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What is trust-building traffic? How do you build an authentic following with trustworthy, personality marketing as your approach? Ryan Lee believes that your own true personality gives trust to your brand. He believes that marketing strategies can be followed, but your unique brand of marketing must be found. In this episode of Traffic Jam podcast, we discuss how to discover your authentic self and build a brand around it, so you can cut through the noise and standout being you. SPECIAL BONUS: Download this Personality Marketing training. Includes MP3 and word-for-word transcript. OUR GUEST: Ryan Lee is the founder of Freedym, a fluff-free, heart-centered podcast for aspiring lifestyle entrepreneurs. He is the author of 2 books “The Millionaire Workout” and “Passion to Profits”. Ryan’s events such as the Continuity Summit and DotComXpo are well thought of in the marketing field. He was a recreational therapist for children and a fitness professional before he ventured in to the world of marketing. He likes watching movies, and volunteering as a coach of his kid’s teams. He used to be the captain of the college track and field team and has held the team’s records for over 13 years. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 75 of the Traffic Jam Podcast… What is Trust Marketing? How Do You Build Authentic Following? How Do You Leverage Experts? How To Resonate Your Brand To Your Audience? Your Unique Business Differentiator. Identifying Your Brand Personality. TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Ryan Lee quote from the show: You can also get Ryan Lee’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click here to Download “Be You. Be Real. Be Authentic. Build Trust.” ~ @_RyanLeeClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide Transcript Hey there listeners! What’s up and welcome back to Traffic Jam. This is show #75 of the podcast show that teaches you on how to get more traffic to your website, and build and engaged and profitable audience online. On today’s show we will be discussing not just about how to get traffic but how to build a following that’s highly engaged and resonates with your authentic brand. My guest today, Ryan Lee calls this trust-building traffic. But before we get to Ryan’s trust traffic building strategies, I wanted to tell you about a blog post that we published this week called “How To Get Traffic”. So Traffic Jam listeners, I think you might be interested in this one, especially because it features 30 of the very best Traffic Jam guests to date, who have come together to share their #1 traffic-getting secret. It’s over 5000-words long and it’s been a huge labor of love this past month, and I’m sure that you’re going to want to check it out, if you do, head on over to www.trafficjamcast.com/75 which is the show notes page for this episode. You’ll see all of the links mentioned in today’s show coming up, plus a link on that blog post as well. I’d love for you to check that out. If you like what you read, I would love to hear your comments in the section below. So let me give an introduction to today’s guest. His name is Ryan Lee. He’s a former fitness professional who’s done a lot in fitness entrepreneurial and marketing space. He’s an all-around personality and you’ll find that out in today’s show. That’s actually where we are going to be spending our time today talking about how to build an authentic-real and true personal brand that resonates with your audience and stands you out online. While we all know that there’s a huge amount of content that exists on the internet. How do you appear different? How do you stand out as your true authentic self? That’s going to be the discussion on today’s episode. Without further ado, let’s introduce today’s guest, Ryan Lee from Freedym.com, (F-R-E-E-D-Y-M) James: Welcome back listeners! You’re tuned in to episode 75 of Traffic Jam. Today you’re joined by Ryan Lee. Ryan how are you doing? Ryan: I am doing great!  I’m excited to be on here because I like your podcast. I’m a fan of the show. To be on here, it’ll be nice if it it’ll be a special episode like 100, but it’s 75. James: 75, that’s three quarters of the way. I’m sure there’s a celebration around 75. It’s not around jubilee, it’s the one after that. Anyways, we’ll make something up. We’ll make you feel special. Let’s talk about your newest project to begin with the Freedym Podcast to bring listeners up to speed, a daily podcast show – its ten minutes in length and you interview experts. With more than one kind of established daily entrepreneurial podcast out there. Why a podcast and why now? Ryan: That’s a great question. A podcast, I look at it, we were talking a little bit before the start of the recording. I look at it as another channel. I think people make a mistake of looking at one thing and say, this is the only thing I’m going to do, and this is the only way I can get traffic. For me, I think it’s about finding your strength. For all the clients, for everyone listening to this, you’ve got to know what your strength is. My strength, I feel is just me communicating, speaking and I do a lot of writing and a lot of emails,  but I don’t think people are really able to hear my voice. It (podcast) was a way for people to hear my voice, to get third party traffic. You know, if you get a decent listing in iTunes, you’re going to get some of that traffic that naturally happens, like someone’s surfing around iTunes and they just find you. I’m a realist, so I don’t think I’m just going to sit back, get in iTunes, get a new and note-worthy, and Oh my god, now I have a new multi-million dollar business. Some people think like that, but it’s not reality.  I look at it as anything that I can get extra is just freebie. I think them hearing me, being prolific , being in their head all the time and a really really big thing is being able to connect and reconnect with a lot of other great entrepreneurs, people that I admire, people that are my clients, people that I worked with in the past and it gives me a reason to reach out to them.  You said you just listened to the interview I did with Seth Godin, we’ve communicated in the past. Sometimes, there’s no really reason for me to reach out to them, but hey Seth, we got this top podcast, I would like to get on with you for ten minutes. There’s a lot of advantages on a traffic perspective, because I know this is the Traffic Jam.  When you promote, when you have people in the show, a percentage of them will then promote it to their network. Not everyone, you’re not going to get 100%, but some will. If people look at my site, they can see a specific page at freedym.com/show and they’ll see all of the time and money and resource I put into creating really nice graphics. It’s a daily show. You are one of our first guess, James. You could see the graphics, and the time and the money we put into it. There’s a good chance that you’ll share it to your audience. It’s funny as I see many people doing this wrong. I got an email about three weeks ago. A guy with a podcast said, “Ryan, I like your stuff, I’d love to interview you in my podcast. However, for me to interview, you must agree to the following. You must one dedicated to your list about the podcast, you must have 2-3 social media updates about it.” and I said, I was flattered, but hell no, you can’t force me. If I like the show and it’s great and I think it goes well, and I want to promote it, I will mention it, but if not then I won’t. That’s the wrong way to look at it. It’s not just a great way to build relationships. It’s got to be giving and connecting. That was a very very long answer. James: Let’s dig in to some of that stuff. Because there’s some interesting lessons in there. I guess, the first follow up question I’ve got is how conscious a decision was the format of a show that you chose. I mean there are two people together, casual conversation. There is the interview next, the star show, that both you and I adapt. Was it a conscious decision for you, at the back of your mind, thinking that if I get other experts on the show, there’s another opportunity to have it promoted in another channels that I could not easily access without these people coming on board. Ryan: It was definitely a factor, but it wasn’t “the factor”. I sat down. The reality is that I’ve been thinking of doing the podcast two years ago. I’ve even announced it and start recording. I recorded 10 episodes. I just didn’t love the way it came out. It didn’t feel right. I sat and I said, if I’m going to do it, what are the real reasons, what are the real benefits, what about the style. Everything in marketing and your business, there is no one size fits all. You have to look within yourself and be totally honest. Say, these are my skills, these are my strengths, and this is what I’m going to do, this is what I’m good at. I know, attention wise, I can’t stand listening to one-hour podcast. I just don’t have the attention and especially when the first 20 minutes and it’s the same story. Everyone’s telling their stories, I get it. Look, I love stories. Sometimes, just get me to the “meat”. I didn’t have the attention to sit and say “Hey, how’d you get started”. Nothing’s wrong with that. I just didn’t want to do that. I couldn’t see myself doing that in the long run. 10 minutes – piece of cake. I love it, I get in, we cut to the core, I don’t let them dance around, I ask the hard questions. We just go. In terms of interviewing people, yes, that was definitely one of the top factors. To me, it’s about getting connecting and relationships, and getting another opportunity to get to talk people to get them on the phone. It’s just because the connections are so strong. That to me, is really everything. I figured that all of the extra traffic I will generate by interviewing them and them posting it in their networks would be an estimate of 20%. I didn’t think 100%. Some people, that’s another mistake James, Okay I’m going to do these webinars, and I’ll interview someone and they’re all going to promote it to their entire network. That’s BS! I recently got a call with the guy who’s doing something similar. He’s doing a book, and he’s been saying, “I’m having 15 experts all contribute to chapter, and they’re all going to promote it.” He’s listing some of these names and I said, “What’s in it for them?” he said, “Well, they going to promote it to their list” . I’m like “No, they’re not! I knew four of those guys” there’s no way they’re sending all the people to a list to get them to the free opt in, to give you 3000 of their most active customers for nothing. They’re just not doing it. You’ve got to be realistic. If you look at this as a slight bump or like a 10-20% of your traffic coming from it, then that’s great but you you’ve got to be able to make it work. On the other end, I also knew that if I do this short shows, I could still intersperse solo shows with me as well, as long as it still in that consistent 10-minute format. I’ve only done one, but I’m going to be doing more. Maybe once every two weeks. There’s just going to be me coming on, doing my little 10-minute rants. I love doing that. I don’t like the pressure of if it’s just me every week, I knew I wouldn’t do it daily myself. Just me even every week, how am I going to feel about this a year or two years down the road? I just don’t want to pressure me. If you’re to do a traffic podcast James, all of that SEO and weekly and it’s just you, by year two, “let’s talk about Alta Vista, let’s talk about hot pot.” James: I think that’s getting the balance right. I think from what I can tell of your show so far, you’ve been able to inject your own personality in the podcast and make it about you, was putting a spotlight on your guest. Sometimes, there’s a tendency if you’re not careful, with interview star show for it to be all about the guest. That’s great content but let’s face it, most of us our doing this to build authority, to position ourselves with expertise. If you’re not careful you can actually take all of that away from yourself. Do you think that’s the case? Ryan:  I agree 100%. Then you’ll become like Larry King. He would just sit there and interview people, or Charlie Rose. It’s great. Everyone knows who Larry King and Charlie Rose is but you’re not buying Larry King’s success program. I mean there will be some people who will. I think you get the point. This is the greatest thing and there’s no personality and you just ask some more questions and you sit back, and you don’t have your branding through it, you’re right, in a way do the opposite. Specially, if all you’re doing is just showcasing your competitors and saying how amazing they are. It’s funny because we’re kind of coming back to the question you asked me before, why I chose this format. If you look at me and my business and the branding that I’ve built over the years, and the consistency, people will think of me, I’m hoping that they think that Ryan is the no BS, cut right to the chase, no hype, no crap, none of this garbage in the typical internet marketing, so this 10-minute fluff-free format is just the extension of the brand. It fits. If it’s a one hour sit down where it’s this serious “Tell me about this. Tell me about your mother” it would just not fit me and my brand. Everyone who’s listening to this, what is it, what’s your superpower, what’s your brand, what’s your image, what do you want people to feel about you when they hear your name. That’s real important. James: I think we should loop back to personality in a moment and sort of talk about how you’ve injected some of your style into the show. I guess I saw it on your marketing I wanted to ask you a little bit about guest selection. You’re probably at 30 episodes or so at the time of this recording. You’ve had heavy hits and names. We mentioned Seth Godin earlier, he’s probably one of the famous names in marketing that you could have in your show, and you’ve had some lesser known guys. I found in this show that actually getting the balance right is really important because, one, it brings context and adds variety to the show. Also your big hits will often be the ones with the biggest downloads. Often the lesser-known guests are the ones that are actually going to help you build your show the most, because they are the ones that are most readily going to talk about the episode and help promote it to your audience. What experience have you got so far? Ryan: Absolutely!  I’m really trying to find that balance between the bigger names and some people who are just in the trenches and unknown, like someone like Christian Moneta, who’s a triathlon coach from Australia that a lot of people might not know. That one and Seth Godin is the next. Like for example, I’ve had someone today, Mary Agnes Antonopoulos, is an incredible social media expert but not really well-known. She has not publish books but she does social media like Jack Kent, JJ Virgin, and she’s promoted my podcast at least five or six times. Even today she just did another big post saying “Go check out the show and if you like it, comment, and share it, then I’ll give you a prize” Seth didn’t do that nor do I expect him to. I like to find the balance between the two. It’s very similar to when I’ve done online summit and when I’ve coached people to do online summits. You want to get some of the big names but don’t expect them to do the marketing for you. The one who’s going to do the marketing are the lesser known names with the blog and the list of 30,000 people.  If you only get the big names, then you’re not going to get that traffic either. Again, going with my brand, and we’ll talk about that soon I guess, with me it is about a lot of finding those people. The real lifestyle business that people in the trenches, making money doing things that are really cool and different and unique. When you think of someone like Seth Godin, you don’t really think of a lifestyle entrepreneur.   You think of someone with big business consulting type. James:  Let’s talk a little bit about the artwork. We touched on it very briefly earlier with the artwork. That is one stand out feature of your show. These beautiful artworks in sort of pieces you produced. I guess as best as we can in words since we are in a podcast. I just want to describe what does it looks like. Perhaps we’ll talk little bit about why have you chosen this style, and also how you use it to promote the show as well. Ryan:  I really wanted to have the visual presentation of a glossy magazine. With my graphic designer, when we came over the first concept, I said “I want each cover to look like it will go on a magazine rack.” That was the thing. It’s got to look like… You can walk by like. What’s the popular bookstore in the UK? James:   I guess WH Smith. I don’t know if there’s any left anymore. Barnes and Noble will be one I guess.  Ryan:  So you walked into the WH Smith, in this cover looks like it can go on a magazine rack, that’s the image I want – very glossy, high resolution photos. I want each cover to look a little bit different. I don’t want it all to look like all exactly the same. I didn’t want it to look like an Ebook cover. I purposely said that it can’t look like Ebook cover. It can’t look like there’s an ongoing series and everything blends together because I have this idea that it should look like a portfolio of a high-end glossy magazine. The reason is because I know that I don’t care how well known you are if you’re on something, if there’s a cover image of you and it looks like a magazine cover, there’s a much greater chance that you’re going to share it. A much greater chance but it doesn’t mean 100% but much greater.  So we did the cover for you and funny, you are actually on my list, I was going to email you to say it went live, but I think you went live on a weekend. So I didn’t have the chance. But you saw that it looks like a magazine cover. Will you share it or will you not?  James: Well I guess the answer is there for you.  Ryan: The answer is “Yes” right?  I don’t know. In my experience, 80% of people share the images, because they look so good. It does cost me a lot of money to create but I’m okay with re-investing back.  I would much rather re-invest back in my business than on a sports car so I can take pictures of and go “Dude look at my car” I could care less about that.  James: Yeah we all like them. That’s the perks. This is exactly why we produce these caricatures for the Traffic Jam shows. It’s something that’s a little bit different and it’s certainly does make our guests more likely to share the content. It’s something different to what is produce for other shows. We do talk nicely of them. I can see exactly why they would work for you, I mean the magazine covers.  Ryan: It is about being different standing out.  In business you always have to look at what’s the differentiator? What am I going to do that my competitors won’t?  I know most of my competitors are never going to do this because it’s too much work, it’s too much money, it’s too much time, and most people are just looking for shortcuts. They are looking to do as little as possible and then not willing to put in the time, money and resource but I am. That’s why I talk a lot about it. If you’re serious about their business, then be freaking serious about your business. Do everything you can do we make a goal of it. For me that was always a big part of it. I’m a very visual guy, and that imagery is really something I know that is going to stand out just like yours with the cartoons. James:  Something that seems pretty true for you, is the whole concept of ensuring that personality is your brand. You do infuse that. Your whole intros in your podcasts are all wacky. I don’t think I can pull that off, but you pulled it off so well. What else are you doing in your marketing to bring that personality to the full? Because we all know now that there is so much content out there, if we’re not doing stuff differently, we’re never going to get seen or heard. What are the tips or advice could you offer to get our listeners think about how they might be different? Ryan:  Just to talk with you with what you’re mentioning, the intro sets the tone for the show. You really have to think hard about your introduction. You are talking specifically about the podcast right? James:  In this case we’re talking about a podcast, but in terms of standing out how else can we do it?  It is a broad question, but I do hope that you are game in answering it.  Ryan:  I was game for it, but I don’t know if I can give you a good answer. It really is a question of doing some soul searching. Soul searching, sitting down and thinking about all the wins you’ve had not just in business but in life. Look back at your history, look at every success, every when, what are the common factors, what was it that made you success in this area. Is it your humor? Is it your brain?  Is it your straightforwardness? Is it the goofiness? Everyone has a personality. Mine tends to be high energy, and I just love to make funny jokes. That’s me. You said you would have trouble doing that kind of introduction, because that’s just not you. That’s fine. People get into trouble James, when you’re trying to be someone you’re not. It just doesn’t sound real. It’s about getting real. The other thing you can do is ask.  There was a book that talked about going to your 5-10 closest friends and asking them, what is that about me that you like? What’s my superpower? The first one will say you are nice, you’re sweet, you’re caring, but as you talk deeper, it’s going to be uncovered. I’ve had people go through this exercise and say “I found out what my superpower is”.  You’ve got to know what your superpower is and be that. You have no idea how nice it is when you can just cut the BS and just be yourself. Just be you. I remember years ago, Frank Kern, I’ve known for a decade, went through like a surfer-dude face and all of a sudden, everyone’s marketing like trying to be a surfer. It feels like, it’s not you. You live in New York City, you’re not a surfer. The other guy is trying to imitate him.  Stop trying to be like other people. Find your strength.  Find your superpower.  Ask your friends what your superpower is.  Be that and let that resonate through, what it has to do, is it has to flow through all of your marketing channels. Whether its email marketing, or your podcast, any ads you’re doing, or your Facebook updates, or your Twitter updates, or your Pinterest updates, your Periscope updates – that feel and that personality have to be consistent throughout. You can’t talk about integrity and honesty and then do this fake countdown clocks. There’s disconnect. One of the first things I do with my clients is sit down and find out what’s their unique ability. What makes them different, it drives me crazy.  You see something those saying that they said they are, they are psychologists, the baby boomers, then they have such a great offline business then they go online. They read a couple of sales copy products and their copies are like “Who else wants to do 500 pull-ups and raise your kids…” It’s not even you, stop that. James: I think something that you’ve done well and we can use as takeaways, you’ve kind of pull this audio queue in that is almost an audio branding that you’ve inserted into your podcast and neatly identifiable as you. In other spaces where people have done that visually, like Frank Kern many years ago with the whole surfer thing, Joe Pulizzi with his orange suit or Richard Branson with his big golden locks is immediately identifiable as them but it also ties in to their personality and what they stand in for. It’s all infused together which makes it work so well. Ryan:  Yeah. Exactly. Like me, I talk a lot about lifestyle business; it doesn’t make sense to have a picture of me and my headshot wearing a suit. James: Yeah. You can’t be a serious guy right? Ryan:  No. No. But if you are the serious guy, and you have the MBA from Harvard, and that’s your thing. It’s all about serious math and stats and split tests then put the suit on. You find it, and you let that kind come through out. In terms of the podcast though, I immediately start with that kind of intro. That’s another thing. Everyone using podcast as an example once again, everyone will go to Fiverr and everyone’s going to get the same intro that sounds the same but there’s no differentiation between that and every other person. It sounds like a radio show, but where are you?  Because I think the old way of marketing is dying. The people who do lifestyle business, the one are who’s succeeding, is all about personality and connections and being you. James: Let’s touch a couple of topics before we finish out. This is more a 10-minute show. Ryan:  I’m here. I got the day scheduled for you James. James: Trust building traffic was one thing that you mentioned to me in our pre-chat. What do you mean about that? How we might go about building more trust in our traffic? Ryan:  How can I describe it? It’s really kind of about using the same theme, using that personality. Trust. How do you describe trust? It’s really just being authentic. It’s cutting through the crap. For example, if you’re doing a Facebook video ad, one guy just post this in our Facebook group and he said looked at his video and I just did. He did it on Fiverr. It was just flashy words. “If you want to lose weight.. “ It’s the same kind of no substance, no meat, there’s no connection. It’s getting rid of all that crap, all the glitz. If you look at what’s really working, people don’t want that stuff.  They want a reality. Stop doing that. Get an iPhone or any little camera. I do that now. I go outside and I film a one or two minute video clips – just me, raw, uncensored, doing my teaching and strategy. Whatever market you are, if its fitness, get your phone, go outside, and say hey “I’m Simon, I want to show you two really cool ways of push up variations today, here’s one… here’s another one. ” One of my clients, Elliot Hulses built this huge business with 600,000 followers. He’s doing a tour now in Europe just by doing that, he has shared videos, he’s kind of showing his face, that’s him. That is real authentic marketing. That’s just what you have to do. I know there are big businesses still that rely on ads. You’ve had a lot of guys on the show that talked a lot about this stuff. You know these ads like “3 Foods To Never Eat” and this kind of stuff. Yeah, it’s going to get some attention, but it’s a very very tough game to play. Let’s say you do come up with a really creative ad, what happens? Everyone, all the really smart guys, they subscribe to all these services, they know what exactly what ad are you doing. Where are you running it, how much are you spending and then they rip it off. Now, all of a sudden, your clicks go up, the cost per click goes up, conversions go down, and then you’re going to start screwing at the back end. That’s a replay game. That’s a tough tough game to play.  People try to play it and they go in not really knowing how hard it is. You can make millions of dollars, but the people who lose money are much greater compared to the people who makes money playing that. Because you need to have some guts, and you need to have a lot of money to spend on traffic, on ads, on split tests. 99% of my audiences are never going to play that game. So I stop trying to cater to them, I’m going for the people who are heart-centered. That’s a tough game. Then what happens is people try to play the game a little bit, then they do another ad “3 Foods To Never Eat” then they to another page that doesn’t really connect with the ad. Then they’ll be like “What about more funnels?” Just cut it out. Be you. Communicate and be authentic. If you look at Gary Vaynerchuk , he just now put videos and even with wine library. All he did is sit there, took a video and talk about wine. That’s how he started the business. That’s how he becomes well-known. It was just short little videos, but Gary was using his personality. He’s still being Gary. He didn’t have to say “7 Ways to Find the Best Wine”. He didn’t do any of that. James: Let’s send this interview with one kind of wrap up piece of advice because you’ve been online for many years now, you have coached a bunch of people in this so called internet space.  What piece of advice has you found repeating yourself with most? What’s the one thing that you’ve been telling people over and over again that you recommend in the businesses to implement? Ryan:  Be you. Be real. Be authentic. Build Trust. That’s it. It’s going to take the pressure off. Stop trying to be someone you’re not. Be authentic. The people, who like you, will resonate with you and are going to like you. The people who don’t, that’s fine. You’ll repel that. Focus on those who are really helping. Marketing is going to be so much easier. Conversions are going to be easier. Sales, running and managing your business, you’ll have less refunds. One thing you can have to touch on is that when you market like this, you get so many more referrals, like your business just changes. That’s my parting advice. Don’t get stressed out; don’t get overwhelmed of all the techniques, of all the social media things happening. Pick one or two traffic things you’re good at, whether its podcasting, whether it’s Facebook, whether it’s Facebook video ads, whether it’s Twitter ads, YouTube ads, Periscope, whatever those one or two things are, just be really good at it. Be authentic and just dive in deeper. Don’t stop and just stay focus.   James: Here you go we have the tweetable for the episode.  Be you. Be real. Be authentic. Build Trust. For you the listener, you’ll probably find that on the episode page of Traffic 75 which you get to at www.trafficjamcast.com/75 . As a passing piece of instruction for our listeners, where should they go to find out more? Ryan: You can go to the new site www.freedym.com or I’ve done a really cool thing to my 15 years of my best business-building strategies, I condensed them to just 3 pages, if you want that, you can text FREEDYM and send it to 33444. I’ve made it easy for you. James: Absolutely, that’s awesome. Thank you Ryan, it’s been an absolute blast having you on the show. I’m sure we’ll get another opportunity to have you again soon. That was Ryan Lee from Freedym.com. Thank you for listening to the episode 75 of Traffic Jam podcast. Remember that you can subscribe to Traffic Jam by going to www.trafficjamcast.com/itunes or www.trafficjamcast.com/stitcher For links to all the resources mentioned in today’s show, head on over to www.trafficjamcast.com/75 where you can get an mp3 version of the show, full transcript of today’s interview plus a link to the round up post that I mentioned right on the top of the show, with 30 of the very best Traffic Jam guests to date who shared their #1 traffic-getting secret.  As I’ve said to get your hands on that and other bonuses of the show, head on to www.trafficjamcast.com/75. Now we end this week of Traffic Jam by featuring a traffic jam by our guest Ryan Lee. His chosen ACDC’s Thundestruck, enjoy the track and I’ll be back with another episode very very soon. RESOURCES: How To Get Traffic by Veravo Freedym.com Customer experience examples: 5 best practices to set your business apart Ryan Lee on Twitter MENTIONS: Seth Godin on Freedym Mary Agnes Antonopoulos on Freedym THE TRAFFIC JAM: The Traffic Jam today selected by of course, our guest, Ryan Lee. It’s the song Thunderstruck by ACDC. This is the lead single for the band’s album entitled “The Razor’s Edge”. The song was released as a single in countries such as Japan, Germany and Australia. This song topped Triple M’s Ultimate 500 Rock Countdown in Melbourne Australia together with other ACDC songs in the Top 5 back in 2010. YOUR NEXT STEPS: Add personality to your marketing. Access the authentic, trust building marketing training below. Includes mp3 and full word-for-word transcript. Just click download and tell us where to send your bonuses and we’ll rush everything to your inbox. Go ahead and click download now. To access this special content upgrade, click download now.

  Should, or should you not be using social media scheduling tools has been an ongoing battle of opinion between social media experts. A previous guest on this show believes that tweets should never be scheduled, because what’s so important that it needs to be said, but not important enough for you to be there when it is. Laura Roeder takes a different stance. She believes that there is a very important place for pre-scheduled updates, so much so she built a tool to do just that. On this episode of the Traffic jam podcast we discuss the pros (and woes) of scheduling posts on social media as well as take a look at the marketing strategies that helped catapult her service Edgar to success. SPECIAL BONUS: Download the Social Media Scheduling Guide and get more productive with your social media marketing. Includes ready-to-go schedule, MP3 and word-for-word transcript. OUR GUEST: Laura Roeder is the founder of LKR Social Media. She started as a web designer before she moved to social media consulting and training. Putting her learning and best practices together, she creates the new social media tool, Edgar. During her off-time, Laura loves to read and spend quality time with her family. She reportedly “kills” it at karaoke. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 74 of the Traffic Jam Podcast… Social Media Scheduling. When To Schedule Updates? How Many Updates To Post? How To Use Your Social Media Time Effectively? How To Use Social Media As Engagement Tool? Content Marketing That Works. Email Marketing Tips. How To Establish Your Email List? Importance Of Regular Blogging. Facebook Advertising. Getting PR Coverage. Why Consistency Is Important? TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Laura Roeder quote from the show: You can also get Laura’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click here to Download “I do not advise posting on social media 5-6 times a day, that’s not good use of your time.” ~ @lkrClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide Transcript Hey, what’s up there Traffic Jam listeners?  You’re tuned in to Episode 74 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic to your website, and build a profitable audience online. I’m your host James Reynolds, as always. Before we get stuck into today’s interview section, I want to say a couple of shouts out to businesses who’ve left some Stitcher reviews to Traffic Jam this week. The first goes out to Michelle from Seattle, who says “Hello James, I appreciate your Jake Burkett interview, very well done! Great information”. Second one to Larry Fournillier and he says “Awesome content! I’ve only recently started listening to Traffic Jam with James Reynolds and I must say, it’s one of the better SEO, Social Media related podcasts out there. The content is fresh and James finds some of the best guests who are top in their respective fields – Two thumbs up!!! :)” Thank you to you guys. To you, the listeners, I absolutely appreciate your reviews and ratings on ITunes or Stitcher and to find both of those places head on to www.trafficjamcast.com/itunes for iTunes and www.trafficjamcast.com/stitcher for Stitcher. So onto this episode, we’re joined today by Laura Roeder from www.LKRsocialmedia.com and www.meetedgar.com, who’s a very savvy social media consultant and a software service business owner. She was first referred to me by the ever so awesome Dan Norris. Now, Laura is going to be talking about to us today about the pros and cons of scheduling your social media updates as well as the lessons that she’s learned marketing her very successful software service business called Edgar which ironically is a social media scheduling tool. So we’ll dive in into a bunch of lessons today. Laura is a fantastic guest and I know you’re going to love this show. Without any further delay, let’s jump into Episode 74 of Traffic Jam with Laura Roeder. James: So hey there listeners, welcome back to Episode 74 of Traffic Jam. Today we’re joined by Laura Roeder. Laura, how are you doing? Laura: I’m excellent, how are you James? James: I’m fantastic! I want to start with slightly tough question perhaps for you to answer. That’s relating back to a quote that Scott Stratten said on the show way back on Episode #4 and he said “Don’t schedule tweets! What’s so important it has to go out, but not important enough for you to be there when it does?” So of course for someone who’s got social media scheduling tool, what’s your answer to that? Laura: I’ve had an ongoing battle with Scott Stratten. James: Have you? I didn’t know that. So here you go. Laura: Yes, because he is actually someone I admire a lot in the social media space but we have a very fundamental disagreement about scheduling because he’s held his stance for years. I actually wasn’t sure if he was still going in the same track, but I hugely disagree with that. You know, I think there’s a big difference in using social media for fun and using social media to market a business. A lot of people start out on Twitter or in Facebook but using it for fun or using it to chat with friends and in transition over using it to promote their business. When you’re using social as a marketing channel, it really doesn’t make sense to spend so much of your time of being there “live” every day. It’s just not a good use of time as a business owner. Not to mention a lot of logistical difficulties like time zones. Right now you’re in Dubai, I’m in UK, I’m usually based in the US, that’s a huge huge spread of time zones and it would be really silly if you have a huge audience in America and not to reach them because you happen to be in the UK and you don’t want to wake up at 3am to tweet in the middle of the night. So I just don’t think it sounded bias for a business using social media to promote themselves. James: I don’t want to get stuck on this too much. But what can go wrong potentially with scheduling? Is there anything to be concern about that we should be aware of? Laura: Definitely. I think a lot of people make a mistake of thinking that they can just set up a tool like “Edgar” one of the other automated tools and just say “Oh great, social media is done now. I never have to look at that again” That’s really not going to work. Social media is also an engagement tool. If you just have all of your updates scheduled, and you never check in, and then you’re probably not going to see a lot of growth or a lot of traffic from social media. What I advise is use a scheduling tool to send updates, because that’s kind of the grunt work. You know, there’s no reason that you need to be typing it in and hitting the send button. Let the software do that for you. Use software to send the updates, but usually checking in, reading other people’s updates, replying, and seeing if the other people have replied to yours. That’s the engagement in social media. That’s how you spend your “live” time. James: Yeah. Well let’s talk a little bit about more about “Edgar”.  I think it’s fair to say it’s been pretty successful venture for you. I think your last count doing somewhere over $100,000 in recurring revenue per month. Let’s get a grip a little bit about with the marketing. I think that will be an interesting perhaps lesson for Traffic Jam listeners. What aside from social media, which I sincerely hope you, are using to promote “Edgar”, are you using? What has been successful for you? Laura: Successful for us have been content marketing, both on our own blog and channels like this. I love to do podcast interviews; we love to guest host on other blogs. That’s actually been huge for “Edgar” and we also do a lot of paid Facebook advertising. James: Okay. Have you also been doing webinars? I think I’ve read that somewhere. Laura: Yeah. We’ve actually just started experimenting with webinars for “Edgar”. We did a lot of webinars for LKR Social Media, my social media training business. James: Well perhaps we will dig in to some of those in just a moment. But I also want to ask you about the kind of the step up you got with your email list, because I think when you first launch Edgar, you did have a pretty establish email list – somewhere over, I think 75,000 people, all of whom I expect were at least interested partially in social media. Do you think that you’d be in the same position kind of 11 or 12 months on, if you hadn’t had that list? What would be different right now? Laura: No way that I’ll be in the same position. Starting a business with a list 75,000 prospects is a pretty big shortcut in the beginning. Of course that shortcut took 6 years of work every day to create, but that was a huge advantage to Edgar being able to market to our existing list. Now we’ve grown our list for “Edgar” on its own as well. But I think a lot of people don’t leverage the audience they already have. Of course, a lot of people are starting with zero. But even if you have a personal following on Twitter, or maybe it’s just an email list of your friends, most people actually do a really bad job of letting people know what they offer. I have a friend that recently started a video production agency. He’s actually based in San Diego and he sent me an email when he first started just saying “Hey, here’s what I’m doing. I started a new business, here’s a brief overview..” and I ended up holding up my team retreat in San Diego about a month ago and I thought “I can get him to do some video footage of our team  that we can use for recruiting. So all he did was just send an email saying “Hey, I’m doing this” and in this case that was enough. I just would’ve never known otherwise. So email your friends, send out Twitter messages, put it out in your Facebook. Tell people about what you’re doing. James: What you say is it’s fair to say that perhaps, your closest connections are the ones that know least of what you do. Laura: Definitely. I was telling you that I’m travelling here in the UK right now and I think that’s something that English people are sort of famous for – is being really shy or being self-promotional. Of course, no one wants to be that jerk. No one wants to be that person where it’s like “Ahh don’t talk to him, he’s always just trying to sell to me his latest thing. But there’s such a huge divide between being that obnoxious person that tries to sell you at the dinner table versus just telling your friends what’s going on in your life and in your business. James: Yeah exactly. I think the same look – If you’ve got this problem, I can help you out. You are actually doing more good than you are, being as you said, kind of like irritating or forth coming with your sort of self-promotion. But it’s definitely some of the best leads in this digital age of Facebook advertising and email marketing list and all sort of other intricate stuff is actually just talking about what you do day to day to the people that you are mostly connected with. Laura: Exactly. I think that people forget that every opportunity comes from a person. Every opportunity comes from either some sort of referral channel from someone you already know or a human has to approach you to ask you about it. I think sometimes we get a little too strategic just looking at okay what sort of traffic building strategies versus talking to people and all sorts of amazing things that you want to emerge from that. James: Let’s go back to the email list conversation. What are you doing right now to grow your email list? What mechanism, so to speak, have you got in place for MeetEdgar.com to grow this new list you are now nurturing? Laura: Our biggest one that we are experimenting with is having people request an invitation before they can join Edgar. That’s our call to action in our homepage right now. We experiment on that a lot. You might listen to this podcast, look at it and see something different. That’s been very successful for us is doing the flow of request an invitation and then after that we have an email marketing sequence getting people to sign up for Edgar. That’s huge and just asking for email addresses on our blog. We have a lot of content marketing that’s in the works for the next six months. Those are the big things we do now. James: Nice. I’m guessing that probably built some anticipation for the product itself. It’s almost like you can’t get in if you wanted to, but once you’re actually through that first gate, I can actually get a hold of this product if I want to. It’s quite a nice anticipation building marketing sequence you’ve got going there. Laura: It is. I think it also works because it’s a very easy “YES” for people. Just saying, “Okay, I’m interested in getting an invitation”, it’s no commitment, no, you’re not going to spend any money, you’re not even saying, yes I definitely want the software whereas signing up for a trial, it’s great that you get that instance access and you can check out the software right away but Edgar requires a little bit of a set up. Most people aren’t sitting down and doing the whole set up the second they first sign up. So you run that risk of being “Hey this looks interesting, but I don’t have the time to do this right now” so I don’t know if I’m going to bother doing the trial. I’ll do it later when I have time. James: You’ve been also doing Facebook Advertising. You mentioned that a moment ago. What’s the most successful ad that you’ve ever run to promote Edgar? Laura: Our most successful ad is a variation of “New social media software, maybe you want to look at it.” It’s really really straight forward. Sometimes your advertising doesn’t need to be so complicated. Our best customer is someone who’s actively interested in social media tools. They have probably tried out other tools, maybe they like them in some ways, don’t like them in the others and they’re actually looking for a better solution. I know as a business owner, I love hearing about new tools. A Facebook Ad got me the other day. That was just like “Here’s a project management tool” that I haven’t heard before so I checked it out because I like to look at them. Sometimes, it’s as simple as that. James: Like it. We all know that we’re checking out magazines and reviews that the most popular post and articles tend to be tool tips and tool recommendations. Everyone loves a good tool. But how long more do you think could you be running that ad for? Do you think that’s something indefinite one wasn’t one? How new can it be? Laura: I don’t know. I think I’m definitely going to push the brand because I’m going to keep in mind that if someone hasn’t heard of it before, then it is new to them. I’m going to push that for as long as I can. James: Fair enough. So what else have you got going on with Facebook ad aside from putting this ad out which seems to be compelling enough to your audience? How are you targeting people? Be it targeting options or what’s the funnel you’re putting the people to? Just sort of why, then a little bit for us.  Laura: We also do Retargeting on Facebook. We both direct that to people who have already visited our website and we have separate campaigns for people who have requested the invitation but haven’t bought Edgar yet. So that’s obviously a really juicy market for us. We know that they are interested enough to give us their email address and maybe they forget about Edgar and never opened up those follow up emails. I think those are what cool in Facebook Ads is it gives you another touch point and I think that’s definitely the future of advertising is not just reaching people through one channel but being in their inbox and having banner ads for retargeting. Having Facebook ads, and maybe showing up on their Twitter feed, were people are like okay I’ve heard from these guys so many times, I’m interested and I’m going to actually do it now. James: Yeah. Absolutely. I think it’s all about being sort of channel agnostic. It understanding really who your audience is, where they are actually hanging out is less important because we got the tools to reach those people in those places right now. It allows us to get back into what our core marketing message is and the tool suggests the way to facilitate the message reaching those people right? It becomes a whole lot easier. Laura: You know the way people use the internet is very rarely through a straight funnel. I think as marketers, we love this idea that like, okay first they stay in my homepage, then they give me their email address, then they watch the webinar, then they buy the initial offer, but really what happens is someone finds your homepage, and they forget about you, and then they read or view a week later, then they remember you and they still don’t visit your page, and the next day they remember that they want to Google you, and then they find your Twitter account, they follow you on Twitter, it’s a very very convoluted process and people are seeing all different touch points. So we have this fantasy that we want clear funnel but people don’t really research that way and people don’t really buy that way. So you need to be readily available on a lot of different channels.  And that’s one place where social media becomes really valuable. If they want to talk on Twitter, we can talk on Twitter. We have a Facebook user group that we use for our customers to ask questions, make feature request. Just the more touch points the better. James: One of the places you’ve been getting a fair amount of coverage is in press. We look at your own personal website and we can see a whole bunch of logos up there on the homepage on the prominent places you’ve been paired. What’s been your secret to getting such good PR coverage for yourself personally? Laura: It’s actually interesting because we haven’t got any traditional press for Edgar as in articles covering us but we have been able to get a good amount of mentions in tool round ups. We’ve done really well where people say that “Here’s the 10 new social media tools”. Another thing that has been hugely valuable is it’s called the YEC, Young Entrepreneurs Council, they have this place where you can answer questions that journalists have asks to collect content, that’s spread all across a lot of media websites. We appeared on Mashable and www.entrepreneur.com and a lot of these major websites through that YEC contribution. James: Nice. I guess another alternative to that would be something like help a reporter out on my blog url and couple of other channels great for that. Are you using any outreach in your content promotion strategy or your PR strategy to get these mentions? Laura: Somewhat. We actively solicit reviews. And those are mostly from our customers, those that are across a lot of little blogs, those are not usually a huge traffic source on their own, but they increase our backlinks, increase our search engine power, and whatever small audience is on that blog is seeing us. We also reach out to influencers both via email and via Twitter and that’s sort of similar to the Facebook ads where we’re saying hey we are a new social media tool. What I found doesn’t work is you might have someone in mind that you think might love your tool and it’d be perfect but they are either interested or they are not. Some people don’t resonate with that like Scott Stratten, he doesn’t like the idea right? James: He’s probably not your ideal type of audience. Laura:  Right. He’s not for us. Even though he’s a huge social media influencer, it would be such a waste to my time if I’ll follow up with him over and over again. What we found is just we send out very basic email and often tweets saying, hey here’s a new social media tool, we’d love for you to check it out if you’re interested. A lot of people aren’t interested, but the people who do say, oh hey these do like a kind of cool, those are the people we dive in further with and that’s were truly well. James: We’ll let’s talk about a little bit about blogging. Perhaps some of the interesting observation that I’ve made around through your methodology or at least what I can see of it. I actually check out your personal website and your company website, I can see that you published blog posts that are very precise in weekly intervals. How important it is to have a regular and consistent publishing schedule to a blog success? Laura: I think the regular schedule is extremely important both from your end and your audience’s point of view. From your point of view as a blogger, blogging is difficult. Blogging takes a lot of work to maintain. If you just have this vague idea like, “I’m going to publish..”. It’s just not going to happen in my experience. You need to treat it really seriously; you need to create an editorial calendar. A lot of bloggers decide that they are going to blog once a week and it gets to be Friday. And then they have this panic that they have not thought of anything, they need to write something. It’s like it’s if the today’s show or one of these morning news shows, showed up Wednesday morning and it was like “Oh no! We have to do a show again? Today? , What are we going to do?” That’s sort of how most people act with their blog. I recommend not doing that. I recommend building out a library of topics and assigning them to dates, so even if you’re writing last minute, if you know what you’re writing, and you stick to it, you can usually turn an article out because it’s obviously a topic that you know a lot about. From your audience’s point of view, they need to see, they need to be able to expect regularity. If you stop blogging for two months, people think that you died and your blog doesn’t exist anymore. James: That’s certainly been the case for me and certainly the case for podcasting. I think that being the almost traditional media format in the new age, like a radio show, people do expect it to be out at certain times and they’ll soon let you know if you missed a show. They’ll be sending you emails – “Where are you this week? Is everything okay? How’s your castle? Are you sick this week? What’s going on?” People do come to expecting I guess you’re doing a good job. That’s a good sign that your content is having the effect that you want it to as well. Laura: Yeah. That’s a real testament where people are emailing you, what happen? Where are you? James: Exactly. The other observation I made in your personal website that I wanted to ask you about is the fact that you seemed to remove comments from post. Why did you do that? Laura: That was definitely a tough decision. I don’t feel very strongly, one way or the other, that people should definitely do one or the other. For us, we just found that it’s something time consuming that wasn’t adding much value. We actually do have comments on Edgar blog, mostly because we really wanted to see what’s sort of feedback are we getting, because as a newer blog, we get very few comments there. With the LKR blog we got so few valuable comments. We have spent so much time reading through spam, people use it as a customer service channel so you have to make sure that you are reading all the comments and not ignoring anyone. There wasn’t really return on the time spent. James: There are the likes of Copyblogger and such like of turning it off because they feel that perhaps conversations are better served sometimes on social media. Do you find that that’s the case?  A lot of people are putting the conversations there and using blog commenting less, as a tool? Laura: Yeah. I think a lot of conversations do happen on social media – Copyblogger interesting now, because they removed their comments, and then they removed their Facebook page too. I think maybe they are telling people to interact in Google+ now, it’s where they’re sending people last I checked. I do think that you don’t want to make it hard to communicate with you, like what I was talking about earlier; you want to make a lot of touch points, and you want to make it easy for people. I would say, don’t make it so hard for people to talk about what you’re writing. James: Yeah. It’s like you’re talking to people, but not open to hearing what people responses might be, which is not particularly social. Well let’s end things kind of back where we started. Having cleared up the scheduling may not be the biggest scene in social media despite what Scott thinks. What are the best times in scheduling our social media posts in your point of view? Laura: I would just schedule every few hours, anywhere from 3-6 times a day. Again, depending on where your audience is in the world and you don’t have to freak out trying to cater to everyone. We generally run our posts during the day in the US. Even though we have a good amount of customers around the world, the vast majority of our users are still in the US. A lot of people are like how I optimize every time zone, you can’t. Some people are awake, some people are asleep. It’s not something to worry so much about. I have written some blog posts on Edgar on how to look at in the analytics of your various tools and see when posts are performing best. You do want to do that. The data is there. There’s no point in not checking out your Facebook analytics and your Twitter analytics, to see when your audience is online. See when you’re getting engagement but it’s not something that you need to be constantly fine tuning trying to figure out 4:03 or 4:07 is the better time to post. James: So your advice would be – Be consistent like what you are in blog posting and post reasonably frequently per day but don’t get caught up too much in the numbers. Laura: Exactly. That’s why I do think that it’s important to use a tool and I would not advise posting on social media 5-6 times a day if they weren’t scheduling it out in advance because you’re going to have the time to do anything else. James: Absolutely. Well, there you go Scott, maybe we’ll send you a link, so you can check it out because he seems to be glued to Twitter each and every hour of the day. Anyway Laura, that has been absolutely fantastic. To you, the listeners if you want to get the show notes and the links mentioned in today’s show by Laura, head on over to www.trafficjamcast.com/74 And all the remains is Laura thank you for coming on the show, been an absolute blast. I know you’re in Cornwall right now in doing sunning England. I’m going to let you go back to your holiday. Laura: Thank you. So that was Laura Roeder from www.meetedgar.com and that pretty much rounds up another episode of Traffic Jam. We will however be back very very soon with another show and to ensure that you don’t miss that episode as soon as its release, please subscribe via iTunes and/or Stitcher Radio, the choice is yours. www.trafficjamcast.com/itunes for iTunes and www.trafficjamcast.com/stitcher for Stitcher. Now for direct links to all the bonuses that come with this episode, including a downloadable mp3, full transcript of today’s session plus social media schedule for you to implement in your own business, go to www.trafficjamcast.com/74 where of course you can join in the discussion for this episode. Now we end the show with a Traffic Jam as we always do which is of course chosen by our guest today, Laura Roeder and she’s picked the track “Underdog” by Spoon. Enjoy the Traffic Jam and we’ll be back with another episode real soon. RESOURCES: LKR Social Media Edgar Copyblogger Young Entrepreneurs Council Mashable MENTIONS: Scott Stratten on Traffic Jam Episode #4 UnMarketing.com Scott Stratten on Twitter Dan Norris on Traffic Jam Episode #69 Dan on Twitter THE TRAFFIC JAM: The Traffic Jam today selected by of course, our guest, Laura Roeder was a song Underdog from an indie rock band Spoon. The song was written by the band’s frontman Britt Daniel and produced by Jon Brion.  The song was featured in the 2009 film I Love You, Man and the 2009 film 17 Again. Two years after, it was used in the opening and ending scene of the film Horrible Bosses. YOUR NEXT STEPS: Get to know more about social media scheduling and use your time on social more effectively! You can access all the bonuses for this episode including the full mp3, transcript and social media scheduling plan for your business below. Just click download and tell us where to send your bonuses and we’ll rush everything to your inbox. Go ahead and click download now. To access this special content upgrade, click download now.  

  Email has been here since the start of the internet age, and is one form of digital communication that remains relatively unchanged. For most it is the preferred tool to reach new audiences, grow a subscriber base and build relationships on a large scale. But how do we do email marketing right? How do we market to new audiences, in a highly targeted (spam free) way that’s cost effective and drives results. On this episode of Traffic Jam, Brian Litman talks us through the business of email solo ads and explains why you need more than just a marketing mindset to get email right. Email marketing is as much about business as it is about marketing. SPECIAL BONUS: Download the Solo Ads Buyer’s Guide and get started with email marketing. Includes MP3 and word-for-word transcript. OUR GUEST: Brian Litman is an Email Advertising specialist with 15 years of experience in digital marketing. He was the VP at MikeLitman.com for ten years before he co-founded DedicatedEmails.com where he is also the current VP. He invested his own money with DedicatedEmails.com, a company knowing that his years of experience has taught him a lot about what works and what does not. DedicatedEmails.com works with companies in the political, health, financial, survival, self help and relationship niches and helps these companies grow their online business through high quality opt in newsletters. They have worked with brands such as Agora, Digital Marketer, Barton Publishing, Stansberry, Crisis Education, EOK Marketing, Sold Out After Crisis and Birch Gold. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 73 of the Traffic Jam Podcast… Defining Email Drops. Who Sends the Emails? Email as a Traffic Source. Business Models that Work with Email. Great Target Markets. The Checklist to Complete. Email Solo Ads Statistics. Email Drop Costs. Testing for Effectivity. Email Funnels. How to Track Campaign Success. Common Email Marketing Mistakes. The Important First Steps. TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Brian Litman quote from the show: You can also get Brian’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “An offer isn’t a business; a business has an offer.” ~ Brian LitmanClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide Transcript Hey what’s up this is Traffic Jam episode#73. Thanks for tuning in and joining me for yet another episode of the Traffic Jam podcast. The show that teaches you get traffic to your website and build a profitable audience online. I am your host James Reynolds and our guest today is Brian Litman who’s got the email marketing agency called dedicated emails. So it will be no surprise too that we are talking today about dedicated emails, the description giving to renting an email marketing list, also referred to as solo emails, list rentals and a bunch of other terminology too! This episode goes in to the fundamentals of email marketing – where to find the email marketing list, what you should be looking for in that list, how much you should pay a whole lot else. But this episode goes in to the fundamentals of email marketing, where to find an email marketing list, what you should be looking for in that list, how much you should pay, and a whole lot else. But this episode is more than just the marketing aspect, it goes in to the business of marketing too! What offer and what business you need. The financials will make email marketing successful for you and a whole lot more than that as well. The business component is really where our guest Brian Litman excels. He’s worked with numerous $3million to $50million dollar businesses making email marketing super profitable for them and in this episode you’ll learn how to do the same for you too. So I guess without any further ado, let’s talk about the business of dedicated emails with Brian Litman. James: So welcome back listeners! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam episode#73 and today we are joined by Brian Litman from DedicatedEmails.com. Brian, how are you doing? Brian: I am doing great! How are you James? James: I am doing awesome! Today we are going to be talking about email drops. And I guess before we get started, we should get to grips with some of the terminology, Brian. Often referred to as dedicated email, email buys, email drops – what do all that mean? What are we actually talking about today? Lay it down for us. Brian: Okay, cool! In the more professional, corporate world it is called dedicated email. In the more home-based business it is called the solo email. Basically they mean the same thing. What the dedicated email is basically you are going to a trusted third party who currently has a relationship with a list or someone who is a broker to a list. For the people you are offering you are leveraging the credibility that they have already established to get access to their email database generally for a one-time fee and a one-time email where you are getting full access to their audience and able to collect leads, make sales, whatever it is that you do, you are getting access to pretty powerful marketing opportunity. James: Do you ever send an email blast? Gosh, I hate that word. Brian: Yeah I hate that word, it doesn’t make sense. Dedicated email is the term for it, solo email is fine but I noticed that email blast is kind of the lower word. James: Yeah, it is hardly appealing to the user to be blasted with email so I guess let us cover off some of the basics. Who would be sending these emails typically? Is it you? Or is it the person that you’ve got the relationship with or who you’re buying the list from? Brian: Most important thing is you are renting somebody’s list so I call it buying a list also but I don’t want people to get confused. When we say buying or renting a list, you’re renting it. The publisher would be the person sending the email. You would send them over there your email subject line and copy. Generally there is a tiny approval process just to make sure that person believes that it can work to their audience. In our company we like to really dig deep and make sure that the creative is really filtered to the person that we know we hit but if ever you are in a situation where somebody is like, hey, here is the database, you go send it, you are in the wrong place and you are throwing money out so generally the publisher is going to be the one sending it out, you should be getting a test, and then go on from there. James: You are obviously a big fan of this, you have been doing this a fair number of years, and you’ve got an agency built around doing email buys. Why do you like it as a traffic source? Particularly, what hits the spot for you? Brian: Email to me is like the never-changing part of the internet. No one is going to do this, what is this called? Assuming someone is doing the right thing, they are not spamming in a buying list, it is like the grandmother that is always there. It never changes for the most part. Google comes in and they create some new filter. Nothing has changed and if anything it has only gotten better. Email is kind of the most steady thing. Facebook can shut you down, Google can shut you off. You do the right thing on email, you kind of run in to problems, but it doesn’t mean it is the end of the world. You can get in to black lists but you can still get off them by doing the right thing. It is very important to be working with the right email service provider but generally all we choose to know is email and we believe that while it isn’t the most scalable, it is safe, you are in control and if you do the right thing, especially from a writing list perspective, there is more than enough to grow to a nice company. Now if you say to me, hey, you know I’m a hundred million dollar company and I can’t depend on email, I get it. It’s still one marketing channel, it’s still not going to work for everybody because their offer might not be prepared for but generally I really believe that is it the easiest one to get started with and the one that will give you the most likelihood success without big brother coming in and slapping you too hard. James: Yeah, I would imagine that now it has become harder to get inside in to someone’s inbox. There probably is more opportunity there now with the right list. Would you say that is the case? Brian: Yeah, I believe email is never going anywhere. Everyone is knocking on wood when we say that. Inboxing is not being difficult, or promotions tab, whatever Google is calling it but promotions now has worked well as it ever were in my opinion from working with my clients and from the list that we own, I really think that in order to succeed at email, it is really like anything else, you have to have a good offer, and most importantly, your business has to be lined up with giving you a real chance to succeed and then I can go deeper in to that or we can save that for another time but a lot of the success that is going to happen with any media buying or any traffic buying is going to come down to your business, your offer and kind of what is your model. James: Yeah, I would certainly like to dig deep in to the business model and we are going to do that in just a moment but I guess to continue on for now, let’s build up the foundations. Someone who is getting started, they are doing email buys for the first time, where would they go to buy a list? What would you suggest that they search down? Brian: There are a few worlds that you can find people in- the health world, the conservative politics world, things like, my whole business we really focus on men, 55+, conservative slanting in terms of government, our market is 99% United States, it is  conservative American politics, but let’s just say you are not in that market, what I would say is I would do, let’s say I was in gardening, I would go on Google and I would search gardening advertising, gardening solo ads, gardening websites, gardening e-sites, and I would start to see stuff coming up and  I would dig deeper and just start to see tons of businesses there where people might have smaller businesses, hey I’d love to work your list, I’d love to work out a deal with you and then there’s going to be some other real companies, but then here is the real key, you don’t need to find the exact niche that you are in to advertising. So my biggest clients are financial clients and health supplements but they are advertising to a conservative political list. You’re more looking for where your market hangs out than a specific list that has a specific niche. Now if you are like into underwater basket weaving it might be a little bit more difficult, but generally, you should be able to find things. Again, if college kids is your niche, it is going to be a little bit more difficult but the professional area is more of a 35+ market, people who have credit cards have a little bit more expendable income but then again you do not need to find the exact list which matches your exact offer. Who is my ideal person and where else are they hanging out is going to give you your biggest scalable opportunities. James: And why is the youth market so difficult? Is it because they are now communicating on Facebook chat, and Snapchat and all these other platforms and they’re not using email so much? Brian: Everything that I am saying is only based on my experience in my own market so there is probably a bunch of people who are out there saying he is wrong and that is cool because I am just going with what I have and what I have is in my market is still have 50% – 60% opening up on their desktop, if not even more than that. The younger ones, I am not sure if they have been trained over the years where email is their most trusted source of opportunities, then I kind of take a step back from that statement and it still goes back to like the niche that you are involved in. If you have like a MMA type of thing, if you have a protein body building muscle and fitness thing, I am probably a bit wrong, but overall for people and in the businesses that I worked with, the older demographic is probably more of where the opportunity email in the direct response base to which we know. I am assuming that a high end or even a middle of the line make up company probably can find that list that are more geared to that 25 year old person, maybe it is People Magazine or Us Weekly type stuff that is out there but generally the direct response market that most of the people probably listen to are probably going to jive with what I am saying. James: Certainly if you’re in the employment market and you are a business owner your primary mode of communication is email so I would expect that that would be perhaps one of the best places that you can reach people for sure but I can see that yeah, maybe the youth market, with them not having these tools necessary their primary method of communication might be a bit different. Brian: Everything also comes a little back to expendable income, but that being said again, MMA stuff and all that, you can go on Twitter, you can go on Instagram, those guys are making sales on free social media way more than a lot of the 62 year old type male market. James: Yeah, so we have done our research, we have found some opportunities, do you have a checklist to sort of walk through that might allow you to filter a good list from a bad list in understanding which might be suitable for you or not? Brian: Again, speaking from my world, there are some trusted resources that are in my world so in my business, I am a publisher, we publish 20+ of our own, I am also a broker for a similar list, I think finding a broker that works in your niche is a good thing, in my niche, like my company is dedicated emails, another one is called emailabilities.com. You want to find people that you can trust that your competitors is already working with. What makes my job easy is I can say XYZ is working with me, they are in the same niche with you so when you are looking for these things and if you don’t find the broker you can say hey Joe, can you tell me a little bit of who some of your other advertisers are and see what creatives they have used, I’d love to see what’s working for your list. In this way, you can really find out the opportunity. Depending on your market, you might just have to roll the dice, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that but if you are going to roll the dice, just stay on the safer side of the money side meaning stay small. It doesn’t mean being silly and say alright, I will spend $20 but so your best to win it out. You will, rule #1 you will get beat up early on. Be prepared for it, stay in the game, email is a lot of people and a lot of money but if you are in there you are like hey I got a dollar to spend but I need to see that I make two dollars back  and if I don’t, forget it, I make a dollar, you are going to be out of it, you are giving up a tremendous source of opportunity so stay in it, do the right thing and know that email works and that as far as I know it is not going anywhere. James: Okay, so it sounds like a possible good question to ask is who else is using this list or what other product similar to my own have been sold through this or promoted to this? What about list size, open rate, click through rate and these sort of statistical information? Any benchmarks to look for there? Brian: Well it’s interesting. Everyone is like, what is your open rate? And I am like, we do our best to be at 10% above, we’re always cleaning a list, I have one list that is a million people, it gets 20-40 thousand opens but it kills it and it is more of a higher priced list. A lot of people have different cleaning policies, different agent policies, I think again, in the health, political and financial markets, you are going to be able to get the right information, you are going to hear the right names from people. You are going to find it. In some of the smaller markets, I think you are going to have to roll the dice a little bit but overall, it is very easy to say I have 80% open rate and all of the sudden they send your email out and you’re like oh, I got six. Well your subject line it doesn’t go. So all of these games that get played, just protect yourself but don’t overly protect. Just know that there is going to be a margin of error until you dial it in for yourself and the long term opportunity of it. So I think that is the most important part of it. James: What should we be looking to pay for an email buy and I guess my sort of follow up to that which you will probably include in your answer is what the metric of sale is? How are we buying this – based on a per thousand send or how is the metric worked out? Brian: Okay, I have lists that are $3 CPMs, I have lists that are at a $100 CPMs. There is no set number, what we focus on is that our lists are priced correctly based on the success of other people. I think that CPM is an outdated model for email. That being said, people still use it, I am more in to the flat rate pricing which is like hey this list actually costs as you could back it out for yourself if you want to. If you are in the financial niche, be prepared to 20-30-40 plus CPM, you can find some opportunities to pay per click that are out there. There is a great company for pay per click company called Traffic for Me, they are good on the ppc side, there is no one true answer to the question but I guess what I would say is based on my own interest, you are getting started, let the person know, beat them up a little bit over price, say look, if it works I will come back. A real businessman will take you on that. They still want to make money that day but if everyone is planning to do the right thing then I believe that you don’t just give in. If they say that it is 20, you can say hey look it is my first run, I would gladly pay 17 if it comes back and I want to buy more, we’ll talk about it then. So there is always room, just be smart and don’t be cheap. James: So I am guessing that you would recommend doing a test send to a part of a list or a small segment before rolling out a larger campaign? Brian: Yes and no. It depends really where you are in your business. If you are sitting there right now and you have a $700,000 to a million business, even two million you’re going to say, alright, I am getting in to this first test, I am going to take 2,3, or five a grand and I am going to sprinkle it all over and I can go slow or I can create all these other things but I can’t be like hey Bob you have a list of a hundred I want to send to 10,000. No one is going to do that. You have to jump in. When people work with us, I always tell people I have your back and we do and we will make sure that they don’t get their ass handed to them for lack of a better word, I am not saying that everyone else are going to do that, but very few people are going to be like put 10,000 on my list, it is not worth a lot of time for a lot of people. So overall, find a number that is comfortable for you. Don’t force it but also don’t be overly patient. Speak to the right people, find out who else has been advertising there, get them to send some emails, and make them know look, if this works my goal is to come back to you X amount of times a month, a year or whatever it is so it really has to be a team game and whenever there is selfishness on either side, it probably is not going to work. James: Okay, so at this point we might have done a deal, I guess we should probably discuss the execution, the actual marketing aspect of it and the business side of things associated with that. What type of offer works best typically or what should we looking to promote? Let’s talk about the funnel and the sales side. Brian: Okay, so there is two different sides of it. The lead gen guys often would say opt in, thank you page offer, and then there is the straight offer guy. To me, I have always been an email opt in type guy, other people who can move bigger volume are straight to sales guys. It really depends on your model so what I would really say to kind of step back in that question is you have to have your model fine tune to make anything work on the traffic side. If you are a guy listening to this right now, you’re like, I have no choice, if I spend a dollar on this, I need to make back a dollar twenty that day or it didn’t work. Your offer is going to get old really fast, it is going to have fatigue, and you are going to be reinventing yourself every 3,6,9 months and that is not fine unless again if you are going to make 10 million dollars on it on that time period I guess it is fun but if you are on point, my recommendation is everyone needs to think for the long haul in the business, now I have a hundred million clients who they pump out winning creatives all the time and they are going straight to get a sell but they have their back in place and then moving in large amounts so without having to tell anybody how to run their business, don’t be copying other people, don’t think just because X is doing it that it is right for you. Get your model fine-tuned but know that if you need to make money on Day one that’s your only option, in my opinion, based on the people I work with, it is going to get over all fast so I definitely would shy away from that. That being said, we have some supplement guys who get 200-300 card values on day 1, with the back end in place, with the ability to lose a dollar on day 1 because they had the back end in place and they had tremendous business so I think to encompass what I had just said in to one sentence is to make sure your model is fine-tuned and dialed in. I think it was Dan Kennedy or somebody else who said that the person who can lose the most money up front has the biggest business, and if you look at any true business out there in the world it is a very true statement. But that being said, it doesn’t have to be true for you. You might not be able to it, you might not believe it, and you have to figure it out on your own. But at the end of the day, that is kind of a winning formula. James: I guess just like any form of paid traffic the guy that’s got the greatest lifetime customer value is the one that is able to do this the best and outspend and outperform everyone else because they know in the long run they are going to win, right? Brian: I always say, an offer isn’t a business, a business has an offer. So when people say I have an offer, start first with I have a business that likes to help XYZ persons solve XYZ problems and the way I do that is to go out there is yeah, I have an offer, No! you have to have a business and a passion to help those people. Usually the guys with the offers, they may be able to make some money on the short term, they probably don’t feel that great about what they are doing. Have a business that has an offer, don’t be an offer to start a business because an offer alone is not a business. James: So this sounds like it might work for the business that you typically wouldn’t associate with email, a service type business that’s got a strong residual service that is perhaps high priced could do really well with this if they just put the right offer on the front end to acquire the subscriber, right? Brian: Let me say this thing, at the end of the day, straight to the sales letter works great for some of my biggest clients. That’s the way they do it! I’m 50/50 on which side people should be working on. It doesn’t matter to be but going back to like the beginner or the intermediate person, it is a lot less painful doing an email drop knowing that in worse case scenarios I’ll get names to follow up with than going straight. And here is the number one key and I will stop talking, split test. That’s it. James: Well, let us talk about tracking. It certainly is on my agenda to ask you about. How do you recommend we track the campaigns and then we’ll talk about how we might go about split testing and what’s in fact in this channel and if it’s the headline, the copy, the landing that we should be testing? So first of all, tracking – Brian: If you are spending money on traffic and if you don’t you’re not able to get a specific tracking tool for every campaign. If you don’t have it, don’t do it. What you really should be doing to combine the two questions is you want to know the open rate so you want to be split testing your subject line. The story of a successful campaign is subject line, email creative/ click through rate and then your landing page and then each one of them for each different type of offer. Each different creatives has metrics that make it work. I ask some guys to put those letter in the email with a hundred clicks with clicks to buy. I know some guys who put some thirty words in there, they’ll get a bunch of clicks but they can be a little more generic. There is no right or wrong, your model, your author will dictate what is needed. But you should be split testing each and every part of it to see what is right for you. I generally like more action on my page. I think EPC is not the correct metric in this, in this it is ROI and what did it cost for you to buy a lead and a buyer. James: I guess it is tracking layers deep, right? It is tracking all the way through a sale and then the residual sales and then the result from it and if you are only tracking top line metrics like opt in and click through rate percentage and stuff like that, right? Brian: You have to look back – 0 day, 7 days, 18 days, you might be a guy who says hey I need to make money from day one but you might wake up from holy crap, 60 days later I’m 200% ROI. So don’t be so short sided in your understanding of your own metrics and really follow them out. In a business that I had 10 years ago in email marketing base, our best clients are the people who lists longest. They brought highest ticket stuff but it might have been two years down the line. So don’t forget that there is long tail value of a consumer that has been with you. The longer they have been with you the more valuable they are to you. James: Let us discuss some mistakes, what are the top one, two, three mistakes that you see people make most commonly with email? Brian: It’s a good question. The most common mistakes people make, first not split testing. Second is taking a copy that worked for an affiliate and just thinking that you can plug it in to a different type of campaign. You have to respect the relationship of every part of it with your publisher that you are buying from and an affiliate for. In an affiliate relationship you probably have to respect more meaning that they guy should make you respect him more. In the third party part, you still need to respect and we get to see stuff turned down all the time but you can kind of lower the barrier a little bit on the amount of information given. Here’s what I would say is I think over bullet pointing is a negative. With the caveat being if you are going with the long form email and you just accept what it’s going to be, I had offers for some big companies where I rewrote it for them. We removed the bullet points because it was too much information, and don’t provide too much information. Each level of the campaign from subject line to email to each level itself, you have 18 bullet points or five bullet points you’re just talking them out via your reader sales which is going to generate the same thing. So don’t overly give too much information on each step. That is a major no-no. That being said, test it and the opposite might be give all your information up front, get 300 clicks but make that 300 clicks worth $7 to you. So this needs to be tested, hopefully that makes sense. James: Absolutely! Well let us get close to wrapping things up. I tend to like to get these sessions to one key point and one key action step, what should our listeners do as a result of listening in to today’s podcast? The first step that they should take after putting down their headphones and listening to us today? Brian: Okay, number one step I’d take is go on Google, find opportunities, find websites, and find advertising opportunities that exist in your niche. Open up a notepad, send yourself an email with ten or twenty of them, it doesn’t mean you are going to be buying them today. Then I’d start with that time today to put together an email to that publisher, find the phone number. I think the secret to the internet is the phone number so someone gives you the opportunity to call them, call them. Your negotiation stance are going to be a lot easier, they are going to feel your money is more real, so I would go. If I am in the gardening niche right now, I’d go and find 20 sites that are advertising if they are offering email. If they do not offer email and that I think is the first actionable step. The second one which is really the no brainer one, make sure your model is in line with spending money and being able to scale your business. That is going to be the number one block to it, because if you are not spending money I don’t necessarily think you’re in business at the level that you want to be. And don’t be scared if you lose. You’ve got to get beat up a few times before you start making it. James: Awesome! Well Brian I think we should end things there. Where should someone go to find out more about you and connect with you online? Brian: The easiest thing, first thing is to spell my last name correctly, it’s LITMAN. You can email me at brian@dedicatedemails.com. You can go to our website dedicatedemails.com, we need to update that but there is some information on there and a form that you can fill out and then we can contact you and I think that anyone who is listening to this who wants to spend 10 – 15 minutes for any niche. I’d gladly talk on the phone with you, just email with with the subject line with the name of the podcast I’ll jump on the phone with you guys or go back on the phone with email or skype, whatever it is and help you. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me again, brian@dedicatedemails.com. James: Perfect! Well that is a fantastic offer, to you the listener, Brian’s website and his email address will be included in the show notes for this episode so to find that easily go to TrafficJamCast.com/73. Awesome! I appreciate that Brian and thanks so much for coming on the show. Brian: Alright! Thanks man, have a good day James! So that is pretty much it for episode#73 of Traffic Jam. We’ll be back real soon with another episode. Remember to subscribe via iTunes by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or subscribe on Stitcher by going to TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. For a direct link to all of the bonuses that come with this episode including downloadable MP3 and full transcript of today’s session, go to TrafficJamCast.com/73 where you can also comment and join in on the discussion for this episode. We end this week’s show with a traffic Jam chosen by our guest, Brian Litman and he has gone for the track Right Now by Band Haven. So, enjoy the traffic jam and I will see back here for another episode real soon! RESOURCES: Email Brian Dedicated Emails MikeLitman.com THE TRAFFIC JAM: The Traffic Jam is a musical Jam chosen by our guest, and Brian Litman has chosen the track Right Now by the band Van Halen, Right Now is a rock song written by the group Van Halen for their album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. The song reflects on living for the moment and not being afraid of making a change. It won Video of the Year at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, and served as the basis for a soda commercial. YOUR NEXT STEPS: Get started with Email solo ads in this 30 minute audio and PDF. Learn how to establish the right business for email marketing, find and negotiate an email buy and craft the best offer. To access this special content upgrade, click download now.

  A study done by Microsoft has concluded that humans now have shorter attention spans than goldfish. As marketers, we need to find the balance between providing substantial information that can move our audience to action, and instant comprehension within an all too small 8-second window. The solution to that is micro content marketing. But what is a micro content? Jake Burkett from Visage explains what this instantly consumable content is all about and how to use it effectively in your marketing. SPECIAL BONUS GUIDE: Download 5 Dirt Cheap Micro Content Creation Tools (Hint: 4 of them are free!) OUR GUEST: Jake Burkett is a career software enthusiast who, for four years, oversaw software development, client services and content strategy for Column Five. Column Five is a large information design agency. Jake has made a name for himself through consulting and speaking engagements where he shares his passion for effective visual communication. He has worked with large Fortune 100 companies and start-up organizations. In 2014, Jake co-founded a software platform called Visage that enables companies to create on-brand visual content themselves easily. The inspiration in creating Visage came from Column Five’s clients who wanted an economical alternative to Column Five’s done-for-you services. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 72 of the Traffic Jam Podcast… What is Micro Content? Typical Micro Content Formats. Creating Micro Content Pieces. Micro Content vs. Long Form Content. Micro Content Topics. Creating Content with Appeal. Testing Micro Content Effectiveness. Distributing Your Content. Tools to Help. Action Steps to Get You Started. TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Jake Burkett quote from the show: You can also get Jake’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “Micro content pieces are meant for instant comprehension.” ~ @JakeRyanBurkettClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide Transcript Hey there listeners! Welcome back to the Traffic Jam podcast. This is show#72! Thanks for joining me today for yet another episode, I am back in the groove with recording and I am happy to share another awesome show with you today. But before we get to the meaty part of the episode I want to say a quick thank you to Gun Hudson who left a five-star iTunes review and Gun said, “the podcast is full of great information, I like the music at the end, a real nice break from the business talk which adds real character. “ So thank you to you Gun, really appreciate that. I would really appreciate your comments and reviews as well, just a quick reminder that you can do that very easily by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or if you prefer to leave your review on Stitcher, TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. So what is coming up on today’ show? Well, in the spotlight today, we are going to be talking about micro-content – small, snackable content pieces that are quick to produce and easy for your audience to consume. Now we are going to be talking about how to create micro-content, both quickly and easily, when and where to use micro-content, and how to use that micro-content to drive traffic from your content pieces through to your website. Our expert guiding us through the process is Jake Burkett who’s a serial software startup guy now involved with a company called Column Five who created in fact a micro-creation tool called Visage, and this is a tool that my team have been enjoying using for the past few months or so. So I guess without any further ramblings from me, let’s get stuck on today’s show. We are joined as I said by Jake Burkett, from Visage. James: So welcome back Traffic Jam listeners, this is show#72 of the Traffic Jam podcast and today we’re joined by Jake Burkett. Jake, how are you doing? Jake: I am doing great! Thanks James! James: Great to have you on the call! We are going to be diving in to a different topic this week, we are going to be talking about micro-content so I guess we should probably open up the show with what is micro-content? Just give us a quick lowdown on what that format is. Jake: Sure! Micro-content is technically classified, it came from the larger long form content like when you think about your white papers, your reports, your e-books or presentations or infographics. The micro-content are little snapshots that could be data driven, they could be just a luster dev, they could be diagrams but they are communicating a concept that doesn’t need a lot of extra support so at the same time you also get some benefits there because a piece of micro-content may not take the amount of time to produce that the longer form content will. So that is just kind of a nutshell how we think about micro content. James: Perfect! Well I guess to probably frame that maybe we can give some examples of what micro-content might look like. What are its typical format? Jake: Typically the most common type of micro-content would be static design. You also see examples of animated GIFs or in some cases you’ll see interactive or dynamic visual content appearing in the form of micro-content but in the most, at least right now, the static design seems to be the largest carrier of what micro-content is and again, as I mentioned before, that doesn’t necessarily have to be data driven. It is just common to see little data stores being told in the form of a micro-content but these can include things like customer testimonial or a notable quote from a thought leader in a specific industry or with an illustration that kind of correlates to what the marketer wants to talk about, does that make sense? James: Yeah, absolutely! So I guess we’ve got a couple of things coming up here, one is that the content tells the story in itself, I mean it’s a short, very consumable piece of content but another line that you picked up on is that it should probably be easy to produce. Would you say that’s fair to say? Jake: Oh absolutely! And here’s kind of a cool angle on micro-content, that now it is easier to produce in general a piece of micro-content but it can be even more so if you take the approach that the visage parent company called this concept here as far as I am concerned, as far as I am aware, but you take a piece of seminal content that maybe takes you some serious thought, some serious research that design researchers to put together. So let’s call it a white paper. So you have a 30 page white paper and throughout that white paper you have all kinds of illustrations and diagrams that support and augment that text copy that you have invested in writing, right? So, an interesting approach to micro-content is divisible content. So you are taking a larger piece of content that may take you weeks or even months in terms of what your editorial calendar might look like but you are able to extract these small, mini visual stories that are meant for getting people interested in the larger body of work. So in that way they kind of entice the visitor, or the reader, or the user to dig deeper. James: So it is not in a sense replacing long form content, it is complementary to long form content or perhaps is even a promotion mechanism for a longer form piece of content or a pillar piece of content perhaps that sits on your website. Jake: I think that is probably the most wicked and efficient use of the micro-content format is exactly that, yeah. At the end of the day, you touched on something earlier that is really interesting- these types of pieces are meant for almost instant comprehension. People’s attention span are so short so if we are serving them a 17-page ebook versus a snap size content, the odds that they are going to understand and have that immediate comprehension content with a micro-content is much higher so by nature these micro-content tends to be the top of funnel content that leads a link to a library of articles or other pieces of content that are really designed to elicit action and once somebody kind of arrives at your site. James: Well, let’s talk a little bit about how to produce micro-content. I think in perhaps a moment we’ll talk about the actual creation of micro-content but let’s take a step back and talk about the process that might go in to actually what that micro-content may become. What’s the process? Do we start off with that pillar piece of content, what the real message is, the real strong piece of content that perhaps lives and sits on our site and becomes what we base our marketing around, is that where we start first and then work out how we divide content afterwards? Is that the process where we kind of start with the main piece and then work your way out from there? Jake: That’s right! That’s a fantastic place to start. But we don’t have to start there. One thing that is such a cool part of the role of the marketer is experimentation and split testing and kind of just figuring out what people are interested in and what works and one thing that micro-content is so great for is that because of the amount of time it takes to create versus other formats and visual content. So, it could just be an idea that you have in the shower or on your way to work that you want to experiment with and see if it elicits more interest than maybe something else with your readership. So that is one place you could start, or like you said, you could start with a larger piece of work and kind of take the divisible content route and the things that you are looking for when you take that approach are what are the most noble, interesting, hard hitting topics in this piece of work? If let’s say you have a very nicely designed visual presentation that you are looking at to kind of extract those micro-stories from. If you have to boil that down to a one-page visual narrative from that 17 pages, those are the points that you will want to turn in to micro-content. James: I guess it’s a process that really encourages the minimalist in us, right? Really sort of just drilling things down to the absolute essential message and information and presenting it in one very succinct piece of content for, as you said, instant consumption. Jake: That’s right. At the same time it also provides an opportunity for us to kind of flex our creative muscle because that is a pretty straightforward approach about thinking about what’s the most important hard hitting thing in this larger piece of work that I can visualize, that I can have designed very easily. You also want to take the opportunity to not just present a data set without really editorializing it or a diagram or a construct without taking the opportunity to think about your audience and who this is going to because oftentimes there is a lot of opportunity to be clever with your headline to be humorous or to take kind of a different approach to how you write that copy with the micro-content so while it is an easier approach to produce, it also gives us an opportunity to get creative. James: Yeah, so where might we find ideas, assuming that we haven’t gone for the major piece of content and created that in to divisible pieces of content afterward. Where would we go for ideas to produce standalone micro-content pieces? Jake: Yeah, well the first step, and this is kind of the no doubt statement of the week, is I would just recommend thinking about your target audience. That’s where it always starts. Look at your editorial calendar. Or if you have a running list of topics that you are planning on writing on, or blogging about, this is kind of the fertile feel of being able to harvest those little nuggets of ideas to be able to then visualize or get designed in to macro content. So that is going to be always your best bet. What does my audience care about? What motivates them? What are interesting trends that I see in the business that I come in, whether it is setting up a bunch of Google alerts to have those firing so that you can kind of see once in a while, you’ll get an interesting hit on a data set or an angle that’s noble to the place that you’re in. that’s probably the best place to start. James: What about design tips? You mentioned that quite often the mistake is that people produce content that is kind of too cluttered visually. What advice have you got for producing visually appealing micro-content? Jake: Yeah, I am really glad you asked that question. I myself am not a designer. But I surrounded myself with fantastic designers for almost the last 10 years and one of my co-founder at Visage, he also happens to be one of the founders of Column Five which in an information design agency headquartered in California. Ross, he’s not a designer but the guy knows more about good design than any other designer I have ever met. And he told me one time, this is probably only about a year ago, he said, 80% of good design is spacing, margins, and topography. And I didn’t really get it when he first said it and then I started watching, I started looking at pieces of micro-content, I started looking at more seminal, larger pieces of work that our agency was putting out, other agencies are putting out, and what other practitioners were creating, and I realized that he was right. So bringing this home, as this relates to how when you are thinking about design and particularly micro-content, you want to keep it clean. You do not want a cluttered piece because again, that works against the point. The point in the first place, your top priority with micro-content is instant comprehension and immediately catch somebody’s attention and if they have to squint at this format of content that is four times as small as maybe other types of content and maybe they are spending 30 seconds trying to read it and digest what you’ve designed then you’ve failed. James: How might you test that? How would you know that is instantly appealing? I am just thinking of scrolling down my screen each day and the content that typically stands out, that’s probably a good test, right? You sort of like scroll past the content very quickly and to double check and to look at it for a few seconds and digest, it has probably failed its purpose but if you can consume it instantly it’s probably doing its job. Would you say that’s true? Jake: I would say that’s true, and further I think unless you are using some gnarly software to measure site analytics and having lots of kind of looking at other people’s shoulders and let us pretend we are not doing that, one really easy way to validate the content that you are creating for marketing purposes is social proof. There’s plenty of research out there that would suggest visual content opposed to just the written word gets so much more attention and I guess traction, than just the written word so I would recommend as you are creating micro- content, don’t just use your own site, use social channels and kind of look at the pickup and the traction that those pieces get, maybe other posts, tweets or kind of – yeah you get what I mean. James: Okay so let us move our conversation forward to distribution. What are some of the channels where we can place micro-content? Jake: To answer that question, I’ll give you two different perspectives. It’s kind of the perspective of the agency. If you are running the agency and you are putting a part of the exercise is to put visibility to a client, whether it is raising awareness, dragging traffic, or eventually once you get those visitors back to your property somewhere asking them to take action that kind of the approach to micro-content for an agency that is representing a brand might be slightly different or just a bit robust than maybe the individual practitioner that is managing a power blog or a website. And here is why, one thing that we had noticed at Column Five is that editors and journalists applications have become more hesitant to publish third party long form content. However, they have been extremely receptive to really well designed, thoughtful micro-content. So this goes back to the divisible content approach. This is a really good approach for agencies that have either a PR firm that they work with like good relationships with publications to have micro-content created that is associated with those campaigns. From a distribution perspective for agencies, media, in other words, third party websites are really an interesting angle for micro-content. And I guess that would also be the same for brand recognition like if you are a marketing leadership or content creator at a brand that one also holds true. So, secondarily, all folks, or all audiences that might be thinking of creating micro-content for the purpose of marketing, social is just going to be a slam dunk, right? Because as you kind of scroll through your Twitter feed, you’ll notice the visual posts, they’ll jump out of you. They’ll get more attention. So that is definitely an absolute no brainer is using micro-content in social. And then definitely, one thing that we have seen a lot that works really well is just using micro-content to break up an article that you write. So instead of writing a hundred word article with just all text, create some micro-content at some point to emphasize something that you are saying or something that you are sighting. Again, it could be a quote, it could be a diagram that is illustrating or visually representing the concept that you are talking about and probably a really good third area in terms of distribution is just using it in articles that you write, whether they are in your own site or whether you have distributorship somewhere or whether that piece is being syndicated. Does that make sense? James: Absolutely! That is awesome! A question I wanted to ask to follow up to that, especially in terms of social shared micro-content is I guess the worry that because micro-content is so quickly consumable that it may not prove to be a valid form of content to drive people to your website. How can people get around that? How can people use micro-content to really drive traffic to a site and get people back to probably your pillar piece of content sitting on your own piece of website? Jake: Well, yeah. That is a fair question. But my thought is you stack a good piece of micro-content up against a piece of long form type of content and some of those classic distribution channels and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know what is going to elicit more interest. It is going to be the piece that is more readily understood and doesn’t look like it requires a lot of work. Our brains move so fast, but they don’t move so fast- they move fast enough to recognize a piece of content that is going to take a while to interpret. So the tendency for somebody in one of these channels that is presented with that type of content is going to be okay, that’s a lot so I would argue that as a traffic generator, as a top of funnel traffic generator you’re probably going to be served better with micro content than you will a full blown content that again takes weeks and months to actually create if you are doing good work. James: Yeah and you are meeting the market in the mindset they are in when you are browsing through the Twitter stream, that is the content that you want. You are going there for a quick fix just to dip in and take something away. That’s where that content is best served and if it can act as a little doorway in to your longer form content and spike interest I guess it served exactly the purpose that we want it to serve. Jake: Yeah, that is right. James: So I guess the next question is, can anyone do this? I know design is obviously an important factor whilst design can be learned, all of that has that skill set. Can anyone produce these types of content? And if they can, what sort of tools or other recommendations could you make to make life easier for someone who produce this stuff? Jake: Yeah, that is a good question. It is a lot easier for the non-designer now to create micro-content, or even other formats of content than several years ago. There are several software applications or software platforms that can help with that. We know that Illustrator is kind of the workhorse for the designer and even if you spent the time actually to use illustrator it doesn’t mean that what you are going to create is going to look good, I know this from personal experience so one example would be the company that we started which is called Visage. Visage is designed to help people become better story tellers that is micro-content. We have a couple other content formats that work within the micro-content paradigm but then there is also a couple other software players that also focus on putting and giving design tools to non-designers to help them create something that doesn’t look like an absolute train wreck. So that is definitely worth looking in to if you are a non-designer and if you are in the communications or the marketing world and want to create micro-content. That is probably a good place to start. Do some online research and look at Visage. James: Yeah, you’ll know that I found you through the Visage platform. We started using it, not particularly for micro-content, we’re actually using it primarily to produce beautiful, branded SEO reports because everything that was available out there in our non-designer hands ended up looking awful and did not give us the data sets that we wanted to communicate so we thought first of all let’s be able to put in the data that we wanted to put in, and then what tool can we find that can help us make this look pretty and we stumbled across Visage and it has been doing a great job for us and I really see though if we really apply this elsewhere in our business, be it in our marketing that we can leverage our very poor design skills probably a lot further than we do, right now. Jake: Yeah, charting is not easy, and it really never has been and really what we endeavor to do in the early days is just create an application that was the easiest way to create beautiful charts on the planet. So I think we are on a good start and we are on our way, and it is so cool to hear that that’s how you are using Visage. We do find that probably a third of our users are like hey I want to create really nice branded charts really quickly so that I can communicate those for reporting purposes to my clients or to internal stake holders so it is definitely the case that makes sense. James: Yeah, okay, so let us wrap things up with some action steps. The term micro-content may be new to people and perhaps it is the first time that we’ve kind of discussed it, at least on this show. Someone wanting to go out there now and produce some of this stuff, what should they do next? Perhaps one or two action steps for our listeners to close things out. Jake: Sure, I would say do some inventory on the topics that you have been wanting to write about, that you have been wanting to talk about, maybe that you have already produced good looking collateral around and harvest those artifacts or your little mental file on what you want to write about to identify opportunities to tell really brief, high impact, bite sized stories. That is step number one. Step number two, do a little bit of digging online and try to find some applications if you are not a designer that will help you actually put that in to practice once you kind of organized your thinking. And then if you are a designer you probably already know what James and I are talking about but then you don’t have to do the second step because you already are an illustrator wizard. James: Awesome stuff! We’ll wrap things out there, I will make sure of course that we’ve got a link off to Visage within the show notes and any of the other resources mentioned in the show. Jake, is there anywhere else that our listeners should go and connect with you online? Jake: Yeah, you can reach out to us at visage.co. Other than that, James it has been a pleasure, thank you so much for having me. James: How awesome to have you on, and to you the listener, to get all the resources mentioned in today’s show, a link to Visage, and various ways to connect with Jake online, go to TrafficJamCast.com/72.   So there you go, that was Jake Burkett from Visage. Thank you for listening in to episode#72 of Traffic Jam. We will be back fingers crossed, next week with another show. So as not to miss that show, as soon as it is released, please subscribe via iTunes by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or subscribe on Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. For a direct link for all of the bonuses that come with this episode, including MP3, downloadable transcript, plus a special bonus tools guide, containing the very best tools on the internet for creating micro-content, go to TrafficJamCast.com/72 where of course, you can also join in for the discussion on this episode. Now, we end the show as we do every week with the traffic jam chosen by our guest, Jake Burkett has chosen Untitled Four, a track by the Icelandic band Sigur Ross, hopefully, I have pronounced that correctly. Enjoy the track and I will see you back here for another episode, real soon. RESOURCES: Visage Jake Burkett’s LinkedIn Profile Jake on Twitter MENTIONS: Column Five THE TRAFFIC JAM: The Traffic Jam is a musical Jam chosen by our guest, and Jake Burkett has chosen Untitled Four, a track by the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Ros. Untitled Four appeared in their Album All Songs Considered 3. YOUR NEXT STEPS: Learn how to create micro content pieces quickly and easily and capture your audiences attention instantly. Download the special episode bonuses below: 5 Dirt Cheap Micro Content Creation Tools (Hint: All of them are free!) Full word-for-word transcript of the episode. 35 minute micro content marketing interview (mp3) Click on the download link and we’ll rush these exclusive episode bonuses to your inbox.

  Conventional thinking would dictate that you should get full credit for a 40,000 word blog post when you wrote it. You write, you get the reward. This was not (entirely) the case for Aaron Agius however when he wrote tens of thousands of words for QuickSprout.com. His name didn’t appear as the author, and he didn’t get paid. Why then would he waste days of his time to content that sits on someone else’s site published under someone else’s name? Aaron Agius understands the power within other people’s audiences, when those audiences are bigger and more established than his own. Aaron is adept at identifying co-authored content and guest post opportunities then exploiting them for his own gain. On this episode, you will discover how Aaron leverages highly trafficked sites to get more ‘eye balls’ and build his brand. SPECIAL BONUS: Download the co-authored content strategy used by Aaron Agius to leverage other people’s audiences to build his brand. OUR GUEST: Aaron Agius is the managing director and co-founder of Louder Online, an inbound marketing agency geared towards creating imaginative marketing strategies for small businesses and global corporates. His business has worked with international brands such as IBM, LG and Ford. Aside from running an agency Aaron is a prolific content creator. He has produced two in-depth guides for QuickSprout; The Complete Guide To Building Your Blog Audience and The Complete Guide To Building Your Personal Brand. Each guide being of more than 20,000 words. Aaron Agius also writes for leading business and marketing publications like Entrepreneur, Hub Spot and Search Engine Journal. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 71 of the Traffic Jam Podcast… Why Aaron Wrote for QuickSprout. Guest Posting. The ROI with Co-Authored Content. Determining Where to Guest Post. Finding the Balance: Content on Site vs. Guest Posting. How to Get Good at Writing. The Right Type of Content. Why Longer Content Works. Social Distribution: How it Works. Aaron’s Facebook Marketing Strategies. TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet these Aaron Agius quotes from the show: You can also get Aaron’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “Create content that answers questions and solves problems.” ~ @IamAaronAgiusClick To Tweet “Guest post content’s main goal is branding and geting your knowledge out.” ~ @IamAaronAgiusClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide Transcript What’s up listeners? Welcome to Traffic Jam episode#71. I am your host, James Reynolds, and right now you are probably wondering where I have been. It has been a few weeks now since we last recorded an episode, what more can I say but sorry, when your traffic is really cranking then you tend to get quite busy and we’ve just had a very intense period of onboarding customers from both SEO Sherpa, our SEO agency, and ClickJam, our performance media business. So we are back I think to normal proceedings and I am really looking forward to putting out a few more episodes in the coming week, starting with today. Super excited to share this interview with you with Aaron Agius and I came about Aaron through a recommendation from Dan Norris, our guest from episode#69. Aaron is from LouderOnline.com.au, an inbound marketing agency that do a lot of work in search, social and content marketing working with some of the biggest brands in Australia. In this episode you’ll hear about some of the epic co-authored content pieces that Aaron has written with Neil Patel and the huge benefits that he’s got from producing those. We will also learn a little bit about his home base and outpost content strategy and what sort of mix he has between his own website and his contributions to sites like Search Engine Journal, HubSpot, and others. We dive really deep in to a lot of different areas of content, search and social and I am sure you are going to love this interview. So I guess without any further ado, let us welcome to Traffic Jam, Aaron Agius from LouderOnline.com.au. James: Hey welcome back listeners. You’re tuned in to episode#71 of Traffic Jam and joining me today we’ve got Aaron Agius from Louder Online in Sydney. So, Aaron, how are you doing? Aaron: I am well. I appreciate you having me here. James: It is great to have you on the show, not quite sure where we are going to take this one yet, but I am going to start by asking you about the two huge content pieces I have noticed that you’ve done with QuickSprout, The Complete Guide to Building Your Blog Audience and The Complete Guide to Building Your Personal Brand. I’m guessing that these two guides were able to generate a lot of traffic for Neil’s site, but I am curious as to kind of what the return was for you. How much did you get out of doing those two guides? Aaron: It went really well, from a purely monetized ROI standpoint, people coming to me immediately and looking for working to do for them so it was well the time and effort and from the other side of things, from a branding perspective, it did really well. I wanted to get content out there that showed that we knew what we were doing as a business and I knew what I was doing as well but there isn’t a massive audience on our own blog so the idea is to leverage where the traffic is and where we can get access to a lot of audience and that’s what we did. James: Yeah, and I guess you also benefit from the implied authority of producing a content piece with Neil who is a well-known name within the industry, let’s just clarify, how long were those pieces? They’re pretty long in length, weren’t they? Aaron: They’re between 30-40 thousand words. James: Okay. Not your average blog post, let’s put it like that. Aaron: It was a decent amount of effort and the good thing is that this sort of content just flows and I don’t have to find how this is the right words so there wasn’t a challenge in knowing how to be put together so it was good and I was very happy with the results. James: Now, by comparison you also write to Entrepreneur.com and Hubspot and perhaps a few others where your post are probably more typical in length, a thousand to fifteen hundred words or so. How does the relative effort to pay off compare between those types of posts and the huge amount of effort I am guessing that was required to produce those twenty to thirty thousand word guides for Neil? Aaron: Yeah I prefer to do the big ones and be able to get the big exposure and but a lot of effort in one sort of document or word but the only reason I don’t is because we are just restricted to the editorial guidelines of each of these sites and so I contribute what we are allowed to contribute and so I do a lot more than I do on HubSpot and Search Engine Journal, Content Marketing Institute and a range of other ones so the return’s good. We stay on top of mind for these people. I stay on top of mind, people reading their feeds and seeing my name multiple times does have its benefits on that perspective as well. James: And that is actually something I want to ask you about, not to dwell on the piece you did with Neil but that was his own branded content, right? Despite the fact that I am guessing you put a vast majority of work in to that whereas something that you would do on Entrepreneur or Search Engine Journal carries your name, it carries your personal brand with it. How important is personal branding to you? Aaron: Personal branding is huge for me. But as you suggested, the association of having Neil and myself doing that in one of these big individual pieces, even if it is branded, it is QuickSprout and his site, that worked really well and it opens up a lot of other doors and it is good to have other pieces directly published as my name on these other sites. There’s plus and minus on both sites. James: How much traffic do you get out of guest posting activities? Anyone who is out there who has done guest posting before knows that guest traffic is not really in abundance before most traffics of blogs. What sort of traffic directly are you getting on a typical post, let’s say on HubSpot.com? Aaron: It is absolutely right. I typically get maybe 500 to a thousand visits per post, and that is never the ultimate post for me. My main goal is the branding and getting my knowledge and content out there. Myself personally, I know what just myself knowing that I contribute to the knowledge out there. Help people when we can and hopefully it does bring business in as well so it is worthwhile. James: How strategic have you been with those content contribution opportunities in terms of selection? They all seem extremely relevant to your business which would make sense but beyond that, how have you decided which third party sites that you do want to contribute too? Aaron: In terms of the site it has largely come down to wanting to focus on those that have really high traffic within the industry and then we are going to get a grand exposure to a lot of people go out and they are trying to guest post and get links on hundreds of thousands of different sites and they think that that is kind of doing the job and it might help with your search rankings to an extent but my goal with this is not to try and improve search rankings at all but it is personal branding and exposure to where the existing community is. James: Absolutely! And I think I would vouch exactly for myself. We do these types of things, it’s really for the authority we built and not just being seen in those places but being able to say that we are in those places to prospective customers and I am sure if you are dealing with pretty clued up with business owners or marketing managers they probably have heard of entrepreneur.com or hubspot.com or Search Engine Journal and to say that you are already a contributor to those places already gives you a level of authority that perhaps your competition don’t have, right? Aaron: Absolutely! You nailed it that is absolutely right. James: So having looked at your own blogged and having seen the activity on where you are posting to, it seems that you are posting to other people’s audiences than your own, what do you think is the right balance to kind of home-based content? Aaron: The reason I do that is largely I want exposure to where the audience already are and we are planning on doing a lot more with the blog and we have a lot of content that is sitting there ready to be published but I just want to get the exposure in the right places first and really focus on that. I don’t see much point in creating absolutely brilliant posts that sit in your own blog when there’s very little traffic to it. So the goal initially is to get out there where the audience is, as that is happening really well we’re getting referral traffic coming through then start publishing their own posts where it is going to be seen by enough people. James: Yeah and I think you would probably agree that your average customer isn’t often going to your blog to check out your content. I mean that’s not the audience that you are focused to. You’re not a teacher type market. You are delivering services to business owners, to marketing managers who want their stuff done for them so they are not really there to be educated. I know that they can trust you to deliver a job I would expect. Aaron: We need to do it to show that we know what we’re talking about and that side of that, you are absolutely right. It’s our target audience, we don’t particularly get a lot of leads or a lot of our business through on our blogs on our website. And we do get some coming through the guest posting that we are doing. A lot of our leads comes through referral and the marketing activities that we are doing. James: Has someone that does create a fair bit of content for others who might struggle to created content with the same sort of velocity as you do Aaron? Aaron: Yeah there’s a few things. First practice, get a few lines every day. If you are following some kind of authority just get something down and get in the habit of writing, it really builds up over time. The other thing is, really the way that I write content is to be able to identify the sort of questions people having the problems, people having in the industry and simply write content that answers questions and solves problems. There’s lot of ways you can identify that, you can check out quora.com, things like Yahoo answers and there’s ways of being able to see the problems people are having out there and focus on frequently writing and answering those questions and make sure it is tied with the audience in whichever site you are looking to post. James: And in terms of content structure do you have any guidelines there? You said already that you prepare a longer form content typically but is that your norm or you have some sort of other guides that you could properly share with us? Aaron: Yeah, I do like longer form and the reason behind that from a search perspective is that longer form content tends to rank and perform better and is more engaging more in depth, a lot more detailed. I prefer to do that. Like I said I can write and talk about this stuff a lot so it just comes out. In terms of structuring, the way I put them together, I usually sit there and I think what are those questions, what I can do in solving this and I put down a few key points on I really need to do to pitch this space. Then I will start on the intro and go ahead and talk to each of those points and to the conclusion, making sure that I’m trying to get people engaged in some point. James: It is interesting about what you said about longer form content with search and that is certainly true but it is also true, I understand, for socially shared content that longer form content generally get shared more often and that’s just because it implies more value because there’s a longer content piece there whether or not that is another matter but they tend to show it more because they think it’s got more value to their audiences when it’s longer. Aaron: That’s what we’re seeing as well, it does perform that way and so while it does I am going to continue focusing. James: Well it seems that a lot of content marketers do spend a fair bit of time on their content for the promotion part, that certainly has been my experience anyway. What is your own process for promoting content once it is published to your site or another site that you might be publishing too? Aaron: That’s exactly what that document, The Complete Guide to Building Your Blog Audience that I put together, it’s a really in-depth piece that really outlines the work that we do in terms of clients and in terms of content promotion. So to summarize what is in there, we do a lot of social distribution, paid social, we do syndication and amplification services, we do influencer outreach, whatever we can do to start seeking eyeballs on that content and hopefully if that content is being created in a way that it aligns with a predefined strategy that will help clients with then it should take on a life of its own and you’ll start to see the results from there. James: Yeah definitely. And you’re doing then what in terms of social distribution? Because I know social is also taking a part in what you do as a service there, just literally announcing on social platforms or a little bit more intricate than that? Aaron: Yeah it is a bit more robust when we – before we put a piece together we identify where the communities are socially, the different fan pages, what hashtags have been used and what sort of volumes are behind this and we make sure that we do the research first and then the piece of content that we do is usually done with a marketing first approach so there is an opportunity to be able to distribute content in these areas to these people and these are problems that they are having and so we have to work back from there and put that piece together that enables that to be distributed well. James: Yeah. We’ve mentioned your website, LouderOnline.com.au. I know you guys do a lot of inbound marketing of various types, part of that being of course search and more specifically SEO, as someone who has the  cool phase with some major brands trying to work out SEO in 2015, what do you believe businesses should be focused on to get better search results in current times? Aaron: It depends on the size of the site that we are looking at. If we are looking at enterprise sized sites, they’ve already got the links and the authority that they need.  A lot of it comes down to trying to resolve technical or IA issues, information architecture issues that exist on the site, problems that may have happened in CMS all the time and problems with missing content and that sort of thing, even minor changes can have a really big impact on enterprise sites. If we are shifting back over to small to medium sites, really it comes down to what we have been talking about the whole time, we’d be creating as much content as possible, making sure that even if it is in How To format just thinking what exists in your space and the questions people having and just write how to answers that are as detailed as possible. And really build out that content, do it consistently that builds up the number of index pages that you got, builds up a number of linkable assets that you have on your site and it gives you a much better opportunity to have a lot more of your content shared socially. It comes down having great content, sure, the technical aspects, the meta data, they are going to help but on a small to medium sized site you really need to build up content and do a lot of it. James: Yeah, absolutely! I couldn’t agree with that more. Well you’re not just an organic marketer, you’ve been getting really good results with PPC and fan pages from what I understand, can you tell me about that strategy and what sort of results you’ve got? Aaron: We’re making sure that clients understand that there’s still a lot of key traffic that can come through Facebook. What’s great about it is the amount of target and cost per click that you can get when buying likes to your fan page through the official Facebook platform. It builds up an asset that you can continually mark so for businesses that we work with we’re telling them right away, get the fan page up, make sure that you are buying likes through the fan page in Facebook and really targeting your demographic and your audience to be really specific to those that are really engaging to the content that you are trying to put out there and get rid of everyone who is not engaging. Once that is happening you are building really good engagement across your fan page. Anything that you post that you want to drive traffic where it is getting the right amount of clicks and it going to the right amount of people who want to share it again socially so it is working out really well for us still and something I highly recommend for people. James: Yeah there’s still a huge amount of opportunity sitting on Facebook despite the fact that people think that the bubble’s burst now and it’s just too difficult to get reach and visibility on the platform. It’s still a great place to be and no doubt that’s where your customers are because everyone is on Facebook as we know. Aaron: Yeah, that’s what I am saying, if you keep tweaking your focus audience in these paid ads what’s going to happen is that the engagement level on your fan page is boosting really high engagement levels so that these concerns for organic reach and there is a way of sort of countering that because you are really boosting overall engagement that means that it still helps on that end so I am still happy pushing that and what I don’t promote and that’s just because of the way we approach things, I am sure it works for people is paying for traffic straight from Facebook and sending it on Facebook. The issue there is that you’re losing the traffic you’re paying for that one click and if you’ve not convinced them straight away to opt in when they’re now databased something like that then you pay for that one click then you never get to market to them again so that is why I focus on fanpages. James: A good sort of addition to that is that with Facebook marketing, we’ve got a couple of guests on the show who have gotten almost great success with inorganic loop of Facebook marketing where you drive people off to a piece of content and then you offer to them back on Facebook. I think that can work very well to sort of get over that risk of losing that click and sending them off to an offer straight away. But there is no doubt, whatever way we cut the cookie there is still a huge amount of opportunity there. Aaron: Yes, absolutely! What you said there is spot on and we are seeing remarketing work really well for people. James: Awesome! I think we should probably get things wrapped up there, Aaron. I want to mention your website, we have mentioned it earlier in the interview but it is LouderOnline.com.au, and where else should our listeners go online to find out more about you? Aaron: You can find me on Twitter on /AaronAgius, that’s probably where I am most active. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. I do a lot of LinkedIn marketing and a lot of stuff with groups. I am on LinkedIn and direct marketing and I am always sharing a lot of good stuff. Feel free to find me there. James: To you the listener, all of those links and all those mentioned my Aaron on today’s show will be listen on TrafficJamCast.com/71. Awesome! Thanks Aaron. Aaron: Thanks for having me. Welcome back! That was Aaron Agius from LouderOnline.com.au. Thank you for listening in to episode#71 and now that we are back on track, we should be back with another episode very, very soon, hopefully as soon as next week so stay tuned for that. To make sure that you don’t miss any future episodes, subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. For a direct link for the bonuses that comes with this episode including downloadable MP3, full transcript of today’s show plus a full mindmap with my very own notes from the session, go to TrafficJamCast.com/71 where you can also join in on the discussion for this episode. Now we end the show as we do every week with a traffic jam chosen by our guest. Aaron Agius has gone for a little HipHop number, Let Me Clear My Throat by DJ Cool, Doggie Fresh and Bismarky so enjoy the track, and I will see you back here real soon! RESOURCES: LouderOnline.com.au Aaron on Twitter Aaron on LinkedIn The Complete Guide to Building your Blog Audience The Complete Guide to Building your Personal Brand MENTIONS: Neil Patel on Traffic Jam QuickSprout Dan Norris on Traffic Jam THE TRAFFIC JAM: The Traffic Jam is a musical Jam chosen by our guest, and Aaron Agius has chosen a Hip Hop number titled Let Me Clear My Throat by American Hip Hop artists DJ Kool featuring Doug E. Fresh and Biz Marky. Let Me Clear My Throat was released in April 1996 as the third and final single from his album of the same name. It was recorded live at the Bahama Bay Club in Philadelphia. YOUR NEXT STEPS: Learn how to create in-depth content at velocity. Aaron Agius has written detailed posts and guides that have ended up on QuickSprout, Hub Spot and Search Engine Journal. He produces content fast and he publishes frequently. Discover how Aaron writes, publishes and promotes that content in these bonus downloads:- Mindmap containing my own personal notes from my conversation with Aaron. Full word-for-word transcript of this episode. Downloadable MP3 audio you can save to your competitor and listen to again (and again). To access your exclusive episode bonuses click the download button below.

  As the big platforms like Facebook and Google become increasingly accessible, (and therefore crowded) main stream marketing approaches are offering diminishing returns. Higher CPC’s, lower CTR’s and increasing noise are forcing the question; where else? In this episode we are looking at alternative marketing strategies and how to win traffic from unconventional sources. Greg Cesar is our guest and he discloses some of his very best alternative traffic sources and some lesser talked about concepts such as sales cycle marketing, piggybacking and UMP’s. SPECIAL BONUS: Download the unconventional marketing strategy used by Greg Cesar to get over 700 customers in less than a year. Includes MP3 and word-for-word transcript. OUR GUEST: Greg Cesar is an established Google Adwords specialist recognised all over the world, with a book; The Top 10 Google Adwords Mistakes Online Entrepreneurs Make… and How To Avoid Them! on the same topic. He is also a regular speaker at conferences talking mostly about Adwords.  But, don’t be fooled that Greg’s know-how is confined to one single channel. Greg Cesar first got started in online business in 1997 and this in-market experience over many years has given him exposure to many, many different marketing approaches.  His ability to mix traditional marketing concepts like print and direct mail, with brand-new in-vogue tactics gives him an edge over others. Aside from marketing (which he does for love not money) Greg is a basketball fanatic. He also enjoys remote control airplanes. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 70 of the Traffic Jam Podcast… UMP vs USP. The Thank You Page. Magazine and Newspaper Ad as Sources. How to Position Your Offer. What is Mindset Marketing? Learn from Filezilla! The Most Important Why Question. Pitfalls to Watch Out For. Have You Got Physical Mail Lately? TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Greg Cesar quote from the show: You can also get Greg’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “Position your offer where your product becomes the logical solution.” ~ @DominateAdwordsClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide Transcript Hey, what’s up TJ listeners? This is the Traffic Jam podcast episode#70. I am super excited to have you here with me today as we are going to be discussing some ways of getting traffic that are rather different. Of course all to often on the show we just discuss things like Facebook, Google, content marketing, and the like and whilst all of these are great, sometimes the best opportunities exist in places where the majority are not. So in this show we’ll be exploring creative, out of the box marketing with Greg Cesar. In fact my very willing guest was happy for me to put him in to the test by asking him to name his very best alternative traffic sources. This is a really fun interview and one that will open your mind to the many other ways that you can get traffic and grow your audience. We discuss in the interview sales cycle marketing, the piggyback method, and UMPs. All terms that may not be familiar to you but that’s the reason they’re rarely ever talked about. Now we’re really going deep in to the lesser known in this episode and I think you are really going to enjoy it. So let me give Greg a quick introduction. I first became aware of him through my friend Ernesto who raved about his Google Adwords prowess and then a little later on Tommie Powers, my guest on episode#67 suggested Greg as a must have guest on the show. Greg is a really versatile marketer and has had exposure to many different marketing strategies since he first started his online business way back in 1997. He loves marketing and according to Greg would actually do it for free, which kind of makes sense, as you’ll soon discover, on the show that he talks about marketing with a huge amount of passion. So without any further ado, here is Greg Cesar for a discussion all about alternative traffic sources. James: So hey welcome back listeners! You’re tuned in to episode#70 of Traffic Jam and joining me today is Greg Cesar all the way from Atlanta. Greg, how are you doing? Greg: I am good. How are you? James: I am doing awesome and super-stoked on today’s session. Let’s jump right in as I always like to do. You of course are pretty well known for your expertise using kind of mainstream channels like Google Adwords and the likes but you’re also known to explore less talked about and often more creative ways getting traffic. So today I think we should focus our attention there hopefully with some kind of free flowing conversation around out of the box ways to build an audience and drive traffic so let’s begin with that and perhaps talk about why might our audience want to look outside the conventional channels to generate traffic to their website. Greg: Well you know I’ll start by saying that there is something I call UMP which stands for Unique Marketing Proposition. Everyone’s got to be familiar with USP, unique selling proposition, and that’s what makes you different. What UMP is how you are marketing differently because if you are doing the same thing at the same way at the same time as everyone else, you are going to get the same results. So when you do things a little differently and you are creative in how you are doing your marketing, what ends up happening is two things. One, you find opportunities that your competition doesn’t even know exist, and second is, you’re in an ocean all by yourself so the conversion is higher, your click throughs are higher. Everything is better when you’re in that field, so don’t look for things like, I have people telling me things like, I don’t see people selling this kind of product. That’s not what we are looking for. We’re looking for markets and opportunities in traffic that other people are doing but we brought it here in our own pond and we are not the same pond with all the sharks. The opportunities are so much better when you do it that way. James: Yeah, far less competition and as you said, a larger swimming pool and more space to swim around makes things a lot easier, right? Greg: Absolutely! James: Well, let’s talk about some of the ways we can do this. Let’s sum the creative traffic sources, what’s your number one? What’s your most unconventional, untalked about traffic source that you’d like to share with us today? Greg: Okay, there’s a lot and some of them are the properties and channels that most people are most familiar with. When you look at Google and Facebook- those types of places. I go about that very differently than other people do. But let me give you a really simple and easy thing that everyone listening can go out and do, and let’s start with the question. What is the most important page on any website on the internet? Right? And the answer to that is the thank you page. That’s the most important page and here’s why. Only the action takers and the buyers land on the Thank you page. So, what is a really easy thing to do? Go to people who have websites and those who are actively advertising. Why advertising? Because that means they’re getting buyers and leads. You’re not running an ad somewhere for months and months at a time and you’re losing money. You approach those people and you say, hey what would you charge me to advertise on your thank you page? By the way I am not taking any business away from you, these are people who are going to be leaving anyway. I am going to help you monetize your advertising. Some people may say, I don’t know, what do you think? Well, I can pay you on a monthly basis, I can pay you as an affiliate, I can pay you at a cost per action, tell me what you have in mind. Hopefully they’ll say, let’s do it as an affiliate, that way they only pay you on every sale. But what you are doing is you are tapping in to a piece of traffic that no one else is tapping in to while they are paying for the buyers and the non-buyers, you only get access in paying for the buyers. To give you an example how powerful this is, I did this with a gentleman who is launching a new product and I said, hey, your customers would be great for some of my products and offerings which is web hosting and things of that nature. He sent me over 700 customers in less than a year, and all I did was pay him to advertise on the thank you page. That was it. So very powerful, very easy, but look for people who are spending money advertising and let me say, let me buy your exit traffic. They’re leaving anyway, let’s not waste it. So a very simple thing to do. James: Wow! As you can see that is going to be highly targeted so let us talk perhaps how we might identify an appropriate target for this thank you page advertising. What sort of steps would you go through to identify who you want to target with this method? Greg: Ok, so I will give you an unconventional way. There’s we can search for people who are online, you know what something people is not going to think about? People who are advertising in magazines. Think about it. Magazines exist because of advertisers. Advertisers exist because consumers are buying the product, so if you find someone who is advertising consistently in a magazine, by the way, which is not cheap. A full page ad in a magazine can cost $8-$15 thousand or more. So if that guy is spending that kind of money, they’re generating leads and sales. But here is the opportunity. No one is thinking about contacting those guys. So a really easy thing to do for people who are advertising in magazines. Look for people who are also sending out direct mail. Because if they are sending out direct mail in places, they are spending a lot of money to do that. Which is again the kinds of people we want to reach because that means they are always going to be marketing. The other thing that you can do is if you are going to go online is look for the people who are running Google Adwords for the people who are running ads on Facebook. Contact some of those people. Look for people who are offering newsletters and asking people to subscribe which means they have a mailing list that you can tap in to. Again, if they are buying that traffic, even better because you know that whatever they are doing must be converting which means they can get you in front of the right people. James: Yeah, definitely. Well I guess we don’t normally encourage our listeners to go and subscribe to every marketing list possible but I guess that is one way of looking at this, you can identify the highly trafficked sites in your market, see who has some form of offer or opt in and list who just subscribed right? They are not doing anything with that thank you page, it is an open piece of real estate that is under-utilized I guess there is straight away an open opportunity to get in touch with that site owner and position some form of deal like this to them, right? Greg: Absolutely! A lot of these posts are sitting on huge numbers of opt ins and sales and they are doing absolutely nothing with it and you can help them monetize that. James: And what did you offer for the website hosting example that you gave? What was your positioning? What was your offer that you put there on the thank you page and how was it crafted? Greg: He was selling a product and basically the offer was you’re going to need internet access or web hosting and go check this page out. The way you position it, especially with their initial product is what I call logical conclusion marketing. So step 1 you need this, step 2 you need this so I became that step 2. Think about, and I don’t understand why car dealers don’t sell car insurance. If they go to your dealership to buy a car, well guess what they need next? Car insurance! So you position your offer with people where your product becomes a logical conclusion. You are the next step, and instead of them going to someone else for the next step, here is the recommendation. So now you’re a recommended offer after step#1 which is a very good positioning. James: Yeah, I call this being second in the production line and it is finding out who has that customer before you do and then just neatly positioning yourself in after that as a natural progression so yeah, I can see exactly why that would work and I am sure as a little exercise for our listeners, go and think about who is dealing with your customer before you do and see if there is advertising opportunities on their site, better still to those customers, or those opted in subscribers by advertising on the thank you page. Love that Greg, Awesome, what a great way to kick things off. Let’s talk about another alternative creative traffic source. What are the ideas that you’ve got up your sleeve? Greg: Believe it or not, newspaper ads! James: Well there you go! Where are we? Are we in 2015 or what year are we in? Greg: Yeah, 2015! Most people say newspaper ads? What a waste of time and energy that is. Guess what? There are people who read newspapers, believe it or not. And there’s millions and millions of them, and here’s the thing. These are people with disposable income. It’s more educated people, they have disposable income. And they will buy things too! Not just newspaper ads, you know what else I like? Newspaper classifieds. In the United States for example, there are groups and in a lot of countries, they may have groups as well. It may not be as big as you’d find in the US but what happens is this. A bunch of newspapers get together and they form a collaborate. And so when you call to place an ad, one they can syndicate your ad to a hundred different newspapers. So instead of you having to place a hundred different ads, you can place one and you are in front of a million people in seven days. And so the cost of the ads are very inexpensive. To give you an example, I just recently did a test for a product and I ran that ad from Florida, all the way to Maine, which is you’re talking 13-14 different states and it cost me $100 to do that. James: Wow! That’s insane. Think about what that would cost you in display advertising, even on a CPM basis you’ll probably be through that budget damn fast right? Greg: Oh, you’d do that in about five minutes. So that’s a hidden gem that most people don’t think about. Now you want to know what happens when you take your ad over there and like I said earlier where you’re not swimming with the sharks? You know what, that ad, what my conversion rate and what my opt in rate was for that offer? It was a 62% opt in rate with a 55% conversion rate. James: I guess there is a lot more effort in landing off your landing page direct from a newspaper ad, you need to be highly qualified, someone’s got that noted down the URL, they’ve typed that in to their browser and they’ve gone there so any traffic that you get to that page is going to be super highly qualified I’d expect. Greg: That is exactly right. That person had to work to get your offer so that tells me something about them already. And then the second piece of it is you’re in what I call the vacuum. So here is what happens when you are in the vacuum. Your competitor is not there so that means I can sell at any price that I want and I can ask that prospect to do anything that I want because the nearest competitor is not a click a way. They don’t even know where the nearest competitor is so I can do anything I want. So that’s what the vacuum allows you to be able to do. James: Very nice! I like that a lot. I guess the next sort of step of this is to be going to real old school direct mail methods and even split testing these ads out right? That would be super cool testing different creatives and sending them to different landing pages and see how that sort of traffic splits out from there but yeah, I love it. These fusions are kind of old ideas with new technologies and new methods and reaps some huge, huge results. It’s like you said, while everyone is zigging, you’re zagging and you just sort of stand out there on your own, positioned there without any particular competition known to you and you can drive huge, huge results. This is great stuff Greg, two awesome ideas and action points there. I think let’s do perhaps a third if we can. What would be another cool, creative way of generating traffic that no other people or few other people tend to do right now? Greg: Another thing, and this would be using more of the traditional channels when you look at YouTube, when you look at Google or Facebook. We start thinking of something that I call mindset marketing. In mindset marketing, you sell to the mind what is going on in their mind versus the product and everyone focuses only on their product when they think about creating marketing opportunities, so when you do that, there’s a whole lot more opportunity to sell things. To give you an example, let’s say someone wants to sell SEO services. So what do most people want to do in Google, Facebook, YouTube? The want to bid on the keyword SEO to find everyone who is looking for SEO. The problem there is you are now competing with every other person who is also selling the same services. It is hard to think about the mindset and ask yourself someone who is looking for SEO, what are they doing now? What are they looking for? What other things can I position myself that I can find that person that is not using the word SEO because if I go after SEO. I am swimming in the ocean with a lot of sharks. So here is an example of some things. One might be something as simple as 301 redirect, right? There are about a hundred thousand people searching for how to create a 301 redirect. The thing about that is only someone who is doing SEO is looking for 301 redirect. Let’s look at opportunities in terms of bidding on YouTube or Google for that. SEO – $10-$12 per click. 301 redirect, if you paid 5cents per click, you paid too much money. That’s how wide open that keyword is, so sometimes in marketing, I will create something to give away or to sell that really has nothing to do with my product but it tells me who that prospect is. It helps me understand that someone who is in my market. I will give you another example. An FTP software, are you familiar with Filezilla? James: I am, that’s another blast from the past. I remember filezilla from a few years ago. Greg: Do you know 1.8 million a month search for filezilla? James: Well, I guess I do now. Is that the statistic? Greg: It is. A lot of people are searching for it. Now, let us look at mindset marketing. Why does someone need filezilla? James: Well, they’re probably building a website or populating some hosting or something to that degree I guess. Greg: A hundred percent. You’re looking at someone who has, because the only reason you need an FTP software is you’re uploading a site to a server. I know if you are searching for filezilla or if you are searching for a tutorial on filezilla you are doing something with a website. And if you are looking for a tutorial on filezilla that tells me you’re not the most advanced person there. So that means you need help with whatever you are looking to do. So why not give that person a tutorial? Hey let me teach you how to use filezilla. And then on the thank you page, by the way, do you need help with marketing that website? Do you need SEO for that website? Do you need someone to do PPC for that website that you are looking to put up there? And the beauty is, from a cost standpoint, nobody else is doing anything with filezilla. You can’t sell filezilla it is a free software so no one is bidding on that keyword. So I can find that customer for pennies while all the other SEO companies are bidding out there paying dollars and dollars to get people to their website. It’s the exact same thing per person. They search for filezilla today and tomorrow except I found a way to get them that my competitor didn’t think about. James: Yeah, I love that. It’s also why I like advertising to those people who are possibly searching about how to tutorials to sell to them because whilst they seem to be kind of the total opposite of the customer that you want, someone trying to do it themselves, than getting a service, there are people that will then get frustrated because they can’t do it themselves. They why you can position in a done for you solution that will take all of their pain and concern and frustration trying to do it themselves away and I guess this is kind of the same thing at play right? Seeing how they are having a problem and then presenting a solution it would be either to solve their problem or perhaps auxiliary to that the hosting and the serving example that you gave? Greg: Yup, you see that it’s that person who has the problem. They say if they want to do it themselves and it is okay but what you’ve done is you’ve identified a huge group of people who’ve identified themselves that say I have a problem, I am looking for a solution and you have the solution. And what I like to teach my students is books. Whatever niche market you are in, whatever product you sell, go out and find every book that has to do with that market and then you bid on those in Google. Because the person looking for that book is serious enough to spend enough money. You want to be in front of those people. That’s some of the best converting keywords ever used with Google Adwords. So again, it’s a traditional channel but we’re going at it in an untraditional, unconventional method. James: Nice! So aside from books which seems to be a fantastic way of identifying these people, how else might you locate these search terms or people that are typing these types of terms in to the search engines? Greg: So I will start with something we all learn in grammar school: who where what why when. And so I will start by asking who are my prospects. What are they looking for? Where else are they getting it from? When do they need it? But the most important question out of all of them is why. When you answer the why question, why do they need this? That opens up the door. To give you an example, let’s look at an ergonomic chair. If you go in to Google and you do a search for ergonomic chair. Every ad there says we’ve got them in stock for a low price. That’s not why people look for an ergonomic chair. The reason they look for an ergonomic chair is because of some level of back pain or some back problem so someone said hey you need to go out and get an ergonomic chair so once you answer the why questions, you start to see that there’s a whole lot other opportunities that I can start going after. People who have back pain, what else are they doing? So now you start placing your ergonomic chair in front of people who have back pain, people who have sciatic nerve, people who need lumbar support and all other opportunities. So you ask yourself, who are they? What are they? Why do they need it? When do they need it? But most importantly is the why question, why do they need this product? And when you answer that, that’s when the floodgates open wide up. James: Nice! Before we close out, let’s cover off some of the what ifs and objections to targeting alternative traffic sources. Is there anything that we should be on the lookout for or perhaps any sort of pitfalls of trying things in an alternative fashion that other people aren’t doing. If they were, what would they be? Greg: There really is no negative or pitfalls to it. The only thing is for people who in an internet marketing space is you don’t want to look for – what is the best way to say it? We’re selling the same things everyone else is selling. We’ve just found ways to get to that consumer that the other folks are not thinking about so don’t say to yourself I want to find markets and opportunities that don’t exist. That’s not where you want to be. We’re just selling the same product and the same services and we’ve just created a different way a more efficient way that consumer. So no pitfalls, the only pitfalls I think is lack of ingenuity and lack of creativity but as long as you think outside of the box, you will find customers that competitors don’t even know exist. James: Nice! Well I know you’re teaching some of these stuff. Certainly you’re teaching the piggybacking method using sites like Amazon. Is that now available? Greg, is that potentially somewhere that we can send our listener off to to get a little bit more of a flavor of more of this stuff? Greg: Yeah, we are in the final stages of our new site which will have all our courses and trainings. It’s at gregcesar.com. James: Awesome! You’ll get a link to Greg’s website and some of the other resources mentioned in today’s show by going to TrafficJamCast.com/70. So all that remains Greg is for me to thank you for coming on the show. This has been awesome! I love looking back and going at this some of these old school methods and some of these less talked about channels because I think it really brings up some of the best insights as opposed to talking about Facebook, and YouTube and Google in the traditional fashion all day long so I found it thoroughly insightful and I just want to say thank you to you for coming on the show. Greg: And to bring that point home, here is a question to you. When did you go to your mailbox and check your mail last? James: Yeah, in fact we just put out a funny cartoon as we do on the site kind of making a joke of how things completely changed originally when we started getting email, we get this little ping that says you’ve got mail and it was just different to get an email in your inbox and now literally we’ve turned a full 360 degrees. It’s got the complete and utter opposite, so I don’t know Greg, I don’t know the last time I got mail but it happens pretty infrequently now. Greg: How about physical mail? Do you get physical mail? James: I send a fair bit of physical mail but that’s just the reason I am a marketer and I want to stand out but physical mail? Hardly ever these days. It is pretty unusual and when it is it is a bank statement. That’s pretty much it. Greg: Now you’ve got to check your mail which is a bank statement. When was the last time you saw a long copy direct sales piece in your mailbox? James: I am guessing that that would be probably close to 10 years ago. Greg: Could you imagine, tomorrow you go check your mail, could be a bank statement or maybe a light bill or something, and here is a long copy sales letter. You look at an envelope and you say, I don’t know who that is, let me open it. So what happens is it stands out like a sore thumb. For me I get so much direct mail, I check my mail three or four times a week, I cannot tell you the last time I got a long copy sales letter. As a matter of fact, I got a letter from Aweber and it was just a regular thank you letter and it stuck out and I was like why is Aweber sending me something in the mail? And I actually saved it because it was so weird to save that but that’s the opportunity and that the offline world, it did not stop existing, it’s just that everyone went online. And so it is so ignored right now that if you do send something offline, it sticks out like a sore thumb and it is a great opportunity. James: Yeah, I will agree with that, I mean one of the things that we do quite regularly in our businesses is just send simple handwritten thank you notes to new customers or people who are doing good stuff for us, be it referrals or something similar. And you would be, I don’t know if you would be surprised but we do get so many great comments back when those little notes go out and it is so simple to do yet nobody is doing it, it’s like we’ve just forgotten about all these great methods to reach our audience and I think sometimes taking a look back to what worked in the past should bring up some pretty good ideas to what you could be doing today. Greg: 100% James: Cool! Well Greg, thank you much, as I have said, it has been a blast and I am sure we’ve just touched the surface of some of the stuff that we could talk about with you so perhaps we can schedule another time to dive a little bit deeper soon. Greg: Absolutely! Anytime. So there you go that was Greg Cesar and you have been listening in to episode#70 of the Traffic Jam podcast. Now we will of course be back real soon with another episode and to make sure that you don’t miss that show as soon as it is released, subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio by following these two links – TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes for iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher for Stitcher. You can also get a direct link to all the bonuses that come with this episode including a downloadable MP3 and full transcript by going to TrafficJamCast.com/70 where you can also join in for the discussion on this show too. Now we end the show with a traffic jam chosen by Greg Cesar. He’s picked a little bit of old school Hip Hop and it is the Sugar Hill gang with Rapper’s Delight. RESOURCES: GregCesar.com Top 10 Adwords Mistakes MENTIONS: Filezilla Aweber Tommie Powers on TrafficJam 67 THE TRAFFIC JAM: The Traffic Jam is a musical Jam chosen by our guest, and Greg Cesar has gone old school with his choice; Rapper’s Delight by the American Hip Hop trio The Sugarhill Gang. Rapper’s Delight, recorded in 1979, became the first rap single to become a Top 40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW: Learn how to market differently, discover new opportunities and swim in a big blue ocean. Download the special episode bonuses including MP3 and word-for-word transcript and find your unique marketing proposition today. All you need to do is click download below and tell us where you want us to send your goodies.

  We all know that honesty is the best policy, yet few adopt that policy like Dan Norris. Dan, most well-known as a no B.S. content marketer and the founder of WP Curve understands that in the crowded world of content marketing you need a differentiator to raise you up above the noise. There are over 200 million blogs online worldwide, and if you are not be “A.N. Other” then you better find a way to be different. Where others have chosen frequency or style, Dan has chosen a position of transparency, candor and honesty as his differentiating factor. Whatever your approach, you’ve got to avoid “content marketing” being your entire content strategy. Marketing these days requires you to stand for something different, offer a contrarian view or zag where others zig. On this podcast Dan shares his journey from failing agency owner to successful entrepreneur and reveals the crucial role content marketing has played in helping his new business (WP Curve) really stand out. SPECIAL BONUS: Download the honest content marketing strategy that made WP Curve an instant hit. Includes MP3 and word-for-word transcript. OUR GUEST: Dan Norris got started in online business running a web agency, which he did for 7 years. Shortly after he closed his agency, he created a web app that was supposed to help business owners get more information through analytics. Unfortunately Inform.ly was a “”failure.” Dan then co-founded WP Curve. WP Curve is an online business that provides unlimited WordPress support and small fixes, 24/7. Since launch in July 2013 the business has grown to 859 active monthly customers. Dan’s passion lies in content marketing. Although he does not recommend blogging for a living, he does believe that the best way to get people to pay attention to your business is through content marketing. His work has been praised by the likes of Joe Pulizzi, often referred to as the godfather of content marketing, and Dan has been voted as Australia’s top small business blogger by Smarter business. When Dan is not hammering away on his computer, he spends his time with his family in the Gold Coast and he goes surfing. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 69  of the Traffic Jam Podcast… Why Dan Chose Content Marketing. Dan’s Content Style. Frameworks that really work. Content Marketing Processes. Sourcing Your Content. Topics to Write About. Measuring Content Success. Dan’s 70/30 Rule. Action Steps for YOU! TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Dan Norris quote from the show: You can also get Dan’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “Talk about your experiences in a way that resonates with your audience.” ~ @theDanNorrisClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide Transcript You’re tuned in to episode#69 of Traffic Jam. I am your host James Reynolds and in just a moment you’ll be listening to me and my guest Dan Norris who I have invited on the show to talk all about content marketing. Everything from content strategy to building your own content marketing team and also how to leverage your existing audience in to a new business model for almost instant profits and that is what Dan did for his new business, WPCurve. We’ll be telling the story of that on this episode. But before we get to the interview I just want to tell you very quickly about an upcoming event. On the 29th of April 2015 I will be holding a webinar called the three most important elements of a high ranking website and how to optimize them to double your traffic and your sales in the next six months. If you want to learn how to better your search engine optimization, increase your ranking, traffic and your sales, then tune in to this webinar to get your seat, you need to go to veravo.com/webinar where you’ll find all the event details and you can of course from that page instantly register. So if you do to that page after the event it will give you details of our next upcoming online event. So now it is time for me to introduce our guest. As mentioned at the top of the show, his name is Dan Norris and he’s from a business called WPCurve which is a company that offers 24/7 unlimited wordpress maintenance and support. It’s business that he has been running now for a little over 12 months with huge success. Dan is actually someone I have known about for quite some time but only got to meet in person about a month ago where we’re both speaking at an event in Sydney and Dan was chronicling the success of WP Curve and what seemed to be instrumental behind its growth which has been incidentally astronomical over the course of the last 12 months. What seemed to be at the core of that was the basis of content marketing an audience that Dan had built up for several years prior to launching WPCurve. So today we are going to talk to Dan about what his content strategy is, how he’s implemented it and where he’s taking it from here. It’s a very frank and open discussion which is very much Dan’s style. I’m sure you’re going to love it. So without any further ado, let’s dive in the interview and welcome to Traffic Jam, Dan Norris from WPCurve. James: Hey welcome back listeners to episode#69 of Traffic Jam and today we are joined by Dan Norris from WP Curve. Dan, how are you doing? Dan: I’m good, thanks! I’m just thinking how many podcasts I have done, I have a feeling you might have just passed me with me as a guest which is weird. James: Really? Well, there you go, 69 is the – Dan: I’m still at 68. James: I don’t know maybe this is some kind of a bingo game we’re playing, anyway, it is all good fun! Dan: I’ve done 68, I’m sorry I just ruined your intro but that’s interesting. James: No, that’s perfect! We’re going to be talking a bit about content marketing today. That’s going to be the main topic of conversation. You as a marketer overall really should have hung your shingles in content marketing over all of the other approaches that you could have used to market your business. Why particularly did you choose content marketing as kind of your main business driver for all of the businesses that you have been involved with? Dan: That’s only for one reason, it’s because it is the only form of marketing that I don’t suck at and that I actually enjoy doing. James: I don’t know If that was necessarily the response I was expecting to hear but I guess that makes sense, right? Dan: Yeah, that’s why I tell people, if they can do something that they’re good at, that they enjoy doing, they’re better off doing that than trying to copy everyone else and trying to do a million things and that’s deliberately what I did when I started the company before this one, which ultimately failed but the content did not fail and I kind of over a couple of years build up a following and I was able to use that when I launched WP Curve. James: That’s an interesting point actually. How much of your current business success can you kind of attribute to your dedication to your content even through the times where your businesses didn’t do well. How far did it put you when you came to launch WP Curve a year or so back? Dan: Well, I’ll never know exactly but I do know that we haven’t spent any money in advertising and I know that when I launched WP Curve I had about 10 people sign up in the first week and they all came from my list and I assumed they signed up because they had a fair amount of trust already because I had been emailing them for a year and writing a bunch of content and doing podcast interviews and that kind of thing so I think they are actually less worried about signing up and from their I have continued on with the content and just focused on word of mouth and content marketing as one of the only way to market my business and so I think from that point of view I would have to say it had been quite successful. James: Yeah, I guess the point here really is if you are doing content regardless of the business it is based around, if indeed it is based around a business, what you’re really doing is building up an audience which you can transfer anywhere if that level of trust has been adopted with that end sort of market in mind. I mean we look at people like, I don’t know, I guess, John of Entrepreneur on Fire would be a classic example, he spent a lot of time building an audience before he actually launched a business around it but because he had that sort of following, it allowed him to tap in to it very, very quickly. And I guess the same seems to have been true to you with WP Curve as well, right? Dan: Yeah, I mean I never really built up the kind of following that he has, I think that the level of following but I think I built just enough trust and credibility to get people to kind of talk about what I was doing and I also did that thing where we chased out later on it was like the monthly reports where I was sort of documenting that I was doing and I was doing that for a whole 12 months before I was making any money like I was trying to make money and failing so they were kind of interesting reports. And they gradually started to be more interesting as I start to make more money and having more success so I kind of have that journey happening before WP Curve and we continued afterwards so I think some of that trust already is transferrable but more than that point, I think during that time I just learned doing good content marketing so at the start of that I was just not going anywhere and I was just writing a post after post and my site was not getting any traction. I think I learned during that time what works, what I’m good at doing, what was resonating with people and then I was able to do it much, much more frequently as WP Curve started to take off. James: I guess this might be a juncture to talk about, kind of your approach to candor and transparency because one thing that you do is you published this reports, detailing your karma and what you have been up to for the month but I think also just generally what you do throughout this content that does seem to development of candor and transparency even to the point when I asked you before this interview, can you share a secret that no one knows about and you said, actually I don’t think there is one. Like pretty much everything is out there for people to see and to read. How important do you think that being transparent is in really supporting strong marketing efforts? Dan: Well, I think it’s just one way to differentiate and I am sort of digging in to this stuff now writing my e-book because I am sort of thinking what’s different about the people who have had good success with content marketing versus the ones who haven’t and it is something that people don’t talk a lot but having that mentioned, John Dumas, he’s one the guys I am talking about in the book and like he had one slight difference when he launched and that was that he did a podcast every single day and otherwise his podcast and his content is not really that much different to everything else that is out there like there’s the entrepreneurship podcast out there, mixergy is kind of the same format but he had that one differentiator of doing this every single day and that just snowballed in to this massive ball of momentum and attention for him and in my case I think the differentiator has been around my genuine desire to help people and to be transparent because I think it is interesting and it is just my style of content and that’s what I notice works. So I think it is like it would be a mistake for someone else to say that monthly reports are working for Pat Flynn and Dan Norris, I should do that, but it would be the right thing for them to think about what they are good at and how they can differentiate and do more of that and what’s working in their case. James: Yeah, well you mentioned your e-book, I think the title is Content Machine which I guess signifies to me that there is some form of framework or system, maybe mechanics built in to your approach with content marketing. What are some of the key systems, frameworks, etc. that people might need in place to really make content marketing work for them as it has done for you? Dan: Well, the thing that is interesting for me is going through the journey of starting the WP Curve blog from scratch and then exiting myself from that so that is really cool to me, to sort of put systems in place I’ve had to put in with WP Curve itself because that’s growing and I can’t do all the work anymore and do that with that content so I now have a full time content manager, we’ve got a bunch of writers who write content for us, we’ve got procedures for everything and like you mentioned we’ve got frameworks for things like coming up with ideas and another one for breaking up ideas in to a bunch of different posts so you might have like broad topic so in our case maybe we’ll write something about an ad that might be working for example. That’s a broad topic and something that our audience will be interested in but how do we create that in to five or six different pieces of content and release those over a couple of months rather than just having one post and kind of having to move on to a whole new idea and then lots of stuff around like what procedures do you have for uploading and creating content, promoting content? What documentation do you give guest writers so they know exactly what to do and what expectations you have? What process do you go to for formatting images to publishing and writing excerpts and basic SEO, all of that kind of stuff and then getting as deep in to automation and sequences and retargeting and things like that so that’s the kind of the stuff I want to give away in the book in terms of like downloadable resources to help other people do the same thing and it is as much about creating good content as it is about making sure that it doesn’t fall back on you as an individual because if you are going to create a business and let it grow then it can’t be you that creates all the content forever. James: And how many of those frameworks or documents existed while you were doing it? Did you have any of it in place has been purely through the process of transferring as the content marketer to someone else, has that been when they’ve actually been generated and created? Dan: No, I am usually pretty good at creating processes even if it is only me or one person in my team doing it. So I’ve had most of this stuff, things like guidelines for creating content or like our guest posting guidelines or a strategy. We’ve had that stuff written down in different formats pretty much since we’ve started but a few things have got a lot more rule, one is allowing people to write content on our site, one that I didn’t really used to do because it was too much work and the other is we now have a full time content manager who manages the whole thing and so for me to train that person after and that is to make sure that every single process we’ve got is really consistent and really detailed so he can just kind of look at that and when there is something wrong with the process he can tell me and then I kind of realized that at the end of doing all of that I had all of these resources that would be useful for other companies so I kind of thought I should be documenting that in book form and I guess one thing led to another to some extent like when I started writing the first part of the book which is just about fundamentals and how do you know what good content is, I went back to the old WP Curve post and looked at what post went well and looked at the criteria for different posts that went well and like what are the sort of things that we built in to the process that we know has got traction on our site like what were the characteristics of a good blog post and then we built that in to a framework that we can use in to a book and give to other people, one thing sort of fed the other. James: Seems like kind of ironically you’ve made yourself redundant from doing content marketing and then you’ve given yourself a book project. You’ve done full circle, right? Dan: Well, yeah but I’ve also got other businesses that I do content for as well like I’ve got this black ops brew which is a brewery in the Gold Coast and I am really enjoying doing the content for that because it’s not like a very advanced industry in terms of content marketing like we get good rewards for really good content, we just put out like this is what we are doing, I did this overseas, nothing really revolutionary but we get really good rewards from that because it is really unique because other people aren’t doing it so I can’t get more motivation from writing that stuff myself than I do from writing the entrepreneurship stuff now. And so I am able to do that content that motivates me and these podcast interviews I really like doing and so it is good I don’t have to do the content for us because I can do a lot more of this stuff. James: Yeah, well I am interested to find out, I guess mainly selfishly kind of how you’ve managed to transfer from yourself from content marketing to someone else, obviously you have to create a lot of systems and frameworks and brief them and get them the structured and brief them about processes, what other things have you uncovered through the process? Perhaps pitfalls or little insights that might help someone like me who’s looking at the idea of giving someone else the initiative for content marketing or perhaps listeners out there who can also take one more thing off their plate and just assign it to someone else? Dan: Well I think the main thing is a lot of people say they want to do content marketing but I don’t want to do it myself, and I think that is fine although I think it is really important that at least the strategy is sound and at least the person who owns the business knows what good quality content is and so I spent a fair amount on the book because I think that it is okay to have someone else doing your content but if they’re not doing good content then it is a complete waste of time, you can find it out the hard way, I think by doing a lot of content yourself and testing things with your audience but you also need to know what to pay attention to and you need to know like if you are putting up a whole bunch of content, you’re writing every day, you’re doing a post-up and you’re only getting only one to two links and it’s not getting traction then that’s a sign that the content is not good enough and so I think the starting point needs to be that you need to understand what makes good content for your audience and I think it is a 50/50 balance to improving things that we know are good. It might be things like the length of the content like I found that the longer post, longer detail actionable posts go really well. Simple things like formatting and headlines and images, making sure the images are really high quality and you don’t have just silly stock photos in there, the images actually mean something to the content. Having really like if you are able to come up with ideas that are contrarian that is something that I had noticed that works really well in getting people’s attention. If you are able to really access people’s emotions like if you are able to talk about your journey or talk about your story or the people in your audience or your customers and do it in a way that really appeals to people, that’s like one of the fundamental things that people will resonate with that idea so that is kind of fundamental stuff but then there’s things that you’ll only learn from your audience like you don’t really know who’s going to be rating your content so when you’re starting out you don’t know which content is going to work so if you know what to pay attention to then you gradually learn you can build that in to a framework for your staff to use. James: And I guess in terms of tracking and understanding what is working and what isn’t, I know when we spoke in Sydney a few weeks ago you send to me, well, there is only probably a handful of instances where I can really attribute any direct sales to my content marketing. So with that being the case, with sales possibly and with your case being the direct measure of results. What are the things that you are measuring to determine whether your content marketing is kind of moving you forward or it is moving in a backward direction? Dan: Yeah I want to measure whether people are caring about my content. So that is all I measure and what I do is really quite simple, I look for content that I would call is a breakout hit. I dub it because the average post may have 10 tweets, if someone’s reading it it is good, but we really want people to share, if people aren’t sharing, then it is not good enough. So I look for the content that is getting 50+ tweets and we’ve had posts that had 500+ but we aim each month to get a post that gets at least 50+ and those numbers are different depending on your audience but with the post, I don’t really care how many people read it, I just care whether or not they care enough to share and the other thing I care about is what they say, whether it be by replying to my emails or by commenting on the post, I pay attention to what they say and if what they say is. If they tell me that they’ve applied it, I’ve got an email, I’ve replied last week to an email we sent out and the email said something like, this is really great, I’ve been able to apply this directly in my business. I think I sent out some of these – I think I sent out a content strategy document and the reply was they have been able to use this. I’ve modified it for my business and I am now using it as a strategy for my business so to me that is like the ultimate reply because people are actually using it. If you are going to comment like oh, this is a great post, thanks for mentioning me or this is really interesting, then, that is cool. Getting people to comment is enough but there is a massive difference between a comment and someone who says they’re actually using it and if it is something that is useful then people will share it and will care a little more about it. So I pay attention to that. The other thing I like to see with my content specifically, I have noticed three things with content that stand out really well. One is actionable, so it tells me where the people are using it, the other is emotional appeal so I look for- like if I talk at a conference and someone comes to me afterwards and say that I can really relate to that, it felt like you were telling my story, then that’s when I know it worked. When I get a comment like that it means that I have really connected with people and the other one is that contrarian thing so if you get people getting on there and disagreeing with you or like sharing it on social media and saying that they’ve got a different perspective or something like that then I think that’ sort of grabbing someone’s attention and for me that sort of content is what’s worked really well. James: I know in that document that you shared with me there were a few different types of content that you would look to explore breaking a kind of a topic out to some I think some of those are case studies and roundups and how to’s and how not to which I guess is the contrarian approach. Do you find that sort of relying on actionable content or content should I say that seem to get the best results. This seems to be actionable based content. Do you find that a lot of your post tends to be a lot of these detailed how to run through types? Dan: Sometimes but it might also just be like we’ve been writing a lot about the topic of remote staff. So an example there would be like a blog post that gets a bunch of remote work just to give their own perspective with what it’s like to work remotely. And to me that differentiates from normal blog posts that we put out there because people don’t ask usually ask for advice on that sort of thing and we’ve done a bunch of things like ask a bunch of remote workers to give their own perspective on what it is like to work remotely. And to me that differentiates from normal blog posts that you put out there because people don’t often ask this stuff or advice for this types of things and we’ve done things like ask a whole bunch of tips from a bunch of different start-ups to share their perspectives on what it’s like to work remotely. And the people who are on remote work can really relate to that. Not that their super actionable. But it that’s thing where they’re like emotionally connected to and something like that works for sure. If we’re mentioning out the companies, it’s like partnership posts where the other company benefits from that post as well and we are getting from their audience so it is not all like super actionable stuff but if we look at historically at the post that I have done with the guest on the site, it is the actionable stuff, like running a podcasting guide that was three to four thousand words long. That was the first one I did that really got a lot of traction and it was literally step by step like this is everything you need to do to create a podcast. James: Yeah absolutely! What I know in terms of my own experience and also that of my guest that I’ve had on the show, their experience also tend to suggest that certainly long form is always going to outperform short form just because of the pure detail and perceived value I guess would be the other part and certainly kind of this how to actionable type stuff because like you said, you want to leave people with not just a fuzzy feeling and a nice piece of content but actually some real results that they can apply and they can then attribute to Dan Norris’s post about podcasting and that’s really the effect that we want to have, right? Dan: Yes and I think the other thing there is like if someone is going to go to the effort of clicking on the link on Facebook or Twitter to go to your site, it really needs to be worth their while. Sort term stuff so you’re really just better off posting that on social media so people can kind of just see it and in their face but if you need to go to an effort in five seconds in clicking and then waiting for the site to load and then keeping that just really long detail actionable stuff that’s like a resource that sits on your own pace at your own time. James: Yeah, perfect! Let’s kind of get closer wrapping things up, perhaps talking a little bit about how you promote your content once that it has published, I know you’ve got systems in place for that and certainly a targeted audience that you reach out to as standard for some of your content pieces. Do you want to walk us through what you do sort of post publishing with a piece of content that are WP Curve? Dan: Yeah, this is one of the frameworks I include in the book. Our process is not that involved as we’ve got a reasonable list already like when I first started I was doing a lot more but now the main things we do are we have a weekly email that we send to our list and we’ve got about twenty thousand people on our list and we also do scheduled tweets, that would generally be like a quotable reference in the article or it might be in with the remote tweet where we’ll say three remote workers from Zapia, Baffa and whoever, share their thoughts in remote working so that will tag that other company in the post and maybe encourage them to tweet it. We’ll also do like an image using Canva especially if it is something like where we’ve interviewed someone or we’ve got a quote from someone in an article and we’d just like put a nice image, maybe an image of them or something relevant to put a quote on top of that and then post that on social media and all that kind of gets scheduled. All that gets looked after by the admin team so when Carl approves the post or fill in the content promotion document and the admin team just take that and do the rest with it, there’s a couple of sites we post our content to but we don’t do a lot of that these days because it’s almost like early on all my contents are a bunch of links in LinkedIn and Facebook groups but now that we’ve got a reasonable audience as it is, I don’t like to do that quite as much. That’s probably all that we do, there’s a lot more that you can do. We also do a bit of interlinking within our post, nothing like technically sexy but just making sure we mention other stuff we’ve written during our content and we also do a lot of mentioning other people in our content and we deep link to their site and we usually tell them, if we’ve linked to them we tell them that we’ve mentioned them in the post and ask them to share if they like if there’s a reasonable question to ask. James: Yeah certainly, I mean that relying on mentioned parties especially if they’ve also got a little bit of weight in your market is very powerful because everyone likes to be mentioned and they’ll of course shout about when they have been, right? Certainly that makes sense. Dan: I think you need to be careful with that. We don’t do that for most of our content, we don’t ask people every time we do but depending on the content it can work really well. One of the content pieces we’re doing this month is a content marketing survey for startups and I emailed a bunch of people. I emailed guys like Gideon Shaw, Neil Patel and No Arcadian, all these guys and I am like can you share this survey because it is good for the industry for us to do this kind of survey and you may ask people to share that because it is good for everyone, it is not really that self-serving and all of those guys shared and we got 30-40 responses in one day when we did that and then when we released sort of all the content available we’ll get back to those guys and say thanks for sharing and thanks for contributing. Here’s the survey result, please share it with the audience if you think it’s useful. James: Yeah, and I guess because they’ve been involved in the process the likelihood of them actually sharing it will be significantly increased, right? Because they feel like they are a bit a part of it. Dan: Definitely, yeah. James: Cool! I guess we should maybe cover some objections at this point. I guess one objection that a lot of people have around content is just the time it takes to pay dividends and I guess you would pay true testament to that, right? You were really plugging away with content before you saw the biggest business benefits down the line. What are the objections that people have against doing content that maybe you could answer? Dan: That one, which I can answer, I can say that it is, it is a long term thing. There’s a few ways you can hack off to some extent like really early on, I have this 70/30 rule where if you are just getting started you do 70% of your content offsite and 30% onsite. And then you flip that back the other way once you’ve got enough audience to gain traction on its own and so when I got started I did a whole bunch of articles offsite. I’d sent my best articles to pro-blogger and think traffic which is now fizzle and other sites like that and a lot of my good stuff ends up outside of our site and then it ends up in my send because I was trying to hack that natural slow process where it’s just going to take forever to build up an audience. And that works like you do get an extra audience if you use that in your site and you can set up for conversions to actually build that email list and fundamentally content marketing is not a short term strategy so I wouldn’t even necessarily try to deal with that objection. If you want a really short term strategy then content marketing is not really the right choice. Most of the objections are probably misunderstanding. More than anything it’s probably more than anything like I want to do content marketing but I don’t want to do the actual articles or that I like writing but I am a slow writer and that sort of stuff and then again to me I don’t really want to do content marketing so I don’t really have to respond to that so I just sort of say like you need to find a unique way to do marketing your business. That is something you’re good at and so if someone is telling you to do content marketing but if you really don’t want to, you really don’t have the skills and have the patience to build up a strategy and pay someone to do it then you probably shouldn’t be doing it. James: Well I guess that terminology for that famed social media, right? Content is getting to the point now where it is becoming sort of a mainstay and a known terminology and businesses are beginning to if they don’t have already found out about it and probably have been told they should be doing it just like social media I think that they’d want to jump in to it even if it’s not the right thing for them to be doing in the first place so – Dan: That’s right. As long as you understand that before you decide because I think a lot people just think you choose a hundred different topics and then you create a two hundred word article about that topic and you put it on your site and that’s content marketing and that’s kind of SEO. To me that doesn’t work, it’s never worked for me and content marketing is that it is worth spending a bit of time educating yourself to work out what it is and realize that it is actually about being useful to people. And people might actually find that they’re a lot lucky more than they think and if they can really write something that is useful for people. The other thing that I found is that people sort of assume that they have to write specific content about their niche and that causes a lot of problems I think for one thing it means that that the content you write is often very boring and not interesting to the person writing and/ or reading it because you’re like specifically trying to write for a keyword and I don’t think you’d have to do that. I just think you can create content for a general broad audience as long as it is broadly related to us and if it is useful content I think you are better off doing that and creating something useful and getting all the benefits of backlinks and social sharing and word of mouth and everything else and I think people once they sort of realize that they’ve got a license to do that and they can sort of write about something a bit broader then they can enjoy doing it. James: Yeah, cool. Well let’s give some listeners perhaps some action steps and some places to go off and explore as a result of this interview. I’m going to suggest that contentmachine.com, Dan, you’re probably going to tell us when that book is coming out but I know if you visit contentmachine.com right now you can pre-register for updates as you are working on the project, would that be right? Dan: Yes you can do that and I’ve also got the link to the Facebook page where I am sharing a lot of the early chapters and some of the downloads and things. In terms of when it will be out it will be the first half of this year, I am not exactly sure when because I have to sort of rely on people to do it for me like formatting things but hopefully by June this year and other places I guess just WPCurve.com/blog which is where you’ll see our content and I am on all the social networks, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like. James: And the like we’ll find. Absolutely so to you the listener if you want to find the link to all of the resources and Dan’s social profiles head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/69 where you can also join in on the discussion for this episode. So yeah I think that leaves us pretty much to wrap things up. Dan, all I want to say is thanks for coming on, it’s absolutely been a blast a cool tip apart from your journey so thanks again for your time. Dan: Yeah thanks for having me. Anytime! So a huge thank you to Dan Norris from WPCurve.com and with that we almost round out the episode. Now of course there will be another show coming up very, very soon and to ensure that you don’t miss that, be sure that you are subscribed via iTunes or Stitcher radio, and to find the listing on both of those places you can follow these two links. The first is TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes which will of course take you to the iTunes player or TrafficJamCast.com/Sticher for Stitcher radio. To get all of the resources mentioned in this show plus a downloadable MP3 and a full word for word transcript, go to TrafficJamCast.com/69 where you can also join in on the discussion for this show. Now we end Traffic Jam as we always do, with a jam chosen by our guest. Dan Norris has asked me to choose a Kanye West track and I have opted for the 2007 tune Stronger which contains a sample by one of my favorite bands, Daft Punk. So enjoy this, Stronger, by Kanye West and I will see you back here with episode#70 really, really soon. See you then! RESOURCES: WPCurve The Content Machine Dan on Twitter MENTIONS: Mixergy Pat Flynn – Traffic Jam Episode 9 John Lee Dumas – Traffic Jam Episode 17 THE TRAFFIC JAM: The traffic jam is a musical jam chosen by our guest. The Dan Norris episode track is a song by American Hip Hop recording artist, Kanye West. Stronger was released as the second single from his third studio album, Graduation (2007). The song utilises a vocoder-affected sample of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” by French house duo Daft Punk. HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW: Learn how to create content that people care about. To help you come up with uniquely different content that resonates with your audience (and promote it better) we’ve bundled up the word-for-word transcript plus MP3 version of this podcast and made it available for your download below. Just press “download now” and tell us where to send the training and you’ll receive an email with your bonuses right away. What are you waiting for? Go right ahead and press download now.

  Hands down the best way to position yourself in front of other peoples audiences is to get introduced. When you “join up” to co-promote with other non-competing businesses who allow you access to their customers, you get to reach your new ideal audience pre approved. Joint ventures, examples of which are shared in this podcast, are the most highly leveraged (marketing) relationships that allow two businesses to reap the benefits from one set of customers. But because at the core of joint ventures is the requirement to share, JV’s are often met with much hesitation and skepticism. On this show, we dive deep in to joint ventures. We cover the strategy, what makes a good (and a bad) JV partner, how to craft the ‘right’ JV offer and tackle the objections that are holding you back from conducting your own joint venture. Whether you are skeptical or curious about joint ventures, you’ll find plenty in episode 67. SPECIAL BONUS: Download free Join Venture training. Includes MP3 and word-for-word transcript. OUR GUEST: Andy Hussong is a joint venture specialist from Indianapolis. He made his name during a 5 year tenure as the affiliate manager for the internet marketer John Reese. He now works with several friends of the Traffic Jam podcast including Ryan Levesque, Todd Brown and Kyle Graham. He comes to Traffic Jam highly endorsed. Andy owns and operates the website JVAttractionCoach.com aimed at sharing strategies for product owners, JV brokers and affiliate managers. Prior to that Andy ran AffiliateManagementInsider.com from 2009 until 2013. Andy’s focus is to help online marketers have higher sales every month through coaching, home study programs and consulting. Outside of the marketing arena Andy enjoys coaching baseball and hanging out with his wife, family and friends. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 68  of the Traffic Jam Podcast… What is a Joint Venture? Why a JV is Good for You. Finding the Right JV Partners. Approaching the Low Hanging Fruit. Webinars Work for JV! Overcoming the JV Phobia. Laying Down the JV Deal. Co-promoted Benefits. What Makes a Successful JV Partnership. You’ve Got to Do This Now! TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Andy Hussong quote from the show: You can also get Andy’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “JV partners should remember that the customer doesn’t belong to any of us.” ~ @AndyHussongClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide Transcript Hi there listener! Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is show#68 of the podcast that teaches you how to get more traffic to your website and build a profitable audience online. I am of course your host, James Reynolds. And I am very thankful as always to have you with me today for the show. Hoping you’ve had a good week so far. Just before we get in to the content, a couple of quick announcements, the first one is that on the 29th of April, I am going to be holding a free online and live event titled, The Three Most Important Elements of a High Ranking Website and How To Optimize Them to Double Your Traffic and Sales in the Next Six Months! So if you want to learn how to leverage search engine optimization to rank your website higher on Google, and generate more traffic and sales for your business, then this is an event you don’t want to miss. To get more information and to register, go to veravo.com/webinar which if you find that page after the event, I am sure you will be able to find out what the next event is coming, so go and find that and register if it is of interest to you. The second thing I want to ask you today is to just go, review and rate on iTunes or Stitcher, I do ask this every once in a while because it really is the best way that you can show support for the show so I’d really encourage you to do that. Of course it helps Traffic Jam rank better in iTunes and that has the benefit of getting the show out to more people. I really would appreciate that if you took just two minutes of your time this week to go and review the show. And of course if there’s some interesting reviews which tends to be the most, make sure that they are read out on a future episode. Today’ show, the topic is joint ventures and we’re joined by Andy Hussong who’s a baseball loving, former US Army National guard who shot to notoriety in the marketing scene being the affiliate manager for John Reese, the former internet marketing guru if you like from 10 years or so. Andy is now working with some of the rising stars in internet marketing. People like Ryan Levesque, Todd Brown, Kyle Graham – all friends of the show here and he really is kind of the number one expert in joint venture partnerships so we’re diving deep in to that topic today. I am not going to spin out the intro anymore, I think it’s just worth diving straight in to the content. We cover a huge amount on the show, from what to look for in joint venture partners, what to promote and how to promote so I am sure you are going to love every second of it. So let us all welcome to the show Andy Hussong for a chat all about joint ventures. James: So welcome back listeners! You’re tuned in to episode#68 of Traffic Jam and today we are talking joint ventures with Andy Hussong. Andy how are you doing? Andy: Pretty great James, I appreciate it man. James: Well let’s dive straight in. Let’s talk about what a joint venture is. If I take a dictionary definition, a joint venture occurs when two or more parties agree to contribute to an enterprise for a share of revenues. How accurate is that definition as it relates to joint ventures for the purpose of marketing which we are talking about today? Andy: I believe it is pretty spot on actually. It depends on who you ask. But I personally believe a joint venture is just any kind of collaboration between two companies that is mutually beneficial and that is not necessarily always both companies promoting each other’s products and services, although that’s what typically happens quite a bit. As long as both sides benefit from the collaboration in some fashion, that would be considered a joint venture. James: Got it. Now a typical kind of why question that might pop up at this stage would be as a host of those types of relationships. Why give up your kind of harder good will relationship to someone else or on the other side of the coin, why split your profits when you could acquire a customer by going direct? What would you answer to those types of questions? Andy: Well I believe that in working with other people to do joint ventures and such, it pays to give a percentage of the profit to start that relationship, not just with a joint venture partner but with the people who are on the subscriber list or customer list that you are working with because that there is a very good chance that working with the people in their subscriber’s database would never do business with you because they have never heard of you without the introduction from your partner so that would be the first and foremost thing I would say about that. James: Okay, well let’s get talking about how we might establish or perhaps find joint venture relationships. Have you got any particular kind of criteria for identifying the right joint venture partners? Andy: Sure! You mean for yourself, right? Your own company, correct? James: Yeah, let’s consider- let’s talk about in my situation, I’ve got a business I want to look out there for people who could promote my stuff and introduce it to their own customers or contacts. How would I identify who might be the right people to approach to do that? Andy: Well first, what I always recommend to people to do is that assuming you have a solid product or service available that converts really well and has a low refund rate which proves that it works for people and people are getting good value and so on. What I would do first is create a contact list of people in your niche who could potentially be a partner for you and prioritize a list of contacts of people who’ve probably met at a live event or some of your clients who love you or who already know they can trust you and could potentially be a marketing partner with you and so on. Even just regular customers or people who you have pinpointed as someone that you could reach out to just trying to get that first JV deal to your belt. And the reason I say that is that so many people think they have to get tons and tons of partners and affiliates to promote for them which you’ll do in a sense especially when you do a product launch or whatever. But if you really just want to get to the basics, it’s all about getting that first JV partner under your belt and then leveraging the results that you’ve got from that in to several partners down the road. So that will be the first thing I will do, just look after your lookout to see who your low hanging fruit are and reach out to them to get a discussion about what you have going on and then leverage from there. James: You said kind of in your niche, I assume we are not talking about direct competition here, we are talking perhaps about those people who have similar audiences but non-competing products or service. Would that be right? Andy: Exactly! Ideally you want to reach out to someone who is in the same marketing space but maybe they are offering a software that complements what you are doing and so on but some people even will reach out to people who are competitors and look for ways to support each other that makes sense, that doesn’t make you guys in direct competition, or even if it does, if you are trading each other’s subscriber list to help each other out. Some people do that, most don’t but I have seen it done before. James: Yeah and it seems to be pretty much confined to the marketing or internet marketing space, right? A few other industries you wouldn’t see a competing companies sharing customers but that kind of mindset does seem to be more prevalent in a space that you and I both operate in. Would you say that is the case? Andy: Yeah, and unfortunately it is pretty incestuous now within the internet marketing scenario. But mainly what it really all comes down to is getting a good, clear picture of the type of partners you’d like to work with and then just being real and reaching out to them in way that you’ll get the conversation and you’ll get them to first place without trying to hit over and trying off the bat, don’t overwhelm it. For the purposes of this call, this is a podcast interview and my last 20 to 30 minutes or whatever, I could go on all day about the do’s and don’ts and what you should and shouldn’t but as long as you are focused on a low hanging fruit that you already know and have a high probability of getting their attention at least and just focus on getting one or two deals on your belt and then putting a hundred percent of your efforts in to making that deal do really well for their sake and for your own sake then again you can leverage from there and there are all kinds of things that you can do to make that happen but those are the initial steps that I recommend everyone start out with. James: Okay, cool. So if we are to find some low hanging fruit and are easy to find joint venture partners. What’s the best way to then approach them? What’s the perfect pitch look like to get a JV partner? Andy: Okay, if it is somebody who is a low hanging fruit, someone who you know already and someone who likes and trusts you, the best way you can do is to reach out and authentically care about what they are doing and what they want at this point. Obviously you want them to promote for you but when you reach out to them, you want to make it all about what’s in it for them first of all but you also want to know what is making them tick right now, what products they are promoting, and more importantly, if they are even interested at all in joint venture opportunities because it doesn’t do any good to contact someone and ask them if they’d consider recommending you to their audience if you haven’t shown them the respect right up front to say, look man, I see that you’ve got a webinar about such and such, how is that going for you? And by the way, curious, are you looking to do any joint ventures with other marketers and their webinars, whatever the case may be. And so the key now is just about having a simple conversation, you’re asking them a question or two just to get them engaged and it is like you are serving them basically to find out if they are doing deals first and foremost, second of all if they are, go back to them with a better reply, look, this is what I have, let me know if it is of interest to you. Here is what I have in mind based on my research and so on. You can also tell them, look, obviously, you know your audience better than I do. I am not going to sit here and tell you that this is a great fit for your list but from my initial research just kind of looking at what you have from the outside looking in, to me it seems like it could potentially be a really nice match and so what you are doing there you are showing them respect of saying look, you understand your people. They’re the one who had put their blood, sweat and tears of building your audience, you’re not. And the reason you’re not setting it up is because after so many years of working as an affiliate for John Reese who is an internet marketing expert in 1994 – 2003 or something like that. While I was working with him, we got so many offers asking us to consider promoting for them when we hadn’t even started the conversation, I didn’t even know who they were. And so they went to the bottom of the list automatically. And so you build that rapport first, just with some simple questions and so on and the worst thing people would say is, hey, I’ve got this product that would be perfect for your list. And I am like, dude, how do you know that? How do you know what’s best for someone else’s list? And so that always complicates. James: It seems that a lot of this stuff is really built on relationships and trust which would make total sense because if I am to give up my customers to you and all then they suggest I go and check up your stuff, you want to make sure that they are to be looked after the product that I am suggesting they check out is good so we can see that that is going to be prevalent. What about to those people who are unfamiliar with joint ventures? Obviously in the internet marketing space people understand what the concept is. But what about to those people who make maybe working more on offline environments where this type of thing is less widely used. How would you overcome perhaps their concern into a JV relationship? Andy: The first thing is it all starts with mindset and understanding both sides of a potential joint venture deal are coming from and when I say the mindset is a lot of people think why would I promote someone else? What if they steal my customers? Keep in mind, these customers don’t belong to any of us. We get customers based on our marketing and they are going to love us and keep coming back to us if we do our job and do it well, regardless of what other people are doing. As long as we are focused on what we do, then we are taking care of what we can control and then when it comes to partnering with other people, the key is, it is like what you mentioned in this call is to find complementary products and services that you fill would be a match and then reach out to them and get the conversation again whether you are online or offline, if you’ve got a jewelry store for instance, obviously a lot of the customers are men who come in to get gifts for their wives in Valentine’s Day, Christmas and so on. Well that jewelry store could team up with a florist to maybe offer a package deal of maybe you come in, you spend $500 in jewelry and we are going to throw in a bunch of red roses. And so it’s just about thinking about complementary products whether it is in your local town or just if you have a brick and mortar business and you know someone maybe a few cities away but something complimentary and you have to have the mindset that look, we are all in this to stay in business. Who can I team up with that can help support that and who can I support to help bring more business to them? And in fact, that is one of the best ways to reach out to someone, make it all about that other person and say, look, I have got an idea for how I can help refer new business to you. Would have time to jump on a quick phone call or something? A simple as that and then you start with a quick phone call session where you discuss the different possibilities. James: Yeah, perhaps a point that might be beneficial here and one of the things that I found to be very successful in terms of getting inside the mindset of the other person is to position the fact that they really are just tapping in to the profits and revenues that otherwise they wouldn’t have available to them right? So if I put my product in front of their audience and it is a product that they too don’t sell, wouldn’t it be beneficial for them to get a piece of that pie because normally they wouldn’t. So yeah it is really like what you said, I am sure positioning it from the point of view of the other person to get them to see the benefit in the relationship. Let’s talk about perhaps how a deal might be structured. We mentioned at the onset of the interview that typically this would be a percentage of revenue type deal or some form of cash payment. Is that the only way to do it or is there another way you could compensate your JV partner with a JV deal? Andy: There are different ways. You can do it obviously, what we are used to in marketing realm is opt for a percentage, but you can also pay what is called a bounty. You can pay somebody a flat fee for having somebody referred to you or having referred different people to you, it just depends on what the offer is and so on. Would you want to expand on that question a little bit? Are you asking besides paying a percentage, how else can you pay them or compensate them? Is that the main question? James: Yeah, I guess that would be the first part, does it always need to be a cash payment? I’ll give you perhaps an example from my previous business which was an offline company selling photography services, instead of actually offering a cash reward to our joint venture partners, we actually offer them free services. So we said to them, look, if you introduce our service to your customers, we’ll give you a credit on photography services that you can then go and use yourself. So I am just wondering if there is any other creative ways that you could compensate that might not just be putting some cash on someone else’s pocket? Andy: Absolutely. And that’s one thing that does happen a lot in our space too where people sometimes will offer their coaching services or access to their mastermind group that might cost twenty thousand a year or more. And so they provide access to that and that then is worth more than let’s say you would have made 10 grand or so in promotion. Well instead if you have access to somebody’s mastermind group that meets a couple time a year or maybe they have online or telephone conversations throughout the year and they are discussing different internet marketing strategies. Think how much more money that could be worth to you so people will barter things such as that but the typical thing is to keep it simple is to offer a decent commission that makes people happy but then obviously people make other types of deals as well and if you don’t mind me saying, one thing that happens a lot is that for instance if someone comes to you and asks would you consider promoting for them, what you would respond with, well would you also consider reciprocating promoting for me? A lot of people would want other companies to reciprocate for them if they are going to promote for that company. And that is fine but that is not always possible. But what I want to point out is that there are a lot of other different ways to reciprocate so this is along the same lines of what you are asking but when it comes to reciprocation, you can reciprocate by also agreeing to promote for them, you can also agree to what we just said, maybe give them a couple of hours of their consulting time to get them through their issues with what your expertise is. And there is so many different things that you can do to return the favor someone promotes for you other than simply promoting for them because what they have to offer may not be a fit to your audience and it is important that you. Have that policy in place beforehand to know what to say if someone asks you to reciprocate. You can let them know, look, I would be more than happy to take a look at it, it’s a first priority for anyone who wants to promote for us but obviously it’s got to be a fit for our list and if it isn’t then we could talk about some other ways that I can help scratch your back because you helped promote our product to your audience. James: Yeah exactly! I think it is a very good point because if you recommend someone else’s stuff, their stuff might not actually be a good fit and not very good so you don’t really want to bite yourself in to those scenarios where reciprocation in the form of promotion is the requirement. You want to make sure that you have the options to kind of reward them with. I guess my next question moving on from this is how do we structure the agreement? Is this something that we get down in to writing and agree on it or is it more of a gentleman’s agreement where we go and agree on it, what would you recommend to be the set up? Andy: Well again it depends on who you are, what kind of niche you’re in. If you’re online, offline, how much you know the person you are dealing with. But I will be honest with you, in the years that I have been doing this, I have had only a written agreement on a few of the projects I have worked on and that was me as a JV director, affiliate manager or whatever you may want to call it, working on a product lines to make sure all of the expectations were black and white and we knew who’s getting paid and how we’re getting paid and when we’re getting paid and so on. But honestly, most of the deals I have done have been gentlemen’s agreements just based on the fact that most of the people I have worked with in the niche I am in which is basically internet marketing mainly high level internet marketing products, all of us are used to working together, promoting webinars for each other and so on and its just something that people have agreed to do and then they just do it. But then again, there are higher level joint venture deals that can be done offline or online that if you don’t know the other person and you have a lot at stake, you definitely want to get some agreements in place just to make sure that everyone’s backside is covered, you know. James: Yeah, okay cool. I think now we should talk a little bit about perhaps the marketing aspect and maybe begin with the offer. In your experience, what is the best platform for a JV partner to promote you with and I guess I am talking about options like doing a co-hosted webinar and offer email to their list, what type of platform works best for this types of things? Andy: What has worked really well, and what I had focused a lot of my time on is on the live webinars that have been done through GoTo Webinars for instance and when I say the products I have worked on I basically help coordinate deals between people who someone who has a really solid webinar answer that they make at the end of that webinar with somebody who has a contact list to promote each other. But I would say that one of the more powerful ones is doing these live webinars because then if you are doing a live webinar, let’s say you are doing one every two weeks, you only need one JV partner every two weeks to line up to keep the revenue coming in and then that takes the pressure off of you, let’ say you’re doing a launch in a month trying to get as many partners as you can. Make that watch as big as you can make it. There is no right or wrong in terms of what you should and what you shouldn’t do, in terms of should we do a webinar or a product launch? It’s all based on what your preferences are and what your goals are for your promotions but I personally love the live webinar models working with JV partners but then what’s cool about that is as you dial that in and you continue doing with that after one or two JV partner deals that you do out of these webinars, it becomes a lot easier to get more partners to promote for you and then you can also leverage that by turning that in to an automated webinar, you can start sending paid traffic to any webinar but I really believe that anyone who says that joint venture deals aren’t good to do because you got paid 50% or whatever the commission is, are missing the boat in that these relationships that you’re building with these people can lead to so many other relationships whether it’s joint venture deals or whatever, it could lead to introductions of someone who can really help you dial in your Facebook ads or someone who could help you set up a solid outreach strategy for your business. Who knows what that could lead to, but anyway, I am kind of off tangent here going from one thought to another here, I have been known to do that so – James: No, I will come back to that point in just a second but what I do want to loop back to is the concept of doing this as a webinar, I can see how this could be so successful because if we think about where we are at in time, 2015, this is kind of now different to someone literally walking you in to a business meeting together with their customer, right? It is more leveraged to a larger scale, your turning to a live event where you are both present, showing that you both exist and you both are in endorsement of each other’s product or service and you are presenting that together to your customers and that is really no different to walking in to a customer meeting with your joint venture partner and introducing their stuff to your customers and that’s the point I want to make and secondly, in terms of networking, it is very much why I do this podcast for the same reason these conversations and relationships that you build up doing this co-promoted and co-conducted content pieces really has so many spin off benefits, would you agree? Andy: Yeah, spot on, awesome. James: Cool, let’s again fast forward a little bit from here now, again talking about what the offer might be, something that I found to be most successful is offering some sort of special deal as a sort of host of that webinar to the other person’s list, because it makes it more appealing to them for their customers and secondly from their point of view, they’re getting a special deal for their customers that otherwise won’t be available. Do you agree that that’s probably the best approach in terms of positioning an offer? Andy: Sure, anytime you can offer a special deal especially if the JV partner is introducing you to their audience, not only are they endorsing you, but if you can come up with a special offer for them especially if your JV partner can include some bonuses to go along with it to entice them to go onboard. It is very powerful! James: Yeah and what was the most powerful JV that you’ve ever done, Andy? You’ve been involved in many, what was it? And I guess my follow up question to that what makes it so successful? Andy: It depends on what you mean by success. I’ve had some that resulted in some really big sales and recently I got some JV partners for a webinar, I don’t know from the sale how much money they did but they did I know they had a high six figures just from that in about a month and a half so I can’t really say who it is, they have to give me permission on that, but what I can say is that one of the most successful deals I have done is between two marketing experts named Todd Brown and Ryan Lee and the reason I say they were successful is that they both really got each other and were really 100% to promote each other and really in tune with partners people gather as much value and solid content and a great offer and so when these people are a hundred percent in for each other, then things just blow up. And I think it is like $50,000 sale from a webinar both sides or something at this point, I can’t remember what the actual numbers were. But if you are talking about huge hundred thousand dollar webinar deals stuff I know there was one that I did with someone else that resulted in over a hundred thousand and again that was because both sides were all in to take care of each other. But let me say this to you real quick James. One of the keys to this, the one that Todd Brown and Ryan Lee did, the reason it did so well is that they both agreed to take on a 15 minute break and storm call and talk about the possibilities on how to position it and everything. Then what that does and is a key to you guys to think over. The key to this type of call is that it creates buzz between two people so that then both sides they can’t wait to promote each other and then they just go all in, or all out for the promotion and if they haven’t had that conversation they may have not done a third of what they have had to do from doing that. James: Interesting! Well, let’s get close to wrapping up, I guess there are a few people out there thinking I’d love to give this a shot but with everything else going on too time poor to take action on it, do you need to do it yourself or can you get someone else to set this up on your behalf? Andy: Oh, yeah, for sure. If you go back to what I mentioned about keeping in mind that you should go after your low hanging fruit and just concentrate one or two deals, keep it simple, then you can get other people on board but especially if you just spend one hour of your week to reach out to your low hanging fruit sending multiple emails in bullet points letting them know what you have. First of all if you know them and they know you, they are going to be receptive to what you bring to them, they’ll at least take a look at it. So if you start doing that and then as you ramp up, you definitely want to start considering bringing somebody on board, especially a JV manager versus a JV broker there is a difference there and we don’t have time to get in to but basically you want to have somebody who could be in-house and they can be the JV manager of all the things you do. They can help bring on all the new partners and then they can also bring in the information to those partners and schedule everything so you can focus on what you do best for your business. James: Great! Well let’s leave our listeners with perhaps some action steps. I am going to borrow one from you and say go and spend an hour identifying those relationships that you could contact and who could potentially be good joint venture partners for you and I’ll leave it to you to perhaps assign a couple more. What two more action steps that you recommend our listeners take as a result of listening to this? Andy: Yeah, okay. So before you even do that, before you line up your partners, what you need to do is get organized and get clear what your joint venture opportunity is and what’s in it for the potential JV partner. Get all of that information together, how much money are they going to make by selling your product? Some basic information about the product itself, price points and so on, and then set it all up on a simple one page website, I call it the JV attraction page because it is set up like a sales page but the purpose is to sell potential partners on promoting your joint venture opportunity. And so get that together on page like that and then prioritize your list of contacts and reach out to them and then you can just send them to that page when they are interested and say, look, check out this page, it’s got a quick 2 minute video on it and all the information that you need. Let me know if it sounds like it would be an offer you’d take and then boom, you’re in business. James: Cool! You can get a full summary of everything that Andy just mentioned in the show notes of episode#68 of Traffic Jam which of course you do get to by going to trafficjamcast.com/68 where of course you can also join in for the discussion for this episode as well so all that remains for me is to thank you for coming on Andy. I thoroughly enjoyed this one actually, I think we have given our listeners some cool stuff and some great action points to go and implement so thank you for your time and perhaps again in the future we can have a round two and we can do it all again. Andy: Sounds awesome James. I appreciate you having me on. So thank you for listening in to episode#68 of Traffic Jam with Andy Hussong. We will of course be back next week with another episode where we’ll be joined by Dan Norris who’s going to be talking to us all about building an audience through content marketing. In the coming week, make sure that you subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher and whilst you’re there, please take the time to leave a review for the show as well. For a direct link to all the bonuses that come with this episode including a downloadable MP3, full transcript of today’s session and a few other goodies too, go to TrafficJamCast.com/68 where you know the drill, you can also join in on this show too. Now we end this week with a traffic jam chosen by Andy Hussong and he’s picked a full on rock track, Guns and Roses, Welcome to the Jungle. So enjoy the track and I will see you back here next week. RESOURCES: JV Attraction Formula JV Attraction Coach Andy Hussong’s JV Formula MENTIONS: Todd Brown on TrafficJam Go To Webinar THE TRAFFIC JAM: The traffic jam is a musical jam chosen by our guest and this week and Andy Hussong has chosen Welcome to the Jungle by the American rock band Guns n’ Roses. Welcome to the Jungle is a song by the American rock band Guns N’ Roses, featured on their debut studio album, Appetite for Destruction. It was released as the album’s second single on October 3, 1987, and reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 24 on the UK Singles Chart. HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW: Download this joint venture training and learn how Andy Hussong negotiates highly profitable JV deals and how you can do the same. Discover how you can identify partners, negotiate valuable deals and craft effective JV offers. This special episode bonus includes MP3 and word-for-word transcript and is available for immediate download below:

YouTube statistics say that every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views. The number of hours people are watching on YouTube each month is up 50% year over year – so of course it makes sense to advertise there! The statistics are staggering and they may excite you, but before diving in it’s important to learn how to advertise on YouTube effectively. When done poorly you can waste thousands, but when done well you can reach billions of people for as little as 5 cents per view. In this podcast we answer questions like what kind of videos do you advertise with? How long should your video ads be? Are call to actions a must? And much more. Who best to get answers to these questions than someone who lives and breathes YouTube marketing. On episode 67 we are joined by Tommie Powers. SPECIAL BONUS: Download the strategy Tommie Powers uses to generate 5 cent views on YouTube. Includes MP3 and word-for-word transcript. OUR GUEST: Tommie Powers specializes in paid traffic and conversions. He has 15 years of marketing and advertising experience most recently focussed on search, social and video marketing. Tommie’s goal is to provide as much information as he can about digital marketing topics and technology. He shares his knowledge to his friends and clients through his blog and newsletters. Currently, Tommie is considered a specialist when it comes to YouTube advertising and has spoken at conferences throughout the United States on the topic. Tommie is also the co-author of a book titled “#Code Bytes: Conversations with Internet Entrepreneurs” When Tommie is not creating YouTube Ad campaigns for clients, he spends his time with his 3 kids and wife. He is also a huge sports fan with Football (American) being his favourite. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 67  of the Traffic Jam Podcast… Why YouTube Advertising? Advertising Costs in YouTube. Facebook vs. YouTube Ads. Different YouTube Ad Types. What are In-Stream Ads. Video Ads that Work! Direct Response Ads. YouTube Ad Funnels. Targeting Your Audience. The Art of Retargeting. Getting Started on YouTube Ads. Overcoming Common Hurdles. TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Tommie Powers quote from the show: You can also get Tommie’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “Find a video that is relevant to your product – that’s where you run your ads.” ~ @tommiepowersClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide TranscriptHey there listeners! What’s up? Welcome back to Traffic Jam. This is show#67 of the podcast that teaches you how to get more traffic to your website and build a profitable audience online. I am your host James Reynolds, grateful and excited to have you listening in to the show today, hopefully we’re back in to the groove after a few weeks of intermittent recording. I think we are, I will do my best to keep it that way. And because we are back in the groove, I want to do too much more than jump straight in to the content. We are going to be talking today about YouTube advertising with Tommie Powers which is super topical and super up to date and relevant because there is a lot of conversation happening about YouTube advertising out there in the community especially at a recent event that I was speaking at, so many people doing great stuff on YouTube especially retargeting. I think that conversation will peak up in this interview. Now before we get in to the recording of the interview, just a reminder to head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/67 which is the episode page for this show where you’ll find a full transcript of the recording, and MP3 download, plus you’ll also be able to join in on the discussion for this show. So let’s get straight in to the content. We’re going to be recording today with Tommy Traffic, that’s what he goes by. His name is Tommie Powers and he’s a traffic specialist that really focuses on Google Adwords, Facebook, Bing and YouTube and that is the topic of today’s show. So, join me in welcoming to Traffic Jam Tommie Powers from tommiepowers.com. James: So hey there listeners! Welcome back to the interview section of episode#67 of Traffic Jam and today we are joined by Tommie Powers and we are going to be talking about YouTube Advertising. So Tommie, welcome to the call. Tommie: Thank you James! Thank you! James: It is good to have you here. Let’s jump straight in. I don’t like to sort of extend the preamble too much. Let’s talk about YouTube, there’s one billion unique visitors each month on YouTube, I guess of which probably 998 million are dudes seeking entertainment in cat videos, literally hovering over the cursor ready to skip the ad button as fast as they can. We’ve all seen YouTube ads, most of us get pretty pissed off by them, why the heck should we be interested in YouTube Advertising? Tommie: Oh man, you got me cranking up by the cat videos. I mean, exactly what you just said, one billion unique visitors. So when you start talking about all of the video that all of those one billion people consume, you’re talking about a lot of traffic and the reason why you should be paying attention to it, you’ve got to be doing this is because it is the next big thing! The speed of broadband is really increasing around the world and video consumption is going to continually increase as this goes up so that means the eyeballs of people you want to reach are there and currently about 80% of that inventory goes on sale so there is a huge opportunity for you to get in the early stages and take advantage of it while it is still super cheap. James: Okay, so is that the thing then, there is so much inventory available that the opportunity literally lies in the cost of the traffic probably being literally low because there is few advertisers competing over those inventory placements? Tommie: You’re absolutely correct! James: Okay, so let’s talk numbers. Traffic Jam listeners like the cold, hard facts. What sort prices are we talking about on a CPC basis for traffic on YouTube? Tommie: The thing about YouTube is that they don’t sell traffic on a CPC basis, it is all sold on a cost per view basis so everything that you do you have to look at from a cost per view standpoint simply because technically you can generate clicks but the way that you do that is YouTube is not going to measure, and obviously Google owns them, they are not going to measure any way they charge you or anything related to cost per click or anything like that. If you want those figures, you actually have to figure anything on your own tool. In their dashboard they are only going to show you views, cost per view, and that sort of thing. So when we break it down to cost per view, when you’re talking US/ Canada/ UK/ Australia, like the top tier, you can get it anywhere from five to twelve cents, it’s a good range per view to pay for quality. When you start getting the lower cost per view, typically they run that on lower quality video traffic so if you want the high quality inventory traffic you have to be willing to bid a little higher. That’s about the average number, it goes up from one market to the next, obviously that’s because some markets are more competitive than others because there are people that are already advertising in those particular niche markets if you will, in those articles or whatever you call them. Different people have different terminologies but some verticals are competitive now but a lot of them aren’t so that’s why I kind of used that range but when you start talking international outside of top tier, you can get a penny or two cent views is very, very common. James: Interesting! So we are talking about a range of five cents to twelve cents probably on average, how does that compare to something like Facebook which also works on cost per view, a CPM type basis or even they also have video type ads on Facebook as well. What would be the comparison between those two types of advertising medium that our listeners would be used to? Tommie: Facebook in comparison in terms of quality, it is right on par with Facebook quality. The only difference is YouTube is a video medium. People go there expecting to watch video whereas, I don’t know maybe it is changing now but I don’t think people go to Facebook saying I want to watch videos even though there is a lot of videos being uploaded there I think that’s kind of changing so I am kind of saying where we are now I think eventually that is going to change but as of now, people who want to watch videos they go to YouTube to do it. On Facebook on the other hand, Facebook video views right now, because the platform is so new and not a lot of the advertisers are taking advantage of it, depending on how you run, you can get views for super cheap! I’m talking less than a penny per view if you know what you are doing. It is hard to make it apples to apples kind of comparison, other than from a standpoint of quality of traffic, it is all par, that is the apples to apples comparison but everything else is kind of, because with Facebook there are so many different ways on how you can market and advertise a video on there, it is so difficult to kind of really compare them head to head in terms of prices and stuff. James: Yeah, well I guess like Facebook and like Google’s own display network, YouTube also has got several types of ad unit, right? I mean, we have been speaking about video in its sort of generic term but there are other ad unit types available. Which unit types do you use Tommy? Tommie: Well, I use all of them because for me personally I have an agency and we have clients and we’re always testing everything, like it is our job to know but the one that I recommend to anybody, no matter what they are doing, they can go to YouTube starting out, I tell them to go to in-stream. In-Stream in my opinion can work for anybody and the reality is there is more traffic. I don’t know if it just seems that there is so much traffic there and it is where it is at in YouTube in my opinion, in-stream ads. James: Well in-stream ads I guess we should just give this some context. These are the ads that come up in the actual stream of the video itself typically at the front but also sometimes within the video as well. Would that be a fair explanation? Tommie: Exactly! James: Okay, cool. So I guess to do in-stream ads we’re going to need to have a video to advertise. What type of video do you suggest to someone who creates for adverting on YouTube? Tommie: We have two basic methods, one is going to be branding, and the other is going to be direct response. Under both of those categories you can have quite a bit of different like what is the goal that you want to achieve. But branding, really, most companies that we work with we don’t typically run branding campaigns, you want really a direct response so for us it’s really a short video, very strong call to action, very specific, really, really hidden on a paying point, meet them in the market place and to capture their attention and to get them off of YouTube. That’s really how we structure that as that video is less than a minute. Sometimes we run them a bit longer, but typically those are like you can do remarketing, some people call it retargeting, and Google calls it remarketing. With those you can actually continue a conversation. So with those, typically you can get away with them being a little longer because even if you are not branding, you can continue the conversation so there are a lot of things that you can play on and it kind of depends on the market in your area and how people respond to the market. If it is a very education market you have got to use in order to sell people that those things come in a playbook. Generally that is how we kind of break it down and again sometimes we do use a bit of branding but what we can do with that typically is the remarketing where they already are familiar with us in some degree so we want to stay in front of them and stay top of mind awareness. But mostly, what we are trying to do is direct response. The first thing you want to do is get their attention and get them away from YouTube so that we can get them in an environment we can control and then we can get them to take some sort of action and then from there we can follow up with remarketing and branding campaigns, just put different messages out there and just continue the conversation you touched on. James: Yeah, both you and I are marketers so we understand the concept of direct response but it seems to me that most people advertising on YouTube don’t understand the concept of direct response. I rarely if ever, see an ad with some form of call to action in it, right? They are actually typically branding pieces which actually have no sense at all in any scenario so how typically do you typically construct a good direct response ad and that call to action typically be? Tommie: So first and foremost you have to understand your audience first and foremost. And you know when you understand your audience and then you are going to craft your ad based on that because you want to know what they want and then you want to relate that in to what you can provide and then the messaging is really built around what’s the paying point and what’s that thing that they are looking for that is going to make their life better that you can provide and how you can relate that to them in the end and then you want to use that type of marketing towards them in terms of saying something like for traffic for example, are you still struggling to get profitable traffic to your website? Check out this 20 page report that is going to walk you to the steps that is actually going to get you to do this starting today. You can read this report in a few minutes and you can be on your way. Check it out, go to my website and then when you get there you can put your email in and download this report or something to that effect. Who wants to get more traffic or who wants to get profitable traffic? There is usually a paying point, right? We have a client, they come to us because they struggle getting the traffic to do what they wanted to do so that is kind of the idea on how to construct it but it varies from that, like my clients I tell them to use their personalities because that separates them from the other people you always want to have a unique proposition and not sound like everybody else. It is one thing to say that other people may be using your own personality or your own spin if you will, we like to do that as well. James: Now you mentioned that we could use perhaps a free report as a download. What are the best offers that you’ve experienced and I guess this is a very broad experience, I am sure you are going to say that it depends on the market and what you are selling. It’s what tends to be some of the best funnels in YouTube, where should we send people to? Tommie: One of the things that’s working extremely well for us outside of the internet marketing niche is webinars. You know in the internet marketing niche everybody knows about them right there. The novelty of them has worn off, right? But outside of internet marketing, they don’t do webinars in the level that we do when we’re selling to marketers, right? These other marketers, they’ve not really leveraged the webinar so that we’ve been able to do extremely well, inviting people to a live event, a live webinar or even a live stream or what have you. We already know that they like watching video, they like that type of medium so a webinar is a good fit in to that audience because they are already in to that live stream environment of video. James: Interesting! We’ve covered off a few points here in terms of constructing a video, we’ve said that we’re doing it for direct response. We’re probably want to keep the length reasonably short, perhaps under a minute. We want to have a strong call to action. But what about the video itself? I guess there are several ways that we could produce this, we can do a screen type capture, we could have something beautifully produced with video crews, and we could do a face to camera type video. What are those videos that you are finding most success with? Tommie: Like the talking here, actual person talking in to the camera. Typically you want to have the script to some degree. It doesn’t have to be a hundred percent scripted out, it doesn’t have to be 100% but you want to have a script that you follow as you talk in to the camera. Those work extremely well. It doesn’t have to be like – the thing that I see a lot of people, the problem that they do is they want to go and do all of these stuff to create this super fabulous video, right? I don’t recommend that. I recommend do the least. I know some people are concerned about their brand and that sort of thing and I get that. But what’s the least amount of effort you can put in to creating a video that you can run because you want to test it first. You don’t really know whether it is going to work or not and you are going to have to get information before you are going to find something that you find will work. That’s when you want to go and spend all your marketing dollars and really invest to really make them knock it out if you want to get superb quality. And that’s one of the things that I see a lot of people doing that they shouldn’t be at first. James: Yeah, and I guess your point here is I guess people can use the barrel and hey I need to consider this like a full blown TV production style ad when really most of us have probably got the equipment already in our pockets or already in our desks somewhere which means we can probably produce an ad in probably 20 minutes to half an hour if you really wanted to, right? Tommie: Absolutely! James: Cool, well let’s now perhaps how we might target people on YouTube. There are a bunch of options I guess similar to Google you’ve got age and location and shared space targeting and it is also some cool stuff for targeting ads on specific YouTube channels if you wish. What’s your favorite way to target users on YouTube, Tommie? Tommie: It’s quite hard for me to pick a favorite but if I was giving advice to someone, I would tell them to start targeting placements and that is basically what you are talking about where you just mentioned specific videos. What you want to do is to find video that is very relevant to what you have to offer and then you want to run your in-stream ads. That’s the targeted method that I would recommend from having that conversation. Me personally, we do it all so it is like I’ll say what works but that’s going to be the one that is most likely to work for just about anybody. James: Yeah, so I guess in your case perhaps, even mine, we can target a video on how to generate traffic and then put on the back of that a service that does it for them, right? It takes all the hassle away of having to do it. I guess that’s really what we’re talking about, isn’t it? Tommie: Right! James: Cool! We mentioned it already, retargeting, in fact I just got back from a conference in Australia where one of the core themes was retargeting website visitors with video ads and in many cases featuring case studies and testimonials for your product or service. Would you agree that that’s a good campaign to implement? Tommie: Absolutely, I agree. Remarketing, retargeting, whatever you want to call it, that person has already been introduced to you on some capacity and so now you’re just trying to continue the conversation. Hey check out this case study that I built, hey check out what my customers have to say about me. Every time you have to add another piece to continue that conversation, it is just another additional way for you to eventually convert them and to get them to do the thing that you want to do and sell them whatever you want to sell them or what not. James: Okay cool, let’s talk about some action and some next things to do. For those of our listeners who haven’t yet run a YouTube ad campaign, what do you suggest is the first campaign perhaps that they set up and what might be the steps to go and implement that? Tommie: If you’re already getting traffic, the first thing you need to do is go and set up remarketing. You need to put Google remarketing pixel in your website so that you’re building a remarketing list through Google Adwords and then with that list you can set up a campaign to target those people when they’re on YouTube watching videos you can hit you remarketing video. That will be the absolute first thing to do assuming you’re already getting traffic. Now, if you’re not already getting traffic you would want to run, then I would recommend a placement traffic campaign and that is what we talked about earlier. Finding video that is extremely relevant to what you have to offer and then putting your ad in front of those people. James: Got it! We already covered one objection and that might be that I haven’t got the equipment or the budget to do advertising on YouTube. What other objections normally come up, Tommie? Tommie: Typically it’s the video creation thing, having a video. You also get with in-stream ads, they call them true view in-stream, and it’s like the technical term for it. You do need to be compliant because Google wants you to have a destination URL and you need a place to send people so what a lot of people have a problem is being compliant or Google has suspended their account in the past or things of that nature, that is another objection that I do get a lot and with in-stream, yes, you do have to be compliant so that there is no way around it. If you can’t get an Adwords account you can’t go around it. That’s the thing it is like do I have to have Adwords to run this? Absolutely! There is no way around it, you know what I mean? And yes you have to be compliant and if you can’t do those things then you won’t be able to run in-stream ads. James: And is there anyone that YouTube advertising might not be for? Tommie: Oh, wow! They got a list of them, you know what I am saying? You’d have to look up Google’s adwords for video is really where YouTube ads are, it’s still Google adwords it’s just adwords for videos. All the rules that apply to adwords apply to YouTube ads so if you fall in to one of those categories you can’t do YouTube ads, but outside of those everything else is good. James: Awesome! Well you of course have got a site tommiepowers.com, is there anything else you want to share in terms of strategies in terms of that and paid advertising medium. Where might we head people off to? Would that be a good place is there anywhere else that we suggest our listeners to check you out Tommie on the web? Tommie: Yeah that would be a good place, that’s my main blog. I don’t blog as much but that is my main hub. If you hit that site and you want to contact me there are ways to get to that there and I’ll see it. James: Awesome! Well, to you the listener if you want to get links to Tommie’ site and some of the other resources mentioned in today’s show head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/67 where you can also join in on the discussion for this episode. So I guess all that remains for me is to thank you for coming on, this is super topical right now. I think YouTube as you rightly said is one of the hot topics of conversation in the marketing space due to the reasons that we laid out on the show so thank you to you for giving us such a great introduction to it. Tommie: No doubt. Thank you for having me. So there you go listeners. That was Tommie Powers talking all about YouTube advertising. Thank you for listening in to Traffic Jam#67. We will of course be back next week with another episode. In the meantime subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. You can get all of the resources and a full downloadable MP3 and transcript of today’s session to TrafficJamCast.com/67 where you can also join in on the discussion for this show. Now we end this week’s episode with a track chosen by Tommie Powers. He has opted for a Michael Jackson track which I don’t believe we’ve had on the show just yet and he’s gone for you want to be starting something. RESOURCES: Tommie Powers Blog YouTube Statistics YouTube Banner Size MENTIONS: PPC Boutique THE TRAFFIC JAM: The traffic jam is a musical jam chosen by our guest and this week, Tommie Powers has gone fore a track called “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin” which is written, composed and co-produced by Michael Jackson for his Thriller album. It peaked at number 5 in the US Billboard charts and top 20 and 30 in other countries. HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW: Download the strategy Tommie Powers uses to get 5 cent views on YouTube. Click below and learn how to access 1 billion unique viewers per month, super cheap. The special episode bonus bundle includes MP3 and word-for-word transcript.

  Building your brand and authority does not always have to mean planting the seeds in your own backyard. Whilst I advocate nurturing your own garden first, if you want to harvest a larger crop you’ll need to sew your seeds elsewhere too. To grow a larger audience, you’ll have to go beyond your own audience and get in front of other people’s audiences (OPA’s). The larger, the more relevant the audience, the better. Todays guest, Tommy Walker learned how to guest post and quickly leveraged that skill writing for top marketing sites like Conversion XL and Crazy Egg. By getting in front of these established and loyal audiences, Tommy developed a loyal audience of his own. On this show you will learn how to find guest post opportunities and how to write posts that drive traffic in to your own backyard. SPECIAL BONUS: Download the strategy Tommy Walker used to grow his reach and influence leveraging other people’s audiences. Includes MP3 and word-for-word transcript. OUR GUEST: Tommy Walker is an Online Marketing Strategist and Consultant. His mission is to mainstream the concepts of online marketing through inspiring, entertaining video content and slick editing. He also writes, a lot, mostly for other peoples audiences. Through guest blogging and regular contributions to the likes of Crazy Egg, Unbounce, Convince and Convert, and Hubspot, Tommy Walker has built himself a reputation as an established voice on marketing and built a loyal following online too. Tommy Walker is a former editor of the Conversion XL blog and currently a marketer for Shopify. Tommy’s bragging rights? He once got fired over a pair of pants, he can beatbox (badly) to NES video games and is a ninja table top role playing gamer. His favourites are D&D and Mage from the World of Darkness series. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 66  of the Traffic Jam Podcast… How Tommy Started His Career. Learning From a Gas Station. Understanding Consumer Behaviour. How to Implement Your Research. Tommy’s Content Approach. Finding Guest Blogging Opportunities. Byline Blindness and How to Overcome it. Moving the Audience to Your Own Backyard. Forums and Communities as Traffic Sources. TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Tommy Walker quote from the show: You can also get Tommy’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “It doesn’t matter who the writer is, it’s all about the content.” ~ @tommyismynameClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide TranscriptHey what’s up listeners? Welcome back to Traffic Jam, this is show#66 of the podcast that teaches you how to get more traffic to your website and build a profitable audience online. I am your host James Reynolds and very excited to be back behind the mic here at the Traffic Jam towers recording another show because it has been a few weeks now since I recorded a Traffic Jam episode, and extremely excited for this show particularly because we’re joined by Tommy Walker, a very accomplished content marketer who’s done some great things for people like conversion excel and shoppify. Tommy is going to joining us to talk about guest blogging and what it really takes to create effective content online and it is going to come right up in just a moment. I just want to remind you, as always, to head on over to the episode page of Traffic Jam which today is TrafficJamCast.com/66 because you’ll find there a bunch of episode goodies that accompany the show and you can also join in on the discussion for this episode as well. So head on over there to TrafficJamCast.com/66. So allow me to introduce our guest. He is Tommy Walker and he’s a former actor, turned gas attendant turned consultant, turned marketer. He does use his excellent story telling skills to explain exactly how that progression came about and you are going to enjoy that right at the start of the interview, unfortunately though, minus a few seconds because I did somehow manage to edit out a very small part right at the start of the interview. But I hope it doesn’t spoil your enjoyment. I am sure it won’t. So here we go, let’s introduce and welcome to Traffic Jam Tommy Walker for a discussion all about content marketing, and guest blogging. Tommy: I just couldn’t get enough. And from about the age of 10 to 19, I went to be a career actor, I did independent film, I did commercials, I did stage, I did anything I can possibly get my hands on and my resume became quite impressive. I actually graduated from the only film acting conservatory in the country which had a less than 4% acceptance rate which is more competitive than NYU so it is a very big achievement and the major thing that happened was I moved home and I said, I am going to save up, $600 is all I need to go back to New York and get my head shots, I am going to go and give my headshots and I am going to be a daytime actor because that is where the money is at in the first place, and it didn’t work out. I moved home from Manhattan, I moved to Manhattan when I was 17. I was there from 17 to 19. I figured that I learned and knew everything when I was 19 years old and when I moved back to my hometown in New Hampshire back home, I end up getting kicked out of my house because I was 19 and I knew it all. What do I care about coming home at 4o’clock in the morning? That’s not a big deal. So I ended up moving in with some friends of mine and I slept at their couch for probably about two years and at that time I worked at the gas station across the street from my apartment at that time and my outlook on the gas station was very different than most people that I worked with at that time and I figured everybody in the world needs gas in order to get to where they are going and it is one of the few jobs that you will ever have where you will see a cross section of pretty much anybody from all walks of life. You’ve got the people who live in the apartment complex with me but also like high fluting businessmen coming in because everybody needs to pay for their gas. Taking that approach, I try to be as friendly as possible to everybody and work on some serious customer service skills and got to know who people were and what they needed and I would have people’s cigarettes ready ahead of time and memorize their orders. I got to know their families and whatever, it was just a really friendly job and how hard is it to sweep and mop floors and make coffees? From that, I actually got recruited in to an internet startup that was in my town and it was growing and they asked me to be on their sales floor and I thought, you know, this would be a good change of pace and this is kind of why I keep this type of attitude and I failed miserably on the sales floor over there. It was one of my customers at the gas stations who said, hey you would be a good fit over here and I tried on the sales floor and basically I just sucked it, getting people’s credit card over the phone. And they said, well, we see that you are a hard worker, and that you have the personality, but you are terrible in getting credit card information, why don’t you try marketing? You have two weeks to make your own money, here’s what you have to do in order to do that. Within the first weekend I made my own money and a year went in to that and it was great but the company ended up losing its way and the whole company went from this position of honesty and integrity, don’t tell client what they need to hear in order to make a sale to a hundred people in the sales floor going, money, money! And it was very like Wolf of Wall Street type scenario where one of the co-founders at one point had a hundred dollar bill and lit it on fire and was like I don’t need this because I can make more, and I was like, Oh, god, so I left and ended up going back in to the crappy gas station job and went from a gas station job to a retail job and ended up getting fired over the retail job over a pair of pants and then I said I can either try to get a job and work or I can try working for myself and within two weeks I got my first client and it has been great since then. James: Awesome! It is actually quite an unlikely in many senses. You’ve ended up in the field of marketing but you started out in an industry that almost needs no marketing and needs no sales, right? I mean it doesn’t need to market too much because as soon as the car runs out of petrol it turns into the gas station. And you don’t really need to convince the guy that’s walked in to the gas station who ran out of petrol to get some money out for gas as he needs gas. You’ve gone from that environment to doing marketing, it is quite an unlikely turnaround. Interesting stuff! Tommy: Yeah, I mean the cool part about the gas station part is there is one thing I did learn if I look at it from the marketing perspective though. It is like everybody has that need but when it comes to the branding aspect of it, the gas station that I worked at is actually one of the well branded ones and actually one of the much friendlier environments and when it comes down to one of the two companies and one doing the bare minimum and one makes an actual friendly environment and you care about that, you would always go to the one with the friendly environment even if it means paying a couple cents more. That is a very valuable lesson that I did not thought of until now, so thank you. James: There you go, creating an environment that makes a sale that much easier and that much more comfortable which you know all about being a conversions guy, removing resistance and making things free and easy, it is very, very important so yeah, even the gas station can learn from this stuff. Well anyway, let us kind of get to a more serious questioning, reading a blog post of yours which I think was posted relatively recently you said that clicks are the currency of the internet and we need to understand what motivates consumers to click and obviously attract more, what are your top lessons for understanding the consumer behavior across this platforms that all of us get involved with these days? Tommy: A lot of it comes down to qualitative research, we get really wrapped up in the idea of packaging our messaging and making it so it is something that people want to hear but a lot times, we’re not actually asking questions. We forget that there are people in the other side of this and that they have questions and legitimate concerns and what I have done from the content perspective is going, let us look at qualitatively what the types of stuff gets traffic from these channels and then see what we can do to run surveys and what not from those individual channels to get deeper in to those channels and questions that people from those specific channels might have. From a traffic standpoint, what that ends up doing is it allows me to create content that says I can pretty much guarantee based on the surveys that I have been running right now that this post is going to do well over Facebook. This post is going to perform extremely well over email. When you start to understand the psychology of the different channels that you have, you can start to repackage things just ever so slightly if it means just tweaking a headline a little bit to go more with what’s in line with these channels as much as the bane of content marketers in existence when it comes to gaining attention, that’s one of the major things that they’ve done. They’ve repackaged information based on whether it is email or twitter or Facebook and I think it is because they’re doing that level of research and finding out what people over that channel care about the most. James: What practical tips have you got for implementing that? Because everyone says configure your content so that it is better for Twitter or Facebook or wherever else, perhaps by adjusting your settings within WordPress so the snippet looks different but how often should it be changed per channel, is that sort of an open question, it really requires research or is there any sort of frameworks or guidelines that you can adapt to make your content for each of those channels regardless? Tommy: Yeah, I mean it is a bit of a broad answer because it is very specific to each channel and for each company behind it but the most practical thing I could say is use a tool like Qualaroo, not to go on a plug spree here but use a tool like Qualaroo to run those types of surveys specifically for each channel right? So you can ask different questions your Facebook audience than you could of your Twitter audience. And it sounds fluffy and I totally understand that but also it takes looking at like the analytics reports and asking those questions using those types of tools in order to get the feedback that will help you rewrite the snippets and yeah, it is one of those things where you have to be doing it. I can’t give a general piece of advice on that. James: Yeah, well let’s talk a little bit about your own content approach. You have got, at least as it appears on the outside, a slightly contrarian approach and that you seem to post more to other people’s websites than perhaps you do to your own. What’s your reasoning behind that? Tommy: Other people pay me more than I pay myself. James: There you go, that’s the simple and effective answer. Tommy: I mean there was a pretty good time about a year ago, I thought that my business was going to be all done, I thought it was going to be over, because I had a client that started paying half payments and then splitting them up further and further and then eventually I had to fire them. Essentially I went on a spree where I said you know what? I have to make a couple hundred dollars an article and it stinks but that’s what I have to do and I ended up finding some guest posting week over at conversion excel and I posted for $200 an article there and what I did not realize was what was happening at the same time was I was also building up a profile and more and more people started to get more familiar with my work and as a result of having to spit out as much content as I wasn’t in order to make ends meet, there was this simultaneous effect of my work was getting better because I was doing more of it but also the profile was getting raised at the same time. And I mean for me it was about getting in front of audiences who need it the most. I feel bad for the people who started following me on the first place, but the truth is the last time I was writing for my blog, I was in a different place career wise and I need to do a better audience development for me own material I suppose. James: Have you got plans in the pipeline to do that? Tommy: Yes, it is a matter of execution time though, I need to be building up my own support network on my side, right now I am a full time content marketer over at shopify so my own material takes kind of a back seat with the full time stuff so I am not really in it. It’s not necessary to have a high profile. I do the work that I do because I very much enjoy it, not looking to become business famous by any structure, it happens if it happens but that’s rally were I am at. James: Well for you it has been slightly different, is it? that exposure and that audience is a byproduct of what you are doing but I guess for other people that would be the main purpose and perhaps the reason that they were doing guest blogging, what advice would you give for others who are looking to learn how to guest post, particularly to grow their own audience, how would they go about finding and selecting guest post opportunities? Tommy: What I did originally, I took John Morris’s guest blogging course a few years back and it was a mind blowing experience. What a lot of it comes down to, and I can say this from the editor’s perspective, is that sites that do guest post generally have a huge, crap pitches. A lot of people aren’t doing research and a lot of people are looking out for themselves when it comes to that. What I did to get on conversion excel, Hap was looking for a guest blogger on a pro blogger job port, so there’s that. There’s always a resource there, the list has some really great stuff where you can find guest blogging work and really just look at sites that are out there that take guest blogs that are within your own market. One of the things that I did when I am going in to launch mode is I’ll actually work my networks and find out A, who do I know at certain sites that I want to get on to and then just work the introductions. What a lot of people are talking about, especially if you are on the outside of that guest blogging circuit is that it is a very inside club, a lot of the editors will talk to each other and find out, hey is this any good? Who would you recommend? I am looking for writers right now, I have six and seven people looking at me right now saying, hey, I am looking to hire full time content writers, do you know anybody? And it is a lot of that relationship building and referral that works out. For me, when I started writing for Unbounced for example, it was because of the work that I did over at Conversion Excel that I said, one of their editors at that time was like, hey, this is a really great post and I just jumped on the opportunity and said, hey, how come I am not writing for you yet? And that was really what it all came down to. And then when somebody else saw my stuff on Unbounced I’d be like, hey, I’d like for you too and there is this sort of like give and take effect where people are asking you but you also have to put yourself out there. And that is the big part, there is a lot of conversations that happen within the emails that is like, hey, I noticed – let me take a step back here for a second, so I am looking at Unbounced, right, and I said I know I want to get a guest blog out here, the thing that I am going to do is take type their site up to opensite explorer and find out what has gotten the most links in the past. Type the same website in to Buzz Sumo and find out what has performed well over social in the past then I am going to read all of the stuff that’s there and try to pull apart what has worked for them in terms of content, subject matter and style and links or the way the whole thing is packaged. And then I am going to look for gaps where the audience has trouble, people going, oh this is a great post but I wonder blah, blah, blah. I then take all of that information and I put it in an email where I say hey I was looking at your site and I noticed that these posts right here did well, your audience has questions on these, I am proposing a topic that the headline would basically address that and give a synopsis of what the post will be about, and then it is either a yes or a no but from the editor’s perspective, being the person that accepts guest posts that has 2500 words, a lot of it comes down to just the willingness to do the research ahead of time and understand the audience before you put the pitch out there. And I will tell you most editors I know myself, in spite a thinly veiled pitch for your stuff right off the bat. James: Totally! I have had success with a similar approach and a hat tip to Neil Patel because I think I got the approach and the sort of version 1 of my script from something that he produced and it is literally that approach. It is really identifying who do I want to target, seeing what content has performed well, seeing where the gaps are and then literally going to them and saying hey I know your audience really well, I have been following your blog sometime which actually you should be doing and then saying, hey I love this bit of content but perhaps here’s where some gaps are, I know you may not have time to produce that content yourself, how about I do it for you and that’s an appropriate pitch because you are putting content in front of them that is actually going to be of interest to them and if you are a good enough writer there is no reason that they shouldn’t look up that sort of approach, right? Tommy: Yeah, exactly. Now, there is a bit of a disclaimer on this too, right? When I first started guest blogging, there was a lot more traffic that came from guest blogs, now I would say that there is a lot of byline blindness. I think Greg Yatti was one of the guys who coined the term. I don’t look at guest blogs as the one and done, end all be all, that’s it. In fact I have found out guest posts go live and I have seen barely blips on my own traffic. However, if you look at it as the beginning of a long term relationship and you start this on a little bit more regular basis, you can build up your own profile and brand recognition or name recognition when you are on that site and then that traffic search comes a little bit more. The metaphor I created is if you’ve seen something only once and that was it and you’ll probably forget almost right away. But if you see a steady stuff of stream coming from that stream from that company, then you are more likely to remember it and check it out when it is relevant to what you need. James: Yeah, but there’s also no doubt some nuances to try to extract that traffic away from those outposts and I am sure having written a fair amount of posts for others you’ve probably started what some of those might be. How would you go about structuring a post, at least to direct people away from there to your own property even if you are bashing people in the head with a call to action or a free list under the hem, what might be the best structure? Tommy: Yeah, that is actually great. I talked about this. It is the idea of active links versus passive links. If you are writing something and you link to it in the post in terms of links, the verbage that you use in that line leading up to the link is very important because you are building up either something that is intriguing or something that you can cross over. I am sure that, have you ever read a post in every link you click you have five more things to read when you’re done? A lot of that has to do with how those links are worded. It is not just a matter of oh yeah, and something, something, something product fit something. It is like, oh yeah and the results that came from this experiment and that was the link and that’s what’s over on your site like you can build up that intrigue and it is a matter of building the word sniffing skills in order to do that and really bake that in to the post. And that’s what I find works the best because by the time someone gets to the byline, if they get to the byline, they don’t care. It doesn’t matter. James: By the time you get to the byline the content has been delivered on an event or something, and they probably have some time to take it all in, are they really going to scan through the byline and kick off? It’s really going to be unlikely, right? Tommy: I know and I thought there have been plenty of stage when I was editor in excel there are plenty of things that I wrote, it was the most epic piece of information that I had and still the owner of the site was getting credit for a lot of the writing as you should because you built the audience initially but if I go to marketing blogger, it doesn’t matter who the writer is. I don’t care about the writer it is all about the blog so in my mind it is all the same. But if you’re building up that sort of intrigue that goes through, you know, someone clicks over to your site, as long as you are not being crappy with the site that you are linking to, as long as you are a good writer, and that is the big secret, if you are a good writer, most editors don’t care if you are linking to your own stuff but you have to make it so it is not overly like hey come over to crazy betty’s website so yeah it mostly comes down to the act of linking versus passive linking and knowing the psychology behind what gets that click. What makes you want to click when you are reading to a post? James: Exactly! I mean, that is the thing, isn’t it? We have to sort of think about what is going to drive that action. There’s actually a good interview I did with Brian Harris that I might suggest we link off in the show notes that talked about some of the concepts that you are describing how to build up to the link or build up to the call to action by increasing intrigue as you go. He used the metaphor of television shows and how they place little clues at the start of the show to what’s coming at the end to get people hooked in to get to that next part, I guess a lot like you are doing on the structure of your post to try and get people then to `try and get people to take whatever action you want them to take whether it be a link click or comment or whatever action it might be. Tommy: And some of the best advice I can give to somebody looking to do more content marketing and guest blogging type of stuff is read books on guest writing. TV shows do this and if you have a show that you’re supposed to show 24 episodes, one hour apiece a week to do that or binge watch people say that attentions spans have died, I think that’s bull, I think that quality content is weaning because words are cheap to produce now and that’s my advice, Lou Hunter’s Screen Writing 101. I would really recommend reading that just to see how screenplays are put together and then put that stuff in to your posts themselves. James: Moving a little bit from guest blog I know you’re a big believer in private groups, forums and communities and you found that those have really great traffic for you. What about those sort of closed door community that make them such a great traffic source? Tommy: There are two things, one there is conversation happening and it is completely unsolicited so if you are paying attention to what is going on to private groups and forums, I would say the ones that are overly at everybody and are being self-promotional. You can see what actual challenges are so there’s that but then the other part is, once you’re seeing what those challenges are, you are able to create content that is inherently social, it’s also media but happens to be marketing but then the other part is you’re just oh let’s look at five different groups. What I like to do is build a spreadsheet of like 50 or 60 and then rate them on three different scales. One is knowledge level of the group, are these guys smarter than me? Or do I feel like maybe I can be the smart guy in the room? Overall conversation that is happening in the room, are people actually talking to each other? What is the quality of that conversation? There are a lot of groups where everyone is like oh this is great article thanks for putting it out there but nobody is actually trying to help each other out, but then there’s places and like 500 people are going here’s the possible solution, so there’s the conversation score, and then there’s the overall interaction, do people actually talk to each other or none at all? So by putting that all together in a mass of spreadsheet, you are looking at immersing yourself in different areas in your market and then creating content that addresses specifically what those problems are and also being able to insert any piece of content that you might have in to conversation when it is most appropriate, does that make sense? James: Absolutely! I would love to perhaps make that framework available, at least summarize it in the show notes because I think it is an excellent, excellent tool. I too have had good luck I’d say in communities and they are much more engaged than many other places online because they tend to be very passionate audiences, quite often they have invested money to be there which makes them more likely to commit to it and be more involved in a regular basis and they of course are very niche as well so I think they’re excellent sources so often overlooked as people go to these bigger networks, the real good quality traffic, the real good audiences that are very much aligned to what you are doing tend to be in these types of places. Tommy: Yeah it’s the difference between having a small meet up at your local café or bar versus going to a convention. You’re going to have a much better quality of conversation that is going to be happening outside of the bigger scope. James: Awesome! Well I think Tommy let’s wrap things up there. I’d like also to make sure that our listeners can go and find out more about you. You do live in various places online, where’s the best place we can send people off to? Tommy: Right now is the shoppify blog so shoppify.com/blog and I post typically on Wednesdays. James: There you go, so you’ll get that scheduled in, so you the listeners to find the links for Tommy at shoppify blog then head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/66 where you’ll find that link and a bunch of others too all relating to this show, well thanks Tom that’s been an absolute blast, we’ve covered a lot and some really interesting topics of conversation today, thank you for your time. Tommy: Thank you so much for having me. So that was Tommy Walker for show#66. Thank you as always for tuning in to Traffic Jam. We will of course be back with another episode real soon and to ensure you don’t miss out on that, as soon as it is released go to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher to subscribe via your favorite podcast player. Now you can also head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/66 which is where you’ll find the episode page for this show. You can join in on the discussion there and also download some special episode bonuses so head on over there right now, it is TrafficJamCast.com/66. We end this week’s show with a traffic jam chosen by Tommy Walker, he’s gone for a track called Can’t Kill Us and it is by the Glitch Mob, so enjoy the track and I’ll see you back here real soon! RESOURCES: Tommy Walker Blog Shopify Blog Buzz Sumo Tommy @ Unbounce Guest Blogging – Cheat Sheet Blogger Outreach – Effective Hacks to Use with Influencers MENTIONS: Neil Patel on Traffic Jam 31 Bryan Harris on Traffic Jam 48 Greg Ciotti THE TRAFFIC JAM: The Traffic Jam is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our guest. Tommy Walker has opted for a track called Can’t Kill Us by the The Glitch Mob. Formed in 2006, L.A.’s Glitch Mob have wowed dance floors around the world with a singular brand of bleepy electronica and heavy hip-hop-influenced basslines. The boomiest track from their album Love, Death Immortality is the instrumental “Can’t Kill Us,” which creeps, groans, and grows as if it were built for a thriller soundtrack. HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW: Download the strategy Tommy Walker used to grow his influence and following using other peoples audiences. Click download, tell us where to send the MP3 and PDF and we’ll rush them right to you…

  No longer is having a profile in LinkedIn enough to get you ahead. LinkedIn has changed and those riding the wave of change on the newest social-media content platform are those that are winning with bigger reach and authority. The recent change on LinkedIn is the addition of LinkedIn Pulse, a blog style portal on linkedin.com for professional content. On this episode we discuss how to use LinkedIn Pulse effectively inorder to grab the attention of your would be audience. Our guest explaining all is Sarah Santacroce, a LinkedIn specialist from simplicitysmallbiz.com. SPECIAL BONUS: Download the one-page LinkedIn Marketing Checklist plus mp3 and word-for-word transcript. OUR GUEST: Sarah Santacroce helps busy small business owners and professionals get more exposure online. Sarah, born and raised in Switzerland, started her career at McDonalds teaching soft skills to aspiring McDonalds managers. Her first online business was created whilst living in California. In building her own virtual business over the years, Sarah has attended a huge number of marketing events and trainings, the knowledge from which she now shares with students. She is the creator of the course LinkedIn For B2B Success amongst other social media training material. When she is not in front of her computer, she enjoys reading and travelling. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 65  of the Traffic Jam Podcast… Recent Changes with LinkedIn. Choosing Your LinkedIn Connections. LinkedIn Algorithm. The LinkedIn Pulse. Social Media Visibility. How to Increase Exposure in LinkedIn. Content Attribution on LinkedIn. What Content Works Best on Pulse. Bringing Offline Content to LinkedIn. Newlse and SlideShare. The Ideal LinkedIn Profile. LinkedIn Groups. TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Sarah Santacroce quote from the show: You can also get Sarah’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “If you want sucess in LinkedIn, build relationships.” @sarahsantacroceClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide TranscriptHey, what’s up listeners? Welcome back to Traffic Jam. This is show#65 of the podcast that teaches you how to get more traffic to your website and build a profitable audience online. Today, we are going to be talking about LinkedIn, one of the most requested topics of our show in recent times so I think it is about time we revisited the topic especially since LinkedIn is such a fast moving platform of late and I really want to bring you up to speed with what’s working now straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak, bringing an expert on who gets really good stuff with the platform. In just a moment we are going to be speaking with Sarah Santacroce but before that I want to give a quick shout out and thank you to a few loyal listeners, Lucas, Ernesto and Jim, all whom have stopped by the episode pages of Traffic Jam, either to leave a comment or a question and that too is where you should be heading because each and every episode comes with a bunch of bonuses, normally including a transcript and an MP3 download but in the case of today’s session, we’ve also got a LinkedIn checklist. A day to day cheat sheet that will tell you exactly the task that you should be conducting on LinkedIn, both daily, weekly and monthly. That has been provided by Sarah Santacroce, our guest on this episode. So to get access to that, go to TrafficJamCast.com/65. Go on over there right now, grab your bonuses and then listen on to the show. Before we dive in to today’s interview, let us introduce our show guest. As mentioned at the top of the show, her name is Sarah Santacroce and she is from the website www.simplicitysmallbiz.com, which is a site where I was very lucky to be interviewed for just recently and then now I am returning the favor by interviewing Sarah for Traffic Jam so I am looking forward to diving in, tapping her knowledge on LinkedIn which is one of the main areas of expertise and she actually counsels business owners, entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs well all around the world on all aspects of internet marketing but LinkedIn is definitely her forte. She’s produced a couple of courses on the topic already and she’s been doing some really good stuff on the platform which is exactly why I wanted to invite her on to the show so I guess without any further ado, let us welcome to Traffic Jam, Sarah Santacroce from simplicitysmallbiz.com. James: So hey there listener! It’s been a good six months since we last focused the show on LinkedIn so I think it is fit to invite on to Traffic Jam a LinkedIn specialist to talk about the changes and what’s working right now on the world’s #1 professional network so join me in welcoming to the show Sarah Santacroce. Sarah: Hi James, thanks so much for having me. James: Thank you for coming onboard. This is going to be interesting. We’ll I think touch upon a lot that has been happening on LinkedIn in recent times and I think we’ll start by talking about what seems to be a fairly big change on LinkedIn’s part and that seems to be the movement on the platform from what used to be your one to one networking platform to what’s now more kind of a broadcast or content sort of platform, what do you believe for the reason on LinkedIn’s part in the recent move and changing direction for them? Sarah: That’s a good point. I think what they announced, probably already a year and a half ago is that they want to become the number one platform for professional content. So that was really their goal in order to change that mentality that LinkedIn is just a place where I post my profile, my CV, and then never go back to it. Well, they want their users to go back to it in a daily basis and in order to achieve that, they needed to create a real but social but professional platform. And so that was really the move that they have in mind and I think they are doing a decent job because as you said, more and more content are being shared professional content and we can go in to the different kinds of functionality in a little bit but that was really their goal. To have people come to LinkedIn to get their dose of content on a daily basis. James: Two of my prior guests in fact, Larry Kim and Neil Patel have both been very successful in generating a lot of traffic essentially by using LinkedIn like they would do Twitter and by that I mean basically accepting and adding as many connections as they can in order to build a large audience for their content. Do you kind of agree with the shotgun style approach that those two guys have adopted? Sarah: It definitely helps with visibility. I always say a small network gives you small visibility so it always depends on your business modules and on your objectives. Obviously if you have an online business like Neil Patel, yes it makes sense. However, if there are listeners here who are in the corporate and they are just using LinkedIn to build their own personal brand where you have a business but it is a local business, then I wouldn’t agree with that connection strategy because you really want to build a network in this case yes have that decent number of connections but also take note where you are at you value the relationships more than the numbers. For me LinkedIn, if you really want success, it’s about building relationships. So the way Neil Patel is using it for the visibility and he has got more success with that but I’d say he’s more about the relationships that count in LinkedIn. James: Does LinkedIn operate in a similar fashion to Facebook in terms of its algorithm? I’m sure that the content that is popping up in yours and my newsfeed is based on some form of algorithmic structure, the people that we have been potentially connecting with much so if that is the case, can it actually affect us if we build too large an audience and a few of those people are actually engaging with the content and engaging personally on the platform? Sarah: That’s a good question. LinkedIn doesn’t really disclose that much information about their algorithm but yes, I am sure there is an algorithm in place and it will affect interactions and engagement will affect how successful you are with the platform. James: Yeah, I guess it is always the marketing case that you really should be connecting with those people that are either your ideal target audience or your ideal audience in terms of content connectors or whoever else. You’ve got to really know who you’re trying to talk to because anyone outside of that is essentially noise for you, isn’t it? Sarah: Exactly, yes. And I think that’s what’s different on LinkedIn, when I teach LinkedIn to those sales professionals for example, a lot of people still have that mindset that oh, I have to mass produce or mass blast links out. LinkedIn is not like that, you can get so much information about an individual that you can then really target your information and so if you are prospecting on LinkedIn for example, you don’t want to prospect with 200 people and send them all the same information. You want to get in to the details and see if this is an actual fit for whatever it is you are trying to sell them. James: Yeah, let’s continue our discussion around LinkedIn Pulse because that has been the major development, at least in recent times and I think it is not just open to influencers as it was originally but it has opened to everyone. I can see that you yourself have been posting regularly to LinkedIn Pulse, can you share any of your success stories or results that you’ve been able to achieve with the 35 articles you’ve posted so far by looking at your LinkedIn profile. What sort of results have you got? Sarah: It is interesting! As you said, when it first launched it was still closed and so you have to submit some kind of thumbprint, they wanted to look at it and back then the results were just amazing and I hear that from other colleagues that you could get really big views on your posts. Because it was still closed. Not that it has opened, you can do quite a bit and get good results and what is nice is that you can reach outside of your LinkedIn network so people always think I am just going to reach my connections but now they can go viral and if it gets picked up by LinkedIn themselves so it gets added to a category in the Pulse then you can really hit the jackpot and go really big. But I’d say just like with Facebook, there is so much content being shared in Facebook that eventually the numbers went down and I kind of see the same thing happening with LinkedIn and yeah, touch wood, hopefully we are not going to have a Facebook situation where you actually have to pay to get visibility. James: Yeah, well I guess it is a big topic, we are approaching this point, not just on the social platforms but really that internet as a whole where we are facing content shock, the idea that there’s more content out there than can ever be consumed so it is going to get diminishing returns as we go on but I certainly do see myself being in LinkedIn that I am certainly getting far more notifications now than I have ever before about content pieces being posted. I am just wondering how much visibility over time they can possibly get because we are limited in terms of our capacity to consume content as consumers. Well, let’s talk about how we might craft and effective post for Pulse. What are your top tips on both creating a content piece that could hopefully get viral, at least some increased exposure and perhaps your tips on promoting it to get a large audience. Sarah: It always comes down to the title just like in any other blog post, the title is what makes the reader click on not click or to read it so obviously the title needs to be sexy and appealing to the audience you are writing to, and I think the errors that I see most often is maybe because people are not used to writing blog posts so they just go on LinkedIn and say hey, I can just write my text in here. It is just like any other blog post, you need to create paragraphs, you need to use the headings; different headings. You can embed image or media. So for example a YouTube video. That stuff obviously is important. It needs to be appealing to the eyes of the readers. When he reads it, it’s not just one big blog of text otherwise nobody is going to read your post. I always recommend also at the bottom to include a small bio. Yes we know already at the top it says this has been published by Sarah Santacroce and they see your picture but if they are at the bottom of the post, they don’t know who wrote this article, if they just come via a link for example so it is always good to have a bio at the bottom and remind them who’s written this article. There is a whole discussion going around about duplicate content, if you’re probably the right person to ask you this but my opinion is yes, it is duplicate content but it doesn’t matter that much as long as you always link back to the original post and you kind of adapt the content in LinkedIn to your LinkedIn audience a little bit so even just the audience, duplicate content would be if you copy a post that you’ve originally posted on your blog and republished it on LinkedIn. I am curious to hear your opinion James. James: From what I understand if basically you use a hyperlink that might say something like originally posted on as you would do typically with other content syndication platforms, that should be enough to tell Google and other search engines that that is where the originating piece of content lives, I am not quite sure if you can post a canonical URL to LinkedIn which is technically the technical term – Sarah: You can’t. James: So you can’t? I think based on that then the other method of just saying hey, this was originally posted on should be enough for the search engines to determine that. But it opens up an interesting conversation, would you typically use Pulse for syndicated content so almost like an outpost for a really good core piece of content that was originally created on your blog, perhaps you can then maybe adjust it, rewrite it, reformat it a little bit for LinkedIn and give it a new audience there? Sarah: It is funny because I kind of changed my opinion. In the beginning I was saying and telling my clients, no, just create unique content on LinkedIn, but let’s face it, there’s just not enough time in our week to create that much content so most clients told me well, we just don’t have the time. And so now I am telling my clients, okay, go, look at your Google analytics and kind of search for the content on your blog that has been previously posted that got a lot of traffic and so you know this must be a good content and then you can republish it but just not copy paste it but maybe create a couple of new paragraphs and then link back to the original post on your blog. I think for most of my clients who are small business owners, this is a strategy that works for them. Of course, ideally, yes you would create unique content for LinkedIn, that would be the best. James: Yeah, and I guess final question around Pulse, what type of content works best? Is it just purely blog style content or have you found the perhaps like image assets like infographics perform also well in the platform? What can you post there? Sarah: Yeah you can definitely post infographics. I am not sure if just an infographic, I don’t think that would work on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn user is a professional user who wants to get more details rather than just a visual so I would go in to a bit more detail. It would have to be content obviously that fits that LinkedIn audience and really gets them interested. It depends again on your business as well, if your business is in the creative and you are a jewelry maker, well, obviously, your LinkedIn audience is not on LinkedIn so don’t even waste your time writing on LinkedIn publisher so I would say it is professional content. James: Well, let’s lay out some action steps perhaps for our listener around pulse so your advice is to go and check your website analytics and find what content pieces are performing well. I guess some other places you can go to would be things like Buzz Sumo which might tell you about the social traction that your content has generated, that might be a good place to look. Then reformat the content for LinkedIn, make sure it’s chunked down but using appropriate headers and titles that you have a compelling headline to your article and then importantly at the bottom that you include a bio and a link back off to the original piece of content. Will that seem fair? Sarah: Yeah, that sounds good. Sometimes also business owners have submitted articles to print magazines and they don’t have anything on their blog about that so that would be a good strategy also to repurpose the content on LinkedIn Publisher. James: Yeah, definitely. Well a couple of other additions to LinkedIn recently has been the acquisition of Newsle and Slideshare which I guess also supports their new direction toward a content platform. As a marketer, where do these applications fit in our LinkedIn strategy and should we indeed be using them? Sarah: Well, I actually do not know about Newsle so that would be new to me, I would have to look that up. But Slideshare that is definitely another content platform but that is more visual but it is also a very professional platform that gets a lot of business professionals use PowerPoint presentations, do presentations in business and so it is nice to have those together and be able to embed presentations on your profile for example. James: Yeah, and I have also seen that they can rank quite well in search, often above LinkedIn profiles themselves. I don’t know whether there’s full follow links there at play or what is happening but it seems to perform quite well in Google search, that’s another little technique you might want to look out for. Aside from Pulse, Slideshare and a few other things, I guess the core of LinkedIn is still the LinkedIn profile, that’s where we base most of our activities. What advice do you have for optimizing your LinkedIn profiles to attract more search traffic and then perhaps also to move that traffic away from the outpost of LinkedIn to your home base such as your company website or your personal website? Sarah: A lot of people don’t realize that the LinkedIn profile is kind of like a mini website and so apart from having to be complete and visually attractive it also needs to be search engine optimized because LinkedIn has its own internal search engine and so that means using keywords, breaking them in strategic locations as for example the headline, that’s probably the biggest mistake I see people make on their headline, that’s the line beneath your name, they use that as a chopped title so they would say owner at Traffic Jam for example. Well, why is that wrong? Because the owner is very generic, every company has an owner and people are not going to be searching for owner in the search bar if they are looking for someone like you as an SEO specialist, and using the company name on the headline because it is like on Google, people tell me you show up for Simplicity, yeah okay I understand that but that’s not what people are searching for. On LinkedIn, it is the same. You don’t put your company name because people don’t know your company name if they don’t know you yet. So that’s the one thing, in your headline you need to describe what it is that you need to bring to the table and what your specialties are, use your keywords in that area. James: Yeah, I am just looking at yours now and I can see that you state that you’re a small business digital marketing consultant which I guess could be the type of terms that the people are searching and then you’ve also stated who you help and why which is also I guess a positioning statement that you just list what you want to do and how you can help which obviously is effective. But I am also scrolling down your profile, I can see some unusual things that I haven’t necessarily noticed elsewhere. If I go down to your interests, I can see there that some of your interests that you’ve listed there are probably chosen with LinkedIn search in mind for instance, would that be the case? Sarah: Yeah, I am totally against keyword stuffing in LinkedIn profiles. That just doesn’t look good if you look keywords in every section, but the interest section is kind of the nice way to hide some keywords because it is all that is. It is just a list of interests and most people use it for hobbies and yes it is nice to add some personal interests in there. It is also a nice place to hide some keywords. What I usually tell my clients is to copy all your skills and paste them in to the interests section so that you kind of have your keywords in both locations. Another tip there is to use common misspellings of your name so my name is really sort of difficult to spell and I have hidden some misspellings in that interest section as well. James: Interesting, I also see that just scanning through the profile itself you’ve got numerous calls to action to various places, be it LinkedIn groups that may be of interest to people, you’ve got email, you’ve got telephone number and it is not often used right? I mean if you look at the average LinkedIn profile, it very much is a biography or a CV or that information but it doesn’t really compel anyone to take a course of action so what would you recommend as a good strategy to move people away from LinkedIn to appropriate places that might move them along that customer journey with you? Sarah: The first thing you could do is to optimize your website links. At the top of the profile we have the option to send people in different pages and by default it would say company page or blog or personal website. That’s okay, some people might click on it. But if you actually customize it you can make it in to a call to action and I think I have something like a free e-book or check out this and that. So you can send them to a specific page, so that could be for example a landing page and so you send them to the landing page and they sign up to your list, we all know that that’s the one place where we want our people and send them to our email list. And that is a good way to send people over. Unfortunately those website links are now much more hidden than they used to be so it is good for people who are already connected with you but otherwise people won’t see that hidden section there. So there’s other ways to use links, for example in reach media you can add a link to a landing page and LinkedIn will then automatically pull in the picture of that landing page and so when people click on it, it will link them forward to your landing page so different options to send people to specific pages on your website. James: Excellent! Well I am going to make sure that your LinkedIn profile of course is included in the show notes page as a mini case study and an example for our listeners. I am sure that there are plenty of learning that they can gain from checking that out. Before we sort of wrap things up on LinkedIn itself, where else should we be spending time on the platform? I think there’s still quite a lot of advocates of LinkedIn groups and a few other things, where would you suggest our listener spend any other time they might have for LinkedIn? Sarah: Yeah there’s definitely the groups. Search for groups where your target audience hangs out. A lot of people or clients still spend too much time on groups where their peers hang out. You want to think about your clients, customer prospects, and that is the group that you want to be active on. So that’s definitely a big thing, and then we don’t have time to talk about the company page. If you are bigger company or agency that is another thing that you need to be using and it is nice because you can use it as a team so it is not just you publishing content but your whole team and your employees can also publish content through that company page. Often I see company pages that have been created but companies don’t really understand that once you created it you should actually be using it just like your personal profile to share content so it all comes down to building an editorial calendar and make sure that there’s valuable content and being shared with the followers. James: Excellent! I always love the conversations that we have before these interviews because I often find out about little gems and I found out about a new tool today which I have never seen or heard of before and that’s Listly and I think you have been getting good results with curated lists. I think before we round out the episode you should probably tell us what you’ve been doing there. Sarah: Listly is a tool where you can build lists, so you would have a top 10 list LinkedIn experts or you can have a top 10 list of best LinkedIn posts for business and things like that and then you can just blend in to the articles it will generate a nice list for you and you can then embed on your WordPress website for example, they have a nice little plugin that you can use and so it generates traffic to your website and also on Listly itself and you and I both know that people love lists so it is really a tool that works great and keeps sending traffic to you. James: Very nice! I guess it is a tool that expands on the concept of the roundup posts where you call on experts perhaps that may contribute to and that’s a fantastic traffic source. You could be mentioning influencers, there is a good chance that they might want to go and promote your content themselves. Good tool, we’ll make sure that that’s linked off to in the episode page of Traffic Jam#65 but before we round things out Sarah I am sure there are listeners wanting to find out a little bit more about you and perhaps what you’ve got to offer. So where should we send people off to? Sarah: Different things, my website is simplicitysmallbiz.com, you can look me up on LinkedIn. One thing I didn’t mention is customization of invitations. I won’t accept your invitation if you just send me the customized ones because I don’t know if you’ve listened to this podcast so make sure that you mention the podcast and I’d be happy to connect with you. So yeah, check me out on LinkedIn. We also have a LinkedIn challenge that I host twice a year but now I am changing one of them to French because I also have French audience so the next one won’t be until December but you can look up the LinkedIn Challenge LinkedIn group, that is a group that I am running close to a thousand members now and we just answer any kind of LinkedIn question so I look forward to seeing you on that Group and what else? Did I give you any other links, James? James: LinkedIn for B2B success was something that you mentioned to me so I guess we should probably include that as well. Sarah: Yes, that is an online video course that I created for small business owners and entrepreneurs wanting to use LinkedIn for their business and so it is a 15-part video course. James: Excellent! Well you the listener if you’ve been listening to Traffic Jam for some time you will now where all of those links live and that is on the episode page of today’s show which today you get to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/65. Awesome! Let’s wrap things up there Sarah. And it has been beneficial certainly to me to kind of get up to date with what is happening on LinkedIn. I am sure our listeners have also gained as much value as I have so thank you! Sarah: Thank you James! It’s my pleasure. So thank you to Sarah from simplicitysmallbiz.com and thank you to you the listener for listening in to episode#65 of Traffic Jam. We’ll be back next week with another awesome episode and awesome guest as well. In the meantime, remember that we have a bunch of goodies available for this show which you can access by going to TrafficJamCast.com/65 where Sarah has kindly donated a daily LinkedIn task sheet. Want to know what you need to do in LinkedIn daily, weekly and monthly? Then you’ll find out in a very convenient checklist provided by Sarah so get your hands on that. Also on the episode page you’ll find a full transcript of today’s session plus an MP3 download as well. If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to the show via iTunes and Stitcher radio which you do by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. Of course we end the show with the traffic jam. It is chosen by our guest by our guest today and she has gone for a song call I Need My Girl and it is by The Nationals so enjoy the track and I will see you back here in about seven days from now. See you then! RESOURCES: Simplicity Small Biz Sarah on LinkedIn The LinkedIn Challenge LinkedIn for B2B Success MENTIONS: Larry Kim on Traffic Jam Neil Patel on Traffic Jam List.ly Buzz Sumo Newsle Slideshare THE TRAFFIC JAM: The soundtrack for this episode, or the Traffic “Jam” as we like to call it is a song called “I Need My Girl” by The National, an American alternative rock band. It was recorded in 2013 for the their album “Trouble Will Find Me”. The band is made up of Matt Berninger (lead vocals), Aaron Dessner (rhythm guitar, keyboards, vibraphone, harmonica), Bryce Dessner (lead guitar, keyboards, e-bow, orchestration), Bryan Devendorf (drums, percussion) and Scott Devendorf  (bass guitar). YOUR NEXT STEPS: To help you maximise your results on LinkedIn with minimum effort, Sarah Santacroce has provided a special LinkedIn Marketing checklist for you. The checklist is a simple one page “to-do” list that will show you exactly the right things to be doing on LinkedIn daily, weekly and monthly. Act on each item in the guide, tick off the items as you go and watch your results explode. The LinkedIn Marketing Checklist is available for immediate download below:

  Anyone in their right mind will grab a good second chance when it’s presented to them, an opportunity to redeem themselves if they missed out the first time round. This is never more prevalent than in marketing – direct mail, email follow up and now retargeting provide us marketers with second chance to persuade our audience to take the step. Subtle reminders using banner retargeting can be enough to push prospects over the line if first time around your product wasn’t right or it wasn’t the right time. Chris Evans loves following up with video, social and banner retargeting and rightly so. According to him retargeting generates a 500% to 1000% better ROI than front end marketing. If you are new to retargeting, curious to know what it is and how it works, or a seasoned retargeter looking for advanced strategies, you’ll find plenty in this episode. SPECIAL BONUS: Download the 500% ROI retargeting training including mp3 and word-for-word transcript. OUR GUEST: Chris Evans is a “business growth strategist” doing Facebook ads, sales funnels, paid media, and retargeting. He is the president and owner of Online Profit Strategies a North Carolina marketing firm. Formerly Chris was the host and co-founder of ReoSuccess TV, a web TV show for the Real Estate Industry. Chris now runs paid media campaigns for several guru’s and consults for Fortune 500 companies. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 64  of the Traffic Jam Podcast… Retargeting Then and Now. Consumer Sophistication. Building Your List Through Retargeting. Advanced and Creative Techniques. The Basic Campaign Musts. Taking it to the Next Level. Musts For Retargeting. Video Retargeting. Platforms That Work for Chris. Watch Out for These! What’s a Burn List? Action Steps to Take. TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Chris Evans quote from the show: You can also get Chris’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “Retargeting is a second chance to persuade.” ~ Chris EvansClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide TranscriptListener, welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is episode#64 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get traffic and build a super profitable audience online. I am your host James Reynolds and today we are talking not just how to get traffic to your website but how to get it coming back. In just a moment we will be joined by Chris Evans who is a retargeting expert so if you’ve ever wanted to know how to follow up your prospects with branded advertising for your business as they browse around the internet then today’s session is for you. But before we get to the interview with Chris, I want to tell you about our website analysis reports which are available at veravo.com. My team and I will put your site through a thorough 30-point audit and tell you how it is performing, both the search engine optimization, usability, and how it compares to other websites in terms of its traffic volume and performance. If you want to get your performance analyzed, head on over to veravo.com, press the analyze my website button which you’ll find in the top right corner of the site, enter the web address you want us to analyze, the email address you’d want us to send the report to and my team will put together a thorough 30-point check of your website and rush it over to you within a couple of days. So to get your own report go to veravo.com. So before I invite Chris on to the mic let me give him a brief introduction, Chris is the president and owner of Online Profit Strategies which is a marketing agency based out of Charlotte, North Carolina in the USA. His agency focuses on lead generation, lead catcher, sales funnel development, Facebook ads, as well as retargeting which of course is the topic of today’s interview. He’s consultant for Fortune 500 companies, he’s spoken at several marketing conferences and he’s the publisher of his own retargeting course. So on that note, let’s welcome Chris Evans from Online Profit Strategies. James: So welcome back listener! This is the interview section of Traffic Jam#64 and today we are joined by Chris Evans for a discussion all about retargeting. Chris, how are you doing? Chris: I am doing fantastic, how are you? James: I am doing good, I am super glad that we’ve put this session together and I am going to dive straight in to the content, no fluff here. I have a pretty advanced audience, I think most people listing in will have experienced retargeting in some way, shape or form. As a retargeting expert do you have a metaphor or kind of your own way of describing what retargeting is? Chris: Yeah, to put it really plain and simply is retargeting really is a second chance. It is a second chance to get a lead, it is a second chance to get a purchase conversion so it is a wonderful thing and I am really excited to be here to talk about this. James: Cool! It is going to be fun, this is not a new topic we have discussed it a fair amount on the show, in fact we had Mike Rhodes on the show, Traffic Jam#59 where he was saying that retargeting in his mind by Google Adwords is probably the most profitable campaign that you can ever run through the platform. I am curious to know, do you agree with him and if you do, do you have any numbers that might back a claim on that? Chris: Yeah, I would totally agree with Mike. Mike is a pretty smart guy so pretty much I listen to most things that he says but for the retargeting that we run, we do a lot in Google just like Mike on YouTube and then a tremendous amount on Facebook as well and our numbers, they can be almost unbelievable. The ROI we get can be 500%, 1000% compared to just a front end traffic site. So the whole idea of remarketing, retargeting is it’s a whole process of building rapport, building trust, and building that brand recognition with people so once they go through that process of initially seeing your brand or initially seeing your offer, maybe that willingness to make that commitment or that decision yet so retargeting really is that opportunity for you to continue to persuade and really build a case for why somebody should opt in for your offer or purchase your product. James: How do you think it has changed our approach to marketing I mean if we sort of think back perhaps to five years where everyone was bashing prospects and visitors over the head ramming them in to squeeze pages really like screwing them to get their email list because they realize that if they left the site there is probably a chance that they never actually get contact with that visitor ever again. How has retargeting changed how we deal with traffic in the first instance to a site? Chris: Well I think one thing it helps companies not being so douche if you will if you know what I am talking about. But the thing is consumers, and even business owners, if you are in the B2B business, they are becoming more sophisticated every single day. So all the tricks and the trickery and all the things that marketers come up with to try to get somebody a decision, as consumers and business owners are seeing this stuff their sophistication level is basically climbing, they’re just a little bit more numb to the trickery that’s out there so what is happening is we now are forced as marketers or business owners trying to get our products and businesses out there, we are forced to bring more quality to the market, right? So what we are forced to do is whether it is content or we’re showing case studies or whatever it might be. So in my mind retargeting gives us the ability to present that case to our prospects. So if I have clients Bill and Suzy and they accomplish great things to my products and services, if John who’s in my site did not purchase my products, guess what, now I can run a case study of Bill and Suzy and the great things that they have accomplished through my product and service, it gives us the ability to do that and really meet them where they’re at their sophistication level as opposed to just some cheesy looking squeeze page with hyped up copy so that is why I am a huge proponent of retargeting. James: Where do you think consumers are at in terms of their sophistication? Because I guess most now are probably aware that they’re even retargeted to. It’s not so new now that people just think wow this brand is super prominent out there in the marketplace I am seeing them everywhere. Is that a problem for us marketers and if so is there any pitfalls that we should look out for when constructing our campaigns with that in mind? Chris: Yeah, you can definitely be very, very creepy in retargeting. And the goal is not to be a creeper. And that is why it is important to have frequency levels in caps on your retargeting. So if you are retargeting somebody you are not hitting them 25 times a day with your ads. Maybe it is one, two or maybe a max of three times in a day where your video ad is displayed to them, but consumers for the most part, they have no awareness of them as they have experienced but they have no way to identify or know what to call it. Many people, in my experience they think that companies are really smart, some of them are, just by their personality, might be a little bit crept out but the percentage is really low. And the people that don’t really mind, from the studies that I had, it is above 50%. People who don’t care about retargeting they’re actually fine with it. James: I’d like to move forward in a moment and talk about some of the more advanced things that we can do with retargeting, perhaps some of the more creative campaigns, things like case studies that you mentioned but I think it will be worth drawing a little bit of a line in the sand to start with and talk about where we should get started if we haven’t got a retargeting campaign in place already. What do you recommend to your own students like the first campaign and the first step? Where should they get on with it? Chris: So yes, that is a fantastic question and one thing, no matter what, is like everybody knows that you should have an email list right? If you think about retargeting, it’s the same thing. You’re basically building a list of people who most likely go to your website. There are other forms of retargeting that we could all talk about but it is all about building a list of people who hit your website so pick your vehicle for retargeting, whether you are using Google platform of Facebook – these are probably the two main ones. You grab your script from one of those platforms and at the very least to drop it in your homepage and start building an audience of people who are coming to your site because essentially those are people who raise their hand and have shown some kind of interest on some kind of level so that would be step one. Then once you decide, hey what’s the message that I am going to put out to these people? By that time you’ll have an audience that you can actually target to. And once you get to it, and you want to get a little bit more advanced, you can start segmenting based on the different pages and the call to actions that you have going on. James: So what do you recommend for a basic campaign? Just lead with a generic branding message? Would it be a testimonial type of campaign? What would be the best one – just go with the broad message to all website visitors? Chris: I think it really kind of depends but for what I am always trying to tell my clients is to build their email list. So whether they have an offer on their homepage or a certain landing page, it is always about trying to get people back to opt in because for me that is one of the most important pieces in your business and one of the most valuable assets that your business is your email list, so whether it is just an application for a consultation or a video download or whatever it might be, always trying to push people back to that offer so they opt in. That can say, hey grab this report on how to build a basket in underwater in ten minutes so whatever your offer might be and for whatever part of it too. I think it is important as well, if you can and legitimately do it, is build scarcity in to your offer, which I think a lot of people don’t put in their retargeting campaigns but is extremely, extremely effective. James: Nice advice. I like that concept for the basis of best insurance too, right? If you can get people on to your email list and you can be retargeting to them and then potentially across multiple platforms which I guess we’ll speak about in a minute that is really the best way to go. So let’s assume for a second that we’ve got a broad campaign in play. We’ve targeted everything all website visitors, we’re driving our prospects back to some form of offer, hopefully we’re getting them to subscribe to our email list. What’s the next step? Where do we take our campaigns from here to really push it up to the next level? Chris: Yes, so a lot of what we do is we build our evergreen funnels so it a lot of automation. So what we do is we have time sequences and a funnel might be 14 days for a front end offer and what we’re doing is we use different plug ins and stuff and this is a little bit more on the advanced site but we used plug ins where we remove the offer based on when they hit that page so what we’ll do is we’ll build an offer for let’ say our funnel is 14 days. We’ll build 14 different audiences and essentially every single day we’ll drop one of those days so they might say an ad on day 1 saying hey we’ve got this product on sale and it is only for 14 days. And this is like another topic that we can talk about. Creating burn list where when somebody hits day 7, all the other days are burnt off so they’re removed from those lists. So then they might see an ad on Day 7 saying hey you only have 7 days to purchase this product, right then on day 14 they don’t see other ads but the only ad they’ll see is hey today is the last day to purchase this product and this is something that is very, very effective that most people don’t implement in to the retargeting because it is a little bit more advanced and utilizing some different plug ins out can actually remove the sales page based on what they hit can be very effective because we know that true scarcity is a very powerful method of persuasion. If you can implement that in to your retargeting strategy, it is super powerful so that is a top notch strategy that pretty much anybody can use. James: I guess something like that would be very good for an e-commerce type business. Perhaps kind of a second chance offer. If you didn’t buy to this price, hey, if you take us up with in the next 14 days you can get it at 25% off or that type of thing. Knowing that the first time around it wasn’t appealing maybe if you adjust the pricing if that didn’t go around the first time you could get a bite the second time around. So outside of scarcity which I can see would be very powerful especially to an engaged audience that already visited your site, what are the things that we can be doing to really maximize results for this stuff? Chris: Definitely the branding. Just having your logo in front of people is really important and I think, two, we are being forced, especially with the sophistication level of people out there to build that rapport so branding campaigns, if you have any copy on there or basically just have a really nice image, a really nice ad that you are just running once a day and they see your logo, they see your brand, and that’s it, because the more and more they see it, the more and more they become comfortable with it and subconsciously that trust is built. So that’s one thing, the case studies are extremely important. Again, with helping somebody make that decision of purchasing that product or opting in, hey it must be a good thing. So this is where you can start utilizing YouTube retargeting. For me a video is probably the most powerful communication modality vehicle out there because we are vocal right now but if you are able to see me you can see my mannerisms and my emotions and that is one thing that is really powerful about video and here is a great thing. Most people are not using video in their marketing, let alone in their retargeting, so if you can get a case study 101 with some clients and customers and them providing a screenshot, even that can be powerful because just see the amount of video that is consumed online today. And it is pretty much on every platform where YouTube is. YouTube videos are on Facebook, on blogs, and obviously when people search for YouTube videos online or certain things online so out pops that YouTube video, and they’re on your retargeting list, guess what, you can run that commercial right before that video with a call to action and it is pretty inexpensive. And there are a few other things that you can do with retargeting as well. James: Yeah I think video is something I’m sure many of our listeners haven’t explored yet. I’m sure there’s a big retargeting via display. There’s probably a few people that have also experimented going on to social and perhaps advertising on Facebook but video is perhaps something you see less often. Where do you actually set this up? Is it via the Google adwords platform or is ti somewhere else? Chris: Yes, so two parts. You put your videos on YouTube and then you can enter a YouTube account with your adwords and then when you set up your campaigns it just gives you the option what video you want to select so you can get pretty granular on the YouTube Google platform. For the guys out there who are a little bit more advanced, you can basically set up audiences with Google analytics based on certain goals and stuff that you have set up so it is really, really powerful. But it is difficult because the adwords platform can scare people away because it Is pretty intense to actually set up the retargeting is really not that difficult at all and here’s the thing about video. In the past people are afraid of video but now is the best time to do video because it is extremely easy whether you do what people call the VSL or kind of just like the walk through video or you just get out your iPhone and have somebody record it any way you choose video is extremely powerful and definitely should be leveraged because a lot of people in businesses aren’t willing to take those extra steps so for you to be able to beat your competition that way is very powerful. James: I’m glad that you touched on briefly platforms because I am sure it is a question that you get asked a lot, which is better, adroll, perfect audience, Google adwords, or whatever else. I am guessing you probably have an answer to this question so in your opinion what is the best platform to be using and why? Chris: Back in the day I was a huge, huge fan of perfect audience as they started out but as they’ve grown and been bought out, I’m not such a big fan. One of the reasons why is because they don’t allow you to put a cap on impressions basically based on their algorithms so I’ll definitely lean towards referencing Facebook for sure, especially when you’re running traffic from Facebook is very, very powerful. The Google platform is such a giant and you almost don’t need to be anywhere else. But here is the thing I kind of want to throw in there. I think what we’re going to see in the future is a big shift in how this is all done. As these big giants especially in the social world are taking over other platforms, you’re going to see this cross pollination of platforms become, right now it is a little bit difficult to retarget somebody who may be in your site on mobile and not on a desktop. But what’s going to happen is these platforms are going to change the way they are building audiences. So for example, Facebook, it won’t be based on a script it will be based on somebody’s account ID, right? So if somebody hits you via mobile from the Facebook platform. You will be able to target that platform towards their desktop or vice versa. So this is something for people to really consider and look towards the future with retargeting and why they should start now as well. James: And is there any pitfalls and problems to look out for, at least in the current scenario where we’re perhaps working cross platform, maybe with using adwords for YouTube and maybe using Facebook exchange or adroll for Facebook. Do we have any challenges there based on we might have huge amounts of ads appearing and then there’s no audience cap. What do we need to be sort of aware of in that regard? Chris: Well the really important thing is to make sure and it is really vital that you create a burn list. So if somebody opts in to your offer or purchases your product, you want to remove them from the audience set they are being retargeted on. Because it is not very professional if somebody purchases your products and they opt in and you are still pushing that ad to them. You need to be more advanced and high level. You put them in some other kind of audience maybe you offer them a different product or service. One thing that is also extremely important is to make sure that you have that burn list created. Essentially what you are doing is you’re dropping that same audience pixel on the thank you page. So when they land there, they can be removed from the audience that you have that you’re marketing to them for that initial offer for your product. The other thing too is just make sure that you are offering high quality. Again, when you are looking at sophistication in the competition out there, it is time to up your game especially when you kind of speak to the IM community here which I am imagining you have a good amount of listeners from. It just doesn’t suffice to have a crappy looking brand and a junky looking image more. Things really time for us in the community and beyond to really put thought in to the message and the brand and how we want to be perceived in the marketplace. I think it is going to be really, really important especially going forward because people just don’t believe that hype and the crap that they’re used to. James: Yeah, totally. Well let’s leave things on a few action steps Chris. For those looking to get started on retargeting and haven’t done so already, what one or two things could they be doing as a result of this conversation? Chris: Yes, one I would look for where your traffic is coming from, if you are running Facebook ads, absolutely have a Facebook ad pixel. Don’t overthink it, just drop the link on the pages. It is really easy to set up the audience with Facebook ad center and also just get the script from Google. Just get these script drafts and just build an audience for your homepage and if nothing else, start running a brand campaign where your brand is displaying one or two or three times a day and then on that I really want to challenge people to go out there and look at creating a video and put it to market, just try and test it with whatever your products and services to get your video in front of your site, your offer, or your product page. James: Excellent! Well I know Chris that you actually teach this stuff and are in the process right now of putting a course together to dive a little bit more deeply in to retargeting. Where can our listeners find out a little bit more about that? Chris: I am finishing the final touches right now but iloveretargeting.com and I go in to great detail on all these stuff. We have done an extreme amount of research and actually implementation on retargeting and I think I could say with a lot of confidence that there is not a course that covers retargeting in the subject of retargeting like I love retargeting so it will be a great course and you’ll want to jump in. James: Pretty self-explanatory as well. I think it also tells very much people about your belief in retargeting as well, right? Chris: It’s easy to remember so James: Absolutely! So I think you the listener can remember exactly what that URL is, it’s iloveretargeting.com but if for any reason you can’t head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/64 where there will be a direct link to Chris’s website plus some of the other resources mentioned in today’s show as well so that’s TrafficJamCast.com/64. Awesome Chris I think we’ll wrap things up there. Thanks so much for coming on the call, it’s an absolute blast and who knows maybe we’ll have another opportunity to do it all again. Chris: I would love to man, I had a good time. Thank you to Chris Evans from iloveretargeting.com. You can find out more about retargeting by going to TrafficJamCast.com/64 where you’ll find a special retargeting guide and of course the full transcript of today’s session and a downloadable MP3 as well. And whilst you’re on the episode page, why don’t you join in on the discussion for this show too? Also, if you haven’t done so already, make sure that you subscribe via iTunes and or Stitcher radio. For iTunes go to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and for Stitcher go to TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. Of course we end the show with the traffic jam. It’s a musical jam chosen by our episode guest. Chris Evans has gone for a classic. It’s a Frank Sinatra track and it’s Fly Me to the Moon. Enjoy this one and I’ll see you back here for another episode real soon! RESOURCES: Connect with Chris on LinkedIn I Love Retargeting MENTIONS: Mike Rhodes on Traffic Jam Get Your Website Analysed THE TRAFFIC JAM: The Traffic Jam is a musical jam chosen by our guest. Chris Evans has gone for a classic and has chosen Fly Me to the Moon by Frank Sinatra. The song which was written by Bart Howard in 1954 was originally titled In Other Words. The song became known popularly as Fly Me to the Moon from its first line, and after a few years the publishers changed the title to that officially. YOUR NEXT STEPS: To help take your YouTube, social media and banner retargeting campaigns to the next level download the special episode bonus below. The training includes MP3 and word-for-word transcript.

  Some twenty years ago it was easy to rank on the first page of Google. There were few websites competing for the top ten spots. Fast forward to the present, there are now millions of websites, and competition is rife. Smart marketers like Jonathan Mizel have turned to paid traffic with ever growing inventory, segmentation and targeting options available to them.  What’s more, the evolution of paid traffic is still in it’s infancy, with the birth of big data ad networks and marketers alike have more precise ways to serve ads to their ideal target market than ever before. In this episode you will learn how release yourself from the shackles of Google search and learn how to buy traffic to your website that is predisposed to buy everything you got. Sound interesting? Listen on.. SPECIAL BONUS: Download the paid traffic bonus bundle including mindmap, mp3 and word-for-word transcript. OUR GUEST: Jonathan Mizel got started marketing online way back in 1993. At the time he marketed several different products, performed lead gen and provided traffic services. He now works with just a handful of clients and on a few captive offers.. Jonathan is responsible for coining the term “Squeeze Page” and was the first to use a squeeze funnel. He’s considered by many as a pioneer of the industry. Jonathan’s skill and expertise, especially in the realm of paid traffic have been called upon by many large corporations such as Microsoft, Intel, American Express, and Barnes and Noble. He is also a consultant to many marketing ‘gurus’ such as Frank Kern, Rich Schefren, Perry Marshall, and Mike Hill. Jonathan Mizel currently resides in Hawaii with his lovely wife, Lish and their cat. When he is not working, he paints, does skiing, surfing, and scuba diving. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 63  of the Traffic Jam Podcast… The History of Internet Marketing. The Past vs. Present. Why Internet Marketing Today is Better. Traffic Sources That Jonathan Avoids. The Google Traffic Scenario. Media Placements. Why Specialising is Better. Jonathan’s Favourite Traffic Sources. Why Email Still Works. The Power of Facebook. TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Jonathan Mizel quote from the show: You can also get Jonathan’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “If you are buying your traffic, you’re going to respect it a lot more.”@JonathanMizelClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide TranscriptWhat’s up there listener? Welcome back to Traffic Jam. This is episode#63 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online. I am your host as always James Reynolds and in just a short moment from now we are going to be joined by Jonathan Mizel for a talk all about paid traffic among other things as well so that is coming up in just a moment. Before we get to the interview, just a reminder that will all Traffic Jam episodes come a bunch of bonuses and today is no different so head on over right now to TrafficJamCast.com/63 to get your episode bonuses which today include my own personal notes from my discussion today with Jonathan Mizel plus a downloadable MP3 and a full transcript of today’s show also. So head on over there right now, download your bonuses, grab a drink, put a notepad to one side and let’s get ready for the show. So as I mentioned at the top of the show, today’s guest is Jonathan Mizel and he’s been marketing online literally since the birth of the internet itself. He’s a true pioneer of the scene with a wealth of experience in both paid traffic, organic traffic, and offline and we are going to be covering each of those topics in today’s session. You’re in for an absolute treat especially so because this is the one and only interview that Jonathan is going to be doing in 2015. I’m extremely honored he’s chosen Traffic Jam. So on that note, let’s welcome to Traffic Jam Jonathan Mizel from Cyberwave Media. James: Welcome back listeners! You’re tuned in to episode#63 of Traffic Jam and joining me today we’ve got Jonathan Mizel. Jonathan, how are you doing? Jonathan: I am great. James: Awesome! Stoked to have you on the call today. We’ve had to move agendas and literally had to get you up at the crack of dawn so appreciate you taking an early morning off and tuning in for Traffic Jam. Let’s get stuck right in to the questioning. I think this is going to be quite interesting, you’ve been online for a long, long time, perhaps longer than most of my previous guests, I thought what we’d do today is talk about some of the things that perhaps worked in the past that no longer work today with some of the newer opportunities where we should be focusing our attention going forward. To kind of set the scene for the conversation and I guess it may surprise some listeners, when and how did you get started online? Jonathan: I think my very first online experience was 1991. 1991, 1992 we had Compuserv, AOL. This was before the commercial internet actually rose up. When we first got online, in terms of the internet, I think there were maybe several thousand websites and here’s an example of where we were at, Yahoo did not have their own domain. They were located on the subdirectory of Stanford University and it was more of a links list with a little function to it and those were back in the very exciting days of the internet because you could do almost anything and you could dominate almost anything. But, on the other hand, there was almost nobody on the internet so that was a very, very different time and of course things just exploded and grew rather quickly from there. James: I guess we are in two extremely different scenarios, before there was a different opportunity but perhaps a smaller market and now there’s massive markets but maybe less opportunity because it is overcrowded. Which scenario would you opt for it you are given the choice between 1991-1993 where you first got started and 2015 where we are now? Jonathan: I would opt for today. One of the things today that is so different is that it seems to me at least, there’s an unlimited amount of traffic back then. It was easy to get traffic but you just did not have a lot of visitors, you did not have a lot of audience and the audience that was there was no real way to segment it and no real reason to either. If they were online you’d be selling them something that related to online like software would be one of the big things that was sold back then. Now because the audiences are so big, you just have tremendous opportunity to sell anything and everything. And you’ve got sites like Facebook or any of the big networks that have segmented things so well and know so much about the audience that no matter what you’re selling whether it is software or something to do with woodworking the audience is there and is ready for you. And also today there is so much more traffic, yeah you have to buy it, yeah, you just can’t throw a website up and everyone would sign up. This was back in the day when you could put a squeeze page or an opt in form up and people just didn’t know any better and you would get 70-80% opt in rates. The audience is more sophisticated now but now you have a real opportunity for segmentation and for real target marketing. James: Yeah, those were back in the days where it was kind of a novelty to receive an email, right? So I am sure people would want to subscribe to email lists like wow, I got another email today, something to tell their friends about. Jonathan: Right! I used to tell that to my girlfriend like, look at all the email I got! That’s amazing! Where are those people from? I don’t know! But isn’t that cool? James: Yeah, times have severely changed. Anyway, I know you’ve got colorful views on certain sources of traffic, one for instance is SEO which you describe as bullshit! Why do you say that? Jonathan: Again, when we started, you can go to search engines like Yahoo or Excite, most of the search engines aren’t even around anymore and you could make a page, you could submit it, and within 5-10 minutes, you can see it in the index. Back then, take a term like weight loss or lose weight or some very popular term today, something like has a hundred million plus searches, you only had a handful of people trying to optimize for that particular phrase. So it was you and ten other guys so of course you’d be able to have a lot of wins. Nowadays, you’ve got you, you’ve got the ten guys, then you’ve got the guys in the next town, then the guys in the next country and I would say the competition has really killed SEO. It hasn’t killed the long tail. There’s still, four, fix, six word phrases that you can get optimized for but that is not really scalable isn’t it James? You can’t build a business on that even if they are 50 highly targeted clicks a week, the way that we discovered paid media is we had some issues with Google and once you’re making a lot of money with SEO and Google decides they don’t like your pages or your sites, or whatever anymore, they turn you off! And there is nothing more depressing than going from a thousand to two thousand bucks a day down to twenty, thirty bucks a day and so that is how we discovered paid media and that’s where we really determined that the most important thing, at least for us, is salability. For a local business, it’s going to be different. I mean if you are a pet shop, you don’t want a million visitors to your website that are going to burn your servers down and they are just going to destroy your load times. You only want as many people as are in your local town to visit your site, but if you are selling something that has true scalability, something in a large consumer market, scalability is where it is at. You want was many visitors as possible so that you can really maximize your audience and then start working on your conversion. James: Yeah, I guess it is becoming a smaller and smaller window with Google, right? Not only is that restriction of 10 spaces set, you’ve also got the issue that the fact now that there are so much content now online, I think the statistics now are that it doubles every seven to twelve months or something. You’re only increasing the nature of that competitive nation, it just gets harder and harder right? Jonathan: And also you have – well we don’t call it web 2.0 anymore because when the social hit, and the user generated content, now there is such a great opportunity for advertising. Imagine being the advertising manager for Facebook, and I don’t know if this is true but I heard someone say that they got something like almost a trillion views a month. Now whether that’s page views a month or page views a quarter, there’s a heck of a lot of inventory out there. And then there is also the Pinterest and all the other social sites so there is such an easy opportunity to buy advertising now that you know, why would you spend your time trying to get SEO? You optimize a page and then three months later you figure out if you actually have something there. James: It certainly is an interesting point, I mean whereas the opportunity perhaps narrows for SEO, it does widen for paid media because it does more and more are going online, they are surfing more and more places and there is more places to put advertising, right? And be more and more targeted in the process so I can certainly see why that would be the case and why you’re perhaps slightly vehemently against SEO as a traffic source. Jonathan: Yeah and listen, if it works for you, I absolutely optimize your page for Google and I think you should have your address at the bottom and your name and you should have a relevant title tag but I wouldn’t rely on that to be the be all. I think we only spend about 20 minutes a month thinking about search engine, we want to make sure we are findable. But in terms of really getting a new audience, and really attracting the tight kind of people on to our site, we almost rely exclusively on paid media, PPV, PPC, email, some sort of search that is paid search, because it is something that we can control and it is something that we can scale and yeah, you have to pay for it. But you know, there is this thing that I learned a while back, traffic goes where it is respected. This is going to sound a little weird but if you are buying your traffic, you’re going to respect it a lot more than if you are getting it for free. If you are paying real money from your pocket to get visitors in to your site, you are not going to give them a crappy page and you are not going to say, oh, look, they were more engaged today than they were yesterday. You’re going to have a solid strategy, you are going to try to engage people, but in the right way. You are going to try to capture their information so that you can follow up with then later and you are going to give them information that’s relevant and that means something to them. And that is really the benefit of switching over to a paid strategy, it’s that you start to respect your audience so much more and conversely they start to respect you. James: Yeah it kind of helps you raise your game somewhat when you’ve got a little bit of dollar in the game, right? Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely! James: You mentioned weight several times, I know you’ve got an agency called Cyberwave Media where you buy media placements in behalf of clients. Tell us a little bit of what you guys have going on over there. What do you do day to day? Jonathan: Well, day to day we’ve actually really scaled that back and now what we do is we like to work with one or two clients or captive offers. These are offers that we either have a vested interested in or that we own ourselves and really start to do media buying and really start buying traffic strategy for those offers as opposed to being just a general agency. And a lot of that has to with the specialization in the industry. You have so many people out there – whenever I see the competition, I move in to a different space. And so when we were the only game in town in terms of media buy, then we started to do more captive offers or offers where we can make more money from them. And whenever we saw more people getting in to a strategy, we started to do away from offering strategy and teaching our stuff, and really start implementing our stuff. Now we still do teach stuff, we’ve got a course called Traffic Evolution, we teach people about email marketing, but in terms of the one on one stuff, with just a couple of exceptions, we like to limit that to stuff that we own, or control, or have an interest in. And I recommend that to everybody listening to this. If you are an agency or a CPA network or a media buyer, you probably have already figured out if you’re going to make more money, have more control, have more reliable income selling something that you have a vested interest in, and something that you own or control, or have at least some degree of control than just working for a client, because if you put yourself in a position, you hang your shingles out saying hey I work with clients that will come my way, you know, you can get fired. But when you own the business or have a vested interest in it, it’s impossible to be fired because it is something that you are a part of. And also, you really start to become an expert on one thing, we’ve really worked in the health space and it is something now that we are so good at not because we say we’re good at it but because we’ve done it so many times for so long that we’ve got our top stand and now we can really focus on that stuff, if you’re beginning or when you’re new, a lot of young copywriters ask me how did you learn to write ad copy, or media buyers, and I said, well bring on a bunch of clients, figure out who you want to serve, and then get hired by people. There is nothing higher than getting deadlines and and work that you have some accountability for. But over time, I would recommend moving from being a generalist to being more of a specialist role, whether you are the owner of the company or you are an agency serving a particular niche. James: Nice! Good advice. Which traffic sources are either you or your clients having most success with right now? We’ve talked about some of you disfavor, which are the ones that you favor most at the moment? Jonathan: I think my most favorite one at the moment and always have been is email marketing. It is shocking to people out there, a couple of things: it is shocking that email still works but this is a real big surprise that people think that with all the span out there that people wouldn’t really be any life in email but a lot of people, when they get their spam, they get mad. When I get my spam, I get excited and I look at it and I am like, huh, I keep getting spam for this thing. I wonder what this thing is. I wonder what this product is. I wonder who owns this list. I wonder if I can contact this list owner. I’ll wonder if they’ll mail for me too! I wonder if they are canned spam compliant and so doing a lot of reverse engineering has really helped me discover not only new traffic sources but new channels to really help me discover not only new traffic sources but also funnels. And then the other thing I really like about email is that we were one of the first people to use the squeeze page and we’ve been using it since 1998. And I think a couple of guys may have been using it longer but in terms of what we’ve been doing, we really love squeeze pages and the reason we love them is because it allows us to build a list, and when we look at all the different kinds of traffic sources out there and we throw that traffic in to multiple pages, the pages that you know you like the most as squeezes and the traffic source that works best with that is email traffic. and that is because those users and behaviorally predisposed opt in list. They opt in to the list that you are renting, or that is doing the list or JV and now they are coming to your page and they are going to opt in to that as well. So email is a huge one for us, we’ve also found that there are a lot of commercially available lists out there you can rent legally, ethically, honestly, and then also, our biggest strategy is finding list owners that maybe have a small list, five or ten or fifteen thousand people on it who have never even considered doing a joint venture or doing their list and when we were hearing a funny story about a guy that just rented a list and apparently the list owner was saying oh my god you want to give me a hundred dollars to rent? Oh my god, I can’t even believe. Maybe I should go in to the list rental business! And my friend was saying, yeah, you should. But only for me. Don’t rent it out to anyone else. I know Charles Kirkland was on and he was talking about PPV and we really like PPV. It is probably our second favorite traffic source because you can literally pop up a squeeze page or a web page over your competitor, if you are selling a weight loss product you can target weight watchers and you can pop up a web page and say, hey, weight watchers visitors, check this out! And so you can create all this fun contextually relevant bridges and almost sneak in there and really target people at the point where they’re about the make a decision like when they’re on the page of your competitor. And then PPC is still fantastic as well and we also rank native advertising which is more of a content based PPC along in the content based bucket but any sort of pay per click where you are getting people to click, you are sticking ads in front of them, either ads that are relevant to the page they are on or ads that are relevant to the keywords that they search for, all of those continue to work to bring people in to your funnel and those probably are our three favorites. Email, PPV and PPC. James: Nice! I love when you spoke about list rentals and it reminded me of a piece I was reading prior to this interview where you said you have been influenced a lot by Jay Abraham and his concepts of doing host beneficiary types relationships that he spoke about in the offline world, gosh, I don’t know 15, probably 20 years ago now but it is very true to the point that there are people whit assets, with customer lists, inquirer’s list who have never, ever thought of actually emailing those people or making that available to someone else so outside the main channel, there are still opportunities that exist, right? Jonathan: Right! And listen, that particular talk that Jay gave which I think I heard from a Gary Halbert letter which maybe I heard two decades ago, it blew my mind. As what Jay said, you need customers. They are a particular type of customer that you can either dig them out of the ground and it is great to do that by the way, I dig a lot of leads and a lot of prospects out of the ground. I dig them out fresh and they’re mine. I am not buying leads from someone. When you run your own lead gen campaigns, you get those leads and they are exclusive to you and that is a fantastic way of getting leads and bringing traffic and prospects in to your business, but it can also be quite expensive because the more targeted you want those persons, you know, when you want someone who wants accounting services, and they have got to be local and they have got to have a business that has to have at least 10 employees, and so you start to look at all this double and triple demographic qualifications that they need, you can pay $30, $40, or $50 a lead or you can just go to a business that targets that same kind of lead. If you are an accountant and you are looking for those kinds of business owners in your area, you contact a lawyer and say maybe I can share those leads with you. And I am already going to pay $40- $50 for those leads by digging them out of the ground, I will just give you the $50 or $50 and I am not even going to compete with you. And so a lot of it has to do with figuring out not just who your competitors are because first of all, your competitors will most often give you your data and give you your list. I mean, look at Click Bank or any of these affilitate networks out there. You contact these guys and they sell a weight loss pill or something like that and you call them up and say I sell a weight loss pill, and they are like, okay, I will mail your offer. I mean, how often before the internet would you see a direct competitor say oh you sell something? I sell the exact same thing and I would love to give you my customers. It is almost bizarre but you forget that there are also a bunch of other businesses that are not necessarily competitors for you, they’re not just selling the exact diet pill but they are competitors for that exact same traffic or they are competitors for that prospect or for that demographic and that’s where the real opportunity lie especially for small businesses and local businesses. It is almost like the Chamber of Commerce meeting and I don’t know if they have them where you are but in the US there are a lot of Chamber of Commerce organizations and the idea was traditionally, 20 to 30 years ago, the accountant, and the lawyer and the contractor, they would all get together and they would all be getting the same prospect but they would be selling something different. Same prospect but different products and different services, and they would share those services amongst themselves in order to further their businesses and that is all that Jay is really talking about and that is how we have made a ton of money over the last 20 years. James: That’s a fantastic strategy! I actually build up a small photography company prior to doing what I do now pretty much based on this host beneficiary type sort of set up. We did family pictures and we did weddings and we literally went out the very best wedding seller, we went to the jeweler, we went to the bridal shop and we handpicked all of the businesses with the same target audience as us that we premium in our area and we incentivize them to introduce us to their customers and it was phenomenal, one because we are getting the right target audience but the second reason was that they were essentially endorsing us and introducing us to their customer base which made us toward a sale much more fluid. It works extremely well as you say for local businesses for sure. Jonathan: Yeah, a lot of people don’t get that when you rent a list to that list owner and you mail on their behalf, they’re actually endorsing you. They’re saying hey I have checked this guy out and he’s solid. And even if they haven’t, I wouldn’t recommend taking advantage of people, I would recommend always doing a solid job with whatever it is you are doing, but remember whenever you have people who are working with you and unknowingly they are putting themselves on the line by recommending you. And you said something that was really powerful. A lot of business owners don’t get this, you incentivize those businesses, you don’t just ask them. You don’t just say hey mail for me, you don’t just say hey, recommend me or refer me or put my business cards on your counter or your flyers on your window. You say, I will pay you to do this, I will give you cash money. When you have someone coming in, the ring seller, and you know they are going to be married because you sell the engagement ring, now there is a three to six months window before the wedding starts getting planned. What a perfect time for that ring seller to say, have you found a wedding planner? Have you got a place yet, a photographer? And now the person is not only highly receptive because the timing is right, but this ring seller has just sold them a $5000 ring and so there is a bit of trust and a degree of connection there. James: Yeah absolutely! How else are they going to make more money beyond that ring sell so it is certainly worthwhile for them too! Let’s get back to talking about online stuff. You’re a big fan of PPC and it seems to be that Facebook is the big flavor of the day now in terms of pay per click marketing, what do you see as the next big trend though, who’s the next one to kind of rival Google adwords and the like? Jonathan: I don’t think Facebook has even started what they are doing to any big extent. Facebook last year launched their network which is an adword network, I think it is Fbx the Facebook Exchange, it is something that we had a lot looking at and what’s so great about Facebook just demographic is psychographic and behavioral information. I mean, we know that this guy is interested in woodworking and we know that he’s 44 yrs. old and we know that he likes BMWs but we also know that because Facebook knows that he clicks ads. I was talking to a large agency a while back and these guys do a ton of banner ads and they have started to aggregate information that is behavioral in nature. And the number one thing that they learned is that their action takers and there are looker list and what they are looking is that out of all the people in the internet like only 13 of them click ads. These is only 13% and out of the 13%, only about 25% of the 13% or 4% opt in to the ads and out of the 4% only 1%-2% regularly buy stuff. Now, we are not talking about Amazon, we are talking about, because we are not going to be competing with Amazon, we are talking about people who are selling a product, an e-book, a widget, or a physical thing off their website. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be only able to target those people and what he had done first of all is just eliminated all the non-clickers. Why would you want to show your banner impressions to people who don’t click ads? And in that case, why would you want to show banner impressions to people who don’t click ads or opt in to forms? And I think what Facebook has is this behavioral data and I did not really see them at first because I don’t think any of us had a clue how much data they were collecting. But now that they are able to aggregate that data in to a huge database and really big data as they are calling it and move that off of the Facebook environment and out of the Facebook site. I think that is going to be really the killer app and if we want to look at something that is not Facebook, it is being done off Facebook as well in native advertising which is native advertising in things like – there are a lot of hypey stuff there but there are also al of stuff that have proven interest type of thing. The videos, the viral stuff, anything that people come in to. You have a viral video of a cat and a hundred million people go to that website and when you’ve got a hundred million people to the website and you are cooking everybody and you have MAC addresses of everybody and you’ve got backend bases for everybody and there’s this giant machine running behind the scenes. Now you can say, oh out of a hundred million people here are the four million and five million that click on the ads. And out of those four to five million that click on an ad, here’s the conversion data on them. Google also does this and Facebook does this too. Facebook had a lot of issues with their conversion tracking at first and I think they even took their conversion tracking off for a while and they did not really understand. Hey here are the people who convert and the offers who convert so I think big data has been talked about in the last few years but it’s not really turning in to something. One thing we saw a couple of years ago was people talking about and last year we finally started to see this and this is really something for Fortune 500 people but it is quickly becoming for us too and that was for people coming to google.com. Google would like Ford to target them and Mercedes.com target them. It was all “anonymous” stuff so Toyota couldn’t say I want this person and this person and this person. It was all aggregated. But it wasn’t anonymous for Google, they knew exactly who those were and it is not anonymous for Facebook either. They know who is online and who is buying and who is clicking and what they are interested in and I would say that the biggest change that we are going to see in affiliate marketing over the next few years is people going to compete with Google and people starting to compete with Facebook. I remember talking to a guy, a great marketer and he said, why does Google hate affiliates? And he said, oh they don’t hate affiliates, they love affiliates. How can they love affiliates? They ban them and they shut them down and stuff, they are not allowed to do case affiliates. And he said, oh no, they love affiliates because affiliates taught them all the verticals and they show them all the profitable ads and they taught them all the profitable landing page strategies and they taught them all the profitable sales funnels and now they don’t need them anymore. And I see if you are an affiliate, now this is bad news, if you are a merchant, this is good news. Facebook and some of these large networks, the out brands, because of the conversion data, I see these guys getting in to the affiliate base and saying if you want to sell supplements, don’t hire 50 affiliates who will rip you off and send you crappy traffic and so on, just hire us. We’ll send you good traffic and we’ll send you real conversions and we know exactly who you want and we know exactly who will buy and we only have to annoy the 4% of the people who buy supplements online. That’s what you’re selling. James: Interesting stuff. Well, thanks Jonathan. It has really given us a sneak peak in to the future and also a good look back in the past. I think we should wrap things up there because we’ve covered so much ground. Where should we send our listeners off to as a result of this show just to find out a bit more about you and see what else you’ve got and offer? Jonathan: I would say the best place is trafficevolution.com. That is our main site, it is our course on all the different ways to get traffic on your website, all the different paid traffic sources, so Traffic Evolution is our main site at this point. You can opt in and there are some free lessons, some great content and that will help you get started. James: Awesome stuff! Well to you the listener, the link off to traffic evolution and some of the other resources mentioned by Jonathan in today’s show will be included in the show notes for episode#63 which you can go to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/63. So yeah, let us wrap things up Jonathan. I am going to leave you to a morning, it is probably 8:30 where you are now so you got up super bright and early for today’s session so I am going to leave you to enjoy the beautiful sunshine and scenery in Maui and I hope to you see again soon. Jonathan: Thank you very much. What an honor to be on your show and to talk to you too. Really appreciate it! James: Thanks Jonathan! So there you go that was Jonathan Mizel from CyberMedia.com. Got to say, super honored and delighted in fact that Jonathan chose Traffic Jam for his only podcast recording for 2015. And also extremely grateful to Jonathan for waking up at the crack of dawn to record that session, so thank you to you Jonathan. To you of course the listener, the interview itself is not the only bundle of goodies you get on this episode when you head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/63. You’ll also get my personal notes from the show plus a downloadable MP3 and a full transcript of today’s training as well. So head on over there right now, it’s TrafficJamCast.com/63. If you haven’t done so already, just a reminder to subscribe to Traffic Jam via iTunes or Stitcher radio. There’s direct links to find your way to the subscription pages which are TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes for iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher for Stitcher. We of course end the show with a Traffic Jam chosen by our special guest Jonathan Mizel who’s chosen The Wind Cries Mary by Jimmy Hendrix, a classic track. I hope you enjoy it and I’ll see you back here again real soon! RESOURCES: Traffic Evolution Cyberwave Media Inc. MENTIONS: Charles Kirkland on Traffic Jam The Gary Halbert Letter THE TRAFFIC JAM: The Traffic Jam is a musical jam chosen by our guest. The Wind Cries Mary is the track chosen by paid traffic expert Jonathan Mizel. It is a song by the American guitar legend Jimi Hendrix. This track was released in 1967 and is included in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW: To help you get the most out of this podcast, I’ve put together a special bonus bundle… This bonus training bundle will teach you how to buy traffic to your website that is predisposed to buy. The pack includes… Paid Traffic Mindmap – My own personal notes from this show laid out in a one page guide. MP3 Audio – Full 45 minute recording of the show you can conveniently save to your computer for future reference. Word-For-Word Transcript – 11 pages of audio meticulously transcribed and saved to a PDF report. To get your bundle, simply click download and tell me where you’d like the bonuses sending:

  There are hundreds of millions of blogs on the internet which makes standing out in the blogosphere hard. With an ever increasing number of bloggers vying for consumers attention, what does it take to stand out above the crowd and be heard? Kristi Hines seems to know how, but then again she should. Aside from her own content Kristi has written over 400 blog posts for others in several different markets, on topics as far reaching as finance and search engine optimisation. Her content has appeared on more than 60 popular websites which gives her an advantage over others. On this episode we ask Kristi Hines to reveal how to do blogging effectively. The type of ‘effectively’ that’s resulted in over three hundred thousand social media shares and one hundred fifty thousand Google search clicks for Kristi to date. Listen in and learn how she does it, so you can implement her learnings in to your own blog content. SPECIAL BONUS: Download Kristi Hines’ Top 5 (Free) Headline Generator Tools For Bloggers and Content Marketers. OUR GUEST: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer who has worked with many well-known companies like American Express, Capital One and Freshbooks. She has been writing about social media, search engine optimization, web analytics and online marketing since 2009 and her blog Kikolani has been recognised as a Top 10 Social Media Blog. When Kristi started freelance writing, she wrote first for Sprout Social, KISSmetrics and Unbounce to name a few. Her freelance writing portfolio contains more than 400 posts which have been shared more than 300K times on social media and received over 150K clicks from search engines. If you want great quality content that actually works, Krisit Hines is a person to go to. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 62  of the Traffic Jam Podcast… The Key Elements of A Blog Post. Finding the Right Topics. Tools of the Trade. Kristi’s Most Famous Blog. Blog Formats That Work. Content Layout. The Visual Element. The Best Content Length. Headlines That Get Clicked. Content Promotion. TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Kristi Hines quote from the show: You can also get Kristi’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “Social media gets immediate traffic but search engine traffic is what you want long term.”@kikolaniClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide TranscriptHey what’s up listener? Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is show#62 of the podcast that helps you get more traffic to your website and make more sales. I’m your host James Reynolds and what an awesome show we’ve got lined up for you today. In just a moment from now we are going to be talking all about how to do blogging with Kristi Hines but before I introduce Kristi and get to the interview itself, there’s a couple of things I’d like you to do. The first is hop on over to iTunes or Stitcher radio and give a rating and review for Traffic Jam. Giving a review really is the number one way you can show support for the show and help get this content out to more people. Plus, when you leave a review, I am more than likely to read it out on a future show so a great way for you to get some exposure for yourself as well so I’d love for you to do that. The second thing I’d like you to do is head on over to the episode page for Traffic Jam#62 which is at TrafficJamCast.com/62 and download the special bonuses that come with this episode. Aside from a special MP3 download for the show, full transcript of the show today, we’ve also put together a special resource guide with several tools that will help you create content topic ideas for your blog post far more quickly and easily than trying to muster them up yourself. So head on over there now to get that – TrafficJamCast.com/62 then let’s move on with the show. Allow me to introduce today’s guest. Her name is Kristi Hines and she’s a freelance writer and professional blogger who writes on topics such as content marketing, search engine optimization, social media, and web analytics. Her work has appeared in more than 60 online publications including Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, and Social Media Examiner. Kristi is the writer of the likes of Kissmetrics, Sprout social and Unbounced quality content that gets results. Her freelance portfolio contains more than 400 blog posts that have generated over 300 thousand social shares and over 150 thousand clicks from Google search visitors each month. Today we’ll be tapping in to Kristi’s knowledge to understand what it really takes to write blog post that generate more traffic and exposure. So let’s welcome now on to Traffic Jam Kristi Hines from KristiHines.com. James: Hey there listeners! Welcome back to the interview section of Traffic Jam. Today we are joined by the very experienced blogger Kristi Hines. Kristi, how are you doing today? Kristi: Doing good! How are you? James: I’m awesome and super excited to have you on the show. Definitely looking forward to tapping in to your experience today. Let’s begin, let’s talk about what makes effective content because you’ve been blogging a lot both at www.kristihines.com and www.kikolani.com but you have also written well over 400 blog posts for others in several other different markets and on topics as far reaching as finance and search engine optimization. So let’s begin by tapping in to some of that experience. What would you say are some of the key elements of a blog post that kind of remain regardless of topic and regardless of market? What are the mainstays of every content? Kristi: The mainstay is basically knowing your audience like knowing who you want to attract to your business website and creating content that is going to be of interest to them. And so I always like to suggest maybe survey the people that want to come to you and say what kind of things are you interested in and do some research to see, because there are not a lot of unique ideas are out there and a lot of topics are being covered because there are millions of blogs and everything out there. So I would suggest people kind of research people who have already talked about certain topics, see what’s the best mix for those and make sure you include yours and make sure that yours has that unique element. James: Nice! Do you use any particular process to do that? Some things that we found effective here is using tools like Buzz Sumo for instance to kind of see which pieces of content have gained social traction and then to try and understand what topics or elements of those pieces of content have really kind of generated rapport and struck home with readers. Do you use any tools in the process like that to really zero in on those effective topics that might be? Kristi: I do use Buzz Sumo, that’s been a recent favorite of mine for finding out which posts are most socially engaging and I also look at what topics ranks the first page of search results for keywords because sometimes they are not the same posts. And you kind of want to get a good idea if somebody is looking at Buzz Search, will you be able to get your post in to that first page and make sure it is unique enough so I kind of use both. James: Yeah, it’s this simple but effective trick right? Google themselves are looking at all those signals as to what makes a piece of content actually a good piece of content and needless to say, those pieces of content that make it up there in the first page, they must be doing something pretty well. Kristi: Exactly! Social media gets you the traffic immediately but in the long run search engine traffic is what you are going to have so definitely that is where you want to end up – that first page. James: Absolutely! And some other things that have worked kind of nicely for us from an SEO standpoint and looking at what pieces of pillar content that really work is actually just then is going to the biggest sites and the most well-known people in the market and seeing which pieces of their content perform best and perhaps use tools like AHRefs or some of these search engine optimization links and analysis tools to effectively see which pieces of content which content gets linked to most and that has also been a good process for us for sure. Kristi: Yeah! One of the tools I use is cognitive SEO and the reason I like it is instead of just looking at an excel table it actually gives you these little dots and if you see a big dot it means that it’s got a lot of links. You can kind of drill down to it and see the links so it kind of helps you visually identify the content that gets the most SEO action. James: Yeah, nice stuff! What’s your best-ever performing piece of content and what made that so successful? Kristi: I don’t know overall but in the past year I know I have done a series of Google analytics post for Social Media Examiner and those have done really well and I think one of the big reasons is that Google Analytics themselves tweeted it – like when that platform tweets and it has like hundreds of thousands of followers so it just got tons of traffic and a ton of social engagement. James: Yeah. That’s nice and that’s a fantastic tip in itself. If you can create a piece of content that includes or is around someone who’s on a social cloud on a good following , it can get them engaged on the content and also helping with distribution, it makes life a little bit easier, right? Kristi: Exactly! You just have to notify them too because sometimes they are not checking the entire web for content so sometimes you have to be like, hey, we mentioned you in this post and that definitely goes a long way. James: Yeah absolutely! Let’s extend conversation around that topic, what types of posts are working really well because one that gain is used a lot by bloggers the world over is list post or expert round ups which would be kind of along the lines of what we just mentioned. Is there any kind of structures or formats on the posts that you yourself are finding the most success with? Kristi: Usually list post, like the more number you can put into the type the better. If you have a hundred sources or whatever, people think it’s interesting and they read it and they are like, oh, wow it’s got a hundred things it must cover everything and then they start sharing. That obviously works very well. How to posts usually do very well too because if somebody is looking for a specific piece of advice that’s the kind of title they are going to click on. James: Yeah, definitely! A past guest who came on talking about guest posting and a particular method that he was using was Brian Harris and he says how to posts are just the way forward for him. He pretty much writes nothing else and that is because while people are searching for it and secondly it is inherently useful. If you can show somebody how to do something and that in itself is extremely valuable and gains a lot of traction so I can see why that would work. Kristi: Exactly! Especially with online marketing people, everybody asks questions and titles and search and sees how to do this then that’s what’s going to get clicked on. James: Yeah totally! So how about laying out the content? I am sure for a how to post that would be extremely important having a mix of actual instructions and then perhaps screenshots and diagrams to show people how to do something. How much attention do you put in to actual lay outs of posts versus the writing itself? Kristi: It is really important to start those types of posts to let people know exactly what they are going to get out of it like within the first paragraph or two because somebody like you can write how to posts like two thousand to three thousand words long and you want people to know immediately that this is the result that you are going to get by the end of it. so you definitely start out with that and then you want to get a clear headers all the way to it just like generic step one, here’s how you do this and step two here’s how you do this, that way if there is somebody who knows most of everything, they can kind of skip through the instruction and get what they really want to get to. Even if they find just one section useful, they are going to probably share it with people because they know that it is complete in like everything. And screenshots are definitely important. If you have a how to post without screenshot for something that is like on the computer then people are just going to leave because they can’t really visualize the information. I have people telling me that they love my post just because the screenshot directed them exactly to where they needed to go. James: Yeah, absolutely! And I think visual content is extremely important. The information is important in itself but when you can also illustrate that and engage people a lot more often with imagery. It really makes that well rounded post effective, right? Kristi: It does. And even if you think about things away from a computer like a recipe, if you’re not a good cook, sometimes you just want to see a picture of the step that is going on so you can be like oh, this is what I am doing so it just makes it easier actually to do. James: Yeah totally. Well my girlfriend will vouch for that, she was never much of a cook until she found instructional how to’s on YouTube and can actually see it being made. I think that element is extremely important. And I guess it also appeals to different modalities. Some people are kind of naturally more visually led and other people like the written word and text so you have to make sure that you have all people covered in one post. Kristi: Exactly, yeah. I like writing but at the same time I really like to have that visual reference if somebody is talking about this and here’s where to go to do it or here’s how to do it. It definitely helps. James: Now content length is certainly a huge case for longer content performing better, generally it does perform a lot better than short form content and I think generally there has been studies that longer content generates more social shares as well on average. In your opinion, is there an ideal word count or range that we should aim for? Perhaps one that you typically aim for for yourself? Kristi: For the bare minimum, for people who are like just looking for content it’s just like 600 words but for people who are like do really well like ad search and social, definitely like 1500 to 2000 words is definitely a good range. I think it’s SERP IQ did a study on this and they said that most content that did on the first page is usually like 1500 and up on word count and I think Buzz Sumo did a study and said that the most viral posts are like 2000 – 3000 words. James: Yeah, and I guess that probably in itself is a suggestion that just because it is longer it is more valuable, I think it’s probably just a substance factor especially when it comes to social sharing. Someone will look at that and go yeah, this looks more valuable maybe I am going to be more inclined to share it with my own audience. Kristi: Yeah, I still go with a theory with a lot of people probably don’t read what they figure for that long it covers everything. James: Yeah, I am sure that’s the case. I have been guilty sharing that stuff, reading it probably a quarter of the way through and realizing it is pretty good stuff but maybe not having time to go through and read the whole lot and sharing it out there on social media. You didn’t hear it here by the way but I’ve done it a few times. Kristi: Yeah, Neil Patel does a really good job and he has these things like huge guides and he breaks them in to little sections and I look at them and I’m like ten thousand words, these are all the topics it covers, it’s good. James: Yeah absolutely! And it coming out, knowing that it’s going to be someone from Neil Patel I know it is going to be good stuff anyway so you probably don’t need to read too far, huh? So what sort of formulas have you got for headlines? Because that, probably as we all know or at least any of the Traffic Jam listeners would know is extremely important for driving traffic and getting people actually in to any content itself. Do you have any formulas for writing headlines that our listeners might be able to follow? Kristi: There’s actually a lot of tools out there if you just do a search for like headline generator or title generator or blog topic generator. There are tools where you put in a keyword and it will give you headlines that kind of work with that keyword and I kind of used a lot of those to generate hundreds of different headlines in that way I can just have quickly go through and say, that’s a good one and I squeeze it to the topic. James: And would you agree with the approach that perhaps you should be spending more time on the headline than the content itself? Several people kind of vouch for that that really is the key critical point of a piece of content and getting that right should be where all the attention is or is that taking it a bit too far? Kristi: I think if you are writing a 1500- 2000 word post you are probably going to be taking more time on the post than the headline but I think there is the up worthy strategy where they re-write the headline 25 times and out of that you get like a couple that are really good. And you can kind of use those to test social media like which ones gets the most clicks and things like that so it is nice to get a couple of ideas, try them out, see which ones are the most popular. James: Yeah, definitely. And looking at the overall concept of blogging, I guess I have two questions around, first one, should everyone be blogging? And the second one will be, can everyone blog? Is writing easily learnable and can someone become an effective blogger even if they are totally adverse to writing a single word anyway? Kristi: I think it kind of depends on your kind of industry. Most businesses have a blog because there is going to be somebody who is interested in some form of information either about their product or about their industry as a whole so I mean there is definitely room for just about everybody to blog out there. As far as writing being easy, it’s not always the easiest thing for people to do but there are ways to kind of get around it; being a freelance writer, there are a lot of people who come to me because they are like, I have this great idea, here are the points I want to cover, I just don’t have the time to actually sit down and that’s when they hire outsource out basically to do it. And there’s also people who speak a lot easier than they can write so they actually just like talk about their idea and then just have somebody transcribe it so there’s lots of different ways to get your ideas in to written content without having to write it. If you enjoy writing, if you have time to write obviously it is a great thing to do but if you don’t there are ways to get around that and get the blogging going too. James: Well you are obviously someone who enjoys writing so if there are people out there who would be interested to engage a writer like you, how would that process work? What would you need to know to write a piece of content that would be effective for a business? Kristi: Typically what I ask people, I ask them if there is any topic that they are interested in putting out in their blogs because there are some people who really just have these great ideas and just don’t have the time to actually put them out on the screen and everything. And I also ask people who their competitors are and I go look at their blogs to see the kind of topics that they are covering because that can be a great insight whether things are going to be popular with your target audience or not. Sometimes you’ll find out your competitors are really writing for other people in the same industry and really, your focus is to write for your customers so there is a lot of insight you can get just from that kind of research. James: Just before we wrap up, let’s turn our attention to promoting our own content. We’ve gone to the process of writing a blog post, we’ve written a topic that we know are going to engage, we’ve got it laid out correctly, we’ve published it on our site, what are the steps after? What do we do next in order to get that piece of content out to the widest and most relevant audience? Kristi: Definitely social media promotion like you would have promoted to all your channel and everything. People think that’s probably overkill but at the same time there are just people who like to be on Facebook and they just like to be on Twitter and if you’re not posting to all of those channels you’re going to miss those people who have like their preferred networks. So social media, if you have the budget you can do the advertising. It is always good to do that too. You just want to make sure that you target the audience really well. You don’t want to be just like oh I want to be telling this to people I don’t care who they are but some people do that and it’s not exactly the best approach like you want to kind of use all the advertising targeting options to like find your ideal custom audience to make sure they’re the ones seeing your ideal content and if you have an email list, definitely send it out to them and if you don’t have an email list start one that way you have people to kind of promote it to like get it directly to their inbox instead of using Facebook reach to get to them and everything. And I have also found discussion marketing really works well so if you kind of set up a Google alert for people talking about a specific topic like if you can find people that are asking questions about it and you can like cover the discussion and be like, well, here’s the answer to your question if you want I have a blog post about it. That kind of thing works really well too. James: Yeah, nice. That can be very effective and actually going back to mentioning the tool that I included at the start of this recording, Buzz Sumo, that’s quite a good way to also see who’s been involved in conversations around other pieces of content, perhaps similar to your own and it is actually quite nice sometimes give a people a heads up and say, hey, I know you are interested in this type of content, I have just created a better post or an even better guide on it, perhaps do you want to check it out and it might seem quite sort of interruptive but actually it gets a very good response because you know those people are interested in the topic that you are presenting them with so try that, or try not, depending on your position but I have also found that to work well. Kristi: Yeah that is really good but just don’t go overboard on it. You don’t want to be that person who’s Twitter stream have like a hundred tweets like @thisperson check this out, @thisperson check this out. James: Absolutely! And certainly be targeted around that, it’s certainly not a blanket approach and I am sure you as I, have been turned off by people who blatantly have been spamming content @me or @you with just a direct approach. I think if you can enter that conversation appropriately with something that is extremely relevant then it can be effective. I know that you’ve got a course coming out quite soon at www.contentpromotionplan.com, without divulging the entire course content, what are some of the biggest content lessons you’ll be sharing in that course? Kristi: The main goal is to help people generate traffic and engagement for their content because it doesn’t really matter what your content goals are if you’re not getting traffic to your content, you’re never going to achieve them. So basically you’re just going to go through all the different steps I use to promote my own content through email, social media, discussions and other different strategies. James: Awesome. We’ll make sure that the link to that site is included in the show notes. I know you are not quite ready for the re-launch just yet but it will be included there so our listeners can keep a watchful eye as soon as it is ready and available. So aside from that I am sure that we’d like people to know that they can find you at www.kristihines.com, where else can our listeners find you out there on the web? Kristi: My Twitter is @kikolani. James: Awesome! We’ll make sure that all of the links to Kristi’s websites, social profiles, and some of the resources mentioned in today’s show are included within the show notes of episode#62 which you the listener get to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/62. Thank you so much for coming on Kristi! Thoroughly enjoyed today’s conversation, all that remains is for me to thank you and hopefully sometime in the future we can hook up once again. Kristi: That sounds great. Thanks for inviting me to be on your show. James: Thanks Kristi! So there you go that was Kristi Hines from kristihines.com. Remember to accompany every episode of Traffic Jam comes a special episode bonus. To get your hands on this show’s bonus go to TrafficJamCast.com/62 where you’ll find a special resource guide with several tools that will help make your job of coming up with content ideas for your blog post that much easier. So head on over there now, go to TrafficJamCast.com/62, grab the bonus and also join in on the discussion for this episode. In the coming week, if you’ve not done so already, remember to subscribe to Traffic Jam via iTunes or Stitcher and you do that by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. Now we end this week’s show with a Traffic Jam of course chosen by our guest today. Kristi Hines has gone for a track chosen by Lindsay Sterling, it is a violin track and it is called Round Table Rival. So enjoy the song to play out the show and I’ll see you back here real soon! RESOURCES: kristihines.com kikolani.com Kristi on Twitter Content Promotion Plan – Course How To Generate Dozens Of Blog Content Ideas – Blog Post MENTIONS: Neil Patel on Traffic Jam Bryan Harris on Traffic Jam Cognitive SEO AHRefs Buzz Sumo The Traffic Jam is a musical jam chosen by our guest Kristi Hines has chosen Roundtable Rival from American violinist, dancer and composer Lindsey Stirling. Stirling’s professional career started in 2010 when she joined America’s Got Talent and finished as a quarter finalist. She has been making waves since then. HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW: For content to be effective, it first needs to be read. In order to get your content read, you need an interesting topic and a compelling headline. However, we all know that coming up with topic ideas, more so headlines, can be a tedious task. Well, what if there were tools that could do it all for you? What if there were several tools and all of them free? This has to be your lucky day! As a special bonus for this episode I’ve created this resource guide: Kristi Hines’ Top 5 (Free) Headline Generator Tools For Content Marketers Using these tools will help you come up with topics for your blog posts, with little effort and a small amount of clicks. You can get the guide containing links to all of these tools immediately below. Go ahead and click download now.

  Content Syndication is a term that heralds from broadcast television, and is the reason why shows like Seinfeld and Friends gained such wide exposure. In the same way that television networks licence their shows to other providers, you can licence your own website content to other publishers in order to increase your audience share. But larger audience share is not the only payoff from a well devised content syndication strategy. Syndicating your content to the right sites will also provide you SEO and authority building benefits too. Listen in to episode 61 and learn how Brian Honigman has leveraged his owned media content to sites like Huffington Post, Mashable and The Next Web and gained over 500,000 search engine visits in the process. FREE BONUS: Download 52 Google search strings that will help you find content syndication and guest blogging opportunities quickly and easily. OUR GUEST: Brian Honigman is a marketing consultant, speaker and freelance writer. He helps business with their online and content syndication strategy. Brian has worked with several startup companies as well as established businesses such as Dell, Citibank and Toyota. Brian used to be Marc Ecko Enterprises’ Digital Marketing Executive doing their global social media strategy for their fashion brands, overseeing the company’s SEO, and managing a team of designers and marketers. Before Ecko, he was LunaMetrics’ Social Media Manager and a Marketing Consultant for Sampsonia Way magazine. As a speaker, he has spoken at conferences such as Huff Post Live and American Advertising Association on topics such as how to find success with social media and the value of guest blogging. When Brian has some free time, he volunteers for the American Red Cross by doing their social media. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 61  of the Traffic Jam Podcast… Content Syndication vs Distribution. Creating Relationships for Syndication. The Syndication Process. Finding The Right Partners. Niche vs High Authority. Content Types That Work. Content Syndication and SEO. Getting Started with Syndication. Results Received By Brian. TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Brian Honigman quote from the show: You can also get Brian’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “Content syndication isn’t for everyone. Do it consistently or not at all.” ~ @BrianHonigmanClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide TranscriptHey what’s up listeners! Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is episode#61 of the podcast that helps you build and grow a profitable audience online. I am, as always, your host James Reynolds and I am excited for another awesome show that we have lined up today. But before we get to the show today, let me just send a couple of high fived out in to the Traffic Jam community. The first one to Julie who commented on the Yaro Starek episode and the second one to Chall who commented on the Mike Rhodes episode. Thank you to you both for providing such awesome feedback. I really do appreciate that. And remember to you, the listener, the episode page for each show is the place to comment, ask questions and to access all the extra bonuses that come with every single show. Because each week we painstakingly put together a full word for word transcript to the show, we add a downloadable MP3 file just incase you want to save the show to your computer and don’t want to stream via iTunes or Stitcher or one of those places. And we add some special bonus training to really help you take the ideas and methodologies that are presented in the show to even greater heights, all of which are available to download for free from the episode page itself. So you may be asking, well, how do I get to that? It is very simple, in this instance go to TrafficJamCast.com/61 and to access the bonus training for the other episodes, same thing, TrafficJamCast.com/ the episode number. So before we get started today, head on over to episode page, grab the MP3 if you wish, grab the transcript, but also grab the special bonus upload, the content upgrade that comes with the show and then be ready to listen on to this episode. Okay, so now to introduce our guest for episode#61. His name is Brian Honigman and he’s a marketing consultant, freelance writer, and professional speaker. He worked with both startups and brands, improving their content marketing, social media and search engine optimization efforts; NYU, UNICEF, Huffington Post, Live, The American Advertising Federation, and for organizations and conferences all over the world. He’s also a contributing writer to Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, Forbes, The NextWeb, Wall Street Journal, and others. Are you interested to know how he got those writing opportunities? Well, it’s your lucky day because that is the topic of today’s interview. We’re going to be talking content syndication – how to take your own content and get it syndicated to major media channels for wider exposure. That’s what’s coming up. So without any further ado, let’s introduce our guest today, his name is as of course, Brian Honigman and we’re talking content syndication. James: So hey there! Welcome back listeners. You’re tuned in to Episode#61 of Traffic Jam and joining me today is Brian Honigman. Brian, how are you doing? Brian: I am doing great! Thanks so much for having me James. James: Great to have you here. As always, I want to drive straight in to the content and it’s actually content syndication that I want to talk to you about today. Just to kind of set the scene because these types of terms do get banded around quite a lot. What’s the difference around content distribution and content syndication? Brian: Content syndication is actually a form of content distribution. So content distribution is just utilizing the content that you have in behalf of your brand or to reach your audience and distributing it where they give their attention where they are active or where they are reading or watch video etc. Wherever your audience is at the same time. The active content syndication as a form of content distribution, content syndication is basically producing your own content on your own properties and then having different partners republishing that content elsewhere. So I think listeners would probably be most familiar with content syndication on TV. Seinfeld is probably the most syndicated television show ever. I don’t know at the top of my mind what the initial channel they were on, but years and years after their show is replayed on other networks giving them more visibility on a wider audience to see their show so business owners and marketers can do a similar thing on a variety of ways – video content, blog content which will be the main content as I describe content syndication. Basically in a nutshell it is a way of producing your own content and making a way to post it with your permission to achieve common goals. James: Nice! You’ve begun to answer my next question which is why after putting all this time and effort and energy in to your content then why give that content to other people for them to gain the benefit of it and I guess it is that exposure, right? I mean really what we are talking about is taking an asset that you own and giving it wider distribution and getting it more eyeballs. Would that be fair to say? Brian: Yeah, absolutely and I think you brought up a common concern. I think the whole process of content syndication has to be very strategic. I wouldn’t say creating a blog post then having it republish on these blogs is a real worth. I think you have to have a very specific plan in mind and understanding why you are doing content syndication you give it greater visibility but in a nutshell you republish your content with partners that reach the audience that you are trying to reach. You want to ensure that you get credit for as the owner of the original content and you want to make sure that your content partners actually get traffic and engagement with their content because what’s the point of publishing a blog post on a website that doesn’t nearly get any traffic or doesn’t get searched with the same audience then that’s when spreading the content is taking much time but it isn’t worth it. So you have to be very strategic in that approach and you can choose what you want to keep as your own solely or other copy you want to syndicate. I have seen blogs that do not practice syndication with all of their content. They only choose some of it, they think that it will do better than others. It is important to incorporate content syndication as part of a greater strategy. It isn’t like the sole channel but one of many that can drive results. James: Yeah, well let’s loop back to the strategy in a moment. I certainly want to dig a little bit deeper on evaluating syndication partners and what quite you might have in place to sort of pick out what would be good syndication relationships and what might not be. But let’s move things forward by talking about the kind of the nuts and bolts process of getting your content syndicated. Do you have yourself Brian a formula that our listener could follow for hooking up these syndication relationships? Brian: Yeah, sure. It definitely is a long process, definitely not something that happens overnight. Let’s talk about blog contents specifically. There are many types of syndication videos but this definitely is applicable to different types but I will be talking solely with your blog. With your blog, I think it is important for when you are producing your content for the long term. So consistently creating valuable assets that drive interaction with your audience. From that point, you want to start your transition to building relationships with other blogs, publications and voices in to space that industry that would potentially be interceding in syndicating your content. So that process involves a lot of relationship building. Also guest blogging. Guest blogging is typically when it comes to the syndication of your blog content, one of the best ways to transition in to this whole process. That is something that I had done and I worked with many clients in the past for my consultancy. Basically, you are creating your own content then in order to reach out and reach the similar audience to your own and generate reviews and your content visibility and is creating content to serve a particular audience, it is great to use guest blogging. Guest blogging is a lot of work because you are not just writing your own blog. You have to create content for the blogs of others that drives results back to you as well. It’s a great tactic and I definitely think that there’s great benefits to it in the long term but it requires a lot of work and a lot of asset and time which are blended for everyone. So syndication is a natural evolution from guest blogging where once you have created content in your own site, you start to reach out to other relevant sites. They are allowing you to blog on their platforms and once you kind of buildup rapport with these editors, blog and content managers, then it would be much more easier to say, hey, are you open for the potential of syndicating content as opposed to an additional content I had been producing for your website up to this point? So it typically requires a little bit of trust or a higher level of trust than just reaching out to a website blindly and that’s unless you have a really, really big brand behind you, a large audience where you can demonstrate the value of syndication so it can work but it is easiest to work once you have already established relationships with the other blogs and publications that you want to syndicate with and guest blogging is a really great way to bridge that gap and establish that relationship. James: Yeah, it is certainly sounds like a sequential process. It’s not like a shortcut here? You’ve really got to first of all, have some proof of quality content before you can even approach those guest blogging opportunities and I guess once you’ve managed to hook up those guest blog post you then have the opportunity of a piece of gain with a little bit of traction. We also have perhaps a bit of interaction, people have enjoyed them, then the next step is, hey, how do we leverage this and perhaps I can give you regular stuff which you can just re-syndicate. Seems to be how it works, right? Brian: Yeah, it’s definitely a slow transition and I don’t want to say that that initial proof that your content will resonate with their audience and it has resonated with yours in the past, that doesn’t mean your blog has to have three million unique visitors a month but what it does require is that you are consistently publishing and that your content is of quality to a particular audience. I think those are without a doubt requirements. Yes, the larger, if you have a very active blog with a large audience that it is very easy to illustrate, yes that certainly will help. But at the end of the day, what’s most important is the quality. James: Yeah and I guess the other opportunity if you don’t have a good blog following and a proven track record of content, you can just go out and create something and submit that as your proof I guess that would be another strategy you could implement. So what are some of the key points then to evaluating syndicating potential partners? You did touch upon a few and that is of course that they have an audience because there is no point syndicating to a blog that has no one actually looking at, but what might some of the other criteria be in selecting who might be an appropriate partner for syndication? Brian: Sure. So I touched on this a little bit already in a sense that you want definitely to choose partners where they’re reach is to a similar audience to your own. So if you are in one industry and the other blog and publication reaches a completely different industry that you are not trying to reach and has no value for your offering as a business that really doesn’t make sense. So first and foremost you want to pick a match in terms of the audience that they are reaching. It doesn’t seem to be a hundred percent exactly the same but if you are trying to reach email marketers. Let’s say you are trying to reach blog managers and this blog and publication reaches in general role, then that’s fine. It doesn’t have to be a 100% match but it should be pretty similar on audience reach or you won’t get any value on this effort. Another really important consideration is does this publication or blog really syndicate content? Not all blogs choose to do so. So how do you find that out? Looking at their content, seeing if you can see any content on there that has been syndicated in the past, just simply illustrated within the article, it will either say at the bottom or at the very top of the piece it will say something along the lines of – this article was originally published on this blog, and will have a link to that original article making sure that they get due credit for their work. That’s always a good sign as to know if the blog does actually accept syndicated content. Also, kind of pointing back to establishing relationships. When you have a relationship with this blog, in any capacity and you have individuals reach out to you, you can just kind of ask them since they are already in touch with you in some capacity. Whereas in other cases it is going to have to be a blind outreach. Some places love to do it, others are against it. it really just depends on where the publication is at and what they are looking to accomplish so I know a big publication like Huffington Post often syndicate content from other sources and I found that out just by looking at following writers on there that I valued their insights and I saw that the article was originally published on their blog or for some other place that they writer for and that was indication enough to do it on my own but yes, understanding if it is an audience match, if they actually do syndicate and then just getting the right contact info. It probably is the best way to do so. It’s the things that I consider when matching up with partners and kind of a tactical approach to the whole identifying partners aspect of content syndication is when I am creating content for my own blog or for another blog for a client, I often think about, okay, so we are writing this blog article, and I always want to ensure its relevancy as it is relevant to my own audience but at the start I begin to brainstorm this article and start to think beginning to write it, will it benefit another audience of the places I am currently or in the future would like to syndicate to? Let’s say I am writing an article on my blog that I plan to have ideally republished in Huffington Post, I will keep that in mind to ensure that from the beginning my article is of worth to my audience but also I am catering it to the style guide and audience interest of the Huffington Post in this example but that’s something I always like to keep in mind so that in the end when I produce this article for my site I want to make sure that it still matches other audience as well otherwise they can potentially say no it is not a match and that is something in the world that will happen but if you plan to really tackle syndication it really is important to keep that in mind from the beginning. James: Yeah, interestingly as we talk about Huffington Post, I know of course obviously that it is one of the sites that you syndicate to. Another one to my knowledge is nextweb and those are quite different right? You’ve got Huffington Post which is kind of a big behemoth of a site with a huge audience spanning a lot of different topics whereas nextweb is a smaller website with a lot more niche focus so I guess one is going after the audience and one is going after the particular demographic audience type that you want. What have been your differing results between the two like if you were to weigh one up against the other, which would you take first? Brian: I think that is a pretty example to pull out there and something for others to definitely keep in mind. You want to be syndicating content to different types of blogs in different locations in your space so for instance the Huffington Post is a much more well-known brand, larger publication, add a lot of credibility for the content that we are producing for. It is a great way for myself or anyone else who syndicates on Huffington Post to say hey, I contribute content regularly to the Huffington post. The difference is that since it is such a large publication at all, once you do have content published on it, it is far more difficult to give that content the visibility that it deserves because there is a lot of other competing content on that website. Let’s say for example Huffington Post is a massive content producer, they probably publish a thousand content a day whereas a smaller niche publication like Next Web probably does something closer to a hundred or less. So you are competing on a far larger scale in a site like Huffington Post so it is likely that your content on there won’t get as much traffic and traction and engagement, social media because you are competing with a lot of other content on their site. But, if for some reason you right something really wonderful, and it gets the visibility you deserve on the Huffington Post or a publication of that size it will be seen by a lot of people. It has potential to reach a massive audience but you will have that less likely to happen on a large publication like that but you’re still so it is beneficial to publish there. You do get the links that are high value, the publicity stamp is there. But whereas with a more niche site, the more industry specific site like Next Web which is kind of tech marketing focused designed for marketers’ publication. It has a much smaller publication. It is not as well known outside of the tech space, still highly credible, still a wonderful place to pitch your content, but it is far more likely that each post will drive more traction for your business if you are in a particular industry. Because they are publishing a far less amount of content so you are competing with a lot less content, the entire audience of the site is more likely the audience you are trying to reach. When you are publishing on an industry niche publication, the entire website is focused on the subject that you are publishing and syndicating content about. Whereas on the Huffington Post, since there is such a large major publication, they are not only publishing tech for this example, but they are also covering politics, business, food, religion – all this different posts that they have, all the many audience that they are attending to. Whearas slightly larger number of the Next Web audience and other industry niche publication audience is relevant to the content that you are producing. Also, with the fact that they are producing a lot less content on a daily basis, your content is far more likely to get published on the homepage on their site, be featured on some capacity, be shared on social media with attribution to you whereas the Huffington Post, or a larger publication, he’s far less likely to tweet that article on your behalf or share on their Facebook page. They are far more likely to share content that they produce in-house and content that’s generating a lot of traffic building for the site so I think the best approach for someone who’s approaching syndication, the best time for the first time is to syndicate with both large publications like the Huffington Post as well as niche publications like Next Web so you get a variety of mix and it is a part of your content syndication plans. James: Yeah, that would certainly be my experience too. A couple of the sites that I syndicate to, one is Entrepreneur Middle East which is relatively broad. It is obviously business focused but it is relatively broad topic related and another that we work with is communicate by advertising page which is a smaller site by comparison but is far more focused. Everyone that’s reading that magazine or looking at that website is in the marketing space and therefore it’s a very applicable audience to me. But would I trade either one of them? No of course not because Entrepreneur is that kind of nice credibility and authority building site that gets big exposure but the other one hits my perfect target audience so I think that is kind of excellent advice. If you can certainly strike that balance, that’s the perfect scenario to be in. Let’s talk about types of content. I’ve found particular success with visual content for syndication especially infographics and things like that. But in your experience, are there any types of content that particularly are well suited to content syndication? You’re obviously doing a lot with blogs, you’ve also mentioned videos, but what types of content might work? Brian: it depends on your goals and the goals of your blog and your organization but I found that blog content – online at least, is one of the most syndicated. I think second to that is videos and visual but everyday videos and visuals are quickly rising in popularity in comparison to the written word and blog content but at the end of the day articles and written content still gets far more visibility so across the web and a lot more readership than a lot of these other forms of content so that is going to make a lot of editors and blog managers far more understanding in integrating blog content in many cases includes video and visual elements as well. But I think one thing that I found that’s worked is, also from a networking perspective, is including perspective of others in your industry. Not just like a roundup post or something like that, but let’s say, if you are talking about email marketing, including the insights of a prolific, influential email marketing expert within an article, you’re not only networking with that individual, but I found that it makes a feast of written content like a blog post gets far more accepted often for industry blogs because they take that industry voice and credibility source for your argument, you’re making it a piece and further encourages them to syndicate it so I would definitely consider a different source of information quoting different sources of info and individuals in your pieces because that is a great way to further encourage your content to getting accepted. James: Yeah and I guess the real smart thing about that is if you do quote industry experts who themselves have a large following and an influential reach if you happen to tell them the fact that you’ve included them, there is also an opportunity they’ll send plenty of people and traffic and visibility your way as well, right? Brian: Exactly! It’s a networking move for both of you and you being generous in the form of content, actually funnily enough, I wrote an article today for my blog brianhornigan.com/blog, about using content marketing to grow your professional network and that is kind of one great way, that is syndication in a sense by including them and featuring them prominently and giving them some additional visibility which they are more likely than not share with their audience which is another great move for everyone involved. James: Yeah cool! Of course content syndication also has SEO benefits, right? It can also support search rankings. What are some of the SEO related syndication tips that you might have and of course are there any pitfalls to avoid as well when you are kind of putting the SEO slant in to some of this stuff? Brian: Right. With anything with SEO, I always, always, always, always encourage to be cautious. If you do anything that is kind of gaming search engine capacity it is highly likely that it will be flagged and not actually help and potentially hurt your efforts to optimize for the search engines. But it is important that all your content, you have this in the back of your mind you have to focus on the right approach. So in terms of SEO I think one really important concern is when possible, I know it is possible, but when syndicating with a partner there is a canonical tag to have them add whenever they republish content to their site of your own. They can add a canonical add that tells this search engine that it is a further indicator to let the search engine know that this is the original home of the piece and to give the original piece the authority and the greater visibility for search engines. So yes, both pieces will rank if you have a piece of content syndicated on three different places, all of those pieces will rank for keywords related to the subject but with the canonical tag, you are telling Google, hey, we’ve given express permission for this to be published out there but we’re the original piece so this is what should get priority in search results. That is an important concern. I don’t think you’re going to get hurt if you don’t use that in some publications. Some blogs that I have worked with and syndicate with don’t even know what that means and they are not really open for such changes but other ones, there’s a lot of plug ins that you can use if you look at this but typically in the instructions given by Google in the topic of syndication, they say that as long as you include that link on the post either at the bottom or at the top that says hey, this article is originally published in Brian Harmon’s blog. A version of this piece was originally published to Brian Harmon’s blog and a link to this piece. Typically that is good enough for the search engines to understand that this is a syndicated piece and to rank it accordingly but the canonical tag is another separate piece to have but not a 100% required. It is a nice to have rather than a must have. James: Yeah totally and I am sure plenty of people’s eyes will be spinning a technical code on things like what exactly is a canonical but – Brian: Yeah, it is a little touchy. James: Totally, but let’s get wrapping things up. Before we do that I want to ask you about how this perhaps applies to great local business owner for him to kind of to get only a small percentage of the potential target market. It might be on some of this bigger publications especially Huffington Post or a site like that. Where do you suggest that they get started if indeed you do suggest they get started with content syndication? Brian: It is not for everyone. I want to make that clear. It depends on what your goals are and your bandwidth for creating content. You don’t want to create it once, you want to do it many, many times and very consistently so if you don’t have the bandwidth to create content on a regular basis and then continue syndicating on a regular basis. It is a long term thing. For everyone who don’t have the bandwidth then it is certainly okay to skip it. Blogging on your own is still valuable as well. This is just an added tool for distribution. What I would suggest for small businesses is mainly using content syndication to help build their visibility online so getting the links, the traffic to your site can help build a more robust profile for your website. They may not have many links to it or may not even often be visited by members of your audience. It can be a small blog in your area, it can like in Brooklyn for instance, it can be a little Brooklyn blog that covers small business needs. See if they ever syndicate content, see if they ever are interested in anyone producing content for their site. Just start to build a relationship with them. Either way, it will be beneficial in some capacity. It is just really important to start small, realize that if that one article doesn’t move a needle for you that syndicated, over time, this whole process can help your website a more powerful than helping market your business and not to mention a stamp of credibility. Which business owner would you be more interested in doing business with? If one has written for the Huffington Post or some other publication or industry, as opposed to the same business owner who owns the same type of business but hasn’t been published anywhere. So it definitely is a great credibility tool like another stamp of approval that you can get from a third party source to help further validate your expertise and your standing within the industry. James: Yeah, well that is something that I am sure that has been of huge benefit to you Brian. You’ve got those relationships in place and you can say that you’ve been published on Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal and some of the other places that you’ve appeared, but to just kind of wrap this whole topic, what have some of those spin offs been? Have you been able to attribute some of this content syndication down to revenue in your pocket or increase traffic to your website? What have been the spin off results for you and your business? Brian: I definitely think without a doubt that using content both on my blog, guest blogging and having it syndicated has been one of the main growth drivers for my entire business. I have been blogging and writing for probably 3+ years now and that content across my site and elsewhere ranks for relevant keywords in the search engines, is shared on social media often so that typically, like 80% of the people that reach out to me are close to other people within my network or from referrals reach out to me because they saw my blog content that was ranking in the search engines or they saw it in social media because someone shared it. And that is typically a source of all my inbound leads. These customers are already interested in my offerings. It is not a hard sell now that they have kind of learned something from me. Sometimes a client will reach out after having followed my content on a particular site for months or years and they’ll say hey I have been following you on the site for a long time you’ve taught me a lot, now I need your marketing expertise for XYZ we’ve got to work together. That helps me make clients, that helps make initial conversation a lot easier because we already kind of have an established rapport if you will, and I think it has been really wonder and a lot of great things, having been able to establish relationships with great individuals in the industry, I have been able to press mentions just because you produce enough content on a particular subject matter, you slowly get started to be associated with someone who knows what they are talking about in that particular field. So it’s been a really great benefit for my efforts and I can’t recommend enough. Just as an example, of the content that I am producing, last year just on the search engine, so content on my blog, content on other websites that I have written when it is ranking in search engines on Google, it’s clicked on over five hundred thousand times a year so that is only a metric of someone clicking on an article and reading it, it doesn’t necessarily mean they read the whole thing, they bounced right away, etc. but that is a lot of potential interaction that has led to a lot of visibility from that so I certainly implore others to definitely experiment with creating content on a consistent basis and seeing what works and seeing what doesn’t. James: Okay cool! Also, it really is inspiring for someone who has only really been writing in the past two or three years and from what I understand kind of hated writing until he passed through school, a bit like me. I think it is quite inspiring for us to get on board and try some of this stuff themselves. Brian I think this a good juncture to send people off somewhere where you live on the web, I guess that would be your website, www.brianhonigman.com or is there anywhere else that you would like to suggest our listeners head on off to? Brian: Yeah, www.brianhonigman.com/blog, at this point I am producing content on there once a week on all these different subjects so I have an article about content syndication if you want to review the process we went over today, that would be helpful. I’m also very, very active on Twitter. You can always reach me there just www.twitter.com/brianhonigman. James: Perfect! Well to you the listener, Brian’s website, his Twitter profile and some of the other resources mentioned in today’s show will also be listed on the episode page for this show which you’ll get to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/61. That’s it! I guess all that remains for me is to thank you Brian. Super stoked that we connected and this was a blast! Thanks for sharing so much. Brian: I had a great time, thanks for having me! So welcome back listener. There you go that was Brian Honigman from www.brianhonigman.com. Now be sure to check out Brian’s website and his social profiles which are included in the episode page for episode#61. And also contained on that page is a special bonus for you. To help you really get started fast with content syndication, I have prepared 52 of my favorite Google search strings that will help you find guest postings and syndication opportunities faster. So to get your hands on that, and of course to join in to the discussion for this episode, go to TrafficJamCast.com/61. Now of course we will be back on Traffic Jam next week with another awesome guest lined up for you, but to play out this week’s show we do have as always, a traffic jam. It is of course chosen by our guest, Brian Honigman and he has gone for a very recent and up to date track. He’s gone for Charlie XCX and the track Boom Clap! So enjoy that and I will catch you again here real soon. RESOURCES: Brian Honigman The Ultimate Guide to Content Syndication Brian on Twitter MENTIONS: The Huffington Post The Next Web Yaro Starak on Traffic Jam Mike Rhodes on Traffic Jam THE TRAFFIC JAM: Brian Honigman has chosen a track called Boom Clap from the soundtrack album of the hit movie The Fault in Our Stars. It is by the British recording artist, Charli XCX. The song may not have have reached the no. 1 spot but it did peak at number six on the UK Singles Chart and number eight on the US Billboard Hot 100. HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW: As a result of listening to this podcast you are probably excited at the idea of syndicating content, but what’s next? Assuming you already have content, you are now ready to locate suitable syndication partners. CONTENT SYNDICATION STRATEGY DOWNLOAD: I like to make things easy for you, so to help you do that faster, I have collated 52 of my favourite Google search strings that will allow you to identify content syndication partners quickly and easily. Copy and paste these search strings in to Google and you will have a long list of partners within minutes. This list is available for free below, so go ahead and download it now.

Since banner ads are largely ignored by consumers, you might assume that you, the marketer, should ignore them too. Whilst this is largely true, due to developments in technology giving us better insights in to our audience and more precise ways to target them, online ads in the right hands are perhaps more effective than ever before. In this media buying 101, Charles Kirkland opens up and discloses some of his best paid traffic tips acquired from years testing in a multitude of markets, across many networks and for both B-to-B and B-to-C products and services. If you are new to media buying and worried about getting your fingers burned, this podcast will teach you how to set things up right from the start and get the maximum ROI from paid traffic. FREE BONUS: Download the Paid Traffic Calculator. Pre-populated spreadsheet that ensures your media buys always turn out profitable. OUR GUEST: Charles Kirkland is the founder of the Media Buyer Association. He is fully committed to helping entrepreneurs and small businesses build successful media campaigns by providing advanced training and resources from real world experiences. Charles used to work for an engineering company but had to quit his job when he was diagnosed with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in his late 20’s. He took different kinds of jobs including teaching and selling products but continued to educate himself in online marketing. After years of learning, Charles took a risk on a media buy and saw his traffic and sales rise in just 30 days. Stunned by these results, he made further studies and realized how powerful media buys can be. With all the ups and downs that he experienced, Charles wants to make things easier for other businesses by giving them training and real world advice. SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 60  of the Traffic Jam Podcast… PPV: Who Should Use It? CPA: Why It Works. Why Yahoo Stream Ads Work. YouTube Ads. Getting Started. How To Choose The Right Model. Charles’ Greatest Successes. Testing and Tracking Ads. TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Charles Kirkland quote from the show: You can also get Charles’ quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “Your business doesn’t work on clicks or optins, but the ROI you are generating.” ~ @TheSEODudeClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide TranscriptHey what’s up there listeners? Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is episode#60 and of course it’s the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online. I am your host, as always, James Reynolds, and I want to start this show just by giving a quick thank you to Jimmy Daly who left a five-star iTunes review for the show, and he said, “I would describe this podcast as action-packed. James brings on really smart guests and asks really smart questions. The result is a high-energy podcast with tons and tons of information.” Thank you to you Jimmy. I really appreciate that glowing endorsement for Traffic Jam. I also want to thank Ferds, Sef and Thomas Dylan who stopped by the episode page for episode#58 and joined in on the discussion there. Thank you to you guys. And that is the place that you too, the listener, should be heading off to each time you listen to Traffic Jam. The location for this show’s episode page is TrafficJamCast.com/60 and there you’ll find a full transcript of today’s show, you’ll find a downloadable MP3, you’ll find episode artwork, plus a special bonus that accompanies the show, which in this case is a paid traffic calculator. You’ll find out why that is important in just a moment but right now I need you to head on over there, download your bonuses and then listen on to the show. So today we are going to be talking paid traffic with Charles Kirkland and he’s the founder of the media buyer’s association and according to Charles’ bio, he is fully committed to empowering media buyers to create successful campaigns through real world education and hands-on training. Charles is a walking, talking, networking blend of credibility and know-how. Me and Charles, we have been connected for some time and I know he is a regular listener to the show also so I thought it was about time we brought Charles on to the show to share his paid traffic wisdom and a lot of that wisdom he has got! I am sure you are going to love this interview, Charles is hugely passionate about paid traffic and I hope his brought some of his passion in you too. I guess that is enough of an intro today, let’s invite on to Traffic Jam, Charles Kirkland from the Media Buyers Association. James: Hey listeners! Welcome back to episode#60 of Traffic Jam and you’re right here with me and Charles Kirkland today. Charles how are you doing? Charles: Doing good! How is it going? James: It is great! I am super excited for today’s session. Let’s jump right in to some jargon because there seem to be a lot of terminologies swimming around the media buying arena and you too have coined some of your own interesting terms in the past. Let’s do a quick-fire round to get this media buying 101 started. For each of the following strategies, I’d like you to explain what they are and who should be using them. First one out the hat is PPV, what is it and who should be using it? Charles: PPV is pop ups so if you’ve been to a site, you’re just browsing around and all of a sudden this pop up, usually 600×800 pixels, and what happens is PPV is basically pop ups. People install adware, people confuse it with spyware, and there is a difference, adware you’ll say hey I’ll get a free weather report because it’s raining but they get a free weather bug, free coupons, free shopping and free video games and because of that they install this little piece of adware and you’ll see a handful of pop ups a day. And then when they visit these sites, the people that control the pop ups will allow people like me and you to bid on it so let’s just say we want a pop up on top of weightwatchers.com because people who are at weight watchers are there for a very specific reason. They are not there because they need whiter teeth, prettier hair or longer lashes. They are there to lose weight. Because of that, it is called contextual priority wherein we are going to target people on a particular site knowing they are only there to interest so really the power of that is massive. If you are an affiliate and you want to promote a weight loss product, or a fitness product, you can target literally a weight loss site. And the more contextually relevant your ad is, your pop up to the landing page and the more that your ad looks like the landing page, the higher the opt in rate. So it is a great way to build a list from affiliate marketing. You can make a lot of sales with CPA. The problem that you get with this is the quality of your prospects aren’t exactly the highest. Let’s just say that if you just go to traffic events and look that the people who are winning these cards. Most of them aren’t exactly sitting there, you’re dealing with typically a very different demographic so they like free gas cards, free games. They have a free mentality, if that makes sense. So if you go if you want to build a high end $20,000 culture program PPV, it would be an epic disaster. Typically, these people, they work like general types of things, like weight loss, sex, regrowing hair, make money online and that kind of stuff. It also falls apart if you want to do things like hey, I am going to show you how to build your own bow cabinet with scrap wood made from pallets would be a disaster like all grooming would be a disaster. So that’s the path but I tell you from the standpoint if you need a hundred thousand visitors a day, you can go to PPV and you can get it. James: Got it! So we’ve laid the ground work there, it’s a volume market and it’s probably not going to be best positioned if you’re selling high priced products, Charles the next one out of the Traffic Jam hat is CPA. What’s that and who should be using it? Charles: CPA really is cost per action and you have a variety of CPA networks. And the reality of this, let’s just say that you’ve got a product, let’s say that we’ve got a product of how to lose weight. What we can do, we can do to the CPA networks and say you know what, you’ve got a product and you can say I will give you $47 of every sale you make of a $2.95 track, 9 days in, you’re screwed up, you have too many hits on the ad, too many hits on those numbers and it doesn’t work out. But just trust me for a minute. So the CPA network says, okay, we’ve got a product we will put it in our network, and we can also distribute it to other CPA companies, so you have what’s called agent of record which is the main CPA company that is basically getting out your product. The beauty of that is that it’s not for beginners and if you’ll tell me Charles I need to figure out how to make my house payment or I need to like sell on internet marketing, it’s not for you. Basically it’s for people that have an advanced system because of the power of this and I know you’d say you’re mad, you’re dumb as ever, I hope you’re not an accountant, don’t ever try to do accounting but what happens, let’s just say we’re paying $47 to the CPA network and we’re selling at $2.95 trial, the reality of this, is you are getting a sale for $2.95. There is a huge issue with the money that we are paying out with what we’re about to make but the reality is, once we can get them to purchase the product, we can run them through which we’re talking literally $400 – $600 upsells potentially, typically it’s not that high. So we’ve got upsells, we can push them to continuity. Once we’ve got a buyer we can have a rep call them on the phone, hey Janet, it looks like you’re trying to lose weight, have you tried the African green mango chai berry, would you also like to get personalized coaching for $97 per month? Yes of course, that sounds like a winner! Or, you can find out that Janet’s recently divorced and bankrupt, you can take that data and sell that data to somebody else who will give you a call about bankrupt problems. The reality is once you’ve got that data, there is so much stuff you can do with it, if she just bought a weight loss product, maybe you can sell her a teeth whitening product, and maybe instead of one month supply we can sell her a six month supply of that for $200. The reality of that is that you obviously paid the money to get you a buyer. It is your business to maximize the revenue from that buyer and they can do this on a scale of thousands of buyers per day. James: Yeah so again perhaps more of an advanced strategy and we certainly need to know our advanced numbers when we dive in with CPA. Good round up Charles. Next one out of the hat is Yahoo Stream Ads. What are they? Charles: That’s beautiful. This is like the greatest thing since Facebook! The reality of this thing is that the truth of the matter, yahoo used to be the dominant player and google kept them in the tail end and took the number one spot. The reality of this is that Yahoo still has got a massive amount of traffic and the most important thing to me is that they’re not the traffic Google has. Typically we say google this, google that it’s like Kleenex, Xerox. The reality is that people who go to the Yahoo homepage, most of them re your average everyday users and there is nothing wrong with that! And Yahoo has this particular scenario where they say, hey, we will take what we call a native ad and we will put it on the Yahoo homepage or the Yahoo pages so you’re on Yahoo and you’re like strolling down and there’s this big list of stuff coming up and you call see this strange stuff but the reality of this is using Yahoo we can now with the native ad formats, we can get our ads in to in Yahoo and I am just going to tell you is that the average person in Yahoo seem to be a better buyer while the google buyer are like I know what I want, I want a clean screen and go from there, the Yahoo prospects are typically a better quality prospect. And truth matters, they’re there, they’re browsing through, they see the content, at that point, they’re reading it, they click on the link which appears to be an article. They’re reading a link with a minimum of 50 words about how simple it is and how the product that can help them, and how it was discovered and how it is made, and clicking on the link by the way they go to get a free trial of Super Testosterone Booster 2000. Plus they have the ability to get it in to their mobile network. The big thing that a lot of people are not really understanding mobile and desktop are two totally different environments. It is also two different buying paths. When you are in the desktop environment, you don’t mind filling out 4-6 to 15 fields, name, email address etc., but when you are in a mobile environment that’s a massive turn off. I don’t know about you but my fingers aren’t all that big and I have like a big sized apple, a big iPhone and it is bigger than the normal thing, and my finger still like hit everything under the sun. So you need to make sure you have a different path. Make sure that especially if you’re using a mobile friendly page, a lot of people end up with desktop native ads building content on the left hand side and ads on the right. What’s interesting is when it goes in to a mobile format, all that you’ll see are the stuff on the right on top of the article which will kill your conversions. So definitely keep that in place. And from a standpoint, if you are doing mobile, make sure you understand that the user who has an android is different from the user who has an apple and even the operating systems that they are going to use are going to be completely different. You are going to have some people who are like if something comes out, they buy it. We also have the people I meet at yahoo, those are two different buying habits or two different buying cycles. You need to make sure you are catering to that group. Also, apple users spend more money than android users just as a side note so make sure all users know that even the device that they’ve got, whether you’ve got the latest Samsung or the old Nokia, it doesn’t make a difference. All that makes a difference when it comes down to when you target them they will give you a different moolah. James: Nice! Well we’ve touched on different few topics which I think I will come back to in a moment or two but I want to pull out the last term from the Traffic Jam hat and I believe this might be a Charles Kirkland term, correct me if I am wrong, but the term’s the traffic death wheel, what’s that all about? Charles: That’s a good one and it is really weird because I started thinking about this, one of the biggest issues that people run in to is only having one traffic source. And I have taught people they have to get Facebook but no they say they know what they are doing on Facebook so therefore I don’t need anything else. The reality of this, at the end of the day if your prospect is using Facebook, okay great, maybe you can communicate with them via the email. Okay, if you’ve got them on Facebook or email could you communicate with them via SMS text message? Yet if you’ve got email or Facebook then it becomes another method of communicating with them. Can you get them to purchase? Do you have their full name, their buying data, their home address, their zipe code? Yes! Have somebody, we have a girl from our office who gives them a call and say hey, I’m calling from Charles’s office, welcome! People freak out over that! We’ve got automated posts going out to our buyers going out to just say thank you and not enough people ever say thank you and they get a post card and they get a call and they get a postcard, you are going above and beyond what everybody else is doing in this space becomes a huge factor because now even if email blows up and let’s just say also you can’t deliver email because everything has been triple opt in and spam compliant. As much as we would like to thank people on our list, if you’re willing to do that, I guarantee it would be to your advantage. So also you have the ability to do direct mail which has the least competition. SMS messaging, lead pages roll out – huge opportunity. Email, Facebook, we then start looking in ad roll, there is a huge opportunity and most people end up using one traffic source and that traffic source eventually will die no matter how you slice it, no matter how you dice it. I know people who thought that the days of Google cache would never end and the guys who are really working the 9-5 job because they made half a million dollars a year with Google cache when it blew up, they had nothing else going and anything else out. James: Yeah. And this is a topic that we do touch on in Traffic Jam and there certainly is a school of people who would say, find one traffic source that works and then maximize it. Just ramp it up as much as possible. But you’re not giving yourself too much insurance if you are single source dependent and as you said, it will soon become a time where it dries up or the rules will get changed and you’ll leave yourself high and dry. Certainly worthy advice Charles. Let’s move on from there. I want to talk to you a little bit about native ads because it is something that you have mentioned already and it is something that people have been literally waxing about for this whole past year. What’s the scoop on native ads? First of all, what are they? And secondly, do they actually work? Charles: Yes and yes. Native ads, people think they are something new. Unfortunately they are something that the old school guys look up to and use let’s just call it an ad camouflage, that’s the easiest way to put it. if you walk up to a store and a guy walks up to you and say just stand back I’m going to make a private space, I don’t want you I just want some private space. Their stuff is like buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff. What’s wrong why are you not buying my stuff? Native ads are completely different. Native ads basically fit in to the format wherever you’re at so if you’re reading a blog, you’re reading content and you see native ads at the bottom and on the side, and native ads are designed to blend in to the content and appear to be content! The magic part of this is when we see ads, immediately our defenses go up like some marketer is trying to sell me something. There are people who leave really nasty comments on Facebook calling me everything but a sanctified child of god. People just send hate emails, I just can’t believe that people hate marketers. We’re not as low as a used car salesman but people don’t really like marketers and when they see marketing their defenses go up, but when they see native ad content that appears to be just more content, they are more inclined to read the content, their defenses are up and it means basically being stabbed and pouring salt in the wound and then the wonderful thing about the native ad is that it also loads you up in the ambulance, gets you to the doctor and gets you fixed at the same time because a native ad will lead you to buy your product that you probably did not even know you needed 10 minutes ago and a good example of that is advertorials. Also tool advertorials work great if you are looking some of the original advertorials, they were in magazines. Nobody reads the word advertorial at the top if they do, they don’t pay any attention. They read the content and they create sales. Give me an example, even Ink magazine, a fast company, you go through it and you see it says advertisement at the top and it will be laid out as an ad. The reality of this, people consume ads and they go it’s an ad. Native ads, they are reading it, it is so much easier to sell and if you want to look at even just more proof positive here, not I would ever recommend you doing it, fake blogs or whatever you want to call them, why they work so well is you read the story of a stay at home mom making $700 per week, whatever, it is because it was presented in a story format. These advertorials and the native ads, typically it’s a story format and people will read stories. People can read stories and recite stories where they could not recite an ad. James: It’s pretty interesting that even this far there’s plenty of places where we can buy media and lots of ways we can go about it. For someone who’s kind of browsing new and getting started I am sure this can be quite overwhelming and I know you’ve got experience teaching others how to do it, where do you suggest that someone doing paid traffic and doing media buys get started for the very first time? Charles: It’s really going to depend on your niche because there are some niches that are more family friendly and they’re just more family friendly than others, if you are just going to say, hey, I am wanting to get started, if you try to come home to Facebook and speak about weight loss, especially before and after weight loss, when they place your ad, they will pretty much keep you to the curb, blacklist your account and tell you I don’t want your money regardless of what. Or if you came in to adwords and say I have to make money online on my business opportunity, with affiliate marketing thing the problem with saying is that the key is really going to depend on your niche. Every niche is different. Like if you are in to finance, you can do great with Facebook. If you are in to weight loss, Facebook is probably not going to be the answer. Fitness, weight loss, business opportunity, make money online, internet marketing, that type of stuff generally, as a general rule, will be better off using PPV to do your first media buy. Somewhere like media traffic because leader pack has probably a thousand dollar buying end to get started with so I would say media traffic. if you are doing something like hey, I have a product, I own a business and I am trying to promote it, then I would say start with adwords. It gives me the best quality traffic you are going to find because they are searching the solution to their problem. The issue that you would have to fight with, adwords is a very mature traffic source so you pay a lot of money per click so you better have a deep funnel, a deep backend and know your numbers. Facebook still has plenty of traffic and has definitely got a lot more expensive. But they have got plenty of traffic and they are very easy to use as long as you are neither some of their banned or un-family type niches. So if you can’t start with Facebook, if you can’t go to adwords, from there PPV. Also keep in mind that once you get started the magic really is in the numbers. What does your tracking tell you? Or the people converting? Because a lot of people make mistake use Facebook. They’ve got a leadpage landing page, they’ve got a leadpage sales page and then they’ve got a thank you page. A lot of times people say it is not working! Did you get any clicks on your Facebook ad? No? Well you can’t tell if it is working or not. Did you get clicks on the Facebook ad? Okay then at least it tells you your Facebook ads are working. Did they land in to your opt in page? Let’s just say that we’re using a squeeze page, well no. then that means there is a disconnect between them clicking the ad because apparently they clicked the ad on Facebook. It had to appeal to them in some way, shape or form. If they are not opting in, we need to sit down and say, okay, what is wrong with our opt in page? Maybe the opt in page is hideous, maybe it doesn’t work, maybe it’s worse than buying mobile traffic on Facebook and the page doesn’t look right. Maybe you’ve done something to the page. Maybe the best thing that you have to do is have the headline match the headline that is on the landing page like the ad. So it follows so consistently. Headline matches the landing page? Okay, so if they click the ad, they opted in but they are not buying, we have to look at did we get enough clicks to determine, if you have a 1% conversion, it takes hundreds of clicks to make one sale. So if you’ve got 50 clicks and you’re saying it’s not working, you don’t have enough data yet. So the next thing you want to look at is maybe the landing page and the sales page or those headlines congruent? Is the offer congruent? If it is, you should be getting sales. And a lot of people don’t really sit down and try to backtrack. If they look at it, they say, o it’s not working. They don’t have the data to determine if it is working or not and that is one of the big things. The big thing especially with beginners is like I got 50 clicks and I did not make a $1000 sale, what is the problem with this? It’s all a scam! I hate to say that but the bigger issue is people. James: Yeah, well hold that thought for just a moment, because we will come back and talk about testing and tracking in just a little bit but for now I want to throw a little bit more jargon out there and discuss how we can essentially buy or pay for traffic because there are several models. These things like pay per click, pay per view, pay per thousand impression, pay for acquisition as we spoke about and many others. What are some of the key considerations to look out for when choosing which model of buying traffic is right? Charles: It really will depend on what you got. I know it is kind of a vague thing but let’s just go from the standpoint of I want to buy traffic. The first thing you need to look at is – is the offer acceptable to the network? If it is acceptable, okay, then go with it. The reality of it is for a CPA basis, you are really looking at needing a bigger budget. You go to a network, you had a thousand dollars, give me some CPA sales. It is going to be crickets. And this is the thing, a lot of people when they are getting started, you don’t know the commercial rate of your landing page, your sales page, your upsells. You don’t even know how much you can truly pay per click. You don’t even know how much money you are going to make from the offer to begin with. So the easiest thing to do is to go in and do pay per click cost per click and say okay, and I am just going to use round numbers here, if I make a dollar per click with a conversion rate of 40% on my squeeze page, with a 2% conversion on my sales page, could I make money? The easiest thing to do what is called predictive modeling. My wife is in accounting, she can do this wonderfully, if your wife is an accountant you’re probably are as lucky as me but what you need to have to do is sit down with any kind of spreadsheet and go how much are you paying per click? What would be the best conversion rate of your squeeze page? What would be the worst case scenario, what would be the average? What is the best case scenario for your sales page? What do you think the average would be and model that up and when you start looking at that you’d be like – a lot of people would be in shock because if you look at the average and the average across the board, you may discover you can’t make money in a dollar per click. You need to get them at least under $0.50 per click. And let’s just say that all of a sudden our numbers are horrible across the board, we can’t pay any more $0.50 per click. Once you look at that, that is going to really limit where you could buy traffic at. That would immediately rule out Google. At $0.30 per click you are probably going to get a lot of stuff. So that may also say if I can’t do Google’s search network, maybe I can do Google’s display network. So then that kind of looks like from a totally different scenario. Can you do display network? If you are looking at Facebook and you realize I can only pay so much per click, I probably can’t advertise on some of this more popular terms. If you are truly limited to PPV, what have you been doing pay per click. If you can do more pay per click then you need to set up a whole new world because then I can say I can go in to Google and I can go in to Facebook and it gives you so much more opportunity but the reality of this is, what can you pay per click? Once you figured that out, the easiest way is to just build a spreadsheet and model it. Start with pay per click. Once you’ve got your numbers tuned in, once you’ve got it optimized, then maybe go to calls per thousand. You can say you know what, looking at what we are at, we would be cheaper if, let’s say we are paying $10 per cost per thousand. So what happens, you say, okay, $10 CPM we know we can make sales, or 1 sale and those numbers begin to work out. But it is hard to do CPM where you are paying per impression to start with unless you know your numbers are ready. So to get started with, go cost per click, then go to CPM. James: I can almost imagine people’s clicking over trying to do some of those numbers in their heads so perhaps we can actually make available a resource or a spreadsheet where people can track. Perhaps you and I will have a conversation about that after we finish recording but for now let’ turn the conversation to the media itself because there are a lot more options available now than just the old static banners of the past. There are things like videos, interactive banners and a bunch of others too. What are some of the most innovative media types now available to advertisers and what are you finding most success with yourself? Charles: I tell you, as much as banners have been around, people have discarded banner ads. Truth of the matter is, banner ads are still converting like crazy. And from a marketing aspect of it, it is a huge opportunity. Another thing to look at is okay, I went to your site, I opted in, didn’t buy your product, retarget those people with banners across the web using Gooogle adroll, using perfect audience, retarget them inside Facebook because they’ve been to your site, they’ve clicked, they’ve opted in, but maybe they didn’t buy. Maybe they’ll just come back and finish the check out. Maybe you need a coupon for a free shipping. You’d be amazed at what that can do. Another thing that a lot of people don’t realize is the power of YouTube. When you go there and you watch that, and we all like a lot of people complain, I have to watch a 5 second commercial before and hit skip on YouTube, that’s some crazy traffic because the typical YouTube person is there searching for something. It’s like in Adwords when they’re searching how do you cure XYZ, when they’re on YouTube, they’re doing reviews on products, how to fix something, how to do something, and how to learn something. How to remove some sort of pain in their life, such a huge opportunity so take advantage of YouTube and basically have an adwords compliant account and an adwords compliant landing page and everything needs to be adwords compliant. But having that adwords compliant really open up to get brand new opportunity for you to get traffic you never could have even imagined. Another thing that a lot of people just overlook the internet marketing is solo emails are basically beat to death and it is not bad because the problem is, most people go in to the same people and buy the same low quality pieces of traffic they can find and go, this is just not working for me. Go to some place like Archemax, contact Bill Archemax, contact Richard, he’s the CEO and they can sell you solo email which are not beat to death and are not double opted in and that people will buy the first time we use archemax. Me and my buddy a number of years ago made like a thousand dollars for the solo drop. We made about $12000 promoting something called FAP robot, it was a forex product. In click bank, we didn’t even have a list in that. We just went bar solo and tested it out to their financial section and sold that Avril Lavigne album Cest’ La vie it was a quick sell of the product and we did not even opt in so I tested it, it proved positive so you know that is another opportunity that people are looking for solo emails. If you buy from same old solo email sellers that are like sending five emails a day to their list saying please click this because it’s a free resource and you are not going to get great result. Go to a place like Archemax or newsmax. They will sell you high quality traffic and yet it costs more than the internet marketing business opportunity but guess what, it is a huge opportunity to get quality traffic. another opportunity, look at degas smith, he’s got a solo ad agency and those guys have quality traffic. I mean, it is out there but I think a lot of people are looking at banners, overlooking native ads, totally overlooking solos and not taking advantage of YouTube traffic. It’s just massive! James: Yeah! Well we’ve touched on several topics and I think for the benefit of our listener we’ll include some links to other Traffic Jam episodes where we explore these topics a bit more and also off to any other relevant training that you’ve got Charles because it is a broad, broad subject. I want to ask you though about testing and tracking because you did touch on it very briefly a moment ago, I’m sure you agree it is critical especially for paid traffic campaigns where we’ve got money in the game. What are the key metrics that are important to track and what tools do you use to monitor then analyze those numbers? Charles: I think the tools you want to look out are like excel, almost everybody have got it on their computer anyway. When you use some kind of traffic something called improve.ly, I absolutely love it. I wish it did more but I absolutely love it because one of the big things that we are looking at from the standpoint of did somebody click? Using improvely you can start to see how many times did they come to the site before they opted in? and when they opted in did they complete the funnel going down? Okay, they opted in, did they buy? If they bought, how much are they worth? Did they take upsell? Were you able to actually monitor that back down to where we can break down, let’s just say in Facebook you were advertising for Ryan Dikes. Let’s just say he’s our target. We are able to come back to that traffic and we are able to say, you know what? There are a lot on the Ryan Dikes keyword and newsfeed. Through the roof! Wonderful! Ryan Dikes newsfeed, checked it out, it is good! The Ryan Dikes right hand side ads did not do as well, Ryan Dike’s mobile devices for apple did great! Mobile devices for android, not so good. Using an approval we can actually break it down to that level and then you can go to – was it a tablet? Was it a mobile device? And one thing to look at you can go now, AT&T job placement, you use smart phone and that’s about it, you just need the polls. A tablet is still a luxury for a lot of people, we’re talking $300 – $400, we’re targeting people who have tablets is more akin to laptops. You’re talking a 10.5 inch screen as probably 11-12 on a laptop. The people that have a tablet are typically a higher end buyer. They want to spend $400 – $500 for a tablet and it acts very similar to a laptop and from a mobility standpoint, it is big, and because of that we have discovered those are very high end, very high quality buyers. And using something like improvely we can come down and say, laptop, phone, desktop, newsfeed, right hand side, you have a way to break it down to that level which is huge. Also from a standpoint of testament tracking, the biggest issue is when you are buying traffic make sure you need to have enough data to make sure that your stuff is actually accurate. A lot of people think we only need a hundred clicks, yeah in a perfect world, in a perfect theory you only need a hundred clicks to determine everything like is the opt in page working? Is the landing page working? Is the sales app working? Is the checkout page working? What we do with like improvely is something called website visual optimizer. I absolutely love it simply because it is easy to use and I like it. What we are going to do is start looking at the key points. What are the key points that can have a huge impact on your business? When you see your check out page, your checkout page can double your income. You don’t even have to double your traffic. All you need to do is double your conversions through your checkout page to go from 1% to 2% conversion is huge. A lot of people think conversion is totally dependent on the sales letter. It is dependent on your sales page and it is dependent on your checkout page. Have security seals, have testimonials. Make sure that paid traffic works, you would be amazed at the easy way sitting down and literally just sitting there waiting for people to optimize those pages. If you are using the default mannequin test page, there is nothing wrong with that? Nanacast is an extremely powerful program. You can actually have custom landing pages, custom check out pages. Make sure those custom check out pages work. Infusion, nanacast, you can actually create all those and create custom check out pages. Another thing to look at and using split testing, you can determine does the recap of the offer help people make a buying decision? Does the security seal above the fold help. Start looking at the value of that. If you say, Charles, I am using click bank, well you can use custom CSS in click bank, optimize it, make the page look good, you can’t really split test a click bank checkout page but guess what, you can. That’s what a lot of people don’t realize. You can actually if you really want to get down and dirty and really make some money, you can have a single product in click bank, we can have product A and product B and product C. Each one can have a product style on the checkout page. They are all selling the exact same thing. Maybe we are selling the James Reynolds Traffic Jam value pack for $97. You can have it listed as multiple products, you can use multiple checkout pages, maybe if you wanted to go even a step further, add them on different accounts but you can actually split test those check out pages. If you will split test your check out pages, you will be amazed by the amount of money sitting there waiting to be taken. Another thing to look at is when you’re saying, okay, the problem that a lot of people have with their split test is they are testing the word free product versus new product. Who really cares about free versus new? Those things are very minor. I see people say hey, we’ve tested the green button versus the red button and next week the red button will outperform the green button. The truth of the matter is, start testing the things that really make a difference. Offer the price points in the headlines. Those are the things that make a big difference from squeeze page, sales page, checkout pages, also with your upsells. A lot of people I find are doing no upsell test. Well, they bought now. You make your money on your upsells. You seldom make money on the front end product. Lord forbid, split testing, does this upsell do better? Did the $97 upsell do better than the $79 upsell? Which one of those converts better? Which one is all about conversions? I see people fall in love with a 2.3% conversion. I don’t care about that. What is the ROI? At the end of the day, all I want to know is ROI. Look at ROI. At the end of the day, your business doesn’t work on clicks, it doesn’t work on opt ins, your business works on what is your ROI generating. We have a 3.8% conversion rate because we’ve discovered our highest converting landing page we have gives us the least ROI. The landing page we have that gets some of the lowest opt in rates has an insane ROI. Because in this page, they know exactly what they are opting in for, they are in the right mindset to be shown a special onetime offer upgrade and it makes a big difference so I think a lot of people make the mistake of going it’s all about CTR. No! At the end of the day, it’s all about ROI. That’s the only thing you pay your bills with. And you look at it from the standpoint of the average user. The little money things I can’t seem to get any bigger gains. Split test different style of landing pages, different headlines and you’d be absolutely amazed. The same headline on two different style landing pages can make a big difference. When we’re spit testing out the gates we’re testing like five different landing pages, same headline on all of these pages. Which landing page style is going to work best for this particular traffic source and the problem people have is because ti works great in Google, it does not mean that it works on Facebook. If it works on Facebook, doesn’t mean it is going to work on mobile. If it works on mobile, doesn’t mean necessarily mean it is going to work for PPV. You have to understand all these traffic sources. You have to keep in mind users have a different mindset for every single traffic source you are using. When they are searching for something on YouTube, it is a how do I. when they are in Google, they are trying to solve their problem. When they’re in Yahoo, they’re reading content. Totally different scenarios. So, with that said, excel I can use it, visual website optimizer, use improvely. And the reality of this, get started. At the end of the day, I have people asking Charles a traffic display test. You’re right and if you are going to do a split test if you don’t start buying some traffic, split testing can make it better. That’s my little testing your tracking rant. James: Awesome Charles! I think that is probably an appropriate point to wrap things up and because we have covered so much on this session I am sure our listeners are going to want to go and explore some of these topics a little further and I am sure you will find a place for people to do that. So let’s share where people can go and find a little bit more about Charles Kirkland. What’s that address on the web? Charles: The easiest thing to do is go to mediabuyerassociation.com. Once you’re there you’ll see a free course, you can click on that and we provide a seven day traffic boot camp, and that landing page by the way is Google compliant, and Facebook compliant may I add, go ahead and optin to that and I promise you, we are not going to spam you or anything. You are not going to get emails from me offering you to buy anything. But we will send you information on how to make money using paid media and how to actually get better at what you do. James: Good!   Well I am sure that is going to be a great place for people also to absorb what you are up to so the link to Charles’s website will be included in the show notes along with a whole bunch of other resources mentioned in today’s show and the address for that is TrafficJamCast.com/60. That’s it Charles. All that remains for me is to thank you for coming in today. Thoroughly enjoyed today’s session. I can also tell you’re super passionate about what you do as it certainly comes through in the interview so thanks for coming on the show! Charles: Thank you for having me I appreciate it. So there you go, that was Charles Kirkland from the mediabuyersassociation.com. Thank you for listening in to this episode of Traffic Jam. This was episode#60 of course. We’ll be back again next week for another episode and to make sure that you don’t miss out on that show, ensure your subscription so subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. For a direct link to all of the bonuses that come with this episode including downloadable MP3, full transcript of today’s show plus a special paid traffic calculator that will help you make better decisions around your traffic sources and campaigns, go to TrafficJamCast.com/60 where you can also join in on the discussion for this episode. We end the show this week with a Traffic Jam of course chosen by Charles Kirkland. He’s gone for a track by Jimmy Buffet and it is called Margaritaville. So enjoy the track and I will see you back here again as always real soon! RESOURCES: MediaBuyersAssociation.com Get The Free Training from Charles Kirkland MENTIONS: Improvely Nanacast LeadPages THE TRAFFIC JAM: Charles Kirkland, our guest on Traffic Jam 60, has chosen the track Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffett. The track is the hit single from Buffett’s 1978 album You Had to Be There. Margaritaville also became the name of a fast-food restaurant chain owned by Buffett. HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW: Go ahead and download the Paid Traffic Calculator that accompanies this episode. This pre-populated spreadsheet in .xls and .numbers format helps you quickly and easily asses the profitability of your online media campaigns. Simply enter your data in the fields and the calculator will tell you whether you can expect to lose or win with your planned campaign. The calculator removes 99% of the guess work so that you can pick a winning media campaign with certainty. You can get instant access to The Paid Traffic Calculator by clicking download below.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher Google, by far, has the greatest market share of all search engines world-wide.  So, naturally it makes sense that if you want to reach people actively searching for what you offer, then you should display your wares on Google. Google has virtually limitless information about the who, what, where and when for everyone on the web. This means that not only can they give you access to a huge market but they can offer many options for the way you target people with advertising on the web. Get these targeting options set up correctly and Google is a literal money making vending machine . Get them wrong and the result could be you burn through a whole lot of cash. Listen in to this episode as Mike Rhodes shares his checklist of must haves and what-nots for Google Adwords retargeting, search and display network campaigns. FREE BONUS: Download Mike Rhodes Adwords Innovations checklist. My notes from Mike’s presentation at a $1000 event. OUR GUEST: Mike Rhodes is a Goodle AdWords Management Specialist from Melbourne, Australia. He is the CEO and founder of Web Savvy, a Google Adwords marketing agency widely considered as the best in it’s market area. Web Savvy helps small businesses improve 3 vital things: overall online strategy, improve website traffic, and then conversion rates. WebSavvy also gives coaching on online marketing, pay per click advertising, and Google Analytics. Mikes’s seven years of experience with Google AdWords campaigns makes him an authority on online marketing. His company is one of the first ever in Australia to be awarded Google Partner status. Aside from being a consultant, Mike Rhodes co-authored the book The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords along with Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd. A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST: Here are some of the highlights from episode 59 of the Traffic Jam Podcast… Why Google Adwords. Common Campaign Errors. Getting Ad Groups Right. Ad Copy That Gets Clicks. Setting Up Google Display Network Campaigns. Google Remarketing Types. Why Mike “Dislikes” Other Retargeting Platforms. Mike’s Checklist (Traffic Jam Exclusive). TWEETABLE MOMENTS: If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Mike Rhodes quote from the show: You can also get Mike’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download. “It’s easy to set up an 80% done campaign but the last 5-10% makes the difference.” ~ @TheGoogleGuyClick To Tweet To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript: Show / Hide TranscriptHey there listener! A special Christmas welcome to Traffic Jam! At the time the show is planned to air it should be Christmas Eve, perhaps even Christmas Day depending to where you are in the world so from me and all of the team behind the Traffic Jam podcast, a very Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year! I do hope to bring you gifts galore on Traffic Jam Episode#59 as we welcome Google Adwords expert, Mike Rhodes to the show. Mike is probably one of the best teachers of Google Adwords the world over. He’s also the co-author of the latest edition of the ultimate guide to Google adwords along with Perry Marshall so that should give you some indication of Mike’s credo. But before we get stuck in to the interview with Mike I want to tell you about the special bonus that accompanies this podcast and for this bonus I’ve dug very deep in to the archives to pull out my notes from my $1000 event in Australia where Mike Rhodes presented his top innovations of the time. These notes cover some of the best, but perhaps most under-utilized features in Google adwords. To get your hands on these one of a kind notes, go right now to TrafficJamCast.com/59. So let’s introduce Mike Rhodes, Mike is the founder of web savvy, widely considered as the #1 Google adwords agency in Australia, he’s the co-author of the ultimate guide to Google Adwords, which he wrote with the godfather of Google Adwords Perry Marshall himself who incidentally describes Mike as the best in the world adwords ninja. I personally know Mike for several years, we’ve been in a mastermind group together, we’re going to be speaking alongside each other in an event in Sydney in March 2015. He’s the best in the business and he gets my absolute highest endorsement when it comes to Google adwords. Do you want to know why? I think you are about to find out on Traffic Jam#59. So let’s welcome to the show Mike Rhodes from PPC Savvy. James: Welcome back listeners! You’re tuned in to episode#59 of Traffic Jam and joining me here today is Mike Rhodes from Web Savvy. Mike, how are you doing? Mike: I am very good James. How are you sir? James: I am excellent! As you hear, just a little run down with a cough and cold but super excited on today’s show so that will soon get me back on track on track for sure. So Mike, there are literally dozens of ways to get traffic that are perhaps more targeted and cost effective than Google Adwords so as we kind of end 2014 and going in to 2015 with stronger competition and higher click cost than almost ever in the past. Why should we still be doing Google ads? Mike: That’s a very good question! It is still where your market hang out. Facebook certainly will be the big competitor to adwords now. Certainly here in Australia adwords is still where everybody goes to search for something. In the States maybe 30% is Bing, here in Australia, it is 4%-5%. I don’t know what the stat is for Dubai – James: Oh, it’s crazy! I think it’s 95% market share for Google. Mike: Pretty huge, here it’s 92% – 94% and anyone here will agree, it’s basically on Google. And a vast number of people that’s still where they are going to go when they are looking to buy something. People at this point in time, at least in 2014, may well be distracted with an ad on Facebook but everybody who are doing well on Facebook, the vast majority are using website custom audiences or Facebook remarketing, that works the best for a lot a of people that I know. All the other types of marketing may be not as good but between Facebook and the display network of Google, I’ve dived in to the deep end here, you can cover a huge, huge range of things and then compare that to what are your other options. Do you go back to doing local papers or TV or radio, so compared to the other lines of options, I still believe it’s more expensive, it’s certainly more competitive, it’s certainly harder to use Google profitably but in the right hands it’s still the best tool that any small business, or any business can use to draw people to their websites and of course there’s always new features and new parts of the adwords machine coming out all the time and staying on top of that is something we pride ourselves in and knowing how to use those things properly is what makes the difference. Anybody can start an adwords campaign. It is very easy to set it up and have an 80% adwords done adwords campaign but that last 5-10% is what makes all the difference. James: Yeah, and I think that is one of the things right? I mean adwords has perhaps more intricacies and a steeper learning curve to something like on Facebook where literally almost to get the best results you can just install one pixel and set and forget the campaign and over time you can get Facebook to perform it for you but with adwords there is more to it. With that being the case, what does it take to succeed especially for those just starting out with Google Adwords? Mike: The tricky bit is for those very low spender counts because if you are spending $500 to $2000 a month, then it is going to be very difficult to find an agency to outsource that that is any good for a start, and it is probably not going to be cost-effective for you to try and learn that and to go up against as an advertiser, a competitor that might be run by an agency like ours so that’s the tricky bit. Getting educated is obviously vital, we’ve all heard the horror stories of melting credit cards and Google stole my money. They didn’t. It’s got the settings wrong on your account. It’s the tool; how you use the tool determines your success. Fire can be used to burn your hut down or heat your dinner, it just depends how you use the tool. If you’re just getting started then obviously getting as much training material and learning on a low budget, that’s fine. There are certainly a few things that I would like at this point in adwords in 2014 are lower risk areas to start, for instance, remarketing or YouTube campaigns, both would be excellent places to start. But if you want to dive in to a non-brand campaign and something like migratory finance than you’re probably going to get your identity. James: Well, let’s talk about some of this kind of cash burning scenarios because we have all heard them. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see Google advertisers make and especially those starting out they literally do melt credit cards or burn through thousands and thousands of dollars overnight. Mike: Well, if it’s a money thing it’s because they haven’t understood the fact that you are able to set your bid for every single keyword and most importantly, a campaign level budget. So all the keywords and everything that you have been bidding on if you’ve got a campaign level budget, Google will not spend a more than you offer. It will go a little bit over some days, it will go up to 20% over so if your budget is over $100 a day, there will be days where Google will go up to a $120, but over the course of a month, 30.4 day period, they will not spend more than $3040 during that period. So you’re melting credit cards because you’ve got your budget wrong first and foremost. James: Got it. Let’s talk about some scenarios with ad copy. I really want to ask you because it is one of the areas that can make the difference to your campaign and probably one of the areas many people fall flat with, what tips have you got, or formulas you’ve got for creating ad copies that stand out and get click? Mike: I’ll combine this with the answer I should have given you now as well but you did ask me about biggest mistakes, budget is only one, so let me give you another big one and then combine it with this answer and that huge mistake is not really understanding the structure of your adwords. Within your account you can do reverse campaign and a campaign holds a number of ad groups. An ad group is like a bucket. It holds a number of keywords and has a slot on the front so when somebody types in something that matches to it, let’s just say for the sake of argument, somebody types in that keyword, they see the ad on the front of that bucket, the ad that’s in and obviously you should be testing and we’ll talk about it in a second, but they see that ad, and one of the biggest, biggest mistakes is people set it up, they have one campaign, one big ad group so one huge bucket, then that campaign with dozens and dozens and hundreds and hundreds of keywords on that bucket. What that means is somebody searching for any one of those keywords, they all see the same ad. I’ll give you an example. Our most recent account this morning, the guy is selling segways and everything was all in the one account so Segway battery, Segway for kids, Segway x2, Segway parts, they’re all in this one campaign which means all of those very, very different people looking for very, very different things because all those keywords are in the one ad group and they’re called adgroups not keyword groups because they are all seeing the same ad. That’s the mistake because that means that is not the most relevant ad for each of those people to see where adwords is going to work well for you is the person searching that kids thing sees an ad about the kid thing, and because you’ve got a different ad, you’re able to send those people to a different page or even send them to the kid’s page on your website. The person searching for spare parts sees an ad about parts and they’re taken to the spare parts page on the site. So that’s where the ad copy part comes in. they need to first and foremost when they’re starting out, the best thing that you can test is showing them what they’re looking for so don’t get fancy, certainly don’t use puns and wordplay and try to be more clever which some copywriters may sometimes try to do. Direct response copy is short, sweet, to the point, here’s what you’re looking for, I’ve got that and showing them that you’re very relevant, you’ve got what they’re looking for, and ideally some sort of point of difference, why am I going to click you compared to all those other things that I could click on on the page results. The brain loves a deal, loves a bargain, loves something different. If everybody is saying the same thing, it is very hard for our brains to figure out what they are all saying and what I need to click on, do I click this one on the top? They all look the same. But if you can stand out, if you can be different and if you can offer something that other people don’t that is going to help you enormously with adwords. James: Yeah and it’s very different to writing ad copy for let’s say a Facebook where you kind of move people out of their current mental state. They’re looking at friends and photographs and now you’ve got to entice them with something that’s going to compel them away whereas adwords, at least in the search network is the opposite. You’ve got to get in tune with currently what they’re thinking and show them exactly what they’re looking for at that time, right? Mike: Absolutely, yeah! It’s not interruption marketing; that is as true today as it was 60 years ago. James: So what’s the difference between setting up a campaign for search which you just described in doing something in the Google display network because I know you’re a big fan of the Google display network but you also admitted that in the wrong hands it can also fall foul. What are your tips for getting a GDN campaign set up correctly? Mike: Perry Marshal who your listeners will know, and I know that you had on the show before has a lovely analogy of what to use here and if search is like checkers or drafts for our signature people, then the display network is like chess. They are definitely more complex; infinitely more moves that you can make which is why so many people fall flat and do not make display work. I have taught literally hundreds of agencies at this point how to use display properly and it never fails to surprise me how little people understand display. You’ve got to understand it from Google’s side to really work out how to make it work. The short answer is that there are a vast variety of ways to target who sees your ad. I’ll give you three. The first one is the easy one and it’s called managed placements. What that means is that you are saying to Google I reckon my prospect is going to show up on this website, be that New York Times or Oprah or this tiny, little blog about making shoes that I found. And I reckon my prospects are going to appear on these sites. I would like you to put my ads on those sites and we’ll just sit back and wait for them to appear. And that’s traditionally how a lot of media buys has been done. We’re going to put you on this big website over here, we’re going to buy 20 million impressions for them, a month after, and because you’re such a good client we actually got you 22 million impressions. Ah, yes. Lovely. Did that actually put any money in my bank account? I hate those reports that talk about your impressions, or your click through rates double the industry average. Based on what? They’re very self-service reports that you get for those media buys and because they all pocket 10% straight off the bat, there is no benefit to them in terms of educating people about Google where you are infinitely more in control and all these other ways to target. So the next way to target then is this thing called contextual targeting. So there you are going to give Google essentially a list of themes, you don’t need to worry about the detail of how to do that but you can give a list to Google of themes and essentially say go find the pages that are about making shoes, I don’t know why that random example came up but – James: It’s not what you bought your wife for Christmas is it? Mike: I would not try and pretend, she’s the top shoe. I am smarter than that. Google knows which pages on which websites match that context, we haven’t got a clue but Google has got access to way, way more than they’ll ever share with us so we can say to Google, look, I don’t know what they are but you do, so these are the themes at the top of page I’d like you to find, go and find those and then stick my ads on those pages next to that content. And there’s all sorts of things that you can do to help shape that. Obviously all the controls that exist is still available to you so you can say only show this that are in Dubai. They might be reading the New York Times but only show them to people because they’re in Dubai or because it’s a Tuesday afternoon or because Google thinks that they’re male aged 45 to 55. All of that control still exists, it’s just a different way of targeting. But the third way is definitely my favorite. Something that I’d probably become one of the top two agencies in the world I would say at this point in time and that’s the behavioral targeting that Google offers and there’s many, many different ways within this and remarketing is one of them. But whether you are targeting your ads based on your previous behavior. In the case of remarketing, it is some sort of behavior that they have exhibited on your website. They know that you have been to the men’s section of your site, or the kid’s section or the sales section. Or that they spent more than five minutes on your site, or that they came to your site from a particular email campaign, or that they added a product to the shopping cart but haven’t bought yet or that they have read more than seven blog posts. Whatever behavior it is that you want to find almost limitless. You can define that behavior and know that they are someone who’s returned to your website for more than five times and in total across those five visits they have spent more than a half hour on your site. You can use that targeting too, or that they came to your site from Google organic in the States. That’s internet, it is limitless. It really is. It is fabulous. James: Yeah, Mike is there anything else you want to say? Otherwise we are just going to move on to remarketing. Mike: Yeah, just very, very quickly. There are a couple of other types there. One that we’re having huge success with at the moment is the thing called in market audience. This is the best non remarketing type of behavioral targeting. Google knows a lot about it, right? If it covers 95% of Dubai, let’s call it 93% in Australia, they know a lot about us, they know what we’ve been searching for, the websites they’ve been to, they know our buying behavior, they know which sites we buy and which ones we don’t. They know how we behave when the weather is when we’re doing different things. There’s so much data they have about how they behave. Google has figured out then that it’s got a list of about at this point about 550 different categories of what people might be in the market for. Everything from watches to juices and blenders and auto insurance and pretty much everything that you can think of, business services is coming in February or March last year, wait for that to come out. Google has figured out all of these people that use Google. You can target people based on the fact that Google believes they are in the market for the product or service that you sell right now. They get really specific with that, I can target people based on the fact that Google knows now in the market for flights to Austin, Texas or a five-star hotel in Austin, Texas. It’s incredibly granular, and once you see the list, which is available to anybody. You just log in to Google Help and find that list. Once you find that list, your brain will explode with possibilities. These are people in the market to buy a new Mercedes in Dubai. Right now, I can put an ad in front of them so I know about all these things and which website they are going to go to, Google knows who they are so use Google, find these people, put the ads and I will pay you only if and when they click on one of those ads and will take them to my landing page. Incredibly powerful. James: It’s almost like they’re bringing search in to display, right? I mean you’re almost getting in to that sort of buyer’s psychology. People that are researching products and services and you are appearing in front of them even though they haven’t just searched for you so it’s almost like these two worlds colliding on Google in one place. Very, very powerful. Mike: Absolutely! It’s almost like remarketing in a sense that it is like being able to put that remarketing code on your competitor site. Google is telling you, look in the market for what you’ve got but they haven’t been to your website yet, would you like to show an ad to them? Yes, please. James: Yeah, there’s only one answer to that question, really there is. Well, let’s move on to remarketer, we certainly want to get to that topic, the place I want to start is really comparing these sort of plug and play remarketing options that are very readily available and things like adroll and other ones like that. We’re now starting to paint a picture I think of really potentially why Google adwords is more powerful based on previous actions that they may have taken on your website which really isn’t available through something like adroll. What other options exist though going through Google adwords platform over one of these generic retargeting options available to us? Mike: Yeah Google is infinitely more powerful over something like adroll. I had a particular place in hell, no I won’t go that harsh but I really dislike adroll, the main reason is the way they measure success. How I prefer to measure success, and bear in mind there that no attribution model is perfect, Your listeners are smart, generally agency types that they can understand we’re driving straight in to here the adwords 301 level and no attribution model is perfect. But, last click attribution, or saying did this last click to this ad lead to a sale and lead to money? I think that’s a far, far better model than saying did somebody randomly half see this on Tuesday afternoon? They didn’t actually look at it for very long, they did not even click on it, but we’re going to take that view of that ad and we’re going to say yep, that, that, that and say that was us that caused that sale that maybe happened nine days later through a completely different and adroll by default and usually viewed through other versions and I think it’s cheating it just smells wrong to me and so I can see many people say oh, look our adroll set is working really, really well and with a couple of clicks of a button, I can show them that actually they did not get a hundred and fifty conversions, they got 4 and that is not uncommon so that’s partly why I don’t like that system. Yeah, Google, where’s our guy? The power of that, go on and ask me that question and I’d be very helpful and respond. James: Perfect! Well it sounds like everyone about in their Christmas jollies so that’s all good. I guess it’s a Thursday afternoon in Melbourne, Australia, it’s probably time to hit the Christmas pub, right? Anyway, I was going to ask you a question and then that was really down to what available options within, and I think it is really coming down to this behavioral based targeting within remarketing right? And I have heard you talk on this topic a lot before so I know you’re a real master of it so maybe just peel the lid back on one or two of those things that you can do with adwords that you can’t do with an adroll or others. Mike: Certainly! You’ve got two main options, you can use adwords to serve the ads to show your remarketing ads be there image ads or text ads, don’t ignore remarketing text ads. A lot of our clients get a lot of success from text ads so it’s not just about showing banners but you have two main ways of building the remarketing list, in other words a group of people that are going to see those ads. The first is within adwords itself and that is very powerful but compared to the second option, it is restricted. And the reason it is restricted is that the way you build a list within adwords is to give it certain rules and almost all of those rules is revolved around the URL that is displayed atop of the browser. So if you want to say build a group for people or your remarketing list or your remarketing audience, you may use those terms interchangeably – of anybody who’s visited the men’s section of my site and the URL contains /mens, done easy rule. Or anybody who’s read a blog post, URL contains /blog, done. Very easy thing to do, but it’s all URL based so people that have cart URL contains cart but not been to the thank you page, URL contains thanks, that’s a really easy audience to build, very easy to create an abandoned cart, a group of people who I can follow around and show ads in the next few weeks. The power though really comes when you start to link the most powerful tool when building a remarketing list, which every single one of your listener already has installed on the website because it is called Google analytics and 50% of the world uses it. Google analytics, when you think about it, all of these reports which none of us ever have the time to go and update in analytics all of those they call dimension tricks so things like the city where somebody was in, how they got to your website that traffic source as sort of alluding before, did they come from a particular email that they come in Google organic or from Facebook or did they come from your particular adwords ad because if they came from a search ad or they came from a display ad, there are probably two different types of quality of prospects. What are some others? New vs. returning – that is going to make a big, big difference in the propensity of somebody to buy. One we see huge success with is this thing called page depth. If somebody has been, and particularly for e-commerce site. Somebody that’s been 10, or 15 or 25 pages deep in to your site, pull the report available to you in analytics. With a little bit of work, pull that report and you’ll probably find people that converting 10, 20. I’ve got clients where those people convert at 40-50%. People that have been 20 -25 pages deep, I can segment that by device, so okay, put just the people from desktops. And just the people that were returning more than twice, how many people of those have I got 10,000 on the last week and 50% of them bought or hang on, I have this group of people here, half of them – half have bought, the other half got inter