur is if we ran into so much inflation that people got very, very unhappy with anything that they had to buy in their daily life.

This applies in the utility business, too, but certainly like auto insurance, and in effect, that they express their outrage at inflationary increases and said, “Let’s nationalize the whole thing.” I mean, that would not — that would be a huge asset that would disappear, if that occurred.

I don’t think that’s a high probability. But if you’re asking me to look at worst cases, that’s probably the one I would come up with. I —

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, that happened. Auto insurance was nationalized somewhere, New Zealand or somewhere.

WARREN BUFFETT: Oh sure.

CHARLIE MUNGER: But it’s not — if you want the absolute worst cases, you found it.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, we nationalized, to some extent, the annuity business, you know, when we went into Social Security. I think it was a good thing.

But when people get outraged enough about something, you’ve heard talk about the banks. I mean, when the public gets outraged, the politicians will respond.

And inflation would be — wild inflation — would be the most likely cause, it seems to me, if something like that — I don’t think that’s probable — but something like that happening in auto insurance.

It’s a bill that most people pay, you know, every six months, or even more frequently than that. And if they see that bill going up and they don’t want to get rid of their car, they’re going to get mad.

And utility companies are going to get — utility customers — are going to get very mad during inflation. Because they need to turn on the lights. And they hate to see, you know, those monthly bills going up.

It’s the — it’s something they can’t give up. And it’s very visible. And the reaction will be to go to their public representatives and say, “Do something about this.”

And one of the things they can do about it is take it over. So very low probability of that, but it’s not nonexistent.

25. No preset goal for international investments

WARREN BUFFETT: Area 10?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Gentlemen, Patrick O’Donoghue (PH) from Cork in Ireland. So I suppose I should start by saying I’m sorry you’ve had such a tough time in my otherwise wonderful little country.

WARREN BUFFETT: I love the Irish. We’ve got some — we’ve had great luck with the Irish. It was my mistake. (Laughs)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: OK. Now, I’d like to grow my investment in Berkshire Hathaway. And I think we’ve established it’s a wonderful company.

So I’m left with a couple of other issues, which, for a foreigner, are maybe a little different for people domestically, the first of which is that any gains in Berkshire Hathaway may be wiped out by a slide in the dollar versus the euro. And we’re talking a long-term investment here, obviously.

The second is, perhaps you could discuss the — your — global acquisitions, which will reduce your dollar dependence and increase your foreign-source income.

I’ve lost the third. If you could discuss those, please.

WARREN BUFFETT: Sure, yeah, and if it comes to you, that’ll be fine.

The — predicting the euro versus the dollar, I’m no good at. You —

CHARLIE MUNGER: You did pretty well.

WARREN BUFFETT: (Laughs) Yeah, we did make a couple billion. But the — (Laughter)

You could, if you wished — I’m not suggesting this at all — but euro/dollar is an easy thing to hedge. I’m not recommending that. I’m just telling you that that is an option, if you’re worried about a major currency. It’s hard to do with smaller-country currencies.

But when you’re talking the euro/dollar thing, you can keep hedging that, if you want to.

But like I say, we don’t normally do that sort of thing. And that could be a pain in the neck to you.

I would say, in terms of Berkshire’s earnings, we will just keep doing things that make — we think make sense. Now, if we own —

We own over 8 percent, for example, of Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola, you know, makes 80 percent or more of its money outside the United States.

We own a lot of Procter & Gamble. They make a lot of their money out of the United States. Kraft makes a lot of money out of the United States.

So we have a lot of indirect sources of earnings. And then we have a lot of direct sources of earnings outside the United States.

ISCAR makes most of its money — it makes money in the United States, but it makes a lot of money elsewhere. And we have other businesses like that.

We do not have a predetermined goal at all of developing X percent of our earnings here or there or that place. We just keep, you know, every day, we go to work.

And we don’t know whether the phone call will come from Israel or from Indiana, in terms of a chance to invest some money.

We want all of our subsidiaries to be looking at opportunities everyplace. And some of them will find them abroad. And some of them won’t. So it — we are not a — we are not heading anyplace, in terms of sources of earnings.

There are a lot of countries we feel comfortable with. And we would be happy to put money into those countries.

But we don’t wake up in the morning saying that we would like to have more money in Germany or Spain or whatever, or that we would want to take money out of those countries.

And Charlie, have any more?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah. People look at a modern, liberal democracy. And it’s very easy to conclude that it’s messy and full of defects. And I think that’s a correct view.

But it’s not at all clear to me that the messy defects that we have are worse than the messy defects of Europe.

I am an agnostic about these things. I think there’s plenty wrong and plenty right on both sides of the Atlantic.

26. “Nobody gets any joy” from layoffs

WARREN BUFFETT: OK, Andrew?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: So this question comes from three shareholders who happen to be employees of Berkshire portfolio companies. They’ve asked not to be named in the — they ask the following question.

They say, “We are concerned with both the financial condition of the company and the stability of our jobs. Could you discuss your attitude towards the use of layoffs as a means of responding to short-term downturns in company profits?”

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, these are investee companies or subsidiaries?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: These are — I imagine they are investee companies. They —

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: And they are shareholders and employees.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, I wouldn’t have a different attitude. I was just clarifying it.

The — there’s no question that business conditions can change such as to necessitate temporary or permanent layoffs.

I mean, there’s — scales of businesses change. We’re fortunate, in a place like GEICO, where our business is expanding. So we’ll probably add at least, I would guess, a thousand jobs, net, at a GEICO.

But at the same time, we probably have close to half of our brick plants closed in the Southwest, because people just aren’t building houses now. Now, that business will come back. And we’ll rehire people.

On the other hand, our textile business never came back. And we employ fewer people at the Buffalo News than we did a year ago. And we are not going to regain those or get back to previous levels.

So there are some businesses that may permanently contract. And you have to face up to that, in terms of layoffs.

There’s other businesses that have severe cyclical-type contractions, and they are going to face significant layoffs.

There are other businesses that are suffering a little bit during a period like this, but very little. And we will resist the idea of having layoffs.

We — you know, nobody gets any joy out of it. And generally, you do it, probably, a little too late, even, because you keep hoping the business will bounce back up or something of the sort.

But, you know, it — if the business changes in a material way, you’d better change your business model. Or, you know, somebody else will. And then you’ll even have more changes facing you.

On balance, we hope we get into businesses that don’t face those kind of problems.

But certainly, in our construction-related businesses — we’ve had layoffs at Shaw, we’ve had layoffs at Johns Manville, we’ve had layoffs at Benjamin Moore, we’ve had layoffs at Acme Brick, and there’s really no alternative. I mean, it — and our competitors all have had also.

And you know, in the textile business, we got into it in 1965. In the end, we laid off everybody. I mean, it — we — it had contracted enormously before we got there. We tried all kinds of things. And we finally gave up.

You know, there — capitalism — you know, is creative destruction. And sometimes, you’re on the short end of that.

This year, in terms of the businesses we have, you know, our employment will probably be reduced even — I’m almost sure it will — even though GEICO will expand.

It will not be reduced dramatically, because it just hits in certain areas. But it will be reduced. And our managers have to look at the reality of the current situation.

Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah. Some of our businesses have a shared-hardship model, where they don’t layoff, at least not yet. And the businesses with that model tend to be very strongly placed, economically.

So I guess it shows that Benjamin Franklin was right, when he said, “It’s hard for an empty sack to stand upright.”

And, so we’re all over the map on that, and so is all of industry. And —

But I do think the — an ideal model would be a business so strong that it could operate in the shared-hardship mode instead of the layoffs.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, some are doing that, where they — you know, you give up hours. And — but a lot of operations don’t lend themselves to that very well, either. So —

CHARLIE MUNGER: ISCAR’s operating that way.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, ISCAR’s operating that way. And, in other cases, you basically have to close down whole plants. I mean —

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah, sure.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, that’s just the nature of it. It’s better — you really can’t operate every plant at 50 percent and have it work as effectively as shutting down the least-productive plants.

CHARLIE MUNGER: In a world where you sometimes have to amputate a limb to stay alive, you can’t expect that every business can stay exactly as it is.

27. Fight egregious CEO pay with embarrassment, not legislation

WARREN BUFFETT: OK, area 11.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, Ralph Witkin from Greenwich, Connecticut. I was first here in 1995. And I really appreciate the way you handle this meeting. I’ve been to dozens of others. And I know you’re not obligated to do this. And I thank you for it, both of you.

My question is very similar to number 9′s, regarding executive compensation.

Not so much your view on the compensation, but how we, as shareholders, can make some attempt to try to correct this and bring it back into some level of balance. Thank you.

WARREN BUFFETT: I had a senator call me just the other day. And, his constituents, obviously, are enraged about executive comp.

Probably — you know, AIG really had a huge impact, although, you know, you can take the Merrills and all the rest of them, also. But that story was huge with people.

And it was probably — in a certain sense, the outrage was disproportionate to what happened. But in any — it doesn’t make any difference. The people are enraged about it.

So this senator called me. And he said, you know — he was essentially saying, “Tell me about a statute we can enact that will make my constituents happy about executive compensation.”

And my advice to him was that he probably couldn’t, and that the last time Congress got into this was in the early days of the Clinton administration, when they passed a bill that said, as I remember, for the top five officers, that you couldn’t get deductibility for comp in excess of a million dollars annually, unless it was tied to performance in some way.

That was probably the most counterproductive piece of legislation that Congress has ever come up with, which is quite a statement to make in itself. (Laughter)

The net result of that was that when the tax was imposed, of course, the stockholders paid it and the officer didn’t. So it penalized the shareholder, who was already getting penalized by the comp.

It led to all kinds of arrangements that were designed to dance around this, which involved lots of lawyering and lots of consultants and lots of pages of proxy statements, the net effect of which was to ratchet up compensation very dramatically. Compensation increased far more, in my view, because that was put on the books than otherwise.

So I suggested to him that the first thing they would do — should do — is probably repeal that and say, “We were wrong,” and then figure out whether they should do something right. But that did not go over very well. (Munger laughs)

So I would say that — I’ve always proposed this. It never has gone anyplace. But that won’t stop me from continuing to propose it.

All you need in this country is the top half dozen or so investment managers who manage, you know, we’re talking hundreds of billions, trillions, in some cases, of assets.

If they would just speak out on the most egregious cases. Just — you know, there’s a lot of stuff about “say on pay” and everything. But half a dozen of them, they get lots of publicity — they wouldn’t have to worry about getting their views out.

The way they get big shots to change their behavior is to embarrass them, you know, basically. And the press has great opportunities to do that. And — but they need the cooperation of the big investors.

So if you’ve got three or four of the biggest investors, when the XYZ Company comes out with some crazy plan, to step up and just say, “This is outrageous,” it would change behavior. And it would —

The directors don’t like to look foolish. They don’t like their names in the paper looking foolish. And you would see some real changes.

I think that the legislation for it is going to be — I just don’t know how to write the stuff, you know?

I mean, you read the case recently at Chesapeake Energy, you know, $75 million for kind of a re-signing bonus and some — there were some other things involved, too.

I mean, it just — you wonder what people are thinking. You know what the CEO is thinking. And it just — I don’t think you can write the statute that stops it. And like I said, the one they tried to write just screwed everything up royally.

But I do think big institutions — if they spoke out — you’d only need three or four of them that spoke out jointly. And they don’t have to do it on every corporation at all, just when it’s egregious enough.

But if they get a reputation for speaking out when it’s egregious, every now and then, it would act as — I think there would be some restraining factor that might set in in corporate America. Because the restraining factor is not there then — not there now.

I mean, right now, every consultant comes in and brings along what the people at so-called pure companies are making. And they —

Nobody wants to say their CEO is in the bottom quartile or something. So they just keep comparing themselves to the higher quartiles. And then they ratchet up from there.

And, you know, it’s a game that works wonders. I call it the honor system. You know, the shareholders have the honor and the executives have the system. (Laughter)

Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah, well, I don’t — I’m not too optimistic about fixing it from the big investor standpoint.

The big investor groups contain many an investment manager making $20 million a year for insignificant contributions. He’s like a man in a glass house that starts throwing stones.

And the public pension funds are dominated, in many cases, by left-wing politicians and by labor unions who tend to have an agenda of their own that doesn’t really relate to good management. So, sometimes, the cure is worse than the disease.

28. We don’t hire potentially great managers

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, on that hopeful note, we’ll move on to Carol. (Laughter)

CAROL LOOMIS: This is a question from Peter Poulson, spelled P-O-U-L-S-O-N.

He says, “When you acquire companies, they come equipped with managers. And in general, Berkshire has done a great job putting the right leaders in the right roles.

“But occasionally, you have to hire someone for an executive spot. Please describe an interview that you might have with a prospective Berkshire operating executive. What do you look for? How do you evaluate a person’s potential to become a great manager?”

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, usually, we hire people that have already proven they’re great managers. I mean, when we buy a business, very — a very high percentage of the time, the management comes with it.

When we buy an ISCAR, you know, we get the group that had been knocking the ball out of the park for years and years and years.

And the real question we have to ask ourselves is, you know, will they be with us in the future? Will they keep — will they be feeling the same way after the deal as they did the day before the deal?

And we’ve made occasional mistakes on that. But overall, that does come through. So it’s — we’ve had good luck with managers, not perfect.

And, the toughest part is, since we have no retirement age, is when managers lose the abilities that they had at an earlier age.

And that — it doesn’t relate to — there’s no yardstick you can use up and down the line for that. So it’s — people age, at least in business ability, they age in very different ways and at different paces.

And Charlie and I have the problem of figuring out, sometimes, when somebody has — does not have the same managerial ability that they had at an earlier time.

And then we have the responsibility for doing something about it. And we hate it. But it’s —

CHARLIE MUNGER: By the way, we’ve been slow in those.

WARREN BUFFETT: We’ve been slow every time.

CHARLIE MUNGER: We’ve been slow. If we really love the guy, we’re really slow. (Laughter) We are far from ideal.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, well, it’s very — well, we had a manager, you know, a wonderful — I mean, a guy we both loved at Wesco.

And he got Alzheimer’s. I mean, it — you know, and we didn’t want to face it. We finally did. But it took us probably an extra year, year and a half, didn’t it, Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Sure.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah.

It’s the only part of my job that I don’t like, basically. I mean, I hate it. But — I’d pay a lot of money not to have to do it. But occasionally, it happens. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to happen that often at —

We find people who love their businesses, you know? I love Berkshire. I — you know, I go to work every day, and I’m excited about it. And we — you can spot that in people.

I mean, I think most of you would probably realize that that’s the way I feel about it. And I realize that’s the way the managers of our subsidiaries feel about it.

I mean, Tony — Tony Nicely — went to work at GEICO when, you know, he was a teenager. And he’s as excited every day about GEICO as I am. It hit me the first time —

I saw him yesterday at lunch. And the first thing he does is hand me the figure, which he knows I’m waiting for. You know, ”(Inaudible), we’re up 505-thousand,” and he carries it out all the way, “policyholders.”

And, I mean, I get excited about those numbers. He gets excited about them. You know, we talk about state-by-state, whatever it may be. And, you can’t put that into somebody.

But we do recognize it when it’s there. And we do our best to make sure that we don’t do anything that dampens that in any way.

29. Don’t try to time the market

WARREN BUFFETT: OK, area 12.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Good afternoon, Mr. Buffett, Mr. Munger. Jimmy Chong (PH) here from Dayton, Ohio.

Mr. Buffett, in October of last year, you wrote, in a New York Times op-ed piece, that you were moving your personal portfolio to a hundred percent U.S. equities.

My question is, is that move complete? If not, are you still buying? And in addition to that, how would you rank the recent market downturn in terms of investing opportunities in stocks during your investment careers?

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, it’s certainly not as dramatic as the 1974 period was. Stocks got much cheaper in 1974 than they are now.

But you were also facing a different interest rate scenario. So you could say they really weren’t that much cheaper.

You could buy very good companies at four times earnings or thereabouts with good prospects. But interest rates were far higher then.

That was the best period I’ve ever seen for buying common equities. The country may not have been in as much trouble then as we were back in September. I don’t think it was. But stocks were somewhat cheaper then.

In the recent period, I — you know, I bought some equities. And then corporate bonds looked extraordinarily cheap. The spreads were very, very wide. So I bought some of those, too.

But the cheaper things get, the better I like buying them. I mean, if I was buying hamburgers at McDonald’s, you know, the other day for X, and they reduced the price to 90 percent of X tomorrow — not likely — but if they did, I’m happy.

I don’t think about what I paid yesterday for the hamburger. I think I’m going to be buying hamburgers the rest of my life, you know? The cheaper they get, the better I like it.

I’m going to be buying investments the rest of my life. And I would much rather pay half of X than X.

And, the fact that I paid X yesterday doesn’t bother me, if I get — as long as I know the values in the business.

So on a personal basis, I like lower prices. I realize that that is not the way all of you feel when you wake up in the morning and look at quotes.

But, it just makes sense that when things are on sale, that you should be more excited about buying them than otherwise.

And lately — when I wrote that article in the Times, I did not predict what stocks were going to do. Because I never know what they’re going to do.

But I do know when you’re starting to get a lot for your money. And that’s when I believe in buying.

Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, if stocks go off 40 percent on average, they’re obviously closer to an attractive price than they were before.

And, of course, interest rates have gone down a lot recently, at least short-term interest rates.

It’s nothing like ’73-4. I knew when that happened that that was my time and my only time. I knew I was never going to get another trip to the buy counter like that one.

Unfortunately, I had practically no money available, which is — (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: That’s why it happened.

CHARLIE MUNGER: That’s why those times occur.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah.

CHARLIE MUNGER: So, if I were you, I wouldn’t wait for 1973-4.

WARREN BUFFETT: No, we don’t try to pick bottoms or you know —

We don’t have an opinion about where the stock market’s going to go tomorrow or next week or next month.

So to sit around and not do something that’s sensible because you think there will be something even more attractive, that’s just not our approach to it.

Anytime we get a chance to do something that makes sense, we do it. And if it makes even more sense the next day, and if we’ve got money, we may do more. And if we don’t, you know, that — what can we do about it?

So picking bottoms is basically not our game. Pricing is our game. And that’s not so difficult. Picking bottoms, I think, is probably impossible, but —

When you get — when you start getting a lot for your money, you buy it. And as I say, after I wrote that, stocks did get cheaper.

Corporate bonds — the corporate bond market got very, very, very disorganized. And we bought some fairly good-sized pieces of bonds for Berkshire. And I also bought a few little things for myself.

But I spend 99 percent of my time thinking about Berkshire. That’s —

CHARLIE MUNGER: Warren, by now, don’t we have our small life insurance companies pretty well full of desirable debt instruments at 10 percent?

WARREN BUFFETT: We certainly have got a lot more of it than we had, yeah. (Laughs)

No, we’ve — we got a chance to buy some corporate bonds very, very cheaply — at least in my view — a few months back.

And we had money in life companies that can’t be used in certain other areas and for which this was an ideal time to just barrel in.

And anytime we like to do something, we really like to do it. I mean, our idea is not to tiptoe into anything. So we buy them as fast as we can, when prices are right.

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah, that bond thing didn’t last very long, but —

WARREN BUFFETT: Nope.

CHARLIE MUNGER: — there were perfectly safe bonds that yielded 9 percent or more with very fancy call protection.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yep.

CHARLIE MUNGER: And some of those bonds are up 20, 25 percent. So the opportunities are frequently under shell A, when you’re looking at shell B.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. We try to look at all the shells.

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah, we look at all the shells.

30. “Decent” rates of return from regulated utilities

WARREN BUFFETT: Becky?

BECKY QUICK: This question is from Jim Mitchell from Costa Mesa, California, who wants to know from both of you.

He says, “Years ago, you taught us to beware of capital-intensive businesses, like electric utilities, that may be overstating profits due to understating depreciation.

“Now that you are investing in utilities and gas pipelines, have you discovered the secret of long life for power plants? Or do we need to discount your utility earnings?”

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, the utility earnings, pretty much, come about through a return on equity capital allowed by the jurisdictions in which you operate.

So, for example, if something like pension costs or something of the sort, you get surprises on, you do get to earn that back over time. But you don’t get any bonanzas, either.

So I would say the capital-intensive businesses that scare me more are the ones outside of the utility field, where you just pump in more money without knowing that you’re going, in a general way, to get, more or less — within a range, anyway — a guaranteed return.

So I do not have — there’s no way we get rich on our utility investments. But there’s no way we get poor, either. And we get decent rates of return on the equity that we leave in it.

And we’ll probably get those returns with or without inflation. Now, inflation may diminish the value of getting an 11 or 12 percent return on equity, if you get into very high rates of inflation.

So in that sense, I’d agree with Jim, who I know, incidentally. He used to work with my daughter out there at Century 21. He’s a good investor.

But the — on balance, if you can find a good business that’s not capital intensive, you’re going to be better off than in a capital-intensive business over time.

I mean, the world, they’re hard to find. But the best businesses are the ones that don’t require much capital and, nevertheless, make good money.

They’ve got some moat protecting them, other than the capital required as entry in the business that’s protecting them.

And if you can find those that are durable, you’ve got a great investment and one that will do the best in inflation, which, as we mentioned earlier, seems fairly likely to come along.

Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah, unfortunately, a lot of moats have been filling up with sand lately, you know, the daily newspaper, the network television station, all these castles with their lovely moats. The moats are filling up.

31. Surprise marriage proposal from Buffett’s great-nephew

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, on that cheery note, we have time for just one more question. And Marc Hamburg, I believe you said there was somebody who wanted to finish this off. Marc, where are you?

MARC HAMBURG: Right here. Right here, Warren.

WARREN BUFFETT: OK, I can’t — I still can’t see you. But I can hear you.

MARC HAMBURG: He’s right up in front.

WARREN BUFFETT: Right up in front. OK, good. Oh, I see you now.

ALEX ROZEK: Hi, Warren. It’s Alex from Boston.

I just wondered if you could give us some advice on how we could improve the economy, as we leave.

WARREN BUFFETT: What was your name?

ALEX ROZEK: Alex, from Boston.

WARREN BUFFETT: Ah. Well, the obvious thing to do is to do what our government tells us to do, which is to go out and spend.

And as I mentioned, household formations are important to developing — to getting past this overbuild in residential construction. So does — I don’t know whether that gives you any ideas or not. But… (Laughter)

ALEX ROZEK: I think so.

Mimi, you’re my best friend. Would you be my wife? (Applause)

MIMI KRUEGER: Yes? (Applause)

VOICE: Mimi, you’ve got to say yes.

MIMI KRUEGER: I said, yes. Yes!

WARREN BUFFETT: I have just two —

ALEX ROZEK: Thanks, Warren.

WARREN BUFFETT: OK. I have two comments to make. Alex is my sister Doris’ grandson, my great-nephew. And Mimi is terrific.

So on that note, we’ll end the meeting. And we’ll be back in 15 minutes for the board meeting. Thank you. (Applause)

32. Berkshire Hathaway formal meetings begins

WARREN BUFFETT: OK, now we’re going to hold an annual meeting.

The meeting will now come to order. I’m Warren Buffett, chairman of the board of directors of the company. I welcome you to this 2009 annual meeting of shareholders.

I will first introduce the Berkshire directors that are present in addition to myself. We’ve got Charles Munger. We’ve got Howard Buffett, Susan Decker, Bill Gates, David Gottesman, Charlotte Guyman, Don Keough, Tom Murphy, Ron Olson, and Walter Scott.

Also with us today are partners in the firm of Deloitte and Touche, our auditors. They are available to respond to appropriate questions you might have concerning the firm’s audit of the accounts of Berkshire.

Mr. Forrest Krutter is secretary of Berkshire. He will make a written record of the proceedings. Ms. Becki Amick has been appointed inspector of elections at this meeting. She will certify to the count of votes cast in the election for directors.

The main proxyholders for this meeting are Walter Scott and Marc Hamburg.

33. Berkshire shares outstanding and quorum

WARREN BUFFETT: Does the secretary have a report of the number of Berkshire shares outstanding entitled to vote and representing at the meeting?

FORREST KRUTTER: Yes, I do. As indicated in the proxy statement that accompanied the notice of this meeting that was sent to all shareholders of record on March 4, 2009 — being the record date for this meeting — there were 1,057,573 shares of Class A Berkshire Hathaway common stock outstanding, with each share entitled to one vote on motions considered at the meeting —

And 14,749,861 shares of Class B Berkshire Hathaway common stock outstanding with each share entitled to 1/200th of one vote on motions considered at the meeting.

Of that number, 821,400 Class A shares and 10,298,152 Class B shares are represented at this meeting through proxies returned through Thursday evening, April 30th.

WARREN BUFFETT: Thank you.

That number represents a quorum. And we will therefore directly proceed with the meeting.

34. Last meeting’s minutes

WARREN BUFFETT: First order of business will be a reading of the minutes of the last meeting of shareholders. I recognize Mr. Walter Scott, who will place a motion before the meeting.

WALTER SCOTT: I move that the reading of the minutes of the last meeting of shareholders be dispensed with and the minutes be approved.

WARREN BUFFETT: Do I hear a second?

VOICE: I second the motion

WARREN BUFFETT: Motion’s been moved and seconded. Are there any comments or questions?

We will vote on this question by voice vote. All those in favor, say, “Aye.”

VOICE: Aye.

WARREN BUFFETT: Opposed? Motion’s carried.

35. Election of Berkshire Hathaway directors

WARREN BUFFETT: The first item of business is to elect directors. If a shareholder is present who wishes to withdraw a proxy previously sent in and vote in person on the election of directors, he or she may do so.

Also, if any shareholder that is present has not turned in a proxy and desires a ballot in order to vote in person, you may do so.

If you wish to do this, please identify yourself to meeting officials in the aisles, who will furnish a ballot to you.

Will those persons desiring ballots please identify themselves, so that we may distribute them?

I now recognize Mr. Walter Scott to place a motion before the meeting with respect to election of directors.

WALTER SCOTT: I move that Warren Buffett, Charles Munger, Howard Buffett, Susan Decker, William Gates, David Gottesman, Charlotte Guyman, Donald Keough, Tom Murphy, Ron Olson, and Walter Scott be elected as directors.

WARREN BUFFETT: Is there a second?

VOICE: I second the motion.

WARREN BUFFETT: It’s been moved and seconded that Warren Buffett, Charles Munger, Howard Buffett, Susan Decker, William Gates, David Gottesman, Charlotte Guyman, Donald Keough, Thomas Murphy, Ronald Olson, and Walter Scott be elected as directors.

Are there any other nominations? Is there any discussion?

The nominations are ready to be acted upon. If there are any shareholders voting in person, they should now mark their ballots on the election of directors and allow the ballots to be delivered to the inspector of elections.

Miss Amick, when you are ready, you may give your report.

BECKI AMICK: The ballot of the proxyholders in response to proxies that were received through last Thursday evening cast not less than 859,366 votes for each nominee. That number of — that number far exceeds a majority of the number of the total votes related to all Class A and Class B shares outstanding.

The certification required by Delaware law of the precise count of the votes, including the additional votes to be cast by the proxyholders in response to proxies delivered at this meeting, as well as any cast in person at this meeting, will be given to the secretary to be placed with the minutes of this meeting.

WARREN BUFFETT: Thank you, Miss Amick.

Warren Buffett, Charles Munger, Howard Buffett, Susan Decker, William Gates, David Gottesman, Charlotte Guyman, Donald Keough, Thomas Murphy, Ronald Olson, and Walter Scott have been elected as directors.

36. Shareholder motion on working conditions at Russell Athletic plant

WARREN BUFFETT: The next item of business is a motion put forth by Berkshire shareholder Joseph Petrofsky.

Mr. Petrofsky’s motion is set forth in the proxy statement and would request Berkshire Hathaway to prepare a sustainability report for shareholders. The directors are recommended that the shareholders vote against the proposal.

We will now recognize, I believe it’s Mr. Billenness — Mr. Petrofsky’s representative — to present the motion.

To allow all interested shareholders to present their views, I will ask Mr. Billenness to limit his remarks to five minutes. The microphone at zone 1 is available. Well, we go first to Mr. Billenness.

SIMON BILLENNESS: Thank you very much, Mr. Buffett. My name is Simon Billenness. And I represent Mr. Joseph Petrofsky, the shareholder who filed this year’s resolution asking for a publication of a sustainability report.

I will move that shareholder resolution. Miss Norma Mejía Castellanos (PH) will then second the resolution. And then I will ask for a preliminary count of the shares voted.

As shareholders, we are proud that, in so many ways, our company is a leader. A prime example is the emerging success story on the Klamath River. This may result in the largest river restoration project in U.S. history. And this makes economic sense for PacifiCorp and for us, as shareholders.

However, when it comes to managing environmental and human rights risk, and disclosing those risks to shareholders, our management is sadly a laggard.

Two respected proxy advisory firms, PROXY Governance and RiskMetrics, have advised shareholders to vote in favor of this resolution on the grounds that management badly lags other companies in disclosing these risks to shareholders.

Last week, CalPERS, the California retirement system, announced that it would vote close to half a billion dollars’ worth of stock in favor of this resolution.

Consider the situation today with Russell, the subsidiary of Fruit of the Loom and a Berkshire Hathaway company. Collegiate licensed apparel — sweatshirts bearing university logos, for instance — is a $5 billion a year market.

Russell has admitted to repeatedly committing serious labor rights violations in Honduras. And now, over 50 universities, including Harvard, Stanford, and the entire University of California system, have decided to terminate Russell’s license to make clothing bearing their college logos.

This particular sweatshirt, which I’m holding up right here, is University of North Carolina. This was made in a Berkshire Hathaway factory. But the university has since ended their licensing agreement.

The treatment — the management of Russell, through its actions, has put $5 billion of potential business at risk. The management of Berkshire Hathaway should provide proper disclosure of that risk to us, the shareholders in this company.

Now, I will pass over to Ms. Mejía Castellanos. She is a sewing machine operator who worked in the factory in Honduras that is the center of these problems. And after she has spoken, I will ask for a preliminary vote count for this resolution.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: Yo trabajó como operadora de una maquila de costura en la fábrica Jerzees Honduras.

INTERPRETER: I used to work as a sewing machine operator at the factory, Jerzees de Honduras.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: En 2006, cuando Fruit de Loom compró la empresa, las condiciones empeoraron.

INTERPRETER: In 2006, when Fruit of the Loom bought my factory, conditions got much worse.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: La empresa empezó hacer acumulación de personal esto para ahorrarse mas y no pagar renta.

INTERPRETER: Fruit of the Loom began to consolidate personnel in order to save more on rent.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: Esto ocasionó mucho molestar de salud en los trabajadores, como ser dolor en la espalda a causa de maquinaria de esta muy cerca, y esto provoca un recalentamiento.

INTERPRETER: This created many conditions in the factory that caused health problems for workers, such as pain in our backs being caused by the heat from the sewing machines, which were now pressed into our backs, because of the limited space.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: Esto significa una inseguridad en un momento de evacuación.

INTERPRETER: The close proximity also made it very dangerous in the case of an emergency evacuation.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: En nuestra fabrica, la ventilación era tan mala que esto nos provocaba enfermedades respiratorias como el cáncer del pulmón.

INTERPRETER: In part, because of the overcrowding, as well, the ventilation was so poor that it caused many respiratory illnesses, including lung cancer.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: El agua de los filtros era contaminada.

INTERPRETER: Even the filtered water was dirty.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: Trabajamos de la 6:30 de la mañana hasta las 5:30 de la noche, con tan solo 15 minutos para almorzar.

INTERPRETER: We worked from 6:30 in the morning until 5:30 at night with only 15 minutes for lunch.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: Nuestros salarios eran demasiado bajos que no nos alcanzaba para pagar una niñera y la empresa no respeta el código de trabajo de nuestro país, porque no brinda guarderías de niños.

INTERPRETER: Our wages were too low to afford childcare. And the management refused to provide onsite childcare, even though it was required by Honduran law.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: Por eso, decidimos organizarlos para obligar el gerente que nos escuchara y que respetara nuestros derechos.

INTERPRETER: Because of all of this, we decided to organize to compel management to clean up our factory.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: Entonces, fue cuando despidió 145 trabajadores ilegalmente por organizarse a un sindicato.

INTERPRETER: In retaliation, Russell illegally fired 145 workers for organizing a union.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: Russell tenía que respetar el sindicato, constituido por la ley. Y entonces, Russell dijo que por causa al sindicato, iba a cerrar la empresa y que nos íbamos a quedar aguantando hambre.

INTERPRETER: After we finally legally established our union, Russell said that because of the union, they would close down the factory and leave the workers to starve.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: Fue cuando empezamos hacer amenazados a muerte los directivos.

INTERPRETER: And this is when we started to receive death threats.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: Me dejaban mensajes y dibujos en los baños y en el puesto de trabajo, diciéndome que me iban a cortar la cabeza.

INTERPRETER: They would leave me notes and illustrations in the bathroom and at my workstation threatening to cut off my head.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: Finalmente, Russell siguió y cumplió con su dicho, y cerro la planta el 30 de enero de este año.

INTERPRETER: Finally, Russell Athletic did follow through with their threat and shut down the factory in January of this year.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: Russell sostiene que nos ayudara a encontrar nuevos puesto de trabajo, pero en cambio la lista negra que tiene con nosotros y nos han impedido la búsqueda de nuevos empleos.

INTERPRETER: Now, Russell has been claiming that they will help us find new jobs. But instead, they have blacklisted us, preventing us from finding work elsewhere.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: Es por que tantas universidades han cortados su contratos con Russell y porque esto se ha convertido en un problema para esta empresa.

INTERPRETER: This is why so many universities have stopped doing business with Russell and why this has become such a problem for Berkshire Hathaway.

NORMA MEJÍA CASTELLANOS: Y por tanto, yo voto a favor de la resolución y exhortó que a los accionistas voten a favor. Gracias.

INTERPRETER: And therefore, I second this resolution and urge that shareholders vote in favor. Thank you.

WARREN BUFFETT: OK. I’d like to ask Mr. John Holland, the CEO of Fruit of the Loom, to respond to the comments just made, and after which, we will act on the motion.

JOHN HOLLAND: First, I need to give you a little background. Russell was a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange prior to the time that we acquired them in August of 2006. The acquisition consisted of 47 facilities with a little over 14,000 workers.

And, as we began to get involved with the Russell operations and how they were conducted, to integrate those into our operations, we found that there were a couple of plants in Honduras that had some problems.

And we began — we acknowledged the problems. And we began immediately to remedy these problems.

A little later, we had a letter from the WRC, the Workers Rights Commission (Consortium), indicating that there had been some abuses of the employees and that some had been terminated because they were involved in union activities.

We were unaware of the union activities. And we investigated the abuses. But we thought it best to contact an independent third-party organization to do an audit.

And we contacted the Free (Fair) Labor Association, which is kind of a worldwide organization that’s grouped with a group of businesses and the leading universities in the U.S. to try to make certain that workers’ rights are adhered to on a worldwide basis.

We asked them to conduct the audit. And they conducted the audit. And all of the abuses that we had been charged with, they said, through the independent audit — they were nonexistent.

But they did tell us that there were two supervisors who had conducted some abusive language with the employees and, also, that it was very likely that some employees might’ve been terminated due to their union activity.

So as a result, they gave us a list of items that they would like us to follow to remedy the situation. The supervisors, as well as the management of the facilities, were eliminated.

And we have started immediately, progressively, to implement all of the recommendations of the Free Labor Association’s independent audit.

And part of that was that the workers that they felt might have been terminated due to union activities, that we reinstate the workers.

The plant had not been organized at that point. So we voluntarily engaged the union and acknowledged them and accepted the union.

And we rehired all of the workers that we could locate into a facility that was across the street from this particular plant.

And since then, we have followed all of the recommendations of the Free Labor Association. And they have a monitoring process.

And after about three months, there was another audit by the Free Labor Association and the Workers’ Rights Commission, which is another related organization. And they said that the activity that we engaged in, they were very well pleased with the progress.

And as I said previously, we acknowledged the union and began negotiations. There was approximately 48 issues that they wanted to discuss. And we reached agreement on 24 of those.

And we — the union even agreed that we had had very good relationships, that we had approached the negotiations openly and fairly.

There were some other points that they wanted to move to arbitration on that — or mediation — that we could not agree on.

And by that time, the time had passed till we reached the midyear of 2008, when the recession in the apparel industry dramatically affected our particular business.

And over the course of the next few months, we had to close nine of our facilities. One of those was the Jerzees de Honduras plant that they have referred to.

And there was a total of 12,780 employees involved in the plant closures. And out of that group, about 310 people, which has been acknowledged by the union, that were union employees, because in Honduras, under the laws there, only 30 people are required to form a union and be acknowledged as a union.

And up until that time, there had been no indications of any issues that had been brought up by the union that were not solved.

Now, beyond that, I would like to tell you a little about how we conduct business worldwide in our plants.

We have been in Honduras since 1993. All of our plants are air conditioned, excellent ventilation in all of those facilities. Our wages in those plants are 26 percent, on the average, above the minimums in Honduras.

We offer 11 paid holidays. We have paid vacations. We have free life insurance. We have a doctor and nurse in each one of those facilities.

And the reference to the filtered water, when we acquired that plant, that particular plant had its own filtration systems, which was different from all of our other plants, which we used bottled water.

We immediately had that water tested. Although there was some discoloration, it was tested as pure. But we immediately shut down the filtration system and went to bottled water that we have in the other plants.

Now, we have paid maternity leaves, we have a breastfeeding hour, we celebrate the employee birthdays, in fact. And also, the — we have a children’s day.

And that, I think, our benefits, I’m proud to tell you, I think are far and above any that you’ll find in most other apparel facilities throughout the world.

And there have been no death threats. We have tried to conduct our business with honesty, integrity.

And quite frankly, I’ve been with this company, I’m in my 48th year, and I would tell you that I’m very proud of how we operate our particular plants.

We have met with a number of the leading universities to try to tell the other side of the story. We’ve invited those presidents of the universities and the administration to come to see for themselves what our plant facilities are like.

And we’ve had two acceptances that were down this past week, the representatives from Princeton and also from the University of Arizona.

And we welcome putting all of this into an open spotlight. We also have a website. That’s www.russellsocialresponsibility.com — that all of this activity that we’re responding to the recommendations of the Fair Labor Association is posted on that website. It’s there for the world to see.

And we continue — Fair Labor Association has a three-step process of continued monitoring. And then they do independent audits periodically to see what our progress is. And all of that is posted on that website. Thank you.

WARREN BUFFETT: Thank you, John. The motion is now ready to be acted upon. (Applause)

If there are any shareholders voting in person, they should now mark their ballots on the motion and allow the ballots to be delivered to the inspector of election. Miss Amick, when you’re ready, you may give your report.

BECKI AMICK: My report is ready. The ballot of the proxyholders, in response to the proxies that were received through last Thursday evening, cast 49,251 votes for the motion and 702,963 votes against the motion.

As the number of votes against the motion exceeds a majority of the number of votes related to all Class A and Class B shares outstanding, the motion has failed.

The certification required by Delaware law of the precise count of the votes will be given to the secretary to be placed with the minutes of this meeting.

WARREN BUFFETT: Thank you, Miss Amick. The proposal fails.

37. Berkshire formal meeting adjourns

WARREN BUFFETT: Does anyone have any further business to come before this meeting, before we adjourn? If not, I recognize Mr. Scott to place a motion before the meeting.

WALTER SCOTT: I move that this meeting be adjourned.

WARREN BUFFETT: Is there a second? Motion to adjourn has been made and seconded. We will vote by voice.

[bashfoo]

How to Kickstart an SEO Audit for Your Startup - Whiteboard Friday Posted by randfish Launching a startup is a huge task all on its own. While it can be a challenge to factor SEO into the mix, it's an incredibly important consideration. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares a comprehensive plan to kick off your new SEO audit and grab a piece of that organic search pie from the get-go. Pro tip: For easy listening, this video is broken up into 9 chapters that correspond with the transcript below. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hi, everyone down at StartCon. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Rand Fishkin. I'm the co-founder of Moz, and today I'm going to be talking to all of you and to Whiteboard Friday fans everywhere about how to kick-start an SEO audit for your startup. So what I've done here is I've taken our classic SEO pyramid, sort of you've got to start with a strong base and work your way up. Well, I flipped it, because, in an audit scenario, we're actually going to start from the bottom and work our way to the top. So I've inverted our pyramid. We're going to start with crawling and accessibility, and we're going to work all the way up to conversion. Now, SEO in a startup setting can be challenging. I'm going to assume that your startup has already launched your website or your web content, your application, and that now you've just realized, "Wait, maybe we should do some of that SEO stuff." And yes, you should. Let me make three big reasons, three big cases why you should. Search traffic is among the highest percentage of all referral traffic on the web. So whereas social traffic sends approximately 5% to 6% of all the web's referral traffic, search engines send about 28% or 29% of all the web's referring traffic. This is data according to SimilarWeb who has a large clickstream panel that they look at. Organic search traffic is more than 90% of all the clicks that go to search results. So 90% of the clicks are going to organic, 10% or actually less than 10% are going to the paid results. Companies around the world are spending $40, $50, $60 billion a year or more on Google's paid search results alone. That organic stuff is a competitive advantage because it means low cost of customer acquisition. It tends to mean higher retention. It tends to mean higher conversion rates. Very, very attractive traffic. Searches are a specific request from a user that says, "I want this thing and I want it right now." That's some of the most powerful traffic you can possibly be in front of on the web, and, as a result, the startups that can get their product, their service, their company, their brand in front of those searchers can have an outsized impact. Now, we need to kick off this audit. Crawling, indexing, and website structure What I've essentially done here is taken sort of the top three things to be thinking about for each of these and detailed them for you. So when it comes to crawling and web structure, we want: 1. Everything on one sub and root domain. I can't tell you how many times I've seen startups use blog.startup.com, or use startupblog.com. Or they blog only on Medium.com instead of blogging on their own site and using Medium as an additional network to amplify that content. Or they put everything on their app and their app is one page, and so Google can't index anything except that one page. Generally, all of these are terrible ideas. If you can, keep everything in subfolders, or if you call them subdirectories, of your website. Don't separate out your content on to multiple sites, and don't build anything on somebody else's site unless you're also using it on your site and just referring back. You want to use Medium, that's great. You want to use Facebook, great. You want to use LinkedIn Publishing, fantastic. Always have the "Here's the link to the original" and point it to your website. 2. You can sign up for Google Search Console (it is free). That will help you identify a lot of crawl errors and issues. If you work with a professional SEO, chances are they're going to use a tool like OnPage.org or Screaming Frog or Moz's Crawl. Those are all good too. They can provide a little bit more extra detail. 3. Eliminate duplicates, search URLs, and thin pages One of the things that you will want to do, when you're looking at your site, is eliminate duplicates, search URLs, meaning pages on your site that are essentially just search results — Google does not like your search results in their search results — and thin pages, pages that have very little content. You might think, "Oh, but they target some extra keywords for me." Yeah, but Google considers your site as a whole. If you have thousands of pages with very thin content, they're going to rank your other content lower, and that is not a good thing. You do not want that. Keyword research & targeting 1. Make a big, broad list. You could do this in Excel. You could do it in a Google Spreadsheet. You could do it in a tool like Keyword Explorer. I want you to use a bunch of different sources. I want you to look at keywords that your competitors are ranking for. You can find that from lots of different tools. You could use something like Keyword Explorer. You could use SEMrush. You could use KeyCompete. You could use SpyFu. There are lots and lots of tools that allow you to do this.I want you to also use the related and suggested search terms that come up when you search for the key terms and phrases you're already targeting in Google. I want you to use semantically-connected terms and terms that are in the format of questions. A lot of folks like Answer The Public. Moz also has the filter in Keyword Explorer for queries that are in the form of questions. These will give you a big, big, broad list. 2. From there, you're going to need some metrics: You want volume, you can get that from Google's AdWords Keyword Tool. You will have to either start an account and pay some money for some paid search ads. Otherwise, Google only shows you these terrible things. Or you're going to have to use a third-party tool like a SEMrush or a Keyword Explorer. You want difficulty, so you want to know how hard it will be to rank. That is not the same as the Competition Score that you get from AdWords. Competition in AdWords is just the competition in the paid search results. Not the same thing as how difficult it will be to rank in the organic search results. You want to know click-through rate opportunity. If there are lots of ads above the fold, if there's a knowledge graph, if there's an answer box up top there, that's going to drive clicks away from the organic results, and you need to know that before you choose to target a keyword. 3. Prioritize by the importance to you and to your company. You're going to use these metrics and you're going to prioritize by the importance to you, to your company. You're going to prioritize by the ease, the difficulty, and by the traffic, which is some function of the click-through rate opportunity and the volume, in order to choose right keywords for you. You're going to prioritize that big list that you've got, and then you're going to start targeting. We are going to create content that targets those searchers and serves them well. Accessible content that delights searchers Why do I say delight searchers here in this third section? Well, because content that merely serves your purposes, that ranks and maybe gets one or two percent of people to convert on your site, give you their email address or sign up for whatever it is you have to sign up for, a free trial, or a subscription to your software, that's fine. But you're probably going to be outranked by someone who does a fantastic job of serving searchers before putting their own interests into the mix. If you put your interest ahead of searcher's interest, over time, someone else is going to take that traffic away from you and Google's going to rank them first.1. Don't just serve your own interest, your own funnel. Satisfy those searchers. 2. You can use low engagement metrics to identify poorly performing URLs. So if you filter in your Google Analytics, your Omniture, whatever you've got, by pages that receive traffic from Google referrals and then you look at bounce rate, you look at time on site, you look at pages per visit, and you see pages that are very low on those metrics, well, that is going to tell you, you are not doing a great job of serving those searchers. Google will probably, over time, push you down, push your competitors up. That's a bad thing. We want content that is doing a great job of delighting searchers. It has to serve both their implicit and explicit query. The explicit part of the query, that's usually obvious. The implicit part can be a, "What do they really want to do after that, once they have that answer?" Keyword use & on-page optimization Next, we're going to take that content and we are going to optimize it for search engines and searchers. That means using keywords intelligently and doing some smart on-page optimization. Now, classic SEO kinds of things, some of them no longer apply. The meta keywords tag, for example, that's gone. We don't need to do the same sort of every little variation of a keyword demands a different page that we used to do in the past. But things like... 1. Keyword use in the title, the URL, the meta description, the headline, and inside the content still matter. What we should be doing nowadays, though, is taking all the keywords that share the same searcher intent, where the searcher is trying to essentially accomplish the same thing. Let's say I'm a mobile phone directory and I have a bunch of reviews of mobile phone devices. "Best mobile phones, best cell phones, best smartphones, best smartphones 2016," guess what? They all share the same searcher intent. I should have one page targeting all those keywords, not a separate one for each one. 2. All the keywords that share the same intent get one URL. Snippet, markup, & schema This is essentially where I'm trying to stand out from the pack in Google search results. If you've performed a search in the last five years, you know that it doesn't just look like 10 blue links anymore. There are a lot more rich options for how your snippet, the search engine result position that you appear in, can look to searchers, and that can drive a lot more traffic. 1. Check out Schema.org. So check out Schema.org and check out the types of results in your specific field or industry or that go with your content that could be met by schema that Google supports right now. 2. Look at your keyword research for the types of results that already appear in your SERPs. You should be taking a look in your keyword research at the types of results that already appear in your search engine result pages. So if you check out your keywords, you're using a tool like Keyword Explorer, you can see here's a distribution of search results that contain images, ones that contain news results, ones that contain recipe-rich snippets, ones that contain video, whatever it is, and then you can choose to do those. 3. Identify "answer box" opportunities. 15%, just about 15% of all search queries in Google today have an answer box of some kind. An answer box, meaning that featured snippet up at what we call result number 0, before the top 10, usually right after the ads. That can drive a tremendous amount more traffic. If you have answer box opportunities, you can take those from your competitors, or you can have your snippet appear in there. There's a great presentation from Doctor Pete that you can check out on Moz or a Whiteboard Friday on that same topic as well. Alternative formats & engines Next, we want to think about non-Google sources of traffic or non-google.com web search sources of traffic. For example: 1. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, ahead of even Baidu, ahead of Bing, ahead of Yahoo. If you are doing video content, you should be thinking about YouTube. Even if you're not doing video content, you should be checking YouTube's search volume to see if lots of people are searching on YouTube for answers to the questions that your business could answer with video. 2. Consider alternative search formats like images, news, and apps. You also want to consider alternative search formats, like images, news, and apps in lots of spaces. For example, in home decor and home repair, image search is very, very popular. Obviously, in spheres like politics and technology, news is very popular. For lots of kinds of queries, apps are very popular, particularly those ones that happen on mobile and have a clear app use or need around them. 3. Check out Google Maps if you're in local. If you are in the local space, you're going to want to check out Google Maps, which can send a tremendous amount of traffic. Through there, you can use a tool like Moz Local or Yext for that. 4. Ecommerce should pay attention to engines like Amazon or Etsy. If you're in ecommerce and you're selling a physical product, there might be engines like Amazon or Etsy, where you could and should be putting your product. Links and amplification Yes, links still matter. Yes, they are still critical for rankings. You will need a lot of links from good places that are editorially pointing to your content, to your website, in order to rank well. You also want to earn other forms of amplification that will then lead to links. Social sharing is one of the big ones. Word of mouth is obviously a big one. Lots of forms of advertising can eventually lead to links through awareness and those sorts of things. 1. Before you ever create content, ask the question: Who will help amplify this and why? If you don't have a great answer to that question, and I mean a specific list of people or a specific list of outlets, you shouldn't hit Publish. Go and do that work first and every piece of content that you create will have more success in terms of amplification and reach and link potential and the potential to earn an audience. And why are you creating content if no one's going to see it? This isn't a forest. You don't need no trees falling. 2. You want to choose a link flywheel that's going to earn you links over time. There are a few different structures. News and press tends to be a good structure that earn links over time in a flywheel sort of format. Content marketing tends to be one. Partnerships tend to be one. Embedded content tends to be one. These flywheels tend to encounter friction, and that's where you use these smart hacks, like submissions to certain kinds of directories that are editorial and high-quality, or outreach on a one-to-one basis. But you don't want to be doing these one-to-one kinds of hacky link building unless it's in the service of a flywheel that's going to move faster over time and grow your link profile while you're asleep. Conversion and funnel optimization So you've done all this stuff to serve searchers well, to earn their trust and their traffic, and now we have to realize two things. 1. Conversion takes time and it takes a lot of visits. In fact, WordStream, Larry Kim, did some great research showing that, over time, on a second or third or fourth visit, conversion rates move up by hundreds of percents versus that first visit. Don't expect that you're going to rank for a keyword, drive someone to your site for the first time and convert them instantly. That rarely happens. Sometimes, but rarely. What's generally going to happen is that you're going to earn that click first, and then, over time, you're going to earn them back again, maybe through social channels, maybe through amplification, through word of mouth, through type-in traffic, through a branded search, through another completely unrelated search. Then eventually, they'll find their way back to you, and on the third or fourth or fifth visit, they will convert. So we have to be thinking about: How can I delight people? How can I brand them? Then, eventually, I want to draw them back to my website and close the deal through my funnel. That's what conversion optimization is when it works in the organic world. FAQOkay. We're through this very, very basic audit process. A few frequently asked questions that I always get from startups:A. "Should I get a consultant, an agency, or should I do it in-house?" If you know that SEO is going to be a long-term, competitive advantage that you continue to invest in and it's going to be something you need to do for the life of your company, you should go in-house as soon as possible. If, however, it's (SEO) more like a nice-to-have and it's a helpful marketing channel, but it's not a core competency and you're not going to build the company's marketing strategy around it, consultant or agency can work just fine. And there are some great ones, by the way. B. PPC versus SEO. Paid search is easy to invest in. It is high-cost, but it's fast to get started. For this reason, it's incredibly competitive, and it tends to be the case that people are bidding at or very close to their maximum ROI to spend ratio, meaning, unless, you have an incredible business model that's way better than all your competitors, there's not usually a lot of competitive advantages to be earned in return on investment or in cost of customer acquisition to lifetime value ratio in PPC. SEO, on the other hand, takes a long time. It's a lot of investment. This is often a six-month or a year process before you start earning big returns, and, therefore, very few people invest in it strategically. It is a much bigger competitive advantage. C. I get this from a lot of folks, especially in the technical world. "Can't Google just figure this all out?" No, they absolutely cannot. If you ignore these things and choose not to invest strategically and specifically in SEO, Google will not just figure it out. That has never happened to anyone who has made SEO a true competitive advantage in their startup, in their company's marketing channels. It's just not how it works. D. "Does social media impact SEO?" The answer is yes, but indirectly. When you do good things on social, they can lead to good links. They can lead to good engagement on your site, which is certainly a positive signal for Google, and they can lead to word of mouth, which can result in branded searches and more clickstream traffic to your site, and all these sorts of things that Google can see. But if you think that buying a bunch of likes or a bunch of tweets on Fiverr is going to help your page rank higher, yeah, you're in for, well, five dollars of pain. Fiverr is quite cheap. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for having me on StartCon. Thanks for watching me on Whiteboard Friday. And I hope to see you around Moz and maybe down in Australia sometime in the near future. Take care. Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! #SEO