#also i missed out on so much doing the gauntlet first??? now that i reloaded to go to moonrise first whoah the sexy old man is there

[fizzytoo]

should i just let them die

[looking-to-rattle-the-stars]

i’m in act 3 of baldurs gate 3 with 2/3 [collected items] for the main story point so here’s some (stupid/absurd) shit i’ve done in my first run of the game!

spoilers ahead!

(also a little out of order towards the end cause i’ve dropped 169 hours into this bad boy lol)

after recruiting astarion and shadowheart i went to the mindflayer in the ship ruins, trying to resist the mental connection and instantly died leaving shadowheart and astarion to fight the mindflayer who pretty much instantly killed them and had to immediately reload

almost didnt recruit gale cause i somehow missed walking by his rock the first time and had to google where he was 💀

sided with the tieflings instead of laezel and when she got knocked unconscious i tried to cure wounds her and she didnt get back up

i then proceeded to accidentally loot everything off her person so she was laying in mud naked and unaware

stole the druids statue after completing the main quest line so that the tieflings wouldnt die but now i have no use for it

almost didnt recruit laezel because i almost didnt go through with checking out the mountain pass and was going to strictly stick to the underdark

in the grymforge i killed all the duergar before letting out nere because i couldn’t get them to side with me for combat and thought this would be easier

had to revive laezel after killing the gith who killed her and that night i long rested i forgot i looted everything off her body and so instead of being in sleep clothing she was just naked

when in the gith creche (?) i pretty much killed all the gith i came across (not on purpose though)

when walking in the underdark i was going to climb up netting but i passed my perception check too late and traps went off and then i couldnt get up the wall

finding the fish cult and killing them and their god

glitched out halsins questline so i had to leave him in act 2 (maybe i didn’t glitch it, was maybe just the order i did stuff but 🤷‍♂️)

was so invested in shadowheart lore i immediately did the gauntlet of shar before talking to isobel at last light inn or going into moonrise towers so that was fun

gave the toll collector an identity crisis so they killed themself

convinced the nurses to "experiment" on each other and watched them kill themselves and then failed to convince the surgeon to do the same

in raphaels quest for astarion i had the guy tell his group to kill themselves, told him to kill his pet, and the told him to kill himself

did kethrics phase one no problem got to phase two and told him he could right his wrongs and watched him kill himself and then immediately had to fight the god of death (phase three)

dribbles scavenger hunt (not yet completed)

went into the sewers via the emperors old hideout only to get greeted by orin pretending to be laezel and find out she kidnapped laezel

fought cazador and when astarion asked for help ascending i told him no and watched him kill cazador, break the staff, and then break up with me and leave the party with tears in his eyes ( i reloaded instantly afterwards)

in act one at the goblin camp i put poison in their alcohol and watched them drop like flies

in act one, at the creche, when speaking with the doctor there and using the device i failed all the saves and laezel almost died but the spirit guardian had to step in cause they didnt like that

slept with the emperor in act three soley for the achievement and then reloaded because i felt bad for cheating on astarion

(fun fact abt this one the three people who walked in on me were astarion wyll and jaehira and it made me want to die until i remembered this was a reload done solely for the achievement and not my main save lol)

took out the steelwatch before speaking to gortash and now all of wyrms rock fortress is red so im just an enemy to one section of the city

said i would save the gondians(?), watched several of them die in the prison and then when uprising in the lab every last one of them died in combat

had to fight gortash with no cut scene and cause of the order i did things in uhh wylls dad had to die cause no way was i letting him renew his pact with mizora but the worst part is his quest line, as of when i last was on, is glitched and when i go to speak to him in regards to the quest marker over his head he just greets me like usual 😭

because of the order i did stuff i lost my wyrms rock (fortress) teleport point and when i tried to cross the bridge they wouldn’t let me so i killed a man (the fraudulent toy maker arfur or whatever) and they still wouldn’t let me in so i just decided to enter from the lower city

oh and if you’re wondering why i didn’t go to gortash sooner, when i tried to enter that area/sharess caress, the fist had a steel watch check me and they declared me an enemy of the state or whatever and i got arrested on the spot and then was too afraid to re-enter wyrms rock cause i thought if i went in the front again that the steelwatch would arrest me again 💀

was also surprised when gale was totally okay with breaking into private quarters when it was for his own gain idk the bit i’ve talked to him i just didn’t expect for him to be so okay and on board with it? whatever he got to read his silly book and tell me that he wants to become a god but we’ll deal with that later

also breaking into the vault for jaehiras quest was so silly! after rescuing mayrina in act one my ass always tries to keep water on me and what do you know it was useful for causing a short circuit (with a little help from call lightning lol)

and that’s all i can think of right now (3:30am) but i’m sure there’s more to come as deal with orin and rescue minsc… and also collect dribbles head lmao

[lycanthrope6221]

Sucide Squad: Kill the Justice League

Character Rant

Hi there here’s my thoughts on all the current operatives in Sucide Squad: Kill the Justice League. I’ll probably do another one of these for the Joker when he releases next month

Disclaimer, I’m a artist not a writer I suck I at writing and I really just wanted to get my thoughts down and put them out there also I’m writing this a after playing the game last night and my memory isn’t 100% I might have missed some things but oh well.

Spoilers!!! mostly just for gameplay I don’t really bring up the story.

Tw: Guns and violence

Harley Quinn:

Character-Loving her dialogue right now. Her voice fits well(duh it’s Tara strong), she has funny dialogue and unhinged dialogue she doesn’t feel forced or anything. I’m happy she’s moved on from the Joker and is trying to live her best life despite the bomb planted into her skull.

Movement- I’m going to be completely honest and say I think I might need to redo the tutorial for the bat grapple gun. All I do is fall…. Beside that it’s fun to swing around and grapple to building my brain keeps defaulting to Spider-Man 2 controls lol.

Combat- I know you can equip any weapon for any character but I’m just sticking to the type of gun they started with so my Harley’s only getting SMG’s and revolvers. I like beating aliens to a bloody pulp with Harley’s bat and I love revolvers in games like there so much fun to use.

Deadshot:

Character- So far it looks like Floyd is basically the voice of reason for the team. He has prior experience to mercenary work and it shows in the way he communicates with Waller i think this is a nice detail. He brings up his daughter sometimes and I really hope he gets to see her preferably not in alien invaded metropolis.

Movement- at first I struggled with the jet pack but after a couple stressful missions I finally got used to it. I don’t really have much to say about it, it’s a jetpack. Blast off woo hoo.

Combat- My Deadshot currently has a a sniper rifle and assault rifle. I’m so happy that the sniper rifles in this game aren’t heavy snipers and don’t take 10 years to reload cause I would be so so dead. I just got my first notorious weapon and it’s Black Mask sniper rifle and the floating back skulls were a jump-scare at first but honestly it gives the gun character.

Captain Boomerang-

Character- As a Tim drake fan I apologize for what I’m about to say. He’s slowly becoming harder and harder to hate. The voice actor and writers are just doing to good of a job also shot out to the animators whoever did facial animations for this game deserves double pay. He’s a dick and he sucks but in a funny way. Like ok Boomer rang why would you put a bomb into a child’s head? Yes that child is an omega level Metahuman but still! I would push him down a flight of stairs but I would also throw him down a granola bar.

Movement- When I first saw the trailer I thought this was “just revived from darkest night and now I have powers” Boomerang but no its some speed force copy cat gauntlet I think this was a good decision. I don’t hate his traversal it’s honestly pretty fun to throw boomerangs and go fast. Gotta go fast…

Combat- I love Boomerangs melee attack I love smacking people with a boomerang. I have a sniper rifle and a shotgun equipped. Shotguns are so much fun in this and doing the quick time thingys is really fun with them 10/10 shotgun lover 4lifers.

King Shark:

Character: King shark is such a neat humanoid shark. At first I thought he was just MCU Drax the destroyer in a different font but even though they both share a lot of tropes King Sharks love for learning reminds me more of Strong from fallout. I really like his design too, we don’t see a lot of 3d humanoid sharks out there and they nailed it.

Movement: King Shark uses his claws and glowing shark powers to jump high and run fast. I can’t really tell but I think he may be the fastest character. It might just be how easy he is to use but I don’t really notice any limitations like the others/its not screaming in my face like with dead shots jetpack over heating or Harley’s bat drone having a cool down. It’s also very cool to run around as a giant shark jumping off builds and plowing through crowds of aliens.

Combat- My King Shark is currently equipped with a heavy machine gun and a shotgun. The heavy gun is fine and kinda fun to use it pairs really well with his melee. King sharks melee attack is his 2 daggers that can cut through people and launch them into the sky so you can riddle them with bullets. That’s my favorite combo and you can do that with every character but King Sharks just seems cooler.

[showyoumyfavoriteobsession]

Finished* act 2 a little by surprise today

*by which I mean beat Ketheric. Act 2 is probably my least favorite (not saying much, there's still a lot to like), so I was prioritizing the story stuff, but I didn't really realize/remember that freeing Aylin basically cuts off your chance to explore Moonrise Towers at all. I did a much more thorough job exploring the rest of the map than I had last time and found several areas and enemies I had never seen, but completely missed out on infiltrating Moonrise prior to the Ketheric fight. I think there's some amount of exploring there that I can do before moving on to Baldur's Gate; I also did make a save before actually starting the battle with Ketheric, so if I *really* want to I can roll back to there and do some exploring before redoing the battle. (I probably won't but. nice to have the option.)

Biggest changes from my first run were:

Prioritizing Thaniel/lifting the shadow curse. I was curious if you could actually lift it significantly earlier in the act; it seems like the answer to that is "not really." Ketheric's dead and the curse is still there - seems likely that it only triggers when you're on your way out. I did find and fight Oliver well before waking up Art Cullagh, which changed the progression a little bit, but not significantly (you still have to fight him again to reunite him with Thaniel). The most notable change from that quest was having Halsin join me for good much earlier, and I played a good chunk of act 2 with him in my party (sorry Wyll :( ) - last time he didn't sign on until I was basically in act 3, by which point I wasn't going to switch him into my well-established party. I'm enjoying running with him (he's a good combat healer), but so far he seems to have an odd dearth of general world dialogue. Hard to tell if it's a bug or not, but I wasn't getting a voice line at all when I clicked on his portrait or switched to him in battle.

Found Zevlor! I found the rest of the tieflings last time but never found Zevlor; this time was the opposite way around (since I didn't really get to explore Moonrise). I like Zevlor and think he's a cool character, but saving the rest of the tieflings as well is the main reason I'm considering reloading that save.

Speedran the Gauntlet of Shar as much as I could. I really wanted to free Aylin (she's a powerful ally, plus impossible to pass up the top-tier lesbian love story), but man that quest is long. It's felt a bit clunky both times I've done it now - getting through the Gauntlet is basically required to beat Ketheric as far as I can tell, but there’s not much of a hook to pay attention to it without Shadowheart in your party.

Found the third Thorm sibling (the bartender) and defeated him without fighting him, and helped He Who Was with his whole... thing. Again, wild how I just missed some huge fuckin chunks of the map last time around.

Also had my lovely mushy Astarion romance scene where he admits he's catching feelings and shares a little more about his relationship Issues. It's a little surprising how much more extra depth and content there is to the character you're romancing - I wish you could get a little more of that with characters you're equally close with but not romancing. (Lae'zel's approval rating is almost as high as Astarion's but it feels like she's not opening up at all.)

GOD okay I have to stop it's nearly 1am on a work night this game is Doing things to me

[sasskarian]

Your Danse fic though! Can you do something for "My heart is thrilled by the still of your hand?"

oh, nonnie, have I got a ficlet for you. 

Note: I still maintain that this is all @asaara-writes​ fault. TWs for illness, wounds, and needles.

*** Hozier Prompts! *** Read on AO3! ***

Danse has been a soldier too long to be a deep sleeper. 

That’s the first thing the Brotherhood trains you out of. The indoctrination comes later, because only a good soldier can be indoctrinated, and a good soldier has to wake up at the first hint of danger. So when he hears the first whimper from across the room, his eyes snap open. The night is quiet, except for Evelyn’s breathing. But even as he watches in the dim moonlight of the gutted building they’re squatting in for the night, her arm spasms— and the dog bellies up to her, nosing at her with a low whine. 

Now that he’s awake, he can hear the uneven, ragged edge to her breath in place of the normal steady and slow he’s used to. Switching on his low-light red headlamp, he makes his way over to her bedroll. Dogmeat looks up at him, snuffling at the quick pat Danse gives him. The closer he gets to Evelyn, the more alarm fills him until he’s kneeling next to her and trying to stay calm. Sweat beads on her forehead, rolling down her damp skin in rivulets he might find aesthetic under literally any other circumstances. In the places it’s already hit her flight suit, dark patches lay like lightless pools against her chest. 

Even as he watches, she convulses once, twice, and then a third time before falling so still, Danse checks to make sure she’s still breathing. Every good field medic has scanners built into their suits but Evelyn has something better. He tilts her Pip-Boy, fumbling with the tiny controls until, in frustration, he shucks off the heavy gauntlets and gloves of his power armor. She teases him about all but living in it, and his gut clenches as he convinces the Pip to show her vitals. He taps it, wondering for a moment if it’s malfunctioning, but the high pulse rate and low oxygen levels stay exactly the same. 

Injury detected, it reads. Deploy stimpak?

Injury? His eyes sweep over her, pinning on a darker spot than the rest and rolls down the collar of her suit, hissing. Imprinted on freckled flesh is an almost perfect set of bite marks, flaming red and hot to the touch. Danse tries, desperately, to remember when she could have been bitten. Was it the fight near the old bookstore? Or down outside of Goodneighbor? In his memory, he hears the clang of armor hitting the ground, and a pained goddammit! But when he’d looked, Evelyn had been reattaching her pauldron, a smoking mutant hound at her feet. 

I’m fine, she’d reassured, reloading her gun— the one he’d given her, some absurdly pleased part of him noted— before heading out. It’s a lie he should have known, recognized, after telling it so much himself.

How long had she been out of her armor? How long did radiation last after a radstorm? Danse searches his brain for answers but none came. Lists of symptoms, survival chances, those things dance in his brain, but the best he can do is shrug out of his own armor (that she wasn’t coherent enough to tease him about it stung) and sit on the side of her bed. 

“Come on, Evelyn,” he murmurs. Shaking hands pry out a bottle of purified water and a cloth from their supply pack, trying to clean the bite of dried blood. As he puts gentle pressure on the wound, dribbles of pus and debris come away on the rag and he rips it in half, trying to prevent contamination as he cleans her, holding on to his forced calm by the tips of his fingers.  

Danse’s scores in field medicine had been average across the board, but with his team more versed in it, those skills are rusty and fuck, he wants to kick himself for it. 

“RadAway,” he tells himself, searching the field kit. Attaching the IV to the bag is easier than finding a place to hang it; he settles on taping it to the hip-brace of his armor with the medical tape Evelyn had insisted on. Finding a vein is harder. He bit his lip as he presses on her arm, thumps it with his fingers, curls her hand into a fist. Nothing seems to work until finally, the smallest hint of blue in the dawning light shows in the back of her hand. 

Evelyn jumps and moans as he swabs the area with the cleaner side of the damp cloth and slides the needle in, her eyes fluttering. The first signs of the medicine helping come around eleven that morning, her crumpled features smoothing out a little. It’s subtle, but Danse can tell; he’s spent the entire night cataloging her every exhale and movement. Dogmeat has somehow ended up half curled on his lap, half draped over his mistress, his heavy rump giving a tentative wag when Evelyn’s breathing begins to even. 

The last of the RadAway drips from the bag, traveling down the long, thin tube to her arm, and Danse slides the IV from her with relief. Next is hydration: a stimpak will have to wait, since he isn’t sure what the mixed medications might do. But as he shifts, leaning over her to drip lukewarm water into her mouth, her hand shoots out and grabs his. 

“Nate?” Her voice cracks, ragged and wet-sounding, and oh, how his heart clenches. “I’m so cold, Nate.” 

He— what does he do here? Dozens of suggestions zip through him, at least half fueled by the heat of her hand on his. “It’s okay,” he finally manages. “You’re a bit sick. Just rest.” 

“Mm.” She curls into him, her cheek nuzzling against his thigh; Danse stares, frozen, disbelieving. “Stay? I’ve been having the worst dream.”

There’s only one answer to that, and his voice is soft, almost wondering, even as the soldier the Brotherhood raised to need nothing beyond himself quails and shivers in his cage of steel. “Of course,” he whispers. Slow, so slow and tentative, he brushes through the coppery hair spread across his lap. Danse can’t remember the last time— if ever— he’s touched someone without his gloves, and the silky slide of her curls through his fingers rocks him down to his bones. 

And that's when he knows he’s in trouble. This— the soft afternoon, with wasteland birds warbling and the touch of her hand on his— is boggy ground. He is her Paladin, her commanding officer. She is his soldier, but… she’s also a friend. In this, though, the way she rests against him, warm and shivering and somehow more real than anything else he’s felt before, Danse is knee-deep in emotion and sinking fast. 

It’s past midnight before her fever breaks. Danse has long since given up on propriety, stretched out on his side next to the bedroll to help keep her warm. Dogmeat drapes over both their feet, snoring softly in the night, and the only stretch of time measured is in the small beep the Pip gives for the alarm he set. Slowly, so he doesn’t disturb Evelyn, he reaches into his pocket for the stimpak syringe and eases it into her injured shoulder. She tenses in his arms, burrowing her face deeper into his chest, but doesn’t wake. 

(It shouldn’t feel good, right? Is he a selfish old bastard, for enjoying this simple human contact?)

Still moving slow, he nudges Dogmeat into waking. “Your turn, boy,” he says, almost soundless. The dog is smarter than most humans Danse knows, though, and he trusts him to stand watch and wake him if something goes wrong. But they’ve picked their camp well, so he doesn’t expect much trouble: Ferals were cleared long ago in another patrol, and there’ve been no signs of mutants for at least a mile. So for a moment, a desperately needed moment after almost two days of trying to keep Evelyn breathing, Danse lets his eyes droop. 

Sleep has almost claimed him when she stirs, breathing her husband’s name against his neck. Guilt lazily slides through him, that her delirium has slapped a dead man’s face over his own in her mind and he hasn’t corrected her, but shock freezes him solid when her lips brush his. Once, soft and sleepy, and then again, more firm; not quite a demand, but when her hands slide to his jaw, he knows he is definitely awake and not hallucinating from exhaustion. He pries her hands from his jaw, ignoring her quiet whine, and settles them between his chest and hers, shuddering when her fingers curl into his undersuit.

“Missed you,” she mumbles against his mouth, her breath a thousand soft pleas against his skin. 

“You’re still sick,” Danse says, summoning the words from somewhere deep inside, a place where willpower reigns over guilt and loneliness. “Rest now, Evie.” 

When she finally settles against him, her ankle resting trustingly between his and her hair tickling his nose, Danse squeezes his eyes shut against the prickling that is most definitely not tears. Paladins don’t cry, and especially not over lovers they can’t have. Loving Evelyn would be a betrayal of her trust, of his military discipline, and disrespecting the memory of her husband. (Wouldn’t it?)

But a smaller, sly part of him knows that he’ll tuck this memory in the depths of his heart: the way she feels, the heavy, reassuring warmth of her body against his. How she fits in his arms, and the silken, forbidden glint of sunlight on her curls. How soft her lips are, even in this dried out desert of horrors.

He’s not in love. He’s not. 

But his final thought, before finally dropping into sleep, is a faint wish that maybe he could be, if he let himself.

[darlingpetao3]

Seducing the Gem (Nash Wells x Reader, Chapter 2/9)

Rating: M (Smut in Chapter 6 only)

Summary: When a mysterious package shows up at your front door, you (a famous Romance novelist) are hurtled from your virtually uneventful life and into one of danger and adventure. In a quest to save your captured friend Caitlin from impending harm, you run into a suave adventurer named Nash who helps you along the way. Or is the charming Nash simply after something in your possession…?

Chapter 1

You never want to travel by air again after this.

So many cumulative hours on a plane, layovers, and don’t forget that brutal time change. Jet lag is the real bitch, hands down.

You weren’t supposed to tell anyone about what’s happening with Caitlin (and even you don’t know the full extent of it, other than she’s being held for ransom and you have to deliver a weird piece of tech to these criminals?), but you felt an obligation to tell Iris. You were all friends, after all, and she should know. Plus, you figured you should tell your boss before she quite possibly never heard from you again.

Needless to say, she freaked out when you told her the gist.

“What do you mean Cailtin’s in trouble? And you’re going where?!”

“I can’t tell you any more than that, Iris, just please keep this all to yourself!”

Iris had promised you as much and even saw you to the airport in a flash.

And yes, you may be reaching your final landing, and it may have to do with your def-con one anxiety flaring up, but you’ve had this nagging little feeling that you have constantly been watched throughout your neverending travels. But of course, who wouldn’t feel a certain level of delusion after losing track of how many hours you’ve been awake?

Wearily, you grab your luggage and attempt to follow the signs to where you might find transportation to the hotel. It’s almost like you need to gain your “land-legs” again after flying for so long. And why is there so much yelling from one man? He sounds American, angry and gruff to boot, so you try to stay clear of him and avoid eye contact.

Now, where are the-?

“Oof.” You walk directly into a towering brick of a man who looks like a real-life G.I. Joe action figure.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he apologizes in a familiar accent. Another American. “Are you alright?”

“Oh yes, yes, I’m sorry, I’m not fully with it right now,” you reply awkwardly. “Do you happen to know where the buses or cabs pull up? I need to get to Pullman Kinshasa Grand Hotel. It’s urgent.”

“Ah, the Pullman!” the silver-haired man exclaims happily. “I’m headed there as well. My wife is here on business and I’ve flown in to surprise her. I rented a vehicle, would you be interested in hitching a ride?”

Honestly, it would save your brain and legs a whole lot of trouble otherwise.

“If you don’t mind? That would be absolutely wonderful,” you exhale in relief. “Thank you so much… I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name?” You offer yours first.

“You can call me Wade,” he tells you with a smile, “now, let’s get you safely out of here.”

***

You don’t remember falling asleep.

Surely, it couldn’t have been for very long. After all, the hotel wasn’t supposed to be too far from the airport. But why did it seem like you were on a jungle road when you should see more buildings…?

Stretching, you yawn and ask, “I wasn��t out long, was I?”

“No, no, not long at all,” Wade replies while keeping his eyes on the road. You continue to look around, feeling the kindling of nerves starting to surface.

“So, uh… how much further until we reach the hotel?”

“Not much longer now.”

A few minutes later and you’re still travelling through the jungle and now the bad feelings are flooding you even though you’re trying your damnedest not to let it show. Where are we going? Who the hell did I get in a car with? Like hell were you going to get taken to a secondary location. You’ve written plenty of those stories before.

“Hey, do you mind pulling over for a minute?” you ask casually. “I didn’t go to the bathroom after landing. It’s pretty urgent.”

“Can’t hold it?” Wade questions you. “Otherwise, you’ll have to just go behind a tree.”

“I’m afraid I can’t wait,” you fake grimace. God, you hope you can get out of whatever this frightening situation is.

“Alright then, be quick,” he says gruffly, but adds overenthusiastically, “luxury awaits!”

You laugh while getting out of the car, and hope it passes for a genuine one.

“You need your backpack with you for this?” Wade comments. Your heart races in fear.

“Oh yeah, well, you know… feminine products.”

After shutting the car door, you plan to make a run for it in five seconds, but the sound of another slammed door echoes along with one of a cocked gun. It’s aimed directly at you.

You’re frozen in place - alone, with an armed man in a jungle with no one else in sight.

Well, fuck.

“Hand over the bag, Miss (Y/L/N),” Wade orders you. “You have no idea what you have in there.”

Yes, you do. It’s the key to saving Caitlin. You hug your purse closer to your chest.

Also, you don’t recall giving him your last name…

Who is this man?

“Hand. It. Over.” Wade takes a step closer, and just when you think you’re about to meet your end, you hear a little beep beep noise. A man on a motorbike approaches and thank the universe there will at least be a witness to your death.

“What’s going on here?” the mystery man asks after stepping off his bike and removing his full-face helmet. You don’t even have time to register the attractive face appear into your vision because a gunshot rings out amongst the trees. The next thing you knew, the tire on Mystery Man’s motorbike lets out a long hiss. The man raises his hands in surrender, but in the blink of an eye, he pulls out his own gun that he must have hidden on his hip under his jacket. He shoots at Wade in retaliation and you hit the ground, crawling to get behind the closest tree or bush.

Why did a freaking shootout have to happen right in front of me? Why?!

As one might expect, you were more awake than you’d ever been.

Mystery Man reloads and takes another shot at Wade, who makes a mad dash behind the hood of his car, then manages to hop into the driver’s side. He peels away, barrelling down the jungle road. Only once the sound of the vehicle disappears can you hear the sound of your heart pounding in your ears.

It gets even louder when you hear footsteps grow closer to where you’re crouched behind a bush. A face pops around.

“Hi, there,” Mystery Man greets you.

“Hi,” you peep.

“You doing alright?” he asks.

“I’d be better if you put your gun away.” He makes an understanding noise and does so, then offers a hand to help you up. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. The name’s Nash.”

Whoa, his eyes are insane. You feel the need to avert your own eyes with the speed in which this Nash guy drew his gun earlier. They’re the soul-piercing kind.

“I’m (Y/N),” you reply, rustling in your pocket for your phone when he starts to talk again.

“So, I have to ask, what in the hell brings you out here with that guy?”

You check your phone and naturally, there’s no signal. You need to call the hotel, get ahold of Caitlin, something.

“Listen,” you say, “I’d rather just try to forget all that. I need you to tell me how to get to Kinshasa. It’s a matter of life and death.”

“Darling,” Nash laughs, “you are hell and gone from Kinshasa! It’s over that way, on the coast.”

Wait, what?

“But that man,” you say, unable to comprehend, “Wade, he said…”

“Yeah, I bet he did.” Something on Nash’s arm - a gauntlet or something - beeps and lights up when he takes a step closer to you.

“What was that?” you ask.

“Don’t worry about it. ...What else did he tell you?”

You leave out the weirdness about Wade seeming to know who you were and you having that GPS device Ronnie sent you in your purse.

“Please,” you beg, “I need your help.”

“I don’t know h-”

“I will pay you!” you add in desperation.

“It’s just that-”

“Everything I have on me, you’ll get!”

Nash raises an eyebrow in curiosity, then laughs. “Relax, okay?” He rests his hands on your shoulders. You feel the weight and size of them on you. You’re happy Nash is on your side and not Wade’s. “The only issue is that my bike is flat,” he explains. “We’ll have to walk.”

You sigh. “Okay.”

“But I can tell you this: you’re going to regret carrying that backpack through this humid heat for miles. You’ll have to ditch it.”

“But I-!” you protest but stop. Sometimes it really sucks being a material girl. Thanks, Madonna. You leave your luggage behind, but you make sure to take your purse and strap it over your shoulder.

“I look forward to getting my hands all over everything on you,” Nash says playfully with a wink.

How dare he! You are having a crisis! You were just held at gunpoint - now is not the time for trying anything!

“Listen, buddy,” you tell him, “I don’t know who you think you are but don’t even think about it.” You start walking away from him, but he calls after you.

“Uh, Princess? Kinshasa’s this way.”

You spin around and shoot him a death glare. That treacherous eyebrow makes a reappearance.

“You know what you are? You’re a cocky bastard!” you exclaim before walking past him on the correct path to Kinshasa.

He laughs again. Damn him having a beautiful laugh, too.

[rwbyremnants]

CHAPTER WARNINGS: Spin the bottle (yes again lol, for the fans of a certain other fic), underage drinking, make out fun, slight boner-town

=Chapter 2

"MERRY DUSTMAS!"

The four teammates shouted the proclamation simultaneously as Ruby pressed a button on a reloadable cracker, a Dust reaction filling the air with shimmering confetti. They laughed and raised their glasses of mulled red sap wine - which Ruby technically shouldn't have been drinking for another few months, but Yang decided as long as she didn't leave the Xiao Long household, it was no big deal.

"I must say," Weiss sighed airily as she gazed around at the festive decor, "even though I'm missing the annual Dustmas Eve Ball at Schnee Manor, this is quite a bit nicer than I expected."

"Put it this way,” Yang laughed before she completely downed her drink, wiping her mouth with the back of her arm. “Here, you don't have to have a stick up your ass."

Her partner, on the contrary, took small sips of her own, savouring all the flavours as she took her seat on the small sofa. The Xiao Long house was smaller than Blake expected, but it was cozy enough. And with their father being away for the weekend, the place was their own.

"I suppose that's true," Weiss said while sniffing delicately at her drink as if to make sure it wasn't poisoned.

"Yay!" Ruby said with a little bounce from her seat on the ottoman. "The Dustmas Bush is all decorated, we have cookies and, um, wine, and all four of us are together! What could possibly make this night better?"

"Presents, duh! You are gonna love yours, Ruby. It practically screams your name." Yang grinned as she plopped down opposite the other girls. In the centre of them, she then placed one of her Ember Celica gauntlets, looking up with a smirk. "Now it's time for some real fun."

"And what, pray tell, qualifies as 'real fun'?" Weiss asked airily.

"Spin The Blade," Ruby grumbled, clearly less than enthused.

"Spin the what? A game? But Ember Celica doesn't even have a blade!"

"Well, back in 'the days of old'-" for that line, Yang had deliberately put on an 'old man' voice, before continuing "-they used a dagger. But my gear does the trick and it’s not loaded, so way less dangerous. Anyway, it's not the blade that's important!"

Ruby's little lackluster nod drew Weiss's attention. "What's with you? It doesn't seem like you want to play this game."

"It's more like I don't want to play it with my sister… but whatever, I guess it'll still be fun." With a concentrated effort, the short-haired girl perked up and smiled. "Okay, I’m in!"

"I'm kinda scared to try this, knowing Yang,” the Faunus admitted, shifting from the sofa back to the floor opposite her partner. “What are the rules?"

"Pretty simple. You spin Ember Celica, and whoever it aims at has three choices: kiss, truth, or dare. Obviously, the more drunk we get, the funner it's gonna be."

"Kiss?" A light went off behind Weiss's violet eyes. "Ohhh… now I get why you don't want to play it with your sister."

"We do cheek-kisses," Ruby groaned. "Still awkward, though. But okay, um, why don’t we get this going?"

However, Blake suddenly seemed to be a little less than enthused with the idea. She didn’t speak up, but did fall completely silent, biting her lip as she glanced between the battle gauntlet and Ruby’s slightly rosy cheeks. Kissing was one of the options? Did it have to be?

"Alright. Since it was my idea, I'm gonna start!" And with that, the blonde grasped the top of Ember Celica, spinning it as fast as she could. With the four of them sat watching it, it continued round and round until it landed on…

"Oooohhh, looks like you're up, Ice Queen."

Instantly, Weiss's estimation of the game took a spiralling nosedive and everyone could see it happening. "W-wait, does that mean if I pick 'kiss', that I have to kiss you?!" Swallowing, she squeaked, "Wh-what are my other two options again?"

"Truth, or dare…" Yang folded her arms, smirking contentedly at how flustered the Ice Queen was. Even more so when her partner posed an interesting question.

"But if she said dare, couldn't you just dare her to kiss you?"

"TRUTH!" Weiss half-shouted. "I pick truth, absolutely, I pick truth, whatever on earth that means!"

"Wow, Weiss," Ruby squeaked as she leaned away from her battle partner. "Way to overcompensate…"

"Almost as if you think Yang has cooties," Blake joined in, chuckling mischievously.

But it was Yang's turn to tease. For a moment, she raised her hand to her chin, thinking deeply for a question. What would make the Ice Queen the most uncomfortable? And then she snapped her fingers. "Which of us three do you find the most attractive?"

Weiss felt both of her eyes go wide as saucers. "I… what… you… damn you, Xiao Long, that's not the sort of thing you can ask a girl! About other girls, even!"

"Well, too bad, she did," Ruby giggled.

"But none of you are boys, this isn't really a fair question!!" Weiss glanced between Blake and Yang briefly. "I suppose… Yang, okay? Are you satisfied?"

"Score!" She celebrated with a fist pump, flexing her muscles.

“It’s because you look so much like a man!” she flung at her, ears already pinkening. “Shut up!”

Laughing aloud, Yang pushed Ember Celica in her direction. "And now it's your turn to spin!"

While Weiss spun the weapon and grumbled something about "self-infatuated gloryhounds", Ruby laughed and said to her sister, "This is a lot more fun than when we played it with Zwei, isn't it?"

"Yeah that was… mostly just gross," Yang confessed. But finally the weapon had stopped spinning, and it landed on… "Oooooh, Blake!"

"W-wha?!" Sure enough, Ember Celica was aiming in her direction. Intimidating as it was, she took a sip of her wine again to try and calm her nerves. If she voted kiss, she would have to kiss one of the girls! Why was this a question of either being embarrassed or humiliated?

Well, there was one other option. "A-alright. Dare."

Letting out an audible sigh, Weiss said, "Alright, um… let me think of something suitably, well, beginner-level." Tapping her chin, she eventually straightened and said. "Oh! I dare you to kiss your Semblance!"

"Kiss my… what?!" She frantically looked around the room, watching as everyone else was just grinning and laughing to themselves. She really had to do this. "F-fine. I guess that’s not too bad."

And soon enough, she puckered her lips, only for that copy of herself to remain frozen, the real her appearing right in front of it as she pressed her lips back against the mirroring set. At least only a small kiss on the lips wasn't that bad.

There was nothing to stop Ruby from giggling. The sight sent a thrill through her, but it was also just really amusing to see two copies of Blake kissing each other. Then again, it could have been the wine talking.

"Fabulous!" Weiss snickered as she clapped. "Well, that was oddly satisfying. Also, I didn't expect it would matter, since you weren't having to kiss one of us. You're welcome."

"Still humiliating though. Look at that face." She gestured toward the copy of herself, lips still puckered for the kiss. But with a wave of her hand, it vanished again.

"Now it's your turn, kitty!"

"Okay, okay…" She quickly spun Ember Celica, watching intently for who it would land on, sipping her wine once again.

"O-oh."

Ruby felt her face warm when she saw the business end of the gauntlet pointing in her direction. Everything had been mildly amusing up until she was the one in the spotlight.

"Ooooohhh this'll be fun!" Yang smirked, staring over at her sister. "What's it gonna be, Sis? Blake will decide your fate!"

"Um… okay, I guess I'll…" Why did she feel so conflicted? A kiss from Blake didn't sound so bad, but then again, asking for it would make her seem weird or desperate. So she merely squeaked, "Um, truth?"

"Hah!" Weiss snapped. "Who's the coward now?"

"STILL YOU!"

"Ladies, ladies, you're both pretty," Yang laughed, getting up and grabbing the many empty glasses belonging to the girls, before heading to the kitchen to get refills. “And chickenshit!”

In that time, Blake was thinking to herself. What would be the best question? "Okay, Ruby, um… I guess, who in the school do you find attractive?"

"Well, I never really thought about it," Ruby said shyly. Maybe a dare would have been better after all, but it was too late to worry about that. "I mean, both you and Weiss are so pretty I can't stand it, but if you mean boys, um… I guess Jaune's kind of cute, in a goofy way."

"Jaune?" Weiss scoffed. "That toe fungus?"

"I didn't say he was some kind of chiseled god, just that he's cute! You really don't think he is?"

Shrugging, the heiress pretended to brush dirt from her impeccable sleeve. "He's beneath me. After all, I'm 'so pretty you can't stand it', right?"

Flushing, Ruby reached out and spun Ember Celica, refusing to comment.

An hour or so later, the group was a constant mess of giggling and laughter. It was Yang's fifth glass of wine, Blake's third, Weiss's second, and Ruby had only finished her one that she was allowing herself. Still, they were all light headed. Yang obviously so when it was her turn.

"Aaaalright Rubes, I ain't no coward. I'll go for kiss!"

"Yaaaang!" Ruby protested, but she was already resigned to her fate. The first time the “blade” had put her and Yang together, she had chosen "dare", and Yang dared her to run around the house in her underwear. That had been mortifying, despite knowing that nobody was around for miles, so the next time she chose "truth" - which led to her having to reveal that yes, she had had a sexy dream before. When asked about whom , she refused to answer on the grounds that it was a separate question.

In light of all that, kissing her sister seemed like the lesser of three evils. Heart pounding, she leaned forward and screwed her eyes closed, waiting for Yang to do the unthinkable.

Even when drunk, her older sister knew how awkward it was for them both, and possibly for the other two watching. And so she only delivered a very brief peck on the lips. Ruby sighed and shivered in mingling mortification and relief, then ducked her head down between her shoulders.

“Thanks, Sis.”

“You’re welcome. I got your back.” She tousled the younger girl’s hair before pushing Celica to her. "Spin away!"

"Never thought I'd see that," Weiss remarked as Ruby spun the bottle.

"Why is it making you blush though?!"

Folding her arms, Weiss did her best to pretend her face wasn't glowing like a stoplight. "Th-this isn't because I watched you two kiss! It's still from Blake's question about what kind of panties I own!"

"Honestly, I didn't expect you to say red lace!" Yang chuckled, by now more or less out of her mind, having to lean against the sofa.

Blake wasn't faring too well either given that she had finished her latest drink, occasionally wobbling as she barely sat upright on the floor. Though then she found herself in the line of fire. "Not again…"

Nodding to herself as if she had been expecting it, Ruby said, "Mkay, Blake. What's it gonna be?"

That was the question. As much as Truth seemed the best option, she didn't fancy the question that would surely be asked. Who did she have a crush on in their year group? Kissing fared no better, considering someone had gotten Yang to kiss her in previous rounds, which had come pretty close to stirring reactions in her body that were better off not coming to pass. There was only one real choice.

"Dare."

By now, with a little wine making her stomach warmer, Ruby felt a lot bolder than she normally would have. "I dare you… to… take one piece of clothing off and leave it off for the rest of the night!"

"Now hold on!" Weiss snapped immediately. "Doesn't this set a dangerous precedent?!"

"WHAT?!" Even in her slightly drunken state, she was far too shy for that. All she had on was some black and white pyjamas that Yang had let her borrow, since she had managed to forget her gown. It was either the top or the bottoms, and neither were preferable. "C-can I change my answer or something? Please?"

"Ssssure you can," slurred Yang, who only pointed at her sister. "Forfeit is to kiss Rubes."

"O-oh," Ruby whispered. None of them had forfeited so far, and she hadn't realised that was the rule. It simply hadn't come up yet.

"So I either have to be in my underwear or kiss your sister?"

"Yep. And not just a peck on the lips Sister-Kiss, either. I mean full-on make out. Curl her toes!"

And with that, the poor brunette’s eyes shot wide open. As lovely as the girl was, Ruby was a little too young to be playing tonsil hockey with anybody! Surely Yang couldn't condone that happening to her own sister… or perhaps she had forgotten thanks to her drunken state. "This is unfair…"

"Seems fair to me," Weiss muttered. "I had to lick Ruby's elbow."

"Yang!" Ruby hissed at her sister. "What are you trying to do?!"

"Whaaaaat?" Yang laughed, unable to help but lay tilt her head.

In Blake's dismay, she sighed reluctantly. As much as she didn't want to do it, kissing Ruby seemed the better option. That punishment didn't last all night at least – and wouldn’t reveal far more than she wanted to let out of the bag.

"Fine. I forfeit."

It seemed Ruby's daring scheme to tease Blake had backfired drastically. "You… do?" Licking her lips, she glanced back and forth at her other teammates for help, but Yang was still saturated with alcohol, and Weiss was merely sitting there with her arms folded, waiting for developments. There was nothing for her to do but sit forward slightly. "Well… um, okay."

With eyes on then both, Blake couldn't give in. She had to swallow her pride. 'Imagine it's someone else,' she thought desperately. 'Sun, or Jaune – or Grandma! Anyone!' But as much as she wanted to, she couldn't deny one emotion biting at her. She wanted it to be Ruby. The whole thing was wrong, making out with the girl she liked when she was so young – and they were drunk! But Ruby was beautiful, kind, passionate. Everything she dreamed of in someone to get closer to.

So, she too leant forward, taking Ruby's lips with her own, kneading them against one another gently.

In all honesty, she had been expecting the kiss with Blake to be rather like the one from Yang; chaste and cheeky, amusing. Despite her sister’s goading, no way would she have really given them hell if they didn’t ‘make out’ as she demanded. Instead, this one was tender, yearning for more yet restrained from taking it beyond this initial stage. Blake's mouth was sweet and somewhat tart from the wine, and she found herself wanting more of it, she wanted-

"I thought you two were supposed to be making out," Weiss said airily. "Not just lip-locking."

It was difficult for Ruby to block out her needling voice, but she did her best. When she tried to shift forward she almost lost her balance, and desperately grabbed for Blake's shoulder to steady herself. Only afterward did it feel strange to her, to be clutching her friend while they kissed, but what could she do about it?

Rolling her eyes behind her eyelids, Blake leant further into the kiss to respond to Weiss, joining in as she also grasped Ruby's shoulder to pull her into her. The girl's lips were far softer then what she had expected. Of course, innocent of any form of kissing, but a delight to indulge in none the less. They felt good. In fact…

It felt too good. Once the other two seemed satisfied, she quickly let go. "T-there, happy?!"

"Y-yes," Weiss stammered as Ruby pressed a hand against her mouth. "That was quite an interesting show you two put on for us, I have to say. Wow."

"Show?" Ruby squeaked. "It's… it was fun, but why would you… I mean, I don't…"

"Hey, are you okay?" Weiss asked, eyebrows knitting. "You're acting kind of extra-doltish."

It took a few more moments for Blake to realise what exactly happened. She had just kissed Ruby Rose. Her leader, two years younger then herself, her partner's sister. It was both an honour, and nearly set off a panic in the pit of her stomach. 'Why did you do that?! She’s barely old enough to be at Beacon at all! You said it yourself, she's too innocent!'

"Hey… You both don't look so hot," Yang pointed out. Both of the two had red cheeks, mainly due to the alcohol rather than their rather steamy kiss.

"Don't say that!" Ruby piped up. "Blake always looks hot!" Only afterward did she realise what she had said. Oops. "I m-mean… well, she does. That's just a fact, right?"

"Whoa! I think we know who that sexy dream was about now…" Yang played along, only then did she look up toward the clock and see the time. "Ah damn, it's three in the morning! We should probably be getting to bed or Dad’s gonna cream us if we throw off our sleep schedules…"

"I'm all for that," Weiss sighed as she stretched her legs out in front of her, having been sitting on them for quite a while. The toes of her fuzzy socks wobbled a little. "If only to end this infernal game."

"But noooo," Ruby whined. "Okay, so this is a weird game, but we could do something else! Do we have to go to bed?"

"Yessss… Besides, Yang thhhhinks she needs it." When getting up, there was a lot of wobbling. If not for her grip on the chair, she would have fallen over. But it didn't stop the eratic giggling. "Y-you two love birds fffeel free to stay up, me and Weiss are gonna hit the sack."

Ruby watched Weiss follow Yang out of the room, and while the heiress didn't take a single backward glance, Yang kept leering at them and making smoochy-smoochy faces. It was humiliating, but luckily Blake was too busy reading the label of the wine bottle to notice. Or pretending to be.

"So," Ruby said in a hushed voice once they had heard the two bedroom doors slam closed.

"So," Blake echoed, placing the bottle back down. What was she meant to talk about now exactly? Should she bring it up? Forget it ever happened? Crack a joke about it to relieve tension? Being somewhat light headed didn't help any of her decisions. "I can't believe Yang let you have any wine."

Squirming for a few moments, Ruby scooted closer to Blake before whispering, "She tried to give me another after she'd had like, a whole bottle, but I said I didn't think it was a good idea. Tomorrow she'll probably feel terrible for it, but… hey, if we were in Vacuo I'd already have been drinking legally for a year now, right?"

"Yeah, that's true. I'm more annoyed that she encouraged you to-" Then she shut herself up. If she mentioned the fact that her and Ruby shared an intimate kiss, she would give away that she was still thinking about it. "A-anyway, has she let you do this before? Have wine, I mean."

"Not a whole glass," Ruby hedged. When Blake only blinked at her, she relented and said, "Okay, so she's been letting me have sips for years, but I swear this is the first time she let me have an entire glass to myself. Is… is that bad?"

"Not really, I guess. I mean, she wasn't forcing you to; still your choice." She laid back against the sofa as she looked over to Ruby. "But I’m there with you, actually. This is the first time I've been… well, drunk, and not just tried a sip or two."

It suddenly occurred to Ruby that she was sitting across from Blake, which made a lot less sense when they were the only two in the room. However, when she tried to stand up and walk over to her, she tripped on her own clumsy feet and face-planted against the cushion right next to Blake.

"OWWW!" she said in a muffled tone. "Well, I guess I'm drunk, too!"

"Easy, there," she laughed. But when seeing she couldn't get up properly by herself, she managed to lean over to her, pulling her shoulder slowly to pull her facing upward. "There you go…"

Though after a few seconds, she saw she was right above Ruby. She found herself looking into those silver eyes once again. Did they always sparkle? Even in such small lighting? The woman couldn't speak, only look at the beautiful girl underneath her.

Ruby returned the gaze, unfocused at first but then locking onto the amber orbs above her. Her throat felt tight. Then she gazed past her hair and pointed at the ceiling.

"Oh, look. Bristletoe."

Sure enough, a sprig of whitish leaves with green berries hung from the rafters, merrily adding a dash of holiday cheer to the decor. However, that particular plant held a specific tradition; you were supposed to spend the entire night with anyone you walked under it with.

"O-oh…" Outdated though it was, the first tradition was to repeat something they had just done: to begin the night with a kiss. Did she dare do it again? “Yeah, it’s… it sure is.”

“Guess you’d better kiss me,” Ruby chirruped in a slightly joking tone. But her cheeks were rosy, her eyes half-closed as she smiled up at her teammate.

Before Blake knew what was happening, she found her lips pressing on the younger girl's, this time remaining still. She wanted to make sure the partner also wanted this.

Ruby had not been expecting her to go through with it, but she actually had upheld the tradition of Bristletoe. Would she go through with the rest? That was unimportant at the moment. Whimpering quietly, she reached a hand up to hold Blake's face against her own as her lips began to move, to push against another set that were so inviting. After a few seconds, she found Blake's bottom lip was between hers, and began to suckle it gently, not knowing quite why she enjoyed it to the degree she did but absolutely sure she wanted more.

"Mmm…" For reasons unknown to her, the soft and delicate suckling against her lips felt amazing. And she returned the favour how she could, managing to catch Ruby's top lip between hers, her teeth brushing lightly against it as she kissed the girl deeper.

When did she move to lay on top of her?! The weight of Blake's body sent a thrill straight down into Ruby's core, one she was completely unaccustomed to feeling. Was this allowed? Could people get this close without being married? Unbidden, she felt her hands trailing up the back and into the hair of her teammate, holding her in place and yearning for more and more contact. Sounds came from her throat that she didn't even believe herself to be capable of making. This was completely alien, and Blake was the last one she had expected to be sharing this moment with. It was magical.

Meanwhile, the Faunus was weathering something of a personal crisis. These were feelings she believed she had left behind years ago; feelings for women, that was. But something about Ruby Rose was so alluring to her. It may have been the wine talking, or just the heat of the moment, but her own hands began to wander over the girl's body, caressing each inviting curve as she moaned into her lover's mouth contentedly.

Slowly, Ruby became aware that this wasn't just going to be a kiss. They were going all the way. She wasn't completely sure that was what she wanted… or what that even meant, but Blake felt better than anything she had experienced in her entire life and it seemed worth it to her that she explore. Taking her first bold action, she let her hand wander down and grip the subtle mound of Blake's backside, delighting in the gentle give of the flesh.

"Mmm!" She found she had to part her lips from the girl's below, letting out a heated sigh. Unintentionally, she pushed her backside into the hand above her, body craving more contact from the perfect woman below her. Completely losing herself in the moment.

However, the heat that was blossoming was doing things to her body she didn't anticipate. Which the younger girl could suddenly feel grinding into her leg.

"Blake!" Ruby panted as their kiss finally broke, her round, feverish face pressing into the curve of her neck. "Y… your belt moved, Gambol Shroud is in the front, or… or what is that?"

"Huh? Oh…" With a sudden jolt of ice water into her veins, Blake knew exactly what it was. Shit. Thanks to the wine, her temperature and hormones were so high, she didn't even realise the reaction making out with Ruby would spur. And now…

"I-it's nothing!" she desperately breathed, crawling backward off the woman underneath, before turning away from her. There was no way she was going to let something like this be ruined again.

"Okay," Ruby said without hesitation, though she was now quite worried about Blake. "Are- Blake, what is it? Talk to me."

One of her hands rested on the shoulder of the back turned toward her, but that was all she could muster. Blake was sad now, rather than enjoying what they were doing seconds ago. Was it anything she did? Or had the effects of the wine simply worn off enough for her to realise this wasn't a course of action she wanted to pursue?

"I-I…" All the while, she seemed to be staring down at the floor, legs bringing themselves up and against her chest so she could hide. With a reluctant sigh, she finally spoke. "Y-you don't want to do this with me, Ruby. I’m not quite the woman you think you’re with under the Bristletoe."

Perhaps Ruby wasn't the smartest student ever to attend Beacon Academy, or the most perceptive. But even she could put two and two together. Something about the mysterious pressure up against her thigh had given her friend great distress. A suspicion crept into her mind, but she pushed it away. That would be impossible. Completely impossible.

Wouldn't it?

"Hey," she breathed shakily as she began to scoot closer to Blake, sliding an arm around her waist. "Um, you're kind of right, I don't know what I want, but… it's not because it's you, okay? All of this felt really good. Super amazingly good! I’m just new at it, that’s all!"

"B-but I'm…" She remained still, just reveling in the feeling of an arm around her waist. Somehow, it felt good, comforting. It wasn't a hug, but it gave the same effect as one, making her feel warm inside her chest. Loved even.

But how long would that last when Blake told the truth? There was no other choice; if she didn’t, the instant she stood up Ruby would find it out, anyway. Because being so close to this magnetic girl was keeping her from being able to suppress that reaction anymore. With a long sigh, she pushed her legs down and out in front of herself, resigned to being humiliated now.

"Listen. I-I'm ugly… down there. You don’t want to keep going with me."

The words only seemed to confirm the strange, idle thought that had flitted through Ruby's brain. "Ugly how?" Then she halted and changed directions, leaning around Blake to try to catch a look into her eyes. "No, you're- Blake, I don't think you could be ugly anywhere."

But her forearm had already bumped the "ugliness" to which the Faunus was referring. Rigidness. It gave far too much to be any sort of weapon or other battle-related implement that she might be carrying, and was in the wrong location to boot.

Blake Belladonna was decidedly not a typical woman.

[renaroo]

The Search (14/16)

Disclaimer: Red vs Blue and related characters are the property of Rooster Teeth. Warnings: Language, Canon-typical violence, Psychological manipulation and trauma Rating: T Synopsis: [Canon Divergence - Alternate S15] The Reds and Blues saved Chorus, but it has been a year and they are still missing. A motley crew has been gathered with the common goal of finding the war heroes, though the road is more troubled than anyone seems to realize.

A/N: I am so so sorry for the very long wait, but for those who don’t know, my schedule updating fics is somewhat in the air because I’m preparing for a huge move halfway across the country and I really appreciate everyone’s patience with me. I hope this delivers!

Special thanks to @secretlystephaniebrown, @xhauntedangel, Yin, MKDemigodZ-Warrior, and DisneyFreak-Lover for the comments and feedback!

Connectivity

Washington had been searching for that very moment — the one where the Reds and Blues were found, were safe, were… well, they were never quite sound — but Washington had been searching for so long for his family to be saved. And in those blurry, amazing moments as they removed the helmets from each of them and watched the life return to their movements and saw the light return to their eyes, it was all worth it.

Every last moment of it was worth it. The worry and the confusion and the painful surprises along the way.

It was worth it for the moment that Caboose lifted him off his feet in a tremendous hug that would have squeezed the life out of a lesser man, no doubt.

“Agent Washington!” Caboose yelled at the top of his lungs despite all the other simulation troopers flinching in unison at the headache that was hitting them. “I knew we’d see you again! I knew it! You never leave for long and I told everyone that you would be back! Tucker did, too.”

“Caboose, you have no idea how glad I am to be nearly crushed by you,” Washington said as truthfully as he had ever said anything before in his life.

The giant Blue looked up at him with a crinkle in his eyes as his smile only broadened. “Aw, Agent Washington, that’s just the nicest thing anyone could ever say. Except Church. Church can say some nice things sometimes. In between the shouting.”

Up close and personal with Caboose, Wash could see there was a hollowness to his cheeks and some dark rings under his eyes. Maybe some emaciation, but definitely a paleness from no exposure to light.

For a moment, Wash allowed his glee to slip from him as he looked around. The others were getting checked over and embraced by the members of the search team. Namely Grey was running between them all with quick evaluations, setting them down. Kai was hanging between Simmons and Grif, her arms slung around their necks as they were all but malleable to her grip. Carolina was asking questions of Donut and Doc as they rested, sitting with their backs against the walls. Sarge wasn’t sitting, but his back was against the wall for balance all the same as Doctor Grey tried to help his thrown out back.

A cold, numbing rage was building within Wash’s stomach. His teeth gnashed and ground back on his molars as the full extent of his family’s inhumane treatment was catching up with him.

“You can let me down, Caboose,” Wash said gently.

“Whoo, okay. Thanks, Agent Washington,” Caboose said, doing that and stumbling a bit in the process. “You were spinning with the room too much.”

“I was’t spinning, Caboose,” Wash assured him before gently guiding him to sit. “You all are weak right now. Don’t worry. We’ll get you back to Chorus and take care of you. I promise.”

“That sounds great,” Caboose sighed fondly. “But we’ve gotta find Church first.”

As usual, Caboose was loud enough to be on stereo, but his words that time caught Carolina’s attention. She left Doc and Donut to walk in their direction. “Caboose, did you say Church is still alive?” she demanded.

“Yes. Well, no, not yet,” Caboose answered. “He died. But that just means we have to go find him so he can come back again. And be my friend forever again. Like every other time.”

Wash pressed his lips to a thin line, taking in the news without betraying any emotion that could upset Caboose. But he could sense that just over his shoulder, Carolina was far from portraying the same. There was still a lot that needed to be done, but one thing that Washington was prioritizing above everything else was the wellness of his family. All of them.

He turned and looked toward Carolina as she stepped back away from the two of them, looking away with her fists shaking at her sides. “Carolina, there’s a lot going on. We don’t know for sure what’s happened yet,” he tried to remind her. “We have to take care of things here first. Right?”

“I…” she said before taking a heralding breath and looking away from them both. “I need a minute.”

“Carolina…” Wash tried to press, beginning to get back on his feet.

“I said I needed a minute, Wash! I can take at least a goddamn minute!” she snapped back angrily.

And then, because their lives were endless in their need to complicate everything, the echoes of gunshots could be heard down the hallway where Hargrove had taken Tucker and Junior.

“Oh god no!” Washington uttered, jumping to his feet at the same time that the rest of the search team also did.

“I’ll get there the fastest. Wash, lead Grey after me. Li’l Grif, stay here with the Reds and Blues and make sure they don’t do something idiotic,” Carolina ordered before zipping off.

“What— that’s impossible! It’s a job for a cop!” Kaikaina screamed after Carolina. She then looked to Wash. “Trade me.”

“No,” Washington answered before reloading his rifle and looking to Grey. “Are you ready?”

“Very,” Grey assured him, gripping her first aid administer.

They ran side by side down the hall. It was long and without the sound of further gunfire, it left the air to be filled with their own panting. Washington knew he should have been asking about what Grey’s professional opinion was on the Reds and Blues’ conditions. He knew that this was the opportunity for Grey to explain to him what else they could do or what damage could be undone after their family’s neural implants had been so ludicrously been invaded and abused.

Those were all things that perhaps a stronger man would have been able to concentrate on but instead there was only one thought in Wash’s head.

Who else had to die before this would all be over?

“Agent Washington, are you alright?” Doctor Grey asked as she ran alongside him.

“Ask me in about fifteen minutes,” Washington replied without so much as processing her words. His full attention was on moving forward no matter the pounding anxieties in his head.

“I only ask because I cannot help but notice that you’re shaking,” Doctor Grey answered.

Glancing down to his hand, Washington saw that she was right. Damn it. But he didn’t stop. His eyes went back to the long hall before them and he kept running.

“It could be low blood sugar, we didn’t have a meal right before landing on this frigid planet, and the amount of energy we’ve expended in the cold can’t be understated,” Grey rattled off. “I only mentioned it at all because of concerns for what it would do for your aim if there’s a gunfight once we reach the end of this tunnel.”

“Emily, all due respect, one thing at a time,” Washington said shortly just as he saw a flash of light from the end of the hall that was enough to make both him and Grey stop in their tracks. He initially held up his hand to block the light, but once it died down to a soft, blue glow, his heart only beat faster. There was a body lying in the chamber door. “God no— wait.” He squinted. “Isn’t that the…douchebag from earlier?”

“Oh how curious, his vitals are still not critical, though not great,” Grey announced with some surprise as she looked down at her medical scanner.

“Wash! Grey! In here! We have a bleeder! A bad one!” Carolina barked.

Without another moment’s hesitation, Wash and Grey both ran past the coughing mess of a mercenary on the floor and reached the chamber at long last. It was completely alive — ancient technology sputtering with power, lights activated everywhere, and most importantly of all, Tucker and Junior standing up and seemingly uninjured.

Washington wanted nothing more than to sigh with relief but the opportunity was stolen from him when he noticed in the near corner that Carolina was on the floor with Andrews, clasping both her hands on a wound to the reporter’s abdomen. Her gauntlets were already red stained.

“Keep the pressure, Carolina, you’re doing well,” Grey said, leaping into action and getting to Andrews’ other side as she expertly began pulling out supplies and scanning the injury. “Oh, Miss Andrews, there are several other ways to get a doctor’s attention, you must realize by now.”

For a moment, Wash considered offering assistance but his instincts were holding true. His real attention was back on Tucker and Junior, and almost immediately he realized that Tucker wasn’t moving.

He stood with his sword arm outstretched, still holding to the plasma sword that was impaling a long dead Hargrove, and the source of the temple’s current power surge.

Junior was cooing something unintelligible toward his father, nearing him apprehensively.

Tucker’s shoulders began to heave with his breaths, the arm at his side trembling.

Slowly, Wash approached Tucker, too. “Tucker,” he called out warily. “It’s me. It’s Washington. Are you alright?”

“No,” Tucker answered without hesitation. “No, I’m not all right. I’m not alright. This fuck took a year from me. He took a year from all of us! He took—“

The sim trooper didn’t finish his words. He didn’t have to for Washington to know exactly what he meant. He didn’t need to explain the outrage and defilement someone felt when someone played with their brain like it was something expendable.

Washington knew. He knew what they were all about to go through.

The only thing he could really offer was what Junior had already beat him to. A solid hug, a guiding hand that let Tucker sheath his sword and drop the arm the held it. He was weak and hollow like the others, head shaved, face haggard.

It was enough to make Wash wish he could have been the one to kill Hargrove instead. And then give everyone else their turn.

But since he couldn’t bring that to reality, he settled on hugging his shellshocked friend as Junior did much the same. He let Tucker lean on him just like he had once leaned on the Blues for everything he had worth fighting for anymore.

“You’ve gotten yourself into quite the situation, Miss Andrews,” Doctor Grey said, dropping to her knees by Carolina’s side as the Freelancer maintained pressure over the bubbling wound. “One would think you were looking for this, the way you ran off without any of us to back you up.”

“I’m just… here to tell… the story,” Andrews gritted out, looking in Grey’s direction weakly. “Guess I… got involved. Risk of… field reporting.”

“There’s no risk,” Emily assured her. “You’re with the greatest medical mind outside of UNSC sanctioned space.”

“Whoo,” Andrews coughed back with some attempt at fanfare.

Seeing the clear pain the reporter was in, Emily adjusted her scanner to a sedative stunning setting and then cleared back some of the kevlar already torn by the bullet wound in order to expose skin and allow her to administer.

“I brought her into this, Emily, I refuse to have anyone else die fighting my battles for me,” Carolina said sharply. “Tell me what to do.”

“I am about to administer a coagulant as soon as I get a clear scan and am sure that it was a through-and-through. If the bullet is still inside then I don’t want to run the risk of a clot surrounding it, dislodging, and stopping her heart,” Grey answered. “Once I give you the clear, you need to lift her and use your speed boost to get her onto the ship. Then come back to get me. Her best chance of surviving is going to involve getting her our of this weather and us on a way to Chorus where I can call ahead for them to prep the surgery room.”

“Who is this chick anyway!?” Tucker’s voice carried from across the room. He was slowly following behind Washington and Junior who were more hurriedly coming to check on their traveling companion. “I mean. I want her to be okay, whoever she is. She came to save Junior. From… from me.”

Junior turned his head to look over his shoulder and let out a gentle cooing, as if trying to comfort his father’s frayed conscience, but Grey had to keep herself focused. She had a patient trying to die on her. A patient who had proven to be a friend.

That was unacceptable.

“Dylan Andrews, a reporter. She helped us on the way to finding all of you,” Carolina answered. “She’s good people.”

“What can the rest of us do, Doctor Grey?” Washington asked seriously.

“Contact Kaikaina and get her, and all the others, loaded and ready to go. Time is of the essence,” Grey assured them.

“You’re already out of time,” a gravelly voice said from the hall entrance, followed by a series of coughs.

Grey’s eyes snapped toward the body they had passed on the way — the mercenary. She didn’t know anything about him, but what interactions she had had and the familiarity she had gotten from Locus and Felix had already decided her judgment for her. Scum.

“What the fuck does someone have to do to kill these assholes?” Tucker all but moaned.

“Siris,” Carolina spit out in the man’s direction.

Quite frankly to Grey’s amazement, the man was able to push himself onto his elbows, even bleeding as much as he was. “You did kill someone. That’s your problem,” he grunted, nodding to the lump of hatable human that was Malcolm Hargrove across the room. “You killed the most powerful man in the UNSC and in the industrial underworld. An honest-to-god robber baron and war hawk profiteer. A real son of a bitch, but someone who everyone from all those corners — all those powerful people — are going to be interested in killing first for revenge and asking questions later. Especially with UNSC and Charon forces on the way.”

“On the way?” Washington snapped, stepping toward him. “Why would that be?”

“Because I was shot first,” Siris coughed again, putting his hand down to his utility pockets and producing, to everyone’s surprise, a badge. “I’m a special investigator for the UNSC. I was deep under cover. Investigating Hargrove. When he had me shot I sent out a signal. Regulation for Charon is to get here ahead of the UNSC and carpet bomb active alien sites and worry about claiming casualties after. And the UNSC might not be much different. Not wanting a place like this to fall into alien hands.”

Almost in unison, Tucker and Junior let out a disgusted snarl at the comment.

“What is this place?” Washington asked.

“This temple… it has the power to transport people to any other temple site in the universe,” Siris explained. “Instantaneous warfare for over half of the UNSC colonies and then some. If the UNSC can’t have it, then they definitely don’t want Forerunner worshippers to get a hand on it and try another glassing spree on humankind.”

“This whole building’s a transporter?” Carolina asked before turning back to Grey. “You said the quicker we get Dylan to Chorus the better, right? We had camps on plenty of alien temples there. This is a perfect setup. You just have to figure out how to get us to one we know will have people stationed.”

“Because I’m the only one who reads Sangheilli?” Grey asked even though she very well knew the answer. “Honestly, some of you should at least take a community college course on it. It’s not like it’s more difficult than Spanish.”

“Fuck, Doctor Grey, have you met us? None of us would learn Spanish for the past fifteen years for Lopez!” Tucker cried out.

“If we transport everyone in this temple, that means we’re taking this Siris, too,” Washington pointed out warily, looking in Siris’ direction. “And I can’t say I completely buy the undercover special agent bit. Especially when he left us all to die.”

“I didn’t say I was a good guy. I just said I was doing everything legally,” Siris responded. “I tried to stop him from killing the kid. I’m at least as worthy of being saved as your reporter friend. And my side of the story will carry a lot more weight to it with the UNSC than a tabloid reporter.”

Carolina turned from her duties in order to stand at full height over Siris, fury shaking through her body. “Insult any of my team again, and you won’t have to worry about telling your story because I will personally put my foot through your jaw. And that’s only if you’re actually undercover and worth keeping around. I can’t even put into words what I’ll do to you if you’re lying and of no use to us. There’s a minor in the room.”

Washington looked at Carolina for a silent few seconds, as did everyone else. Then he looked away a bit sickened. “Jesus. She means it.”

“Of course I do. When have you ever heard me joke?” Carolina demanded.

For a moment, Siris seemed to lose his cool demeanor, leaning further back and away from Carolina’s imposing stature.

But Emily Grey’s mind was already working at a mile a minute. “Carolina, get back down here and stabilize Dylan. We don’t know how this will work and it is important that she not suffer any physical damage. If this is anything like the transportation cubes it could get bumpy.” She got to her feet and raced to the console-like device that was lit up on the far wall of the room. “Tucker, I may need your sword—“

“Bow chicka honk honk!”

“Junior! Timing is off,” Tucker complained before pulling his son into a hug. “God, I fucking missed you.”

Carolina got to her knees again, pulling Dylan’s limp body into her lap as Tucker and Junior came to Emily side.

For her part, Emily held her fingers to her temples and focused as hard as she could.

“Um. What are you doing?” Washington asked worriedly.

“I remember the exact sector that is the coordinate pattern for Chorus so now I’m attempting to remember what the latitudes and longitudes of the alley base’s temple is so that I can accurately transport us there and not make us all splatter somewhere in the depths of space,” she answered.

“You’re joking,” Washington said, baffled. “You can do that?”

“I’m the smartest human mind I have ever come across, and I’ve dissected more than a few,” Grey replied before opening her eyes and then looking to the lit up console. “I have it. Now… translated into Sanghelli that would be…” She deftly used her fingers to touch the glowing alien script on the console, then to the next, the colors changing as she did so. Confident as she read over the script again she looked at Tucker. “Now! Put your sword in the hole and take us home!”

“That’s what she said!” Tucker said, unleashing his plasma sword and thrusting it into the same hole not he side of the wall that Emily had directed him toward.

The lights of the script that Emily had touched changed back to the blinding white that the rest of the temple was covered in, but it grew only brighter.

Tucker had done his job, and they were one tingling, discombobulated, partially conscious journey away from discovering whether or not Grey had managed hers.

[ciathyzareposts]

Game 367: Taskmaker (1989)

This is a pretty morbid way to organize your “to do” items.

         TaskMaker

United States

Storm Impact (developer); XOR (publisher)

Released 1989 for the Macintosh Remade and re-released as shareware in 1993

Date Started: 15 May 2020

          TaskMaker is a slick little game, probably the best I’ve played so far on the Macintosh. It uses the platform’s strengths in graphic detail and sound but offers a fuller RPG experience than most Mac games of the era. While it has that inescapable “cutesy” look of most Mac games, it’s relatively long and hard, and it has enough good, new ideas to break out of the “Ultima clone” status that you might otherwise assign it at first glance.

           It’s typical of a Mac game to offer menu options for movement. At least this isn’t the only way to move.

        We owe reader LanHawk yet another appreciation pin for tracking this down, in this case writing to the original developer for the files. Because almost everything written about the game is about the 1993 version, being able to cover the original is a nice coup. I’ll have more on the development and the two versions on a subsequent entry; I’ll probably take a run through the 1993 version while I’m covering the game rather than saving it for 1993.

      The backstory is relatively short: The land was once at peace, under the direction of a wise king. When the king died, the “governing body split into three confrontational factions.” The main character is an adventurer who remembers the way things used to be. He decides to restore order by becoming Master of the Land, but lacking experience and guidance, he seeks out the TaskMaker, an advisor of the former king.

            The TaskMaker introduces himself.

       Character creation is a process of selecting a name, then selecting five personal attributes from a list of 20. Your selections calibrate your maximum totals for seven attributes: food, health, spirit, strength, agility, intellect, and stamina. Current totals for these attributes are represented with a bar, and they deplete as you walk around the kingdom and fight. You find various potions and objects to restore lost attributes. Most important are those that restore health, because it depletes fastest in combat, and food, because everything else can be restored with rest.

           Creating a character. I imagined this one something of a bard.

         The game world is a relatively small 100 x 100, dotted with castles, dungeons, towns, and caves. The TaskMaker lives in a castle to the center-east of the land, and the basic setup is that you go to him, he gives you a quest, you go out into the world to find and complete the quest, and you return to the TaskMaker for a reward and the next quest. Quests take place in towns or dungeons. The game doesn’t make a lot of distinction between dangerous areas and safe ones, as dangerous monsters can appear in towns or castles, including the TaskMaker’s, and NPCs can appear in dungeons. 

            The game opening has you sailing to the TaskMaker’s shores. Too bad you don’t get to keep the boat.

         The equipment system is pretty advanced, offering slots for helmets, armor, cloaks, amulets, belts, gauntlets, bracers, boots, rings on both hands, and an item in each hand–either a weapon and shield, a two-handed weapon, or dual-wielding two weapons (I found the latter to be much better). No matter how much money you make, the shops (which only show you items you can afford) always seem to have a better item available. 

            Buying items in the shop.

Choosing between two helms.

           Monsters are a mix of traditional (goblins, orcs, kobolds) and somewhat original, although most of the original ones are also kind of silly, like happy faces and evil computers. I haven’t met any so far with much in the way of special attacks or defenses. None of them seem capable of magic or attacks at range, for instance. They’re simply differentiated by how many hit points they can whack away in a single combat round.

            The “Evil Mac” is a goofy enemy.

            Combat is of the early Ultima type, where you hit (F)ight and hit the creature in front of you, although it has a little more complexity with spells and usable items. Combats are quite tough, even well into the game. For the first few hours, I had to repeatedly use what we might call “exit-scumming,” by which I would lead an enemy to the exit of an area, fight as long as possible, retreat to the outer area, rest, and re-enter to continue fighting. This is made possible partly by your one advantage: you can carry a huge amount of equipment–more than 60 items. That’s enough food, potions, or whatever to outlast any enemy. But I occasionally found myself in impossible situations where enemies would appear both outside and inside at the same time.

            Battling some goblins on a bridge.

        This is where we get into another of the oddities of the game: when you die, you don’t die permanently; you go to Hell. You can escape Hell by fighting your way through demons and solving a maze (if you die in Hell, you just reappear in Hell), but you then have to go find your non-equipped equipment back on the surface. You also lose your gold in the process.

              Wandering through Hell’s maze.

         This system unfortunately introduces a weird way to cheat. The game tracks the world state independently from the character state. This theoretically allows you to have multiple characters active at once, although I don’t know how this works with the TaskMaker. Thus, if you die and reload instead of escaping from Hell, you’ll still find a pile of equipment where your character last “died.” You could use this to infinitely replicate useful objects like potions or expensive objects that you can sell at the store. I didn’t deliberately cheat this way, but it’s annoying and hard to get out of Hell, and there were times that I reloaded and then picked up some of my old, duplicated items if I happened to come across them. To avoid temptation, I’ve been trying to reload before I die in times when death seems inevitable.

The separation of character from world means that you can also take advantage of commands to reset a particular map or the entire game world, keeping your character as-is. It’s a good option if you want to clear the same dungeon twice, finding double the treasure and experience. 

           Little piles of stuff mark the location of previous deaths.

          The controls are quite good, offering keyboard backups to all of the menu commands. Spells are cast with SHIFT and the first letter of the spell. There’s an “Invoke” spell that lets you type in your own spells that you might find during the game, but it apparently also a way for the developer to introduce cheat codes and interface changes. I’ve been slow to explore spells; the one I’ve used the most is the “Strike” spell which casts a bolt at enemies. I tend to use it on fleeing enemies so I don’t have to chase them.

Sound is also quite well-done. Much of it uses spoken voice recordings. (In fact, one voice they used, a deep bass, sounds eerily like my own.) When you first start the game, the voice says, “TaskMaker.” A different one says, “What is it?” when you use the (I)dentify commands. There are screams for deaths on both sides and solid attack and spellcasting effects.

The TaskMaker’s first task was to retrieve a package he left in Skysail Village. It was in an area of the village amidst a horde of monsters and required me to figure out a switch puzzle. The game is fond of puzzles involving doorways blocked by electric forcefields for which you have to find a switch to deactivate. When I returned the package, he rewarded me with five “Instant Vacation” scrolls, invaluable items that replenish all of your meters.

     His second task was to retrieve a chessboard in his own castle. It was in an area north of the bar. Getting it involved fighting a few monsters, but it was otherwise pretty easy. He gave me a double-bladed sword.

         My reward for the second quest.

       For Task 3, he wanted me to travel to some silver mines, where he owns a share, and kill some conspirators who had taken over the mines, bringing him back a golden chalice as proof. This was a tough mission; the mines were full of numerous tough monsters, but also some nice treasure rewards. By the time it was done, I had mostly magic gear and a magic sword in each hand. The TaskMaker’s reward was a suit of platemail, a huge armor upgrade from the leather I was wearing before.

          Battling a “war wizard” in the silver mine.

         I’m still working on Task 4, which is to find an unknown magic item in the “sands of Porta.” He indicated he doesn’t know where the item is buried, so I might be “in for a lot of digging.”

           The TaskMaker gives the fourth mission.

        As you quest, you amass experience and gain levels (I’m on Level 7 now) and your attributes increase. I guess they must increase proportionally to the skills you actually use because my spirit and intellect (which governs magic) have barely gone up but my strength, agility, and stamina are almost at maximum. Health and maximum food didn’t budge for a while but increased a bit during the last few hours.

      Other features of the game: 

       The game tracks your karma based on how many good, neutral, and evil creatures you’ve slain and other acts like stealing from shops and houses in town.

            Checking out my personal statistics. I’m “basically good.”

         There’s also a score. It increases every time you solve a quest or kill a creature and slowly decreases as you move around in between those moments. High scores are tracked on a scoreboard.

There’s an “identify” command that will tell you what’s in front of you. An “action” command will use it if it’s usable.

A “get info” command tells you a bit about the history of whatever area you’re in.

         The TaskMaker’s castle.

          The game has its own “runic alphabet” used for shop and city signs. It’s not translated in the game manual, so I suppose you have to figure it out by noting the runes in places where you can guess what they’re saying. I haven’t been bothering with them, but I wonder if I’m missing hints and clues because of it.

         As I’m in Skysail, I’m guessing those runes say “SKYSAIL.”

           NPCs aren’t terribly valuable in this game unless you bribe them by giving them things. Even then, they rarely tell you anything you need to know.

              The game pokes fun at Lord British. I didn’t realize his adoption of a more executive role was well known in 1989.

          If you drink alcohol, you start to go the wrong direction when moving. I think Ultima introduced this, but I don’t remember what edition. IV, probably.

There’s a fun system where you can find valuable objects like gold bars and necklaces and “cash them in” at ATMs. It feels like ATMs were pretty new in 1989. I think my Maine hometown may have only gotten one that year. 

             Finding an ATM in a dungeon. This dungeon happens to be full of treasure, so it was a relief to find it.

          There’s a set of miscellaneous game options I’ve never seen in any other place. I feel like every game could benefit from these. I don’t know what “wandering monsters” does, though. Un-checking it doesn’t seem to stop them from appearing.

            Setting various game preferences.

          A shop in the castle offers an invisibility cloak. If you put it on, the shop will no longer transact with you because you’re invisible.

          Come on! You’re the one who sold it to me!

            I rather enjoy this basic approach: offer an open game world with a variety of small missions. You don’t have to follow the TaskMaker’s quests exclusively; nothing stops you from simply exploring the towns and dungeons in a random order, or even from solving some of the quests before the TaskMaker even gives them to you. We’ve seen this approach before, going all the way back to Akalabeth, but this is perhaps the first game to use it with such a variety of lengths, difficulties, and objectives.

         But while I’m having fun, it’s tempered by an inability to ever feel like I’m getting more powerful no matter how much my statistics and inventory increase. Every time I think I’m doing well, some new enemy suddenly pops up in a familiar location and kicks my butt. Frankly, if it hadn’t been for the extra Instant Vacations I’ve been able to loot from locations where I’ve died, I’m not sure I would have been able to make it this far. I think eventually a cycle of starvation and poverty would have put me in a permanent downward spiral. I’ve watched videos of the remake, and it looks like the developers took the edge off the difficulty level between the two, although the remake still seems challenging.

     The number of entries will be determined by the number of tasks, I guess. Ten would be just about perfect. I suspect the TaskMaker is going to turn out to be evil based on the things he’s having me do and how he reacts if I happen to pop by with a task unfinished.

      Time so far: 6 hours.

                source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-367-taskmaker-1989/

[lawrenceseitz22]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 166

Click on the video above to watch Episode 166 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://ift.tt/2BQjTCo.

  Announcement

Bradley: Bots.

Adam: Oh, we’re live. All right. This is the fun episode where you watch Adam take notes and Bradley talk about stuff that has nothing to do with Hump Day Hangouts. Just kidding.

Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts and I believe it’s episode 166. Correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t have it up in front of me actually.

Bradley: You are correct sir.

Chris: Yes.

Adam: Before we get into things real quick we’re going to do a quick hello to everybody. Then we’ve got a few special announcements, and then, as usual, we’ll get into the questions, but I’ll start on my left here and see Chris. How’s it going with you?

Chris: Doing good. Got a early rise up tomorrow. 7am airport time and then off to the slopes for some winter action.

Adam: Nice, nice. Outstanding. Hernan how about yourself?

Hernan: Living the life stanman. No, I’m good. I’m good. Excited to be here guys. Excited for what’s coming. We’re going to be with Adam I think it’s early to mention that but we’re going to go to the [inaudible 00:01:00] Live, right Adam?

Adam: Yup.

Hernan: In March. By the end of it. So if you guys want to hand out at some point. We’re going to be doing some networking, we’re going to be doing some good stuff over there sir.

Adam: Yeah definitely. Let us know if you’re going and then if you’re in the area. I think it’s Orlando so we’ll see. We’ll have a little bit of time, can’t guarantee anything right now, but obviously would love to hear from you.

Hernan: Yeah. We’ll have more info as time goes, as we get closer but we’ll be representing Semantic Mastery over there.

Adam: Cool.

Bradley: Represent, represent.

Hernan: Yeah.

Adam: Marco how’s it going man?

Marco: What’s up man? I just got out of the lab with Rob. We’re tearing down right brain, just a little bit. A little part of the algorithm that we found. It’s amazing. It’s amazing the stuff that Google has that’s public and that you can actually manipulate where I constantly back and forth, back and forth. Let’s do this and let’s try that, and what’s this and what’s that and then sometimes even our own users. Not necessarily in our way as reloaded. This was actually from a question in the Cemented Master Mastermind that made us go about 45 minutes into the lab. Okay let’s track this down, let’s see what happened. That was really good. I had fun. That’s my idea of fun. 45 minutes of looking at code.

Adam: Glad you guys are doing that. I’m sure something good is going to end up coming out of this. Bradley, how you doing?

Bradley: I’m good. Happy to be here. Got lots to go through today. We’ve also, just update guys, we’ve got the Syndication Academy Update Webinar Number 18, immediately following Hump Day Hangouts today, so if you’re in Syndication Academy, go check the events tab in Facebook and you should be able to get the URL to it. Okay?

Adam: Awesome. All right a couple quick announcements. We will be sending out some more information about the next two things I’m going to mention. The first one is video lead gen system. Bradley just put the finishing touches on a video email prospecting course that kind of deep dive into that so Bradley you want to tell people just real quick about that?

Bradley: Yeah, we did a really extended webinar. Went damn near three hours in the Mastermind about how to do the video lead gen prospecting system that I’ve been using for years that I really got my start. Started building my agency up using that method. That specific method. It’s a bit time consuming but it works incredibly well for landing clients and it’s still valid and works well today. It actually works even better today because you can embed gifs into the emails now that look like actual videos playing in the email. It’s a click enticer. It’s click bait so-to-speak.

Anyways, we went through three hours of training on how to do it step-by-step and I basically just edited that webinar. Put it into separate modules. Individual lesson videos and sections with notes and all that kind of stuff. We packaged it up and that’s basically it. It’s a very riffle approach instead of a shotgun approach for targeting prospects, but it works incredibly well.

The good news is about 90 percent of it can be outsourced. There is a part of it that should be done by whoever … If you’re a one man agency or solopreneur or whatever, you’re going to want to record the audit videos, or if you’ve got a sales person or something like that, maybe it would be them, but somebody obviously that knows a little bit about whatever service it is that they’re selling, but other than that the rest of everything else can be outsourced and so we’ve had questions a lot recently over the last few weeks about prospecting and how to keep your pipeline full and all that kind of stuff. One way to do it is just to consistently be prospecting. Make it part of your standard operating procedure. Your just normal weekly tasks in your business should be prospecting so that you always keep your pipeline full.

That’s why I think this course was so timely because if you outsource it then you know it gets done, and that way you can keep your pipeline full of leads at all times so that you can cherry pick the best clients, number one and number two you won’t be so desperate when you are talking to the … If you only got five leads for three months, then you try so hard to close all five. Whereas, if you had 10 or 15 leads per week, then you could be a hell of a lot more selective and really, if somebody’s going to give you any resistance, thank you very much, see you later, click. Hang up, move on to the next one.

Adam: Definitely.

Bradley: I think it’s going to be a good course coming out. I think a lot of you guys, about 60 percent of our audience is into local marketing. I think this will help a lot of you to be able to generate some clients, as well as maybe land service providers if you’re selling leads.

Adam: Definitely. Yeah, it’s a good one. Like Bradley said, it can save you a ton of time. It’s going to keep your pipeline full, and it works. I’ve used this stuff too in a couple different industries and this really applies to anyone, which is really cool. You can use this for consulting. You could use this for financial services. You could use this for contractors, and it has a very good response rate, which is why it is the lead gen system using video. Anyways, more on that later. We’ll be telling you guys all about that.

The other thing we wanted to tell you about was Jeffrey Smith. If you missed his SEO boot camp webinar that was, I’m going to get the date wrong, I think it was early December or late November, but that went really well. We had some technical issues the very first time we had him on. He came back, had a webinar, that went great. We got really good feedback. People who hopped in the course loved it. I know Bradley, you said you went through it, or did you go through all of it or parts of it?

Bradley: Not all of it. I’ve been through parts of it. Kind of like what Marco mentioned to me. I just go through and find stuff that I need when it’s pertinent at that particular time. Everything I’ve seen has been so thorough though. It’s training after our own hearts in that its so detailed and he went way over and above and it’s an amazing course.

Adam: Cool. So we’re going to have him back. That will be on Monday. We’re getting stuff set up for that right now, so we’ll be sending out emails about that. Be sure to check that out and we will have a replay available if you can’t make it live on Monday.

Before we get into it I wanted to remind everybody about the charity that we’re supporting throughout January. That’s still going on. We’ve had a lot of really good donations so far. It’s really impressive so first of all, thank you to everyone who’s helped out and then Marco, if you want to tell people, because I know we have people come who aren’t here all the time. If you want to tell them quickly about what the charity is, whose it for?

Marco: Yeah sure. It supplies uniforms and books for kids. We’re targeting first, second and third grade kids. We want to keep them in school. A lot of times the reason why they can’t go to school is simply because they don’t have the supplies, the uniforms or the books. They don’t have shoes. Right? They have to go to school barefoot. Imagine if you’re having … still in 2018 going to school barefoot, man. This is the type of stuff that we’re dealing with. Not only that, the environment that these kids live in. Someone comes knocking at the door, you don’t know who’s coming knocking at your door. They’re living in a place where they’re under lock and key. When they go out they have to go out in groups because they have to run a gauntlet man. Drug dealers, drug users. Just the worst of the worst man, so what we’re trying to do is, I know that education is the key to success. Without an education all you’re doing is you’re going to stay in that poverty cycle because you’re not going to know anything except that which you experience.

So experiencing an education, experiencing the world, experiencing all of the different things that are offered through an education opens your mind to all kinds of possibilities and it lets you know that you’re not useless. That you’re not worthless. Someone is taking the time to tell you you’re actually worth something, which to me, that’s incredible. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re going into these neighborhoods. We’re trying to get these kids, as many as we can. Right now we’re almost at the 10k mark, which is what had set. 100 kids takes $10,000. We’re almost there so if it’s a dollar, if it’s two dollars, we don’t care. Just go ahead. Please donate. Thank you very much those who have donated already. This is really a really good cause, man.

Adam: Awesome.

Marco: I just hope people will listen and donate and I dropped the link on the event for those who would like to go and take a look at the video and see what it’s all about, more in depth.

Adam: Awesome. Thanks again as Marco said, to everyone who’s donated so far. We appreciate it. When is it? I think we got another week or two right?

Marco: Yeah. We made the cutoff on the 26th so we can go the week of 29th for the supplies. Just before they’re going to school on February 5th, but after that we’re going to keep it open. We’re going to do something else so that when next February comes around we’re ready for even more kids to go to school. We’ll be doing something. We’ll announce it. I’ll talk to you guys and we’ll work it out.

Adam: Sounds good. Awesome. Well if you are new to Semantic Mastery, first off, thank you for joining us on Hump Day Hangouts. A lot of times we get asked, “Where’s a good place for me to start?” Well the Hump Day Hangouts, you’re in the right place so that’s the good place to start. The next step would be the Battle Plan and we’ve got a discount code. I’ll pop that up on the page, but check out the Battle Plan, it’s a solid investment and it is very, very much worth the little amount of money you have to pay for all the information in there.

If you don’t yet have an account over at SerpSpace, go to serpspace.com, you can open up an account for free. Check out the tools there, check out the Done for You services and if you’re really jonesing for some Semantic Mastery information and you just need to see Bradley making a chart or something during the week head over to support.semanticmastery.com and that’s where we put a lot of these common questions that come up, or the more in depth answers where Bradley’s maybe drawing a chart or giving some information, so you can go check that out and get an answer in the middle of the week.

If you’re really ready to take things up and you’re not new maybe to Semantic Mastery, then I highly suggest going to the mastermind.semanticmastery.com. I’ll pop the link on there and if you’re ready to join the Mastermind, that’s the place to be. If you ever have any questions about that, you can contact us at support@semanticmastery.com. If you have any questions about the Mastermind after looking through the page and seeing if maybe it’s a right fit for you or not, we’d be happy to chat with you.

Bradley: Sweet.

Adam: All right. Anybody else? Any announcements or are we ready to get rolling?

Bradley: No. I’m ready to get in questions. Just one brief thing. The new Mastermind curriculum starts this week. We have our first Mastermind Webinar for 2018 under the new training schedule, which is tomorrow. We’re in the PPC module. I’m actually a bit behind in preparing the presentation and training for tomorrow, but whatever is fine, because I imagine for the next couple weeks it’s going to be a little bit in disarray as we settle into this new training, but we’re going to be doing … AdWords has been updated, the interface has, so we’re going to be doing AdWords for local, as well as for national stuff, which could apply to affiliate campaigns, plus we will be doing AdWords for YouTube for again, local led gen, as well as national lead gen and then also for affiliate stuff and we’re going to be doing some of that for Semantic Mastery for our own channel, for example. Some of that will also be included and then we’ll be doing some Bing ads and also Hernan’s going to be doing some training on Facebook ads. This is all stuff that’s going to be in part of module one, which should last probably about six weeks and so again, I would highly encourage you to come join the Mastermind.

Last thing I want to mention very briefly is, and I say this the beginning of every Hump Day Hangouts go to bradelybenner.com and subscribe and the reason I say that is because I got an email from one of my subscribers today that was replying, and it’s Jenny, and Jenny is always on our Hump Day Hangouts asking questions. I’m not going to read your email to me, Jenny, but the last two lines that you put in the email as a reply to one of my emails about the Mindset series was, “Thanks for kicking my ass today, sir. May I have another?” That’s awesome. I get some replies from some of my subscribers because it’s just about mindset stuff and I highly recommend that you go check it out. At least I know it helps me to be able to write those.

By the way, I started crossfit training as a coach every single day this week. This week is when I started. I was supposed to start last week but the extreme cold prevented me from doing it, so I haven’t been able to write an email every morning, but I’m trying to squeeze it in when I can. Like today, I got the email written right after I got back from the crossfit gym. Just to let you guys know, I’m trying to write every single day. I’ve got about 40 emails in the series now. Go subscribe, check it out. If you don’t like it, just unsubscribe. Okay? With that said, let’s get into it.

Okay you guys. Let me know if everything’s coming through okay?

Adam: Yup.

What Are Your Recommended Frequency And Topics On Press Releases?

Bradley: Sweet. Okay, Harold’s up first. He says, “Hello everybody, thank you so much for giving us this space so we can ask our questions.” You’re welcome Harold. “Mine is, how often should I get press releases and what are some good topics?”

Well the frequency is really up to you. The nice thing about press releases is whenever a press release is picked up and distributed, it gets picked up by usually hundreds of websites so it’s a kind of a natural occurrence to get a bunch of links back from a press release, because companies all the time are announcing news and it’s a natural type thing. It’s traditional. It’s normal and so you can be a bit aggressive with press releases. I know I usually do them about once every two weeks. That’s usually the speed with which I do it, until I get the results that I’m looking to achieve, which is typically to rank in the three pack. Sometimes it’s organic stuff, it depends, but for the most part I’m trying to rank in the Maps pack and usually , just do them about every two weeks.

However, I know Rob, for example, the co-creator of RYS Reloaded with Marco, he just hammers the shit out of sites with press release, after press release, after press release and he’s able to get results so I don’t think there’s much of a velocity issue. Again, I do it about every two weeks, but I know that it’s been done a lot more than that. The frequency a lot higher than that and it hasn’t caused any issues. Marco, do you have a comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, as a matter of fact, I haven’t seen it. Like you said, we just bang one right after another and we stack them the right way going after different URLs. Now we have another press release service that has even more publication sites so that’s a really good mix. It’s really good to mix them up. One of them gives us embeds, which is even better for us and so it’s a lot of good things that you could do and a lot of nasty things that you can do with press releases.

Bradley: Yeah. All right, and as far as good topics, Harold, all right, so there’s a couple of things I want to mention here about topics. One, pretty much anything can be turned into a press release. Any sort of company news, any sort of seasonal changes, sales, specials, new products, new services. Anything at all can really be worthy of a news release to be written. What I’ve been doing for the most part is we published press releases anytime a customer review has been received by one of my lead gen sites or one of my contractor, client sites, excuse me. That’s another reason to publish a press release is because you’re announcing the glowing testimonial review that you just received, right? That’s just another example and I like using that method because it encourages the business owners to solicit reviews from their customers and then every time they get a review, I get notified and I go publish a press release for it and I get to bill them for it, and they get to puff out their chest and say, “Look at me, look at how awesome we are.”

I’ve been using that method. In fact, that’s our front end service on our new agency. It’s doing basically reputation. It’s a combination of video marketing, reputation marketing and PR marketing. It’s a combination of those three and that’s our front end service. It’s a very, very powerful way.

Also, any time you publish a blog post typically you could do that. Now, the last thing I want to mention about that is if you’ve got a good writer, a PR writer that you work with, a good PR writer will typically be able to create an angle out of just about anything. So an angel or a news hook out of just about anything. The other option would be to use the press release writers from the distribution service that you’re using.

For example in Serpspace, we don’t even allow manually submitted PRs anymore, I don’t think. I think we just have our net distribution service or network writers write them, because they know what the editorial guidelines are and a lot of those distribution service writers, right, that will provide as just an add on service, the press release to be written. It’s usually about $30 or so or something like that and it ranges between $30 to $45, somewhere in that range, but a lot of times, all they need is just a handful of small details and then they’ll create the news hook, because they know what they’re distribution network is looking for, if that makes sense?

A lot of times all I’ll do is just list who, what, when, where and then a quote from a company executive or in the case of using a review, I just quote the review, whatever the customer review text was that’s the quote. Does that make sense? That’s all we do and it’s very, very simple and I love it because it takes the content marketing side of things off my shoulders. We still have bloggers that do the curating and stuff, but I don’t have to think about so many content ideas for press releases anymore. We just say, “Hey go get another review. As soon as you get a review, let me know. We’ll publish a press release” and boom it’s done.

By the way, just to let you guys know, I had been doing that myself for my clients for my own agency every month. I would spend about two days at the beginning of the month. I still have been generating client reports and there’s a reason why I do that, because I typically, once I generate client reports and I send the reports to the clients I also include a brief breakdown of what the reports are showing in my own voice and sometimes I record a screen cast video and send that to them with an overview of what I’m seeing for the month and some new opportunities that have arisen and I’ve got a really close relationship with my clients so because of that, I don’t outsource the client reporting part of it, but I had been generating the review commercials, which is a David Sprague. Every month, this is just an add on service I added to most of my clients. I would generate a review commercial from a new review that they received within the last month and then publish the video, distribute it across my network. My syndication networks typically ranks the video, but if it doesn’t then I end up with a press release anyways.

I had been doing all of that myself for the last six or seven months since I’ve really started playing with this strategy. One of my virtual assistants is in the UK. She’s been blogging for me for, I’d say at least four years. She’s great. She reached out to me around the turn of year and said, “Hey, I’m looking for more work and we’ve been working together for years. Would you have anything else you wanted me to do?” And I was like, “Oh, perfect. I’ve been meaning to unload this work, now that I know this is a viable strategy and it’s something I’m going to do.”

The reason I’m telling you this guys, is because I want to let you know, I struggle too with doing shit that I’m not supposed to be doing. For example, taking two days at the beginning of every month to generate these review videos and order the press releases. It was something that could have been outsources three or four months ago once I really knew that it was going to be something that I was going to carry on or be a continuing service, however, I never took the time to create the process docs. I get up on my soapbox all the time and preach to you guys about outsourcing stuff, yet there are processes in my business that I still have not outsourced, and it’s just because of a lack of time, or really a lack of desire for doing it. For creating the process training for that process and what it comes down to typically is just not wanting to do it because it sucks. It’s boring work. It’s tedious and often times I’m so freaking busy with all the work that I’m trying to fulfill that I feel like I don’t have the time to create process docs about the work that I need to fulfill. If that makes sense? So it’s a catch 22. Right?

Because she gave me a reason, Michelle did, my VA. She gave me a reason and because I’ve got so much work on my plate right now for this new Mastermind training curriculum, I knew at the beginning of every month this year, I don’t want to spend two days generating reports and also the review commercials and ordering the press releases and all that stuff. I don’t want to do all that. So I spent the first two days of this week creating the training process. The training videos, the written procedures, which are in Google docs and all that and I sent that to her yesterday and she’s now going to take over it for me and guess what. I never have to fucking do it again.

The reason I went through all of that is just to let you know that this is all stuff that can be outsourced guys and I highly recommend, sometimes I need to remind myself of some of my own advice, and this is something I should have done four or five months ago, and I just finally got it done and I can tell you what a weight, a load has been lifted off my shoulders because now I’m not going to dread the beginning of the month every month because it’s going to eat up two days, if that makes sense. So guys, if you take anything away from that at all, it’s that if you’ve got stuff in your business that makes your stomach turn sometimes because you have to do it and every time it comes up it makes your stomach turn, that’s the shit you need to outsource first. Honestly, that’s the stuff, the stuff you don’t like to do or you hate to do, that’s the stuff that you should absolutely, as much as it’s going to be painful and tedious to do, but create process docs for how to do all that, and then hire that shit out so that you don’t have to do that anymore.

Again, we get into this business not because we want another job, right? We want freedom and we want to enjoy it and so sometimes there’s obviously going to be stuff in everyone’s business that has to done, that’s not enjoyable. Outsource it. If you create the exact process for how to do it, you can outsource anything. This was not a pitch for Outsource KingPin, but we do have a training product that specifically teaches the methods for how to do exactly what I just described and it’s called Outsource Kingpin. Check that out. I know that was a long winded answer and I’m sorry Harold, but I just wanted to share with you guys that even I struggle with not following my own advice at times, but outsource as much as you can.

Anybody want to comment on that before I move on?

Chris: I agree with you Bradley.

How Does Google View Directory Sites In Terms Of SEO?

Bradley: Okay. Good enough. Thank you. Juan says, “Hello lovely people and thanks for having me. Are directory site’s viewed by Google as good or bad for SEO?” I think Juan, this is going to be not anything based in absolute data for me anymore, as it is just more of opinion or assumption, but I’d like to get some opinions of the other guys. I believe it has more to do with the directory itself then just a blanket statement.

For example, I know they say reciprocal links are bad, but I’ve seen many cases where reciprocal links actually are still very beneficial and I know a lot of low end directories that are really spammy, will require a reciprocal link, those are the ones that I would suspect are not good, but there’s a lot of good other directories that are good.

For example, Yelp is a directory site right? It’s a local or it’s a business directory site, but it is a directory site. We all know that’s a good link, but then obviously if it’s some obscure directory out there that is just … and they’re all requiring reciprocal links and stuff like that, then I would say no. I think it would be more about selective then just a blanket statement. I think it depends on the directory itself. What do you guys say?

Chris: Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree with you Bradley. The fact that on some directories you need to think about this in terms of what kind of value can you get from the directory, right? As well as what kind of value can you get from the reciprocal link, because if it is let’s say that you’re doing, I don’t know SEO for a doctor, and then you can get the doctor, put it in directory for doctor’s and even further for local doctors that would actually, could help you bring in some profit. Right? Even further if the directory is ranking in Google. Paid directories sometimes work as well because just being paid, even if it’s $5 or $10 for a lifetime link, usually work because they weed out 99 percent of spammy links so have that in mind. Some of them are really, really high authority so I would say that it would be on a case by case basis.

Some people would say that, for example, blog comments will be bad for SEO and that’s not entirely true.

Bradley: That’s right.

Chris: If you make a really thoughtful blog comment on a highly relevant publication or blog, it can blow your website away, right? It can really help you so I think it’s a case by case basis. If you’re on GSA’s spamming blog post or spamming directories, which you could definitely do, just do it as far away as possible from your clients or your own website, but if it’s a manual placement from a website that you can get value from and value meaning either authority or traffic, I would say go ahead and do it.

Bradley: Good advice. Marco?

Chris: No I think you guys covered it perfect.

What Is The Best Way To Indexing One Million Pages A Day?

Bradley: Beautiful. Fabian. What’s up Fabian? He says, “I want to index about 1,000,000 pages a day.” Wow. Okay. “So I need a very scalable solution. How would you do this using IFTTT and Plus Twitter. If yes, how often can I post the tweets that my account won’t be shut down? Should I create several accounts and spread my posts on them? Thanks a lot.”

Yeah, I don’t think you would want to do a million tweets per day in one Twitter account. I don’t think that’s a good idea. You probably need a hell of a lot of Twitter accounts to be able to accomplish a million tweets per day. We have an indexing service in Service Space. I don’t know if that amount of links would be a scalable option. There is one service that I can mention for mass volume that I know my, one of our link building director, he basically pointed it out a while ago. Now it’s been probably a year and a half since he mentioned this to me, I know I still use it though, but it’s called Express Indexer. Let me see if I can …

Hernan: Yeah, Bradley.

Bradley: Go ahead.

Hernan: I talked to [Debbie 00:28:48] already about this because I had seen this question come up. I actually saw it on Facebook.

Bradley: Okay.

Hernan: And he said, “No, it’s not working.”

Bradley: Okay.

Hernan: As it used to. He said that he’s trying to find a way around it. He’s still working on it because we had to shut down the indexing service in Serpspace actually.

Bradley: Oh did we? I didn’t even know that.

Hernan: Yeah, we had to shut it down because it just wasn’t indexing the way that it should. This option IFTTT to Twitter is not scalable because you’re going to need, for a million pages, what a hundred thousand profiles to push 10 tweets a day, 20 so that’s how you have to look at it. You can’t get away with more than 10 or 20, 20 tweets a day actually is pushing it because you’d have to scale up to 20. You can’t start at 20. You’ll get banned now.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: In Twitter. So I don’t have a solution. You don’t want to submit a million pages to the Google URL submitter, because you’ll trigger the captcha and so I don’t have an answer for this other than what we were using isn’t working at this level.

Bradley: Yeah. Well good. Thanks for chiming in. That’s a good question Fabian. I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer for you. Apologize.

What Are The Different Ways Of Indexing Local Citations?

Okay, so Shripad, I guess. Forgive me if I mispronounce that. He says, “What are the different ways to index local citations?”

Well indexers work. Typically that’s what I do. For example, when I order citations, whenever I get the citation report back, I just open up the spreadsheet. Copy all the citation URLs and then just submit them to the indexer. I usually submit them to multiple indexers. That’s all I do. That’s all you need to do. Okay?

Some citations, if you try to let them index naturally, sometimes it takes forever for citations to index naturally, that’s why I typically, as soon as I get a citation report guys, I’ll just go copy them and submit them to at least two indexing services to try to speed that up a little bit.

mbedding Maps – MyMaps Or GMB Map Page

All right. RL Sanders, “Hey guys, as always thank you for what you do. When you guys talk about embedding maps are you talking about my maps or the GMB map page?”

Both, RL. Both. I don’t mean embed both at the same time. I haven’t really tested with that, but I just mean you can do an embed run with the My Maps and then do another embed run with the GMB maps page. I’ll be a hundred percent honest with you, even though I know it’s super powerful, the My Maps thing, I don’t do a lot of that. I don’t set those up typically. If I get it back from a drive stack then I’ll do an embed blast with that through MAPS Powerhouse, but I don’t do, when I’m working on client stuff myself, I typically don’t do the My Maps. I just end up doing all the GMB stuff, but the My Maps are very, very powerful and what’s great about the My Maps guys is you can squeeze them, basically do follow links in and there’s a whole lot of ninja stuff that you can do. Marco teaches an RYS Academy that I just don’t have the time to do it or I would do more of it, but fortunately we have a [jessen 00:32:12] who can build them for us.

Can You Share Any Tips For Finding Local SEO Clients?

“Also, can you repost the link for Marco’s charity?” Yes. He posted it already, I believe. RL’s another question. He says, “Can you share any tips for finding local SEO clients? I need a few recurring payments to get the ball rolling. Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks.”

Yeah, look, I don’t know if I want to share this on … Well okay, RL, let me just say this. There’s one method that … no I’m not going to share that here. What I’m going to say is select a niche, RL. Right? Select a niche that you want, an industry that you prefer to work in or that you know that you may already have some experience in, whatever. Something that you’re familiar with or that you have a genuine interest in so that it makes it feel like not so much like work. Then start targeting those clients. Craft a very specific message. Again, we talk about the video lead gen system, which is going to be the product that we’re going to release in about two weeks. You could use that very specifically for finding and prospecting local SEO clients. Finding the clients isn’t that difficult, it’s the prospecting. Right? Finding prospects isn’t hard. You can use scrapers, there’s lot of tools out there. You can hire VA’s to do that kind of stuff, whatever. That’s not really the difficult part.

The hard part is starting the conversation with them. I found that even sales isn’t that difficult. The hardest part is starting the conversation from a position where they’re willing to receive the message and I found the video email is a fantastic way to start that conversation. To initiate that conversation. Break the ice and lower the defenses a bit and get the conversation started because you can position yourself as an expert and show them beyond a shadow of a doubt that you know what they hell you’re doing, whereas 99 percent of anybody else that’s contacted them about marketing services isn’t going to do that, and that’s what makes you stand out.

I would recommend that you pick that up when we release it in a few weeks. Obviously if you’re in the Mastermind RL, we cover that in there. That’s all included, but we did also cover a very specific … By the way, the method that I just said I’m not going to reveal right here is in that course that will be released in about two weeks or whatever. Just keep that in mind guys. It’s a very specific method for finding video SEO clients. Well for finding local clients period, but it’s a very specific way, using YouTube to find those clients and it works like crazy. Okay?

Anyways, I have to tease you guys with that a little bit, because I can’t reveal it here. It’s in the course. Come to the Mastermind though and I’ll share it with you.

What Are Your Recommendations On InMotion Hosting All Domains In One Cpanel Account?

Ajay says, “Two questions. I have a hosting account with In Motion Hosting.” Okay. “I just realized they might be hosting all my websites, domains, as add on domains under the same C-Panel account. What is your recommendation?”

Yeah, that’s how they do it, Ajay. When you have a shared hosting account that’s how it works. Every time you create an add on domain, it’s really like a sub-domain of your whatever the IP or C-Panel was set up as. It doesn’t matter. You can still configure your sites to all resolve to the exact, to whatever domain it is that you’ve added, but that’s just how it works in C-Panel. Okay? That’s not an issue.

Are There Any Benefits Of Sub Folders In Terms Of Link Juice?

“Number two, I had read an article recently about the advantages of sub-directories for link juice over sub-domains. The following link is … “

Guys we need to probably create a … somebody wants to make a note of this, a frequently asked question about this because we get this question a lot.

Yes, sub-domain folders apparently through a lot of testing, not so much my own, but from other people’s testing I do understand that there’s supposed to be a slight SEO advantage of doing multiple sites in sub-directories as opposed to on sub-domains, but we have repeatedly, or we’ve held our position on this for many years now, which is that sub-domains in my opinion is a superior method. There may be a slight SEO benefit to doing sub-directories over sub-domains. That’s fine. I get that. The problem with that is every single site that’s in a sub-directory is subordinate to the root domain, which means that if the root domain catches a penalty or if any of the subordinate sites in the sub-folders or sub-directories catch a penalty, it will penalize the entire domain and all of the other sibling sub-directories. Does that make sense?

The problem is it’s a penalty that would be leveled to basically the root, which would damage everything. It would be applied to everything domain wide, however, if you do a sub-domain, then in Google’s eyes, each sub-domain site is considered a separate entity. Right? A separate website and so when I talk about using sub-domains, it’s a way to offer or provide a level of protection for every individual site. The trick with that is to make sure that you keep the root clean and don’t do anything spammy to the root, because just as we talked about with the sub-directories, if the root was to catch a penalty or any of the sub-directories catch a penalty, it would apply to the root, and therefore tank all the rest of the sites. If you catch a penalty on the root domain with sub-domain sites, all the sub-domain sites will be affected as well because it is a domain wide penalty, but if you get a penalty on a sub-domain site, then it only applies to that sub-domain. Your root would still remain intact and your other sibling sub-domains would also remain untouched, unaffected.

There’s a reason why we do it that way and it’s to mitigate risk, to reduce potential catastrophic failure of all your sites if you were to catch a penalty. That’s why we do it that way. Okay? I don’t suspect you guys have anything to add to that, do you?

Adam: No, you nailed it.

Bradley: All right cool. Great question though Ajay. That was a really good question. We get that often, but guys, like I said, we should probably just make a frequently asked question out of that one.

Did You Eventually Charge More As The Company Grew Or Did You Keep The Rate The Same?

Mohammed, what’s up buddy? He’s recently joined the Mastermind and he’s been incredibly active in there. I saw your question Mohammed about local stuff in there. We’re going to cover that slightly tomorrow in the Mastermind as well. So keep that in mind.

“Hey guys have you ever worked with a small company that grew because of your marketing?” Yes, my BB’s Tree Guys. “Did you eventually charge more as the company grew or do you keep the rate the same?” Well Mohammed, that’s a great question by the way. Yes, I always … Well let me rephrase, if I add additionally marketing services I always increase. I don’t necessarily increase the rate, but because I’m adding more services I bill them more. Does that make sense?

To answer your question. For example, I just had a client call on Monday. A client of mine that I’ve had for, well shit, she was one of my first clients and it’s not 2018 and I opened my agency in March of 2012. So almost six years she’s been a client of mine. She called because she’s been ranked at the top of Maps for six freaking years and she, like often happens with a lot of clients, they tend to forget why they’re getting leads on line. Especially when it’s been six years, right? You guys would be absolutely ashamed if you knew what I was charging this lady, because again, it was one of my very first clients and it was such a small amount of money per month. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s $250 a month is what she’s paying me and she’s been ranked at the top of Maps for six freaking years, but she has never wanted to do any additional marketing services.

I have pitched her a least a dozen times on different types of marketing services. Press releases. PR marketing, video marketing. All this other kind of stuff and she never wants to do a damn thing. On Monday, we scheduled a call for Monday, I guess actually it was last Friday, anyways, we scheduled a call from two months ago and we got on the phone and she was like, “I need to know what you’ve been doing. I just really want to know if it’s worth me still spending $250 a month.” I almost laughed at her. I told her, I was like, “Listen, you were one of my first clients. You’re on a rate that is so much lower. That is less than half what I typically charge any client, even just to speak to them basically and I’ve left you at that because we’ve had you ranked, you’ve been receiving good results. I’ve pitched you on other marketing services. You don’t want to do any of it. Look, if you want to cancel that’s fine, but I don’t understand after six years of getting results.”

Anyways, it was just this long basically me having to convince her not to cancel services with me, when honestly, I should have just let her freaking cancel. I should have just said, “Hey, if you don’t think $250 is worth you being number one in Google and have been for six years, please feel free to cancel. See how you do in six months.” You know what I mean?

Chris: She’s costing you money.

Bradley: Huh?

Chris: She’s costing you money.

Bradley: Probably, but my point with that was that I have clients that have been grandfathered into specific rates that I have not raised. I probably could, but I haven’t. If they ask me for additional marketing services, then I will price those accordingly based upon my current rates, but whatever I have been charging them guys, I will leave it as is. But again, this is going to be different. Marco, I’m sure, does stuff different. I’m sure Hernan does stuff differently. Adam does stuff differently.

Personally, I don’t charge more for existing clients for existing services. I just charge more for new services as they add them. What are your opinions guys?

Chris: Yeah, this is actually a good question. I think it’s a case by case basis. I usually don’t, as you were saying, I usually don’t … unless I have some fixed costs that needs abating. You know how we raise our BA salaries once in whatever. We try to do that for BA’s.

Bradley: Yup.

Chris: If that’s the case, then I would raise it slightly. Just to update the costs, but I don’t do it, not because they’re getting more clients because of what I’m doing I won’t do it. That’s why I really like half retainer, half revenue share agreements. Revenue share could be whatever. It could be on a sales basis, it could be on a lead basis. If they are paying you, for example, x amount of money on retainer, we can be a little bit lower since you’re getting some revenue share. There is no cap to the amount of money that you can make and at the end of the day you will be motivated to work more for the guys, right? Because if they are making more money, you’re making more money, we’re all happy. If it’s activity based, meaning blog posts, et cetera, et cetera. Unless they increase the amount of activity, I don’t charge them more for it.

Sometimes, as a business grows, this is the good news, is that, as a business grows, as Bradley was saying, they will require more, hopefully they will require more service from you and that’s a completely different story, right?

Bradley: Right. Anybody else?

Hernan: I charge high enough from the beginning so that it’ll be awhile before I decide to raise my rates, but yes, I definitely do if year over year, you can show growth that can be attributed to your efforts. If you can show growth at that level, right? 10, 20, 30 percent, whatever it is, then I would raise my rates accordingly and then you’re going to get a lot of push back. You’re going to get a lot of no’s, get a lot of people that’ll just walk away and that’s all good and well. I have one specific company that I did a bunch of AdWords for and it was a million dollar account and we had it humming. We had it to the point where they were making just so much stinking money that I told them that I want more money and they decided to go with what they had in house and try to keep it that way, but 18 months later they contacted me again and said, could you come and work on our AdWords again. This is after they told me that they longer needed me, but I was at a point in my career, my life and my on line business where I could tell them, “Hell no. I don’t need a client like you.”

The thing is you have to weigh whether it’s worth raising the rates, how much it is that you’re charging from the beginning. If you price yourself right, if you know what you’re worth and you know what you’re going to be worth to that company, then you’ll be charging the correct price right at the beginning so you should know what you’re worth rather than worrying about what it is that you’re bringing to the client. The client should just say yes to you with whatever it is that you have because you’re producing.

Bradley: Yeah. Lastly on that Mohammed, when you said like BB’s Tree Guys. Yeah, but remember with the Tree, especially with the one contractor that I’ve really, really expanded his business, that’s a revenue share model, just like what Hernan was mentioning. I cover all the costs of expanding any marketing services. I build all the infrastructure at my expense and then I just get a cut of every job that gets closed. Again, with that, when you’re selling leads or you’re on a revenue or equity share model, then its unlimited scalability in that I don’t charge them anymore, it’s the same rate. I get 10 percent of any job that closes. Whatever the contract price is, I get 10 percent of that and that’s been that way with this contractor for four or going on five years now. Again, there’s no change in rate, but as I continue to build more and more sites and we cover more and more territory, we generate more and more leads and therefore, I make more and more money. Right?

Is It True That Google Will Penalize A Review/Product Type Rich Snippet That Is Placed On The Homepage?

Okay, I’m just going to call you Steve. What’s up buddy? He says, “Hey guys, I remember I read somewhere that putting a review product type rich snippet data on your home page instead of an organization webpage article type is not good, because Google will penalize you somehow. I mean a review product type schema, which shows those review stars below your listing in the Serps for better click through rate. Is this true or just gossip?”

Well first of all, if you’re adding schema for review stars, just for the sake of getting review stars, then yes, that structured data spam, don’t do it. You would probably get away with it for some time, but it’s likely that eventually you’ll get caught and you can get a manual spam action for that in search console, so don’t do that.

Now, if you actually have products, I don’t know because I don’t do eCommerce, but product review or product stuff, I don’t do that kind of stuff so I don’t know if there is some law or rule, not law, excuse, but some rule or best practice that states that you’re not supposed to have product reviews on your homepage. I don’t think that that’s the case though. Anybody have an answer for that? Okay.

If you do product stuff, if you have products, you sell products, for example, if it’s a product review site and the homepage has got a blog roll on it and there’s product reviews, I don’t think that that would cause a penalty because that’s a valid site right? When you’re spamming schema or structured data specifically to gain search right? Which would be like adding review stars to a site that has no business having review stars, then yes, that can be a problem so don’t do that. All right?

Is There Any Good Up-To-Date Google Adwords Course You Would Recommend?

“A short second question please. Is there any good, up-to-date AdWords course you would recommend?” Yeah, well first of all, we have Local Kingpin, but it needs to be updated because the AdWords interface has changed so much and so what I’m going to recommend is that you join Semantic Mastery Mastermind because we’re covering PPC and AdWords this month in depth. That’s going to packaged up like it’s a separate course, but we’re not selling it outside of the Mastermind. That’s how we’re going to be doing the new Mastermind this year. Every single module is basically going to be like a separate stand-alone course. They’re all going to piece together because they’re all going to be building out the same businesses, but, like this is the PPC module, so it will get packaged up into its own basically course, but only way to get it is to be in the Mastermind.

That said, the AdWords training that I learned from was Perry Marshall’s training and it was really good. Again, that was almost two years ago now though. Yeah, that was probably two years ago now so I don’t know if he’s got updated training. I’m assuming he does and that’s good training too. Okay? I would say our training because we’re current as far as we’re going to be doing all types of AdWords stuff. Google search, PPC, YouTube PPC, remarketing, maybe some display network although I’m assuming we’re going to hold that off until we do the remarketing module and that’s a separate module all together. We’ll also be doing Bing, PPC, and Hernan will be training on some Facebook PPC stuff. That’s what I would recommend is you get in there, because it will be a much more well rounded training then just buying an AdWords course alone, if that makes sense? All right.

Do You Use Any Plugins In Blocking Web Spiders?

Jenia, there he is. This is one that I was just talking about. Replied to my email. What’s up buddy? He says, “Good afternoon gentlemen, I have a question about blocking spiders. Do you use any plug-ins like Spider Spanker or anything else like that?” I don’t anymore, Jenia. I used to do all of that when I was running a lot of PBN’s and stuff, but I don’t do that anymore. I don’t even use that plug-in at all anymore.

“Is there a good way to prevent competition from reverse engineering your SEO efforts?” As far as blocking spiders, first of all, you do that through HT access. Can you do that in robots.text too? I can’t remember.

Hernan: You can but it’s always better to block them through HT Access.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: Because robots are directives that the robots can or may or may not follow. Now when you’re blocking them through HT Access, the hosting is not even serving them the webpage. You know what I’m saying?

Bradley: Right. Yup.

Marco: Yeah that’s absolutely right. HT Access and you block everything except the bot that you want in there and that’s how you protect yourself except that the bot, the coders are smart enough to always change the user agent, and they’re constantly updating and so there’s a website and I’ll have to go and dig through my stuff, but there’s a website that constantly updates the bot that you should be blocking. I’ll see if I can find it and post it in here so that you can use that. They update every 30 days. Every 60 days or so with new bot that you should block and user agents, but definitely HT Access. No plug-ins.

Does Blocking Web Spiders A Good Way To Prevent Competition From Reverse Engineering Your SEO Efforts?

Bradley: Yeah. Okay, we’re going to try to run through guys because we’ve only got a couple questions left and we’re almost out of time and I want to get to them. It looks like we really only got like two, three questions left. Jenia, he says, “Is there a good way to prevent competition from reverse engineering your SEO efforts?”

There’s some things that you can do, Jenia. For example, we talk about in the Mastermind how to use tag pages, well canonicals period. Very strategically, which will hide, will mask your efforts from prying eyes so-to-speak. Canonicals are a great way to do that, but there’s a lot of other stuff that we talk about in the Mastermind too and I’m not saying that because I don’t want to answer your question, Jenia. One, when it comes to reverse engineering, if it’s a good SEO they’re going to be able to find a lot, right? One of the things that you could do would be to use Spider Spanker or some sort of bot blocking stuff and block the Majestic SEO Crawlers and the AH Refs Crawlers and things like that so that nobody can index your links or what’s on your site. The important thing then would be to use those bot blockers on the sites that are linking to you.

In other words, when I was doing a lot of PBN work, I would use bot blockers to block Majestic and AH Refs on the sites, on my PBN sites so that those links wouldn’t get indexed. The inbound links pointing to my money sites wouldn’t get indexed and people wouldn’t be able to see them. Does that make sense? Google will see them, because they’ll show up in your links to your site in search console, but the SEO analysis applications wouldn’t, right? That’s one way you could do it, but again, I don’t use PBNs really at all anymore, so because of that I just … remember guys, we’d talk about using syndication networks and we’d do a shit ton of back linking to the syndication network properties, so people want to start looking out at our different tiers and doing back link analysis on tiers, then they’re likely going to be able to find out what we’re doing, but if they’re just going to look at the money site, they’re not going to see a shit ton of inbound links, or if they do, they’re going to be press release links and syndication network links and drive stack links and stuff like that. Does that make sense?

I don’t really go … I don’t spend a lot of time trying to prevent other people from seeing what I’m doing anymore. I just don’t really worry about it that much, Jenia. “Or are so amazing that no one can’t touch this.” No anybody can be taken down.

Can You Explain The Basics Of How Money Site Integrates When Using Syndication And RYS Academy For Both Local And Affiliate/Ecommerce?

All right, we’re almost out of time guys. Nigel says, “Good day gents, first I want to thank you for the Hump Day Hangout resource. You all are much appreciated.” Plus one that. Okay, he says, “Question, can you explain the basics of how money site integrates when using syndication in RYS Academy for both local and affiliate eCommerce. What I mean specifically is how would you set up the money page? If you can explain this a bit, because honestly the term money site is used so freely in groups I sometimes I feel like the only one not in on the secret.”

Money site just means your primary digital asset. Whatever you use to create revenue, right? So a money site, if you’re doing lead gen, could just be a landing page, right? What I mean by local lead gen. Say your generating leads for a plumber, for example, then your money site could typically be a lead gen style landing page. Somebody lands on it and it’s got a big contact form. Says contact request form and it’s got a big phone number on it and that’s it. That could be a money site. Another money site could be an affiliate site. Could be a blog. I’m sorry, was somebody going to say something? I thought I heard somebody trying to jump in.

Marco: No.

Adam: I don’t think so.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, a money site just means any website that you own, or that you are generating revenue with. Don’t let that confuse you. As far as syndication RYS for both local and affiliate eCommerce, I’m not sure what you mean unless you’re trying to set up a local aspect on a site as well as an eCommerce or affiliate and again, that’s a little bit of a unique situation and with our limited time right now, I don’t know how I can really unpack that and describe to you a good strategy without knowing a little bit more. I know it can be done, I’m just not sure how to tell you how to set that up without knowing specifically what your objectives are. Does that make sense?

Okay, it says, “Example for local create an article and place a link with offer. Where, how many, suggestion, where it links into syndication, RYS general was more than enough.” Well remember RYS Academy is just basically it’s like a link building method so that you can boost existing properties, right, and the drive files themselves can rank, but syndication networks are just a way of … it’s a content amplification method, right? You publish content to your money site, or your YouTube channel, either one and it syndicates out across your network for content application, excuse me, amplification as well as provide some SEO benefits. Okay? Just keep that in mind. The link with the offer, where and how many? That’s really just going to depend on many different things, but essentially yeah, you create an article and then you can link out to whatever you want. If it’s an affiliate offer, so be it. Okay? Again, I apologize that I can’t give you more specific answer. I would need more details Nigel.

Would You Say That It’s True That The IFTTT + SEO Strategy That You Teach In Semantic Mastery Will Probably Stand The Test Of Time, Not Fall Victim To Any Google Penalties?

All right guys we’re almost out of time. Dee says, “Would you say that it’s true that the IFTTT plus SEO strategies that you teach in Semantic Mastery will probably stand the test of time, not fall victim to any of Google’s penalties?” Well that’s our hope, Dee and I certainly feel confident that it’s not going to become an issue because it has been effective for me since 2012 when I started using this method. It’s only become more effective in pretty much standard op … It’s almost required now to have your footprint. To claim your footprint as a brand. That’s what helps to validate the entity, so I can’t imagine, although I don’t work for Google. I could change tomorrow, it could change six months from now. It could change six years from now, I don’t know, but as it stands right now and the foreseeable future, I don’t see it creating any problems. Okay?

I think we’re done guys.

Adam: Yes.

Marco: Before we go just a second. I listed the resource on the page. It’s called botreports.com and it actually gives you the HT Access code for blocking whatever specific bots you want to block. It’s a really awesome resource.

Bradley: Yup. You got it. Okay guys thanks for everybody being here. Remember Syndication Academy webinar starts in about one minute, well probably two and then we’ll be at Mastermind webinar tomorrow with the new curriculum, so we’ll see you guys there.

Adam: Awesome buddy. Bye everybody.

Hernan: Bye everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 166 posted first on your-t1-blog-url from Blogger http://ift.tt/2Dfj75S via IFTTT

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 166

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 Announcement

Bradley: Bots.

Adam: Oh, we’re live. All right. This is the fun episode where you watch Adam take notes and Bradley talk about stuff that has nothing to do with Hump Day Hangouts. Just kidding.

Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts and I believe it’s episode 166. Correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t have it up in front of me actually.

Bradley: You are correct sir.

Chris: Yes.

Adam: Before we get into things real quick we’re going to do a quick hello to everybody. Then we’ve got a few special announcements, and then, as usual, we’ll get into the questions, but I’ll start on my left here and see Chris. How’s it going with you?

Chris: Doing good. Got a early rise up tomorrow. 7am airport time and then off to the slopes for some winter action.

Adam: Nice, nice. Outstanding. Hernan how about yourself?

Hernan: Living the life stanman. No, I’m good. I’m good. Excited to be here guys. Excited for what’s coming. We’re going to be with Adam I think it’s early to mention that but we’re going to go to the [inaudible 00:01:00] Live, right Adam?

Adam: Yup.

Hernan: In March. By the end of it. So if you guys want to hand out at some point. We’re going to be doing some networking, we’re going to be doing some good stuff over there sir.

Adam: Yeah definitely. Let us know if you’re going and then if you’re in the area. I think it’s Orlando so we’ll see. We’ll have a little bit of time, can’t guarantee anything right now, but obviously would love to hear from you.

Hernan: Yeah. We’ll have more info as time goes, as we get closer but we’ll be representing Semantic Mastery over there.

Adam: Cool.

Bradley: Represent, represent.

Hernan: Yeah.

Adam: Marco how’s it going man?

Marco: What’s up man? I just got out of the lab with Rob. We’re tearing down right brain, just a little bit. A little part of the algorithm that we found. It’s amazing. It’s amazing the stuff that Google has that’s public and that you can actually manipulate where I constantly back and forth, back and forth. Let’s do this and let’s try that, and what’s this and what’s that and then sometimes even our own users. Not necessarily in our way as reloaded. This was actually from a question in the Cemented Master Mastermind that made us go about 45 minutes into the lab. Okay let’s track this down, let’s see what happened. That was really good. I had fun. That’s my idea of fun. 45 minutes of looking at code.

Adam: Glad you guys are doing that. I’m sure something good is going to end up coming out of this. Bradley, how you doing?

Bradley: I’m good. Happy to be here. Got lots to go through today. We’ve also, just update guys, we’ve got the Syndication Academy Update Webinar Number 18, immediately following Hump Day Hangouts today, so if you’re in Syndication Academy, go check the events tab in Facebook and you should be able to get the URL to it. Okay?

Adam: Awesome. All right a couple quick announcements. We will be sending out some more information about the next two things I’m going to mention. The first one is video lead gen system. Bradley just put the finishing touches on a video email prospecting course that kind of deep dive into that so Bradley you want to tell people just real quick about that?

Bradley: Yeah, we did a really extended webinar. Went damn near three hours in the Mastermind about how to do the video lead gen prospecting system that I’ve been using for years that I really got my start. Started building my agency up using that method. That specific method. It’s a bit time consuming but it works incredibly well for landing clients and it’s still valid and works well today. It actually works even better today because you can embed gifs into the emails now that look like actual videos playing in the email. It’s a click enticer. It’s click bait so-to-speak.

Anyways, we went through three hours of training on how to do it step-by-step and I basically just edited that webinar. Put it into separate modules. Individual lesson videos and sections with notes and all that kind of stuff. We packaged it up and that’s basically it. It’s a very riffle approach instead of a shotgun approach for targeting prospects, but it works incredibly well.

The good news is about 90 percent of it can be outsourced. There is a part of it that should be done by whoever … If you’re a one man agency or solopreneur or whatever, you’re going to want to record the audit videos, or if you’ve got a sales person or something like that, maybe it would be them, but somebody obviously that knows a little bit about whatever service it is that they’re selling, but other than that the rest of everything else can be outsourced and so we’ve had questions a lot recently over the last few weeks about prospecting and how to keep your pipeline full and all that kind of stuff. One way to do it is just to consistently be prospecting. Make it part of your standard operating procedure. Your just normal weekly tasks in your business should be prospecting so that you always keep your pipeline full.

That’s why I think this course was so timely because if you outsource it then you know it gets done, and that way you can keep your pipeline full of leads at all times so that you can cherry pick the best clients, number one and number two you won’t be so desperate when you are talking to the … If you only got five leads for three months, then you try so hard to close all five. Whereas, if you had 10 or 15 leads per week, then you could be a hell of a lot more selective and really, if somebody’s going to give you any resistance, thank you very much, see you later, click. Hang up, move on to the next one.

Adam: Definitely.

Bradley: I think it’s going to be a good course coming out. I think a lot of you guys, about 60 percent of our audience is into local marketing. I think this will help a lot of you to be able to generate some clients, as well as maybe land service providers if you’re selling leads.

Adam: Definitely. Yeah, it’s a good one. Like Bradley said, it can save you a ton of time. It’s going to keep your pipeline full, and it works. I’ve used this stuff too in a couple different industries and this really applies to anyone, which is really cool. You can use this for consulting. You could use this for financial services. You could use this for contractors, and it has a very good response rate, which is why it is the lead gen system using video. Anyways, more on that later. We’ll be telling you guys all about that.

The other thing we wanted to tell you about was Jeffrey Smith. If you missed his SEO boot camp webinar that was, I’m going to get the date wrong, I think it was early December or late November, but that went really well. We had some technical issues the very first time we had him on. He came back, had a webinar, that went great. We got really good feedback. People who hopped in the course loved it. I know Bradley, you said you went through it, or did you go through all of it or parts of it?

Bradley: Not all of it. I’ve been through parts of it. Kind of like what Marco mentioned to me. I just go through and find stuff that I need when it’s pertinent at that particular time. Everything I’ve seen has been so thorough though. It’s training after our own hearts in that its so detailed and he went way over and above and it’s an amazing course.

Adam: Cool. So we’re going to have him back. That will be on Monday. We’re getting stuff set up for that right now, so we’ll be sending out emails about that. Be sure to check that out and we will have a replay available if you can’t make it live on Monday.

Before we get into it I wanted to remind everybody about the charity that we’re supporting throughout January. That’s still going on. We’ve had a lot of really good donations so far. It’s really impressive so first of all, thank you to everyone who’s helped out and then Marco, if you want to tell people, because I know we have people come who aren’t here all the time. If you want to tell them quickly about what the charity is, whose it for?

Marco: Yeah sure. It supplies uniforms and books for kids. We’re targeting first, second and third grade kids. We want to keep them in school. A lot of times the reason why they can’t go to school is simply because they don’t have the supplies, the uniforms or the books. They don’t have shoes. Right? They have to go to school barefoot. Imagine if you’re having … still in 2018 going to school barefoot, man. This is the type of stuff that we’re dealing with. Not only that, the environment that these kids live in. Someone comes knocking at the door, you don’t know who’s coming knocking at your door. They’re living in a place where they’re under lock and key. When they go out they have to go out in groups because they have to run a gauntlet man. Drug dealers, drug users. Just the worst of the worst man, so what we’re trying to do is, I know that education is the key to success. Without an education all you’re doing is you’re going to stay in that poverty cycle because you’re not going to know anything except that which you experience.

So experiencing an education, experiencing the world, experiencing all of the different things that are offered through an education opens your mind to all kinds of possibilities and it lets you know that you’re not useless. That you’re not worthless. Someone is taking the time to tell you you’re actually worth something, which to me, that’s incredible. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re going into these neighborhoods. We’re trying to get these kids, as many as we can. Right now we’re almost at the 10k mark, which is what had set. 100 kids takes $10,000. We’re almost there so if it’s a dollar, if it’s two dollars, we don’t care. Just go ahead. Please donate. Thank you very much those who have donated already. This is really a really good cause, man.

Adam: Awesome.

Marco: I just hope people will listen and donate and I dropped the link on the event for those who would like to go and take a look at the video and see what it’s all about, more in depth.

Adam: Awesome. Thanks again as Marco said, to everyone who’s donated so far. We appreciate it. When is it? I think we got another week or two right?

Marco: Yeah. We made the cutoff on the 26th so we can go the week of 29th for the supplies. Just before they’re going to school on February 5th, but after that we’re going to keep it open. We’re going to do something else so that when next February comes around we’re ready for even more kids to go to school. We’ll be doing something. We’ll announce it. I’ll talk to you guys and we’ll work it out.

Adam: Sounds good. Awesome. Well if you are new to Semantic Mastery, first off, thank you for joining us on Hump Day Hangouts. A lot of times we get asked, “Where’s a good place for me to start?” Well the Hump Day Hangouts, you’re in the right place so that’s the good place to start. The next step would be the Battle Plan and we’ve got a discount code. I’ll pop that up on the page, but check out the Battle Plan, it’s a solid investment and it is very, very much worth the little amount of money you have to pay for all the information in there.

If you don’t yet have an account over at SerpSpace, go to serpspace.com, you can open up an account for free. Check out the tools there, check out the Done for You services and if you’re really jonesing for some Semantic Mastery information and you just need to see Bradley making a chart or something during the week head over to support.semanticmastery.com and that’s where we put a lot of these common questions that come up, or the more in depth answers where Bradley’s maybe drawing a chart or giving some information, so you can go check that out and get an answer in the middle of the week.

If you’re really ready to take things up and you’re not new maybe to Semantic Mastery, then I highly suggest going to the mastermind.semanticmastery.com. I’ll pop the link on there and if you’re ready to join the Mastermind, that’s the place to be. If you ever have any questions about that, you can contact us at support@semanticmastery.com. If you have any questions about the Mastermind after looking through the page and seeing if maybe it’s a right fit for you or not, we’d be happy to chat with you.

Bradley: Sweet.

Adam: All right. Anybody else? Any announcements or are we ready to get rolling?

Bradley: No. I’m ready to get in questions. Just one brief thing. The new Mastermind curriculum starts this week. We have our first Mastermind Webinar for 2018 under the new training schedule, which is tomorrow. We’re in the PPC module. I’m actually a bit behind in preparing the presentation and training for tomorrow, but whatever is fine, because I imagine for the next couple weeks it’s going to be a little bit in disarray as we settle into this new training, but we’re going to be doing … AdWords has been updated, the interface has, so we’re going to be doing AdWords for local, as well as for national stuff, which could apply to affiliate campaigns, plus we will be doing AdWords for YouTube for again, local led gen, as well as national lead gen and then also for affiliate stuff and we’re going to be doing some of that for Semantic Mastery for our own channel, for example. Some of that will also be included and then we’ll be doing some Bing ads and also Hernan’s going to be doing some training on Facebook ads. This is all stuff that’s going to be in part of module one, which should last probably about six weeks and so again, I would highly encourage you to come join the Mastermind.

Last thing I want to mention very briefly is, and I say this the beginning of every Hump Day Hangouts go to bradelybenner.com and subscribe and the reason I say that is because I got an email from one of my subscribers today that was replying, and it’s Jenny, and Jenny is always on our Hump Day Hangouts asking questions. I’m not going to read your email to me, Jenny, but the last two lines that you put in the email as a reply to one of my emails about the Mindset series was, “Thanks for kicking my ass today, sir. May I have another?” That’s awesome. I get some replies from some of my subscribers because it’s just about mindset stuff and I highly recommend that you go check it out. At least I know it helps me to be able to write those.

By the way, I started crossfit training as a coach every single day this week. This week is when I started. I was supposed to start last week but the extreme cold prevented me from doing it, so I haven’t been able to write an email every morning, but I’m trying to squeeze it in when I can. Like today, I got the email written right after I got back from the crossfit gym. Just to let you guys know, I’m trying to write every single day. I’ve got about 40 emails in the series now. Go subscribe, check it out. If you don’t like it, just unsubscribe. Okay? With that said, let’s get into it.

Okay you guys. Let me know if everything’s coming through okay?

Adam: Yup.

What Are Your Recommended Frequency And Topics On Press Releases?

Bradley: Sweet. Okay, Harold’s up first. He says, “Hello everybody, thank you so much for giving us this space so we can ask our questions.” You’re welcome Harold. “Mine is, how often should I get press releases and what are some good topics?”

Well the frequency is really up to you. The nice thing about press releases is whenever a press release is picked up and distributed, it gets picked up by usually hundreds of websites so it’s a kind of a natural occurrence to get a bunch of links back from a press release, because companies all the time are announcing news and it’s a natural type thing. It’s traditional. It’s normal and so you can be a bit aggressive with press releases. I know I usually do them about once every two weeks. That’s usually the speed with which I do it, until I get the results that I’m looking to achieve, which is typically to rank in the three pack. Sometimes it’s organic stuff, it depends, but for the most part I’m trying to rank in the Maps pack and usually , just do them about every two weeks.

However, I know Rob, for example, the co-creator of RYS Reloaded with Marco, he just hammers the shit out of sites with press release, after press release, after press release and he’s able to get results so I don’t think there’s much of a velocity issue. Again, I do it about every two weeks, but I know that it’s been done a lot more than that. The frequency a lot higher than that and it hasn’t caused any issues. Marco, do you have a comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, as a matter of fact, I haven’t seen it. Like you said, we just bang one right after another and we stack them the right way going after different URLs. Now we have another press release service that has even more publication sites so that’s a really good mix. It’s really good to mix them up. One of them gives us embeds, which is even better for us and so it’s a lot of good things that you could do and a lot of nasty things that you can do with press releases.

Bradley: Yeah. All right, and as far as good topics, Harold, all right, so there’s a couple of things I want to mention here about topics. One, pretty much anything can be turned into a press release. Any sort of company news, any sort of seasonal changes, sales, specials, new products, new services. Anything at all can really be worthy of a news release to be written. What I’ve been doing for the most part is we published press releases anytime a customer review has been received by one of my lead gen sites or one of my contractor, client sites, excuse me. That’s another reason to publish a press release is because you’re announcing the glowing testimonial review that you just received, right? That’s just another example and I like using that method because it encourages the business owners to solicit reviews from their customers and then every time they get a review, I get notified and I go publish a press release for it and I get to bill them for it, and they get to puff out their chest and say, “Look at me, look at how awesome we are.”

I’ve been using that method. In fact, that’s our front end service on our new agency. It’s doing basically reputation. It’s a combination of video marketing, reputation marketing and PR marketing. It’s a combination of those three and that’s our front end service. It’s a very, very powerful way.

Also, any time you publish a blog post typically you could do that. Now, the last thing I want to mention about that is if you’ve got a good writer, a PR writer that you work with, a good PR writer will typically be able to create an angle out of just about anything. So an angel or a news hook out of just about anything. The other option would be to use the press release writers from the distribution service that you’re using.

For example in Serpspace, we don’t even allow manually submitted PRs anymore, I don’t think. I think we just have our net distribution service or network writers write them, because they know what the editorial guidelines are and a lot of those distribution service writers, right, that will provide as just an add on service, the press release to be written. It’s usually about $30 or so or something like that and it ranges between $30 to $45, somewhere in that range, but a lot of times, all they need is just a handful of small details and then they’ll create the news hook, because they know what they’re distribution network is looking for, if that makes sense?

A lot of times all I’ll do is just list who, what, when, where and then a quote from a company executive or in the case of using a review, I just quote the review, whatever the customer review text was that’s the quote. Does that make sense? That’s all we do and it’s very, very simple and I love it because it takes the content marketing side of things off my shoulders. We still have bloggers that do the curating and stuff, but I don’t have to think about so many content ideas for press releases anymore. We just say, “Hey go get another review. As soon as you get a review, let me know. We’ll publish a press release” and boom it’s done.

By the way, just to let you guys know, I had been doing that myself for my clients for my own agency every month. I would spend about two days at the beginning of the month. I still have been generating client reports and there’s a reason why I do that, because I typically, once I generate client reports and I send the reports to the clients I also include a brief breakdown of what the reports are showing in my own voice and sometimes I record a screen cast video and send that to them with an overview of what I’m seeing for the month and some new opportunities that have arisen and I’ve got a really close relationship with my clients so because of that, I don’t outsource the client reporting part of it, but I had been generating the review commercials, which is a David Sprague. Every month, this is just an add on service I added to most of my clients. I would generate a review commercial from a new review that they received within the last month and then publish the video, distribute it across my network. My syndication networks typically ranks the video, but if it doesn’t then I end up with a press release anyways.

I had been doing all of that myself for the last six or seven months since I’ve really started playing with this strategy. One of my virtual assistants is in the UK. She’s been blogging for me for, I’d say at least four years. She’s great. She reached out to me around the turn of year and said, “Hey, I’m looking for more work and we’ve been working together for years. Would you have anything else you wanted me to do?” And I was like, “Oh, perfect. I’ve been meaning to unload this work, now that I know this is a viable strategy and it’s something I’m going to do.”

The reason I’m telling you this guys, is because I want to let you know, I struggle too with doing shit that I’m not supposed to be doing. For example, taking two days at the beginning of every month to generate these review videos and order the press releases. It was something that could have been outsources three or four months ago once I really knew that it was going to be something that I was going to carry on or be a continuing service, however, I never took the time to create the process docs. I get up on my soapbox all the time and preach to you guys about outsourcing stuff, yet there are processes in my business that I still have not outsourced, and it’s just because of a lack of time, or really a lack of desire for doing it. For creating the process training for that process and what it comes down to typically is just not wanting to do it because it sucks. It’s boring work. It’s tedious and often times I’m so freaking busy with all the work that I’m trying to fulfill that I feel like I don’t have the time to create process docs about the work that I need to fulfill. If that makes sense? So it’s a catch 22. Right?

Because she gave me a reason, Michelle did, my VA. She gave me a reason and because I’ve got so much work on my plate right now for this new Mastermind training curriculum, I knew at the beginning of every month this year, I don’t want to spend two days generating reports and also the review commercials and ordering the press releases and all that stuff. I don’t want to do all that. So I spent the first two days of this week creating the training process. The training videos, the written procedures, which are in Google docs and all that and I sent that to her yesterday and she’s now going to take over it for me and guess what. I never have to fucking do it again.

The reason I went through all of that is just to let you know that this is all stuff that can be outsourced guys and I highly recommend, sometimes I need to remind myself of some of my own advice, and this is something I should have done four or five months ago, and I just finally got it done and I can tell you what a weight, a load has been lifted off my shoulders because now I’m not going to dread the beginning of the month every month because it’s going to eat up two days, if that makes sense. So guys, if you take anything away from that at all, it’s that if you’ve got stuff in your business that makes your stomach turn sometimes because you have to do it and every time it comes up it makes your stomach turn, that’s the shit you need to outsource first. Honestly, that’s the stuff, the stuff you don’t like to do or you hate to do, that’s the stuff that you should absolutely, as much as it’s going to be painful and tedious to do, but create process docs for how to do all that, and then hire that shit out so that you don’t have to do that anymore.

Again, we get into this business not because we want another job, right? We want freedom and we want to enjoy it and so sometimes there’s obviously going to be stuff in everyone’s business that has to done, that’s not enjoyable. Outsource it. If you create the exact process for how to do it, you can outsource anything. This was not a pitch for Outsource KingPin, but we do have a training product that specifically teaches the methods for how to do exactly what I just described and it’s called Outsource Kingpin. Check that out. I know that was a long winded answer and I’m sorry Harold, but I just wanted to share with you guys that even I struggle with not following my own advice at times, but outsource as much as you can.

Anybody want to comment on that before I move on?

Chris: I agree with you Bradley.

How Does Google View Directory Sites In Terms Of SEO?

Bradley: Okay. Good enough. Thank you. Juan says, “Hello lovely people and thanks for having me. Are directory site’s viewed by Google as good or bad for SEO?” I think Juan, this is going to be not anything based in absolute data for me anymore, as it is just more of opinion or assumption, but I’d like to get some opinions of the other guys. I believe it has more to do with the directory itself then just a blanket statement.

For example, I know they say reciprocal links are bad, but I’ve seen many cases where reciprocal links actually are still very beneficial and I know a lot of low end directories that are really spammy, will require a reciprocal link, those are the ones that I would suspect are not good, but there’s a lot of good other directories that are good.

For example, Yelp is a directory site right? It’s a local or it’s a business directory site, but it is a directory site. We all know that’s a good link, but then obviously if it’s some obscure directory out there that is just … and they’re all requiring reciprocal links and stuff like that, then I would say no. I think it would be more about selective then just a blanket statement. I think it depends on the directory itself. What do you guys say?

Chris: Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree with you Bradley. The fact that on some directories you need to think about this in terms of what kind of value can you get from the directory, right? As well as what kind of value can you get from the reciprocal link, because if it is let’s say that you’re doing, I don’t know SEO for a doctor, and then you can get the doctor, put it in directory for doctor’s and even further for local doctors that would actually, could help you bring in some profit. Right? Even further if the directory is ranking in Google. Paid directories sometimes work as well because just being paid, even if it’s $5 or $10 for a lifetime link, usually work because they weed out 99 percent of spammy links so have that in mind. Some of them are really, really high authority so I would say that it would be on a case by case basis.

Some people would say that, for example, blog comments will be bad for SEO and that’s not entirely true.

Bradley: That’s right.

Chris: If you make a really thoughtful blog comment on a highly relevant publication or blog, it can blow your website away, right? It can really help you so I think it’s a case by case basis. If you’re on GSA’s spamming blog post or spamming directories, which you could definitely do, just do it as far away as possible from your clients or your own website, but if it’s a manual placement from a website that you can get value from and value meaning either authority or traffic, I would say go ahead and do it.

Bradley: Good advice. Marco?

Chris: No I think you guys covered it perfect.

What Is The Best Way To Indexing One Million Pages A Day?

Bradley: Beautiful. Fabian. What’s up Fabian? He says, “I want to index about 1,000,000 pages a day.” Wow. Okay. “So I need a very scalable solution. How would you do this using IFTTT and Plus Twitter. If yes, how often can I post the tweets that my account won’t be shut down? Should I create several accounts and spread my posts on them? Thanks a lot.”

Yeah, I don’t think you would want to do a million tweets per day in one Twitter account. I don’t think that’s a good idea. You probably need a hell of a lot of Twitter accounts to be able to accomplish a million tweets per day. We have an indexing service in Service Space. I don’t know if that amount of links would be a scalable option. There is one service that I can mention for mass volume that I know my, one of our link building director, he basically pointed it out a while ago. Now it’s been probably a year and a half since he mentioned this to me, I know I still use it though, but it’s called Express Indexer. Let me see if I can …

Hernan: Yeah, Bradley.

Bradley: Go ahead.

Hernan: I talked to [Debbie 00:28:48] already about this because I had seen this question come up. I actually saw it on Facebook.

Bradley: Okay.

Hernan: And he said, “No, it’s not working.”

Bradley: Okay.

Hernan: As it used to. He said that he’s trying to find a way around it. He’s still working on it because we had to shut down the indexing service in Serpspace actually.

Bradley: Oh did we? I didn’t even know that.

Hernan: Yeah, we had to shut it down because it just wasn’t indexing the way that it should. This option IFTTT to Twitter is not scalable because you’re going to need, for a million pages, what a hundred thousand profiles to push 10 tweets a day, 20 so that’s how you have to look at it. You can’t get away with more than 10 or 20, 20 tweets a day actually is pushing it because you’d have to scale up to 20. You can’t start at 20. You’ll get banned now.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: In Twitter. So I don’t have a solution. You don’t want to submit a million pages to the Google URL submitter, because you’ll trigger the captcha and so I don’t have an answer for this other than what we were using isn’t working at this level.

Bradley: Yeah. Well good. Thanks for chiming in. That’s a good question Fabian. I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer for you. Apologize.

What Are The Different Ways Of Indexing Local Citations?

Okay, so Shripad, I guess. Forgive me if I mispronounce that. He says, “What are the different ways to index local citations?”

Well indexers work. Typically that’s what I do. For example, when I order citations, whenever I get the citation report back, I just open up the spreadsheet. Copy all the citation URLs and then just submit them to the indexer. I usually submit them to multiple indexers. That’s all I do. That’s all you need to do. Okay?

Some citations, if you try to let them index naturally, sometimes it takes forever for citations to index naturally, that’s why I typically, as soon as I get a citation report guys, I’ll just go copy them and submit them to at least two indexing services to try to speed that up a little bit.

mbedding Maps – MyMaps Or GMB Map Page

All right. RL Sanders, “Hey guys, as always thank you for what you do. When you guys talk about embedding maps are you talking about my maps or the GMB map page?”

Both, RL. Both. I don’t mean embed both at the same time. I haven’t really tested with that, but I just mean you can do an embed run with the My Maps and then do another embed run with the GMB maps page. I’ll be a hundred percent honest with you, even though I know it’s super powerful, the My Maps thing, I don’t do a lot of that. I don’t set those up typically. If I get it back from a drive stack then I’ll do an embed blast with that through MAPS Powerhouse, but I don’t do, when I’m working on client stuff myself, I typically don’t do the My Maps. I just end up doing all the GMB stuff, but the My Maps are very, very powerful and what’s great about the My Maps guys is you can squeeze them, basically do follow links in and there’s a whole lot of ninja stuff that you can do. Marco teaches an RYS Academy that I just don’t have the time to do it or I would do more of it, but fortunately we have a [jessen 00:32:12] who can build them for us.

Can You Share Any Tips For Finding Local SEO Clients?

“Also, can you repost the link for Marco’s charity?” Yes. He posted it already, I believe. RL’s another question. He says, “Can you share any tips for finding local SEO clients? I need a few recurring payments to get the ball rolling. Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks.”

Yeah, look, I don’t know if I want to share this on … Well okay, RL, let me just say this. There’s one method that … no I’m not going to share that here. What I’m going to say is select a niche, RL. Right? Select a niche that you want, an industry that you prefer to work in or that you know that you may already have some experience in, whatever. Something that you’re familiar with or that you have a genuine interest in so that it makes it feel like not so much like work. Then start targeting those clients. Craft a very specific message. Again, we talk about the video lead gen system, which is going to be the product that we’re going to release in about two weeks. You could use that very specifically for finding and prospecting local SEO clients. Finding the clients isn’t that difficult, it’s the prospecting. Right? Finding prospects isn’t hard. You can use scrapers, there’s lot of tools out there. You can hire VA’s to do that kind of stuff, whatever. That’s not really the difficult part.

The hard part is starting the conversation with them. I found that even sales isn’t that difficult. The hardest part is starting the conversation from a position where they’re willing to receive the message and I found the video email is a fantastic way to start that conversation. To initiate that conversation. Break the ice and lower the defenses a bit and get the conversation started because you can position yourself as an expert and show them beyond a shadow of a doubt that you know what they hell you’re doing, whereas 99 percent of anybody else that’s contacted them about marketing services isn’t going to do that, and that’s what makes you stand out.

I would recommend that you pick that up when we release it in a few weeks. Obviously if you’re in the Mastermind RL, we cover that in there. That’s all included, but we did also cover a very specific … By the way, the method that I just said I’m not going to reveal right here is in that course that will be released in about two weeks or whatever. Just keep that in mind guys. It’s a very specific method for finding video SEO clients. Well for finding local clients period, but it’s a very specific way, using YouTube to find those clients and it works like crazy. Okay?

Anyways, I have to tease you guys with that a little bit, because I can’t reveal it here. It’s in the course. Come to the Mastermind though and I’ll share it with you.

What Are Your Recommendations On InMotion Hosting All Domains In One Cpanel Account?

Ajay says, “Two questions. I have a hosting account with In Motion Hosting.” Okay. “I just realized they might be hosting all my websites, domains, as add on domains under the same C-Panel account. What is your recommendation?”

Yeah, that’s how they do it, Ajay. When you have a shared hosting account that’s how it works. Every time you create an add on domain, it’s really like a sub-domain of your whatever the IP or C-Panel was set up as. It doesn’t matter. You can still configure your sites to all resolve to the exact, to whatever domain it is that you’ve added, but that’s just how it works in C-Panel. Okay? That’s not an issue.

Are There Any Benefits Of Sub Folders In Terms Of Link Juice?

“Number two, I had read an article recently about the advantages of sub-directories for link juice over sub-domains. The following link is … “

Guys we need to probably create a … somebody wants to make a note of this, a frequently asked question about this because we get this question a lot.

Yes, sub-domain folders apparently through a lot of testing, not so much my own, but from other people’s testing I do understand that there’s supposed to be a slight SEO advantage of doing multiple sites in sub-directories as opposed to on sub-domains, but we have repeatedly, or we’ve held our position on this for many years now, which is that sub-domains in my opinion is a superior method. There may be a slight SEO benefit to doing sub-directories over sub-domains. That’s fine. I get that. The problem with that is every single site that’s in a sub-directory is subordinate to the root domain, which means that if the root domain catches a penalty or if any of the subordinate sites in the sub-folders or sub-directories catch a penalty, it will penalize the entire domain and all of the other sibling sub-directories. Does that make sense?

The problem is it’s a penalty that would be leveled to basically the root, which would damage everything. It would be applied to everything domain wide, however, if you do a sub-domain, then in Google’s eyes, each sub-domain site is considered a separate entity. Right? A separate website and so when I talk about using sub-domains, it’s a way to offer or provide a level of protection for every individual site. The trick with that is to make sure that you keep the root clean and don’t do anything spammy to the root, because just as we talked about with the sub-directories, if the root was to catch a penalty or any of the sub-directories catch a penalty, it would apply to the root, and therefore tank all the rest of the sites. If you catch a penalty on the root domain with sub-domain sites, all the sub-domain sites will be affected as well because it is a domain wide penalty, but if you get a penalty on a sub-domain site, then it only applies to that sub-domain. Your root would still remain intact and your other sibling sub-domains would also remain untouched, unaffected.

There’s a reason why we do it that way and it’s to mitigate risk, to reduce potential catastrophic failure of all your sites if you were to catch a penalty. That’s why we do it that way. Okay? I don’t suspect you guys have anything to add to that, do you?

Adam: No, you nailed it.

Bradley: All right cool. Great question though Ajay. That was a really good question. We get that often, but guys, like I said, we should probably just make a frequently asked question out of that one.

Did You Eventually Charge More As The Company Grew Or Did You Keep The Rate The Same?

Mohammed, what’s up buddy? He’s recently joined the Mastermind and he’s been incredibly active in there. I saw your question Mohammed about local stuff in there. We’re going to cover that slightly tomorrow in the Mastermind as well. So keep that in mind.

“Hey guys have you ever worked with a small company that grew because of your marketing?” Yes, my BB’s Tree Guys. “Did you eventually charge more as the company grew or do you keep the rate the same?” Well Mohammed, that’s a great question by the way. Yes, I always … Well let me rephrase, if I add additionally marketing services I always increase. I don’t necessarily increase the rate, but because I’m adding more services I bill them more. Does that make sense?

To answer your question. For example, I just had a client call on Monday. A client of mine that I’ve had for, well shit, she was one of my first clients and it’s not 2018 and I opened my agency in March of 2012. So almost six years she’s been a client of mine. She called because she’s been ranked at the top of Maps for six freaking years and she, like often happens with a lot of clients, they tend to forget why they’re getting leads on line. Especially when it’s been six years, right? You guys would be absolutely ashamed if you knew what I was charging this lady, because again, it was one of my very first clients and it was such a small amount of money per month. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s $250 a month is what she’s paying me and she’s been ranked at the top of Maps for six freaking years, but she has never wanted to do any additional marketing services.

I have pitched her a least a dozen times on different types of marketing services. Press releases. PR marketing, video marketing. All this other kind of stuff and she never wants to do a damn thing. On Monday, we scheduled a call for Monday, I guess actually it was last Friday, anyways, we scheduled a call from two months ago and we got on the phone and she was like, “I need to know what you’ve been doing. I just really want to know if it’s worth me still spending $250 a month.” I almost laughed at her. I told her, I was like, “Listen, you were one of my first clients. You’re on a rate that is so much lower. That is less than half what I typically charge any client, even just to speak to them basically and I’ve left you at that because we’ve had you ranked, you’ve been receiving good results. I’ve pitched you on other marketing services. You don’t want to do any of it. Look, if you want to cancel that’s fine, but I don’t understand after six years of getting results.”

Anyways, it was just this long basically me having to convince her not to cancel services with me, when honestly, I should have just let her freaking cancel. I should have just said, “Hey, if you don’t think $250 is worth you being number one in Google and have been for six years, please feel free to cancel. See how you do in six months.” You know what I mean?

Chris: She’s costing you money.

Bradley: Huh?

Chris: She’s costing you money.

Bradley: Probably, but my point with that was that I have clients that have been grandfathered into specific rates that I have not raised. I probably could, but I haven’t. If they ask me for additional marketing services, then I will price those accordingly based upon my current rates, but whatever I have been charging them guys, I will leave it as is. But again, this is going to be different. Marco, I’m sure, does stuff different. I’m sure Hernan does stuff differently. Adam does stuff differently.

Personally, I don’t charge more for existing clients for existing services. I just charge more for new services as they add them. What are your opinions guys?

Chris: Yeah, this is actually a good question. I think it’s a case by case basis. I usually don’t, as you were saying, I usually don’t … unless I have some fixed costs that needs abating. You know how we raise our BA salaries once in whatever. We try to do that for BA’s.

Bradley: Yup.

Chris: If that’s the case, then I would raise it slightly. Just to update the costs, but I don’t do it, not because they’re getting more clients because of what I’m doing I won’t do it. That’s why I really like half retainer, half revenue share agreements. Revenue share could be whatever. It could be on a sales basis, it could be on a lead basis. If they are paying you, for example, x amount of money on retainer, we can be a little bit lower since you’re getting some revenue share. There is no cap to the amount of money that you can make and at the end of the day you will be motivated to work more for the guys, right? Because if they are making more money, you’re making more money, we’re all happy. If it’s activity based, meaning blog posts, et cetera, et cetera. Unless they increase the amount of activity, I don’t charge them more for it.

Sometimes, as a business grows, this is the good news, is that, as a business grows, as Bradley was saying, they will require more, hopefully they will require more service from you and that’s a completely different story, right?

Bradley: Right. Anybody else?

Hernan: I charge high enough from the beginning so that it’ll be awhile before I decide to raise my rates, but yes, I definitely do if year over year, you can show growth that can be attributed to your efforts. If you can show growth at that level, right? 10, 20, 30 percent, whatever it is, then I would raise my rates accordingly and then you’re going to get a lot of push back. You’re going to get a lot of no’s, get a lot of people that’ll just walk away and that’s all good and well. I have one specific company that I did a bunch of AdWords for and it was a million dollar account and we had it humming. We had it to the point where they were making just so much stinking money that I told them that I want more money and they decided to go with what they had in house and try to keep it that way, but 18 months later they contacted me again and said, could you come and work on our AdWords again. This is after they told me that they longer needed me, but I was at a point in my career, my life and my on line business where I could tell them, “Hell no. I don’t need a client like you.”

The thing is you have to weigh whether it’s worth raising the rates, how much it is that you’re charging from the beginning. If you price yourself right, if you know what you’re worth and you know what you’re going to be worth to that company, then you’ll be charging the correct price right at the beginning so you should know what you’re worth rather than worrying about what it is that you’re bringing to the client. The client should just say yes to you with whatever it is that you have because you’re producing.

Bradley: Yeah. Lastly on that Mohammed, when you said like BB’s Tree Guys. Yeah, but remember with the Tree, especially with the one contractor that I’ve really, really expanded his business, that’s a revenue share model, just like what Hernan was mentioning. I cover all the costs of expanding any marketing services. I build all the infrastructure at my expense and then I just get a cut of every job that gets closed. Again, with that, when you’re selling leads or you’re on a revenue or equity share model, then its unlimited scalability in that I don’t charge them anymore, it’s the same rate. I get 10 percent of any job that closes. Whatever the contract price is, I get 10 percent of that and that’s been that way with this contractor for four or going on five years now. Again, there’s no change in rate, but as I continue to build more and more sites and we cover more and more territory, we generate more and more leads and therefore, I make more and more money. Right?

Is It True That Google Will Penalize A Review/Product Type Rich Snippet That Is Placed On The Homepage?

Okay, I’m just going to call you Steve. What’s up buddy? He says, “Hey guys, I remember I read somewhere that putting a review product type rich snippet data on your home page instead of an organization webpage article type is not good, because Google will penalize you somehow. I mean a review product type schema, which shows those review stars below your listing in the Serps for better click through rate. Is this true or just gossip?”

Well first of all, if you’re adding schema for review stars, just for the sake of getting review stars, then yes, that structured data spam, don’t do it. You would probably get away with it for some time, but it’s likely that eventually you’ll get caught and you can get a manual spam action for that in search console, so don’t do that.

Now, if you actually have products, I don’t know because I don’t do eCommerce, but product review or product stuff, I don’t do that kind of stuff so I don’t know if there is some law or rule, not law, excuse, but some rule or best practice that states that you’re not supposed to have product reviews on your homepage. I don’t think that that’s the case though. Anybody have an answer for that? Okay.

If you do product stuff, if you have products, you sell products, for example, if it’s a product review site and the homepage has got a blog roll on it and there’s product reviews, I don’t think that that would cause a penalty because that’s a valid site right? When you’re spamming schema or structured data specifically to gain search right? Which would be like adding review stars to a site that has no business having review stars, then yes, that can be a problem so don’t do that. All right?

Is There Any Good Up-To-Date Google Adwords Course You Would Recommend?

“A short second question please. Is there any good, up-to-date AdWords course you would recommend?” Yeah, well first of all, we have Local Kingpin, but it needs to be updated because the AdWords interface has changed so much and so what I’m going to recommend is that you join Semantic Mastery Mastermind because we’re covering PPC and AdWords this month in depth. That’s going to packaged up like it’s a separate course, but we’re not selling it outside of the Mastermind. That’s how we’re going to be doing the new Mastermind this year. Every single module is basically going to be like a separate stand-alone course. They’re all going to piece together because they’re all going to be building out the same businesses, but, like this is the PPC module, so it will get packaged up into its own basically course, but only way to get it is to be in the Mastermind.

That said, the AdWords training that I learned from was Perry Marshall’s training and it was really good. Again, that was almost two years ago now though. Yeah, that was probably two years ago now so I don’t know if he’s got updated training. I’m assuming he does and that’s good training too. Okay? I would say our training because we’re current as far as we’re going to be doing all types of AdWords stuff. Google search, PPC, YouTube PPC, remarketing, maybe some display network although I’m assuming we’re going to hold that off until we do the remarketing module and that’s a separate module all together. We’ll also be doing Bing, PPC, and Hernan will be training on some Facebook PPC stuff. That’s what I would recommend is you get in there, because it will be a much more well rounded training then just buying an AdWords course alone, if that makes sense? All right.

Do You Use Any Plugins In Blocking Web Spiders?

Jenia, there he is. This is one that I was just talking about. Replied to my email. What’s up buddy? He says, “Good afternoon gentlemen, I have a question about blocking spiders. Do you use any plug-ins like Spider Spanker or anything else like that?” I don’t anymore, Jenia. I used to do all of that when I was running a lot of PBN’s and stuff, but I don’t do that anymore. I don’t even use that plug-in at all anymore.

“Is there a good way to prevent competition from reverse engineering your SEO efforts?” As far as blocking spiders, first of all, you do that through HT access. Can you do that in robots.text too? I can’t remember.

Hernan: You can but it’s always better to block them through HT Access.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: Because robots are directives that the robots can or may or may not follow. Now when you’re blocking them through HT Access, the hosting is not even serving them the webpage. You know what I’m saying?

Bradley: Right. Yup.

Marco: Yeah that’s absolutely right. HT Access and you block everything except the bot that you want in there and that’s how you protect yourself except that the bot, the coders are smart enough to always change the user agent, and they’re constantly updating and so there’s a website and I’ll have to go and dig through my stuff, but there’s a website that constantly updates the bot that you should be blocking. I’ll see if I can find it and post it in here so that you can use that. They update every 30 days. Every 60 days or so with new bot that you should block and user agents, but definitely HT Access. No plug-ins.

Does Blocking Web Spiders A Good Way To Prevent Competition From Reverse Engineering Your SEO Efforts?

Bradley: Yeah. Okay, we’re going to try to run through guys because we’ve only got a couple questions left and we’re almost out of time and I want to get to them. It looks like we really only got like two, three questions left. Jenia, he says, “Is there a good way to prevent competition from reverse engineering your SEO efforts?”

There’s some things that you can do, Jenia. For example, we talk about in the Mastermind how to use tag pages, well canonicals period. Very strategically, which will hide, will mask your efforts from prying eyes so-to-speak. Canonicals are a great way to do that, but there’s a lot of other stuff that we talk about in the Mastermind too and I’m not saying that because I don’t want to answer your question, Jenia. One, when it comes to reverse engineering, if it’s a good SEO they’re going to be able to find a lot, right? One of the things that you could do would be to use Spider Spanker or some sort of bot blocking stuff and block the Majestic SEO Crawlers and the AH Refs Crawlers and things like that so that nobody can index your links or what’s on your site. The important thing then would be to use those bot blockers on the sites that are linking to you.

In other words, when I was doing a lot of PBN work, I would use bot blockers to block Majestic and AH Refs on the sites, on my PBN sites so that those links wouldn’t get indexed. The inbound links pointing to my money sites wouldn’t get indexed and people wouldn’t be able to see them. Does that make sense? Google will see them, because they’ll show up in your links to your site in search console, but the SEO analysis applications wouldn’t, right? That’s one way you could do it, but again, I don’t use PBNs really at all anymore, so because of that I just … remember guys, we’d talk about using syndication networks and we’d do a shit ton of back linking to the syndication network properties, so people want to start looking out at our different tiers and doing back link analysis on tiers, then they’re likely going to be able to find out what we’re doing, but if they’re just going to look at the money site, they’re not going to see a shit ton of inbound links, or if they do, they’re going to be press release links and syndication network links and drive stack links and stuff like that. Does that make sense?

I don’t really go … I don’t spend a lot of time trying to prevent other people from seeing what I’m doing anymore. I just don’t really worry about it that much, Jenia. “Or are so amazing that no one can’t touch this.” No anybody can be taken down.

Can You Explain The Basics Of How Money Site Integrates When Using Syndication And RYS Academy For Both Local And Affiliate/Ecommerce?

All right, we’re almost out of time guys. Nigel says, “Good day gents, first I want to thank you for the Hump Day Hangout resource. You all are much appreciated.” Plus one that. Okay, he says, “Question, can you explain the basics of how money site integrates when using syndication in RYS Academy for both local and affiliate eCommerce. What I mean specifically is how would you set up the money page? If you can explain this a bit, because honestly the term money site is used so freely in groups I sometimes I feel like the only one not in on the secret.”

Money site just means your primary digital asset. Whatever you use to create revenue, right? So a money site, if you’re doing lead gen, could just be a landing page, right? What I mean by local lead gen. Say your generating leads for a plumber, for example, then your money site could typically be a lead gen style landing page. Somebody lands on it and it’s got a big contact form. Says contact request form and it’s got a big phone number on it and that’s it. That could be a money site. Another money site could be an affiliate site. Could be a blog. I’m sorry, was somebody going to say something? I thought I heard somebody trying to jump in.

Marco: No.

Adam: I don’t think so.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, a money site just means any website that you own, or that you are generating revenue with. Don’t let that confuse you. As far as syndication RYS for both local and affiliate eCommerce, I’m not sure what you mean unless you’re trying to set up a local aspect on a site as well as an eCommerce or affiliate and again, that’s a little bit of a unique situation and with our limited time right now, I don’t know how I can really unpack that and describe to you a good strategy without knowing a little bit more. I know it can be done, I’m just not sure how to tell you how to set that up without knowing specifically what your objectives are. Does that make sense?

Okay, it says, “Example for local create an article and place a link with offer. Where, how many, suggestion, where it links into syndication, RYS general was more than enough.” Well remember RYS Academy is just basically it’s like a link building method so that you can boost existing properties, right, and the drive files themselves can rank, but syndication networks are just a way of … it’s a content amplification method, right? You publish content to your money site, or your YouTube channel, either one and it syndicates out across your network for content application, excuse me, amplification as well as provide some SEO benefits. Okay? Just keep that in mind. The link with the offer, where and how many? That’s really just going to depend on many different things, but essentially yeah, you create an article and then you can link out to whatever you want. If it’s an affiliate offer, so be it. Okay? Again, I apologize that I can’t give you more specific answer. I would need more details Nigel.

Would You Say That It’s True That The IFTTT + SEO Strategy That You Teach In Semantic Mastery Will Probably Stand The Test Of Time, Not Fall Victim To Any Google Penalties?

All right guys we’re almost out of time. Dee says, “Would you say that it’s true that the IFTTT plus SEO strategies that you teach in Semantic Mastery will probably stand the test of time, not fall victim to any of Google’s penalties?” Well that’s our hope, Dee and I certainly feel confident that it’s not going to become an issue because it has been effective for me since 2012 when I started using this method. It’s only become more effective in pretty much standard op … It’s almost required now to have your footprint. To claim your footprint as a brand. That’s what helps to validate the entity, so I can’t imagine, although I don’t work for Google. I could change tomorrow, it could change six months from now. It could change six years from now, I don’t know, but as it stands right now and the foreseeable future, I don’t see it creating any problems. Okay?

I think we’re done guys.

Adam: Yes.

Marco: Before we go just a second. I listed the resource on the page. It’s called botreports.com and it actually gives you the HT Access code for blocking whatever specific bots you want to block. It’s a really awesome resource.

Bradley: Yup. You got it. Okay guys thanks for everybody being here. Remember Syndication Academy webinar starts in about one minute, well probably two and then we’ll be at Mastermind webinar tomorrow with the new curriculum, so we’ll see you guys there.

Adam: Awesome buddy. Bye everybody.

Hernan: Bye everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 166 posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnZU8p

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 166

Click on the video above to watch Episode 166 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 https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

 Announcement

Bradley: Bots.

Adam: Oh, we’re live. All right. This is the fun episode where you watch Adam take notes and Bradley talk about stuff that has nothing to do with Hump Day Hangouts. Just kidding.

Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts and I believe it’s episode 166. Correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t have it up in front of me actually.

Bradley: You are correct sir.

Chris: Yes.

Adam: Before we get into things real quick we’re going to do a quick hello to everybody. Then we’ve got a few special announcements, and then, as usual, we’ll get into the questions, but I’ll start on my left here and see Chris. How’s it going with you?

Chris: Doing good. Got a early rise up tomorrow. 7am airport time and then off to the slopes for some winter action.

Adam: Nice, nice. Outstanding. Hernan how about yourself?

Hernan: Living the life stanman. No, I’m good. I’m good. Excited to be here guys. Excited for what’s coming. We’re going to be with Adam I think it’s early to mention that but we’re going to go to the [inaudible 00:01:00] Live, right Adam?

Adam: Yup.

Hernan: In March. By the end of it. So if you guys want to hand out at some point. We’re going to be doing some networking, we’re going to be doing some good stuff over there sir.

Adam: Yeah definitely. Let us know if you’re going and then if you’re in the area. I think it’s Orlando so we’ll see. We’ll have a little bit of time, can’t guarantee anything right now, but obviously would love to hear from you.

Hernan: Yeah. We’ll have more info as time goes, as we get closer but we’ll be representing Semantic Mastery over there.

Adam: Cool.

Bradley: Represent, represent.

Hernan: Yeah.

Adam: Marco how’s it going man?

Marco: What’s up man? I just got out of the lab with Rob. We’re tearing down right brain, just a little bit. A little part of the algorithm that we found. It’s amazing. It’s amazing the stuff that Google has that’s public and that you can actually manipulate where I constantly back and forth, back and forth. Let’s do this and let’s try that, and what’s this and what’s that and then sometimes even our own users. Not necessarily in our way as reloaded. This was actually from a question in the Cemented Master Mastermind that made us go about 45 minutes into the lab. Okay let’s track this down, let’s see what happened. That was really good. I had fun. That’s my idea of fun. 45 minutes of looking at code.

Adam: Glad you guys are doing that. I’m sure something good is going to end up coming out of this. Bradley, how you doing?

Bradley: I’m good. Happy to be here. Got lots to go through today. We’ve also, just update guys, we’ve got the Syndication Academy Update Webinar Number 18, immediately following Hump Day Hangouts today, so if you’re in Syndication Academy, go check the events tab in Facebook and you should be able to get the URL to it. Okay?

Adam: Awesome. All right a couple quick announcements. We will be sending out some more information about the next two things I’m going to mention. The first one is video lead gen system. Bradley just put the finishing touches on a video email prospecting course that kind of deep dive into that so Bradley you want to tell people just real quick about that?

Bradley: Yeah, we did a really extended webinar. Went damn near three hours in the Mastermind about how to do the video lead gen prospecting system that I’ve been using for years that I really got my start. Started building my agency up using that method. That specific method. It’s a bit time consuming but it works incredibly well for landing clients and it’s still valid and works well today. It actually works even better today because you can embed gifs into the emails now that look like actual videos playing in the email. It’s a click enticer. It’s click bait so-to-speak.

Anyways, we went through three hours of training on how to do it step-by-step and I basically just edited that webinar. Put it into separate modules. Individual lesson videos and sections with notes and all that kind of stuff. We packaged it up and that’s basically it. It’s a very riffle approach instead of a shotgun approach for targeting prospects, but it works incredibly well.

The good news is about 90 percent of it can be outsourced. There is a part of it that should be done by whoever … If you’re a one man agency or solopreneur or whatever, you’re going to want to record the audit videos, or if you’ve got a sales person or something like that, maybe it would be them, but somebody obviously that knows a little bit about whatever service it is that they’re selling, but other than that the rest of everything else can be outsourced and so we’ve had questions a lot recently over the last few weeks about prospecting and how to keep your pipeline full and all that kind of stuff. One way to do it is just to consistently be prospecting. Make it part of your standard operating procedure. Your just normal weekly tasks in your business should be prospecting so that you always keep your pipeline full.

That’s why I think this course was so timely because if you outsource it then you know it gets done, and that way you can keep your pipeline full of leads at all times so that you can cherry pick the best clients, number one and number two you won’t be so desperate when you are talking to the … If you only got five leads for three months, then you try so hard to close all five. Whereas, if you had 10 or 15 leads per week, then you could be a hell of a lot more selective and really, if somebody’s going to give you any resistance, thank you very much, see you later, click. Hang up, move on to the next one.

Adam: Definitely.

Bradley: I think it’s going to be a good course coming out. I think a lot of you guys, about 60 percent of our audience is into local marketing. I think this will help a lot of you to be able to generate some clients, as well as maybe land service providers if you’re selling leads.

Adam: Definitely. Yeah, it’s a good one. Like Bradley said, it can save you a ton of time. It’s going to keep your pipeline full, and it works. I’ve used this stuff too in a couple different industries and this really applies to anyone, which is really cool. You can use this for consulting. You could use this for financial services. You could use this for contractors, and it has a very good response rate, which is why it is the lead gen system using video. Anyways, more on that later. We’ll be telling you guys all about that.

The other thing we wanted to tell you about was Jeffrey Smith. If you missed his SEO boot camp webinar that was, I’m going to get the date wrong, I think it was early December or late November, but that went really well. We had some technical issues the very first time we had him on. He came back, had a webinar, that went great. We got really good feedback. People who hopped in the course loved it. I know Bradley, you said you went through it, or did you go through all of it or parts of it?

Bradley: Not all of it. I’ve been through parts of it. Kind of like what Marco mentioned to me. I just go through and find stuff that I need when it’s pertinent at that particular time. Everything I’ve seen has been so thorough though. It’s training after our own hearts in that its so detailed and he went way over and above and it’s an amazing course.

Adam: Cool. So we’re going to have him back. That will be on Monday. We’re getting stuff set up for that right now, so we’ll be sending out emails about that. Be sure to check that out and we will have a replay available if you can’t make it live on Monday.

Before we get into it I wanted to remind everybody about the charity that we’re supporting throughout January. That’s still going on. We’ve had a lot of really good donations so far. It’s really impressive so first of all, thank you to everyone who’s helped out and then Marco, if you want to tell people, because I know we have people come who aren’t here all the time. If you want to tell them quickly about what the charity is, whose it for?

Marco: Yeah sure. It supplies uniforms and books for kids. We’re targeting first, second and third grade kids. We want to keep them in school. A lot of times the reason why they can’t go to school is simply because they don’t have the supplies, the uniforms or the books. They don’t have shoes. Right? They have to go to school barefoot. Imagine if you’re having … still in 2018 going to school barefoot, man. This is the type of stuff that we’re dealing with. Not only that, the environment that these kids live in. Someone comes knocking at the door, you don’t know who’s coming knocking at your door. They’re living in a place where they’re under lock and key. When they go out they have to go out in groups because they have to run a gauntlet man. Drug dealers, drug users. Just the worst of the worst man, so what we’re trying to do is, I know that education is the key to success. Without an education all you’re doing is you’re going to stay in that poverty cycle because you’re not going to know anything except that which you experience.

So experiencing an education, experiencing the world, experiencing all of the different things that are offered through an education opens your mind to all kinds of possibilities and it lets you know that you’re not useless. That you’re not worthless. Someone is taking the time to tell you you’re actually worth something, which to me, that’s incredible. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re going into these neighborhoods. We’re trying to get these kids, as many as we can. Right now we’re almost at the 10k mark, which is what had set. 100 kids takes $10,000. We’re almost there so if it’s a dollar, if it’s two dollars, we don’t care. Just go ahead. Please donate. Thank you very much those who have donated already. This is really a really good cause, man.

Adam: Awesome.

Marco: I just hope people will listen and donate and I dropped the link on the event for those who would like to go and take a look at the video and see what it’s all about, more in depth.

Adam: Awesome. Thanks again as Marco said, to everyone who’s donated so far. We appreciate it. When is it? I think we got another week or two right?

Marco: Yeah. We made the cutoff on the 26th so we can go the week of 29th for the supplies. Just before they’re going to school on February 5th, but after that we’re going to keep it open. We’re going to do something else so that when next February comes around we’re ready for even more kids to go to school. We’ll be doing something. We’ll announce it. I’ll talk to you guys and we’ll work it out.

Adam: Sounds good. Awesome. Well if you are new to Semantic Mastery, first off, thank you for joining us on Hump Day Hangouts. A lot of times we get asked, “Where’s a good place for me to start?” Well the Hump Day Hangouts, you’re in the right place so that’s the good place to start. The next step would be the Battle Plan and we’ve got a discount code. I’ll pop that up on the page, but check out the Battle Plan, it’s a solid investment and it is very, very much worth the little amount of money you have to pay for all the information in there.

If you don’t yet have an account over at SerpSpace, go to serpspace.com, you can open up an account for free. Check out the tools there, check out the Done for You services and if you’re really jonesing for some Semantic Mastery information and you just need to see Bradley making a chart or something during the week head over to support.semanticmastery.com and that’s where we put a lot of these common questions that come up, or the more in depth answers where Bradley’s maybe drawing a chart or giving some information, so you can go check that out and get an answer in the middle of the week.

If you’re really ready to take things up and you’re not new maybe to Semantic Mastery, then I highly suggest going to the mastermind.semanticmastery.com. I’ll pop the link on there and if you’re ready to join the Mastermind, that’s the place to be. If you ever have any questions about that, you can contact us at support@semanticmastery.com. If you have any questions about the Mastermind after looking through the page and seeing if maybe it’s a right fit for you or not, we’d be happy to chat with you.

Bradley: Sweet.

Adam: All right. Anybody else? Any announcements or are we ready to get rolling?

Bradley: No. I’m ready to get in questions. Just one brief thing. The new Mastermind curriculum starts this week. We have our first Mastermind Webinar for 2018 under the new training schedule, which is tomorrow. We’re in the PPC module. I’m actually a bit behind in preparing the presentation and training for tomorrow, but whatever is fine, because I imagine for the next couple weeks it’s going to be a little bit in disarray as we settle into this new training, but we’re going to be doing … AdWords has been updated, the interface has, so we’re going to be doing AdWords for local, as well as for national stuff, which could apply to affiliate campaigns, plus we will be doing AdWords for YouTube for again, local led gen, as well as national lead gen and then also for affiliate stuff and we’re going to be doing some of that for Semantic Mastery for our own channel, for example. Some of that will also be included and then we’ll be doing some Bing ads and also Hernan’s going to be doing some training on Facebook ads. This is all stuff that’s going to be in part of module one, which should last probably about six weeks and so again, I would highly encourage you to come join the Mastermind.

Last thing I want to mention very briefly is, and I say this the beginning of every Hump Day Hangouts go to bradelybenner.com and subscribe and the reason I say that is because I got an email from one of my subscribers today that was replying, and it’s Jenny, and Jenny is always on our Hump Day Hangouts asking questions. I’m not going to read your email to me, Jenny, but the last two lines that you put in the email as a reply to one of my emails about the Mindset series was, “Thanks for kicking my ass today, sir. May I have another?” That’s awesome. I get some replies from some of my subscribers because it’s just about mindset stuff and I highly recommend that you go check it out. At least I know it helps me to be able to write those.

By the way, I started crossfit training as a coach every single day this week. This week is when I started. I was supposed to start last week but the extreme cold prevented me from doing it, so I haven’t been able to write an email every morning, but I’m trying to squeeze it in when I can. Like today, I got the email written right after I got back from the crossfit gym. Just to let you guys know, I’m trying to write every single day. I’ve got about 40 emails in the series now. Go subscribe, check it out. If you don’t like it, just unsubscribe. Okay? With that said, let’s get into it.

Okay you guys. Let me know if everything’s coming through okay?

Adam: Yup.

What Are Your Recommended Frequency And Topics On Press Releases?

Bradley: Sweet. Okay, Harold’s up first. He says, “Hello everybody, thank you so much for giving us this space so we can ask our questions.” You’re welcome Harold. “Mine is, how often should I get press releases and what are some good topics?”

Well the frequency is really up to you. The nice thing about press releases is whenever a press release is picked up and distributed, it gets picked up by usually hundreds of websites so it’s a kind of a natural occurrence to get a bunch of links back from a press release, because companies all the time are announcing news and it’s a natural type thing. It’s traditional. It’s normal and so you can be a bit aggressive with press releases. I know I usually do them about once every two weeks. That’s usually the speed with which I do it, until I get the results that I’m looking to achieve, which is typically to rank in the three pack. Sometimes it’s organic stuff, it depends, but for the most part I’m trying to rank in the Maps pack and usually , just do them about every two weeks.

However, I know Rob, for example, the co-creator of RYS Reloaded with Marco, he just hammers the shit out of sites with press release, after press release, after press release and he’s able to get results so I don’t think there’s much of a velocity issue. Again, I do it about every two weeks, but I know that it’s been done a lot more than that. The frequency a lot higher than that and it hasn’t caused any issues. Marco, do you have a comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, as a matter of fact, I haven’t seen it. Like you said, we just bang one right after another and we stack them the right way going after different URLs. Now we have another press release service that has even more publication sites so that’s a really good mix. It’s really good to mix them up. One of them gives us embeds, which is even better for us and so it’s a lot of good things that you could do and a lot of nasty things that you can do with press releases.

Bradley: Yeah. All right, and as far as good topics, Harold, all right, so there’s a couple of things I want to mention here about topics. One, pretty much anything can be turned into a press release. Any sort of company news, any sort of seasonal changes, sales, specials, new products, new services. Anything at all can really be worthy of a news release to be written. What I’ve been doing for the most part is we published press releases anytime a customer review has been received by one of my lead gen sites or one of my contractor, client sites, excuse me. That’s another reason to publish a press release is because you’re announcing the glowing testimonial review that you just received, right? That’s just another example and I like using that method because it encourages the business owners to solicit reviews from their customers and then every time they get a review, I get notified and I go publish a press release for it and I get to bill them for it, and they get to puff out their chest and say, “Look at me, look at how awesome we are.”

I’ve been using that method. In fact, that’s our front end service on our new agency. It’s doing basically reputation. It’s a combination of video marketing, reputation marketing and PR marketing. It’s a combination of those three and that’s our front end service. It’s a very, very powerful way.

Also, any time you publish a blog post typically you could do that. Now, the last thing I want to mention about that is if you’ve got a good writer, a PR writer that you work with, a good PR writer will typically be able to create an angle out of just about anything. So an angel or a news hook out of just about anything. The other option would be to use the press release writers from the distribution service that you’re using.

For example in Serpspace, we don’t even allow manually submitted PRs anymore, I don’t think. I think we just have our net distribution service or network writers write them, because they know what the editorial guidelines are and a lot of those distribution service writers, right, that will provide as just an add on service, the press release to be written. It’s usually about $30 or so or something like that and it ranges between $30 to $45, somewhere in that range, but a lot of times, all they need is just a handful of small details and then they’ll create the news hook, because they know what they’re distribution network is looking for, if that makes sense?

A lot of times all I’ll do is just list who, what, when, where and then a quote from a company executive or in the case of using a review, I just quote the review, whatever the customer review text was that’s the quote. Does that make sense? That’s all we do and it’s very, very simple and I love it because it takes the content marketing side of things off my shoulders. We still have bloggers that do the curating and stuff, but I don’t have to think about so many content ideas for press releases anymore. We just say, “Hey go get another review. As soon as you get a review, let me know. We’ll publish a press release” and boom it’s done.

By the way, just to let you guys know, I had been doing that myself for my clients for my own agency every month. I would spend about two days at the beginning of the month. I still have been generating client reports and there’s a reason why I do that, because I typically, once I generate client reports and I send the reports to the clients I also include a brief breakdown of what the reports are showing in my own voice and sometimes I record a screen cast video and send that to them with an overview of what I’m seeing for the month and some new opportunities that have arisen and I’ve got a really close relationship with my clients so because of that, I don’t outsource the client reporting part of it, but I had been generating the review commercials, which is a David Sprague. Every month, this is just an add on service I added to most of my clients. I would generate a review commercial from a new review that they received within the last month and then publish the video, distribute it across my network. My syndication networks typically ranks the video, but if it doesn’t then I end up with a press release anyways.

I had been doing all of that myself for the last six or seven months since I’ve really started playing with this strategy. One of my virtual assistants is in the UK. She’s been blogging for me for, I’d say at least four years. She’s great. She reached out to me around the turn of year and said, “Hey, I’m looking for more work and we’ve been working together for years. Would you have anything else you wanted me to do?” And I was like, “Oh, perfect. I’ve been meaning to unload this work, now that I know this is a viable strategy and it’s something I’m going to do.”

The reason I’m telling you this guys, is because I want to let you know, I struggle too with doing shit that I’m not supposed to be doing. For example, taking two days at the beginning of every month to generate these review videos and order the press releases. It was something that could have been outsources three or four months ago once I really knew that it was going to be something that I was going to carry on or be a continuing service, however, I never took the time to create the process docs. I get up on my soapbox all the time and preach to you guys about outsourcing stuff, yet there are processes in my business that I still have not outsourced, and it’s just because of a lack of time, or really a lack of desire for doing it. For creating the process training for that process and what it comes down to typically is just not wanting to do it because it sucks. It’s boring work. It’s tedious and often times I’m so freaking busy with all the work that I’m trying to fulfill that I feel like I don’t have the time to create process docs about the work that I need to fulfill. If that makes sense? So it’s a catch 22. Right?

Because she gave me a reason, Michelle did, my VA. She gave me a reason and because I’ve got so much work on my plate right now for this new Mastermind training curriculum, I knew at the beginning of every month this year, I don’t want to spend two days generating reports and also the review commercials and ordering the press releases and all that stuff. I don’t want to do all that. So I spent the first two days of this week creating the training process. The training videos, the written procedures, which are in Google docs and all that and I sent that to her yesterday and she’s now going to take over it for me and guess what. I never have to fucking do it again.

The reason I went through all of that is just to let you know that this is all stuff that can be outsourced guys and I highly recommend, sometimes I need to remind myself of some of my own advice, and this is something I should have done four or five months ago, and I just finally got it done and I can tell you what a weight, a load has been lifted off my shoulders because now I’m not going to dread the beginning of the month every month because it’s going to eat up two days, if that makes sense. So guys, if you take anything away from that at all, it’s that if you’ve got stuff in your business that makes your stomach turn sometimes because you have to do it and every time it comes up it makes your stomach turn, that’s the shit you need to outsource first. Honestly, that’s the stuff, the stuff you don’t like to do or you hate to do, that’s the stuff that you should absolutely, as much as it’s going to be painful and tedious to do, but create process docs for how to do all that, and then hire that shit out so that you don’t have to do that anymore.

Again, we get into this business not because we want another job, right? We want freedom and we want to enjoy it and so sometimes there’s obviously going to be stuff in everyone’s business that has to done, that’s not enjoyable. Outsource it. If you create the exact process for how to do it, you can outsource anything. This was not a pitch for Outsource KingPin, but we do have a training product that specifically teaches the methods for how to do exactly what I just described and it’s called Outsource Kingpin. Check that out. I know that was a long winded answer and I’m sorry Harold, but I just wanted to share with you guys that even I struggle with not following my own advice at times, but outsource as much as you can.

Anybody want to comment on that before I move on?

Chris: I agree with you Bradley.

How Does Google View Directory Sites In Terms Of SEO?

Bradley: Okay. Good enough. Thank you. Juan says, “Hello lovely people and thanks for having me. Are directory site’s viewed by Google as good or bad for SEO?” I think Juan, this is going to be not anything based in absolute data for me anymore, as it is just more of opinion or assumption, but I’d like to get some opinions of the other guys. I believe it has more to do with the directory itself then just a blanket statement.

For example, I know they say reciprocal links are bad, but I’ve seen many cases where reciprocal links actually are still very beneficial and I know a lot of low end directories that are really spammy, will require a reciprocal link, those are the ones that I would suspect are not good, but there’s a lot of good other directories that are good.

For example, Yelp is a directory site right? It’s a local or it’s a business directory site, but it is a directory site. We all know that’s a good link, but then obviously if it’s some obscure directory out there that is just … and they’re all requiring reciprocal links and stuff like that, then I would say no. I think it would be more about selective then just a blanket statement. I think it depends on the directory itself. What do you guys say?

Chris: Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree with you Bradley. The fact that on some directories you need to think about this in terms of what kind of value can you get from the directory, right? As well as what kind of value can you get from the reciprocal link, because if it is let’s say that you’re doing, I don’t know SEO for a doctor, and then you can get the doctor, put it in directory for doctor’s and even further for local doctors that would actually, could help you bring in some profit. Right? Even further if the directory is ranking in Google. Paid directories sometimes work as well because just being paid, even if it’s $5 or $10 for a lifetime link, usually work because they weed out 99 percent of spammy links so have that in mind. Some of them are really, really high authority so I would say that it would be on a case by case basis.

Some people would say that, for example, blog comments will be bad for SEO and that’s not entirely true.

Bradley: That’s right.

Chris: If you make a really thoughtful blog comment on a highly relevant publication or blog, it can blow your website away, right? It can really help you so I think it’s a case by case basis. If you’re on GSA’s spamming blog post or spamming directories, which you could definitely do, just do it as far away as possible from your clients or your own website, but if it’s a manual placement from a website that you can get value from and value meaning either authority or traffic, I would say go ahead and do it.

Bradley: Good advice. Marco?

Chris: No I think you guys covered it perfect.

What Is The Best Way To Indexing One Million Pages A Day?

Bradley: Beautiful. Fabian. What’s up Fabian? He says, “I want to index about 1,000,000 pages a day.” Wow. Okay. “So I need a very scalable solution. How would you do this using IFTTT and Plus Twitter. If yes, how often can I post the tweets that my account won’t be shut down? Should I create several accounts and spread my posts on them? Thanks a lot.”

Yeah, I don’t think you would want to do a million tweets per day in one Twitter account. I don’t think that’s a good idea. You probably need a hell of a lot of Twitter accounts to be able to accomplish a million tweets per day. We have an indexing service in Service Space. I don’t know if that amount of links would be a scalable option. There is one service that I can mention for mass volume that I know my, one of our link building director, he basically pointed it out a while ago. Now it’s been probably a year and a half since he mentioned this to me, I know I still use it though, but it’s called Express Indexer. Let me see if I can …

Hernan: Yeah, Bradley.

Bradley: Go ahead.

Hernan: I talked to [Debbie 00:28:48] already about this because I had seen this question come up. I actually saw it on Facebook.

Bradley: Okay.

Hernan: And he said, “No, it’s not working.”

Bradley: Okay.

Hernan: As it used to. He said that he’s trying to find a way around it. He’s still working on it because we had to shut down the indexing service in Serpspace actually.

Bradley: Oh did we? I didn’t even know that.

Hernan: Yeah, we had to shut it down because it just wasn’t indexing the way that it should. This option IFTTT to Twitter is not scalable because you’re going to need, for a million pages, what a hundred thousand profiles to push 10 tweets a day, 20 so that’s how you have to look at it. You can’t get away with more than 10 or 20, 20 tweets a day actually is pushing it because you’d have to scale up to 20. You can’t start at 20. You’ll get banned now.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: In Twitter. So I don’t have a solution. You don’t want to submit a million pages to the Google URL submitter, because you’ll trigger the captcha and so I don’t have an answer for this other than what we were using isn’t working at this level.

Bradley: Yeah. Well good. Thanks for chiming in. That’s a good question Fabian. I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer for you. Apologize.

What Are The Different Ways Of Indexing Local Citations?

Okay, so Shripad, I guess. Forgive me if I mispronounce that. He says, “What are the different ways to index local citations?”

Well indexers work. Typically that’s what I do. For example, when I order citations, whenever I get the citation report back, I just open up the spreadsheet. Copy all the citation URLs and then just submit them to the indexer. I usually submit them to multiple indexers. That’s all I do. That’s all you need to do. Okay?

Some citations, if you try to let them index naturally, sometimes it takes forever for citations to index naturally, that’s why I typically, as soon as I get a citation report guys, I’ll just go copy them and submit them to at least two indexing services to try to speed that up a little bit.

mbedding Maps – MyMaps Or GMB Map Page

All right. RL Sanders, “Hey guys, as always thank you for what you do. When you guys talk about embedding maps are you talking about my maps or the GMB map page?”

Both, RL. Both. I don’t mean embed both at the same time. I haven’t really tested with that, but I just mean you can do an embed run with the My Maps and then do another embed run with the GMB maps page. I’ll be a hundred percent honest with you, even though I know it’s super powerful, the My Maps thing, I don’t do a lot of that. I don’t set those up typically. If I get it back from a drive stack then I’ll do an embed blast with that through MAPS Powerhouse, but I don’t do, when I’m working on client stuff myself, I typically don’t do the My Maps. I just end up doing all the GMB stuff, but the My Maps are very, very powerful and what’s great about the My Maps guys is you can squeeze them, basically do follow links in and there’s a whole lot of ninja stuff that you can do. Marco teaches an RYS Academy that I just don’t have the time to do it or I would do more of it, but fortunately we have a [jessen 00:32:12] who can build them for us.

Can You Share Any Tips For Finding Local SEO Clients?

“Also, can you repost the link for Marco’s charity?” Yes. He posted it already, I believe. RL’s another question. He says, “Can you share any tips for finding local SEO clients? I need a few recurring payments to get the ball rolling. Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks.”

Yeah, look, I don’t know if I want to share this on … Well okay, RL, let me just say this. There’s one method that … no I’m not going to share that here. What I’m going to say is select a niche, RL. Right? Select a niche that you want, an industry that you prefer to work in or that you know that you may already have some experience in, whatever. Something that you’re familiar with or that you have a genuine interest in so that it makes it feel like not so much like work. Then start targeting those clients. Craft a very specific message. Again, we talk about the video lead gen system, which is going to be the product that we’re going to release in about two weeks. You could use that very specifically for finding and prospecting local SEO clients. Finding the clients isn’t that difficult, it’s the prospecting. Right? Finding prospects isn’t hard. You can use scrapers, there’s lot of tools out there. You can hire VA’s to do that kind of stuff, whatever. That’s not really the difficult part.

The hard part is starting the conversation with them. I found that even sales isn’t that difficult. The hardest part is starting the conversation from a position where they’re willing to receive the message and I found the video email is a fantastic way to start that conversation. To initiate that conversation. Break the ice and lower the defenses a bit and get the conversation started because you can position yourself as an expert and show them beyond a shadow of a doubt that you know what they hell you’re doing, whereas 99 percent of anybody else that’s contacted them about marketing services isn’t going to do that, and that’s what makes you stand out.

I would recommend that you pick that up when we release it in a few weeks. Obviously if you’re in the Mastermind RL, we cover that in there. That’s all included, but we did also cover a very specific … By the way, the method that I just said I’m not going to reveal right here is in that course that will be released in about two weeks or whatever. Just keep that in mind guys. It’s a very specific method for finding video SEO clients. Well for finding local clients period, but it’s a very specific way, using YouTube to find those clients and it works like crazy. Okay?

Anyways, I have to tease you guys with that a little bit, because I can’t reveal it here. It’s in the course. Come to the Mastermind though and I’ll share it with you.

What Are Your Recommendations On InMotion Hosting All Domains In One Cpanel Account?

Ajay says, “Two questions. I have a hosting account with In Motion Hosting.” Okay. “I just realized they might be hosting all my websites, domains, as add on domains under the same C-Panel account. What is your recommendation?”

Yeah, that’s how they do it, Ajay. When you have a shared hosting account that’s how it works. Every time you create an add on domain, it’s really like a sub-domain of your whatever the IP or C-Panel was set up as. It doesn’t matter. You can still configure your sites to all resolve to the exact, to whatever domain it is that you’ve added, but that’s just how it works in C-Panel. Okay? That’s not an issue.

Are There Any Benefits Of Sub Folders In Terms Of Link Juice?

“Number two, I had read an article recently about the advantages of sub-directories for link juice over sub-domains. The following link is … “

Guys we need to probably create a … somebody wants to make a note of this, a frequently asked question about this because we get this question a lot.

Yes, sub-domain folders apparently through a lot of testing, not so much my own, but from other people’s testing I do understand that there’s supposed to be a slight SEO advantage of doing multiple sites in sub-directories as opposed to on sub-domains, but we have repeatedly, or we’ve held our position on this for many years now, which is that sub-domains in my opinion is a superior method. There may be a slight SEO benefit to doing sub-directories over sub-domains. That’s fine. I get that. The problem with that is every single site that’s in a sub-directory is subordinate to the root domain, which means that if the root domain catches a penalty or if any of the subordinate sites in the sub-folders or sub-directories catch a penalty, it will penalize the entire domain and all of the other sibling sub-directories. Does that make sense?

The problem is it’s a penalty that would be leveled to basically the root, which would damage everything. It would be applied to everything domain wide, however, if you do a sub-domain, then in Google’s eyes, each sub-domain site is considered a separate entity. Right? A separate website and so when I talk about using sub-domains, it’s a way to offer or provide a level of protection for every individual site. The trick with that is to make sure that you keep the root clean and don’t do anything spammy to the root, because just as we talked about with the sub-directories, if the root was to catch a penalty or any of the sub-directories catch a penalty, it would apply to the root, and therefore tank all the rest of the sites. If you catch a penalty on the root domain with sub-domain sites, all the sub-domain sites will be affected as well because it is a domain wide penalty, but if you get a penalty on a sub-domain site, then it only applies to that sub-domain. Your root would still remain intact and your other sibling sub-domains would also remain untouched, unaffected.

There’s a reason why we do it that way and it’s to mitigate risk, to reduce potential catastrophic failure of all your sites if you were to catch a penalty. That’s why we do it that way. Okay? I don’t suspect you guys have anything to add to that, do you?

Adam: No, you nailed it.

Bradley: All right cool. Great question though Ajay. That was a really good question. We get that often, but guys, like I said, we should probably just make a frequently asked question out of that one.

Did You Eventually Charge More As The Company Grew Or Did You Keep The Rate The Same?

Mohammed, what’s up buddy? He’s recently joined the Mastermind and he’s been incredibly active in there. I saw your question Mohammed about local stuff in there. We’re going to cover that slightly tomorrow in the Mastermind as well. So keep that in mind.

“Hey guys have you ever worked with a small company that grew because of your marketing?” Yes, my BB’s Tree Guys. “Did you eventually charge more as the company grew or do you keep the rate the same?” Well Mohammed, that’s a great question by the way. Yes, I always … Well let me rephrase, if I add additionally marketing services I always increase. I don’t necessarily increase the rate, but because I’m adding more services I bill them more. Does that make sense?

To answer your question. For example, I just had a client call on Monday. A client of mine that I’ve had for, well shit, she was one of my first clients and it’s not 2018 and I opened my agency in March of 2012. So almost six years she’s been a client of mine. She called because she’s been ranked at the top of Maps for six freaking years and she, like often happens with a lot of clients, they tend to forget why they’re getting leads on line. Especially when it’s been six years, right? You guys would be absolutely ashamed if you knew what I was charging this lady, because again, it was one of my very first clients and it was such a small amount of money per month. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s $250 a month is what she’s paying me and she’s been ranked at the top of Maps for six freaking years, but she has never wanted to do any additional marketing services.

I have pitched her a least a dozen times on different types of marketing services. Press releases. PR marketing, video marketing. All this other kind of stuff and she never wants to do a damn thing. On Monday, we scheduled a call for Monday, I guess actually it was last Friday, anyways, we scheduled a call from two months ago and we got on the phone and she was like, “I need to know what you’ve been doing. I just really want to know if it’s worth me still spending $250 a month.” I almost laughed at her. I told her, I was like, “Listen, you were one of my first clients. You’re on a rate that is so much lower. That is less than half what I typically charge any client, even just to speak to them basically and I’ve left you at that because we’ve had you ranked, you’ve been receiving good results. I’ve pitched you on other marketing services. You don’t want to do any of it. Look, if you want to cancel that’s fine, but I don’t understand after six years of getting results.”

Anyways, it was just this long basically me having to convince her not to cancel services with me, when honestly, I should have just let her freaking cancel. I should have just said, “Hey, if you don’t think $250 is worth you being number one in Google and have been for six years, please feel free to cancel. See how you do in six months.” You know what I mean?

Chris: She’s costing you money.

Bradley: Huh?

Chris: She’s costing you money.

Bradley: Probably, but my point with that was that I have clients that have been grandfathered into specific rates that I have not raised. I probably could, but I haven’t. If they ask me for additional marketing services, then I will price those accordingly based upon my current rates, but whatever I have been charging them guys, I will leave it as is. But again, this is going to be different. Marco, I’m sure, does stuff different. I’m sure Hernan does stuff differently. Adam does stuff differently.

Personally, I don’t charge more for existing clients for existing services. I just charge more for new services as they add them. What are your opinions guys?

Chris: Yeah, this is actually a good question. I think it’s a case by case basis. I usually don’t, as you were saying, I usually don’t … unless I have some fixed costs that needs abating. You know how we raise our BA salaries once in whatever. We try to do that for BA’s.

Bradley: Yup.

Chris: If that’s the case, then I would raise it slightly. Just to update the costs, but I don’t do it, not because they’re getting more clients because of what I’m doing I won’t do it. That’s why I really like half retainer, half revenue share agreements. Revenue share could be whatever. It could be on a sales basis, it could be on a lead basis. If they are paying you, for example, x amount of money on retainer, we can be a little bit lower since you’re getting some revenue share. There is no cap to the amount of money that you can make and at the end of the day you will be motivated to work more for the guys, right? Because if they are making more money, you’re making more money, we’re all happy. If it’s activity based, meaning blog posts, et cetera, et cetera. Unless they increase the amount of activity, I don’t charge them more for it.

Sometimes, as a business grows, this is the good news, is that, as a business grows, as Bradley was saying, they will require more, hopefully they will require more service from you and that’s a completely different story, right?

Bradley: Right. Anybody else?

Hernan: I charge high enough from the beginning so that it’ll be awhile before I decide to raise my rates, but yes, I definitely do if year over year, you can show growth that can be attributed to your efforts. If you can show growth at that level, right? 10, 20, 30 percent, whatever it is, then I would raise my rates accordingly and then you’re going to get a lot of push back. You’re going to get a lot of no’s, get a lot of people that’ll just walk away and that’s all good and well. I have one specific company that I did a bunch of AdWords for and it was a million dollar account and we had it humming. We had it to the point where they were making just so much stinking money that I told them that I want more money and they decided to go with what they had in house and try to keep it that way, but 18 months later they contacted me again and said, could you come and work on our AdWords again. This is after they told me that they longer needed me, but I was at a point in my career, my life and my on line business where I could tell them, “Hell no. I don’t need a client like you.”

The thing is you have to weigh whether it’s worth raising the rates, how much it is that you’re charging from the beginning. If you price yourself right, if you know what you’re worth and you know what you’re going to be worth to that company, then you’ll be charging the correct price right at the beginning so you should know what you’re worth rather than worrying about what it is that you’re bringing to the client. The client should just say yes to you with whatever it is that you have because you’re producing.

Bradley: Yeah. Lastly on that Mohammed, when you said like BB’s Tree Guys. Yeah, but remember with the Tree, especially with the one contractor that I’ve really, really expanded his business, that’s a revenue share model, just like what Hernan was mentioning. I cover all the costs of expanding any marketing services. I build all the infrastructure at my expense and then I just get a cut of every job that gets closed. Again, with that, when you’re selling leads or you’re on a revenue or equity share model, then its unlimited scalability in that I don’t charge them anymore, it’s the same rate. I get 10 percent of any job that closes. Whatever the contract price is, I get 10 percent of that and that’s been that way with this contractor for four or going on five years now. Again, there’s no change in rate, but as I continue to build more and more sites and we cover more and more territory, we generate more and more leads and therefore, I make more and more money. Right?

Is It True That Google Will Penalize A Review/Product Type Rich Snippet That Is Placed On The Homepage?

Okay, I’m just going to call you Steve. What’s up buddy? He says, “Hey guys, I remember I read somewhere that putting a review product type rich snippet data on your home page instead of an organization webpage article type is not good, because Google will penalize you somehow. I mean a review product type schema, which shows those review stars below your listing in the Serps for better click through rate. Is this true or just gossip?”

Well first of all, if you’re adding schema for review stars, just for the sake of getting review stars, then yes, that structured data spam, don’t do it. You would probably get away with it for some time, but it’s likely that eventually you’ll get caught and you can get a manual spam action for that in search console, so don’t do that.

Now, if you actually have products, I don’t know because I don’t do eCommerce, but product review or product stuff, I don’t do that kind of stuff so I don’t know if there is some law or rule, not law, excuse, but some rule or best practice that states that you’re not supposed to have product reviews on your homepage. I don’t think that that’s the case though. Anybody have an answer for that? Okay.

If you do product stuff, if you have products, you sell products, for example, if it’s a product review site and the homepage has got a blog roll on it and there’s product reviews, I don’t think that that would cause a penalty because that’s a valid site right? When you’re spamming schema or structured data specifically to gain search right? Which would be like adding review stars to a site that has no business having review stars, then yes, that can be a problem so don’t do that. All right?

Is There Any Good Up-To-Date Google Adwords Course You Would Recommend?

“A short second question please. Is there any good, up-to-date AdWords course you would recommend?” Yeah, well first of all, we have Local Kingpin, but it needs to be updated because the AdWords interface has changed so much and so what I’m going to recommend is that you join Semantic Mastery Mastermind because we’re covering PPC and AdWords this month in depth. That’s going to packaged up like it’s a separate course, but we’re not selling it outside of the Mastermind. That’s how we’re going to be doing the new Mastermind this year. Every single module is basically going to be like a separate stand-alone course. They’re all going to piece together because they’re all going to be building out the same businesses, but, like this is the PPC module, so it will get packaged up into its own basically course, but only way to get it is to be in the Mastermind.

That said, the AdWords training that I learned from was Perry Marshall’s training and it was really good. Again, that was almost two years ago now though. Yeah, that was probably two years ago now so I don’t know if he’s got updated training. I’m assuming he does and that’s good training too. Okay? I would say our training because we’re current as far as we’re going to be doing all types of AdWords stuff. Google search, PPC, YouTube PPC, remarketing, maybe some display network although I’m assuming we’re going to hold that off until we do the remarketing module and that’s a separate module all together. We’ll also be doing Bing, PPC, and Hernan will be training on some Facebook PPC stuff. That’s what I would recommend is you get in there, because it will be a much more well rounded training then just buying an AdWords course alone, if that makes sense? All right.

Do You Use Any Plugins In Blocking Web Spiders?

Jenia, there he is. This is one that I was just talking about. Replied to my email. What’s up buddy? He says, “Good afternoon gentlemen, I have a question about blocking spiders. Do you use any plug-ins like Spider Spanker or anything else like that?” I don’t anymore, Jenia. I used to do all of that when I was running a lot of PBN’s and stuff, but I don’t do that anymore. I don’t even use that plug-in at all anymore.

“Is there a good way to prevent competition from reverse engineering your SEO efforts?” As far as blocking spiders, first of all, you do that through HT access. Can you do that in robots.text too? I can’t remember.

Hernan: You can but it’s always better to block them through HT Access.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: Because robots are directives that the robots can or may or may not follow. Now when you’re blocking them through HT Access, the hosting is not even serving them the webpage. You know what I’m saying?

Bradley: Right. Yup.

Marco: Yeah that’s absolutely right. HT Access and you block everything except the bot that you want in there and that’s how you protect yourself except that the bot, the coders are smart enough to always change the user agent, and they’re constantly updating and so there’s a website and I’ll have to go and dig through my stuff, but there’s a website that constantly updates the bot that you should be blocking. I’ll see if I can find it and post it in here so that you can use that. They update every 30 days. Every 60 days or so with new bot that you should block and user agents, but definitely HT Access. No plug-ins.

Does Blocking Web Spiders A Good Way To Prevent Competition From Reverse Engineering Your SEO Efforts?

Bradley: Yeah. Okay, we’re going to try to run through guys because we’ve only got a couple questions left and we’re almost out of time and I want to get to them. It looks like we really only got like two, three questions left. Jenia, he says, “Is there a good way to prevent competition from reverse engineering your SEO efforts?”

There’s some things that you can do, Jenia. For example, we talk about in the Mastermind how to use tag pages, well canonicals period. Very strategically, which will hide, will mask your efforts from prying eyes so-to-speak. Canonicals are a great way to do that, but there’s a lot of other stuff that we talk about in the Mastermind too and I’m not saying that because I don’t want to answer your question, Jenia. One, when it comes to reverse engineering, if it’s a good SEO they’re going to be able to find a lot, right? One of the things that you could do would be to use Spider Spanker or some sort of bot blocking stuff and block the Majestic SEO Crawlers and the AH Refs Crawlers and things like that so that nobody can index your links or what’s on your site. The important thing then would be to use those bot blockers on the sites that are linking to you.

In other words, when I was doing a lot of PBN work, I would use bot blockers to block Majestic and AH Refs on the sites, on my PBN sites so that those links wouldn’t get indexed. The inbound links pointing to my money sites wouldn’t get indexed and people wouldn’t be able to see them. Does that make sense? Google will see them, because they’ll show up in your links to your site in search console, but the SEO analysis applications wouldn’t, right? That’s one way you could do it, but again, I don’t use PBNs really at all anymore, so because of that I just … remember guys, we’d talk about using syndication networks and we’d do a shit ton of back linking to the syndication network properties, so people want to start looking out at our different tiers and doing back link analysis on tiers, then they’re likely going to be able to find out what we’re doing, but if they’re just going to look at the money site, they’re not going to see a shit ton of inbound links, or if they do, they’re going to be press release links and syndication network links and drive stack links and stuff like that. Does that make sense?

I don’t really go … I don’t spend a lot of time trying to prevent other people from seeing what I’m doing anymore. I just don’t really worry about it that much, Jenia. “Or are so amazing that no one can’t touch this.” No anybody can be taken down.

Can You Explain The Basics Of How Money Site Integrates When Using Syndication And RYS Academy For Both Local And Affiliate/Ecommerce?

All right, we’re almost out of time guys. Nigel says, “Good day gents, first I want to thank you for the Hump Day Hangout resource. You all are much appreciated.” Plus one that. Okay, he says, “Question, can you explain the basics of how money site integrates when using syndication in RYS Academy for both local and affiliate eCommerce. What I mean specifically is how would you set up the money page? If you can explain this a bit, because honestly the term money site is used so freely in groups I sometimes I feel like the only one not in on the secret.”

Money site just means your primary digital asset. Whatever you use to create revenue, right? So a money site, if you’re doing lead gen, could just be a landing page, right? What I mean by local lead gen. Say your generating leads for a plumber, for example, then your money site could typically be a lead gen style landing page. Somebody lands on it and it’s got a big contact form. Says contact request form and it’s got a big phone number on it and that’s it. That could be a money site. Another money site could be an affiliate site. Could be a blog. I’m sorry, was somebody going to say something? I thought I heard somebody trying to jump in.

Marco: No.

Adam: I don’t think so.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, a money site just means any website that you own, or that you are generating revenue with. Don’t let that confuse you. As far as syndication RYS for both local and affiliate eCommerce, I’m not sure what you mean unless you’re trying to set up a local aspect on a site as well as an eCommerce or affiliate and again, that’s a little bit of a unique situation and with our limited time right now, I don’t know how I can really unpack that and describe to you a good strategy without knowing a little bit more. I know it can be done, I’m just not sure how to tell you how to set that up without knowing specifically what your objectives are. Does that make sense?

Okay, it says, “Example for local create an article and place a link with offer. Where, how many, suggestion, where it links into syndication, RYS general was more than enough.” Well remember RYS Academy is just basically it’s like a link building method so that you can boost existing properties, right, and the drive files themselves can rank, but syndication networks are just a way of … it’s a content amplification method, right? You publish content to your money site, or your YouTube channel, either one and it syndicates out across your network for content application, excuse me, amplification as well as provide some SEO benefits. Okay? Just keep that in mind. The link with the offer, where and how many? That’s really just going to depend on many different things, but essentially yeah, you create an article and then you can link out to whatever you want. If it’s an affiliate offer, so be it. Okay? Again, I apologize that I can’t give you more specific answer. I would need more details Nigel.

Would You Say That It’s True That The IFTTT + SEO Strategy That You Teach In Semantic Mastery Will Probably Stand The Test Of Time, Not Fall Victim To Any Google Penalties?

All right guys we’re almost out of time. Dee says, “Would you say that it’s true that the IFTTT plus SEO strategies that you teach in Semantic Mastery will probably stand the test of time, not fall victim to any of Google’s penalties?” Well that’s our hope, Dee and I certainly feel confident that it’s not going to become an issue because it has been effective for me since 2012 when I started using this method. It’s only become more effective in pretty much standard op … It’s almost required now to have your footprint. To claim your footprint as a brand. That’s what helps to validate the entity, so I can’t imagine, although I don’t work for Google. I could change tomorrow, it could change six months from now. It could change six years from now, I don’t know, but as it stands right now and the foreseeable future, I don’t see it creating any problems. Okay?

I think we’re done guys.

Adam: Yes.

Marco: Before we go just a second. I listed the resource on the page. It’s called botreports.com and it actually gives you the HT Access code for blocking whatever specific bots you want to block. It’s a really awesome resource.

Bradley: Yup. You got it. Okay guys thanks for everybody being here. Remember Syndication Academy webinar starts in about one minute, well probably two and then we’ll be at Mastermind webinar tomorrow with the new curriculum, so we’ll see you guys there.

Adam: Awesome buddy. Bye everybody.

Hernan: Bye everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 166 posted first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 166

Click on the video above to watch Episode 166 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://ift.tt/2BQjTCo.

  Announcement

Bradley: Bots.

Adam: Oh, we’re live. All right. This is the fun episode where you watch Adam take notes and Bradley talk about stuff that has nothing to do with Hump Day Hangouts. Just kidding.

Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts and I believe it’s episode 166. Correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t have it up in front of me actually.

Bradley: You are correct sir.

Chris: Yes.

Adam: Before we get into things real quick we’re going to do a quick hello to everybody. Then we’ve got a few special announcements, and then, as usual, we’ll get into the questions, but I’ll start on my left here and see Chris. How’s it going with you?

Chris: Doing good. Got a early rise up tomorrow. 7am airport time and then off to the slopes for some winter action.

Adam: Nice, nice. Outstanding. Hernan how about yourself?

Hernan: Living the life stanman. No, I’m good. I’m good. Excited to be here guys. Excited for what’s coming. We’re going to be with Adam I think it’s early to mention that but we’re going to go to the [inaudible 00:01:00] Live, right Adam?

Adam: Yup.

Hernan: In March. By the end of it. So if you guys want to hand out at some point. We’re going to be doing some networking, we’re going to be doing some good stuff over there sir.

Adam: Yeah definitely. Let us know if you’re going and then if you’re in the area. I think it’s Orlando so we’ll see. We’ll have a little bit of time, can’t guarantee anything right now, but obviously would love to hear from you.

Hernan: Yeah. We’ll have more info as time goes, as we get closer but we’ll be representing Semantic Mastery over there.

Adam: Cool.

Bradley: Represent, represent.

Hernan: Yeah.

Adam: Marco how’s it going man?

Marco: What’s up man? I just got out of the lab with Rob. We’re tearing down right brain, just a little bit. A little part of the algorithm that we found. It’s amazing. It’s amazing the stuff that Google has that’s public and that you can actually manipulate where I constantly back and forth, back and forth. Let’s do this and let’s try that, and what’s this and what’s that and then sometimes even our own users. Not necessarily in our way as reloaded. This was actually from a question in the Cemented Master Mastermind that made us go about 45 minutes into the lab. Okay let’s track this down, let’s see what happened. That was really good. I had fun. That’s my idea of fun. 45 minutes of looking at code.

Adam: Glad you guys are doing that. I’m sure something good is going to end up coming out of this. Bradley, how you doing?

Bradley: I’m good. Happy to be here. Got lots to go through today. We’ve also, just update guys, we’ve got the Syndication Academy Update Webinar Number 18, immediately following Hump Day Hangouts today, so if you’re in Syndication Academy, go check the events tab in Facebook and you should be able to get the URL to it. Okay?

Adam: Awesome. All right a couple quick announcements. We will be sending out some more information about the next two things I’m going to mention. The first one is video lead gen system. Bradley just put the finishing touches on a video email prospecting course that kind of deep dive into that so Bradley you want to tell people just real quick about that?

Bradley: Yeah, we did a really extended webinar. Went damn near three hours in the Mastermind about how to do the video lead gen prospecting system that I’ve been using for years that I really got my start. Started building my agency up using that method. That specific method. It’s a bit time consuming but it works incredibly well for landing clients and it’s still valid and works well today. It actually works even better today because you can embed gifs into the emails now that look like actual videos playing in the email. It’s a click enticer. It’s click bait so-to-speak.

Anyways, we went through three hours of training on how to do it step-by-step and I basically just edited that webinar. Put it into separate modules. Individual lesson videos and sections with notes and all that kind of stuff. We packaged it up and that’s basically it. It’s a very riffle approach instead of a shotgun approach for targeting prospects, but it works incredibly well.

The good news is about 90 percent of it can be outsourced. There is a part of it that should be done by whoever … If you’re a one man agency or solopreneur or whatever, you’re going to want to record the audit videos, or if you’ve got a sales person or something like that, maybe it would be them, but somebody obviously that knows a little bit about whatever service it is that they’re selling, but other than that the rest of everything else can be outsourced and so we’ve had questions a lot recently over the last few weeks about prospecting and how to keep your pipeline full and all that kind of stuff. One way to do it is just to consistently be prospecting. Make it part of your standard operating procedure. Your just normal weekly tasks in your business should be prospecting so that you always keep your pipeline full.

That’s why I think this course was so timely because if you outsource it then you know it gets done, and that way you can keep your pipeline full of leads at all times so that you can cherry pick the best clients, number one and number two you won’t be so desperate when you are talking to the … If you only got five leads for three months, then you try so hard to close all five. Whereas, if you had 10 or 15 leads per week, then you could be a hell of a lot more selective and really, if somebody’s going to give you any resistance, thank you very much, see you later, click. Hang up, move on to the next one.

Adam: Definitely.

Bradley: I think it’s going to be a good course coming out. I think a lot of you guys, about 60 percent of our audience is into local marketing. I think this will help a lot of you to be able to generate some clients, as well as maybe land service providers if you’re selling leads.

Adam: Definitely. Yeah, it’s a good one. Like Bradley said, it can save you a ton of time. It’s going to keep your pipeline full, and it works. I’ve used this stuff too in a couple different industries and this really applies to anyone, which is really cool. You can use this for consulting. You could use this for financial services. You could use this for contractors, and it has a very good response rate, which is why it is the lead gen system using video. Anyways, more on that later. We’ll be telling you guys all about that.

The other thing we wanted to tell you about was Jeffrey Smith. If you missed his SEO boot camp webinar that was, I’m going to get the date wrong, I think it was early December or late November, but that went really well. We had some technical issues the very first time we had him on. He came back, had a webinar, that went great. We got really good feedback. People who hopped in the course loved it. I know Bradley, you said you went through it, or did you go through all of it or parts of it?

Bradley: Not all of it. I’ve been through parts of it. Kind of like what Marco mentioned to me. I just go through and find stuff that I need when it’s pertinent at that particular time. Everything I’ve seen has been so thorough though. It’s training after our own hearts in that its so detailed and he went way over and above and it’s an amazing course.

Adam: Cool. So we’re going to have him back. That will be on Monday. We’re getting stuff set up for that right now, so we’ll be sending out emails about that. Be sure to check that out and we will have a replay available if you can’t make it live on Monday.

Before we get into it I wanted to remind everybody about the charity that we’re supporting throughout January. That’s still going on. We’ve had a lot of really good donations so far. It’s really impressive so first of all, thank you to everyone who’s helped out and then Marco, if you want to tell people, because I know we have people come who aren’t here all the time. If you want to tell them quickly about what the charity is, whose it for?

Marco: Yeah sure. It supplies uniforms and books for kids. We’re targeting first, second and third grade kids. We want to keep them in school. A lot of times the reason why they can’t go to school is simply because they don’t have the supplies, the uniforms or the books. They don’t have shoes. Right? They have to go to school barefoot. Imagine if you’re having … still in 2018 going to school barefoot, man. This is the type of stuff that we’re dealing with. Not only that, the environment that these kids live in. Someone comes knocking at the door, you don’t know who’s coming knocking at your door. They’re living in a place where they’re under lock and key. When they go out they have to go out in groups because they have to run a gauntlet man. Drug dealers, drug users. Just the worst of the worst man, so what we’re trying to do is, I know that education is the key to success. Without an education all you’re doing is you’re going to stay in that poverty cycle because you’re not going to know anything except that which you experience.

So experiencing an education, experiencing the world, experiencing all of the different things that are offered through an education opens your mind to all kinds of possibilities and it lets you know that you’re not useless. That you’re not worthless. Someone is taking the time to tell you you’re actually worth something, which to me, that’s incredible. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re going into these neighborhoods. We’re trying to get these kids, as many as we can. Right now we’re almost at the 10k mark, which is what had set. 100 kids takes $10,000. We’re almost there so if it’s a dollar, if it’s two dollars, we don’t care. Just go ahead. Please donate. Thank you very much those who have donated already. This is really a really good cause, man.

Adam: Awesome.

Marco: I just hope people will listen and donate and I dropped the link on the event for those who would like to go and take a look at the video and see what it’s all about, more in depth.

Adam: Awesome. Thanks again as Marco said, to everyone who’s donated so far. We appreciate it. When is it? I think we got another week or two right?

Marco: Yeah. We made the cutoff on the 26th so we can go the week of 29th for the supplies. Just before they’re going to school on February 5th, but after that we’re going to keep it open. We’re going to do something else so that when next February comes around we’re ready for even more kids to go to school. We’ll be doing something. We’ll announce it. I’ll talk to you guys and we’ll work it out.

Adam: Sounds good. Awesome. Well if you are new to Semantic Mastery, first off, thank you for joining us on Hump Day Hangouts. A lot of times we get asked, “Where’s a good place for me to start?” Well the Hump Day Hangouts, you’re in the right place so that’s the good place to start. The next step would be the Battle Plan and we’ve got a discount code. I’ll pop that up on the page, but check out the Battle Plan, it’s a solid investment and it is very, very much worth the little amount of money you have to pay for all the information in there.

If you don’t yet have an account over at SerpSpace, go to serpspace.com, you can open up an account for free. Check out the tools there, check out the Done for You services and if you’re really jonesing for some Semantic Mastery information and you just need to see Bradley making a chart or something during the week head over to support.semanticmastery.com and that’s where we put a lot of these common questions that come up, or the more in depth answers where Bradley’s maybe drawing a chart or giving some information, so you can go check that out and get an answer in the middle of the week.

If you’re really ready to take things up and you’re not new maybe to Semantic Mastery, then I highly suggest going to the mastermind.semanticmastery.com. I’ll pop the link on there and if you’re ready to join the Mastermind, that’s the place to be. If you ever have any questions about that, you can contact us at support@semanticmastery.com. If you have any questions about the Mastermind after looking through the page and seeing if maybe it’s a right fit for you or not, we’d be happy to chat with you.

Bradley: Sweet.

Adam: All right. Anybody else? Any announcements or are we ready to get rolling?

Bradley: No. I’m ready to get in questions. Just one brief thing. The new Mastermind curriculum starts this week. We have our first Mastermind Webinar for 2018 under the new training schedule, which is tomorrow. We’re in the PPC module. I’m actually a bit behind in preparing the presentation and training for tomorrow, but whatever is fine, because I imagine for the next couple weeks it’s going to be a little bit in disarray as we settle into this new training, but we’re going to be doing … AdWords has been updated, the interface has, so we’re going to be doing AdWords for local, as well as for national stuff, which could apply to affiliate campaigns, plus we will be doing AdWords for YouTube for again, local led gen, as well as national lead gen and then also for affiliate stuff and we’re going to be doing some of that for Semantic Mastery for our own channel, for example. Some of that will also be included and then we’ll be doing some Bing ads and also Hernan’s going to be doing some training on Facebook ads. This is all stuff that’s going to be in part of module one, which should last probably about six weeks and so again, I would highly encourage you to come join the Mastermind.

Last thing I want to mention very briefly is, and I say this the beginning of every Hump Day Hangouts go to bradelybenner.com and subscribe and the reason I say that is because I got an email from one of my subscribers today that was replying, and it’s Jenny, and Jenny is always on our Hump Day Hangouts asking questions. I’m not going to read your email to me, Jenny, but the last two lines that you put in the email as a reply to one of my emails about the Mindset series was, “Thanks for kicking my ass today, sir. May I have another?” That’s awesome. I get some replies from some of my subscribers because it’s just about mindset stuff and I highly recommend that you go check it out. At least I know it helps me to be able to write those.

By the way, I started crossfit training as a coach every single day this week. This week is when I started. I was supposed to start last week but the extreme cold prevented me from doing it, so I haven’t been able to write an email every morning, but I’m trying to squeeze it in when I can. Like today, I got the email written right after I got back from the crossfit gym. Just to let you guys know, I’m trying to write every single day. I’ve got about 40 emails in the series now. Go subscribe, check it out. If you don’t like it, just unsubscribe. Okay? With that said, let’s get into it.

Okay you guys. Let me know if everything’s coming through okay?

Adam: Yup.

What Are Your Recommended Frequency And Topics On Press Releases?

Bradley: Sweet. Okay, Harold’s up first. He says, “Hello everybody, thank you so much for giving us this space so we can ask our questions.” You’re welcome Harold. “Mine is, how often should I get press releases and what are some good topics?”

Well the frequency is really up to you. The nice thing about press releases is whenever a press release is picked up and distributed, it gets picked up by usually hundreds of websites so it’s a kind of a natural occurrence to get a bunch of links back from a press release, because companies all the time are announcing news and it’s a natural type thing. It’s traditional. It’s normal and so you can be a bit aggressive with press releases. I know I usually do them about once every two weeks. That’s usually the speed with which I do it, until I get the results that I’m looking to achieve, which is typically to rank in the three pack. Sometimes it’s organic stuff, it depends, but for the most part I’m trying to rank in the Maps pack and usually , just do them about every two weeks.

However, I know Rob, for example, the co-creator of RYS Reloaded with Marco, he just hammers the shit out of sites with press release, after press release, after press release and he’s able to get results so I don’t think there’s much of a velocity issue. Again, I do it about every two weeks, but I know that it’s been done a lot more than that. The frequency a lot higher than that and it hasn’t caused any issues. Marco, do you have a comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, as a matter of fact, I haven’t seen it. Like you said, we just bang one right after another and we stack them the right way going after different URLs. Now we have another press release service that has even more publication sites so that’s a really good mix. It’s really good to mix them up. One of them gives us embeds, which is even better for us and so it’s a lot of good things that you could do and a lot of nasty things that you can do with press releases.

Bradley: Yeah. All right, and as far as good topics, Harold, all right, so there’s a couple of things I want to mention here about topics. One, pretty much anything can be turned into a press release. Any sort of company news, any sort of seasonal changes, sales, specials, new products, new services. Anything at all can really be worthy of a news release to be written. What I’ve been doing for the most part is we published press releases anytime a customer review has been received by one of my lead gen sites or one of my contractor, client sites, excuse me. That’s another reason to publish a press release is because you’re announcing the glowing testimonial review that you just received, right? That’s just another example and I like using that method because it encourages the business owners to solicit reviews from their customers and then every time they get a review, I get notified and I go publish a press release for it and I get to bill them for it, and they get to puff out their chest and say, “Look at me, look at how awesome we are.”

I’ve been using that method. In fact, that’s our front end service on our new agency. It’s doing basically reputation. It’s a combination of video marketing, reputation marketing and PR marketing. It’s a combination of those three and that’s our front end service. It’s a very, very powerful way.

Also, any time you publish a blog post typically you could do that. Now, the last thing I want to mention about that is if you’ve got a good writer, a PR writer that you work with, a good PR writer will typically be able to create an angle out of just about anything. So an angel or a news hook out of just about anything. The other option would be to use the press release writers from the distribution service that you’re using.

For example in Serpspace, we don’t even allow manually submitted PRs anymore, I don’t think. I think we just have our net distribution service or network writers write them, because they know what the editorial guidelines are and a lot of those distribution service writers, right, that will provide as just an add on service, the press release to be written. It’s usually about $30 or so or something like that and it ranges between $30 to $45, somewhere in that range, but a lot of times, all they need is just a handful of small details and then they’ll create the news hook, because they know what they’re distribution network is looking for, if that makes sense?

A lot of times all I’ll do is just list who, what, when, where and then a quote from a company executive or in the case of using a review, I just quote the review, whatever the customer review text was that’s the quote. Does that make sense? That’s all we do and it’s very, very simple and I love it because it takes the content marketing side of things off my shoulders. We still have bloggers that do the curating and stuff, but I don’t have to think about so many content ideas for press releases anymore. We just say, “Hey go get another review. As soon as you get a review, let me know. We’ll publish a press release” and boom it’s done.

By the way, just to let you guys know, I had been doing that myself for my clients for my own agency every month. I would spend about two days at the beginning of the month. I still have been generating client reports and there’s a reason why I do that, because I typically, once I generate client reports and I send the reports to the clients I also include a brief breakdown of what the reports are showing in my own voice and sometimes I record a screen cast video and send that to them with an overview of what I’m seeing for the month and some new opportunities that have arisen and I’ve got a really close relationship with my clients so because of that, I don’t outsource the client reporting part of it, but I had been generating the review commercials, which is a David Sprague. Every month, this is just an add on service I added to most of my clients. I would generate a review commercial from a new review that they received within the last month and then publish the video, distribute it across my network. My syndication networks typically ranks the video, but if it doesn’t then I end up with a press release anyways.

I had been doing all of that myself for the last six or seven months since I’ve really started playing with this strategy. One of my virtual assistants is in the UK. She’s been blogging for me for, I’d say at least four years. She’s great. She reached out to me around the turn of year and said, “Hey, I’m looking for more work and we’ve been working together for years. Would you have anything else you wanted me to do?” And I was like, “Oh, perfect. I’ve been meaning to unload this work, now that I know this is a viable strategy and it’s something I’m going to do.”

The reason I’m telling you this guys, is because I want to let you know, I struggle too with doing shit that I’m not supposed to be doing. For example, taking two days at the beginning of every month to generate these review videos and order the press releases. It was something that could have been outsources three or four months ago once I really knew that it was going to be something that I was going to carry on or be a continuing service, however, I never took the time to create the process docs. I get up on my soapbox all the time and preach to you guys about outsourcing stuff, yet there are processes in my business that I still have not outsourced, and it’s just because of a lack of time, or really a lack of desire for doing it. For creating the process training for that process and what it comes down to typically is just not wanting to do it because it sucks. It’s boring work. It’s tedious and often times I’m so freaking busy with all the work that I’m trying to fulfill that I feel like I don’t have the time to create process docs about the work that I need to fulfill. If that makes sense? So it’s a catch 22. Right?

Because she gave me a reason, Michelle did, my VA. She gave me a reason and because I’ve got so much work on my plate right now for this new Mastermind training curriculum, I knew at the beginning of every month this year, I don’t want to spend two days generating reports and also the review commercials and ordering the press releases and all that stuff. I don’t want to do all that. So I spent the first two days of this week creating the training process. The training videos, the written procedures, which are in Google docs and all that and I sent that to her yesterday and she’s now going to take over it for me and guess what. I never have to fucking do it again.

The reason I went through all of that is just to let you know that this is all stuff that can be outsourced guys and I highly recommend, sometimes I need to remind myself of some of my own advice, and this is something I should have done four or five months ago, and I just finally got it done and I can tell you what a weight, a load has been lifted off my shoulders because now I’m not going to dread the beginning of the month every month because it’s going to eat up two days, if that makes sense. So guys, if you take anything away from that at all, it’s that if you’ve got stuff in your business that makes your stomach turn sometimes because you have to do it and every time it comes up it makes your stomach turn, that’s the shit you need to outsource first. Honestly, that’s the stuff, the stuff you don’t like to do or you hate to do, that’s the stuff that you should absolutely, as much as it’s going to be painful and tedious to do, but create process docs for how to do all that, and then hire that shit out so that you don’t have to do that anymore.

Again, we get into this business not because we want another job, right? We want freedom and we want to enjoy it and so sometimes there’s obviously going to be stuff in everyone’s business that has to done, that’s not enjoyable. Outsource it. If you create the exact process for how to do it, you can outsource anything. This was not a pitch for Outsource KingPin, but we do have a training product that specifically teaches the methods for how to do exactly what I just described and it’s called Outsource Kingpin. Check that out. I know that was a long winded answer and I’m sorry Harold, but I just wanted to share with you guys that even I struggle with not following my own advice at times, but outsource as much as you can.

Anybody want to comment on that before I move on?

Chris: I agree with you Bradley.

How Does Google View Directory Sites In Terms Of SEO?

Bradley: Okay. Good enough. Thank you. Juan says, “Hello lovely people and thanks for having me. Are directory site’s viewed by Google as good or bad for SEO?” I think Juan, this is going to be not anything based in absolute data for me anymore, as it is just more of opinion or assumption, but I’d like to get some opinions of the other guys. I believe it has more to do with the directory itself then just a blanket statement.

For example, I know they say reciprocal links are bad, but I’ve seen many cases where reciprocal links actually are still very beneficial and I know a lot of low end directories that are really spammy, will require a reciprocal link, those are the ones that I would suspect are not good, but there’s a lot of good other directories that are good.

For example, Yelp is a directory site right? It’s a local or it’s a business directory site, but it is a directory site. We all know that’s a good link, but then obviously if it’s some obscure directory out there that is just … and they’re all requiring reciprocal links and stuff like that, then I would say no. I think it would be more about selective then just a blanket statement. I think it depends on the directory itself. What do you guys say?

Chris: Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree with you Bradley. The fact that on some directories you need to think about this in terms of what kind of value can you get from the directory, right? As well as what kind of value can you get from the reciprocal link, because if it is let’s say that you’re doing, I don’t know SEO for a doctor, and then you can get the doctor, put it in directory for doctor’s and even further for local doctors that would actually, could help you bring in some profit. Right? Even further if the directory is ranking in Google. Paid directories sometimes work as well because just being paid, even if it’s $5 or $10 for a lifetime link, usually work because they weed out 99 percent of spammy links so have that in mind. Some of them are really, really high authority so I would say that it would be on a case by case basis.

Some people would say that, for example, blog comments will be bad for SEO and that’s not entirely true.

Bradley: That’s right.

Chris: If you make a really thoughtful blog comment on a highly relevant publication or blog, it can blow your website away, right? It can really help you so I think it’s a case by case basis. If you’re on GSA’s spamming blog post or spamming directories, which you could definitely do, just do it as far away as possible from your clients or your own website, but if it’s a manual placement from a website that you can get value from and value meaning either authority or traffic, I would say go ahead and do it.

Bradley: Good advice. Marco?

Chris: No I think you guys covered it perfect.

What Is The Best Way To Indexing One Million Pages A Day?

Bradley: Beautiful. Fabian. What’s up Fabian? He says, “I want to index about 1,000,000 pages a day.” Wow. Okay. “So I need a very scalable solution. How would you do this using IFTTT and Plus Twitter. If yes, how often can I post the tweets that my account won’t be shut down? Should I create several accounts and spread my posts on them? Thanks a lot.”

Yeah, I don’t think you would want to do a million tweets per day in one Twitter account. I don’t think that’s a good idea. You probably need a hell of a lot of Twitter accounts to be able to accomplish a million tweets per day. We have an indexing service in Service Space. I don’t know if that amount of links would be a scalable option. There is one service that I can mention for mass volume that I know my, one of our link building director, he basically pointed it out a while ago. Now it’s been probably a year and a half since he mentioned this to me, I know I still use it though, but it’s called Express Indexer. Let me see if I can …

Hernan: Yeah, Bradley.

Bradley: Go ahead.

Hernan: I talked to [Debbie 00:28:48] already about this because I had seen this question come up. I actually saw it on Facebook.

Bradley: Okay.

Hernan: And he said, “No, it’s not working.”

Bradley: Okay.

Hernan: As it used to. He said that he’s trying to find a way around it. He’s still working on it because we had to shut down the indexing service in Serpspace actually.

Bradley: Oh did we? I didn’t even know that.

Hernan: Yeah, we had to shut it down because it just wasn’t indexing the way that it should. This option IFTTT to Twitter is not scalable because you’re going to need, for a million pages, what a hundred thousand profiles to push 10 tweets a day, 20 so that’s how you have to look at it. You can’t get away with more than 10 or 20, 20 tweets a day actually is pushing it because you’d have to scale up to 20. You can’t start at 20. You’ll get banned now.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: In Twitter. So I don’t have a solution. You don’t want to submit a million pages to the Google URL submitter, because you’ll trigger the captcha and so I don’t have an answer for this other than what we were using isn’t working at this level.

Bradley: Yeah. Well good. Thanks for chiming in. That’s a good question Fabian. I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer for you. Apologize.

What Are The Different Ways Of Indexing Local Citations?

Okay, so Shripad, I guess. Forgive me if I mispronounce that. He says, “What are the different ways to index local citations?”

Well indexers work. Typically that’s what I do. For example, when I order citations, whenever I get the citation report back, I just open up the spreadsheet. Copy all the citation URLs and then just submit them to the indexer. I usually submit them to multiple indexers. That’s all I do. That’s all you need to do. Okay?

Some citations, if you try to let them index naturally, sometimes it takes forever for citations to index naturally, that’s why I typically, as soon as I get a citation report guys, I’ll just go copy them and submit them to at least two indexing services to try to speed that up a little bit.

mbedding Maps – MyMaps Or GMB Map Page

All right. RL Sanders, “Hey guys, as always thank you for what you do. When you guys talk about embedding maps are you talking about my maps or the GMB map page?”

Both, RL. Both. I don’t mean embed both at the same time. I haven’t really tested with that, but I just mean you can do an embed run with the My Maps and then do another embed run with the GMB maps page. I’ll be a hundred percent honest with you, even though I know it’s super powerful, the My Maps thing, I don’t do a lot of that. I don’t set those up typically. If I get it back from a drive stack then I’ll do an embed blast with that through MAPS Powerhouse, but I don’t do, when I’m working on client stuff myself, I typically don’t do the My Maps. I just end up doing all the GMB stuff, but the My Maps are very, very powerful and what’s great about the My Maps guys is you can squeeze them, basically do follow links in and there’s a whole lot of ninja stuff that you can do. Marco teaches an RYS Academy that I just don’t have the time to do it or I would do more of it, but fortunately we have a [jessen 00:32:12] who can build them for us.

Can You Share Any Tips For Finding Local SEO Clients?

“Also, can you repost the link for Marco’s charity?” Yes. He posted it already, I believe. RL’s another question. He says, “Can you share any tips for finding local SEO clients? I need a few recurring payments to get the ball rolling. Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks.”

Yeah, look, I don’t know if I want to share this on … Well okay, RL, let me just say this. There’s one method that … no I’m not going to share that here. What I’m going to say is select a niche, RL. Right? Select a niche that you want, an industry that you prefer to work in or that you know that you may already have some experience in, whatever. Something that you’re familiar with or that you have a genuine interest in so that it makes it feel like not so much like work. Then start targeting those clients. Craft a very specific message. Again, we talk about the video lead gen system, which is going to be the product that we’re going to release in about two weeks. You could use that very specifically for finding and prospecting local SEO clients. Finding the clients isn’t that difficult, it’s the prospecting. Right? Finding prospects isn’t hard. You can use scrapers, there’s lot of tools out there. You can hire VA’s to do that kind of stuff, whatever. That’s not really the difficult part.

The hard part is starting the conversation with them. I found that even sales isn’t that difficult. The hardest part is starting the conversation from a position where they’re willing to receive the message and I found the video email is a fantastic way to start that conversation. To initiate that conversation. Break the ice and lower the defenses a bit and get the conversation started because you can position yourself as an expert and show them beyond a shadow of a doubt that you know what they hell you’re doing, whereas 99 percent of anybody else that’s contacted them about marketing services isn’t going to do that, and that’s what makes you stand out.

I would recommend that you pick that up when we release it in a few weeks. Obviously if you’re in the Mastermind RL, we cover that in there. That’s all included, but we did also cover a very specific … By the way, the method that I just said I’m not going to reveal right here is in that course that will be released in about two weeks or whatever. Just keep that in mind guys. It’s a very specific method for finding video SEO clients. Well for finding local clients period, but it’s a very specific way, using YouTube to find those clients and it works like crazy. Okay?

Anyways, I have to tease you guys with that a little bit, because I can’t reveal it here. It’s in the course. Come to the Mastermind though and I’ll share it with you.

What Are Your Recommendations On InMotion Hosting All Domains In One Cpanel Account?

Ajay says, “Two questions. I have a hosting account with In Motion Hosting.” Okay. “I just realized they might be hosting all my websites, domains, as add on domains under the same C-Panel account. What is your recommendation?”

Yeah, that’s how they do it, Ajay. When you have a shared hosting account that’s how it works. Every time you create an add on domain, it’s really like a sub-domain of your whatever the IP or C-Panel was set up as. It doesn’t matter. You can still configure your sites to all resolve to the exact, to whatever domain it is that you’ve added, but that’s just how it works in C-Panel. Okay? That’s not an issue.

Are There Any Benefits Of Sub Folders In Terms Of Link Juice?

“Number two, I had read an article recently about the advantages of sub-directories for link juice over sub-domains. The following link is … “

Guys we need to probably create a … somebody wants to make a note of this, a frequently asked question about this because we get this question a lot.

Yes, sub-domain folders apparently through a lot of testing, not so much my own, but from other people’s testing I do understand that there’s supposed to be a slight SEO advantage of doing multiple sites in sub-directories as opposed to on sub-domains, but we have repeatedly, or we’ve held our position on this for many years now, which is that sub-domains in my opinion is a superior method. There may be a slight SEO benefit to doing sub-directories over sub-domains. That’s fine. I get that. The problem with that is every single site that’s in a sub-directory is subordinate to the root domain, which means that if the root domain catches a penalty or if any of the subordinate sites in the sub-folders or sub-directories catch a penalty, it will penalize the entire domain and all of the other sibling sub-directories. Does that make sense?

The problem is it’s a penalty that would be leveled to basically the root, which would damage everything. It would be applied to everything domain wide, however, if you do a sub-domain, then in Google’s eyes, each sub-domain site is considered a separate entity. Right? A separate website and so when I talk about using sub-domains, it’s a way to offer or provide a level of protection for every individual site. The trick with that is to make sure that you keep the root clean and don’t do anything spammy to the root, because just as we talked about with the sub-directories, if the root was to catch a penalty or any of the sub-directories catch a penalty, it would apply to the root, and therefore tank all the rest of the sites. If you catch a penalty on the root domain with sub-domain sites, all the sub-domain sites will be affected as well because it is a domain wide penalty, but if you get a penalty on a sub-domain site, then it only applies to that sub-domain. Your root would still remain intact and your other sibling sub-domains would also remain untouched, unaffected.

There’s a reason why we do it that way and it’s to mitigate risk, to reduce potential catastrophic failure of all your sites if you were to catch a penalty. That’s why we do it that way. Okay? I don’t suspect you guys have anything to add to that, do you?

Adam: No, you nailed it.

Bradley: All right cool. Great question though Ajay. That was a really good question. We get that often, but guys, like I said, we should probably just make a frequently asked question out of that one.

Did You Eventually Charge More As The Company Grew Or Did You Keep The Rate The Same?

Mohammed, what’s up buddy? He’s recently joined the Mastermind and he’s been incredibly active in there. I saw your question Mohammed about local stuff in there. We’re going to cover that slightly tomorrow in the Mastermind as well. So keep that in mind.

“Hey guys have you ever worked with a small company that grew because of your marketing?” Yes, my BB’s Tree Guys. “Did you eventually charge more as the company grew or do you keep the rate the same?” Well Mohammed, that’s a great question by the way. Yes, I always … Well let me rephrase, if I add additionally marketing services I always increase. I don’t necessarily increase the rate, but because I’m adding more services I bill them more. Does that make sense?

To answer your question. For example, I just had a client call on Monday. A client of mine that I’ve had for, well shit, she was one of my first clients and it’s not 2018 and I opened my agency in March of 2012. So almost six years she’s been a client of mine. She called because she’s been ranked at the top of Maps for six freaking years and she, like often happens with a lot of clients, they tend to forget why they’re getting leads on line. Especially when it’s been six years, right? You guys would be absolutely ashamed if you knew what I was charging this lady, because again, it was one of my very first clients and it was such a small amount of money per month. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s $250 a month is what she’s paying me and she’s been ranked at the top of Maps for six freaking years, but she has never wanted to do any additional marketing services.

I have pitched her a least a dozen times on different types of marketing services. Press releases. PR marketing, video marketing. All this other kind of stuff and she never wants to do a damn thing. On Monday, we scheduled a call for Monday, I guess actually it was last Friday, anyways, we scheduled a call from two months ago and we got on the phone and she was like, “I need to know what you’ve been doing. I just really want to know if it’s worth me still spending $250 a month.” I almost laughed at her. I told her, I was like, “Listen, you were one of my first clients. You’re on a rate that is so much lower. That is less than half what I typically charge any client, even just to speak to them basically and I’ve left you at that because we’ve had you ranked, you’ve been receiving good results. I’ve pitched you on other marketing services. You don’t want to do any of it. Look, if you want to cancel that’s fine, but I don’t understand after six years of getting results.”

Anyways, it was just this long basically me having to convince her not to cancel services with me, when honestly, I should have just let her freaking cancel. I should have just said, “Hey, if you don’t think $250 is worth you being number one in Google and have been for six years, please feel free to cancel. See how you do in six months.” You know what I mean?

Chris: She’s costing you money.

Bradley: Huh?

Chris: She’s costing you money.

Bradley: Probably, but my point with that was that I have clients that have been grandfathered into specific rates that I have not raised. I probably could, but I haven’t. If they ask me for additional marketing services, then I will price those accordingly based upon my current rates, but whatever I have been charging them guys, I will leave it as is. But again, this is going to be different. Marco, I’m sure, does stuff different. I’m sure Hernan does stuff differently. Adam does stuff differently.

Personally, I don’t charge more for existing clients for existing services. I just charge more for new services as they add them. What are your opinions guys?

Chris: Yeah, this is actually a good question. I think it’s a case by case basis. I usually don’t, as you were saying, I usually don’t … unless I have some fixed costs that needs abating. You know how we raise our BA salaries once in whatever. We try to do that for BA’s.

Bradley: Yup.

Chris: If that’s the case, then I would raise it slightly. Just to update the costs, but I don’t do it, not because they’re getting more clients because of what I’m doing I won’t do it. That’s why I really like half retainer, half revenue share agreements. Revenue share could be whatever. It could be on a sales basis, it could be on a lead basis. If they are paying you, for example, x amount of money on retainer, we can be a little bit lower since you’re getting some revenue share. There is no cap to the amount of money that you can make and at the end of the day you will be motivated to work more for the guys, right? Because if they are making more money, you’re making more money, we’re all happy. If it’s activity based, meaning blog posts, et cetera, et cetera. Unless they increase the amount of activity, I don’t charge them more for it.

Sometimes, as a business grows, this is the good news, is that, as a business grows, as Bradley was saying, they will require more, hopefully they will require more service from you and that’s a completely different story, right?

Bradley: Right. Anybody else?

Hernan: I charge high enough from the beginning so that it’ll be awhile before I decide to raise my rates, but yes, I definitely do if year over year, you can show growth that can be attributed to your efforts. If you can show growth at that level, right? 10, 20, 30 percent, whatever it is, then I would raise my rates accordingly and then you’re going to get a lot of push back. You’re going to get a lot of no’s, get a lot of people that’ll just walk away and that’s all good and well. I have one specific company that I did a bunch of AdWords for and it was a million dollar account and we had it humming. We had it to the point where they were making just so much stinking money that I told them that I want more money and they decided to go with what they had in house and try to keep it that way, but 18 months later they contacted me again and said, could you come and work on our AdWords again. This is after they told me that they longer needed me, but I was at a point in my career, my life and my on line business where I could tell them, “Hell no. I don’t need a client like you.”

The thing is you have to weigh whether it’s worth raising the rates, how much it is that you’re charging from the beginning. If you price yourself right, if you know what you’re worth and you know what you’re going to be worth to that company, then you’ll be charging the correct price right at the beginning so you should know what you’re worth rather than worrying about what it is that you’re bringing to the client. The client should just say yes to you with whatever it is that you have because you’re producing.

Bradley: Yeah. Lastly on that Mohammed, when you said like BB’s Tree Guys. Yeah, but remember with the Tree, especially with the one contractor that I’ve really, really expanded his business, that’s a revenue share model, just like what Hernan was mentioning. I cover all the costs of expanding any marketing services. I build all the infrastructure at my expense and then I just get a cut of every job that gets closed. Again, with that, when you’re selling leads or you’re on a revenue or equity share model, then its unlimited scalability in that I don’t charge them anymore, it’s the same rate. I get 10 percent of any job that closes. Whatever the contract price is, I get 10 percent of that and that’s been that way with this contractor for four or going on five years now. Again, there’s no change in rate, but as I continue to build more and more sites and we cover more and more territory, we generate more and more leads and therefore, I make more and more money. Right?

Is It True That Google Will Penalize A Review/Product Type Rich Snippet That Is Placed On The Homepage?

Okay, I’m just going to call you Steve. What’s up buddy? He says, “Hey guys, I remember I read somewhere that putting a review product type rich snippet data on your home page instead of an organization webpage article type is not good, because Google will penalize you somehow. I mean a review product type schema, which shows those review stars below your listing in the Serps for better click through rate. Is this true or just gossip?”

Well first of all, if you’re adding schema for review stars, just for the sake of getting review stars, then yes, that structured data spam, don’t do it. You would probably get away with it for some time, but it’s likely that eventually you’ll get caught and you can get a manual spam action for that in search console, so don’t do that.

Now, if you actually have products, I don’t know because I don’t do eCommerce, but product review or product stuff, I don’t do that kind of stuff so I don’t know if there is some law or rule, not law, excuse, but some rule or best practice that states that you’re not supposed to have product reviews on your homepage. I don’t think that that’s the case though. Anybody have an answer for that? Okay.

If you do product stuff, if you have products, you sell products, for example, if it’s a product review site and the homepage has got a blog roll on it and there’s product reviews, I don’t think that that would cause a penalty because that’s a valid site right? When you’re spamming schema or structured data specifically to gain search right? Which would be like adding review stars to a site that has no business having review stars, then yes, that can be a problem so don’t do that. All right?

Is There Any Good Up-To-Date Google Adwords Course You Would Recommend?

“A short second question please. Is there any good, up-to-date AdWords course you would recommend?” Yeah, well first of all, we have Local Kingpin, but it needs to be updated because the AdWords interface has changed so much and so what I’m going to recommend is that you join Semantic Mastery Mastermind because we’re covering PPC and AdWords this month in depth. That’s going to packaged up like it’s a separate course, but we’re not selling it outside of the Mastermind. That’s how we’re going to be doing the new Mastermind this year. Every single module is basically going to be like a separate stand-alone course. They’re all going to piece together because they’re all going to be building out the same businesses, but, like this is the PPC module, so it will get packaged up into its own basically course, but only way to get it is to be in the Mastermind.

That said, the AdWords training that I learned from was Perry Marshall’s training and it was really good. Again, that was almost two years ago now though. Yeah, that was probably two years ago now so I don’t know if he’s got updated training. I’m assuming he does and that’s good training too. Okay? I would say our training because we’re current as far as we’re going to be doing all types of AdWords stuff. Google search, PPC, YouTube PPC, remarketing, maybe some display network although I’m assuming we’re going to hold that off until we do the remarketing module and that’s a separate module all together. We’ll also be doing Bing, PPC, and Hernan will be training on some Facebook PPC stuff. That’s what I would recommend is you get in there, because it will be a much more well rounded training then just buying an AdWords course alone, if that makes sense? All right.

Do You Use Any Plugins In Blocking Web Spiders?

Jenia, there he is. This is one that I was just talking about. Replied to my email. What’s up buddy? He says, “Good afternoon gentlemen, I have a question about blocking spiders. Do you use any plug-ins like Spider Spanker or anything else like that?” I don’t anymore, Jenia. I used to do all of that when I was running a lot of PBN’s and stuff, but I don’t do that anymore. I don’t even use that plug-in at all anymore.

“Is there a good way to prevent competition from reverse engineering your SEO efforts?” As far as blocking spiders, first of all, you do that through HT access. Can you do that in robots.text too? I can’t remember.

Hernan: You can but it’s always better to block them through HT Access.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: Because robots are directives that the robots can or may or may not follow. Now when you’re blocking them through HT Access, the hosting is not even serving them the webpage. You know what I’m saying?

Bradley: Right. Yup.

Marco: Yeah that’s absolutely right. HT Access and you block everything except the bot that you want in there and that’s how you protect yourself except that the bot, the coders are smart enough to always change the user agent, and they’re constantly updating and so there’s a website and I’ll have to go and dig through my stuff, but there’s a website that constantly updates the bot that you should be blocking. I’ll see if I can find it and post it in here so that you can use that. They update every 30 days. Every 60 days or so with new bot that you should block and user agents, but definitely HT Access. No plug-ins.

Does Blocking Web Spiders A Good Way To Prevent Competition From Reverse Engineering Your SEO Efforts?

Bradley: Yeah. Okay, we’re going to try to run through guys because we’ve only got a couple questions left and we’re almost out of time and I want to get to them. It looks like we really only got like two, three questions left. Jenia, he says, “Is there a good way to prevent competition from reverse engineering your SEO efforts?”

There’s some things that you can do, Jenia. For example, we talk about in the Mastermind how to use tag pages, well canonicals period. Very strategically, which will hide, will mask your efforts from prying eyes so-to-speak. Canonicals are a great way to do that, but there’s a lot of other stuff that we talk about in the Mastermind too and I’m not saying that because I don’t want to answer your question, Jenia. One, when it comes to reverse engineering, if it’s a good SEO they’re going to be able to find a lot, right? One of the things that you could do would be to use Spider Spanker or some sort of bot blocking stuff and block the Majestic SEO Crawlers and the AH Refs Crawlers and things like that so that nobody can index your links or what’s on your site. The important thing then would be to use those bot blockers on the sites that are linking to you.

In other words, when I was doing a lot of PBN work, I would use bot blockers to block Majestic and AH Refs on the sites, on my PBN sites so that those links wouldn’t get indexed. The inbound links pointing to my money sites wouldn’t get indexed and people wouldn’t be able to see them. Does that make sense? Google will see them, because they’ll show up in your links to your site in search console, but the SEO analysis applications wouldn’t, right? That’s one way you could do it, but again, I don’t use PBNs really at all anymore, so because of that I just … remember guys, we’d talk about using syndication networks and we’d do a shit ton of back linking to the syndication network properties, so people want to start looking out at our different tiers and doing back link analysis on tiers, then they’re likely going to be able to find out what we’re doing, but if they’re just going to look at the money site, they’re not going to see a shit ton of inbound links, or if they do, they’re going to be press release links and syndication network links and drive stack links and stuff like that. Does that make sense?

I don’t really go … I don’t spend a lot of time trying to prevent other people from seeing what I’m doing anymore. I just don’t really worry about it that much, Jenia. “Or are so amazing that no one can’t touch this.” No anybody can be taken down.

Can You Explain The Basics Of How Money Site Integrates When Using Syndication And RYS Academy For Both Local And Affiliate/Ecommerce?

All right, we’re almost out of time guys. Nigel says, “Good day gents, first I want to thank you for the Hump Day Hangout resource. You all are much appreciated.” Plus one that. Okay, he says, “Question, can you explain the basics of how money site integrates when using syndication in RYS Academy for both local and affiliate eCommerce. What I mean specifically is how would you set up the money page? If you can explain this a bit, because honestly the term money site is used so freely in groups I sometimes I feel like the only one not in on the secret.”

Money site just means your primary digital asset. Whatever you use to create revenue, right? So a money site, if you’re doing lead gen, could just be a landing page, right? What I mean by local lead gen. Say your generating leads for a plumber, for example, then your money site could typically be a lead gen style landing page. Somebody lands on it and it’s got a big contact form. Says contact request form and it’s got a big phone number on it and that’s it. That could be a money site. Another money site could be an affiliate site. Could be a blog. I’m sorry, was somebody going to say something? I thought I heard somebody trying to jump in.

Marco: No.

Adam: I don’t think so.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, a money site just means any website that you own, or that you are generating revenue with. Don’t let that confuse you. As far as syndication RYS for both local and affiliate eCommerce, I’m not sure what you mean unless you’re trying to set up a local aspect on a site as well as an eCommerce or affiliate and again, that’s a little bit of a unique situation and with our limited time right now, I don’t know how I can really unpack that and describe to you a good strategy without knowing a little bit more. I know it can be done, I’m just not sure how to tell you how to set that up without knowing specifically what your objectives are. Does that make sense?

Okay, it says, “Example for local create an article and place a link with offer. Where, how many, suggestion, where it links into syndication, RYS general was more than enough.” Well remember RYS Academy is just basically it’s like a link building method so that you can boost existing properties, right, and the drive files themselves can rank, but syndication networks are just a way of … it’s a content amplification method, right? You publish content to your money site, or your YouTube channel, either one and it syndicates out across your network for content application, excuse me, amplification as well as provide some SEO benefits. Okay? Just keep that in mind. The link with the offer, where and how many? That’s really just going to depend on many different things, but essentially yeah, you create an article and then you can link out to whatever you want. If it’s an affiliate offer, so be it. Okay? Again, I apologize that I can’t give you more specific answer. I would need more details Nigel.

Would You Say That It’s True That The IFTTT + SEO Strategy That You Teach In Semantic Mastery Will Probably Stand The Test Of Time, Not Fall Victim To Any Google Penalties?

All right guys we’re almost out of time. Dee says, “Would you say that it’s true that the IFTTT plus SEO strategies that you teach in Semantic Mastery will probably stand the test of time, not fall victim to any of Google’s penalties?” Well that’s our hope, Dee and I certainly feel confident that it’s not going to become an issue because it has been effective for me since 2012 when I started using this method. It’s only become more effective in pretty much standard op … It’s almost required now to have your footprint. To claim your footprint as a brand. That’s what helps to validate the entity, so I can’t imagine, although I don’t work for Google. I could change tomorrow, it could change six months from now. It could change six years from now, I don’t know, but as it stands right now and the foreseeable future, I don’t see it creating any problems. Okay?

I think we’re done guys.

Adam: Yes.

Marco: Before we go just a second. I listed the resource on the page. It’s called botreports.com and it actually gives you the HT Access code for blocking whatever specific bots you want to block. It’s a really awesome resource.

Bradley: Yup. You got it. Okay guys thanks for everybody being here. Remember Syndication Academy webinar starts in about one minute, well probably two and then we’ll be at Mastermind webinar tomorrow with the new curriculum, so we’ll see you guys there.

Adam: Awesome buddy. Bye everybody.

Hernan: Bye everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 166 published first on your-t1-blog-url

[sabrinasupdates]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 166

Click on the video above to watch Episode 166 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://ift.tt/2BQjTCo.

  Announcement

Bradley: Bots.

Adam: Oh, we’re live. All right. This is the fun episode where you watch Adam take notes and Bradley talk about stuff that has nothing to do with Hump Day Hangouts. Just kidding.

Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts and I believe it’s episode 166. Correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t have it up in front of me actually.

Bradley: You are correct sir.

Chris: Yes.

Adam: Before we get into things real quick we’re going to do a quick hello to everybody. Then we’ve got a few special announcements, and then, as usual, we’ll get into the questions, but I’ll start on my left here and see Chris. How’s it going with you?

Chris: Doing good. Got a early rise up tomorrow. 7am airport time and then off to the slopes for some winter action.

Adam: Nice, nice. Outstanding. Hernan how about yourself?

Hernan: Living the life stanman. No, I’m good. I’m good. Excited to be here guys. Excited for what’s coming. We’re going to be with Adam I think it’s early to mention that but we’re going to go to the [inaudible 00:01:00] Live, right Adam?

Adam: Yup.

Hernan: In March. By the end of it. So if you guys want to hand out at some point. We’re going to be doing some networking, we’re going to be doing some good stuff over there sir.

Adam: Yeah definitely. Let us know if you’re going and then if you’re in the area. I think it’s Orlando so we’ll see. We’ll have a little bit of time, can’t guarantee anything right now, but obviously would love to hear from you.

Hernan: Yeah. We’ll have more info as time goes, as we get closer but we’ll be representing Semantic Mastery over there.

Adam: Cool.

Bradley: Represent, represent.

Hernan: Yeah.

Adam: Marco how’s it going man?

Marco: What’s up man? I just got out of the lab with Rob. We’re tearing down right brain, just a little bit. A little part of the algorithm that we found. It’s amazing. It’s amazing the stuff that Google has that’s public and that you can actually manipulate where I constantly back and forth, back and forth. Let’s do this and let’s try that, and what’s this and what’s that and then sometimes even our own users. Not necessarily in our way as reloaded. This was actually from a question in the Cemented Master Mastermind that made us go about 45 minutes into the lab. Okay let’s track this down, let’s see what happened. That was really good. I had fun. That’s my idea of fun. 45 minutes of looking at code.

Adam: Glad you guys are doing that. I’m sure something good is going to end up coming out of this. Bradley, how you doing?

Bradley: I’m good. Happy to be here. Got lots to go through today. We’ve also, just update guys, we’ve got the Syndication Academy Update Webinar Number 18, immediately following Hump Day Hangouts today, so if you’re in Syndication Academy, go check the events tab in Facebook and you should be able to get the URL to it. Okay?

Adam: Awesome. All right a couple quick announcements. We will be sending out some more information about the next two things I’m going to mention. The first one is video lead gen system. Bradley just put the finishing touches on a video email prospecting course that kind of deep dive into that so Bradley you want to tell people just real quick about that?

Bradley: Yeah, we did a really extended webinar. Went damn near three hours in the Mastermind about how to do the video lead gen prospecting system that I’ve been using for years that I really got my start. Started building my agency up using that method. That specific method. It’s a bit time consuming but it works incredibly well for landing clients and it’s still valid and works well today. It actually works even better today because you can embed gifs into the emails now that look like actual videos playing in the email. It’s a click enticer. It’s click bait so-to-speak.

Anyways, we went through three hours of training on how to do it step-by-step and I basically just edited that webinar. Put it into separate modules. Individual lesson videos and sections with notes and all that kind of stuff. We packaged it up and that’s basically it. It’s a very riffle approach instead of a shotgun approach for targeting prospects, but it works incredibly well.

The good news is about 90 percent of it can be outsourced. There is a part of it that should be done by whoever … If you’re a one man agency or solopreneur or whatever, you’re going to want to record the audit videos, or if you’ve got a sales person or something like that, maybe it would be them, but somebody obviously that knows a little bit about whatever service it is that they’re selling, but other than that the rest of everything else can be outsourced and so we’ve had questions a lot recently over the last few weeks about prospecting and how to keep your pipeline full and all that kind of stuff. One way to do it is just to consistently be prospecting. Make it part of your standard operating procedure. Your just normal weekly tasks in your business should be prospecting so that you always keep your pipeline full.

That’s why I think this course was so timely because if you outsource it then you know it gets done, and that way you can keep your pipeline full of leads at all times so that you can cherry pick the best clients, number one and number two you won’t be so desperate when you are talking to the … If you only got five leads for three months, then you try so hard to close all five. Whereas, if you had 10 or 15 leads per week, then you could be a hell of a lot more selective and really, if somebody’s going to give you any resistance, thank you very much, see you later, click. Hang up, move on to the next one.

Adam: Definitely.

Bradley: I think it’s going to be a good course coming out. I think a lot of you guys, about 60 percent of our audience is into local marketing. I think this will help a lot of you to be able to generate some clients, as well as maybe land service providers if you’re selling leads.

Adam: Definitely. Yeah, it’s a good one. Like Bradley said, it can save you a ton of time. It’s going to keep your pipeline full, and it works. I’ve used this stuff too in a couple different industries and this really applies to anyone, which is really cool. You can use this for consulting. You could use this for financial services. You could use this for contractors, and it has a very good response rate, which is why it is the lead gen system using video. Anyways, more on that later. We’ll be telling you guys all about that.

The other thing we wanted to tell you about was Jeffrey Smith. If you missed his SEO boot camp webinar that was, I’m going to get the date wrong, I think it was early December or late November, but that went really well. We had some technical issues the very first time we had him on. He came back, had a webinar, that went great. We got really good feedback. People who hopped in the course loved it. I know Bradley, you said you went through it, or did you go through all of it or parts of it?

Bradley: Not all of it. I’ve been through parts of it. Kind of like what Marco mentioned to me. I just go through and find stuff that I need when it’s pertinent at that particular time. Everything I’ve seen has been so thorough though. It’s training after our own hearts in that its so detailed and he went way over and above and it’s an amazing course.

Adam: Cool. So we’re going to have him back. That will be on Monday. We’re getting stuff set up for that right now, so we’ll be sending out emails about that. Be sure to check that out and we will have a replay available if you can’t make it live on Monday.

Before we get into it I wanted to remind everybody about the charity that we’re supporting throughout January. That’s still going on. We’ve had a lot of really good donations so far. It’s really impressive so first of all, thank you to everyone who’s helped out and then Marco, if you want to tell people, because I know we have people come who aren’t here all the time. If you want to tell them quickly about what the charity is, whose it for?

Marco: Yeah sure. It supplies uniforms and books for kids. We’re targeting first, second and third grade kids. We want to keep them in school. A lot of times the reason why they can’t go to school is simply because they don’t have the supplies, the uniforms or the books. They don’t have shoes. Right? They have to go to school barefoot. Imagine if you’re having … still in 2018 going to school barefoot, man. This is the type of stuff that we’re dealing with. Not only that, the environment that these kids live in. Someone comes knocking at the door, you don’t know who’s coming knocking at your door. They’re living in a place where they’re under lock and key. When they go out they have to go out in groups because they have to run a gauntlet man. Drug dealers, drug users. Just the worst of the worst man, so what we’re trying to do is, I know that education is the key to success. Without an education all you’re doing is you’re going to stay in that poverty cycle because you’re not going to know anything except that which you experience.

So experiencing an education, experiencing the world, experiencing all of the different things that are offered through an education opens your mind to all kinds of possibilities and it lets you know that you’re not useless. That you’re not worthless. Someone is taking the time to tell you you’re actually worth something, which to me, that’s incredible. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re going into these neighborhoods. We’re trying to get these kids, as many as we can. Right now we’re almost at the 10k mark, which is what had set. 100 kids takes $10,000. We’re almost there so if it’s a dollar, if it’s two dollars, we don’t care. Just go ahead. Please donate. Thank you very much those who have donated already. This is really a really good cause, man.

Adam: Awesome.

Marco: I just hope people will listen and donate and I dropped the link on the event for those who would like to go and take a look at the video and see what it’s all about, more in depth.

Adam: Awesome. Thanks again as Marco said, to everyone who’s donated so far. We appreciate it. When is it? I think we got another week or two right?

Marco: Yeah. We made the cutoff on the 26th so we can go the week of 29th for the supplies. Just before they’re going to school on February 5th, but after that we’re going to keep it open. We’re going to do something else so that when next February comes around we’re ready for even more kids to go to school. We’ll be doing something. We’ll announce it. I’ll talk to you guys and we’ll work it out.

Adam: Sounds good. Awesome. Well if you are new to Semantic Mastery, first off, thank you for joining us on Hump Day Hangouts. A lot of times we get asked, “Where’s a good place for me to start?” Well the Hump Day Hangouts, you’re in the right place so that’s the good place to start. The next step would be the Battle Plan and we’ve got a discount code. I’ll pop that up on the page, but check out the Battle Plan, it’s a solid investment and it is very, very much worth the little amount of money you have to pay for all the information in there.

If you don’t yet have an account over at SerpSpace, go to serpspace.com, you can open up an account for free. Check out the tools there, check out the Done for You services and if you’re really jonesing for some Semantic Mastery information and you just need to see Bradley making a chart or something during the week head over to support.semanticmastery.com and that’s where we put a lot of these common questions that come up, or the more in depth answers where Bradley’s maybe drawing a chart or giving some information, so you can go check that out and get an answer in the middle of the week.

If you’re really ready to take things up and you’re not new maybe to Semantic Mastery, then I highly suggest going to the mastermind.semanticmastery.com. I’ll pop the link on there and if you’re ready to join the Mastermind, that’s the place to be. If you ever have any questions about that, you can contact us at support@semanticmastery.com. If you have any questions about the Mastermind after looking through the page and seeing if maybe it’s a right fit for you or not, we’d be happy to chat with you.

Bradley: Sweet.

Adam: All right. Anybody else? Any announcements or are we ready to get rolling?

Bradley: No. I’m ready to get in questions. Just one brief thing. The new Mastermind curriculum starts this week. We have our first Mastermind Webinar for 2018 under the new training schedule, which is tomorrow. We’re in the PPC module. I’m actually a bit behind in preparing the presentation and training for tomorrow, but whatever is fine, because I imagine for the next couple weeks it’s going to be a little bit in disarray as we settle into this new training, but we’re going to be doing … AdWords has been updated, the interface has, so we’re going to be doing AdWords for local, as well as for national stuff, which could apply to affiliate campaigns, plus we will be doing AdWords for YouTube for again, local led gen, as well as national lead gen and then also for affiliate stuff and we’re going to be doing some of that for Semantic Mastery for our own channel, for example. Some of that will also be included and then we’ll be doing some Bing ads and also Hernan’s going to be doing some training on Facebook ads. This is all stuff that’s going to be in part of module one, which should last probably about six weeks and so again, I would highly encourage you to come join the Mastermind.

Last thing I want to mention very briefly is, and I say this the beginning of every Hump Day Hangouts go to bradelybenner.com and subscribe and the reason I say that is because I got an email from one of my subscribers today that was replying, and it’s Jenny, and Jenny is always on our Hump Day Hangouts asking questions. I’m not going to read your email to me, Jenny, but the last two lines that you put in the email as a reply to one of my emails about the Mindset series was, “Thanks for kicking my ass today, sir. May I have another?” That’s awesome. I get some replies from some of my subscribers because it’s just about mindset stuff and I highly recommend that you go check it out. At least I know it helps me to be able to write those.

By the way, I started crossfit training as a coach every single day this week. This week is when I started. I was supposed to start last week but the extreme cold prevented me from doing it, so I haven’t been able to write an email every morning, but I’m trying to squeeze it in when I can. Like today, I got the email written right after I got back from the crossfit gym. Just to let you guys know, I’m trying to write every single day. I’ve got about 40 emails in the series now. Go subscribe, check it out. If you don’t like it, just unsubscribe. Okay? With that said, let’s get into it.

Okay you guys. Let me know if everything’s coming through okay?

Adam: Yup.

What Are Your Recommended Frequency And Topics On Press Releases?

Bradley: Sweet. Okay, Harold’s up first. He says, “Hello everybody, thank you so much for giving us this space so we can ask our questions.” You’re welcome Harold. “Mine is, how often should I get press releases and what are some good topics?”

Well the frequency is really up to you. The nice thing about press releases is whenever a press release is picked up and distributed, it gets picked up by usually hundreds of websites so it’s a kind of a natural occurrence to get a bunch of links back from a press release, because companies all the time are announcing news and it’s a natural type thing. It’s traditional. It’s normal and so you can be a bit aggressive with press releases. I know I usually do them about once every two weeks. That’s usually the speed with which I do it, until I get the results that I’m looking to achieve, which is typically to rank in the three pack. Sometimes it’s organic stuff, it depends, but for the most part I’m trying to rank in the Maps pack and usually , just do them about every two weeks.

However, I know Rob, for example, the co-creator of RYS Reloaded with Marco, he just hammers the shit out of sites with press release, after press release, after press release and he’s able to get results so I don’t think there’s much of a velocity issue. Again, I do it about every two weeks, but I know that it’s been done a lot more than that. The frequency a lot higher than that and it hasn’t caused any issues. Marco, do you have a comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, as a matter of fact, I haven’t seen it. Like you said, we just bang one right after another and we stack them the right way going after different URLs. Now we have another press release service that has even more publication sites so that’s a really good mix. It’s really good to mix them up. One of them gives us embeds, which is even better for us and so it’s a lot of good things that you could do and a lot of nasty things that you can do with press releases.

Bradley: Yeah. All right, and as far as good topics, Harold, all right, so there’s a couple of things I want to mention here about topics. One, pretty much anything can be turned into a press release. Any sort of company news, any sort of seasonal changes, sales, specials, new products, new services. Anything at all can really be worthy of a news release to be written. What I’ve been doing for the most part is we published press releases anytime a customer review has been received by one of my lead gen sites or one of my contractor, client sites, excuse me. That’s another reason to publish a press release is because you’re announcing the glowing testimonial review that you just received, right? That’s just another example and I like using that method because it encourages the business owners to solicit reviews from their customers and then every time they get a review, I get notified and I go publish a press release for it and I get to bill them for it, and they get to puff out their chest and say, “Look at me, look at how awesome we are.”

I’ve been using that method. In fact, that’s our front end service on our new agency. It’s doing basically reputation. It’s a combination of video marketing, reputation marketing and PR marketing. It’s a combination of those three and that’s our front end service. It’s a very, very powerful way.

Also, any time you publish a blog post typically you could do that. Now, the last thing I want to mention about that is if you’ve got a good writer, a PR writer that you work with, a good PR writer will typically be able to create an angle out of just about anything. So an angel or a news hook out of just about anything. The other option would be to use the press release writers from the distribution service that you’re using.

For example in Serpspace, we don’t even allow manually submitted PRs anymore, I don’t think. I think we just have our net distribution service or network writers write them, because they know what the editorial guidelines are and a lot of those distribution service writers, right, that will provide as just an add on service, the press release to be written. It’s usually about $30 or so or something like that and it ranges between $30 to $45, somewhere in that range, but a lot of times, all they need is just a handful of small details and then they’ll create the news hook, because they know what they’re distribution network is looking for, if that makes sense?

A lot of times all I’ll do is just list who, what, when, where and then a quote from a company executive or in the case of using a review, I just quote the review, whatever the customer review text was that’s the quote. Does that make sense? That’s all we do and it’s very, very simple and I love it because it takes the content marketing side of things off my shoulders. We still have bloggers that do the curating and stuff, but I don’t have to think about so many content ideas for press releases anymore. We just say, “Hey go get another review. As soon as you get a review, let me know. We’ll publish a press release” and boom it’s done.

By the way, just to let you guys know, I had been doing that myself for my clients for my own agency every month. I would spend about two days at the beginning of the month. I still have been generating client reports and there’s a reason why I do that, because I typically, once I generate client reports and I send the reports to the clients I also include a brief breakdown of what the reports are showing in my own voice and sometimes I record a screen cast video and send that to them with an overview of what I’m seeing for the month and some new opportunities that have arisen and I’ve got a really close relationship with my clients so because of that, I don’t outsource the client reporting part of it, but I had been generating the review commercials, which is a David Sprague. Every month, this is just an add on service I added to most of my clients. I would generate a review commercial from a new review that they received within the last month and then publish the video, distribute it across my network. My syndication networks typically ranks the video, but if it doesn’t then I end up with a press release anyways.

I had been doing all of that myself for the last six or seven months since I’ve really started playing with this strategy. One of my virtual assistants is in the UK. She’s been blogging for me for, I’d say at least four years. She’s great. She reached out to me around the turn of year and said, “Hey, I’m looking for more work and we’ve been working together for years. Would you have anything else you wanted me to do?” And I was like, “Oh, perfect. I’ve been meaning to unload this work, now that I know this is a viable strategy and it’s something I’m going to do.”

The reason I’m telling you this guys, is because I want to let you know, I struggle too with doing shit that I’m not supposed to be doing. For example, taking two days at the beginning of every month to generate these review videos and order the press releases. It was something that could have been outsources three or four months ago once I really knew that it was going to be something that I was going to carry on or be a continuing service, however, I never took the time to create the process docs. I get up on my soapbox all the time and preach to you guys about outsourcing stuff, yet there are processes in my business that I still have not outsourced, and it’s just because of a lack of time, or really a lack of desire for doing it. For creating the process training for that process and what it comes down to typically is just not wanting to do it because it sucks. It’s boring work. It’s tedious and often times I’m so freaking busy with all the work that I’m trying to fulfill that I feel like I don’t have the time to create process docs about the work that I need to fulfill. If that makes sense? So it’s a catch 22. Right?

Because she gave me a reason, Michelle did, my VA. She gave me a reason and because I’ve got so much work on my plate right now for this new Mastermind training curriculum, I knew at the beginning of every month this year, I don’t want to spend two days generating reports and also the review commercials and ordering the press releases and all that stuff. I don’t want to do all that. So I spent the first two days of this week creating the training process. The training videos, the written procedures, which are in Google docs and all that and I sent that to her yesterday and she’s now going to take over it for me and guess what. I never have to fucking do it again.

The reason I went through all of that is just to let you know that this is all stuff that can be outsourced guys and I highly recommend, sometimes I need to remind myself of some of my own advice, and this is something I should have done four or five months ago, and I just finally got it done and I can tell you what a weight, a load has been lifted off my shoulders because now I’m not going to dread the beginning of the month every month because it’s going to eat up two days, if that makes sense. So guys, if you take anything away from that at all, it’s that if you’ve got stuff in your business that makes your stomach turn sometimes because you have to do it and every time it comes up it makes your stomach turn, that’s the shit you need to outsource first. Honestly, that’s the stuff, the stuff you don’t like to do or you hate to do, that’s the stuff that you should absolutely, as much as it’s going to be painful and tedious to do, but create process docs for how to do all that, and then hire that shit out so that you don’t have to do that anymore.

Again, we get into this business not because we want another job, right? We want freedom and we want to enjoy it and so sometimes there’s obviously going to be stuff in everyone’s business that has to done, that’s not enjoyable. Outsource it. If you create the exact process for how to do it, you can outsource anything. This was not a pitch for Outsource KingPin, but we do have a training product that specifically teaches the methods for how to do exactly what I just described and it’s called Outsource Kingpin. Check that out. I know that was a long winded answer and I’m sorry Harold, but I just wanted to share with you guys that even I struggle with not following my own advice at times, but outsource as much as you can.

Anybody want to comment on that before I move on?

Chris: I agree with you Bradley.

How Does Google View Directory Sites In Terms Of SEO?

Bradley: Okay. Good enough. Thank you. Juan says, “Hello lovely people and thanks for having me. Are directory site’s viewed by Google as good or bad for SEO?” I think Juan, this is going to be not anything based in absolute data for me anymore, as it is just more of opinion or assumption, but I’d like to get some opinions of the other guys. I believe it has more to do with the directory itself then just a blanket statement.

For example, I know they say reciprocal links are bad, but I’ve seen many cases where reciprocal links actually are still very beneficial and I know a lot of low end directories that are really spammy, will require a reciprocal link, those are the ones that I would suspect are not good, but there’s a lot of good other directories that are good.

For example, Yelp is a directory site right? It’s a local or it’s a business directory site, but it is a directory site. We all know that’s a good link, but then obviously if it’s some obscure directory out there that is just … and they’re all requiring reciprocal links and stuff like that, then I would say no. I think it would be more about selective then just a blanket statement. I think it depends on the directory itself. What do you guys say?

Chris: Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree with you Bradley. The fact that on some directories you need to think about this in terms of what kind of value can you get from the directory, right? As well as what kind of value can you get from the reciprocal link, because if it is let’s say that you’re doing, I don’t know SEO for a doctor, and then you can get the doctor, put it in directory for doctor’s and even further for local doctors that would actually, could help you bring in some profit. Right? Even further if the directory is ranking in Google. Paid directories sometimes work as well because just being paid, even if it’s $5 or $10 for a lifetime link, usually work because they weed out 99 percent of spammy links so have that in mind. Some of them are really, really high authority so I would say that it would be on a case by case basis.

Some people would say that, for example, blog comments will be bad for SEO and that’s not entirely true.

Bradley: That’s right.

Chris: If you make a really thoughtful blog comment on a highly relevant publication or blog, it can blow your website away, right? It can really help you so I think it’s a case by case basis. If you’re on GSA’s spamming blog post or spamming directories, which you could definitely do, just do it as far away as possible from your clients or your own website, but if it’s a manual placement from a website that you can get value from and value meaning either authority or traffic, I would say go ahead and do it.

Bradley: Good advice. Marco?

Chris: No I think you guys covered it perfect.

What Is The Best Way To Indexing One Million Pages A Day?

Bradley: Beautiful. Fabian. What’s up Fabian? He says, “I want to index about 1,000,000 pages a day.” Wow. Okay. “So I need a very scalable solution. How would you do this using IFTTT and Plus Twitter. If yes, how often can I post the tweets that my account won’t be shut down? Should I create several accounts and spread my posts on them? Thanks a lot.”

Yeah, I don’t think you would want to do a million tweets per day in one Twitter account. I don’t think that’s a good idea. You probably need a hell of a lot of Twitter accounts to be able to accomplish a million tweets per day. We have an indexing service in Service Space. I don’t know if that amount of links would be a scalable option. There is one service that I can mention for mass volume that I know my, one of our link building director, he basically pointed it out a while ago. Now it’s been probably a year and a half since he mentioned this to me, I know I still use it though, but it’s called Express Indexer. Let me see if I can …

Hernan: Yeah, Bradley.

Bradley: Go ahead.

Hernan: I talked to [Debbie 00:28:48] already about this because I had seen this question come up. I actually saw it on Facebook.

Bradley: Okay.

Hernan: And he said, “No, it’s not working.”

Bradley: Okay.

Hernan: As it used to. He said that he’s trying to find a way around it. He’s still working on it because we had to shut down the indexing service in Serpspace actually.

Bradley: Oh did we? I didn’t even know that.

Hernan: Yeah, we had to shut it down because it just wasn’t indexing the way that it should. This option IFTTT to Twitter is not scalable because you’re going to need, for a million pages, what a hundred thousand profiles to push 10 tweets a day, 20 so that’s how you have to look at it. You can’t get away with more than 10 or 20, 20 tweets a day actually is pushing it because you’d have to scale up to 20. You can’t start at 20. You’ll get banned now.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: In Twitter. So I don’t have a solution. You don’t want to submit a million pages to the Google URL submitter, because you’ll trigger the captcha and so I don’t have an answer for this other than what we were using isn’t working at this level.

Bradley: Yeah. Well good. Thanks for chiming in. That’s a good question Fabian. I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer for you. Apologize.

What Are The Different Ways Of Indexing Local Citations?

Okay, so Shripad, I guess. Forgive me if I mispronounce that. He says, “What are the different ways to index local citations?”

Well indexers work. Typically that’s what I do. For example, when I order citations, whenever I get the citation report back, I just open up the spreadsheet. Copy all the citation URLs and then just submit them to the indexer. I usually submit them to multiple indexers. That’s all I do. That’s all you need to do. Okay?

Some citations, if you try to let them index naturally, sometimes it takes forever for citations to index naturally, that’s why I typically, as soon as I get a citation report guys, I’ll just go copy them and submit them to at least two indexing services to try to speed that up a little bit.

mbedding Maps – MyMaps Or GMB Map Page

All right. RL Sanders, “Hey guys, as always thank you for what you do. When you guys talk about embedding maps are you talking about my maps or the GMB map page?”

Both, RL. Both. I don’t mean embed both at the same time. I haven’t really tested with that, but I just mean you can do an embed run with the My Maps and then do another embed run with the GMB maps page. I’ll be a hundred percent honest with you, even though I know it’s super powerful, the My Maps thing, I don’t do a lot of that. I don’t set those up typically. If I get it back from a drive stack then I’ll do an embed blast with that through MAPS Powerhouse, but I don’t do, when I’m working on client stuff myself, I typically don’t do the My Maps. I just end up doing all the GMB stuff, but the My Maps are very, very powerful and what’s great about the My Maps guys is you can squeeze them, basically do follow links in and there’s a whole lot of ninja stuff that you can do. Marco teaches an RYS Academy that I just don’t have the time to do it or I would do more of it, but fortunately we have a [jessen 00:32:12] who can build them for us.

Can You Share Any Tips For Finding Local SEO Clients?

“Also, can you repost the link for Marco’s charity?” Yes. He posted it already, I believe. RL’s another question. He says, “Can you share any tips for finding local SEO clients? I need a few recurring payments to get the ball rolling. Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks.”

Yeah, look, I don’t know if I want to share this on … Well okay, RL, let me just say this. There’s one method that … no I’m not going to share that here. What I’m going to say is select a niche, RL. Right? Select a niche that you want, an industry that you prefer to work in or that you know that you may already have some experience in, whatever. Something that you’re familiar with or that you have a genuine interest in so that it makes it feel like not so much like work. Then start targeting those clients. Craft a very specific message. Again, we talk about the video lead gen system, which is going to be the product that we’re going to release in about two weeks. You could use that very specifically for finding and prospecting local SEO clients. Finding the clients isn’t that difficult, it’s the prospecting. Right? Finding prospects isn’t hard. You can use scrapers, there’s lot of tools out there. You can hire VA’s to do that kind of stuff, whatever. That’s not really the difficult part.

The hard part is starting the conversation with them. I found that even sales isn’t that difficult. The hardest part is starting the conversation from a position where they’re willing to receive the message and I found the video email is a fantastic way to start that conversation. To initiate that conversation. Break the ice and lower the defenses a bit and get the conversation started because you can position yourself as an expert and show them beyond a shadow of a doubt that you know what they hell you’re doing, whereas 99 percent of anybody else that’s contacted them about marketing services isn’t going to do that, and that’s what makes you stand out.

I would recommend that you pick that up when we release it in a few weeks. Obviously if you’re in the Mastermind RL, we cover that in there. That’s all included, but we did also cover a very specific … By the way, the method that I just said I’m not going to reveal right here is in that course that will be released in about two weeks or whatever. Just keep that in mind guys. It’s a very specific method for finding video SEO clients. Well for finding local clients period, but it’s a very specific way, using YouTube to find those clients and it works like crazy. Okay?

Anyways, I have to tease you guys with that a little bit, because I can’t reveal it here. It’s in the course. Come to the Mastermind though and I’ll share it with you.

What Are Your Recommendations On InMotion Hosting All Domains In One Cpanel Account?

Ajay says, “Two questions. I have a hosting account with In Motion Hosting.” Okay. “I just realized they might be hosting all my websites, domains, as add on domains under the same C-Panel account. What is your recommendation?”

Yeah, that’s how they do it, Ajay. When you have a shared hosting account that’s how it works. Every time you create an add on domain, it’s really like a sub-domain of your whatever the IP or C-Panel was set up as. It doesn’t matter. You can still configure your sites to all resolve to the exact, to whatever domain it is that you’ve added, but that’s just how it works in C-Panel. Okay? That’s not an issue.

Are There Any Benefits Of Sub Folders In Terms Of Link Juice?

“Number two, I had read an article recently about the advantages of sub-directories for link juice over sub-domains. The following link is … “

Guys we need to probably create a … somebody wants to make a note of this, a frequently asked question about this because we get this question a lot.

Yes, sub-domain folders apparently through a lot of testing, not so much my own, but from other people’s testing I do understand that there’s supposed to be a slight SEO advantage of doing multiple sites in sub-directories as opposed to on sub-domains, but we have repeatedly, or we’ve held our position on this for many years now, which is that sub-domains in my opinion is a superior method. There may be a slight SEO benefit to doing sub-directories over sub-domains. That’s fine. I get that. The problem with that is every single site that’s in a sub-directory is subordinate to the root domain, which means that if the root domain catches a penalty or if any of the subordinate sites in the sub-folders or sub-directories catch a penalty, it will penalize the entire domain and all of the other sibling sub-directories. Does that make sense?

The problem is it’s a penalty that would be leveled to basically the root, which would damage everything. It would be applied to everything domain wide, however, if you do a sub-domain, then in Google’s eyes, each sub-domain site is considered a separate entity. Right? A separate website and so when I talk about using sub-domains, it’s a way to offer or provide a level of protection for every individual site. The trick with that is to make sure that you keep the root clean and don’t do anything spammy to the root, because just as we talked about with the sub-directories, if the root was to catch a penalty or any of the sub-directories catch a penalty, it would apply to the root, and therefore tank all the rest of the sites. If you catch a penalty on the root domain with sub-domain sites, all the sub-domain sites will be affected as well because it is a domain wide penalty, but if you get a penalty on a sub-domain site, then it only applies to that sub-domain. Your root would still remain intact and your other sibling sub-domains would also remain untouched, unaffected.

There’s a reason why we do it that way and it’s to mitigate risk, to reduce potential catastrophic failure of all your sites if you were to catch a penalty. That’s why we do it that way. Okay? I don’t suspect you guys have anything to add to that, do you?

Adam: No, you nailed it.

Bradley: All right cool. Great question though Ajay. That was a really good question. We get that often, but guys, like I said, we should probably just make a frequently asked question out of that one.

Did You Eventually Charge More As The Company Grew Or Did You Keep The Rate The Same?

Mohammed, what’s up buddy? He’s recently joined the Mastermind and he’s been incredibly active in there. I saw your question Mohammed about local stuff in there. We’re going to cover that slightly tomorrow in the Mastermind as well. So keep that in mind.

“Hey guys have you ever worked with a small company that grew because of your marketing?” Yes, my BB’s Tree Guys. “Did you eventually charge more as the company grew or do you keep the rate the same?” Well Mohammed, that’s a great question by the way. Yes, I always … Well let me rephrase, if I add additionally marketing services I always increase. I don’t necessarily increase the rate, but because I’m adding more services I bill them more. Does that make sense?

To answer your question. For example, I just had a client call on Monday. A client of mine that I’ve had for, well shit, she was one of my first clients and it’s not 2018 and I opened my agency in March of 2012. So almost six years she’s been a client of mine. She called because she’s been ranked at the top of Maps for six freaking years and she, like often happens with a lot of clients, they tend to forget why they’re getting leads on line. Especially when it’s been six years, right? You guys would be absolutely ashamed if you knew what I was charging this lady, because again, it was one of my very first clients and it was such a small amount of money per month. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s $250 a month is what she’s paying me and she’s been ranked at the top of Maps for six freaking years, but she has never wanted to do any additional marketing services.

I have pitched her a least a dozen times on different types of marketing services. Press releases. PR marketing, video marketing. All this other kind of stuff and she never wants to do a damn thing. On Monday, we scheduled a call for Monday, I guess actually it was last Friday, anyways, we scheduled a call from two months ago and we got on the phone and she was like, “I need to know what you’ve been doing. I just really want to know if it’s worth me still spending $250 a month.” I almost laughed at her. I told her, I was like, “Listen, you were one of my first clients. You’re on a rate that is so much lower. That is less than half what I typically charge any client, even just to speak to them basically and I’ve left you at that because we’ve had you ranked, you’ve been receiving good results. I’ve pitched you on other marketing services. You don’t want to do any of it. Look, if you want to cancel that’s fine, but I don’t understand after six years of getting results.”

Anyways, it was just this long basically me having to convince her not to cancel services with me, when honestly, I should have just let her freaking cancel. I should have just said, “Hey, if you don’t think $250 is worth you being number one in Google and have been for six years, please feel free to cancel. See how you do in six months.” You know what I mean?

Chris: She’s costing you money.

Bradley: Huh?

Chris: She’s costing you money.

Bradley: Probably, but my point with that was that I have clients that have been grandfathered into specific rates that I have not raised. I probably could, but I haven’t. If they ask me for additional marketing services, then I will price those accordingly based upon my current rates, but whatever I have been charging them guys, I will leave it as is. But again, this is going to be different. Marco, I’m sure, does stuff different. I’m sure Hernan does stuff differently. Adam does stuff differently.

Personally, I don’t charge more for existing clients for existing services. I just charge more for new services as they add them. What are your opinions guys?

Chris: Yeah, this is actually a good question. I think it’s a case by case basis. I usually don’t, as you were saying, I usually don’t … unless I have some fixed costs that needs abating. You know how we raise our BA salaries once in whatever. We try to do that for BA’s.

Bradley: Yup.

Chris: If that’s the case, then I would raise it slightly. Just to update the costs, but I don’t do it, not because they’re getting more clients because of what I’m doing I won’t do it. That’s why I really like half retainer, half revenue share agreements. Revenue share could be whatever. It could be on a sales basis, it could be on a lead basis. If they are paying you, for example, x amount of money on retainer, we can be a little bit lower since you’re getting some revenue share. There is no cap to the amount of money that you can make and at the end of the day you will be motivated to work more for the guys, right? Because if they are making more money, you’re making more money, we’re all happy. If it’s activity based, meaning blog posts, et cetera, et cetera. Unless they increase the amount of activity, I don’t charge them more for it.

Sometimes, as a business grows, this is the good news, is that, as a business grows, as Bradley was saying, they will require more, hopefully they will require more service from you and that’s a completely different story, right?

Bradley: Right. Anybody else?

Hernan: I charge high enough from the beginning so that it’ll be awhile before I decide to raise my rates, but yes, I definitely do if year over year, you can show growth that can be attributed to your efforts. If you can show growth at that level, right? 10, 20, 30 percent, whatever it is, then I would raise my rates accordingly and then you’re going to get a lot of push back. You’re going to get a lot of no’s, get a lot of people that’ll just walk away and that’s all good and well. I have one specific company that I did a bunch of AdWords for and it was a million dollar account and we had it humming. We had it to the point where they were making just so much stinking money that I told them that I want more money and they decided to go with what they had in house and try to keep it that way, but 18 months later they contacted me again and said, could you come and work on our AdWords again. This is after they told me that they longer needed me, but I was at a point in my career, my life and my on line business where I could tell them, “Hell no. I don’t need a client like you.”

The thing is you have to weigh whether it’s worth raising the rates, how much it is that you’re charging from the beginning. If you price yourself right, if you know what you’re worth and you know what you’re going to be worth to that company, then you’ll be charging the correct price right at the beginning so you should know what you’re worth rather than worrying about what it is that you’re bringing to the client. The client should just say yes to you with whatever it is that you have because you’re producing.

Bradley: Yeah. Lastly on that Mohammed, when you said like BB’s Tree Guys. Yeah, but remember with the Tree, especially with the one contractor that I’ve really, really expanded his business, that’s a revenue share model, just like what Hernan was mentioning. I cover all the costs of expanding any marketing services. I build all the infrastructure at my expense and then I just get a cut of every job that gets closed. Again, with that, when you’re selling leads or you’re on a revenue or equity share model, then its unlimited scalability in that I don’t charge them anymore, it’s the same rate. I get 10 percent of any job that closes. Whatever the contract price is, I get 10 percent of that and that’s been that way with this contractor for four or going on five years now. Again, there’s no change in rate, but as I continue to build more and more sites and we cover more and more territory, we generate more and more leads and therefore, I make more and more money. Right?

Is It True That Google Will Penalize A Review/Product Type Rich Snippet That Is Placed On The Homepage?

Okay, I’m just going to call you Steve. What’s up buddy? He says, “Hey guys, I remember I read somewhere that putting a review product type rich snippet data on your home page instead of an organization webpage article type is not good, because Google will penalize you somehow. I mean a review product type schema, which shows those review stars below your listing in the Serps for better click through rate. Is this true or just gossip?”

Well first of all, if you’re adding schema for review stars, just for the sake of getting review stars, then yes, that structured data spam, don’t do it. You would probably get away with it for some time, but it’s likely that eventually you’ll get caught and you can get a manual spam action for that in search console, so don’t do that.

Now, if you actually have products, I don’t know because I don’t do eCommerce, but product review or product stuff, I don’t do that kind of stuff so I don’t know if there is some law or rule, not law, excuse, but some rule or best practice that states that you’re not supposed to have product reviews on your homepage. I don’t think that that’s the case though. Anybody have an answer for that? Okay.

If you do product stuff, if you have products, you sell products, for example, if it’s a product review site and the homepage has got a blog roll on it and there’s product reviews, I don’t think that that would cause a penalty because that’s a valid site right? When you’re spamming schema or structured data specifically to gain search right? Which would be like adding review stars to a site that has no business having review stars, then yes, that can be a problem so don’t do that. All right?

Is There Any Good Up-To-Date Google Adwords Course You Would Recommend?

“A short second question please. Is there any good, up-to-date AdWords course you would recommend?” Yeah, well first of all, we have Local Kingpin, but it needs to be updated because the AdWords interface has changed so much and so what I’m going to recommend is that you join Semantic Mastery Mastermind because we’re covering PPC and AdWords this month in depth. That’s going to packaged up like it’s a separate course, but we’re not selling it outside of the Mastermind. That’s how we’re going to be doing the new Mastermind this year. Every single module is basically going to be like a separate stand-alone course. They’re all going to piece together because they’re all going to be building out the same businesses, but, like this is the PPC module, so it will get packaged up into its own basically course, but only way to get it is to be in the Mastermind.

That said, the AdWords training that I learned from was Perry Marshall’s training and it was really good. Again, that was almost two years ago now though. Yeah, that was probably two years ago now so I don’t know if he’s got updated training. I’m assuming he does and that’s good training too. Okay? I would say our training because we’re current as far as we’re going to be doing all types of AdWords stuff. Google search, PPC, YouTube PPC, remarketing, maybe some display network although I’m assuming we’re going to hold that off until we do the remarketing module and that’s a separate module all together. We’ll also be doing Bing, PPC, and Hernan will be training on some Facebook PPC stuff. That’s what I would recommend is you get in there, because it will be a much more well rounded training then just buying an AdWords course alone, if that makes sense? All right.

Do You Use Any Plugins In Blocking Web Spiders?

Jenia, there he is. This is one that I was just talking about. Replied to my email. What’s up buddy? He says, “Good afternoon gentlemen, I have a question about blocking spiders. Do you use any plug-ins like Spider Spanker or anything else like that?” I don’t anymore, Jenia. I used to do all of that when I was running a lot of PBN’s and stuff, but I don’t do that anymore. I don’t even use that plug-in at all anymore.

“Is there a good way to prevent competition from reverse engineering your SEO efforts?” As far as blocking spiders, first of all, you do that through HT access. Can you do that in robots.text too? I can’t remember.

Hernan: You can but it’s always better to block them through HT Access.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: Because robots are directives that the robots can or may or may not follow. Now when you’re blocking them through HT Access, the hosting is not even serving them the webpage. You know what I’m saying?

Bradley: Right. Yup.

Marco: Yeah that’s absolutely right. HT Access and you block everything except the bot that you want in there and that’s how you protect yourself except that the bot, the coders are smart enough to always change the user agent, and they’re constantly updating and so there’s a website and I’ll have to go and dig through my stuff, but there’s a website that constantly updates the bot that you should be blocking. I’ll see if I can find it and post it in here so that you can use that. They update every 30 days. Every 60 days or so with new bot that you should block and user agents, but definitely HT Access. No plug-ins.

Does Blocking Web Spiders A Good Way To Prevent Competition From Reverse Engineering Your SEO Efforts?

Bradley: Yeah. Okay, we’re going to try to run through guys because we’ve only got a couple questions left and we’re almost out of time and I want to get to them. It looks like we really only got like two, three questions left. Jenia, he says, “Is there a good way to prevent competition from reverse engineering your SEO efforts?”

There’s some things that you can do, Jenia. For example, we talk about in the Mastermind how to use tag pages, well canonicals period. Very strategically, which will hide, will mask your efforts from prying eyes so-to-speak. Canonicals are a great way to do that, but there’s a lot of other stuff that we talk about in the Mastermind too and I’m not saying that because I don’t want to answer your question, Jenia. One, when it comes to reverse engineering, if it’s a good SEO they’re going to be able to find a lot, right? One of the things that you could do would be to use Spider Spanker or some sort of bot blocking stuff and block the Majestic SEO Crawlers and the AH Refs Crawlers and things like that so that nobody can index your links or what’s on your site. The important thing then would be to use those bot blockers on the sites that are linking to you.

In other words, when I was doing a lot of PBN work, I would use bot blockers to block Majestic and AH Refs on the sites, on my PBN sites so that those links wouldn’t get indexed. The inbound links pointing to my money sites wouldn’t get indexed and people wouldn’t be able to see them. Does that make sense? Google will see them, because they’ll show up in your links to your site in search console, but the SEO analysis applications wouldn’t, right? That’s one way you could do it, but again, I don’t use PBNs really at all anymore, so because of that I just … remember guys, we’d talk about using syndication networks and we’d do a shit ton of back linking to the syndication network properties, so people want to start looking out at our different tiers and doing back link analysis on tiers, then they’re likely going to be able to find out what we’re doing, but if they’re just going to look at the money site, they’re not going to see a shit ton of inbound links, or if they do, they’re going to be press release links and syndication network links and drive stack links and stuff like that. Does that make sense?

I don’t really go … I don’t spend a lot of time trying to prevent other people from seeing what I’m doing anymore. I just don’t really worry about it that much, Jenia. “Or are so amazing that no one can’t touch this.” No anybody can be taken down.

Can You Explain The Basics Of How Money Site Integrates When Using Syndication And RYS Academy For Both Local And Affiliate/Ecommerce?

All right, we’re almost out of time guys. Nigel says, “Good day gents, first I want to thank you for the Hump Day Hangout resource. You all are much appreciated.” Plus one that. Okay, he says, “Question, can you explain the basics of how money site integrates when using syndication in RYS Academy for both local and affiliate eCommerce. What I mean specifically is how would you set up the money page? If you can explain this a bit, because honestly the term money site is used so freely in groups I sometimes I feel like the only one not in on the secret.”

Money site just means your primary digital asset. Whatever you use to create revenue, right? So a money site, if you’re doing lead gen, could just be a landing page, right? What I mean by local lead gen. Say your generating leads for a plumber, for example, then your money site could typically be a lead gen style landing page. Somebody lands on it and it’s got a big contact form. Says contact request form and it’s got a big phone number on it and that’s it. That could be a money site. Another money site could be an affiliate site. Could be a blog. I’m sorry, was somebody going to say something? I thought I heard somebody trying to jump in.

Marco: No.

Adam: I don’t think so.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, a money site just means any website that you own, or that you are generating revenue with. Don’t let that confuse you. As far as syndication RYS for both local and affiliate eCommerce, I’m not sure what you mean unless you’re trying to set up a local aspect on a site as well as an eCommerce or affiliate and again, that’s a little bit of a unique situation and with our limited time right now, I don’t know how I can really unpack that and describe to you a good strategy without knowing a little bit more. I know it can be done, I’m just not sure how to tell you how to set that up without knowing specifically what your objectives are. Does that make sense?

Okay, it says, “Example for local create an article and place a link with offer. Where, how many, suggestion, where it links into syndication, RYS general was more than enough.” Well remember RYS Academy is just basically it’s like a link building method so that you can boost existing properties, right, and the drive files themselves can rank, but syndication networks are just a way of … it’s a content amplification method, right? You publish content to your money site, or your YouTube channel, either one and it syndicates out across your network for content application, excuse me, amplification as well as provide some SEO benefits. Okay? Just keep that in mind. The link with the offer, where and how many? That’s really just going to depend on many different things, but essentially yeah, you create an article and then you can link out to whatever you want. If it’s an affiliate offer, so be it. Okay? Again, I apologize that I can’t give you more specific answer. I would need more details Nigel.

Would You Say That It’s True That The IFTTT + SEO Strategy That You Teach In Semantic Mastery Will Probably Stand The Test Of Time, Not Fall Victim To Any Google Penalties?

All right guys we’re almost out of time. Dee says, “Would you say that it’s true that the IFTTT plus SEO strategies that you teach in Semantic Mastery will probably stand the test of time, not fall victim to any of Google’s penalties?” Well that’s our hope, Dee and I certainly feel confident that it’s not going to become an issue because it has been effective for me since 2012 when I started using this method. It’s only become more effective in pretty much standard op … It’s almost required now to have your footprint. To claim your footprint as a brand. That’s what helps to validate the entity, so I can’t imagine, although I don’t work for Google. I could change tomorrow, it could change six months from now. It could change six years from now, I don’t know, but as it stands right now and the foreseeable future, I don’t see it creating any problems. Okay?

I think we’re done guys.

Adam: Yes.

Marco: Before we go just a second. I listed the resource on the page. It’s called botreports.com and it actually gives you the HT Access code for blocking whatever specific bots you want to block. It’s a really awesome resource.

Bradley: Yup. You got it. Okay guys thanks for everybody being here. Remember Syndication Academy webinar starts in about one minute, well probably two and then we’ll be at Mastermind webinar tomorrow with the new curriculum, so we’ll see you guys there.

Adam: Awesome buddy. Bye everybody.

Hernan: Bye everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 166 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 166

Click on the video above to watch Episode 166 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://ift.tt/2BQjTCo.

  Announcement

Bradley: Bots.

Adam: Oh, we’re live. All right. This is the fun episode where you watch Adam take notes and Bradley talk about stuff that has nothing to do with Hump Day Hangouts. Just kidding.

Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts and I believe it’s episode 166. Correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t have it up in front of me actually.

Bradley: You are correct sir.

Chris: Yes.

Adam: Before we get into things real quick we’re going to do a quick hello to everybody. Then we’ve got a few special announcements, and then, as usual, we’ll get into the questions, but I’ll start on my left here and see Chris. How’s it going with you?

Chris: Doing good. Got a early rise up tomorrow. 7am airport time and then off to the slopes for some winter action.

Adam: Nice, nice. Outstanding. Hernan how about yourself?

Hernan: Living the life stanman. No, I’m good. I’m good. Excited to be here guys. Excited for what’s coming. We’re going to be with Adam I think it’s early to mention that but we’re going to go to the [inaudible 00:01:00] Live, right Adam?

Adam: Yup.

Hernan: In March. By the end of it. So if you guys want to hand out at some point. We’re going to be doing some networking, we’re going to be doing some good stuff over there sir.

Adam: Yeah definitely. Let us know if you’re going and then if you’re in the area. I think it’s Orlando so we’ll see. We’ll have a little bit of time, can’t guarantee anything right now, but obviously would love to hear from you.

Hernan: Yeah. We’ll have more info as time goes, as we get closer but we’ll be representing Semantic Mastery over there.

Adam: Cool.

Bradley: Represent, represent.

Hernan: Yeah.

Adam: Marco how’s it going man?

Marco: What’s up man? I just got out of the lab with Rob. We’re tearing down right brain, just a little bit. A little part of the algorithm that we found. It’s amazing. It’s amazing the stuff that Google has that’s public and that you can actually manipulate where I constantly back and forth, back and forth. Let’s do this and let’s try that, and what’s this and what’s that and then sometimes even our own users. Not necessarily in our way as reloaded. This was actually from a question in the Cemented Master Mastermind that made us go about 45 minutes into the lab. Okay let’s track this down, let’s see what happened. That was really good. I had fun. That’s my idea of fun. 45 minutes of looking at code.

Adam: Glad you guys are doing that. I’m sure something good is going to end up coming out of this. Bradley, how you doing?

Bradley: I’m good. Happy to be here. Got lots to go through today. We’ve also, just update guys, we’ve got the Syndication Academy Update Webinar Number 18, immediately following Hump Day Hangouts today, so if you’re in Syndication Academy, go check the events tab in Facebook and you should be able to get the URL to it. Okay?

Adam: Awesome. All right a couple quick announcements. We will be sending out some more information about the next two things I’m going to mention. The first one is video lead gen system. Bradley just put the finishing touches on a video email prospecting course that kind of deep dive into that so Bradley you want to tell people just real quick about that?

Bradley: Yeah, we did a really extended webinar. Went damn near three hours in the Mastermind about how to do the video lead gen prospecting system that I’ve been using for years that I really got my start. Started building my agency up using that method. That specific method. It’s a bit time consuming but it works incredibly well for landing clients and it’s still valid and works well today. It actually works even better today because you can embed gifs into the emails now that look like actual videos playing in the email. It’s a click enticer. It’s click bait so-to-speak.

Anyways, we went through three hours of training on how to do it step-by-step and I basically just edited that webinar. Put it into separate modules. Individual lesson videos and sections with notes and all that kind of stuff. We packaged it up and that’s basically it. It’s a very riffle approach instead of a shotgun approach for targeting prospects, but it works incredibly well.

The good news is about 90 percent of it can be outsourced. There is a part of it that should be done by whoever … If you’re a one man agency or solopreneur or whatever, you’re going to want to record the audit videos, or if you’ve got a sales person or something like that, maybe it would be them, but somebody obviously that knows a little bit about whatever service it is that they’re selling, but other than that the rest of everything else can be outsourced and so we’ve had questions a lot recently over the last few weeks about prospecting and how to keep your pipeline full and all that kind of stuff. One way to do it is just to consistently be prospecting. Make it part of your standard operating procedure. Your just normal weekly tasks in your business should be prospecting so that you always keep your pipeline full.

That’s why I think this course was so timely because if you outsource it then you know it gets done, and that way you can keep your pipeline full of leads at all times so that you can cherry pick the best clients, number one and number two you won’t be so desperate when you are talking to the … If you only got five leads for three months, then you try so hard to close all five. Whereas, if you had 10 or 15 leads per week, then you could be a hell of a lot more selective and really, if somebody’s going to give you any resistance, thank you very much, see you later, click. Hang up, move on to the next one.

Adam: Definitely.

Bradley: I think it’s going to be a good course coming out. I think a lot of you guys, about 60 percent of our audience is into local marketing. I think this will help a lot of you to be able to generate some clients, as well as maybe land service providers if you’re selling leads.

Adam: Definitely. Yeah, it’s a good one. Like Bradley said, it can save you a ton of time. It’s going to keep your pipeline full, and it works. I’ve used this stuff too in a couple different industries and this really applies to anyone, which is really cool. You can use this for consulting. You could use this for financial services. You could use this for contractors, and it has a very good response rate, which is why it is the lead gen system using video. Anyways, more on that later. We’ll be telling you guys all about that.

The other thing we wanted to tell you about was Jeffrey Smith. If you missed his SEO boot camp webinar that was, I’m going to get the date wrong, I think it was early December or late November, but that went really well. We had some technical issues the very first time we had him on. He came back, had a webinar, that went great. We got really good feedback. People who hopped in the course loved it. I know Bradley, you said you went through it, or did you go through all of it or parts of it?

Bradley: Not all of it. I’ve been through parts of it. Kind of like what Marco mentioned to me. I just go through and find stuff that I need when it’s pertinent at that particular time. Everything I’ve seen has been so thorough though. It’s training after our own hearts in that its so detailed and he went way over and above and it’s an amazing course.

Adam: Cool. So we’re going to have him back. That will be on Monday. We’re getting stuff set up for that right now, so we’ll be sending out emails about that. Be sure to check that out and we will have a replay available if you can’t make it live on Monday.

Before we get into it I wanted to remind everybody about the charity that we’re supporting throughout January. That’s still going on. We’ve had a lot of really good donations so far. It’s really impressive so first of all, thank you to everyone who’s helped out and then Marco, if you want to tell people, because I know we have people come who aren’t here all the time. If you want to tell them quickly about what the charity is, whose it for?

Marco: Yeah sure. It supplies uniforms and books for kids. We’re targeting first, second and third grade kids. We want to keep them in school. A lot of times the reason why they can’t go to school is simply because they don’t have the supplies, the uniforms or the books. They don’t have shoes. Right? They have to go to school barefoot. Imagine if you’re having … still in 2018 going to school barefoot, man. This is the type of stuff that we’re dealing with. Not only that, the environment that these kids live in. Someone comes knocking at the door, you don’t know who’s coming knocking at your door. They’re living in a place where they’re under lock and key. When they go out they have to go out in groups because they have to run a gauntlet man. Drug dealers, drug users. Just the worst of the worst man, so what we’re trying to do is, I know that education is the key to success. Without an education all you’re doing is you’re going to stay in that poverty cycle because you’re not going to know anything except that which you experience.

So experiencing an education, experiencing the world, experiencing all of the different things that are offered through an education opens your mind to all kinds of possibilities and it lets you know that you’re not useless. That you’re not worthless. Someone is taking the time to tell you you’re actually worth something, which to me, that’s incredible. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re going into these neighborhoods. We’re trying to get these kids, as many as we can. Right now we’re almost at the 10k mark, which is what had set. 100 kids takes $10,000. We’re almost there so if it’s a dollar, if it’s two dollars, we don’t care. Just go ahead. Please donate. Thank you very much those who have donated already. This is really a really good cause, man.

Adam: Awesome.

Marco: I just hope people will listen and donate and I dropped the link on the event for those who would like to go and take a look at the video and see what it’s all about, more in depth.

Adam: Awesome. Thanks again as Marco said, to everyone who’s donated so far. We appreciate it. When is it? I think we got another week or two right?

Marco: Yeah. We made the cutoff on the 26th so we can go the week of 29th for the supplies. Just before they’re going to school on February 5th, but after that we’re going to keep it open. We’re going to do something else so that when next February comes around we’re ready for even more kids to go to school. We’ll be doing something. We’ll announce it. I’ll talk to you guys and we’ll work it out.

Adam: Sounds good. Awesome. Well if you are new to Semantic Mastery, first off, thank you for joining us on Hump Day Hangouts. A lot of times we get asked, “Where’s a good place for me to start?” Well the Hump Day Hangouts, you’re in the right place so that’s the good place to start. The next step would be the Battle Plan and we’ve got a discount code. I’ll pop that up on the page, but check out the Battle Plan, it’s a solid investment and it is very, very much worth the little amount of money you have to pay for all the information in there.

If you don’t yet have an account over at SerpSpace, go to serpspace.com, you can open up an account for free. Check out the tools there, check out the Done for You services and if you’re really jonesing for some Semantic Mastery information and you just need to see Bradley making a chart or something during the week head over to support.semanticmastery.com and that’s where we put a lot of these common questions that come up, or the more in depth answers where Bradley’s maybe drawing a chart or giving some information, so you can go check that out and get an answer in the middle of the week.

If you’re really ready to take things up and you’re not new maybe to Semantic Mastery, then I highly suggest going to the mastermind.semanticmastery.com. I’ll pop the link on there and if you’re ready to join the Mastermind, that’s the place to be. If you ever have any questions about that, you can contact us at support@semanticmastery.com. If you have any questions about the Mastermind after looking through the page and seeing if maybe it’s a right fit for you or not, we’d be happy to chat with you.

Bradley: Sweet.

Adam: All right. Anybody else? Any announcements or are we ready to get rolling?

Bradley: No. I’m ready to get in questions. Just one brief thing. The new Mastermind curriculum starts this week. We have our first Mastermind Webinar for 2018 under the new training schedule, which is tomorrow. We’re in the PPC module. I’m actually a bit behind in preparing the presentation and training for tomorrow, but whatever is fine, because I imagine for the next couple weeks it’s going to be a little bit in disarray as we settle into this new training, but we’re going to be doing … AdWords has been updated, the interface has, so we’re going to be doing AdWords for local, as well as for national stuff, which could apply to affiliate campaigns, plus we will be doing AdWords for YouTube for again, local led gen, as well as national lead gen and then also for affiliate stuff and we’re going to be doing some of that for Semantic Mastery for our own channel, for example. Some of that will also be included and then we’ll be doing some Bing ads and also Hernan’s going to be doing some training on Facebook ads. This is all stuff that’s going to be in part of module one, which should last probably about six weeks and so again, I would highly encourage you to come join the Mastermind.

Last thing I want to mention very briefly is, and I say this the beginning of every Hump Day Hangouts go to bradelybenner.com and subscribe and the reason I say that is because I got an email from one of my subscribers today that was replying, and it’s Jenny, and Jenny is always on our Hump Day Hangouts asking questions. I’m not going to read your email to me, Jenny, but the last two lines that you put in the email as a reply to one of my emails about the Mindset series was, “Thanks for kicking my ass today, sir. May I have another?” That’s awesome. I get some replies from some of my subscribers because it’s just about mindset stuff and I highly recommend that you go check it out. At least I know it helps me to be able to write those.

By the way, I started crossfit training as a coach every single day this week. This week is when I started. I was supposed to start last week but the extreme cold prevented me from doing it, so I haven’t been able to write an email every morning, but I’m trying to squeeze it in when I can. Like today, I got the email written right after I got back from the crossfit gym. Just to let you guys know, I’m trying to write every single day. I’ve got about 40 emails in the series now. Go subscribe, check it out. If you don’t like it, just unsubscribe. Okay? With that said, let’s get into it.

Okay you guys. Let me know if everything’s coming through okay?

Adam: Yup.

What Are Your Recommended Frequency And Topics On Press Releases?

Bradley: Sweet. Okay, Harold’s up first. He says, “Hello everybody, thank you so much for giving us this space so we can ask our questions.” You’re welcome Harold. “Mine is, how often should I get press releases and what are some good topics?”

Well the frequency is really up to you. The nice thing about press releases is whenever a press release is picked up and distributed, it gets picked up by usually hundreds of websites so it’s a kind of a natural occurrence to get a bunch of links back from a press release, because companies all the time are announcing news and it’s a natural type thing. It’s traditional. It’s normal and so you can be a bit aggressive with press releases. I know I usually do them about once every two weeks. That’s usually the speed with which I do it, until I get the results that I’m looking to achieve, which is typically to rank in the three pack. Sometimes it’s organic stuff, it depends, but for the most part I’m trying to rank in the Maps pack and usually , just do them about every two weeks.

However, I know Rob, for example, the co-creator of RYS Reloaded with Marco, he just hammers the shit out of sites with press release, after press release, after press release and he’s able to get results so I don’t think there’s much of a velocity issue. Again, I do it about every two weeks, but I know that it’s been done a lot more than that. The frequency a lot higher than that and it hasn’t caused any issues. Marco, do you have a comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, as a matter of fact, I haven’t seen it. Like you said, we just bang one right after another and we stack them the right way going after different URLs. Now we have another press release service that has even more publication sites so that’s a really good mix. It’s really good to mix them up. One of them gives us embeds, which is even better for us and so it’s a lot of good things that you could do and a lot of nasty things that you can do with press releases.

Bradley: Yeah. All right, and as far as good topics, Harold, all right, so there’s a couple of things I want to mention here about topics. One, pretty much anything can be turned into a press release. Any sort of company news, any sort of seasonal changes, sales, specials, new products, new services. Anything at all can really be worthy of a news release to be written. What I’ve been doing for the most part is we published press releases anytime a customer review has been received by one of my lead gen sites or one of my contractor, client sites, excuse me. That’s another reason to publish a press release is because you’re announcing the glowing testimonial review that you just received, right? That’s just another example and I like using that method because it encourages the business owners to solicit reviews from their customers and then every time they get a review, I get notified and I go publish a press release for it and I get to bill them for it, and they get to puff out their chest and say, “Look at me, look at how awesome we are.”

I’ve been using that method. In fact, that’s our front end service on our new agency. It’s doing basically reputation. It’s a combination of video marketing, reputation marketing and PR marketing. It’s a combination of those three and that’s our front end service. It’s a very, very powerful way.

Also, any time you publish a blog post typically you could do that. Now, the last thing I want to mention about that is if you’ve got a good writer, a PR writer that you work with, a good PR writer will typically be able to create an angle out of just about anything. So an angel or a news hook out of just about anything. The other option would be to use the press release writers from the distribution service that you’re using.

For example in Serpspace, we don’t even allow manually submitted PRs anymore, I don’t think. I think we just have our net distribution service or network writers write them, because they know what the editorial guidelines are and a lot of those distribution service writers, right, that will provide as just an add on service, the press release to be written. It’s usually about $30 or so or something like that and it ranges between $30 to $45, somewhere in that range, but a lot of times, all they need is just a handful of small details and then they’ll create the news hook, because they know what they’re distribution network is looking for, if that makes sense?

A lot of times all I’ll do is just list who, what, when, where and then a quote from a company executive or in the case of using a review, I just quote the review, whatever the customer review text was that’s the quote. Does that make sense? That’s all we do and it’s very, very simple and I love it because it takes the content marketing side of things off my shoulders. We still have bloggers that do the curating and stuff, but I don’t have to think about so many content ideas for press releases anymore. We just say, “Hey go get another review. As soon as you get a review, let me know. We’ll publish a press release” and boom it’s done.

By the way, just to let you guys know, I had been doing that myself for my clients for my own agency every month. I would spend about two days at the beginning of the month. I still have been generating client reports and there’s a reason why I do that, because I typically, once I generate client reports and I send the reports to the clients I also include a brief breakdown of what the reports are showing in my own voice and sometimes I record a screen cast video and send that to them with an overview of what I’m seeing for the month and some new opportunities that have arisen and I’ve got a really close relationship with my clients so because of that, I don’t outsource the client reporting part of it, but I had been generating the review commercials, which is a David Sprague. Every month, this is just an add on service I added to most of my clients. I would generate a review commercial from a new review that they received within the last month and then publish the video, distribute it across my network. My syndication networks typically ranks the video, but if it doesn’t then I end up with a press release anyways.

I had been doing all of that myself for the last six or seven months since I’ve really started playing with this strategy. One of my virtual assistants is in the UK. She’s been blogging for me for, I’d say at least four years. She’s great. She reached out to me around the turn of year and said, “Hey, I’m looking for more work and we’ve been working together for years. Would you have anything else you wanted me to do?” And I was like, “Oh, perfect. I’ve been meaning to unload this work, now that I know this is a viable strategy and it’s something I’m going to do.”

The reason I’m telling you this guys, is because I want to let you know, I struggle too with doing shit that I’m not supposed to be doing. For example, taking two days at the beginning of every month to generate these review videos and order the press releases. It was something that could have been outsources three or four months ago once I really knew that it was going to be something that I was going to carry on or be a continuing service, however, I never took the time to create the process docs. I get up on my soapbox all the time and preach to you guys about outsourcing stuff, yet there are processes in my business that I still have not outsourced, and it’s just because of a lack of time, or really a lack of desire for doing it. For creating the process training for that process and what it comes down to typically is just not wanting to do it because it sucks. It’s boring work. It’s tedious and often times I’m so freaking busy with all the work that I’m trying to fulfill that I feel like I don’t have the time to create process docs about the work that I need to fulfill. If that makes sense? So it’s a catch 22. Right?

Because she gave me a reason, Michelle did, my VA. She gave me a reason and because I’ve got so much work on my plate right now for this new Mastermind training curriculum, I knew at the beginning of every month this year, I don’t want to spend two days generating reports and also the review commercials and ordering the press releases and all that stuff. I don’t want to do all that. So I spent the first two days of this week creating the training process. The training videos, the written procedures, which are in Google docs and all that and I sent that to her yesterday and she’s now going to take over it for me and guess what. I never have to fucking do it again.

The reason I went through all of that is just to let you know that this is all stuff that can be outsourced guys and I highly recommend, sometimes I need to remind myself of some of my own advice, and this is something I should have done four or five months ago, and I just finally got it done and I can tell you what a weight, a load has been lifted off my shoulders because now I’m not going to dread the beginning of the month every month because it’s going to eat up two days, if that makes sense. So guys, if you take anything away from that at all, it’s that if you’ve got stuff in your business that makes your stomach turn sometimes because you have to do it and every time it comes up it makes your stomach turn, that’s the shit you need to outsource first. Honestly, that’s the stuff, the stuff you don’t like to do or you hate to do, that’s the stuff that you should absolutely, as much as it’s going to be painful and tedious to do, but create process docs for how to do all that, and then hire that shit out so that you don’t have to do that anymore.

Again, we get into this business not because we want another job, right? We want freedom and we want to enjoy it and so sometimes there’s obviously going to be stuff in everyone’s business that has to done, that’s not enjoyable. Outsource it. If you create the exact process for how to do it, you can outsource anything. This was not a pitch for Outsource KingPin, but we do have a training product that specifically teaches the methods for how to do exactly what I just described and it’s called Outsource Kingpin. Check that out. I know that was a long winded answer and I’m sorry Harold, but I just wanted to share with you guys that even I struggle with not following my own advice at times, but outsource as much as you can.

Anybody want to comment on that before I move on?

Chris: I agree with you Bradley.

How Does Google View Directory Sites In Terms Of SEO?

Bradley: Okay. Good enough. Thank you. Juan says, “Hello lovely people and thanks for having me. Are directory site’s viewed by Google as good or bad for SEO?” I think Juan, this is going to be not anything based in absolute data for me anymore, as it is just more of opinion or assumption, but I’d like to get some opinions of the other guys. I believe it has more to do with the directory itself then just a blanket statement.

For example, I know they say reciprocal links are bad, but I’ve seen many cases where reciprocal links actually are still very beneficial and I know a lot of low end directories that are really spammy, will require a reciprocal link, those are the ones that I would suspect are not good, but there’s a lot of good other directories that are good.

For example, Yelp is a directory site right? It’s a local or it’s a business directory site, but it is a directory site. We all know that’s a good link, but then obviously if it’s some obscure directory out there that is just … and they’re all requiring reciprocal links and stuff like that, then I would say no. I think it would be more about selective then just a blanket statement. I think it depends on the directory itself. What do you guys say?

Chris: Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree with you Bradley. The fact that on some directories you need to think about this in terms of what kind of value can you get from the directory, right? As well as what kind of value can you get from the reciprocal link, because if it is let’s say that you’re doing, I don’t know SEO for a doctor, and then you can get the doctor, put it in directory for doctor’s and even further for local doctors that would actually, could help you bring in some profit. Right? Even further if the directory is ranking in Google. Paid directories sometimes work as well because just being paid, even if it’s $5 or $10 for a lifetime link, usually work because they weed out 99 percent of spammy links so have that in mind. Some of them are really, really high authority so I would say that it would be on a case by case basis.

Some people would say that, for example, blog comments will be bad for SEO and that’s not entirely true.

Bradley: That’s right.

Chris: If you make a really thoughtful blog comment on a highly relevant publication or blog, it can blow your website away, right? It can really help you so I think it’s a case by case basis. If you’re on GSA’s spamming blog post or spamming directories, which you could definitely do, just do it as far away as possible from your clients or your own website, but if it’s a manual placement from a website that you can get value from and value meaning either authority or traffic, I would say go ahead and do it.

Bradley: Good advice. Marco?

Chris: No I think you guys covered it perfect.

What Is The Best Way To Indexing One Million Pages A Day?

Bradley: Beautiful. Fabian. What’s up Fabian? He says, “I want to index about 1,000,000 pages a day.” Wow. Okay. “So I need a very scalable solution. How would you do this using IFTTT and Plus Twitter. If yes, how often can I post the tweets that my account won’t be shut down? Should I create several accounts and spread my posts on them? Thanks a lot.”

Yeah, I don’t think you would want to do a million tweets per day in one Twitter account. I don’t think that’s a good idea. You probably need a hell of a lot of Twitter accounts to be able to accomplish a million tweets per day. We have an indexing service in Service Space. I don’t know if that amount of links would be a scalable option. There is one service that I can mention for mass volume that I know my, one of our link building director, he basically pointed it out a while ago. Now it’s been probably a year and a half since he mentioned this to me, I know I still use it though, but it’s called Express Indexer. Let me see if I can …

Hernan: Yeah, Bradley.

Bradley: Go ahead.

Hernan: I talked to [Debbie 00:28:48] already about this because I had seen this question come up. I actually saw it on Facebook.

Bradley: Okay.

Hernan: And he said, “No, it’s not working.”

Bradley: Okay.

Hernan: As it used to. He said that he’s trying to find a way around it. He’s still working on it because we had to shut down the indexing service in Serpspace actually.

Bradley: Oh did we? I didn’t even know that.

Hernan: Yeah, we had to shut it down because it just wasn’t indexing the way that it should. This option IFTTT to Twitter is not scalable because you’re going to need, for a million pages, what a hundred thousand profiles to push 10 tweets a day, 20 so that’s how you have to look at it. You can’t get away with more than 10 or 20, 20 tweets a day actually is pushing it because you’d have to scale up to 20. You can’t start at 20. You’ll get banned now.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: In Twitter. So I don’t have a solution. You don’t want to submit a million pages to the Google URL submitter, because you’ll trigger the captcha and so I don’t have an answer for this other than what we were using isn’t working at this level.

Bradley: Yeah. Well good. Thanks for chiming in. That’s a good question Fabian. I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer for you. Apologize.

What Are The Different Ways Of Indexing Local Citations?

Okay, so Shripad, I guess. Forgive me if I mispronounce that. He says, “What are the different ways to index local citations?”

Well indexers work. Typically that’s what I do. For example, when I order citations, whenever I get the citation report back, I just open up the spreadsheet. Copy all the citation URLs and then just submit them to the indexer. I usually submit them to multiple indexers. That’s all I do. That’s all you need to do. Okay?

Some citations, if you try to let them index naturally, sometimes it takes forever for citations to index naturally, that’s why I typically, as soon as I get a citation report guys, I’ll just go copy them and submit them to at least two indexing services to try to speed that up a little bit.

mbedding Maps – MyMaps Or GMB Map Page

All right. RL Sanders, “Hey guys, as always thank you for what you do. When you guys talk about embedding maps are you talking about my maps or the GMB map page?”

Both, RL. Both. I don’t mean embed both at the same time. I haven’t really tested with that, but I just mean you can do an embed run with the My Maps and then do another embed run with the GMB maps page. I’ll be a hundred percent honest with you, even though I know it’s super powerful, the My Maps thing, I don’t do a lot of that. I don’t set those up typically. If I get it back from a drive stack then I’ll do an embed blast with that through MAPS Powerhouse, but I don’t do, when I’m working on client stuff myself, I typically don’t do the My Maps. I just end up doing all the GMB stuff, but the My Maps are very, very powerful and what’s great about the My Maps guys is you can squeeze them, basically do follow links in and there’s a whole lot of ninja stuff that you can do. Marco teaches an RYS Academy that I just don’t have the time to do it or I would do more of it, but fortunately we have a [jessen 00:32:12] who can build them for us.

Can You Share Any Tips For Finding Local SEO Clients?

“Also, can you repost the link for Marco’s charity?” Yes. He posted it already, I believe. RL’s another question. He says, “Can you share any tips for finding local SEO clients? I need a few recurring payments to get the ball rolling. Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks.”

Yeah, look, I don’t know if I want to share this on … Well okay, RL, let me just say this. There’s one method that … no I’m not going to share that here. What I’m going to say is select a niche, RL. Right? Select a niche that you want, an industry that you prefer to work in or that you know that you may already have some experience in, whatever. Something that you’re familiar with or that you have a genuine interest in so that it makes it feel like not so much like work. Then start targeting those clients. Craft a very specific message. Again, we talk about the video lead gen system, which is going to be the product that we’re going to release in about two weeks. You could use that very specifically for finding and prospecting local SEO clients. Finding the clients isn’t that difficult, it’s the prospecting. Right? Finding prospects isn’t hard. You can use scrapers, there’s lot of tools out there. You can hire VA’s to do that kind of stuff, whatever. That’s not really the difficult part.

The hard part is starting the conversation with them. I found that even sales isn’t that difficult. The hardest part is starting the conversation from a position where they’re willing to receive the message and I found the video email is a fantastic way to start that conversation. To initiate that conversation. Break the ice and lower the defenses a bit and get the conversation started because you can position yourself as an expert and show them beyond a shadow of a doubt that you know what they hell you’re doing, whereas 99 percent of anybody else that’s contacted them about marketing services isn’t going to do that, and that’s what makes you stand out.

I would recommend that you pick that up when we release it in a few weeks. Obviously if you’re in the Mastermind RL, we cover that in there. That’s all included, but we did also cover a very specific … By the way, the method that I just said I’m not going to reveal right here is in that course that will be released in about two weeks or whatever. Just keep that in mind guys. It’s a very specific method for finding video SEO clients. Well for finding local clients period, but it’s a very specific way, using YouTube to find those clients and it works like crazy. Okay?

Anyways, I have to tease you guys with that a little bit, because I can’t reveal it here. It’s in the course. Come to the Mastermind though and I’ll share it with you.

What Are Your Recommendations On InMotion Hosting All Domains In One Cpanel Account?

Ajay says, “Two questions. I have a hosting account with In Motion Hosting.” Okay. “I just realized they might be hosting all my websites, domains, as add on domains under the same C-Panel account. What is your recommendation?”

Yeah, that’s how they do it, Ajay. When you have a shared hosting account that’s how it works. Every time you create an add on domain, it’s really like a sub-domain of your whatever the IP or C-Panel was set up as. It doesn’t matter. You can still configure your sites to all resolve to the exact, to whatever domain it is that you’ve added, but that’s just how it works in C-Panel. Okay? That’s not an issue.

Are There Any Benefits Of Sub Folders In Terms Of Link Juice?

“Number two, I had read an article recently about the advantages of sub-directories for link juice over sub-domains. The following link is … “

Guys we need to probably create a … somebody wants to make a note of this, a frequently asked question about this because we get this question a lot.

Yes, sub-domain folders apparently through a lot of testing, not so much my own, but from other people’s testing I do understand that there’s supposed to be a slight SEO advantage of doing multiple sites in sub-directories as opposed to on sub-domains, but we have repeatedly, or we’ve held our position on this for many years now, which is that sub-domains in my opinion is a superior method. There may be a slight SEO benefit to doing sub-directories over sub-domains. That’s fine. I get that. The problem with that is every single site that’s in a sub-directory is subordinate to the root domain, which means that if the root domain catches a penalty or if any of the subordinate sites in the sub-folders or sub-directories catch a penalty, it will penalize the entire domain and all of the other sibling sub-directories. Does that make sense?

The problem is it’s a penalty that would be leveled to basically the root, which would damage everything. It would be applied to everything domain wide, however, if you do a sub-domain, then in Google’s eyes, each sub-domain site is considered a separate entity. Right? A separate website and so when I talk about using sub-domains, it’s a way to offer or provide a level of protection for every individual site. The trick with that is to make sure that you keep the root clean and don’t do anything spammy to the root, because just as we talked about with the sub-directories, if the root was to catch a penalty or any of the sub-directories catch a penalty, it would apply to the root, and therefore tank all the rest of the sites. If you catch a penalty on the root domain with sub-domain sites, all the sub-domain sites will be affected as well because it is a domain wide penalty, but if you get a penalty on a sub-domain site, then it only applies to that sub-domain. Your root would still remain intact and your other sibling sub-domains would also remain untouched, unaffected.

There’s a reason why we do it that way and it’s to mitigate risk, to reduce potential catastrophic failure of all your sites if you were to catch a penalty. That’s why we do it that way. Okay? I don’t suspect you guys have anything to add to that, do you?

Adam: No, you nailed it.

Bradley: All right cool. Great question though Ajay. That was a really good question. We get that often, but guys, like I said, we should probably just make a frequently asked question out of that one.

Did You Eventually Charge More As The Company Grew Or Did You Keep The Rate The Same?

Mohammed, what’s up buddy? He’s recently joined the Mastermind and he’s been incredibly active in there. I saw your question Mohammed about local stuff in there. We’re going to cover that slightly tomorrow in the Mastermind as well. So keep that in mind.

“Hey guys have you ever worked with a small company that grew because of your marketing?” Yes, my BB’s Tree Guys. “Did you eventually charge more as the company grew or do you keep the rate the same?” Well Mohammed, that’s a great question by the way. Yes, I always … Well let me rephrase, if I add additionally marketing services I always increase. I don’t necessarily increase the rate, but because I’m adding more services I bill them more. Does that make sense?

To answer your question. For example, I just had a client call on Monday. A client of mine that I’ve had for, well shit, she was one of my first clients and it’s not 2018 and I opened my agency in March of 2012. So almost six years she’s been a client of mine. She called because she’s been ranked at the top of Maps for six freaking years and she, like often happens with a lot of clients, they tend to forget why they’re getting leads on line. Especially when it’s been six years, right? You guys would be absolutely ashamed if you knew what I was charging this lady, because again, it was one of my very first clients and it was such a small amount of money per month. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s $250 a month is what she’s paying me and she’s been ranked at the top of Maps for six freaking years, but she has never wanted to do any additional marketing services.

I have pitched her a least a dozen times on different types of marketing services. Press releases. PR marketing, video marketing. All this other kind of stuff and she never wants to do a damn thing. On Monday, we scheduled a call for Monday, I guess actually it was last Friday, anyways, we scheduled a call from two months ago and we got on the phone and she was like, “I need to know what you’ve been doing. I just really want to know if it’s worth me still spending $250 a month.” I almost laughed at her. I told her, I was like, “Listen, you were one of my first clients. You’re on a rate that is so much lower. That is less than half what I typically charge any client, even just to speak to them basically and I’ve left you at that because we’ve had you ranked, you’ve been receiving good results. I’ve pitched you on other marketing services. You don’t want to do any of it. Look, if you want to cancel that’s fine, but I don’t understand after six years of getting results.”

Anyways, it was just this long basically me having to convince her not to cancel services with me, when honestly, I should have just let her freaking cancel. I should have just said, “Hey, if you don’t think $250 is worth you being number one in Google and have been for six years, please feel free to cancel. See how you do in six months.” You know what I mean?

Chris: She’s costing you money.

Bradley: Huh?

Chris: She’s costing you money.

Bradley: Probably, but my point with that was that I have clients that have been grandfathered into specific rates that I have not raised. I probably could, but I haven’t. If they ask me for additional marketing services, then I will price those accordingly based upon my current rates, but whatever I have been charging them guys, I will leave it as is. But again, this is going to be different. Marco, I’m sure, does stuff different. I’m sure Hernan does stuff differently. Adam does stuff differently.

Personally, I don’t charge more for existing clients for existing services. I just charge more for new services as they add them. What are your opinions guys?

Chris: Yeah, this is actually a good question. I think it’s a case by case basis. I usually don’t, as you were saying, I usually don’t … unless I have some fixed costs that needs abating. You know how we raise our BA salaries once in whatever. We try to do that for BA’s.

Bradley: Yup.

Chris: If that’s the case, then I would raise it slightly. Just to update the costs, but I don’t do it, not because they’re getting more clients because of what I’m doing I won’t do it. That’s why I really like half retainer, half revenue share agreements. Revenue share could be whatever. It could be on a sales basis, it could be on a lead basis. If they are paying you, for example, x amount of money on retainer, we can be a little bit lower since you’re getting some revenue share. There is no cap to the amount of money that you can make and at the end of the day you will be motivated to work more for the guys, right? Because if they are making more money, you’re making more money, we’re all happy. If it’s activity based, meaning blog posts, et cetera, et cetera. Unless they increase the amount of activity, I don’t charge them more for it.

Sometimes, as a business grows, this is the good news, is that, as a business grows, as Bradley was saying, they will require more, hopefully they will require more service from you and that’s a completely different story, right?

Bradley: Right. Anybody else?

Hernan: I charge high enough from the beginning so that it’ll be awhile before I decide to raise my rates, but yes, I definitely do if year over year, you can show growth that can be attributed to your efforts. If you can show growth at that level, right? 10, 20, 30 percent, whatever it is, then I would raise my rates accordingly and then you’re going to get a lot of push back. You’re going to get a lot of no’s, get a lot of people that’ll just walk away and that’s all good and well. I have one specific company that I did a bunch of AdWords for and it was a million dollar account and we had it humming. We had it to the point where they were making just so much stinking money that I told them that I want more money and they decided to go with what they had in house and try to keep it that way, but 18 months later they contacted me again and said, could you come and work on our AdWords again. This is after they told me that they longer needed me, but I was at a point in my career, my life and my on line business where I could tell them, “Hell no. I don’t need a client like you.”

The thing is you have to weigh whether it’s worth raising the rates, how much it is that you’re charging from the beginning. If you price yourself right, if you know what you’re worth and you know what you’re going to be worth to that company, then you’ll be charging the correct price right at the beginning so you should know what you’re worth rather than worrying about what it is that you’re bringing to the client. The client should just say yes to you with whatever it is that you have because you’re producing.

Bradley: Yeah. Lastly on that Mohammed, when you said like BB’s Tree Guys. Yeah, but remember with the Tree, especially with the one contractor that I’ve really, really expanded his business, that’s a revenue share model, just like what Hernan was mentioning. I cover all the costs of expanding any marketing services. I build all the infrastructure at my expense and then I just get a cut of every job that gets closed. Again, with that, when you’re selling leads or you’re on a revenue or equity share model, then its unlimited scalability in that I don’t charge them anymore, it’s the same rate. I get 10 percent of any job that closes. Whatever the contract price is, I get 10 percent of that and that’s been that way with this contractor for four or going on five years now. Again, there’s no change in rate, but as I continue to build more and more sites and we cover more and more territory, we generate more and more leads and therefore, I make more and more money. Right?

Is It True That Google Will Penalize A Review/Product Type Rich Snippet That Is Placed On The Homepage?

Okay, I’m just going to call you Steve. What’s up buddy? He says, “Hey guys, I remember I read somewhere that putting a review product type rich snippet data on your home page instead of an organization webpage article type is not good, because Google will penalize you somehow. I mean a review product type schema, which shows those review stars below your listing in the Serps for better click through rate. Is this true or just gossip?”

Well first of all, if you’re adding schema for review stars, just for the sake of getting review stars, then yes, that structured data spam, don’t do it. You would probably get away with it for some time, but it’s likely that eventually you’ll get caught and you can get a manual spam action for that in search console, so don’t do that.

Now, if you actually have products, I don’t know because I don’t do eCommerce, but product review or product stuff, I don’t do that kind of stuff so I don’t know if there is some law or rule, not law, excuse, but some rule or best practice that states that you’re not supposed to have product reviews on your homepage. I don’t think that that’s the case though. Anybody have an answer for that? Okay.

If you do product stuff, if you have products, you sell products, for example, if it’s a product review site and the homepage has got a blog roll on it and there’s product reviews, I don’t think that that would cause a penalty because that’s a valid site right? When you’re spamming schema or structured data specifically to gain search right? Which would be like adding review stars to a site that has no business having review stars, then yes, that can be a problem so don’t do that. All right?

Is There Any Good Up-To-Date Google Adwords Course You Would Recommend?

“A short second question please. Is there any good, up-to-date AdWords course you would recommend?” Yeah, well first of all, we have Local Kingpin, but it needs to be updated because the AdWords interface has changed so much and so what I’m going to recommend is that you join Semantic Mastery Mastermind because we’re covering PPC and AdWords this month in depth. That’s going to packaged up like it’s a separate course, but we’re not selling it outside of the Mastermind. That’s how we’re going to be doing the new Mastermind this year. Every single module is basically going to be like a separate stand-alone course. They’re all going to piece together because they’re all going to be building out the same businesses, but, like this is the PPC module, so it will get packaged up into its own basically course, but only way to get it is to be in the Mastermind.

That said, the AdWords training that I learned from was Perry Marshall’s training and it was really good. Again, that was almost two years ago now though. Yeah, that was probably two years ago now so I don’t know if he’s got updated training. I’m assuming he does and that’s good training too. Okay? I would say our training because we’re current as far as we’re going to be doing all types of AdWords stuff. Google search, PPC, YouTube PPC, remarketing, maybe some display network although I’m assuming we’re going to hold that off until we do the remarketing module and that’s a separate module all together. We’ll also be doing Bing, PPC, and Hernan will be training on some Facebook PPC stuff. That’s what I would recommend is you get in there, because it will be a much more well rounded training then just buying an AdWords course alone, if that makes sense? All right.

Do You Use Any Plugins In Blocking Web Spiders?

Jenia, there he is. This is one that I was just talking about. Replied to my email. What’s up buddy? He says, “Good afternoon gentlemen, I have a question about blocking spiders. Do you use any plug-ins like Spider Spanker or anything else like that?” I don’t anymore, Jenia. I used to do all of that when I was running a lot of PBN’s and stuff, but I don’t do that anymore. I don’t even use that plug-in at all anymore.

“Is there a good way to prevent competition from reverse engineering your SEO efforts?” As far as blocking spiders, first of all, you do that through HT access. Can you do that in robots.text too? I can’t remember.

Hernan: You can but it’s always better to block them through HT Access.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: Because robots are directives that the robots can or may or may not follow. Now when you’re blocking them through HT Access, the hosting is not even serving them the webpage. You know what I’m saying?

Bradley: Right. Yup.

Marco: Yeah that’s absolutely right. HT Access and you block everything except the bot that you want in there and that’s how you protect yourself except that the bot, the coders are smart enough to always change the user agent, and they’re constantly updating and so there’s a website and I’ll have to go and dig through my stuff, but there’s a website that constantly updates the bot that you should be blocking. I’ll see if I can find it and post it in here so that you can use that. They update every 30 days. Every 60 days or so with new bot that you should block and user agents, but definitely HT Access. No plug-ins.

Does Blocking Web Spiders A Good Way To Prevent Competition From Reverse Engineering Your SEO Efforts?

Bradley: Yeah. Okay, we’re going to try to run through guys because we’ve only got a couple questions left and we’re almost out of time and I want to get to them. It looks like we really only got like two, three questions left. Jenia, he says, “Is there a good way to prevent competition from reverse engineering your SEO efforts?”

There’s some things that you can do, Jenia. For example, we talk about in the Mastermind how to use tag pages, well canonicals period. Very strategically, which will hide, will mask your efforts from prying eyes so-to-speak. Canonicals are a great way to do that, but there’s a lot of other stuff that we talk about in the Mastermind too and I’m not saying that because I don’t want to answer your question, Jenia. One, when it comes to reverse engineering, if it’s a good SEO they’re going to be able to find a lot, right? One of the things that you could do would be to use Spider Spanker or some sort of bot blocking stuff and block the Majestic SEO Crawlers and the AH Refs Crawlers and things like that so that nobody can index your links or what’s on your site. The important thing then would be to use those bot blockers on the sites that are linking to you.

In other words, when I was doing a lot of PBN work, I would use bot blockers to block Majestic and AH Refs on the sites, on my PBN sites so that those links wouldn’t get indexed. The inbound links pointing to my money sites wouldn’t get indexed and people wouldn’t be able to see them. Does that make sense? Google will see them, because they’ll show up in your links to your site in search console, but the SEO analysis applications wouldn’t, right? That’s one way you could do it, but again, I don’t use PBNs really at all anymore, so because of that I just … remember guys, we’d talk about using syndication networks and we’d do a shit ton of back linking to the syndication network properties, so people want to start looking out at our different tiers and doing back link analysis on tiers, then they’re likely going to be able to find out what we’re doing, but if they’re just going to look at the money site, they’re not going to see a shit ton of inbound links, or if they do, they’re going to be press release links and syndication network links and drive stack links and stuff like that. Does that make sense?

I don’t really go … I don’t spend a lot of time trying to prevent other people from seeing what I’m doing anymore. I just don’t really worry about it that much, Jenia. “Or are so amazing that no one can’t touch this.” No anybody can be taken down.

Can You Explain The Basics Of How Money Site Integrates When Using Syndication And RYS Academy For Both Local And Affiliate/Ecommerce?

All right, we’re almost out of time guys. Nigel says, “Good day gents, first I want to thank you for the Hump Day Hangout resource. You all are much appreciated.” Plus one that. Okay, he says, “Question, can you explain the basics of how money site integrates when using syndication in RYS Academy for both local and affiliate eCommerce. What I mean specifically is how would you set up the money page? If you can explain this a bit, because honestly the term money site is used so freely in groups I sometimes I feel like the only one not in on the secret.”

Money site just means your primary digital asset. Whatever you use to create revenue, right? So a money site, if you’re doing lead gen, could just be a landing page, right? What I mean by local lead gen. Say your generating leads for a plumber, for example, then your money site could typically be a lead gen style landing page. Somebody lands on it and it’s got a big contact form. Says contact request form and it’s got a big phone number on it and that’s it. That could be a money site. Another money site could be an affiliate site. Could be a blog. I’m sorry, was somebody going to say something? I thought I heard somebody trying to jump in.

Marco: No.

Adam: I don’t think so.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, a money site just means any website that you own, or that you are generating revenue with. Don’t let that confuse you. As far as syndication RYS for both local and affiliate eCommerce, I’m not sure what you mean unless you’re trying to set up a local aspect on a site as well as an eCommerce or affiliate and again, that’s a little bit of a unique situation and with our limited time right now, I don’t know how I can really unpack that and describe to you a good strategy without knowing a little bit more. I know it can be done, I’m just not sure how to tell you how to set that up without knowing specifically what your objectives are. Does that make sense?

Okay, it says, “Example for local create an article and place a link with offer. Where, how many, suggestion, where it links into syndication, RYS general was more than enough.” Well remember RYS Academy is just basically it’s like a link building method so that you can boost existing properties, right, and the drive files themselves can rank, but syndication networks are just a way of … it’s a content amplification method, right? You publish content to your money site, or your YouTube channel, either one and it syndicates out across your network for content application, excuse me, amplification as well as provide some SEO benefits. Okay? Just keep that in mind. The link with the offer, where and how many? That’s really just going to depend on many different things, but essentially yeah, you create an article and then you can link out to whatever you want. If it’s an affiliate offer, so be it. Okay? Again, I apologize that I can’t give you more specific answer. I would need more details Nigel.

Would You Say That It’s True That The IFTTT + SEO Strategy That You Teach In Semantic Mastery Will Probably Stand The Test Of Time, Not Fall Victim To Any Google Penalties?

All right guys we’re almost out of time. Dee says, “Would you say that it’s true that the IFTTT plus SEO strategies that you teach in Semantic Mastery will probably stand the test of time, not fall victim to any of Google’s penalties?” Well that’s our hope, Dee and I certainly feel confident that it’s not going to become an issue because it has been effective for me since 2012 when I started using this method. It’s only become more effective in pretty much standard op … It’s almost required now to have your footprint. To claim your footprint as a brand. That’s what helps to validate the entity, so I can’t imagine, although I don’t work for Google. I could change tomorrow, it could change six months from now. It could change six years from now, I don’t know, but as it stands right now and the foreseeable future, I don’t see it creating any problems. Okay?

I think we’re done guys.

Adam: Yes.

Marco: Before we go just a second. I listed the resource on the page. It’s called botreports.com and it actually gives you the HT Access code for blocking whatever specific bots you want to block. It’s a really awesome resource.

Bradley: Yup. You got it. Okay guys thanks for everybody being here. Remember Syndication Academy webinar starts in about one minute, well probably two and then we’ll be at Mastermind webinar tomorrow with the new curriculum, so we’ll see you guys there.

Adam: Awesome buddy. Bye everybody.

Hernan: Bye everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 166 published first on your-t1-blog-url

[storytelleratheart]

I said I would do this, so I will

Dramatis Personae from this tale of Heresy in the Dark:

Red: Red is a no nonsense redhead veteran of the Imperial Guard (the Army to which ‘casualties in the billions’ on a daily basis is… trivial) who was born on a forge world (i.e. A planet that is basically just one massive factory). Suffice to say she’s seen some shit, done some shit and been neck deep in all that shit. It’s a bit surprising that she’s only somewhat jaded. Interestingly she comes from a long line of characters made by her Player who all have names to do with the colour red. And out of all of them she may be the least promiscuous, but she’s the only one to succeed in getting laid. So good for her.

Red is notable for her skill at stabbing things to death with all manner of implements and the ability to operate a ten thousand year old weapon of mass destruction without: A, having read the manual and B, not being able to read any of the old worn buttons on the device (in an age where people don’t know the big red button means explosions).

Jebediah: Jebediah is a Witch Doctor from a ‘Feral World’, this walking, breathing stereotype has a collection of scattering bones to tell the future and is apparently a Psyker, people who are able to draw on the powers of the Immaterium to not only see the future, but warp reality to some extent through magical abilities, detect magical and daemonic entities and a variety of other powerful and undoubtedly useful skills. (In other words he’s a wizard of some kind)

Unfortunately he had an incredible streak of failing to detect psychic presences. For some time his squad mates wondered whether or not he was actually a Psyker or not. He was somewhat skilled at telling the future, but this came to everyone’s attention after he acquired some new scattering bones from the corpse of a powerful Psyker and fortune teller. Jebediah is best known for his poor luck, and the ability to barely scrape by whenever the going got tough. Also the inability to notice that the party had been transported into the warp. His rolls to detect Psychic and daemonic energy (Psyniscience).

Seriously by the time this ‘little’ adventure is done with him, there’s not a lot of this poor guy left. (Spoilers).

 Dwayne ‘The Rok’ Johnston: An Arbitrator, the closest thing the Warhammer 40,000 universe has to a Police Force. (Think of Judge Dredd, that’s the Police in the 40K universe) with a very… unique name. Dwayne IS. THE. LAW. He lives it, he breathes it and he cannot, under any circumstances tolerate Heresy, Law Breaking, Mutants, Demons or Aliens. Of all these the only one he hasn’t brutally executed in the name of mankind are aliens, because they are probably wise enough to avoid this hulking enforcer. As you can probably tell, Dwayne is very dedicated to his job, when he isn’t bringing justice to the galaxy, he’s constantly writing down case notes in one of his many notepads.

Dwayne could in many ways be described as the protagonist, especially if this was a big expensive Hollywood film, he’s the big tough guy who tends to lead from the front, and he rarely suffers as much as a scratch, coupled with his godly dice rolls and ability to move around silently in what is essentially plate armour, on top of all this he’s one potent fighter. Plus he dual wields a pair of shotguns, which were eventually modified heavily by his friendly neighbourhood Techpriest (IT guy/Mechanic) into a personalised, silenced pair of death dealing machines that carried enough rounds in an extended magazine that Dwayne only had to reload once after he had them modified. These shotguns proved to be surprisingly useful for silently dispatching heretics, somehow.

If this isn’t enough the guy is so tough he found a whip that’s essentially made of razor wire and he keeps it wrapped around his gauntlet, and isn’t worried about cutting himself on the damn thing. He also doesn’t eat on campaign, instead consisting off Cigars and a Flask of nondescript alcohol. Presumably when he isn’t on campaign he eats nails, without milk.

 Author’s note: Dwayne was not my character in this campaign. Do you honestly think I could come up with such an original name as Dwayne Johnston?

 Malice: Malice, like Jebediah was born on a Feral world and on this small, unassuming planet she was raised until a neighbouring planet decided to enslave their ‘lesser; neighbours. Malice’s life from that point onwards was as a slave until, at the age of seventeen she managed to escape. From there Malice went on a bloody revenge filled bender, favouring murdering people affiliated with the torment of her people in back alleys and wherever she could get her hands on them.

Malice was eventually recruited into the Inquisition by chance, and has since been used as a bloody, yet elegant tool.

It is important to note that she cannot in fact read. This will come up a few times.

Eventually however, Malice’s mental state and faith deteriorated as, after a fateful encounter with a Daemon, she fell into a state of being ‘murder crazy’, and the Inquisition decided her… enthusiasm would be best used elsewhere. Enter Gaius.

Author’s Note: Malice and Gaius were the characters I played during this campaign. I’ll try my best to be impartial whenever my murder-hobo children are mentioned.

 Gaius: Gaius does not feature in the very first act of the merry bands grand adventure, instead he is brought on to replace Malice who was going a bit murder loopy in the interlude. (In actual fact it was decided that we needed someone with medical and technological expertise, and could preferably read. After all we had two very potent fighters and Jebediah’s supporting role was purely centred on warpcraft.)

Gaius is, in short a very, very salty medic who hates his job and wishes he was a mechanic working on the best and greatest machines devised by man instead of patching up men and women.

Gaius is a Techpriest, which means he is one of the few people that understand how machinery works within the Imperium, albeit mostly through various hymns and religious rites that occasionally include vast quantities of incense. Gaius was born on a frontier world and despite how gifted he was, he would have been confined to that backwater planet litterally building kettles for the rest of his days if a request from a nearby warzone for a Techpriest to service military vehicles hadn’t come through his factory. Overjoyed Gaius volunteered, wanting to see the stars, instead he arrived to find he was too late and plenty of replacement Techpriests had arrived. Being the lowest ranking Tech Adept he was instead put to work in the field hospital.

Techpriests are known for their antisocial, eccentric ways. And he wasn’t trained in medicine. Naturally this arrangement didn’t go down so well at first. His bedside manners never got better but eventually he managed to reconcile with his faith by reminding himself organics were, to a degree simply inefficient (compared to the Machine God’s creations) machines.

Now Gaius can put almost anything back together, be it man, woman or machine with surprising efficiency.

And he’s not so bad at disassembling them with a sniper rifle or his kick-ass robotic prosthetic arm. Plus the Inquisition needed someone to take records of all the shit this group got up to, because so far 99% of it was too hard to believe if the evidence hadn’t obliterated half a city. So Gaius was given what was basically small camera mounted on a slender metal appendage sticking out of his back, he can control it at will and record whatever needs to be recorded, which is pretty handy. And no, he does not use it as a selfie stick, as much as his team mates would want him to.

 THE GREAT RALI: THE GREAT RALI was a circus strongman who unfortunately only appears for a short portion of the campaign as a whole. But Goddam (Emperor damn?) did this guy make an impression!

Humanity does not deserve such a great and noble champion.

 Sally: Sally is, to be blunt a Maid that the party half rescued, half kidnapped before they dragged her across the galaxy. Due to the circumstances surrounding her meeting the party, Sally turned to alcoholism and experimented with drugs, which was quite sad. We tried to make it feel better but with fellowship stats like ours, that never really worked out, instead she became increasingly distant over time. It was pretty tragic.

However Sally was not some helpless damsel, oh no, Dwayne was polite enough to give her a shotgun (but forgot to teach her how to use it) but that was no matter, for Sally never missed a shot. (In game terms, she has a Ballistic/Shooting skill of 20. Being untrained in the use of firearms she suffers a -20 to hit (in other words giving her a 0% chance to hit), but would always fire at point blank like the suicidal, drunken woman being dragged around the galaxy by a group of insane weirdos she was. Being Point Blank gave her a +30 and with that, she would always manage to hit her target, and usually do some seriously devastating damage too.

 Inquisitor Furion: No he isn’t related to Furiosa from Mad Max, in fact he’s a surprisingly average looking old guy, in a suit of baroque power armour and with the authority to destroy entire planets because he thinks there might be one illegal Psyker in the slums. Unsurprisingly Furion doesn’t take centre stage very often, he’s more concerned with the bigger picture and as great as the deeds committed by his faithful acolytes were, he only meets them in person once, to interrogate their prisoner they brought in.

He’s a top bloke by the way.

He gave us all a job at least.

 Throne Agent Vincentus: You know that guy who co-ordinates all the branches of the armed forces when they need/ are forced to co-operate? (Or in this case do whatever the Inquisition tells them to). Well that’s Vincentus. This guy is not amused, if you flawlessly rescue the governor of an entire planet, Vincentus will complain you didn’t rescue a second one while you’re at it. Prone to sighing over the radio while marking down whatever crazed story Dwayne feeds him about the mission’s current status. Vincentus was also responsible for organising all the transport and support the party received over the course of their campaign. So in a way, without Vincentus none of this would have been possible. So good on you Vincentus, you asshole.