#also if anyone has a link to a site where the episode might get uploaded quickly (like an hour or two after it airs)

[pray4jensen]

i have very low expectations for the winchesters finale but thanks to robbie thompson being showrunner, i think it’s fair to have slightly higher expectations than normal. so anyways, a good finale to me would contain at minimum the following components:

1) dean appearing for at least 5 min of screen time total over the course of the finale

2) dean’s alive or trying to get out of heaven and be alive

3) dean mentions he’s either trying to find cas, get cas out of the empty, or makes it clear cas is present in his thoughts in some way—bonus points if he calls cas by name instead of his friend or an angel

4) the finale doesn’t end on a cliffhanger because the chances of it getting renewed for a second season are slim to none so that would suck to be left hanging

4) carlos and lata don’t die because we need to stop having poc die for pointless reasons, esp since there’s a possibility they won’t ever be brought back if there’s no season 2

i think these are all fair and reasonable requests for this finale and i’m hoping it’ll instead surprise me by being even better

anyway back to putting my clown make-up on 🤡

[superlinguo]

Practical advice if you want to start a podcast

I wrote a post for the RED team at La Trobe with some general advice for podcasting, but I’ve found there are some recurring questions that I get about setting up a podcast. This post is here to answer those questions.

If you’re not interested in starting a podcast, but want to listen to more linguistics podcasts, I’ve got a list for you!

I last updated this post in June 2021 - if you find this post a few years after this you might want to search for some more up to date specs. I’ll continue to update this from time to time as new questions (or answers) come up.

Picture your audience

Before you make any decisions about your show, know who it is for. Your topic might be incredibly niche and have an audience in the hundreds, which is very different to a potentially larger but less engaged audience. See the classic blog post from Kevin Kelly on the power of 1000 true fans. Knowing your potential audience, where they hang out online, and how they’re likely to support you, will help your decision making. I have a self-guided slide set for refining your project before you start working on it. It’s also ok to know who you don’t want as your audience, and make choices that don’t actively include them. Do this early and clearly so people aren’t disappointed. For example, having a show with clearly noted explicit language selects away from young kids and their parents.

The length and format of your show are a product of your aims

I personally like shows in the 25-35 minute range. But, having said that, I love Shortwave, which regularly clocks in at 10 minutes, and I’m disappointed when an episode of You’re Wrong About is less than an hour.

Know your audience and the level of depth you want to explore a topic in. The frequency of episodes and the amount of time you have to prepare and edit will also affect how long episode end up. Record a few episodes first and share them with people you trust will give you good feedback.

The best interviews are conversations

Good interviews are just conversations that are intentionally lopsided, and good interviewers make the conversation feel like it’s not lopsided. Do your homework, write out some questions, and then take a step back and actually listen to the person you’re interviewing.

Anyone who has done even a few interviews has already faced most of the questions you first think of. There are some fixes for this: push through your initial brainstorming, think about the specific angles on their topic that are most relevant to your audience and (again) listen to what the person is telling you. Like many podcasting skills, good interviewing takes practice, and you can practice by staying curious about humans you interact with in any area of your life, not just your podcast guests.

Use the best mics you can, but don’t over-invest

You don’t have go and buy the fanciest tech. If you have access to a studio, great! If you don’t, then decide what your budget is. When we started Lingthusiasm, Gretchen recorded into her phone, because we were running the show on no budget and had no idea if we’d stick it out more than 6 months. When we started making money we got Gretchen a Zoom H4n to match mine. It’s still not the fanciest, but it’s rugged and adequate, especially if you make sure you’re in a closet with some blankets. Do I regret the earlier episodes of Lingthusiasm don’t sound amazing? Not as much as I would have regretted investing hundreds of dollars in a podcast that had 4 episodes.

Edit your show

Even a light edit will make the show easier for your audience to listen to, and show respect for the people you interview. I know people believe there’s an aesthetic of authenticity that comes with not editing, but all podcasting is a performance. Editing is a politeness to your audience.

Editing means a very wide range of things. You can do full production editing, including the addition of music, multiple different voice-overs and voices reading parts (e.g. getting someone else to read author quotes to bring them to life) and additional sound effects. Or you might just edit out the start and end of the recording, and any false starts and errors throughout the show. A lot of the pauses and fillers we use in conversation are designed for an audience who is in on the conversation and can reply, and can feel like they’re holding up a conversation when you’re a passive listener like a podcast audience. Many of the best conversational podcasts are given an edit to make them easier on the ears.

I use audacity to edit

Audacity is free to use. It takes a little longer to learn than something like GarageBand, but once you know how to use it, you’ll be much faster at editing. I appreciate that it has stayed pretty much the same since I started using it almost 15 years ago.

Get your levels right

Once you’ve edited your show, making sure there aren’t too many loud laughs, or your two hosts aren’t unbalanced in loudness. You’ll also need to make sure your podcast isn’t too loud or soft compared to others in people’s list. You need to regularise it. A lot of podcasts regularise to -16 LUFS. A few other numbers bounce around (-14, -18), but this is what we use and no one complains.  Audacity can’t do it. You can process a certain number of hours of audio for free each month using the web-based Auphonic. It’s great. 

There’s lots of great free music to use

You want to look for music that has a license that’s free to use. Even if you don’t plan to make money from your podcast, make sure the license includes commercial use so you don’t limit your future options. SoundCloud and YouTube have lots of options, as does Kevin MacLeod - who has created royalty-free music in a massive range of genres. 

Web hosting is different to getting your show on iTunes

We use SoundCloud to upload and share our audio. It’s fine. I have no complaints. Once you’ve uploaded a few hours of audio you’ll have to pay annually for a pro account. Anchor seems to be a good new competitor, it’s free - I assume they make money off people choosing to run ads on their podcasts. You then generate an RSS feed, which is the thing that points all the podcast players to the place you’ve uploaded your recording. You’ll then have to add your show to major podcast platforms (Apple Podcast, Google Podcast), smaller ones will pick it up from there.

It takes a few days for your show to get picked up on all the podfeeders

Launching a podcast is a bit of a mess - it will go live on your hosting site but then you’ll have to set yourself up with iTunes, Google Podcast etc. and that can take a few days to update and populate. The sites that are popular, and the process of linking into those spaces, changes often enough that you should just google advice when you’re ready to launch, and give yourself a few days. This is part of why some podcasts launch a short ‘episode 0′ or a trailer, it gets the show set up.

Transcripts should be one of the first things you fund

Not every podcast has the time or funds to make transcripts. I do think they’re important though; for people who can’t or don’t want to listen, for discoverability and for your own record when you can’t remember when you talked about a specific story. If you have any time or money and want to be taken seriously at all, this should be one of your earliest priorities. This is even more true for educational podcasts, where a transcript ensures all students can appreciate the content of your show.

You don’t neeeeed a website, but it’s handy

You can run a show using a hosting platform and some social media. Having a website does allow you to add more information about the show and yourself. The Lingthusiasm page has grown over the years as the show has; we made a page for our liveshow events, we provide a list of episodes by topic, information about our Discord community, and our marvelous wall of supporters. The website was much more minimal when we started, but compared to just having a SoundCloud it gave the show room to grow.

You probably want socials, but be selective

You need to make your podcast discoverable by people who are likely to be your audience. Social media is one way to do this, but it’s better to be actually engaging on fewer social platforms than overextend yourself. Focus on platforms that are the intersection of where your possible fans are likely to be and where you enjoy being.

Funding a podcast takes time, and takes work

There are three main revenue streams for podcasts: advertising, crowdfunding and merch. A fourth option is institutional support (through your university or business), but then you’re beholden to the funder. Whichever revenue options work for you, think about them and plan towards them early. Part of that is making sure your podcast gets in as many ears as possible. Most successful podcasts spend as much, if not more, time on marketing, audience engagement and business planning as they do podcasting (it’s just not very glamorous to admit that!).

Choose whether each episode can stand alone

Some podcasts build a narrative over multiple episodes. Others allow listeners to jump in at any point and listen in any order. Whatever you choose, make this clear to your audience. This choice is going to influence a range of choices around what information to include in the opening and closing, how topical to make the show, and how you promote your podcast. 

Seasons are a great structure to keep a podcast manageable

Regardless of whether your show runs in a sequence, planning a season with a fixed number of episodes allows you to take some time off, to maybe change some things that weren’t working, or to step away from the project with a podcast that hasn’t been left hanging.

[baby-pigtails]

Kiddo Sites/Apps!

Hi hi! I always see a lot of posts recommending sites and apps for age regressors but a lot of the time they’re the same things, so I thought I’d make my own! All the sites and apps on here are free, don’t worry! (Some may have ads or in-app purchase, though!) It’s under the cut cause I tried to include some preview pictures which made it kinda long! If anyone would like to add more or have me add more, just let me know! Have fun and stay safe during this time of quarantine and social distancing!

WEBSITES

- DisneyClips

     This is probably my FAVOURITE site for when I’m regressed! It’s made by Disney fans for Disney fans, and is updated with new activites pretty often! It has a bunch of safe and fun games, quizzes, coloring pages, and even things like analysis charts for kiddos whose special interest or hyperfixation is Disney! It has dress up games that are super-duper easy and cute, and I love them because their style looks like it could come right out of the film it’s from! Like the dresses and everything, and they stick to each princess’s style while making different dresses from the original ones! It’s crazy!!

-PBS Kids

     A classic but awesome site!! You can watch all sorts of episodes for free, you don’t have to put in an email or anything! There are even games and episodes from shows that have long since gone off the air!

-American Girl

     Don’t be fooled by the site’s title, this site is for everyone! If you’re familiar with the American Girl characters, there’s lots of dress up and themed games, and if you’re not familiar with the characters, don’t worry cause there’s still super cute games like pet grooming and, my favourite, Coconut’s Safari! I linked to the games page, but there’s quizzes and polls, too!

-Webkinz

     I’m sure a lot of you know about Webkinz already, but it hasn’t gone anywhere even after all these years! It’s one of my favourite sites, and it’s free to play now! For people unfamiliar with Webkinz, it’s a virtual world where you can raise a pet, decorate rooms, and collect all sorts of objects, food, and clothing! You can play this one online, with their new desktop app, or with their mobile app! (I will warn you, though, the mobile app does not have that much stuff on it)

-Poptropica

     Poptropica has been around for a while too, but it’s changed a lot in recent years! You can play it online and there’s also an app. This one is probably for older kiddos, though - it has a lot of puzzles and requires a lot of thinking at times, so if you’re looking for a relaxing game this probably isn’t it. 

-Poptropica

    Poptropica has been around for a while too, but it’s changed a lot in recent years! You can play it online and there’s also an app. This one is probably for older kiddos, though - it has a lot of puzzles and requires a lot of thinking at times, so if you’re looking for a relaxing game this probably isn’t it.

APPS

- Habitica

     Habitica is a super-duper easy habit tracker/reminder app! I use it to remind me to take my meds, shower, brush my teeth, things like that! But you put in your habits and to-do list so you can personalize it! Usually I don’t like apps like this because they offer no incentive but Habitica turns it into an RPG like Dungeons and Dragons!! So you can level up and get equipment and even pets! What I love about it, too, is that if you ever have any question, their FAQ is super clear and easy to understand, which makes it ideal for autistic kids like me!

- Cookie Run

     Cookie Run is an oldie but a goldie! It’s a running platformer game where you can collect lots of cute cookies and their pets and learn their stories! Plus there’s canon LGBTQ+ rep with some of the cookie heroes! Cookie Run has a lot of bright colours and fast movement though, so it might not be the best game for kiddos with seizures or sensory issues!

- My Tamagotchi Forever

     Super cute revamp of tamagotchi!! Your pets don’t run away or anything in this one, haha! You can decorate your town and your house with coins you earn from simple minigames, and you can dress up your tamagotchis in different outfits and fill out their scrapbooks and collect them all! I really liked this app, definitely one of my favorites :)

- Hello Kitty Lunchbox

     Super simple “cooking” game! Again, this is a super easy, no hassle game and is good for really young kiddos. You get to make a lunch for Hello Kitty and decorate it, along with her lunchbox before “eating” your meal. But again, I wanna stress this one is super simple and some kids may get bored of it.

-Pocket Ponies

     A My Little Pony version of the classic ball shooter game. You aim to hit enemies with your balls, and eventually charge up your ponies so they can perform their special action. You get to collect My Little Pony characters and each one has a different ability.

-Hello Kitty Music Party

     This one’s more of an idle tapper game. It wants you to tap on your screen along with the beat of the music, but even if you don’t tap with the beat you can still get rewards! It has a couple cutesy pop songs in the app, but it can also access your music library on your device so you can tap with whatever you want! The app itself doesn’t offer much instruction but it’s fairly simple to figure out. But like the other Hello Kitty game, it can grow boring quickly for some kids, which is why it became an idle game for me. 

-Disney TsumTsum

     This one is kind of like Bejeweled or Candy Crush - you connect little Disney characters to make them “pop!” You get to collect a bunch of different characters and each character has a special ability.

YOUTUBE CHANNELS

-RescueHero’s Nostalgia Zone

     A lesser known channel but it’s one of my favorites! It’s a gameplay channel, but pretty much every video is old video games like TV plug and plays, leapster/leap frog games, or CD-ROM games from the 2000s. It’s an active channel, too, and tends to upload every week or so! From what I can tell, there’s no voiceover and their videos are just simple, nostalgic gameplay.

-Shirley Curry

     This one’s a little weird but it’s very wholesome - it’s a grandma in her 80′s(?) who loves to play video games! She mostly plays games for older kiddos like Skyrim, but her videos are very calming and she’s very cute in the way she comments on games. She’s super sweet to her viewers and calls them her grandkids, and usuaslly responds in comments. Her videos are also easy videos to listen to in the background, too.

-pstoyreviews

     I don’t watch a lot of toy channels because a lot of the time they’re over the top and super corny or just... really weird, but this channel is run by two people (I think they are a couple but I’m not sure) named Shannon and Paul, and they’re very casual about their videos (despite the corny thumbnails, lol). Anyway, they mostly do blind bag openings for trinkets and toys that are currently on the shelves - things like Tokidoki, LOL Dolls, Shopkins, minifigures, things like that. It’s a very good channel if you like those cutesy sorts of things but don’t have the money to get them yourself! To my knowledge they’re not really sponsored, so there’s no encouraging you to buy a product or anything like that. Like I said, they’re very casual and do talk during the videos but they talk a little slow and there’s no background music, so they are very easy to understand! I believe Shannon also has a doll-specific channel, too, if you’re into that.

-nana825763

     Better known as piropito, this channel is well known for its really cute and wholesome Minecraft gameplay that you can start watching here. This is a Japanese channel, but he captions his own videos, so don’t worry! Anyway, his goal was to figure out everything in Minecraft with absolutely no cheats or searching the web for information or anything like that. That’s really the only thing I’d recommend on this channel, however, and do be careful because they do have some horror game playthroughs on there so stay safe!

-Sesame Street

     Not much to explain here! It’s Sesame Street, and they post clips of the show, songs, and sometimes even full episodes.

[theonyxpath]

Yes, that’s right, we actually do not have a Kickstarter running this week. Weird, huh?

Legendlore just wrapped up with a very strong (and unexpected but delightful) final 48 hours last week, and we have not yet launched the They Came From Beyond the Grave! KS.

So instead, let me tell you about the guy I illustrated for the cover shown above. In-universe (or Continuum), that’s Duke Rollo, the gonzo journalist/commentator of the TC: Aberrant setting.

But.

He’s also Justin Achilli, who originated the character and wrote both small Duke Rollo books – one for first edition Aberrant and now the book pictured for Trinity Continuum: Aberrant.

I originally pictured him as Justin appeared back then, piercings and all, and with a very gonzo attitude to life, and work, and especially after-hours playtime. The version above was drawn to still be the same character, but seasoned. More experienced, but still railing against the inequities of the TC: Aberrant world.

I bring this up because real-world Justin has amassed even more experience and knowledge since the WW days, and has explored game design in the electronic gaming sphere very successfully, and yet has never stopped applying what he has learned to TTRPGs, and specifically the World of Darkness and Vampire: The Masquerade.

His experience with party deduction games led to his working with us on The Prince’s Gambit card game, for example. And his online design theory posts through the years are rife with game design theory that could be applied to electronic games, or right back in TTRPGs.

And in fact, he himself, is also right back in TTRPGs with last week’s announcement that Justin is the new Creative Lead for the WoD 5th Edition efforts over at Paradox!

Congrats, Justin!

Now, I have a long history with Justin, going back to when he was developing the RAGE card game at WW. (A “dragon biting some clown in half”, anybody?) He was developer and I was art director for years on VtM Revised, we worked on the late, lamented, WoD MMO together, and he was the first developer for V20, and then helmed many V20 books for Onyx Path.

And yet, even I really don’t know what he’s planning for V5. The Covid situation here and in Sweden, where Paradox is based, has complicated matters, so we’re still looking forward to what’s going to happen next.

As they say, more news when we have it!

Let the Streets Run Red art by Sam Denmark

Surely You Have Something Kickstarter-y?

OK. Fair enough, I hear ya!

You want to know more about They Came From Beyond the Grave!, especially since that’s going to be the subject of our next Kickstarter.

Well, it is the second game in the They Came From…! game line, and this time, rather than being based in the world of Sci-Fi movies of the 50s, TCFBtGrave! is set in two time periods favored by horror movies of the 60s and 70s: the Victorian Era and the late 60s into the 70s.

In fact, the game supports either era, or both with players swapping back and forth between the two. Hammer Horror is of course a huge influence, along with Roger Corman horror films, and even the Dark Shadows TV series.

Like TCFBtSea!, TCFBtGrave! uses the Storypath System plus Quip cards that allow players to contribute appropriate (or far more often extremely inappropriate) comments and dialogue that is often hilarious, but also can give mechanical benefits to the character. With the cards, the player doesn’t need to be funny, just how they use the quip.

Similarly, there are cards for filmic situations appropriate to the genre we’re emulating, like “The Devil Himself!”, or “Missing Scene” which allows for a miraculous escape that players can note as having happened during that scene. It was amazing, just a shame the scene is missing, but at least we’re all OK.

Honestly, we should have one titled “Christopher Lee’s Voice”, but that might be too powerful for players.

Keep an eye out on our social media as we continue to tease the game, and check out the actual play sessions that are available on our Twitch channel.

Pirates of Pugmire art by Pat McEvoy

Updates On Previous Mentions:

As I mentioned last week, we were looking to hire an out-of-house HR representative as a contact person for anyone with concerns on an HR level with Onyx Path. We indeed did hire Georgina who can be contacted at hr.onyxpath@gmail.com.

Scion Companion art by Shen Fei

Sorry to say it, but the pandemic is still affecting everyone – writers, printers, shippers – so while we are seeing some folks come back to business as sorta-normal, many others still can’t do that. Sometimes that’s our creators, and other times it’s our manufacturers and shippers. I’m currently waiting for at least five books worth of PoD proofs to get to me for approval so we can start selling them.

So, please hang in with us as we maneuver through this continuing alteration in our normal business practices. There’s a lot of things changing all across the world, and our little hobby isn’t in a bubble – and even if it was, we’re still going to be affected like I mention above. Just know that we are doing what we can to get you the materials so you can enjoy our:

Many Worlds, One Path!

Blurbs!

Kickstarter!

Next Up On Kickstarter: They Came From Beyond the Grave!

And keep your eyes open for:

Onyx Path Media!

This week: the Terrifically Terrible Trio chat about the Onyx Path Virtual Gaming Convention, and online TTRPG gaming in general!

As always, this Friday’s Onyx Pathcast will be on Podbean or your favorite podcast venue! https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

This week on Twitch, expect to see

V5 – Chicago by Night

Behind the Screen – Scion

They Came from Beneath the Sea! – They Came from Devil’s Reef!

Changeling: The Dreaming – The Last Faerie Tale

Mage: The Awakening – Occultists Anonymous

Scarred Lands – Purge of the Serpentholds

Get watching for some fantastic insight into how to run these wonderful games and subscribe to us on Twitch, over at twitch.tv/theonyxpath

Come take a look at our YouTube channel, youtube.com/user/theonyxpath, where you can find a whole load of videos of actual plays, dissections of our games, and more, including:

#OnyxPathCon | How to Write for TTRPGs [Panel]: https://youtu.be/UKmJQEhInP8

#OnyxPathCon | Consent & Safety Mechanics [Panel]: https://youtu.be/LljJV-TRLWA

Legendlore – The Metal Scourge: https://youtu.be/IrhhKnf6dHg

#OnyxPathCon | The Art of Onyx Path [Panel]:https://youtu.be/2mG_BqXzkfE

#OnyxPathCon | What’s Up with Onyx Path #2 [Panel]:https://youtu.be/GjukejNcCcc

#OnyxPathCon | Create Your Best Character [Panel]:https://youtu.be/UZIBL87hu6U

#OnyxPathCon | Onyx Pathcast Live [Panel]:https://youtu.be/XxNvUPUtC1o

Subscribe to our channel and click the bell icon if you want to be notified whenever new news videos and uploads come online!

Did you miss Occultists Anonymous‘ last episodes of their excellent Mage: The Awakening chronicle? Here they are:

Episode 108: Car-V Heist While Songbird prepares for a dangerous summoning, Atratus and Wyrd hit the junkyards with an overly elaborate plan to make an overly elaborate gift. How very Mage of them… https://youtu.be/wSy3c74jkfM

Episode 109: Crown of Blood Wyrd and Atratus enjoy the joy of a well-made gift and the good vibes that comes with that. Songbird joins together with Hadramiel to summon an Angel of Death to anoint a Vampire Prince in power. https://youtu.be/QxB6Ml6uStY

The Botch Pit have released an excellent overview of Mage: The Awakening right here. Do give them a like and a subscribe: https://youtu.be/D-0O1Nun6NA

Systematic Understanding of Everything is a new Exalted Explainer Podcast by Exalted Dev Monica Speca and Exalted Writer Chazz Kellner that is breaking down Creation in 45 minute chunks in preparation for Exalted Essence.

Their most recent episode in on Creation and its history – https://anchor.fm/exaltcast/episodes/Trackless-Region-Navigation—What-is-Creation-eg2g9d

Get past episodes at http://www.exaltcast.com/

Please check these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games! We’d love to feature you!

Electronic Gaming!

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is awesome! (Seriously, you need to roll 100 dice for Exalted? This app has you covered.)

On Amazon and Barnes & Noble!

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue from which you bought it. Reviews really, really help us get folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these latest fiction books:

Our Sales Partners!

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost Second Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scion 2e books and other products are available now at Studio2: https://studio2publishing.com/blogs/new-releases/scion-second-edition-book-one-origin-now-available-at-your-local-retailer-or-online

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e at the same link! And now Scion Origin and Scion Hero and Trinity Continuum Core and Trinity Continuum: Aeon are available to order!

As always, you can find Onyx Path’s titles at DriveThruRPG.com!

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, to celebrate the arrival of Justin Achilli, we present V5 Chicago By Night electronic wallpaper and V20 Lore of the Clans Storyteller’s Screen PDF files, both on DTRPG!

Conventions!

Though dates for physical conventions are subject to change due to the current COVID-19 outbreak, here’s what’s left of our current list of upcoming conventions (and really, we’re just waiting for this last one to be cancelled even though it’s Nov/Dec). Instead, keep an eye out here for more virtual conventions we’re going to be involved with:

PAX Unplugged: https://unplugged.paxsite.com/

And now, the new project status updates!

Development Status from Eddy Webb! (Projects in bold have changed status since last week.):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep.)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

Adversaries of the Righteous (Exalted 3rd Edition)

The Devoted Companion (Deviant: The Renegades)

Saints and Monsters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Anima

M20 Technocracy Operative’s Dossier (Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary)

Squeaks In The Deep (Realms of Pugmire)

Redlines

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Hundred Devil’s Night Parade (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Novas Worldwide (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Exalted Essence Edition (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Wild Hunt (Scion 2nd Edition)

CtL 2e Novella Collection: Hollow Courts (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Second Draft

Many-Faced Strangers – Lunars Companion (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Mission Statements (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Contagion Chronicle Ready-Made Characters (Chronicles of Darkness)

Trinity Continuum: Adventure! core (Trinity Continuum: Adventure!)

Dead Man’s Rust (Scarred Lands)

The Clades Companion (Deviant: The Renegades)

V5 Forbidden Religions (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

M20 Rich Bastard’s Guide To Magick (Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary)

V5 Children of the Blood (was The Faithful Undead) (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Development

TC: Aberrant Reference Screen (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Contagion Chronicle: Global Outbreaks (Chronicles of Darkness)

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Assassins (Trinity Continuum Core)

V5 Trails of Ash and Bone (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Manuscript Approval

Crucible of Legends (Exalted 3rd Edition)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Under Alien Skies (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

N!ternational Wrestling Entertainment (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Post-Approval Development

Editing

Lunars Novella (Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Player’s Guide to the Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Contagion Chronicle Jumpstart (Chronicles of Darkness)

TC: Aberrant Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

LARP Rules (Scion 2nd Edition)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

The Book of Lasting Death (Mummy: The Curse 2e)

They Came From Beyond the Grave! (They Came From!)

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Dearly Bleak – Novella (Deviant: The Renegades)

Post-Editing Development

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

W20 Shattered Dreams Gift Cards (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Hunter: The Vigil 2e core (Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

Pirates of Pugmire KS-Added Adventure (Realms of Pugmire)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Terra Firma (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Indexing

Art Direction from Mike Chaney!

In Art Direction

Tales of Aquatic Terror – Handed off to Meredith to AD.

WoD Ghost Hunters (KS) – KS assets wrapped up.

Aberrant – AD’d. Checking with Gunship.

Hunter: The Vigil 2e

Mummy 2

Deviant

Legendlore – KS running.

Technocracy Reloaded (KS)

Cults of the Blood God – Rolling along.

Scion: Dragon (KS) – Waiting on art notes.

Masks of the Mythos (KS) – Getting the cover art going.

Scion: Demigod (KS) – Art rolling. KS assets AD’d.

They Came From Beyond the Grave! (KS) – Prepping KS assets.

TC: Adventure! (KS) – Shen Fei cover art finished by end of the month.

Geist: One Foot In the Grave – AD’d.

In Layout

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad

Vigil Watch

TC Aeon Terra Firma

V5 Let the Streets Run Red – continued working it.

Pugmire Adventure – small project, knocking the layout together.

Scion Titanomachy

Proofing

Trinity Aeon Jumpstart – Errata gathering.

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate – Page XXs.

Contagion Chronicle – Backer PDF out to backers, closing errata.

Cavaliers of Mars: City of the Towered Tombs

Magic Item Decks (Scarred Lands)

Yugman’s Guide Support Decks (Scarred Lands)

Dark Eras 2 Screen and booklet

Scion Companion – Inputting changes from devs.

At Press

TCFBTS Heroic Land Dwellers – PoD files uploaded.

TCFBTS Screen and Booklet – Files at press.

They Came from Beneath the Sea! – Press proofs signed off on, PoD files uploaded.

Creature Collection 5e – PoD proof ordered. Traditional files sent to printer.

Pirates of Pugmire – Files at press. PoD proofs ordered.

Pirates of Pugmire Screen – Files at press.

Pugmire Buried Bones – PoD proof ordered.

Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition Dark Eras Compilation – Uploading PoD file.

Today’s Reason to Celebrate!

I’d really like to get back to needing to pull wacky things that happened on this date, but we need to celebrate the life of a towering giant in his field. Ennio Morricone, one of the greatest film composers, has left this earth he brought so much magic and passion and joy to. The Untouchables. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. The Mission. Once Upon A Time In the West. His film scores were the background music I played while illustrating all the way back to high school, and as late as two weeks ago I asked Alexa to “Play Ennio Morriconi music” as I wrote that week’s MMN blog. Not only was he a genius in composing instrumental scores, but he was willing to incorporate single instruments, or non-instruments, or inserted choral sections, or even compose an entire theme using fart sounds. Maybe not to everyone’s tastes, that last example, but my point is, he stretched what could be done with musical scores with a deft hand and a genius’s ear. His like will not be heard again.

[the-lightning-strikes-again]

Quarantine Tech Tip: How to Stream Movies/Shows/Videos with Friends and Family Online (no matter how far apart you are!)

Hi, all! Coronavirus continues to sweep the world. One way to keep socializing with your friends and family is to stream content together online.

There’s a lot of different programs that allow you to watch things together in perfect synchronization, and to use text/voice chat while viewing. Some of the basic options include:

https://www.watch2gether.com/ - where you can enjoy Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, and Dailymotion content together, or shop together on Amazon using an integrated chat room. It creates an instant chat/viewing room without registration.

https://www.mycircle.tv/ - where you can watch things like YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, and possibly even twitch.tv together. It creates an instant chat/viewing room without registration. You can create a whole playlist of videos to watch.

https://www.netflixparty.com/ - an extension ONLY for Chrome, which allows you to sync up your Netflix viewing with others and message together while watching. The only downside is that you must have Netflix yourself for it to work, even if you’re just the one viewing. Another issue is that you have to create a new session for each episode you watch. 

https://picarto.tv/ - where you can watch artists streaming as they screenshare and work on their projects. This is not optimized for viewing shows/movies together, but I wanted to add it because it’s fun to watch people draw and interact with artists!

But what about being able to sync up over content available on Netflix, Hulu, or even videos on your own computer desktop?

Over the last couple of days, some friends and I have been testing some of the more agile programs that allow you to have greater control over the websites you can share and the ways you can interact. Those programs include:

Kast: https://kast.gg/

TwoSeven: https://twoseven.xyz/

To stream content, both of these programs require that you 1) sign up with a free account, and 2) that you use certain technology to ensure it functions:  

KAST

Kast is the new version of the old Rabbit app, available at: https://kast.gg/. You can watch movies with 100+ friends online while chatting through voice/video or text. There doesn’t appear to be a limit in terms of what you can watch through this. You can share:

Your entire screen

Any application window (website tabs, desktop programs, you name it--including Netflix and other streaming services that your viewers may not have while you do)

Your webcam

Other advantages:

Kast has several personalization features and supports a lot of languages.

You can invite people by sharing a link to your party room.

Your party room is automatically private, unless you change settings to make it fully public.

You can create multiple parties to enjoy things with different people.

You can add moderators, or kick/ban/block people.

You can access a list of other people’s public parties and search by tags to find content you want.

You can use emoji reactions in chat.

You have a lot of control over how to send or receive sound.

Their privacy policy is pretty expansive with lots of ways for you to contact them.

Kast has a help desk/troubleshooting site if you need it: https://kast.zendesk.com/hc/en-us 

Kast is very quick to show content (very little loading/buffering time)

Its app is optimized for either Windows or Mac.

You can download the app here (recommended): https://kast.gg/download.html

Or if you just want to view someone else’s stream, you can use the web version through a Chrome browser. If you are joining a stream, you may have to sit through a brief advertisement to gain access to the streaming room.

Kast caveats:

You have to be 13 years of age to sign up and use the app, according to Terms of Service: https://kast.gg/legal/Kast_Terms_of_Service.htm

Kast retains the right to use any of your posted content for its own self-promotion opportunities, according to its Terms of Service. 

Kast screens/monitors content according to its Terms of Service, to ensure legal compliance. 

Kast technical disadvantages:

You have to download the app to actively stream content. The web version does not support voice/video streaming—it just allows you to join other streams.

It might not be the most optimized for mobile use. (In testing, my friends and I struggled to get audio to work.)

You may experience some lag at random times. But in general, we had a very smooth, in-sync stream while watching most of a movie. It glitched only once and that was because the movie file itself had a glitch.  

To get movie audio to play for others, your own audio settings as a streamer MUST be set to Computer Audio. So this means if you get pings on Discord, others can hear it. Ideally, you’d also want to use the text-chat function instead of voice while viewing, to avoid feedback issues.

Depending on your tech, you might experience a black-screen when trying to share something. This didn’t happen during our test while using the app and VLC Player/Youtube/Netflix, but Kast does have a troubleshooting section on their site: https://kast.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/360006131691-Video-issues

TwoSeven

Another free streaming service is TwoSeven (or, 27), available at: https://twoseven.xyz. 

TwoSeven is another very impressive service that is entirely based online (no app needed to stream). Once you sign up for a free account, you can easily create a room and stream content from a variety of places, including:

Youtube

Netflix

Amazon

HBO

VIMEO

Personal (files on your desktop)

Web

TwoSeven advantages:

Intuitive, simple interface that exists fully online (no downloadable app required)

Audio/text function works while viewing video content.

You can share your webcam.

Videos stream with high-quality picture.

You can toggle who is able to adjust video controls.

People who receive the link to your stream room do not need to sign up to use the interface.

TwoSeven caveats:

Minors (people under the age of 18) are prohibited in the Terms of Service from using this website.

The service reserves the right to use any of Your Content, according to the Terms and Conditions: https://twoseven.xyz/help/terms-and-conditions.html. I would assume most likely for promotion, but it’s silent on its purposes.

The website reserves the right to kick you for not complying with its rules, but it oddly doesn’t say how it would know. Odds are, it engages in some kind of monitoring/recording of content as well.

TwoSeven disadvantages:

You need to download an extension to get the website to work well with sharing online content outside of YouTube. Otherwise, you may be left in a permanent buffering purgatory.

It’s not optimized for sharing your computer screen; the Personal option requires that you upload a video to share, and the buffering for that can take several minutes.

It requires all users to have accounts on the streaming service that they're using. So if you want to watch Netflix together, each viewer will need an account (or a Netflix profile if your account supports multiple profiles).

It cannot bypass regional restrictions for video content.

We experienced an issue where audio was out of sync with visuals on longer files.

Some people experienced audio issues depending on their headset.

There is no option to make your streaming public. So you’d have to post the link in a public place to drive traffic to it.

It is not connected to any other streams, so you’re unable to join other streaming communities through TwoSeven.

Conclusion

There are always advantages or disadvantages to any service you use. I wanted to share all this to bring awareness to the possibilities, as well as their capabilities and limitations. Nothing’s ever perfect, lol. But I hope this information can help you all find the best streaming service for your interests/needs, and that streaming can help you stay connected with friends and family!

(Note: This post was made based off of personal experiences using the Kast and TwoSeven systems and others. I’m not under any incentive to market these programs, and I welcome anyone to correct or add to my suggestions. Some regions of the world may be unable to access these programs.)

Special thanks to @lunar-magnolia and @weebleswrites for helping me test and @crystal-rebellion for alerting me to the existence of TwoSeven.

[mythicaldemigoddess-of-deltarune]

I Can NOT Believe This Youtuber....

okay I’m on the Xbox One, and I was playing a video game.

but then after saving, I decided to take a break.

and check out the Xbox One’s Youtube.

(which I am still wondering if the computer’s Youtube, has that setting where you can hide inappropriate stuff.)

anyway guess what I find...?

Helluva Boss Episode 4, BUT someone a certain Youtuber....

had uploaded it, not a clip, but the FULL episode.

that episode with the other episodes and pilot,

should only be on it’s Home Channel.

that is a property of  Vivziepop.

the Youtuber who did such a thing, has about 226 subscribers.

the time they had uploaded March 23, 2021.

and by the looks of it, they did it to Episode 5 of Helluva Boss too.

on May 1, 2021.

even if I tell them what they are doing is wrong,

and there is somethings you can and can’t do with clips of Youtube Original Series made by it’s creators.

there is a possibility they wont listen.

and their actions, will cause someone to think the original episodes

came from them, if they didn’t check out the link below,

which is lucky in view and isn’t in the hidden where you will have to press “show more” button.

in the description part, in the copy of episode 4,

they tell those who are viewing

they wrote “Made By Viviziepop go sub to him or her“

and in the copy of episode 5,

they wrote "Made By Vivziepop go sub to him" 

Youtube really REALLY needs to do better,

I’m not sure if [REDACTED] knows that there can be bad side effects to that.

I don’t have to worry about Camp Camp, Red Vs Blue, RWBY or Death Battle

too much, yeah they are still on Youtube, but at least they are safe on the official Rooster Teeth Site.

which is here -->  https://roosterteeth.com/

and they should not call her “Him”

so unless that is her gender identity and she goes by the him/he pronouns,

they should either call her she/her or the neutral pronouns that is for everyone.

it’s not just what that person did, which I just found out today.

but EVERY Youtuber, who does the same thing that they are doing,

I don’t even think they even got permission,

which even if they asked, I don’t believe they would of been given the okay to do so.

there is some stuff you can do on Youtube, and some stuff you can’t.

I think if possible, maybe they can be reason with.

yes there is a chance they might say that nothing is wrong with what they are doing, but sorry to say that isn’t so.

like I said, some people will still do false reports and might not bother to read below.

if they end up seeing [REDACTED]’s copy of the episodes on their channel,

without even bothering to read the bottom of where the video came from.

and they end up seeing the episodes from their home channel,

they might do a false report.

and I am NOT letting that happen again to another person.

sure the Undertale amv is still up, but only the sub version

that the person who put the subs on there, but at least they got permission.

I did surprisingly found the original at another place, and I can only hope it was place by the original owner.

maybe nothing will happen for now,

but just in case, I believe that there needs to be a way to stop the many youtubers who keep doing that, and think they are not harming her and every other youtuber.

what some youtubers keep doing, by stealing other youtubers videos,

by placing a copy of the full videos on to their channels,

without permission, it can end up getting others mad.

 at first I was going to write that episode stealing jerk on here,

but I rather not, so I edited the name out and put Redacted instead.

if I’m going to say who they are, then I will say this...

they are just like every youtuber who doesn’t do the fair use,

and just take a full copy of the episodes and then upload them on their channel.

and the one who did it, is from Canada.

 at least not everyone from Canada is like that,

nor is the ones from here and the other places in the world.

I wonder if I might have distant cousins from Canada...?

maybe not but it is still possible I do and don’t know it,

there is a possibility I could have distant cousins from around the world, because of my different ancestors and heritages.

 it isn’t just that youtuber that is the problem,

it’s every youtuber that keeps doing it.

I know there are others who feel the same way, and wish youtubers like them would stop.

yes Youtube still has some problems.

I would suggest Vimeo, but I'm not sure if that is for the best, yeah there does seem to have Helluva Boss episodes on the Vimeo.

but I don’t know if half of the people who had put them on Vimeo,

are part of the team that worked on Helluva Boss.

I wanted to try to check Vimeo, to see if Viv has a channel their,

and maybe see that as a alternative place to watch the episodes.

it doesn’t seem likely, which I guess is fine.

I’m still fine with watching the episodes and even other videos of theirs on youtube.

I’m not sure if I will watch stuff on Vimeo very much.

it kind of sucks that how this day was going so well,

until find another one of Those Youtubers, once again doing that...

and they better not touch the Arackniss Audio Series,

I’m will not be happy if AxelGear becomes another target for those jerks.

maybe I should just try to relax, and hope karma will deal with those jerks.

I think after I check out Xbox One’s Youtube,

I will watch Panty & Stocking, well maybe before that,

I could watch My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, no wait maybe I will watch a movie first.

maybe Deadpool, yeah I think I will watch Deadpool first.

then later I will watch the Arackniss Audio Series from the beginning.

also now that I know from a confirmation sign (ain’t saying what sign.)

that my soul name is Small Lilith, maybe I can try to see if I can have it changed....even if the name Lilith is a normal name now a days.

it doesn’t really help that my spiritual heritage is both a Earth Angel

and Succubus, and I have to protect myself dream walking, by the use of the dream catcher I got now, which is bigger than dream catchers I had before I think.

of course when I did sleep with dream catchers when I was little,

it was for different reasons.

plus I sleep with gems under my pillow, some which are gems shaped like angels.

I don’t think I use to sleep with bracelets on,

at least not until I had that one dream where I was still sleeping but it was like being awake at the same time, and all I could see was dark,

I was laying on my back, and then I felt something that felt way too real

and as soon as it happen, it scared me awake.

I think it might of been a incubus.

it’s fine that no one believes that or thinks that I’m worrying over nothing

and it was just a scary dream and nothing more.

but no matter if it was just a scary dream and it just felt too real,

I want to play it safe.

if someone like me, were to accidentally dream walk into another person’s dream, it will be because of the sexual energy and it will put me or anyone else like me, into a trance.

which of course if it was like the normal type succubus,

they would be the one doing the placing a trance on the dreamer that they walk into the dream of.

but for the hybrid souls, they will be the ones place in the trance,

the only way to keep anything happening, is to be fully aware and then not get close to the dreamer that you accidentally walked into the dream of,

and then hope you end up back into your own dream.

 at least I know now that the reason why I never truly figured out I was Aceflux,

was because of the sexual energy of others.

I kind of want to flip Matron Lilith and Lesser Lilith, the birdies....

I might not agree with what Adam did to Lilith,

and she would of end up being fully healed thanks to the Earth-Heavenly Mother, if it weren’t for what happen.

of course when the Goddess took a piece of Lilith’s soul,

of course it will have traces of “succubus” in it and possibly along with Lilith’s still human soul, and that soul was mixed with the angel soul that Lilith was having romantic relationship with, and it created a Earth Angel Baby.

my soul isn’t very old, surprisingly it hasn’t done that much reincarnating.

so lucky me I was never the ones who I thought I was in a past life.

I’m just fragmented from their soul.

anyway I have my reasons as to why I can’t help but think of wanting to flip those two Lilith’s off, I mean someone who wouldn’t normally do that,

might end up be doing it because of stuff like what jerk youtubers are doing to other youtubers.

 I will understand that many will agree about well the whole how a human can end up being a mix of a Earth Angel and Succubus.

or that they have energy wings that can go into flame mode when upset,

or the wings hug around them when they are upset or nervous or any form of mad or sad emotion.

I’m still human, even though my species identity is Demi-Human.

yes biologically I’m human, and my bio-sex is female.

but my gender identity is binary & nonbinary, which is a bigender identity.

I think it might be possible that my Gyno-Agender identity,

might become Feminine-Nonbinary, but it might stay Gyno-Agender.

plus it might be stereotyping to assume that Heaven will just look like,

well the sky and clouds.

that can be just one version, the other being that it looks like earth,

with trees, flowers and who knows what else.

I mean not everyone has to agree about my new views about it,

and you can respect my different view, just don’t call it blasphemy.

also I want to make sure there is no misunderstandings,

plus I want to only talk about this kind of stuff, maybe only once in a while.

I also want to make sure there is no really bad misunderstandings

that can go past the limit of being understanding to end up hurting others.

most of the time whenever I do say something,

it gets taken the wrong way in the worse way, and I end up having my feelings hurt to the point of crying.

I want to make sure to be more careful and try to make it so that my words are not misunderstood in the wrong way.

misunderstandings can be okay, so long as they are small and things can still be worked out the right way.

also maybe I will wait to watch the stuff that I said I would watch,

I mean I can pick something else to watch later.

I still need to color that Bendy drawing and then post it here,

I would of did it yesterday but I wasn’t able to.

so I plan to color it today and then post it on here later.

I think it is best that I try to see about trying to get my soul name changed, maybe in a few months or next year.

but I guess for now I just have to put up with it.

I think I will watch Hotel Transylvania, I can’t wait until the Hotel Transylvania 4.

it be nice if I could find my own zing one day,

and well I’m fine right now, plus if I ever do find my own zing one day,

they will need to respect my personal space when I need it,

be nice to my baby, aka my cat.

they would also need to understand that I need to go to my bedroom half the time, to protect myself as it is my safe zone.

also they would need to understand my different view of romance,

that romance between two people who love each other,

don’t always have to be all kissing all the time or the snu-snu.

it can also just have them hanging out and playing video games and watching movies or reading comic books or any type of book really.

I think I should only try to find my “zing” when I feel ready to.

and I don’t think I am.

love takes time, even to a heart that has been broken before.

ya can’t force it.

so I’m fine with having crushes on real people and not doing anything about it,

or even having crushes on characters from shows or movies.

     and well there is a reason why I use “redacted” for the youtuber that stole those episodes...

it might be a bit sensitive, something that concerns and worries me.

maybe I can explain another time about it, like why I had decided to edit out their Youtuber name before posting this up.

I can be sensitive I know, my most dominant expression now

is what you will see on Frisk from the Undertale game.

I do smile and feel happy too, but I rather not smile unless I feel like it.

like if I think of a  really funny joke, which I had the other day.

I couldn’t help but laugh.

I think I will wait until much later or tonight to watch Hotel Transylvania and the other stuff I plan to watch.

I think I will watch Arackniss Episode 1 to the other episodes, I mostly watch them not signed into Youtube.

also I have to say if I had to pick

who I would trust more, either my older cousin (who is in jail now, and is most likely a prison-wife possibly.)

or Valentino and Vox....

I’m gonna go with the two Overlords.

as dangerous as they might be, I don’t think they would cross a very dangerous line that my much older cousin did that got them thrown in jail in the first place.

I’m making sure to pray every once in a while

to both God and Goddess that he stays there for life.

I still think it is possible if I was listen to, about what I remembered from my childhood, which might of been a warning dream,

and if it was then I need to try to find out which Angel gave me that warning dream, and make sure they do NOT do that kind of warning dream again,

if they are gonna do that, make sure just say it and not let it be a kiss that ends up traumatizing and causing bad feelings where the child doesn’t talk about it to their family.

it is possible when we get traumatize as children,

we will bury the memories deep in our minds

and we wont remember until years later.

my older cousin wasn’t even in jail yet or did the crime yet,

my trying to tell my concern about them, came first.

and then some time later when we no longer had to worry about him,

we find out he did something really bad.

I don’t think it was a coincidence.

I don’t even think I was truly safe with half of my family.

maybe some of them, but not all of them.

I was just too oblivious and too trusting.

I’m gonna write one more thing up, so I will just post this up first...

and I hope that that youtuber that I had just found out about today,

who is stealing Vivziepop’s stuff, gets stop for good, and others like them.

and if I feel like explaining why I decided to put their name in Redacted, I will.

but right now I can’t.

and I’m sure if there has been anyone who has been hurt past the breaking point before, they might do the same thing as me and try to be cautious.     

[recentanimenews]

Anime in America Podcast: Full Episode 8 Transcript

  It's time to bid farewell to Crunchyroll's Anime in America podcast, but not before it goes out with a banger of a final episode. Join host Yedoye Travis and special guest Kun Gao as they tackle the streaming wars, and read on for the full episode 8 transcript. 

  The Anime in America series is available on crunchyroll.com, animeinamerica.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts. 

  EPISODE 8: THE STREAMING WARS

Guest: Kun Gao

  Disclaimer: The following program contains language not suitable for all ages. Discretion advised.

  [Lofi music]

  Last we checked in, the anime industry was struggling. Rising competition matched with the economic crisis of ‘07 and ’08 caused half the industry to shutter its doors within the next five years. And even without economic obstacles, the physical media and broadcast focused industry was still facing the looming threat of piracy.

  I’m Yedoye Travis and this is the final episode of Anime in America. 

  [Lofi music]

  By this point anime was already available to stream legally, and had been as early as 2002 with Valkyrie Media Partner’s video on demand service Anime Network. It had been a mainstay on Netflix since back when the company was still mailing out DVDs, which it technically still is, but if you already knew that, chances are your internet connection isn’t strong enough to listen to this podcast. Funimation and VIZ had already made the jump to digital with major streaming services Hulu and...uh… Joost?

  Do you remember Joost? Cause I do not. What the fuck is “Joost?”

  Both inked deals along with the now defunct U.K. anime distributor Gong in 2008 to stream select anime series from their catalogs. More on that in Anime in the U.K.! Ha ha, just kidding… unless… maybe?

  Video hosting websites were presenting a major problem to anime distributors, however. The internet had entered the age of YouTube and new sites and services where literally anyone could upload a video without any kind of quality control were rising and falling daily and with them fell the final remaining barrier between consumers and pirates, technological literacy [Pirate “Arr!”]. The online ecology was primed for pirates to step out of IRC and torrenting sites and start putting their work on streaming video pages that literally anyone could use.

  Unburdened by approvals and quality assurance, piracy had been beating official releases in terms of speed for decades and now suddenly was standing shoulder to shoulder with official services in availability. 

  But already the seed of a new era had been planted. And among the thousands of video hosting sites was an anime-focused page run by a group of young Bay Area techies.

  Gao: We started to just tinker around on nights and weekends. We were watching Starcraft replays, we were watching anime content, and every week it was like “well, let’s load up this torrent and let’s wait for the Naruto to come out, and now we have to seed to a bunch of people before we can watch and let’s hope we don’t get a virus, or whatever.” And it was like, you know it was like a lot of work. And then we’re like “well, why don’t we just make a website that people can just click, just like YouTube, and just start watching?” And coincidentally, YouTube took off in… I’ll say ‘05-’06, when it was really starting to hockey stick, so we kinda said “well, that’s kinda the model.” YouTube, there was many other sites, at the time, now it’s just YouTube, but Veoh, MetaCafe, like Stage6, like all these sites we were like, what if we just did one where people would upload content they normally just can’t watch? And anime just made a lot of sense to us because we couldn’t find how to watch it… anywhere. Except for torrent sites. That’s kinda the chronology up until we founded the company in the middle of ‘06. 

  That is Kun Gao, founder and former CEO of Crunchyroll. It wasn’t always the biggest catalog of anime in the world, back then it was a small website he and his friend designed to host anime and Starcraft videos which quickly turned from a passion project into an ever-increasing logistical and financial struggle as site traffic began to balloon.

  Gao: We ran out of bandwidth [dialup sounds] though pretty quickly, because bandwidth was really expensive. Especially back then [dialup sounds end] it was like 20 times more  expensive than it is now. And I remember we were just maxing all our credit cards, because we didn’t, we weren’t really making money, there wasn’t a way to monetize with video ads, there wasn’t video ads to begin with. So yeah, that was the situation in early ‘07. So we, first it was raising with some angels. We said, we approached some angels, they were angels for our first company, my first company, and they had gotten a return from that investment. And I asked them if they wanted to invest into the new company, and they were very supportive and they were right behind us. And then within about a month or two after the angels invested, the site just continued to grow. And it was showing up on Alexa, which was not the Amazon speaking thingamajig, it was a website where you could look at other peoples’ traffic, and how they were trending over time. And I think that’s when VCs started knocking on our doors, they saw that the website was just hockey sticking and blowing up and they approached us and said they wanted to invest. And so from about… August-September through December of 2017, we started talking to a lot of VCs and then we found the right VC to invest into our business, and then we raised about $4 million bucks into the company, and that was when we started paying off all our credit card bills, and then we started to you know, get more servers, starting to hire full time employees, because we weren’t paying anyone or ourselves at that time, so that everyone could work on this full time. 

  That’s Angel Investors, of course, not actual… angels, which, uh… in some circles, you might believe are fake. Depends. We’ll leave that up to God. Who is real! [angelic choir].

  Gao: In 2008, after we raised VC funding, we said “well, we need to figure out how to, like, license this content. We need to figure out how to compensate creators, and then we need to figure out how to make money for this content.” And so at that time, I think the company was like six, maybe seven, people? And everyone was an engineer, and so I drew the lucky or unlucky straw of having to figure out how to like, figure out Japan. The first thing I had to do was, you know, was like figure out “who do I talk to?” And I didn’t know who to talk to. And so fortunately, one of our advisors was a guy who was, at the time, the CEO of a company called BitTorrent, and he, along with Bram, who created the BitTorrent protocol, had setup a office in Tokyo where BitTorrent was a thing you can license to put on to like, a NAS drive, or a router, where you could do BitTorrenting on your NAS or your router so you don’t have to turn on your computer to do that. And so they had a business out there, and so I talked to him about who to talk to. And he said “well, you should talk to this guy called Vince Totino, he works for the BitTorrent in Japan.” And so in March of 2008, I went to Japan, met up with Vince, and then the more we talked, the more it was like “well, this guy’s awesome. Like, he knows everything about Japan, because he’s been there for 20 years. He speaks fluent Japanese. Maybe he can help us to navigate Japan.” And so he joined full time, and then we then set about going to all the major Japanese anime companies. And he didn’t have all the connections, either, so it was just we found someone who knew someone who knew someone, and then we contacted him and just kept going down the chain until we were able to get to, we were able to get to the key folks at all the major companies. And then, as relates to subtitling, outputting content, once we figured out the business side and we were able to get a deal with TV Tokyo, we had to figure out how to legitimately subtitle the content. Because we were getting the files before TV broadcast, we can’t just put it out there for fansub groups to fansub, because we wouldn’t know or be able to trust that. And so we started to hire people to help us to subtitle. And it ended up being that a lot of the people who used to participate in the fansub community were the best people to subtitle. And so they were able to receive some compensation and credit for their work doing it officially, legitimately, through the Crunchyroll business.

  So, Kun just went to Tokyo, linked up with Vince and got all the major anime publishers on board. Pretty simple, right? Wrong! Absolutely wrong. You’re stupid for thinking otherwise. Turns out it was pretty difficult not only to sell them the whole idea of streaming media, but also to convince those publishers to license out their valuable IP to a pirate site.

  Gao: Interesting side story is, if you remember when we previously talked about VHS that was pirated and distributed by fans, for fans, very analogous to what we were doing, that started a company called AD Vision, by John Ledford, who I would say is probably the pioneer of anime home video distribution. And today the company’s called Sentai. But he helped us to introduce us to TV Tokyo, in like the Fall of 2008. And then, when we got to TV Tokyo, they were, you know, they were very pragmatic about the situation. I would say not everyone was pragmatic. We would have conversations, a lot of conversations, were something to the tune of “Hey! We’ve got a website, there’s a lot of fansubbed content on there, we know it’s not legal, we want to get the license to legally do it.” And then they would just… not try to make eye contact, they would like act visibly angry, they would be shaking and they would say “you’re stealing from us, you’re pirating our content.” And we said “well, we want to make it legitimate. And if you want us to take all of your content down, today, we will. But that’s going to send all the fans to dark corners, to get access to your content, because they really want to watch it. And we want to make a bright lit place for you and your content to be distributed worldwide.” And so I think TV Tokyo really got that, and so we were able to work with them to figure out how to license Naruto legitimately. And at the end of ‘08, we announced together with TV Tokyo that they would be, we would be simulcasting Naruto, for the first time [Naruto opening 2 “Haruka Kanata” plays], within like an hour of TV broadcast starting Jan…. uh, Jan 7th, or something, 2009. So that’s kinda how that arc started.

  [Lofi music]

  On New Year’s Eve 2008, Crunchyroll deleted all of its illegal videos and fan contributed content, converting to an official streaming service that began simulcasting Naruto Shippuden in January 2009. On the Japan side it would remain an uphill battle over the years as Crunchyroll continued to shop itself out and prove itself to other publishers, but in America it was a deal that shook the entire industry. Streaming anime was just beginning to creep onto platforms like Netflix and Hulu in 2008 but NO ONE was simulcasting. At the time, Naruto was the single most popular anime in the world and suddenly it was on a brand new service that was putting it up to stream within an hour of its Japanese broadcast.

  For anyone who doesn’t know, simulcasting is a portmanteau of the words “simultaneous” and “broadcasting,” and I think based on those two words you can guess that it means “simultaneous broadcasting.” 

  This was a foundational shift both for the established industry and for pirates. Where before pirates had speed on their side, they couldn’t hope to turn around episodes of Naruto within an hour. Crunchyroll’s agreement with TV Tokyo got them all the materials in advance of the broadcast to allow them to do the legwork pre-release, which would eventually shrink down the window to be near simultaneous with the Japanese TV broadcast. Suddenly the fastest and easiest way to watch new anime was once again an official source.

  Along with their new offering, Crunchyroll also established a new framework for the streaming business. Although Crunchyroll’s original catalogue was small, many fans considered it a win-win.Crunchyroll had a large pre-existing community that trusted the brand and now it was beating the pirates in speed and had a clear financial throughline from your wallet to the people making the product. 

  So Crunchyroll started to grow. And it started to grow FAST.

  Suddenly industry titans like Funimation, VIZ, and the recently established Aniplex of America found themselves having to play catch-up. This started the Simulcast Wars, a nearly 10 year long race for each of these companies to launch its own branded streaming services and get their products out alongside the official Japanese broadcast, and of course, everyone tried to get in.

  And I mean everyone. Every single person. 

  But quick aside before I get into that… This pivot to simulcasting is a huge moment for anime itself, but that moment had another lasting effect on licensing that’s definitely worth mentioning. Anime itself got more opportunities. Licensing companies always have to be strategic to make money, but the shift toward streaming as the primary vehicle changed the economics of anime. You might say it… disrupted… the industry.

  Gao: I think when you start off as… when you start off and become so successful like Funimation in home video, sometimes it’s tough to switch gears and disrupt your own business. And so we were disruptors. We were definitely way smaller, but we had to be nimble. And there were a lot of content that Funimation just doesn’t license, because for them it doesn’t make sense to go get Haikyu!! [Haikyu!! opening “Imagination” plays]. It wouldn’t ever sell on home video, and that was the only way they made money. So that wasn’t interesting for them. But it was interesting for us. Through the internet, there’s a lot of sports anime fans who love that genre, who love the fact that sports is just a vehicle for telling stories, and they’re willing to subscribe, they’re willing to watch online. And so we had an advantage in that regard. 

  Before our modern era where there’s just about 100 percent licensing rate every season, tons of titles would get skipped over because anime distributors in the U.S. had to judge new titles through the lens of a physical release and decide if a production looked like it would sell enough units to make up for their investment. A streaming model meant it was not only easier for each anime to find its audience online, but a lower price tag since you didn’t necessarily have to add the costs of designing, manufacturing, and distributing DVDs and a title’s performance online could act as a testing ground to inform your later decisions regarding a physical release.

  You could make the argument that this also hurts anime’s longevity since physical releases are often all that is left of a title if the license enters limbo and that’s certainly legitimate but, as a counterpoint... We might notta gotten Haikyu!!... so there’s that. That’s enough of an argument, right?

  Okay! Back to the thing that I was talking about.

  EVERYBODY. In all caps.

  Funimation was the quickest to follow, streaming a near simulcast of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood the very next season, four days behind the Japanese broadcast, which was fast by industry standards, but still gave pirates plenty of wiggle room for one of the biggest shonen releases of the 2010s [Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood opening “Again” plays]. 

  VIZ followed next with Inuyasha: The Final Act in the Fall season which they simulcast on Hulu.

  This was the pattern for about two years as other companies experimented with simulcasts of top priority titles and Crunchyroll continued to grow not only in subscribers but their number of their simulcast titles each season.

  Then Anime News Network tried to get in on the action.

  Y’know, the news site. The one with “News” in its name? One of the most trafficked anime sites in the world at the time, Anime News Network wanted in on the game, and after picking up some catalog titles from the likes of Aniplex, Bandai, and Sentai, they made their simulcasting debut starting with Oreimo in Fall 2010 [Oreimo opening plays]. Oreimo is… uh… I will say the definitive title in a genre of anime known as “Siscon,” upon which I refuse to elaborate but you can google at your own risk.

  Unfortunately ANN pulled a Funimation, and someone took advantage of an exploit in their system and managed to get ahold of the second episode of Oreimo pre-release, and ANN was also forced to suspend its simulcasts because siscon dudes mean business. At this point though they were probably already on their way out of the streaming business. Despite the large amount of traffic ANN commanded on its editorial side, it was unable to leverage that into streaming views and it quietly wound down its catalog over the years to once again focus exclusively on news. Because they’re a news site. They do news.

  The Fall 2010 season also saw the launch of Toonzaki, a creation of none other than the now-failing 4Kids’. It started with a catalogue of 72 mostly non-exclusive titles, and honestly the streaming site may have been one of the best things 4Kids’ ever created, a community focused platform that attracted even longtime critics of the anime licensor. Unfortunately the site couldn’t survive 4Kids’s financial woes and it was ultimately killed, likely as a result of the 2012 lawsuit we mentioned in the previous episode. In 2012 Toonzaki suffered the 1-2 punch of losing its entire Yu-Gi-Oh! catalog and having its site mysteriously going down for three whole months. I dunno about you but I would cancel my subscription after uh, probably a couple of hours, actually. Ultimately the site’s ownership was passed to Konami and it was later shut down in 2013.

  In 2012 VIZ announced its own online streaming channel called Neon Alley which was kinda like a TV channel but VIZ anime and on the internet. That uh, ya know the whole concept of streaming? That’s what we’re talking about this episode. Unfortunately it didn’t fly and by early 2014, VIZ cut a deal with Hulu that added Neon Alley as a content channel to the larger streaming service’s menu. Within just a few months the Neon Alley name was dropped altogether as VIZ’s content was fully incorporated into Hulu’s service.

  2013 saw the introduction of a brand new face in American anime streaming which, if I were a company like Crunchyroll or Funimation at the time, I probably would have greeted with hostility. Daisuki was founded by a Japanese consortium led by Asatsu-DK whose investors included major studios like Toei Animation, Aniplex, Sunrise, and TMS with the intention of streaming their anime globally. If that wasn’t scary enough, they were later joined by another $3 million in investments from a who’s who of Japanese publishers like Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan, and Kadokawa.

  Included in their starting catalog were Aniplex hits like Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Sword Art Online as well as a large number of Sunrise mecha anime. And I can not emphasize enough the vibe at the time was that this was the apocalypse for international licensing. Japan’s gonna hold onto all their titles, choke everybody else out, and run their own one-stop shop for anime.

  But obviously that didn’t happen, so… what went wrong?

  Well nobody’s entirely sure but probably a number of things. By 2013 America’s short romance with mecha anime like Gundam Wing, Escaflowne, and Evangelion had long since come to an end and it was Gundam titles courtesy of Sunrise that made up most of Daisuki’s initial offering of exclusives. Look, Gundam fans, I see you. I’m one of you. I don’t know why kids these days can’t appreciate giant robots, either, but that’s just how it is. The rest of Daiksuki’s starting catalog was pretty sparse since they’d already shopped out the licenses to many of their major titles in the largest international markets. By now, I’m sure this episode feels like a thinly veiled Crunchyroll ad, but the fact is, Crunchyroll had the good fortune of launching with Naruto the single most popular anime of its era, while Daisuki had two major Aniplex hits that were already showing their age. That, along with some endemic technical issues on their platform, seem to have made an environment not even One Punch Man and Dragon Ball Super could save. Also, it seems, splitting up anime streaming rights by region and selling them piecemeal to major streaming services may have been more profitable for some of Daisuki’s investors.

  In March of 2017 Bandai Namco purchased Daisuki’s owner Anime Consortium in Japan and by October of the same year the service shut down completely.

  Anime was already a popular subsection of Netflix’s sprawling catalog in 2014, but that year the company started to make public moves to invest in the medium and secure their own exclusives, teaming up with Polygon Pictures to secure many of their future seinen releases such as Knights of Sidonia and Ajin: Demi-human [Ajin trailer clip], likely establishing the relationship that would later lead to a number of 3D anime produced by Netflix itself like the upcoming Pacific Rim and recently released Altered Carbon and Ghost in the Shell.

  Early 2016 saw Funimation launch their own streaming platform dubbed FunimationNow. But that wasn’t the only major announcement they planned that year. 2016 was also the beginning of what was probably the biggest news for Anime in America since the start of simulcasting: the big Crunchyroll/Funimation alliance.

  Under the tagline “better together” Crunchyroll and Funimation, now two of the biggest names in anime not only in the U.S., but worldwide, announced a strategic partnership in which they’d be sharing their libraries with one another.

      [Lofi music]

  As it turned out, 2017 was the year that two media juggernauts would turn their eyes on anime and I just gotta discuss the most unfortunate one first. I’m talking, of course, about Amazon’s Anime Strike. And I say “of course,” but you might not’ve known about it until I just said it, so... Amazon announced its entry into the anime industry January 17th with a great deal of fanfare. 

  [IGN News: Amazon has just launched its own anime focused streaming channel, called Anime Strike]

  Anime Strike was the first of what would be several branded add-on channels for Amazon Prime Video, which were essentially ways of compartmentalizing content that they could charge extra money for. So, in addition to your Prime subscription, you’d have to shell out an additional $4.99 to watch the exclusive anime Amazon was planning to load on the service.

  Amazon wasn’t fuckin’ around, either. Among their first exclusives was the seinen sex drama Scum’s Wish, which would be the first of Amazon’s new exclusive streaming deal with the lauded Noitamina animation block on Fuji TV which, down the line, would land them Inuyashiki, After the Rain, and Banana Fish. They also entered a strategic deal with Sentai Filmworks that would give Anime Strike an exclusivity window for certain new Sentai titles. After about four months they even rolled out the ability to download episodes for offline viewing. So even up against Netflix and the new alliance between Crunchyroll and Funimation, Anime Strike was shaping up to be the next major competitor in anime streaming.

  Or… it seemed that way.

  Let’s just say anime fans didn’t like Anime Strike very much. You could forgive them for charging another $60 a year for a very limited library of anime ($160 if you didn’t already have Prime). But also, Anime Strike just didn’t seem to “get” anime fans and didn’t seem very intent on trying to figure us out.

  And despite Amazon’s massive and sophisticated streaming video infrastructure, they just couldn’t seem to get anime episodes up on time. They would show up days late, often without subtitles. And discoverability was a problem, with many complaining they were unable to find Anime Strike anime on Amazon even after searching for its exact title. Amazon publicly blamed late deliverables from Sentai for the frequent episode delays which Sentai very publicly stated was an outright lie.

  It was a bad look that just got worse with their PR. Anime Strike “no commented” several journalists looking for interviews and the ones they did get like ANN’s interview with VP of Digital Video Michael Paul were… uh, awkward? Forbes and IGN each released articles panning Anime Strike, citing its prohibitive cost and that it just didn’t seem to understand anime fans. Despite acquiring many major titles in 2017 including the Anime Award Winning Made in Abyss, Anime Strike was circling the drain.

  Just seven days shy of its first year, the channel was finished. Amazon announced they were canning Anime Strike and putting their content back in general population on the rest of Prime Video. Their deal with Sentai ended with Sentai slowly retrieving their titles off Amazon and eventually losing their exclusive deal with Noitamina as of 2019, which you can probably thank for The Promised Neverland, Given, and Sarazanmai showing up on Crunchyroll. But Amazon hasn’t gotten out of the anime game entirely. Their acquisitions have been more low key and selective but they’ve kept things going with dark fantasy and science fiction anime over the past year such as Dororo, Blade of the Immortal, Psycho-Pass 3, and PET. So some good shows to check out if you still have your mom’s login or your college forgot to delete your .edu email. Otherwise, you know, I don’t know what to tell you. 

  Later in July, Sentai would announce its own streaming service HIDIVE to stream Sentai and Section23 anime which at first looked like any of the services I’ve already talked about that had good catalogs but not much new anime because of Anime Strike’s exclusivity window, but in hindsight this may have been some next level maneuvering from Sentai to prepare for Anime Strike’s fallout. However you look at it, Strike is dead and HIDIVE lives, having picked up many of Strike’s most acclaimed titles like Made in Abyss and Land of the Lustrous since their exclusivity window ended on Amazon. So thanks for the signal boost, Bezos. And congrats on your… unnecessary amount of money.

  [Bezos clip: Thanks, it’s great to be here.]

  In October of still 2017, a year that felt never-ending until 2020 came along, Netflix announced a big $8 billion dollar spend on original content, a considerable portion of which was earmarked to produce 30 anime titles in the coming years. On the heels of the Neo Yokio announcement some fans with zero taste thought this was pretty terrible news, considering Netflix had also rubbed those same fans the wrong way earlier in the year by purchasing TRIGGER’s much-anticipated Little Witch Academia set to premiere in January then just not releasing it. So, until its eventual release six months later, no one knew why it wasn’t already out or when they could expect it to be released. 

  It turns out this would become Netflix’s strategy in the coming years, eschewing simulcast schedules for batch releases often months after their conclusion to compete with international dubs… unless you’re in Japan where they broadcast on time. This supports the binge culture that has only become more important as we all stew in our own smells at home. It’s hard to tell if that system is working out for them or not because Netflix only recently hinted at maybe releasing viewership numbers and because they’re so big they could honestly just buy all that anime and set it on fire and still not hurt their bottom line.

  Anyway, Little Witch Academia was the first of a sudden Netflix shopping spree. In addition to streaming titles from other anime distributors, Netflix has been pretty reliably picking up exclusive rights to about two to three anime per season, even securing a big (although temporary you’ll soon discover) exclusive streaming deal for the Fate franchise with Aniplex, and slapping a “Netflix Original” sticker on it, driving anime aggregator websites crazy every quarter when they try to build seasonal launch lists.

  Regardless, Netflix’s interest in anime is undeniable. They would follow up their 2017 announcement with another in early 2018 claiming they had partnered with Production IG and Bones to produce new anime and ANOTHER announcement including Anima, Sublimation, and David Production in 2019. And context should tell you those are VERY BIG anime studios. But If it doesn’t, I will tell you. They are VERY BIG anime studios.

  Meanwhile their list of air quotes “original” exclusive seasonal anime is growing and Netflix has begun announcing a number of new original anime now based on successful live action Netflix series such as Altered Carbon, and also licensing all the live action anime from Japan that nobody has ever seen, unless you live in Japan. Basically what I’m trying to say here is Netflix is very into anime.

  Another smaller announcement in 2017 was that Funimation had been acquired by Sony, which was notable but not unusual, since the company had changed hands multiple times.

  And that’s where I’m ending my history. That’s it.

  [Lofi music]

  Now, in case you’ve been trapped under a rock for the past 10 years, you should know that media companies in the U.S. have been slowly consolidating, with Disney leading the charge on their mission to own all 100 of the Top 100 blockbuster Hollywood movies every year. And if you didn’t know before, I’m sure you’ve learned in quarantine, that Disney has started its own streaming service.

  2020 was the starting line for what’s already been a free for all between Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, Disney+, and HBO Max for the eyeballs of every human being on planet Earth and, of course, anime is a big part of that. If Amazon and Netflix suddenly investing in the medium doesn’t convince you then here are some numbers.

  A report estimated the total revenue generated by the anime industry at about $19 billion USD in 2017. Another report estimated the total revenue generated by the U.S. film industry as a whole at about $43 billion USD, with anime on average being considerably cheaper than inflated Hollywood and premiere TV budgets like Avengers Endgame’s $356 million purse or Game of Thrones’s $90 million final season budget, which covered a mere 6 episodes.

  It’s also worth noting that under quarantine a lot of anime is on hold, but overall animation is the easiest television production to produce, with Netflix going back into production on shows like Big Mouth and things of that sort. 

  Ironically, despite technical advances we’ve just about come full circle with the largest media conglomerates in the U.S. once again being in charge of anime localization. We’ve also seen the reappearance of anime as a relatively cheap addition to content portfolios, the major differences being the dramatically shrinking distance between Japan and America, an almost 100 percent rate of title acquisition by Western companies, and anime having transformed from something to fill time or disguise as American cartoons into its own mainstream force in the media alongside the MCU and whatever HBO is doing since Game of Thrones ended.

  There are definite concerns with the way the industry is headed but the benefits are undeniable. Save for maybe China, Americans are the most privileged group of anime fans, even more so than those in Japan itself. A perfect storm of being one of the largest anime markets in the world paired with this decades long consolidation of media is that all the anime gets licensed but spread across less platforms than even in Japan. So, even if it seems like you’re forking over subscription fees to an unreasonable number of services to catch all the big shows, realize you’ve got it better than international fans whose countries don’t even get every seasonal title.

  When you think about it, anime is even easier to keep up with than American TV. Amazon Prime, Netflix, Crunchyroll, Funimation, and HIDIVE gets you well over 99 percent of everything out there. Meanwhile in the sprawling American media landscape you’ll also need a subscription to Disney+, HBOMax, Peacock, and not only Hulu but make sure to grab Starz, Cinemax, and Entertainment add-ons… maybe even Hallmark if you, if you’re into stuff your grandma watches. And this is to say nothing of specialty and classic services like Shudder and Criterion. And of course Quibi. How could we possibly forget Quibi? Point is, each of these services probably has a few titles that were formative to your childhood and has some upcoming release that you’re interested in. And compared to that, anime has been cordoned off into what appears to be a reasonably small number of subscriptions.

  Now the face of competition has changed entirely. Co-productions are nothing new in anime, dating back to the beginnings of anime in America in the 60s and definitely providing a deep enough topic to warrant its own episode if Crunchyroll greenlights a season two…?

  But co-productions had previously been a way to get a particular project created, one of the most famous examples being the 1995 Ghost in the Shell film, a joint production between Kodansha, Bandai Visual, and the U.K.-based Manga Entertainment. Once again, Anime in the U.K.?

  Maybe? 

  As previously discussed in our manga episode, up until that film Ghost in the Shell, along with many Masamune Shirow works, had a considerable following in the West, greater even than in Japan. Investing in the film made sense and the deal gave Manga Entertainment exclusive rights to a cult classic that’s still being both emulated and outright ripped off by American directors to this day. At the time it was what you’d call a smart investment in a specific title with crossover appeal to Western audiences.

  And… yeah that’s still what co-productions are, but also they’re a way of getting your foot in the door early on titles you wanna license by investing in them years in advance rather than bidding on rights in the lead-up to the release. It also goes a long way in developing good relationships with studios and production committees. 

  And Netflix has been loudest on the co-production front, proudly announcing their strategic partnerships since as early as 2014, licensing content from studios directly to dodge the committee system, and just slapping “Netflix Original” on titles after they purchase exclusive rights whether they were actually involved in production or not, partly because that’s just how TV works in America.  

  Looking back you can find at least one example of a co-production from most of the major American anime companies that rose and fell in the 90s and 2000s. Crunchyroll itself has been quietly producing anime since early in its existence, counting over 60 co-pros before announcing their Originals Slate in 2020. Funimation first dipped their toes in back in 2016 with Dimension W and have slowly started to accrue their own roster of co-productions since late last year. If you’re a proper anime fan that never skips the OP, you may have noticed a growing number of American names and companies in the production credits since 2010.

  [Lofi music]

  Which brings me to my final point. What even is anime anymore?

  Japan has been outsourcing work to Korea for about 20 years now even as foreign animators have been traveling to Japan to work in Japanese studios. International entities are becoming increasingly involved in production and now foreign creators and source material are more prominently featured in new titles. As the number of foreign names increases in anime credits that inevitably means the number of Japanese names proportionally decreases.

  Korean webcomics are getting anime, Daft Punk and Porter Robinson had music videos made by anime studios, Studio 4C produced an anime film adaptation of the manga Tekkonkinkreet directed by an American animator. A manga by a french Canadian has been adapted into an anime. Marvel comics have gotten anime. Batman is a ninja now. Well, he has been for a while but this time animated by the studio that does the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure openings. 

  At what point does a production lose the essential Japanese-ness that the term anime implies?

  Scratch that, what does “anime” even mean?

  The very definition of anime is now being tested, used as a marketing term to evoke a popular conceit about the medium rather than an identifier of its point of origin. Nowadays if you ask Netflix what an anime is, they’ll tell you it’s a cartoon written by the lyricist of Vampire Weekend starring Jaden Smith or an animated series made by a studio in Texas based on a 1983 American kids show, and written by the director of MallRats.

  So where are we headed with all this? Can anime survive its exposure to the American media ecosystem keeping its identity intact, or will anime soon just mean “cartoons but with blood in them?”

  I can’t answer these questions, I don’t know. Gonna have to get back to you in a sequel podcast in 2030. Anime in Space. Or in The Parallel Dimension That Apparently Exists. All I can do for now is provide you with the wise words of the individual who has provided me with the answers to most of life’s questions up until now. My mom…

  Grace: I don’t- I tried to do research, and I have no clue what this thing is.

  Yedoye: Yeah? Like, nothing at all? You didn’t find anything?

  Grace: They’re just cartoons! That’s all I know, you trying to test me?

  Yedoye: [laugh] A little bit, yeah.

  Grace: Why?

  Yedoye: Because- 

  Grace: I never watched cartoons. 

  Yedoye: But WE watched cartoons!

  Grace: It was never my thing.

  Yedoye: It was our thing, though.

  Grace: Pinky and the Brain, that’s it. 

  Yedoye: I mean, yeah, but that’s what we did on Sundays. But there was other stuff, after that. 

  Grace: [skeptical] Okay. I have no clue. I wish I did the research, I was too busy.

  Yedoye: You didn’t listen to any of the podcast? 

  Grace: I listened to one, it’s all about Japanese something, right? 

  Yedoye: Yeah,

  Grace: I know ??? used to draw them. He loved Japanese cartoons. 

  Yedoye: Yeah.

  Grace: But I can not make out- I may have been sitting there, but I never paid attention. 

  Yedoye: No? There’s, I mean, there’s like… Pokemon is anime. That counts. 

  Grace: Oh, really? Pokemon is anime?

  Yedoye: Yeah!

  Grace: Oh my God! I thought the name of the cartoon is “anime.” 

  Yedoye: Oh, no, no. 

  Grace: [realization] Ahhh, Pokemon is anime, which means... There’s several versions, right?

  Yedoye: Yeah, there’s a lot. There’s like, there’s Pokemon, there’s Dragon Ball Z, umm-

  Grace: Dragon Ball Z! I just recently [Notification sound] heard that.

  Yedoye: Yeah. And there’s um… did you ever watch Speed Racer?

  Grace: In the car? 

  Yedoye: Yeah.

  Grace: They like to drive?

  Yedoye: Yeah.

  Grace: Yeah, I’ve seen that.

  Yedoye: Yeah. That’s anime, too.

  Grace: I watched you guys ?? , but I just- you know, all that stuff was for you guys, babysitting activities. 

  [Both laugh]

  Yedoye: There’s shows-

  Grace: It was for babysitting, it was all for babysitting.

  Yedoye: They're not even-

  Grace: Did you know that?

  Yedoye: They’re not even for kids, though! 

  Grace: Eh?

  Yedoye: Those shows are not for kids though!

  Grace: Yeah, that’s why I’m trying to tell ??. Yeah, so the general name is “anime.”

  Yedoye: Yeah. 

  Grace: Then under anime is like, you have all these different versions of cartoons.

  Yedoye: Yeah, yeah.

  Grace: Okay.

  Yedoye: You thought it was one show?

  Grace: I thought it was just one.

  Yedoye: Oh G- Okay. 

  Grace: And I just heard of them.

  Yedoye: I definitely could’ve uh…

  Grace: And the name is anime.

  Yedoye: I definitely could’ve clarified that a few weeks ago. 

  Grace: Yep, I didn’t even know. 

  Yedoye: Okay, maybe that’s my fault. 

  Grace: So Pinky and the Brain, Pinky wasn’t one of them?

  Yedoye: Uh, no, no, he was not.

  Grace: Oh, okay. You guys confuse me. What else you wanna know?

  Yedoye: Umm, I think maybe that’s it? I don’t know-

  Grace: What do you mean “that’s it?!”

  Yedoye: There’s not that much, I just wanted to know if you knew what anime was. 

  Grace: I wasted all this time just to tell you in five seconds that anime, something is under anime is just a broad name for all the cartoons.

  Yedoye: Yeah!

  Grace: Jeeze.

  Yedoye: [laugh]

  Grace: And I be here, all excited, thinking that something else is coming up.

  Yedoye: Oh, no, no, I just was gonna- I just wanted to ask if you knew...

  [Lofi music]

  Thanks for listening to Anime in America presented by Crunchyroll. If you enjoyed this, please go to Crunchyroll.com/AnimeInAmerica to see the site I’ve talked non-stop about for most of this episode. 

  Special Thanks to Kun Gao. 

  This episode is hosted by me, Yedoye Travis and you can find me on Instagram at ProfessorDoye, or Twitter @YedoyeOT. This episode is researched and written by Peter Fobian, edited by Chris Lightbody, and produced by me, Braith Miller, Peter Fobian, and Jesse Gouldsbury. 

  [Lofi music]

[Beep]

  Yedoye: But you can just- you can like, you can start watching them now, if you want.

  Grace: [skeptical] Seriously?

  Yedoye: Yeah, anime’s not just for kids, you know. There’s like, there’s adult stuff.

  Grace: [continued skepticism] Really? Like, one example.

  Yedoye: There’s… Cowboy Bebop is a good one, it’s like a… it’s like a drama sort of like...

  Grace: Okay, tell me what do they do?

  Yedoye: They’re uh… so the main characters are like they’re bounty hunters, and so they fly through space just like, tracking down criminals. It’s kinda like a, it’s like a crime thing. 

  Grace: You know I don’t like Star Wars. 

  Yedoye: [sigh] I know you don’t like Star Wars. [Chuckle] But I know you like crime stuff. 

  Grace: So now you think I’ll gonna like-

  Yedoye: But I know you like crime stuff, though!

  Grace: Ah-ha! Now you’re talking!

  Yedoye: Yeah! It’s like a crime show. 

  Grace: Which one? I have to watch it! Which one?

  Yedoye: It’s called “Cowboy Bebop,” they like, track down criminals and they take them in for a bounty. 

  Grace: They like, all those stick people do, right? It’s all cartoon folks, it’s not real? It’s not realistic? 

  Yedoye: I mean, it’s not real, it IS realistic, it’s drawn really well. 

  Grace: Yeah… see that’s still fake to me, I like more realistic stuff. 

  Yedoye: I think you would like it. 

  Grace: Name it again?

  Yedoye: Cowboy Bebop.

  Grace: Cowboy what?

  Yedoye: Bebop.

  Grace: Bebop? Cowboy Bebop, okay. 

  Yedoye: Yeah.

  Grace: Cowboy Bebop. 

  Yedoye: I’ll send you a link.

  [Lofi music]

  Thanks! Bye.

  By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[alexandrawilbraham]

Can I take a break from the Corona virus?

I’m sure the coronavirus is past the point of needing an introduction by now. Town centres are eerily quiet, shops, pubs and theatres have all locked their doors and news of events being cancelled or postponed, from local quiz nights to the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, reaches us every day. Self-isolation is a priority. Entire cities are under quarantine.

Covid-19, the coronavirus, has pushed ‘pause’ on our normal lives, muting the hustle and bustle of everyday business, resulting in unavoidable changes to people’s routines.

This is difficult for anyone to manage, but for people on the autistic spectrum, the loss of a well-known structure can be particularly difficult to manage.

To be fair, in my case, quarantine couldn’t have been declared at a better time. Seeing as my days were spent working from home, leaving the house for exercise, shopping, theatre and friends. So, routine-wise, I was set for self-isolation.

What I’m struggling with is the lack of a timeline, the delay. The fact that plans, for the time being, seem pointless as I don’t know what I’m working towards. When can I put a new event in the calendar?

It has been hitting me especially hard this week. There have always been times when all I wanted was to live in the bathtub. Lights off as I curl up with some soft blankets, comforted by my ability to control this confined space, to switch off an overcrowded mind.

Normally, I feel like this for a couple of hours, a few days at most. Once I take the time to recover, the gears start turning again.

But this is not normally. This is a constant bombardment of change. All I want to do is wrap myself up in a blanket, jump into the tub and skip forward to the point when this is all over. Impossible. And as the number of cases rises every day, new rules and recommendations are put out on a regular basis, and supermarket shelves are left devoid of products, I am finding it harder and harder to distract myself from the uncertainty this situation brings. My anxiety has skyrocketed, and my energy is low.

I’ve been looking up information and tips for autistic people online, but most resources are targeted at children. Which, with the normal support services falling away and the struggle of fitting home-schooling into your daily routine, I can fully understand.

So, with no sign of this situation slowing down, or rather no sign of the curve flattening, I have put together a list of tips and media I have found helpful.

ON THE SPECTRUM – HOW TO COPE WITH COVID-19

This list is based on Purple Ella’s video Autistic How To Cope With Covid19 Pandemic, which can be found on her YouTube channel and for which I will provide a resource link below. Another resource I used was the National Autistic Society’s Tips for autistic people and families on their Coronavirus advice pages, also linked below.

 1.   Create a new structure for yourself

Planning out short increments of time makes the many unknowns of this situation a lot more bearable. You can lay out a structure for a week, for a day, for half a day, whatever you can manage and feel comfortable doing. I am trying to give myself half an hour in the morning to write out my structure for the day. That way, creating a structure becomes part of my structure. Then I always pin the plan on my wall as I like having it visible, but you can put it in a Word Document or write it in your diary or your phone. Very importantly, your structure can be flexible. I tend to have a to-do list to hand, organised by priority and with estimates of how long each task will take. This way I don’t overcrowd my structure and can easily work in time for exercise and relaxation. Give yourself constants around which you can shift your structure. Specific mealtimes for example. Who doesn’t like planning their day around food?  

 2.   Write lists

As mentioned above, I have a to-do list. But putting down in writing any kind of information that is crowding your head and possibly causing you more anxiety as you try to remember all of it will help lift that weight off your shoulders. For example, are you unclear about behaviours and rules you must follow to protect yourself and others from contracting and spreading the coronavirus? Make a list of them. That way you know where to check and aren’t looking them up on the internet, which will put you at risk of being bombarded by tonnes of coronavirus headlines.

You can make a list of ingredients you have in the house and ideas for meals you can use them in. This also gives you a good base for writing a shopping list. Once you’ve used up necessary items, add them to the list for the next shopping trip.

Talking of shops, since many of the big supermarkets have changed their opening hours, check the current hours of your local store. I have found a good overview in the Independent, which I have also added to the resources below. It includes priority shopping hours for the elderly, vulnerable and key workers which you might be able to make use of if you fall into one of these categories.

 3.   Limit your time checking news and social media

Social media is currently one of the main ways of remaining in contact with friends and family, but it can also be the source of a great deal of anxiety around corona. It can be easy to try and consume as much information as possible and thus become overly focused on the topic. Try to build social media and news into your daily structure. Perhaps you prefer to check the news in the morning or the afternoon. What I wouldn’t recommend is trying to catch up right before going to bed, as that isn’t the time you should start absorbing and processing information. Make sure you use a reliable news site or go directly to the government updates. This also gives you the opportunity to save a link to read during your allotted time or to re-read when you need to.

Something I have found useful is listening to podcasts, uploaded from news sites,  which cover current events, or podcasts which cover infectious diseases. This way I limit the time I spend consuming updates. For me it is also easier to process information this way, particularly if it has been a challenging day.

One podcast I can recommend is This Podcast Will Kill You – a six-part series on Covid-19-Anatomy of a Pandemic, from the biology of a virus to the mental health impacts.

You can find the series here: thispodcastwillkillyou.com/category/covid-19/, and they provide timestamps, transcripts and resources for each episode.

 4.   Don’t put yourself under too much pressure

Last, but not least, you don’t have to push yourself to be more productive than usual during this time. Yes, you might feel the need to use the extra time to make an impact, but this crisis has dumped a lot of extra tasks in people’s laps. Childcare, managing work from home, applying for temporary jobs or unemployment benefits while your workplace is closed or has made you redundant. There is a huge amount to get accustomed to. If all you can manage in a day is taking care of your basic needs, that’s OK. Just make sure it doesn’t become your routine.

Think about activities that help you focus and give yourself time to take that break from corona.

  USEFUL RESOURCES

Purple Ella - Autistic How To Cope With Covid19 Pandemic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIpvdMVnfGs&feature=youtu.be

 A list of free, online, boredom-busting resources!

https://chatterpack.net/blogs/blog/list-of-online-resources-for-anyone-who-is-isolated-at-home?fbclid=IwAR2I6AlBHze0MHgIK-l-RXWxY4KFvcG5zcTQX9BSeTcfqrmxRdkSN0VPOlE

 21 boredom-busting websites that will entertain you forever

https://inktank.fi/most-entertaining-websites/

 Coronavirus: What are the supermarket opening times?

https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/food-drink/supermarket-opening-times-hours-coronavirus-tesco-asda-morrisons-a9433841.html

 Which supermarkets have delivery slots available?

https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/food-drink/supermarket-delivery-uk-tesco-asda-sainsburys-online-shopping-coronavirus-a9424346.html

 National Autistic Society – Tips for autistic people and families

https://www.autism.org.uk/services/helplines/coronavirus/resources/tips.aspx#

 National Autistic Society – Coronavirus

https://www.autism.org.uk/services/helplines/coronavirus.aspx

[shirlleycoyle]

How to Remove Non-Consensual Videos From Pornhub

If you've been a target of non-consensual porn, you're far from alone: as many as one in 25 people in the U.S. have had a private image or video of themselves shared without their consent.

These videos spread quickly and rampantly, but even if they've been online for years, the situation isn't hopeless. While much of the technology and methods big porn websites use to moderate non-consensual porn aren't sufficient, there are steps you can take to get videos removed from these sites.

One of the most popular websites that people find and spread videos without consent is Pornhub. By filling out Pornhub's content removal form, you can get specific videos removed from that site.

According to Pornhub's form page, you're eligible to use this takedown method if you're reporting "revenge porn, blackmailing, intimidation because a video or photo that was posted on one of our sites that you did not authorize, [or] a comment on a video or photo that reveals personally identifiable information." Anything that you don't want online, that involves you but isn't a copyright claim, counts.

1. Secure your email and other accounts

Before getting started, you should decide where you want correspondence related to this process to go. You're required to enter your email address, and Pornhub will communicate with you about the takedown status via that address. If your regular email is logged in on a shared computer, or you share the login with someone else and don't want that person to be privy to this process, it's a good idea to set up a free, secure ProtonMail account just for this purpose.

It could also help to do a full security check on all of the accounts you use, in general: check this guide for how to protect yourself against stalkerware, which has tips for securing your devices that are useful for anyone, not just stalking victims.

If you think you might ever want to go to the authorities to report the revenge porn that's spread of you, it's important to collect the evidence first. The nonprofit group Without My Consent has instructions on how to properly gather and retain proof, before you request to have it deleted.

2. Collect URLs to the videos you want removed

If you've only heard about these videos being online from other people, you might not know where the videos are. If you trust the person who alerted you, ask them to send you the link. Or, you can try searching for your name on Pornhub—sometimes people use the Pornhub comment sections to dox the women in the videos. If you were in a Girls Do Porn video, for example, you can try variations on "Girls Do Porn" or "GDP" and comb through the results, or try searching your episode number, if you know it.

If you don't want to visit Pornhub.com directly, you can run these searches from Google. Type this into your search bar:

site:pornhub.com “[your name here]”

The results could show videos with your name mentioned in the title or comments, if there are any.

Be warned that the thumbnails and preview images (the still shot that appears before the video plays) might be of yourself or someone you know, and that the entire experience of navigating a porn site can be retraumatizing. If this part of the process is difficult for you, it's okay to ask a trusted confidant to find the videos or collect the links.

3. Set up fingerprinting

At the bottom of the form, there's information on how to prevent future uploads of the same video to Pornhub, using fingerprinting technology. Motherboard's investigation into this tech found that it does still let some videos through, and is far from perfect at catching future uploads. It also doesn't work retroactively: If a video matching yours is already on the site, it won't be automatically deleted.

Although it's flawed, it's worthwhile to prevent exact replica uploads of the videos spreading in the future.

To request your videos be added to Vobile's fingerprinting database, contact Vobile at support@vobileinc.com. You can say something like this:

Hello, this is a non-consensual video of me that I want fingerprinted for removal from Pornhub: [paste the URL here]

Someone will respond and ask you to provide either a copy of the content itself, or a link to the content online. When Motherboard tested this process, Vobile said if the content is already offline, they can still contact Pornhub "on your behalf in order to gain access." Do not send video files through non-encrypted or shared email addresses.

4. Fill out the form

This is the form you'll need.

If the videos you want gone are non-consensual porn, and not content you've copyrighted, check "No" to the question "Is this issue related to copyright infringement?" Copyright infringement claims are done through a separate process.

Paste the links into the designated box.

One of the sections of the form asks for reasons why you want content removed. It's important not to include too much detail or emotion in this answer, so that Pornhub can clearly see the reason. This one-line script has worked in the past, in Motherboard's testing:

This is non-consensual pornography and I did not consent to it being put online.

Cara Van Dorn, an associate on the legal team representing the women in the Girls Do Porn case, suggests that targets of Girls Do Porn include the following:

That you are a victim of the GirlsDoPorn.com fraudulent scheme

That you did not consent to the video being published online

That you were assured (by the actor, producer, recruiter) that the video would not be published online

That you would never have participated in the video if you had not received those assurances

Pornhub says you'll need to fill out the form yourself, and it makes users "digitally sign" at the end. This only involves typing your name and agreeing that it's you in the video. But you don't have to use your legal or "real" name. You can use a pseudonym or nickname.

Once the form is submitted, you should get an email from Pornhub support, that will look like this:

In Motherboard's testing, the confirmation email arrived within an hour of sending, and the video link was taken down. However, it could take longer; note that the email might go to your spam folder.

5. Talk to someone

At this point, the videos you requested should be off Pornhub, but they could still exist on other sites, or through archived versions of the link. Unfortunately, it's possible they will never be completely scrubbed from the internet. These steps don't guarantee that no one will ever see these videos again, but as one of the most popular porn sites in the world, getting any links removed from Pornhub is a good start.

This process is straightforward, but for a survivor of sexual violence or non-consensual porn, enduring harassment and isolation is incredibly difficult. You don't have to go through it alone.

Cyber Civil Rights Initiative provides a hotline for revenge porn survivors, where trained representatives listen and provide non-legal advice. Text or call the hotline is at 844-878-CCRI (2274). CCRI also provides a list of attorneys that specialize in revenge porn on a low-bono or pro-bono basis, as well as detailed guides to getting content removed from social media and other websites.

If you worked with or were targeted by the Girls Do Porn operation and want to take further action around the federal investigation, the FBI is requesting anyone involved contact their offices with information. You can call any of these numbers and mention GirlsDoPorn.com by name—even if you filmed with MomPOV.com, one of their other websites:

San Diego FBI: (858) 320-1800

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Green: (619) 546-6955

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sabrina Feve: (619) 546-6786

After non-consensual porn gets out, some women report that their partners or relatives become emotionally or physically abusive. For support against community violence, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or www.thehotline.org, or reach a local sexual assault program through RAINN at 1-800-656-HOPE or chat online at www.rainn.org.

If you're having thoughts of hopelessness or suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or chat online with a trained listener.

Have you been a target of non-consensual porn? We'd love to hear from you. Contact Samantha Cole securely on Signal at +16469261726, direct message on Twitter, or by email at samantha.cole@vice.com or samleecole@protonmail.ch.

How to Remove Non-Consensual Videos From Pornhub syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[entrepreneursbloguk]

New Post has been published on Entrepreneurs Blog

New Post has been published on https://www.entrepreneursblog.co.uk/blog/5-passive-income-ideas-that-you-can-action-now/

5 Passive Income Ideas That You Can Action Now.

Are you fed up of spending every waking hour working hard each day to make other people rich? Working 9-5, living pay slip to pay slip and never having enough money to actually save or have enough time to spend on the things you actually enjoy doing.

Well, the answer to this problem is passive income. You have a finite time to live on this planet, and the majority of that time is traded for a little bit of money. Wealthy people know this and change the equation and spend their time building their revenue streams to give them a passive income.

So to help you understand what things can help build a passive income revenue stream, and build one yourself, we have put together a list of 5 ways to earn a passive income.

Every idea on this list can be actioned and completed within a month or two and can earn passive income for years to come. So start now by spending some of your valuable time (when you’re not using it to make someone else richer) on one or more of these ideas and completely change your life for the better.

Idea 1: Write an ebook

Ebooks might not seem as profitable as other online revenue streams, but in my experience, they can be a great product to source a longterm passive income. An ebook can be something that you can put together within a month which could generate a passive income for years to come.

The reasons I love ebooks are;

They are relatively quick to put together and there is no real ongoing work once it has been completed (depending on your topic that is). You may need to update them from time to time, but generally speaking, it should look after its self.

Ebooks can earn you a passive income for years! Other streams of passive income sources can die out really quickly if you don’t keep them up to date. In my experience, an ebook that is based on an evergreen topic will keep generating an income for years.

You don’t have to be an amazing writer or even an expert to generate an income from an ebook. Many people will not write one as they are too scared, as they believe they don’t know enough about the topic and they think that they are not very good at writing. You just need to be brave, pick a topic that you know something about, and have an interest in and start. Write what you know about the topic and if you’re not already an expert then don’t pretend to be.

You can write your ebook from the perspective of a beginner, which might actually help your audience relate to you.

So how do you get started?

The best thing to do is just start. Think of a topic that you’re passionate in, and set up your Word Doc. Most eBooks are 50,000 words, but if you can write about 30,000 words then you’ll probably be fine. Once you’re done get a friend to proofread it, this will help fix typos or grammar issues.

Once you’re happy with your ebook, the next step is to get it published. smashwords.com is a great site that can help you with this. You can upload your Word document and they will convert it into the correct file type ready for distribution. They are able to get your ebook onto major distribution channels, such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all other major e-book sites.

If you have a website, Youtube channel or social media following then you can use these to market your ebook as well.

It’s best to keep plugin your ebook to your market audience to increase the numbers seeing your published ebook.

Time to earn: 1 month Potential earning longevity: 10 years Earning potential for 30 days work: £100 – £1000 per month, but this depends on how you market it. Ongoing work: Almost none (depending on your choice of topic).

Idea 2: Build a passive income website

Here is the basic idea of building a passive income website. Take the same type of content that you would create an ebook and put it on your own website. If you target the right keywords (SEO) then with about 30 posts you can get enough traffic to earn a good income.

There are 3 ways you can earn income from your posts;

Affiliate products – you link to products that other people are selling (on Amazon or various other sites) and you earn a commission for every sale.

Advertising – Once you start to get some traffic, you can place ads from premium ad networks (like Google Adsense).

Information products – You can take some of your content and organise it into a premium content package. It can be in the format of a written guide, audio guide, or video course. You can then start selling this on your own site to those who want the premium content.

One key thing to building a passive income website is to make sure that you’re consistent. The biggest mistake that most people make is that they quit too soon. They write 30 + articles that don’t generate any money for 3 months they then give up and delete the site. Remember it is quite normal for a site to take 3-6months for its content to start bringing in any substantial amount of traffic.

It can be really easy to be overwhelmed when building a website from scratch, there is really a lot to think about, and a lot of things that need to be right on your site for it to get traction. If you’re not technically minded or don’t have the time to put together your site, then you can purchase a ready-made site with all of the technical bits and pieces in place. Click here for more info

Time to earn: 3-6 months Potential earning longevity: 2 to 15 years depending on the topic Earning potential for 30 days work: £500 to £5,000 per month Ongoing work required: Monthly updates, tweaks too content and weekly to fortnightly content writing.

Idea 3: Start a YouTube channel

Youtube is a huge opportunity for anyone looking to earn a passive income. Youtube can work just like a website. You pick a topic you can share information about and then start recording videos. The best way to do this is to keep them simple to start with, you can use your phone and YouTube video editor to give your self a starting point.

Once your channel starts to get views, you can start making money with ads. But that not even the best part. You can also recommend affiliate products and even sell your own information products from your channel.

The best way to start would be to spend a month making 30 or so videos. Upload them to your YouTube channel and schedule them to post once a week for 30 weeks. If it starts to pick up and you get positive view count and subscribers then you can decide to make more videos to keep promoting your affiliate products and your own products.

Time to earn: 5 -10 months Potential earning longevity: 1 to 5 years Earning potential for 30 days of work: £500 per month Ongoing work required: Adding more video content on a regular basis will dramatically grow your earnings.

Idea 4: Record a podcast

A podcast works in a similar way to a Youtube channel, it’s just through a different medium. You will need to record your podcast a bit like a TV show by adding seasons. Spend the next month recording 30 episodes on any topic that you’re interested in and schedule them to go out one a week. Podcasts work best if they are informative and entertaining. Think about how it is going to be listened to, most people will be listening to your podcast whilst driving or at the gym, don’t give them too much to do whilst they are listening.

Time to earn: 1 month Potential earning longevity: less than 2 years Earning potential for 30 days of work: £50 to £500 Ongoing working required: Just like a Youtube channel, the more content you create on a regular basis, the more your earnings will grow.

Idea 5: Start investing

Investing is the most important source of passive income over the course of your life. If you’re not putting money aside into some kind of investment then you’re missing out on more money.

The difference in how much wealth you can accumulate if you start investing is astounding. Every wealthy person on the planet understands how to make their money work for them and not the other way round.

There are a few ways that you can get started with investing. You can invest in commodities such as gold & silver, stocks or buying assets, like buy-to-let housing, that generate cash flow. Set aside a little bit of money every month, and build up a bit of a surplus. The idea is to create a bit of a buffer with money that you can afford to lose if everything goes south in your investment portfolio. You can decide where to put this money but the idea is to convert it into an asset that generates more money. Make your money work for you rather than you working for money.

If you don’t know anything about investing I would suggest that you spend some time learning as much as you can about it. A great place to start would be Rich dad poor dad, Robert Kiyosaki does a very good job in explaining how investing works in a simple way and will give you a solid base to start from.

Time to earn: immediately Potential earning longevity: Forever Earning potential for 30 days of work: infinite Ongoing work required: check in occasionally, learn as you grow, invest more.

Conclusion

All of the above ideas are a great way to start building your finances so that you can begin to have a bit more freedom within your life. Although each of the ideas will take a bit of work, to begin with, once the foundations have been built it they will pretty much look after themselves. The biggest hurdle to all of this is getting started. So free up some of your valuable time, and put it to good use, something that you will benefit from in the long term.

[netflixmess]

By The Fader .

In Oslo, weekend nights are everything.

That’s partly because of Norway’s strict liquor laws, and also the general social drinking culture, which both tend to encourage weekend binges. People of all ages are normally reserved during the week, keeping their heads down as they go to class and to work, rarely speaking to strangers. Come Friday, though, all bets are off.

In early October 2016, a weekend party was in full swing, at a nice flat with tall ceilings in Grünerløkka, a cool neighborhood in central Oslo. Young, good-looking people were drinking and laughing, talking and flirting. Music was playing loudly — a bass-heavy Norwegian pop song, or maybe something by an American rapper.

At one point, someone started shouting, and asked for the music to be turned down. If this was a bad movie, there might have been a record scratch sound. Following a couple seconds of chaos, it became clear what was happening: a new Skam clip had been posted to the internet. “Oh my God!” someone screamed. “I’m not prepared,” said another. Within minutes, someone had pulled it up on their phone, and the party fell silent for the whole segment, as if collectively hypnotized. Anyone who tried to speak was swiftly shut down. There were no objections: it was time to watch.

That’s exactly how it went down, at least according to Erlend, a scruffy 25-year-old who works in the Norwegian music industry. He lives in Oslo, a.k.a. the birthplace of Skam, a ridiculously popular coming-of-age drama series that depicts the lives of fictional local teenagers. Even though it’s only been around since 2015, Skam, which is produced by NRK, a government-owned public broadcaster, and the biggest media company in Norway, is one of the most adored programs in the nation’s history, with about a quarter of the four million-person population watching each clip. It might also be one of the best TV shows about high school ever made.

Skam, which means “shame” in Norwegian, is released in real-time, with zero warning. If a scene takes place at school on a Tuesday afternoon, the clip goes up on the show’s website Tuesday afternoon. If it takes place at one in the morning at a Saturday night house party, like the first scene of the third season, which Erlend and his friends watched together last year, then it’s uploaded on a Saturday night. At week’s end, the clips, which vary in length but are rarely longer than 15 minutes, are rolled into a single “episode,” which airs on television. For now, if you live outside Scandinavia, the only way to watch Skam is illegally, via fan blogs who upload the episodes, usually to Google Drive or YouTube, and write their own subtitles. In other words: they’re doing God’s work.

Every season of Skam follows a different student at Hartvig Nissen, a real public school in Oslo, where a few of the show’s main actors are actively enrolled. The first season tracks Eva, a nervous, big-hearted 16-year-old who starts high school on the outs from her old clique. Noora, a headstrong feminist who strikes up an unlikely romance up with an older, brawl-starting ladies’ man named William, is at the center of Season 2. Season 3, which aired in the final months of 2016, is all about Isak, a baby-faced teen coming to terms with his sexuality. The fourth season, which began airing the second week of April, is about Sana, a muslim teen who always speaks her mind. The day the trailer dropped, it was announced on Instagram that Sana’s season would be the show’s final one.

Though it’s entirely scripted, Skam is good at blurring the lines between drama and reality. The characters (not the actors) have their own Instagram accounts, which are updated in time with the events of the show, and their fictional text messages, written by 27-year-old web producer Mari Magnus, are posted on the Skam site between clips. Sometimes a short conversation between two characters can stir up more suspense for viewers than a whole episode. The Skam team — headed up by director, screenwriter, and all-around mastermind Julie Andem, 34 — doesn’t allow the cast to do interviews often, partly because they are actually very young, but also because they want to safeguard the show’s tightly wound universe, to preserve the illusion that these characters could almost be real.

Andem, who declined to be interviewed for this piece, doesn’t do very much press either, especially outside of Scandinavia. This strategy has created an uncommonly intense relationship between the show and its audience. Fans invest in the characters' lives as if they were their friends, refreshing frantically, waiting for a clip or a text message as if their own life depended on it. Soap operas have long provided people around the world an escape from everyday traumas. Skam is helping people cope in a new way, by making the real world a more exciting place to be. Of course it’s all just pretend, but sometimes you need to make believe if you want to feel something real.

Oslo is frigid in March, and it snows a lot — gently, on and off. For someone whose first window into Norwegian culture was watching Skam bootlegs, exploring the city is kind of like walking through a film set. Bus stops, icy parks, a line of cottages on a slanted street. Everything looks familiar, but in an uncanny sort of way. It’s clean and quiet, especially on weeknights. It’s small, too, presenting itself as its own self-contained little universe, like the inside of a snow globe.

Every person I speak to in Oslo, from the noodle-limbed checkout guy at the corner store to a middle-aged festival organizer visiting from Denmark, knows what Skam is, and most of them have seen it. When I finally meet someone who seemed to know nothing about it — my Airbnb host, a lawyer in her early 30s — it’s actually just a mixup. “Ohhh, I thought you said Scandal or something,” she says, laughing. “I love Skam. I’ve seen every episode.”

No one expected it to get this massive, at least not according to Andreas Blaauw-Hval, a 32-year-old NRK communications manager who, along with his colleague Nathalie Sprus, handles all P.R. for the show. They’re the gatekeepers of the Skam universe, fielding calls from reporters all over the world on a daily basis, and saying “no” to nearly everything. “I think a lot of journalists, and our colleagues in the TV business, find this kind of arrogant,” Blaauw-Hval says. “But it's for the best of the series.”

Sprus and Blaauw-Hval are sitting in a plain-looking coffee shop in Frogner, a pretty neighborhood that feels upscale, but not in an ostentatious way. The café appeared in an episode of Skam once, and it’s just a couple blocks from the high school at which a big bulk of the show is filmed. “It's important to emphasize that the strategy was made before anyone knew how big it would be,” Blaauw-Hval says. “Our job is to try to maintain it, to keep it low-key and exclusive.”

It’s all just pretend, but sometimes you need to make believe if you want to feel something real.

When the show was launched in 2015, it was part of NRK’s attempt to connect with older Norwegian teens who seemed to spend most of their time on Netflix, or caught up in their own lives. Its creator, Julie Andem, who’d previously worked on Jenter, an NRK show for tweens with a similar short-burst real-time release format, was meticulous about accuracy from the get-go. She spent months traveling around and interviewing Norwegian teenagers about everything: sex, drugs, dating, their friends, their fears, their dreams. A lot of the show’s characters were loosely based on real people she met, or composites of several.

Next they started auditions, sitting with 1,200 kids born between 1996 and 2000. “At first people weren’t that interested,” Andem explained in 2016, during a rare TV interview that someone translated and posted on YouTube, in which she comes across as stern but likable. “NRK hadn’t made anything for [older teens], so they were skeptical,” she said. The cast they eventually settled on included a couple locally known child actors, but was dominated by amateur young nobodies, whose raw performances help elevate Skam to greatness. When 19-year-old Lisa Teige, who plays Eva, stresses out over a Facebook message to a potential new friend, it feels not just real, but true.

When it came time to release the first clip, Andem and her team, which includes producer Marianne Furevold-Boland, shared the link with tastemakers from the audition pool, as well as the cast. “The producers wanted the kids to find the series themselves,” says Nathalie Sprus from NRK, 31, who has brown hair with highlights and is almost always smiling. “Their worst nightmare was that a parent would read a news article about ‘this new cool show for kids’ and recommended it to theirs.” Furevold-Boland says this unorthodox, rumor-based strategy “creates loyalty, and a feeling of unity and ownership among teens,” adding that despite its unprecedented success with viewers of all ages, Skam is still made with its teenage target audience in mind.

“I watch Skam because I can relate, to the people and to the parties,” says Henrik, a beer-drunk 21-year-old, in a tented bar beside a church turned concert venue. He speaks in a nasally drawl, like an extra from a Nordic remake of Dazed & Confused. He tells me about russefeiring, the extremely Norwegian tradition in which crews of graduating high schoolers literally purchase a bus to party on for a couple weeks during their final semester. The celebrations, which start after the students turn 18 and can thus can guzzle beer legally, happen all over Norway, but are a huge deal in Oslo specifically. Henrik says kids here often make plans for “russ time” years in advance. Groups have recruited pop singers to record official theme songs for their bus; a bus might spend up to $17,000 USD on music alone, an Oslo-based English-language newspaper reported in 2014.

Russ is a big plot point in Skam. Eva joins a “bus” after her skater boyfriend Jonas encourages her to make new friends. Her search leads her to Noora, a poised new girl with a thing for red lipstick; Vidle, a Type A, russ-obsessed neurotic; Sana, a smart, snarky Muslim teen; and Chris, an unrestrained goofball behind some crucial moments of comic relief. Neither cool nor explicitly uncool, they’re the sort of relatable misfits you can’t help but cheer for. “Just acknowledge that we’re losers,” Sana says to the girls during a russ meeting in the first season. “So you think you’re a loser yourself?” Vidle aks, visibly perturbed. Sana responds: “I'm a Muslim girl in a faithless country — I'm the biggest loser of them all.”

The russ subplot is mostly on the back burner in Season 3, which tells the story of Isak, a confused, self-hating teenager played by a gifted 17-year-old named Tarjei Sandvik Moe, one of the actors who attends Hartvig Nissen in real life. While the earlier seasons hinted that Isak was grappling with something, his sexuality comes to the forefront in this one, which traces his messy romance with Even, a hip, handsome classmate with secrets of his own. All of Skam is gorgeously executed, but it’s Season 3 that feels like straight-up perfect television; you’d be hard pressed to find a more authentic depiction of young queer love. Isak’s realizations, about the tricky business of loving yourself enough to care for someone else too, never feel forced. They come slowly, with lots of help from friends, in a way that feels heartbreakingly true-to-life.

“I think the third season has a really relevant and really clear theme,” explains Elise By Olsen, the 17-year-old editor of an Oslo youth culture magazine called Recens Paper, one afternoon at an indoor food market on the Akerselva river's western bank. Olsen, who is something of a budding fashion icon in Norway, is a big believer that teenagers are more capable than adults give them credit for, and says that she wishes more young people were actively involved in the day-to-day production of Skam. She says she didn’t get into watching the show live until Season 3, which impressed her by tackling issues of sexuality and mental health. “It sort of normalized this stuff, which is quite rare here in Norway,” she explains. Olsen is also friends with some of the cast, including Henrik Holm, who plays Even. “One time he tagged me in a photo and I got, like, 2,000 new followers,” she says.

In Season 2, Noora and William’s will-they-won’t-they arc helped grow the show’s audience, particularly within Norway, but it was the Even and Isak love story that took Skam to the next level. Some truly adorable screenshots of the boys cuddling went viral on Tumblr, which led people across the globe to investigate where it had come from. Now, Skam’s is one of the more voracious TV fandoms in recent memory; in March, Isak and Even came first in E! Online’s fan-picked “TV's Top Couple” contest, by winning millions of votes from fans across the world. “Not bad for a Google Drive show,” one English-speaking stan account tweeted in celebration. “That they managed to win the poll proves there's a very strong engagement,” says Norwegian academic Vilde Schanke Sundet, who has a PhD in television studies from the University of Oslo. “The Norwegians cannot vote alone — you need to get your fan community organized,” she continues. Sundet, who’s working on a post-doctoral study about Skam, says the discourse within the fan community actually mirrors the tone of show, tackling serious topics in a respectful way. There’s a comment section under each official clip, too. “You can check it almost like a newspaper, or your Facebook,” Sundet says.

Part of what makes Skam feel like a news feed is its tight production schedule. According to producer Furevold-Boland, there’s a very short time between idea and execution, which “creates a great energy among the team members,” and also allows the show to respond to real events as they happen. Season 4 will do that by focusing on Sana, who is played confidently by 20-year-old hijabi actress Iman Meskini. “The point was to make a character that chooses her own relation to her religion,” Andem said in that interview on YouTube. “She has strong faith, but she doesn’t need to relate to the whole package the culture is trying to push on her.”

Sana introduces a lot of lofty ideas to Skam, often schooling her friends by offering a different perspective — adding important context to their private dramas without ever diminishing them. “War doesn’t start with violence, it starts with misunderstanding and prejudice,” she tells Noora, whose rigid ideals are challenged throughout the show. “If you say you’re in favor of a world full of peace you actually have to try to understand why others think and act the way they do.”

Despite her typically prickly exterior, Sana has a romantic side, and is an intensely loyal friend. Fans are excited about her season because, from a narrative standpoint, there’s still a lot left to learn about her. But her story feels especially meaningful now, as conversations around islamophobia and xenophobia have never been more urgent, in Scandinavia and beyond. The same day NRK released the trailer for Season 4, a suspected terrorist attack in Stockholm killed four and wounded several others, thrusting Sweden’s open door stance towards migrants and refugees into the global spotlight. In February, Donald Trump blamed a terrorist attack that never happened on Sweden’s liberal immigration policy, and in January he signed a highly contentious and swiftly overturned executive order to keep refugees and immigrants out of the U.S., specifically targeting seven predominantly Muslim nations.

The surprising news that this will be Skam’s last season stings, but if it has to end, Sana’s story feels like a good place to stop — with a reminder that the show isn’t just fodder for insatiable fans, but important, too. Sana isn’t a real person, but she has the potential to be a visible and outspoken role model for real young women, with real stigmas, who have real needs. The trailer for her season is soundtracked by a Nina Simone cover, sung by Yusuf Islam, the artist and convert to Islam formerly known as Cat Stevens. The clip runs in reverse, making the song virtually unrecognizable. Play it forward though, and you’ll hear the words: “I'm just a soul whose intentions are good/ Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood.”

Being a teenager is a beautiful mess. It’s miserable in a lot of ways, but there’s also something strangely poetic about the urgency of it all, the way your little high school world is constantly expanding and collapsing in on itself. Like the greatest shows about teenage life — My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks, the sometimes overly schmaltzy Degrassi — Skam never trivializes these feelings.

Even as a 26 year old, I was swept up in Skam straight away. I wish it had been around when I was younger, though I always remind myself it couldn’t have. It’s so inextricably connected to modern digital behavior, which is in itself a hopeful reflection of the things that are good about being young right now, and the way social media has created lifelines for teenagers looking for others who understand them and care what they have to say, whether they’re queer, religious outcasts, or die-hard megafans of a teen drama from Norway.

One of my personal favorite scenes is a quiet one, during which Isak opens up about his sexuality to his best friend Jonas. He tells him that he has romantic feelings for Even after school, over kebabs. Jonas doesn’t flinch; it’s obvious he doesn’t mind who his friend dates. It’s borderline tear-jerking in its casualness, a total non-event. One afternoon, I ride past the kebab shop from that same scene. I pull out my phone to snap a photo of the storefront, and one of the employees in the window, who’s probably getting used to fans appearing out of nowhere, laughs and covers his face.

Later, I walk into an old church with big wooden doors and a clock tower steeple. It’s the setting of another emotional scene from Isak’s season, one that aired a little before Christmas. It features a cameo by Norwegian performance artist Nils Bech, who sings a haunting, Swedish-language rendition of “O Holy Night,” in this very church.

When, on another night, I share a drink with Bech in the back of a crowded bar downtown, he says his cover of the iconic holiday staple was a kind of political statement. He relates the song’s biblical lyrics about God’s son dying for our sins to LGBTQ folk’s long-term struggle for visibility; to him, the words are directed at his gay peers, urging them to think about those who fought for equality before them. “I wanted to say, Hey people! Remember that someone, in a way, died for us to be able to be us!” Like the song, Skam itself is a symbol of how far we’ve come, and a reminder of how much work is left to do.

The reaction to the track was wild, Bech says, with admiring notes from fans and other artists pouring in straight away — a testament to the power of Skam. I asked what he thinks it is about the show that reaches people in such a unique, special way. “When you fall in love, it's always so fucking difficult,” he says, laughing. “And I love the way [Julie Andem] showed that. I think a lot of people watching realized, ‘Oh, it's not about being gay or straight or whatever — love is love.’” He took a sip of beer. “At least that’s why I like it so much.”

Late last year, it was announced that an English-language remake of the show is in the works for U.S. and Canadian audiences, with backing from American Idol producer Simon Fuller. Most Skam fans I talk to are skeptical to say the least, sometimes citing MTV’s tone deaf, too-faithful take on the U.K.’s druggy high school show Skins as an example of just how terribly these translations can go. The real-time rollout and the digital elements can be replicated easily, but the content can’t. “If the show wasn't good, you wouldn't let yourself be so engaged,” Vilde Schanke Sundet tells me.

“I think a lot of people watching realized, ‘Oh, it’s not about being gay or straight or whatever — love is love.’” —Nils Bech

Skam has earned large fan groups in a lot of places, including but not limited to the U.K., the Philippines, China, and the United States. For supporters who stop in from out of town, there is a map of shooting locations on VisitOslo.com, the city’s official travel guide. But there’s occasionally some tension between local fans and tourists, and some Norwegians feel like they understand the show in a more significant way than their international counterparts.

“Norwegian fans are really protective,” Sundet says when we meet in a gift shop near the entrance of The Vigeland Park, a huge sculpture garden full of twisty, snow-covered footpaths, before explaining the unspoken cultural rules known as the Law of Jante, which prohibits citizens from ever thinking they’re superior to anyone else. “They will tell international fans off, saying, ‘You can't go into the school,’ or ‘You need to ask before you take the pictures,’” she explained. “This is a social democracy, so the idea of someone sticking out is strongly bound in our culture. We don't have the kind of superstars that you have in Hollywood.”

That famous and non-famous people have been historically afforded the same level of respect and attention in Norway adds a layer of relatability to Skam, and helps the stories feel more personal. But the show is also a straight-up global phenomenon, one that has pushed the small Nordic society into uncharted waters by complicating these long-standing ideas about what it means to “stick out.” It’s all emblematic of another reason the show is so intoxicating: it’s reflecting back small ways the world is changing, in real time.

One night, I walk around Oslo at dusk. I walk past book shops and clothing stores and chain coffee shops and markets. I walk past churches and houses and apartments and parks. I look at the people who pass me on the street. I look at their bulky scarves and puffy jackets and fuzzy wool gloves. At some point, I start to see the Skam characters in all of their faces.

For one second, I convince myself that I actually do see Henrik Holm — the actor who plays Even, Isak’s dreamy love interest. If it is him, he’s walking fast in the opposite direction, talking into a cell phone and dragging a suitcase behind him. Suddenly, for a split second, we’re right next to each other and out of the corner of my eye, I decide that it’s really him. I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure. I awkwardly stop walking and whip around, but he’s got long legs and a quick stride, and is already on the next block.

[theonyxpath]

Our next Kickstarter is for the Legendlore RPG, and starts on this Thursday, March the 12th, at 2pm Eastern US time!

From the Kickstarter:

Legendlore was originally a comic, first published by Arrow Comics in 1986 and since procured by Caliber Comics, about four people who fall through a Crossing into the Realm. The Realm is home to fantasy creatures from elves to dragons, and the characters discover they too have ‘fantasy powers’ – the jock becomes a Fighter, while the bookish one becomes a Wizard, and so on. They go on adventures and some of them eventually find their way back to Earth.

This is the basic premise of the Legendlore RPG. You Cross into the Realm, where you become a hairfoot Bard, or maybe an elven Sorcerer. You can change any characteristics you like. For example if you have hay fever and glasses, you choose if your Legendlore self keeps or drops those. Your identity might not always match your outward physique, but your Legendlore character does. We’ve also updated the 1980s setting so Realmborn characters represent all ethnicities, genders, and sexualities. No one in the Realm will bat an eyelash at your agender panromantic self.

This comes hard on the heels of our fantastic Kickstarter campaign for Hunter: The Vigil 2e, which ended up at over 500% of the funding goal and just a couple of folks away from 2000 backers! Truly, the Vigil was a rewarding one, and we’re thrilled so many folks came along with us on the hunt.

Even though we’re jumping right into the new KS for Legendlore, Hunter 2e‘s campaign left us with a number of Stretch Goal projects to continue with, and, for us, Legendlore is such a different kind of project that creatively it is a nice break in our recent string of Kickstarters in the Chronicles of Darkness and V5 game worlds.

Legendlore will also be our newest game line to use the d20 system for 5e fantasy gaming, along with Scarred Lands and (much-simplified) the Realms of Pugmire, so that also gives us a chance to stretch some system creative muscles we like to keep toned up.

If you’re a fan of D&D, etc. then I think you’ll find a lot of fresh spins you’ll enjoy in how Legendlore treats genre expectations and tropes while still providing a sweeping setting ripe for adventuring in. And if you aren’t so much, I still think you may find value in supporting developer Steffie de Vaan and her creative team’s 2020 take on this multi-decade saga and setting.

Like almost every one of our Kickstarters these days, Legendlore is pretty much finished in the writing stages, and backers will get sections of the finished text during the course of the KS campaign. Steffie is working with at least one Twitch streaming group to create actual play episodes showing how Legendlore plays at an actual gaming table, and we’re really looking forward to airing those (and they’ll be linked on the KS page).

So, anyone interested is going to have multiple chances to check this project out in a way that works for them, as we’ve been working to set up with each of our KSs. And, James Bell, our Kickstarter Concierge will be back for this KS to once again provide information and guidance, as well as his patented affable banter!

V5 Chicago Folio art by Felipe Gaona

Items From Our Monday Meeting:

In no particular order, which is a lot like our meeting style!

DriveThruRPG‘s massive GM’s Day Sale has another week to go, and hoo-boy are there a lot of our PDFs for sale over there! All of our game lines are represented, as well as offerings from the Community Content sites!

This was a Twitter note sent out during our meeting by Eddy Webb:

“Thanks to Justin Achilli, I got to be in a work meeting where we talk about the aesthetics of urine and throwing bears at the moon.”

Which is pretty much true.

Mighty Matt McElroy was scheduled to attend Emerald City convention this coming weekend, but the whole con was postponed due to concerns about the Coronavirus (COVID-19). He’d already had a bunch of meetings cancelled out from under him and was figuring on cancelling, when boop! the convention cancelled instead!

You folks all take care of yourselves out there! We’re a virtual office, so aren’t going to infect each other, and we don’t have anything currently being manufactured in China, so I’m just encouraging all our folks to stay in and work 20 hour days at their computers. (I’m kidding.) (But not really.)

Mirthful Mike Chaney wonders how that’s any different than his usual day, anyway?

They Came From Beneath the Sea! Heroic Land Dwellers art by Brian LeBlanc

We’re still getting folks asking about whether projects that come out as Advance PDFs will be released in PoD versions or if Backer PDFs will be sold to the public, along with PoDs, on DTRPG. First, we’re always glad to answer folks’ questions, and second, yes, our sales strategy has always been to deliver PDFs and PoDs of projects on DTRPG and so we have been releasing them that way for the whole time we’ve been in business.

The only caveats to that are projects we might do like printed Screens offered on Kickstarters, which DTRPG can’t create in PoD form, and recently with the V5 Cults of the Blood Gods Stretch Goal rewards which will only be available in PDF as the V5 managers at Modiphius do not want PoD versions made available.

We’ve scheduled a nice surprise for the backers of Exalted 3rd‘s Dragon-Blooded KS that should put some folks’s concerns to rest about getting their rewards. So keep your eyes open for that, DB backers!

I’m out next Monday, so Dixie Cochran will be in as our guest MMN blogger! Please be nice to her as she wrangles the rusty and arcane controls for this blog, and I’ll talk to you in two weeks about our:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

Kickstarter!

On Thursday, March 12th at 2pm Eastern US Time we start the Kickstarter for Legendlore!

Onyx Path Media!

This Friday the Onyx Pathcast Terrific Trio take a deep dive into Vampire: The Requiem 2e‘s Spilled Blood! Messy, but fun!

As always this Friday’s Onyx Pathcast will be on Podbean or your favorite podcast venue! https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

We’ve got a stupendous number of shows on Twitch this week! Tune in for V5, Chronicles of Darkness, Scion, Pugmire, Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition, Scarred Lands, MORE Vampire: The Masquerade, Changeling: The Lost, Mage: The Awakening, even more Scarred Lands, Werewolf: The Forsaken and a third Vampire: The Masquerade game! We’ve even got Eddy Webb’s Workshop, which takes you through the development process of our books! Hail Ming!

A big shout-out to our three Vampire: The Masquerade games running this week, which have been running week-in, week-out! You can subscribe to our channel over on twitch.tv/theonyxpath to catch up with any episodes you missed! This Ming’s a psycho.

Come take a look at our YouTube channel, youtube.com/user/theonyxpath, where you can find the following videos uploaded last week alone:

The Onyx Path News: https://youtu.be/zKo1h7bLPE0

Scion: Behind the Screen: https://youtu.be/v9Wo38rl5-Y

Changeling: The Lost – Littlebrook Reunion: https://youtu.be/hxSbemynBLs

Changeling: The Dreaming – The Last Faerie Tale: https://youtu.be/gKAm-zGxTW4

Even more Scion: Behind the Screen: https://youtu.be/QDSIS_ClFbE

A special shout-out to the Scion: Behind the Screen series, which has provided a wonderful entry point for people new to the game! Flying blind on a rocket cycle!

Do subscribe to our channel and click the bell icon if you want to be notified whenever new news videos and uploads come online! Spare me the madness.

In case you missed it last week, the Story Told RPG Podcast continue with their excellent Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition chronicle right here: http://thestorytold.libsyn.com/the-78-laments-episode-3-riders-in-the-sky

And back once again, the Story Told‘s review of Trinity Continuum: Aeon http://thestorytold.libsyn.com/episode-40-trinity-continuum-on-overview

Red Moon Roleplaying‘s V5 Cults of the Blood Gods “The Family” chronicle continues on their YouTube channel, Spotify, their website redmoonroleplaying.com and everywhere else good podcasts and New York City girls might be found! https://youtu.be/J1qCIhMPn7Q

Now, the tributes from Ardentia.

Even more shows from Occultists Anonymous for all you Mage: The Awakening fans out there!

Episode 86: Risky Business Wyrd the Seer prepares to found a legacy and shape her soul. Songbird makes contact with the Carthian Movement. Atratus meets with the Phantasm Society who have a daring plan.https://youtu.be/9XWLaxl_B-Y

Episode 87: New Lives Wyrd the Seer pays the price for tying herself to the Rookery. Songbird makes himself useful at the Arrow Armory. Atratus kills Emily Miller.https://youtu.be/ZZklb6-fC7o

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

Electronic Gaming!

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is awesome! (Seriously, you need to roll 100 dice for Exalted? This app has you covered.)

Update: the devs are working on the updates for the roller in both Android and iOS – here is the rundown from them:

1) Redo the UI for system for android.  It will look the same as the current design.  My goal is to have something ready by Saturday to send out to the Facebook users, asking them if this fixes the issues.  This will be a beta type thing.  This will break several of the fancy dice.

2) If the above worked out and the android users give all the clear, we’ll redo the graphics system to fix the fancy dice that got broken.  We’ll do another android beta through Facebook.  This might take up to two weeks, as my schedule allows.

3) If everything worked well, we’ll release to android for real at that point.

4) Port all of the existing stuff to iOS and release on that.

On Amazon and Barnes & Noble!

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue from which you bought it. Reviews really, really help us get folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these latest fiction books:

Our Sales Partners!

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) books are also on sale at Studio2, and they have the 5e version, supplements, and dice as well!: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/scarred-lands

Scion 2e books and other products are available now at Studio2: https://studio2publishing.com/blogs/new-releases/scion-second-edition-book-one-origin-now-available-at-your-local-retailer-or-online

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e at the same link! And NOW Scion Origin and Scion Hero AND Trinity Continuum Core and Trinity Continuum: Aeon are available to order!

The massive GM Day’s Sale continues for another week with huge savings on PDFs from all of our game lines!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/rpg_gmsday.php

As always, you can find Onyx Path’s titles at DriveThruRPG.com!

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, we will be releasing the Advance PDF of Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed for Mage: The Awakening 2e AND the electronic, PDF, and physical book PoD releases of Haunting Shadows: the Wraith20th fiction anthology on DTRPG!

Conventions!

Assuming these conventions are not postponed due to plague, here is our current list:

UKGames Expo: https://www.ukgamesexpo.co.uk/

GenCon: https://www.gencon.com/

Tabletop Scotland: https://tabletopscotland.co.uk/

Gamehole Con: https://www.gameholecon.com/

PAX Unplugged: https://unplugged.paxsite.com/

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

RUST (Working Title) (Scarred Lands)

Under Alien Suns (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Mission Statements (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Adversaries of the Righteous (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Novas Worldwide (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Exalted Essence Edition (Exalted 3rd Edition)

The Clades Companion (Deviant: The Renegades)

The Devoted Companion (Deviant: The Renegades)

Saints and Monsters (Scion 2nd Edition)

M20 Rich Bastard’s Guide To Magick (Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary)

Wild Hunt (Scion 2nd Edition)

Redlines

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Hundred Devil’s Night Parade (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Adventure! core (Trinity Continuum: Adventure!)

Assassins (Trinity Continuum Core)

The Book of Endless Death (Mummy: The Curse 2e)

N!ternational Wrestling Entertainment (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Contagion Chronicle Ready-Made Characters (Chronicles of Darkness)

Second Draft

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Crucible of Legends (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Many-Faced Strangers – Lunars Companion (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

They Came From Beyond the Grave! (They Came From!)

Development

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

TC: Aberrant Reference Screen (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Contagion Chronicle: Global Outbreaks (Chronicles of Darkness)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Manuscript Approval

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Post-Approval Development

Scion LARP Rules (Scion)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Editing

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

Pirates of Pugmire KS-Added Adventure (Realms of Pugmire)

Terra Firma (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Lunars Novella (Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Buried Bones: Creating in the Realms of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Titanomachy (Scion 2nd Edition)

Player’s Guide to the Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Contagion Chronicle Jumpstart (Chronicles of Darkness)

TC: Aberrant Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Post-Editing Development

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

W20 Shattered Dreams Gift Cards (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Hunter: The Vigil 2e core (Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Indexing

They Came From Beneath the Sea! (They Came From��!)

ART DIRECTION FROM MIKE CHANEY!

In Art Direction

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant – Awaiting replies to pings.

Hunter: The Vigil 2e (KS)

Cults of the Blood God (KS)

Mummy 2 – Starting to contract the rest of it.

City of the Towered Tombs

Let the Streets Run Red – Some finals in.

Deviant

Legendlore (KS) – KS prep of bits.

Technocracy Reloaded (KS)

TC: Aeon Terra Firma – Contracted.

WoD: Ghost Hunters (KS) – Cover in, getting rest of KS art set.

Tales of Aquatic Terror

Pirates Extra Adventure – Loboyko lined up for this one.

Scion Titanomachy – Contacting artists.

In Layout

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad – Ongoing.

Contagion Chronicle – With Josh, interior proof coming.

Vigil Watch – Ongoing.

TCfBtS!: Heroic Land Dwellers

TCFBtS! Screen and Booklet

Ex3 Lunars – Yep, pretty much my March right here.

Scion Companion

Proofing

Dark Eras 2 – Sending back to Aileen for errata input.

Trinity Continuum Aeon Jumpstart

Chicago Folio – Creating PoD files.

Pirates of Pugmire – Fixes in, working on cover.

CtL Oak Ash and Thorn – At WW for approvals .

Geist 2e fiction anthology – Backer PDF out to backers for errata.

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 – The Silence of Our Ancestors (Exalted 3rd Edition) – Backer errata being gathered.

Distant Worlds – Errata being gathered.

VtR2 Spilled Blood – Errata being input.

At Press

Geist 2e (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition) – Prepping to go live with PDF/PoD versions on DTRPG a week Wednesday (the 18th).

DR:E – Shipping to backers, PoD files uploaded.

DRE Screen – Shipping to backers.

DR:E Threat Guide – Helnau’s Guide to Wasteland Beasties

Memento Mori – PoD proof ordered.

Scion Mythical Denizens – PoD files uploaded.

Wraith20 Anthology – ePub, PDF, physical book versions all live Weds on DTRPG.

MtAw2 Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed – Advance PDF on sale this Weds on DTRPG.

Today’s Reason to Celebrate!

Yesterday was International Women’s Day, and that’s certainly worth celebrating today as well! (Especially since here in the US we lost an hour from yesterday due to the return of our Daylight Savings Time. Typical).

Today, we heard of the death of actor Max von Sydow at 90. The man who played chess with death, acted in just so many roles in mainstream and genre films that I’m not listing them here, and, just for Matthew Dawkins, starred as Ming the Merciless.

[lostgypsygurl-blog]

KPop-ing In Seoul

Hello everyone! If you are reading this right now it only means that you have read the Part 1 of my blog all about my trip to Seoul last year. I originally planned for it to have two parts which is the pre-planning and another one for the trip itself. But alas! Sloth that I am, I keep pushing back the days for writing the part 2 and so here we are, 4 months after the trip and I haven’t finished writing the rest of part 2. Although, I did start on writing about the Day 1 of that trip which is mainly about visiting Kpop entertainment company buildings and just Kpop-ing all day. So instead of writing all of my 9-day trip (which can be suuuuppper long) in one entry, I’ll upload them one at a time. I originally planned for this to be super detailed however aside from I think you guys wouldn’t want to read all of my blabber it’ll also take me longer to finish a detailed one. So, I decided to just talk about all the places we went to with a bit of instructions on how to get there, where to find places and tips and maybe trivia as well about these places. I will also be adding links of the blogs and sites that we used as guide especially for directions in going to places. Our itinerary was planned “thematically” which means that in each day we went to places which seemed similar or close to each other. I’m not saying you follow the same thing. You can plan your trip however you want.  I will be including links of other blogs that we referred to for this trip so go and check them out and I hope you find it as helpful as much as I did.

Kpop Entertainment Companies Day

The day after we arrived in Korea, visiting entertainment companies was the first thing we did. We decided to do this first because we the week that we went to Korea was the Chuseok season. Chuseok is usually celebrated for 3 days; pre-chuseok, chuseok day, post chuseok. During these days most establishments will be closed and for those that are open regular working hours does not apply. And we thought that maybe idols and artist would go to their hometowns with these 3 days and we might not catch a glimpse of them if we go on those days. We went to 6 company buildings that day; JYP, Cube (old building), FNC, SM, J.Tune Camp (old building) and Jellyfish Entertainment. All of these places are in Gangnam area so you can just walk around or take the bus to find them. Links of addresses and directions are below:

JYP, Cube (old building), FNC, SM Training center https://kpoptourguide.wordpress.com/k-pop-entertainment-company-headquarters/

Jellyfish Entertainment  http://managerhyung.blogspot.com/2014/02/how-to-get-to-jellyfish entertainment.html

SM Town at COEX Artium https://koreancodex.wordpress.com/2015/01/06/how-to-get-to-sm-town-artiumwhere-is-the-sm-town-artium

Experience:

JYP & Encounter with Day6 

This is the first place we went to. We got a bit lost along the way cause we got confused of the landmarks but with the help of a few locals we we’re able to get there before lunch time. The building was smaller than I thought it would be although it’s very easy to spot because of the huge ass JYP sign and all the faces of JYP artists on it. There was a construction going on in front of the building, apparently it was the popular Dunkin Donuts store that Cube and JYP artists like to go to. After taking pictures in front of the building my friend and I decided to stay there for about 15 minutes just to see if we’ll spot any idol. We sat outside this clothing store right in front of the building and not more than about 5 minutes I noticed this guy wearing a black cap and black mask. He looked suspicious because duh, why would you wear a cap and a mask unless you are someone who wants to conceal your identity right? The guy turned his head in our direction right before entering the building and then it hit me, it was Day6’s drummer Dowoon. I totally freaked out as I am a fan of Day6. Since we didn’t actually see Dowoon’s face I asked my friend to stay a little longer on where we we’re because I wanted to make sure that it was Dowoon and maybe we’d have a chance to see the rest of Day6. After about 10 minutes the guy who I thought was Dowoon came back out carrying a pair of drumsticks but still wearing the same mask and cap. It confirmed my suspicion that it was him because as far as I know JYP only has 2 bands right now, Wonder Girls and Day6, unless that guy was a trainee. We followed where he went to and tried to low-key spazz and we saw him enter this basement room on the same building. There was a glass door and it has words JYP Entertainment written on it so it’s probably a practice room for their artists. My friend and I didn’t get to take photos of Dowoon cause everything happened too fast. After that my friend and I got hungry so we ate lunch at this salad bar just right in front of JYP building. Their salads are good! We recommend it. While we we’re eating we spotted another member of Day6! It was my bias, YoungK. He had red hair that time and he went to the same basement room Dowoon went too. After we finished eating we spotted a van stop in front of the basement room and viola came out 3/5 Day6 members and got into the car. We saw Dowoon, YoungK and Jae. Before getting on the van, YoungK suddenly came half-running into our direction and for a second there I seriously thought he was heading to the same salad bar  and I was just sitting there looking at him panicked, not knowing what to do LOL. Apparently he was heading to the convenience store right beside the salad bar. We waited for him to come out and had our camera phones ready when he came out I called his name and he turned to me, smiled and bowed a bit. We also made a friend while hanging around JYP. She’s Chinese and she doesn’t know how or where to go to find other Kpop company buildings so she tagged along with us.

CUBE Entertainment 

Unfortunately, it seems like CUBE moved to a different building which we didn’t know the address off. The old building they used to occupy is just really close to JYP’s they are practically neighbors. Since my friend and I don’t really stan anyone from CUBE we didn’t bother to look up their new address.

FNC Entertainment 

FNC’s building is just a matter of a walking distance from where JYP and CUBE is. They have two buildings in between a tiny road. It’s easy to spot but we didn’t hang around too long because like what I said the road’s pretty tiny so it can feel make you feel a little claustrophobic to be there. Although there’s a convenience store in front of their main building and if you wanna hang around to spot an artist from FNC you can stay there.

SM Training Center– SM’s building is very close to where FNC is. Unfortunately, that day the building was closed. That’s what it said when we looked up their address on Google maps that day. I guess it meant that there will be no office for staffs and management? I’m not really sure. We just got our pictures taken outside the building and decided to leave cause it didn’t seem like anyone was inside the building. However if you do decide to hang around the area to wait for your fave SM artist there’s a park right in front of the building. You can find a good spot there and wait.

Actually, SM has two buildings. This is the old one (I guess) and there’s another one which bigger and has a coffee shop at the ground floor. We we’re quite confused about this one and wondered if this is the building that their artists regularly visit. Although, when I watched that episode of My SM TV with NCT Dream as guests and this building as shown for a bit. For this building it is difficult to spot the artists though because they have an underground parking area and I think they have an entrance/exit there too so I bet that���s how the artists enter the building.

SM Town at COEX Artium

The SM Town is part of the COEX Mall located at Gangnam-gu area. It’s easy to find because it’s a huge establishment. We took a cab going there cause our Chinese friend got tired of walking and she offered to pay for the cab fee which was just 3,000 Won. You can use your T-Card to pay for it. If you are an SM stan then this is THE place to be aside from the SME company buildings. The atrium has 6 floors. Check out the photo below for what each floor has to offer.

Let me just warn you ahead of time that this place will have you throwing your money all over the place cause it practically has all the merch of your fave SM artist, from albums, clothes, posters and even cosmetics. They also got a coffee shop that offers treats and drinks so you can lounge there and rest a bit. By the way, their baristas and staff have on point visuals so yeah, you might want to feast over that too. LOL. I got a crush on one of their staff who wasn’t just good-looking but super sweet too. He helped us by giving us directions for our next destination. That was a K-Drama moment for me right there. Hahaha.

JTune Camp 

 My friend is a huge MBLAQ fan so she wanted to visit Jtune camp. At this point there’s just the two of us cause our Chinese friend decided to go back to her hotel. When you look up Jtune’s office online the result would be the address Seoul Metropolis Gangnam-gu Samseong-dong Office 44-10 Soam Building #501. This building was very difficult to find and we spent a long time trying to figure out where it is. When we got to Samseong-dong we had to depend on Google Maps to get us to this building but we didn’t find any building with a Jtune Camp sign on it. We ended up asking the locals around and the building ended up to be this ordinary looking building. My friend and I we’re really doubtful it if was the right building at first but we decided to enter the building and find out for ourselves. The main door was closed cause it was already around 7 pm when we got there. We saw that there was a back door which was open and we decided to enter through that and got on the elevator. I WOULDN’T SUGGEST YOU DO THE SAME IF YOU’RE GOING TO LOOK FOR YOUR FAVE IDOLS CAUSE THIS CAN BE QUITE DANGEROUS. Remember that you’re in a foreign land so always think of your safety and I have to admit our action can come off a bit of sasaeng-ish. However, my friend was desperate cause we spent so much time looking for it. So we went to the 5th floor of the building cause online that’s what says where Jtune is but there was no one there and it looked creepy af. We decided to just give up and went back down. When we left the building there was this ahjussi that greeted us, it seemed like he worked at the building and he then asked us “MBLAQ?” he figured we we’re there for them. He didn’t speak English so I had to use up all of the Korean I know to talk to him LOL. Anyway, according to him, Jtune isn’t in that building anymore for a long time. It seems like there are still fans that go there though so he wasn’t surprised about us being there. The problem is that he also doesn’t know where their new building is and we told him that the only address found online for Jtune is that building’s address. So if you are a fan of MBLAQ and Madtown, you have to look up their new address.

Jellyfish Entertainment & Encounter with VIXX’s Ravi – Our last stop was Jellyfish Entertainment. From Samseong-dong we followed the address and directions from the blog I found online. Since it was already late in the evening and Jellyfish’s building is a bit difficult to find. When we got there the area was really quite. The building’s main door was made of glass so we can see from outside that the light was one but it didn’t seem like anyone was inside. We just took photos and sat in front of the building to catch our breath before leaving. Our bodies we’re tired from all the walking that day and we haven’t eaten anything since lunch so we sat there talking about where to eat dinner. Every now and then and employee would enter or exit the building. Suddenly I noticed that there was a tall guy inside the building heading for the door. I can’t see his face cause the glass door was a bit tinted so I can only make out his silhouette. I can make out that he’s tall and he’s wearing baggy clothes. My fangirl instincts kicked in and as he got closer to the door I saw that it was VIXX’s Ravi. I shook my friend’s arm and told her that it’s Ravi. When the door finally opened it was indeed Ravi. Once again I was too stunned to do anything so I just sat there calling his name while my friend grabbed her phone and tried to take a photo of him. Ravi was about to go to the parking area when he spotted my friend taking a photo he immediately turned around and went back inside the building. I think we caught him off guard or something and he was probably as surprised as we we’re thus his reaction. A few minutes after that a staff came out of the building and got into this jeep type car. He parked the car right in front of the building and went back inside the building without turning the car off. My friend and I figured out that Ravi doesn’t want to be bothered so we decided so walk away from the building so that he won’t feel uncomfortable. We then saw Ravi come out of the building together with the same staff and got on the car.

Whew! That’s 5 pages of Microsoft word right there. Hahaha. Anyway, there you go. That’s Day 1 of our 9-day trip. I guess this one will be the most helpful (?) too and what most KPop fans will be needing when Kpop-ing in Seoul. I hope I can write about the rest of our trip soon. Once they’re done I’ll just update them and hope it helps you on your own trip! Thanks for reading.

[lawrenceseitz22]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 226

Click on the video above to watch Episode 226 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

  Adam: Alright, we’re live with Hump Day hangouts Episode 221. All right, I just did that. I’m a little embarrassed us now going to be on YouTube forever. So anyways, moving right along into the sixth of March 2019. We got the whole crew here. Bradley is

Chris: doing some secret squirrel stuff in the background. But we’ll get to that. So first, let’s start on the left and work our way down. Chris, how you doing? Man? Doing good Spring is here

Adam: actually. Nice. Yeah, it’s quite nice. But I’m getting kind of like form on like the snow snowboard enough this year. So

Chris: unlike everybody else, I’m actually liking the winter when it’s not too hot and stuff and they can actually write on the slopes and we get powder and stuff so yeah, like I’m one of those weird freaks who is actually enjoying wintertime

Adam: bad and her not I like your shirt. But let’s see what summer is coming to you. Right.

Hernan: Thank you Yes balls here man I’m sweating myself but anyways I’m super pumped thank you guys actually wanting to publicly say thank you guys I love you soon as Bobby can say that because you guys have been awesome you got a lot of you guys were got the Battle Plan v3 and you’re really supporting the costs right here right now so I love you guys thank you for the support it’s been awesome

Adam: yeah definitely actually I’m going to pop that on the page if you’re watching grab the battle plan that’s a little quick note but in case you weren’t aware we launched just over a week ago you can still get in there and get it it’s we priced it you know we get a lot of questions about this to you know when we first came out with it as $100 and you know it’s overly well has a lot of great processes in place things out really smoothly but over time we decided to bring that price down and it’s much much much cheaper now because we really truly did want to get this in everyone’s hands so that you have simple processes and if you go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com, you can see us talking about that and how this can help you in your business, no matter what you’re doing. So anyways, I just want you to go check that out.

Chris: I would have had a battle plan right now, other than the price Say that again, why would avoid a Battle Plan right now? Other than the price?

Hernan: Can I go for it? Yeah, because it’s step by step process do now for sure. Like, we have actually distilled a lot of the stuff that, you know, we have been teaching and showing over the past, you know, five, six years on Semantic Mastery, we have distilled that into a step by step process. So if you have like, if you have a brand new website that you should put your domain right like yesterday, and you want to put it up with the band, go get the Battle Plan. If you have an H website that has been, you know, yielding good results he has a year it’s, you know, it’s a year old, but you still want to push it to go get the benefit. If you get a YouTube video that you want, push, go get the bad plan. If you also get have a GMB that you need better and

Like that is something that we have recently added to this be three and you know we made the webinar the how to be successful marketing 2019 that’s the value alone of admission and then you get a lot of additional bonuses on the bonus member’s area that you’re getting for free so it’s a no brainer your question

Adam: And I’m still learning how to use the mute button alright so yeah I’m not gonna expand on that I think are Hernan hit it and we’re really happy to be able to share this with you guys and like croissants at the bonuses are friggin cool so check out but Marco we wanted to check in of course with you how you doing man

Marco: I’m good, man. I’m about. Give me three to six months and I’m going to drop a

Adam: whoops. Sorry about that. Yeah, that was me in my browser.

Marco: Quit Quit messing with that shit man. I’m about to drop a nuclear bomb on the SEO world again. Alright, so stay tuned. It’s coming it’s it’s I’m sorry but it’s not going to be like the battle plan almost free because I’m on some takeover shit and I’m done. I’m done like playing I’m done with people hating I’m done with people. I’m when I say done if you talk about me I’m going to make you a fucking porn star. That’s how this is gonna be. So fuck with me.

That’s that’s what this is about. That’s what that’s what’s coming. They don’t fuck with me to

Hernan: Yeah and you got you guys better listen because what Marco says that he’s dropping the good stuff he usually like 100% of the time delivers, right he did what he did with our YS Academy. One are ways to kind of meat to it always brings up the good stuff. So definitely.

Adam: Well, I want to circle back around to where we started with introducing and saying welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. And since they If you’re new to semantic mastery first of all thanks for watching. We might have just heard us talking about the battle plan, grab it. It’s the best place to get started not only with us but for like Hernan said all you know your age sites your new sites. If you’re getting into videos whatever it is GMB start their battleplan.semantic mastery.com if you are you know looking to either start or grow your local digital marketing agency and you want to join the best community for that and be a part of that then join the mastermind and you can find out all about that at mastermind dot semantic mastery.com. And for everyone, no matter what you’re doing. Go to em. Gee why b dot SEO. Alright, for the premium done for you SEO Services, you know, getting the GMB verified so you’re not spending your time trying to do that which we’re going to touch on I know a lot of people have questions about candies and what’s going on there if you want syndication networks done, you know really, really high quality from you know, the training that Bradley originally created these updated over the last four years our YS stuff

Man what else press releases we got all sorts of stuff and there’s a lot more good stuff coming down the pipeline right.

Hernan: Cora and keyword research I think that that that’s worth mentioning because you know you can you can spend like an entire week going after keywords you know going after keyword research and whatnot and I think that that solves the entire issue and I haven’t personally I haven’t seen and mean that type of I don’t know how you guys are doing that because that’s all marketing Rob but I don’t know how you guys are pulling that up but honestly I haven’t personally seen any any other keyword research report that you don’t need to pay I don’t know shit ton of money to get something like that you’re getting a piece of the market, No kidding so I think that’s pretty cool and that takes a lot of time and I don’t think that we’re pushing it enough for with the body that you guys are getting some. Definitely get man it’s a goldmine for Edwards like Yeah.

Adam: Oh cool. I’m sorry. So I was about to post something on the page. We’re going to hop Over to Bradley in a minute. As I said, he’s got some stuff going on in the background. But something else I want to say, I know we get a ton of views on YouTube. And you know, people either aren’t here live or to catch it later, they will watching down the road. If you want to, you can click the button, click Subscribe, stay up to date, obviously, with Hump Day Hangouts, a lot of the videos that we upload there, and if I can ask a favor for anyone watching, you know, we really want to help people find out about our YouTube channel and really grow that if you find Hump Day hangouts helpful. If you’re watching a video clip and you found it helpful, please share it with them. You know you think it’s going to be particularly helpful we try to really help people out point them in the right direction and a lot of times you know what you’re learning or what you’re solving could definitely help someone out so point them in the right direction send them the video clip or point them to semantic mastery. com slash each the questions and real quick I’m going to pull something up but Bradley Are you in the middle of it. Are you are you ready?

Bradley: Alright. I’m sorry. I was muted and had the camera off I guess I can note to self and to everybody else out there do not start a server migration right before our webinar

Adam: Here hold on a minute let me let me write this down real quick the support staff the support staff assured me that it was going to be a smooth process bullshit

Bradley: I’ve got client sites down left and right like a database connection issues all kinds of shit and it’s kind of a shit storm right now I’m trying to get it resolved and now I’ve got a host a webinar so but Bradley no self we have a Caesar

Yeah, well not gonna be able to get in touch with them right now. We got a webinar host. So anyways, what else are you going to say?

Adam: I was just gonna say we had to people Hey, Alex, and Rishi. Thank you very much. They just grabbed the battle plan, I think today and we’re just talking about it. So thank you and appreciate you guys being here and checking it out and we’re happy to answer your question. So with that Bradley, I guess.

How are you doing? And then let’s just jump into it.

Bradley: I’m a little stressed out, but here right and answer some questions and help others. Well, my shit crumbles.

But that’s all right. So yeah, I’m good.

Adam: This is good. Well, focus because you know what? I’m guessing that there’s next working on your server. There’s nothing you can literally do about it right now. So this will be good. take your mind off it.

Yeah. All right, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s rock and roll. I’ll grab the screen.

Alright, so we got to go back to seven days ago. That’s how we determine where we left off. Right.

Is It Better To Use Gmails Instead Branded Emails For GMB?

  Adam: Let’s make sure with the Six Day guy there we go. I can’t see it looks like a mobile, mobile. Mobile is movie local business.

Bradley: Okay, so I’ve always pushed businesses to use their branding domain for their email info at company.com. As an example, instead of Yahoo, Hotmail or whatever but it could be better SEO to use Gmail and said for GMB and across citations now I recommend using a branded domain, always. And in fact, I would recommend using g sweet for your branded domain instead of like shitty webmail. That’s one of the issues I’m actually dealing with right now, with the server migration webmail sucks. And there tend to be problems a lot with webmail accounts guys that are through servers. But you know, for the price is going up, I think, in the next couple days for G Suit, but for a basic G Suite or domain account, domain web email account. That’s all hosted through Google at $6 a month guys per user, but you can add like, I don’t know if it’s unlimited or not. But you can add a whole bunch of domain alias is if you’d like so that you can actually send and receive email from multiple domains from the same Gmail account it’s or G Suite account but it’s Google email essentially and I would and also as Marco will probably chime in here that’s also another entity validation signal to be hosting your, your domain at using G Suite email services for your domain.

So I would recommend that you do that. What do you say, Marco?

Marco: I totally get that business card on file whether or not whether you do it through G Suite. It used to be that Google only would allow names in Gmail, right? They wouldn’t they wouldn’t discourage you from using business names. But now it says everybody started doing it then it now okay so you could actually do Gmail and pay through Gmail right for driving extra drive and everything but you have G Suite there and if you have a business or that you’re running or a business that you’re helping them, by all means, get them over into G Suit and run everything through their let Google see that this is a legitimate business with legitimate services products or whatever it may be. So yes, I 100% agree. Go and pay Google for these services.

Bradley: And just as a quick, I’m not going to go through it guys on screen, but just write this down or take notes. It’s not a hard process, there is a wizard that will kind of help you through it. But the first couple of times you do it, it’s a little geeky, but once you understand how to do it, it’s really simple. You have to use go You have to be able to access your domains, DNS settings which you know can either be through your registrar or if you’re using something like a third party DNS, iCloud flair, you can do it there. But you got to add a text a text record for domain verification. That’s to prove to Google that you own the domain or control the domain and then you add your MX records. There’s five of them.

Yeah, there’s five of them and they’ll get the G sweet will give you those. It’s it’s fairly standard or easy to set up. And then after that, there are just a few additional records that you want to add like one is called an SPF record. Another one is called a D Mark record. And the last one is a DKIM signature and those are three different things that you want to add. So just write down down and then you can just search in G sweet help which when you’re logged into your G sweet admin panel there’s a help search bar at the top and you can just type those in like SPF records DK, I am signature and D Mark and you it’ll, it’ll give you help files to show you exactly how to set that stuff up. Once you do those, then you should be good to go. You know, it’s also important, make sure that you do have a domain that setup with website and such that’s good for domain reputation for email, or for email reputation, if you’re sending from a domain email account, if that makes sense. So just adding those few things are going to help to make sure that you get really good deliverability. I do use g Suite accounts for prospecting when I’m doing you know, cold emailing for prospecting, and they tend to work really well. If you use a standard Gmail accounts like personal Gmail accounts, and, you know, free Gmail accounts essentially and you try to send a cold email within a very short period of time, your emails will stop being too delivered, they’ll stop in boxing. What depends on I guess, really the volume and whether people are hitting spam and stuff like that. But if you use the domain emails and you set up those records, like I said, and you have a website on the domain, so at least you know that those are kind of things that helped it for those to the inbox. But for a standard business, you shouldn’t really have to worry about much of that other than just set up those records correctly, and you should be good to go. That’s a good question though.

Would The GMB Auto Poster Strip The Meta Data And Geo Settings Of A Picture Uploaded Within The Post?

Elaine is up, she says. Would the GMB auto poster software strip the metadata of a picture we upload including the geo settings when scheduling a new post?

You know, I have no idea but I doubt that it would because we are developing knows how important that is. Marco, do you have a definitive answer?

Marco: No, I don’t have a definitive answer. But it’s essentially Google that strips it.

Bradley: Yeah, but yeah.

Marco: Yeah, they get the information and they know you give them all the information and then it doesn’t matter if it’s still on the image. All you want is the relevance and Google can also take a look at the at the front of the picture. And you’d be surprised at how much entity information Google pulls from the front of the image instead of just the back.

Bradley: Yeah. But I mean, specifically for her question was, does the auto-poster application itself strip the metadata?

Marco: Yeah. I don’t have a definitive, definitive answer for that. All I can say is, if it’s getting stripped out, it’s usually Google that’s doing that.

Bradley: That’s correct.

Adam: That’s something maybe we can run by St. Pat the developer find out if he knows for sure. Again, he’s he’s a good guy. He knows guys what the benefit of what we’re doing. So I’m quite sure that that’s kind of baked into the software already, but we can confirm that with him.

Will An Older GMB Account Have The Same Ranking Effect As With Those That Have Been Created Recently?

Bradley: Dan’s up he says, If I have a customer that has had their GMB for some time, does the process work the same with the press advantage from the press release pointing the first post etc. is the process to rank GMB as effective as on a GMP that has been around for a while.

Yeah, it’s typically more effective that way. In other words, if you use the same methods that we teach in our various products, whether it’s local least for our local GMB pro and you apply those two or PR progress in your, in your case, Dan because that’s what sounds like you’re talking about it either any one of those methods are going to should should work better for an established GMB than they do for a brand new one. Because remember with the brand new one guys you’re trying to build a reputation and we’re trying to force it very quickly and if you pick the low competition areas which were the original location research training for local least bro you can typically get rankings almost overnight or with very little work very low effort.

Now if you’re using the updated version where you’re going much more granular and trying to target more locations and even more like metro areas and such you’re still going to have a bit of a dogfight that’s what I’ve been experiencing. So and it takes time because and here’s the thing when you’re looking at like location research and you’re looking at even if you see opportunity because there are locations that don’t have the same they’re not the same zip code area that you’re searching and that kind of stuff. You’ll see that a lot of. At times, especially in metro areas, the the the API, the top 10 results that it pulls in are pulling in maybe locations, or GM bees that are outside of that specific location. But it’s pulling them in because they’re very relevant. They’ll have big authority signals, such as lots of reviews, lots of images, website citations, ages is a factor. So you have to take all of that into account. So even if you target your location placement perfectly, you still have to compete with other entities out there, essentially, companies or brands, locations that have built authority, and that’s why Google is pulling them in as being the most relevant. So there is still a bit of a dogfight to do with that. But what I’m saying is if you have an existing asset that’s been established for some period of time, and I don’t know what you know what the threshold would be to make this better obviously, probably the older the better, but if you apply those same kinds of methods, you’re going to get better results than with them with a brand new listing.

Guys, there’s another good question.

Do You Hide The GMB Backlinks And Sensitive Data To Protect Yourself From Angry Competitors?

Okay, Alex is up. He says, Hey guys just purchased the battle plan. Glad I did. How common is it for competitors to report lead gen sites to spam or whatever, both the jam BS in the actual WordPress sites.

For me it’s been rather rare I haven’t really experienced that much I’ve actually had years ago when I first got into the business. Should I’d say it was it was it was actually my first Tree Service site that ever built and one of the competitors did report that one and I got it reinstated which was funny, I had to re-verify it via mail. Unfortunately, I still had the mailbox that I was using for that at the time. So I was able to re verify it and get it out and he was just pissed because we outranked him like within a couple of months, and he’d been an established Tree Service business. But that was really the only time I’ve had to experience it. And I’m going to knock on wood, but I hadn’t really experienced that. So here’s the thing. I mean, if you’ve got a good lead gen asset that set up correctly and it’s optimized well. And it’s not super spammy and you’ve got the calls that are directing especially you know, as always recommend to a call center where it’s a valid Pete person answering the phone right away, you know that kind of stuff. It’s hard to really bitch about that, you know, to prove that it’s spam you know, especially if you’re using surface area businesses in your location, your physical location or the address the physical address is hidden. How would they know you know what I mean? It’s not like it used to be where sometimes you could still display your address if you got a surface area business, you’re not supposed to display your address. So how can they know? You know what I mean? So I haven’t really experienced that again, fortunately not saying it can’t happen. guys just saying I haven’t experienced that much.

Alex has to finish up he said. Do you do anything to protect yourself from anger competitors? Yeah, as I said, I don’t display the address. That’s why I’m actually not building citations as much because a lot of citation platforms still require you to display the address or you can even place a citation on their directory.

So, um, you know, again, I’m doing a lot of other stuff outside of using them because if we’re using a, an address that’s not, you know, actually where the business is located, then we don’t want to publish that if possible. So that’s just one of the things I’m doing is doing a lot of other sorts of stuff, a lot of on page stuff and other types of off page where I don’t have to display the address.

Okay, you got any comments on that? Anybody?

How Do You Use GSites To Increase The Visibility Of A GMB Page For Nearby Cities?

Alright, moving on. With this house is good agents. Thank you for or thank you for offering this form to us. I have questions about g sites as a way to increase visibility from nearby city g site 1000 word article, videos, content samurai, or summary of Article links to money site and GMB website and also include several links to the web to auto or should I be cautious about them to you.

You mean can you link to your web two daughters from the G sites? Or are you talking about building links to your web two point O properties?

I would say you could do either if your web two or tier one properties and they’re built well then I don’t see why it would you know, again, it’s just kind of like validating the entity is if we’re syndication Academy guys, whether you’ve been through our training or you purchase done for you networks from us, that’s how we do it right, we interlink all of our tier one properties. They’re all branded properties. We’re not trying to hide our footprint you’re actually trying to display our footprint, right? Because those are all branded entities. We want Google to make the connection between all of those as being of the same brand. So I don’t see why that would be any issue in either instance, what I’m saying is, if you’re linking out to branded tier one properties that are well built, well optimized, then that’s kind of internal linking your brand. If you’re building links to your branded properties, that’s fine too. I would recommend you do that instead of direct to your money site, which is what I think you’re alluding to anyways, right? That’s part of the reason that we use this dr stacks and G sites and things like that because their Google domains, Google properties and we can just literally hammer them and it will take it like a champ.

So any any comments on that guys?

Adam: No, I think I think that’s perfect. And the setup is perfect too because you can even drop press releases into the D side and and Dr. Second power those up and Yeah, well, we’ve I mean, we’ve done I keep talking about this. We did 1 million spam links including porn and not not intentional. I just told that it hit it with whatever you got in and it was actually a anyway GSA is what we use for it. So he didn’t he didn’t filter he didn’t do anything they just blasted it, it was it turned out to be a million plus went through the drive stack through the site onto Well, the mind is not the mind map. But the Google business map which ranked in the three packets still ranking to this day. There’s nothing we could do.

As a matter of fact, the guy stopped paying. First of all, he took one of his phones. I talked about this role, he took one of his phone’s off the hook because he just couldn’t handle the call body. And then the fucking to stop paying with that, that just totally makes no sense why would you stop paying but he’s still ranking to this day major metropolitan area highly competitive niche and it’s there and last time I looked there was still a porn link indexed in his link profile. So think about that. Google has it has its index right when you go and look at the link profile in Google you do the site search and appointment comes up so Google is hey you know we like this port link for for your website. Here you go. How much better can it get that you do spam links into a drive second g site and it comes up pristine on the other end and you can push power to wherever you want it to me that’s that’s just incredible. And it’s only been five years since it’s been working. So what a loophole.

Bradley: There you go he says do I do the same for each city that I want to rank for?

Well similarly to what I talked about with syndication networks if you know I prefer to use one brand one branded network for multiple locations if possible and so if you’re talking about building web tues out for brand then you know if you want to get location specific you certainly can you can always add like a location monitor to the brand name so for example you know Joe’s plumbing is the primary brand and then let’s say you’ve got, you know, three different locations and they’re all obviously different cities then you could do Joe’s plumbing an input the city name for example as a modifier if you’re going to create another set of web tools that are location specific and you can certainly do that you know if that’s what you want to do now do stacks yeah just you can either buy new new drive or bi or build new dr stacks for each individual location or better yet create internal folders within the main brand drive stack in silo just like you, you know, essentially create like silos within the stack, okay.

So it’s up to you how, again, I try not to build location specific web tools if possible, because I like to just use the branded one. You know, I like let let I like doing getting results with the least amount of effort. And so I try not to do that if necessary. But sometimes in more competitive areas, it does help to do that. And so that if that’s what you’re asking then. Yes, I would say you can do that too

Can You Please Enlighten Us With The New Policy Of GMB?

Toby’s up. Let’s have name. I haven’t seen in a while it says hello, gangstas. Happy to be back in your hood. Can you explain one more time G and its new policy on GMBs?

Um, well, I would. But I don’t really know. I mean, the policy is don’t do what we do. That’s the policy but we do it anyways. And so there’s a lot of misconceptions out there now. Thanks, Toby. Yeah, there are I mean that’s the thing you know, that’s why we haven’t really commented yet as to we don’t have a definitive answer on that as to what what to do and what not to do at the moment. I can tell you one thing I’ve I’ve got my Multiple lead gen assets that I was in, I was chatting with Rob today in our slack app about this, that, you know, I’ve, I’ve been updating a lot of my stuff like crazy. Some of them are brand new listings. And I have not had a single problem with getting anything suspended. I mean, I’ve even done some stuff that would typically trigger re verification immediately and in the last few days, and it has not caused any issues for me whatsoever. Now, I’m not saying you guys can go buck wild right now, because there is a lot of suspensions happening, but I think there’s certain things triggering them.

So for example, I mentioned this last week, too, by the way, and I don’t have any problem mentioning this to you guys on Hump Day Hangouts. Because I want you guys to not make this mistake. One of the things and it’s only mistake now It wasn’t a mistake a month ago. And I don’t know for sure that this is absolutely like an absolute rule. But I know that one of the things that I’ve noticed we lost about six assets in the last couple of weeks. And so I’ve got my team actually not doing anything.

In the like, on page work on GMB stuff, right now, I’ve got my team working on off page stuff. I myself, I’m still inside doing, I’m testing different things inside on, you know, like on page edits, and stuff within GMB locations, and I haven’t had any suspended on me. But when my team was doing them, one of the things that we we think we identified as as a trigger was adding to the appointment URL like an ad ID page, for example, which is typically an Amazon we host those you know, we’ve talked us and said this publicly before but we host those on Amazon s3. If you don’t know how to do it, get to buy the course the figure it out or find out on your own. But one of the things was that originally it would take an s3 bucket URL but it stopped doing that the appointment URL section would stop stop doing that after some time. So then we got smart, right and we added a redirect URL and then it would take it again but one of the things that I think is causing that is by putting something in that appointment URL other than an actual appointment app link like to calland Lee or something else, or to using the business, the Google My Business website URL to go in the appointment, you were out. Or if you had a page on a money site that had an appointment app embedded in it, that would also work.

But if you’re if you’re still staying strictly within the Google ecosystem, which is what we’ve been primarily doing, where we don’t have an off page, you know, we don’t have a self hosted site then. We’ve been using the GMB business side is the primary website and then using yet ID page in the appointment URL section. And I think that that’s an issue right now. So I said this last week, guys, just don’t link to that in there. I would recommend not putting anything in that appointment you are Unless Unless it’s a valid appointment URL or app or, or if you got a money site, and you want to put the GMB business site URL on the appointment URL. I don’t think that’s going to be an issue either, but if you start doing that, I do what you should be by the way.

Creating that page, it’s super powerful link to it with a contextual link from the GMB website. That way, you still get it in there, guys, you’re still getting Google to go crawl it from the GMB asset. It just doesn’t have to be in the employment URL. And we did that because we were able to, but if that’s one of the trigger points, which I think it is, I don’t have 100% certainty on that but we noticed that that’s one of the things that when we had six we lost six assets in a week and what my builder Joe was the one that was the one that said that he thinks that that’s what it was because he noticed that it happened on three of them right after he had added that URL. So I recommend just not doing it for now until we know for sure that makes sense.

Okay.

So as far as what is the actual what are the policies while the policies are don’t spam? Are you going to abide by that because I sure as hell not you know, so essentially that’s, that’s what it is. So we just got to keep playing around in there until we figure it out. Now, I know some of you guys don’t have the resources is to be able to, you know, burn through a bunch of GMP. And I get that. And that’s part of the reason why we’re still testing and figuring out what it is. But like I said, I’ve done a lot of on page edits and stuff right now. And I mean, just today alone, I did a lot of stuff that would have typically required re verification or suspension, and it didn’t cause any of that. So I’m just just letting you guys know, until we figure it out. I would recommend that you just tread lightly, don’t do anything super spammy. You know, take things slow, as Marco always says, make a couple of edits, you know, or one big edit or something, and then get the hell out of there and leave it sit for a couple days. let it marinate, right that that it season, let that kind of settle in before you go back in and change a bunch of other stuff. What do what do SEOs do SEOs go in especially when you got a team and processes developed like we do that go in and like within you know, two, three hours they’ve completely optimized everything and added photos and posted and like you know, I’ve done everything and that’s business owners don’t do that because they don’t know how to do that.

You know what I mean? So if you act like a business owner or if like Marco said, if you go in as like an agency through a manager account, make some edits. I always recommend removing the manager account afterwards. But that’s something else, you know, there’s different things that you can test with, with some of your own assets. assets, excuse me, but just think about, you know, what looks natural, a business owner wouldn’t go in and fully optimize and, you know, in one fell swoop because they don’t typically know how to do that kind of shit. A manager might, right. But I also believe we’ve talked about not having, you know, using a manager if you’re targeting one vertical, don’t use that same manager account for every account that you or GMB that you log into. Because that’s a way that their footprint could be created. use multiple manager accounts. For example, guys, probably most of you have a shit ton of syndication networks, at least I hope you do, which means you’ve got a lot of different Google accounts. So you could use those different Gmail accounts that you have for various profiles to actually act as a manager where you log into one of your make some changes, and then log back out and remove the manager for the owner account, if that makes sense. And that’s something that you could do to reduce potential footprint issues.

That was another good question.

Robert Nelson. He’s a new mastermind member. I had a call with him yesterday. It was great. Glad to have you.

Is There A Way To Automatically Randomize Images For Posts When Autoposting Using GMB Briefcase?

Robert says, Hey, guys. Great to be in here. When auto posting using the GMB briefcase Is there a way to automatically randomize the images used for posts so they are being scheduled monthly?

Yes, it’s called it with the briefcase. Yes, that’s got an image spinning. I think you have to upload them via CSV and I have not tested with that yet. It’s because I just haven’t taken the time to learn it. But I don’t know where I can point you to. For the training. We have a slack group Robert, that was there were some beta testers for the briefcase, we can probably add you to that because you’re in the mastermind, guys. You have to be in the mastermind for stuff like that. Sorry. But if you’re if you’re interested in that, Robert, ping me in the mastermind Facebook group and I’ll see if I can get you added to this slack group for that. And there’s a lot of training and stuff in there for that. And there’s probably training files in the briefcase for that. I just haven’t seen them there. So anybody know for sure.

Hernan: Oh, that’s actually a good question. Bradley will need to double check. But yeah, that’s something for sure that you might want to join the mastermind for that. And not only that, but also for the calls that you get, you get an onboarding call, and then you get a 90-day call follow up. So that is pretty cool, too.

Adam: Yep. Yeah, the only other thing I was going to say if there is any issues to and you want to do it on your own, you know, if he can let me know, because I do some of the stuff with spreadsheets before it was added in there where you know, you’re randomizing some of the stuff on your own which might come in handy and some other places.

Bradley: Yeah, so maybe that would be a good thread for us to start in the Facebook group for the mastermind anyways, and we got a mastermind webinar tomorrow guys, so now might be something we can talk about there too. But yeah, Robert, I’ll see if I can get you out of To the slack group I just picked St. Patty’s the developer see if he minds if he doesn’t mind I’ll squeeze you in on there okay. let’s say what’s up clan Adam? That’s cool when did you change your was that different?

Adam: Yeah must pull from Facebook I think I updated a couple days ago It looks like a boss

Hernan: oh yeah that’s from Nashville yeah.

Have You Seen Results With The Mapping Techniques Of Peter Drew’s GMB Dominator?

Bradley: Jim what’s up. Bradley, in the past you mentioned Peter Drew’ GMB Dominator, not by name as it didn’t have a name yet. I just saw the beta testing pricing today and wondered if you have seen the results with these mapping techniques that software it’s 100 or $500 one time $100 month shiny or legit.

You know, it’s a legit tool. There’s no question it’s a good tool. I’ve been actually consulting a lot with Peter drew about that stuff. So yeah, it’s cool. I mean, I haven’t tested all of the software some of the new stuff that just comes in the last couple weeks I haven’t had the time to but a lot of the let’s just say there’s going to be some collaboration between us anyways guys.

If you end up purchasing it, you’ll see that I added some preliminary training on. It’s kind of a teaser training for we’re updating the video lead gen system specifically for outreach and prospecting, to monetize lead gen assets. And I’m working on that currently, right now, as a matter of fact, like in the last week and a half now, I’ve been working on that. And so I think we’re going to launch that in April. And that’s going to be a complete update to the already existing product. And it’s going to include a whole bunch of resources and methods and processes and stuff like that for monetizing lead gen assets. Or for going and targeting on non-owner verified profiles to get your foot in the door. That way using video emails is the primary prospecting method. And so and you’ll see that if you end up checking on a gym, it’s I think it’s a good product, you know, just like anything, you have to use them and use them consistently those kinds of tools to get results. So just keep that in mind. It’s not like a one-shot you buy these things. You go run one campaign for something and you’re done. You’ve ranked if you’re you know you’re successful in your you never have to work again it’s not like that even with those tools that are simple tools which is why I like them you have to you know use them repeatedly and usually run multiple campaigns per project in order for you to get results. So just keep that in mind but yeah absolutely, I would recommend it guys no doubt.

Okay. New Battleplan executor here. It looks like a lot of what how we Schwartz used to do in the early days of I am great stuff. Okay, I’ll take your word for it I don’t know who our Schwartz’s.

Adam: That’s a name from like 2008-2009

Hernan: And that was the guy more time than I thought I think the guy got pulled up by Google security in one of theirs. I can’t remember exactly what happened you will have to I’ll have to look that up later but something happened in one of the guys got a lot in Google’s nerves so that’s a good nice to see men and thanks for buying the battle plan. Rishi

Bradley: You guys, that was just a year or two. I started in 2010. So that must have been right before I got involved with internet marketing. So sorry. Go ahead.

Hernan: You were too young for that.

Bradley: Yeah. Well, I wasn’t too young. I just hadn’t started in digital marketing it that’s all.

How Many Network Is Enough To Get Enough Traffic To An Affiliate Marketer In YouTube?

My question lies and having enough first doing more than necessary and getting slapped. I mean YouTube based affiliate marketers starting in a new market. For this, I have set up one email address, which I used to create an over a dozen other web properties and implemented the battle plan. I’ve also started my YouTube videos as part of the bonus. That’s great. I’m glad to hear that. My question is, Is that enough? Or should I be creating more and more web properties like I am keyword based content? Or can this one network with the siloed videos on YouTube provide me enough horsepower and bring enough traffic to my videos?

Now for videos guys, for you, specifically Rishi if you’re doing YouTube stuff go nuts. With networks you syndication networks, add as many networks to your channel as possible and not just tier one network. In other words, not just where the YouTube channel triggers syndication two networks, I would recommend also creating second to, you know, to tier networks. And if you want to go beyond that, you certainly can. You can go, you know, third tier networks, fourth tier networks, I don’t recommend that only because it becomes a bitch to manage. I’ve always preferred to stop it two-tier networks, which means and again, if you’ve been through syndication, network training or syndication Academy training, or if you purchase a two-tiered network from MGYB be which we will set it up for you, you could always go back through and reverse engineered if, you know, if you’re not a build a single tier network that’s triggered directly from the YouTube channel and then you see a two-tiered network you’ll you’ll you’ll know how to do it because you’re just going to use the RSS feed from the blog properties on the on the first tier network. So like blogger, Tumblr WordPress to post to republish to the second tier network and it’s very, very powerful and the different sizes with YouTube there’s no footprint issues.

If You use the app, what’s the way that we teach, okay, if you start importing the video descriptions and republishing them and all that kind of stuff, you can get web 2.0s terminated and that can look spammy so I don’t recommend that. I recommend that you do exactly what the app what’s the way that we designed them because I tested all that stuff guys and there’s a reason why those outlets for video syndication networks were set up the way that I did because there are no footprint issues there. And the reason why is because all you’re acting as is a publisher for Google at that point because all you’re doing is syndicating Google embed code and then a link back to the channel and or a playlist that’s it. So like again, I don’t see how that could ever be an issue and it’s never caused a problem. And so what I say is like usually when I was when I was still I have a lot of aged themed video syndication networks now that I use so I don’t really build them anymore or even buy new ones for that matter.

Um, but when I was doing a lot of that and building a lot if I was going to test a new channel like a new niche, a new industry then what I would do immediately go with two or three, two-tier syndication networks attached to the channel right off the bat like right out of the gate, I’d have at least two or three two-tier syndication networks. So that’s essentially four syndication rings per network to tier syndication network right so I would have anywhere between eight to 12 syndication rings being triggered from one YouTube channel right off the bat and so I would recommend that, yeah I mean go nuts with that as many as you feel like building or buying and you know to add to your arsenal do it because it’s only going to get make it better and easier for you to get results from your videos that way. But I would recommend also Rishi to go back to the last couple Hump Day hangouts that from last week and I think the week before especially I know last week we talked about it but this is over the last several weeks let’s put it that way. We’ve talked a lot about how one of the magic secret sauce things that you can do besides embeds and backlinks which is kind of traditional SEO for videos guys. Just push a little bit of traffic into them and watch the magic happen then it’s like it’s like it comes alive when you just push a little bit of traffic. And I’m not talking about just shit spam traffic that you can buy from Fiverr gigs although there is a little bit of a benefit to that. But there are ways that you can use YouTube ads for example, to push traffic into videos specifically that if you’ve got embed them cascading through and embed network your own syndication networks, whatever and you’ve applied some traditional link building and things like that you start pushing a little bit of traffic into that whole system and you’ll see that like everything it’ll start to rank really really well.

And again, we see if you didn’t know that order bump which was one of the things you could have purchased in buying the battle plan about Google Ads pro or was it your local ads pro or something like that I don’t remember what you guys call it yeah the killer local ads training Yeah, the killer local ads training, which was essentially the YouTube training I did specifically showing how to do what I’m just talking about that was an order bump and if you didn’t get access to it well. We may be able to if you reach out to support. Adam Don’t kill me if I’m wrong for saying that.

Adam: I’m gonna kill you

Bradley: But that’s something I would recommend that you do because it’s going to really really help but yeah don’t worry about footprint issues with as long as you’re using the app what’s the way that we teach you’re going to be good to go stack as many networks as you want, okay? Does anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Oh I like that I am still and beds were really well for YouTube video so if you combine the power at some point he wasn’t even funny like it was really broken the fact that you could go live on a bed and a bunch of places in the new rank first instantly not for injury attorney but for something similar but that still works really well so if you pay that live streaming, it still is. It’s very well still up that lethal combo so yep, yeah.

Bradley: So focus on building up your primary network that’s branded for your YouTube channel. Typically, you want to brand that you’re you know you’re that. That’s like your branded network for a channel, right? That’s the one that you really want to build up as far as, like, additional link building to the network properties is perfect for that. So when, by the way, we have that we have that available in the back end, I don’t think we have the public page up yet. But the link building service in our store guys is going to be available very very soon, I promise.

So that’s what I would recommend is that you continue boosting that your branded network for your channel but then like I said, as far as you can build persona based channels and just or similarly themed channels, right that is, excuse me networks, that similarly themed networks that you can stack as both tier one networks as well as trigger tier two networks because what I found through testing guys was that if you have like let’s just say that you got 10 syndication rings and you had them all triggered as a tier one so they were triggered directly from the YouTube upload or live stream, then a lot of times you’ll get really quick rankings from that like you’ll get the videos will jump, you know, to page one or page two right off the bat. But then they’ll start, they’ll start to slip down in the rankings rather soon. I compared to, if you were to take those same 10 rings, and let’s say you did three, you know, two or three, two-tier networks out of those instead, then they might not rank as quickly. But when it does rank, it tends to stick longer. And at least that was, you know, I haven’t done a hard test on that now, and probably two years, but that’s was I did extensive testing on that several years ago. And I found that when you use the two-tier networks, they tend to stick longer if they even if they don’t rank as quickly they tend to stick once they rank longer if that makes sense.

As a good question to we’re going to keep moving.

Should You Hold Off Doing On-Page Work On GMBs Until The Wave Of Suspensions Subside?

Grant says that we could go on Hump Day hang out, you were suggesting to hold off on doing on page work on GM B’s until the current wave of suspension suicides? One a week later, Is that so your recommendation? Well, that’s up to you. As I just mentioned, Grant

Hey, so I already answered and I see that you saw that or heard that. So that’s good. I would recommend, you know, that’s up to you go in, and I would do a tentatively. So, if you’ve got raised, which I know you, probably you do grant because you were in the pope who live group with us. And so that was one of the objectives of being in that group was everybody was to build their own Build Team. So if you’ve got a team doing it, I would recommend maybe you go in and do some of the off page things that you want to do so that you can see firsthand what you’re doing. And if you get a suspension, then you can start to deduce you know, what may have triggered that whereas if your team does it, they might not you know, I’m not saying don’t trust your team, because my team actually was the one that notified me about like the ad ID the appointment URL thing so and I trust that that’s that was probably it. And that’s something that I’ve avoided doing for the last few days as I’ve been in making on page updates, even brand new like I’ve just got a brand new one delivered today and I was in there. I literally went in.

And I did some stuff that would have absolutely triggered re-verification a couple of months ago. And it was perfectly fine. In fact, I did it twice just to see because I didn’t believe the first time that it was it took it the way that it did. So I did it a second time within two hours. And it took it still valid still there. And in fact that said edits pending and about 90 seconds went by refresh the page and it was fine. And just like it had taken the edits that I had made, which typically would have re-triggered or trigger verification. So, Grant, I would recommend that you go on and do that yourself so that you can kind of, you know, very like dip your toes in the water before jumping in, you know, I mean?

How To Expand A GMB To Another Adjacent Suburb?

Wills up, he says, I have a client that dominates for a suburb and GMB, how can we target locations that are 10 K or less that are not that they are not showing up, for example, they don’t show up for the next to Jason. suburb three k away. I don’t what is, I’m not sure what three kilometers, Excuse me.

Well, there’s a lot of. To do that will, it’s kind of something we’re not gonna have time to really explain here. But I mean, and also, that’s something that we cover Marco covers and local GMB Pro. And it’s called expanding the central at least that’s what Marco calls it. So there are things that you can do with an existing listing to where you don’t need to create another listing to actually expand. If you have a self-hosted website, you can add pages and target like what that you can call them geo post or geo pages specifically, and set up silos, location-based silos for those areas and produce content where you’re targeting that type of, you know, landmarks and, you know, things like that, that you can, you know, I got a VA that I trained how to do that kind of stuff. If you’ve got a self-hosted website, you can do some additional things that way, because you can create silos you can still do that with your GMB to but again, we can’t really share those methods here on a free setting. So I would recommend, if you don’t already if you’re not in local GMB Pro, that’s the perfect training for what you’re trying to do. Would you agree, Marco?

Marco: Absolutely I mean it’s not that difficult to extend or expand this the century. I have some people say move the centroid well that’ll that’ll get you suspended more often than not so if you don’t want to get suspended if you want to be like careful and take care of your asset that you have to look to go from where you are to where you’re not and that’s as far as I’m gonna go with that yeah.

Should You Separate The Alpha And Beta Keywords In One Ad Group?

Bradley: Frankie what’s up Frankie he’s hard at work on ads I can see says hey guys question for you is creating specific scab which stands for single keyword ad group for each and every keyword and a beta and alpha campaign with keywords specific optimized landing pages and metadata for each keyword etc. worth it or is it okay to have them in one ad group? Thanks.

Okay. That’s a great question, Frankie. Um, first of all, on your beta campaigns, I don’t do single keyword ad groups, right? That’s only an alpha campaign. So beta campaigns are typically you still want to create ad groups with your beta keywords which are typically just going to be a very small handful of keywords guy, Frankie, because it’s the modified broad match, right? So because it’s a modified broad match, you don’t need many keywords and a beta ad group, because you really only need your short tail.

The most important thing with the beta ad group is your negative keyword list, right? That’s where you want to spend your time building up is the negative keyword, negative keyword list. But the actual keywords that you add for targeting purposes that which are modified broad match, it’s usually just a very, very small handful of keywords per ad group, right? And you want to make sure that they’re closely related in each ad group. But usually, I don’t have more than three or five keywords max in a beta Group, a beta ad group now you’re single keyword ad groups that you can have if they’re if they’re a similar type of keywords, very similar.

First of all, Google will even, by the way, guys, the Google Ads platform has gotten incredibly I mean, so much better. In fact, it used to be like I said. I’ve been talking about the Display Network getting so much better. But the search ads have gotten so much better to, if you go look at the recommendations, a lot of those recommendations, which again, two years ago, I would have said, Don’t follow the recommendations, they’ll spend your money back more. But if you start applying some of the recommendations that Google gives you, you’ll see your performance, your ad performance going up your cost per click, going down conversions going up, that kind of stuff.

And so it’s the AI the machine learning artificial intelligence and all the automated bidding strategies and all this stuff that they that’s available now. And the ads platform is really really good. So I what I do is I recommend always starting off with all your campaigns managing them manually, to begin with, until you get a set, you know, some good data in which might take you two weeks, it might take you six weeks. That’s up to you and what your ad spend is really, but once you got enough data in there, start taking a look at the recommendations that Google provides and start applying them make notes of what you do. Keep a Google doc and make notes date, take dates and notes of when you’ve applied. Changes or recommended you know recommended changes that Google provides and monitor your you know, take a screenshot of what your results were when you applied that change or recommendation and then go back two weeks later or a month later or whatever and then take a screenshot of your results since that change was applied and see if your ad performance is better because if it then leaves that recommendation in place if not then remove it take it back to your managing the campaign manually so anyways that’s what I was trying to get at with single keyword ad groups it used to be where there would be you know for example singular version of a keyword or plural version right so like let’s use remodeling contractor plus city right so whatever that let’s just use Cole pepper that’s where I’m at so remodeling contractor called pepper or remodeling contractor in called pepper or Remodeling Contractors in called pepper VA. Those are all very similar keywords and so in the past a single the alpha group in the alpha the alpha group, I would have every one of those variations in their own separate as their own separate keyword. They would all still maybe target one landing page but that would i would have inserted each one of those is exact match keywords in that particular alpha alpha campaign or alpha ad group.

  But now if you do that one of the recommendations is and I think it’s just for ease of management but Google recognize those those as being like singular and plural version is the same keyword so even though it’s in you put it an exact match brackets you don’t have to put all those different variations because Google will still serve your ad even if it’s not exactly as it like if you just use one keyword one exact match keyword type in the ad group Google will still display your ad for the plural version or if they add the VA modifier, and in this case, like Cole pepper and Cole pepper VA, Google will still display that and that’s a change that just occurred kinda recently and again, that’s because machine learning has gotten so much better.

That makes sense. So my point is, yes, Frankie to make management a little bit easier. Beta groups should only be a handful of very closely theme keywords where you want to spend your time there is developing your negative keyword list as far as your alpha campaigns. Yeah, as long as they’re very closely related. But again, you really don’t even need to create a bunch of keywords in the alpha list because Google will still display your ad now for what it knows to be. What do they call them? Shit, close variants. That’s what it’s called close variants. Okay. It was a good question though.

Okay, cool. We’re almost out of time, guys. Marcus says via spam links which are not indexed by Google. Do I need to worry about them know?

You mean if you have spam links pointing to your site?

Should You Be Worried If Spam Links Are Not Indexed By Google?

Uh, yeah. No, I mean, I’m not sure what the question is. Mark is if you’re asking if you have spam links pointing to your site that aren’t being indexed by Google, do you need to worry about them, kind of if it’s to a money site only because just because they’re not indexed doesn’t mean Google doesn’t know about that.

It’s most likely that Google knows about them. One of the ways you can tell is go to search console, look at the links to your site. And you can download a report. And you’ll see that there are probably a lot of links that are linking to your site that are not indexed in Google. Google knows they’re there, or else they wouldn’t be in the report. So that’s something that, you know, Marco doesn’t ever disavow and stuff. And I haven’t had to do that shit. And a couple of like, several years, but I used to disavow spam links, and it would work I’ve recovered sites from penguin penalties from that it’s a pain in the ass. I don’t like doing that kind of shit anymore. But anyways, if you have spam links that you’re using to push something that isn’t indexed in Google, don’t worry about it. You can try to get them indexed. You know, we have a service that eventually will be up hopefully the next week or so. And our link builder, he does a lot of spam links to, you know, in the correct way. And one of the things he does is always submit them to indexers. But just because they go through the index or doesn’t mean they’re going to be index. All you have to worry about is Google become aware of them. And typically Google will become aware of this. Sooner or later okay? Good question as well.

Paul says: if you’re a G Suite customer Google Plus for your G Suite account should remain active contact your G Suite administrator for more details? Okay, cool I could care less about Google Plus anymore. Find out why they are not indexed a lot of those a lot of those are infected disavow those yeah see that’s I agree with Clint in that respect.

You know, I like to I’ve done it in the past I don’t really mess with that kind of stuff much anymore like off page cleanup and stuff I don’t really have to but yeah in the past that’s what I would do. So I agree with the plan.

What Are Possible Reasons Behind The Increase Of Bounce Rates?

Dan says I set up two domains along with two g sweet accounts to do cold email sequencing using prospect rocket bounce rates were up to 30% even though I didn’t mean that was probably look up.

I hadn’t I hadn’t really shouldn’t results from prospect rockin I’m not trying to talk shit about like David Sprague’s he’s got a lot of tools that I actually do use like rap videos are great for meetings and that kind of stuff.

But I had something to do with running things through prospect rocket. I don’t know if that’s still the case but I had terrible I mean like I couldn’t get my inbox at 30% and I haven’t even used it

Adam: Bradley so maybe you can clarify but is that what it was scraping or what is sending?

Bradley: Cold email sequence bounce rates were 30% that means about 30% of them were bouncing back well are you verifying your emails, Dan? The emails that you’re the email list that you’re sending emails to are you sending running them through like never bounce for example like that’s something you got to worry about if you’re if you’re using something like lead Kahuna, which is the scraper that I use again David sprigs product so great scraper. If you’re doing a lot of mass emails, that’s a great scraper. If you’re not doing a lot of masses, you’re doing more targeted stuff I would highly recommend leads recon. So like the video email prospecting that I’m developed like the updating that now for Jambi monetization, asset monitoring, you know, lead gen asset monetization and I’m doing very targeted email Sales again back to my roots which is how I really started my agency so I’m doing individual video email so for that leads recon is fabulous. But if you’re doing a lot of mass cold emails then yeah leads lead Kahuna is great for that well. You can use the never bounce and bright verify as part of the software which will go check them but I would recommend that once you filter your list your output list your export list with your con you know contacting those that you still go upload that CSV file to never bounce and only download the valid emails output so don’t double dip because I made that mistake and we burn through a lot of money verifying emails like three times because we use the never bounce settings and lead Kahuna and right verified but then I would still output the export file and then upload it to never bounce because it would still find additional invalid or spam traps or unverified emails that I would have been sending to which will lower your domain reputation and low and will cause your email to inbox less and less over time, so that that’s why I recommend that damn what I would tell you to do is just second leads going to never bounce is built in.

Yeah. But I still would recommend and I and again, guys, I’ve tested this over and over again, if you take that same export file, even if you used never bounce as part of the lead Kahuna scraping process, if you export that CSV and then go to never bounce and upload it and then let it process and then you download you can download all and it will have a column and show you what the status code is for each one of them. You’ll see you’ll still end up with many of them that are either invalid or will be what they call catch all on verified and that kind of stuff. So I would recommend either just running using just bright verify in league Kahuna itself and then manually editing or uploading them to never bounce once you’ve generated the list. Okay? but yes, that’s what I’m saying. It scrapes crappy emails you have to verify and never bounce.

So yeah, Dan Absolutely. That’s your issue right there. That’s your issue. You’re sending emails to shit. You’re sending out emails to shit email addresses, right? A lot of that stuff’s going to bounce. And it’s going to be that’s going to lower your domain reputation. In fact, I would probably recommend if you’ve already hit 30% bounce rates, abandon those domains. And remember, you can add additional domain aliases to the same gG Suite account. So I would abandon those domains and go by similar domains and add them as G sweet emails as domain aliases, and then start emailing again. But make sure you’re doing the never bounds. Okay?

Oh, cool. We’re almost done. And I thought we’re going to go way over me. See what’s the last comment was here? Yeah. Okay. All right.

Does The Opportunity Lie Greater In Mass GMBs or Client-Side GMBs If You’re Just Starting Out?

Calvin says if I’m just starting out, does the opportunity like greater and masculine bees or client-side GMB or both? Really? Both? Absolutely. That’s good. Both in both. That’s cool. Both Yeah, absolutely. Both. The thing is guys then there maybe you know, it may, it’s getting harder and harder to verify.

And Google is going to continue making it harder. And I’ve been predicting that since, you know, we really started pushing building additional GMB assets. Because I know it guys, it’s all that’s the case of SEO, anything. Anytime something works really, really good people catch on, and they do more and more of it, and then they get shut down. And then we figure out another, it’s a cat and mouse game that we play. But I know my prediction has been that it’s going to be more and more difficult to verify. And so you know it while it’s still available, do that, but at some point is going to become damn near impossible without providing corporate Docs or screen, you know, like, you know, things that can absolutely verify that there’s a legit business at that physical location. And that’s going to make it harder and harder. And so that’s why it’s good to do it while you can. Because if the more that you have to practice with for example, the better you will get so that when that time comes, you’ll be able to get results from just working on individual GMB assets that are you know, bonafide is part genuine business type stuff so I would do both. Okay.

Okay the fact that you are consulting with the tools make me feel better about using He must be talking about Peter drill yeah I’ve been chatting with him almost on a weekly basis and he’s in Australia and I’m in the state so it’s like a 15 hour time difference so I’ve talked to him at 6 am in the morning and it’s like 9 pm at night on his end and we’ve done that several weeks in a row so he’s got some good stuff going on then.

Dan would the Peter drew software be a waste of money for service-based companies that wouldn’t have driving directions to their business address? well I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this… there’s there’s an update coming down. I was going to ask this but forgot to do so for what’s the replacement for all the map stuff? There’s an update coming, okay? Just that’s all I can say – there’s an update coming.

Quintin says hello I’m a full time musician I’m looking to spam My name quit and revenue- we talked about this last week when.. yeah?

Adam: this is a different question though I like the way that he’s using discuss to spam.

Do You Still Recommend Press Releases To Increase Visibility?

Bradley: Keep doing it. All right, all right let me let me start reading it again then because the opening part of it sounded exactly like the previous question that we asked. Hello, I’m a full-time musician. I’m looking to spam My name, quitting revenue so much that people think I’m the mayor of Charleston South Carolina when you Google Charleston. Do you still recommend press releases?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I love press releases still use the shit out of them all the time in fact I use them heavily so I would absolutely recommend that. One of my videos content press for my name blasting and Charleston every other hour or something about me as posted 24 hours a day any recommendations um. Yeah I mean one thing is if you’re if you’re brand is Quintin rabbit, or like your name is your brand set up a GM before that, I don’t know why that wouldn’t be possible.

You know what I mean? Like I don’t think that’s it because I know that realtors do it right. Doctors do that sometimes, you know, they were they have their brand, their, their name is like their brand and like that’s their business. So they, you know, I can’t imagine you couldn’t do it as a musician. So, set up a GMB use that to put publish GMB posts consistently and regularly, just like you probably do on Facebook or, you know, whatever other your social networks are, you know, I don’t do music marketing, but SoundCloud, probably in a lot of other places. So I would recommend that you, you know, use Google to because remember, that’s you want to, we’re trying to feed Google what it wants. So, use a GMP set yourself up as a branded entity, even if it’s a personal brand use that press releases is great for that that’s gonna help to build authority. Something else you might want to do is, you know, try to reach out by the way, in your case, I would say try to reach out to some of the local news and media stations and stuff like that and try to develop like, I mean, don’t spam them. That’s not what I’m saying. But I’m saying try to develop a relationship with some of the local media type people or newspapers and or local magazines like event magazines, and things like that, or event blogs, that kind of stuff. And see if, you know, you can get posted on local event boards and things where you can, you know, kind of like not like I said, don’t spam them. But when you have bigger events, and, you know, place concert events or things that you’re going to be at performing at that you can contact them with a well written press release. And they’ll publish for you right, and get picked up on the local media websites and perhaps even get some TV airtime, you know, get some featured on local news and stuff like that. That’s what I would recommend doing. In a case like yours, I would absolutely do that because you’re trying to build your own brand. And there’s no better way to do that than to get local press from it like and not just press releases that you spam out there. That’s a good starting point, but like to get actual local journalists or broadcast journalists to do to run stories on you, right, and that’s perfectly legit. And that’s perfect. You’re perfectly capable of doing that if you try to develop a relationship with them.

Go ahead and spam away until then, though.

Alright, guys, I gotta wrap it up. Quinces, I predict verification will be paid to play. Yeah, you do that. And like I said, I’m, you know, showing corporate docs like utility bills with the company name on it with the physical address showing and that kind of stuff that’s something I’ve had to do already not for the lead gen stuff but for for actual businesses that i’ve you know manage that have moved locations and they didn’t have access to their original GMB that was verified so we had to produce corporate docs and things like that in order for Google. But I mean, it was easy to do once once we get Google what we wanted within 24 hours it was moved and ranking you know what I mean? So I think that’s what’s how it’s going to go. Or like Clint says there may be a paid pay to play version of it.

David No, there’s not. We keep it cheap enough to where you know, we don’t have to provide discounts for upgrades for that

You guys aren’t anything on a radio. A new version of SEO ultimate plus. Yeah, it’s been it’s been in beta for a couple months now Clint.

Adam: I talked to Jeffrey every Wednesday after Hump Day Hangouts and asked him Clint so I’ll make it a point to go and ask him and as soon as as I know something it’ll go first into our semantic mastery mastermind.

Hernan: That that’s who receives all of our all of the benefits as soon as he tells me Yeah, it’s a goal we got it you guys will be the first to know in our semantic mastery mastermind Yeah, because people ask about that all the time So…

Bradley: Alright, guys gotta run. Thanks, everybody will see you guys next week. mastermind webinar tomorrow for those of you in the mastermind. We’ll see you then. Bye everyone. See ya.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 226 posted first on your-t1-blog-url from Blogger https://ift.tt/2Cdvo86 via IFTTT

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 226

Click on the video above to watch Episode 226 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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Announcement

 Adam: Alright, we’re live with Hump Day hangouts Episode 221. All right, I just did that. I’m a little embarrassed us now going to be on YouTube forever. So anyways, moving right along into the sixth of March 2019. We got the whole crew here. Bradley is

Chris: doing some secret squirrel stuff in the background. But we’ll get to that. So first, let’s start on the left and work our way down. Chris, how you doing? Man? Doing good Spring is here

Adam: actually. Nice. Yeah, it’s quite nice. But I’m getting kind of like form on like the snow snowboard enough this year. So

Chris: unlike everybody else, I’m actually liking the winter when it’s not too hot and stuff and they can actually write on the slopes and we get powder and stuff so yeah, like I’m one of those weird freaks who is actually enjoying wintertime

Adam: bad and her not I like your shirt. But let’s see what summer is coming to you. Right.

Hernan: Thank you Yes balls here man I’m sweating myself but anyways I’m super pumped thank you guys actually wanting to publicly say thank you guys I love you soon as Bobby can say that because you guys have been awesome you got a lot of you guys were got the Battle Plan v3 and you’re really supporting the costs right here right now so I love you guys thank you for the support it’s been awesome

Adam: yeah definitely actually I’m going to pop that on the page if you’re watching grab the battle plan that’s a little quick note but in case you weren’t aware we launched just over a week ago you can still get in there and get it it’s we priced it you know we get a lot of questions about this to you know when we first came out with it as $100 and you know it’s overly well has a lot of great processes in place things out really smoothly but over time we decided to bring that price down and it’s much much much cheaper now because we really truly did want to get this in everyone’s hands so that you have simple processes and if you go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com, you can see us talking about that and how this can help you in your business, no matter what you’re doing. So anyways, I just want you to go check that out.

Chris: I would have had a battle plan right now, other than the price Say that again, why would avoid a Battle Plan right now? Other than the price?

Hernan: Can I go for it? Yeah, because it’s step by step process do now for sure. Like, we have actually distilled a lot of the stuff that, you know, we have been teaching and showing over the past, you know, five, six years on Semantic Mastery, we have distilled that into a step by step process. So if you have like, if you have a brand new website that you should put your domain right like yesterday, and you want to put it up with the band, go get the Battle Plan. If you have an H website that has been, you know, yielding good results he has a year it’s, you know, it’s a year old, but you still want to push it to go get the benefit. If you get a YouTube video that you want, push, go get the bad plan. If you also get have a GMB that you need better and

Like that is something that we have recently added to this be three and you know we made the webinar the how to be successful marketing 2019 that’s the value alone of admission and then you get a lot of additional bonuses on the bonus member’s area that you’re getting for free so it’s a no brainer your question

Adam: And I’m still learning how to use the mute button alright so yeah I’m not gonna expand on that I think are Hernan hit it and we’re really happy to be able to share this with you guys and like croissants at the bonuses are friggin cool so check out but Marco we wanted to check in of course with you how you doing man

Marco: I’m good, man. I’m about. Give me three to six months and I’m going to drop a

Adam: whoops. Sorry about that. Yeah, that was me in my browser.

Marco: Quit Quit messing with that shit man. I’m about to drop a nuclear bomb on the SEO world again. Alright, so stay tuned. It’s coming it’s it’s I’m sorry but it’s not going to be like the battle plan almost free because I’m on some takeover shit and I’m done. I’m done like playing I’m done with people hating I’m done with people. I’m when I say done if you talk about me I’m going to make you a fucking porn star. That’s how this is gonna be. So fuck with me.

That’s that’s what this is about. That’s what that’s what’s coming. They don’t fuck with me to

Hernan: Yeah and you got you guys better listen because what Marco says that he’s dropping the good stuff he usually like 100% of the time delivers, right he did what he did with our YS Academy. One are ways to kind of meat to it always brings up the good stuff. So definitely.

Adam: Well, I want to circle back around to where we started with introducing and saying welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. And since they If you’re new to semantic mastery first of all thanks for watching. We might have just heard us talking about the battle plan, grab it. It’s the best place to get started not only with us but for like Hernan said all you know your age sites your new sites. If you’re getting into videos whatever it is GMB start their battleplan.semantic mastery.com if you are you know looking to either start or grow your local digital marketing agency and you want to join the best community for that and be a part of that then join the mastermind and you can find out all about that at mastermind dot semantic mastery.com. And for everyone, no matter what you’re doing. Go to em. Gee why b dot SEO. Alright, for the premium done for you SEO Services, you know, getting the GMB verified so you’re not spending your time trying to do that which we’re going to touch on I know a lot of people have questions about candies and what’s going on there if you want syndication networks done, you know really, really high quality from you know, the training that Bradley originally created these updated over the last four years our YS stuff

Man what else press releases we got all sorts of stuff and there’s a lot more good stuff coming down the pipeline right.

Hernan: Cora and keyword research I think that that that’s worth mentioning because you know you can you can spend like an entire week going after keywords you know going after keyword research and whatnot and I think that that solves the entire issue and I haven’t personally I haven’t seen and mean that type of I don’t know how you guys are doing that because that’s all marketing Rob but I don’t know how you guys are pulling that up but honestly I haven’t personally seen any any other keyword research report that you don’t need to pay I don’t know shit ton of money to get something like that you’re getting a piece of the market, No kidding so I think that’s pretty cool and that takes a lot of time and I don’t think that we’re pushing it enough for with the body that you guys are getting some. Definitely get man it’s a goldmine for Edwards like Yeah.

Adam: Oh cool. I’m sorry. So I was about to post something on the page. We’re going to hop Over to Bradley in a minute. As I said, he’s got some stuff going on in the background. But something else I want to say, I know we get a ton of views on YouTube. And you know, people either aren’t here live or to catch it later, they will watching down the road. If you want to, you can click the button, click Subscribe, stay up to date, obviously, with Hump Day Hangouts, a lot of the videos that we upload there, and if I can ask a favor for anyone watching, you know, we really want to help people find out about our YouTube channel and really grow that if you find Hump Day hangouts helpful. If you’re watching a video clip and you found it helpful, please share it with them. You know you think it’s going to be particularly helpful we try to really help people out point them in the right direction and a lot of times you know what you’re learning or what you’re solving could definitely help someone out so point them in the right direction send them the video clip or point them to semantic mastery. com slash each the questions and real quick I’m going to pull something up but Bradley Are you in the middle of it. Are you are you ready?

Bradley: Alright. I’m sorry. I was muted and had the camera off I guess I can note to self and to everybody else out there do not start a server migration right before our webinar

Adam: Here hold on a minute let me let me write this down real quick the support staff the support staff assured me that it was going to be a smooth process bullshit

Bradley: I’ve got client sites down left and right like a database connection issues all kinds of shit and it’s kind of a shit storm right now I’m trying to get it resolved and now I’ve got a host a webinar so but Bradley no self we have a Caesar

Yeah, well not gonna be able to get in touch with them right now. We got a webinar host. So anyways, what else are you going to say?

Adam: I was just gonna say we had to people Hey, Alex, and Rishi. Thank you very much. They just grabbed the battle plan, I think today and we’re just talking about it. So thank you and appreciate you guys being here and checking it out and we’re happy to answer your question. So with that Bradley, I guess.

How are you doing? And then let’s just jump into it.

Bradley: I’m a little stressed out, but here right and answer some questions and help others. Well, my shit crumbles.

But that’s all right. So yeah, I’m good.

Adam: This is good. Well, focus because you know what? I’m guessing that there’s next working on your server. There’s nothing you can literally do about it right now. So this will be good. take your mind off it.

Yeah. All right, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s rock and roll. I’ll grab the screen.

Alright, so we got to go back to seven days ago. That’s how we determine where we left off. Right.

Is It Better To Use Gmails Instead Branded Emails For GMB?

 Adam: Let’s make sure with the Six Day guy there we go. I can’t see it looks like a mobile, mobile. Mobile is movie local business.

Bradley: Okay, so I’ve always pushed businesses to use their branding domain for their email info at company.com. As an example, instead of Yahoo, Hotmail or whatever but it could be better SEO to use Gmail and said for GMB and across citations now I recommend using a branded domain, always. And in fact, I would recommend using g sweet for your branded domain instead of like shitty webmail. That’s one of the issues I’m actually dealing with right now, with the server migration webmail sucks. And there tend to be problems a lot with webmail accounts guys that are through servers. But you know, for the price is going up, I think, in the next couple days for G Suit, but for a basic G Suite or domain account, domain web email account. That’s all hosted through Google at $6 a month guys per user, but you can add like, I don’t know if it’s unlimited or not. But you can add a whole bunch of domain alias is if you’d like so that you can actually send and receive email from multiple domains from the same Gmail account it’s or G Suite account but it’s Google email essentially and I would and also as Marco will probably chime in here that’s also another entity validation signal to be hosting your, your domain at using G Suite email services for your domain.

So I would recommend that you do that. What do you say, Marco?

Marco: I totally get that business card on file whether or not whether you do it through G Suite. It used to be that Google only would allow names in Gmail, right? They wouldn’t they wouldn’t discourage you from using business names. But now it says everybody started doing it then it now okay so you could actually do Gmail and pay through Gmail right for driving extra drive and everything but you have G Suite there and if you have a business or that you’re running or a business that you’re helping them, by all means, get them over into G Suit and run everything through their let Google see that this is a legitimate business with legitimate services products or whatever it may be. So yes, I 100% agree. Go and pay Google for these services.

Bradley: And just as a quick, I’m not going to go through it guys on screen, but just write this down or take notes. It’s not a hard process, there is a wizard that will kind of help you through it. But the first couple of times you do it, it’s a little geeky, but once you understand how to do it, it’s really simple. You have to use go You have to be able to access your domains, DNS settings which you know can either be through your registrar or if you’re using something like a third party DNS, iCloud flair, you can do it there. But you got to add a text a text record for domain verification. That’s to prove to Google that you own the domain or control the domain and then you add your MX records. There’s five of them.

Yeah, there’s five of them and they’ll get the G sweet will give you those. It’s it’s fairly standard or easy to set up. And then after that, there are just a few additional records that you want to add like one is called an SPF record. Another one is called a D Mark record. And the last one is a DKIM signature and those are three different things that you want to add. So just write down down and then you can just search in G sweet help which when you’re logged into your G sweet admin panel there’s a help search bar at the top and you can just type those in like SPF records DK, I am signature and D Mark and you it’ll, it’ll give you help files to show you exactly how to set that stuff up. Once you do those, then you should be good to go. You know, it’s also important, make sure that you do have a domain that setup with website and such that’s good for domain reputation for email, or for email reputation, if you’re sending from a domain email account, if that makes sense. So just adding those few things are going to help to make sure that you get really good deliverability. I do use g Suite accounts for prospecting when I’m doing you know, cold emailing for prospecting, and they tend to work really well. If you use a standard Gmail accounts like personal Gmail accounts, and, you know, free Gmail accounts essentially and you try to send a cold email within a very short period of time, your emails will stop being too delivered, they’ll stop in boxing. What depends on I guess, really the volume and whether people are hitting spam and stuff like that. But if you use the domain emails and you set up those records, like I said, and you have a website on the domain, so at least you know that those are kind of things that helped it for those to the inbox. But for a standard business, you shouldn’t really have to worry about much of that other than just set up those records correctly, and you should be good to go. That’s a good question though.

Would The GMB Auto Poster Strip The Meta Data And Geo Settings Of A Picture Uploaded Within The Post?

Elaine is up, she says. Would the GMB auto poster software strip the metadata of a picture we upload including the geo settings when scheduling a new post?

You know, I have no idea but I doubt that it would because we are developing knows how important that is. Marco, do you have a definitive answer?

Marco: No, I don’t have a definitive answer. But it’s essentially Google that strips it.

Bradley: Yeah, but yeah.

Marco: Yeah, they get the information and they know you give them all the information and then it doesn’t matter if it’s still on the image. All you want is the relevance and Google can also take a look at the at the front of the picture. And you’d be surprised at how much entity information Google pulls from the front of the image instead of just the back.

Bradley: Yeah. But I mean, specifically for her question was, does the auto-poster application itself strip the metadata?

Marco: Yeah. I don’t have a definitive, definitive answer for that. All I can say is, if it’s getting stripped out, it’s usually Google that’s doing that.

Bradley: That’s correct.

Adam: That’s something maybe we can run by St. Pat the developer find out if he knows for sure. Again, he’s he’s a good guy. He knows guys what the benefit of what we’re doing. So I’m quite sure that that’s kind of baked into the software already, but we can confirm that with him.

Will An Older GMB Account Have The Same Ranking Effect As With Those That Have Been Created Recently?

Bradley: Dan’s up he says, If I have a customer that has had their GMB for some time, does the process work the same with the press advantage from the press release pointing the first post etc. is the process to rank GMB as effective as on a GMP that has been around for a while.

Yeah, it’s typically more effective that way. In other words, if you use the same methods that we teach in our various products, whether it’s local least for our local GMB pro and you apply those two or PR progress in your, in your case, Dan because that’s what sounds like you’re talking about it either any one of those methods are going to should should work better for an established GMB than they do for a brand new one. Because remember with the brand new one guys you’re trying to build a reputation and we’re trying to force it very quickly and if you pick the low competition areas which were the original location research training for local least bro you can typically get rankings almost overnight or with very little work very low effort.

Now if you’re using the updated version where you’re going much more granular and trying to target more locations and even more like metro areas and such you’re still going to have a bit of a dogfight that’s what I’ve been experiencing. So and it takes time because and here’s the thing when you’re looking at like location research and you’re looking at even if you see opportunity because there are locations that don’t have the same they’re not the same zip code area that you’re searching and that kind of stuff. You’ll see that a lot of. At times, especially in metro areas, the the the API, the top 10 results that it pulls in are pulling in maybe locations, or GM bees that are outside of that specific location. But it’s pulling them in because they’re very relevant. They’ll have big authority signals, such as lots of reviews, lots of images, website citations, ages is a factor. So you have to take all of that into account. So even if you target your location placement perfectly, you still have to compete with other entities out there, essentially, companies or brands, locations that have built authority, and that’s why Google is pulling them in as being the most relevant. So there is still a bit of a dogfight to do with that. But what I’m saying is if you have an existing asset that’s been established for some period of time, and I don’t know what you know what the threshold would be to make this better obviously, probably the older the better, but if you apply those same kinds of methods, you’re going to get better results than with them with a brand new listing.

Guys, there’s another good question.

Do You Hide The GMB Backlinks And Sensitive Data To Protect Yourself From Angry Competitors?

Okay, Alex is up. He says, Hey guys just purchased the battle plan. Glad I did. How common is it for competitors to report lead gen sites to spam or whatever, both the jam BS in the actual WordPress sites.

For me it’s been rather rare I haven’t really experienced that much I’ve actually had years ago when I first got into the business. Should I’d say it was it was it was actually my first Tree Service site that ever built and one of the competitors did report that one and I got it reinstated which was funny, I had to re-verify it via mail. Unfortunately, I still had the mailbox that I was using for that at the time. So I was able to re verify it and get it out and he was just pissed because we outranked him like within a couple of months, and he’d been an established Tree Service business. But that was really the only time I’ve had to experience it. And I’m going to knock on wood, but I hadn’t really experienced that. So here’s the thing. I mean, if you’ve got a good lead gen asset that set up correctly and it’s optimized well. And it’s not super spammy and you’ve got the calls that are directing especially you know, as always recommend to a call center where it’s a valid Pete person answering the phone right away, you know that kind of stuff. It’s hard to really bitch about that, you know, to prove that it’s spam you know, especially if you’re using surface area businesses in your location, your physical location or the address the physical address is hidden. How would they know you know what I mean? It’s not like it used to be where sometimes you could still display your address if you got a surface area business, you’re not supposed to display your address. So how can they know? You know what I mean? So I haven’t really experienced that again, fortunately not saying it can’t happen. guys just saying I haven’t experienced that much.

Alex has to finish up he said. Do you do anything to protect yourself from anger competitors? Yeah, as I said, I don’t display the address. That’s why I’m actually not building citations as much because a lot of citation platforms still require you to display the address or you can even place a citation on their directory.

So, um, you know, again, I’m doing a lot of other stuff outside of using them because if we’re using a, an address that’s not, you know, actually where the business is located, then we don’t want to publish that if possible. So that’s just one of the things I’m doing is doing a lot of other sorts of stuff, a lot of on page stuff and other types of off page where I don’t have to display the address.

Okay, you got any comments on that? Anybody?

How Do You Use GSites To Increase The Visibility Of A GMB Page For Nearby Cities?

Alright, moving on. With this house is good agents. Thank you for or thank you for offering this form to us. I have questions about g sites as a way to increase visibility from nearby city g site 1000 word article, videos, content samurai, or summary of Article links to money site and GMB website and also include several links to the web to auto or should I be cautious about them to you.

You mean can you link to your web two daughters from the G sites? Or are you talking about building links to your web two point O properties?

I would say you could do either if your web two or tier one properties and they’re built well then I don’t see why it would you know, again, it’s just kind of like validating the entity is if we’re syndication Academy guys, whether you’ve been through our training or you purchase done for you networks from us, that’s how we do it right, we interlink all of our tier one properties. They’re all branded properties. We’re not trying to hide our footprint you’re actually trying to display our footprint, right? Because those are all branded entities. We want Google to make the connection between all of those as being of the same brand. So I don’t see why that would be any issue in either instance, what I’m saying is, if you’re linking out to branded tier one properties that are well built, well optimized, then that’s kind of internal linking your brand. If you’re building links to your branded properties, that’s fine too. I would recommend you do that instead of direct to your money site, which is what I think you’re alluding to anyways, right? That’s part of the reason that we use this dr stacks and G sites and things like that because their Google domains, Google properties and we can just literally hammer them and it will take it like a champ.

So any any comments on that guys?

Adam: No, I think I think that’s perfect. And the setup is perfect too because you can even drop press releases into the D side and and Dr. Second power those up and Yeah, well, we’ve I mean, we’ve done I keep talking about this. We did 1 million spam links including porn and not not intentional. I just told that it hit it with whatever you got in and it was actually a anyway GSA is what we use for it. So he didn’t he didn’t filter he didn’t do anything they just blasted it, it was it turned out to be a million plus went through the drive stack through the site onto Well, the mind is not the mind map. But the Google business map which ranked in the three packets still ranking to this day. There’s nothing we could do.

As a matter of fact, the guy stopped paying. First of all, he took one of his phones. I talked about this role, he took one of his phone’s off the hook because he just couldn’t handle the call body. And then the fucking to stop paying with that, that just totally makes no sense why would you stop paying but he’s still ranking to this day major metropolitan area highly competitive niche and it’s there and last time I looked there was still a porn link indexed in his link profile. So think about that. Google has it has its index right when you go and look at the link profile in Google you do the site search and appointment comes up so Google is hey you know we like this port link for for your website. Here you go. How much better can it get that you do spam links into a drive second g site and it comes up pristine on the other end and you can push power to wherever you want it to me that’s that’s just incredible. And it’s only been five years since it’s been working. So what a loophole.

Bradley: There you go he says do I do the same for each city that I want to rank for?

Well similarly to what I talked about with syndication networks if you know I prefer to use one brand one branded network for multiple locations if possible and so if you’re talking about building web tues out for brand then you know if you want to get location specific you certainly can you can always add like a location monitor to the brand name so for example you know Joe’s plumbing is the primary brand and then let’s say you’ve got, you know, three different locations and they’re all obviously different cities then you could do Joe’s plumbing an input the city name for example as a modifier if you’re going to create another set of web tools that are location specific and you can certainly do that you know if that’s what you want to do now do stacks yeah just you can either buy new new drive or bi or build new dr stacks for each individual location or better yet create internal folders within the main brand drive stack in silo just like you, you know, essentially create like silos within the stack, okay.

So it’s up to you how, again, I try not to build location specific web tools if possible, because I like to just use the branded one. You know, I like let let I like doing getting results with the least amount of effort. And so I try not to do that if necessary. But sometimes in more competitive areas, it does help to do that. And so that if that’s what you’re asking then. Yes, I would say you can do that too

Can You Please Enlighten Us With The New Policy Of GMB?

Toby’s up. Let’s have name. I haven’t seen in a while it says hello, gangstas. Happy to be back in your hood. Can you explain one more time G and its new policy on GMBs?

Um, well, I would. But I don’t really know. I mean, the policy is don’t do what we do. That’s the policy but we do it anyways. And so there’s a lot of misconceptions out there now. Thanks, Toby. Yeah, there are I mean that’s the thing you know, that’s why we haven’t really commented yet as to we don’t have a definitive answer on that as to what what to do and what not to do at the moment. I can tell you one thing I’ve I’ve got my Multiple lead gen assets that I was in, I was chatting with Rob today in our slack app about this, that, you know, I’ve, I’ve been updating a lot of my stuff like crazy. Some of them are brand new listings. And I have not had a single problem with getting anything suspended. I mean, I’ve even done some stuff that would typically trigger re verification immediately and in the last few days, and it has not caused any issues for me whatsoever. Now, I’m not saying you guys can go buck wild right now, because there is a lot of suspensions happening, but I think there’s certain things triggering them.

So for example, I mentioned this last week, too, by the way, and I don’t have any problem mentioning this to you guys on Hump Day Hangouts. Because I want you guys to not make this mistake. One of the things and it’s only mistake now It wasn’t a mistake a month ago. And I don’t know for sure that this is absolutely like an absolute rule. But I know that one of the things that I’ve noticed we lost about six assets in the last couple of weeks. And so I’ve got my team actually not doing anything.

In the like, on page work on GMB stuff, right now, I’ve got my team working on off page stuff. I myself, I’m still inside doing, I’m testing different things inside on, you know, like on page edits, and stuff within GMB locations, and I haven’t had any suspended on me. But when my team was doing them, one of the things that we we think we identified as as a trigger was adding to the appointment URL like an ad ID page, for example, which is typically an Amazon we host those you know, we’ve talked us and said this publicly before but we host those on Amazon s3. If you don’t know how to do it, get to buy the course the figure it out or find out on your own. But one of the things was that originally it would take an s3 bucket URL but it stopped doing that the appointment URL section would stop stop doing that after some time. So then we got smart, right and we added a redirect URL and then it would take it again but one of the things that I think is causing that is by putting something in that appointment URL other than an actual appointment app link like to calland Lee or something else, or to using the business, the Google My Business website URL to go in the appointment, you were out. Or if you had a page on a money site that had an appointment app embedded in it, that would also work.

But if you’re if you’re still staying strictly within the Google ecosystem, which is what we’ve been primarily doing, where we don’t have an off page, you know, we don’t have a self hosted site then. We’ve been using the GMB business side is the primary website and then using yet ID page in the appointment URL section. And I think that that’s an issue right now. So I said this last week, guys, just don’t link to that in there. I would recommend not putting anything in that appointment you are Unless Unless it’s a valid appointment URL or app or, or if you got a money site, and you want to put the GMB business site URL on the appointment URL. I don’t think that’s going to be an issue either, but if you start doing that, I do what you should be by the way.

Creating that page, it’s super powerful link to it with a contextual link from the GMB website. That way, you still get it in there, guys, you’re still getting Google to go crawl it from the GMB asset. It just doesn’t have to be in the employment URL. And we did that because we were able to, but if that’s one of the trigger points, which I think it is, I don’t have 100% certainty on that but we noticed that that’s one of the things that when we had six we lost six assets in a week and what my builder Joe was the one that was the one that said that he thinks that that’s what it was because he noticed that it happened on three of them right after he had added that URL. So I recommend just not doing it for now until we know for sure that makes sense.

Okay.

So as far as what is the actual what are the policies while the policies are don’t spam? Are you going to abide by that because I sure as hell not you know, so essentially that’s, that’s what it is. So we just got to keep playing around in there until we figure it out. Now, I know some of you guys don’t have the resources is to be able to, you know, burn through a bunch of GMP. And I get that. And that’s part of the reason why we’re still testing and figuring out what it is. But like I said, I’ve done a lot of on page edits and stuff right now. And I mean, just today alone, I did a lot of stuff that would have typically required re verification or suspension, and it didn’t cause any of that. So I’m just just letting you guys know, until we figure it out. I would recommend that you just tread lightly, don’t do anything super spammy. You know, take things slow, as Marco always says, make a couple of edits, you know, or one big edit or something, and then get the hell out of there and leave it sit for a couple days. let it marinate, right that that it season, let that kind of settle in before you go back in and change a bunch of other stuff. What do what do SEOs do SEOs go in especially when you got a team and processes developed like we do that go in and like within you know, two, three hours they’ve completely optimized everything and added photos and posted and like you know, I’ve done everything and that’s business owners don’t do that because they don’t know how to do that.

You know what I mean? So if you act like a business owner or if like Marco said, if you go in as like an agency through a manager account, make some edits. I always recommend removing the manager account afterwards. But that’s something else, you know, there’s different things that you can test with, with some of your own assets. assets, excuse me, but just think about, you know, what looks natural, a business owner wouldn’t go in and fully optimize and, you know, in one fell swoop because they don’t typically know how to do that kind of shit. A manager might, right. But I also believe we’ve talked about not having, you know, using a manager if you’re targeting one vertical, don’t use that same manager account for every account that you or GMB that you log into. Because that’s a way that their footprint could be created. use multiple manager accounts. For example, guys, probably most of you have a shit ton of syndication networks, at least I hope you do, which means you’ve got a lot of different Google accounts. So you could use those different Gmail accounts that you have for various profiles to actually act as a manager where you log into one of your make some changes, and then log back out and remove the manager for the owner account, if that makes sense. And that’s something that you could do to reduce potential footprint issues.

That was another good question.

Robert Nelson. He’s a new mastermind member. I had a call with him yesterday. It was great. Glad to have you.

Is There A Way To Automatically Randomize Images For Posts When Autoposting Using GMB Briefcase?

Robert says, Hey, guys. Great to be in here. When auto posting using the GMB briefcase Is there a way to automatically randomize the images used for posts so they are being scheduled monthly?

Yes, it’s called it with the briefcase. Yes, that’s got an image spinning. I think you have to upload them via CSV and I have not tested with that yet. It’s because I just haven’t taken the time to learn it. But I don’t know where I can point you to. For the training. We have a slack group Robert, that was there were some beta testers for the briefcase, we can probably add you to that because you’re in the mastermind, guys. You have to be in the mastermind for stuff like that. Sorry. But if you’re if you’re interested in that, Robert, ping me in the mastermind Facebook group and I’ll see if I can get you added to this slack group for that. And there’s a lot of training and stuff in there for that. And there’s probably training files in the briefcase for that. I just haven’t seen them there. So anybody know for sure.

Hernan: Oh, that’s actually a good question. Bradley will need to double check. But yeah, that’s something for sure that you might want to join the mastermind for that. And not only that, but also for the calls that you get, you get an onboarding call, and then you get a 90-day call follow up. So that is pretty cool, too.

Adam: Yep. Yeah, the only other thing I was going to say if there is any issues to and you want to do it on your own, you know, if he can let me know, because I do some of the stuff with spreadsheets before it was added in there where you know, you’re randomizing some of the stuff on your own which might come in handy and some other places.

Bradley: Yeah, so maybe that would be a good thread for us to start in the Facebook group for the mastermind anyways, and we got a mastermind webinar tomorrow guys, so now might be something we can talk about there too. But yeah, Robert, I’ll see if I can get you out of To the slack group I just picked St. Patty’s the developer see if he minds if he doesn’t mind I’ll squeeze you in on there okay. let’s say what’s up clan Adam? That’s cool when did you change your was that different?

Adam: Yeah must pull from Facebook I think I updated a couple days ago It looks like a boss

Hernan: oh yeah that’s from Nashville yeah.

Have You Seen Results With The Mapping Techniques Of Peter Drew’s GMB Dominator?

Bradley: Jim what’s up. Bradley, in the past you mentioned Peter Drew’ GMB Dominator, not by name as it didn’t have a name yet. I just saw the beta testing pricing today and wondered if you have seen the results with these mapping techniques that software it’s 100 or $500 one time $100 month shiny or legit.

You know, it’s a legit tool. There’s no question it’s a good tool. I’ve been actually consulting a lot with Peter drew about that stuff. So yeah, it’s cool. I mean, I haven’t tested all of the software some of the new stuff that just comes in the last couple weeks I haven’t had the time to but a lot of the let’s just say there’s going to be some collaboration between us anyways guys.

If you end up purchasing it, you’ll see that I added some preliminary training on. It’s kind of a teaser training for we’re updating the video lead gen system specifically for outreach and prospecting, to monetize lead gen assets. And I’m working on that currently, right now, as a matter of fact, like in the last week and a half now, I’ve been working on that. And so I think we’re going to launch that in April. And that’s going to be a complete update to the already existing product. And it’s going to include a whole bunch of resources and methods and processes and stuff like that for monetizing lead gen assets. Or for going and targeting on non-owner verified profiles to get your foot in the door. That way using video emails is the primary prospecting method. And so and you’ll see that if you end up checking on a gym, it’s I think it’s a good product, you know, just like anything, you have to use them and use them consistently those kinds of tools to get results. So just keep that in mind. It’s not like a one-shot you buy these things. You go run one campaign for something and you’re done. You’ve ranked if you’re you know you’re successful in your you never have to work again it’s not like that even with those tools that are simple tools which is why I like them you have to you know use them repeatedly and usually run multiple campaigns per project in order for you to get results. So just keep that in mind but yeah absolutely, I would recommend it guys no doubt.

Okay. New Battleplan executor here. It looks like a lot of what how we Schwartz used to do in the early days of I am great stuff. Okay, I’ll take your word for it I don’t know who our Schwartz’s.

Adam: That’s a name from like 2008-2009

Hernan: And that was the guy more time than I thought I think the guy got pulled up by Google security in one of theirs. I can’t remember exactly what happened you will have to I’ll have to look that up later but something happened in one of the guys got a lot in Google’s nerves so that’s a good nice to see men and thanks for buying the battle plan. Rishi

Bradley: You guys, that was just a year or two. I started in 2010. So that must have been right before I got involved with internet marketing. So sorry. Go ahead.

Hernan: You were too young for that.

Bradley: Yeah. Well, I wasn’t too young. I just hadn’t started in digital marketing it that’s all.

How Many Network Is Enough To Get Enough Traffic To An Affiliate Marketer In YouTube?

My question lies and having enough first doing more than necessary and getting slapped. I mean YouTube based affiliate marketers starting in a new market. For this, I have set up one email address, which I used to create an over a dozen other web properties and implemented the battle plan. I’ve also started my YouTube videos as part of the bonus. That’s great. I’m glad to hear that. My question is, Is that enough? Or should I be creating more and more web properties like I am keyword based content? Or can this one network with the siloed videos on YouTube provide me enough horsepower and bring enough traffic to my videos?

Now for videos guys, for you, specifically Rishi if you’re doing YouTube stuff go nuts. With networks you syndication networks, add as many networks to your channel as possible and not just tier one network. In other words, not just where the YouTube channel triggers syndication two networks, I would recommend also creating second to, you know, to tier networks. And if you want to go beyond that, you certainly can. You can go, you know, third tier networks, fourth tier networks, I don’t recommend that only because it becomes a bitch to manage. I’ve always preferred to stop it two-tier networks, which means and again, if you’ve been through syndication, network training or syndication Academy training, or if you purchase a two-tiered network from MGYB be which we will set it up for you, you could always go back through and reverse engineered if, you know, if you’re not a build a single tier network that’s triggered directly from the YouTube channel and then you see a two-tiered network you’ll you’ll you’ll know how to do it because you’re just going to use the RSS feed from the blog properties on the on the first tier network. So like blogger, Tumblr WordPress to post to republish to the second tier network and it’s very, very powerful and the different sizes with YouTube there’s no footprint issues.

If You use the app, what’s the way that we teach, okay, if you start importing the video descriptions and republishing them and all that kind of stuff, you can get web 2.0s terminated and that can look spammy so I don’t recommend that. I recommend that you do exactly what the app what’s the way that we designed them because I tested all that stuff guys and there’s a reason why those outlets for video syndication networks were set up the way that I did because there are no footprint issues there. And the reason why is because all you’re acting as is a publisher for Google at that point because all you’re doing is syndicating Google embed code and then a link back to the channel and or a playlist that’s it. So like again, I don’t see how that could ever be an issue and it’s never caused a problem. And so what I say is like usually when I was when I was still I have a lot of aged themed video syndication networks now that I use so I don’t really build them anymore or even buy new ones for that matter.

Um, but when I was doing a lot of that and building a lot if I was going to test a new channel like a new niche, a new industry then what I would do immediately go with two or three, two-tier syndication networks attached to the channel right off the bat like right out of the gate, I’d have at least two or three two-tier syndication networks. So that’s essentially four syndication rings per network to tier syndication network right so I would have anywhere between eight to 12 syndication rings being triggered from one YouTube channel right off the bat and so I would recommend that, yeah I mean go nuts with that as many as you feel like building or buying and you know to add to your arsenal do it because it’s only going to get make it better and easier for you to get results from your videos that way. But I would recommend also Rishi to go back to the last couple Hump Day hangouts that from last week and I think the week before especially I know last week we talked about it but this is over the last several weeks let’s put it that way. We’ve talked a lot about how one of the magic secret sauce things that you can do besides embeds and backlinks which is kind of traditional SEO for videos guys. Just push a little bit of traffic into them and watch the magic happen then it’s like it’s like it comes alive when you just push a little bit of traffic. And I’m not talking about just shit spam traffic that you can buy from Fiverr gigs although there is a little bit of a benefit to that. But there are ways that you can use YouTube ads for example, to push traffic into videos specifically that if you’ve got embed them cascading through and embed network your own syndication networks, whatever and you’ve applied some traditional link building and things like that you start pushing a little bit of traffic into that whole system and you’ll see that like everything it’ll start to rank really really well.

And again, we see if you didn’t know that order bump which was one of the things you could have purchased in buying the battle plan about Google Ads pro or was it your local ads pro or something like that I don’t remember what you guys call it yeah the killer local ads training Yeah, the killer local ads training, which was essentially the YouTube training I did specifically showing how to do what I’m just talking about that was an order bump and if you didn’t get access to it well. We may be able to if you reach out to support. Adam Don’t kill me if I’m wrong for saying that.

Adam: I’m gonna kill you

Bradley: But that’s something I would recommend that you do because it’s going to really really help but yeah don’t worry about footprint issues with as long as you’re using the app what’s the way that we teach you’re going to be good to go stack as many networks as you want, okay? Does anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Oh I like that I am still and beds were really well for YouTube video so if you combine the power at some point he wasn’t even funny like it was really broken the fact that you could go live on a bed and a bunch of places in the new rank first instantly not for injury attorney but for something similar but that still works really well so if you pay that live streaming, it still is. It’s very well still up that lethal combo so yep, yeah.

Bradley: So focus on building up your primary network that’s branded for your YouTube channel. Typically, you want to brand that you’re you know you’re that. That’s like your branded network for a channel, right? That’s the one that you really want to build up as far as, like, additional link building to the network properties is perfect for that. So when, by the way, we have that we have that available in the back end, I don’t think we have the public page up yet. But the link building service in our store guys is going to be available very very soon, I promise.

So that’s what I would recommend is that you continue boosting that your branded network for your channel but then like I said, as far as you can build persona based channels and just or similarly themed channels, right that is, excuse me networks, that similarly themed networks that you can stack as both tier one networks as well as trigger tier two networks because what I found through testing guys was that if you have like let’s just say that you got 10 syndication rings and you had them all triggered as a tier one so they were triggered directly from the YouTube upload or live stream, then a lot of times you’ll get really quick rankings from that like you’ll get the videos will jump, you know, to page one or page two right off the bat. But then they’ll start, they’ll start to slip down in the rankings rather soon. I compared to, if you were to take those same 10 rings, and let’s say you did three, you know, two or three, two-tier networks out of those instead, then they might not rank as quickly. But when it does rank, it tends to stick longer. And at least that was, you know, I haven’t done a hard test on that now, and probably two years, but that’s was I did extensive testing on that several years ago. And I found that when you use the two-tier networks, they tend to stick longer if they even if they don’t rank as quickly they tend to stick once they rank longer if that makes sense.

As a good question to we’re going to keep moving.

Should You Hold Off Doing On-Page Work On GMBs Until The Wave Of Suspensions Subside?

Grant says that we could go on Hump Day hang out, you were suggesting to hold off on doing on page work on GM B’s until the current wave of suspension suicides? One a week later, Is that so your recommendation? Well, that’s up to you. As I just mentioned, Grant

Hey, so I already answered and I see that you saw that or heard that. So that’s good. I would recommend, you know, that’s up to you go in, and I would do a tentatively. So, if you’ve got raised, which I know you, probably you do grant because you were in the pope who live group with us. And so that was one of the objectives of being in that group was everybody was to build their own Build Team. So if you’ve got a team doing it, I would recommend maybe you go in and do some of the off page things that you want to do so that you can see firsthand what you’re doing. And if you get a suspension, then you can start to deduce you know, what may have triggered that whereas if your team does it, they might not you know, I’m not saying don’t trust your team, because my team actually was the one that notified me about like the ad ID the appointment URL thing so and I trust that that’s that was probably it. And that’s something that I’ve avoided doing for the last few days as I’ve been in making on page updates, even brand new like I’ve just got a brand new one delivered today and I was in there. I literally went in.

And I did some stuff that would have absolutely triggered re-verification a couple of months ago. And it was perfectly fine. In fact, I did it twice just to see because I didn’t believe the first time that it was it took it the way that it did. So I did it a second time within two hours. And it took it still valid still there. And in fact that said edits pending and about 90 seconds went by refresh the page and it was fine. And just like it had taken the edits that I had made, which typically would have re-triggered or trigger verification. So, Grant, I would recommend that you go on and do that yourself so that you can kind of, you know, very like dip your toes in the water before jumping in, you know, I mean?

How To Expand A GMB To Another Adjacent Suburb?

Wills up, he says, I have a client that dominates for a suburb and GMB, how can we target locations that are 10 K or less that are not that they are not showing up, for example, they don’t show up for the next to Jason. suburb three k away. I don’t what is, I’m not sure what three kilometers, Excuse me.

Well, there’s a lot of. To do that will, it’s kind of something we’re not gonna have time to really explain here. But I mean, and also, that’s something that we cover Marco covers and local GMB Pro. And it’s called expanding the central at least that’s what Marco calls it. So there are things that you can do with an existing listing to where you don’t need to create another listing to actually expand. If you have a self-hosted website, you can add pages and target like what that you can call them geo post or geo pages specifically, and set up silos, location-based silos for those areas and produce content where you’re targeting that type of, you know, landmarks and, you know, things like that, that you can, you know, I got a VA that I trained how to do that kind of stuff. If you’ve got a self-hosted website, you can do some additional things that way, because you can create silos you can still do that with your GMB to but again, we can’t really share those methods here on a free setting. So I would recommend, if you don’t already if you’re not in local GMB Pro, that’s the perfect training for what you’re trying to do. Would you agree, Marco?

Marco: Absolutely I mean it’s not that difficult to extend or expand this the century. I have some people say move the centroid well that’ll that’ll get you suspended more often than not so if you don’t want to get suspended if you want to be like careful and take care of your asset that you have to look to go from where you are to where you’re not and that’s as far as I’m gonna go with that yeah.

Should You Separate The Alpha And Beta Keywords In One Ad Group?

Bradley: Frankie what’s up Frankie he’s hard at work on ads I can see says hey guys question for you is creating specific scab which stands for single keyword ad group for each and every keyword and a beta and alpha campaign with keywords specific optimized landing pages and metadata for each keyword etc. worth it or is it okay to have them in one ad group? Thanks.

Okay. That’s a great question, Frankie. Um, first of all, on your beta campaigns, I don’t do single keyword ad groups, right? That’s only an alpha campaign. So beta campaigns are typically you still want to create ad groups with your beta keywords which are typically just going to be a very small handful of keywords guy, Frankie, because it’s the modified broad match, right? So because it’s a modified broad match, you don’t need many keywords and a beta ad group, because you really only need your short tail.

The most important thing with the beta ad group is your negative keyword list, right? That’s where you want to spend your time building up is the negative keyword, negative keyword list. But the actual keywords that you add for targeting purposes that which are modified broad match, it’s usually just a very, very small handful of keywords per ad group, right? And you want to make sure that they’re closely related in each ad group. But usually, I don’t have more than three or five keywords max in a beta Group, a beta ad group now you’re single keyword ad groups that you can have if they’re if they’re a similar type of keywords, very similar.

First of all, Google will even, by the way, guys, the Google Ads platform has gotten incredibly I mean, so much better. In fact, it used to be like I said. I’ve been talking about the Display Network getting so much better. But the search ads have gotten so much better to, if you go look at the recommendations, a lot of those recommendations, which again, two years ago, I would have said, Don’t follow the recommendations, they’ll spend your money back more. But if you start applying some of the recommendations that Google gives you, you’ll see your performance, your ad performance going up your cost per click, going down conversions going up, that kind of stuff.

And so it’s the AI the machine learning artificial intelligence and all the automated bidding strategies and all this stuff that they that’s available now. And the ads platform is really really good. So I what I do is I recommend always starting off with all your campaigns managing them manually, to begin with, until you get a set, you know, some good data in which might take you two weeks, it might take you six weeks. That’s up to you and what your ad spend is really, but once you got enough data in there, start taking a look at the recommendations that Google provides and start applying them make notes of what you do. Keep a Google doc and make notes date, take dates and notes of when you’ve applied. Changes or recommended you know recommended changes that Google provides and monitor your you know, take a screenshot of what your results were when you applied that change or recommendation and then go back two weeks later or a month later or whatever and then take a screenshot of your results since that change was applied and see if your ad performance is better because if it then leaves that recommendation in place if not then remove it take it back to your managing the campaign manually so anyways that’s what I was trying to get at with single keyword ad groups it used to be where there would be you know for example singular version of a keyword or plural version right so like let’s use remodeling contractor plus city right so whatever that let’s just use Cole pepper that’s where I’m at so remodeling contractor called pepper or remodeling contractor in called pepper or Remodeling Contractors in called pepper VA. Those are all very similar keywords and so in the past a single the alpha group in the alpha the alpha group, I would have every one of those variations in their own separate as their own separate keyword. They would all still maybe target one landing page but that would i would have inserted each one of those is exact match keywords in that particular alpha alpha campaign or alpha ad group.

  But now if you do that one of the recommendations is and I think it’s just for ease of management but Google recognize those those as being like singular and plural version is the same keyword so even though it’s in you put it an exact match brackets you don’t have to put all those different variations because Google will still serve your ad even if it’s not exactly as it like if you just use one keyword one exact match keyword type in the ad group Google will still display your ad for the plural version or if they add the VA modifier, and in this case, like Cole pepper and Cole pepper VA, Google will still display that and that’s a change that just occurred kinda recently and again, that’s because machine learning has gotten so much better.

That makes sense. So my point is, yes, Frankie to make management a little bit easier. Beta groups should only be a handful of very closely theme keywords where you want to spend your time there is developing your negative keyword list as far as your alpha campaigns. Yeah, as long as they’re very closely related. But again, you really don’t even need to create a bunch of keywords in the alpha list because Google will still display your ad now for what it knows to be. What do they call them? Shit, close variants. That’s what it’s called close variants. Okay. It was a good question though.

Okay, cool. We’re almost out of time, guys. Marcus says via spam links which are not indexed by Google. Do I need to worry about them know?

You mean if you have spam links pointing to your site?

Should You Be Worried If Spam Links Are Not Indexed By Google?

Uh, yeah. No, I mean, I’m not sure what the question is. Mark is if you’re asking if you have spam links pointing to your site that aren’t being indexed by Google, do you need to worry about them, kind of if it’s to a money site only because just because they’re not indexed doesn’t mean Google doesn’t know about that.

It’s most likely that Google knows about them. One of the ways you can tell is go to search console, look at the links to your site. And you can download a report. And you’ll see that there are probably a lot of links that are linking to your site that are not indexed in Google. Google knows they’re there, or else they wouldn’t be in the report. So that’s something that, you know, Marco doesn’t ever disavow and stuff. And I haven’t had to do that shit. And a couple of like, several years, but I used to disavow spam links, and it would work I’ve recovered sites from penguin penalties from that it’s a pain in the ass. I don’t like doing that kind of shit anymore. But anyways, if you have spam links that you’re using to push something that isn’t indexed in Google, don’t worry about it. You can try to get them indexed. You know, we have a service that eventually will be up hopefully the next week or so. And our link builder, he does a lot of spam links to, you know, in the correct way. And one of the things he does is always submit them to indexers. But just because they go through the index or doesn’t mean they’re going to be index. All you have to worry about is Google become aware of them. And typically Google will become aware of this. Sooner or later okay? Good question as well.

Paul says: if you’re a G Suite customer Google Plus for your G Suite account should remain active contact your G Suite administrator for more details? Okay, cool I could care less about Google Plus anymore. Find out why they are not indexed a lot of those a lot of those are infected disavow those yeah see that’s I agree with Clint in that respect.

You know, I like to I’ve done it in the past I don’t really mess with that kind of stuff much anymore like off page cleanup and stuff I don’t really have to but yeah in the past that’s what I would do. So I agree with the plan.

What Are Possible Reasons Behind The Increase Of Bounce Rates?

Dan says I set up two domains along with two g sweet accounts to do cold email sequencing using prospect rocket bounce rates were up to 30% even though I didn’t mean that was probably look up.

I hadn’t I hadn’t really shouldn’t results from prospect rockin I’m not trying to talk shit about like David Sprague’s he’s got a lot of tools that I actually do use like rap videos are great for meetings and that kind of stuff.

But I had something to do with running things through prospect rocket. I don’t know if that’s still the case but I had terrible I mean like I couldn’t get my inbox at 30% and I haven’t even used it

Adam: Bradley so maybe you can clarify but is that what it was scraping or what is sending?

Bradley: Cold email sequence bounce rates were 30% that means about 30% of them were bouncing back well are you verifying your emails, Dan? The emails that you’re the email list that you’re sending emails to are you sending running them through like never bounce for example like that’s something you got to worry about if you’re if you’re using something like lead Kahuna, which is the scraper that I use again David sprigs product so great scraper. If you’re doing a lot of mass emails, that’s a great scraper. If you’re not doing a lot of masses, you’re doing more targeted stuff I would highly recommend leads recon. So like the video email prospecting that I’m developed like the updating that now for Jambi monetization, asset monitoring, you know, lead gen asset monetization and I’m doing very targeted email Sales again back to my roots which is how I really started my agency so I’m doing individual video email so for that leads recon is fabulous. But if you’re doing a lot of mass cold emails then yeah leads lead Kahuna is great for that well. You can use the never bounce and bright verify as part of the software which will go check them but I would recommend that once you filter your list your output list your export list with your con you know contacting those that you still go upload that CSV file to never bounce and only download the valid emails output so don’t double dip because I made that mistake and we burn through a lot of money verifying emails like three times because we use the never bounce settings and lead Kahuna and right verified but then I would still output the export file and then upload it to never bounce because it would still find additional invalid or spam traps or unverified emails that I would have been sending to which will lower your domain reputation and low and will cause your email to inbox less and less over time, so that that’s why I recommend that damn what I would tell you to do is just second leads going to never bounce is built in.

Yeah. But I still would recommend and I and again, guys, I’ve tested this over and over again, if you take that same export file, even if you used never bounce as part of the lead Kahuna scraping process, if you export that CSV and then go to never bounce and upload it and then let it process and then you download you can download all and it will have a column and show you what the status code is for each one of them. You’ll see you’ll still end up with many of them that are either invalid or will be what they call catch all on verified and that kind of stuff. So I would recommend either just running using just bright verify in league Kahuna itself and then manually editing or uploading them to never bounce once you’ve generated the list. Okay? but yes, that’s what I’m saying. It scrapes crappy emails you have to verify and never bounce.

So yeah, Dan Absolutely. That’s your issue right there. That’s your issue. You’re sending emails to shit. You’re sending out emails to shit email addresses, right? A lot of that stuff’s going to bounce. And it’s going to be that’s going to lower your domain reputation. In fact, I would probably recommend if you’ve already hit 30% bounce rates, abandon those domains. And remember, you can add additional domain aliases to the same gG Suite account. So I would abandon those domains and go by similar domains and add them as G sweet emails as domain aliases, and then start emailing again. But make sure you’re doing the never bounds. Okay?

Oh, cool. We’re almost done. And I thought we’re going to go way over me. See what’s the last comment was here? Yeah. Okay. All right.

Does The Opportunity Lie Greater In Mass GMBs or Client-Side GMBs If You’re Just Starting Out?

Calvin says if I’m just starting out, does the opportunity like greater and masculine bees or client-side GMB or both? Really? Both? Absolutely. That’s good. Both in both. That’s cool. Both Yeah, absolutely. Both. The thing is guys then there maybe you know, it may, it’s getting harder and harder to verify.

And Google is going to continue making it harder. And I’ve been predicting that since, you know, we really started pushing building additional GMB assets. Because I know it guys, it’s all that’s the case of SEO, anything. Anytime something works really, really good people catch on, and they do more and more of it, and then they get shut down. And then we figure out another, it’s a cat and mouse game that we play. But I know my prediction has been that it’s going to be more and more difficult to verify. And so you know it while it’s still available, do that, but at some point is going to become damn near impossible without providing corporate Docs or screen, you know, like, you know, things that can absolutely verify that there’s a legit business at that physical location. And that’s going to make it harder and harder. And so that’s why it’s good to do it while you can. Because if the more that you have to practice with for example, the better you will get so that when that time comes, you’ll be able to get results from just working on individual GMB assets that are you know, bonafide is part genuine business type stuff so I would do both. Okay.

Okay the fact that you are consulting with the tools make me feel better about using He must be talking about Peter drill yeah I’ve been chatting with him almost on a weekly basis and he’s in Australia and I’m in the state so it’s like a 15 hour time difference so I’ve talked to him at 6 am in the morning and it’s like 9 pm at night on his end and we’ve done that several weeks in a row so he’s got some good stuff going on then.

Dan would the Peter drew software be a waste of money for service-based companies that wouldn’t have driving directions to their business address? well I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this… there’s there’s an update coming down. I was going to ask this but forgot to do so for what’s the replacement for all the map stuff? There’s an update coming, okay? Just that’s all I can say – there’s an update coming.

Quintin says hello I’m a full time musician I’m looking to spam My name quit and revenue- we talked about this last week when.. yeah?

Adam: this is a different question though I like the way that he’s using discuss to spam.

Do You Still Recommend Press Releases To Increase Visibility?

Bradley: Keep doing it. All right, all right let me let me start reading it again then because the opening part of it sounded exactly like the previous question that we asked. Hello, I’m a full-time musician. I’m looking to spam My name, quitting revenue so much that people think I’m the mayor of Charleston South Carolina when you Google Charleston. Do you still recommend press releases?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I love press releases still use the shit out of them all the time in fact I use them heavily so I would absolutely recommend that. One of my videos content press for my name blasting and Charleston every other hour or something about me as posted 24 hours a day any recommendations um. Yeah I mean one thing is if you’re if you’re brand is Quintin rabbit, or like your name is your brand set up a GM before that, I don’t know why that wouldn’t be possible.

You know what I mean? Like I don’t think that’s it because I know that realtors do it right. Doctors do that sometimes, you know, they were they have their brand, their, their name is like their brand and like that’s their business. So they, you know, I can’t imagine you couldn’t do it as a musician. So, set up a GMB use that to put publish GMB posts consistently and regularly, just like you probably do on Facebook or, you know, whatever other your social networks are, you know, I don’t do music marketing, but SoundCloud, probably in a lot of other places. So I would recommend that you, you know, use Google to because remember, that’s you want to, we’re trying to feed Google what it wants. So, use a GMP set yourself up as a branded entity, even if it’s a personal brand use that press releases is great for that that’s gonna help to build authority. Something else you might want to do is, you know, try to reach out by the way, in your case, I would say try to reach out to some of the local news and media stations and stuff like that and try to develop like, I mean, don’t spam them. That’s not what I’m saying. But I’m saying try to develop a relationship with some of the local media type people or newspapers and or local magazines like event magazines, and things like that, or event blogs, that kind of stuff. And see if, you know, you can get posted on local event boards and things where you can, you know, kind of like not like I said, don’t spam them. But when you have bigger events, and, you know, place concert events or things that you’re going to be at performing at that you can contact them with a well written press release. And they’ll publish for you right, and get picked up on the local media websites and perhaps even get some TV airtime, you know, get some featured on local news and stuff like that. That’s what I would recommend doing. In a case like yours, I would absolutely do that because you’re trying to build your own brand. And there’s no better way to do that than to get local press from it like and not just press releases that you spam out there. That’s a good starting point, but like to get actual local journalists or broadcast journalists to do to run stories on you, right, and that’s perfectly legit. And that’s perfect. You’re perfectly capable of doing that if you try to develop a relationship with them.

Go ahead and spam away until then, though.

Alright, guys, I gotta wrap it up. Quinces, I predict verification will be paid to play. Yeah, you do that. And like I said, I’m, you know, showing corporate docs like utility bills with the company name on it with the physical address showing and that kind of stuff that’s something I’ve had to do already not for the lead gen stuff but for for actual businesses that i’ve you know manage that have moved locations and they didn’t have access to their original GMB that was verified so we had to produce corporate docs and things like that in order for Google. But I mean, it was easy to do once once we get Google what we wanted within 24 hours it was moved and ranking you know what I mean? So I think that’s what’s how it’s going to go. Or like Clint says there may be a paid pay to play version of it.

David No, there’s not. We keep it cheap enough to where you know, we don’t have to provide discounts for upgrades for that

You guys aren’t anything on a radio. A new version of SEO ultimate plus. Yeah, it’s been it’s been in beta for a couple months now Clint.

Adam: I talked to Jeffrey every Wednesday after Hump Day Hangouts and asked him Clint so I’ll make it a point to go and ask him and as soon as as I know something it’ll go first into our semantic mastery mastermind.

Hernan: That that’s who receives all of our all of the benefits as soon as he tells me Yeah, it’s a goal we got it you guys will be the first to know in our semantic mastery mastermind Yeah, because people ask about that all the time So…

Bradley: Alright, guys gotta run. Thanks, everybody will see you guys next week. mastermind webinar tomorrow for those of you in the mastermind. We’ll see you then. Bye everyone. See ya.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 226 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 226

Click on the video above to watch Episode 226 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

  Adam: Alright, we’re live with Hump Day hangouts Episode 221. All right, I just did that. I’m a little embarrassed us now going to be on YouTube forever. So anyways, moving right along into the sixth of March 2019. We got the whole crew here. Bradley is

Chris: doing some secret squirrel stuff in the background. But we’ll get to that. So first, let’s start on the left and work our way down. Chris, how you doing? Man? Doing good Spring is here

Adam: actually. Nice. Yeah, it’s quite nice. But I’m getting kind of like form on like the snow snowboard enough this year. So

Chris: unlike everybody else, I’m actually liking the winter when it’s not too hot and stuff and they can actually write on the slopes and we get powder and stuff so yeah, like I’m one of those weird freaks who is actually enjoying wintertime

Adam: bad and her not I like your shirt. But let’s see what summer is coming to you. Right.

Hernan: Thank you Yes balls here man I’m sweating myself but anyways I’m super pumped thank you guys actually wanting to publicly say thank you guys I love you soon as Bobby can say that because you guys have been awesome you got a lot of you guys were got the Battle Plan v3 and you’re really supporting the costs right here right now so I love you guys thank you for the support it’s been awesome

Adam: yeah definitely actually I’m going to pop that on the page if you’re watching grab the battle plan that’s a little quick note but in case you weren’t aware we launched just over a week ago you can still get in there and get it it’s we priced it you know we get a lot of questions about this to you know when we first came out with it as $100 and you know it’s overly well has a lot of great processes in place things out really smoothly but over time we decided to bring that price down and it’s much much much cheaper now because we really truly did want to get this in everyone’s hands so that you have simple processes and if you go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com, you can see us talking about that and how this can help you in your business, no matter what you’re doing. So anyways, I just want you to go check that out.

Chris: I would have had a battle plan right now, other than the price Say that again, why would avoid a Battle Plan right now? Other than the price?

Hernan: Can I go for it? Yeah, because it’s step by step process do now for sure. Like, we have actually distilled a lot of the stuff that, you know, we have been teaching and showing over the past, you know, five, six years on Semantic Mastery, we have distilled that into a step by step process. So if you have like, if you have a brand new website that you should put your domain right like yesterday, and you want to put it up with the band, go get the Battle Plan. If you have an H website that has been, you know, yielding good results he has a year it’s, you know, it’s a year old, but you still want to push it to go get the benefit. If you get a YouTube video that you want, push, go get the bad plan. If you also get have a GMB that you need better and

Like that is something that we have recently added to this be three and you know we made the webinar the how to be successful marketing 2019 that’s the value alone of admission and then you get a lot of additional bonuses on the bonus member’s area that you’re getting for free so it’s a no brainer your question

Adam: And I’m still learning how to use the mute button alright so yeah I’m not gonna expand on that I think are Hernan hit it and we’re really happy to be able to share this with you guys and like croissants at the bonuses are friggin cool so check out but Marco we wanted to check in of course with you how you doing man

Marco: I’m good, man. I’m about. Give me three to six months and I’m going to drop a

Adam: whoops. Sorry about that. Yeah, that was me in my browser.

Marco: Quit Quit messing with that shit man. I’m about to drop a nuclear bomb on the SEO world again. Alright, so stay tuned. It’s coming it’s it’s I’m sorry but it’s not going to be like the battle plan almost free because I’m on some takeover shit and I’m done. I’m done like playing I’m done with people hating I’m done with people. I’m when I say done if you talk about me I’m going to make you a fucking porn star. That’s how this is gonna be. So fuck with me.

That’s that’s what this is about. That’s what that’s what’s coming. They don’t fuck with me to

Hernan: Yeah and you got you guys better listen because what Marco says that he’s dropping the good stuff he usually like 100% of the time delivers, right he did what he did with our YS Academy. One are ways to kind of meat to it always brings up the good stuff. So definitely.

Adam: Well, I want to circle back around to where we started with introducing and saying welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. And since they If you’re new to semantic mastery first of all thanks for watching. We might have just heard us talking about the battle plan, grab it. It’s the best place to get started not only with us but for like Hernan said all you know your age sites your new sites. If you’re getting into videos whatever it is GMB start their battleplan.semantic mastery.com if you are you know looking to either start or grow your local digital marketing agency and you want to join the best community for that and be a part of that then join the mastermind and you can find out all about that at mastermind dot semantic mastery.com. And for everyone, no matter what you’re doing. Go to em. Gee why b dot SEO. Alright, for the premium done for you SEO Services, you know, getting the GMB verified so you’re not spending your time trying to do that which we’re going to touch on I know a lot of people have questions about candies and what’s going on there if you want syndication networks done, you know really, really high quality from you know, the training that Bradley originally created these updated over the last four years our YS stuff

Man what else press releases we got all sorts of stuff and there’s a lot more good stuff coming down the pipeline right.

Hernan: Cora and keyword research I think that that that’s worth mentioning because you know you can you can spend like an entire week going after keywords you know going after keyword research and whatnot and I think that that solves the entire issue and I haven’t personally I haven’t seen and mean that type of I don’t know how you guys are doing that because that’s all marketing Rob but I don’t know how you guys are pulling that up but honestly I haven’t personally seen any any other keyword research report that you don’t need to pay I don’t know shit ton of money to get something like that you’re getting a piece of the market, No kidding so I think that’s pretty cool and that takes a lot of time and I don’t think that we’re pushing it enough for with the body that you guys are getting some. Definitely get man it’s a goldmine for Edwards like Yeah.

Adam: Oh cool. I’m sorry. So I was about to post something on the page. We’re going to hop Over to Bradley in a minute. As I said, he’s got some stuff going on in the background. But something else I want to say, I know we get a ton of views on YouTube. And you know, people either aren’t here live or to catch it later, they will watching down the road. If you want to, you can click the button, click Subscribe, stay up to date, obviously, with Hump Day Hangouts, a lot of the videos that we upload there, and if I can ask a favor for anyone watching, you know, we really want to help people find out about our YouTube channel and really grow that if you find Hump Day hangouts helpful. If you’re watching a video clip and you found it helpful, please share it with them. You know you think it’s going to be particularly helpful we try to really help people out point them in the right direction and a lot of times you know what you’re learning or what you’re solving could definitely help someone out so point them in the right direction send them the video clip or point them to semantic mastery. com slash each the questions and real quick I’m going to pull something up but Bradley Are you in the middle of it. Are you are you ready?

Bradley: Alright. I’m sorry. I was muted and had the camera off I guess I can note to self and to everybody else out there do not start a server migration right before our webinar

Adam: Here hold on a minute let me let me write this down real quick the support staff the support staff assured me that it was going to be a smooth process bullshit

Bradley: I’ve got client sites down left and right like a database connection issues all kinds of shit and it’s kind of a shit storm right now I’m trying to get it resolved and now I’ve got a host a webinar so but Bradley no self we have a Caesar

Yeah, well not gonna be able to get in touch with them right now. We got a webinar host. So anyways, what else are you going to say?

Adam: I was just gonna say we had to people Hey, Alex, and Rishi. Thank you very much. They just grabbed the battle plan, I think today and we’re just talking about it. So thank you and appreciate you guys being here and checking it out and we’re happy to answer your question. So with that Bradley, I guess.

How are you doing? And then let’s just jump into it.

Bradley: I’m a little stressed out, but here right and answer some questions and help others. Well, my shit crumbles.

But that’s all right. So yeah, I’m good.

Adam: This is good. Well, focus because you know what? I’m guessing that there’s next working on your server. There’s nothing you can literally do about it right now. So this will be good. take your mind off it.

Yeah. All right, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s rock and roll. I’ll grab the screen.

Alright, so we got to go back to seven days ago. That’s how we determine where we left off. Right.

Is It Better To Use Gmails Instead Branded Emails For GMB?

  Adam: Let’s make sure with the Six Day guy there we go. I can’t see it looks like a mobile, mobile. Mobile is movie local business.

Bradley: Okay, so I’ve always pushed businesses to use their branding domain for their email info at company.com. As an example, instead of Yahoo, Hotmail or whatever but it could be better SEO to use Gmail and said for GMB and across citations now I recommend using a branded domain, always. And in fact, I would recommend using g sweet for your branded domain instead of like shitty webmail. That’s one of the issues I’m actually dealing with right now, with the server migration webmail sucks. And there tend to be problems a lot with webmail accounts guys that are through servers. But you know, for the price is going up, I think, in the next couple days for G Suit, but for a basic G Suite or domain account, domain web email account. That’s all hosted through Google at $6 a month guys per user, but you can add like, I don’t know if it’s unlimited or not. But you can add a whole bunch of domain alias is if you’d like so that you can actually send and receive email from multiple domains from the same Gmail account it’s or G Suite account but it’s Google email essentially and I would and also as Marco will probably chime in here that’s also another entity validation signal to be hosting your, your domain at using G Suite email services for your domain.

So I would recommend that you do that. What do you say, Marco?

Marco: I totally get that business card on file whether or not whether you do it through G Suite. It used to be that Google only would allow names in Gmail, right? They wouldn’t they wouldn’t discourage you from using business names. But now it says everybody started doing it then it now okay so you could actually do Gmail and pay through Gmail right for driving extra drive and everything but you have G Suite there and if you have a business or that you’re running or a business that you’re helping them, by all means, get them over into G Suit and run everything through their let Google see that this is a legitimate business with legitimate services products or whatever it may be. So yes, I 100% agree. Go and pay Google for these services.

Bradley: And just as a quick, I’m not going to go through it guys on screen, but just write this down or take notes. It’s not a hard process, there is a wizard that will kind of help you through it. But the first couple of times you do it, it’s a little geeky, but once you understand how to do it, it’s really simple. You have to use go You have to be able to access your domains, DNS settings which you know can either be through your registrar or if you’re using something like a third party DNS, iCloud flair, you can do it there. But you got to add a text a text record for domain verification. That’s to prove to Google that you own the domain or control the domain and then you add your MX records. There’s five of them.

Yeah, there’s five of them and they’ll get the G sweet will give you those. It’s it’s fairly standard or easy to set up. And then after that, there are just a few additional records that you want to add like one is called an SPF record. Another one is called a D Mark record. And the last one is a DKIM signature and those are three different things that you want to add. So just write down down and then you can just search in G sweet help which when you’re logged into your G sweet admin panel there’s a help search bar at the top and you can just type those in like SPF records DK, I am signature and D Mark and you it’ll, it’ll give you help files to show you exactly how to set that stuff up. Once you do those, then you should be good to go. You know, it’s also important, make sure that you do have a domain that setup with website and such that’s good for domain reputation for email, or for email reputation, if you’re sending from a domain email account, if that makes sense. So just adding those few things are going to help to make sure that you get really good deliverability. I do use g Suite accounts for prospecting when I’m doing you know, cold emailing for prospecting, and they tend to work really well. If you use a standard Gmail accounts like personal Gmail accounts, and, you know, free Gmail accounts essentially and you try to send a cold email within a very short period of time, your emails will stop being too delivered, they’ll stop in boxing. What depends on I guess, really the volume and whether people are hitting spam and stuff like that. But if you use the domain emails and you set up those records, like I said, and you have a website on the domain, so at least you know that those are kind of things that helped it for those to the inbox. But for a standard business, you shouldn’t really have to worry about much of that other than just set up those records correctly, and you should be good to go. That’s a good question though.

Would The GMB Auto Poster Strip The Meta Data And Geo Settings Of A Picture Uploaded Within The Post?

Elaine is up, she says. Would the GMB auto poster software strip the metadata of a picture we upload including the geo settings when scheduling a new post?

You know, I have no idea but I doubt that it would because we are developing knows how important that is. Marco, do you have a definitive answer?

Marco: No, I don’t have a definitive answer. But it’s essentially Google that strips it.

Bradley: Yeah, but yeah.

Marco: Yeah, they get the information and they know you give them all the information and then it doesn’t matter if it’s still on the image. All you want is the relevance and Google can also take a look at the at the front of the picture. And you’d be surprised at how much entity information Google pulls from the front of the image instead of just the back.

Bradley: Yeah. But I mean, specifically for her question was, does the auto-poster application itself strip the metadata?

Marco: Yeah. I don’t have a definitive, definitive answer for that. All I can say is, if it’s getting stripped out, it’s usually Google that’s doing that.

Bradley: That’s correct.

Adam: That’s something maybe we can run by St. Pat the developer find out if he knows for sure. Again, he’s he’s a good guy. He knows guys what the benefit of what we’re doing. So I’m quite sure that that’s kind of baked into the software already, but we can confirm that with him.

Will An Older GMB Account Have The Same Ranking Effect As With Those That Have Been Created Recently?

Bradley: Dan’s up he says, If I have a customer that has had their GMB for some time, does the process work the same with the press advantage from the press release pointing the first post etc. is the process to rank GMB as effective as on a GMP that has been around for a while.

Yeah, it’s typically more effective that way. In other words, if you use the same methods that we teach in our various products, whether it’s local least for our local GMB pro and you apply those two or PR progress in your, in your case, Dan because that’s what sounds like you’re talking about it either any one of those methods are going to should should work better for an established GMB than they do for a brand new one. Because remember with the brand new one guys you’re trying to build a reputation and we’re trying to force it very quickly and if you pick the low competition areas which were the original location research training for local least bro you can typically get rankings almost overnight or with very little work very low effort.

Now if you’re using the updated version where you’re going much more granular and trying to target more locations and even more like metro areas and such you’re still going to have a bit of a dogfight that’s what I’ve been experiencing. So and it takes time because and here’s the thing when you’re looking at like location research and you’re looking at even if you see opportunity because there are locations that don’t have the same they’re not the same zip code area that you’re searching and that kind of stuff. You’ll see that a lot of. At times, especially in metro areas, the the the API, the top 10 results that it pulls in are pulling in maybe locations, or GM bees that are outside of that specific location. But it’s pulling them in because they’re very relevant. They’ll have big authority signals, such as lots of reviews, lots of images, website citations, ages is a factor. So you have to take all of that into account. So even if you target your location placement perfectly, you still have to compete with other entities out there, essentially, companies or brands, locations that have built authority, and that’s why Google is pulling them in as being the most relevant. So there is still a bit of a dogfight to do with that. But what I’m saying is if you have an existing asset that’s been established for some period of time, and I don’t know what you know what the threshold would be to make this better obviously, probably the older the better, but if you apply those same kinds of methods, you’re going to get better results than with them with a brand new listing.

Guys, there’s another good question.

Do You Hide The GMB Backlinks And Sensitive Data To Protect Yourself From Angry Competitors?

Okay, Alex is up. He says, Hey guys just purchased the battle plan. Glad I did. How common is it for competitors to report lead gen sites to spam or whatever, both the jam BS in the actual WordPress sites.

For me it’s been rather rare I haven’t really experienced that much I’ve actually had years ago when I first got into the business. Should I’d say it was it was it was actually my first Tree Service site that ever built and one of the competitors did report that one and I got it reinstated which was funny, I had to re-verify it via mail. Unfortunately, I still had the mailbox that I was using for that at the time. So I was able to re verify it and get it out and he was just pissed because we outranked him like within a couple of months, and he’d been an established Tree Service business. But that was really the only time I’ve had to experience it. And I’m going to knock on wood, but I hadn’t really experienced that. So here’s the thing. I mean, if you’ve got a good lead gen asset that set up correctly and it’s optimized well. And it’s not super spammy and you’ve got the calls that are directing especially you know, as always recommend to a call center where it’s a valid Pete person answering the phone right away, you know that kind of stuff. It’s hard to really bitch about that, you know, to prove that it’s spam you know, especially if you’re using surface area businesses in your location, your physical location or the address the physical address is hidden. How would they know you know what I mean? It’s not like it used to be where sometimes you could still display your address if you got a surface area business, you’re not supposed to display your address. So how can they know? You know what I mean? So I haven’t really experienced that again, fortunately not saying it can’t happen. guys just saying I haven’t experienced that much.

Alex has to finish up he said. Do you do anything to protect yourself from anger competitors? Yeah, as I said, I don’t display the address. That’s why I’m actually not building citations as much because a lot of citation platforms still require you to display the address or you can even place a citation on their directory.

So, um, you know, again, I’m doing a lot of other stuff outside of using them because if we’re using a, an address that’s not, you know, actually where the business is located, then we don’t want to publish that if possible. So that’s just one of the things I’m doing is doing a lot of other sorts of stuff, a lot of on page stuff and other types of off page where I don’t have to display the address.

Okay, you got any comments on that? Anybody?

How Do You Use GSites To Increase The Visibility Of A GMB Page For Nearby Cities?

Alright, moving on. With this house is good agents. Thank you for or thank you for offering this form to us. I have questions about g sites as a way to increase visibility from nearby city g site 1000 word article, videos, content samurai, or summary of Article links to money site and GMB website and also include several links to the web to auto or should I be cautious about them to you.

You mean can you link to your web two daughters from the G sites? Or are you talking about building links to your web two point O properties?

I would say you could do either if your web two or tier one properties and they’re built well then I don’t see why it would you know, again, it’s just kind of like validating the entity is if we’re syndication Academy guys, whether you’ve been through our training or you purchase done for you networks from us, that’s how we do it right, we interlink all of our tier one properties. They’re all branded properties. We’re not trying to hide our footprint you’re actually trying to display our footprint, right? Because those are all branded entities. We want Google to make the connection between all of those as being of the same brand. So I don’t see why that would be any issue in either instance, what I’m saying is, if you’re linking out to branded tier one properties that are well built, well optimized, then that’s kind of internal linking your brand. If you’re building links to your branded properties, that’s fine too. I would recommend you do that instead of direct to your money site, which is what I think you’re alluding to anyways, right? That’s part of the reason that we use this dr stacks and G sites and things like that because their Google domains, Google properties and we can just literally hammer them and it will take it like a champ.

So any any comments on that guys?

Adam: No, I think I think that’s perfect. And the setup is perfect too because you can even drop press releases into the D side and and Dr. Second power those up and Yeah, well, we’ve I mean, we’ve done I keep talking about this. We did 1 million spam links including porn and not not intentional. I just told that it hit it with whatever you got in and it was actually a anyway GSA is what we use for it. So he didn’t he didn’t filter he didn’t do anything they just blasted it, it was it turned out to be a million plus went through the drive stack through the site onto Well, the mind is not the mind map. But the Google business map which ranked in the three packets still ranking to this day. There’s nothing we could do.

As a matter of fact, the guy stopped paying. First of all, he took one of his phones. I talked about this role, he took one of his phone’s off the hook because he just couldn’t handle the call body. And then the fucking to stop paying with that, that just totally makes no sense why would you stop paying but he’s still ranking to this day major metropolitan area highly competitive niche and it’s there and last time I looked there was still a porn link indexed in his link profile. So think about that. Google has it has its index right when you go and look at the link profile in Google you do the site search and appointment comes up so Google is hey you know we like this port link for for your website. Here you go. How much better can it get that you do spam links into a drive second g site and it comes up pristine on the other end and you can push power to wherever you want it to me that’s that’s just incredible. And it’s only been five years since it’s been working. So what a loophole.

Bradley: There you go he says do I do the same for each city that I want to rank for?

Well similarly to what I talked about with syndication networks if you know I prefer to use one brand one branded network for multiple locations if possible and so if you’re talking about building web tues out for brand then you know if you want to get location specific you certainly can you can always add like a location monitor to the brand name so for example you know Joe’s plumbing is the primary brand and then let’s say you’ve got, you know, three different locations and they’re all obviously different cities then you could do Joe’s plumbing an input the city name for example as a modifier if you’re going to create another set of web tools that are location specific and you can certainly do that you know if that’s what you want to do now do stacks yeah just you can either buy new new drive or bi or build new dr stacks for each individual location or better yet create internal folders within the main brand drive stack in silo just like you, you know, essentially create like silos within the stack, okay.

So it’s up to you how, again, I try not to build location specific web tools if possible, because I like to just use the branded one. You know, I like let let I like doing getting results with the least amount of effort. And so I try not to do that if necessary. But sometimes in more competitive areas, it does help to do that. And so that if that’s what you’re asking then. Yes, I would say you can do that too

Can You Please Enlighten Us With The New Policy Of GMB?

Toby’s up. Let’s have name. I haven’t seen in a while it says hello, gangstas. Happy to be back in your hood. Can you explain one more time G and its new policy on GMBs?

Um, well, I would. But I don’t really know. I mean, the policy is don’t do what we do. That’s the policy but we do it anyways. And so there’s a lot of misconceptions out there now. Thanks, Toby. Yeah, there are I mean that’s the thing you know, that’s why we haven’t really commented yet as to we don’t have a definitive answer on that as to what what to do and what not to do at the moment. I can tell you one thing I’ve I’ve got my Multiple lead gen assets that I was in, I was chatting with Rob today in our slack app about this, that, you know, I’ve, I’ve been updating a lot of my stuff like crazy. Some of them are brand new listings. And I have not had a single problem with getting anything suspended. I mean, I’ve even done some stuff that would typically trigger re verification immediately and in the last few days, and it has not caused any issues for me whatsoever. Now, I’m not saying you guys can go buck wild right now, because there is a lot of suspensions happening, but I think there’s certain things triggering them.

So for example, I mentioned this last week, too, by the way, and I don’t have any problem mentioning this to you guys on Hump Day Hangouts. Because I want you guys to not make this mistake. One of the things and it’s only mistake now It wasn’t a mistake a month ago. And I don’t know for sure that this is absolutely like an absolute rule. But I know that one of the things that I’ve noticed we lost about six assets in the last couple of weeks. And so I’ve got my team actually not doing anything.

In the like, on page work on GMB stuff, right now, I’ve got my team working on off page stuff. I myself, I’m still inside doing, I’m testing different things inside on, you know, like on page edits, and stuff within GMB locations, and I haven’t had any suspended on me. But when my team was doing them, one of the things that we we think we identified as as a trigger was adding to the appointment URL like an ad ID page, for example, which is typically an Amazon we host those you know, we’ve talked us and said this publicly before but we host those on Amazon s3. If you don’t know how to do it, get to buy the course the figure it out or find out on your own. But one of the things was that originally it would take an s3 bucket URL but it stopped doing that the appointment URL section would stop stop doing that after some time. So then we got smart, right and we added a redirect URL and then it would take it again but one of the things that I think is causing that is by putting something in that appointment URL other than an actual appointment app link like to calland Lee or something else, or to using the business, the Google My Business website URL to go in the appointment, you were out. Or if you had a page on a money site that had an appointment app embedded in it, that would also work.

But if you’re if you’re still staying strictly within the Google ecosystem, which is what we’ve been primarily doing, where we don’t have an off page, you know, we don’t have a self hosted site then. We’ve been using the GMB business side is the primary website and then using yet ID page in the appointment URL section. And I think that that’s an issue right now. So I said this last week, guys, just don’t link to that in there. I would recommend not putting anything in that appointment you are Unless Unless it’s a valid appointment URL or app or, or if you got a money site, and you want to put the GMB business site URL on the appointment URL. I don’t think that’s going to be an issue either, but if you start doing that, I do what you should be by the way.

Creating that page, it’s super powerful link to it with a contextual link from the GMB website. That way, you still get it in there, guys, you’re still getting Google to go crawl it from the GMB asset. It just doesn’t have to be in the employment URL. And we did that because we were able to, but if that’s one of the trigger points, which I think it is, I don’t have 100% certainty on that but we noticed that that’s one of the things that when we had six we lost six assets in a week and what my builder Joe was the one that was the one that said that he thinks that that’s what it was because he noticed that it happened on three of them right after he had added that URL. So I recommend just not doing it for now until we know for sure that makes sense.

Okay.

So as far as what is the actual what are the policies while the policies are don’t spam? Are you going to abide by that because I sure as hell not you know, so essentially that’s, that’s what it is. So we just got to keep playing around in there until we figure it out. Now, I know some of you guys don’t have the resources is to be able to, you know, burn through a bunch of GMP. And I get that. And that’s part of the reason why we’re still testing and figuring out what it is. But like I said, I’ve done a lot of on page edits and stuff right now. And I mean, just today alone, I did a lot of stuff that would have typically required re verification or suspension, and it didn’t cause any of that. So I’m just just letting you guys know, until we figure it out. I would recommend that you just tread lightly, don’t do anything super spammy. You know, take things slow, as Marco always says, make a couple of edits, you know, or one big edit or something, and then get the hell out of there and leave it sit for a couple days. let it marinate, right that that it season, let that kind of settle in before you go back in and change a bunch of other stuff. What do what do SEOs do SEOs go in especially when you got a team and processes developed like we do that go in and like within you know, two, three hours they’ve completely optimized everything and added photos and posted and like you know, I’ve done everything and that’s business owners don’t do that because they don’t know how to do that.

You know what I mean? So if you act like a business owner or if like Marco said, if you go in as like an agency through a manager account, make some edits. I always recommend removing the manager account afterwards. But that’s something else, you know, there’s different things that you can test with, with some of your own assets. assets, excuse me, but just think about, you know, what looks natural, a business owner wouldn’t go in and fully optimize and, you know, in one fell swoop because they don’t typically know how to do that kind of shit. A manager might, right. But I also believe we’ve talked about not having, you know, using a manager if you’re targeting one vertical, don’t use that same manager account for every account that you or GMB that you log into. Because that’s a way that their footprint could be created. use multiple manager accounts. For example, guys, probably most of you have a shit ton of syndication networks, at least I hope you do, which means you’ve got a lot of different Google accounts. So you could use those different Gmail accounts that you have for various profiles to actually act as a manager where you log into one of your make some changes, and then log back out and remove the manager for the owner account, if that makes sense. And that’s something that you could do to reduce potential footprint issues.

That was another good question.

Robert Nelson. He’s a new mastermind member. I had a call with him yesterday. It was great. Glad to have you.

Is There A Way To Automatically Randomize Images For Posts When Autoposting Using GMB Briefcase?

Robert says, Hey, guys. Great to be in here. When auto posting using the GMB briefcase Is there a way to automatically randomize the images used for posts so they are being scheduled monthly?

Yes, it’s called it with the briefcase. Yes, that’s got an image spinning. I think you have to upload them via CSV and I have not tested with that yet. It’s because I just haven’t taken the time to learn it. But I don’t know where I can point you to. For the training. We have a slack group Robert, that was there were some beta testers for the briefcase, we can probably add you to that because you’re in the mastermind, guys. You have to be in the mastermind for stuff like that. Sorry. But if you’re if you’re interested in that, Robert, ping me in the mastermind Facebook group and I’ll see if I can get you added to this slack group for that. And there’s a lot of training and stuff in there for that. And there’s probably training files in the briefcase for that. I just haven’t seen them there. So anybody know for sure.

Hernan: Oh, that’s actually a good question. Bradley will need to double check. But yeah, that’s something for sure that you might want to join the mastermind for that. And not only that, but also for the calls that you get, you get an onboarding call, and then you get a 90-day call follow up. So that is pretty cool, too.

Adam: Yep. Yeah, the only other thing I was going to say if there is any issues to and you want to do it on your own, you know, if he can let me know, because I do some of the stuff with spreadsheets before it was added in there where you know, you’re randomizing some of the stuff on your own which might come in handy and some other places.

Bradley: Yeah, so maybe that would be a good thread for us to start in the Facebook group for the mastermind anyways, and we got a mastermind webinar tomorrow guys, so now might be something we can talk about there too. But yeah, Robert, I’ll see if I can get you out of To the slack group I just picked St. Patty’s the developer see if he minds if he doesn’t mind I’ll squeeze you in on there okay. let’s say what’s up clan Adam? That’s cool when did you change your was that different?

Adam: Yeah must pull from Facebook I think I updated a couple days ago It looks like a boss

Hernan: oh yeah that’s from Nashville yeah.

Have You Seen Results With The Mapping Techniques Of Peter Drew’s GMB Dominator?

Bradley: Jim what’s up. Bradley, in the past you mentioned Peter Drew’ GMB Dominator, not by name as it didn’t have a name yet. I just saw the beta testing pricing today and wondered if you have seen the results with these mapping techniques that software it’s 100 or $500 one time $100 month shiny or legit.

You know, it’s a legit tool. There’s no question it’s a good tool. I’ve been actually consulting a lot with Peter drew about that stuff. So yeah, it’s cool. I mean, I haven’t tested all of the software some of the new stuff that just comes in the last couple weeks I haven’t had the time to but a lot of the let’s just say there’s going to be some collaboration between us anyways guys.

If you end up purchasing it, you’ll see that I added some preliminary training on. It’s kind of a teaser training for we’re updating the video lead gen system specifically for outreach and prospecting, to monetize lead gen assets. And I’m working on that currently, right now, as a matter of fact, like in the last week and a half now, I’ve been working on that. And so I think we’re going to launch that in April. And that’s going to be a complete update to the already existing product. And it’s going to include a whole bunch of resources and methods and processes and stuff like that for monetizing lead gen assets. Or for going and targeting on non-owner verified profiles to get your foot in the door. That way using video emails is the primary prospecting method. And so and you’ll see that if you end up checking on a gym, it’s I think it’s a good product, you know, just like anything, you have to use them and use them consistently those kinds of tools to get results. So just keep that in mind. It’s not like a one-shot you buy these things. You go run one campaign for something and you’re done. You’ve ranked if you’re you know you’re successful in your you never have to work again it’s not like that even with those tools that are simple tools which is why I like them you have to you know use them repeatedly and usually run multiple campaigns per project in order for you to get results. So just keep that in mind but yeah absolutely, I would recommend it guys no doubt.

Okay. New Battleplan executor here. It looks like a lot of what how we Schwartz used to do in the early days of I am great stuff. Okay, I’ll take your word for it I don’t know who our Schwartz’s.

Adam: That’s a name from like 2008-2009

Hernan: And that was the guy more time than I thought I think the guy got pulled up by Google security in one of theirs. I can’t remember exactly what happened you will have to I’ll have to look that up later but something happened in one of the guys got a lot in Google’s nerves so that’s a good nice to see men and thanks for buying the battle plan. Rishi

Bradley: You guys, that was just a year or two. I started in 2010. So that must have been right before I got involved with internet marketing. So sorry. Go ahead.

Hernan: You were too young for that.

Bradley: Yeah. Well, I wasn’t too young. I just hadn’t started in digital marketing it that’s all.

How Many Network Is Enough To Get Enough Traffic To An Affiliate Marketer In YouTube?

My question lies and having enough first doing more than necessary and getting slapped. I mean YouTube based affiliate marketers starting in a new market. For this, I have set up one email address, which I used to create an over a dozen other web properties and implemented the battle plan. I’ve also started my YouTube videos as part of the bonus. That’s great. I’m glad to hear that. My question is, Is that enough? Or should I be creating more and more web properties like I am keyword based content? Or can this one network with the siloed videos on YouTube provide me enough horsepower and bring enough traffic to my videos?

Now for videos guys, for you, specifically Rishi if you’re doing YouTube stuff go nuts. With networks you syndication networks, add as many networks to your channel as possible and not just tier one network. In other words, not just where the YouTube channel triggers syndication two networks, I would recommend also creating second to, you know, to tier networks. And if you want to go beyond that, you certainly can. You can go, you know, third tier networks, fourth tier networks, I don’t recommend that only because it becomes a bitch to manage. I’ve always preferred to stop it two-tier networks, which means and again, if you’ve been through syndication, network training or syndication Academy training, or if you purchase a two-tiered network from MGYB be which we will set it up for you, you could always go back through and reverse engineered if, you know, if you’re not a build a single tier network that’s triggered directly from the YouTube channel and then you see a two-tiered network you’ll you’ll you’ll know how to do it because you’re just going to use the RSS feed from the blog properties on the on the first tier network. So like blogger, Tumblr WordPress to post to republish to the second tier network and it’s very, very powerful and the different sizes with YouTube there’s no footprint issues.

If You use the app, what’s the way that we teach, okay, if you start importing the video descriptions and republishing them and all that kind of stuff, you can get web 2.0s terminated and that can look spammy so I don’t recommend that. I recommend that you do exactly what the app what’s the way that we designed them because I tested all that stuff guys and there’s a reason why those outlets for video syndication networks were set up the way that I did because there are no footprint issues there. And the reason why is because all you’re acting as is a publisher for Google at that point because all you’re doing is syndicating Google embed code and then a link back to the channel and or a playlist that’s it. So like again, I don’t see how that could ever be an issue and it’s never caused a problem. And so what I say is like usually when I was when I was still I have a lot of aged themed video syndication networks now that I use so I don’t really build them anymore or even buy new ones for that matter.

Um, but when I was doing a lot of that and building a lot if I was going to test a new channel like a new niche, a new industry then what I would do immediately go with two or three, two-tier syndication networks attached to the channel right off the bat like right out of the gate, I’d have at least two or three two-tier syndication networks. So that’s essentially four syndication rings per network to tier syndication network right so I would have anywhere between eight to 12 syndication rings being triggered from one YouTube channel right off the bat and so I would recommend that, yeah I mean go nuts with that as many as you feel like building or buying and you know to add to your arsenal do it because it’s only going to get make it better and easier for you to get results from your videos that way. But I would recommend also Rishi to go back to the last couple Hump Day hangouts that from last week and I think the week before especially I know last week we talked about it but this is over the last several weeks let’s put it that way. We’ve talked a lot about how one of the magic secret sauce things that you can do besides embeds and backlinks which is kind of traditional SEO for videos guys. Just push a little bit of traffic into them and watch the magic happen then it’s like it’s like it comes alive when you just push a little bit of traffic. And I’m not talking about just shit spam traffic that you can buy from Fiverr gigs although there is a little bit of a benefit to that. But there are ways that you can use YouTube ads for example, to push traffic into videos specifically that if you’ve got embed them cascading through and embed network your own syndication networks, whatever and you’ve applied some traditional link building and things like that you start pushing a little bit of traffic into that whole system and you’ll see that like everything it’ll start to rank really really well.

And again, we see if you didn’t know that order bump which was one of the things you could have purchased in buying the battle plan about Google Ads pro or was it your local ads pro or something like that I don’t remember what you guys call it yeah the killer local ads training Yeah, the killer local ads training, which was essentially the YouTube training I did specifically showing how to do what I’m just talking about that was an order bump and if you didn’t get access to it well. We may be able to if you reach out to support. Adam Don’t kill me if I’m wrong for saying that.

Adam: I’m gonna kill you

Bradley: But that’s something I would recommend that you do because it’s going to really really help but yeah don’t worry about footprint issues with as long as you’re using the app what’s the way that we teach you’re going to be good to go stack as many networks as you want, okay? Does anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Oh I like that I am still and beds were really well for YouTube video so if you combine the power at some point he wasn’t even funny like it was really broken the fact that you could go live on a bed and a bunch of places in the new rank first instantly not for injury attorney but for something similar but that still works really well so if you pay that live streaming, it still is. It’s very well still up that lethal combo so yep, yeah.

Bradley: So focus on building up your primary network that’s branded for your YouTube channel. Typically, you want to brand that you’re you know you’re that. That’s like your branded network for a channel, right? That’s the one that you really want to build up as far as, like, additional link building to the network properties is perfect for that. So when, by the way, we have that we have that available in the back end, I don’t think we have the public page up yet. But the link building service in our store guys is going to be available very very soon, I promise.

So that’s what I would recommend is that you continue boosting that your branded network for your channel but then like I said, as far as you can build persona based channels and just or similarly themed channels, right that is, excuse me networks, that similarly themed networks that you can stack as both tier one networks as well as trigger tier two networks because what I found through testing guys was that if you have like let’s just say that you got 10 syndication rings and you had them all triggered as a tier one so they were triggered directly from the YouTube upload or live stream, then a lot of times you’ll get really quick rankings from that like you’ll get the videos will jump, you know, to page one or page two right off the bat. But then they’ll start, they’ll start to slip down in the rankings rather soon. I compared to, if you were to take those same 10 rings, and let’s say you did three, you know, two or three, two-tier networks out of those instead, then they might not rank as quickly. But when it does rank, it tends to stick longer. And at least that was, you know, I haven’t done a hard test on that now, and probably two years, but that’s was I did extensive testing on that several years ago. And I found that when you use the two-tier networks, they tend to stick longer if they even if they don’t rank as quickly they tend to stick once they rank longer if that makes sense.

As a good question to we’re going to keep moving.

Should You Hold Off Doing On-Page Work On GMBs Until The Wave Of Suspensions Subside?

Grant says that we could go on Hump Day hang out, you were suggesting to hold off on doing on page work on GM B’s until the current wave of suspension suicides? One a week later, Is that so your recommendation? Well, that’s up to you. As I just mentioned, Grant

Hey, so I already answered and I see that you saw that or heard that. So that’s good. I would recommend, you know, that’s up to you go in, and I would do a tentatively. So, if you’ve got raised, which I know you, probably you do grant because you were in the pope who live group with us. And so that was one of the objectives of being in that group was everybody was to build their own Build Team. So if you’ve got a team doing it, I would recommend maybe you go in and do some of the off page things that you want to do so that you can see firsthand what you’re doing. And if you get a suspension, then you can start to deduce you know, what may have triggered that whereas if your team does it, they might not you know, I’m not saying don’t trust your team, because my team actually was the one that notified me about like the ad ID the appointment URL thing so and I trust that that’s that was probably it. And that’s something that I’ve avoided doing for the last few days as I’ve been in making on page updates, even brand new like I’ve just got a brand new one delivered today and I was in there. I literally went in.

And I did some stuff that would have absolutely triggered re-verification a couple of months ago. And it was perfectly fine. In fact, I did it twice just to see because I didn’t believe the first time that it was it took it the way that it did. So I did it a second time within two hours. And it took it still valid still there. And in fact that said edits pending and about 90 seconds went by refresh the page and it was fine. And just like it had taken the edits that I had made, which typically would have re-triggered or trigger verification. So, Grant, I would recommend that you go on and do that yourself so that you can kind of, you know, very like dip your toes in the water before jumping in, you know, I mean?

How To Expand A GMB To Another Adjacent Suburb?

Wills up, he says, I have a client that dominates for a suburb and GMB, how can we target locations that are 10 K or less that are not that they are not showing up, for example, they don’t show up for the next to Jason. suburb three k away. I don’t what is, I’m not sure what three kilometers, Excuse me.

Well, there’s a lot of. To do that will, it’s kind of something we’re not gonna have time to really explain here. But I mean, and also, that’s something that we cover Marco covers and local GMB Pro. And it’s called expanding the central at least that’s what Marco calls it. So there are things that you can do with an existing listing to where you don’t need to create another listing to actually expand. If you have a self-hosted website, you can add pages and target like what that you can call them geo post or geo pages specifically, and set up silos, location-based silos for those areas and produce content where you’re targeting that type of, you know, landmarks and, you know, things like that, that you can, you know, I got a VA that I trained how to do that kind of stuff. If you’ve got a self-hosted website, you can do some additional things that way, because you can create silos you can still do that with your GMB to but again, we can’t really share those methods here on a free setting. So I would recommend, if you don’t already if you’re not in local GMB Pro, that’s the perfect training for what you’re trying to do. Would you agree, Marco?

Marco: Absolutely I mean it’s not that difficult to extend or expand this the century. I have some people say move the centroid well that’ll that’ll get you suspended more often than not so if you don’t want to get suspended if you want to be like careful and take care of your asset that you have to look to go from where you are to where you’re not and that’s as far as I’m gonna go with that yeah.

Should You Separate The Alpha And Beta Keywords In One Ad Group?

Bradley: Frankie what’s up Frankie he’s hard at work on ads I can see says hey guys question for you is creating specific scab which stands for single keyword ad group for each and every keyword and a beta and alpha campaign with keywords specific optimized landing pages and metadata for each keyword etc. worth it or is it okay to have them in one ad group? Thanks.

Okay. That’s a great question, Frankie. Um, first of all, on your beta campaigns, I don’t do single keyword ad groups, right? That’s only an alpha campaign. So beta campaigns are typically you still want to create ad groups with your beta keywords which are typically just going to be a very small handful of keywords guy, Frankie, because it’s the modified broad match, right? So because it’s a modified broad match, you don’t need many keywords and a beta ad group, because you really only need your short tail.

The most important thing with the beta ad group is your negative keyword list, right? That’s where you want to spend your time building up is the negative keyword, negative keyword list. But the actual keywords that you add for targeting purposes that which are modified broad match, it’s usually just a very, very small handful of keywords per ad group, right? And you want to make sure that they’re closely related in each ad group. But usually, I don’t have more than three or five keywords max in a beta Group, a beta ad group now you’re single keyword ad groups that you can have if they’re if they’re a similar type of keywords, very similar.

First of all, Google will even, by the way, guys, the Google Ads platform has gotten incredibly I mean, so much better. In fact, it used to be like I said. I’ve been talking about the Display Network getting so much better. But the search ads have gotten so much better to, if you go look at the recommendations, a lot of those recommendations, which again, two years ago, I would have said, Don’t follow the recommendations, they’ll spend your money back more. But if you start applying some of the recommendations that Google gives you, you’ll see your performance, your ad performance going up your cost per click, going down conversions going up, that kind of stuff.

And so it’s the AI the machine learning artificial intelligence and all the automated bidding strategies and all this stuff that they that’s available now. And the ads platform is really really good. So I what I do is I recommend always starting off with all your campaigns managing them manually, to begin with, until you get a set, you know, some good data in which might take you two weeks, it might take you six weeks. That’s up to you and what your ad spend is really, but once you got enough data in there, start taking a look at the recommendations that Google provides and start applying them make notes of what you do. Keep a Google doc and make notes date, take dates and notes of when you’ve applied. Changes or recommended you know recommended changes that Google provides and monitor your you know, take a screenshot of what your results were when you applied that change or recommendation and then go back two weeks later or a month later or whatever and then take a screenshot of your results since that change was applied and see if your ad performance is better because if it then leaves that recommendation in place if not then remove it take it back to your managing the campaign manually so anyways that’s what I was trying to get at with single keyword ad groups it used to be where there would be you know for example singular version of a keyword or plural version right so like let’s use remodeling contractor plus city right so whatever that let’s just use Cole pepper that’s where I’m at so remodeling contractor called pepper or remodeling contractor in called pepper or Remodeling Contractors in called pepper VA. Those are all very similar keywords and so in the past a single the alpha group in the alpha the alpha group, I would have every one of those variations in their own separate as their own separate keyword. They would all still maybe target one landing page but that would i would have inserted each one of those is exact match keywords in that particular alpha alpha campaign or alpha ad group.

  But now if you do that one of the recommendations is and I think it’s just for ease of management but Google recognize those those as being like singular and plural version is the same keyword so even though it’s in you put it an exact match brackets you don’t have to put all those different variations because Google will still serve your ad even if it’s not exactly as it like if you just use one keyword one exact match keyword type in the ad group Google will still display your ad for the plural version or if they add the VA modifier, and in this case, like Cole pepper and Cole pepper VA, Google will still display that and that’s a change that just occurred kinda recently and again, that’s because machine learning has gotten so much better.

That makes sense. So my point is, yes, Frankie to make management a little bit easier. Beta groups should only be a handful of very closely theme keywords where you want to spend your time there is developing your negative keyword list as far as your alpha campaigns. Yeah, as long as they’re very closely related. But again, you really don’t even need to create a bunch of keywords in the alpha list because Google will still display your ad now for what it knows to be. What do they call them? Shit, close variants. That’s what it’s called close variants. Okay. It was a good question though.

Okay, cool. We’re almost out of time, guys. Marcus says via spam links which are not indexed by Google. Do I need to worry about them know?

You mean if you have spam links pointing to your site?

Should You Be Worried If Spam Links Are Not Indexed By Google?

Uh, yeah. No, I mean, I’m not sure what the question is. Mark is if you’re asking if you have spam links pointing to your site that aren’t being indexed by Google, do you need to worry about them, kind of if it’s to a money site only because just because they’re not indexed doesn’t mean Google doesn’t know about that.

It’s most likely that Google knows about them. One of the ways you can tell is go to search console, look at the links to your site. And you can download a report. And you’ll see that there are probably a lot of links that are linking to your site that are not indexed in Google. Google knows they’re there, or else they wouldn’t be in the report. So that’s something that, you know, Marco doesn’t ever disavow and stuff. And I haven’t had to do that shit. And a couple of like, several years, but I used to disavow spam links, and it would work I’ve recovered sites from penguin penalties from that it’s a pain in the ass. I don’t like doing that kind of shit anymore. But anyways, if you have spam links that you’re using to push something that isn’t indexed in Google, don’t worry about it. You can try to get them indexed. You know, we have a service that eventually will be up hopefully the next week or so. And our link builder, he does a lot of spam links to, you know, in the correct way. And one of the things he does is always submit them to indexers. But just because they go through the index or doesn’t mean they’re going to be index. All you have to worry about is Google become aware of them. And typically Google will become aware of this. Sooner or later okay? Good question as well.

Paul says: if you’re a G Suite customer Google Plus for your G Suite account should remain active contact your G Suite administrator for more details? Okay, cool I could care less about Google Plus anymore. Find out why they are not indexed a lot of those a lot of those are infected disavow those yeah see that’s I agree with Clint in that respect.

You know, I like to I’ve done it in the past I don’t really mess with that kind of stuff much anymore like off page cleanup and stuff I don’t really have to but yeah in the past that’s what I would do. So I agree with the plan.

What Are Possible Reasons Behind The Increase Of Bounce Rates?

Dan says I set up two domains along with two g sweet accounts to do cold email sequencing using prospect rocket bounce rates were up to 30% even though I didn’t mean that was probably look up.

I hadn’t I hadn’t really shouldn’t results from prospect rockin I’m not trying to talk shit about like David Sprague’s he’s got a lot of tools that I actually do use like rap videos are great for meetings and that kind of stuff.

But I had something to do with running things through prospect rocket. I don’t know if that’s still the case but I had terrible I mean like I couldn’t get my inbox at 30% and I haven’t even used it

Adam: Bradley so maybe you can clarify but is that what it was scraping or what is sending?

Bradley: Cold email sequence bounce rates were 30% that means about 30% of them were bouncing back well are you verifying your emails, Dan? The emails that you’re the email list that you’re sending emails to are you sending running them through like never bounce for example like that’s something you got to worry about if you’re if you’re using something like lead Kahuna, which is the scraper that I use again David sprigs product so great scraper. If you’re doing a lot of mass emails, that’s a great scraper. If you’re not doing a lot of masses, you’re doing more targeted stuff I would highly recommend leads recon. So like the video email prospecting that I’m developed like the updating that now for Jambi monetization, asset monitoring, you know, lead gen asset monetization and I’m doing very targeted email Sales again back to my roots which is how I really started my agency so I’m doing individual video email so for that leads recon is fabulous. But if you’re doing a lot of mass cold emails then yeah leads lead Kahuna is great for that well. You can use the never bounce and bright verify as part of the software which will go check them but I would recommend that once you filter your list your output list your export list with your con you know contacting those that you still go upload that CSV file to never bounce and only download the valid emails output so don’t double dip because I made that mistake and we burn through a lot of money verifying emails like three times because we use the never bounce settings and lead Kahuna and right verified but then I would still output the export file and then upload it to never bounce because it would still find additional invalid or spam traps or unverified emails that I would have been sending to which will lower your domain reputation and low and will cause your email to inbox less and less over time, so that that’s why I recommend that damn what I would tell you to do is just second leads going to never bounce is built in.

Yeah. But I still would recommend and I and again, guys, I’ve tested this over and over again, if you take that same export file, even if you used never bounce as part of the lead Kahuna scraping process, if you export that CSV and then go to never bounce and upload it and then let it process and then you download you can download all and it will have a column and show you what the status code is for each one of them. You’ll see you’ll still end up with many of them that are either invalid or will be what they call catch all on verified and that kind of stuff. So I would recommend either just running using just bright verify in league Kahuna itself and then manually editing or uploading them to never bounce once you’ve generated the list. Okay? but yes, that’s what I’m saying. It scrapes crappy emails you have to verify and never bounce.

So yeah, Dan Absolutely. That’s your issue right there. That’s your issue. You’re sending emails to shit. You’re sending out emails to shit email addresses, right? A lot of that stuff’s going to bounce. And it’s going to be that’s going to lower your domain reputation. In fact, I would probably recommend if you’ve already hit 30% bounce rates, abandon those domains. And remember, you can add additional domain aliases to the same gG Suite account. So I would abandon those domains and go by similar domains and add them as G sweet emails as domain aliases, and then start emailing again. But make sure you’re doing the never bounds. Okay?

Oh, cool. We’re almost done. And I thought we’re going to go way over me. See what’s the last comment was here? Yeah. Okay. All right.

Does The Opportunity Lie Greater In Mass GMBs or Client-Side GMBs If You’re Just Starting Out?

Calvin says if I’m just starting out, does the opportunity like greater and masculine bees or client-side GMB or both? Really? Both? Absolutely. That’s good. Both in both. That’s cool. Both Yeah, absolutely. Both. The thing is guys then there maybe you know, it may, it’s getting harder and harder to verify.

And Google is going to continue making it harder. And I’ve been predicting that since, you know, we really started pushing building additional GMB assets. Because I know it guys, it’s all that’s the case of SEO, anything. Anytime something works really, really good people catch on, and they do more and more of it, and then they get shut down. And then we figure out another, it’s a cat and mouse game that we play. But I know my prediction has been that it’s going to be more and more difficult to verify. And so you know it while it’s still available, do that, but at some point is going to become damn near impossible without providing corporate Docs or screen, you know, like, you know, things that can absolutely verify that there’s a legit business at that physical location. And that’s going to make it harder and harder. And so that’s why it’s good to do it while you can. Because if the more that you have to practice with for example, the better you will get so that when that time comes, you’ll be able to get results from just working on individual GMB assets that are you know, bonafide is part genuine business type stuff so I would do both. Okay.

Okay the fact that you are consulting with the tools make me feel better about using He must be talking about Peter drill yeah I’ve been chatting with him almost on a weekly basis and he’s in Australia and I’m in the state so it’s like a 15 hour time difference so I’ve talked to him at 6 am in the morning and it’s like 9 pm at night on his end and we’ve done that several weeks in a row so he’s got some good stuff going on then.

Dan would the Peter drew software be a waste of money for service-based companies that wouldn’t have driving directions to their business address? well I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this… there’s there’s an update coming down. I was going to ask this but forgot to do so for what’s the replacement for all the map stuff? There’s an update coming, okay? Just that’s all I can say – there’s an update coming.

Quintin says hello I’m a full time musician I’m looking to spam My name quit and revenue- we talked about this last week when.. yeah?

Adam: this is a different question though I like the way that he’s using discuss to spam.

Do You Still Recommend Press Releases To Increase Visibility?

Bradley: Keep doing it. All right, all right let me let me start reading it again then because the opening part of it sounded exactly like the previous question that we asked. Hello, I’m a full-time musician. I’m looking to spam My name, quitting revenue so much that people think I’m the mayor of Charleston South Carolina when you Google Charleston. Do you still recommend press releases?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I love press releases still use the shit out of them all the time in fact I use them heavily so I would absolutely recommend that. One of my videos content press for my name blasting and Charleston every other hour or something about me as posted 24 hours a day any recommendations um. Yeah I mean one thing is if you’re if you’re brand is Quintin rabbit, or like your name is your brand set up a GM before that, I don’t know why that wouldn’t be possible.

You know what I mean? Like I don’t think that’s it because I know that realtors do it right. Doctors do that sometimes, you know, they were they have their brand, their, their name is like their brand and like that’s their business. So they, you know, I can’t imagine you couldn’t do it as a musician. So, set up a GMB use that to put publish GMB posts consistently and regularly, just like you probably do on Facebook or, you know, whatever other your social networks are, you know, I don’t do music marketing, but SoundCloud, probably in a lot of other places. So I would recommend that you, you know, use Google to because remember, that’s you want to, we’re trying to feed Google what it wants. So, use a GMP set yourself up as a branded entity, even if it’s a personal brand use that press releases is great for that that’s gonna help to build authority. Something else you might want to do is, you know, try to reach out by the way, in your case, I would say try to reach out to some of the local news and media stations and stuff like that and try to develop like, I mean, don’t spam them. That’s not what I’m saying. But I’m saying try to develop a relationship with some of the local media type people or newspapers and or local magazines like event magazines, and things like that, or event blogs, that kind of stuff. And see if, you know, you can get posted on local event boards and things where you can, you know, kind of like not like I said, don’t spam them. But when you have bigger events, and, you know, place concert events or things that you’re going to be at performing at that you can contact them with a well written press release. And they’ll publish for you right, and get picked up on the local media websites and perhaps even get some TV airtime, you know, get some featured on local news and stuff like that. That’s what I would recommend doing. In a case like yours, I would absolutely do that because you’re trying to build your own brand. And there’s no better way to do that than to get local press from it like and not just press releases that you spam out there. That’s a good starting point, but like to get actual local journalists or broadcast journalists to do to run stories on you, right, and that’s perfectly legit. And that’s perfect. You’re perfectly capable of doing that if you try to develop a relationship with them.

Go ahead and spam away until then, though.

Alright, guys, I gotta wrap it up. Quinces, I predict verification will be paid to play. Yeah, you do that. And like I said, I’m, you know, showing corporate docs like utility bills with the company name on it with the physical address showing and that kind of stuff that’s something I’ve had to do already not for the lead gen stuff but for for actual businesses that i’ve you know manage that have moved locations and they didn’t have access to their original GMB that was verified so we had to produce corporate docs and things like that in order for Google. But I mean, it was easy to do once once we get Google what we wanted within 24 hours it was moved and ranking you know what I mean? So I think that’s what’s how it’s going to go. Or like Clint says there may be a paid pay to play version of it.

David No, there’s not. We keep it cheap enough to where you know, we don’t have to provide discounts for upgrades for that

You guys aren’t anything on a radio. A new version of SEO ultimate plus. Yeah, it’s been it’s been in beta for a couple months now Clint.

Adam: I talked to Jeffrey every Wednesday after Hump Day Hangouts and asked him Clint so I’ll make it a point to go and ask him and as soon as as I know something it’ll go first into our semantic mastery mastermind.

Hernan: That that’s who receives all of our all of the benefits as soon as he tells me Yeah, it’s a goal we got it you guys will be the first to know in our semantic mastery mastermind Yeah, because people ask about that all the time So…

Bradley: Alright, guys gotta run. Thanks, everybody will see you guys next week. mastermind webinar tomorrow for those of you in the mastermind. We’ll see you then. Bye everyone. See ya.

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