Post Category → Brain Food

Shane MeLaugh: Outsourcing from SEO to Software Development

My good friend Shane MeLaugh has put together an excellent webinar about outsourcing. He is admittedly not an expert, rather an entrepreneur like me and you… who has been outsourcing large portions of his work and software development to 3rd parties (including overseas).

Don’t worry, he is not selling anything… this webinar is what I call “safe-content.” Don’t be a freeloader though… it’s just not polite or respectful. Shane is running a business, just like you and I. So, if you enjoy the video, “Like” this post on Facebook, or “Tweet” about it, using the button on the left-hand side, and make sure to check out Shane’s Blog in the “Learn More About Shane” section below.

Ultimately, Shane is leveraging the law of reciprocity, not crappy fear based marketing tactics like so many online marketers do. This is a process known as paying it forward and it’s how I believe all good marketers do business.

Enjoy the presentation:

Resources Mentioned:

Learn More About Shane:

Shane lives in Zurich, Switzerland. He and I became friends about 4 months ago. I found one of his blogs and really liked the content. I emailed him to connect, stating we were on similar paths and should mastermind together every couple of weeks. Since then, we have come to call each other friends. Shane was sharp, and recognized that I was methodical in the way I built our relationship. He asked me one day, so I wrote a post about it in my notebook, How To Build a Mastermind Network.

The Most Important Piece of Software That We Use

In the modern world, the tools may not make the person, but they do play a major role in how far they can go and how quickly they can get there.

Imagine we are at the race track in the 1940s, and I appear on the scene in a ’90s Lamborghini Diablo. You could put the best driver in the world against me, and I would beat them without even leaving 2nd gear or breaking a sweat.

Winning The Race

Just like me in a Diablo, a person with less skill can beat an expert while putting in considerably less effort if they have the right equipment.

Why put yourself at a disadvantage? Why not get the best? It is usually because of money. Well, I am here to tell you that 9 times out of 10 that excuse is complete baloney. Most people do have enough money, they just aren’t willing to cut their expenses. So it is not money, it is a prioritization issue. And when you factor your time into the equation (the extra time you will need to invest by using inferior tools), you will discover that you are actually spending more money by using them.

Liberation from the daily grind is no longer just about being a good delegator, that is a recipe for skyrocketing expenses and laborious management duties. The real secret that everyone is chasing is good automation. And it really isn’t that much of a secret. It is usually just the elephant in the room that no one seems to see.

Anyway I digress, it is time for me to get to the point…

Some people use aWeber and similar solutions, others use 1ShoppingCart or one of the many other solutions that are on the market. If you do a little research, you will quickly realize that most marketing automation tools come from either infomarketers or companies with no real marketing experience. They have little infrastructure or long term planning in place as well.

This is what makes Infusionsoft unique, they have:

  • grown from 3 guys in a garage to a team of 143 people in only 7 years.
  • gone from 0 to over 22 million in annual revenue during the process.

Do you think they might have something special going on? I can tell you for certain, they do. They have something very special. They have the equivalent of a Diablo in the ’40s, today. Plus, they specialize in helping small business owners with 1 to 15 employees.

Infusionsoft Circle of Automation

I will be 100% upfront with you as I always am, Infusionsoft did have a rough patch for the last couple of years, in my opinion. Any company that grows that quickly is bound to have some fallout. Hence my not promoting them for several months. Plus, when you are that successful the haters tend to pop up out of the woodwork.

But you can rest assured that Infusionsoft is firing on all cylinders now.

Find Out What Infusionsoft Can Do For Your Business

Visual of Infusionsoft System

Watch a Live Infusionsoft Demo Today – It’s the Quickest and Easiest Way to Understand What Infusionsoft Can Do For Your Business!

Seriously, if you are stuck and can’t figure out why you can’t move your business forward, Infusionsoft is likely one of the missing ingredients. I would bet that traffic is also a stumbling block, but that can be cured by following up properly with the leads you already have in your pipeline. If you don’t have a couple hundred leads in your pipeline… you might want to consider changing careers, unless you are working with really high-ticket items.

Feel free to leave a comment on this post and I will gladly field any questions you have. I have two Infusionsoft applications, one for jiveSYSTEMS and the other for AskFlywheel. I have also been a CMAC (a certified Infusionsoft coach) for several years now and keep an open mind by continually testing the other solutions on the market, so I am in an excellent position to advise you.

Up 15 Positions in the Search Results for “Video Email”

Since the Panda update, it seems everyone has their knickers in a twist 1. From my perspective, the people that have been hit the hardest are Black Hat SEOs 2. Panda isn’t a penalty, it is really just an improvement to Google’s algorithm 3.

What Does the Panda Update REALLY Mean?

  • Crappy sites with low quality backlinks and no traffic have been significantly devalued.
  • Professional sites with high quality backlinks and real visitors have been pushed up the search results.

Take a Look at Our Results in Search Engines Post Panda

It may interest you to know that in the past 45 days (June 1st to July 15th), I have actually moved jiveSYSTEMS up the search results. Not just a little but, but a lot; a total of 15 positions for 3 competitive keywords: “video email“, “video email marketing“, and “video email software“. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can go to Google yourself and verify the results!4

jivesystems video email seo results june / july 2011

Now I have already discovered that our competition has been reading this blog, and are quite frankly copying many of the strategies that I reveal. So for those of you who like more details, please know that I do best to share as much as possible, openly and with full transparency. However, I must keep some information private, hence the above image only including 3 of our keywords. I am working with about 20 keywords, and we are moving up the rankings quickly for all of them!

How To Rank Higher in the Search Results

Ranking high in the search results isn’t a mysterious art form. All you need to create is high quality relevant content that people what to read and share. You then put that content on your website(s) and distribute it around the internet, after which it is just a case of rinse and repeat5.

Step-by-Step Plan

  1. Keyword Research - Keyword selection is critical; some keywords are very competitive, whereas others are not. Look for hidden gems – longtail keywords that have lots of traffic and no competition. To do keyword research, you basically type in words related to your products into a keyword research tool and it spits out keyword ideas, gives you an idea of the competition you are up against, and how much traffic you will get from a given ranking in the search engines.  You can use Google AdWords Keyword Tool for free and get pretty good results. I use a paid tool called SECockpit for my keyword research because it goes deeper and searches faster; another thing I like is that it gives me a detailed breakdown of traffic estimates based on placement, which no other tool on the market that I have tested can do (e.g. a placement of 1-3, 4-7, 8-10).
  2. Content Creation - You need an archive full of A+ content weaved around your chosen keywords (articles, video, webinars, ebooks, and more). I would lean more towards video content because it is more engaging. Plus, you can create 1 video and upload it to multiple video sharing sites (YouTube, MetaCafe, etc.).
  3. Setting Up or Optimizing Your Site – The more sites the merrier! However, they all have to be on different servers or blocks, otherwise Google will devalue the sites. The key is creating a structure that converts visitors into revenue, content into opt-ins, and opt-ins into sales. You also want to add floating social buttons to make your content easy to share. We are using a WordPress plugin called Sharebar on the left side of this blog. WordPress is my platform of choice for building websites. A insider tip is to only use WordPress themes that are built on Frameworks. Most of the themes on the market are not built on a Framework. This means they do not get updated as frequently if at all. The best development houses have a framework and then create several themes based on it. This means they can update the framework cost effectively, as it will update across all of their themes. StartBox is a brand new framework that looks fantastic for building a website and a blog, although I have yet to use it. I have built several websites using WooThemes, they have a lots of themes to choose from. If you are looking to build landing pages, launch funnels, and membership sites, check out our “Stuff We Recommend” page.
  4. Distributing Content to the Internet – Article sharing sites, web 2.0 properties, video sharing sites, forums, and more. One trick is to leverage sites like Posterous6, where you can setup a blog that will automatically syndicate your content to other sites. If you are savvy, you will create multiple identities and mimic the behavior of real people as closely as possible. When syndicating content, after using tools like TrafficGeyser and TubeMogul, I have switched back to manual video submissions, as I feel they are more natural and I am certain Google is smarter than these tools. This is why I recommend that 80% of your content distribution be manual. I feel you get more SEO Juice when you manually submit your content and mix up the subject lines and keywords, as it looks more natural.

Never Stray From My TCA Formula

If what you are doing doesn’t fall into one of these 3 buckets, STOP DOING IT. Also, make sure to create balance between each area. I like to focus on generating traffic for a few days, and then improving conversions, and then customer support.

TCA - Traffic, Conversion. Advocates

Conclusion

SEO is not for everyone, it is a long and laborious process. 95% of business owners would be better investing their time in building relationships and their referral/JV network. For my clients (the few that I do consult with still), I only recommend SEO if they get a capital infusion or have a stable and profitable revenue stream. This is because SEO efforts take about 3-9 months to mature, so they need to be in for the long haul; on the flipside, the results become exponential once you reach the tipping point.

Footnotes

  1. “Knickers in a Twist” is British saying that describes a person who gives themselves a wedgie. If that doesn’t strike a chord for you, you could liken getting your “knickers in a twist” to “pouring itching powder into your underpants” ↩
  2. If you are a Star Wars fan, Black Hat SEO is just like the Dark Arts. You may win the battle with it, but just remember the good people always win the war. ↩
  3. If you want more details about the Panda Update, watch the video in this post. ↩
  4. To verify our search ranking, open up Google and search for “video email marketing”. ↩
  5. The key is getting the rinse and repeat part of SEO systematized, so you can do it without breaking the bank. ↩
  6. You can see our Posterous site and the sites we have it connected to here. ↩

The Recent Changes to Our Blog Navigation and Setup

In this post, I talk about the changes I have made to our blog and how they will improve our rank in the search engines.

We’ve been pushing really hard for search engine rankings, and it’s been paying off. We’re currently result 2 in Google for “video email marketing“, result 5 for “video email software“, and result 10 for “video email“, and we are rapidly approaching number 1 for all these results.

Search Engine Results July 2011

Updates Made

  • Removed Banner Ads – I removed all the banner ads from our pages because they create a leak in pagerank and therefore our position in the search engines. I moved our banner ads to a page that is called “Stuff We Recommend“, which has a very different impact on both perception and the way page rank flows. Banner ads show globally (on EVERY page) on most themes. Each banner you have on your blog is basically one outbound link for each page they’re on. That’s a lot of outbound links, folks. The Google Panda update also adds fuel to the fire when it comes to banner ads, as it is believed the new algorithm doesn’t take fondly to sites with lots of banner ads, potentially because it is an indicator of an affiliate site.
  • Relocated Categories – I moved our categories from horizontal (across the top) to vertical (on the right sidebar). I read an article that talked about how we sort information better when it’s vertically laid out, as opposed to horizontally.
  • Added a Tag Cloud – I added a tag cloud underneath the new vertical category display that shows the most used tags. In the past, I’d tag our posts appropriately, but they didn’t really do anything for anyone because no one saw them. Now, with the visual tag cloud, we hope that it will aid in the navigation of the blog.
  • Re-categorized Posts – I filed all our content differently, reducing the amount of categories and making posts easier to find.

The Google Panda Update: What Does it Mean?

The video below is from a world authority on white hat search engine marketing. Rand explains how Google changed their algorithm, what it means to you, and talks about the future of searching.

With updates this major coming out rarely from Google, it’s wise to stay informed on how it can affect your business. If you are currently doing (or want to pursue) organic search engine marketing, you need to watch this video.

Take a look at the changes we made to our blog, as a result of the Panda Update.

Seth Priebatsch – The Game Layer On Top of The World

In this talk, Seth Prebatsch shows us how different aspects of games take hold of our attention and can influence massive amounts of people; we just have to lay the framework first.

The last decade was the decade of “the social”. Priebatsch tells us that this next decade will be the decade where “the game” framework is built. He breaks games down into 7 “game dynamics”, and gives real-world examples of 4 of those. If we take these game dynamics and apply them to communications and marketing, we can steer people’s behaviors and reshape their patterns.

“Seth Priebatsch: The Game Layer on Top of the World”

Take Action and Implement

Games are all around us, and whether we are aware of them or not they have a massive impact on our society and the world. From the extreme of the War Games the military conducts with thousands of troops that involves the cooperation of many nations, to coupons from the local supermarket.

Do you leverage any games with your prospects, clients, and team? Think about how you could apply game dynamics to motivate people to achieve specific goals. If you are like me, the games you will come up with at first will be time and cost prohibitive to implement, involving special registration features with points being award for all sorts of actions. However, what follows will likely be some simple game layers that can be implement quickly and easily.

Dan Pink – The Surprising Science of Motivation

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.

“There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business doesn’t. Here’s what science knows. One, those 20th century awards, those motivators we think are the natural part of business, do work but only in surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two, those if-then rewards often destory creativity. Three, the secret to high performance isn’t rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive. The drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things because they matter. And here is the best part. Here is the best part. We already know this. The science confirms what we know in our hearts. So if we repair this mismatch between what science knows and what business does,. If we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century. If we get past this lazy, dangerous idealogy of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe, maybe, we can change the world. I rest my case.”

-Dan Pink: Author of a trio of provocative, bestselling books on the changing world of work.
Quote taken from “Dan Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation”