Join Matt and Chris for another thrilling episode of the Best SEO Podcast! TRANSCRIPT:

Chris Burress: Hi and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burress, one of the owners here at eWebResults.

Matt Bertram: My name is Matt Bertram, the CEO of eWebResults.

Chris Burress: The CEO. He got it right this time. Last podcast, he struggled with his own identity. This time, he has identified himself and then pronounced it to the world.

Matt Bertram: I would just say Senator, we run ads too.

Chris Burress: He’s also one of the owners here, so let’s not forget that.

Chris Burress: Welcome to podcast number 469. We started podcast number 468 and we were going to do, well, we were going to do podcast 469 as the topic, but we got off topic and it turned out to be really cool stuff about search engine optimization and software that we’re working with right now that we’re really excited, can’t talk about, can’t reveal it yet, but we’re pretty excited about what’s going to happen there in the power in it. Got distracted. We’re like, “Okay, we’ve got to do another podcast.”

Matt Bertram: That was an SEO podcast.

Chris Burress: It turned out to be an SEO podcast.

Matt Bertram: So this is now a social media podcast.

Chris Burress: It’s going to be a social media podcast.

Matt Bertram: All under internet marketing, unknown secrets.

Chris Burress: Of podcasting.

Matt Bertram: Of podcasting.

Chris Burress: Please remember we’re filmed live here in Houston, Texas and Matt and I, we are your results rebels.

Matt Bertram: Kowabungas. You did this last time.

Chris Burress: Oh that’s what I used to do. Yeah, I couldn’t remember. It’s been awhile.

Matt Bertram: Yeah, it’s been awhile.

Chris Burress: Yeah, I forgot. It’s this one.

Matt Bertram: Horns down? What is that? Let’s go cougs.

Chris Burress: Go cougs is this one.

Matt Bertram: We’ll do that.

Chris Burress: Go cougs. Yep. Our school, the cougars.

Chris Burress: So what we’re going to talk about today is we’re going to talk about social media. If this is the first time that you’ve listened to the podcast, you’re wondering what the hell is going on because this odd pauses. Howdy and welcome to the podcast. If you’ve listened to this podcast before, thank you for being a great listener. You can visit our website and find stuff that you can connect with. And if you’ve listened to before, you’re probably back because you got some value out of the last podcast, so we’re going to ask you to shikow us.

Matt Bertram: Share, like, and follow. Does my shirt say that?

Chris Burress: It says share, like and follow us right there on the back. Boom. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead and shikow us. We really appreciate that. It adds a lot of value to us. Teaser, the article we’re talking about today is, well it’s not an article.

Matt Bertram: There’s no article and no agenda. It’s just social media.

Chris Burress: Just a free flow of internet marketing expertise is going to come your direction. If you would like a shirt like that, you can actually get a shirt like that. And by the way, if you know what the Senator, we run ads too, means go ahead and hit us up on Facebook and like, Oh we run ads. It’s a reference to something.

Matt Bertram: Yeah, we should put a link. That would be kind of cool. Put a link by the shirt of what the inspiration or something like that. So I’m working on some new t-shirts, right? So these are eWeb specific marketing agency specific t-shirts. So a lot of our staff wear them all the time. It’s part of our new uniform, I guess. But you know, we’re coming out with some that are podcast related. So you love the podcast, you like the stuff we put out, you’ll be able to get some podcast related t-shirts and hats and we’re working on a bunch of stuff.

Chris Burress: Still though, you go to ewebresults.com/swag.

Matt Bertram: That might work. I know if you go to BestSEOpodcast.com forward slash swag and then there’s also a button for it there. So really we’re starting to move everything from the pot. Well, so yeah, we should keep the agency stuff at the agency and then we’ll move to podcast. Okay, good point.

Chris Burress: We’ll do that.

Matt Bertram: I’ll make a note. That’s why I have this yellow legal pad here and I was like, not.

Chris Burress: When I make points.

Matt Bertram: Yeah.

Chris Burress: Take action.

Matt Bertram: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Burress: Yes, so yeah. bestSEOpodcast.com/swag. Very cool. We could just text it out, but that would be rude on a podcast.

Matt Bertram: I’m working on, I was actually supposed to write a blog this week, but I’m just going to talk it.

Chris Burress: You were supposed to write a blog?

Matt Bertram: I was going to talk a blog to Louisville and it was going to write it.

Chris Burress: There’s this word called dictate. That’s a word that some people use.

Matt Bertram: I don’t use that word around here.

Chris Burress: I’m going to talk a blog.

Matt Bertram: I’m going to talk a blog.

Chris Burress: I’m just going to talk a blog. All right, so we’re going to talk about social media and we’ve actually made some changes. And again, this sounds familiar. When I say we’ve made changes to the social media offering that we have here, Matt has really made them. Obviously we’re brainstorming and saying, “Hey, what we were doing in the past really wasn’t adding value.”

Matt Bertram: Algorithm changes.

Chris Burress: And algorithm changes.

Matt Bertram: When an algorithm changes the things that you’re doing, you got to do something else, right? It’s a little bit of a moving target as well.

Chris Burress: Yeah. In the social media environment for sure. So I’m assuming we’ve stopped all of our MySpace offerings, so you got to make changes when you’re going to deliver value.

Matt Bertram: We do [inaudible 00:05:12] still on MySpace. It’s a video sharing site now.

Chris Burress: Oh yeah?

Matt Bertram: So we do use it.

Chris Burress: There’s link building that’s available. Is that a pro tip, people should?

Matt Bertram: Yeah, I mean you should build it. It still has a high domain authority.

Chris Burress: Yeah. I’m sure it gets a ton of traffic still.

Matt Bertram: But I did have to explain it to one client. They’re like, “Why did you?”

Chris Burress: Why did you build a link on MySpace?

Matt Bertram: Why did you set me up a profile on MySpace because I don’t use that anymore.

Chris Burress: Yeah, okay. So our previous offering, what was it? What are we changing to? Why do we think there’s more value there? And we’ve worked with a lot of social media companies, right? One of the things that we’re good at doing is, “Hey, if there’s another company out there who has some idea about maybe a better strategy, a better way to do things, let’s buy it and try what they’re offering.”

Matt Bertram: So one of the things that a buddy of mine suggested that we do, and I actually did this in a previous life with the staffing, okay, was working with VCs and providing some overall just auditing or strategy, right? Of like, “Hey, I’m about to buy this company or can you do an audit? Let me know how much do you think their marketing’s worth?” Or, “Hey, have another agency doing a bunch of stuff for me, can you take a second look at it?” And that’s really one of the areas that we are trying to grow here because we’ve seen a lot across all industries.

Matt Bertram: We partnered with all different kinds of companies. We’ve partnered with a couple people that have written books, have written social media, all kinds of stuff. And we really picked up a lot. We’ve really acquired of just like you listening to this podcast and learning, we’re sharing stuff that we’re seeing in the market every day. And really the offering that we had was, and a lot of people were offering this if they’re not still offering this, I don’t know how effective it is and they’ve had to probably bundle it with some other things, but three posts on different high value social media platforms for them a week. That was a consistent service that you saw for a creative, a few social signals. It was some social proof, but you were getting organic reach. Okay?

Matt Bertram: And as the world changes and as these algorithms change and as these companies.

Chris Burress: As the Facebook turns.

Matt Bertram: As the Facebook turns. I do like that. I mean, I’m starting to see Facebook ads for Facebook groups on television. I think it’s interesting that they’re starting to kind of do the Netflix thing and make their own shows, which now they’re becoming content creators, so that’s going to be a little sticky because he would always be like, Mark would, I’ll just call him Mark. Mark was just basically like, “We’re not a content creator. We can’t be liable for any of that stuff.”

Chris Burress: For the content that’s on our site.

Matt Bertram: But now they’re starting to do it. So it’s really quite interesting some of the changes that are being made, but they basically came out, I think it was last March. Well, Facebook Live was a big one. Facebook Live was awesome, but now last March [crosstalk 00:08:14]

Chris Burress: And we’re still participating in that with up social live.

Matt Bertram: Yeah, no, there’s a lot of value. But really now if you’re a business, it’s pay to play, right? You’re not going to get really any in viewership. I forget the numbers, how low they were, to target your audience. And also little tips and tricks I guess of distribution of content across social media platforms. You only have 6,000 friends. That maxes you out.

Chris Burress: That’s your max, yeah.

Matt Bertram: And so if you’re going to be doing a post, you need to be maxing out your friends, but also you need to be tagging other people, right? And so then you show up in their feeds, right? And so there’s little strategies like that. There’s little things you can do to trip the algorithm to get more visibility, but on Facebook for the most part, which Facebook is phenomenal, right? Phenomenal targeting wise, yeah. Okay. User intent, all that sort of thing. And it’s not that expensive. So running ads on Facebook’s great. I recommend it.

Chris Burress: And one thing that we would absolutely recommend is remarketing on Facebook.

Matt Bertram: Yes, oh my God.

Chris Burress: This is a bare minimum. You have to hit the threshold of traffic, right, so that you’re able to do remarketing on Facebook and you should be doing remarketing on Facebook, period.

Matt Bertram: Yeah. And I mean, look, when you get your site to about 5,000 visitors a month, you can start incorporating a remarket on something like AdRoll. I’m going to talk to them, like recommended and they’re not giving me any money or anything, but they’re tapped into all these different exchanges and so it’s really quite a great service to really get in front of people. They help you with a lot of that and it’s something, as you get a little bit bigger, you want to look at doing, and it incorporates a Google display into it as well as other ad exchanges.

Matt Bertram: But one of the things that we’re doing, I guess from a service offering standpoint, is after that stopped working, I basically kind of shut it down or went down to one post a week. Really [crosstalk 00:10:19]

Chris Burress: Just so that there’s some activity, because the website used to be the place, like you hand out a business card and somebody goes to your website.

Matt Bertram: And they’re like, “Oh, you’re a legit business.”

Chris Burress: You’re legit. Now, they want to go over and check you out on Facebook to see what’s happening there. Do you have bad reviews? So there’s still value.

Matt Bertram: And Facebook’s changing, right? So now is it just recommendations? So I think we had a hundred reviews that just disappeared.

Chris Burress: Yeah.

Matt Bertram: Was that what it was? It was reviews.

Chris Burress: I think it was reviews, yeah.

Matt Bertram: Yeah. And now it’s just recommendations. So things change, right, and you feel like that’s a digital asset for you and then boom, it’s gone. They change it. So you got to be really careful and a lot of people [crosstalk 00:10:57]

Chris Burress: Be careful how vested you are in one platform.

Matt Bertram: Yeah. Yeah. And so really what we moved to right is, so we were offering a social media service and it was adding some complexity, approval of content, these sort of things. So we’ve had established a brand guide. We’re moving to more videos because it’s more engagement. So we’ve been changing some things but we kind of really, it’s a bolt on service. It’s not something we offer and if there’s a unique need for it, we do it. There’s some things we do with psych social signals from an SEO standpoint, but for the most part, we were ranking for it and I just kind of shut it down. Okay. I was like we’re really not, there’s other companies.

Chris Burress: Rankings for social media marketing?

Matt Bertram: Yeah, I really shut it down and I was like, “Look, there’s other companies out there that just do this, that focus on this and they’ll do a better job and we’re not that company, right, for you.”

Matt Bertram: Now, kind of a resurgence we’ve seen in social media is there’s things that you can do and really where the game is at right now is LinkedIn. I’m about to write a article on everything that I’m doing with LinkedIn.

Chris Burress: Are you going to talk that article?

Matt Bertram: Yes, I am actually. I’m really going to make that work. But what we’ve seen is it’s almost more guerrilla marketing, right? So what we’ve been doing is working with an internal marketing admin at some of the medium sized companies we’re working with and giving them the strategies to do it, right?

Chris Burress: Go into this group.

Matt Bertram: You go into next door and do this and go into these Facebook groups and a lot more go into these forums and don’t spam the world or use software or anything like that. Really thoughtful posts and creating that structure. And so we’re telling them what to do. And then some of them are doing it and it’s adding a lot of value. But what we’re seeing is for you specifically, your other business, we’re adding five figures, right? Five figures? Four figures? Five figures a month and increased growth outside of SEO when we’ve maxed out SEO, right? And so the things that you need to do that are different than the things you need to do SEO.

Matt Bertram: And so what we’re looking at is more of an integrated marketing service package where we can accomplish some of those tasks for you, but we can do it turn key in-house. Right? And so at some of our larger packages, we’ve increased our package size. We’ve added on a marketing assistant for X number of hours that follows our best practices. That’s going to do some of these guerilla marketing things that we’re seeing as a need that has to happen. And also video creation. We’re seeing it as a need because we’re seeing some websites that five years ago, great site, but all stock art, like people don’t even know if it’s a real company. I mean, we were meeting with one of your good buddies that we’re bringing on as a client and spending [crosstalk 00:13:53].

Chris Burress: Everybody in the room.

Matt Bertram: Spending eight grand a month on PPC and he’s run into a site that I didn’t even.

Chris Burress: To a homepage.

Matt Bertram: To a homepage that didn’t even know was real.

Chris Burress: Everybody at the table, including the people in on his team were like, “If I landed on this page, I would not call them,” because it looked like a lead generation website.

Matt Bertram: Yeah. They were all unhappy and it was very uncomfortable that when I realized that they had the guy that was managing everything in house in the meeting and that’s kind of why he was kind of questioning a number of things that we had to kind of explain through.

Chris Burress: It was interesting.

Matt Bertram: Yeah. And then he was like, “I want all of your marketing material.” And I was like, “Is that the guy?” So, yeah. So, really what we’re seeing happen is another shift in the dynamics. Also, I kind of previously touched on this just slightly is there’s a divergence. Okay. I’m seeing it heavily over the last quarter, a divergence in people that understand the internet and know that it’s the new way to drive leads in business and people that are unsure about it. Okay? And so now people are doubling down on the internet. It’s getting more competitive and people that aren’t and so that divergence that’s happening, it’s getting more complex, it’s getting harder. And also we’re seeing that the needs have to change, so what we’re offering from a marketing standpoint is more guerrilla tactics online.

Chris Burress: Right, and guerrilla tactics if you’ve ever read the book, Guerrilla Marketing, is how do you just go out there and use your own voice? Right? How do you use your own time to do things that will drive business to you, that will market your business?

Matt Bertram: That don’t cost money, like exchange for ads or something like that.

Chris Burress: It does cost money because you’re hiring somebody to do that stuff for you, but yeah.

Matt Bertram: But we have a roadmap we’re doing.

Chris Burress: It delivers value.

Matt Bertram: It creates a lot of value.

Chris Burress: I mean, as an example, we had a number of clients, probably a good 30% of our clients were on the social media package. And we’re like, “Look, it’s not adding any value. Let’s drop that.” So if it’s not going to add value to you, right, in the bottom line, then it’s not something that we’re going to sell.

Matt Bertram: Well, and I know we need to wrap up here from a social media standpoint, so we’re going to have to cut this podcast a little bit short to get out there for some meetings and podcasts and sort of things like that. But yeah.

Chris Burress: You have to talk a blog. Yeah.

Matt Bertram: I do. I do. I’m going to do it.

Chris Burress: Yes.

Matt Bertram: But really, storytelling, okay, and long form content and videos is really a great way to do that.

Chris Burress: That’s why we have an in house video team now.

Matt Bertram: Yes, exactly. I mean, and we’re making changes as a company. We brought on a video crew and we’re offering the service and we’re seeing the value in conversions and storytelling, long form sales letters like the way people are interacting with the internet is changing the way people are understanding social media is changing and I think people are starting to get how they want to use social media. Also, things like Facebook ads are starting to work really well because what I’m seeing at least in my kind of circles of friend groups is people are getting off Facebook. Facebook’s getting a little boring. No one’s putting anything out there that’s wowing them, right? What is it? Awe.

Chris Burress: There’s no sense of awe.

Matt Bertram: That sense of awe. So you creating that and running that ad, if you can get that to go viral and people to share it and really communicate your story and people are more engaging with some of that content, right? I’m seeing on LinkedIn a lot of engagement with organic posts. TikTok is starting to …

Chris Burress: It feels like it’s exploding, but you know.

Matt Bertram: Yeah. But that’s the thing is you see these things changing and you have to start making adaptations and what most business owners do is, “Hey, this is how I do business. This is how it’s going to be and this is how it should be fixed going forward.” And that’s the thing about SEO is it’s a lot more fluid.

Chris Burress: And social media.

Matt Bertram: And social media is a lot more fluid and so when it comes down to strategy and tactics, it’s super important to stay current to see what’s working, to evaluate it, to AB test, to look at the analytics and then make decisions based on that. And so what we’re seeing is, okay, you need to spend a little bit more and you need to offer some different things. I mean, let’s end on kind of just really high level with your business. You’re creating some of the requests for new services from eWeb based on the needs of your other existing business and we’re building out offerings that we can offer to other clients based upon your needs, so you’re driving change into what’s happening based on what your needs are in the market.

Chris Burress: Yeah. Right. And it’s because my other business, it’s a supplement business and it’s a supplement that nobody’s heard of, right? So they don’t really know they need it. So I’ve always called it kind of an education marketing strategy, right? So you’ve got to get out there in front of people who don’t know you exist, don’t know they want your product and then you’ve got to let them know about the product. And so that’s very much different than our core strategy here is search engine optimization where they know your product, they know maybe not your particular brand, but they know what they’re wanting to buy. And so you’ve got to get that your customer’s particular brand in front of them at that time. So this is driving all sorts of new strategies, the whole concept of being able to place people on podcasts. Right? That’s a PR firm.

Matt Bertram: Well, yeah.

Chris Burress: In reality, it’s a PR firm, which is certainly something that we’ve been shifting towards. That’s a PR firm. Getting Facebook ads, we’ve mostly focused on remarketing but really driving Facebook ads and funnels that are supported, like where the traffic is driven by Facebook ads and any other email marketing.

Matt Bertram: Even the remarketing, we’ve added a layer of branding to that and what we’re seeing is even if you’re maxed out a first position across the board or top three, top five positions in Google and so you got the lead flow, well getting people to buy from you, right? So that’s telling.

Chris Burress: Conversion.

Matt Bertram: Conversion, your unique selling proposition, people have heard about your brand. And so really the evolution of what’s happening of how people are interacting online is changing and you have to change with it and the strategies change and so you have to do things different than you’ve done before. So things that were working three years ago, they’re different now. But the interesting thing is the things that were working three years ago now are actually new to foreign markets. Yeah, for foreign markets and so we’re seeing that.

Chris Burress: And I remember some of this is going to come back because if we think about snail mail, it’s coming back too, right, delivering physical mail to people, that has a lot of value because all of that mail [inaudible 00:21:12].

Matt Bertram: I think emails get kind of left in the dust because they’re not as sexy as everything else.

Chris Burress: Even though they’re the best converting right there. The best conversion is on emails.

Matt Bertram: Yeah. I mean if you’re B2B, you need to be doing emails and you need to get good at emails and copywriting is so important. There’s a lot. I feel like there was so much that I could talk about as far as LinkedIn. Okay. And one of our previous podcasts when people came and were shown kind of behind the scenes a little bit and I was talking about some of the things that I’m going to talk about in my article of the things that are working on LinkedIn and how to utilize that platform properly. I know we don’t have time today to go into that, but that’s something that I think [crosstalk 00:21:57]

Chris Burress: We could maybe do a whole nother.

Matt Bertram: It could be valuable. Maybe we even do a series, because here’s the thing Chris, a lot of people are asking me, “Hey, I want to learn internet marketing. What podcasts do I watch first?” Right? And so maybe it’s like we did a couple articles.

Chris Burress: Start here, like 101.

Matt Bertram: And this could even become info products to a certain degree is, “Hey, here’s what you need to do on Facebook.”

Chris Burress: We’ve done a couple of podcasts where we were like, “Look, you’re getting into internet marketing. Here’s the first three things that you have to do.”

Matt Bertram: That’s the thing I’ll end on. I can tell you that I mentioned this one time before, but I went to a class reunion of all small business owners. Basically the school I went to was parents all kind of owned small businesses and the kids were taking them over and I’m working with one girl from my high school reunion and she was going around telling people what we had done for her. And I mean, she’s been a client for six, seven, eight months and we’ve really helped her business grow. She couldn’t even articulate to our other friends what I was doing. And they were like, “Oh, you’re doing some kind of internet thing.”

Matt Bertram: And so all you internet marketers out there, I think, and a lot of you know too that I think, it’s really on education. SEO is still so new. Okay. Social media is still so new and we’re in it every day. You got to really break down the fundamentals of where the value is and why it’s important and explain how maybe you achieve that at a really high level, because I think sometimes we get into the nitty gritty then maybe we could lose somebody.

Chris Burress: Just like anybody in any industry, you start using kind of what your assumptions are, not things that you can assume your customers know.

Matt Bertram: I mean what I’m doing on social media, I mean I think if I just start sharing that with people …

Chris Burress: They would love it.

Matt Bertram: Yeah. Well I think they would love it.

Chris Burress: And get value out of it.

Matt Bertram: I think they would love it, but I think I might go a couple layers too deep. Oh, I’ll give you one. You need to like your own posts. Like your own posts. A lot of people are trying to say, I like your own posts. If you like your own posts, I do think the waiting’s a little bit less than somebody else liking it.

Chris Burress: But it adds value.

Matt Bertram: But there is value to it if you’re looking at the algorithm and a lot of people ask me, “Oh I don’t know if you should like your own posts or not.” And I’m like, “I like all my own posts pretty much.”

Chris Burress: Do you not like your posts? That’s kind of crazy. All right, listen.

Matt Bertram: I like that.

Chris Burress: If you liked this podcast, please tell three people about that podcast. Maybe you could do that right now while you’re listening. Maybe you can pull up your phone.

Matt Bertram: Share it.

Chris Burress: Tweet it or share it. Shikow it.

Matt Bertram: If you’re seeing this on Facebook or LinkedIn, share it.

Chris Burress: If you would like to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet.

Matt Bertram: The internet.

Chris Burress: Call eWebResults for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is (713) 592-6724. If you have a referral, somebody who’s interested in internet marketing, you send them to us. We deliver amazing value. They pay us and then we pay you.

Matt Bertram: In some form.

Chris Burress: In some form. Maybe it goes to a charity of your choice. We were filmed live.

Matt Bertram: Or maybe a t-shirt.

Chris Burress: Or a couple of t-shirts. I think we would do at least two. We were filmed live here at 13105 Northwest Freeway, Suite 515, Houston, Texas 77040. If you’d like audio, video or transcript of this podcast, you can go look for it on.

Matt Bertram: Somewhere.

Chris Burress: And that’s SEO podcast. You guys have made us the most popular internet marketing podcast or one of them.

Matt Bertram: Well it says by, what’s his name? With last name SEO.

Chris Burress: According to Michael SEO. He says we constantly review SEO podcasts and ours is the best. Thank you guys. Thank you guys for making us the most popular internet marketing podcast. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burress.

Matt Bertram: My name is Matt Bertram.

Chris Burress: Bye bye for now.