#okay ill pause the game the next time im free to ..... so i can finish phanto ... and maybe illl even leave a review ... like a good netizen

[dirt-str1der]

Since im taking a break from watching tanimura fail to account for the fact that someone is going to shoot the guy hes talking to out of nowhere despite it already happening like twenty minutes ago heres another funny phantasmagoria screenshot yakuza is a comedy

[tarosin]

the great adventures of y/n tommy tubbo jack and ranboo - how y/n made friends with everyone

this is an extra to the great adventures series

requested: yes/no

warnings: cursing

tommy

you were actually friends with tommy when he was streaming to a few viewers, and you even watched as his channel grew. eventually he asked you to mod for him, as he knew he could trust you and because had experience being a twitch mod. he was also the reason you began streaming. as for how you met, you were in the same classes as him in highschool, and since you were the ‘quiet’ person in the class, they sat tommy next to you. honestly, you hated him when you first met him and the feeling was mutual. you didn’t want to sit next to the rather loud teenager and he had no one to talk to anymore as his friends were on the other side of the room.

“do you ever talk?”

“heh?”

“i said do you ever talk...do you always do that”

“do what”

“that fucking HeH.”

“are you mocking me simons?”

“noooo why would i do that...”

“it’s y/n.”

“right, yeah, yeah, i totally knew that.”

“great now please leave me alone i’m trying to work.”

“loser.”

“the fuck did you just say?”

“nothing.”

it was that moment tommy decided he was going to make you just like him, and a few years later that’s exactly what he did. by year 11 you and tommy had grown extremely close. the last day of school arrived a lot earlier than expected, everyone was extremely stressed, no one knew what to expect or what was going to happen. you found yourself hanging around with tommy a lot more as you had no idea if you would both be going to the same college, in september you received a text message that made your night:

tommy: college sent out emails telling you if you were accepted go check

*2 minutes later*

tommy: well?

y/n: i got accepted

tommy: me too

y/n: call me right now

tommy: i’m about to stream..have you ever considered streaming?

y/n: absolutely not

tommy: make an account and stream after me i’ll raid you..make me mod you know how people can be

once college started up, you were slightly nervous the two of you would drift away from each other. however this was far from the case, although you both did different subjects and he was only in on wednesdays, the pair of you would hang out together a lot more. he would be in your streams and vice versa, you would either be in his tiktoks, or you would be the one filming them.

“y/n make a tiktok we can be mutuals.”

“please god no.”

you spent so much time at his house either talking about random things, playing whatever game you could find, or streaming. he dragged you to every meet up he went on, allowing you to meet people such as niki, phil, and, wilbur. you didn’t know this, but he would constantly bring you up in conversations with dream, which eventually lead to you joining the smp in october where you would later be able to meet the likes of jack, technoblade and jschlatt. the only person you didn’t seem to see on the server was his other friend tubbo.

ranboo

you had become friends with scott after being his first twitch mod and when he noticed you started streaming, he was extremely supportive, always raiding your stream once he ended his. today you found yourself bickering with scott because he wouldn’t let you in mcc despite the fact you were ‘the best minecraft player.’

“y/n, i watched you die in minecraft 7 times last night within 5 minutes.”

“oh i’m sorry mr perfect, let me in mcc.”

“no.”

“fine i’ll make my own.”

and that’s exactly what you did..well you tried your best.

you started your stream as soon as scott ended and had him call you on discord after explaining to your chat what you were about to do.

“scott final chance let me in mcc, i’ll settle for access to the practice server.”

“fine.”

“REALLY?!”

“absolutely not!”

“fuck you, ill be in it one day!”

you left the call telling chat you didn’t need that negative energy in your life.

you really have scott to thank for you making friends with ranboo, scott made a tweet explaining what you were doing on stream which caught ranboos eye.

Smajor1995: after not making it into mcc again my good friend @y/n has decided to take it upon themselves to make their own on stream!! ill also be in the stream (if they answer my calls) *twitch link*

ranboo joined your stream and was instantly met with you yelling at scott (again) to let you in mcc.

“IM YOUR TWITCH MOD!”

“i will ban you from mcc!”

“you don’t have the nerve... so he left the call this is bullshit watch me land this water bucket clutch down this ravine so we can find axolotls and build an army.”

*you died*

you pulled your hood over your face before sinking down your chair taking a deep breath.

“FUCK!”

you calmly got back up and looked into your camera.

“i was so close, so very close.. HEY CHAT SCOTT SENT ME A LINK TO THE SERVER!”

a few minutes later you were able to get onto the server, only to be kicked less than a minute later. the reason you were banned being ‘i watched you fail the water bucket clutch down a ravine.’

you continued your build on your server and just spent the rest of the stream talking about anything that crossed your mind, that was until you decided to copy ace race. once finished, you looked into your camera and pulled your microphone closer to you.

“so this is race ace, so scott doesn’t sue me, and basically it’s going to be this course, but i’m going to change a random section practice it every day, not tell anyone it changed. of course i’m going to tell my team we have to win, oh fuck i forgot scott was watching my stream..it’s okay he didn’t hear me he’s too busy planning how he can rig the next mcc.”

ranboo found himself enjoying your content and even noticed you in his chat multiple times.

“just a minute chat i’m just sending an important dm to my mods.”

that’s when you noticed chat paused for a minute after you sent a message, it confused you for a minute before realising ranboo made you a vip on his channel and you decided to do the same for him on your channel, from there you added each other on discord. the pair of you made friends extremely quickly, you were constantly part of his streams as you would call him on discord not realising that he was streaming.

“hi y/n, by the way i’m streaming”

“i just wanted to ask if you knew how to break into a house?”

“....why”

“i locked myself out by accident and my parents are asleep come help me.”

“you are in the uk.”

“okay? catch a flight.”

chat honestly loved you and your friendship with ranboo. the pair of you only met a few weeks ago and you were already acting as though you had known each other for years.

jack

you and jack met for the first time on the smp, which would have been fine, however you met during lore and your characters weren’t exactly the best of friends. once lore had ended, everyone said their goodbyes and left the call. a few moments later you received a discord message from jack asking if you were available to call any time soon. since you were back in lockdown, you had plenty of free time. you arranged a time and date a few days later you called jack, where you had your first proper interaction out of character.

“hello jack!!”

“oh hi y/n i just thought it may be a good idea to get to know each other, well you know considering we’re both on the dream smp.”

“yeah, yeah, i understand what you mean.”

the pair of you ended up getting along with each other, it was slightly awkward for the first 5 minutes of the call, but that was expected since you hadn’t really met jack before and were anxious to call him. however, after that the conversation started to flow and you found out the pair of you had a lot in common making it easy to come up with things to talk about. it ended up feeling as though you were catching up with a friend you hadn’t spoken to for a while.

“has anyone told you your accent is really strong.”

“so is yours, y/n, what the fuck is that supposed to mean.”

“it means your accent is strong, duh.”

jack asked if you’d like to stay in call and join him on the smp whilst he streamed, and you gladly accepted the offer as you really didn’t want to do your college work, and you were enjoying your time with him. a few minutes into the stream jack had killed you several times.

“JACK STOP KILLING ME!”

rather than answering you he just sat laughing. he then went on to attempt to mute him microphone, he failed. however he didn’t realise this, so you sat listening to his plan on how he was going to kill you again. this time you were prepared, you sent a message to tommy telling him to log on along with your location. few minutes later tommy was by your side and helped you kill jack several times for revenge.

“Y/N...TOMMY!!”

“you didn’t mute your mic, so i told tommy you were bullying me.”

“im gonna go...BYE JACK, BYE Y/N, ILL SEE YOU SOON!”

“i can’t believe you.”

“hey you’re the one who didn’t turn your mic off.”

“how did you know?”

“i had your stream on my other monitor.”

“ayeee you watch my streams?”

“...i’ve been a sub for 4 months.”

the two of you stayed chatting and playing for another hour. the pair of you were already so close and you had only met each other the other day. this was just the start of your friendship, soon enough you were in a laugh and the stream ends challenge on his stream, however due to lockdown rules this was done over discord leading to you accidentally leaving the call several times.

“and they’re gone again!”

*4 minutes later*

“SORRY JACK IM BACK!”

“stop leaving y/n!”

“oh i’m sorry, let me just go yell at my wifi to stop cutting out!”

a few seconds later you could be heard faintly in the background screaming at your wifi as it would continue to buffer. as soon as restrictions were over one of the first things you decided to do was go to jacks and stream a laugh you lose where there was a punishment if you were responsible for losing the last heart. however everything was apparently hilarious in person as you would constantly laugh, meaning you were responsible for losing the last heart.

“y/n give me your phone.”

“no.”

“you lost let me tweet from your account”

“fine..”

soon enough your fans and friends with your notifications on received this twitter notification

“y/n: jack is so cool and funny he is also really tall i am not”

tubbo

tubbo was actually the last person you met and made friends with, your community were convinced for some reason that you both didn’t like each other and that’s why the pair of you didn’t talk to each other. this was far from the case you were both waiting for the right time, tubbo was an extremely busy teenager and you didn’t want to interrupt him, and tubbo knew you were currently in a stressful position since you had recently joined the dream smp, also you were still meeting people so he didn’t want to stress you out. this doesn’t mean he didn’t want to be your friend, he actually asked tommy since he had been your friend for at least 4 years what would be the best way of getting to know you.

“mate they hated me when we first met, just talk to them or something. you could have met them the last time i went up to visit you, but they ended up not feeling too good and went back to the hotel room.”

“when are you next coming up?”

“how about next week, and i’ll bring y/n, i really don’t understand why you’re nervous tubbo, it’s y/n they wouldn’t hurt a fly..well hmm.”

“see you next week then!”

a week later tommy dragged you to the train station.

“uh tommy where are we going?”

“...on a train.”

“no way, really? oh my god!”

a few hours later you finally got off the train.

“ill go with my dad to check into the hotel room, do you want to come with us or?”

“i think i’ll go for a walk and stretch my legs.”

“right okay, meet you at the beach later”

you spent a few minutes walking around the beach picking up any rocks and shells that caught your eye, little did you know it would result in you meeting tubbo. once you finished putting your new collection in your pockets you noticed a small crowd of people walk up to someone asking for pictures assuming it was tommy you walked over to the boy, it wasn’t tommy it was in fact tubbo. at first you stayed silent not wanting to really cause attention to yourself. you only spoke up when some people started to make inappropriate comments towards him.

“oh sorry to be a pain guys me and tubbo have plans with tommy in a few minutes, we should go so we’re not late. bye guys.”

you smiled and waved as they walked away. you looked over to tubbo, you could tell he was still pretty anxious about what just happened and honestly if you was in his position, you would react the same way.

“we should probably move from here incase they come back and see you’re still here, are you okay?”

“im feeling better now it’s over..thank you”

“oh it’s no problem i’m, y/n btw.”

“wait you and tommy were still meant to be on the train.”

“the train was actually on time, tommy went to check into the hotel i wanted to stretch my legs, i also wanted to collect some rocks.”

“did you collect enough or did you want more?”

“im not going to say no if you wanna go collect some with me.”

the pair of you walked around keeping each other close incase the people from before returned. half an hour later, the pair of you sat on a bench close to the beach so you could show tubbo everything you decided to pick up, he ended up keeping a rock he liked to have as a memory. tubbo wrapped an arm around you as it was getting cold whilst you watched the sunset.

“tubbo i think tommy forgot about me.”

“you can spend the night at mine, i’ll send him a message to let him know.”

“are you sure?”

“of course!”

“this has to be the most unsafe thing either of us will ever do, we hardly know each other and now i’m staying at yours.”

tommy sent you a message explaining that he didn’t forget, there was a problem at the other hotel and they had to go find another one, but you’ll be fine to stay at tubbos for the night. the pair of you spent the entire night learning as much as you can about the other person. it had only been an evening but you already knew the pair of you would be great friends.

taglist:

@dumb-chaotic-bi-energy @uselesssapphickitten @l0ver0fj0y @etheriaaly @xx-smiley-xx @hawarun @kylobensgirl @cawcaw-pretty-thing @reverse-iak @renleicrashed @c1loudee

[taestefully-in-luv]

Always You | JJK (Drabble#4)

Summary: Jungkook is drunk and misses you. What happens when he teases you with a little video?

Pairing: Always You!Jungkook x female reader

Genre: smut, fluff

Word count: 2.5k

Warnings: Masturbation (male and female), phone sex

Notes: Decided to get this little thang out askdsdfj enjoy! Remember requests for drabble ideas are open! Lets chat:)

© taestefully-in-luv

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jungkook stumbles into the empty apartment with Jimin and Taehyung following closely behind him. He curses under his breath as he takes his shoes off, the apartment is cold thanks to the running AC and he fucking shivers. He thought being this drunk he would be extra warm but nope, it doesn’t look that way.

“Jesus, what is the temperature set on?” Jimin is the first to outwardly complain. “Do you want me to freeze to death?”

“It is really cold, Jungkook.” Taehyung whines as he slips his own shoes off.

“Sorry…” Jungkook mutters, “y/n usually took care of the air. But as you two know she’s no longer with us”

“You’re acting like she died.” Jimin deadpans as Taehyung tries to stifle a chuckle.

“She isn’t answering her phone…” Jungkook pouts to himself. “She said she would always answer my calls no matter what.” He juts his lip out dramatically and Jimin rolls his eyes.

“She still has a life dude.”

“I am supposed to be her life.” He whines, walking in the living room and plopping down on the couch. “I was only going to tell her I miss her.”

“She knows you miss her man.” Taehyung sits down next to him, “We all know…”

“Well, now you guys get to hear it more.” Jungkook pipes up, “Because I miss her soooo much. I miss her hugs, her cuddles, her kisses, god, I really miss when she would suck my di—”

“Okay!” Taehyung cuts him off but Jimin swats Tae’s arm.

“No, let him finish.” Jimin says with a smirk.

“You’re gross dude.” Tae swats Jimin’s arm in return.

“God, she really knows how to ride dick too.” Jungkook drunkenly slurs out, “Like, she just really knows what she’s doing.”

“I’m glad my girl is getting so much praise!” Jimin claps his hands as his sly smile grows, “Please, tell us more.” He leans his head forward.

“Please don’t.” Taehyung chuckles awkwardly. “Do you guys want to play a game or watch music videos or something?”

“I want to talk to my girl.” Jungkook cries out dramatically. “I miss her.”

“Maybe you need to rub one out dude.” Jimin playfully remarks, “Make a video for her or something.” Jimin is so clearly joking but Jungkook’s entire face lights up like he was just given the best god damn idea in the world.

“Okay, you guys go home. I’m going to bed.” Jungkook stands up and begins walking to your shared bedroom.

“He realizes we aren’t leaving right?” Taehyung asks Jimin and Jimin just shrugs.

“Let’s watch music videos.”

~~~~~~

Jungkook has his phone set up on the desk, his camera on and pointed towards him. He has his shirt off and is only wearing briefs and sweats. He decides to run his fingers through his already messy hair and make it a bit more wild.

He’s going to send you a little teaser video. He presses record on his phone and sits at the desk, his legs spread wide as he rubs himself over his sweats. His cock grows harder and harder as he rubs himself, he throws his head back on the chair. He then takes his hand and drags the sweats and briefs down, letting his cock spring free. He strokes it gently while whimpering. He calls out for you over and over. His quiet voice rising just the slightest as he gets himself going.

And that’s it. That’s the video. He presses stop and watches it over and approves. He sends it to you with a smirk on his face, he hopes you love it.

y/n 3:34am

Jungkook, what the fuck

y/n 3:35am

I started watching that in public!!! Do you know how quick I had to turn off my phone!!!!!!

Jungkook 3:35am

Oh? So you do exist…I was starting to think you didn’t cuz you keep ignoring my calls

y/n 3:36am

im now just seeing the calls baby, Ill be home soon…ill video call you

Jungkook 3:36am

Good.

Jungkook suddenly becomes so fucking giddy, he jumps to his feet in rushed excitement. He can’t wait to see your gorgeous face. Unfortunately, he stood up way too fast, the world starting to spin…his drunken world.

“Ah, fuck.” He slurs.

But really, he can’t wait to talk to you, to see you. It’s been a few months and he has yet to visit. But texts and video calls are what’s getting him through everything, if he’s being honest. He really does miss you…he misses laying in bed with you just talking, he misses your laugh, he misses your smile, he misses the way you smell, he misses holding you…he just misses you.

He’s lying on his bed, staring up at the swirling ceiling, wondering when you will call. It’s around 4 am now and he’s starting to doze off. But thoughts of you are keeping him conscious.

Suddenly, his phone starts vibrating and he sees that he has a incoming video call from you. He excitedly and quickly taps his screen a million times until he’s answering.

“Hi.” He slurs out, his dopey grin making you laugh.

“Hi drunky.” You giggle, staring at him through your screen.

“Just wanted to talk to you and tell you I miss you. And that I love you more than literally anyone.” He smiles at you, his words getting jumbled together.

“I miss you too baby.” You say softly. “I just got home and I wish I was coming home to you instead.” You quietly pout and he wishes he could kiss your cute lips.

“I am going to buy my ticket to see you soon, I promise. Only two more weeks. Then I see you” He says, his smile fading. “I really do miss you babe. I feel so lost without you here.” He admits between soft breaths. “I left the AC on too low and I got back home and it was freezing.”

“Jungkook.” You whine, “The bill is gonna be so high.”

“It’s okay my love. I got it.” He assures you with a soft smile and you begin to melt. The screen does not do Jungkook justice.

“You look very handsome.” You gulp, “Did any girls hit on you tonight?”

“I didn’t notice…” Jungkook smirks, “I make sure to tell everyone I have a beautiful girlfriend.”

You can’t help but smile and laugh…you two have gotten into some pretty heated arguments over your insecurities…you don’t want a repeat of that.

“Good. You’re all mine.”

“All yours.” He blows you a kiss through the phone and you pout.

“I wish I could feel your lips on me right now.”

“I see you in 2 weeks my love, you will get all the kisses you want and need.” Jungkook slurs his words and you giggle.

“God, you are drunk.”

“Not uh.” He pokes his tongue out, “I’m maybe a little tipsy though!” he laughs for no real reason and you join him.

“So about that video…” you smirk at him, and he brings the phone to his chest as he giggles at his shamelessness.

“Hey! Bring the phone back to you!”

“What about the video? Hm?” Jungkook brings the phone back to his face and you rub your thighs together…his hair is wild and his expression screams that he’s beginning to become fucked out.

“I watched it when I got home.” You admit, “I think it made me…” you pause, biting your lip. “Really wet.”

“Oh really?” Jungkook feels his cock hardening at the thought of your wet pussy. “I want you to feel yourself for me and let me know.”

You chuckle, sliding your hand down your yoga pants and feeling yourself.

“I’m wet baby.”

“Your panties soaked?”

“I’m not wearing any.” You breathe out and Jungkook sucks in a sharp breath.

“Bad girl…” he finally says. “I wish I could bend you over my knee and spank you.”

“You wanna slap my ass?”

“Mhm. I want to fuck your ass too.” He slurs out and you feel your pussy clench around nothing.

“Can I touch myself?” you shyly ask him and he shakes his head with an evil grin.

“Not yet baby. I want you to watch me first.”

“Jungkook, why are you being unfair?” you whine, your fingers just above your aching clit that is dying to be touched.

“Just like playing with you a little.” He admits, “I like getting you so worked up.”

“Okay, I’ll watch you.”

Jungkook gets off the bed and places the phone on the desk, setting it up to where you can have the perfect view of him sitting in the chair.

“Should I continue where I left off?”

“Yes.” You sigh out heavily, waiting just waiting to see his gorgeous cock.

“What’s the magic word?” he teases and you’re so close to touching yourself.

“Jungkook.” You warn in an exaggerated whine, “Please.”

“Good girl.” And he’s snaking his hand down his sweats and pulling out his leaking member, it’s so hard and so swollen that your mouth waters immediately. God, you are so starved of his cock that even through the screen it has you desperate for him.

“I want you to grip your cock for me…” you begin to instruct, “And tug at the head just a little, get you feeling good.”

Jungkook obeys your orders as he gets a hold of his aching length, he starts by squeezing the tip just slightly getting him to groan out.

“Good, now use the lube baby. Put a generous amount in your palm, I want your dick soaked.” He does as you say, squirting the lube in his hand.

“Now stroke your cock for me, but don’t put too much pressure.”

“Baby…” he breathes out.

“Pretend that it’s my hand.” You softly order, “Pretend I’m there with you right now.”

“Ah.” Jungkook moans out as he strokes himself, “Feels good.” He says, causing you to arch your back. You begin moving your hips back and forth as you watch him.

“Okay,” you swallow hard, “Add more pressure and stroke yourself faster.”

Jungkook squeezes his hand around his length, his moans getting louder and you blink at him, your hand tightening its grip around your phone. He looks so fucking hot.

“I want you to take your other hand, yes good, and touch your balls for me, yes…just like that.” Jungkook is a sight for sore eyes, his cock and balls out on display and you want to jump through the screen and straddle his lap, sinking down on to him. Fuck, you want to touch yourself.

“Shit…baby…” you say, losing composure as you watch him get himself off, “Please let me touch myself.”

“Okay.” Jungkook gives the green light, “Rub your clit for me.” He says while rubbing himself faster and faster, his head thrown back in pleasure as high pitched moans leave his mouth.

“Thank you baby” you set your phone down, your hands quickly pull down your yoga pants and you immediately touch your desperate bundle of nerves.

“Gotta see you though.” Jungkook whines. “Need to see you. See your pussy, see your face.”

“Fuck, okay, hold on.” You prop the phone up on some pillows until he has the perfect view of you.

“Lemme see your fingers on that pretty pussy baby.” He softly commands and you feel yourself get dizzy. “Even through the screen I can see how fucking wet you are, my god.” Jungkook strokes himself faster. “My baby is so perfect.”

“How close are you? Can you wait for me?” You practically beg and he smirks.

“I got all night baby.” He winks, “Now get your fingers nice and wet, soak them. Then I want you to taste yourself.”

Your fingers gather your juices, drenching them in the process. You bring your fingers to your lips and suck on them, allowing a moan to escape. Jungkook rolls his eyes to the back of his head as he watches you.

“Good girl.” He praises, “How’s it taste? Fucking delicious, right?”

“Yes. Yes.” You moan out, your fingers going back to your clit.

“Want to see those fingers fuck your pretty pussy.” He slows down on his cock, he grips it tighter instead and rubs himself slowly. “Let me see.”

You slip one finger inside your hole and gasp, it’s been so long since something, anything has entered you like this.

“Another finger.”

Your eyes widen at his request…but you listen, you slide another finger inside your weeping cunt and begin to thrust them in and out of you.

“Another finger.”

“Jungkook.” You sigh out, “Another?”

“Yes baby, you can take it.” He fondles his balls some more, still stroking his dick. “Let me see.”

You slip a third finger in your hole and you start to feel full. You begin thrusting all three fingers in and out of you at a quick and brutal pace. His fingers would reach more places but yours will have to do for now.

“Ah fuck…” you grit out, “I wish you were here, Jungkook.”

“Keep saying my name.”

“Jungkook, Jungkook.” He starts rubbing himself faster now, he is losing it. He imagines you writhing beneath him, your lips apart, breathing heavily. He’s so close, he fucking close.

“Baby, let’s come soon.” He breathes out, “Together.”

“mmm.” Your other hand finds your clit, and you begin rubbing it faster and harder trying to set yourself over the edge.

“Imagine my cock is inside you right now baby, imagine me fucking you, making you scream my name.”

“Yes, Jungkook!” you yell out, not caring if your neighbors hear you. “Fuck, I’m about to come.”

Jungkook grips the tip of his cock and strokes himself so quickly, his hips meeting him halfway as he moans out your name over and over until his cum is spurting out and making a mess in his hand. That’s the last straw…that’s what you needed to see to get you to come.

You let the tension build so deliciously, until it snaps in half. You come all over your fingers, with the image that you’re creaming all over Jungkook’s cock.

“Ugh.” You groan, “I miss you so much…” you calm your heavy breaths, “Can two weeks hurry the hell up?”

Jungkook stares at the screen and smiles, his hand still sticky with his cum. He grabs a towel and cleans himself and is looking at you once again.

“Two weeks baby, and I’ll be there. I’ll be there to hold you, kiss you, fuck you.”

“Two weeks.” You say with a smile.

Two weeks and you’ll be reunited with your love.

[pillowfluffs]

Late Night!Minhyuk

Pairing: Minhyuk X Reader (gender neutral)

Genre: fluff but you already knew that

Summary: It’s never too late for video games right? well, maybe tonight... 

Author’s Note: i really wish i had a boyfriend honestly uwu. And If you haven’t realized, I don’t say exact names of things like Instagram/ twitter, instead, I saw social media or other things like watch videos, I don’t say YouTube. Idk why i do that but I just don’t like it when stories I read say the direct names. Idk it’s just my pet peeve as a reader soo i create a false name but i make it very similar to the original so others can tell im joking As always, feedback is greatly appreciated and please look forward to more works in the future!

**C/C = Career Choice**

The evening at your apartment was filled with fun; your boyfriend and his members had a free schedule the next day so you invited them to sleep over cause why not? Memories were always made afterward and it felt as if time was frozen for you; nothing and no pressures of life suffocated you. All was well with them around. The evening began after dinner as they filled your moderately sized abode, beginning by watching a few movies of various genres; from comedies to horrors to romances. Tonight wasn’t the first night you had them sleepover at your place, you never complained and they never objected. Your home became a second dorm for them, even allowing some members to share a room with one other member than at their normal dorm where they would share with two others.

You bought your current home with the help of your father, the CEO of a rather successful company which boomed in recent years. It was a car service where people could use their smartphones to connect driver-partners and riders. Passengers who needed a ride could request for a ride if the driver is in their area. The company was named to be called Yuber. You were the only child in the family so you were very pampered, but you worked very hard in school and in your current career; C/C. Your father told you the house was essentially a gift, one you believed was too big since you lived alone. Your home was a four-bedroom house, each with a shower. It had a garage with a large space of land for your backyard. When you first moved in, it was quite scary for you since it was just you in such a large place, but you slowly adapted, especially after you let the guys stay.

You and Minhyuk shared your master bedroom whenever he stayed. The other bedrooms were slightly smaller but very comfortable for two people. You let them bring whatever they needed into your house. At first, they felt ill at ease at such a generous offer of you letting them basically move in with you, but you saw it as no problem at all. After a few weeks, they became comfier. Jooheon and Changkyun shared a room, where they even bought a tv. Hyunwoo and Kihyun shared a room and Wonho and Hyungwon shared a room. Later on, you figured you needed a few things to make the boys feel even comfier where they could work and relax if they wanted. You filled your once empty basement with gym equipment and a fridge always filled with refreshments. You had a sunroom but saw no use for it since you weren’t the biggest fan of heat, so you changed it into a soundproof place where they could either dance to practice or record. Unfortunately, as much as they wished they could live there more often, they couldn’t due to their company’s strictness, so they only came whenever they were absolutely free, which was tonight.

The members and you were gathered in your living room sprawled about on the couches. Minhyuk, Jooheon, and Changkyun battler each other in various games they had brought over while the others watched, cheering for whichever member they wanted to win. You, of course, sat there cheering for Minhyuk, but your energy was rather low since it was pretty late. They were playing an intense game of super smash bros and it felt like it would never end. Minhyuk sat in the corner of the couch where it would bend with the room. You laid your head next to him since Minhyuk was rather competitive when it came to gaming so he moved often. Hyungwon was already upstairs sleeping. As time went on through the night, the other members began heading upstairs to sleep. The three remained to play, some occasional shouts and whines of almost losing from the other.

“Min, can we go to bed?” You gently tapped his leg as you yawned, lifting your head as you laid on your stomach. You could just go upstairs and sleep alone but after getting used to sleeping with Minhyuk these past few weeks when he could, it became more challenging to sleep by yourself when he was gone. You needed him. You waited for his reply, only to get none. “Min?” You tapped him a bit harder this time.

“Just a few more minutes, I promise sweetie,” his attention was on the game. He was currently the most points for knocking Jooheon and Changkyun off and he was determined to keep it that way. You looked at the time, seeing they had set the game to an infinite amount of time. “Lay on my leg if you want.” He glanced at you, seeing how tired you were.

“But you move when you game,” your voice was quiet and dripped with sleepiness but he heard it clearly despite the other two younger members teaming up against him, but alas were no match. You rested your hand on his leg, feeling his physical energy coming off of him as he played.

“I promise I won’t.” Minhyuk was able to pause his playing for a brief moment since he had knocked Changkyun and Jooheon off the edge and was waiting for them to respawn into the game. He smiled, rubbing your cheek with his hand, then pat his thighs for you to lay on them.

You began to scooch yourself onto his thighs, laying against them, absorbing the warmth he radiated from his body. He leaned down and pecked your lips and brushed his fingers through your hair.

“If you fall asleep, I’ll wake you up when we finish, okay?” He brushed the hair from your face. You nodded in response before he glanced back up at the tv seeing they had respawned and were beginning to attack him.

You laid with your stomach down, both arms wrapped around his waist. You watched as their character battled each other out, seeing Minhyuk in the first place, Changkyun a close second, and Jooheon a close third. Jooheon sat on the other couch as Changkyun sat on the floor in front of the tv, making some exclamations as they were calling for each other to make the next strike against Minhyuk. You were quite surprised yourself; Minhyuk was keeping his promise, not moving as he game, not even yelling. He was relaxed but he was most likely dying to yell out on the inside.

A good amount of time had passed. Your eyes were staring into space, no longer in focus, just seeing blurs of bright colors from your tv. Your breathing had slowed down. The moments between each time you blinked increased, getting longer and longer. You could feel a slight soreness on your eyes when you closed them. You closed your eyes, allowing the soreness to go away, being lulled to sleep from the sound of your and Minhyuk’s breathing and the warmth he gave no other blanket could.

“Good game, guys,” Minhyuk placed the controller on the table, sliding it to Jooheon as they began to shut off the tv and the gaming console, packing it up for the night. He moved his body carefully, trying not to disturb your sleeping form. He looked down at you, adoring your resting features, the way your cheeks were squished against his leg just made his heart swell.

“Do you need our help to carry Y/N to you guys’ room?” Changkyun and Jooheon offered as they stood on the other side of the coffee table.

Minhyuk proceeded to gently lift you up so he could slide out. “No, I can handle them, thanks though. You two should go to sleep.” He waved them off as they began heading up the stairs to their shared room. Minhyuk gently turned your sleeping body so you laid on your back, pushing his arm below your knees and below your back, lifting you from the couch. Fortunately, you were just about the same weight as him, if not less. He made his way toward the stairwell.

You subconsciously in your sleep wrapped your arms around Minhyuk’s neck as he carried you, resting your head on his chest, hearing his steady heartbeat as he neared the bedroom. He used his foot, pushing the bedroom door open, walking through and laying you gently on your side of the bed. He quickly rushed back downstairs, switching off all the lights before he ran back up to you. He slid into bed, pulling you into his arms where you nuzzled your face into this neck, falling asleep peacefully.

~~~~~

Masterlist for more!

[crystalninjaphoenix]

One Short Day

A JSE Fanfic

Yay, I wrote something that isn’t connected to pain for once in my life! Or at least, the most you get are hints and maybe a moment. I was planning on working on something else, but...I don’t know, I just felt like I needed something softer, and I’m sure there are people who need that too. So behold, an attempt at mostly-fluff! I just wanted to write the boys having fun out on the town, simple enough ^-^

It was rare that there was a full day they could all be together. A day where Schneep wasn’t working, Chase wasn’t recording, Marvin didn’t have a show, and Jackie didn’t have to bolt off at the last minute to do heroic vigilantism. A day where they could just do whatever they wanted, all of them, together.

They met up at Jackie’s apartment building. Naturally, JJ arrived first, then Schneep and Chase at about the same time. Just when they were starting to get worried, Marvin showed up, sprinting up to the group and skidding to a halt beside them.

“Late again, I see?” Jackie said when Marvin finally caught his breath. “Maybe we should just tell you we’re meeting thirty minutes earlier than we actually are.”

“Gimme a break.” Marvin rolled his eyes. “My phone was out of battery so I couldn’t check the time, then I got distracted.”

Jackie raised an eyebrow. “With what?”

“Um...” Marvin looked away, embarrassed. “I may have started playing Plague Inc...for an hour...or more.”

“Dude. Set a timer next time or something,” Chase said. “Ask JJ if you can borrow one of his watches if you have to, I dunno, anything.”

“Enough of this, we are wasting minutes,” Schneep said, checking his own watch. “Jackie decided what to do, what is it?”

Jackie immediately brightened. “Okay, so, we all know JJ hasn’t seen much of the town.” Everyone nodded. “So I thought we could give him the grand tour! Get lunch, go to the park, and I think the fair is open tonight so we can finish with that. That good with everyone?”

“So we’re just gonna walk all over town?” Chase asked. “Only two of us can drive, and none of us have a car right now.”

“Toughen up, Chase, walking’s good for you!” Marvin teased. “Right? Schneep, you’re a doctor, tell him I’m right.”

“He’s right,” Schneep said.

“See?!”

JJ snapped his fingers for attention. I thought we were wasting time? I certainly can’t lead the way, so I’ll ask one of you to.

“Right!” Jackie started off. “C’mon guys, lunch is waiting for us!”

They ended up at a local restaurant near the center of town called Kassie’s. It was a quaint little place, and since it was a warm day they decided to sit at a table outside. The chipper waitress gave them a plate of free fries, then took their order, and headed back inside.

“Is it just me, or is it kind of hot today?” Chase asked, fanning himself with some of the napkins.

“No, it’s not just you. God, I’m dying,” Jackie agreed.

“Jackie, you are not only wearing long sleeves, you are wearing two layers of them,” Schneep pointed out with a smile.

“Oh, you’re one to talk, Mr. Sweater-all-the-time!” Jackie rolled his eyes. “What about Jays? He’s got that vest/dress shirt on.”

JJ looked aghast. You four can run around and show your arms all you like, but I’ll have you know it isn’t proper for a gentleman!

“Are you implying we aren’t gentlemen?” Marvin asked, right before tossing a fry into the air and catching it in his mouth.

JJ raised an eyebrow. Indeed.

“I don’t care, it’s hot. I’m taking this off.” With a few flailing arms, Jackie pulled his hoodie over his head and tugged it off, revealing a Marvel-themed T-shirt underneath. “Ah. That’s better.” He looked around to see the others staring at him with wide eyes. “What?”

“Holy shit, Jackie!” Chase yelled. “Your arm!”

“Wh—oh fuck I forgot I was wearing short sleeves today.” Jackie looked down at his left arm. “Yeah, okay, I got scars, you can look all you want.”

“So that’s why I’ve never seen you in T-shirts,” Marvin realized. “Jackie, what the fuck happened?”

Jackie frowned, then coughed awkwardly. “Y’know...I’d rather not talk about it right now. Maybe later. Besides, Schneep already knows the story. ‘S how we met.”

“Honestly, you three are making mountains out of mole hills,” Schneep said. “Is fine now. You should see his torso, now those are scars.”

That only made the other three look more worried. Jackie sighed. “Look, guys, we’re having a fun day. We’re gonna have fun, and not gonna get all concerned, though I do appreciate it. And you—” he glared at Schneep “—need to stop saying that, ‘cause it makes it sound like I lost some epic battle instead of just having top surgery.”

Chase and Marvin relaxed in unison. “I’m still convinced you have, I dunno, fucking bullet scars or something,” Marvin muttered as Chase pulled the remains of the fries towards him.

“Oh yeah, but Schneep’s talking about the surgery. He’s done this before, and it’s no longer funny!” Jackie looked pointedly at Schneep when saying that last part, who just responded with a massive grin.

JJ was the only one who still looked concerned, but now that was paired with confusion. He looked around at the others. What is top surgery?

You could almost hear the hiss as the others all inhaled sharply in unison. They’d all forgotten for a moment that JJ didn’t know. Schneep cleared his throat. “Jackie, would you like to explain?”

“Right yeah. God, where do I start with this?” There was a slight pause in the conversation as the waitress returned with their food. The moment she was out of earshot, Jackie started up again. “Alright, so...” he leaned forward, hands clasped together, eyes wide and nervous. “You know how I call myself Jackieboy Man, right?”

JJ nodded. A moniker I never understood, but yes.

“Well, I didn’t always call myself that. Neither did anyone else. Because, well, they all thought that...I was a, uh, girl. Even I did. For the longest time I just sort of...accepted it. I only started to figure it out in high school. I got my first job, and one of the customers called me ‘that nice lady,’ and hearing it...just sort of surprised me. Like someone gave the wrong answer to a really easy test question. So...I started thinking, and eventually I realized that I wasn’t...actually a girl. That was when I renamed myself.”

JJ didn’t look any less confused. Why would they not understand that? Wouldn’t they be able to...see that you are not?

Jackie winced. “Well, no...you see, I...fuck.” Jackie put his head in his hands, took a deep breath, then looked up again. “I was born...in the wrong body. Top surgery is...it’s to get rid of the parts I didn’t want. Are you...are you getting this now?”

After a moment, JJ’s eyes widened. He nodded hesitantly.

“Okay. Good. Great.” Jackie sighed. “I don’t know if this word existed in the twenties, but nowadays we have ‘transgender’ as...a thing. When someone is something other than what their body is born as. I’m still a he. Or, just, anything but she, really. Literally call me anything but a girl. And please, don’t ask about what my name was before. Or what’s...down there. Those questions make me...really uncomfortable.”

My good man! JJ signed. Why would I do such a rude thing? And to my dear friend, nonetheless. 

Jackie’s shoulders slumped. He leaned back in his chair and exhaled in relief. He’d been dreading this conversation, but better to rip the bandaid off now. “Thanks, man. I...appreciate your understanding.”

JJ smiled. No trouble at all, Jackie! I may not fully grasp the concept, but that’s no reason to disrespect your wishes.

“If you want, I can answer questions. Just...later. And as long as you get I don’t represent everyone who’s trans.”

JJ nodded and gave a thumbs-up. There was silence for a moment, before Chase broke it by saying “Hey, guys, I made a Jenga tower out of fries.”

Schneep rolled his eyes, and immediately knocked over Chase’s tower.

“Aw you bitch!” Chase gasped. “You didn’t even play the game right!”

“Fuck your games. Actually eat the food like it’s supposed to be.”

“You’re just jealous cause you got a salad instead.”

“Maybe I am! Did you think of that?!”

“Dude, I just said I did!”

The rest of lunch was covered in the blanket of familiar banter. Jackie smiled to himself. God, he was so glad nothing changed.

About two hours later, the boys had made their way to the southern part of the city. That was where the park was. It had an official name, but everyone just called it “the park” because there was only one of them and it was shorter. The park itself was pretty big, with trees, paths, flowerbeds, and two playgrounds at either end.

Since it was the middle of the afternoon, there were quite a few families with young children hanging around, parents watching their kids climb all over the jungle gyms and pushing them on the swings. While Marvin and Jackie walked ahead, pulling JJ with them and talking his ears off, Chase and Schneep hung back a bit. Chase was staring at the families on the playground.

“Chase? Are you okay?” Schneep asked gently. 

“Yeah...yeah, I’m fine. It’s not a down day.” Schneep gave him a Look. “No, really! It’s just...y’know, seeing all the kids kinda bums me out. You know?”

“Of course I do, Chase,” Schneep said. He was probably the only one of the boys who did. “If you are feeling upset, you can go home.”

“No! God, no, that’s not what I meant at all. This has been good so far. I don’t want it to end.” Chase frowned. “Now I’m just...man. I’m starting to lose it.”

“Chase.” Schneep grabbed his hand. “If you are not enjoying yourself, we can always go do something more quiet. We would hate to push you to do something you are not up to.”

Chase considered it for a moment, then shook his head. “Nah, it’s not too bad. It helps that you guys are here, I think. But I’ll let you know...if it gets too much.”

Schneep gave him a long look, before finally judging that everything was alright. “Okay. You have to do that, or I am going to break into your home at night and yell at you for lying.”

“Okay, okay, I get the idea,” Chase laughed. He looked down at their clasped hands. “You’re not worried people are gonna think we’re a couple, then?”

“What? Oh. Is there no such thing as regular hand-holding in this country?! Besides, it should not fucking matter. Also you are not my type anyway.”

“Yeah, you’re not mine, either. You’re a guy.” Chase and Schneep both had a good laugh at that.

Marvin looked over his shoulder at the two of them. “Are you two gonna walk fast or what?”

“Or what,” Chase said with a smirk.

“Oh, you’re hilarious. A fucking comedic genius. Hey guys!” he said that last part to Jackie and JJ. “We’re gonna slow down so these two assholes can join us.”

“Marvin, how dare you,” Schneep said, mock-offended. “At least be more creative in your insulting us.”

“No.” The two mini-groups merged together to form the main group once again. “So what’re you two talking about?”

“Chase is worried that hand-holding makes a couple,” Schneep tattled.

“Bullshit,” Marvin stated. Jackie went “yeah!” in the background. JJ frowned at the use of language, but nodded. “What makes a couple is the kissing. And romantic interest in each other, which leads to the former.”

“You say, having not been on a date in at least five months,” Jackie muttered.

“Shut your stupid face, you...lovely person.” Marvin pulled his wand out of his pocket and twirled it, like he did when he was nervous. “We’ve all been kinda busy lately.”

“Yeah...that’s true,” Jackie sighed. “But maybe if you went out more, you could find someone you could go out with. Just once, if a commitment isn’t your thing right now.”

Marvin frowned. “Why in the wide world of wingmen would I go on a date once deliberately?”

“A night of fun?” Schneep suggested.

“With a complete stranger that I have no interest in? No. I need to have some intrigue in whoever they end up being.”

“None of you are gonna get anywhere with him,” Chase said. “He doesn’t get one-night stands.”

“Damn right I don’t! There’s no point!”

And it just seems improper, JJ signed. If you aren’t going to court someone, don’t approach them at all.

“Marvin! You have an ally!” Jackie gasped. 

“Good. Finally, someone who agrees with me.” Marvin held up his hand and, after a moment of figuring out, JJ high-fived it. “Yeah! There we go, you got it!”

Jackie checked the time on his phone. “Alright, it’s starting to get a bit late. If we want to get enough time at the fair, we’re gonna have to book it to the eastern side.”

They didn’t actually run the whole way there, despite Jackie wanting to. By the time they got to the fair the sun was starting to set. They bought tickets and headed inside, where the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster towered over the smaller rides and the carnival games. It was a weekday, but it was one of the first days the fair was open, so the fairgrounds were crowded but not packed.

Chase gasped. “Games. We can do the games first.”

You do realized they’re all rigged, right? JJ asked.

“Who cares? They’re fun! Games now.”

Soon, the others started to suspect that the reason Chase was so eager to play games was because he knew he would win every time. The dude was scarily good. A combination of sheer luck, skill, and fuck-it-let’s-take-a-chance-ness led to many more victories than the others, something Marvin and Schneep immediately called him out for.

“You are cheating, I am sure of it!” Schneep huffed, folding his arms.

“Nah, just have a knack for it. And, in this case, practice.” Chase tossed one of the wooden balls back and forth while he waited for the carnival worker to hand him his prize. “Ya gotta aim for a bit above the spot where the third jug sits on top of the other two, then throw hard. It’s a bit of an arc.”

“No, you’re a cheater,” Marvin asserted, muttering darkly.

“Aw, c’mon! Here, will this make you less salty?” Chase accepted his stuffed prize from the worker, then handed it right over to Marvin. “I got it for you! You like cats.”

Marvin glared down at the plushie. “You’re lucky it has a cute face,” he said.

“See?!” Chase smiled. He was actually having a good time. It was a good change of pace from the park.

Eventually, everyone had a prize except for JJ. They were running out of games to play, but then Jackie spotted one of those ‘find the ball under the shuffling cups.’ “Hey guys, you up for that one?”

JJ brightened. I’m actually quite skilled at those!

“Well, then, let’s go!” Jackie pulled him over, the others in tow.

The carnival worker was calling out the rules of the game. “You get one, you win one of these lovely roses, you get two in a row, you win one of these tiny fellows here, and you get three in a row, you win one of these adorable penguins! Step right up, step right up!”

“Hey!” Jackie waved to get the worker’s attention. “We want to play!”

“Well then, young sirs, the rules are simple. Keep your eye on the ball, see right here, right here, it’s under the middle cup. Now watch as I take the cup this way, then that, then this and oh look at that! It’s goin’ fast, it’s goin’ fast don’t lose it don’t lose it! Now, which one is the ball under?”

Jackie was fairly sure he knew where it was, but he turned to JJ anyway. “So, which one?” he asked.

JJ bit his lip, then reached forward to point at one of the cups...only for the worker to slap his hand away. “I’m sorry sir, please don’t touch the cups. To prevent tamperin’, see? Just tell me.”

JJ looked a bit stunned at the worker’s aggressive tone. But he signed It’s under the left one.

“Excuse me?”

“He says it’s under the left one,” Marvin jumped in.

“...ah, I see.” The worker lifted up the cup to reveal the ball. “Seems you were right. Do you want to try again?”

The boys glanced uneasily between each other. The worker’s tone had dropped from the polite-carnival talk to one that was a bit...short. She was also talking much slower than she was before, drawing out the vowel sounds. “He can hear you perfectly fine,” Chase said. “He just can’t talk.”

“Mmm...I see...” The worker pursed her lips. “Do you want to try again?”

They all nodded. The worker was silent this time as she shuffled the cups, faster than before. When she stopped, she looked at Jackie. “Which one is the ball under?”

Jackie had a vague idea where, but he wasn’t sure. “JJ, do you know?”

The left one again, JJ signed, less enthusiastically.

“The left,” Jackie translated.

The worker frowned as she revealed the ball under the left cup. “You boys aren’t cheating, are you? Those weird gestures seem like symbols.”

Marvin laughed bitterly. “Yeah, they’re symbols alright. They stand for words. Do you not know how sign language fucking works? He’s telling us the answers ‘cause he’s the best one at it. Now let’s do this one more time.”

The worker shuffled the cups impossibly fast. Once more, she asked Jackie where the ball was. This time, he had no idea, and just looked at JJ. JJ, in turn, stiffened a bit, eyes hardening. It’s under the right one, though I wouldn’t put it past her to sneak it up her sleeve.

“Right,” all the boys said in unison.

The worker reluctantly lifted up the rightmost cup to show the ball sitting underneath. “Congratulations,” she said dully. “You win one of the big prizes. What color do you want?”

Turquoise, JJ signed. “Turquoise,” Jackie translated.

They walked away from the booth in silence. After a few moments of walking, Marvin said, “I could totally put a curse on her.”

“No,” Jackie said firmly.

“Just one little spell. She can lose her voice for a week.”

JJ shook his head, then tucked his prize under his arm so he could use his hands to sign. Revenge is never the best answer. 

“It’s what she deserves!” Marvin snarled. “She was making that difficult on purpose. I saw her, she was going much slower with the customers before us. JJ, I’m so absolutely sorry on her behalf, cause god knows she’s not gonna fucking apologize.”

It’s okay, JJ insisted. Believe it or not, I’ve faced worse, especially in my day. They were much less friendly back then.

“I am sure you are not using that word in the correct meaning,” Schneep mumbled.

Marvin shoved his hand into the pocket containing his wand. “One hex. Come on. Just one. I won’t even make her ears fall off or anything.”

Everyone refused to let Marvin curse the carnival worker, and he reluctantly relented. At this point, they’d finished with the games, and all that was left were the rides. They took turns, one or two of them sitting out to watch the accumulated prizes while the others spun and flew and then stumbled off the rides. After trying most of the rides out, they took a snack break for ice cream and cotton candy.

“I think the Ferris wheel is the only one left,” Jackie said. “Unless we want to catch that sideshow thing. There’s supposed to be magicians—”

“Fake,” Marvin interrupted.

“—clowns, animals, and they advertised a knife-thrower—”

Schneep nearly choked on his ice cream. “No.”

“Okay, got it. No show then.” Jackie nodded. “But I’m not too sure about the Ferris wheel. I know at least one of us is afraid of heights.”

“Yeah, uh, me.” Chase bit his lip. “But I think I’ll be fine if I don’t look over the edge. Unless someone else doesn’t want to go on it, then I’ll stay off with them.”

“I’m good,” Jackie said. “Schneep? Marv? Either of you scared of heights?” Both of them shook their heads. “Alright. JJ?”

JJ signed, A bit, but after all these dizzy rides, I’ll take something calm like the Ferris wheel, if you please.

“Alright. Guess we’re going on the wheel, then!”

Night had truly fallen by this point. The Ferris wheel wasn’t exceptionally tall, but it still rose above everything else in the fair, providing a fantastic view of the colored lights below. Instead of having the traditional two-person seats, this wheel had booths that could fit up to eight people, so all the boys fit into one just fine. The wheel turned, and the booth turned with it. Chase squirmed, resolutely not looking over the side. Jackie and Marvin did the exact opposite, practically leaning out of the booth to look down below.

JJ tapped Schneep, signing something real quick. Schneep nodded, then yelled “Can you two stop that?! You are going to fall out of the fucking side, and you are making Jamie nervous.”

“Oh, sorry.” Jackie sat back down.

“Aww,” Marvin groaned, but pulled back into his seat. “I hope you know I do this for you, JJ.”

JJ smiled. Thank you, it’s appreciated. And I’m sure your body feels the same way, having narrowly avoided a fall to great injury.

“Nah, I would’ve been fine.”

The wheel stopped. Their booth was right at the top. “Oh, fuck,” Chase muttered, covering his eyes with his hands.

“You know, you didn’t have to come,” Jackie said quietly. “We would’ve been alright letting you stay down on the ground.”

Chase peeked between his hands. “I know. But...it’s really nice up here. Quiet. And with just you guys. As long as I ignore the distance from the ground, I’m good. You’re my friends, you know, and you make everything better.”

“Oh, Chase,” Marvin gasped. “That’s...really sweet!”

“What? Didn’t think we where friends?”

“It’s...always nice to be reminded.” Marvin smiled softly.

Well then consider this your reminder, Marvin! JJ wiggled his mustache happily. I consider you all my friends, maybe even family. You are all wonderful people and I love having you in my life!

“Nooo, stop.” It was hard to see in the dark, only lit up by the lightbulbs on the Ferris wheel, but it was possible that Marvin was actually blushing.

“You know what? I love you guys.” Jackie grinned. “Not afraid to admit it! Best friends I’ve ever had.”

Schneep cleared his throat. “Yes, I feel the same. You are all great people, and I am fortunate to have met you. I...love you as well.”

“Aaaahck!” Marvin appeared to be trying to fold into himself. “Too much love! Fatality!”

Chase chuckled. “Marvin! Accept our love!”

We love you, Marvin! JJ signed eagerly. Now you have to say it back!

Marvin made a strange sort of groaning exhale before inhaling deeply, calming down. “Yeah...I—I love you guys too. God, I love you guys so much. You should all know that.”

“There we go!” Jackie said, triumphant. “Marvin, you are, truly, the emotionally constipated one. And I thought Schneep was the worst.”

“Excuse me?!” Schneep gasped. “I assure you I am very love-sharing. I just do not use words too much because they are complicated.”

“Understandable,” Chase shrugged. “I can barely speak half the time, and I was born in English.”

I thought you were born in Ireland, JJ signed, amused.

“Oh, you know what I mean!”

The Ferris wheel started lowering, stopping and starting as it let passengers off. The boys stepped out of the booth and onto land once again.

JJ yawned. I must say that I’m rather tired after all this. I think it’s time we go home.

“Yeah, I’m starting to feel it,” Jackie agreed.

“You all are weak!” Marvin countered. “I’m good for another couple hours.”

“Watch you crash immediately upon entering your room,” Chase laughed.

“Oh, shut up.”

“I think JJ is right,” Jackie said. “It’s time to go home.”

Schneep nodded. “Yes, I could stay up longer, but I have morning shift tomorrow so I should not push my luck. I will see you all later?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Course, dude!”

“Definitely.”

Count on it!

With that, they left the fair. Eventually they split up, each heading their own separate ways until they eventually got to wherever they were staying that night. Some went to sleep immediately, some stayed up a bit later, but eventually they all went to bed.

And when they decided to do it, none of them had trouble for once.

[brendajhensonblog]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 224

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 224

Click on the video above to watch Episode 224 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

Bradley: Okay. Now we’re live. This is screwing me up. Hey everybody! This is Bradley Benner with Semantic Mastery. This is Hump Day Hangouts Episode 224. It is February 20th, 2019. I’m sorry I don’t have my camera today. For some reason Google Hangouts decided it did not wanna recognize my camera at the last minute. You guys would probably appreciate the fact you don’t have to look at my face. I’ve only got two people on with me today because Adam and Hernan are out at the Funnel Hacking Live event. They’re out having fun while we’re hard at work.

Let me say hi to Chris. What’s up, Chris? How are you?

Chris: Doing good. Great to be here.

Bradley: Marco.

Marco: I made it, man. I’m here.

Bradley: Good. I don’t really have any announcements specifically, except that we’ve got a Mastermind webinar tomorrow, for those of you that are in the Mastermind. We’re gonna be covering several things that I’ve been tracking for the last few weeks now as far as doing some off-page tests for ranking GMBs, doing a whole bunch of different types of off-page tests and isolation.

In fact, let me se, for one moment, I’ve got pause the screen for a minute. Marco, do you have any announcements while I do that?

Marco: No. But I’m so glad you’re gonna talk about this because my write-up for the Mastermind, which I’m finishing up today by the way, is about that, testing, whether it’s single variable testing or whether it’s testing in isolation, or what it actually is that you’re trying to do.

What you’re trying to do is gauge whether there’s an effect. You’re not trying to show that something doesn’t work. It’s crazy going in and trying to test that something doesn’t work. The test should be, what does it do? You should get the data. The data should speak for what the tests. You’re testing a variable, but does the variable move the needle? No, it doesn’t. Okay, onto the next thing, which is what you’re doing, you’re testing all of these different variables and you’re isolating so that you can do whatever it is that you’re doing to each one.

I’m really glad that you’re talking about this. I’m gonna go a little bit more in-depth in the Mastermind newsletter about testing and how people are being misled by so-called, all of these are expert testers that don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. So I’ll just leave it at that.

Bradley: Yeah. I’ve been tracking, well, about a month ago was. It was around January 21st when I started setting these tests up. I’m testing every one of these methods and isolation. In other words, they’re GMB or Google My Business profiles that had the initial on-page stuff done and what my standard operating procedure is for optimizing a new profile, and then from there, all I’m doing is specifically one of these methods.

I’m testing across multiple properties per methods so that I can see if we get positive results or negative results or no results on any one method, I want to see if that occurs across more than one property for the same type of method. Because if we get positive results on two properties, if I’m only doing two tests or testing on two locations per method and they’re both positive, then that’s a really good indication that that’s a viable method or something that moves the needle.

Like he says, that’s actually funny you said that because that’s the title or the subtitle of the actual test that I’m doing Which Method Moves the Needle the Most? These different tests that I’m doing, and like I said, if a positive result occurs on two properties, two separate locations, then I know that it’s a good method to use and that it will continue … It will be duplicatable, in other words.

I will obviously set it up and see if I can repeat it again across other properties. If I get two no changes, or two negative changes, then it’s probably the case also. But if we get one that’s positive and one it’s neutral, or one that’s positive, one is negative, then it’s obviously gonna have to require further investigation.

So that’s essentially what I’m doing. I’ve tried several these things and I’ve got some really super good results back with one of these methods in particular. I’m not gonna tell which one here, guys, you got to join a Mastermind for that. But I’m gonna be covering it tomorrow because I’ve got really, really good results from one method in particular. It’s actually one of the easiest methods and that’s what I love about. I’m pleasantly surprised. Actually, I was not surprised that the method works because of what I know about that method, but I’m glad that it’s one of the easier methods for any one of us to achieve, or to implement, I should say.

Again, I’m gonna be covering that in the Mastermind webinar tomorrow as well as I’m also gonna be covering some questions about PR stacking from some of our members. I’m also gonna be talking about setting up display ads for remarketing using the Google Display Network because it’s a much, much easier process now and it’s very, very effective.

So that’s what I’ve got to tease with for tomorrow. It looks like we don’t have that many questions. But I’m gonna get right into it.

Chris: I got a question, man.

Bradley: Go ahead.

Chris: I scrolled through my Facebook feed today, people are literally scared of GMB and Google all of a sudden. You just were talking about, yeah, which method is the most potent or the biggest needle move of them. Anybody, you wanna share your insights on that, Marco or Bradley?

Bradley: I’ll start. Yeah. Armageddon is coming, right? The sky is always falling, Chicken Little type stuff. By the way, that screenshot that you’re looking at there, guys, that’s the tease for tomorrow’s webinar in Mastermind because those are the movements that I’ve seen occur just in the last few days from that one particular method I’m gonna be covering.

Anyways, Marco and I, well, we’ve been around long enough to know that shit changes all the time. It’s SEO. For the last several months we’ve been pushing really hard on GMB stuff because it’s been working so well and I’ve been saying all along it at some point Google’s gonna shut it down. I don’t necessarily think that existing properties are gonna be taken down. What I think is gonna happen, and this is just my assumption, guys, my educated opinion about this or my educated guess, prediction I should say, is that it’s gonna become damn near impossible to register new GMB profiles. I think that’s how it’s gonna be shut down.

That’s why I’ve been pushing for people to build, build, build for the last several months, and to build your ass off and to build a team for scaling your build processes so that you can secure as many location as possible prior to what I think is going to happen, which is going to be damn near impossible to register new businesses.

I don’t know exactly what they’re gonna do to shut it down, but it’s likely going to be something like having to take photographs at a storefront or at the business location. It could also be requiring … Again, guys, just speculation, but it could also require you to send corporate documents in or something that shows proof of address with the business name on it, so like a utility bill or something. I know because I’ve actually had to call Google Support before to get help moving a legit business for a client of mine to get the Maps listing updated. That was one of the things required, was a bank statement, the account details and everything could be blurred, but it had to show the company name and the mailing address and all that.

Those are things that I assume or that I predict are going to happen. But we always find workarounds and we always find ways to continue to make money. That’s really the name of the game, guys. Don’t freak out. Don’t go into panic mode. Relax. Know that you’re gonna have other options. We’re gonna figure them out eventually and other people will figure them out as well, and you can too. But it’s about keeping your head cool and realizing that this is a cat-and-mouse game that we play and that’s the business that we’re in.

Marco, what are your thoughts?

Marco: I get a little bit more basic, man. Yeah, I don’t care. Why? I say basic because there’s basic web principles. The foundational stuff that we teach is based on web principles, right? We’re in the semantic web. We all know that, right? We talked about ART, activity, relevance, trust and authority, and how to generate all that. But there’s foundation of principles. You can only code one way. If you write spaghetti code, you’re writing garbage that nobody’s ever going to be able to tell what it is if someone needs to come and take over. So there’s international standards that are set.

There are basic principles where the guidelines are not set by Google. Google’s Terms of Service and Google’s guidelines are determined by Google, but coding standards are set by other people. In order for Google to mess with that, Google has to go and push at a higher level where there’s a bunch of other people pushing back. I’ve been talking about this since Semantic Mastery began. Google is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Correct, but there’s others on the web. Google can’t just go and do whatever the fuck they want to do. There’s some stuff that they just can’t touch.

While that goes on we’ll just keep going and getting the results that we get. That’s what you saw. The test that you’re shown, which is beautiful because it’s based on basic foundational principles, that’s what we work from. Now all of these other stuff, yes, they’re hacks, guys. We manipulate. That’s our job. We’re in this to make money. We’re not here to make people happy. We’re not here to make Google happy. I’m in this to make money. I don’t care. They can’t tell me that it’s wrong to do what I’m doing, well then, Google should go and change their whole scheme for making money online because it’s all based on lies and it’s all based on moving people into their funnel and keeping them there as long as possible; they don’t care how they do it, they just want to do it. Well, that’s fine. That’s their business model. I have mine.

Just to get back to this, basic principles, they still work. Why? Because everyone has to adhere to the same standards no matter what. That’s my rant for today – well, hopefully.

Bradley: Yeah, I agree with that. Let’s get into questions, guys. Not a whole lot of questions and I’m surprised. Maybe it’s this new platform that’s scaring people off, the discus platform. All right.

Chris: The sky is always falling.

Bradley: What’s that?

Chris: The sky is always falling. Some people say it’s …

Bradley: Chicken Little, yeah. Okay. Ben’s up. He says, “Hey Bradley, thanks for our call last Thursday.” Okay. Ben’s one of our Mastermind members and I’d been doing Mastermind calls. I opened up an opportunity for our Mastermind members to schedule a 30-minute call with me. It started the first week in January and this is the seventh week that I’ve been doing those calls. Next week, I’ll wrap it up and then it’ll be closed down until June. In June, I’m gonna open it back up again.

I encourage our Mastermind members that even scheduled to call with me in this first round to call schedule a second call with me in June because in six months you will have hopefully overcome some of the issues that we discussed on our call, and hopefully you have a new set of issues. I really want to continue to find out what’s going on with our members. It’s been super insightful for me to learn more about what’s going …

Well, first, to get to know our members on a more personal level. It’s been great. It really has been. I’ve really enjoyed the calls. Number two, it’s given us a lot of insight as to what’s going on, and in our Mastermind, which is our top level program, what’s going on in our members’ businesses, so that we can develop better tools and resources and training to help them overcome their obstacles. It really has been beneficial to me as well as, hopefully, to others.

Is Local GMB Pro Included In The MasterMind?

That’s what Ben is referring to here. He says, “Thanks for our call last Thursday. It was good to talk to you and I got a lot out of it.” Well, thank you, man. I appreciate that. He says, “A couple of questions. Number one, is Local GMB Pro included in the Mastermind? Not that I need it. Local Lease Pro is looking pretty comprehensive as I go through it. I’m just curious as it doesn’t recognize my username.”

Yeah, I know. We had Rob Beale collaborate on that with us and so there is an additional charge for that. But as a Mastermind member you get it at a silly ridiculous discount from what the advertised price is, if you look at the sales page publicly. Just contact Support when you’re ready for that, Ben. But since I did talk with you, trust me, you’re not ready for that yet. Go through Local Lease Pro, start implementing those strategies, provided that they’re still going to work, depending on what happens with the GMB stuff going forward.

As it stands right now, it’s still working just fine. But just keep in mind that you should be implementing that right now and then the Local GMB Pro training would really be more about assets that need the additional push, or if you’re in super competitive areas, that’s where you’re going to want to implement Local GMB Pro. But again, that’s not something that I would recommend you start with right now, you’re gonna be overwhelmed. I know you and I talked about that. Do not overwhelm yourself with too much training. I’d rather you take action and Local Lease Pro is set up with actionable data, actionable information for you to go out and implement immediately to start building, and that’s the most important thing. Okay.

Good question. But, yeah, as a Mastermind member, you’ll get a significant discount on that when you’re ready. But I can tell you right now you’re not ready for that. Okay.

How Do You Overcome Shiny Object Syndrome?

Number two, he says, “You said you were a former shiny object syndrome sufferer.” Yes, I was. That’s absolutely true. I think most of us in this industry or in this space are or have suffered from that, and maybe still do at this point. As SOS is so clearly at the root of my lack of progress to this point, I was wondering what it was that helped you turn the corner. You are clearly totally recovered and in control today.”

Yeah. You know what it was, honestly, it was kind of a perfect storm in that I was trying to do too many things and trying to not only teach on too many different topics as far as digital marketing, but I was trying to do too many things for my agency and provide too many services. What happens is I became overwhelmed with chasing different methods and trying to implement every method that I could learn about. So every time I saw a marketing email come through, and you guys know, I’m sure you are all on a million email list too, I would get the same type of emails, you guys would about new methods, about new tools and processes and things like that and I would get sucked in. The grass is always greener, right? I would see the opportunity that I thought, as an entrepreneur, I would see opportunity and I’m want to go after it, I want to chase it.

But what happened was over time things started to accumulate and accrue to the point where I had 15 projects going on and none of them were really progressing because I was spread too thin across too much. We, as a corporation, Semantic Mastery kind of suffered that for a period of time too and in part, I’m the face of the company, I should say, not to discredit my partners or anything, but in part because I was doing that in my own business as well. So we were kind of going that way with Semantic Mastery, trying to be too many things to too many people.

Really what happened was, and fortunately, my partner Adam, he’s not here today, but he introduced us to a book by Gino Wickman, I think it is, called Traction. It’s a program for really zeroing in on a singular focus and purpose for a company, for any organization. We’ve been working through that now, guys. What are we, over a year now into that, Traction? Are we on our fifth quarter now? Somebody would comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. I can’t remember exactly what quarter we’re on.

Bradley: I think we’re on our fifth quarter now. Anyways, we do everything now. It’s kind of a combination of various methods, but the 12-week year is one of the books that we provide to our Mastermind members when they come join. Another one is That One Thing. That’s another book that where it teaches you how to really focus in on one thing to get results and find out what is the most important thing, the one thing that I can do such that everything else becomes irrelevant or less important or irrelevant, or something like that. It’s a great book. Then there’s the 12-week year, which is about taking 12-month goals and boiling them down into 12 weeks, which is a 90-day period. What we call them 12-week Sprints. It’s a quarter every year.

We started implementing these strategies and then traction really kind of started giving us the organizational structure as a corporation to start developing our goals, figuring out what our primary focus was going to be, zeroing in on that, and then building out our processes and systems to achieve those goals. Like I said. I think we’re on our fifth quarter of that process now. That’s why over the last probably six months or so, you guys have been following us and probably noticed we’ve really shifted to just local marketing stuff. Not that we don’t still talk about and teach and share and present information in the Mastermind about all types of marketing, but our primary push is local.

That’s because I needed to do that in my own business in order for me to get better results for my clients to increase my own income and to get some of my time and my sanity back because I was just all over the place and it was overwhelming and, honestly, it was exhausting. Also, as you guys know, shit’s changing all the time in the digital marketing space, so having to stay on the cutting edge of everything is incredibly difficult.

So I really wanted to shift my focus into something that I preferred, which was local marketing. I also feel that that’s one of the quickest ways to earn revenue, is local marketing. So I kind of shifted to that. We took several surveys of you guys, our members, to find out that that’s what the vast majority of our audience was doing, was local marketing or lead generation, that kind of stuff. So we really shifted all of our focus to that.

Again, Ben, to answer your question, how I got over it was kind of a combination of recognizing the fact that I was really spinning my wheels and not making any progress in a lot of different areas because I was going after too many things, my attention was spread too thin, and then also, again, when the student is ready the teacher appears.

Adam kind of presented us or brought to our attention like this, Gino Wickman’s Traction program and they call the EOS, I guess the employee operating system, and all this stuff. Just get the book, guys, it’s inexpensive, and go through it. It’s a lot of work. We’ve been at it for five months now-, or excuse me, five quarters now, I think five quarters, and it’s a lot of work. But it’s totally worth it because we’re seeing the benefits and the fruits of the work that we’re putting in.

So a combination of those two things for me really kind of got me to stop … Guys, I’m not kidding, I’ve unsubscribed from just about every single email list. I got one specific email that I would always sign up for stuff and now, because over the years I’ve subscribed to so many lists, I’ve unsubscribed from just about everything. But yeah, I still get emails for internet marketing products and stuff all the time, from stuff that I’ve never even subscribed from. You guys know how that goes, people sell lists and your name gets passed, your email gets passed around from one list to another, whether you subscribed or not.

I’m not gonna lie, every single day now when I get a marketing email unless it’s from somebody that I want to be on their list, I go find the unsubscribe button. as soon as I open an email, hit the unsubscribe button, and then I come back and hit the spam button. I do it every fucking day every single day. Some days I might only get one email now, other days I might get five or six spam type marketing emails. But I do the same thing. I open them up, I don’t even read them, I just go right find an Unsubscribe button, click Unsubscribe, and then I come back it’s hit the Spam button. What it’s done is it’s really reduced the amount of junk that I see on a daily basis.

I was telling this to Ben when we had our call, our Mastermind call, it’s like being an alcoholic and going to a bar. Right? When you open your email account, if you know you have shiny object syndrome and you’re not getting any traction in any one area of your business because you keep chasing opportunity, stop, stop going in your email box and reading these emails, guys. Stop. It’s like get yourself out of the bar if you’re a recovering alcoholic, right? It’s the same principle. You need to avoid the shit that’s detracting from you being able to get make progress in your business.

So for me, it was just eliminating the marketing messages. I’m a marketer so I’m susceptible to marketing messages, right? For me, it was just avoiding them. Out of sight, out of mind. Putting blinders on. Putting my nose down. Working through what I knew I needed to do and that was local marketing. Right now it’s about building a lead gen business and developing processes but I’m not doing all the work and then teaching our members about what I’m doing and how we’re doing it. So that’s what’s worked for me.

Any of you guys have comments on that?

Chris: Yeah. You probably should read the latest Mastermind issue, for February, because what I wrote about was pretty much what you’ve just talked about, but in steroids. It’s like if you’re struggling with that there’s something really, really valuable in there for this month.

Bradley: It’s awesome.

Chris: Not to reveal everything, so from Masterminding members, you can be looking forward to some really sweet stuff. I recommend you check it out as well, Bradley.

Bradley: I sure will. Marco?

Marco: Well, the way that I stopped is I realized that we’re producing better shit than most people out there. So I focus on our own things and I know that you focus, we, the Mastermind’s focus is local. But I’m still in the lab looking at manipulation methods for national, global, just whatever, because that’s just how my mind works. I can’t just do the local thing and be happy. I have to be able to see where all of the algorithms are going, where Google is going, where it’s taking us and why, and then try to intercept at the right time, which is kind of like how RYS Academy was born, then RYS Reloaded, Local GMB Pro, as a matter of fact, came through because of that. It was just looking to see where Google was going and why. So I’m constantly after that, where is Google going, why?

As long as I’m on that, I don’t care about somebody else’s shit because I’m too busy with my own shit. That’s how I was able to overcome. We’ve all been there. If you’ve been online for any length of time, it could be a week, you bought something. Yeah. That’s just the way it is.

Are Both G+ Personal And Business Profiles Be Shut Down By Google?

Bradley: Yeah. That’s a great question, Ben. I really appreciated that question. Hopefully, that was helpful. Ken. What’s up, Ken? He says, “Are both G Plus personal and business profiles going away or is it just personal?” I believe it’s all Google Plus. I think the only Google Plus that’s going to remain, and I could be wrong about this guys, but I’m pretty sure that they’re all being killed off unless you’re what they call Google Plus Enterprise, which is only for like, it’s like internal Google Plus for large organizations. I don’t even know anything about it. I just read somewhere about it.

So as far as I know, Google Plus is being completely killed. I think in April it’s gonna be down completely. You won’t be able to access even your old stuff. I got notifications, dozens and dozens of notifications about it where they say if you got any photos in Google Plus, the notifications, you got to download the photos and all that kind of stuff because in April they’re gone. That’s it. They’re extinct. Whatever. Good riddance. No big deal. Move on.

Which, by the way, guys, we covered the Google Plus … Oh, yeah, guys, if you’re in the Syndication Academy and you didn’t watch the update webinar from last week, go back and watch it. I mean, literally, as soon as Hump Day Hangouts is over, go watch it because it’s super, super powerful what I was talking about, because one of the things I was covering was Google Plus being shut down. We had a lot of people comment and question about, “What’s going to happen? Because Google Plus is down and that’s one of our main social hubs.” Yeah. So what? We find others.

I shared exactly what I’m using now, which is so much more effective anyways, and it’s really, really powerful. If you’re in Syndication Academy, guys, go watch the update webinar that was just recorded last week. It’s in the archives area, the updates area along with all the notes and everything in there. Super powerful and it’s easy to do. Okay. AlL right. I’m gonna keep on moving.

What Photo Selection In GMB Is It That Dictates Which Image Is Displayed In Google Maps?

Jay says, what’s up, Jay? “Inside the GMB, what photo selection option is it that the dictates which image is displayed in Google Maps? I’ve tried several options there but it won’t change.” Yeah. I’ve had that issue in the past too, Jay. I don’t know, maybe Marco has an answer. I’ve tried in some cases to get an image to change too and not been able to get it to change. I just don’t even care at this point. I know some clients do, but it’s not been a major issue for me so I haven’t dug into it that much.

Marco, do you have an idea as to what you can do to get Google to display what you want?

Marco: No. I don’t have an answer for that. It sometimes displays the latest one, it sometimes displays what it wants to, I don’t know. If you have GMB that is legit, that is tied to a company or whatever, you might wanna get in touch with a Google rep and see if they can help you out. If you act really ignorant, if you act really stupid, like you don’t know what’s going on, they’ll really help you out. They’ll go out of their way to help you out. I found that the more ignorant you act and the more that they … “I don’t know …” “Oh, you mean like Chrome?” I mean they go that deep into … Just totally being blissfully ignorant about everything online.

Because you’re a business owner who doesn’t have time for all of this. The only people who have time for this are marketers who are in there trying to manipulate every day, who are the first ones that find out what doesn’t work and what does. So you wanna try to avoid being that know-it-all marketer because if you do that you’re gonna get nuked, your IP is gonna get tagged, and you’re in for a lot of trouble.

Bradley: Yeah, I agree. If it’s a legit business, man, just contact the Google My Business Support. Again, if it’s legit verifiable business, guys, I don’t have any problem contacting Support anymore. I found them to be quite helpful when needed. Again, don’t be afraid to do that. I remember years ago it was damn near impossible to get support help from Google and it was only via email and it would be sometimes days or even weeks before they would reply and it was just a bitch. But now it’s a lot easier to get in touch with Google Support. Again, if it’s for legit business, don’t be afraid of trying.

What Are Your Most Successful Tactics In Getting Client Response From Cold Emails?

Okay. Jeff says, a minute, I still got to get used to this platform, guys. Jeff says, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Two questions. What is the record for most F-bombs dropped by Marco in one rant?” Well, apparently, Ken’s been counting, he says 87.

Chris: Did you see the RYS Academy sales video, the webinar, the very first one? I bet it goes higher.

Marco: Guys, listen, I don’t do it purposely. It’s just when I get excited I get really animated and it just flows. Please excuse me, I don’t mean to offend. Well, I have meant to offend people in the past, let me change that. You guys, in general, I don’t intend to offend you. If you are, please excuse me. Please understand that that’s just … My partners know that that’s me because they have to deal with me on a daily basis, so they know. They know Marco.

So you guys, just please excuse me. Next time if you come to my webinars or whatever, please put the kids away and you might not want the wife, girlfriend, boyfriend or whatever around while you’re listening to me talk.

Bradley: Yeah. I remember we had a Mastermind webinar about three years ago, maybe three and a half years ago, and Marco and I, we’re a little loose with our lips as far as some of the things we were saying. One of the members posted like “I’ve got kids in the room.” It was so funny because immediately after that I put a parental guidance suggested explicit language, image, or whatever, graphic on the bottom of the header image for the page that we were hosting the webinars on. In that point forward, we always kept it to be like, hey, keep your kids out. It’s not safe for work-type stuff. I think it was really funny. I think Carolyn was her name.

Anyway, so to carry on with the real stuff here, guys. Jeff says, “I know you mentioned this previously, but I couldn’t find it when researching out-, or excuse me when reaching out to business owners. In an effort to sell them the leads we were generating, what has been your more successful tactics for getting them to respond? This is primarily a cold email question.” Jeff, that’s a great question. That’s something we’re going to be covering a lot in depth in actually going through real live tests in case studies and such for monetizing GMB assets. We’re gonna be doing a lot of outreach stuff in the Mastermind coming up over the next several weeks. In fact, that was supposed to be started this week. I’m a little bit delayed, but I’m gonna be working on that a lot next week. I’ve got several assets that I need to start doing outreach for too.

But to answer your question, what I found and I spent a lot of time last year, in 2018, doing prospecting and trying to do sales for traditional agency services. I got really good at prospecting, getting the conversation started. As far as sales, I failed miserably. I think we spent like $18,000 between our salesperson and our VA staff which was handling the cold email outreach and all that stuff. I think we made like $6,000 in sales. It was ridiculous. That in part is just because I think that the local business market is so saturated with solicitation calls from marketing and advertising agency.

So long story short, that’s part of the reason we shifted back to the lead generation model because it changes the dynamic entirely, and I know that’s what you’re asking about. But when it came to prospecting, I found the easiest thing to do is, are quick question type emails.

There’s a great book by the guy that the developer of quickmail.io. If you go to quickmail.io, it’s a service that you can subscribe to, it’s like an email tracking service and all that. I personally like gmass.co better as an email marketing platform, but I started out with using quickmail.io. There’s a book by the developer. It’s a real short book. You can get it on Amazon, Kindle. I think you can get in paperback too, but I got it on Kindle. It’s a real short book, it’s only like 30-some pages I think, really inexpensive. I think it might only be $1 or $2.99 or something like that.

Go get it. Go to quickmail.io and probably click through some of the links and you’ll find the guy’s name, the developer’s name, and then you can find the book on Amazon. Pick that book up. Guys, I tested last year multiple types of cold email outreach methods for prospecting. Out of everything that I tested, and I tested David Sprague stuff, David Sprague’s got some really good tools, guys, there’s no question, but as far as his cold email outreach programs and stuff, I just had miserable success and we gave it full on effort.

I mean, for months, not just his program but all different types of outreach methods. What I found that produced the most success, especially dealing with contractors, was the quick question type emails. That strategy is outlaid perfectly in that short little book by the developer quickmail.io. His name is Jeremy something, I think. Anyways, just go pick it up, read through that book, and then start testing. That’s what I did and it worked really, really, really well.

We’re actually gonna be testing in the Mastermind. I’m gonna be using a combination of the more mass email approach, which is what I was talking about with the quick question type emails, which all you’re trying to do is solicit a response, a reply, that’s it. No, you’re not asking them to click through any links, you’re not getting diarrhea of the mouth and dumping a whole bunch of information and doing an email. You just ask them a simple question that’s kind of disguised like a lead for them. It’s a little bit misleading, but not so, because you’re gonna present them with an opportunity.

Again, it’s not unethical. Like I said, it’s just a way to ask questions. For example, maybe if I got a tree service site or assets that I need to monetize, I might contact 10 or 15 different … When I was doing the mass prospect, I would contact 50, 60 tree service contractors with these quick question type emails. Now I’m going to be doing a hybrid model that it incorporates the video email process, which is, we have a training program that I developed that I’ve used for years to get results for prospecting and sales and that’s called the video lead gen system.

It’s how to use video emails to get people’s attention. It’s a bit time-consuming because you got to record videos that are personalized to each person you reach out to. I’m trying to templatize that now to where it’s going to be a lot easier and more efficient and have a team that does the video editing and all that kind of stuff so that we can turn it into more of a process. Like an assembly line to where we can do 10 or 15 videos in a short period of time and then targeted emails out.

But I’m still going to be using those quick question type emails where I might say like, “Quick question, are you guys accepting or are you guys providing estimates for tree removal right now?” When they reply yes, that’s the conversation starter. “Okay, great. Would you mind if I sent you a video explaining what it is that I’ve got?” Then if they reply yes again, now you they’ve given you permission to send them a video. Then you send them the damn video, which is a personalized video explaining what you got.

“Hey, look, I got these leads coming in right now.” You don’t show your assets, guys. You show call volume or you show the fact that you’re generating leads. Show proof. Say, “Look, I really need somebody who can take these leads. If you’re interested, let me know I’ll send a few of them to you for the next week, or I’ll send you five leads or 10 leads or whatever, whatever your business model is good for. You say to them, “I’ll send you five leads for free,” and then, “I’ll follow up with you after that to find out if you’re if you like them. If they were good genuine valid leads that you’d like to continue that service, we can talk then,” stuff like that. Just real simple little questions, guys.

I’ve tested all kinds of processes and what I found was those quick questions where you don’t drop a link in it, you don’t ask them to click, you don’t ask them to go to a landing page and fill out a survey, or watch a video on the first email, none of that, you just ask them to reply. That’s a conversation starter. That starts the dialogue. Once the dialogue starts, then you ask permission to send them a link for them to click, which is just a video essentially. You say, “Can I send you a video to explain what I’ve got?” If they say yes, now they’re giving you permission.

Then you send them the video link, and then they’ll click on it, and now watch the video. Then sometimes they will reply, sometimes they won’t. But that’s really the whole point. Again, video lead-gen system was the course that we did on how to use video email. Then I’m going to be kind of mixing that with the more … I’m trying to templatize that and make it towards a process to where it’s not so time-consuming to do those emails, although they’re very, very effective. Okay?

Again, this is stuff that in the Mastermind, guys, were gonna be covering over the next several weeks. Okay. Those were great questions, Jeff.

Does anybody else have-

Chris: I’ll post a link to the book in a second.

Bradley: I’m sorry?

Chris: I’ll post a link to the book in a second. I already got it.

What Are Your Thoughts On WebFire 3.0 Tool?

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Yeah, it’s a great little book. All right, moving on. Martin says, “Have you any experience with the WebFire 3.0 tool?” No, Martin. When you said that, I clicked on it and I looked, I don’t, so I can’t really comment on that. I don’t have time to look through it right now. Perhaps, if you remind me, next week I will take a look at that before. I might look through that thing when we’re off this webinar today.

Marco: Hey Bradley, those are all like, those are click … Well, what do you call that, the auto traffic-

Bradley: It’s like a click-through spambot?

Marco: Yeah. Tons of websites like that.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: The problem that I’m seeing, and by the way, they’re working. Some are working better than others. I’m not gonna say which one because then everyone will run there and ruin it for me. I don’t want you guys messing with my money. At any rate, they are working, go and test them out. But interestingly enough, what I found works the best is … You did a course on it, it’s only available in the Mastermind.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: The way that you teach it becomes actually cheaper than most of these click-through spams or spam traffic networks, which is really interesting because you’re targeting real people to come and visit your stuff. These real people have a genuine interest in whatever it is that you’re doing right and they’re going to ask way-, they’re going to act, excuse me, way differently than the people that have to click on your link. Does that make sense? They pay for it. Well, you paid for it, they go, they click, then they get credit. It just becomes crazy because they’re not really interested in your stuff, they’re only interested in theirs.

Now since we’re targeting real people with the real interest, through Bradley’s training, it becomes that much better. Guys, activity, relevance, trust and authority. We’re in trusted and authoritative to the max because were inside Google.

Bradley: That’s right.

Marco: Relevance because we’re targeting whatever it is that we’re targeting. I’m not gonna say anything because it’s something that’s right now only available in the Mastermind. Then, activity on that link. It’s relevant activity. People clicking on that link going and acting the way that real people do. Some might not like it and bounce back, many will. But that’s what real people do and that’s what we’re after.

Bradley: Yeah. I’m not gonna reveal the method here either, but exactly what Marco was saying, because that is real genuine traffic that Google knows has an interest in what you’re sending them to. So guys, when you’re talking about activity and engagement, which is one of the primary ranking signals now, is engagement, it’s not just blind engagement.

Again, if you are trying to rank something locally and you’re getting clicks from China and Russia and Korea and UK, and I’m talking about in the US, I’m just using this as an example, guys. But if you’re getting a bunch of clicks from things that are non-relevant either geographically especially for local stuff or non-topically relevant, in other words it’s just kind of like random traffic coming, do you think Google counts that traffic as an engagement signal, the same type, and gives it the same amount of weight as somebody that is in the local area that’s clicking from a local IP, likely from a mobile device that is intimately connected to them at all times, that they have a history of being interested in that particular type of content or service or product? Think about that guys, which click, which engagement signal is gonna be given more weight by Google? You already know the answer to that.

It’s not that these kind of tools and stuff can’t produce some nominal results, they can, but if you wanna get really good results and do it within terms of service, there are alternative ways to do it and it’s super, super effective. I mean, super effective. So it’s absolutely true.

Marco: I just want to be clear, Fiverr geeks, Fiverr traffic geeks, they get some results. These types of websites, the spam traffic, they get some results. But when you compare them all and compare them to the course that we have, it’s night and day. it’s just totally different because it’s just targeted traffic, people that are targeted to the geolocation so that they interact with whatever it is that you’re doing at that level, if that’s necessary. If not, then you can adjust to whatever it is that you’re doing and get traffic for pennies on the dollar, guys. That’s what it’s all about.

Bradley: Yeah. Again, topical relevance and geographic relevance, and you can combine both and get super, super good results. It doesn’t take a lot of traffic to get good results when you have heavily weighted engagement signals, which is what that is. It only takes a few engagements to get significant results when you have a really targeted audience that Google knows about. All right.

Anyways, we’re gonna keep moving. Sorry, I can’t give you a better answer on that. Bryan says, “What is the backlog on GMB listings in MGYB purchases. I’m out about four weeks.” Bryan, you’d have to contact support. I don’t manage any of that stuff, I’m sorry. Just contact support or send us ticket to support@mgyb.co and we’ll get it answered for you. Okay?

Marco: I was just talking to Rob about this to make sure. We have to deal with whatever it is that Google decides. I mean, they were on the show, we don’t control them. So we can’t say it’s definitely this or definitely that, or we’ll have it in a day, in seven days or whatever. It takes however long it takes. Some of them are nearly impossible. I believe that Bryan has already contacted Support and gotten an answer.

Now my thing is if you go through Support and then you come here, it just slows the process because then I have to go reach back to support, ask what’s going on, track it down, and then they all go and track it down and try to see what’s going on when it has already been answered.

The only thing that I can add to this is, guys, we’re not in control of this. We’re trying to do what we can. Bryan, you’re welcome to request a refund. If it gets too long, you’re welcome to request a refund and try to find someone who stands behind the product like we do 60-day guarantee replacement. If it gets suspended within those 60 days, we offer a legitimate guarantee. Now how long it takes to get it for you, that’s another question altogether.

Bradley: What’s up, Daniel? Hey man, the question you asked two weeks ago on Mastermind that we didn’t get to because the training went so long, please repost that for tomorrow because the Mastermind webinar is tomorrow and I didn’t want to spend some time on that. It was about a GMB question you had. We’re gonna have time. I’m gonna be covering specific training tomorrow, but it will be a lot shorter because I just did the Mastermind newsletter entry specifically about that. So that we’re gonna do some video training on it tomorrow, but you guys will have the written process.

You guys know how I do my process stocks. Well, you’re gonna have the written processes, the newsletter entry that you’re gonna get in about two or three weeks, whenever you get the next newsletter. That means my training tomorrow, the video training, will be a bit more streamlined so I should be able to get to your question. All right. I apologize I didn’t get to that, man, and it’s been weighing on me for almost two weeks now.

Is It A Good Idea To Leverage A Popular Family Name Or Brand To Get Press And Media Attention?

Anyways, Quentin’s up. He says, “Hello my name is Quentin Ravenel. I’m a full-time musician based in Charleston, South Carolina. Arthur Ravenel Jr. is a staple here. We’ve named a bridge after him that gathers 25,000 people every year in April to run or walk on the Ravenel Bridge. Is there any way to use my last name as leverage?”

That’s a really good question. Yeah. I would think Press Releases would probably be a great way to kind of piggyback off of that name recognition because that’s essentially … It’s a brand, right? Ravenel is a brand, right? If you can use that … There’s a strategy called newsjacking. Look into that, Quentin. Look in the newsjacking. In fact, you could just do a Google search for newsjacking and find plenty of resources, Amazon books, whatever that can teach you the strategy of newsjacking that I think would be perfect for that, for what you’re saying here because you have the same last name-, excuse me, as a brand that’s well-known in that area. I would use that newsjacking strategy as a way to get some press and some media. It’s almost like click bait but in a proper way, in an ethical way.

Again, I don’t do a lot of that stuff, I just haven’t had the opportunity to, but I’m familiar with that strategy. That’s something that I think you could implement here.

Marco, do you have any suggestions for that?

Marco: Entity relationship, man. That’s what he’d have to do. Relate his name to the Ravenel Bridge name so that when it comes in the, what they call, the Google auto predict, autosuggest, so when people go looking for the Ravenel Bridge walk, or a Ravenel Bridge run, Ravenel Bridge weekend, all of that stuff, your name comes up in there too. I mean, we’ve done that, right? Social conditioning?

Bradley: Yeah, social engineering.

Marco: Yep.

Bradley: Newsjacking, go check it out. There’s tons of information about it. There’s the book, David Meerman Scott, I think is the pioneer of that or whatever, at least the most well-known, but you can find all kinds of information about this free and paid. Just spend some time researching that newsjacking because it’s something that I think you could implement and get some significant results that way. Okay. By the way, go to mgyb.co to purchase Press Releases and we’ll publish them for you, they’re really, really nicely done. Okay.

Gregg. What’s up, Greg? You and I got a Mastermind call tomorrow, Gregg. Looking forward to it. We got a lot to catch up on.

Urban Towing says, “Does SerpClix work well for traffic to RYS or is there something else you would recommend?” Again, I’m not familiar with SerpClix. If it’s another CT spambot or crowd search, click-through thing-

Marco: It is.

Bradley: -which I imagine it would be. Yeah, I would probably produce some results, I don’t know how much. But I would recommend finding some better methods where you can actually buy or get real targeted traffic from real people that may have a genuine interest in your potential product or service. Guys, paid traffic is a good way to do that kind of stuff.

Marco: I actually went to SerpClix and did the math. It’s 14 cents per click. We can beat that through your method, can’t we, Bradley?

Bradley: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Marco: And this is real people. Real people targeted, remember that. Activity, relevance, trust, authority, that’s what you’re after.

Bradley: Yeah. Guys, we did … for years, Dan Anton had a product called crowdsearch.me. It works like gangbusters for a long time. Click-through spam was an engagement signal … I call it click-through spam. But that’s when somebody does a search on Google for example, keyword search, it could be a brand search, which is called a navigational search.

Guys, you can go to our YouTube channel. You can just go to Google and search crowdsearch.me and you’re gonna find this Semantic Mastery webinars. I’ve done two of them because we did one webinar and I think two years later we did another webinar because it was still working so well. I explained in that webinar, and both of those webinars and great length what click-through spam is and why it works so well.

It was actually a method that I learned way back in 2011 from Ivan Budimir, who was my most influential mentor in the local marketing, digital marketing space. It was Ivan Budimir. He’s no longer in the space, but he was absolutely amazing. I learned so much from that guy. He actually introduced that method to me back in 2011 and showed the Google patent. It’s not the actual official name of the Google patent, but he always called it site weight.

Site weight. In other words, if all things being equal, if there were two sites that were identical, which we know is impossible, pretty much, but theoretically, if two sites were equally authoritative, like they had the same amount of on-page optimization, the same amount of off-page optimization but one site got navigational search queries, which now in the semantic web is incredibly important, what is a navigational search query?

That’s a brand search or a variation of a brand search, like brand plus keyword, or brand a plus phone, like for somebody looking for the phone number of a company, or brand plus location, or brand plus map so that people looking for how to get to that location or get to that company or that store or whatever the case may be. Those are called navigational queries. If all things being equal, there were two identical sites competing brands and one had navigational queries and the other did not, the navigational query site would outrank the other, one hands down, two to one every time. Every time and it was tested over and over and over again. That was because of the site weight algorithm, or filter, or whatever you call that shit. Again, I’m not the patent nerd like Marco. Marco, that’s a term of endearment, by the way.

He introduced that way back in 2011 and the strategy then was to hire microtask workers to set up these little gigs. You would pay microtask workers two or three cents or something like that to go do a particular search, preferably with the brand dimension. Then find the link that you told them to find, click through, and then you would tell them, “Go find copy and paste the third word of the seventh paragraph on that page into the answer box,” and the answer box was their proof that they did the task that you assigned.

The reason why you wouldn’t just tell him to go click the link and copy because you want them to dwell on the page. That dwell time counted as an engagement signal, right? They would land on the page and then they’d have a hunt for that specific word or phrase or whatever it was that you told them to do that would make the answer. That would be the answer that means they solved the task that you gave them to do. That would create the dwell time, potentially scroll, you might ask them to click through to another page, whatever the task might be, click through to the link, then click through to the contact page, and then leave a message or whatever the case may be. You could set it up multiple different ways, but those were engagement signals way back in 2011 guys and it moved the needle like almost overnight.

The problem was as soon as you would stop paying in microtasks workers within just a few days your rank positioning start falling again because it was all about those engagement signals. Guys, again, this was eight years ago. Well, now, we’ve just been talking on this webinar alone about how important engagement signals are. So engagement signals are weighted even more now than they were back then.

Now the engagement signals are weighted more because Google can track and knows its users and the users’ behavior and their history. That’s what I was talking about. If you can get engagement signals from people that are locally and/or topically relevant to the content that you’re having them engage with, then that’s going to be weighted so much more.

What I’m saying is, again on a local level, if you can get people from a local geographic area that have a history for having an interest in that topic or that product or service as well as being local, a handful of clicks from them can produce better results than dozens or hundreds of click from non-relevant and non-non topically and non-geographically relevant clicks. Does that make sense?

So the click-through spam, and that’s what I called it because we were literally spamming click-throughs, isn’t as effective as it is when you can get relevant audience to engage because Google understands its audience, guys. Google knows its audience because everybody’s connected to Google all the time, right? So it knows what their history is and what their interests are and where they’re located and all that kind of stuff.

So that’s what I’m getting at. As far as the click-through spam stuff, for a long time it was working really well. Dan Anton’s, I think the best bot that came out, which was crowdsearch.me and for I think three, four years, I mean, I used it heavily. I was getting 50,000 credits per month and I was using every bit of them. It worked like gangbusters. But over time, it slowly started to stop working as well. I know that service is still out there. There are potential uses for it but it’s not something that I would do to direct to money site anymore. There are better alternatives now in my opinion, which is what we we’ve been talking about. We did some training about that in the Mastermind a few weeks ago.

It was a good question though. I was worried we’re not gonna have enough to talk about today, man, and look, we’re almost up. It’s awesome. Let’s see. “Think of how stupid the average person is and realize half of them are stupider than that.” That should actually be how stupid the median person is, right? It’s awesome. Thanks, Greg.

Okay. Grant says, “It might be easier to just close/delete designed junk email accounts ThAn unsubscribe endlessly.” Yeah. I know what you’re saying, Grant, but this is an email account that I’ve had for, God, 15 years, so it’s not something I wanna get rid of. But, yeah, I know what you mean.

By the way, I did all the heavy lifting. Now it’s just a daily maintenance thing. If I see an email come in, if that’s from something that was unsolicited, I open it, unsubscribe, and then as soon as the unsubscribe is successful, I go back and hit the spam button. Again, most days now guys, I might only get one or two spam emails. There are some days where I’ll get five or six or whatever, but almost every day now it’s just a bare minimum. So it’s manageable now. It just took a little bit of time.

Also, there’s a service called unroll.me. Guys, go check it out. Go to unroll.me, especially any of you suffering from shiny object syndrome. Type in your email and it’ll take a few minutes to run and it’ll come back and show you how many lists you’re subscribe to, and tell me it doesn’t take your breath away. It’s like, holy shit, how did I get subscribed … It’s just over the years, you accumulate, you get added to so many subscription lists either voluntarily or involuntarily, a combination of both really.

If you go to unroll.me, it’s amazing. It’ll just take your breath away when you see how many email lists you’re on, and you can start to systematically unsubscribe. Okay.

Chris: You’re the nightmare of every email marketer.

Bradley: Yeah. Well, now, I am, yeah. But trust me, a lot of email marketers made a lot of money from me too. All right. Let’s see, Walt says, “Not an affiliate link.” Okay. This is the quick, probably the quick … There you go, Grow Your Business With Cold Emails, Jeremy Chatelaine. That’s correct. He’s got an accent or whatever. It’s awesome, guys. Really short book. Look at that, it used to be cheaper, but 10 bucks, buy it, guys, it’s worth it. 100% worth it, buy it, and read it. It’s a great book for anybody’s doing prospecting. Guys, hands down, that has been the best strategy for me that I’ve ever found. Okay.

I’ll keep moving. Grow Your Business With Cold Emails: Everything You Need to Know. Go, perfect. Thanks, guys. I appreciate that.

Daniel, awesome. “Guys, I’m not whining about the GMB question, and I do have faith in SM.” Bryan, I think he took offense to which you said, Marco. Just looking to start implementing building out the local strategy and certainly anxious to get moving.” I totally get it, Bryan. I totally get it.

Marco: Yeah, so do we. I didn’t expect or intend again to offend. I just come across that way. I was just explaining that it just takes time. We try to get as quickly as possible. We know all you guys were anxious, but there’s only so much we could do when the beast keeps changing shit around.

Bradley: Correct. Yeah. That’s one of the issues, guys. Again, we all have to keep changing our methods to get these things done verified and such. I don’t even know what they’re doing to do it. I don’t care. Bryan, I’m just like you. I placed my orders too. I’m not kidding. Guys, I placed my orders just like you do now. I do have a little bit of pull sometimes, most of my orders are in queue still now because they’re not critical. But sometimes, for clients, for example, that have requested maps expansion, then I pull some strings to get them pushed forward a little bit. So that’s one of the benefits I guess of the CEO.

But for the most part, guys, I’m in queue just like you guys. It’s not you guys aren’t waiting because I’m getting all mine done. Trust me. I’m waiting too. Awesome. Unroll.me, You’re welcome, Grant

All right, guys. We gotta wrap it up. “Marco, you didn’t drop an F-bomb on me so I was unsure about the love.” It was Bryan again.

Chris: It’s coming.

Bradley: Marco, you got to say fuck just to make everybody happy once.

Marco: Yeah. Let me just close this off with this: fuck Google.

Bradley: All right, there you go. ‘Nuff said. All right everybody. Thanks for being here. Mastermind webinar tomorrow, don’t forget. If you did not check out the Syndication Academy update webinar from last week, do it, guys. Super, super powerful stuff. I showed you how to use RSS feeds there with geo-tagging.

By the way, I’m doing a lot of testing with I have it … No, I must already closed it down. No, there it is, RankFeedr. I’ve got it open. I’m not gonna show my projects. But Lisa Allen’s RankFeedr, guys. I know the coupon has expired now. She actually extended it because of the Syndication Academy update webinar that I did last week. I talked about it in there. Although the method that I showed was how to use Feedburner feeds to create local geotag feeds and they’re super powerful too, not as powerful as the RankFeedr feeds though because RankFeedr you can splice together and create static or sticky items and you can add the geotag and not just a specific geo coordinate but you can add what’s called a geo box, which is like a service area business. Super powerful stuff, guys.

I’ve been testing really hard for the last week now with the RankFeedr stuff and I’m seeing good results. Again, I know the coupon that she gave is expired, but it’s still totally worth it. It’s super inexpensive guys for the elite subscription, which I think allows you to create eleven hundred RankFeedr feeds.

Guys, it’s a set and forget. You set up a RankFeedr feed one time and you let it go. It just runs for as long as you keep your subscription active and you don’t have to do anything else. It will help to create co-citation geographic and topical relevancy on autopilot, guys. I’m telling you and for the elite service the elite subscription level, which again I think is 1,100 feeds, it’s $47 a month. It’s a no-brainer.

So if you haven’t already picked it up, guys, go watch the Syndication Academy update webinar, and go pick up the RankFeedr subscription service, which is how you create those things. I’m only telling you guys, we don’t pimp other people’s products unless we truly believe in them and I’m endorsing this because it’s such a good product and you can go to our website SemanticMastery.com I think it’s RSS-authority-sniper-3 I think. You could find the webinar replay and go through that process, if you want to watch the webinar where she talks about it.

But honestly, you don’t even need to watch the webinar, just go pick up the damn service because it’s really powerful. All right. With that, we’re gonna close it out. See you all next week. Thanks everybody. Thanks, Marco. Thanks, Chris.

Marco: Bye everybody.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 224 posted first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 224

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 224

Click on the video above to watch Episode 224 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

Bradley: Okay. Now we’re live. This is screwing me up. Hey everybody! This is Bradley Benner with Semantic Mastery. This is Hump Day Hangouts Episode 224. It is February 20th, 2019. I’m sorry I don’t have my camera today. For some reason Google Hangouts decided it did not wanna recognize my camera at the last minute. You guys would probably appreciate the fact you don’t have to look at my face. I’ve only got two people on with me today because Adam and Hernan are out at the Funnel Hacking Live event. They’re out having fun while we’re hard at work.

Let me say hi to Chris. What’s up, Chris? How are you?

Chris: Doing good. Great to be here.

Bradley: Marco.

Marco: I made it, man. I’m here.

Bradley: Good. I don’t really have any announcements specifically, except that we’ve got a Mastermind webinar tomorrow, for those of you that are in the Mastermind. We’re gonna be covering several things that I’ve been tracking for the last few weeks now as far as doing some off-page tests for ranking GMBs, doing a whole bunch of different types of off-page tests and isolation.

In fact, let me se, for one moment, I’ve got pause the screen for a minute. Marco, do you have any announcements while I do that?

Marco: No. But I’m so glad you’re gonna talk about this because my write-up for the Mastermind, which I’m finishing up today by the way, is about that, testing, whether it’s single variable testing or whether it’s testing in isolation, or what it actually is that you’re trying to do.

What you’re trying to do is gauge whether there’s an effect. You’re not trying to show that something doesn’t work. It’s crazy going in and trying to test that something doesn’t work. The test should be, what does it do? You should get the data. The data should speak for what the tests. You’re testing a variable, but does the variable move the needle? No, it doesn’t. Okay, onto the next thing, which is what you’re doing, you’re testing all of these different variables and you’re isolating so that you can do whatever it is that you’re doing to each one.

I’m really glad that you’re talking about this. I’m gonna go a little bit more in-depth in the Mastermind newsletter about testing and how people are being misled by so-called, all of these are expert testers that don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. So I’ll just leave it at that.

Bradley: Yeah. I’ve been tracking, well, about a month ago was. It was around January 21st when I started setting these tests up. I’m testing every one of these methods and isolation. In other words, they’re GMB or Google My Business profiles that had the initial on-page stuff done and what my standard operating procedure is for optimizing a new profile, and then from there, all I’m doing is specifically one of these methods.

I’m testing across multiple properties per methods so that I can see if we get positive results or negative results or no results on any one method, I want to see if that occurs across more than one property for the same type of method. Because if we get positive results on two properties, if I’m only doing two tests or testing on two locations per method and they’re both positive, then that’s a really good indication that that’s a viable method or something that moves the needle.

Like he says, that’s actually funny you said that because that’s the title or the subtitle of the actual test that I’m doing Which Method Moves the Needle the Most? These different tests that I’m doing, and like I said, if a positive result occurs on two properties, two separate locations, then I know that it’s a good method to use and that it will continue … It will be duplicatable, in other words.

I will obviously set it up and see if I can repeat it again across other properties. If I get two no changes, or two negative changes, then it’s probably the case also. But if we get one that’s positive and one it’s neutral, or one that’s positive, one is negative, then it’s obviously gonna have to require further investigation.

So that’s essentially what I’m doing. I’ve tried several these things and I’ve got some really super good results back with one of these methods in particular. I’m not gonna tell which one here, guys, you got to join a Mastermind for that. But I’m gonna be covering it tomorrow because I’ve got really, really good results from one method in particular. It’s actually one of the easiest methods and that’s what I love about. I’m pleasantly surprised. Actually, I was not surprised that the method works because of what I know about that method, but I’m glad that it’s one of the easier methods for any one of us to achieve, or to implement, I should say.

Again, I’m gonna be covering that in the Mastermind webinar tomorrow as well as I’m also gonna be covering some questions about PR stacking from some of our members. I’m also gonna be talking about setting up display ads for remarketing using the Google Display Network because it’s a much, much easier process now and it’s very, very effective.

So that’s what I’ve got to tease with for tomorrow. It looks like we don’t have that many questions. But I’m gonna get right into it.

Chris: I got a question, man.

Bradley: Go ahead.

Chris: I scrolled through my Facebook feed today, people are literally scared of GMB and Google all of a sudden. You just were talking about, yeah, which method is the most potent or the biggest needle move of them. Anybody, you wanna share your insights on that, Marco or Bradley?

Bradley: I’ll start. Yeah. Armageddon is coming, right? The sky is always falling, Chicken Little type stuff. By the way, that screenshot that you’re looking at there, guys, that’s the tease for tomorrow’s webinar in Mastermind because those are the movements that I’ve seen occur just in the last few days from that one particular method I’m gonna be covering.

Anyways, Marco and I, well, we’ve been around long enough to know that shit changes all the time. It’s SEO. For the last several months we’ve been pushing really hard on GMB stuff because it’s been working so well and I’ve been saying all along it at some point Google’s gonna shut it down. I don’t necessarily think that existing properties are gonna be taken down. What I think is gonna happen, and this is just my assumption, guys, my educated opinion about this or my educated guess, prediction I should say, is that it’s gonna become damn near impossible to register new GMB profiles. I think that’s how it’s gonna be shut down.

That’s why I’ve been pushing for people to build, build, build for the last several months, and to build your ass off and to build a team for scaling your build processes so that you can secure as many location as possible prior to what I think is going to happen, which is going to be damn near impossible to register new businesses.

I don’t know exactly what they’re gonna do to shut it down, but it’s likely going to be something like having to take photographs at a storefront or at the business location. It could also be requiring … Again, guys, just speculation, but it could also require you to send corporate documents in or something that shows proof of address with the business name on it, so like a utility bill or something. I know because I’ve actually had to call Google Support before to get help moving a legit business for a client of mine to get the Maps listing updated. That was one of the things required, was a bank statement, the account details and everything could be blurred, but it had to show the company name and the mailing address and all that.

Those are things that I assume or that I predict are going to happen. But we always find workarounds and we always find ways to continue to make money. That’s really the name of the game, guys. Don’t freak out. Don’t go into panic mode. Relax. Know that you’re gonna have other options. We’re gonna figure them out eventually and other people will figure them out as well, and you can too. But it’s about keeping your head cool and realizing that this is a cat-and-mouse game that we play and that’s the business that we’re in.

Marco, what are your thoughts?

Marco: I get a little bit more basic, man. Yeah, I don’t care. Why? I say basic because there’s basic web principles. The foundational stuff that we teach is based on web principles, right? We’re in the semantic web. We all know that, right? We talked about ART, activity, relevance, trust and authority, and how to generate all that. But there’s foundation of principles. You can only code one way. If you write spaghetti code, you’re writing garbage that nobody’s ever going to be able to tell what it is if someone needs to come and take over. So there’s international standards that are set.

There are basic principles where the guidelines are not set by Google. Google’s Terms of Service and Google’s guidelines are determined by Google, but coding standards are set by other people. In order for Google to mess with that, Google has to go and push at a higher level where there’s a bunch of other people pushing back. I’ve been talking about this since Semantic Mastery began. Google is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Correct, but there’s others on the web. Google can’t just go and do whatever the fuck they want to do. There’s some stuff that they just can’t touch.

While that goes on we’ll just keep going and getting the results that we get. That’s what you saw. The test that you’re shown, which is beautiful because it’s based on basic foundational principles, that’s what we work from. Now all of these other stuff, yes, they’re hacks, guys. We manipulate. That’s our job. We’re in this to make money. We’re not here to make people happy. We’re not here to make Google happy. I’m in this to make money. I don’t care. They can’t tell me that it’s wrong to do what I’m doing, well then, Google should go and change their whole scheme for making money online because it’s all based on lies and it’s all based on moving people into their funnel and keeping them there as long as possible; they don’t care how they do it, they just want to do it. Well, that’s fine. That’s their business model. I have mine.

Just to get back to this, basic principles, they still work. Why? Because everyone has to adhere to the same standards no matter what. That’s my rant for today – well, hopefully.

Bradley: Yeah, I agree with that. Let’s get into questions, guys. Not a whole lot of questions and I’m surprised. Maybe it’s this new platform that’s scaring people off, the discus platform. All right.

Chris: The sky is always falling.

Bradley: What’s that?

Chris: The sky is always falling. Some people say it’s …

Bradley: Chicken Little, yeah. Okay. Ben’s up. He says, “Hey Bradley, thanks for our call last Thursday.” Okay. Ben’s one of our Mastermind members and I’d been doing Mastermind calls. I opened up an opportunity for our Mastermind members to schedule a 30-minute call with me. It started the first week in January and this is the seventh week that I’ve been doing those calls. Next week, I’ll wrap it up and then it’ll be closed down until June. In June, I’m gonna open it back up again.

I encourage our Mastermind members that even scheduled to call with me in this first round to call schedule a second call with me in June because in six months you will have hopefully overcome some of the issues that we discussed on our call, and hopefully you have a new set of issues. I really want to continue to find out what’s going on with our members. It’s been super insightful for me to learn more about what’s going …

Well, first, to get to know our members on a more personal level. It’s been great. It really has been. I’ve really enjoyed the calls. Number two, it’s given us a lot of insight as to what’s going on, and in our Mastermind, which is our top level program, what’s going on in our members’ businesses, so that we can develop better tools and resources and training to help them overcome their obstacles. It really has been beneficial to me as well as, hopefully, to others.

Is Local GMB Pro Included In The MasterMind?

That’s what Ben is referring to here. He says, “Thanks for our call last Thursday. It was good to talk to you and I got a lot out of it.” Well, thank you, man. I appreciate that. He says, “A couple of questions. Number one, is Local GMB Pro included in the Mastermind? Not that I need it. Local Lease Pro is looking pretty comprehensive as I go through it. I’m just curious as it doesn’t recognize my username.”

Yeah, I know. We had Rob Beale collaborate on that with us and so there is an additional charge for that. But as a Mastermind member you get it at a silly ridiculous discount from what the advertised price is, if you look at the sales page publicly. Just contact Support when you’re ready for that, Ben. But since I did talk with you, trust me, you’re not ready for that yet. Go through Local Lease Pro, start implementing those strategies, provided that they’re still going to work, depending on what happens with the GMB stuff going forward.

As it stands right now, it’s still working just fine. But just keep in mind that you should be implementing that right now and then the Local GMB Pro training would really be more about assets that need the additional push, or if you’re in super competitive areas, that’s where you’re going to want to implement Local GMB Pro. But again, that’s not something that I would recommend you start with right now, you’re gonna be overwhelmed. I know you and I talked about that. Do not overwhelm yourself with too much training. I’d rather you take action and Local Lease Pro is set up with actionable data, actionable information for you to go out and implement immediately to start building, and that’s the most important thing. Okay.

Good question. But, yeah, as a Mastermind member, you’ll get a significant discount on that when you’re ready. But I can tell you right now you’re not ready for that. Okay.

How Do You Overcome Shiny Object Syndrome?

Number two, he says, “You said you were a former shiny object syndrome sufferer.” Yes, I was. That’s absolutely true. I think most of us in this industry or in this space are or have suffered from that, and maybe still do at this point. As SOS is so clearly at the root of my lack of progress to this point, I was wondering what it was that helped you turn the corner. You are clearly totally recovered and in control today.”

Yeah. You know what it was, honestly, it was kind of a perfect storm in that I was trying to do too many things and trying to not only teach on too many different topics as far as digital marketing, but I was trying to do too many things for my agency and provide too many services. What happens is I became overwhelmed with chasing different methods and trying to implement every method that I could learn about. So every time I saw a marketing email come through, and you guys know, I’m sure you are all on a million email list too, I would get the same type of emails, you guys would about new methods, about new tools and processes and things like that and I would get sucked in. The grass is always greener, right? I would see the opportunity that I thought, as an entrepreneur, I would see opportunity and I’m want to go after it, I want to chase it.

But what happened was over time things started to accumulate and accrue to the point where I had 15 projects going on and none of them were really progressing because I was spread too thin across too much. We, as a corporation, Semantic Mastery kind of suffered that for a period of time too and in part, I’m the face of the company, I should say, not to discredit my partners or anything, but in part because I was doing that in my own business as well. So we were kind of going that way with Semantic Mastery, trying to be too many things to too many people.

Really what happened was, and fortunately, my partner Adam, he’s not here today, but he introduced us to a book by Gino Wickman, I think it is, called Traction. It’s a program for really zeroing in on a singular focus and purpose for a company, for any organization. We’ve been working through that now, guys. What are we, over a year now into that, Traction? Are we on our fifth quarter now? Somebody would comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. I can’t remember exactly what quarter we’re on.

Bradley: I think we’re on our fifth quarter now. Anyways, we do everything now. It’s kind of a combination of various methods, but the 12-week year is one of the books that we provide to our Mastermind members when they come join. Another one is That One Thing. That’s another book that where it teaches you how to really focus in on one thing to get results and find out what is the most important thing, the one thing that I can do such that everything else becomes irrelevant or less important or irrelevant, or something like that. It’s a great book. Then there’s the 12-week year, which is about taking 12-month goals and boiling them down into 12 weeks, which is a 90-day period. What we call them 12-week Sprints. It’s a quarter every year.

We started implementing these strategies and then traction really kind of started giving us the organizational structure as a corporation to start developing our goals, figuring out what our primary focus was going to be, zeroing in on that, and then building out our processes and systems to achieve those goals. Like I said. I think we’re on our fifth quarter of that process now. That’s why over the last probably six months or so, you guys have been following us and probably noticed we’ve really shifted to just local marketing stuff. Not that we don’t still talk about and teach and share and present information in the Mastermind about all types of marketing, but our primary push is local.

That’s because I needed to do that in my own business in order for me to get better results for my clients to increase my own income and to get some of my time and my sanity back because I was just all over the place and it was overwhelming and, honestly, it was exhausting. Also, as you guys know, shit’s changing all the time in the digital marketing space, so having to stay on the cutting edge of everything is incredibly difficult.

So I really wanted to shift my focus into something that I preferred, which was local marketing. I also feel that that’s one of the quickest ways to earn revenue, is local marketing. So I kind of shifted to that. We took several surveys of you guys, our members, to find out that that’s what the vast majority of our audience was doing, was local marketing or lead generation, that kind of stuff. So we really shifted all of our focus to that.

Again, Ben, to answer your question, how I got over it was kind of a combination of recognizing the fact that I was really spinning my wheels and not making any progress in a lot of different areas because I was going after too many things, my attention was spread too thin, and then also, again, when the student is ready the teacher appears.

Adam kind of presented us or brought to our attention like this, Gino Wickman’s Traction program and they call the EOS, I guess the employee operating system, and all this stuff. Just get the book, guys, it’s inexpensive, and go through it. It’s a lot of work. We’ve been at it for five months now-, or excuse me, five quarters now, I think five quarters, and it’s a lot of work. But it’s totally worth it because we’re seeing the benefits and the fruits of the work that we’re putting in.

So a combination of those two things for me really kind of got me to stop … Guys, I’m not kidding, I’ve unsubscribed from just about every single email list. I got one specific email that I would always sign up for stuff and now, because over the years I’ve subscribed to so many lists, I’ve unsubscribed from just about everything. But yeah, I still get emails for internet marketing products and stuff all the time, from stuff that I’ve never even subscribed from. You guys know how that goes, people sell lists and your name gets passed, your email gets passed around from one list to another, whether you subscribed or not.

I’m not gonna lie, every single day now when I get a marketing email unless it’s from somebody that I want to be on their list, I go find the unsubscribe button. as soon as I open an email, hit the unsubscribe button, and then I come back and hit the spam button. I do it every fucking day every single day. Some days I might only get one email now, other days I might get five or six spam type marketing emails. But I do the same thing. I open them up, I don’t even read them, I just go right find an Unsubscribe button, click Unsubscribe, and then I come back it’s hit the Spam button. What it’s done is it’s really reduced the amount of junk that I see on a daily basis.

I was telling this to Ben when we had our call, our Mastermind call, it’s like being an alcoholic and going to a bar. Right? When you open your email account, if you know you have shiny object syndrome and you’re not getting any traction in any one area of your business because you keep chasing opportunity, stop, stop going in your email box and reading these emails, guys. Stop. It’s like get yourself out of the bar if you’re a recovering alcoholic, right? It’s the same principle. You need to avoid the shit that’s detracting from you being able to get make progress in your business.

So for me, it was just eliminating the marketing messages. I’m a marketer so I’m susceptible to marketing messages, right? For me, it was just avoiding them. Out of sight, out of mind. Putting blinders on. Putting my nose down. Working through what I knew I needed to do and that was local marketing. Right now it’s about building a lead gen business and developing processes but I’m not doing all the work and then teaching our members about what I’m doing and how we’re doing it. So that’s what’s worked for me.

Any of you guys have comments on that?

Chris: Yeah. You probably should read the latest Mastermind issue, for February, because what I wrote about was pretty much what you’ve just talked about, but in steroids. It’s like if you’re struggling with that there’s something really, really valuable in there for this month.

Bradley: It’s awesome.

Chris: Not to reveal everything, so from Masterminding members, you can be looking forward to some really sweet stuff. I recommend you check it out as well, Bradley.

Bradley: I sure will. Marco?

Marco: Well, the way that I stopped is I realized that we’re producing better shit than most people out there. So I focus on our own things and I know that you focus, we, the Mastermind’s focus is local. But I’m still in the lab looking at manipulation methods for national, global, just whatever, because that’s just how my mind works. I can’t just do the local thing and be happy. I have to be able to see where all of the algorithms are going, where Google is going, where it’s taking us and why, and then try to intercept at the right time, which is kind of like how RYS Academy was born, then RYS Reloaded, Local GMB Pro, as a matter of fact, came through because of that. It was just looking to see where Google was going and why. So I’m constantly after that, where is Google going, why?

As long as I’m on that, I don’t care about somebody else’s shit because I’m too busy with my own shit. That’s how I was able to overcome. We’ve all been there. If you’ve been online for any length of time, it could be a week, you bought something. Yeah. That’s just the way it is.

Are Both G+ Personal And Business Profiles Be Shut Down By Google?

Bradley: Yeah. That’s a great question, Ben. I really appreciated that question. Hopefully, that was helpful. Ken. What’s up, Ken? He says, “Are both G Plus personal and business profiles going away or is it just personal?” I believe it’s all Google Plus. I think the only Google Plus that’s going to remain, and I could be wrong about this guys, but I’m pretty sure that they’re all being killed off unless you’re what they call Google Plus Enterprise, which is only for like, it’s like internal Google Plus for large organizations. I don’t even know anything about it. I just read somewhere about it.

So as far as I know, Google Plus is being completely killed. I think in April it’s gonna be down completely. You won’t be able to access even your old stuff. I got notifications, dozens and dozens of notifications about it where they say if you got any photos in Google Plus, the notifications, you got to download the photos and all that kind of stuff because in April they’re gone. That’s it. They’re extinct. Whatever. Good riddance. No big deal. Move on.

Which, by the way, guys, we covered the Google Plus … Oh, yeah, guys, if you’re in the Syndication Academy and you didn’t watch the update webinar from last week, go back and watch it. I mean, literally, as soon as Hump Day Hangouts is over, go watch it because it’s super, super powerful what I was talking about, because one of the things I was covering was Google Plus being shut down. We had a lot of people comment and question about, “What’s going to happen? Because Google Plus is down and that’s one of our main social hubs.” Yeah. So what? We find others.

I shared exactly what I’m using now, which is so much more effective anyways, and it’s really, really powerful. If you’re in Syndication Academy, guys, go watch the update webinar that was just recorded last week. It’s in the archives area, the updates area along with all the notes and everything in there. Super powerful and it’s easy to do. Okay. AlL right. I’m gonna keep on moving.

What Photo Selection In GMB Is It That Dictates Which Image Is Displayed In Google Maps?

Jay says, what’s up, Jay? “Inside the GMB, what photo selection option is it that the dictates which image is displayed in Google Maps? I’ve tried several options there but it won’t change.” Yeah. I’ve had that issue in the past too, Jay. I don’t know, maybe Marco has an answer. I’ve tried in some cases to get an image to change too and not been able to get it to change. I just don’t even care at this point. I know some clients do, but it’s not been a major issue for me so I haven’t dug into it that much.

Marco, do you have an idea as to what you can do to get Google to display what you want?

Marco: No. I don’t have an answer for that. It sometimes displays the latest one, it sometimes displays what it wants to, I don’t know. If you have GMB that is legit, that is tied to a company or whatever, you might wanna get in touch with a Google rep and see if they can help you out. If you act really ignorant, if you act really stupid, like you don’t know what’s going on, they’ll really help you out. They’ll go out of their way to help you out. I found that the more ignorant you act and the more that they … “I don’t know …” “Oh, you mean like Chrome?” I mean they go that deep into … Just totally being blissfully ignorant about everything online.

Because you’re a business owner who doesn’t have time for all of this. The only people who have time for this are marketers who are in there trying to manipulate every day, who are the first ones that find out what doesn’t work and what does. So you wanna try to avoid being that know-it-all marketer because if you do that you’re gonna get nuked, your IP is gonna get tagged, and you’re in for a lot of trouble.

Bradley: Yeah, I agree. If it’s a legit business, man, just contact the Google My Business Support. Again, if it’s legit verifiable business, guys, I don’t have any problem contacting Support anymore. I found them to be quite helpful when needed. Again, don’t be afraid to do that. I remember years ago it was damn near impossible to get support help from Google and it was only via email and it would be sometimes days or even weeks before they would reply and it was just a bitch. But now it’s a lot easier to get in touch with Google Support. Again, if it’s for legit business, don’t be afraid of trying.

What Are Your Most Successful Tactics In Getting Client Response From Cold Emails?

Okay. Jeff says, a minute, I still got to get used to this platform, guys. Jeff says, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Two questions. What is the record for most F-bombs dropped by Marco in one rant?” Well, apparently, Ken’s been counting, he says 87.

Chris: Did you see the RYS Academy sales video, the webinar, the very first one? I bet it goes higher.

Marco: Guys, listen, I don’t do it purposely. It’s just when I get excited I get really animated and it just flows. Please excuse me, I don’t mean to offend. Well, I have meant to offend people in the past, let me change that. You guys, in general, I don’t intend to offend you. If you are, please excuse me. Please understand that that’s just … My partners know that that’s me because they have to deal with me on a daily basis, so they know. They know Marco.

So you guys, just please excuse me. Next time if you come to my webinars or whatever, please put the kids away and you might not want the wife, girlfriend, boyfriend or whatever around while you’re listening to me talk.

Bradley: Yeah. I remember we had a Mastermind webinar about three years ago, maybe three and a half years ago, and Marco and I, we’re a little loose with our lips as far as some of the things we were saying. One of the members posted like “I’ve got kids in the room.” It was so funny because immediately after that I put a parental guidance suggested explicit language, image, or whatever, graphic on the bottom of the header image for the page that we were hosting the webinars on. In that point forward, we always kept it to be like, hey, keep your kids out. It’s not safe for work-type stuff. I think it was really funny. I think Carolyn was her name.

Anyway, so to carry on with the real stuff here, guys. Jeff says, “I know you mentioned this previously, but I couldn’t find it when researching out-, or excuse me when reaching out to business owners. In an effort to sell them the leads we were generating, what has been your more successful tactics for getting them to respond? This is primarily a cold email question.” Jeff, that’s a great question. That’s something we’re going to be covering a lot in depth in actually going through real live tests in case studies and such for monetizing GMB assets. We’re gonna be doing a lot of outreach stuff in the Mastermind coming up over the next several weeks. In fact, that was supposed to be started this week. I’m a little bit delayed, but I’m gonna be working on that a lot next week. I’ve got several assets that I need to start doing outreach for too.

But to answer your question, what I found and I spent a lot of time last year, in 2018, doing prospecting and trying to do sales for traditional agency services. I got really good at prospecting, getting the conversation started. As far as sales, I failed miserably. I think we spent like $18,000 between our salesperson and our VA staff which was handling the cold email outreach and all that stuff. I think we made like $6,000 in sales. It was ridiculous. That in part is just because I think that the local business market is so saturated with solicitation calls from marketing and advertising agency.

So long story short, that’s part of the reason we shifted back to the lead generation model because it changes the dynamic entirely, and I know that’s what you’re asking about. But when it came to prospecting, I found the easiest thing to do is, are quick question type emails.

There’s a great book by the guy that the developer of quickmail.io. If you go to quickmail.io, it’s a service that you can subscribe to, it’s like an email tracking service and all that. I personally like gmass.co better as an email marketing platform, but I started out with using quickmail.io. There’s a book by the developer. It’s a real short book. You can get it on Amazon, Kindle. I think you can get in paperback too, but I got it on Kindle. It’s a real short book, it’s only like 30-some pages I think, really inexpensive. I think it might only be $1 or $2.99 or something like that.

Go get it. Go to quickmail.io and probably click through some of the links and you’ll find the guy’s name, the developer’s name, and then you can find the book on Amazon. Pick that book up. Guys, I tested last year multiple types of cold email outreach methods for prospecting. Out of everything that I tested, and I tested David Sprague stuff, David Sprague’s got some really good tools, guys, there’s no question, but as far as his cold email outreach programs and stuff, I just had miserable success and we gave it full on effort.

I mean, for months, not just his program but all different types of outreach methods. What I found that produced the most success, especially dealing with contractors, was the quick question type emails. That strategy is outlaid perfectly in that short little book by the developer quickmail.io. His name is Jeremy something, I think. Anyways, just go pick it up, read through that book, and then start testing. That’s what I did and it worked really, really, really well.

We’re actually gonna be testing in the Mastermind. I’m gonna be using a combination of the more mass email approach, which is what I was talking about with the quick question type emails, which all you’re trying to do is solicit a response, a reply, that’s it. No, you’re not asking them to click through any links, you’re not getting diarrhea of the mouth and dumping a whole bunch of information and doing an email. You just ask them a simple question that’s kind of disguised like a lead for them. It’s a little bit misleading, but not so, because you’re gonna present them with an opportunity.

Again, it’s not unethical. Like I said, it’s just a way to ask questions. For example, maybe if I got a tree service site or assets that I need to monetize, I might contact 10 or 15 different … When I was doing the mass prospect, I would contact 50, 60 tree service contractors with these quick question type emails. Now I’m going to be doing a hybrid model that it incorporates the video email process, which is, we have a training program that I developed that I’ve used for years to get results for prospecting and sales and that’s called the video lead gen system.

It’s how to use video emails to get people’s attention. It’s a bit time-consuming because you got to record videos that are personalized to each person you reach out to. I’m trying to templatize that now to where it’s going to be a lot easier and more efficient and have a team that does the video editing and all that kind of stuff so that we can turn it into more of a process. Like an assembly line to where we can do 10 or 15 videos in a short period of time and then targeted emails out.

But I’m still going to be using those quick question type emails where I might say like, “Quick question, are you guys accepting or are you guys providing estimates for tree removal right now?” When they reply yes, that’s the conversation starter. “Okay, great. Would you mind if I sent you a video explaining what it is that I’ve got?” Then if they reply yes again, now you they’ve given you permission to send them a video. Then you send them the damn video, which is a personalized video explaining what you got.

“Hey, look, I got these leads coming in right now.” You don’t show your assets, guys. You show call volume or you show the fact that you’re generating leads. Show proof. Say, “Look, I really need somebody who can take these leads. If you’re interested, let me know I’ll send a few of them to you for the next week, or I’ll send you five leads or 10 leads or whatever, whatever your business model is good for. You say to them, “I’ll send you five leads for free,” and then, “I’ll follow up with you after that to find out if you’re if you like them. If they were good genuine valid leads that you’d like to continue that service, we can talk then,” stuff like that. Just real simple little questions, guys.

I’ve tested all kinds of processes and what I found was those quick questions where you don’t drop a link in it, you don’t ask them to click, you don’t ask them to go to a landing page and fill out a survey, or watch a video on the first email, none of that, you just ask them to reply. That’s a conversation starter. That starts the dialogue. Once the dialogue starts, then you ask permission to send them a link for them to click, which is just a video essentially. You say, “Can I send you a video to explain what I’ve got?” If they say yes, now they’re giving you permission.

Then you send them the video link, and then they’ll click on it, and now watch the video. Then sometimes they will reply, sometimes they won’t. But that’s really the whole point. Again, video lead-gen system was the course that we did on how to use video email. Then I’m going to be kind of mixing that with the more … I’m trying to templatize that and make it towards a process to where it’s not so time-consuming to do those emails, although they’re very, very effective. Okay?

Again, this is stuff that in the Mastermind, guys, were gonna be covering over the next several weeks. Okay. Those were great questions, Jeff.

Does anybody else have-

Chris: I’ll post a link to the book in a second.

Bradley: I’m sorry?

Chris: I’ll post a link to the book in a second. I already got it.

What Are Your Thoughts On WebFire 3.0 Tool?

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Yeah, it’s a great little book. All right, moving on. Martin says, “Have you any experience with the WebFire 3.0 tool?” No, Martin. When you said that, I clicked on it and I looked, I don’t, so I can’t really comment on that. I don’t have time to look through it right now. Perhaps, if you remind me, next week I will take a look at that before. I might look through that thing when we’re off this webinar today.

Marco: Hey Bradley, those are all like, those are click … Well, what do you call that, the auto traffic-

Bradley: It’s like a click-through spambot?

Marco: Yeah. Tons of websites like that.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: The problem that I’m seeing, and by the way, they’re working. Some are working better than others. I’m not gonna say which one because then everyone will run there and ruin it for me. I don’t want you guys messing with my money. At any rate, they are working, go and test them out. But interestingly enough, what I found works the best is … You did a course on it, it’s only available in the Mastermind.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: The way that you teach it becomes actually cheaper than most of these click-through spams or spam traffic networks, which is really interesting because you’re targeting real people to come and visit your stuff. These real people have a genuine interest in whatever it is that you’re doing right and they’re going to ask way-, they’re going to act, excuse me, way differently than the people that have to click on your link. Does that make sense? They pay for it. Well, you paid for it, they go, they click, then they get credit. It just becomes crazy because they’re not really interested in your stuff, they’re only interested in theirs.

Now since we’re targeting real people with the real interest, through Bradley’s training, it becomes that much better. Guys, activity, relevance, trust and authority. We’re in trusted and authoritative to the max because were inside Google.

Bradley: That’s right.

Marco: Relevance because we’re targeting whatever it is that we’re targeting. I’m not gonna say anything because it’s something that’s right now only available in the Mastermind. Then, activity on that link. It’s relevant activity. People clicking on that link going and acting the way that real people do. Some might not like it and bounce back, many will. But that’s what real people do and that’s what we’re after.

Bradley: Yeah. I’m not gonna reveal the method here either, but exactly what Marco was saying, because that is real genuine traffic that Google knows has an interest in what you’re sending them to. So guys, when you’re talking about activity and engagement, which is one of the primary ranking signals now, is engagement, it’s not just blind engagement.

Again, if you are trying to rank something locally and you’re getting clicks from China and Russia and Korea and UK, and I’m talking about in the US, I’m just using this as an example, guys. But if you’re getting a bunch of clicks from things that are non-relevant either geographically especially for local stuff or non-topically relevant, in other words it’s just kind of like random traffic coming, do you think Google counts that traffic as an engagement signal, the same type, and gives it the same amount of weight as somebody that is in the local area that’s clicking from a local IP, likely from a mobile device that is intimately connected to them at all times, that they have a history of being interested in that particular type of content or service or product? Think about that guys, which click, which engagement signal is gonna be given more weight by Google? You already know the answer to that.

It’s not that these kind of tools and stuff can’t produce some nominal results, they can, but if you wanna get really good results and do it within terms of service, there are alternative ways to do it and it’s super, super effective. I mean, super effective. So it’s absolutely true.

Marco: I just want to be clear, Fiverr geeks, Fiverr traffic geeks, they get some results. These types of websites, the spam traffic, they get some results. But when you compare them all and compare them to the course that we have, it’s night and day. it’s just totally different because it’s just targeted traffic, people that are targeted to the geolocation so that they interact with whatever it is that you’re doing at that level, if that’s necessary. If not, then you can adjust to whatever it is that you’re doing and get traffic for pennies on the dollar, guys. That’s what it’s all about.

Bradley: Yeah. Again, topical relevance and geographic relevance, and you can combine both and get super, super good results. It doesn’t take a lot of traffic to get good results when you have heavily weighted engagement signals, which is what that is. It only takes a few engagements to get significant results when you have a really targeted audience that Google knows about. All right.

Anyways, we’re gonna keep moving. Sorry, I can’t give you a better answer on that. Bryan says, “What is the backlog on GMB listings in MGYB purchases. I’m out about four weeks.” Bryan, you’d have to contact support. I don’t manage any of that stuff, I’m sorry. Just contact support or send us ticket to support@mgyb.co and we’ll get it answered for you. Okay?

Marco: I was just talking to Rob about this to make sure. We have to deal with whatever it is that Google decides. I mean, they were on the show, we don’t control them. So we can’t say it’s definitely this or definitely that, or we’ll have it in a day, in seven days or whatever. It takes however long it takes. Some of them are nearly impossible. I believe that Bryan has already contacted Support and gotten an answer.

Now my thing is if you go through Support and then you come here, it just slows the process because then I have to go reach back to support, ask what’s going on, track it down, and then they all go and track it down and try to see what’s going on when it has already been answered.

The only thing that I can add to this is, guys, we’re not in control of this. We’re trying to do what we can. Bryan, you’re welcome to request a refund. If it gets too long, you’re welcome to request a refund and try to find someone who stands behind the product like we do 60-day guarantee replacement. If it gets suspended within those 60 days, we offer a legitimate guarantee. Now how long it takes to get it for you, that’s another question altogether.

Bradley: What’s up, Daniel? Hey man, the question you asked two weeks ago on Mastermind that we didn’t get to because the training went so long, please repost that for tomorrow because the Mastermind webinar is tomorrow and I didn’t want to spend some time on that. It was about a GMB question you had. We’re gonna have time. I’m gonna be covering specific training tomorrow, but it will be a lot shorter because I just did the Mastermind newsletter entry specifically about that. So that we’re gonna do some video training on it tomorrow, but you guys will have the written process.

You guys know how I do my process stocks. Well, you’re gonna have the written processes, the newsletter entry that you’re gonna get in about two or three weeks, whenever you get the next newsletter. That means my training tomorrow, the video training, will be a bit more streamlined so I should be able to get to your question. All right. I apologize I didn’t get to that, man, and it’s been weighing on me for almost two weeks now.

Is It A Good Idea To Leverage A Popular Family Name Or Brand To Get Press And Media Attention?

Anyways, Quentin’s up. He says, “Hello my name is Quentin Ravenel. I’m a full-time musician based in Charleston, South Carolina. Arthur Ravenel Jr. is a staple here. We’ve named a bridge after him that gathers 25,000 people every year in April to run or walk on the Ravenel Bridge. Is there any way to use my last name as leverage?”

That’s a really good question. Yeah. I would think Press Releases would probably be a great way to kind of piggyback off of that name recognition because that’s essentially … It’s a brand, right? Ravenel is a brand, right? If you can use that … There’s a strategy called newsjacking. Look into that, Quentin. Look in the newsjacking. In fact, you could just do a Google search for newsjacking and find plenty of resources, Amazon books, whatever that can teach you the strategy of newsjacking that I think would be perfect for that, for what you’re saying here because you have the same last name-, excuse me, as a brand that’s well-known in that area. I would use that newsjacking strategy as a way to get some press and some media. It’s almost like click bait but in a proper way, in an ethical way.

Again, I don’t do a lot of that stuff, I just haven’t had the opportunity to, but I’m familiar with that strategy. That’s something that I think you could implement here.

Marco, do you have any suggestions for that?

Marco: Entity relationship, man. That’s what he’d have to do. Relate his name to the Ravenel Bridge name so that when it comes in the, what they call, the Google auto predict, autosuggest, so when people go looking for the Ravenel Bridge walk, or a Ravenel Bridge run, Ravenel Bridge weekend, all of that stuff, your name comes up in there too. I mean, we’ve done that, right? Social conditioning?

Bradley: Yeah, social engineering.

Marco: Yep.

Bradley: Newsjacking, go check it out. There’s tons of information about it. There’s the book, David Meerman Scott, I think is the pioneer of that or whatever, at least the most well-known, but you can find all kinds of information about this free and paid. Just spend some time researching that newsjacking because it’s something that I think you could implement and get some significant results that way. Okay. By the way, go to mgyb.co to purchase Press Releases and we’ll publish them for you, they’re really, really nicely done. Okay.

Gregg. What’s up, Greg? You and I got a Mastermind call tomorrow, Gregg. Looking forward to it. We got a lot to catch up on.

Urban Towing says, “Does SerpClix work well for traffic to RYS or is there something else you would recommend?” Again, I’m not familiar with SerpClix. If it’s another CT spambot or crowd search, click-through thing-

Marco: It is.

Bradley: -which I imagine it would be. Yeah, I would probably produce some results, I don’t know how much. But I would recommend finding some better methods where you can actually buy or get real targeted traffic from real people that may have a genuine interest in your potential product or service. Guys, paid traffic is a good way to do that kind of stuff.

Marco: I actually went to SerpClix and did the math. It’s 14 cents per click. We can beat that through your method, can’t we, Bradley?

Bradley: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Marco: And this is real people. Real people targeted, remember that. Activity, relevance, trust, authority, that’s what you’re after.

Bradley: Yeah. Guys, we did … for years, Dan Anton had a product called crowdsearch.me. It works like gangbusters for a long time. Click-through spam was an engagement signal … I call it click-through spam. But that’s when somebody does a search on Google for example, keyword search, it could be a brand search, which is called a navigational search.

Guys, you can go to our YouTube channel. You can just go to Google and search crowdsearch.me and you’re gonna find this Semantic Mastery webinars. I’ve done two of them because we did one webinar and I think two years later we did another webinar because it was still working so well. I explained in that webinar, and both of those webinars and great length what click-through spam is and why it works so well.

It was actually a method that I learned way back in 2011 from Ivan Budimir, who was my most influential mentor in the local marketing, digital marketing space. It was Ivan Budimir. He’s no longer in the space, but he was absolutely amazing. I learned so much from that guy. He actually introduced that method to me back in 2011 and showed the Google patent. It’s not the actual official name of the Google patent, but he always called it site weight.

Site weight. In other words, if all things being equal, if there were two sites that were identical, which we know is impossible, pretty much, but theoretically, if two sites were equally authoritative, like they had the same amount of on-page optimization, the same amount of off-page optimization but one site got navigational search queries, which now in the semantic web is incredibly important, what is a navigational search query?

That’s a brand search or a variation of a brand search, like brand plus keyword, or brand a plus phone, like for somebody looking for the phone number of a company, or brand plus location, or brand plus map so that people looking for how to get to that location or get to that company or that store or whatever the case may be. Those are called navigational queries. If all things being equal, there were two identical sites competing brands and one had navigational queries and the other did not, the navigational query site would outrank the other, one hands down, two to one every time. Every time and it was tested over and over and over again. That was because of the site weight algorithm, or filter, or whatever you call that shit. Again, I’m not the patent nerd like Marco. Marco, that’s a term of endearment, by the way.

He introduced that way back in 2011 and the strategy then was to hire microtask workers to set up these little gigs. You would pay microtask workers two or three cents or something like that to go do a particular search, preferably with the brand dimension. Then find the link that you told them to find, click through, and then you would tell them, “Go find copy and paste the third word of the seventh paragraph on that page into the answer box,” and the answer box was their proof that they did the task that you assigned.

The reason why you wouldn’t just tell him to go click the link and copy because you want them to dwell on the page. That dwell time counted as an engagement signal, right? They would land on the page and then they’d have a hunt for that specific word or phrase or whatever it was that you told them to do that would make the answer. That would be the answer that means they solved the task that you gave them to do. That would create the dwell time, potentially scroll, you might ask them to click through to another page, whatever the task might be, click through to the link, then click through to the contact page, and then leave a message or whatever the case may be. You could set it up multiple different ways, but those were engagement signals way back in 2011 guys and it moved the needle like almost overnight.

The problem was as soon as you would stop paying in microtasks workers within just a few days your rank positioning start falling again because it was all about those engagement signals. Guys, again, this was eight years ago. Well, now, we’ve just been talking on this webinar alone about how important engagement signals are. So engagement signals are weighted even more now than they were back then.

Now the engagement signals are weighted more because Google can track and knows its users and the users’ behavior and their history. That’s what I was talking about. If you can get engagement signals from people that are locally and/or topically relevant to the content that you’re having them engage with, then that’s going to be weighted so much more.

What I’m saying is, again on a local level, if you can get people from a local geographic area that have a history for having an interest in that topic or that product or service as well as being local, a handful of clicks from them can produce better results than dozens or hundreds of click from non-relevant and non-non topically and non-geographically relevant clicks. Does that make sense?

So the click-through spam, and that’s what I called it because we were literally spamming click-throughs, isn’t as effective as it is when you can get relevant audience to engage because Google understands its audience, guys. Google knows its audience because everybody’s connected to Google all the time, right? So it knows what their history is and what their interests are and where they’re located and all that kind of stuff.

So that’s what I’m getting at. As far as the click-through spam stuff, for a long time it was working really well. Dan Anton’s, I think the best bot that came out, which was crowdsearch.me and for I think three, four years, I mean, I used it heavily. I was getting 50,000 credits per month and I was using every bit of them. It worked like gangbusters. But over time, it slowly started to stop working as well. I know that service is still out there. There are potential uses for it but it’s not something that I would do to direct to money site anymore. There are better alternatives now in my opinion, which is what we we’ve been talking about. We did some training about that in the Mastermind a few weeks ago.

It was a good question though. I was worried we’re not gonna have enough to talk about today, man, and look, we’re almost up. It’s awesome. Let’s see. “Think of how stupid the average person is and realize half of them are stupider than that.” That should actually be how stupid the median person is, right? It’s awesome. Thanks, Greg.

Okay. Grant says, “It might be easier to just close/delete designed junk email accounts ThAn unsubscribe endlessly.” Yeah. I know what you’re saying, Grant, but this is an email account that I’ve had for, God, 15 years, so it’s not something I wanna get rid of. But, yeah, I know what you mean.

By the way, I did all the heavy lifting. Now it’s just a daily maintenance thing. If I see an email come in, if that’s from something that was unsolicited, I open it, unsubscribe, and then as soon as the unsubscribe is successful, I go back and hit the spam button. Again, most days now guys, I might only get one or two spam emails. There are some days where I’ll get five or six or whatever, but almost every day now it’s just a bare minimum. So it’s manageable now. It just took a little bit of time.

Also, there’s a service called unroll.me. Guys, go check it out. Go to unroll.me, especially any of you suffering from shiny object syndrome. Type in your email and it’ll take a few minutes to run and it’ll come back and show you how many lists you’re subscribe to, and tell me it doesn’t take your breath away. It’s like, holy shit, how did I get subscribed … It’s just over the years, you accumulate, you get added to so many subscription lists either voluntarily or involuntarily, a combination of both really.

If you go to unroll.me, it’s amazing. It’ll just take your breath away when you see how many email lists you’re on, and you can start to systematically unsubscribe. Okay.

Chris: You’re the nightmare of every email marketer.

Bradley: Yeah. Well, now, I am, yeah. But trust me, a lot of email marketers made a lot of money from me too. All right. Let’s see, Walt says, “Not an affiliate link.” Okay. This is the quick, probably the quick … There you go, Grow Your Business With Cold Emails, Jeremy Chatelaine. That’s correct. He’s got an accent or whatever. It’s awesome, guys. Really short book. Look at that, it used to be cheaper, but 10 bucks, buy it, guys, it’s worth it. 100% worth it, buy it, and read it. It’s a great book for anybody’s doing prospecting. Guys, hands down, that has been the best strategy for me that I’ve ever found. Okay.

I’ll keep moving. Grow Your Business With Cold Emails: Everything You Need to Know. Go, perfect. Thanks, guys. I appreciate that.

Daniel, awesome. “Guys, I’m not whining about the GMB question, and I do have faith in SM.” Bryan, I think he took offense to which you said, Marco. Just looking to start implementing building out the local strategy and certainly anxious to get moving.” I totally get it, Bryan. I totally get it.

Marco: Yeah, so do we. I didn’t expect or intend again to offend. I just come across that way. I was just explaining that it just takes time. We try to get as quickly as possible. We know all you guys were anxious, but there’s only so much we could do when the beast keeps changing shit around.

Bradley: Correct. Yeah. That’s one of the issues, guys. Again, we all have to keep changing our methods to get these things done verified and such. I don’t even know what they’re doing to do it. I don’t care. Bryan, I’m just like you. I placed my orders too. I’m not kidding. Guys, I placed my orders just like you do now. I do have a little bit of pull sometimes, most of my orders are in queue still now because they’re not critical. But sometimes, for clients, for example, that have requested maps expansion, then I pull some strings to get them pushed forward a little bit. So that’s one of the benefits I guess of the CEO.

But for the most part, guys, I’m in queue just like you guys. It’s not you guys aren’t waiting because I’m getting all mine done. Trust me. I’m waiting too. Awesome. Unroll.me, You’re welcome, Grant

All right, guys. We gotta wrap it up. “Marco, you didn’t drop an F-bomb on me so I was unsure about the love.” It was Bryan again.

Chris: It’s coming.

Bradley: Marco, you got to say fuck just to make everybody happy once.

Marco: Yeah. Let me just close this off with this: fuck Google.

Bradley: All right, there you go. ‘Nuff said. All right everybody. Thanks for being here. Mastermind webinar tomorrow, don’t forget. If you did not check out the Syndication Academy update webinar from last week, do it, guys. Super, super powerful stuff. I showed you how to use RSS feeds there with geo-tagging.

By the way, I’m doing a lot of testing with I have it … No, I must already closed it down. No, there it is, RankFeedr. I’ve got it open. I’m not gonna show my projects. But Lisa Allen’s RankFeedr, guys. I know the coupon has expired now. She actually extended it because of the Syndication Academy update webinar that I did last week. I talked about it in there. Although the method that I showed was how to use Feedburner feeds to create local geotag feeds and they’re super powerful too, not as powerful as the RankFeedr feeds though because RankFeedr you can splice together and create static or sticky items and you can add the geotag and not just a specific geo coordinate but you can add what’s called a geo box, which is like a service area business. Super powerful stuff, guys.

I’ve been testing really hard for the last week now with the RankFeedr stuff and I’m seeing good results. Again, I know the coupon that she gave is expired, but it’s still totally worth it. It’s super inexpensive guys for the elite subscription, which I think allows you to create eleven hundred RankFeedr feeds.

Guys, it’s a set and forget. You set up a RankFeedr feed one time and you let it go. It just runs for as long as you keep your subscription active and you don’t have to do anything else. It will help to create co-citation geographic and topical relevancy on autopilot, guys. I’m telling you and for the elite service the elite subscription level, which again I think is 1,100 feeds, it’s $47 a month. It’s a no-brainer.

So if you haven’t already picked it up, guys, go watch the Syndication Academy update webinar, and go pick up the RankFeedr subscription service, which is how you create those things. I’m only telling you guys, we don’t pimp other people’s products unless we truly believe in them and I’m endorsing this because it’s such a good product and you can go to our website SemanticMastery.com I think it’s RSS-authority-sniper-3 I think. You could find the webinar replay and go through that process, if you want to watch the webinar where she talks about it.

But honestly, you don’t even need to watch the webinar, just go pick up the damn service because it’s really powerful. All right. With that, we’re gonna close it out. See you all next week. Thanks everybody. Thanks, Marco. Thanks, Chris.

Marco: Bye everybody.

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 224

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 224

Click on the video above to watch Episode 224 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

Bradley: Okay. Now we’re live. This is screwing me up. Hey everybody! This is Bradley Benner with Semantic Mastery. This is Hump Day Hangouts Episode 224. It is February 20th, 2019. I’m sorry I don’t have my camera today. For some reason Google Hangouts decided it did not wanna recognize my camera at the last minute. You guys would probably appreciate the fact you don’t have to look at my face. I’ve only got two people on with me today because Adam and Hernan are out at the Funnel Hacking Live event. They’re out having fun while we’re hard at work.

Let me say hi to Chris. What’s up, Chris? How are you?

Chris: Doing good. Great to be here.

Bradley: Marco.

Marco: I made it, man. I’m here.

Bradley: Good. I don’t really have any announcements specifically, except that we’ve got a Mastermind webinar tomorrow, for those of you that are in the Mastermind. We’re gonna be covering several things that I’ve been tracking for the last few weeks now as far as doing some off-page tests for ranking GMBs, doing a whole bunch of different types of off-page tests and isolation.

In fact, let me se, for one moment, I’ve got pause the screen for a minute. Marco, do you have any announcements while I do that?

Marco: No. But I’m so glad you’re gonna talk about this because my write-up for the Mastermind, which I’m finishing up today by the way, is about that, testing, whether it’s single variable testing or whether it’s testing in isolation, or what it actually is that you’re trying to do.

What you’re trying to do is gauge whether there’s an effect. You’re not trying to show that something doesn’t work. It’s crazy going in and trying to test that something doesn’t work. The test should be, what does it do? You should get the data. The data should speak for what the tests. You’re testing a variable, but does the variable move the needle? No, it doesn’t. Okay, onto the next thing, which is what you’re doing, you’re testing all of these different variables and you’re isolating so that you can do whatever it is that you’re doing to each one.

I’m really glad that you’re talking about this. I’m gonna go a little bit more in-depth in the Mastermind newsletter about testing and how people are being misled by so-called, all of these are expert testers that don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. So I’ll just leave it at that.

Bradley: Yeah. I’ve been tracking, well, about a month ago was. It was around January 21st when I started setting these tests up. I’m testing every one of these methods and isolation. In other words, they’re GMB or Google My Business profiles that had the initial on-page stuff done and what my standard operating procedure is for optimizing a new profile, and then from there, all I’m doing is specifically one of these methods.

I’m testing across multiple properties per methods so that I can see if we get positive results or negative results or no results on any one method, I want to see if that occurs across more than one property for the same type of method. Because if we get positive results on two properties, if I’m only doing two tests or testing on two locations per method and they’re both positive, then that’s a really good indication that that’s a viable method or something that moves the needle.

Like he says, that’s actually funny you said that because that’s the title or the subtitle of the actual test that I’m doing Which Method Moves the Needle the Most? These different tests that I’m doing, and like I said, if a positive result occurs on two properties, two separate locations, then I know that it’s a good method to use and that it will continue … It will be duplicatable, in other words.

I will obviously set it up and see if I can repeat it again across other properties. If I get two no changes, or two negative changes, then it’s probably the case also. But if we get one that’s positive and one it’s neutral, or one that’s positive, one is negative, then it’s obviously gonna have to require further investigation.

So that’s essentially what I’m doing. I’ve tried several these things and I’ve got some really super good results back with one of these methods in particular. I’m not gonna tell which one here, guys, you got to join a Mastermind for that. But I’m gonna be covering it tomorrow because I’ve got really, really good results from one method in particular. It’s actually one of the easiest methods and that’s what I love about. I’m pleasantly surprised. Actually, I was not surprised that the method works because of what I know about that method, but I’m glad that it’s one of the easier methods for any one of us to achieve, or to implement, I should say.

Again, I’m gonna be covering that in the Mastermind webinar tomorrow as well as I’m also gonna be covering some questions about PR stacking from some of our members. I’m also gonna be talking about setting up display ads for remarketing using the Google Display Network because it’s a much, much easier process now and it’s very, very effective.

So that’s what I’ve got to tease with for tomorrow. It looks like we don’t have that many questions. But I’m gonna get right into it.

Chris: I got a question, man.

Bradley: Go ahead.

Chris: I scrolled through my Facebook feed today, people are literally scared of GMB and Google all of a sudden. You just were talking about, yeah, which method is the most potent or the biggest needle move of them. Anybody, you wanna share your insights on that, Marco or Bradley?

Bradley: I’ll start. Yeah. Armageddon is coming, right? The sky is always falling, Chicken Little type stuff. By the way, that screenshot that you’re looking at there, guys, that’s the tease for tomorrow’s webinar in Mastermind because those are the movements that I’ve seen occur just in the last few days from that one particular method I’m gonna be covering.

Anyways, Marco and I, well, we’ve been around long enough to know that shit changes all the time. It’s SEO. For the last several months we’ve been pushing really hard on GMB stuff because it’s been working so well and I’ve been saying all along it at some point Google’s gonna shut it down. I don’t necessarily think that existing properties are gonna be taken down. What I think is gonna happen, and this is just my assumption, guys, my educated opinion about this or my educated guess, prediction I should say, is that it’s gonna become damn near impossible to register new GMB profiles. I think that’s how it’s gonna be shut down.

That’s why I’ve been pushing for people to build, build, build for the last several months, and to build your ass off and to build a team for scaling your build processes so that you can secure as many location as possible prior to what I think is going to happen, which is going to be damn near impossible to register new businesses.

I don’t know exactly what they’re gonna do to shut it down, but it’s likely going to be something like having to take photographs at a storefront or at the business location. It could also be requiring … Again, guys, just speculation, but it could also require you to send corporate documents in or something that shows proof of address with the business name on it, so like a utility bill or something. I know because I’ve actually had to call Google Support before to get help moving a legit business for a client of mine to get the Maps listing updated. That was one of the things required, was a bank statement, the account details and everything could be blurred, but it had to show the company name and the mailing address and all that.

Those are things that I assume or that I predict are going to happen. But we always find workarounds and we always find ways to continue to make money. That’s really the name of the game, guys. Don’t freak out. Don’t go into panic mode. Relax. Know that you’re gonna have other options. We’re gonna figure them out eventually and other people will figure them out as well, and you can too. But it’s about keeping your head cool and realizing that this is a cat-and-mouse game that we play and that’s the business that we’re in.

Marco, what are your thoughts?

Marco: I get a little bit more basic, man. Yeah, I don’t care. Why? I say basic because there’s basic web principles. The foundational stuff that we teach is based on web principles, right? We’re in the semantic web. We all know that, right? We talked about ART, activity, relevance, trust and authority, and how to generate all that. But there’s foundation of principles. You can only code one way. If you write spaghetti code, you’re writing garbage that nobody’s ever going to be able to tell what it is if someone needs to come and take over. So there’s international standards that are set.

There are basic principles where the guidelines are not set by Google. Google’s Terms of Service and Google’s guidelines are determined by Google, but coding standards are set by other people. In order for Google to mess with that, Google has to go and push at a higher level where there’s a bunch of other people pushing back. I’ve been talking about this since Semantic Mastery began. Google is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Correct, but there’s others on the web. Google can’t just go and do whatever the fuck they want to do. There’s some stuff that they just can’t touch.

While that goes on we’ll just keep going and getting the results that we get. That’s what you saw. The test that you’re shown, which is beautiful because it’s based on basic foundational principles, that’s what we work from. Now all of these other stuff, yes, they’re hacks, guys. We manipulate. That’s our job. We’re in this to make money. We’re not here to make people happy. We’re not here to make Google happy. I’m in this to make money. I don’t care. They can’t tell me that it’s wrong to do what I’m doing, well then, Google should go and change their whole scheme for making money online because it’s all based on lies and it’s all based on moving people into their funnel and keeping them there as long as possible; they don’t care how they do it, they just want to do it. Well, that’s fine. That’s their business model. I have mine.

Just to get back to this, basic principles, they still work. Why? Because everyone has to adhere to the same standards no matter what. That’s my rant for today – well, hopefully.

Bradley: Yeah, I agree with that. Let’s get into questions, guys. Not a whole lot of questions and I’m surprised. Maybe it’s this new platform that’s scaring people off, the discus platform. All right.

Chris: The sky is always falling.

Bradley: What’s that?

Chris: The sky is always falling. Some people say it’s …

Bradley: Chicken Little, yeah. Okay. Ben’s up. He says, “Hey Bradley, thanks for our call last Thursday.” Okay. Ben’s one of our Mastermind members and I’d been doing Mastermind calls. I opened up an opportunity for our Mastermind members to schedule a 30-minute call with me. It started the first week in January and this is the seventh week that I’ve been doing those calls. Next week, I’ll wrap it up and then it’ll be closed down until June. In June, I’m gonna open it back up again.

I encourage our Mastermind members that even scheduled to call with me in this first round to call schedule a second call with me in June because in six months you will have hopefully overcome some of the issues that we discussed on our call, and hopefully you have a new set of issues. I really want to continue to find out what’s going on with our members. It’s been super insightful for me to learn more about what’s going …

Well, first, to get to know our members on a more personal level. It’s been great. It really has been. I’ve really enjoyed the calls. Number two, it’s given us a lot of insight as to what’s going on, and in our Mastermind, which is our top level program, what’s going on in our members’ businesses, so that we can develop better tools and resources and training to help them overcome their obstacles. It really has been beneficial to me as well as, hopefully, to others.

Is Local GMB Pro Included In The MasterMind?

That’s what Ben is referring to here. He says, “Thanks for our call last Thursday. It was good to talk to you and I got a lot out of it.” Well, thank you, man. I appreciate that. He says, “A couple of questions. Number one, is Local GMB Pro included in the Mastermind? Not that I need it. Local Lease Pro is looking pretty comprehensive as I go through it. I’m just curious as it doesn’t recognize my username.”

Yeah, I know. We had Rob Beale collaborate on that with us and so there is an additional charge for that. But as a Mastermind member you get it at a silly ridiculous discount from what the advertised price is, if you look at the sales page publicly. Just contact Support when you’re ready for that, Ben. But since I did talk with you, trust me, you’re not ready for that yet. Go through Local Lease Pro, start implementing those strategies, provided that they’re still going to work, depending on what happens with the GMB stuff going forward.

As it stands right now, it’s still working just fine. But just keep in mind that you should be implementing that right now and then the Local GMB Pro training would really be more about assets that need the additional push, or if you’re in super competitive areas, that’s where you’re going to want to implement Local GMB Pro. But again, that’s not something that I would recommend you start with right now, you’re gonna be overwhelmed. I know you and I talked about that. Do not overwhelm yourself with too much training. I’d rather you take action and Local Lease Pro is set up with actionable data, actionable information for you to go out and implement immediately to start building, and that’s the most important thing. Okay.

Good question. But, yeah, as a Mastermind member, you’ll get a significant discount on that when you’re ready. But I can tell you right now you’re not ready for that. Okay.

How Do You Overcome Shiny Object Syndrome?

Number two, he says, “You said you were a former shiny object syndrome sufferer.” Yes, I was. That’s absolutely true. I think most of us in this industry or in this space are or have suffered from that, and maybe still do at this point. As SOS is so clearly at the root of my lack of progress to this point, I was wondering what it was that helped you turn the corner. You are clearly totally recovered and in control today.”

Yeah. You know what it was, honestly, it was kind of a perfect storm in that I was trying to do too many things and trying to not only teach on too many different topics as far as digital marketing, but I was trying to do too many things for my agency and provide too many services. What happens is I became overwhelmed with chasing different methods and trying to implement every method that I could learn about. So every time I saw a marketing email come through, and you guys know, I’m sure you are all on a million email list too, I would get the same type of emails, you guys would about new methods, about new tools and processes and things like that and I would get sucked in. The grass is always greener, right? I would see the opportunity that I thought, as an entrepreneur, I would see opportunity and I’m want to go after it, I want to chase it.

But what happened was over time things started to accumulate and accrue to the point where I had 15 projects going on and none of them were really progressing because I was spread too thin across too much. We, as a corporation, Semantic Mastery kind of suffered that for a period of time too and in part, I’m the face of the company, I should say, not to discredit my partners or anything, but in part because I was doing that in my own business as well. So we were kind of going that way with Semantic Mastery, trying to be too many things to too many people.

Really what happened was, and fortunately, my partner Adam, he’s not here today, but he introduced us to a book by Gino Wickman, I think it is, called Traction. It’s a program for really zeroing in on a singular focus and purpose for a company, for any organization. We’ve been working through that now, guys. What are we, over a year now into that, Traction? Are we on our fifth quarter now? Somebody would comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. I can’t remember exactly what quarter we’re on.

Bradley: I think we’re on our fifth quarter now. Anyways, we do everything now. It’s kind of a combination of various methods, but the 12-week year is one of the books that we provide to our Mastermind members when they come join. Another one is That One Thing. That’s another book that where it teaches you how to really focus in on one thing to get results and find out what is the most important thing, the one thing that I can do such that everything else becomes irrelevant or less important or irrelevant, or something like that. It’s a great book. Then there’s the 12-week year, which is about taking 12-month goals and boiling them down into 12 weeks, which is a 90-day period. What we call them 12-week Sprints. It’s a quarter every year.

We started implementing these strategies and then traction really kind of started giving us the organizational structure as a corporation to start developing our goals, figuring out what our primary focus was going to be, zeroing in on that, and then building out our processes and systems to achieve those goals. Like I said. I think we’re on our fifth quarter of that process now. That’s why over the last probably six months or so, you guys have been following us and probably noticed we’ve really shifted to just local marketing stuff. Not that we don’t still talk about and teach and share and present information in the Mastermind about all types of marketing, but our primary push is local.

That’s because I needed to do that in my own business in order for me to get better results for my clients to increase my own income and to get some of my time and my sanity back because I was just all over the place and it was overwhelming and, honestly, it was exhausting. Also, as you guys know, shit’s changing all the time in the digital marketing space, so having to stay on the cutting edge of everything is incredibly difficult.

So I really wanted to shift my focus into something that I preferred, which was local marketing. I also feel that that’s one of the quickest ways to earn revenue, is local marketing. So I kind of shifted to that. We took several surveys of you guys, our members, to find out that that’s what the vast majority of our audience was doing, was local marketing or lead generation, that kind of stuff. So we really shifted all of our focus to that.

Again, Ben, to answer your question, how I got over it was kind of a combination of recognizing the fact that I was really spinning my wheels and not making any progress in a lot of different areas because I was going after too many things, my attention was spread too thin, and then also, again, when the student is ready the teacher appears.

Adam kind of presented us or brought to our attention like this, Gino Wickman’s Traction program and they call the EOS, I guess the employee operating system, and all this stuff. Just get the book, guys, it’s inexpensive, and go through it. It’s a lot of work. We’ve been at it for five months now-, or excuse me, five quarters now, I think five quarters, and it’s a lot of work. But it’s totally worth it because we’re seeing the benefits and the fruits of the work that we’re putting in.

So a combination of those two things for me really kind of got me to stop … Guys, I’m not kidding, I’ve unsubscribed from just about every single email list. I got one specific email that I would always sign up for stuff and now, because over the years I’ve subscribed to so many lists, I’ve unsubscribed from just about everything. But yeah, I still get emails for internet marketing products and stuff all the time, from stuff that I’ve never even subscribed from. You guys know how that goes, people sell lists and your name gets passed, your email gets passed around from one list to another, whether you subscribed or not.

I’m not gonna lie, every single day now when I get a marketing email unless it’s from somebody that I want to be on their list, I go find the unsubscribe button. as soon as I open an email, hit the unsubscribe button, and then I come back and hit the spam button. I do it every fucking day every single day. Some days I might only get one email now, other days I might get five or six spam type marketing emails. But I do the same thing. I open them up, I don’t even read them, I just go right find an Unsubscribe button, click Unsubscribe, and then I come back it’s hit the Spam button. What it’s done is it’s really reduced the amount of junk that I see on a daily basis.

I was telling this to Ben when we had our call, our Mastermind call, it’s like being an alcoholic and going to a bar. Right? When you open your email account, if you know you have shiny object syndrome and you’re not getting any traction in any one area of your business because you keep chasing opportunity, stop, stop going in your email box and reading these emails, guys. Stop. It’s like get yourself out of the bar if you’re a recovering alcoholic, right? It’s the same principle. You need to avoid the shit that’s detracting from you being able to get make progress in your business.

So for me, it was just eliminating the marketing messages. I’m a marketer so I’m susceptible to marketing messages, right? For me, it was just avoiding them. Out of sight, out of mind. Putting blinders on. Putting my nose down. Working through what I knew I needed to do and that was local marketing. Right now it’s about building a lead gen business and developing processes but I’m not doing all the work and then teaching our members about what I’m doing and how we’re doing it. So that’s what’s worked for me.

Any of you guys have comments on that?

Chris: Yeah. You probably should read the latest Mastermind issue, for February, because what I wrote about was pretty much what you’ve just talked about, but in steroids. It’s like if you’re struggling with that there’s something really, really valuable in there for this month.

Bradley: It’s awesome.

Chris: Not to reveal everything, so from Masterminding members, you can be looking forward to some really sweet stuff. I recommend you check it out as well, Bradley.

Bradley: I sure will. Marco?

Marco: Well, the way that I stopped is I realized that we’re producing better shit than most people out there. So I focus on our own things and I know that you focus, we, the Mastermind’s focus is local. But I’m still in the lab looking at manipulation methods for national, global, just whatever, because that’s just how my mind works. I can’t just do the local thing and be happy. I have to be able to see where all of the algorithms are going, where Google is going, where it’s taking us and why, and then try to intercept at the right time, which is kind of like how RYS Academy was born, then RYS Reloaded, Local GMB Pro, as a matter of fact, came through because of that. It was just looking to see where Google was going and why. So I’m constantly after that, where is Google going, why?

As long as I’m on that, I don’t care about somebody else’s shit because I’m too busy with my own shit. That’s how I was able to overcome. We’ve all been there. If you’ve been online for any length of time, it could be a week, you bought something. Yeah. That’s just the way it is.

Are Both G+ Personal And Business Profiles Be Shut Down By Google?

Bradley: Yeah. That’s a great question, Ben. I really appreciated that question. Hopefully, that was helpful. Ken. What’s up, Ken? He says, “Are both G Plus personal and business profiles going away or is it just personal?” I believe it’s all Google Plus. I think the only Google Plus that’s going to remain, and I could be wrong about this guys, but I’m pretty sure that they’re all being killed off unless you’re what they call Google Plus Enterprise, which is only for like, it’s like internal Google Plus for large organizations. I don’t even know anything about it. I just read somewhere about it.

So as far as I know, Google Plus is being completely killed. I think in April it’s gonna be down completely. You won’t be able to access even your old stuff. I got notifications, dozens and dozens of notifications about it where they say if you got any photos in Google Plus, the notifications, you got to download the photos and all that kind of stuff because in April they’re gone. That’s it. They’re extinct. Whatever. Good riddance. No big deal. Move on.

Which, by the way, guys, we covered the Google Plus … Oh, yeah, guys, if you’re in the Syndication Academy and you didn’t watch the update webinar from last week, go back and watch it. I mean, literally, as soon as Hump Day Hangouts is over, go watch it because it’s super, super powerful what I was talking about, because one of the things I was covering was Google Plus being shut down. We had a lot of people comment and question about, “What’s going to happen? Because Google Plus is down and that’s one of our main social hubs.” Yeah. So what? We find others.

I shared exactly what I’m using now, which is so much more effective anyways, and it’s really, really powerful. If you’re in Syndication Academy, guys, go watch the update webinar that was just recorded last week. It’s in the archives area, the updates area along with all the notes and everything in there. Super powerful and it’s easy to do. Okay. AlL right. I’m gonna keep on moving.

What Photo Selection In GMB Is It That Dictates Which Image Is Displayed In Google Maps?

Jay says, what’s up, Jay? “Inside the GMB, what photo selection option is it that the dictates which image is displayed in Google Maps? I’ve tried several options there but it won’t change.” Yeah. I’ve had that issue in the past too, Jay. I don’t know, maybe Marco has an answer. I’ve tried in some cases to get an image to change too and not been able to get it to change. I just don’t even care at this point. I know some clients do, but it’s not been a major issue for me so I haven’t dug into it that much.

Marco, do you have an idea as to what you can do to get Google to display what you want?

Marco: No. I don’t have an answer for that. It sometimes displays the latest one, it sometimes displays what it wants to, I don’t know. If you have GMB that is legit, that is tied to a company or whatever, you might wanna get in touch with a Google rep and see if they can help you out. If you act really ignorant, if you act really stupid, like you don’t know what’s going on, they’ll really help you out. They’ll go out of their way to help you out. I found that the more ignorant you act and the more that they … “I don’t know …” “Oh, you mean like Chrome?” I mean they go that deep into … Just totally being blissfully ignorant about everything online.

Because you’re a business owner who doesn’t have time for all of this. The only people who have time for this are marketers who are in there trying to manipulate every day, who are the first ones that find out what doesn’t work and what does. So you wanna try to avoid being that know-it-all marketer because if you do that you’re gonna get nuked, your IP is gonna get tagged, and you’re in for a lot of trouble.

Bradley: Yeah, I agree. If it’s a legit business, man, just contact the Google My Business Support. Again, if it’s legit verifiable business, guys, I don’t have any problem contacting Support anymore. I found them to be quite helpful when needed. Again, don’t be afraid to do that. I remember years ago it was damn near impossible to get support help from Google and it was only via email and it would be sometimes days or even weeks before they would reply and it was just a bitch. But now it’s a lot easier to get in touch with Google Support. Again, if it’s for legit business, don’t be afraid of trying.

What Are Your Most Successful Tactics In Getting Client Response From Cold Emails?

Okay. Jeff says, a minute, I still got to get used to this platform, guys. Jeff says, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Two questions. What is the record for most F-bombs dropped by Marco in one rant?” Well, apparently, Ken’s been counting, he says 87.

Chris: Did you see the RYS Academy sales video, the webinar, the very first one? I bet it goes higher.

Marco: Guys, listen, I don’t do it purposely. It’s just when I get excited I get really animated and it just flows. Please excuse me, I don’t mean to offend. Well, I have meant to offend people in the past, let me change that. You guys, in general, I don’t intend to offend you. If you are, please excuse me. Please understand that that’s just … My partners know that that’s me because they have to deal with me on a daily basis, so they know. They know Marco.

So you guys, just please excuse me. Next time if you come to my webinars or whatever, please put the kids away and you might not want the wife, girlfriend, boyfriend or whatever around while you’re listening to me talk.

Bradley: Yeah. I remember we had a Mastermind webinar about three years ago, maybe three and a half years ago, and Marco and I, we’re a little loose with our lips as far as some of the things we were saying. One of the members posted like “I’ve got kids in the room.” It was so funny because immediately after that I put a parental guidance suggested explicit language, image, or whatever, graphic on the bottom of the header image for the page that we were hosting the webinars on. In that point forward, we always kept it to be like, hey, keep your kids out. It’s not safe for work-type stuff. I think it was really funny. I think Carolyn was her name.

Anyway, so to carry on with the real stuff here, guys. Jeff says, “I know you mentioned this previously, but I couldn’t find it when researching out-, or excuse me when reaching out to business owners. In an effort to sell them the leads we were generating, what has been your more successful tactics for getting them to respond? This is primarily a cold email question.” Jeff, that’s a great question. That’s something we’re going to be covering a lot in depth in actually going through real live tests in case studies and such for monetizing GMB assets. We’re gonna be doing a lot of outreach stuff in the Mastermind coming up over the next several weeks. In fact, that was supposed to be started this week. I’m a little bit delayed, but I’m gonna be working on that a lot next week. I’ve got several assets that I need to start doing outreach for too.

But to answer your question, what I found and I spent a lot of time last year, in 2018, doing prospecting and trying to do sales for traditional agency services. I got really good at prospecting, getting the conversation started. As far as sales, I failed miserably. I think we spent like $18,000 between our salesperson and our VA staff which was handling the cold email outreach and all that stuff. I think we made like $6,000 in sales. It was ridiculous. That in part is just because I think that the local business market is so saturated with solicitation calls from marketing and advertising agency.

So long story short, that’s part of the reason we shifted back to the lead generation model because it changes the dynamic entirely, and I know that’s what you’re asking about. But when it came to prospecting, I found the easiest thing to do is, are quick question type emails.

There’s a great book by the guy that the developer of quickmail.io. If you go to quickmail.io, it’s a service that you can subscribe to, it’s like an email tracking service and all that. I personally like gmass.co better as an email marketing platform, but I started out with using quickmail.io. There’s a book by the developer. It’s a real short book. You can get it on Amazon, Kindle. I think you can get in paperback too, but I got it on Kindle. It’s a real short book, it’s only like 30-some pages I think, really inexpensive. I think it might only be $1 or $2.99 or something like that.

Go get it. Go to quickmail.io and probably click through some of the links and you’ll find the guy’s name, the developer’s name, and then you can find the book on Amazon. Pick that book up. Guys, I tested last year multiple types of cold email outreach methods for prospecting. Out of everything that I tested, and I tested David Sprague stuff, David Sprague’s got some really good tools, guys, there’s no question, but as far as his cold email outreach programs and stuff, I just had miserable success and we gave it full on effort.

I mean, for months, not just his program but all different types of outreach methods. What I found that produced the most success, especially dealing with contractors, was the quick question type emails. That strategy is outlaid perfectly in that short little book by the developer quickmail.io. His name is Jeremy something, I think. Anyways, just go pick it up, read through that book, and then start testing. That’s what I did and it worked really, really, really well.

We’re actually gonna be testing in the Mastermind. I’m gonna be using a combination of the more mass email approach, which is what I was talking about with the quick question type emails, which all you’re trying to do is solicit a response, a reply, that’s it. No, you’re not asking them to click through any links, you’re not getting diarrhea of the mouth and dumping a whole bunch of information and doing an email. You just ask them a simple question that’s kind of disguised like a lead for them. It’s a little bit misleading, but not so, because you’re gonna present them with an opportunity.

Again, it’s not unethical. Like I said, it’s just a way to ask questions. For example, maybe if I got a tree service site or assets that I need to monetize, I might contact 10 or 15 different … When I was doing the mass prospect, I would contact 50, 60 tree service contractors with these quick question type emails. Now I’m going to be doing a hybrid model that it incorporates the video email process, which is, we have a training program that I developed that I’ve used for years to get results for prospecting and sales and that’s called the video lead gen system.

It’s how to use video emails to get people’s attention. It’s a bit time-consuming because you got to record videos that are personalized to each person you reach out to. I’m trying to templatize that now to where it’s going to be a lot easier and more efficient and have a team that does the video editing and all that kind of stuff so that we can turn it into more of a process. Like an assembly line to where we can do 10 or 15 videos in a short period of time and then targeted emails out.

But I’m still going to be using those quick question type emails where I might say like, “Quick question, are you guys accepting or are you guys providing estimates for tree removal right now?” When they reply yes, that’s the conversation starter. “Okay, great. Would you mind if I sent you a video explaining what it is that I’ve got?” Then if they reply yes again, now you they’ve given you permission to send them a video. Then you send them the damn video, which is a personalized video explaining what you got.

“Hey, look, I got these leads coming in right now.” You don’t show your assets, guys. You show call volume or you show the fact that you’re generating leads. Show proof. Say, “Look, I really need somebody who can take these leads. If you’re interested, let me know I’ll send a few of them to you for the next week, or I’ll send you five leads or 10 leads or whatever, whatever your business model is good for. You say to them, “I’ll send you five leads for free,” and then, “I’ll follow up with you after that to find out if you’re if you like them. If they were good genuine valid leads that you’d like to continue that service, we can talk then,” stuff like that. Just real simple little questions, guys.

I’ve tested all kinds of processes and what I found was those quick questions where you don’t drop a link in it, you don’t ask them to click, you don’t ask them to go to a landing page and fill out a survey, or watch a video on the first email, none of that, you just ask them to reply. That’s a conversation starter. That starts the dialogue. Once the dialogue starts, then you ask permission to send them a link for them to click, which is just a video essentially. You say, “Can I send you a video to explain what I’ve got?” If they say yes, now they’re giving you permission.

Then you send them the video link, and then they’ll click on it, and now watch the video. Then sometimes they will reply, sometimes they won’t. But that’s really the whole point. Again, video lead-gen system was the course that we did on how to use video email. Then I’m going to be kind of mixing that with the more … I’m trying to templatize that and make it towards a process to where it’s not so time-consuming to do those emails, although they’re very, very effective. Okay?

Again, this is stuff that in the Mastermind, guys, were gonna be covering over the next several weeks. Okay. Those were great questions, Jeff.

Does anybody else have-

Chris: I’ll post a link to the book in a second.

Bradley: I’m sorry?

Chris: I’ll post a link to the book in a second. I already got it.

What Are Your Thoughts On WebFire 3.0 Tool?

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Yeah, it’s a great little book. All right, moving on. Martin says, “Have you any experience with the WebFire 3.0 tool?” No, Martin. When you said that, I clicked on it and I looked, I don’t, so I can’t really comment on that. I don’t have time to look through it right now. Perhaps, if you remind me, next week I will take a look at that before. I might look through that thing when we’re off this webinar today.

Marco: Hey Bradley, those are all like, those are click … Well, what do you call that, the auto traffic-

Bradley: It’s like a click-through spambot?

Marco: Yeah. Tons of websites like that.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: The problem that I’m seeing, and by the way, they’re working. Some are working better than others. I’m not gonna say which one because then everyone will run there and ruin it for me. I don’t want you guys messing with my money. At any rate, they are working, go and test them out. But interestingly enough, what I found works the best is … You did a course on it, it’s only available in the Mastermind.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: The way that you teach it becomes actually cheaper than most of these click-through spams or spam traffic networks, which is really interesting because you’re targeting real people to come and visit your stuff. These real people have a genuine interest in whatever it is that you’re doing right and they’re going to ask way-, they’re going to act, excuse me, way differently than the people that have to click on your link. Does that make sense? They pay for it. Well, you paid for it, they go, they click, then they get credit. It just becomes crazy because they’re not really interested in your stuff, they’re only interested in theirs.

Now since we’re targeting real people with the real interest, through Bradley’s training, it becomes that much better. Guys, activity, relevance, trust and authority. We’re in trusted and authoritative to the max because were inside Google.

Bradley: That’s right.

Marco: Relevance because we’re targeting whatever it is that we’re targeting. I’m not gonna say anything because it’s something that’s right now only available in the Mastermind. Then, activity on that link. It’s relevant activity. People clicking on that link going and acting the way that real people do. Some might not like it and bounce back, many will. But that’s what real people do and that’s what we’re after.

Bradley: Yeah. I’m not gonna reveal the method here either, but exactly what Marco was saying, because that is real genuine traffic that Google knows has an interest in what you’re sending them to. So guys, when you’re talking about activity and engagement, which is one of the primary ranking signals now, is engagement, it’s not just blind engagement.

Again, if you are trying to rank something locally and you’re getting clicks from China and Russia and Korea and UK, and I’m talking about in the US, I’m just using this as an example, guys. But if you’re getting a bunch of clicks from things that are non-relevant either geographically especially for local stuff or non-topically relevant, in other words it’s just kind of like random traffic coming, do you think Google counts that traffic as an engagement signal, the same type, and gives it the same amount of weight as somebody that is in the local area that’s clicking from a local IP, likely from a mobile device that is intimately connected to them at all times, that they have a history of being interested in that particular type of content or service or product? Think about that guys, which click, which engagement signal is gonna be given more weight by Google? You already know the answer to that.

It’s not that these kind of tools and stuff can’t produce some nominal results, they can, but if you wanna get really good results and do it within terms of service, there are alternative ways to do it and it’s super, super effective. I mean, super effective. So it’s absolutely true.

Marco: I just want to be clear, Fiverr geeks, Fiverr traffic geeks, they get some results. These types of websites, the spam traffic, they get some results. But when you compare them all and compare them to the course that we have, it’s night and day. it’s just totally different because it’s just targeted traffic, people that are targeted to the geolocation so that they interact with whatever it is that you’re doing at that level, if that’s necessary. If not, then you can adjust to whatever it is that you’re doing and get traffic for pennies on the dollar, guys. That’s what it’s all about.

Bradley: Yeah. Again, topical relevance and geographic relevance, and you can combine both and get super, super good results. It doesn’t take a lot of traffic to get good results when you have heavily weighted engagement signals, which is what that is. It only takes a few engagements to get significant results when you have a really targeted audience that Google knows about. All right.

Anyways, we’re gonna keep moving. Sorry, I can’t give you a better answer on that. Bryan says, “What is the backlog on GMB listings in MGYB purchases. I’m out about four weeks.” Bryan, you’d have to contact support. I don’t manage any of that stuff, I’m sorry. Just contact support or send us ticket to support@mgyb.co and we’ll get it answered for you. Okay?

Marco: I was just talking to Rob about this to make sure. We have to deal with whatever it is that Google decides. I mean, they were on the show, we don’t control them. So we can’t say it’s definitely this or definitely that, or we’ll have it in a day, in seven days or whatever. It takes however long it takes. Some of them are nearly impossible. I believe that Bryan has already contacted Support and gotten an answer.

Now my thing is if you go through Support and then you come here, it just slows the process because then I have to go reach back to support, ask what’s going on, track it down, and then they all go and track it down and try to see what’s going on when it has already been answered.

The only thing that I can add to this is, guys, we’re not in control of this. We’re trying to do what we can. Bryan, you’re welcome to request a refund. If it gets too long, you’re welcome to request a refund and try to find someone who stands behind the product like we do 60-day guarantee replacement. If it gets suspended within those 60 days, we offer a legitimate guarantee. Now how long it takes to get it for you, that’s another question altogether.

Bradley: What’s up, Daniel? Hey man, the question you asked two weeks ago on Mastermind that we didn’t get to because the training went so long, please repost that for tomorrow because the Mastermind webinar is tomorrow and I didn’t want to spend some time on that. It was about a GMB question you had. We’re gonna have time. I’m gonna be covering specific training tomorrow, but it will be a lot shorter because I just did the Mastermind newsletter entry specifically about that. So that we’re gonna do some video training on it tomorrow, but you guys will have the written process.

You guys know how I do my process stocks. Well, you’re gonna have the written processes, the newsletter entry that you’re gonna get in about two or three weeks, whenever you get the next newsletter. That means my training tomorrow, the video training, will be a bit more streamlined so I should be able to get to your question. All right. I apologize I didn’t get to that, man, and it’s been weighing on me for almost two weeks now.

Is It A Good Idea To Leverage A Popular Family Name Or Brand To Get Press And Media Attention?

Anyways, Quentin’s up. He says, “Hello my name is Quentin Ravenel. I’m a full-time musician based in Charleston, South Carolina. Arthur Ravenel Jr. is a staple here. We’ve named a bridge after him that gathers 25,000 people every year in April to run or walk on the Ravenel Bridge. Is there any way to use my last name as leverage?”

That’s a really good question. Yeah. I would think Press Releases would probably be a great way to kind of piggyback off of that name recognition because that’s essentially … It’s a brand, right? Ravenel is a brand, right? If you can use that … There’s a strategy called newsjacking. Look into that, Quentin. Look in the newsjacking. In fact, you could just do a Google search for newsjacking and find plenty of resources, Amazon books, whatever that can teach you the strategy of newsjacking that I think would be perfect for that, for what you’re saying here because you have the same last name-, excuse me, as a brand that’s well-known in that area. I would use that newsjacking strategy as a way to get some press and some media. It’s almost like click bait but in a proper way, in an ethical way.

Again, I don’t do a lot of that stuff, I just haven’t had the opportunity to, but I’m familiar with that strategy. That’s something that I think you could implement here.

Marco, do you have any suggestions for that?

Marco: Entity relationship, man. That’s what he’d have to do. Relate his name to the Ravenel Bridge name so that when it comes in the, what they call, the Google auto predict, autosuggest, so when people go looking for the Ravenel Bridge walk, or a Ravenel Bridge run, Ravenel Bridge weekend, all of that stuff, your name comes up in there too. I mean, we’ve done that, right? Social conditioning?

Bradley: Yeah, social engineering.

Marco: Yep.

Bradley: Newsjacking, go check it out. There’s tons of information about it. There’s the book, David Meerman Scott, I think is the pioneer of that or whatever, at least the most well-known, but you can find all kinds of information about this free and paid. Just spend some time researching that newsjacking because it’s something that I think you could implement and get some significant results that way. Okay. By the way, go to mgyb.co to purchase Press Releases and we’ll publish them for you, they’re really, really nicely done. Okay.

Gregg. What’s up, Greg? You and I got a Mastermind call tomorrow, Gregg. Looking forward to it. We got a lot to catch up on.

Urban Towing says, “Does SerpClix work well for traffic to RYS or is there something else you would recommend?” Again, I’m not familiar with SerpClix. If it’s another CT spambot or crowd search, click-through thing-

Marco: It is.

Bradley: -which I imagine it would be. Yeah, I would probably produce some results, I don’t know how much. But I would recommend finding some better methods where you can actually buy or get real targeted traffic from real people that may have a genuine interest in your potential product or service. Guys, paid traffic is a good way to do that kind of stuff.

Marco: I actually went to SerpClix and did the math. It’s 14 cents per click. We can beat that through your method, can’t we, Bradley?

Bradley: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Marco: And this is real people. Real people targeted, remember that. Activity, relevance, trust, authority, that’s what you’re after.

Bradley: Yeah. Guys, we did … for years, Dan Anton had a product called crowdsearch.me. It works like gangbusters for a long time. Click-through spam was an engagement signal … I call it click-through spam. But that’s when somebody does a search on Google for example, keyword search, it could be a brand search, which is called a navigational search.

Guys, you can go to our YouTube channel. You can just go to Google and search crowdsearch.me and you’re gonna find this Semantic Mastery webinars. I’ve done two of them because we did one webinar and I think two years later we did another webinar because it was still working so well. I explained in that webinar, and both of those webinars and great length what click-through spam is and why it works so well.

It was actually a method that I learned way back in 2011 from Ivan Budimir, who was my most influential mentor in the local marketing, digital marketing space. It was Ivan Budimir. He’s no longer in the space, but he was absolutely amazing. I learned so much from that guy. He actually introduced that method to me back in 2011 and showed the Google patent. It’s not the actual official name of the Google patent, but he always called it site weight.

Site weight. In other words, if all things being equal, if there were two sites that were identical, which we know is impossible, pretty much, but theoretically, if two sites were equally authoritative, like they had the same amount of on-page optimization, the same amount of off-page optimization but one site got navigational search queries, which now in the semantic web is incredibly important, what is a navigational search query?

That’s a brand search or a variation of a brand search, like brand plus keyword, or brand a plus phone, like for somebody looking for the phone number of a company, or brand plus location, or brand plus map so that people looking for how to get to that location or get to that company or that store or whatever the case may be. Those are called navigational queries. If all things being equal, there were two identical sites competing brands and one had navigational queries and the other did not, the navigational query site would outrank the other, one hands down, two to one every time. Every time and it was tested over and over and over again. That was because of the site weight algorithm, or filter, or whatever you call that shit. Again, I’m not the patent nerd like Marco. Marco, that’s a term of endearment, by the way.

He introduced that way back in 2011 and the strategy then was to hire microtask workers to set up these little gigs. You would pay microtask workers two or three cents or something like that to go do a particular search, preferably with the brand dimension. Then find the link that you told them to find, click through, and then you would tell them, “Go find copy and paste the third word of the seventh paragraph on that page into the answer box,” and the answer box was their proof that they did the task that you assigned.

The reason why you wouldn’t just tell him to go click the link and copy because you want them to dwell on the page. That dwell time counted as an engagement signal, right? They would land on the page and then they’d have a hunt for that specific word or phrase or whatever it was that you told them to do that would make the answer. That would be the answer that means they solved the task that you gave them to do. That would create the dwell time, potentially scroll, you might ask them to click through to another page, whatever the task might be, click through to the link, then click through to the contact page, and then leave a message or whatever the case may be. You could set it up multiple different ways, but those were engagement signals way back in 2011 guys and it moved the needle like almost overnight.

The problem was as soon as you would stop paying in microtasks workers within just a few days your rank positioning start falling again because it was all about those engagement signals. Guys, again, this was eight years ago. Well, now, we’ve just been talking on this webinar alone about how important engagement signals are. So engagement signals are weighted even more now than they were back then.

Now the engagement signals are weighted more because Google can track and knows its users and the users’ behavior and their history. That’s what I was talking about. If you can get engagement signals from people that are locally and/or topically relevant to the content that you’re having them engage with, then that’s going to be weighted so much more.

What I’m saying is, again on a local level, if you can get people from a local geographic area that have a history for having an interest in that topic or that product or service as well as being local, a handful of clicks from them can produce better results than dozens or hundreds of click from non-relevant and non-non topically and non-geographically relevant clicks. Does that make sense?

So the click-through spam, and that’s what I called it because we were literally spamming click-throughs, isn’t as effective as it is when you can get relevant audience to engage because Google understands its audience, guys. Google knows its audience because everybody’s connected to Google all the time, right? So it knows what their history is and what their interests are and where they’re located and all that kind of stuff.

So that’s what I’m getting at. As far as the click-through spam stuff, for a long time it was working really well. Dan Anton’s, I think the best bot that came out, which was crowdsearch.me and for I think three, four years, I mean, I used it heavily. I was getting 50,000 credits per month and I was using every bit of them. It worked like gangbusters. But over time, it slowly started to stop working as well. I know that service is still out there. There are potential uses for it but it’s not something that I would do to direct to money site anymore. There are better alternatives now in my opinion, which is what we we’ve been talking about. We did some training about that in the Mastermind a few weeks ago.

It was a good question though. I was worried we’re not gonna have enough to talk about today, man, and look, we’re almost up. It’s awesome. Let’s see. “Think of how stupid the average person is and realize half of them are stupider than that.” That should actually be how stupid the median person is, right? It’s awesome. Thanks, Greg.

Okay. Grant says, “It might be easier to just close/delete designed junk email accounts ThAn unsubscribe endlessly.” Yeah. I know what you’re saying, Grant, but this is an email account that I’ve had for, God, 15 years, so it’s not something I wanna get rid of. But, yeah, I know what you mean.

By the way, I did all the heavy lifting. Now it’s just a daily maintenance thing. If I see an email come in, if that’s from something that was unsolicited, I open it, unsubscribe, and then as soon as the unsubscribe is successful, I go back and hit the spam button. Again, most days now guys, I might only get one or two spam emails. There are some days where I’ll get five or six or whatever, but almost every day now it’s just a bare minimum. So it’s manageable now. It just took a little bit of time.

Also, there’s a service called unroll.me. Guys, go check it out. Go to unroll.me, especially any of you suffering from shiny object syndrome. Type in your email and it’ll take a few minutes to run and it’ll come back and show you how many lists you’re subscribe to, and tell me it doesn’t take your breath away. It’s like, holy shit, how did I get subscribed … It’s just over the years, you accumulate, you get added to so many subscription lists either voluntarily or involuntarily, a combination of both really.

If you go to unroll.me, it’s amazing. It’ll just take your breath away when you see how many email lists you’re on, and you can start to systematically unsubscribe. Okay.

Chris: You’re the nightmare of every email marketer.

Bradley: Yeah. Well, now, I am, yeah. But trust me, a lot of email marketers made a lot of money from me too. All right. Let’s see, Walt says, “Not an affiliate link.” Okay. This is the quick, probably the quick … There you go, Grow Your Business With Cold Emails, Jeremy Chatelaine. That’s correct. He’s got an accent or whatever. It’s awesome, guys. Really short book. Look at that, it used to be cheaper, but 10 bucks, buy it, guys, it’s worth it. 100% worth it, buy it, and read it. It’s a great book for anybody’s doing prospecting. Guys, hands down, that has been the best strategy for me that I’ve ever found. Okay.

I’ll keep moving. Grow Your Business With Cold Emails: Everything You Need to Know. Go, perfect. Thanks, guys. I appreciate that.

Daniel, awesome. “Guys, I’m not whining about the GMB question, and I do have faith in SM.” Bryan, I think he took offense to which you said, Marco. Just looking to start implementing building out the local strategy and certainly anxious to get moving.” I totally get it, Bryan. I totally get it.

Marco: Yeah, so do we. I didn’t expect or intend again to offend. I just come across that way. I was just explaining that it just takes time. We try to get as quickly as possible. We know all you guys were anxious, but there’s only so much we could do when the beast keeps changing shit around.

Bradley: Correct. Yeah. That’s one of the issues, guys. Again, we all have to keep changing our methods to get these things done verified and such. I don’t even know what they’re doing to do it. I don’t care. Bryan, I’m just like you. I placed my orders too. I’m not kidding. Guys, I placed my orders just like you do now. I do have a little bit of pull sometimes, most of my orders are in queue still now because they’re not critical. But sometimes, for clients, for example, that have requested maps expansion, then I pull some strings to get them pushed forward a little bit. So that’s one of the benefits I guess of the CEO.

But for the most part, guys, I’m in queue just like you guys. It’s not you guys aren’t waiting because I’m getting all mine done. Trust me. I’m waiting too. Awesome. Unroll.me, You’re welcome, Grant

All right, guys. We gotta wrap it up. “Marco, you didn’t drop an F-bomb on me so I was unsure about the love.” It was Bryan again.

Chris: It’s coming.

Bradley: Marco, you got to say fuck just to make everybody happy once.

Marco: Yeah. Let me just close this off with this: fuck Google.

Bradley: All right, there you go. ‘Nuff said. All right everybody. Thanks for being here. Mastermind webinar tomorrow, don’t forget. If you did not check out the Syndication Academy update webinar from last week, do it, guys. Super, super powerful stuff. I showed you how to use RSS feeds there with geo-tagging.

By the way, I’m doing a lot of testing with I have it … No, I must already closed it down. No, there it is, RankFeedr. I’ve got it open. I’m not gonna show my projects. But Lisa Allen’s RankFeedr, guys. I know the coupon has expired now. She actually extended it because of the Syndication Academy update webinar that I did last week. I talked about it in there. Although the method that I showed was how to use Feedburner feeds to create local geotag feeds and they’re super powerful too, not as powerful as the RankFeedr feeds though because RankFeedr you can splice together and create static or sticky items and you can add the geotag and not just a specific geo coordinate but you can add what’s called a geo box, which is like a service area business. Super powerful stuff, guys.

I’ve been testing really hard for the last week now with the RankFeedr stuff and I’m seeing good results. Again, I know the coupon that she gave is expired, but it’s still totally worth it. It’s super inexpensive guys for the elite subscription, which I think allows you to create eleven hundred RankFeedr feeds.

Guys, it’s a set and forget. You set up a RankFeedr feed one time and you let it go. It just runs for as long as you keep your subscription active and you don’t have to do anything else. It will help to create co-citation geographic and topical relevancy on autopilot, guys. I’m telling you and for the elite service the elite subscription level, which again I think is 1,100 feeds, it’s $47 a month. It’s a no-brainer.

So if you haven’t already picked it up, guys, go watch the Syndication Academy update webinar, and go pick up the RankFeedr subscription service, which is how you create those things. I’m only telling you guys, we don’t pimp other people’s products unless we truly believe in them and I’m endorsing this because it’s such a good product and you can go to our website SemanticMastery.com I think it’s RSS-authority-sniper-3 I think. You could find the webinar replay and go through that process, if you want to watch the webinar where she talks about it.

But honestly, you don’t even need to watch the webinar, just go pick up the damn service because it’s really powerful. All right. With that, we’re gonna close it out. See you all next week. Thanks everybody. Thanks, Marco. Thanks, Chris.

Marco: Bye everybody.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 224 published first on your-t1-blog-url