Double Opt-in E-mail List for SEO - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 51

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO podcast. Today is the 51st podcast. Unfortunately, we do not have Paul here today. Don't worry, I will introduce this gentleman shortly. Paul is out. We wanted to send our thoughts and prayers over to Paul and his grandmother. His grandmother is having some emergency surgery this morning, and he's heading over to exciting Beaumont. So, our thoughts and prayers are over with him. And here next to me, we have Ken Roberts. And, you know, I printed off a page for Ken. So, why don't you introduce yourself, say a little bit about your company, and I'm going to get that page that I've got. All right. Good morning. My name is Ken Roberts. I'm with Search Marketing Profits. And Chris asked me to stand in and talk a little about what we do, collaborate. And I'll let him. All right. So, Ken Roberts, we're going to get right back to him. As usual, what we want to do first in our podcast is we want to talk about briefly what we talked about last time. Because, you know, if we talked about it at length, it would be the same podcast. So, we definitely don't want to do that. Last time we were talking about the Microsoft SEO tools. And I think it was Darren Bowie sent us a message saying, hey, what about Microsoft SEO tools? We honestly didn't know anything about it. And Ken actually had heard of it, but really had to look at it. He's like, oh, yeah, that sounds interesting. And I have too many other things to do. So, we did a little bit of research and we came up with some good information. So, the last podcast that is podcast 50 is a good podcast to go back and listen to. Remember, you are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. You might even be watching the most popular SEO podcast. Then it would be on Ustream, I guess, because you're watching it there. We love it when you stalk

us. We love it when you give us reviews. We're always kind of reading our reviews on air because we get some wonderful things. People are saying some great things about us. If you want to stalk us, you can stalk us on Twitter. To find us on Twitter, you just go to twitter.com slash eWebStyle. And we'll talk about that because we were talking about social media a little bit earlier this morning. Facebook, because the URL is so ugly and useless, I don't give it off over the air. However, what I do do is I tell you to go to eWebStyle.com slash Facebook. That will take you to our Facebook page. Please become a fan. Our fans are growing. Actually, that was another thing that I wanted to discuss today. We may not get to that. Ustream, hopefully some of you are watching us on Ustream already. We do broadcast the video of this podcast live every Friday at 9.15 Central Standard Time. Wave hello again. Hello out there in internet video land. If you want to find our Ustream page, again, the easiest way is eWebStyle.com slash Ustream. Don't worry, I'm almost done. And next is our YouTube page. And I've been promising you for at least two podcasts that I would give you a shortcut to it. We do have a shortcut. The shortcut is eWebStyle.com slash YouTube. And that is U-Y-O-U-Tube. And stream is U, the letter, and then stream. So make sure that you follow us and make sure that you stalk us. What we really enjoy is when you take the time and you make an account on iTunes. You put in your vote. You say that we're awesome. If you get any good information, please take a little bit of time out and go to iTunes, make an account, and submit a review. We really appreciate that. And if you do submit a review, send us an email so that we can give you a little bit of link love. And you can find us via email at podcast at e-webstyle.com.

And that will go to both either Paul or I. Anyway, I think, and then we've got a little bit of news. This is kind of cool. I don't know if you knew this. Facebook unseated Google as the most visited site this week. Yeah. So the press release went out. That's kind of interesting. Actually, that's something that's over a month. That they have more traffic coming in than Google does. In fact, a lot of people, even from the pay-per-click standpoint, are moving to Facebook for pay-per-click because of Google and the higher cost. Anyway. Yeah. No. It's interesting because I did mention Facebook and that I was going to, I printed out something. Facebook sent me an email, and I think it was with regard to our business page. Saying, you know, these are the people who have come and said they like your page. And so there was actually like Facebook analytics. And one more thing that we have to deal with here as search engine optimizers. And I think we'll probably talk about that because social media is such a big monster right now. And there's a lot of potential in it for traffic depending on the type of business. So we'll bring that up in a little bit. Just exciting, you know. So now, you know, Google had their run. I don't know. That sounds like they're done. And obviously, they're not done. But, you know, they were on top for so long. And now, here we are. Facebook has overcome them in terms of traffic. So that's pretty exciting. Another thing that we wanted to bring up. Yahoo drops, and this is just in one of the magazines that we have here, industry magazines. Yahoo dropped their shopping API. So they're sending all of that shopping API traffic. They're just saying, hey, they're not even sending it. They're saying, hey, go to PriceGrabber. So this is like almost probably three out of four podcasts where we kind of talked about technologies that Yahoo is stopping doing. What are they going

to do? Like, where are they going? Eventually, maybe they're going to their core competency, which, what? Is it email? Are they just going to drop off the face of the earth? Who knows? Because it looks like every couple of weeks, boom, they're just dropping off and they're deciding, you know, we just don't want to do, that's, you know, one of the ones was GeoCities. They dropped GeoCities. It was still getting like millions of traffic on a daily basis and they just shut it down. They didn't try and sell it. They didn't try and do anything with it. I just think that's a little, it's a little bizarre. Yeah, I don't understand it. I don't think they're done. Right. You think they'll be dropping more? Yeah, well, I, you know, they're changing gears, but which direction will be a good question to see. Yeah, so we'll keep an eye on that. We'll have the latest Yahoo drop some technology announcements here on the Secrets to, Unknown Secrets to SEO podcast. So, and one last thing, I think we're really close to our Geno time limit. And Ken actually listened to one or two of our podcasts before coming, and I appreciate that. And one of them was the one we were talking about, Geno, and Geno complaining about the first ten minutes being muck that he just has to fast forward through. So we're close. But I did want to give one shout-out to a city on an island next to Ibiza. I was looking at our stats, and we actually had somebody, I think it was last night. They downloaded two of our podcasts, and they're from Palma de Mallorca. Now, I think it's Spain. I think it's Spain. Could be Italy, but I think it's Spain. Yeah, it is right next to Ibiza. So look it up before next week. Yeah, forgive our, or my, American geography ignorance in not knowing specifically exactly where that is. But we're really excited that we've got listeners there.

If you are the listener there, send us an email. Let us know. Give us an education. We'll, you know, put a little bit more information. By the way, the city looks gorgeous. I zoomed in on Yahoo Maps, actually, with the satellite view, and the city looks awesome. There was a port with just huge yachts, and I was like, wow, that'll be some place that I visit. Broadcast from there. Yeah, ooh, that's a good idea. Yeah, actually, if you're listening from Palma de Mallorca, and you have a place that we could set up our webcam and our microphone, maybe we could come there and broadcast from there. That'd be awesome. We just need a place to stay. That's it. All right. So a while back, we had some people who were interested, you know, send us emails, and we love your comments. Keep them coming. Podcasts at e-webstyle.com. And an individual requested some interviews, suggested, hey, you guys should do some interviews. And we have done one interview, and I think I mentioned to you we did an interview of the SEO rapper. Right. Charles is his name. It's a great interview, and yes, there is an SEO rapper. Believe it or not. Did you have a chance to look at it? Yeah, that's unbelievable. That's incredible. Did you see it? Incredible. Isn't it awesome? Did you get a chance to see his video yet? I didn't watch it. Oh, yes. But amazing. Yeah. He does a really amazing job. So props to Charles, also known as Mo Serious, also known as the SEO rapper. He is really good and has done a great job of, you know, some of the comments we get are that, you know, SEO is dry material, and we actually make it fun and entertaining. Well, the dude rapped to it. Right. How much more can you stick out than that? That's awesome. So, and hopefully we'll get him back in here. It would be nice. So, in the vein of interviewing people, I bumped into Ken. I actually had a

networking event the other day, and we're, you know, both do the same thing. It's like, hey, you know, we seem to be on the same page on a couple of things. Why don't you come in and we'll do a podcast? And so you guys can have a little different perspective. And how long have you been in the business? Since 1994. Since 1994. Did you hear that? Did they have internet in 1994? Well, the browsers did not display pictures at that point. So he was doing optimization before there were pictures. Wow, that's cool. I come from the brick and mortar side of the business, and back then, there was no SEO company to go to, and it was just the emerging of all that, where all of a sudden you can realize that on InfoSeek, if you remember InfoSeek, how you could submit your page, hit refresh, and you could see your page jump. And I'd have wars with my competitors, and we'd be doing this all day. Wow. And so it just grew from there, and we actually had a full-blown SEO department in-house. Right. And this was for your data retrieval business. So some of you guys out there didn't know, and I actually learned this this morning in kind of our pre-interview interview. Ken is responsible for a lot of technology associated with being able to retrieve data off of dysfunctional data sources, hard drives specifically. So, you know, whenever you've lost that data, and I told Ken, one time I lost, we lost a hard drive. Well, we had the hard drive still. It was just, we couldn't communicate with it. And this is actually a good tip. So I went to, I think the company was Disc Doctors, and they were like, oh, they did this analysis, and they got this quote, this big, long two-page quote to me, and it was like $1,400. And I'm like, you know what? I have most of that data. There might be some. Like, I just don't remember if there's some on there that

I don't know if I want. And I'd be willing to pay $400 for that data. Anything over that, I'll just let it go. Guess what? They gave me the data for $400. So there's your tip if you can actually negotiate with people who pull data off. But Ken apparently came up with a lot of the technology, the processes, and so your initial SEO experience was related to your business and getting that on the first page. Right. Well, we spent a lot of time in-house because there was nothing going outward to- Right. There's no one to outsource to. To optimize. Right. And so we developed in-house, and we had a whole team from copywriters, design, metrics, the whole nine yards, just in-house. Awesome. And what had happened is that when I was approached seven years ago and sold the business. Right. And when I sold the business, we had done such a good job from an optimization standpoint in-house. And we had actually done it for other companies that we knew and we were friends with. Right. Well, it's like, what are we going to do now? So we took our whole department and we had done- Started an SEO outsourcing company. Right. Because we did it for ourselves. We did it for a handful of others and very successful. Right. We know we can do it for everybody else because we were trying to figure out, what are we going to do now? We just sold the company. Right. Hung around for an extra year. Right. And we're in transition. But now, what do we do now? We can only sit around for so long. Right. You take that three-month holiday and then you're like, okay, I want to get back to work. Now, I can appreciate that. So back in 94, you were actually doing it in-house. It was for a company kind of like this. I'm just trying to give an example. Kind of like this doctor is a company that would do data recovery and you did some big projects, which apparently

we can't talk about. I noticed on your website, so I went to his website and your website is searchmarketingprofits.com. Correct. Okay. That's it. So it's searchmarketingprofits.com and on one of the pages, this is the three steps to internet profitability, you talk about what you call, and I've heard you say this, the three get-ems. What are the three get-ems? Well, being from the South and from Texas, it's pronounced, the correct way to pronounce it is get-ems. Right. And so it's the three get-ems. We get them qualified visitors to come to your website. Right. We get, once they're on your website, we get them to take some action. Convert in some form or fashion. Fill out a form, pick up the phone, purchase something, click a button. There's some type of action we want to occur. And then we want them to come back for more. Okay. Okay. So I think often what we talk about in the podcast is probably the first two get-ems. And that's, you know, get them to come and get them to take action because we talk about, if you go back to previous podcasts, CIVO, which we call Search Engine Visitor Optimization, which is, okay, great, we can get them there, but what are the calls to action? What are we doing with them? Are we educating them? Are we getting a newsletter? And I know that's what you're talking about. Getting them to come back, that's something that I think we probably touched on, but not in kind of a concrete and separate process. Tell me a little bit about, or the audience actually, a little bit about getting them to come back. Well, it's, you can't get them to come back unless you've done what you need to in the first two. Right. Which is engage in the conversation. Right. You need to start the conversation and keep the conversation going. A lot of people, a lot of clients, they look like, look at me like I have three heads. What do you mean by have a conversation? It's

a static webpage. Right, it's a webpage. But with the technology and the way it's going, my father would look at me like, what are you talking about? Are you talking to the computer now? But it is the conversation. You're, by getting them to take action, you're getting them to, you know, sign up for something, purchase something. You're engaging. Once they've engaged, a lot of companies, that's where it'll stop. You know, think, you know, oh, go, we got an order. We, you know. Right. We got them to do something. If you don't come back to them in some form or fashion, pick the phone up and say, thank you very much. Is there anything else we can help you with? Right, exactly. In fact, that's a big key because a lot of people don't realize that we are human. Right. And we still like that human interaction. Right. Okay. So, even though you've got a digital order, by picking the phone up, you will stand out over somebody else that's just taking orders. Yeah, that's definitely true. Absolutely. Having some type of an email series. Not to sell them something, necessarily. That, obviously, is part of email series. It's the end goal. Right. Right. But, to have the conversation, you know, we're still here and give them a little tidbit of information, you know. So, that really speaks and I don't remember where I learned this or, you know, the number one way to increase the profit of your company is actually to increase the spend of your current customer base. Right. It's easier to get a current customer to pull his wallet out than it is to go find somebody to get a new customer. Yeah. Okay. So, then, so, yeah. So, now that we've, potentially, we've gotten an order and that's one way or we've just engaged them because we gave them a white paper. We talk about, you know, giving out white papers a lot and I think even on your website, one of your focuses is, you know, give me your email

and let's go from there. And, you know, that's one of the things that we do also. We have a free website analysis. It's a six-point website analysis. It's still free. You can get that, by the way. I'm going to throw a plug in here. You can get that by going to our website and then clicking SEO and on the first paragraph, we encourage you to call us. We'll answer the phone and do an analysis for you. Great. Or, at the bottom of that first paragraph is a little link to a form. And, I think you would probably argue that that form needs to be more prominent so that it can engage. We were, you know, we're always playing with stuff, right? So, we're like, oh, we'd really like them to call us. And, that's a good point, what you said. But, you said there needs to be more prominent. You're always tweaking it and thinking of. You never should stop testing. Yeah. Testing is not a point of arrival. Right. It's a journey until the business stops. Right. In other words, is it going to pull better having the form here or a link to the form here or whatever you're trying to get them to engage in. Right. It's testing. There's ways to do that where you're not reinventing the wheel every time. And, I think one of the things on your website you talk about, in fact, it might even be in here, where you're doing the A to B comparison. A to B comparison. A to B split testing. A to B split testing, where Google mentions in that that they had, they did an A to B split test for Picasso, which is their, I don't know if you've read the article or maybe they changed the literature. So, in promoting their A to B split testing, they're like, here's one thing that we did. And, we did it for our Picasso software. And, I don't remember the detail. I'm sure you could just go out there and Google it. But,

they changed the link. Like, free versus, you know, software now or something. And, it was the non-obvious one. It was the one that didn't say free that actually got more people to actually download the Picasso software. So, those are, you know, a lot of users are, and, you know, what, free yesterday getting lots of clicks may not mean that free today gets lots of clicks. So, there's probably a reason to kind of. And, it depends on, it depends on your industry, your niche, and who your audience is on what they look. In the internet marketing industry, the word free usually means, okay, what's the catch behind this? Yeah, a free and a catch. And, what's the catch behind this? Right. It means things to different audiences. Right. And, so, in that situation, maybe you stay away from free. You don't say, get your free white paper. You say, learn about, just say simply, learn about whatever. And, they provide their email or whatever. Just as a question, as I'm thinking about this, do you automatically send it or do you require, do you always require an email verification? Uh, most of the time it's an email verification. Yeah, because if they're just going to give you a bogus email, then they don't really deserve the information that's, and I think it's, you know. There's two schools of thought here, and it depends on what you're, what you're trying to do. I mean, you can't even take it to step, step out and, and, and say, okay, I'm going to just let somebody download something. Right. Because there's some, there's some type of an engagement. Right. And, from that, you can step them into, you know, you want more or bigger and better. Right. Now, you're going to have to give me your email address. And, with that, there's a, what we call a double opt-in, a confirmation. Right. Keep yourself, uh. Out of trouble. Out of trouble. Keep your doors open. Right, right. Because there's, there's been too many, it's not a myth any longer

about, oh, you're going to get sued and, and shut your doors because of, of, uh, of email issues. Right, right. It's true. And you're talking specifically, like, email spam issues. Well, it's gone to the point now where, where if, you know, somebody doesn't like you, they can submit emails to you, uh, on, because there's lists of people out there of known people that hate unsolicited email. Right. And they'll submit their email to you. And if it's not double opt-in, that person will make your life miserable. Miserable. Wow. And, and there's actually, uh, uh, some lawyers that will, uh, if their name is on a, gets on a list like that, it's unsolicited. Uh, I've had one say, I've made more money this month by getting them to settle with me than I did in my own practice, because he would just go down the list of his garbage and say, you know what, I am a lawyer, so it's not going to really cost me anything, but I'm going to sue you unless you send me a check for two grand. And he made lots of money. Now, is that ethical or not? Bottom line, it's just showing that- He's, he's a lawyer, so is that a rhetorical question? Yeah. But, the, the, the bottom line is that, uh, it, it's, it's not a myth and it's, the, the, the, the, the, the core systems do recognize it. And you can get yourself in a lot of trouble now. If you don't do a double opt-in. So, so be careful about, uh, I think what, you know, some messages that we can pass along. Be careful about any sort of email newsletter system that you do set up. Make sure, uh, we use Constant Contact. I don't know if you use another service or, or you just- Eye Contact, AWeber. Yeah, AWeber also we use. So, uh, there's a lot of really good services out there. Uh, and they have a couple advantages. One of them is, if you happen to be hosting with some

sort of smaller company, um, there are some times you have email problems. You have problems getting emails into MSN, into AOL, or into Hotmail or Gmail, uh, where a Constant Contact has, uh, has reputations and established, uh, relationships with the larger mail services. Uh, so they don't have as many problems. So, uh, that's, that's, that's an advantage worth it in and of itself. That's a whole, that's a whole conversation in itself. Yeah. And then, um, and then they also, they also have kind of requirements of at least opt-in, if not double opt-in, uh, that keeps them out of trouble. That's part of the reason they have the good relationships with, uh, MSN and Hotmail and Gmail. So, uh, I think that's a good lesson, you know, definitely, uh, definitely make sure you're using a reputable service because you don't want to get sued. I actually, uh, was at a big seminar. It was about 7,000 people and there's an attorney on stage. Uh, and, and he said, uh, I don't know, like two paragraphs or whatever into his, his little speech. He said, well, I really have to apologize for my lisp, uh, because I cracked my tooth the other day when the ambulance slammed on its brakes. I, you know, you've got to appreciate a lawyer with, uh, the ability to laugh at himself. So, uh, so that's awesome. Um, okay. So that's about getting them to come back. That's a, uh, uh, you know, engage in a dialogue, make sure that you're, you know, you, you talked about series emails. Do you, do, so does your company, do you guys write those emails or what, what kind of services? We have professional copywriters in-house, so, uh, we write all of that. Okay. It's, it's the conversation. Now, now email is not just, is not the conversation. It's still a, a very viable conversation to have, to, to, to engage in. A lot of people say, oh, email's dead. Actually, just the opposite. I agree. Yeah. If it is, it, it, it has to

be managed today. It can't be, it used to be the wild west where you could hit send and just blast and who cares about the complaints? It doesn't, you know. Yeah. Now that gets you in court. But. Or at least somebody threatening to get you in court and you send them a, requesting a couple grand. So, let's say that somebody enters your space via an email. Right. Okay. Um, because maybe that's how they prefer to communicate is email. Right. There's different communication. I think there's a lot of people out there who like, they don't, they may chat, they don't feel like picking up. A lot of people just don't want to pick up the phone for whatever, maybe because they don't want to be sold to, you know, by a talented salesperson. So, they don't want to, you know, they don't want to have to be put in that situation. So, uh, email's safe and even chatting is safe because they can always just close it or ignore it or whatever. Or, you know, just down, hone down to a, to a, a, a knit view. Right. Um, but you can, you can get somebody, let's say that you, you have a Facebook page. Um, in your email series and communication, you can all of a sudden, you can introduce your Facebook to them. Right. Right. Okay. So, that's just one touch point, if you will, is hey, we remember. So, so, so maybe after all said and done, they want your emails because they're they want your information, uh, maybe they don't read it like they really would like to. Right. But all of a sudden, wow, now I'm being introduced to Facebook and they maybe engage better. Right, right. Okay. Because that, that may be something they check regularly and, yeah. This, at the same point, you can do the same thing on your Facebook in coming back the other direction. To the, to the email campaign or to a particular page where you're giving away that white paper. Yeah. Right. Or just,

just general information, getting them to come back for more, it really can only happen through, uh, through an ongoing conversation. Um, you can blast out an email that you haven't had a conversation with, with, uh, that are opt-ins. Right. And you, you might get some return of that, you know, I'm selling golf balls and. Right. And they're 50% off because it's springtime. Right. Uh, you, you'll get some buyers. Right, right. But a lot of people aren't going to remember who you are. And did I, why am, did I ever really get on this list? Yeah, I don't remember why. Or I've, you know, I've, I've started buying golf balls from so-and-so over here because they're communicating with me. Right, right. Okay, and so they're going to, it, because we are humans, they, we still need that communication. Okay. Yeah, I think, uh, we, we did an interview with a guy by the name of Joe Orsack and it was actually a really powerful interview. He does, uh, improve my credit USA.com. And one of, um, one of his value added propositions for his business is communication. They, they talk about a hundred percent communication. It's kind of motivated us to kind of go into the no geek speak, you know, our new website when it, when we get the chance to finalize it, you know, it was going to kind of stress that, you know, that we, we can speak your language. We can speak your business's language and we communicate a lot. You know, we always say we're world-class experts at what we do and we're not perfect. Uh, and when we're not perfect, we let you know and we say, look, you know, uh, in our, in the case of SEO, we're giving reports on a regular basis and, you know, some crazy numbers can happen, you know, from one report to the next. And we let you know, you know, look, this dropped and we don't know exactly why and we're working on it. And, you know, that, that hundred, I think,

you know, I just have this feeling, people just want to know that you're aware of the problem, that you're working on the problem and that it's important to you. And all three of those things can only happen with communication. Right. And so communication from your business, whatever, even if it's golf balls, if you do it appropriately and, you know, within the right timeframes, uh, is invaluable. It's, it's a, it's a huge part of growing a business. So, so yeah, I agree with that 100%. We're actually done, uh, with this first 30 minute podcast. We're going to ask him to say, you can stay for another excellent. We're going to end this podcast right now, uh, for you guys who are watching us on video, we're going to stop, take a little bit of break, uh, and then we'll come back and probably another 15 minutes and knock out another 30 minute podcast for those listening to our podcast. Thank you so much. Uh, you are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. This is podcast number 51. Uh, remember, send us emails at podcast at ewebstyle.e-webstyle.com. Again, that's podcast at e-webstyle.com. Your website again, Ken? Searchmarketingprofits.com. You have a, you want to give out an email or something that they can, or just send them to, yeah, just go to searchmarketingprofits.com. Uh, and I know you've got a couple of email forms that people can fill out and, uh, and start a dialogue with Ken. So, uh, thanks for listening to the 51st podcast. My name is Chris Burris. Ken Roberts. Thank you very much. Bye-bye for now.