Business Podcasts | Why Excellence Is Not Common In Life & In Business, Why No One Drifts to Success + How to Build An Excellent Business Based Upon Excellent Systems + Consistency Is King!!! + Search Engine Optimization Domination 101

Audio Transcription

Get ready to enter the Drive Time Show! We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re on the top. Teaching you the steps, jumps to get what we got. Culling Dixon’s on the hooks, I’ve written the books. He’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks. As the father of five, that’s where I’m a dive. So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them hi. It’s C and Z up on your radio. And now three, two, one, here we go. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and that’s where you gotta get. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One of the biggest things we picked up when we picked up the Thrive 15 team was an entire team. You want an SEO guy that knows things about search engine optimization? Got it. You got a website guy that’s built big websites like Garth Brooks’ website? Awesome. We have it. He’s coming in. If I had to pay for that on my own outside of Thrive15, there’s just no way. For us, one of our most immediate needs when I got connected with Clay was technology. We had a website, but I had a website in Tulsa. Our other partner had a website in Colorado. They did everything from doing a drone video, where they flew over all of our markets with a drone, they integrated that into our site, they built every single thing that I think of, they do. We do a podcast. If I was gonna produce my own podcast, there’s no, I mean, that alone, just that alone would be what I pay for it, just for that. But then if you add the fact that I’ve got, if I need a business card design, if I need a website build, if I need this, if I need that. I know what I would pay for that if I had to go a la carte. I feel guilty sometimes. Like I don’t probably write a big enough check for the value that I get. I think there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that have ideas of what they want to do with their business, and how they want to grow, and what market they want to be in, and how they can increase production and do all this. But it’s not about having 4,000 ideas. It’s about having 12 and executing them 4,000 times. That’s the trick, in my opinion. And that’s where Thrive’s value comes in. I feel like I have my own Staff my own like I don’t know a 20 person team that when I need something I just go to him and it happens Well thrive nation on today’s show if you’ll go to thrive time show comm forward slash millionaire again That’s thrive time show comm forward slash millionaire. You can follow right along you can read here from page 216. So page 216 from my newest book, A Millionaire’s Guide How to Become Sustainably Rich. And we’re talking about 13 systems that build excellent businesses. Now I’m not saying that if you don’t have these 13, you’re not gonna be successful, nor am I saying that these are the only 13, these are the only 13 systems you have to have. These are just 13 of the systems you have to have in place if you’re going to run a successful company. And folks, you’ve got to remember this. Being excellent is different, which is why so few people are used to an environment where excellence is expected. Just being excellent at anything is not typically the default setting for basketball players, for musicians, for business owners. If you’re going to be excellent, you’ve got to perform at a higher level. And so on today’s show, we are talking about 13 systems you need to have in place to make sure you build an excellent company. And to talk about it is the founder of BunkyLife.com, David Frazier. Welcome on to the Thrived Time Show. How are you, sir? I’m doing excellent. Thank you for having me, Clay. Well, OK. So let’s get into these 13 systems. So system number one, you have to have a system in place to verify that your teammates are paid on time. I know this sounds crazy. I know this sounds odd, but David Frazier, I’ve met so many business owners who’ve told me at our conferences, they’ve said, how do you remember to pay your people on time? What’s the best system for paying your people on time? And I go, how do you know you didn’t pay them on time? And they go, well, everyone in my office was really upset about it. I guess I forgot to pay them. So you can’t run your business the way that most people run their life. You can’t be casual because being casual causes casualties. Can you talk about that? Just having systems in place for making sure you know that you take out the trash regularly, or you pay your people on time, as opposed to where a lot of people’s personal life, it looks like the refrigerator hasn’t been addressed in a you know maybe half a decade. I’m flabbergasted that doesn’t happen. I’ve never been in a company or never not paid anyone. So yeah, that seems like basic. And the good thing is we have software that does that automatically. I don’t have to think about it. Every Tuesday night it goes, run payroll. And then we run payroll, which takes a couple minutes. And yeah, it’s not that hard. But you know what I’m saying, though? There are people that have something growing in their refrigerator, and it grows. They have a junk drawer. They have a garage where the trash has built up to a point where they look like they’re an emotionally unstable person. Their car is filled with artifacts and trash from a decade ago. And there’s a lot of people that live like that. There’s a lot of people that live like that. But in business, you just cannot be casual. I mean, this is an intentional decision that you have to make every day, how do you keep it on the rails at Bunkeylife.com? In that case, we have software that just does the payroll and bugs us if we don’t do it. So we don’t think about it. Yeah, that one’s an easy one. That one’s a no-brainer for me, but… Okay, okay, that’s fair. But again, I just see a lot of people that have these problems. Okay, now move number two. This is system number two you want to have in place if you want to build an excellent business. So again, a CFS system in place to verify that your team members are paid accurately. Okay, here we go. Back to that again. I just dealt with a wonderful contractor who I’ve worked with for years, who found out that he was, this is a true story. This is an East Coast builder who found out that he was overpaying his team on average by 20% every week for the whole year. Now, again, you say, how does that happen? He says, well, my guys were turning in overtime and I guess I didn’t catch it and people were BSing on their hours. And I’m like, how are you profitable? And he’s like, we barely were, I couldn’t figure it out. He spent a whole year barely surviving because he was paying people too much. How do you at BunkyLife.com stay on top of that? So once again, software helps a lot and we have video. So if someone’s at the factory working, there’s video of all that stuff. So we can pretty easily verify someone did or didn’t, which just holds everyone accountable to each other. So if they’re an hourly employee, it’s pretty easy to see when they’re there and when they’re not, because they’re all in a little factory. So it’s easy for us. We don’t have people moving around as much. But yeah, systems in place and then have accountability from your managers. Like obviously at that point, if you got people traveling around, you should have supervisors making sure they’re actually doing their job and that when they say they are and not there, not saying they are when they’re not. I think it boils down to just having an accountable system where at any point you could check on them and everyone knows that and then they’re not going to cheat. Okay, let me give you another example. Maybe this will help kind of I want to help hopefully this connects with somebody I had a podcaster I worked with for years David and this person would say man My downloads are down this month and I’m going we have a weekly meeting I’m like, did you doubt did you upload your show this week? And she said oh Man, I guess I forgot And okay, man, my ads are down my and my sales are down. Like are you are you running? Ads every month. He said well one of my key sponsors. I guess I forgot to run ads for them this month. And again, I think by default, people do not measure what they treasure. They just, they don’t. They say they treasure it, but they don’t measure it. And just default drifting is the common place for most people in most areas of their life. How do you on a daily basis choose to be intentional with BunkyLife.com? We try to measure everything we possibly can. So having from the number of leads that come in every week to the number of dollars that come in every week to the number of sales we close to every salesperson’s outbound calls and how many connects, we try to measure it all. There’s really no reason not to. And have every single person accountable for measuring things in a way that at any point, I could check. I think that’s the system that works for us at least. All right. So system number three, you got to make sure your vendors are paid on time. I see people all the time. It gets awkward. I see people that will read. These are real, real deal. We work with many clients. Most of the clients we work with, we update and we optimize their website for them. And when we optimize and update the website every month, we have to log into the back end to make sure that the website is updated to all of the Google search engine compliance rules. By the way, folks, on part two of today’s show, we’ll be talking about search engine optimization. When we log in, sometimes my designers or developers will say, hey, on this guy or gal’s website, this person’s website, this business owner’s website, they have a thousand unresponded to leads. It looks like they’re not open. Should we tell the client? We call the client. We say, client, have you not responded to the last 1000 leads? I mean, no exaggeration. There was a fitness trainer years ago, and I said, hey, have you not responded to 1000 plus leads? And he says, are you serious? Yeah, because on the weekly tracking sheet, we go over the leads, and I can only go over the leads that he reports to me. So every week, I’m like, how many leads did you get? How many leads did you get? And on the tracking sheet every week, he’s telling me four leads, seven leads, five leads. And I go, if you have missed out on nearly a thousand leads, that means there’s 20 leads a week that you’re not getting, and he says, you know, I guess I don’t check that email very much. I want to ask you this. How do you stay on top of those routine things like making sure inboxes responded to making sure those leads are responded to making sure vendors are paid on time. What mechanisms do you have in place to stay on top of it? Because again, by default, nobody drifts to success. Well, I think, yeah, tracking is important. So every week we track the number of leads so you can tell if there’s a weird drop-off, at least he should have been able to tell that, right? You know, and then also it’s one person’s job to make sure the inbox is handled. So we can hold that person accountable at any point, I can log into the inbox and see what’s going on. We got, we had more than like 50 to 100 unresponded to emails in a day. We’re like, what’s going on here? And we get hundreds and hundreds of emails a day. So it’s a full-time, almost a full-time job for one person. But if you’re, even if you’re on a smaller scale, I would say my advice would be get everything in one inbox, make sure you as the owner can check it. Even if it’s someone else’s job, you can always get in there and check it. And then if you’re measuring leads every week, you should be able to go, oh, there’s like a trend here. And if all of a sudden something’s way off trend, that should alert you. Like we had a situation where our website, the contact forms weren’t going through for whatever reason. They’re still getting saved on the backend, but they weren’t going through the inbox. We caught that in about three days, probably less than three days, because we were measuring it. And I go, what happened last week? And it was helpful because if you don’t measure, then you have nothing to compare it with. And you go, oh, I guess we’re just slow, blah, blah, blah. But it’s actually no, your website was broken for a minute. Now, another system you have to have in place, and again, folks, these might seem redundant, they might seem obvious, but I wouldn’t go over them if people weren’t dealing with these on a consistent basis. Again, you have to have a system in place to verify that your investors are paid on time. You know, if you promise an investor, you say, you invest in my company, I’m going to pay you 5% of my gross revenue or 2% of my gross revenue. You have to pay that stuff on time. Nobody drifts to success. You’ve got to be intentional. If you’re listening out there today, I would recommend you get a Google calendar, you put on there the dates, you put on there the date and what needs to happen, and you put that in there recurring, and you do it. Because again, I forgot is not an acceptable answer in the game of business. Next, you have to verify your weekly account balance. I see so many business owners that have a situation where money is supposed to be going into the account, but it doesn’t get there. Somehow, either the money wasn’t batched from a credit card processor, money was being embezzled by an employee, deposits weren’t made. I can go on and on. So you’ve got to verify that the cash or the money that deposits actually makes its way into your account. Next, you’ve got to make sure, you’ve got to make sure, folks, you have a system in place to make sure your tax is paid properly and on time. You’ve got to pay your taxes on time and properly. Next, you’ve got to make sure, folks, this is big stuff. This might not seem big to you, but it’s big to somebody out there, folks, I’m telling you. You’ve got to make sure you have a system in place to verify the accurate profit of the business. I just talked to a guy last week, God bless him, I talked to him on Thursday, God bless him, love this guy, great guy, pretty successful business owner, you would think, making money, has the new work trucks, new auto wrap, work trucks, new office, sales are booming, and the guy goes, I don’t know where all my profit’s going. And we’re looking, and what the guy’s doing is he’s not doing merit-based pay. So it’s almost like he would tell, and again, you’re not doing this, but I’m saying this would be an example. It would be like if he ran BunkyLife.com, and folks, if you go to BunkyLife.com, one of the reasons why people love the product so much is that it’s very reasonably priced. I mean, they’re high quality bolt-on bedrooms, but also they’re affordable, you know? So it’s $8,495 to buy this particular Cabana Bunky, let’s say. So it would almost be like you would take the money, you price it at 8495, but then you have no idea what you’re going to pay your employees to build it. It would be the best example I could give you. So this guy installs windows and doors, and so he quotes the customer $9,000 to install the windows and doors, but he pays his team 9,400. I’m going, how is it possible? And he says, well, I guess I didn’t tell my team up front what they would get paid for the job or how many hours were allocated for the job. Let me get your thoughts on that, dealing with all the contractors out there that are maybe struggling with the idea of managing their labor costs as it relates to projects. Well, it’s a struggle. I mean, there’s definitely no way around that, but you have to get, you have to know what it’s going to cost to do a job. And if there’s overruns, someone has to hear about it. So you have to have a budget for each project and you have to have realistic budgets that you then measure after the project’s done. You go, do we hit our budget or not? Because it’s so easy for those. I mean, so we don’t manage projects. That’s one of the reasons that I love my business. We don’t ever manage projects. We just sell bunkies to people that manage projects, whether it’s the homeowner building it themselves, which is most people, or whether it’s some contractor that’s buying a bunkie to build it for a client. We just don’t handle that. But if you do, it’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare. So I’m not going to sell you on managing projects, but if you have to do that, if that’s your job, you have to have a budget ahead of time for the materials, budget for the labor, and then you have to compare actual what actually happened to your budget. That’s just the way you have to do project management. And if your budget is over what your team is supposed to be paid, you have to have tough conversations. And I’ll tell you folks, your success or the ease of your life, the level of success in your life is determined by the number of tough conversations that you are willing to have. If you’re unwilling to have tough conversations, you will have a tough life. Someone should remember that and write that down. Next, you have to have a system in place to make, you have to have a system in place for cross-referencing your weekly budget against your expenses. I see so many business owners where their budget of what it should cost to run the business, at no point is compared to what it actually costs. So let me give an example. We had an employee on my team who no longer works for me, he had the bright idea recently, this was recently, this is one of the reasons they don’t work for me anymore. They had the bright idea that to save money, they would pre-buy, without my permission, one year’s worth of toner. Let me repeat, an employee on my team had the bright idea, their job was to go to said store and buy toner. Go to the store, buy the toner, you’re already going to be at the store, here’s the toner we need, here’s the printers we have, go get the toner. Now the toner should be like 200 bucks a piece, 200 bucks a piece, you know, for the toner, 150 bucks a piece. And David, they were talking to the salesperson, the salesperson says, you know, if you buy this in bulk, if you buy a couple years worth up front, you can save some money. So the employee uses my card to buy crazy amounts of toner. Now here’s how I knew something was going on. They come back to the office, no toner. I said, no toner, what’s going on? They said, oh, they were out. Well, I guess they had it, but not enough. I know I needed, we need a couple more. We need some extra. So I went and got a little extra, but they were out. So they’re gonna just deliver it tomorrow. I’m gonna ship that stuff online. We’re gonna get it. I said, okay. So you don’t have any toner? Your core job was to get the toner. We can’t print you needed to get the toner The purpose was to go ahead and get it store now And then we’re going online to buy a bunch of it. What are you saying happened? They go. Oh, they didn’t have enough to get ahead of it. So I didn’t get any today But I went ahead and order online I’m like, well, that’s the reverse of why I sent you to the store I sent you the store because the backup toner that we had David it wasn’t working Well, the toner either wasn’t working. It was out. Something was jacked up with it. So I’m like, just go to the local store, get the toner, we’ll buy more. Anyway, this person somehow, I don’t know what happened. And the next day I’m going, I am so pissed about this because people can’t rent the rest of the afternoon. And I start to see the UPS truck pull up. It pulls up and it’s like one of these bigger UPS, like a semi sort of a, makes the air sound, opens the door, guy starts getting a dolly out. I’m like, why is he getting a dolly out? Guy’s getting a dolly out. Why is he getting a dolly out? He starts dollying in, no exaggeration, what appears to be a room, like a 10 by 10 room of toner, like enough toner to put in a 10 by 10 room. It’s almost like a bunkie worth of toner. I said, how much toner are you bringing? He says, sir, this truck is for you, this truck. This truck here. I go talk to the employee I said did you buy like did you but did you buy 20 grand of toner the employees is yeah I mean I can’t tell a lie I was just trying to help us get ahead and save some money I’m like no the printers gonna change the printers are only 250 bucks by the time we use all that toner, who knows if that toner will even exist, if that paper even exists, if that print… What are you doing? You bought two years of toner? What? So then I had to pay a restocking fee to ship that crap back, and if I didn’t have a hawk eye on my businessman, I would have spent 20 grand on toner. I’d love to get your thoughts on this, of cross-referencing your budget every week of what it actually is versus what it should be. Yeah, huge, huge deal. Also a little side tip, this might work for the clay cart enterprises as well. You can make employee cards that have very small credit limits. Oh, yes. Yes. No, I will say this to everybody out there, I 100% agree with you. In my world, my whole thing is I don’t let my employees buy anything. Like I don’t. I just don’t. I don’t want them buying anything. I don’t for me I only have 47 employees that work in my office up here at this business. I don’t want anybody buying anything Yeah, that’s a good rule son. I’m like hey go over to office Depot. Take your ass over there It’s I said it nicely, but I’m like go over there. Just get some toner. We’ll come back order online Somehow they took a hundred and eighty our purchase and turned it into the biggest purchase of their life Anyway, this is this is the reason why with why we can’t have nice things. Let’s continue here. Okay, so you’ve got to have systems in place to verify how much tax is owed and make sure you pay that thing. You’ve got to have systems in place to verify the accuracy of your profit and loss statement. You don’t want to have an annual meeting with your accountant where you go, holy crap. You want to meet with your accountant at least once a month. I recommend you set it and forget it. You have a monthly meeting with your bookkeeper or your accountant, a monthly meeting. You have to have a monthly meeting, otherwise you get to the end of the year and you’re screwed. Next, you have to have a system in place for managing your insurance risks and needs. Everything in your office needs to be insured, so put it in the calendar once a month, look at your business and make sure you have enough insurance. This might sound insane. Okay, do it once a quarter. But I would have your insurance agent come in and work for your money, and once a quarter, come in and look at what you have and make sure you’re not over insured or under insured. Next you got to have a system in place for managing your cash flow. In my life there’s a certain amount of cash I want in the bank account for each business. So one of my businesses I’ll just be very clear one of my businesses I keep a hundred thousand dollars of cash in that business. Another business I have I keep a hundred thousand dollars in that business. Another business I have I keep more than that in there. The reason why I do that is because I don’t want to have any more or less than a hundred thousand dollars of cash in that particular company at any time, and that’s almost like a thermostat for the business. And if the account ever goes over a hundred thousand, I transfer that into different investment accounts. It’s very important you stay on top of your cash flow. Okay. Next, you want to have a system in place for tax filing and planning. What am I saying? You got to have an ongoing system. Like every time you buy something, what do you do with the receipt? Where do you save that data? How do you input it? Every time you buy something, how do you input it into your software? You want to be intentional about your write-offs and your documentation for tax purposes. It’s very important you do that. Next, you have to have a system in place to communicate with investors. What am I saying? I’m saying if people have invested in your business, you might want to give them a monthly update. I’m going to call them once a month to give them an update. I’m saying if people have invested in your business, you might want to give them a quarterly update. You might want to give them an annual update, but you want to have set the expectations so it doesn’t get weird. But the capstone thought I want to hammer home, and I want to get your thoughts here, at Bunky Life, I mean, you’re not drifting to success here at BunkyLife.com. I mean, if I go up here and I buy a seven bunky without a loft, that’s what I’m getting here. If I buy the rock wood bunkie, that’s what I’m getting. If I buy the hideaway bunkie, that’s what I’m getting. It’s not a willy nilly playing with hand grenades, throwing horseshoes, we’ll see what happens because casualness causes casualties. Can you speak to all the entrepreneurs out there that are operating off a yellow notepad on a Sharpie and everything’s in their head, nothing’s written down, and nothing’s intentional. Let me get your thoughts out there. What would you say to any of the entrepreneurs out there that are living casually? There’s nothing intentional going on in their business. Well, it’s tempting if you’re a certain size to think, oh, well, I don’t need to do that. I’ll figure that out when I’m bigger. But the time to figure that out is now because your only things are only getting more complex if you grow. And all those problems, all those 13 issues that Clay just brought up, they’re only going to get worse and scarier and more deadly if you put them off until next year or next month or next quarter or whatever it is. So the sooner you can get that stuff in order, even if you don’t think, oh, I can kind of remember what I need to do. I’ll remember to pay the blah, blah, blah bill. It’s like you probably won’t, but the key is solve it now because it’s the railroad tracks that let your whole business move. And if you don’t have that, you’re gonna crash. Now, if you’re out there today and you feel like you need to add on a little bit of office space to your office, a little space to your residential home area, you want a bolt-on bedroom or a bolt-on office, and maybe you don’t have the financial capacity or the mental tenacity needed to pull a permit. Maybe you don’t want to pull a permit. Maybe you just said I want to do it to see. Maybe you can’t pull a permit. Maybe you need to add on an extra building for your office, extra building, maybe a guest house. One great way to do that is by going to bunkeylife.com. Again, that website is bunkeylife.com. David Frazier, sir, if people are out there looking to get a bunkeylife.com and check out our stuff. You can always book a tour if you’re close enough to our factory in Ontario, or more likely if you’re far away, book a virtual tour with us. We can take you through the models, blah, blah, blah, show you the factory itself, explain how a bunkee might be able to fit your needs depending on what they are, and then we can ship a bunkee right to you as soon as this week. We’re able to ship anywhere in North America. At Bunkeylife.com, folks, they can ship your bunkie, they cannot ship your pants. So if you’re looking for a bunkie, go to BunkyLife.com, they can ship your bunkie, but they cannot ship your pants. David Frazier, thank you so much for carving out time for us, sir. And on part two of today’s show, we’re doing a deep dive into search engine optimization. Again, thank you for your time. We’ll talk to you next week. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye-bye. Two men, 13 multimillion dollar businesses, eight kids, one business coach radio show. It’s the Thrive Time Business Coach Radio Show. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. That’s it, bombs away. Yeah! We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time show on your radio and podcast download. My name is Clay Clark. I’m the former United States Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year. I’m the father of five kids, and I feel like it’s my mission to help you create both time and financial freedom by teaching you the practical skills that will help you to enjoy time freedom. And so on this show, when possible, I try to interview people that really are the world’s best at what they do. We’ve had the world’s best public relations expert of all time. This isn’t an arguable thing. This is Michael Levine. I mean, he’s the PR consultant for Michael Jackson, for Nike, for Nancy Kerrigan, for Pizza Hut, for Charlton Heston, for the Bushes and the Clintons, the Prince, we mentioned Prince, there’s just so many, I mean he’s huge. Well on today’s show we have the number one expert in the history of the world ever in the field of search engine for dummies each year for, he writes the search engine for dummies on search engine optimization. Yeah. This is the world’s number one search engine expert. Most consider him to be the father of search engine optimization. When Larry and Sergey built Google as a way to help people find information more quickly, they developed an algorithm that determines what websites get to be the top of search engine results. And when you as a company get to the top, when you navigate through that algorithm and you find your way at the top of search results, as an example, if you train dogs and you came up top in Google when you type in Tulsa dog training, or if you were a pizzeria in Florida and your company whose name was Papa Gallo’s and you typed in pizzeria and your company came up top. If you had an automotive repair shop and you typed in Tulsa automotive repair and you came up top it would change your life. If you were teaching basketball lessons and you came up top in search engine results it changed your life. If you were typing in any specific phrase and you came up top like if you were typing in carpet cleaning quotes into Google today and you were top in search results, it would change your life. That’s worth a little bit of money. That’s why for the brands I work with like Oxifresh, I mean, Oxifresh, let me tell you, these guys are so successful for a lot of reasons. They have great systems, processes, wonderful people, a great vision. They have leadership, a very affordable franchise model. They have the world’s greenest carpet cleaning technology. But it wouldn’t matter if people couldn’t find them. And marketing is about getting in front of your ideal and likely buyers and sales is about charging them money in exchange for solving their problem. But if you’re out there and you can solve a problem for the world but you can’t get in front of your ideal and likely buyers, it’s like having a billboard hidden in the woods. So this particular podcast could be worth millions for anybody out there. We’re giving it away for free for anybody out there who’s willing to take notes, listen in and understand what is being said. In our Thrive Time Show business coaching program, we will help you execute the system, but Bruce Clay here is teaching you how to optimize your website and how to get to the top of search engine results. This is the Million Dollar Show. It’s going to change somebody’s life. I’m excited to introduce you to my friend, Mr. Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization. Bruce Clay, the author of Search Engine for Dummies, the world’s number one search engine expert in the house. Bruce, how are you? I am doing great, thank you. Bruce, your book, Search Engine for Dummies, took me, and I’m not exaggerating, about seven to eight weeks to read it. I have the highlighter to prove it. And then I had to read it again and again to fully understand it. The last version I read was 760 something pages long. How long did it take you to write Search Engine for Dummies? So Wiley approached us and it took a while to actually end up with the agreements that we were going to write it. The dummy series is pretty specific, so it’s worth it to understand that the difference between a dummies book and a normal book is that dummies will not allow you to define it, use a term that’s not defined in the book. So we wrote it, we sent it to the editors and they totally tore it apart because we’re used to the jargon of the industry. Right. And they weren’t. So mechanically, the first version of the book took over a year. Wow. I think for a lot of listeners, a year working on a book can seem like a long time. I know my Start Here book took me a couple years from start to finish. How long did it take you to go from total start to finish? Well, we were lucky. We do a course on SEO. It’s a classroom course for people who really need to know how it works. So we already had an outline for the entire book. All we had to do is actually go through our course materials and write it down for everybody else. The job wasn’t that hard, it was the actual writing. And when I say a year, I’m not talking about part time for 52 weeks. I’m talking about one year of tracked time for us to actually full-time work on that book. You know, Wiley approached you to write the book. I know about you because I’m big in the franchise world. I work with a lot of franchisees, a lot of franchisors. I work with a lot of business owners. And your name comes up in conversations a lot. And for the listeners out there who don’t know your name, but who will undoubtedly search you on Google, in the search engines, and find the book Search Engine for Dummies, and find your website, can you explain how you became the search engine guru that you are today? Absolutely. This was back in January of 1996. For those of you who remember that far back, I think that’s when Al Gore invented the internet. Thank you, Al. But yeah, January 96 on my dining room table, I was deciding I wanted to try my hand at consulting. I had had large corporate positions, but I wanted to consult. I thought it was going to be somewhat easy. My bachelor’s is in math and computer science. I have an MBA. I thought, hey, this marketing thing and programming and algorithms is right up my alley. So I started doing it. Then it took off and it just grew. I hired hired a couple people, kept growing, hired a couple more. I’m now located in Southern California in a suite of 12 offices with offices around the world. So it has certainly grown over 22 years. You’re right, I’ve been given credit for basically being one of the founders of the entire industry. And in fact, if you do a Google search for who is the father of SEO, I show up. Hey, real quick, real quick. I have an audio clip from somebody. And as we’re talking about fathers and father related conversations, perhaps the listeners out there aren’t as familiar with Star Wars as I am. But there was a scene in that movie where Darth Vader was claiming to be Luke’s father. And you just claimed to be the potential father of the search engine industry. So, Bruce, if it’s okay, I want to play a little audio excerpt. One of our listeners called in and wanted to leave this for you, Bruce. Are you ready for this, Bruce? I’m ready. Here we go. La la la, Luke. Luke, I am your father. La la la. That’s from the movie Tommy Boy there, Bruce. So hopefully that tribute did you justice my friend. So your credit is being the father of search engines. I know this because I feel like I’m a, I feel like search engine is like nerd meets practical, you know, because you’re helping grow companies. Can you please explain to me when you say it took off, were you cold calling businesses? Were you emailing businesses? Were you, how did you get your businesses? Because you have so many clients today. I mean, you have thousands and thousands, you have probably a waiting list for everything you do. How did you start? I mean, were you starting out of an apartment? I mean, how did you start your business? Well, as I said, I started at home, but the way I got my business is I actually optimized my own site. Oh, there we go. So I have actually, in the entire history of the company, not had to go out and do a cold call. I think my reputation is sort of preceding me, but I’m known as the company you go to when nothing else works. People cannot figure out how to get ranked. They’ve gone through one or two or three agencies that are mediocre, and they finally decide they just have to do it right, and I’m the guy. So I’ve not had to call companies. They basically call us. They go to the website, fill in the form, we touch base. I’m the gatekeeper here. So if you were to go to the form and fill it out, I’d be the guy that said, sorry, we can’t help you. Or that looks like an interesting opportunity. Let’s take no names. What’s your website for the listeners out there who aren’t familiar with your website and how to get in touch with you? Well my site is of course BruceClay.com. I have several sites, but BruceClay.com is the main site. It is all about search engine optimization. We’ve got a fantastic blog where we give away free information. In fact, the site is over 5,000 pages and not a bit of it takes ads and not a bit of it is in any way generating money. I don’t charge a subscription fee. The site is just there for people to learn about SEO, they recognize they just don’t want to do it themselves. Okay, okay. So, here we go. Now, you’re hitting on a hot button. I want to see if you can unpack this for us. I know you can, but my company, my companies have actually hired you to do work for us, your team, because you have a certain level of mastery. Also, I like to freshen up our approach. We help companies with marketing and I always want to stay, I believe in coaching. I believe in hiring mentors who really know the path and you are, I mean seriously, you are in a good way. You’re kind of like the Darth Vader of search engine optimization. I mean you are the Obi-Wan, you’re the Yoda, you know search engine optimization. You are the father of the industry. And so, you know, we’ve hired you, but it wasn’t free, and it wasn’t cheap, but it was effective. Why can the listeners out there not hire a search, why is it not possible to hire a search engine optimization company to help your business for $199 a month? Because every listener gets a call from somebody from some foreign country calling, emailing, saying that they can do your search engine for as little as $99 a month. Why is it just not possible? Well, the fact is that the industry is changing. Google changes the algorithm approximately five times a day. So it takes time to stay current on technology. There’s not much you can do about it. You just have to pay to be current. Well, if you’re not current, I can sell you whatever I want, you can give me a check, then when I don’t deliver it, you go away and I ended up with a free check. So I think that a great many people take shortcuts, they don’t care if you get in trouble, they don’t care if you get penalized. The flip side of that is, would you work for somebody for a month for $200 and I think that most people wouldn’t. If you wanted a competent CPA would you get one of them for $200 or would you expect to pay a rate? Same for a lawyer, same for a brain surgeon. This is the Thrived Time Show on your radio. Stay tuned. Alright Thrive Nation, welcome back to The Conversation. It is the Thrive Time show on your radio. On today’s show we are interviewing Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert, the best-selling author of the book Search Engine for Dummies, a guy who’s worked with some of the largest brands in the country. His company, you can find more about them at bruceclay.com. I have paid them thousands upon thousands of dollars, and I don’t regret it. He is the world’s best for big companies. I will tell you, there are projects, Chuck, that he’s worked with where he’s charging clients over a million dollars a year for search engine optimization. And that just shows you how valuable that is. Most of the clients are $6,000, $7,000, $8,000 a month clients for him. I mean, he has big account chop why can you really not find a legitimate search engine optimization company that’s going to do it for two hundred dollars a month why does it never work because it takes more time than that like it’s a simple math like that you can only get a few hours of work for two hundred bucks from somebody that knows what they’re doing and so all ultimately they’re going to end up outsourcing it to another country or somewhere with shady business practices that Google will end up penalizing you for. And so if you’re out there and you have an awesome company, you do an awesome product or service, but nobody can find you, well, what are you doing? So you’ve got to be where people are, and that’s on the Internet. So Thrive Nation, I would encourage you to listen in and take notes as Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization, breaks down how search engine optimization really works. The question is, would you work for somebody for a month for $200? And I think that most people wouldn’t. If you wanted a competent CPA, would you get one of them for $200? Or would you expect to pay a rate? Same for a lawyer, same for a brain surgeon to do surgery on your kid, $200 for the surgery would really make you suspect. So fundamentally, the problem is that the infrastructure is changing so much that unless you are just taking somebody’s money, you can’t even possibly justify that kind kind of a rate. It usually takes a few thousand dollars, I’d say, and sometimes many, many thousands of dollars. There’s large companies out there that have 30 to 40 in-house SEOs just working on their own property. Those are the big guys. And, you know, if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it, but you can bet that’s more than $199 a month. If you want it cheap, well, the cheaper you want it, the cheaper you get it. And I agree with you. If you go overseas, it is entirely possible to find somebody that can make changes, but unless you know what kind of changes are being made, you’re just losing out. They’re taking your money. What I want to do is, if it’s possible, I want to kind of get into the weeds with you. And I want to kind of get into some of the details. So that’s all right with you and kind of go through them in a linear fashion. And if you feel like the way that I’m organizing it isn’t the best way, feel free to interrupt me and lead the way here. But Google compliance just overall, I have seen so many people with a beautiful website, Bruce, you’ve seen it, too, where it looks great. The site itself, visually, you go, wow, that is nice. The problem is it’s like a billboard in the woods and no one can find it. And then you go to Wikipedia that doesn’t look that beautiful but it indexes and comes up top for everything. Can you talk to me about what it means to build a website that is crawlable or searchable by Google? I can certainly address that. Understanding that Google is changing all the time, the technology is changing as well. The process of getting into the index is simple. Google will send out a spider. It’s a piece of software that reads your website and attempts to figure out what you’re about. Many of the really pretty websites have been built by designers who do not know anything about SEO. They don’t understand how to connect things, they don’t understand how to word things, they’re not authors and not writers, they’re people who can build pretty things. And a big part of the problem when you do that is you don’t dot the I and cross the Ts to make it appropriate for a piece of software to figure out what you’re about. It’s highly visual, which doesn’t help a search engine. The search engine basically is blind, deaf, and dumb. It reads your site. There’s three ways they influence ranking. But one of them is it will read your site, and it will attempt to determine what you’re about by looking at your content, and by looking at how page A is connected to page B. And the infrastructure and nature of your words really determines what the search engine thinks you’re about. Now, a lot of people in a very visual environment, they have very few words and a lot of really pretty pictures. And the search engine cannot understand what that is. Now, there’s two other things that fit. And I’ll just go into them briefly. One is what’s referred to as backlinks, where other sites link to you. Well, if your content is pretty, you might be able to get some links. And a great many offshore SEO companies, that’s what they focus on. But that is not going to make you an expert. It’s just going to be a bunch of people linked to you. The third part is something called RankBrain, which is the Google algorithm. And it’s based on click-throughs. So if you don’t rank, you don’t get clicked. If you don’t get clicked, there’s no dwell time or perception of your quality. And so it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy that the best ranked sites perform the best. So the only way a website can really get to the top is to build something that a search engine can perceive to be authoritative information, quality information, and then the search engine can put you at the top and then you will get links and then you will have RankBrain like you and then you’re pretty well entrenched over time. So all those things have to play together. You can’t just do one and expect it to be there. But pretty sites, everybody loves a pretty site. Oh we love it. Oh. Google loves it. Yeah. Because the prettier your site the more likely you are to have to buy pay-per-click in order to get your traffic. Right. Now here’s the thing about it. I hear a lot of people say, this is what people say a lot of times, they’ll say gosh you know but Nike, Nike doesn’t have a lot of content. Bruce, they have a lot of pictures. Adidas. And I would say well it’s because Nike and Adidas are spending millions and billions on advertising, driving… And by the way, people are typing in Nike.com every day. But if you’re the average plumber, dentist, doctor, lawyer, whoever you are, the chances of people typing in your name, like a household name, is probably not going to be there. I mean, Bruce, have you ever heard people tell you that kind of objection? They say, well, the reason why I want my site to look like that is because I want it to look like Nike. Well yeah, and it happens a lot more often than you would think. People have this perception that if you build it they will come and therefore if you build it prettier more will come when in fact if you build it prettier they won’t come until you buy the ads on Google. So if you’re out there and you have a business that is trying to generate more traffic, you have to learn. You just can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the internet does not exist. Search engines, search engines, and how to get to the top of search engines. When we return, it’s our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay. Stay tuned. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show, we’re interviewing Bruce Clay, who many consider, who everyone considers to be the father of search engine optimization. Each year, he releases an edition of Search Engine for Dummies, and his firm, which you can find out more about at bruceclay.com is the world’s authority on big budget search engine optimization. Now I’ve hired his firm in the past and if you have a big company I would advise you to check him out as well but I’m telling you you’re definitely going to be spending he talks about it in the interview, but $200 minimum per article. Minimum. He’s talking about thousands of dollars a month for search engine optimization. We’re talking six thousand a month, seven thousand. He talks about clients that their website has 12 million pages when they come to him. Right. And they got to re-optimize and rewrite and everything. This is a big deal. Bruce is search engine optimization on the next level. And so I try to do on this show is I try to break down big concepts and actionable steps that our listeners can take to make the money that they want to make so they can have the time freedom that they deserve and desire. And so now without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert. You can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the Internet does not exist. According to Forbes right now, 88% of consumers, according to Forbes, and we’ll put a link on the show notes, 88% of consumers read reviews online before buying something. But they’re not going to read a review unless they find you online. And I don’t know the stats. Bruce, you probably know the stats more than I do, and I’m not certainly trying to paint you into a corner about knowing the stats, but I don’t even know the percentage. I know the last studies that I looked at from Forbes, I do write for Forbes. I’m a contributing writer for Forbes. I’ve looked at some of the stats. Will over 9 out of 10 people start any product or service, they start their search for any product or service online? Do you have any data that would argue that 9 out of 10 consumers don’t start looking for things online? Or is it higher do you think? I mean I think I’ve read it shows about 9 out of 10 people start looking for the products and services they’re going to buy with an online search. No, you’re right. The number has consistently been, the lowest number I remember is 84%, but I think it’s consistently over that. I also understand a statistic which is 94% of all people click on only the first page of Google, which means you have to be in the top 10. So yeah, you gotta be there if you expect to satisfy anybody’s queries. I think that probably your entire audience finds things, or at least finds reviews, and certainly how-to’s and things like that online. Digital is the way of the world now. And yeah, you gotta be there. Now we talked about you kind of get it as high level we gotta have a website that Google can crawl that the spiders can index. I want to get a little more into the details of this. There’s a stuff called meta content which you write so eloquently about in your book Search Engine for Dummies that only took you a couple years to finish because it’s so detailed. I’m telling you that book Bruce I’m not sure if you make any money every time you buy a copy of that book, but that book is awesome. Search Engine for Dummies with Bruce Clay. Talk to me about meta data, meta content, things like the title tag and the description and the keywords. I think the vast majority of our listeners have no idea what a meta title is, a meta description is, what keywords are. They just have no concept of these things. Could you kind of explain it in a way that a simple mind like me might grasp? Most of our listeners, Bruce, are very intelligent people, but if you’re just talking to me, break it down, make it simple for my cranium. So you want it to be at your level. Right, because I am a shallow Hal. Okay. So metadata, actually, metadata is data about data. So in a portion of your web page, commonly referred to as the head section, the top of the source code, you have a section which has data, these content fields, that describe what your page is supposed to be about. And in that area, there’s typically key tags. One is the title tag, most commonly recognized because when you do a Google search, the link that you get to click on, that is actually the title tag of the page you’re clicking. The second part is a description tag, so it’s called a meta description, and it is the part in the Google search results that commonly show up under the title. And that’s where you would put a call to action. That’s where you would describe why people should click to your site. So those have to be balanced out against the content of your site, or there’s a mismatch and Google won’t like you. There’s a keyword tag which is logically used as sort of a, just a list of words that should be on the page. Can I ask you a question about that for the listeners out there that might have a question about keywords there? Let’s say I cut hair. I’m a haircut, I’m a hair stylist, and I’m in Boise. Talk to me about keywords. If I’m cutting hair, I’m in Boise. I think some people are just unfamiliar with that term at all. We have hundreds of thousands of people to download this podcast. I want to make sure nobody gets left behind. If I cut hair for women in Boise, what kind of keywords would you be talking about? I would think hair cutting, certainly Boise. These are things that somebody might string together in a query. Like a search? Like a search. Okay. So an interesting An interesting statistic is 70% of all searches have not been searched on in the last six months. Yes, repeat it again, please. That right there is a knowledge bomb for somebody. Please repeat. 70% of all searches have not been searched for in the last six months. What does that mean? If I am in Boise and I need to find a dentist because at 2 a.m. I broke my tooth, you’re not going to just search for dentist. You’re going to search for emergency dental repair, Boise, right now I’m in pain. And that is a string of keywords that most often are not on any websites. So when you come up with keywords and content and things for your webpage, you need to think about how somebody might actually try to find you and use those words on your webpage. You’re making me cry, this is so good. This is so good. Oh, you’re preaching the good news, yes! I’ll tell you right now, most people, I’ve had cases where people come to me and they don’t understand why they don’t have a better ranking for a particular keyword. And when I do the analysis, they’re not even using the keyword in their content. Google isn’t going to believe you’re about anything if you don’t use your keywords properly on your webpage. Now, in terms of just the amount of content, just content, I think a lot of people don’t grasp this idea. This is a funny thing I did, Bruce. This is back in like 2004, 2005. It was 2003. I owned a company called DJConnection.com. And for the listeners out there, if you go to DJConnection.com, you can see it’s still a company that’s thriving today. I sold it and moved on to open different ventures. But DJConnection.com, one of the things with that company was that I was starting to figure out how search engines work. And this was early stuff. I mean, Yahoo was huge at that point. Yahoo was like a dominant player. Thrive Nation, stay tuned. We come back, we’re going to learn why content matters for your website. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Nation, you are in for a powerful training today. We have Bruce, the truth, Clay on the show. Bruce Clay, this guy is the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies. His search engine optimization firm is the number one search engine firm on the planet. His firm represents massive companies that have over a million pages of content that are making billions of dollars and he’s here to teach you the principles and the fundamentals of search engine optimization so you can implement these systems and strategies in your own life and business. Without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay. And I didn’t realize just how much content mattered, so I decided to write the most amount of high quality content in the world about the phrase, chocolate fountains, Bruce. So I wrote an insane amount of content, because I owned a company called Chocolate Elegance, and we owned chocolate fountains. It’s like the fondue, you know, weddings, that kind of thing. You dip fruit in it. And lo and behold, Bruce, I got chocolate elegance to the top of search engine results as a result of writing something like 80 pages about the origins of chocolate, chocolate fountains, how chocolate fountains work. It was all really well done. It was it was almost disturbing. Can you talk to me about why the volume of quality content really does matter. Sure, and this should be pretty clear if you understand what you would want when you do a search. There’s a concept called siloing. We invented it 18 years ago. And what siloing does is it says that you should have organized the content on your website in a clear hierarchy. That’s actually one of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. So in a clear hierarchy, what Google is looking for is a bunch of interconnected pages that are on the same theme. So what you did is you created a large group of pages that were clearly different. They had different purposes, but they’re all about the same topic, the same theme. And so what Google does is it looks at your website and sees that you have these connected pages. And therefore, they assume that you are more of an expert than somebody that doesn’t. So if your site is poorly structured, you’re not going to rank as well as somebody that has a properly structured website. The architecture and the way your pages are tied together make a lot of difference. So we’ll go and use that as an example. If I wanted to find a site about chocolate fountains, if there was a site that had one page about them, or another site that has 20 pages about them, that user would prefer the 20 pages. It’s more content, more information, better able to satisfy them. And we all have to believe that Google knows that. So Google is looking at how much content that is quality. It has to be quality, how much quality content is interconnected to build a theme that matches what people are searching for. And if you build that correctly, in a nice hierarchy, connected correctly, then you can perform very well in search. And that’s what you had done. You know, Bruce, I actually was the head of a group called the Tulsa Bridal Association, which was the group that threw the wedding shows in Tulsa. We started the Tulsa wedding show where brides would go and gather at these banquet halls. You get maybe a thousand brides in one banquet hall at one time at the Renaissance Hotel. They’re all trying to find their wedding vendors. I remember a vendor in particular pulled me aside one time and she says to me, she had a wedding, a bridal store, and she says, how did you find the time to write hundreds of pages of content on DJConnection.com. And I said, well I didn’t find the time to write a hundred pages, or hundreds, I actually wrote thousands. And I did it myself. I usually, Bruce, did it between the hours of 5 a.m. or 4 a.m., usually 4 a.m. to 9 a.m., about five hours a day. I’d write content every day. And Bruce, I’d do it in the bathtub, which I know is a disturbing visual, but I’d sit there in the bathtub and I’m just writing content, just blah, blah, blah, writing about how to throw a bouquet, how to catch the garter, when the first dance was, when the father and the bride dance was, what’s the etiquette behind the toast, why we have a toast, why we do the cutting of the cake, the history of the cutting of the cake, why we have DJs, who the first wedding DJs were, I mean, on and on and on. I mean, all of the dollar dance, the waterfall dance, the Soul Train line, the cha-cha slide, the Cupid shovel, how to do it, the electric slide. I mean, I was like the Wikipedia of DJs, which is why I became the top ranked company in search engines. Can you explain to me what percentage of your clients say to you, you know, hey, Bruce, can you just write the content for me? And what percentage of them actually are willing to sit down and write the content themselves? I believe I have a psychological problem called I enjoy grinding, but I don’t know, I have very few clients I’ve ever worked with who want to write the content. What percentage of your clients prefer to have your team write the content versus the ones that want to write it themselves? Well, we have large projects where they don’t have the team to do it. Under normal circumstances, I would look at you in that particular case and think of you as the subject matter expert. So we would partner with you and we could write the draft, you can finish it, we can editorialize it and make it ready for SEO, and then as a partnership we publish it. That’s the way most of our writing projects are actually structured because when you’re doing that for a technical business at all, then you’re not going to be the subject matter expert. If you went to somebody, and this is my opinion, but if you went to somebody and said, Hi, I want 200 pages on this topic, you’re going to get 200 pages of absolute garbage. Oh yeah, total garbage. Complete and total garbage. And that really annoys me. You have to spend the time to do the page right, to do the research. The average 1,000-word page is supposed to take about three hours. And it isn’t just writing, it’s editing. And it’s making sure that you have sources and which image do you put on the page. And it’s far more complex. What we find with our clients, be it good or especially the small guys, what we find is that they absolutely commit to doing it and then they unconditionally don’t. Okay, repeat that again. That right there, I’m going to put that on a t-shirt. I’m going to put that on a hat. I want to embroider that on my head and get a tattoo on my leg. Can you please repeat that? That was powerful. The companies absolutely commit to writing the content because they’re the experts, they want to do that, but then they don’t write it. And it is unfortunate, but that is the case. And we’ve had many projects where we become the company’s writing team. Yeah. And, but if it is technical at all, we still need them to read it. So what do you charge to write an article? I mean, if you’re going to write a thousand words for somebody, I mean, you’re going to charge them $6, $12, 7 cents. I mean, there’s a lot of companies in India right now, and you’re aware of this, Mr. Bruce. I mean, there are companies in India, companies based in China right now, companies in the Middle East that will say, I will write you an article right now for $9. I mean, what would you charge somebody to write a thousand word page of content? Well, we’re back to the cheaper you want it, the cheaper you get it. I think that one of the problems that you run into internationally is they do not have a shared experience with you as the author. And so they make assumptions about your target persona person. They assume things about what it is that you do for a living and what your product should do and why people should use it. And it hardly ever matches reality in a different country. So we believe that every country has to write their own product content. So in our case, what is the right price? It varies. If it’s a thousand words and it’s going to take three hours, it’s a few hundred dollars. So $200 for a quality, you know, maybe thousand word article, you think $200 is that is that is like a low average you think maybe? That’s a low average. If it is more technical, it takes longer. Now, I’m going to go out on a tangent here and give you some additional data. And I know you hate it when I do that. No, it’s good. This is good. This is gonna blow someone’s mind. When you look at the results in the search engines, typically, typically the top ranked sites have more words on the pages than the sites below them. Thrive Nation, do not get overwhelmed by search engine optimization. Just leave us an objective review on iTunes. Just subscribe to the Thrive Time Show podcast on iTunes. Leave us an objective review and email us proof you did it. We’ll send you free tickets to our next in-person Thrive Time Show two-day, 15-hour workshop, and we’ll teach you everything you need to know. Stay tuned. Attend the world’s best business workshop led by America’s number one business coach for free by subscribing on iTunes and leaving us an objective review. Claim your tickets by emailing us proof that you did it and your contact information to info at Thrivetimeshow.com. Hey Chuck, are you familiar with that thing called the internet? Enter in the net, that’s when you catch fish, internet, right? Chuck, I’ll tell you this man, there’s people out there starting to use this thing called Google, or they’re on them Facebooks, and I’ve heard that people are going on there to buy products and search for goods and services on that Google. Now, we boys from Oklahoma. And we, I know there’s three things I know about search engines, Chuck. One is the word search is the first word. That’s right. The second word is optimization. And the third is I ain’t knowing nothing about it. You want a V8, I know that about engines. Chuck, you think I should grow out my perm or just kind of let it be? Yeah, you ought to let it grow. Should I put the lightning bolts on the side of my mullet, Chuck? Yeah, yeah, perm mullet with the lightning bolts, Clay. That’s what you want. You know, Chuck, you know, Chuck, you know, Chuck, I don’t know if you’ve thought about this very much, but one thing that we like to say in Oklahoma, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, you know what we say? What is that? You know what they say? See you abroad to get that booty, yackle. Laid it down, a smack on yackle. All right, now, Thrive Nation, if that’s about, if you’re saying to yourself, yeah, when it comes to search engine, I’m serious, if you’re sitting there at an office party or an office event gathering, a networking event, you’re talking to a buddy of yours who owns a business, and he says, well, search engine optimization is key to our success. And you find yourself saying, well. You know what they say, see a broad to get that booty, yak him. Lay her down or smack him, yak him. If that’s all you know about search engine, if somebody put a gun to your head and said, teach me how to get to the top of Google, and you immediately said, La la la luke. Then you need to listen in because Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization, is going to be dropping knowledge bombs on you like your name is Saddam. Ooh. Thrive Nature, without any further ado, back to my conversation with the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, Mr. Bruce Clayton. In our case, what is the right price? It varies. If it’s a thousand words and it’s going to take three hours, it’s a few hundred dollars. So $200 for a quality, you know, maybe thousand word article, you think, $200? Is that like a low average, you think, maybe? That’s a low average. If it is more technical, it takes longer. Now when you look at the results in the search engines, typically the top ranked sites have more words on the pages than the sites below that pages. Bruce, I want you to help me on this. This is my six-year quest. John Kelly knows this, my right-hand man. We have been working to be top of the world for the phrase business conferences for about six years. And we’re at the top of page two now. And we have a podcast that’s ranked in the top ten on iTunes in the business section. We have thousands of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of downloads, but we’re competing against Tony Robbins. I mean, Tony, for anybody out there that is not aware of Tony Robbins, welcome to the planet Earth. But Tony Robbins, I mean, this guy, Bruce, he has tons of backlinks from news and media agencies. The guy has a team of bloggers writing content every day. And he’s a beautiful man, too, I’m sure. But it’s taken a long time to be… And I know it’s just… So every week, we add content at a rate that exceeds his rate of adding content. And I’ve kind of timed it out, and I believe in probably January of this year, we’re going to beat him finally. But I mean, is it normal where you go into an industry and you go, wow, this industry, I mean, because Tony Robbins, when we decided to do it, I knew it would take years and years and years. Do you often sit down with a client and explain to them like, hey, to be top of Google for your term, my friend, that’s going to cost you a lot of money and a lot of time? And many times that’s the case. And it depends upon what is missing. missing, and I want to make sure everybody understands how it works, it isn’t also whoever dies with the most backlinks wins. It’s who has the best backlinks, and are the backlinks appropriate for that one keyword, and am I spamming the backlinks? Am I buying them? Am I getting backlinks from garbage sites. Those are the kinds of things that matter the most. Many brands, by the time you become a brand, you’re going to get backlinks to you by your brand name, not particularly what your brand does. That contributes a lot of power to your home page. And then your home page distributes that power to your sub pages. So when you think about a Tony Robbins, you’re competing, and a Wikipedia, you’re competing against a brand that over time has acquired a lot of link value. That doesn’t mean that you need to publish more content than them, it just means your content has to be better than them and it has to be more of a solution to that user than them. We have a blog and at one point I felt that we have to publish a lot of blog posts and when I did the analysis I decided it isn’t how many you publish it’s how good it is. And so we focus more on, is this blog post solving somebody’s problem? And then, how do I tell that person I have the blog post? That is far more important than just publishing things. You have to kind of advertise that you’ve published it. And you have to advertise to the people that matter. But it isn’t an issue so much of quantity. It is far more an interest in quality that’s going to cause the search engines to perform well with you on your content. Now, having said that, I do believe that if you have too little content, you’re not going to succeed. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as too much content. We do projects large and small, hundreds of thousands of dollars at the high end and, you know, 500 a month at the low end. So it really will vary. But we do them all over the board. Now, Bruce, this is a concept that I would like to see if you can share with listeners in your book, search engine optimization for dummies, you discuss the amount of content that needs to be on a page in order for Google to count it or for Google to really care about it or to index it or to think it’s not a waste of time. You can’t have two words on every page. And you talked about certain industries and you alluded to it earlier. Certain industries you might have to have 1,500 words of content to be relevant. In certain industries you might have to have 350 words of content on a page for it to be relevant. Why do you have to have a minimum amount of words on a page for Google to care enough to index it? I know the Google algorithm doesn’t care, but in order for Google to index it, why do you have to have a certain minimum number of words per page? You can get away with almost none. We’ve seen well-performing pages that have fewer than a hundred words. They have like 80 words. The issue with words is you need a sufficient quantity compared to your competition to prove to search engine that you are a subject matter expert. In some industries where all your competitors have 400 words, 400 might be a really good number. But if I am competing for an information source against Wikipedia, Google, government.gov’s government pages, university pages that are writing about it, and they all have 2,000 words, my 400-word page isn’t going to stand a chance. You have to be equal and then better. And just showing up to the party is not sufficient. Bruce, whenever I have spoken at big conferences, I’ve spoken for Maytag and Hewlett-Packard and O’Reilly’s Auto Parts and UPS, a lot of big companies, and I’ll get an attendee that will come up to me. I’m sure you’ve never run into this, Bruce, but someone will come up to you and say, they’ll say, hey, here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. Honestly, I’m willing to pay you guys up front quite a bit. And I just want to know, how do I get to the top of Google in like two weeks? I know you guys all preach that it’s a process, like growing a tree, and that you can’t get to the top of Google immediately, because you’ve all kind of agreed to the secret society of preaching a process. But unlike planning a garden, and unlike raising a child, and unlike growing a successful business, I want it to be a microwave thing. And I’m willing to pay you, Bruce, right now, $40,000 up front. Make me top in Google in two weeks. Let’s go. Boom. Why, Bruce, is it not possible? Can you explain to somebody that I’ve run into, people you’ve never run into, but people that I’ve run into at my conferences that want to be top in Google in two weeks, why can you not be top in Google in two weeks? Many reasons. One, we don’t know what’s wrong with your site, we have to open the hood and look under it and see where things are broken. See, if everything was working correctly, then theoretically, everybody would be number one. But in fact, most sites are their own worst enemy. And sometimes I could take a site and change their life in a few weeks. I don’t think two is a realistic number, but let’s say four. I can change your life in four weeks provided the reason you don’t rank is you did something wrong. It’s when you did everything right that it takes longer. I view reviewing websites and fixing websites to be a little bit like a hospital. The very first thing you do is you cart the website into the emergency room and stop the bleeding. You make them so that they’re not their worst enemy anymore. Then you take them into surgery. That’s when you’re going to do the heavy lifting, deep thinking SEO that an average person could not even come close to being able to accomplish. So it’s multiple steps. You have to go through them all. And that’s the way you have to do it to get ranked. And so if you have no competitors, none, sure, I can get you ranked in a heartbeat. And if you have a million competitors, just do a query for your keyword. You’ll see how many different sites are out there. If these are real competitors, then it’s going to take longer. The best I think we’ve done is we’ve had the ability to get a site to the top out of 3.5 billion results, but it took two years. There is no easy button when you’re doing SEO. Okay, okay, so this leads me into a bigger question. I tell people all the time this, and Bruce, you run a, can I ask you, I mean, how many people, maybe not employees, but how many people work in your organization? How many people, because you said you occupy nine floors, am I correct, nine floors of a building? No, I actually have 12 suites. 12 suites. I’m sorry. So 12 how many folks are working with you? I mean do you have a couple dozen guys? Do you have hundreds of people? How many people are coming? Oh, no, I I want to make sure I say this correctly We are extremely Focused on Basically taking no prisoners got where the company you go to when you unconditionally need to be in the top three. That’s what we do. And as a result, we don’t take every single account because they don’t really pony up and commit to doing the work necessary. One of the sayings I use is it’s funny how you will never get the results for the work you didn’t do. Chuck, I want to save both time and money, and one way to do it is by having your office and printer supplies shipped directly to you, my man. That’s right, and you can do that with our awesome show sponsor, OnyxImaging.com. In fact, if you get your office supplies, your printer supplies, and printer service through these guys, they’re going to give you a free printer copier, free of charge. So get a hold of them at OnyxImaging.com or call them at 918-627-6611. Stay tuned. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back. Today we are interviewing the founder, the father of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, Bruce Clay. You want to get to the top of the internet search results? You have something you can sell, a product you can make, or a service you can deliver? Do you feel like you can really deliver to millions of people? Well, maybe. Well, not maybe, but for sure. If you want to reach your ideal and likely buyers, you have to get to the top of search engine results. And who better to teach you and I how to do it than the father of search engine optimization as an industry? The guy who literally has written the book on search engine optimization, the yearly edition of Search Engine for Dummies. My friends, I introduce you to my friend, Bruce Klett. And that’s when you’re gonna do the heavy lifting, deep thinking SEO that an average person could not even come close to being able to accomplish. So it’s multiple steps. You have to go through them all. And that’s the way you have to do it to get ranked. And so if you have no competitors, none, sure, I can get you ranked in a heartbeat. If you have a million competitors, just do a query for your keyword. You’ll see how many different sites are out there. If these are real competitors, then it’s going to take longer. The best I think we’ve done is we’ve had the ability to get a site to the top out of 3.5 billion results, but it took two years. There is no easy button when you’re doing SEO. Okay, okay. So this leads me into a bigger question. I tell people all the time this, and Bruce, you run a… Can I ask you, I mean, how many people, maybe not employees, but how many people work in your organization? How many people? Because you said you occupy nine floors, am I correct? Nine floors of a building? No, I actually have 12 suites. 12 suites, I’m sorry. So 12 suites. How many folks are working with you? I mean, do you have a couple dozen guys? Do you have hundreds of people? How many people are working with you? No, no. I want to make sure I say this correctly. Sure. We are extremely focused on basically taking no prisoners. Got it. We’re the company you go to when you unconditionally need to be in the top three. That’s what we do. And as a result, we don’t take every single account because they don’t really pony up and commit to doing the work necessary. One of the sayings I use is it’s funny how you will never get the results for the work you didn’t do. And we run into that all the time. Their eyes are bigger than their stomach. They have the ability to write a check, but they’re not willing to do the work to get there. And that is a problem that we run into often. But overall, it’s a tough thing. This is something that I want to get your take on, because you have a big team, people that work with you guys. It’s not about having the most employees necessarily. I’m just saying but you guys have a team of people that really know what they’re doing. I mean you probably have front-end coders and back-end coders, content writers, search engine experts. I mean you have a whole team there. And I think we have people that have been with us here at the company for over 15 years and people know what they’re doing. And people want though search engine to be an overnight thing. So someone said to me, Clay Clark as a business coach, what’s the key to building a great team? I would say every week, never stop interviewing, step one. Step two, never stop advertising that you’re hiring. Let’s go back to step one, never stop interviewing. Step two, never stop advertising. Step number one, interviewing, advertising. And you never stop, and you prune the tree over time. That is how I explain to people how search engine works. You’re never done. It’s like pulling weeds from a garden. Can you explain in your own words why you can never be done optimizing your website? Oh, absolutely. SEO has a tendency to be a loop. And as you know, loops don’t have an end. The search engine changing the algorithm five times a day causes you to have to do different things. A good example is five years ago, nobody was talking about mobile search being as important as it is. And certainly, nobody was talking about voice search. And nobody was talking about how different tags are being invented every year by the search engines to help them. And the word schema wasn’t even heard five years ago. So because the technology is moving ahead quickly, focused on helping the search engines understand what you’re about so that the proper answer can be given, that change alone isn’t going to end. I have another sign I use in my class, which is SEO is done when Google stops changing things and all your competition is dead. So, let me make sure the listeners get that. Search engine optimization. Google, Larry and Sergey, started Google. They’re out of their Stanford dorm rooms there. They started Google. They’re using campus computers. They grew it. They moved into the founder of, the lady who is now the CEO of YouTube’s garage to grow the company they kept growing it they brought on Eric Schmidt To be the CEO and to take the company to the next level They regret they they pushed back About monetizing the company for a long time really resisting advertisements that kind of thing They wanted to create the most pure and the best search results possible So you’d always find the most relevant search results when using Google. But Google’s the only company out there that you can kind of kill by simply switching to another search engine. I mean, so if you don’t find what you’re looking for on Google, right, and you go to Yahoo or Bing, all of a sudden Google’s not relevant anymore. So Google’s always trying to increase the quality of the search results it produces, which is why it’s always trying to stop scammers and Spammers, so I’d like for you to talk about scammers and Spammers remember back in the day Bruce people could just buy back links From a foreign country and they could be top in Google and then how that doesn’t work anymore You remember that Bruce? Oh, of course. I still run into it a lot of sites have poisoned themselves with those. So let’s start with that one. If you’ve purchased a bunch of backlinks that are absolutely not real, not legit, they’re from pop-up websites in third world countries, and by the way, Google knows, how do you remove or disavow or say, hey, I don’t want those backlinks? How do you remove those backlinks and tell Google, hey, hey, or maybe you’re a, I ran into a client, this was probably three years ago, their competitor bought backlinks and pointed them at them as a way to hurt their rank. How do you disavow or get rid of bad backlinks? The concept of links to you is that some other site is doing it to you. You don’t own that other site, they just choose the link to you. And what you’re referring to as bad links that a competitor pointed at you is referred to as negative SEO. It is clearly their attempt to poison your backlink profile in the eyes of the search engine so that the search engine thinks of you as a spammer. What we want to be able to do is to monitor our own backlinks, to determine what is acceptable, and then to get rid of the bad links. However, we don’t own those other sites, and that’s where a special process called Disavow was created. It turns out I actually was the guy that recommended it to the search engine. Are you looking for an accountant who is a true expert about tax and accounting, financial planning? Check out hoodcpas.com today. To claim your tickets to the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshop for free, all you have to do is to subscribe to the Thrive Time Show on iTunes. Leave an objective review and send us confirmation at info at thrive timeshow.com. To claim your star in the National Star Registry, we can’t help you. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show, we have the father of search engine optimization, Bruce Clay, with us on the program, and I want to make sure we kind of reset so we know what we’re talking about. Back links, whenever a site links to your website, if it’s a good website, if it’s not a scam site or an adult website or some site with a virus on it, it actually helps your website. If a site that’s related to you, related to your industry, links to you, then you’ll raise up higher in the search engines. So an example would be if like Forbes, I write for Forbes, if Forbes links to me, that helps my search engine rank. Now if you are a nefarious person and you want to do reverse search engine optimization to hurt your competitors, this is what you’ll do. You’ll go out there and you’ll go to a website where you can buy backlinks. So you can buy backlinks. There are sites out there today that will sell you backlinks. And you might say, well how do I find them? If you just type in buy backlinks, you’re gonna find a lot of websites right now that they will, you know, you can pay like 20 cents a backlink or a dollar a backlink, and then they’ll link back to you. Well, what happened was years ago with my company, DJ Connection, one of our competitors noticed that we were beating them in Google search results. So they paid a nefarious search engine company to put thousands of backlinks back to my website, thus killing my search engine rank. And Bruce Clay realized that a lot of business owners were doing that to each other. They were actually tanking each other’s websites by putting bad links to your website, to your competition’s website. And so he invented a process called disavow, which is where he educated the search engine optimization companies, Google, Bing, that kind of thing, about how this practice was hurting small business owners because shady business owners were putting bad links from bad websites to good websites. And so that is what we’re talking about. So without any further ado, back to our interview with the search engine wizard, the father of search engine optimization, Mr. Bruce Clay. And then to get rid of the bad links. However, we don’t own those other sites. And that’s where a special process called Disavow was created. It turns out I actually was the guy that recommended it to the search engines, to Matt Cutts and Bing. being. And so what it was supposed to be is I have somebody linking to me that I don’t want. I don’t control their site. I don’t want it to count against me. So there’s a process in place supported by the search engines where I can actually get rid of the bad links pointing to me. I disavow them. What you’re going to run into is you’re always going to see negative SEO guys out there that are trying to poison your backlink profile. Or you have people who are naive and don’t know anything about your product but they think that you’re a cool site and they steal your site. Or do they somehow scrape Google or something that actually hurts your overall ranking. At one point I had about 900,000 links to my website, which is a ridiculous number of links, in my opinion. And it was just somebody that wanted to poison me and lower my ranking by getting bad links pointing to me. Do you have a problem with Putin? I mean, did you and Putin get into an argument? Is that what happened? Did he dispute? Did he claim that he was the father of search engines? Is that how that happened? No, that hasn’t happened yet, but you know, you never know. All right. So you had all these people linking to you from Russia that you had no connection with, and so you thought to yourself, I’ve got to find a way to notify the search engines, and you arguably created this strategy called disavowing links. Is that correct? That is correct. Now, I want to ask you this next question here. As far as these are the scamming, the spamming, and you don’t want to poison your website. My partner, Jonathan, and I, we’re the renowned business coach, Eric Chup, who initially greeted you when we called you today. We see this all of the time, where you’ll see a client, Eric, I’m sure you’ve seen this, where a client will just literally copy the content from another website and paste it on their site. Other people, other people’s clients. I’m sure none of your clients have done this, Eric. No, it definitely happens, especially if they decide to delegate something like this to a member of their team that they don’t know that well. Yeah, I’ll get it done. And then you go look at this. And so we use Copyscape and SEMrush to check. And it’s obvious, Bruce, when someone copies on your, you know. But an owner of a company will say, hey, you know, John, the front desk guy, Karen, the front desk lady, could you please write the content for my homepage because I’m too busy? And then this person, let’s say the Karen or the Kelly or the Al or the Marvin, whoever it is that works for you, they’ll copy the content from your direct competitor and just paste it and go, all done, Bruce, I’ve written the content. It’s beautiful. But our team will discover that the content was in fact plagiarized and copied. Why is that absolutely lethal to your search engine ranking? Well, there’s multiple layers of that. The first is, you’re absolutely right, people do that all the time. They still do it to me. The part I really like is when they paste my content on their site, it still contains my phone number. That’s downright ignorant. I periodically get, you mentioned Copyscape and others, I periodically get notifications that other people have my content. Used to be that I was stolen often because I ranked so well. So it is an issue. Now to the search engine, you’re right at the edge. They don’t really have a penalty if you have that duplicate content. They don’t call it a penalty. But what happens is Google views you as not necessarily being the author of the content because they can’t tell who wrote it first. So what they end up doing is lowering the quality of your site in the rankings. That’s not a penalty. There’s duplicate content. We’re just not sure, so we’re not going to guess. And the search engine can actually diminish your ranking, but they don’t refer to it as a penalty. We’ve had cases where content was syndicated, where sites actually allowed other sites to use their content through a syndication contract. It turns out that a couple of our clients, being big clients, actually had syndication agreements with even bigger clients. And what would happen is they’d publish the content, they’d put it up on their website, the syndication would take it, it would be published on another website, they’re a bigger authority than you, they got credit for it, and you got hit. So Google has taken a position that even though there’s no penalty for you if you have duplicate content, there’s no penalty. They really think that you may not be the owner, you will see a filter, and your rankings can be impacted pretty much as a quality item. And so the rule is publish once and make it the best you can make it. Drive Nation, I encourage you during the break to check out one of our incredible show sponsors. That’s will-con.com. Will-con.com. That’s Williams Contract. And these guys will do a great job building a piece of commercial property for you, adding on to your church, adding on to your building. Check them out today at will-con.com. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show on talk radio 1170. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Conversation. On today’s show, we have the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, Bruce Clay, on the show. Now, Bruce Clay is explaining to you and I, the listeners, out there why you cannot copy content from another website and why, if you copy content from another website why it will absolutely destroy your search engine ranking. He’s also teaching you how the practical steps you can take to optimize your website and to get your company to the top of the search engine results so that you can get in front of your ideal and likely buyers who are searching for the products and services that they’re looking for online. This just in, your ideal and likely buyers are using the internet to search for the products and services that they are looking for. Chuck, I think a lot of people push back right there. They do, I don’t know, I’m in a different industry, all my business typically comes word of mouth. Why do I need to do search engine optimization, Chuck? Because you cannot rely on word of mouth alone, especially if you’re trying to grow something and you have big goals you’re trying to get to. So you’ve got to get out there. You’ve got to market. You’ve got to be on the top of the search results because it can literally be worth millions of dollars to you. Furthermore, you saying that the reason why you shouldn’t optimize your website is because all your clients currently come from word of mouth would be like me living in the forest, spending my entire day hunting for food and then saying to you, I have no need for this new thing you’re talking about called the grocery store because all of the food that I eat comes from hunting. So I don’t need, I don’t know what this is, you’re saying it’s two blocks away? So if I walk two blocks, I can go to the grocery store and have all the food I want? Nah. Well I don’t need this thing you call an automobile. I got a horse. I’m good. I track every single thing I kill and all of it comes from hunting. So I don’t need a grocery store. So screw off. I’m happy. You’re an idiot, and I don’t do search engines either, because 100% of my business comes word of mouth. You see, what happens is, the other people who live in the forest with me, they’re all extras from the movie Robin Hood, the one with Kevin Costner, all of us, we all know word of mouth, I kill more deer than anybody else out there. But if you do go to whatever that grocery store is, I would like to know if they sell beer, because currently it takes me like a half a year to make any. It takes a long time. Like one barrel. It takes me forever. You wouldn’t believe how long it takes me to crush the grapes, to make the wine, let it ferment. I need a drink because hunting is boring. Wait a minute. So you’re saying that there is a grocery store? Yes. Are you saying that my ideal and likely buyers, 80 to 90% of them are using search engines to find the products and search… What? Yes. Do you know what this means? According to Forbes. Chuck, Chuck. Do you know what this means? It means that this thing doesn’t work at all. All right, now back to our interview with Bruce Clay, the search engine guru. But if you spin it out to a bunch of other sites or if people on other sites steal your content, that will actually impact your perception as being a quality site for that particular article. Google doesn’t like the same article on multiple sites. They don’t like your content on other sites. One more thing, if what you did is you took the content and you randomly change a few of the words. Ooh, here we go, this is a hot button for me. That is considered spam by Google, not duplicate content. That’s worse. What you’ve done is you’ve actually tried to take the same content and manipulate it to get rankings for substantially the same structured content and Google believes that that is spam. So if I have an article, whatever the article is about chocolate fountains in Los Angeles and then somebody took it and put it chocolate fountains in New York, both ends could receive a penalty for that. So again, if you’re out there and you’re scamming and you’re spamming and you’re playing little games, that’s bad. But I think a lot of our listeners are not trying to play games, but someone in your office might be trying to play a game. I mean, you might be the owner of the business, but you hire somebody and they’re going, well, what’s the fastest way to get this done so I can go out and have a burrito? And so we’re talking about scamming and spamming and things you shouldn’t do. One of the things I have seen is people hiring a company in a third world country, typically, to write articles for them. And they use a service called a spinner service. The service, what it’ll do is you’ll send them the links, right, Bruce, to an article that you like, and they’ll promise they’ll send it back paraphrased. I mean, that’s just what they do. But the problem is Google knows what you’re doing. And as you mentioned earlier, that’s a form of spam. Can you talk to me about just categorically why spinners or hiring companies to write articles for you in third world countries is not a move? Well, there’s multiple layers to it. You mentioned Copyscape. Copyscape was originally designed to identify plagiarism because we all know that there’s no plagiarism issue with high schools or college papers, but that’s what they were designed to do. They were designed for an instructor to be able to say, here’s my paper, is it on the web? And if it is, then that’s plagiarism. Well, the search engines own their own index, and you have to believe that they know and have software to detect duplicate content or manipulated content or even re-sequenced content. So, all of that is bad. Your spinners, they did something a little bit different. What they would do is you would be able to hire a company, give them some keywords and a topic and here’s my website and they would write 50 pages for you, and all 50 pages were probably the fastest they could do it because they get paid per page, and they don’t charge a lot. So the faster they can pump out a page, the more they get paid. It isn’t that you actually have to write something that shows up in search. It isn’t that you actually have to have people like it, or even comment on it. It’s just, did you write a page? And when you go into that environment, Google has repeatedly issued warnings and penalties against companies for what is referred to as spinning. Now what spinning mechanically is, is I will write one article, it’ll be low quality, but to make up for it I’m going to put it on 25 sites and that’s the spinning part where you you take one piece of content and you put it everywhere and often that’s where they do the minor modification every time they publish it and that is always going to get you in trouble. Google has indicated that if you have content on multiple sites, they consider it duplicate content. No penalty for it, it’s duplicate content. They’re going to ignore it in many cases. They’ve also indicated if that content links to you, they consider that duplicate links and they’re going to ignore them too. So there’s no real value to you to have a piece of garbage content published on other websites that will accept anything and probably aren’t catering to your persona and your target market and the links don’t count that is just poisoning yourself and so Google has indicated that’s a serious problem and nobody does it anymore Unless you’re overseas and that’s all you know how to do to make money. Now Bruce, I want to talk to you now about simplifying the complexity of search engine optimization. You are arguably the father of search engine optimization, the best-selling author of search engine for dummies. You’re the guru. You are the Yoda of search engine optimization. And so I want to read you a notable quotable from Robert Green, the bestselling author of Mastery. And then I want to read you, I want to ask you a question. He says, in the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them. Those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and that could never focus enough to learn. My friend, the complexity of search engine optimization for many people, myself included, can be overwhelming which is why at the Thrive Time Show our team uses checklists for everything. We have checklists to help us manage the complexity of and the diligence required and the focus required to optimize our own websites. Can you talk to me about why the complexity of search engine optimization can be overwhelming for most people? Thrive Nation on tomorrow’s show Bruce Clay continues to break down how search engines work. The father of search engine optimization Bruce Clay will be back on tomorrow’s show to break down how search engines and search engine optimization works But before we wrap up today’s show, let me tell you about one of our great show sponsors and Tulsa’s number one Ford Automotive repair shop with over 80 years of combined experience. That’s RC auto specialist job RC auto Specialists calm what’s their phone number their phone number is 9 1 8 8 7 2 8 1 1 5 again Again, that’s 918-872-8115. You can check them out at rcautospecialists.com. Thrive Nation, there is no danger. Don’t be a stranger. Go to thrivetimeshow.com today. Podcasts, workshops, one-on-one coaching, it’s all there. I’m telling you, you can change your life simply by going to thrivetimeshow.com and implementing what you learn. Three, two, one, boom! 2020 was our best year in sales. We were 142% over what we were in 2019, which was the previous high sales year for the company. So it’s definitely a huge, huge step in the right direction for us. My name is Nick Beslick. My wife and I own Security Glass Block in West Dallas, Wisconsin just outside Milwaukee. Purchased the business end of 2019 and winter is typically a slow time of year but it was kind of too slow for for what I was looking for being a new business owner. So happened to be talking to this contractor, a customer of ours, and mentioned how he’s been working with the leadership initiative and really brought him back from almost having to close the doors as a business and really has brought them back strong. So I heard about it with him and I decided to kind of reach out and see how they could help us out. Currently, we’re working with them as a business coach. Obviously, they’re also helping us with our marketing, with our website, getting us to the top spot on Google, really helping us boost our Google reviews. But really, they’ve also helped us, being new business owners, they’ve helped us work through the checklist, putting together checklists for employees, getting rid of toxic employees, not being held captive by our employees, and not being able to own the business and grow the business how we want to by having the old culture that was kind of instilled with the previous owner. So right now we’re really working to kind of purge some of that old mindset of the eight original employees that they had were down to one that currently is still here. So again, just getting rid of that old mindset help us put together the process, put together the interview, the group interview system to get a lot of people in here in a short amount of time to really find the people that are gonna work best with us and how we wanna build the culture moving forward. In previous roles, in previous life before owning this business, I worked for a large company. We have plenty of consultants come and go for different various parts of the business, whether it was marketing or IT or sales, things like that. It’s just the follow-up, constantly getting in here, meeting once a week with a business coach, checking on what we’ve done from the previous week, making sure that we’re getting done what we need to be getting done to set ourselves up for success in the future. If we want to be independent of the business or have the business work independent from my wife and I as owners, so that way we can do other things or pursue other interests, it’s really just having the time to set the business up for success, put the processes in place. And I just think that’s the huge difference from other consultants that I’ve worked with in the past is the constant follow-up, the pushing you to get things done versus, okay, it’s not done, no big deal, we’ll just kind of move on mentality. So that’s been a great help for us. Extremely happy. I’d probably say I have a nine. The other one is probably just me still being new owners. Last year, we had the COVID came at the beginning of the year, but then the whole summer we had the best year that the company has ever had. So it was an extremely busy spring through the end of the year. So just the time on my behalf to sit down and get things done that need to be done to work on the business rather than working in the business. What was the real struggle? So still something we’re working through, bringing on new talent within the sales and the installation side of our business. As of right now, like I said, it’s just been a huge help. We still have a long way to go to fully get there. However, I think it’s been a huge success for us just in a short amount of time. But again, it’s also helping us put together a process that the company can run on without me being here every day. And so, you know, having that, that eventually when that’s all put together and running smoothly and we have the right people in the right seats on the bus, you know, I think that’s really going to help us. It’s going to open up more time for me to be able to spend with my family, which is the ultimate goal, or to spend time doing other interests or pursuing other business opportunities in the future. So definitely, definitely recommend working with the Leadership Initiative. 2020 was our best year in sales. what we were in 2019 which was the previous you know high sales year for the company so it’s definitely a huge huge step in the right direction for us where we’re currently outgrown our current facility so that’s that’s a good problem to have you know we need to figure out how we can do that in the future, but yeah, the sales have gone up ridiculous amounts and I think that’s a good part to the leadership initiative and just really getting us to the top of Google at this point. As of this point, like I said, it’s been a tough year. Because we’ve been so busy, it’s been hard for me to work on the business due to the high increase of sales, which is, again, a good problem to have. But now that we have those people, getting the right people within the company that can take over some of those day-to-day operations that I was doing pretty much everything for, it is definitely going to help. So the emotional lens, besides just the comfort level of, hey, we’re losing 35 years of experience with people that are leaving. If you had asked me in the spring or the summer how I felt about that I would have been extremely nervous. But right now just with the processes in place again the getting people in here to in the group interview system along with just the the checks the checklists the checks and balances of making sure everybody’s doing what they need to be doing to have the company run smoothly It has been a huge weight off my shoulders. We need to we need to enact those things at this point, but right now just knowing that it’s there knowing that we’re working on it and working towards those goals is a huge I’d say huge emotional support for me at this point, so that’s definitely a win in my book. The number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. We are Jared and Jennifer Johnson. We own Platinum Pest and Lawn and are located in Owasso, Oklahoma. And we have been working with Thrive for business coaching for almost a year now. Yeah. So what we want to do is we want to share some wins with you guys that we’ve had by working with Thrive. First of all, we’re on the top page of Google now. I just want to let you know what type of accomplishment this is. Our competition, Orkin, Terminex, they’re both $1.3 billion companies. They both have 2,000 to 3,000 pages of content attached to their website. So to basically go from virtually nonexistent on Google to up on the top page is really saying something. But it’s come by being diligent to the systems that Thrive has, by being consistent and diligent on doing podcasts and staying on top of those podcasts to really help with getting up on what they’re listing and ranking there with Google. And also, we’ve been trying to get Google reviews, asking our customers for reviews. And now we’re the highest rated and most reviewed pest and lawn company in the Tulsa area. And that’s really helped with our conversion rate. And the number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. Wait, say that again. How much are we up? 411%. So 411% we’re up with our new customers. Amazing. Right. So not only do we have more customers calling in, we’re able to close those deals at a much higher rate than we were before. Right now our closing rate is about 85%, and that’s largely due to, first of all, like our Google reviews that we’ve gotten. People really see that our customers are happy, but also we have a script that we follow. And so when customers call in, they get all the information that they need. That script has been refined time and time again. It wasn’t a one-and-done deal. It was a system that we followed with Thrive in the refining process. And that has obviously, the 411% shows that that system works. Yeah, so here’s a big one for you. So last week alone, our booking percentage was 91%. We actually booked more deals, more new customers last year than we did the first five months, or I’m sorry, we booked more deals last week than we did the first five months of last year from before we worked with Thrive. So again, we booked more deals last week than the first five months of last year. And it’s incredible, but the reason why we have that success by implementing the systems that Thrive has taught us and helped us out with. Some of those systems that we’ve implemented are group interviews, that way we’ve really been able to come up with a really great team. We’ve created and implemented checklists that when everything gets done and it gets done right. It creates accountability. We’re able to make sure that everything gets done properly both out in the field and also in our office. And also doing the podcast like Jared had mentioned that has really, really contributed to our success. But that, like the diligence and consistency in doing those in that system has really, really been a big blessing in our lives. And also, it’s really shown that we’ve gotten a success from following those systems. So before working with Thrive, we were basically stuck. Really no new growth with our business. And we were in a rut, and we didn’t know. Oh, sorry. The last three years, our customer base had pretty much stayed the same. We weren’t shrinking, but we weren’t really growing either. Yeah, and so we didn’t really know where to go, what to do, how to get out of this rut that we’re in. But Thrive helped us with that. You know, they implemented those systems, they taught us those systems, they taught us the knowledge that we needed in order to succeed. Now it’s been a grind, absolutely it’s been a grind this last year, but we’re getting those fruits from that hard work and the diligent effort that we’re able to put into it. So again, we were in a rut, Thrive helped us get out of that rut, and if you’re thinking about working with Thrive, quit thinking about it and just do it. Do the action and you’ll get the results. It will take hard work and discipline, but that’s what it’s gonna take in order to really succeed. So, I just wanna give a big shout out to Thrive, a big thank you out there to Thrive. We wouldn’t be where we’re at now without their help. Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Moore, I’m a pediatric dentist. Through our new digital marketing plan, we have seen a marked increase in the number of new patients that we’re seeing every month, year over year. One month, for example, we went from 110 new patients the previous year to over 180 new patients in the same month. And overall, our average is running about 40 to 42 percent increase month over month, year over year. The group of people required to implement our new digital marketing plan is immense. Starting with a business coach, videographers, photographers, web designers. Back when I graduated dental school in 1985, nobody advertised. The only marketing that was ethically allowed in everybody’s eyes was mouth-to-mouth marketing. By choosing to use the services, you’re choosing to use a proof and turnkey marketing and coaching system that will grow your practice and get you the results that you’re looking for. I went to the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry, graduated in 1983, and then I did my pediatric dental residency at Baylor College of Dentistry from 1983 to 1985. The Thrivetime Show, two-day interactive business workshops, are the highest and most reviewed business workshops on the planet. You can learn the proven 13-point business systems that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. When we get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website, we’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two-day, 15-hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter Bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on-hot-coals product. It’s literally we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, and I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert, Zellner, and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses, or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever and we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you and we’re excited to see it. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey with Tip Top K9 and I’m the founder. I’m Rachel Wimpey and I am a co-founder. So we’ve been running Tip Top for about the last 14 years, franchising for the last 3-4 years. So someone that would be a good fit for Tip Top loves dogs, they’re high energy, they want to be able to own their own job, but they don’t want to worry about that high failure rate. They want to do that like bowling with bumper lanes. So you give us a call, reach out to us, we’ll call you, and then we’ll send you an FDD, look over that, read it, fall asleep to it, it’s very boring. And then we’ll book a discovery day, and you come and you can spend a day or two with us, make sure that you actually like it, make sure your canine dog does something that you want to do. So an FCD is a Franchise Disclosure Document. It’s a federally regulated document that goes into all the nitty-gritty details of what the franchise agreement entails. So who would be a good fit to buy a Tip Top Canine would be somebody who loves dogs, who wants to work with dogs all day as their profession. You’ll make a lot of money, you’ll have a lot of fun, it’s very rewarding. And who would not be a good fit is a cat person. So the upfront cost for tip top is $43,000. And a lot of people say they’re generating doctor money, but on our disclosure the numbers are anywhere from over a million dollars a year in dog training, what our Oklahoma City location did 25, 35 grand a month. To train and get trained by us for Tip Top K9 to run your own Tip Top K9, you would be with us for six weeks here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So we’ve been married for seven years. Eight years. Eight years. So if you’re watching this video, you’re like, hey, maybe I want to be a dog trainer. Hey, that one sounds super amazing. Go to our website, tiptopk9.com, click on the yellow franchising tab, fill out the form, and Rachel and I will give you a call. Our Oklahoma City location last year they did over a million dollars. He’s been running that shop for three years before he was a youth pastor with zero sales experience zero dog training experience before he ever met with us. So just call us come spend a day with us spend a couple days with us make sure you like training dogs and own your own business. Well the biggest reason to buy a Tip Top K9 is so you own your own job and you own your own future and you don’t hate your life you get an enjoyable job that brings a lot of income but it’s really rewarding. My name is Seth Flint and I had originally heard about tip-top canine through my old pastors who I worked for. They did a phenomenal job and became really good friends with Ryan and Rachel. I was working at a local church and it was a great experience. I ended up leaving there and working with Ryan and Tip Top K9. The biggest thing that I really really enjoy about being self-employed is that I can create my own schedule. I have the ability to spend more time with my family, my wife and my daughter. So my very favorite thing about training dogs with Tip Top K9 is that I get to work with the people. Obviously I love working with dogs, but it’s just so rewarding to be able to train a dog that had serious issues, whether it’s behavioral or you know whatever and seeing a transformation taking that dog home and mom and dad are literally in tears because of how happy they are with the training. If somebody is interested I’d say don’t hesitate make sure you like dogs make sure that you enjoy working with people because we’re not just dog trainers, we are customer service people that help dogs and and so definitely definitely don’t hesitate just just come in and ask questions ask all the definitely don’t hesitate just just come in and ask questions ask all the questions you have.