Business Podcast | How to Optimize Websites & Build Dream Teams | “I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish & what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100.” – Steve Jobs + TipTopK9.com Success

Audio Transcription

I’ve built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people and not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A players. And I found something. I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go through the incredible work to find, you know, five of these A players, they really like working with each other because they’ve never had a chance to do that before. And they don’t want to work with B and C players. And so it becomes self-policing and they only want to hire more A players. And so you build up these pockets of A players and it propagates. Steve? Yes. Thanks for coming in today. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I appreciate you applying for the job. Always. When’s the earliest you could start, Tyler? Kyler. Mrs. Anderson? You can call me Marlene. Okay, Marlene, we appreciate you applying for the job. I appreciate being here. Let’s just dive right in. Boom! Go! What’s your availability like? I’m boycotting Daylight Savings Time, so I’ll either be an hour early or an hour late, depending on the seasons. Tell me a little about yourself. My mom says I have to get a job, so that’s why I’m here, because he wants me to get a job. Why did you leave your last job? Of course, Harry, he was, he was, I just felt like he was looking at me in a particular way. Of course, he was blind, so I don’t know why I feel that. Why did you leave your last job, Steve? Fired. Next question. So what do you think you bring to the table? I can read people’s energies. Let me read your energy real quick. You’re a coyote. Congratulations. I don’t run errands, and I don’t answer the phone. You know what I do? I look hot. 24… hot. Whatever you need, I can do it. Janitor, CEO, cook, I can do it all. And I have done it all. And I will do it all. Okay, so you do have experience in all of those areas. No, but I just believe I can do it. So, availability, you know, that’s kind of a week-to-week thing for me. You know, I really just kind of like, we’ll see. So what do you consider your weaknesses? Chocolate, candy, Snickers, Reese’s Pizzas. Becky, I think we’re done here. Do I get the job? Get ready to enter the Thrivetime Show. The Thrive Time Show. That’s what I’m about. So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them 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, now that’s what we gotta do. Rive Nation, on today’s show, we’re going to interview Matt Klein. And I want everyone to really dial into today’s show and potentially even take some notes. There’s this thing called the dynamic range. Steve Jobs wrote about this, the co-founder of Apple. He said that the dynamic range between A players and B players and C players, it can be massive. What does that mean, a dynamic range? I mean, you give, you hire a guy to do a job and there might be someone on your team that does the job 10 times better than everybody else, even though it’s the same job. And that’s the same thing in franchising. And so if you’re out there today and you want to buy a time freedom and financial freedom creating business, a business that gives you the opportunity to create time freedom and financial freedom, I encourage you to look into Oxifresh.com, O-X-I-Fresh.com. But at Oxifresh, just like with any sport or any business, the dynamic range can be massive between the most successful person and the least successful person. I want to take a moment to brag on this Oxifresh franchisee that’s just doing an awesome job, according to Matt Klein, the franchise brand developer. Matt Klein, welcome on to the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? Awesome, thanks for having me. Well, hey, let’s dive into this franchisee here and tell us what are they doing well? What is it that they’re doing so well that’s allowing their OxiFresh franchise to thrive? Yeah, you know, one of the things that you’ve talked about a lot and we talk about a lot is really trying to understand the value of getting Google reviews to establish a good footing in the marketing realm of what you’re trying to do, right? Like if you need to get reviews from your customers and from your network of folks so that your end user can see that you’re a valid company with a lot of reviews, a lot of recent reviews, like he’s probably been the best franchise in the last five years at getting reviews. He understood from the moment he started talking to us that was important. We overemphasized that throughout the process of evaluating. The moment he got his franchise, he was just so aggressive on doing it that he probably outpaced the average franchise by six months in terms of growth. Because it wasn’t a question. He was one to almost set the new standard for when we launch a franchise, what’s to be expected on getting reviews. Because he broke the mold, right? We thought getting a few reviews a day was good. I mean, he was getting 20 reviews a day. Because he knew that for him to make money and make money faster, he needs to get Google Pages at a ranking. In order to do that, he had to garnish reviews. And so, he just, that’s how he started his business. But just now he’s growing. In a year, he’s expanded to, I think, five more territories. He just was able to take over most of Seattle. And he started with just one, got through reviews, proof of concept, and now he bought out all of his neighbors. So he’s just a very special franchise. What do we need to do to look him up? How do we find him online? What do we need to search for? We need to OxyFresh Washington, or we need to look for Beautiful Man, or how do we see him? Is he in Tacoma? He is not in Tacoma. He… Is he in CHOP, that area that used to be like a Pied Protest zone? And is he in that area there? Where was that? I don’t think he’s in… That was in Oregon? CHAS or CHOP. CHAS or maybe he’s at the territory he got is the CHAS tent city. What’d you guys charge him for that? You just throw that free zone in, you say, hey, you buy… It was a free… Yeah, he didn’t have to pay a lot for that one. That one was pretty already set. Here, I’ll show you real quick the area that he actually is in. Okay, we’re pulling it up here, folks. He just bought five more territories, which is pretty cool for him. He’s going to own, he’ll own the most of anybody in the Washington market. And I point, the reason why I want to hammer this as you’re pulling that up there, looking that up, is that it is entirely possible to be super successful quickly as an Oxifresh owner. It is possible. You could, if you want to, for whatever reason, go as slow as possible. I don’t quite understand that. And then what you’ll do, not that your people have ever done this to you, Matt, no Oxyfresh franchisee would ever do this, but I find that the people that do the least activity have the most questions. Let me try that again. The person who has the lowest amount of activity usually has the most questions. I saw it in basketball. I was a pretty decent basketball player, but I found the guy, Matt, that didn’t work out, didn’t want to practice, didn’t want to shoot, didn’t want to hustle, always had the most strategic questions with the coach. Always wanted to know, you know, he had 45 questions about the same play. He’s going, coach, in the Omaha, if he does a pick and then he rolls and I set a screen and then he goes baseline, what happens then? And the coach is like, listen, I just need you to run to your position. Yeah, but coach, if the Earth’s gravitational pull were to change during the game, and let’s suppose that I was playing small forward as opposed to shooting guard, where would I go to stop and just run the play? And I find in business it’s the same thing, Matt. People who have the most questions typically are the least productive. So tell us about this guy. I mean, he’s high action. Where can we find him? Yeah, Kirkland, Washington, Cottage Lake, Washington. You’ll know in either of those cities that he’ll rank in the top of Google. And he hasn’t owned these for that long. Kirkland, Washington. Now I’m doing a search for Kirkland, Washington, carpet cleaning. There he is. Now I just wanna show people this real quick just so we get this. I got one of my clients. Now again, to be top of Google, there’s four main components. We don’t have time to get all of them on today’s show. On part two of today’s show though, we will have a search engine expert named Bruce Clay that will join us. But there are four major components to raking top in Google. The first one is you have to have the most, I call it canonically compliant. A lot of search engine nerds will say that phrase. They’ll say canonically. We’ll just call it Google compliant. Okay, let’s not overcomplicate it. Whoever has the website that adheres to the Google standards for how a website should be optimized, that has to happen. So if you type in Joplin gyms into Google, Joplin gyms, J-O-P-L-I-N, Joplin gyms, you’ll see my long-time client, Kola Fitness, comes up top. But you say, well, why does he come up top? Is he a good guy? Yeah, he’s a great guy. Is he highly motivated? He’s highly motivated. But why does he come up top? One, he follows the Google rules. Two, he has the most reviews. Now, Matt, this guy, he shows up at my conference about six years ago, seven years ago. He says, dude, I’m competing against Planet Fitness. What do I need to do? I said, brother, my team, we’ll build the website for you. We’ll do that, step one. Step two, we’re gonna make it mobile compliant. We’ll do that. But what I need you to do is I need you to get a Google review from every single person that works out in your gym. So what he does, Matt, is he says to people, he says, hey, how was your workout today? They say, fine. He says, hey, if you could leave an objective review about your experience today, I’ll be happy to give you a protein bar. And you just, you know, just for taking the time and don’t feel the need to leave a five star or a one star, just whatever you feel. I just want to get your feedback from you. Look at this guy. He’s got 10,000 Google reviews. And look at this 24 elite gym. They’re like, guys, we need to hit a 9,800 pointer here because we only have a hundred and thirty three. I mean he is just on the grind. And so this guy in Kirkland I mean this guy is after it. You’re saying he has how many territories now. He just bought. We’re in the process of transferring five more areas. If you go to Cottage Lake Washington just take Kirkland out. Cottage Lake. Cottage Lake. Home of the Lake Cottages. Oh look at that. Oh oh he’s still in this. He has how many. Pretty new too. Oh, look at that. Oh, oh, he’s feeling it. He has how many? He’s pretty new, too. So he’s just, he’s really embraced it and he’s going to continue to do that. But a few months ago, he had no ranking and now he’s already at 192. But he leapfrogged over 200 carpet cleaners to be in this space just by his efforts. It’s not even money. It’s not paying for this spot. those reviews just like you’re talking about. Now I want to talk about this for a second because this is so big I’m taking notes here this is some powerful stuff here. Also you know when you run an OxyFresh you’re gonna have to have people that clean the carpet. You’re gonna have to people that clean the carpet. And so today I’ll speak very vague Mac so I’m gonna be I never know if my employees listen to these shows and if they do I want to be vague. So here we go. So today I had a person, I’m not going to say their gender, no, I’m not going to do that, I want to but I won’t. This person comes to me and says, I’m not going to work here anymore. After years of working here. And I, really? What has happened? I just feel like the work dynamic, the culture is weird. I find out, said employee is dating another employee, all without my knowledge and it didn’t work out well. And so it turns out, Matt, if you’re sometimes sleeping in the same house as an employee and your things aren’t working out and you know, whoever that looks like. And so what I have to do, I do today, Matt, is I had to have this employee that’s just not working out. The culture is getting weird. I’m like, the culture is getting weird. What happened? It’s just not working out. I find out though, be like, did you hear the thing? What thing? Those two broke up. I didn’t even know they were together, man. That’s how I try to stay out of their zone. So then, Matt, what I have to do today is I’ve got to figure out, okay, who’s the golden baby? Who can stay, who can go, that whole thing, you know? So I figured out who can stay. The other person, thankfully, wants to go. But I have to have somebody ready to go. And so what I do every single week, it might sound crazy, folks, but every single week I interview candidates. And I mean this, folks, I do it every single week. Every single Monday I’m cross-training so that I have people ready to go into the next spot. Much like a football team might have a backup kicker ready to go, or a backup running back, or a backup quarterback. I have to have people ready to go. And from my experience, having worked with OxyFresh for the last 10, 15 years or so, I’ve noticed that the franchisees that are always recruiting always do well. Can you talk about that, Matt, the importance of never hosting and feeling like, finally, we’ve got the dream team, baby. Yeah, I mean, you might have the dream team, but life happens, things happen, there’s things out of your control, right? In your situation, that one’s just not awesome. But, you know, I have folks that, you know, their significant other had to leave the state or whatever. You know, there’s nothing that they can do. So, if you don’t have someone at least that you know that’s gonna be in that place, I mean, you’re gonna have to scrap real quick to try to find someone. You might make decisions on that employee that you don’t like because you’re in a bad spot. So, having someone to take their place that you’ve already vetted, right? That’s kind of hanging in the wind, in the wings there is important. So yeah, I think for what you’re trying to accomplish is that you’re preparing for an environment that’s pretty unreliable, right? I mean, you can have reliable people, but the more people you have on your team, the more ability, or not the ability, the more probability that things are going to happen, right? And so you’re just putting yourself in a prepared spot to where if something does like today, you’ll be able to replace them and do that very quickly. If you are rehiring for every person that leaves, you’re basically, you’re having to put more effort in, you’re having to make decisions very quickly, and you may hire people that aren’t the best at that position because you have to do it in such a time frame. Powerful, powerful folks to always stay ahead of it. And again, there are many other difference makers that you have to make on a daily basis if you want to grow an oxy fresh. Many things are, we call that key performance indicator, indicators, key performance indicators, KPIs. In my office, we call them CRAP, four repeatable actionable processes. You got to know the CRAP. What CRAP do you have to do? Four repeatable actionable processes. What are the four repeatable actionable processes that you need to master? And if you’re out there today and you’re saying, you know what, I want to create time freedom and financial freedom. I recommend that you don’t become a rocket scientist. And you say, why? Because I don’t know how scalable that is. I don’t know how scalable that is to find somebody with the mental capacity and or tenacity needed to understand what makes space travel possible. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. But I can tell you this, if you want to build a business without having to recruit a team of rocket scientists, but people that are smart and hardworking, if you’re looking to find a to build a business that can be built upon what normal everyday people can do, I recommend you look into an Oxifresh. It’s not hard to find great staff. It’s not hard to find great employees. It’s not hard to build a team because Oxifresh has built a very scalable process. And you can learn more about opening your own Oxifresh today by going to thrivetimeshow.com forward slash Oxifresh. Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash Oxifresh. Matt Klein, I’ll give you the final word there, sir. What would you say to anybody out there thinking about buying an Oxifresh franchise, sir? Yeah, it’s a great time. You know, the future is kind of unreliable at the moment. So, you know, I talked to a ton of people that, you know, they’re either fired from their job or let go of their job or they’re having a hard time trying to get to where they want to be. And this is a really good option. It doesn’t take any time or a lot of time, doesn’t take any money to go through the evaluation of a franchise, right? We’ll figure out who you are, what you’re trying to accomplish. We’ll look at territory. All that stuff is just a little bit of time. It doesn’t take money. And you might find out that you’re a great fit for a business with the skills you’ve had, or maybe you’re a young person that just doesn’t want a boss. We have all sorts of franchises right now, all different walks of life, backgrounds, family dynamics. Give it a shot. If you come out the other end and you realize that you don’t want to be a franchise, there’s no risk. Hey, man, Matt Klein, thank you for carving out time for us again, folks. If you want to learn about buying an Oxifresh franchise, it’s one of the world’s most affordable franchises. You can learn more today by going to thrivetimeshow.com forward slash Oxifresh, thrivetimeshow.com forward slash Oxifresh. And for a limited time, if you do schedule a consultation with Matt Klein, we will allow you to be a third person on a dream date with Matt Klein and his wife. You can go with Matt Klein and his wife to wherever they’re going to be going. You can, I’m just messing with you folks, but again, that’s something people ask for Matt, and I tell people that’s not available. We’re not going to allow people to be a third wheel on a dream date with you and your wife Matt. I appreciate you for setting the boundaries there sir. All right, I think that’s good. All right, see ya. Two men, 13 multi-million 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 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 actually pay the bills and to teach you the proven systems that will allow 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, Pizza Hut, for Pizza Hut, for Charlton Heston, for Bush’s 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. He writes the search engine for dummies on search engine optimization. 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’s 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 and 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. Well that’s what 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, 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 gonna change somebody’s life, and 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, Surge 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 767 pages long. How long right 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 that the difference between a dummies book and a normal book is that dummies will not allow you to 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, 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 of 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 was 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. Your name comes up in conversations a lot. 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, you know, 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 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. Oh, hey, real quick, real quick. I have an audio clip from somebody, 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. That’s from the movie Tommy Boy there, Bruce. So hopefully that tribute did you justice, my friend. So your credit as being the father of search engines. I know this, because I feel like I’m a, it’s 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, did you, 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. I guess the benefit to me is by the time somebody has gone to the site and learned 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, and 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. 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 prime time show on your radio. Stay tuned. All right, 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’ve 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 accounts. Chuck, why can you really not find a legitimate search engine optimization company that’s going to do it for $200 a month? Why does it never work? Because it takes more time than that. Like it’s a simple math. Like you can only get a few hours of work for 200 bucks from somebody that knows what they’re doing. And so 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. 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 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 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, if 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 and what kind of website is absolutely not findable by search engines and 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. They’re not writers. They’re people who can build pretty things. 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. site, there’s three ways to 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. And 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 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 because I want it to look like Nike. Well yeah, and that 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 Lay. 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 Find out more about it. 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 are definitely going to be spending, he talks about it during the interview, $200 minimum per article. Minimum. He’s talking about thousands of dollars a month for search engine optimization. We’re talking 6,000 a month, 7,000. He talks about clients that their website has 12 million pages when they come to them. Right. And they gotta re-optimize and rewrite and everything. This is a big deal. Bruce is search engine optimization on the next level. And so what 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 wanna 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 got to 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-tos and things like that online. Digital is the way of the world now. And yeah, you’ve got to be there. Now, we talk about, you kind of get it, that’s high level. We’ve got to 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 of 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 I’d say 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. OK. So metadata, actually, metadata is data about data. So in a portion of your webpage, 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 what would be a number of 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 other tags. 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 hairstylist and I’m in Boise. Talk to me about keywords. So 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 that download this podcast. I wanna 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 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? So if I am in Boise and I need to find a dentist because at 2 AM 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. 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, 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 web page. 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 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, 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 that you can implement these systems and strategies in your own life and business. Clay. Clay. Clay. 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 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 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 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 write content every day. And Bruce, I 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 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 it, 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? Because I believe I have a psychological problem called I enjoy grinding. 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. We would partner with you. 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. It isn’t just writing, it’s far more complex. And 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. It is unfortunate, but that is the case. We’ve had many projects where we become the company’s writing team, 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 gonna write a thousand words for somebody I mean you’re gonna charge them six dollars, twelve dollars, seven cents. I mean there’s a lot of companies in India right now and you’re aware of this Mr. Bruce. I mean your company’s in India. Companies based in China right now. Companies in the Middle East will say I will write you an article right now for $9. 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. 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, maybe a thousand word article, you think, $200? Is that a low average, you think, maybe? That’s a low average if it is more technical It takes longer now I’m gonna 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. It’s good. It’s gonna blow someone’s mind 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 them. 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 thrive timeshow.com Hey Chubb, are you familiar with that thing called the internet? Enter in the net, that’s when you catch fish, internet, right? Chubb, I’ll tell you this man, there’s people out there starting to use this thing called Google Oh, I don’t know if they do. 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, I ain’t, I ain’t knowing nothing about it. Now, man, you want a V8, I know that about engines. Chuck, do you think I should grow out my perm or just kind of let it be? Yeah, you gotta 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, you know what we say? What is that? You know what they say? See you abroad to get that booty, yackle. Leg or down or smack or 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, you know, 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, yakka, leg her down, or smack him, yakka. 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. 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 Clay. 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. $200. 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 them. Pages. Bruce, I want you to help me out 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 anyone 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 that 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. 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 homepage, and then your homepage distributes that power to your subpages. 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 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. 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, and 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? Well, you can get away with almost none. We’ve seen well-performing pages that have fewer than 100 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, hey, 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. If everything was working correctly, then theoretically everybody would be number one. But in fact, most sites are their own worst enemy. 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. And 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 and 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, 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. Twelve suites. I’m sorry. So 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. We are extremely focused on basically taking no prisoners. 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. Jeff, I wanna 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. That’s OnyxImaging.com, or call them at 918-627-6611. Stay tuned. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. Alright, 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 Klepp. 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. 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 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. We are extremely focused on basically taking no prisoners. 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. And 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 and content writers, search engine experts. I mean, you have a whole team there. And I think a lot of people- Yeah, we have people that have been with us here at the company for over 15 years. And people- They 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’s 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 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 backlinks from a foreign country and they could be topping Google, and then how that doesn’t work anymore? Do 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 is probably what, 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? Well, the concept of links to you is that some other site doing it to you. I mean, 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 Thrivetimeshow.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. You might say, well how do I find them? If you just type in buy backlinks, you’re going to 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 being 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 now 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. 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. 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 turned out that a vast majority of them were spammers or they came from Russia. And it was just somebody that wanted to poison me and lower my ranking by getting bad links pointing to me. Did 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, the renowned business coach, Eric Chupp, 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. Yeah. I’m sure none of your clients are doing this, Eric. Right, right. 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, that’s all the- 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, and 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 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 in a 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, you know, 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. And 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. Thrive 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? Yeah. 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 them an automobile. I got a horse. 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. 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… What? Yes, we’re saying that. Do you know what this means? According to Forbes. 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, right? 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 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 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 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. 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. You’re 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 best-selling 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 can 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 RCAutoSpecialist.com. What’s their phone number? Their phone number is 918-872-8115. 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! I’m Rachel Wood. I’m going to be your host for this week. I’m going to be your host for this week. I’m going to be your host for this week. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9 and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys, we appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house. Right, this is where we used to live a few years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See? It’s nice, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing. And this is our old team. And by team, I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing and this is our new team. We went from four to 14 and I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman. So we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd, we’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship, and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, times a thousand. The Thrive Time 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 gonna teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re gonna 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 gonna leave energized, motivated, but you’re also gonna 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, but 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. Alright, and now ladies and gentlemen I’m going to bring up my good friend Ryan Wimpy, my good friend Ryan Wimpy, and his dog Odin, this dog has the ability to eat me so I’m sort of concerned. I’ll pass the mic to you and Odin you can have your own mic if you want, whatever you want Odin. Okay, I’m a little bit afraid of Odin. Hi, I’m Ryan Wimpy. And I’m Rachel Wimpy, and the name of our business is Kip Top Canine. Our business is a dog training business. We help people with behavioral issues and teach their dog how to listen. When I was learning to become a dog trainer, we didn’t learn anything about Internet marketing or advertising or anything at all, just dog training. And that’s what’s so great about working with Clay and his team, because they do it all for us. So that we can focus on our passion and that’s training us. Clay and his team here, they’re so enthusiastic. Their energy is off the charts. Never a dull moment. They’re a threat. We’ve been working with Clay and his team for the last five months, two of which have been our biggest months ever. One, our biggest gross by 35%. Clay’s helped us make anything from brochures to stickers, new business cards, new logos, scripts for phones, scripts for email, scripts for text messages, scripts for everything. How I would describe the weekly meetings with Clay and his team are awesome. They’re so effective. It’s worth every minute. Things get done. We’ll ask for things like different flyers and they’re done before our hour is up. So it’s just awesome, extremely effective. If you don’t use Clay and his team, you’re probably going to be pulling your hair out or you’re going to spend half of your time trying to figure out the online marketing game and producing your own flyers and marketing materials, print materials, all the stuff like that. You’re really losing a lot as far as lost productivity and lost time. Not having a professional do it has a real sense of urgency and actually knows what they’re doing when you already have something that’s your core focus that you already know how to do. You would also be missing out with all the time and financial freedom that you would have working with Clay and his team. We would recommend Clay and his team to other business owners because they need to be working on their business, not just trying to figure out the online game, which is complex and changing daily. So, no one has a marketing team, too. Most people don’t, they can’t afford one, and their local web guy or local person that they know probably can’t do everything that a whole team and a whole floor of people can do in hours and not just weeks or months. There’s a definite sense of urgency with Clay and his team. I used to have to ride other web people, I mean really ride them to get stuff done, and stuff is done so fast here. There’s a real sense of urgency to get it done. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey. I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I’ve definitely learned a lot about life design and making sure the business serves you. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us in getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. We have workflows that are kind of all over the place, so having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards is pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super, it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Play is hilarious. I literally laughed so hard that I started having tears yesterday. And we’ve been learning a lot. We’ve been sitting here, we’ve been learning a lot, so the humor definitely helps. It breaks it up. But the content is awesome, off the charts, and it’s very interactive. You can raise your hand, it’s not like you’re just listening to the professor speak. The wizard teaches, but the wizard interacts and he takes questions, so that’s awesome. If you’re not attending the conference, you’re missing about three quarters to half of your life. You’re definitely, it’s probably worth a couple thousand dollars. So, you’re missing the thought process of someone that’s already started like nine profitable businesses. So, not only is it a lot of good information, but just getting in the thought process of Clay Clark or Dr. Zellner or any of the other coaches getting in the thought process of how they’re starting all these businesses To me just that is it’s priceless. That’s that’s money Well, we’re definitely not getting up sold here My wife and I have attended conferences where they up what was great information and then they up sold us like half the conference I don’t want to like bang my head into a wall And she’s like banging her head into the chair in front of her. Like it’s good information but we’re like oh my gosh I want to strangle you shut up and go with the presentation that we paid for and that’s not here. There’s no upsells or anything so that’s awesome I hate that. It makes me angry so glad that’s not happening. So the cost of this conference is quite a bit cheaper than business college. I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business. And I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using for the last nine years. So what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school. And I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. I would definitely recommend that people would check out the Thrive 15 conference, it’s the information that you’re going to get is just very, very beneficial and the mindset that you’re going to get, that you’re going to leave with is just absolutely worth the price of a little bit of money and a few days worth of your time. Alright JT, so hypothetically, in your mind, what is the purpose of having a business? To get you to your goals, so it’s a vehicle to get you to your destination. And would you need profits to get there? I mean, when you have a business that’s successful, in your expert opinion, would you need profits to get you to your goals? Yeah, because if you have a $15 million business, but you have $15 million of expenses, it’s kind of pointless. Holy crap. All right, so the question I would have here for you, if you could take, I don’t know, 10 minutes or less and see if you could save $3,000 a year by reducing your credit card fees. Would you do it? Yes, absolutely. Holy crap. Why would somebody out there who’s listening right now, who has a sane mind, why would they not go to Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card, Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card to schedule a 10 minute consultation to see if they can reduce their credit card fees by at least 3,000 bucks a year Why would they not do it? Yeah? Why would they not do it? Maybe because they understand how you said the website This tree is a symbol of the spirit of the grid wall family Christmas No, that’s that’s clear. Okay, so that that can be a deck can be true So I would encourage everybody check out thrive time show calm board slash credit dash cards right time show calm board slash credit dash card What would be another reason why someone would not be willing to take 10 minutes to compare rates to see if they could save? $3,000 or more on credit card fees. Maybe they think it is a waste of time and then it won’t it’s not possible There’s somebody out there. Okay. Well, I’ll just tell you folks, if you’re out there today and you’re making less than $3,000 per 10 minutes, I would highly recommend that you go to thrive. Time should I come forward slash credit dash hard because you can compare rates, you can save money. And, you know, the big, the big goal, in my opinion, of building a business is to create time, freedom and financial freedom. And in order to do that, you have to maximize your profits. Holy crap! Now, one way to maximize your profits is to increase your revenue. Another way to do it is to decrease your expenses. It’s a profit deal! It takes the pressure off. JT, is there any other reason why somebody would not be willing to take 10 minutes to compare rates to see if they could save a total of $3,000 a year on average I Am at a loss and I cannot think of any other shampoo is better. I go on first and clean the hair Conditioner is better. I leave the hair silky and smooth. Oh really fool? Really fool, really! Stop looking at me, swan! Let me tell you a good story here real quick. I actually years ago compared rates with this company here called IPS. It’s Integrated Payment Services. And I scheduled a consultation. I don’t know if I was skeptical. I just thought, whatever, I’ll take ten minutes. I’ll compare rates. I can’t tell. You can tell me I’m a doctor. No, I mean, I’m just not sure. Why can’t you take a guess? Well, not for another two hours. You can’t take a guess for another two hours. And in my case, in my in my case, my particular case, I save over twenty thousand dollars a year. Holy crap. Wow. Which is like groceries when my wife goes to the organic stores. Find everything you need today? Yeah. Great. Okay. Oh, God. Everything okay, ma’am? It’s just that you’ve only scanned a few items and it’s already 60 bucks. I’m so scared. Okay, I’m a trained professional, ma’am. I’ve scanned a lot of groceries. I need you to stay with me. It’s just that my in-laws are in town and they want a charcuterie board. This isn’t going to be easy, so I need you to be brave, all right? What’s your name? Patricia. Patricia, all right. I need you to take a deep breath. We’re about to do the cheese. You know, that’s the difference between eating organic and not organic. So because my wife eats organic, I had to take the 10 minutes needed to compare rates to save the $20,000 a year on credit card fees just for one of my companies. One question. What’s the brand name of the clock? The brand name of the clock, Rod. Do we have it? The brand name of the clock. It’s an elegant from Ridgway. It’s from Ridgway. Let’s buy the clock and sell the fireplace. I encourage everybody out there, go to Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card. You schedule a free consultation, request information. A member of our team will call you. They’ll schedule a free consultation. It should take you ten minutes or less and they’re going to compare rates and see if they can’t save you more than $3,000 a year off of your credit card processing. You were hoping what? I wouldn’t owe you money. No, you don’t owe us money. Because at the end of the day, at the end of the day, the goal of the business is to create time freedom and financial freedom. In order to do that, you need to create additional profits. 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. Okay. I just want to let you know what type of accomplishment this is. Our competition, Orkin, Terminex, they’re both 1.3 billion dollar companies. They both have two to three thousand pages of content attached to their website. So to basically go from virtually non-existent 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, with their listing and ranking there with Google. And also we’ve been trying to get Google reviews, you know, asking our customers for reviews, and now we’re the highest rated and most reviewed Pessamon 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%. Okay. 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. That has obviously, the 411% shows that that system works. Yeah, so here’s a big one for you. 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. 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 is 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. 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 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. We were in a rut. 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 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 we 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% 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-turn-key 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. Hello, my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark. Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. And Clay’s done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with Lee Crocker, the head of Disney, with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with Mike Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10,000 or more people show up to some of these tours. On the day-to-day, he does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers, and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week. So think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. Every 6-8 weeks he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every 6-8 weeks he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13 step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires, helping them grow their companies. I’ve seen guys from start-ups go from start-up to being multi-millionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, organizing everything in their head to building into a franchisable, scalable business. One of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. Amazing guy. Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. And that’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you. And Clay’s been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that, we became friends. My most impressed with him is when I was shadowing him one time, we went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. When we walked out, I knew that he could make millions on the deal and they were super excited about working with him. He told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it, I’m going to turn it down because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run. The guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right. And anyways, just an amazing man. So anyways, impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate. Anytime I’ve got nervous or worried about how to run the company or navigating competition and an economy that’s like, I remember we got closed down for three months. He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9, and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys, we appreciate you, and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house, right? This is where we used to live a few years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See? It’s nice, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing. And this is our old team. And by team, I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing and this is our new team. We went from 4 to 14 and I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman, so we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd. We’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month and we still have time to go We’re just thankful for you thankful for thrive and your mentorship And we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us Just thank you. Thank you. Thank you times a thousand The thrive time show today interactive business workshops are the highest and most reviewed business workshops on the planet You can learn the proven 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. 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. 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. to 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 loan us. We built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it. If we go back eight years ago, think about the number of clients you had back then versus the number of clients you have now. As a percentage, what has been the growth over the past eight years, do you think? We’ve got to inspire somebody out there who just doesn’t have the time to listen to her calls. Clay, it’s like I would go up and down from about $10,000 a month up to about $40,000, but it’s up and down roller coaster. Now we’ve got it to where we’re in excess of 100 clients. That’s awesome. I would have anywhere from 5 clients to 20 clients on my own with networking, but I had no control over it. I didn’t, without the systems, you’re going to be at the, you’re going to be victimized by your own business. For somebody out there who struggles with math, if you would say that your average number of clients was 30 and you go to 100, as a percentage, what is that? I have grown, I have doubled every year since working with you. So I’ve doubled in clients, I’ve doubled in revenue every year. It’s 100% growth every year I’ve worked with. So I’m looking, we’ve been good friends 7-8 years and I’ve got doubled 5 times. Which is just incredible. I mean the first time you do it, that’s one thing, but when you do it repeatedly, I mean that’s unbelievable. We’re working our blessed assurance off this year to double. We’re planning on doubling again. We’re incorporating some new things in there to really help us do it, but we are going to double again this year. I started coaching, but it would go up and down, Clay. That’s when I came to you, as I was going up and down, and I wanted to go up and up instead of up and down. And so that’s when it needed a a system. So creating a system is you have nailed down specific steps that you’re going to take no matter how you feel, no matter the results. You lean into them and you do them regardless of what’s happening. You lean into them and it will give you X number of leads. You follow up with those leads, it turns into sales. Well I tell you, if you don’t have a script and you don’t have a system, then every day is a whole new creation. You’re creating a lot of energy just to figure out what are you going to do. The best executives, Peter Drucker is a father of modern management, he said, the most effective executives make one decision a year. What you do is you make a decision, what is your system, and then you work like the Dickens to make sure you follow that system. And so that’s really what it’s all about. So with a script here, we have a brand new gal that just came in working for us. She nailed down the script and she’s been nailing down appointments. Usually we try to get one appointment for every 100 calls. We make 200 to 300 calls a day per rep, and she’s been nailing down five and eight appointments a day on that script. Somebody out there is having a hard time. So she’s making how many calls a day? She’s making between two and three hundred calls a day. And our relationship is weird in that we do, if someone were to buy an Apple computer today, and or let’s say you bought a personal computer, a PC, the computer is made by, let’s say, Dell. But then the software in the computer would be Microsoft, let’s say, or Adobe or whatever that is. So I basically make the systems, and you’re like the computer and I’m like the software. It’s kind of how I would describe our relationship. Tim, I want to ask you this. You and I reconnected, I think it was in the year 2000 and, what was it, maybe 2010? Is that right? 2011 maybe? Or maybe further down the road. Maybe 2013? 2012. Okay, so 2012. And at that time I was five years removed from the DJ business. And you were how many years removed from tax and accounting software? It was about 10, 11 years. We met… How did we meet? What was the first interaction? There was some interaction where you and I first connected. I just remember that somehow you and I went to Hideaway Pizza. Do you remember when we first reconnected? Yeah, well, we had that speaking thing that… Oh, there it was! So it’s Victory Christian Center. I was speaking there. My name is Robert Redman. I actually first met Clay almost three years ago to the day. I don’t know if he remembers it or not, but I wasn’t working with him at the time. I asked to see him and just ask him some questions to help direct my life, to get some mentorship, but I’ve been working with Clay for now just over a year. The role I play here is a business coach, business consultant, I work with different businesses implementing best practice processes and systems that I have learned here by working with Clay. And the experience working here has, to put it real plainly, has been just life-changing. I have not only learned new things and have gained new knowledge, but I have gained a whole new mindset that I believe, wherever I end up, will serve me well throughout the rest of my life. Since working with Clay, I have learned so much. I mean, I would like to say it was everything about business in terms of the different categories. I haven’t learned it all, but I’ve learned all about marketing. I’ve learned about advertising. I’ve learned about branding. I’ve learned how to create a sales process for organizations in any industry. I’ve learned how to sell. I’ve learned how to create repeatable systems and processes and hold people accountable. You know, how to hire people. It’s almost like every aspect of a business you can learn. I have learned a lot in those different categories. And then, again, the mindset that I’ve gained here has been huge. You know, working here, you can’t be a mediocre person. You are a call to a higher standard of excellence. And then as you’re called to that standard here, you begin to see those outcomes in every area of your life, that standard of excellence that you want to implement no matter what you’re involved in. I would like to describe the other people that work with Clay are people that are going somewhere with their life. Marshall, in the group interview talks about how, you know, the best fits for this organization are the people that are goal-oriented. So they’re on their own trajectory and we’re on our own trajectory. And the best fits are those people where there can be a mutually beneficial relationship that as we pursue our goals and we help the business pursue those goals, the business helps us pursue our goals as well. And so I say people that are driven, people that want to make something of their lives, people that are goal-oriented, they’re focused, and they’re committed to overcoming any adversity that may come their way. Clay’s passion for helping business owners grow their businesses is, it’s unique in that, I don’t know if there’s anyone else that can be as passionate. Whenever a business starts working with Clay, it’s almost as like Clay is running that business in the sense that he has something at stake. He’s just serving them. They’re one of his clients, but it’s as if he is actively involved in the business. Whenever they have a win, he’s posting it all over his social media. He’s shouting it across the room here at Thrive. He’s sending people encouraging messages. He can kind of be that life coach and business coach in terms of being that motivator and that champion for people’s businesses. It’s, again, unique because there’s no one else I’ve seen get so excited about and passionate about other people’s businesses. The kind of people that wouldn’t like working with Clay are people that are satisfied with with mediocrity, people that want to get through life by just doing enough, by just getting by, people who are not looking to develop themselves, people who are not coachable, people who think that they know it all and they’re unwilling to change. I would say those are the type of people, in short, anyone that’s content with mediocrity would not like working with Clay. So if you’re meeting Clay for the first time, the advice I’d give you is definitely come ready to take tons of notes. Every time Clay speaks, he gives you a wealth of knowledge that you don’t want to miss. I remember the first time that I met Clay. I literally carried a notebook with me all around. I was looking at this notebook the other day actually. I carried a notebook with me all around and I just took tons of notes. I filled the entire notebook in about about three or four months just from being around Clay, following him, and learning from him. And then I would say come coachable. Be open to learning something new. Be open to challenging yourself. Be open to learning and adjusting parts about you that challenging yourself. Be open to learning and adjusting parts about you that need to be adjusted.