#anyways this is what im doing ahead of a hurricane :)

[patrocles]

The Lord of Winterfell was twenty-three, only a few years older than the Lords of Raventree and Riverrun... yet Stark was a man and they were boys, as all those who saw them together seemed to sense. The lads shrank in his presence, Mushroom says. "Whever the Wolf of the North stalked into a room, Bloody Ben would recall that he was but three-and-ten, whilst Lord Tully and his brother blushered and stammered and flushed red as their hair."

"The city was his, to do with as he wished." Septon Eustace says. "The northman had taken it without drawing a sword or loosing an arrow. Be they king's men or queen's men, stormlanders or seahorses, riverlords or gutter knights, highborn or low, common solidiers deffered to him as if they had been sborn to his service."

FIRE & BLOOD - The Hour of the Wolf

[sergeifyodorov]

Hi cody which of the big names (or lesser known guys that are your blorbos) do u think will play for their team for their entire career and who do u think will leave? Tampa bay is on my hit list for dropping stamkos like that

ohoho this one is FUN... everyone is my blorbo im gonna go through every team and See...

the biggest difficulty in making this list is that like inevitably b/c of the Inevitable Passage Of Time the babies grow up and sometimes they grow up into like. diff ppl... like i imagine rn the sharks and hawks respectively want mack and bedsy to be with them for life... but is that Happening? it's too early to say ... bedsy seems like he might though. he's goodcanadianboy enough.

boston bruins: marchand and pasta are 100% lifers... mcavoy seems like they want him to be a lifer but he hasn't made up his mind yet.

buffalo sabres: if they make the playoffs within the next five years (BIG IF) then i can see one of power or dahlin sticking it out. but at this point i'm pretty sure the only thing that can save the sabres is a serious exorcism and i mean a SERIOUS one so i doubt this'll happen in truth

detroit red wings: larkin. duh.

florida panthers: barkov

montreal canadiens: n/a. see buffalo sabres but replace "power" with "caufield" and "dahlin" with "slafkovsky" . i mean i guess you can put arber on that list but mostly because his career isn't gonna be that long probably

ottawa senators: the one and only THOMAS CHABOT

tampa bay lightning: i WOULD have said stamkos until this offseason... fucking crasy... ok anyway here's my juice: vasy's back injury/surgery have meant he is no longer the goalie he was and i doubt he'll command much after this contract is over. i say 50-50 he leaves vs stays as a reasonable backup/tandem guy. kucherov Wants 2 Win and has a much lower tolerance for Bullshit than stamkos, which means if a competitive price is not being paid for him he will Just Leave. victor hedman is going to be a lifer though

toronto maple leafs: morgan rielly is the only one i know in my heart is a lifer, but only because a) jt was already an islander and b) willy and auston will probably play most of their reasonable careers as leafs and then have like 1-3 seasons somewhere else as ancient old men to Cup Chase One Last Time. don't ask about the other guy you know how i feel about jinxes

carolina hurricanes: n/a

columbus blue jackets: n/a

new jersey devils: n/a... they will try to keep at least 1 hughes but i think we have seen so little of the current devils era (hischier/hughes) that it's hard to say anything about their future atm. can you believe nico was only drafted the year after auston like they haven't gotten off the ground at ALL.

new york islanders: [squints in trying to name islanders]... actually a bunch of lifers looking at it. sorokin. anders lee. barzal if you're nasty. brock nelson. etc

new york rangers: chris kreider FER SURE, igor shesterkin FER MAYBE

philadelphia flyers: see devils re: brink of something new. they're going to try and keep tk forever though

pittsburgh penguins: do i REALLY have to say anything here

washington capitals: Do I Really Have To Say Anything Here

chicago blackhawks: was about to make another bad seth jones contract joke here before remembering he's already played on a different team. no further comment

colorado avalanche: natemac has made it pretty damn clear he wants to stay an av forever, because sidcros stayed a penguin forever. do what you will with that information

dallas stars: jamie benn definitely, but everyone else is too young to say something about or has been on other teams already. good luck with your jrob21 contract negotiations stars front office You Will Need It

minnesota wild: ...jared spurgeon...?

nashville predators: did you guys know puckpedia has the preds abbreviated as NAS and they're ahead of the devils. crazy. anyway roman josi and juuse saros are gonna be preds for life, and probably filip forsberg too

st louis blues: vlad tarasenko IN MY HEART...

winnipeg jets: hellebuyck and schiefele fer sure

anaheim ducks: because they've been trying to trade him for a decade and have been unsuccessful yet: john gibson

calgary flames: n/a

edmonton oilers: nuge + mcdrai also

la kings: doughty + kopi

seattle kraken: n/a

san jose sharks: logan couture

vancouver canucks: my hot take is nobody because quinn hughes is going to pull a mark giordano or jason spezza or perhaps even a chris tanev and play the last couple years of his career as a leaf. petey is gonna slut it up somewhere else later, brock is straight up going to leave as a ufa OR sign a short bridge and then leave as a ufa, and jt miller was a ranger

vegas golden knights: n/a

[blossom-hwa]

what if i want u to strangle me and bring me back to life to kiss me on the fucking mouth huh lina have u ever thought of that 😤😤 anyways i know nothing about little women but u know what im just gonna request choi san as choi do-il tyvm AND CONGRATS ON THE LATE 5 YEAR ANNIVERSARY - your one and only baker anon <3

hey so um you're dead to me :) so very dead to me :) how fucking dare you request this I'm going to go INSANE

5 year anniversary drabble game: send me a Stray Kids/TXT/Golden Child/Ateez/The Boyz member + a prompt (check out the post for ideas) and I’ll write a drabble for you!

(this is one scene of a longer fic that I’m trying to write for little women specifically - not an idol x reader story, but choi do-il x oh in-joo. for the purposes of this version, of course, it’s idol x reader though!)

REQUESTS OPEN!!

~

Title: A Small Storm (Excerpt)

Pairing: San x gender neutral!reader

Word count: 1.7k

Warnings: n/a

~

"You're a small storm, Ms. Oh. No matter where you go, you change the flow of the air, although you don’t seem to notice it." - Little Women

. . . . .

Tropical Storm. That's what San had your name saved as in his phone before.

That’s what he saves it as again when he gets his new phone.

The old one had been damaged. Screen cracked, back cracked - if he wasn’t careful, bits of glass would sometimes try to pierce his skin. When he reached Greece, the first thing he’d done was pull out the SIM card, snap it in half, and toss it in a dump. The phone he kept. Sentimental purposes, or something.

He’d memorized your number. It was a given in case they were ever separated, in case his phone was out of commission and he needed a new one. When he gets his new iPhone, creamy white in contrast to the previous sleek black, he types the number into his contacts and presses save with a trembling thumb.

He hovers over the call button for a while, one minute turning to five, then seven, then ten. In the end, he turns off the phone and puts it away. 

Choi San is not a coward. He worked with the Russian mafia. He worked with Park Jae-sang and his insane wife. He’s laundered money, murdered people, gotten himself in and out of terrifying situations without so much as blinking an eye, and he’s made it out alive and in one piece. 

Still, as he closes the drawer with the phone inside, it’s hard not to hear the voice in the back of his head screaming coward. 

. . .

He takes the phone out the next day. There are no new notifications, at least not important ones, and San has to fight down a twinge of disappointment. But disappointment at what? It’s not like he told anyone he’d gotten a new phone. He didn’t even tell anyone when he’d get one - all he’d said to you was a vague eventually. It’s not like he told anyone he was keeping the same number, either. 

Still, though. It hurts. Even though he was the coward who didn’t press the call button in the first place. 

Then the phone starts ringing. 

He jumps. Looks around to see who saw him jump (no one, he lives alone and only his co-workers and parents have bothered him anything in the past six months) and looks back at the phone. 

Tropical Storm

For all the anxiety you give him, maybe he should go ahead and change your name to Hurricane instead. 

His hand automatically curls around the phone, thumb immediately accepting the call. “Y/N?” 

(He’s bizarrely proud of the way his voice only barely shakes.)

A sharp gasp, almost a scream. San’s heart leaps into his throat. “Y/N? Hello?” he repeats, nails of his free hand biting into his palm. 

Silence. 

“Y/N?”

He’s got one hand on the doorknob, has already begun twisting it open when he finally hears your voice. 

“Sorry.” It’s warped, garbled, and it sounds like you don’t have enough air. San knows that voice - it comes when unexpected things happen, when something shakes you to the core and you don’t know how to react. The door is open and he’s recalling the route to the airport, praying he can make the next flight to your country, when you speak again. “Sorry, I’m fine.”

Then you end the call. 

San looks at the phone in his hand, dumbfounded. You hung up. You hung up -

He calls you again. And again, and again, and again until the number in the call logs beside your name reaches seven. 

You decline every single one. 

San closes the door. Turns. Automatically packs a bag of the barest essentials, then searches up the next flight back. It leaves in three hours. The trip to the airport takes one. 

He shoves the phone back in his pocket. He can make it there in half an hour. 

. . .

San doesn’t break into your apartment. It’s one choice he considers, but his flight touches down at three in the afternoon and from what he’s dug up about you over the course of the plane ride, your job at the florist two streets down from the apartment your grand-aunt left you will let you off at around five. And though he’s ascertained that you aren’t in trouble, at least not yet, San thinks there are better ways to make sure of this than by entering your apartment when you aren’t home. 

The florist is called Green Garden. It’s a cheerful little place, even to his critical eye - lots of customers bustling about, one or two employees dressed in green aprons to help them out. But when San looks through the glass doors, only the cashier’s face catches his eye. 

You don’t look up when he comes in, not at first. Someone’s just finished calling your name in the back and you say something in response, not that San is paying any attention to it. Instead, as the door shuts behind him, all he can process is how the air changes in your presence, shifting and swaying and whirling about you in a small tempest, drawing him into the eye as he wavers on the edge -

You’re looking at him. You’re looking at him now, and that’s the only thing San needs to step fully into your hurricane, meeting you in the eye. 

“Hi,” he says, stepping up to the counter. Your mouth has dropped open and San lets himself smile at it, resisting the urge to tip up your chin and close it himself. 

You close your mouth abruptly. Open it again. San watches your throat bob, the endearing expression of shock still on your face as you try to find your words. He wonders what you’ll say to him. Will you yell? Shout? Will your voice remain steady and low? Will it shake? Will it rise to the shrill screech you adopted when no one told you about the plan?

As it turns out, you do none of these. 

Instead, you burst into tears. 

. . .

“You’re an asshole,” you finally hiccup when San has gotten you out of the flower shop and back to your apartment, your bundle of things held in his hand. “You’re an absolute piece of shit, San.”

“I know. Sorry.” He brushes a line of tears from your cheek, smiling to hide the fact that his eyes aren’t exactly dry, either. 

You fumble with the apartment keypad, pressing in a string of numbers that San will pretend he doesn’t already know. The door swings open and you herd him inside, still wiping tears from your face. 

He drops your things where you point by the door, then puts his own bag down next to them. When he looks up, you’re already looking at him, eyes trained on his. “What?”

Quick as a flash, you step forward and slap him across the chest. 

“Ow.” He looks down at his chest and then back up at you. “What was that -”

“How did you find me?” you snap, cutting him off. “How did you know where I work? And - oh my god - how did you know where my apartment was without me telling you? Were you stalking me?”

“I didn’t stalk you,” San replies, not bothering to dim the smile on his face. It would be too hard to hide the way his heart is buzzing with warmth at the sound of outrage in your voice, the voice he didn’t realize he missed as much as he did until now. “I found you.”

“That’s stalking!” You swat him again, and this time San doesn’t bother to hide his laugh, either. “Stop laughing! You didn’t text, you didn’t call -”

San takes the hand that just swatted his chest, still laughing. “I did call,” he says, squeezing your fingers lightly. “Seven times. You didn’t answer any of them, so I came.”

(”I tried my best to come up with a plan. But I couldn’t, so I just came.”)

You look down at your joined hands, then back up at him. Something shifts in your eyes, a questioning breeze flitting across your pupils before something solemn settles in them, a spot of calm in the storm. 

“Why?”

He swallows. Contemplates answers. He could say he thought you were in trouble, that he thought you needed help. That would be the safest answer. But there are holes in that response, and in those eyes of yours San can see you wouldn’t let him stop there. Wouldn’t let him take the cop-out. 

For the first time, San allows himself to wonder if you may have missed him as much as he missed you. 

“Why?” he repeats, words soft. “Because you’re a storm, Y/N.” He steps forward and you don’t pull away when he takes your other hand in his, bringing himself into the swirling winds of your tempest eyes. “A small storm. Wherever you go, you change the flow of the air.”

Your eyes flash with a memory, a memory of the words he spoke in the car so many months ago. 

“I’ve been caught in your storm,” he says quietly. “And I’ll follow it, wherever your winds blow.”

He presses his forehead to yours. Your eyes close for a moment, hands still gripping his. 

“I want to be with you,” he whispers. “Forever, until the day I die.” He swallows. “Will you allow it?”

Slowly, you squeeze San’s palms. Your fingers weave between his, settling against his skin. Altogether it probably only takes you a second to respond, but there has never been a more excruciating second in San’s entire life. 

“Yes,” you whisper, your breath a ghost against his skin. “Yes, San.” 

Your eyes glitter into his, the calm in the middle of a storm. Dazedly, San thinks his name has never sounded more like music from someone else’s lips. 

“I will.”

[florelia12]

Flora & Helia Headcanons

Im just gonna go ahead and do all of them cuz I need more winx content

1. Flora is definitely an early bird. She is up at 5 in the morning, watering her plants and doing yoga. Bloom can sleep through a hurricane and Flora is also pretty stealthy so she doesn't really notice. Helia gets up in the middle of night to write down random ideas that pops into his head. He usually gets obsessive once he begins a painting and he won't stop until its perfect, which means sleep is not a priority. Since Riven likes to train late, these two are always the last to go to sleep out of all the specialists.

2. Flora is the little spoon when they are going to sleep but at night Helia tends to move away to avoid all their hair getting tangled up (Stan couples with great hair). But our girl doesn't let him get away that easy and usually ends up throwing her leg over him and spooning him instead.

3. Flora hogs the covers cuz small people get cold easily and Helia lets her. The cold doesn't bother him anyway. They both love to cuddle but it quickly gets complicated with all that hair but that usually leads them to braiding each other's hair.

4. Helia is the one who does all this mushy stuff most of the time. There are times when Helia wakes her up with kisses just to inform her that he is now only going to sleep at 5 in the morning.

5. Both of them have nightmares cuz saving the universe takes it toll on your mental health. If they end up waking each other up because of the nightmares, they talk about it over a cup of tea. Flora used to get sleep terrors as a kid due to her anxiety so she makes sure to take her special brew to calm herself before she goes to bed and has passed on the habit to Helia. They are a very tea centred couple.

6. Riven or Flora usually wake up at night to find him scribbling away on his notebook with the lamplight on and at this point they are pretty used to it. Flora's the mom friend who gives great advice and often finds herself surprised by her own deep insights (in the middle of the day)

7. Flora has issues with anxiety and while she is mostly successful at hiding it from the others, Helia pays too much attention to her to not notice when she zones out or picks her nails. However, she hates it when people notice and try to help but she loves how Helia knows exactly when to give her space.

8. Helia sleeps shirtless and sometimes in his jogger pants that is always covered in paint. Flora gets cold easily at night but wears thin nightdresses to bed much to Helia's confusion. She just likes being all covered up in blankets,

9. Flora is the specialist when it comes to all kinds of tea and while Helia is good at many things, cooking is not one of them. So Flora just makes little homemade tea bags for him so that it is easier.

10. Flora has a sweet tooth but they both love sour candies. They are supposed to the healthy couple so no one knows when they sneakily share candy with each other.

11. Both of them are hopeless romantics (as we all know) but prefer romantic books than movies. However, Flora is the kind of psychopath who can watch gore without flinching one bit. It scares Helia but Flora is just pretty used to blood since both her parents are in the healing profession. She loves Horror because she knows its fake but it makes Helia uncomfortable even if he doesn't admit it. They usually only watch horror movies with the whole gang while Flora nonchalantly calls out the director for his inacurrate portrayal of stabbings. It makes Helia wonder sometimes.

12. Flora is smol & Helia is tol. Once, Flora had to literally climb onto a chair during an argument with Helia but that just made him laugh and made her even angrier.

13. Flora scares easily meaning that she freaks out when Stella or Musa suddenly pop out of corners and scream at her. But she fights monsters for a living at this point and has learned to control her reactions. Helia's face is unreadable so no one can usually tell what he is feeling. But he has a deadly fear of clowns that Riven found out about and makes it a point to give Helia a small heart attack at least once a year.

14. Flora would pet a shark and Helia wrangles werewolves and dragons on a daily basis so they aren't afraid of animals, even the small ones. Both of them usually ignore the spider unless its big, then they would just safely let it outside or Flora would sometimes collect them for her potions.

15. Helia pretty much lives in the dark with only a lamplight for when he is writing. Flora did develop a fear of the dark after villains kept using spells on her that put her in darkness. So there is always a nightlight beside her when she sleeps.

16. Flora doesn't flinch when people get stabbed in movies but flinches at really loud noises. They both love the rain and kissing in the rain but once they hear thunder Flora drags Helia inside.

17. Both of them love to work at home. The house they are gonna live in is going to be huge and have all kinds of weird rooms (hehe), I mean well mostly there will be an art studio, a greenhouse and a potions lab. and another room. that is up for your imagination. if you don't get this then you are probably too young or innocent.

18. They like both dogs and cats and are definitely planning on getting a few pets together.

19. They call each other babe/baby like normal couples ( I cringe every time Helia calls Flora 'flower' in fanfics ). Helia likes to call her princess sometimes and Flora calls him papi in her mother tongue (spanish). It took Helia a while to grasp its full meaning and he loves it when she calls him that.

20. It mostly starts out with Helia as the Dom but Flora usually goes from soft sub to a brat pretty quickly.

[beuhakkaka]

PART 4. I am so tired wejwjjwjwj. I was lacking all inspiration and then boom 4 am creative juices started pouring. Is this healthy? Prbly not lmao. Anyways, warnings! blood and death deptions are ahead. Also spoilers for genshin impact Uwu. Pls enjoy this heaping amount of angst

The Archons Beloved

The woman seemed to relax slightly when she got his name. He didn't know why exactly, but he continued on.“You are in Mondstat, the city of wind and freedom. I brought you here.” her eyes bugged from shock. Mondstat??? That was very far away from Khaenri’ah! She definitely would not be able to retrieve anything from her hideout now. She didn't even know the layout of the land here. How was she supposed to survive? Her thoughts raced, every single thought she had presenting a new disaster scenario. All of which she ended up dead.

At least in Khaenri’ah she knew where everything was. Also one of the archons lived here. The anemo archon if she remembered correctly. The one who had nearly killed her with his hurricanes. She prayed that he was still searching Kheaneriah for survivors, and that he wouldn't be back any time soon. She was so lost in her own anxieties that she didn't even think to question Ventis' story. That was the least of her worries right now after all. 

Barbatos grew worried at her terror filled expression. He had expected her to be a little happier, having left the dangerous wasteland of Khaenri’ah. But after thinking it over, it clicked. She was probably afraid of him. He was one of the gods to destroy her home after all.

Of course she would be horrified to learn she was in the land watched over by an archon. Once again his guilt was compounded. He truly was a monster. Instead of dwelling on these thoughts though, he attempted to bring the woman out of her own head. He couldn't bear to see her so distraught. “How are your wounds?” Barbatos figured that was a good enough question, also he needed to make sure she wasn't hurt anymore. Especially since she was up and about now. The woman stared up at him. Good, he had caught her attention. She recoiled slightly, confusion on her expression. As though she were unaware of her injury in the first place. She placed a hand on her abdomen. Flinching only slightly. It seemed he was right about not being able to fully heal her.

Barbatos frowned softly, having hoped she wouldn't feel any pain. As the woman examined herself, she looked confused at the amount of blood on her dress. The brown fabric was drenched. Barbatos now found himself also confused. She was unconscious when he found her, maybe she had no recollection of getting injured in the first place. Finally she spoke, drawing him out of his thoughts. 

 “I…we-well my side aches a bit…and my dress is ruined by the blood but uh…Im ok…” She mulled over her words before speaking again, pointing her finger at Venti. “Did…did you heal me?” She caught on quickly, he smiled softly. “Yes, I did. I'm glad to hear you’re feeling better. I was quite worried when I found you…” Once again she was surprised.

He didn't look like a healer at all. His vision was anemo as well, she didn't know that anemo could heal. In her silence, Venti’s soft voice filled the quiet. “What is your name child?” He spoke sweetly, doing his best to show that he meant no harm. He hadn't even realized he had used the term child. He was just so used to speaking to humans like that. 

Child?? She was a grown adult, and was now a slightly offended one. But…then again in this form it was probably hard to tell. She sighed softly before responding. “It's Annora...” Annora. What a unique name. Venti found it suited her. It sounded nice as well…very elegant. He recognized it as a latin name, though what that name meant he could not recall. Venti smiled slightly as he responded. “My, that's quite the unique name. I like it.” Annora’s lips twitched a little, like she wanted to smile at the compliment.

She must have been too scared to though, her lips falling into a frown again. He spoke, fiddling with his hands nervously. “Listen, Annora, I know it will probably be hard for um…someone your size to survive in a new environment. I would like to help you.” Annora stared up at him, her green eyes wide. “Would you let me help you?” Ventis' voice was soft, doing his best to not scare her. Annora looked shocked before she frowned slightly, lowering her gaze. Why would he want to help her? He had just met her after all.

He probably didn't even know what she was. She was from Khaenriah too. Shouldn't he be more hesitant? Truthfully, she wanted to believe him. But no one offers help without wanting something in return. This was especially true for her. Annoras voice was soft, unsure of herself and him. “You…what do you want exactly? From me I mean…I can't give you anything of worth y’know...” maybe at her original height she could have, providing him with meat and hides in exchange for help. But as of right now she couldn't even defend herself against a slime. 

Venti looked down, guilt racking him once again. She wasn't wrong, he did want something. He wanted to atone for his great sins. He wanted to feel like a good person again. His hands clenched and unclenched as he realized just how selfish that was. He could never make up for all the lives he took. Using her to feel better about himself…it was wrong. But even so, he still wanted to help her.

Venti’s voice was haunted, dripping with shame and guilt. “I…I just…I simply want to help you Annora. I understand that you don't trust me but…I just, I can't leave you out here all alone in the wild. At least not without offering assistance..” He had to keep to his morals. If she denied his help, he would just have to just accept that. But…despite how strongly he believed freedom must be given to all, dark thoughts of simply forcing her to remain protected at his side flitted across his mind. Even if it was by force, she would be better off right? As long as she was alive…

No. He can't do that to her. He had promised himself and his people freedom for all. He can't go back on that, no matter how tempting. Barbatos refocused his attention on her, unconsciously holding his breath as he awaited her answer. Annora pursed her lips, in deep thought. She did need help, desperately. Annora didn't have her weapon, she didn't know this land's terrain and she was in the country ruled by a god who wanted her dead along with the rest of Celestia.

She needed an ally. But…Venti felt weird to her. Something about him just…wasn't right. Maybe it was the tremendous amount of guilt that laced his words, or maybe it how eerily similar his voice was to the anemo archon. Eventually after debating with herself, Annora spoke once again. “...Ok. I will accept your help…” she knew that by taking up his offer she would owe him, and that was scary. But she needed the help. Venti’s smile didn't comfort her much. He looked so elated…she didn't understand why someone would want to help her so much. Venti couldn't contain his joy, practically beaming. “Gr-great! Um, quick question, are you hungry?”

[janetbrown711]

"Magica?" Poe looked at her curiously, "you look uh-"

"Like a rotting corpse?!" She picked him up and squeezed against him, her eye accidentally falling out as she did so.

"Woah.. that uh-... that fell right out there," he commented. Magica growled.

"Something has happened," she sneered, picking up her eye and putting it back.

"Yep," poe just nodded.

"I knew it! I could feel the dark shadow forces stirring," she began to pace her small skull island.

"I'm not suprised because i saw her! The princess Webbigail!"

Magica paused.

"Webbigail... alive...?" Her eye twitched.

"That Vanderquack brat?!" She threw Poe against a wall.

"Uh- yes..? I guess she got a kick in the head- the curse just isn't what it used to be," he shrugged.

"That's why im stuck here in limbo!!!" She realized furiously. "My curse is unfulfilled!" She flung her arms out, her hand flying clean off with the rest of her arm length glove. She sat and cried dramatically.

"Oh Poe... look at me," she flung herself on a rock. "I'm falling apart."

"Oh no Magica," Poe said as he brought over her hand. "Considering how long you've been dead, you look pretty good."

"Bah..." she pushed it away as Poe put back on her hand.

"Magica, you do! You do!" He tried to convince.

"Really?" She sniffled.

"Is this the face of a crow who would lie to you?" He smiled innocently. "Come on, for a minute there you had your old spark back!"

"Before I had lost the gift from the dark spirits," she hissed and sat up. "And the key to my powers!"

"What? You mean this old thing," he lifted up the purple gemstone. Magica gasped.

"Where did you find this?" She inquired.

"Oh i found it-"

"Give it to me!" She snatched it.

"Wha-"

"My old friend-"

"Brother-"

"Friend, together again," she had been talking to the stone. She picked it up and embraced it to her cheek.

"Now my dark purpose can be fulfilled!" She laughed. "And the last of the Vanderquacks will die!!!"

"Where is that wind coming from?" Poe looked around, but lightning quickly flashed and shot him out of his seat.

"Come forth my minions!!!" she called, dark shadows swirling out of the purple gen like a massive hurricanes.

"It is time to fulfill your purpose one last time!!! Go!! Fly!!! And kill Princess Webbigail!!!"

.o0o.

Louie was the last one of the three (well four, if you counted the dog- which he didnt) to sit down, and when he tried to sit next to his uncle, Lena had sat down right there and growled at him. Louie rolled his eyes and sat next to Webby.

"Mut gets the window seat," he muttered under his breath. Donald rolled his eyes and continued forging the fake documents for Webby. Webby fiddled with her necklace.

"Hey- you know that's not very ladylike, right? You're a Grand Duchess" Louie asked. Webby harumphed and slumped over.

"How is it you know what a Grand Duchess' is even like?" She said.

"I make it my business to know," he smirked.

"Oh," she gave up and kept playing with the necklace. Louie sighed.

"Look, Webby, i'm just trying to help," he teased. Donald side eyed him. Webby sat up.

"Louie, do you really think im royalty?" She asked.

"You know I do," he said.

"Oh yeah? Then stop bossing me around!" She spat, slouching over and playing with the necklace once again.

Donald chuckled. "She certainly has a mind of her own."

"I hate that in a woman," he growled. Webby stuck out her tongue at him before returning to face the window.

Donald chuckled and marked off "Webby- 24" and "Louie- 3" on a spare piece of paper. He was having fun. There was a long stretch of silence, Webby got out a book (Louie didn't even know if she could actually read, but it appeared so), and Donald excused himself for a moment.

"Look, I think we got off on the wrong foot," Louie sighed.

"Good, I agree," she snarked. "But i accept your apology."

"Apology? Who said I was sorry?" Louie gawked.

"I still accept it," she smiled cheekily and went back to her book. She paused a second.

"Are you gonna miss it?" She asked.

"Miss what?" Louie asked.

"Russia," Webby stared out the window.

"No," Louie said flatly.

"But... it was your home," Webby said.

"It was a place... that I lived in... end of story." he closed his eyes and sighed.

"Well then you must plan on staying and making Paris your home, huh?" Webby asked.

"What is with you a-and home?" He threw his arms in the air.

"Well- for one, its something every normal person wants," she huffed, "and for another thing, its just- ugh. Forget it," she climbed out of the train booth just as Donald appeared with Lena once more.

"Oh thank goodness you are here- get him out of my sight," Webby scowled before leaving.

"Louie, what did you do?" Donald sighed.

"Me?! I-it's her! Won't stop talking about home and stuff..." he crossed his arms and sat back down.

"Louie, it's not her fault. She doesn't know," Donald sat by him.

"Yeah, yeah," he blew it off. Donald sighed and went back to his paperwork.

"I'm... i'm gonna get some fresh air," Louie went out of the cabin.

"And i'll be here," Donald shook his head slowly.

Little did they know, a swarm of dark shadows were flying speedily not too far away.

But for now, it was time for their papers to be checked. As Donald waited in line he overheard a conversation.

"I cannot believe i had to delay this trip for a week because they changed the papers from blue to red! It's outrageous!"

"Blue.. to red?" Donald looked down.

Their papers were blue.

Donald dashed his way out of line and back to Louie, who went back to the cabin not too long ago.

"Something wrong?" Louie asked.

"One thing i hate about this government is that everything is in red," he explained. Louie rubbed his face.

"Hoh boy," Louie rubbed his face and started packing their things.

"I suggest we move to the baggage cart," Donald said.

"On it," Louie nodded. He nudged the sleeping Webby in the corner, who punched him square in the face. He fell back in his seat.

"Oh i'm so- oh it was you. Nevermind," she relaxed. Louie rolled his eyes.

"C'mon, we gotta go," he took her hand.

"Wha- where are we going?" She asked. Louie didn't explain.

"Men are such babies," she muttered under her breath, following him anyway.

"Ah, yes. This'll do nicely," Louie nodded.

"She'll freeze in here," donald rubbed his arms from the cold.

"She'll thaw in Paris," Louie rolled his eyes.

"What are we doing in the baggage car?" Webby asked. Both men shrugged with giant grins on their faces. "There wouldn't be anything wrong with our papers, would there?"

"Of course not, you grace," Louie mocked lightly, "it is just that I hate to see you with all those commonfolk." He spat the words like they were poison. Webby scoffed.

"Funny," she rolled her eyes and sat on a bag, before noticing that Lena wouldn't stop barking at a door.

"Lena? What's wrong?" She asked.

"She's a mutt, that's what," Louie said. Webby shot him a look and only that. As Donald went to investigate, the cart flung and all three of them fell to the ground, the cart somehow separating from the rest of the train. Donald stood up again and noticed that the engine room was on fire like mad.

"I think someone messed with the engine," Donald shouted over the wind. Louie huffed, took off his jacket and went to see for himself, instructing the others to stay there. Louie successfully got in after climbing over the coal cart, but it was too hot see anything and coals and hot pieces of rock were flying everywhere. He tried to look at the speedometer, but the fire grew and practically burned his feet, forcing him back.

"We're going way too fast!" Webby cried out. Louie quickly came back.

"Nobody is driving this train," he explained, "we're gonna have to jump." Webby and Donald nodded. Together they all opened a door they could all jump through but say they were far above the ground, and jumping would be impossible.

"We'll disconnect the car," Louie said, going outside to do it. He put his foot on it, but somehow it had melted.

"C'mon! I need a wrench- an axe- anything!" He called for his uncle, who handed him a hammer.

Lena's continuous barking distracted Webby from her search for something useful.

"What's the matter with you today?" Webby out her hands on her hips and Lena lowered her head to the box she was standing on labeled "explosives".

"Lena! You're a genius!" Webby picked up a stick of dynamite. It was good timing too because not long after, Louie's hammer broke.

"Ugh! C'mon! There's gotta be something in there better than this!" He held his hand out and Webby placed the lit stick of dynamite. Louie blinked and looked at it.

"Well that'll work," he lodged it in it's place. "Go Go Go!" Everyone scrambled to the back of the cart, as the dynamite exploded.

"Well! Now we got plenty of track so we'll wait til it comes to a stop!" Louie said. He jinxed it though, as a swarm of black shadow demons could be seen destroying the larger bridge up ahead.

"You were saying?" Webby blinked. Louie growled, saw a massive chain and hook on the ground and got another idea.

"I need your help donald. Would ya give me a hand?" Louie asked. Just as he did though, Donald fell backward into a giant crate so Webby took her own liberty and decided to fill in.

"Hand me the chain," Louie had climbed down and was using all his strength to connect with the train from the bottom. Webby started to hand it to him when he stopped her.

"Not you!"

"Donald's busy. Wanna die or not?!" She gave him the chain. He took it and secured it to the bottom of the train. Then, a pipe broke loose and almost killed him, but Webby helped pull him up just in time. Their eyes met and he gazed into them for a long moment, but their look snapped when they saw a branch get destroyed.

"And to think it coulda been you," she teased a little, smirking. Louie cleared his throat and she helped him back inside.

"If we get through this... remind me to thank you," he shook his head, trying to get the flushed feeling out of his face.

"Here goes nothing," him and Webby pushed the chain off, and it connected to the track, but jerked the trainso it went off the rails but stilm showed no sign of slowing.

"Well boys, guess this is our stop!" Webby called as the men readied themselves. Soon, they linked arms.

"One... two... three!" They jumped off and into the snow. In the distance they saw the massive explosion the engine and baggage cart left and sighed breaths of relief.

"I... hate trains," Louie panted, collapsing in the snow.

"Me too," Webby groaned.

"Welp... gotta get going sometime. C'mon," Donald helped the two up and they headed off to find a town.

.o0o.

"No!!!" Magica slammed her fists on the table. She had been watching the whole thing with her magic.

"Woah, take it easy there," Poe said. Magica glared at him.

"How could they let her escape?!" She threw and shattered a skull into the ground.

"Ah, you're right, it is very upsetting," he acknowledged. "Guess this relic is broken," he threw it, but Magica scrambled to catch it, so much so her elbow fell off and her muscles streched to catch it.

"You IDIOT!" she growled.

"Now- master I-"

"I sold my soul for this!!!" She picked him up and squeezed him tightly.

"My very existence depends on it!!! And you almost shattered it!!!!" She threw him against a wall, harder than she had before.

"Yeah yeah, blame me, i'm an easy target," he coughed and muttered.

"What are you muttering about?" She looked at him.

"Oh just Webbigail. Wishing I could do the job for you Magica. I'd kill her nice and quick," he saluted.

"You are a crow and an imbecile," she rubbed her forehead, but then laughed to herself. He looked at her puzzled but she patted his head.

"No, no my dear Poe. I have something else in mind. Something a lot more... sinister to finish the job." She cackled, lightning flashing behind her.

"Uh- and what would that be?" He asked.

"Poe... where's the fun in telling you that?"

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

[minijenn]

Bot Battle Preview 3

aslkdjasldkjsaldjas ok so again I am SO sorry this chapter is taking SO goddamn long but yeah chances of me getting it out before kh3 comes out tomorrow are pretty much zero but whatever I’m still gonna pound away at it until then anyway alskdjalskdjsld again SORRY I REALLY AM BUT AHHHHHH IM AN ABSOLUTE EXCITED MESS RIGHT NOW FORGIVE ME 

“I-I… I can’t believe it…” Ford shook his head, the shame in his tone unmistakable as they all stood before the entrance to Gravity Falls’ dump. Pearl and the kids had spent the entire trip there explaining McGucket’s rather disheartening story to the author, who could only really react to it with shock and guilt that he was far too ashamed to hide. “I… I knew that Fiddleford had taken his… horrific experience with the portal harshly, but I could have never imagined he would have used that infernal memory gun to…” Ford trailed off, letting out a sad sigh as he shook his head and looked back to the ramshackle shack Pearl and the kids had told him McGucket now called home. “If what you all have told me really is true… then this is all my fault…”

“Oh, Stanford…” Pearl frowned, placing a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “This isn’t your fault. There’s no way you could have known; there’s no way any of us could have known… Because believe me, if Rose and Garnet and Amethyst and myself had known, then we certainly would have done everything in our power to help him…”

The most Ford could offer in response to such a solemn sentiment was a small, but weary smile. However, upon noticing the palpable remorse between the pair, Steven was quick to step in to try and alleviate it. “Maybe you guys weren’t able to help Mr. McGucket back then…” he began with a frown that soon turned into a reassuring smile. “But the good news is you can still help him now! Heck, we already have by helping him get back his memories!”

“Yeah!” Mabel chimed in enthusiastically. “Which is why I’m sure he’ll totally down to help you guys out with building your super-cool giant robot!”

“Wait, that’s why you clods dragged us all the way out here to this disastrous waste depository?” Peridot asked, baffled as she finally tuned into the conversation. Since the green Gem still needed to be watched carefully lest she run off on her own again, Ford and Pearl agreed that they had to bring her along with them to the junkyard so they could keep an eye on her. Of course, the green Gem had protested, especially when they more or less forced a leash on her to keep her from escaping. Still, she ultimately had no choice in coming along, and was clearly appalled upon learning exactly what the point of this outing really was. “I can’t believe you’re wasting my valuable time that I could be using to build my machine that will no doubt pummel yours into the ground just so you can find this ‘McGucket’ creature! This is completely asinine!”

“Well, its not any more ‘asinine’ than you thinking you can actually take Pearl and Great Uncle Ford on in an inventing battle and win,” Dipper remarked with a rather sarcastic smirk that succeeded in eliciting a frustrated growl from Peridot.

“Well… I suppose we should head inside…” Pearl said with a hint of apprehension in her tone. Without any further deliberation, the group approached the hillbilly’s shack as Mabel went on ahead to knock on the door.

“Old Man McGucket! You in there?” she called. “We have something we need to…. Ask you…?” she trailed off as the brittle wooden door slowly creaked open on its own accord, allowing everyone to peak in to see the rather ruinous state the shack had been left in.

McGucket’s home wasn’t usually the cleanest, given its spot right in the heart of the junkyard, but now it certainly seemed to even more of a wreck than it usually was. What few actual possessions the hillbilly had were strewn and scattered all over the tiny shack in a chaotic, disorganized mess. And even more mysterious than the hectic state before them was the fact that McGucket himself was seemingly nowhere to be found within it.

“Whoa, it like a hurricane blew through here…” Dipper noted with a worried frown.  “I wonder what could have happened?”

“Its strange…” Pearl nodded fretfully. “It almost seems like the place has been entirely abandoned, and in quite a frantic rush at that… But if Fiddleford isn’t here, then were could he-”

The white Gem cut herself off as a sudden clamor sounded from the small window on the far side of the shack. Startled, everyone tucked away behind a rather large pile of garbage to see exactly who was apparently breaking into the shack for some unknown reason. Though, ironically enough, said perpetrator just so happened to be the very hillbilly that called it home.

McGucket let out a loud cry of alarm as he haphazardly slipped in through the open window, landing hard on the other side of it into a pile of miscellaneous scraps. “Aw, conswarnit!” the hillbilly huffed, clearly exasperated as he picked himself up off the ground and began hurriedly picking through his scattered possessions. “Now where’d I put those darn things? They’ve gotta be around here somewhere! I can’t spend all day ‘round here lookin’ for ‘em! I gotta skedaddle outta here again before that confounded portal blows this whole town sky high!”

“The portal?” Ford whispered with a concerned gasp as he leaned out from behind their hiding spot a bit. However, in doing so, he accidentally happened to knock over a stray empty can from the pile, which of course, garnished McGucket’s attention the instant it hit the ground.

“Whazzit?! Who’s there?!” the hillbilly exclaimed fearfully, swiping up a nearby frying pan off the ground and brandishing it as threateningly as he could. “I got me a cast iron skillet here, and I ain’t ‘fraid to use it! I’m warnin’ ya!”

“Whoa, hey, its ok!” Steven assured as him, Dipper, Mabel, and Pearl stepped out first. Ford nearly joined them, but decided to hang back at the last second, both to make sure Peridot was restrained and out of fear as to how McGucket might react to him after so many years. “Its just us! L-long time no see, huh, Mr. McGucket?”

“Oh!” McGucket gasped with apt relief as he lowered his pan. “W-well howdy, kids! A-and howdy to you too, Miss Pearl…” he said, inclining his head in respect for the white Gem.

“H-hello again, Fiddleford,” Pearl greeted somewhat awkwardly, mostly since she know fully remembered the rapport herself and the other Gems used to have with him. “How have you been since… well, since your memories were returned to you?”

“I… gotta admit I’ve seen better days…” McGucket frowned, scratching the back of his neck as he looked down fretfully. “B-but I’m afraid I don’t got time to stand around here and catch up. I only came back here to get my handy dandy whittlin’ spoon,” he said, holding said very old, very bent up spoon up. “I gotta hightail it back to the bunker, and I reckon ya’ll do the same! It’s the only place where any of us has a chance at bein’ safe once that darn portal opens up and-”

“Uh… actually… the portal sort of… already opened,” Dipper pointed out.

“…W-what?” McGucket asked, his eyes wide with growing fear. “B-but… but that’s impossible! If that confangled portal opened up, t-then none of us would even be standin’ here right now! It would have blown us, this town, maybe even the whole entire world to smithereens! It would have started the end times, the apocalypse! And worst of all, it would have let that… darn, dastardly demon out to terrorize us all!”

“W-well, then, we certainly were lucky. It didn’t destroy everything and it didn’t let him out, thank goodness,” Pearl clarified with a sigh of relief. “But… it did bring someone else back instead…” At this, the white Gem glanced over at Ford, who still really had no idea how exactly he intended on facing his old partner, much less what to even say to him. Still, the author knew that it was either now or never, which was why he took in a deep breath to steady himself before finally stepping out of hiding to face his former friend for the first time in over 30 years.

“H-hello… Fiddleford,” Ford said with a small, bittersweet smile as he took in just how hard the passage of time had apparently been on the once youthful inventor before him. “It… certainly has been a long time… hasn’t it?”

[artificialqueens]

You're A Kite, Dancing in a Hurricane. (Biadore)

Hi Guys. I was torn as to whether to continue this as I have exams upcoming but it’s a good distraction from working and the reviews we’re pretty good so I thought I would do! Please let me know if you’d like to see it continue!

Here’s a link to part one.

Wednesday marked the middle of Roy’s first week teaching at the new school. He felt as though he was settling in quite well. He was starting to warm up to some of his students as he began to understand them better and had hope that he could genuinely help at least some of them. But there was one student he wanted to help most of all. He mulled over this thought as he awaited Danny’s arrival, fifteen minutes late as usual. Since Danny had seemed far more relaxed and willing to engage in somewhat meaningful conversation, Roy was looking forwards for another forty-five minutes of light banter. When Danny trudged in, practically dragging his bag behind him, with huge dark bags under his bloodshot eyes, Roy decided he may have pre-empted his enthusiasm. Danny sat in his usual seat at the back of the room and took out the same small notebook from Monday’s detention without even acknowledging Roy. Roy stated sat behind his desk silently for a few minutes before talking.

“You okay there, chola?” Roy asked. Danny looked up and grinned at the nickname. Roy was pleased he could make him smile, since it looked like he had had a rough day.

“Just a shitty day.” Danny smiled lightly. Roy could tell that this was an understatement to say the least.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

“Thank fuck” Roy joked, making Danny laugh again. He started to sit up a little straighter in his chair and closed the cover of his book. Roy decided that today probably wasn’t the day for delving into Danny’s problems and so settled for trying to make him laugh insead. “Thought I was going to have to listen to some crap there.” He continued, making Danny laugh harder. “I got my own shit to be dealing with.” Danny kept laughing more and more until the unexpected happening. Through the laughs his eyes became teary. His laugher hitched in his throat and all of a sudden he was sobbing. He covered his face with his hand and turned away from Roy slightly. “Shit” Roy murmured

“Were my jokes that bad?” Roy joked uneasily. He walked over to Danny’s desk and took a seat next to him. “Was it something I said?” Roy checked. Danny shook his head no, as his sobs subsided into light shakes and sniffles.

“Sorry” Danny muttered. Roy didn’t say anything, just brought him some tissues from his desk drawer.

“Do you drive yourself home?” Roy asked, glancing out of the window at the rain. Danny shook his head. “Does anyone pick you up?” Danny shook his head again. Roy let out a small sigh. He knew that he would get some unwanted questions if he offered to drive Danny home, so resisted the urge.

“How about we wait here until the rain lets up a little and then you can leave early.” Danny nodded slightly. “Do you want me to leave you be?” Danny didn’t answer. Not wanting to push Danny to talk, Roy slid Danny’s black notebook towards him and went to sit behind his desk once more.

“Mr Haylock?” Danny said after a few minutes of silence. Roy looked up from his work in acknowledgement. “Thank you.”

Once the rain began to ease up slightly Roy told Danny that it was okay for him to leave. Danny thanked him once more and left quickly. Roy packed up his things and walked out to his car to leave. As he got to his car the rain started in full force once more and he thought about Danny walking home alone. After driving a for a few minutes he noticed Danny waking ahead of him and contemplated offering him a ride. Nobody from the school would know. And even if they did, there’s surely nothing wrong with driving a student home in the rain. Something about it felt wrong, so he decided against it. That was until he saw the strap of Danny’s bag break and all of his belongings fall out onto the sidewalk. He immediately pulled over a few metres ahead of Danny and watched in the rear view mirror as Danny stood on the sidewalk staring at his belongings looking utterly lost. It broke Roy’s heart.

Roy hopped out of his car and made his way to Danny, grabbing the umbrella from the trunk of his car on the way. Roy approached Danny gently and held the umbrella over his head, allowing himself to get rained on. Danny looked up with tear filled eyes and stared at Roy. “I don’t need help.” Roy put the umbrella into Danny’s hand and bent down to start picking up his things from the floor. Danny just held the umbrella in silence, not speaking, not crying, just watching Roy.

“Let me drive you home.” Roy said and gestured towards the car. Danny didn’t argue and walked round to the passenger side seat. Roy got into the driver’s seat and turned on the heaters but didn’t drive straight away. He passed Danny’s things back to him and he sat holding his damp belongings in silence.

“I know today might have been shitty and it feels like everything is against you, but it’ll pass, chola.” Roy smiled lightly at Danny. “I promise.” He added, for extra emphasis. Danny smiled briefly. That was a start. Roy started driving and got to the end of the road before he realised he had no idea where he was actually going. He asked Danny, who gave him directions until they arrived in a relatively nice neighbourhood. Roy looked around at the nice looking houses, wondering which one was Danny’s. “Anywhere around here.” Danny muttered and Roy shut off the car.

“Let me take a look at that bag strap.” Roy said before Danny got out of the car.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course. I’ll take it home and see what I can do. You can pick it up tomorrow morning from my classroom.” Danny thanked him and left the car carrying the contents of his bag. Roy waited where he was parked to make sure that Danny got into his house safely and he watched as Danny walked away from the nice street they were on and down an alley leading somewhere else. It was very clear that Danny did not in fact live around here at all. It made Roy sad to think that Danny would want to lie about where he lived, as though that would make any difference to how he viewed him.

When Roy got home that night he sat down at his sewing machine to have a look at Danny’s bag. The tear in the strap was simple enough to fix so he decided to reinforce the strap in the weakest areas so that Danny could avoid this happening again. He looked over the main body of the bag noticing a few holes and rips and patched those up too. Feeling pleased with his work Roy eventually left the bag by the door for the morning and set about making himself some dinner. Later that night he went to bed and found himself hoping that Danny was alright and anticipating the following day when he could see him again.

—

Thursday morning rolled around far too slowly for Roy’s liking and he sat in his classroom anticipating the arrival of Danny. When he did arrive, he tried to act as though he was in the middle of something.

“Morning, chola.” Roy smiled and tossed Danny the bag. “You feeling better today.” Looking at Danny he noticed he looked a little brighter this morning.

“Yeah I’m good. Just a bad day yesterday. All good now though.” Danny smiled, baring all of his brilliant white teeth. Danny turned the bad over in his hands noticing how Roy had sewn up every little imperfection. Danny’s grin widened. he really appreciated Roy’s effort, even though it made the bag look way less punk. It reminded Danny of the time his grandmother stitched up the holes in his ripped jeans and he laughed.

“Thank you. You didn’t have to do this.” Danny said sincerely

“I know.” Roy smiled. After saying brief goodbyes Danny left the classroom with a huge smile across his face and swore to himself today would be a good day.

When detention rolled around Roy walked into his classroom ready to start his 15 minute wait for Danny to arrive when he noticed a different student sitting on the front row.

“Hey Mr Haylock.” The girl said casually, as Roy sat behind his desk. He tried not to act too disappointed that it wouldn’t just be him and Danny.

“Hello Kayleigh.”

“Is this detention gonna be, like, long? Because I have somewhere else I want to be.”

“Believe it or not sweetie, I have somewhere else I’d like to be too.” Roy laughed and the girl grinned. “Did you finish the assignment I set you in class today?” The girl shook her head. “Why don’t you start working on that and when you’ve finished it you can leave?” Kayleigh took out her notebook and started to work on the assignment. After a few minutes Danny walked in late and to his usual seat.

“Noregia, you gotta sort out this fashionably late thing you’ve got going on.” Roy said, mainly so that he didn’t seem like a pushover in front of the other student.

“Sorry.” Danny drawled, grinning. Danny took out his black notebook and the three sat in silence for a few more minutes.

“So what brings you two here today then?” He said, obviously knowing why Danny was there but not wanting to single out the other girl.

“I’ve missed like a billion English assignments or something I don’t even know.” Roy rolled his eyes dramatically.

“Maybe you should be working on your English assignments instead of mine, hey?”

“Hey Sir, you didn’t ask me why I’m here.” Danny spoke up from the back of the room. “It’s because of my whore mouth.” Danny said followed by a wink. Roy blushed bright red and Danny laughed loudly. Roy decided it would be best to let the students work in silence.

After a few minutes of working, Danny tore a page out of his notebook, crumpled it and threw it towards the front of the classroom. “Will you throw that away for me, Sir?” Danny said, followed by miming ‘open it’. Roy looked confused but unfolded the paper anyways. ‘IM BORED’ the paper read. Roy smirked.

“I’d love to help you Danny, I just don’t want to.” Roy laughed and tossed the paper back. Kayleigh laughed. Danny murmured something under his breath and went back to writing. After another minute he stood up and walked towards the trash can.

“Guess I’ll just do it myself then.” Danny said, throwing the paper into the trash with one hand and placing something on Roy’s desk with the other. Roy unfolded the paper, ‘BORED BORED BORED’, it read, with the letter growing increasingly bigger. Roy laughed and tossed the paper into the trash in a way that Danny could see. Danny playfully sulked at his desk.

Danny spent a few minutes focusing intently on whatever he was writing, then looked over to make sure Kayleigh was still working and proudly held up the sign he had made. ‘B O R E D’, it read in huge letters, decorated with pink gel pens and highlighters. Roy let out and audible laugh, which he had to fake into a cough when Kayleigh looked up. He scowled at Danny and Danny laughed.

Roy decided to get his revenge on Danny and wrote a message on a piece of paper which he folded in half four times. He got up and walked to Danny’s desk and placed the paper in front of him. “Here’s the assignment I wanted you to complete over the weekend for extra credit.” Danny grinned and unfolded the paper to reveal the message. ‘Do. Your. Fucking. Homework.’ Roy had written, perfectly neat, unlike Danny’s scrawly huge letters. Danny chortled and Roy look pleased with himself.

Danny and Roy spent the rest of the detention making faces at each other and communicating in increasingly ridiculous means. By the time Danny actually leaves the classroom Roy was blushing like a schoolgirl. This was bad. He needed a drink, but of course the only local bar doesn’t serve any alcohol, so decided to settle for calling his friends instead.

As soon as his friends answered he let out a long frustrated sigh.

“Hey Baby Girl! How you doing?” DJ asked, as him and Willam fought to be in the centre of the screen. Roy laughed and thought about how much he missed his friends.

“Confused!” He groaned.

“Girl whats wrong? Is it this little boy child you’ve got yourself a crush on?” Willam laughed hard as Roy covered his face with his free hand.

“Of course it is!” He blushed. “But I do not have a crush on him you’ve got to stop saying that!”

“So what is this thing you’ve got going on then?” DJ asked in a more serious tone. He was no idiot and he knew how much trouble Roy could get into if he was fooling around with a student.

“I’m helping him.”

“Is that what the kids are calling it these days.” Willam joked, earning a nudge from DJ.

“Look this kid is clearly going through some shit and what kind of a teacher would I be if I just ignored it.”

“There’s nothing wrong with helping a student but you’ve worked at that school for four days and our only two conversations have involved him.” Roy looked embarrassed. He knew that what he was doing was wrong.

“I know. I can’t help my feelings. I just don’t know what to do.” Roy was torn. He didn’t know how he could help Danny without his feelings growing, but he couldn’t refuse Danny help purely based on his own selfishness. He hated this.

“I think you just need to find yourself some friends. You know like something else to focus on? Maybe now you should get Grindr!” Willam grinned. Roy rolled his eyes at the mention of Grinder but considered the other part of the advice.

“Getting something else to focus on isn’t actually a bad idea. You know you guys are actually super smart when you try.” Maybe if he has some friends he would be able to gain a little perspective. Roy said goodbye to his friends and decided that he would minimise contact with Danny unless necessary and attempt to find a real bar at the weekend.

–

Friday was Danny’s last detention with Roy, hopefully if Roy could get through this hour with limited flirtation and he wouldn’t have to spend any more one on one time with Danny for a while and the flirtation would die down. Danny walked in and Roy smiled from ear to ear, this was going to be a little harder than he anticipated.

“So, do you feel reformed?” Roy joked.

“Of course.” Danny laughed.

“Will I be seeing you back in detention again soon?”

“Of course.” The pair both laughed.

“Do you want to leave early today?”

“Party!” Roy laughed at the childlike charm of Danny’s favourite word. Roy was slightly disappointed at Danny’s willingness to leave early but then considered that at 18 years old he probably had  a lot better things to be doing than hanging out in detention.

“Come on then we might as well leave now.” Roy said gesturing towards the door.

“Do you have any plans this weekend?” Danny asked on the walk through the halls towards the main entrance doors to the school.

“Well, I was going to try and find something to do outside of this tiny town. Like a bar maybe? Just something normal?” Something to get my mind off you, he continued in his head.

“Well my sister performs at a bar outside of the city on the weekends. It’s dirty and small and about 30 miles away but it’s the closest thing to any kind of nightlife around here.” Roy wasn’t exactly thrilled about Danny’s sister being a part of a his plan to find something else to do, but he guessed it was better than nothing.

“What does your sister do?” Roy asked as Danny stopped to get some things out of his locker. He really should’ve just said goodbye and looked up the bar online but he decided to stay and wait for Danny to finish so that he could walk the rest of the way with him.

“She sings. And she’s pretty fucking good.” Roy laughed at Danny’s abruptness.

“So where is this bar then?”

“You’re actually going?” Danny’s eyes lit up.

“Yeah why not.” Roy said as Danny’s smile got wider. It was nice to see Danny so enthusiastic about his sister. At least it meant he had at least one good person in his life.

“Give me your hand.” Roy was confused about the request and started to blush before he realised that Danny was holding a pen. Danny took Roy’s hand gently and scrawled the address on the back of it. Roy rolled his eyes.

“Couldn’t you have written this on paper.” Roy chuckled, feeling his skin burn at the points Danny had touched it.

“I didn’t want you to forget!” Danny laughed. “You’d better go. My sister will look out for you.” Roy said goodbye to Danny, promised to go the bar that night and walked to his car. As he was driving away he rolled his window down as he passed Danny.

“Danny I forgot to ask, what’s your sisters name?”

“Adore.”

[hielorei]

what an unsatisfying ending for tri. some spoilers ahead since i just watched it and i need to think

I like it, like a lot... but still some things.... like the title should be Digimon Adventure Tri: Ordenimon’s Ass...

you had  movies to make me feel something for Meicoomon, and you failed. and the Yydrassil Agent was using Gennai appearance because? what happened to Maki? is she still alive? im glad we got to see the silhouettes of the 02 kids... and you cant tease use with daemon and “dream big” after this. 

you attack magnaangemon with devimon and they have the same power level? i mean it would have worked with patamons PTSD because Devimon kill him, but at this point he didnt had him memories back... Wizardmon was there as the good plot device he is.... Jessmon was a thing... 

they teased us with a few ships here too. like Sorato, Taiora, Taiyama, Takari and holy shit that was a Taimeiko what I saw?????? 

I liked that Matt took control. TK stayed next to Kari (you know i love these two togheter, as a couple, as a best friends or as sibling, i love them)

I liked that this was heavy focused on Hikari. 

they say they were about to reboot the human world and the kids were like its okay we have a backup of the digimon files... but wouldnt that mean that the humans would be the ones rebooted ??? you would have been the ones without memories right?

the humans didnt had better weapons against the digimon???? 

where the fuck is Maki??? because we know Daigo is dead.

what happened to the original gennai? he was with the 02 kids... and Alphamon??? the fuck happened to Alphamon?

DID WE NEED THAT MANY BUTT SHOTS OF ORDENIMON’S ASS??? was that out of place like Rosemon’s bouncing boobs because??

weregarurumon finally got its evoluition sequence... 

I dont know what to think about Holydramon, I like it, I Really do, but Adventure always treated Hikari and Takeru as a pair, like with their digimon partners... I mean, MagnaAngemon and Angewomon are mirrors evolution frame by frame in tri. and it was logic to have Ophanimon and Serafimon. anyways does this mean that Hurricane Touchdown is canon? does this mean that my boy Willis is Canon???? please let WILLIS BE CANON. it was the only thing that I was waiting outta Gatomon’s mega, If it was Holydramon and since no one asked who is that digimon, it means they already knew, it means Holydramon was seen before! It means Willis is Canon! okay, i dont know, but I can dream.

okay, I have the dirty feeling that the new project is 02 related, Toei and Digimon has to do that after all the shit they got because the 02 kids....

if you have seen Tri, please talk to me

[queenevaine]

Some David/Ace stuff, as a sequel to this fic!

It had been several days since Ace and David spoke after their fight in the woods near the campfire.  The gambler was fine with that; they were able to avoid each other and not cause any more problems.   David wasn't keen on approaching the subject, and Ace was more than happy to leave it that way.  He had since adopted his normal, confident smirk, as if nothing had ever been wrong.  

Even in another trial against the Doctor, Ace seemed no worse for wear.  He worked on generators with the others, while David kept the Doctor busy.  They easily managed to get several done before David was put on his first hook.  

Meg ran off to go save him, leaving Ace and Nea to finish the last few generators.  When there was only one left, Ace opted to head into the basement and see what he could find in the chest he knew was always down there.  He had become dulled to the faint heartbeat; the Doctor sometimes could be felt from a long distance away.  

He looked through the chest he found there, listening to his heartbeat and realizing it was getting faster.  It was unlikely that the Doctor was coming over to check his basement, and Ace kept searching to find a basic, half stocked medkit.  He sighed, turning to head to the stairs when now saw he was being watched by unblinking eyes.  

Ace stared cautiously at the Doctor, unable to shake the feeling growing in his stomach.  For a few, uneasy moments, the Doctor just stared, almost studying him.  He watched the Doctor slowly tilt his head, and he swore the already forced grin on the lunatics face grew.  Then the Doctor slowly stepped forward, electricity surging around him.

Ace screamed at the shock, gritting his teeth when the Doctor walked closer and held Ace against the worn, bloody wall.  He had a few moments to catch his breath before another, slightly stronger shock went through him.  Not this again!  His first thought was to try and kick the Doctor away, but the shocks made his muscles tense too much to respond to what he was trying to do.  

Give in, and the pain stops.  

Something spoke to him.  It couldn’t be the Doctor, it didn’t sound like him at all even when the lunatic laughed.  Whatever it was, he shook his head.  Ace didn’t listen to anything trying to give him commands.  The Doctor laughed, electricity crackling so much Ace could hear and feel it in the air.  He screamed at the top of his lungs, legs giving out underneath him.  The Doctor stepped back to let him sink to the ground, leaning against the wall.  

The Doctor laughed as he put his mace aside, rubbing his hands together with distinct crackling.  

David had heard the screaming from the other side of the trial.  He had been at the exit gate with Nea and Meg, all three of them darting their attention over when they first heard the screaming.  They had quickly gotten the last generator on and had the gate open, waiting for the fourth of their group.  David started towards the screams, pausing to look over his shoulder.  

“Someone keep an eye out ‘ere, I’m gonna go get ‘im.”  

Meg jogged to catch up with him.  

“Like hell you’re going alone, big guy.  I can run the Doctor around while you get him to the gate.”  

David sighed, shrugging in response.  No time to argue about this shit now.  Moments between him and Ace were awkward and tense, considering their last time actually talking resulted in a branch across David’s face.  But, he couldn’t in good conscious leave Ace to suffer with the Doctor again.  He cared in his own, blunt way.  

He and Meg reached the stairs to the basement after a full out sprint across the worn ground of the woods.  Ace’s screams were getting more and more strained and weak, giving a sense of urgency.  Without hesitation, David leapt down the stairs.  

“OI!  STEP THE FUCK BACK!”  

The Doctor turned, hands and arms absolutely alight with electrical currents.  Ace was slumped against the wall, head leaned back and his body shaking.  Even from where David stood, he could see Ace’s chest heaving with every breath and terrible electrical burns around exposed areas of skin, even in the dim light of the basement.  David grit his teeth, ready to punch the Doctor in his stupid fucking jaw.  He picked up his mace, chasing Meg and David up the stairs from the basement.  

Everything in Ace’s body hurt.  He was certain that so much electricity should have killed him, but the Entity didn’t quite understand human limits.  Or, it simply didn’t care.  Cares enough about what electricity can do besides killing you.  He was grateful for the small break from the painful shocks, the Doctor’s ‘treatment’.  Ace closed his eyes, trying to muster up the strength to get up.  He felt so weak and vulnerable, and it was a terrible feeling.  

He couldn't help a soft gasp as he felt someone's hands on either side of his face and level his head.  When had someone come back?  And God, he sounded so pathetic.  

“Easy, not gonna hurtcha.  I'm gettin’ you outta this shithole.”  

Why would David of all people come back for me?  He briefly shook his head.  Now's not the time.  

“I can't.. can't move much.”  

Even speaking was a strain.  David's hands fell from his face, and his head hung towards his lap.  

“Alright, sit still and don't squirm, then.”  

Before he could ask what David meant, Ace felt himself be lifted into David's arms, carried bridal style.  He lay limp as David raced up the stairs and bolted towards the gate.  Ace would worry about appearances later, when he wasn't keenly aware of how much he was shaking and his muscles still twitched, albeit slightly.  

Nea was waiting at the gate, eyes focused elsewhere.

“Go ahead and go.  I'll make sure Thomas gets out in one piece.”  

Ace felt David pause, then continue moving on after a few seconds. The cool fog closed in, and Ace willed himself to moving.  David's grip only tightened.  

“The fuck did I say?  Don't squirm.”  

“David, you can put me down now.  I can walk.”  

“Bullshit.  You're not fuckin’ walking while you're shakin’ like a damn tree in a hurricane.”  

“David-”

“Look ‘ere, Ace.  We ‘aven’t been playin’ nice with each other lately.  But there's a better fuckin’ chance of hell freezing over before I willingly let anybody here suffer when I can do somethin’.  Being an arsehole is just part of my personality.”

Ace sighed, closing his eyes and letting himself relax.  No convincing him now.  David set him down carefully by the fire, taking extra time to be as gentle as he could.  He grabbed a medkit, taking out bandages to wrap around the burn marks on Ace's chest, neck, and arms.  He hated feeling helpless, but everything hurt far too much for him to care.  

“Scream if I'm hurting ya.”  

Ace nodded once, laying limp as David bandaged him up.  He was almost surprised at how careful the rough and tumble scrapper could be.  

“Oi, stay with me ‘ere.”  

Ace groaned softly.  Everything ached and he just wanted to rest.  He felt David wrap his arms around him and pull him close.  

“Sorry, ‘bout nearly beating the shit outta ya.  It just worries me and the rest of us when you act outta sorts.”  

Ace stayed quiet as he thought about David's words.  It was almost funny, beating someone up because you care about them.  

“I'm sorry, too.  Wasn't thinking straight.”  

Moving his arms to try and return the hug shot pain through them, making him stiffen.  

“Gh-shit.”  

Ace wasn't sure why that was the moment panic set in.  David wasn't going to hurt him, but his mind still screamed that Ace was going to be hurt more.  Just wait.  David set him down, his left hand pressing against the right side of Ace’s neck to check his pulse.  It was the feeling of pure helplessness that bothered Ace; being at someone else’s mercy and there was little he could do.  David pulled his hand back at the soft whine Ace made.  

“I’m not gonna hurt ya.  Promise.”  

Ace shook his head, sitting up despite his muscles screaming at him.  

“‘M fine.  Just need time to rest.”  

He looked around at the campfire, surprised that no one else was there.  Was he still hallucinating?  

“Just me ‘nd you here.”  

Ace sighed in relief.  It was a small relief, knowing that only a few people saw him breaking down instead of all the others he shared the campfire with.  He still didn’t like it much in the first place, but it was the best he was going to get.  David sat next to him, arms crossed.  

“Y’know, no one’s gonna think less of ya for ‘aving a bad day.  Shit ‘appens to all of us.”

Ace took a deep breath.  It was true, he wasn’t a perfect individual and got unlucky, but that was something he didn’t like admitting even to himself.  He blinked in surprise when David moved behind him, arms around his waist.  

“Get some rest anyway, yeah?  No one’s gonna touch ya.”  

There was plenty more he wanted to say, that he didn’t need to be protected, but it was a comfort he didn’t want to pass up.  Ace leaned his head against David’s shoulder, letting himself relax as David held him close.  

[bluethepaladin]

I just lost a friend over something so stupid, and I’m so mad. I want to scream.

Somebody literally had the audacity to use my situation with Hurricane Harvey to promo their blog.

As most of you know, I was hit kind of hard by Harvey. I don’t post about it too much, because it’s Depressing and Unfun, and tumblr is mostly my way to escape. So a while back, when the floodwaters had just retreated, my friend on tumblr came to me wanting to vent, and I thought they were asking for advice. After a few back and forths, I realized they didn’t want my advice and just wanted to vent. But like, I have a lot on my plate right now. And because I thought we were friends, I thought I could be honest about that. So I sent a polite message saying 

“Okay somewhere along the line I think I misunderstood what you wanted from me. I thought you were asking for advice, which is why i offered it. Since we're friends, I'll be honest with you. For about the next 3 days it's going to be super duper rough for me, and I've got a lot on my plate. On a normal day I would be 1000% down to listen to you vent and be a Supportive and Good Friend™ but I just don't have the mental or emotional capacity to do that right now. I'm sorry, I want to be there for u to listen to you vent, and you can totally lay it all on me like at any other time and I will be glad to hear it, but for now and the next 3 days, I just can't handle it.”

They responded with “that’s fine.” and nothing else, so I said “Thank you so much for understanding” and they just. Stopped talking to me. The next day I sent a message saying that I hope they had a great day, and sorry for being a downer. No response.

Two days later, I asked them how their day was. They said “fine. you?” Since, again, I had asked to not talk about Deep things, I glossed over the fact that my house was being ripped apart by helpful neighbors, and also mentioned I had class tomorrow. Their response? 

“i'm fine. hope you have a good day in class tomorrow.”

Clearly, that is the end of the conversation. So I just figured, hey, they’re probably not in the mood to talk right now, So I said I’d leave em to it, and logged off. 

Two days later, I see a post on my dash. It’s them asking for a promo. The tags are this: #i think an ex mutual is badmouthing me ://// #because i didnt want to talk to them when they wanted to talk #so i think theyre like name dropping me now #but anyway im also close to my next k

Cool. Fine. Whatever.

But then I see an ask on my dash

Anon: You don't have to answer this if you don't want to, but why would they badmouth you? If you don't mind me asking?

Answer: nah it’s cool here’s the storythe other day i was ranting to them about something that was bothering me, and they were talking to me about it and stuff but then they just snapped at me and told me they couldn’t deal with me for the next couple of days (because they were dealing with the aftermath of Harvey and like okay that’s fine that’s cool i understand please by all means go deal with that don’t even worry about me my issues aren’t as important) so we didn’t speak for a few days. i gave them their space. which is what they wanted, right? well like almost exactly 3 days later they come to me and want to talk. well, i haven’t been feeling awesome lately, as you might know, and when i get into a depressive state i tend not to talk much. i’ll answer anons and stuff but messages don’t really… i can’t really handle that. so they start talking to me, and i reply but… i’m not as into the conversation as i usually am when i talk to them i guess? (also i’m watching a video at this time so i’m like trying to watch that and not leave them hanging while also feeling like shit. and i told them this) so anyway they unfollowed me sometime between that conversation and the next morning. (also the conversation didn’t even… like i wasn’t shitty to them? and they weren’t shitty to me? so i don’t understand) now since then i’ve lost like 20 followers. and i haven’t been posting on this blog much. i have a queue running but i don’t think any of those posts were problematic, if so i think someone would tell me. and any discourse i post is on a sideblog so it can’t be that. unless tumblr is royally fucking up, but i don’t think that’s it. so i’m pretty sure this person is flat out just bashing me. anyway that’s it im done talking about it. just if yall could reblog my promo post that would be awesome because i’ve been steady losing followers since that night ://///

Bolded emphasis is mine.

Literally all of that is a lie. I never unfollowed them until yesterday, which is how I saw the post! It was on my dash. 

I never said I didn’t want to deal with them, I said I couldn’t handle venting for probably 3 days. 

I sent a message to them after they said “that’s fine” I sent a message the next day and got no response. And I sent a message the day after that, and that’s when they finally decided to grace me with their presence.

I never unfollowed them. Well, I did yesterday because I value myself too much to let myself be used and dragged around by people.

I never told anyone about it using their name.

So of course, I sent a message. I asked them if they wanted me to unfollow them, since they’d unfollowed me. I said I was hurt because pretty much none of that was true. They said they’d deleted the chat and at the top it didn’t say I was still following so they just assumed I unfollowed. 

They said “I guess it was just a misunderstanding”

Then I apologized. After reading the wording of the post, I thought, oh no maybe they read my initial message wrong, and assumed that I actually didn’t want to talk to them, not just talking about the vent stuff. 

“ I apologize if I worded it in a way that made you think I couldn't handle YOU. What I was trying to say is that I couldn't handle anymore emotional drama right now than my own, which I think is fair. Since you deleted it, this is what I said: 

‘Okay somewhere along the line I think I misunderstood what you wanted from me. I thought you were asking for advice, which is why i offered it. Since we're friends, I'll be honest with you. For about the next 3 days it's going to be super duper rough for me, and I've got a lot on my plate. On a normal day I would be 1000% down to listen to you vent and be a Supportive and Good Friend™ but I just don't have the mental or emotional capacity to do that right now. I'm sorry, I want to be there for u to listen to you vent, and you can totally lay it all on me like at any other time and I will be glad to hear it, but for now and the next 3 days, I just can't handle it.’

 I was trying to say we should talk about only not-emotional things for a while, since, you know, my house is being ripped apart and I no longer have a car. And I also am trying not to bog my friends down with the fact that I'm in a Shitty Situation right now and I don't think it's fair to constantly be like This Sucks, so I was trying to stay away from emotionally heavy topics”

and they told me that it wasn’t the case. That the initial message was not the problem. Then why, in their massive plea to their followers did they lie and say I ‘didn’t want to deal with them?’

Their response:

“that's not why i thought you were mad at me. i understood that. you're situation sucks, i saw the pictures. so i understood completely that you didn't want to deal with the drama. i thought you were mad at me because when you did talk to a couple days later i wasn't feeling very good and i wasn't talking to anyone but i wanted to reply to you. after you didn't reply after i apologized i figured you had gotten super pissed that i wasn't being talkative. like we usually are. “

Here are the next few messages:

Me: I'm going to lot out of Tumblr for a while. You really really hurt my feelings. I understand there was a miscommunication but instead of talking to me about it, you posted about it on tumblr, which I saw on my dash just scrolling through Tumblr. I feel like I've shared a lot with you and now I feel very vulnerable, like if I ever am anything but 100% emotionally available to you, you'll blame me for things too. I'm just hurt. And I need to take care of stuff at the house, and I need time to nurse my hurt feelings

Them: i understand

3 days later

Me:  I'm back on tumblr and I noticed you don't follow me anymore. why? do you still think i told people to unfollow you? that isn't true. I never told anybody anything. I feel like I also deserve an explanation. Why did you make a post about me, saying that I told people to follow you? I'm still following you, by the way. Unless you don't want me to, which is okay, I guess but kind of unexpected, seeing as I have literally done nothing to you at all, besides asking you to not vent to me for like 3 days. I just.. I want an explanation. And where do we stand now. Do you just not want to be friends anymore?

Them:  i unfollowed you because i was sure that you had unfollowed me. and then when you came and told me you didn't i felt like if i had it would have made things worse, so i waited. the night you talked to me after the whole don't vent to me for three days thing you said "i guess i'll leave you to it." and i told you that i wasn't feeling well, also i was watching something. you never got back to me so i was like well shit i think i pissed them off. i didn't mean to i just did not feel good. so the next day i went to see if you still followed me, but this must be a sideblog or something because it didn't find you. i think that's what it does for sideblogs. so i did the next best thing, which was to delete our conversation and start a new one to see if it said we were still mutuals or whatever. it didn't say anything so i assumed you had unfollowed me (i lost like 3 or 4 followers that night and i thought you were one of them) so i was like oh damn i guess i did piss them off. so i went ahead and unfollowed. then in like the next day or so i lost like 20-30 followers. i wasn't posting any discourse or anything so i didn't understand why this mass amount of people were ditching me all at the same time. the only thing i could think of was that someone was shit talking me. (turns out it was an ex mutual that was trash talking me, but it wasn't you) so i assumed oh damn i guess i pissed them off really bad and they're here trash talking me. in hindsight it was stupid but my RSD was snowballing everything into a horrible mess. i thought i had pissed you off so bad that night that i wasn't being chatty. literally none of this had anything to do with the three days you didn't want to talk to me.

Me: okay, 1. please stop saying i didn't want to talk to you for 3 days. We already talked about this and established that I didn't want to talk about heavy things, aka venting--Not that I didn't want to talk to you. You told me that you understood this. If you don't then we can go through it again, but I never ever said that I didn't want to talk to you, and the fact that you keep saying that is really rubbing me the wrong way. 2. Cool. I understand your reasoning. I get it, I just took 3 days off myself because I was crazy overwhelmed. But you made a post about me, in which you are very clearly talking about me. Like, people asked me about it. In that post, you said I snapped at you, and you accused me of name-dropping you and getting people to unfollow you. Then, in the tags, you said that you never name-dropped me, and it's because you aren't "sheisty," meaning that I AM shitty for "namedropping" you, which I didn't do. I literally never did anything, and the post is STILL there 3. I didn't respond to you because I logged off tumblr. I started up a chat, asked you how your day was, you said fine? you? i gave you an update and said i had class tomorrow. You said "have a good day at school tomorrow" which is what people usually say when they say bye. So, i was like, alright, Lio's not in the mood for talking, guess it's time to go. 4. If you were worried I was mad, you could have just asked. 5. you have yet to say sorry. I dunno, are you sorry? like I didn't DO anything to you, Lio, and you even said it was someone else, yet you made a huge post about me which I saw on my dash because I'm still following you! It was a lot to handle, because I thought we were friends, and I was already dealing with a lot! It really really hurt me and it left me feeling vulnerable. I understand why you thought the way you did, but you still made a post about me that people could tell was me, because I got questions about it!! Lastly, this IS a sideblog, I have a personal blog, which is in my about and I have answered questions about and I don't give it to people unless we're friends because the Voltron fandom is full of nasties.

It’s almost been a week since I sent that. No response. I’m a pretty understanding person. If they had sent a message like “Hey, I want to keep talking to you about this, but I need a few days to get organized.” I would be totally fine. Also, I’m getting mad at this point, because they have yet to say sorry. The lied and accused me of doing things I didn’t do to get sympathy from their followers, and the post is still up. If they just literally talked to me about anything, sent a “hey, are you mad at me?” or “do you still follow me?” none of this would have happened. Keep in mind, I didn’t do anything they accused me of, and they realized that it was someone else.

So finally today I said:

Me: guess that's it, huh? never figured you for someone who wouldn't apologize. For clarity's sake, now I've unfollowed you.

Them:  Just because I hadn't replied to you yet doesn't mean I'm not sorry or that I wasn't going to. But alright.

Them:  Regardless, I am sorry for everything I did. It was stupid of me to assume everything and even stupider of me to air it publicly. No matter how upset I was or how how wholeheartedly I believed my own foolish accusations. You didn't deserve any of this and I'm sorry for putting you through it after that you've already had to deal with. It wasn't fair and for that I profusely apologize. You don't have to reply to this I just wanted you to know that I am sorry before all is said and done. Anyway, goodbye.

Somebody literally used my situation with Hurricane Harvey as an excuse to promo themselves on tumblr.

Literally all I wanted was a sincere apology, and maybe the post taken down or a correction posted because people who followed us both asked me about it. They knew who I was based on that post. It’s taken me a long time, and a lot of therapy to get here, but my therapist keeps reminding me that I have to value myself enough to demand acceptable treatment for myself. Wanting an apology is not unreasonable. Like, how dare you use my situation to promo yourself? How dare you claim I’m being unreasonable after going radio-silence on me for almost a week, with no explanation? (Again, I’d be totally cool if they needed a week to deal with other stuff, if they’d just asked). 

I’m so mad. I’m seeing red. 

My advice: Talk to people about how you feel and don’t make shit up about them. Be honest with how you feel and what’s up.

And last of all, don’t be a manipulative asshole.

[jey-chan]

The eves read, How to take care of your servamp for 1ts time eves. ch 1

Beta'd by @legendarygriffin  Thanks Mahi for doing it!

Mahiru was in the library that Misono had in his mansion and of course, he found the need to clean some part of it. That’s when he found a little book that appear to be a journal, the thing was old and had a strangle black ribbon like drawing. However, the most interesting thing was the title. In some old fashioned type writer letters - How to take care of your servamp for 1ts eves - was written.

“How to take care of your servamp? How old is this? And more importantly, who wrote it?” curious of why shush a thing was made he took it and read the sumary: If you aren’t an Eve don’t read this! And more importantly DO NOT TELL THE SERVAMPS ABOUT THIS! NEITER TO THEIR MINIONS. Ok now if you are an eve please read this and don’t say a word to the guys. It’s for their dignity. If you are ready to read this then I really hope, it will help you. Att. Our Little Bird.

Now that took his interest and so he opened the book and started to read it. Yellow pages met him and a really strangle mix of cute old fashioned letters and a very modern way of writing started telling him the message of that mysterious Our Little Bird person.

Hi! I’m someone that just wants to help you take care of yourself and your servamp. (You know that vampire that can become an animal but has some serious issues with itself. Yeah that person.) I lived with them for a while and I learned some things about them so knowing how bad it was for some eves to figure out the things they need to do to have a proper relationship, I have decide to do this. Here are all my theories and observations, please be careful and share the information. More importantly, if you find something more adequate then please pretty pretty please update this stupid book.

Okay that throws away the idea of this person being a long lost relative for the guys but… they lived with them so, what was and who was it? Probably the answer will be more ahead so he started Reading again.

Okay so first thing you need to know about a Servamp is what is his/her power is. All Servamps have one, and it’s part of them so you need to balance that.

For example, if your Servamp is Gluttony you need to give him some meals but at the same time you need to take care he does not eat more than necessary, You are his balance in conscience! If he does not let you eat you can always punch him in the face! (if it doesn’t work you can always be a traitor to him by killing a cake) He need to know you need to eat too! Scold him if it’s necessary but make your point clear! (Make sure to do that with his minions too. Some of them will help you).

If your servamp is Wrath then… sorry but you are sooo dead. She is the mom of the house and if you do something stupid you are going to be grounded for your life. Buuuut that doesn’t mean I do not have a solution! (or a theatrical one anyway I don’t have many ways of experiment it, I mean I usually are off trouble so yea, I hope this will help you) you need to make her remembered to take a breath and take it easy, once she is calmed things are going to be fine. (If you found another one, please put it here! I left some blanks pages in the end of this journal so you can put there the new information) But seriously she is nice, very very nice, don’t let the face scare you. She only wants to protect all of us and do the best for you, she may be a Little spooky but she is nice and is a lovely mother. Just make sure you don’t make her mad. She can be scary like all moms are when their angry, but she has the pluses to be a vampire and a Wolf soo… yeah, try to be a good guy.

Mahiru took that to heart. It was real, he may know her a Little but it’s true, she is really a good mother.

Jealousy is a Little shy like how you sometimes envied some thigs but don’t say anything about it and no one can call it. He is like that but is easy to made mad and play pranks in him so yeah he can become a powerful hurricane of deadly things if you don’t take care of what you do and you promise to him. But is a great guy! He may be a “I do not care what happen to you but silently I wish you the best of luck with some thigs and Im here to you but Im not going to tell you that because you are strong”  jaba daba dubi du type of guy. However, he is mature and usually he will talk to you if he like you or you are a person worthy of it. So if he says something to you don’t take it bad, he really care for you.

Mahiru didn’t know how to take that. He knows that Jeje is a little strange but it was a good guy so he will take this in count the next time he sees it.

Lust is the best girlfriend that is a guy that you can hope to have in all the time! He may be a person that like to show some skin (and you need to remember him HE DONT NEED TO DO THAT ALL THE TIME! ),  he is a good person too,  but sometimes he thinks that secrets are the safe way to keep someone’s mind safe. You need to tell him that not all humans are like that.  Confront him and make him tell you the truth, and try to make him feel better.  He always has a special spot for children, and is so sad for him when one chooses to leave this living Word.  So please, try to made him better when this time come, he is the more series and tactical brother, always have a wise words and know how to take care of others but never to himself so please take care of him!

That was true. Mahiru know that Lily was just like that and sometimes he prefers to deal with the problems with no sharing them, he need to talk to Misono about this. “oh Tetsu’s is next”

Pride is… prideful. He is the only one in this strange family that acts like a real vampire (or at least the one the Dracula story tell us). He is one of the best people around here, it’s always good to know what to say to make you think and do the right choose, he prefers to try and correct his siblings and more than one occasion it had done some nasty things in name of the pride. So if he is your servamp you need to remember him that something is more important your dignity or your family above pride, you need to make him see the pride in little thigs that no one seems to care, that’s the balance you need to make for him.

Mahiru was speechless, Old Child doing bad stuff for pride. Na, that’s have to be a lie, right? But… yeah sometimes pride made you do stupid thigs… he need to pass the tip to Tetsu.

Greed. Man, this one is just… I don’t know how to describe it, but he is a good guy only that he… well he can be in pain sometimes. And his need of greed blinds him of some important stuff, he is an artist so you need to remember to look around him sometimes, and if that means doing it in a punch way then do it. Do not hesitate and do it. (You have all my permission to kick him in the ass if its necessary, if does not work you can always tell Mother, she will make sure to put some sense in him) anyway your duty is to make him see that not all the gold in the world is a material thing. That he need to be greedy in the emotion land, that sometimes it’s better to let it go than to have it and made it useless.

That… it was perfect for that extroverted vampire. In addition, He need to tell Licht that this person gave him permission to do some kicking sense to his vampire.

Sloth without doubt is the one that needs more balance, and more than balance he need something that help him to not sleep his problems away. He is the most silent and caring guy you will ever meet.  He is the shy guy that complains about everything, but the first to run to protect you if you need it. He had made some bad choices in order to protect us all but sometimes his siblings don’t see it that way, and critique him, he needs a balance that remind him that you can do things at your own time but there will be times you will need to stop being lazy and work your way out. However, please if he is your servamp.  Take care for him, okay? He is the one that needs it the most. And personally he is the one that that will help you in his one way.

That… that made Mahiru stop. It was so true. Kuro was the one that needed it the most, he was the one that always carried the consequences of the bad things he and his family did, he needed more support than nothing, but he was better now. He helped more and more, and is in peace with himself, he doesn’t try to sleep away more of the time now so, in a way he felt he may have made this person have a breath form worry over him. Mahiru did not know this person. He doesn’t know if was a mage or if it was a vampire, or a werewolf, but he had the feeling that it was not more alive. And that their soul was in a more peaceful rest because of the way kuro and the rest of the servamps was healing.

“Mahiru? Oi you are here. Bastard-chan want you to see something in the garden. What a pain, he could have come to find yo- What is that?”

The voice of his partner made him close the journal and try to hidden it. “K-Kuro?! What are you doing here? I oh this is nothing it’s only an old novel I found here and I was so into it that well I think I will ask Misono to borrow it?” He really wanted to fulfil the wishes of this Our Little Bird person, and it was more than sure that if the lion saw it, he would create a bad reaction and reawaken some pain that he had or had not forgotten. The blunette did not put much importance in the thing. He knows that Mahiru was hiding something but he will wait for him to tell him what it is.

“Can’t deal, common bastard-chan is waiting”

“Don’t call him that!”

“what a pain” Mahiru signed, he knows that he knows about the lie, but this is was something he prefers to discus with the eves alone. It may not like it, but it was for the best and… hopefully with this book they will know more about their parent’s and help them when they need it the most. Oh and add what a servamp and an Eve its, section to the book. 

 The same with the lead.

Hope you enjoy it! and special thanks to @angel-of-music-hyde-no-longer @tina-nightray @just-servamp-trash and @legendarygriffin 

[gryffvndors]

ceramic teacups [draco malfoy]

request: “Oh man can you do a draco x reader using 248 and 370 please?” - @tragicallypetty

word count: ~1600

a/n: if this got terribly confusing/out of hand i apologize, i started off in one mood in the beginning and then, due to my mood swings, ended in a totally different one. if this is crazy sorry! im a crazy lady! lmfao anyway enjoy i hope this is what u wanted!!!

248: “please, don’t leave.”

370: “you know, it’s okay to cry.”

The ceramic of the teacup is cold against the pads of your fingers. You gaze absentmindedly at the wall - the raised paint job, the chipping off-white, the absence of picture frames. Everything, it seems, is in a mixture of slow motion and hyperreality; you have trouble distinguishing, in the very back of your mind, whether the soft press of ivory keys is something you’ve created in a fit of disillusion or it’s very real, the piano in the corner put to use for something other than to gather dust. You have not the energy to move. The piano is behind you, and while turning around would be a feat, your bones yearn for nothing more than to be still.

The chill of the breeze from the open window awakens you from your dream-like state. You shiver, shutting your eyes for a brief moment. You’re alone. You don’t hear the heavy footsteps you usually do, you don’t feel his presence, the presence that leaves the hair on your arms raised and your body humming, vibrating, making you feel oh-so alive.

You wish you heard those footsteps, felt that presence. It’s dreadfully lonely without him.

In a way, you’re also glad he is gone; you hate the pity that swims in his eyes, the calm before the storm. Maybe you only feel that way because of the shade of the irises you gaze into. You like storms, but not when they’re blinking at you in the forms of pleas that only further aggravate you and make you want to dig your nails in the palm of your hands so hard the skin breaks.

Though, who knows? Maybe it’s good for you. Pain makes you feel awake. You don’t purposefully hurt yourself anymore (you listen to him that much), but there is no sorrow at an accidental incident.

The music is in your head. You hear the scraping of the lock, the whine of the door as it is pushed open. Draco’s lips are set in a frown as he enters your home and glances at you. You barely hear your name pass his lips; the keys are increasing in volume, a steady uproar and cacophony until it’s as if the musician is slamming.

the.

keyboard.

with.

all.

fingers.

“Are you alright?” You hear him ask distantly, the volume dimming some. You nod numbly. Out of the corner of your eye, there’s a flash of color; he’s brought you flowers. You try to smile and watch him hold a vase under the water until it’s halfway empty. He takes the scissors from the drawer next to the sink and snips off the bottom parts of the stems. Then he drops the flowers into the vase, resting it in the middle of the dining table. He approaches you, platinum hair illuminated by the soft golden glow the drapes let shine through the cracks. He kneels by your side. “Are you sure?”

You nod again; you force yourself to look away. The pity is suffocating. You don’t want to drown, you tell yourself. A second later, you don’t care. You look back into his eyes and swallow.

“I’m… fine,” you allow.

“You know, it’s okay to cry.”

You don’t realize you’re crying until you are. Your vision is shaky, the wall blurring before your eyes. You let a tear slip an inch down your face before you wipe at it, furious.

“I’m fine,” you repeat. You hunch over and a sob escapes your throat. Draco sighs softly and leans forward to wrap his arms around you. You shake, and you hate yourself for it.

This isn’t hyperreality. This isn’t slow motion. This is real time, the present, and you don’t know how to feel about it. The pain that is making you feel alive isn’t physical, but rather emotional - you’d have a hard time stuttering out some cliche term about how you feel empty inside, emotionless, like an empty bag that’s been set out and is blowing all over the place. Draco doesn’t say anything as you take his shirt in your fists and bury your head in the crook of his neck. He doesn’t say anything when you weep out incoherent sentences, doesn’t say anything when you collect yourself and sit back in your chair, eyes bloodshot and puffy, lips red, tear stains on your cheeks. You feel an absence on your hands. The chill of the ceramic is replaced with the warmth of his body, the softness of his shirt, the soothe of his voice.

The empty teacup is on the floor, shattered. You stare down at it. After a second, Draco does, too, mirroring your pouty facial expression.

“I don’t know when that fell,” you muse. Draco snorts and gets out his wand. “No-” you rest your hand on his, pushing it away. “I want to do it. Magic… helps. I feel real.”

He nods. “Go ahead, then.”

You reach behind you and grapple for your wand. Once the familiar, stiff mahogany finds you, you let out a breath you didn’t know you’d been holding. You marvel over the buzzing of the power. It’s an extension of your arm, you realize. You exchange a smile with Draco before you mumble, “Reparo.” The teacup forms back together, shards mending before your eyes. Draco picks it up and rises. He sets it in the sink and returns to your side.

“Are you feeling better?” He asks, worry plaguing his words. You push aside the looming onslaught of, ‘It will be back. The darkness always returns’.

You shake your head ‘yes’ and rise to your feet as well. “You make me feel better,” you admit, cheeks flush. It embarrasses you to admit it. Intimacy has never been your strong spot. Never his, either. That’s why you two fit so perfectly. Two pieces of a puzzle, the last and final pieces that let the big picture shine. You decide to embark on the road of embarrassment and continue. “You… make the music go away.”

“That sounds quite awful.”

“No, no, it’s good. It isn’t music, really. More of a big noise, like white noise, that has lots of bad piano concertos playing all at the same time.” He arches a brow. You exhale. “I sound crazy.”

“A little.”

You let yourself smile. “You make me crazy.”

He makes you let loose. You’ve calmed down, your emotional (or rather, unemotional) outburst long forgotten. Maybe it’s your mood swings, maybe it’s the fact that he’s here with you. One sounds plausible, but a stupid excuse, the other something you would never say out loud.

Draco takes your hand in his. He tosses your wand onto the table with his and takes the other one, too. “You were already crazy.” Leaning down, he presses his lips to your cheek and whispers, “Crazy for me.”

You pull away, laughing and wiping your ear with your shoulder. “Ew, I don’t think so! You’re bad.”

Draco kisses you, long and hard. You squeeze his hand. This is good. This keeps the manic away, keeps you sane, lets you stop thinking. This drones out the white noise that plays constantly in the background. Against his lips, you breathe, “Please, don’t leave.”

He kisses you harder. When you break apart, there is no pity in his hurricane eyes. You can’t place what’s present, but as long as there is no sorrow, it’s okay with you. “Where would I go?” He asks.

“Away from me. To normal.”

Draco rolls his eyes. “What, and risk you coming after me with a knife? No, I’d much rather stay here,” he deadpans.

You untangle your fingers and punch him in the chest. “Stop being a prick, or I’ll play those concertos for you and force you to listen to every single one of them-”

“You couldn’t play the piano if you tried,” Draco smirks.

“Play it for me, then,” you pretend to think, then smirk. “Play me that hard Chopin one.”

“The day you do come after me will be a good one,” he snarks. “Fine. I’ll play the stupid muggle composer. But sit and listen through the entire piece, don’t go touching me while I’m playing,” he kisses you one more time, a chaste one to the lips, and leads you over to the piano. You watch Draco crack his knuckles before sitting at the bench. You perch on the sofa next to him. Slowly, he begins to play, a haunting melody that you’re glad isn’t ruined by your disassociation fits.

Halfway through the piece, you can’t resist yourself. You kiss his neck, his ear, his jaw, his hair - Draco stops playing and grabs the sides of your face, scowling. “I said no touching.”

“What are you gonna do, spank me?”

He actually seems to consider that. You snort, tearing away from his hold. “Kinky bastard. It’s so stereotypical for you to know how to play the piano. Rich git.”

Draco narrows his eyes. “You’re complaining about my playing, when you were begging me to play it earlier?”

“No,” you smirk, leaning forward to press your lips against his.

He doesn’t let you stop, then, and instead explores your mouth with his tongue. You nip at his lip. He practically flies backwards, exclaiming, “Did you just bite me?” Then, “...Why did I like it?”

“Keep playing, Mozart,” you slam your hand down on the left side of the piano, snorting when he jumps.

He whines, “Why can’t you always be sappy?”

“I’m not wired to. Keep playing, Draco, I want to see how long it takes you to stop when I do this…” You attach your mouth to the spot where his jaw meets his neck, sucking lightly. Draco groans, but a second later, continues the piece.

This, pretending to be normal, is natural for you. It’s just to calm you down, relieve the tension. Hours later, you’ll be shaking again, and Draco will be by your side, ready to calm you down and recite lines about how ‘everything will be okay.’  

For now, though, it takes him about twenty seconds before he stops playing for good.

[daynamartinez22]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 225

Click on the video above to watch Episode 225 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: We are live very quickly today. Hey everybody! Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 225, two hundred and a quarter. Today is the 27th of February 2019. We have got some great announcements for you. But before we get into that, we’re gonna go down and say hi to everybody. Starting on the left, Chris, how are you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Exciting day today, especially with all the good stuff going on in Semantic Mastery.

Adam: Definitely, definitely. Hernan, how about yourself, how are you doing?

Hernan: I’m doing great. I’m super excited for today, super excited for Funnel Hacking live last week, it was awesome. We have a lot of good stuff coming up for you guys, so stay tuned. We have a lot of good stuff coming up for you guys today, actually. So it’s gonna be awesome.

Adam: Oh, I just have this T-shirt on, how random. All right. Well, anyways, moving right along. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I’m good, man. What’s up?

Adam: Nothing, just chillin’. I was hoping for a weather report. It’s kind of overcast and nasty here. How about you?

Marco: It’s over-sunny and sunny here.

Adam: Bradley, how are you doing? What have you got, snow, hurricanes? What’s going on?

Bradley: I don’t know. I haven’t been outside since about 6 o'clock this morning because I’ve been working all day. But it looks sunny, with the temperature. Anyways, hi!

Adam: Well, I see you’ve got your nightshirt on too.

Bradley: Yeah. We got the memo, apparently. Mine is fading now because I wear mine more than you, apparently.

Adam: Yeah, yeah. I might have just gotten one for the conference I was at. So shout out to Dan, if you’re watching, good to see you, man. We bumped into Dan and his wife at Funnel Hacking Live. It’s always good to see people. We met a few more people who knew us from Hump Day Hangout. It was really cool to see, Hernan, I think you met up with a few people, [inaudible 00:01:52] my mind while I’m talking I can’t remember anybody’s name.

Hernan: Yeah, for sure. Adam reached out to me and he was a big fan of Semantic Mastery. He had a digital marketing agency and he was listening to Hump Day Hangouts pretty much every week. So yeah, it’s good to see, “Hey, you’re from Semantic Mastery. I know you guys,” and that’s pretty cool. That is pretty cool.

Adam: Awesome. Well, I’d like to say this every time, if you’re new to Semantic Mastery, first of all, thank you very much for watching Hump Day Hangouts. This place gets your questions answered, you can just put them on the page. If you’re watching the replay, just go to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions and ask your question there. Then you can always come back, we timestamp the video so you can watch later whether you got client calls, you’re working, whatever it is.

Then the next thing we always tell you is, because people ask us, where should I start with Semantic Mastery? Well, you should start with the Battle Plan. Today, the Battle Plan 3.0, bigger, better badder, expanded, has landed and we have got all sorts of good stuff in there. We’re going to talk about that a little bit more, but I’ll be putting the link on the page. I highly suggest you grab that. We got some kick-ass bonuses. I’m not gonna read it to you. I want you to go check out the sales page. Personally, I like it because I made it, but secondly, we got just a like laundry list of some cool stuff we put together for you guys. So please go and check that out.

If you’ve already done that and you’re looking to take things up a few notches, if you’re wanting to grow or you want to start your own local digital marketing agency, then we would love to have you join the Mastermind and you can find out more about that at mastermind.semanticmastery.com.

Bradley: By the way, I wanna welcome Robert Nelson. He just joined today. Robert, I reached out to you via email to schedule your onboarding call with me. Welcome to the Mastermind. I hope to chat with you next week sometime.

Adam: Outstanding! Looking over things real quick, I wanted to tell you too, I’ve skipped this while I was excited about talking to the new people, but if you’re checking out the replay or you watch these on YouTube and you’re checking this out sometime in the future, click the subscribe button, stay up to date with all the Hump Day Hangouts, all the video clips we put out, all the training, all the good stuff. It’s great way and free way to stay up to date.

Let’s get into it. I need to pay some stuff on the page. Hernan, or you guys, can you tell them a little bit more about what’s going on with the Battle Plan?

Hernan: Yeah, for sure. The Battle Plan was born because, I think it was like two years ago and we have been putting out like, Bradley specifically, he’s a content machine, and we have been putting out a bunch of content, a lot of content pretty much every week, between Hump Day Hangouts, between the Mastermind sessions and whatnot, the groups and whatnot. So a lot of people are reaching out and saying, “Hey guys, you guys are awesome, but we need, or we feel we need something that we could actually grab and take a look at and say, all right, so I am at this stage, I have a new website, what step one, what would Semantic Mastery recommend? What would Bradley Benner do?”

Basically, we kind of developed that step-by-step framework so that we knew a lot of people that were coming that they would have like new websites and, bam, we developed a framework for them, each websites we develop a framework for them, YouTube videos, we developed a framework, local websites, we developed a framework. We have been adding up, taking out, subtracting, adding and updating to the latest and greatest stuff that we have been finding throughout these past few years.

Now, this edition, the 3.0, the SEO Confidential, we have added everything that goes into Google My Business, which is something that we didn’t have on previous versions. Now it’s there. So if you’re optimizing Google My Businesses for clients doing lead-gen and whatnot, this is the type of stuff that you wanna get. We have also added a bunch of additional bonuses.

Not only that, when you’re getting the Battle Plan, which is again of kind of a feel manual, you go through it, you know exactly what you do, where to order, what to do, in what quantity, in what power and whatnot, you also get access to a webinar that we recorded that is basically the Battle Plan in a webinar format. So I think that when getting the Battle Plan you’re sending yourself up for success with your local digital marketing agency. Even if you’re doing info products, if you’re doing affiliate, it also works as well just because of the fact of how specific it is.

If you want a million different things, that’s not your thing, that’s not what you wanna get. But if you want to simplify way of applying the Semantic Mastery knowledge over the past five years, then that is the guy that you want to get pretty much.

Marco: Can I just add that simply does not mean bad. We boiled it down. It’s a step-by-step instruction so that anybody could come in and follow what we do, how we apply our own training. Because Bradley does training, I do training, Hernan does his stuff, and we have to have a way for people to know, okay, so if I were to approach this, how would I tackle this step-by-step? So that’s what was done in the Battle Plan.

Just because it’s simplified doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work, that it’s bad. We’re hardly charging anything for it, anyway. But it’s just a way for you to go and take a look, okay, so these are the things that I need to do. If I follow this formula, does this guarantee me success? Oh, fuck no. Nothing guarantees anything. The thing that we can tell you is that this is what we do and the things that we apply to get our success online. These are the things that we have done.

If you apply it and if you follow everything in sequence, I mean, nothing’s guaranteed and in this world, especially not when you’re dealing with the 800-pound gorilla in the room, but this guy, there’s some absolute fantastic tactics in there that will help you overcome that 800-pound gorilla. I mean, you can go and do the Google tickle. When all is said and done and you’re still having trouble, you can go in and you can still hammer Google and make the needle move. It’s just how much work are you willing to put in towards your success? Because nothing in this world is free. I’m Christian, and so if you don’t work, you don’t eat. It’s very plain. So guys if you don’t put in the work, how can you expect to be successful on the web?

No magic pills. No magic formulas. Anybody telling you that you can make $100,000 overnight is blowing smoke up your ass. Stop listening. Put in the work.

Bradley: Yeah. He mentioned G tickle, that sounds a lot dirtier than it really is. Just check out the Battle Plan, you’ll see what we mean.

Adam: Yeah. I want to say real quick, I wanted to do something fun for you guys. If anyone is watching right now and hasn’t picked up the Battle Plan yet, one, you should do it, and two, we’ll give you a little push in the right direction here. Go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com. Buy it, grab it during Hump Day Hangouts and comment on the page and we’ll randomly select one person who does that, we’ll buy one of these nice fancy T-shirts for you and ship it to you for free.

Marco: Can we give someone a Battle Plan for the best question? I know we didn’t plan this ahead, but why don’t we do that?

Adam: Yeah.

Marco: Or if they bought it, we can refund it.

Adam: Yeah. We’ll do a free one, just because I don’t wanna screw up our stats. I’m not gonna lie. I’m looking at the numbers. But yeah, best question, Marco, we’ll pick someone, and then if you go and buy the Battle Plan during comment, leave a comment on the page, and we’ll randomly select. We’ll hop online, we’ll get one of these nice shirts, printed out for you and send it to you.

Bradley: Cool. Can we get into it?

Adam: Let’s do it.

Bradley: All right. I’m gonna tease the Mastermind just briefly because we’ve been working on building out GMB assets and all that. By the way, guys, if you’re in any other groups, you’ll probably are aware that there’s a lot of shit going on right now with GMB because Google’s trying to crack down on spam to Maps listings, which we all knew was gonna happen. I’ve been preaching that for months. That’s part of the reason why I’ve been pushing for months on building a scalable process for building these out. I kept hammering all of our Mastermind members especially with guys be building, building, building right now, well, monetize them later, right now build them, because I knew it was gonna be a loophole that was gonna get shut down or at least made more difficult. It looks like that’s what’s going on right now.

So there’s a lot of stuff going on, a lot of changes, Google’s cracking the whip, they’re tightening the noose, so to speak. So I recommend staying out of the GMBs, unless you have to go in them, work on off-page stuff. That’s really what my team is doing. My team has been completely prohibited from going in any new accounts or anything that’s been set up recently. So I’m having them just go back through and fine-tune our off-page strategies until we figure out what’s going on.

Also, a lot of times, guys, it’s just a matter of letting the dust settle, like letting everything calm down and cool off before going back in. We have some ideas, we’re not gonna share them here yet, but we do have some ideas as to what not to do in order to prevent suspensions and that kind of stuff.

But just know that you have options and opportunities to work on existing assets that may need additional pushes, like I’ve got a bunch of those. So we’re kind of working on the off-page stuff at the moment. Then once we nail down what we’ve determined is the proper procedure for going forward, obviously, we’re going to share that in our paid groups or the members that have bought specific products and things like that.

Just kind of wanna give everybody a heads up that, no, don’t panic, guys, I’m sure you’ve got plenty of stuff that you can work on while the process is calming down. Eventually, it will, it always does, and we’ll find other ways. That’s just the nature of the game. It’s a cat-and-mouse game. That’s what SEO is, really, digital marketing.

With that said, also I have recently released all my processed docs and everything to the Mastermind members because I had spent about four months really developing these processes in training and virtual assistant team to build out my assets and so that I could scale this and do exactly what I’ve been preaching and that was to build, build, build. I think we built-, well, I’m not going to mention how many, but a lot. We built a lot of different assets. I think it was two weeks ago I released, or maybe a month ago now, or three weeks ago, something like that, all the process docs that I developed with my team as well as some of our live event attendees to the Mastermind, which was invaluable.

I got a lot of really good responses and comments from that because we didn’t charge anything extra for that, guys, as part of the Mastermind. We always say Mastermind has its privileges. Well, because I’ve got my team doing off-page stuff right now and recently there’s been some developments. For example, we did a webinar with Lisa Allen. You might want to get this link ready, Adam, anyways for the RankFeedr webinar, if anybody hasn’t seen it yet. Lisa has this tool that’s a co-citation RSS feed creator, or a super feed creator, as I like to call it. It’s called RankFeedr.

It’s great for creating co-citation and adding geographic relevance, especially for some of the processes that we developed for the GMB asset building or the Local Lease Pro model. It’s something that you can set and forget. It’s a bit time-consuming to create these super feeds. Also, there’s a way that you can embed them in specific pages.

There’s a question specifically from our new Mastermind member Robert that I’m gonna answer in just a few minutes, but there’s a process that I taught on how to create an embedded feed using feed burner in Syndication Academy update webinar, which was the last update webinar. I just held that a few weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago, three weeks ago now. So if anybody’s in Syndication Academy, excuse me, if you haven’t seen, that go to the training area and go look at the update section. It’s the only replays or archived so far for 2019. So it’s in a specific section there in the replays or updates, module, whatever you call it.

In there I talked about specifically how to do that. Well, you can combine the two methods. If you’ve got RankFeedr, then you can actually embed the feed. It’s really powerful. So I’ve got my team, I actually was working on producing the process doc for my team today so that I can get my VAs, because I’m just having to do off-page stuff at the moment. So they’re gonna go back through and go through all the assets that we’ve created and start embedding these feeds and in very specific locations. It’s a bit of a process but I’m just gonna give you guys a quick preview of what my process docs look like. The Mastermind members already know, many of you probably don’t.

That in itself, guys, I’ve put a lot of work into this stuff. I’ve developed my processes over the years and how to create process docs and how I train my team. It’s a literal step-by-step process that they cannot make mistakes. As long as they follow, I mean, they don’t even need the training video. There’s always a corresponding training video with all of my process docs. But they could just follow, if they can read, you can take a VA, virtual assistant that’s cold right off the street, like essentially has no internet marketing skills whatsoever. But as long as they know how to read and navigate on a computer, then they can complete any process that I want them to complete. That’s essentially how we train our teams.

So I’m just gonna grab the screen before we get into it anyways. I’m gonna show you guys this really quickly. Take a screenshot if you’re smart. But this is it. This is me explaining what it is to my team, and then I go through and I tell them what we’re gonna be doing. I just started on part one, the training video will go here, there’s a step-by-step process as part two will be next, and then part three is how to create the feed burner feed and embed it.

So again, I just wanted to do it real quick, kind of tease on that, guys, because Mastermind members, as soon as I get that process training completed, I’m gonna add that to the process docs that I shared with you, guys, in the Mastermind just a couple of weeks ago. Okay. So be on the lookout for that, you’ll be able to put it to use. All right.

Also, we’re gonna get into questions, but I did wanna mention this very quickly, Ben had a great question last week, he’s also a Mastermind member, about how to get over shiny object syndrome and how to focus and how not to get carried away or swept away by other products or methods that are attractive? As entrepreneurs, we often chase opportunity because we see opportunity everywhere and, as the saying goes, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, right?

So a lot of times we get involved with or started on a project usually a new method of some sort that we’ve been suckered into from an attractive marketing message. We start off with what’s called uninformed optimism, and then as we dig into it a little bit we realize the amount of work or the learning curve involved and all that kind of stuff, that’s where we go into this next stage of what’s called the emotional cycle of change. It’s called informed pessimism.

Anyways, I’m not gonna go through all that because I put a video on here that I found to be very helpful. I review it often when I find myself in this emotional cycle of change. So I posted this in the comment section, guys. Just bookmark it. Go back and watch it if you are the type that suffered, most of you are probably entrepreneurs and that’s why you’re watching this webinar, you’ve probably suffered from shiny object syndrome at some point or you currently still are. I’m a recovering shiny object syndrome, that’s like a recovering alcoholics. Do you know what I mean? I was talking about how I’ve unsubscribed from all the marketing emails message or lists and things like that specifically because I really want to stay focused on doing what I know is going to progress my business. I think this video may help you, guys, so just check it out when you get a chance.

Does Ranking YouTube Videos And Selling Lead For Local Business In Google Still Work In 2019?

Okay. We’re gonna get right into questions. It looks like Renee Wagner posted his question twice and it looks like she posted it last week probably after the webinar, so I’m gonna start with her. She says, “Does ranking videos for local businesses and Google using YouTube and selling the leads to local businesses still work well in 2019?”

Yeah, it can. The thing about ranking local videos for leads is they don’t convert typically as well as having a Maps listing would. They can, don’t get me wrong, depending on the message and if it’s a compelling video and that kind of stuff. Also, ranking videos, you can still do it, but I also recommend that you learn how to use YouTube ads because YouTube ads, you can get really targeted traffic from the very specific areas. You can set your geographic targeting. There’s so many targeting options as far as audience targeting inside YouTube now or the Google ads platform for video that you can get really good results.

And as a byproduct of having a video that is targeted and getting targeted views from people that are within a specific geographic area, that are known to Google to be in the market or interested in that particular product or service, those are heavily weighted views. And as a byproduct of that, the video will often rank. Again, this has been a trick up my sleeve for years now, but it’s gotten better and better recently, and that’s using YouTube ads to actually rank the video.

So if you know video SEO, you still apply all of the SEO methods to the video as well as the channel, you can still do off-page SEO stuff, but the magic, the real magic is using YouTube ads to run local relevant traffic to it. Because it’s not just about the traffic either, you actually get engagement and clicks to your offer or clicks to the landing page or leads for local businesses. You’ll actually get real traffic and real leads from a properly set up YouTube ads campaign.

Correct me if I’m wrong, Adam, but isn’t that training available is an order bump for the Battle Plan?

Adam: I’m not gonna lie I was looking at a spreadsheet, I missed the first part of that.

Bradley: The YouTube ads training I did for local videos?

Adam: Yep. Yeah. You can get that if you buy the Battle Plan on check out. It’s the killer ads for local, order bump, yeah.

Bradley: I would recommend you look into that. It is still a strategy that works. For the longest time, for years now, guys, like five years now I’ve been ranking videos or doing video SEO, selling a wholesale video SEO services to a local video production company that creates videos for local businesses. They would always just create the videos and then sell them, the client, their customers, they would sell them the video and the customers would put them on their website, maybe posted into Facebook, put them on a YouTube channel, but they never were getting leads from them or ranking them in Google.

For about five years, now I’ve provided wholesale SEO services to that company. So the company handles the sales, then they upsell my service to the client or the customer and so they make money off of my SEO service every month. That way I don’t have to deal with the customers and all that kind of stuff, all I do is provide reporting. However, with just in the last six months or so, I’ve actually went back to them, after four and a half years or so of just providing wholesale SEO services, and I said, “Look, I’m not going to provide the SEO service anymore. I’m going to provide local ads. I’m going to set up ad campaigns for the videos.” Because I can guarantee traffic that way. I can’t guarantee traffic or leads or clicks or anything from ranking in Google. I can’t guarantee rankings either.

I mean, I’ve always done that. I’ve always said, “Look, if it doesn’t rank, then I don’t refund the money, but we could cancel service.” They can always cancel anytime. I don’t ever put them on contract. I’ve always been successful at ranking them anyways, but I can guarantee traffic, clicks to the website or the landing page, whatever the destination or target URL is with the call-to-action of the video. I can guarantee that with ads. I tell them, “Look, you can still tell your customers as a byproduct of a well-optimized video and a well-optimized ads campaign. It’s likely going to rank anyways.” So I still apply the SEO techniques to the videos, but I set up the ads campaign now.

What’s also cool about that is the reporting is so much better. So I provide the video production company with the reports that then they send off to their customers or their clients. The reporting is so much more detailed. It’s so much more accurate because I can show where exactly the clicks are coming from. If you go into ads and you look, and you go into the ad group and then you go into locations, you can pool locations reports. You can do it by zip code or by city or by county and things like that. So I can literally show where the views are coming from specifically.

So my targeting can be extremely tight. I can show that “Hey, this is only local people looking at the video. I can also show the audience targeting options. I can show the demographics.” I can show an incredible amount of detail as to where the traffic and clicks are coming from the ad campaign, which you couldn’t do with regular YouTube analytics or with just a rank report if that makes sense.

Again, 95% of the time the video is gonna rank because of a proper YouTube targeting campaign, because of the traffic and the engagement is [inaudible 00:23:41] both geographically and topically. [Inaudible 00:23:49]. It’s available, like I said, as part of the quarter buff to the Battle Plan. All right. That’s a great question though.

Marco: If I may, run a test just to see. Because this is interesting, we ran the test over a two, three week period. We ran embeds and link building tests to see what kind of action that would do. Interestingly enough, that still it, not only moves the needle, it has a great effect on videos. Once they start hitting the first page and they move towards the top, you can start seeing the people start coming through to the channel and subscribing and liking and sharing, and doing all of the things that a video needs in order for YouTube and Google to keep giving it love.

So there are two things that play here, right? If you hit the top spot, you’re going to get traffic if, and now here’s a caveat, the video has to be engaging enough for real people to take action to like it, to share it, or to give you that thumbs down in YouTube and in comments and everything else.

There are two ways to do this, both ways are still viable. Bradley’s method, the ads training, that’s hyper-targeted people that are likely to convert into leads. Now on the other method where you’re doing the embeds and the link building, what you’re going to get is you’re going to get a more general viewership and so you’re going to need more in order to get the leads that you could generate through the video ads course. But both methods are still alive and well in 2019.

Bradley: Yeah. To be clear, guys, that’s why I mentioned, I still apply all the SEO methods. For example, I always live stream a video to a channel that’s connected to a bunch of syndication networks. So that’s the first step. Once the live stream is over, it literally cascades through all of the syndication networks that are attached to that channel. It’s automatically getting embeds. My syndication networks are well-themed and aged because I’ve been doing this for so long. So it gets a lot of super good traditional SEO power, or juice, or whatever you want to call it from that, which are traditional signals that Marco’s talking about, like embeds.

Even if you don’t have well-aged syndication networks or whatever, you can just use an embed service and embed it. So all of those are traditional SEO signals and they still work, there’s no doubt about that. What I’m saying is combining those two methods, guys, that’s where the magic happens. So still do all the SEO stuff, optimize on page, which means optimize the video, optimize your channel, use playlists, guys, playlists, YouTube Silo Academy is how you silo. Guys, even if you only have one video on a playlist, create a playlist and put the video on it. Because a playlist is also part of video SEO, right?

Again, on-page stuff for the video, on-page stuff for your channel, use playlists, use embeds, use some backlinks. But if you’re not getting the traction that you want, and like I said, for me, it’s just standard operating procedure, I do all that first and I immediately go set up the YouTube ad for it and start driving real engagement, real traffic from Google to the video.

Google knows who that traffic is, what they’re interested in, where they came from and where they’re located. So it’s super-targeted traffic which is highly weighted trafficked by Google, and that’s the magic that really kind of helps all that SEO work. It just flourishes, right? It just works. Everything comes surfacing. It’s almost guaranteed. Again, I don’t guarantee rankings now. I tell them if it doesn’t rank, they don’t have to pay me and we’ll cancel it. But I do guarantee views and clicks. I can’t guarantee a certain number of clicks, but I can guarantee targeted views because I can buy those views directly from Google. You know what I mean? Again, use both methods, guys. I’m not saying do one or the other, use both. All right.

Factors Contributing To Low Conversion/Leads Despite Having Many Views in GMB Insights

Alex is up. He says, “Hey guys, I’m ranking in the 3-pack and I have a couple of five-star reviews. The GMB Insight shows around 450 views per month, but the calls are around five to eight per month. Is there a reason why it might be getting so few phone calls? Could you explain some common mistakes that lead to that? Thank you.”

Yeah, Alex. It could be many things. First of all, what is your message? Do you have a compelling call-to-action? What are your calls to action? What are the images? Where are you sending people, by the way? For example, if your call-to-action is to click the button in the post and go to a landing page, or wherever you’re sending them, where are you sending them? If you’re sending them to just the homepage of a website that’s not set up for lead conversions, then it could be that you’re losing them there.

It could be that if you’re just using the call buttons, then you could be losing traffic from desktop searches because people aren’t clicking the call button from desktop search and some people won’t go actually click through to the website or go do another search for it. I mean, there’s a number of things that could be it. I would say that, typically, if you’re getting a lot of exposure but you’re not getting a lot of calls or leads, then I would look at your calls to action, what your offer is, and where you’re directing the traffic to, if it’s a click-through as opposed to just a call conversion goal.

Also, in your posts, if you’re doing posts regularly, which you should be, use some images that are relevant to the industry. Because I know a lot of people that use stock images in their GMB post, guys, people are almost blind to that, they almost are numbed to a lot of stock images, so try to get original images from the client if possible, also just relevant images. I talked about how to do that from YouTube. You can also local images, which is more for SEO purposes. We talked about that at some of our training, can’t talk about that here.

Those are some of the things that I would recommend. Marco, what do you say?

Marco: I’d say that that’s just about right with 450 views, between two and 10 calls a month. You have to get, this is for talking about locally and from our experience with Mario who had more phone calls and other locals that I’ve been doing. It’s not until you get the thousands of views that you start seeing movement upwards of 20 calls. I mean, the ultimate it’s calls or people going to your website or asking for directions, all of that are our actions that could turn into leads depending on where they’re going. It just means that you have to go and figure out. I’m not gonna get too deep into our training, but you have to know when to deliver the message. Right? There’s ways to know which days, what time, what message.

Bradley: And how often.

Marco: Correct. I mean, in some niches, you might only need two or three posts a week. In others, you might need two or three posts a day. In others, you might need just a whole lot more. It’s just constant, right? Because there’s people constantly looking for it. So there’s a whole lot of things involved. Just a general overall opinion on what’s happening, I would say from 450 views, you’re just about right on the calls.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s increased the views per month and it’s a numbers game. If you’re getting what looks like 1 to 2% of whatever your views are, it looks like that’s what’s actually converting in the leads based upon that number that you’re showing there, right? Four hundred fifty views per month, five to eight calls, that’s about 1 to 2%. So if that’s the case, even if that were to hold true, that number, then if you increase your views, if you doubled that to where you’re getting 900 per month at that conversion rate, then you should essentially get 10 to 16 calls per month. Does that make sense?

Well, how do you get more views? More activity, better images, more compelling images, those kind of things, video, start using video in your GMB post, guys. If you haven’t done that yet, go test it because you’ll see that a video post, just like it does on Facebook, will get a hell of a lot more exposure, therefore, it will get a hell of a lot more views. Okay?

Marco: I would also say to look at the posts and see which of the posts are getting the most action and then try to figure out why. Explore why those are getting the action and the other ones aren’t, and tailor your posts to the ones that are getting the most action.

Bradley: Test different calls to action in different messages. It’s just like split testing ads, guys. If you’ve ever done any pay-per-click search marketing, you got to split test copy, you split test your landing pages, all that kind of stuff. Again, you can fine-tune for conversions, which is called conversion optimization, right? That’s something that you may also want to look into.

Can You Explain The Siloing Process Of GMB Auto Poster?

All right. Olena’s up. She says, “Bradley, on the Local Lease post training you talked about siloing post. You said silo post based on tags.” Yeah, that’s just because there’s an auto post, like our GMB post scheduler or GMB Briefcase, depending on the level that you’re at with your business, gives us the ability to schedule posts within the dashboard of it, which is great. It’s great for my team. It just makes things a lot easier. Then the post siloing can be accomplished through tags. It just daisy chains post together. It’s a very simple process. It’s not difficult at all.

Let me carry on with the question. She says, “Silo post based on post tag. Assign each post in the Auto poster, then select to silo posts in the Auto Poster, which means it takes the previous post URL, and adds that link from the previous post to the new post.” That’s correct. “Your GMB websites turns posts into inner pages.” That’s correct. “The first post you do manually and then in Auto Poster, the second post links to the first, the third to the second, and so on. Can you please explain a little bit further what you meant?”

No, you’re right on track. The difference is … Look, when my team goes through to set up to optimize do on-page stuff of a new asset, a new GMB location, then they typically will do, and this is just our standard operating procedure, they don’t add or connect that location to the post scheduler first. That’s something that gets done after the initial on-page work gets done, and part of the initial on-page process is just posting a post manually.

I also recommend posting manually to it anyways instead of automatically connecting a new location to an API and using an automated tool, which is what the post scheduler is, because it’s very similar, guys, to syndication. I know Olena, you’re in Syndication Academy or have been, I know that for sure. It’s the same as the best practices that I’ve been preaching for years about syndication networks, is that you don’t go out and build or purchase a brand new syndication network and then hook it up to IFTTT and start posting to it through an automated way or right off the bat.

Because if you do, it’s likely that some of your web 2 accounts within the network will get terminated. It’s happened time and time again, guys. That is specifically why I tell you if you’re gonna build them yourselves, which I don’t recommend, you’re better off buying them already built from MGYB. But my point is, whenever you build them or buy them, I’ve always recommended that you post manually to, at least to the blog accounts, which are Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress, post manually to them and allow that post to sit with for about seven days or so, I call that seasoning the network, before hooking IFTTT up and starting to automate post to it.

Because if you automate right off the bat, then a lot of the times one of those or a couple of those blog accounts will get terminated. Tumblr has been real like trigger-happy in the past, and it goes in waves, guys. WordPress too, WordPress will often get terminated if you try to automate posting to it too quickly. So that’s my process for GMBs as well. We don’t like to automate things right off the bat. I like to have my team go in and do all this stuff manually and then within a week or so, or a few days time, they’ll go back and connect through the API, which is through essentially that’s done within the post scheduler dashboard, and then they’ll start to automate the posts.

So just so you’re aware, if you’re posting manually first, which is what I recommend, then you’re not going to have a tag in that post. So when you start the posting, scheduling posts out using the post scheduler or the briefcase, depending on what level you’re at, then that first post that you create will be the first post in the silo. You can manually go link from within that first scheduled post to the post that you created. That’s why in the spreadsheet, the GMB assets sheet, which you guys have the template for that have joined Local Lease Pro, there’s a column for the first GMB post URL.

Again, my team, when they go to schedule the first post within the briefcase, we use the briefcase because we got a lot of locations, then they can just go copy and manually add that first post URL to that first scheduled post, and then that one will have the tag in it, and from that point forward they can daisy chain them together.

All right. Again, you’re right on track, Olena. I think you just needed a little bit of clarification.

Issues With Changing Appointment URL With Amazon S3 @id Page in GMB

All right. Ted’s up next. Ted says, “Hey guys, a heads up. My tree service GMB that’s been around and generating leads since LLP launched was suspended this weekend when I updated my appointment URL with the Amazon S3 @id page. Also, I was using the same Ghost Browser session since day one. I just wanted to get everyone heads up.” Yeah. That is one of the things that I would recommend. Well, first of all, like I said, I’ve told my team to stay out of them all together right now while we let things settle and there’s a lot of testing going on through various people and other groups as well. So once we have a better understanding of what it is that is triggering that, which can be a number of things, we’ve got to try to identify each one of them.

Again, I would recommend just staying out of them, but one of the things that I would recommend not doing, for those of you that still want to test with your own assets at the moment, is do not add the @id ID page to the appointment URL. If you want, you can link to it via anchor text link within the GMB website text, so it would be a contextual link. But I would recommend not pushing anything into the appointment URL at the moment, that section, other than an actual appointment app. Okay. That’s just one of the things that I think is potentially causing problems. So I would recommend not adding that URL right now to the appointment section URL, only adding a valid appointment URL or scheduling app there at the moment. Okay.

Again, you can still link to it, guys. You can link to it from your GMB post. You can link to it from an anchor text link within your GMB website content. Okay? I’m sorry for you, Ted, but that’s the nature of the game. The good thing is at least you’ve got quite some longevity out of that anyways. You said it had been producing leads for you and all that. You know can do it again, right?

Marco: Yeah. I told my VAs not to change anything, to just keep doing what they were doing it and not to start anything new, by the way.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: We just kept going because I don’t like changing, I don’t like sending Google mixed signals. Interestingly enough, I had one suspended, and I hadn’t had one suspended yet I was wondering what all the ruckus was about, and I finally had one suspended. Then when we started talking about it, when I went back and talked to the VA, she uploaded a video which we had never done on that one account. So veering from what we’re doing, just by a video was enough to get the account suspended.

Bradley: That’s crazy.

Marco: Yeah. It’s really interesting what’s going on. If you do anything different than what you’ve been doing, you’re setting yourself up to be hit. They’re just sniping anyone, left and right. I mean, third on the match and you’re done.

Bradley: Yeah. By the way, that’s something else. We had our live event and that was really where I started developing the scaling processes so that we could build, build, build. That was the goal for … We had our live event in October and so we had a 12-week period or a 90-day sprint where were our goal was to hit 50 assets built and optimize. So that ended about three weeks ago and so the next 12 weeks was gonna be all about monetizing assets.

It just worked out for us that we had built all these and now because of what’s going on, the timing is, it just happened that it’s a good time for us to stay out of building new ones at the moment, work on off-page stuff to get the ones that we built that aren’t performing well yet. We can work on all the off-page stuff now to get those to start performing better, ranking better, producing better.

I am developing the processes right now currently for, well, obviously, as I shared with you guys just moments ago, I’m still developing some of the off-page strategies and processes for my team, but at the same time I’m developing the monetization so that outreach prospecting and sales process for monetizing these assets, and that’s my next 12-week goal, which like I said we’re in about week three now of developing those processes out, which will be shared in the Mastermind. I’m gonna give everybody exactly what I’ve been doing and show real road examples of how the stuff that I’m doing, what works, what doesn’t work, all of that, like I always do in the Mastermind.

So that’s something that we just got started on this week. Now the POFU Live event attendees, I have a weekly accountability meeting with them and we did that on Monday. If anybody’s here on the Hump Day Hangouts that was there on Monday or watched the replay, you can comment, if you don’t mind, on the page and let people know how that strategy is going.

Because it’s a very powerful strategy, using video email. We’ve got a training protocol video call lead-gen system that I’m going to be updating with all of this prospecting training and processes that I’m developing right now for outreach in prospecting in sales essentially monetizing our assets specific to GMB stuff. I’m going to be adding all of that training and updating it in the video lead-gen system. That’s going to be something that we will launch probably at the end of this 12-week sprint, which is about nine weeks from now.

Again, guys, there’s a lot of stuff going on. If you’ve got stuff that’s already built but not monetized yet, now’s a good time to work on pushing them to get them to produce better and also working on developing your prospecting strategy to get them monetized. Let the dust settle on building new assets at the moment and within a few weeks, guys, will have some new methods.

What Are Some Of Your Ranking Strategies in Pinterest?

Anyways, the next question, from Dean. Marco, it’s gonna be directed at you because I don’t have any idea about anything on Pinterest. I’ll read it for you. “Question for Hump Day Hangout 225. Have any of you guys tried ranking in Pinterest? Their PPC system seems expensive compared to Google but they are a good fit for my home and garden client. Thing is with nearly 2,000 pins of furniture products and with hashtag optimized descriptions, only a few seem to pop up in Pinterest search. Old pins that have been saved a few times or more, that hints to me that pin saved by people may be the biggest ranking factor in Pinterest. Can you shed some light? If that’s the case, I wonder if some spam accounts can save pins and manipulate it somewhat?”

Marco: All right. I’m sorry I’ve spent about two years in Pinterest figuring out the algorithm and a whole bunch of different things that what makes it go and I’m not willing to give that up for free.

Bradley: Okay, fair enough. We’re gonna move on. Sorry, Dean. I’d help you if I could, but I don’t know a dick about Pinterest. I’ve never really done anything with Pinterest so I can’t help you anyways.

What Are The Reasons Why Verified GMBs Do Not Show Up In Google My Maps?

Jay Turner says, “Some of my service area business client’s verified GMBs do not show up in Google My Maps when searching for them in order to add their pin to a Google My Map. Why is that? Does adding KML file …? Again, it’s probably because it’s a GMB service area business. I don’t know that for sure because I don’t do a whole lot of My Map stuff. Is that something we can comment on? I know that’s kind of RYS stuff.

Marco: It is. If you hide the address you cannot expect to find it.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: Because all you’re going to pull up is a service area. So there’s no way to do that.

Bradley: Yeah. You could use the city center for that area. I mean, that’s something that you could do. But I don’t do a whole lot of My Map stuff still. I just never really did. I know we have RYS Academy training that talks about that stuff, Jay. So if you’re in there, that might be a good question for the RYS Facebook group. Okay.

Will. Let’s see. This is similar to the one that Olena asked, but I’ll read it real fast and we’ll move on. He says, “When using the GMB auto poster and writing a month’s worth of post, are you saying that we should manually post the first post in the sequence of these 30 posts then use the GMB auto poster software so that we can link to the first post and the subsequent posts in the Auto poster?”

Well, no. Again, it’s not about always linking to that first post, guys. Again, you post manually because it’s a way to kind of season the asset without automating stuff right off the bat. Okay? That’s it. That’s all. It’s just part of the optimization process for my team. It’s not about always linking to that one post, guys. The siloing is more about theming. It’s just like a website silo, guys. I think too many of you guys are trying to over complicate stuff, and I’m not picking on you, Will.

But if you understand website silo architecture, for YouTube silo architecture, which you can accomplish with playlists, it’s the exact same with GMB post silos. Again, it’s the same principle, guys. It’s no difference whatsoever. As long as you understand website silos and how to build those correctly and theme your silos correctly, you just repeat that same process in either YouTube or GMB. It’s the same process, right? Again, it shouldn’t be over complicated, guys.

If you don’t understand website silo architecture, go search our YouTube channel. I’ve got several videos on there that I’ve talked about. They’re several years old, but the strategy has not changed a bit. Right? It’s one of those things that are timeless, that will continue to work. You can also go search Bruce Clay. Just go search on Google Bruce Clay website silos and it’ll be the first link at the very top of Google search results and click on it. It’s an old article. I think it’s from 2009 or ‘10. Read it, it’s still valid and relevant today. Okay.

Next, Robert Nelson. He’s our new Mastermind member. Welcome, Robert. He says, “Hey guys, excited! Just signed up for the Mastermind around an hour ago. Looking forward to getting to know you guys better over the next few months.” Yeah. I hope you schedule a call with me through my calendar link I sent to you, Robert, via email. So I hope to talk to you next week.

Is It Okay To Use RSS Authority Sniper On PBNs?

He says, “My question is, I’m wondering if you think it’s a good idea to use RSS authorities.” Oh, yeah. This is a great question, by the way, guys. This is a really good question. I’m gonna answer it. “I’m wondering if you think it’s a good idea to use RSS authority sniper on PBNs if it’s also been used to create feeds for the money site.” Okay. First of all, you’re using RankFeedr to create the feeds. RSS authority sniper just finds feeds, okay? So you’re using RankFeedr to create the feeds.

“Which my PBNs are linking to.” He says, “I’m a bit worried about a footprint if the domain they use for RankFeedr feeds has links to my money sites as well as my PBNs. Do you think that’s an issue?” All right. What I would recommend is that you would create separate feeds to embed in your money sites. Okay. If you’re using PBNs, and I don’t know if you’re populating content, in other words, are you feeding content to your PBNs through RankFeedr, which I don’t recommend because that would look like crap, but you can embed the feed.

Again, I just talked about that in Syndication Academy on how to do that, guys, and the Mastermind, you guys all have access to that anyways, which means, Robert, you’ll have access to that too. Again, that was the most recent Syndication Academy update webinar. I talked about how to embed a feed. Okay. So using the RankFeedr feed to embed is super, it’s great, it’s fantastic.

So what I would recommend is that you can use RankFeedr feeds on your PBN as an embedded feed which will create co-citation, but do not include your money site links either static or RSS feeds as part the RankFeedr feed that’s on the money site-, or excuse me, the PBNs. Just use that to add local and topical relevancy to the actual PBN. Then you can still use traditional links within the content to link back to your money sites because the RankFeedr feeds that are embedded aren’t going to be having any of your content sources in the feed itself, which would be kind of a footprint, because now you’d have an embedded feed that has links to your content sources like your money content sources as well as contextual links from your traditional PBN links back to the same destination. Yeah, that would be in a footprint I would worry about.

Plus, I would also have, if you’re going to be using RankFeedr to create co-citation feeds for your money site, those would be separate feeds. In other words, I’d have one RankFeeder feed that I would use is an embed on the PBN to just add geographic and topical relevancy to that PBN, then I would have separate RankFeedr feed where you would include your money side RSS feed, your GMB RSS feed if you’re doing it for local, you could also have your static items and all that so that you can create local and geographic co-citation relevance to your money site. Bt that would be separate and apart from what you’re using on your money site-, or excuse me, your PBN. Does that make sense?

Just keep that in mind, guys. Remember, with the top level subscription package, it’s like $47 a month, guys. It’s ridiculous. You can get up to 1,100 feeds. I would create two separate feeds in that case if you’re doing that, just like I said. Robert, we can talk about that in a little bit more on our call, if you want to go and do it a little bit deeper. Okay.

Also, you can post, by the way, Robert, the Mastermind Facebook group, we go real deep into discussions about anything that you want. So if you want to post that in there, we can comment on a little bit further, also on the mastermind webinar as we dig into that stuff, so you see over the shoulder training type stuff. Marco and I get real deep into that stuff all the time. We get into the weeds. Awesome. Glad to have you.

Greg, thanks for being here, man, as always.

Is There Some Type Of Google My Business Updates Going On?

Frankie says, “Hey guys, it’s my first time back,” what’s up, Frankie?, “since you moved off Google Plus. I would like to know if there is some type of Google My Business GMB updates going?” Yes, a lot. “There was a lot of talk about this in other groups. Is it all BS or GMB the same still?” No. They’re cracking down, which guys we’ve been talking about, we knew it was gonna happen, it was just a matter of time. It doesn’t mean that it’s the end of the world. It just means that shit settles down, we’ll figure out the next method and we’ll produce training around it when it’s available, all right, once we figure it out. But glad to have you back, Frankie. Okay.

Jordan says, “Welcome back to WordPress sites, all GMBers.” Well, no, I wouldn’t say that yet. Maybe. We’ll see.

Marco: No. There’s still other ways that you can verify GMBs. All they’re trying to do is kill one loophole, but there’s quite a few others. The old stuff that we’ve always been preaching is still working. So no, I’m not planning on going back to WordPress sites anytime soon. If anything, I’ll just go back to G sites. Well, I never left G sites, right? Drive stacks and G sites.

Bradley: Yeah. Quit This House says, “Do we still get the bonus semantic webinar if we buy feed burner stuff today?” Yeah. Well, essentially, all I was gonna do was share some of my methods on how I’m using it and some of the results that I’ve gotten. Yeah, sure. I’m glad you mentioned that, by the way, because I almost forgot about it. So if you bought RankFeedr guys through us and you can prove it, then just reach out, what I’ll do is …

By the way, Adam, if you’re still, on can you do me a favor and make a note of this? Maybe in two weeks or three weeks something like that I’ll hold a kind of an update webinar for RankFeedr, and Mastermind will obviously be included, and maybe I’ll probably include Syndication Academy members too, because it’s precisely the method that I’ve shared in Syndication Academy, which is how to embed those feeds and create the feeds, and what I’m doing, and where I’m embedding them. I’ll even give you guys the process for, well, that’s only Mastermind members will get the process doc, guys. It has to be that way.

But I can share with you what I’m doing and the results that I’m getting specifically with those RankFeedr feeds and how to get really good results for local stuff. Okay. So, yeah, I will do just an update webinar and it’d probably be a short webinar. Again, the Mastermind, they’re going to get the process docs for this stuff too so that they can have their team do it as opposed to doing it on your own or developing the docs on your own.

But, yeah, that’s a good idea. I appreciate you reminding me about that. Absolutely, just reach out to us at support. We’ll create a small list on for people that we’ve known. Or just come join a Mastermind, you’ll get it anyways. Also, as I said, it might be part of the Syndication Academy update webinar is what I’ll do. It’s likely gonna be that too and we’ll just include the RankFeedr buyers into that also. Okay. It’s a good question though.

What URL Do I Use From The GMB Briefcase Auto Poster To Setup The RSS Authority Sniper?

Michael says, “Question about RSS authority sniper. What URL do I use from GMB briefcase auto poster to set up the sniper? Everyone I’ve tried got an error. Thanks.” I don’t know why that’s the case, Michael. Have you posted? You have to have GMB post or the RSS feed won’t register. It’s just like a WordPress site. If you try to add an RSS feed to IFTTT that contains no items, it won’t accept it. It will give you an error every time. So have you posted? If so, then what I …

By the way, inside the auto poster, guys, there’s an update RSS file button. You go to settings RSS feeds and that lists all of your locations that are connected to the auto poster or the briefcase, depending on where you’re at, and then it says, there’s a blue button off to the right column and it says copy URL or whatever. Well, that’s your RSS feed. If you’re having issues, just click that update RSS file button, it’s at the top of that column, it’s a yellow button, click that.

It’ll take a few seconds to reload. Once it read loads, all of your feeds will be updated and just check it then. Go check it in a Firefox browser. You’re gonna have to add, it’s called the RSSPreview Firefox add-on. RSSPreview is one word. Go open Firefox, go to Google and search RSSPreview Firefox add-on. It’ll be the first link at the time top of the search results. Click that, add it to your Firefox, enable it. That way you can start viewing HTML versions of an RSS feed in Firefox again. They disabled that a few months ago for whatever reason. The native RSS feed reader in Firefox is you have to create add the add-on now. Okay. But then just go check it.

If you have any other issues, contact support Shreepad, which is little support bubble is in the bottom right corner inside the briefcase or the post scheduler, he’s really, really good at replying to support requests, guys. If you have any issues, contact him. But I promise you, if you’ve got posts in there and you click the update RSS file button, it should work fine. Okay.

Should We Use SEO Ultimate Plugin Instead Of Yoast For The Battleplan Strategy?

John says, “Hey guys. I purchased the Battle Plan. Awesome. In the plan, it suggests using SEO ultimate plugin, but in the webinar Yoast seems to be the favorite.” Are we still linking to one of the older versions of the webinar, at that point maybe?

Hernan: Yep. Maybe we’re gonna be clipping and updating that really shortly. We have redirects over there.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah. SEO ultimate is way better, guys. It doesn’t have a bunch of loaded code. Jeffrey Smith knows his guys, I’m telling you. It is hands-down the best SEO plugin and get the SEO ultimate plus. It’s inexpensive and gives you a ton of additional functionality. The version 2 of SEO ultimate plus is coming out very soon. It’s been in beta for the last couple months but it’s going to be awesome.

Marco: Yeah. Just a short comment, Yoast is foot fungus get SEO ultimate. Please do yourself a favor.

What Are Some Top On Page And Off Page GMB Tips?

Bradley: Greg Derebret says, “Top on-page GMB tip.” I would say just complete the profile and post regularly. That’s the best on-page tip I can give you. Just completely complete the profile with well-optimized everything. Not stick spammy, just well optimized, well written stuff, and post regularly. Best off-page? That’s to be determined. Right now probably some of the stuff that we teach on Local Lease Pro and some of the stuff that I’m talking about with RankFeedr and that kind of stuff, Greg. Again, we’ll talk about that in one of the closed groups.

Marco: I would say top on-page silo, silo, Gregg. You’re with Gregg. I mean, that’s hands down, I mean, now with Jeffrey, hands down. The top off-page? Press releases, stack them.

Bradley: Yeah. Although the press releases in and of themselves are not as effective as they used to be, even six months ago, unless you’re varying distribution networks consistently or you stack, you publish press releases consistently and regularly-

Marco: That’s why I mentioned stack the press releases.

Bradley: Yeah. I had super good results with the Local PR program method with just as little as two press releases. I was able to rank in 3-pack a year and a half ago or two years ago whenever we launched that training. Now I’m finding to get the same kind of a result I have to publish six or eight press releases to get the same kind of a result, unless I’m varying the distribution networks and stacking to where I’m using three or four different distribution networks where still a lot of them share the same type of footprint, in other words, they share a lot of the same distribution sites.

But if you get some more link diversity from other distribution networks, because they distribute to different sites, in other words, and get picked up by other sites. If you do that, if you have access to a lot of different press release distributions, then that’s that can help. Or you have to stack consistently and regularly if you’re using the same sort of network and make sure that you’re …

Again, I’m not giving away too much here, but as I talked about in the Mastermind last week, I think it was Muhammad’s question about that, there’s not a set formula for how to stack, guys. You just need to constantly be varying what you’re linking to for to different tier one types of properties. It’s something that you need to do and it just seems like it’s taking more press releases to accomplish same thing. And that’s to be expected, guys. Anytime something works really well in SEO, it’s only a matter of time before it starts to become less effective. Right?

So don’t say the press releases aren’t effective. I’m not saying that at all it’s just the strategy has evolved a bit. Right?

Marco: Just to add just a quick thought, Greg. You have access to Dedia. Reach out to him because if you link build to your press releases he knows exactly what to do.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: That’ll set it on fire. Now I’m giving away too much. Drop some traffic in there, Greg

Where Can We Get Backlinks For Videos?

Bradley: Yeah. Marco, the next question, when does link building gonna be available in MGYB?

Marco: It’s being added as we speak.

Bradley: Okay. So there you go. Because, Greg, you can contact Dedia directly or you can wait, it should be available any minute because it thought was gonna be available last week. So that answers the next question, we he says, “Where can we get backlinks for videos?” Guys, our best link builder, he’s been working with me for six years now I guess and he’s awesome. We’re gonna have that service available in MGYB and it should be like at any moment. Okay? So check back often.

Is It Safe To Autopost To Lead Gen GMB Nowadays?

Guys, I got to run in a minute so I’ll try to get through the next one very quickly. Grant. What’s up, Grant? He was one of the POFU Live attendees. He’s been working very closely with the group. It’s awesome to have you here. He says, “Is auto posting to lead-gen GMB safe currently? Yeah, it is. As far as I know. I haven’t had any issues with that whatsoever. I have not had a single property terminated or suspended from that. Now I can’t swear that that’s the case for everybody. I’m just telling you I have not had any issues whatsoever it’s making on-page changes that’s been causing problems. It’s depending on what kind of change it is too, because I’ve actually been manually going in and changing on a lot of different stuff.

Like I mentioned earlier, guys, one thing I would not recommend doing is trying to add anything to the appointment URL section other than an actual bonafide genuine appointment app right now. That’s one thing that I see is triggering suspensions. Okay. I don’t know that for sure, but that’s a hunch of mine. I’ve heard that happen now from several different people. We lost six or seven assets just last week. But it’s the first six or seven out of like more than 10 times that we’ve built.

Again, I think a lot of it has to do with that one particular process. So my team’s not touching anything at the moment. I’m in their testing with different things right now. Something else is, and this is kind of using a manager account, I’ve talked about not doing that in the past, but I think using a manager account actually helps right now. So what I’ve been doing is I’ve been going in and adding a manager account to an asset and making some slight changes and then removing the manager. Still I’ve not had anything suspended like right before my eyes anyways, if that makes sense.

Google Starts To Ask For GMB Location Validation With Tax Invoice Or Business License

Gregg says, “Google is starting to ask for GMB location validation with tax.” Yeah, that’s one of the things I had predicted I thought would happen. Gregg, I’ve said that before that that was my speculation on what was going to happen, is that they were gonna start requiring either corporate doc’s or proof of mail being facts or photos taken with company letterhead or like bank statements, all of that stuff that I’ve had to do in the past to have verified GMBs moved to different locations. That’s what I assumed and I had speculated would probably happen.

The plan you outlined in your POFU group to monetize your GMB locations is brilliant and simpler, easier, and is the best method I’ve seen from all your optimization methods I’ve seen over the years that will be high converting. That’s awesome, Gregg. Yeah. I’m gonna be doing a lot of training over that next few weeks on that.

Last call to win the free Semantic Mastery T-shirt. Okay. “Bradley, is there a new press release program coming down the road soon?” Yes, there is. I can’t really announce that just yet, but I’ve been testing something that’s really kind of disruptive. I wouldn’t say that lightly, but it’s really, really cool technology that one of our very own Mastermind members has been developing it. He’s one of the code developers behind it. I’ve been on several calls with him and it’s actually very disruptive what they’re doing. Something that no other service out there has that I think would be a great addition to what we’re already doing. Again, that’s something that we’ll be announcing here in the coming weeks.

All right. Guys, pick the best question and all that so we can wrap it up.

Marco: Alex. One of the very first questions was excellent.

Bradley: Where was that? Right there?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Yep, Alex. Okay. So Alex is the winner for what, either the Battle Plan or what? T-shirt?

Hernan: Battle Plan.

Marco: Yeah. We said Battle Plan I think.

Bradley: Okay. Well, somebody else is getting a T-shirt, aren’t they?

Adam: Yeah. We did a random number generator and saw who bought and who posted back. Ted, you are the winner so just send into support from your normal email. I think we’ve actually had some back and forth between me and you, so just shoot an email into support. We’ll get to that large shirt and next time I’m in Sacramento I’m gonna find you for a beer, man.

Bradley: Don’t lie. The reason why he won is because of the beer emoji. Guys, I hope you all were paying attention. The next time you want to win something just put a beer emoji in there.

Adam: Yeah. Be within an hour’s drive of me and offer a free beer. No. We used a random number generator. It worked out, man. So we’ll get you your shirt just send them to support that’s semanticmastery.com.

Bradley: Awesome. I hope everybody got a lot out of this. No Mastermind webinar tomorrow, but we got one next week on what I’m working on, which I’ll be sharing with you guys, with the POFU members, and I have started developing this week, which is the outreach program using video email specific to the GMB asset stuff. We’re going to be going through that. So guys pay attention. Oh, and I’ll share the RankFeedr process doc with you guys in the Mastermind too. So see you all next week. Thanks guys for hanging out.

Hernan: See you, guys.

Marco: Bye everybody.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 225 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 225

Click on the video above to watch Episode 225 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: We are live very quickly today. Hey everybody! Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 225, two hundred and a quarter. Today is the 27th of February 2019. We have got some great announcements for you. But before we get into that, we’re gonna go down and say hi to everybody. Starting on the left, Chris, how are you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Exciting day today, especially with all the good stuff going on in Semantic Mastery.

Adam: Definitely, definitely. Hernan, how about yourself, how are you doing?

Hernan: I’m doing great. I’m super excited for today, super excited for Funnel Hacking live last week, it was awesome. We have a lot of good stuff coming up for you guys, so stay tuned. We have a lot of good stuff coming up for you guys today, actually. So it’s gonna be awesome.

Adam: Oh, I just have this T-shirt on, how random. All right. Well, anyways, moving right along. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I’m good, man. What’s up?

Adam: Nothing, just chillin’. I was hoping for a weather report. It’s kind of overcast and nasty here. How about you?

Marco: It’s over-sunny and sunny here.

Adam: Bradley, how are you doing? What have you got, snow, hurricanes? What’s going on?

Bradley: I don’t know. I haven’t been outside since about 6 o'clock this morning because I’ve been working all day. But it looks sunny, with the temperature. Anyways, hi!

Adam: Well, I see you’ve got your nightshirt on too.

Bradley: Yeah. We got the memo, apparently. Mine is fading now because I wear mine more than you, apparently.

Adam: Yeah, yeah. I might have just gotten one for the conference I was at. So shout out to Dan, if you’re watching, good to see you, man. We bumped into Dan and his wife at Funnel Hacking Live. It’s always good to see people. We met a few more people who knew us from Hump Day Hangout. It was really cool to see, Hernan, I think you met up with a few people, [inaudible 00:01:52] my mind while I’m talking I can’t remember anybody’s name.

Hernan: Yeah, for sure. Adam reached out to me and he was a big fan of Semantic Mastery. He had a digital marketing agency and he was listening to Hump Day Hangouts pretty much every week. So yeah, it’s good to see, “Hey, you’re from Semantic Mastery. I know you guys,” and that’s pretty cool. That is pretty cool.

Adam: Awesome. Well, I’d like to say this every time, if you’re new to Semantic Mastery, first of all, thank you very much for watching Hump Day Hangouts. This place gets your questions answered, you can just put them on the page. If you’re watching the replay, just go to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions and ask your question there. Then you can always come back, we timestamp the video so you can watch later whether you got client calls, you’re working, whatever it is.

Then the next thing we always tell you is, because people ask us, where should I start with Semantic Mastery? Well, you should start with the Battle Plan. Today, the Battle Plan 3.0, bigger, better badder, expanded, has landed and we have got all sorts of good stuff in there. We’re going to talk about that a little bit more, but I’ll be putting the link on the page. I highly suggest you grab that. We got some kick-ass bonuses. I’m not gonna read it to you. I want you to go check out the sales page. Personally, I like it because I made it, but secondly, we got just a like laundry list of some cool stuff we put together for you guys. So please go and check that out.

If you’ve already done that and you’re looking to take things up a few notches, if you’re wanting to grow or you want to start your own local digital marketing agency, then we would love to have you join the Mastermind and you can find out more about that at mastermind.semanticmastery.com.

Bradley: By the way, I wanna welcome Robert Nelson. He just joined today. Robert, I reached out to you via email to schedule your onboarding call with me. Welcome to the Mastermind. I hope to chat with you next week sometime.

Adam: Outstanding! Looking over things real quick, I wanted to tell you too, I’ve skipped this while I was excited about talking to the new people, but if you’re checking out the replay or you watch these on YouTube and you’re checking this out sometime in the future, click the subscribe button, stay up to date with all the Hump Day Hangouts, all the video clips we put out, all the training, all the good stuff. It’s great way and free way to stay up to date.

Let’s get into it. I need to pay some stuff on the page. Hernan, or you guys, can you tell them a little bit more about what’s going on with the Battle Plan?

Hernan: Yeah, for sure. The Battle Plan was born because, I think it was like two years ago and we have been putting out like, Bradley specifically, he’s a content machine, and we have been putting out a bunch of content, a lot of content pretty much every week, between Hump Day Hangouts, between the Mastermind sessions and whatnot, the groups and whatnot. So a lot of people are reaching out and saying, “Hey guys, you guys are awesome, but we need, or we feel we need something that we could actually grab and take a look at and say, all right, so I am at this stage, I have a new website, what step one, what would Semantic Mastery recommend? What would Bradley Benner do?”

Basically, we kind of developed that step-by-step framework so that we knew a lot of people that were coming that they would have like new websites and, bam, we developed a framework for them, each websites we develop a framework for them, YouTube videos, we developed a framework, local websites, we developed a framework. We have been adding up, taking out, subtracting, adding and updating to the latest and greatest stuff that we have been finding throughout these past few years.

Now, this edition, the 3.0, the SEO Confidential, we have added everything that goes into Google My Business, which is something that we didn’t have on previous versions. Now it’s there. So if you’re optimizing Google My Businesses for clients doing lead-gen and whatnot, this is the type of stuff that you wanna get. We have also added a bunch of additional bonuses.

Not only that, when you’re getting the Battle Plan, which is again of kind of a feel manual, you go through it, you know exactly what you do, where to order, what to do, in what quantity, in what power and whatnot, you also get access to a webinar that we recorded that is basically the Battle Plan in a webinar format. So I think that when getting the Battle Plan you’re sending yourself up for success with your local digital marketing agency. Even if you’re doing info products, if you’re doing affiliate, it also works as well just because of the fact of how specific it is.

If you want a million different things, that’s not your thing, that’s not what you wanna get. But if you want to simplify way of applying the Semantic Mastery knowledge over the past five years, then that is the guy that you want to get pretty much.

Marco: Can I just add that simply does not mean bad. We boiled it down. It’s a step-by-step instruction so that anybody could come in and follow what we do, how we apply our own training. Because Bradley does training, I do training, Hernan does his stuff, and we have to have a way for people to know, okay, so if I were to approach this, how would I tackle this step-by-step? So that’s what was done in the Battle Plan.

Just because it’s simplified doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work, that it’s bad. We’re hardly charging anything for it, anyway. But it’s just a way for you to go and take a look, okay, so these are the things that I need to do. If I follow this formula, does this guarantee me success? Oh, fuck no. Nothing guarantees anything. The thing that we can tell you is that this is what we do and the things that we apply to get our success online. These are the things that we have done.

If you apply it and if you follow everything in sequence, I mean, nothing’s guaranteed and in this world, especially not when you’re dealing with the 800-pound gorilla in the room, but this guy, there’s some absolute fantastic tactics in there that will help you overcome that 800-pound gorilla. I mean, you can go and do the Google tickle. When all is said and done and you’re still having trouble, you can go in and you can still hammer Google and make the needle move. It’s just how much work are you willing to put in towards your success? Because nothing in this world is free. I’m Christian, and so if you don’t work, you don’t eat. It’s very plain. So guys if you don’t put in the work, how can you expect to be successful on the web?

No magic pills. No magic formulas. Anybody telling you that you can make $100,000 overnight is blowing smoke up your ass. Stop listening. Put in the work.

Bradley: Yeah. He mentioned G tickle, that sounds a lot dirtier than it really is. Just check out the Battle Plan, you’ll see what we mean.

Adam: Yeah. I want to say real quick, I wanted to do something fun for you guys. If anyone is watching right now and hasn’t picked up the Battle Plan yet, one, you should do it, and two, we’ll give you a little push in the right direction here. Go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com. Buy it, grab it during Hump Day Hangouts and comment on the page and we’ll randomly select one person who does that, we’ll buy one of these nice fancy T-shirts for you and ship it to you for free.

Marco: Can we give someone a Battle Plan for the best question? I know we didn’t plan this ahead, but why don’t we do that?

Adam: Yeah.

Marco: Or if they bought it, we can refund it.

Adam: Yeah. We’ll do a free one, just because I don’t wanna screw up our stats. I’m not gonna lie. I’m looking at the numbers. But yeah, best question, Marco, we’ll pick someone, and then if you go and buy the Battle Plan during comment, leave a comment on the page, and we’ll randomly select. We’ll hop online, we’ll get one of these nice shirts, printed out for you and send it to you.

Bradley: Cool. Can we get into it?

Adam: Let’s do it.

Bradley: All right. I’m gonna tease the Mastermind just briefly because we’ve been working on building out GMB assets and all that. By the way, guys, if you’re in any other groups, you’ll probably are aware that there’s a lot of shit going on right now with GMB because Google’s trying to crack down on spam to Maps listings, which we all knew was gonna happen. I’ve been preaching that for months. That’s part of the reason why I’ve been pushing for months on building a scalable process for building these out. I kept hammering all of our Mastermind members especially with guys be building, building, building right now, well, monetize them later, right now build them, because I knew it was gonna be a loophole that was gonna get shut down or at least made more difficult. It looks like that’s what’s going on right now.

So there’s a lot of stuff going on, a lot of changes, Google’s cracking the whip, they’re tightening the noose, so to speak. So I recommend staying out of the GMBs, unless you have to go in them, work on off-page stuff. That’s really what my team is doing. My team has been completely prohibited from going in any new accounts or anything that’s been set up recently. So I’m having them just go back through and fine-tune our off-page strategies until we figure out what’s going on.

Also, a lot of times, guys, it’s just a matter of letting the dust settle, like letting everything calm down and cool off before going back in. We have some ideas, we’re not gonna share them here yet, but we do have some ideas as to what not to do in order to prevent suspensions and that kind of stuff.

But just know that you have options and opportunities to work on existing assets that may need additional pushes, like I’ve got a bunch of those. So we’re kind of working on the off-page stuff at the moment. Then once we nail down what we’ve determined is the proper procedure for going forward, obviously, we’re going to share that in our paid groups or the members that have bought specific products and things like that.

Just kind of wanna give everybody a heads up that, no, don’t panic, guys, I’m sure you’ve got plenty of stuff that you can work on while the process is calming down. Eventually, it will, it always does, and we’ll find other ways. That’s just the nature of the game. It’s a cat-and-mouse game. That’s what SEO is, really, digital marketing.

With that said, also I have recently released all my processed docs and everything to the Mastermind members because I had spent about four months really developing these processes in training and virtual assistant team to build out my assets and so that I could scale this and do exactly what I’ve been preaching and that was to build, build, build. I think we built-, well, I’m not going to mention how many, but a lot. We built a lot of different assets. I think it was two weeks ago I released, or maybe a month ago now, or three weeks ago, something like that, all the process docs that I developed with my team as well as some of our live event attendees to the Mastermind, which was invaluable.

I got a lot of really good responses and comments from that because we didn’t charge anything extra for that, guys, as part of the Mastermind. We always say Mastermind has its privileges. Well, because I’ve got my team doing off-page stuff right now and recently there’s been some developments. For example, we did a webinar with Lisa Allen. You might want to get this link ready, Adam, anyways for the RankFeedr webinar, if anybody hasn’t seen it yet. Lisa has this tool that’s a co-citation RSS feed creator, or a super feed creator, as I like to call it. It’s called RankFeedr.

It’s great for creating co-citation and adding geographic relevance, especially for some of the processes that we developed for the GMB asset building or the Local Lease Pro model. It’s something that you can set and forget. It’s a bit time-consuming to create these super feeds. Also, there’s a way that you can embed them in specific pages.

There’s a question specifically from our new Mastermind member Robert that I’m gonna answer in just a few minutes, but there’s a process that I taught on how to create an embedded feed using feed burner in Syndication Academy update webinar, which was the last update webinar. I just held that a few weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago, three weeks ago now. So if anybody’s in Syndication Academy, excuse me, if you haven’t seen, that go to the training area and go look at the update section. It’s the only replays or archived so far for 2019. So it’s in a specific section there in the replays or updates, module, whatever you call it.

In there I talked about specifically how to do that. Well, you can combine the two methods. If you’ve got RankFeedr, then you can actually embed the feed. It’s really powerful. So I’ve got my team, I actually was working on producing the process doc for my team today so that I can get my VAs, because I’m just having to do off-page stuff at the moment. So they’re gonna go back through and go through all the assets that we’ve created and start embedding these feeds and in very specific locations. It’s a bit of a process but I’m just gonna give you guys a quick preview of what my process docs look like. The Mastermind members already know, many of you probably don’t.

That in itself, guys, I’ve put a lot of work into this stuff. I’ve developed my processes over the years and how to create process docs and how I train my team. It’s a literal step-by-step process that they cannot make mistakes. As long as they follow, I mean, they don’t even need the training video. There’s always a corresponding training video with all of my process docs. But they could just follow, if they can read, you can take a VA, virtual assistant that’s cold right off the street, like essentially has no internet marketing skills whatsoever. But as long as they know how to read and navigate on a computer, then they can complete any process that I want them to complete. That’s essentially how we train our teams.

So I’m just gonna grab the screen before we get into it anyways. I’m gonna show you guys this really quickly. Take a screenshot if you’re smart. But this is it. This is me explaining what it is to my team, and then I go through and I tell them what we’re gonna be doing. I just started on part one, the training video will go here, there’s a step-by-step process as part two will be next, and then part three is how to create the feed burner feed and embed it.

So again, I just wanted to do it real quick, kind of tease on that, guys, because Mastermind members, as soon as I get that process training completed, I’m gonna add that to the process docs that I shared with you, guys, in the Mastermind just a couple of weeks ago. Okay. So be on the lookout for that, you’ll be able to put it to use. All right.

Also, we’re gonna get into questions, but I did wanna mention this very quickly, Ben had a great question last week, he’s also a Mastermind member, about how to get over shiny object syndrome and how to focus and how not to get carried away or swept away by other products or methods that are attractive? As entrepreneurs, we often chase opportunity because we see opportunity everywhere and, as the saying goes, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, right?

So a lot of times we get involved with or started on a project usually a new method of some sort that we’ve been suckered into from an attractive marketing message. We start off with what’s called uninformed optimism, and then as we dig into it a little bit we realize the amount of work or the learning curve involved and all that kind of stuff, that’s where we go into this next stage of what’s called the emotional cycle of change. It’s called informed pessimism.

Anyways, I’m not gonna go through all that because I put a video on here that I found to be very helpful. I review it often when I find myself in this emotional cycle of change. So I posted this in the comment section, guys. Just bookmark it. Go back and watch it if you are the type that suffered, most of you are probably entrepreneurs and that’s why you’re watching this webinar, you’ve probably suffered from shiny object syndrome at some point or you currently still are. I’m a recovering shiny object syndrome, that’s like a recovering alcoholics. Do you know what I mean? I was talking about how I’ve unsubscribed from all the marketing emails message or lists and things like that specifically because I really want to stay focused on doing what I know is going to progress my business. I think this video may help you, guys, so just check it out when you get a chance.

Does Ranking YouTube Videos And Selling Lead For Local Business In Google Still Work In 2019?

Okay. We’re gonna get right into questions. It looks like Renee Wagner posted his question twice and it looks like she posted it last week probably after the webinar, so I’m gonna start with her. She says, “Does ranking videos for local businesses and Google using YouTube and selling the leads to local businesses still work well in 2019?”

Yeah, it can. The thing about ranking local videos for leads is they don’t convert typically as well as having a Maps listing would. They can, don’t get me wrong, depending on the message and if it’s a compelling video and that kind of stuff. Also, ranking videos, you can still do it, but I also recommend that you learn how to use YouTube ads because YouTube ads, you can get really targeted traffic from the very specific areas. You can set your geographic targeting. There’s so many targeting options as far as audience targeting inside YouTube now or the Google ads platform for video that you can get really good results.

And as a byproduct of having a video that is targeted and getting targeted views from people that are within a specific geographic area, that are known to Google to be in the market or interested in that particular product or service, those are heavily weighted views. And as a byproduct of that, the video will often rank. Again, this has been a trick up my sleeve for years now, but it’s gotten better and better recently, and that’s using YouTube ads to actually rank the video.

So if you know video SEO, you still apply all of the SEO methods to the video as well as the channel, you can still do off-page SEO stuff, but the magic, the real magic is using YouTube ads to run local relevant traffic to it. Because it’s not just about the traffic either, you actually get engagement and clicks to your offer or clicks to the landing page or leads for local businesses. You’ll actually get real traffic and real leads from a properly set up YouTube ads campaign.

Correct me if I’m wrong, Adam, but isn’t that training available is an order bump for the Battle Plan?

Adam: I’m not gonna lie I was looking at a spreadsheet, I missed the first part of that.

Bradley: The YouTube ads training I did for local videos?

Adam: Yep. Yeah. You can get that if you buy the Battle Plan on check out. It’s the killer ads for local, order bump, yeah.

Bradley: I would recommend you look into that. It is still a strategy that works. For the longest time, for years now, guys, like five years now I’ve been ranking videos or doing video SEO, selling a wholesale video SEO services to a local video production company that creates videos for local businesses. They would always just create the videos and then sell them, the client, their customers, they would sell them the video and the customers would put them on their website, maybe posted into Facebook, put them on a YouTube channel, but they never were getting leads from them or ranking them in Google.

For about five years, now I’ve provided wholesale SEO services to that company. So the company handles the sales, then they upsell my service to the client or the customer and so they make money off of my SEO service every month. That way I don’t have to deal with the customers and all that kind of stuff, all I do is provide reporting. However, with just in the last six months or so, I’ve actually went back to them, after four and a half years or so of just providing wholesale SEO services, and I said, “Look, I’m not going to provide the SEO service anymore. I’m going to provide local ads. I’m going to set up ad campaigns for the videos.” Because I can guarantee traffic that way. I can’t guarantee traffic or leads or clicks or anything from ranking in Google. I can’t guarantee rankings either.

I mean, I’ve always done that. I’ve always said, “Look, if it doesn’t rank, then I don’t refund the money, but we could cancel service.” They can always cancel anytime. I don’t ever put them on contract. I’ve always been successful at ranking them anyways, but I can guarantee traffic, clicks to the website or the landing page, whatever the destination or target URL is with the call-to-action of the video. I can guarantee that with ads. I tell them, “Look, you can still tell your customers as a byproduct of a well-optimized video and a well-optimized ads campaign. It’s likely going to rank anyways.” So I still apply the SEO techniques to the videos, but I set up the ads campaign now.

What’s also cool about that is the reporting is so much better. So I provide the video production company with the reports that then they send off to their customers or their clients. The reporting is so much more detailed. It’s so much more accurate because I can show where exactly the clicks are coming from. If you go into ads and you look, and you go into the ad group and then you go into locations, you can pool locations reports. You can do it by zip code or by city or by county and things like that. So I can literally show where the views are coming from specifically.

So my targeting can be extremely tight. I can show that “Hey, this is only local people looking at the video. I can also show the audience targeting options. I can show the demographics.” I can show an incredible amount of detail as to where the traffic and clicks are coming from the ad campaign, which you couldn’t do with regular YouTube analytics or with just a rank report if that makes sense.

Again, 95% of the time the video is gonna rank because of a proper YouTube targeting campaign, because of the traffic and the engagement is [inaudible 00:23:41] both geographically and topically. [Inaudible 00:23:49]. It’s available, like I said, as part of the quarter buff to the Battle Plan. All right. That’s a great question though.

Marco: If I may, run a test just to see. Because this is interesting, we ran the test over a two, three week period. We ran embeds and link building tests to see what kind of action that would do. Interestingly enough, that still it, not only moves the needle, it has a great effect on videos. Once they start hitting the first page and they move towards the top, you can start seeing the people start coming through to the channel and subscribing and liking and sharing, and doing all of the things that a video needs in order for YouTube and Google to keep giving it love.

So there are two things that play here, right? If you hit the top spot, you’re going to get traffic if, and now here’s a caveat, the video has to be engaging enough for real people to take action to like it, to share it, or to give you that thumbs down in YouTube and in comments and everything else.

There are two ways to do this, both ways are still viable. Bradley’s method, the ads training, that’s hyper-targeted people that are likely to convert into leads. Now on the other method where you’re doing the embeds and the link building, what you’re going to get is you’re going to get a more general viewership and so you’re going to need more in order to get the leads that you could generate through the video ads course. But both methods are still alive and well in 2019.

Bradley: Yeah. To be clear, guys, that’s why I mentioned, I still apply all the SEO methods. For example, I always live stream a video to a channel that’s connected to a bunch of syndication networks. So that’s the first step. Once the live stream is over, it literally cascades through all of the syndication networks that are attached to that channel. It’s automatically getting embeds. My syndication networks are well-themed and aged because I’ve been doing this for so long. So it gets a lot of super good traditional SEO power, or juice, or whatever you want to call it from that, which are traditional signals that Marco’s talking about, like embeds.

Even if you don’t have well-aged syndication networks or whatever, you can just use an embed service and embed it. So all of those are traditional SEO signals and they still work, there’s no doubt about that. What I’m saying is combining those two methods, guys, that’s where the magic happens. So still do all the SEO stuff, optimize on page, which means optimize the video, optimize your channel, use playlists, guys, playlists, YouTube Silo Academy is how you silo. Guys, even if you only have one video on a playlist, create a playlist and put the video on it. Because a playlist is also part of video SEO, right?

Again, on-page stuff for the video, on-page stuff for your channel, use playlists, use embeds, use some backlinks. But if you’re not getting the traction that you want, and like I said, for me, it’s just standard operating procedure, I do all that first and I immediately go set up the YouTube ad for it and start driving real engagement, real traffic from Google to the video.

Google knows who that traffic is, what they’re interested in, where they came from and where they’re located. So it’s super-targeted traffic which is highly weighted trafficked by Google, and that’s the magic that really kind of helps all that SEO work. It just flourishes, right? It just works. Everything comes surfacing. It’s almost guaranteed. Again, I don’t guarantee rankings now. I tell them if it doesn’t rank, they don’t have to pay me and we’ll cancel it. But I do guarantee views and clicks. I can’t guarantee a certain number of clicks, but I can guarantee targeted views because I can buy those views directly from Google. You know what I mean? Again, use both methods, guys. I’m not saying do one or the other, use both. All right.

Factors Contributing To Low Conversion/Leads Despite Having Many Views in GMB Insights

Alex is up. He says, “Hey guys, I’m ranking in the 3-pack and I have a couple of five-star reviews. The GMB Insight shows around 450 views per month, but the calls are around five to eight per month. Is there a reason why it might be getting so few phone calls? Could you explain some common mistakes that lead to that? Thank you.”

Yeah, Alex. It could be many things. First of all, what is your message? Do you have a compelling call-to-action? What are your calls to action? What are the images? Where are you sending people, by the way? For example, if your call-to-action is to click the button in the post and go to a landing page, or wherever you’re sending them, where are you sending them? If you’re sending them to just the homepage of a website that’s not set up for lead conversions, then it could be that you’re losing them there.

It could be that if you’re just using the call buttons, then you could be losing traffic from desktop searches because people aren’t clicking the call button from desktop search and some people won’t go actually click through to the website or go do another search for it. I mean, there’s a number of things that could be it. I would say that, typically, if you’re getting a lot of exposure but you’re not getting a lot of calls or leads, then I would look at your calls to action, what your offer is, and where you’re directing the traffic to, if it’s a click-through as opposed to just a call conversion goal.

Also, in your posts, if you’re doing posts regularly, which you should be, use some images that are relevant to the industry. Because I know a lot of people that use stock images in their GMB post, guys, people are almost blind to that, they almost are numbed to a lot of stock images, so try to get original images from the client if possible, also just relevant images. I talked about how to do that from YouTube. You can also local images, which is more for SEO purposes. We talked about that at some of our training, can’t talk about that here.

Those are some of the things that I would recommend. Marco, what do you say?

Marco: I’d say that that’s just about right with 450 views, between two and 10 calls a month. You have to get, this is for talking about locally and from our experience with Mario who had more phone calls and other locals that I’ve been doing. It’s not until you get the thousands of views that you start seeing movement upwards of 20 calls. I mean, the ultimate it’s calls or people going to your website or asking for directions, all of that are our actions that could turn into leads depending on where they’re going. It just means that you have to go and figure out. I’m not gonna get too deep into our training, but you have to know when to deliver the message. Right? There’s ways to know which days, what time, what message.

Bradley: And how often.

Marco: Correct. I mean, in some niches, you might only need two or three posts a week. In others, you might need two or three posts a day. In others, you might need just a whole lot more. It’s just constant, right? Because there’s people constantly looking for it. So there’s a whole lot of things involved. Just a general overall opinion on what’s happening, I would say from 450 views, you’re just about right on the calls.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s increased the views per month and it’s a numbers game. If you’re getting what looks like 1 to 2% of whatever your views are, it looks like that’s what’s actually converting in the leads based upon that number that you’re showing there, right? Four hundred fifty views per month, five to eight calls, that’s about 1 to 2%. So if that’s the case, even if that were to hold true, that number, then if you increase your views, if you doubled that to where you’re getting 900 per month at that conversion rate, then you should essentially get 10 to 16 calls per month. Does that make sense?

Well, how do you get more views? More activity, better images, more compelling images, those kind of things, video, start using video in your GMB post, guys. If you haven’t done that yet, go test it because you’ll see that a video post, just like it does on Facebook, will get a hell of a lot more exposure, therefore, it will get a hell of a lot more views. Okay?

Marco: I would also say to look at the posts and see which of the posts are getting the most action and then try to figure out why. Explore why those are getting the action and the other ones aren’t, and tailor your posts to the ones that are getting the most action.

Bradley: Test different calls to action in different messages. It’s just like split testing ads, guys. If you’ve ever done any pay-per-click search marketing, you got to split test copy, you split test your landing pages, all that kind of stuff. Again, you can fine-tune for conversions, which is called conversion optimization, right? That’s something that you may also want to look into.

Can You Explain The Siloing Process Of GMB Auto Poster?

All right. Olena’s up. She says, “Bradley, on the Local Lease post training you talked about siloing post. You said silo post based on tags.” Yeah, that’s just because there’s an auto post, like our GMB post scheduler or GMB Briefcase, depending on the level that you’re at with your business, gives us the ability to schedule posts within the dashboard of it, which is great. It’s great for my team. It just makes things a lot easier. Then the post siloing can be accomplished through tags. It just daisy chains post together. It’s a very simple process. It’s not difficult at all.

Let me carry on with the question. She says, “Silo post based on post tag. Assign each post in the Auto poster, then select to silo posts in the Auto Poster, which means it takes the previous post URL, and adds that link from the previous post to the new post.” That’s correct. “Your GMB websites turns posts into inner pages.” That’s correct. “The first post you do manually and then in Auto Poster, the second post links to the first, the third to the second, and so on. Can you please explain a little bit further what you meant?”

No, you’re right on track. The difference is … Look, when my team goes through to set up to optimize do on-page stuff of a new asset, a new GMB location, then they typically will do, and this is just our standard operating procedure, they don’t add or connect that location to the post scheduler first. That’s something that gets done after the initial on-page work gets done, and part of the initial on-page process is just posting a post manually.

I also recommend posting manually to it anyways instead of automatically connecting a new location to an API and using an automated tool, which is what the post scheduler is, because it’s very similar, guys, to syndication. I know Olena, you’re in Syndication Academy or have been, I know that for sure. It’s the same as the best practices that I’ve been preaching for years about syndication networks, is that you don’t go out and build or purchase a brand new syndication network and then hook it up to IFTTT and start posting to it through an automated way or right off the bat.

Because if you do, it’s likely that some of your web 2 accounts within the network will get terminated. It’s happened time and time again, guys. That is specifically why I tell you if you’re gonna build them yourselves, which I don’t recommend, you’re better off buying them already built from MGYB. But my point is, whenever you build them or buy them, I’ve always recommended that you post manually to, at least to the blog accounts, which are Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress, post manually to them and allow that post to sit with for about seven days or so, I call that seasoning the network, before hooking IFTTT up and starting to automate post to it.

Because if you automate right off the bat, then a lot of the times one of those or a couple of those blog accounts will get terminated. Tumblr has been real like trigger-happy in the past, and it goes in waves, guys. WordPress too, WordPress will often get terminated if you try to automate posting to it too quickly. So that’s my process for GMBs as well. We don’t like to automate things right off the bat. I like to have my team go in and do all this stuff manually and then within a week or so, or a few days time, they’ll go back and connect through the API, which is through essentially that’s done within the post scheduler dashboard, and then they’ll start to automate the posts.

So just so you’re aware, if you’re posting manually first, which is what I recommend, then you’re not going to have a tag in that post. So when you start the posting, scheduling posts out using the post scheduler or the briefcase, depending on what level you’re at, then that first post that you create will be the first post in the silo. You can manually go link from within that first scheduled post to the post that you created. That’s why in the spreadsheet, the GMB assets sheet, which you guys have the template for that have joined Local Lease Pro, there’s a column for the first GMB post URL.

Again, my team, when they go to schedule the first post within the briefcase, we use the briefcase because we got a lot of locations, then they can just go copy and manually add that first post URL to that first scheduled post, and then that one will have the tag in it, and from that point forward they can daisy chain them together.

All right. Again, you’re right on track, Olena. I think you just needed a little bit of clarification.

Issues With Changing Appointment URL With Amazon S3 @id Page in GMB

All right. Ted’s up next. Ted says, “Hey guys, a heads up. My tree service GMB that’s been around and generating leads since LLP launched was suspended this weekend when I updated my appointment URL with the Amazon S3 @id page. Also, I was using the same Ghost Browser session since day one. I just wanted to get everyone heads up.” Yeah. That is one of the things that I would recommend. Well, first of all, like I said, I’ve told my team to stay out of them all together right now while we let things settle and there’s a lot of testing going on through various people and other groups as well. So once we have a better understanding of what it is that is triggering that, which can be a number of things, we’ve got to try to identify each one of them.

Again, I would recommend just staying out of them, but one of the things that I would recommend not doing, for those of you that still want to test with your own assets at the moment, is do not add the @id ID page to the appointment URL. If you want, you can link to it via anchor text link within the GMB website text, so it would be a contextual link. But I would recommend not pushing anything into the appointment URL at the moment, that section, other than an actual appointment app. Okay. That’s just one of the things that I think is potentially causing problems. So I would recommend not adding that URL right now to the appointment section URL, only adding a valid appointment URL or scheduling app there at the moment. Okay.

Again, you can still link to it, guys. You can link to it from your GMB post. You can link to it from an anchor text link within your GMB website content. Okay? I’m sorry for you, Ted, but that’s the nature of the game. The good thing is at least you’ve got quite some longevity out of that anyways. You said it had been producing leads for you and all that. You know can do it again, right?

Marco: Yeah. I told my VAs not to change anything, to just keep doing what they were doing it and not to start anything new, by the way.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: We just kept going because I don’t like changing, I don’t like sending Google mixed signals. Interestingly enough, I had one suspended, and I hadn’t had one suspended yet I was wondering what all the ruckus was about, and I finally had one suspended. Then when we started talking about it, when I went back and talked to the VA, she uploaded a video which we had never done on that one account. So veering from what we’re doing, just by a video was enough to get the account suspended.

Bradley: That’s crazy.

Marco: Yeah. It’s really interesting what’s going on. If you do anything different than what you’ve been doing, you’re setting yourself up to be hit. They’re just sniping anyone, left and right. I mean, third on the match and you’re done.

Bradley: Yeah. By the way, that’s something else. We had our live event and that was really where I started developing the scaling processes so that we could build, build, build. That was the goal for … We had our live event in October and so we had a 12-week period or a 90-day sprint where were our goal was to hit 50 assets built and optimize. So that ended about three weeks ago and so the next 12 weeks was gonna be all about monetizing assets.

It just worked out for us that we had built all these and now because of what’s going on, the timing is, it just happened that it’s a good time for us to stay out of building new ones at the moment, work on off-page stuff to get the ones that we built that aren’t performing well yet. We can work on all the off-page stuff now to get those to start performing better, ranking better, producing better.

I am developing the processes right now currently for, well, obviously, as I shared with you guys just moments ago, I’m still developing some of the off-page strategies and processes for my team, but at the same time I’m developing the monetization so that outreach prospecting and sales process for monetizing these assets, and that’s my next 12-week goal, which like I said we’re in about week three now of developing those processes out, which will be shared in the Mastermind. I’m gonna give everybody exactly what I’ve been doing and show real road examples of how the stuff that I’m doing, what works, what doesn’t work, all of that, like I always do in the Mastermind.

So that’s something that we just got started on this week. Now the POFU Live event attendees, I have a weekly accountability meeting with them and we did that on Monday. If anybody’s here on the Hump Day Hangouts that was there on Monday or watched the replay, you can comment, if you don’t mind, on the page and let people know how that strategy is going.

Because it’s a very powerful strategy, using video email. We’ve got a training protocol video call lead-gen system that I’m going to be updating with all of this prospecting training and processes that I’m developing right now for outreach in prospecting in sales essentially monetizing our assets specific to GMB stuff. I’m going to be adding all of that training and updating it in the video lead-gen system. That’s going to be something that we will launch probably at the end of this 12-week sprint, which is about nine weeks from now.

Again, guys, there’s a lot of stuff going on. If you’ve got stuff that’s already built but not monetized yet, now’s a good time to work on pushing them to get them to produce better and also working on developing your prospecting strategy to get them monetized. Let the dust settle on building new assets at the moment and within a few weeks, guys, will have some new methods.

What Are Some Of Your Ranking Strategies in Pinterest?

Anyways, the next question, from Dean. Marco, it’s gonna be directed at you because I don’t have any idea about anything on Pinterest. I’ll read it for you. “Question for Hump Day Hangout 225. Have any of you guys tried ranking in Pinterest? Their PPC system seems expensive compared to Google but they are a good fit for my home and garden client. Thing is with nearly 2,000 pins of furniture products and with hashtag optimized descriptions, only a few seem to pop up in Pinterest search. Old pins that have been saved a few times or more, that hints to me that pin saved by people may be the biggest ranking factor in Pinterest. Can you shed some light? If that’s the case, I wonder if some spam accounts can save pins and manipulate it somewhat?”

Marco: All right. I’m sorry I’ve spent about two years in Pinterest figuring out the algorithm and a whole bunch of different things that what makes it go and I’m not willing to give that up for free.

Bradley: Okay, fair enough. We’re gonna move on. Sorry, Dean. I’d help you if I could, but I don’t know a dick about Pinterest. I’ve never really done anything with Pinterest so I can’t help you anyways.

What Are The Reasons Why Verified GMBs Do Not Show Up In Google My Maps?

Jay Turner says, “Some of my service area business client’s verified GMBs do not show up in Google My Maps when searching for them in order to add their pin to a Google My Map. Why is that? Does adding KML file …? Again, it’s probably because it’s a GMB service area business. I don’t know that for sure because I don’t do a whole lot of My Map stuff. Is that something we can comment on? I know that’s kind of RYS stuff.

Marco: It is. If you hide the address you cannot expect to find it.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: Because all you’re going to pull up is a service area. So there’s no way to do that.

Bradley: Yeah. You could use the city center for that area. I mean, that’s something that you could do. But I don’t do a whole lot of My Map stuff still. I just never really did. I know we have RYS Academy training that talks about that stuff, Jay. So if you’re in there, that might be a good question for the RYS Facebook group. Okay.

Will. Let’s see. This is similar to the one that Olena asked, but I’ll read it real fast and we’ll move on. He says, “When using the GMB auto poster and writing a month’s worth of post, are you saying that we should manually post the first post in the sequence of these 30 posts then use the GMB auto poster software so that we can link to the first post and the subsequent posts in the Auto poster?”

Well, no. Again, it’s not about always linking to that first post, guys. Again, you post manually because it’s a way to kind of season the asset without automating stuff right off the bat. Okay? That’s it. That’s all. It’s just part of the optimization process for my team. It’s not about always linking to that one post, guys. The siloing is more about theming. It’s just like a website silo, guys. I think too many of you guys are trying to over complicate stuff, and I’m not picking on you, Will.

But if you understand website silo architecture, for YouTube silo architecture, which you can accomplish with playlists, it’s the exact same with GMB post silos. Again, it’s the same principle, guys. It’s no difference whatsoever. As long as you understand website silos and how to build those correctly and theme your silos correctly, you just repeat that same process in either YouTube or GMB. It’s the same process, right? Again, it shouldn’t be over complicated, guys.

If you don’t understand website silo architecture, go search our YouTube channel. I’ve got several videos on there that I’ve talked about. They’re several years old, but the strategy has not changed a bit. Right? It’s one of those things that are timeless, that will continue to work. You can also go search Bruce Clay. Just go search on Google Bruce Clay website silos and it’ll be the first link at the very top of Google search results and click on it. It’s an old article. I think it’s from 2009 or ‘10. Read it, it’s still valid and relevant today. Okay.

Next, Robert Nelson. He’s our new Mastermind member. Welcome, Robert. He says, “Hey guys, excited! Just signed up for the Mastermind around an hour ago. Looking forward to getting to know you guys better over the next few months.” Yeah. I hope you schedule a call with me through my calendar link I sent to you, Robert, via email. So I hope to talk to you next week.

Is It Okay To Use RSS Authority Sniper On PBNs?

He says, “My question is, I’m wondering if you think it’s a good idea to use RSS authorities.” Oh, yeah. This is a great question, by the way, guys. This is a really good question. I’m gonna answer it. “I’m wondering if you think it’s a good idea to use RSS authority sniper on PBNs if it’s also been used to create feeds for the money site.” Okay. First of all, you’re using RankFeedr to create the feeds. RSS authority sniper just finds feeds, okay? So you’re using RankFeedr to create the feeds.

“Which my PBNs are linking to.” He says, “I’m a bit worried about a footprint if the domain they use for RankFeedr feeds has links to my money sites as well as my PBNs. Do you think that’s an issue?” All right. What I would recommend is that you would create separate feeds to embed in your money sites. Okay. If you’re using PBNs, and I don’t know if you’re populating content, in other words, are you feeding content to your PBNs through RankFeedr, which I don’t recommend because that would look like crap, but you can embed the feed.

Again, I just talked about that in Syndication Academy on how to do that, guys, and the Mastermind, you guys all have access to that anyways, which means, Robert, you’ll have access to that too. Again, that was the most recent Syndication Academy update webinar. I talked about how to embed a feed. Okay. So using the RankFeedr feed to embed is super, it’s great, it’s fantastic.

So what I would recommend is that you can use RankFeedr feeds on your PBN as an embedded feed which will create co-citation, but do not include your money site links either static or RSS feeds as part the RankFeedr feed that’s on the money site-, or excuse me, the PBNs. Just use that to add local and topical relevancy to the actual PBN. Then you can still use traditional links within the content to link back to your money sites because the RankFeedr feeds that are embedded aren’t going to be having any of your content sources in the feed itself, which would be kind of a footprint, because now you’d have an embedded feed that has links to your content sources like your money content sources as well as contextual links from your traditional PBN links back to the same destination. Yeah, that would be in a footprint I would worry about.

Plus, I would also have, if you’re going to be using RankFeedr to create co-citation feeds for your money site, those would be separate feeds. In other words, I’d have one RankFeeder feed that I would use is an embed on the PBN to just add geographic and topical relevancy to that PBN, then I would have separate RankFeedr feed where you would include your money side RSS feed, your GMB RSS feed if you’re doing it for local, you could also have your static items and all that so that you can create local and geographic co-citation relevance to your money site. Bt that would be separate and apart from what you’re using on your money site-, or excuse me, your PBN. Does that make sense?

Just keep that in mind, guys. Remember, with the top level subscription package, it’s like $47 a month, guys. It’s ridiculous. You can get up to 1,100 feeds. I would create two separate feeds in that case if you’re doing that, just like I said. Robert, we can talk about that in a little bit more on our call, if you want to go and do it a little bit deeper. Okay.

Also, you can post, by the way, Robert, the Mastermind Facebook group, we go real deep into discussions about anything that you want. So if you want to post that in there, we can comment on a little bit further, also on the mastermind webinar as we dig into that stuff, so you see over the shoulder training type stuff. Marco and I get real deep into that stuff all the time. We get into the weeds. Awesome. Glad to have you.

Greg, thanks for being here, man, as always.

Is There Some Type Of Google My Business Updates Going On?

Frankie says, “Hey guys, it’s my first time back,” what’s up, Frankie?, “since you moved off Google Plus. I would like to know if there is some type of Google My Business GMB updates going?” Yes, a lot. “There was a lot of talk about this in other groups. Is it all BS or GMB the same still?” No. They’re cracking down, which guys we’ve been talking about, we knew it was gonna happen, it was just a matter of time. It doesn’t mean that it’s the end of the world. It just means that shit settles down, we’ll figure out the next method and we’ll produce training around it when it’s available, all right, once we figure it out. But glad to have you back, Frankie. Okay.

Jordan says, “Welcome back to WordPress sites, all GMBers.” Well, no, I wouldn’t say that yet. Maybe. We’ll see.

Marco: No. There’s still other ways that you can verify GMBs. All they’re trying to do is kill one loophole, but there’s quite a few others. The old stuff that we’ve always been preaching is still working. So no, I’m not planning on going back to WordPress sites anytime soon. If anything, I’ll just go back to G sites. Well, I never left G sites, right? Drive stacks and G sites.

Bradley: Yeah. Quit This House says, “Do we still get the bonus semantic webinar if we buy feed burner stuff today?” Yeah. Well, essentially, all I was gonna do was share some of my methods on how I’m using it and some of the results that I’ve gotten. Yeah, sure. I’m glad you mentioned that, by the way, because I almost forgot about it. So if you bought RankFeedr guys through us and you can prove it, then just reach out, what I’ll do is …

By the way, Adam, if you’re still, on can you do me a favor and make a note of this? Maybe in two weeks or three weeks something like that I’ll hold a kind of an update webinar for RankFeedr, and Mastermind will obviously be included, and maybe I’ll probably include Syndication Academy members too, because it’s precisely the method that I’ve shared in Syndication Academy, which is how to embed those feeds and create the feeds, and what I’m doing, and where I’m embedding them. I’ll even give you guys the process for, well, that’s only Mastermind members will get the process doc, guys. It has to be that way.

But I can share with you what I’m doing and the results that I’m getting specifically with those RankFeedr feeds and how to get really good results for local stuff. Okay. So, yeah, I will do just an update webinar and it’d probably be a short webinar. Again, the Mastermind, they’re going to get the process docs for this stuff too so that they can have their team do it as opposed to doing it on your own or developing the docs on your own.

But, yeah, that’s a good idea. I appreciate you reminding me about that. Absolutely, just reach out to us at support. We’ll create a small list on for people that we’ve known. Or just come join a Mastermind, you’ll get it anyways. Also, as I said, it might be part of the Syndication Academy update webinar is what I’ll do. It’s likely gonna be that too and we’ll just include the RankFeedr buyers into that also. Okay. It’s a good question though.

What URL Do I Use From The GMB Briefcase Auto Poster To Setup The RSS Authority Sniper?

Michael says, “Question about RSS authority sniper. What URL do I use from GMB briefcase auto poster to set up the sniper? Everyone I’ve tried got an error. Thanks.” I don’t know why that’s the case, Michael. Have you posted? You have to have GMB post or the RSS feed won’t register. It’s just like a WordPress site. If you try to add an RSS feed to IFTTT that contains no items, it won’t accept it. It will give you an error every time. So have you posted? If so, then what I …

By the way, inside the auto poster, guys, there’s an update RSS file button. You go to settings RSS feeds and that lists all of your locations that are connected to the auto poster or the briefcase, depending on where you’re at, and then it says, there’s a blue button off to the right column and it says copy URL or whatever. Well, that’s your RSS feed. If you’re having issues, just click that update RSS file button, it’s at the top of that column, it’s a yellow button, click that.

It’ll take a few seconds to reload. Once it read loads, all of your feeds will be updated and just check it then. Go check it in a Firefox browser. You’re gonna have to add, it’s called the RSSPreview Firefox add-on. RSSPreview is one word. Go open Firefox, go to Google and search RSSPreview Firefox add-on. It’ll be the first link at the time top of the search results. Click that, add it to your Firefox, enable it. That way you can start viewing HTML versions of an RSS feed in Firefox again. They disabled that a few months ago for whatever reason. The native RSS feed reader in Firefox is you have to create add the add-on now. Okay. But then just go check it.

If you have any other issues, contact support Shreepad, which is little support bubble is in the bottom right corner inside the briefcase or the post scheduler, he’s really, really good at replying to support requests, guys. If you have any issues, contact him. But I promise you, if you’ve got posts in there and you click the update RSS file button, it should work fine. Okay.

Should We Use SEO Ultimate Plugin Instead Of Yoast For The Battleplan Strategy?

John says, “Hey guys. I purchased the Battle Plan. Awesome. In the plan, it suggests using SEO ultimate plugin, but in the webinar Yoast seems to be the favorite.” Are we still linking to one of the older versions of the webinar, at that point maybe?

Hernan: Yep. Maybe we’re gonna be clipping and updating that really shortly. We have redirects over there.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah. SEO ultimate is way better, guys. It doesn’t have a bunch of loaded code. Jeffrey Smith knows his guys, I’m telling you. It is hands-down the best SEO plugin and get the SEO ultimate plus. It’s inexpensive and gives you a ton of additional functionality. The version 2 of SEO ultimate plus is coming out very soon. It’s been in beta for the last couple months but it’s going to be awesome.

Marco: Yeah. Just a short comment, Yoast is foot fungus get SEO ultimate. Please do yourself a favor.

What Are Some Top On Page And Off Page GMB Tips?

Bradley: Greg Derebret says, “Top on-page GMB tip.” I would say just complete the profile and post regularly. That’s the best on-page tip I can give you. Just completely complete the profile with well-optimized everything. Not stick spammy, just well optimized, well written stuff, and post regularly. Best off-page? That’s to be determined. Right now probably some of the stuff that we teach on Local Lease Pro and some of the stuff that I’m talking about with RankFeedr and that kind of stuff, Greg. Again, we’ll talk about that in one of the closed groups.

Marco: I would say top on-page silo, silo, Gregg. You’re with Gregg. I mean, that’s hands down, I mean, now with Jeffrey, hands down. The top off-page? Press releases, stack them.

Bradley: Yeah. Although the press releases in and of themselves are not as effective as they used to be, even six months ago, unless you’re varying distribution networks consistently or you stack, you publish press releases consistently and regularly-

Marco: That’s why I mentioned stack the press releases.

Bradley: Yeah. I had super good results with the Local PR program method with just as little as two press releases. I was able to rank in 3-pack a year and a half ago or two years ago whenever we launched that training. Now I’m finding to get the same kind of a result I have to publish six or eight press releases to get the same kind of a result, unless I’m varying the distribution networks and stacking to where I’m using three or four different distribution networks where still a lot of them share the same type of footprint, in other words, they share a lot of the same distribution sites.

But if you get some more link diversity from other distribution networks, because they distribute to different sites, in other words, and get picked up by other sites. If you do that, if you have access to a lot of different press release distributions, then that’s that can help. Or you have to stack consistently and regularly if you’re using the same sort of network and make sure that you’re …

Again, I’m not giving away too much here, but as I talked about in the Mastermind last week, I think it was Muhammad’s question about that, there’s not a set formula for how to stack, guys. You just need to constantly be varying what you’re linking to for to different tier one types of properties. It’s something that you need to do and it just seems like it’s taking more press releases to accomplish same thing. And that’s to be expected, guys. Anytime something works really well in SEO, it’s only a matter of time before it starts to become less effective. Right?

So don’t say the press releases aren’t effective. I’m not saying that at all it’s just the strategy has evolved a bit. Right?

Marco: Just to add just a quick thought, Greg. You have access to Dedia. Reach out to him because if you link build to your press releases he knows exactly what to do.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: That’ll set it on fire. Now I’m giving away too much. Drop some traffic in there, Greg

Where Can We Get Backlinks For Videos?

Bradley: Yeah. Marco, the next question, when does link building gonna be available in MGYB?

Marco: It’s being added as we speak.

Bradley: Okay. So there you go. Because, Greg, you can contact Dedia directly or you can wait, it should be available any minute because it thought was gonna be available last week. So that answers the next question, we he says, “Where can we get backlinks for videos?” Guys, our best link builder, he’s been working with me for six years now I guess and he’s awesome. We’re gonna have that service available in MGYB and it should be like at any moment. Okay? So check back often.

Is It Safe To Autopost To Lead Gen GMB Nowadays?

Guys, I got to run in a minute so I’ll try to get through the next one very quickly. Grant. What’s up, Grant? He was one of the POFU Live attendees. He’s been working very closely with the group. It’s awesome to have you here. He says, “Is auto posting to lead-gen GMB safe currently? Yeah, it is. As far as I know. I haven’t had any issues with that whatsoever. I have not had a single property terminated or suspended from that. Now I can’t swear that that’s the case for everybody. I’m just telling you I have not had any issues whatsoever it’s making on-page changes that’s been causing problems. It’s depending on what kind of change it is too, because I’ve actually been manually going in and changing on a lot of different stuff.

Like I mentioned earlier, guys, one thing I would not recommend doing is trying to add anything to the appointment URL section other than an actual bonafide genuine appointment app right now. That’s one thing that I see is triggering suspensions. Okay. I don’t know that for sure, but that’s a hunch of mine. I’ve heard that happen now from several different people. We lost six or seven assets just last week. But it’s the first six or seven out of like more than 10 times that we’ve built.

Again, I think a lot of it has to do with that one particular process. So my team’s not touching anything at the moment. I’m in their testing with different things right now. Something else is, and this is kind of using a manager account, I’ve talked about not doing that in the past, but I think using a manager account actually helps right now. So what I’ve been doing is I’ve been going in and adding a manager account to an asset and making some slight changes and then removing the manager. Still I’ve not had anything suspended like right before my eyes anyways, if that makes sense.

Google Starts To Ask For GMB Location Validation With Tax Invoice Or Business License

Gregg says, “Google is starting to ask for GMB location validation with tax.” Yeah, that’s one of the things I had predicted I thought would happen. Gregg, I’ve said that before that that was my speculation on what was going to happen, is that they were gonna start requiring either corporate doc’s or proof of mail being facts or photos taken with company letterhead or like bank statements, all of that stuff that I’ve had to do in the past to have verified GMBs moved to different locations. That’s what I assumed and I had speculated would probably happen.

The plan you outlined in your POFU group to monetize your GMB locations is brilliant and simpler, easier, and is the best method I’ve seen from all your optimization methods I’ve seen over the years that will be high converting. That’s awesome, Gregg. Yeah. I’m gonna be doing a lot of training over that next few weeks on that.

Last call to win the free Semantic Mastery T-shirt. Okay. “Bradley, is there a new press release program coming down the road soon?” Yes, there is. I can’t really announce that just yet, but I’ve been testing something that’s really kind of disruptive. I wouldn’t say that lightly, but it’s really, really cool technology that one of our very own Mastermind members has been developing it. He’s one of the code developers behind it. I’ve been on several calls with him and it’s actually very disruptive what they’re doing. Something that no other service out there has that I think would be a great addition to what we’re already doing. Again, that’s something that we’ll be announcing here in the coming weeks.

All right. Guys, pick the best question and all that so we can wrap it up.

Marco: Alex. One of the very first questions was excellent.

Bradley: Where was that? Right there?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Yep, Alex. Okay. So Alex is the winner for what, either the Battle Plan or what? T-shirt?

Hernan: Battle Plan.

Marco: Yeah. We said Battle Plan I think.

Bradley: Okay. Well, somebody else is getting a T-shirt, aren’t they?

Adam: Yeah. We did a random number generator and saw who bought and who posted back. Ted, you are the winner so just send into support from your normal email. I think we’ve actually had some back and forth between me and you, so just shoot an email into support. We’ll get to that large shirt and next time I’m in Sacramento I’m gonna find you for a beer, man.

Bradley: Don’t lie. The reason why he won is because of the beer emoji. Guys, I hope you all were paying attention. The next time you want to win something just put a beer emoji in there.

Adam: Yeah. Be within an hour’s drive of me and offer a free beer. No. We used a random number generator. It worked out, man. So we’ll get you your shirt just send them to support that’s semanticmastery.com.

Bradley: Awesome. I hope everybody got a lot out of this. No Mastermind webinar tomorrow, but we got one next week on what I’m working on, which I’ll be sharing with you guys, with the POFU members, and I have started developing this week, which is the outreach program using video email specific to the GMB asset stuff. We’re going to be going through that. So guys pay attention. Oh, and I’ll share the RankFeedr process doc with you guys in the Mastermind too. So see you all next week. Thanks guys for hanging out.

Hernan: See you, guys.

Marco: Bye everybody.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 225 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 225

Click on the video above to watch Episode 225 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: We are live very quickly today. Hey everybody! Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 225, two hundred and a quarter. Today is the 27th of February 2019. We have got some great announcements for you. But before we get into that, we’re gonna go down and say hi to everybody. Starting on the left, Chris, how are you doing, man?

Chris: Doing good. Exciting day today, especially with all the good stuff going on in Semantic Mastery.

Adam: Definitely, definitely. Hernan, how about yourself, how are you doing?

Hernan: I’m doing great. I’m super excited for today, super excited for Funnel Hacking live last week, it was awesome. We have a lot of good stuff coming up for you guys, so stay tuned. We have a lot of good stuff coming up for you guys today, actually. So it’s gonna be awesome.

Adam: Oh, I just have this T-shirt on, how random. All right. Well, anyways, moving right along. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I’m good, man. What’s up?

Adam: Nothing, just chillin’. I was hoping for a weather report. It’s kind of overcast and nasty here. How about you?

Marco: It’s over-sunny and sunny here.

Adam: Bradley, how are you doing? What have you got, snow, hurricanes? What’s going on?

Bradley: I don’t know. I haven’t been outside since about 6 o'clock this morning because I’ve been working all day. But it looks sunny, with the temperature. Anyways, hi!

Adam: Well, I see you’ve got your nightshirt on too.

Bradley: Yeah. We got the memo, apparently. Mine is fading now because I wear mine more than you, apparently.

Adam: Yeah, yeah. I might have just gotten one for the conference I was at. So shout out to Dan, if you’re watching, good to see you, man. We bumped into Dan and his wife at Funnel Hacking Live. It’s always good to see people. We met a few more people who knew us from Hump Day Hangout. It was really cool to see, Hernan, I think you met up with a few people, [inaudible 00:01:52] my mind while I’m talking I can’t remember anybody’s name.

Hernan: Yeah, for sure. Adam reached out to me and he was a big fan of Semantic Mastery. He had a digital marketing agency and he was listening to Hump Day Hangouts pretty much every week. So yeah, it’s good to see, “Hey, you’re from Semantic Mastery. I know you guys,” and that’s pretty cool. That is pretty cool.

Adam: Awesome. Well, I’d like to say this every time, if you’re new to Semantic Mastery, first of all, thank you very much for watching Hump Day Hangouts. This place gets your questions answered, you can just put them on the page. If you’re watching the replay, just go to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions and ask your question there. Then you can always come back, we timestamp the video so you can watch later whether you got client calls, you’re working, whatever it is.

Then the next thing we always tell you is, because people ask us, where should I start with Semantic Mastery? Well, you should start with the Battle Plan. Today, the Battle Plan 3.0, bigger, better badder, expanded, has landed and we have got all sorts of good stuff in there. We’re going to talk about that a little bit more, but I’ll be putting the link on the page. I highly suggest you grab that. We got some kick-ass bonuses. I’m not gonna read it to you. I want you to go check out the sales page. Personally, I like it because I made it, but secondly, we got just a like laundry list of some cool stuff we put together for you guys. So please go and check that out.

If you’ve already done that and you’re looking to take things up a few notches, if you’re wanting to grow or you want to start your own local digital marketing agency, then we would love to have you join the Mastermind and you can find out more about that at mastermind.semanticmastery.com.

Bradley: By the way, I wanna welcome Robert Nelson. He just joined today. Robert, I reached out to you via email to schedule your onboarding call with me. Welcome to the Mastermind. I hope to chat with you next week sometime.

Adam: Outstanding! Looking over things real quick, I wanted to tell you too, I’ve skipped this while I was excited about talking to the new people, but if you’re checking out the replay or you watch these on YouTube and you’re checking this out sometime in the future, click the subscribe button, stay up to date with all the Hump Day Hangouts, all the video clips we put out, all the training, all the good stuff. It’s great way and free way to stay up to date.

Let’s get into it. I need to pay some stuff on the page. Hernan, or you guys, can you tell them a little bit more about what’s going on with the Battle Plan?

Hernan: Yeah, for sure. The Battle Plan was born because, I think it was like two years ago and we have been putting out like, Bradley specifically, he’s a content machine, and we have been putting out a bunch of content, a lot of content pretty much every week, between Hump Day Hangouts, between the Mastermind sessions and whatnot, the groups and whatnot. So a lot of people are reaching out and saying, “Hey guys, you guys are awesome, but we need, or we feel we need something that we could actually grab and take a look at and say, all right, so I am at this stage, I have a new website, what step one, what would Semantic Mastery recommend? What would Bradley Benner do?”

Basically, we kind of developed that step-by-step framework so that we knew a lot of people that were coming that they would have like new websites and, bam, we developed a framework for them, each websites we develop a framework for them, YouTube videos, we developed a framework, local websites, we developed a framework. We have been adding up, taking out, subtracting, adding and updating to the latest and greatest stuff that we have been finding throughout these past few years.

Now, this edition, the 3.0, the SEO Confidential, we have added everything that goes into Google My Business, which is something that we didn’t have on previous versions. Now it’s there. So if you’re optimizing Google My Businesses for clients doing lead-gen and whatnot, this is the type of stuff that you wanna get. We have also added a bunch of additional bonuses.

Not only that, when you’re getting the Battle Plan, which is again of kind of a feel manual, you go through it, you know exactly what you do, where to order, what to do, in what quantity, in what power and whatnot, you also get access to a webinar that we recorded that is basically the Battle Plan in a webinar format. So I think that when getting the Battle Plan you’re sending yourself up for success with your local digital marketing agency. Even if you’re doing info products, if you’re doing affiliate, it also works as well just because of the fact of how specific it is.

If you want a million different things, that’s not your thing, that’s not what you wanna get. But if you want to simplify way of applying the Semantic Mastery knowledge over the past five years, then that is the guy that you want to get pretty much.

Marco: Can I just add that simply does not mean bad. We boiled it down. It’s a step-by-step instruction so that anybody could come in and follow what we do, how we apply our own training. Because Bradley does training, I do training, Hernan does his stuff, and we have to have a way for people to know, okay, so if I were to approach this, how would I tackle this step-by-step? So that’s what was done in the Battle Plan.

Just because it’s simplified doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work, that it’s bad. We’re hardly charging anything for it, anyway. But it’s just a way for you to go and take a look, okay, so these are the things that I need to do. If I follow this formula, does this guarantee me success? Oh, fuck no. Nothing guarantees anything. The thing that we can tell you is that this is what we do and the things that we apply to get our success online. These are the things that we have done.

If you apply it and if you follow everything in sequence, I mean, nothing’s guaranteed and in this world, especially not when you’re dealing with the 800-pound gorilla in the room, but this guy, there’s some absolute fantastic tactics in there that will help you overcome that 800-pound gorilla. I mean, you can go and do the Google tickle. When all is said and done and you’re still having trouble, you can go in and you can still hammer Google and make the needle move. It’s just how much work are you willing to put in towards your success? Because nothing in this world is free. I’m Christian, and so if you don’t work, you don’t eat. It’s very plain. So guys if you don’t put in the work, how can you expect to be successful on the web?

No magic pills. No magic formulas. Anybody telling you that you can make $100,000 overnight is blowing smoke up your ass. Stop listening. Put in the work.

Bradley: Yeah. He mentioned G tickle, that sounds a lot dirtier than it really is. Just check out the Battle Plan, you’ll see what we mean.

Adam: Yeah. I want to say real quick, I wanted to do something fun for you guys. If anyone is watching right now and hasn’t picked up the Battle Plan yet, one, you should do it, and two, we’ll give you a little push in the right direction here. Go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com. Buy it, grab it during Hump Day Hangouts and comment on the page and we’ll randomly select one person who does that, we’ll buy one of these nice fancy T-shirts for you and ship it to you for free.

Marco: Can we give someone a Battle Plan for the best question? I know we didn’t plan this ahead, but why don’t we do that?

Adam: Yeah.

Marco: Or if they bought it, we can refund it.

Adam: Yeah. We’ll do a free one, just because I don’t wanna screw up our stats. I’m not gonna lie. I’m looking at the numbers. But yeah, best question, Marco, we’ll pick someone, and then if you go and buy the Battle Plan during comment, leave a comment on the page, and we’ll randomly select. We’ll hop online, we’ll get one of these nice shirts, printed out for you and send it to you.

Bradley: Cool. Can we get into it?

Adam: Let’s do it.

Bradley: All right. I’m gonna tease the Mastermind just briefly because we’ve been working on building out GMB assets and all that. By the way, guys, if you’re in any other groups, you’ll probably are aware that there’s a lot of shit going on right now with GMB because Google’s trying to crack down on spam to Maps listings, which we all knew was gonna happen. I’ve been preaching that for months. That’s part of the reason why I’ve been pushing for months on building a scalable process for building these out. I kept hammering all of our Mastermind members especially with guys be building, building, building right now, well, monetize them later, right now build them, because I knew it was gonna be a loophole that was gonna get shut down or at least made more difficult. It looks like that’s what’s going on right now.

So there’s a lot of stuff going on, a lot of changes, Google’s cracking the whip, they’re tightening the noose, so to speak. So I recommend staying out of the GMBs, unless you have to go in them, work on off-page stuff. That’s really what my team is doing. My team has been completely prohibited from going in any new accounts or anything that’s been set up recently. So I’m having them just go back through and fine-tune our off-page strategies until we figure out what’s going on.

Also, a lot of times, guys, it’s just a matter of letting the dust settle, like letting everything calm down and cool off before going back in. We have some ideas, we’re not gonna share them here yet, but we do have some ideas as to what not to do in order to prevent suspensions and that kind of stuff.

But just know that you have options and opportunities to work on existing assets that may need additional pushes, like I’ve got a bunch of those. So we’re kind of working on the off-page stuff at the moment. Then once we nail down what we’ve determined is the proper procedure for going forward, obviously, we’re going to share that in our paid groups or the members that have bought specific products and things like that.

Just kind of wanna give everybody a heads up that, no, don’t panic, guys, I’m sure you’ve got plenty of stuff that you can work on while the process is calming down. Eventually, it will, it always does, and we’ll find other ways. That’s just the nature of the game. It’s a cat-and-mouse game. That’s what SEO is, really, digital marketing.

With that said, also I have recently released all my processed docs and everything to the Mastermind members because I had spent about four months really developing these processes in training and virtual assistant team to build out my assets and so that I could scale this and do exactly what I’ve been preaching and that was to build, build, build. I think we built-, well, I’m not going to mention how many, but a lot. We built a lot of different assets. I think it was two weeks ago I released, or maybe a month ago now, or three weeks ago, something like that, all the process docs that I developed with my team as well as some of our live event attendees to the Mastermind, which was invaluable.

I got a lot of really good responses and comments from that because we didn’t charge anything extra for that, guys, as part of the Mastermind. We always say Mastermind has its privileges. Well, because I’ve got my team doing off-page stuff right now and recently there’s been some developments. For example, we did a webinar with Lisa Allen. You might want to get this link ready, Adam, anyways for the RankFeedr webinar, if anybody hasn’t seen it yet. Lisa has this tool that’s a co-citation RSS feed creator, or a super feed creator, as I like to call it. It’s called RankFeedr.

It’s great for creating co-citation and adding geographic relevance, especially for some of the processes that we developed for the GMB asset building or the Local Lease Pro model. It’s something that you can set and forget. It’s a bit time-consuming to create these super feeds. Also, there’s a way that you can embed them in specific pages.

There’s a question specifically from our new Mastermind member Robert that I’m gonna answer in just a few minutes, but there’s a process that I taught on how to create an embedded feed using feed burner in Syndication Academy update webinar, which was the last update webinar. I just held that a few weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago, three weeks ago now. So if anybody’s in Syndication Academy, excuse me, if you haven’t seen, that go to the training area and go look at the update section. It’s the only replays or archived so far for 2019. So it’s in a specific section there in the replays or updates, module, whatever you call it.

In there I talked about specifically how to do that. Well, you can combine the two methods. If you’ve got RankFeedr, then you can actually embed the feed. It’s really powerful. So I’ve got my team, I actually was working on producing the process doc for my team today so that I can get my VAs, because I’m just having to do off-page stuff at the moment. So they’re gonna go back through and go through all the assets that we’ve created and start embedding these feeds and in very specific locations. It’s a bit of a process but I’m just gonna give you guys a quick preview of what my process docs look like. The Mastermind members already know, many of you probably don’t.

That in itself, guys, I’ve put a lot of work into this stuff. I’ve developed my processes over the years and how to create process docs and how I train my team. It’s a literal step-by-step process that they cannot make mistakes. As long as they follow, I mean, they don’t even need the training video. There’s always a corresponding training video with all of my process docs. But they could just follow, if they can read, you can take a VA, virtual assistant that’s cold right off the street, like essentially has no internet marketing skills whatsoever. But as long as they know how to read and navigate on a computer, then they can complete any process that I want them to complete. That’s essentially how we train our teams.

So I’m just gonna grab the screen before we get into it anyways. I’m gonna show you guys this really quickly. Take a screenshot if you’re smart. But this is it. This is me explaining what it is to my team, and then I go through and I tell them what we’re gonna be doing. I just started on part one, the training video will go here, there’s a step-by-step process as part two will be next, and then part three is how to create the feed burner feed and embed it.

So again, I just wanted to do it real quick, kind of tease on that, guys, because Mastermind members, as soon as I get that process training completed, I’m gonna add that to the process docs that I shared with you, guys, in the Mastermind just a couple of weeks ago. Okay. So be on the lookout for that, you’ll be able to put it to use. All right.

Also, we’re gonna get into questions, but I did wanna mention this very quickly, Ben had a great question last week, he’s also a Mastermind member, about how to get over shiny object syndrome and how to focus and how not to get carried away or swept away by other products or methods that are attractive? As entrepreneurs, we often chase opportunity because we see opportunity everywhere and, as the saying goes, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, right?

So a lot of times we get involved with or started on a project usually a new method of some sort that we’ve been suckered into from an attractive marketing message. We start off with what’s called uninformed optimism, and then as we dig into it a little bit we realize the amount of work or the learning curve involved and all that kind of stuff, that’s where we go into this next stage of what’s called the emotional cycle of change. It’s called informed pessimism.

Anyways, I’m not gonna go through all that because I put a video on here that I found to be very helpful. I review it often when I find myself in this emotional cycle of change. So I posted this in the comment section, guys. Just bookmark it. Go back and watch it if you are the type that suffered, most of you are probably entrepreneurs and that’s why you’re watching this webinar, you’ve probably suffered from shiny object syndrome at some point or you currently still are. I’m a recovering shiny object syndrome, that’s like a recovering alcoholics. Do you know what I mean? I was talking about how I’ve unsubscribed from all the marketing emails message or lists and things like that specifically because I really want to stay focused on doing what I know is going to progress my business. I think this video may help you, guys, so just check it out when you get a chance.

Does Ranking YouTube Videos And Selling Lead For Local Business In Google Still Work In 2019?

Okay. We’re gonna get right into questions. It looks like Renee Wagner posted his question twice and it looks like she posted it last week probably after the webinar, so I’m gonna start with her. She says, “Does ranking videos for local businesses and Google using YouTube and selling the leads to local businesses still work well in 2019?”

Yeah, it can. The thing about ranking local videos for leads is they don’t convert typically as well as having a Maps listing would. They can, don’t get me wrong, depending on the message and if it’s a compelling video and that kind of stuff. Also, ranking videos, you can still do it, but I also recommend that you learn how to use YouTube ads because YouTube ads, you can get really targeted traffic from the very specific areas. You can set your geographic targeting. There’s so many targeting options as far as audience targeting inside YouTube now or the Google ads platform for video that you can get really good results.

And as a byproduct of having a video that is targeted and getting targeted views from people that are within a specific geographic area, that are known to Google to be in the market or interested in that particular product or service, those are heavily weighted views. And as a byproduct of that, the video will often rank. Again, this has been a trick up my sleeve for years now, but it’s gotten better and better recently, and that’s using YouTube ads to actually rank the video.

So if you know video SEO, you still apply all of the SEO methods to the video as well as the channel, you can still do off-page SEO stuff, but the magic, the real magic is using YouTube ads to run local relevant traffic to it. Because it’s not just about the traffic either, you actually get engagement and clicks to your offer or clicks to the landing page or leads for local businesses. You’ll actually get real traffic and real leads from a properly set up YouTube ads campaign.

Correct me if I’m wrong, Adam, but isn’t that training available is an order bump for the Battle Plan?

Adam: I’m not gonna lie I was looking at a spreadsheet, I missed the first part of that.

Bradley: The YouTube ads training I did for local videos?

Adam: Yep. Yeah. You can get that if you buy the Battle Plan on check out. It’s the killer ads for local, order bump, yeah.

Bradley: I would recommend you look into that. It is still a strategy that works. For the longest time, for years now, guys, like five years now I’ve been ranking videos or doing video SEO, selling a wholesale video SEO services to a local video production company that creates videos for local businesses. They would always just create the videos and then sell them, the client, their customers, they would sell them the video and the customers would put them on their website, maybe posted into Facebook, put them on a YouTube channel, but they never were getting leads from them or ranking them in Google.

For about five years, now I’ve provided wholesale SEO services to that company. So the company handles the sales, then they upsell my service to the client or the customer and so they make money off of my SEO service every month. That way I don’t have to deal with the customers and all that kind of stuff, all I do is provide reporting. However, with just in the last six months or so, I’ve actually went back to them, after four and a half years or so of just providing wholesale SEO services, and I said, “Look, I’m not going to provide the SEO service anymore. I’m going to provide local ads. I’m going to set up ad campaigns for the videos.” Because I can guarantee traffic that way. I can’t guarantee traffic or leads or clicks or anything from ranking in Google. I can’t guarantee rankings either.

I mean, I’ve always done that. I’ve always said, “Look, if it doesn’t rank, then I don’t refund the money, but we could cancel service.” They can always cancel anytime. I don’t ever put them on contract. I’ve always been successful at ranking them anyways, but I can guarantee traffic, clicks to the website or the landing page, whatever the destination or target URL is with the call-to-action of the video. I can guarantee that with ads. I tell them, “Look, you can still tell your customers as a byproduct of a well-optimized video and a well-optimized ads campaign. It’s likely going to rank anyways.” So I still apply the SEO techniques to the videos, but I set up the ads campaign now.

What’s also cool about that is the reporting is so much better. So I provide the video production company with the reports that then they send off to their customers or their clients. The reporting is so much more detailed. It’s so much more accurate because I can show where exactly the clicks are coming from. If you go into ads and you look, and you go into the ad group and then you go into locations, you can pool locations reports. You can do it by zip code or by city or by county and things like that. So I can literally show where the views are coming from specifically.

So my targeting can be extremely tight. I can show that “Hey, this is only local people looking at the video. I can also show the audience targeting options. I can show the demographics.” I can show an incredible amount of detail as to where the traffic and clicks are coming from the ad campaign, which you couldn’t do with regular YouTube analytics or with just a rank report if that makes sense.

Again, 95% of the time the video is gonna rank because of a proper YouTube targeting campaign, because of the traffic and the engagement is [inaudible 00:23:41] both geographically and topically. [Inaudible 00:23:49]. It’s available, like I said, as part of the quarter buff to the Battle Plan. All right. That’s a great question though.

Marco: If I may, run a test just to see. Because this is interesting, we ran the test over a two, three week period. We ran embeds and link building tests to see what kind of action that would do. Interestingly enough, that still it, not only moves the needle, it has a great effect on videos. Once they start hitting the first page and they move towards the top, you can start seeing the people start coming through to the channel and subscribing and liking and sharing, and doing all of the things that a video needs in order for YouTube and Google to keep giving it love.

So there are two things that play here, right? If you hit the top spot, you’re going to get traffic if, and now here’s a caveat, the video has to be engaging enough for real people to take action to like it, to share it, or to give you that thumbs down in YouTube and in comments and everything else.

There are two ways to do this, both ways are still viable. Bradley’s method, the ads training, that’s hyper-targeted people that are likely to convert into leads. Now on the other method where you’re doing the embeds and the link building, what you’re going to get is you’re going to get a more general viewership and so you’re going to need more in order to get the leads that you could generate through the video ads course. But both methods are still alive and well in 2019.

Bradley: Yeah. To be clear, guys, that’s why I mentioned, I still apply all the SEO methods. For example, I always live stream a video to a channel that’s connected to a bunch of syndication networks. So that’s the first step. Once the live stream is over, it literally cascades through all of the syndication networks that are attached to that channel. It’s automatically getting embeds. My syndication networks are well-themed and aged because I’ve been doing this for so long. So it gets a lot of super good traditional SEO power, or juice, or whatever you want to call it from that, which are traditional signals that Marco’s talking about, like embeds.

Even if you don’t have well-aged syndication networks or whatever, you can just use an embed service and embed it. So all of those are traditional SEO signals and they still work, there’s no doubt about that. What I’m saying is combining those two methods, guys, that’s where the magic happens. So still do all the SEO stuff, optimize on page, which means optimize the video, optimize your channel, use playlists, guys, playlists, YouTube Silo Academy is how you silo. Guys, even if you only have one video on a playlist, create a playlist and put the video on it. Because a playlist is also part of video SEO, right?

Again, on-page stuff for the video, on-page stuff for your channel, use playlists, use embeds, use some backlinks. But if you’re not getting the traction that you want, and like I said, for me, it’s just standard operating procedure, I do all that first and I immediately go set up the YouTube ad for it and start driving real engagement, real traffic from Google to the video.

Google knows who that traffic is, what they’re interested in, where they came from and where they’re located. So it’s super-targeted traffic which is highly weighted trafficked by Google, and that’s the magic that really kind of helps all that SEO work. It just flourishes, right? It just works. Everything comes surfacing. It’s almost guaranteed. Again, I don’t guarantee rankings now. I tell them if it doesn’t rank, they don’t have to pay me and we’ll cancel it. But I do guarantee views and clicks. I can’t guarantee a certain number of clicks, but I can guarantee targeted views because I can buy those views directly from Google. You know what I mean? Again, use both methods, guys. I’m not saying do one or the other, use both. All right.

Factors Contributing To Low Conversion/Leads Despite Having Many Views in GMB Insights

Alex is up. He says, “Hey guys, I’m ranking in the 3-pack and I have a couple of five-star reviews. The GMB Insight shows around 450 views per month, but the calls are around five to eight per month. Is there a reason why it might be getting so few phone calls? Could you explain some common mistakes that lead to that? Thank you.”

Yeah, Alex. It could be many things. First of all, what is your message? Do you have a compelling call-to-action? What are your calls to action? What are the images? Where are you sending people, by the way? For example, if your call-to-action is to click the button in the post and go to a landing page, or wherever you’re sending them, where are you sending them? If you’re sending them to just the homepage of a website that’s not set up for lead conversions, then it could be that you’re losing them there.

It could be that if you’re just using the call buttons, then you could be losing traffic from desktop searches because people aren’t clicking the call button from desktop search and some people won’t go actually click through to the website or go do another search for it. I mean, there’s a number of things that could be it. I would say that, typically, if you’re getting a lot of exposure but you’re not getting a lot of calls or leads, then I would look at your calls to action, what your offer is, and where you’re directing the traffic to, if it’s a click-through as opposed to just a call conversion goal.

Also, in your posts, if you’re doing posts regularly, which you should be, use some images that are relevant to the industry. Because I know a lot of people that use stock images in their GMB post, guys, people are almost blind to that, they almost are numbed to a lot of stock images, so try to get original images from the client if possible, also just relevant images. I talked about how to do that from YouTube. You can also local images, which is more for SEO purposes. We talked about that at some of our training, can’t talk about that here.

Those are some of the things that I would recommend. Marco, what do you say?

Marco: I’d say that that’s just about right with 450 views, between two and 10 calls a month. You have to get, this is for talking about locally and from our experience with Mario who had more phone calls and other locals that I’ve been doing. It’s not until you get the thousands of views that you start seeing movement upwards of 20 calls. I mean, the ultimate it’s calls or people going to your website or asking for directions, all of that are our actions that could turn into leads depending on where they’re going. It just means that you have to go and figure out. I’m not gonna get too deep into our training, but you have to know when to deliver the message. Right? There’s ways to know which days, what time, what message.

Bradley: And how often.

Marco: Correct. I mean, in some niches, you might only need two or three posts a week. In others, you might need two or three posts a day. In others, you might need just a whole lot more. It’s just constant, right? Because there’s people constantly looking for it. So there’s a whole lot of things involved. Just a general overall opinion on what’s happening, I would say from 450 views, you’re just about right on the calls.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s increased the views per month and it’s a numbers game. If you’re getting what looks like 1 to 2% of whatever your views are, it looks like that’s what’s actually converting in the leads based upon that number that you’re showing there, right? Four hundred fifty views per month, five to eight calls, that’s about 1 to 2%. So if that’s the case, even if that were to hold true, that number, then if you increase your views, if you doubled that to where you’re getting 900 per month at that conversion rate, then you should essentially get 10 to 16 calls per month. Does that make sense?

Well, how do you get more views? More activity, better images, more compelling images, those kind of things, video, start using video in your GMB post, guys. If you haven’t done that yet, go test it because you’ll see that a video post, just like it does on Facebook, will get a hell of a lot more exposure, therefore, it will get a hell of a lot more views. Okay?

Marco: I would also say to look at the posts and see which of the posts are getting the most action and then try to figure out why. Explore why those are getting the action and the other ones aren’t, and tailor your posts to the ones that are getting the most action.

Bradley: Test different calls to action in different messages. It’s just like split testing ads, guys. If you’ve ever done any pay-per-click search marketing, you got to split test copy, you split test your landing pages, all that kind of stuff. Again, you can fine-tune for conversions, which is called conversion optimization, right? That’s something that you may also want to look into.

Can You Explain The Siloing Process Of GMB Auto Poster?

All right. Olena’s up. She says, “Bradley, on the Local Lease post training you talked about siloing post. You said silo post based on tags.” Yeah, that’s just because there’s an auto post, like our GMB post scheduler or GMB Briefcase, depending on the level that you’re at with your business, gives us the ability to schedule posts within the dashboard of it, which is great. It’s great for my team. It just makes things a lot easier. Then the post siloing can be accomplished through tags. It just daisy chains post together. It’s a very simple process. It’s not difficult at all.

Let me carry on with the question. She says, “Silo post based on post tag. Assign each post in the Auto poster, then select to silo posts in the Auto Poster, which means it takes the previous post URL, and adds that link from the previous post to the new post.” That’s correct. “Your GMB websites turns posts into inner pages.” That’s correct. “The first post you do manually and then in Auto Poster, the second post links to the first, the third to the second, and so on. Can you please explain a little bit further what you meant?”

No, you’re right on track. The difference is … Look, when my team goes through to set up to optimize do on-page stuff of a new asset, a new GMB location, then they typically will do, and this is just our standard operating procedure, they don’t add or connect that location to the post scheduler first. That’s something that gets done after the initial on-page work gets done, and part of the initial on-page process is just posting a post manually.

I also recommend posting manually to it anyways instead of automatically connecting a new location to an API and using an automated tool, which is what the post scheduler is, because it’s very similar, guys, to syndication. I know Olena, you’re in Syndication Academy or have been, I know that for sure. It’s the same as the best practices that I’ve been preaching for years about syndication networks, is that you don’t go out and build or purchase a brand new syndication network and then hook it up to IFTTT and start posting to it through an automated way or right off the bat.

Because if you do, it’s likely that some of your web 2 accounts within the network will get terminated. It’s happened time and time again, guys. That is specifically why I tell you if you’re gonna build them yourselves, which I don’t recommend, you’re better off buying them already built from MGYB. But my point is, whenever you build them or buy them, I’ve always recommended that you post manually to, at least to the blog accounts, which are Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress, post manually to them and allow that post to sit with for about seven days or so, I call that seasoning the network, before hooking IFTTT up and starting to automate post to it.

Because if you automate right off the bat, then a lot of the times one of those or a couple of those blog accounts will get terminated. Tumblr has been real like trigger-happy in the past, and it goes in waves, guys. WordPress too, WordPress will often get terminated if you try to automate posting to it too quickly. So that’s my process for GMBs as well. We don’t like to automate things right off the bat. I like to have my team go in and do all this stuff manually and then within a week or so, or a few days time, they’ll go back and connect through the API, which is through essentially that’s done within the post scheduler dashboard, and then they’ll start to automate the posts.

So just so you’re aware, if you’re posting manually first, which is what I recommend, then you’re not going to have a tag in that post. So when you start the posting, scheduling posts out using the post scheduler or the briefcase, depending on what level you’re at, then that first post that you create will be the first post in the silo. You can manually go link from within that first scheduled post to the post that you created. That’s why in the spreadsheet, the GMB assets sheet, which you guys have the template for that have joined Local Lease Pro, there’s a column for the first GMB post URL.

Again, my team, when they go to schedule the first post within the briefcase, we use the briefcase because we got a lot of locations, then they can just go copy and manually add that first post URL to that first scheduled post, and then that one will have the tag in it, and from that point forward they can daisy chain them together.

All right. Again, you’re right on track, Olena. I think you just needed a little bit of clarification.

Issues With Changing Appointment URL With Amazon S3 @id Page in GMB

All right. Ted’s up next. Ted says, “Hey guys, a heads up. My tree service GMB that’s been around and generating leads since LLP launched was suspended this weekend when I updated my appointment URL with the Amazon S3 @id page. Also, I was using the same Ghost Browser session since day one. I just wanted to get everyone heads up.” Yeah. That is one of the things that I would recommend. Well, first of all, like I said, I’ve told my team to stay out of them all together right now while we let things settle and there’s a lot of testing going on through various people and other groups as well. So once we have a better understanding of what it is that is triggering that, which can be a number of things, we’ve got to try to identify each one of them.

Again, I would recommend just staying out of them, but one of the things that I would recommend not doing, for those of you that still want to test with your own assets at the moment, is do not add the @id ID page to the appointment URL. If you want, you can link to it via anchor text link within the GMB website text, so it would be a contextual link. But I would recommend not pushing anything into the appointment URL at the moment, that section, other than an actual appointment app. Okay. That’s just one of the things that I think is potentially causing problems. So I would recommend not adding that URL right now to the appointment section URL, only adding a valid appointment URL or scheduling app there at the moment. Okay.

Again, you can still link to it, guys. You can link to it from your GMB post. You can link to it from an anchor text link within your GMB website content. Okay? I’m sorry for you, Ted, but that’s the nature of the game. The good thing is at least you’ve got quite some longevity out of that anyways. You said it had been producing leads for you and all that. You know can do it again, right?

Marco: Yeah. I told my VAs not to change anything, to just keep doing what they were doing it and not to start anything new, by the way.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: We just kept going because I don’t like changing, I don’t like sending Google mixed signals. Interestingly enough, I had one suspended, and I hadn’t had one suspended yet I was wondering what all the ruckus was about, and I finally had one suspended. Then when we started talking about it, when I went back and talked to the VA, she uploaded a video which we had never done on that one account. So veering from what we’re doing, just by a video was enough to get the account suspended.

Bradley: That’s crazy.

Marco: Yeah. It’s really interesting what’s going on. If you do anything different than what you’ve been doing, you’re setting yourself up to be hit. They’re just sniping anyone, left and right. I mean, third on the match and you’re done.

Bradley: Yeah. By the way, that’s something else. We had our live event and that was really where I started developing the scaling processes so that we could build, build, build. That was the goal for … We had our live event in October and so we had a 12-week period or a 90-day sprint where were our goal was to hit 50 assets built and optimize. So that ended about three weeks ago and so the next 12 weeks was gonna be all about monetizing assets.

It just worked out for us that we had built all these and now because of what’s going on, the timing is, it just happened that it’s a good time for us to stay out of building new ones at the moment, work on off-page stuff to get the ones that we built that aren’t performing well yet. We can work on all the off-page stuff now to get those to start performing better, ranking better, producing better.

I am developing the processes right now currently for, well, obviously, as I shared with you guys just moments ago, I’m still developing some of the off-page strategies and processes for my team, but at the same time I’m developing the monetization so that outreach prospecting and sales process for monetizing these assets, and that’s my next 12-week goal, which like I said we’re in about week three now of developing those processes out, which will be shared in the Mastermind. I’m gonna give everybody exactly what I’ve been doing and show real road examples of how the stuff that I’m doing, what works, what doesn’t work, all of that, like I always do in the Mastermind.

So that’s something that we just got started on this week. Now the POFU Live event attendees, I have a weekly accountability meeting with them and we did that on Monday. If anybody’s here on the Hump Day Hangouts that was there on Monday or watched the replay, you can comment, if you don’t mind, on the page and let people know how that strategy is going.

Because it’s a very powerful strategy, using video email. We’ve got a training protocol video call lead-gen system that I’m going to be updating with all of this prospecting training and processes that I’m developing right now for outreach in prospecting in sales essentially monetizing our assets specific to GMB stuff. I’m going to be adding all of that training and updating it in the video lead-gen system. That’s going to be something that we will launch probably at the end of this 12-week sprint, which is about nine weeks from now.

Again, guys, there’s a lot of stuff going on. If you’ve got stuff that’s already built but not monetized yet, now’s a good time to work on pushing them to get them to produce better and also working on developing your prospecting strategy to get them monetized. Let the dust settle on building new assets at the moment and within a few weeks, guys, will have some new methods.

What Are Some Of Your Ranking Strategies in Pinterest?

Anyways, the next question, from Dean. Marco, it’s gonna be directed at you because I don’t have any idea about anything on Pinterest. I’ll read it for you. “Question for Hump Day Hangout 225. Have any of you guys tried ranking in Pinterest? Their PPC system seems expensive compared to Google but they are a good fit for my home and garden client. Thing is with nearly 2,000 pins of furniture products and with hashtag optimized descriptions, only a few seem to pop up in Pinterest search. Old pins that have been saved a few times or more, that hints to me that pin saved by people may be the biggest ranking factor in Pinterest. Can you shed some light? If that’s the case, I wonder if some spam accounts can save pins and manipulate it somewhat?”

Marco: All right. I’m sorry I’ve spent about two years in Pinterest figuring out the algorithm and a whole bunch of different things that what makes it go and I’m not willing to give that up for free.

Bradley: Okay, fair enough. We’re gonna move on. Sorry, Dean. I’d help you if I could, but I don’t know a dick about Pinterest. I’ve never really done anything with Pinterest so I can’t help you anyways.

What Are The Reasons Why Verified GMBs Do Not Show Up In Google My Maps?

Jay Turner says, “Some of my service area business client’s verified GMBs do not show up in Google My Maps when searching for them in order to add their pin to a Google My Map. Why is that? Does adding KML file …? Again, it’s probably because it’s a GMB service area business. I don’t know that for sure because I don’t do a whole lot of My Map stuff. Is that something we can comment on? I know that’s kind of RYS stuff.

Marco: It is. If you hide the address you cannot expect to find it.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: Because all you’re going to pull up is a service area. So there’s no way to do that.

Bradley: Yeah. You could use the city center for that area. I mean, that’s something that you could do. But I don’t do a whole lot of My Map stuff still. I just never really did. I know we have RYS Academy training that talks about that stuff, Jay. So if you’re in there, that might be a good question for the RYS Facebook group. Okay.

Will. Let’s see. This is similar to the one that Olena asked, but I’ll read it real fast and we’ll move on. He says, “When using the GMB auto poster and writing a month’s worth of post, are you saying that we should manually post the first post in the sequence of these 30 posts then use the GMB auto poster software so that we can link to the first post and the subsequent posts in the Auto poster?”

Well, no. Again, it’s not about always linking to that first post, guys. Again, you post manually because it’s a way to kind of season the asset without automating stuff right off the bat. Okay? That’s it. That’s all. It’s just part of the optimization process for my team. It’s not about always linking to that one post, guys. The siloing is more about theming. It’s just like a website silo, guys. I think too many of you guys are trying to over complicate stuff, and I’m not picking on you, Will.

But if you understand website silo architecture, for YouTube silo architecture, which you can accomplish with playlists, it’s the exact same with GMB post silos. Again, it’s the same principle, guys. It’s no difference whatsoever. As long as you understand website silos and how to build those correctly and theme your silos correctly, you just repeat that same process in either YouTube or GMB. It’s the same process, right? Again, it shouldn’t be over complicated, guys.

If you don’t understand website silo architecture, go search our YouTube channel. I’ve got several videos on there that I’ve talked about. They’re several years old, but the strategy has not changed a bit. Right? It’s one of those things that are timeless, that will continue to work. You can also go search Bruce Clay. Just go search on Google Bruce Clay website silos and it’ll be the first link at the very top of Google search results and click on it. It’s an old article. I think it’s from 2009 or ‘10. Read it, it’s still valid and relevant today. Okay.

Next, Robert Nelson. He’s our new Mastermind member. Welcome, Robert. He says, “Hey guys, excited! Just signed up for the Mastermind around an hour ago. Looking forward to getting to know you guys better over the next few months.” Yeah. I hope you schedule a call with me through my calendar link I sent to you, Robert, via email. So I hope to talk to you next week.

Is It Okay To Use RSS Authority Sniper On PBNs?

He says, “My question is, I’m wondering if you think it’s a good idea to use RSS authorities.” Oh, yeah. This is a great question, by the way, guys. This is a really good question. I’m gonna answer it. “I’m wondering if you think it’s a good idea to use RSS authority sniper on PBNs if it’s also been used to create feeds for the money site.” Okay. First of all, you’re using RankFeedr to create the feeds. RSS authority sniper just finds feeds, okay? So you’re using RankFeedr to create the feeds.

“Which my PBNs are linking to.” He says, “I’m a bit worried about a footprint if the domain they use for RankFeedr feeds has links to my money sites as well as my PBNs. Do you think that’s an issue?” All right. What I would recommend is that you would create separate feeds to embed in your money sites. Okay. If you’re using PBNs, and I don’t know if you’re populating content, in other words, are you feeding content to your PBNs through RankFeedr, which I don’t recommend because that would look like crap, but you can embed the feed.

Again, I just talked about that in Syndication Academy on how to do that, guys, and the Mastermind, you guys all have access to that anyways, which means, Robert, you’ll have access to that too. Again, that was the most recent Syndication Academy update webinar. I talked about how to embed a feed. Okay. So using the RankFeedr feed to embed is super, it’s great, it’s fantastic.

So what I would recommend is that you can use RankFeedr feeds on your PBN as an embedded feed which will create co-citation, but do not include your money site links either static or RSS feeds as part the RankFeedr feed that’s on the money site-, or excuse me, the PBNs. Just use that to add local and topical relevancy to the actual PBN. Then you can still use traditional links within the content to link back to your money sites because the RankFeedr feeds that are embedded aren’t going to be having any of your content sources in the feed itself, which would be kind of a footprint, because now you’d have an embedded feed that has links to your content sources like your money content sources as well as contextual links from your traditional PBN links back to the same destination. Yeah, that would be in a footprint I would worry about.

Plus, I would also have, if you’re going to be using RankFeedr to create co-citation feeds for your money site, those would be separate feeds. In other words, I’d have one RankFeeder feed that I would use is an embed on the PBN to just add geographic and topical relevancy to that PBN, then I would have separate RankFeedr feed where you would include your money side RSS feed, your GMB RSS feed if you’re doing it for local, you could also have your static items and all that so that you can create local and geographic co-citation relevance to your money site. Bt that would be separate and apart from what you’re using on your money site-, or excuse me, your PBN. Does that make sense?

Just keep that in mind, guys. Remember, with the top level subscription package, it’s like $47 a month, guys. It’s ridiculous. You can get up to 1,100 feeds. I would create two separate feeds in that case if you’re doing that, just like I said. Robert, we can talk about that in a little bit more on our call, if you want to go and do it a little bit deeper. Okay.

Also, you can post, by the way, Robert, the Mastermind Facebook group, we go real deep into discussions about anything that you want. So if you want to post that in there, we can comment on a little bit further, also on the mastermind webinar as we dig into that stuff, so you see over the shoulder training type stuff. Marco and I get real deep into that stuff all the time. We get into the weeds. Awesome. Glad to have you.

Greg, thanks for being here, man, as always.

Is There Some Type Of Google My Business Updates Going On?

Frankie says, “Hey guys, it’s my first time back,” what’s up, Frankie?, “since you moved off Google Plus. I would like to know if there is some type of Google My Business GMB updates going?” Yes, a lot. “There was a lot of talk about this in other groups. Is it all BS or GMB the same still?” No. They’re cracking down, which guys we’ve been talking about, we knew it was gonna happen, it was just a matter of time. It doesn’t mean that it’s the end of the world. It just means that shit settles down, we’ll figure out the next method and we’ll produce training around it when it’s available, all right, once we figure it out. But glad to have you back, Frankie. Okay.

Jordan says, “Welcome back to WordPress sites, all GMBers.” Well, no, I wouldn’t say that yet. Maybe. We’ll see.

Marco: No. There’s still other ways that you can verify GMBs. All they’re trying to do is kill one loophole, but there’s quite a few others. The old stuff that we’ve always been preaching is still working. So no, I’m not planning on going back to WordPress sites anytime soon. If anything, I’ll just go back to G sites. Well, I never left G sites, right? Drive stacks and G sites.

Bradley: Yeah. Quit This House says, “Do we still get the bonus semantic webinar if we buy feed burner stuff today?” Yeah. Well, essentially, all I was gonna do was share some of my methods on how I’m using it and some of the results that I’ve gotten. Yeah, sure. I’m glad you mentioned that, by the way, because I almost forgot about it. So if you bought RankFeedr guys through us and you can prove it, then just reach out, what I’ll do is …

By the way, Adam, if you’re still, on can you do me a favor and make a note of this? Maybe in two weeks or three weeks something like that I’ll hold a kind of an update webinar for RankFeedr, and Mastermind will obviously be included, and maybe I’ll probably include Syndication Academy members too, because it’s precisely the method that I’ve shared in Syndication Academy, which is how to embed those feeds and create the feeds, and what I’m doing, and where I’m embedding them. I’ll even give you guys the process for, well, that’s only Mastermind members will get the process doc, guys. It has to be that way.

But I can share with you what I’m doing and the results that I’m getting specifically with those RankFeedr feeds and how to get really good results for local stuff. Okay. So, yeah, I will do just an update webinar and it’d probably be a short webinar. Again, the Mastermind, they’re going to get the process docs for this stuff too so that they can have their team do it as opposed to doing it on your own or developing the docs on your own.

But, yeah, that’s a good idea. I appreciate you reminding me about that. Absolutely, just reach out to us at support. We’ll create a small list on for people that we’ve known. Or just come join a Mastermind, you’ll get it anyways. Also, as I said, it might be part of the Syndication Academy update webinar is what I’ll do. It’s likely gonna be that too and we’ll just include the RankFeedr buyers into that also. Okay. It’s a good question though.

What URL Do I Use From The GMB Briefcase Auto Poster To Setup The RSS Authority Sniper?

Michael says, “Question about RSS authority sniper. What URL do I use from GMB briefcase auto poster to set up the sniper? Everyone I’ve tried got an error. Thanks.” I don’t know why that’s the case, Michael. Have you posted? You have to have GMB post or the RSS feed won’t register. It’s just like a WordPress site. If you try to add an RSS feed to IFTTT that contains no items, it won’t accept it. It will give you an error every time. So have you posted? If so, then what I …

By the way, inside the auto poster, guys, there’s an update RSS file button. You go to settings RSS feeds and that lists all of your locations that are connected to the auto poster or the briefcase, depending on where you’re at, and then it says, there’s a blue button off to the right column and it says copy URL or whatever. Well, that’s your RSS feed. If you’re having issues, just click that update RSS file button, it’s at the top of that column, it’s a yellow button, click that.

It’ll take a few seconds to reload. Once it read loads, all of your feeds will be updated and just check it then. Go check it in a Firefox browser. You’re gonna have to add, it’s called the RSSPreview Firefox add-on. RSSPreview is one word. Go open Firefox, go to Google and search RSSPreview Firefox add-on. It’ll be the first link at the time top of the search results. Click that, add it to your Firefox, enable it. That way you can start viewing HTML versions of an RSS feed in Firefox again. They disabled that a few months ago for whatever reason. The native RSS feed reader in Firefox is you have to create add the add-on now. Okay. But then just go check it.

If you have any other issues, contact support Shreepad, which is little support bubble is in the bottom right corner inside the briefcase or the post scheduler, he’s really, really good at replying to support requests, guys. If you have any issues, contact him. But I promise you, if you’ve got posts in there and you click the update RSS file button, it should work fine. Okay.

Should We Use SEO Ultimate Plugin Instead Of Yoast For The Battleplan Strategy?

John says, “Hey guys. I purchased the Battle Plan. Awesome. In the plan, it suggests using SEO ultimate plugin, but in the webinar Yoast seems to be the favorite.” Are we still linking to one of the older versions of the webinar, at that point maybe?

Hernan: Yep. Maybe we’re gonna be clipping and updating that really shortly. We have redirects over there.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah. SEO ultimate is way better, guys. It doesn’t have a bunch of loaded code. Jeffrey Smith knows his guys, I’m telling you. It is hands-down the best SEO plugin and get the SEO ultimate plus. It’s inexpensive and gives you a ton of additional functionality. The version 2 of SEO ultimate plus is coming out very soon. It’s been in beta for the last couple months but it’s going to be awesome.

Marco: Yeah. Just a short comment, Yoast is foot fungus get SEO ultimate. Please do yourself a favor.

What Are Some Top On Page And Off Page GMB Tips?

Bradley: Greg Derebret says, “Top on-page GMB tip.” I would say just complete the profile and post regularly. That’s the best on-page tip I can give you. Just completely complete the profile with well-optimized everything. Not stick spammy, just well optimized, well written stuff, and post regularly. Best off-page? That’s to be determined. Right now probably some of the stuff that we teach on Local Lease Pro and some of the stuff that I’m talking about with RankFeedr and that kind of stuff, Greg. Again, we’ll talk about that in one of the closed groups.

Marco: I would say top on-page silo, silo, Gregg. You’re with Gregg. I mean, that’s hands down, I mean, now with Jeffrey, hands down. The top off-page? Press releases, stack them.

Bradley: Yeah. Although the press releases in and of themselves are not as effective as they used to be, even six months ago, unless you’re varying distribution networks consistently or you stack, you publish press releases consistently and regularly-

Marco: That’s why I mentioned stack the press releases.

Bradley: Yeah. I had super good results with the Local PR program method with just as little as two press releases. I was able to rank in 3-pack a year and a half ago or two years ago whenever we launched that training. Now I’m finding to get the same kind of a result I have to publish six or eight press releases to get the same kind of a result, unless I’m varying the distribution networks and stacking to where I’m using three or four different distribution networks where still a lot of them share the same type of footprint, in other words, they share a lot of the same distribution sites.

But if you get some more link diversity from other distribution networks, because they distribute to different sites, in other words, and get picked up by other sites. If you do that, if you have access to a lot of different press release distributions, then that’s that can help. Or you have to stack consistently and regularly if you’re using the same sort of network and make sure that you’re …

Again, I’m not giving away too much here, but as I talked about in the Mastermind last week, I think it was Muhammad’s question about that, there’s not a set formula for how to stack, guys. You just need to constantly be varying what you’re linking to for to different tier one types of properties. It’s something that you need to do and it just seems like it’s taking more press releases to accomplish same thing. And that’s to be expected, guys. Anytime something works really well in SEO, it’s only a matter of time before it starts to become less effective. Right?

So don’t say the press releases aren’t effective. I’m not saying that at all it’s just the strategy has evolved a bit. Right?

Marco: Just to add just a quick thought, Greg. You have access to Dedia. Reach out to him because if you link build to your press releases he knows exactly what to do.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: That’ll set it on fire. Now I’m giving away too much. Drop some traffic in there, Greg

Where Can We Get Backlinks For Videos?

Bradley: Yeah. Marco, the next question, when does link building gonna be available in MGYB?

Marco: It’s being added as we speak.

Bradley: Okay. So there you go. Because, Greg, you can contact Dedia directly or you can wait, it should be available any minute because it thought was gonna be available last week. So that answers the next question, we he says, “Where can we get backlinks for videos?” Guys, our best link builder, he’s been working with me for six years now I guess and he’s awesome. We’re gonna have that service available in MGYB and it should be like at any moment. Okay? So check back often.

Is It Safe To Autopost To Lead Gen GMB Nowadays?

Guys, I got to run in a minute so I’ll try to get through the next one very quickly. Grant. What’s up, Grant? He was one of the POFU Live attendees. He’s been working very closely with the group. It’s awesome to have you here. He says, “Is auto posting to lead-gen GMB safe currently? Yeah, it is. As far as I know. I haven’t had any issues with that whatsoever. I have not had a single property terminated or suspended from that. Now I can’t swear that that’s the case for everybody. I’m just telling you I have not had any issues whatsoever it’s making on-page changes that’s been causing problems. It’s depending on what kind of change it is too, because I’ve actually been manually going in and changing on a lot of different stuff.

Like I mentioned earlier, guys, one thing I would not recommend doing is trying to add anything to the appointment URL section other than an actual bonafide genuine appointment app right now. That’s one thing that I see is triggering suspensions. Okay. I don’t know that for sure, but that’s a hunch of mine. I’ve heard that happen now from several different people. We lost six or seven assets just last week. But it’s the first six or seven out of like more than 10 times that we’ve built.

Again, I think a lot of it has to do with that one particular process. So my team’s not touching anything at the moment. I’m in their testing with different things right now. Something else is, and this is kind of using a manager account, I’ve talked about not doing that in the past, but I think using a manager account actually helps right now. So what I’ve been doing is I’ve been going in and adding a manager account to an asset and making some slight changes and then removing the manager. Still I’ve not had anything suspended like right before my eyes anyways, if that makes sense.

Google Starts To Ask For GMB Location Validation With Tax Invoice Or Business License

Gregg says, “Google is starting to ask for GMB location validation with tax.” Yeah, that’s one of the things I had predicted I thought would happen. Gregg, I’ve said that before that that was my speculation on what was going to happen, is that they were gonna start requiring either corporate doc’s or proof of mail being facts or photos taken with company letterhead or like bank statements, all of that stuff that I’ve had to do in the past to have verified GMBs moved to different locations. That’s what I assumed and I had speculated would probably happen.

The plan you outlined in your POFU group to monetize your GMB locations is brilliant and simpler, easier, and is the best method I’ve seen from all your optimization methods I’ve seen over the years that will be high converting. That’s awesome, Gregg. Yeah. I’m gonna be doing a lot of training over that next few weeks on that.

Last call to win the free Semantic Mastery T-shirt. Okay. “Bradley, is there a new press release program coming down the road soon?” Yes, there is. I can’t really announce that just yet, but I’ve been testing something that’s really kind of disruptive. I wouldn’t say that lightly, but it’s really, really cool technology that one of our very own Mastermind members has been developing it. He’s one of the code developers behind it. I’ve been on several calls with him and it’s actually very disruptive what they’re doing. Something that no other service out there has that I think would be a great addition to what we’re already doing. Again, that’s something that we’ll be announcing here in the coming weeks.

All right. Guys, pick the best question and all that so we can wrap it up.

Marco: Alex. One of the very first questions was excellent.

Bradley: Where was that? Right there?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Yep, Alex. Okay. So Alex is the winner for what, either the Battle Plan or what? T-shirt?

Hernan: Battle Plan.

Marco: Yeah. We said Battle Plan I think.

Bradley: Okay. Well, somebody else is getting a T-shirt, aren’t they?

Adam: Yeah. We did a random number generator and saw who bought and who posted back. Ted, you are the winner so just send into support from your normal email. I think we’ve actually had some back and forth between me and you, so just shoot an email into support. We’ll get to that large shirt and next time I’m in Sacramento I’m gonna find you for a beer, man.

Bradley: Don’t lie. The reason why he won is because of the beer emoji. Guys, I hope you all were paying attention. The next time you want to win something just put a beer emoji in there.

Adam: Yeah. Be within an hour’s drive of me and offer a free beer. No. We used a random number generator. It worked out, man. So we’ll get you your shirt just send them to support that’s semanticmastery.com.

Bradley: Awesome. I hope everybody got a lot out of this. No Mastermind webinar tomorrow, but we got one next week on what I’m working on, which I’ll be sharing with you guys, with the POFU members, and I have started developing this week, which is the outreach program using video email specific to the GMB asset stuff. We’re going to be going through that. So guys pay attention. Oh, and I’ll share the RankFeedr process doc with you guys in the Mastermind too. So see you all next week. Thanks guys for hanging out.

Hernan: See you, guys.

Marco: Bye everybody.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 225 published first on your-t1-blog-url