Chris: Hi and welcome to the SEO Podcast: Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burres, owner of eWebResults.
Matt: My name is Matt Bertram, owner of eWeb!
Chris: CEO of eWebResults. Remember?
Matt: Oh, CEO.
Chris: Do you not remember the crowning that we did for the last podcast?
Matt: Yes, yes, yes.
Chris: So you should go back and check Podcast #450.
Matt: It’s a good number 450, yeah.
Chris: There was a crowning. A passing of the crown.
Matt: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: So all of my responsibilities.
Matt: We could do– I’ve seen an elf hat over there and I’m like–
Chris: Before we jump in, I just got to share this review. This is from Karli Ross. It is of course–
Chris & Matt: 5 stars!
Chris: “Shiko to you guys from down under.” We’ve actually got a kangaroo here with us. “After being done over by some supposed SEO companies out there, your informative podcast gave me ‘To Do List’ items every week. Might as well do it myself as we get better results thanks to you guys. Karli at New Age Caravans Gold Coast, Australia.” A punch in the face to ya. That’s a British not an Australian.
Matt: Yeah man, we’re boxers. His fans are kind of bent to come down here, but he’s a boxing Joey.
Chris: He’s boxing.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: Alright.
Matt: For all you podcast listeners out there.
Chris: In Australia down under.
Matt: You can see it, yeah.
Chris: Thank you.
Matt: Yes!
Chris: Thank you.
Matt: Boom!
Chris: We are broadcasting live here from Houston, Texas and Matt and I, we are your– Chris &
Matt: Results Rebels!
Chris: Alright, so if you are tuning in to the first time for this podcast: Howdy, and welcome to the podcast. You’re going to have a wonderful time while you’re here, and learn lots of great SEO information: just like Karli suggested to you. If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you know what we’re going to skip. Every week we run a contest and that contest is: if we get 10 shikos–
Matt: A share, a like or a follow.
Chris: If we get 10 shikos–
Matt: Shikow!
Chris: Which sounds like a Shikow when you’re doing it. And we read a review or get a review, like we just read, then we skip the piece where we tell you how to leave us a review until the end.
Matt: So Chris, when was the last time we actually had to tell people how to share, like, or follow us at the beginning of the podcast.
Chris: I would get back to you on that little piece of information. The podcast has just been growing, you guys have been sharing and liking, so thank you.
Matt: Yes!
Chris: Make sure that trend continues and go share, like, or– well, go Shikow us.
Chris & Matt: Shikow!
Chris: Shiko us. Also if you’re back here, you may be interested in more tips and tricks that you could get from us, and we’re happy to share those with you. Just go to eWebResluts.com/Tips.
Matt: Yeah, and I would just say: they’re not tricks, they’re just best practices.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: Best practices. We are going to talk about an article today: “How to Align your Content & Social Media Efforts for Link Building Success.”
Matt: Yes, it’s important.
Chris: You do know that link building is important, right? If you’re an SEOer out there, there’s part of you – even if you’re not doing it – that knows that link building is really important and you should be doing it. We, like some of the information out there says that like 40% of your rank depends on your backlink profile. So link building is something you want to be doing. We will be covering this, this is by Kristen Vaughn. Punch in the face to you Kristen Vaughn for a really good article. If you would like a website analysis. You might know that we could do those for you and all you need to do is go to eWebResults.com and fill out the form that you can find, and Matt has a t-shirt.
Matt: Well, so we’re–
Chris: Matt, you’re showing–
Matt: So Chris if you want to–
Chris: I’m going to say this, okay. “Mondays don’t suck, your job does.” That’s a nice t-shirt. I like that.
Matt: This is the shirt that I’m going to wear for our hiring video.
Chris: Yeah, I like that.
Matt: Okay?
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: So starting next month when we move to our new location– because we are straight out of room right now.
Chris: Totally out of room.
Matt: Totally out of room. We’re having to work–
Chris: Don’t tell the fire department.
Matt: We are working in sessions– like people have to work from home. We’re like cycling people through here. Our conference room and our front desk area have become like office areas. So realistically we will be hiring once we move to the new location.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: And if you want to work on contract with us. If you’re around the US and you do good blogs, reach out to us. If you’re a good PPC, SEOer reach out to us. If you’re local here in Houston we will have an open house first week of May.
Chris: yeah.
Matt: But basically this– because you know, we’re a little edgy with punch in your face. this is what we believe in.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely.
Matt: Okay?
Chris: I love coming to work on Mondays.
Matt: That you wake up on Mondays and don’t want to go to your job: you’re in the wrong job.
Chris: You’re job sucks.
Matt: Come talk to us. Yeah.
Chris: Absolutely. And also we have a program. So you don’t necessarily have to have a lot of experience if you’re in the Houston area. You can come here and start as an account administrator and grow up into internet marketing.
Matt: We have a fantastic training program if you love internet marketing as much as us. And you want to grow a career in that space.
Chris: Yeah, with people who had careers in other directions and have decided to come and work here and are happy to be here on Mondays and every day of the week.
Matt: Yes.
Chris: Yup. So yeah, that’s it. That’s the potatoes of our podcast.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: Let’s jump into this article. Again by Kristen Vaughn, “How to Align your Content & Social Media Efforts for Link Building Success.”
Matt: Yes.
Chris: She wrote a pretty good article. Part of it talks about what are good– you got to have good content.
Matt: Pretty good? She wrote an awesome article!
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Matt: Yeah, you don’t say pretty good.
Chris: Yeah, I’m sorry.
Matt: Yeah, you know.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: There are many strategies that you need to be considering, right? Which is: Third-party Outreach, Competitive Link Analysis, Brand Mentions Identification, Business Profile Optimization, Trade Associations, Industry Affiliations. Those are kind of all the places that you can go and build links.
Matt: And what do these links do? Okay? They drive referral traffic, they increase brand visibility, and they reach a new audience for you.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: Link building is so important to–
Chris: Fundamental.
Matt: To kind of– I like to say like you kind of pollinate other little flowers, like be a little bee.
Chris: Yeah, it’s adding value to each of all the other things you do.
Matt: Link Bee-uilding.
Chris: We are not making that t-shirt. By the way, we have lots of wonderful internet marketing t-shirts that you could get. Just go to eWebResults.com/Swag.
Matt: Link Bee-uilding.
Chris: We’re not getting rich off of our swag, off of our t-shirts, but they are a lot of fun. So go out there and get those. And may the rank be with you.
Matt: Yes.
Chris: Or Bee with you.
Matt: Bee-uilding. Bee-uilding. Bzzz!
Chris: Alright, so backlinks are just one of the factors that they use. You also need to focus on technical site elements. You got to make sure you have goo on-page, that’s like the other 60%. You want to leverage content and your social to support your backlink building. “Essential parts of naturally generating authoritative backlinks to a websites: 1) Producing high quality, link-worthy content.” We’re going to talk about that in a second. She’s done an amazing job, Kristen, of making sure that she talks enough in this article about creating high quality content, because that’s like step one.
Matt: I mean where Google’s going, and the smarter and smarter it gets: that’s really the focus. You can rank pages now just with great quality content. People spending a lot of time on that page, engaging with it. So really the core of any SEO strategy should be high quality content building, and getting that in front of new eyeballs.
Chris: So basically building great content and then, “Promoting that quality content strategically.”
Matt: That sounds way better how she said it, than me.
Chris: Certainly more succinct. So the next couple of pieces are: how do you create link-worthy content? And interestingly, we have a couple podcasts – it’s actually three podcasts that we did – that you should go check out about link-worthy content. Those are Podcasts #419, #421 and #422. I don’t know if you remember #420, we did a different type of podcast with that one.
Matt: We did. We did. That was a solid.
Chris: That was a different podcast.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: And so we’re just going to kind of breeze over these and ask you to reference those podcasts because that’s where you can find three in depth articles about the power of building link-worthy content. First “Create Link-worthy Content.” “Influencer Insights.” So one simple way to create some content, those are influencers in any particular industry. Go find them, and ask them a question, and then put together an article of the answers of their question: that’s really good link-worthy content.
Matt: Yeah. No, those are those articles of like the predictions for next year, the 10 things you need to look for, you know? Even polls and stuff like that, or what people think the most important thing is like Roundups and stuff like that.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: They’re great.
Chris: She says, “Interview-style Articles, Roundups, Lists of Predictions, and Quotes.” So you two out of four there, that’s pretty good. If you don’t have a list–
Matt: I didn’t know it was a like a multiple choice here.
Chris: I’ve been doing the– I’m just going rate your contributions as we go through the podcast.
Matt: Okay, alright.
Chris: I’ll give that an 8.
Matt: I’ve got a 50, 50%.
Chris: A 50%, but I feel like you articulated it well.
Matt: I didn’t know that I had to give them all! I was just giving some examples.
Chris: So, a tool that you could use is FollowerWonk, right? And I don’t know if you’ve ever checked that out. It’s basically a way to kind of cull the data of Twitter.
Matt: Twitter’s noisy.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: Twitter’s noisy, you know?
Chris: Here’s an example: The Top Artificial Intelligence Predictions for 2019, and then you might use FollowerWonk to find those people who talk about artificial intelligence or AI, and then get their predictions, and then put those in the article. And that would be good link bait, link-worthy article.
Matt: But that’s just good content, like right?
Chris: Fundamentally.
Matt: Fundamentally getting the experts out there, and pooling it together and curating content about a particular topic. I think it’s fantastic.
Chris: Next is “Research.” “No matter what industry you’re in, research is valuable.” What are common questions that you’re getting? So if you can make contact with your frontlines, or whether it’s your sales people, or your customer service people, make contact. What questions are they asking regularly? Because those are going to be good link-worthy articles, right? So answer those questions.
Matt: Yeah. No, I mean there’s some really great examples out there. A lot of case studies about how you just think about every question your customer would ask, and then answer that question.
Chris: Yup.
Matt: And we’ve been starting to build out that format for us and for our clients. So basically an FAQ about that topic, video, transcribe it, and building out a structure in that way.
Chris: But another tool that she recommends.
Matt: BuzzSumo.
Chris: BuzzSumo also allows you to search for topic/keywords to determine profiles that are sharing similar content.
Matt: So really news SEO is kind of a whole different ball of wax.
Chris: Yup.
Matt: And really getting the algorithm to trip for what’s current, and you really got to be on your toes and engaging.
Chris: And ahead of it, yeah.
Matt: For most small business clients, evergreen content works better, but as you move into kind of the inner–
Chris: It’s certainly more cost-effective.
Matt: Cost-effective, but the inner price level clients, to get a big scoop of traffic, going after the news-related topics, constantly updating the blogs if you have that kind of money, is absolutely worth it if you have the infrastructure in place to do that.
Chris: Yup.
Matt: Right? But for most small businesses social can be tough, but if you’re a franchisee out there, or there’s something that’s affecting your industry life. Like for example: if we wanted to rank for the Houston keyword right now, we could talk about the big industrial fire down in Pasadena with like Benzene clouds and all of that. And we could really pick up some traffic if we wanted to. Relate it to that and how it’s affecting small businesses today. We would get a lot of people coming in to the website that way, but is that the target market we want? So you got to figure out your content strategies.
Chris: Nobody has sunrises like Houston.
Matt: So one of our potential clients, but soon to be–
Chris: Clients, yeah.
Matt: Well, past client soon to be future client, coming in to the office next week. Went down to meet with him, it’s a wedding venue, and there’s literally like–
Chris: By the way it’s a whole western town.
Matt: Yeah, it’s–
Chris: Were you blown away by it? Because it was your first time seeing it.
Matt: Yeah, it was pretty awesome. The thing that was most amazing is they had a wedding there the next day, and there was this black plume of cloud going over the chapel, and I’m like, “Now, that’s picturesque.”
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: And then there’s like ashes falling, and I go, “I don’t know if I should be here right now.”
Chris: Should I run off?
Matt: I was like, “We’ll have the meeting at our office next time.”
Chris: Alright, so another tool. We mentioned BuzzSumo. The other thing that you want– another kind of great content that you can have for link acquisition is resources. Sharing resources or tools. So in SEO, an article about all the tools that are out there – the top 5 SEO tools – those types of things are going to be really good link building assets.
Matt: Yeah, we’ve really– I’ve actually seen that kind of inbetween the news aspect of it, and then the general evergreen kind of content. If you’re providing a specific value to something. Like Sammie did an article on air story. Like, it’s a content writing piece, and that still gets traffic today.
Chris: Yup.
Matt: And it’s super high valuable content.
Chris: Yup.
Matt: And so that kind of stuff I think does really well. Comparisons do really well. Like: “Hey, how do we compare versus a competitor.”
Chris: Right.
Matt: Also that’s a strategy if you want to go after kind of their name and reviews, and kind of a comparison sites to–
Chris: We should probably do one on the project management tool, because we’re looking around to make a change in project management tool areas. And that would just be exposure for–
Matt: And it’s funny that he brings this up because really the influence is coming from a project management tool that wants to advertise on our podcast. And so it’s influencing what we might be sharing with you. So we’re going to disclaim– provide a disclaimer that they’re providing us–
Chris: They’re a paid client.
Matt: Yeah, they’re–
Chris: They’re providing services to us at a discount or free rate.
Matt: But yeah, it’s really interesting how really companies are driving the news cycle. Like who owns the newspapers, right? And like we can get into all kinds of conspiratorial stuff, but it’s super interesting because we’re actually dealing with that thing internally of: are we going to talk about this project management tool, or are we looking at these other ones? Are we running out of time? Because I got a call at 4:00 pm.
Chris: Yeah, let’s kind of smoke through this. So basically make valuable content, we touched on that. Make sure you go check our previous Podcast #419, #421, and #422. For really great examples and more in depth discussion about that great content. Alright so “Promoting Content Strategically.” “Post Sharing. My advice is to share individualized, customized and engaging messages – always.” That sounds kind of obvious, but what she’s really trying to break down is: there’s so much noise, everybody’s exposed to so much noise, if it doesn’t like mention you specifically or sound specifically relevant to you, then you’re just going to skip it. So take the time, and instead of tagging every person that you send out tweets, send out individual tweets that are engaging and won’t come off as automated, right?
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: “Use their name, say something that shows you know them, consider using custom graphics, or quoting them in separate social updates.”
Matt: Personalization. Personalization is really, really important in today’s day and age. You know like, when we talk about email subject lines, like putting their name involved with it.
Chris: Yup.
Matt: There’s a lot of things you can do from a personalization standpoint, but again remember, if you provide value to somebody specifically that helps them, they typically want to reciprocate with you.
Chris: In some way.
Matt: In some way. And so it’s a great way to build the relationship with somebody and not all things should be scalable, okay?
Chris: Yeah, certainly. and then that kind of bleeds directly into her next idea: “Direct Outreach,” right? So hey, if you’re going to do kind of mass outreach, now get more specifically. “It’s important that you reach out to the people and websites mentioned in your content directly, whether via direct message: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and email.” We do that probably about 15% of the time in this podcast. So it should be our process that we reach out to Kristen Vaughn and we will probably do it this way.
Matt: Yeah. Well so, interestingly enough, we found the data from the mass outreach tools that are out there to actually manually outreaching, being specific, knowing something about the person, they’re more likely to respond. It’s actually like three times higher the response rates we get when we do manual outreach. And you know, the right kind of links are totally worth it, and building. And it’s all about the relationship, it’s not about spamming everybody and to get–
Chris: And hoping something sticks, yeah.
Matt: And hoping something sticks. I think it’s really about doing good SEO and reaching directly out to that, and that’s what SEO is: it’s online PR.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: So you don’t want to do everything that’s scalable, you know?
Chris: Creating that buzz about your business in the internet space, right?
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: So “Leverage some of the tools mentioned above (FollowerWonk & BuzzSumo) to figure out who has shared your content in the past.”
Matt: Yeah, that’s good.
Chris: Right? Because if they’ve shared it in the past, clearly they’d be interested in sharing it again. And may be interested in that new topic. So you definitely want to do that.
Matt: This time I’m setting up the Google Alerts. It’s super easy to setup the Google Alerts. I always get the Google Alerts when I guest podcast I’m on are published or anything about eWebResults, or press releases are done. It’s really good like reputation management to know what people are–
Chris: To keep an eye on what’s going on.
Matt: What people are saying about you because if you’re not part of that conversation, somebody else is going to take it where it goes.
Chris: So if you don’t know what Google Alert is, actually 1) Go google: Google Alerts. And what it’ll do is it’ll keep track of: as Google indexing the new pages on the internet, or the new content on the internet, you can give it a search phrase or a couple of search phrases, and as it finds those phrases it’ll pop you an email with those phrases. So what Matt was saying is: he’s probably got a Google Alert on Matt Bertram, and on eWebResults, and on Build Your Brand Mania, your book right? And so when those things happen– when Google finds new content with those phrases in it, he gets and email that says, “Hey, here’s where those phrases have been.”
Matt: Yeah, even search terms that are local. I mean, this is a free tool that’s out there. I would encourage you to use it. It gives you a little more visibility of what’s going on out there without you.
Chris: For sure.
Matt: Yup.
Chris: Alright, so how to kind of promote your link-friendly content or link bait in “Advertising.” So, “don’t underestimate the power of paid advertising on social media.” This is just getting more and more true. Facebook has kind of had two pivotal moments. We’re like, “Well, we’re not going to show business feeds anymore,” and then, “Well, we used to show them even more than we said last time. We’re going to cut that off even more.”
Matt: Well so, what I can tell you is I am Hubspot certified and we’ve done a number of things with Hubspot.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: And the thing I really do like about Hubspot– now it is expensive, and if you’re not in the right place, it’s not the right tool for you. But when you start getting really aggressive with your content marketing as a strategy – which I can actually go into later, I’ve been doing a lot of research on this – we’ve had a lot of success, but here’s the thing: What Hubspot will do is you can track it back from the keyword term that they searched for to the blog that they go to, to what they did, to converting a lead. So you can go– if this blog wasn’t written and we weren’t ranked for this keyword, we would have not had that sale.
Chris: Right.
Matt: So when you’re a bigger company, or you’re an enterprise level company, like knowing those kinds of things and just to find that up the chain is super important.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: And Google Analytics just doesn’t give you that visibility.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: And so there are tools out there that you can use to start getting that granular area to understand what’s happening online. Same thing with like heatmaps. But really a strategy of promoting blogs through paid content for keywords that are very competitive, that you can’t rank for: we’ll bring them in, you can do the remarketing/retargeting to it. And there’s a lot of strategies even with like emails, like videos, like you run a little bit of a short video to a longer video, or a blog that has a video on it. There’s a lot of strategies that you can utilize with paid content. It makes it really powerful. There’s like Tabula, and there’s OutBrain, and there’s a lot of other stuff out there that’s less targeted.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: A stumble upon and that sort of thing that you can get your content out there. But even with like AdWords, you can be directly after a certain keyword term. And again, that is a whole new sphere for a different podcast. So yeah.
Chris: “Create Tailored Audiences using the list of link building targets that you’ve gathered and those mentioned in the article.”
Matt: That’s awesome.
Chris: Alright, “Final Thoughts.” “Remember, high-quality content is essential.” I circled it, that means it’s really important. “High-quality content–” and worth repeating. “High-quality content is essential.” Go back and check our Podcast #19– what was it? #419. I think I said #219 just moments ago and it was not #219 it was–
Matt: Well the tip that I will leave you with while Chris looks that up, and we really didn’t hit on it here, but you did mention it is: Is building custom audiences.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: So the power of custom audiences from a paid standpoint, even from like a remarketing standpoint of people hitting different pages, different articles, figuring out what’s important to them, building basically a profile of that candidate, and getting super personalized to target them, is where everything is going. Because if you see content and it’s not relevant to you, you’re getting hit with so many ads and so much stuff, you just disregard it.
Chris: Filter it out.
Matt: So you got to really be targeted when doing that. So my takeaway, even though we didn’t really hit on it, was all this that you’re doing, make sure it’s customized and personalized to your target audience.
Chris: Start with that content.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: Alright. Alright, so what a great article. That was a great article by Kristen Vaughn.
Matt: Yes.
Chris: Punch in the Face to you, we’ll be reaching out to you as per the article told us that we should do that.
Matt: Well, we’re a little short-staffed right now because we’ve added a number of clients and we’re hiring people right now. We have a videographer coming on April 1st. So really he’s going to be in charge of this. We have a new social media content creation service, and so just want you to know we are taking everything to the next level here at eWebResults. So reach out to us. Share, like, and follow us. We love you.
Chris: Yeah. If you’re interested in growing your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet.
Matt: The internet!
Chris: Call eWebResults for increased revenue in your business 713-592-6724. If you have a referral: send that referral to us. We’ll either contribute to a charity of your choice or actually pay you depending on what you’d like.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: Remember we were filmed at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas 77092. If you would like audio, video, or a transcript of this podcast: you can get that eWebResults.com. You guys have made us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. We appreciate you guys. Thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you for connecting with us on Youtube, so make sure you subscribe and follow on Youtube. And on Facebook, Facebook Live, we get connected. And until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burres.
Matt: My name is Matt Bertram. Chris & Matt. : Bye bye for now.