On this webcast we discussed the best ways to reach your target audience in order to gain more business. Below is a summary of the topics we discussed:
– Website Design & Development
– Email Newsletters – Social Media
– Internet Marketing (SEO)
– Communities, Forums & Directories
– Testimonials & Reviews
– Content Marketing (Blogs & Articles)
– Google Ads
Sarah Marince:
Hello, everyone. Happy Wednesday. Welcome to crew talk brought to you by Shoot.Video. I’m Sarah, and I’m so happy that we are all here together to have a wonderful a wonderful video chat. And we have a wonderful panel with us today, and we are going to do something fun. We are actually going to be covering a lot of different topics today, which is why we have a panel who can who’s here with us to cover all of those topics. And so I’m going to take a minute and go have everyone go around and kind of introduce themselves. So Don, why don’t you go first?
Don Seckler:
Hi everybody. I’m Don Seckler my company’s called peak inbound marketing, and we focus on SEO and paid advertising to help businesses generate qualified leads.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Hey, good afternoon, everybody. My name is Jaco Grobbelaar. I’m a founding partner of broad vision marketing and we specialize in inbound marketing. So lead generation. That’s the game we play.
Julbert Abraham:
Hey everyone. She’ll go Abraham here from AGM and we specialize on LinkedIn marketing and LinkedIn advertising.
Chris Vaglio:
Everyone, Chris Maglio here from rocket growth agency. I am actually a personal branding coach and consultant, but also a former video production agency owner of 20 years. So I’ve just recently transitioned into this new role. So looking forward to speaking with everybody today.
Sarah Marince:
That’s awesome. And Justin, yeah.
Justin McAleece:
I’m Justin McAleece, a co-owner video production company, BLARE Media, and a work behind the scenes that shoot stuff, video and host these things occasionally.
Sarah Marince:
Very cool. So for everyone who’s tuning in, as we cover each topic today, if you have questions, you don’t have to save them until the end, go ahead and type them into the chat box and we will be answering them as we go along and fun side note, we do have a $50 BNH gift card to give away today. So you’re going to want to stick around for that. All right. So why don’t we get started with the topic website, design and development. So whoever wants to kind of take the floor can go ahead and just talk to us about what you know about it. Tips and tricks, and yes. Give us your brilliant knowledge on website, design and development. And then again, for anyone watching any questions you have about it, feel free to just type them in the chat box, but don’t all start at once.
Chris Vaglio:
Yeah. We’ll go ahead, Don. You go first guy. You’re, you’re more of the web guy that I am.
Don Seckler:
So when you’re thinking about your website, you want to make sure that you are making sure that you’re answering questions and showing the problems you solve for your customers. Show how you do that. Talk about things that go into that. It doesn’t have to be a super sales pitch all the time. You should be able to show how you solve those problems for people who might be wanting to use your services. That’s really kind of it in a nutshell,
Sarah Marince:
Well, who needs a web space? Who needs a website? And why do you need a website?
Don Seckler:
I think any business needs a website because these days that’s expected. So you can go with something simple, like a Squarespace or Wix, or you can get a step up from that and go with WordPress, which is a little bit more complicated, but not really. It’s almost as easy to use as those other two services. And they both work. They work really well with Google in terms of getting visibility in the search engines.
Sarah Marince:
What would you say is like the most important thing that you first see when you go on. If you’re a business. So like, what do you want to see for what’s the most important
Don Seckler:
You, you want to, you want it to be targeted to your ideal prospect. So think about everybody who could use your services and who are the ideal people and who are the not so ideal people focus on the ideal ones, try to identify what makes them a little bit different than everybody else who could use your services and focus on their needs and their questions. And that’s going to help you in a lot of ways, just with search visibility and also with interaction of the site.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
I think that’s pretty cool that, you know, people reach you and they don’t get to a page because they ask a specific question. They search for a specific issue that I have. So if they get to that page, you have to answer that question. So it’s that relatedness that will keep them on the page as well. Otherwise they bounce off and that’s not good for your SEO again. I mean, I would also say that before a lot of people will say, I need to get away. So I need to get a website. I would say, do some planning and strategy beforehand, you know, so do some research on who is your customer. What’s important to them because sometimes people would get websites set up, they talk about all the services, but it doesn’t address that actual customer and their challenges like Don and Jacquelyn mentioned. So do some research before you even create that site so that you really elaborate on how you can help that customer.
Justin McAleece:
I think it’s fair to say too, that, that, you know, your business changes over time. And so your website should change over time to reflect how your business changes obviously. But a lot of businesses start trying to do one thing and then realize that actually they can either make more money or they’re better at a different thing. And so, yeah, like focusing your website on to that particular problem solving aspect of what you guys do best is very vital. Yeah.
Chris Vaglio:
Yeah. And just, just to add one more, very quick, simple thing is buy your domain name of your name if you can, because that seems to be a thing that I find a lot of people don’t do. And when I talked to a lot of, of, you know, just, you know, freelancers out there, people who are just doing their thing, they haven’t even thought about buying their name as their domain name and I not, your name is not always to be available, but get a little crafty. Then you don’t come up with something that at least has your name in it, just so you can then begin to think about it from our personal branding side. So that’s, that’s just like sometimes it’s just the simplest thing is the things sometimes we all forget to do including myself when I first started, I did not buy my, I didn’t buy my, my name until like even just a few years ago. So it is a quick, like simple thing that you can do that will really help as you begin to plan and do your strategy.
Julbert Abraham:
In addition to that, Adding social media logos and connect to the social channels from your website. You know, I noticed there is some website that they don’t even have any social channels connected to it. So you’re missing out on an opportunity where people can learn more about your brand, your business overall. So adding those LinkedIn logos and connect that to your LinkedIn company page or Instagram or Facebook and so forth.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Yeah. I want to go back to your original question, Sarah, as who, who needs a website. I think if there’s one thing that we have learned now from COVID is that everybody goes online. Everybody is searching online. So, you know, if, if people can’t find you online, how do they do business with you? You know, that’s one of the things just before COVID I think the average search volume was something like 55.5 billion searches per day. And that was just on Google. So you can imagine maybe where did this now today? So the question is not whether people are searching, the question is whether they find you and if they can’t find you, they go into business with you.
Chris Vaglio:
Yeah. It’s a great point. I, as a producer in my, in my former life, as a, as a, in video production, I was always absolutely shocked at the staggering amount of actors and voiceover artists and other talent like that, that did not have a website. And I got to tell you, as a, as a, as a producer, somebody who was doing casting, it would drive me absolutely insane that I couldn’t just go to an actor’s website if I really liked them and see pictures and see reels and things like that. So I, that’s something that I think, you know, to, just to your point is you got to have a website.
Don Seckler:
Yeah. Another quick point with your website give each of your services, a separate presence on the site. So give them each a separate page. So if you’re shooting video, editing, video, whatever those different services are, or it could be even industries, if you do, you know, weddings and parties and, and corporate work make, give a separate page for each of those. Because again, when you go back to Google being found, those pages will have a chance to show up in the web and the search results.
Sarah Marince:
So that’s a good point is having each everything you do a separate tab or a separate page, what else can you do to make your website User-Friendly? Like having your contact info, easy to find using those links? What are some other things people can do that makes it easy for people when they arrive at your site?
Chris Vaglio:
Well, one of the things that I just actually did to my own website, because I love the feature on other people’s, it’s just adding the widget where, you know, somebody could just call up and ask for help, like right there a little, you know yeah, that’s what I use. Yes. I just, I just started using drift and it’s great. Cause I actually have it connected to my phone. So if somebody on my site instantly wants to ask a question beyond the quick automated, Hey, how I can help you. I instantly got that and I can interact with somebody right away if they need a quick question or whatever, answer to anything. So I think that that’s a really key component, especially if you’re in a very service-based industry where people want answers fast. Yeah.
Don Seckler:
Make it super easy for people to contact you. So make sure your phone number is very high profile. Make sure you email address, make sure you have a forum on every page that will, you know, a contact type form. I can’t tell you how many especially smaller businesses are afraid to put their address on there because they’re, you know, don’t have an office and they’re working out of their house. Go ahead and use that address. Use the phone number, make them easy for people to find don’t bury them.
Chris Vaglio:
Yeah. Make sure they work too actually works because you don’t want to be people fill it out stuff and you never see the leads go of it. Right.
Don Seckler:
Right. Exactly. Test your forums. Yeah.
Justin McAleece:
One last thing to audit your own site, you know, go through periodically, make sure everything works, test all the links. People might not hit you up and tell you that they’re not working, but they know. And they realize it as they’re working a little, the site doesn’t even work anymore. And that can catch any of us at any time because stuff just breaks. You know,
Don Seckler:
You can also ask a friend to try and do some things on your site and watch them actually do it. Sit with them, bring your laptop and say, Hey, could you look at this and see how w what would you do if you wanted to contact me? Where, how would you do it and watch how they go through the site? You get a, it’s a small user group, but it’s a user group of somebody who may not be as familiar with the site as you. And you could see that, Oh, it’s not as easy as I thought it was.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
The other thing is to delve in what you want them to do, you know, a great user experience, but we don’t tell them what to do. They might just need your site. So have call to actions on the site, tell them exactly what you want them to do next. And so that way it’s like during the conversation, it’s the same principle. Yeah.
Don Seckler:
We see clients who are doing blogging, which is great because it makes you more visible in search. But then on those blog pages, there’s no way no, nothing to download, no form, nothing, no way to interact. So you want to go ahead and have that call to action, like Jocko said on every page.
Sarah Marince:
Yeah. All really great points.
Chris Vaglio:
I was just going to say one more quick thing on on the of things that would make it easy for people to interact with you is also to use a calendar service, like Calendly or something like that. And have that link very active on almost every page, which like everybody was saying about a call to action, which is very easy to do, which is, Hey, book some time with me right away, and you can link it to,
Chris Vaglio:
You know, whether you want to do 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 45 minute blocks with people. And that just allows a use it, or right away book time with you. And that’s an automated process. That’s very easy to, to set up. And so that’s just another way of, of making sure that, you know, you can connect with somebody and that you have an opportunity with them. So that’s another very simple call to action to do.
Justin McAleece:
Calendly definitely reduces friction. You know, if you want to set up something Like, okay, well, we’ve got to figure out what time works for both Of us. And I don’t know, you know, it’s a one-way conversation at that point, you in a good sort of way. And so it’s like done, I got to figure it out. We’re going to do it
Julbert Abraham:
Great. And it’s free to start. So that’s part of the story.
Sarah Marince:
That’s perfect. So let’s move on to email newsletters.
Chris Vaglio:
Oh my goodness. It’s so much. Do they work? Do they do? Yeah, they do work. They work.
Sarah Marince:
What are some great services that to use for email newsletters? So go for it.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
I’m a HubSpot business partner. So, but HubSpot is a big system and we use it more for marketing automation, but I think you have constant contact. I’m not sure if I were, but still exist. And what are, I don’t even know. What’s all the services that’s about. I use MailChimp. Mailchimp is another popular one I use Kartra. Okay. One of the important things with email for me is that you’ve got to realize that you always have to be building your email list. It’s something that you can never stop. It’s for me, it’s one of the most valuable marketing instruments that’s available there. You know, usually I’m not talking about buying lists, I’m talking about people who’s opt in or people that you’ve done business with. They know you. And if you can email gives you the opportunity to share information with them on a regular basis that educate them or that engage them. So, you know, increases your brand and increase their awareness of you.
Don Seckler:
Yeah. And don’t just slap your email newsletter together. Get you got to create valuable content. Again, go back to your ideal prospect. What are the types of questions? One way to get a great content strategy is just make a list of all the questions you’ll get asked by either a prospect or somebody who’s just about to sign with you or even a customer. Each of those, each of those questions are great ideas for content. So you could do blog posts and then put them in your email newsletter. And when your newsletter has value to your reader, they look forward to getting it. And they’re going to click through, we, we use this with especially with B2B and have great success in driving a lot of traffic back to the website where we can then get them to interact with us and get further along in that buyer’s journey. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Vaglio:
That’s a really great point. And then just to Jocko’s point, the, the one thing, and didn’t talk about County real quick. They both is that I’ve actually integrated calendar now that when people set up appointments with me, they added to my MailChimp Mailing list. Which then I’m always, so I’m always building my list and, and for that, you know, and if they don’t want to be on an email list, that’s fine. They’ll just unsubscribe. It’s, you know, it’s there to features there. It’s very easy MailChimp makes it easy, but it is a way to constantly be building your list. And, you know, those are people that wanted to connect with you in the first place. So it’s not so, so cold. So that, that’s just another like little integration from what we were just talking about previously, that can help build your,
Julbert Abraham:
I think it’s also structuring a newsletter, right? Because the people will do it two or three times and then they stop and then randomly do it again, two or three times later that year, make it either something that’s weekly bi-weekly or monthly so that the readers can look forward to that content. You know, that’s, there’s some type of predictability going around it. That’s really important.
Don Seckler:
And look at which content they’re interacting with, which subject lines are making them open. You may see themes happening over and over again, every time I mentioned this subject lighting, for example, wow, it gets 30% opens instead of 15% opens. So those types of things can help you not only make decisions about the newsletter, but also the other content on your website. Okay.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
One thing to be careful of when people start with females, I think it’s easier. I’m going to do one every, every week and then they get busy. You bad as what you just say, make sure you can do it consistently. It’s like, okay, what happened to them? Are they out of business?
Chris Vaglio:
Yeah, it’s very true. Yeah, because once you get people onto a routine, when it disappears, that’s when they really notice
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Yeah. What you said, Don is don’t, don’t give them information where you selling to them. Be careful. Don’t educate me about, you know, what do I want to know about? So if you know what they want to learn, that’s what you give them.
Don Seckler:
And if you have trouble creating the content, writing the blog posts that you would put in the newsletter, you can also curate stuff. So have one post that you’re your from your website and then three or four from other reputable sources that people will find that valuable as well. And we’ll love to get that information on a regular basis.
Julbert Abraham:
And you could use that content in several different ways, you know, because you, you, why are you using it for your newsletter? Some of this content can be benefit on social media to help you build out your list as well. So think about those content that you, that people actually open and read from your newsletter, how else you could use it to benefit your marketing?
Chris Vaglio:
Yeah, I’ve I, I often times as newsletters that I purposely subscribed to, I save them and those to me, I use them for influence and, and, you know, to come up with ideas for my own newsletter, you know, and, and that’s a great that’s a great thing to do is if you are already on somebody’s newsletter, I’m not saying copy them 100%, but take a look at it. Why do you like this? And you can integrate a lot of that influence into your own. And it’s fine. It’s a newsletter mean it’s, you know, there’s only so many different ways you can do it and everybody’s doing the same thing, but know, just make it relate to you and your audience. And that’s totally fine. If you’re looking for inspiration in a lot of these like MailChimp and the different, the different ones, they do have great templates that are there and you can customize them and save them and reuse them.
Chris Vaglio:
And you can begin to create different ones as you go along and become more comfortable with, with these, with these applications. But they do make it pretty easy. And if you ever get stuck, there’s a lot of how-to videos out there and things like that, that you can instantly Google and look up on YouTube, that’ll show you how to do it in like 60 seconds. Another thing you can do too, is if you do get a newsletter that really hits, I think is see if you can riff off of that right away, and don’t send it right away. But, but save that for three months or six months down the line, that way, you know, that it did work at once. It’s still fresh in your mind, once you did the research and all that stuff, you might hit new people, or you might have the same people that are already on your news list might want to hear it again because it’s, that’s a good reminder and you can build off of it and sort of go to step two. I think that can be really useful that way you have something banked, hopefully. And also you’re already building on something that already works. Yeah. Great idea.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Maybe something to follow up. What Dan said is that after you send the email, go and do the analysis, I mean, you sent that email for a specific reason, so don’t just send it and forget it, go into the analysis, look at how many people opened it, how many people click through now, what links that they click on that gives you an indication of what people like to see. And then if the people that click through, what is your sequence to follow up with them now, you’re going to, when somebody has clicked through, that’s become sort of like a lead, that’s a prospect, what is your process to follow up and connect with them?
Don Seckler:
The other thing you can do with the newsletter is you could send it out, give it three or four days, and then take all the people who didn’t open that and do it again, but with a different subject line and send it again. And we’ve done this with, with some pretty large publishing businesses. And it works really well for them in terms of you’re going to get an extra 20 to 30% opens on top of what you got the first time.
Julbert Abraham:
That’s a really good idea. Yeah, yeah. That is great.
Don Seckler:
A little bit of work by changing that subject line, but send the same exact thing three or four days later.
Chris Vaglio:
Yeah. Well, they ain’t open it the first time, so it’s brand new to them.
Don Seckler:
Right? Exactly. So just trying to get those opens are all about the subject line. So if that subject line nails up for somebody they’re going to open it. And that’s why it’s important to test those on an ongoing basis as well.
Justin McAleece:
There’s, there’s someone back there waiting, like it was a Christmas present, wait until Sunday to open and then he’s going to send another one. I’d like to meet that person. [inaudible] Who are you? What is wrong with you? Talk a little bit about social media alone, that a very,
Sarah Marince:
Very broad subject we could be on. We could be on this for hours. I hope to everybody, there are so many social media platforms and you know, they can be used for so many different ways. So, which do you think are the most important, the best ways to use them? And again, go for it. Well, I’ll just start real quick, but I’ll throw, I’m gonna throw it till Joel bear, because I’m going to say it, I’m going to throw it right to this guy, but I’m telling you right now. Yeah, exactly. If you’re in business and you don’t have a LinkedIn page, you’re, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. And if you have a LinkedIn page and you haven’t updated it in like forever, you’re also doing yourself a big disservice. Now I’m going to throw out the drill there. All right.
Julbert Abraham:
Over 700 million people on LinkedIn and they’re all business professionals. So think about when someone is looking for you and they’re Google your name. One of the first thing that will pop up on that first and second page is your LinkedIn profile. So if it’s not updated, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunity because that’s that first impression. So from updating, we talking about your headshot gotta be correct. You can’t have, you know, a picture that you crapped out with someone else and you had a bottle of beer in it. Don’t do that, right. A Banner image in the back of your profile to really stand out, you know maybe something about your brand, your logo, company names slogan and so forth. Your about section don’t make that about you make it about your potential clients. You know, it shouldn’t be about, you know, I have a hundred years of experience, blah, blah, blah. No one cares. Talk about, you know, the problem that you saw share. Some of those case studies, a new feature, a section they just added core featured where you can upload some of your work. So if you do video freelancing, upload some of those content up there, so people can see the type of work that you do, great way for you to stand out from the masses. We have the experience section, make sure you create a company page that make your business look more legit, and that’s really easy to do. So it’s just click on the burger logo in the top right corner, where it says work, and then go all the way down with this, create a company page, click on that, fill it out, add your logo and then connect it to your profile that makes you even more legit and allow people to trust you faster. Then we have the recommendation section. Anybody you work with in the past, don’t be scared to ask them for recommendation and connect with your clients and potential clients. You know, use it as if you were creative. Linkedin should be one of your best tool to use because you could share so much content on there and really attract the right people to you. So that’s just LinkedIn. We have Facebook, Any opportunity.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
That you’re bad at something that you said earlier, you’ve got to think of it from a strategic point of view. Yes. No different horses, different courses. It’s not just go and use all the social media. There are certain Social media platforms that work better for certain, for certain businesses. And you’ve got to go and do that research and find out which social media platform compliment what you do the best.
Julbert Abraham:
Definitely agree. A hundred percent. Also think about your clients, right? So if you’re doing wedding videos, Instagram might be better for you. Right? Right. So that don’t mean you should have a LinkedIn profile. You should still have the LinkedIn profile because you could connect with a wedding planners and so forth. But Instagram might be where you share your work and you know, people on LinkedIn get married.
Don Seckler:
I think for a lot of businesses, especially small businesses are solo preneurs. A social gets really challenging because you say, well, there’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik, TOK, Snapchat, all these different platforms. My advice to people is always pick the one you’re most comfortable with and just do it. And once you get rolling with it and you get into a rhythm and you’re scheduling your posts and you’re, you’re doing it on a regular base, you’re interacting with people. Then you can expand out to whatever platform you’re most comfortable with or second most comfortable with. So, you know, you don’t have to do them all at once. Pick one that like Jill Baer was saying that fits well with your, your audience and start there.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
I mean, you tried to build a community and you’ve got to realize that you, that community needs to be engaged. So if you don’t engage the community, they will disappear. So whatever you do think of that, right? From the starters, which platform you’re going to use, how are you going to develop your content? And then how will you keep going to keep them engaged? And how are you going to convert them?
Julbert Abraham:
I agree a hundred percent in term of the converting and the strategy because let’s go back to one of our prior conversation about building out your newsletter. Social media could be a great place where you could invite people to join your newsletter or community. You know, so think about how all these different tools can work together, your website, your social media platforms, your newsletter, and everything else that you have in marketing. If you have the plan and strategy, like a lot of us keep saying over and over again in place, then that would make your job easier because you know now, okay, I’m going to be posting on LinkedIn. And my goal when I post this to build a community of people that love my content, then I can invite them to join my newsletter. Then they can get more information about what I do then that could lead me to do calls and then go to my website to see some of my work. So think about it that way you got it.
Don Seckler:
I have a strategy. You have to have a plan. Don’t wing it. You should in anything to do with any of this stuff. Content, social media has to be planned out. If you don’t plan it, it’s you just going to, it’s going to fizzle out and you’re going to get no results. So plan it, execute it, and then evaluate the results. That’s super important.
Sarah Marince:
A question from Navi. Hi, Navi. What for website and social media, do you recommend to represent a company, a brand or as a represented company and brand, or as an individual, especially for a one person company or service, for example, should I have a website in my name or in my business name and same goes for the social media?
Chris Vaglio:
Well, I’ll tell you from my perspective, because I am doing that. Having both like, so have your name, but it can link right to your company website. I think that that’s still important. So have your name, but link it over. I run two different social media accounts. I, I, for my personal and for my business, but they are sort of one in the same because you know, it’s very important to not only just establish your business as a brand, but it’s also very important to establish your own personal brand as well, because that’s the thing that people engage with a personal brand, much more than no engage with just the company brand. So it’s, you know, while you, and if you really want total separation, then you can just have a personal, personal account, but I would then have a public facing account then that would be in your name.
Chris Vaglio:
But that’s not to say you shouldn’t also have just a company account too, because it also breeds a lot of SEO and it helps for search on all that. Yeah. Yeah. The other challenge is, especially on Facebook and Instagram, they throttle business page visibility cause they want you to pay for ads. So a lot of times you’re, you’re going to get way, way more attraction with your personal page. Like, you know, on Facebook, I’ve got over a thousand friends personally, so we just launched a podcast and we’re promoting it through that page as opposed to the podcast page, which has no visibility yet. So
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Yeah, maybe I’ll stay back and think, where do you want to be in three, four, five years? Because that’s the most important, you know, the general that you choose now, there’s the general that you’ve got to bolt over time because you don’t want to stay just where you are. You want to grow. And if you want to grow what you want to be in front of you as maybe doubling difference from where you are right now. But also I saw a question about, do you need to be a paid member to add a banner image on your LinkedIn page? No, no it’s free. Anybody can do it.
Sarah Marince:
I actually do a lot of really great LinkedIn stuff with the free account, like right. You don’t have to pay for LinkedIn to have a lot of those LinkedIn benefits.
Julbert Abraham:
Yes you could. Yes. Especially with the content side. So there’s no reason for you not to start sharing and putting out content on LinkedIn. And you could do that every day. You could build LinkedIn stories. You could do LinkedIn videos, you could do LinkedIn posts, you could apply for LinkedIn live and be able to do that on a consistent basis. You create your own small show on LinkedIn and have it weekly or bi- weekly. I mean, Chris does it. So it’s a great way to build your presence and combining your personal and company print By having both, as Jack was said in five years, you could have a very strong personal brand and then have a very strong company brand at the same time.
Justin McAleece:
People, I think like, like brands that work within themselves, you know? So they, they want to talk about Gary V or someone, right? Like you don’t differentiate him from his brand, from what he does for his clients, for, from what he preaches. Right? You think it’s the same thing in a good sort of way, because you know what you’re getting from him. You’re not like, Oh, we’ll go to his personal page. And he talks about all this other crazy crap. Like it’s not that it’s like, you get a, you get to know the person, you get to know what they’re selling and you want what they’re selling because you know the person. And so I think those things can interact well and they sort of need to in 2020, 20, 21, because it’s only going to get more tied, obviously like you can’t silo yourself and you can’t silo you as yourself or your brand. And what if that, what if your company, what if all that stuff then industry changes. You need to be able to bring yourself to the next year and be able to, you know, rebrand your company maybe, but you don’t have to rebrand yourself.
Sarah Marince:
So a term that has been thrown around a little bit already, it is very important is SEO. What’s that stand for? I should know search engine optimization, but I’m going to let you guys just speak on SEO and form us all.
Don Seckler:
Okay. I’ll give you the super short, easy, no technical blather about SEL focus on that ideal prospect, create that content for them, answer their questions, solve their problems. If you do that alone, your website will be way ahead of everybody else. The other thing I always tell people is always make data- driven content decisions. So don’t pick your main keyword for an article based on your gut. Do the research, see how many people are searching for that keyword each month, how much competition there is for it, look at what kind of content is out there for that keyword now, and can your content be better than that content? So without that, without the numbers, you’re just kind of guessing in the wind as to what’s gonna, what’s going to work and not work. But when you focus on data to drive your content decisions you can really, really grow your site dramatically because you’ll have much more visibility in the search engines.
Justin McAleece:
It sounds like sorta what you’re saying, Don is that it’s, it’s not necessarily about a lot of techie type stuff behind the scenes, as much as it is about representing the right content to the right people in the right way, like build that as a holistic approach, then
Don Seckler:
You don’t, you know, it helps to have the techie stuff, but 90% of SEO is the text on the page. And how does it answer the query that somebody has asked? So Google looks at every page on the internet and says, okay, this page is, should be number one for this question. And so your whole site has some effect as well, but they really are looking at individual website pages. That’s why blogging works so well for, for search visibility, because you can narrow in on a specific topic. And if you do it really well, Google even rewards you with a thing called a featured snippet, which are some of the, kind of the image things or boxes that you’ll see at the top of Google. Sometimes those are extremely, extremely powerful. I’ll give one example. We have a local architect here in New Jersey and we were focusing on the, the term how much does it cost to build a new house? And we were able to create content around that, that answered that really clearly. And Google gave us that featured snippet. And this customer went from 3000 visitors a month to 10,000 visitors a month. And most of them were going to that article where we had a great call to action. So he got business out of it as well. There was a lot of waste of traffic, but as he’s just works here in New Jersey and he can’t help somebody in California, but he dominated here as well. So it was really, really impactful.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Yeah. But that’s when you, when you have a page like that, an a, an, a snippet like that, the benefit is that people come to your website and so Google see that people visit you. And the more people that visit your website, the more people say, well, you must know what you’re doing because people look up your page when you’re sorry, when you do this before you start first, look at what people are searching, look at the keywords or the search terms, because if there are not enough search volume, you may want to rethink what you want to do. So before anything look at what are people searching? What is the search volume for every search them. And then on that make an informed decision of how you want to tackle your search engine optimization.
Don Seckler:
Yeah. And you can check out your car, you can check out your competitors. So we will do audits for our clients where we take their website and their three closest competitors. And we’ll see, well, what are these competitors ranking for? What other top rankings in Google? What do those pages look like? And we do all that analysis and then take all that information and build our own strategy that will either beat them or, you know, compete at least. So there’s, there’s a lot of ways to go at it.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
And the one benefit is Google changed their search algorithm almost daily. So because there’s over them, change how they index content changes. So you always have an opportunity to get your content, to go to the top, make sure that you follow, make sure that, you know, what’s those, those changes that take place and both that in your content development. The other thing about content is it’s not about that sprint. It’s about the journey. You know, it’s like putting gas into your car tank. If you do a block a month, that’s it, you do a blog a month and you keep on doing it. If you do a blog a week, you do a blog a week and the bots come to your website and they will index you. Right. But it’s not about blogging 20 times. And they think you going to stay on top. Now you’re have to feed that monster every week.
Don Seckler:
Yeah. It’s super important. And people kind of forget that part of it. There’s no magic bullet. It’s a lot of work. The technical side of it can get very hairy, especially like Jocko said, with all the changes, you could check your keyword rankings in the morning and then in the afternoon. And they will be different every time. So it’s, it’s like a river it’s fluid, but if you’re heading in the right direction over time, you know, and going up into the right, if I might go in the right way here having success.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Yeah, bro. That’s why they call it Google juice. Yeah. Another concept we’ll think of when you work, it’s not about being shallow and wide. It’s about being narrow and deep. That’s why they call it the long tail of the internet. So don’t take 10 topics and write two blogs about it. But rather they take two topics and write 10 blocks about it. Right. It goes, Google gives you a, what they call a domain authority. And you know, when you look at your domain authority, there’s many factors that go into it. But a way to think of it very easily is to think of the quality and the quantity of content that you have on your website related to the topic that you represent.
Don Seckler:
Yeah, you definitely, there, there definitely look at, they want expertise and authority, especially in areas that are things that are they call them your money or your life. So divorce is one of those areas where, or medical, where they don’t want to see spam content with fake, you know, stories about this will cure you from back pain or whatever. So there has to be some authority behind your content as well. So if you’re going to write medical content, you better be a doctor. You better have experience in that field for a long time and, and have some, some other writings around the internet on medical journals or other websites that would indicate your authority and expertise. That’s very important for those areas.
Justin McAleece:
How do you write content if you think that that stuff’s already been covered, what’s a good way to come up if you’re sort of running out of things to write about maybe?
Chris Vaglio:
Well, one of the things that I do is I actually try to, like, I keep an ongoing, like like simple a Google doc going, and I just will sit there and I’ll just think about topics, things that that my audience relates to the things that I want to talk about with my audience, with, and the things that they’re asking me about. And I’ll just keep writing and writing and writing and writing until I’m done. And then I look at, then I go back and look at it and start to zero in on the things that I want to create content with.
Chris Vaglio:
And then, you know, for me, like when it comes to writing blogs, like I’m not a good writer. I don’t like it. It’s not my thing, but I do understand that. And to what Don says, like it has to be done. Like if it’s such an important part of the SEO process to have blog content on your site, if you want to be found. So what I do is I actually just record my blogs using the voice recorder on my phone and I just, I just literally talk the blog. And then I go and I use a transcription service, like rev.com and just get it transcribed. And then I throw it in Google docs and I added it. And then I have a copywriter look at it. So, you know, it, I have, it looks like I have a good command of the English language, but that’s how I create blogs and it, and it works great.
Chris Vaglio:
And it actually makes it much more efficient to keep content coming out and I work and I just work off that list. Right. It’s very similar to what we do. Yeah. That’s, it’s totally useful way to do it is to just talk and then transcribe it great. And actually rev.com just release an app to like where you can just talk to their app and then it transcribes it like sends it right away. So they’ve automated the process a little bit better.
Don Seckler:
The other thing to remember Justin, especially is it’s you know, there’s nothing new under the sun, so you just kind of have to pick that keyword or subject and put your own personal spin on it. You know, your expertise, your point of view, what, you know, those are the types of things that people will find valuable. Especially if you write from, you know, in here, people get to know you a little bit and you know, that’s unique, so nobody else is going to be you, you know? So I think that it goes a long way, even though there’s no, you know, no new subjects really establish a personal brand. For sure.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Just, I think Justin, the other point is that Google make their money through search, you know, by delivering the best search results. That’s why people go use Google. So when you think of the topic goes, sit back and think about the topic. I think what are the different aspects of the topic? And then when you address it, you address the whole topic. And that makes that’s why Google will display your content and not somebody else’s content because you’re answering the question where you’re talking about the topic more holistically.
Don Seckler:
Yeah. Or it could be something as simple as looking what’s, what’s showing up on the first page for Google for that subject. And if it’s like, okay, the top one is 12 reasons to AB and say, do 20, you know that right away, that’s your a little bit better. The content will be newer and you have a chance for showing up there as well.
So I use a tool called also ask that com where I’ll put the topic name and then they’ll pull up a bunch of questions that people asked on the internet and then just modify that and write content around it and publish my article through that. So that’s been very helpful. And also I use a tool called keyword to that IO to kind of see, do some searches, to see what are some of the most popular searches in term of keywords coming up.
Julbert Abraham:
So those ads help a lot.
Justin McAleece:
From a technical standpoint what’s the low hanging fruit you guys would say to to fix a website that, that maybe was just thrown together by someone who didn’t understand SEO at all. What’s easy to change that would help?
Jaco Grobbelaar:
I think the most important thing is to look at the title tag of the page, because that’s what Google used to index the page. So if, if your, if, if the page content is about video production, then the title tag should say video production, you know? So Google can make that connection between what’s on the page and what the title, what the page is about. Think of walking into a library with a book that you’ve written. You don’t just take that book and you put it in the, any shelf or something like that. You go and they index it and that’s what Google do. They, that’s how they index your page. So you’ve got to make sure that you do your title tag correctly. That for me is always the most important thing.
Don Seckler:
I think the other thing that’s very helpful is think logically. So keep in mind that everybody at Google are engineers, so they like structure. Okay. So your home page is up at the top. It’s very broad and general has a lot of different subjects on it. As you get deeper into your site, get more specific and give more detail that alone will help your, your site. But you really have to really kind of think like an engineer while you’re creating your content strategies.
Justin McAleece:
You don’t want an old, old school, a geo city site, or the only thing, or three pages deep,
Don Seckler:
The flashing numbers rotating, right?
Justin McAleece:
Yeah. The counter. Yeah, the counter. That’s awesome. Good. That’s great. Yeah. I love to think about it like that. Like Jaco was saying that’s a really good perspective. Cool. Okay.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Yeah. It says it’s strange. Nobody has mentioned link building yet. Yeah.
Don Seckler:
Well, it’s having links from your other sites to your site. And according to Google terms of service, you’re not supposed to try to build links to improve rank. People still do it. Google is getting better at getting those links, devalued. So the best way to do it is create good content. And when you create good content, people will share it. And like for example, we did an article about UTMs, which are snippets of code. You could add to the end of a URL to track it better. And that article got shared by the Google analytics, Twitter account. Well, the traffic went through the roof, we got 10, 15 links, really good links from it. And that really helps. So you can rank, you can rank content without links. You can’t rank links without content. So if there’s nothing on, on the page that answers the question really well. It doesn’t matter how many links you have. So a lot of people chase links and I don’t think it’s a, it’s a great, because it’s
Don Seckler:
It’s very hard to get good, valuable links. Like the better links are from big sites like New York times, CNN, the big news sites, any big brand sites have a lot more you know, power with Google to when those links come to your site. So it can be challenging. Yeah. I agree with you Don, but much better to focus on the actual content, you know, having good content.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Yeah. The thing is you can’t ignore it because one of them major ranking criteria stole backlinks, but don’t forget about internal links as well, where you link between your content, because that tells Google ways, that content cloud, you know, how articles are related, makes the topic bigger. And so Google see you address more and more sub topics or issues are related to the topic. So you get credit for that as well.
Don Seckler:
Yeah, definitely. And that’s when that site structure really comes into play. So if all your, you know, your articles about lighting for photography or AR are linking to your lighting page, for example, I don’t know if that even makes sense, but that will help that lighting page do better. We’ve we do that with our clients all the time. And I just saw in the comments from Doug here he was saying, I’ve been writing blogs for Blair media for several months. I always write from the same POV that the reader wants to learn how to become a makeup artist, editor, a copywriter, et cetera. My rationale is whether the readers are already professionals or not, the tone should inform rather than sell. Am I on the right track? I think we can all agree that yes.
Don Seckler:
Yeah. Just, you know, give help and answer questions and don’t sell, don’t sell and blog posts. It’s the, it’s the worst.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Yeah. And you will have call to actions on the page that you can utilize to sell you first, establish your, you establish your expert nurse by the quality of the content. How good you answer these questions or how well you educate them.
Chris Vaglio:
Yeah. And have a link for your ma have a link to sign up for your mailing list on your blog page. Once again, build that list, build that list because somebody went, wow, this is really good. I want to see content like this. Right. And let them sign up right away.
Julbert Abraham:
Yeah. Share that on your social media.
Chris Vaglio:
Yeah. Put it up on LinkedIn. There we go. All one change sharing. Yeah. Well, it’s amazing too, because you can create so many different pieces of content out of a blog or out of, you know, so you could easily, so say you made a video where you can turn that video into a blog by transcribing that audio and editing it and turning it into a blog to a podcast. Exactly. Then same thing. When a blog, you can take a blog, create a video and create a podcast out of it. You can even create a little slide flip book out of it too, and put that out of slides. And so there’s so many ways to reuse and repurpose content. So don’t think that just because you wrote this one blog, it’s one and done, like there’s no such thing anymore as one and done it’s it’s content is, you know, disposable. And I don’t say that negatively. It’s just how people consume content. And so what you put up on Instagram in three, five days, max that’s that is super old news. You know, so we’re using that and, and, you know, like redoing, like re putting out the email newsletter with a different subject line it’s okay.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
They say content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.
Chris Vaglio:
I love that. Yes. A hundred percent. Yes.
Sarah Marince:
That kind of takes us into our next topic that I wanted to talk about, which is communities, forums and directories, like kind of networking, like all of that stuff. So if you guys could touch on that,
Justin McAleece:
Sarah, if we want to maybe do the we should, we should get to the BNH gift card here in just a few minutes
Justin McAleece:
So some of you may know how we do this, but for those of you who don’t, here’s how we’re going to do this. So basically you’re going to pick a number between one and 100, and you’re going to put that number into the chat box, not the question and answer box, the chat box right now. So do it now. Pick your number now, panelists. I’m so sorry. You can not play our game.
Justin McAleece:
I don’t get to play either. Neither does Sarah.
Sarah Marince:
I mean a B&H gift card. I would love it. I love it. I’ve have enough money to be an H in my, in my life, but it’s a good gift to get. It’s a good gift card to get, but yeah. So go ahead, everybody drop your number into our chat box. Good. We got those numbers coming in. This is great.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Can you wait just a minute? I’m texting all my friends.
Justin McAleece:
Crazy too. How we get some of the the distribution, the random distribution. People will pick the same number and stuff like that, or you’ll get a bunch right around the same thing or some sort of live mine that works here. Yeah.
Justin McAleece:
That’s a good point. All right. Well that seems like it. Here we go. I’m going to randomize this. Hey, pick a number and it says eight. Can we all see that? Hold on. Glare time eight. So the closest summer is, Hey, we got Michael David here. He’s five away. Michael David said the same thing. Yeah. Michael David, it looks like is the winner.
Sarah Marince:
Awesome. I guess that means we have to wrap this up. Okay. So here’s what we do at the end. Every, each of you gets to go around and say your name again, if you’d like to, but your social media, where people can find you, if they have questions if they just want to connect and see your work, go for it. And Don, we’ll start with you again.
Don Seckler:
Okay. people can find [email protected]. Peak Inbound Marketing
Jaco Grobbelaar:
We are broadvisionmarketing.com and welcome to ask us questions.
Julbert Abraham:
You can find me on LinkedIn Julbert Abraham, or send me an email@ [email protected].
Chris Vaglio:
So I just put in the comments my link tree. So you can find all my links there, but Chris Vaglio Rock It Growth Agency and you can go there and check out all my links there because everything is in there. So LinkedIn, my podcast, YouTube channel, everything. So cool. Check it out. Excellent.
Justin McAleece:
And we do have a couple minutes left. We’re not quite done yet, but another, we got that out of the way. We want to talk about community a little bit. You know what this is based on here at shoots.video. That’s our own video community. And for people to come on there, make a profile. And basically it’s like taking word of mouth and digitizing it. That’s what we want to do, get reviews and that sort of thing. So how does community work with you guys? How, how do you engage in any of those systems?
Chris Vaglio:
Well, I mean, I, I kind of created my own communities on, on Facebook and WhatsApp. Actually Julbert and I have a community we’ve created together and I have other communities on a part of, but really taking advantage of things like creating a Facebook group, because the big difference between a Facebook group and a Facebook page is the fact that Facebook company pages pretty much exist for SEO and branding. But, you know, as what Don was saying with the Instagram business pages, it’s set up to, to generate money for those programs. So to get through a post out you got to pay money, but if you create a Facebook group, that’s a lot different because now you’re able to create a community of people based around whatever you want. I mean, it doesn’t have to be just about your company, but say your video production or photography, or you just want to create a creative community. You can create that group and sort of, you know, create this whole network and use that and everybody can participate. And it’s a great way to keep you top of mind in a branded and same thing with WhatsApp. Yeah, yeah. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Yeah. Same thing. But for video production professionals
Julbert Abraham:
To add on to that let’s say you have a video professional and you work with event planners or wedding planners. You can create a LinkedIn group and only invite event planners or wedding planners into that group and just share content with them and stay contact with them and, you know, have different zone events with them. And that’s your community that you’re building and you have your community grow and they get value. So make sure that you manage it, make sure that you answer the questions. And if you come to answer the question, go and invite people to come and answer the questions.
Chris Vaglio:
Yeah. Great, excellent point. Exactly.
Justin McAleece:
Michael he, you know, he won the gift certificate. So now he’s got all the ideas here. He says now once you pay for posts, boosts on his social media, the social media will lower your engagement. Even more to make you a paying customer. The Facebook has become our dealer apparently. And yeah, that’s, that’s totally how it works. I’ve heard that before and you know, that’s built into the system to keep you coming back from war to make sure you get the same amount of interactions that you got the previous time. So yeah. It’s you want to build your own stuff and get people coming there because they want to come there because your content is so good and answers their questions. I mean, I think that’s really the takeaway. Find out what questions they have and answer those questions as effectively as possible.
Don Seckler:
One piece of advice don’t boost posts on Facebook.
Chris Vaglio:
I was just going to say, I was just, no, I was just going to say, so Don, what do you think of Facebook?
Don Seckler:
It’s the worst. If you want to run ads, run ads, you have so much more control over them that you’re going to get much better response ads. You can, you can pay per click and not by impression with boosts. They just throw it out there. And we’ve never seen. Yeah, we’ve never seen posts, boost, beat ads. It’s always ads dominate. So you’re wasting your money with poop posts, posts.
Justin McAleece:
That’s an excellent distinction. We don’t necessarily realize that a lot of people. And certainly I don’t, I didn’t for a long time,
Don Seckler:
They make it very, they make it very easy to boost posts and they do that because it’s an easy way to get your cash. It’s the same. As when you do Google ads, they make it very easy for you to let them do everything and you end up losing a lot of money, a lot more money. So you need to manage it still.
Justin McAleece:
Sorry. I was just cutting someone off Jaco.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Sure. I just say that Facebook retargeting as well. That’s very low expense.
Justin McAleece:
Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Retargeting. It, has it changed its name or is it still the same, same program? It was. I know that there’s a little bit of a jargon there. It’s different.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
I’m not aware that they’ve changed their name. Okay.
Don Seckler:
Remarketing or retargeting. It’s the same thing. It’s basically showing an ad to somebody who’s already been to your website.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Hmm. Okay. Yeah. That’s a great combination with pay-per-click any type of Viper. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Chris Vaglio:
I think one of the biggest things before we sign off here and I think I can get everybody to agree on this. Is the, I think the biggest thing I could share with everybody who’s listening is do not get trapped Into the mindset that you’re giving everything away. Like give away information, give away information, because that is the thing that will get you hired that will get you the gigs you want and be where you want to be too. Please do not get in the mindset of I’m giving it all away. You’re not, don’t worry about your yeah. Yeah. Don’t worry about your secret sauce.
Don Seckler:
Everybody else is out there doing it. Give away whatever help you can and it will come back to you. Definitely guaranteed.
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I’d love to say that the bootstrapper is a bootstrapper, you know, they will never use you, so they, any way not your clients go and look for the people who are prepared to buy
Don Seckler:
The other thing, somebody who’s going to steal your idea or whatever. They were never going to pay you in the, in the, in the end. So it doesn’t matter. Yeah. Excellent. I mean, put content out there to show people how to do things, how to make their own videos, how to take better pictures. How did you know what had a better writer do all that stuff? Because they will try it and they will do it at least once or twice. And they go, Oh my God, it’s too much work. I’m hiring you, but they’re going to remember you because you help write your, and you’re the expert. It also helps paint you as an expert. It’s showing that, you know what you’re talking about,
Jaco Grobbelaar:
You know, a final word is that it’s not a sprint. It’s a journey. Hmm. Excellent.
Justin McAleece:
Thank you, Sarah. I think we can end it on that. If you want to wrap it up for us, this is brought to you by shoots.video.
Sarah Marince:
Yes. And you can find these videos on our YouTube page. We did have one last quick question from Michael David. Thanks for the clarification in is that B2B is B2B the ideal client because they have a bigger cash flow?
Julbert Abraham:
Yeah. There’d be the seed company that has the cashflow. B2B is just business to business, you know?
Don Seckler:
Yeah. I think you have to decide what your ideal prospect or ideal client looks like and go for that person. You know, whether it’s B2B or beta say to, I don’t think no, I think it’s just a matter, I think it would be to be you just get a little bit more into niche because it could be, it depends what kind of business that is. I mean, maybe be the only, there could be only four companies that produce this thing, but if that’s your client, then you know, you kind of know where to focus in on, but yeah. You know, it can get very nichey
Jaco Grobbelaar:
Now look at your overhead cost structure. How much do you want to charge? You know, you’re gone, you don’t have a middle market product and try to sell it to A’s and B’s right. Yeah. Okay.
Sarah Marince:
Okay. Awesome. Well, thank you guys. This was an awesome panel. I mean, time flew. I did not realize we were coming to the end of our video. We just started. Thank you for all of the information. I didn’t even get through all my questions. This could have been a two hour panel, but thank you guys so much, Justin, thank you for hopping on as well. And thank you for everyone for tuning in and we will see you next time. Bye guys!